I don’t know about you, but I’m a ‘face’ person. I’m pretty good at recognising faces I haven’t seen for years. Honest. You know when you’re with friends and you see a person who some of you can vaguely recognise but can’t recall a name or place where you met him/her? Well I’m the person who can remember everything. No really.
Even if the only time we all saw that person was for some obscure 10 minutes three years ago that wasn’t even worth remembering, I’m the one that says: “Oh yeah, can you remember the time when we were in a bar and he asked where the toilets were?” Yip, that’s me – the loser with a weird long-term memory. If only the short-term were the same. What day is it?
However, what I am terrible with, is names. Don’t know why, but I’m terrible. Really, someone can tell me their name three times and I can forget it within minutes. I must have weird brain cells that are programmed with something along the lines of: “Remember what you had for lunch on July 14 2001 for no apparent reason, but if you’ve been interacting with someone for less than 24 hours then forget! forget! forget! Stephen!” Well not that bad but you get the idea?
Okay, back to the post’s topic…what was I talking about? Oh yeah, names. One thing I do find irritating in the realm of social media and online interaction is the lack of names in my RSS reader. Just adds to the confusion of my disfunctional-name-rememberance-xyia or DNR for short.
Frequently, I will subscribe a new blog to my RSS reader, only for it to show up in my feeds as the name of the blog. This is no good to me. If I’m reading a blog I want to see the names behind it. The DNR is an irritation, but one that must be met head-on, so I’ve painstakenly edited the majority of my Bloglines subscription feeds so the bloggers’ names appear instead of the name of the blog. Make sense? Well it does to me. I bet some of you frequently read a blog without knowing the blogger’s name?
Social media is what it says it is: Media that allows you to be social. So if you use blogging as a way to socialise and network then you have to become familiar with bloggers’ names first and foremost. I’ve been testing this out for about three weeks now and it works – well at least for someone with DNR it does. Try it – you might get to know your feeds better.
Stephen is a communications consultant based out of the UK. You can connect with him on Twitter or check out his LinkedIn profile. | Email Stephen
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Richard Bailey
I wouldn’t worry about it, Simon.
Jon Silk
Nice points, Stephen.
I’ve been wondering about blog titles and trying to balance a decent Google crawl result with enough info in the RSS to look good, while not overloading the browser title bar. (This is the kind of thing I do in my spare time – just realised that I sound a trifle dull.)
You’ve given me food for thought – although in many cases the blog title needs to reflect what people are going to be searching for… And for many corporate blogs, that ain’t the name, it’s the topic.
Stephen
Richard: Hah!
Jon: Very true. Something I’ve been toying with lately. I changed my blog’s title from ‘PR Blogger’ to ‘PR Blogger by Stephen Davies’ and within a week my blog went from second in Google (sometimes third) to first when using my name as a search term.
Oddly, it also went from second to first for the search term ‘pr blogger’ at the same time.
When developing a corporate blog, I suppose it’s best to try and sum-up the topic of the blog within its name. And possibly domain name?
And if you’re an individual blogger, it might be best to get your own name somewhere in there.
Duane
I’m the same way. I’m all about the face and where and when verse what their actually name is.