PR Perspective: A Blogger's Journey Into The Unknown

by Mark Schannon

mschannon@cox.net

When I set out on my own to become a consultant, it was obvious that I'd need a website or a blog or something to attract hordes of clients who would pay outrageous sums for my wisdom and experience. After all, I'd been accumulating mountains of articles about new theories in economics, psychology, neurology that were revolutionizing our understanding of how people take in, process information, form judgments, opinions, values, biases, and even behaviors-usually at the conscious level. And I was developing new theories and models that would, dare I say it, change the face of PR. Yawn.

I started using a free blogging service and quickly discovered that the diary form of a blog didn't lend itself to explaining the complexity of these new theories and models I'd developed. I was getting articles published elsewhere, but a blog doesn't give you the chance to show the big picture.

The less said about my attempts to create a website, the better. Plus, I discovered to my surprise that most PR people weren't willing to challenge their own assumptions. And, not to my surprise, I realized that I'm a lousy self-promoter.

However, there were two other completely non-business related urges keeping me active on the internet: The first was my love of parody, humor, satire, and politics, and the second was that, after years of trying, I thought I was finally writing some decent fiction and knew I'd need help maneuvering through the Kafkaesque maze called the publishing world.

Hence was born Parodies Lost (parodieslost.typepad.com/), my primary blog where I could just sound off on anything I wanted. In the beginning I'd get my five or six hits a day, one comment a month. I scoured other sites for all these bizarre ways to promote my blog, but they didn't do much. But I was having a good time, and I met some fascinating people-many of whom were politically very different but with whom I have had great discussions and debates without sinking into the nonsense and personal attacks that seem to dominate the web.

I started out trying to collect blogs I enjoyed, which are listed on the site, but I have to confess, I've been bad recently.

Then I discovered Blog Critics (blogcritics.org/), which at the time cast itself as a "sinister cabal of superior bloggers." I was accepted, eventually became one of the political editors, and have watched with fascination as the site-now up to 3 million hits a month-is evolving into an on-line magazine.

In terms of my writing, I was discovering wonderful communities, such as www.readerville.com, a great site for writers, readers, and wannabe writers (in which category I cast myself) and Backspace (www.bksp.org/) which includes Agent Query (www.agentquery.com/, and a great forum. There are great sources for writers on the net, and what follows isn't an exclusive list at all:

• Agent 007 (http://agentoo7.blogspot.com/)
• Emergency Writer's Network (http://www.emergingwriters.typepad.com/)
• Publishers Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/)
• Publishers Marketplace (http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/)
• Preditors & Editors (http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pema.htm)