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Ryan Paugh is using Brazen Careerist to share ideas. Join now to become a member and start networking with Ryan Paugh and other professionals just like you. Learn more.
Ryan Paugh is using Brazen Careerist to share ideas. Join now to become a member and start networking with Ryan Paugh and other professionals just like you. Learn more.
It’s almost 2009. And in the weeks leading up to the New Year, people begin thinking a lot about the things they’re going to improve upon. Here at Brazen HQ, we’re no different …
The community is growing. We’ve made big improvements. But that doesn’t mean we’re satisfied with the way things are.
We want to continue to make things even better. And to make that happen, we need your help.
Think of this as Brazen’s Annual Review. What are we doing well? Where do we need improvement? Feedback from the community has always been one of our focal points. So when I say fire away … I mean fire away!
Instead of doing a survey, or asking for feedback via email, we want this to be a discussion. So please, provide your feedback below. Keep the conversation going and keep in mind that everyone’s experience in our community is uniquely their own, so nobody can be right or wrong.
Here are a few examples of things we want to know …
I want to say thanks to everyone for their support during our first year as a company. We couldn’t have done it without you. Happy Holidays!
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Ryan, as we are all in the midst of a very difficult economy,I think a weekly or regular feature on sharing a success would be a nice "appetizer" for the front page...there is no better learning then from the success of friends and piers..so maybe a little sharing "focused" on what you did to overcome the obstacle and persivere...a primer on how you confronted the economic downturn and succeeded!!!
thats my 2 cents for the new year...
Happy holiday to you and the brazen team!
What are you doing here - reading my mind? I was actually going to send you an email but I don't have to do that now. :) OK, here is an idea that may help people (like me) navigate easier on the site. Place a link (maybe on the navigation bar) for all posts organized by date - maybe only for the posts dated for the previous week. I say this because you have limited real estate and you're swapping headlines daily and sometimes even more frequently. Let's say I place a comment on a post and I come back a day or two later and I want to see if the blogger or someone else has responded to my comment. Now I have to try and remember who the blogger was or the category of the post to eventually land on the specific page of the post I'm trying to get to - many clicks later. That's my idea - make navigation of the site as easy and intuitive as possible. Happy holidays Ryan!
I would like to see Brazen have less posts regarding personal stuff that really is not career related - and less posts that are provocative just for the sake of being provocative (i.e. bloggers being against gay marriage - unless there can be a clear line drawn to career here.)
I think your best content is when Gen Y bloggers explore career issues - either from a discovery standpoint (i.e. what I wish they taught me in college) or from an expert standpoint. I'm not saying the personal and the professional don't cross - they do and your bloggers should write about it. It's when the personal doesn't really cross with the professional where I think it weakens your product.
One of the main reasons I think Brazen works is not just because a bunch of Gen Ys are blogging. It's the common purpose of the blogs that makes it so strong.
Focus on what makes you strong - and it'll make you stronger.
Keep up the good work there!
One possibility to improve the site (and content within) would be a Digg-like feature that would allow BC members with a profile to vote on articles. In doing so, I think you all would get a good feel for what topics / bloggers are producing the content the BC community wants to see.
I might be in the minority on this one, but I have to disagree with Suzanne. While the career writing is clearly the focus of this site and community, I think it would be a shame for the editors to ignore great writing on other topics from time to time. Many of us blog on a variety of topics beyond careers, business, and personal branding. It's understood and expected that Brazen won't feature all or even many of those "off-topic" posts, but I think it helps keep the conversation fresh to throw in some seemingly random stuff from time to time.
I say this also in response to the all-too-common "what the hell is this crap doing on a career site" comments I see anytime the editors publish something that's perhaps a more personal post or not career focused. It would help for Brazen to make clear to visitors how it selects content for its homepage (i.e., editors selecting posts from bloggers' feeds) and to set some sort of expectation that while the vast majority of content will be career related, we're not a one-dimensional crowd of people. I've stumbled across some great bloggers through BC, and often those posts wouldn't make the cut if our standard was strictly topical material.
Otherwise, I want to commend the Brazen team for their hard work. I think profiles are a great addition and I think the community is growing stronger every day. Kudos.
+ 1 on Taylor's comment (surprised?). I think it's obvious that this community will and should give a lot of real estate to posts about careers -- it is Brazen *Careerist* after all. But to be frank, most of the posts I read on this site do not deal with careers. The posts I end up reading completely are those by bloggers who are taking an idea they're passionate about or interested in, and presenting something new or unique that I didn't know or think about before, whether it's politics or economics or productivity or tech or environment or dating or, yes, even career tips.
I'm a strong believer in Penelope Trunk's philosophy that the number one thing that people our age (or any age!) can do to help them in their careers is to blog. I think this community strongly encourages and evangelizes that idea. But that doesn't mean that your blog has to be *about* careers (or success or interviews or workplace tips). Blogs are a great avenue to explore your area(s) of interest and expertise, to focus and develop your thoughts on anything that's important to you. I would be sad if those posts were deemphasized here.
(Full disclosure: though on Tropophilia we sometimes write about career stuff, it certainly is in the minority of our content, and I think it's safe to say that many if not most of our posts that have been featured on BC have been on something besides career topics. So, this is a little out of self-interest... but I don't think we're the only blog in that situation, either.)
On a totally different front, I would suggest an easier way to identify community members with common interests, fields of work, or location. From what I can tell there's no simple way to find, for example, all tech industry folks within the community. The existing search is messy for this purpose. Improving the UI would encourage more people to become fans of and follow others.
Hi,
First, I like the mix of personal and professional posts. Work-life balance is integral to professional success, and I'd hate to see the personal posts disappear. They're so elemental in the community aspect of Brazen Careerist.
Also, the profiles have been a great addition. Is there any way to create a "groups" function similar to other networks on Ning and Facebook? For example, it would be cool for me to be in a group for D.C. bloggers or PR bloggers so I can connect with them on topics that might not be of interest to the greater BC community.
Finally, adding an events section might be a good addition to the site. It would be great to connect in person with the many bloggers I've "met" through BC, and highlighting social media/blogging/tech conferences that members of the community can attend might be beneficial. And, eventually, I'd love to see a Brazen Careerist National Conference.
Looking forward to another great year with BC,
Meg
I like the mix of personal and professional posts as well. I think it's easy for people to think, because of the title and tagline of the site, that it should be limited to just career-related topics. I get that Brazen has become a site where people explore work AND life issues for Gen Y, but I don't think that is reflected in how Brazen positions itself, so it may just come down to coming up with a different tagline or description that helps visitors see right away that this is not strictly a career-related site. The variety of topics is what makes it interesting!
I think it would also help, as we've seen from recent comments, to have more clarity around how the site functions, since it seems like people are unaware of how posts are chosen, who chooses them, and the fact that these posts all come from our personal blogs, etc.
I also second what other people have said about being able to find bloggers in your area or in similar workfields -- it would be really nice to be able to search for bloggers with similar careers or who live in the same city as you.
But overall, I think Brazen has been doing a great job this year, and I've read and learned from a lot of really interesting bloggers through Brazen!
Nisha
The market for career content is HUGE right now in light of the current state of the economy (check out the Careers section in the WSJ, NYT, US News, etc.) I think you're missing out on a big opportunity to pull in readership by not focusing the majority of the featured posts on this topic.
That said, should BC want to re-position itself (this includes redoing the current "About" section) as a "Gen-Y Life/Work" type site, I think it would be best to create sections like "careers," "education," "life," more prominently on the homepage and have separate landing pages featuring content for each topic (much like Wordpress used to do on its homepage). That would help you leverage the large amounts of content you already have and help to create more intimate communities between members (the "relationship" folks would interact more readily with other "relationship" folks, "career" folks would interact more closely with "career" folks, et al).
Overall I think BC is suffering from a bit of a branding problem. Maybe Dan Schwabel could help?
I have to agree with The Office Newb and Suzanne here. Its always refreshing to read about different types of content, but usually if I want to read about relationships, I'll look elsewhere. If I want a feel good story, I'll look elsewhere.
I work for a Fortune 500 company. I dont believe it would be appropriate for my company's blog to post about things that arent directly related to my company's business model. As The Office Newb commented, there is a huge market for career oriented material, and I believe that is what BC's niche can and should be. BC can either be just another blogging network, or they can be the specialized network that everyone will come to when looking for Gen-Y career-oriented content. If Apple started selling tanning lotion or beer, their crediblity and value would diminish as a technology-focused consumer products and services company.
I do agree with most of the commenters about the possibility of a groups feature. That would be a great way to improve the networking process.
Keep up the great work!
When I was a kid (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and there was no cable TV), there was something called "New Coke." Coca Cola tried to make itself more like Pepsi(even though Coke had more of the market share). Nobody bought it. It was disaster.
I don't think Brazen has a branding problem at all. They have cut out a niche that is their unique selling proposition. Something nobody else was doing. The goal is not to beat the competition - but have no competition. They shouldn't try to make Brazen the New Coke.
My original post never said that I thought Brazen shouldn't have personal stuff. I just think it needs to be where work and life meet. If you write about your new dog and how cute he is and how you bought him a little dog raincoat - I don't care. However, if you bought a new dog and you find it's hard to take care of the dog and work all the time, then you are starting down a different road: How do I balance it all? And that I would find interesting.
Hey Everyone,
Thanks for all of the comments so far. I just wanted to jump in for a moment and respond to some of the great feedback. Because a lot of what I'm hearing is aligned to where we're already heading or thinking about heading with the side.
@Mark W: One thing we're currently developing is a community-wide feed that will display all of our network's blog posts as they are posted. It should help you find up-to-date content regardless of where it is published on the site.
Regarding follow-up comments on older posts. Have you thought about using the feature that allows you to receive emails when new comments appear on a post you're interested in?
@Taylor: We'll be adding a filter by profession tool to our Blogger Index in January.
@Office Newb: As we grow, we're definitely thinking about how we break the site up. Because we do have a branding problem. It's obvious to anyone who hears "Brazen Careerist." And at the same time it's hard to discount all the value, non-career related sites have brought to the community.
We'll do our best to continue to make everyone happy. But I think we need to see significant growth before we get there. Maybe once we reach 1,000+ syndicated blogs we'll be able to break things out more effectively. Right now we're around 450 ...
Either way, you're right. It's a problem and we're thinking about it.
@Meg: I was talking about groups earlier with Photis (our dev guy), and it's something we really want to do. The first step is finding a better way to integrate a forum into our website. Because the current one just is not working with our interface. This is something that's going to happen, but probably not in the next couple months.
Keep the feedback coming everyone. If it's something we're already rolling out, I'll let you know. If it's something we'd like to do, but probably won't be able to complete in the next couple months, I don't mind telling you that either.
I have a feeling this may not be possible in a short-term wish list... but I would really be interested in being able to see the visitor stats on posts syndicated from my blog. I know our blog itself gets a lot of referral visits from when our content is featured on BC, but it would be useful to know how many eyes are on our posts but don't necessarily click through.
And +1 on groups, Digg-style voting, and community-wide feed.
I dig the Digg idea too! We've thought about this ... and it would be awesome to put some editorial control into the hands of our community.
This isn't something that will happen in the next couple months, but it's on my wishlist too!
@Ryan - "Have you thought about using the feature that allows you to receive emails when new comments appear on a post you're interested in?" That's a good suggestion. I did the email reply followup to comments option once on Penelope's blog because I saw that check box, didn't know what it was, and had to try it out. The particular post I tried it out on was very popular. I had emails being delivered at a pretty good rate for a few days. I didn't care for it and decided to not ever check that box again! I don't think it would be such a problem if there's just a few follow up emails. Bottom line - I'll try checking that box again.
Ryan - First let me just say "Congrats!" on everything the BC team has accomplished this far. It's hard to believe the site launched less than a year ago. Judging by last week's contest and all of the conversations that have happened, you're obviously doing a lot of things right.
About personal posts... Keep (some) of them. Not all of them will fit the "career advice" mold, but what about the categories of Religion, Politics, and Culture? I like the way Suzanne put it... Personal posts make great content as long as its tied back to work/life in some way.
If there were one thing I could change, I'd try and brainstorm new ways of designing the front page. I think there might be more efficient ways of organizing content. Personally, I've rarely clicked on "my cities, popular posts, or recent comments."
Also, I'm loving the Digg idea.
I have to agree with Andy about the front page. I find that I ignore the right two columns and spend most of my time scrolling for the blogs. I think the top news stories should be shorter and less prominent (I come for the blog aggregator not a newswire).
Maybe you could consider creating more pages and instead use the front page as a jumping off point (links to the "blog" section, "news" section, "corporate blog" section, "city" section etc.)
I might be a little late to the party, but I agree with the Office Newb and Andy about more streamlined categorization. Personal development is just as much a part of work development so, it may be a good idea to break the categories down, but also make them a lot more visible when you come to the site.
Also, how does BC rotate the use of various contributing bloggers? Not to be a jerk, but sometimes, I feel like I'm reading the same folks day after day...
@Andy & Office Newb:
I couldn't agree more. What we've learned through things like My City is that those types of topics are better for a forum-based discusion (something I'd like to do in 2009).
Expect a more blog-focused front page in early 2009. We're talking about putting a lot more content that we think people want to read on the homepage. And a ton of it will be career focused.
Revamping the site into muliple category sub pages will probably not happen until we have 1,000 plus active bloggers. Even with almost 500 people it's tough because many people don't blog at high frequency.
@Raven:
Your comment ties into what I just mentioned above. Even with a large number of syndicated blogs on the site, not everyone is blogging 3-4 times per week. The people who are, end up hitting the front page a lot more.
There are other factors too, such as how focused a blogger's content is. Some people even reach out to us and let us know ahead of time that they think they're about to publish something that would be good for discussion. I totally welcome that! Just sent me a PM on the site.
Another thing we have been doing is reaching out to people we'd like to see featured, but maybe need a little direction on what to write about. But as the community grows, it's nearly impossible to reach everyone. So if you feel like you might be someone who could use a little help, drop me a line!
I never realized how difficult in is to pick posts until I started getting involved in the process. It's tough, and believe me, we don't want to feature the same folks over and over. We want diversity.
Thanks everyone! Keep it coming!
This is more of a functional suggestion than a content one, but I think that links should open in a new tab/window.
Thanks for all you do- this is great stuff!
An idea for the News section of the site - integrate current news items from the News section to a revamped forum that you'll hopefully have up and running next year. It seems to me that relevant current news items would be a good thing to have up for discussion in a forum.
There were a lot of good discussions above and on the personal vs professional front, I would have to say that a balance is good. I like to learn who the person is behind the posts and the personal posts that are included are generally powerful moments that really shaped the person and not posts like "I ate too much Taco Bell and my belly hurts".
Some things that I would like to add is about the Popular Post section. When you use number of comments to determine popular posts, I would rather you not count comments that are too people arguing back and forth on random topics. Two people debating is one thing but a back and forth of "you're rude/you're a jerk/you're a bigger jerk" should not make a post "popular"
I really like the news article that you link, too.
I don't really like the flickr picture and comments. It comes across as pop philosophy from Reality Bites.
2 cents poorer,
Deadhedge
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