I feel like I’m a little late in the game to be doing the obligatory post-SX-wrapup blog post, but I’m going to do it anyways. And hopefully I can share some insight for those of you who might go to SXSW 2010. Especially the really young people, since I was easily one of the youngest there.

To answer the obvious first question: yes, it really was amazing. A lot of people will tell you: it’s about the people and connections, not about panels. This is generally true. However, panels are great too. And some of the best connections I made at SXSW were by going to panels and staying behind after they were over to talk to the panelists and get to know them more.

Was it weird hanging out with people you only knew online before: not at all, though I’m sure my friends are waiting with their “cyberfriends” cracks. But I think they’re missing out on a huge opportunity by NOT networking online. And finally getting to meet some of these people I’d been working with online for so long was really awesome. Sydney is so much fun. Elysa really loves her iPhone a lot Ryan Paugh is just as really, really sweet as Penelope describes him, and we have a shared affinity for taking shots. Holly and Margie are tiny but make up for it with a whole lot of energy. Oh, and Penelope really is a tornado. In a good way though! I think. She also gave me dating advice: “Nisha, there’s a ton of single tech entrepreneurs with no social skills at this party and hardly any girls. Come on! You’re not leveraging your girlness enough!” Thanks, P.

I could go on forever about all the things I liked about SXSW, and the fantastic people I met and the great opportunities I got out of it (I’m attending 2 conferences I’m really excited about in the next two months because of people I met at SX!) but I can’t possibly get into all of it.

One thing I will say is that I went to SXSW because of Brazen Careerist. Those of you who have been around this blog since the beginning –which, okay, is not really that long ago — will know I wrote this crazy post on how blogging impacted my life in December for the Brazen blog contest, and by some miracle I actually won, and got to attend SXSW Interactive as a result. To be honest, I had no idea what SXSW even WAS before that contest but I entered because Ryan Paugh would not stop talking about this contest for two weeks straight so I figured, why not. I really just was hoping my post would be good enough to get on the front page of Brazen, since I didn’t know much about SXSW.

I wrote that post three months ago and my theme was about empowerment, and how blogging empowered me to quit being a “lurker” – both online and in my personal life. It was about how I started becoming an active participant in running my own life instead of letting my decisions be dictated by others. And it was all about how empowering and exciting that was to me.

Three months later I’m home from SXSW and I can’t believe what an amazing experience this conference was — and most importantly, it was empowering. It was so exciting to spend five days in the company of some of the most brilliant, creative, innovative minds in the field of new media and technology. Like Sydney said: this conference is for the innovators and early adopters — and it was amazing to be around like-minded people who shared the same interests I did. I know I’m not the only one who can honestly say I’m having SXSW withdrawal.

Because of SXSW and some of the people I’ve met there, I’ve found even more cool new opportunities in the next few months that I’m really excited about and I feel really empowered by all of it. I feel like SXSW was just the beginning of what is going to be a really exciting ride. But that definitely would never have happened if I hadn’t put myself out there, started a blog, joined Brazen, written that post at 4 am, and entered that contest that I didn’t even think I should have been entering in the first place.

So to sum up, I think the lesson I’ve learned from this whole experience is: don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Sometimes it sucks, I know. But you never know what kind of awesome opportunities could come out of it. So take a risk and do whatever it is you’re worried about…. you might be really pleasantly surprised.

(And next time Brazen has a contest: you better enter!)

Nisha Chittal is a writer and journalist who currently serves as Associate Editor of CitizenJanePolitics.com and is a political columnist for UniversityChic.com. Her personal blog is Politicoholic, where she offers commentary on a range of topics, including but not limited to politics, technology, and the changing role of women and Generation Y in politics today.

First of all, I think Penelope Trunk is a fantastic writer. She’s the kind of writer that makes you think.

You can check out Penelope’s blog here. She’s down to earth and doesn’t mince words. She’s not scared to write about controversial subjects or her personal life.

I read her book Brazen Careerist in early January. Even though there were some parts I wasn’t sure of, there were a lot of points she made that got me thinking. Her book has inspired me to change 10 things about myself.

While everyone was making new year’s resolutions, I was inspired to come up with 10 ways to work on my career and life after reading her book.

10 Ways I’m Being Brazen:

1. Accept uncertainty. Since I don’t know where I will be in five years, I am focusing more on how to develop the skills I will need to have perfected in five years.
2. Be adventurous. There are so many opportunities to try new things. I’m heading to New Orleans in March to go to the PRSSA National Assembly. That will be an adventure in itself!
3. Work on marketing. My Web site, blog and resume are all tool that market me and my brand. In mid-December I had launched a new design for my site. Now I plan on reevaluating my blog and resume so I can market myself better.
4. Study harder. I’m not talking about school here. I’m studying the PR industry harder so I can be more knowledgeable when I get my summer internship.
5. Become a negotiator. In order to get what I want, I need to be able to negotiate. Penelope offers great tips on negotiating salaries, which can be applied to other situations as well.
6. Solve problems. I think Penelope said it best when she said, “Your success depends on your ability to get control of a problem and solve it.”
7. Clean up the inbox. A few weeks ago, I had more than 250 e-mails in my inbox. I’ve followed Penelope’s advice on getting a “real to-do list” and have been able to keep my inbox organized by filing away and deleting messages as soon as I get them.
8. Make time. When my schedule is packed, I don’t have time to think. When I do start thinking about stuff, I don’t have time to work on the ideas I have. This semester I’ve squeduled all evening meetings on Monday and Tuesday. I now have more time to breathe, think and blog.
9. Be organized. According to Penelope, having a messy desk makes you look incompetent. I’m usually fairly organized at my desk, but not at home. I now have a better system of keeping things together at my apartment, which has made me more productive.
10. Delegate. I used to say, “I might as well do this myself so it gets done right.” Since I have committees and teams in the various organizations I am in, I have started to delegate work more. Not only does this give them experience and portfolio pieces, but I also have more time to do things that matter more.

Rachel M. Esterline works as an account executive for Central Michigan Life, the nationally award-winning school newspaper at Central Michigan University. She is as an account executive for PR Central, CMU’s student-run public relations firm and as a public relations executive with the Student Government Association. Additionally, Rachel serves on the executive board of the Public Relations Student Society of America at CMU and has completed a seven-month internship with her university’s public relations and marketing department. Rachel will graduate in May 2010 with a degree in public relations with minors in journalism and communication.

I just got off the phone with Zeus, and I’m angry. This isn’t a surprise because I’m quick to anger, quick to forgiveness and quick to just about every emotion, really. The emotional roller coaster of being a woman and all.

Zeus and I have been engaged in phone warfare. Which also isn’t all that surprising considering that he works for a start-up and now I work for a start-up and well, life is busy.

You will understand this even more when I tell you who Zeus is – that is, Zeus is Ryan Healy, co-founder of both Brazen Careerist and Employee Evolution.

Many of you already know this about Zeus being Ryan, but I felt it was time to announce it beyond my About page because of some recent emails I received from my readers.

I feel I have every right to keep my private life private, but I also feel a strong relationship with my blogging community. My blog and the people who support it are the primary reasons I’m successful today, and so it’s important to me to be as transparent as possible.

I didn’t make my relationship with Ryan explicit before because we had just started dating (even now we’re early in the relationship game), and it’s hard enough to begin a relationship, let alone have the extra pressure of so many people watching you. I mean, Ryan and I are both “In a Relationship” on Facebook, but not even explicitly with each other because I’m so superstitious.

(Yeah, you try dating me.)

This is made all the more difficult because like I mentioned, we’re both busy, and I want the career, the relationship, the blog, the time to exercise and hang out with my friends and call my family.

“People that exercise every day and work twelve hours a day have no life,” Ryan reminds me. So, okay. But maybe I could be the exception?

“No, you can’t have it all. Something has to give,” he goes on. Ryan is practical to my impractical. Rational to my emotional. The pea to my pod. He’s a Taurus and I’m a Virgo. He’s an INTJ and I’m an ENFP. By all personality tests and worldly measures we’re a good match.

But sometimes it’s hard to like someone so much and have so much else going on in your life. It’s hard to think that we might not always live in the same city or that I might not be able to change the way I want to.

It’s easy for me to ignore all these elephants cramping my view though, because in my heart, I see this working. And I know that because this is one of the hardest times in our lives, it’s also one of the best. If you’re playing it right, the best time in your life is filled with uncertainty and risk. There’s nothing balanced about that. It’s exciting and exhilarating, and to take full advantage, you need to:

1) Let go.
2) Give in.
3) Smile.
4) Repeat.

I work for a company that will disrupt the traditional retail market and my boyfriend is someone that has disrupted everything I know about relationships. Nothing is stable now. That’s the thing about work/life balance. It’s more of a see-saw, kind of up and down, and is only ever balanced for the briefest moments in time.

Possibility perch.

Yes, this post was Ryan-approved before I hit publish. What are your thoughts on work/life balance? How do you achieve it? Do you want to have it all? Is it possible or are you content with just one or the other?

Jacob Share on the Personal Branding Blog shared some great tips on using avatars for branding.

First of all, if you don’t have an avatar, get one! I went to http://en.gravatar.com/ to get one for my blog posts.

These are really important for branding yourself. You can use them for your Twitter, your social networks (like Brazen Careerist) and they also show up when you reply to blog posts.

I recently edited a photo to be use as my avatar. It comes out fairly recognizable even as a small image. The extremely small image is hard to see well, but you would recognize it if you had seen it around before. 

One thing I did with this avatar was completely edited out the background. This causes all of the focus to be on me. Since my hair was a shade different during the summer when the picture was taken, I changed the picture to black and white. I think back and white is very classy looking.

Your picture should portray how you want to be perceived. I wanted to look professional, but not still and unhappy like some professional pictures I have seen.

I created this avatar in a basic photo program called PhotoDraw. It was quick and easy and helps create a consistent look for my personal brand.

Rachel M. Esterline works as an account executive for Central Michigan Life, the nationally award-winning school newspaper at Central Michigan University. She is as an account executive for PR Central, CMU’s student-run public relations firm and as a public relations executive with the Student Government Association. Additionally, Rachel serves on the executive board of the Public Relations Student Society of America at CMU and has completed a seven-month internship with her university’s public relations and marketing department. Rachel will graduate in May 2010 with a degree in public relations with minors in journalism and communication.

Last Friday, Monica O’Brien of Twenty Set wrote about how blog networks sucked and that there wasn’t any advantage to being part of one. I disagree and this post is my response.

Here are the four universal truths about blog and social networks, and how to use them to your advantage:

1. Network means it’s not just about you. Social media by definition is social and is thus a give and take world. Traffic will not magically be sent to your blog, nor will exposure magically occur.

Joining a network – whether that be a blog network like Brazen Careerist, a social network like Facebook or Twitter, or the professional network LinkedIn – doesn’t mean that all of sudden things will be easier for you. Really, it only means that your work has just begun. Hard work.

I mean, I get it. I’ve been there. We think that since we are letting networks have access to all of our writing – words that we have toiled over until 2:00 am and let sit until 2:37 am just to feel motivated and confident enough to even publish – that we should reap grand rewards. That just by giving away permission to our soul, great things should happen. I’ve been there, but that’s not how it works.

It works by not only allowing more people into your world, but by listening to them, hearing them and responding. It works by participating and figuring out how you win with your post and how the community does too.

2. You can’t be found without showing up. A blog network is not your blog. Think of a network as the meeting place – a community house, a bar on a Friday night, the lunchroom at work, whatever. Your blog, in contrast, is your home. You’re the same person – and your posts are the same – in both places, but different people show up and different conversations occur.

If you stay at home, people will find you, but the majority won’t know you exist. Similarly, if you go to the bar and just sit in a corner, that girl is not going to magically give you her number. So you can’t just blog in a vacuum, nor can you join a network and expect that to be the final step if you want to build exposure and traffic. People don’t just find you – you find them.

And that isn’t a theory just for beginners; it’s a commandment for established bloggers. The fact that Penelope Trunk syndicates the heck out of her blog is no coincidence to her success, nor is the fact that Chris Brogan shows up to every social media event imaginable. You don’t stop working ridiculously hard when you’re established. You work harder.

3. Use their network to build your network. A blog network is not promising you a product like cereal, but is selling you on relationships. Before Brazen Careerist started, the sense I had of the Gen Y blogging world was limited; I knew around twenty-five Gen Y bloggers. Now I know and have access to hundreds, not only because Brazen Careerist helped discover those people, but also because Brazen created, inspired and facilitated that particular market to be part of the conversation.

I take advantage of the Brazen network by looking at the community profiles in the same way I look at who my favorite Twitter friends are following, or who my real-life friends and I have in common on Facebook.

And when people comment on a post of mine on any network, I don’t just hope that they subscribe to my blog, I’m proactive. I check out their blog, reply to them, comment on their posts, link to them and begin to build a relationship. I get interested in what they’re doing, because they’ve shown interest in me.

I can’t imagine how I would find these people – those that are interested in my topic – in an easier way. That’s called building community and it’s what social media is all about.

4. Blog networks do give special treatment for two reasons. The first is to attract a lot of traffic from good writers. Want to be featured on the front page of a network? Be a good writer. You could be among the most-hated participants but if you write well, you’ll still be featured.

The second is to reward the people that they have relationships with. This isn’t unfair, it’s smart. Relationships make the world go round. I personally have no idea how blogs are picked to be on the front page, but there’s an easy way to circumvent whatever process the blog network has installed. That is, build a relationship.
Email the community manager if you feel you have an especially good post to, 1) promote yourself, 2) begin that relationship, and 3) make the community manager’s job easier.

I guarantee that a better attitude to success is to ask not what the network can do for you, but what you can do for your network.

Collective truth.

I love my blog for two reasons – 1) It’s my space to do whatever I want in, and 2) I get to share that space with an amazing community. I’d like to start 2009 with turning the spotlight on to that community.

This isn’t a list of my favorite Gen Y bloggers, or the most established, or the best or even the most under-appreciated. And I haven’t included a lot of people I really like. A lot. But looking into the Gen Y crystal ball, I see these fellow bloggers making waves in 2009. Here we go (in no particular order):

1. Politicoholic
Nisha Chittal is becoming rapidly well-known in the Gen Y blogging world. As an extremely talented writer, she easily won the Brazen Careerist blogging contest with this post.

2. Employee Evolution
Speaking of Brazen Careerist, the guys at Employee Evolution have had a tough time maintaining their blog since co-founding the company. But in 2009 that will change. Look for Ryan Paugh to split off and start his own blog here, and for Ryan Healy to re-commit to Employee Evolution with renewed energy.

3. The Schiff Report
Jaclyn Schiff illuminates Gen Y by discovering and commenting on interesting press clips, and more importantly, consistently providing a thought-provoking point of view.

4. WorkLoveLife
It would be hard not to include Holly Hoffman on this list. And it would be hard to imagine the Gen Y blogosphere without her snappy and sensational writing on oh-so-many revealing topics.

5. FeverBee
Richard Millington talks about ideas for building online communities. I discovered him through Chuck Westbrook’s “Under-Appreciated Blogs” series. Look for Millington to become the Seth Godin of our generation. Seriously.

6. Personal Branding
The real power of Dan Schawbel comes not from his blog, but his incredible passion which makes him one of the hardest-working Gen Y bloggers around. Watch for his book Me 2.0 to come out in early April of this year.

7. I Hate HR
Both witty and wise, Rachel Robbins’ posts are a short and cohesive snapshot of the HR world, something that I could care less about, but that she manages to make interesting.

8. The Office Newb
I love that Jacqui Tom challenges my opinions and forces me to synthesize my ideas. No, really, literally. And while I don’t always agree with her, she makes appealing arguments as a clever writer.

9. Girl Meets Business
It’s been easy to overlook Angela Marino’s consistently practical and solid advice, but with the launch of her fun and innovative 2009 YP Rockstar series, I know she will gain well-deserved attention.

Wait, one more…
10. Modite
I’m totally cheating. I know. Putting my own blog on my own list is completely self-involved. But I hear you when you say you want me to post more. And I will.

And finally a note about…
The Almost Royal
Sometimes people do things I don’t understand and should stay out of. Like when Sarah Pare deleted her blog. But I want her to come back. She was a favorite. Come back, Pare, we need you.

Who will you be watching in 2009?

(And an update: this post just won me a free ticket to SXSW Interactive in March!)

I used to be a lurker.

You know who they are: those surfers of the web who revel in dark, unknown corners.  Who consume but don’t reciprocate. Whose existence is known to none but themselves, whose presence we are never aware of as anything more than a number on our blog stats that might pique our curiosity. They lurk and disappear back into cyberspace, and no one ever has to know; no trace of them is left behind.

I knew the ups and downs of Penelope’s divorce, Ryan’s workaholism; but until recently I had never so much as left a single comment on any of their blogs. Your first reaction might be: creep! But something like 90% of blog readers are equally creepy lurkers. Chances are, you are lurking right now and will read, digest, and move along without ever saying a thing to me (including you, email subscribers – I know who you are!). You’ll never voice your opinion. So before you call me a creep, don’t forget what you’re doing right now: creeping.

Daring to commit your opinions and your intellectual thoughts down in words, permanently etched into pixels in cyberspace, is unnerving. It takes balls that most people don’t have, and that is why the vast majority of users of the Web are what we so affectionately refer to as lurkers. They’re afraid to voice their opinion and let anyone who Googles them find them; afraid that someone will disagree and criticize them.

I was one of those, and I was hiding. And for a long time that was a theme in my life: hiding. I have about 4 drafts of blog posts I have written over the years, saved in my archives, about how I hide different parts of my life from everyone. But, in my typical fashion, I never posted one of them. Because it takes courage to even blog in the first place. It makes you an outlier, it makes you different, and that opens you up to a whole new level of scrutiny.

Blogging is at once intensely personal, yet unnervingly public. And it connects people in the most individual, human, personal way. Of my college-age friends, I have very few who have blogs. And when one of them first started her blog, she proceeded to get mocked and made fun of behind her back, constantly. Her blog is a joke to the rest of them, constantly bantered about; every new post is gossip fodder, eagerly devoured. Spending so much time around people like that had left me paralyzed, afraid to just be who I am; and prancing around in that living charade was exceptionally tiring. Why did I care about these people again? It was illogical and irrational.

The difference between me pre-blog and me post-blog is simple: I went from an invisible, hiding lurker to a real person, and an outlier. Seems simple, but that transformation is empowering in a way you’d never expect. I went from letting others define me to defining myself. Instead of always having to hide what I do from people, I can just…be. I have something to say that is worth saying, and I actively contribute to the conversation.

It’s no longer a simple matter of writing a blog and hoping someone reads: it overflows into every other area of my life. Now, I want to have more conversations and put out my opinion on everything. I want to seek out new people and new perspectives and constantly learn from everyone around me. I want to explore new ideas, challenge them, and be challenged. I want to do something worth doing, instead of just what everyone else is doing. And sadly, though perhaps not surprisingly, most people aren’t willing to do that. But blogger are.

The mockers matter less and less, because, really, I’d rather drop them from my life now. When one of my favorite writers, who is far, far more successful than me, emailed me out of the blue and told me she loved a piece I wrote, the game changed a little. When my work started to get noticed by some others, the game changed a little. I no longer care to be just one of millions of college kids that are exactly the same. Who wants to blend in?

I realized I am different from them, but instead of continuing to try to hide it I started to reluctantly embrace it. I constantly strive to be an outlier, to be above and beyond, to put myself out there and be someone who challenges the status quo — and not someone who maintains it. I no longer want to be part of the norm. As one blogger said, that’s fifth place, when I know I want first. But if your presence is never known, how will you make an impact? How will you leave your mark? The simple act of voicing your opinion and expressing yourself means you are challenging the status quo, however insignificant you feel. But if you aren’t visible, to the world you don’t exist. If you’re just lurking and not participating, you’re outdated, obsolete, last year’s season. That’s not even fifth place; that’s invisibility.

Now, I’m no longer letting things happen to me. I don’t let others tell me what to do. I don’t believe in destiny; I just go out and make things happen. And I tend to brazenly defy everyone who doesn’t believe me. I realized that the way I defined myself and my life had to change. And in doing so, I won the inner battle that has been raging inside of me for twenty years. I killed the inner critic, the voice that stops so many people from doing great things. I stopped living for what other people think, and started living solely to create an impact and a difference.

And blogging, and everything and everyone that came with it, are what forced that change.

So when I sat down to write a post about how blogging has changed my life, many things came to mind. I wanted to write something as flawless as Andrew Sullivan’s brilliant essay, “Why I Blog.” But I am not Andrew Sullivan, so I can’t. Instead I thought of all the things I had learned, the advice I had gained, the opportunities I’ve received, the people I had interviewed and the late night discussions I’ve had when I could have been studying. And those have all been amazing things. But to this day, nothing compares to the surprising rush of empowerment that comes in that moment when you hold your breath and hit the ‘Publish’ button. It’s your blog, and no one can fuck with you there.

It’s something those legions of lurkers will never understand.

—–

(Hat tip to BC – what a challenge. This is probably the hardest thing I have ever written!)

Nisha Chittal is a writer and journalist who currently serves as Associate Editor of CitizenJanePolitics.com and is a political columnist for UniversityChic.com. Her personal blog is Politicoholic, where she offers commentary on a range of topics, including but not limited to politics, technology, and the changing role of women and Generation Y in politics today.