While I was at Back on My Feet, something I was proud of completing was, with the great help of a colleague, a company style guide.

A style guide should be a fundamental piece of documentation that goes a long way to creating an institutional memory. If everything imploded, a style guide would help you rebuild your organization — with workflow being more explicitly enumerated in staff manuals.

As your organization grows, it’s easy to wake up and find a lot of disparate, disconnected pieces that you’ll need to assemble again. Take hold and  keep connected the work you do for a tighter, more inspired and successful campaign.

In looking at other guides and finding value in ours, there are a few items that I think every style guide should include:

• Branding: Take control of how employees describe, share and employ reference and mention of your organization.
  • What is your organization’s name and its appropriate shorthand?
  • What is your organization’s logo and its acceptable varieties?
  • List the colors in your logo and the palate of colors from your website and other materials.
• Language: You don’t want your staff sounding like robots, but getting everyone on the same page can help create an effective culture in talking about your mission.
  • What is your mission statement and acceptable shorthand?
  • (i.e. At Back on My Feet, staff took issue with reporters describing us as a ‘homeless running club,’ so we needed to combat that with something nearly as short but more descriptive. With all parties, we came to “a running-based program to combat homelessness.”)
  • What are basic responses to common questions that staff can use? Save your staff time with quick, canned responses to common questions.
• Marketing: Keep materials around marketing, invitations, one-pagers and the like similar.
  • What are the major events your organization hosts or is involved in and how do you market them?
  • What are the fundamentals musts and basic look
• Style: The broader, specific expectations that fit into all three of the above categories.
  • What are the fonts you use?
  • Is your basic grammar and usage AP style? Or something else?
  • Are there organization-specific words or phrases that should used or portrayed in a specific way?
• Anything else you have basic, staff-wide rules around.

I’ve squabbled with people over domains and publication names, of projects and story titles.

There was a moment of inaction in creating the technology news site for Philadelphia that I am now proud to say continues to take on readership and bring on partners. Technically Philly certainly isn’t descriptive on its own and makes for a fairly long domain. But I like to think we’ve developed some degree of brand recognition. That name means technology and innovation coverage to a few thousand people in Philadelphia.

The secret is, I think, that within reason, if you brand it, they will come.

I think Twitter and Facebook and MySpace are all dumb brands, actually. But they found a distinct name and made it their own. Those names now conjure a definable action and look.

Distinction is important.

I went to Temple University and wrote for its college newspaper The Temple News. Because TTN remained editorially independent and the school sought a publication to regularly maintain the record of official activity, the university’s department of communications published The Temple Times.

Though ours was a nicely designed, 87-year-old broadsheet and the latter a generation-old, straightforward newsletter, not a week went by when I didn’t hear someone confuse the two — more normally landing on The Temple Times title.

The Temple News name makes sense, but it doesn’t have the separation and power of the younger and perhaps stranger sounding brands.

What the Hell a NEast is, not many know, but I see real use of the phrase on NEast Philly’s Facebook group page, which has taken on nearly 5,000 fans in three weeks and has become a sounding page for all sort of Northeast Philadelphia discussion.

Yes, people still sometimes stumble on the name and call it Northeast Philly Online — particularly frustrating because, while not strong competition, it exists. But I see the creation of a brand separate from the products in that part of the city that do have Northeast in its name.

As a startup, don’t waste too much time on picking the name, just make sure it’s distinct, back it up with persistence and longevity. They’ll come around.

I worked with Shannon McDonald to launch a hyperlocal news site for Northeast Philadelphia. Initially in late 2008, she wanted the product to be the Web presence of a print product she wanted to call NEast Magazine.

It’s not where we ended up.

That domain and the shortened NEastmag.com were then used by a now defunct snowboarding magazine. So we thought more seriously about branding. We decided developing a Web first brand didn’t have to mean we couldn’t someday offer a niche print product if the value was there.

So we went hunting for a domain that fit. Our intention then, as it probably should be for most when possible, was a five to seven-letter domain dot com name that was the same as the brand.

While for brand protection, she bought others, eleven-letter NEastPhilly.com fit and flown well since.

Now, as dot coms get crowded and more crowded still, we’ll see the evolution of upper level domains — geographic specific options like .philly and perhaps more respect for .nets and .infos — but for now, you want it short, you want it a dotcom and you want it the same as your business or brand.

If your domain is long, try to grab something in shorthand that can forward there — like tphilly.com for TechnicallyPhilly.com and WDSTL.com for We Don’t Speak the Language — or get creative with an action, like how I encouraged friend and author Eric Smith to grab ReadTextualHealing.com for the novel he’s self-publishing.

Because by now, existing legacy businesses are online, and no one should start any business ever again without a Web-first mentality. So the question of what your domain will be has to be an early decision.

When going to the clever and strong staff blog of alt-weekly Philadelphia CityPaper, I still often type theclog.com, which of course they didn’t buy when they launched the brand. The Washington Post got picked on for launching World Wide Wilbon without grabbing the domain.

There are countless more examples, of course. So be sure, in discussing a product’s name, the availability of a related domain is also part of the process.

Weekly in Print. Daily online, I suggested.

I wrote it on a piece of paper and posted it in my cubicle, as editorial page editor. In the mid-1990s, our newspaper staff rather presciently decided to move from printing three days a week to just once, having already dropped from a daily a few years earlier.

The intent, a front-page story read at the time, was to reduce costs at a time when the Internet would soon be the source of all news. Gosh, they were a bit too early, but dead on. So, they’d update daily online and follow-up with the biggest stories weekly.

A fine concept if it had carried through. However, at some point, the legendary NEWS, as old-head TTNers call it, fell into disrepair in the late 1990s and into the 21st-century. Despite some bright spots and top talent, the paper became a tabloid weekly at best.

By the time I got to Room 243 in October 2004, things were already improving. By my senior year, we were returning to national recognition — having repeated with an Online Pacemaker, awarded by the AP’s Collegiate division. I wondered if a tagline could further change the culture of a newsroom.

So, among a slew of other initiatives, we set about, as a staff, returning our focus to daily online updates, with bigger, more feature-orientated pieces in the weekly product. We started the action, so the pledge seemed to be a logical next step.

Once I admitted I was late, I just kept delaying the inevitable — buying business cards.

I got into the full-time, freelance writing back in December, so I ought to have had something right away. I could have passed them out when I spoke at a high school journalism conference and with the many sources I’ve met in my freelancing work since.

Well, now I have them, double-sided cards, as depicted above, though the colors are a bit darker and the text a bit harder to read here than they are when printed. Much thanks to colleague graphic designer Brian James Kirk who did the dirty layout work.

There are those who say business cards are old hat, but, let me answer my own question, they are still absolutely necessary for a freelance journalist even today. Below I share what I did and related learning.

My contact list is heavily organized in my Gmail account, something I think more journalists should be doing. But many of those contacts ended up in there from a card someone passed me. I want that to happen when I meet editors, writers or potential sources. I want them to have my information easily at hand. I also want to motivate them to get to my Web site.

So, OK, OK, I need cards. My colleagues and I at Technically Philly had been talking about getting TP business cards for months. That made great sense, as we’re trying to develop the brand.

I suggested, since my two other co-founders and I are all freelancing, let’s get our personal work on one side and TP on the other side of our premium business cards with Vista Prints. Done. Oh, but then time’s involved, too.

Last week, I wrote about the national BarCamp NewsInnovation conference held at Temple University in swimming fashion on Saturday. Lots of rad people were going to be in attendance and TP was co-hosting the event, so, along with Kirk and Sean Blanda, I got mine rush delivered in three days.

I was ordering 500 cards for $25, but that rush delivery would have been $30 more (!) making the total $55 — 11 cents a card. I called a local Kinkos and a North Philadelphia printer someone recommended, but their prices were still triple and more than double, even with the rush delivery. I would have liked to offer my business to the local printer, and under different circumstances, I likely would have, but I had BarCampers to impress.

I resigned myself to doubling my cost because of speed-shipping when, nearing checkout, Vista Prints, in its incessantly pestering Web site, offered to double my order size for less than a third of the cost. That cut my price-per-card be nearly half, so, though I certainly don’t need that many, I got myself 1,000 cards.

Here’s what my bill looked like:

• 1,000 Custom business cards: $15.23
• Grayscale backside: $11.23
• Matte Finish Included: $0
• Two uploaded images: $7.48
• Rush three-day shipping: $30.18
• Total: $64.12 (6.4 cents per card)
  

A lot more than the free cards I was going to get from Vista a few months back, paying nothing more than $10 in shipping, but they are a lot more useful and better looking.

What I learned:

• Cards are absolutely valuable — get them.
• Start with no more than 250 free cards and then come back to something bigger and better later.
• Unless you’re a graphic designer or another creative field that begs you to have a bit more ostentation in your card, paying 10 cents or less per card is a good goal to feel you’ve gotten a deal.
• Order the cards now and do the slowest delivery method you can find (Vista Prints 21-day delivery is currently $7, and a little more than $10 for two weeks). Don’t wait for when you really need them.
• If you have another business, a side project or something else you want to promote, utilize the second side of your card. I think that’s better than having two different cards.
• Wait until you have a phone number that ain’t changing — a major reason I did continually delay getting cards.
• If you’re in a city, do give a neighborhood for a bit more specificity, that increases the chance for a connection with a new contact. I listed my Frankford neighborhood, which could warrant someone I meet to remember me if they once lived or knew someone or something from Northeast Philadelphia.
• Do not give an exact address, unless it’s a P.O. box. This could easily be called paranoid, but after much deliberation, I don’t like handing out my address anywhere near as much as I am comfortable with sharing my phone number, e-mail and Web site. Yes, a business card is for ease of information, but I can give it in a quick e-mail if it’s needed.
• 1,000 cards may be more than I need, particularly for a first run, but I wanted to make up for my other mistakes in terms of cost (like ordering late) and am happy to have the motivation to pass them out. For a first run, go with 250 if you’re unsure about the information changing and 500 if you’re feeling a bit more confident.

I get it, we’re entering a brave, paperless world, where varied resumes are important but not as much as the one in your head, right next to that elevator pitch of yours. They’ll tell you a business card isn’t as important anymore. Maybe it’s lost something.

Though I’m awfully happy with the design, the look and its double-side, I know mine isn’t among the most creative business cards out there. But, don’t let anyone fool you, getting someone to move from introduction to your Web site cannot be done better than with a card of your own.

Xerox that. Get a Band-Aid.

Of course, that has clearly followed online.

Google that. Digg that – though not Digg me. Facebook me; the confluence of Twitter and tweet and twittering. You don’t LinkedIn someone, which might relate to how Facebook could crush its professional conterpart if it would only offer a more restricitve and private version of a person’s Facebook profile for colleages.

Can this come to news media?

A subject could probably get TechCrunched – if covered by the popular Silicon Valley blog. (Could we peer into the future and see Delaware Valley region tech businesses getting Technically Philly-ed?)

Before his death, Tim Russert was rising in prominence and fame for his grilling of leaders and legislators. In the future, could have been Russerting his guests?

It seems a silly path in vanity, but I think this is a lesson in the power of personality over person – it’s not who you are or what you can prove, but what you can show and say.

CNN’s ratings are slipping in comparison to booming audience figures for opinion-heavy and personality-driving MSNBC and Fox News.

I don’t think anyone’s doubting that news is going to need an increasingly character-basis to bring in the masses.

Whether the brands will matter enough to develop verb-use, we’ll have to see.

While the digital divide is slowly lessening and more people are online all the time, there is a very small community that is always repeating itself  on whatever the social media of the moment is – lately that has been Twitter, of course.

I’m part of it, no doubt. Because our society today demands self-promotion, or so it seems. The echo chamber is so small and there are so many people talking – mostly about the same things – that it’s tough to be heard over it all.

Your post or your story or your A1 article is getting buried, surely a big part of why newspapers are faltering. The democratization of the Web has given megaphones to anyone with an Internet connection, so no longer does your daily newspaper have the same pedastal.

So, if you want to be heard, you flee to MySpace, or Facebook or Twitter or on your blog or wherever else.  I believe that you have to put yourself everywhere online if you want to compete in a media field of your choice. But it’s easy to cross over from active self-promotion to incessant self-indulgence.

I’ve done it myself, so here’s my pledge to do better.

Self-promotion is, of course, generally heralded as a dirty course. It is most often read as an unabashed and unchecked sense of self, which is, of course, not something I want.

I aim to do so better.

I have three times submitted my own work to Digg, and mentioned them many times more. But I have a small comunity of friends who use Digg, the news aggregation site, and, looking back, I can see why I thought what I submitted was worth submitting, I could have guessed I’d never get a handful of diggs at best.

Because an individual should very rarely be doing that. I’d like to see more publications with a devoted social media specialist – there are plenty on Twitter – whose job is to promote and push their staff material, but it can’t genuinely come solely from the author’s end.

For little output, there was a big cost, seeming entirely uninterested in genuine connection. Really, all of social media is self-involved, to be put above others as being a self-involved hack, there is a real loss in trust.

In the past, I too often rushed for the success of self-promotion, without seeing the beneficial self-promotion in being myself. Because God, we all roll our eyes a bit when someone is selling something too hard, even if it’s that person himself. I missed that whatever new readers I gained, I may have bored or even insulted another existing one.

So, I’m calling off excessive online self-promotion. Here, I will continue to post links to all the stories I write and work I do – as I still maintain every journalist on the planet should – but I’m going to take a break from pushing any of it out anymore.

There’s already too much noise resounding in the echo chamber.

Image from Lakewood.

I’ve already said that journalists of all stripes, anyone interested in media, research or anything in which your writing, your name and your credibility is best served defended and re-defended somewhere it can be found.

One of the best reasons to traipse into this fad — and, of course, blogging is fad for now, fashion, perhaps, later, because we won’t know of its longevity for some time — is because there is no better way to develop a voice and a focus. These are, they tell me and tell me and tell me again, central qualities to all writers of note and consequence, indeed, even writers and speakers and thinkers of even relative success.

And it’s harder than you might think.

Do you have a blog? Like any good newspaper column, I really think you ought to be able to tell me its specific focus in 25 words or less.

I’ve been writing here for more than a year and, I fastly admit, spent the first several months floundering with my focus – occasionally posting news bloopers and too-personal experiences – under the broad umbrella of media blogging, too broad to be sure.

Today on my About page, though, I pledge to do the following:

On this professional site, I blog about being a young freelance journalist in Philadelphia – with central themes on pitching, writing, researching, networking and journalism 2.0.

That’s 28 words and, really, I hope to further narrow my focus further – regardless of how succinct the above sentence is. The process has been a lesson to me, and I’ve developed since.

So I may share funny Youtube videos and quirky news stories via Google Reader, but they don’t belong here. Any private stories I like to share I post on My Life To-do list, a personal site whose role will be discussed more in a future post. Otherwise, I stick to what I think this site’s focus should be – the tour of a young freelance journalists in 2008.

In the past six months of narrowing my focus, I have seen growth in my readership (hello to more than two-dozen new subscribers!). It is easier for potentially interested readers to decide coming or subscribing here is worth their time. I can reach out to share my specific goal.

Too many blogs, some written by even experienced writers, have taglines that include words like “ramblings,” or “anything that comes to mind.” I don’t pretend to think I’d ever want explicit control on such nonsense, but it seems to me that writing belongs in a journal stored in your sock drawer – not cluttering the Interwebs.

It took me longer to realize that than I hope it will take you.

Find a focus, a niche, do it best and link the rest.

That’s where blogs can be transcendent because it’s the same lesson newspapers need to learn. Unless your columnists – or newspaper bloggers – have real insight, have them link elsewhere and let them do what they do best – humor or metro or crime-coverage, etc. You should too.

Develop your voice and find your focus, and write it down for yourself in 25 words or less. Then stick to it. For all of us.

Image courtesy of MingLee.

It’s the attitudes that got them into this mess – newspaper executives thinking the party would never stop, but newspapers need to combine an appreciation and interest in learning the future with the confidence of being the most powerful news sources in the world.

Too many just seem to be running scared.

Of course,we know why many newspapers seem to be running scared. …Their staffs are scared.

The Rocky Mountain News is in so much trouble that they’re begging for help. The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New Orleans Times Picayune, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times. They have all gotten national headlines, not for great coverage but for fiscal struggles. Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s parent company filed for bankruptcy.

The New York Times – which was somehow anointed as the online newspaper of record because bloggers won’t shut up about it – has gotten plenty of bad press, too, but, they’re also looked on as an innovator. Part of that comes from just what I mentioned, looking toward the future but continuing their attitude.

An established journalist and mentor-of-sorts of mine shared a story. He was talking to a buddy of his who was an executive with NYTimes.com. The executive mentioned a concept in which he was interested. My mentor asked him why didn’t he push to try it with on his company’s famed news site.

“We don’t practice on NYTimes.com,” the executive said.

That sounds bloody pretentious, doesn’t it? Of course it does. As much as I roll my eyes at this country’s collective crush on New York (more because it’s the home of media than any actual difference) and its related idolatry of the New York Times, that is the attitude any paper worth its weight ought to have. We don’t practice with our product.

Have some side projects, but that masthead of yours better not be on it. That attitude, though, has to, has to, has to be combined with an incessant pursuit for where the future will be, innovation, my friends.

NYTimes.com has a couple hundred programmers. Does the Philadelphia Inquirer have any? Philly.com, a separate company that boasts it has a nearer feel to a Web start-up than a newspaper, has a handful, but, well, is that the adamant pursuit of the future? Are they practicing?

While Philly.com may be successful compared to the Inqy, I still feel icky about Downtheshore videos being so near to the Inqy masthead. That feels like practicing. That feels like the Inqy doesn’t have that attitude that, Hey, 350,000 people read our Sunday edition, we’re the 15th most circulated newspaper in the country and the third oldest. We have a crap load of Pulitzers. We’re the most important and historic and meaningful news source in the fourth largest media market in the most powerful nation in the world.

A few weeks ago, the cover of the Inqy business section ran an Associated Press photo from New York. It was a picture of “For Sale” signs for a story on declining retail sales. Someone couldn’t take that photograph in Philadelphia? Sure there are cutbacks, but the Inquirer doesn’t have a file photo of something like that? It frightens me that the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to have long given in. They don’t have that attitude right now. They seem to give in. New York is a better city. Kneel and kiss the mofo ring of the Times and the AP.

It’s that Philly mentality of defeatism creeping in – and a particularly distasteful, dirty feeling when New York gets involved. But this is news. If the Inqy doesn’t really collectively think it does things that no one else on the planet can, well, then, I think we’ve already lost.

Photo from Green Apple.

I don’t want to repeat this anymore, so let me direct you elsewhere.

I got an e-mail from a young aspiring journalist, still in high school and already coming to the questions I just started coming upon late in college. Her question:

how do you buy spaces on a google seerch?

Hey, even she will tell you that I told her to work on her grammar and spelling. (Oh, word processors, what have you done to us?).

But more importantly, it made me realize I never wrote the obligatory “own your name in Google” post. I have surely touched on it in previous posts, but rather than repurpose that information or rewrite what has been written so many times, I say to young reporter or fresh-on-the-web journalist, find out why branding your name online matters, and then read the following – because they’ve already done the job.

• HowardOwens: Owning Your Name In Search
• SeanBlanda: How To Overcome Your George Blanda

Somewhat relatedly, lots of posts I’ve read have focused on what that branding should be (and whether it really matters):

• BrianJamesKirk: Confessions of a Writer I Drink Beer and Network Socially
• Colin Lenton: Photos, Personal History and Facebook
  

I’ve written about using social networks to develop more control on a Web search of your name:

• The End is Here: Christopher Wink Just Joined Facebook
• Check me out on MySpace: why I am selling out
  
• Your digital legacy: we know your wild past won’t forget, but who doesn’t?

OK, that should answer your questions. Have anymore? Let me know below.