Sometimes I hear that I share too much in my blog posts. Other times I hear from people that wish I would share more details. How much I share and how I share it is a bit of a balancing act with several factors to consider.
My general sharing guidelines
I share stories about past successes and (shudder) learning experiences.
I share less about what I’m working on now or planning to work on.
I never share who I am working with (customers and partner businesses) unless it has been approved by the other party and makes sense to share.
I share most of my knowledge.
I share most but not all of my implementation tricks.
I share information about my personal life sparingly. (We can cover that ground face to face some day)
I’m constantly refining my sharing threshold.
Jim,
Your personal sharing threshold is what defines your voice, writing style, and POV and what keeps me interested in reading your posts. I appreciate your recent addition of post title to the subject line in your emails!
Mari,
Thank you, I find your comment quite useful. I had not thought about my sharing threshold as defining my voice, writing style and POV but I believe you are correct. At the very least it’s a significant component part.
As for adding the post title to the subject line, that’s just part of my continuous (and almost obsessive) tinkering with all things blog in my life. You may have also noticed the delivery time moved from 11pm central to 6am. Hopefully that is also more useful for you and the other subscribers.
Jim
Great list, Jim.
I think it’s important that all of us continue to refine our sharing threshold. It helps for me to occasionally step back and review my tweets and facebook posts for a week or so. Sometimes I say, “Geez, I’m boring people.” Other times it’s “Hmm – skipped over a lot of interesting and important stuff.”
And I completely agree about customers – they don’t get mentioned unless the explicitly agree to it. For the most part, I don’t even ask unless there’s something I think the greater world would benefit from knowing.
Randy,
I don’t mention customers for lots of reasons. Most of them competitive. Besides this is my megaphone. I’d be happy to write for and about them in other places (for pay of course) 😉
Jim