We all know that online activities can backfire, à la John P. Mackey, the Whole Foods chief executive whose anonymous online postings to financial message boards attacking competitor Wild Oats caused even me, a diehard Whole Foods zealot, to question my thrice-weekly trips to the salad bar. But online activities, especially blogging, can just as easily be a career benefactor as a blemish. Consider these stories:
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Jeremy Blachman arrived at Harvard Law School, but like so many law students, he had little interest in practicing law. As an undergraduate in Princeton, he wrote musical comedy and songs. To keep up with his writing while in law school, he started playing with blogs.
In his second year, Mr. Blachman interviewed for a summer job with the prominent law firms that came to campus to recruit for summer associates. With summer jobs paying $2,400 a week, he was more than happy to earn big bucks while being reminded that big law firm work was not for him. On a lark, he started an anonymous blog inspired by the law firm partners he had met in those on-campus interviews. “I expected the whole thing to last a few weeks,” he said.
Thanks to some artful linking around the Web, Anonymous Lawyer took off. Mr. Blachman’s online persona was an over-the-top caricature — he blogged about a series of housekeepers he fired and mocked a young associate who sent a BlackBerry message about his availability from the hospital room where his wife had just given birth — yet readers believed that the writer was a real lawyer.
At the height of its popularity, Anonymous Lawyer averaged more than 3,500 readers a day. In this post, “Anonymous Lawyer: From Blog to Book,” Mr. Blachman tells the story of how his blog became a book.
He is now talking with NBC about a television version of Anonymous Lawyer and still regularly blogs, now at Jeremy Blachman’s Weblog. Typical posts include comic musings about chair placement, water bottles and parking at television studio meetings. More seriously, he even includes honest talk about his doubts about his writing future.
Bee Kim, 28, was a hobbyist blogger while running a vocational school in south central Los Angeles. Blogging about her personal life and issues relevant to Asian-Americans, Ms. Kim amassed a few hundred loyal readers over several years. When she became engaged and moved to New York, her blog began focusing on the details of her coming wedding. She worried that she was losing the interest of her male readers, so she moved all wedding-related posts to a new blog called Wedding Bee.
As other brides-to-be started hearing about Wedding Bee, Ms. Kim began receiving requests to plan other people’s weddings. That is when she knew she was onto something. Slowly, Wedding Bee evolved.
“I went from being a regular blogger that just loved to share ideas and research to more of a professional blogger, where I watched for tone, libel, and even language,” such as cursing, she said. Previously, “if I didn’t like a vendor, I’d vent away knowing they’d never read my post. Now when I review a vendor, I know the vendor is likely to stumble across my post. So I check the facts, make sure the tone is balanced, and basically pretend to be a real journalist.”
By inviting other women to become contributors, Ms. Kim spawned a group of about 20 other co-bloggers from around the country. Ms. Kim, now married, still blogs under the name Mrs. Bee. Her contributors each use a blogger handle; married bloggers tend to be insects (Mrs. Caterpiller, Mrs. Firefly), while the future brides are heavy on fruits and candies (Miss Butterscotch, Miss Licorice).
With each change to the business, she involved her readers. In this post, Wedding Bee Tweaks, she wrote about the decision to accept advertising, offering the proposed design up to her readers for comments.
After moving to New York to be with her new husband, Ms. Kim dedicated herself fully to the blog. Now with about a million page views a month (and nearly 500,000 unique visitors), according to the tracking service Sitemeter.com, Ms. Kim says, Wedding Bee is earning enough from advertisements to cover a salaried part-time editor and cover rent and living expenses in their West Village one-bedroom apartment.
Carmina Perez, 47, began her blog, Mogulettes-in-the-Making, about six months ago after a long career in finance and media. Over the years, she had taken a few stabs at starting various businesses, but she always returned to the security of a job.
When her last job came to an end in May 2006, she decided to get serious about entrepreneurship. But this time it would be different. She now had a considerable financial cushion so she could support herself while building a business.
In the past, Ms. Perez always started businesses on her own, and the isolation was part of the reason she never went far. Blogging seemed like the way to create an instant community of support.
Mogulettes-in-the-Making, the blog, is about helping other women build their businesses, the very business Ms. Perez is in the midst of building. Typical posts document meetings where she brings in an expert to teach her “mogulettes” something, like this post about a session on computer security, a lecture she organized with a guest speaker about public relations or a field trip to the Science, Industry and Business Library in New York City, which offers reference resources and free sessions with business counselors for entrepreneurs.
Though the blog has only about 300 page views a month, Ms. Perez has developed a small following among women who look to her for advice.
When Ellyssa Kroski, who is in her mid-30s, completed her master’s degree in library science in 2004, she could not find a full-time job. She was working part time in the Butler Library at Columbia University and in technology consulting, the work she did before she started her master’s program. She decided that blogging about her expertise might be a way to build connections in the field that could lead to a job.
Befitting a librarian, Ms. Kroski’s posts are well researched and well cited, the old-fashioned way, using properly formatted footnotes rather than hyperlinks.
And the blog did lead to a job, an adjunct faculty position at Long Island University’s Palmer School of Library and Information Science. But in the meantime, her interests have changed: while the job is not full time, because of her blog Ms. Kroski’s horizons have risen even further.
“As a new librarian, no one would publish me,” Ms. Kroski said. Yet, after publishing her first article, “Authority in the Age of the Amateur”, on her blog, Infotangle, and circulating it to bloggers in her field, she discovered that she was cited everywhere.
“It’s been a snowball effect ever since,” she said. “I started making all kinds of connections and getting invitations to speak at national conferences. And within eight months of starting the blog, I was approached by a publisher to write a book about Web 2.0 for librarians.”
A version of this article published earlier referred incorrectly to the anonymous online postings of John P. Mackey, the Whole Foods chief executive. They were on financial message boards, not in a blog.
Marci Alboher, a former lawyer, is a journalist/author/writing coach. She is the author of One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success (Warner Business: 2007).
