Not long ago I connected a marketing acquaintance at a national meeting.  He offered to look at my blog and give me some tips.  We sat over coffee and he took me to task for my shortcomings.

Where’s your pop up email registration? And what does 33 charts mean? I don’t know what that means.  Are you tryin’ to be cute?  Where’s your call to action?  Where are your webinars and white papers?  What’s your content strategy?  Look at this site … I can’t even tell what you’re doin’.  Did you know that you have .233 milliseconds to impress an individual when they land on your site?  If not…BAM (palm on table)…you’re done, buddy.

It went on longer than this, but you get the point.  It culminated, predictably, in a consulting offer to set me on the straight-and-narrow.

The assumption for a long time has been that web properties exist only to sell things.  This was once the case.  Marketers were first to the social web and they set the standards for what was possible.  But the connected world is now connected for reasons other than selling vitamins and pushing webinars.

Thousands of doctors, for example, translate and publish their knowledge in the spirit of FOAM.  My friend Wes Fisher doesn’t sell anything but revolutionary ideas.  Jordan Grumet tells what it’s really like to be a doctor.  Ramona Bates is a plastic surgeon who’s public to showcase her beautiful quilts.  And she was blogging long before my slick-haired marketing friend knew what a blog was.

But the reality is that there are people beating the pavement telling doctors that being public is about selling videos and vitamins. There’s nothing wrong with creating a business or leveraging your online presence.  But the real opportunity with being public goes beyond that.  It’s is the opportunity to teach, share our passions, or change the way people think. Public presence is beyond what doctors sell.

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