Dino Dogan: dog blogger extra-ordinaire

Interview with influential dog blogger Dino Dogan
By Laure-Anne Viselé, November 2010

Who is Dino Dogan?

With countless guest-posting, speaking gigs and over 5,000 Twitter followers, Dino Dogan is an accomplished social media entrepreneur. He has become nothing short of a figure head for the dog blogging community. When it comes to social media, he reads it all, tries it all, and then translates it in effective, to-the-point blog posts for the rest of us less techno-savvy bloggers.

What’s even more remarkable about Dino’s success is that he specialises in a niche market, which is all too often synonymous with social media anonymity. His speciality?… You’ve guessed it: dog training.

So what makes Dino so successful? Well, there is his blogging style, for starters. It is so catchy they should put a warning on that blog. His blog posts are to-the-point, chaotic, engaging, down-to-earth and hilariously funny.

But most remarkable of all: Dino Dogan’s blog is so incredibly thought-provoking. With posts like Do we really need animal shelters, he engages his readers into reconsidering widely accepted perspectives.

How I met Dino

I came across Dino through Twitter, and the relationship evolved when we started discussing his posts through comments on his blog. I am now one of many of his blogging “students” on Dog Trainer 2.0, and it just evolved from there.

It was only a matter of time before he made it to my dog pro hall of fame. So, without further ado, meet the king of dog blogs, Dino Dogan. In this interview, we’ll be talking about buddhism, books, working in IT, … and, in passing, blogging and dogs!

The interview

For an audio version of this interview, go to Social media and niche blogging.

LAURE-ANNE: Dino Dogan is an impossibly cool name. It can’t be your real name, surely?

DINO DOGAN: I get that all the the time! But it’s my real name. Worked out, didn’t it? If we had video, I could show you my driver’s licence! How about your name?

L-A: Oh I’ve got a bit of a checkered past. My parents are French speakers, but I partly grew up in the UK and now… I live in the Netherlands. So my accent’s this complete melting pot.

DD: You should totally do voice-over work!…

About working in IT and training dogs

DD: So, this week, I am taking time off and doing only things I enjoy doing. This is one of them!

L-A: Oh you’re so lucky. I am feeling overwhelmed with my dog career and my IT career, plus the kid.

DD: I’m sorry [referring to the fact that I work in IT…]. Am a network engineer.

L-A: Oh really, you’re in IT too!? I’m a project manager on big software projects. But I’m trying to do a job that inspires me more, and I’m completely nuts about dogs. That’s even what I studied at university [Zoology]. So here I am, writing the Canis bonus blog and taking dog pictures.

And this leads me to my question: you’re a niche blogger about dogs, so what do you do with dogs professionally?

DD: I’ve been owning and training dogs since I was a kid, but it’s never been a main source of income for me. But in layman’s terms, I train dogs.

From dog bloggers to published authors?

DD: But more importantly, I think it is my interests outside of the dog world that drive me and give me a different perspective on human-dog relationships.

L-A: Oh you definitely have a unique perspective. I loooove your stuff.

DD: Thank you! A few years ago, I started developing this thing I like to call a thesis on human-dog problem tree. I’d like to turn it into a book and I realised that unless you already have a platform like Paris Hilton or Ricky Martin, you’re not going to get published. The book business is a business after all. So in order to create a platform for myself I started a blog.

The other reason I have a blog is that it helps me solidify my ideas.

L-A: Clever. We have very similar paths [I also have a book project on the way]. Except that your strategy seems a lot more driven and focused. What you do in social media has been so effective.  You’re definitely getting that platform: what a following.

A social media guru… by accident

DD: The other thing that happened totally accidentally is I became a social media guy in the process. I didn’t mean to, but, in fact, this Sunday, I gave a talk on social media for a group of female small business owners in Brooklyn.

L-A: That is so cool. Because you never even planned to get there and now people ask you to speak at their functions and write guest-posts as a social media advisor.

DD: You know, I’m a life-long student, am a life-long learner.

L-A: Hear hear!

DD: And one of the things that I’ve learned is that if you’re gonna learn something, overlearn it.

L-A: Oh my God, you’re taking words right out of my mouth!!!

DD: So I’ve spent copious amounts of time sifting through a lot of social media information, a lot of it junk. But there are certain pearls of wisdom that you can pull from it. And I try to implement that stuff. I guess that because of that, I have a lot to share in terms of social media.

L-A: You know we use you as a filter for… crap. You sieve all the useless stuff out come out with the pearls. It’s really useful.

DD: [laughs] Well that’s exactly the idea behind it.

Hidden agendas

DD: I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but one of my interests is Psychology, and I always try to discern, when a person is writing something, where it’s coming from, who they’re speaking to. When dispensing dog advice, for example, you can look at it strictly from a human perspective or from a dog perspective.

In my town, for example (I’ve just discovered this), you can’t keep your dog outside permanently. That’s clearly not something that’s necessarily good for dogs. Some dogs can be just fine being outside provided his needs are met. So that law is clearly made for people. And it’s not even made for dog owners. It’s made for non dog owning people, to protect the greater interest. Which is perfectly understandable, but it’s not a law that was made for dogs.

So when someone is saying X, Y and Z, it’s nice to be able to discern who their audience is, and where they are coming from. And it’s the same thing in social media, in business, in the dog world, same thing anywhere.

L-A: I think you’re what I’d call a finely-attuned agenda sniffer! And that’s what am talking about when I talk of your unique perspective.

We’re so overburdened with information, and yours is one of the only blogs that I read where I’m not thinking: “Oh gaaaawd, so much to get through”. It’s not taxing. The information flows naturally. You don’t use really long sentences or impossible words. Like I said: you just filter out all the crap and what comes out is what people really want to read.

DD: Thank you!

Dog training, social media and… buddhism

L-A: But you were talking about psychology. It’s a recurring theme in your blog. Do you have any formal academic background on the subject?

DD: OK, brace yourself for this. In college, I studied… theology.

L-A: Oh yes!!!! Also one of my areas of interest! And history [also one of Dino’s hobbies]! But not motorbikes [big recurring themes on Dino’s blog].

DD: It was a secular school. I wasn’t studying to be a priest or anything.

L-A: So what religions did you focus on? Roman catholicism, protestantism?

DD: It was more of a social slant on religion. The effect of religion on politics, on everything. Was it Ghandi who said that if you think that religion and politics are not the same then you don’t understand either?

L-A: I would say the same about money.

DD: Right, right!…

So we studied the biggies, the big three. What we didn’t focus on was buddhism, which is something that I’ve developed an interest for in the last few years.

L-A: Ha haaa! But technically speaking, you’re not meant to call it a religion, are you? I don’t know why, but…

DD: That’s true. [Smiling. Yes, you can tell.] Well it’s the way, it’s not a religion. You can be a buddhist catholic if you want to, there’s no conflict of interest.

L-A: Oh we’re getting into theology aren’t we? But I am going HAVE to take the bait. Out of curiosity, what makes buddhism not a religion? It’s a set of precepts, and it involves belief in some kind of supernatural phenomena, for want of a better word, like reincarnation.

DD: Yeah, I suppose. You know, it’s known as “the Middle Way“. The point is, it’s not extreme in its views. It’s kind of like the Goldie Locks story: she gets lost in the woods and into the family Bear’s cabin, and tries all three beds. One’s too hard, one’s too soft, and one’s just right. That’s buddhism.

It’s a vast system of precepts. I don’t feel remotely qualified to condense it into a single conversation.

There’s no deity per se. It teaches you the way you relate. And in everything we do, we relate. You can use it to relate better to whatever your religion might be. I’m hardly an expert, but the more I learn about buddhism, the more I like it, so…

Obsessive about learning

L-A: About learning. I have a kid, one year old, and the ‘literature’ aimed at babies is so interesting. It boils things down to basics and I love it! I love the way the world is explained in these books. I love the way he sees the world.

DD: There’s your guru.

L-A: Yeah, he is.

But that’s why I love the ‘For Dummies‘ book collection. It boils things down to their simplest form. I have a whole set of ‘For Dummies’ about different religions and even this superficial grasp of all these has changed my perspective of the world.

But I just want to know everything, it’s exhausting! I need a million lives! I see from your writing that you have similar tendencies. Take psychology, for example. You talk about psychological studies and experiments. How do you stay so up-to-date?

DD: I just read a lot.

L-A: But where? On the internet?

DD: No, it’s mostly books. You know, I’ve just got back from Barnes and Noble.

L-A: Aaaargh. That place [Barnes and Nobles] will be the death of me!

DD: [laughs]

I’m reading this amazing book by Steven Johnson. I believe he’s written a few books before, like “Before the invention of air” and I think he wrote “Everything that’s bad is good for you”. But his latest is called “Where good ideas come from”.

He’s my type of author. He can connect the dots and put together these dissimilar viewpoints. Things that, at a first glance, have nothing in common. He has a way of bringing these together.

You know, reading his book, I literally wrote down five ideas for different articles. So that’s where a lot of my ideas come from. It’s really pilfering other people’s stuff [laughs].

So a lot of the stuff that these guys make [talking of where good ideas come from], you can take the same point and apply it to business, or social media, or whatever. So I try to apply that stuff to the niche audience that I’m speaking to, in this case, a dog niche. I used to have a motorcycle blog too, because I’m a motorcyclist as well.

In the book ‘the Invisible Gorilla’, they talk about model airplanes.

L-A: Who comes up with these titles? It’s pure genius!

DD: It’s from the psychological research that they’ve done. Check out the ‘Count the number of passes’ blogpost that I’ve done. There’s the invisible gorilla experiment on there.

But the author talks of toy airplanes. It’s a scaled down version of the real thing. Not only in size, but the level of detail of the components is also reduced. The point is: all advice that we receive is basically a model airplane, a scaled down version. Think about advice on business success, or social media success, or even dog training success. What people are giving you is a model. They can’t give you their life experience. They can’t give you the nuanced approach that they themselves have used because:

1. Noone’s got that kind of time; and
2. A lot of people don’t even see it.

L-A: And it wouldn’t necessarily all apply.

DD: I think a lot of it might not apply, yes, you’re right.

So if you approach, say, a dog training session, with that knowledge. Understanding the limitation of exchange, you’re probably better off.

L-A: Mmmmmh… Interesting!

DD: So yes, I read a lot. I read somewhere that Stephen King read approximately 75 books a year. I think I probably read about fifty books last year.

L-A:  Seriously? [That’s one a week]. Where do you get the time? I’m so jealous!

DD: Well, that’s a kind of a secret of mine.

L-A: What, you sleep-read?

DD: He he.

No, I am literally attached to my i-Pod. When am driving, it’s plugged into my ears; when am walking, it’s plugged into my ears,… And then I have books in my car so if I’m meeting a friend for coffee or whatever and he or she is late, I pull a book and I can read in that time.

L-A: That’s also my trick. Except I have five books, and it weighs a tonne! I always have lots of books in my backpack. It’s a very good trick actually, because it makes waiting way less annoying. [last one was about the rise of fascism. I got some funny looks!]

DD: And it’s the buddhist way: make the best of your time.

L-A: But obviously you don’t have a one-year old! [talk about time eaters]

DD: Well I have a dog, does that count?

L-A: Well I have a dog AND a one-year-old. On the time bankruptcy contest, I win!

Dogan and dogs

L-A: So I wanted to ask: how many dogs have you got right now? You’ve just got the one on the youtube video? The German Shepherd?

DD: Yes, he’s a German Shepherd. He’s the only one I have right now.

L-A: That total recall video made me laugh so much. We’re such a bunch of dog geeks!

So, how long have you had him?

DD: I’ve had him since he was seven weeks, and he’s two years now.

L-A: Aaaaw, so he’s still just a baby, really!

DD: Pretty much, yeah. He certainly behaves like a baby.

L-A: So have you always had dogs?

DD: Yeah! I think I was seven when my parents got me my first dog. You know that old saying: “The universe sends you your first dog and makes it perfect? So that you’ll spend the rest of your life getting other dogs hoping to match him?” Well my first dog was exactly like that. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve experienced a connection like that with anyone before or since [he smiles].

L-A: So what kind of a dog was it?

DD: He was a German Shepherd type mix.

L-A: Ha haaaa. So you have a type!

DD: Yeah. Well, I love burly dogs like Boxers. And South African Boerboels are my favorites!

L-A: Oh really?! They’re huge. I’ve just had a photo session with one. You obviously don’t want to mess with them!

It’s funny, I’d only ever really had big dogs before my current one. But I’m really not unused to having a “smaller” dog (well, he’s English bulldog size). I’m totally overprotective of him, it’s quite funny. [about childhood dog breeds]

So you’ve only had German Shepherd types?

DD: They’ve always been some kind of a mix. Dojo is my first pure-bred German Shepherd.

But I probably would have gotten some kind of a Boxer, but my girlfriend didn’t push me towards a German Shepherd.

Breeding practices: stepping carefully

L-A: I think you probably did well for your vet’s costs. Boxers tend to have a few problems. At least here in Europe.

DD: A lot of it is just poor breeding practices.

L-A: Yes. How do you get away from that, though?

DD:  I’m afraid to open up that can of worms.

L-A: Actually, how is the situation with breeders in the US? Because I can tell you that in Europe, at least in the Netherlands, there’s hardly any regulation at all [in terms of genetics and rearing practices, see interview with a European breeder of Anatolian shepherds].

DD: You know, am probably the wrong person to ask about breeding practices. I really don’t know. I don’t feel qualified to say anything. I hate to call anybody out either.

Here’s an example. There’s a probably population of breeders of Boxers in Pennsylvania [Dino lives in New Jersey]. And I can recognize Pennsylvania Boxers as soon as I see them. Because even when adult, they look small. They’re really on the low end of the Boxer scale.

They probably  breed them that way, I have to assume on purpose, because smaller dogs are easier to sell and if they have to keep them, they’re easier to feed. That’s my hunch anyway.

L-A: Strange. Makes me wonder if it could be environmental. It would be possible to have a state-wide genetic trend (perhaps a strong founder effect with a very popular sire?), but would it be much less likely  funny to have state-wide trends in nutrition practices among Boxer breeders? It’s curious, anyway.

A boot camp for dog bloggers

L-A: I wanted to ask you about Dog Trainer 2.0, your Facebook Group. How long has it been on-line?

DD: Do you know, I’m really bad with time lines. Let’s call it six months?

L-A: It’s a good sign [being bad with time lines]. You care about the stuff that matters. So what’s the group about?

DD: The idea behind it is, when I started my blog, I really wanted to bring dog bloggers from around the internet together on the same blog. But that’s like jumping from the ground floor to the tenth storey. But a united dog blog has been brewing in my brain for a long time.

So Dog Trainer 2.0 serves two purposes:

• I want to establish relationships with dog bloggers; and
• I want it to act as a training ground for dog bloggers.

L-A: [Ever the devil’s advocate] Why do you want to establish a relationship with other bloggers, though? I know that the blogging community is a lot about sharing, but that’s very new to a lot of people. A lot of people would be like “Don’t copy my stuff”. They’d be a lot more defensive.

DD: Yes, it is [a new mindset]. But you know, now that you mention it, I totally understand the [defensive] mindset. And it’s not at all the right mindset to get into this.

But I think that even those people who aren’t that keen on collaboration would be more open to the idea of sharing and contributing once they have a relationship with somebody. We can get to know each other.

So on the blog training front, I can add value to their lives by sharing about social media and all sorts of stuff that’s useful to them. One of the things we’re doing on Dog Trainer 2.0 is the “Dog Blogger Challenges”.  It’s a sort of boot camp for dog bloggers. [Dog Blogger Challenges are short, targetted blogging assignments posted on Dog Trainer 2.0 that systematically get you to discover blogging best practices.]. I’ve been slacking on that a bit.

L-A: Oh my God, YOU’ve been slacking? I haven’t done the first challenge yet!

But it’s a brilliant idea? I really like it!

DD: I want people who become part of a collective dog blog to be good bloggers.

L-A: So dog bloggers need to know where to find you. You’re hugely visible in the community. [Today, there are 135 fans to the page, which is enormous considering the narrow target community]. How do you do that?

DD: Actually, Facebook changed the way Fan Pages are managed, and I lost all the people that were on it, and I haven’t really maintained that part of things since then. I don’t necessarily need people to be fans of the Dogandog Fan Page (that used to be 200 people or so). But it’s Dog Trainer 2.0 where the action happens.

Dogs and social media

DD: In terms of visibility, I don’t know. I’m on Facebook, am on Twitter, and I blog.

L-A: Is that all you do? Just those three? [I am thinking, relieved, that I don’t have to learn my way through another fifty new social media platforms]

DD: Yes, I think so. I write a lot on social media, though, and I comment a lot on dog blogs. Not as much as I’d like to, but….

L-A: I see that  you’re being asked to guest-post left, right and centre nowadays. That must feel pretty good.  I mean hey, people are really starting to take you seriously on the social media front.

DD:  You know that’s great to hear. That’s your perspective from the outside looking in, though. From the inside looking out, it’s …. too slow. And you said I’m so active, where do I find the time, etc. And really I’m not so active. Am not putting in enough time.

Going back to buddhism: both the inside perspective and the outside perspective are judgements. And judgements are inherently flawed because they’re relative. They change, going from person to person. And a buddhist might say: universe does not judge itself. It just experiences itself as it is.

L-A: But that’s a judgement, Mr Buddhist!

DD: he he he. I guess you could say that.

L-A: So right now, on Twitter, you have over 5000 followers which, from where I’m am standing, is ridiculously successful.

DD:  This is the exact same conversation I had with Aaron Lee (@askaaronlee on Twitter) who’s got 150,000 followers! And from my perspective, I feel the same way you do. So the thing with Twitter, it’s a law of reciprocity platform. [check Twitaholic to get an idea of the followings of Twitter players]

L-A:  Haaaa, so you’re following a lot of people?

DD: As a rule, I follow everyone who follows me.

And, I haven’t done this in three or four months, but I used to go out and mass-follow a lot of people.

L-A: Ah, but then, the value of individual tweets is really decreased.

DD: Yes, so I try to mitigate that by basing my follow requests on relevant hash tags. [hash tags are prefixes used on Twitter to indicate the topic. It makes automated searches for relevant topics easier for your followers. If you are writing about dogs, for example, you might want to use the #dog hashtag].

L-A: I have to say, I just found it unmanageable to follow everybody who followed me. Not that it was that many, but, I have purged my list and have only kept the ones that genuinely add immediate value to my life right now.

DD: The rules of the Twitter change depending on your number of your followers. So the rules will change if you have a few hundreds versus a few thousands versus a few hundred thousands. If you have a few hundred followers, then monitoring those people is relatively easy.

I follow 4,000 people, but I rarely look at my Twitter timeline. I use Tweetdeck, and I place people of interest to my list. And again, this is something that Erin Lee and I spoke about. Unless you’re on somebody’s list, and someone’s got thousands of followers, chances are they’re not seeing you.

L-A: Interesting… But, you know, I did try Tweetdeck lists, and I still found it very difficult to sort the relevant tweets from the others. But then again, I didn’t give it a lot of time and effort.

DD: It doesn’t happen overnight. Somebody tweets something interesting that you happen to catch, and you just put them on your list. Otherwise they largely get lost in the shuffle. I’m being brutally honest, but that’s what it is.

The only thing I would say, for anyone reading this or listening to this, is: make sure you ‘at’ me [In Twitter-speak, preceding someone’s user name by the @ sign in your message. This appears in a special list of tweets for the targeted people]. That, I monitor.

L-A:  You can just hope we don’t all decide to do it en-masse!

DD: [laughs] Naaaw it’s OK.

L-A:  If you’re going to get your 4,000 private messages a day, I don’t think you’re going to be a happy bunny!

DD: We’ll deal with that when it comes.

The art of dog blogging

L-A: So, I think I interrupted you. You were talking of the objectives of Dog Trainer 2.0.

DD: Right, so one of the objective is a training ground, so when we deploy the collective dog blog, … I hate to put it in these terms, but I want to put the reader first (for the collective dog blog). And in order for that to happen, I want the submitted entries to meet a certain standard. And the only way is if you’ve been trained at blogging. So that way it’s less work for me to edit it.

So Julie Nutter [One of the most thought-provoking and up-beat dog blogs around: The Koda Diaries] for example, she has improved amazingly since we started the challenges. Her blogposts… It blows me away. Not only in the way it’s written, the way the points are laid out and stuff like that. But the way the posts are designed. It’s excellent. And I’ve seen the same type of improvements across the board.

Jana Rade [and her famous Dawgbusiness blog], her formatting has gotten so much better.

You know I hate to harp on formatting and design, but it’s so important. I mean, think about it: when you visit a website, you immediately make a snap judgement what that website is about.

L-A: Oh that’s right! And it tells me: “That guy is a professional” or “That is not going to be clear to read”.

DD: Oh one of the common mistakes people make is their font is too small.

L-A: Interesting, interesting… I’ll be putting that in my bag of tricks.

DD: Especially if you consider the audience: dog people who read dog blogs. Who are they? They might be internet savvy, they might not be. I bet you regardless that if they’re reading something on-line, they want to be able to do it without squinting. I got 20/20 vision, and am a computer guy. And when I look at a small font, it’s taxing

I use Social Media Examiner as sort of a benchmark. If you look at their font size, I believe they’re using 14. Which is medium.

L-A: Oh, you make me feel like going to Dog Trainer 2.0 right now, and checking all these other tips.

DD: I don’t think I necessary mentioned the font size on 2.0.

L-A: The formatting improvements in Julie’s and Jana’s posts are even more remarkable, then. It shows that the DT 2.0 followers are clearly benefiting from your broader message, if they are taking their own initiative to change their blog’s design without specific instructions. There’s definitely a maturing process going on.

DD:  I do practice what I preach, if you look at my blog. Actually, I have a post coming out on Copyblogger. Copyblogger is this ginormous blogging website. Brian Clark is like the grandfather of bloggers. And it is one of the points that I recommend people practice with in the upcoming article. I’m not saying that you have to do what I do, but I’m saying try it. So one of the things that I do is:

• I use small fonts (10 or 11 points) for picture captions
• I use a medium font for the main text
• I use 16 or 18 for subheaders (it’s called ‘large’ on the platform I use).

L-A: Oh I see that. And sometimes your headers are miles long, so your point is made very clear as your header is really descriptive and, visible.

I was looking at your blog tonight again, and one of the things that I like is that it’s really fresh, and you make really short points. For a tired old brain, it’s a welcome change. When you asked about who reads dog blogs. I think it’s tired people probably on a break from work, or at the end of a long working day, and they just want readability. They just want snippets, and not very long sentences (which is my personal style).

DD: The upcoming article on Copyblogger talks about that. One of the things it mentions is research done by Clicktale (an Israeli software company) back in 2006. They make software that monitors user behaviour on websites or blogs (the line between a website and a blog is blurring now). So what they discovered is that people stay on a page for approximately 19 to 27 seconds.

L-A:  That does not surprise me, and that depresses the hell out of me!

DD: It goes back to knowing what you’re up against. It’s scary, but it’s inherently good. At least you know what you’re up against.

L-A: It’s the death of the long monologue.

DD: Well, you know, I have a problem being verbose. I’ve had to make a conscious effort to try and make my points short.

L-A: Seriously? I thought being concise was one of your strongest points. So you’ve had to work at that?

DD: Oh absolutely. I like to take a scenic route to the point.

L-A: Oh me too! But that’s the thing. Every time I read your blog, I come back and it influences the way I write because I think: “That was a pleasant read. Maybe I shouldn’t do this to my readers and I should shorten my stuff”.

DD: Well, you know, you touch on a very important point. I think I wrote about it in one of my posts. The word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek ‘idios’, which means ‘self’. It didn’t necessarily have a negative connotation, it didn’t mean that you were stupid. What it really meant is that you could only view things from your own perspective.

So I tell people “Don’t be an idiot” in the original sense of that word. Try to look at things from other people’s perspective. And when I write an article, that’s what I am trying to do. I try to think of the reader, reading that thing.

L-A: But it’s funny. When I read your stuff, I also get a sense of “D’you know what? Screw it. I don’t really care. I write for me.” And it really transpires that you don’t sell out. So for all your social media savvy, it stays genuine. You are yourself on the blog.

For example, you’re not very apologetic about the fact that it’s pretty chaotic at times. But it works, and it flows, and it’s dynamic. You actually make that point yourself if am not mistaken, on a couple of your posts. You say: “D’you know, that’s me. I write like that”.

DD: Thank you, that’s very kind.

L-A: Oh it’s true. There’s a fine line between using  all the blogging best practices and being bland. We would all be uniform if we were all Dog Trainer 2.0 robots. I think Dog Trainer 2.0 is about combining those skills with our own unique styles. And I think finding our voices will only come with  a lot of experience.

I know that when I started blogging, about a year ago, I was miles away from what I write now. It was very different. And indeed, it is very important to self-train into at least the basic blogging best practices.

For some people like yourself, social media strategy is quite an interesting topic and easy to absorb, but for people like me, you are a God-send because I don’t actually find that stuff interesting, and I need people like you to make that knowledge accessible to me. For me, social media strategies are a means to an end. I would hate to research the primary sources myself. You’re the summarizer if you will, a filter for relevance on social media information.

DD: You know, if you ever have a question about social media, or you can’t find something. Just ask.

L-A: I would hesitate to do that because you have thousands of followers and if we all did that…

DD: Naaaah. It’s fine. We’re in this together!

Finding Dino

• Follow Dino on Twitter: @dino_dogan
• Join Dino’s Fanpage for dog professionals active in the social media: Dog Trainer 2.0
• Follow Dino’s widely acclaimed posts on Dogan Dogs

Any comments?

I always welcome your comments, no matter how short or long, approving or contrary. I would particularly like to hear your views if you:

• Also blog about dogs
• Are a pet professional involved in the social media
• Have negative or positive experiences to share about combining social media and dog training

Further reading

Canis bonus dog blog
Interviews of other dog professionals
Canis bonus dog writer