It’s finally happening, beauty queens get their own blogs now. On a rainy Friday afternoon in April, Smojoe mentored Katie Starke, the 2008 Miss Teen Canada - World on the fine points of building and branding her online identity. Together we huddled over a computer on the third floor of  of 258 Adelaide St east Toronto, in the center of a busy En Course: Business Development Agency office to start something small that will certainly spiral into something big: Miss Teen Canada’s blog.

Miss Teen Canada - World is a blogger?

Its an exciting time for Katie Starke, this teenager is about to share her life with hundreds of readers. She’s nervous and anxious to make her new posts look as beautiful as her portraits. So when I pointed my trusty Sony sure shot digital camera at her she flinched and shied away. “I didn’t know we were taking pictures today” she protested.

“Katie, professional bloggers take pictures everyday as they chronicle their life experience.” I reminded her, and then mercilessly snapped another horribly amateur image.

Its a blog about the reality of living the fantasy.

All this before we got busy and opened Wordpress. I was quiet as Katie studied the blank canvas.  What should we write about? In this case the quintessential first question was further complicated by the subtleties and enormous potential of the situation. How do we introduce Katie Starke and establish the origins of a ‘personal blog’ while honouring the integrity of the Miss Teen Canada-World title, and not come off as pedantic or cliche?  The answer lies in the minutia of a young girl’s exciting life.

Katie recently flew back from a speaking engagement in Victoria at the British Columbia Miss Teen Canada - World Regionals. She found herself on the same flight as Russell Peters, fresh from hosting the 2008 Juno Awards in Vancouver, and after her people talked to his people they met and had a photo together.  Perfect, I thought.  Let’s write about that, and let’s make the headline read: Miss Teen Canada Meets Russell Peters After 2009 Juno Awards In Vancouver. That way we can really pay it off as linkbait.

Katie Starke is a quick study,

Next we attempted to embed a video of Russell Peters at the Vancouver awards show from some official channel on YouTube. I was running out of time because I really wanted to show Katie how to put videos into her posts, and my process wasn’t working. Videos are important for this blog because so many clips will soon be posted on YouTube.com by fans and proud parents and sponsors, and also there’s certain to be plenty of news media surrounding the actual Miss Teen Canada - World pageant event at the Metro Convention Center this summer. So a good strategy for Katie would be to embed pictures and videos of all interesting social gatherings and celebrities on her blog, and then describe these pieces in detail using her own words. This would give readers a rare and privileged insight into very relevant material, as I suspect that footage of the upcoming Miss Teen Canada - World pageant at the end of July will be extremely well trafficked on YouTube and Flickr for years to come… so anyway I tried to embed this video but it wouldn’t work. I tried everything and I was running out of time. Then Katie suggested that perhaps the computer we were working on didn’t have Flash installed, and I looked at her sharply because I knew at that moment she was right, and she’s going to become a terrific blogger.

Tags: beauty pageant, blog, Katie Starke, Miss Teen Canada, Social Media

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Personal Blog, Social Media, Toronto, workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.