Social media is like a hungry teenage boy. As any parent will tell you, when it comes to food, they’re never satisfied. Similarly, social media has a voracious appetite requiring continual feeding in the form of content and communications in a variety of formats.
What’s a marketer to do keep your social media initiatives sated? Here are seven tips to develop appropriate content and engagement to nourish the social media beast, regardless of which platforms you use.
Go to the source if you want to learn more about how Heidi feeds the beast. Me? I use Google Reader to search for content that is in alignment with my brand and my blog so that I curate or create content that is in alignment with my customer value demands. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
Yesterday I spoke at an in-service day for teachers at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College on the topic of social media for academic thought leaders. Here’s my preso…
You don’t need ideas, open Google Reader or join #Blogchat. You’ll have enough ideas to write posts for the next year.
The problem is, when you actually WRITE the post, then it’s real. Then you are dangerously close to publishing it. Which means suddenly everyone will see it, and read it, and judge it.
And yet, you are often the harshest judge of your own work. Too often, you assume that your post isn’t worthy of the reader, before they have a chance to dismiss it. So it stays in your Draft folder, mocking you.
Yesterday was all about perfecting my Mac-based curation workflow. Today is all about speaking at an in-service day at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College on the topic of ‘Publish or Perish 2.0’. But first? No more Twinkies? Ho-Hos?
Hostess Brands, the company behind Twinkies, preparing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, sources say – @WSJ
If you visit your favorite blogging tips and marketing tips blog today, you will come across a lot of tips, ranging from tips on writing well to tips on building an audience.
The reality is that a lot of new blogs spring up every day, and the majority of these blogs are bound to fail right from the beginning. It’s not because there is something wrong with their approach, but because they fail to neglect something really important: their wellbeing.
Do you know that blogging is not only a physical challenge? It is also a mental challenge.
There are a lot of things we bloggers go through every day that no amount of practice will help make easier, but by focusing on being okay in every aspect of our lives (mental, emotional, physical, etc.) we’ll find those challenges easier to deal with.
In this article I’ll be touching some subjects bloggers hardly discuss online, and I’ll be giving tips to help you deal with them.
Go to the source if you’d like the rest of author John Smith’s perspective. Comment or ‘connect’ to talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
One of my new, favorite bloggers Heidi Cohen has these thoughts on blog design for you to ponder…
Writers at heart, many bloggers rush through selecting their blog design elements without much thought when they first start. But the reality is that design is core to your blog’s brand and readership. Therefore, out-of-the box blog set-ups most likely won’t work for you.
Blog design doesn’t require artistic training. It requires strategic (read: high level) thought, determining your blog’s goals and target audience (aka: persona) before you jump in and start blogging.
Review the blogs you read frequently to become familiar with your options. Consider which blogs you like and which elements of those blogs attract your attention. Make a list of those elements you want and those that you don’t want.
Here are twenty-one blog design elements that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to select…
Go to the source if you are interested in her 21 elements. Me? Through a long and rigorous evaluation process, I have decided to become a Woo Themes developer. I won’t bore you with the details of my search, but it literally lasted years. Woo offers over 100 themes that look good ‘out of the box’ but are also very easy for me to customize to a client’s specifications…
Heidi’s right! Much more important than the design is the actual strategy. Adam Osborne said “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous” and I agree. When it comes to design, I believe a tweaked Woo theme may be all you need – as I tell my clients, ‘Google doesn’t search for pretty’. I focus instead on delivering to my clients a system or toolkit with a repeatable process that is easy to use based on the premise that if it’s easy and fun to do, they might actually do it. On the back end, I have been working hard this year to link my ‘e1evation workflow’ more deeply to the value demands of my target audience by linking keywords to the problems my target audience is trying to solve. If you use a repeatable process like mine for your blogging and use a Woo theme for your site, you will draw your target audience in and the design won’t scare them away!
Heidi’s thoughts on determining your blog’s goals and target audience are must read before getting started — comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen
lions— everyone but a school bus driver.
Unknown
You may not be a great warrior. You might not lead explorations to the North Pole or climb Mount Everest. But you still need courage.
Courage lies in the simple things as well as the grandiose. It’s fun and easy to speculate about how we would respond in our fantasy lives – climbing that mountain or leading knights into battle – but what about now?
Do you have the courage to live your life, to walk your path every day, right where you are?
Sometimes, it takes more courage to do the ordinary things in life than it does to walk to the door of the airplane and jump.
It takes courage to get sober, to stay sober, to get up every day and go to your job, support your family, pay the bills, and walk the path that you have been given to walk. We all need courage to do the thing that scares us and sometimes to do the thing that doesn’t scare us, over and over again.
God, please grant me the courage to do the right thing in my relationships, in my job, and in my spiritual growth. Please give me the courage to live my life.
The best book I read this week was “The Information Diet” by author Clay Johnson. Recently, he posted on an aspect of his book I find interesting…
With information, we seem to have taken the worst concepts of dieting and applied it to our habits. Somehow an information diet meant throwing away your blackberry, deleting your Facebook account, or taking a “social media fast”. This kind of stuff isn’t healthy dieting, it’s anorexia. Banting had it right — we need to learn the skill of selectivity and choice, not the skills of banishment and avoidance. Nobody’s getting obese eating too much raw broccoli.
Our information diets are required to be much more diverse than our food diets are — whereas a college student in June and an accountant in April may require very different information diets, the food that keeps them healthy is roughly the same. That’s why the Information Diet is about habit building, conscious consumption, and measurement and not about telling you specifically how much to consume or what specifically to consume.
The first important habit you need to build to have a healthy relationship with information is measurement. The important thing to do on an information diet is to measure what you’re consuming, and then to start making decisions based on that data — those decisions should usually be to consume more of the good stuff, and less of the bad stuff.
Secondly, there are the important skills you get — the ones I describe in further detail in the book. Cultivating your data literacy to be able to delve deep into source material. CodeYear is a great commitment to make in this regard — learning how to write code will give you the skills needed to sort and look through data.
Finally, it’s about making some decisions about what to consume. And honestly this is the toughest thing for me, as an author, to recommend. My grandmother, for instance, read the bible every day, and I’m convinced that while it was the only book she ever read, she read it more than 1,000 times. I’d never suggest to her that she stop reading the bible — that’d be wrong. Instead though, I might encourage her to dig deeper into the source material there, and go beyond the King James Version.
I was already thinking about the topic of ‘what to consume’ when Clay’s book came along. In my ebook ‘Personal News Aggregation for Fun and Profit’ [registration required] I talk about using email for ‘just in time’ information and Google Reader for ‘just in case’ information, but I had worked my way up to almost 900 sources that I was tracking. It occurred to me recently that just because I can add a site to Google Reader easily doesn’t always mean I should. In the same way that Rupert Murdoch makes some judgments before buying a media outlet to include in his News Corporation, I too must have a set of filters I use before deciding to include a feed in my ‘news corporation’ as a trusted source…
More and more, I’m thinking about the ‘strategic alignment’ of everything I do on the internet – from consumption to production – with the ‘consumer’ in mind. Call me Captain Obvious, but in order to avoid wasting time or risk unmet ‘consumer demand’ it occurs to me that everything I do – including the sources to which I subscribe in Google Reader – should be in line with my brand which in turn needs to be tightly aligned with solving ‘customer problems’ as my friend Nilofer Merchant says…
If you, like me, are thinking about the way you integrate information in your life, I highly recommend Clay’s book – it stimulated some great internal thinking about how and why I use my tools to support my business and personal objectives by consuming information ‘on purpose’. If you’d like to talk about how this impacts your life, comment below or use the connect tab above to start the discussion…
Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners has some good thoughts about brand building for beginners here…
So you’ve made the resolution that in 2012 you are finally going to “get into” social media and use it to build a brand for yourself or your business. You’re not a geek, and you’re not with a big corporation that already has a social media team or a fairly savvy marketing department. For you, time is of the essence. You don’t have all day to give to this endeavor which is why you haven’t done it already. So here’s what to do in ten easy steps:
1) If you don’t already own it, buy the domain name for yourself and/or your business. I gave my grandchildren their domain names when they were born.
2) If you have some area of expertise that you would like to showcase, start a blog. Use WordPress or Blogger because they are free, hosted, and have some built in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) juice. Point the DNS to your brand domain. Your domain registrar can help you do this. This will stop your blog’s address from being http://buppythepuppy.wordpress.com and make it http://buppythepuppy.com. (Yes, I branded my golden retriever). Shorter and easier for people who want to go there. And don’t expect traffic or comments. That’s not the objective. Authority is the goal.
No worries, you won’t have to blog every day. Just sit down once a week or so and write 500 words about your field of expertise or your major interest. Or take pictures, make video, or record sound. Just contribute to your blog, and keep the subject matter related to what you want your brand to be known for (fishing experts should not write about wine, even if they love it). Your blog is found by its keywords, so write about something in which the same keywords might occur in almost every post.
I agree with and have applied these 10 steps over the years – you can go to the source if you want the rest. To her observations about blogging I would add this; I’m an advocate of posting every day to drive traffic to my site. I agree that at least once a week, you should do the ‘thoughtful creation post’ about your field of expertise or your major interest. On the other days, however, I think it’s a good practice to showcase other thought leaders in your industry through curation like I did here…
As in, “that’s not a real football team, they don’t play in Division 1” or “That stock isn’t traded on a real exchange” or “Your degree isn’t from a real school.”
Real contains all sorts of normative assumptions and implicit criticisms for those that don’t qualify. Real is just one way to reject the weird.
My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else’s.
One of my new, favorite bloggers Heidi Cohen has these thoughts on blog design for you to ponder…
The best book I read this week was “The Information Diet” by author Clay Johnson. Recently, he posted on an aspect of his book I find interesting…
Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners has some good thoughts about brand building for beginners here…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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