Love it? Hate it? Facebook must be part of a complete social media tool kit. I originally started using Facebook five or six years ago to start keeping tabs on my high school boys — now I teach Facebook for Business as part of my social media certification class. I have to admit that while my love for Facebook is waning that is remains a social media tool that everyone must master…
You see tools are just that. Tools. You don’t have to love them. They don’t have to be fun. Some tools are just so important that you have to hold your nose and use them sometimes. Facebook has become sort of like that for me. It used to be one of my favorite places to hang out online — now every time they make an improvement, the improvement means Facebook has exposed more of your privacy. As long as you remember that you are not the customer, you’re the product — it is possible to have a fulfilling social media relationship with Facebook. Just be careful as to how you go about it and no one will get hurt…
Here’s my weekly summary of the best Facebook information I have found in this past week…
My readers know well my passion for Google Reader and the power it brings to content management. Last week I cracked the code on autoposting to Twitter with the help of ifft.com and I’ve prepped a Google Reader tips and tricks video that I’ll share with you later in the post. First, though, here’s something that made me smile…
Devon Heaton of Servant of Chaos made my day with his post on how social media mechanics like me are on the rise…
You need an individual uniquely suited to “getting s#@t done. You need the Social Media Mechanic.
This is the person who can implement your strategy, find the right bits and pieces and bolt them together. This person will know what needs to be done to make the right things work – and sometimes even do the wrong things (let’s face it, we’re still making mistakes and learning from them, right?).
But without the Social Media Mechanic, you’re just going to be left with a whole heap of unconnected parts. So once you’ve got your continuous digital strategy underway, start seeking your Social Media Mechanic. You’ll never get out of the trough of disillusion without one!
I have always referred to myself as an internet ‘plumber’ much to the chagrin of @lisenbury who pleaded with me to use the phrase internet ‘electrician’. For some reason, that didn’t suit me but social media mechanic fits just fine! So, if you’re looking for a social media mechanic, look no further…
As proof of my worthiness, I offer this ‘riff’ on Google Reader for content management. Google Reader is the most important tool in my content management workflow and here are just a few tips for using it well;
On Tuesday, I usually focus on tools for content management and marketing for thought leadership. I had just prepared a post on Google Reader tips and tricks when my good friends at Zemanta shared a little tool from their labs they call Quotelove. Quotelove is a nifty tool for curation that allows me to highlight and grab any text I find with a minimal amount of fuss. Here’s an example of a quote that I curated using this content management tool…
I have written before on the rise of the Business Designer – a person uniquely adapted to optimise your business processes. But in line with the Hype Cycle, the Business Designer is most effective later in the cycle – as you climb out of the Trough of Disillusionment. Most businesses are not in this space as yet. And many are still facing the ascendant forces of the Peak of Inflated Expectations. It is in the way up this peak (and the way down the other side) that you need an individual uniquely suited to “getting s#@t done. You need the Social Media Mechanic. This is the person who can implement your strategy, find the right bits and pieces and bolt them together. This person will know what needs to be done to make the right things work – and sometimes even do the wrong things (let’s face it, we’re still making mistakes and learning from them, right?). But without the Social Media Mechanic, you’re just going to be left with a whole heap of unconnected parts. So once you’ve got your continuous digital strategy underway, start seeking your Social Media Mechanic. You’ll never get out of the trough of disillusion without one!
I plan to curate more of Gavin Heaton’s thoughts on ‘social media mechanics’ later on. For the time being, I wanted to give a shout out to the smart Slovenians at Zemanta that give me such great tools for content marketing…
Two years ago, I wrote an epic post called ‘From Thinker to Thought Leader in one easy workflow’. The original title was ‘By Jove, I think I’ve got it‘ [shows how little I knew about writing effective post titles, eh?]. Well, it took me a couple of years, but I’ve finally found it. It? That elusive personal niche that everyone keeps talking about. I call it ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘ and it is my passion and my purpose in life.
What is content management and marketing for thought leadership you might say? First some terms…
Content management?
“Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.” Source: Content management – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.” Source: Content marketing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I like the perspective Mindy Gibbins-Klein’s shares in her book 24 Carat Bold:
“What does a real thought leader look like? How would you go about finding one, or becoming one, if that is of interest? Well, let’s start with the Wikipedia definition stated earlier: ‘A futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.’ Not bad, but there is one important word missing here: market. It’s not just about being recognized by your peers and mentors. To effect real change, you need a market, or followers, or fans or constituents or a congregation… you get the idea.
Gibbins-Klein, Mindy (2009-09-01). 24 Carat BOLD: The Standard for REAL Thought Leaders (Kindle Locations 309-313). Ecademy Press. Kindle Edition.
So to me, a thought leader is a person who…
Is an expert in their field
Has innovative ideas or perspectives
Promotes and shares those things using the “good, fast, and cheap” tools available on the internet
Becomes recognized
So then what is ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘? My simple definition goes like this: It is “becoming and being known as the expert“.
Here’s a little riff that I did last summer on the difference between thinking and thought leadership…
When I first rebooted e1evation, llc 3 years ago and shifted the focus from lead management to lead generation using inbound marketing tools, my tagline was ‘marketing, sales and technology for small business, non-profits and academic institutions’. I laugh now because that focus is so broad that not even Mashable! with their massive staff can cover it comprehensively. As time has gone on, I’ve continued to sharpen my focus so that I can increase my expertise in this emerging area. This is who I am and what e1evation, llc and this blog is about; content management and marketing for thought leadership.
When Michelangelo was asked how he created his classic work ‘David’, he said “”Ho iniziato con un blocco di marmo e scheggiato via tutto ciò che non aveva l’aspetto di David” [loosely translated: “I started with a block of marble and chipped away anything that did not look like David”]. I was inspired last week by Chris Brogan‘s comment “My blog is a piece of crap. Time to work harder.” If his blog is crap, what is mine? Why am I settling for less than sharp focus and clarified outcomes? In the month of February, my goal is to chip away from this blog everything that does not look like ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘.
Henceforth, this blog will be about the following topics:
Social Media [including blogging, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter]
and the strategies, tools and tactics that make them available for every thinker who aspires to thought leadership
…and I will parse out my thinking in the following categories…
Thoughts
Tactics
Tools and technologies
Trends
I’m going to continue to perfect the ‘e1evation workflow’ — my ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ cycle for ‘thought leadership’ marketing — while applying the zenlike simplicity of ‘getting things done’ principles to content management and marketing for thought leadership.
If that’s what you’re looking for, stick around. Watch me. Interact with me. Let me know how I’m doing now that I’ve found my niche. If you want If you’re looking for something else let me recommend http://google.com…
Sundays are all about blogging here at e1evation. My fundamental belief is that blogging is foundational for content marketing success and that a blog should be at the center of everything you do online. Why? Here are a couple of reasons that come to mind at the moment…
You own your blog. You do not own Facebook. You wouldn’t build your dream home on rented land — why build your brand on something you don’t own and control?
Blogs give you more control over how you express yourself.
Websites that blog actively get 7x more traffic than static sites.
It would seem that big brands are starting to get the picture…
The big three social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, were the most widely used in 2011, followed by YouTube, and publishing a blog. Across the various platforms, brands cited the following adoption levels: Facebook (87%), Twitter (83%), LinkedIn (76%), YouTube (66%), and blogs (57%). In 2012, blogs are expected to gain the most ground: An additional 28% of brands that don’t currently publish a blog plan to do so in 2012—bringing the percentage of brands that publish a blog to 85%. Social Media – Blogs Top List of Social Media Investments for 2012 : MarketingProfs Article
To my mind, blogging is the ultimate ‘content marketing for thought leadership’ tool. Maybe it’s time you took a page from their playbook and started business blogging as well?! Contact me if you’re not sure where to start…
Here are some of the best blogging articles I found this week…
I’m a visual guy and as you can tell from reading this blog I love infographics and I curate them quite a bit. This one is better than most. Take a hard look and ponder the data and what it means to you and your organization…
Cute! Heidi Cohen has 13 ways social media scares marketers for Friday the 13th. The first one comes up in every social media class and preso her in Northeast Wisconsin…
Social media is scary for marketers. Used to controlling their brand and messages, they feel most comfortable using one-to-many media for distribution. By contrast, social media allows for multi-directional socializing and interaction.
As a result, marketers only control one aspect of the current communications ecosystem while consumers and the public have media platforms that provide low cost content creation and distribution.
Here are thirteen ways social media instills marketers with fear and actionable marketing tips to help your firm overcome it.
People can say bad things about us. With social media, every consumer has a media platform, a built-in audience and a megaphone to amplify their message. A disgruntled customer can use his smartphone to capture an incident and quickly distribute it. Actionable Marketing Tactic. Use social media’s public forum to engage customers and determine how to improve your offering, gather insights for future improvements, and provide additional service where needed.
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…
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.
I am amazed at the blog-reluctance of many small businesses. I hear things like “I don’t have time to blog”, “blogging doesn’t make sense in my industry”, and sometimes even the dreaded “what the heck is a blog?”
The reality is if your company provides unique products or services, you should be blogging. (And if your company doesn’t, you should probably consider a career change.)
Of course, the overall return on investment on a blog will vary from business to business. But there are 6 fundamental benefits to corporate blogging that should not be overlooked:
1) Gain Visibility as a Thought Leader
Each thoughtful post on your blog is a public demonstration of your thought leadership, personal integrity, humor, and professional insights. You don’t have to refute one of Einstein’s theories to get respect. For example, a summary of recent trends in your industry, or a reaction to a recent news article can be extremely effective blog posts.
![social-media-demographics9-560x420[1]](http://elevation.company/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/social-media-demographics9-560x4201.png "social-media-demographics9-560x420[1]")
Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners has some good thoughts about brand building for beginners here…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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