The ever brilliant Heidi Cohen shares this:

Pinterest is the fourth largest source of traffic in the world according to data from Shareaholic. Pinterest’s traffic has doubled since May making it an important entryway to your business.

Since the beginning of 2012, Pinterest has passed other social media platforms including LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Twitter and StubbleUpon, in terms of the amount of traffic it refers to other sites. Additionally, Pinterest refers more traffic than Bing and Yahoo. (Here are nineteen other reasons to use Pinterest with charts.)” Get the rest here: Pinterest: The Best New Source of Traffic [Research] | Heidi Cohen.

September 25, 2012 0

Chris Brogan cut through all the Pinterest crap with a great reminder this morning. He said…

It’s Never the Medium. It’s the People

We seek to connect with people. We want to reach them for whatever our goal might be. It’s our effort to connect with them in a meaningful way that benefits our mutual needs that should be the goal. It’s never about the delivery mechanism.

We want what we want. Can you listen to Dr. Stephen R. Covey on cassettes? Absolutely. But if I leave those cassettes in my car (well, if my car had a tape deck), then I’m out of luck, aren’t I? With Audible.com, I can download the audio file to whatever device I want, as often as I want. It’s not the medium. It’s the information.

The People Are the Goal

Who follows whom on Twitter isn’t all that interesting. What we do with those connections is why it matters. How we take our access and make something interesting happen-that is the goal.

Again, it’s not whether I follow you or not. It’s whether something I do can improve your business or goals, and it’s whether you can share something or introduce something, or riff on something, or whatever. It’s how we use the network to build a system. It’s how we make our platform shine to help others, to grow our business, and more. That’s the magic.

Is Pinterest The New Amazing Network?

It will be, for those who use it to build a relationship that goes beyond the pins. Any network is serviceable, if you learn how to interact and help people satisfy their needs.

Now, let’s make mix-tapes together, shall we? Let’s make songs of love: a love of doing better business by building stronger human relationships over whatever medium we want.

You in?

Source: Never Fall In Love With the Medium

No, I’m not into Pinterest. I’ve played with it, found a few shortcuts [like use the Pinterest extension from Shareaholic in Chrome], created a couple hundred pins. It’s fun, but it’s not as useful for me as Evernote! I thought I’d use Pinterest to share the infographics that I love [I’m a huge fan of infographics!] but I ran into a couple of shortcomings that make Pinterest less that useful for me…

Ask yourself this question: If a picture is worth a thousand words, which of the thousand words will I use to describe the picture so that it can be found by anyone, anywhere at any time. Pinterest doesn’t really give you the ability to describe or search for what you are looking for very well. Pinterest would be really cool if it had a powerful advanced search feature or better yet, visual search. As it is though, for me it’s just a cute little toy at the moment. Those words may come back to haunt me someday but for now, that’s my take…

Here’s a little riff I did comparing Pinterest and Evernote focusing on some of the features that are important to me. I’ll let you decide what works best for you…

http://youtu.be/UzGbEY3KiD8

Here are some of the best reads I’ve found on Pinterest lately:

It’s fun and cute, but not very useful to me…

http://storify.com/e1evation/am-i-the-only-one-that-doesn-t-love-pinterest

6 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing (hubspot.com)
Pinterest for Business: 9 Tips From Superuser PediaStaff [CASE STUDY] (socialfish.org)
Cool Pinterest Infographic (abbeydufoe.wordpress.com)
Posting From Pinterest To Your Facebook Fan Page (marketaire.com)
Pinterest is What YOU Want it to Be (cc-chapman.com)
Sorry, but I’m just not that Pinterested (newhope360.com)
7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest (hubspot.com)

February 21, 2012 0

An editorial focus and calendar that reinforces it may be the single most important thing you can do if you want to blog for thought leadership. In his ground breaking book ‘Brand Stand’, Craig Badings writes…

The more research you do on the topic [on which you choose to focus] the more you will understand the space you want to enter. Ask yourself: Who is already playing in that space? What they are saying? Are they achieving cut through? Does our company have substantially more to say or something unique to offer in that space or not? Your deciding question should be ‘Can we own that space?’ If you cannot own a space my advice would be do not go there.

Badings, Craig (2009-07-08). BRAND STAND (Kindle Locations 790-794). BookPal. Kindle Edition.

If you have decided you can ‘own the space’, here is an overly simplified formula for achieving alignment in your content marketing strategy and getting ownership:

Brainstorm around your unique offerings in the space. Ask yourself “what are the problems my clients expect me to solve and how do I solve them in a unique way?”
Use Google’s keyword tools to research keywords around those unique offerings
Track trusted sites and keyword searches in Google Reader; read primarily those things that deepen your expertise in your unique offerings without losing the context of the whole space
Only curate or create content on your blog related to that unique offering
Leverage social media, etc. to amplify your content
Connect effectively with the readers you draw in

If you do those things in that order, you will have alignment around solving your customer problems and you will be found when people are looking for your solution[s]. In order to effectively cover my space, for example, which is content management and marketing for thought leadership, I track the topics content management, content marketing and ‘thought leadership’ marketing as well as the following tools:

Blogging
Facebook
Google+
LinkedIn
Twitter
and supporting tools like Google Reader, Shareaholic, Storify, etc.

Thursday, for example, is Twitter day. Every Thursday I reflect on Twitter as part of a balanced content management and marketing for thought leadership strategy and ‘storify’ a summary of the best articles from the previous week. This tactical approach ‘forces’ me to not only review the best content from the previous week in Google Reader and Twitter, but be sure to cover it in my blog.

Questions? Feedback? Comment below or use the connect form. In the meantime, here’s a summary of the best of what I found in content marketing, LinkedIn and Twitter this past week…

http://storify.com/e1evation/content-marketing-linkedin-and-twitter-for-2-17-20

How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online (readwriteweb.com)
5 Key Elements for Business Blogs (thenextweb.com)
Google Calendar Lab Hides Your Least-Used Hours [Labs] (lifehacker.com)
5 Essential Tactics to Jumpstart Your Google+ Business Page (hubspot.com)

February 17, 2012 2

Things are getting Pinteresting in social media — Pinterest is the hottest, latest trend to rock the social media world. I spent a good chunk of the weekend working alongside local Pinterest goddess Kerry Geocaris of MarketingSavant and had the chance to consume massive quantities of Pinterest Kool-Aid. This morning, however, my jury is still out…

Don’t get me wrong! Pinterest — like Kerry — is very cute and cool and I can see why she likes it so much. It’s a great, fun place for digital hoarders to collect their social media treasures. Despite the trends — Pinterest is the fastest growing platform in social media right now — I’m not convinced it’s the best tool for me…

I’m currently weighing Pinterest against the a combination of Evernote + Twitter. I can grab graphics using the Evernote clipper in Chrome and send clipped graphics to Twitter from there. Evernote may not be as sexy as Pinterest right now, but I can tag my multimedia so that it’s easier to find later. At first blush, Pinterest doesn’t have very robust metadata or search functionality. Although I’m a digital hoarder like Kerry, I need my hoarding tools to fit into my social media workflow and Pinterest is lacking in that regard…

One trick we learned? The Pinterest extension for Chrome from Shareaholic adds some nifty functionality to the pinning process. After ‘pinstallation’, I can select descriptive text for my pin on the page before pinning a graphic to a board. I’m going to continue to test it and I’ll report back from time to time…

In the meantime here’s the best of Pinterest that I’ve found in my travels around the internet recently…

http://storify.com/e1evation/pinterested

Here’s an infographic I posted using the embed function in Pinterest. It was underwhelming in that the width of this column is 633 and I like my infographics to cover the entire width of the column. Pinterest would not allow me to enlarge it beyond the 553 pixels in Pinterest…

Source: mpdailyfix.com via Todd on Pinterest

More Kool-Aid!

The Potential of Pinterest (soshable.com)
Pinterest Weekend Update – Feb11 (SchneiderB.com)
Social Network Pinterest of growing Importance (folden.info)
Utilizing Pinterest For Your Business Marketing Plan To Building Brand Awareness! (expandingspaboundaries.wordpress.com)
The Next Big Thing In Social Media – Pinterest (tcapushnpull.com)
Pinterest of Interest (ckpcreative.com)
The Next Big Thing In Social Media – Pinterest (Part 2) (tcapushnpull.com)
Pinterest Is Not For Friends (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
Should your brand be on Pinterest? (freshnetworks.com)

February 12, 2012 1

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun... — Image via CrunchBase

Twitter has not always been a starting player in my content management and content marketing lineup — in fact, for a long time I must confess I neglected Twitter. Oddly enough, it was Google’s changes to Google Reader and privacy issues with Facebook and Google that made me rethink my content management and content marketing strategy…

When I started to think about the fact that Twitter is pretty much ubiquitous — one of my favorite college words for ‘everywhere’ — I rethought Twitter’s role in my content management and content marketing world. I had a big of a revelation a couple of weeks ago as to how Twitter could play a central role in my content marketing strategy — you can view it here. Now I’ve gone from neglecting Twitter — thinking of it just as one of the bases I have to cover — to giving it a starring role!

I used Twitter in concert with Shareaholic — one of my ‘must use’ tools — in fact, I call it the ‘Swiss Army knife’ of social media. Thanks to Shareaholic I’m always ready to send any good thing I stumble upon to my Twitter account via HootSuite. Why via HootSuite? Well, there are a lot of reasons why I use HootSuite and I should go into that again sometime. In this case, though the reason is that HootSuite gives me great analytics on how my tweets are doing.

If you want to focus on Twitter for content management and content marketing like I do, try adding Shareaholic and HootSuite to your mix!

Here’s a summary of great Twitter articles I read this past week via @Storify…

<script src="

I summarize the top Twitter news every Thursday at this time…

http://storify.com/e1evation/trending-topics-in-twitter-for-this-week-on-2-2-20.js”>%5B<a href="

I summarize the top Twitter news every Thursday at this time…

http://storify.com/e1evation/trending-topics-in-twitter-for-this-week-on-2-2-20″ target=”_blank”>View the story “Trending topics in Twitter for this week on 2/2/2012” on Storify]

Google Reader tips and tricks for content management (e1evation.com)
HootSuite Reaches 3 Million Users, 700 Million Sent Messages [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
Twitter to launch new analytics tools for publishers to measure social reach (brafton.com)

February 2, 2012 0

Open Share Icon — Image by Si1very via Flickr

Here’s my new, favorite Firefox plugin…

“Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader notes, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr, twitter, and ycombinator. You can also e-mail the web page directly to a friend.” Shareaholic – The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly

If you’re a blogger, one of the most important things you can do is to get your content out into the social media stream is to share, share, share. Shareaholic is the fastest, easiest way I’ve seen to do that so far…

6/29/2011 My old friend the ‘Blog Post Promoter’ tells me via this post that I’ve been officially loving Shareaholic for over three years now. Although I have moved from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser, Chrome remains the one extension or add-on that I could not live without. While I’m not a Chris Brogan or Darren Rowse, when an internet mechanic like me says this extension rocks, I’d suggest you find out why…

;-)

Housekeeping: New sharing options? (charman-anderson.com)
The Best Social Media Plugins: Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (singlegrain.com)
ABC. Always be curating! (e1evation.com)
Start me up! (e1evation.com)

June 28, 2011 1

http://mixergy-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf

via mixergy.com

Sharing — that basic skill you learned in kindergarten — is foundational to social media. No tool allows you to do it better or faster than Shareaholic. Watch the video to learn why…

June 21, 2011 2

“Creating beats consuming”

Auren Hoffman has a great post on consuming vs. producing. He says…

“We are meant to be both creators and consumers. Today, however, most people consume far more then they create. Part of the reason for this is because being both a consumer and a creator at the same time is very difficult, and because goods and services have never been more accessible. But a healthy life is one that balances both creation and consumption.

When you consume you are often appreciating other’s work. You eat, watch movies, visit nice places, read books, and party. You vegetate to the sounds of your favorite musical artist on a wonderful couch while surfing Facebook on your beautifully designed laptop.

Creators do just the opposite: they strive to make something that others (or their future self) will appreciate. Creators toil, try different things, fail, and try again.” Source: Summation: creating beats consuming

…follow the link for the rest of his article.

It’s not hard to move from consuming content to producing content for your internet marketing. I’m working on a screencast to show you how Google’s Chrome, Shareaholic and Posterous can work together to help you make the transition from thinker to thought leader. Stay tuned…

May 5, 2010 0

Every once in awhile…

…I stumble upon something that I had used once and had forgotten and can’t remember why I stopped. This morning I fell in love with Shareaholic all over again…

“Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, bit.ly, connotea, google bookmarks, google reader notes, gmail, kaboodle, magnolia, meneame, mixx, myspace, plurk, reddit, soup.io, stumbleupon, tipjoy, tumblr, twine, twitter, weheartit, yahoo buzz, and ycombinator. You can also e-mail the web page directly to a friend.” Source: Shareaholic – The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly

Why is this important? Let me try to net it out quickly…

Finding a great website may help you advance your knowledge but what if you had a way to share it with others that required little or no additional effort? Wouldn’t that be worth it? Sure, there are some websites that I keep for my own private use, but for the sites that contain good information for my ‘followers’, I can post those sites to my ‘rooms’ in FriendFeed and they show up as featured articles in the right hand column of my blog. That way, these bookmarks benefits me as well as the rest of the world and make my site more of a destination because of the valuable resources that are there! If you want to drive people to your website or blog, give me a call at (920) 486-4798 or drop me a note using the contact form above. I can help!

December 13, 2009 0

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It’s Never the Medium. It’s the People

The People Are the Goal

Is Pinterest The New Amazing Network?

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