Thinks I find along the way
Dana VanDen Heuvel shared this with me as something we need to show at our social media bootcamp today. Had to share it here! btw, there’s still time to sign up. You can get more info here…
Here’s a bonus for paying attention late on a Friday afternoon. Super smart social media guy Dana VanDen Heuvel just went nuts and posted almost everything he has ever written on Scribd. Here’s a sample that he used in our panel discussion on ‘Thought Leadership Marketing’ just yesterday…
Am I a Thought Leader? Self-Diagnostic Test – Thought Leadership Handout http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf
You can find it all here! Go check it out before he regains his senses and pulls it all down… :-D
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Building a social media hub doesn’t need to be as expensive as outlined in the source article, so don’t be intimidated by the idea. You NEED a hub to help manage your social media outposts or channels and I can help you get one that is “good, fast, and cheap”. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
Still not convinced on the topic of curation? Read on…
Curation is now a necessity. The web is full of content. More than a person could consume in several lifetimes if all they did was sleep a couple hours per day and surf the web, life after life.
Google can’t help us with our internet A.D.D. Nor can Facebook or Alltop.
The best we’ve been able to do so far to harness the massive information overload is use tools like Google Reader and RSS feed aggregators like Alltop. They’ve helped, to be sure, but no one is going through all that information and picking out the best of the best and making sense of it all for you.
Rather than start a new site with the goal of creating a bunch of new content, it’s time for people to think about being content curators. Organizing and commenting on the best content around a certain topic.
Curators still use blog software to publish their content, but the vast majority of each post is made up of carefully reviewed and organized 3rd party information.
Jack Humphrey says it well here and I encourage you to follow the ‘via’ link and read his 11 reasons. Me? I am the self-styled ‘king of curation’ and my ‘e1evation workflow’ allows you to curate content better and faster than any other system I know of with maximum effect. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
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…
;-)
I’ve been following industry oracle Guy Kawasaki for over 25 years and I agree with him almost all of the time. He was right about the Mac, he’s right about Posterous and he’s right about Alltop. He’s right about so many things. When he speaks, I take notes. This time, however, I take issue…
He posted a recent article on the topic of Facebook pages recently and this is one of the rare times I need to take issue…
“Q: I’m a small business entrepreneur, and I’ll be introducing a consumer product soon. Should I create a website for my company or a Facebook fan page?
A: I faced a similar question a few weeks ago for my book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I had three options: create a site for the book, add a section for the book to my existing website, or create a Facebook fan page.
After five minutes of thoughtful deliberation, I decided to add a bare-bones section to my website (which I haven’t gotten around to do yet—which should tell you something) and create a Facebook fan page but not to create a website for the book. Here’s why I did not choose a website:” Source: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website? : The World :: American Express OPEN Forum
Guy goes on to elucidate 4 reasons why he did not choose a website and 8 reasons why he chose a Facebook page along with 3 potential ‘gotchas’ — go to the source and read the entire article if you’d like…
Here’s where Guy and I part thinking. In business, the answer is rarely either/or. Frequently it’s both/and. Guy’s advice is great for someone launching a product or a book, but it’s not really great long term advice for an entrepreneur launching a company. As a short term strategy I recommend that entrepreneurs buy a domain, set up Google Apps and create a Facebook page. Google Apps will give them the ability to send corporate email from their domain and their domain name can be temporarily directed toward their Facebook page until they build a blogsite. This will give them a total ‘appearance package’ that will allow them to look professional immediately while they contemplate their website and further social media strategy and tactics…
On this issue I side with author Lisa Barone who recently posted…
“Brace yourself: Facebook is trying to take over the world. Or, if not the world, at least the entire Internet. With Facebook partnering up with popular sites like Yelp, many SMB owners may feel as if their load got lighter. I mean, why waste time worrying about your building your blog or your own site when you can grow your Facebook presence instead? If Facebook’s opening up the doors so that people can take you with them, you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, right?
Wrong!
It doesn’t matter how hot Facebook or any of the other social media sites are looking right now. You still need to be focused on using your blog to create your own authority and brand.” Source: 10 Reasons Not To Ignore Your Blog For Facebook
Reason #1 she cites? “You don’t own Facebook”…
The problem with Facebook from my perspective is that you’re not only a renter, you’re a free renter and you can expect all the rights and privileges thereof. In other words, you have no rights on Facebook — not even privacy. You use it at your own risk. Facebook can — and has — made major changes to their technology without notice or recourse. Using a Facebook page is a great place for an entrepreneur to start but not to stay. I agree with Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse and other internet visionaries who propose an internet ‘homebase and outpost‘ strategy that puts a blog at the center of your online presence. The key is that you have to own that presence and be ‘master of your domain’ name and internet brand…
In the future, these homebases may become less important as more people understand the wisdom of David Sauter and his team at Envano. Their ‘autobahn’ model describes a future where a website becomes less important as a company embraces appropriate social media tools to build their internet presence, but the lack of an ‘easy button’ or unified social media dashboard makes this more of a future vision than a present reality…
Guy, I love you, your thought leadership and your content, but just this once I think your Q&A might have done the reader a disservice. Readers? Questions? Feedback? Please comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
Back in 2000, I picked up a book at Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, CA. The Cluetrain Manifesto (affiliate link) was on the end cap display and having been involved in “Internet stuff” for a while for a few years, I was keen to explore what the book had to offer. Little did I know (same for most of us I’d imagine) that Cluetrain would be even more relevant over a decade later than when it was first written. Frankly, I can’t think of too many business books that can make that claim, so that in and of itself is really something. Over the past several years I’ve read and re-read Cluetrain a few times and have kept the 95 theses document close at hand. As we all look forward to what 2011 brings, it seems an appropriate time to get reacquainted with the full Cluetrain set of 95 theses albeit with a bit more depth. (one liners such as “markets are conversations” don’t have the same immediate resonance with everyone and thusly some explanation may be required.). So, in in the spirit of getting fully engaged in the Cluetrain mindset that I’m embarking on the project of bringing all 95 of these to life over the next 95 work days.
Dana VanDen Heuvel of MarketingSavant Group is engaged in a rather ambitious project over at his blog, but as I have said so many times before — when Dana talks, I take notes. Follow the ‘via’ link over to his site and track his ’95 days of Cluetrain’ — I know I will…
Many of the tasks we’ve traditionally undertaken have been moving over to mobile over the past few years thanks to devices like the iPhone that have shifted our expectations.
Email usage is one of those tasks, with email marketing company Campaign Monitor revealing some interesting patterns from the last two years of data it has collected from — and here’s a sample size for you — over 2 billion recipients.
The percentage of emails opened on a mobile device has risen from just 4% in May 2009 to 20% in May 2011 while desktop client usage has declined by 11%. Webmail has shown the least change over two years, with a 4% decline.
As one might expect, among mobile devices the iPhone is leading the pack with a whopping 71.98% lead. The iPad actually appears next at 14.95% before other smartphones such as Android, which makes up 8.24% of the mobile email use.
One of the points that David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, makes is that CSS support on mobile devices is generally far superior to support in desktop clients. If these trends continue and clients with CSS support become the norm we could be moving toward a golden age for email design, like the one we’ve seen on the web this year as HTML5 and CSS3 support has become more widespread.
Me? I use a combination of Google Apps for Business and a Google Android Nexus S to handle email so it really doesn’t matter where I’m at or how I’m interacting with email. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
Here’s what I’m thinking at the close of the weekend and the start of a new week…
To paraphrase my good friend Dana VanDen Heuvel of MarketingSavant, the difference between a thinker and a thought leader is that while the thinker has a point of view, the thought leader has a PUBLIC point of view; a point of view that is searchable, findable and knowable. This public point of view gets the thought leader a share of voice which leads to a share of mind which leads to share of market which in turn adds to the bottom line. Almost anyone can establish a thought leadership position using the tactics and tools I discuss and use every day; a good thought leader can beat the great thinker to the customer by learning to use these tools well. If you want to know about the STRATEGY of being a thought leader, then you need to head over to MarketingSavant.com, subscribe to the rss feed and newsletter and learn from Dana — he does the thought leader thing much better than I do. If you want to know about the TACTICS AND TOOLS of thought leadership, however, read on…
As of today, this website is ranked 364,509 in the United States by Alexa — and thanks to my friends in the UK, it’s ranked 273,939 there [btw, I want to use my incredible influence there to say one thing: “Hey, British dudes! Give Ireland back to the Irish! but I digress.”]. Three months ago, my site was not even within the top 20 million in the world so that’s a pretty rapid ascent. Traffic this week is more than double that of last week. Traffic this month is 59% greater than that of last month and today is only the 18th of the month. What’s the secret? Home bases and outposts. Home bases and outposts. Home bases and outposts….
Every day I use my ‘top 10 tactics and tools’ [tomorrow I’ll be writing about #2; using Google Reader to help establish your point of view] to market my business. Using a systematic process, I take the reading I do every day and spin it into a blog using good, fast, and cheap cross-platform tools widely available on the internet — kind of like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold — and I could teach you how to do it too. If you want to be a thought leader, Dana has the data and the strategy and I’ve got the tactics and tools; together we can help you get the market share you want!
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact form…
6/22/2011 Hey, kids! Back when this was first posted in 2009 I thought I was really on to something. And I was right. Here’s my Alexa ranking today…
If you want an effective but inexpensive website that rocks traffic, comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
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…
Long before I was a website developer, I was in sales and sales management. The other day, I had a convo with a fellow sales puke and we were discussing the top 3 sales movies of all time. They were, in our opinions, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room and, of course, Tommy Boy! Here’s the best sales team meeting of all time imho [warning: NSFW!]…
Blake, Alec Baldwin’s sales manager character says ABC means ‘always be closing’, but if you’re a blogger I say ABC means ‘always be curating’!
In my weltanschauung [worldview for those of you behind on your German], blogging, on one level, is little more than the public e-mailing and bookmarking. After all, what is a blog post but a “to whom it may concern” memo to the world? Because most people save bookmarks and send e-mails and links to one another they already have the basic instincts they need for thought leadership marketing. They are however using tools that are sub optimal for the task at hand. Even the person who has 1 million people in their address book cannot match the reach of a tool that can reach out to 2 billion people on the Internet.
What then are the right tools? I believe they are the 10+ tools in the elevation workflow…
I firmly believe that anyone who wants to be a thought leader can use this combination of tools to establish their public point of view. Many people are using some or all of these tools but have not aligned them in an optimal fashion.
I want to take a moment to talk about Shareaholic. When teaching social media I tell my classes if you only add one extension to Google Chrome [or Firefox], make it Shareaholic. Why? Because Shareaholic is the one tool that allows you to always be curating. With the Shareaholic extension installed I am always ready to share content to the appropriate channel in my vast Internet publishing empire. Shareaholic, I have said earlier, is the Swiss Army knife of sharing. Allow me to demonstrate…
Curation not only adds authority to your public brand, but it will also rock your SEO. Shareaholic is the secret to my success, because with it, to paraphrase Night Ranger, I’m curating and blogging 25 hours a day…
I believe that the elevation workflow is a kick ass solution for thought leadership marketing. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization — I’m always available for Personal Digital Coaching on the ‘e1evation workflow’…
Sweta of GlobalThoughtz has an interesting blog post on the topic of corporate blogs…
“How do you follow your favorite company? How do you come to know about their latest launch or what’s cooking in their labs? My answer to this would be their ‘Corporate Blogs’. Not only does it give me a constant update about the company I like but also makes me feel connected to them. It gives me the feeling that they are listening to me.
Today as a consumer, I have several products to choose from for each of my need and certainly my choice is driven by my affinity to a particular brand. Just like Internet presence had become crucial a few years back, corporate blogs are absolute necessity now. After all we live in the world of Social Media.
Its not just web companies that need to engage their consumers with their blogs. Few of the most loved companies in the world also house must read blogs. One of the best example of corporate blog is Official Google Blog, not only does it provide an insight into the company but also provides useful information to its readers. Corporate blogs such as McDonald’s Corporate Social Responsibility by McDonald’s, Check Out by Walmart and Fast Lane by GM have made these most loved companies even closer to their consumers. The Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter constantly update their users with their blogs The Facebook Blog and Twitter Blog.” Source: Why a company must have a blog.
Here’s the real payback, however, and the real reason why these corporations do it: HubSpot says that companies that blog get 55% more visitors, have 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages [which are valuable from a search perspective]. Better yet, customers who are engaged by a corporate blog and social media spend 30% more than their disconnected counterparts, according to MarketingSavant Dana VanDen Heuvel…
I guess you don’t really HAVE to have a blog, but at a time when many companies are fighting for their economic survival, I think it’s good to know there’s a good, fast and cheap tool that delivers these kinds of results. Question? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page…
Last week, I posted that I had been chosen by Erin Davisson of WFRV TV in Green Bay to talk with her viewers about Google Reader. That segment was aired this evening…
http://www.wfrv.com/v/?i=123863049
Here’s the transcript…
Need to do a lot of online research? There’s a Google tool that can help make you a lot more efficient. It’s called Google Reader. It’s a free, web-based reader of RSS feeds, and once you find out how useful it is, you’re going to want to use it.Todd Lohenry is the owner of e1evation llc, and a social media expert. He’s a big fan of the Google Reader.
“Google Reader is a tool that lets you track the sites that you trust to search for terms that you want to know about and to track the people that you trust and turn the tide of information from chasing websites, hoping to find something good – to making the information you want flow to you,” said Lohenry.
The Google Reader is able to bring content from your favorite websites, blogs and topics to one location by the use of RSS feeds. Lohenry says RSS feeds are like the antenna on top of a television station. It broadcasts a signal to anyone who chooses to receive it. Google Reader is one of those receivers.
Google Reader also offers extras like personal stats, and keyboard shortcuts. You can track topics by using an RSS feed of a Twitter search. Lohenry says mastering the Google Reader means freeing up massive amounts of time, and says, “It makes all the difference in the world in terms of what you are able to accomplish on the internet.”
It will take some time to set up your Google Reader. but once you’ve found all your RSS feeds- it’s very handy.
Thanks so much to Erin Davisson for featuring my thoughts on ‘personal news aggregation’ with Google Reader on ‘Online with Erin’. Comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how Google Reader applies to your organization…
Same applies to websites or almost any other type of technical work. If you’ve heard me speak, I’m always talking about “good, fast, and cheap” tools. There are a few — like Google Apps for Business — that are all three! Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
I thank God every day that my mother forced me to take touch typing in high school — especially when you consider that people who use keyboard shortcuts are 4x more productive than those who stumble along with their mouse! Keyboard shortcuts are what make Gmail and Google Reader the killer apps they are! Get to know them and you’ll be loving life…
This afternoon, I thought I was heading to a personal digital coaching session on Google Reader for local anchorwoman Erin Davisson of WFRV TV in Green Bay. Instead, unbeknownst to me, it was Erin’s intention to interview me for an upcoming news segment…
Fortunately, I’m always ready to talk about the power of ‘personal news aggregation’ using Google Reader and I had no trouble giving Erin 50x more content than she’ll ever be able to use! Erin was also kind enough to give me a tour of the studio and sit for this picture. Now I’ll have to ask her to autograph my blog…
:-)
PS Be sure to tune in Tuesday the 14th at 5:00 to see the segment!
Here’s part 3…
As I introduced at the beginning of this post, using social media to react is just the beginning. But at some point it takes a shift to not only react, but also lead. Demonstrating the value of social media is our mission in 2011. In 2012, proving the value of the insights learned from customers and prospects in social channels will help connect disparate business units and functions into one connected and adaptive company.
This is about taking the perpetual switching of social media from on and off to on again and evolving campaigns to that of continuum engagement. A connected customer is always on and as such, an adaptive business must do just that, remain nimble.
Your task is not easy. The case must be made to leadership that there are material benefits in embracing change. To help, I’ve assembled three videos produced by Salesforce featuring my dear friend Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. In each of the three videos, you’ll learn how to build the business case, how to calculate ROI and how to make the cause for an adaptive business.
Here’s the final installment on how to make the cause for an adaptive business…
Things we’ve been tracking in the past 24 hours…
– Woot! Love it…
Here’s the second installment…
For some of you, I’m preaching to the choir. Perhaps this comes across as rudimentary or common knowledge. But in my experience, social media is largely siloed in marketing departments. And for those businesses experimenting with customer engagement in social media, engagement insights and lessons are largely siloed within the service department. I challenge you to extend the value of social media beyond any silo to not just socialize the entire business but introduce new processes, systems, and methodologies that makes it more relevant and adaptive to an increasingly discerning connected customer.
The opportunity before us extends beyond Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and even in the communities that exist to connect customers to one another in branded forums. The challenge however lies in our ability to translate engagement into either direct or dotted lines to existing business metrics. Yes, we need to look beyond what I refer to as the 3F’s (friends, fans, and followers) to prove the value of social media. But this goes beyond just documenting converting numbers into KPIs that lead to ROI. This is also about translating insights into catalysts for business transformation.
To determine the ROI of social media, programs must be designed with the end in mind and compared to the performance of existing programs using existing measurement processes. Additionally, customers insights and trends must be documented to demonstrate the opportunity to improve customer experiences. For example, you can demonstrate that social media reduces inbound call volume and thus saves the company money over time. But that’s just the beginning. If you identify repeat problems, issues, or trends, your next step is to work with the affected business units to create or deliver a fix. Once this is communicated to customers through all available channels, customers en masse will feel acknowledged and appreciate the businesses ability to adapt to their needs and concerns. What’s the value of that experience?
Here are some thoughts on the ROI of social media…
What is RSS?
An RSS Reader is a simple and easy way to read your favorite news site or blogs. Instead of going out to these site to read the most recent stories or posts, the newest stuff comes to you, all in one simple page. Even more convenient is having a Reader which is online, reaching it from any place in the world.In my eyes Google Reader is one of the best online RSS Readers on the web. For the first time user, just getting used to the whole RSS thing, this post will talk about: a) How to subscribe to a feed b) view your feeds c) the cool features built into Google Reader and d) just some nifty little tricks you can use while you’re at it. Remember, being a master of your RSS feeds is also a very important way to build up and maintain powerful social media accounts
The first thing you would have to do, is head over to reader.google.com and sign up for a free account. From there, you would want to start building up your subscriptions.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above if you’re just getting started with Google Reader…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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