Thinks I find along the way
Are you an entrepreneur? Want to be one? Then it’s good to ponder this…
What exactly is it that sets entrepreneurs apart from the rest? What is it that makes certain people believe in themselves enough to take the prospect of failure head-on and have the determination to come out on top? It takes a special kind of person to set an idea in motion, riding the highs and lows from humble beginnings to ultimate success.”
Click here to read more…
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I’m going to do another Google Reader Rockstar event. This time, it will be a hybrid event. Thos of you who want to attend in person can do so in the Jag, Inc. conference room at 1508 Sunset Avenue in Algoma, WI. Those of you who don’t want to make the trip can attend online via GoToMeeting. We can only accommodate 25 people in all, so be sure to register today!
Don’t attend, however, if you don’t want to learn about a competitive advantage that will fundamentally shift the way you look at information and make you smarter than your competition…
I don’t comment on politics often here, but here’s a politician who gets YouTube! Ex-reality tv star cum DA Sean Duffy is a former client of mine who looks like he’ll have a new zip code in January — although he’s no technologist himself, at least he understands the value of social media in getting his ‘awesome’ out. Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how this applies to your business…
I’d like to call your attention to a new webinar being offered by Dana VanDen Heuvel of Green Bay. In a couple of weeks, Dana will be speaking on the topic of business blogging for thought leadership and few people know this topic better than him. Dana says…
“Blogging is one of the most important aspects of a thought leadership or social media presence, yet so many organizations struggle with blogging or decide to dismiss it altogether because of the content publishing demands of blogging. Blogging doesn’t have to be hard, take a lot of time or take an entire staff to publish.
The Blogging for Thought Leadership webinar will take you through the steps from developing your thought leadership position to creating a realistic publishing plan that any organization can manage.
Some of the highlights that we’ll cover in the webinar:
- Developing your thought leadership and blog point of view
- How to use insurgent marketing to claim a thought leadership position in a crowded market
- The social media thought leader’s equation
- The weblog publishing roadmap
- 20 types of blog posts to take your blog to the next level
- How to create your own efficient blogging process
- How to create the ideal social media publishing calendar
- Getting the most from your chosen blog platform
- How to connect your blog to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Case studies of organizations with highly successful thought leadership blogs”
You can go to the source to sign up. Whether you can attend in real time or no, you’ll still get the content to view later…
This humble blog is one of the highest ranked websites in the US thanks to business blogging…
…and many of the concepts Dana will be presenting are ones we both consider to be ‘common sense‘ in this space — I wholeheartedly endorse his content and recommend it to you without reservation. Understanding the connection between business blogging and thought leadership could propel your online presence to new heights and there are few people better suited to explain it than Green Bay’s own Dana VanDen Heuvel. Be there when he lights it up…
In the past few weeks, I’ve had numerous conversations with colleagues, partners and in some cases, clients, about blogging and the challenges of keeping a blog up and running.
Most of those conversations come down to one thing: Content.
Do you have enough to say to sustain a blog? Do you have strong enough opinions and takes to cut through the massive sea of clutter that is the open Web these days? And, maybe most importantly, do you know what to look for when it comes to content your customers or audience might be interested in?
That last one is the key point I want to focus on today. So many brands, when they start blogging, think too myopically about blogging. I need to talk about my product or service. I need to talk about my company. I need to talk about what my product or service can do for my customers.
Sure, that’s part of the mix, but in my view, it’s actually a pretty small part.
The much larger portion of your blog’s content should focus on everything AROUND your product or service.
It never ceases to amaze me that many of my client buys the logic of purchasing a blog enabled website but falter when it comes to actually producing content. After all, what is a blog post but an email to the world about who we are, what we do, why we do it and the ‘world’ in which we do it? You can follow the ‘via’ link above to get ideas for thinking like a blogger. Comment or ‘connect’ to discuss how this applies to you and your organization…
A lot of social media purists will tell you that you’re the spawn of the devil if you use automation.
To truly use social media properly, you have to “be there” constantly, otherwise you’re just fooling yourself and your connections.
Bullshit.
Maybe to the purists that are on Twitter and Facebook non-stop, and love to tweet just for the sake of getting influence scores up, automation is evil. After all, they’re on there doing their “thing” all the time, so why shouldn’t you be?
Simple.
The people that aren’t on Twitter and Facebook all the time are generally doing other things. You know… like client work. Yes, they’ll jump on and interact, but usually that’s when the other important stuff is done.
So forgive me if I see folks tell me automation is bad. If I’m going to share a blog post anyway by someone that I truly trust to deliver the goods, why do I need to physically be on Twitter to do this when I can send the same post out with something like Triberr or Twitterfeed?
What’s that? Because I’m not being true to social media and its values? Give me a break, please.
Gee, Danny, how do you really feel? Seriously, I agree with Danny Brown when he says “Social media is just another toolset, or platform, or information base, or whatever tag you want to give it, to help you manage your needs better, whether they be personally or professionally.” I use dlvr.it to parse out my blog posts and social bookmarks throughout the day while I’m doing REAL work. That get’s the conversation started. On the backend, I use HootSuite and Gist to keep the ball rolling. Personally, I think that if you’re not using some form of automation, you’re working too hard and social media is costing you too much…
Back in the day, if you wanted support from a business, you had to go to where the business’s reps were. Be it via an 800 number, support forums, e-mail or chat, the business would set the rules about how quickly your inquiry was addressed.
But with social media growing as a real-time support channel, the picture looks quite different these days. Customers are taking back control, and businesses increasingly have to assist on consumers’ terms.
I chatted with a colleague of mine, Brian House of IBM, about the different types of people searching for social support, and we discovered that most can be put in one of two categories. The first is the “social media native.” These are people who use social media, specifically Twitter (
), as their main point of contact with companies and brands. These types are social media-savvy and reach for Twitter to share their everyday thoughts and opinions, which often overlap with their use of products and sentiment about brands.
The second type is the “last resort social media user.” This type of customer is more dangerous to a business because she is likely frustrated with the brand’s traditional support channels and has resorted to the public forum of social media to voice negative sentiment. She is not happy and won’t hesitate to share her opinion with friends.
Social support is no longer a luxury, but a necessity in today’s business climate. It’s an opportunity to maintain engagement with the savvy users in category one and stay on top of potentially damaging chatter from those in category two. To ensure that you are successful, here are five tips and considerations that you need to think through before engaging in social support.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the 5 tips…
…according to John Jantsch…
One of the most common questions I receive is “how do I get started blogging?” Some might find it a bit odd that I suggest a three step approach and the first two steps don’t have much to do with directly working on your own blog. No, I think you get started blogging by working on your blogging mindset and blogging presence. So, here’s my 3-step blogging start-up plan.”
Click here to read more…
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“Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that can be accessed through your account on their website, on your desktop, by instant messaging and mobile phones. Hundreds of thousands of people and companies, including several presidential candidates, reportedly, are users, although the firm won’t release that information.
What is known about Twitter is that its traffic is increasing rapidly, although it’s still considered a niche site. According to data from Web analytics firm Hitwise, visits to Twitter have more than doubled in the past 3 months and were up 60% in April. Twitter ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums in late April, but its size is difficult to measure because it has so many ways for access, primarily cell phones.” Click here to read more…
Part of a series. Original version at AlexandraSamuel.com.
In my recent blog post about how to sustain your social media presence in just 3 hours a week, I advise drafting 3 blog posts in under one hour. That may sound unimaginable if (like me) you’ve fallen into the habit of turning each blog post you write into a mini-manual or philosophical essay.
But back in the day — you know, before Twitter — a lot of blog posts consisted of simply sharing a link and saying, hey, here’s something useful you should read. Now that we’ve got Facebook and Twitter, people tend to share links in 140 characters or less, and the blog-post-as-link-share has largely disappeared.
I’m all for sharing links in an efficient way, through Twitter or Facebook or even delicious. But we’ve lost something in this rapid-fire micro-sharing: we’ve lost the conversation about why something is worth sharing (or reading). We’ve lost the reflections on what we learned by reading the post we’re about to share.
And we’ve lost a great, valuable route to sustaining a blog. My 3-hour social media method relies on bringing back the “I read this and so should you” blog post. But in the era of Twitter et al., just sharing the link is not enough. You’ve got to provide some additional value….something that makes the reader glad to read your blog post, and not just annoyed you didn’t point them towards the original.
Here are seven ways to add value to a blog post you are sharing:
- Summarize the main argument of the post (but in a way that still encourages the reader to read the full post)
- Share a (brief) excerpt or two from the original post that you think was exceptionally interesting or useful
- Explain why you think it’s worth reading, or what you enjoyed about it
- Suggest another way to apply the original post’s advice or insight
- Raise a concern, criticism or missing piece of information
- Ask a question prompted by the blog post
- Point to another related or complementary resource, or draw a thematic connection between multiple blog posts
If you can add value to the post you are sharing in one (or more) of these ways, you can draft a useful, legitimate blog post in 10 minutes or less. Don’t believe me? Then watch this video, which records the process of writing yesterday’s blog post about digital fasts.
The excerpt above is longer than most of my curation posts, but Alexandra Samuel’s perspective is a good one that summarizes from another perspective what I was discussing with clients in a executive briefing on Friday and I wanted to accomplish three objectives here. First, show them how I first post things to my own site before sharing them with anyone. Second, how you can effectively curate content from other sources to prove your own point and third, ask people to interact with you based on the information you’ve shared. Comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
I’m talking social media with a barrista named John in the Starbucks in York, NE. Yes, there is one thank God — it’s one of the few redeeming features of this intersection called York where I have been sleeping while attending Husker Harvest Days. John noticed my Wisconsin license plate and asked where I was from. Turns out we’re from opposite ends of Kewaunee County and we’re chatting at a Starbucks in York. Small world…
Starbucks has the only reliable wireless internet connection for me to upload my content for AGCO so I have been a better customer than usual as yesterday I had over 2.5GB of content from the show to upload for the Envano team back in Green Bay. The social media campaign we have been doing for AGCO has been wildly successful. There are over 2,000 fans in Facebook now and we just added a beautiful YouTube channel for Husker Harvest Days.
I’m looking forward to heading back to Algoma with stops in Des Moines, IA and Galena, IL along the way. Soon I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the technology behind the AGCO social media success — including my huge disappointment with the iPhone and the way it performed on the trip! Be sure to fan AGCO in Facebook and follow the new YouTube channel in the meantime. If you’re curious about how all this works, give me a call @ (920) 486-4798. I’ll be happy to talk with you — I have 12 hours of driving time to kill on the way home… ;-)
Just in case you missed Dan Zarella’s awesome webinar yesterday, you can hear the recorded content here…
With job satisfaction rates at record lows and more and more people looking to enjoy a higher quality of life, millions of people are desperately trying to leave their miserable jobs and are flocking to the world of blogging and Internet marketing.If you’re already a blogger, chances are you’ve heard of Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, and Leo Babauta. These names are synonymous with blogging success and the dream of living the “Internet lifestyle”.
On the surface, blogging as a business seems like a dream job. You get to set your own hours, work from anywhere with little more than a laptop, connect with fascinating people from all over the world, and potentially have an impact on the entire world.
Now THAT’S a job!
The TruthDon’t get me wrong, blogging does offer all these things and more and beats the hell out of sitting in a cubicle working for the man every day of the week.
Given how many people are drawn to this lifestyle, the competition to stand out and become noticed is enormous. Millions of blogs are started each day and cover every conceivable topic imaginable.
What often begins as the thought of a life working on your iPad while sitting on a sandy beach, slowly transforms into the harsh reality of what goes into building a successful and profitable business from your blog.
Before you embark on a journey to quit your job and become the next pro blogger, you need to fully understand what goes into creating a sustainable business.
This article, while primarily written for those who can to build a sustainable business on blogging has some ‘truths’ that you need to consider. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you want to drill down on the 10 hard truths. Business blogging to promote your existing business is an altogether different topic — comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
It’s always easier to just buy an ad. There are people that will take your money and use it to produce a commercial, tv spot or print ad. People will see your ad and a few of them may even come into your store if your ad has a good call to action or a coupon. There is a problem with that strategy. There’s an easier way that takes more work. How can something be easier and take more work?It’s more work to…
…gather contact information for all of your current clients or members.
…communicate with them about things other than your organization, store or “sale of the century”.
…talk to individuals instead of buying an ad for the masses.
But it’s easier to…
…get information of your current clients than to get information from strangers.
…talk about what’s important to their lives if you’re listening on their terms (Facebook or Twitter come to mind).
…talk to individuals and get a response than to buy an ad and get the attention of the masses.
As with all things worth while it’s easier in the long run if you do more work in the beginning.
Stop throwing money at the masses and start talking to individuals.
Nice post by Andy Traub. For me, it’s like Guy Kawasaki says ““If you have more Money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing. If you have more Brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.” [Just in case you’re not sure, ads are outbound, social media is inbound.] One of the things I love about social media marketing is that it takes more time than money! All of us are working hard in the current economy but imho, the smart ones are channeling that effort into inbound marketing in the form of social media. Questions? Feedback?
I’ve heard it all before… “my company just needs a good website to get my product out. Trust me they will come”… or another good one, “I have a facebook profile and now I can send out product updates and people will just get them.” Er, no. For years Business to Business companies have been trying to match the success, and sometime failures, of traditional media that Business to Consumer companies have had. Then the internet seemed to even the playing field. Only problem was, B2B companies didn’t have the budgets B2C companies had to market that cool website. Plus, the market for their products is much smaller. When I mean smaller, I mean I know a few companies that only have about a dozen or so potential customers. You could technically buy a dozen donuts and email each prospect one. As long as it’s not jelly filled, because that could get messy.
So back to facebook.com and can it work for B2B? The answer is yes. But it does come with a few caveats. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will work without a sound marketing strategy. Also, one of the main reason’s any tactic will fail is lack of follow through. Let’s face it, nobody has any time to do any marketing things during our busy work day right? Wrong. How may of us check our facebook account as often as we check our email? Lots, ok, we also check on our farms, but that’s totally different. So just by checking your facebook account, you have time to add a update that can make your business more relevent to prospects and current customers. So I have written five steps that can help any B2B company get more out of facebook.
I’m so glad I know Kiar Olson and I love his perspective on this topic — you can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to read his ‘5 step’ program…
So I launched my blog this past Monday and announced it to the Twitter world…got many retweets and congrats, and at least one blog mention (thanks again, Maggie!).
Now the reality sets in. I actually have to write this thing…it ain’t gonna write itself. After all, I don’t want to be like the bride who loves weddings and hates being married. I confess: this might be a big reason I haven’t started a blog before now. After all, it’s a commitment. I value my integrity, and now I’ve publicly said I’m gonna do this thing, I darn well better do it!
Sometimes, putting “it” out there, making it public, is a very good thing. I guess that’s why they tell you writing down your goals is so important. I think this blog is going to do some really good things for me.
• It will help me be more disciplined in when and how I write. Writing is hard work…just ask any writer who makes it look effortless (and there are a lot of them out there!). You can’t wing it; you can’t “mail it in.” Every writing teacher I ever had (not to mention every book in my writer’s library) told me the key to success in writing is to sit down and write. Regularly.
• It will force me to prioritize (or at least take a stab at it) what I want to think and write about. My really big challenge is that I have lots to learn and lots of things I want to learn, and lots of things I want to write about here. Even within the topic of learning – not to mention the peripherally related things that might end up on this blog. Ten minutes on Twitter and I’ve found 20 new websites to read…an hour on a live Twitter chat brings me new tweeps and a whole new set of links to explore. Simply by going through the process of prioritizing what’s important to this blog, I’ll get increasingly better at deciding where to focus, what to write about.
• It will help me refine my ideas. When I’m figuring things out, I’ll frequently “think out loud” (if you’ve ever been in conversation with me, you’ve likely heard me do it!). I “write out loud,” too…a sort of stream-of-consciousness process that helps me capture ideas and then mold them into something that makes sense (to me, anyway).
So even as I blog, I’m learning. Learning to be more disciplined, better at prioritizing, better at refining ideas. My big ‘ah-ha’ for the day…what was yours? Spend a little time thinking about it; you might surprise yourself.
I loved this post so much that I grabbed the whole post as a quote. The ‘learning evangelist’ nailed it! I blog as much for myself as I do my readers and clients — blogging is a discipline that benefits me. Far from being a waste of time, I find it actually makes me more efficient about doing ‘marketing’ because it allows me to chip away at it a little bit at time…
When someone asks me a question, if I answer them via email, I benefit only that person and perhaps the people in their circle. If I take the same content, however, and create an ’email to the world’ via a blog post, I can reexpress my own content over and over again to people and in ways I never dreamed possible!
Kudos to the ‘learning evangelist’. You get ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is and I predict a long and happy blogging career for you…
It’s always interesting to go back and see where you were a year or so ago thoughtwise and what you may have learned since then. My ‘old post promoter’ randomly brings up old posts and this one, looking back on 2009 is very interesting to me. In it we find the genesis of what I now call the ‘e1evation workflow’ which now consists of 10.5 tools — many of which have stood the test of time since 2009. The mainstays of this process have been working for me for over 18 months now and continue to produce consistent results across a wide variety of industry verticals. What follows is the original post…
LOL! Here I sit looking back over the past decade, thinking that it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting in fear of Y2K. Now I’m making a living using tools that for the most part didn’t exist back then. It’s a wonderful [tech] life, eh?!
Wrapping up 2009, here’s the list of my favorite social media tools, organized according to their position and role within the e1evation system. This may look like a simple list but it took over a year to develop and that’s not because I’m a slow learner — it’s because I use rigorous filters for inclusion in my social media toolkit. I also am constantly using Einstein’s Razor [“Things must be as simple as possible but no simpler.”] to keep the toolset small. With that intro, here they are…
Perception
Publishing
Propagation
Preferences [other favorites tools]
Effectively using these tools together has elevated my business blog to #474,040 in the United States and #1,612,683 in the world in just 6 months according to Alexa. Imagine what you could do if you added one of these tools to your toolkit every month or so next year!
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page. And, have a great 2010!
Sharing is a foundational part of the social media process. Here’s an interesting perspective on the topic of sharing on the internet…
“The parts of the report that caught my eye included the following:
- People still share via email and instant messenger more than via social networks. An astounding 59% of all shares on the widget were done via email, 25% via instant messenger and just 14% were passed along on networks like Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter, which has recently emerged as the share site du jour for those in the social media world, accounts for only one percent of all shares. Facebook is 11%. Yahoo mail is the highest individual share channel at 26%.
- Yahoo (44%) and MSN (25%) mail are way ahead of Gmail (19%) as the email provider used by Tell-A-Friend users.
- Facebook accounts for 79% of all shares via social networks. MySpace is second at 15%. Twitter is just 5% of all social network shares via the widget.
While I do think there is a separation between what I would call hyper-tech users (those who owe their soul to Google, defer to other bookmarklets and other methods rather than clicking on the share widgets provided) and the average Joe or Jane, the statistics are significant. They show us how wide of a gap there is between those two crowds. When we as Internet marketers are making recommendations and building functionality for the mainstream, we have to remember that WE are not the mainstream.
Another insight I get out of this data is that one-to-one communications – email and instant messenger – are still enormously powerful. Most people either don’t realize they can share with more folks via social networks or are not comfortable doing so. It might just be that sharing the information with one or two people is the methodology of choice for the rest of the world. That can change how we approach social media strategies for some products and services. Design programs and products that inspire more one-to-one pass alongs rather than “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” messages on social networks.
To gather some comparative data, I asked Tell-A-Friend competitor ShareThis if they minded sharing some cursory data. For the month of October, their users also shared more via email (46.4%). Twitter was higher than Tell-A-Friend’s results, but also surprisingly low (5.82% of all shares). Facebook accounted for 33.32% of all share paths for ShareThis in October, higher than Tell-A-Friend. If you’re wondering about ShareThis’s IM numbers, they don’t offer instant messenger clients as share options, sans AOL Instant Messenger, which is buried on the third tab of their full icon set option.” New Study Reveals How People Share Online | Social Media Explorer
How do YOU share? For me the most important tool in my toolkit is Shareaholic! I’m pretty sure it’s available for all major browsers at this point…
When did you last check your email?
I’d bet it was within the last hour. Quite possibly within the last ten minutes. You might well have your inbox open right now, with message alerts jumping up at you.
Almost everyone I talk to feels that email takes up too much of their time. If you work for an employer, in a traditional office environment, you might have your email open from the moment you get into the office until the moment you shut down your computer at the end of the day.
(And you’ve probably checked email after hours or on the weekends, too.)
If you’re self-employed or work from yourself, it’s probably even worse. You might find yourself worrying about emails during dinner, or when you’re supposed to be having some family time.
The problem isn’t knowing what to do. You’ve read plenty of advice telling you to close the inbox, to avoid checking emails first thing in the day, and to get on with your key tasks first. But are you doing it?
Act now to take control over your information! :-D
“Social media is free. Social media is easy. Just hop on twitter and start tweetin’!” Hmmm… how many times have we heard that? I have honestly heard social media consultants at networking events state during their 60 second pitch “social media is free, come talk to me if you want to do free marketing!” Ouch, not the case folks.
Several business leaders have asked me lately for tips on finding a good business or social media consultant. Many have been confused by the blog posts that seem to only complain versus helping business decision makers find someone who can really help them.
I actually did a few Google searches and found very little in regard to helpful tips and skills to look for. What I did find was numerous posts complaining about social media consultants, gurus and how to spot a bad one. I have to admit I too have posted a few blog posts that are on the humorous side of this topic while trying to offer helpful tips at the same time.
I wanted to provide some helpful tips when hiring a consultant. Note, what is a good consultant for Tom doesn’t mean it will be so for Betty and Jane. Consultants, just as mentors and coaches should be selected based on personal fit with your business goals, life cycle, culture, gaps etc. The most important thing is that you do your research and talk to a few. Don’t go with the first one you meet.
I’m one of those social media consultants. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article and then give me a call and rake me over the coals!
Bright, shiny objects! 
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