A famous comment usually attributed to Lord Leverhulme goes: “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”. The same is true of your blogging and social media time! How can you tell if you’re on track? Which 50% is working? What can you do if you’re off course? Well, the simplest way may be to check your WordPress.com stats for the past year and see what links people are actually clicking on…
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…then give them more of what they like and less of what they don’t! @jonswanson reminded me that reviewing your mosts popular posts and doing more like them is a good review do to as well!
Another interesting way is to add twitter tool Twylah to your mix. Twylah brings your brand message into focus, extends the life of your tweets, and helps you get discovered beyond Twitter. Twitter you say? I don’t even use that! Well, you might want to start! I use the sharing feature in the WordPress settings to send every WordPress post to Twitter as a way of amplifying my posts. I also use Twitter to share articles that I don’t feel like sharing on the blog. Together — my blog posts and my tweets — create what I call a lifestream and Twylah is the place where I put that lifestream. Twylah automagically organizes my lifestream by topic and gives me a pretty good indication of how the internet views my lifestream. If the topics are way off, it might be time for a course correction! If the topics look like who you want to be known as, then Twylah provides that validation as well…
Another reason why I love Twylah in closing is that I can host Twylah on my domain so that I can effectively add Twylah to my WordPress.com blog and get Search Engine Optimization [SEO] benefits from my tweets as well. Oh, and did I mention that Twylah is free?
Blogging in the WordPress.com community is fun, but if you actually want to be recognized as an authority in an area and get found when people are looking for you, these two tools may be all you need to amp your internet presence! Oh, and by the way if you’re looking for WordPress.com or ‘thought leadership’ marketing coaching, you can stop by my business site at http://e1evation.com/services/…
Friend, mentor and client Nilofer Merchant posted recently about the problem of fragmentation:
It’s a fragmented world. And it’s only becoming more so. It used to be that when people wrote, they wrote more deeply. In the early days of the web (pre-twitter), I remember hand picking the few voices I would listen to and then putting them into my RSS feeder and checking for their essays. Essays, not tweets, were the way we shared what we were thinking. But as “content” has become more important to maintain a standing online, more and more people are entering into the fray. More and more people who may not even have a point of view to advocate but just want to participate in the conversation.
As content becomes more fragmented, you could try and compete with that by doing more and more, by curating other people’s content, by then running your content through Twylah, by having that “twitter magazine” come out which puts all your tweets and links in one place so that people can catch it if they missed each particular one.
Or you could do the opposite. You could go deep. You could be that voice that everyone listens to because when it speaks, it is so deep and rich that it’s worth slowing down to listen to. Sort of a Morgan Freeman voice, in the times of Justin Bieber bop. Maybe it will allow the light of an idea to be seen more clearly.” There’s more at the source: In a fragmented world, go deep – Nilofer Merchant
If I were talking with Nilofer, I’d gently push back on this one. ‘Going deep’ does not preclude using Twylah; rather, I think, the answer to fragmentation and ‘going deep’ is focus…
When I first started blogging I was not confident in my own skillset and my focus was a mile wide and six inches deep. My tagline was “Marketing, Sales and Technology for small business, non-profits and academic institutions”. It makes me laugh now because there are no dozen websites that can cover THIS landscape effectively. I used to curate anything and everything related to those topics sometimes posting over 20 times a day! I got traffic but it wasn’t really relevant and it didn’t get me customers. Over time, Nilofer helped me go deep and realize my ‘onlyness’ was really helping thinkers to become thought leaders through the use of a minimal toolkit for content marketing. Now my tagline is “content marketing for thought leadership” and I help experts get found when people are looking for what they do. By going deeper, I may lose the opportunity to develop a small business website but I might gain the opportunity to work with a TED Fellow like Nina Tandon which is much more rewarding in the long run. Now, too, I’m more confident in my onlyness, I only post a couple of times per week…
Nilofer and I have had this discussion before and I think we both agree: If our thoughts are going to resonate with our target audience we need to understand the questions they are asking and align our answers with their queries. If we position ourselves as the obvious answer to the questions of the people we want to attract, we will get found when people are looking for ‘that one voice’. It’s not good enough however simply to think deep thoughts; we need to let people know that we are thinking them. Nilofer is a great thinker on strategy but I direct my energy toward ‘thoughts, tools and tactics’ for content marketing and ‘thought leadership’ marketing; I think the answer here is not either/or it’s both/and. I don’t think Nilofer’s saying that Twylah is a bad thing and I think she’d agree you need to go deep thoughtwise AND master ‘thought leadership’ marketing toolwise because the two go together like peanut butter and chocolate — it’s just that mindlessly tweeting and retweeting doesn’t do much to add value…
In closing, here are the 3 tools I recommend for ‘thought leadership’ marketing:
Google Reader
WordPress
Twylah
Ed. 2019: The current version of this list would be:
Google News or Inoreader
WordPress
Buffer
I posted about them here just last week. They are the tools that will help you get found when you decide to ‘go deep’ and become the one voice [because it doesn’t matter how deep you go if no one can find you]…
Sometimes, I think I post more about how much I love Twylah than the folks at Twylah do. Whether that’s true or not, I’m a huge fan and the main reason why is Twylah is the only social networking tool I know of that actually adds Search Engine Optimization [SEO] to your domain simply by tweeting. Still, if the DNS manager of your domain host is unfamiliar territory you may not be getting the maximum value out of Twylah and Twitter. I talk you through it here…
Ever heard of the Pareto Principle? Mostly likely you have but may not know it by that name. “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” In the ‘e1evation workflow‘, 80% of my results come from having mastered just three tools. Why is this important? My clients include thought leaders like authorNilofer Merchant, author and professorPhilip Auerswald, author and professor Timothy Kastelle, consultant Gretchen Jahn and professor and TEDFellowNina Tandon; people like that don’t have the time or patience to learn an infinite number of tools — they need to know the three that will yield the most effective results…
I teach them [and all my clients] that if I could only use three tools for effective content marketing there is no confusion in my mind as to what they would be:
Why? No other combination of tools covers the basics of content marketing better. Google Reader helps me find great content that deepens my expertise. WordPress and Twylah help me document my expertise by turning everything I create or curate into content marketing with Search Engine Optimization [SEO] value for my domain. Let me explain…
Here are all the tools I use in the ‘e1evation workflow’:
And here are the 20% that yield the 80% of my results:
Questions? Feedback? Comment or contact me to talk more about how this applies to you and your situation…
There are three main reasons why I think of Twylah as my ULTIMATE lifestream repository. First, let me share a definition of ‘lifestreaming‘ for those of you unfamiliar with the concept:
The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe “…a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents — papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists.”[1]
Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams.
Social network aggregators adapt Freeman and Gelernters original concept to address the vast flows of personal information and exchange created by social network services such as MySpace or Facebook “Web companies large and small are embracing this stream” of providing lifestreaming.[2] Other online applications have emerged to facilitate a users lifestream. Posterous offers a variety of unique features to enhance its basic blogging function. Tumblr is a similar concept, but with slightly different features.” via Lifestreaming – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Now, why do I think Twylah is the ultimate lifestreaming tool? Because…
Twylah can be the ultimate container for EVERYTHING you curate or create online [because you can ultimately get EVERYTHING into Twitter!]
Twylah drives enagement 40x better than Twitter alone
Twylah converts your tweets into valuable Search Engine Optimization [SEO]
Here’s how it works:
Bottom line? If you can get it to Twitter, Twylah will do the rest. Automatically! Now, because I’d rather talk than type, I’ll talk you through the concept below…
…or how to be a thought leader in your industry without breaking the bank! Prepare yourself — I’ve been thinking about this one all weekend…
I had a chance to have lunch last week with Dana VanDen Heuvel, an internationally known ‘thought leadership‘ marketing expert who happens to live in nearby Green Bay. Dana and I travel in similar circles although his focus is more on strategy while mine is more on the mechanics of thought leadership marketing. Back in November I was trying to get my mind around content marketing and thought leadership and I asked Dana whether or not the two were synonymous. Either he didn’t have time to answer my question or you wanted me to figure it out on my own; in either case eventually I concluded that content marketing is a means toward thought leadership but the two are not the same. You can use content marketing to create share of voice on the internet but it’s the quality of your ideas that determine whether or not you ultimately become a leader by getting share of mind and share of market.
To me, thought leadership is the process of becoming and being known as the expert. In my oversimplified view of things that requires two activities; you have to deepen your expertise and detail your expertise or, get smarter and show people you’re getting smarter. IF you do that well they may actually follow your ideas…
Are you a wannabe thought leader? You can test the waters in this area for $17 per year using WordPress.com as your thought leadership marketing hub. The $17 will buy you a domain and the ability to map that domain to your free WordPress site. Then, all you gotta do is publish something…
Deepening your expertise
In in order to deepen your expertise I think there are three things you need to do
Use Gmail to manage your just-in-time information
Use Google reader to manager just-in-case information
Use Gist to track other thought leaders
Detailing your expertise
In order to demonstrate to people that you are an expert
Either create or curate your ideas in WordPress.com
Share the content you create or curate on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Paper.li, Twylah and MailChimp
Engage in conversations using HootSuite and/or NutshellMail
David Kanigan of davidkanigan.com is an example of someone who had done exactly what I recommended on his WordPress.com blog…
New to blogging — only 6 months in — and he is already rocking his site! His Alexa rank is currently 61,500 in the US — testimony to both the power of WordPress.com and his frequent posting [too bad that due to his work in the financial industry he can’t engage in business blogging]…
You could be a David, too, and take on the Goliath’s in your industry using the tools and tactics I mentioned above. Here are links to every tool and a few more…
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imho, here are the best tools for content management and marketing for thought leadership. All free, all cross platform…
imho, here are the best tools for content management and marketing for thought leadership. All free, all cross platform…
Now, either you look at this and say “Ah, that makes perfect sense — why didn’t I think of that before?” for you look at this and say “What a fustercluck!?!?!?” In either case, I may be a resource for you. Either I can help you simplify your existing thought leadership marketing workflow or I can set it all up for you and teach you how to run it. It’s your call, but if you’re looking to establish a thought leadership position you have just run out of excuses…
In previous posts I’ve talked quite a bit about how Twitter has become much more important in my ‘thought leadership’ marketing workflow. I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to tell you about two tools; one not so new and one that that just popped up on my radar recently. They are Paper.li and Twylah. I’m sure I saw Paper.li pop up over a year ago — Guy Kawaskaki was the first person I saw using it well. Twylah is a different story — I stumbled across Nilofer Merchant’s Twylah page only about a month ago. Both are great tools, but in the final analysis I think if you’re looking to use your tweets as part of your Search Engine Optimization [SEO] strategy, you’ll decide like I did that Twylah is the tool for you. Here’s a little riff I did for you outlining the reasons why…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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