Archive for March, 2008
Advertisers Take Heed
This will end up seeming really echo chamber, but I saw this post by Teresa Valdez-Klein that cites this post by Ken Burbary for finding this great video:
Advertising. Ah, yes.
The Chris Show at SXSW
One afternoon at South by Southwest, Kris Smith recorded a podcast with me, Chris Heuer, with a brief walk-through visit by Chris Messina. Despite the fact that I’m a goofball repeatedly throughout the experience, there are some nuggets of goodness in there. Pop it open in another tab and listen while you’re working. Let me know if there are parts that were actually worthwhile. We had fun, at least.
JC Hutchins Interviews me for Ultra Creatives Podcast
Check out this interview with famed author J.C. Hutchins, for his show, Ultra Creatives. We had fun. Check out the other 1-8 that came before me, too!
Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
Twitter brought me a really special gift a month or two back, in the shape of Grace Nikae. She’s a concert pianist who is exploring the use of social media to build relationships with her audience and fans of music. In imagining how I’d advise someone who was a professional entertainer to use social media, I doubt that I could find someone more accomplished at reaching into social media than Grace. Let’s explore a bit.
Blog Behind the Scenes
Grace has a great blog called Stretching Intervals, which is a perfect mix of what goes on behind the scenes, as well as information about what it’s like to be a pianist. She writes posts that are worthy of being full fledged journalistic articles, and yet, they’re very approachable and readable.
By blogging what’s on her mind, Grace gives her fans, aspiring pianists, professional women, and anyone else who wants to know what it’s like to be a busy creative and professional a glimpse of what we all want to know.
Share a Little
Grace provides links to her YouTube videos, to photos on Flickr, and to other little tidbits all through her website. It gives you a sense of what she’s about, her style, and a peek at what you’re missing if you don’t go to her concerts. Sure there’s a store and other things you’d expect from a professional musician, but if you fault her for that, you’re crazy. After watching/listening to her YouTube videos, I plan on picking up her debut solo album, Fantasies, myself. : )
Stretch Out
Grace also maintains a presence on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a few other social sites, and though it’s a bit challenging to maintain it all, I’ve seen her have conversations on Twitter, and have been privy to several thoughtful comments on my blog. So she’s managing to find a little time to cover some thoughts and have conversations with people well outside her typical sphere of the world of a pianist.
Will it be fruitful? I guess Grace will have to tell us in several months whether all this social media brought her a different experience than before she started using it.
For Entertainers
Musicians and comics know that MySpace is a viable place to meet new audiences, build community, and promote your performances. Dane Cook made a good chunk of his career’s launch off MySpace’s mechanisms. Facebook isn’t as effective for performers, but I know that more folks are coming over to try it out. Twitter? It’s not exactly teeming with celebrities, but savvy folks like Grace are trying it out, so we’ll see how that turns out. My advice?
- Do this social media yourself. Don’t use an assistant.
- Communicate two-way. Just blurting out your calendar isn’t going to win you friends.
- Be just as much about other people as you are yourself.
- Give us peeks behind the scenes.
- Share a little something.
- Don’t get lost in all this stuff, as your real product is your performances.
We have lots of talented and upcoming performers and entertainers in our midst, several of whom already use these tools to great effect. Is it having an impact on their career? Will these tools benefit the mainstream stars as much as it does those who have a built-in appeal to the social media set? Time will tell.
What other advice could we give entertainers with regards to social media? What’s your take?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Taming the Inbox- One Week Later
A little over a week ago, I wrote about cleaning out my inbox. I’ve learned a bit in the previous week, and want to pass on my learnings to those of you who are following along and working on your own inbox. As you can see from the attached picture, I’m still at zero, but that’s not always easy. It takes determination. Here are some things I’ve learned, and maybe, if you’re doing this yourself, share what YOU’VE learned in the comments, too.
Schedule Two Things Faithfully: Offload and Review
The hardest part, and what left a few emails sticking in my inbox, was not just taking the moment to shuffle through them twice a day. The second hardest part, and where I fell down the hardest, was not getting back into my review/follow-up items, and thus missed a few responses I owed people.
Schedule these in Google Calendar (or your calendar of choice) if you find yourself falling down on this front.
Be Brutal With Email and Stop Peeking
Delete the hell out of your email. Answer what needs answering, but don’t keep things around for “someday.” At the worst, stick something in your calendar to revisit an idea, but otherwise, delete.
I’m still learning to not peek at email until I’m ready to blaze through them. If I let them build up, part of me twitches, thinking, “Well my inbox isn’t empty,” but that’s not the point. The point is to empty the thing when I’m scheduled to empty it, not just be a crazed inbox checker.
Write Better Emails in the First Place
I did reasonably well at this, but I found that when I had a ping-pong in my inbox, it was usually my fault for not closing the loop. The better the email I can write someone, the less likely I’ll get something back in my lap.
So What Did YOU Learn?
I’ve seen emails and blog posts and twitters from people saying they’re working on the empty inbox thing. What are you finding along the way? What have you noticed? Share with us.
Screenshots are always taken with Plasq’s Skitch.
Using Social Networking and Media Offline
A great friend of mine mentioned that all my social media stuff was great, but that he was frustrated because a lot of his constituency wasn’t particularly connected to the Net, and didn’t really use computers too often. It came to me pretty quickly that computers really aren’t a hard and fast requirement for attempting to get the same results I often preach about. In fact, it kind of opened my own eyes, too.
Social Networking Online to Off
Online: Status message like in Twitter or Facebook.
Offline: Quick phone call to see if someone’s going to be at an event.
Online: Blog post.
Offline: Letter or newsletter.
Online: Friending.
Offline: Meeting new people at networking events.
Social Media Online to Off
Online: Flickr.
Offline: Mail some photos to people.
Online: Podcasts.
Offline: Mail them a CD.
You Get the Point
Essentially, you can do most of what you do online in the offline setting. It just takes a little longer and is a little less convenient. And yet, the MOTIVATION behind what we do in the social networking space can be carried forth, and probably would help us a bit.
Agree? Silly? What’s your take?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo Credit, LiberalMind1012
Do You Know Who Your Customers Are
For those of you looking to use social media towards a business end, do you really understand your customer base? Do you understand how things like conferences and blogs and making media relate to bringing in business?
In media making, there is often a triangle:
- The people who want what you’re talking about.
- The people who want to know those people.
- You. The media maker.
On this list, your customer is #2.
#1 is your community.
You can sell into your community, but in media making, the bigger opportunities are in the folks who want to know your community.
And then, there’s the rub, because unless you’ve built that covenant with your community, you cannot just let loose #2 all over your community. It would be BAD. Capital B. Know whether you’re building a community or developing a marketplace. SOMETIMES you can do both, but that’s not the norm.
Food for thought.
Advertiser Types- Any Info
A friend of mine sent the following request for information that he’s hoping to wrap his head around:
I am working on an internal research project and am trying to build a reasonably accurate model of today’s online advertising/marketing value chain… essentially we are working to build a common understanding of how the big pieces fit together and how the $$ flows between the various segments. Ultimately, I’d like to pull together a single slide that covers:
- The brand advertisers (GM, Procter & Gamble, and all the way down)
- The ad agencies
- The media planners/owners
- The ad servers (Doubleclick) and networks (VideoEgg, ScanScout, Tribal Fusion et al)
- The publishing platforms (Brightcove, Move Networks)
- The destination media sites (from CBS to Youtube to Facebook and everyone in between)
- The mega-players who bring multiple pieces to the table (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL)
- The ad targeting (Revenue Sciences) and measurement firms (Quantcast, Dynamic Logic, Nielsen, Omniture)
- Any other major categories that I missed?
I’m not in this space at all, but you might be. If you’re interested and have information about this, please email me: blog at chrisbrogan dot com.
Social Networking Features are Toilets
In the future, social networking features will be like toilets.
Charlene Li is quoted in The Economist as saying:
Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.”
She’s right, and I agree with this. But I’m going to put out a different version of the same idea.
Future social networks, or rather those features we currently assign to the idea of “social networks,” will be like toilets. Today, if you rent a hotel room in the US, you expect a few things: a bed, maybe a TV, a desk, a chair, a few coat hangers, and a bathroom complete with a shower/tub and a toilet.
It could be the sexiest hotel room in the world, but without a toilet? Nothing. Just a non-starter.
I think the features we expect (a social graph of sorts, reputation, messaging, and value facilitation) either will be there and we’ll have the option to participate in as much or as little of it as we wish, or we just won’t stay there.
Toilets. As said by Mr. McGuire in The Graduate, toilets.
Photo credit, Delgoff (and there are some funny snaps in that set).
Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
Disclaimer right up front: I’m not in the real estate biz, so I’ll write this from the perspective of what I’ve observed and what might be useful. Some REAL real estate pro can come and fix this on their own blog, and it’d likely be better. Why would I ever let a simple thing like inexperience get in the way of sharing my opinion?
Show Me the House
The first and most obvious thing I think the real estate world can (and should) be doing is buying video cameras and shooting their own walkthroughs. You don’t have to be a pro. You DO have to know how not to make something look horrible, but that comes with trial and error.
Pick up a Video Camera
If you don’t already own a video camera, two ends of the spectrum that I’d recommend for realtors are:
Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1 for a nicer rig (around $400) , or the Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder for around $160.
The Xacti is a higher end picture. The Flip is YouTube quality. Honestly, the Flip is the camera for the job, but some folks want the best, so it’s up to you. Me? I’d buy the Flip. (Personally, I use a digital camera’s movie setting to shoot most of my stuff).
Editing
Now, to actually do it, you have two options: learn how to edit things easily in iMovie (Mac) or Windows Media Maker (PC), or pay someone to edit what you shoot. Benefits of A are that you can do it when you need it and your time is all you pay. Benefits of B are that the editor will be good at what they do, will save you time, and will know what to do next. Drawback of B is that it costs and you have no control of when you get back your files, depending on how professional your person is.
Posting the Video
Last step to putting a video up is to find hosting for the video so that you can then embed it on your blog. YouTube makes sense for two reasons. One, it’s easy and most people can navigate it. Two, it becomes a second market for your homes if you’ve added captions at the end that show how to contact you.
If you want a different look and feel from YouTube, you can try Blip.tv, Brightcove, Vimeo and a gazillion other companies who host video and have a nifty player.
I could probably write a series on just how to add video to your world, but I’m in the middle of another series, so let’s leave it there for now. If you want helping DOING any of this, let me know and I’ll point you to the right resources.
Ways Your Blog Will Help
First, blogging about certain properties you’re hoping to move will give you an obvious potential return, but that might be limited. Instead, think of what buyers and sellers might need to know, and what they might need to know about you. You’re likely going to weigh this information heavily on the sell side, and that’s okay, so make your website a great place to learn about things like “curb appeal” and how to declutter a home for better show-ability. Give people ideas that have added thousands back to the sale price of your clients’ homes.
Testimonials
People are so itchy about asking for testimonials. Don’t be. Ask. Ask your clients with whom you’ve had a great business experience to comment. Want to get really edgy? Be willing to post someone’s negative comments about your business with them, and don’t be defensive. Instead, just thank them.
The Secret Sauce
As a media maker, you can do things that will add to one’s impressions of a potential new home. You can shoot video of the general neighborhood, add Flickr photos of some selling points of the town, record audio reports of people’s general feelings of the town. Can you imagine the impact that might make? You could potentially take a “normal looking” house and demonstrate the value of the home’s setting through media.
Will everyone care? No. WIll you have a chance to reach more folks? I’m betting yes.
What’s your take?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, dry icons
