Archive for June, 2008
YouTube is Losing Hundreds of Millions a Month
Think about this, oh followers of the Cult of Chad: where do YOU go to remember old TV clips, to find out what your favorite bands from high school and college sound like these days, the trailer for that new movie? YouTube, right? It’s easy. It’s right there. Powerful search, billions of videos, and nothing too tricky to watching one. And yet, I think they’re missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars a month. Here’s how.
Affiliate Sales
I went searching for the mashup David Usher’s Kill the Lights single mixed with the new Batman Dark Knight movie trailer. (By the way, Google threw out a Mitch Joel link before even YouTube - good Google juice, Mitch!) I wanted to watch this:
(Go on, watch it. I’ll wait.)
Now, what should come next? I’ll tell you what: YouTube should have a sidebar to that video (legality questions aside) that says, “Why not buy David Usher’s new album?” with an easy click to an Amazon store or whatever. And what else? “Why not pre-order the Batman DVD?” Why not? I’m already turned on by the song and the video. I’m already hopped up, and it’s like free marketing for two products that didn’t spend a dime to get me excited!
There are lots of ways this makes sense. It’s right there: market, interest, pre-selection.
Okay, YouTube: ready, steady, go! Go make money. I’ll be here watching more weird Batman things:
(What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?)
How Do Realtors Demonstrate Community
Through a conversation in Twitter, I happened across Life in Bonita Springs, a blog by Chris Griffith (aka Twitterzilla). The first post that caught my eye was a beautiful shot of a public area called Coconut Point, with a really small dog in the foreground. The blog post was about a “small dogs only social.” Wow, I thought. Now that’s something you don’t see every day. It got me thinking.
Realty Has a LOT to Benefit From With These Tools
There are lots of ways social media can be applied, but look at real estate. If your job is to sell community, you can do lots of things. Create a videoblog of interviews of people in the community you’re trying to sell into. Build an events page or community site where people can gather, share their stories, post events, and express themselves. Take mountains of photos on Flickr, showing off the best in community art, as well as some of the finer homes.
But How Does It All Tie Together?
If I’m reading a community or realty blog, how will I convert from a blog reader into a home buyer? What are the right ways to convert me gently? For example, on Chris’s blog, I see the sidebar has ways to connect me to her. If I’m an RSS subscriber, I won’t ever see that, and there’s nothing in the post to connect me to business.
This is great, if the only goal is to keep people in the community aware of what’s going on in the community, but if another goal of the blog is to sell homes, is there a way we could gently convert me?
Or should you?
What’s Your Take?
Technically, we’re all prospective customers of realtors. What would attract you, were you to stumble into an interesting blog about real estate, or about a community?
Further, if the community where you lived right now (is it a community? Do you know each other?) had social media tools in place, how could you see them being used?
Curious to see your take on this.
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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, Kevin Dooley
Podcasting for Business-Are Your Customers Worth It
Are your top 10 best customers worth $50 each and a few hours of your time? Here’s an idea: why not buy a few Apple iPod Shuffles, load them up with recorded audio version of your most important product and service information, or your sales pitch, or your annual report, or whatever else they’re probably not reading in expensively-printed paper format, throw in a little bit of podsafe music in between each bit, and send it out to them?
Think it’s crazy? Christopher S. Penn records a daily podcast about financial aid information, money saving tips, and a little bit of podsafe audio, and he’s brought in millions for his company. Is the show boring? Not at all. Chris has TONS of info that you can use, even if you’re not in financial debt. And he’s got WAYYYYYY more listeners than if he were to write about this all day long and count on people to read his materials.
Is it hard to start podcasting? You need to know about a few tools and methods, but after that, no. How can you learn about starting out? Attend a PodCamp, read a good book on the topic ( Podcast Academy: The Business Podcasting Book is recommended by me), and start learning by doing.
What do you think? How would your very best customers react to seeing a nicely packaged iPod in their mailbox one morning?
Photo credit, Re-ality
How Do I Add FriendFeed Comments to My Blog
Hey, smarter people: how do I add a FriendFeed comments module under my blog comments? I want to see all these great comments. Just found these several days later:
Man, so many great people saying great things, and I didn’t engage at all. : (
How Does the Internet Impact Consumer Behavior
My friend, Rachelle, from Fleishmann-Hillard sent me this release about her European offices’ recent work on understanding how the Internet affects consumer behavior in Europe.
Key findings:
- The Internet beats TV two to one on influence, and eight to one over print.
- People ask other people for personal purchase advice, but for airline tickets and stuff, they prefer the corporate sites.
- Only 28% of people trust the information they read online, and yet 66% say the web helps them make better decisions. Huh?
- No surprise: different parts of Europe use the web differently: Germany uses more search; the UK has more social networking interest.
The full paper is free to download here.
Photo credit, Paull Young
Where I Learn Even More
Take this great article by Bill Rice. I’m not a salesperson. Not even close. I can cop to being “business development,” but that just means “salesman that doesn’t know how to close. And we know about closers, don’t we?
Bill’s advice: know when you are just shuffling things around, and get back to the fundamentals. It’s perfect advice. I think what’s best about it is that I can apply it to my use of social media tools.
Know When You’re Just Shuffling
- Are you editing your profiles and pictures on all your social sites? Is this really worth it?
- Are you reading Twitter just because you have nothing else to do?
- Are you signing up to the next shiny object just because?
- Are you over-subscribed to blogs and podcasts?
- Are you just focusing on your stuff and not the larger community?
Get Back to the Fundamentals
- Keep a steady and established habit and pace.
- Be clear about your goals.
- Fish or cut bait, but not both.
- Do big work first.
- Stop whining. (Loved Bill’s advice here).
See? I got that out of a sales post. Where else could I find influence? Where else could YOU? Keep your eyes open for how to apply learning from other fields into what you’re doing. It will round out what you’re doing. I promise. What do you think?
Read Bill’s article for more ideas about sales, and maybe, think how it applies to you.
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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.
Using Social Media for Social Good
I don’t have a lot to add here. Patrick Byers has blogged his presentation from PodCamp Seattle on how to use social media tools to create social good. It’s definitely worth flipping through and considering. I know that there’s quite a number of people in this community who help with nonprofits and other social responsibility projects.
Check out Patrick’s presentation here.
Why Pirates are Necessary
Superstar pirate chronicler Matt Mason has released a video bit to go with his nifty book. Check it out here.
If you’ve yet to read it, I strongly recommend picking up The Pirate’s Dilemma. Thank goodness for Whitney Hoffman, else I wouldn’t have read this book. She’s a great book recommender.
A Flickr Project for Everybody
I want your help on a project.
One of the many ways that I use Flickr is as a database of people. I go to Flickr to see someone’s face before I meet them, so that I might remember them better when I run into them at a conference. I do the same if I’m in an email exchange with someone I know, but that I don’t know very well. It turns out that Flickr is a great way to see more about someone’s life (You can also argue Facebook photos, but think about it: if I’m not that person’s “friend,” I can’t see all those snaps usually). Flickr also allows lots of ways for us to tag photos.
See how this could be helpful to a project?
To that end, I take lots of photos:
I’ll admit that it helps to have a nice camera. The folks at NikonUSA sent me a camera to evaluate. I call it my “blogola” camera. It’s pretty cool and their scheme worked, because I’d recommend the thing to anyone, but listen: you don’t need an amazing camera to capture the world around you. And this project just needs faces and names, not artistry. At least not on the surface.
The Project
- If you don’t already have one, get a Flickr account.
- Go to your account settings by clicking your user name.
- Push the second tab marked “Privacy & Permissions”
- Go to Defaults for New Uploads
- Set these to something in the range of: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons (some folks don’t care if their photos are used commercially, and others might want to ensure other uses of the materials as well. If you want more info, go to Creative Commons to better understand the permissions thing).
You’ve just set the permissions such that people can use your photos in blog posts and the like, should they want to remember people they meet that you’ve photographed.
Next, take photos of people and use tags. Tag their name. Add their company if it makes sense. Put as many identifiers as you want into the metadata alongside their photo. (Note: if you accept “friend” requests in Flickr, it makes this even easier, because your friends can tag the photos, too).
That’s pretty much the project: take photos of people, label them appropriately, and share them with the world. Suddenly, we have a useful database of visual information to go alongside whatever someone choose to put up on websites, and this database is out there in the open for Flickr users, such that we can search it, see people, and get to know them better through the photos you’ve captured.
What do you think? Do you have photos of people from events that you could contribute to the project at large, simply by sharing them and tagging them on Flickr? Are YOUR account settings right so that people can share in your brilliant works on their blogs? What’s your take?
Roasting Scott Monty
Boston area folks know Scott Monty as that great guy who participates in stuff all the time, no matter what else is going on. Others all over the globe know him as that lucky bastard who got a new job as social media god of Ford. As it turns out, John Wall and I (mostly John because he set up the eventbrite site and picked the restaurant) are setting up a roast for Mr. Monty.
What’s a roast? John Wall answers that here with a video at the end of the post. But you’ll want in.
Essentially:
- Friday, July 11th at 7PM
- Ken’s Steakhouse in Framingham, MA
- Your $50 gets you dinner, two drink tickets, and a chance to beat down Scott on a microphone.
What’s not to love?
To be part of the mayhem, purchase a ticket today!
