Building the Digital Channel - Beyond Social Media
I thought we could have the conversation in the comments section today. I’m curious why you and/or your company is interested in social media. What brought you to the shores of thinking that blogging and podcasting and belonging to social networks was something your company (or you as an individual) needed in your life? What are you hoping to get out of it all? Why do you come here every day to read?
Let’s talk in the comments section today, okay?
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Your company has decided to launch a blog, and you’re the lucky blogger. Maybe you’ve even asked for this pleasure, suggested it to the boss yourself. Only now, you have to deliver, and you have to stay consistent. It’s not always easy to keep up a steady blogging pace, and there are days when you might run into a roadblock or two that might keep you from delivering on your schedule. Here are some ideas on how to build and maintain a steady blogging rhythm, be it for your personal blog or your business blog. We’ll cover goals, tasks, tools, and some bonus secrets.
Blogging with a purpose helps you stay consistent.…
Between books people send me, books I buy, and books I get from my local library system, I’m usually chock full of good reading material. Here’s a selection of books that I’ve either skimmed through once but want to read again fully, or that I intend to do more work with over the coming weeks. Have you read any of these? What did you think? What’s on YOUR summer bookshelf?
Groundswell
Grammar Girl
Secrets of Great Rainmakers
Trump 101
Marketing Champions
ProBlogger
Word of Mouth Manual
Tuned In
Word of Mouth Marketing
CrazyBusy
The Pirate’s Dilemma
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
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Today marks the birthday of Liz Strauss, one of the best community people I know out there. She gets it. She loves people more than she loves pretty much everything. And she’s the kind who shares all the damned time. When she published a beautifully written ebook about how to blog, she priced it so that anyone could buy it, not just big businesses (even though I told her to charge more). Why? Because she loves you, dammit. And I love her.
If you’re going to get to know someone over this next year, give Ms. birthday girl a try. Liz is the type of person who takes any idea and brings it ahead about seven notches.…
Steve Rubel has a thoughtful post about the recent state of Internet social sites. In it, he suggests that users are acting as tenants in a rental property situation, and that it seems we’re all a bit flustered when our properties, like Twitter, have damage. I like the perspective, and I think the conversation should definitely be had. But immediately, I had another analogy come to mind for a slightly different reason. Steve mentioned the difference between “renting” on other people’s services versus “owning” our blogs. For whatever reason, I thought about the way we “shiny object” types are showing up on all these various social platforms, and I thought about strip malls.…
BatchBlue Software was kind enough to give me a big sized account to try out managing my contacts with their BatchBook product. They let me do five things, if I’m so inclined: manage contacts, keep track of my communications, slice my contacts into lists (remember this one), manage to-do lists, and use their SuperTags to build small custom databases of meta information around my contacts. All of that is relatively neato, and something that lots of us aren’t especially doing well today (how many of you use a spreadsheet somewhere to track your important conversations?)
I should state that I know Michelle Riggen-Ransom (marketing goddess) and Adam Darowski (UX prince) through meetings at various social events, like SXSW, the occasional Tweet-up, etc.…
We are governed by many things in our lives: laws (both natural and those created by man and religion), rules (those things that we abide by to maintain a certain level of order), norms (the way most of society acts, including courtesy and manners), and habits (those things that we’ve ingrained in ourselves for one reason or another. Understanding these things more deeply benefits you more than you can imagine, and I’m not talking about social media today. I’m talking about social norms, the way people act, the way YOU act, and what you can do with this knowledge.
First, accept and understand that we follow and break human laws all the time.…
TripWolf is a social site for travel, loaded with all kinds of goodies, like map mashups, people-recommended sights to see, friends and “trip gurus” to add for specific places, journal/blogs for your travel experiences, and the ability to meet up with other folks as part of your travel experience. I did a reasonably fast pass through the site and found it loaded with all kinds of information and facets that would make your holiday travel plans a little easier.
The other things I noticed that seem cool are Facebook integration, user-added info (kind of wiki style), geo-locative data (codes everything nicely), pictures (and you can upload yours, of course), and maps.…
