Archive for the Article category
Alexa Scordato Weighs In
From a comment left by Alexa Scordato:
I’m a little behind commenting on this, but I really have to publicly thank you Chris for letting me tackle this with you.
As everyone has already acknowledged, the wealth of information you’ve managed to put out in the past year is not only valuable, it’s inspiring. The content you put out is thoughtful, thorough, and always a step ahead. You successfully balance honesty with analysis, humor with opinion, and quality with quantity.
Even though I was a frequent reader of this blog prior to the assignment, it wasn’t until I spent hours trying to archive your posts, knee deep in links and trackbacks that I really grasped the magic you have going on here.
On average, you blogged more than 50 posts a month, sometimes updating as frequently as 3 or 4 times a day. In addition to your content, you also managed to develop an impressive readership - a community of dynamic, creative, and articulate individuals who all do what you preach: think, participate, and communicate. Did you know that out of the 528 posts I read through, the average post had at least 13 comments? Only 6% of your posts had 0 and these entries were audio based posts via Utterz or some other service where comments were posted externally.
I haven’t told you this yet, but I actually printed out the 22 page excel sheet I generated listing every single blogpost on here. Not only is it a visual reference I look at when I want to quickly find a post, it is a daily reminder of lessons I learned from you and this site:
1. Be passionate. Social media is constantly evolving and folks move fast in this world. It’s exhausting trying to keep up, but only those who really love it can.
2. Be a sponge. Read and learn from anything and everyone and constantly seek out new sources of information and opinion. Ask questions.
3. Be a creator of quality content. Whether its blogging, vlogging, podcasting, programming, etc. producing content is key. It’s one thing to observe and talk about social media. It’s another thing to actually make it, live it, breath it.
4. Be a person. Yeah chrisbrogan.com is IMO the #1 source for all things social media, but it’s also a great resource for how to be a listener and well-rounded human being. There are some great posts about family, friends, and balancing work/play and professional/personal time. We all have to unplug sometimes.
5. Participate online and offline. It’s not enough to develop surface connections with people via urls, friend requests, and email. Make the effort to meet someone face to face and converse in real time.
There’s more I can add to this list, but these are really the big picture ideas that are embedded in my head after reading your blog.
To any aspiring rockstars looking to stay afloat in social media waters, this site is the golden life preserver.
Thanks again Chris.
ReadBurner Partners with NetVibes
Why let Google Reader have all the fun? My friend, Drew Olanoff, alerts me to the news that ReadBurner, known for showing news from the point of view of how many people have shared it using Google Reader’s Shared Items feature, have expanded. They’ve just released (20 minutes ago) a tie into NetVibes via the Ginger API, that will promote a similar kind of feature. The tab is already live on the ReadBurner site, so you can test it out directly.
As the aggregation space heats up, I’m excited that Drew, Adam, and the rest of the team are coming up with interesting new ideas at ReadBurner, and I wish them well.
What do you think? And who’s going to come out with smart filtering first?
Screen caps made with Skitch
Get Faster
One way to stay pertinent is to scan, learn, absorb, reflect, and synthesize relevant information faster than the others in your space. Play the cards you’re given, but if it takes you almost a week to report into the space something that a hundred other people have already weighed in on, your insight had best be earth shattering, because otherwise, it’s just another log on the fire someone else started.
Social media is a pulse-driven network of fast. The problem becomes learning how to sort and synthesize what’s important instead of just reading everything that comes along. Are you learning?
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, la cola di mi perro
The Target is Not the Weapon
Donald Trump. Who’d have thought I’d be in a bookstore last night and see a book by Donald Trump, and that I’d pick it up, and at random flip to a chapter with that title? The Target Is Not The Weapon. It’s a simple lesson, and yet profound in how it changes one’s focus.
In social media, the tools aren’t the same thing as reaching a goal. If you’re a marketer looking to use these tools, then make the first goal to learn how the community moves, listen to its ebbs and flows, and then make the next goal to try starting conversations. But don’t stop there. What’s the real goal? What’s your real target? Growing sales? Building leads? Engaging more people in your nonprofit cause?
I have been doing this exercise for days in different forms, but not with this language in mind. Think about this in Trump’s words. If you’re seeking to hit a target, is the goal to use a dart or an arrow or a bullet, or is it to improve your accuracy, or is it simply to hit the bullseye? The answer is C, even though A and B are part of the equation. Make sense?
I’m thinking long and hard on which social media tools do what for my own business goals, and how this will impact what I advise people to do next. Do the tools have impact? Definitely. See the Financial Aid Podcast and Wine Library TV for two small business examples. See Direct2Dell for another example. See tons more examples in between.
But the chatter, the conversation for conversation’s sake? It’s fine and I don’t begrudge people using the tools for social conversation (enhanced beyond standard email). And yet, I’m assessing which parts do the most for me. What about you?
Here’s an Amazon link to the book:
Photo credit by uuuhyeah
Kirtsy Back in Business
Kirtsy is the new name for Sk*rt, who skirted into waters that weren’t as comfy for a moment there. It’s a pretty cool site. Mix the wisdom of the crowds with 22 engaged and passionate editors and you get a fabulous hybrid of social news meets curated content.
Kirtsy is a site where women point out the cool stuff. Is that simple enough? There’s obviously a lot more at play here, but after looking around the site, I think you’ll figure it out pretty quickly, as well, and so I won’t dig in too deeply.
What I will say, however, is that Kirtsy has some neat features (the mix of editing and voting, for one), a nice design, and has a lot to offer women looking for information on a whole host of subjects, including family, design, travel, mind and body, and more.
Give Kirtsy a look-see, and let me know what you think-see.
Screen caps made with Skitch
Best Social Media Advice From This Site
I’m passionate about how certain strategies married to certain technologies allow individuals and companies to build things: reputation, trust, personal brand, community, relationships, and even marketplaces. My efforts to cover larger stories, tools, strategies, and more over the last several months have given you quite a bit to consider. But blogs are a tricky method for learning and reflecting. They’re like a running stream, and if you step out for a moment, a certain point in the stream will pass you by.
To that end, I’ve collected some links to the posts that I think might be helpful to you. Peruse these at your leisure. I’ve grouped them a bit for you. Feel free to pick and choose the topics that matter to you. I hope this proves helpful. If it does, please consider blogging a link to this post, and/or feel free to pass it on to any who might want more of this type of information.
There’s a lot here. Feel free to bookmark it for later. (And if you want even more to read, sign up for my free newsletter, which is even MORE original content.)
Thanks!
Community Development
- Understanding Community Development Strategies
- Ways to Disrupt a Community
- Why Do Community Development
- Should Your Small Business Use Community Tools
- The Long Tail of Community
- If Communitites Are Just Marketing Pools
- The Magic of Including People
- Meeting People at Events
- The Community Play
- The Community Ecosystem
- How Blogs Improve Customer Service and Product Development
Social Networks
- Three Things LinkedIN Does Better than Facebook
- How I Use Facebook
- Things To Do on Facebook
- Facebook - Let Me See My Friends
- Fix Your Facebook Profile Now
- Facebook and the Social Graph - Who Benefits
- Five Things to Do on LInkedIN
- Considering Social Etiquette
- Social Networks are Your Local Pub
- Why Join Another Social Network
- Marketers in a Social Network World
- Real Live Human Social Networking
- Social in Real Space vs. Social Networking
- Making Social Networks Work
- Improve Your Social Network
- The Importance of a Human Social Network
- Three Untapped Values of Social Networks
- Five Things to Do at a Social Networking Meetup
Social Media
- Social Media Starter Pack
- A Basic Social Media Strategy
- My Social Media Toolkit
- A Sample Social Media Toolkit
- Participation- The Key to Social Media
- Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses
- How Big Companies could Use Social Media
- Social Media Inside the Firewall
- Social Media Power Secret - Listening
- Small Businesses And Social Media
- Social Media is a Set Not a Part
- Social Media for Your Career
- Help Someone Understand Social Media
- Social Media as Personal Power
- Snake Oil in Social Media
- Using Social Media to Meet People
- Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
- Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
- Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
- How I Use Twitter
- Deeper Twitter - Tuning Twitter for Value
- Newbies Guide to Twitter
- Twitter as Directors Commentary
- Twitter as an Advisory Board
Personal Branding
- The Power of Personal Leadership
- Slicing Time in a Face to Face Environment
- Brand Stories
- Some Quick Branding Tips for Individuals
- The foundations of Your Power
- Personal Scalability
- Personal Branding and Social Media
- Passion Drives Personal Brand
- Elements of a Personal Brand
- Challenges of Social Media Types in the Workplace
- The Value of Networks
- Scaling Yourself
Making Media
- Why Create Personal Media
- Whats Your Social Media Strategy
- Media Makers Next Steps
- Blogging Advice for the Next Level
- Expand Your Audience
- The Future of Microcontent and Hperlocal Media
- Why Bother Blogging Podcasting and Using Social Networks
- Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy
- Marketing Media Means Moments That Matter
- Using Social Sharing to Extend Your Message
- Performance and Your Audience - Blogging Tips
- Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
- Tagging and Metadata and Why Bother
- A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies
- Promoting Your Media
- The Power of Links
- 20 Blogging Projects for You
- Succeeding in Independent Online Media
- Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today
- Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
- 100 Blog topics I hope YOU Write
- 100 PodCamp Topics for You to Cover
I’m writing new stuff all the time at [chrisbrogan.com]. If you’re reading this for the first time, please consider subscribing for free. If you’re a subscriber, don’t forget to get the completely-different content published at least twice a month in my newsletter. And thanks for your attention and time.
Special thanks to Alexa Scordato for compiling this data on my behalf. It was a lot of work. Thanks!
Making a Business From Social Media
Who’s making a business from social media? Audio and video producers are, for the most part, scraping by, give or take a few notables (several of who are being paid from VC money). Bloggers are making money in varying degrees, depending on their advertising opportunities, or their opportunity for consulting. I’m going to leave the “entertainment” category out of this discussion for that reason (though you’re welcome to argue it back in). So, who’s really making a business out of social media?
Early Adopters: Advertising, PR and Marketing
First to market with actual paying jobs in social media are public relations and marketing firms. Why? Because if you squint your eyes, the tools are the same thing: a means for communicating professionally. Is that wrong? I don’t think so, provided we don’t lose ground with regards to how these new tools re-humanize technology-assisted communication.
Using social media for “viral” advertising is popular, but mostly because it’s low-cost, low-barrier technology that permits folks to get a message across through different channels. Will that last? I can’t see why we’d go back to $100,000 spots, when we can create the media and distribute it for free, especially where the world is shifting to those free methods, too.
Business Users
I’m not sure what department an internal corporate social media practitioner would fall into. Project management makes sense, because inside the firewall, these tools facilitate collaboration, status messages, data sharing, and other uses that would work well for facilitating projects. Product management and R&D might adopt the tools as well, but there probably wouldn’t be a pre-defined role for someone who simply knows how to use the tools.
Comparing the Two Most Likely Businesses
On one side, we have obvious jobs: PR, marketing, advertising. On the other, we have a potential role for daring companies, or a more likely future of an adoption of the tools by several people after receiving training from a more expert user. So, there are two options.
Which makes more sense? On one side, you have a mountain of communications companies hoping to adapt quickly. On the other side, you have businesses who aren’t as motivated to change their internal processes. But will there be a point where businesses take back their external arms for outreach to their customers? In a world where companies talk directly to their customers, the media, and prospects, will the business of communications go in-house?
Not Necessarily a Primary Business
We’re all jumping up and down and excited about social media and what these tools can do for us. WHAT, exactly, do these tools do for us that translates into a business directly? My answer: for lots of people, they don’t.
Looking for a career in social media would be like seeking a career in email. Instead, use these skills to cultivate another ability of yours. If you’re a salesperson, use social media tools to build leads, understand need, get the word out about your products. If you’re a nonprofit professional, you’ve already figured this out, and use these tools to aid in awareness, fundraising, communication, and more.
Instead of focusing on how these tools will become a career, focus on how you can equip others with these tools. THAT, I believe, is the business, in the short term. But even that will be the short term.
What do you think? Agree? Disagree? What’s your take?
Photo credit, Greg Westfall
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.
Social Networks- Time to Specialize
I’m looking at a new social network for writers called Protagonize. It’s a place where writers can come, register, add a picture, fill out a profile, type in the same stuff (granted, they’ve streamlined this a bit here), and then you can do the main core activities of the network:
- Submit stories or parts of stories.
- Collaborate on other people’s stories.
- Comment.
- Vote.
- Add friends.
It’s nicely made, has some reasonably interesting features, and if you’re a writer, it’s worth checking out.
And Yet
I want more. I want lots more. No, don’t come comment on my post and tell me that it’s coming. It’s not your fault, but here’s the thing.
We have the baseline functionality of account, friends, comments, voting, etc. That’s all done. There are hundreds of implementations of it. We get it.
At this point, I want someone to get smart like the ZLoop guys and figure out a centralized social networking profile repository that permits us to have multiple iterations, depending on the network.
For a site about stories and writing, I want MUCH more specialized tools. Maybe a floating ajax thesaurus. Could there be a visual storytelling tool that lets writers branch the story in multiple ways like a choose-your-own-adventure book? I want mark-ups and overlay editing features so that others can come in and give you edits and annotation to your stories.
For a site about music, maybe it would be different tools. Come to think of it, Flickr should buy Aviary and roll Picnik in tighter so that we get specialized tools there, too.
I think professional networks have the most opportunity in this regard. Businesses and professional organizations need tools that go beyond what LinkedIn have offered to date. We’re actually looking into that at CrossTech Partners, researching toolsets and building use cases for how professional networks can evolve.
If You’re Developing a Network
Don’t stop at the basics. Don’t just give me another place to make a profile and add friends. It has to give me much more than that before I care. And I think I’m speaking for the user base in general at this point.
Consider what might really make the software valuable and useful. Consider ways in which your targeted users might want to interact. Specialize instead of generalize. Give us VERY specific tools. What would librarians find interesting? What would educators need to take time away from their typical haunts?
And as for YOU, what do you want in your specialized social network? What can you imagine being a set of tools for growing out your human relationships?
Love your thoughts on some variations on the theme.
Business To Business Forum 2008
Marketing Profs is throwing a
Business to Business Forum event on June 9th-10th in Boston, focusing on Driving Sales: What’s New and What Works. I’m one of the speakers, as are some of my friends:
Tons more folks are also speaking that I’ve yet to meet.
It’s not free, but it’s reasonable for a two day event with lots of sales and marketing leadership information.
If you’re interested, check out the event page for more information.
Still Here
Some of you sent mail asking whether I was going to stop blogging. Short answer: no. I could just as much stop blogging as I could stop breathing. For over ten years (a decade!), I have been writing my thoughts and ideas down onto the Internet for people to take away, change, challenge, and adapt. Not because I just want to give ideas away, but because you enrich me with your thoughts and points of view, and because I love seeing where you go with the things I put out for consideration.
Some of you asked me what book it was that I read on the plane that helped me gain my most recent perspective. The book is called CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life, by Dr Edward Hallowell (who happens to be from Massachusetts, btw). It appeals to people who want to better understand how modern living (especially all of us online) can give us true ADD-like symptoms (Attention Deficit Disorder is a medical condition, but Dr. Hallowell says we can develop symptoms that are pretty darned close to the real thing).
So, if the book seems like something you want to check out, here’s an Amazon link (or use your local library).
But I’m still here. A more thoughtful post about social media and the like comes later.
