But I want to talk about more. I want to do more.

The guy in that photo is Mark Horvath from Invisible People. He caters to the homeless. Directly. He and Liz Strauss walked around giving pizza to homeless guys while they were here. They talked to the homeless, made them feel seen.

As well as meeting me, I want you to find Mark and say hi. I want you to make HIM feel the way you make me feel. He’s doing good work.

This is Melissa Leon and AJ Leon from TheLACProject, a human business company. They are doing AMAZING things. Find them in the hallway and talk about Africa and social good.

On another note, Thom Singer. He just wrote about a giving moment that happened at a party at SXSW. Man, I wish I went to that party.

What We Could Do: Networking

We need better networking tools. We need to build a “I’m ____, and I’m into _____ , and I’d love to talk about _____ , and I’d love to meet people into ______ , or just ______ . I like _____ food. If I were to support a cause, it’d be _____ , but I’m open to ____ , too” kind of tool.

We need to give new people the warmest welcome with some kind of “I’m new here” badge.

Can you see it?

What We Could Do: Panels and Speeches

We need to give the new people more to talk about. We need to give them more fundamentals. We need to strip out some of the entertainment value and get back to sharing our big ideas, our golden thoughts. (Me included. I think the panel that Julien and I gave was fun, but not as informative as we could’ve made it. Next time.)

We need to bring our A game, our A ideas. Maybe some of you did. I spoke to a few hundred people, and no one gave anyone rave reviews except for the panel with Jeff Jarvis, and the talk by Clay Shirky. (Note: I didn’t see hardly any panels, so I’m not talking from experience, as much as I’m talking from what the buzz reported).

What We Could Do: Sponsors and Exhibitors

We could do lots more in these regards. I think sometimes, as attendees, we forget that the sponsors are helping pay for the experience. How can we do more things to pay them back for that? Yes, we pay for the ticket. I think we would do well to grab a quick interview with a few sponsors while we’re out and about at all these parties.

What We Could Do: Interpersonal

People still anxiously talk all about themselves. We could ALL just ask about the other person, get to know what they’re doing, and share our best intentions of understanding each other. Sounds hippie, but that’s how things really get done. It doesn’t get done when you start into your pitch before really even getting to know us.

Might Just Be Me

Know what I saw more than anything else when I really took a moment to look around? Lonely people. I saw people not connecting. I saw lots of people who could’ve used a little attention. And I saw many people with lots of energy looking for a place to put it. And that means we have opportunities.

This wasn’t a rant about SXSW. It’s a post begging for a new way, a more engaged way, a human way to bring out the best in our efforts and time and expense.

What say you?

Can’t see the video? click here.

Direct link to the video

People always ask which camera I used to shoot my video. I use the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 (that’s a review of the camera).

Simon is marketing director for Bar B-Ria, an upscale barber shop experience for gentlemen in Bogota, Colombia. They offer everything from massages to haircuts to manicures and pedicures, and a bar full of top shelf liquor, including a new favorite rum, Zacapa from Guatemala. I’ll tell you what advice I had for the place upon appreciating their services and their commitment to guest experience. This is mostly tactical. There’s still something to learn from it.

Turn The Revenue Measure From “Dollars Per Day” into ” Dollars Per Guest”

Because the entire plan of Bar B-Ria is hinged around delivering excellent guest experiences, it dawned on me that measuring revenue by day instead of dollars-per-guest means that opportunities get lost. For instance, I love Zacapa rum. When I walk in the door, it should be one goal of the Bar B’Ria team to pour me a glass (and add to my bill). This is how places like Disney think. They work on delivering maximum guest experience, but they calculate on dollar-per-guest, as do cruise ships, as do many other hospitality experiences.

Build Relationship Databases

I recommended that Simon have each guest in a database that tells them my preferences all the way through. Do I like gel in my hair after the haircut? Do I want my massage hard or soft? Why shouldn’t everyone in the place know that upon my arrival? It’s going to benefit my experience, and it’s going to improve my perception of the service. You can do this easily with Google Docs, better with BatchBook.

Partner With Hotels

Simon needs my dollars. I’m a US guy in Colombia and the service he offers is premium-but-inexpensive by American standards. If I hadn’t had friends from Colombia, I’d have never heard of Bar B’Ria. The people of Colombia in general don’t know much about it yet, and the men here aren’t yet convinced that a $30 haircut is somehow better than a $4 haircut.

Hotels that cater to people from other countries or vacationers would be a great place to build a relationship with concierges, maybe even to sponsor/advertise. Simon could earn much more by building bridges between the places where people who can afford the experience are and into his establishment.

Until more folks come and see the value for themselves and use it to treat themselves.

Word of Mouth Referral Program

Simon would do well to give me a card upon leaving that offers someone a free drink or a scalp massage or something else. He should give me 3-5 per visit. Imagine the experience: I’m done with my massage and my haircut and my delicious rum, and I am about to leave the venue. Aren’t I going to go forth and spread the word? It’s the perfect opportunity. Should 3 of those people come in with my referral, I’d maybe get a small benefit back: my own free scalp massage, perhaps.

Little Things Add Up

Over all the various ideas I gave Simon, they weren’t immediate millions-makers. They are all experience-enhancing and tactical. They all relate to giving guest value that results in improved revenue and guest acquisition. None of what I talked about had to do with the web. That’s almost the easy part, right?

Your Ideas

What would you add to this, oh social media friends. Give a few ideas in the comments on what you’d do to amp up the social elements, and tell me how they’d help Simon. (I’ll share my ideas in the comments a day or so later.)

Good?

(Oh, and I found this video in Spanish about the venue, if you want more inspiration.

VERY special thanks to Carlos Pardo for help finding the link to the place, and for the hospitality he (and his amazing parents) showed me at their family home for dinner while in Bogota. (And ladies of Colombia: he’s single.)

Your Blog as PART of a System

In the drawing above, I list your blog as part of your content ecosystem. Here’s why I recommend you start thinking this way: because your blog is only one destination and it’s only reaching one channel of a much larger opportunity and demographic. The minute you see your blog as only “a” channel, that’s when you start thinking of other outreach opportunities.

This, by the way, is the logic behind Steve Jobs’s iPad. He didn’t make it for us. He made it for your mom, for the photographers, for people who want a big shiny viewing device for downloaded movies. It’s another way to build a channel for people to buy stuff off the iTunes store.

Now, with that in mind, the easy first step is to strongly highlight the opportunity to get your blog sent to people via email (more people use email than read blogs). That’s the easy opportunity. From there, start asking yourself how else you can build out your content delivery, both offline (print, perhaps, or publish a book) and into new channels online. Then, think about products.

Your Content as Products

Think about the various ways your content can fit into different shapes as a product. For instance, is your content suitable for audio? Have you considered recording and giving away (or selling) an audio version? I’m working up some audio projects for the commuters in our lives, not to mention the fact that Trust Agents and Social Media 101 are both available via audio download.

Can you take some of your projects and turn them into slide decks and make them available to the public? Or look at Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism. That’s a project that’s gotten Brian tens of thousands of placements in presentations over the last few years. Every time I see that wheel come up, it’s a chance for us to go back and check out Brian’s blog.

What other projects can you think up based on your products?

Education: The Power of Events

Online or off, some of what you’ve created would be good for educational opportunities. What could you turn from a few blog posts into a helpful class? You might have to give more thought than what went into the original posts. There’s a gap between “informative” and “educational” sometimes (unless you’re Whitney Hoffman, who writes very thorough posts), and you have to tighten that up.

This might be turned into a live event, like a teaching opportunity. It might turn into online courses. It might turn into a private membership site like Third Tribe. But education is a really good opportunity to spread your content into a new ecosystem. And, if you get really clever, you start wondering if your content might make a good part to someone else’s parts and that it might together form a larger opportunity.

Partnerships

My friend, Matthew Ebel is a professional musician. He creates music, tours, and does all that, but he also offers his services to conference and event producers. Imagine the difference between attending an event, versus attending an event with engaging live music. Matthew can add this to a conference experience. However, as a guy who runs conferences for a living, I’m very unlikely to call up a musician to perform. I would, however, call my event planner and see if she knew someone for the event.

Thus, it benefits Matthew to partner with event planners, so that he can book more gigs at conferences. Make sense?

Partnerships with your content work the same way. There may be part of the story you’re great at and parts that others are better at explaining/providing. For instance, if you’re yet another social media blogger, how much more powerful would your site and content become if you partnered with an SEO professional, a digital marketing professional, and a graphic/interface design specialist. You’d have a killer teaching/educating/selling opportunity for people looking for the larger picture.

See how killer this one step could become?

Ecosystem Thinking

This, to me, is where things get powerful. Once you see your platform as an ecosystem and not the parts, your possibilities to grow and develop more business value. Can you see it? Look beyond your blog as being the core of things. Think of it as an outlet. From there, things get exciting.

What say you?

The Method Is What We’re Taught to Pursue

We learn our times tables. We learn the 50 states (in the US, at least). We are taught all these rules, these patterns, these systems, these methods. Musicians learn their scales. Painters copy the Masters. Copy. Learn. Make patterns.

Repetition. Finding grooves. Fitting into our assembly lines. Aligning to the way we understand how to measure.

Method. The process by which we get somewhere. Kempo karate is a method of fighting. Kicking the other guy’s ass is the goal.

You see this, right?

“New” is Rarely a Byproduct of Repetition

Except when it is. iPod was a whole new way of framing the music story: 1000 songs (not megabytes and gigabytes). iTunes store not just an orphaned player. Wheel and single button, not a slew of buttons.

And the Nano is the baby of the original, but the iPhone is nothing like the original, except they removed the wheel and left only one button. New. Again.

Now, repetition isn’t the only facet of method, and method isn’t bad. I need to be clear about that. But focusing on perfecting one’s method isn’t as useful as focusing on solving for the goal.

Pursue the Goal, Not the Method

I addressed the International Association of Business Communicators at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, a painted lady teetering between demolition and emotional buttressing. The room was, as it always is, filled with that mix of the converted, the confused, the naysayers, the proof (that it all works), and me. Me, the street preacher, the jester, the irreverent, the addle-brained and yet target-minded sayer of what everyone swears they already know and blogs that they’ve seen it all before. Common sense. Be human. Be real.

I imagine some of them at their desk today, looking at their monitor, digging into their email, looking at their stats, settling back into the warm cottony folds of what they know how to do, what they were taught to do, what they practiced and repeated and did again and again. Trenchwork, some of it. And some of them are damned pleased and okay to be pleased by performing it.

But some of my people, some of those who saw something, felt the sparkle, caught a whiff of what I’m cooking, they got what I was saying. Old roads have precious little to do with new paths. What came before doesn’t have to explain what should be done next. We don’t have to repeat repeat repeat repeat.

I read once that every cell in our body completely recycles every four days. Perhaps I have it wrong, but when I think of that, I’m caught. I wonder why my scar from cutting my left ring finger while pulling a fern out of the ground during a Boy Scout survival weekend still persists. I wonder why I still have cowlicks in my hair. If every cell is new again, why can’t I be someone else every four days? But this is a side thought. This is a distraction for you to ponder. Scientists need not apply: I’m a disciple of accepting mystery instead of seeking truth. (Delusional, maybe, but pleasantly surprised? Yes.)

Methods change. It’s not that you shouldn’t learn methods, but rather that you should be ready to switch methods by facing the goals.

And Here At the End, The Goal

You will do so much more with your pursuits should you become a pursuer of the goal, and not a student of the method. Okay, SOME of you will. Others, you need the repetition, the ritual, the comfort. That is so very okay. Religion is all that. Okay, most religion is all that. Most religion is the method.

Seek the goal. The goal is equipping people. The goal is satisfying need. The goal is seeking to better others. The goal is to provide. The goal is to make everything work better.

See how that works? Think about your goals. Think about your company’s goals. What if you threw out EVERY method you were using before this very moment? The goals would still be there.

What if you left email behind and used ONLY voice? Could you still reach your goal? What if I stopped blogging and only sent you emails? What if we all shut our computers off? (Not sure we could ever get that genie back into the bottle.) What if we switched to mobile-centric design?

Goals. Not. Methods.

And you said…

Photo credit Dru Bloomfield

Listening

Listening tools have more than one application: they’re useful for customer service. They’re good for PR & crisis management. They’re also good for marketing opportunity discovery, and finally as an R&D lead source. Realizing that there are many applications for the same category should give you a sense of what needs doing. Again, let’s look at this like a frame for your efforts. Once you’ve decided to take on listening, you’ll have to answer the following:

• Which tools should I use? (Free? Radian6? ScoutLabs? Sysomos? A combination?)
• Who should do the active listening?
• Where do we route the information?
• What are we doing with analytics tools? (Hubspot, Google Analytics, etc)
• How do we measure success?

Listening is primary to many of the other areas of practice, because it’s your primary instrumentation. As you can see, I include mechanical “listening,” the use of tools like Hubspot and Google Analytics, into the space of listening. This is normally bunched up in company’s web departments, with an SEO person. And yet, I believe we should align it here.

Connecting

Connecting embodies all the points of social presence and outreach, as well as community building. This is your Twitter and Facebook usage, your commenting on blogs, your building of private communities or your nurturing of other people’s communities. This is your HR hiring process as well as your lead generation. This is where all human interaction opportunities are routed. Even when listening detects some action to take, it should be handled by whoever is assigned to connecting. (Note: this could and might likely be the same person.)

Tools for connecting (just some serving suggestions – don’t use all of these):

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Blog accounts like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous (“passports,” as I mentioned in my personal branding ebook).
• Bookmarking accounts like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon
• YouTube, Flickr
• Ning.com
• And what do you do on these? Who do you connect with? What are your contact policies? What are the rules of engagement?

What you do in connecting is very important. Here’s where social media really shines. Connecting and making it a two way street is such a big opportunity. It’s a chance for your customers/clients/prospects to feel seen, heard. It’s the essence of giving people what they really want most times: an interaction where both sides feel heard. It’s also the primary place sales people will find value in social media. It’s also where new blood is found for projects and initiatives. It’s where databases grow. It’s where you can nurture your organization and its connecting points. It’s where community can happen.

Publishing

The last of the three areas, but no less important, publishing incorporates how social media does what it does best. The ability to blog, make video, share photos and audio effortlessly, and do so for free or cheap is one of the reasons people come to the social media shores. Once you see the value in content marketing (organic SEO results, the opportunity to connect, the ability to share news in a non-email way, the chance to tell stories that matter to you and your organization), you won’t want to stop.

Publishing has many tools:

• Blogs such as WordPress (either hosted for free at WordPress.com or hosted on your own site, using WordPress.org), Moveable Type, Posterous, and more.
• Video platforms like Blip.tv, YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and dozens more.
• Audio platforms like BlogTalkRadio.com
• Live video like Ustream.tv, BlogTV.com, and more.
• Photo sharing on Flickr.com

The trick with publishing is to make the information relevant to the consumer of this media. B2B has great opportunities in using publishing to improve the communications/sales process by making simple, short videos instead of simply lobbing white papers. Customer service can create behind-the-scenes blogs to show how to better use a product. Smaller businesses can capture their best customers in a photo or quick video. People can record radio shows that cover what matters most to the business. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunities to promote great content are equally dizzying in their promise.

Tying It All Together

It’s in how these tools are all used, in the nuances of good etiquette, quality content creation, effective promotion, useful policies, and a myriad of other pieces that the details become important. We’re all chipping at this stuff in some way or another, and this part’s where we work on tying it all together.

At New Marketing Labs, we have worked with companies in all these areas, but it’s fun how there’s always a variation on the emphasis. In some projects, we do much more publishing work. In others, we’ve done almost all connecting. Blending these areas and fitting them appropriately for our partners is what is most exciting.

Your Take

Does this lay out the way you see it? Are you working in these three areas? How are you working on these projects with clients or inside your own company? If you’re a smaller business, how does this translate?

Photo credit pdz_house

If you look at this graphic I copied, you’ll see a few titles that get your eyebrow raised. I found the experiment to be interesting, and even more interesting when I picked a topic material that wasn’t really my thing. It’s amazing how just the titles got me thinking about my own blog and what I could do better.

Just for fun, I grabbed the most recent titles from my blog. Here they are:

• The Location Game – Over on OPENForum
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Review
• How Social Media Can Power Your Business – Kitchen Table Talks
• Points of Contact
• The Social Media Pie – over on OPEN Forum
• How I Use Mindmapping to Write
• Cubicle Farming
• New Job New You – a Book Review
• The Writing Practice
• Switch- A Book Review
• The Beginning – Kitchen Table Talks
• How NOT to Help Haiti
• How Systems Thwart Service
• Your Farmer List
• Living In Google Wave
• What is Your Pop-Up Store
• Get Seen- Do It Now
• Represented by the APB Speaker’s Bureau
• More Fun Than Competition
• Business Stripped Bare – Book Review
• Do One Thing Very Well
• How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers
• The Future Is Evidently Blurry
• A Customer Aware World
• Experiment- 30 Days of Bing
• Deepen Your Networks
• New Sponsor – Search Engine Strategies NYC
• Are You Ready for Fun

There are four book reviews. There are four “announcement/promotion” type posts. There are seven video posts.

Of the titles, I think I did okay. I think they could be better. I’m sure Brian would tell me I could do better.

So, what do you think? How do YOU stack up? Does looking at other people’s titles and ideas help you think about your blog?

Can you see the value in comparisons, or, as I talk about in More Fun Than Competition, are you just competing with yourself?

If your blog was the next Wired / BusinessWeek / FastCompany / whatever-for-your-industry, how would you rate it?

Before you ask, because the technology minded of you often do, this particular mindmapping software is called Mind Node and it’s for Mac. There are plenty of tools for Windows and some that operate online. I think Steve Rubel covered some a while back, but I’m too lazy to Bing the exact title. That’s not exactly the point.

The way I use mindmaps is that I start with my main idea, and then figure out the “branches” I’ll want to talk about. Think of them as the main points of my speech, in this case. From there, I can then think about these ideas separately, and then expand upon them. For instance, as I think about the goals that people might want to attain when thinking about the new marketing world, I might add the following:

So, in this case, I just add a few ideas. These lead me to think of other ideas. Some might swing over to the “capabilities” branch, as I explain what I think would drive these goals. Others might lead me to the “ecosystem” branch, as I want to talk about the set of tools that would drive these goals and empower these capabilities.

Mind maps are a great tool for getting your jumbly thoughts into a framework. From there, you can work backwards and forwards on ideas without the “weight” of lots of words to slow down your thinking. Then, by the way, you can use the words you’ve put down as the titles of slides, or as the headers to paragraphs or as the notes on your note cards for your speech.

What happens, often, when we write, is that we look at sentences as this whole big thing. We get worried about transitions. We think about the tasks the entire paragraph has to put off. Or, when we create slide decks for speeches, we get caught up in finding visuals to illustrate our points before we’ve really mapped out our points very well. In all cases, the “stuff” of the final product gets in the way of the frame of what we’re putting together.

That’s where mind maps excel (or one place where mind maps excel).

What about you? Do you ever use them to write? What other uses are you finding for mind maps?

It’s practice. Practice the verb, in this case.

The Spark of an Idea

Last night, Kat and I were at Ruby Foos in Manhattan for dinner after a movie. The server, Jenna, was pretty good at her job, but when it came time to try and sell us dessert, I noticed a flaw in her service. She said, “Do you think you’re going to have room for dessert?”

The answer to this should always be no. To say yes is to say that you’re gluttonous. It also isn’t very appealing. It requires more questions.

Instead, if Jenna had said, “We make the most amazing molten chocolate cake here,” I might have raised an eyebrow. Even if chocolate isn’t my thing, my head would immediately go to the dessert I wanted, but then I’d already be shopping for it. Make sense?

There. That’s the spark of an idea. Just a little moment in time with a server at a restaurant, and I have something to talk about: suggestive selling and the benefit of leading your prospect.

Sparks are everywhere. We just have to look for them. I look every day. Need more help? Use your phone’s camera. Snap weird things that you see. I write many blog posts based on weird photos that I snap.

From Spark to Fire

Having a good idea is one thing. Turning it into a blog post is another. If you want the complete rundown of what I do each time, check out 27 blogging secrets I’ve given you here. In short, for a blog post to be useful, it has to be useful to more people than yourself.

Fires start when you get them in many minds. If I share something of interest to me, that might only stay a smoldering spark in my head. If I share something that you can run with, now we’re talking. That’s the goal. Always look for ways to turn your spark into a fire that will fuel other people’s imaginations and set them to burning with new ideas.

The Actual Practice of Writing

I’m writing this to you while I’m waiting for someone to get some webinar software rebooted. I find time like this everywhere. I wrote about this in 2006 when I covered time quilting. The thing is, you have to practice writing when you can. I don’t think it’s good enough to say, “I’ll write every morning,” or “I’ll write after the kids go to bed.” When I say this, I understand that you have to find time where you can, but the actual practice of writing is something I want you to try doing all the time.

How?

Think about pieces to write. Jot notes about those pieces. Record little snips of audio or leave yourself voicemail or write on the back of receipts. Whatever you can do, think about what you’re going to write.

Grab paragraphs where you can. I’m writing this paragraph in the back of a town car in the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City. This piece of writing has officially been crafted in three places (I started in an airplane).

Read other people’s stuff. This actually counts as writing practice, provided you read as a writer, and then develop what you need to do to make your writing better from it.

Publish often. Another place where our practice falls down is that we keep tons of drafts of things around, but never publish. Here’s the truth: If it’s not out there, it doesn’t count as much. (Journal keepers, I don’t mean you. Put down the purple pitchforks.) Get your work out there onto the web, onto blogs, into the hands of other people, whatever. Get it out there. The more you publish, the more people will take swings at it, the more people will riff off it, the more you’ll get the chance to get feedback.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

I spent a good chunk of my life believing I was destined to be a fiction author. The moment I threw that away, I found great success writing my blog and then writing a New York Times bestseller. Life throws curveballs. Don’t forget that the practice of writing might lead you somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Be open to this as much as you’re open to anything else in your experiences. You’ll sometimes surprise yourself.

And keep writing. Keep practicing. Keep trying new things. The only way to improve is to work with it, to practice, to learn from what others are saying about you, to learn what you think about others.

So, Practice

And in that practice, share what you find. Okay? Do you find that when you share what you’ve learned it helps you and others? I do. Maybe you will, too. And I hope you share it with us.

What else? What did I miss? What can you add to this?

Photo credit C.C. Chapman

Let’s talk about it.

Do Your Homework

All bloggers aren’t the same. Big numbers don’t mean big response. Just because someone writes about X doesn’t mean that your product is actually X to them. Bloggers can be fickle and often work to the beat of their own drum.

I get dozens of pitches a day. I delete almost all of them unread, unless I know the person, and then half the time, I delete those, too. The reason is that people aren’t considering what I write about before pitching to me. I rarely ever cover software here, so if you’re showing me a software story, it damned well better have a human angle.

The same is true for any of the bloggers you need to reach. Not sure where to find the bloggers you need? Use these resources:

• Alltop – the Internet’s magazine rack.
• Google Blogsearch – search by topic.
• Twitter Search – find bloggers by what they tweet about.
• Postrank Topics – search by topic.

Once you have a sense of who you might want to reach for your stories, it’s all about building relationships.

Be There Before the Sale

This is something Julien and I wrote about in Trust Agents, and it’s the first part of making your blogging outreach more successful. If you want people to write about you, they should probably know about you first. Quick ways to get that started:

• Follow them on Twitter.
• Comment on their blog posts.
• Set up Google Alerts and comment on related articles.

Is this more work than just blanketing someone with email and hoping a few write about it? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

The trick is not to talk about your stuff. You should have started this outreach weeks and weeks before ever needing anything, and it should be genuine. Be interested in the people you hope will take an interest in you.

Make It Easy

People that I like in the outreach department work to find the people who she thinks make the most sense for the story. They deliver tons of information and preparation. They do lots of checking and double-checking (because bloggers can be fickle or forgetful). They make everything as seamless as possible. Some ideas:

• Make everything dead simple.
• (Tyler in the comments suggested) Be clear what you want the outcome of the outreach to be.
• Provide URLs to everything, so that bloggers can refer.
• Provide photos to go with the piece, or a video, or whatever other content.
• Keep your outreach emails brief, and keep the details highlighted and bolded appropriately.
• Make sure your FIRST email does nothing but get the buy-in to pitch the story.

Let’s pause on that last point. Some people disagree. They want the whole pitch in the first email, because two becomes a clutter. I’ve honestly seen it done both ways. I know that when Cathy sends me an email asking to pitch me, I’m going to ask for the pitch. I’ve seen others send me the pitch in the first email and it’s been okay, but more often than not, I prefer the two-email system. You can dispute this. Really.

To me, making the effort simple is a good thing.

Ask the Right Questions

I’m often given business books to review. I’m a voracious reader, and I like sharing the good ones with people. However, I also tell people who send me books that I don’t guarantee a review. Sometimes, the book is okay, but not my favorite. Other times, I really don’t like the book. If the people who send me the book ever push for a review, I usually explain that it might not be as positive as they’d like. As an author, myself, I don’t like giving bad reviews.

To that end, think about some questions that might let you have some guidance on how the blogger acts.

• Can you tell me how long it takes to post from when you receive the product?
• May I check back in a few weeks from now?
• What do you do with negative reviews?
• If you have disagreements or problems with the product, could you email me first to make sure you have all the information?

Questions like this and others can be really helpful to you setting your own expectations.

Above All Else, Don’t Push

If not this story, the next one. Believe me, relationships in this space run long and weird.

Christina Pacelli from Red reached out to me to cover the Eye Fi (a USB-to-wifi cool gadget) over a year ago. She sent me one. I couldn’t really get over my own techno-idiocy to make it work. A year later, Christina and team got smart and mailed me a new Eye-Fi (still have the old one, by the way) and a Novatel Mifi device (which acts like a wandering hotspot). Combined with BOTH, I’ll be able to use this product on the show floor at my next event and report back what I think of its benefits to various groups.

A year. Christina has been politely persistent for a year. And it will pay off. (Who knows? Maybe the links already make it pay off.)

Don’t push bloggers, and just accept that sometimes the story doesn’t hit. I’ve had a series of situations where things seemed right, and upon checking them out, I just didn’t feel good about blogging it, or wasn’t moved to blog it, etc. As the person pushing that particular product, I’m sure it doesn’t feel well when your push goes nowhere. I’m so sorry when I’m the cause. I imagine bloggers also have their own reasons and feel bad, too.

In most cases, it comes around to the better at some point. This is a long game for lots of us. Be patient. Learn who doesn’t work out. Move onward.

An Imprecise Science

There’s more to it than all this, but this is a good start. If you’ve questions, I can definitely add more. What do you think? What have you tried that’s worked? What else have I missed?

Photo credit 蓝莓兔子