July 8, 2008 70 Comments

Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy

crowd In yet another moment of informational threading, here’s a post by Dan Kennedy about hyper productive markets. Kennedy points out that knowing your rough sales target is one thing, but knowing the most productive and yielding part of the whole bunch is worth so much more.

Thread this together with Robert Middleton’s post about a karate model for marketing. There’s a lot to it, but the key point was something he took out of another presentation he’d seen, and that was this:

1. You first have to get your clients and customers to consume what you’ve already sold them.
2.…

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July 8, 2008 114 Comments

What Social Media Does Best

office workers If you’re still looking for the best ways to explain to senior management or your team or your coworkers or your spouse what it is that social media does, why it’s different than the old way people used to use computers and the web, why people are giving two hoots about it, here are some thoughts to start out the conversation. I look at this mostly from a business perspective, but I suspect you’ll find these apply to nonprofits and other organizations as well. Further, as I’m fond of saying, social media isn’t relegated to the marketing and PR teams. It’s a bunch of tools that can be used throughout businesses, in different forms.…

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July 5, 2008 209 Comments

A Sample Blogging Workflow

writer 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.


Goals of Your Blog Posts

Blogging with a purpose helps you stay consistent.…

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July 4, 2008 81 Comments

Threading Some Trends Together

This post by Shel Israel and this post by Steve Rubel bear reading and examining. There’s something afoot, and it deals with several pieces of economic pie shifting at the same time. In fact, it’s a little strange that Richard Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, is so timely. For a little more trend connection, throw in a little bit of Seth Godin from May (this has stuck with me since then).

If you are an employer, think on this:

Connectivity is Everywhere

It costs you more money to house a work staff than it does to manage them remotely.…

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July 1, 2008 46 Comments

What Do YOU Think People Want From Your Site

Heather McConnell Forever the thinker, Jeremiah Owyang posted about the future of corporate websites. He cites Kristie Connor and Christopher Smith, who won a contest for their efforts to describe such. It’s a great question. I’d recommend reading Jeremiah’s post and commenting on that, but if you want to talk about it more, it’s a great question.

People Want Information

Not marketing. When I go to Staples.com, it’s because I need a store locator, or the price of a USB drive. I don’t mind being sold potential values and bargains around the information I seek, but I sure don’t want to hear marketing-ese about whatever you think the summer value plan is going to be.…

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June 30, 2008 50 Comments

How Do Realtors Demonstrate Community

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.…

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June 27, 2008 37 Comments

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?

    • …

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June 25, 2008 85 Comments

Writing Email That Gets Answered

mail Writing email seems to be a recurring topic of mine. I receive about 400 messages a day at present, and most of these require an answer. There are mails that get a faster response, and some that take days. Here’s the difference, plus a few more ideas.

One Decision Per Email

It seems counter to cutting down on email to ask you to limit the decisions required in a message to one per email, but I’ve seen it have the opposite effect. Think about choosing to go out to eat: if the first message is, “what day is good for you?”, the second message is, “what type of food do you like?”, and the third message is, “should we invite Jay, even though he laughs a lot and makes it hard to concentrate?”, you’ll see my point.…

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June 24, 2008 81 Comments

Social Media Strategy- The Planning Stage

As part of my Social Media 100 series, and because I believe it will have value to the space in general, I’m working through all the elements of a social media strategy. What comes first? Planning.

In coming up with the elements of a plan, I found a few surprises. One, I hadn’t considered having a “trial” phase or project as part of a strategy. Maybe there are elements that you’re not ready to roll up against your main brand. For those, you might want to trial them in a less direct way. Another surprise was that I hadn’t considered the training required for internal resources until I had a conversation with Cynthia Closkey.…

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June 20, 2008 66 Comments

Social Media Strategy – Aligning Goals and Measurements

bullseye Since starting a social media strategy series, I’ve been working diligently on understanding what goes into the process. I’m building a framework that, when completed, should prove fairly useful. Along the way, I’ll share some of what I’m learning, so that you can learn along with me, and hopefully influence the end results with your thoughts and ideas. Today, let’s talk about goals, strategies and measurements. We’ll start with a specific goal from my company, go into another basic example, and then open the conversation to you.

You Can’t Have Strategy Without First Having Goals

Strategy is essentially the diet, but the goal might be weight loss, muscle growth, cholesterol reduction, allergy aversion.…

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