I saw this great pic from Oscar Berg, and it showed his primary social media flow. I thought it was interesting, but then, it got me thinking about how I see my social media world (for me, not for clients, but it relates).

In September 2008, I wrote about using outposts in your social media strategy, and I defined the “home base,” “outposts,” and “passports” idea. If you see me speak, there’s a 40% chance, I define it quickly during such presentations. Outposts are those touchpoints away from your main online presence where you connect with others in some way.

In the above drawing, I point out that I see sources for input, and then I have places where I connect with others as an outpost.

You could do the same thing quickly with a piece of paper and a few minutes. The thing is this: I do see my site as the primary point of value. I put all my best work into [chrisbrogan.com], and push attention here, not to my outposts.

I see many using Posterous and other outpost apps as a kind of replacement to their home base, or as a temporary “second base,” I guess. I’m not sure how that tactic is working out for them. To me, spreading the value too thin is a recipe to have no value captured.

Thinking of your primary online presence as your home base (and it doesn’t have to be a blog, but Twitter isn’t necessarily the right medium, I don’t think), and then thinking of the places where you make social connections as your outposts (realized I forgot LinkedIn, but I’m there too, obviously), then you see how you might prioritize your time and/or how you might try keeping the value chain alive.

You might weigh your outpost efforts differently. You might determine where else you spend time (various forums, Flickr, etc) that contribute to your success, but without keeping your home base central and your outposts as a secondary part of the value, I think leads to a bit of frustration.

One last thought: sometimes, “success” in an outpost, like lots of great conversations on Twitter, pushes us to conclude that those areas are of more value to us. Ask yourself whether you see it that way in the larger ecosystem of your online presence.

What’s your take?

Mister Seth Godin schooled me personally HARD in The Dip. If you didn’t buy that book, do so. And read it. It’s like… a half hour of reading. It’s tiny and yet so powerful.

There is a right time to give up. There’s a right time to quit. The trick, and it is a HUGE trick, is knowing which is which.

In the new book that Julien and I are working on, that’s something we’ll talk about. We’ve both come to realize that by experimenting frequently, often privately, and iterating on our failures, we’ve come out ahead faster than not. But in that, we’ve learned when to give up. We’ve learned when to kill something that’s not working.

I urge you to think about this long and hard. As the year is coming to an end, review your efforts of the last year frankly. Ask yourself where it worked. Ask yourself where it wasn’t really all that successful. And determine what you’re going to do next. But do, in fact, think about when it might be time to give up, and then try something else.

One Last Thing

Remember that surrender is every bit as much a part of strategy as victory. Learning when to surrender or lose a smaller battle has been part of the success plan of every major war ever fought. The trick is in knowing what really matters, and never letting go of that. The problem we have is that we fall into the trenches and think the battle is the war.

Never give up? Hell. Give up all the time. Just keep your eyes on the real prize, what really matters, and don’t let that go.

Photo credit Beverly & Pack

You don’t have to build relationships to sell things. McDonalds is sinking over $100 Million USD into their McCafe program, because they expect sales of those products to account for $1 Billion in sales. Do you think they give a rat’s anus about getting to know me? Not at all. Will their efforts work? I’m guessing yes. Even if they miss that Billion mark, it will be a pretty decent ROI in the end for their efforts. (We like coffee.)

But relationships are a choice. I can choose to build relationships because I want a longer term sales experience with you. For instance, I was talking with @moniquewade on Twitter, and she was asking me if the Trust Agents community on Facebook was just a way to market the book. I replied, “The idea is this: relationships sell better than typical marketing. If you are PART of Trust Agents, it’s better than selling.”

I went on to say, “Exactly so. I’m not selling a book. That’s just the byproduct, the souvenir. I’m sharing access and interaction. For free!”

My Marketing Mindset for Trust Agents

First, pay attention: I’m talking about me, my marketing mindset, and specifically that which relates to Trust Agents, my upcoming book with Julien.

In thinking about marketing this book, Julien and I built a Trust Agents community over on Facebook. It (like a lot of what I do) is an experiment. We wondered if people wanted to talk about trust and how different trust is in the online world. As of this writing, we have over 1500 people participating in conversations, and sharing their thoughts.

Why bother, if all I want to do is sell a book? But that’s it. I don’t want to sell a book. I want to build a relationship that lasts much longer than a book. Yes, I’d love it if you buy a book. Julien and I worked very hard on it. We put a lot of our beliefs into it. We’ve spent months working on it, and we’d love for you to buy anywhere from one to 200 copies. But that’s not the point.

We want to know you. We want to talk with you. We want you to call us out when we’re wrong, and to tell us how to improve. We want to hear how you’re doing, and we want to interact.

Why? Because we feel that a trust agent uses the secret skill that we call being a “Human Artist,” and that knowing how best to build relationships of value is something best demonstrated instead of just being this thing we wrote about in a book.

Relationship marketing takes lots more effort, but I’m banking on the fact that you and I have much more between us than your $20 for our book.

Is One Better Than the Other?

Hell no, and punch the person who tells you it’s all about the relationships. When I drive into McDonalds, I order a large iced coffee with milk and one Splenda. I don’t care what McDonalds does wrong or right. They don’t care about me. It’s just a transaction, and it works just great. I am VERY aware of their new ad campaign, and I’m sure it’s driving more sales. It works great for them.

Could I sell Trust Agents without building relationships? Hell yes. There are lots of ways to mechanically get that book moved. Is that how I’ve chosen to do it? No. I much prefer the relationships.

The point is simple: choose. If you want to build relationships as part of your marketing, that’s very do-able. If you want to have a more transactional approach, that’s fine, too. But don’t attempt relationships and then hope for transactional returns.

And always be clear on your ask. If you’re building relationships ONLY to market, that’s just a longer haul transaction. Be clear if you’re asking someone for something, or if you’re just making friends. It helps on all fronts.

Thoughts From You?

What’s your take?

A Strategy is the Path You Choose to Take

Before we dive in, just realize this: strategy is a word that’s rarely used properly. Check out Erika Andersen’s Being Strategic if you need more on the right way to think about strategy. If not, just accept that strategy just means “the best way I can think of to get to the goal.”

Strategies are flexible. People don’t realize this. If your goal is to land more sales, then making one decision and sticking to it is not likely going to be the best way to plan your blogging methods. For instance, if you decide to write about product features every post, and that doesn’t convert to sales, would you still do it? No. You’d adjust your strategy and try new content approaches.

With that all said, let’s go in a bit more.

Sample Goals to Start our Strategies

Here’s a quick list of some ways one could use a blog in alignment with business strategy:

• Customer Loyalty
• Product/Service education
• Lead Generation
• Organic Keyword Marketing Assistance (SEO/SEM)
• Entertainment
• Awareness
• Thought leadership
• Announcements

There are, obviously, many more ways to use blogs, but you get the picture. From these goals, we can devise strategies.

Blogging Strategies

• Customer Loyalty – make a “customer of the week” post. Write about and promote others.
• Product/Service education – write several how-to posts
• Lead Generation – write posts that attempt to move people to a conversion point.
• Organic Keyword Marketing Assistance (SEO/SEM) – write blog posts that help you rate better for the search terms that matter to you.
• Entertainment – create interesting posts that keep up people’s good will
• Awareness – write frequent posts that maybe dip into many of these categories, to try and keep people interested
• Thought Leadership – write posts that establish you or your leaders as credible industry voices with great value.
• Announcements – use the blog as a glorified press release engine.

Again. I could write another 12 strategies each for the above-mentioned, but that’s not the point. I’m illustrating ways you can think about strategies for your blogging. Let’s go another layer down.

Tactics to Consider

• Customer Loyalty – include pictures in every post. Link to the customer often.
• Product/Service education – build good category support. Use sharethis.com or similar.
• Lead Generation – make simple calls to action. Don’t confuse with too many links, pictures, or other distractions.
• Organic Keyword Marketing Assistance (SEO/SEM) – learn which keywords you want to rank for and blog accordingly. (I’m not very into this method).
• Entertainment – build cross-promotional efforts, like tying posts to facebook and friendfeed for more exposure. The name of the game is eyeballs.
• Awareness – find ways to share and distribute. Look for external sharing mechanisms. The more you can cross-pollenate the message without seeming spammy, the better.
• Thought leadership – empower your leader (whoever you choose) to share as much as possible with the community. Comments help this cause lots.
• Announcements – be concise, and be able to share as much as possible.

What Works For You?

One thing to never forget is that you should always discount anything I say by tempering it with the understanding of what works best for you. You might be having tons of success by writing huge posts with no visual breaks. Who knows? Go with what works for you.

If you want more about the mechanics blogging, here is my best advice about blogging. Some of that might help, too.

Was this useful to you? What else did you want to share with everyone about your own successes? What’s worked or not worked for you?

Photo credit Floyd Nelio

Build a Foundation

The moment my blog took off was the moment I settled on a series of topics that people knew would consistently be the focus of my work. Long before I accepted that I was any kind of marketer, I settled into the idea that I wanted to talk about how social media tools and online communities changed things. At times, I’d talk about podcasting. Other times, I’d talk about features of a social network and how they might help you interact. But I had a foundation.

It’s hard finding that blogging voice and to settle on a topic. One focusing element I have that I try to practice all the time is: “will this help other people?” Though my post about how not to market on Twitter is a brief rant, it’s also something PR professionals and marketers can absorb, consider, and build their plans around. The lessons that came out of that post were: PR is no longer divided by days, but by hours. Marketers learned that Twitter users probably won’t respond well to any formalized campaign if it feels robotic. See? Helpful.

Start by thinking of the foundation of what you want your blog to do? Is it a blog to talk about yourself? Might not really grow very big. Is it a blog to report news? Then speed and accuracy are of the essence. Is your blog built to assist in marketing the thinking around your product or service? What if you turn that to make it around your customer’s potential needs?

Build With Colorful Blocks

In 27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community, I wrote about starting with a catchy title. I wrote about using a photo per post. I laid out lots of what you might consider your colorful blocks. But in another way, at the content level, posts can be blocks that build on each other.

For instance, if you’re writing about nonprofit tech tools, perhaps you start with a series of 101 posts that build upon each other. Maybe from there, you drill down to specific tools and implications for specific types of nonprofit work. Make each post able to standalone, but then have the opportunity to hook them up together into a larger and more useful work.

Let People Take Blocks And Build Yourself

The thing is, we all want to participate. We want to have our say, spin things our way, give our opinions, to make things look the way we want them to look. Why not make your blog posts just as user-friendly? Make your posts the starting points of other people’s posts. Make your posts a gathering place for others’ ideas, and then share those ideas in their own way.

When you go from talking/instructing to sharing and encouraging interactions, you get the full breadth of what social platforms like blogging encourage. If you can perform that one magic trick, you win. (Or you have a better shot at winning.)

What About You?

Does this make sense? Can you do something with this? If you go back and look at your last 20 or 30 blog posts, is there any kind of building-block structure, or are you shooting in all directions?

Photo credit, woodleywonderworks

Perfect. How’s that all work? Who actually does it? Who gets paid when things go well and who gets fired when they go poorly?

Where do the various social media tools belong in a company?

How Social Media Aligns Within Companies

This post is 100% variable. You could argue every point and be right. The main point of writing it is for us to think about it.

Is blogging marketing or PR? Technically, it’s neither. It’s a tool. But used by marketers, it’s a way to talk more about products and services, and it’s a way to engage in conversations. Hmm. That could be either marketing or PR. The question might come down to whether or not you’re going to use the blog as a conversion point or just a conversation station. See the difference? If you’re going to try and sell something in the food chain there, that’s probably on marketing’s shoulders. Agree? Disagree?

Twitter: Where Should It Go? I’m expecting Laura to swing in here and weigh in. Ditto Rachel Happe. Twitter, at its best, would be the new phone in the office. That is to say, I think it should be on every desk. HOW is it used? Well, there’s the thing. We can be like Frank Eliason of Comcast and do customer service. We can be like Ferg Devins at Molson and be the PR twitter type. We can be Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory and be the CEO. Where do you think it goes? I say everywhere, and then one strategy per account.

Facebook: Oui ou Non? Facebook is still an experimentation grounds within a company. I think most organizations keep these kinds of efforts tied to marketing, but is that where it belongs? What’s Human Resources relationship to Facebook and what should it be?

Video and Podcasting. Media making is surely the job of marketing, or outsourced advertising, right? What if project managers decide to use Flip cameras to capture their weekly status meetings, and then podcast the results to the other offices? Not really marketing, eh? But then, is there a larger media story within the organization, and do things like video and audio podcasting have more than one role? (Depending on the size of the organization, yes.)

And The Other Way Around?

Which tools help which department the other way around? If you’re in sales, do you care about podcasts? You might if you feel they improve your lead generation or funnel activity. If you’re in marketing, why should you want your message strewn all over the social web? If you’re in PR, won’t creating more channels just mean you’re responsible for more listening?

The Purpose of This Post

Now that I’ve thrown that all into the air, what are your thoughts? What can you riff on? What is cut and dry to you and/or your organization?

The point isn’t the post. It’s entirely the comments. Come play and think.

Photo credit AMagill

Every one of these ideas applies to us as much as it does to the incoming rush of journalists out there.

Location-Based Media

I live in a small town in northern Massachusetts, surrounded by many other small towns. There’s always tons of little things going on, but we rarely know what’s what or where. A blog with really simple brief posts about events, and then maybe longer reviews about places that are great to visit would really give me some value. And if you’re looking for revenue, local advertising is an area where you can hustle some interesting opportunities together.

Another location-based idea involves my experiments with BrightKite. I’ve written about my thoughts on the annotated world, and I think there are further opportunities here, for all of us to consider. And please, not for your company’s dumb products. Think “useful.” Think “helpful.”

Interest-Based Media

There are always opportunities for media around specific ideas. I suggested the need for someone to build a blog to equip people to report small news. It’s another way someone could be helpful, and there are so many more.

That’s the thing. You could write about your skills and there’s almost certainly someone out there who’d want to know more about it. Are you passionate about canning and pickling? I know that TV celebrity Brea Grant probably would subscribe, because she’s looking to learn more about it. Want to learn about grilling and food preparation? Try Justin Levy’s Prime Cuts blog.

There are hundreds of ways to slice this, maybe more. But there’s gold in figuring it out.

Self-Improvement

This category never gets old. Blogs like LifeHacker and 43 Folders and Lateral Action come right to mind, as do many other blogs that teach us ways to improve. There’s a fairly perpetual marketing for this kind of information. Do you have an area of self-improvement that you can write knowledgeably about? Maybe it’s your ticket to the next level.

We Have Such an Opportunity

We have the presses. We are the TV stations. This is our chance to master tomorrow’s radios today. Why create what’s been done before? Why stick to the media styles and methods and models that have dominated the traditional formats for so long?

Make useful media, share it far and wide, and build business around those opportunities. This is your chance.

Photo credit, ralphbijker

Where would you start? What would come first? How might you think about getting out there and joining in on the experience?

If I Started Today

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll build three different scenarios out, and give you the starting points for what I’d do with social media if I were in these steps. Try to extrapolate them out to your profession or your need. If you really want to have fun with this post, take what I’ve started here, and write your own post for your vertical or condition, and then be sure to share the ideas with us here, so we can go to your site and check it out. (We’ll even be able to visit via trackbacks, if you link back to the original post).

This post is brought to you by the Genesis Premium WordPress Theme:

Before it All: Listening

(Note: this was updated after Lucretia pointed out that I probably inadvertently forgot to mention it.)

Listening is my first move in starting to understand social media. That means this: go and read the blogs that are out there. Read from different genres. Go visit Twitter.com and more importantly search.twitter.com, and see what people are saying. Read comments on people’s blogs and see which ones seem to get any response. Search using Google and Technorati.com, and start listening to conversations that are out there.

And then, start here.

First Platform: A Blog

No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. It’s a website, with lots of built in features that make it useful from a search perspective, and simple from a content creation perspective. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Don’t worry as much about the features, although certain companies make blogging platforms that go above and beyond simple content publishing. Don’t focus hard on the add-ons and whizbangs, but do know that a bare bones, out of the box blog is about as appealing as two slices of bread with a piece of bologna on it.

Now, let’s break that into three potential scenarios.

Personal branding: I’d buy my own domain name, and host it somewhere inexpensive, but with good service.

Company communications: I’d use an off-brand domain, with a “powered by” mindset, similar to Digital Nomads by Dell. Meaning, I wouldn’t necessarily do a “product blog” or a “corporate voice” blog as much as I’d want to do a “something useful to people” blog. Exceptions: really big corporations with lots of bloggers, like Sun, IBM, Cisco, etc.

Nonprofit: I’d start a storytelling and pictures blog about the causes I was tasked with supporting. No question about it: stories and pictures are powerful contributors to nonprofit experiences.

For blog topics and other ideas, I’ve collected my best advice, and that should get you started there.

Second Step: Outposts

In all cases, I’d build outposts which help me reach into lots of different places and communicate with people where they might be. Depending on my needs, I might use different tools. At the very minimum, I’d start accounts on:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

I might or might not then pick one or two more specialized networks. Let’s look at how this works for our three examples.

Personal: use Twitter to build relationships and share interests. Use Facebook to learn about groups and events of interest. Keep LinkedIn active and updated, and stay involved in the answering of questions part of the site. Goal here: keep your name out there, far ahead of when you might need anything from anyone.

Company: use Twitter as a way to show that you're humans in there. I like how Dell has several namesatDELL type accounts like RichardATDell and LionelATDell, etc. You could also just be yourself, like ScottMonty from Ford, or astrout(Aaron Strout) from Powered. Use Facebook as individuals and LinkedIn as individuals, but with a group purpose. You might participate in other people's groups. You might find friends with like interests or similar demographics and reach out to them that way. Be human. That's the main goal here.

Nonprofit: depending on the cause, you could either use Twitter as the cause name, or you can reach out as an individual. There are both in the field, and I've yet to see which is more productive. Maybe a nonprofit can comment on their experiences here. On Facebook and LinkedIn, be the individual, but form groups around your causes, and invite people who might be like minded into the groups.

With all three groups, the specific networks I mentioned at the beginning of these segments would obviously vary. One note: don't use those tools that push your status across multiple platforms. I understand that it's simpler to update things that way, but it also means that you don't respect your individual audiences at those outposts.

In all cases, use your picture for the avatar, not a logo. Try to get a candid shot that's not a stuffy professional photo, but one that isn't a cropped picture of you next to some ex relation.

In all cases, put enough information in your profile to connote that you're at once a business person as well as a human being. In Facebook, consider which applications you add to your profile. Yes, being a pirate or a vampire might be fun, but it might also make someone question your professional intent. But do feel free to share your interests in books or movies or sports, and make sure your status messages aren't always and forever about your business interests, or people might be less engaged after a very short amount of time.

I also have my best advice about social networking to help you there, too.

Third Step: Audience

Once you have a primary place to express yourself (your blog), and a few outposts where you can communicate in a less structured, more real time way (outposts), the next then I would do is find like minds. It depends on your business goals what you might do with this audience, and for some people, this might not apply as much. For the three examples I gave, it would be an important thing to build a level of followership and interaction across your platforms, so we'll cover this all as one group, not as separate goals.

My best advice about building community and audience is this: be helpful. Write blog posts that others can use (like this one, for instance). The more you can help others, the more they'll come back.

Avoid writing "me too" blog posts about the latest news in your vertical. Chances are, someone else is doing it better, and your "me too" is just a throat-clearing proof that you're not creating original content. Work harder on doing something original instead of just pumping out "I read this article about" types of posts, unless you're going to expand on the ideas, and/or recast them for your particular audience.

If you're writing for a company, maybe these blog topics will spark some ideas. If you're writing a personal blog, here are 100 blog topics to get you started.

More important in growing a community: comment. Go out to other people's blogs and start getting involved. Use a service like BackType to learn what other people are saying and where they're commenting. The more you make your voice heard in the general space where you want to do business, the better you'll be.

Note something important: you might want to think about commenting in two places. First, where your peers are writing their stuff makes sense as a place to comment, but that will only bring you into a better relationship with your peers in a space. If you want to start building business, start learning to comment on your customers' blogs, in your customers' verticals, where your customers are spending their online time.

Fourth Step: Experiment

If something's not working, try something else. If you're not using analytics and stats packages to learn more about your web visitors, you're missing out. If you aren't learning how these social media elements tie to your business, and you're just using them as another isolated thing, then you're missing the whole reason to start (for businesses, at least).

Experiment. Try new things. I try something new every day. It might be a blog post. It might be a strategy about how I can get more people to do X instead of Y. It might be something as simple as reaching out to other people in new ways. But experiment. If you just sit around doing the same things you did to start out, you might as well turn in now.

I just gave myself another idea even writing this post. That's the power of experimenting. You learn by doing, not reading. So, read all this, but then do something.

Your Turn

What would you tell people about starting out? If you want to adapt this to your specific blogging or media making interest, what would you tell people differently? How else might you serve your community?

Or, what do you have further questions about?

What do you need to start today?

Photo credit, a super long name I don't remember, but just click this, okay?

You, at your desk, can come back and do the same thing over and over and over for weeks and weeks, and it will look like youre doing something. It will feel like you’re moving. But if you’re in the trenches, and you can’t see things from a different perspective, how do you know it’s working? How do you know anything?

In life, in business, in our interactions with people, the most visible thing is that things are the way they are. The truth, with effort, is that everything can change. Nothing is permanent. Your job is not permanent. Your relationships aren’t permanent. Where you live, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, are all things that, with effort, could move. Could change.

Are you stuck in the trenches or are you looking at 2009 with new eyes? With or without the answers, will you stick with what you’ve been doing, whether or not it’s working? Or will you be daring and try something new?

I’m over here trying something new. How about you?

The goal is rarely that. The goal is conversation. Or if you’re someone else, the goal is sales. Or if you’re someone else, the goal is thought leadership. Or the goal is capturing business practices.

It doesn’t require the right picture. It doesn’t require a blog post. It doesn’t require anything very specifically, as much as it requires realizing that you’re doing what matters most to the goal. If my goal is to make money blogging, then I do a really poor job of it. If my goal isn’t about this blog at all, but for something larger, then getting tied up in my stats and things like that means I’m not focusing on the goal.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Right?

Photo credit, Michael Morel