In my keynotes and workshops on internet marketing (which I am hereby referring to as “new marketing”), one of my key concepts is “leading with value.” For me, a key part of business in general is creating (and maintaining) relationships. Of course, business is about much more than just making money. But, in this culture, that’s easy to forget. My real bottom line is the fact that the quality of the relationships that I have created via my business are perhaps the greatest source of satisfaction that I have in my work (right up there with the creative satisfaction and opportunity to make a difference).
For this reason, I am particularly enthusiastic about the authentic aspects of social media that literally depend upon “leading with value.” Social media is about networking, which to me means “virtually meeting” new, interesting people and learning new things from them. And, likewise, being able to easily share what I consider to be valuable information with as many people as possible. I love that. I enjoy it so much that sometimes I even think, “I was born for social media” …and I’m not even a social media “big shot.”
So along these lines, I simply want to start my Monday morning by sharing a couple of insightful blog posts that to me do a great job of underscoring some important aspects of our new media world. Hopefully, they will provide sparks for you as they have for me, so we can all go out and (like the Beatles said) “make it better”:
Focusing on Value: How I’m Changing How I Use Twitter
This is one of the most substantive blog posts I’ve read in some time, and I especially like it because it addresses, in a very real and pragmatic way, how best to deal with Twitter users who spam. Bottom line, don’t auto-follow everyone back; and most importantly, un-follow all those affiliate marketers who are only trying to “capture” your dollars.
The Five Essential Pillars of a Social Media Campaign
This list of values provide a foundation for social media relationship building that are, as the author says, “essential.” They include “generosity” which is very close to my “Leading with Value” concept.
ABC-TV News on “Marketing with Meaning”
Yes, marketing executives are actually writing books on how marketing campaigns are more effective when they have MEANING. What a concept! Nice to see it being covered in the so-called mainstream media.
I love this. I’ve been playing around with iPhone photo editing apps for a month or two, but I just discovered Chase Jarvis’ TheBestCamera.com (as in “the best camera is the one that’s with you”) and now I’m more excited about iPhone photography than ever before.
This integrated offering has me really impressed. Not only is it probably the best iPhone photo editing app that I’ve seen; but, it’s got integrated photo sharing to Twitter and Facebook built in, plus instant uploading to a true iPhone photo community site. Get the picture? (yes, pun intended) In fact, they’ve got the Big Picture. They’ve thought this through and put together what is essentially a mobile photography platform that’s sophisticated, feature rich, supported by great user interface (online and on iPhone). Very well done.
This iPhone app has already made it onto my first page of iPhone apps… a first! In fact, I’m using it to replace Apple’s iPhone Camera app.
As far as I can tell both TheBestCamera website and Mr. Jarvis himself have really “got it going on.” I’ll let him introduce himself via the video below. The app and the site are very much worth checking out, in my humble opinion…
Even though blogging is currently a very big buzz… a “buzz word du jour” even, I still think it widely misunderstood. So, what’s The Big Idea?
First of all, your blog is your home base. If you’re doing social media marketing, it’s the center of your virtual storm. Your Twitter, Facebook and other social media posts all link back to your blog.
Perhaps even more importantly, your blog is where you find your voice. It’s a real world exercise in speaking your truth and finding your value, making your offering. It’s not a new marketing trick. It’s actually the heart of authentic, transparent, 21st Century marketing.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an awesome video clip featuring two true marketing “gurus.” Don’t be fooled, this video is less than 2 minutes long, but you may not hear a more important message this week (or month? or year?) So maybe you’ll want to watch it more than once? You probably know the speakers. Seth Godin who has written some of the most creative as well as best-selling internet marketing books ever (in fact he coined the term “permission marketing”) and Tom Peters of “In Search of Excellence” and so many other best sellers. Listen carefully. These guys not only really know what works, they are sharing what’s most essential to them… and apparently that’s blogging!
One benefit of my on-going back recovery is that I’m currently watching even more online video than usual. This weekend, I was delighted to discover a rich sampling of video clips that I found inspiring as well as informative. So, of course, I want to share the three carefully selected video clips embedded below with you, dear readers, blog commenters and tweet peeps.
I invented the term “Video Web” when I was writing for Videography magazine, and now that this particular dimension of the Web is expanding and improving in quality at an exponential rate, I find that it also just keeps getting better (at least by my subjective standards). I hope you will agree that these clips are exemplary of something good and that they also reflect some valuable trends and useful models. But, even more importantly, I think that each of them also delivers actionable, leading edge information (at least for some of you).
1. “RIP: A Remix Manifesto,” A Mashup Culture Flick with a Message
The first clip is a trailer for an independent feature film, RIP: A Remix Manifesto being distributed via the Web as well as in theaters, Internet cafes and at film festivals. Being a strong believer in the importance of freedom around the controversial issues of digital rights, I was so inspired by the content I saw in the trailer and on the producer’s other sites, I coughed up $5 (optional) and downloaded the whole movie. (This was a first for me.) It’s really well done. It’s as clear as anything I’ve seen—certainly at this length—in illuminating these important rights issues. And, because of its real world examples (most notably the mashup performing artist, Girl Talk), this movie authentically walks its talk on many levels. Highly recommended!
2. Leo Laporte Explains Successful Webcasting with Transparency
Personally, I admit to not being a fan of podcasting pioneer and former TechTV host, Leo Laporte; however, for obvious reasons, Mashable’s headline, “Leo Laporte Makes $1.5 Million Per Year from Podcasting” caught my eye. And then, as I started listening to the 40-minute conference talk below, I was impressed by not only the success of the Twit.tv entrepreneur, but by his willingness to share pretty much everything he knows about what’s working and what’s not working in the world of Net video advertising and more. He also frankly shares his experiences as he has made the migration from failed broadcaster willing to call an idiot an “idiot” and a stupid business model “stupid,” to someone who has built a viable online “netcasting” business that is reportedly doubling every year. Laporte has really been there and done that, and he’s not afraid to tell you what he knows. I like that.
3. Epipheo Creates Viral Wave Explaining Google Wave
Clear, concise video clips that explain technology with under-stated style are quite close to my heart. If you don’t know, Google Wave is a “next big thing” groupware, collaborative platform currently in “limited beta” at Google. Amongst the technorati, there’s quite a buzz. Even Business Week thinks it could be big. Enter the video clip below, “What is Google Wave?” from Epipheo Studios. This clip was just released a few days ago and I have personally watched it go from about 150K views to over 200K views on YouTube in the last 24 hours (as of Sunday night, 10/4). Watch it. I think you might learn something worth knowing, at least if you’re interested in the leading edge of online collaboration; and, for sure, you’ll see a neat, short video clip that tells its story well. A tip of my virtual hat to you, epipheo guys.
Link sharing inspired by social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn is nothing new. But fresh data published in Sunday’s New York Times by Brad Stone in his article, “Share The Moment And Spread the Wealth” reinforces the fact that this trend is continuing to gather momentum. It is doing so even to the extent that it has become equally important and now sits side-by-side with SEO (the historically dominant technique for building website traffic via Google) as a strategy for increasing the visibility for your website.
This underscores the powerful points made by some of my favorite thought leaders. Whether you call it building your “Tribe” as Seth Godin does or creating a “World Wide Rave” as David Meerman Scott articulates the opportunity, I have to say that whether you are a marketer or just a business owner, social networking has now crossed a major trend line. If you didn’t consider it essential before, now there is no doubt (at least in my mind) that social networking that encourages link sharing must now be considered a mission critical component of every company’s marketing plan.
For this reason, ComBridges’ is increasingly offering more social media marketing services in a variety of formats, including contract, consulting and even mentoring/coaching. Click here to request a free consultation.
FYI, I’m also very excited to let you know that I will be covering social media marketing and related topics in our upcoming EBiz Express Teleseminar series. Be sure to subscribe to our “It’s a Wonderful Web” enewsletter if you want to be invited. The guests/co-presenters will be awesome, and we are keeping this educational series very affordable.
I’m glad to see the comments on the post below about the maintenance and other issues involved in running a WordPress website. Unfortunately, just now, these challenges have increased as a result of idiot hackers who are violating WordPress websites to insert “black hat” permalinks. How lame and what a nuisance, and more evidence of my old saying, “It’s always more complicated than you think it is.”
If you are responsible for a WordPress website, heads up and here’s a good article with links to other useful articles: “Old WordPress Versions Under Attack” by Lorelle on WordPress. More useful information is in Andy Sowards post.
We were working on service level agreements this week that we plan to propose to our ComBridges clients in order to cover this kind of maintenance service. In the meantime, if you are a ComBridges client, we’ll let you know if your site is in need of service and any additional costs that may be involved.
Thanks for spreading the word (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) so that everyone becomes aware of this issue as quickly as possible.
And putting this aside, Happy Labor Day weekend to you all!
Recently, in a WordPress group on LinkedIn, the question was asked “Is WordPress the answer to all our prayers?” The writer was extending the conversation about his own blog post which objected vehemently to crazy claims that complete novices could build “killer websites” in minutes if they just used WordPress. It seems that the world of technology is filled with these kinds of false promises and unrealistic expectations.
For those of us who have hand-coded HTML back before tools like Dreamweaver were invented, and who have experimented and had learning experiences with creating web pages in a wide variety of ways, WordPress is an important new platform for website development. Compared to anything we’ve seen before, WordPress is amazingly simple and intuitive, especially given its array of powerful features. It lets you change your design without affecting your content, it has great built-in SEO (search engine optimization) features, and it’s free.
WordPress also has advantages over competing website publishing systems like Drupal and Joomla. For one thing, you can use easy offline editors (like Windows Live Writer and Ecto) to update content on WordPress sites. WordPress also began as a blogging platform, and as a result, it’s “natural” for WordPress websites to include blogs. For many website designers, even those who have never learned Java, never learned Flash, never learned PHP, and don’t know a single programming language, WordPress does answer many prayers.
But, that’s very different from saying that anyone can use WordPress to design and implement a sophisticated website. If you try to take advantage of WordPress’ full capabilities as a content management system without knowing anything about HTML, CSS, or PHP — or about WordPress itself — you are simply asking for trouble. Yes, you can set up a basic blog using WordPress.com without knowing much, but to really make WordPress (or any other new software) sit up and do tricks, you have to put some time into learning how to use it. (More advanced users download WordPress from WordPress.org. The supply of tricks available at WordPress.com is limited.)
When you think about it, most people only know how to use the most basic features of the software that they use every day. They treat Microsoft Word like a glorified typewriter and don’t even know most of its tools and options exist, much less how to use them. They pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop and only use the functions they could have gotten for free with Picasa. (Photoshop is so sophisticated that even advanced users can spend hours studying DVD tutorials to learn new things.)
So why should WordPress be any different? It’s not, but people get excited and apparently WordPress’ many benefits give birth to irrationally exuberant expectations. Either that, or there are some people out there who think that because WordPress is easy for them, it must seem that easy to everyone else.
For example, if you hear that there are 5,000 free plugins that extend WordPress’ platform, and hundreds of free themes in the theme repository, shouldn’t you expect that just looking through them and testing them to see which ones would be best for you might take quite some time? And then there’s the fact that new versions of WordPress come out a lot more often than new versions of Photoshop. So you have to stay up to date, by doing things like attending meetups and Wordcamps, reading blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, or even reading books. (There are several good books on WordPress, but it is hard for print books to keep up with the rapid developments in the platform and its plugins.)
Because WordPress is a web-based platform, it’s much easier for geographically dispersed teams to collaborate on websites. But due to its popularity, Wordpress sites are also open to server hacks and blog spam attacks–as ComBridges discovered first hand recently.
While it doesn’t necessarily take a programmer to learn WordPress, if you want to create a sophisticated WordPress site, skills like PHP will come in handy. And, if you want to learn your way around, study the WordPress Codex and be sure to allow some time to learn important fundamentals such as, for example, which plugins make it easier to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system). For professional website developers like us, that’s part of our job.
Even though WordPress is easy enough for Sallie’s hairdresser to update, Sallie was the one to create the site, and had to provide more than one tutorial on posting to the blog and editing pages.
WordPress deserves to be praised for many reasons, but exaggerated claims about its ease of use for the complete novice does everyone a disservice. Let’s practice a little expectation management, people.
Don’t view this in your face presentation at your own risk. It’s packed with provocative stats, presented in rapid fire fashion, to make the case for Social Media as much more than a fad, but rather a real people-powered media revolution. Dare to disagree?
If you are still in the “I don’t get it” crowd in relation to the current Big Thing i.e. Twitter, you are not alone. I resisted it. Tim O’Reilly resisted it. David Letterman is still resisting it. Even Kevin Spacey can’t convince him. Just the same, the Twitter “toothpaste” is out of the tube and it’s not going back in.
So, to support your techno-enlightenment, especially if you are a business person not taking advantage of this remarkable opportunity for fun, social networking, information gathering, low budget customer service, and just plain ole marketing, I offer the following recent bites of online media in a friendly effort to get you going:
Our ComBridges team uses Central Desktop as “groupware” for project management and collaboration. I appreciated a blog post by one of their young associates called “Twitter for Business? Call Me Dr. Jekyll…” Although I think of this as more of a “Confessions of a Former Twitter Resister,” bottom line he makes a solid business case in a very personal way (which, by the way, is a very good thing to do online).
Nissan has recent launched a new website for its upcoming electric car called the Leaf. What’s interesting is that their new website is “Powered by Twitter.” Of course, this is just one example, amongst many, of serious businesses investing in Twitter for marketing and customer relationship building. Note the real time Q&A below the car stuff.
Darren Rowse, a.k.a. ProBlogger, who I respect, is arguably one of the most successful professional bloggers in the world, and he is also a down-to-earth, authentic thought leader. Darren has not only created another blog especially for Twitter, Twitip which is packed with great info on how to use Twitter; but he’s produced a very nice, FREE 40-minute orientation program for you which I’m embedding below.
Now, go tweet your brains out, have a great time, and market appropriately please. Thanks.
I think this is the first time I have given something I thought worthy of posting on this blog the same title as the thing itself. It’s an indication of how “right on” this simple slide show is. Don’t be intimidated by the fact there are 83 slides. You can click as fast as you like. I highly recommend this content. It’s a clear and well-articulated message and, in the view of this media maven, includes many concepts that more of us need to understand. Useful information rules! Please let me know if you agree.
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In my keynotes and workshops on internet marketing (which I am hereby referring to as “new marketing”), one of my key concepts is “leading with value.” For me, a key part of business in general is creating (and maintaining) relationships. Of course, business is about much more than just making money. But, in this culture, that’s easy to forget. My real bottom line is the fact that the quality of the relationships that I have created via my business are perhaps the greatest source of satisfaction that I have in my work (right up there with the creative satisfaction and opportunity to make a difference).
Link sharing inspired by social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn is nothing new. But fresh data published in Sunday’s New York Times by Brad Stone in his article, “
” as Seth Godin does or creating a “
” as David Meerman Scott articulates the opportunity, I have to say that whether you are a marketer or just a business owner, social networking has now crossed a major trend line. If you didn’t consider it essential before, now there is no doubt (at least in my mind) that social networking that encourages link sharing must now be considered a mission critical component of every company’s marketing plan.
