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Archives for October 2012

How Not To Use Triberr

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This past weekend I created a tribe and was invited into four others; something was in the water! One particular tribe was formed by someone seeking multiple shares of his content, and thus he formed a tribe of 100 “power sharers.”

A handful of my peers are in the group; the other 95 I have not had the privilege of meeting. That’s almost a good thing…you want to be in tribes with people you’ve not yet met so you can read new material, share new content and build on your community.

I accepted the invitation on Sunday; by Monday evening I was exhausted having visited my Triberr stream more than four times that day to stay abreast of the posts that were everywhere from people I didn’t know (and thus could not gauge the quality of their writing).

I began to panic and truly wonder whether I should back out of the tribe and not engage. I thought I’d give it a week to see what happens and tough it out. It’s been a few days, but the volume of content/posts in my Triberr stream is absolutely overwhelming.

Adam Toporek gave me a tip that you can hide people from the stream; I didn’t know that. If there is someone littering the stream with poor-quality content, I’m going to need to check into that little tool.

What’s making me most nervous is my consciousness about being a good influencer. I don’t want to forward schlock; I’m trying to read before I forward; however, it’s impossible for me to read more than the title and the intro.  (There’s a tip to pay special attention to your blog title and the introduction.)

There are definitely peeps writing excellent content in this bunch of 100 bloggers, and there is content I have no interest in. The breadth of content is amazing and having it all in one place is kind of exciting.

I’m getting a glimpse of some cool monetization from the mommy blogger and real estate sales person. I’m seeing ideas for content curation, and reviews by tech geeks, as well as many, many authors trying a go with blogging and book reviews.

What this “experiment” is doing for me is the following:

1. Immediate introduction to a variety of bloggers I don’t know.

2. Testing whether my peers in this tribe truly are power sharers. I’ve shared more of others’ content than they have shared of mine.

3. Getting a Twitter bump; more followers coming on board as a result.

4. Enabling me the opportunity to write this piece more neutrally (which is the right thing to do).

5. Showing me how Triberr should ultimately be used as a best practice.

6. Making me appreciate the tribes I’m in and the ones I’ve created of like-topic bloggers within my peer group and vertical.

7. Giving me a new appreciation for what Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo have built in this channel. We were there in its pre-infancy, and now look at it — astonishing growth and universe of bloggers all in one place.

Triberr comes and Triberr goes…bloggers should NOT underestimate its power to build influence, community, and brand. Trust me, I’m a case study.

Chief Marketer Social Marketing 2012 Survey Results

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Chief Marketer is one of my faves for reading about topics oriented to B-to-B social media marketing (what I do) and tips and tricks of the trade. A survey of brand marketers was just released, and I was invited to share feedback about responses by B-t0-B marketers and B-to-C marketers…we should all be saying B-to-P by now, eh?

The Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Survey showed a number of interesting findings, and I detail a few in this quickie video of Soulati Media On The Street (taken with the iPhone 4S, holding the camera flipped my way and standing in my bright yellow and red kitchen — that was all for Michelle Quillin of New England Multimedia who just went smartphone on us!).

What I don’t detail is the following:

56% of brand marketers surveyed said social media is “complex to measure.” 

Why is that? My question in response you’ll need to hear in the video, actually. (Heh.)

By a factor of 3, brand marketers said they would reduce engagement on Facebook next year (I sorta garbled that in the video, so I explain it better here).

This is fascinating, and I can leave it up to the Facebook marketers and trainers to determine a really smart answer, but here’s my deduction:

Facebook has made its own life complex and thus ours.

With 1 billion registered users (1/3 of the world’s population), the little U.S. company struggling on the stock market, is still trying to ace mobile. Along the way, it bought Instagram and then launched Camera (what’s the difference?), introduced Timelines and now Collections, has privacy issues and advertising data malarkey — no wonder the medium is complex for brand marketers still stuck measuring with likes and shares (that’s old).

LinkedIn remains a favorite for B-to-B marketers at 85% adoption while B-to-C marketers are only engaging there 39% (of respondents polled).

Google+ is a critical channel for local visibility and organic search, yet most of the marketers surveyed yawned at this medium. I encourage everyone to claim their brand identity!

If you want to see the really long version of my video (12 minutes), you can click here. Otherwise, take a peek with me right now:

 

Any thoughts, Friends?

This has been the 11th installment of Soulati Media On  The Street! Thanks for watching!

Emulate, Collaborate, Create To Drive Blog Success

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Look around at the bloggers who influence you. I’m going to bet they post frequently, lead with news you’ve yet to learn, educate you about some tech thing, and generally fuel oodles of comments and engagement.

There’s something else you should take note of, too:

What new collaborative project are these bloggers announcing of late?

Let me illustrate what I’m talking about:

Gini Dietrich

A favorite blogger, author, speaker and friend extraordinaire Gini Dietrich, of Spin Sucks fame, recently announced her collaboration called The Three Things with Howie Goldfarb and Michael Schechter to run one post each Sunday about something that’s new and is meaningful.

Danny Brown

Danny Brown spins more creativity than anyone I’ve ever seen.  Back in the day, 12for12K was his pet project; it’s how I was introduced to him. Since that time, I’ve been privy to his blog changing focus, changing design, and announcing new collaborations.

His latest is For Bloggers By Bloggers, and peeps can jump in there and ask questions of leading bloggers and gain access to just about any topic.  Danny has other blogs, too, with a band of writers. Don’t forget the recent event in Toronto on social media he just put on.  Here’s a post from one of my favorite search marketing experts, Brankica Underwood.

Mark W. Schaefer

Mark Schaefer has two books under his belt, a smashing success with Social Slam (third year upcoming), and a new collaboration with some big names in Jay Baer, Tom Edison, and Jason Falls called The Social Habit.  His Sunday post shows how Mark gets out of his box to interview  the founder of Storify…a channel I need to look into.

The SMB Collective (shameless  plug)

I’d be remiss not sharing my pet project that began with Neicole Crepeau two years ago and engaged a community of small business owners to contribute posts to The SMB Collective. I’m trying desperately to resurrect this wonderful blog (gosh, where is my time), because it’s an outlet for each of us to focus on business issues and share tips.  Let me make this my call to action for you to join me. Submit a post from the archives with links and an image if you choose, and you can earn some link love.

 

Continuous Creativity 

These are just 3.5 examples of leaders on the ‘sphere who are continually innovating to keep things interesting for themselves, their brand and their community. I could interview them for this piece, but I’m going to do something I rarely like to do, and that’s assume.

Here’s what I think these three blogger leaders are doing:

1. Innovation is a requirement of growth to keep fresh ideas and content in front of an audience and community.

2. With new concepts comes more attention from a wider array of audiences.

3. Without change, the blogging journey would be boring and a community would also get bored.

4. Collaborations help everyone be on top of their game and engage with the smartest minds and close the six degrees of separation forever.

 

What does that say about your blog:

  • If you’ve been blogging 12 months, it’s time to change it up.
  • Ensure you tweak your design every six months or else the landscaping gets stale.
  • Invite more guest bloggers to write and expand your network beyond just your own writing.
  • Do more video or try podcasting. (When you upgrade your technology, you can do podcasting much easier.)
  • Do Q&A with someone you admire or who has a high level of influence.
  • Add calls to action to the blog to encourage people to subscribe and/or download a study, e-book or something.
  • Always have something in the works. There must be a top-secret project you’re working on to drive your creativity?
  • Start  on a small scale and grow from there; people are in your tribes, in your stream, in your network…ask them to collaborate!

 Think first.

Please do emulate the leaders, but engage on a scale that works for you. With more creative juice flowing, you can also boost mojo that leads to long-term success.

This Business of Breasts

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October. The. Pink. Month.

Who doesn’t know by now that Is this the month that companies must do or die? The local fire engine is now pink — really? How many tax payer dollars were used for that?

(Aside: This is not a post against victims and survivors of breast cancer; I have the utmost compassion for their plight.)

I’m wondering how the gents feel each October; I wonder if prostate cancer should have a huge splash, too.

This business of breasts is quite the marketing opportunity for companies to show ‘raderie. Heck, it seems girls and women’s bodies are incredible treasures of opportunity for pharmaceutical companies.

 Merck’s Gardasil

Gardasil, the Merck creation of a series of three injections for pre-sexual teen girls to ward off human papillomavirus which causes cervical cancer, recently …albeit the drug launched in 2007. Turns out one of the side effects was fainting on the day of the shot (do you think that was purely anxiety for these young ladies?).

The Texas governor Rick Perry mandated all girls get the shot while 24 states launched legislation requiring all school girls to get the shot in 2007 prior to safety studies.

Barr Pharma Plan B Contraceptive

How about the from Barr Pharmaceuticals called Plan B, to all the teen-age girls’ families throughout 50 schools in the 1-million student body?

The Associated Press broke the story Sept. 26, 2012 .

It’s being given to teenage girls many who have yet to have intercourse and to parents who have the option to opt out of the program. Only 1 to 2 percent of parents refused.

Here’s more:

  • More than 7,000 New York City girls ages 15 to 17-years-old get pregnant each year.
  • More than 2/3 of those pregnancies end in abortion.

A parent and president of the parent association at a high school on Staten Island quoted in the story by the Associated Press said, “The children nowadays are not going to abstain from sexual intercourse. How many unwed mothers do we need?”

How Do You Feel? 

As a mother of a 10-year-old girl, I cringe. The message I hear for our daughters is one promoting promiscuity with a drug safety net. Let’s not even address birth control measures for teenage girls, either.

Boys and Condoms

Here’s what I’d like to know…are condoms being passed out to families and all the teenage boys in high schools? Are boys suffering the consequence of teenage pregnancy as well as the girls? Do boys have to carry around the computerized babies that actually throw a tantrum, puke and poop in the night? I have never seen a boy carrying those faux babies; but, they should!

From what I’ve read of late, the consequence of teen intercourse is a one-sided situation skewed to the girls. When pink October arrived with a bang on the heels of the Gardasil news last week and the morning-after pill the week prior, I knew I had to speak.

This about firing up your blog pushed me over the edge to publish.

I’m a concerned mother of a pre-teen daughter, a business owner who sees females being exploited in pharmaceuticals, and a parent on the fence about these new fixes that may or may not be a good thing. I just don’t know yet.

What I do know is that gender inequality about this business of breasts and sexual promiscuity is alive and well.

Bring it…

 

 

 

The Future of Blogging Is Mobile Technology

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This is post #351; how cool is that?

The future of blogging is mobile technology AND motivated bloggers, that’s my add. This week, I took Mark Schaefer’s blog post about dim lights ahead for bloggers with little that’s new and added my perspective. Read Mark’s post there; read my post here.

In comments, the community heard from both Mark Schaefer and Danny Brown. Each weighed in to put some more insight to what’s around the bend for bloggers.

What they said is too valuable not to make into a post:

Mark suggested he purposely kept his post about what’s new in blogging (July 2012) a bit thin to prompt conversation and chatter about the direction we’re all going. What he clarified in comments on the blog yesterday was more on the influence of mobile technology on blogs.

Mark proffered, “ As smartphones increasingly become our first step to the Internet, the utility of our blogs is eroding day by day. Our beloved medium is becoming harder to read, harder to engage with and less useful – and writing better blog posts won’t change that.”

What he also alluded to is mobile platforms remove the bells and whistles from a blog’s appearance. When people use smartphones and tablets to read a blog, all the widgets and plug-ins in the sidebar disappear. Who we are becomes next to invisible when mobile technology is used.

Enter Danny Brown.

Danny shared fabulous tips in comments I’ll paraphrase and quote:

  • Bloggers are lazy and short-changing their audience.
  • Bloggers have no reason not to be mobile for readers’ convenience and at minimal cost.

“Free platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com already offer great mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized designs, and if you’re on self-hosted WordPress, plugins like WPtouch Pro offer a great solution, too,” said Danny in comments.

“Yet, the best one – and very inexpensive – is a true, responsive design. This adapts your site or blog to whatever browser your visitor comes in on, so it’s not just optimized for mobile for older browsers and different displays.

You can grab a responsive design package from the likes of Studiopress and their Genesis framework and child themes for as little as $80.

If you’re serious about your blog and your readers, go responsive. Don’t look to blogging’s future as being at stake – think about you as a blogger, and your responsibility to user experience,” he concluded.

Responsive Design

According to Wikipedia responsive design is “an approach to web design in which a designer intends to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”

If you’re really a geek, you may want to try and read the rest of the page after sentence one; I couldn’t make heads or tails about it, but it certainly becomes the question to ask designers of websites and blogs.

Do you do responsive design?

About That Technology

Mark Schaefer will tell you what a scaredy cat I was back in the day when I insisted on tweeting instead of blogging – for a whole year! Mark would try to convince me, and I’d cringe about the technology.

I still hate it because I’ve not mastered it. The things you hear me whine loudest about are the things I fear – big data, analytics, technology, and my new iMac.

Deploy New Plug-ins

What the leaders are saying is for a blogger to grow to the next level, technology is the answer. Go get WPTouch or WPTouch Pro:

From Brave New Code on the plug-in: WPTouch (lifted exactly)

WPTouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

Now Available: WPtouch Pro! Totally re-written top to bottom, with a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, Web-Application mode, and more!

Awesome iPad theme support is now available in WPtouch Pro, now at version 2.7!

So, to wrap it up — run and get some new mobile-type plug-ins for your blog; we have to or else Mr. Brown is going to keep calling us lazy critters!

Credit: Brave New World WP Touch