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Soulati-'TUDE!

The Great American Content Mashup

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I’m reading Jason Falls’s blog, Social Media Explorer, and if you’ve not subscribed to him, you’re missing the boat. In 500 words, Jason packs a punch with tips and lessons galore about social media and of late, content.

I predict the great American content mash up is ready to collide in our faces.

Everywhere you turn, Facebook pages are coming alive launched by companies that want a piece of the pie. But, look closely, the content is el stinko on many a fan page. How about Twitter? It’s not easy for some to write thoughts in 140 without littering the characters with “and” plus “that.” Thank goodness teen tweeps aren’t texting on Twitter although in those circles, I’m sure texting content exists.

And, then there are the blogs. I’m appreciative the bloggers I follow can write and write well. Sometimes you have to wonder who is doing the writing especially when the “author” is one popular dude (i.e. Seth Godin who posts the shortest blog fodder I’ve ever seen hit day light).

Content is king and having a content strategy will get you farther than a turtle with six legs.

Think about the numbers of people and companies engaged in content development today. Danny Brown wrote a recent blog post “52 factoids about the big 4 (and he didn’t call it that)” You’ll want to keep it for reference. It provides the user data for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.  In a nutshell, users and traffic are astronomical and growing.

So what do I mean by the Great American Content Mash Up?

Writers from all walks of life have an opportunity to ghost write blogs, Facebook pages, Web sites, tweets, and more. It’s the next social media revolution as content needs collide with a limited number of high-quality writers.

Imagine the vertical markets that require specialty writers. Are there enough to go around to produce these communications? Probably not.

So, those self-employed, unemployed, newly graduated, or semi-retired, think about the opportunity facing the online world today. We need good writers, and we need them now. Is that your calling?

Social Media Fear Factor Quiz

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Here’s a little quiz I created to pinpoint your social media fear factor. Seems everything I read Monday was associated with taking risks like skydiving, bungee jumping or zany scary free fall theme park rides. That would make my fear factor off the chart; in fact, I’d not survive either experience.

Perhaps some of you feel the same way about social media? I’m also thinking you’re not sharing it if you are; hence, this line of questioning to get it all out in the open. Then you can move out of your own way and engage already.

While you’re mulling over why you’re not engaged, I’m here to help push the envelope. Want to chat for 15 minutes about why you may not be tweeting? I’ll offer baby steps you need to launch. Want to chat with me for 30 minutes and get a tutorial on Twitter and learn more than just basic elements? I’ll help you do that, too. Don’t be afraid to ask and receive!

Check all the boxes that apply in each question.  When done, count them up and look below for the unscientific analysis.

1. You have a Twitter account that:

[] Is dormant     [] Is used ~4x/week or less         

[] Has <100 followers     [] Has <100 tweets

2. You don’t tweet because:

[] You aren’t clever enough to write 140       

[] No one needs to know your life story

[] You have nothing to sell          

[] You’re happily married and don’t need a new partner

[] You don’t have a blog so there’s nothing to promote 

[] You lack confidence

[] Twitter is a bunch of malarkey

3. You refuse to launch Facebook because:

[] Farmville sucks           

[] No way are you re-connecting with high schoolers

[] You want privacy        

[] No one is using it for business anyway

4. LinkedIn is definitely OK, but:

[] You can’t get as many links as your boss           

[] It’s dormant except for the occasional invite

[] Too many strange questions on groups annoy you      

[] It’s a popularity fest and you hate to compete

5. You’re not blogging because:

[] You have nothing to say 

[] You have no time       

[] You need your extra sleep

[] You haven’t the faintest idea where to begin

[] You don’t know what SEO means

[] You’re too old to start something new              

[]You’d rather talk to your dog

6. You’re not engaging in social media because:

[] Social media is a fad and it’s going away

[] Social media is a waste of time

[] You have nothing to sell, so why bother

[] You have no time to learn anything new for now

Unscientific Analysis

If you checked 25 to 29 boxes, you have serious antipathy against social media and you’re likely never to get over it.

If you checked 18 to 24 boxes, you’re on the brink of not seeing the forest through the trees. Call me to save you.

If you checked 10 to 17 boxes, you are engaging in social media although you’re just not a freak like some of us.

If you checked 1 to 9 boxes, you have hope! You can easily be rescued from social media fear factor!

(But call me anyway…if you’d rather talk to your dog than start a blog, I’ve got to change that ‘TUDE!)

10 Tips for Social Media Moxie

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This is directed at you — the laggers who are likely NOT reading this blog among my colleagues (who shall remain nameless) who are creeping along outside the action like a voyeur.

I hit a wall this week with the umpteenth public relations and/or marketing peer not engaging in social media with the basics of basics – Twitter. Then there was a fabulous new company launch with a highly creative site from an old colleague with whom I was eager to tweet. Sadly, his last tweet was 20 days ago.

Are you engaging for real, people? C’mon, don’t kid yourself…we both know you’re not.

From a seriously real cross section of colleagues, peers, practitioners of all ages and experience ranges, who are experts in their own right with budding businesses, etc., the writing is on the wall. Marketing and public relations are NOT engaging in social media, and that’s a SAD state of affairs.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT GOING AWAY! SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A TREND! (Yep, caps on purpose; felt better than boldface.)

I’m here to push you off your derrière and raise your bar. How can you ignore something so incredibly exciting for marketing public relations when clients and employers expect you to be the expert who leads them to social media opportunity?

I own a virtual public relations agency, Soulati Media, Inc.  I can’t find anyone yet (within the confines of my circular engagement) who knows more than me in social media. Why’s that? Because I’ve been busting my chops for the last three years to learn, engage, test, fail, test, and become knowledgeable. (See that “fail” word in there? Painfully, it has to happen to become learned, and then the doors swing open and shut more smoothly.)

This is not about blogging, either. It’s simply about carpe diem. There’s gold in them ‘thar hills, people, and if you don’t go mining, you’re never going to get your social media mojo.

Here are Jayme Soulati’s 10 Basic Social Media Engagement Tips:

1. Launch a Twitter account associated with business. Brand yourself as an expert, but first believe you are one.

2. Expect to fail (failure comes in many sizes) and embrace the pain as learning anything new. You will get through that episode (spoken from my own trial and error).

3. Re-launch the Facebook  account you closed down because you couldn’t handle connecting with high school alumni. Consider it a business venture and make it so with a fan page to fuel your business or expertise.

4. Adopt a mentor, but don’t suck them dry! Be respectful of their time and their own hard-earned pathway to knowledge.

5. Engage, people, really engage. That means post a comment on a blog with your perspective. Make yourself known to the blogger you’re reading who has no idea you exist. Communication is a two-way street.

6. Understand fear and get beyond it. Your fear may be lack of confidence in your own expertise. Get out of your own way, and just do it already.

7. Tackle one new thing every day. This is as easy as tweet five times. Follow five people. Post one comment on a new blog every day. RT someone’s blog post. Explore a new social media application everyone else is so you’re in the know, too.

8. Don’t get left behind! I’ve been tweeting for maybe 15 months now, and it’s the sole reason I’ve met the cool people who are now my new colleagues and friends. It saved me days of boredom through the dark winter because social media takes you to Bali, Singapore, Australia, and South America where peers there seek engagement, too.

9. Set a goal. While I’ve never written goals, they are in my head. Yesterday I had the same number of followers and following on Twitter, 1817. Because I compete, I want to get to 2000, but it’s getting tougher to create a Twitter stream that’s not littered with spammers, scammers, and salespeople.  So, I’ll go for quality over quantity. Don’t let the numbers fool you.

10. Ask for help. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I’m glad to help you get there, too. Post your little question down below, and we’ll journey.

Got social media? Please say “yes!”

Un-Social Media

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Here’s a quickie; just a rumination, really.

At the crux of “social” media are “un-social” people. Our dependence on the next generation device, new gadget, emerging application, competition to befriend the highest number of peeps, linkedins, FB’ers, and the like is causing detrimentally the weakening of social skills.

  • I watch it with the Wii generation of <10-year-olds.
  • We can see it in the very young teens with texting.
  • We learn about it from the high schoolers with sexting (something they’d NEVER have considered doing with a 35mm lens or Polaroid).
  • I watch the Kindlers and soon-to-be iPadders stick a nose in a device (rather than a book) and ignore the socialization happening around them. (Not sure why I think sticking a nose in a device is less acceptable than a book?)
  • I interact with college students who lack the social graces to interview and communicate without technology or e-mail.
  • And, then there are you and I. For at least 15-hours-a-day, we’re plugged in to social media, email, crackberries and i-devices addicted to who’s saying what and when it’s being delivered.  

I do pick up the phone; I do send a “what’s up?” e-mail to friends not in touch; I do send Skype messages to connect with friends in Mexico and Hong Kong; I do (gasp) write letters!

Alas, the rate of return on these efforts to connect when combined en masse is perhaps 2 percent. A sad state of affairs, isn’t it?

We’re smack in the era of mobile tech, WiFi, MiFi, gigs, and RAM, and there’s no telling when it might right itself. Those of us who pre-date the fax machine (yes, I’m seasoned) know of what I speak. Heck, all of us pre-date social media, and I bet you understand what I’m talking about?

Apps Review: Gravatars and RSS

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Sometimes there are just too many widgets, gadgets and gizmos for everyone to clearly understand their value.  I want to hear your suggestions about applications you might wish to learn more about.  I’ve had several people comment about RSS and another ask for info about a gravatar.

Hence, today I’ll start this regular feature spotlighting apps and tools; Gravatars and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) are first up.  I’ll research, test the application and present a simplified snapshot. I’ll also provide my recommendation based on first-time research (or current use of the tool). Please add your list to comments below so we can explore and learn together.

Gravatar

According to WordPress, “a globally recognized avatar, or gravatar, is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality such as a forum, chat, website, or other form of online community in which the user can distinguish from other users. Created by Tom Werner, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.”

A visitor to Soulati-‘TUDE! asked how some guests had photos while others suffered the edgy monster avatars I selected to denote people without their own avatar. It had been awhile since I researched how I had done this for other sites yet did not have an avatar on my own site.

Here’s how you do this:

  • Head to a Web site accessible at this link Gravatar.
  • Create an account featuring the primary email address you use when commenting. Upload a photo or logo; whatever you’d like your gravatar to be (your globally recognized avatar).
  • When you comment on blogs, forums, chats, Disqus, etc. and you enter your primary email, your gravatar automatically uploads.
  • I went back to my account and added a new email address along with another gravatar. I uploaded a fresh photo and my logo, too. It’s now in use when I make comments on Soulati-‘TUDE!

Difficulty

Simple; any non-IT person can do this. Best news yet…no need to edit images in a photo editor. Gravatar.com uploads a full-size image and allows you to accept the cropped image.

Recommendation

Yes! I do recommend gravatars, especially if you are active in social media and blogging. Having a self-selected gravatar differentiates your brand and boosts awareness.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, has been around awhile. It allows people to subscribe to content generated by bloggers and podcasters. It provides publishers (in this case bloggers) the ability to syndicate content throughout the Internet.

At the upper right-hand corner of this blog, there is a “subscribe”/RSS feed button. When you click this, it asks whether you’d like Soulati-‘TUDE! to be delivered by email or in a reader. Then it asks you to choose your reader (the channel by which your content will be captured and delivered to you.)

I receive Soulati-‘TUDE! by email each early afternoon, and I subscribe to the blog in my Google Reader. This way, I see what everyone else sees as a way of quality control.

What to do:

1. Set up a Google G-mail account. There are so many reasons to have G-mail, and it doesn’t hurt to indulge in one more address for tinkering.

2. On the Google tool bar, hit the “more” tab and find “Reader.” Set up a Google Reader account and explore the many blogs you can now subscribe to.  As a Web-based aggregator released in 2005, Google Reader is one of the best tools to have. When you subscribe to blogs, Google Reader captures all the content and saves it for you to read whenever you wish. It’s also easy to unsubscribe, too.

3. While on the road, you can log in to your G-mail account using any browser (preferably Chrome or Firefox) and read all the blog posts captured in your reader. When you’ve read each, “mark all as read” and the table of contents will show zero new posts. If you’d like to make a comment, link to the blog title and you’ll navigate to that blog to post comments.

Difficulty

Setting up a reader is simple for anyone. The tip is not to overload the reader with more than 15 blogs at one time. You’ll quickly know whether a blog is worth keeping up with, and you can refresh topics in queue any time by way of a topical search to pinpoint new content.

Recommendation

There’s no way I can manage to read all the content I do without a reader. I absolutely recommend Google Reader (because I’ve been using it awhile). Regardless of whose you use, I encourage you to register so you can easily subscribe to Soulati-‘TUDE! and not miss a future post!