Month: October 2009

Considering I’m at Blogworld it’s not surprising I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we communicate in social media and how blogs fit into the equation. I contributed to my first blog in 2001 and started my own in 2003 back when there weren’t all these other options, like Twitter. I like Twitter for the connections I’ve made and maintain, and for the instant stream of useful information I get now that I’ve filtered my streams with TweetDeck. But I had a realization yesterday that’s likely to change the way I use it.

When I arrived at BlogWorld I started tweeting interesting tidbits from the early sessions. Watching the hashtag, I realized I was basically tweeting the same nuggets of information as everyone else. Often it was interesting and useful, but it was also fragmented and lacking context. More important, I realized I was spending half of each session paying attention to my iPhone rather than the speakers. In a weird way I was limiting what I absorbed and remembered to what I tweeted. I was self-limiting my own experience of the event to what I would get if I were sitting in my office following the hashtag.

Wayne Sutton has been blogging the sessions and posting them to his blog within a few minutes of the end of the session. That’s providing real value to his readers, as well as giving him some great searchable content for his blog. When we were talking about this yesterday, he crystalized it for me pretty succinctly with a concept he attributes to Louis Gray: Tweet less, blog more.

With that in mind I decided not to tweet from Chris Brogan’s keynote and instead turn it into a blog post. I took notes in Google Docs during his keynote, then tidied them up a bit as soon as he was done and posted them. “I will never regret having started my career as a reporter.” I sent a tweet linking to the post and tagged it with the BlogWorld #bwe09 hashtag.

The result: quite a few people retweeted it, including Chris. As of now, about 18 hours after I posted it and two hours after Chris tweeted it, I’ve had 350 people click the link, according to bit.ly.

There are several lessons I’ve learned or re-learned from this, none of which are new:

1. Provide good content that people want to read and they’ll read it.

2. Writing a blog post takes more effort than sending a tweet, but in the end you have something of substance.

3. If you want to get attention in this space, you’ve got to work. It would have been easier for me to send some tweets, then bust out of the room and go get a drink. Instead I sat in the room for another half hour getting the post up and adding a photo. In the end, time well spent.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Posted via email from David B. Thomas

At BlogWorld Expo #bwe09

Posted via email from David B. Thomas

Chris Brogan delivered the closing keynote today at BlogWorld Expo. As usual it was inspiring, often unexpected and a bit profane. I’m posting my notes cleaned up a bit but more or less as I took them.

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This is no rah-rah speech. This is not going to be “hooray, we’re the cool kids.”

First and foremost, be humble about what you know and stop this “they don’t get it” crap. If they don’t get it it’s because we’re not teaching them well enough, or because they don’t need to know.

You are the preachers for this new street religion, and you can bring the message if you just stop hanging around with the same people.

You need to go back and embed with the other folks.

You need to talk about everything that you’re passionate about, not social media. Please don’t write a blog post about me tomorrow, write about somebody who needs the attention.

Some of you are going to die along the way. You’re going to get fired because you did something wrong. And if you’re not at risk, you’re not trying hard enough.

What’s next is about how human business works. The term “social media” never sat well with me. We need to learn how this human business is going to change how we do things. I’m sick of talking about things like what avatar to put up.

Stop creating words with “tw” in front of them. We did that a few years ago with “pod.” How’d that work out?

Branding has to do with managing the end-to-end experience. Look at Disney. Be all the way 360 who you really are. If you’re a bad person, get good or get offline.

Your brand is about the way you communicate, the experience you create. It’s not about the tools. Do you want to know how I did what I did? I did it with love. And I do mean love. Love in business means something different than love at the house. It means really respecting your customers and showing them you care. We tell them we love them then we bombard them with stupid stuff that doesn’t do them any good “bad email newsletters”.

The first thing people look for is the case studies. Case studies are what happened back then. Comcastcares came about because Frank had a Twitter account and started doing something with it.

Don’t be a “business card ninja,” firing cards at people the moment you meet them. It’s like a poke in Facebook, only less interesting. Shake someone’s hand, get to know them. If you feel like you want to get to know them, then ask if they want to exchange business cards.

Think about three things:

1. Think about your own business, your own goals.

2. Think about who else this person you’re meeting needs to know. That’s the best thing I ever do, is be at the elbow of every deal, get people together. If you’re the person who gives everybody else the work, you’re set for life.

3. Don’t ask ‘what can I do for you.’ Anticipate what you can do. Give an idea of what you’re going to do next for people.

Uninstall Farmville. Stop Mafia Wars. I heard two grown adults talk about what it was going to take to get some kind of pig.

We need to drive this stuff to business. The days of kumbayah are over. Love everybody like you mean it, but the salad days are done. It’s not time to be all gee whiz with each other anymore. It’s time to think how this will affect our business.

Your platform is vital. The reason I got a book deal is because I have a platform: speaking gigs, a blog, a newsletter. The platform is what people are seeking. If someone says they’re looking for influential bloggers, they’re really looking for the numbers. They don’t care if you’re actually a good blogger.

You do have to do face-to-face. F2F is alive and well. Get out and meet people. Volunteer as much as you can, but watch out for overvolunteering.

Have flexibility in your schedule. Learn how to say no more.

We have so much more important work to do than convincing companies they need to be blogging. You don’t have to save everybody. Do the business. Get it done.

Make it about them. Stop looking at this as a cult of me. It has to be about your customers and your audience. And turn them into a community. The difference between an audience and a community is the way you face the chairs.

The difference between an audience and a community: one will fall on its sword for you and the other will watch you fall.

Get out and start finding the people whose stories are important.

Put it out there for other people. You’re all going to die wishing you’d said more about other people. Put it on paper. Help other people understand. Give it all away. We all think we have the best secrets, but we don’t. Give away the good stuff.

Friendship with intent. Start seeking out really cool alliances. It’s cool to start cool things, but it’s really cool if you can do it with people who have the same ideas and are already doing things.

You don’t need 26 kinds of conferences, you need conferences that are really well defined.

Give people the tools to start doing this on their own. Give them things like video that they can use to do things, so you can go do other things.

Social media is not a channel, but it’s the most amazing set of tools in the world for channel development.

As for your community, start paying attention to how you’re going to get business, and it’s not always the best idea to make your community your customers. Oprah has an active community. She acts as a ferocious gatekeeper and sells access to the big companies that want to reach them.

Always look to be innovating. Always take the chips from your winnings and move them to the next table.

Make your site your storefront. Whatever you’re trying to sell, be more explicit. It’s amazing how many people tell me they’re trying to consult and I go to their blogs and all I see is reviews of Wii games.

I write about industries that I hope to change, and then they call me. I write about what I think hotels should do, and they call me. I write about what airlines should do, and they call me.

Give stuff away. Bring wine to the picnic. If you show up in these social sites and start pitching, that won’t work. But everybody likes something delicious.

Editing is good manners. Be concise. Tell good stories. We don’t have time to read Moby Dick anymore. Long form articles in the New Yorker aren’t getting read anymore. People want real stories. Take your ideas and make them small, compact and readable and give them “handles” so people can take them with them.

If you’re not doing stuff with mobile, put that back on the list.

Build armies. You need to connect with people, equip them, embed and team up. You need to keep making the Super Friends over and over again. The snake oil salesman are here and you have to be better than them.

Flip the mindset. “How can I equip you” should be the way you write every post.

Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that person pushing your dumb stuff on people all the time. Just because you’re so excited about your awesome startup, it’s very likely that the rest of us aren’t just yet.

Talk about them. It’s amazing how few people write stories about other people as much as they write about themselves. It’s great to talk about how your experience relates to someone else, but they want to hear things about themselves. Point out the cool people that aren’t named you.

Test by doing. There’s just a little too much research in what we’re doing. Try stuff, and kill the stuff that doesn’t work. If your blog isn’t getting readers and comments, do something different.

Three things:

Build small, powerful networks. Having a lot of friends on Twitter doesn’t matter; having friends you can motivate to rise to a cause when you need them to matters.

Tune your business. Make sure you have products people want.

Focus on integrated, wholistic human business. Social media is not the new PR or marketing, it’s the new dial tone. It’s the new nerve center of your organization. Even if your bosses don’t want to get into it yet, wire it up.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’m about to embark on an uncharacteristic whirlwind of travel. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to speak at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer in Chicago and the Social Media Business Forum in Durham, NC. All three are crammed into a span of nine days. I’m not looking forward to being away from The Mrs and The Boy “especially since he changes every five minutes these days”, but I’m really looking forward to these events, much more than I have to other business trips in my previous 20 years as a professional communicator.

Being in marketing “or communications, or marketing communications” sure is a lot more fun these days, and I’ve been thinking of all the reasons why.

The tech

Let’s just get this one out of the way. I have incurable Shiny Object Syndrome, and I love learning new tools and technology. There’s been a quantum leap in my career in the tools available to us to communicate in cool ways. The first web site I ever helped put up, when I worked for the World Trade Center North Carolina in the mid ’90s, was done for us by an agency. We had no idea how it worked, and only one person in the office “not me” had any idea what HTML was and how to perform the alchemy required to make the words change on the screen.

Contrast that with last week, when I used a free web tool to create an animated movie, or the week before when I used my webcam to shoot a short video. Last night I played around on Google Wave with a friend in California, and another who I don’t know where he lives, come to think of it. When I’m traveling later this week, I won’t just call my son to say goodnight, I’ll Skype him. He’s 20 months old and video calling is already old hat for him.

And I haven’t even mentioned the iPhone.

The people

I’ve been to a lot of business conferences in the last 15 years or so. I’ve had a lot of conversations about sports in general, golf in particular, and kids “before I had one of my own”. That’s what was safe to talk about, and that was just the lead-in to the pitch. I’ve been pitched a lot, often in a half-hearted and dutiful manner, mostly while sitting in a big room with collapsible walls eating overcooked chicken.

These days the people I run into at events remind me more of the people I met when I worked in the music industry. A lot of them are smart, funny, irreverent and not a little profane. And unlike a lot of the people I met when I worked in the music industry, they also know how to Get Stuff Done.

Most important, I very seldom feel like I’m getting pitched, even when I’m talking to somebody with something to sell. “I still getting plenty of ham-handed, old-school pitches, but over the phone or in email.”

The events

I once sat politely and listened to a presentation about the benefits of dredging ship channels at the Port of Wilmington. None of the people in that room were actually in the dredging business, or had anything of their own that required dredging.

I went to a two-day conference on newsletter publishing several years ago. Here’s everything I remember: People respond well to prices that end in seven, except for patients in Turkish mental institutions, who prefer the number three.

I have been to several events in my career where people have fallen quite obviously asleep in their chairs. One august and dignified representative of a major international organization managed to roll off his chair and tumble gently to the floor. I remember one woman in a bad brown pantsuit sitting in the back row of an auditorium, head back, mouth open and snoring.

To be fair, I have fought with varying degrees of success to stay awake at more than one event. But nobody is napping at the social media events I’ve been to in the last year. Everybody is wide awake and on the edge of their seats, because they know the information they are hearing will have an immediate impact on their jobs and their lives. Plus, it’s hard to fall asleep when somebody like Jason Falls, Chris Brogan, David Armano or Gia Lyons is speaking.

The attitude

I think it used to be okay to be boring. It was a work event; we had to talk about work even if we didn’t really want to, or enjoy it. Nobody really expected it to be fun, and so they weren’t surprised or disappointed when it wasn’t.

It also used to be okay to be phony. Everybody had their work persona, and often it had nothing to do with who they really were. We didn’t really expect to make real connections with people, and if we did it was a big surprise.

It’s not like that so much anymore, at least at social media conferences. If you’re boring, people walk out, or call you out on Twitter. It puts more pressure on the speakers “and I hope I haven’t just jinxed myself” but in a way it also sets you free to be yourself and talk about what you really care about.

Yes, I realize I am idealizing social media, and no I don’t think everyone in social media is beautiful and smart and honest and pure. But social media and the principles behind it are a big part of the sea change that is taking place in marketing, and irrevocably changing both the profession and the people who practice it.

And making it a lot more fun.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Sometimes people don’t want to hear that social media takes time and effort. I made this short video after seeing the “social media guru” video on YouTube done with the same tool from Xtranormal. Please note: If I work with you and you see any resemblance to any conversation we’ve had, this is merely a gross exaggeration to make a point. I am fortunate to work with communicators and marketers who understand the need for a plan.

http://www.xtranormal.com/players/jwplayer.swfhttp://www.xtranormal.com/players/embedded-xnl-stats.swf

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog