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How to Write a Blog Series
Posted on 7 September 2010 | 1:30 am by chrisbrogandotcom
If you want to learn to do marketing…
then do marketing.
You can learn finance and accounting and media buying from a book. But the best way to truly learn how to do marketing is to market.
You don’t have to quit your job and you don’t need your boss’s permission. There are plenty of ways to get started.
If you see a band you like coming to town, figure out how to promote them and sell some tickets (posters? google ads? PR?). Don’t ask, just do it.
If you find a book you truly love, buy 30 and figure out how to sell them all (to strangers).
If you’re 12, go door to door selling fresh fruit–and figure out what stories work and which don’t.
Set up an online business. Get a candidate you believe in elected to the school board.
The best way to learn marketing is to do it.
[And Chris Guillabeau's new book turns this simple idea into a plan for life--Kindle link].
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 10:48 pm by Seth Godin
Powerful first-person reports from Pakistan, from TED’s Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson, curator of TED, was born in Pakistan, and last week, he and the Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz, his wife, spent several days in the flood zones there. They visited refugee camps and flooded villages, spoke to local aid workers and unusual volunteers, and collected many stories that simply aren’t being told by world media — stories of personal heroism and commitment in the face of this massive tragedy.
Chris has been aggregating these stories on his personal blog, interspersed with his own on-the-ground reports, photo and video. It’s a powerful read, with more to come throughout the week as more stories come in. Above is a short video Chris shot, of a refugee camp at Thatta; below is a shocking video sent by Dr. Awab Albi of the deplorable conditions at a pediatric ward in Shikarpur.
If you’re moved by these reports to get involved, Chris recommends starting at On the Ground in Pakistan.
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 1:48 pm by Emily McManus
5 Things to Consider BEFORE Using Social Media
Many companies I work with today are enthusiastic about diving into social media. It’s shiny object syndrome at its finest. The problem I find most prevalent is that companies have no realistic idea about what it takes to launch and support a social media program.
It takes a lot more than creating an account and setting up a profile with the best of intentions to participate.
Here are 5 things to consider before you choose to add social media to your marketing mix:
- Prospect Preferences. Do you know where your prospects hang out online? Do they engage in social media? If so, is their involvement based on personal or professional reasons. (e.g. many people use Facebook for family and friends, keeping it separate from business)
- Content. How much of it do you have? Do you have plans to continuously develop a flow of content with the variety of contexts you need to meet expectations in different social media venues? Is your company stance to gate content or make it freely available? Is all this content focused on your prospects’ perspectives? Is it helpful? Do your prospects engage well with the content you already share with them? In other words, will they be receptive to more of it? If not, fix that first.
- Resources. How many people do you have that can spend time working on social media efforts? What? Just you? How much free time do you have in your current schedule? Social media is not free. Take a look at #2 above and then consider how much time it actually takes to keep up with conversational threads, developing and sharing your content—-as well as that of others—contributing to conversations, answering questions, etc.
Are you a writer? If not, make sure you line up writing resources to contribute content you can use. If you think you can force people (engineers, product managers, customer service agents, executives, etc. to write blog posts, think again. It’s harder to get busy people to make time to write than you’d ever imagine.) Solely interacting in social media by curating other people’s content (not your own) may make you a relied-upon resource, but it won’t make you a thought leader that people seek out for ideas.
- Long-term Commitment. Social media is not something you start and expect to see amazing results with in 3 months or less. It’s definitely the turtle that beats the hare in this race. It can take 6 months to a year to develop the following, engagement and participation that leads to directly attributed sales gains.
And, if you start, what impression will you make if you stop and your accounts become inactive? Social media requires commitment. You must be prepared to measure short-term wins and long-term goals accordingly. And those goals must be reasonable and achievable or you’ll be setting yourself up for failure. Getting pushy and trying to make it happen faster can (will) backfire.
- Connection Points. How can you integrate your social media efforts with your existing marketing programs? Set up a plan to develop cross-over and help your prospects find the content they’re searching for regardless of where they look. Make sure you’ve got calls to action designed to help them migrate from one platform to another to follow your ideas and engage with your content—and your company.
How will you share what’s going on in social media internally across your company so that when the subject comes up, your customer service agents, salespeople, installers, etc. know how to respond? For B2B companies, social media is not a singular effort but a plural one. If people are out of the loop and get blindsided, it can be problematic—both for your company’s reputation and your own dealings with other departments within the company.
Social media can be a boon for marketers and companies. But it does require planning and commitment that’s often out of reach for many marketing departments already spread thin.
The best advice I can share is to do your research and stockpile some content (or create an editorial calendar) before you begin. Incorporate it with your existing marketing programs from the start to give it legs. Choose one tool that matches your prospects’ preferences and apply yourself to becoming the best at it. Measure as you go. Then add more platforms/tools as you and plan to be prepared before continuing to expand your efforts.
Consider starting with a blog. A blog is the surest way to generate the content you need to fuel sharing on other social media platforms. Plus, with the proper planning, you can incorporate blog posts into newsletters and nurturing sends right away. This said, go back and really take a hard look at the list above before you commit.
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 7:50 am by ArdathAlbee
Design with intent
Neat idea, free PDF… will differently (definitely) make you think. HT to Lucas.
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 6:59 am by Seth Godin
Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising
Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson Microsoft Advertising
If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you’ve no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft. When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn’t get close to. Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising , especially via social media channels and at conferences to the Webmaster and search marketing community. His work is global and very interesting. With the Bing and Yahoo convergence, I thought it was time we did an interview – and he agreed.
Mel has accomplished amazing things with Microsoft’s use of social media and other large companies could learn a lot from this interview where he talks about Microsoft’s use of social media and what impact the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance will have on search and search advertising.
Welcome Mel, it’s exciting times as usual in the search engine world. Please tell us, what has changed about your job at Microsoft since you were last here?
My role at Microsoft Advertising evolved about 18 months ago as a result of the work our team had been doing in social media for adCenter. We had been building up an engaged audience on the adCenter Blog and forums for 3 years and started the adCenter Twitter account and Facebook page. Our engagement with our customers was such a success, it made sense for someone to start using social to tell marketers about all our other digital assets. So I started the Microsoft Advertising Blog which brings our readers news and insight in what we’re up to in display, mobile, games advertising and research.
I also head up our events calendar. Last year we covered nearly 40 digital conferences all over the world, and it’s my job to ensure we have people trained to blog and tweet from @MSAdvertising at those events and really bring them alive.
Sometimes we go the full monty and come armed with a film crew and interview folks. Perhaps my highlight was Twitter founder Biz Stone at Cannes 2009 , but this year was awesome as we got backstage access to the TED@Cannes conference we’d partnered with them and the Starcom Mediavest Group on.
We featured Microsoft Advertising in a post about B2B Social Media Winners, earlier this year and I’m wondering if you can share how your group developed their approach to the social web?
In February this year we published a white paper (pdf) which outlined our story and approach. We’ve been listening to our customers since the start of 2006, way before Twitter and Facebook hit the mainstream. We got involved because it made perfect sense to use the web to communicate in a two-way dialogue with adCenter customers who were expecting best practices, tips, tricks and news to be at their fingertips.
We started slowly with a blog and forum, and built the strategy through common sense and by reacting swiftly to the needs of our advertisers. Social media isn’t the proverbial “rocket science”. It’s an awesome extension of traditional marketing and research methods which enable you to glean feedback in real-time, and help people in ways that never existed before.
What guides your social media strategy and participation?
Microsoft Advertising is an intensely customer-centric organization. It’s our advertisers, and potential advertisers, that guide us through where they go for news and information and what they tell us they need in order to be better marketers.
By investing in a team to monitor and engage with our paying customers, we hope we’re demonstrating that we’re open to feedback, want to build the best products and services we can, and are excited to provide insight through research and case studies that resonate with marketers all around the world.
What are your social media goals and how do you measure them? Or is it more accurate to say, what are your business goals that involve social media and how do you measure them?
Bit of both really. We look at growth as an indicator. Be it number of followers or fans, visitors to the site, number of answers to forum questions by other forum members, links from other blogs and news sites. The more reach we have, the more people we can tell our story to and let folks know we’re here and willing to help.
The other big ROI metric is how far we help lower support costs. It’s not cheap to have a call center, so if we can answer questions online through a carefully crafted blog post or tweeted link to the best information, we’re not incurring costs and we’re reaching more people with that information. A happy and informed advertiser is likely to spend more, so the two together increase the bottom line.
Return on In-action is another. What would people think if we weren’t operating in the social space? What would be the business implications of not having an early warning system in place?
How do you structure and manage listening and engagement?
We cover about 16 hours a day as I’m based in London and we have a team in Seattle. I’ll look after things from 9am GMT until about 6pm when it’s 10am PST and the US team takes over. We have various alerts set up on Twitter clients and monitoring tools and pretty much know within minutes if we have a problem or someone needs help.
We have rules of engagement which are pretty straightforward. We ask for actionable insight if an advertiser has an issue and have escalation paths internally to get things fixed.
Again, it’s common sense. You need a plan, you need outcomes and you need a team that can be flexible and personable.
A virtual smile goes a long way in this industry!
What listening or social media management tools do you recommend?
We recommend using lots. We trial, test and use a number of platforms, widgets and gizmos that all do different things with varying degrees of accuracy and success. The important thing is to find tools that are enablers and build a picture from the data they expose.
What challenges have you had gaining buy-in to social media projects and how did you overcome them?
To be honest, we’ve not had too much difficulty getting buy-in because we’ve always kept a step ahead by demonstrating the value of what we’re doing. I think many businesses dive into social media marketing with no plan around measurements of success.
Because we set out with the commitment to measure everything and tell compelling stories as we went, the business knows and relies on our data and successes now to be successful in itself.
Microsoft was called out recently as being one of the most, if not THE most social brands out there. We get it and will continue to invest because it works well for us.
What is one great example of a social media success that like to share the most? It can be Microsoft or anyone else.
My favorite story that I’ve used in countless presentations is about how my old headmaster, who is a Benedictine monk, called me up many years ago to advise him on a search campaign to promote his website through which he wanted to recruit monks.
We set it up and 3 years later he actually did sign up one chap who found his site while searching for inspiration on the web. You can read the full story here.
Just goes to show how search and social are intertwined.
A story more close to home is obviously the Windows 7 Launch where Marty Collins and her team managed to garner 221 million impression of earned media running up to and post launch of the biggest selling piece of software ever. Check out the case study here.
If you were to give advice to a friend starting a small business on how they should get involved with social media, what would that checklist look like? What would the essentials be?
Figure out some goals and work back. Don’t think “social media” as in the tools. Think “social media marketing” as in the discipline. Research your market, find out who’s using what platform and build your value exchange around it. Make sure there are social elements in all your marketing endeavors. Have everything built for discovery and sharing. Measure as much as you can and use the data to inform decisions in other part of the business.
Oh….and don’t ever stop. Getting off the social train is not an option now it’s gathered so much pace under so much steam.
Enough of this social media, let’s talk about Microsoft and Yahoo. I know there’s the Search Alliance website and this clever little video, but can you sum up a few things for our readers who might not read Search Marketing publications? Without any corporatePRspeak, what does the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo search mean to marketers?
It’s all on the www.searchalliance.com website. More volume with less effort. Now you’re optimizing for two marketplaces instead of three so you should see a return on time investment. More volume means we can make quicker decisions on which innovations will work best for marketers in the future.
What will it mean to consumers?
Having scale will mean speedier innovating of search results, which means those decisions consumers are looking to make get made quicker. More satisfied customers means a more loyal fan base, and as a result, we could increase share making our advertisers happy too!
What innovations in search technology (from a user perspective) are you excited about?
Bing Maps without a doubt – check out this Ted Talk with Blaise on some of the incredible innovation going on in his team.
How important is social media to the future of traditional search?
What’s traditional search these days? Ten blue links? It’s all moving so quickly but there’s no doubt that social media marketing is having an effect on search results. When you have algos associated with consumers liking content – YouTube, Facebook and others – when they’re added into the traditional mix, it makes for interesting times with optimization.
If you just take a look at what Bing has released lately in terms of social it’s obvious we feel it’ll be an integral part of how we all interact and make decisions going forward.
How do you stay current with search and social media and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that follow?
I subscribe to loads of newsletters, watch my Twitter feed and travel to many conferences around the world. We have a great ecosystem of learning and notifying here at Microsoft as well, so I pick up a lot of knowledge here internally.
Thanks Mel!
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Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising | http://www.toprankblog.com
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 4:12 am by OnlineMarketingSEOBlog
How to Write Effective Blog Posts
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 1:30 am by chrisbrogandotcom
Whatever happened to labor?
Not Labor with a capital L, as in organized labor unions. I mean labor as in skilled workers solving interesting problems. I mean craftspeople who use their hands, their backs and their heads to do important work.
Labor was a key part of the manufacturing revolution. Industrialists needed smart, dedicated, trained laborers to solve interesting problems. Putting things together took more than pressing a few buttons, it took initiative and skill and care. Labor improvised.
It took thirteen years to build the Brooklyn Bridge and more than twenty-five laborers died during its construction. There was not a systematic manual to follow. The people who built it largely figured it out as they went.
The Singer sewing machine, one of the most complex devices of its century, had each piece fitted by hand by skilled laborers.
Sometime after this, once Henry Ford ironed out that whole assembly line thing, things changed. Factories got far more complex and there was less room for improvisation as things scaled.
The boss said, “do what I say. Exactly what I say.”
Amazingly, labor said something similar. They said to the boss, “tell us exactly what to do.” In many cases, work rules were instituted, flexibility went away and labor insisted on doing exactly what they had agreed to do, no more, no less. At the time, this probably felt like power. Now we know what a mistake it was.
In a world where labor does exactly what it’s told to do, it will be devalued. Obedience is easily replaced, and thus one worker is as good as another. And devalued labor will be replaced by machines or cheaper alternatives. We say we want insightful and brilliant teachers, but then we insist they do their labor precisely according to a manual invented by a committee…
Companies that race to the bottom in terms of the skill or cost of their labor end up with nothing but low margins. The few companies that are able to race to the top, that can challenge workers to bring their whole selves–their human selves–to work, on the other hand, can earn stability and growth and margins. Improvisation still matters if you set out to solve interesting problems.
The future of labor isn’t in less education, less OSHA and more power to the boss. The future of labor belongs to enlightened, passionate people on both sides of the plant, people who want to do work that matters.
That’s what Labor Day is about, not the end of a month on the beach.
Posted on 5 September 2010 | 10:52 pm by Seth Godin
A Secret About Secrets
Posted on 5 September 2010 | 11:30 am by chrisbrogandotcom
Package Your Business
Posted on 5 September 2010 | 1:30 am by chrisbrogandotcom
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