Building Knowledge and Wisdom from the Conversation
Knowledge and wisdom is the most important piece you can extract from any social media campaign. Not matter what type of strategy you implement, learning from the conversation is where you should focus and the rest will come with it. Any amount of information can be obtained from many different conversational sources throughout your campaign, the following areas are typical conversational information sources; Blogs, Forums, Question and Answer Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Image Sharing Sites, ...
Adding Forum Search to the Google Universal Stack
I was doing some research tonight for a new social media marketing campaign tonight....I perform due diligence on a topic by running through the Google Search Toolbar...web,images, video and blogs.Then I jump over to use BoardTracker and BoardReader to search through forums on different topics.I think Google should go ahead and purchase one of these forum search engines and add it to their...
Quick Launch RSS from Blog on Web Site
I was looking for a quick way to get our Social Media Squad blog on the home page and feature area on our new Social Media Squad web site.I wanted it to be a real-time feed, so I chose to go with a JavaScript RSS Feed, and I quickly found Feed2JS. I was able to select:URL of the RSS Feed
Latest Wordpress
I was just helping Ahren launch the new Social Media Squad Blog, and we are using the new Wordpresss. I am really impressed with the functionality. I was able to combine several blogs over the past couple years into one. I did it in minutes.The interface is very well done. I will review more...
Looking Through NPR's API / Toolset
I am an NPR addict. I have a serious problem...I admit it. I measure the productivity of my day on how many of their programs I actually manage to listen to. Ok that is out of the way.Anyways, I was looking through their new API and Tools section and I am intrigued by it. Not sure exactly what I would do with it yet.They offer access to audio, text, images and other web only content from as far back as 1995. This archive consists of over 250,000 stories that are ...
Explaining What Social Media Is
Using Your Social Network Education Profile
I was just going through linked for our business social media squad. I came up with a use for the education part of your profile.I will start recording everything new we learn as a company...and publish.Seems it would show good in the search results?
LinkedIn Lately..
I just signed up for a business account for our business Social Media Squad. I'm curious what it will bring me. I think LinkedIn is on a good path, they are moving to provide more value to us business owners.I've started monitoring the questions and answers on LinkedIn more. I find a lot of valuable information on there and make some good connections as well.Most people I connect with on an answer usually add me as a connection.I'm going to play around ...
Guerrilla Social Media Marketing
Big Companies and their Understanding Social Media
I just got off a conference call with a big, well known manufacturer. They are launching a new "viral campaign" this fall.I came to the table with many social and viral ideas including widgets and a simple / slick OpenSocial / Facebook application.They weren't interested. They wanted to start small and keep things focused and manageable. Which makes sense. Except there was nothing viral about the campaign except that the word viral was used everywhere.I un...
Social Network Account / Profile Management
We offer social network account and profile management to our clients on a regular basis. It is a lot of work to maintain your social network profile.I find I can spend a good hour a day on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn for my own personal profile. I didn't even touch my other profiles such as Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Mashables, Fast Company, and on and on.Just making sure your account is logged into everyday and your profile is fresh is a lot of work.Next I t...
Establishing Your Profile Real Estate
I think I've talked on this topic before. I am going through and setting up a series of MySpace profiles for a client and establishing several "conversational" profiles so they can reach a certain audience.I am amazed at even MySpace how many good URL user names are still available. An example is http://www.myspace.com/kinlane/ which is the URL representation of your MySpace profile.It is much like securing the domain name for your company. You should go to all majo...
Embracing Your Audience
It seems like a very simple concept. Talk to you customers, get to know what they want. Let them help you formulate your decisions around your company, products, and services.Seems to make sense, but really it can very hard for a lot of companies to open up to their customers. Traditional business practices somehow keep this from being common place.In this age of social media and user generated content, the audiences voice is getting stronger and can no longer be i...
When Twitter is down...
When Twitter is down....how do I tell everyone about it? Ne...
Tear Jerker on NPR
Those of you know me, know that I'm an NPR junkie....I love the stories and music. I listen to the StoryCorp programs every week. Many touching stories.There was one today that really moved me:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90959458It was a mom telling the story about how her 9 year old son died watching a sunset.WOW. That was moving.
Maintaining My Profile
As I am doing things every night...I am uploading files, downloading files, making database updates, and bulk find / replaces I try to maintain my profile.
Being in the social media business it seems I should have a more complete profile, at least on the major networks.
It is a lot of work to maintain multiple social network profiles, keep track of blogs, images, videos, and all the other stuff.
Think I'll hire someone to help me with my profile.
Distributed Data and Syndication
I am building out a pretty complex system that really seems like a lot of overhead to get some pretty basic systems up.It involves republishing small subsets of data to various data stores such as MySQL, Amazon S3, GData, or just XML.Then I syndicate web services / feeds in RSS, XML, JSON to those little data stores.I keep getting asked why don't you just allow one central data feed off main data store.From a security and load balancing standpoi...
RSS Feeds for All Businesses
I know I've ranted about this before, but here we go again. It cannot be said enough. EVERY business that has a web site and has information on the Internet needs to provide RSS Feeds for that data.
I am looking for product review web sites right now. Looking to harvest data on different product areas and feed it back out to users. I am not looking to harness the traffic, it will go to the source of the reviews. I do this to get data and statistics and ultimately provide value t...
Google's New AJAX Libraries API
Just came across Google's New AJAX Libraries API. I was wondering when someone was going to merge together all the common JavaScript libraries out there into a single set of libraries. The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.loa...
Speaking at the UO American Marketing Association
I spoke last night at the UOAMA which is a student run marketing organization that aims to connect students with professional marketers and offer insight into the marketing profession through the avenues of solid leadership, strong communication, real-world marketing experience, and charitable involvement.I spoke on the topic of online marketing and social media marketing. Unfortunately my wife I...
Small Business Online Operations Plan
I have been working with my brother-in-law to really escalate the operations of his small business Thinwrench, which offers custom wrench and tool manufacturing. He has had the business since the 1990's and has had the site since I believe 2001. The site gets a fair amount of traffic and it generates a small trickle of orders for him though out the year, but nothing really significant. It is impress...
Participate in Question and Answer Sites to Market Yourself
How would you project your monthly costs in terms of storage and bandwidth if you didn't knowhow much traffic to expect on your startup photo/video sharing site?This is just one notable connection I've made via social networks, thought it showed the valu...
Bad Debt in America and How Bad it Really Is
I was just watching Bill Maher and was listening to their discussion on Kevin Phillips book called Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, and Cornel West said something that summed up how sad things really are:Read more →
Fast Track to Widgets, Facebook, and OpenSocial Apps
I have been deploying large amounts of widgets, Facebook and OpenSocial applications to various social networks and platforms lately.
Even though I am a programmer I have been able to do much of my heavy lifting using tools that are already available to me without any programming at all.
I use a combination of Youtube, Read more →
50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth
My wife and I just finished launching a new site for a client called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It is the revised, updated edition of a book originally released in the 1990's and was New York Times bestseller.We have been working hard for 3 months to design, develop and launch the site to support he book's release by Earth Day.It is a significant site for us. It is our first major release on the
When Twitter is down....how do I tell everyone about it? Ne...
