Archives for August 2010

You Scratch My Back

the price of comfort How much information is free information?

How much should be guarded and how much should be shared?

If you?re asked by someone, ?How do you do this?? or ?What methods work for you??, should there always be an answer?

Say you receive a request from someone asking about some of your business practices or approaches.

Do you always offer an answer, or do you feel uncomfortable giving them one?

Is there a limit on help or is it part of the whole relationship building approach to social media?

Take it offline as well. It isn?t just restricted to social media.

We build relationships every day because we want to help people and be helped where needed. We offer our experience and ask for that of others when we become stuck.

Some relationships move to a higher level than others. Some may even become akin to partnerships without the legalese to say so.

Yet is there a time to draw the line at how much free help is offered? Is there some help that should be viewed as a business service?

Where?s your line drawn?

photo credit: Genista

Are You Selling Baldness Cream to Seth Godin?

You like Seth Godin.

You hear he’s speaking at an event in NYC so you sign-up for your ticket. Others have signed up too because, well, Seth Godin always offers excellent knowledge and you want to catch up with the latest news from him.

There’s you and 200 other folks in the audience. Seth’s talking, and it’s awesome. You learn so much that you can take away and use for your own business. That’s the gold; that’s why you came.

The MC asks if you have any questions.

Other folks ask about things he was speaking about; he answers. They take notes and share thoughts on how that can help them increase their leads.

Then you pipe up.

“Great, Seth, but I think you’d really benefit from my product that helps bald men be more successful. We guarantee that you won’t feel awkward ever again, and you’ll be more successful with women and career prospects than you could possibly imagine. Because I’m here today, I’ll give you a 3-for-1 option on it – just let me know where to send it. Oh, and while I’m here, do you have erectile dysfunction too, because my company can also help with that.”

Yeah, right.

So. Are you looking to sell to the right audience at the right time, or are you just hitting blindly and hoping something connects?

Image: Squidoo Graphics

Social Media Roadmaps

This is a guest post by Kapil Apshankar, an innovative social media strategist. He writes about tips, tricks and techniques that help his readers score higher in social media at Social Media Notebook.

Kapil also maintains a personal blog, Spring Rainbow, which captures his life away from social media.

He can be reached via Twitter @KapilApshankar – or by email from his blogs’ contact pages.

Social media is one of the most misunderstood – and underused/abused – concepts of our times.

To borrow a term from Michael Stelzner’s lexicon, social media is indeed a jungle – where it’s very easy to get lost or get (b)eaten! We all need a roadmap for success here.

Chris Brogan had a wonderful post a few days ago – Sharpen Your Pencil – that talked about making success happen. The original post is a worthy read by itself – but one of the comments (by SocialSteve) really rocked:

This sounds similar to what Emmet Smith said at the induction of the Football Hall of Fame. He said something like he had dreams. And the next step after a dream was writing it down on paper. And then turning that into a plan. Maybe there will be a social media hall of fame some day. 🙂

Social media success strategies need to be customized and tailor fit. A one size fits all approach just doesn’t work.

Here are four key steps to build a custom social media roadmap – one that works for you.

Establish Your Base Camp

Your base camp isn’t Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Your base camp has to be your blog. Take it anywhere else, and you’re at the mercy of external forces to keep your camp alive. It just doesn’t work that way.

There is also the About Me page – the center piece of any base camp – that needs attention. To recap the wisdom of Darren Rowse,

Setting up an about page is really important ? it?s one of those pages that a new reader will head to in order to help them work out what your blog is about, who is behind it and to decide whether they?ll keep reading it.

Fortify (And Diversify) Your Primary Social Media Channels

The next step is to focus on your primary social media channels. In all likelihood, they will be Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn.

One rule to remember here is something I learned from Tamar Weinberg. Every baby is different, so also every social media channel is different.

Play to the strengths of each channel. Danny had written a wonderful post right here on the topic, How to Use Blog Lists for Your Social Media Strategy. And then, take them to the next level. For starters, answer questions on LinkedIn and get on Twitter chats. You want to get more from your primary channels.

Establish Secondary and Tertiary Channels

Social media without interactions is a monologue at best. Think about ways to make your social media interactions rich – both in content and semantics. Encourage comments, cross-comments and discussions. Healthy debates are good for everyone involved.

Also to think about are mechanisms for your audience to share more than just text – how about images, audio and video?

That’s also what I would refer to as your secondary and tertiary channels of the social web.

Think beyond the conventional channels – think YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, UStream, Vokle et al.

Keep The Big Picture Perspective

Social media is all about real connections that thrive on the foundation of trust, empathy and authenticity. Anytime we violate the Golden Rule, we dent our reputation and credibility. Everything that we do with social media should fit into our big picture perspectives.

It might help to define your big picture using the framework I laid down at Social Media Success – One Day At A Time!

What do you think? What other strategies are helping you build your own successful social media roadmaps?

Image Credit: nullalux

Why You Don’t Need to Blog Daily

Keep up and blog on There’s a bit of a debate as to how often you should blog if you want to have a successful blog and grow the community around it.

Some folks will say you need to blog every day, or every other day.

Others will say once a week.

Others will say only blog when you have something useful to say (I’m not too sold on the last one – one person’s definition of useful is another’s definition of crap).

To be honest, there’s no right or wrong answer. Or at least, no standard right or wrong answer.

There is a right answer for you, however, and that’s the one you need to look at.

Questions and Answers

Blogging’s a funny beast. It can be personal; it can be corporate. It can be funny; it can be sad. It can be a sales tool; it can be a simple connection tool. It can be written; it can be media.

Simply put, blogging is in a world of its own when it comes to set parameters. You can’t say what works for one blogger will work for another; it just doesn’t roll that way.

What it does do, however, is make it easy to choose how often you’ll blog by asking two must-know questions before you start.

Are you passionate about the topic?
What time can you realistically allocate?

These are just two questions, but they offer the best idea for you as to how often you’ll blog. If you’re not passionate about your topic, blogging will soon become a chore, and once something becomes a chore… Well, we all hate chores, right?

If you can only allocate a few hours a week (and this includes promoting your blog and responding to comments on the post), then you’re probably only going to post once or twice a week. An hour a day would see you post daily; a couple of hours a month, you’d probably only be able to blog bi-weekly. (These are just rough stats – they don’t necessarily relate to your timescales).

So these questions kind of dictate how often you might blog.

It’s Not Worth It Then, Is It?

Now, depending on who you read and who you listen to, if you’re posting infrequently then you’re never going to grow your blog or get the readers/subscribers you’re after. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Not necessarily.

I blog pretty much every day. I don’t do it just to “get more readers” – I’ve never had a subscription run here and I don’t plan on having one, ever. I’d rather grow my readership and subscribers organically as opposed to giving faux reasons why you should subscribe.

Instead, I blog as frequently because I genuinely love blogging. I love the interaction with you; I love being able to bounce ideas off each other; I love being able to offer an alternative take on something and then invite you to offer yours.

My friend John Haydon blogs a little less frequently, but still pretty regularly. Chris Garrett, co-author of the ProBlogger book and owner of the popular new media site ChrisG.com, has been posting fairly irregularly over the last few months.

Now. Take a look at this chart from Compete.com, which shows the monthly traffic for all three sites over the last 12 months.

As you can see, while there have been dips and gains, Chris has the most traffic, while John and I have swapped it back and forth as to where the higher traffic has been on a given month.

The blog that posts less is more “popular” than ones that post either daily, or more frequently. Kind of blows the whole “post every day” argument out the water.

So.

Listen to you, and write for you. Everything else is a bonus – readers, commenters, community, subscribers. Get what feels right for you, and that comfort will come across in your blog.

And that’s when it starts being fun. And when others see it’s fun? Well, there might just be no stopping you then…

photo credit: markhillary