On November 1st 2011, a new social media blog will launch. Set to counter the hyperbole of many social media stories and claims, it aims to be different from your normal social media blog. With viewpoints from award-winning bloggers, as well as business and media professionals, the new blog aims to question the status quo and make you think. Ready to be entertained? Sign up below to get in from the start. Update: The site is now live and can…

First, apologies to anyone suffering Klout burnout here – but sometimes a topic has more than just a simple viewpoint. Especially when that topic is something like online privacy. And that privacy has (potentially) been broken by Klout. I was on Facebook today, and my friend Tonia Ries asked about Klout’s ability to make profiles, when users haven’t connected their details with the service. I pointed her to the response from Megan Berry, Klout’s marketing manager, where she says if we…

This is a guest post by Bob LeDrew. I’ve been an observer of things Klouty for a while now. But I’ve been darned if I could work up a lot of excitement over it, positive OR negative. Until now. I got pointed to a post on the Klout blog today about their reworked formula. Since I haven’t any accounts linked to their service, I didn’t have much reason to care. But then I began to read the comment thread, and…

A couple of months back, I wrote about online influence tool Klout, and their approach to how they build their membership (they use opt-out profiling, versus the more widely-used opt-in). The main concern I had was the fact it was so difficult to leave Klout if you didn’t want to be seen as endorsing their product. As of today, two months later, my profile is still live, despite requests to be removed. While the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Empire…

I was flying home from Utah earlier this year, and it included a stopover at Houston. The clouds over Houston were super thick, and it seriously looked like we were flying into mashed up cotton wool on our descent approach to the airport. Because it was an evening flight, it was starting to get pretty dark and you really couldn’t see anything but cloud. The pilots, for all intents and purposes, were flying blind. They were looking at the same…

Often, we change things based on what we see in front of us, or based on perceptions of what we feel is in front of us. It may be that our sales channels are bringing in less than 12 months ago; so we change the sales team or manager. Or, our customers are leaving in numbers that are scary; so we change the customer service team or manager. The problem is, often what we see in front of us is…

This post is inspired by this awesome article from Daniel Newman. There’s been a bit of conversation in recent months about mass unfollows on Twitter. These have been carried out by folks with large followings, with the biggest complaints being the numbers were unmanageable; spam was an issue; etc. Some onlookers have questioned how genuine these unfollows were; and if it wasn’t just an attention-seeking ploy. Discussions have being started, with folks from both sides of the unfollow coin sharing…

No matter what business you’re in, your success can very often boil down to one thing – your people culture. You may have the greatest product with the big dollars to promote it, but it’s the people that will really define how successful the product is. This is true for internal people as well as external. Customers Are Your External People You need to build trust and loyalty with them. Get your relationship right with your customers and you’ll be…

Blogging’s a great way to grow awareness of you and/or your brand and, with bloggers now getting book deals and media contracts, it can also be a lucrative one. Unfortunately, many bloggers shoot themselves in the foot by making some basic errors that holds their blog back from its true potential. Knowing how to avoid these mistakes can mean the difference between just another blog online, and one that stands out as the kind people take notice of. 1. Not…

From the moment we can, we’re forever chasing shadows. As children, we chase the shadow of ourselves that the streetlight throws in front of us. As teenagers, we chase the impossible date with the most popular boy or girl. As adults, we chase the dream job that never happens, or the pot of gold we never reach. We know – subconsciously or otherwise – that some shadows can never be caught, and yet we chase them anyway. And the damage…