Archives for October 2011

The Great Twitter Unfollow of 2011 – Leaked Email

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 their reasons for support / disdain. Theories arose; and more questions were asked as opposed to answered.

Until now.

In this leaked email between two social media gurus, their reasoning can finally be shared as to what The Big Twitter Unfollow Purge of 2011 (as it has become known) was all about. The reasons might surprise you. Then again, probably not…

Anyhoo – here’s the email. Names have been changed for no reason other than it seems the fashionable thing to do when sharing a leaked email.

Project Unfollow Email

Social Media Guru A: “Okay, people aren’t talking about us as much any more – we’ve been found out for lack of real business acumen, and our blogs are empty shells of what they used to be. It sucks.”
Social Media Guru B: “I know. Remember when everyone was talking about us, thinking we were awesome? But now they see through us and think we’re less than average. If only we could get people talking about us again, so we feel as important as our egos tell us we should be.”
Social Media Guru A: “I know – let’s completely ignore all the advice we doled out while building our false reputations, and UnFollow everyone on Twitter, and blame it on spam. They don’t do anything for us, anyway – they don’t buy our affiliate programs any more. Who needs them?”
Social Media Guru B: “Great idea! We’ll make big announcements, make it sound like we’re the wronged party and everyone should feel sorry for us, even though there are a host of ways we can manage and filter all the stuff we’ll blame for the UnFollow.”
Social Media Guru A: “And to keep it buzzing along, we’ll do it at spaces apart from each other, and then promote each other’s words of angst.”
Social Media Guru B: “Love it! But won’t people see through it as nothing but an ego stroke and a desperate last throw of the dice to seem relevant?”
Social Media Guru A: “Not at all. I’ll make up some webinar and charge for it, describe it as something it isn’t, and the heat generated around that decision will make our UnFollows seem genuine. Then people will actually believe we cared about the feelings of those we strung along all these years, with our advice of reciprocal follows.”
Social Media Guru B: “Genius. Absolutely genius.”
Social Media Guru A: “Yeah, some suckers will trust anything we tell them, hehe. Okay – let’s start stroking those egos!”

End of email

Of course, the mass unfollows of 2011 are nothing new – this “experiment/event” already happened two years earlier with unfollows in 2009. So maybe not such a new trend after all.

Ah well, there’s always the Great Facebook Desertion Exercise. Oh – wait a minute…

image: Neil Crosby

Building a Culture of Success

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 in a far stronger position to build from within and continue to enhance that relationship.

Keep them up-to-date with what?s happening.
Don?t trick them with false offers.
Listen to their feedback and act on it.

These are just some of the?ways to get your?external?people culture right.

Employees Are Your Internal People

They have the power to make or break your brand.

Unhappy employees don?t care if you had the best sales year; unhappy employees have no incentive to come to work except for the paycheck; unhappy employees don?t live the culture that happy employees do.

How do you encourage happy employees? Become part of their culture as much as asking them to be part of yours.

Be involved?in their lives.
Allow them time to be with those that matter.
Promote a healthy work/personal time split.
Have an open door policy.
Be genuinely interested in what they have to say as opposed to just offering them a sympathy nod.

Getting it right with your internal people is just as important as getting it right with your external people; sometimes more so.

Help Your People Grow

The most successful companies are the ones that build a strong people culture around everything they start; the most successful companies are those where the customers and the employees aren?t classed as customers and employees. Instead, they?re classed as?your people.

How are you building?your?success?

image:?iLenny

12 Common Mistakes New Bloggers Make

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 owning your own domain

Having your own domain ? as in,?blogname.com?? certainly isn?t a must-have for all bloggers. But if you want to be taken seriously, having a professional domain makes that much more likely. The great news is you can even buy a premium domain and use it on free blog services like?WordPress.com?and?Blogger.com.

2. Not owning your online property

For anyone serious about blogging, a self-hosted option is the only way to go. Not only does it give you more options for styling and customization, it shows you?re in this for the long haul, which can be an attractive proposition for brands looking to sponsor blogs.

3. Not optimizing your blog?s permalinks

Usually, a new blog?s permalinks are set to?blogname.com/?p=123. Pretty ugly, eh? It?s not very search engine friendly either. As soon as you set your blog up, change your permalink settings so they just show the post or page name after the main URL. So something likeblogname.com/posttitle?or?blogname.com/pagetitle.

4. Forgetting to change your favicon

When you have a browser tab open, there?s a little icon on it that shows which site you?re on (Gmail has a red envelope, for example). This helps your site stand out when multiple tabs are open. Use a favicon generator like?favicon.cc?to make your own.

5. Having a generic logo

While you don?t need to go all out and custom design your complete blog as soon as you start, at the very least get your own personalized logo. This is one of the first things new visitors see and can say a lot about your blog.

6. Not using a web-friendly font

A lot of bloggers want their blog to stand out, so go for a font that looks cool. Unfortunately, on the web, it might be painful to read. Stick to a?sans-serif font?for all your main body content, and try not to use too many different fonts on one page or post.

7. Not submitting your blog to the search engines

While a blog is incredibly search engine friendly as it is, because you?re offering fresh, new content, they need to know you exist. You can speed this up by submitting your blog to search engines when live. Google makes it really easy to?submit your blog.

8. Not learning SEO

Many bloggers will tell you content is king. It?s a good point ? but if content is king, SEO is blogging?s queen. If you want people to find your blog, understand how SEO works ? there are many?free resources as well as paid options.

9. Not taking the time to format posts

Web pages that have nothing but lines of continuous text are horrible to read. Make your blog jump from the page by using short sentences, bullet points, headlines and great images. Even long posts can seem shorter with great formatting.

10. Not offering more than one subscription method

Many bloggers offer just an?RSS subscription feed?for their blogs. But email subscription is hugely popular for those that prefer it, while services like?Odiogo?offer another great option for the visibly impaired. Make sure you offer more than one option.

11. Not offering social sharing options

For many bloggers, social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are big drivers of traffic. Make sure you offer the most popular social networks as sharing options on all your posts, and make them prominent.

12. Wanting to be someone else

Perhaps the biggest mistake new bloggers make is to want to be someone else. But the other bloggers you want to be like already have that audience ? so be you, be cool with making mistakes, and grow your style naturally.

These are 12 of the most common mistakes I see new bloggers make. While they may not all be crucial to where you want to go with your blog, they will play a big part in how soon you get there (if at all).

Blogging is fun. It can also be hugely rewarding. By making sure you don?t make these 12 most common new blog mistakes, it?ll be more fun and rewarding for you too.

A version of this post originally appeared on?12 Most.

image:?chrisinplymouth

The Powerful Act of Simplicity

Take a look at the video at the end of this post. It?s a fan-made homage to the band?Dashboard Confessional?and their song?So Long, So Long.

There?s nothing special about it. It?s a simple piece of video, made with Windows Movie Maker then put up on Youtube for the?creator?s?friends to see. And yet?

Its simplicity is also its strength. The mood and pace of the video complement the song perfectly, and doesn?t take away from the song itself. There are no garish images, no fast edits, no multiple screen tricks ? just a simple video for a simple song.

Creative agencies often try to come up with elaborate advertising, PR or marketing messages. The feeling is the more elaborate the message is, the more mystique (and therefore interest) around the brand. And it can work, if done properly.

But you know what? Sometimes it?s the simplest things that are the most elaborate of all.

The comments below this video on Youtube show that many people thought it was the official Dashboard Confessional video for the song.

That has to tell us something about simplicity, no?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frZY6cutYA8[/youtube]

A Lesson In Smelling Roses At The Speed Of Social Media

This is a guest post by Bruce Aristeo.

It was late, and after a long day I stretched out my arms, took a deep breath, and let out a huge sigh. My hands reached out and I began clicking, swiping, and typing as my shoulders curled inward around my chest as if humped over in pain.

My eyes were focusing and scanning the screen, my receptors acting as the light on a copy machine, pin-pointing each pixel and assigning the meaning to each symbol creating structure to what I was seeing.

My TweetDeck was doing its usual fly-by, email accounts were reaching out to their respective servers, Facebook Page was at a standstill while deals were secretly being made in the chat area, and my brain was on stimulus overload from subconsciously keeping track of it all.

No television or iTunes music to breakup the live feed chatter streaming into my mind, only this continued dull hum that my defense mechanism creates to keep me sane.

Breaking The Silence of Social Media

Damn, I forgot to check my Google+ account, I was interested in huddling with a new friend and forgot the time.

Exhausted, my graphic designs began to look as if tie-dye was making a comeback from the sixties, loud and no sharp edges, so it was time to take a short break anyway. I opened my Google+ account and clicked through the various areas looking for something to break the deafening silence of watching social media.

A post? Danny Brown? Wow, I forgot he was in one of my circles. Even visiting Danny?s blog on occasion didn?t break the armor piercing rounds of my focus.

You?d think that reading a great story would stop the world, if only for a moment, but each story only enforced the realization of how much time was passing; the visits became fewer as the weeks slid by. My visit to Danny?s articles were long over due, so I stopped to read this post, a chance to smell the roses ?so to speak.

A Musical Rose Garden

Huh! Nothing to read, only this posting of a video and a small blip, ?Loving this version of ?Livin’ on a Prayer” from Desmond Child, the guy that co-wrote it with Bon Jovi. Very soulful.”

Okay, I know the song; I grew up in Philly and live in New Jersey. Keep in mind that Social Media was still racing, running, streaming and posting with one eye on the accounts and the other on Danny?s post. I know, ?not exactly the full attention I should be giving another human, let alone the artistic expression embedded with a ?play? button.

I clicked the play button and the music began, ?slowly, ?a familiarity to the original yet different. My mind stopped to synchronize my recollection of the original version to this new version. Matching beat, tempo, breaks in the lyrics, but I?m analyzing and still not really free to enjoy the music.

The Shift in Reality

Visually, I broke from the video 30 seconds in, scanning other posts.

Something changed, a shift ?not what I was looking at, but how I was looking.?I was reading and not scanning posts, each one in fact. The music slowed down all my inputs.

Vision, hearing, movement, and thought were as if warped by Star Trek?s ?Q? and the Space Time Continuum. I guess I just dated myself?

I began thinking about the speed at which social media moves, and I correlated it with my studies in child psychology.

It?s interesting that my mind and reactions slowed to the tempo of the music.

Reading the posts became something that happened without intention. It was as if walking through a garden, not intending to smell the roses, but they were there and I happen to think of smelling them.

Stimulation: 10 Second Countdown

Studying child psychology was enjoyable because there were answers to that which gave reason to rhyme.

One such study described how television shows, such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company were delivering a 10 second lesson, meaning the child watching would learn something new every 10 seconds. That philosophy gave rise to the theory that children are being conditioned with over stimulation, thus causing attention spans to decrease.

Being a teacher (K-12), I can attest to how much teachers have to add into lesson plans to maintain student attention.

Listen + Communicate = Intimacy

Now, back to us adults. What are we doing to ourselves by over stimulating our senses with the speed of social media? Are we destroying our ability to sit and listen to another Being by conditioning ourselves with communication void of intimacy?

Our children find text messaging each other while in the same room, sometimes next to each other, is more appropriate than speaking.

Intimacy, the bedrock of communication and the factor dividing us from other animals, is not something transmitted through text, email, Tweets, or Huddles. Intimacy is offered from within each of us, as a means to authentically connect and touch one another with the intention of personal growth.

Some might say that intimacy was part of my social media experience. This is true, but was it Danny?s intention to deliver his personal experience in the link? Only he could answer what his intention was, but my experience came from within. I was only reminded of that place of slowing down, ?my personal rose garden.

Giving Thanks and Slowing Down

My engagement with Danny, I couldn?t thank him enough for being in the right place at the right time. Although my message of thanks to Danny was brief, I could not verbalize the shift that occurred within me. Danny?s post reminded me of slowing down, taking a breath, and truly seeing and being in the moment.

Of course you hear ?Stop and smell the roses? everyday, but do you ever feel it? I did?

As I part from this experience in social media, and I walk away from the roses, I will always keep that particular garden in mind.

The one I walked through when I was exhausted, and the feeling I experienced when stopping to smell the roses…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liSc1FMnjB8[/youtube]

About the author: Bruce Aristeo?is an artist, entrepreneur, and a lecturer/teacher of mathematics and psychology. In the spirit of North American Indians, he is a?Magician and?co-creates the world around him. You can read more from Bruce at AB2BC.Net, or connect with him on Google+?and?Facebook.

image: Adventures in Librarianship