Monday, November 10th, 2008
In the wake of the historical moment that happened earlier this week, there have been tons and tons of blog posts on President Obama’s victory. In this special edition of weekly links, I present five of them that really caught my attention, four of them marketing and/or social media based, and one commentary based.
1) Marketing lessons from the US Elections by Seth Godin. - I haven’t read Seth Godin’s “Tribes” yet, but from hearing about it and reading his blog, it’s pretty intuitive what it’s about. Find out how tribes (and stories) played a part in the elections.
2) Obama proves that there is nothing more powerful than an engaged community by Alexander van Elsas in the Netherlands - Tribes, community, they’re the same thing. Having them is one thing, but having them and setting fire to them is another.
3) Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama Presidential campaign by David Meerman Scott - Not going to go through all ten, but I loved the points about citizen journalists and putting your fans first.
4) Online Facebook Efforts Prove Successful for the Obama Campaign by Louis Gray - Some interesting data on the Facebook community engaged with Obama. Louis asks if John McCain’s loss could be a result of the lack of social media efforts. I certainly think it’s a key reason.
5) Obama: The morning after and some last thoughts by Steven Hodson at the Inquisitr - I picked this because a) it appeared in my Google Alerts for my name, and b) because it collects some really heartfelt comments from people around the internet, and not all of them American, demonstrating how truly global this election has been.
If you weren’t big on the elections and the marketing/social media efforts, have no fear. Regular round of Links For The Week will be right up tomorrow!
Tags: alexander van elsas, citizen journalists, david meerman scott, engaged community, google alerts, inquisitr, john mccain, louis gray, marketing lessons from the us elections, obama facebook efforts, president barack obama, putting your fans first, seth godin, steven hodson, tribes
Posted in Links, Marketing | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 13th, 2008
In line with generating some social capital, I thought I’d go back to my link-sharing ways to both spread stuff of value, as well as generating some nice linklove.
Corporate Social Media
Social Media For Business - Who’s Doing It Well & How - In addition to some common social media case studies, I really liked breaking down the social media strategy to a four step process, and being absolutely clear who your target audience is. Too many people have the misconception that social media reaches everyone, and reaches them quickly. False on both accounts.
Don’t Be Boring - Ten Company Blogs Analysed - by who else but Hutch Carpenter from May’s blogs worth reading. What I appreciate is the attempt to distill blogposts and empirically count them, what I enjoyed was hearing that companies include silliness in blog content. And why not? Brilliant, I say.
5 Competencies of the Connected Corporation - For the people working in social media enabled workspaces. I think being in the loop and being nimble are traits that you need to have in this new world. The sooner companies realise this and try to get there, the better.
RSS
I’m Evangelizing RSS With Google Reader’s E-mail Function - Haven’t linked to Louis Gray in awhile (though I am still reading him frequently), but this post is great because I honestly have never used Google Reader’s email function. Now that I know how useful it is, you can bet I’ll be using much more of it. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that Louis has emailed someone content from my blog. Thanks!
Music
What Would the Perfect Streaming Music Service Look Like? - Although I usually blog about music over on my personal blog, I think this link is good just to share good stuff about the music world, and how it’s not driven by the labels. I feel their legal nonsense and DRM issues in general are the biggest threat to music innovation.
I’m always on the lookout for great blogposts to read and share. If you have any, feel free to post them in the comments, or send them over to my Delicious profile.
Tags: being in the loop, being nimble, competencies of the connecting corporation, corporate social media, corporate social media case studies, drm, evangelizing rss, generating social capital, google reader, hutch carpenter, louis gray, music industry, read write web, record labels, sharing links, social media for business, streaming music service, uniquefrequency on delicious
Posted in Icio, case studies, social media, social media business | 6 Comments »
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Haven’t done this in awhile, but I really wanted to direct you to two resources which I found to be extremely valuable just yesterday.
Word Of Mouth Manual II
Dave Balter who co-authored Grapevine (which I remember reading two years ago) has a new book out called the Word Of Mouth Manual Volume II. Since focusing more and more on social media, I had actually thought in recent weeks about re-visiting the book and seeing what is still relevant today. I first came across the link from Mitch Joel and I don’t want to copy and paste the URL here because it’s a unique URL (excellent for measurement), so head on there if you want to download the book for FREE! (otherwise it costs you $45 on Amazon).
Also, the way the news got out was great, targeting a few key influencers online like John Moore from Brand Autopsy, John Bell from the Digital Influence Mapping Project, Todd Defren at PR Squared and of course Seth Godin among others. Given that these posts appeared in my feeds alone, I’m sure spread out over the targeted blogs, many more people interested in communication and word of mouth would have come across it as well. And appearing numerous times in numerous blogs also sends a strong signal: These many people have found it worth their time, it’s probably worth yours too.
Feedly
As always, Louis Gray brings the best in all things feed-related. I’m not going to just scrape the details from his blog because his write-up is so thorough, there’s probably nothing more I can do but to help spread the word by directing you to his coverage. I’ve just installed Feedly and am finding it a lot to get used to, but I can see certain elements I like.
Tags: brand autopsy, bzzagent, dave balter, digital influence mapping project, feedly, grapevine, john bell, john moore, louis gray, mitch joel, pr squared, seth godin, todd defren, word of mouth manual
Posted in Blogs, Marketing, collaboration, social media | No Comments »
Monday, February 25th, 2008
Just over a week ago I highlighted a chance to get on AssetBar as provided by Louis Gray, as well as introduce LinkRiver, picked up from the same source.
I don’t know how many people took up those invitations, but I sure did and I have to admit my reaction is kinda mixed. I liked the features of AssetBar, but not the UI (user interface). I liked LinkRiver’s functions, but found it a little hard to find friends. All in all, great products, but I wasn’t sure they would ever take the place of Google Reader. Not that it really mattered, I wasn’t looking for a replacement, just different ways of using the same RSS function on the web.
As a pretty typical Internet user, my attention span isn’t great, and I thought “Ok nice programme, doesn’t do a lot for me, I’ll try to keep it in mind.” What changed it was that creators from both applications dropped me a message at my blog to say “look out for this” or “just to clarify this”.
In other words: they were listening. I commented on this somewhere, which lead to Louis beating me to the punch (on time, but not message), that companies that listen to their users will win in the end
And that alone was enough for me to consciously set aside time to continually explore their applications, and I’m sure one day they’ll give Google Reader a run for their money.
If you’ve had similar stories, or other such applications/programmes to share, feel free to comment and share them!
By the way, I am well aware that these posts are just flying over the heads of many of my friends, but I’m going to be introducing 2 things that have totally changed my internet usage habits: RSS and del.icio.us. So if you’ve been one of them who’s been telling me “your blog is so technical now” or “why do I want to be even more connected?”. Stay tuned and read on.
Tags: aggregators, assetbar, centralisers, google reader, linkriver, listen to consumers, louis gray, rss feeds
Posted in Blogs, Search, Social Networks, social media | No Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile, but was motivated into action by Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels Of Separation on his post regarding Technorati Authority.
Background: Technorati authority is simply a measure of how many other people are linking to you from their blogs. ie If 10 people link Unique-Frequency, my Technorati ranking is higher than if 2 people linked me. (This isn’t a new metric of “importance”, Google’s PageRank uses a similar system)
Thinking about this over the last week or so, I have to respectfully disagree with Mitch on the issue because I don’t think it’s a good indicator of whether a blog is “successful” or not.
The reason? Technorati doesn’t discriminate between links. I could have been scraped by a spam blog, just added by someone’s blogroll or mentioned in Joseph Jaffe’s UNM2PNM new marketing and they all will get picked up equally and add to my authority.
That said, of course it’s nice to have a higher authority, but does that really, tangibly mean anything? For example, Mitch has an authority of 550 on Technorati, but Jaffe has about 685. Should that mean I automatically take Jaffe to be more credible? Certainly I have learned a lot from both bloggers and would not say they should be almost 150 points apart.
Conversely, the JaffeJuice group on Facebook has 626 members while the Six Pixels Society more than doubles it at 1325 members. Does that mean anything?
Both are instances where bloggers or Facebook users have a choice whether to link or to join the groups. Some choose to, some don’t.
Here’s what I feel is the inherent flaw: You have to own a blog or be on Facebook to add to the Technorati authority or to the Facebook group’s numbers. But the number of people who are actual content creators (ie bloggers) is somewhere in the region of 13% according to a study shown in social media class. In other words, the other 87% are by default, excluded.
Now I’m not saying this is a bad metric. Obviously I love it when my authority goes up (I’m at 13). But I also know that while I have certain nice mentions by people like Louis Gray in an actual conversation, it also contains spam blog links and links on people’s blogroll, whether or not they read my blog. This difference makes me take the Technorati authority with a pinch of salt.
The system isn’t perfect, but then perhaps no system is. But personally, until this tension between discriminatory and non-discriminatory links are reconciled, I’m hesitant to place a strong emphasis on Technorati authority.
Tags: blog rankings, facebook, google pagerank, jaffe juice, joseph jaffe, louis gray, mitch joel, six pixels of separation, technorati authority
Posted in Blogs, social media | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Louisgray is very quickly becoming one of my top “must reads” whenever something comes from his RSS feed. Late January he alerted the blogosphere about AssetBar, and now he has the latest on LinkRiver.
So we already use Google Reader or some other RSS reader, why LinkRiver? Without trying it out yet, the biggest draw for me is that is aggregates everything from your RSS feeds to Twitter to Del.icio.us bookmarks into one central location. As Louis says:
harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single “Stream”. As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a “River” of shared links, hence the name.
To get a real good idea, check out Louis’s stream right here. I for one am already sold and have sent in my beta application.
The one negative that I can see coming out of it is if someone is pushing similar feeds on social bookmarks, Google Reader and Twitter, and then it could get very tiresome to deal with. I suppose we’ll find out soon won’t we?
Do you keep your feeds/updates central? Or is there some other way you keep on top of everything? Let me know.
Tags: aggregator, assetbar, blogosphere, centraliser, delivious, google reader, link river, linkriver, louis gray, louisgray, must read, must reads, rss, rss feeds, twitter
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »
