IDEAS

BTW – We agree

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

Children aren’t going to understand the importance of keeping passwords secret unless you explain it to them.

I had a conversation with a guy the other day, and he told me about his son’s personal password tragedy. The kid really liked an online game. He played it often and accumulated a lot of valuable in-game items; magic swords and armor. One day another guy in the game convinced his son to give up his password. The guy stole all of his son’s equipment and left his character essentially naked.

The bright-side of this story is that his son learned a valuable lesson about password protection, privacy, and security within the safety of a game. As upset as the child was, the damage wasn’t irreparable.

My message is simple, teach your children to keep passwords secret.

After you teach them, they can choose to ignore you as a teenager… But that will be on them, you did your job.

Teach your children to practice safe computing.

Syndicated by The Geek Whisperer

Last week, Google released Google Buzz to the social media world. With Google Buzz, you can update your status, share links, photos, videos and more. It integrates directly with gmail and connects to sites like Twitter and Flickr to make sharing even easier. With this new sharing tool comes new code that you may want to put on your blog.

As a followup to my previous post Adding Social Media Links to Wordpress Without Using a Plugin, here is new code that you can use for Google Buzz:

http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>

And the addition to the code that we use on this site (which is shown in my previous post) just adds a new list item to the existing links:

<li><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="Share with Google Buzz">Buzz</a></li>

Note that Buzz uses Google Reader to share links. In order for this to show up on your Buzz, you have to make sure that Reader is connected with your Buzz.

Yesterday, I attended an event by the New Jersey Communications Advertising and Marketing Association (NJCAMA). Met some good people and heard some great things. The guest speaker for the evening was Geno Church from Brains on Fire. Geno gave a great presentation on word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and movement building where he took us through a few case studies with Best Buy and Fiskar (yes, the orange handle scissor people).

Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.

Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it

Social media is not WOMM

People trust people

Tactics bog us down

“No! If you build it we won’t come”

90% of WOMM occurs offline

Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories

• support a cause
• enable an experience
• communicate the ethos of a brand

Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements

1. Movements are built on passion
2. Movements begin with the first conversation
3. Movements have inspirational leadership
4. Movements have a barrier for entry (invite only)
5. Movements empower people with knowledge
6. Movements encourage ownership
7. Movements have powerful identities
8. Movements live born on and off line
9. Movements make advocates feel like rockstars
10. Movements get results

There are tons of Wordpress plug-ins that offer you the ability to share your blog posts using social media websites. Many of these plug-ins word great (bookmarkify did its job for us in the past) but you are limited to the websites and, most of the time, the design. You also may be limited to the message that you want to include with the link – for example, adding your @Twitter ID to the Twitter link – and not being able to include URL shortening.

So what if you want a completely custom way to share your links? Keep reading, I’ll share the code that I used to convert the Local Wisdom blog from being plug-in dependent to having our own custom code.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our phase 1 integration with Facebook is in its testing phase. To help us test it out, we need your assistance!

After reading the Smashing Magazine’s article How to Integrate Facebook with Wordpress, we decided to try this out ourselves. Not only can you read our blog straight from our localwisdom.com URL, you can also access it on Facebook from apps.facebook.com/localwisdomblog. Comments are shared between both locations. If you want, you can set up the blog feed right onto your profile using our blog application.

We also set up a Facebook login using Facebook Connector from Sociable (see image to the right) so that you can log into Facebook straight from our blog to comment as yourself (for now, the log-in is located as the last item on our sidebar).

Now this is where we need your help – we need Facebook users who do not currently have a username on the LW blog to make some comments so that we can fully test these plug-ins. No… I’m not trying to fish for comments here, just simply asking for a favor from some of our Facebook/blog readers so we can see if this thing really does work properly. If you do this, you get your very own Derrick-ism that you can use with no limits, no trademark symbols, given by the man himself (certain restrictions apply to the term itself – sorry folks, but I can’t give away words like Fridaying®, Friday-eye® Laterz®, etc that are already hard-coded into the Derrick-tionary).

If you run into issues with it, just leave a comment here and I’ll attempt to work it out.

This is from InformationisBeutiful.net a gem blog that I happened to come across not too long ago.

Its by the very talented David McCandless visual & data journalist from London.

Great place for data junkies and data geeks like me.

If you like the the Twitter one, you’ll love everything else on the blog.

Love the Shift Happens series. Always combine 3 things I like to see on my computer: good design, cool transitions, and impactful statistics.

Read more about it here.

Earlier last month Jakob Nielson posted his latest research findings on Social Networking on Intranets. Also always the study was quite thorough with case studies from 14 companies over 6 countries.

We work on a good number of Intranet sites for our customers and we find they are facing many of the same challenges.

Here are some notable quote-ables from the article.

When Intranet information architectures are structured according to the org chart, employees have a hard time finding their way around.

As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise

most companies are not very far along in a wholesale adoption of Web 2.0 technologies

Social software is not a trend that can be ignored. It’s affecting fundamental change in how people expect to communicate, both with each other and the companies they do business with.

successful social media initiatives at many companies emerged from underground, grassroots efforts

social software isn’t really about the tools. It’s about what the tools let users do and the business problems the tools address

So, rather than saying: “X is hot on the Web, let’s get it on the intranet,” say: “We need to accomplish Y; can X help us?”

void advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.

The tool itself is nothing; the value comes from the strength of its content.

Widespread use of internal social media breaks down communication barriers. That sounds good, but it can threaten people accustomed to having a monopoly on information and communication.

Corporate communications must adapt to social media’s real-time culture and become much more proactive than in the past

Before implementing intranet collaboration tools, you must consider company culture.

Things Take Time

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Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love – and it all ends up on The Hype Machine. http://hypem.com/

I’m about 10 minutes in and it’s kept me entertained, so for here is the line up that I’ve listened to.

• An MP3 Roundup including Amanda Blank, Amy Milan, Grooms & White Rabbits
• Bruises by Chairlift
• And currently listening to Always Right by Ramona Falls

Fun way to discovery new music!