Big Idea #1:  Permission Marketing: A Privilege, Not a Right

The post Permission Marketing Explained in Plain English [Book Summary] appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

For this inaugural “Listen To This”, I am pleased to recommend to you an amazing 33 minutes of audio: Seth Godin speaks volumes on the Read to Lead podcast. Why this episode? What’s so important? 

Action–>Belief

Though this entire podcast is gold, I found my inspiration a little over 12 minutes in, where the following question is posed: “How do I resolve the idea that I often know I can, but I don’t always believe I can?”

Woh. That’s a biggie. You might want to read that question again.

You should really listen to Seth’s entire answer, but here is how he boils it down: “We don’t take action because we believe; we believe because we take action. […] Do first; believe second.”

I’ll admit it; I had to listen to this section several times to really understand what Seth was saying. The idea of action preceding belief just would not jive with my brain, and it still turns me inside-out a bit. Generally, we act on belief, not the other way around. Or so my thinking goes.

However, what I finally understood was the angle of the question. He’s not talking about belief in something external (i.e., a cause or an event); Seth’s talking about belief in yourself. Like, how do I convince myself to do something? How do I jump out of my comfort zone to start something that I know I can do, know that I should be doing, but am just not sure yet that I have the right to do? Ultimately, how do I squash fear and do the good work that I know I should be doing?

And I whole-heartedly believe that Seth is right; just do it. How do you start believing that you can do something? Just start doing it. Like, right now.

What Is Your X?

We all find ourselves in this boat: I should be working on X; I know that I should be working on X; seriously, I need to start working on X. Then we whistle casually as we saunter back to A, B, and C. Why? Because it’s comfortable, it’s familiar, and it’s not that scary X-thing.

Doing X might mean doing good work, but also doing hard work. Doing X might mean exposure. Doing X might mean failure.

Can I do X? Yes. I know that I can type the words, do the research, connect a microphone to a computer, or whatever basic skills that X requires. But do I believe that I can do X…that’s the sticking point. It’s a sticking point that you have created as an excuse, but it’s still there.

How many times has that sticking point, that lack of belief, that fear of failure stopped you from doing what you know is your good work, the work that needs to be done? Yah, me too. Let’s stop that.

Today, let’s commit to action. No Fear; Just Do It; It’s Your Turn.

Why wait for you to believe in yourself when you have such an opportunity to make believers out of everyone else?

Your First Action

Let’s start today. Scroll down and leave a comment. It’s not for my ego, it’s not for analytics, and it’s not for nothing. Commit to action and put it into words (your first action). Make your commitment real (and public); that’s why we invite your participation. Or disagree with the post; that’s cool, too. I’ll just put the blame on Seth (kidding), but go ahead and push back, and we’ll figure it out together. Then leave me a link to what podcast you’re listening to; there’s a very (very) good chance that I’ll check it out. Thanks in advance for any of the above, and let’s keep this conversation going.

Lastly, thanks to Jeff Brown and Seth Godin for making the effort to share their conversation with the rest of us. *Shanti*

The post Listen To This: Seth Godin on the Read to Lead podcast appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Today innovation is more than a nicety; it’s a survival skill. Rapid changes in technology over the last ten years mean that you either innovate or get left in the dust as entire industries undergo major upheavals.

How do you set the stage for innovation and create an environment where new ideas are welcome and the organization is set up to implement them?  What is the culture of the companies that win at innovation? Here are seven qualities of the innovative organization.

1. Innovation is stated value and a priority.

There are people, titles and budget assigned to assuring that innovation is part of the culture.  One way to do this is to have an innovation team making sure that everyone knows their ideas will be heard and more importantly—management commits to hearing them. I am part of such a team at my company, Lion Brand, a brand that has been on the market for 135 years.

2. Welcoming innovative ideas means making the time to explore them.

Innovative organizations know that if all the time in a day is spent taking care of emails, attending meetings about the status quo and fighting fires there is no time to think about and discuss innovative ideas.  It’s not easy to step back from the response-based activities to the more generative process of creating something entirely new. If people are too busy to hear about and consider innovative ideas, they won’t be too busy for long.

3. Innovative companies are aware of the competition but not focused on them.

The danger in focusing on the competition is that you will replicate what’s already been done, simply because you think it’s successful.  Innovative ideas arise when you look outside your own industry or connected two ideas from unrelated disciplines to create something completely new.

Nike didn’t look to the designs of Adidas to make a better sneaker. They looked at how a future that connects technology with health and athleticism could create a new product.

4. Innovative companies get comfortable with uncertainty.

They understand that it is not easy to evaluate and budget for innovation. It’s difficult to project the ROI of something that doesn’t already exist, and for which there is little precedent. If you wait until all the possibilities are accounted for, you won’t innovate.

5. Failure must be an option.

If failure is the worst thing that can happen in an organization, then the only path to success is to bet on tried and true, use best practices and repeat history over and over again. Everyone who is considered a successful innovator has stories of the failed attempts that preceded their successes.

Chris Sacca, an investor in Twitter, spent his college loans in the stock market, made $12 million and then lost it all, going $2 million in debt when tech stocks crashed. He hustled his way into becoming an angel investor with a business card and a website and became a success investing in early tech startups. Francis Ford Coppola, creator of Apocalypse Now and the Godfather films, and has had more  failures than successes at the box office (fortunately the financial gains of the successes were significantly higher).

6. Great innovators notice things and ask good questions.

The culture in an innovative company is comfortable with people questioning the status quo. Innovation results when you as “why not?” or “what if?” The compliant, rule-following, people are not the innovative rock starts of the future.

Henry Ford asked how he could make cars more affordable using technology. Today a good question for every business is “How can technology help lower the cost of, improve, or market our product?”

7. Great innovators get out a lot.

Sitting at your desk, checking off your to do list, answering emails and filling out budget forms virtually guarantees that you won’t have an innovative idea.  Going to a conference, taking a walk around the block, going to lunch with a colleague—just getting out more and exchanging ideas—takes you off the well-worn paths that lead away from new ideas.  Avoid the familiar in routine and get out of the online echo chamber.

Step into the world of innovation by immersing yourself at a conference.

I’m a big believe in attending the right conferences to stay up to date on the cutting edge thinking in your industry. But for everyone, attending a conference that inspires them to get on a path to innovation is worthwhile. Because of the burgeoning interest in the topic a number of conferences have sprung up that feature speakers from a wide array of fields including neuroscience, academia, technology and film.  These conferences include the Social Innovation Summit, held at Stanford this month, The Innovation Uncensored Conferences run by Fast Company, the 99U Conferences and a conference, for which I am an evangelist, Creativity and Commerce (C2-MTL) Conference in Montreal.  C2-MTL happens this May and features speakers including James Cameron (filmmaker), Christian Loubouton (designer) and Tony Hseih (Zappos).

If you’re stuck for ideas, plan the time to step out of your everyday activities and get inspired by the innovation rock stars and the creative people who gather to hear them. I can offer a significant discount off the C2-MTL conference that’s good until December.  Feel free to email me if you are interested at Ilana221@gmail.com

The post 7 Ways To Become A Rock Star of Innovation appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

This was a tweet I stumbled on last week. I was taken by it because it was a great summary of Godin’s book in 140 characters.  It also struck me that providing leadership content is a highly effective social media strategy.

At about the same time I saw that tweet, I was reading a Wall Street Journal article that offered some insight into leadership in the realm of fitness.  The story exemplified the idea of creating a tribe, describing a new movement among fitness instructors who mentor, inspire, befriend and motivate their students.  As a result of their leadership and the relationships  they develop with their students, they drive business filling classes.  And not only do students flock to specific teachers every week, but they follow them to yoga and other fitness retreats around the globe, spending thousands of dollars for the opportunity to spend a few days with these teachers.

In the article, the national director of group fitness at Equinox summed it up: “The reason our group fitness business is so powerful is because the relationship between the instructor and the members is, in many ways, emotional.”

That emotional component of leadership is what moves people.  And moving people—influence—is what leadership content is about.

What are the essential qualities of leadership content?

1. Leadership content provides inspiration and motivation. It doesn’t tell you what to do or lay out tactics. It provides the principles and allows individuals to work out the specifics of execution.  In this way, it is a stimulus for creativity.
2. Leadership content reflects the leader’s unique way of viewing the world .
3. Leadership content teaches.
4. Leadership content moves people to change the way they do things.
5. Leadership content focuses on providing value for the reader, not the author.

The writers of this blog are held to an editorial standard based on providing leadership content.   The editorial guidelines include information about who we are writing for and what our mission is.  The litmus test we use to determine whether a post fits with the mission of Social Media Explorer is this:

• Is it strategic in focus?
• Is it open-minded?
• Is it about ideas?
• Is it an original perspective?

It’s the original perspective that is the hardest part of providing leadership content. The ability to say something–even slightly different–in the face of all the content on the web is a challenge. The “how” of doing this is about creating content that reflects your unique experiences and beliefs.

A few of the leaders that provide leadership content that resonates with me include Julien Smith, Behance, Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Danielle LaPorte, Valeria Maltoni and Mark Silver,

Who inspires you with leadership content? What is it about their content that moves you?

The post Leadership As A Social Media Strategy appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I imagine that many corporate social media documents list engagement as a goal.  Whether it’s an individual initiative or an overall strategy, the word “engagement” has become the ultimate prize in the world of social media. Yet, gaming the system, creates only an illusion of engagement.

Try as you might to create massive amounts of engagement, it’s your mission—the meaning you bring to your community that determines genuine engagement. Joel Osteen has a mission—a higher calling.  But you don’t need to be a ministry to have a mission.

If your social media efforts strive to be helpful, inspiring, supportive, informative or fun and do so in a way that fits your brand and delivers value, you have a better chance of being engaged than if you goal is engagement.

Social media is the ultimate vehicle for spreading ideas and as Seth Godin says, “ideas that spread win.” Yet we see so many manipulative tactics being used to get people to like Facebook pages, to retweet updates on Twitter and to “engage” for reasons other than a desire to be part of something and spread the word. A mission to increase engagement is like a mission to make a viral video.  Other people will decide if your video or your idea is worth spreading.

How do you increase your Facebook likes or get more retweets?  If it involves giving people a secondary reason like the opportunity to win a prize or vote for a charity, the sharing is short term.  A relationship based entirely on this type of motivation is fragile at best.

Consider three types of engagement:

Organic engagement

Organic engagement happens when people choose to like, share or comment on your Facebook status, share your tweets, or comment on your blog without prompting or reward. Because of your content or your product, they are moved, on their own to talk about and to you.  They feel something  about your product or your content that drives their behavior.

Encouraged engagement

Discovery sometimes needs a little help.  People may not be aware of your Facebook presence or they may be standing on the sidelines and need some encouragement to participate. Encouraged engagement comes from promoting the fact that your content exists and making the “ask .”   And, it should be accompanied with an explanation of what to expect from your social media account.

Encouraged engagement also includes asking for the “like” or the comment. It’s a gentle reminder that you want to have a conversation.

Incentivized (or Forced) engagement

Now we are getting into murkier territory.  Almost everyone incentivizes engagement at some point. You run a contest to get people to interact on Facebook or Twitter.  You offer a reward for sharing content.  “Come by our booth and tweet about our product for a chance to win an iPad”

As a short term result, you’ll get more likes and more people talking about you on Facebook or more Tweets because you paid for it in some way.  But it’s not sustainable.  Forced engagement is not a long-term strategy.  If people don’t ultimately connect organically, you will be caught in a never ending cycle of having to offer a reward.  You don’t build trust and nobody really cares that much because as soon as a better offer comes along they will disappear.

So the next time you sit around the table hatching a plan to “increase engagement” ask three questions. 

Is this engagement sustainable?  Does it build trust? How will people feel (about you) when they are sharing? The answers to those questions will tell you whether you can expect engagement that adds value to your brand or the illusion of engagement.

The post How To Avoid The Illusion of Social Media Engagement appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If only I could get one of those big names – Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Brian Clark, I’d even settle for Jason Falls – to trumpet the piece I’ll be en route to cashing checks and speaking in front of sold out conference center ballrooms.

If only I could get it to catch on. Maybe it’ll happen this time. I really hope it does.

</patheticness>

While we won’t readily admit to it – at least not out in the open on the internet – we often use hope as the primary driver of our content strategy.

“I hope people like this.”

“Hopefully, it’ll get picked up by the linkerati.”

“We haven’t considered our resources, our audience, or our end goals, but we hope this [fill in the blank with a whitepaper, video, blog post, etc.] will do the trick.”

It’s good to be optimistic, right? We should believe that anything could happen, shouldn’t we? Isn’t it better to see the glass as half full, not as half empty?

Maybe that’s what our kindergarten teachers and psychologists tell us, but optimism in the world of content marketing is the quickest path to surefire disappointment and oftentimes failure.

Allow me to steal a lesson from Jim Collin’s oft-referenced masterpiece “From Good to Great“.

James Stockdale – a veteran who survived almost 8 years in a P.O.W. camp was asked if the people who didn’t make it had anything in common, he said this:

“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Though the circumstances are drastically different (read: running a content marketing program is absolutely nothing like surviving a P.O.W. camp) the lesson remains the same: if you’re not ready to “confront the brutal facts of your current reality” you’re not likely to be successful.

Those brutal facts are:

•  There are no overnight successes. Despite what viral videos appearing on the Today Show might lead you to believe (I’m looking at you, golden-voiced Ted Williams), a viral video doesn’t typically pave the way to sustainable success. It usually provides a temporary downpour of traffic and then a drought.

•  Sustainable success takes commitment. The output of a top 10 blog in the AdAge Power 150 is astounding: On average, they’ve produced 2.4 posts per day with an average word count of 1,278 every single day for the last 7 years.
• A lot of your stuff will be ignored. Not every hit is going to be a home run. In fact, you’ll probably strike out a lot. The key is to keep learning and improve your approach as you go.

We can be as optimistic as we want when it comes to our content strategy, but our hearts will usually end up broken, our sails will lose the wind, and we’ll constantly be refreshing our Google Analytics report hoping to see the visits adding up.

But when they don’t, we question ourselves, we question our ideas, and we question the entire idea of content marketing in the first place.

And sometimes we quit. After all, the optimists die first. The people that see it like it is, never get too high, never get too low, and always keep their nose to the grindstone are the ones that survive. And after enough of the grind, they thrive.

In other words, don’t end up like the bunny.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Lee Odden, Kipp Bodnar and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

The post The Optimists Die First: Why Hope is Not a Content Strategy appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Clinging to the status quo is a recipe for extinction. I say this from the perspective of someone who works for a 134-year-old brand. You can never get complacent. You have to constantly reinvent your business.

Just look at the industries that have been disrupted by technology.  Publishing. Printing. Retail. Education. Banking. Music. Entertainment.  The businesses within these industries that survive have been the disruptors.

But, how do you dare to disrupt your own business? How do you move beyond the status quo?  Here are 6 trends that point the way and a reading that can help.

Entrepreneurship

You don’t have to found a tech start-up to be an entrepreneur.  You just have to have an entrepreneurial approach to every aspect of your business.  Act small.  If you find you are unable to have mini-start-ups in your company because your procedures are too cumbersome, your infrastructure too complex, or your hierarchy too structured take note. These are red flags that tell you, you’ve moved outside the realm of being an entrepreneur.

Failure

Failure is “in” because it’s a sign that you have taken risks and innovated.  The option—the  safe route based on best-practices and “the way it’s always been done” is a path to extinction.  Failure is the price you pay for being open to new ideas and for taking risks.  Learning to take calculated risks and get comfortable with failure is a requirement for entrepreneurial ventures.

Creativity

Creativity is a key factor in being able to disrupt the status quo.  And, creativity isn’t just for “creatives.”  There’s no reason why salespeople or shopkeepers should stay in a self-imposed ghetto of mundane thinkers. Several of the books on this list teach how creativity works and how creativity can become a discipline, rather than an unreliable and mystical resource. Taking the kind of leaps that are necessary to keep up with the marketplace means learning to be fearless and embracing creativity.

The Power of Fringe

The safe, middle-of-the-road, something-for-everyone business is not so safe.  When businesses were largely local, it only mattered that you stood out from a small number of competitors. When information was scarce, any source of information was valuable. Now standing out is more important.  Just check Google for generic terms related to your business if you’re uncomfortable with being different. Learning to be different–meaningfully and significantly different–is more important than ever.

Radical Simplicity

Cumbersome and complex businesses and products are ripe for disruption.  Simplicity (or at least solutions that appear simple) reduce the friction that comes between a person and an action or purchase.  Simplicity allows for the speed that goes hand-in-hand with disruptive technologies. Businesses like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Square and Dropbox are examples of businesses that are simple to use and simple to understand.

Thinking Small

This trend is a subset of Radical Simplicity. As organizations get bigger, they tend to get more complex and slow down. Speed is one of the requirements of successful disruption and small has the potential to move faster and sell faster in the world of short attention spans.  People don’t have the patience to read long pieces of content, even in print.  People who are used to paying $1.99 for an app are going to think five times before paying $199 for a downloadable product. While this doesn’t require firing people or cheapening your output, it does mean rethinking your internal processes to be nimble and redefining the size of a piece of content.

The Reading List

Here are a list of books that address these trends. Some of them can fit into more than one category.

• The Lean Start-up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton Christenson
• Zen Habits: Handbook for Life by Leo Babauta
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya
• The Power of Unpopular: A Guide to Building Your Brand for the Audience Who Will Love You (and why no one else matters) by Erika Napoletano
• We Are All Weird by Seth Godin
• Different: Escaping the Competitive Heard by Youngme Moon
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
• Do The Work and the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
• The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice by Todd Henry
• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
• Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

The post The Business Survival Reading List appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

There is a Zen aspect to audience building goes like this:

• If you want to be able to sell people something, don’t focus on selling.
• If you want people to listen to you, don’t talk about yourself.
• If you want to get something back from your audience, be generous.

So, how can you see a dollar from this?  Wrong question.

An engaged audience is a valuable asset, but not necessarily for the purpose of selling. And you cannot fully fathom the value of that asset in the short term.  Over a period of years, as you grow your audience what happens is this: opportunity knocks because of your audience.

Most business bloggers understand this about their blogging efforts.  They don’t expect their blog to generate revenue.  It’s the same reason that celebrities and newsmakers grant the most desirable interviews to Barbara Walters or Oprah. It’s not because they get paid more to do it.

Over the past ten years at Lion Brand Yarn Company, we have built an audience and a community that today numbers in the millions. And of course, these are not just top line numbers. We are engaged with each other.

Virtually anywhere that people who use, or are likely to use our product spend time online, we established a branded venue, sharing and communicating, without always knowing how we could “use” that audience or how they could pay us back for our investment. (Blasphemy, I know.)

How do we know how we’re doing?  We know because the size of the audience grows organically. We know by the numbers of people who comment, open newsletters, download podcasts, and share posts at rates that grow and consistently meet our own internal standards.  In general, these standards are simplified versions of the Google and Facebook algorithms.

We keep our investment small.  We engage agencies only to teach us how to do things ourselves when we enter unfamiliar territory. We gradually shifted spending out of print, print ads and postage line items. Digital marketing has always been a lean startup.

With Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Ravelry, YouTube, a podcast, a blog,or the 7 million email newsletters we send each month, our goal has been to build an engaged audience first and foremost.

The direct, measurable revenue we generate from the people we are engaged with is not the main point. And yet we are on intimate terms with our numbers.  Through tracking links and Google analytics we know how our Pinterest traffic and blog traffic convert; we know each source’s relative performance in terms of all key performance indicators.  We study Facebook insights and regularly test new third party Twitter measurement tools.  We look at the numbers and continuously ask, “Why?” Our small but smart, creative marketing team figures out the how.

It is only in retrospect that we can look at our efforts and say that this audience building made sense.  When we do want to promote something,  we don’t have to (as Seth Godin says) wait for some big media outlet to choose us.  We choose ourselves.

Opportunities that are invaluable come to us because  licensors, corporate relationships and other business building partners know that we can reach a very specific but relatively large audience within minutes of deciding to do so.

If you think of yourself as a media outlet, you understand that an engaged audience is an end in itself. There is value in having the attention of the right people.

Jeff Bezos understood this.  According to a Fortune Magazine article on the 12 top entrepreneurs of all time, “He was in no hurry to boost profits at the expense of building an important and lasting company.” In fact, for about the first six to eight years, most people wondered what the heck Amazon was doing.

Building a business that lasts means or building an audience that is willing to give you their attention involves long term thinking. It’s not that the ROI question is wrong.  It’s the timing of the question that makes the difference.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

The post Don’t Let ROI Get In Your Way appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What is your Plan for this Disruption? 

Disruption is rampant, from print to digital marketing, book and magazine publishing, music distribution and more. In the midst of this we still need to provide viable marketing direction to our clients.  Not always an easy or straightforward task. Everyone is a publisher today. Gatekeepers no longer have much if any real control and are becoming less and less every day.

I read a Seth Godin interview this week titled Godin to Authors; You have no right to make money anymore.  While it may not speak exactly to marketers, most of it applies, as the Abundance Economy is upon us. ”Amateurs” are everywhere now, and they are taking part of what used to be your work.

This probably isn’t the kind of message that most authors (or creative professionals of any kind) want to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The rise of the amateur, powered by the democratization of distribution provided by the Web and social media, is something that is disrupting virtually every form of content that can be converted into bits. To take just two examples, the news industry is struggling to adapt to an era where anyone can commit “random acts of journalism” with a blog or smartphone — and where sources of news have the ability to publish their own content instead of having to go through a middleman — and photography has been battling the rise of the amateur for years now.

The Gatekeepers are Extinct 

Marketing studios used to control the gate keys to an array of things that they no longer make money from, or at least a much lower percentage. What are you doing to replace that revenue and compete with “good enough?” And to be clear, when we refer to good enough, it really is good enough. The sooner we understand that, the better.

As media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out before, abundance breaks a lot of content-related business models that were built on scarcity, and that includes the ones that have supported the book-publishing industry for so long. That’s why publishers have been scrambling to try and lock down their content — including jacking up the prices that libraries pay for e-books — and it’s why authors who have a built-in audience are using the web to connect directly with that audience. Godin’s message may not be a popular one, but it is the way that content works now.

Marketing certainly isn’t dead. To really reach today’s consumers, companies and brands will need to build relationships with them rather than simply grabbing their attention or utilizing disruptions as an advertising tool. In other words, marketers should be progressive rather than aggressive, adding a fifth “P” — Participation — to the traditional marketing mix of Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Are you up for the long haul?

The post Your Business is Being Disrupted. What Are You Doing About It? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If it is true that blogging is on the decline, then I’d say these companies are more fickle than nimble. Throwing over — or not starting a blog because it’s easier to use Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest is short-sighted and risky. A blog may be an “old” form of social media but it has five benefits that the newer platforms can’t touch.

Ownership

Unless the internet disappears, a blog is the one platform you know you will always be there when you log in. The equity you build is yours to keep. What guarantee do you have that the time and effort you put into building relationships on Facebook and Twitter will not evaporate one day five years from now? And based on how fickle marketers are, who knows what platform the next social media craze will drive everyone to?  Are you willing to bet 100% of your social media efforts on platforms you don’t control?

Insight

The data you get from your blog through Google analytics is deeper, more detailed and more valuable than anything you can get from the other platforms. You have the opportunity to test and learn at will on your blog.  Facebook insights are about as good as it gets on the other platforms, yet even that data pale in comparison to the information that Google analytics provides.

SEO

If Google loves your blog, why wouldn’t you? The Google algorithm prefers your blog to your website because it is fresher, and has (hopefully) valuable, original content.  If you’ve been using best practices on your blog by keeping up with it, offering helpful content, writing to your customers’ needs,  in the language they use (using keywords they are looking for), then your blog posts are helping your SEO. Individual Facebook posts or tweets don’t do that for you.

Space

On your blog, there are no limits to the number of characters, image size or overall length.  On a blog, not only can you take as many words and as much space as you want to tell your story, but you can use your blog to extend the space that you have on the other platforms.  Where will you sent thad Pinterest link?  Do you need your Facebook post to link to a story with an image or video?  The blog is the perfect spot.  While you may want to keep certain conversations within the Facebook and Twitter platforms, the blog provides endless opportunities to create landing pages where you can offer your communities on other platforms the opportunity to visit you in your permanent home.

Trust

Trust is what builds your business and your brand. Nothing establishes trust, thought leadership, and authority like a blog. It takes more than 140 or 255 characters to make a point, tell a story, or build a reputation. And it takes the ability to look back and read the history of what has been written to grasp the entire story or the depth of knowledge that a company brings to the table. You can’t look back very far on Facebook and Twitter.

Blogging has such value that virtually all of the most influential social media marketers are bloggers. Seth Godin, who is one of my marketing heroes, uses blogging as virtually his only digital form of marketing.

It’s easy to have our heads turned by the next shiny object in social media and in fact, many of the latest “crazes” are innovative, addictive and at least seemingly, effective. We want to test them, move to them and because we can’t do everything, abandon something else. That’s the definition of being fickle, not nimble.  I’m not sure how to deal with all the new opportunities in social media.  I do know that jumping from one thing to the next because one is easier, even if the other is more solid can come back to bite you later.

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. AT&T’s Chris Baccus, Radio Shack’s Adrian Parker, Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, next Friday, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

The post In Social Media, The Fine Line Between Nimble And Fickle appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

He described that teacher to his biographer as “one of the saints of my life.”

“If it hadn’t been for her,” Jobs said, “I’m sure I would have gone to jail.”

Imagine that. A teacher meant the difference between Steve Jobs becoming … well, Steve Jobs — and  a convict.

How many of you have had a teacher or coach that had a life-changing effect on you? Many people owe their success to a teacher.  So let’s break down why that could be and ask what it could mean for your business.

A great teacher has the power

• To change your behavior
• To inspire you
• To make you see things in a way you never saw them before
• To make you see something in yourself that you didn’t know was there
• To infuse you with passion through her own passion for the subject

When a great teacher teaches, you don’t necessarily learn a step-by-step approach.  She teaches the principles and the concepts but leaves the details up to you.  The only thing that everyone comes away with that is the same is a commitment to that teacher and a love for the subject.  And that teacher, in the case of your business, will come to represent your brand.

Oh yes, and a great teacher can hold you in the palm of her hand.

Several months ago, I wrote on Social Media Explorer about how education is the new marketing and if that is so, then:

Teachers are the new marketers.

If you look at the most popular Ted talks, you’ll discover that many of the presenters are professors.  But whether they hold the job officially or not, you’ll recognize great teachers in the field of marketing, and in any other field, if you think about the criteria in the bullet points above.  Oprah, for example, whether you happen to be a fan or not, is a great teacher.  People in business you’ll certainly be familiar with, like Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk are great teachers.

Great teachers are important because content is so important. You can’t just take content and put it out there.  You’ve got to take your content, add conviction, caring and passion, and communicate it in a way that makes an impact on people so that they will want to share it.

That’s why teachers are the new marketers. 

What if the Fortune 500 companies, (or your company) went to the top universities and found the most beloved, world-class educators of English or physics or psychology who happened to also be passionate about health or fashion or cars or wine (or your product) and hired those people to work in your company, evangelizing your product? Or, what if you found people with the qualities of a great teacher?

Take a look at this video from a doctor who is trying to sell people on the benefits of a particular form of preventive medicine.  If I were a health insurance company, I’d hire him and pay him a generous sum of money to evangelize this and possibly other messages about staying healthy in order to help keep the costs of insurance coverage down for my members.

Imagine what it would mean to your business if you hired a great teacher and gave that person an opportunity to develop and use media that reach well beyond a classroom? Who can you think of in business that fits the criteria of a great teacher and what else would you add to the list?

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! The first 100 to do so get an incredible discount! Reserve your seat today!

The post You Are One Hire Away From A World-Class Marketing Team appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

In between tending to newcomers at the bar, he asked me,

  “What do you think I could do to get my name out there using social media?”

I appreciated that he didn’t say what I often hear which goes something like, “I wouldn’t waste my time on Facebook” or “who wants to know what someone’s cat did?” Unlike many others I meet, he sensed there could be professional value for him in social media. One thing he knew for sure was that he wasn’t likely to meet anyone at the restaurant who would give him an acting job.

I figured I had about 40 seconds to give him an answer before either my friends arrived or another patron sat down at the bar to be taken care of. This might actually be a useful exercise in cutting to the chase when I get that question from people.

What I told him is this: before you can make social media work for you, you’ve got to figure out who you are and what you have to offer that is special.  Once you do that, the rest is mechanics, terminology, etiquette and some basic principles.  That part is fairly easy to learn.

I’ve seen people (including myself) and businesses struggle with social media because the answers to that question were not figured out before getting started.

If you’re just another actor or consultant or retailer of shoes or food, you’ll be spouting undifferentiated content.

Producing content is pointless unless it finds its way up the SEO ladder to the top of Google.  Your content needs to be worth sharing and your links need to be worth clicking on.

In Seth Godin’s book We Are All Weird, he quotes Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google as saying:

Every day we produce as much content as was produced by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003.

The likelihood of getting discovered online is even smaller than the likelihood of that bartender being plucked out from behind the bar for a role in a movie.   There’s just too much noise online for people to be heard unless they can say something original and interesting.

It used to be that if you had a big budget, you could buy yourself awareness through advertising. But money cans no longer buy you love.  You’ve got to earn it.

Social media is not a magic bullet. People who think that this “social media thing” is worth jumping into before they can answer the “what’s so special about me?” question are going to be greeted by silence. Blogging five times a week or hiring an expensive agency to get you onto Facebook won’t help very much.  Talking more is not the solution when the problem is too much content.

Seth Godin’s prophetic book from 2002, The Purple Cow, is truer today than when he wrote it. The simple message:  be remarkable. In We Are all Weird, he takes the idea further and implores readers to make choices, to have the courage to commit to their off-center passions and talents—and embrace the reality that they will be alienating some part of the market.

Today, when SEO is your walk-by traffic, celebrating the ways that you are different and not the middle of the road approach of pleasing the masses is going to determine whether you survive or not.

So I challenged the bartender to answer the question about what makes him stand out from the crowd—what qualities, or ideas, or looks, or approach or history (or all of the above) make him special?

He was stumped.

Social media won’t solve that problem.

RELATED:

The Paradoxical Secret Of Obsession Worth Branding (Forbes)

What’s The Difference Between Your Product And A Meaningless Commodity (Marketing Without A Net)

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