At least that’s how General Mills sees it. The world’s sixth largest food company, whose brands include Wheaties and Green Giant vegetables, has even let hungry-girl.com announce two of its products, according to public relations manager David Witt. Lillien is “one of the first consumers who was found a following with their own voice,” Witt says. “She’s one of the most cogent voices in the weight management field.”

General Mills is one of the more prominent consumer products companies to leverage the power of bloggers. The company maintains three significant platforms with which it interacts with this new breed of influencers.

• MyBlogSpark.com is a members-only club where bloggers can try out new products and participate in surveys and events.
• Pssst… Is a word-of-mouth network in which several thousand influencers have opted in to receive news, behind-the-scenes information and product samples.
• MyGetTogether is a place where Pssst members can register to host parties and events featuring General Mills product samples.

Having bought into the power of word-of-mouth, General Mills has learned a thing or two about working with consumer influencers. For starters, it believes in having an objective for engagement. Witt ticks off the company’s goals: brand advocacy, awareness/trial, introducing something new and exciting, furthering engagement with the brand and improving the way the company works. “If you believe that 10,000 people are smarter than one, then we become better by listening to our market,” he says.

General Mills doesn’t treat its online influencers like the media. The relationship is closer to a friendship than a business exchange. “When you have great news, who do you tell after your family? You tell your friends, of course,” he says. “That’s the philosophy we try to engender.”

A critical principle is to make influencers feel like insiders. That goal doesn’t have to be expensive to achieve. For example, every member of a General Mills network gets snippets of behind-the-scenes information delivered by e-mail at effectively no cost to the company. Some also get the privilege to buy branded merchandise from the company store. “Who cares if they don’t buy anything? There’s no cost to making the products available to them,” reasons Witt.

Particularly influential members may be invited to visit the Betty Crocker kitchens or to give feedback directly to management about new product ideas. Witt stresses that General Mills never tries to twist arms or buy loyalty. The company insists on following the FTC and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics guidelines, which basically come down to “identify yourself and be clear about the intent of the relationship,” Witt says. “Be authentic and overtly transparent.”

In a nutshell, treat the online influencer as you would treat someone who invited you into her house. Witt likes this quote from Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay cosmetics: “Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’” Isn’t that how you would like to be treated?

More Stories and Advice at Awareness Community

The article above is one of several that I’ve recently written for Awareness Networks. Awareness was actually one of the first companies in the enterprise social media business. Its enterprise blogging platform was in use by some companies as early as 2005. Recently, Awareness has gotten into the business of integrated social marketing with a service called the Social Marketing Hub. The Hub enables businesses to manage their presences in multiple social venues (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and quickly cross-post information in a manner that’s appropriate to the destination site. The company is signing on boatloads of customers, so if your social media presence is a bit chaotic right now, give them a look.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles I’ve written for the Awareness Community:

• Old Spice Exclusive Interview: The Greatest Smelling Marketing Campaign in History
• Five Questions with SEO Expert Mike Moran
• JetBlue Listens Till It Hurts
• Social Media Case Study: Cree Leads the LED Lighting Revolution
• Twitter Best Practices — Getting the Most Of Your Tweet Time

Tip of the Week: Notepad++

The notepad is one of the most basic utilities on any computer. It’s a bare-bones text editor with a handful of fonts, no formatting and almost no special features. So why is it one of the most vital tools in my technology arsenal?

I’m not referring to Windows Notepad. I’m talking about an open-source alternative called Notepad++. I use it every single day. Notepad++ was designed for professional programmers, who work with very large amounts of text. I don’t even use 5% of its features, but the ones I do use save me at least an hour or two of work each week. Some of my favorites:

• Notepad++ takes about two seconds to start and consumes a tiny amount of memory.
• It’s blazingly fast. A search-and-replace operation takes less than a second to complete, even if there are hundreds of occurrences of the text string involved. This is a great way to strip out the HTML formatting code that make cutting and pasting from one authoring system to another such a pain.
• It can search and replace across multiple documents. This was a godsend when I was hit with a WordPress virus this spring and had to strip rogue code out of hundreds of PHP files. Notepad++ completed the task in about 10 seconds.
• The search-and-replace function understands spaces and tabs, which sometimes throw Word for a loop. This means I can paste a text table from a website and convert it to a comma-delimited CSV file that opens in Excel in a few seconds.
• Did I mention that it’s blazingly fast?

Developers have created lots of plug-ins for useful tasks like word count, auto-capitalization, file comparison and more. I just can’t say enough good things about this extraordinary tool. Best of all, it’s free.

Just for Fun: Free (Or Really Cheap) Stuff

Want silver jewelry for a gift, sheet music, cookbooks or Spanish lessons, but don’t have lots of money to shell out? No problem. Check out the links in this Woman’s Day article and you’ll find you can get stuff for cheap or free that you probably never thought possible. Some items are particularly nice to have for business travelers — free WiFi spots, business classes, business cards, radio service with your favorite types of music. We won’t call you “cheap,” but rather “thrifty.” And there is a recession on, after all.

Content curation is about filtering the stuff that people really need from out of all the noise around it. In the same way that museum curators choose which items from a collection to put on display, content curators select and publish information that’s of interest to a particular audience.

The problem with curation is that it’s labor-intensive. Someone has to sift through all that source information to decide what to keep. This task has never been easy to automate. Key word filtering has all kinds of shortcoming and RSS feeds are little better than headline services.

I’ve recently been working with a startup that’s developed an innovative technology that vastly improves the speed and quality of content curation. CIThread has spent the last 15 months building an inference engine that uses artificial intelligence principles to give curators a kind of intelligent assistant. The company is attacking the labor problem by making curators more productive rather than trying to replace them.

Full disclosure: I have received a small equity stake and a referral incentive from CIThread as compensation for my advice. Other than that, my pay has amounted to a couple of free lunches. I just think these guys are onto something great.

CIThread (the name stands for “Collective Intelligence Threading” and yeah, they know they have to change it) essentially learns from choices that an editor or curator makes and applies that learning to delivering better source material. More wheat, less chaff.

The curator starts by presenting the engine with a basic set of keywords. CIThread scours the Web for relevant content, much like a search engine does. Then the curator combs through the results to make decisions about what to publish, what to promote and what to throw away.

As those decisions are made, the engine analyzes the content to identify patterns. It then applies that learning to delivering a better quality of source content. Connections to popular content management systems make it possible to automatically publish content to a website and even syndicate it to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the CIThread dashboard.

There’s intelligence on the front end, too. CIThread can also tie in to web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. For example, it can analyze content that generates a lot of views or clicks and deliver more source material just like it to the curator. All of these factors can be weighted and varied via a dashboard.

Shhhhh!

CIThread is still pretty early stage. It has some early test customers, but none can be identified just yet. I’ll describe generally what one of them is doing, though.

This company owns a portfolio of properties throughout the US and uses localized websites as both a marketing and customer service tool. Each site contains frequently updated news about the region, but the portfolio is administered centrally for cost and quality reasons.

Using CIThread, individual editors can now maintain literally dozens of these websites at once. The more the engine learns about their preferences, the more websites they can support. That’s one of the coolest features of inference engines: they get better the more you use them.

The technical brain behind CIThread is Mike Matchett, an MIT-educated developer with a background in computational linguistics and machine learning. The CEO is Tom Riddle (no relation to Lord Voldemort), a serial entrepreneur with a background in data communications, storage and enterprise software.

The two founders started out targeting professional editors, but I think the opportunity is much bigger. Nearly any company today can develop unique value for its constituents by delivering curated content. Using tools like CIThread, they can get very smart very fast.

If you want to hear more, e-mail curious@cithread.com or visit the website.

Tip of the Week: Google URL Builder

I arrived at the train station at about 1 a.m. body time, looking forward to napping on the hour-long ride north. Only the train didn’t come. For a long time. After about 20 minutes hour of waiting, I pulled out my smart phone to check Twitter. Success! CalTrain had an account. Surely there would be an explanation of the delay there.

Unfortunately, the most recent Caltrain tweet was from several hours earlier, referring to an unrelated schedule change. There was nothing to explain the current delay. As I made my way slowly northward that night by alternative means, I kept an eye on the CalTrain Twitter feed but could find nothing to explain the outage that had stranded thousands of people in one of the nation’s busiest rail corridors.

Dashed Expectations

CalTrain deserves credit for adopting an important customer communication tool, but it deserves a spanking for failing to understand the consequences of that action. It’s easy to sign on to any social platform these days, but having an account and using it appropriately are two different things. CalTrain had created an expectation that it would communicate with its riders and then failed to deliver. It would have been better off not using the tools in the first place.

This wasn’t my first brush with Twitter dysfunction. A couple of months earlier, I had tweeted frustration about my credit card company’s practice of suspending accounts over unspecified security concerns. I was surprised to receive a reply tweet from a representative of the bank offering to help. I quickly posed a follow-up question and waited for a reply. That was in February. I’m still waiting.

Coincidentally, a few weeks later I found myself across the dinner table from that very same bank representative. He explained that for the past several months he had been the sole person assigned to monitor Twitter at a company with well over 100,000 employees worldwide. It was an impossible task.

The bank was shooting itself in the foot. Regardless of whether it earnestly desired to engage with customers or was just trying to be trendy, it had created an expectation that it couldn’t possibly fulfill. Enabling someone to respond a little bit was worse than not responding at all.

Paving Cow Paths

Social media has turned the corner in the last two years. Twitter and Facebook badges are now everywhere, and a company that is active on social platforms uses an average of eight of them.

Unfortunately, a lot of these businesses don’t know what they’re doing. Scan the Twitter pages of a few big brands and you’ll see lots of self-congratulatory promotional messages but precious few “@ replies” or retweets. These companies are doing the 21st century equivalent of paving the cow paths: applying new tools to old processes.

What many marketers have failed to grasp is that the tools of new media aren’t just about publishing; they’re also about conversing. A Twitter feed, blog or Facebook page that delivers a message without acknowledging replies is an insult. As a rule of thumb, every Twitter inquiry should be answered within 24 hours. Blog comments should be answered within 48. Are you ready to make that commitment? If not, then limit your activities until you are. It’s better to be late than clueless.

Got a New Blog and Looking for Stories

The nice people at Awareness have engaged me to write a blog about one of my favorite topics: how businesses are successfully using social media. My most recent profile is of JetBlue, which learned about the new power of customer voices in a humiliating 2007 incident and which has since reinvented itself around the principles of openness and dialogue. There’s also a fun B2B case study about Cree, a 23-year-old maker of LED chips that created a clever multi-dimensional campaign around a new line of lighting products.

Have you got your own great story to tell? I’m looking for good cases and advice about real-life business scenarios. Drop me a line and let’s talk. And while you’re visiting Awareness’s website, check out their new Social Marketing Hub, an enterprise class server that publishes to multiple social platforms simultaneously, and which is quickly being adopted by some of the biggest brands in the world.

WOM for Water

Last December’s Supergenius conference in Chicago was one of the most energetic, entertaining and educational events I’ve attended in a long time, so it took me about a nanosecond to agree to host GasPedal’s request to present at Supergenius in New York next week.

This event is about more than just media; it’s also about relieving the crushing shortage of drinking water in the Third World. GasPedal has partnered with charity: water, an organization whose goal is to bring clean drinking water to the estimated 1 billion people on earth who don’t now have it. I’m supporting the effort and I hope you will too. Equally important, I hope you will tell your friends and help prove that grassroots organization using the tools of social media really can make a difference. You can sign up for Supergenius here. Use the discount code “paulismyhero”. I hope to see you there, because this event is awesome.

Tip of the Week: Levelator

If you podcast, or even if you just record conference calls to post on an internal network, you know how erratic audio quality can be. Speakers with long-distance connections can sound much softer than those using VOIP lines or sitting in front of the microphone. You need Levelator, a free software utility developed by Doug Kaye’s fantastic Conversations Network podcast service. Levelator later automatically normalizes recorded audio to adjust all voices to roughly the same volume. All you do is drag and drop a WAV file onto the Levelator icon and a minute or two later, everything is done. No one who works regularly with recorded voice should be without this valuable tool. Find it here.

Just for Fun: Geeky Pranks

It’s summertime here in the northern hemisphere and that can mean goofing off like a teenager. We found some harmless (and some of them, fairly geeky) pranks to play on your best friend or worst enemy at work. If you like the reaction you get, bring the tricks home to your spouse. Nothing says, “I missed you while I was at work, my darling” like the blue screen of death on your sweetie’s computer when he or she is trying to check email before bed.

ROI is one of the most misused terms in marketing today, in part because so many people are struggling to understand how it applies to social media. I worship at the church of Katie Paine, the measurement expert who argues that you can measure almost anything if you are creative enough. Measurements can usually be related to a financial outcome, and that’s when ROI becomes meaningful.

I’ve attended many conferences at which this topic has come up, and I’ve observed that when people talk about ROI, they usually speak in terms that have nothing to do with return. They talk about measuring friends, followers, repeat visitors, traffic and the vaguely-defined “brand awareness.” These are results of marketing campaigns, but they aren’t returns.

ROI is all about money. It is a simple ratio that defines investment as input and a financial result as output. If the financial output is greater than the investment, then the ROI is positive. If not, then you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Calculating ROI requires good historical data and precise analytics. The free Google Analytics tool can tell you a lot about activity on your website, including where people came from, which pages they looked at, how long they stayed and what they were viewing when they left. When you match this information to financial outcomes and compare to historical data, you can create cause-and-effect scenarios that map to dollars.

You need to have some basic information about how activity on your website correlates to financial results. For example, to calculate the value of a webcast listener, you can divide the profitability of all business generated by webcasts over the last year by the number of attendees.

Then compute the average lifetime value of a customer. If you know that the average customer is with you for five years and spends $50,000 during that time at a 10% profit margin, then the average lifetime value of a customer is $5,000. If last year’s webcasts generated 100 new customer accounts, then webcasts created a lifetime profitability of $500,000. If you had to get 2,000 people to register for webcasts in order to land 100 new customers, then the value of a webcast registrant is $250. In other words, if you spent less than that amount per registrant, you should be in positive ROI territory.

Let’s look at one more example: computing the value of a tweet. Suppose your analytics package tells you that you got 1,000 visitors to your website from Twitter messages last month (this number is easy to track if you use unique URLs). You know that 200 of those visitors navigated to your order page. You also know that 10% of the people who land on your order page become customers. We already know that the lifetime value of a customer is $5,000.

Dragging out the old spreadsheet, we calculate that those 1,000 visitors became 20 customers at a total lifetime value of $100,000. We also know that we had to send 50 tweets to get 1,000 people to visit. That means that 50 tweets created $100,000 in value, or $2,000 per tweet.

In real life, of course, ROI isn’t this simple. There are many other factors involved in the equation, including the cost of sales, the net present value of money and opportunity costs There are also intangibles such as the cost of building a quality Twitter following that delivers 1,000 visitors with 20 tweets. You can make these estimates as detailed as you want, but the point is that many of the supposedly incalculable returns of social media can be quantified if you have good analytics and historical data with which to correlate them.

If you’d like more detail, read my chapter on this topic and please give me your feedback.

The Secret of Twitter? Use It

I recently wrapped up a research report for BtoB magazine about marketers’ use of Twitter. The 387 respondents to the survey delivered one clear message: The people who derive the most value from the world’s favorite micro-blogging service are the ones who use it the most. The 20% of respondents who attributed tangible revenue to Twitter were one-third more satisfied with Twitter’s value than those who are still awaiting sales. And successful Twitter marketers are also more optimistic about Twitter’s future. Read a summary of the findings here. You can also purchase the complete report, encompassing more than 30 charts, here (I make no commission on those purchases).

Tip of the Week: Windows Speech Recognition

I’m a big fan of speech recognition software. It’s helped me write four books in the past four years. I type 90 words per minute, but I can speak a lot faster than that. I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for several years. At $50 on eBay, it’s a great value, but if $50 is too rich for your blood, try Microsoft’s embedded Windows Speech Recognition.

Microsoft doesn’t exactly make this handy tool easy to find. In Windows 7, you have to navigate down to the Accessories|Ease of Access folder. Even then, Microsoft makes it appear that Windows Speech Recognition is intended only to manage Windows commands. However, there is a full-blown speech recognition engine inside that permits you to dictate documents and spreadsheets. I’ve been playing around with Speech Recognition for a couple of weeks and find it superior to Dragon in some cases. All you need is a basic headset, which costs about $15.

Just for Fun: @BPGlobalPR

“As long as we can get loaded potato skins at T.G.I.Friday’s, seafood can suck it.”

“We are doing everything we can to stop the information leaks in the Gulf.”

“Honestly, why are we still talking about the spill? Twilight comes out next week! Come join us in line!”

There isn’t much mirth to be found in the oil spill that continues to plague the Gulf Coast, but an anonymous Twitter user who goes by the alias of “Leroy Stick” has hijacked the identity of BP p.l.c.’s public relations organization to produce a viciously funny online persona called BPGlobalPR that spoofs the oil company’s efforts to manage public opinion while it grapples with the disaster.

Stick isn’t doing this just to be funny. In one of his few public statements, he skewered BP for trying to manage public sentiment around the situation. “I’m trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company?” he wrote in a post on Street Giant. The BPGlobalPR Twitter account has 10 times as many followers as BP PR’s real account.

By the way, did you know that the Deepwater Horizon spill is not the largest on record, at least not yet? That honor belongs to the Lakeview Gusher (below), which spewed 9 million barrels into the southern California desert beginning in 1910. The site of that spill is now a California Historical Landmark. At this rate, Deepwater will soon pass it.

Eric Schwartzman and I are wrapping up the manuscript for Social Marketing to the Business Customer, which will be published by John Wiley & Sons in January. This following excerpt is from the chapter on B2B communities. I welcome your feedback by e-mail or by commenting on

Online communities are a bit of a paradox. They are both the oldest form of social media and also the newest. Forums and discussion groups date back to the late 1960s and have been a staple of customer support operations at technology companies for 30 years. Internet newsgroups, CompuServe, The Well and other early communities had membership in the hundreds of thousands a decade before anyone had heard of a Web browser.

Those early online outposts looked little like the Facebooks and LinkedIns of today, though. The modern features that have made social networks the fastest-growing consumer phenomenon in history have created all kinds of new use scenarios, including some compelling B2B examples. Communities are the convention centers of social media. They are flexible gathering halls that can fill a wide variety of purposes ranging from product development to lead generation. The key is to get members to want to participate.

Friends and Fame

The great innovation in online communities came in 1998, when Classmates.com introduced the concept of personal profiles and friends. Those metaphors are now a staple of every social network and provide a powerful incentive for participation. Profiles are a member’s personal homepage. Everything the member contributes, from establishing contacts with others to joining groups to posting status updates, is captured in the profile. The more active the member is, the higher his visibility and the greater the value of the network to his personal success.

Friends are a virtual version of their real-world equivalent. When people create friend relationships, they exchange information that is not visible to others and they form persistent connections based upon trust. That’s actually how it works in real life, too. At their simplest level, friends connections are an efficient way to stay in touch. Members can always learn each other’s current address or job situation by searching within the network.

In B2B communities, personal profiles are a way to register areas of expertise that others may find useful. Activity is also a validation point. It’s one thing for someone to say he is an expert in direct marketing, but it’s more powerful when he can prove it by solving the problems of other direct marketers.

That proof is stored in the person’s profile. Online friendships also translate fluidly into real-world connections. “Community isn’t just about discussing products but about getting to know each other and making friendships,” says Nicholas Tolstoshev, a Spiceworks community manager.

Online friends in B2B communities frequently arrange meet-ups at trade shows and events. Successful community managers we spoke to invariably augmented their online worlds with physical events to meet and thank their most active members.

Prior to the introduction of personal profiles, it was difficult for participants in online networks to build visibility.

Recent experience has shown that visibility is the single most powerful driver of participation. Many communities use a recognition system that ties a member’s status to contributions. A few, like SAP, celebrate their most active members at physical events.

Spiceworks awards points to members who post well-regarded answers to other members’ questions. Valued members of the community are invited to participate in conference calls with Spiceworks developers. Their contributions are rewarded with low-cost swag like T-shirts but more importantly with inside information. Community managers also publish occasional interviews with featured members, highlighting their contributions and career accomplishments. “Online status drives a huge amount of activity without our sending money out the door,” says Tolstoshev.

FohBoh.com, a social network for food service professionals, highlights new contributions by its members on its home page and invites others to congratulate them on their celebrity. TopCoder, a contract software developer that hosts programming competitions and licenses the best solutions to commercial customers, applies an elaborate algorithm to the code submitted by its members to compute the quality of their work. Leader boards are maintained for the major competitions and quality ratings are reflected back to individual profiles. Top coders win money and also visibility that leads to jobs and lucrative contracts.

The most prolific contributor to LinkedIn’s “Answers” forum is Dave Maskin, a New York-based event marketing specialist who has answered an incredible 25,000 questions. Maskin refers to himself as “Mr. Lead Generator,” indicating that the value he provides to the community is good for his business.

How to Integrate E-mail and Social Media Marketing

As hot a topic as social media has become, the fact is that most of us still live in our inboxes. The challenge for e-mail marketers is to incorporate new tools into their programs as a way to gain subscribers and deliver messages through additional channels. I just finished creating a brand-new presentation on this topic entitled “Social Marketing With Email.” Click her e to see it on SlideShare. I’d be pleased to present it to your e-mail marketers or local professional organization either on-site or remotely. Please contact me if you’re interested.

Meet Me In NYC

I’ll be in the Big Apple a lot in June and July. Here are some upcoming events where I’m on the program. Please come and say hi:

• The Future of Social Media Marketing: PR’s New Paradigm – Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit, June 28.
• Social Media for Social Good – 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service, June 29
• Word of Mouth Supergenius Conference, July 20 (use code Gill25 to save 25%)

Tip of the Week: Maximixing Follower Value

Most people send Twitter messages whenever the spirit moves them, but that may not always be the best time to get those coveted retweets. To maximize the impact of what you say on Twitter, schedule your tweets to coincide with the times when you have a lot of followers online.

Twitter Analyzer is a great tool for analyzing follower activity. It can show you the times of day when your follower count is highest. Then you can use a tool like HootSuite or the latest version of TweetDeck to schedule tweets for the times when your messages are most likely to be seen (and forwarded). If you have international followers, you may find that they cluster around different times of the day than your working hours, so scheduling tweets for the middle of the night Milwaukee time may be just the tick et to reach that cluster of fans in Norway. Start with Twitter Analyzer and see what times work best for you.

Just for Fun: Eight Years in 103 Seconds

When we see people regularly, we don’t notice how much they change. But they do change a lot in a short time. JK Keller proved it. He took a picture of his face every day for 8 years and lined them up one after another in this video montage. This 1:43 video might leave you feeling a little old. Take your mind off it by looking at Photos That Will Never Be in Your Wedding Album.

It took two years for Jim Cahill and  Deb Franke to convince the management at Emerson Process Management that a blog was a good idea. Their reticence was understandable. It was 2005, and blogs were widely perceived to be the domain of teenage diarists and scandal-mongers. Why would anyone want to get mixed up with that? And why would they want to read about equipment that manages large industrial plants?

Cahill and Franke persevered. Some technology companies were creeping into the blogosphere at the time and clearly enjoying good results. Cahill and Franke eventually overcame objections by arguing that, as communications people, they understood the pitfalls and how to manage them. Emerson Process Experts was born.

Four years and more than 500 entries later, Cahill is enjoying a new job as head of social media at Emerson Process Management. Process Experts was named Best Corporate Blog by BtoB magazine in 2010 and Cahill is now leading the company’s charge into Twitter and Facebook while institutionalizing best practices among all the Emerson Process Management divisions.

The blog has brought numerous business opportunities into Emerson, including an invitation to bid on a large, new plant that could total hundreds of millions of dollars. “I have the e-mail from that company on my wall next to a sign that asks ‘Is there any value in blogging?’” he laughs.

Even after four years, Emerson Process Experts remains an enigma in a heavy industry that has done little with social media. Topics like “Sensing Liquid Levels with Vibrating Fork Technology” may cause the average visitor’s eyes to cross, but the elite engineers who run giant process control systems can’t get enough of this kind of technical wisdom. And for a blog this specialized, the traffic is pretty impressive. About 2,000 v

isitors stop by on an average business day and 15 to 20 messages land in Cahill’s inbox every week. While most are routine, a few gems inquire about business opportunities. After replying with a thank-you message, Cahill forwards them on to the sales team.

Search Engine Magic

One reason is the search engine magic that blogs deliver. Search on “process control” or “process management” and Emerson ranks in the top five results. Even rarely used terms like “compressor surge control” deliver Emerson on Google’s first page. The secret is the lack of competition. As an established presence in a community with few other bloggers, Cahill is a big fish in a small pond. And as we know, Google loves blogs.

Cahill approaches his job with a reporter’s eye. He isn’t an engineer, but with more than 20 years at the company, he understands the lingo and is able to write in the customer’s language. “When I pass people in the hall, I’ll ask if they had any recent customer interactions that were interesting,” he says. “I’ll dig into those stories and use the language that the experts used to solve the problem. Those stories are rich in the keywords that customers use.”

His advice to prospective b-to-b bloggers: “Be prepared to stick with it for a while; it takes a couple of years to build up your presence. Listening is a key skill. Blogging isn’t just pushing out information, it’s responding to the interests of your market.” Few bloggers do that better than Jim Cahill.

Thanks, also, to my other panelists: Kirsten Watson of Kinaxis, Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly of American Express OPEN and Petra Neiger, whose team at Cisco Systems created the wonderful My PlanNetsimulation game for network managers.

How to Integrate E-mail and Social Media Marketing

As hot a topic as social media has become, the fact is that most of us still live in our inboxes. The challenge for e-mail marketers is to incorporate new tools into their programs as a way to gain subscribers and deliver messages through additional channels. I just finished creating a brand-new presentation on this topic entitled “Social Marketing With Email.” Click here to see it on SlideShare. I’d be pleased to present it to your e-mail marketers or local professional organization either on-site or remotely. Please contact me if you’re interested.

Tip of the Week: Google Searches via RSS

Did you know you can save Google searches as RSS feeds? A lot of people don’t, but Google quietly slipped that feature into its search results more than a year ago. I only just found out about it.The feature works only through Google Alerts. When you set up a search query in Google Alerts, you have the option of specifying “Deliver to: Feed.” You can then click on the feed icon to grab the address or view the results directly in Google Reader.

The advantage of an RSS feed is that you only have to run the query once. After it’s been added to your RSS reader, you can rerun the query simply by refreshing the feed. RSS readers also save historical results, so you can keep an archive of past searches.

Just for Fun: Incredibly Eccentric People

If you’re dreading summertime because it means more time with your crazy family, just be thankful you’re not related to any of the people on this list of 10 incredibly eccentric people. If you have a teenager in the house who is constantly embarrassed by the fact that you breathe the same air he or she does, you may want to send the youngster to this site with the message, “See? It could be worse.” You could be Hetty Green (right), the millionaire miser who allowed her son’s leg to be amputated because he couldn’t find free medical care. Also be sure to check out the other “Top 10″ list at the bottom of the page.

The book is called Open Leadership, and I would classify it as the first of the post-social media books. By that I mean that it looks at the consequences democratized communications rather than at the media itself. Expect to see wave of similar books in the coming years. This one is a very good first entry. Open Leadership will make a lot of people uncomfortable because it proposes that the only way to govern effectively in a transparent business world is to give up control and trust people to do the right thing. Li makes a persuasive case by citing many examples of companies that have done exactly that with great success.

Li is a former Forrester Research analyst, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell, the breakthrough 2008 book that provided the first demographic profiles of social media users as well as a rigorous methodology for evaluating the ROI of social programs. In Open Leadership, she builds on some of the economic models first presented in Groundswell, but the new book is more of a call to action than a financial exercise.

The premise is encapsulated in the title of Chapter 1: “Why Giving up Control Is Inevitable.” Li asserts that today’s business world is too complex and competitive to permit organizations to continue to manage the way they have since the Industrial Revolution. That top-down philosophy assumes that people who can’t accomplish tasks without instructions, rigid rules and constant oversight are idiots. That worked okay when companies had some control over their environment, but today too many factors are out of their hands. So one man’s story of how an airline broke his guitar and refused to fix it becomes a cultural sensation while the airline stands by helplessly and fumes.

Li (left) asserts that the only way to gain any level of control over today’s turbo-charged business environment is to give up as much control as possible. New business leaders set examples, demonstrate confidence and create cultures that tolerate intelligent, well-intentioned failure. And guess what? It turns out that when smart people are given the latitude to make decisions, they tend to make better ones than if someone else makes decisions for them.

Open Leadership provides some refreshing new examples of how this new management philosophy is working:

• Meetup.com replaced a top-down approach to project management with one that requires stakeholders to persuade engineers to spend time on their projects. Productivity exploded;
• BestBuy outlasted competitors in the brutal electronics retailing business in part by developing a culture that lets its employees guide customers toward the best decision, even if that means buying from a competitor;
• Electronics distributor Premier Farnell distributed low-cost digital video cameras to every employee in the company so that they could document their best practices and share them on an internal network. Employees are more empowered and the quality of information is better.

Li is particularly inspired by John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, which has undertaken a massive program to drive decision-making down to local levels. Chambers says the idea unnerved him at first, but that Cisco is now a faster, more responsive and more innovative company as a result. And he’s working fewer hours. Chambers provides critical support for the concepts outlined in Open Leadership; he has the unwavering support of Cisco’s board of directors, which enables him to talk honestly about his own reservations and the mistakes he has made.

It is on the issue of mistakes that the author is most emphatic. Li stresses that businesses can only be innovative if they learn to accept the fact that failure is a necessary by-product of risk-taking. Companies that successfully practice open leadership evaluate decisions based upon the thought that goes into them rather than the results. Failure is an opportunity to learn and try again, and the only unpardonable sin is making the same mistake twice.

Most businesses do a lousy job of this. They publicly declare a commitment to innovation, but privately punish employees whose ideas don’t succeed. Tolerance for failure is sometimes cited as the most important reason that Silicon Valley has outclassed every other region of the U.S. in technology innovation. Reading Open Leadership, I get the impression that such tolerance is the only option for businesses that hope to lead in uncertain markets.

B-to-B Social Marketing — Really!

My new presentation on social marketing for b-to-b companies drew a nice audience
at NewComm Forum last week, and many people have asked about the slides. The presentation, entitled “B-to-B Social Media – Really!” cites numerous examples of businesses that have applied all sorts of new communication tools to building brand, generating leads and improving customer support. It’s available on SlideShare, along with all my other past presentations, and you are free to download it and use it as you wish. As always, I appreciate attribution. I’d appreciate even more a chance to present my findings to your company or professional association.

Tip of the Week: OffiSync

I love Google Documents, the suite of office applications that lets people collaborate on text files, spreadsheets and presentations without worrying about version control or synchronization. Dana and I wrote Joy of Geocaching on Google Docs and found it to be a godsend when we weren’t at home but still needed to access each other’s files.

Google Docs has shortcomings, however. The apps aren’t nearly as feature-rich as Microsoft Office, so fancy formats and off-beat fonts aren’t nearly as easy to use. Also, applications delivered online run more slowly than those that run on a fast PC. I’d say I’m twice as productive with Word as I am with Google’s rudimentary word processor.

OffiSync is finding a middle ground. This hot startup has come up with a cool utility that runs inside Microsoft Office and automatically connects to Google Docs as a back-end. You can load and save Docs files as if they were on your local hard drive. The tool also integrates Google search and real-time collaboration, meaning that is two or more people are working on a file simultaneously, their changes are synchronized every time they save to the server.

These high-end features are only available in the paid version of the product, which sells for a modest $12 annual fee, but the free version does a good job of managing the back-end interaction with the server. Your creativity is limited by the least common denominator or Google Docs support, but if you want to enjoy the power of local Word apps while shortcutting the tedious process of sending files to and from the server, this tool is pretty sweet. Here’s the download link.

Just for Fun: Those Nutty Skydivers

Skydiving looks like fun. And if it wasn’t for pesky things like responsibility and the fact that they can’t guarantee I’d live through it, I would have done it years ago. So I respect people all the more who not only skydive, but do so on a regular basis and attempt to set records. Woman’s Day collected 10 pictures of phenomenal feats of people flinging themselves from mountaintops and airplanes. We just hope all of them made it safely to the ground!

On the surface, Facebook’s move to make its famous “Like” button a fixture on many other websites seems unremarkable. But it’s really the tip of the iceberg for future services that Facebook calls “Open Graph” which will strengthen its position as the power broker of the social Web. Moreover, the way Facebook is approaching its strategy is a notable evolution from its past behavior. This company is growing up fast and Google had better be on its toes.

What does it mean to “socialize the Web?” As I’ve written in the past, the next great evolution of the Internet will be to move beyond static websites and toward services that travel with the user. The most important of these will be persistent connections to members of one’s social circle. Basically, the experiences and advice of the people we trust will become part of our information-gathering process, influencing and guiding us whenever we choose to consult them.

Facebook’s new features are an important first step. Visitors to a partner website will now be able to register their recommendations by pressing the famous thumbs-up button and having that endorsement added to their Facebook profile as well as to the destination website. Their friends will then be able to see that opinion when they visit the partner site or check the person’s profile or news feed on Facebook.

Services that choose to partner with Facebook will benefit from immediately adding content from Facebook’s 400 million-plus members with minimal effort. They’ll also enjoy easier cross-enrollment with the social network. Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn have all been nibbling around the integration issue with features like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, which enable people to log onto one social network using credentials from another. Now Facebook is making this cross-registration so easy that it says it will discontinue Facebook Connect entirely.

Services like the consumer review site Yelp, which is one of Facebook’s early partners, are positively bubbly about these new developments. Yelp believes that the addition of Facebook friend recommendations will deepen the quality of its reviews and juice its membership. Yelp members will benefit from having their friends’ advice appear next to that of the strangers who now contribute most of the site’s content. Another partner, CNN, stands to gain from having Facebook members recommend stories and drive traffic to its website without any additional promotion on CNN’s part. Meanwhile, Facebook made it clear in its announcement that the “Like” button is just the first of many possible extensions of its service to other partners.

Good Citizen

One aspect of this week’s announcement that particularly impressed me was Facebook’s decision to work with partners. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) declared that “In the first 24 hours alone we’re going to serve one billion ‘Like’ buttons on the Web,” meaning that Facebook has done its homework to enlist partners that will give its strategy instant legitimacy. This is an impressive evolution for a company that has a history of being arrogant and difficult to deal with. It also demonstrates that Facebook is aware of the need to add value to other services instead of trying to steamroll them.

Contrast that with Google, which has appeared positively inept in some of its recent Web socialization attempts. Google Buzz has none. Google Wave, which sounded good in theory, has been a flop in practice. I don’t know anyone who uses it. Knol, which was once seen as a competitor to Wikipedia, is all but invisible. Sidewiki attempts to integrate friends’ recommendations into the Web browsing experience, but implementation is awkward and website owners may see it as more of a threat than a benefit.

In short, Google’s reputation as a good partner seems to be giving way to the kind of go-it-alone approach that’s typical of market dominators. This is happening just as Facebook is learning the value of collaboration. All in all, this is not a good omen for Google. While a company with 70% of the search market is in no immediate trouble, history has shown that even dominant companies can fall fast when the rules change. Facebook is trying to change the rules.

Why is Facebook’s initiative good for Joe and Jane Web user? Because it continues to move the value equation toward quality content. The more that online success is tied to peer endorsements, the more incumbent it is upon content providers to deliver value that others can recommend. The influence of marketing dollars continues to ebb while the influence of good information grows. What could possibly be bad about that?

B-to-B Audio Wisdom

Eric Schwartzman and I are nearly halfway through the process of writing our forthcoming book, Social Marketing to the Business Customer (Wiley, Jan., 2011) and we’ve been recording many of our interviews for posting on Eric’s popular On the Record…Online podcast. Here are some of the recent insights we’ve gleaned from experts in all aspects of b-to-b marketing, ranging from search engine optimization to community management. There are more in the pipeline, so consider subscribing to OTRO’s RSS feed or just keep an eye on future issues of this newsletter.

• Community-Building Tips from HR.com founder Debbie McGrath;
• B2B SEO Strategy and Tactics with Search Guru Lee Odden;
• Corporate Social Media Policy Development with SocialMediaGovernance.com founder Chris Boudreaux;
• Trust and Loyalty through B2B Social Networks with Dell TechCenter’s Scott Hanson.

C’mon! Take the Survey!

I’ve STILL got a couple of new giveaway promotions to entice you to take my survey on multiplatform social media practices:

The first is collectible trading cards featuring prominent entrepreneurs. There are 33 business greats featured in the series and all the profits go to Kiva, an organization that loans small amounts of money to business owners in Third World countries.

Take the survey and get a limited edition Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card in a Lucite case. What have you got to lose? Ten minutes of your time for a card that your kids will look at and say, “Who?” Do you really want to deny them that?

Or you can get a free copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I need to read this book myself, since I’m still having trouble influencing people to take the survey.

The only requirement is that you must be a marketer or business owner and mustfill out the survey. Do you need the link again? Really. Think of the children.

Tip of the Week: Tools for Travelers

I’ve been on the road a lot lately, so these tips are inclined toward services that help the frequent traveler. Here are a few of the sites I use:

Tripit - Once you set up an account, you simply forward your airline, hotel and ground transportation arrangements to plans@tripit.com and the information magically appears in an itinerary organized by trip. Tripit has an uncanny ability to parse confirmation e-mails and figure out where, when and how you’re going. I keep all my travel arrangements there. There’s a social network underlying the service, but I don’t use that. It’s just great for collecting information you need.IPhone and Android apps make the details available on the road.

SideStep – This is the best of the reservation aggregators, in my view. Sidestep collects information from most major travel sites and permits you to search across them to find the best deals. It then sends you to the source site to complete the purchase. You can also set up monitors for things like falling airfares.

Priceline – This service has been around forever and it’s still the best for travel bargains, particularly hotel and car reservations. I was recently able to reserve a rental car for one third the cost of the best deal on any site. The key is to watch the prompts; Priceline will often tell you when your bid is too low so you can bring it up a couple of bucks.That’s important, because failed bidders may have to wait as long as 24 hours before they can try again.

SeatGuru – At 6’ 3”, I don’t fit well into airline seats. SeatGuru can be a useful source of advice on where to how to find seats that provide the most leg and elbow room. It has an exhaustive database of different aircraft and airline configurations.

Just for Fun: Advice for Evil Geniuses

Why does Goldfinger lower Bond slowly into the piranha tank instead of just dumping him in and getting it over with? Why does the evil scientist post a map of the control room in a convenient place where the hero can find it? And why does every villain seem compelled to share his plan for world domination with his victims when he’s about to kill them, anyway?

If questions like these have ever vexed you, you’ll appreciate “Things to Remember If I Ever Become an Evil Overlord,” a clever collection of absurd behaviors that always frustrate movie bad guys. There are 101 items on the list, and fans of everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter will find something to identify with.

Be Conscious Of Time – I almost always ask interview subjects how much time they have. This helps me plan the pace of the questions and also makes sure that I get to the critical ones. If you’re expecting an hour and your subject has only 15 minutes, you need to adjust quickly. If you need extra time, ask for it up front. If the subject turns you down, ask again later in the interview when he or she is hopefully more invigorated about the conversation.

Ask About the Subject’s Background – People like to talk about themselves, so indulge them with a question that they are happy to answer. I’ve found that the simple question, “Tell me about yourself” is a great conversation-starter.

Avoid Yes/No Answers – Instead of asking, “Are you satisfied with your progress this year?” use “Tell me how your progress this year compares to your expectations.” Avoid questions beginning with “do,” “will,” “are,” “and “should,” and instead use questions beginning with “what,” “how,” “why” and “describe.”  Asking someone to “Tell me about…” gives them no choice but to share an experience.

Invite Stories – I once heard former Wall Street Journal feature writer Bill Blundell give advice I’ll never forget: “Write in pictures.” In other words, tell stories that readers can visualize in their minds. Storytelling is the most powerful form of human expression. Stories turn abstract ideas into useful examples. Ask the subject to make the topic real by citing examples or personal experiences.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask The Same Question Twice – This is particularly true in an interview that concerns a controversial subject. Executives are media-trained to answer the questions they want to answer rather than the questions they’re asked. If your subject is evasive, ask the same question a different way. Sometimes you can coax someone into answering a difficult question by feigning ignorance: “I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that. Can you dumb it down a bit for someone like me?”

Control the Interview– You need to dictate the pace and topic of the interview. If the subject rambles or goes off course, cut her off gently whenever you can get a word in. Even if you back off a bit to let her finish the thought, you’ve sent a subtle message that it’s time to move on.

Be Empathetic – Chances are your subject is pretty passionate about the topic you’re discussing. Let your behavior reflect that interest. Smile when she smiles and shake your head when she relates a tale of woe. This isn’t misleading; it’s simply reflecting back a person’s feelings in a way that helps to draw them out. People like to talk to responsive listeners.

Ask For Closing Thoughts – The longer people talk, the more comfortable they are. This is why the best quotes often come at the end of the interview. When you finish your questions, give your subject a chance to summarize her thoughts or restate an important point. One good tactic is simply to ask, “Is there anything I missed?”

Here are thoughts on a few common questions:

Should You Use A Tape Recorder? These days, the answer is increasingly yes because you want the latitude to publish the interview as a video or audio podcast. That said, recording devices can put a damper on a conversation. Once you start recording, put the gadget aside and don’t look at it. You want your subject to forget about it as quickly as possible. Also, most states require that a person audibly consent to be recorded. Be sure you get that permission on tape.

Should You Go Off the Record? This question is complicated by the fact that “off the record” means different things to different people. Technically, “off the record” means the information can’t be used under any circumstances, which makes it of little value to you. However, people often use this term when they really mean “not for attribution.” I rarely agree to off-the-record terms but I will go on background if the information is important. It often turns out that you can negotiate the use of background comments if you paraphrase them appropriately.

Approvals – Many people ask to approve an article before it’s published. I let the context be my guide. Very often, both interviewer and subject have the common goal of making the speaker look good. In that case, I see no problem with letting someone review their comments for accuracy. However, if the topic is controversial or if the speaker is a celebrity or public official, no way. Those people know the rules. In any circumstance, I advise against giving full editing access. Confine the subject’s revisions to statements of fact.

Those are some of my best practices. What are yours? Post a comment.

A Couple of Great Giveaways for You

I’ve got a couple of new giveaway promotions to entice you to take my survey on multiplatform social media practices:

Entrepreneurship guru Evan Carmichael has created collectible trading cards featuring prominent entrepreneurs. There are 33 business greats featured in the series and Carmichael is donating all the profits to Kiva, an organization that loans small amounts of money to business owners in Third World countries.

But you don’t have to pay to get a prize; simply take the survey and get a limited edition Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card in a Lucite case. Only 1,000 copies of each of these cards will be made, so they might be valuable one day. And even if they aren’t, they’ll still impress the Mac out of the Apple fanatics in your life.

Or you can get a free copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, the landmark book by Dale Carnegie that has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. This is being offered in connection with a promotion for a new application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The rules are the same for both promotions: You must be a marketer or business owner and must fill out my survey on multiplatform social media practices. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and the results will be used in a research report about best practices in multiplatform deployment. Participants will also get an early copy of the results.

By way of full disclosure, I’m not receiving any financial compensation for either of these promotions. My only reward is survey responses and being included in an influencer relations campaign. I’m a big fan of that concept.

Recently Published

Paul & Dana Gillin interviewed on the Geocaching Podcast, Apr 13, 2010

Putting the ‘social’ in social media – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

B-to-b firmly in social media – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

5 tips for b-to-b social media marketing – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

We Got Social… With Paul Gillin – JSH&A Living Room, Apr 9, 2010

Paul Gillin on Communities – InMagic, Apr 8, 2010

“Cloud Chasers” Radio pilot from Novell, hosted by Paul Gillin, Apr 1, 2010

Five Rules of Brand Ambassadorship – PRSA Comprehension, Mar 22, 2010

Just For Fun: The Lying Down Game

This is one of the more ridiculous flash mobs I’ve ever seen, but I have to admit it’s weirdly amusing. The Lying Down Game challenges players to find the oddest place to have their pictures taken lying down. There are only two rules: hands must be flat against the sides and toes must be pointing at the ground. Like any simple idea that catches on, people have brought some wonderful innovation to the task. The game has more th an 90,000 fans on Facebook.

I’ve probably conducted 4,000 to 5,000 interviews in my 30 years as a journalist and have learned a few tips for making them go smoothly. For many people, interviews are intimidating and scary, but they don’t have to be.

Interviews are one of the most popular ways to generate content for a blog and they have the secondary benefit of establishing relationships with people who can raise visibility and awareness.

When you interview prominent people, they often link back to your site and provide a nice little boost in traffic. Interviews are a great way to get a social media effort off the ground. Here’s how to get started.

Be Prepared –- This is interviewing 101. Preparation has several beneficial effects. Not only does it enable you to ask better questions, but it’s a sign of courtesy and respect for the guest. Spend 15 minutes on a relevant website to come up to speed on your subject. It really shouldn’t take longer than that for a basic interview. Then integrate the information you find there into your questions. Your guest will be more cooperative and forthcoming as a result; I guarantee it.

Learn Something Personal -– The Web is a wonderful tool for researching people as well as companies. Between public profiles and Twitter feeds, you can learn all kinds of interesting things about a person’s hobbies, history and passions. Use this information as an icebreaker: “I understand you backpacked across America. I’ve always wanted to do that.” This gets people talking about something that really invigorates them. The rest of the session will be more relaxed as a result.

Flatter Your Subject — There’s no faster way to get a subject to warm to you than to share a statement like “I absolutely loved your book.” If the setting is somewhat confrontational, a little compliment at the front can diffuse the tension. You don’t need to be disingenuous; chances are you can find something to admire even if you don’t agree with the person.

You Don’t Have To Read the Whole Book -– Authors are popular interview subjects because they’re willing and available. You should make it a point to read at least some of their work, but there’s no reason you have to read it all. I find that scanning the table of contents, reading the introduction and skimming the first couple of chapters will usually tell you most of what you need to know about a business book. That should take you no more than a half-hour. Business books tend to be repetitive, anyway, so the good stuff is usually at the front.

Prepare Questions But Be Ready To Discard Them -– We’ve all heard those painful interviews in which a novice questioner insists on reading through a list of prepared questions regardless of what the subject says. This creates a disjointed and awkward conversation. You should absolutely prepare questions, but use them as notes to make sure you hit on important subjects or use them to restart the conversation when you hit a dead end. Mark the ones that you absolutely need to ask, but don’t make the questions a goal. Following up, redirecting and exploring new paths are the essence of good conversation. The same goes for an interview.

One question that stirs some debate is whether subjects should be allowed to see questions before an interview. If the meeting isn’t confrontational and the speaker is uncomfortable, I say sure. However, public figures and experienced executives shouldn’t need this nicety. If you do provide questions in advance, be sure to note that you intend to take the conversation in whatever direction you need. Never promise to stick only to the prepared list.

Be Interested -– This is the most important bit of advice I can offer. The person you’re interviewing is probably passionate about the subject matter. The more you can channel that interest, the more forthcoming your subject will be. Even if the topic doesn’t rivet you, pretend it does. Lean forward in your chair, look the subject in the eye and nod occasionally to show that you are following the conversation. Laugh or show pain at appropriate points in the discussion. If conducting the interview by phone, an occasional “Mmm-hmmm” confirms that you’re there and engaged.

Restate and Confirm –- If you’ve ever taken a course in active listening, you know the value of this technique. Tell the person what you believe you just heard him say. This shows that you’re listening and avoids problems that stem from misinterpretation. If you can restate the message more succinctly than your subject, ask if you can attribute your words to him. Usually, people are happy to be edited in this way.

Lob A Few Softballs -– if you dive right into the heavy stuff, you risk putting your subject on the defensive and derailing the interview. Start off with some easy questions: “Tell me about your background,” or “How did you get into this line of work to begin with?” Small talk works in social settings and the same goes for formal interviews.

In my next entry, I’ll go into more details about how to guide the course of an interview and handle problems. Meanwhile, share your advice for how to prepare and start an interview below. If you can link to some particularly well structured interviews that you or others have published, so much the better.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how badly an interview can go, check out the video clip on my blog that goes with the photo below. It’s from an old Bob Newhart show and it’s one of my favorites.

A Personal Plea to Support the NewComm Forum

The New Communications Forum is the one social media event I attend every single year. That’s because the speakers at this conference, which is now in its sixth year, are predictably incredible. I’m not talking about me; I’m referring to people like Kami Huyse, Geoff Livingston, Shel Holtz, Shel Israel, Maggie Fox, Katie Paine, Jackie Huba, Francois Gossieaux, Geno Church, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Solis and many others. These are, quite simply, the people I most respect and listen to in the social media realm.

NewComm Forum takes place the week after next in San Mateo, CA. The keynote presentation on Thursday, April 22 is by Scott Monty, whose accomplishments at socializing the Ford Motor Company’s marketing programs are deserving of a lifetime achievement award. People told me that last fall’s presentation on The Hyper-Social Organization by Gossieaux and Ed Moran of Deloitte Services actually changed their lives. I know it had a huge impact on me. You can hear an updated version on Wednesday, April 21.

I’ve asked you to support the Forum before, but I’m doing so now with new urgency. Registrations are down this year, whether because of the economy or the flood of new competition or something else. The Forum has always existed on a shoestring budget and I worry about its future if it doesn’t meet attendance goals this year. Believe me when I say that no other event will send you home with as many new insights, ideas and action items as this one.

The organizers have made $500 speaker discounts available if you register with the code NCF500. They’ve also added a one-day pass for $395 if you register with code NCF1D. If you happen to be in the Silicon Valley area, the latter option is a no-brainer. Please support this valuable event and assure its health into the future. Tweet it to your followers using hashtag #ncf2010. And thanks for listening to this final plea from me.

New Slides for Your Viewing Pleasure

I recently developed a three-hour presentation on Blogging Basics that features a brand new slide deck. This presentation is much heavier on tips and tactics than any I’ve given before. It includes dozens of ideas for overcoming writer’s block, creating headlines and promoting content through multiple social media channels. I hope you find it useful. Contact me if you want a version customized for your audience.

Speaking of multiple channels, last week I presented the interim findings of my research on multi-channel social media deployment, called “Social
Marketing Goes Multiplatform.” The webinar was hosted by my principal sponsor, Awareness Networks, and you can download the slide deck about the research and several case studies at the link above.

Tip of the Week: AVS Video Converter

If you do presentations with video clips, you know what a hassle it can be to embed videos from YouTube and other sites into PowerPoint. In fact, PowerPoint doesn’t support the popular Flash FLV format natively, meaning that you must convert downloaded videos into WMV, AVI or some other standard. There are various tools you can buy to do this, but several Firefox plug-ins have recently emerged that make the whole process free and easy.

The one I’ve been using is called AVS Video Converter. The plug-in becomes part of your Firefox toolbar and with one click you can download videos from YouTube and about 200 other sites to your local hard drive. With another click, you can convert them to other popular formats. Then just embed them in PowerPoint and you’re ready to go. Open source is a wonderful thing!

Just For Fun Twofer

We don’t have a killer Just For Fun this week, so we’ll give you two mini-gems to choose from. The first is this video of a performance of The Nutcracker somewhere in Russia. If you’ve ever been a member of the ensemble at a play, you’ll appreciate the antics of the person dressed as a tiger at the back left. He steals the show from the two principal dancers. We can also assume he got his walking papers immediately after exiting the stage, but not before creating a memorable swan song.

The second treat is this collection of behind-the-scenes photos of Disney’s River Country water park. Shuttered in 2001, the park doesn’t appear on any Disney maps or signs, but it’s still alive if not exactly kicking. We love Disney and always marvel at the pristine perfection of its resorts, which is what makes the broken down wreck of the dilapidated River Country all the more incongruous.