DISQUS

Absolutely. Especially as speakers like Chris make the transition from presenting at free events to pay-for events. As much as I love hearing what everybody has to say, there really is a fair amount of overlap so I REALLY better be hearing something new if I'm attending a social media gig, especially if I'm gonna pony up $295+.

<abbr>Don Lafferty’s last blog post..Jonathan Maberry and Harvey Finkel</abbr>

Marketing is about lead generation. Sales is about converting that lead to...a sale.

You can slice and dice the strategies and tactics to suit the market niche you're targeting - IF you have a good internal process and the rare combination of a sales and marketing organizations that LISTEN to each other.

Every now and then I have to remind myself that while we're in new territory with regard to the mode of communication we're using, the itches we scratch haven't changed since the first caveman went looking for his breakfast.

I think this is spot-on but I believe it'll have the greatest impact on the acceptable product lifespan of durable goods from cars to certain wardrobe staples.

The blistering speed of technology advancement will limit the expected life span of electronics, but some items, like automobiles, winter boots and backpacks will require more value to survive in the new consumer mindset.

Value costs money, but is almost always a better buy, so communicating that value is going to be a critical piece of the puzzle for brands who want to trade on it.

Five years ago I decided I would take a run at becoming a more published writer. This meant, as you know, building platform, which includes landing on the first page of search results on Google where you can be found by agents and editors.

So for the first time ever I googled my name, only to find out that the late Don Lafferty happened to be the winning-est, most renown checkers player of all time. Yeah.

Five years later now, and Don and I sorta split that first Google search page.

While the change in Google Profiles has the ability to accelerate the process of climbing the search ladder, it'll also swamp us with search results as more and more users of this free service load up profiles with all manner of information and then, as often happens, abandon the profile or otherwise lose their access to it.

But like any place on the Web, as you point out, Justin, it bears some time and careful consideration to craft a profile that fits with your overarching objectives and feeds them appropriately.

Fear or nervousness does not equate to a lack of confidence.

I often experience my most significant breakthroughs and successes when I'm doing something that scares the hell out of me.

But I remain confident. Based on my track record I know I can trust my plan and move forward even when it feels like I'm performing without a net.

Over time I've come to associate this feeling of nervous energy with good things, so fear of the unknown, or that whacked out feeling I get before presenting to a crowd is usually a sign that good things are about to happen.

Flip that association around in your own head and you'll find yourself operating in a space that creates a whole new level of opportunity.

We're partnering with RIF (Reading is Fundamental) and NAIBA (National Association of Independent Booksellers), and donating books to the military in conjunction with our Liar's Club Tells the Truth About Independent Bookstores Tour.

Response has been overwhelming.

Even when a client KNOWS they need the value of social media in their toolbox, the learning curve can be long-ish.

It's funny, my initial sit-downs used to be so much different. I'd start off with a general overview of the tools best suited to a client's core objectives, and then I'd make the mistake of talking about their future options. By the time I concluded the meet and greet their heads were spinning.

What made perfect sense to me, having the benefit of experience, was frequently mind boggling to the client. Clients also have a proclivity to assign cost to EVERYTHING. Especially the creation of content, so while it's common for quick-sell artists to characterize social media tools as "free" or "low cost", the prudent social media guru recognizes the cost of the manpower, content creation, and outside expertise associated with all that listening, repackaging, and cross-linking.

I couldn't agree more.

Hashtags are great when following savvy Twitter users who want their stuff to be found, but I like the idea that I can pick up terms like "dog", "zombie" or "GLAAD" being used by people talking about those things that really define a specific interest.

Context takes a little decoding sometimes: there's a big difference between the way Randy Jackson and Martha Stewart use the term "dog", but that easy enough to sort through for access to fresh conversations about the things you're monitoring by people who represent the pulse of the conversation.

<abbr>Don Lafferty’s last blog post..Jonathan Maberry and Harvey Finkel</abbr>

Look for my proposal next week, babe. Have a holiday...please!

I can't help but think you were onto this more than a year ago, babe: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/a-sample-social-medi...

Clients hire gunslingers because clients don’t know the right gun for the job, but gunslingers do because they’re shooting somebody every day.

Social media tools and tactics are evolving at a blistering pace, making it a challenge [read: a real job] for practitioners to stay on top of the best tools for the job at hand, especially considering the breadth of applications for Social Media.

Last night I happened to catch an old Radiolab piece where Robert Krulwich explored the Placebo Effect and how the power of suggestion combined with context can cause people to feel better or worse. The most important component to instilling this effect is the level of confidence with which the doctor identified the patient’s condition.

Consider that for a moment. With thousands of years of medical information at a patient’s fingertips, providing them with any number of diagnoses for their problem, it’s the simple, firm assurance of their family doctor that begins the process of feeling better. This is a field that experiences dramatic technological advancements during a practitioner’s average career span.

So, know your tools; know you’ll be challenged; know you’ll make mistakes, and know you’ll never stop learning.

Gain an understanding of your client’s expectations as soon as possible, and then align and adjust them accordingly depending on the tools available.

Carry yourself with confidence at all times, and know in advance that you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/200... - Radiolab

Merry Christmas, amigo.

Tourism boards have the same PR concerns as any publically held corporation, that is, the wrong message could really make an unfavorable impression, even if it’s accurate from the writer’s point of view.

If a tourism board wants to work through blogging to enhance their city’s image they have two choices:

1. Manage their own blog.
2. Schmooze some travel bloggers, just like they schmooze travel agents, and hope like hell none of the bloggers get’s mugged during the visit. 

Marketing collateral has only one purpose and it’s not to tell the good, the bad and the ugly, which all seem to find their way into a blogging environment.

That said, I travel all over the world and have grown dependant on a few travel web sites for their everyman reviews to get scoop and consensus on hotels and neighborhoods. I can almost always find somebody out there who has blogged about their visit to every city I’ve ever visited where I usually find out where NOT to go and what to avoid.

People, including bloggers, are much more motivated to report a poor experience than a positive one, unless their getting schmoozed.

Thank God I ate breakfast already so I have something to barf up. Thank God too that I only have three more kids to get through college.

It might be time to divert some of that SAT tutoring cash to softball training.

What a daymare.

I can answer your question in two ways:

1. How I sell my clients.
2. How I help my clients sell their stuff.

I score clients through a variety of approaches, from conducting social media seminars for writers to sending unsolicited proposals and case studies to prospects with a more corporate posture. I follow up by phone and I meet face-to-face once I identify the right person at a prospective client.

Once I locate the appropriate conversations for a particular client, I participate in those conversations myself, establishing credibility and trust with other participants who I evaluate for possible targeting. I’m skipping over a ton of tactical detail here, but most of readers here know how that’s done.

The writers I work for are quick to refer me, and since networking is a critical component of every writer’s survival kit, they have no problem talking about me to anybody who’ll listen.

When it comes to advising my clients on their strategy for selling, it all depends.

I’ve created social media campaigns for bestselling novelists, high tech manufacturing companies, youth athletics organizations, past life therapists and Washington lobbyists.

I assess my client’s market knowledge and their target customer profile and go from there, overlaying what I know about social media users, and crafting strategies that enable the client to capitalize on the overlap through a variety of methods as you’ve mentioned, Chris, in some of your Social Media Toolkit posts.

Lastly, I think it’s kinda funny that you feel compelled to mention that “Business Isn’t Evil”.

Unless someone is fortunate enough to be independently wealthy, it’s all about business. While Social Media may still be finding its footing, the phenomenon Social Media represents is nothing new—it’s just different.

Different than TV, different than radio, different than the telegraph and different than the printing press…but kinda the same in terms of its revolutionary impact on communication, and I don’t think anybody would argue that each of those breakthroughs in communication technology were all about facilitating business and became business themselves.

At its core, product placement isn’t too far removed from “friend of a friend” testimonial, that is, “Any friend of Brogan’s is a friend of mine”.

Why?

Because I’ve done my time building trust with you so if you tells me somebody is okay, that works for me.

Product placement works on the same platform of implied trust.

If you, Chris Brogan, like a product, based on my experience with you and the standards I know you demand, I’m able to make a pretty quick assessment about the quality of that product. If it’s something I need, I’m more likely to try it if somebody I trust is using it.

If, over the course of time, this logic fails a few times, I’m less likely to trust your judgment, and while I still may enjoy the pictures you put on your blog, I may not be so quick to eat the same brand of frozen waffles as you.

Whether you disclose your business association with the product or not, I’m choosing to try it because I trust you. Once I try something however, it’s got to stand on its own merits.

I assume if somebody is associating themselves with a brand, they’re likely being compensated. If you or any other public person is silly enough to trade your reputation for money by pimping an inferior product, YOUR brand value will diminish accordingly and eventually the public will shift their trust elsewhere.

Tell me, don’t tell me…I don’t care. In the end, good stuff and high quality will endure.

I thought Twitter would have been a perfect forum for Cloverfield considering the way Abrams spoon fed the public teases about the movie for months. People were googling their fingers bloody trying to find out stuff about that movie before its release.

I think perhaps where moviemakers could get the beat bang for the Social Media buck is in targeting the second and third time moviegoer as well as the DVD release.

The really big blockbusters, especially the superhero, horror and recurring character series, like Indiana Jones, always count on their most loyal public attending two and three times to get the big screen experience.

Consumers like this are usually young and engaged in social media.

A well crafted strategy could include social media presence for the characters – like a MySpace page or a Twitter account for Shia LaBeouf’s character, Mutt Williams, in the latest installment of Indiana Jones. This would allow fans to engage the character, not the actor and personalize their experience with the work.

The producers and distributors would have a direct line to their public for providing ancillary content, running contests, and making announcements for future products.

There are ways social media could supplant traditional Hollywood movie promotion, but not in the widespread fashion Tinseltown is accustomed to operating.

I’m not so sure bloggers have to train or retrain anybody.

In fact, if you were to transpose your sentiments back onto mainstream media, I’d venture they’d have a similar laundry list of pet peeves and advice for those who pitch. And I think they found out a long time ago that politeness isn’t necessary.

It’s important to remember that while the blogger pipeline to the world is indeed different than the traditional pipelines, everything has been done before.

I don’t know this to be true, but I suspect we’re all living through Blogging’s more innocent age simply by virtue of timing and fate, and somewhere in the future, blogging as a form of media will be as mainstream as old line media, just a little different.

Look at your personal journey, Chris.

Think about who you were as a blogger a year ago and who you are today. Are you more aggressive, less forgiving, more demanding? Remember when you were happy that ANYBODY cared to read what you have to say? Do you have the time to be as personal and warm as you used to, or are you more discerning about who you give your time to?

And so Blogging in general will go. There will always be the disruptors whose business and scope of influence requires them to mature into the mainstream only to make room for more disruptors.

Stay as long as you can, my friend.

I'm with Seth E; I think it was just a bonehead move. Nothing overtly disrespectful or malicious.

But...make an example of one, teach many.

While I agree it’s a cool idea and a productive use of the forum, the potential for creating customer dissatisfaction scares the hell out of me.

Putting a customer support function on Twitter is akin to placing a support person on a busy sidewalk with a sign asking “Can I help you?” I imagine the queue could become overwhelming pretty darn quickly.

Is it brilliant? No more brilliant than using the phone or a chat function or any other incoming communication technology. They’re all pretty nifty, but each have their limitations and frustrations for customers. It stands to reason that the Twitter doorway will have some shortcomings too.

I would be interested in understanding the internal protocol and work instructions TurboTax build around their foray into Twitter-based support.

How many live bodies are reading the feed of what kind of schedule?
What’s the procedure for handling an incoming support query?
Does the Twitter person hand off to a traditional support function?
Does TurboTax apply the same metrics of acceptable response and satisfaction to Twitter as they do to other forms of query or is this just somebody’s personal science project?
Is this a temporary presence or has TurboTax made Twitter a permanent part of their customer support structure?

I could probably think of more, not least of which is, do the customers find it better, the same or worse?

The Beatles’ musical influences are well known. In all the interviews they did over the years this was almost always one of the topics that came up. It usually does with everyone who rises to the top of their profession, especially where creativity is concerned.

But what is it about The Beatles that made them iconic?

Originality.

You could argue that The Beatles broke new ground with their work, but they were just putting their spin on the ideas of their influences, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and others. In fact, part of the process of mutating into their own sound was copying the sounds they liked; covering them.

It took them years of fiddling around with the sounds of their influences before their “overnight” success.

I’d never suggest plagiarism is acceptable, but if a writer is going to be bold enough to sprinkle some threads of original thought in a piece of work bound together by the parallel work of her contemporaries, with acknowledgement where appropriate, I think you can feel secure in the knowledge that the creative process facilitated by public discourse is working the way it always has.

While blogging requires writing, I believe blogging as a practice possesses challenges that are not necessarily unique to writing as a pursuit.

Any time a writer publishes, they’re putting their craft, and sometimes their thought process, out there for critique, whether the writing is a novel, a traditional magazine article, an online article or a blog.

The first three methods of publication usually pass through an editor who provides the writer with some level of validation, after all, if the writing was crap, the editor wouldn’t pass it through.

But a blog is unedited naked ambition. When a writer becomes a blogger it’s like a newspaper reporter starting her own paper and becoming editor, publisher and paperboy. There’s nobody and nothing to hide behind when you take the plunge into blogging.

So blogging winds up being a bit like running your own business. As we’ve all heard so many times, blogging is about building your personal brand.

Not every writer has enough of a business head to manage a brand, even when the brand is themselves. Consequently, being a good writer, even a great writer, doesn’t necessarily mean one has what it takes to be a solid blogger.

Which lead me to this final point.

A good blogger can get by with writing that would never pass muster at a traditional publication, but still provide an interesting, insightful point of view on any number of topics while they work out their personal writing style.

Happy Birthday, cowboy. I hope you get what you want.

Time stamps on our general activities, Twitter, commenting on blogs, etc...render us highly stalk-able, uh, I mean track-able.

Why do you think I have so few tweets? I prefer to keep my whereabouts and activities somewhat close to the vest.

Reputation = "What have you done for [to] me lately?"

Glory is fleeting but screwups endure. I don't want my screwups impacting my reputation, it'll make me less likely to risk failure.

Didn't we just talk about this?

@ eban crawford ~ I second the notion that MySpace is being overlooked by the folks in the fishbowl.

I still get more bang pushing promotion out through MySpace AND Yahoo Groups.