Is social media really the future of marketing? Join me as I talk about how the power of social media is grossly exaggerated. Social media is a powerful tool, but it is just one of many gears that you need to make up your marketing machine.

I agree with this statement, and it got me thinking about all the hype we’ve seen recently over social media. Where is this thing going?

History Repeats Itself

As happened in the early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, social media has its nay-sayers, doers, exaggerators and believers — that’s all par for the course in the cycle of a technology as it goes from introduction to mass adoption. If you started riding the social media wave early on, you have probably gone from curiosity to interest to avid enthusiasm to evangelizing. Then as the landscape began to change and others swooped into what felt like “your territory,” you may have experienced some irritation, nervousness, competitiveness, even fear. Then perhaps you regrouped and shifted your focus to carve out your space in an ever-increasingly crowded marketplace. Some of you may already be curious about something newer on the horizon, something shinier and more interesting than blogs, microblogs and social networks, like mobile and augmented reality.

No matter where you are in this cycle, one thing is clear: Social media is not just hype, in the same way that the Web was not just hype, or the Internet or the cell phone or the personal computer. HubSpot’s promotional email got it right that social media is a powerful tool (or perhaps more accurately, a “set of tools.”) But like any tool in your marketing, communications and customer relations toolkit, it is not the be-all and end-all.

The Masses Are Here

Two things happened to me in the last week that made me realize that this is the “big moment” for social media, right before the hype starts to die down, and we begin to take for granted that these tools exist because they will be assimilated into most people’s work and lives:

1. My dad told me he watched a segment on CNN about Facebook and social media for small businesses. My dad is a civil engineer and would admit to only being moderately active on the Internet. The fact that he took the time to watch the segment was significant. Social media, Facebook and Twitter are all becoming a recognized part of his world, although he still scratches his head about them. He’s “getting it” more, although he may still tell you he just doesn’t “get it.” Yet the information has reached him and has sunk in.
2. A friend asked if I knew how she could get a Facebook Page for her church’s youth group. She’s an accountant and other than having a personal Facebook profile is not a techie, unless you count financial and Quicken skills, of course. Her budget was about $200. And I knew she could get a suitable page for that amount of money because someone out there is proficient enough to build it for her for a few hours pay.

Basic Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are fast becoming commoditized. The more challenging and critical aspects of using social media — the aspects that we need to pay attention to — are being strategic about how we enhance our social media properties; how to incorporate them into our processes, including our communications and marketing mix; and how to manage our social media properties and the people who connect with us through them.

Do you feel that social media is about to become something we take for granted, like the web?

image released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons by GravisZro

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The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

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As you are looking to fill in the blanks in your social media calendar? Here are some ideas you can use to develop the content for your blog posts, tweets and status updates.

Start with some “Marketing 101″ questions:

Next, you want to think in terms of “big picture,” longer-term items, then narrow your view to the more immediate and daily. Here are some questions you can answer to start filling in those blanks:

Annual, Quarterly and/or Seasonal

Start by thinking of “big picture” umbrella events and messaging:

• What events are taking place six months to a year out that inform your marketing efforts?
• What other marketing efforts do you have scheduled — or do you need to schedule — including press releases and social media releases?
• What are touchstone issues for your company that can inform messaging that expresses your company’s values?

Monthly

Concentrate on you want to achieve each month, including date-specific events that you can use to anchor your messages:

• What are you promoting?
• What actions do you want your audience to take (particularly ones that are measurable)?
• What’s happening with your company this month?
• What’s happening in your industry this month?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic this month you can comment on?

Daily

Here are some ancillary ways to keep conversations moving and draw out the lurkers in your social networking communities:

• What are you reading?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you doing?
• What do you want to know about your audience (i.e what questions you can ask them)?
• What’s happening with your company today?
• What’s happening in your industry today?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic you can comment on?
• What are your friends, fans and followers saying that you can repeat?
• What are your friends, fans and followers doing that you can acknowledge publicly?
• What calls-to-action can you announce to attract attention and stimulate conversations and participation?

Also think of the types of conversation starters you can use to achieve particular goals while taking your community’s needs into consideration. Here are some ideas for posts, tweets and updates:

• Brand-related: Something about your company or brand to establish values, tone and “personality”
• Fun facts about your company or industry
• Press releases with specific company news announcements
• Coverage of real-world events
• Creation of online events
• Hybrid online/offline events
• Customer service oriented
• Crowdsource a FAQ for your company
• Ask for feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Ancillary but relevant or related topics
• Current news (relevant but not too controversial)
• Twitter trending topics
• Customer recognition (birthdays, accomplishments, etc.)
• Quizzes, polls and surveys
• Quotes (but make sure they are relevant and don’t overuse them)

An important thing to remember when you are filling in your social media calendar is to stay focused on useful messaging, but even more important is to be present and genuine. No amount of planning can ever take the place of those spontaneous moments in your social networks when you act or react in the moment and your friends, fans and followers respond in kind.

How are you planning for the content you produce and messaging you publish in your social media channels?

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Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

In the study, bloggers cautioned PR professionals that traditional outreach methods would not be effective with them; they were adamant that a smart, well-researched approach would work best. The study goes on to say that “most bloggers tend to write about subjects they are passionate about. And most of the time, the product (blog) is wholly owned by them. Therefore, their blog and the subject matter are extremely personal endeavors.”

I haven’t seen a more recent study of a similar type to show what has changed, but as someone who engages both in blogger outreach with my company and blogging, I feel that the landscape has fundamentally shifted.

I’ve noticed a significant decrease, year over year, in how responsive bloggers are — or more accurately, are not — even to individualized, customized and thoughtful outreach. In 2007, response rates were between 20-25 percent positive (the percentage of bloggers who published information provided to them or responding to our outreach). Toward the end of 2009, I began to see a marked drop-off of in acknowledgments from bloggers, much less actual published responses to email outreach. In my company’s experience, we’ve found the response rate to decrease to less than 10 percent, even less than five percent in some cases. This poor response rate is even despite the fact that our relationships with individual bloggers have strengthened over the years.

The decrease in blogger outreach effectiveness can be attributed to a myriad of factors including

1. The recent FTC rulings on marketing firms and blogs
2. A glut of PR requests to bloggers, so most no longer get opened
3. The realization by many bloggers that they now hold an increasing degree of power and influence in terms of information distribution, so they are becoming more selective
4. The fact that many bloggers are still not businesspeople, and don’t even look to PR as a source of fodder for their blogs
5. A continued misunderstanding about blogging culture and what bloggers need or want by marketers
6. There’s a misconception that all bloggers want to be approached by PR reps or to receive press releases, so firms keep throwing stuff out there to see what sticks
7. The fact that not everyone who blogs is open to blogging about things other than their own lives or work, especially products they don’t actually use.

Putting On My Blogger Hat

As a professional blogger as well as a personal blogger, I find myself drowning in pitches from PR firms. On the personal side, I find that unless they use the correct email to pitch me and keep the pitches very short, to the point, and on target with my blog topics, I pretty much ignore the emails. I simply don’t have the bandwidth. Plus, my personal blogs aren’t really commercial endeavors.

On the professional side, I look for a prominent mention of the blog they’re pitching me for (such as WebWorkerDaily); exactly what they are pitching (a new application to help web workers do something better, for example); and how familiar they are with what I write. There is nothing more effective in pitches to me than one with a highly targeted phrase like “I noticed your blog post about RSS feeds last week and wanted to let you know about my client’s new app that would really benefit web workers by helping manage their feeds.” Bingo!

I can’t say that I read every email pitched to me — it is just not humanly possible. I can say that the PR people who politely but regularly nudge me several times to gauge my interest in their pitch have gotten a lot farther with me than the ones who threw a pitch at me like spaghetti to a wall. Kindness and consideration along with persistence wins the ink. Getting annoyed that I haven’t responded, or that I’ve had to switch a demo call at the last minute isn’t going to win any brownie points. We’re all just people trying to make a living, and we all have a life.

The other thing I find incredibly effective in terms of pitching me on behalf of a client is not only the thoughtfully targeted pitch but regular pitches that can provide me with ideas for new blog posts. I look forward to those emails and count the PR people who help to make my professional blogging life just a little bit easier as important contacts. That’s the power of relationships. You care, I care, we work together, everyone wins.

Alternative Ways of Engaging Bloggers

Because of the decrease in effectiveness of blogger outreach carried out in the manner of traditional media outreach, there needs to be alternative ways to engage bloggers to help produce valuable and educational content for our clients; build greater awareness of client brands; and have a measurable impact in the blogosphere. Some of these tactics include:

1. Blog panels. Select bloggers who are knowledgeable in a given area to provide guidance on a company or organization’s blog editorial calendar that can be syndicated on their own blogs in a coordinated fashion. This is a more credible and effective tactic when the participation is a voluntary and non-compensated position; however, there must be a mutual exchange of value and all value exchange must be disclosed.
2. Blogger pools. Select bloggers who can be guest authors of a company or organization’s blog by identifying a pool of qualified, expert and diverse bloggers who can contribute content – with or without compensation – for the exposure. Again, if compensation is involved, it must be disclosed.
3. Blog sponsorship. Identify key blogs and bloggers reaching the “right” audience and offering to pay them to sponsor content that meets particular guidelines. For the bloggers who are in the business of blogging, this can be a more attractive relationship, and both parties must make sure a paid sponsorship is properly and prominently labeled as such.

As the blogging landscape continues to change, it is important for us to engage bloggers in the conversations about best practices in blogger outreach and continue to build more meaningful relationships with bloggers similar to the way we’ve cultivated relationships with the media but realizing the differences. If I feel we have a strong base of blogger relationships in a given industry or area, I may recommend blogger outreach to a client in the future. However, building a targeted blogger list from scratch without relationships solidly in place is proving to be a less effective and more expensive endeavor than it was three years ago.

Do you engage in blogger outreach? Or are you a blogger being approached by marketing types? What are your thoughts on the topic of blogger outreach as an online marketing tactic?

You don’t have to limit your marketing and promotional efforts to content creation, though. Here are a few other ideas to help you get the word out about your business.

1. Create and maintain a high-quality, easy-to-use, self-explanatory web site.

Your web site works for you 24/7/365, so it’s important that it does a good job. It doesn’t need to be beautiful or showy. As a web designer, I would actually recommend clean and easy-to-use over pretty, fun or cute.

When thinking about your web site’s design and functionality, focus on answering these questions for your ideal visitor:

• What is this site about?
• What does this person/company do?
• How much does the service/product cost? How does the service/product work? What else do I need to know about this service/product?
• How can I sign up or purchase this service/product? How can I contact this person/company?
• Should I keep up with this person/company (through a blog, newsletter, regular email coupons/discounts, etc.)? If so, how do I sign up or follow the person/company?

Your site should quickly and obviously answer these questions so that visitors can find their way around your site easily and so that they take action as quickly and painlessly as possible.

2. Use a short and effective email signature.

Every time you send an email, it’s a chance to remind your followers and new contacts what you do. Take advantage of the opportunity. Don’t be spammy. Don’t overdo it. Just provide a concise message to jog their memory and get them to click over to your site every once in a while.

Here’s my signature.

Amber Singleton Riviere
http://www.ambersingleton.com/

I also like my friend Betsy’s.

Betsy Talbot | www.marriedwithluggage.com | Twitter @marriedwluggage

3. Be a guest on other video blogs, podcasts and radio shows.

Monitor places like Twitter, Blogger Linkup, and HARO for opportunities to be interviewed for video blogs, podcasts and radio shows. It’s a great way to expand your reach and get known for your expertise.

4. Invite others to be guests on your blog, video cast or podcast.

One of my best methods for networking actually revolves around guest posts, whether I’m inviting people to contribute to my site or offering content for their sites. It’s been a very effective way to generate interest around my business. It takes a lot of effort to keep up, but it’s worth every minute of it.

I offer guest posts regularly on my site (usually ten or more per month), and what’s great about it is that you usually get the added benefit of promotion to the person’s followers and audience.

5. Participate in online networking.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are great places to meet new people and get the word out about you and your company or site. Also, be sure to follow and comment on other blogs that target your ideal customer or client. By participating in conversations surrounding your niche, you’ll become known as an expert and a valued source of information.

6. Run promotions and discounts on your services periodically.

Getting potential customers and clients to take action and actually purchase your products or services can be tricky, but if you run occasional discounts, you’ll find customers coming out of the woodwork, and it’s a good way to get new prospects to test the waters with you and your company.

I offer a discount in each of my newsletter issues, as well as occasional discounts on Facebook and Twitter. On that note, running contests can also be a good way to get attention for you and your business, especially on Twitter.

Promoting a business doesn’t always have to be difficult. The key, though, is consistency.  Select the methods that work best for you and then stick with them. Do them on a regular basis, even if you’re not seeing immediate results. It takes some time to gain traction, but if you’re persistent, you’ll eventually hit the tipping point and business will start to snowball.

What other easy ways do you promote your business?

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What exactly are comment trolls? They’re the readers, often anonymous, who post inflammatory or off-topic remarks. They can be doing this to attract attention to themselves, promote their own web sites, or simply because they are bored.

According to my friend he received both inflammatory comments and off-topic self-promotion from his readers. Though I’ve gotten the odd troll in my own blogs, I don’t have the readership to be as bothered as he was. Even then, there must be a better way to deal with trolls than just by deleting your blog altogether. Here are some alternatives:

Have a comment policy. This is a paragraph in your comments section or a separate page that lists your policy for identifying and handling inappropriate comments. For an example comment policy, check out this one from ProBlogger.

What do you do when a reader breaks your comment policy? It depends on how long the reader has been participating in your blog. Personally, I prefer to delete the comment and move on.

Set comment approval rules. Blogging platforms and plug-ins can usually automate comment approval for you. Readers that have commented before can have their comments auto-approved, while first-time commenters will have their messages held for approval. This ensures that readers who already know your comment policy will be able to reply to a post without waiting. You can also filter out comments that have swear words and too many outbound links (often a sign of spam).

If you get too many comments and it’s no longer practical for you to moderate them, you can get a virtual assistant to help you. You can ask him or her to delete or unapprove inappropriate comments, as well as notify you when specific comments require an urgent reply.

Disallow comments altogether. This may sound a drastic move, but if you don’t want to deal with the commenting aspect of having a blog, then don’t allow comments at all. Most blogging platforms allow you to disable comments on your entire blog or on individual posts. The trade-off is that you then can’t build a community with your blog, but if that’s not part of your goals, then allowing comments doesn’t really matter.

Do you get many comment trolls on your blog? How do you deal with them?

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If social media tools can enhance our various forms of more traditional marketing — including traditional web sites and email marketing — why do the social media presences we build get ignored and are rarely integrated into other forms of marketing communications?

There is only so much a social media marketing consultant who has been hired as an outside vendor can do to remind and encourage clients to mention and leverage social media tools. To have a better impact on marketing best practices, we need to first identify why there is so much resistance to a set of tools and a fresh, more interactive and engaging way of communicating with consumers.

Here are some thoughts as to why social media marketing is hard for some to understand and embrace:

• The learning curve. Social media tools require a degree of learning new technology.
• The adaption curve. Practitioners entrenched in the “old ways” of marketing are resistant to having to adapt what they know how to do well. Additionally, some people actually get complacent.
• The added work. Many marketers have their formula down to a well-oiled machine. Social media marketing requires paying attention and responding in ways that may seem too burdensome when one is used to pushing out press releases and making phone calls to the media, as opposed to truly interacting with consumers.
• The measurement factor. Even though social media marketing is far more measurable than public relations, for example, more traditional practitioners will use “you can’t measure it” as an excuse not to use it.

In order to bring social media marketing tools and tactics into acceptance, we all need to be careful about several things:

1. Avoid the hype. Don’t over-promise things that social media tools cannot deliver. You’ll fail, and you’ll make the rest of us look bad in the process.
2. Educate others. Those of us who “get” social media marketing need to remain patient and willing to teach those who don’t.
3. Support marketing. Don’t come in like gangbusters, saying that social media tools will replace traditional ones, but instead offer to help support other people’s work and help them look good.
4. Be persistent. Without being a pest, find ways to constantly remind clients and other marketers to remember to mention the social media touch points in all of their communications. They wouldn’t fail to put a web site URL on a press release. Four additional words — “Find us on Facebook” — can make the difference between a single web site visit and a loyal Facebook fan who wants to interact.

What other things are you doing to bring social media marketing tools and tactics into the marketing and communications mix with your company, organization or clients?

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With the advent of blogging in business, many of us feel compelled to showcase our knowledge and expertise in our blog posts; this often means giving free advice. My favorite blog posts to write are the ones that contain some concrete, how-to information that readers can take away and act on immediately to fix or improve something.

On Twitter, this “free advice mentality” is rampant as a way to make our Twitterstream more valuable by building the number of followers we have. Many of us who do business and use Twitter in more business-oriented ways cannot deny that we hope people will also recognize our smarts and make the move to hire us.

But at what point is “free” too much?

I recently had one follower ask for my advice on how to do something on Twitter. Easy enough to answer, and I was happy to do so. That same follower, however, continued to pose more questions to me. “How do I do this?” “How do I do that?” Suddenly, the very thing I’m happy to do anytime for anyone began to bother me.

“But I get paid a lot of money to help people figure this stuff out. This is my business.” I thought.

I tried to craft something to that effect in 140 characters that didn’t sound offensive or whiny in a tweet but finally gave up. I didn’t want to seem selfish. After all, I’m one of the people who constantly talks about the need to be generous on Twitter and in social networks in general.

Why did I reach my breaking point and feel put upon by requests for advice? I began to examine my own expectations from Twitter and social networks as a marketing tool. Was it possible I was being too generous?

What I came up with as a way to analyze when free is too much is to first understand that what happens in social networks and blogs is a two-way street. It isn’t simply about your own generosity in terms of sharing ideas, advice and instruction. It is also about how others take that information, or if they take advantage of your giving that information.

Finding the right balance of “free” means:

1. You need to decide where you draw your own lines in terms of what you will share and when you should start charging;
2. We all need to understand that when someone is paid to be a consultant yet they are providing ideas, advice and instruction for free in certain forums, we should value their contribution and show our gratitude by offering to pay them for additional interactions.

It boils down to mutual respect: Respecting your readers, audience, followers, peers, friends, and wanting to teach and share information as a service to your communities.

But also your readers, audience, followers, peers,and friends need to respect that you do this stuff for a living. It is your job to define where your lines are and make this fact clear to those who read your blog, fan you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter. And when someone crosses the line, you should call them on it without hesitation.

When and how do you draw the lines between “giving it away for free” and putting your foot down and naming your price?

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The book is divided into sections on blogging; Twitter and microblogging; social networking; media sharing; social news and bookmarking; ratings and reviews; forums; and virtual worlds. In each section, Zarrella provides very short descriptions of leading web sites in the particular category, together with quick discussions of how they work, and how businesses could benefit from using them.

The book’s author dedicates it to his grandparents, which is appropriate, since this is the sort of book that I’d give to someone older and less computer-savvy. It sometimes gets a little technical for this audience, but the writing style is clear and friendly.

The book feels like a bit of a departure for O’Reilly Media (who kindly provided the book to me). I tend to think of O’Reilly as publishers of dense software and programming manuals. I was amused to note that the book is listed in O’Reilly’s catalog as “First Edition.” The book will need updating frequently if it’s to stay relevant — some of the screenshots are already out of date.

“The Social Media Marketing Book” is a little book. At 239 8″ x 6″ pages (in paperback or as an e-book), with lots of illustrations and white space, the content is frankly limited. But it’s well-organized, easy to understand, inviting to flip through,and approachable. I doubt that many WWD readers will learn anything new from this book, but it might be useful for lending to clients, family and friends.

How do you explain social media to clients?

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Here are a few of the tips that were shared during the panel to help you write blog content that will help your search engine rankings with no knowledge of SEO techniques or web development required.

Write Great Titles

Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.

• Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
• Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
• Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
• Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon

Write New and Interesting Content

Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.

Include Personal Anecdotes

Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.

These are just a few of my tips for writing content that people will enjoy reading and then link to, which generates better search engine rankings.

What are your tips for using content to improve your SEO?

Photo by Nathan Bergey, used under Creative Commons.

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This is an important thing to keep in mind when marketing your business online. There are tons of ways to build a web presence, including a variety of social media and networking sites, but nothing is as important as your blog.

Maintained correctly, your blog is the one tool that will get you the most traffic, and it’s the tool over which you have the most control. If you set out with the intention of posting three to five times per week, within a year, you will begin seeing significant activity around your site. Within two to three years, you could easily be an authority in your particular niche.

So, how can you make sure that you don’t neglect your blog (or your “mothership”)?

1. Spend time there. Visit your site or blog frequently (ideally, several times per day). This helps you stay connected with your vision for your business, and it also helps you stay in tune with the usability of your site, as well as find ways to improve it.
2. Keep it updated.It’s very easy to allow a month to go by without posting a single blog entry. Naturally, the frequency of your posts will depend on a number of factors, most important being your own goals for your site, but you should post on a regular and consistent schedule so that your site content remains fresh.
3. Engage your audience. Ask questions, make thought-provoking posts, and most importantly, monitor the comments on your blog. If someone replies to one of your posts, take the time to respond, and if you really want to impress the person, email him or her with a thoughtful “thank you for following” message.
4. Give it some thought. Don’t just post “filler content” to make an arbitrary quota. Really think about what your audience wants to hear. What do they want to know more about? How can you help them? Find ways to provide greater value for your readers. You’ll know you’re providing benefit when you hear clients and customers say things like, “I’m trying that idea you mentioned on your blog.”
5. Find ways to improve. Organize your archives a little better, add links to your social networking profiles, or spruce up your “About” page. Find ways to regularly improve your site, making it more visually appealing and more user-friendly.

Your blog is the most direct line to you and your business. It’s what new followers and visitors read to determine if you’re someone they’d like to get to know better or if you can provide value to their lives or businesses. Don’t neglect it. Consider it to be your “mothership” and take care of it as such.

In what ways do you take care of your blog? How do you make sure that it represents you in the best light possible to visitors of your site?

Image from stock.xchng by zizzy0104

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I’ve been running my personal blog on TypePad since 1993 and the early adopter in me made me make the jump to trying out the new preview version as soon as I got the opportunity. Here are some of my first impressions about the impending update to this fee-based blog publishing platform.

TypePad Dashboard

The new TypePad dashboard is more expansive than the previous version. Significant changes include:

• Follow TypePad Members. This is a social networking feature that enables you to follow other TypePad members who are running blogs of interest to you.
• Comments. You can view full text of the recent comments left on your TypePad hosted blog.
• TypePad Blogs. You can access any of your TypePad blogs from this feature. You can also create a new TypePad blog from your dashboard.
• Question of the Day. This is a new TypePad feature to inspire blog writing. You can answer the question of the day as a post on your blog, view answers to questions of the day, and even submit your own questions. While this is a fun feature, if you are using your TypePad blog as a more professional blog than Question of the Day is going to prove detracting to your professional message.

There is also includes access to widgets you can add to your blog, and the option to subscribe to “Everything Typepad,” which provides updates to new TypePad features. I like the new user interface because it is better balanced and more usable than the old one.

Library
When I first made the jump from Blogger to TypePad, it was the media management tools in the library that drew me in. The  TypePad library provides access to the following:

• Photo Albums. You still have the option to host your photos on TypePad, but you are probably hosting your photos on PhotoBucket or Flickr anyway.
• TypeLists. TypeLists can include links including books, music, your other Web properties, or your Flickr account.
• File Manager. You can manage the files you upload to your TypePad blog from File Manager. While the TypePad interface has gone through some changes, the File Manager has stayed largely the same.

Final Thoughts on the TypePad Preview
A hosted blogging platform can be a good choice for your personal blog, because it takes a lot of worries off your plate and lets you focus on your core business. TypePad is a fine blogging platform, but this new version isn’t really bringing too much new to the table, except for interface tweaks.

Have you tried out the TypePad preview? What has been your experience?

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We’ve all learned that good news travels fast online, but bad news travels faster. Now, with social networks, blogs and microblogs, the speed with which bad news can travel online is staggering, as everyone can get in on the conversation almost instantly. What can any of us — individuals, organizations and companies — do to handle a social media communications crisis?

After publishing my 10 Golden Rules of Social Media, I’ve been asked by a number of people what to do when things go wrong in the social mediasphere. Anyone who is putting themselves out there using social media tools is bound to encounter moments of crisis — some as large as the Domino’s fiasco, others as small as an old-fashioned person-to-person flame war.

My advice is to plan now. Don’t wait for that communications crisis to take place before planning for how you’ll handle the fallout when something bad (inevitably) happens. Here’s a blueprint you can use for your own plan.

1. Pay attention. Whether you are using Google Alerts or Twilert or any other monitoring service to see when your name or brand name is mentioned, setting up “digital listening posts” is essential to help learn about not just the good things people are saying about you, but the bad things as well. Getting an early “heads up” can make all the difference in the world between crisis and total disaster.

2. Review context. Before you panic and jump the gun to respond to what might appear to be a crisis, dig a little deeper to make sure you understand what is being said and why. You don’t want to enter the conversation until you have a firm grasp on the issues being raised.

3. Address promptly. Timeliness is everything when dealing with and defusing the crisis. Every day, every hour, every minute you agonize over what to do — or ignore the situation altogether — is time wasted.

4. Acknowledge first. Once you figure out what has happened and what some of the emotions are behind it, make sure to address these issues or emotions in your responses. Like any good interpersonal communications, start with statements like “I understand you’re frustrated” or “We realize this is a confusing situation.” Give credence to the other party’s feelings and perceptions. They may not be correct, but they are valid in that they’re what they believe and feel.

5. Don’t overthink. Running through committees, endless drafts and approval processes to get a response out there can cause far more damage than good. As long as you have taken the time to assess the situation and can take a rational, respectful tone in your response, even an awkward response is OK to start with, and buys you time to continue to respond to the problem.

6. Be open. If you’re upset, nervous, worried, shocked — don’t be afraid to express that as well. People want to see a human response to a crisis, not an overproduced, formulaic or canned reply. When there is a crisis, there are people involved. Pretending there are no emotions mixed in the mess is a surefire way to lose credibility with others. Domino’s CEO responded pretty quickly and openly. However, check out his response to the crisis. The CEO never once looks at the camera. If you are going to be open and forthcoming in your response, at least look straight at the camera at some point. Even when reading from a teleprompter, you can set it up so your eyes are directed at the camera. Otherwise, you’ll look shifty and untrustworthy.

7. Fix the problem. If the crisis is bringing a problem to your attention, admit it, address it and fix it. If something is wrong and you can make it right, do it. If something isn’t really wrong but someone perceives that it is wrong, don’t dismiss their concerns. Take every exchange seriously, and do your best. That is all anyone can really expect. If you make sincere efforts and consistently take the high road, you stand to gain some goodwill, even if the problem is not entirely resolved.

8. Tell your story. Telling your own story throughout the “fixing” process is another good way of helping defuse the issue. Giving updates such as “We’re still looking into that bug that caused your data loss,” and “Please contact us privately so we can make amends to this situation” lets anyone paying attention to the situation see something is being done, even some of it has to happen “behind-the-scenes.”

What other things should we think about when it comes to crisis communications in a social media-powered world?

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Likewise, writers can’t just keep producing the same kind of content for a different medium. The web, and its readers, demands a different kind of writing, delivered in a different way. It can hard to find the right mix, especially if you’ve spent your entire professional life writing one way, only to be asked to completely change that up. Here are some tips and resources to help get a handle on just what kind of change is required.

Practice Makes Perfect

It’s an old maxim, but one that doesn’t seem to lose its validity no matter how much time goes by or how many technological changes we may experience. If you want to learn something new, you need to practice it. For online writing, there are a number of different ways you could go about it.

First, there’s good ol’ rewriting. Find a source, or better yet, a number of sources of writing samples that resemble the type of working you’re aiming to do. Then try to produce a similar piece, maintaining the spirit of the original(s), but incorporating your own take. When you’re examining your sources, pay special attention to what they all share, and, when you’ve written your own version, look for things that your piece has that the others don’t. It may be a useful innovation, but maybe it’s something from print that’s extraneous to web writing.

You could also use a prompt, which is not just a useful tool for creative writing, no matter what you may have heard in high school. You could try coming up with your own, based on the area you’re interested in, but you might also want to use a prompt list or generator. Creativity-Portal.com has one specifically created for blogging and online writing, so it’s probably a good place to start looking.

Twitter Is Your Friend

I can hear some of my old English professors cringing at what Twitter could potentially mean for the future of the English language. Regardless, if you plan on writing online, you should get better acquainted with the beast. And it doesn’t have to be an entirely one-sided relationship, either. There’s a lot your writing can gain from Twitter. For example, it trains you to respect brevity, a key skill for writing online.

It can also benefit you in other ways. You can find a healthy list of those benefits over at Write for Your Life, in an article called “How Twitter can help you improve, market and publish your creative writing”. A large number of the advantages he lists focus on the networking advantages Twitter presents. All you have to do is partake in #editorchat or #journochat to see what’s possible. Also check out #writing for tons of great tips, comments, and worthwhile people to follow.

Those are just a few general ideas to get you started, but at least you won’t feel adrift in an unfamiliar sea. Perhaps most importantly, you have to give yourself time to adjust, because otherwise it’s easy to make missteps and end up making an early gaffe if you venture in without taking the lay of the land. Stay tuned for more tips on making the switch.

Have you switched from writing for print to online? Share your tips in the comments.

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Artician seems like a more polished implementation of the same concept behind MyFolio. Artician will appeal to creative professionals because it seems crafted, top to bottom, by designers who really care about their work. Despite still bearing the “beta” tag that’s part and parcel of practically any new web service release these days, Artician is a fully functional network that will seem like a breath of fresh air to bitter deviantArt vets (myself included).

Once you’ve signed up for Artician, you can upload work, customize your profile and site, customize a blog, and update your geographic locale. The interface for doing so is straightforward. I especially like how the work of network members is showcased throughout the web site via the “Browse” subsection, which is the central focus of your launch page.

Clicking on the “Submit” link reveals a pleasant surprise: You can actually import your deviantArt portfolio directly, which could represent a significant time-saver if you already have a lot of work over there. In practice this seemed to work very quickly and with good results, although my deviantArt portfolio is quite small, so I’m not sure how well it would handle larger libraries.

I like the categories and genres Artician offers, which include a broad range. My biggest pet peeve when it comes to these kinds of online portfolios is that the built-in categories they provide often seem limited, haphazardly chosen and not an accurate reflection of the work that creative professionals working on the web do.

Another thing Artician has going for it is the built-in blog feature. Alone, a web-based portfolio is nice, but there’s only so much you can convey about yourself professionally via gallery descriptions and comments. It’s much better to be able to maintain a full-scale blog alongside your work. You can also use the import tool to move existing content from any RSS feed. Sadly, there’s no way to import comments as of yet.

Because it’s designed for creative people, Artician also gives you ample opportunity to flex that creative muscle. You can customize your profile in a number of ways, but the best feature is probably custom CSS editing and creation, which is available without any additional cost.

Judging by the content I saw while looking through Artician’s “Browse” section, there are already a lot of talented people using the network. Still, the “Browse” feature doesn’t seem either targeted or detailed enough to bring in much work on its own. It’s probably better to use your Artician page as a component of your online portfolio.

As a ready-made portfolio and resume in one that allows you to exert as much or as little of your own creative control as you’d like, Artician has quickly become my service of choice for showing my work online. Farewell, deviantArt. I’ll miss you like I miss making rock show posters pro bono for friends’ bands via the company copier, but me and Artician have bigger fish to fry.

Have you tried Artician or a similar servivce for showcasing your work? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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