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Oscar Wilde Knows a Thing or Two About Branding

March 31, 2010 By

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. — Oscar Wilde

wilde oscar Oscar Wilde Knows a Thing or Two About BrandingIt’s a big fear of the corporate attorneys that people are going to say bad things about them. That’s why they don’t do blogging and social media.

“We don’t want people to leave negative comments about us on our blog,” they say. (The solution, of course, is to solve the problem the people are complaining about, and then post the response that you fixed it, but that’s for another post.)

The thing is, people are talking about you already. Do a quick check on Google, Twitter, and even on Facebook to see if people are talking about your brand. If you’re a large company or nonprofit, you’ll find people talking about you online, whether you have a blog or not.

But what if you’re a small or medium sized company or nonprofit and nobody is talking about you? That’s a good thing, right?

Wrong.

It means nobody is talking about you. They’re not saying how great you are. They’re not talking about how much they love your product. They’re not saying a single thing about you.

In other words, they think you’re rather unremarkable.

And unremarkable companies don’t make money. Unremarkable nonprofits don’t get volunteers or donations. Unremarkable companies and nonprofits go out of business.

But you’re not unremarkable. You’re awesome! You do some amazing stuff. In fact, I was talking to John and Kara about you. You remember John and Kara, right? They were telling me about that time you were hanging out with them at that place, and that guy came up and did the thing. Don’t you remember? Well, they love you.

So why aren’t John and Kara talking about you online? Why aren’t John and Kara telling all their friends about you? Maybe it’s because you’re not on there to talk with them, which will remind them to mention that time at the place with the guy who did the thing.

But if you did, if you did take the plunge, and start using a social media tool — just one — they’ll start talking about you. They’ll leave reviews about you on places like Yelp.com and Google Local. They’ll mention you in tweets, and refer people to your website.

And you’ll be able to talk back to them. You’ll thank them for the reviews. You’ll answer their questions. You’ll solve their problems when they’re upset with you. Then everyone else will notice, and they’ll start talking about — and to — you too.

That way, you’ll start attracting more attention, which will lead to more customers, which means more revenue from new sales channels.

So if you want to increase your reputation, increase your customers, and increase your sales, just try it. Just a little. Pick a social media tool (we like Twitter), and start using it.

Because the only thing worse than not being talked about is being talked about in the past tense.

Filed Under: Communication, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

The Fishers Gaga for Google Fiber Video is Done

March 25, 2010 By

This past Sunday, I joined 199 of my fellow Fishers residents and we shot a video, singing about the virtues of the Google Fiber network, to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi.” Mercifully, we weren’t in the video very long, and you can barely see me, and only if you know where to look (hint: I’m NOT the guy at the beginning of the video. That’s Caleb, and that really is him singing.)

You can read more about Fishers’ quest to get some of that Google Fast Fiber at the Professional Blog Service blog.

Filed Under: Communication, Networking, Tools Tagged With: , ,

Help Fishers, Indiana Get Google Fiber

March 24, 2010 By

One-Mississippi.

One second. It’s how we counted when we were kids playing flag football or hide-and-seek. One-Mississippi is how long it takes you to download a 3MB song to your computer.

Five-Mississippi, six-Mississippi, seven-Mississippi.

That’s how long it actually takes at my house. I have high speed Internet, and we usually average 3 – 5MB per second. At least it’s supposed to.

But if you’ve ever tried to get online between 3:00 – 5:00 (when the kids come home from school), your Internet speed drops like a rock. It’s bad again on Saturday afternoons, and again on Sunday nights.

But what if you could get 1GB (yes, one gigabyte) of speed in your house?

1GB equals 1,000MB (actually, 1024MB). At that speed, you could download 333 songs in One-Mississippi. That’s not a typo. Three hundred and thirty-three songs in a single second. That’s how fast 1GB is.

One-Mississippi. We just downloaded almost the entire Beatles catalog (It took two more seconds to finish “Hey Jude.”)

This is the exciting part: Google said they plan to build and test ultra-high speed fiber networks in a select number of communities across the United States.

The Town of Fishers and the Fishers Chamber of Commerce are working on a submission to get Google Fiber run throughout the entire town of Fishers.

We’re competing with cities and towns all over the United States. Even our friends up in Anderson, IN are in the running.

But we want it here in Fishers. Call me selfish, but since I live there, I would love to see it in my hometown. It would be great, not only for the homes and schools in Fishers, but for the businesses.

Imagine the possibilities: Video production companies can upload their videos in seconds, not minutes. Video conferencing will be a snap. Software companies can collaborate around the office or around the world. Movies on demand will be just as fast as watching regular TV. And yes, you can download your MP3s in a fraction of a second.

Think about what 1GB per second can do for the technology industry here in central Indiana. Many of us are fond of calling this region “Silicorn Alley.” But with speeds like this, Fishers can quickly become the entire hub of Silicorn Alley. (Or would that be the stalk?)

Think of the jobs it will create for Central Indiana if many software companies started relocating here. Think of what it can do for home sales and the surrounding economy, and even the state’s brain drain if companies began locating to Fishers, just for 1GB per second.

So, please, even if you don’t live in Fishers, take a few minutes to stop by the FastFishers.com website and nominate our not-so-little town for Google’s Fiber.

Video Proof of Our Craving for Fast Internet

This past Sunday, about 200 Fishers residents gathered to produce a community video to show Google how badly we want Google Fiber in our town. My friend, Alison Moore, of the Fishers Chamber wrote lyrics to a Lady Gaga song, and we sang. We sang our hearts out, and sang about our love for Google and the promise of Google Fiber.

Yes, I even sang. That’s how bad I want this. I sang a freaking Lady Gaga song! Now, if I can sing a Lady Gaga song, you can certainly take just 3 minutes to show Google why our town deserves the new network they’re going to give to a few lucky cities or towns in the United States.

And when you’re done, and if we get it, you’re more than welcome to come up here and try it out. We’d love to have you.

Filed Under: Communication, Networking Tagged With: , , ,

What Stylebook Should Bloggers Use?

March 23, 2010 By

If you ever want to see writers argue loudly (and who doesn’t?), ask them which writing style guide is the best. The opinions will be varied, the disagreements will be vocal, and the slap fights will be, well, slappy.

Nothing gets the ire of a writer up higher than someone slamming on their beloved style guide. A stylebook is really just a preference guide for how you want people to punctuate, and spell and capitalize certain words.

Bloggers often get caught in the cross-fire, because we don’t know which style guide we should use. This is a question I’m often asked, and I always say the same thing:

Bloggers should use the Associated Press Stylebook

What Stylebook Should Bloggers Use?

I like the Associated Press Stylebook What Stylebook Should Bloggers Use? (affiliate link) because it’s a book for journalists by journalists. And since bloggers are really citizen journalists, we might as well use the book the journalists use. Although it was really written for writers who work for the Associated Press, it has been adopted by every journalist except for the New York Times.

While there are no major differences between most of the stylebooks, except on some small ticky-tack stuff, like whether you should use the Oxford comma or whether or not to hyphenate certain words.

I realize there are many style guides you can choose from: MLA (Modern Language Association for English), Turabian (history), and APA (American Psychological Association; social sciences) for the academic world. The Chicago Manual of Style for book publishers, Strunk and White’s Element of Style for general writing, and The Bluebook for lawyers.

While there is the Columbia Guide to Online Style (COS), I prefer the AP Stylebook. The COS is used for citing online sources, and is a style guide for “creating documents electronically for submission for print or electronic publication,” but from what I can see, it’s used more for academic purposes, rather than the real world.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

The Era of Calling Things “Dead” Is Dead. Or Should Be.

March 22, 2010 By

108154 47756fc3 The Era of Calling Things Dead Is Dead. Or Should Be.Oh God, I am sick to death of this “sky is falling” mentality that I keep seeing more and more. Everyone thinks they’re either cool or a 21st century Nostradamus by saying something is dead. “Twitter killed blogging.” “Google Buzz killed Twitter.” Blah blah blah.

Here are just a tiny few articles I found declaring something to be dead (something that is still widely in use):

Sorry, my crystal ball must be broken, because all I see are more and more customers using Twitter, email, Facebook, blogging. I don’t like Buzz and have never tried the Wave, but I see plenty of people telling me they’re still using it, so they’re not dead.

Basically, until someone like Google, Twitter, or Facebook declares they’re shutting down, everyone else should just shut up about things being “dead.”

After Newsweek pundit Clifford Stoll famously declared that the Internet would not replace newspapers, that Nicholas Negroponte was an idiot for saying we would buy books and newspapers straight from the Internet, and that you couldn’t “tote that laptop to the beach,” I would think that most people would hesitate before putting themselves out like that without any evidence to back it up. (In fact, Stoll’s piece has been generating such big laughs these past few weeks, that Newsweek’s own blog said, “Decca Records didn’t get this much heat for passing on the Beatles.”)

There are very few people whose predictions I absolutely trust. If one of them says, “this technology is dead,” I’ll check it out for myself to make sure. Anyone else who says it just looks like a poseur (that’s the real spelling of “poser.” It rhymes with “hoser.”) Everyone else seems to be killing technology because they don’t use it anymore (if they ever did), or they read a story somewhere that said overall use was down, or it had peaked, or some shiny new thing came along.

If you’re declaring something to be dead as a way to generate buzz and bring in some readers, start writing things with substance. Scott Scheper just did it with his blog post, Twitter, As We Knew It, is Dead. And while his qualifying phrase, “as we knew it,” keeps him from flying too close to my whole nose-wrinkling disdain of “is dead,” I do have to say his article is filled with enough actual useful information that he gets a free pass this time.

Basically, if all you can do is declare something to be dead because you can’t think of a catchy headline, then just don’t say anything until you can. Talk about how the thing has changed, talk about how you think it can be saved, or talk about its replacement. Just stop killing things for everyone else just because you quit using them.

Filed Under: Blogging, Facebook, Networking, Opinion, Twitter, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Help Name Our Next Book

March 9, 2010 By

Kyle Lacy and I are working on another social media book geared toward someone who is entering the “Second Phase” of their career.

(I helped him write Twitter Marketing for Dummies).

Our new book is not for the recent college graduate, or the social media newbie. This is for someone who is proficient on a computer, and is even aware of social media. They may even have a Facebook account.

Problem is, we don’t like the name “Second Phase.”

So we need your help. We’re turning to all of our friends and social media buddies, and asking for your suggestion on what to call the book.

Here is a blurb from our book proposal to give you an idea of what we’re doing.

(T)here is a Second Phase of personal branding when a person leaves the corporate workforce to find their passion, something that moves them, that gives them a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. They’ll look for a new job, a new industry, or even launch an entire new career.

Creating this Second Phase needs to happen both online and off. It’s a rebirth and a redefinition. The Second Phase means people are starting anew, learning how to take lessons learned in the corporate infrastructure, and rekindle their sense of purpose, their personal mission.

The point of our book is to show people how to kickstart the Second Phase, to rebrand themselves into how they want to be seen, not how they need to be seen to be hired, a decidedly First Phase way of thinking.

Thanks to today’s social media tools, this redefinition is not only becoming easier, it’s crucial to personal and professional success. It’s more about working YOUR network, adding value, and thinking and acting like an authority, even when you might not feel like one.

We used “Second Phase” in the proposal, but we’re trying to find something cooler, something that sounds more modern, and — dare we say it? — a little trendy.

So we’re looking for suggestions. Give us an idea, any idea. Leave it in the comments section, and if we use it, we’ll give you credit inside the acknowledgments. And if it’s possible, we’ll even use you in the book. (I’m not promising anything; if we can get it in, it will go in. If not, c’est la vie.)

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3 Reasons Why Sports Marketers Need Social Media

March 8, 2010 By
Tomas Scheckter

Sponsoring a sports team or event is not just about signing a check. It’s more than just getting your name on the side of a car or a sign in the stadium.

Basically, if you want your sponsorship dollars to be an effective marketing tool, you need to double your total sponsorship budget just to promote the fact that you have a sponsorship deal. If your sponsorship is for $100,000, spend another $100,000 to promote it.

If you’re sponsoring a racing team, you need to tell your customers about it, and get them to cheer for “your” team. If you’re sponsoring a football team, you need to get your best customers into the luxury suite to see and hear the game. Even if you’re sponsoring a Little League baseball team, you need to find a way to bring the parents into your store or restaurant after a game.

Tomas Scheckter 300x225 3 Reasons Why Sports Marketers Need Social Media

Tomas Scheckter

I’ve been thinking about how sports marketing professionals can use social media to their benefit over the last several months. Last year, we brought a some Indy Lights team owners and sponsorship brokers — Gary Sallee, Roger Brummett, and Tyce Carlson — to talk about sports marketing at a Confluence networking event.

That month, I also had a chance to talk to Mike Micheli, PR director of Dale Coyne Racing, who was also a great guide and mentor when I became one of the first ever race bloggers at last year’s Indianapolis 500. (He also hooked me up with Tomas Scheckter for a quick interview.)

The Problem: You Just Can’t Effectively Measure Traditional Marketing

One thing both the team owners and Mike Micheli explained is that sports marketing is no longer just about soliciting checks from big companies. Now, team owners have to be able to demonstrate the ROI of a sponsorship.

I can’t imagine anything harder in the measurement and analytics world. It’s just as hard as measuring regular marketing outlets. You don’t know which TV commercials increased sales, and which ones lost money. You don’t know which billboards brought visitors to your website.

And good luck trying to figure out which logo placement or interview plug was responsible for the bump in sales. You’re trying to figure out which made money and which lost you money, whether it was the car sponsorship, or the special event tent. Or the t-shirts. Or the ad in the race program. Or the — you get the picture.

But social media can do all of that, and then some. Here are three things social media can do for sports marketers.

1. Social Media Can Prove ROI in Sports Marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s easy to demonstrate the ROI. Thanks to simple tools like Google Analytics and bit.ly, it’s possible to come up with a basic system to see how many people found your website, requested additional information, or bought something. With a paid solution like Yahoo Analytics, you can actually get more specific information, as well as deeper stats and real-time results.

You can measure a campaign’s success and figure out which variables, messages, and even time of day brought the best results. See if you get spikes in traffic before, during, or after an event. And whether the spikes are taking place in the event’s city, or if they’re spread out. You can even set up different URLs and landing pages, and do A/B testing to see which variables brought the best results.

Take it a step further and use products like Radian6, ScoutLabs, or even Vocus to monitor the social media discussion about your brand and your team. Now you can pay attention to who’s talking about your brand, and interact with the ones who are the most vocal, whether positive or negative. You just can’t do that with a billboard or a TV spot.

2. Social Media Can Grow a Sports Marketing Audience

There are more social media tools than you can shake a stick at. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of ways to connect with your customers online. For a good start, get Twitter Marketing for Dummies 3 Reasons Why Sports Marketers Need Social Media (affiliate link). (Full disclosure: I helped Kyle Lacy write this book. Shameless plug: We’re working on another one.)

Use tools like Twitterment, NearbyTweets, and even Twitter’s own search function to find people who are interested in your team. Use Twitterfall or TweetDeck’s search feature to watch for dicsussions about your team or the event.

Connect with those people, and discuss the team, the players/drivers/crew, and the event itself. Don’t sell them anything or talk about your company. if you have to, hold a special contest or make a special offer. “If our team finishes in a certain place or higher, the first 500 people to tweet us gets a coupon for a free widget.” But other than that, talk about the thing that interests the fans (hint: it’s not you).

3. Social Media Can Deepen Relationships With Fans and Customers

Enhance your customers’ experience on race day by live blogging, tweeting, and video streaming from the stands, the sponsor’s tent, or even Victory Lane.

  • Get some behind-the-scenes looks (assuming you get permission from the team) at what it looks like in a garage or locker room.
  • Hold a special Twitter chat with a driver or crew member.
  • Have a player give a special video greeting or tour for fans.
  • Ask different team members to blog about their experiences over the season, complete with photos and videos.

Social media lets fans see the things they might be missing, but help them feel like they’re part of the experience. By doing this, you help them feel more like a part of the team. They’re insiders, with special knowledge about the team, the athletes, and the event. By feeling like they’re connected, they’ll become more of a fan, not only of the team, but of the organization or brand that helped them get there.

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Who has time to do the work today?

March 1, 2010 By

icon blog time Who has time to do the work today?There has been a lot of news lately on how companies are really not hiring right now. A recent report talks about how a companies are hiring temp workers, but they are not hiring them to stay. In the past, a common practice was to test drive a worker then offer them a position. Hiring them as full-time employees is not happening right now.

So, who is getting the work done?

When I joined ATA Airlines back in 1997, George Michelsons brought in Bain and Company to basically prepare the company for sale. The process was to get rid of a lot of people and put more jobs onto fewer people. While this strategy worked around the country for Bain, it usually preceded an upgrade in office automation to ensure the work could still get done.

The office automation phase did not occur at ATA Airlines.

The result was a lot of stressed out people carrying around their imaginary trays trying to figure out how they were going to fit one more item onto an already heavy load. No longer were people interested in teamwork, they were more interested in self-preservation. It created a lot of ill-tempered people in the process.

As some of my clients reveal their corporate cultures, I am finding similarities to what I experienced at ATA Airlines. No one has time to commit to anything above and beyond what their core responsibilities are. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is not projected to get much better – CEO’s are reluctant to hire.

What are the solutions?

The easiest is what is being done by some today. Hire temp workers to get things done. They may cost a little more in the short-term, but allow you to avoid the headaches of hiring employees and their costs over the long-term. There are a lot of companies providing these services.

Sometimes, just hiring a grunt worker is not enough. Sometimes you need a professional person to do the work, you don’t have time to do. There are companies being set up that can act as your Marketing Department, your Accounting Department, or your HR Department. They can do it at a cost that is far cheaper than hiring full-time employees, but are focused solely on getting work done for you.

So, look around and ask yourself, are you and your colleagues a bunch of stressed out grumpy people not really accomplishing much because there is too much to do? There is help out there that can help your company meet its strategic goals for the year.

We actually put together a white paper on the ROI of outsourcing blogging and social media. You can download it here, if you want to take a look.

Filed Under: Blog ROI, Blogging, Ghost Writing, News, Research Desk, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

Five Things Newspapers Can Teach Us About Blogging

March 1, 2010 By

If you’re not getting readers to your blog, it may not be your social media promotion, it may be because your blog sucks.

(Okay, it doesn’t really suck. I was just saying that to get your attention. You’ll see why in a minute.)

I recently spoke to the Hoosier PRSA chapter of the Public Relations Society of America about the secrets of blogging, and realized I had never actually written about the subject of the presentation.

Blogs are a lot like newspapers. In fact, a good blog is written more like a newspaper than a magazine. And since bloggers are becoming citizen journalists, I think it’s important that bloggers learn to write like newspaper writers. Here are a few ways you can improve your blog writing and have it read more like a newspaper article.

160812336 ed8f519ae2 Five Things Newspapers Can Teach Us About Blogging

Write in Newspaper Style.

This means the most important information goes first, second most important goes next, and so on. It’s the inverted pyramid style. After a certain point, usually around the halfway mark, you start seeing more of the inside information, background story, etc., and the story gets boring.

Newspapers are written this way, because readers usually abandon a story when it gets boring. They also abandon it because it’s too long.

So with a blog post, you need to end the post before you get to the boring part. When you start writing background information, or repeating old information, stop. Don’t write a post that’s long enough for people to get bored. Instead, put a “To learn more about this issue, check out these previous posts” section with links to older stories.

Short words. Short sentences. Short paragraphs.

Despite what my 7th grade English teacher said, it’s perfectly all right to have a one word paragraph.

Nyah.

By breaking things up, and making them easier to read, we’re more likely to continue on. We glance ahead and see all the short paragraphs and think, “that’s not so hard. I can go a little longer.” Pretty soon, “a little longer” turns into “the entire story.”

Negative Space = Readability

One of the reasons newspapers are tough to read is the lack of negative space (that’s fancy graphic designer talk for “spaces between paragraphs”). All the paragraphs are crammed together, which can make for some tiring reading.

Our eyes and our brains need a break from all the text running together, so we look for that break by switching to other stories, abandoning the one we were just reading. But if you can provide some extra relief in the story, that will help propel readers forward.

Create a Powerful Lede

379979781 468e8b8ae7 Five Things Newspapers Can Teach Us About BloggingI got your attention when I said your blog sucked, didn’t I? Not every blog post has to have a Pulitzer-quality opening, but it doesn’t hurt to have something that’s attention getting and informative.

Remember, a newspaper article’s job is to get you to read the first sentence. The first sentence’s job is to get you to read the second sentence, and so on. So your lede better be a doozy.

(By the way, the opening sentence of a newspaper is spelled “lede,” not “lead.” Lead is the soft metal used to create the individual letters used to lay out the newspaper. Since “ledd” and “leed” are spelled the same, journos started calling the opening sentence the “lede” to avoid confusion, forcing future generations to explain that we’re not idiots, and we do know how to correctly spell that word.)

Write For a Clever 12-Year-Old

It’s a newspaper’s dirty little secret that they write for a 6th grade education and attention span. (Don’t feel too insulted; TV news is produced at a 4th grade level.) That’s why the important stuff is at the front of the story. Bloggers need to do that too.

It’s not that your readers are stupid, or can’t understand big words. It’s that we just don’t want to devote the mental resources and energy to decoding really long and complicated words. Even academic journals written by and for Ph.Ds in an academic field are considered “better” if they’re written at a high school level instead of a post-graduate level.

So skip the polysyllabic words and use short ones instead.

It’s also important that you explain new terms. Assume that your story is going to be read by someone who is experiencing this issue for the very first time. Don’t assume knowledge on their part, don’t assume they know as much about the story as you do. So be sure to explain it like you’re telling that 12-year-old for the first time. Don’t use jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations unless you explain them.

For example, newspaper style requires you spell out what a term means, followed by the acronym/abbreviation in parentheses. That tells the reader you’re going to use it from then on in the story.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) today announced a new measure banning texting by truck drivers.

Afterward, I can use FMCSA in the story wherever I want. However, when I do a new story, I have to assume a new set of readers, so I have to spell it out again.

Writing a blog can be easy, especially if you’re doing it informally, and for just a few people. But writing it newspaper style takes a little more effort, but the payoff can be worth it. You’ll get more readers, your readers will stick around longer, and you’ll earn a reputation of being a stellar writer.

Just remember to tell them where you learned it.

Photo credit (inverted pyramid at the Louvre): KeepTheByte, Flickr
Photo credit (lead type): JM3, Flickr

Filed Under: All Posts, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Social Media, Writing Tagged With: , , ,