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Three Ghost Blogging Concerns We Hear From Clients

January 31, 2012 By Erik Deckers Leave a Comment

Some people have issues with ghost blogging. We’ve got clients who use it on a regular basis, and love it. Other times, we have run into some people who can’t wrap their brains around it. They’re not sure they want to do it, and they have trouble accepting our help. These people tend to fall into one of three categories.

They don’t think they have a high-enough position to need a ghost writer. They don’t think they’re that important to “deserve” it. They think their company needs to be bigger, or they need to have a more prestigious position. I saw this a lot when I was doing speechwriting for a Congressional candidate in 2004. It’s not a matter of prestige, it’s a matter of having the time to do it.

Okay, that's kind of creepy.

They feel they need to “earn” the words by doing the work themselves. These people have a very strong do-it-yourself ethic, and think that they should be able to and know how to do every aspect of their business. They don’t want someone to do the things they should be capable of doing themselves, and they feel like they’re slacking when they don’t. But a lot of people can’t write quickly or efficiently — they take a couple hours to write a single blog post. That’s a problem when their time is worth $250 an hour, like a defense attorney. Why spend $500 of your billable time, three times a week, when you could hire someone to do the ghost blogging for you?
They think writing is so easy that anyone can do it. “After all,” they reason, “I learned how to write in school, so I can just take the skills I learned 20 – 30 years ago, right?” This is like saying, “I know how to work a table saw, so I ought to be able to make my own custom cabinets. Look, we all learned how to communicate via the written word, but that doesn’t make you a writer. A professional ghost blogger has been trained on how to write tight, concise copy that will inform, entertain, or persuade. While some people are able to do this without training, those people are few and far between. Don’t risk turning off your audience with less-than-professional writing that rambles on, is filled with errors, or just plain doesn’t make sense. (Not so surprisingly, these are the same people who demand that every position in their company has experience in their industry, including the accountant, the IT person, and even human resources staff.)

Ghost blogging is one of those services that companies need to maintain an online presence, but don’t have the time or resources to do it. It’s for the people who are too busy to write on a regular basis, no matter what “level” you are in your career. It’s for the people who struggle with writing, or are basically too expensive to do anything that doesn’t directly result in bottom line revenue for their company or firm.

Photo credit: starfish325 (Flickr)

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Headline : Three Ghost Blogging Concerns We Hear From Clients • Keywords : ghost blogging, blogging services, corporate blogging, business blogging •

Use Communication Theory to Boost Search Engine Optimization

January 24, 2012 By Erik Deckers Leave a Comment

The persuasion theory behind celebrity endorsements is the same theory behind Google’s new social media search.

It’s called Balance Theory, and when you understand the essence of it, you start to understand why Google is putting so much stock into Google+. And how Google+ can enhance your own search experience.

Balance Theory and Celebrity Endorsements

Without getting into all the scientific language we used when I was in graduate school, balance theory basically says this:

I like Celebrity A.
Celebrity A likes Product B.
That means I should like (and buy) Product B as well.

(Fellow philosophy majors will also recognize this as the 2 premises/1 conclusion logical construction.)

In other words, I like Eminem. Eminem likes Chrysler. Therefore, I should also like Chrysler. (The danger is that if I don’t like Celebrity A, I’ll purposely not like Product B just to restore that balance. It’s why a lot of sponsors drop celebrities who get into trouble.)

This is what marketers are counting on when they put a celebrity’s name and face on a product or company. It’s why Eminem is schlepping Chrysler on the Super Bowl. It’s why Reebok is clamoring for contracts with the NFL. It’s why Nike puts famous basketball players on its shoes.

This is the same basic idea that goes into Google’s personalized “My World” search results. If you’ve used Google lately, you’ve noticed that a lot of your friends are appearing in those results. That’s because Google is relying on Balance Theory to help improve your search results. (Maybe not intentionally, but that’s what’s at play here.)

Here’s what they’re doing with it:

I like Douglas Karr.
Douglas Karr has talked about corporate blogging.
That means I should check out what Douglas has said about corporate blogging.

And if I like what Google has shown me, I’ll continue to use Google.

These are the PERSONAL results for "corporate blogging." But that is not really Jason Falls in the 2nd picture from the left.

How Can You Use Balance Theory in Search Engine Optimization?

If you’re building your personal brand, or you’re doing social media marketing for your company, the best way to use Balance Theory for your search engine optimization is to use Google+, and develop relationships with key decision makers at the companies you want to do business with.

Connect with the decision makers at the companies you’re trying to reach.
Write blog posts about the key areas and problems they’re dealing with at their company. You can find that out just by paying attention to their conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.
Continue to share important articles with them related to those same areas and problems. (This is all part of that “be a valuable resource” stuff we’ve talked about before.)

Then, as these people search for those particular keywords, your blog posts and your articles will rise to the top of their search engine results page. End result? “Hmm, this person seems to know an awful lot about this topic. I wonder what else they can help me with?”

However, this is not a reason to connect with everyone you can find on Google+ or to spam the bejeezus out of them with all kinds of articles and blog posts. You do that, and you’ll most certainly be blocked and ignored by everyone you’re trying to reach. Just write about what you want to write about at an acceptable pace, and connect with a reasonable number of people on a level that doesn’t seem creepy, desperate, or spammy.

With a little effort and just by following some common sense, you can use the Balance Theory — something usually only used by marketers with millions to spend — to start winning higher search engine rankings on your chosen keywords.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Headline : Use Communication Theory to Boost Search Engine Optimization • Keywords : balance theory, Google, Google+, corporate blogging, communication, search engine optimization •

Filed Under: Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Marketing, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: balance theory, Communication, corporate blogging, Google, search engine optimization

It’s Called “Personal Branding.” Get Over It.

January 4, 2012 By Erik Deckers 11 Comments

Being a personal branding book author and speaker, I get a little protective of the term. I always want to roll my eyes at people who claim “I’m not a brand, I’m a person,” or at people like Olivier Blanchard, who call people with personal brands fake, saying the personal brand is an artifice.

Personal branding is really just the fancy 21st century word for “reputation.” It’s how people perceive you.

Do you do what you say you do? More importantly, do other people say you do what you do? Are you a kind and helpful person? Do other people say so? Then your personal brand — your reputation, if you must — is that you’re kind and helpful. Do people think you’re an arrogant jerk? Then your personal brand is that you’re an arrogant jerk.

We call it personal branding for two reasons:

A brand is an emotional response on the part of the people who see it.

It’s much more than just a company’s logo and a tagline. It’s how you feel when you see that logo and tagline.

Think of your feelings toward McDonald’s, the Chicago Cubs, and even BP Oil. Love them or hate them, that is what you feel, and that’s how you react when you see symbols of that corporate brand. You won’t eat at that place, you’ll remain a fan for life, or you refuse to buy gas from that company. That’s your emotional response.

Basically, what other people feel, and how they react, when they hear your name and see your face is your personal brand. Does your face make people happy? Or does the mere mention of your name make people make gagging noises? That’s their emotional response, which makes it your personal brand. (Again, we can still call it your reputation.)

A brand is what people say it is.

The control of marketing has been seized from the professionals by real people. It’s no longer in the hands of the trained marketers to say whether a product or company is good. We now trust the say-so of people, often friends, but sometimes strangers.

Think about the last time you bought a piece of electronic equipment or a book, or even visited a new restaurant. Did you check the reviews or ask friends what they thought of it? Or were you persuaded by the marketing copy, the photos, and the search engine placement?

Like most of us who are plugged into this Web 2.0 world, you took the unsolicited and unmoderated recommendations of friends (and even strangers) over the hard work of the trained professionals. And that equipment, book, or restaurant was as good or as bad as your friends said it was.

In other words, the marketing message of a particular company or product has been seized by the people who will react to it, share it, spread it, buy into it, boycott it, or denigrate it.

People control the brand now. The marketers may be able to control the information, but people control the reputation.

How does this affect your personal brand?

This is true of people and their perceptions of us: right or wrong, we have become the sum of what people think of us. Their “reviews” of us come in the form of responses to our tweets, comments on our blog posts, even things they say about us when we’re not around.

In many cases, the thing we’re selling is us. We’re selling ourselves when we apply for a job. Or when we’re pitching a project. Or getting a speaking gig. Or selling a book. People are buying us, and if they don’t like who we are, based on our reputation, we won’t get the “sale.”

A personal brand is not an act, it’s not a character, it’s not a fake you. It’s the real you that wants to be seen and respected by other people. It’s the person you want to be, not the person you want people to think you are. That’s fakery — acting like a jerk to people in private while trying to be sunshine and light in public.

Being true to your personal brand means that you’ll act the same way in public as you do when no one is looking, or at least no one with a decent Klout score. If you’re kind (or a jerk) in public, you’ll be kind (or a jerk) in private. That’s the real personal brand.

It comes down to this. I don’t care what you call it: call it a personal brand, call it your reputation, call it your image. But whatever you call it, be true to it. Don’t fake it, and don’t try to pass as something you’re not.

Just know that most of the people around you are going to call it “personal branding,” whether you like the term or not. Fighting this battle is about as fruitless as people not wanting to call blogging “blogging” anymore, or think that “social media” just needs to be called “media.” It’s all just tilting at windmills while everyone else is actually doing the thing, regardless of what people call it.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Year : 2012 • Headline : It's Called Personal Branding. Get Over It. • Keywords : personal branding, social media, reputation management • Publisher : Professional Blog Service •

Filed Under: Klout, LinkedIn, Personal Branding, Reputation Management, Social Media Tagged With: online reputation management, personal branding, Reputation Management, Social Media

You Don’t Get Social Media ROI Yet? C’mon, Man!

December 26, 2011 By Erik Deckers Leave a Comment

Social media ROI is not that hard to understand. There's a simple formula, a simple process, and some simple tools to do it all.

I was feeling good about social media ROI, and how/whether people understand it. I figured, at least my people — marketers — get it. They understand how to measure social media, or at least the principles behind it.

Apparently not.

eMarketer dashed those hopes to the ground with their December 20, 2011 article When Will Social Media Measurement Mature?.

Marketers know that counting fans, “likes” and followers is not the best way to measure success in social media marketing. Yet these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. It’s not surprising, then, that marketers consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media, and that a majority of them believe they cannot measure social media campaigns effectively.

How to Calculate Social Media ROI

Calculating the ROI of anything is easy. Subtract how much you spent from how much you made, and that’s your answer. If you spent $10,000 on a social media marketing campaign, and you made $50,000, your social media ROI is $40,000.

Simple, right?

$50,000 – $10,000 = $40,000.

So how do you know whether sales are coming from your social media efforts?

I’m not going to delve into the step-by-step process, but I’ll give you the tools and concepts you’re going to need to get started.

Set up Google Analytics, and install the code on every page on your website. If you have a blog, it only needs to be part of the code. If it’s on a website with pre-built pages, it needs to be on every page.
Set up a Bitly account. Bitly is a URL shortener that also lets you do some basic analytics on the number of people that have clicked your link.
Create a Google Analytics tracking campaign for any and all major links you’re sending out. This is how you’re going to measure a particular blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, etc. If it’s just a basic link to the website, a campaign code is optional. But if it’s a blog post about a particular marketing campaign, set up the Google Analytics campaign.
Put a hyperlinked call to action in your blog posts that take people directly to a sales page or order page. Make sure that the hyperlink is given a unique campaign code.

Here’s what will happen:

You’ll send out a link to a blog post via Twitter, Facebook, etc. Let’s say that 10,000 people see that link on your various accounts.
1,000 people visit your page and read that blog post, all within a 6-hour span.
Of that 1,000 people, 100 people actually make a purchase with a total of $10,000 in sales.
Those 100 people also fill out their contact information, which gets placed into your CRM.

By looking at these numbers, you can determine a number of things.

1,000 visitors out of 10,000 social media followers, fans, and friends means you have a 10% click-through rate.
100 sales out of 1,000 visitors is a 10% close rate; out of a 10,000-person network, that’s a 1% close rate.
By looking at the entrance and exit paths of that particular 6-hour period, or particular day, you can see that a majority of people were moved enough by the blog post to go directly to the order page. Compare that to another blog post that only lead to 30 sales out of 1,000 visitors, and you know it wasn’t as effective in moving people to act.
You can then subtract the cost of that particular campaign from the amount of money you made to calculate the total ROI for the day/week/month.

Calculating social media ROI is not that difficult. It’s just a matter of having the right tools and knowing basic analytics and campaign creation. There are literally hundreds of articles and several books on each step I first described. It’s just a matter of reading, and then trying out what you’ve learned. With some trial and error, and constant measuring, you’ll soon learn what works and what you can stop doing.

Or you could just hire a social media professional to do it all for you.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : You Don't Get Social Media ROI Yet? C'mon, Man! • Keywords : social media ROI, social networking, social media marketing, marketing, ROI •

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: Marketing, ROI, social media marketing, social media ROI, social networking

50 Things That You’re Not Measuring for ROI, But Should

December 23, 2011 By Erik Deckers 5 Comments

I’m so sick of the “what’s the ROI of social media” question. It’s asked by people who a) think it makes them sound clever, and they’re hoping to show that social media “doesn’t work,” or b) think they’re supposed to ask it, because they read an article that said they should ask it.

The problem is, we can’t answer the ROI question during out first meeting. We can answer it after your social media plan has been up and running for six months. We set goals and then measure to see whether you made them. We count how much money the social media campaign made — because we can do that — and we subtract how much money it cost.

But we can’t predict it accurately beforehand, and anyone who tells you they can is lying.

What about you and your business? What’s the ROI on the stuff and the staff at the office? Have you measured them? All of the things you buy and the people you hire have a direct impact on your bottom line. Some contribute to revenue, some take up space, and some are a drag on your bottom line. Number 50 painted on a wall And yet, the people who are so quick to pull the “what’s the ROI of social media?” trigger haven’t asked that question about anything else in their own business.

So I’d like to see companies start measuring ROI on these things.

Your college interns.
Your brochures. You pay professionals to design these things. What have they gotten you?
Your weekly staff meetings.
Every other meeting you have to attend. They’re a big time suck and productivity killer. Yet we go to them without question. So what’s their ROI?
The person who answers your phones. Don’t you think the voice of your company contributes to customer satisfaction?
Your accounts receivable department. What does it do to your cash flow if they’re on time versus late with sending out invoices?
The paintings and furniture in the front lobby.
Your telephone hold music. People actually study this kind of thing, so it should be possible to figure out.
That lunch meeting you had.
Your mobile phone.
The company mission statement that took eight people three months to write over six hour-long meetings.
Your membership in three different trade associations. You should get valuable sales and clients from these. Are you?
Your Chamber of Commerce membership.
The company car. Lease costs, gas costs, maintenance. Are you making your money back on that?
Your HR department.
Your legal department. They’re great for keeping you out of trouble and for helping with intellectual property. How much did they make you this year?
Your sponsorship of a Little League baseball team.
Your fax machine. Seriously, do people still use fax machines? They have online services you can buy to send and receive faxes, instead of paying $40 a month for a separate phone line.
Your voice mail system.
The PR agency you hired for your latest campaign. And none of this “this is what your media coverage is worth” stuff — how much money did you actually make?
Your office coffee machine.
Your annual industry conference in Las Vegas.
The business class flight you took to get to the conference. Execs need more leg room than regular staffers, apparently. So did you make more money by taking the more expensive flight?
Your trade show display. These things are expensive. But did you make the money back?
Your marketing department. These are the ROI experts. How much money did they make you?
The cleaning service.
The office Christmas party.
Your office location. Retail stores can demonstrate how one location outperforms another. But what do you get for where you’re located? Do you really need an office downtown in the big city, when a location in the suburbs will cost less?
The water cooler.
The TV commercials you ran on cable TV for six months in 25 major markets.
The IT department.
Your CIO. Should your CIO really have the same decision-making abilities over the CMO? Should they be able to tell the CMO, “no, you cannot use social media tools to help market the company”? Hopefully they generated revenue to make up for all the lost sales they just caused.
Staying at the conference hotel instead of a cheaper hotel a mile away.
Your sponsorship of the local chamber event.
The 90-minute morning networking meeting you attended. You go to this once a month. Have you gotten sales directly from going?
The giant flat screen monitor in the conference room.
The big table in the conference room.
The conference room.
Your administrative assistant.
The company website. If you don’t sell anything on it, is it still making you money? Why did you spend $10,000 to get it designed?
Subscriptions to all the business magazines that decorate your lobby. Did you even read them?
Your newspaper ads.
Your business cards.
Casual Fridays. And while we’re at it . . .
Appropriate business attire. There must be a reason we have to dress up for work. So how much money did you make from it?
Your customer service department. You know how much they cost you, but do you measure how much they made you?
The accounting department.
The 12 books on new management ideas you bought and never had time to read.
Your industry trade magazines.
You.

I am not opposed to the social media ROI question. I just think it’s an easy fallback question that people use as an excuse, whether it’s out of fear or disdain. And I encourage businesspeople to ask that question. After all, you’re going to spend money on it, so you’d damn well better know how much money you’re making from it.

But you should do the same thing for some of these other things you have in your business as well.

Photo credit: duncan (Flickr)

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : 50 Things That You're Not Measuring for ROI, But Should • Keywords : social media, ROI, social media measurement, marketing, business •

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: business, Marketing, ROI, Social Media, social media measurement

Who Should Rule, Content or Marketing?

December 15, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

The argument about whether content or marketing is king is missing the big picture.

Over on his blog, Nashville writer Jeff Goins questions whether content is really king.

Well, actually, no he doesn’t. he said content is not king anymore. It’s a “fat, dethroned monarch, dis-empowered of his royal ability to influence.”

Janus, the two-faced Roman god, should represent content marketing.

Marketing — or as Jeff calls it, “relationships” — are the true king. Without relationships, without marketing, it doesn’t matter how awesome your writing is.

I used to be terrible at this. I thought all I had to do was be a good writer. But I was wrong.

I was scared. And lazy. I didn’t want to have to actually meet people. I just wanted to write.

But that’s not how the world works. So why would I think for one minute the Web would work that way? Yes, even in real life, it’s not just what you know that matters, but also who you know.

And even in business, the best way to promote an idea, product, or service is relationship. We all know this, because in this day of media saturation, we don’t buy what the ads tell us to buy. We buy what our friends recommend.

If I have to give an edge to either of them, I still side with content. Because hidden content can accidentally be discovered one day. I might write a post that gets picked up by search engines, and I could start being found for that topic.

But I could optimize and promote the bejeezus out of something really awful, and a lot of people could see it, but what do you think would happen if everyone showed up and saw — and said — how awful it was?

Still, it’s not a question of whether content or marketing is king.

Content Marketing Rules

This does not have to be an either/or proposition. You shouldn’t have to choose one over the other. And no, this is not one of those “why can’t everyone just get along” cop-outs that I detest. This is like arguing about whether peanut butter or jelly is more important on a PBJ.

Content and marketing have a symbiotic relationship. One cannot exist without the other. You can have great content, but if your marketing sucks, no one will see your stuff. And you can have great marketing, but if your writing sucks, no one will care.

There has to be a happy medium here. Or at the very least, we have to recognize that Content/Marketing is a two-faced king, like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings. You can’t have good marketing and lousy content, and you can’t have lousy marketing and good content. Without one, the other will die.

Content without good marketing is a private diary. Marketing without good content is spam.

I think once writers realize they need to market, we’ll see a bigger explosion in books and ebooks. And once marketers realize that content is not some throwaway afterthought, they’ll start seeing an explosion in sales and profits.

And if you want to learn how to do both, you can buy Branding Yourself or No Bullshit Social Media to see how.

(See what I did there?)

Photo credit: mscolly (Flickr)

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Headline : Who Should Rule, Content or Marketing? • Keywords : content marketing, writing, marketing, relationships, Jeff Goins, social networking •

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Writing Tagged With: content marketing, Jeff Goins, Marketing, relationships, social networking, writing

Reaching Inbox Zero in Five Simple Steps

December 12, 2011 By Erik Deckers 2 Comments

Inbox Zero. It’s the holy grail of anyone who uses email as a primary form of communication. My inbox is empty right now. Completely empty. It took months to get there, mostly because I kept letting it get filled up again with complete crap. It will probably get full again, but my goal is to keep it below 10 as much as possible.

If you’re like me, you treat your inbox like a to do list. If it’s in there, it’s an actionable item, and you’ll leave it there until you can cross it off your list. (Because otherwise if you delete or archive the email, you’ll forget to do it.) Then, important emails get buried and you miss out on them.

Here are the things I’ve done over the past few weeks to get to a beautifully empty inbox.

This is the most beautiful site these eyes have ever seen.

(Note: I use Gmail and all the Google properties, including Google Calendar and Google Tasks. This has also helped keep me organized because everything is interrelated. Some of this information is based on what I can do with Gmail.)

1) Delete the crap and dreck.

Before you do anything else, go through all your email newsletters, semi-interesting advertisements, and other pieces of information you thought you’d find a few extra minutes to read. If you have’t read it by now, you’re not going to find the time. If it’s an ad, a solicitation, or a special offer you signed up for, get rid of it. This is like junk mail. You wouldn’t keep piles of junk mail and newspapers in your house “just in case,” so do the same for your inbox.

2) Create a label or folder and archive emails.

If you have important emails that you need to save about a certain project, client, or topic, create a folder, and put those emails in that folder. If you use Gmail, create a filter to apply a specific label for that project, client, or topic, and then archive it. When you need to recall it, click on that label, and all those emails will appear. If you store everything in folders, then search through that particular folder.

3) Delete or archive anything older than 2 months.

This is especially important if you’re the kind of person who saves all your emails in your inbox. I’ve known people who have more than five thousand emails in their inbox. Not their entire email folder. Their inbox. There is no reason you have to keep these handy. They’re not doing you any good, because if you’re treating your inbox like a to do list, those action items have lo-o-o-o-ng since expired. Just dump any emails you don’t need, and archive the ones you might.

4) Add actionable items to a to do list.

Copy the important information into the notes. I use Google Tasks, and there is a place for notes with each task. I can also type in specific keywords, the date, and the people involved, so I can search for that particular email later. And by archiving — Gmail has a great searchable archive that makes finding old emails a breeze — I get those things out of my inbox. Similarly, if it’s information I need to keep, I’ll copy and paste it into my Evernote so I can find it later.

If you’ve got stuff you need to take care of in the next day or two, leave those items out for now.

5) Do important actionable items right away.

By this point, you should only have a few emails left — things you have to get to right away, deadlines to meet, answers to send, appointments to schedule. I try to work in 15 minute blocks and plow through as many emails as I can in this fashion. If someone needs a reply, I send it. If I have to read something, I do it fast. Plow through all the necessary items as fast as you can, even if it means scheduling an appointment with yourself to keep that time blocked.

Important: Don’t just file actionable emails into a To Do file. That may be a real Inbox Zero trick, but to my mind, it’s cheating. You don’t just file stuff away to have an empty inbox. You actually do the things you’re getting the emails for. If you can’t do them, leave them in the inbox until you can. But if you feel the burning desire to hit Inbox Zero, then pull the emails into your To Do list, or copy and paste the information into a document on your desktop. But filing for later is not the best option.

To maintain Inbox Zero, I jealously guard my inbox from all intruders, and I treat each one like an incoming task. Here are the ways I get rid of those emails to keep them from piling up again:

Skim and delete newsletters. Unsubscribe from any that don’t catch my interest. If I’ve received it five times and never opened it, I unsubscribe from it.
Respond to easy questions immediately, and archive the emails. If a response is coming back, there’s no reason to keep the email in my inbox. It will pop back in soon enough when the other person replies.
Schedule responses for appropriate times. If you have Outlook, you’ve always been able to do this. I just started using Gmail on Chrome recently, and I got the Boomerang extension, which allows me to schedule replies and responses. If I work ahead on an answer to a client or colleague but they don’t need the answer right away, I schedule my reply for a future delivery, and then archive the email.
Filter particular emails like newsletters I want to keep, and have them delivered straight to a particular folder, bypassing the inbox. Then I can read them when I have the time, but they won’t sit in my inbox.
Ruthlessly delete unnecessary emails. Be a jerk about it. If something doesn’t grab my interest right that second, dump it. I don’t keep it, hoping it will be relevant in a few days. If I really want to keep something, I’ll put it in a special folder called “to do eventually.” I created that folder six months ago, in the hopes that I would find time to go back to those “maybe I oughta” emails, and haven’t pulled anything out of it since. I haven’t missed anything since then either.
Use Boomerang to have emails pop back into my inbox. If I don’t want to add something to my to do list, Boomerang can help. I can archive or hide a message and have it come back to my inbox at a certain time. When it shows up, I’ll deal with it at that moment. This is different from filing stuff into a To Do folder, mostly because I say it is. No other reason.

So that’s what I’ve done to achieve Inbox Zero, and what I’ve been doing to keep it clutter free. What do you do? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? What about you real Inbox Zero practitioners? What are some of the best ways you’ve found to work clutter free?

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Content Rating : G • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Headline : Five Simple Steps to Get to Inbox Zero • Keywords : Inbox Zero, email, decrapify •

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: decrapify, email, Inbox Zero, productivity

Awesomize.me is Still The Awesome

December 11, 2011 By Erik Deckers 1 Comment

I just got a very nice comment from Tatiana Sorabi from Awesomize.me very politely pointing out that I can be a big whiner at times. After my last post, Should I Cover Up the Name of No Bullshit Social Media?, Tatiana responded a couple days later with this very nice comment.

Erik, We are working on the issue. You jumped on this too quick. Your inquiry was forwarded to me last week. This was the first incident for us. We are still in startup phase and lacking resources.

To avoid ending up another myspace, we have put in place a strong policing system to keep the spammers and offenders away. We fully realize you are neither spammer nor offender. We are trying to come up with a solution how to separate your case with others. Once, the solution is in place, I send you a note.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to create a page for your company and book on our site. You can use the “Add Product” Template for your book.

So, I rescind my complaint, and will add my product for my book. AND I’ll rename my book to No Bullsh*t so they have plenty of time to work on their solution.

Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Content Rating : PG • Contributor : Tatiana Sorabi • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Creator : Erik Deckers • Headline : Awesomize.me is Still The Awesome • Keywords : No Bullshit Social Media, censorship, books, publishing, social networks, awesomize.me • Mentions : Awesomize.me • Version : 1.0 •

Filed Under: No Bullshit Social Media, Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: awesomize.me, books, censorship, No Bullshit Social Media, publishing, social networks

Should I Cover Up the Name of No Bullshit Social Media?

December 8, 2011 By Erik Deckers 8 Comments

Update: Awesomize.me contacted me with a great response addressing this issue.

I wrote a book with a naughty word in the title.

My latest book, No Bullshit Social Media, which I wrote with my good friend Jason Falls, has generated surprisingly little controversy. It’s been placed cover out on all the shelves in all the Barnes & Noble bookstores. It was even on their New Arrivals shelf, top center, where everyone could see it.

Of course, there has been some controversy. I’ve given presentations where I had to refer to the book as “No BS.” One group asked that I not mention the book at all, and since they dealt with a lot of very conservative Christians, who would be attending the conference, I was fine with that. (I covered up most of the offending word, and kept the cover one the last slide of the slide deck though.)

I’m not ashamed of the title. I’m not sorry I did it. I understand that some people don’t like saying it, and I’m fine with that. If they want to call it No BS, they’re more than welcome to. I won’t tell someone to do something they’re not comfortable with.

But what’s bothering me today is a particular social network, awesomize.me is covering up the title of the book completely. In my bio, I included the title of my book, spelled out in all its 4 letter (8 letter?) glory.

However, the “no naughty words” algorithm covered up the word, and recast it as No @#$% Social Media.

This actually bothers me. I can’t tell you why. It’s not censorship, because awesomize.me is a private company, and they can do what they want. If they want to make a rule that says “no swear words,” then they’re free to do it.

But at the same time, I’m annoyed by the fact that on a social network made up of grownups, I can’t use a grownup word. Not in a gratuitous, shocking, let’s-make-everyone-giggle kind of a way. But in a this-is-a-real-book-title way.

The easy thing to do would be to just change the title of the book myself to “No BS Social Media,” or “No Bull***” or even “No Bullsh*t.” But I don’t want to. That’s not the name of the book.

Am I overreacting? Should I just toe the line and change the title of the book in my bio? Or should I stand firm on principle, and refuse to change it, even if it means that people are going to wonder what @#$% stands for?

What would you do?

About : No Bullshit Social Media and censorship • Accountable Person : Erik Deckers • Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Content Rating : PG-13 • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Creator : Erik Deckers • Editor : Erik Deckers • Genre : Non-fiction • Headline : Should I Cover Up the Name of No Bullshit Social Media? • Keywords : No Bullshit Social Media, censorship, books, publishing, social networks • Mentions : Jason Falls • Publisher : Professional Blog Service • Version : 1.0 •

Filed Under: No Bullshit Social Media, Opinion, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks, Writing Tagged With: books, censorship, No Bullshit Social Media, publishing, social networks

U.S. Court Declares Bloggers Second Class Citizens, Not Part of Media

December 7, 2011 By Erik Deckers 3 Comments

A U.S. district court just ruled that bloggers — at least bloggers in Oregon — are not part of the media, and therefore, not protected by Oregon’s media shield laws.

As a citizen journalist, this scares the bejeezus out of me. If you’re a blogger of any kind, it should worry you too.

I’ve been clamoring for years that bloggers are citizen journalists. That is, we should be entitled to the same First Amendment protections, the same access, and the same considerations that newspaper, TV, and radio reporters get. At the same time, it means that bloggers need to act like journalists: with great power comes great responsibility, etcetera, etcetera. Handcuffs

But a U.S. District Court judge in Portland, Oregon just set us back to pre-1990 days when he ruled against Crystal Cox, a blogger, after she was sued by Obsidian Finance Group for defamation over blog posts that criticized the firm and co-founder Kevin Padrick. The judge also awarded Padrick $2.5 million.

In his ruling, the judge wrote:

. . . although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law.

Seriously? Pamphlets? In other words, if she had slapped together an 8-page booklet at Fedex/Kinko’s, she would have been protected?

Whether this is a problem with the judge not understanding the Internet, or — more likely — Oregon having a media shield law that doesn’t reflect 21st century technology, this may have a chilling effect on bloggers, even in states with media shield laws.

As it stands now, Oregon’s media shield law says:

No person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

Seems comprehensive enough: any medium of communication to the public strikes me as anything from newspapers to TV to radio to the Internet (including blogs). But when someone learned about the Internet from the Ted Stevens’ School of Technology, they may not realize that the Internet is far more evolved than pamphlets.

Compare Oregon’s law to Washington’s media shield law:

Any newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book publisher, news agency, wire service, radio or television station or network, cable or satellite station or network, or audio or audiovisual production company, or any entity that is in the regular business of news gathering and disseminating news or information to the public by any means, including, but not limited to, print, broadcast, photographic, mechanical, internet, or electronic distribution;

(Read more about Washington’s media shield law here.)

Washington at least spells out what they consider to be the media. But any state that has not included “the Internet” in their shield laws may be able to exclude bloggers from the people who should be protected.

In other words, if you are a pamphleteer, you’re protected. If you type something on a typewriter, reproduce it on a mimeograph machine, and staple everything together by hand, you’re protected by the First Amendment. But if you publish the biggest online-only newspaper, and have for the last fifteen years, tough. You’re not protected by media shield laws in Oregon, or several other states.

This will have a chilling effect on your rights as a journalist, as the government can impose sanctions on bloggers and Internet-based writers, simply by declaring they are not part of the protected media.

Photo credit: Tourettte (Flickr)

About : Blogging, citizen journalism, and media shield laws • Accountable Person : Erik Deckers • Author : Erik Deckers • Content Location : Indianapolis, IN • Content Rating : PG • Copyright Holder : Professional Blog Service • Copyright Year : 2011 • Creator : Erik Deckers • Genre : Non-fiction • Headline : U.S. Court Declares Bloggers Second Class Citizens, Not Part of Media • Keywords : blogging, citizen journalism, blogger, Oregon, media shield law, Washington • Source Organization : Professional Blog Service • Version : 1.0 •

Filed Under: Blogging, Citizen Journalism, News, Newspapers, Radio, Social Media, Television, Traditional Media, Writing Tagged With: Blogger, blogging, citizen journalism, media shield law, Oregon, Washington

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