This stuff really really works from Elastic Lab on Vimeo.

Jobs that exist because of social media. Corporations transformed by it. Vocations refocused. Products purchased. The list is long and varied, but always ties back to the evolution of social media in the workplace. Any workplace, large or small. The voices in this episode include a new media broadcaster and journalist, an ordained minister, a corporate podcaster, a fine artist, an independent blogger, and a small businesswoman. Together, they reflect social media at its best, as a way to create positive change regardless of who you are or what you do.

About the series: The Culture of Content Creation is a video series about people who make their own digital content for sharing — such as blogs, podcasts, wiki entries, online product reviews or videos — to learn why they do it, what they find rewarding, and how they view their role in the world. Started in early 2008, this cultural media project from Elastic Lab continues today, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, and the social fabric of the Internet.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

Jeffrey L. Cohen, of Radian6, spoke about this at the CloudForce Conference in San Francisco last week. It comes down to offering valuable content and building a trusted relationship as key elements to your sales and marketing strategy. People have very short attention spans, and businesses that understand this are producing a frictionless way for their customers to get the solutions they seek.

Businesses are doing this by giving significant thought to the problem their product or service is solving, offering free advice, content and consultation. This is your real-time opportunity for customers to experience what it’s like working with your company.

This approach isn’t new, of course. It’s even been touted as “customer-focused selling” or “solution selling” in some circles. But a true transition isn’t just an adaptation of existing selling techniques to focus more on the customer. Instead, it’s a whole new approach that can barely even be called “selling” at all. It can be thought of in terms of helping customers to find solutions that will help them achieve their objectives, and to Jeffrey’s point, delivering them valuable content in doing so.

Temporarily leave your objectives, your sales goals, and your quotas at the door.

Today’s customers are overflowing with information, and they are tired of slick, product-focused presentations. As their preferences evolve, so too does the savvy business who’s offering solutions to customers in lieu of touting products. For today’s discerning customer, the convenience of a solution-based approach translates to greater value.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

Article first published as Instagram Helping Big Brands Filter, Share, and Promote Their Message on Technorati.

One of the things I like about the Signal Conference, put on by Federated Media Group, is that they pack a whole lot of talent into a single day. But just 10 minutes with Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram was not enough this time. The iOS photo-sharing phenomenon was the first social app to have crossed a million users in just three months. Today, over one million users a week are adding the application.

In molecular terms, the atomic unit of Instagram is the “image.” So, it’s no accident that the success of Instagram truly came with the iPhone 4 launch. With photos as the base medium, the phone’s 2x screen and 5 mega-pixel input device enabled the masses to truly use the app the way it was designed. True to practice, Instagram was created with the intention for users to do four things:

1. Image capture
2. Image manipulation (“to make it look awesome,” as Kevin says)
3. Syndication of the image through existing channels (like Facebook and Twitter)
4. Inspire and enable two-way communication about it

27 million users later, it’s working. But what’s particularly interesting, if not somewhat unexpected, is how the product is beginning to affect brands and advertisers. This is what Kevin is particularly passionate about. He cites brands using Instagram as a social media marketing tool in three key ways:

Products

Burberry was one of the first brands to sign-up with Instagram. Their advanced, early-adopting social media has been able to attract over 200k followers to their branded Instagram website. Burberry uses the product as a way to show the products they build. So now, more than just tweeting about London fashion show, users are sharing real-time images of the event. Similarly, Burberry takes its own ads through the Instagram filter, to create uniquely engaging content that doesn’t feel like advertising.  “It feels like entertainment,” says Kevin.

Other brands have used Instagram successfully, as well.  Banana Republic is using the tool to promote its Mad Men jewelry collection. The campaign is seeing staggering results, as 25% of followers are engaging with their photos.

Events

Events like the Grammys and Sundance Festival are using Instagram in creative ways. At the most recent Grammys, whole teams of people were deployed to take behind-the-scenes photos, creating an instant and retrospective way for viewers and readers to talk about people. Sundance took things a step further, crowd-sourcing followers to use the tool. The festival encouraged users to tag their Instagram photos “Sundance 2012,” as a sort of visual check-in. “That’s free advertising,” Kevin points-out.

Campaigns

Tiffany’s came to Instagram and asked, “How can we tie your tool into a new campaign about love? The company asked people to take photos with the tool, instructing them to hashtag each “truelovepictures.” The result is a collection of user generated photos in a new web microsite that generates droves of traffic each day: Trueloveinpictures.

Brands like Nike and Warby Parker have established creative Instagram-driven campaigns, as well. Warby Parker took its fans on an “Insta-walk” where they posted photos of Warby Parker glasses. Certainly, the tool has grown beyond all expectation and continues to evolve.  If we’d had only one more minute for Q&A at the Signal Conference, my question would have been: “Android? When?” The rest of the world is ready.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

Pinterest is all the rage, as of this writing…

People are motivated to visit blogs from Pinterest by one thing: image quality –

Let’s remember, every action in liking, re-pinning and sharing in Pinterest is visually-driven.  Recipes, kittens in coffee cups, hot infographics, and inebriated people removing themselves from the gene pool – along with brilliant photographic and video work will get seen, shared (read: lifted and repinned to others’ boards) and make you the cat’s meow in Pinterest.

Seldom-discussed fact: Pinterest is hardly new.  Private beta invites went out in the beginning of March, 2010

I think its just a matter of how long I’ve been using Pinterest and perhaps the OsakaSaul name that people have “seen around” that has caused me to collect likes, repins and a slew of followers within Pinterest.  I have been kicking their tires for nearly two years, and while they’re gotten flashy, I would love to see them be more thoughtful to the user in their user experience.  My ideas for just the most obvious Pinterest UX improvements:

• Close windows after we’ve liked/shared
• let us multi-share with boxes to tick, rather than having us repeat steps
• provide us with us more condensed view options – so we can get more done with a lot less scrolling

For me, words are my strength.  Article titles drive traffic from many sources, and terms, or “key words” within the body of posts draws natural search traffic.  A couple Google Analytics screenshots should speak volumes.  For Referral Page Views, StumbleUpon is still doing it for me, with 1,095 pageviews in the last 30 days (just 4 new articles published in that time), and Pinterest, where I have had an account and boards for about two years, does not even make the top 25.  Also, note the 1.19 page visits (means some people see other pages after the one they came to see, once on my blog) and an average stay of 58 seconds:

Where do I find Pinterest within Google Analytics?  39th place – seven visits/30 days.

Seven visits, thanks to my seven boards in Pinterest and dozens of images, most of which lead to OsakaBentures.com.  While the Time on site of 10:13 and 3.57 average pages viewed would look glorious, I’m not buying it:

1. the sample is too small – just seven visits to my blog from Pinterest, so, I’m guessing that one or more people left their computer on and the browser showing my blog and did other things for an hour or so – before closing the browser or going elsewhere on the internet;
2. my own wife would not listen to me for 10:13 at a time (or read 3.57 of my writing) – even when we were still dating, and she still felt compelled to pretend to take interest in what I had to say.

If you, too, are not using breathtaking images, infographics, or showcasing the People of Walmart in original and shocking ways…

Learn to build a presence in StumbleUpon

1. Follow people you know, to start, but understand that it will take some time to understand how they are going to use StumbleUpon.  I get better and better at looking at a Stumbler’s number of likes, the recency of likes and what they like – and decide if the Stumbler is going to appreciate what I share to them, perhaps “SU-like” on occasion, and maybe not share tons of odd stuff to me.
2. Every couple days, from Profile > Connections > Visitors, from the pull-down menu, see who you don’t already know (they could be people you are already connected to who simply looked at your likes most recently), and see what their stats tell you.  What do they like? How often, and when was the last time they shared content? Follow (or don’t) wisely; you can only follow 500 people in StumbleUpon.
3. Stumble-review your own post, and also go through your blog circle, etc. and SU-like your supporting bloggers’ latest posts.The first review on a page is the StumbleUpon “Discovery Review” – and counts the most for StumbleUpon SEO.  StumbleUpon allows you to add as many tags as you like, but actually uses the first five you provide. These, multiplied by the number of likes you have on the page, once reviewed, increase the likelihood that your page will appear “randomly” before Stumblers who are Stumbling their followed topics.
4. For reviews on your own posts/pages – or any that you want to be sure get in front of many Stumblers’ eyes – test your tags in the StumbleUpon “Explore Box,” which suggests acceptable StumbleUpon topics from words and phrases that you input.

If your content is not particularly visually dynamic and you are seeing far better results, please share what you are doing differently.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

January 14, 2010 by BL Ochman 250

B.L. Ochman is a Managing Director of Proof Digital Media; publisher of What’s Next Blog, and co-founder of pet site Pawfun.com. Follower her on Twitter at @whatsnext.

Companies large and small are rushing to understand and get involved in social media. But most of the agencies and consultants who are being paid to establish social media campaigns for corporations are afraid to tell their clients three things they don’t want to hear.

1. Everyone Must Work Together

In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don’t work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.

For example, I recently handled social media advertising for a major retail chain’s holiday microsite. The promotion was conceived by the digital department and involved augmented reality. But the IT department refused to allow a link from the homepage to the microsite because the microsite’s design was done by an external agency.

Further, the marketing department refused to allow a dedicated e-mail to go out to the company’s mailing list, and when placed in the company’s normal promotional e-mail, the link to the microsite was lost in a sea of weekly specials.

These hurdles made it very hard to drive traffic to the microsite.

But more than that, this lack of internal collaboration and contact makes any kind of social media involvement virtually impossible.

A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

2. Top Management Must Be On Board

If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it’s OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company’s marketing and culture.

Example: The marketing team of an international manufacturer of electronics wanted to know how the company could begin to use social media and we discussed the many possibilities.

Listening and responding to what customers are saying about the brand in social media can supply good intelligence and give the company a chance to interact with customers.

“Our management doesn’t want to listen to customers,” the PR director said. “They want to talk to them.”

However, that doesn’t work anymore. The status quo is dead. Any company that isn’t willing to listen to customers and be nimble and quick enough to respond, and, when necessary, change, will soon be unable to compete with smart, tech-savvy companies that can turn on a dime.

Willingness to change is the new bottom line for every business today. But top management has to buy in before change can begin.

3. Don’t Expect Overnight Success

Sure there are videos that go viral, contests that attract a lot of buzz, and Facebook pages that get a lot of fans. But what comes after those efforts?

After the tools change (and they surely will) how will social media fit into the company’s overall strategy and help it reach long-term goals?

Example: Smart companies look at the long-term. The Fiskateers, now in its sixth year, is the brainchild of digital agency Brains on Fire, for their client Fiskars.

With the scissors brand losing market share to foreign knock-offs, the company enlisted several actual crafters to blog, attend events, and represent the brand to customers as part of a new community strategy.

“If you empower your customers to become your evangelists, you’d better be prepared to continue it,” says Brains on Fire’s Geno Church. “It’s permanent when you engage in this type of marketing.”

Once you have created the community, listen to it. Fiskars made several changes to its products based on what it discovered through its Fiskateers community. Doing so helped build customer trust and loyalty.

Where Should Your Company Start?

Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.

Pick a small number of social media goals for the coming year. Some possibilities:

- Turn the company newsletter into an internal blog and give all employees the ability to contribute
- Establish a social media policy for employee participation in social media on company time and beyond
- Let employees vote on the best ideas suggested by other employees
- Resolve to respond to customer service issues within three hours, via social media

Don’t try to do all of these things at once. Pick the ones that are most likely to be possible for your company to start and sustain.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

January 13, 2012 by Frank Marquardt 9

Frank Marquardt is director of content strategy at The Barbarian Group, a digital services and creation company. Find him on Twitter @tralition.

Traditional advertising worked through distraction — an interruption to our sitcom, a page between magazine articles, a banner teasing our attention at the top of a webpage.

Then entertainment channels fragmented as digital moved to the center of culture. “The goal now is to attract rather than distract, to engage rather than intrude,” as eMarketer puts it in its Top Digital Trends for 2012 report.

The result? Brands are content publishers. And the Holy Grail of brand-produced content is magnetic content — an emerging buzzword eMarketer describes as a form of marketing that “involves blurring the lines between content and advertising,” and calls out as one of the top trends for 2012.

The Role of Magnetic Content in Your Marketing Mix

Magnetic content is content that’s good — content that gets people’s attention with great story or outright hilarity. It’s the sort of thing people want to engage with and share.

As one element of a brand’s broader content marketing strategy, magnetic content is the premium stuff: It can powerfully augment the everyday flow of comments and questions and links you’re sharing in your social media channels, garnering earned media attention that drives interest in your brand and builds audience for it. But how do you do it right?

Here are five strategies to get you started defining magnetic content for your 2012 marketing mix.

1. Make It Brand-Relevant

Properly produced magnetic content manifests your brand strategy. If there’s no relevance to your brand, there’s no magnetism for your brand, so you want the content to reflect your brand aspiration and engage around its promise.

Denny’s web series “Always Open” features comedian David Koechner conducting short interviews of fellow comics like Will Arnett, Amy Poehler and Sarah Silverman in a Denny’s booth at a live, working restaurant. The quirky questions and silly interactions don’t open any new doors, but they meet Denny’s millennial target through recognizable actors and goofy situations, evoking a cultural sensibility toward diners as places where people come together and talk and eat in a casual environment.

2. Connect Across Time

The most magnetic content lives over time, building community around an experience — think of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Seinfeld. But that doesn’t mean it has to be episodic. In fact, you can maximize your impact if you design your content experience to live as a platform.

Look at Lancome’s Visions of Beauties, which invites people from around the world to share what beauty is to them through photos, videos, and tweets. As a crowdsourced campaign, Lancome has set up an aspirational, brand-resonant experience around beauty that anybody can participate in as a contributor or voyeur. The seductive, elegant interface speaks to a global audience. The experience evolves over time, bringing people together across space to weave together a story about the very thing Lancome’s products aspire to: beauty. The brand promise becomes the story, linking the brand’s global audience.

3. Extend Across Media

The Internet makes it easy to extend excellent content, creating a transmedia (multi-platform) experience that builds off an initial execution to offer many different ways to engage. Hornbach, a German home improvement and DIY chain, created the 10-minute film The Infinite House, to introduce the launch of its online stores.

While the video itself is a masterful story that speaks of Hornbach’s core values of loyalty, friendship, and neighborliness, it served as one piece of a broader experience that included Facebook profiles of the film’s characters and construction manuals for the furniture featured in the film. These extensions from the video provide ways for people to immerse themselves more deeply in the story and engage in a richer experience with the brand.

4. Inspire People

Magnetic content doesn’t have to offer something inspiring, but, when done well, inspiration can have an enormous effect. It can root the content in the brand’s values and associate the brand with a meaningful stand. Levi’s Now Is Our Timeplays with this idea, pulling together brand values of pioneering, freedom, and equality to connect with its young, independent-minded customer.

The campaign extends across multiple media, but the film that provides a framework and platform for a series of crowdsourced philanthropic fundraising hits an emotionally resonant note that’s fresh and unexpected, especially from a brand: “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light, but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them.”

5. Draw From the Everyday

Some of the best ideas are taken from everyday experience. Everybody relates to meeting friends in a diner; we all have personal experiences of beauty. Finding ideas that can produce magnetic content only means thinking hard about what a brand, product, or service stands for, and how we might relate it interestingly to our experiences.

Consider how IKEA Sweden communicated its promise of “better sleep for everyone.” It commissioned six Swedish musicians to modernize classic lullabies — a simple idea, harmonizing perfectly with the product’s promise.

Then IKEA took the idea a step further, extending beyond the simple lullaby (which it later sold as an album on iTunes, with an album cover that looked a lot like a banner for IKEA) to commission six different artists, each of whom created a music video for a lullaby, featuring IKEA beds. The lullabies aired on the radio and a website provided a place to watch the music videos and read about the artists and their beds.

Magnetic Content Tells a Story

The best magnetic content begins with a strong, compelling idea. It offers a platform and extension that goes beyond a simple, dead-end execution, and creates conversation around an experience that is relevant to your brand.

But that doesn’t mean the content is about your brand primarily, or even secondarily. The story must come first. Magnetic content is always about human experience. It is an attractor because it is fundamentally and meaningfully social. And its power lies in the degree to which it reflects and expands people’s vision of themselves.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DSGpro

SOURCE

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

There really are a list of reasons why most fail at internet marketing, and ONE of them is by thinking of a home based business as more, “Home” than a “Business”.

Your business IS a business, no matter how fast or slow you chose to grow it. It takes the same mindset whether you started your home based business for a secondary income, or to make it a primary one. Home based business’ are too often thought as a hobby. It is extremely unlikely you will make any money treating it as that.

Just like a “Serious business” like, let’s say, a McDonald’s franchise, you need customers to hand over money. Just like McDonald’s you need a product people are interested in. And just like McDonald’s, you may have to answer for unsatisfactory performance of your product.

Making money is a SERIOUS thing. If money were easy to obtain, it wouldn’t be worth much. Thinking of your business seriously is not to say it can’t be part-time, or only to make a few extra bucks. It is not the time put in we are talking about, but the effort. You need to invest time and money into your business. If anyone tells you you don’t, stay away from them! See your business as a serious business that can one day be huge, whether you plan to grow it that far or not.

So think hard about it. Are you SERIOUS about your business? If you are, then you WILL succeed.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

Aweber email marketing

We already talked about step 1. Starting a blog (Click HERE), the importance of a blog, and what to write about (Click HERE). Now for the next step.

Once you start getting traffic to your blog, you need to keep in touch. You need to keep the readers hooked. How are you going to keep your blog traffic from getting away, forgetting about you and what you have to offer? Answer: AUTO-RESPONDERS.

Autoresponders give you a way to capture your reader’s email address, so you can continually stay in front of them. They give you a way to get their information without you having to figure out who is reading your blog, and then having to find a way to contact them.

One of the best autoresponders I use is AWEBER. With AWEBER you can create an “Opt-in” form, just like the one in the right side bar of this blog, or the one that “POPPED UP) here. This allows user to subscribe to your blog so you can stay in touch with them, to further establish yourself as an expert or guru in your field, and to further your rapport with them by continuing to give them free tips. The autosponder not only will capture the information you ask your readers for, but will AUTOMATICALLY EMAIL THEM FOR YOU, A CUSTOMIZED EMAIL! This email will also address the user by first name if you chose, making your email personal!

Then the most important part; you can have a series of emails in your autoresponder, ready to email your “Opt-in list” a series of emails you loaded into a campaign list. The email campaign can be set to email your list a series of emails in a set interval of days that you chose. The campaign can email daily, every other day, or randomly.

Another great thing about autoresponders is they can email your list a copy of your latest blog post… the way it did some of you on my list. Some of you are here to read the rest of this post because my autoresponder emailed you the “Teaser”.

So TRY IT OUT! Sign up on my list to the right. Either the “Get this first” offer (And you get to watch a great marketing video series to boot), or my “Twitter Training” advertisement, and watch my autoresponder first hand.

Then, go signup for it. CLICK HERE for your own, AWEBER AUTORESPONDER).

Later, I will do a tutorial on how to set it up.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

Setting up a blog is extremely important (see “Internet Marketing” – Where to Begin… ).

If you are not the techie type, you don’t need to be to make posts to your blog, but setting one up can be intimidating to many.

You know, not everything FREE is worth doing, and some things should be left to experts. This blog is about teaching how to attract a market for your business, amost step-by-step. I have links to tools to help you market, articles on marketing and video tutorials… most for FREE! Still, if you are SERIOUS about making money online, you eventually will have to pay for something to help you market. A blog is a vital part of marketing, and if you are confused about setting it up, it is a small investment to get an expert to do it for you.

For a very reasonable fee, I will setup a FREE wordpress blog (the actual blog is free, but not the labor I am offering) or a blog on YOUR website, and I will get you started, teaching how to make posts.

Don’t have a website? Well, I can help you with that too! Check out the IPOWER link to the right. Again, I will install it and get your website up and running for a very reasonable fee.

Here are a few examples of my work:
www.PooPooPeeDo.com
www.swflwireless.com
www.denversings.com
www.ravenwoodhomesfl.com

If you would like for me to install your blog and/or website for you, fill out the form below and I will contact you regarding fees.

 Fill out this form if you would like  help setting up your blog.

First Name:

Last Name:

Email:

Phone Number (Optional):

We respect your email privacy

 

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris

 

So ya have a blog. Congrats! Now what are ya gonna do with it? (If you haven’t, start HERE)

If you just want to write about your passions, then that is an easy answer. Write whatever your heart speaks. But if you started a blog to market your Network Marketing company or other business, there is a strategy. And the first thing to starting down the right road to successful internet marketing is… ready? Do NOT write articles promoting your company! That is right! Do NOT make your blog a commercial for your company. That is probably first THE single most big mistake new internet marketers make. So why not??? Credibility.

You see, credibility is what your blog is for. You write about what your business is about to show you are an authority in your market. You educate people on the products your company provides. You create value to your market.

If you have computer problems (and if you own a PC, you do. lol), who do you go to when you need answers? Your friend who is alway tinkering and talking about computers, right? Most PC techs have enough on their plate trying to keep their own Windows networks running. Many do not have to run around soliciting business. I even seen a shirt in computers stores that said, “NO! I won’t fix your computer!”

All the computer geeks passion messing around with computers has created an image of an expert in your eyes. When you had computer problems, you automatically thought of the guy who is always modifying, fixing, and messing with them. He may have taught you a few things about them, and you never have forgotten that.

So when you blog with the intent to market your company, don’t talk about your company. Teach your readers about the products of your company. Show them how much you know, and you will be a “Guru” to them. When they need a product you have taught them about, they will come to you to get your recommendation on where to get that product and which is best. In which case you answer, “I sell them, you know?”

You see, people get turned off when you try to sell them something, but if you make yourself an expert in their eyes, they come to you on their own terms. THAT is what you want. A market that comes to you, not one you have to chase and convince to buy your product, or into your company. Good stuff, huh? Yeah! You are gettin’ it now, aren’t ya?

Now, subscribe to my blog so you will never miss an update. We are not even warmed up yet. Upcoming I will tell you about how to use other people’s knowledge and products to attract customers to you for yours.

Health and Prosperity to you!

- Denver Harris