Adam has some great business advice–Lambert, not Smith, that is.
When given the choice, do you look for the “long shot” or the “sure bet?”
This guy’s voice gets on my nerves, and I am generally not a fan. However, he consistently picks the sure bet. Within every genre, he has selected the song that turns the judges into bobble heads. Sure, he has a good voice, but out of the 50,000 contestants these finalists all have good voices. Plus, they practice 8 hours a day, but before spending any time practicing, Adam spends time thinking and asking, “what’s the sure bet?” He doesn’t pick songs that are out of his range. He doesn’t pick songs because his mom sang them to him when he was a kid. He strategically picks songs that consistently wow the judges–and obviously the audience.
In business, there are as many reasons to pursue various opportunities as there are opportunities. You can “pull off” a thousand opportunities and possibly hit a home run, but sure bets guarantee consistent hits. For some reason, we are inclined to pull for the long shot. The payoffs on the long shot can potentially pay 40:1, but the sure bet will statistically make you rich–the long shot can make you hopeless.
Once you pick the sure bet, you still, like Adam, have to work hard to get big results, but you’d be doing that anyway.
Occasionally, I have the good fortune of finding tools that truly simplify my life. I waste away the other twenty-some-odd hours of the day playing with the non-productive tools. It is a sick cycle, but there is a balance in there somewhere.
When writing a blog post and taking a few screen captures the captures, file save, upload process can be cumbersome and time consuming. Enter Jing, which is available for Windows or Mac.
1. Enter a keyboard shortcut to start the screen clipping service. For the mac, I am using Command+Shift+1. The crosshairs appear, and you can select portions of the screen, whole windows, or the whole desktop – basic screen capture stuff.
2. After selecting the image, you can add some basic markup (lines or text) to the image through the tools panel.
3. This is where the magic happens. After naming the file, you can upload to Flickr, or to your FTP location for insertion into your post. HOLY COW–You have just saved so much time!
Yes there may be other screen capture to FTP programs out there, like GrabUp, but Jing also includes the ability to create screencasts and post to YouTube, Screencast.com or import into Camtasia for editing.
You can download a free version of the software here (mac or PC). Or you can “go pro” for $14.95/year, which enables more options for image and video formats.
If you are new to Twitter, you may scratch your head with all of the #followfriday tweets. This is an organic tradition where you list the people that you enjoy following and want to share with others.
You can track everyone’s suggestions, by using this Twitter search. In addition, you can make the search more sophisticated with advanced search.
More importantly, whenever I want to make #followfriday suggestions, I often forget if I have suggested someone before. SO, I run this simple search before tapping out my tweet:
You can use this search by simply replacing <TWITTERID> in the above URL with your own twitter id.
Some Twitter traditions (and yes I avoided twitteritions) are dull, but I enjoy this one as a compliment to the people that you follow. Also, you can use the suggestions to pick up interesting reads.
Sorry. All of that emphasis on page one SERPs of Google may not be the funky cold medina after all. Search Engine Optimization, which is a profession that didn’t exist a few years ago may not exist in a few years. Thus, the modern era of the Internet: professions that don’t exist today may be the top job in 3 years. [check this video for an interesting communication of this phenomena]
If you’ve been in the interactive advertising business for at least the last five years, you’ll recognize the pitch for social media to be nearly identical to the ones we heard (and made) in 2002 for search. Search ads were fast and cheap to create and dirt cheap. (You didn’t even have to pay unless you got a click!) In the face of a bloated and barely effective display advertising market, search looked to be the best deal in town.
Honestly, I am not predicting that one medium will trump the other, but I believe that a single tool arsenal is not the Internet “marketing” solution. Staking one’s business upon Google results is simply not a sound solution. For a few weeks, the question, “will Twitter trump Google?” has been circulating tweets and blogs.
No, but social media will rule supreme as the top referrer of the web.
Twitter is already towering over the news sources in the UK and this doesn’t even include the API connections (i.e. Tweetdeck, Twhirl) to the social service:
In February, 4 million people in the U.S. visited the site, up from 2.6 million the month before, according to the latest data from comScore. That represents a 55 percent month-over-month growth rate, compared to 33 percent growth in each of the two months prior.
There is a good reason for this explosion in use. Social media serves niches that search engines and blogs alone cannot.
1. Internet Portal
Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are many people’s portal to the Internet. Sorry of conjuring up imagery of AOL. But, these are the first and last accessed sites that many people use during their Internet sessions. In a recent Nielsen study, 10% of all “internet time” is spent in social networks. Facebook is being used as their portal page to the web, and they find referral links through in-network communications.
2. Hyperlocality
National sites and search engines will always be handicapped to scale down to provide accurate poignant local results-despite the changes to the algorithm. Social Networks have the ability to scale because the content creators are local. For example, if you want a Hot Dog in a particular city, page one results and the top result are far more national with localized information (Krystal). However, tapping out less than 140 characters, “where is the best Chicago dog in Knoxville?” will likely return nuanced and accurate local results.
3. Contextual Relevancy (crowdsourcing)
In the network of friends and followers, questions are not blindly stripped and plugged into an algorithm that may or may not account for misspellings or memory lapse. For example try this query on Google, “what is the name of the place that used to be next to the pizza parlor on johnson st.” Surprisingly, the same query to Twitter will likely yield a poignant response. In addition, all of these past queries are searchable.
On a cold day in January while staring off into my tweetcloud in tweetdeck. I noticed a surge in Hudson and Plane. At least 30 minutes before any television news network could mobilize, Twitter broke the story. The Hudson is not the only case. The Mumbai terrorist attacks were best reported via Twitter by people inside the hotel.
Throw your Rolodex out the window. Social networks are connecting people directly to their sources. Want to complain about comcast or tell motrin that their ad is offensive? You don’t have to write letters that may or may not be read, you can tweet or blog directly to the source.
The caveat is that BS detectors are very high in social mediums. For an advertiser or owner, simply setting up twitterhawk to swoop in to keyword mentions or hiring ghosttweeters to engage customers can be catastropic. Inauthentic posts or ghost written material can be obvious to readers / followers / friends, and as @guykawasaki has learned, exposure of ghost writing can be a disaster (or at least distracting).
6. Eavesdropping is Awesome
My guilty pleasure is to eavesdrop on (interesting) conversations while dining in restarants. Whether on someone’s wall or in their Twitter feed, social marketing is largely about listening to people talking. If something is interesting, we are generally permitted to engage in that conversation. Of course, this can be exploited by marketers, but in some cases I want to be engaged while ranting about the ridiculously slow download speeds on my comcast connection.
7. Google Doesn’t Care
Some suggest that Google is “passionate” about providing quality search results. Google is an advertising company; first and foremost the objective is to generate revenue. Facebook recently redesigned the intro screen to open up more advertising, and this emphasis towards ads will like be more pervasive in future redesigns. On the other hand, Twitter’s revenue model is nebulous and undefined [probably best served and most profitable to sell to Google]. Therefore the free flow of information is not altered by the revenue model (yet).
Search engines are not going away. They will continue to improve the results, but the fact remains that people are continualy drawn to people. This is not a new phenomena as any listserve or newsgroup junkies of web 1.0 will tell you. As social networks continue to proliferate, they will become increasingly important referrers of the web.
He titled the keynote, “Twitter As A Tool For Social Media: Nobodies are the new Somebody.” While 80% of the audience at SES NY admitted to be “twittering” while Guy was talking, his keynote read like an intro to Twitter, but that is not to say that it was not without a few new nifty tools.
This is an interesting keynote topic of a “Search Engine Strategy” conference, but this base thread seemingly weaved into all of the first day sessions.
1. Forget the “A” list - don’t worry about the big Twitter names. It is not about a “trickle down” interaction. Twitter is about a “bubbling up” of excitement and evangelism.
2. Defocus
3. Get lots followers – it is important
Autofollow everyone that follows you. You can use SocialToo to do this automatically.
Retweetist. Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery.
As I was presenting ideas about social media and the trends that we are seeing. I used a term that answers some of the critiques of the statusphere: devicification of the Internet.
Scary? Hell yes it is, but then again I write about more “revealing” things than “my washer just finished a load of laundry.” Unfortunately, the washer is probably more interesting.
Spokes Marketing has launched Coupon Katie–a site devoted to sharing money-saving tips–in Knoxville. There are a number of “coupon” sites on the web, but this site is dedicated to hyperlocal stories about saving some money. As I like to say, “Saving Green is the new Black.”
As Katie says:
The goal of this website is to simply inform you of the best deals here in the Knoxville, TN area and to help you develop your own Coupon Strategy. Although I am here in Knoxville, most of the information posted here can be applied to your town.
"The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks."
