First Donut Training Video Posted
Here is my first donut training video from my Krispy Kreme Challenge Training video blog called 4 Miles and 12 Donuts. It was recorded from an undisclosed location with the help of my capable assistant. Check out the details and statistics over there, and subscribe so you don’t miss any of the training fun.
4 Miles and 12 Donuts Episode 3 from Jeff Cohen on Vimeo.
Build Your Twitter Network
It seems that everyone in the mainstream media is talking about Twitter, including NPR, CNN, local newspapers and local tv stations. This is causing lots of people to sign up for the microblogging service. There are over 4 million Twitter users worldwide, and some estimates put growth as high as 5 million users by the end of the year. According to Complete.com, nearly one quarter of all Twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (determined by a very light usage of 6+ visits/month), and another 25% are light users (2-5 visits/month).
But I really want to focus on the majority of users who have only visited one time. These are the people who join, but don’t know why they’re joining. Someone told them to “Follow Me” on Twitter. They sign up, find and follow the person they went there for, and stop. What’s next? This post and some links will answer that question. There is not really any one place they can go to learn about what to do. If you are new to Twitter, first read this post called How to Twitter: The Basics and come back here. That post addresses the mechanics of what to do. I will talk about the why and the how.
The real value in Twitter is in your network. This is especially true if you are using Twitter for business marketing. Your network can provide answers to your questions. They can recommend articles and blogs that have caught their attention. They can forward, or retweet, your messages. They can even tell you what they are having for lunch.
So where does this network come from? You must build it, and you must do so intentionally based on your industry and interests. The basic idea of Twitter following is that when you follow someone, they get an email letting them know. Many people will automatically follow you when you follow them, but not everyone. As Twitter gets more crowded and more commercialized, this behavior is becoming less common. Instead of hoping people follow you, there is a more deliberate approach to building your network.
1. After creating a username that relates to your name, brand, blog, or company, create a full and accurate profile
A complete profile tells a potential follower that you a person, not a spammer. Start by using your real name. Add your city and state for your location. While it is cool to update this field from your iphone or website that tracks your location, this could prevent someone from following you if they don’t know where you are. The web field should link to your blog or company web site. And finally add a bio that tells people who you are and what interests you. There is a tendency to be cute or sarcastic in these fields, but if you are using Twitter as a business intelligence tool to build a network of like-minded professionals, keep the cheekiness to a minimum. The more information you provide in these fields, the more likely you will connect to others in your industry.
2. Grow with balance
As you start to build your network, you want to try to keep your followers to those you following in balance. Twitter is a social engagement tool and you want to think about conversations, rather than broadcasts. Go to Twitter Search and put in a keyword that relates to your business, industry, or personal interest. Scan down the list and find someone tweeting about something you are interested in, or have knowledge about. Click on their username and reply (with the @) to them. This is the conversational part. Now when you follow this person, they will more likely follow you back. If you do this slowly and deliberately, not only will you grow your network of people you listen to (or follow), but also with people who listen to you. This will create a more relevant update stream to others as they decide to follow you back.
3. Find friends, neighbors, and colleagues on Twitter
One of the best uses of Twitter is to build a community in a local area. This is a good way to expand your business network offline. If you know anyone on Twitter, make sure you follow them. You probably are not the first one on your block to be on Twitter. One tool to find local users is TwitterLocal. You can also use the advanced search options within Twitter Search to search by locale as well. As you delve more into Twitter, you will learn that many tools are available that interact with Twitter. Twitter provides open access to “the Twitter stream,” which allows people to develop tools to interact with tweets and users. Watch the tweets of people you follow for talk of new tools to try. Here is one list of tools from Twitips.com, a new site that provides a wealth of information for Twitter users of all experience levels. Make sure to read the comments, where users add many other favorite tools.
4. Follow the High Volume Tweeters
Some of the leading Twitter users follow, and engage with thousands of other users. Ever wondered how they do it. Here’s Chris Brogan’s post how he follows so many folks on Twitter. And here’s a post from Guy Kawasaki on how to increase your followers on Twitter, which I take with a grain of salt. Guy has lots of good ideas and helpful links in the post, so I definitely want to include it here. If the goal is to build your network of engaged conversationalists, many techniques in his post will help.
Leave comments below if you have additional ideas about a thoughtful approach to building your Twitter network.
By the way, are you following me @dgtlpapercuts? It wouldn’t hurt if you engage with me too.
Originally posted at Koroberi.com
Blogging in an Echo Chamber
As the month winds down, and I look at the counter on the right, I see that I probably will not make my goal of averaging 1 post per day. I have 2 excuses, and neither of them are very good. One of them is that I have been very busy and haven’t had a chance to post. Last week I took the kids to the fair. I took nearly 300 pictures while we were there, and it was all I could do to go through them and get them up on Flickr. If you follow me on Twitter (or Facebook), you might have seen them already, since I usually post a link to Flickr photo sets.
But the other reason I have fallen behind is that I have started business blogging. Our new company website includes a blog, and I am one of the primary bloggers. This is great to be able to bring a skill to work that I developed on my own. This requires me to spend more time at work fully engage in marketing blogs and the b2b and advertising worlds online. This definitely changes the amount of time I spend doing similar things at home. Before blogging for work, I spent time reading Ad Age and Adweek online, whether through email newsletters, RSS or on the web. Now I do it at work. I used to check Twitter sporadically during the work day. I was a night and weekend Twitterer. Now I watch custom Twitter searches all day long. I am constantly looking for content for my business marketing blog. All this means that what I used to do in my free time, now can get done during work hours. I only need my free time to keep up with friends’ blogs and other personal interests. Think of all the free time I should have. It hasn’t really worked out that way. I’m still getting use to this change in process.
I still need to follow Twitter at night to catch up on politics and funny videos. I still need to dedicate a big chunk of time and a whole section of my brain to content generated by Wayne Sutton. I even generate some of that content.
And finally, what makes all of this a bit odd, is that the new business site where I have been blogging the whole month of October isn’t even live yet. I’ve written posts that nobody has read. It is the ultimate blogging in an echo chamber. The good news is that the site should launch the end of this week, and I can start promoting my new content. Some of it might even get re-posted here. More posts coming soon. Maybe even some back-dated ones to fill in the past couple of weeks.
Marketing Lessons from Converge South
Last week I attended the ConvergeSouth Blogger Conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. This gathering of technology professionals, personal bloggers and business marketers had a decidedly political tone to it. Many bloggers are charged up over the upcoming election and are using Social Media to get their message out and connect with like-minded people. This is the core of Social Media, but the same principles apply to business marketing.
You start with a goal that you would like to reach, whether it is more sales, more customers, greater brand awareness, and you develop a strategy to reach it. Blogging is a tool that can help you reach your goal. It is just another form of communicating, according to keynote speaker Chris Rabb. The first blogger was Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense advocated independence from England. Another form of proto-blogging was the use of quilt patterns to guide people through the Underground Railroad.
As the day progressed, there was lot of talk about the coming revolutions in Social Media. The biggest Social Media sites, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, were compared by speaker Anil Dash, to the days of the big three networks (ABC, NBC and CBS for you kids). These companies have too much control over our web experience and how people interact with their own data and information. Revolutions will occur from both the inside and the outside. Technology changes and improvements will allow people to control their information across the web. At the same time, people will demand more control, and get that control by going to other sites.
The lesson for business marketers is to understand your target audience. If you don’t give your customers what they want, they will not be your customers for long. In the early stages of a customer relationship, many things are overlooked, but as time passes, it is critical to provide exactly what customers need. If you can’t do it, your competitor is waiting in the wings.
And finally, internet superstar Robert Scoble spoke about how video can enhance the content of any web site. It is easy to get started with simple tools, but make sure you can record good audio. People will suffer through bad video if they can hear what is being said. And like with any business marketing campaign, the key is to have a plan. If you start a project without knowing where you are going, it is difficult to get there.
Originally posted on Koroberi.com.
Who Helps You Meet Your Goals?
As each month is winding down, I check the number of posts on my blog (look to the right if you are on my blog, take my word for it if you are reading this in a feed reader), and make sure I am in the ball park of 1 post per day average. That is generally around 30 posts. My posts are not always written. Sometimes it is just a photo or a video. But I try to have about 30 of them in the month.
I usually check in with Peter, my 10-year-old son, and let him know how I am doing. Last night we looked at my total and I was at 26. He told me that I needed to post 4 more times. I said it shouldn’t be a problem, because I usually have several things floating around in my head to post. Sometimes I just don’t get to them, and other times I just change my mind about posting.
I posted a couple things early in the evening, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post any more. At 10:00 I said to Peter, I have two more hours to post two more things. I asked him if I had to post two more things. He replied, only if you want to meet your goal.
Olympic Bloggers
As part of Lenovo’s sponsorship of the 2008 Summer Olympics, they have set up an athlete’s blog aggregator. This allows fans to connect with the athletes on a more authentic level than the melodramatic tv coverage.
From the about statement:
We have invited a collection of athletes from every sport and every region around the world to blog about their experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games. In some cases, these athletes were already blogging. In others, we helped them to start their blogs and get into blogging for the first time. Together, they represent the real stories of the Games. Athletes who may or may not win a medal, but have struggled, persevered and taken years of their life to be a part of those few short weeks in August when the world’s attention will turn to Beijing and their dreams will take center stage.All the athletes participating in our program were provided with new Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences. They all also agreed to place a badge on their blogs indicating that they were part of our program (to be fully transparent), and also all agreed to allow their blog posts to be pulled into this site you are reading now. They were NOT paid in any way apart from the machines, and have not been asked or required to write about Lenovo in any way.
We are producing this program with our partners, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and have adhered to the best practices set out for campaigns like this by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Athletes are provided support for starting their blogs, but Lenovo does not regard the blogs of the participating athletes to be Lenovo blogs – nor will Lenovo ever ask for any overt advertising or sponsorship acknowledgement on the athlete’s blogs. These properties are the property and responsibility of the athlete and are not subject to editorial management in any form by Lenovo, Ogilvy or Google. Terms and conditions are governed by Google’s standard terms for its Blogger and YouTube properties, and content guidelines have been established by the IOC.
Difference between pitching to Bloggers and Mainstream Media
Here’s a great post from Chris Brogan about how to approach bloggers with pr opportunities: link
Bloggers offer glimpse of uncensored Cuba
In a highly censored country like Cuba, people have taken to blogging to get the truth out about their country. Using black market dial-up accounts, stolen passwords or disguises to sneak into tourist hotels, these bloggers are getting on the internet to tell their stories.
Here’s a link to the AP story published on Wired.com.
Links to Cuban Blogs:
Generacion Y (Google Translation)
My Island at Midday (Google Translation)
Potro Salvaje (Google Translation)
Not Necessarily a Gratuitous Post
My general blogging goal is that by the end of each month, I will have averaged one blog post per day in the month. And I have met that goal each month since November. I was close in September and October, but really didn’t set that goal until December. Generally this means that I post what I want throughout the month, and I have a flurry of posts at the end of the month to meet this goal. Unless I post a bunch today, and I really don’t have the time to do that, I will not meet this goal. I have gotten close, but I am going out of town today (for the coming week), and will not have the access to post.
In looking at my posts over the past month, my topics have been on the down side of life: torn-down buildings, broken arms and zombies. Since most of those are things I have taken pictures of, rather than events in my life, I am not worried about it.
We Like Jott a Lot
Last night I started playing with Jott. It is a free service that let’s you make a call from your registered phone, leave a message and send that message to a variety of places. Your message is transcribed and Jott sends both the text and a link to your recorded message. The default is that it sends it back to you via email (or text message) and to your the Jott inbox. This is a basic reminder service that is helpful, but not extraordinary.
Where this application really flies is in its connection to other services. I currently have it set up so I can Twitter from Jott, blog from Jott, and even update my Google Calendar. And now that Google Calendar can sync to Outlook, Jott becomes a service that lets you voice record appointments that show up on your Outlook calendar.
Peter was definitely enjoying playing with Jott too much. He loved the mis-transcription of “We are watching basketball” to “We are watching I Got Bob.” Here are some links to Peter’s Jotts: