The keys to the kingdom. A {growtoon}.
Aug 24th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Joey Strawn is a social media strategist that loves enjoying a good book and then drawing in it. Check him out on Twitter: @joey_strawn
Five steps to re-invent your social media business networking
Aug 23rd
By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Chances are you’ve never heard of Oliver Starr. But you’ve probably heard of many of the people below:
This may seem odd to you, but Oliver, a successful blogger and Michael Arrington’s first employee at Tech Crunch, had never heard of these people when I mentioned their names. The only reason I learned who he was is because he’s the product evangelist for Pearltrees, a tool for organizing information that I really love. My interaction with Oliver was eye-opening because I just assumed that if you’re in “the biz” you would have heard of most of these folks.
It made me realize just how narrow our view of the web is.
A few weeks ago Mark Schaefer wrote about his observation that there is nothing new in blogging. I’m willing to bet if most of Mark’s readers put the names of the blogs they read on a regular basis into a hat, they would all have a very similar list. Our natural tendency is to gravitate towards people similar to us, and the result is a self-imposed lens through which we view the social web. Maybe it isn’t that there’s nothing new in blogging, but that we’ve been stuck in an incestuous circle of social media marketers, lifestyle designers, and personals development bloggers. Just so we’re clear, I’m not pointing fingers. I fall into those same incestuous circles!
Innovation and new ideas can’t diffuse throughout the social web when experts spend all their time talking to experts. That’s why I believe it’s important we not only embrace new and emerging talent, but also take steps to get outside of our comfort zone and expand our horizons. Here are five ideas on how to do that …
1. Purge your blog reader and start from scratch
Every few months I literally unsubscribe from nearly every blog I read. This enables me to accomplish a few things. First I’m able to prioritize which blogs have become the most important to me. Second, it forces me to look for new blogs and creates an opportunity to connect with new people. As a result my network continually expands. Subscribe to a few blogs that have nothing to do with your industry but that you just find interesting.
2. Pick 5 new people to follow on Twitter and build a relationship with them
I’ve never particularly cared too much about the number of followers I have on Twitter which might seem sacrilegious, but it’s been a big part of my philosophy on building relationships. What I’m more interested in is who is actually following me. Every few days I read the bios of my new followers and pick a few to engage with. The amazing people I’ve found by doing this include successful entrepreneurs, artists, published authors, literary agents, and many other people who are doing amazing things online. This has been a great way to broaden my own horizons and connect with exciting new people.
3. Attend a conference outside your industry
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about leveraging public speaking was from Michael Port. He said that rather than speaking at a social media conference go speak to an association of dentists because in that environment you’ll be the go-to person on your subject matter. This could lead to additional speaking engagements and consulting opportunities. By attending or speaking conferences outside your industry, you not only have an opportunity to grow your network substantially, but you could also tap into a significant source of opportunities. Additionally you may find that you’ll be exposed to a wide variety of new ideas.
4. Go to smaller conferences
Our general tendency is to attend the biggest industry conferences each year so we can see as many people as possible. This creates a highly competitive environment for people’s attention and limits what we can get out of the conference. I think conferences like Social Slam, which is devoted to opening up speaking and networking opportunities for diverse new talent, drives opportunities to meet thought leaders outside the echo chamber. One additional suggestion I have for conferences – don’t hang out with the people you already know. Seems obvious, but not always easy to do.
5. Don’t go to conferences. Attend a retreat instead
A 5-minute conversation and business card exchange during happy hour at a conference has its limits in terms of building long-term relationships. This is why I think a 5-6 person retreat of some sort that involves more than just talking about business could be much more powerful than a typical conference. Imagine how well you’d get to know each other if a small group of people spent three or four days together.
If we’re going to discover what’s new in blogging and social media marketing, then we have to keep opening up ourselves to new people and new experiences by trying things we’ve never tried.
Please leave your ideas in the comment section about how you are energizing your network and feel free to leave the names of a few non-social media experts you enjoy learning from!
Srinivas Rao writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did and his the host-co founder of BlogcastFM. You can follow him on twitter @skooloflife
Illustration courtesy of BigStock.com
Social media: Sowing the seeds of panic?
Aug 22nd
I don’t know if you have kept up with the rather bizarre panic that is occurring in India but there was a line in a New York Times news account that sent a chill down my spine:
BRAJAKHAL, India — Like a fever, fear has spread across India this week, from big cities like Bangalore to smaller places like Mysore, a contagion fueling a message: Run. Head home. Flee. And that is what thousands of migrants from the country’s distant northeastern states are doing, jamming into train stations in an exodus challenging the Indian ideals of tolerance and diversity.
A swirl of unfounded rumors, spread by text messages and social media, had warned of attacks by Muslims against northeastern migrants, prompting the panic and the exodus. Indian leaders, deeply alarmed, have pleaded for calm, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared in Parliament on Friday to denounce the rumor mongering and offer reassurance to northeastern migrants.
Social media, a technological lifeforce that unites, inspires, informs, educates, and delights us, clearly also has the power to maim.
Social media and the seeds of terror
Here in America, the greatest panic of my generation, and hopefully of my lifetime, was the 9/11 terrorist attack. I’m so very glad we didn’t have Twitter back then.
“Nine eleven” was a day of complete chaos. Planes were falling out of the sky. We didn’t know what was happening or why. Agents of terror had seemingly used the nation’s infrastructure at will to kill thousands of innocent people on our own soil.
What would be the next target? The water supply? A nuclear power plant? The air that we breathe? Did we need to lock ourselves up in our homes? Run? Prepare for a nuclear?
What would Twitter be like in the midst of that brand of terror and chaos? Certainly social media connections can help in an emergency and maybe even save lives, but it can, and sadly will, magnify terror.
When every confused eye witness with a cell phone becomes a reporter and the most ridiculous innuendo can become a viral “fact” today, I shudder to think how much more emotional and psychological damage could have been done had we been following a Twitter stream that day. How are terrorists plotting to use social media to spread misinformation to make a future situation even more dangerous? Are the seeds being planted right now?
Amid the horror of 9/11, we had to rely on “traditional” media. And for all its faults, there was probably some psychological and emotional advantage in waiting for official statements from emergency services and the government.
Can anything be done?
Here’s the part that is most unnerving to me. In the moment of the next crisis, I can think of no way to effectively blunt social media’s rampant contribution to chaos. Here’s what India did about it, in this account by Rama Lakshmi for the Washington Post:
India blocked about 250 websites and social networking sites Monday, accusing them of spreading inflammatory content that triggered panic among thousands of workers and students from the country’s eight northeastern states last week.
The government’s blame list ranged from Facebook to fundamentalist Pakistani sites, Twitter to text messages, and Google to YouTube videos. Authorities also barred the sending of text messages to more than five people at a time for two weeks.
In other words, the government is shutting down social media sites almost a week after the fact. Probably not a very timely or effective response but what COULD they do?
Sorry for the morose post, but the article from India touches on an issue we will probably all have to deal with at some time, in some way, in our own homelands. If social media were fueling panic where you live, what would the government do?
This situation and the suffering that occurred from the panic made me sad and I very much wanted to hear your thoughts.
Image: Reuters
Kred tries to one-up Klout by taking influence to the masses
Aug 21st
Kred, a platform to measure social influence similar to Klout, just introduced a new interface called “Story” with several very interesting new features. It is so graphically-intensive that I wanted to provide a video (below) so you can experience the changes first-hand. In my view the overhaul provides some valuable new tools for marketers interested in influencer marketing (and you should be).
Click here if you can’t see the video of Kred Story.
So what does this mean to you? I see at least two interesting business applications of the new “Story” format.
First, this puts some useful, free tools into the hands of small businesses and brands. So far Klout has really been the domain of big brands fortunate enough to be able to experiment with Klout Perks. One of the questions I am often asked is, “OK we understand this marketing trend, but we’re a small business. How do we find these influencers?”
Kred has come up with some very nice free or inexpensive features so that many businesses can find topical influencers by geographic location.
A second benefit I see (which may not be even be apparent to Kred) is the usefulness of seeing the most shared content by category and the influencers behind the sharing. This could be an extraordinary tool for curating top content.
When I previewed the new Kred offering, there were still a few pretty strange bugs in the system, but honestly that doesn’t bother me as much as other people. We are watching an entirely new marketing channel unfold and iterate in public — a pretty extraordinary business model. So I am more focused on the trend and the opportunities than short-term things that look might appear silly.
I had an opportunity to ask a few questions of Kred CEO Andrew Grill about this latest round of social influence innovation:
Andrew Grill
Mark: I imagine that it is difficult creating sustainable points of differentiation in a field where there really is no intellectual property protection. In other words, you are probably in a cycle where competitors simply continually copy each other. How do you compete in an industry like that?
Andrew Grill: When we gained access to the Twitter firehose back in 2008, we developed our architecture to be able to handle the masses of data that come from sources like Twitter, Facebook, and the ever-growing social networks. We’ve developed IP (Intellectual Property) and know-how around receiving and ingesting big data.
We are the only influence provider that is generating scores in real time. We also took the decision to be open and transparent from day one, by not only publishing exactly how we derive the Kred scores, but also showing on every one of the 120 million Kred profiles the effect of interactions on the scores in real time. No-one else has decided to be this transparent – something that sets Kred apart from other platforms.
Mark: What is Kred’s R&D cycle? How often can we expect to see major updates like this?
Andrew Grill: We iterate fast. Kred was built in just three months, and the build time for Kred Story was even faster. Small enhancements to the site based on our valuable community feedback are added into the development cycle on a weekly basis. Customers also benefit from our quick R&D cycle as we can build custom versions of Kred elements extremely quickly.
Mark: One of the things many people don’t understand is that you have no choice but to iterate in public. There is no way to test enough ahead of time to be able to predict everything that might happen when you flip the switch and a million people hit your servers. From a business standpoint, how do you gear up for the inevitable fire-fighting when you make a major change like this?
Andrew Grill: Having an amazing technical team who work around the world in multiple time zones means that we’re ready for anything. You are right that we have to iterate in public, and we are always listening to what people are saying about us and the product – feeding things back to the development team as we receive it. We love being in such an agile environment and industry – it makes us work harder to build the best possible platform we can.
We also utilize our network of Kred Leaders to seek feedback on new deployments. In addition, we have a round the clock community management team looking out for any issues and feeding them back to the team. As social media is real time, if something is not working, we hear about it pretty quickly through Twitter.
Mark: How do you project the Twitter API change will affect Kred and its new format?
Andrew Grill: We don’t expect any material changes to the Kred Story format to be compliant with the new API. We have been working with Twitter for four years now since we gained access to the full Twitter firehose and we have a great partnership.
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Take a look at the demonstration video and let the {grow} community know what you think about it. Other than the features I’ve named here, what else do you like about this new interface?
Disclosure: Kred has named me a “Kred Leader” but I have not been active and maintain a neutral position in the industry. Andrew Grill bought me dinner earlier this year during a business trip.
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