THINKing

Social Media Relationships: Are They Real?

Just saw Suzanne Vara’s excellent piece on building social media relationships. Let’s listen to Ms. Vara for a moment:

Social media has afforded us the opportunity to meet a lot of people. We gain insight as to who they are through their profiles, blogs, with whom they associate and our interactions with them…we find an entirely new world and start building relationships. There are some people we just click with and feel like we have known them forever.  We like them and look forward to seeing them each day on their blog, on our blog and in our platform streams.

There are a number of people – those whom I call DCs or “digital colleagues” – I look forward to each day as well. But are these relationships real and actionable from a business standpoint? Most are not. But some of those online relationships – as Ms. Vara points out – may blossom into something deeper.

As we have discussed before, the value of connections in business cannot be underestimated. I’m talking primarily about tight connections that you use to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Friend and business coach Brent Dees of Focus Four tells us that you if want a $1 million business, you should have 40 contacts (your Focus 40) each of whom can bring you $25,000 in business. Your job is to help each of these contacts achieve their goals and they, in turn, will help you reach yours. This is a spin on the method that made Andrew Carnegie a millionaire many times over.

Now, Brent says that a human can’t truly support more than 40 contacts of this nature, and I agree.

However, with the advent of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, you can have access to hundreds of contact to help you connect with others who may be able to help you.  Social media means your close relationships are no longer bound by geography – and that is a beautiful thing. For instance, there is Bob Taylor from Grand Rapids, Michigan who I talk with about wine, bacon, guitar playing and social media. Jay Ehret in Waco, Texas, has become someone I read and listen to via podcast. Says Jay in a piece called Welcome To Social Town,

The amazing thing is I didn’t know any of these people three years ago. This is what social media has done for my professional, and personal, life. To me, it’s not a marketing channel, it’s a community of my favorite people who don’t happen to live in the same city I do. I wish we all did live in the same place because we would have some killer happy hours! But we don’t, so we just hang out together online, in Social Town.

What do you think?

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2010′s Top Five Creativity Links

Our weekly series of creativity links has uncovered some very good tools for you thinkers. What have been the most popular links so far this year? I’m glad you asked.

100 Online Creativity Tools – From tools that help you organize, plan, and brainstorm to tools that inspire through writing prompts and creative photos to tools that work to develop the creative mind, you will find plenty of inspiration in this list.

10 Essential Blogs For Creative Entrepreneurs – Here are 10 blogs that are essential reading for creative entrepreneurs – they will fuel your creativity, sharpen your business skills, connect you with others on the same path, and sustain you through the ups and downs of your entrepreneurial journey.

50 Tools To Improve Your Writing – This extensive list of writing tools can help you improve your writing skills.

Visual Thesaurus – This is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.

Bad Billboards – Sometimes you just need to see creativity gone wrong.

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WIIFM?

The young lady pictured above is skeptical, and rightly so. So many blogs are posting content that doesn’t really relate to her. Will your blog be any different? She thinks not.

We’ve been taking a look over the last couple of weeks at developing compelling blog content. (links to the previous installments are at the bottom of this post) Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me so we can erase that look of skepticism and turn your blog visitors into regulars.

You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog. This blog covers advertising, creativity, PR, marketing and social media topics – a pretty broad spectrum.

First, we keep an eye on our blog stats to see what are the top keywords bringing people to our blog.

We have written a series called “New Business Primer”, which has been very popular.  The term “new business” brings in a lot of traffic for us. Phrases containing the words “creative” and “creativity” show up often in our top keywords, as do phrases containing “journalism” or “journalists.” Are you using your blog stats to review keywords?

Another thing we do is review our stats to determine which posts get the most traffic, both initially and over time.

Our posts on media relations always seem to be a hit, as do our creativity posts. Writing-related and social media posts do well, too. Advertising posts are not doing as well and we don’t post much on that topic any more.

But it is not enough just to post on those topics. Just as we do in advertising copywriting, we need to think about the reasons people “buy” something. In a blog’s case, visitors are “buying” your writing.Geoff Ayling writes about the reasons people buy in his book Rapid Response Advertising. The 51 reasons people buy include,

• to make more money
• to attract praise
• to avoid criticism
• to make their work easier
• to speed up their work

So, how does that apply to the blogger? Let’s take the first one and come up with a post title that fits into THINKing‘s list of topics. We know that people like our writing-related posts and Ayling tells us they want to make more money at it. So, how about: Copywriting Tips To Help Build Your Direct Marketing BusinessSo, just remember, give the readers what they are looking for and they will come back. We’d love your thoughts on this topic.

#1 – Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Blog Content

#2 – How To Be A More Compelling Writer

#3 -  Great Images Make Content More Compelling

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Sharing

It’s funny how when you start thinking about a certain topic – like content development or web design – that you start seeing more and more references to it. I guess it is because you are attuned to it. Anyway, I’ve been running across some excellent articles on content development, as well as web design and thought I’d share with the class.

5 Ways To Create Fresh Content For Your Blog – One of the toughest parts of running a blog is coming up with fresh content. Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can pull out when you’re tapped out and in need of some new blog content.

10 Ways To Use Recycled Content – Make sure you’re getting as much mileage out of your best content as you can. That means finding ways to repurpose it. I mean, you wouldn’t throw an ice cream carton away until you had scooped out every last bit, right?

50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers – This list will help you find some nuggets of information that will help you avoid headaches and stress by saving you time.

Color Theory Reference Sheet For Designers -This cool infographic lays out a lot of data about color theory in a visual manner that is easy to comprehend.

40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners – Just getting started in web design? Here are some valuable resources to get your career kickstarted.

30 Essential iPad Apps For Developers & Creatives -  Here are 30 different apps spanning several categories that can help designers and creatives out with everything from jotting down notes and wireframing to staying on task.

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Great Images Make Content More Compelling

You are probably wondering what this photo has to do with this post. Well, in part one of this series, Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content, our friend, Rubbermaid blogger  Jim Dietzel, laid out his five key elements for creating compelling content. Number 3 was “pictures are good.”

Our digital colleague, Rodger Johnson from GetSocialPR, also thinks that imagery can kick your content up a notch. He says use compelling images to support the story, a lesson he learned from his journalism days that still works today.

The photo above may be interesting, but it doesn’t really go with this post. So, good pictures are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

If you are going to use photos, you also must respect copyright law. Don’t just do a Google search and use the images. They may be copyright protected. We did a piece sometime back about some free photo resources that you may want to revisit.

Below are a few more related posts on the use of images in your blog.

An Introduction To Using Images On Blogs

Finding Compelling Flickr Images

Using Images Legally On Your Blog

Using Images To Take Your Posts To A New Level

Why Images Are Vital To Modern Blogs

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Creativity 2010 – Week #30

2010 keeps flying by – it’s week #30 already. I hope you are enjoying the creativity links we bring you each week. Here are five more.

Absence Thinking: Think about what is not there.

CATWOE: A checklist for thinking about problems and solutions.

Jump Start: Enter a “How can I?” question, then get a list of adjectives that can help start the brainstorming process.

Mindomo: Use this mind mapping tool to organize your thoughts and start your project with a clear plan.

365 Picture Prompts: Use these photos and imagesto spark your creativity.

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Creativity 2010 – Week #29

Igor Stravinsky Agrees: Standards Enable Creativity – There is a stereotype of the creative person who chafes at standards, convinced that any sort of process-driven continuous improvement will have a negative effect on how his work is performed. Just the opposite is true.

Can Creativity Be Taught? – Newsweek says creativity scores among children have been falling since 1990. Can we turn it around?

Forget Brainstorming - Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, so why are we still trying it?

Creative Car Advertising – Campaign for the Smart Car.

43 Things – Publish your lists to keep yourself accountable and browse through other lists to find creative ideas.

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Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content

I have been thinking a lot recently about creating compelling blog content, and at first blush, there seem to be a lot of barriers. But like getting over a barbed wire fence, you just have to step back for a minute and think through your approach so that you don’t catch something important on a barb.

The primary reason I have been pondering the topic is purely selfish.

This blog once had great traffic, but it has fallen off recently due to spam attacks which hijacked my blog and took out my RSS feed. I had nearly 1,000 subscribers to that feed.  Not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but enough interested folk that we had some good conversations going. So, now I find myself trying to rebuild what I had originally built over a span of about five years.

Compelling content brought subscribers here in the first place, and it will bring them back.

I reached out to some of my Twitterati to ask them to define compelling content. Their input will be the basis for much of this series on compelling content. My friend Jim Dietzel from Rubbermaid was first to get back to me and he had a list of five key elements.

#1. Hire a good writer. Seriously.

#2. Write about what your audience cares about.

#3. Pictures are good.

#4. Make it easy to read/scan

#5. Look at what is working and do more of that.

That’s a pretty simple, but effective formula. We’ll explore these ideas in future posts.

I’d love to hear from you, as well. So, please comment on this post with your thoughts on creating compelling content, or take our poll.

More on developing compelling content:

How To Be A More Compelling Writer

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Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Ran across this infographic below recently at David Steel’s Blog. It nicely sums up what pitfalls businesses should avoid in social media, as well as some best practices. The two most important points about what a business should do to succeed in social media, in my opinion, are:

- Have a plan before you start.

- Give great content.

We’ve written about these topics before and we are preparing more in-depth posts on them.

What other items in this infographic should we write about? We’d love your thoughts and even some guest posts. Comment below, or drop us a note.

Via: The Steel Method

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Creativity 2010 – Week #28

Our weekly post providing you some fodder for your little gray cells continues this week #28 of 2010. Here are a few thought-provoking links to stimulate your creativity.

5 Websites To Spark Your Creativity

4 Creative Uses For Twitter

The Key To Creating Remarkable Things

5 Creativity Refreshers For The Workplace From The Work Of Art

Creativity Tool: Doodling 

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