THINKing

Connect With My Creative Team

Are you connected with My Creative Team? Here are the ways to get and stay connected:

Facebook

Friendfeed

Think (our monthly enewsletter)

THINKing (RSS Feed)

Twitter

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Socialize With Us

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, let me say I appreciate the time you spend with us and your thoughtful comments on this blog. We are here to listen as well as speak to our peers and customers. You can subscribe to our blog via Feedburner.

Beyond this blog, My Creative Team is sociable in other ways. So, feel free to join our conversation through our other social media vehicles. Here’s how:

You can follow MyCreativeTeam on Twitter, or become an MCT fan at Facebook. We have a Friendfeed, or you can stumble along with us via StumbleUpon.

My Creative Team’s award-winning monthly enewsletter, Think, is another way to follow us.  Sign up here.

We love social media and believe every company should be using these tools to connect with their key audiences. What do you think? How can we do a better job connecting with you?

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Links - 9/19/2008

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile

How To Grow Your Personal Brand (Happy Blog Birthday, Jason)

Where To Find PR Help In The Web 2.0 World

What We Can Learn From EMail Spammers

13 Ways To Promote Your Next Blog Post

From THINKing’s Dusty Archives:

- Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers

- Great Employees = Happy Consumers

- RSS 101 - 16 Links To Get You Started

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Best THINKing

What is the best content in your RSS reader? Do you have a way to filter the wheat from the chaff? One way to do it is with AideRSS, the intelligent assistant that continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you.

It uses an algorithm that takes into consideration relevance and and reaction to blog posts, and then scores the posts accordingly. Here’s what AideRSS says are the top THINKing posts:

Brand Trust

Green Content Marketing

Soft Economy? No, Soft Marketers

The ROI of Social Media

Email Is Alive And Well

What are the top posts in your blog, as ranked by AideRSS? Any surprises? Wade into the conversation.

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The Dusty Archives

I was strolling through the dusty THINKing archives the other day and realized how much good stuff was in here that you may have missed. So, I’m digging out the top 10 postings of all time. Enjoy.

Top 10 Story Starter Tips for Blocked Bloggers

What Customers Want

Patience? No, Let’s Kill Something

When Billboards Go Bad

Twittering Journalists

RSS 101 Top 16 Links to Get You Started

A Bigger Logo Necessitates A Smaller Idea

Search Me

Marketing By Mistake

Top 17 Media Relations Links

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Get The Flock Onto Your Computer

Flock has supplanted Firefox as my favorite browser. It is powered by Mozilla, the same engine that supports Firefox, however it has so many more features designed for our new social, digital world. There is a nice demo of Flock by Candy With A Why, so I won’t recreate the wheel.

Here’s what I like about it. It is a nice tool for handling all your RSS feeds. Sometime back I said that we needed an Outlook type platform to make RSS as ubiquitous as email. Flock is close. It also makes it simple to handle all of my accounts: del.icio.us, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it. Finally, it has a feature that allows you to track your friends on all their accounts. Get it and use it.

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Sending Out An RSS

Photo By photopia (Flickr)

RSS is a friend of mine. Subscribing to feeds helps me keep current on a wide variety of blogs and topics. So, today I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on using RSS.

Now, I have a number of blogs I keep up with, like those of my digital colleagues Jason Falls (RSS feed) and Rodger Johnson (RSS feed), to mention a couple. Instead of visiting their sites ever day, I subscribe to their feeds and have the information come to me. Feel free to subscribe to this blog’s feed.

I’ve started using the new browser from Flock and have found it an excellent tool for keeping up with key feeds. It’s Firefox on steroids. But that is a topic for another day.

Now, another tactic is to use Google’s blog search for terms or phrases you follow. For instance, I follow the phrase “stumbleupon marketing“. So, type in your term under Google’s blog search. When the results come up, you’ll see in the left hand column about halfway down is the word “Subscribe”. Below that is the word “RSS” hyperlinked. Click on that and you’ll be subscribed to the search. Anytime it changes, you’ll be automatically updated.

How are you using RSS?

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BlogUpp!

You’ll notice the window in the sidebar to the right that provides a thumbnail snapshot of another blog. This is from BlogUpp!, a new blog promotion tool widget that I am trying. I’ll report back on how it works to drive traffic. Here’s what BlogUpp! says about itself:

• BlogUpp! snapshots your blog and reads your RSS regularly
• Blog’s thumbnail shows on other blogs with our service activated
• The thumbnail is accompanied by your blog’s most recent article
• For every 10 readers of your blog, it is shown to 9 readers on other blogs
• An identical widget projects on your weblog, listing relevant blogs
• Each link clicked in the widget opens a new window, not closing your blog
• And all this is completely free and with no effort whatsoever

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7 Most Helpful January Posts

Sometimes you miss the best information on your favorite blogs, like THINKing, just because other things are happening. Here is my list of the Top 7 Most Helpful Posts from THINKing in January.

8 Best THINKing Posts of 2007

New Business Primer

Contact

Media Relations How-To

RSS vs. Email

What Does Social Media Success Look Like?

It’s Not Your Brand

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RSS vs. Email: Technology Smackdown

(Photo by tanakawho)

Email is ubiquitous. People understand it and use it despite its problems. Some industry experts say email deliverability is in the 60 percent range. US Airways has a better on-time record than that.

RSS has 100 percent deliverability. But people don’t understand it or use it despite its advantages. In fact, eMarketer estimates that only about 20 percent of consumers use RSS. Peter Lenkfi has a good article on this topic today at SiteProNews. Lenkfi says - and I agree - that what we are missing is a piece of killer software like Outlook that makes RSS easy and intuitive.

In this new more advanced world, you will have your own personal RSS address. Not connected to a business or blog content, just to you personally. Yes, you may be thinking… “just like my email address”. When someone wants to hear from you, they will go to some fancy Web 2.0 service and subscribe to your personal RSS feed. They will sign-up for their own personal RSS feed and then subscribe to yours, providing you with their name (if they are a friend) and perhaps their interests if they are a business contact. When you want to send them, and only them a message, you’ll open up the fancy wysiwyg editor provided by the cool Web 2.0 service mentioned above, create a message and publish it.

That’s not here yet. In the meantime, here is an RSS resource from Mashable. And, here is a link to a previous THINKing post, Top 16 RSS Links. And in the interest of balanced reporting, here’s some good email news.

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