THINKing

Social Media Burnout

Whether you are using social media personally or for business, it can wear you out.  I don’t know if you have noticed it, but I’m detecting an upswing in social media fatigue (SMF) these days. Is it happening to you? Georgina Laidlaw at Gigaom has picked up on it.

From a personal perspective, social media is wearing on me because there seems to be an explosion in the number of networks available. Seems like every day someone is inviting me to join yet another one.  I’m involved in enough thank you very much, and I really don’t need more.

On the business side of the equation, I think organizations are beginning to realize that engagement is a lot harder than just placing an ad and responding to inquiries.

It’s a little slower way to build your business, too. Not that I think this is a bad thing. The business you get through social media is more likely to be the kind that lasts. Engagement forces you and the customer to determine ahead of time if your cultures are compatible. When I worked for a mid-sized ad agency, we knew that the relationship had about a two year window. Then, the honeymoon was over and it was time to date someone else.

No matter why you might find yourself suffering from SMF, there is one word you should remember: focus.

Select – and commit to – a handful of social media networks that work strategically for you and your organization. Don’t just add a network for a specific tactical function.  Then, work those strategically selected networks like a government mule and you will have success.

Are you suffering from SMF? Tell us about it, or check these related articles.

10 Tips For Managing Social Media Burnout

6 Ways To Overcome Social Media Burnout

Is Social Media Burnout Imminent? (video)

Why Social Media Is Like Going To The Gym

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Social Media Hub

We’re flattered to have been included as a featured blogger in the new social media hub, Social Media Informer. The site has just launched this week, and there is great content there from a diverse group of social media thought leaders.

Here’s what my pal, Tom Pick, at Webbiquity says about SMI,

SMI was developed by some of the same people as the popular B2B Marketing Zone b2b marketing portal. It also uses the same underlying Browse My Stuff technology, which enables publishers, PR agencies, corporations and other enterprises to build branded content aggregation hubs. For readers, SMI will aggregate high quality content; make it easy to navigate based on topic, source or date; and expose valuable niche content that might otherwise be overlooked.

This is going to be a great destination for people interested in high level social media thinking. So, check it out, soon.

Oh, and here are some of the other featured bloggers:

• Alex Blom
• Buzz Marketing for Technology
• Conversionation
• ConverStations
• Direct Marketing Observations
• FreshNetworks
• Idaconcpts
• Janet Fouts
• Kyle Lacy
• One Social Media
• Scott Gould
• Simon Mainwaring
• Socialized
• The Relationship Economy
• Webbiquity SMM
• WindMill Networking

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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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Top 19 Free Photo Sites For Bloggers

Our list of free photo resources has been a popular post since 2007. I noticed that one on the list had gone out of business and have found a few new ones. So, I wanted to bring you a new, improved list for 2010. Morguefile and Flickr Creative Commons are my favorites for truly free, not just royalty-free, images.

Please let me know if there are others you use that aren’t on our list.

MorgueFile

Flickr Creative Commons Service

Stock.Xchang

Image Base

Open Photo

FreeFoto

EveryStockPhoto

FreePhotosBank

Image After

Studio 25

Free Stock Photos

PD Photo

Free Images

Stock Vault

Free Digital Photos

Free Range Stock

Unprofound

Photo Rogue

Free Pixels

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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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How To Be A More Compelling Writer

We’re examining the ways to make your blog more compelling.  A number of Twitterati responded to my request for their ideas. The quality of writing was on their minds:

As we heard from Jim Dietzel, a Fortune 1000 blogger for Rubbermaid, “Hire a good writer. Seriously.”

Colleague Tom Pick of Webbiquity tells us we must do a better job in naming our posts, using compelling headlines like “Common Myths of…” or “Mistakes to Avoid in…”

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer thinks we need to consider the way we approach the content. He says to think like a movie trailer, not a journalist. Compelling content isn’t reporting. It’s entertaining.

If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.  Let’s address a few of these basic ideas that we have tackled here in THINKing previously.

Write Tight -  My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on. You don’t have to create an act of literature every time you sit down to write. But remember, as Jason Falls points out, simply reporting is not enough. Don’t edit out the entertainment while editing out the extraneous.

Tell Me A Story – Since the dawn of time mankind has been a sucker for a story. We may be wearing synthetics now instead of skins, but that one truth has not changed. Storytelling is a way to add some passion, interest and drama to your blogging.

Tell Me A Story About Me – Well, it’s all about me after all, isn’t it? Don’t tell a self-serving story. Tell one that speaks to the self-interest of the reader.

Get Active -  My lovely bride and mystery novelist par excellence, Terry Hoover, is the queen of the vivid verb. Peruse the first chapter of her book, Double Dead, to see what I mean.

Storystarters – Sometimes you are just stuck for an idea or an approach to a blog post.  Leap those obstacles with these methods.

Do you have some thoughts on compelling content? Well, what are you waiting for…tell us!

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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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Cap The Spill, Then We’ll Talk

You’ve probably read about BP’s so-called social media efforts to shape the conversation about the oil spill. It’s not just BP. The government keeps barring journalists from the area in what seems to be a move to downplay the spill. There is plenty of blame to go around in this debacle.Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has an interesting take on this topic, too.  Says Andy,

“Updates, Response, Statement, Briefing, Broadcast, Distribution, Push. Those are just some of the words that I found while looking around BP’s social media efforts for the Gulf oil spill. So, what’s missing? How about…Listening, Engaging, Discussing, Conversation, Dialog, Understanding.”

Listening would be a good step, but BP, if you really want to shape the conversation, fix the spill. Once that is done, I”ll be ready to “talk” with you through social media.

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Too Much Social, Not Enough Sales?

Is social media wearing you out and getting in the way of your real work? It’s not bad enough that you have to keep up with a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Youtube and maybe Plaxo, but every day I’m being asked to join yet another social network. There are hundreds of them, it seems. I’ve said no to Viadeo, no to Friendster, no to MySpace, and by-bye to Goodreads.

How many social networks is too many to handle? As in every other facet of business, I believe focus is the answer. Pick three to four that make sense for you and your organization and do them right.

If you are spending all of your time blogging, Twittering, adding posts on your company Facebook page, when are you going to have time to keep the business afloat? After all, the first rule of business is to stay in business. To do this, you must make money.

How many networks are you trying to keep afloat? Have you jettisoned any? Which ones? What is working – or not working – for you?

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