THINKing

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 7/29/2008

Why Is Stuart Elliott Shilling On Facebook?

Hundreds Of Bloggers To Interact With On Digg, StumbleUpon

48 Cool Social Media Sites

Social Media Ad Spending Hasn’t Caught Up With Hype

Cuil Stumbles Out Of The Gate

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We’re YouTubing & Metacafe-ing Dog Gone It

My Creative Team has just finished production of a video for client, Pet Sitters International. It’s about what happens when you leave your dog with the neighbor’s kid instead of with a professional petsitter. The MetaCafe player is embedded above.

Please take a look at the spot on YouTube and let us know how you like it. Please help us spread the message by StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, whatever your social network of choice is.

We’re planning on alternate endings. More on that later…

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Connections Revisited

I asked what social networks you are a part of and several of you have waded in. Let’s see what’s working for our readers:

Ashleigh Hunter of Bank of America wrote:

I am a part of linkedin and facebook actively. I have an account on jigsaw but have not figured out how to effectively use it. I typically end up X-raying linkedin for the right folks as opposed to going through my network. This is the one I find the most useful.

Your PR Guy Blogger Rodger Johnson wrote:

I’m in 5 social networks: Facebook, Linkedin, MyRagan, Smaller Indiana, and Twitter. I’m finding that Facebook is meeting my business objectives the least — but connecting with other professionals has been more fruitful in MyRagan, SMIN, Linkedin and Twitter. I must say, however, Twitter is still new to me.

WebMarketCentral Blogger Tom Pick wrote:

About 40. For standard websites: StumbleUpon (by far – better than all others combined). Then, in order best to least, Bibsonomy, Mister Wong, BeeTooBee.com, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Netvous. For blogs: Technorati (again, by far — as valuable as the next four combined). Then, in descending order, StumbleUpon, Searchles, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Zimbio, IceRocket, BeeTooBee.com, Clipmarks and Sphinn

Social Media Explorer Blogger Jason Falls wrote.

I’m involved in too many to name, but because I’m supposed to know and understand them for my job. (Advising people on how to use them.) But I’m primarily active on the following, all of which have business implications: SocialMediaExplorer.com – My own blog and mini community, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Groups, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us.
A number of niche forums/message boards and communities connected to my clients (like RobbysUprising.com, a Ning community for fans of Robby Gordon, Jim Beam’s NASCAR driver.)

Blogger Joe Pulizzi wrote:

LinkedIn is most effective (outside of Junta42 of course). Other network I’m involved in is Facebook. I’ve tried others as experiments, but they are so unimportant at this point that I can’t remember the names.

Sandy Vasseur of Little Architecture wrote:
LinkedIn gives me the best opener a person can have, regardless of whether or not I am personally acquainted with someone. I can say, “We’re linked in via John Doe.” Or, “I’m two-times removed from you on LinkedIn.” Most of us are online for the same purpose, and those opening lines always get me a response.

Blogger Carter Langston, ABC wrote:
I incorporate LinkedIn as one element of my larger email database for my ‘connected’ networking. While I think I understand what you mean by ‘social,’ my offline social networking is much more extensive and diverse. Some very important people in my sphere of influence just aren’t part of the Internet Social Revolution, so my networking takes place online, offline, face-to-face, etc.  Within the greater LinkedIn population, there are sub-groups that I find personally beneficial. For instance, there is the ExecuNet Group, IABC Group, CEO Exchange and more that refine the target audience a bit.  In terms of business objectives: Have I received business directly from those in my network? No. But I interact with people, share information, help other professionals address their issues and concerns. In the process, I learn from others, sharpen my own counsel, build relationships and earn referrals.  In terms of sales objectives: There is nothing more effective than face-to-face networking and talking to people about meeting thei tangible business needs.

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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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Sharing With madKast

Have you noticed the little green “Share” icon that recently has popped up to the right of my blog headlines? That’s for a new service from madKast. I’m giving it a test drive to see if I like it better than the previous bookmarking widget I was using.

madKast has the added benefit of providing traffic-related stats. The widget hasn’t been installed long enough to provide much data. But here is our analytics page if you want to take a look.

madKast doesn’t currently offer StumbleUpon sharing, which I think is critical. I mentioned this to madKast’s Josh Larson and he says they are working on it. Why don’t you visit one of the posts here at THINKing and try the widget?

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StumbleUpon Two-Step

StumbleUpon can be an enormous traffic generator for bloggers and marketers. I use it all the time. And I just tested what I call the StumbleUpon Two-Step technique of driving traffic, and it also worked well to drive traffic. Let’s review how I did it.

Recently I launched a PRWEB release about Holiday For Charity. In the release, I had links back to my blog for additional details about the story. I used these tags in the release: holiday, charity, cause marketing, charitable giving, holiday for charity, holiday spending, donation, gift, ad agency, and pr firm.

A month after launching the release, I gave it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, placed it in the living category and used the cause marketing and charity tags. I had 118 – and still counting – visits referred by that Stumbled url. Based on my PRWEB statistics for the release, I had more than 200 visits from Stumblers on the day I thumbed it up. So, a very high percentage of visitors to the release made the leap to my blog, too.

I have some ideas to test that may bring even more traffic by the two-step method. Do you have any ideas on how to use this or other Stumble techniques? Post your thoughts.

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Social Media Corrupted

Social media is supposed to be democratic. You like something, you Stumble it or Digg it. But money always follows successful tactics. There is a site that pays you to Stumble and Digg links. Read more about it here. Social Media Corrupted

Thanks to Leonard Bartholomew for pointing me to this the old fashioned way, via StumbleUpon , with no payment expected.

Update: here’s a new post on the issue.

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Holiday For Charity Gains Traction

Our Holiday for Charity effort is gaining traction. Last week we mentioned it in our enewsletter, and we distributed a news release via PRWEB. If you visit our release, please feel free to share it through StumbleUpon or your other social networks.Additionally, I posted an article on social site, Gather.

The Publicity Hound featured us in its Help This Hound feature in both the newsletter and the blog.

A good story on charitable giving appeared on the highly trafficked Unclutterer blog and I posted a note there about the program.

Today, the Charlotte Business Journal mentioned our Holiday For Charity effort in its print and electronic editions. Other places we have found the story:

News.Bigg.Net

Newslife.us

If you like this holiday for charity idea, help spread the word. Use your social networks to  let others know. Use our embedded  social bookmarking feature beneath this posting, too. Thanks.

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