Month: January 2011

Social Media, Sleeping, and my Daughters

Social media truly never does sleep but what I find is that social media is very reactive. You have to put out to get back so at some point, usually late at night, you simply have to put a hard stop in place. That is hard for me since I am a content producer on Twitter and since I think in 140 characters naturally I am always spitting out content. Since I have come to realize that I can survive on 4 hours sleep for many nights in a row, but anything less than that does not work, I know I cannot carve anymore time out of the day, so 2am is usually my hard stop when I find myself going overboard.

Order and consistency is all in how you perceive what you are doing and how you maintain your connection to what is important. My personal brand, and who I am, is all about being responsive and creating trust and relationships. So I find the social media world, and all the connectivity it affords, a perfect medium for maintaining connection and consistency.

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Gratitude fuels community

 

Please DON’T buy that next book on “How to build a community,” or that yet-another-book on “Joining the conversation.” Here’s something you can do right now, right where you are, and you don’t even need a book to show you how: when that next person walks into your office, calls you on the phone, or sends you an email, stop to seriously ponder the question…

“Why am I glad this person is on the planet?”
When you have the answer to that question, take it from your mind, put it into words, and give those words to that person.

If you make a habit of focusing on things for which you’re grateful and then make it a habit of expressing that gratitude through every available media (and especially face-to-face), you’ll build that community you seek. And, hey, even if you don’t built a huge community, guess what? You’ll be grateful for the community you do have.

You might just be amazed what a lot of gratitude and a small community can do together.

Gratitude fuels community.

Trey Pennington

Need New Product Success? Get Hipsters and a Revolving Door

OK, so you’ve got this product that you need to market, so that it’s ‘cool’, so that it takes off like all those other hip items that you just had to have, the iPad, iPod, tablet, etc..  I mean look at the iPod, it’s just a music player, yet for a time everybody had to have one, it became de rigueur to the max. And then you look at that Steve Jobs fellow and you think, yeah he’s got it. Went up against the might of Microsoft with a closed operating system, with a box that continues to be twice as expensive as anything else and yet he’s making a killing.

So you’re looking at your marketing guys and you’re thinking, maybe I should dress them up in some naff looking skivvy or polo neck jumper (in black, of course) like Jobs. But you know that won’t work. So, you realize you need to hire someone a little different, someone with an edge, someone like…an authentic hipster  – to infuse a counter culture in your marketing department.

Here’s the first lesson of being hip, or a hipster if you must: it means going against the current trend, it means being self-consciously anti- whatever it is that’s happening.

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Brand Survival for 2011: The socially-focused organization

It’s a whole new year – literally and figuratively.

Social media is quickly changing the way we need to think about our brands and marketing.  We can no longer expect to be successful if we just focus our marketing efforts on telling our target market how great our own brand is.  What we – the brand – say about ourselves is no longer what matters.  It’s what OTHER people say about our brand and their experience of our brand.

Brands have a challenge having effective external conversations with consumers and then truly activating them as Advocates unless they evolve internally into a socially-focused organization.

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What’s the Return on You? Seven Services with No Price Tag

What’s the Return on You? For professional service providers, it’s imperative to speak the language of numbers to the accountants and business managers that run corporations. Many CFOs question the value of public relations, the power of a brand name, or the role of reputation management. They want to know one thing: Return on Investment.

Wired for hard costs—building and energy bills, employee health insurance, computer fees—investments in soft skills and sustaining customer relationships are difficult for them to quantify. It’s even more challenging when we add social media into the service mix. Tweeting and blogging as marketing? That’s why in every client pitch, we prepare for the CFOs in the room. As we passionately show our creative skills and share our success stories, we are careful to include real costs and deliverables.

As a business owner and the payer of our firm’s fixed costs, I understand that language. Our team knows that “Every day we wake up unemployed.” Giving 110% to every project and every client reminds us that in addition to a client expecting significant Return on Investment, they deserve significant R.O.Y.—Return on You.

Just what do we sell and what do we freely give?

Here are seven services that have no price tag, but help create long-term client relationships and significant R.O.Y.

1. Loyalty and protection.


In the 1954 TV series Lassie, a collie dog plays with and guards young Timmy night and day. His loyalty is palpable. Lassie barks when he senses impending trouble, protects Timmy from harm, and intuitively runs for help when needed. A loyal PR firm protects its clients’ trade secrets and seeks their best interests in every interaction.

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The Power of YES

I love anticipating the smell of the Thanksgiving turkey roasting all day at home, and the lingering scent it leaves behind for a few days until my 14′ douglas fir arrives.  (Even though I’m allergic to the tree, the beauty of its’ fullness and soft evergreen needles keeps me coming back.  My husband and grandson say no more 200 lb. trees are coming in the house; we’ll see….) 

This year, my side of the family gathered at Bricker’s Pizza in Hershey for Thanksgiving; my nephew, Robbie, has worked there part-time since his college days.  Since his girlfriend’s family and our whole family convened to celebrate the holiday, we needed someplace to meet that could accommodate all of us.  Even though he’s now finished graduate school and works as a civil engineer, he still loves filling in at the pizza shop when they need help.  His gal, Lauren, is a senior at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; they’ve been dating since January, thanks to his aunt Jenny (who set them up on a blind date then). 

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What’s Here? Announcing Mass Relevance!

For the last couple years I’ve thought a lot about where user generated and social content are going. It’s valuable, but growing exponentially, more of it is real-time, and there’s a difficult-to-manage fragmention of customer experiences.

I’m excited to announce a company my co-founders and I have formed to go after a big market problem. Today we announced the launch and funding of my new company, Mass Relevance, co-founded with Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao. You can see early coverage at the Statesman, AustinStartup (more full story here) and TechCrunch. I foreshadowed this announcement with a market thesis post I just wrote, and the point that there’s a big content gap in the market.

Chloe Sladden on how Twitter and TV work well together
Also, there was a serendipitously-timed cover story in Fast Company on Twitter and TV that is at the bullseye of what Mass Relevance is doing, specifically serving entertainment and media. And you can see this blog post by Brian on how Twitter (and our product, TweetRiver) can help rescue live TV.

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