Chris Brogan is on a Roll

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Social Media rock star, Chris Brogan, is on a roll with his blog posts these days.

Yesterday he posted links to ten posts representing his Best Advice About Social Media.

Then today he followed it up with his Best Advice About Blogging.

If you aren’t familiar with Chris’ blog, you should definately check it out. Subsribe to his RSS feed.

Chris Brogan has his finger on the pulse of the social media world. And one of the things I like most about Chris is that he doesn’t have a huge ego about it, either.

He is very open about what he knows. And he tends to ask as many (or even more) questions than he answers.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with both Chris Brogan (and Chris Garrett) at SOBCon this past spring. They are two of the most genuine folks around.

And I made sure we got a photo of the three of us, well, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Sure it was a Chris thing. Maybe you wouldn’t understand.

Delicious Gets a New Look and a New Domain

One of my favorite social media sites, the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, got a major overhaul about a week ago. Not only did the site get a whole new look, but they’ve cast off their strangely unique domain name for a more conventional one.

Delicious Bookmarks

If somehow you aren’t familiar with Delicious then you are missing out.

Back in the day the only way we had to save a link to a web page we wanted to be able to referr to down the road was to “Add to Favorites” in our browser. Trouble is that method quickly became unwieldy.

With the hierarchical organization of most browser favorites folder lists it grew harder and harder to keep bookmarks organized in a way you could find the page you wanted when you wanted it. Browser favorite lists weren’t searchable.

Then along came Del.icio.us with their funny domain name. With Del.icio.us you can save as many bookmarks as you wanted. They are searchable. And because you can add a few tags to each bookmark to make them even easier to find.

Very nice. Read more

KnowMoreMedia - Demise of a Blog Network

This has been a sad week for the blogging world. KnowMoreMedia, a major blog network with over 100 blogs focused on the business world, effectively went out of business as of Thursday.

Well, they laid off all their employees anyway. I suppose technically that’s not exactly the same thing as going out of business.

But it might as well be for the folks who are no longer being paid.

Postmortem

I can’t imagine autopsies being fun.  Nor do I understand we’re so prone to slow way down when passing a highway accident to be sure we get a good look.

Yet we do slow down to get that good look. And I can’t help asking some questions as I look at the apparent downfall of one of the larger niche blogging networks out there.

And as an aside let me say that I completely admire what KnowMoreMedia did for blogging as a medium and for bloggers individually. I consider Easton Ellsworth, their now former Senior Editor and longtime author of BusinessBlogWire, a good friend.

I take no pleasure in their demise. But I do have lots of questions. Read more

Sunday Morning Goodness - July 6 2008

This week I’m bringing back our Sunday Morning Goodness feature that’s been on hiatus for nearly a year.

You see there is so much good stuff being published out there. And some of the things I find in my feed reader are simply worth sharing.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee, click through the links and enjoy your a great start to your Sunday.

Let’s start with a quote from an author who never fails to amuse me, Douglas Adams.

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

Now on to some good blog postage…

• If you’re having trouble getting your blogging groove on check out Chris Brogan’s Sample Blogging Workflow. Not only does Chris address some good blogging strategy ideas, but he then goes on to share some critical tasks, and some tools to make blogging easier. Then he ends with some ways to get your creative juices flowing when you run short of post ideas.
• David Bullock give us a social media explanation using a senator, Twitter & you. David takes a look at how the radically different approaches of the Obama and Clinton campaigns towards social media in general, and Twitter in particular, produced an Obama victory. David’s spot on. Back in February I pionted out that Hillary’s approach to social media killed her campaign not realizing then that she’d hang on as long as she eventually did. Wonder if things might have gone differently for her if she’d changed strategies then?
• Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, takes it offline for a bit analog advice with some great tips on How to Stop Junk Mail. Tired of a mail box stuffed  full of unwanted catalogs, direct mail pieces, and a flood of credit card offers? Matt gives has some great suggestions on how you can some headway towards reducing the junk.
• Finally there’s a fun post from Christine Kane called 22 Sparkly Ways to Shine Your Inner Bling. I had to include this one because the dog photo made Goregous laugh out loud when she read the post. (Click through and you’ll see what I mean.) And despite the, um, less than manly sounding title, there’s some good advice in there from Christine for all of us.

Have a wonderful Sunday. Enjoy!

Photo Credit: Konaboy

2008 Age of Conversation Author List Finalized

Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton have finalized the list of contributing authors for the 2008 edition of the Age of Conversation. Natural attrition pared down the original list of 275 to 237 finalists. And the list reads like a who’s who of the blogging, social media and online marketing realm.

This means the book is one step closer to final publication, currently slated for later this summer. In the meantime I can offer you a sneek peek inside.

Check out some of these blogs from the list below. Be sure to subscribe to the any that strike your fancy. Read more

Organize Your Internet with SecondBrain

With the wealth of social media sites that are coming available to us these days, services that help us organize all that information are going to become more and more valuable. SecondBrain is striving to become the premier service in that department.

Easy Sign Up

Getting started with SecondBrain is a snap. Simply go to the site and select your user name. For example I chose ChrisCree which created my SecondBrain URL of http://ChrisCree.secondbrain.com - easy as typing.

Then just set your password and you can start filling your SecondBrain with content. Right now there are 19 different social media sites that you can dump into your account.

Lars told me this morning that they are working on adding more including the ability to add general RSS feeds like, say, from your blog. He expects they’ll have that functionality in the next month or so.

In addition to the “automatic” content you are free to manual post info and links to your SecondBrain. They even have a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your browser to add sites as you are cruising the web. Once the bookmarklet is installed you can save info to your account that you want to save with just two clicks of the mouse. Very handy. Read more

Sneek Peek Inside the Age Of Conversation

In addition to preparing to give a social media talk last week I had to get my chapter in this year’s Age Of Conversation by the Thursday deadline. As I posted a while back, the overarching topic this year is “Why don’t people get it?”

I’m still going to leave it as a surprise as to which of the topic areas inside the main theme that I chose because, well because I’m sneaky that way sometimes.

I will however give you a taste of what I wrote in the exactly 400 words that I submitted. (That was our targeted word count for submission. I love it when a plan comes together!)

…“Don’t ask them to pimp your stuff,” I explain, “especially before you’ve established a relationship with them.” I am approached multiple times a week with requests to promote other folk’s stuff on my blog…

And if you’d like to find out what some of the nearly 300 contributers have to say about the project, just check out the Google Blog Search for “Age of Conversation”.

I’ll be sure to give y’all a shout when the book is released.

Presentation - Blogging and Social Media in Your Business

This past week I gave a presentation on Blogging and Social Media in Your Business to a local group of 60+ entrepreneurs. The talk was sponsored by the ATDC and the Creative Coast here in Savannah.

The talk was designed as an introductory talk for business people who didn’t yet have an understanding of what blogging and social media is all about. Because most of the people in the room were not much beyond the “we’ve hear the terms” phase it meant I had to cram a ton of information into the 30 minutes I was given. (For some reason when preparing I thought I had 45 minutes plus 15 minutes question time not 30/15. Oops.)

I told the folks to buckle their seat belts and hold on ’cause I threw a bunch of information at them very fast.

My hope was that everyone would find at least one nugget to walk away with that they could take back to their own businesses and get thinking about the possibilities.

Here are the slides I presented for any who are interested.

Enjoy!

Definition of Social Media

I’m putting the finishing touches on a presentation I’m giving tomorrow to a group of local entrepreneurs. The subject is Blogging and Social Media in Your Business.

As I was putting it together I discovered that there still isn’t a definition of social media that really hits the mark out there yet. Robert Scoble started a big discussion about the term over a year ago. That post has over 100 comments with all kinds of opinions on the subject.

Wikipedia is often the go-to reference source online these days, and it happens to be a social media site itself. However the Wikipedia definition comes of sounding a bit lofty and I get the feeling that when the average person reads through those two sentences walks away thinking, “Great. But what does that mean?”

Most of the rest of the definitions out there seem to be by marketing types who get fixated on the various tools and technology. The best definition I found was by Isabel Walcott Hilborn. But hers is still missing a piece of the puzzle from my perspective.

Social Media Definition

Here is what I came up with.

Social Media

Communication formats publishing user generated content that allow some level of user interaction.

It is the ability for users to interact with one another over and above their ability to generate content that really makes a media form “social” in my book. And that component has so far been missing from the definitions floating around out there.

Social media seems to pretty much be confined to the internet at this point. I’m not convinced that will necessarily always be the case. It is entirely possible that some new form of technology might be created that allow social media in other realms.

What are your thoughts on social media?

Is that a workable definition or does it still need more work?

But is Twitter Useful?

One of the people that Gorgeous and I connected with in Chicago this past weekend was Christine Kane. It probably didn’t hurt that the three of us were all seated in close proximity to a very wild and obnoxious three year old on the same flight into Chicago. That got diverted to Columbus for more fuel after holding too long for bad weather.

But that’s a story for another time.

I also had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as Christine at the conference. As speakers like Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, and Terry Starbucker were talking about the people in the room who were using Twitter to communicate with one another (and with folks half a world away) during the conference, Christine would ask the rest of us questions on the side.

They ranged from the basic to the technical, for example…

• What’s the point? to interact with others
• Why would you bother? because I like people
• Can everyone see what I tweet @ someone? Oh, yeah
• How does the direct message thing work? “d your_friends_twittername” and they’ll get a private message

Read more

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