Jun 16 2010
Want a couple of simple tips to make your blog posts more social? I’ve been messing around with a couple of aggregation tools and I’ve discovered two quick ways to get your content in front of more eyeballs in the process. These techniques are simple and will help you to become more findable through some social channels – Twitter in particular. Continue reading “How To Instantly Make Your Blog Posts More “Social”” »
Jun 15 2010
These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Jessica RandazzaWhat Peter had to say about Jessica: “Jessica is smart, smart, smart. She’s very good at the Social Media world, getting great ideas and running with them.”
Jessica has traversed the United States and has settled recently in New York City. She attended the University of Alabama to study Public Relations and Advertising and graduated from the University of Alabama – Birmingham. She began her career in public relations with Publicis Consultants | PR in Seattle, focusing on food/nutrition and health/wellness accounts. Earlier this year, she moved to the East Coast to become a Senior Associate with Digitas, where she focuses on consumer accounts and agency strategy. She blogs at JessicaRandazza.com as well. Continue reading “Pay It Forward 2010 Profile: Jessica Randazza” »
Jun 08 2010
These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Daniel HonigmanWhat David had to say about Daniel: “Daniel previously worked at the Chicago Tribune activating “Colonel Tribune” as a character based of the Tribune’s history which gained a large following on Twitter. Since then, Daniel has [been]… doing some interesting work with storystreaming (telling stories through lifestreaming tools such as Posterous).”
Daniel attended SUNY Buffalo where he earned his undergraduate degree in Anthropology. He then attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and earned his Masters degree in Journalism. Daniel started his career in newspaper and was a Social Media Strategy Coordinator at the Chicago Tribune, and then the social media lead with Tribune Interactive. He eventually wound up working at Weber Shandwick as a Digital Communications Supervisor, and recently joined Sears Home Electronics as a Social Media Manager. He also blogs at Old Media New Tricks and the3six5 Project, with he runs in collaboration with Len Kendall.
What interested Daniel in social media: As a reporter, he saw how digital was becoming an important part of the mix. Daniel looks to brands like Zappos, which has created tons of supporters that go out and promote for the company. If the conversation is good on a site, people will go back several times per day to continue to engage in the discussions. He says that authentic conversation starts advocacy.
Some of Daniel’s thoughts on the importance of branding through social media: “In social media, there are a lot of people who understand the space but don’t have ‘tread on the tire’ when it comes to working with brand. It’s important to know how to brand yourself! Using social media with brands, facing real challenges; it’s exciting but difficult. You have to convince your clients as well as your company stakeholders of its importance. You can have the most impact by building up client relationships and coming up with solutions that make sense.”
Some of Daniel’s thoughts on journalism and social media: Daniel believes that it is important to look for different story-telling formats, but he also believes that the long-form article won’t disappear entirely – it has to exist. For example, he says to take a look at The New Yorker and The Atlantic – not all journalism can happen in 140 characters. Journalism is journalism – whether in 5,000 characters or in 140 characters.
Where Daniel sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months, Daniel thinks that lifestreaming will play a major role in the progression of social media. With this, he believes that Tumblr & Posterous will help people manage their social media presence. Using tools like these as ‘hub-and-spoke’ modeling for managing your social media presence can help to center your digital activities and give others a more aggregated view of your on- and offline activities.
Connect with Daniel on:
photo credit: Chris Brogan
Jun 01 2010
These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Len KendallWhat David had to say about Len: “I’ve worked with Len at Critical Mass but he’s already been developing a name for himself by being a prolific writer, commentator and participant in social media and communications. Len is very passionate about the space and no doubt will continue rising due to his persistence and the level of participation he puts out there.”
Len attended Purdue University where he studied Marketing and Sales. He says that studying sales was helpful in terms of learning how to network. He started his career with Starcom, a media communications agency, where he realized that digital was his passion. After spending two years with Starcom, he joined CriticalMass, a digital marketing agency. There he was involved in digital media buying/planning and started getting more involve with social media. He found that media buying/planning was valuable, but may not be leading the charge with social technologies and observed that PR was well positioned to lead the charge when it came to social media. Following his time with CriticalMass, Len freelanced for a bit, and through this work he was offered lots of professional guidance. Eventually, GolinHarris offered him a position and he currently works as an Account Supervisor with the Dialog Group there. His focus is on providing clients with expertise on digital and social media PR campaigns. In addition to his job, Len also spends time being creative via Posterous and the3six5 Project, which he runs in collaboration with Daniel Honigman
Some people who have inspired Len: David Armano was someone who inspired Len – in fact, he said that David is the reason he went to work at CriticalMass. He respected David’s work even though they didn’t work closely. They had a sort of “digital mentorship” relationship. Len also says he learns a lot from Tac Anderson, Digital Consulting Director at Waggener Edstrom, and Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer at Mullen. Of Boches, he says that there are a lot of the creative people in the business aren’t that much into social media, but he is.
What Len loves about social media: Len says that he likes to live a life of “micro empires”. He says that he gets bored doing just one thing so he enjoys having side projects that inspire him. Being a part of social media, he says there are many opportunities to be a “renaissance man”, which is part of what inspired him to start the3six5 Project with Daniel Honigman. The idea of this project was to have 365 people write a blog post every day of 2010. Each day, a different person posts an entry, so they’ll have a diary of the year written by each of these people. The project was born from the idea of lifestreaming – they want to stream the collective life of people from many different places, and social media has helped facilitate this.
Where Len sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months Len believes that social media will become a business priority for the Fortune 500. If a company has a customer service or PR division, then it will most assuredly have specific employees dedicated to social media. Additionally, Len believes that jobs involving social media will continue to be on the rise. If you look at job boards you will see that there are a lot of opportunities to work with big brands in the realm of social media right now. Agencies are growing social media business areas because that is where brands are in need of service.
Connect with Len on:
Apr 26 2010
With the availability of so much information these days via social media, I feel that if you’re not constantly putting yourself in front of your audiences, you take a chance on them forgetting about you. In about three weeks, I am doing a presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis on how recruiting professionals can do this without being annoying to their audiences.
Since I tend to be a bit of an over-sharer on Twitter, last week I decided to take the entire week off from tweeting via @researchgoddess, just to see what would happen. I also didn’t write any new blog posts.
My guess is that most of you did not notice, which is what I expected to happen. However, even though I wasn’t actively posting new content, I still gained a couple new Twitter followers, and my blog continued to be visited. The volume to my blog went down only slightly, and the search terms with which people found my blog were a little different:
2 weeks ago
last week
Twitter was a different story. I stopped tweeting on Sunday the 18th. Over the course of the week I had a total of only 13 tweets to me…a significant change. The first tweet to me wasn’t even until 3 days after I stopped. There were no tweets for previous blog posts or links that I had shared in the past. Only one person, @mosy311, made an observation that I hadn’t tweeted in awhile. I had 5,141 followers last Saturday, and as of Sunday evening, I had 5,143 followers. Over the course of the week I gained and lost quite a bit but I netted only 1 new follower. Basically – I was forgotten. I used Twitalyzer to check out some metrics over the course of the week:
My conclusion? The search-ability of my blog and the keywords I use on it kept it active and visited. The terms with which people found my blog changed, some for the better. (I love the fact that search for “AT&T sourcing” brought traffic to my blog!) Twitter however, appears to require more updating and attentive interaction in order to stay relevant. Even though search engines like Bing and Google now pick up tweets and other social traffic, it’s still important to be in front of your audience’s eyes and continue to update. I suspect that if I went another 1-2 weeks without blogging, these numbers would change and get lower. But it would seem that occasional neglect of a blog is less impactful to one’s online identity than neglect of your Twitter account – if you’ve got an established audience as I do.
One thing I did discover while being silent this week is that life DOES go on when you’re not twittering, and I enjoyed the break. But don’t be too sad – I am going to start tweeting again now!