Archive | October, 2010

The No-Strategy Strategy: A Strategy Guide for Bloggers

Today’s post is a guest post by my friend and SEO maverick, Phil Buckley.

Is it possible you’re spending too much time on strategy? I think it is.

If strategy is draining time, energy and resources from the actual doing, maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy strategy.

The idea of a no-strategy strategy popped into my brain while reading Any Jerk Can Be A Social Media Strategist.

If you’re a simple business, or a single blogger you should probably be spending more time on measuring your actions than on complicated strategy documents. My advice to anyone who is thinking about blogging is, START WRITING! That’s not a complicated strategy, in fact, it’s just the core action.

You run a business selling firewood, here’s your strategy - write about firewood. Done. You’re a mommy blogger, here’s your strategy - write about your life. You’re IBM or the Carolina Panthers, now you need a strategy. Rather than overthink your strategy, start doing the work. Start writing. Write something right now! If you can’t write this very second, make sure you make a date to write tonight.

Maybe you think that you’re a special case, and you really do need a specific strategy. That’s possible. Here’s a quick test to see if how much time you should be spending on strategy for you blog:

  • You have as many people subscribed to your blog as you have contacts in your phone. (1 minute)
  • You have posts waiting to be published in the future. (1 minute for each future post)
  • You have people contacting you about advertising on your site. (2 minutes per inquiry/month)
  • You are being asked to speak at local events. (3 minutes per engagement/month)
  • You are being offered money to speak at industry events. (5 minutes per engagement/month)
  • Your blog is main source of income (10 minutes)
  • Your business makes enough money to employ additional people. (30 minutes/employee)

Now add up the time from the list above. That’s how much time you should be spending on your strategy. Now get going bringing that strategy to life.

Phil Buckley is the Director of User Experience at Media Two Interactive, a media advertising agency specializing in digital and traditional planning, buying and design. He blogs at 1918.com on search social and web development. You can follow him on Twitter @1918.

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How to Engage Online
It’s all about the open body language…

How to Engage Online It’s all about the open body language…




How to Engage Online

It’s all about the open body language and friendly smile.

And not talking to people just to get them to buy stuff.

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Deep-Fried Triangle Tweetup Swag! Last night I attended the…




Deep-Fried Triangle Tweetup Swag!

Last night I attended the Deep-Fried Tweetup at the North Carolina State fair.  I don’t know who came up with the idea, but it’s better than a deep fried honeybun on a stick.

Not only do you get to meet a lot of fellow Twitter users in real life, people aren’t buried in their phone tweeting the event.  You get to actually talk to them and not ther face buried in a smartphone.  And they have free deep-fried food, including deep fried cookies.

They also give us a metric ton of swag. Watch the video and see how much stuff I got just for walking in the door.

Thanks to the North Carolina State Fair, Triangle Tweetup, and all the sponsors who make great events like this happen.  Not only did you get people off of their computers and meeting real people, you also managed to clog our arteries.

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Any Jerk Can be a Social Media Strategist

Any Jerk Can be a Social Media Strategist

In my ivory tower of social media criticism, I notice that social media practitioners rarely do everything they preach. I’m guilty of it. I follow more people than I can reasonably keep up with. I don’t engage and converse with the people I follow enough.  My content sometimes doesn’t provide any informative or entertainment value.

Anyone can be a social media strategist. If you’ve ever thought about how you will update Facebook for more than a minute, then you’re strategizing.  Welcome to the glamourous world of social media strategy.  Make sure you go get the uniform.  We can plan our next tweet while you put it on.

It’s easy to make a social media strategy.  The trouble is, some people are much better at it than others.  Whether that’s through innate talent and understanding of the human nature, or simply hard work, there is no requirement or certificate that confers any social media title on anyone (I’m looking at you, ninjas, gurus, and mavericks). There is no divine right to any title on the Internet. You earn the title by making content that kicks ass and then having your esteemed colleagues confer it onto you.

Any jerk with a dream and a Twitter account can be a social media strategist.  But without any serious thought, their strategy will be worth shit.  Don’t be a shitty social media strategist.  The good ones have enough crap to deal with already.

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The Anti-Social Media at ideaSPARK In case you missed it,…




The Anti-Social Media at ideaSPARK

In case you missed it, here’s my speech on why Facebook is evil from ideaSPARK/PechaKucha Raleigh.  Thanks to Carlee Mallard and the whole team of volunteers who helped make ideaSPARK such an awesome event. I had a lot of fun presenting this and putting it together, if only because I got to make fun of Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, I’m petty that way, but it feels so good.

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Everyone Predict Facebook’s Next Annoucement

Everyone Predict Facebook’s Next Annoucement

Facebook is hosting an event tomorrow. It’s curious they host it less than a week after The Social Network premiered, but there are about a hundred different things that could actually go down at this event, between recent rumors of a Facebook phone, Skype integration, or just making Facebook suck less. Still, they could also host a Salem-style witch trial of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher.

My best guess is something to do with Places from the words “check-in.”  But really, it could be anything that further develops the social layer they’ve added to our lives.

Are public burnings going to take place?  Less privacy for everyone?  Mark Zuckerberg giving us all Facebook stock? I want your best guess.

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The Social Network Movie Review

I saw The Social Network, aka the Facebook movie.

I love movies. I watch lots of movies, and I’m probably at a movie theater every other week. I love the way a story unfolds in a good movie and I love to make fun of a bad movie. I’m known among my friends for going out of my way to see bad movies just to make fun of them. The only thing worse than a bad movie is a mediocre movie because you can’t explain how horrible it was, and at the same time, you can’t rave about how good it is.

The Social Network is a terribly mediocre movie.

The plot was dull. Horribly dull. You know what’s going to happen because we all still use Facebook, and you can read all about Zuckerberg, Saverin, the Winklevosses and their settlements online. The way the story is told and because of history, you know Zuckerberg screws everyone over.  The rest of the movie is a bunch of college kids on Facebook.  Did you need to see a bunch of college kids get on Facebook?  Have you ever watched someone use a computer?  Trust me, it’s just as exciting to see on film as you’re imagining it is.

The characters are two dimensional at best. Zuckerberg just wants to screw everyone over and work on his ideas. Saverin is moneyed but incompetent.  The Winklevosses are rich, spoiled, giants. Sorkin’s dialogue is great, but there isn’t much in the movie to show these are real people with hopes, dreams, and desires besides making money off a website.

Compare The Social Network to Zodiac, Fincher’s other film based on a true story. Zodiac is the opposite of The Social Network because the characters come alive. In Zodiac, you have a story that was never solved, and you get the feeling of exploration, mystery, and fear that grips California in the 1960’s. With The Social Network, you know where things are right now. You know Facebook is still here, and that Mark Zuckerberg is rich as hell. There isn’t any type of adventure, and the drama of litigation between rich folks isn’t dramatic.

If you want a movie that will bring down Facebook, make people hate Mark Zuckerberg, and make people question what they do online, The Social Network isn’t that movie. It isn’t even interesting from a social media perspective, and it’s not a great movie.  I’m just hoping it doesn’t get a lot of Academy Award nominations, because if it does, I don’t want to know what Inception was.

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Social Media is Supposed to be Fun

Social Media is Supposed to be Fun

Once again, I’ve been feeling burned out from this blog for a while. Part of it is because I’ve been working on a large number of projects, and my commitments here take up a lot of my time. Other times, it’s just hard to keep up the anger and the frustrations when no real solutions are being proposed to fix Facebook’s privacy issues and to have people stop tweeting about how gross their coworkers are in the bathroom.

I’ve forgotten how to have fun with social media and how to make fun of social media.  When you are buried in articles and people who are obsessed with social media marketing, you forget about how average people use social media to communicate, to inform and complain. It’s not hard to disconnect from humanity when you spend an hour on Tweetdeck looking into the matrix of social media.

So, I’m going to spend more time writing articles that make me laugh and snicker. If you don’t like it, go read some other blog. There are more than enough “experts” for you to follow mindlessly.

Social media is fun. It’s not about connecting to people just so you can sell the latest piece of crap. It’s not about analyzing every minute change and how it will change everything. Get off your computer, enjoy life, and when you get on your computer, enjoy social media.

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