SpaceRace

Grab your monocles and rubber thimbles, friends, because it’s time to announce the SpaceRace 2011 Reading List.
We’ve carefully selected some top notch titles to work through this year. Some are brand new. Others are a little longer in the tooth, but all promise to bring insight to your marketing and communications practice.
Since we’re so fond of reading around here, we’ve decided to host a monthly SpaceReads on our UStream channel. It’s free to join, and you don’t even have to have read the book to participate. We’ll also look at the auxiliary materials developed to go with each book, including companion sites, video, and other related content. For each title, we’ll try to draw out 5 critical insights for discussion. We’ll post them ahead of time and during the live chat.

SpaceReads will happen on the last Monday of every month.

So without further ado, here are the selections (so far) for 2011:

January: Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives – Christakis and Fowler

February: Macrowikinomics – Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams

March: What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly

April: Real Time Marketing and PR – David Meerman Scott

May: Designing for the Social Web – Joshua Porter

June – December: TBA (suggestions welcome)

I hope you’ll join us for a rousing knees up at 8 pm MST on January 31, 2011. Pants optional. Helmets mandatory.

Influence is the conversation of the day, my friends: who’s got it, who needs it, and what numbers such as a Klout score actually mean. We can’t resist knowing how we rate.

Technology gives us access to many more friends of friends of friends, but I’m not convinced that these linkages provide the strong and trusted connections and relationships that really lead to authentic influence. Isn’t it just simply that people like to do business (and other transactions that are just as important) with people that they like and trust? Companies would do well to map their social networks and identify these “liked” and trusted relationships (all the way down the ladder) rather than blasting meaningless messaging. Instead of diluting the true potential of the Web.

This article from Mashable on how marketing threatens the social web resonated with me this week. Read it and tell me how your organization connects, collaborates, and creates positive social action. If it does any of these things, the social network will be sufficiently “influenced” and will share your message throughout their networks. And probably to Kevin Bacon too.

The Klout Army and it’s ilk distract us (and businesses) from stepping up and making a real difference using the tools available.

From Christakis and Fowler’s Connected:
” …the spread of influence in social networks obeys the Three Degrees of Influence Rule. Everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). Our influence gradually dissipates and ceases to have a noticeable effect on people beyond the social frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. Likewise, we are influenced by friends within three degrees but generally not by those beyond.”

(BTW – it’s a GREAT book, and will be reviewed shortly in our SpaceRace 2011 Reading List.)

The SpaceRace vibes were streaming through the airwaves today. You might have noticed that the wind changed, or that your hair stood up for a few minutes. Don’t worry. Don’t hide under your desk. It was only me, in an interview with CJAM-FM‘s Cameron Wells.
Cam’s weekly show, Handilinks, focuses on disability issues, and features interviews with a variety of people involved in advocacy, support, and community initiatives. Cam and I had a chat about the amazing Totally ADD. I’m very proud to be their Community Manager, a role that involves managing the website, connecting with the ADHD community, and performing all of the social media management, execution, and point of contact for the entire online space. Yep, the whole internet. Did someone say ADD?
Totally ADD is in the midst of a pledge drive on over 80 PBS stations in the US. Their award-winning documentary, ADD & Loving It?! is screening in living rooms all over the continent, and it’s an absolutely crazy time for the entire team. The volume of incoming email has easily tripled, and our Facebook page is buzzin’ like Studio 54, and Twitter? Well, let’s just say that that particular birdie is definitely not flying south for the winter. Because of our success, the essential services that a Community Manager provides have become that much more essential. People are reaching out to us through channels not previously available, and we (I) have to be there to intercept problems, concerns, kudos, and opportunities to make connections. It’s a great problem to have, but it does underline the importance of flexibility, access, and patience. In good times and in bad, it’s not a role for the energy deficient. We’re about to hit 10,000 members. What a ride!
Here’s the interview. I hope you enjoy it.

Congratulations! You’ve wheedled and schmoozed your way through the mire of convincing your CEO, Executive Director, or Honcho of Another Official Stripe to launch a blog on your dazzling new, 2.0 enabled website. Or maybe you’re the Honcho, and you have realized that blogging is a great way to increase awareness about your company/initiative/life’s work and connect with your audience. Great job – you’ve come to the right place! With some careful and deliberate planning and consideration, the corporate blog can be a place of content worth sharing. Here are some tips on how to make it so.

1. Identify a coach. Somewhere within your organization is a person who reads blogs. Who blogs themselves. Who knows a little bit about the blogging process. This person can help you. Find them. Whether it’s by providing motivation, giving quick editorial feedback, feeding and checking links, or just showing up on “post day” with a helium balloon, the blog coach can be an essential tool in getting thoughts posted.

2. Commit. That means signing off, in blood, to the promise that your new blog won’t wither on the vine within 3 weeks, or 3 months. You’re in it for the long haul, and blogging needs to be seen as another product or extension of your products.

3. Plan an editorial calendar with natural opportunities to share information. There are several editorial calendar plug-ins with which to augment the back end of your site. A calendar can be an effective tool for planning posts aligning with strategic activities and events, planned press releases, or reactions to industry news. If a plug-in is too fancy, then get thyself to Google Calendar and plot it out there.

4. Comments are good. You might never get a comment, and that might be because your content is boring. It also might be because your readership are lower on the Ladder of Engagement than in other sectors. And it might be because you aren’t asking questions that readers can respond to. Don’t sweat it. Use the challenge as an opportunity to tweak your writing. Try new things. Increase the amount of links in your posts. And if all else fails (and it will unless you do this) – start commenting on other people’s blogs. Quid pro quo. But please, please, do not make visitors who want to comment go through an extensive registration process. Remove the barriers, and people will share.

5. Get up close and personal. Be yourself. Develop your voice.

6. Use the discovery process. If you’re the author of the blog, have your “coach” interview you. An interview is a great way to draw out motivations, inspirations, and opinions that can translate to an engaging read for site visitors.

7. Integrate in other conversations and channels. In order to be read, you must be found. A blog is not an island, and selective integration with other social media channels is paramount to drawing traffic and inserting yourself into the world of online conversations. Ensure that your posts are tweeted (and Twitter is a whole other essential ballgame). Link your blog to relevant industry directories. Mention it on your company or organization’s home page, and certainly in your newsletter and any other communications. Have your coach ensure that relevant keywords are tagged, and that includes images. Link those to a Flickr account that links back to your blog.

8. Interview someone else. Struggling to come up with content and ideas to blog about? Interviewing someone else in your industry is a great way to share knowledge and extend relationships. Is there a leader in your organization who deserves to have their story shared? An employee who’s done something amazing? An interview post can be short and sweet, and rewarding to everyone involved.

9. Edit with kindness. This one’s for you, coach. Remember that we’re striving for an authentic voice, not an overly sanitized sales pitch. Don’t let the copy editors loose. Copy editors are lovely, smashing people, but over-editing a post will destroy any sense of the authentic, natural flow that makes a blog a blog.

10. Make it fun. Blogging should be an expressive act that happens to be good for business. As soon as it becomes a slog, the quality of the posts diminishes, the time between posts increases, and eventually your blog rests in the Graveyard of Abandoned Corporate Communications.

11. Use Evernote to catch and catalog inspiration. Evernote lets you capture content you find online, and save it for when you need it. It’s great for remembering things that might inspire a post of your own, including photos, text, videos, and sites. It’s free, so you have no excuse not to try it. Filing cabinet, be damned. The 21st century is here and you can save it all! Whee!

Got additional tips and experience to share? Here’s the place!

I was shown a potential affiliate site for an advertising campaign. They claim that a huge number of our “target” market visits their site every month. *cough*

I took a wander through the “community”. All of the video content came from one advertiser. There might have been 6 videos, all introducing the staff of the advertiser. All from the same company.

Hmm, I thought, why didn’t they post this on their own website?

The other content was of the extremely thinly veiled sponsored type. And to make things worse, it appeared that the publication had only managed to sell this coveted space to two or three businesses.
And to make things even worse, the content stunk. Stank?
A gigantic number of our target audience are frequent frequenters of this site? Really?
And best of all, the publication would send out an email BLAST to this audience (on our thinly veiled behalf).

I capitalized the word BLAST because that’s exactly how I view this type of spam. Like people who capitalize their online communications for effect, email blasts, in my mind, are obnoxious, abusive, and scream-y. Stop yelling, eh.

In other, related news, I unsubscribed from a whole lotta junk this week. Community initiatives that sounded good at the time, but revealed themselves to be BLASTERS of the same, boring, market-y sponsored content. Sure, they’d promised to be my “one stop shop” for resources and information, but most of them could only manage to rope together a boring, amateur list of links (back to their site, of course) with stuff I couldn’t read/open on my cursed Blackberry (always on me though, BTW) to product promotions and testimonials that the sponsoring companies had obviously paid for. Yeah, we know that customers didn’t write those.

I don’t believe that email marketing is dead. I just get a lot of it, and as an informed consumer, I’ve learned to separate the shit from the champagne. Same with “community” websites that are really little more than a community of desperate advertisers. For parents, for athletes, for readers, for teachers, for rich stay-at-home Pilates mums, for web designers. When someone trusts you with their email address, you must take that trust and vow to not throw poop at them. Step up your content, people, or don’t be surprised when the punters run, en masse, holding their noses.

To end on a positive note – I came across some excellent content-based campaigns this week. Here they are:

Hunter Shoots A Bear, NSFW from the makers of Tippex.

How to Build Your Workday around Focus from the fine folks at Lifehacker. Yep, they’re helping sell a book, but the content is juicy and fresh-smelling.

How to Leverage Social Media for PR Success from Hubspot, who are selling their service, but always give great content.