The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

Here’s a quandary: you have something valuable to say, you set up a blog and set about sharing your ruminations. The blog begins to attract visitors and subscribers but they trickle in at best. What do you do to attract a larger audience? Check out how other bloggers do it thats how! Here are some great success stories with vital tips you can take advantage of:
ProBlogger has a really detailed post from the writer of ThinkSimpleNow sharing the detailed strategies they used to go from zero to 2000 visitors in the space of 3 months.

Dosh Dosh celebrated 10,00 subscribers by sharing the reasons why people subscribe to that blog.

Entrepreneur Magazine featured an article from John Chow a local boy who makes huge amounts of money from his blog.

Out-Smarts has already started to implement some of the ideas these bloggers were kind enough to share and our visitor count has gone up by about 50% in just a few days. I guess the results speak for themselves.

Thanks guys!

Local new media aficionado and funny girl Monica Hamburg known for her hilarious “Your Dose of Lunacy” posts and the more serious “Me Like the Interweb” blog, wrote a great piece recently on Facebook for business. Here it is in it’s entirety - you can’t fail to learn from it:

Behold the Power of Facebook For Business

With Facebook’s more than 55 million active users, it would be a tragic oversight for a company not to have a public presence on the site in some capacity. Facebook offers more than a way to keep up with friends – it has the ability to keep you in touch with your clients, gain attention for your brand and provide a more personal face for your business.

The nature of Facebook is entirely viral, and users can garner information from their friends and their interactions. Facebook can be an unintrusive way of making people aware of your business.

Recently, the social networking website has allowed businesses to create profiles for free, and innovative companies are fast employing the tool. Kris Krug, President of Raincity Studios, added the “fan page” application for his company, commenting that such an option “means companies can have a place of their own in the FB empire allowing them to send out announcements to “fans” and build up yet another presence to promote their projects, give details and promote events.”

Mhairi Petrovic uses the profile page for her company, Out-Smarts, to “extend our brand reach and reinforce it. When people become a fan, our logo appears on their website and in turn is seen by more people. Having a page and encouraging fans to join establishes Out-Smart as an innovator in social marketing (one of the services we provide).”

Utilizing this particular tool to its full capacity is the Palo Alto restaurant, Junnoon,
whose page contains essential information such as hours of operation, payment options and parking and further entices customers by prominently displaying pictures of the interior of the establishment, the food and posting its culinary philosophy, accolades and reviews.
(more…)

Here for your Friday enjoyment is a funny little clip found on YouTube all about the social networking tech bubble.  Blog in the womb indeed!

Comscore today released their Widget Matrix results (yes widgets are officially important enough to justify a report all to themselves) ranking the web widget viewing audience. A widget just in case you’ve been living in a cave for a while is a little application embedded in a web site such as those fun applications that make your Facebook profile so distracting.

I was interested to see that the 2nd most popular Facebook app  was the Flixster Movies Widget an app (with over 5 million active users in the US) that allows you to share and rate your movie experiences with friends and strangers alike. This is a great example of how an organisation, with a little imagination and ingenuity can use Facebook applications to reach a wider audience and to reinforce its brand.

1. Use Twitter to market to you audience (assuming your audience are Twits that is (or should that be Tweets?). It can be used for branding and networking effectively. Dosh dosh lists 17 more Twitter marketing applications and innovative Tweet uses.

2. Participate in the blogosphere. Find blogs pertaining to your industry or your target audience and get commenting. You would be amazed at how this can help spread the word.

3. Find out about new technologies that make it easier for people to do business with you - like Skype - the on-line phone service or that help you present your offering more effectively - like Flickr the photo site -  and make full use of them on your website.

4. Get creative with video clips about your company: make them quirky, funny or alternative and post on YouTube. You never know, this could be the next big meme.

5. If your not comfortable with writing blog comments or posts or are camera shy, why not consider a Podcasting your message. Its much easier than you think.

6. When you find interesting articles, pages or clips, share them with your others in your field. I Stumble but hear that Magnolia and Deli.cio.us are great for this too.

7. Join Facebook, MySpace or Linked In (or all three) and get networking. You know the old adage about a friend of a friend being your friend too: its so much easier to do business with people you’ve been referred to by a friend or colleague.

8. Use Internet advertising technologies such as AdWords or Facebook Social to reach and promote to the right audience.

9. Forums or chat rooms where your audience collaborate are great ways to get involved, join the conversation and establish expertise with a wider audience.

10. Get wiki with it. Join Wikipedia and share your knowledge (but be careful not to be blatantly corporate or your posts will just get deleted) with the global audience.

At a session I attended this week at CES questions were posed of 4 panelists on the subject of taking the blogosphere seriously. The panelists consisted of industry experts including “rock star” blogger (the mediator’s title not mine) Ryan Block from Engadget. Here are a couple of the questions posed with my slant on the answers:

Who isn’t taking the blogosphere seriously? Answer - there are 70 million blogs out there and thousands more added daily if corporations aren’t taking it seriously then a heck of a big chunk of their client base is. Simply put there are people who get it and people who don’t. Those who do are reaping the rewards and those who don’t face extinction.

When asked how the panelists would approach convincing a CEO to blog, the general consensus seemed to be that if a company isn’t using the blogosphere (either to listen or to communicate) then they risk losing control of their brand completely.

Judging by the turnout at the session most CESers were more interested in gadgetry than the fine art of blogging - more fool them perhaps. For more ruminations from the panelists:Taking the Blogosphere Seriously, Consumer Generated Media, David La Plante, Really? This is my job.

The other day I posted the Facebook hoax Funwall message and wanted to follow up on the aftermath.  There’s been a lot of discussion about this hoax in the blogosphere and turns out that my mentioning it brought many new visitors to this blog (welcome!).  The message was indeed a hoax (as if that wasn’t obvious).  Apparently it was created by 2 girls with bad grammar  and nothing better to do with their time (get a life ladies).  There’s talk that they will be cast out of the network (Social Network purgatory if you will….).  But you have to give it to them for creating a viral meme.  Word of the hoax spread quickly and Facebook itself reacted on its blog by outlining how they communicate with users in the event that they need to do so.Here’s an excerpt:”We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:  

Since Facebook  is becoming the SN of choice for business users the prevalence of messages like these will simply put off this new audience so its good to see Facebook react proactively and professionally to counter.   

How to manage your Facebook friends is something everyone should consider when joining a social network. Marc Cuban the Blog Maverick and owner of the Dallas Mavericks had a good post last week pointing out how he adds Facebook friends. He gets almost 100 requests to add new “friends” daily and given the number of friends he has he recently hit the 5k friend limit and had to start weeding. Here is how he does it:

“The first layer has my real friends. Those people who who I have actually met in real life and who I enjoy keeping in touch with. FB provides a great way to keep up with things with them via pictures, notifications, etc.

The 2nd layer is people who I have tangential connections to. They may just live in Dallas Fort Worth. They may be self proclaimed Mavs or MMA or movie fans, or in groups I’m in. For whatever reason there is something about them that I could connect to.

The 3rd layer is emerging as a very unique and interesting network in FB. Its what I will call “The Power Layer.” These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. Having them as FB friends, although very simple and non committal, gives me some level of access to them, and them to me. These are people that if they sent me a FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same.”

I myself have different strategies for different social networks. I choose to network in Facebook and add friends only if they fall into the following criteria:

a) I know them in the real world (friends, colleagues, business associates, former co workers, school mates etc),

OR

b) They are people with a shared professional interest (in my case its Internet and Social Marketing).

By controlling the friends I add I can manage the feedback, network with a trusted community and avoid letting FB suck up too much of my time.

Now MySpace is another story altogether. You could say I am a MySpace slut: I’ll make friends with anyone (until they spam me at which point they are swiftly deleted)- but thats a story for another blog article on another day (and I have a business reason for doing so).

What is your Facebook friend strategy?

I recently received a Facebook Funwall post claiming to be from Mark Zukkerberg regarding the over population of Facebook. I thought I would forward it so you could get a good laugh at the grammatical errors and typos (its attached below). As my friend Jamie pointed out, Facebook has other ways to track whether you are using your profile regularly and this is probably a hoax to slow down the system not to mention that they “kindly ask for donations” - aye right! Here it is:

Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Always leading edge, Capulet Communications have done it again with the release of their new e-book Getting To First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. I found the link to this little gem in my inbox this morning and I am looking forward to some excellent holiday reading as it promises tactics to drive more traffic, increase on-line visibility and viral effect, develop blogger relationships and market your offering effectively on Facebook. I’m already looking forward to the full length book.