Yesterday, I wrote about Stevel Rubel’s presentation at the New Media Academic Summit. He mentioned that they published a paper “chock full of with actionable insights for businesses”. You can directly download the PDF. 

I found particularly useful a list of 10 conversations for companies to monitor and I’ve added some of my own thoughts.

It’s very easy with current technology to set up automatic alerts to track mentions of your company’s brand name, website and key personnel (we’ll show you tomorrow how to set up a Google Alert) - but the paper suggests this is not enough, you need to be looking for particular conversations and you should be treating different types of conversations differently. Some of these conversations may never even mention your brand (at least at first).

1. The Point of Need: If you can meet people at their point of need, you are not interrupting or pitching, you are helping and responding to an expressed need

This is often why Google Adwords is so successful with certain search keywords. People are looking to solve a problem at that particular point in time so they are far more receptive to advertisements that fit exactly with their need. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Rubel has a great blog called Micro Persuasion (it’s well worth sticking on your reading list for his interesting and insightful comments). He works for a firm called Edelman and they along with PR Week hosted the New Media Academic Summit 2008.

From the Summit, he sums up what he sees as the Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing and identifies three main trends:

The Attention Crash
People have access to increasing amounts of information with only a finite amounts of time - not even including any increases in work and stress levels, it’s clear to see that Attention is a commodity that will only become more precious. Time is not free. Marketing needs to be able to

“break through the clutter and ’stick’… keep things short, simple and visual.”

A secondary industry that is already developing due to information overload is that of discerning gatekeepers whom Rubel calls “curators”. They sort the wheat from the chaff (i.e., like services like Digg). There’s another level of curators who go further and deliver it to us as bread (i.e., the NY Times or Wikipedia - they summarise all the information into something easy to consume and digest).

Social Networks Become “Like Air”

Basically, online social networking is not as new as many marketers would have us believe:

It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes…

Social networking software facilitates things that people want to do in areas they care about.  

Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.

Remember that the Attention Crash will mean that a whole lot of noise also comes from social networks and people are likely to ignore or abandon those networks that aren’t fulfilling their needs as they just add to the Information Clutter.

Google: The Reputation Engine

We should already be aware of the importance of search (and Google’s importance in search). Well that’s only going to grow as the Attention deficit increases (why take the time to do more than a Google search if you get good results?). Search is no longer search, it’s media (and indeed, Google is already a leading publisher of media with its acquisitions of YouTube and Blogger)

The search engine algorithms are only going to get better at determining what is quality content and this will reinforce the trust people already have in search engines.

Communicators will need to know how to create and earn content that is not only findable, but worthy of discussion so that it earns and maintains visibility in Google - which often makes judgments based on quality.

No arguments here! Often in internet marketing, there’s a lot of talk about how to game the system, how to easily acquire higher rankings quickly. While I’m all for optimisation and marketing strategies - in the end, your website needs to have real value on it or you’re working on borrowed time. Google will catch up and deliver its dreaded Google slap. Your content needs to contribute to the conversation.

What can you do?

It’s often said that the only thing you can predict is change, but Charlene Li (Rubel’s co-panellist at the Summit) has a few tips in her post The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air:

So what is a social network, marketer, or developer to do? Here are my recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually-controlled identity federation
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock-in
• Develop social applications that have meaning
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social network

I’m amazed at the number of social networking services that have popped up that appear merely to try and get a particular demographic into a (their) social network without offering that demographic anything that’s really useful.  Determine your target audience’s needs and mindset - look at what they are currently doing and see how you can create a service that can facilitate them doing it better. Don’t expect them to suddenly want to do something new because it’s got the “social networking” label attached to it.

Oosah allows you upload and store up to 1TB of photos, video and audio files - but not documents . That’s practically a thousand gigabytes!

But what’s very cool is that it allows you to link a variety of social networking and media accounts like your YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook accounts so that you automatically pull media from each of your accounts and using drag and drop share them with other accounts. So you can upload a photo and just drag it into your Facebook photo album or vice versa. They are currently working to add MySpace into the mix.

For those who have iPhones, there’s also a special iPhone edition (though remember not to go over your iPhone data caps or else “free” can become very expensive quickly).

(via Lifehacker)

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

~ Henry Ford

It’s easy to make promises - what counts is your ability to follow through and turn those words into actions. You’d be surprised how few people do indeed do. The mere act of getting out there and really trying something (with “umph” remember!) will easily put you in the top 10% (if not more) of everyone else out there.

We try to keep Sundays dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul).

My previous choice of computer wallpaper was cute but hardly inspiring. Then saw this amazing picture of a sunset on someone’s desktop (if you like his set up - there are instructions but do need some geek skills). As soon as I saw the image, it made me feel both rested and excited at the same time.

I realised that because I had so much clutter on my computer’s desktop, I was just plain avoiding it because every time I saw it, I just had this awful sinking feeling. Because I couldn’t always avoid it, I was guaranteed to feel defeated several times a day even if this was all happening subconsciously. It’s obvious to see the problems mess on our real life desks can create but I think we can easily forget the effect virtual clutter has on our productivity.

So I decided to give my computer’s desktop a spring clean to get rid of the clutter and I also wanted to see if changing the desktop image would have an effect.

I got rid of all my non essential program icons and I cleared the backlog of downloaded files and documents that had covered almost all of my desktop. I made sure that I only had links to documents that are current key priorities and a few everyday folders that I need quick access to.

I tell you what, it makes a huge difference. To paraphrase an old saying: Clean Desktop, Clean Mind. 

I’ve put reviewing and clearing my computer’s desktop clutter as part of my weekly review. And you know, because I love the image, I’m motivated to regularly clear the clutter that builds up.

I now no longer avoid going to my desktop and when I see it, it instantly fills me with energy rather than draining me of it. 

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If you like the sunset image, you can download it for your own wallpaper. Once you’ve downloaded it, open it up in Window Explorer and on PCs right click and choose “Set as Desktop Background” to make it your new wallpaper. Mac users need to go to their System Preferences and then Desktop & Screen Saver (here are some more instructions).

Click on the image below to go to the Flickr page where you can download it in a size that best suits your monitor:

(Source: wvs)