Social Media Marketing II

I’m going to start with a little dissertation on creating effective PowerPoint pitches for your company.

This post is from Guy Kawasaki and it's great. His topic?  How to create an Enchanting Pitch -- in otherwords, how to tell your story to get the contract/client/funds.

In addition to the 11-step structure he gives you, you can also download his PowerPoint deck for you to fill in. He talks about what to add in each slide.

Even if you never have to give a business presentation about your products/services, fill out the slide deck to help you figure out your story.

Guy's tips don't really go into specific storytelling devices you need to use (metaphor, contrast, sensory material, characters). But think of each slide as the place to share a personal story.

What a terrific tool and how-to! Make sure you read the article, grab the file, and start using it.

These days, anyone who is interested in optimizing his or her website can easily find numerous killer SEO tactics which are ready to highlight the most efficient optimization methods. If you are also searching for such tactics, you can locate different tips for:

- creating trust with different search engines
- promoting product pages
- building links and driving targeted traffic towards your website
- avoiding duplicate content
- getting suitable URLs
- finding the best free SEO tools

The last time I used the phrase "social influence" in a face-to-face conversation at a business luncheon for small businesses, one of the owners sighed:

"Another buzzword they want to stick down on our throats."

"Well," I told her, "you know online marketing? PR? Elevator pitch? ROI? Sustainability? They are all buzzwords. Because like it or not, they are part of our business success."

But she's made me think: buzzwords have a negative baggage. Are you really aware what social influence is? Why is it important and how can you use it to your advantage? Let me share some quick tips with you how to turn it to your advantage...

Do you know the optimum time of day to tweet your followers? Here's a look at five Twitter tools that will give you valuable insisght . . .

Five years after Youtube's birth there's probably not a newsroom in the land that isn't trying to do video journalism in some way or another.

I say 'trying' because, as you'll probably have seen...

Want to create videos about your company and its customers?  Want to shoot an interview with a colleague or an expert you met at a conference?

Then follow these 10 tips about what to avoid and how to create a really good video.  It doesn't need to be complicated or high tech, just pay attention to the basic technical issues listed here, and combine it with good storytelling skills. I'm learning to master this medium -- and you can too!

Associate Director, UCLA Laboratory of Brain, Behavior, and Pharmacology (RT @BrianNewberry: Thinking vs.Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising - The Atlantic http://t.co/m6Dp9aBL...)...

Good read MT @uxmag http://t.co/4sDpB5MP Selective Attention and #UX Understanding limitations of visual perception to predict user behavior...

A great collection of useful content curation resources, articles, tools and people to follow for those working in the non-profit sector.

It includes the following curated sections:

• Why Curate? 
  
  
• Getting Started
  
  
• Best Practices for Content Curation
  
  
• Tools
  
  
• Additional Resources 

(In this light you may want to check also the two recordings of my contribution to the last NeVC Conference here:

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/broadcasts/recordings/NeVC2011/default.htm?file=Day2Session1-new.flv

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/broadcasts/recordings/NeVC2011/default.htm?file=Day2Session2-new.flv)

Resourceful. 8/10 

The word “proactive” is tossed around a lot these days, and you could easily be forgiven for thinking that being proactive is pretty much the only way to blog or do anything else.

Certainly in your blogging life there are times when being proactive is important; but it’s not always the answer!

The problem with being proactive
Being proactive essentially means doing things unprompted—typically, you set a schedule and you work to it. This is a great way to ensure you get things done. The problem is that to be proactive in this way, sometimes you have to write blog posts at times when you don’t feel all that inspired; this can result in posts that are less than perfect, which is never a good thing...

If you have been online Twitter or Facebook this week it would be hard to miss the chatter on Klout and their new algorithm. A new algorithm launched on October 26, 2011.

There were strong arguments for and against the change. Although Klout stated “a majority of users will see their scores stay the same or go up”, there seems to be more that dropped than not. Many saw a drop of of 15+ points. My personal score dropped 19 points. I am yet to receive an explanation or a response to my email from Klout as to the change and to several other very important questions I asked them.

As Danny Brown summarized in the article, “Is Klout Using Our Privacy to Violate our Privacy?” there are concerns that Klout is creating and publicly publishing profiles of minors set to private on Facebook for people who haven’t ever signed up for Klout...

Robin Good: I don't feel particularly good at picking on Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire, which I respect for the good efforts he is placing in promoting, via valuable articles and content, its own curation platform and services, but he offers me the perfect opportunity to highlight a key element about curation, that may otherwise go unnoticed for some more time.

The key point I want to highlight is that Curation done with the goal of obtaining SEO visibility is something altogether different from Curation done with the goal of "making sense", "explaining" or "comprehensively informing on a topic while communicating to a specific audience".

These two different Curation activities are presented and perceived by the novice and the large public as one and the same, but I personally think that the two are not even distant relatives.

While I do not doubt that effective curation can bring (as a consequence) great SEO benefits, I must warn those new to this, about the perils they are going to be meeting if they discard understanding the difference between the value for a search engine (and how much that will stay as is) and the value for true human beings. 

Curation done with the explicit goal of doing content marketing is a flawed value creation process and it can survive only as long as there are no true-to-the-meaning high-value curators. 

As soon as true "curators" emerge, content curation done for SEO and marketing purposes will rapidly lose its perceived value, as it didn't carry much in the first place by definition, besides producing a "focused" quantity of news on a topic.

The type of advice that Forbes has endorsed by way of this article, is not helping us, as users, get any type of true value from it.

We are not going get less noise, and quality curated news channels of information on something specific we are interested in, but we will rather inundated by an even bigger wave of regurgitated content with no value, insight or perspective added to it.

I understand and respect the need of content marketers to do what they want to do, but I think that it is as much important to explain why content curation is also something altogether different when looked at it with different glasses.

In my opinion, SEO Visibility, increased reputation and authority are and are going to be increasingly directed by the true value served to your specific audience, rather than by the precision and quantity of precisely-targeted keyword-based selected stories that you can put out. Or at least I hope that this will be the case.

The new Google algorithm, first released on Feb.24th of this year with the name Google Panda, seems to be working in making such SEO-based content marketing efforts useless too.

Sadly, the only example given in this Forbes article, to support how successful this SEO-oriented content curation can be, tends to confirm my fears: content curation done for SEO or visibility has nothing to do with content curation intended to provide value, information or insightful understanding of a topic.

See for yourself [from the article]: "Marketers who are curating are seeing improvement in SEO and using those results to evaluate their content curation efforts.

VP of Marketing at Aternity Donna Parent puts it simply: “We are very pleased to be listed organically on the first page of ‘end user experience’ with our site.

[this is the page that includes curated content from Aternity: http://www.aternity.com/news-recent.htm]

That was a key goal that has been sustained since earlier this year (so about 6 months after implementation).

This was and remains a key metric for us and proves the value.”
 

What do you think? Where do you stand?
Is it all the "same" curation for you? 

Creating compelling content is a theme running through the PRSA 2011 International Conference this year.

I like this quick article with its 5 bullet points.  4 out of the 5 are all about storytelling and is a quick checklist for developing content that is meaningful and memorable.  There are links to videos to illustrate the author's points, making this article even more valuable.  Enjoy!