Successful Blog

Because You Asked — BlogIt EarnIt $250 Off Discount Extended to April 1

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A Room of Excellence to Fine Tune Your Business

sobcon-vmc

Suppose you could take a weekend retreat away from the noise of the Internet …

  • to focus entirely on your business
  • to work with the support of a mastermind team
  • to get quality time to interact with the top people in social media
  • to get the best information AND time to discuss how you’ll apply it
  • to work with sponsors who are doing the same thing
  • in a room limited to 150 people — all focused in the same direction
  • without worry because the food and the wireless are outstanding.

Imagine a weekend work retreat with these people totally invested in sharing this content.

The BlogIt EarnIt Discount Until April 1!!

I’m delighted to announce that Terry and I get to make this offer …

Write a blog post about what “The Virtual Meets the Concrete” means to you. We want to celebrate how our relationships online help our lives and businesses online and off. Tell us why online and offline relationships and strategies matter.

Here’s how to qualify for the discount

1. Write a blog post about a person (or people) online or off who has (or have) made a difference in your life. Celebrate how they have made your life easier, better, smarter, more productive, more meaningful.

2. Then let us know by tagging your post #SOBCon2010 and leaving a comment with a link to it on this post. Include a working email with your comment and as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $250 off the $895 FULL conference rate – that’s over a 25% savings! (We won’t use your email to spam you.)

Or, if you can’t make to SOBCon2010, you could “pay it forward” and pass the discount on to one of your friends — or offer it back to us as a gift for us to pass on for you.

We’re doing everything we can to bring you all the value, the experts and expertise, and the time to work and network that you need to make your business outstanding and extremely profitable in 2010.

What could you do with a weekend of the time, expertise, and support you need to focus your business?

Geoff Livingston Hosts SOBCon NonProfit Give Back Day

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On Sunday May 2nd, SOBCon 2010 will highlight four charities (501c3) that have volunteered themselves for a social media coaching session from its attendees. We have the great honor of Zoetica Media Geoff Livingston serving the conference as the NonProfit Give Back facilitator.

Each of our four charities — Anixter, Ashoka, InvisiblePeopleTV and Vitamin Angels — will discuss their strategy, current social media efforts, and online hopes. From there the room, comprised of some of the brightest minds in social media, will match the mission and goals of the organizations with the tools, with the end game of providing meaningful social media strategy that can impact the world.

Like Zoetica CEO Beth Kanter likes to say, “Even better, what if we all learned from the process?” In addition to group sharing, we will have break-out sessions where each table

Sounds like a plan to me. The following is a brief description of each of our four participants. I hope to see you at SOBCON!

Our Participants

anixterlogo293.gifAnixter: The mission of Chicago-based the Anixter Center is to enhance the ability of individuals living with or at risk of disabilities to live, learn, work, and play in the community. Each year, at dozens of locations across greater Chicago, Anixter Center provides an array of effective, innovative services to more than 5,000 children and adults. These services include education, employment, life skills, communication, recreation, health care, counseling, and support.

image_preview.jpgAshoka: The global association serves the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women tackling system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Since 1981, more than 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs have become Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries. With its global community, Ashoka develops models for collaboration and design infrastructure needed to advance the field of social entrepreneurship and the citizen sector.


invppl.jpgInvisiblePeopleTV: Mark Horvath (@hardlynormal on Twitter) will come and discuss Invisible People. For years mark used the lens of a television camera to tell the stories of homelessness and the organizations trying to help. The reports were produced well and told a story, but the stories Mark produces now on Invisible People are much different. These are the real people, telling their own, very real stories… unedited, uncensored and raw. The purpose: To make the invisible visible.

VA_logo_2color_RGB.jpgVitamin Angels: This socially-savvy charity seeks to mobilize and deploy private sector resources to advance availability, access and use of micronutrients, especially vitamin A, by newborns, infants and children in need. Vitamin Angels reduces child mortality worldwide by connecting essential nutrients, especially vitamin A, with infants and children under five. Essential nutrients enable young immune systems to fight infectious diseases, helping children attain good health and the opportunity to lead meaningful and productive lives.

SOBCon2010 Webinar with Garrett, Brogan, Naslund and Strauss

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Check out the FREE “Preview of SOBCon2010” webinar on February 15, 2010, from Noon to 1:30 EST, hosted by Chris Garrett and featuring:

This is a great panel of Social Media rockstars (all on the podium in Chicago), and they will be offering you a little sneak preview of some of the fantastic content they will be showcasing at the event – and offer their takes on why SOBCon2010 will be the best one yet.

(We’ll also be announcing the winner of the 2010 “Blog It, Earn It” FREE ticket – more on that later)

This webinar is exclusive to attendees and newsletter subscribers.
2/15 Update: Since it is Webinar day, here is the registration code

Also, please sign up for our newsletter (link in the sidebar) to get other special offers and up-to-date information.

Win a Trip to SOBCon — $2000 Value!!

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150 People to Fine Tune Your Web Presence

sobcon-vmc

Suppose you could take a weekend retreat away from the noise of the Internet …

  • to focus entirely on your business
  • to work with the support of a mastermind team
  • to get quality time to interact with the top people in social media
  • to get the best information AND time to discuss how you’ll apply it
  • to work with sponsors who are doing the same thing
  • in a room limited to 150 people — all focused in the same direction
  • without worry because the food and the wireless are outstanding.

Imagine a weekend work retreat with these people totally invested.

Would you write a blog post to get a chance to win a FREE SOBCon Weekend?

An Expense Paid Ticket!! AND the Return of The BlogIt EarnIt Discount

I’m delighted to announce that Terry and I get to make this offer …

We had such fun last year with the SOBCon “BlogIt, EarnIt” discount. We’re bringing it back again. Again this year, we’d like to hear from you — this time about what “The Virtual Meets the Concrete” means to you. We want to celebrate how our relationships online help our lives and businesses online and off.

Tell us why online and offline relationships and strategies matter.

Here’s how to qualify for the discount and enter to win

1. Write a blog post about a person (or people) online who has (or have) made a difference in your life. Celebrate how they have made your life easier, better, smarter, more productive, more meaningful.

2. Then let us know by tagging your post #SOBCon2010 and leaving a comment on this post. Include a working email with your comment and as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $250 off the $895 FULL conference rate – that’s over a 25% savings! (We won’t use your email to spam you.)

We’ll also tweet your blog post so that we can celebrate the folks we all think make us stronger.

Get your posts up before Noon EST on February 14th, 2010, and noon EST pm the next day (February 15th), to kick off a special SOBCobn2010 Webinar with Chris Garrett, Chris Brogan, Amber Naslund and Liz Strauss (details coming soon), we’ll put all of the entries in a random drawing and choose one lucky winner who will receive:

  1. a free ticket to SOBCon2010 – $895.00 value
  2. airfare and three nights at Hotel 71 – up to $1105 in hotel and airfare

A total package value worth as much as USD $2000 – nontransferrable, nonrefundable

Blog your thoughts …
Share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit).

We’ll also encourage you to comment on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And remember as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $250 off the $895 FULL conference rate – that’s over a 25% savings!

Or, if you can’t make to SOBCon2010, you could “pay it forward” and pass the discount on to one of your friends — or offer it back to us as a gift for us to pass on for you.

We’re doing everything we can to bring you all the value, the experts and expertise, and the time to work and network that you need to make your business outstanding and extremely profitable in 2010.

What could you do with a weekend of the time, expertise, and support you need to focus your business?

We’re all coming for the same reasons.

December Content Strategies

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Mack Collier, writing at The Viral Garden, has a very informative post about how to get the most out of the blogging “lull” in December:

Use December’s blogging lull to your advantage – The Viral Garden

Here’s five ways to make the most of December’s blogging lull:

1 – Re-evaluate everything. Go back and look at what your blogging results have been for 2009. How did traffic do? Subscribers? Comments? And how did these metrics tie back to your blogging goals? Put your blogging strategy for 2009 on trial, and then tweak it for 2010. Set goals for your blog. But make sure that those goals tie back into your larger focus for your blog.

This is always good advice. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, right? Have you done your measurement? How do you track your traffic and how your readers navigate your site? I use a combination of Sitemeter (the free service)and Google analytics. Sitemeter is great for me because it is much closer to real-time than Google, and I like to keep an eye on my referral logs.

2 – Ramp up content. David Armano advises doing this, using the Holiday vacation to push out as much if not more content than usual, with the thinking being that since many other bloggers are slacking off, your content can more easily be seen. We are going to keep looking for content to share with our networks, and if you keep creating great content while everyone else slacks off, guess whose posts will be shared with my network? Use December to increase your blogging visibility.

This is a no-brainer, but time can be an issue. Like the old saying goes, the best time to plant an orchard is 10 years ago, the best time to prepare for the December lull is earlier in the year. How do you do that? Well, for one thing you can compile your posts on book reviews as you do them, creating an uber-list for gift-giving ideas. And use those Amazon links to generate a little extra money for your own holidays…

3 – Use December to get a blogging jumpstart on 2010. Hey we all want to spend time with friends and family during the Holidays. Work in all forms seems to take a backseat…But if nothing else, use that last week of December to get your content in order to hit the ground running in January. Most people won’t begin to get back into reading blogs regularly until Jan. 4th (a Monday), and this is when many bloggers will begin to get back to writing. Use December to have at least one week’s worth of posts already written for January, so that way first thing on Monday the 4th, you’ve already got fresh content waiting on readers, while many other bloggers are thinking about getting back to writing.

Again, get out your calendars right now and jot yourself some notes for August, September, and October 2010 to write some draft posts that you can complete for that first week of 2011. Getting a head start like this is a real motivator and can help you get a jump on your competition next year. And remember, in the US November 2010 is an election for the Congress, who knows what might happen. Uncertainty will likely be highin January 2011 – think about how your business can capitalize on that.

4 – Experiment. Every year I spend the final week of the year spending time with social sites/tools that I’ve been meaning to try out, but just haven’t had the chance. … December is a great time to examine different tools and see if they work for you to complement your blogging efforts.

If you have done your homework and prepared for your December/January content, then this is a great time to play around with all of those applications that you have been meaning to try. In addition, this is great new content! Blog about your experiments, and create conversations with your readers and social media network about what works and what doesn’t.

5 – Become a commenting superhero. Remember, traffic is going to come to a crawl on many blogs. … If many people aren’t commenting, this is your chance to get noticed. And not just with other readers, but by the bloggers themselves.

Commenting is definitely one of the best network- and traffic-building strategies. It is time-consuming and feels like real work sometimes, but it can also be fun and can pay off in increased traffic for your site, increased credibility and authority for yourself/your company and may even lead to guest-posting offers.

What is your December strategy? It’s not too late to do at least a couple of these activities this year.

(cross-posted at stephenpsmith.com)

Questions to Start a Social Media Discussion

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Amber Naslund shares some very valuable information:

Brand Elevation Through Social Media and Social Business | Altitude Branding

Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. How would you describe the culture of our organization?
5. How do you use the internet in your work life? In your personal life? Where are the overlaps?
6. How do you believe your team uses the internet for their work? Have you heard ideas or feedback for ways they’d like to use it more or differently to do their jobs better?
7. Where do you turn when seeking resources or information about your role? Our company? Our industry?

Read them all!