Successful Blog

SOB Business Cafe 08-27-10

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Social Media Explorer
Social CRM is being hawked by monitoring services, market research firms, traditional sales software and — if you can believe it — Twitter applications. Brand managers, marketing managers and agencies everywhere are anxious to get them some of that social CRM, by golly. Sadly, most of them don’t even know what CRM stands for.

Smart Blog on Social Media
When the song does come on my iPhone via shuffle, I quickly skip it and move to the next. So why do I get so excited when a song I can listen to anytime comes on the radio? The answer is that someone else, with a far greater reach, has chosen to share one of “my songs” with their audience.

OPENForum
We multitask at work – flitting between 12 browser tabs, chatting on IM, taking phone calls, processing our inboxes. We multi-task in the car – driving, texting, listening to the radio. We multi-task in the kitchen – talking to our partners, chopping vegetables, checking our Blackberries or iPads. Yet, multi-tasking has been proven time and again to be a miserable failure.

So how do we fight back?

Mack Collier
Let me clear up front: If you are going to use social media, you absetively should have a strategy driving your efforts. Totally.

But simply creating a social media strategy and executing it doesn’t mean you are using social media correctly. I can create a blogging strategy for your company and tell you exactly what to do, but that still doesn’t mean you’ll have a successful blog.

Blog for Profit
Should your blog’s domain name be a brand or your own name? Or should it contain search keywords? Grant and I get this question all time from our clients. The answer may surprise you.

EConsultancy
You can measure a thousand different metrics and still fail at social media, because you’re ignoring the hundreds of different methods involved. If you want to create true engagement, then you’ll need to drop any preconceptions you might have about market behaviour and take time to speak personally to each customer.

Related ala carte selections include

Chris Pirillo
I spend probably 80% of my working time writing things. I communicate with people across social networks. I compose missives to be sent to various people. I occasionally author books and articles. I draft items to send to potential sponsors. I dash off the quick email
or hundred. The one thing I do not do is write a letter. Who needs to do such a thing in this day and age of 140 characters or less?

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 08-20-10

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

PR Squared
Andrea had been with us for 3 years, and in that brief amount of time — since she was a rockstar — she climbed the ranks from quiet, mousy intern to Senior Account Executive.

Web Worker Daily
Is there an area of your life or business where you just can’t seem to get a grip? You try and try, but can never seem to fix it.

Riding on Dragons
For years I believed something I was told by experts that now appears to be wrong. Which brings up lots of questions.

Pick the Brain
Have you ever wondered why some people are able to weather financial upheaval without breaking a sweat and have confidence to spare when it comes to taking risks such as starting their own business or taking a year off to travel without an enormous safety net?

Servant of Chaos
So, it is with some joy I came across Heather LeFevre’s Planner Survey for 2010. It covers the industry from top to tail – sharing details of salaries, roles, locations and so on. It captures what planners think of their jobs, why they stay, why they go – and who they think is doing the best work. It also lists a bunch of people who the community rate – not because they are famous, but because they get on with the challenge of producing good work.

Related ala carte selections include

Barry Moltz
Congratulations Barry!

over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 08-13-10: The SOBCon SxSW Panel List

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week is

the list of panels by the friends of SOBCon. If you know these folks, you’ll know that it’s smart and lucky to vote for them.

SOBCon influence invades SxSW Panel picker. Get out and vote for these amazing folks so

  1. @lizstrauss @starbucker @caroljsroth@caroljsroth will present:

    Build, Buy, Partner: Time is Money
  2. @lizstrauss @starbucker @caroljsroth@caroljsroth will present:

    From Jobbies to Businesses: Strategies for Irresistible Success

  3. @ericlukazewski will present:

    Confessions From Social Media Event Organizers

  4. @JasonFalls will present:

    Social Media: The Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech?
  5. @renewabelle @renewabelle will present:

    Making Sustainable Attainable: Energy Efficient Computing
  6. @DaveMurr will present:

    Have Fun to Increase Customer Engagement
  7. @jeanniecwwill present:

    X Marks the Spot: Mapping The Customer Experience
  8. @LisaPetrilli @judymartin8 will present:

    Conquer Your Kryptonite: Superpowers Fueling Kick-Ass Business Deals
  9. @conniereece will present:

    Resources Roulette: Winning Social Strategies for Shrinking Budgets
  10. @ScottMonty @Schwen @ShannonPaul will present:

    Socially Regulated: Social Media in Regulated Industries
  11. @jonathanfields will present:

    Fear and the Art of Creation
  12. @LucretiaPruitt will present:

    Killing Clark Kent; When You Outgrow Your AlterEgo
  13. @GlendaWH will present:

    The untapped iPad Market: Is Your Site POUR?
  14. @hardlynormal Mark Horvath will present:

    A Conversation on Social Change through Social Media
  15. @armano will present:

    Why PR’s Future May Not Look Like PR

Remember, voting ends on August 27th, so do it now. BTW, these are also great people to follow on Twitter.

If you’re a member of the SOBCon community or want to be one and you have a panel you’d like to be on this list, Tweet or DM us at @sobcon, or add a comment to this post.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 08-06-10

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Steve Farber
In a recent article in Investor’s Business Daily, Sonja Carberry interviewed Jim McCormick, Razi Imam, and myself to identify the “X Factor” qualities in entrepreneurs and executives who tend to rise above the rest.

Copyblogger
In fact, online content in general and blogging in particular are very non-bookish indeed, thanks to the real-time interactivity the medium allows. Instead of a static monologue, blogs are a two-way multimedia interactive environment.

Let’s take a look at four ways you can spark interaction with your audience that increases engagement and makes you a more innovative content producer.

Ramblings from a Glass Half Full
It had to be just the right adjective. The one that would launch a thousand retweets.

The one that would make the headline bark out “READ ME”!!!

Problogger
Voice can give a blogger a serious edge. Your unique voice can set you apart from the competition, form a foundation for your brand, engender audience loyalty, and more. If you find it difficult to retain readers, and you’re confident of the quality and accuracy of the content you provide, you may need to work on your voice.

Spin Sucks
This is a big conversation we have internally all the time – how do we decide what is me being overly nice and what is a request that is going to move us closer to the vision? We don’t have all of the answers yet, but we do have a ton of places where you can get free advice from me every day.

Deaf Mom at Home
Whenever I would share my family’s story about how we all became deaf and hard of hearing, people would be incredulous at the events that lead to hearing loss. “Y’all need to stop banging your heads,” one person remarked.

Related ala carte selections include

Tech Crunch
Many a post has come before this one on the special adventure that is pitching TechCrunch. And while most of our writers have their own preferences (Please don’t call my cell before 7 a.m. PDT unless you’re Google, and you’re buying Twitter. And you’ve made breakfast in bed.) there’s definitely a right and wrong way to ping tips@techcrunch if you’re a startup hungry for coverage.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 07-30-10

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Brian Solis
A recent study conducted by Duke University and the American Marketing Association documented the rise of hiring, budgets, and social media spend over next year.

According to the 2010 CMO Survey, on average, CMOs expect to increase marketing budgets by 5.9% citing social media as a crucial slice of the Internet marketing mix.

Fast Company
Sure, these companies could have found this data elsewhere, at any time–but they likely didn’t. Public information on a Facebook page is still public, and public means your friends as well as sort of scary corporations like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin have access to it.

Harvard Business Review
Culture determines who will work for you, who stays, and who quits. Once formed, culture is nearly impossible to change. People who work well within the culture quickly self-select. And those who don’t fit leave.

Problogger
One of the biggest challenges for a new bloggers starting out in an established niche is to find a way to stand out from the crowd and find their first readers. Without existing profile and/or credibility – getting those first readers can be very tough.

grow smart business
The lessons and advice imparted in Dale Carnegie’s ground breaking 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People are as useful today as they were then. Think about the reasons we small business owners spend time and money on marketing, especially social media: We want to connect with current and prospective clients and convince them that they need our product or service. To do that, we need to know exactly how to connect with them, and this is where the book comes in.

TAG Communications
Second only to “how much is this all going to cost?” the question of how to control their brand ranks high on our clients’ list of priorities.

The short answer? You can’t.

Related ala carte selections include

Co Design
via @MelissaPierce

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 07-23-10

by

SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Awake @ the Wheel by Alexis Neely
If you are reading this blog, it means you are a pretty smart cookie. You love to read, think, critique, improve. Me too.

Reading at three. High school and college, a breeze. Graduated first in my law school class (more to do with over-studying as a result of massive fear that I was the dumbest person in the room than to innate smartness).

A smarty-pants.

The Brand Builder
Point: Knowing full well that a method, tool or model no longer yields the desired outcome (assuming it ever did), some organizations will continue to bet on it, in the hopes that the laws of the universe will shift in the night and miraculously turn a completely ludicrous project into success.

Geoff Livingston
Ever interrupt a conversation with people you don’t know at a party and start talking right away, only to find the members leave? It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? No one likes to have their conversation interrupted, and normal conventions are to walk up, listen, introduce yourself, maybe even ask a question, and then participate after listening for a couple of minutes.

Listening Comes First

Note: You can download the first drafted chapter of the new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free.

Digital Peas & Carrots
How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers, the latest report by eConsultancy, takes a look at consumer behavior in both the US and UK with a focus on 1) how consumers interact with e-commerce brands 2) how consumers conduct product research and 3) how consumers are affected by different factors in the buying decision-making process.

Carol Roth
After I stopped rolling my eyes, I realized it was such a great reminder of how you need to sell your products in a location and manner relevant to your customers.

Thought Gadgets
Web stats go up and down, but it’s noteworthy that Google’s share of total U.S. search volume has plummeted since it redesigned its main page back in May. In April, just before adding bells and whistles to its search venue, Google led U.S. search volume with 71.4% share. In June, its share had fallen to 62.6%. Third-place chaser Bing is gaining fast, up from 9.4% to 12.7% of all U.S. searches in the same period.

Related ala carte selections include

SOBCon COLORADO CONTEST
Win! Win! Win!

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing