Successful Blog

Great Graphic Ideas: crowdSPRING

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Looking for a Little Creativity or Maybe a LOT?

If you know an outstanding design site, email me a link and tell me why you think it’s important to share. Then I can pass it along.

This week at the Feast for Smart Marketers I met Pete Burgeson of crowdSPRING. We had quite the conversation about this Chicago-based business that calls itself a “marketplace for creative services.”

Great Find: crowdSPRING
Permalink: http://www.crowdspring.com/
Target Audience: Design clients, creatives

Content: When Pete I started talking I asked how crowdSpring worked. He described the basic model as they do on the website.

I questioned a model based on work done on spec, but after a closer look I’m quite taken by what’s happening at crowdSPRING. Their model is intelligent and built to grow with their community.

  • crowdSPRING serves the new guys. Small businesses just launching need a professional presence that won’t cost them out of the market. Talented creatives starting out need to build visibility and a portfolio of clients.
  • It also serves who’ve been “around the block.” I’m fully confident that buyers looking for serious design work can find it here because there seems to be no requirement to participate in the “projects.”

    • I was able to browse projects, portfolios, profiles, and forums. Personal messages and forum conversations make it easy to connect with creative suppliers.

  • Creatives can upload portfolios next to their profiles. Profiles include a record of performance on projects completed through the site.
  • It’s community for learning and thinking, as well as a marketplace. The forums are filled with insightful discussion of design and of the projects on the site.

crowdSPRING is using social media in the best way . . . by making it easy for people to connect around ideas that they care about.

Go on, have a look. See how easy it looks when it’s done well.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related
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https://www.successful-blog.com/1/great-find-yudu-freedom/
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Great Find: PDF Online — Free

Dear ANYONE, If You Want a Blogger’s Attention . . .

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Spam Ain’t the Way

Recently, I received the 4th unfortunate, attention-getting email from the same PR firm in NYC. I took the following screenshot of the subject line.

Expert Available Email Headline

To the first email in the series, which ran about 6 pages long, I responded,

“To a blogger, this is spam.”

The reply was stunning.

“We only want to help, not hurt

I will read you more often

Please give me your url”

What?

How could you have read me at all, if you didn’t have my url?

If You Want a Blogger’s Attention . . .

If you want to get someone’s undivided attention, here’s what you do.

  • Make it personal.
  • Make it valuable.
  • Make it relevant.
  • Make it clear that you’re not going to waste time while you say it.
  • Make it your message about them, not about you.
  • Make it short and say thank you.

In this case, here’s a message that might have worked.

Subject Line:
Social Media and Successful and Outstanding Boomer Businesses

Dear Liz,
I know you write about social media. I also know you’re passionate about small business. I’d like to offer an idea.

If you’re looking for a guest post written with wit and insight, we have a client who helps boomers use social media to save their small town businesses. She’d jump at a chance to tailor a blog post to your audience. I’d love to talk to you about it. Email me or call if you think this would bring value to your readers.

Thanks for what you do on Successful-Blog,
PR Person
Title: She who wants to write to 5 bloggers rather than blast 500

I’m sure I missed something. What would you add to the list?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Patterns of Bad Social Media Behaviors

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In my email this week was a leadership statement from Vincent Wright, Social Media Consultant, man I admire. If you’re on MyBlogLog or Twitter, you may have met him. If you haven’t yet, look for him. You’ll know you’ve found the Wright guy when you see his Wright hand avatar over there.

Wright_hand

Bad Social Media Teachers
by Guest Writer Vincent Wright

In each social media environment, there are patterns of behavior.

There are good patterns of behavior.

There are bad patterns of behavior.

Social media owners, moderators, and group participants recognize both the good and bad patterns of behavior.

Those who seek to use social media platforms for their intended usage, enjoy witnessing those who use social media the right way.

Those who seek a more self-centered purpose — even to the detriment of the platforms they are on — use social media poorly, and jeopardize the platform for all users.

The first group could be called social media environmentalists.

The second group could be called a whole bunch of names — none worthy of sharing with a “PG 13” audience.

But, think about this: patterns of behavior don’t just come into existence without a cause, without a stimulus.

Someone must conceive, create, and cause the propagation of both the good and the bad behaviors we see.

If we see what I call “profile stamping” on Ning, where a member will go to dozens upon dozens of profiles and stamp the same banal message with the same graphic over and over and over, some bad social media teacher taught them to do that.

If we see what I call ” ‘hi’ stamping” on Yahoo Groups, where hundreds of members attempt to sign up for private, moderated groups just by saying, “Hi”, some bad social media teacher taught them to do that.

If we see what I call “toll boothing “ on Linkedin, where some “enterprising” Linkedin member wants to charge you a fee for a service that is free, some bad social media teacher taught them to do that.

If we see what I call “invitationitis” rampant on any number of social media platforms, where people without any modicum of self-control seem to indiscriminately invite just for the heck of inviting, some bad social media teacher taught them to do that.

There is no shortage of other bad social media behavior we could add to the above list – feel free to add yours – but, I love that the word “teach” literally means “to show”. So, if someone is showing you bad social media behavior then, they are bad social media teachers.

And this, too: since the word teach means to show, what are you teaching those who are watching what you’re showing them on these social media platforms?

Vincent Wright
Social Media Consultant
Twitter.com/VincentWright | Linkedin.com/in/VincentWright |
MyLinkingPowerForum.com | MyVirtualPowerForum.com | MyLinkedinPowerForum.com
My Virtual Power Forum on Li Groups | http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/732357 |
________________

Vincent,
This is going to run while I’m gone to BlogWorld. I agree with the heart and hope in this message. I bet that some are “self-taught” social media experts who are now teaching others to do these nasty things.

Bet the folks who read this have more bad social media practices.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

What Will We Be When the Social Media Market Grows Up?

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Attention Is Not a New Idea

Creativity at Work

Thanks to everyone who participated in yesterday’s discussion of Creativity with a Capital C as described by the criteria set out by Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who also wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. As I enjoy rereading this favorite in this new time, I hope you’ll stay with me.

Unlike instinct, learning must be acquired by every new person again and again. As a culture gains more information, individuals must pay more attention or focus in on narrower domains of study. As a culture gets more complex subdomains become too huge for one person to assimilate.The more mature the culture, the more it favors specialized knowledge.

Csikszentmihalyi points out that

Nobody knows who last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix, topology — and vice versa. . . . now all of these special skills tend to be acquired by different people.

Therefore it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge.

Consider three people — a community builder, an event planner, and a social media manager. The first two need to focus their attention on studying one thing. Their jobs are defined and somewhat narrow. The social media manager must study both of those areas plus many others.

We need to master a domain before we can innovate or create new ideas. As domains add more information, experts are forced deeper into narrower bits.

Mature markets form niches — it’s the natural evolution. Limited attention limits our options. To know anything well we must focus on less.

At the moment, the social media market is young and not well understood. Relatively little information is available. As more information is added to the common pool, it becomes less possible for one person to be fluent in all of it.

Do you see social media domain splitting? Are social networking sites becoming more specialized? What we will be when the social media market grows up?

I wonder.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Can Social Media Produce World-Changing Creativity?

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Creativity with a Capital C

Creativity at Work

Every two or three years, I return to the book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Creativity is based on a rigorous study of 91 internationally recognized creative people as part of his “effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things.” He called it Creativity with a capital C, because their contributions had world changing impact.

The study included writers, astronomers, Nobel Prize winners, actors, Historians, paleontologists, scultors, painters, architects, scientists, biologists, musicians, photographers, economists, philosophers, inventors, composers, physicians, chemists, psychologists, politicians.

According to Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, three things must come together for culture changing Creativity to occur.

  1. a domain that contains symbolic rules
  2. people who bring novelty into that domain
  3. a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation

All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place.

Can the Social Media Produce World-Changing Creativity?

Every morning, we wake up to the challenge of being creative in our lives. As Lateral Action points out this morning, Creativity is Economic Priority Number One. Some cynically don’t see value in thinking beyond the fundamentals, but that doesn’t change the challenge continues to grow. The present shift moving programmable and scripted jobs offshore requires a high concept, creative and human response.

I see us with the toys of social media communication. Some days, I wonder how many of us are caught up in the playing. What’s the value Plurking on Plurk about Plurking? How much of that is really necessary to understanding the humans think? What problems does it help us solve?

Conversation without a clear purpose is still conversation that doesn’t go anywhere. Collecting friends isn’t a noble goal in itself.

How are we to put these virtual applications toward getting the world to work?

  1. Is social media a domain that contains symbolic rules?
  2. Are there people who bring to it novel ideas?
  3. Has it established a field of experts who can recognize and validate an innovation?

Can social media produce world-changing Creativity with a Capital C?

I wonder.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

What Color is the Sky in a World of Digital Media?

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Would Seeing Be Believing?

Suppose a colleague, a photographer, called asking you what you thought of the sunset last evening. You’re forced to admit that missed you it entirely. So the colleague emails you this huge photo.

Evening sky colors

What do you imagine your response would be?

    a. Wow! I need to pay more attention to the world around me.

    b. Hope the weather holds and we catch another sunset like this tonight.

    c. Up in the corner looks like storm clouds could be rolling in.

    d. They don’t make skies like that. Wonder how much she enhanced it?

    e. other

My dad often said, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.”

What color is the sky in the world of digital media?
How do we know what’s real?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!