blogging

May 10 2012

Can You Play Stick?

Does it sound like there’s a whole bunch of social media gabbing and not a lot of actual doing? Yeah. I think so, too.

Golfers Prepare to Play — Photo by oatsy40, used with Creative Commons license

There’s a phenomenal book from a few years ago – WARNING – NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA BOOK! – and it’s worth another look.

The book? Paper Tiger by Tom Coyne. [NOTE: I’m in Illinois and can’t make a red cent off of Amazon Affiliate Links; thus, there’s nothing in it for Area 224 if you buy that book or go to your library and check out a copy.] The subtitle of this book probably tells you a ton: “An Obsessed Golfer’s Quest to Play with the Pros.”

I won’t spoil the plot of the book – it’s a true story about the author and his handicap index and whether or not he can get a tour card. It’s a great read.

A Story with Social Media Parallels

There’s a ton of gabbing in social circles about who is great and who is awesome and who is killing it or crushing it. And if you were to believe everyone you follow, tweet with, are friends with or subscribe to – the economy should have no problem rebounding.

Which brings us to the story from Coyne’s book. About a young golfer who showed up for his first day on tour bragging about how he wasn’t nervous because he had already been a winner at every other level of his career.

Amateur Champion. College Champion. And so on, and so forth – this was nothing by comparison.

The story may be a little apocryphal – but, as Coyne explains in the book…

“As the story was told to me, it was Craig Stadler who wandered over to where the rookie was hitting balls and gave the young man a few quiet words of advice.

“‘You see the guy next to you, and the guy next to him? Every one of them, All-Americans…hell, some of these caddies were All-American…nobody here gives a damn if you’re All-American, or even if you went to college at all. All anybody here wants to know is…can you play stick?'”

Can YOU Play Stick?

There’s humble-bragging a plenty on the interwebs. It’s getting annoying – sorta like showing up at the tournament as a seasoned pro and having to listen to the guy brag about how he just won the college championship.

And the scary thing is – a good many of the braggers haven’t done anything of substance. They talk a good ballgame but, when it’s time to execute, they’re big on excuses – and small on actual work product.

Consider the precarious position of some social media types with no actual inside-the-ropes experience. (“Inside the ropes” being a golf term, as in…those inside the ropes are playing in the tournament. Those outside the ropes are spectators.)

They may have watched and reported on the business world from the get-go – and they may even have a blog with hundreds of subscribers, or a flirtatious Twitter presence that draws you into their lifestream.

But have they actually been inside the ropes?

AND, those who throw the darts at those who are “doing it wrong” may have never actually built something.

Organizational Dynamics On Tour

If you think pro golf involves showing up, hitting a bunch of balls, being awesome and winning tournaments – consider a good chunk of the behind-the-scenes stuff that has to happen. I’m not talking about practice, mind you. I’m talking about playing in the qualifier to make the US Open field. I’m talking about writing the letter asking for a sponsorship exemption so you can play in the smaller event.

I’m talking about being the type of tour pro who has a great time at the Pro Am – not because it’s required of him, but because he’s playing golf with some people that he truly wants to have fun playing golf with.

And the list can go on, and on.

Because word spreads.

Play Stick at the Office

We’re not asking for you to suck up to everyone you meet, hoping that there’s an eventual payoff. We’re not asking that you put in extra hours creating white papers that show that you know what it is you’re doing.

What we ARE saying is this:

There’s “table stakes” in business and life. Eventually, you will be found out as the person who is all hat, no cattle.

You might be bloody awesome at whatever it is that you do. Great. You know what we want to see?

Evidence. Of you being bloody awesome.

That’s All We Want To Know: Can You Play Stick?

May 09 2012

Real Work Takes Time

New to this site? We’d love for you to check out our book: Six Biggest Mistakes.

Photo by simpologist, used with Creative Commons license

The payoff of your online efforts is proportional to the amount of effort that goes into it.

Spend an hour working on your link-building, and get a few people to visit your site. Spend some spare time on launching a business – and get that sort of spare-time quality traffic.

And so on, and so forth.

No Shortcuts to Online Success

Here’s a for-instance: Let’s say you’re launching a blog called “New Frugality.” It’s not an overnight success, because it takes real time. Time for you to build relationships, time for you to get real quality content, time for you to carve out your niche.

We’re in our Fourth Month over at New Frugality HQ. And it’s taking some time to get over the hump – as expected.

But here’s the thing: we’re actually in this for the long haul.

The Tactics to Definitely Avoid

If you’re new to the online space – or you’re a veteran marketer but are just now getting into blogging – you can easily get sucked in to some shortcuts that are disguised as strategic moves. They’re actually just tactics that are kinda lame – and will end up giving you headaches as you build your online empire. And here are a couple:

1. The “Can I Guest Post?” Email

These can be great – and you need a healthy reliance on guest posting (as you will read in this awesome “Noob Guide” on the SEOMoz site). But we have had a few requests over at New Frugality that gave us some serious pause.

Quoting an email: “This is Jack…I went through your site while surfing in Google.com, am very much impressed with your site’s unique informations.”

AVOID.

We HAVE had some great guest posts on that site – but they came to us from legitimate people with legitimate social presence. (Hint: they had last names.)

2. The “Same Stuff, Different Site” Post

We have watched a couple bloggers of note make this mistake – and they may NOT be paying attention to words like “Panda” or “Penguin.”

“Penguin” is Google’s Algorithm Update. This controls search like nobody’s business. And this can affect your business like nobody’s business.

In brief, you can’t copy and paste content that you used on one site and put it on another site you own WITHOUT making changes to a good percentage of the text. (Estimates we’ve heard: 70% of the content can be the same.)

3. The Over-Reliance on Facebook Likes

“Engagement” by big brands on Facebook – that means how many times stuff the big brands say gets shared, commented on, or has the like button clicked – is as high as 0.2% in the auto industry, according to this report by “All Facebook.” (This study looked at “daily page engagement.”)

Wait. WHAT?

Ford is considered the industry standard for its social media presence – and they have 1,400,000 fans on Facebook. They should expect 4,200 of those fans to be engaged each day. A tiny number.

This isn’t to say that 4,200 is a BAD number for Ford.

But for you…that percentage of engagement multiplied by your number of Facebook fans (or people who click the like button) isn’t going to give you much. And the amount of time to get those fans – well, your efforts might be better spent elsewhere. Now, the last thing to avoid:

4. Posting Stuff That Isn’t Good

Chris Brogan had a great piece on this the other day – though we think the title of the post doesn’t match the content.

Upshot? Write Good Stuff.

Not everyone is an awesome writer – we get that. But that doesn’t mean that crap needs to be put on the page just to have the page filled. You’re not running a daily newspaper here – if you don’t have something good, productive, well-thought out, clever or (here’s that word again) “engaging,” don’t publish it.

Real Work – Online AND Off – Takes Time.

Apr 19 2012

The Power of the Third Person

Challenge: Write a blog post about marketing and business. Don’t use the First Person at all.

Roman Numeral One, Thanks, chrisinplymouth, used with cc License

Easy, right?

Here’s the thing: people love to talk about themselves. People love to point to the awesome stuff they’re doing – and, with the dawn of Social Media Marketing, it’s so much easier to be self-centered.

Because you have to connect with someone else, and they have to connect with you.

But How To Avoid Crossing “The Line?”

You know “The Line,” because it’s rather garish these days. Everyone has a book coming out, it seems, and they’re doing the mass market promotional thing. Everyone has expertise that they want to tout – for a fee, of course – and it’s tough to separate the value from the pablum, the pitch from the meat.

Even the uber-engagers – the ones who call their fans “community” – have to point to themselves as the examples of pure awesomeness…in a bottle, or on a blog.

Don’t Fall For It. Don’t.

Pretty soon, you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

The valuable posts start going away, the “Buy The Book” posts start arriving. Maybe there’s an F-bomb for effect, or maybe it’s just an old idea disguised by new social media buzzwords.

Don’t. Fall. For. It.

Don’t.

Third Person Credibility

So, here’s a list. Some blogs that aren’t all First Person. Ones that aren’t overly promotional – and, instead, give you a taste of knowledge that you can take and do something valuable with.

Go forth. Avoid the First Person.

Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder. This is worthwhile for the past couple posts alone: a frying pan to the face of conventional business wisdom.
Marjorie Clayman, MargieClayman.com. She’s just cool – but her insights, which DO sometimes involve the First Person, are spot on.
Shelly Kramer and Team, V3im.com. People from Kansas City are just really nice. Down-to-earth. And focused on helping you.

Done. One List, No First Person. What do you think?

Mar 02 2012

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

If you’re new here, great to see you. We’d love to have you join us starting March 6 for our series of Webinars on Marketing and Business. Learn more about FORWARD:MARCH here.

If you haven’t seen Dave’s side project called New Frugality, that’s okay. We – Dave and Indigo21‘s Heather Acton – spent the month of February in beta mode – which is the way people say “soft launch” or “private open” these days.

But we’d certainly like you to come visit – it’s not a “work in progress” anymore.

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

It might seem counter-intuitive for Dave from Area 224 to work on something so…well, “consumer-y” – but here are a couple reasons.

1. Frugality is More than “Being Cheap”

Everyone can learn a thing or two about how to best spend resources – and, I’ll be honest, I’ve learned more over the past few weeks researching articles and reading up on things people do to be frugal than I would have expected. (A month ago, there’s no way the thought of ditching shampoo would have crossed my mind.)

2. Frugality Can Help You in Business

Yes, Area 224 prides itself in sharing Marketing knowledge – but we have to get better at the whole allocation of resources thing. Who doesn’t?

Plus, if anyone claims to have all the answers, they’re wrong – and I picked up some great tips from Heather in this post on the low-cost small business.

3. And, Let’s Be Honest…New Markets

Frankly, while I’ve spent some time in consumer marketing, I can always learn more about how consumers think. What’s on the minds of shoppers? Who is looking for what, and when?

The insights from this site have already shown us what sorts of things the visitors want to know about, and what things they’re not that interested in. Expect to see more of what you actually like to read.

So, yeah, this is a self-serving blog post inviting you to visit another blog. Here’s a link to New Frugality. Thanks!

Feb 15 2012

Top 5 Things That Top 5 Things Blog Posts Can Teach You About Blogging

Welcome! New here? Say hi, and check out something special and cool we’re doing for the Month of March called “FORWARD:MARCH.” Your business may well thank you…

Remember this logo kerfuffle? Jeremy Lin pinned about it

Jeremy Lin. Pinterest. Infographics. Downton Abbey. Social Media. Business. Life.

It seems as if every stinking topic on the Internet these days is being blogged about in a “Top 5 Things” post. It’s enough to make you run, kicking and screaming, to your nearest book, as a means of escaping the madness.

Can you really learn anything from any of these Top 5 (or any other number) posts? Why yes, yes you can. Sometimes. Kindof. If you pin about it. Here goes:

1. Be prepared to chase car bumpers

Ever wonder what the car that chases the car bumper actually DOES with the car once he catches it? That semi-rhetorical question is meant as a thought-provoker: No dog has ever been shown on YouTube catching a car. But they chase them anyway.

It doesn’t matter if Jeremy Lin is a flash in the pan, or if Pinterest will have its traffic wane – bloggers are a mercurial bunch and will chase whatever topical car bumper they can.

2. Bigger means more, not better

I’ll call two sites on the carpet: Huffington Post and Forbes. Both have had posts in the past week that had this author scratching his head: they seemed to have been thrown together randomly, weren’t very well thought through, and were done entirely for search value.

As if to say that a “Top 5 Things That Jeremy Lin Can Teach You…” post is going to actually teach you something.

(As if to say THIS list will actually teach you something.)

The fear is that blogs are becoming like any other news outlet that has space to fill: if it’s a rainy day, then you run a story on umbrella salesmen if nothing else is going on.

3. We like lists when we can see ourselves in them

Think about it, if you see a list of “Top 5 Bloggers in Arkansas,” you want to see yourself there (if you live in Arkansas). If you don’t live in Arkansas, you may very well want to see yourself making one of those lists for your own state.

Often, especially in “social media,” people don’t become your friend, fan your page, or retweet your blog post because they like you. They do so because they want to BE you. You give off an image of someone who has it in control, or vacations a lot, or has a great MLM business. (If you’re a brand, it’s because of those brand attributes – drinking your beer will make me more attractive, driving your car will make me cooler.)

Chicago Magazine ran a list of the 100 Most Powerful Chicagoans yesterday, and I gravitated toward it – but, knowing I’m not ever going to be in the list, I started scheming about ways to get on similar lists. It happens, it’s human nature.

4. Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you have something relevant to add to the conversation

Big brands and especially B2B companies are learning this first-hand. Now, everyone and their brother has access to blogging – so, it follows, why shouldn’t everyone blog?

This is my beef with Forbes.com – the addition of a post on Jeremy Lin wasn’t exactly adding to an already noisy conversation. Here’s the link.

5. Everyone is an expert

We saw the first of many “How to Use Pinterest for your Business” blog posts yesterday: and we saw this one by accident, as we haven’t been looking for them. Because we know they’re out there – next to the “How to Market Your Business with Quora” posts.

This expertise on everything that’s everywhere leads us to the next question: if everyone’s an expert, what is anyone actually DOING?

While this blog post might have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there are some serious questions we think you should ask yourself:

Why are you blogging? Who are you blogging for? And, most importantly, are you adding anything relevant to the conversation, or just talking?