Today I flew out from San Francisco after speaking to the Northern California Book Publicity and Marketing Association luncheon yesterday on ”Online PR and Social Media,” and spent the flight listening to the Dead on my iPhone.
This was shortly after having coffee in Sausilito this morning with my friend Ann Matranga at The Depot. We sat outside and watched the kids play in Lytton Square which Bill Graham helped create and we talked about the Dead.
So it seems synchronistic, speaking of the Dead that David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan today announced, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from The Most Iconic Band in History (Wiley, 2010).
There are so many reasons why this book is cool, but I have to be honest and say I love Chapter 8: Encourage Eccentricity and the whole focus on the fans and marketing.
I love it because it reveals how a company or band or individual can tap into the power of differentiation and eccentricity to make their way in the world. Not only can this bring you success, but it’s the right thing to do!
To quote from that chapter, “The Grateful Dead teaches us that we are all eccentric in some ways. Smart companies understand eccentricities and create a market from them.”
I also like this from the book, ”Deadheads are your neighbors, coworkers and friends.” As a dancing bear tattooed Deadhead I’ll have to confess, I know the deadheads, the deadheads are friends of mine, and I am proud to still be one!
As Bill Walton says in the foreword of the book, “Like other daring visionaries The Grateful Dead rejected conventional wisdom.”
That’s why we are still dancing – and that’s really how you can build a fan base that even after all these years is still trading Dead stories, tapes, t-shirts and mementos of their time drifting with the Dead.
So any marketing lesson that Scott and Halligan share in this book you definitely should tune into.
Go see David’s post all about the book tour at his site.
And check out his new tie-dye pic on the site too. Wonderful.
Meanwhile, me and my dancing bear will be digging the marketing nuggets of this extraordinary and timely book on marketing!
- Image via Wikipedia
If you’re ready to truly have independence and thrive both online and offline, then you need to also declare your independence from naysayers.
You know who they are and you have to compassionately say goodbye to them. They are not only the people in your life that are always the first to say no to a new idea, but also your own negative beliefs about your brand, your offerings or your value to the world.
Does this mean once you say goodbye to them you don’t have to do any more work? That things will just happen? Absolutely not. To make anything happen in this world, you absolutely must be scrappy, persistent and unyielding in your desire to attain your dream.
If you want to attain the dream of being more visible online then you should:
1. Stop listening to people who say social media tools like Twitter and Linkedin.com are useless.
2. Stop listening to viral marketing agencies and PR firms who tell you the only way to get your message out is through bait and switch content and endless affiliate marketing spam techniques.
3. Build your thought leadership online by sharing your insights freely, honestly and often. Stop waiting for people to give you permission to share your expert knowledge. Start providing your community a way to freely access your content on your blog/website in conjunction with other social media networks.
4. Stop listening to people who promise a quick method way to gaining thousands of followers on social network communities with very little real work or effort on your part. There is no quick, easy way to community-building, start one click at a time and keep going.
5. Stop buying into the idea that only a giant PR or marketing firm can do conversational sweeps, define social media touchpoints, or find relevant communities for you to participate in. You can do alot of this work on your own and you can collaborate with the agencies if you do determine to work with them.
6. Stop letting the fear of social media and all those folks who say it can’t be used effectively keep you from you USING it. If you choose not to let your voice be heard through online channels, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to truly effect change in the world.
No go and be vibrantly independent!
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- 10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics (mashable.com)
Friday is a good day for posting a few sites you should know about and tools you should be using as an author. So enjoy and think kindly of me as the temperature in Austin is heading toward the upper nineties!
1. If you’ve not yet registered to publish your blog on Kindle then you should do so today. Here is a great and easy way to do it on Squidoo. I have to say too that Seth Godin mentioned this in his incredible talk at IBPA this year so YOU really should do it!
2. If I were an online book publicist (which I sometimes am) then I would feel incredibly happy to share the link to the Book Bloggers Convention attendees and tell you that you don’t need an online publicist to build your own book blog pitch list from those blogs.
2A. Don’t copy the whole list and then just spam pitch them. Take time to read their blogs, see if your book is a good fit and contact them one at a time. (Of course one would hope this is what PR flaks would do too, but alas, I’m not sure they are as smart as you!)
3. Gee, I wish all those cool blog posts I have could somehow be converted to newspaper-style format, so I could be my own mini-me publisher. Hmm. How can I do that? Try Feedjournal.
4. If I were an author I would be using Muckrack.com to find what journalists are tweeting in my vertical/topic and I would make a list and follow them on my Twitter account.
5. If I were someone who is always trying to figure out other ways to use Twitter (and I am), I might start following the publications I hope to be featured in and anytime they tweet out a new article link, be one of the first ones to go the publication site and comment on the article. If I do it often enough they might even think about using me as an expert for a future story. If I do it without marketing blather and authentically then at the very least I’ve created a way for folks to find me and perhaps visit my blog.
6. If I wanted to save money on news clipping services and use the Google alerts I set up in an even more powerful way, then I would convert all the places I’m mentioned or featured online by using HTML to PDF converter for free.
7. If I had an intern and wanted to be booked on radio shows, I might have them go through this list and see how many are a good fit for my topic and who the producers for the shows are by visiting the web links to the actual station. (Ok, this means you have to do a little bit of sleuthing but is that so wrong?!)
8. If I were an author hoping to get a book review or a writer wanting a book deal I would follow the folks listed under books here.
Now go and conquer all things Web and may the “book-Force” be with you.
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- Image by luc legay via Flickr
Here are some new ways you can empower your profile, enlarge your community and GET MORE SOCIAL!
1. At every single book signing you do make sure you not only sign your book, but what about putting your @TWITTERID right underneath your signature?
2. Revive and revamp your signature line in your email – make sure you include your TWITTERID, YOUR LINKEDIN profile, your FACEBOOK FAN PAGE and a link to your BLOG. Also make sure that you put your TWITTERID and your LINKEDIN ID on your business cards.
3. Encourage people to tweet during your booksignings. Create a hashtag that is your book title, or topic and give it out at the start of the booksigning.
4. Still think you can’t find media on Twitter? WRONG! Check out this great link for all the public media.
5. Always mention your TWITTERID in media interviews – say you would love for people to connect to you via Twitter.
6. Subscribe to the enewsletters from media, print and online magazines you want to be featured in. Make sure when you get the enewsletter you take time to then go to the site and immediately comment on a story. By doing this authentically you are not only providing more insight, but providing the reporter or freelance journalist another possible expert for a future story. Journalists don’t always want to quote the same sources for every story. Respect their work and they will in turn count on you to add new ideas in future stories.
7. What? You don’t have time to source actionable data on Muckrack.com? That’s crazy! You aren’t seriously thinking your PR person is doing this all day every day to find new journos on twitter? Peeshaw. Start doing it yourself.
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Today I want to wish Happy Mother’s Day to all my fellow Moms on the Web and off the Web. The most incredible job I’ve ever had the great honor to hold is being a Mom. There is nothing more important than this job.
My hero Erma Bombeck said this of motherhood, ”
“It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.”
When I speak at conferences, no matter what the topic of my talk is I always start out by telling my story of returning home to my daughter when she was just a mere 11 weeks, 2 hours and 9 minutes old.
My boss, news director Bruce Whiteaker at the Austin KXAN-TVNBC affiliate news station had patiently waited for my return to work after 11 weeks leave. The morning of my return to my job, I slowly drove toward Austin listening to NPR and drinking my coffee wearing a bright blue suit, hose, and heeled pumps. Humming Helen Reddy’s “I’m Woman Hear Me Roar,” I powered my Honda Accord north toward Austin, and then after less than four miles, I powered it back toward home.
I reached my house in less than 7 minutes having thrown my pumps out the window on our dirt road (later my husband Andy would go and get these), and leaving behind a career that I knew I would not return to.
I returned home to take care of my daughter, even after leaving my husband with enough pumped breast milk to feed the Walton clan and a list of directions that spanned four pages. This is the same good husband that had my daughter, her first night on Earth, sleep just like a tiny doll on top of his chest after holding my hand the entire time of delivery.
I peered through our front den window, scared to go in and wondering what my husband was going to say to this harried, tear-streamed face, standing in pumpless feet with ruined hose chanting, “I want my child back.”
It took all I could muster to step inside and tell my husband, now rocking our daughter, that I turned the car around.
“I turned the car around,” I said softly at first. He was still looking at me, and I said again, “I turned the car around.”
Now he stood up with our sweet daughter and said, “Sweetie, of course you turned the car around, and handed me our daughter.”
Not only had I turned my car around but I had turned our life around. And it was all for the better. What this one choice gave me was countless moments of wonder with both my children now ten and fourteen. What it also gave me was a brand new career because I was lucky enough to get a job as a technology journalist in 1996 writing for a first mover online business information site called Internet Business Forum. Instead of interviewing celebrities as a freelance writer, I was interviewing people who built everything we use in our daily lives. I was at the start of the dot com, survived the dot bomb and am still going strong. (Thank God for my children and my husband who gave me the gift of doing this.)
Today I want to witness how powerful being a mother is, and although my story is about leaving a job and staying at home, motherhood is a 24 hour job no matter what decisions you make and every mother is incredibly important to the world. Each mother has a right to choose what is best for her children, her life and how she will mother. Every single mother counts, because they are the ones that shepherd each magnificent life to a well-lived life.
God Bless them all.
- Image via Wikipedia
Every once in awhile I’m amazed by how many PR people, who’ve actually never had the experience of being a journalist, write “how-to” articles focused around what you should and should not do in interviews with journalists!
I am a card carrying member of the Internet Press Guild and the Online News Association. Having been a journalist/reporter online since 1996, I can tell you that journalists are people too. They’re just like us. They’re trying to do their job well, get paid and stay alive in what has become an increasingly competitive and low pay market.
The majority of journalists write because they love to write. They want to create good stories – they’re not out to get trap you in an interview or take things out of context. I’m speaking primarily in terms of major offline and online publications, not tabloids.
Journalists are not out to get you, they are out to get the story. The story includes your personality so the best thing you can do is be yourself. Don’t be a robot, be a real person. Stop listening to PR flaks who tell you that you have to ONLY talk about your brand or in polished soundbites.
Good content comes from good conversations, real conversations where you present the full picture of your life. Good reporters create amazing stories by making authentic connections with their interviewees.
When I was a full-time dot com journalist you would be amazed at how many CXO level interviews I did where it was heartening to find out the CEO or business leader had a life outside of just their job and their title. In fact, I always tried to share a little bit about my life (stay-at-home Mom wearing journalist cape by day and night between storytime, naps and Cheerios on the floor), and what that did is help my interviewees feel comfortable to share their real lives as well.
Putting the heart first in connecting with journalists who interview you will keep you in their hearts, and more importantly their contact Rolodex, much longer than if you simply choose to not interact with them on a real human level.
Oftentimes the most interesting part of a story comes from you and the journalist realizing you have more in common than just the story. What some PR flaks consider small talk is actually gem talk. These little beautiful gems that come through connecting on a real level with one another.
As a bonus, if you become a source of bigger insight than just your brand, it will help the journalist depend on you for other stories long-term.
Reporters are generous, smart, hard-working writers and their goal is to create valuable content, help them do that by being a valuable human first, and brand spokesperson second.
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Use the below list to determine if you just might be a social media junkie. Answer Yes or No. Score 1 for Yes. 0 for No’s (Hint: If you answer Yes to one question you might be a junkie and that is not exactly a good thing.:>)
For someone (me) who is always trying to balance the online with the offline, I feel your social media junkie pain.
You Just Might Be A Social Media Junkie if…
1. You keep dropping a note in your collection plate at church instead of a donation. The note says, “Dear Reverend Hill – why have you not yet started a Facebook fan page for Jesus?”
2. Your wife wants you to be in therapy with her, but you’ve told her you will only do it if you can find a therapist who can dispel his/her wisdom in 140 characters or less. (length of a Twitter)
3. You’ve told your immediate and extended family that the best place for them to find out what you’re up to is on Tweetdeck.
4. Instead of an emergency phone number on your children’s school information – you’ve posted your TwitterID account and told them that is the best way for them to reach you. (The school secretary in particular does not seem hip to the tweeting.)
5. You volunteered for the Parent Teacher Organization group but only on a virtual level and have promised you will send tweets during the school carnival when the principal is dunked.
6. Your Mom closed her Facebook account, because she was getting too many Fan messages from you asking her to join your Fan page.
7. Your husband has a Google alert set up on your name and occasionally searches Google images so he can see what you looked like before you became part of your office chair.
8. Your neighborhood bunko group has unfriended you on Facebook because they don’t much cotten to you sending status updates like, “I just kicked everyone’s butt in bunko. I’m the bunko queen and these women can’t roll a triple six if it killed them.”
9. You tell people you and Barack Obama are very close virtually because you joined his Facebook Fan page.
10. You found your Honors English teacher (Mrs. Whitley) on Facebook and you’re sending her blog posts to redline for you (because after all once a teacher, always a teacher.)
11. Your husband has banned twittering, facebooking, linkedin-ing from the bedroom.
12. Your pug starts a very high pitched noise when he sees you reach for your iPhone.
First day’s recap of Erma Bombeck Conference, and what a day it was! Tomorrow I’ll be presenting my “Overwebbed: Help I’m Having A Social Media Breakdown and I Can’t Tweet Up” and I’m very humbled to be here.
Wonderfully funny and incredibly talented people abound and the dinner this evening could not have been more hilarious. If you’ve not read anything by Laretta LaRoche, please change that and get her books.
She was the keynote speaker this evening and really delivered! Also Tim Bete (past director of Erma Conference) spoke and he was truly funny as well.
The room tonight was packed full and what a great honor to be among so many talented people.
I’m nervous about presenting tomorrow but I’m wearing my tweet-proof vest so all should be well, plus I’ve got to say the spirit here feels incredibly kind and generous. I’m going to try very hard to have the audience at my first “Hello, Ya’ll.”
I also got to hang out with Sam Horn, who I really count as one of my mentors and just think it is incredible gift to know. You should also check out Sam’s books!
- Image via Wikipedia
I’ll be leaving tomorrow to speak at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Conference which is a great thrill for me. My client Bill Scheft will be speaking there too, as well as one of my heroes Gail Collins.
Erma is another hero of mine and I started reading her books when I was very young and my Mom would pass them to me to inspire me and give me the gift of humor. I’m taking my Mom, a 72 year old English teacher, who still teaches in an 95% economically disadvantaged school district near Dallas. My mom gets the kids in 9th grade who everyone else has “passed along” but those same kids can’t read and often have no one to believe in them. My mom changes all that for them. Several of her students are now in college and many have gone on to work in other careers as well. She inspires them to do more with their lives.
Erma’s writing always inspires me. It is timeless because it is good common sense and elevates the power of humor and love in our lives. Being a humorist is the hardest writing job one can have, yet Erma did it effortlessly. So before I leave for the trip in the morning, I wanted to share my favorite Erma quotes.
1. Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.
2. Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
3. Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.
4. If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.
5. Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
6. There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
7. When humor goes, there goes civilization.
8. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me”.
9. When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?” it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.
10. It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.” I’ll be presenting “Overwebbed: Help I’ve Had a Social Media Breakdown and I Can’t Tweet Up”. I’ll also be tweeting from the event so look for hashtag #ebww . I think everyone will be using that one for tweets.
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So grateful to be included in the “Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time To Get Busy” book.
This book is an incredible tome of leading marketers, writers, PR folks and others on the Web. Hope you’ll take time to check it out. And below are all the fantastic folks who contributed to the book itself.
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“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” (Albert Einstein)
When I work with clients on Web visibility, I define exactly what we want their social media Economy of Effort plan to engender. I define Economy of Effort in this way – taking the best content and brainshare you can provide and using it in the most efficient and economical way possible to reach your communities through online channels.
In the hype, over-hype, more hype and master hype that the social media “experts” are urging you to buy into about social media profiles, they forget to pass on the real truth that if you can’t keep up with them all, then not one of these tools serve you well.
If you’re diluting your message across hundreds or frankly even five or more social media platforms, fan pages, blogs, twitterIDs – then you’re not utilizing economy of effort in social media. And your return on investment in doing all this work will be very small.
You can’t conquer all communities, you can’t be the answer for every single question on the Web, and you can’t be active on every social media platform. And trust me, you don’t want to be either.
It’s not about the masses, it’s not about how many people are following you on Twitter, it’s about the quality, the congruency and the resources they require from you uniquely to help them.
It’s not about how many comments your blog posts are getting – it’s about setting up a structure for you to blog effectively, even if it’s just once weekly, with valuable and integrity-based content. It’s about using content to its best purpose through all your online profiles and not spending hours generating tweets, blog posts, status updates or weeping over your keyboard because you can’t possibly think of one other “tweet-worthy” thing to say.
Instead, it is about using your efforts wisely. Pick three goals and focus your online efforts toward those.
(HINT: Make it a goal to attract journalists, media and peer publications to your blog or your profiles, so you become a valued expert for them, without the need for PR gatekeepers, agencies and pitches full of pablum to mass media lists.)
Keep in mind all your goals should focus on supporting your community with grace and respect for their time as well as yours. Your community is always more important than you. Your community, by this point, is most likely sick of being interrupted by your Flickr, YouTube, blog posts and incessant tweeting.
We would all be served better if we decided to incorporate what Einstein said, “Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
How to do that?
1. Out of clutter find simplicity – Start slow with your social media efforts. I suspect many of you are already suffering from what I’ve termed “Post-Traumatic Social Media Disorder” and so for you, I would advise you “socialdown” immediately. I know it sounds hard, but you can do it. If you’ve got twenty places you’re juggling online, reduce them to five. Message them so they know where you’ll be and why you’re doing it, and believe me, the ones who really value you will “socialdown” right along with you. In fact, you’ll inspire them to take this step themselves.
Think of it in terms of downsizing, social media belt tightening so to speak. There’s not enough time in the day to do everything well, and keep our work life balance where it should be, so choose to no longer be trapped by ”tiny shiny social media” tools.
2. From discord find harmony – Incorporate a strategic and congruent plan for your brand and your online conversations. Not just superficial junk, make sure that every single thing you’re doing counts for something. Not only counts, but brings you harmony with your community. And most importantly, brings you harmony in your life. Stop being in front of the computer 24/7. Get off the Blackberries, iPhones, laptops, YouTube and walk outside.
3. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity – I feel your pain. I feel your panic about what you might be missing out there if you’re not online all the time and you’re not on all these platforms. That difficulty – that pain- will pass. Give yourself six months and you’ll recognize that it’s nice to see the sun again, it’s nice to not be in constant social media panic mode, it’s nice to have a plan and follow it. Congruently, abundantly and with boundaries.
Sieze the opportunities, I promise you’ll find, if you’ll choose to set yourself free from being everywhere online.
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5 Ways to Kiss Your Publicist Goodbye And Pitch Your Book Online:
1. You’ve compiled your list of bloggers to reach out to. You’ve read their blogs, followed their blogs or websites and know the kind of books they like to highlight or review.
2. You demand coverage or review of your blog in an ALLCAPS email to them. (Ok…no you don’t.) What you do instead is send them a brief email pitch like this one below:
DEAR (NAME) (real name!):
I’ve been reading your blog and know that you review business books on networking and I wanted to see if you might consider a review copy of my new book, “Accidental Networking.” (PUBLISHER, 2010)
BRIEF PARAGRAPH ABOUT THE BOOK HERE – this paragraph would answer WHY, WHAT and HOW.
a. Why the book is important and different than other books out there
b. What the book details very briefly and its target audience
c. How their blog readership will benefit from the book and the blogger sharing it with them.
Here is a link to the book and my site for more information.
Thank you and please let me know if you’re interested in seeing the book.
END
3. You wait patiently for their response. You give them time to consider the book before you followup with another email. You don’t email every hour, you don’t send them chocolates, wine or fervent pleas about how they must cover your book on their blog. You don’t comment on their blog about how they must cover your book. You just wait. Wait, wait, wait.
4. If you’ve not heard back from them within 2 weeks of your first pitch, you make one more pitch to them. It looks like this.
Dear NAME,
Just wanted to reach out once more and see if you’ve had time to consider the possibility of reviewing my book, “Accidental Networking,” , it was most recently reviewed here – LINK TO REALLY GOOD UNBIASED REVIEW (not one your mom wrote) – and I hope you might take a look at it too.
I know you’re probably inundated with pitches, so I appreciate your time in considering it.
Thank you.
Your NAME
END
4. They respond to you and say they’d love to read the book and you SEND it! You also note in the email that you would be happy to provide them a ready-made Q&A or a book for giveaway to their readership if they feel that would be appropriate.
5. You go back to your target Excel sheet (where I know you’re keeping all your outreach lists organized) and you mark that blogger as IN PROCESS and you go to the next blogger. Also keep in mind that you’re always compiling a new list of 20 bloggers, tweeters or websites that you can reach out to.
Bonus: The blogger reviews your book and you link to that review in your blog, thank the blogger via the comments on their blog and feel grateful that you’ve garnered another review.
Bonus: You start all over again. You don’t give up. You keep pitching, researching and of course thanking anyone who takes time to cover your book!
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