Online mass marketing will fail you. Its too indirect and regardless of how much whuffie you think you have your message will blend in with the spam. Tara Hunt has posted her real life example about this. On her blog she states follower count doesn’t matter and that it is quality over quantity.
I agree with half of that. Follower count doesn’t matter but its not even the quality of your followers that matters. Its how direct and how much work you put into your message.
This feels kind of backwards saying this about someone I adore and has inspired much my community work but if Tara thinks that with whatever whuffie she has built up that she can just make a withdrawal she is dead wrong.
Social media has never been about give and take. Its about engaging and being personal. So no matter how much whuffie you have, no matter how many followers you have if you are only promoting for the masses your message is going to get lost.
The best messages, marketing or not, are direct and relatable to the audience. If you are promoting your event, product or whatever take the time to write a personalized email to the top 10 influencers who you think would benefit most from what you are doing. Explain why they should click your link and what supporting it means to them and the things they value. And then, and this is key, ask them that if they think this is valuable and want to support it, share this information to their network.
The goal is not to build up on whuffie to cash in on it later. The goal is to identify the people who would get the most value from what you have to offer and engage them and empower them to become champions for you. When you do that you have something stronger than marketing, you have something you stronger than a follower, you have someone who really cares and finds value from what you do.
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on March 1, 2010 at 9:05 pm, filed under Reactions and tagged social media, Tara Hunt. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Social media is a dangerous place and I’m not talking about for businesses. I’m talking about for people and the aspiring individuals who want to expand their knowledge and build a network. Before I told people if you want meet people and gain credibility you have to get on twitter or you should be reading this blog or that blog. The truth of the matter is I was completely wrong. What I should have told them is if you want to meet people and gain credibility you need to do something remarkable.
What I have come to realize is Social Media is only conversation. And there is a lot of it. Its distracting and addictive. When you are focused on building your follower count you should be focusing on building your product. When you are skimming through your reader you should be thinking does any of this help me to create.
Social media does have its place and continues to add value to my work however that doesn’t mean I need to work to increase my follower count over 1000. It doesn’t mean I need to read every tweet. And it doesn’t mean I need to be checking in or sharing every thought I have as a status update.
Too many people who are making zero dollars from social media have their reader, facebook and twitter client open all day long. Stop it. Learn to trim back on the content you consume and start focusing on producing. Social media is about marketing and if you don’t have a product in works its time to start thinking about where you are investing your time.
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on February 28, 2010 at 8:55 pm, filed under Uncategorized and tagged social media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Its been in the works for some time coming but I can now gladly and openly say that we, Microblink, have sold our first site. Near the end of 2009 we put What the Hashtag on the market. Within the month we had several responses; one of which came from What the Trend. From our perspective this was the perfect match for our service. WTT is the source for trending topics on twitter and the site was already doing a great job supporting some of the communities forming through twitter chats and meetups/conferences.
What does this mean for What the Hashtag? WTT has been running the site most of the year already. It wasn’t until recently they posted the banner showing the transfer of ownership. I’m not sure how the two sites may integrate over time however users should know this is good news for WTH as WTT will be able to tackle some of the issues we have experienced in the past with Twitter’s API (and limits) and continue to build on what we started.
What the Hashtag was a great learning experience for us and me personally. It was an honor to get a post on TechCrunch and I was doing backflips when we found out that some of the smartest minds in the social space were checking out our service. However now, for myself and the Microblink team, this frees up some of our time to work on new projects… and I’m also looking forward to participating in a few of the hashtags that inspired us to build What the Hashtag in the first place.
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on February 27, 2010 at 9:00 pm, filed under Projects and tagged Twitter, What the Hashtag, What the Trend. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I broke down yesterday and did some additional back-end work on the blog. So after reviewing numerous posts with the top x must have plugins here is what I am using on Scribblinks.
Akismet - protect your blog from spam and reduce comment administration time
All In One SEO Pack – search engine juice and really I don’t think I need it but its so dang easy
Google XML Sitemaps – more search engine juice; well at least that is what all of the SEOs say
Ultimate Google Analytics – google analytics lets me pat myself on the back; want to get serious about content skip the analytics and measure on comments
WP-Super-Cache – feel free to drive traffic to my blog, it should be ready for it. Don’t worry I’ll just wait here while you link out my blog to all of your friends
So after typing all of this out I have decided all your really need is Akismet. Thankfully the whole process of installing plugins takes about 10 minutes; reading blog posts about plugins however can take days.
Happy blogging.
(and did see what I did with the post title? …guaranteed to increase blog traffic)
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on February 10, 2010 at 7:44 am, filed under Blog Update and tagged wordpress. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Startup Weekend is making its round across the Midwest again. Des Moines is onboard and have my ticket. This will be my third weekend and second in Des Moines. This year I hope to see more developers involved and for my own professional growth I hope to try out what I have been learning about Information Architecture.
Prior years I have gone in with a Project Manager’s mindset; Get the team on one goal, know when to cut off talk and get creating, keep people busy and keep the right people clear of distractions. This year I want to focus on work on design, usability and creating wireframes. I’m not sure how much room there is for this in a 54 hour project but if I can work it in I’m going to do it.
If you have been interested in creating a product, want some real world experience pitching your ideas and want to network with others with the same goal of launching a startup sign up for Startup Weekend and I’ll see you there.
Des Moines
Omaha (I really want to attend this but the third is due around the same time)
- When: March 19 – 21
- Where: Peter Kiewit Institute
- Cost: $75
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on February 9, 2010 at 10:06 pm, filed under Events and tagged des moines, dsm, startup weekend. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I have been blogging off and on since late 2004 however recently I decided to take a fresh stab at it and here you have it. Please allow me to introduce my new blog, Scribblinks.
Hello and let me give you the tour.
Scribblinks is powered by Wordpress and strangely enough with all of its features and ability to have a million sidebars I opted for the this extremely simple yet beautiful one column theme from Ashley Morgan. You can find it here.
With a site so simple I found myself wondering why I didn’t just create it on Tumblr, but the truth is Tumblr is too easy. I get too distracted in the dashboard and with my personal blog there. Its also too easy to swap out hundreds of beautiful themes but this setup, here, I can be happy with. And I hope it will help me just write and share my thoughts.
What I’m writing about.
I don’t do anything particularly well; I tinker. I can’t code, I’m horrible at design and I’m a terrible writer; I just tinker. But I do love the internet and more specifically I love the interactive and social web. As I continue to tinker in this area and discover new things I will share my experiences and thoughts here. Hopefully you will also chime in from time to time and overall it will be a great time had by all.
Thanks!
Thank you for your time so far. Hopefully there is much more to come so feel free to subscribe to my blog or bookmark the site so you can find your way back.
This entry was written by Rob Jensen, posted on February 1, 2010 at 10:34 pm, filed under Blog Update. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.