Everybody loves lists…well, this is a ‘mega list of lists’! During the last 3 years I’ve put together a collection of links that lists PR and marketing content related to the social media universe.
I will keep adding new items to the list and if you are a regular subscriber of my blog you’ll find all these updates in my reports. In this post I mentioned only ‘lists’ but in my reports I include other valuable content too like stats, case studies, ebooks, white papers, info-graphics, etc. so if you didn’t subscribe yet to my blog but you think it would be a good idea, grab the rss feed and stay tuned! đ
Age Of Conversation 3 (AOC3), the book that I co-authored with an amazing group of marketing pros, is finally out and you can get it on amazon! It’s available in:
(the proceeds will be donated to an international childrenâs charity of our authorsâ choosing – stay tuned for more updates). Once again a special thanks goes to Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan for inviting me to join this great project.
What’s the book about?
Age of Conversation 3 captures the distinct shift from social media as a hypothetical consumer loyalty tool, as it was considered only a little more than a year ago, to its current state as a staple in the modern marketing toolbox. Although the book covers more than just social media, the topic is ubiquitous among the bookâs 10 sections: At the Coalface;Â Identities; Friends and Trusted Strangers; Conversational Branding; Measurement; Corporate Conversations; In the Boardroom; Innovation and Execution; Influence; Getting to Work; and Pitching Social Media.
Enjoy it and let me know what you think about it here on the blog or via twitter @vascellari!
What steps do you need to take to create a valuable online service or business
What’s the strategic approach that an individual can follow to create value, authority, credibility and the opportunity to make business online
Video highlights below. Enjoy it!
@Robin: Thanks for the great time, it was nice to see you again! đ
Andrea
Video highlights:
Anyone can do what she/he wants for a living
There is one thing that everybody should keep in mind. Nowadays, more than ever before, everyone has a chance of doing what he or she loves for a living.
Going Global
Why? Because we are going global. With a simple blog and few clicks you have the chance of connecting with the entire world. It’s definitely interesting period the one we are living in.
Being Passionate
At the base, before focusing on technology, it’s important to be really passionate about what you are doing. I see way too many people who are unsatisfied with their jobs, and I can’t stand that. Maybe it’s because I am an entrepreneur. I really do what I love. I love my job. That is what I am really passionate about in my life and I think everyone has some passions. I think they should go for it. Online you are instantly connected with the entire world. You will find other people that have your same passions becoming your target audience, whether you do it for business or not.
What you do doesn’t have to be necessarily related to business (it could non-profit etc.) but let’s say that you have the possibility of finding a place to express yourself. Usually, if something is done with passion, you have that drive to go on that usually other people do not have. It’s not going to be easy. Every time you do something, you will find roadblocks. Ultimately, passion is the drive that makes you go on. Nothing really starts or works in first place if you do not really want it badly.
Start By Listening
First thing you should do is to start by listening a little bit what’s going on and understanding who is already out there. Let’s say you want to start your own small business. You should carefully listen to which are the other players in your field and to understand in which environment you will have to move, because sometimes it will happen… you won’t be the first. You definitely have to pay attention to them, and then of course build a presence on the web that express your strategic communications plan. It doesn’t have to be just ‘a blog’, your online presence is going to be the gate between you and the world or your target audience, so it has to be done really carefully.
Jump Into The Conversation
After that, you can start to jump into the conversation that is happening out there – I do not want to say “join” the conversation, because I am sick of hearing it. Everyone is talking about “joining the conversation” and just few people actually do it. Anyway… you have to start to jump into that, where the conversation is already happening, with your audience, with people within your niche. After that, when you establish a basic connection with this environment that is out there, then you can start to be proactive.
Build Trust, Engage Deeper
Once the trust is built, then you can start to engage at a deeper level and eventually this will translate into business. It could also be just for a passion or for the organization you are working for. It just depends on which is your focus and what are your objectives.
When Does The Money Show Up?
The money comes after you establish a real connection with your audience, after your target audience trusts you. The money will come after, as a consequence.
I tell you an example.
Every time I go to Venice – I come from Venice region in Italy – I go to the market on Friday morning. I go there and buy some good fresh fish. There are tons of people that are selling fish, but I always go to the same lady. There is no way I can go and buy fish from anyone else, because I bought fish from her for years.
How she convinced me at first?
observing the crowd and stopping me when she noticed that I need some fish,
showing me the really good fish she had,
why would have been better to buy from her and not from others,
giving me good tips on how to cook fish, and so on.
She established a real emotional connection, so I trusted her and I became her client.
You can basically do the same online. At that point – after you have built all these connections – is where the money is going to come. It’s going to be a consequence.
Word of Mouth
Another important thing is what you call in Italian “il passaparola“, the power of word of mouth. Happy clients will talk to other potential clients and they will bring them to you. It’s going to be also your community that will help you and your business grow.
What is it?
Relationships that people have on the web can be described with concentric circles. The innermost represents the people we trust the most, our closest friends. When we start to move out from that close group of people, our trust starts to fade away until we reach the point in which we start to rely more on the opinions of ‘experts’ or more authoritative and recognized voices in that space.
Update based on comments: Existence of multiple groups of circles around each individual. Each one of these groups is dedicated to a specific niche (professional, personal life, etc.). Although certain contacts can be present on different groups, according to the niche we are looking at they can have a different level of influence/trust.
Why it’s important?
The understanding of the trust circle dynamics can offer great positioning advantages for brands, strategists and other communications practitioners. Understand where you are standing or where you should eventually be helps the listening process, the engagement, the acquisition, the support and the retention of your target audience.
Take this as a conversation starter. What would you add to it? What’s your take?
I’d love to hear your thoughts here in the comments or via twitter @vascellari (remember to link to this post!).
Last week I spoke at the Ignite in Rome (Italy). My presentation was in Italian but on this post you’ll find all the notes related to each slide (below) in English.
Learn how to use Google to take Twitter search to a whole new level. Enjoy!
Every time you go to an event it’s nice to take something back home. Something practical to play around with and experiment. So in my presentation I wanted to give more practical tips then just theory.
Passive VS Active use of social media. Many people use social media in a passive way. They just use the standard features but they don’t use the tools at full and they don’t even combine them with others to get the best out of them. In this presentation we’ll do exactly this: Combining twitter with Google to get the best out of it.
Challenge: Find stuff that matters. This is an open challenge for many communicators. When we are searching for something we look for information that can help us in better achieving our objectives. Searching junk that doesnât apply to our aims.
So from where we can start our search? Well social media/networks are a good starting point. According to Nielsen consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year. In this presentation we have a closer look at Twitter.
Let’s say that I have a client, a restaurant for which we are conducting a competitive analysis. Among other strategic moves & tactics we want to search on twitter for potential competitors that we can examine and study. So we are looking for other restaurants on twitter that are located nearby our client. By typing and searching for ‘restaurant’ we’ll get thousands of results of tweets that contain the word ‘restaurant’ but that are not necessarily tweeted by restaurants.
We need something more accurate. If we have a look at the advanced twitter search we can use multiple search terms, a specific location etc. but it’s still something that doesn’t help us much in narrowing down our results to only restaurants in that area.
What we noticed with my team at itive is that the best result we can get at this level are the one that contain links. In fact when people share valuable information online they usually do it with a link to add more value to what they are sharing.
What the advanced twitter search doesn’t offer (yet) is the possibility to search for multimedia content. For example videos and photos. This data can be really useful at times in our searches (keeping in mind that you might want to use these tips I’m giving also for other searches and not just for restaurants). Twitter is full of photos, but do we find them?
It’s simple. You’ll just need to add to your search term some of the services that people use to share photos on twitter (like twitpic, etc.). Here’s what you need to type: restaurant twitpic OR ow.ly.
But let’s try to use these channels in an active way. As you probably now recently Google started to index tweets in its search results. We can use this as an advantage that can help us achieve better results for what we are looking for. We’ll use Google to search Twitter.
We can start by searching twitter profiles that have in the name/title the word ‘restaurant’. We’ll do it by using intitle:”restaurant* on twitter” site:twitter.com in our search. Interesting isn’t it?! đ
Yes but what is the this twitter profile (in my slide I used my own to not share the one of any restaurant -privacy) has the word ‘restaurant’ in their Bio instead of in their name/title. Example: The name could be ‘Delicious Food’ and the bio description could be ‘We are an Italian restaurant etc…’. How to we search our relevant info in the bio?
we’ll simply need to change the attribute in our search with this: intext:”bio * restaurant” site:twitter.com. Keep in mind that we would have found any of these restaurants by using the previous ‘title search’. At this point our research is starting to give us better results but we still need to focus on our location.
Location is very important. But once again the search we perform on the basic advanced search of twitter just gives us ‘general’ results. (to get these results we specified the location in from the advanced twitter search page). What we can do is something smarter…check the next point.
A this point we can combine the two previous searches (title, bio) and add on top of those a third attribute, the location. So we’ll search for twitter profiles of restaurants (whether is specified in their title or bio) that are in New York City (I chose NYC as an example you can enter any other location/area/state/city). Here’s what we’ll nee to type: (intitle:”restaurant * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * restaurant”) intext:”location * NYC” site:twitter.com. The results are exactly what we were looking for đ
Remember that this is nothing without a strategic communications plan. This tips are at tactical level, not strategic.
Tactics like this can help us in monitoring trends, analyzing competitors and of course in gaining a competitive advantage.
You can find more info related to similar topics on my blog andreavascellari.com. If you have any questions or you would like to talk more, drop you comments or get in touch via twitter @vascellari (please read my twitter policy if you start to follow me, thanks).
In the long run many tweets don’t seem to be searchable. This is why I decided to have a backup of all my updates.
How to do it?
Few months ago I read the tips shared by Steve Rubel on this topic. The idea was to use Twistory to subscribe and consequentially import your tweets to Google Calendar. At that point all your tweets would have been saved and of course searchable. Really handy.
The Edelman 2010 Trust Barometer survey of trust and credibility in business and government has just been released.
According to Richard Edelman (President & CEO Edelman) business has stabilized and trust has risen in few countries such as the US but generally the picture is much more solid.
However trust in business is very fragile and business has to learn that the biggest drivers of corporate reputation are no longer an outstanding CEO and having terrific financial results.
Productivity – Google Calendar is more than a simple calendar. Here’s how it works for me.
I create different calendars and use them for different purposes like:
Do/Done list: In this calendar I write what I have to do everyday. What I can’t accomplish in a certain day is moved to the next one or to a different date. At the end of each day I have a list of tasks that I completed and a list of upcoming tasks that I’ll have to take care of in the next days/future. I usually mark the entries in this calendar as ‘all-day’, I don’t set specific time or place.
Meetings: In this calendar I save all my meetings – virtual (via Skype, Adobe Connect, Cisco, Google Hangout etc.) and in the real world (face to face). All the entries have detailled information about place (for virtual meetings I mention a specific URL or on which platform they’ll run), time (including the corresponding time for participants that live in other countries. Here’s a handy tool that can help you setup your meeting time) and alarm notifications.
Use hastags (#): Google calendar is searchable. By using hashtags in your calendar entries it will be easier for you to search and keep track of certain items/lists over time. I use #tags for all sort of activities in my calendars (work, sport, shopping, etc.)
As you probably noticed in the first screen-shot (above) some of my calendars are named as ‘project…’. In the next post dedicated to tools I’ll share how you can use Google Calendar to help you with your project management. Stay tuned by subscribing to this RSS feed!
Did you know that you can manage and sync all your calendars on the go? You might find interesting:
This is a blueprint of what I’m planning to share on my blog in 2010. I created it few days ago during my flight to New York keeping in mind who you are and what you need (remember Tag Yourself?).
The tool I used is mindnode and as you can see it’s still a draft that I intentionally left incomplete because I wanted to hear your thoughts about it. The aim is to ultimately add value to what you’ll read/watch here on my my blog in 2010.
What would you add or change?
share your ideas, requests, suggestions in the comments below or via twitter @vascellari (linking back to this post)
I’m always on the go and I need to have access to my calendar/s from wherever I am and whenever I need it. Instead of calendars I look at them as sets of data related to the projects I’m working on. During the last years I tested a good number of tools but I got the best out of the ‘Google Calendar – iCal –iPhone or iPod touch‘ combo.
Sync your additional calendars with your iPhone/iPod Touch by visiting https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect from any browser (via desktop or mobile device) or For Google Apps users: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOUR DOMAIN NAME/iphoneselect
When you sync your iPhone/iPod Touch on iTunes make sure to select the calendars you want to sync (in the screen-shot below I synced all my calendars). iTunes > iPhone/iPod Touch > Info > Calendars
Advantages?
Your data doesn’t live anymore on single devices like your computer or you mobile phone, it lives in the cloud. Devices are used to simply edit or interact with your data. This means that…
after you edit one of the calendars (iCal, Google Calendar or iPhone) the changes will reflect in realt-time on all the others. Basically you use ‘one ring to rule them all’.
Tip: If you are using an iPhone/iPod and you don’t have wifi/data connection when you are on the go…no worries. Keep updating your calendar and the when you’ll find a connection (or when you’ll plug your iPod/iPhone to your computer > iTunes) your calendar entries will sync automatically!
you always have an online backup of all your data. So there’s no problem if you lose your phone or your computer crashes.
if you don’t have with you or you can’t use your phone or computer, you can still access your data from any other device connected to the internet. (I’ve been in this situation once… and this literally ‘saved me’)
What appears to be a simple synchronization actually opens up a huge number of new doors on how you can better organize and manage your life, work and projects. Give it a try!
If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:
Meanwhile… Do you have any related tips you want to share? What advantages you find syncing with the cloud? Questions? Ideas? Special requests? Feel free to share them in the comments or via a quick âcomment-ready-tweetâ @vascellari!
