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Going Home

August 10, 2008 By 1 Comment

I was talking to one of my bloggers recently about getting back to my roots and getting back to what made me the blogger I am today. I talked about rediscovering the talents that I developed long ago when I was a Daddy blogger talking about the little things in life that as I discovered recently are actually the big things. He said something remarkable that immediately caused me to think of this post, he said “It’s like going home.”goinghome.jpg

I have had that in my mind and can’t get the thought out of my head. I like the sound of “going home.” The thought of going home has many emotions and memories, even smells and other senses and thoughts of better days. I think of all of the times I actually went home when it brought with it the safety of youth and the feeling of protection and notion of being where I belonged.

What does this have to do with social media consulting or anything business related? I believe we all need to sometimes take a moment to stop and go home. We need to get an idea of what brought us to where we are and what started us on the journey to begin with and to see if we are still on that path. Many times we have changed paths without ever knowing and we need to refocus our efforts to get back on the proper path.

For me, getting back to what the true nature of blogging is and was for me is essential to being able to teach and mentor others. It allows me to explain to companies needing my services with the passion I first had for blogging and how it changed my life and the can change their company. As a business owner can you remember where your home is? Perhaps you are working for a company and can think of the time when you first decided that you believed in your company and its message or mission. If not perhaps a short trip back home is in order.

[photo courtesy of sanjoyg]

Filed Under: Blog Consulting, BTW, Business Blogging, Companies Needing Blogs, Marketing, Professional Blogging, Services, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Media Voo Doo You Do

February 18, 2008 By 1 Comment

There are many people that believe that social media is some sort of new religion.  In fact, many believe that adopting social media will somehow take them to the promise land, and make them successful beyond their wildest dreams.  This I’m afraid to say is not actually the case.

Joshua Porter has posted entitled “The Problem with Social Media Marketing“.  This is a great common sense approach to social media marketing, and well worth the read to get a very practical look at social media marketing.  I want to “amplify” his statement:

In other words, it’s better to think of social media tools as amplifying customer opinion rather than improving it.

You can’t simply set up social media tools and expect your business to get better. You have to change your business for your business to get better.

This is the lesson I want to get out to everyone about this post.  Social Media tools simply enable businesses.  It’s not an injection of coolness for your service or product.  Social Media is about community.  Building your community around your product or service.  As your community grows and your product becomes more well known, it will also be successful.  That is of course if you listen to what is being said in your community.  If you have a cool product or a cool service, it will be more cool in a larger community.  If it stinks, guess what it will stink more in a larger community.  Social Media is not some magic you turn on to make your product or service better.  It’s a tool that you use to tell people how good you think your product or service would be to them.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Consulting, Marketing, Services, Social Media

Social Media From Riches to Rags

February 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I had to jinx myself as a result of my bragging about touching everything and having it turn to gold.  The pendulum has swung as it relates to my quote:

Then after the 4 years we have been going here, I have a week like this one where everything clicks.  Everything I touch turns to gold and nothing could possibly go wrong.

I totally messed up my karmic balance.   You had to know that with a bold statement like that I had a slap of reality coming.

I decided it was time to upgrade my version of WordPress here at One By One Media and at its sister site Bloggers For Hire.  As he upgrades completed, the templates I was using for the design were not compatible with the newest version of WordPress.  My sites had to use a default template.  Not the best of signs for a blogging consultant try to impress prospective clients.  That would only serve to be the first of the payback.

For two days or longer, I have not been able to figure out, my email has been totally borked.  Yes, that is a really good term for it.  I can’t seem to receive email.  I can send it out but I cannot for some strange reason receive it in my Google application of Gmail.  The emails are making it to my server under the domain but then they are not pushed on through to my Gmail application.  I can read them using my Cpanel version, but I can’t make them go to Gmail.  I have no idea why and have as much technical skills in my body to have told you so far what I have found, but have no clue how to fix it.  So here I sit.  My WordPress install is an old version and probably open to being hacked and my email running on less than all cylinders.

I’m hoping with the posting of this blog the pendulum will swing again.  I don’t mind being in middle but the extremes of this spectrum are driving me to drink!

Filed Under: Blog Consulting, Blog Platforms, Bloggers and Blogs, Bloggers For Hire, Marketing, The Site

We Are Here, We Are Blogging, We Are Evolving, We Are One By One Media

November 14, 2007 By 2 Comments

Many of you have come by here and wanted to know what is going on in the world of One By One Media, and why we have been dormant.  There are many reasons( you know what they say about excuses), but the biggest of which is we are terribly busy, and suffice it to say that in this case, blogging here seems to have taken a back burner priority.  Those darn clients and customers can be so demanding!

We were recently out in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center attending, exhibiting and speaking at the Blog World and New Media Expo last week, and I for one am trying to get my feet under me again from what turned out to be a smashing success for us here at One By One Media and for Bloggers For Hire.  I am working on a recap post with photos and all kinds of information and I will be posting that shortly.  I was so glad to get to meet many people in our blogging industry, (yes we are now our own industry) and actually meet in the flesh those that I feel I have known as colleagues and friends online for a long time.  We are about to launch a new look and feel at One By One Media, so stay tuned for more of that soon.  For now, we are trying to get back into gear and up to speed.

Filed Under: Announcements, Blog Consulting, Bloggers For Hire, Conferences/Trade Shows, Marketing, Services, Social Media, The Site

Searching For A Local Business: Old vs. New

September 10, 2007 By 1 Comment

yellowpages3 I can remember the first time I had my name appear in the phone book after I purchased my first home.  Like Steve Martin in the movie “The Jerk”, I danced around and shouted, “I’m somebody now”.  Back then of course, I think computers were something in sci-fi movies, and the Internet had not yet been thought about.  But I can still see that brand new version of the white pages all clean and crisp with my name right there alongside the other 30 people that shared my name.

I was recently watching television when the new Dex advertisement came on and I had a trip down memory lane.  I am still amazed that anyone would be spending much time looking at a Yellow page book in the modern era of finding everything through search.  I think the last time I used a yellow pages directory it was for a booster seat for the kids to reach the table better. 

Then I saw a related article recently put out by eMarketer.com.  The article states that online local advertising will reach 2.9 billion in 2007, which is only 13.4% of the total online advertising market.  The study and article are an interesting look at local advertising.  It made me wonder about the dollars being spent on traditional offline products such as the yellow pages.  I also wondered whether what they were being told about the results they would get as business owners and placing the ads.

I can remember the game back in the day of Yellow page advertising, companies wanted to somehow be listed first in their niche.  If they had a plumbing business, they would call it AAA Plumbing, because then they would be listed as the first alphabetical result listing in the book.  We are not that far off now with the way companies are clamoring for that all important number 1 placement in search results.  Now we are doing it with SEO and other tactics.  The ideal is still the same and that is to be that first listed business under plumbing.  Even though advertising is drastically changing since the old days, in some respects it stays the same.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Consulting, Blog Metrics, Blog Mining, Blog Revenue, Blog Tools, Business Blogging, Findability, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Services

The New Era of Social Media: The Growth Stage and Education

September 2, 2007 By 1 Comment

On the same vein as my lost post regarding a blogging hiccup or what I see as a new era of business blogging, we are now at a crossroad of corporate advertising, marketing and PR online.  There are many forward thinking companies that are early adopters, and especially in the technical world where technology is seen as a tool to harness if you want to succeed.  So where are we in the adoption of social media as it relates to the rest of the companies and corporations?  We are at a new beginning, the stage of educating the rest of the world. Those companies that didn’t get it, the ones that want to see what the early adopters did and what worked and what didn’t.

800px-ProductLifeCycle We have seen it in our own business model here at One By One Media and Bloggers For Hire.  We really didn’t have to sell real hard to get companies that were contacting us about business blogging and hiring bloggers.  They wanted to adopt the technology and they wanted to make it a part of their online presence.  They were already sold on the idea.  All I or any other social media consultant had to do was implement the tools necessary for the company to join in the social media world.  We had the good life then, and our sales were self fulfilling prophecies.  Now we are in the education stage of the rest of the world.  These companies and corporations are not yet sold on the idea of social media.  In fact, I think it was stated best in a post and thread at the newly canceled Blog Business Summit.

Steve Broback wrote:

Like the Lambada, I don?t believe my original, 1990?s era event model is nearly as viable as it used to be, and certainly not so for the BBS. The BBS really never attracted the huge numbers of marketing and PR types that clearly *needed* to learn this stuff. I tried very hard with the Chicago event to attract that demographic and our efforts washed up on shore like a dead fish.

In addition, we emailed, snail mailed, and telephoned 250 CTOs and CIOs and invited them to come and learn how Wikis and blogs can enable internal knowledge sharing. They were terrified, and only 3 signed up. A couple even said they were ?too busy? with their current efforts to reign in email overload to take the time to attend(!) (emphasis added)

This was a very astute thought and a comment by Kevin Hillstrom about the event:

In the posts of the past two days, one can see that you feel hurt by spending so much time and effort to evangelize something you believe in, only to have to make tough choices that may, on the surface, appear contrary to what you?ve evangelized over a period of several years.

It will probably be hard, but try to not blame people who ?don?t get it?. It is just as likely that people failed to do a good job of educating folks as it is that people ?don?t get it?. You?ll never know which of those two issues is the right one.

Teresa mentioned that companies that don?t get this are ?sunk?. They aren?t. They are simply missing an opportunity to improve the performance of their business.

When the conversation turns to picking on the ones who you are trying to evangelize, you make it that much harder to be successful in the long term.

Don?t feel bad about having to cancel something you so strongly believed in. Spend your efforts moving forward, showing folks that they can benefit by doing what you?re suggesting, and that what you?re suggesting is evolving and changing every day.

I sent two folks to your conference last year. One of those folks made a difference in her organization, armed with the knowledge she gained. Know that your efforts do help others who have an interest in your subject matter.

Kevin’s comment is spot on in my opinion.  We will need to show the examples of the past early adopters.  We need to take those examples and show the rest of the corporate world how the companies used the tool and how it benefited them and provide hard numbers for those companies to see for a return on their investment. As mentioned, Teresa stating that companies not adopting this social media tool are not sunk, but if companies want to differentiate themselves from their competitors, they can, if not, they are missing the opportunity.  I think we agree on the fact that if a company misses out on enough opportunities, sooner than later they will eventually sink  and die.  It will be up to them if they sink or swim, but it is up to us as social media consultants to throw them a life raft if needed.

So where do we go from here?  Now is truly the call for social media consultants to become evangelists. It’s time to stop preaching to the choir and truly find followers that want to succeed in business using social media tools.  Now is when we have the tough sell.  The easy sell is a thing of the past.  Pull in your numbers, get those examples ready, and show what you have done, and what you can do in the future.  It’s not going to be the easy contract that you get now, but one that you truly earn.

Filed Under: Advertising, Announcements, Blog Consulting, Blog Tools, Bloggers and Blogs, Bloggers For Hire, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Companies Needing Blogs, Conferences/Trade Shows, Corporate Blogs, Marketing, Media, Professional Blogging, Services, Social Media

The Blog Hiccup?

August 30, 2007 By 5 Comments

My friend and mentor Paul Chaney recently asked a question on Facebook about the writing on the wall of the possibility of blogs exiting stage right.  His question:

Two things happened this month that are of significance where business blogging is concerned. Rick Bruner offered up the BBC domain for sale and BBS Chicago was canceled. What do you think that says about the state of business blogging as a trend?

Paul has been around long enough to see the rise of blogging, and the now plateau we seem to be seeing in the area of business blogging.  I responded with a short answer:

I think the shine has left the tool, and we are seeing a bit of a paradigm shift in the tech industry to newer applications. As far as businesses are concerned we have seen the early adopters, now we are beginning to see others see what it’s all about.

My idea is that in the tech industry and the early adopters, blogging is old news.  Who was attending blogging conferences and reading about business blogging?  The tech industry and those early adopters.  Now it’s time to start selling the idea to those that have not already had a taste of the Kool-Aide, or are savvy to what blogs can accomplish.  This is the hard sell era. 

Paul assured me in a conversation he and I had about his question:

I think blogging has matured as a marketing and business communications practice and found it’s place in the overall spectrum. It will still continue to grow, though at a more measured pace than before.

Paul is working on his own plans for his new role at Bizzuka, Inc., as its new Internet Marketing Director.  I hope the company knows what an asset they have hired in Paul to run their Internet marketing.  As soon as Paul gets that company’s blog up and running I can assure you it will be on top of my subscribed feeds and must reads.

A timely post about the blogging slide, is a post by Richard called Is Blogging in “The Dip”? Are we Throwing The Blogging Baby and Bathwater out?  I dont want to steal his entire post but he makes a very good point I would like to direct you to:

From where I sit, business blogging is just starting, so the future has not arrived. It is just emerging. As for those valuable ?Naked Conversations? between businesses and people, I sense they are also just in their infancy. And those conversations are found in blogs ? every day, hundreds of them, good, bad, fun and serious. Real people conversing among themselves, and sometimes with businesses. I am not seeing these real conversations at YouTube or using video. Nor do I see those connections at MySpace or FaceBook. Certainly not to the same and open extent I see them in blogs. Are we leaving the promise of blogging behind to pursue the next big thing, without ever realizing its potential?

I?m even wondering if blogging is in Seth Godin?s ?The Dip? and is going to need that focus and attention to get it through the dip, to realize all it could be. From my travels around the web, blogging is still producing the most genuine conversations between a business and people who want to talk about that business. But maybe I just don?t get it all yet either?

As Shel Israel recently noted (and reminded me personally, for which I say “Thanks Shel!”) ?Naked Conversations was essentially about conversations replacing messages because of the internet. We called that part a revolution and we still do. We talked almost exclusively about blogs because they were the only power tool of the conversational revolution at the time. What has changed is that there are now a great many tools and anyone can use any combination of them.? In this vein, Hugh ,over at Gaping Void, made it clear that ?Bogging isn?t for everybody, Web 2.0 is for everybody

I just think we need to be careful. Facebook has great features for sure. There are lots of sexy Web 2.0 applications, but let?s not throw baby blogging out with the bathwater. That is where I still see real conversations emerging.

I agree with Richard’s thoughts here.  Business blogging is not yet made it to mainstream.  It has been looked at played with, used, abused, and tested and tried by those that do that sort of thing and been given its stamp of approval.  Now it has moved on.  It is seen now by that early group as approved, adopted, and sold as a tool that has passed muster.  It now is entering the next phase which is implementation by all.  It used to be that if you didn’t have a website, you were dead.  Now since you are living with your website, if you don’t already have a blog, “your’e dead”.

Filed Under: Blog Consulting, Bloggers and Blogs, Blogging News, Business Blogging, Companies Needing Blogs, Corporate Blogs, Marketing, Services, Social Media

A One By One Media Client Makes The Wall Street Journal

August 27, 2007 By 1 Comment

It’s not often we get to toot our horn around here, but when we can, I like to play it loud and play it often.  I was reading through the comments section of the blog and noticed that Alex has given us a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Sarah Needleman entitled Blog It and They May Come. The article discusses small businesses and their blogging campaigns.  It was a nicely written article and it does point our some of the problems we see from small businesses, this blogging thing is work.

To my pleasant surprise, about half way through the article I saw a familiar name.  I was looking at a past client that used our services and is now being interviewed and quoted in the Wall Street Journal!

Making the Link

Ty’s Toy Box Inc., an online retailer based in Erlanger, Ky., has lured people to its blog about trends in the toy-licensing industry by having other blogs and Web sites link to it. The company arranged a link-exchange agreement in April with TheToyGuy.com, a Web site from toy-industry expert Chris Byrne that features news and product reviews.

“We coordinated it so that occasionally our blog and Chris’s blog are about the same issue, but from different perspectives,” says George Stolpe, vice president of business development and media relations for Ty’s Toy Box. The two blogs link to each other in each post, he says.

Ms. Melberg says the links help boost a company’s search-engines ranking because blogs recommended by external sources rank higher than ones without link referrals.

According to Mr. Stolpe, Ty’s Toy Box pays a free-lance writer to maintain its blog and says the total cost for it is “a very minimal amount.” He says while he can’t quantify the blog’s role in the near-triple-digit average growth in sales every year since its start, he has no doubt it has played an important part.

After seeing that I was proud of Ty Simpson and George Stolpe for sticking it out and seeing the power of blogging.  They paid one of our bloggers for a while and decided on a different path but finally stuck to it in the long run and now they are a feature in the Wall Street Journal.  I’m not saying all of our client’s will be this much of a success, but if I have anything to do with it you can bet I’ll try!

Filed Under: Advertising, Announcements, Blog Consulting, Bloggers For Hire, Blogging News, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Client Sites, Corporate Blogs, Marketing, Media, Services, Social Media

Join One By One Media in Chicago at the Blog Business Summit 07

August 21, 2007 By 1 Comment

BBSChicagoSponsor One By One Media is once again a proud sponsor of the Blog Business Summit in Chicago, September 17-19, 2007.  We were a sponsor last year in Seattle and it proved to be some of the best marketing money I have ever spent.  Money is tight in every small company, but if you plan to attend any social media type conference this year, this one is the one you should choose to attend.  If you are a large company, you better attend so as to compete with the smaller businesses wanting a piece of your social media pie.

This conference is the premiere event for all things business blogging.  Each time I have attended I have learned new things about business blogging, have met new friends, and have made important contacts that were important to my business.  The parties are fun, the hallway discussions are invaluable and they usually have some great food and provide excellent facilities.  This year is their first year in the middle of the country and not on the West coast so I know it will open up some opportunities for the east coasters and southern attendees to get a taste of the fun. 

If you want to attend, and would like to get a discount, of course who wouldn’t want a discount, then all you need to do is enter in a simple code when signing up for the event.  One By One Media has been given a special discount code you can use.  When registering just use P65CHI and you get an immediate savings of $100.00.  Can’t beat it!  If you decide to use this code to sign up for the conference, I will personally give you a free gift!  In order to find out how cool that gift is, you need to sign up and use the code!

Filed Under: Advertising, Announcements, Blog Consulting, Blog Tips, Bloggers For Hire, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Conferences/Trade Shows, Marketing, Social Media

Reinventing the Social Media Wheel

August 5, 2007 By 5 Comments

Some of the A-List has been talking about social media overload, and I for one have to join in the same complaint.  As part of what we offer as social media consultants, we provide information about the latest and greatest technology available for a company to use in their marketing, advertising and PR campaigns.  I have been wanting to write this post for quite some time, but it wasn’t until a post by Digital Alex entitled “My Friends Hate Pownce”, that I realized he was channeling my frustration.

Like Alex, I grow tired of the same but different applications, like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.  The next company that thinks they have the next big thing in this type of application, please ask yourself will anyone say to you that this application we are making is going to be compared to any of the three above, scrap the project.  If you are changing the colors and making the same application better, chances are it won’t be adopted unless it really knocks the socks off users.  I have all three, but because Twitter was first, I have the largest number of users there.  Why?  because I started building my network there first.  If I have to rebuild my network of friends for each application, it causes me to reinvent my social media wheel.

I like Alex’s solutions to the problem.  I think Facebook is coming close to what Alex describes as a social aggregator, but it still has a way to go before it completes what he intends in his mind.  My reinvention of the social media wheel also follows what he tells us is his solution to the networking.  Migrate all of my friends for me from one application to another.

At this point there is really no need for a money back guarantee, as all of these applications are free, unless of course you have a pro account with Pownce, but I would be willing to pay for a service if it was the be all and end all application that did it all.

Filed Under: Blog Consulting, Blog Tools, Blogs and PR, Marketing, Media, Services, Social Media
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