Social Strategist

How to Make Twitter Take Less Time

If you’re using twitter professionally, efficiency is important. There are some simple ways to save time without sacrificing substance. Building lists, saving searches, queuing content, and using Tweetfilter can help you keep twitter valuable, effective, and low-cost.

Build lists of the people you want to interact with

You want your audience, influencers, and others to follow you, but you don’t want to be a spammy follower. Good twitter professionals understand that while following another user is one of the best triggers for a follow-back, having a positive relationship with the person you’re following is key to making that succeed. Lists (particularly… [Read the rest »]

How to Fail at Social Media – Ignore Customer Complaints, Like Bolt Bus

Smart companies know that twitter is where conversations (including conversations about them) are happening, and there’s much benefit to joining in. Engaging fans and earning referrals, smoothing over mistakes and saving lost business, and enticing potential customers to try them are all benefits from joining the conversation. But once you’re in the twitter room, it’s as rude and alienating to ignore customers talking to you as it would be if it were in person.

A particularly bad offender I’ve noticed is Bolt Bus. During a bad experience of my own last week, I tweeted at them three times over the course… [Read the rest »]

What is content strategy (and what is “content”)?

It’s how businesses are earning attention, getting customers, and shaping their industry. It’s content strategy: a plan for producing and sharing information and media with audiences you want to reach, to achieve goals like customer acquisition and press coverage.

Three Quick (Fictional) Examples of Content Strategy

B2C: Lapadio, an online music company, wants to get more iTunes users to sign up and upload a list of their music library. They host monthly contests for users to build playlists for unique themes and add commentary, from their uploaded library. The content (and links to it as users promote their playlists in an… [Read the rest »]

Highlights from the Archives

As I work on some new posts, I wanted to point you to some of my best old ones; many of these I’ve reread and found to be useful recently myself.

How to Add Value to a Discussion

Join the conversation!, the Cluetrain Manifesto said. And every year new businesses / bloggers / young professionals hop eagerly aboard, charging into your blog comments / presentations / conferences to say:

“Hi! Great post / talk / point. Could you answer a question you already answered in it? Here’s something you said, restated in a slightly different way. Now, could you do

… [Read the rest »]

Boston’s Best Conference, BarCamp Boston, This Weekend

This Saturday and Sunday, April 9th & 10th, BarCamp Boston 6 is happening at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. It’s Boston’s geek unconference, an event where 350 – 400 of Boston’s most passionate and interesting people, from students to CEOs, get together for two days of intriguing sessions, excellent conversations, and free food. Unlike many conferences with expensive tickets, prearranged speakers, and an invite-only mentality, BarCamp is free to attend, open to everyone, and available for anyone to present at.

We schedule sessions live each day at the event, with anyone who would like to host a discussion… [Read the rest »]

11 Twitter Tools for 2011

Twitter applications are becoming essential for marketers that want to excel at creating value on twitter. Finding conversation opportunities, improving content timing & engagement penetration, and measuring value are all challenging, time-consuming tasks. There are some excellent twitter apps out there, but I’m still finding some big holes that have yet to be filled.

Finding Conversation Opportunities

Twitter is about relationship-building. The last thing you want to do is spam members of your target audience with @replies linking to your product. It’s a complete waste of time, it’ll get you kicked off twitter, and it gives your brand a terrible… [Read the rest »]

7 Improvements I Want from Facebook Marketing in 2011

Facebook sucks at making money. If you’ve ever used their advertising tools, you’ve been briefly amazed by how useful it is to be able target based on interests and fine-grained demographic detail, and soon, disgusted with how terrible Facebook’s implementation is. This post is not about bashing Facebook or their business model: socially-targetted advertising will be as big of a deal for marketers as search marketing (a $16.6 billion industry) is. This post is about how Facebook could do a much better job of providing marketers with effective tools, and serving users a more engaging and relevant advertising experience.

1)

… [Read the rest »]

What’s Next? The Aftermath of Startup Failure.

Shutting down my startup has left me needing to fill three voids: goals, money, and credibility. I’m fortunate to have steady consulting work, a simple lifestyle with few expenses, and little danger of of not being able to fill my basic needs. But I was drawn to startups because I want to live a life that’s both fun and that makes a difference. So I’m trying to get back on track to doing both; here are the challenges that I face:

Setting New Goals & Making New Plans

The startup provided at least a rough framework for the next year… [Read the rest »]

Lessons Learned from Shutting Down My Second Startup

Two years ago, when I wrote a post-mortem for News Armada, I was an overly-ambitious first-time entrepreneur, chasing dreams of venture funding and changing the world on my first time up to bat. I learned two important lessons from that experience:

Momentum is everything. Lost momentum isn’t just missed opportunity, it’s a weight that slows your startup down.
Value before revenue. Don’t spend all your time working on a plan to generate revenue from a community / product before you’ve proven that it provides enough value to people that they’re willing to use / pay for it. Market traction

… [Read the rest »]

You Procrastinate Because You’re Scared

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as an entrepreneur is my own fear of rejection. With EasyImpress entering a sales phase, this has been my biggest priority for overcoming. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that many others with this same fear don’t even realize they have it. Many entrepreneurs have the bad habit of procrastination, but that’s all they think of it as. They’re not lazy people — they’re frequently some of the most active people you know. But some things they know they need to do, even some of the most important things, end up getting endlessly delayed.

For… [Read the rest »]