positive disruption by: Tom Martin | New Orleans based Social Media Consultant

How To Be More Amazing

Do you ever wish you could create amazing? Amazing content, amazing blog posts, amazing service, amazing products or just amazing anything. It sounds hard doesn't it... to be amazing. I mean really, how often do you consider something or someone amazing?

Chances are... not often.

So why is that? We all want to be amazing or at least be more interesting... yet we live in a sea of sameness.

But back to amazing... there it is... in black and blue -- Tom Moradpour calling something I created amazing. Even cooler... two others @TedSullivan and @JoePiehl both considered the Tweet Awesome and in Ted's case the most awesome #FF ever.

So what was the commotion all about? [click this link to see the tweet]

Instead of simply typing a tweet, or a list of tweeters or maybe doing a blog post telling you why you should follow Tom Moradpour, this particular #FF tweet was a short little video telling you why you should follow Tom on Twitter.

So why then was it considered amazing or the most amazing ever?

Only Tom, Ted and Joe could really answer that question for you... and maybe they will. But I'm guessing it was considered amazing for a couple of reasons.

First, no one had ever done that (at least I've never seen a video #FF recommendation) so it made an impact. It was different. Second, video still carries a subconscious belief of difficulty. It's a perception really... The reality is that platforms like TwitVid (which is where this particular video was made) makes it quite easy to capture, upload and tweet video. But perception is reality, so we think recording and uploading and sharing a video takes a lot of time. So therefore, the video recommendation seems like the creator put a lot of effort into the recommendation because it seems to indicate a substantial effort was made. Third, and lastly, it was personal. It's easy to BS in a blog post... it's just words. But when your face is on a camera and people can see you... it's harder to fake it. I think Tom, Joe and Ted could all see that the #FF recommendation was sincere.

And therein may lie the answer to creating amazing... content, people or ideas. There is a sincere desire to do something different that will make a real impact. To do something people will want to share. To do something that gives someone a reason to talk about it.

So what do you think? What do you consider amazing (feel free to share examples) and why do you consider it amazing? Do tell....

 

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The Power of Authentic

Tonight I saw the power of authentic and it was simultaneously humbling and energizing. The kind of energizing that makes you want to stay up all night talking to the other people that saw the same power and want to harness it, direct it and create something greater.

I was attending #Cocktails4Causes - an event my social media agency created for our client, The Drake Hotel. 

The idea behind the effort is that Chicago area folks, mostly in the social media arena, can volunteer to host a cocktail party at The Drake. The Drake donates the appetizers, provides the space free of charge and then donates 50% of the gross cash bar tab to the host's selected charity. Simple, straightforward. You come drink, mingle, have a good night and a worthy cause gets awareness and money.

Tonight I listened as more than a few folks "pitched" -- sorry I can't think of a better word to describe the feeling I got when I was in those conversations -- why they should get to be one of the 10 hosts of future parties in 2011.

There was such pasison, such caring and such a personal investment. I heard stories of mothers with diseases, father's that had passed and in one case, the story of a five year old son that died in his sleep of SUDEP. Because word spread that I was involved with the party, these folks sought me out to inquire about being a host. And in conversation after conversation, what struck me was the passion.

And I watched as our host of tonight's party, Sean McGinnis told the story of being a bone marrow donor and how that lead him to host and pick BeTheMatch.  As I listened to him, I finally understood why he had worked so hard for the last few weeks to drive attendance at the party. It was the passion.

For Sean, and the folks I talked to tonight, it wasn't a marketing campaign. It was a calling. A chance to do something important for something they thought mattered in this world. And in Sean's case, it went beyond just helping his cause. He wanted to make sure his party rocked, so the Drake would continue to believe in the effort and thus continue to offer more parties. He didn't just want to improve his part of the world, he wanted to do his part to make sure others could receive the same opportunity. And what's really interesting is that I saw the same thing in December when Lisa Petrilli and Lisa Diomede hosted.

There was a passion to deliver for the cause they cared about.... and for the brand that was making it possible.

Think about that the next time your crafting your cause marketing campaign.

Maybe think about doing something that's less about votes and more about change. Maybe think about doing something that relies less on process and more on passion. Maybe think about sitting on the sidelines versus being the star. Maye think about creating honest to goodness change versus driving a metric or ROI.

Think about it and you might just discover the power of authentic.

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photo credit: By PinkMoose

The role of foreplay in social media - Thirsty Thursday of Knowledge

If you're spending time in the social media space stricly for the joy of conversation, you can skip the rest of this post. BUT if you're spending time on social networks with the goal of building a tribe that you can activate to grow your business, help a cause you care deeply about or just call on when you need more brainpower than you can muster on your own, then you want to invest a little time engaging in a bit of social media foreplay.

As I've noted before, social media isn't just about conversation and your follower numbers do matter. Both of these points are directly related to leveraging the incredible power of social media and social networks to achieve goals related to commerce or cause.

And if you're trying to do business here... maybe consider giving these five things a try before you make that first ask.

@them baby. One of the greatest things about Twitter is the "anyone can talk to anyone" culture that exists on the platform. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn where you must first establish a relationship to communicate, Twitter is the ultimate cocktail party. Someone once blogged that Facebook is where you go to talk to friends and Twitter is the place you meet new ones... or something to that effect. So don't just find people and follow them. Take the time to actually Tweet with them - regardless of how "famouse" they appear. Watch their stream and find a place where you can drop something to show them you see them and that you'd really like to be a part of their Twitter. Just yesterday I was reminded of how easy this is.

John Refford asked about innovative Valentine's Day ideas for a gift. John is on a Twitter list I follow and I thought, what a great way to say hello. So I tweeted him and suggested he get a local florist to agree to send his wife flowers once a month for a year. I've done it for my wife and she loved it. I also took the opp to read his blog and comment on a QR post he wrote.

Then this morning - I see that he's updated his post and included my comment in the body of the post. Now that wasn't my goal of this interaction... BUT, that's what makes it a perfect example of how investing in a little foreplay can lead to the building of a relationship that can someday be called on to help you achieve a goal.

DM them. Use this one sparingly. Most folks seem to guard their DM box more than their eMail inbox if you can believe that. This is probably why this channel can be such a great way to extend the conversation beyond what you feel comfortable talking about in public. With the DM channel you can get a bit more personal and begin to really build a better bond. A bond that can lead to the next step...

Friend or Link to them. Most folks will probably be more likely to link with you on LinkedIn than friend you on Facebook. So go ahead... find them on LinkedIn and remind them that you met/chat on Twitter and you'd like to add another channel of connection. Think you'll find that most will take the offer and presto - now you get to see a whole other part of their life -- their professional life. You can see what they've done, who they've done it for a and often who they've done it with. And for those times where you need action -- knowing who your friends are linked to can be very important. With that data you can selectively activate your tribe versus just blasting everyone with a call for help. Funny how selectively asking for help vs the blast and see method enables you to tap your tribe more often and get better results.

Call me. Yes, it's not just a movie cliche. If you really want to form a relationship with someone you "met" on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn -- call them or better Skype them via video. Steve Woodford first taught me the true power of this when he invited me to video chat with him. To this day I've never met Steve in person but I think he'd agree, I can count on him to help me when I need it and he knows he can count on me. That's the power of investing an hour and a cocktail in a video call.

Get on a damn plane. Yes, that's right... go actually meet someone in real life. Make the ultimate gesture of interest...spend your hard earned money to go visit the people you wnat to meet or just catch up with after a long time of not seeing them in person. I love this particular kind of foreplay because it comes with a great side benefit.... you'll often meet new people that you can add to your tribe. You never know when one of your Twitter buddies will decide to host a lunch in honor of your being in town so that you can meet even more people (looking at you Stacey Hood).

At the end of the day, we all want to feel loved, important and that we matter. We want folks to see us -- in the Avatar sense. So often we're asked to do for others before they've done for us. Don't make that mistake. Use social networking tools to find and initiate contact with interesting people. Then use a bit of social media foreplay to develop a relationship with those folks. You'll be richer for it, and I don't just mean in terms of conversation.

Special thanks to fellow #UsGuys member Carl Sorvino for tweeting the impetus for this post.

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photo by NeoGaboX

Stop Screaming. Start Whispering.

Consumers are tuning us out. They're fast forwarding through our commercials, blocking our online ads and opting out of our digital campaigns. Why? Because they can. Because for the most part, we give them no good reason not to.

So in 2011, maybe try shouting at them less and whispering in their ear a bit more. It's sexier, more pleasing to the ear and just might make you or your clients more money.

Every January we are given permission. Permission to toss out the old, bring in the new and commit to changing that which is not working in favor of something we think might work better. We call them resolutions and while they are THE linkbait post of January and December, that should stop you from making them, publicizing them and then talking about them.

In that spirit, I've been given the chance to create and share mine (for the ad industry) first at Ad Age's Small Agency Diary and later this week as a guest of the Nashville AAF. The first resolution involves the need for advertisers to stop shouting (it isn't really working all that well anyhow) and start whispering... we need to get closer to the consumer and whisper in their ear, when they want versus when it's convenient to our sales cycle/projections or any other non-consumer centric metric.

I'm hoping the Nashville marketing community will join me as I give a good bit more depth to the 6 resolutions I implored all advertising agencies (and marketers in general) to make via my Ad Age post. If you'll be in Nashville on Thursday, I'd love to see you.

If you can't make it, watch this blog for video snippets of the talk. I plan to be a bit more blunt than a post on Ad Age would ever allow. And I'm hoping it will make for a good discussion in Nashville and maybe beyond.

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 Photo credit: By crosathorian

Thirsty Thursday of Knowledge - Talking With Tom edition

On Tuesday, I finally was able to launch Talking With Tom -- my new video blog project/experiment.

If you missed the announcment post, you can learn more about the background of this 100% mobile based content marketing experiment.

After launching it, a number of folks asked me how I was doing it. They wanted the nitty gritty of programs, hacks, etc. So today, I thought I'd share that with you so you could do your own experiment or just maybe understand and appreciate mine.

Platform
I'm using the iPhone4 for this project because it has both a great camera, but also you can download the iMovie app from iTunes. It's the iMovie app that makes the filming and editing possible.

Editing Software
I'm using the iMovie app for all of my editing. Overall I'd say that it works reasonably well. You don't want to do any really heavy lifting or editing, but for simple clip trims and splices, it works pretty well. Primarily the difficulty is in editing long pieces of video. Because you're working on such a small area you have to zoom the video timeline in order to make accurate cuts. Hence, if you're working with a longer piece of video, it becomes really difficult to keep zooming in/out.

The other tricky thing is the titles. If you go watch the video of Greg Cangialosi talking with me, you'll notice I added a black bar at the bottom with his Twitter handle. It's really easy to add BUT iMovie adds the title to the video SEGMENT. So if you want it to be up for the entire movie and that movie has multiple segments, you have to do a little hack. I'll get to that in a minute.

It says you can add in a title card to the movie too. To do this you'd need to have that title card saved on your phone as a JPEG. I haven't gotten that ambitious yet, and as I don't have any sponsors for the project yet, so I've put this on the phase II tests.

Publishing Software
To publish the blog, I'm using Posterous. I've been goofing with Posterous for a few years now but have never really seriously taken the platform for a test run. Talking With Tom changed that. I have to say, I'm VERY impressed. First, the iPhone app is easy to use -- even letting me tag posts and then when the post goes live, the tags I generated become categories on the site. Very nice. I even learned how to embedd live hyperlinks in the post body copy -- more on that under the Hacks section.

I can also use the iPhone app to manage comments, see how many views I've had on the post, etc. The one thing I do wish it did though, was give me the ability to do some level of formatting, link creation, etc. on the body of a post without having to code it manually. So Posterous, if you're listening... please add that to the Next Update list... thx!

The Posterous site made it really easy to use a custom domain but host it on Posterous' servers. I just had to register my name, go into my Domain Management section of my GoDaddy account and update two fields. Then within a few minutes, presto, I had TalkingWithTom.com up and running on a basic Posterous theme. I then went shopping for a new theme and selected one by Cory Watilo and BAM I was in business. For those of you who can sling a bit of code, you can go in an customize stuff and if you know CSS you can get really fancy pancy. Me, I'm not smart enough for all of that so I relied on Cory's theme to get the job done. And like all good blog hosting sites, Posterous makes adding Twitter/FB Like buttons easy as clicking a button.

Lastly, I like that Posterous hosts the videos on my site vs using a YouTube or Vimeo embed. Maybe the Columbus Dispatch ought to consider using Posterous in the future.... kidding. It forces anyone who is clicking a link shared in social media to come to my home base to view the video, whether they find the site via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or another blogger's blog -- they have to come here to view the content (video). Again, as I think through how this approach can be sponsored, I've got to think that makes the site more appealing to a sponsor than if I was using YouTube vids that could be picked up, embedded anywhere and next to anything (content wise). Any brand managers readinging this? Would love to hear your 02 on the subject.

Other Toys
Half the reason I like my little experiments is that I'm given a reason to go buy new toys to play with. Talking with Tom will be no different. Already I've added a Brando Directional Mic, wide-angle lens and my personal favorite -- a Glif. I'm really loving the Glif because I was part of the group that crowdfunded its development using Kickstarter. And if you're loking for a simple mount that will let you use your iPhone on a tripod, this is the right tool. I've been loving it.

The first few videos that will post were shot before I got the wide angle lens, so watch for the difference in February. It's pretty interesting in that it allows me to get really close to my subject but maintain a view (on the video) that doesn't feel like I'm standing right on top of them. I'm also going to pony up for a wireles lav mic. Hee hee hee... I love buying toys. This one got decent reviews... so we'll see. Again, you probably won't see videos using this until February or March.  If anyone out there is a big audio buff and know of a better solution, please let me know.

Hacks
Ok, with any new endeavor you have to figure it out as you go along. For me, these are hacks and frankly, their half the fun. So far I've needed to do two hacks.

The first is putting HTML links in the body copy of posts. In my fisrt post, a number of folks said they wished I had done that as it would have made it easier to learn more about Greg, his company Blue Sky Factory, etc. Now as I said, the Posterous iPhone app doesn't give you a way to do that...BUT what I've figured out is that if I just code the HTML mark-up into my post and upload, the Posterous site translates my code into links. Presto, now I can create links and make them open in new windows. It's kind of a pain because I don't know HMTL and typing that much on the iPhone can be difficult, but I've got a few ideas for another hack to make my work a bit easier. What about you -- got any thoughts on hacks I might use to make this easier? Trust me, I'm all ears!

The second hack is getting a constant title bar on the entire video instead of getting it fading in and out with each cut of the video. To do this with the iMovie app you simply make all of your edits and get the video finished. Then render it and it will save as a new movie in your Camera Roll. Then, go back into iMovie, import that new movie to edit. Once you've imported it (if you've used iMovie on a Mac, you know what I mean by importing the movie -- it works the same way on the iPhone) then create your title bar and copy. Now, because you've only got a single video it applies it to the entire segment so that you get that desktop professional look. You'll see I figured this out on the second video.

So that's it for now. If you've got an iPhone -- what I hope you're seeing is that you've got more than a phone. Thanks to apps like iMovie and Posterous, you've got a social media content production studio in your hands.

So the only questions left are... what are YOU going to do with it? And of course, does anyone know of any other mics, lenses, mounts, etc., that you think I should try out during this project? Maybe a steadicam or different lens/mic set ups that will give better quality video? If you do, let me know. No promise that I'll run out and buy it (remember, I still don't have a sponsor underwriting the costs to buy equipment, travel to film these folks, etc.) but I'll do my best!

And hey, if you enjoyed this post or just want to keep updated on the project, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent directly to your eMail in box. And don't worry, I'll never share your email with anyone and I don't send anything but blog posts... because that's not what your here for right?

It's Alive - The Birthing of a Social Media Site

 

I am so excited to announce the official launch of a new project I've been working on...

TalkingWithTom is my new vBlog.

I'm launching this video blog for two reasons. First, I want to see if I can create, publish and manage a video blog using nothing more than my iPhone. That's right... for the TalkingWithTom project, I'm going to film, edit and publish all of the content directly from my iPhone -- no computer required. Then, I'm going to use the Posterous iPhone app to try and manage comments, etc.

Why you might ask am I doing this? Because I can... and because you need to know you can too. I've watched too many a good Content Marketing idea die on the conference room table because one or more folks in the room couldn't let go of traditional video production thinking. They wanted to hire videographers, audio guys, script everything and of course, massage it all to a perfect storm of creativity and video grace.

Who knows... maybe they're right. Maybe you do have to have a finely polished, high quality product in order to truly drive interest and repeat visitation. But maybe I'm right.. maybe content trumps quality. Or maybe, with today's modern technology you can have both (within reason).

Second, I felt like writing another social media content marketing case study. We need more good social media and content marketing case studies in digital and social marketing. Sure there are a lot of blog posts (ahem... link bait) that pass themselves off as case studies. But when you really read them, they don't cut the mustard in my opinion. So I'm going to do my best to track the results of this effort. How many people visit, how many share the site, tweet and retweet the content on Twitter, etc. I'm not making any promises -- right now this is still a sponsorless effort -- but I'm still hoping one smart company will figure out that this is a fabulous project to underwrite. But till then, it's me doing it in my free time, so we'll do the best we can...ok?

I don't want to give away everything... but suffice to say, I've been lucky enough to get a ton of the smartest people in social and digital media to agree to be interviewed. Here's a peek at who's going to be featured in upcoming posts at TalkingWithTom:

Greg Cangialosi | Jay Baer | Jason Falls | Julien Smith | Tim Hayden | Mack Collier

Amber Naslund | Lisa Hoffmann | Chris Brogan | Marc Meyer | Steve Woodruff

Jason Keath | Peter Shankman | Beth Harte | DJ Waldo | Steve Garfield | Scott Stratten

and a ton more.... but we have to keep some secrets right?

Along the way, I'm hoping that I'll get the chance to include others in my blog -- folks that are doing it right and seem to have a good grasp on where all of this might be going. Then I'll corner them at a conference or reach out via an email to invite them to share their thoughts on What's Next.

Speaking of... who do you think I should include? I've still got about 20 slots I need to fill... so comment away and let me know who YOU want me to interview.

In the meantime, see what Greg Cangialosi had to say when I asked him, What's Next Greg?

 

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Why I like Facebook Video for Content Marketing

Normally I'm not a big user of Facebook's video posting platform. Up until recently the file size and length restrictions were too limiting for meaningful video content IMHO. But with Facebook now allowing up to 20 minutes of video and 1 GB file size, I have been rethinking my opinion. Then today, I see this in my stream via CC Chapman's Facebook page.

It's a video review by Scott Stratten of CC and Ann's new book, Content Rules and it put me to over the edge re: Facebook video as a marketing tool.

Primarily, I'm liking Facebook video because you can like Facebook video -- from right there inside the video (see the upper left hand corner). Thus, if my content strategy was to grow a Facebook following via supplying really good video content, my prospect is a mere click away from liking me on Facebook.

That's a pretty powerful reason in and of itself. Hence, I'm going to start experimenting with the platform in 2011 and I'll let you know what I learn.

But like I said, up till now, I've not been a big user/believer in Facebook video... so tell me what you think of the platform. Do you use it? If so, how and what kind of response have you had? Anyone care to take the counter point? Tell me why I was right in the first place and why Facebook Video isn't all that and a bowl of jelly?

Comment please....

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And hey, if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent directly to your eMail in box. And don't worry, I'll never share your email with anyone and I don't send anything but blog posts... because that's not what your here for right?