When was the last time you read a really insightful blog post?

When was the last time you acted on a follow recommendation on Twitter or a LinkedIn connection?

I’d bet recently. The beauty of social media is that there’s an infinite choice of people to interact with and some of them are really, really worth your time. Insightful, witty, funny, amazing, smart, beautiful, whatever you want to describe them as, you’re swimming in a knowledge pool with thousands of these kinds of people.

When was the last time that any of these people who you got or gave accolades to in the moment impressed you so much that you were willing to take an extra 30 seconds to click through or Google them, find their blog, and subscribe to it?

I’d wager it’s been a while. For some of you, it’s been a long while.

Here’s why this is important: you’ll lose touch otherwise. The curse of social media is that there’s so much to pay attention to – even legitimate, good quality stuff – that you lose good people in the noise. You’ve had this experience – someone’s name will pop up in your Facebook birthday reminders or a passing mention in Twitter and you’ll kick yourself for forgetting that person existed…

… and in the meantime, you’ve lost the benefit of whatever they were sharing during that period. Sure, you can always catch up, but if they’re really valuable, then your competitors have been reading and taking advantage of their ideas the whole time, putting you behind the curve.

If someone really impresses, subscribe to their blog. Take that extra 15-30 seconds to copy and paste to Google Reader. Keep them on your mental radar screen so that you can continue to benefit from their shared knowledge.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Consider this: from where you sit reading this right now, you have access to streams of real-time information from all over the world, knowledge spread the moment it’s created. You can watch far-off places, have immediate or near-immediate access to the sum of publicly available human knowledge, communicate with thousands, if not millions of people with just a few clicks of a mouse, influence and affect people next door and thousands of miles away.

In another time, in another place, these would have been powers reserved only for the greatest of superheroes. Comic books would have been written about such a person with these powers…

… and that person is you, here and now. You have superpowers that a generation ago would have been not only legendary, but even absurd. Comic books of years past would have called infinite knowledge an amazing feat; we call it Google. Action hero movies of yesteryear would have called global mindreading an astonishing power; we call it Twitter.

Here’s the snag: we have superhero powers, but we don’t necessary have superhero awareness. We don’t necessarily know what we’re capable of, don’t necessarily understand all of the different ways we can use our powers.

That’s what this blog is about, ultimately. We’re on a never-ending quest to understand not just the new media space, but to understand our role in it and how we can be more effective, more powerful, and more heroic through it. We have to awaken ourselves – awaken our superheroes, and it’s a journey I hope you’ll join me on.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Here’s a really simple exercise for you to try: wherever you keep your archives and backups (you do keep backups, right?), go sifting through them for 15 minutes at some point today and see if there’s something in there that is worth bringing back to the light.

Why? Your network, your audience is ever-changing, ever-shifting, and hopefully ever-growing. There are people you are friends with today that had never heard of you a week, a month, a year ago. While your old stuff may be dusty to you, it may be brand new to them – and more valuable than it ever was. Rather than discard old stuff simply because it’s old, take a look at your old stuff and see if it’s worth rseurrecting.

Here’s an added twist: with what you know now, see if your old content improves. Do you have access to better tools, better knowledge, better processes? Here’s a photo I shot way, way back in 2001, which is practically the stone age in digital terms.

What’s different is that today, I have access to tools like Aperture and Adobe Photoshop. When this photo was taken, I would have been using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Today’s version, CS5, is technically version 12.0 of that same software, and the tools have just gotten better. I used Aperture’s basic auto-enhance tools on this photo and it looks better than it ever did back then.

Here’s a video clip of world-renowned master martial arts teacher Stephen K. Hayes from 2007.

What’s changed? iMovie 9 has motion stabilization and audio normalization, so what would have taken me a ridiculous number of steps back then to edit took relatively few today. You get to enjoy the content – which is still as valuable as ever – but re-creating the content is much less painful.

Back when I did a daily podcast, years ago now, I would go to concerts and with the artist’s permission, record stuff live. All those old recordings are still sitting around in raw form, collecting dust in the archives. When I dug back into them to resurrect something, I found that they definitely needed editing – but my editing skills have changed and improved vastly in the 4 years it’s been since I made the recording. Here’s an example, Rebecca Loebe’s song Grace recorded at a bar in Cambridge, MA about 3 1/2 years ago (MP3). Sounds better than ever with better audio editing knowledge.

So what are you sitting on? What stuff seems old and stale to you but your newest friends might really, really enjoy? It’s a summer Friday – go take a few minutes and bring something back from the past. If it’s still high quality, all of us will appreciate enjoying it again, whether we’ve seen it or not.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Original:

Are you ready for the Twitpocalypse?

On June 30, 2010, Twitter will change forever. For many of you, your favorite widgets, sites, clients, and applications will shatter. Twitter will simply stop working for you in the way you’re used to.

Why?

Twitter announced a really, really long time ago that on June 30, 2010, they’re ending support for basic HTTP authentication, and requiring that all applications that access Twitter via the API change to OAuth authentication. This is being done for security purposes, to make Twitter more secure and accounts less vulnerable to hijacking.

How do you know if you’ll be affected?

Simple. Any application, site, widget, etc. that requires you to type in your Twitter username and password will stop working once Twitter flips the switch. This includes software like popular desktop clients, iPhone apps, and services like TwitPic and many others.

Any application, site, widget, etc. that requires you to “authorize” an application will continue to work as intended.

What can you do if you will be affected?

Plan for a short time to use the Twitter web site until your favorite tools convert over to OAuth if they’re not already on OAuth. Contact the manufacturers of your favorite tools to let them know to switch over to OAuth if they still ask you to type in a username and password today. Find alternatives to your favorites on sites like OneForty.com by searching for applications which specifically use OAuth. If you’re highly dependent on an application or service that uses Basic Authentication and there’s no sign it’ll be ready for the switchover, let your friends and followers know where to find you besides Twitter.

Ultimately, the switch to OAuth is an important one and a good one, but there will definitely be some pain along the way. Be ready now.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

I very rarely write about work-related stuff directly here because I figure you can get it on the company blog if you’re so inclined. That said, this is an announcement that’s been a long time in coming (more than two years!), well before I was even an employee at Blue Sky Factory. Today, we’re all very proud to kick our newest child out of the private beta nest and see how well it can fly.

Today, we announce SocialSync.

What is it? Short version: take your existing email database, turn on this service (part of the Publicaster service), and in a relatively short amount of time, see how social that database is. Who’s on Twitter? Who’s on LinkedIn? Who’s on Facebook?

Then we kick it up a notch by adding friend/fan/follower/connection numbers. Who’s influential? Who has audience? Who can, if communicated with in an intelligent manner, help you get your messaging way beyond the inbox?

The beauty of SocialSync is that no data processing is required on the customer’s part. Social segmentations “magically” appear alongside your regular email marketing segmentations, and sending socially-focused messages takes literally just a few clicks.

Why is this important? So many companies are sitting on gold mines. Treasure troves. Keys to the kingdom. Those jewels are their customer databases, but until now, there was no easy, simple way to mine that database for social information and get actionable knowledge from it. Now there is.

One of my lists

More important, from a strategic perspective (which is my specialty), SocialSync can do things that you can’t do right now. If you don’t have a social strategy at all as to even where you should be participating, SocialSync will tell you your customers are here or there, so go there and start listening. If you do have a social strategy, SocialSync will either confirm that you’re in the right place or show you where you need to be focusing more of your time.

It’s incredibly powerful for sales, marketing, and customer service. Customer service departments can learn where they should be listening for their customers. Marketing can learn where the influencers in their audience are and jump-start precisely targeted social campaigns using a tried and true asset, their email database. Sales can take existing prospect lists and understand where they should be prospecting socially.

I’m very proud and thrilled to see this service come to market at long last. It’s not the first of its kind – back in a previous career I was using similar data tools, but back then you had to be a database administrator and a developer with mad technical chops and willingness to code for hours and hours to make this work. I’d wager that no marketer on the planet could have used it in its raw form back then, because almost no marketers are programmers or database admins. SocialSync is the first of its kind that does NOT require you to have that expertise, and that’s what makes it so important.

If you’d like to learn more about how SocialSync can help your business, go hit up the info page on the Blue Sky Factory web site.

Stupidly obvious disclosure: I’m an employee of Blue Sky Factory. While I’m not specifically compensated to write about work on my personal blog, I still benefit personally from the success of the company. For a complete list of who else has paid me off, visit my disclosures page.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Personal brand is absolutely essential to future corporate success, at least from a marketing perspective.

Here’s why. If you have employees who are already engaged in new media – blogging, podcasting, social channels – then they likely already have and belong to other communities. Some of their interests overlap with their coworkers, but not many.

If we drew a Venn diagram (you remember these from school, yes? Logic class?) of the various personal networks and interests of your employees, you’d get something that looks like this:

That tiny little wedge in the middle is the intersection of personal and corporate networks. Companies that force their employees to rigorously keep personal and professional separate or even require employees not to participate in personal media creation outside of work create and get access to only that tiny little wedge in the middle, and nothing else.

Now imagine that a company, instead of discouraging or trivializing employees’ personal brands, encouraged them to actively grow their own networks, to use and leverage social media and new media to the best of their abilities. Imagine a company so forward-thinking that each employee had their own powerful personal brand and the freedom to express it (as long as said employees weren’t doing anything materially harmful in public).

What would that company’s reach be? Well, instead of the tiny intersection in the middle of those three networks in the chart above, the company’s effective reach would be the sum, the union of all the networks. Each employee’s personal network would contribute to the effective reach of the whole network.

More important, those employees have different audiences than your core corporate audience. For example, look at a few of the employee non-work blogs of the folks over at Radian6:

- Marcel LeBrun
- Amber Naslund
- Lauren Vargas
- Teresa Basich
- Robin Seidner
- Robbie MacCormack

Each of these folks has their own audience. Some of their audience probably doesn’t even know what they do for work. By liberally encouraging their staff to be out and about in new media, Radian6′s reach is much greater than its corporate blog, and its reach extends into different audiences.

What would it take to make this happen? A few things.

On the corporate side:

1. Employee education. Not just about what is or is not professional even in a personal blog (hey, you know that party photo you have in your photo feed…), but also how to build and grow audience, how to communicate effectively, how to create interest in what they’re doing on a personal level.

2. An awesome company with amazing products and services that’s worth talking about. Requiring employees to blog about your company usually falls flat. You shouldn’t have to ask if your employees legitimately love working for you – they’ll do it on their own. You can generally suggest (hey, we’ve got a kickass promotion for new customers, please tell your friends) but you can’t force it on your employees in their personal, non-work spaces.

3. An embrace of the 80/20 rule. Google and 3M are most famous for embedding this rule in their cultures, wherein employees have up to 20% of their schedule freed to experiment, to try new things, to work on stuff that isn’t in the core business objectives list. This includes stuff like personal blogs, networking outside of corporate target audiences, and participation in things that at first glance don’t seem to feed direct ROI numbers. As long as your team is meeting or exceeding their objectives otherwise, let the 80/20 rule operate to bring in the benefits of serendipity.

On the employee side:

1. Employees need to exercise profoundly good judgement at all times, even outside of work. Each of us is in sales. Each of us is in marketing. Each of us is in customer service. Each of us is in public relations. This is true no matter what title is on your business card. Wherever we go, wherever we interact with other people (online or offline) we are ambassadors of the company we work for. Does that mean we’re working 24/7? No. It does mean we’re not a public embarrassment, however. If you’re going to participate in new media in any way, shape, or form, recognize that you are also implicitly representing your employer whether you want to be or not.

2. Employees need to look for opportunities to build business. If an employer implements the 80/20 rule, there’s an informal social contract that effectively says, if you’re allowed to do your own thing and build your own brand using some work time, throw us a bone here and there so that we’re getting an equal exchange of value. Put up a navigation bar link on your blog with our top SEO keyword (hey, look at that shiny email marketing link), mention us if it’s appropriate when the topic of our business comes up in conversation, and refer people to sales if you’ve got a friend who really and truly needs what we have to offer.

3. Don’t feel obligated to participate. At companies where you have highly engaged coworkers, you may be asked or even subtly peer-pressured into doing the same things. Don’t. If your heart isn’t in blogging or Tweeting or creating new media, don’t do it, because the outcome will suck. The outcome will reflect your lack of passion, and your time is better spent doing things you love.

If you can match up the power of personal networks and different audiences with a great company, great products, and talk-worthy stuff, your reach and influence will be magnified far beyond what you have today.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Most of what you need to be successful has nothing to do with social media.

We focus a great deal on tools and metrics because these are tangibles, as tangible as you can get for an information-based medium. We talk about tricks, hacks, methods, and skills because frankly, we have nothing better to teach, and we won’t for a while.

It’s not for want of intelligence or cleverness. It’s that what powers social media is ultimately being skilled at communicating something fundamentally human. Media, social or not, merely amplifies what’s already there.

So how do you succeed in social media quickly? Figure out what human skills you’re already great at. Unless you’re a complete failure at everything in life, you have at least something you’re proficient at. Find that human skill set and work the message amplification power of media into it.

We’ve said for years that you have to be the expert in order to be successful in your use of social media, but not because people inherently trust expertise.

No, you have to be the expert at something because it’s where you’re most confident, most comfortable, most skilled as a human being. When you are communicating with others, if you work in the dead center of your comfort zone, it shows. It’s reassuring to people. It’s energizing to watch, to listen. It’s compelling to see a true master at work in their trade.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of thing you want to see in your media, social or otherwise. Why watch the Olympics, for example? Because it’s a breathtaking display of the world’s very best, demonstrating to us all what incredible mastery looks like.

If you’re new to social media, communicate from the dead center of your comfort zone at the peak of your game so that whatever mistakes you make with the communications tools themselves are easily glossed over and shined away by the demonstration of your mastery on display.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

The first RoboCop movie was a box office success, which immediately activated the sequel machine. In the following movies, producers largely made the human story a subplot to lots of shooting, lots of gadgets, and even more gadgets. I can just hear the conversations in the executive suite now…

“RoboCop needs more cool somehow… I know, to jazz up this franchise, let’s give him a jetpack! The kids will love it!”

What made RoboCop successful wasn’t the gadgets. It was the stories, the fairly complicated subplots in the original that were abandoned for larger explosions and more gadgets in the sequels, which did increasingly poorly at the box office.

Your social media efforts aren’t so different.

Rather than looking for the next big thing, the next shiny object, the next bit of wizardry to spruce up your social media presence, stop for a moment and assess what has given you success so far. If you’ve achieved any level of success, a good bit of it is likely from your human efforts, from your story-based work and not the social media equivalent of rocket backpacks.

As you assess your social media efforts for this year, put aside the platforms and technologies for a little bit and look at what stories you are currently telling, what stories you plan to tell, and how your audiences and communities will receive those stories. This year, I’m certain the platforms will change. Stuff that’s hot right now will be less so, and there will undoubtedly be newer, shinier things.

Had the producers of RoboCop’s sequels left the gadgets behind and focused on the story of the human beneath the machine, they might have made even more box office gold. Don’t let the same fate happen to your social media efforts. Forget the gadgets. Bring out the human behind your social media machinery and tell those stories instead.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

Using the hashtag #the5, I’ll let you know about 5 things that caught my eye in the morning news. It might be marketing, search, social media, amusing silly fun, or heck, even big World of Warcraft news (you can bet Cataclysm will make #the5 on launch day). Whatever’s interesting and of note in the morning reading, it’ll get tagged #the5.

Obviously, this would be a great deal more interesting if you participated, too. Yes, there’s Google Reader shared items. Yes, there’s all different ways of sharing stuff. #the5 is just a more casual way of doing it, and it’s focused on the start of the workday, interesting things that catch your mind and eye before the day gets busy. It might be a photo, a tweet, a video, whatever.

I look forward to seeing what catches your eye as you start your day.

Each day I’ll also link up to Twitter Search to see what you are putting in YOUR version of #the5.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

I’ve been reading Six Pixels of Separation, the book by friend Mitch Joel. It’s a terrific read, well worth the $14 or so I spent on the Kindle version, but I’m amused by many of the comments and criticisms of the book, especially that it’s not a how-to book.

If you have any familiarity with the food world, you know of Alton Brown. Part Mr. Wizard, part Monty Python troupe member, Alton Brown spends an enormous amount of time in his show Good Eats on the why of food, rather than just the how.

How is the individual recipes. How to make pancakes. How to deglaze a pan. How to fry a turkey.

Why is the rationale behind the choices you make as a cook. Why is the muffin method used for certain recipes when the end product doesn’t look like a muffin? Why is water’s molecular structure so important to cooking?

Here’s the difference between how and why: how is for beginners. How is for the line cooks who just need to crank out predictable results over and over again. How can be accomplished by relatively untalented people or even by machines. How is good and useful, but how is not the way you become better at what you do once you’re no longer a beginner.

Ask any proficient chef how large their recipe card index is and they’ll give you a blank stare at best, because they’ve transcended the need for individual recipes. Professional chefs understand concepts and the why of cooking. Professional chefs understand that the flavors of tomato and basil go together at a subconscious level, so they don’t need the individual recipe cards that specify mixing X amount of tomatoes with Y amount of shredded basil leaves plus a pinch of salt. Professional chefs understand at a subconscious level that you always, always, always salt tomatoes as early in the cooking process as possible. Why? Because tomatoes contain a natural form of glutamic acid and salt bonds to it to create a natural form of MSG which really makes a tomato’s flavor sing.

Six Pixels of Separation is not a cookbook of how. You won’t find a recipe in it for exactly how to structure a tweet or exactly how to write a good blog post. You’re not supposed to find those recipes in it, because it’s largely a book of why, not how. If you’re looking for a recipe book, there’s an entire industry of For Dummies / For Morons / For Complete Idiots / For The Stupidest People That Are Still Capable of Reading This Book books out there. (does it bother anyone else that you’re automatically a Dummy if you’re a beginner, at least according to those series titles? Labeling someone a Dummy as a beginner is a great way to ensure people don’t want to try something new.)

Once you’ve transcended the need to march in lockstep with exact recipe cards, once you understand the basic application of all the tools and you’re ready to step up to understanding why you should or should not be doing things, you’re ready for a book like Six Pixels of Separation.

Don’t misunderstand – there is still a tremendous need for very beginner focused materials out there. The constant 80% new folks rate of attendance at PodCamps testifies to the continuing opportunity for people to get involved in new media. I’m just saying that you need to set your expectations appropriately for a book like Six Pixels of Separation and be prepared to work very, very hard to execute on the strategies in it.

Full Disclosure: Mitch is a friend and I’m probably biased in my review of his book. Expect links in this post to go to one or more affiliate programs and know that I get paid a nominal fee for referring you to those resources if you make a purchase or purchase inquiry. Thanks in advance for buying everything in triplicate.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com