Month: July 2011

  • How to value social media traffic

    Google+. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. What’s really working for you? Do you know? How would you know? It turns out the answer is easily within reach. Here’s how to set up a very quick dashboard to see what’s truly working for you. First, I will assume that you have set up goals and goal values in

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  • Authenticity, the real, and the ideal

    I made lemonade today, and said lemonade got me thinking. Why? The lemonade I made looked like cloudy water. It was a pale yellowish milky color with little random bits of stuff floating around in it, absolutely nothing like lemonade is “supposed” to look. But when I drank it, it was like getting face-punched by

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  • Understanding and Evaluating Google+

    Are there “right” and “wrong” ways to use Google+? There are right and wrong ways to use any tool. You can, for example, use a jackhammer to tenderize a steak. The result might be different, but if you’re especially skilled with it, it might work. Ultimately, the tool is theoretically capable of performing the action

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  • Are your social media networks supporting goals?

    Looking at how everyone is trying to find a place for Google+ and all of the other networks, I thought I’d share the way things are shaping up and how I use them. You might find a few ideas you can use. I look at social media sites from the perspective of what they do

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  • Disclaimers, cautionary tales, and warnings

    Adele McAlear noted with surprise that I endorse the use of TweetAdder, mentioning on Twitter that most of their promotional stuff encourages practices that I don’t endorse and in some cases explicitly oppose. She’s right, which begs the question, why do I endorse it? TweetAdder does what I want it to do, which is maintain

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  • Building Your Digital Content Marketing Ladder

    In order to reach the goals you’ve set for yourself as a company, as a marketer, as a brand, you need a way to get to them, a path that helps you understand what you should be doing next. Rather than just do stuff haphazardly or because everyone else is doing it, take a few

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  • Foodblogging: Yes, I A/B Test My Meat

    At every steakhouse I’ve ever been to, they tout how their dry aged steaks are the best thing since Moses brought tablets off a mountain. Most of the time, they are reasonably good, but not worth the price of admission. For those unfamiliar, dry aging a steak is effectively partially dehydrating it, on the premise

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  • Stop talking about the hammer

    Do you feel like you’re writing the same blog post over and over again? Do you feel like you’ve got nothing left to tweet about, nothing left to post about, nothing new to put into your newsletter? There’s a good chance that you’re stuck because you’re only talking about the hammer. What in the world

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  • How to beat social media lock-in

    Mark Zuckerberg, at yesterday’s Facebook event, announced to the world that the metric that matters to him is sharing, not raw numbers of users. The words coming out of his mouth certainly don’t match the actions of his company. Consider the recent move to block the Facebook Friend Export extension for Google Chrome. Don’t believe

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  • How to measure Google Plus with analytics

    This post was updated for new information on July 8, 2011 Right now, Google Plus (hereafter lazily abbreviated as G+) is in its infancy. That said, it’s certainly got the buzz and the shine that social media folks have been craving for some time. It’s got the ease of Facebook plus the asymmetric relationship nature

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