[chrisbrogan.com]

Posted: 03 Aug 2008 11:00 PM CDT

Tonight, I found myself in a strange spot. I left a comment on a microblogging site called Plurk where I said that I didn’t much like the service for me. I don’t. The user interface doesn’t work well for me. It’s a little too slow, too disjointed, and doesn’t scale well. It works great if you have a hundred or two hundred people to follow, but beyond that, it gets messy fast.

People responded back that they were upset that I didn’t like it, or that I hadn’t given it much time, etc, etc, etc. All of their thoughts were valid. Except it didn’t matter to me. I’m not saying they shouldn’t like it. I’m not saying it’s not a good platform. All I said was that it wasn’t for me.

Do What Works for You

Welcome to the fishbowl. In here, we get a little bit too excited sometimes. We get zealous about the bleeding edge. We sometimes get tired of things before most of the rest of the Internet has even found it. And we often crave connections and meaning and value out of these shiny objects.

But don’t let people tell you that you’re wrong for not liking something. Not into blogging? Swell. Don’t like Twitter? Fine. Hate podcasts? Perfect. It’s okay not to need/want/love the whole landscape. There are lots of services that people love that don’t fit my personal needs. I appreciate the services, but I’m not using them much.

If you’re here for business, for entertainment, to meet new friends, great. Do what works for you. Don’t let everyone else call you wrong for not liking MySpace, or for liking MySpace. If you’re excited about Second Life, don’t let me tell you that you’re silly just because I’m not a big fan.

Learn what works. Try out lots of things. And then go with what you end up liking. No harm. No foul.

I’ll be over here trying out new things still, but also going with what works for me.

You?

Photo credit, lbonnett

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Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

Posted: 03 Aug 2008 08:53 AM CDT

This was a request from Jennifer

You probably already get social media, and see its value, and think it’s really nifty cool. But if you can’t articulate the benefits and the return on the effort, and several other little details to the folks upstairs, it’s going to be hard to get your ideas moved from “wouldn’t this be great?” to “let’s assign a project manager and get started.” First and foremost, you have to jump over the fence from where you’re thinking, and get into their mindset. From there, look back at social media, and create values you believe they can understand. Here are some ideas.

Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

Social media tools like blogging, social networks, and social bookmarking are more effective in reaching the millions online than a traditional website.
Blogging can act as a way to reduce customer service calls (if there’s helpful how-to information on the blog).
Cost of implementing a blog is free or cheap. No more than $100 for a year of hosting. And most software is free. (There are some benefits from professional blogging software, but for most people, free is plenty fine).
Social networks are now used frequently by your customers, your prospects, and your competitors. Connect with people, learn their business needs, and respond more simply and flexibly.
Social media provides robust tools for listening, ranging in price from free to inexpensive, to reasonably expensive. Even the free tools help an organization find out who’s talking about them, so they can choose to respond.
First steps can be simple, like establishing a blogger relations process to go along with your press relations process. You might find bloggers who will want updates on your space, and even this is a good first step.
Internally, social media tools can be used to help with status information, training, project collaboration. Most tools like blogs, twitter-clones like identi.ca, etc can be set up internally instead of used on the public web, for more privacy.
Building an online social media component to most marketing and PR efforts ensures a better reach for the media created, and potentially better tracking through clicks and other metrics captured online versus in traditional media (like TV, newsprint, magazines, radio).
Blogging helps a business differentiate and establish a thought leadership position.
Using social network sites helps in customer prospecting, HR background checks, product marketing, and community awareness.
Building a social network group (either on someone else’s platform or around your primary site) encourages customer retention (a huge metric for lots of companies).
Another way to help is to find other companies or organizations, either in your vertical, or similar, and present information on how they’ve used social media.