Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Blog and Podcast - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image

Are there best practices in Social Media Marketing?

Marketers struggle to come up with answers because Social Media is still a very new and exciting channel that we're all discovering. Some might even debate if you can have best practices in Social Media at this point in time? The debate rages on whether the actual practice is one for the marketing professionals or for the public relations industry.

What are your best practices for Social Media Marketing?

This is the start of a new group writing project to create the most-up-to-date guide to Social Media Marketing Best Practices.

It's really simple to take part:

1. Write a Blog post on your Social Media Marketing Best Practice. I'll challenge you to choose just one (granted, you're free to do whatever you want).

2. Include links to other people who have written similar posts for this Social Media Marketing Best Practices writing project that have caught your attention, or include their insights in your own post (just make sure to give them proper attribution).

3. Link back to this Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Blog. This will help me organize all of the content, it will help spread the word, and if you link back to this Blog and email me, I'll make sure to include - at least - two links back to you. (note: you don't have to do this, but I am trying to keep this as organized as possible).

4. If you use Technorati Tags (or anything like it), please tag your post "social media marketing best practices project".

5. Feel free to tag other people in your post to get their opinion and help spread the project.

The idea would be that each tagged person will then write their own Blog post. I'm sure people will flood each other's comment sections, but the "big win" will be if we get all of us writing our own unique posts. I'll centralize and link to them here.

There is no deadline to write but I have high hopes that this project will go on for some time, develop, morph, adapt and become an organic resource for Marketers today and tomorrow. I'll post aggregated updates and links here on this Blog every so often.

You can also win a prize!

I have a brand new Apple iPod Shuffle (1GB) that I am offering up for the "best" best practice, with a runner-up book prize of, Always Be Testing - The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, by Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto-vonTivadar and Lisa T. Davis (see below for the updated prize). I will - personally - choose the winners at the end of November 2008.

Here's my Best Practice in Social Media Marketing:

Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. Have a consistent username that you use in all of your channels (mine is mitchjoel). Use the same photo, so that you are recognizable in all of these channels. Use the same name in all of your postings (even when I comment on other Blogs, I use: Mitch Joel - Twist Image). Don't blast out five pieces of content or join three online social networks and fade away. Choose one, stick with it and keep at it. Be more like the tortoise instead of the hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Advertising is the hare and Social Media is the tortoise. If you release a weekly Podcast, don't change your production to every month of so. If you start with a monthly show, you can always step it up to twice-weekly (or weekly) as it grows in audience and popularity. Be consistent.

I'll also kick things off by tagging: Chris Brogan, Bryan Eisenberg, Shel Holtz, Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel, Andy Sernovitz and Kate Trgovac.

Now, it's your turn. What's your best practice?

(hat tip to Ben Yoskovitz from Instigator Blog and Julien Smith from In Over Your Head for the inspiration).

UPDATE: Bryan Eisenberg has offered to supply an authographed copy of his latest book, Always Be Testing. Thanks Bryan!

I'm a huge fan of Michael Wesch and what he (and his students) are doing with the Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. If you haven't already seen his most brilliant videos Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing and A Vision of Students Today you really do owe it to yourself to check them out.

Wesch gave a great presentation at the Library of Congress on June 23rd, 2008. Wesch is way more than a Cultural Anthropologist and teacher. He understands what these new digital media channels are better than most Marketers and - more importantly - he presents these new shifts in media in a clear, fun and interesting way.

Here's his fifty-five minute presentation - An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube. Take the time to check it out... 

Is the amount of Spam you're getting bringing your online depression to new heights? I'm getting it too. Spam - now new and improved. I've had spam in Twitter, the latest pain has been Spam in Facebook and I'm dealing with this insane amount of fake CNN and MSNBC spam in my email in box (it's so good that - at first - I thought it was real email from the two news outlets).

There's a reason you can't get away from it: It works.

Check out this news item from AppScout: 29 Percent of Internet Users Admit Purchasing from Spam.

Ouch.

That's nearly one-third of the entire online population (and, for the record, this is inching ever-closer to the one billion person mark).

"29 percent of Internet users that admit to purchasing items from spam email, according to a recent survey. Often these goods are pirated, counterfeit, or cheap knock-offs that would be difficult to come by through the legitimate market... More than 150 billion spam messages circulate daily, accounting for more than 85 percent of the total number of emails sent throughout the world. The sheer volume of spam consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth and remains one of the Internet's biggest security problems."

The report was put together by Marshal's Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team and you can review their news release here: Sex, Drugs and Software Lead Spam Purchase Growth.

And, it's not just fake Rolex watches that we're buying. Get ready for this:

"The most commonly purchased items include sexual enhancement pills, software, adult material and luxury items such as watches, jewellery and clothing."

Common knowledge dictates that the open and response rates for Spam is minimal, but with that much messaging being plugged into the tubes, it's clear that there are still enough financial rewards for the spammers to continue working the channel.

And here's the sad reality:

“A common misconception is that ‘regular’ people don’t buy from spam. But, you have to consider the types of products people are buying. It’s pirated software, knock-off watches, counterfeit designer goods, cheap drugs and prescription medicines, pornography and other adult material. The Internet provides convenience and a degree of anonymity to people who want to buy illegal or restricted goods. It is a black market and spam has become a conventional means of advertising to a willing audience of millions of people who are purchasing from spam.” 

If you follow the numbers, we're talking about 250 million people who are - obviously - interested in this type of messaging. This is the paradox of advertising. The general consumer screams for less and less advertising, but buys into it at such a furious rate that although they say they're not interested, they are sustaining the business model by voting with their dollars. The old adage continues to be true: if you really don't want spam, stop buying from these types of messages. There is another theory that if less and less people responded to Spam, the spammers would kick it up and increase the messaging. I don't believe this to be true. Spammers use this channel because it is cheap and cost effective. They'll move on to something else once the fast buck is no longer ready for the taking.

Welcome to episode #118 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. This is noting but one big, fat and ugly rant about a journalist and their article about why they won't/don't Blog. It got me all kinds of frustrated, and I didn't get my full release on the Blog, so you can hear me rave about it here for a bit. Enjoy the conversation...

Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #118 - Host: Mitch Joel.

• Running time: 30:41.
• Audio comment line - please send in a comment and add your voice to the audio community: +1 206-666-6056.
• Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com.
• Hello from Beautiful Montreal.
• Subscribe over at iTunes.
• Please visit and leave comments on the Blog - Six Pixels of Separation.
• Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook.
• or you can connect on LinkedIn.
• ...or on twitter.
• Facebook Group - Six Pixels of Separation Podcast Society.
• In a perfect world, I'd love for you to connect with me, directly, through my Facebook profile instead of joining the group - but, that's your call.
• Check out my other Podcast, Foreword Thinking - The Business And Motivational Book Review Podcast - sponsored by HarperCollins Canada.
• Foreword Thinking - Episode #11 featuring Michael Gerber - E-Myth Revisited and Awakening The Entrepreneur Within.
• PodCamp Montreal - September 20th and 21st - Pavillon de De Design at UQAM.
• Organized by: Sylvain Grand’Maison, Julien Smith, Bob Goyetche, Jean-François Blais, Laurent LaSalle, Laurent Maisonnave, Hugh McGuire, Casey McKinnon, Harold Boeck and Michelle Sullivan.
• Twist Image is a sponsor.
• I will be co-presenting two sessions:
• The New New Music - Fans, Community And What Business Can Learn From An Industry In Peril with David Usher – musician and cloudid.
• Podcasting From The Heart - The Value Of Recording A Show With No Editing And No Second Takes – C.C. Chapman – Managing The Gray – Accident Hash – The Advance Guard.
• Globe and Mail article - I'm Not Blogging This, Mark My Words by Christie Blatchford.
• Six Points of Separation – Six Reasons Why Blogs Are Unstoppable:
• 1. Power of the individuals.
• 2. Speed to publish.
• 3. Cost to publish.
• 4. People want to share their stories.
• 5. There’s an audience for it.
• 6. It’s different from other media.
• David Usher – ‘Kill The Lights’.

Please join the conversation by sending in questions, feedback and ways to improve Six Pixels Of Separation. Please let me know what you think or leave an audio comment at: +1 206-666-6056.

Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #118 - Host: Mitch Joel.

Several months back, I saw Seth Godin speak as one of the keynote presentations for the CMA - Canadian Marketing Association - National Convention and Trade Show (full disclosure: I am the co-chair for this event and sit on the Board of the Directors as well). In the question and answer segment of his presentation, one of the attendees asked Seth about where he gets his ideas for his books and his Blog postings from. Seth went on to explain that he follows what's happening in the space, does a lot of reading, uses many of the tools I wrote about here: Online Chatter - Six Free Tools To Monitor What The Public Is Saying About You, etc..., but the attendee kept on prying into the thought process.

Seth simply replied, "that's my secret sauce."

What he meant to say is, "who knows? It just comes to me."

It's the perfect answer.

Most of us know the seven notes that make up all music. None of us are able to put them together quite like John Lennon.

Lennon's ability to weave those seven notes together was his secret sauce.

Each one of us has our own secret sauce.

I think part of life's mystery is one's ability to figure out, exactly, what their own secret sauce is.

My guess is that some people find out really early, some figure it out only later in life and the vast majority of us never ever do (which is sad). So, when we see someone who has found it - whether they are an artist, project manager, scientist, speaker or plumber - we all marvel at the skill set, result or constant ground-breaking passion they bring to whatever it is that they do.

Brilliant ideas come out of this lifeforce, but they have to be nurtured, practiced, pushed, prodded and questioned. I think a lot about this lately. When I see a new businesses idea proposed to me, when I see a rock band live, when I read certain Blog postings, when I see specific marketing campaigns, I don't ask, "how did they come up with that idea?" I let it all soak in and ask myself: "what's their secret sauce and how did they discover it?"

We tend to think that only celebrities, famous people and the rich have discovered their secret sauce. It's not the case. We've all seen people from all walks of life who just do what they do in their own - very unique and special - way. Knowing your secret sauce is not correlated to a hefty bank account. I also happen to think that it's not about how much self-reflection you do either. I think it's about doing lots of stuff you're passionate about and playing full out (especially when you're working). We tend to look at people who have embraced their secret sauce as having an easy life. My guess is, life is easy for them because they're doing what comes naturally and what keeps them inspired.

A traditional journalist is always going to flare up their own Google Juice when they write a piece titled, I'm Not Blogging This, Mark My Words, like Christie Blatchford did yesterday in the Globe and Mail (full disclosure: I write a twice monthly business column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun - both Canwest Publishing properties). A whole bunch of thoughtful writers have posted their own thoughts about it (my two favourites are: The Praized Blog - News Is Conversation and Matthew Ingram - Blatchford Pines For The Monologue), and I highly recommend taking some time to read Blatchford's piece. It's a living testament to one of my favourite quotes of all time: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." (General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army as quoted by Tom Peters in the book, Re-Imagine).

Blatchford's piece is a must-read because her actual reasons for not Blogging and the value this new media brings to society highlights how much the world has shifted.

"...now there is blogging, and comments. Readers may take 30 seconds to post a comment on a story or blog item that a writer dashed off in a minute. On The Globe website, our slogan is 'Join the Conversation,' but in the blogosphere, what follows isn't usually a conversation but a brief, ungrammatical shouting match. You can have more pensive chats in a bar fight... And journalism wasn't meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn't like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin."

It's a tough pill to swallow. I thought that newspapers were always meant to be the way a community informed itself? Everyone could not know everything and be everywhere, so we appointed scribes (writers, journalists) to gather this information, package it and distribute it to the masses. As a Journalist myself, I always knew that my role was to ask a musician the questions that the public wanted to know, take that information and feed it back to them as a service. If I wasn't asking the right questions or getting the appropriate answers, my loyalty was to the readers. The only way I would know if I was doing my job is feedback and having very passionate conversations in person (or through the mail). Granted, there wasn't much wiggle room for a conversation in that type of media, but isn't that the whole beauty of Blogging and where technology is taking us? Now, the last period at the end of the last sentence of any news item is where the real story begins.

"It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff. It is not true that even great productive writers like The Globe's Jim Christie or Ms. DiManno or Mr. Farber can hit a home run every time they sit before the laptop. But the odds of them doing it are greatly increased if they haven't already filed 1,200 words to the Web, shot a video, done a podcast and blogged ferociously all day long... Most important, Michael Farber is right. We all have a limited number of things to say, informed opinions, funny lines, quirky observations. We have only so many words in us. Do we really want to spend them on something as ephemeral as a blog?"

I think anyone can try to write (and has the right to express themselves). That being said, writing isn't the issue, readership and audience is. Who cares how many newspapers, Blogs or Podcasts are out there? If someone finds value in any of this content, they stick with it. If they don't, they move on. I've seen terribly written newspapers with huge readership (just go check out the tabloid section of your local newsstand) and I've seen the most brilliant of Blogs build up readership that trounces the New York Times, Washington Post and Time Magazine combined. This is what I call Digital Darwinism - your content does not evolve because you are using the latest and greatest technology. Your content evolves when people read it, connect to it, share it, tell others and continue to pay attention to it.

I also disagree that writing is based on the scarcity model. As someone who has been writing professionally since the mid-eighties, I find the more words I put out there, the more channels I try, the more creative I get, the easier it is to find my words, the more I self-edit and the more creative I get. I'm not going to become a better writer by doing it less... I'm going to get better by doing it more. I don't Blog less when I'm writing a book (as I am doing now). If anything, I find the need to flex those muscles more. My self-defense coach, Tony Blauer, used to say, "practice does not make perfect... perfect practice makes perfect."

In this new media world, "time to press" and new technology is not the enemy. One's attitude towards the changes and reality of a world where anyone can publish for free and express themselves is the new enemy. I cherish Blogging because I can embrace the haters, freaks and geniuses. I can gage the value of my content based on the readership and comments (or there lack of). It forces me to think even more about what, exactly, I am going to say when my readers are now my fellow community members and their words and thoughts get the same featured value.

And with a headline like that, I'm sure everyone interested in SEO - Search Engine Optimization is now reading.

Back in the early nineties I published a national (and free) magazine called Enrage Magazine. It was all about bridging new culture. I had this crazy idea that bands like Slayer could coexist alongside Green Day and that stories about cyber culture could line up nicely with articles about Jim Rose and his Circus Sideshow. In fact, I recently came across this item (courtesy of Mark Shainblum) - Enrage On Net! (I think it was meant to be a press release). Check out this quote of mine from 1994: "The Net and other digital media are the future of publishing... We must be out there getting our message across in this medium or we risk becoming irrelevant." Mark also makes this interesting comment: "Enrage, published by Mitch Joel, was arguably one of the earliest magazines in the world to go online. When I laid eyes on the World Wide Web for the first time, on a Sun SPARCstation running Mosaic, my words were already there. That was an experience."

What did I know? This Internet thing is still probably just a fad ;)

Back to the story... the first issue of Enrage had a cover story feature on the Internet. Circle back to those times and the Web was still extremely nascent. The latest breakthrough (beyond the basic Web Browser) was hypertext - the ability to have links on a page that people could click on and be transported to another page. I know, it sounds so basic and lame, but at that point in time, this was breakthrough technology. The point of hypertext was to help link related pieces of content together, to help foster some kind of cohesion around the many different voices that were popping up online, and to make the content increasingly easier to find and organize.

We tend to forget where we came from, and we tend to only look at where we're going.

Now, links are all about Google Juice. Links are only about increasing your visibility in a search engine to increase traffic or acting as some kind of digital beacon to let another website know that you've mentioned them. If you read this Six Pixels of Separation Blog on a regular (or even semi-regular) basis, you'll notice that I link to everything. If I mention Google, Facebook or Twitter, I still hyperlink to them on the first mention. Do I really believe that I am increasing my searchability by doing this? Do I think that companies of that size are even noticing that I'm mentioning them?

The answer is "no" to both.

I link to make your online experience that much better. I know full well that you know how to type in www.google.com into your browser, but that isn't the point. First off, I want to make the experience seamless for you, so adding in clickable links that enable you to move around the Web is simply a common courtesy. Second, what has always made me love the digital space is the non-linear and non-hierarchical nature of it. Links give you this amazing freedom that regular text can't. It takes you from a two-dimensional context into a three-dimensional matrix-like grid world where the words can literally transpose you all over the place and into a forest of new and exciting content.

So, maybe the power of reciprocated links is loosing some steam in the search engine optimization world. Maybe if you can't benefit from that in terms of increased traffic or a higher PageRank, there is no real point in taking the time to add links.

I think differently.

I think links are what makes reading content online so interesting, engaging, exciting and fresh. I choose to link in hopes that others do as well. I choose to link in hopes that it becomes standard operating procedure and a best practice for online content. I choose to link so that you can choose where you want to go now or next. Linking has become way too much about what it can do for the content creator. I think it's time to go back to the beginning and start linking because it's about what it can do for the reader and their online experience.

This is a mash-up...

Two individually awesome things that make up one even more amazingly awesome thing.

Enjoy.

(hat tip - Julien Smith)