Blog Posts About: socialmedia

I'd like to start with a disclaimer.  Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, the authors of Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, are friends. While I may be biased, knowing them for years also means I know the depth of the their knowledge and experience. And that's the big point of my review of their book - these people know what they're talking about because they live in social media every day and have for years. I've asked myself in the past - What would Darren and Julie do?

Friends with Benefits is very much a handbook. It provides direct, actionable and easy-to-understand advice on getting started with social media marketing. And that's one of the aspects of the book that I think is most valuable.  They don't speak in generalizations, like you should blog "often."  They say business bloggers should to try to blog 3 times a week. They don't say it takes significant time to do social media, they say to plan on at least 25% of your marketing time. This kind of directness takes away some of the anxiety that people feel about getting started and readers will appreciate it.

Along with in-depth introductions to the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, the book comes with a healthy dose of the realities of social media. The online world brims with supposed "social media experts" who will have you believe that anything and everything is possible. Darren and Julie know better because they've been there. The truth is, social media marketing can be amazingly valuable, but comes with real risks. I was happy to see that along with strategies for achieving the very real benefits, the book is clear about the reality of social media: it's difficult, it takes time and the results can vary widely. This book will keep you from looking foolish online.

If you're ready to get off the sidelines and get serious about social media marketing, you must read this book first. Friends with Benefits is tactical, practical and above all, useful.

As you may know, we've published a number "in Plain English" videos over the last year or two that are related to Social Media.  Taken together, there are 9 of them on subjects from Wikis to Twitter.  We've learned along the way that:

1) Professionals like you find these videos useful for introducing social media concepts to others.
2) You would prefer to use "Presentation Quality" versions that are downloadable and look great on screens of all types.
3) You love quantity discounts.

To serve all these needs, we've created the Social Media 9 Pack, which offers all 9 of our Social Media videos for the price of 7 videos.  For individuals, that's about US$132 for all 9, for 3 years. Of course, the same videos are available as a "Site License" for entire organizations as well.

You can purchase and immediately download the 9 pack via our Store. Here's what it includes:

Wouldn't it be nice if every author actually lived in the world that they wrote about? It's one thing to be an observer, but yet another to be a resident.  That's why it's my pleasure to point you to a new ebook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Capulet Communications.

It's called "Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook".  You can learn more (and purchase it) at SocialMediaReady.com. This video provides a quick overview too.

I've known Darren and Julie for years and there are few people whose words I would trust more regarding social media marketing. Why?  Because it is their world. Through their work, their blogs, their goofy satire sites and sites like DearRockers, they've been there every day for years.

As part of the roll out, they created a Common Craft inspired video called "Blogger Outreach 101" with Sachi and I in starring roles - as horses (I think!).  You'll just have to watch it and laugh...Darren reminds us that he think it's "just awful."  We are flattered nonetheless.  

[Disclosure] I provided a quote and some very small input as a part of the ebook's development.

It's easy to assume that YouTube and similar hosts are open to everyone but it's not the case for a lot of professionals.  We hear from people almost every day that need a way to access our videos off the web because their organizatio/school restricts access to websites like YouTube.

We recently became aware of TeacherTube, which is a video sharing site that has become a workaround for educators who can't access YouTube videos on the web. Many schools may block YouTube, but allow access to TeacherTube because it's an educational resource.

The site is a clone of YouTube with more advertising.  For it to work in the educational world, there seems to be two big issues (besides quality content):

1. Convincing schools to unblock TeacherTube 

2. Making sure that TeacherTube remains a safe resource. 

I asked Adam Smith, the co-founder, about how schools work to make sure Teacher Tube is unblocked.

To answer your question, we absolutely will work and continue to work with schools to help unblock TeacherTube, however the TeacherTube Community Members usually beat us to it. If any members campuses are blocking TeacherTube, they can email me direct at adam@teachertube.com and I can provide server information and/or generate a letter to the school’s technology director.  

I also asked about how TeacherTube remains safe for the educational setting.
When we started the design phase of the website, site monitoring was top priority. That is why we keep the quote at the top "Keep it SAFE! Flag all Inappropriate Videos." Once our member number grew over 20,000+ in the first three months, we new we had to add [flag as] inappropriate features and ask the TeacherTube Community for help. On all videos we added inappropriate video and comment flagging capabilities. So we not only have our staff constantly look over inappropriate content, we now have over 45,000+ members watching and flagging inappropriate content.

I've become a fan of TeacherTube because many of our fans depend on it to help educate others.  It's nice to see that they've been able to scale and stay relevant by working with a dedicated community of users.

Find Common Craft videos on TeacherTube here.  

This almost seems unreal - maybe it is.  Dan, a Stanford student,  has a chance to make a guest post on TechCrunch about his viral video company.  What does he do?  He proceeds to make it stunningly clear how misguided and irresponsible his "viral video" tactics are.  It reads like a manual for new media douchebaggery.

Some examples:

Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users.
MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
Commenting - Having a Conversation with Yourself:  A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this).
Dan finishes with this bit of perspective and advice...

You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.
I think I speak for you when I say O_M_G. Dan has the nerve to call his advice ways to acheive "true virality".  Doesn't he know that what he's doing is blatantly artificial? I'm floored. 

Update:  Dan posts again TechCrunch. This time he's saying that he doesn't use all those techniques, he was just saying that that some do. I don't buy it, though I do know Dan has big regrets about his original post. I'm not sure why, but his words and those that support him eat at me in a fundamental way. I've wasted too much time on it already, but I may have to write more just to get it out.