Life Events

There are few events in life that can really affect you.

There's the good: new job, marriage, birth of a child.

And then there's the bad: loss of job, divorce, death of a loved one.

It's easy to prepare for the expected events such as marriage or birth of a child, but often times the unexpected, bad events can really throw you for a loop.

I've learned that having an open relationship and communication along with financial planning can help you get through those unexpected events. (I would think thought that having an open relationship and communication could actually prevent one of those tragedies.)

7 social media lessons from Nestle's Facebook missteps

Just wanted to share this post from Ragan.com's top 5 stories on social media.

In this case study Nestle doesn't get that they no longer own or control their brand.
Your brand now is the top 10 results in Google when your customer searches your company name or your product name.

The issue and online conversation was around Nestle using palm oil in its products and palm oil being linked to environmental harm. Nestle's response was to tell people not to post their logos.

One commenter sums it up: "It’s not OK for people to use altered versions of your logos but it’s OK for you to alter the face of Indonesian rainforests? Wow!"

In the post, Ragan.com provides 7 really good lessons that any professional communicator needs to know and ensure their executives or clients know.

To sum them up:

• You need to listen and understand both the issue and the tools before jumping in.
• It's a conversation and sharing of ideas with your clients, it's not one-way (push) like traditional advertising.
• You need to give up control of the message and take the good with the bad. You're not going to please everyone and there will be bad feedback.
• It will require time commitment and dedicated resources (people) to follow, listen and participate in the conversations.

By the Numbers: Internet 2010

Here's a great article with some stats on Internet use and growth in 2010.

Notably, here are some social media stats.

Twitter doubled the number of accounts and Facebook grew by almost a third.

(Although as a side note, I noticed my nephew adding Facebook accounts with reckless abandon on the weekend just so he could create more towns for some game! That's just wrong. He also pumped up the number of email users by creating random Hotmail accounts for the Facebook accounts.)

Social media

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
• 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
• 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Always Learn and Share

I'm sharing a post from copyblogger about the new age of teaching.

He has some good points when it comes to online marketing. You can't always be shilling your wares online. People will be quick to "unfriend" you if that's all your messages are.

"Your authority and credibility no longer depend on credentials — it depends on mastering skills by practicing them in the real world. You must be sensitive to what your prospective students want to learn, instead of forcing them to learn whatever you decide to teach them. And there’s no such thing as tenure. You stay relevant and useful or you lose all your students."
Specifically Josh Kaufman is talking about his online teaching business, but the same goes for your clients. You need to know what they're interested in and provide solutions that meet their needs and desires, not push your latest product or service.

You always need to be sharing something new that people want to learn or that will benefit them. Then, as I'm doing with the copyblogger post, your followers will share and spread your message.

Immortality through our online connections

I started this blog a few years ago with the greatest of intentions to write every day, but as my archive of posts shows I haven't been successful at that.

My blog title, "ego scriptor proinde ego sum," along the lines of I think therefore I am, means "I write therefore I am". In a way social media and all the self-published content is a way for everyone to achieve a bit of immortality.

Today this really hit home for me. A coworker has been battling cancer for the past year. To keep everyone up to date and I'm sure as a way to help her, she started a blog to keep track of her journey. (Thankfully she's just received the official diagnosis that her cancer is in remission.)

However, through her blog she came into contact with someone else fighting cancer and who is also blogging about her life and battle with the disease.

Today, my coworker's post was that this person who had touched her life, and yet had never met, passed away this weekend.

Until today I had never heard of Daria Maluta, and yet through these online connections I was made aware of her life and how she touched other's lives. A note of caution, when I followed the link I was left with a lump in my throat after reading the last few posts of her life.

Getting started in social media

To follow up to my commitment to social media and writing in this blog, I plan on working my way through these four stages.

Four stages to marketing and promotion.

1. Sign up, observe, and educate yourself (sometimes called lurking). Many people stay at this stage for a long time, simply soaking up good information.

2. Participate. Start to make yourself known. This could be as simple as making status updates, posting photos or sample writing, or creating a profile.

3. Share something and grow relationships. Focus on what you give people or what you can share that's of value. As you participate and share with others in the community, and do things for each other, relationships grow and develop.

4. Ask for help. This is when you might actually put your connections to work as a means of soft or hard marketing. Maybe you want to tell people to pre-order your book on Amazon on a specific day. Or you're hoping that your network will spread the word about an upcoming event you're hosting. So you ask.

People who know you and trust you will be more likely to help you. That's why it's important to establish relationships far before you market and promote a product/service. The relationships have to be meaningful before they have value in a marketing/promotion effort.

Note: The above is from my own notes from a workshop or seminar but unfortunately I didn't note the source when I wrote the notes. So, I don't profess to the above being entirely my own thoughts. It's probably came from Groundswell.

A New Year, A New Commitment

We're already half way into January of 2011. My last post was early January 2010! :(

I've signed up for two social media courses through Algonquin Colleges distance education and renewing my commitment to take on this social media storm front on.

I'm on Twitter (@jason_clements and @moviesinlondon) and I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn but I've never fully committed to any of these and have never regularly logged in or posted to any of them.

So, there you go, I'm putting myself out there and the social media courses will be my inspiration and will make me accountable to post here regularly and hopefully dive into the other sites.