What does Social Media success look like in 2011?

Here at Council Blogs in the cyber wigwam the elders convened around the campfire to discuss what success looks like in 2011. Like all gatherings of wise people no overwhelming consensus was reached. Reviewing the facts: Twitter is still clicking along with 600 tweets per second. Facebook has over 750 Million users. LinkedIn has 116 Million users. (Almost double from 2 years ago!) One thing for sure, social media is growing. We’re not sure about BranchOut and Google+. We’ll save those for the next pow-wow. All the chiefs agreed that success in 2011 for social media would be doubling sales in 5 months like Old Spice did in 2010.

The 1912 Overture: Year of the Maine Hunting Shoe

Necessity is the mother of invention

In 1912 Leon Leonwood Bean developed the Maine hunting shoe primarily to keep his feet dry while hunting. An interesting story unfolds from that humble beginning to one of America’s biggest mail order retailers. I had the opportunity to listen to the book, In search of L.L.Bean at a time when their journey of marketing discovery hit a resonant chord with me. I vividly remember listening to an audio version of the book in the car on a long trip. When we’d have to make a bathroom break, we literally ran back to the car to catch the story again. In today’s world of blogs and internet the search for the best mail order marketing seems a little old school. In our blogging club in Rockford we have seen how social media is all about telling the story of your business. Better yet, how do you tell the story of what you do for your customers. What do they get? What’s the results of your efforts for them? What will be the Maine hunting shoe of this century?

WordPress Myth 13: When I press enter I only get double spaces!

!@#$%&*^%$#!! , said the blogger trying to get his copy single spaced when all the time he hit enter it would jump down a whole additional line. Has this ever happened to you? The wordpress editor has nice but limited formatting capabilities. But how to do something as simple as single spacing – there is not a way! Fortunately, with a little research we found a way. Using <shift-enter> instead of enter will insert only a single line here are some examples:

This is one line <enter>

This is the second line <shift-enter>
this is the third line <shift-enter>
This is the fourth line <enter>

This is the 5th line<shift-enter>
This is the 6th line… <enter>

This is the 7th line and it brings it here….

Myth – BUSTED!

Why 13? 13 is the decimal ASCII code for carriage return.

Linkedin hits 115.8 million subscribers!

In May, soon after their IPO, LinkedIn has garnered Over 115 million subscribers. At the end of 2009 my story of sixes included LinkedIn with 63 million users. What growth! Personally, I noticed recent updates to LinkedIn. Have you noticed the new review profile feature? Have you seen the little Post-it note check marks? LinkedIn is a portion of the Social Media marketing framework that we develop in classes at lept Like A Blog. In our blogging club, Council Blogs, we occasional visit the Linkedin profiles too. You can visit my LinkedIn profile by clicking on the icon on the left.

Council Blog’s 5 step recipe for successful posting

1. Show up

To get started you have to take the first step. We like to use WordPress for publishing our blogs.

2. Prepare ingredients

Gather your unique content, catchy title, pictures, tags

Image via Wikipedia

 

 

 

3. Proofread

At Council Blogs we find that saving the draft and then proofreading in the “Preview post” window. You can make use of wordpress.com’s Recommendation window. If you don’t have a recommendation box in your edit post window, you can select the check box under Users/personal settings.

4. Publish

Press that square blue button when you have your tags all selected.

5. Have FUN!

What a sense of accomplishment to get those poetic words out into the blogosphere.

Shall I compare thee to a Social Media?

It won’t be long and people will use the characteristics of Social Media to make analogies. Fortunately, the distinction of the top 3 tools is blurring. Have you noticed that the evolution of Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin seem to be converging? One aspect I’ve noticed is the use of thumbnails to indicate the author of a chat, comment, or post. YouTube is coming along quickly too by adding social elements to what was once just a big video repository. In the future, when someone is terse or curt you will say, “Are you Tweet?” or “Don’t be such a Tweet!”  It’s hard to say. Social Media has definitely had an impact on the internet, and traditional advertising. It only stands to reason that the terminalogy and concepts will find their way into the culture mainstream. Look at OMG!