Joe Hackman

Joe Hackman

Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, Tesla, maker, and more...

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Adventure Day 6 – Extended San Diego Stay and a Toast

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Sleep is definitely not over-rated, and I think we’re all sleeping better now that we’ve settled into our new environment. That’s one thing that was really lacking over the last month or more, sleep. Listing and selling your house and prepping to hit the road for a month involves a lot of work, ups and downs, and stress. All of those have an impact on sleep, and over time that starts to take a toll. Late this afternoon, I found myself taking a spontaneous nap to help catch up. Sleep is good. Today was officially workday #2 on the road. Yesterday I mentioned that our time in San Diego was too short. Today we realized that it would be cool to stay in San Diego a little longer, so we extended our trip an additional day to be 1 full week. I am pretty sure that the laid back atmosphere here will help us get fully caught up on our rest and ready for the road ahead. It will also allow me to get out and meet more of my customers.

Fishing from a Paddle Boat

After cruising around in the paddle boat yesterday and watching the bass and perch cruise by, we decided to take some time to try our luck today fishing. We didn’t catch a thing, and we somehow managed not to lose anything either. One thing about these lakes is that there are many aquatic plants and algae to catch your lure/hook on.

Paddle Boat Fishing!

Paddle Boat Fishing!

It’s official, *cheers* our Danville House closed Escrow today.

Last week we said goodbye to our Danville house of almost ten years; today, it became official. To toast the occasion, we popped the cork on a very special Cabernet Sauvignon made by Wine Maker Steve Tonella (aka my brother in law) of SR Tonella Cellars. Wow, what a treat it was indeed. His release party is this weekend, head over to his website if you want to be a part of this very special event. Sadly, we are going to be in Arizona that day so share your experience with me if you do make it!

Toasting to 2010 S.R. Tonella Cellars Cab

Toasting with a 2010 S.R. Tonella Cellars Cab

The 2014 RV Adventure Flickr Album

I promised to upload photos from my SLR and decided a Flickr Album would be the best way to share. Here is one of my favorites. It’s as if the ducks were saying, “No food? We’re out!”

Highlights and observations from Today

  1. I need a place to hang a hammock.
  2. The RV can start to feel small pretty fast if acting as an office and a summer school.
  3. I really enjoy being near water. (Add this to the house feature list? Hmmm)

Tomorrow I am excited to spend my third working day in San Diego and to have the opportunity to meet up with a couple of old friends. It’s going to be a great day.

Next up: Adventure Day 7 – Friends Missed Far Too Long

Why do you blog?

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Blogger Tag Cloud by Joe Hackman (via Tagxedo)I was reading a comment today from Ileane and she was sharing with me that her daughter got her into blogging. I also learned not too long ago that Gini Dietrich started Spinsucks because she was frustrated by the way that many PR professionals created a very poor impression of the PR industry. This inspired me to write this post, because I suspect the answers to the question “Why do you blog” will be far more interesting than the post itself.

Why do I blog?

I started blogging years ago on my company website in the late 1990’s, I didn’t realize what I was doing would be called blogging one day. I mostly wrote stories to inform my company’s clients about changes occurring in the IT industry that might affect them, and I actually still do that on Facebook and at Managed Solutions. I continued to do that for a number of years and eventually in 2008 I started blogging using wordpress.com on my blog called “Reasonable Ideas”. On that blog I wrote mostly about non-profits and science. This experiment would carry over into my next blog Joegonesocial.com, the blog you are most likely reading this story at. When I decided to embrace social media it was not an easy transition from paranoid IT Security minded guy to the more open and public Internet footprint that comes with being a blogger. In light of that I made the decision to wholly embrace social media and to add it to my “must do’s” in my business. Bottom line, I blog for a lot of reasons but the core (and intentionally vague!) reasons I blog are:

  • For business reasons.
  • For personal reasons.

Why do you blog?

I am intentionally not giving a lot of detail about my reasons, I really want this post to be more about you and why you blog. What do you blog about and why? I look forward to hearing about you.

Helping friends not Twitter Spammers

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You may have recently heard how Twitter, Facebook and Buzz factor into Bing and Google search results. I was somewhat concerned when I read that article. I was concerned because I think it will encourage spammers and SEO games with twitter and further clog up an already difficult to manage stream of information. I wrote about your sources being much more important than your followers earlier this year but it is becoming even more critical today and that is why I am revisiting this issue. Here are some key points to consider:

  1. When you follow a spammer, your good name makes it more likely for other legitimate people to follow them.
  2. By adding to their follower count you increase their reach and improve the SEO of the garbage they are pimping.

Follow the leader, they love the spammer

Remember the Honda motorcycle jingle (maybe you don’t but that’s alright, you didn’t grow up with that 2 wheel culture?):

Follow the leader, he’s on a Honda.

Your vote of confidence and good name could really make the difference between someone that respects you following or not following an unscrupulous user. In fact it is one of the things I’ve weighed in my decisions on whether or not to follow someone. Take this example, I clicked to find a random Twitter user, for this example let’s pretend that @katyzack just followed me:

Katy Zack on Twitter

As you can see in this initial view of Katy’s profile I note that several trusted sources of mine are already following her. This scores some kudo/follow back points, but note when I click through to see who the 10+ others were I saw this trio in the list:

Credible Followers

This is indeed good news for Katy, a couple of my #infosec sources follow her and my pal Gini Dietrich as well. I wouldn’t even think twice about following Katy now. This is an example of an obvious credible user but imagine if one of these folks that I respect followed another user with shall we say less than admirable selfish intentions? This is in fact the point I am trying to make:

Your good name could encourage me to follow someone I probably shouldn’t

Passing on Twitter Juice

According to the article I cited earlier the authority of a user is impacted by the number of followers they have (Bing) and both Bing and Google calculate the authority of all Twitter users. My argument here is simpler:

Follow a Spammer and you are improving their SEO

Summary and Conversation Fodder

Sources are becoming more and more crucial, you want to pass along democratic SEO happiness to quality folks but certainly don’t want to help saturate the Twitter Firehouse. With benefit of this information are you going to reconsider your Twitter policy? There is one heck of a post and comment thread about Twitter policies on Spinsucks. I’d imagine these recent developments could re-start that debate? What do you think?

The Value of Serendipity in New Media

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Liz StraussI had a great serendipitous experience this month, it all started when I noticed a great blog post that had some un-answered comments. The author happened to be someone that I have now learned is exceptional about responding to comments but there had been a technical challenge making it difficult for her to do so. If you want to hear the rest of that part of the story you can view this post on amplify, but that is not what this post is about. This post is about meeting that person, none other than Liz Strauss, in SF for lunch. When I saw her tweet that she just landed in SF I reached out to see if we might meet for coffee or lunch while she was in town. Eventually we worked something out and I was headed to SF to meet a fantastic blogger and person.

When Liz came across the street she was finishing a phone call and she stretched out her arms to give me a hug. To me this was a great gesture for someone I was meeting for the first time. We grabbed a table inside and started to chat. One of the things that struck me right away is how Liz was asking me a lot of questions, gauging my knowledge with sincere interest. Before long she began to share with me a lot of great ideas about blogging, being found, Twitter, hired help and other things. I am going to highlight that information in this post because much of it has been extremely valuable to me.

  • Some tips about article titles.
  • A strategy to find some help.
  • A great strategy for engaging content creators on Twitter.

Some prudent advice on article titles

Liz gave me some great advice, in a very simple way, about how to title articles. She suggested that you read your article and determine what question it answers and build the subject around that. The thought process was brilliant, when people search for that question they are likely to find your article with content relevant to their question. I know people that love tricky titles may not like this approach, but you can always tweet out different content and see which one works better. I have taken this method very much to heart and I am utilizing it when appropriate here on my blog.

A strategy to find some help

I explained to Liz that I cut back on my manpower over the past two years and I am the only full time employee at my company. I also explained that I am enjoying it but there are times when I would like to delegate some work. Liz asked about universities in the area and explained an excellent way to establish a relationship with professors and their top students. The idea is that you reach out to the appropriate subject matter professor – Computer Science if you’re looking for IT, Marketing if you need marketing and so forth. You offer to get involved with classes, possible helping with providing your area of expertise as a resource. You also ask if they have students that might be interested in internships. Going through the professor the idea develops further, they have a vested interest in the success. They are likely to suggest their best students, wanting to make sure that things work out since they are involved.

Engaging quality content creators on Twitter

The premise for this was simple, whenever you share an article see if you can’t find the author on Twitter and reference them in the Tweet. If they are monitoring their Twitter account at all they are likely to follow you and even RT you. This seems really obvious, but in an age where content curation has become so critical this technique is that much more valuable. Liz is an absolute pro blogger and power Twitter user. In fact look at what Klout says about her:

Liz Strauss Klout Influence Matrix

“You have the amazing ability to filter massive amounts of content to surface the nuggets that your audience truly care about.”

A little about Liz

While Liz was so generous with her time, I worked at learning more about what she does. I was pleased to hear that she does public speaking, puts on SOBCon and consults with clients helping them navigate social media. I have added the SOBCon event to my “must do” events for 2011 and I confess I am completely pumped up about it. You can find Liz via @lizstrauss on Twitter and via successful-blog.com.

How to respond to customer complaints expressed in Social Media

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Just last week I received the first ever Email newsletter from Safeway. I had used their home delivery once or twice mostly as a novelty to see what it was like. I really didn’t want or need to get correspondence from them, I’m more of a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” type of person, unless of course I intentionally opt in for something. When I did receive the first message from Safeway, I was disturbed to be taken to a website with a login page when I clicked the unsubscribe button. I’ve already written that rule #1 of Email Marketing should be “1 Click Opt out and add me to the “don’t ever send me Email again” list. Obviously me having to login does not meet those criteria, in fact if I’ve forgotten my password (I had) I really don’t want to do a password recovery and waste more time to opt out of this message that is already wasting my time. So what do I do? I took it to Twitter…

The Complaint

Some Friendly Email Marketing Advice

Thankfully one of my Twitter friends @katiefelten also RT:

Katie Felten RT

So in all honesty, I had no idea what would occur now. Would Safeway be listening? I had already verified they had a Twitter account. It turns out they  were listening and responded:

Acknowledgement

@Safeway Responds

So that was decent of them, at least they were listening and responded. That is certainly better than nothing, right? So I decided to make another suggestion, just driving the point home so to speak:

Suggestion

Joe responds back to @safeway

The Adjustment

Then I sort of did what I should and forgot all about it. This morning I received another message from Safeway. “Joe, MORE Exclusive Coupons Are Here!” oh snap, I guess I better test the unsubscribe rather than assume they did not listen. Much to my surprise it brought me to a screen where I could easily opt out of all of the newsletters. Here is a partial screenshot:

What can we learn from this?

Ultimately I have to say I am impressed with Safeway’s response and approach. I learned that they are:

  1. Monitoring their twitter account.
  2. Responding to “complaints”.
  3. Acting on the feedback.

Sometimes I feel like Social Media is my only outlet to respond to bad service or poor policies. I really try to go out of my way to help companies that provide good services and products, but on occasion I have written bad reviews on Yelp. I certainly won’t be giving Michael Finney a run for his money, but it’s nice to know that you can have a positive impact in some cases by choosing to exercise your voice in Social Media.

Share YOUR story

Have you used Social Media to influence a similar situation? I’d love to hear your examples in the comment section below.