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I was asked to give some tips in ten minutes to my Rotary Club on how to use Social Media more effectively. The average member might access Facebook casually and has limited time for Social Media involvement. After looking at their situation I came up with this presentation and delivered it this morning. It is a quick read but the suggestions I made could easily be applied to any business or cause.
This is the second episode of a new monthly feature on my podcast where I interview “interviewers” in this case The A-List host Jennifer Neeley. Jennifer interviews social media and journalism influencers and thought leaders about what they do, how they got there and the passions that fuel their journey. Jennifer is a social media strategist, speaker and new media pioneer, who spearheads a variety of social media functions and programs for her clients – committed to helping them achieve maximum benefit from their social media investment. An Emmy-nominated media veteran who has worked for the “Big Three” TV networks, she earned her Masters from Columbia School of Journalism and Bachelors from Cal Berkeley. Jennifer brings her passion for interviewing to the program.
What can you expect by listening to this podcast?:
Regarding a particularly chaotic experience in the news business.
“Broadcast news on crack.“
On Twitter @jennifered
Her blog at jenniferneeley.com/
Listeners, who should I interview next?
Recently Danny Brown to joined me for a discussion about blogging ethics and transparency. Danny Brown is co-founder and partner at Bonsai Interactive Marketing, offering integrated marketing, social media, digital and mobile marketing solutions and applications. His blog is featured in the AdAge Power 150 list as well as Canada’s Top 50 Marketing Blogs, and won the Hive Award for Best Social Media Blog at the 2010 South by South West festival. After reading Danny’s blog for a while I learned two things that compelled me to invite him to join me for this episode:
Who better to dive into a topic that some might view as controversial? I knew that Danny would give me his honest answers and would not pull any punches. I really looked forward to chatting with him again, Danny was a part of the PRapalooza panel in early November 2010. Danny definitely lived up to my expectations and if you’re interested in learning more about transparency and ethics in the blogosphere have a listen:
On Twitter @dannybrown
Also might want to read his recent post about Blog Disclaimers at Dannybrown.me.
Know someone or a group of people that might be interesting to interview? Contact me or @hackmanj.
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.
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:
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.
I was writing a post about the importance of including images in posts with embedded video’s recently and discovered a great little “hack” to hide said images so that only the thumbnail would show up when shared. This post is the result of that discovery, it solved a long standing issue that I had with video only posts. If you also had come across this issue the video tutorial in particular will be very valuable. There is actually a hidden image immediately after this paragraph, view the page source if you want to see it or watch the video to see how it was done.
Posts with only embedded video and no pictures do not display as nicely when shared on Facebook, Linked In and other similar sites. For example, when I share a post without an actual image included, these are my thumbnail choices:
None of these are appropriate in most cases as they do not represent what I am posting about. The thumbnail should represent what the post is about, here is a good example:
In the example above the image represents the 2 Year Anniversary of Waxing Unlyrical (Shonali – that’s 3 days in a row, inside joke sorry readers). With the two candles you really get the gist of what the post is about before reading it, the image ties in perfectly with the title and what the post is about. The example above is clean and professional.
The solution is simple – an appropriate but hidden image, this video will show you how you do it: