Brad Meltzer's website, circa 2000

I recently saw this Ted Video by Brad Meltzer called How to Write Your Own Obituary, which I highly recommend.  Brad was a client of mine from 2000-2005 in the days of small, narrow, author websites (see screenshot to the right).  We say howdy via email every couple of years, and I guess it’s about time to say hi again.  So, “Hi Brad, loved the website! Let’s have lunch next time you’re in Colorado!”

Anyway, I’d like to add a bit to his legacy that he can choose to use in his obituary or not.

Early on in our relationship, at about the time when The First Counsel had come out, He had a book signing in Denver at the Tattered Cover.  I jumped in the car and headed down there. He was a client from the DC area at this point and I’d never met him in person and wanted to finally meet him.  I enjoyed the book reading and the quick chat we had in the long line afterwards.  Since my Mom had just finished reading The Tenth Justice and really liked it, I purchased The First Counsel and Brad gratefully autographed it for my Mom.  He didn’t know my Mom, but that was ok.  He said just the right thing that a Mom wants to hear about her son.  It shows just how much that a “Mom” means to Brad and I’m very grateful for it (as a side note, it’s a nice compliment to me too! Thanks again!).  It supports everything he talks about in the video about his Mom and what I’ve heard from him about her since her passing.

In his Ted talk, he speaks about his mother and her impact on his life as part of her legacy after her passing.  There’s much that he says about his mother that I could say about mine, but you can view his talk below.

Jump ahead 11 years.

Last January, my Mom passed away too.  In being home in VA and helping my family go through some things, I discovered The First Counsel on the book shelf and opened it up to see the inscription that had been there for more than 10 years and had to smile.  It brought back the memory of meeting Brad and working with him over the years.  I also still have a post card he sent promoting another book with a handwritten note on it about my Mom. It’s so easy to not take the time for a personal note, but so meaningful when you do.

A couple days later as I was waiting in the airport for my flight home, I started reading it.  Unfortunately, at the book signing, I only bought the one copy and had neglected to get a copy for myself, but was grateful to have a chance to read it… finally.  I read almost all of it on my 2 flights across the country (and a long layover in Atlanta) and, Brad, this is a long time coming, but I loved it!  Keep ‘em coming! I’m working through the ones I’ve missed.

So, Thanks to Brad for increasing his legacy by making an impact in my life and my Mom’s life (and being a great client).  I know she was a fan of your books and I wish you could have met her – and I wish I could have met your Mom too (who knows, maybe there’s a place for them to meet and share stories about us).

It’s amazing what a simple inscription to a fan in a book can do.  And that night at the Tattered Cover, you weren’t a client, but you certainly turned me into a fan (and I still am).

So, as part of finishing Brad’s Obituary: “He was a… son who loves his Mom.”

Thank you!

P.S. here’s Brad’s great talk:

TEDxMIA – Brad Meltzer – How To Write Your Own Obituary

Why is that?  Well, 3 reasons.

1. Users are looking for something that meets their needs.
2. You are looking for users that are interested in what you have to offer.
3. You really want to build a relationship with your users and your users want to build a relationship with you.

The online dating community purports to be pros at compatibility.  They all say that they have the best way to match you and someone else.  Their primary function is to build a relationship between 2 people, to show information about one that is interesting to the other and to build understanding and trust in order to inspire one to make a commitment of some sort to the other.

How is this different from what you’re trying to do on your website?  Probably more so than it should be.

Think about it.  What are you trying to do online?  Unless you really don’t care if anyone listens or sees whatever you’re doing online, you’re probably looking for customers, donors or readers to to take some sort of action.  And how do you inspire commitment?  By getting your readers to learn about you, to feel comfortable with you and start a relationship with you – just like dating.  If they’re not comfortable with what they see and learn from you, then they’ll move on to someone else – just like dating.

So do yourself a favor and have another look at your own website and compare it to some dating websites to see how you stack up against these common qualities from some of these online dating sites.

• Character
• Passion
• Intellect
• Humor
• Energy
• Kindness
• Confidence
• Education
• Honesty
• etc…

Are you exemplifying qualities that will inspire someone to make a commitment to you?  If not, maybe you should be.

I noticed this article in my Daily Smart Brief for Social Media email today about the over use of the List Post format in Blogs.  It’s called The One Reason You Read So Many List Posts.  I very much agree with Jay Dolan about this.  There have got to be better ways to title and promote your content without using lists all the time (the Bad way).  Really, the only place I still like them is when Letterman uses them (the Good way).

Speaking of which, here’s the one from yesterday:

Top Ten Ways To Mispronounce Muammar Qaddafi

10.Mallomar Cookie

9.Milli Vanilli

8.Grande No-Foam Latte

7.Live! with Regis and Kelly

6.Lady QaQa

5.Mumizzle Qadizzle

4.Mouthful of Taffy

3.Kathy Mavrikakis

2.Qadaffi Duck

1.Qarmelo Anthony

Ok, to be fair, sometimes List Posts do have their place and can be beneficial.  I do also like them when they’re on a topic that I think I know at least something about and then getting some quick, new insight is pretty nice.  But, you can also tell when bloggers are just looking for some quick, cheap and easy Google Juice.

Anyway, this post really didn’t start out to discuss the List Post, nor was it supposed to head down the Letterman tangent.  Really, I thought that the email I got from Daily Smart Brief displayed the article in a somewhat ironic way (the Irony way) that I wanted to share.  See it below:

The anti List Post irony....

So, Let’s be creative and start looking for additional ways to promote your content. And to be fair, I’ve done it too and am not proud of it. Maybe I should’ve call this post “2015 characters to support my point that you shouldn’t use List Posts for everything.”

I think my next article will be called: “Three ways I’ll stop using List Posts to drive content.”

And I’ll have it celebrity-Tweeted by Garfield, Hobbes and Marmaduke.

As far as best communication goes, really, I think a blog is something that you could be using daily or weekly to talk about anything and everything you do.  I guess my real question is what’s your end goal?  If you want to really drive viewers and build your list, then being more aggressive with blogging and Facebooking and email newsletters is the way to go.  If you’re happy with the 500-600 subscribers because that’s your core audience, then sticking with a simple newsletter will probably work just fine (I would encourage you to send them more often, though).  I also think that your subscribers are committed to you (for the most part) so if you switch to a blog and feedburner subscriptions, I expect most of them will follow you that way.  I think you’ll also start communicating with them more and that’s a good thing, especially if you’re looking to grow with more students and/or more funding.

I think for you, the best package would be creating a blog, adding subscriptions to it, then populating the posts to twitter and a facebook account.   Using your email newsletter to promote the blog and feedburner subscriptions and then blog weekly about what’s going on.  I think readers like to see shorter, yet more often (than 2x/year) posts about what’s going on.  This way you could really get more people involved in more of the day to day happenings and successes of the school.  And I don’t think you’d need to take too long to write each post as they wouldn’t need to be novels.

Email newsletters are still good, but I believe they are more effective when you have a specific purpose like selling products or specific knowledge or information.  The category of information from you all is probably more blog-like where people will read and browse because it’s interesting life information.

The only drawback is that the tracking of social media is less distinct than email newsletters.  But, via feedburner stats and google analytics, we can see a pretty good snapshot of how things are performing.

Considering they’re a small school with out a ton of resources, the goal is to put something fairly simple together that they’ll use more often and from which they’ll get some decent traction.  Obviously, the big question is their goals for traffic and exposure and how much Social Media they can commit to, so the goal is to ease into this and have them grow it as resources allow by using a few key channels to easily and frequently get their word out.

First off, was that email marketing was this huge, great new tool to get your message out to the masses.  And it worked.  And it was simple because that’s about all there was at the time.

SEO and SEM weren’t being focused on and of course no one had blogs, feeds or social networks, so if you were emailing to a list once or twice a month, you were doing pretty well.  And it was a simple decision when you compared direct mail costs to the pennies you could spend on a per-send fee for email.  Email was king, and it could be just about the only marketing you did online after building a website to be successful.

But now, in this world of heavy duty social media, does email marketing fit?

Here are 4 reasons why I think it’s less effective than it used to be.

1. As great an alternative to direct mail email was, and at fractions of a cent per send, it’s potentially a higher cost per acquisition compared to Social Networking.
2. Email marketing still requires more interaction on the user’s end to sign up and be in a space where they can read a more in depth email.  It’s a push method that requires the user first sign up for it and then to open it in their email.
3. Users don’t sit in their email program all day. They sit in social networking sites. You need to push your message/product/service to where the users are.
4. About 10% of users* (and growing) are accessing websites via mobile devices.  Your messaging (and websites) need to start being tailored to mobile devices with short, succinct messages and effective designs that fit and enhance the User Experience.

Mashable

Apple

An example is Mashable’s daily update email.  It has neither a link to a mobile version nor a mobile stylesheet and it difficult to read on a smart phone.

Meanwhile, Apple’s email is much simpler and in the portrait format is a little hard to read, but still doable, and in landscape format is very easy (Mashable still doesn’t work well in landscape unless you zoom in).  More on these in another post.

The point being that email now needs to be compatible with smartphones and integrated into social media to be most effective.

When email was all there is, you had to use it and it was all there was.  Now that there are other social media channels, you need to find the right balance for all of your marketing efforts.  Email marketing should probably fit into your marketing mix, but figuring out that mix is key.  When you find the right mix, your marketing plans should, and will, be complementary of each other and work together for increased acquisition and conversion.

So, what’s the right marketing mix?  Give me a shout and we’ll figure it out.

* This comes from analytics research of 40-50 clients of mine over several years.

I would disagree with this.  And here’s why.

Guiding on the Arkansas River in Buena Vista, Colorado

Many years ago I was a river guide on the most popular stretch of river in the US – Brown’s Canyon on the Arkansas river in Buena Vista.  I guided that river every day for almost 10 years.  About year 4, I got bored with floating the same stretch of 8-12 miles every day (many times twice a day!).  One day I decided that I was going to look for something new on the river every day to see what I could find.  I quickly discovered that there was sooooo much more going on under my nose than I had EVER imagined!  I saw ruins of old buildings, waterfalls, plants, birds, rock formations, rapids, etc.  And in doing this, I was able to share much more of the natural history with my friends and passengers that I was able to get to know my passengers better and greatly enhance their trip in ways I had never imagined.

As a side result, I became a better boater too.

This is Social Media Marketing.  Noticing new things every day and being able to talk about them in one social way or another.  Whether you use a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other avenue of communication, you can be social.  Find something you’re passionate about and share it – regularly.

@ryanseacrest and @MikeStelzner

This one, well, it’s just funny (A classic from last month)!

@rainnwilson and @joshspear

It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.

Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.

Here are a couple questions to consider:

1. Why are we doing this?
   • because it’s fun?
   • to find business?
   • to show off our thought leadership?
   • increase customer engagement?
   • PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
   • Improve search engine optimization?
   • Provide a way to disseminate information?
   • Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
2. How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves?  Can we put numbers to this?
   • Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
   • Comments on blogs
   • Links to blog postings
   • Increased leads
   • SEO
   • Social Media mentions.

1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.

2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.

3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success.  Wave your own flag a bit.

4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post.  Find keywords that support the blog and the post.

5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions.  Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.

6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world.  Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client.  If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.

Some bullets on process:

• Address a business need
• Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers.  Guest post both ways whenever possible.
• Encourage online reviews of your work
• Be strategic not trendy
• Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
• Social media is NOT an experiment.  It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
• Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
• Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
• Social connections.  Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets.  Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
• Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.

@Gangsta_Claus tweet

Fortunately, Someone I work with, @paulknipe, translated this for me:

“Have you heard the news that I have a Twitter page? I highly encourage you to follow me right away. Click the follow button. It doesn’t cost anything.”

Thanks Paul, I think you are right on!  (But how would I know, I imagine I’m a little out of touch…)

So, here goes, in no particular order.

Why Should a Business Have a Social Media Marketing System in Place? – Social Media Bits

WordPress Firewall Plugin – SEO Egghead

Here’s What You Should Do to Improve Your Blog Today – Pro Blogger

How to Make an Absolute Fortune From Your Blog (Really) – Pro Blogger

5 Tools I Am Willing to Pay for [And Recommend] to Improve My Blogs – Pro Blogger

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech – Swift Kick Online

15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From – Open Forum

5 brand blogs to learn from – iMedia Connection

8 Cool WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins – Chase Sagum

Corporate Blogging — Expert Series: Interview with Lou Hoffman. Part 1 – Steve Farnsworth

The 10 Best Infographics for Internet Marketing Pros – Marketing Pilgrim

100 Days of Real Food – Jason Leake & Lisa Leake

Getting started with “Getting Things Done” – 43 Folders

21 Simplicity Tips from the Worlds Most Popular Bloggers – Live Simply

10 Easy To Implement Flash Based Mp3 Players For Your Website – Web Design Booth

Five Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral – Tech Crunch

What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily – Justin Kownacki

Yeah, solar and wind power are nice. But you need the grid to get off the grid. – Christian Science Monitor

50 Surprising Facts About Social Media – EduDemic

Alex Bogusky interviews Robyn O’Brien – The FearLess Cottage via YouTube

Technology to liven up your creative – iMedia Connection

8 Powerful Ways to Use Facebook Landing Tabs – Social Media Examiner

Website design: 12 sites dissected – Going beyond “pretty” – iMedia Connection

How Women Use the Web – Mashable