The problem is… it’s really difficult to figure out what tools to use and how to stick to some habits and processes.

Here are five of my favorite tools/processes (I don’t have any affiliation with these co’s – I’m just an online tinkerer):

1)       Ping.fm – I use Ping.fm to update business messages to a variety of different social media/business platforms. I use the ping.fm toolbar to share stories that I find useful with my Twitter, Plaxo and LinkedIn groups. I find that some people are more active on certain networks, and I don’t want to have to manually update everyone separately. Ping.fm works great for this. I don’t update my primary Facebook page with this tool because those are mostly “social” friends in there. But I do have it set up to update my QualityWriter fan page.. which is really a nascent thing. There’s a good article about the best ways to set up Ping.fm here. Chris Brogan and ProBlogger Darren Rowse have good articles about how to structure your information sharing hub with a “home base” and “outposts.” They’re worth checking out for strategy purposes.

2)      Eye.fi – This is an SD memory card that goes into my digital camera. It stores photos and has a built-in Wi-Fi antenna (I’m amazed at how small the technology is – looks just like a regular SD card!). Whenever I arrive at my local network/home wireless network, Eye.fi auto-downloads all my photos and videos to folders on my computer and automatically uploads them to my services (Kodak Gallery, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) based on my settings. This thing is dynamite. This has changed my photo managing habits. I now try to delete all bad photos and videos off of my camera before turning it on near my wireless network… before the “auto-up-suckage”. Another way to handle this is to use the Protect feature on your camera. Only photos that are protected are uploaded to your folders and networks.

3)      Google Voice – Google has a voice/phone service that integrates your landline and cell phone and texting into a unified “inbox”. I give out my Google Voice number to select clients and friends. When they call it, both my office phone and cell phone ring. It’s like a “Bat Phone.” From my laptop, I can SMS text my Gmail contacts (which are really all my contacts). This makes it easy to type out longer txts without doing the big-finger-blackberry thing. All messages go through my Google Voice inbox. They’re transcribed into text and emailed to me, too. I think I can have them sent as texts to my cell phone, too (not sure about this one). There are lots of other cool features – check it out, you’ll see.

4) ShareIn – If I want to update Facebook and/or Twitter friends about a story I’ve just read or a video I’ve just watched, I use ShareIn. This is a browser bookmarklet that gives you a “one click” way to do so. No more copy and paste. I wrote an article on how I came to embrace ShareIn here: How to Simplify your Social Media Life: The Pros and Cons of Posterous, Soup.io, ShareIn and FriendFeed. Ping.fm does this, too. But Ping.fm is better for touching all groups at once. ShareIn is good when you know exactly who you want to send something to – Twitter folks (who are more business for me) or Facebook (who are more social friends).

5)      Posterous – This blog/hosting services is a quick and easy to share photos, thoughts, articles, sounds and videos with friends and associates. See the “How to Simplify” link above for more of my thoughts on Posterous. Essentially, I use Posterous as a place to update close family and friends with my videos and photos of family life. I wouldn’t do this kind of in-depth posting on Facebook, because I don’t want to spam a loose group of social friends with too much cuteness, kid soccer games and such. Posterous, however, is a great place to archive stuff and allow family members to catch up. My family and friends don’t need to have an account or log in any way. It’s just my Posterous URL. Simple… and I can update it via email or the browser toolbar bookmarklet. Easy peasy.

Check out these awesome services. They’re all free – except for Eye.fi, which is a one time cha-ching (mine cost $69.99 at Amazon – with free shipping – shipping is a little steep from the main eye.fi site).

Please let me know your tips and tricks too by commenting below and sharing this post with your networks and groups. Thanks. – Phil

I just got off a juicy conference call with a client and a partner. An interesting discussion came up.

The client was describing a bunch of projects they have lined up. A batch of case studies, a white paper, a data sheet for an upcoming trade show. . the typical round-up of persuasion projects.

They riffed for a bit on how the brochure/data sheet needs to be brief, because no one has time to read these days and it’s really difficult to compete for attention.

Then they said something really interesting. “We need to work on custom intros for the RFPs we’re working on. This is the one document that really has to sell – they have to read it, so the lead-in has to be really compelling. It directly impacts the sale.”

Um, yeah. This makes a lot of sense to me. People are bombarded with email newsletters, tantalizing links to content in Twitter and Facebook, magazines on their tables, and countless other “media interruptions.”

But.. they have to read closely when it counts – in an RFP. Their job depends on it, so companies throw a lot of resources and thought at RFP writing – especially on the front-end executive summary and positioning copy.

I’ve done this type of work before. I worked on a 100+pp RFP for Pitney Bowes a few years ago. They were bidding for the big law firm Latham & Watkins’ business. It was exactly this type of drill. They wanted a marketing writer to help write several sections and edit the entire document for persuasiveness, attention to detail, and consistency.

What do you think? Have you been seeing more of this kind of work? Please share your thoughts below.

Are you familiar with the “inbound marketing” concept?

If not, here’s my quick explanation. If so, please scroll down to the bottom of this post to see if we’re on the same page and could possibly work on a project together.

Ok – inbound marketing is easy to describe if you compare it to traditional or conventional marketing/advertising methods.

Conventional marketing seeks to interrupt and pitch to people.

• It’s the unsolicited junk mail in your actual mailbox and the spam in your email inbox.
• It’s the car salesman that asks about your kid’s soccer team but has no interest or intention of getting to know the details of your son’s 8-2-1 season.
• It’s the 10,000 address Hoover’s mailing that seeks a 1-2% conversion via reply card.
• It’s the out-of-context XM radio ads that drone on and on about re-financing when you have no intention of re-financing your home. . or going bankrupt. . or rehabilitating your credit or whatever.

In short, interruption marketing is the old school approach that throws $10 million in ad budget at every method under the sun in order to bludgeon the market into coughing up a slim margin of return.

An Alternative to Annoyance

Inbound marketing is the modern, Web-connected alternative – although it integrates off-line advertising, direct mail, billboards, text messages, magazine ads and so forth. It’s really not about offline/online. It’s more about integration, conversion and accountable measurement.

Inbound marketing seeks to generate leads by offering content, value, conversation and education up front. It’s like “working the room” at a networking mixer. You ask about the other person first and try to understand what they’re up to before you lean in with your needs analysis. You don’t just foist out the business card and recite your elevator pitch. It’s about thought leadership, too. Inbound marketing might generate an email list by offering an in-depth, educational white paper.

Ideally, the best inbound marketing strategy should just offer up that white paper without any strings attached (no email capture or sign up form). Your content should educate and position you as the advisor resource right off the bat. That alone generates email leads, phone calls and qualified conversations about how your products and services can help.

Inbound marketing is also about measurement. How are your leads converting to real business? Can you measure that? Which landing pages are successful? . . which headline? Subheads? Photos? Calls to action?

All that stuff is easily measured with simple Web tools.

Have You Been in These Types of “Creative Meetings?”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve suffered through meetings where marketing teams deliberate endlessly about subjective content treatments without having a clue about testing and conversion results (A/B tests or multivariate testing).

Inbound marketing strategies, systems and tools help you manage all this.

So . . do you agree with any of this? Are we on the same page? Are you ready to implement some real strategies and solutions for generating leads, improving your messaging, and cultivating enthusiastic product evangelists and “hub customers” that Tweet about your products, blog about your services, and promote you to their friends on Facebook.

Here are just a few general areas that you’ll want to consider.

Content Creation: Is your current Web site set up as a blog or do you have some other Content Management System (CMS)? Are you pumping out relevant, useful, well-written content on a consistent schedule? If not, why not? Your competitors probably are.

Optimization: Are you using tools to grade keywords, landing pages and inbound links? Do this right, and you’ll make some significant SEO strides.

Promotion: How are you using social media “channels” to connect with customers and leverage the exponential reach of friend networks? Do you have an efficient system for communicating with prospects via email and measuring the results of those interactions? Again, do this well and you’ll smoke your competition.

Conversion: What’s do your lead-gen process and pipeline/nurturing practices look like? Do you have simple, clean yet powerful ways to manage prospect lists and leads?

Analysis: Who are you reaching? When are they most receptive to your messages? Are they weighing you against competitive offerings? Are they asking their social networks about your solutions or products? Do you have a way to track all this and “listen” to the market?

Ok – enough with the questions. You get the point. Inbound marketing is an integrated, accountable approach to lead-generation and conversion. It’s about creating great content, making promises, having conversations, delivering value and converting interest to revenue.

Are you at the point where you want to do some these things and start making a measurable difference?

Call (949-244-9440) or email, and let’s talk. We recently gained partner status at Hubspot, so we can get you into that system. Or, we can pick up a few small projects and take it slowly.

This is one area of your business that you don’t want to ignore. There’s a big shift going out there in sales/advertising/marketing/lead-gen-land, and you don’t want to get caught behind the curve. Your competitors will just beat you up at every turn.

And please don’t get suckered into green, newbie “social media” and SEO outfits that promise to solve all your problems by setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts. (This is the part about burning your as$.) Inbound marketing programs are about reasoned, focused marketing campaigns. You don’t want to keyword stuff, pump out useless blog posts, or spam your press releases every 1/2 hour on Twitter. Content development is the key. You need writers, designers, creative input and cohesive strategies to make progress.

Contact us today, and let’s talk inbound marketing and meaningful content development.

949-244-9440

service@qualitywriter.com

I haven’t seen The Social Network yet, but it’s already bugging me. My neighbor, for example, announced that she took her entire family off Facebook after seeing the movie.

Now, I can understand why people would do this. Kids can get into a lot of trouble with social tools online. They need some tech guidance when it comes to the open-ness of these platforms and the traps that lie in waiting. Part of their education should also cover how to express  ideas, what to omit, how to communicate politely, etc.

But that’s not the point here.

My biggest, general beef is with the way people discuss these things. They place a lot of blame on the messenger and demonize the tools people use to express their ideas and connect with others.

It’s like a journalist from 1975 blaming his typewriter for the word f*#k. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

These tools we’re using evolve over time, and they have some features that can get non-techies into trouble. But they’re only tools with people behind them. Back in the 50′s there were people new to telephone communication who didn’t quite understand the concept of the party like (this is when neighborhoods were bunched into common calling lines – before the advent of one line, one house). They got caught gossiping while others listened in on their calls.

Similar things go on today with Facebook and Twitter. You’ve heard the stories.

So technology is disruptive because it catches those who remain unaware in these difficult situations – they get fired, their kid gets called into the principal’s office, a photo of their donger gets passed around the Internet (sorry Brett Favre).

The horse was disruptive, as was a car, and texting is disruptive (thought not as impressive as a horse). “The network” might be as impressive as a horse (e.g. Web/Internet/Social Media). Blah, blah, blah. It’s all technological leaps.

As long as you stay clear about what technology is, then you’re ok. We’re just talking about communication tools, really.

Modern, Web 2.0 tech helps you communicate with people, express your ideas, look for things and check things out. End of story. If you’re abusing those tools or using them stupidly, then it’s your fault.

That’s why content curation and filtering are going to be so critical moving forward. There are lots of companies in this space already, but I’m guessing that we’ll see even more interesting things develop in the months ahead. Mike Elgan wrote a great article about How Facebook Could Rule the World that relates to this.

Let’s just agree to stop all the stupidity about the tools themselves.

I like to periodically reset and remind myself that tech is only a bunch of tools for ideas. That’s why they’re important to me, at least.

Spreading ideas, sending them quicker, forming them, getting exposed to different ones, etc.

That’s my $0.02. What do you think? Please comment below.

Oh – regarding the irony – I tend to post a lot about technology, marketing and communication. . so I’m guilty of obsessing .

The following quotes are from Richard Florida’s analysis of the current worldwide economic situation – The Great Reset. This is a fantastic book that dovetails with a lot of the things I’ve been seeing on the Web, in markets, and in other books (like Seth Godin books, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Daniel Suarez’ Daemon and Freedom, and others).

“People will always define themselves through their consumption habits. There will always and inevitably be some element of competitiveness in our consumption that will never die, even if the rules change. .

“If, before, people trumpeted their financial success through their purchases, there’s no reason to think they won’t continue to show off what righteous and evolved new “citizen-consumers” they’ve become..

“As long as people have been trading money or goods and services, they’ve been demonstrating their unfailing ability to fall for a clever marketing pitch, and marketers know a good thing when they see it. .

“Witness The Gap’s ‘Buy Red, Save Lives’ campaign or a company like Endangered Species Chocolate, which are still designed to get people to buy things they almost certainly don’t need but that now play to their newfound identity as responsible citizens of the planet..

“We might not like to admit this about ourselves, but it isn’t so much material goods themselves that drive our consumption as the perceived status we assign to them. Largely, our material possessions and our perceived status are one and the same thing, but only up to a point.”

“A decade ago, John Seabrook identified a shift away from older forms of conspicuous consumption to new and subtler status distinctions…

“Green products have become the ultimate status goods. People buying hybrid cars are more driven by the status they confer than the fuel savings and energy efficiency they provide. Toyota Prius owners pay a significant premium over many conventional fuel-efficient cars. .

“When asked about the top motivating factors behind their purchase, the comment “makes a statement about me” was at the top of the list, while “higher fuel economy” came in third and “lower emissions” fifth, according to a July 2007 survey reported in the New York Times. (That’s probably something we should have intuited. After all, the carmakers figured out long ago that the rush to buy SUVs had less to do with safety or carrying capacity or durability than with buyers’ perception that driving an SUV conveyed an image of youth, ruggedness, and adventure.)”

Ok – I just laid a lot of quotes on you.  Here are my thoughts.

Following this same line of thinking, the new consumer is more interested in buying experiences rather than purchasing products.  This is in keeping with the consumption lifestyle trend. You are what you do more than what you are what you have.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

For one thing, that means you have to pay close attention to emotional drivers – which you should have been doing in the first place.

Either way the emotion drives the purchase.  If you buy a fancy car, you’re expressing an emotional need.

But if you go deeper into this, you need to find the motivations and pair those with the experiences.  I think this new trend toward experience as marketing or the consumer being more interested in experiences is important because really that’s all that was happening earlier, as well.

A product was purchased because of the experience it generated.  It didn’t matter that it was a physical object or nonphysical object.  A massage can produce a feeling.  A cookie can produce a feeling.  A toy can produce a feeling.

So you have to work back from the feeling of the customer to the reality of the product.  Does the product satisfy the emotional driver?  Does the products solve the pain the issue, the itch, the disturbance?

It’s also useful to pay attention to the general trend where marketers pair altruistic or idealistic/emotional causes with physical products or physical experiences or events.

What are you doing to ensure that your marketing messages are working back from the emotion to the product?  Do you have processes in place to ensure that your clients or customers are thinking about these kinds of drivers? . . whether they’re experiential drivers, lifestyle positioning, or product add-ons for specific causes, charities, or events.

Please comment below. I would love to hear from you.

My favorite part:

“I said outbound links were fine, great even! And then talked a bit about how it’s a bad idea to build pages for nuances in the search engine algorithms anyway, as hundreds of signals exist and they’re changing all the time. Oh, he said. We’ve been talking about implementing the canonical tag. We probably shouldn’t do that then. And I realized, how would a developer know that the canonical tag is awesome and the meta keywords tag isn’t? That you shouldn’t worry about keyword density but you should put important keywords in your title tag?”

Do you research high-end products thoroughly before you purchase? Does it take lots of pressure to get you to move from one trusted brand or consumer product to another?

Me too. Especially when it comes to consumer goods like razor blades.

For years, I’ve happily used Gillette Good News razors. They’re simple, do the job and are inexpensive.

Until . . one day. . queue the bass drums. . I bought a package of Good News that included a free sample of the multi-blade Fusion product.

Now – I’ve tried these before. In fact – way back in the 1980′s I even had a power 2-blade razor that buzzes like the Gilette Power Fusion. I liked the concept and the shave back then.

But somehow I ended back up with the basic Good News razors. It was probably during a “simplicity” or economizing phase.

Anyway, I tried the Fusion sample and liked it a lot. The beard grew out less in a day, it seemed. That was a good deal for me.

So I ordered the Power Fusion product. And I’m waiting to get it from Alice.com. Mind you: this is after years and years of using the Gillette Good News razors.

The lesson? Persistent suggestions in your marketing materials (which were the actual product in my case) are CRITICAL!!! Never give up on this idea. Gillette sure doesn’t.

Offer samples, suggest up-sells, show the customer new ideas. IT WORKS.

It even worked on me – one of the more skeptical, difficult to motivate and move consumers I know.

Do you have any examples of how persistent messaging, product offerings or samples have motivated you to engage a company or switch products?

Please comment below.

Stephanie, who was ordering the pizza and salads, asked,”Do you eat anything? Or do you have things you can’t eat?”

The rest of us – two dudes – said no, we were cool with anything she might order. Truly remarkable!

Now, I understand that lots of people have legitimate food allergies. That’s not what I’m addressing here.

I started to wonder if all the crazy food marketing of the past few decades has been teaching us to be overly-selective, finicky, obnoxious, high maintenance eaters.

Think about it. Never before have we been subjected to some much information and marketing on food packages. Heck, even vegetables are now packaged in plastic and cardboard that are oozing with subtle and not so subtle messages. Stickers are everywhere, too.

Check out your local Target when you get a chance. They’re getting into the food biz in a big way, and they’re selling produce that’s entirely pre-packaged.

Interesting stuff, ay?

What do you think? Are we training ourselves to be annoying?

But.. I’ve got another problem that I’m sure you’re familiar with.

I call it Tabbed Browsing Hell for lack of a better name. This is the scenario where you’re so engrossed in research or just plain media consumption that you open tons of tabs. Eventually, you become burdened by them. They have psychic energy that can drain and distract you.

So what’s a boy (or girl) to do?

I found a nifty way to clear things up (at least for a while). It’s akin to stuffing papers into file folders in order to get a clean desk.

But it’s pretty slick to boot.

First, check out this nifty little service: Read Later

Read Later allows you to click a bookmark/script and save articles for later on your Instapaper.com account.

But wait, there’s more! (not steak knives or a slotted spoon)

When you want to back and read the articles you’ve gathered in Read Later, you can use another bookmark/script to force them into a clean, standardized format for consumption (you choose the font size and format). It’s called Readability. The buttons on the side allow you to easily and quickly get back to the original article (for Tweeting, sharing or Facebooking purposes, for example).

I think it’s pretty cool. And it helps me “get clear” and get back to work.

Have you tried it? What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.

P.S. The two solutions go great with RSS feed readers, too. Good way to filter articles and read later in a clean, consistent format.