People You Should Listen To

I’ll be listing everyone’s Twitter profile, since that’s usually the easiest way to connect with them, and I didn’t meet anyone there who wasn’t active on Twitter. If you’re at all interested in marketing and aren’t already, get on Twitter. Seriously.

Amber Naslund- Made some great points about managing corporate brand identity on social networks, and gave one of the most useful talks of BlogWorld on “Managing Your Social Media Time.” This talk was a real eye-opener for me (especially in my day job), and was a great example of how social media can be no-nonsense and results-oriented. You can check out the slideshow from her talk here, though without her talking you don’t get the full effect.

Margaret Francis- Really impressed me on the brand management panel as well. She obviously knows her stuff and had a lot to contribute.

Laura Fitton- Gave an extremely inspirational keynote about why you should recognize that you’re awesome and stop hiding it from other people. Her talk was a perfect way to kick off the event. Funny, entertaining, and has “been there, done that” herself.

Erika Neapoletano- Never actually met her in person at BlogWorld, but have been following her and reading her blog since then, and she’s got some hilarious and refreshing thoughts on marketing and writing. Well worth following.

Nathan Hangen- Nathan is a great writer, and teaches people the right way to get the most out of Twitter and their other Internet marketing efforts. He’s also a really nice guy, to boot!

Sites and Tools You Should Use

Social Mention- Like Google Alerts, but for social media. With Google Alerts becoming less useful and less accurate all the time, this is a great option for research and tracking.

NetVibes- Like iGoogle or other homepage tools, but on steroids. Follow a crazy variety of sources that are important to you on one page. It’s a great tool for listening in to conversations on the web.

Klout- A great tool for measuring your influence on Twitter, and seeing how your activity and influence stacks up against other people in your network.

Del.icio.us- Many of you are probably already using this, but if not, get an account now. Besides having totally portable bookmarks that don’t clutter up your browser, there’s the social bookmarking aspect. You can discover great new sites all the time, and help others do the same. One of the best information-gathering and discovery tools out there.

Slideshare- Share your slide presentations online, and check out those by people you find interesting. You can get some amazing free content from shows you didn’t attend, if you follow people who are presenting at shows.

Stuff You Should Read

The Awesomeness Manifesto- A treatise on why being awesome is more important than being innovative. Even if you think there’s nothing new under the sun (a topic I plan to write about soon) there’s still room to be awesome and make a big impact on the world.

279 Days to Overnight Success- Written by Chris Guillebeau (who I’d like for his name, if for no other reason), it talks about the hard work required to become an “overnight success” and how you can create your own success story.

Marketing Advice Worth Remembering

On social media for your business (from Amber Naslund’s session): You can’t possibly be everywhere at once, so pick 2 or 3 social media tools and stick to those. Ideally, they should be where your potential clients/customers are. Don’t bother chasing the bleeding edge of tech tools, go where people are already having conversations. The Top 5 tools where people are having conversations are: Forums & boards, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs. Your audience may only use 1 or 2 of those, so do some research to find out which are being actively used and which to not bother with.

On the size of your audience: Don’t worry so much about how many followers or subscribers you have- worry about how those people engage with you. When you share something with them, do they take action, or are your efforts falling on deaf ears? Who cares if you have 5,000 followers on Twitter if nobody’s actually listening to you? It’s better to get real results from a small but dedicated audience than to have a huge following that doesn’t do anything for you.

On differentiating yourself and your business: No matter what your industry or niche, it’s tough to be the first to talk about the topic. This is true whether you blog about blogging, making money, being a mom, video games, whatever. You need to 1. find an angle or hook that makes your message somewhat unique and 2. let your personality shine through. Give people a reason to want to get to know you and like you. If that turns some people off, that’s OK. It’ll likely attract more people than it drives away… unless you’re just genuinely unlikable

On not reinventing the wheel: Ben Huh of Failblog gave a great talk about how they’ve grown their site to about 250 million pageviews a month. The most amazing thing, though, is that they’ve done it while hardly doing any internal development. Every aspect of their site uses somebody else’s technology, from their site platform (WordPress) to their video hosting (YouTube and Viddler), to their intranet (Google Docs) and much more. Almost all of their platform uses free tools, which makes it even more amazing. They realized early on that the likelihood they could build a better tool or piece of software than what someone else came up with is pretty low. Instead, they decided to let others handle the heavy lifting when it comes to the tools, and just stick to providing the content their users want. Stick to what you’re great at, and let others handle the rest.

There was a lot more I learned and other great people I met at the show, but I’ll cover some of those ideas in later posts. Be sure to subscribe if you’d like to hear more!

For those of you haven’t attended before, the content of BlogWorld covers a wide variety of topics, including monetizing your blog, expanding your online influence in your niche, improving your site’s SEO, and designing a killer theme. There are also many sessions about specific topics in social media and video/podcasting.

When I first attended last year, the sheer amount of new knowledge and techniques being thrown around was pretty mind-blowing. I came out of the event with dozens of pages of notes on sites I needed to check out, services to try, and changes to make to my blogging efforts. This year, I came away with a few good ideas and some great new connections made, but I didn’t feel nearly the same sense of awe at what I’d learned. If you’ve never attended before, though, you must attend at some point. It’s one of the best conferences in any industry, and can do wonders for your business.

I think this lack of new surprises is probably just due to having been in the industry for another year and keeping a much closer eye on resources like Twitter than I did before last year’s event. However, I also think it’s because social media and blogging technologies have matured, and the truly useful tools and services like Twitter (honestly, I swear it is) have continued to grow while other flash-in-the-pan technologies of last year have fallen by the wayside or been relegated to a particular niche. At BlogWorld 2008, people were really excited about some exciting sites or products that just didn’t turn out to be that useful.

At this year’s BlogWorld, I heard plenty of conflicting advice on different panels, like whether to use Twitter for your business or not, whether (and how) to monetize your site, how much content to give away for free, and much more. The funny thing is that listening to each person make their case, I think they were all right in their assessments! It just really depends on how you personally want to do business, and what your goals are. Except in a few really rare cases, it’s probably possible to make any technique work in any niche.

One message that was common to everyone I heard speak, though, was this: You’ve got to seriously care about what you’re doing. If you’re only ever chasing after what you think will make you popular or rich, you’re far more likely to fail. I heard it in Laura Fitton’s great keynote, Ben Huh’s talk on How to Get Huge, and especially on the all-star panel of Internet Marketing for Smart People. Caring isn’t a guarantee of success, but it’ll make it more likely that you’ll be passionate about your business, that you’ll persevere when things don’t go well, and your caring will be appealing and infectious to other people. Your passion, and genuine willingness to form relationships with people in your niche, will go a long way to helping you be a success.

PS- If you were hoping for more details and specifics, I’ll post those separately soon.