Being curious, I signed up for an account and checked it out. At that stage, this was pretty much all I did, I couldn’t see where Posterous would help me and with 3 blogs, 2 Twitter accounts and a Facebook account, I was pretty busy on the social media side – especially since I have a real job as well.

So fast forward a while and I start to see more people using the Posterous platform. I read a couple of reviews and I start to believe that it might have something going for it after all.

The first thing you’ll note with Posterous is the nice clean page layout. This made me think that it would make a nice platform for a photoblog and that is what I’m going to be using it for. The site will have some iPhone pics of what we are up to along with some favorites from our wedding photo business. My aim is to update the site everyday.

Posts are uploaded by email. Want to upload a photo (or several) attach to the email message. Same with video or documents. You can register as many of your email address as you want with the site and just send your message to post@posterous.com. The site takes care of the rest, and puts your images in a nice little gallery if you attach more than one.

There are a couple of features with Posterous I really like. One is that you can use a custom domain, rather than just yourname@posterous.com. I happened to have davidholliday.net kicking around so that is what I’m using.

The other great thing is that rather than just trying to compete with the other social media sites, Posterous can compliment them. I’ve set up my account to automatically post my updates to my Twitter and Facebook accounts – there are a lot of others to choose from as well. Posterus is actually the simplest way I’ve found to upload photos to Twitter – better than trying to use Tweetie on my iPhone.

At the moment, Posterous is free. I believe there is a limit of 1GB of storage. The plan is to introduce paid premium accounts in the future that will include unlimited space. As long as the price is sensible, I’d get one of these for sure.

You’ve probably noticed that Posterous has converted me from a skeptic to a fan. Check out my efforts at davidholliday.net. You can get more info and set up you own Posterous site here. It is going to be really interesting to see how the platform develops in the future.

What about you, do you use Posterous or something similar? Do you see the need for a social media platform between blogs and Twitter or are there enough platforms already?

Related posts:

1. Social Media – keeping it under control
2. HootSuite – in-browser Twitter client
3. $50/Month Marketing Program: Part I

Needless to say, it isn’t that simple so consequently this post has lived in draft form for way too long, waiting inspiration.

Wow, this morning that inspiration might just have arrived. It was delivered to my Google Reader by that Guru of Corporate blogging, Mack Collier. Strangely, the story isn’t even new, it has been there for the best part of a month. It is called Your Boss Doesn’t Care About  “The Conversation” and you can read it at Mack’s site here.

The story is about how a well intentioned, social media aware marketing dude is trying to get the boss to agree to get into social media and blogging in particular. To quote Mack, when the naive pimply faced marketing kid is asked what is in it for the company to start a blog, he replies  “Blogging is a conversation, and right now we aren’t a part of it.  We need to start a blog so we can join the conversation.”

Needless to say, the boss of Mr. Pimple Face isn’t too impressed with this reasoning. Her mission is to grow the business, get more qualified leads, build market share, awareness and all the other things a marketing group is supposed to do. Having a “conversation” usually isn’t included in the business plan.

Mack goes on to point out, that if Marketing Guy has any chance of selling his social media ideas to his boss, he needs to clearly show how the business will benefit. How building a blog, Facebook page, Twitter presence etc., will result in more leads, more sales, happier clients.

Right, so back to my post and my problem. How can social media become part of the marketing plan when there really isn’t much in the way of conversation in the first place? Is it a lost cause?

First of all, why no conversation? There are obviously various reasons for this. I wrote about one of the big ones in my post Social Media and the IT Guy A lot of businesses control where the employees can go on-line and social media sites are often blocked.

In addition, most of the people who represent my potential customer base are pretty busy and are not hanging around on Twitter or Facebook at work. Those that did have time for this sort of thing have probably been downsized already.

So that was our dilemma when we decided we wanted to add an inbound component to our largely outbound marketing program. We did all the traditional things; mailings, telemarketing, tradeshows, a quarterly newsletter etc. We also had a decent website and played around with Adwords a bit to drive traffic there.

Looking around and talking to people in the business, it seemed that our competitors and other people in our business were in much the same situation. Sure a few companies had blogs and some even had people using Twitter (most of the Twitter users were just Tweeting company stuff so not very interesting). The only exception I found was Carl Brown from SimplyRFID. Carl is active & entertaining on Twitter and has an interesting company blog focusing on his RFID business.

So when we wanted to balance our marketing to bring more inbound ideas, there was not an existing model we could use to get started.

One thing I had learned from my photography business was that Google likes blogs. For UniqueDay Events, our blog outperforms our static website every month in terms of Google search results.

So a blog seemed to be a good idea and I happened to have one kicking around. RFIDNews.net was an old project of mine that wasn’t even on-line any longer. No problem, I registered the domain LabelingNews.com, invested in a new template from great WordPress guy Brian Gardner and the Winco ID quarterly newsletter was now on-line.

We thought we had some pretty good stories to tell on  Labeling News, but of course good content does nothing of no-one reads it. We therefore focused on getting our stories to rank well with Google, indeed the posts on the site are often written with Google in mind.

Why is this important? Well for us, we know that we are not going to be driving people to Labeling News via Twitter or Facebook (we do have a presence on these as well as other social media networks, but as already mentioned our customers are generally not active there) so we needed something else.

The something else was that we know our clients have problems and they have questions. When I come across a problem, my first reaction is to type the question into Google and look for possible solutions. I don’t look at the sponsored ads (on all my personal PCs I use Adblock so never see any Google ads anyway), just the organic ones. My strategy depends on me not being the only person who works this way.

So my tactic here is to try and write stories that address specific problems our clients might have. I also try to get inside their heads as to how they would search for information. By keeping an eye on Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools I can see how this is working. On the whole I’m reasonably pleased, I’d rate the results about B- (Not bad but room for improvement).

The other key metric is how often we get a direct contact from Labeling News or how often the phone rings. We make a point of asking new contacts how they found us and Labeling News is high on the list.

One thing I would like to see is more interaction in the post comments. I’m not sure this will happen though – as I mentioned already, our potential clients are not usually that engaged with social media. Instead they find us if they have a problem, get the answer (which often involves making a purchase from us) and move on.

So our Labeling News site is the centerpiece of our social media marketing. We support this with our presence in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, send monthly targeted outbound emails (with links to specific landing pages), hold regular technology seminars, attend tradeshows. We have not allowed the economic situation to slow down our programs – indeed we see doing a better marketing job as being the solution to getting through the tough times and being in good shape as things recover.

It is still early days for social media in our industry, but I believe it’s important to start building a presence now.

If you are involved in a manufacturing company, does social media play a part in your job? Where do you turn to find reliable solutions to problems?

Preserved Machinery Photo by John Spooner http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnspooner/ / CC BY 2.0

Related posts:

1. Social Media – keeping it under control
2. Why you really do need to blog
3. Social Media & the IT Guy

I came across Mark Lovett, the Global Patriot guy during the recent 12for12k 24 hour event. Mark has had a successful business career and now is devoting a lot of his time to helping others.

Marks idea is that being a Global Patriot is different to being a National Patriot. While a National Patriot is concerned with people and events within a single country or region, the Global Patriot wants to do and create things that are good for everyone.

As someone living in a different continent to where I grew up, I can completely relate to this idea.

Mark reminds us in a post about patriotism that the concept has changed over the centuries and is still evolving today. It is very true that old style National Patriotism has been responsible for many of the wars over the past few hundred years as well as many of the problems we face today.

The key question Mark presents us with today is:

“Can we envision patriotism from a global perspective…embracing patriotism without borders?“

Personally I believe that not only we can, but we have to. That is also one of the features of the 12for12k campaign. While 12for12k certainly supports local charities (the Eye Care for Kids” in Utah being a great example) there has also been support on a global with UNICEF and more to come.

The Global Patriot concept fits in really well with 12for12k and the teams will be working closely together later this year. Both are natural tie ins with social media, which brings people from all over the world together. Maybe in time, social media will show just how artificial traditional borders are – letting people bypass the traditional blocks and communicate together directly.

Personally, I’m proud to call myself a Global Patriot and really pleased to have Global Patriot as Blog of the Week!

Where do you stand? Are you a Global Patriot? How should we be working together to make life better for everyone?

Related posts:

1. 12for12k – Doctors Without Borders
2. 12for12k Global Event #GG24
3. Blog of the Week – Kids are Heroes

It seems to me that getting one of my lame sites to actually show in Google (or other search engine) results is as much black magic as technique. What makes the whole thing even more frustrating is that for a business, getting good search engine placement is pretty much essential for success. What is a sad marketing person to do?

Funny you should ask that because I have a solution.

For a while now I’ve been reading the blog over at SEOMoz and it is one of the best places I’ve found to learn about the basics of SEO. If you hang out in Social Media at all you’ll have come across Rand Fishkin, the inspiration behind SEOMoz.

I’ve not met Rand in person, but I have a lot of time for what he has to say. He is one of a small core of people who seem to love sharing their knowledge and I find myself reading his blog just about everyday.

Rand not only shares his thoughts on how to be successful with your SEO, he also writes about his business, raising venture capital and is an all around interesting guy – someone you know would be good to chat with over a beer or two!

Even better, SEOMoz isn’t a one-man band. A number of people from their team write on the blog or take part in the videos – serious geek factor sometimes, but always done in an accessible way. While SEOMoz clearly has the mission of selling their consulting and SEO products, there is just so much great info that they make freely available for anyone.

So here’s my thought – getting our websites found is vital for success so part of my strategy is to make sure I read the SEOMoz blog. That’s why it’s Blog of the Week!

How do you get found in search? Do you use a company like SEOMoz to help? Do you read Rand’s blog?

Related posts:

1. Blog of the Week – Copyblogger
2. Blog Of the Week – Danny Brown
3. Blog of the Week: Vlad Dolezal

I’m not sure I like that kind of marketing, but it does seem to have worked – the developer 140ware has been overwelmed with requests try out the application.

Tweetboard is actually a pretty clever idea, one I was tempted to try out myself.

Basically it allows the site owner to set up a little tab that allows conversations to take place with visitors using Twitter. You’ll see the tab on the left side of your browser window. You can log in with your Twitter ID and we can have instant conversations as well as see my recent Tweets. The concept has been described as being a micro-forum: probably pretty close.

If I keep Tweetboard installed, it might well replace the Twitter widget I already have on the Totally Incorrect! homepage – I’m not really sure yet.

If you want to try out Tweetboard on your own site or blog, head over to the Tweetboard site.

There is also a good write up by Jennifer at Mashable.. She thinks it is a cool idea as I do. Will it stay on my site? Hmm, time will tell.

Is this something you’d use on your site? What do you think of the developer’s Twitter marketing methods? You can go ahead and let me know via the Tweetboard tab =)

Related posts:

1. Mixero – another Twitter desktop app
2. HootSuite – in-browser Twitter client
3. Twitter Desktop Apps

As you can see from the image above, my icons are designed to fit in with the thumbnail iamges I use on the homepage.

The set consists of icons for Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, FriendFeed, Scribnia, Delicious, Linkedin, Stumbleupon, WordPress and RSS.

If you’d like to use any of these on your own blog, you are most welcome to do so. You can download them in a zip file from my LiveDrive site.

Let me know if you like them.

Do you use Social Media icons on your site? Do you know of any good resources for this kind of thing?

Related posts:

1. Social Media – keeping it under control
2. Social Media – Over Hyped?
3. Social Media in Manufacturing

People who market to businesses, (I really don’t like the expression B2B but I guess that’s what it is) often seem to complain that social media marketing techniques are not as successful as they are when marketing to consumers.

I’m not sure this is totally true, especially if you include blogs as being part of social media, but it is a fact that there are not too many people in manufacturing spending a lot of time on Facebook or Twitter.

So why is this? Obviously part of the reason is that people these days are usually pretty busy – their company has probably reduced the workforce so people have little time to spare.

One other reason is the dreaded IT Guy.

The IT guy (yes, I know the IT guy might well be the IT lady or IT team, but I don’t feel like typing IT person everytime. I really hope you’ll bear with me on this one) isn’t happy unless everything is locked down so that it is impossible to get to anything useful on the Internet.

Actually to be fair quite often these are company rules and the IT guy just has the task of carrying them out. Let’s have a look at some of reasons might have their Internet access restricted:

Stop time wasting. This is a good one; I can’t believe how many companies I go to where multiple people (starting with the receptionist if there still is one) are playing solitaire on the company’s PC. I don’t see how being able to access some useful web content would be more of a time waster. In anycase, these days companies can’t afford to have people loafing around – however they are doing it.

Using bandwidth. Hmm, how many businesses are paying by the GB for bandwidth? Not too many I suspect.

Watching porn. This one I do agree needs to be blocked. I don’t believe anyone, unless working in the adult entertainment industry would have a problem with this. Same thing with sites such as on-line betting which are illegal here in the US. You want to do this? Fine – do it at home!

Bringing malware into the network. This is always a concern. I believe the IT folks need to make the assumption that everyone is very capable of going to a bad site, clicking a link on the wrong email etc and having the systems in place to deal with it.

Visiting sites of categories considered to be inappropriate. This is where it gets interesting. Here are some examples of blocked categories from my company:

Health – a lot of our clients are hospitals or healthcare organizations so we can’t go to their site for information.

Weapons manufacturers – hmm, big part of our business is which DoD contractors.

Blogs and forums – crazy, most of what I learn these days comes from blogs but I’m blocked from seeing many of them (including this one) at my office.

Social Media – forget it. Unless you want to get another job, Linkedin is available – get those resumes posted.

I get the impression that our company is pretty typical with choosing to block certain types of on-line content. All in all, a bit of a pain.

What’s the solution? I hear you cry!

Well some companies have innovative ways around the problem. One of our clients has an area set up (they call it the Town Square) with table and workstations where anyone can go online during their breaks or when they need to. The workstations have internet access but no access to the company network. Employees can check their email, do their banking or whatever they need to do without fear of them bringing in malware. I think this is a great idea.

My personal workaround is to use my iPhone as much as possible. I find I can do about 90% of what I need this way. If it became more of a problem, I’d get an AT&T access card for my laptop.

Another good workaround is to use the RSS feeds that Twitter provides. Say you want to keep up with #IranElection but you can’t access Twitter. No problem use Twitter Search to search for #IranElection and subscribe to the provided feed. You can then follow updates in Google Reader or other feed reader.

I often wonder whether locking employees out from social media and other sites is actually holding businesses back. I know it often takes me longer to get things done than it really should. I’d much prefer to treat this as a peopel management issue and not block everyone from potentially useful content.

What do you think? Are you fighting the IT guy or is your business more enlightened? Would giving people access to social media help the business with new ideas or would it just waste time?

Related posts:

1. Social Media in Manufacturing
2. Social Media – keeping it under control
3. Social Media – Over Hyped?

Kids are Heroes was set up my Gabe O’Neil and his daughter Mary Margaret and it strives to help young people do great things – become heroes!

As I understand it, the idea for Kids are Heroes came from Mary Margaret and she was able to get her dad on board – I think she was 9 at the time so this is pretty cool. It was also rather fortunate that Gabe just happens to be a web designer so he was able to put the whole thing together.

Check out the Kids are Heroes site to see some of the cool things Mary Margaret and Gabe have been able to set in motion – really impressive.

Kids are Heroes was recently chosen to be featured on PitchTV, on Virgin Atlantic flights. Watch the video, introduced by Richard Branson.

And, as if this family isn’t amazing enough already, Gabe’s brother Greg is heavily involved with another children’s charity Sleeping Children Around the World (SCAW). Gabe himself also finds time to be an enthusiastic supporter of 12for12k which I really appreciate. I’m really hoping that we can somehow get Kids are Heroes to be a 12for12k charity one month.

Oh, since this is supposed to be about blogging, you can check out Gabe’s blog as well as follow him on Twitter where he is @kidsareheroes.

Quite a family and a worthy Totally Incorrect Blog of the Week!

Related posts:

1. 12for12k – Eye Care for Kids
2. Why Support Eye Care for Kids?
3. Blog of the Week – Global Patriot

Um, excuse me a second …… what’s that? Oh, wrong Vlad!

Sorry about that; let’s start again.

Vlad Dolezal is a blogger who lives in Leeds – life there is just as exciting as that led by the other Vlad. Now, it so happens that my Dad is from Leeds and I’ve spent a lot a time there. This leads (no pun intended) me to believe that our friend Mr. Dolezal isn’t really a Leeds native, but I’m a sporting guy so I’ll let it go.

Vlad Dolezal is a great blogger. His blog shows up in my Google Reader as “An Amazing Mind” although he has recently changed the name to “Fun Life Development.” Whatever it’s called, you’ll find Vlad’s blog at http://vladdolezal.com/blog. I prefer the original title because this guy’s mind is indeed amazing.

Read any of his stories and you’d swear it is written by an older guy, someone who’s been around and experience a lot. You’d think the stories were were written by someone who has been studying for many years at the highest levels of philosophy. When you realise that the blog is written by a bloke studying mathematics at college you’ll be – well, amazed.

I’ve been reading Vlad’s work for quite a while and often thought that he needs to be Blog of the Week sometime. Two of his recent posts have ensured that he gets this unique accoclaid. The first one was where Vlad announced that since he is a huge open source fan, he felt it was only right to change the copywrite licence for his blog. So now Fun Life Development blog is licensed under the WTFPL Licence. Go and read his post about it right now.

The other post is the one about his “Free Hugs” session. Vlad actually went out onto the mean streets of Leeds with a big sign offering free hugs. Crazy or what – I mean no one in their right mind would do this; least of all in Leeds. His story of the day is just so funny and inspirational.

No question, Vlad Dolezal is an inspirational guy. That’s why he is the writer of this weeks Blog of the Week!!

Sorry about all the Vlad the Impaler references Vlad. I know I’m hardly being original – just couldn’t help it

Related posts:

1. Blog of the Week – Discomfort Zone
2. Blog of the Week – Copyblogger
3. Blog Of the Week – Danny Brown

One of my passions is reading and learning (OK, that’s two passions but the two are strongly connected). As part of this, I’m a huge fan of Google Reader where I subscribe to lots of great blogs and other sources.

For a while I’ve been wondering how I can share great articles and stories I find with the reader of Totally Incorrect. I think I’ve found it.

Recommended Reading is a Wordpress plug-in designed to display my shared items in Google Reader. It is just so simple, once I had it installed and configured, every time I share an item in Google Reader, it shows up at the top of the reading list in my sidebar – Brilliant!!

So in future, every time you visit Totally Incorrect, you’ll be able to see what I’m excited about. Clicking on the article name in the sidebar will take you right to the blog post. Social Media is all about exploring and sharing so I hope you’ll check back often to see what new gems I’m reading that day.

Do you use Google Reader (or another RSS feed reader) to keep up with your reading? Which reader do you like best?

Related posts:

1. Are you a Reader or a Skimmer?
2. Scribnia: Connecting Blogs & Readers
3. Blog Updates