Totally Incorrect Video-cast! 12for12k

If you read Totally Incorrect, or hang out with me at Twitter, you’ll know that I support the charity movement 12for12k

For a while, I’ve wanted to put a video-cast of my thoughts together and finally got around to it.

To get more information, here are some links:

12for12k.org website

Follow Danny Brown on Twitter

Follow Henie Reisinger on Twitter

Musicians on Call

Doctors Without Borders

The brilliant bluesy theme music is by Lee Douglas

Want to contribute? Do it right here:

What do you think? Do you see social media as a good way for non-profits to thrive? How could 12for12k do a better job? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I Love Barbara Talisman!

When I was heading out to the office this morning, I glanced at the 12for12k Twitter stream and saw a response from Danny Brown to a  blog post that had been written by someone called Barbara Talisman.

Knowing that there is nothing like a good fight to start the day, I felt compelled to read the posts by both parties – Ms. Talisman first.

To say I was surprised was an understatement. You can read her contribution to American literature here. I had no idea at all who this person is, but there was a rather rude person on the weekend 12for12k conference call and I believe it was her. Check out Danny Brown’s much more dignified response on his blog here.

My first assumption was that she must have been drinking when she typed the post – I can imagine anything more bizarre. As a supporter of 12for12k and Danny Brown I was also somewhat offended by what she said.

Anyone that has connected with Danny knows that her accusations are a long way from the truth. Yes, there are quite a lot of social media “experts” that take every opportunity to promote themselves and their businesses, but Danny Brown isn’t one of them. I don’t ever recall him even mentioning his marketing business at the same time as 12for12k, I don’t see him trying to flog his latest book and I don’t see his blog full of affiliate links (well, other than the Headway theme one, but I have a Studiopress theme link so I can’t complain about that).

I often can almost feel the embarrassment of Danny when he responds to those “oooh you are soooo great @DannyBrown” Tweets and he always makes a point of highlighting the fact that 12for12k isn’t Danny Brown, it is a team of dedicated people.

Is 12for12k perfect? Heck no! I don’t believe Danny had any non-profit experience when he came up with the idea and the whole thing is a work in progress – albeit with some expert guidance from people such as Jon Aston, Rich Marti, John Haydon, Mickey Gomez, Sarah Robinson and the unique (but totally crazy) Henie Reisinger.

So why to I love Barbara Talisman?

For a couple of reasons.

First, while she timed her attack for her own reasons, she has done nothing but make Danny Brown and 12for12k look good. A lot of very influential people have come to Danny’s defence and pointed out the gaping holes in her argument.

Second, with the launch of the big Go Global 24 hour event to support Doctors Without Border, 12for12k needed every possible bit of attention on the blogs and social media sites. Barbara made sure we got it.

Thirdly, Ms. Talisman had the good sense to apologize. See this later post on her blog. She is even offering to help – we’ll see if it happens.

Finally, there is one point she made that I do agree with. Where were all these supporters of Danny Brown when they were needed to support the charities? There should have been more raised than there has been and I’m hoping that the 12for12k team (including Barbara, if she is serious about helping) can get to grips with this. The great ideas being put forward for next year are going to make a huge difference so the future looks good!

Oh, one more thing – I was reminded of the huge value there is in thinking before clicking on the Publish button  – thanks Barbara, no wonder I love you!

Anyway, what is much more important right now is Go Global 24 hours. Please check the 12for12k Events page for info of how you can help!

Would you like to leverage your social media experience to help others? Support 12for12k!!

12for12k Global Event #GG24

I’ve already written about the program that the 12for12k team has been putting together to support our September charity, Doctors Without Borders,

The month has started really well with the Music as Medicine events proving to be a huge success and going a long way to meeting our goals. It is going to be up to the social media community to take over and finish the month on a high note.

12for12k is planning a gala Go Global 24 hour event that will be accessed from the Go Global 24 portal on the 12for12k site. The host for the whole 24 hours will be Henie Reisinger – one of twitter’s most dynamic and engaging personalities.

Go Global 24 (#GG24) Starts: 3 am Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, September 29 and Ends: 2:59:59 am Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, September 30.

It is really important that all the friends of 12for12k support the event by blogging and tweeting about what is going on.

We are going to offering sponsorships for 1 hour segments of the event. These can be purchased in advance by business wanting to take part and they will also be auctioned on eBay. The #GG24 sponsorships will offer some huge advantages to the sponsoring businesses.

Sponsors can use #12for12K’s collective global reach to introduce themselves, their latest innovation, their hottest new promotion, their brand… all in a way that adds value.

For example, in their hour, sponsors might conduct a question and answer session, run a contest, host a moderated panel discussion, and/or point fans and prospects to relevant information on their blog, or website, or microsite.

In addition sponsors will receive:

  • Real-time introductions, comments and thank yous
  • Will be featured on our event portal during their hour
  • Permanent thank yous on 12for12K.org
  • Lots of tweets and retweets and blog posts: before, during, and after the event

This is a huge opportunity for a business established in social media, or just getting started to create a really big impression, get out their message and have fun doing it.

However you choose to support 12for12k, you’ll get to meet a lot of influential social media people and (my favorite part) have a great time while helping others!!

There will be more information released over the next few days, so I’ll be updating this post from time to time.

Important Update: Along with the sponsorships we are also seeking items to be auctioned on eBay at the same time as the event.

If you have something you’d like to have included, you can send details to Jon Aston (jonaston@gmail.com) and he will include on the 12for12k auction site. As an alternative, you can set up the auction on your own account and set it up to donate directly to Doctors Without Borders. (I’m going to be setting one of these myself so once I know how to do it, I’ll post here again).

Should you set up your own auction, please let @12for12k know so we can include links to it. Also let us know the total you raise to update the grand totals.

If you’d like to make a direct contribution to Doctors Without Borders, you can do so via this 12for12k page.

Thanks for the support – as Jon Aston would say “You Rock!”

12for12k – Doctors Without Borders

September promises to be a fantastic month for The 12for12k Challenge. It is going to bring together three powerful ideas:

12for12k: The idea that regular people can use social media to get together and make the World better

Global Patriot: Mark Lovett’s vision that patriotism needed be confined by national or regional boundaries – which I subscribe to 100%

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières using the same philosophy to bring health care to people in need, regardless of race, religion or any of the other reasons for separating people.

With the huge number of people suffering in the World today, there is no question that Médecins Sans Frontières offers the only hope for many and it is a pleasure to be able to support this brave group of dedicated people in doing their good work.

There is a whole program of really cool events being planned for September. One of the first is Music as Medicine, being held in San Diego on September 3rd.

If you are going to be in San Diego that evening, I hope you can go. It will be a great night and you’ll be supporting a great cause. Even if you can’t be there life, I hope you will be able to make a small contribution to the cause.

There will be more exciting 12for12k and Global Patriot events throughout the month. Search on #12for12k on Twitter or check out the 12for 12k and Global Patriot sites for more info.

It’s time to get involved – time to make a difference!!

What do you think? do you have any ideas to make this program better and more effective? If you do, we’d love to chat with you.

Oh, don’t you agree the Music as Medicine poster is just way cool? I love it =)

Totally Incorrect Podcast – August 09

This months podcast is very much a social media one.

You can hear me ramble on about Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed. The Twitter outage, Facebook buying out FriendFeed etc.

Also, an update with what’s going on with 12for12k right now as well as my #FollowFriday and Fool of the Week features.

You can listen in the little media player you should see below.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Here are links to some of the sites and people mentioned in the podcast:

10e20 blog

The Harte of Marketing – Beth Harte’s blog

Danny Brown on Twitter

The 12for12k Challenge site

ScanSource, Inc.

Mark Shaw on Twitter

IBM Social Media Guide

The fantastic theme tune is sampled from No-one to Blame by Lee Douglas

I hoped you enjoy the podcast. Let me know if you love/hate, agree/disagree!!

Social Media – keeping it under control

It seems to be ironic writing this on the day that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, but I have to say, I’m feeling that social media has been taking up too much of my time.

To be honest my use of social networking sites is a lot less than many people, but I’m finding that 3 blogs, 2 Twitter accounts, 2 FriendFeed accounts, Posterous, Facebook etc is getting to be way too much. Of course this is without my full-time sales and marketing job and our part-time wedding business (trying to help out with 12for12k as well)! I have a feeling of being overwhelmed with the whole social media thing and it is time to make it fun again. The question is; how to deal with it before I turn into a whiny complainer!

So I have a plan that seems to be working. It is actually working because I’ve added two new tools to my already full toolbox:

Posterous – which I wrote about the other day.

Bit.ly – a great way to post to Twitter and to the Labeling News blog.

So here is how it all works:

Personal stuff.

I’m mainly interested in networking on Twitter with a little Facebook thrown in – mainly for family connections. I’m not quite as active on Twitter as before, mainly because of work pressures, but I’m still there quite often. Posterous is really helping with this because I can post one of my photos there and have it auto post to both my Twitter and Facebook accounts – very nice. Posting to Posterous is so fast (send image as an email attachment), that keeping up with my goal of one image per day is no problem. To be fair, the fact that my Posterous posts seem to be about one or two words long seems to help as well.

I’ve been slacking a bit with post to Totally Incorrect, which I need to work on getting back on track. When I do post here, I’ll often mention the fact on Twitter as well as post a link on Facebook.

I currently have Totally Incorrect and my Twitter account both post to FriendFeed as well so I have a presence there,  albeit in auto post only mode – I don’t do anything else on FriendFeed and rarely visit the site. It is worth noting that I can’t currently auto post from Facebook to FriendFeed after the Facebook guys messed about with the feeds. I’m sure this will change soon ;-)

My accounts on Linkin and Scribnia are pretty much dormant at the moment, although one or another of my blogs is updated in my profile there. Linkedin seems to be full of people either looking for a job or trying to sell me their schemes, I’m not interested in either. Scribnia I like a lot, but I feel it takes time to really get involved there. I plan to get back to it after the end of our wedding season here.

Winco ID Social Media

Our social media marketing efforts at Winco ID are built around the Labeling News blog. This has been working out very well and is well worth the time invested. I’m really lucky to have Kathy and Linda involved in this project which is only going to get better. One thing I try to do is to post at least 4 or 5 links of news about labeling or RFID to the Labeling News Twitter account everyday. These are also posted to the Labeling News FriendFeed account and from there to the FrendFeed widget in the Labeling News sidebar.

Because I’m blocked from Twitter at work (yes, really see my post about social media and the IT guy) I use Bit.ly to both shorten the links and to post to the Twitter account – brilliant move, it I say so myself! There isn’t really much conversation going on in the Labeling News Twitter account – I use my @_djh account for that – but it is getting a steady stream of new followers, even if most of them seem to want me to check out their nude profile!

I like to post the Labeling News blog stories in our business Facebook page too – currently this is a manual operation that I’ll automate soon. I’m really hoping that we will see more automation between Facebook and FriendFeed after the acquisition.

UniqueDay Blog

Currently this blog which I use for my wedding business is very much standalone. This is something that really needs a total refresh which I’m sure will happen this winter. I also have the @UniqueDay Twitter account which is really just a placeholder at this time.

So there it is – my complete social media strategy. Adding Posterous and Bit.ly to the mix has really helped, along with the easy integration that FriendFeed offers.  How does my plan compare compare to yours? Do you find time to get involved in a lot of networks or do you focus on just a couple?

Why I’m Liking Posterous

When I heard about Posterous, I wondered if we really needed another social media platform. We already have Twitter for small posts and there are a ton of blogging and social bookmarking platforms out there for everything else.

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?

Totally Incorrect Podcast – July 2009

Alright – I’ve finished the first edition of the Totally Incorrect Podcast!!!

You can listen in the little media player you should see below.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Here are links to some of the stories and people mentioned in the podcast:

Person of the Week: Brian Gardner

The 12for12k Challenge

Twitter for Business Guide

Fool of the Week: Doug Meacham’s post about BestBuy

England vs Australia at Lord’s – from the NY Times even!!

The fantastic theme tune is No-one to Blame by Lee Douglas

I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Any ideas on how to make it better? Feel free to leave me a comment!

Social Media in Manufacturing

How can social media be integrated into a marketing plan for a manufacturing company that sells to other manufacturing companies? This post has been on my to-do list for a long time. When you bear in mind that I’m a social media enthusiast and a marketing manager for a manufacturing company, you’d think it would be easy. I should be the perfect person to use social media to market to my clients, most of whom are manufacturers themselves. Just write about what I do during the day and the post should be finished right?

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

Why Support Eye Care for Kids?

A few days ago I wrote about Eye Care for Kids being the July charity for 12for12k.

As the first charity of the second half of the year, this is quite a contrast to the June charity, UNICEF. Whereas UNICEF operates on a global scale, Eye Care for Kids works on a much smaller scale, covering the US state of Utah.

This is one of the great things about being a 12for12k supporter, the opportunity to make a difference to a diverse range of people, all of whom could certainly use our help.

Based in Salt Lake City, Eye Care for Kids concentrates on the poorer areas of the state, including the Native American reservations. So far they have helped nearly 20,000 visually impaired, low income children – not bad hey?

One of the good things with these smaller charities is that every single donation can be seen to make a real difference. For example, a donation of $25.00 is enough to provide an eye exam and eye glasses to a deserving child. Giving a child the gift of good vision can have a fantastic effect on their life.

For most of my life, I’ve done very little to help charities. I’ve been too busy, too broke, too lazy or thought that the small amount I could give would make no difference. That’s the idea of 12for12k, if we join together and each donate a small amount, the result will indeed make a difference.

If you are like me and enjoy all the things that social media gives us for free, you might feel it is time to contribute just a little back. Bring vision to America’s kids!

Want to lean more about 12for12k? Head over to the site.

I’m in – are you?