Derek Markham

Interesting finds, random goodness, and pointless bits & pieces that don't fit anywhere else

Old Digg User Returns After Being Gone for a Week

via socialblade.com

The Social Media Policy I Followed to Drive Over 36 Million Pageviews

via nealrodriguez.com

"This is the People Media Movement. The campaign aims to eradicate technological barriers posed by digital networks that stop brands from communicating with their target communities. We move to facilitate such communication through education on the uses of communication tools on digital networks, and working in part with development teams administrating the social networks."

From http://nealrodriguez.com

A Sweet Google Buzz Trick

via thedoghousediaries.com

Hide Your Kids: The Social Media Marketers are Coming

I use my social media network to share information, to have conversations, to collaborate, to get feedback, and I’ve even been the focus of a  social media fundraising campaign. And when I choose who to include in my network, I screen people based on their usual stream (Is it helpful or interesting to me? Or is it just selling to at me, over and over?). Once in my network, I then come to trust those people, and I don’t expect them to try to sell me something.

So when I read about the latest social media influencing schemes targeting kids, I had a very mixed reaction. The piece talked about two companies, one of which was promoting music/artists/bands, and the other, which promoted stuff. You know, Coca-Cola, Nintendo, a Barbie mp3 player… stuff.

via naturalpapa.com

Social Media #PRfail: Promoting Your Irrelevant Links

As a blogger, bad PR moves are an easy target for me to laugh at in the privacy of my office, but sometimes I just can't help myself. I need to share.

So here's the latest PR fail to hit my inbox:

You've seen other people using fancy signatures in their emails, and you hear it's a helpful thing to do, so you spend the time to make a nice signature that includes your social media profiles and links to other web affiliations.

Awesome. Great thought.

And now you're sitting at your desk, about to send out a press release to bloggers, journalists, and social media mavens. So you copy and paste the info into the body, insert your signature, and blind copy everyone on your email list. Now you spellcheck the email and give it a good proofreading, then hit send.

Right afterward, your client gets tons of great coverage from bloggers, is ecstatically happy with your work, and you all live happily ever after, right?

Not.

Why not?

There's no single answer to that, but one clue might be because the people who receive your emails are a discerning bunch. They live on the web, and will click through your social media links to check out your streams, perhaps heading to your company website to see what's what. And now you've lost them.

Why?

Your social media profiles identify you as a PR professional, a communications expert, or perhaps even something cuter, like a strategist or guru or something, but when we look at the content you promote with those profiles, we're quite unimpressed.

Either you're broadcasting the same things to us over and over, or you've fed last night's Blip.fm stream to Twitter, or you are sharing too much information about your personal life with us. Or maybe you've greatly misunderstood the topics we're interested in, and think we will be impressed with whose Youtube channel you subscribed to, or which products you're promoting, while we also ignore your negative or bitchy updates.

And so we tune out. We hit delete and move on.

Before you include social media profile links into emails, go take a look at your profile from the vantage point of a stranger. Does it look like you're a professional? In what industry?

Are your social media links relevant to the people you're sending them to? If not, don't promote them. It only hurts you in the end.

 

 

 

People Share News Online That Inspires Awe, Researchers Find

Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”

They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.

“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.

via nytimes.com