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Wow, a lot of good articles this week in my Google Reader feed! It’s been very tough reducing the list to a reasonable length, but I managed it in the end – happy reading!

Is it Time to be Ditching Traditional Marketing? by Karen Skidmore
Karen argues something dear to my heart – that traditional marketing is still a very important part of the mix.

Leverage What You Have and Take Your Blog to the Next Level by Darren Rowse
Mr R. looks at what makes blogs grow.

Building a successful business blog by Jim Connolly
Discusses the often forgotten point that if you try and do everything yourself, the success of your blog will be limited to your expertise in a wide range of specialist areas.

No More Websites. Only Publishers by Mitch Joel
Mitch Joel looks at the need for businesses to rethink the role of their website

Social Media Misconceptions 2 : “I have profiles on all the main sites/networks, so I’m using social media” by Nick Tadd
Does exactly what it says on the tin in the title.

Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub? by Jay Baer
Jay Baer looks at possible alternatives and ends up answering his question with a “yes”.

What Every Blogger Should Know About Design When Buying a Theme by Seth Godin
Getting a new design for your blog is both time consuming and expensive. Seth Godin looks at the key issues involved.

How to Be a More Relational Blogger [Tips for New and Established Bloggers] by Darren Rowse
More from ProBlogger, this time discussing the idea that a relational approach and community feel are still one central aspect of many successful blogs.

Wake Up! You’re a Blogger Not a Crackhead by Seth Godin
If the article was poor, I’d still have included it for the title. But it’s not. It exposes the danger of being adicted to blogging, and explores 3 areas of potential addiction.

Points of Contact by Chris Brogan
Make a very important point – we can have so many points of contact that we end up neglecting people.

Massive Traffic 101 by Court
There’s so much sense in what Court writes here and it is in the same spirit as Seth Godin’s post on “Crackheads”.

Other posts you might like:
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 3
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 2
That was the week in Social Media Blogging

One of the facts that gets quoted every now and then by people advising bloggers on how to write articles is that the top bloggers use the word “you” more often than “me” or “We/Our”. So I thought I’d take a look and see if this is true, or another Social Media Urban Myth.

As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!

Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined

Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.

As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.

There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc

The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.

Do you ever worry about the lack of real leaders around the world? From a British perspective, do you feel a bit glum when you think about the General Election in  May 2010 and try to identify the genuine leaders amongst the front benches of the major parties?

A lot of people confuse leadership with management, thinking that the two are synonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth and in this article we are going to draw clear distinctions between the two before looking at the specifics of servant leadership.

Putting it simply, leadership is about deciding the right things to do whilst management is about doing things in the right way. Management is particularly concerned with the efficient use of resources. Peter Drucker once wrote that most organisations are over-managed and under-led and this can be seen when examining bankruptcies. The courts are full of companies that were highly efficient at doing the wrong things!

This can also be seen in the uptake, or lack of uptake, of Social Media in organisations. Many managers prefer to optimise current work practices rather than embrace change. If those same organisations lack leadership with the vision to see that the game is changing, then they are unlikely to successfully integrate Social Media into their culture. They will be highly efficient players in a game that no longer exists – they may dislike change, but eventually they will come to realise that they will like being increasingly irrelevant even less!

Leadership is about doing the right things and this has two dimensions to it. Choosing the right activities to be involved in and also ‘doing the right thing’, in other words, choosing the morally right thing to do. And this is where servant leadership comes in. The title of ‘Leader’ is not something that someone awards to themselves. It is something that is recognised in the individual by other people. In the increasingly transparent world that is a result of Web 2.0 and 3.0, self-proclaimed leaders without the track record to back it up will have a very short shelf-life.

And other than with senior appointments in organisations (and even then I’d argue that most are managers rather than leaders), leadership will be something one does with people, not to them. In fact I’d go a stage further and suggest that Servant Leadership will often be characterised by what the Leader can do for her/his people. The very name suggests that servant leadership is concerned with issues such as “How can I Serve my Team?”

What are the qualities, skills and behaviours of Servant Leaders? To adapt one of my favourite pieces of writing, I suggest that in practical terms, Servant Leaders:

Are patient
Are kind.
Do not envy,
Do not boast,
Are not proud.
Are not rude,
Are not self-seeking,
Are not easily angered,
Do not keep no of wrongs.
Do not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
Will do the morally right thing rather than hide behind what is legal or expedient
Always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere.

Just for something completely different, and for a bit of fun, key customer service questions in a 90sec video – 9 key questions that should be at the core of any customer service and customer care strategy.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed it!

Week 3 in the series – I had decided to try this for a month and see whether people found it useful. Next week is the last in the month – let me know if you enjoy the reviews and find them useful!

Social Media misconceptions: 1. I don’t have time. by Nick Tadd
English blogger Nick Tadd examines one of the main ‘excuses’ people raise for not getting involved in Social Media

Social Media Gurus – That Old Chestnut by Mitch Joel
Mitch Joel looks at the old cliche “who should own Social Media”; does it fall under the heading of digital marketing, does it ….? I’m not going to steal his thunder

How to tap into your blog visitors need for new information by Marko Saric
Marko’s premise is that you  should always be reminding people that you and your products exist, and you should allow them to spend time with the content and the value that you create.

4 Ways Bloggers Differ From Reporters by Jay Baer
His key premise is that bloggers’ influence is derived from their own ability and moxie, whereas journalists’ influence is in large measure derived via the outlet they represent.

Your Farmer List by Chris Brogan
No, Chris Brogan hasn’t gone agricultural! This post is about what he calls a “farmer list,” meaning the chores you’ve gotta do every day

How does the style of your writing need to differ between your blog, your brochure and your website? by Karen Skidmore
This article is all about considering the different platforms for your writing.  Knowing when to sell and when to give value.  And a blog is place where you will sell more by selling less!

Please stop saying social media marketing is free by Jason Cohen
A plea for a return to sanity and to not be seduced by the free nature of the tools; there is always an opportunity cost for the time involved, if nothing else!

The Key Factors to any Successful Product Launch by Alex of Blogussion
Blogussion e launched their first product recently and this article discusses some of the things they learned a lot from doing it. Some good tips for all of us who sell, or intend to sell, products online.

The Power of Uniqueness [19 Starting Points for Being a Unique Blogger] by Darren Rowse
The title of the article describes its theme – uniqueness, written in Sarren Rowse’s usual flowing style.

How to lose friends and tick off people on FaceBook by Scott Stratten
If I had an ‘Article of the Week’ award, this would be it. It will no doubt ruffle a few feathers and some may find its style edgy but it really does say what many people are thinking. And whilst the article is aimed at Facebook, the points made apply to all networking sites. Great article

In case you are unaware of it, there is a way in Windows 7 to create a folder which is a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

Although the name may be sacrilegious to some, (in which case, when you’ve created the folder you can always rename it) the so-caller “GodMode,” can be entered by creating a new folder and then renaming it as: “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without the speech marks”)

When you’ve done that, the folder’s icon will change to resemble a control panel and the folder will contain dozens of control options. I’ve not found any comment from Microsoft on the net about why this exists, but it’s very handy!

Many organisations fail to see the importance of becoming involved in social media. Some don’t see the relevance of it, others hide behind “we don’t have the resources” but whatever the reason for not becoming involved, it’s dangerous.

Traditionally, businesses focused on two communication channels: Business to business and business to customer. Social Media creates a powerful third channel: Customer to Customer.

Facebook, Twitter, and any number of blogs and online forums, allow customers to disclose and discuss their experiences with companies. And potential customers are relying more and more on testimonials and feedback from previous customers before buying. Ebay probably couldn’t exist without the buyer and seller feedback system.

Can companies afford to remain in ignorance about what customers and others are saying about them? Those dialogues about their organisation are happening – it’s a great source of information. The key questions are how to access that information and how to make use of it. In the context of customer service, a strategy needs to consider at least the following:

how to respond to negative feedback;
how to engage customers, and potential customers, in meaningful dialogue and who is responsible for those conversations;
how to respond to mobile platforms. It’s not just a matter of making their web site mobile friendly; customers with iphones can now go into a retail outlet, take a photo of a product, upload it and receive price comparison data and user feedback of product and of that retailer;

The problem appears to me to be that many social media consultants seem still to be at a stage where they are fascinated with the tools for their own sake whereas consideration of their application is in its infancy. Alan Stevens has written a useful article here about questions to use to try to establish the credibility of a social media consultant. The list provides a pragmatic approach to opening up a conversation, which then needs to dig deeper into the issues I’ve set out above. And I’ll bet that I’ve overlooked some key areas of a customer service/care strategy, so please, add your ideas!

After yesterday’s post about the neural web, I came upon the following from Chris Saad, which has much in common with the views I has expressed. The last 3 or 4 slides are particularly powerful.

My question, as per yesterday, is who is going to win the race to provide the tools that enable us to create the strong neural connections; whoever is first with a workable solution will get a headstart over their rivals.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the strength of connections, rather than the number of them.

I’ve also been interested for a long time in psychology and how the brain and mind work. One of the things that neurologists have told us is that as we learn skills and acquire knowledge, we form new connections between the neurons in the brain. The more we use those neural pathways, the stronger the connections become. Conversely, if we don’t sue them, they wither and die. So it is with what we might call the Neural web!

Social Media software is great for making connections; most network sites allow you to create huge networks but don’t give you the tools to then manage those networks proactively. This has got to happen if networking is to be taken to the next level and I believe it is something that will be developed in the next couple for years. Otherwise, we may lose the important conmnections and the link will wither away like the neural pathway.

Imagine a network of 10,000 connections. It’s difficult to identify within that list, the like-minded people with whom you want to stay in close contact. Then imagine if you could create several lists, by keywords and could then communicate with them around shared interests. Like the brain creating new neural networks as a new subject is learned, those connections will be nourished with reapeated contact and giving. It is important to have breadth of contacts – we also need to find ways to create depth and strength.

In that way, armed with the knowledge of the group’s skills, knowledge and strengths, you can keep their names close at mind. Then when someone mentions that they are looking for an individual with a particular skill- or knowledge set, you can make the appropriate referral.

This is what nourishing the ‘we’ in web means to me, is consistent with the concept of the neural web and is something for which I’m trying to find solutions. How do you do it, particlarly if you have one or more large networks you are managing?

Huh? Have I redefined physics? Not at all, just borrowed a famous equation!

To rephrase Einstein, E=MC4; Effectiveness = Motivation x Commitment x Concentration x Clarity x Consistency, where motivation and commitment both include action as well as positive thinking, concentration is focus and clarity is having a clear objective.

Whilst “The  Secret” and the “Law of Attraction” are deserverdly popular – they have focused people’s attention on the important part their beliefs play in their daily lives, they miss out on the action element.  Empowering beliefs and positive thinking  on their own are not enough, otherwise we’d all win the lottery! Taken to its logical conclusion, if positive thinking and beliefs were all that is required, you needn’t even take the action of buying a ticket! But we know that’s absurd, we know that action and effort are required.

Yet the idea of putting effort into something has become unpopular as more and more people want a fast fix, quick buck, easy solution. If people really understood tha social media and networking is not a sprint, it’s a marathon as Gary Vaynerchuk is fond of saying, I’m prepared to bet that the number of bloggers out there would drop off sharply!

Where does effort come into the equation above? Effort is a combination of the energy that comes from being committed and motivated and the repetition of consistency.

Maslow, in his well-known hierarchy of needs, says there are two processes necessary for self-actualization: self exploration and action. It’s not an either/or, it requires both. So, what are the characteristics of self-actualized people? According to Maslow (1) they:

• Embrace reality and facts rather than denying truth.
• Are spontaneous.
• Are interested in solving problems.
• Are accepting of themselves and others and lack prejudice.

(1) Maslow, Abraham H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.”  (1943) PDF retrieved 14 December 2009