Blogussion
Lots of useful articles on all matters related to succeeding online, whatever that means for you. .

Boomerang
First of all, I love the design of the site. So many blogs (although not many on this list)  look the same: straight out of the box wordpress sites. Not so with this which covers a wide range of topics.

Britopian
Michael Brito is an advocate of using social media for customer advocacy as well as social business and is currently writing a book on his experiences called “Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media in Your Organization.” The book promises to be a little different as it focuses on how organisations are (or should be) evolving into social businesses and the blockages to the changes required. I’m looking forward to the book!

Chris Brogan
Author of one of the best books on Social Media, “Trust Agents”, Chris Brogan has been involved in online communities for a long time. It shows in his writing, full of no-nonsense articles.

Final Piece
Devoted to helping businesses to understand how they can use social media to help their business to grow.

Greg Verdino
This blog looks at trends in media and marketing, as these industries grapple with the changes being brought on by disruptive technologies, new business imperatives and the rise of the empowered consumer.

Idea Launch
Idea launch offers a wide range of content marketing services and solutions. They claim that their offerings are unmatched in the industry and the perfect match for any company, any size. Whether this true or not, their blog is well worth reading.

Instigator (Ben Yoskovitz)
He writes at the top of his site “My thoughts & lessons learned on startups, entrepreneurship, marketing and other stuff”. His thoughts and lessons are spot on, in my (not so) humble opinion.

Lis Sowerbutts
If you are at all interested in passive income, Lis is worth reading. She often reviews software and services and is not afraid to say what she thinks.

Louis Gray
Full of insight and not afraid to say it how it is, Louis Gray’s site is one of my favourites. He’s usually among the first writers to cover a breaking story, emerging technology or trend. His writing gives the impression that he’s been around the industry a long time, though his photo seems to show a younger man. Whatever, he’s a must read.

Mashable
Well, it would be rude to leave them out, wouldn’t it!

Mitch Joel
Author of one of my favourite Social Media books, Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel is an insightful writer and, judging by his site, has a great taste in design. If you haven’t read Six Pixels, I urge you to do so.

Penny Power
The better looking half of the couple that own ecademy, Penny writes with compassion and feeling. She concentrates on the people aspect of social media, and is the author of  the book “Know me, like me, follow me.”

Problogger.net
Tips and techniques on how to improve your blogging. Wonderful site, full of resources.

Seth Godin
Love him or loathe him, Seth Godin is always worth reading. Even if you don’t like his message, take the time to examine how he writes: a simple, straightforward style with little fluff. He proves that you don’t have to baffle people with long words or complex sentences.

SEO Moz
If SEO interests you, seomoz provides a daily blog on all SEO issues plus tips tips, tricks and techniques.

Scott Monty
The personal blog of the head of social media for Ford. Scott shares his personal views on social media. Very practical, even if he does wear a turquoise bow tie!

socialmedia.biz
I’ve only just come across this one so can’t comment too much  but I love what I’ve read so far! And don’t miss the sharing center; lots of free pdfs to download.

Social media examiner
It claims to be “Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle” and does a good job of it. Oh, and another site with a distinctive design. Clearly written articles abound, what more do you need?

Steve Rubel
“There are signs that the companies that regularly innovate in social media seem to be more memorable”. That alone should endear him to the social media world!

The Buzz Bin
Musings and analysis on marketing, buzz and communications.

Thomas Power
The other half of the ecademy ownership, Thomas writes a lot about the applications and platforms that make up the wild world of social media.

UnMarketing
Scott Stratten is very good at pointing out some of the absurdities in social media. A refreshing change of angle.

I‘ve enjoyed assembling this list and hope that at least some names will be new to you!

Why Choose Genesis?

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress,  believes that child themes are the way to go with WordPress and points out that Genesis has great support for child themes as well as other WordPress functionality, including SEO. Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (of Problogger.net fame) are both highly influential bloggers and are also devoted fans of Genesis. Supporters like those make a strong case for at least looking more closely at the framework.

What Genesis is Not

It’s not a turn-key, out of the box ready solution. It takes a little getting used to and you need to know some basic HTML if you want to create something personalised. If someone is tempted by the look of the sites featured in the showcase, they will need to be able to do some coding. On the one hand, Genesis is not as easy to modify as Thesis. On the other hand, once you undestand the concepts, Genesis will give the opportunity for a much wider variation in the way your sites look.

While the forums do offer support and tutorials, they need much more content. Still, I imagine that the Genesis team has had their hands full creating child themes (there are already 31 of them) and more in depth support will follow. Some of the moderators’ answers on the support forum are not always helpful. All too often, a newbie posts a question and is told that they “have to modify the style.css file.” Well yes, that is true, but an indication of where in the file to make the changes would help!

What Genesis Is

Those two small beefs aside, Genesis is flexible, SEO friendly and offers a well-priced (the framework and 31 child themes for under $250) solution for web-developers who need to react quickly to clients’ needs. I particulary like the policy of a one-off payment for the pro package; there’s no developers option that requires a monthly fee. More detailsof the key features can be found here.

Two examples of Genesis Sites.

In the few days I’ve had to get to grips with Genesis, I’ve migrated this site and built another. The huge difference in the appearance of the sites shows the great flexibility inherent in the framework. Incidentally, this site will get a more spectacular revamp once I’ve gained even more experience”!

Would I recommend it to others? As long as you can do a little basic HTML, or know someone who can, I’d recommend it without any hesitation!

On the basis that they can’t both be wrong, I decided I needed to find out for myself. So, if the site changes appearance a few times, don’t panic! It’s just me experimenting with the features and flexibility offered by this amazing framework.

In order to help others who want to make the most of WordPress and wish to know more about Geensis, I’ll post a full review, once I’ve got the hang of the framework and its child themes and can do justice to them.

But as a taster, at the moment, the site is pretty much the framework out of the box, with the default theme. Genesis comes with over 20 child themes, to cover most requirements. This means that you can change your site’s theme just byinstalling a new child theme. However, they take a little learning and I’ve not yet had the time. I’ll rectify this over the coming week or so and will then post a more detaild review.

Yeah, right! There may be a few bloggers that do that (and perhaps they need to get a life!), but most use technology. One of the great things about WordPress is that posts can be scheduled in advance. In other words, you write them before going on holiday and then input the date on which you want each post to be published. If you click on the date section under ‘Publish’, at the top right of the page, you can change the date and time of publication. Hit ‘OK’ and you will see that the line then reads “Scheduled for…”.

Now, be careful. Since around WordPress 2.8, scheduled posts have often missed their date and/or time. There’s a bug in the package. The safest thing to do is to install a plugin called, appropriately enough, “Missed Schedule”.

So, that takes care of the posts but what about announcing them to the world? Many bloggers Tweet their Twitter followers about new articles. Again, you can schedule these, if you use HootSuite. Write a Tweet in the “Compose Message” box and you will find that at the bottom of the box, reading from left to right, are first the “Shrink” box, (I’ll avoid poor jokes about psychiatrists), to use shorter URLs, then the “attachments” button, and then the “Schedule Message” button.

Don’t go mad and schedule your posts hourly – 3 times a day will be sufficient. And bearing in mind that others will be logging on spasmodically, you can schedule the posts to be Tweeted on several days.

Happy holidays and happy blogging!

Do you want to be a social media overnight success? It’s easy – all you have to do is put in a lot of time, effort, persistence and possibly money and the chances are you’ll succeed!  I read somewhere, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong, that Chris Brogan took 6 years to  be an “overnight success” and a social media rockstar!

You think I’m joking? You’ve read about those celebrities that have become an overnight success and you think there’s a short cut? Just because social media is new, it doesn’t mean that those at the top haven’t put in a lot of effort to get and stay there.

I bet that those celebrities did small roles for years in movies that you loved, but you never knew it. The problem is that once they’ve “arrived”, the press often forget that that worked so hard for years before the success came. The truth is that you are extremely unlikely to become an overnight success.

Even these “reality” talent contests that are meant to throw up new talent rarely do so. The UK’s X Factor’s 2 biggest finds,  Leona Lewis and Alex both had backgrounds in the performing arts; they’d paid their dues. And those who won without such a background soon sunk without a trace.

The first thing that you need to do is some self-examination. Ask yourself the following:

Who are you?

What do you want from life?

How do you define success?

What’s important to you?

What are you good at?

Are you prepared to pay the price?

We all have weaknesses that may jeopardize our chances of success, do you know what yours are?

Are you prepared to put in the effort to improve on your areas of weakness?

Why do you want to be involved in social media?

Once you have the answers to those questions and have defined your goals you will then need to develop a plan. You will find that if you write a plan, you will know where you are heading, you will be able to see how far you have come and have far you have to go to achieve your goals. You will also need to keep in mind that every milestone that you pass is some sort of success and you should reward yourself.

If your goal is to lose weight, then for every ten pounds you should always yourself to indulge in one (small) thing that you love. This will keep you motivated and on your path. If your goal is to be a social media rockstar, then find an area that appeals to you and focus on it.  It’s easy to lose track – social media is such a wide field. Focus on one aspect, get good at it, move on to the next one.

As to becoming an overnight success or feeling like an overnight success, it is a change of mind. It is where you finally realize that you have worked so hard, come so far, and that you have noticed a definite change.  It’s an overnight understanding rather than an overnight success. Others may call you an overnight success, but in your heart you know otherwise!

Chris Brogan’s take on the social media world is called Trust Agents and is well worth a read

All you bloggers – why do you blog? All you Social and Business Networking site addicts, why are you members?

Bloggers

Why do you blog? Is it altruistic, happily sharing information with anyone who will read what you have written? Did you get seduced by one of the “You can make a fortune out of blogging” scams but are still waiting for the money? Is it to complement your business, keeping clients, colleagues, prospective clients up to date with your activities and offers? Unless it’s the first reason, how are you doing? Is your blogging helping your business to grow?

Analyse your time – how much time do you spend going from one site to another, seeking that “one missing, vital insight”? As Seth Godin wrote last week, reading is not doing! It’s easy to waste days reading expert after expert and what do you end up with? Paralysis by analysis together with a severe case of information overload! I’ve done it and, as my primary school teacher used to say “it’s not clever and it’s not grown up!”

It was a shock for me to realise that I’d owned some of the most important pdfs about setting up and running successful blogs and static sites for quite a while. But I’d got them when I was in a mad goldrush to get as much info as possible so they stayed on my hard drive, unread.

And I had wasted so much time since, trying to find information I already had! If I think of that wasted time, how much different things could be if I’d used it “doing”, rather than “researching”. You can add to the time wasting, the hours I spent tweaking my site’s design, rather than writing or doing things to draw traffic to the site. Part of a step forward in my personal development has been realising that pursuing Social Media for its own sake is a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes, unless you are a social media commentator or consultant.

How many of you (me included) have products and/or services that are not on your site and that could be earning you money? At the very least, they could be drawing people in.

Social and Business Networking

How many sites have you joined? I came across a software site the other day that sold an app that will register you automatically with the top 150 social networking sites… why? What’s the point? I’m in the process of quitting those few sites I have joined as I can’t keep up with the e-mails and messages. And that makes me look bad!  So, I’m going to cut right back for the time being to LinkedIn, ecademy, Twitter and Facebook (and the latter only because it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with my wife’s family and our friends in South Africa.)

Focus

For me, this year is about focus; Chris Brogan introduced me to the concept of having keywords for the year rather than New Year’s resolutions and focus is one of mine. Focus on clients, on quality networking and on using time profitably – that doesn’t mean that every moment has to be monetised, far from it.

But every working moment has to contribute to success as I have defined it for myself. Yes that includes time for networking, for building supportive relationships; it includes time for acts of altruism too as giving without expectation of a return is an important value. In on-line terms, it’s about identifying those people with whom I would like to connect, engage and share with at a deep level. It’s also about making sure that key off-line relationships are nurtured.

Time Management

It’s going to be tough! I’ve already started reducing the number of feeds from blog sites and making a plan for returning to my roots with my own blogging. I’m not an SM expert, yet I’ve spent far too much time recently writing about SM rather than personal and organisational development. Focus and minimalism is the way forward for me, at least in the number of sites of which I am a member.

I’m also going to cut back to three posts a week at each blog during the working week and the review of the SM week here at the weekend, as people seem to enjoy it and I’ve sorted out an efficient workflow.

Although many of the tools may be free, social networking isn’t. There’s always an opportunity cost, if only for the time spent and sooner or later there has to be a return on the time invested.

Anybody interested in joining me in this exercise?

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.

I’m sometimes asked to recommend a book on social media and social networking and thought I’d post a few ideas from some of the social media experts here; these are all books that I’ve read in the last 12 months!

	Trust Agents – Chris Brogan, Julien Smith This is in some ways similar to Penny’s book in that the focus is clearly on creating trust.  Because trust is key to building social media reputations, the authors define those who understand the value of, and set out to create, trust as “trust agents.” It’s a mixture of the theoretical and the practical and is well worth a read, if only because it is written by authors with over 10 years of online social media experience
	Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me – Penny Power Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me is different from the other three social media books. She uses her experience as a co-founder of ecademy (I often describe this as my ‘base’ on the internet)  and the trials and tribulations it went through to make important points about her belief that social media offers a better way for business people to meet, connect and help one another solve problems and expand their businesses. It is written in a warm, very personal style and is a great read. If you want a book that goes into details about how to make use of the many social media tools out there, Mitch Joel’s book would make a great companion read to Penny’s book.
	Crush it – Gary Vaynerchuk I am a huge fan of Gary V., of what he has done for the wine industry and for his business and of the way he uses video blogging, the new kid on the social media block. I have to confess that for me, what makes him so good at video blogging, his speed of delivery, his enthusiasm, his ‘flow’, doesn’t come over so well in the book. That said, the checklist in appendix a is worth the price of the book alone, for those who are new to social media or who what to make sure that they have covered everything.
	Six Pixels of Separation – Mitch Joel Whilst I have listed the books in no particular order, this is my favourite of the four when it comes to social media’how to’.  It’s a great book written in a relaxed style that covers everything you would want to know about social media, and more! Mitch emphasises that he is not a technical person, he is just one of us. It takes on an ambitious task, to unify the concepts of Personal Branding, Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship, and achieves it in a clear, fun and provocative manner. Full of  case studies to illustrate the points he makes, this book offers a complete set of social media tools, tactics and insights to empower individuals to reach a global audience and consumer base with a few clicks of the mouse, and almost all of them for free.

Social Media Books – Recommendations

So, my recommendations? I enjoyed all four and think anyone wanting to find oute  about more about social media will benefit from reading any or all of them. And recommending books is always difficult as it’s so much a matter of personal preference and each of these books has much to offer.

All of the books are written in easy to read styles offering examples of best practice for everyone to emulate.

Mitch Joel – Full of Social Media Tools, Tactics and Insights

However, if I had to make a recommendation, it would be to buy Mitch Joel’s book and if you want to add a semi-autobiographical account from a woman who’s been there, read Penny’s too. Then get on the internet and watch Gary V’s videocasts and hop over to Chris Brogan’s blog (one of my favourite blogs) for a full set!

However, to repreat what I wrote above, any and all of these books make a great read for the social media afficianado, as are the authors’ blogs each of which features in my list of favourites.