Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

Sorry for getting you all excited about my return to writing today (I’m being sarcastic, not conceited!) – my regular readers know of my ongoing health problems, but for those of you who don’t – I broke my back twice falling out of the sky awkwardly in a couple of extreme sports accidents. I’ve damaged vertebrae, discs, nerves, my hip, sacroiliac joint and various other bodyparts, resulting in my walking with a stick these days…

Anyway today is what I have come to call a ‘Pain Day’ – when my back is incredibly painful leaving me almost incapable of achieving much that particular day, and confined to my bed, blitzed my an enormous array of pain killers. I’ve managed to get onto the computer for a little while as pain killers have temporarily improved the situation, but this will have to be a pretty brief post today.

Have you come across a site called Picnik yet? It’s a very useful image editing web application – it’s easy to upload your photos, edit them and add effects then share them among your friends and social networks. It costs nothing to use – although there is a pro option if you want extra filters and the ability to upload infinite pictures. If you don’t have Photoshop, or Gimp, you’ll find this a very useful site when you have photos you want to edit eg to get rid of red-eye, or you just want to make an existing photo more fun with special effects -

Check out vampire Rob…

So get yourselves over to Picnik – you don’t need to have a Photoshop-sized budget to do great work on your photos!

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a far less pain day – I have a meal out in the evening so it better be!

Rob Bell

Marketing is not Promotion People – Get that in Your Heads.

Promotion and Advertising are tools used within a Marketing programme when a product or service is ready to be launched. There’s lots of marketing needs to be done before that stage  though.

There are so many people around claiming to be marketing experts because they’ve undertaken promotional actions to some degree of success – that doesn’t make you a marketing guru that makes you a promotions guru.

Marketing is much more than just promoting products – it’s researching markets, identifying opportunities and problems, developing services and products to solve those problems in a manner a customer would like  setting up and testing Marketing campaigns, using above the line-, below the line- and digital- methods to formulate, execute and analyse the success of each actitivy, something that is particularly easy online given the availability of data, constantly testing and refining promotions as needed. And eventually, the product is ready to go, hopefuly with a well-armed knowledge of the new market that will allow him or her to dominate.

Market Research

A true Marketer knows that any product needs research prior to committing, here are just 15:

1. What’s the size of the market?
2. Who are the major players?
3. How competitive is it?
4. Have you done any Keyword Research?
5. What’s the customer profile?
6. What are people in the market desperate for?
7. Are there any problems there you can solve through your product or service?
8. Are you asking people in the market if they see a place for your product?
9. Would they buy it or try it out and give it a mark out of 100 for you??
10. Are you doing usability studies?
11. What’s the best way to reach your target consumers? It’s not always going to be online, many niches can found away from the computer.
12. What are the best factors to identify in order to do competitive analysis? Price, Features, Quality, Exclusivity – they’ll be different  for each market
13. Does your product represent what you want to sell to them, or what they want to buy from you?
14. How could you change the former into the latter?
15. Where can your potential customers be found?

Next time, I’ll look at competitive positioning and discuss how understanding a fairly simple topic to grasp can help you know more about your market than most others

Yes, it’s true – the Internet Police have been round and arrested me for neglecting my blog once again. They said I had been blogging with undue care and attention, leaving my blog unattended for many days, even weeks at a time.

Oh blog, what can I say? I neglect you so, yet you sit there showing the world my words 24/7/365 unaffected by my ignoring you. They say I haven’t been feeding you properly, or dressing you appropriately. It’s not that I’ve lost interest, I still care for you – but I’m sorry, I’ve been seeing other Web platforms and activities. Yes, I have been spending increasingly more time with my Web Design business, and I’ve been seen a lot around Twitter and Facebook – I have also been spending a lot time with new clients, or on courses, webinars, or my other business, Ex Ignibus.

It’s not that I don’t love you, I’m just not sure that I’m in love with you – you’re not the blog I met almost 4 years ago (actually that’s true, you’re not that blog but you look and sound just like she did). You’ve got kinda bloated with all those plugins and applications I so love to feed you with, and your dress sense is so out of date compared to my other sites, who all got updated a couple of months ago. Your style just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the pack anymore…. but I don’t want to lose you.

There’s so much we should be doing together, and I know we have a bright future together – we just need to work better as a team, show a united front, and do what we do best together – giving useful information to novices and experts alike, on how to market ethically and effectively online, all about the latest trends online, and how best to use networks like Twitter. We need to up our game, dear blog, so here’s what has to happen.

Nothing much is going to happen here over the next week, because I am absolutely busied up with client work – and no matter what you say, you’ll always come second to my beloved clients.

After that, you and me are going to be spending some quiet time together, working on cleaning you up, getting you into optimised shape, thinning down your plugins, and completely redesigning your style and layout to turn you into one cool, sexy, intelligent blog that people are going to want to hang around with once again.

So get ready, because October is going to go down in history as the month you grew up and left your chrysalid to become a beautiful butterfly, rippling waves of positive effect across the blogosphere.

I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you – I’ll do better, I promise.

Your Naughty Owner,

Rob x

p.s. I got away with a caution from the Internet police, but they said they’d be keeping an eye on me in the future – and they’ll be back if I treat you bad ever again!

I’m not quite sure what it is… it’s not time, it’s not lack of ideas, it’s not lack of content… but something makes this blog harder to keep updating than any of the rest of my web estate! Those of you who follow me on social networks know that I’m online plenty, always researching new and quality information and applications, engaging with and sharing with people. I have almost 2,300 Twitter posts to my name at the time of writing this, so why oh why oh why do I find it such a chore to look after my blog? It’s been 6 weeks since my last update here – shame on me!

Does anyone else share this malady, and find their blog to be the hardest part of their web presence to maintain?

Of course, I have a bagful of excuses – too much client work, medical appointments, other jobs to do, things to learn, too busy talking to people – but at the end of the day, they are just excuses. I can make time for this blog, I’ve just failed to do so, and I aim to rectify this starting today. I made an agreement with my mentor to finalise the core of each of my sites – I’m going to include this site too, so a redesign to fit in with the others is imminent!

I always put pressure on myself to make my blog posts fit certain criteria – they have to be a certain minimum length, be original content that isn’t lifted from somewhere else, pass my rigorous quality standard… and I set the bar too high for myself, it’s so high I can’t realistically hope to fulfil all the requirements every single time – I have been paralysed by my own perfection-demanding nature. I read Seth Godin’s blog posts each day via RSS and they’re not often very long at all – why do I crave lengthiness in my own??!?

So today I’m giving myself a slap and reminding myself of the saying “You don’t have to be great to get going, but you do have to get going to be great”

What are you going to get going today to get great?

Rob Bell

p.s. I stayed up until ridiculous o’clock to ensure I got my vanity link on Facebook, so I’m going to use it lots – friend me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/robbell

p.p.s. And as if you didn’t already know, on Twitter I’m @robbell

Today is a big day for some, and a day like any other for many. Unless you’re a Social Media nerd, you probably couldn’t care less, but Twitter reached an important milestone today.

Ashton Kutcher went against Larry King and CNN and fought to become the first user to have 1 million people following them.

At 7.15 (ish) GMT this morning, Kutcher won! EA had offered to give all their games for a year to the person who was millionth to follow him, which resulted in so many people trying to follow him at that point many struggled to follow in time, and he shot to 1,000,300 in the time it took me to refresh my screen from the point he was at 999,976.

Kutcher broadcast live via Ustream as the moment approached, and a party began straight after his victory speech, then he was up dancing away with wife Demi Moore to ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang (incidently, I share the same name as the lead singer – Robert ‘Kool’ Bell – different middle names though!!!)

The battle was watched live on CNN and on the web via live-stats analysis provider Chartbeat (see below)

In his victory speech, with fellow twittererati P Diddy on speakerphone, Kutcher talked about how it’s a victory for new media – no longer are we confined to having to rely on tv and newspaper news because the people can now reach each other with no help from the media at all, and one person can reach out to millions easily. He played down his individual victory, declaring it a victory for the new information age against the old school.

Kutcher also passed 1 million followers on his Facebook account yesterday, without actually promoting it.

When I wrote The Ultimate Guide to Twitter, I documented the top 10 Twitterers – Obama was at the top with almost 250,000 followers. Now, just 2 months later he has almost 750,000 – but Kutcher and CNN have both overtaken him to become the two most followed accounts. The growth of the service in those 2 months is phenomenal, and it’s predicted to continue – especially given the fact that Oprah Winfrey is about to become the next celebrity twitterer, with Kutcher helping her send her first tweet live on her TV show later today. We’re expecting a big influx of stay at home Mums turning to Twitter along with Oprah today. I wonder how long it’ll take her to hit 1 million? I daresay it’ll set records…

Kutcher promised to donate $100,000 to help Malaria for his win, and showed the cheque, already printed, live in Ustream

Read more about Ashton Kutcher’s 1 million followers  on Mashable