In case you blinked, here are some interesting communications-related items from the past week.
Clever video: May the Fourth be With You Let’s start with this smart video from Indigo. It’s interesting how the bookstore chain, while using humour, manages to let us know that they also sell home décor items, toys and Star Wars paraphernalia. Thanks to my friend Kristen Ridley for sharing.
Mitch Joel on podcasting In a HuffPo piece, my friend and fellow podcaster Mitch Joel contends that podcasting is a useful business tool: “As businesses and brands clamor for friends, followers, likes, retweets and pins, start tinkering with audio podcasting. You may not only enjoy it, but be able to find some highly qualified new business leads and a burgeoning and loyal community along the way.” Amen, I say.
Content curation survey The folks at Curata have just published a survey about the use of curation in organizations. The stats are helpful to someone like me, who often speaks to clients about how and why to curate content.
Tech news: LinkedIn buys Slideshare Business networking giant LinkedIn has purchased my favourite slide-sharing platform. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it.
Here is my entirely subjective collection of interesting tidbits found online this week.
Birth to 12 years in under three minutes Here’s a lovely time-lapse video showing the filmmaker’s daughter growing up before our eyes. I hope he continues this project through the teen years.
Why great design is the future of content marketing It’s funny, but I was just thinking about this topic recently, after noticing how we are seeing more and more visuals; some of them are even well designed!
Curate your way to a successful email newsletter My friend Christopher S. Penn explains how to curate content so you’ll never have to lament: “We have nothing to say in our newsletter this month!”
15 things people absolutely hate about your website Since I’m in the midst of a total reboot of my website, I was eager to read this post about the things that really bug site visitors.
The right way to use PowerPoint This simple post from Nick Morgan explains how to avoid fatal flaws in your presentation when you use PowerPoint. If only every presenter would follow Morgan’s recommendations.
From Facebook's Timeline to Pinterest to Slideshare to ubiquitious infographics, we live in a visual world. At an event about creating compelling content this morning, one participant asked the speaker how to create multimedia content without breaking the bank. So, here are a few quick and painless ways to introduce visuals to your communications:
Find photos to accompany your blog posts and articles. If you don't have your own cache of pictures, get an account at istockphoto.com. Yes, you can grab royalty-free photos on Flickr and other sites, but in my opinion, it takes too long to sift through the dross. Istockphoto.com's easy-to-use search engine will help you to find the right photo for just a few dollars.
Share your presentations on Slideshare.net. Without you to speak about the slides, the presentation is not as powerful, but people often do ask to see your slides. As long as there's no proprietary content in my presentation, I'm usually happy to share it. Especially if you work in the B2B world, Slideshare can be an effective way to spread your ideas and put you in front of potential buyers. (With almost zero promotion, one of my decks on Slideshare has garnered more than 9,000 views.)
Start using Pinterest. I admit that when I first saw Pinterest, I judged it to be a cute site for people who like sexy shoes and decorating “porn.” But now that I've started pinning, I've changed my mind completely. When you add a photo to your blog post, pin the photo with a link back to the post. Create a relevant Pinterest board title and include your pinned post. I'm amazed at how much of my blog traffic is now coming from my Pinterest boards.
Publish a screencast. If you want to show your audience how to do something, why not make a screencast? You can take screen shots in sequence, or capture the live motion with a tool like Camtasia. Add an audio track with a snappy narration and you’ve created a useful, shareable piece of content without spending a lot of money.
Create a quick video. I know what you're thinking: A quick video? Seriously? Yes, seriously. The most difficult aspect of video is distilling your message down into as few words as possible. As a communicator, this probably comes fairly easy to you, right? Add some photos or graphs and put it all together with a tool like Animoto. Here's an example I created recently to tell my own company story.
Let's face it. Humans love to look at pictures. So satisfy their needs while telling your organization's story visually.
If you need help creating quick and painless visual stories for your organization, let's talk.
Happy Friday the 13th! You’re not superstitious, are you?
Here is my totally subjective list of interesting communications-related items spotted online in the past week.
Caine’s Arcade Many of us were totally charmed by this video. Watch as an amazing young man’s dream comes true, thanks to a thoughtful new friend and social media. (Bonus: More than $125,000 has been raised for a scholarship fund for Caine.)
Music at the heart This video demonstrates the powerful influence of music on memory, emotion and behaviour. You can’t help smiling as this senior citizen comes alive upon hearing his favourite tune.
New app of the week Ah, we iPhone users love our new apps. This week I grabbed Nightcap, but I haven’t had time to put it through its paces. It’s supposed to vastly improve low-light photography and give you control of shutter speed, admittedly a weakness of the iPhone camera.
How to record a phone call Here’s my video on how to record a phone call for a podcast, customer testimonial or other use.
Here is my totally subjective collection of interesting communications-related stories in the past week. I’m not covering the biggies that we’ve all seen. Instead, I’ve tried to find some gems you may have missed.
The Bensonhurst Spelling Bee This hilarious video spoke to me on so many levels. I grew up in a mostly Italian neighbourhood in Astoria, Queens, New York, and was my school spelling bee champ in sixth grade. I hope you enjoy this playful send-up as much as I did.
How leaders can inspire action through storytelling Here is a wonderful example in Forbes magazine of using a compelling story to spark action. The example relates to a charity movement, but many of the principles could apply more broadly to business.
Seven ways to become a masterful storyteller Can you tell that I love the topic of storytelling? Here’s a nice practical post from Ragan.com.
Are you reinforcing your social media content? This post by Christopher S. Penn appealed to me this week because I realized that more traffic was coming to my blog via LinkedIn than any other source, so I decided to focus more on my LinkedIn updates. You may not want to go as tech-heavy as Chris, but you will definitely learn from him in this post. (Tip: Subscribe to his newsletter for more great tips.)
Content marketing and social media go together like peanut butter and jam. You see, when you go to the trouble of creating great content, there are two ways people can find it: (a) search, whether organic or paid (b) sharing, by you or others.
Let’s focus on (b). After you write an article or blog post for your site, it’s important to get it in front of your customers and prospects. You might follow steps like this:
Tweet a link to the blog post
Post an update to LinkedIn with a link to the blog post
Publish an item to GooglePlus with a link to the blog post
Share the blog post on your company Facebook page or your personal page or both
Pin the item to Pinterest, if it has a visual aspect
You might also add a line to your email signature with a teaser about the blog post and a link to it. Of course you’ll refer to it in your newsletter too.
If your post or article is relevant and well crafted, chances are that others will share it with their friends and followers. And so the conversation will continue and more people will discover your business. Perhaps they’ll subscribe to your feeds or sign up to get your newsletter.
In the same vein, content marketing solves one of the problems many businesses experience around their social media presence: “We are on Twitter and GooglePlus and so on, but what are we going to say?” The answer is content marketing: You are going to publish meaningful content that’s relevant to your audience, and you’re going to share it on your social media platforms. Think of it as a cycle – a cycle that gains attention and potential business.
Of course you don’t want your social media accounts to look like advertising, so don’t let them become push-only platforms. Be sure to engage with your readers, to ask questions, to answer questions, and to promote the work of others in your network and beyond.
Do you have any tips to share about the links between content marketing and social media?
Visit the Trafalgar Communications website for information about how we can help your organization to tell its story through traditional and new media.
How do you read Twitter updates? I’m apt to pop into TweetDeck in the early morning, at lunchtime and again in the evening. Sometimes, especially when I’m accessing Twitter on my iPhone, I’ll see an interesting item that I just don’t have time to click through and read.
Packrati to the rescue! This handy little site lets you set up an account that will bookmark Twitter links that you have marked as favorites. Packrati can save the links to Delicious, Read It Later, Instapaper, Diigo and several other services.
Here’s how it works. Suppose I see a brilliant tweet that links to a long blog post or article. I don’t have time to read it now, but I don’t want to forget about it. I’ll mark it as a “favorite” on Twitter, and then Packrati automatically adds the item to my Delicious account, tagged “packrati.” When I have time later, I go into my Delicious bookmarks, and read the item. I may decide then to add my own Delicious tags to it.
Give Packrati a try! For me, it’s become an integral part of my content curation efforts.
Visit the Trafalgar Communications website for information about how we can help your organization to tell its story through traditional and new media.
No matter how much client work I do in a given week, I always find time to read and save interesting content that I find via my RSS feeds, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Paper.li and now Pinterest, among other sources.
I thought I’d start curating some of this material for you each Friday. So here goes: A totally biased list of some of the most interesting communications-related content I’ve found on the Web this week.
10 changes to Facebook you need to know about It’s a challenge to keep up with Facebook’s myriad changes. Here’s a good outline of what you need to know about the most recent updates.
Five insanely simple ways to make your next presentation sizzle I always learn something from posts about presentations, or else am reminded of what I thought I knew but don’t always practice. Here’s a nice quick list of things to do to please your audience and meet your speaking goals. On a related note, please check out the Trafcom News Podcast interview I did with Shel Israel, author of the new book, Stellar Presentations.
A sweet business story I’m a sucker for these kinds of things, and love reading about the provenance of products I buy. Here’s a lovely example of storytelling about a product.
Why Pinterest is not the next big thing for your business Everyone’s in a lather about Pinterest. Yes, it’s new and it’s fun but is it truly the be all and the end all for business communications? John Jantsch reminds us to calm down.
Speaking of Pinterest Although, like John Jantsch, I don’t think Pinterest is the best thing ever invented in the history of the world, I’m exploring ways of using this tool. Recently I’ve joined a pinboard devoted to podcasting, thanks to Daniel Lewis. What do you think?
Top tips for a great video meeting More of us are meeting via video these days, whether it’s Skype or GooglePlus Hangouts. Follow these tips for a better online meeting experience. I would add two things: Be sure your camera is positioned in front of your face, not looking up your nose! And be aware of what's in the background. No one wants to see your laundry pile.
Why an optimized content strategy is crucial for social search Social search is changing the way we find information online, and publishers of content need to take this into account. Here’s some advice on ensuring that your content is optimized. You might also want to check out my recent series of posts on content marketing.
Top 100 first-world problems Let’s end with a laugh. This well-produced video reminds us to keep things in perspective, and to be grateful for the lifestyle we enjoy in the developed world.
I love this infographic from Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger, on how to come up with fresh content for your blog. Many of the tips could also be applied to podcasts and other multimedia.
