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Blog by Kevin O'Keefe, "Real Lawyers Have Blogs," on the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, and baseball, February 23, 2014. O'Keefe reviews a study by Gerry Moran on using social media to teach, not to sell. Other key points that O'Keefe makes: Build a large social network of people modeled after your customers and their influencers. 75% of B2B decision makers use social media to learn. (wonder where this stat comes from?) Pass on valuable information. Don't use your social media and networking channels to promote yourself. You want to be known for handing out knowledge and not brochures. Use social so that people will want to visit with you in person. 73% of customers are willing to engage with you on social media, so the opportunity is there. Use social media to teach, not sell. Selling is best done face-to-face. However, Social Media Today reports B2B buyers look at an average of over 10 digital resources before ever making a purchase. Since customers need to learn before they buy, use this opportunity on social media to connect. Teach and connect with today's technology. Connect and get on the radar of your customers and potential networks by retweeting, sharing, commenting and favoriting others' content. Develop Insights. Before you teach and connect with your customers, you need to listen to the customer and their customers. Social is an excellent listening tool. Be a publisher. In addition to curating and passing on the great content to your network, create your own assets on a blog. Organizations who blog get clients. Later Excerpt: Over the years LexBlog as been all about helping lawyers understand how to use the Internet in a real and effective fashion so as to grow their practices. By sharing information from third parties along our own insight via blogs and other social media we established a reputation as trusted advisors. Even when I reach out to meet with lawyers and law firms I have never met f

Blog post by Gerry Moran, 3.9.13, at Marketing Think on how to calculate your Facebook and Twitter success Excerpt for how B2B brands need to use social media: Amplify: Increase the awareness of the brand story and solutions. Engage: Drive customer and prospect engagement with related content. Convert: Provide a way for the customer to convert interest after they become aware and have consumed enough content to move to the next step in the buying journey. To help you understand if you are reaching your goal, it is important for you to understand the right questions to ask to get the right social media measurement. Marketers need to map key social metrics to strategic questions vs. just measuring and blindly reporting how a channel performs.

Very interesting Slideshare on finding the juicy problems of your customers that they will pay you to help solve. Should go into our marketing resource group. Offers a leanstartup validation board from customer hypothesis to problem hypothesis to solution hypothesis to design experiment (get out of the building) to validate what you plan to offer.

""Women small business owners are not just more optimistic about their own businesses, they're also more bullish about the prospects for female entrepreneurs who are just starting out," said Billie Dragoo, national board chairwoman of the National Association of Women Business Owners. "With a positive outlook and strong entrepreneurial spirit, women business owners continue to be a driving force of our economy." The research also gauged how female business owners are using social media to help grow their companies. While 85 percent of the women surveyed believe social media is important for building customer relationships, only 67 percent currently use social media to connect with customers. The study found that just 25 percent of female business owners are posting on social media at least once a day, with 23 percent rarely posting at all. When they do use social media, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube are the preferred platforms."

Blog post by Sylvia Browder at the Story Exchange--where women mean business. "Challenge 2: Undefined Niche To Niche or Not to Niche…that is the question. What is a niche? A niche business is one that targets a very specific group of people with specific shared interest. A business with an undefined niche is like a ship sailing in shallow water. By creating a niche business allows you to market to your ideal clients. For example, if you were a behavioral psychologist targeting teens, you would market your services in places where parents are likely to find out about you; such as advertising in parent magazines, providing resources to local middle and high schools or joining organizations geared towards parents. Solution: By understanding who and where your ideal customers are; it is easy to craft a marketing plan to target them. Here are three easy ways to target your potential clients: * Improve your website's SEO with specific key words * Generate exposure locally and virtually with professional speaking, seminars or publishing a book or articles. * Craft a clear message that speak at the heart of your customer " Challenge 4: No Social Media Plan Random tweets and meandering Facebook posts will result in a lot of time devoted to zero results. Before making another useless post, sit down with pen and paper and make a list of what you want to achieve from social media. To which social media do you belong? What are some social media marketing strategies that you have noticed from other companies? What do you have that will offer value? You may find that your company is spread a little too thin across the social media spectrum. Quality truly is superior to quantity in this respect. Solution: Create a social media marketing plan and stay the long haul. Establishing a strong presence can be a very time consuming process. It is unwise to expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

Talia Shani from 2010, Kissmetrics, writes about tools that enhance the Twitter reach: bitly, Buffer for scheduling and spreading out tweets, Cotweet for marketing, Hootsuite for managing multiple social media, scheduling tweets for later release, tracking results, and multiple collaborators. Paper.li for curating tweets into newspaper format. SocialOomph for scheduling tweets, tracking keywords, extending Twitter profile, and more. Triberr is an invite only community of like-minded bloggers. Tweetdeck--similar to hootSuite but now part of Twitter. Twitterfeed uses RSS feeds to automatically share your blog and others every time there is an update to them. Visibli shares any links you want along with custom share bar and ability to customize.

Susan Greene, a freelance writer and editor of web sites and articles, describes how creating a personal connection with potential customers is crucial on your About Us page. Tell stories, connect with visitors, be creative.

Another About Us page article

Great talk on the new management, putting employees first so they can do the best job they can for customers. This includes employees rating their managers up to their CEO's, being able to outsource the boring aspects of their work, make decisions about how to do better. Knowledge technology and the web has changed the competitive nature of business, and a new model of competition is developing and will develop. The web has democratized and made management structures obsolete.

Great talk on the new management, putting employees first so they can do the best job they can for customers. This includes employees rating their managers up to their CEO's, being able to outsource the boring aspects of their work, make decisions about how to do better. Knowledge technology and the web has changed the competitive nature of business, and a new model of competition is developing and will develop. The web has democratized and made management structures obsolete.

LA Times article by Matt Pearce, January 20, 2013 on infrequent Office MAx customer who received a solicitation from Office Max with his name on it followed, by "Daughter Killed in Car Crash." How did the company get the information and why did it appear on the envelope because the recipient had lost his daughter in a car crash a year before?

#6 in a series on Big Data in Spiegel Online

interesting history of employee education at IBM including an early commitment to train college educated women in the 1920s

Customer concierge for Delighted blog post, what creation is about

Blog post by Lisa Lane early this month (November 2012 explaining to another online instructor how she built a system for aggregating students' blog posts that may be relevant to WLStudio series and "sharing" activities? She uses FeedWordPress. Excerpt: "Participants set up their own blog wherever. Then I need to get the feeds from those blogs into the Pedagogy First! aggregated blog, using FeedWordPress. I use the Add Link widget (yes, I know it's old) so participants can add their own, and have provided more extensive instructions for them about blogs and feeds. In particular, we want people who post on many subjects to not only use the "potcert" tags for their posts, but use the feed for that tag only. This is so only their class-related posts show up on the class blog. The back end of this process is a little more complicated. When participants enter their information in Add Link, it goes directly into the Blogroll. The Blogroll is what feeds into FeedWordPress as a default. I customize the titles of feeds and the names of participants to use their real names for everything. I change the titles of feeds by going into FWP's Syndication area and using Feeds & Updates. Using the drop down menu to bring up a particular blog, I change the title and click manual control so it doesn't revert back the next time the feed updates. When I do this, it seems to update automatically in the Links area. Then I go to Users and make sure their names are their full names by editing them individually."

WordPress designer of courses, communities, etc. Endorsed by Nancy White. 1/2013 May be someone we should consider for future customization?

blog post on using LinkedIn for career development Tips 1. create a keyword-heavy profile title 2. Join your college alumni groups 3. Never send LinkedIn invites unedited--always customize 4. Do "small goods" for your LinkedIn contacts

Blog post by Barbra Gago, 9.14.12, on importance of individual information consumption/curation. Excerpt: "The future of knowledge management is about letting employees curate their own information consumption, empowering them to be in charge of their own learning and professional development. Conversations need to be indexed, but so do updates from processes, customer interactions, and news about related projects. External data needs to be brought in to enhance internal data, and people need to be able to act in real-time-not ask 5 different people for a file or wait until tomorrow because their manager is half-way across the world."

This framework reminds of what we need to use for our Story Booth-- Seth Godin's Icarus Sessions "The rules are simple The Icarus Sessions are a challenging new way to bring your art forward. Not to make a sales pitch, not to get customers or patrons, but to find the courage to stand up and say, "here, I made this." You can attend a session without presenting, of course. A presentation at an Icarus Session is 140 seconds long. You can go shorter, but not a second longer. You can use slides, or handouts, or even better, just bring your enthusiasm. The assignment: Tell the group about your art. What have you created? What frightened you? What matters? Not a pitch. An act of brave vulnerability. I made this. It scared me. This might not work. Here's how it changed me. What do you think?"

Blog post by Chris Collison, , on why organizations don't value implementing in a more systematic way the documented learning. "In my experience, many organisations sometimes treat lessons learned like they are an end in themselves - as though the value has to remain in the document - rather than where possible leading to actions which embody the learning. These actions might include updating a process, policy, standard or system has been updated to incorporate the learning, which removes the need to promote the lessons or recommendations to future teams. So why do some organisations settle for a pile of lessons rather than a set of improvements? Some possibilities: It's much easier to write a document than see a change through to completion. It's too difficult to find the owner of the process which needs changing. I'm measured on how many lessons our project captures. We have invested in customizing SharePoint to capture lessons learned documents, and need to show that we're using it. Although I wrote the recommendation, I'm not 100% confident that we should change the process for everyone."

Techcrunch.com article on how Mightybell is morphing into a more collaborative space from its original design and focus, which was creating step-by-step private guides for anything. Users create spaces, and "Users in these spaces can post photos, write a note, chat with others via a chat functionality, comment, like an interaction and more. Users can also customize a particular collection and create a these around their space."

More on Mightybell

video (18 minutes) by Clay Johnson, February 2012, hyping his book The Information Diet. Goes to food analogies again and again--pizza tastes better than broccoli--and abundance of entertainment, affirmation, and fear is secret pact between customer and media producers online. What is it that people want? What we tell them through our clicks and searches is that we want to be right acc: to Johnson. AP story--poll economic worries pose new snag for Obama. On Fox news, it says that Obama has big problem with white women. They changed headline and reduced story by 600 words, taking out everything positive about his work. They know that readers will read something negative about president. "Opinion tastes better than news." How AOL should make its editorial decisions--they want to spend no more than $84 on a piece of content. How they decide: traffic potential (using SEO to find out what people are searching for--no one is searching for Pentagon Papers or broccoli); bottom of list is editorial integrity because it is market inefficiency. Believes that we are living in land of info abundance where we want to be affirmed, not told the truth. SEOs complete the inquiry to present tabloid types of info that attract us and distract us and misinform us. Our clicks lead to poor information diets, a disease. Make a whole news movement, a slow news movement, demand that media change. We as readers need to upgrade. information over-consumption, not overload enable infoveganism--eat food, not too much, real food at bottom of food chain. 2. Use source material--show your work. 3. Let me pay you for ad free experience. 4. Content is not a commodity (for news producers)