Mashable Archives - AHA Creative Strategies

Social Media is NOT a Quick Hit

As many regular AHA blog readers know, we are big fans of Brian Solis. He is a smart guy who “gets” social media and is able to explain it in a straightforward manner in a business context. If you haven’t discovered Brian, read his book Engage or keep up with his blog. The information he shares is valuable and there are few people in the social media world, in my opinion, who can clearly explain the how to of both strategy and execution – and the why behind it. He is a thought leader and he happens to have the ability to inspire and move you to action.

Brian recently wrote 14 Best Practices for Long-Term Social Media Success, which appeared on Mashable. It is well worth a read. The 14 best practices put forward in this piece are gold; they are points that we drive home over and over again with clients. If you want to engage in social media for the long-term and create positive relationships with your community – read this blog post.

Lists Make Life Easier

You have to love lists. I love this one from Brian Solis on Mashable.com for a couple of reasons:

It’s a great review of 21 rules for social media engagement and
This list lets me keep my commitment to an active blog and provides enough great content that I can now go have a coffee and catch up on emails.

Check out why I need the coffee and follow my travels through New Zealand as I blog on behalf of Tourism New Zealand here. Two more New Zealand blog posts will be up today.

Communicating Using Only Social Media

There is an interesting piece in Mashable about @SilentClark, who has decided to remain silent for a month. He’s only communicating through social media as a fundraising effort. It’s an interesting approach and one that is breaking through the clutter to generate some media attention for @SilentClark.

Can Big Media Control Google Content?

TechCrunch has a very interesting article entitled “The Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers.” It’s well worth a read.

The article discusses how some large media organizations are accusing Google of “stealing” their copyrighted content. It also links to another TechCrunch post about the Associated Press declaring that it will now police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.”

There is a huge challenge in trying to police the Internet and, while I am not a copyright expert, it seems to me that some of these large media conglomerates are spending an awful lot of time, energy and money on trying to control the Internet instead of focusing on creating a new, interactive and collaborative business model.

I read a lot of blogs, follow a lot of people (but not too many!) on Twitter, spend time on Facebook, use Google, and spend far too much time on Mashable. From my perspective, content creators online are quick to credit and to link to others – including media outlets. Doesn’t this drive traffic to the media sites? Isn’t that a good thing? And – according to the TechCrunch article – there is a way for these big media moguls to stop Google from listing their content and it’s just one line of programming. So why don’t they…because they WANT people to find the news and click that link. It seems like they want to have their cake and eat it too.

One of the few “grown ups” in journalism that I think really “gets it” and is investigating how journalism and the Internet can create a mutually beneficial relationship is Kirk LaPointe of The Vancouver Sun. His blog is also worth following.

I love journalism. I grew up at Maclean’s and I have a huge respect for how the mind of a journalist works. We, as a society, need journalists to ask the tough questions, to research and fact check, to make complex subjects more understandable to those of us who are not experts in the field, and to bring perspective and balance to an issue. In my opinion, journalists are an important part of the fabric of our society. It’s not the journalists doing this…it’s the big business that has been behind the media for all these years.

The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and according to a blog post by Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, he says that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will speak to them. That will be an interesting discussion.

This is an interesting time. I hope the business of the big media companies doesn’t get in the way of true journalism and that the big dog media conglomerates can find a way to see the value of the Internet, bloggers and Google and the fact that this wide open approach to information, sharing and a global conversation is a really good thing. And if they put half as much energy into finding a way to make money from it as they do trying to control it, their world would be much less stressful.

Some Social Media Tools

Today’s blog post is a list of a few of the social media tools we like to monitor for ourselves and for our clients. These may help you navigate through the social media sites and weed through the hundreds of different tools in the area to figure out ways to increase business and/or open conversations with your customers/stakeholders.

Mashable – The Social Media Guide – is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and social networking news. If you can only review one blog in the social media area, this one will keep you up-to-date with the latest and greatest.

Peter Shankman, the founder of The Geek Factory in New York, has developed an email/Twitter service called Help A Reporter Out (HARO). The email outreach is distributed three times a day, Monday – Friday, and offers 15 – 25 inquiries from reporters around North America looking for assistance with their stories. Go to his website and click on “Looking For Help A Reporter?” on the top right-hand corner to get on his email list. We saw Shankman speak at the Ragan Social Media Conference in Vegas last month. He is very interesting, engaging and really funny. HARO has changed things in how communicators connect with journalists – and it’s FREE! Shankman is also worth a look if you are searching for a keynote that is not typical.

Checkusernames.com is very useful. Simply type in your organization’s name in the “Check User Name” box and find out if your name (or your product’s name) is being used on various social media sites on the Internet. Over 100 social media sites are listed. This check leads into the topic of “brandjacking.” This is when a third party takes over another organization’s name or brand on social media sites and communicates with others for their own purposes.