Kin Lane

Managing My Brand

2008-09-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

So I am always working to get a better handle on how people view me and my personal brand. My brand consists of my profile, work experience, technologies, blog, pics and just the general image of how people view me personally and professionally online.

Maintaining my brand is a full time job and I do not always achieve the results I want. When people look for me they usually start at Google, so this is where I start.

The first two pages of Google search for my name is where I start. I have a unique brand so I dominate the first two pages. These are the sites where I come up on the these pages:

KinLane.com
Classroom 2.0
Blogger
Fast Company
Facebook
Naymz
Ning
Mashable
Flickr
Twitter
Businesscard2
Bebo
Plaxo
LookupAnyone

A couple other notable networks I feel are necessary to focus on even though they aren't in the top Google results:

MySpace
LinkedIn

Now these results fluctuate based upon Google's indexes and I add relevant sites from time to time to my maintenance list.

In an effort to maintain my brand I try to keep an active presence and profile on these social network and social media sites.

It is a full time job, I am working on a process and requirements needed to maintain each area so that I can have a systematic approach for each day and each week on what I should be doing.

I will publish the approach to each network and its maintenance as I formalize. This is a work in progress and I will keep updating this post with links to updated information.

2.0 Incubators and Pilot Projects

2008-09-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

I was just reading another great blog post 2.0 from Dion Hinchcliffe, he always delivers with his posts. This one is called Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know and has some critical 2.0 advice for decision makers in any company.

There is one tip that really stood out and rang true for me because it has been something I have battled it at the last two major companies / projects I was working on.

It is number 6 under Key Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategies:

Incubators and pilots projects can help create initial environments for success with 2.0 efforts. Too much contact with the traditional support environment of an existing, primarily 1.0 organization makes it hard for 2.0 efforts to succeed; everything gets done in the traditional way instead of the new ways that are required. The traditional tools, processes, and skills just aren't there or are just too slow and burdened with unnecessary overhead. Creating dedicated incubators that are designed to use the strengths of the organization while being isolated from its weaknesses can help. Incubators are at risk of becoming too isolated however, and won't inform or change the greater organization unless care is taken to roll the lessons and capability back in.

I have worked at several organizations to push for keeping 2.0 initiatives external in some way to keep them shielded from the pull of the 1.0 energy in the organization. I get positive reception to the idea, but then when it comes to actually splitting the project or initiative off and make it happen I get resistance.

I think their needs to be a balance between keeping the project somewhat on its own, but have the benefits of the primary organization and its strength.

I don't know how to create the perfect balance for this to work, but willing to continue exploring.

One Wiki to Bind them All

2008-09-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

I have been using wikis a lot lately to layout strategy for social media marketing campaigns. Social media marketing really overlaps into a lot of different areas, some are internal and some are external.

So we are designing what we call "online ecosystem" strategies for companies that help visualize all of their online virtual real estate.

Using a simple wiki you can layout all the elements of your online presence from your web site and blog to your Facebook and Youtube channels.

With this strategy a vision of your virtual real estate will come into focus and you can start bringing them under one unifying strategy that will help you maximize your presence on this valuable real estate you possess.

Crowd Sourcing of Projects

2008-09-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

I am seeing more and more talk of crowd sourcing of projects. I am reading more about virtual assistants and how they are changing how businesses operate and grow their business in this tough economy.

In my work with Ahren over at Social Media Squad I have assisted him in the development of crowd sourced strategies for social media marketing campaigns.

It is not without its problems, we have trouble finding quality and reliable talent sometimes....and we fall short of targeted goals from time to time.

However we are really dialing in some great process for crowd source execution of projects and individual tasks. I have worked with some serious talent that is working from home as a mother, student, or other capacities.

I am really eager to see where crowd sourcing and virtual assistants go in the mainstream employment and business human resource process.

Image Search

2008-09-06T18:30:00.001-07:00

When is image search going to move past what the picture is named and more about what the picture is about.

If the picture author named the picture appropriately then the picture search is valid...however most of the time the results are crap.

Makes it very frustrating to search for relative pictures.

Google Chrome is Added to My Tools

2008-09-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

I have used Google Chrome for the last few days, and I am happy with it. I still definitely can't live without my Firefox and its Add-Ons. However as a browser Google Chrome is very smooth and functional...I like it...it is an excellent start.

I added to my desktop shortcuts right next to Internet Explorer and Firefox.

I tend to use Firefox heavily for social media marketing campaign execution because of the add-ons and Google Platform integration, however I now have Google Chrome open instead of Internet Explorer to have my personal mail and other applications available.

I can definitely see where they are going with their platform direction. I will be setting up computers that I get for free and donate to non-profits and kids with Google OS and Google Chrome.....it is a great base.

Gmail Features

2008-09-05T18:57:00.001-07:00

I just want to say I really like how my Google Talk conversations show up right with all my Gmail email conversations as well.

Closer to how I have my SMS, Email, Chats, Phone Calls in one listing on my Blackberry.

In-House Social Media Marketing Campaign Strategy and Execution

2008-08-28T13:10:00.001-07:00

Lately we have been receiving a lot of requests for in-house social media marketing trainings. Clients are requesting that we come on site to assist them in developing a social media marketing campaign strategy.

The downturn in the economy has really hit small businesses and they are looking for new ways to find and retain customers. Social Media and Social Networks are a great avenue for finding new customers and maintaining the relationship with your existing customer base.

We are always working to provide new white papers, case studies and operations manuals for social media marketing campaigns in many different industries and conversations. These materials assist small business owners who may not be able to afford a full-blown social media marketing campaign.

Social Media Squad has been assisting businesses and organizations on-site with the following:

On-Site social media marketing strategy needs assessment and development
Social media marketing campaign setup, oversight process, and reporting / metrics
In-House social media marketing campaign training and monitoring
Custom social media marketing materials development

This new in-house social media program is really helping businesses cut cost and realize a social media marketing campaign for their business. They are able to utilize existing staff and resources as well as outside professional social media marketing resources to achieve their online goals.

Stay tuned for more blog posts, white papers, and programs on in-house social media marketing campaigns.

Reputation Management

2008-08-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I was Googling my name as I usually do on a Monday morning as part of my personal reputation management.

I noticed a social network profile I signed up for a few months back called Naymz has grown significantly in PageRank as well as made it to the first page on my Google Results.

So I figured I better work to complete my profile on it and make it as robust and relevant as possible to the conversation(s) I have positioned myself in.

Naymz looks like it has become a great social network profile to use in your online reputation management campaign.

Twitter Redirect

2008-08-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

I was just reading a Techcrunch blog post on the the local services market Workstir.com.

I went and signed up to be notified for the private beta.

Then after I signed up it gave me the following option on the thank you page:

In the meantime, if you could help us out by tweeting about Workstir, that would be amazing!

It gave me a twitter login, then took me to the twitter site.

Pretty smooth move, I just helped them in their social media marketing.

Facebook Takes Over As Number 1 Social Network

2008-08-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

Was just reading an article on the latest comScore report showing that Facebook has beaten out MySpace as the number one social networking site.

Facebook grew 153% last year and has 132 Million unique visitors.

MySpace better clean up its act!

Conversational Marketing Assessment

2008-08-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

As part of every social media marketing strategy that we build we conduct a conversational marketing assessment that evaluates the target arena we are considering entering as part of the social media marketing campaign.

We are noticing that pretty much every one of our clients has a very fragmented presence on the Internet and in the social media space.

This is not their fault it is the nature of technology and the Internet moving forward as a company grasps their goals in this space. Having a web site has become the norm, however what do you do with Facebook, Youtube, blogs, and other areas.

We are seeing that providing a conversational marketing assessment along with some sort of ecosystem visual showing where they exist is an excellent place to start.

The Power of Having a Voice

2008-08-12T22:14:00.001-07:00

Was just contemplating the power the Internet gives you in having a voice in this world. Within minutes you can have your own domain and site or blog up and being broadcasting to the world.

That is really powerful stuff.

Social Application and Social Widget Advertising Integration

2008-08-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

So was just having a random thoughts while designing a couple of social applications. I was thinking out you can build social applications that run on different platforms and work with a web service that allows various information to drive the application.

So why can't you start evolving advertising to be widget based and run more like application. They would feed from any demographic or targeting data you would have on the user and feed them an intelligent and interactive ad.

Just a random thought. Will someone please do it for me.

Social Media Marketing By The Numbers

2008-08-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a new presentation from Ahren over at Social Media Squad on Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Marketing By The Numbers

View SlideShare presentation (tags: social marketing marketing media social)

Social Media Marketing Campaign Overview and Direction

2008-08-11T21:14:00.001-07:00

There are so many opportunities on the Internet for marketing your business using social media, it is easy to get distracted and dilute your efforts. Having a strategy before you embark on social media marketing is extremely important, and revisiting this strategy regularly is critical to evolving and changing your approach so that you find success.

Focusing your campaign in one specific conversation or topic is critical to keeping your approach and target audience small enough so that you can find success and interact with them in a valuable way. Of course you can scale and grow into larger or more conversations as your resources and approach grow.

While monitoring and participating in a specific conversation it is very important to continually extract smaller topics that are dictated by the public at large that are involved in social media. Tracking these topics and trends can create a focus that can be used in production of content that you can put back out into the social web, adding value to the conversation while keeping it relevant to the conversation.

Keywords are vital building blocks of the Internet and are critical to providing contextual relevance for your site and content you put on the Internet. Having a master keyword list that reflects the online and social marketing of your web site is very important, you should have URL's or web addresses that reflect all primary pages or sections of your web site(s). These keyword / URL should be used consisently throughout your conversation participation, content creation, and activity streaming efforts, providing a focus for all traffic that will elevate the traffic and participation in your online real estate.

Operating your social media campaign from a standardize platform gives you a way to consistently monitor the conversation, build wisdom from that conversation, develop content, and present yourself to the public that can be scaled as your time and resources grow. A platform is critical to a solid approach to social media marketing.

Tracking various efforts of your social media marketing campaign and reporting on this data is essential to a successful campaign. Your campaign should evaluate campaign data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and using this to adjust your campaign in an agile way ensureing that you move and adjust as the conversation and online community changes. The online social internet today is a fast moving, ever changing world and you have to work hard to keep up.

Maintaining the overview of your campaign is key to keeping a 10,000 foot view of your efforts that will help you ensure success in your efforts.

Contact Plan
Conversation Focus
Keyword / Tag / URL Focus
Platform
Reporting
Reputation Management
Social Graph Building
Topic / Production Focus

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Social Networking in Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

2008-08-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

Social Networks are a phenomenon amongst the younger generation of Internet uses, and has continue to grow in popularity amongst old users as well. The next growth in social network sites and usage will be among business users with networks such as LinkedIn. The business usage of social networks is still in its infancy and many small and large companies are struggling to understand how to best leverage for their own uses as well as being able to sanction usage by their employees.

There are many large successful social network sites that give you access to millions of users in various demographic ranges. These large social networks provide a great opportunity for you business to setup and maintain a healthy presence and network with many users.

There are also many niche social networks popping up on the Internet today which cater to very specific demographic audience usually in a very focused topical area. These niche social network sites provide a very targeted opportunity for you to reach and interact with your audience.

Social Networks provide a wonderful opportunity for you to monitor and participate in the conversation, build knowledge and wisdom from that conversation and also stream your presence back out to your audience increasing the awareness of your company its products, services and brand.

Launch Social Network
Major Social Network Profile Management
Niche Social Network Profile management
Social Network Application Development

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Streaming and Syndicating Your Companies Activity

2008-08-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

Telling the world about your businesses products and service has been around since the beginning of time, how you do this has evolved with each generation of business. The latest evolution of this consists of streaming the activities of your company, its staff, and your marketing efforts online in the social media space.

There are many web 2.0 tools these days for getting your message out onto the social web. These tools include video sharing sites such as YouTube and Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. These tools provide you with the tools you need to stream or broadcast your companies products, services, and message to the world.

There are also many forms in which you can stream your message and activities to the public, it is valuable to stream your message and activities in as many different formats as you can so it is universally available. This means you have formal and informal text content, images, videos, slideshows, audio, and many other different variations of your message available.

Having a standard platform and message for streaming your activities and message to the public from is critical to presenting yourself to your audience through the platforms and tools they already use everyday. Streaming your message in many formats and through many platforms ensures your message and brand reaches users where they already participate in the conversation online, and increases their awareness of your products and services.

Audio Syndication
Blog Syndication
Bulk Email Communication
Image Syndication
Micro Blogging
Press Syndication
Social Bookmarking
Video Syndication
Web Site Syndication
Widget Deployment

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Content Creation for Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

2008-08-11T21:11:00.001-07:00

Social media content is at the heart of the web these days. Blogs, Video, Images, Audio, and other social media is what you use to listen in on the conversation and build an awareness of the audience and conversation that is taking place. To participate in the conversation you need to communicate through the creation of content as well. Content creation is as simple as posting comments on blogs or employing a complete production team to make videos each week.

Content creation starts with adhoc blog commenting and blog posting on your on blog. Then content creation grows when you start getting more organized and planning your content creation with a schedule, topical focus, keywords and url references, and much more planning and cohesiveness to your content creation.

No matter how big your team is, planning is crucial to a clear, coherent, and relevant content creation for your social media campaign. Your content is your contribution to the social web and represents your companies online presence, so make sure it reflects how you want people to see you.

Article
Audio
Blog
Image
Slideshow / Screencast
Video
Wiki

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Building Knowledge and Wisdom from the Conversation

2008-08-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

Knowledge and wisdom is the most important piece you can extract from any social media campaign. Not matter what type of strategy you implement, learning from the conversation is where you should focus and the rest will come with it.

Any amount of information can be obtained from many different conversational sources throughout your campaign, the following areas are typical conversational information sources; Blogs, Forums, Question and Answer Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Image Sharing Sites, Audio Sharing Sites, Search Engines.

All this information can be organized in many shapes and forms for you to access. The real question is how you analyze and evaluate this information for it to become knowledge and wisdom.

When monitoring the conversation it is easy to read what is said and evaluate from your perspective. The most valuable thing you can do in conversation monitoring throughout social media is to truly listen, and try and see the content from the public's point of view. The most limiting thing you can do is just to see things from your perspective.

As you conduct any social media campaign information should be identified as being valuable to your efforts and gathered using RSS, XML and other methods and organized in a searchable and easy to organize database for access in the future.

Your knowledge can be used to constantly steer your campaign, assist you in creating content, and help in driving your business and marketing decision throughout your business.

Audio Aggregation
Content Creation
Google Custom Search Engine
Google Docs
Google Notebook
Google Reader
Image Aggregation
Video Aggregation

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Conversation Monitoring and Participation

2008-08-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

On the Internet there is a conversation going on. Everyone is participating in this conversation, using Social media. Pick a topic, the environment, politics, Britney Spears or your product and people are talking about it. They talk about it using Blogs, on video using Youtube, with images using Flickr, and they share and interact with others using MySpace and other social networks.

This conversation happens everyday with or without your company being involved, people are talking about business their services, products and other trends as they see them. They talk about their every day lives and how these products, services and trends affect them. They do this in a very open and sometimes brutally honest way.

It is critical for every business to at a very least listen in on this conversation and see what people are saying. The conversation provides a realistic perspective of how your customer base views your industry, products, and services. The Internet gives us an opportunity to view this conversation in a way that focus groups and other traditional techniques do not provide.

Monitoring the conversation is a great way for your business to build an awareness of your customer base, trends, and what your competition is doing. Monitoring can be done by reading blogs, forums, question and answer sites, video sharing, and other social networks.

Reading and monitoring the conversation on daily basis will provide valuable information that your business can use through your business and marketing strategies. It will also give you an understanding of your audience and customers in a way that you may have never been able to before.

Audio Monitoring
Blog Monitoring
Contact Relationship
Forum Management
Question and Answer Monitoring
Search Engine Monitoring
Video Monitoring
Wiki Monitoring

Choose from our services above to get more details on specific social media marketing services areas.

Gmail is Down

2008-08-11T15:07:00.001-07:00

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Test Driving co.mments.com

2008-08-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

I was just test driving a new bookmarking and comment tracking tool called co.mments.com. I test drive these types of web services to see if there is a fit for use on social media marketing campaigns.

It is a pretty simple straightforward approach...which I like. I prefer applications to do one thing and do it well.

The tool has me bookmark my conversations as apposed to CoComment which is a firefox add-on and just tracks comments I place automatically.

Maybe the tool needs mature a little and get a firefox add-on and some other bells and whistles. Then I could possibly find a use for it. Until then CoComment does the trick.

Adding Forum Search to the Google Universal Stack

2008-08-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

I was doing some research tonight for a new social media marketing campaign tonight....I perform due diligence on a topic by running through the Google Search Toolbar...web,images, video and blogs.

Then I jump over to use BoardTracker and BoardReader to search through forums on different topics.

I think Google should go ahead and purchase one of these forum search engines and add it to their universal search stack.

Quick Launch RSS from Blog on Web Site

2008-07-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a quick way to get our Social Media Squad blog on the home page and feature area on our new Social Media Squad web site.

I wanted it to be a real-time feed, so I chose to go with a JavaScript RSS Feed, and I quickly found Feed2JS.

I was able to select:

URL of the RSS Feed
Number of items to display
Amount of RSS description to show
Show item posting date
Open links in a new window

I is nice to just find quality simple tools available out there in cyberspace that you can use to make your life easier...and get work done.