Infographic by PPC Blog

A lot of organizations have jumped on the Facebook thing. Some have done a really nice job, others: not so much! There needs to be a strategic plan for whatever you’re doing with regard to electronic communications. As I’ve said before, it doesn’t have to be much, but there has to be something.

A Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media presence that an organization has taken on, and doesn’t listen to, watch or update can be hugely problematic for the communicator. In the best case you’ve created something that demonstrates that you’re not able to follow-through with what you started and it becomes a ghost ship, in the worst case, you get haters using your platform to talk smack about your organization.

If you’re going to start with social media, start small, start with something you can manage with the staff you have. Social media and the maintenance of it takes a hell of a lot of time, real labor and quick-mindedness is involved. For instance, if somebody posts a negative comment, say on your Facebook page, do you have to go through four levels of approvals to respond, do you just delete the nay-sayer’s post, do you just let it go and do nothing, or does your quick-minded social media specialist post a rebuttal, from memory, on message, because they’re just that good ( P.S. They have to be that good, this can’t just be some college nitwit who’s good with the interwebz). Each of these situations have their own specific punishments and rewards, generally dictated by where your organization stands, and how your organization wants to be considered, as well as the way it’s position – Are you a company of the people for people, are you positioned for your service, or as a no BS, brass tacks kind of outfit who wouldn’t flinch at a hastily worded jab at anyone who dare defy you?

It’s not just a Facebook page, or a Twitter feed, it’s an extension of your brand and who you are. Before you go out there know you are, don’t be afraid to communicate it! These are the folks who are thriving with social media today.

This article presents a perspective that I’ve come up against personally and professionally, and it’s often the reality just beyond the hype. Blogs take a lot of work and dedication. I’ve started a half-dozen blogs, only to get bored, and have them turn into ghost ships, myself. In fact, I’ve had the idea for this blog for three or more years, but I knew I wasn’t ready so I waited. I’ve had clients, numerous clients, who’ve wanted blogs, and I inform them about what’s involved with doing a blog and getting it out there, but after a while, the inspiration dries up or the sense of urgency that created the blog dissipates — ghost ship.

I don’t think that this is a reflection of the medium. The blog is a very powerful thing. Not everyone is going to be a Seth Godin, or Michael Arrington. However, that shouldn’t deter anyone from giving it a shot. The beautiful thing about the Web is that we have this tool for communicating to everyone that’s open to everyone; that’s a profund reality! With the openess, though, there will be some (Read: many) who get involved and can’t keep it going. That’s Ok, give it a shot. The next hot blog could be anecdotes from a rural plumber who always wanted to be a writer and shares stories of his life’s experiences, or the rants of house wife driven insane by ordinary madness, and uses the blog as a way to vent, and tell amusing stories.

Therefore, a few tips for a successful blog (whether professional or personal) might be:

1. Express yourself.
2. Do it because you want to do it, not as a means to an end (i.e. a book deal, praise, because everyone else is, etc…)
3. Be genuine; people will see disengenuousness a mile away and never come back…
4. Do these things, do them fully, and don’t put a time line on it… the universe and the Web works on its own time. If you’re doing items #1-3, then just doing those will be enough, allowing for item #4 to unfold on it’s own…

Hopefully, these tips will help you avoid the ghost ship, and give you a better idea of what’s involved with a blog before you get started.

Don’t get me wrong I think that it’s important to have search engine optimized Web sites, but sometimes, it’s a little much. Content is, and always, will be king! Write good content, and people will read it, work to optimize your site with crappy content, and you’ll get one time visitors who don’t bother to come back. This makes sense if you’re building link farms to game the Google Ad system, but otherwise I would say emphasize the content.

I, for one, wish I could write long, thoughtful, and well-researched pieces of content like the folks over at CopyBlogger or Future Buzz, but my mind just doesn’t work like that. Instead, I get these little nuggets of insight that I want to share. That’s my style, and like any style, it’s my hope that I can develop a readership of folks who like to read these brief thoughts, and hopefully they will provoke some further discussion.

Take away: Focus on developing solid content, and with the increase in readers and linking come the emphasis on certain keywords in your content – I call this the El Naturale SEO, because it’s happening naturally, through a natural process of attention and interest – this is the best!

I’ve been doing this blog on here for less than a year, and to read some of the points on here that Adam makes is great for not just myself, but for anyone looking to start a blog, or looking to integrate blogs into their work or communications plans.

What is social media?

Social media is any web tools that allows groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content (examples are YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc…)

Social media is particularly valuable for entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters in-general, I’m thinking artists – painters, musicians and the like, because it gives them low cost, high value, far reaching exposure for whatever they’re doing. As I write more about the social media value, I’ll cover some of these. For starters, I would say see this post on Twitter or items tagged with social media on this blog. Though, I’ll be covering stuff more in-depth, and high level, alike as I develop this feature of the blog.

Scientists, universities, and businesses alike are all investigating sustainable means for producing energy and/or just making less expensive and less environmentally toxic means of transport. However, on all accounts we’re a long way from the energy silver bullet. What’s happened because of this is that local has become the new exotic. As we move towards this emphasis on local goods and services, including locally grown food, locally made goods, local entertainment, stay-cations and the like, small business is faced with huge opportunity on the Web.

Historically only a precious small percentage of small, local, businesses have bothered with the most basic Web presence. The thing is as more and more folks are using iPhones, Blackberries, Twitter, Facebook, and Google to find family restaurants rather than national franchises, and small boutiques over big-box stores, or just trying to find something unique and different in their locale they’re turning to the Web. More and more, I’m telling small business owners and would-be small business owners to get their company online before you worry about the Yellow Pages and the like. Even a basic, professionally done Web presence is better than no Web presence at all, especially if you’re doing something truly local and truly unique to your community.

My initial reaction to this article was two-fold: First, what a great idea and second, this such an excellent example of a socially responsible Michigan firm doing their part to try and help those struggling in the Michigan economy.

However, what Oneupweb teaches here isn’t just about helping Michigan, but really it’s about outreach and social responsibility. As I said in my post here, the Web has always been social and it’s always been about sharing with others. It’s one thing to to do this only in the digital domain of the Web, from the comfort of one’s office or living room, such as I’m doing now, but it’s something else entirely to take this sharing and exchange on the road to meet the man on the street where he lives. Very inspiring.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

To be sure, this is a bold statement, not because I’m a super Twitter user, though I did crack 100 followers yesterday (not much in the scope of @Oprah or @APlusK (Ashton Kutcher)), but because this statement positions itself to be some kind of pronouncement about Twitter as a communication tool. Twitter, or any other Web/electronic communications vehicle is temporal at best, and subject to the natural evolution that has affected communication methods since the dawn of the Web.

With the Web communication approaches are always changing – Usenet, BBS Systems, and Listservs were improved upon by OneList, eGroups and later Yahoo, Google Groups and AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo and Alta Vista informed Google, which Google improved on. AOL Instant Messenger laid the ground work for ICQ, and Facebook, or semantically different, but no different really, Twitter and micro-blogging. Live Journal laid the groundwork for blogging and MySpace which laid the ground work for Facebook, and Facebook was informed by Twitter when they integrated a Twitter-esque piece into Facebook, which actually was more reminiscent of AOL Instant Messenger status messages… Anyway, you get the point.

Facebook, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. Twitter, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. This is the evolution of sharing ideas, information and our lives in our community, while the definition of community, and what it means to communicate with that community, continues to change.

The bone that I really have to pick with IABC’s press release is their choice of wording in the title. Many communicators don’t get Twitter especially in the context of business. So in some ways this title, from a leading communications organization creates the appearance that they’ve washed their hands of the value that Twitter could add to communications, and the subtext is that communicators should, too… Maybe that’s unintentional, but from my perspective that’s how it comes off.

I’m assuming that IABC considers themselves to be experts in communications, as it is they’re business and issuing this press release could support this theory to some, but truly, if they were they would understand the history and context of not just Twitter but the history of communicating on the Web in general and fold some of that history, if only a couple paragraphs, into the release. They didn’t, though…

Twitter is a tool, and tools become outmoded and improved upon. Anybody trying to harness the power of these tools needs to recognize their temporal nature. Neither Twitter nor Facebook are here to stay in their current form; if they stayed in their current form they wouldn’t exist at all in ten years… MySpace stuck to their “current form” for too long and they’re foundering because of it, replaced by Facebook; same with Yahoo! who were improved upon so long ago by Google that they’ve become the de facto cautionary tale of why you have to change (Read: evolve) or die.