ME...LIKE...BLOG...

Welcome to the new world, one in which spam blog comments have evolved. No more do you get the nonsense blobs of letters and numbers. Spammers figured out that most of us use anti-spam plug-ins like Akismet. Now we get intelligent spam, like this one on a blog that hasn’t been active in a while. The post in question was from a year ago, and a spammer saw it and thought, “I’m going to comment on that and get a link back to my ED drug/luxury watch/miracle diet pill website! And the best part is, I don’t even have to read the post!”

The post in question was announcing that the authors of a children’s book were going to be on an Internet talk show. The spam comment? “That’s great, I never thought about BLOG.3EHEALTHEDTOOLS.COM: We’re on The Authors Show! like that before.”

I’m guessing this is some sort of bot, and while it’s an improvement over the old spam comments, it’s still nonsense, it’s still spam — and it still won’t get your comment published.

I WANT MY FACEBOOK!

Have you heard? Facebook plans to start charging the $3.99 starting July 9, 2010! Join the group on Facebook called NO, I WILL NOT PAY $3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010! That will stop them, because we all know that online petitions are both highly effective and not a huge waste of your time and bandwidth.

See that? I promised myself I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s called sarcasm.

The Internet hoaxers have moved from email malware dissemination to Facebook hijacking. Groups like this commandeer your Facebook account and put out spam wall postings to everyone on your friend list with messages like ”Lisa, this is without doubt the hottest video ever! “

Facebook has repeatedly issued statements that they have no intention of charging members…their research tells them that no one would pay it, and they make a ton of cash from advertising. If no one’s on Facebook, no advertisers. No advertisers, no income. So don’t be suckered in.

Doing research for a client, I noticed a disturbing trend in which website copy is written in the third person, as if the doctor/therapist is talking to the family of the patient, or the insurance company of the patient — everybody but the patient him/herself. It’s as if the writer assumes patients are in a catatonic state and can’t be reached by Internet, so there’s no point in speaking to them.

But according to Google, about 4 million people per month search “mental health,” and they aren’t all relatives of the afflicted. Those people who are searching the web for treatment options for themselves, not to mention understanding and empathy, need to be spoken to directly.  What they need is less alienation, not more.

Therapeutic websites need to reach out and connect with sufferers. They need to do it by speaking directly to them in the second person. In second person, you’re writing to the reader. For example, You’re hurting. You need tools to get well. We can help. Let’s try to stop isolating people who need help and include them in the conversation.

Well, I’ll tell you how. Let’s start with there. How to remember it? There‘s opposite, here, is inside the word. So when you want to get to there, you start here. And then slap a T on the beginning of it. Simple, right?

They’re is easy too. It’s a contraction of they and are. The apostrophe stands in for the a in are. So when you’re trying to decide which of the three to use, just take a moment to think about what you’re saying — and go all cave-man-speak (the apostrophe hadn’t been invented yet, so there were no contractions).

Think of their as the crazy aunt your grandma kept locked in the attic –or Boo Radley, if you like –and remember that it just doesn’t make any sense, like much of the English language. But once you know the first two, this third oddball is easy.

So do your part to clean up the blogosphere and commit these three to memory.

"Tastes great!" "Less filling!"

After the recent Massachusetts election, some of my Facebook friends were bold enough to either celebrate Brown’s win or decry it as a harbinger of doom. One of these friends sparked a multi-page comment-on-comment debate among his own friends, and let me tell you, it got ugly.

I was interested to see how far it would go. In the semi-anonymous world of blog commenting, folks can get as rancorous and cruel as they want — after all, they’re prowling blogs of perceived enemies for the sole purpose of arguing (although most of it involves misspelled name-calling and not constructive discourse).

Well, it didn’t go as far as blog comments normally go. Is it because photos of the writers are visible right next to their snotty, self-righteous comments? Or could it be that the commenters share a mutual friend? Maybe it was both, but it’s important to remember that Facebook is social media, not anti-social media. Folks are there to have fun, visit with friends, share information. I say let’s keep it friendly, and if you feel you absolutely must set a friend of a friend straight, do it kindly. Don’t name-call. Don’t call him or her stupid…or evil.

Let’s keep Facebook civilized.

If you’re a dedicated Twitter user, meaning you tweet at least a couple of times a week, you’re keeping a pretty good log of what’s going on in your business and life, 140 characters at a time. But who has time to go back through the gigantic log of tweets swimming in the ether?

As it turns out, there’s an easy way to look at your old tweets without having to wade through other people’s. It’s called OldTweets, and all you have to do is enter your Twitter user name. Read about how here.

Not only do you have a record of the past, but you also have a good picture of your online persona. Take a good look at what you wrote and how you wrote it. Read your tweets and ask yourself these questions:

1. Overall, were you upbeat and positive, or were you whiny and petulant?
2. Did you write the same thing over and over, believing that, as with advertising “touches,” the audience needed to be shown the same message ten times before they acted on it?
3. Did you offer interesting insights, links and information, or did you only post short advertising messages about my business?
4. If you use humor in your tweets, did you use the same “punchline” more than once?

If you don’t like the answer to any of the above questions, resolve in the new year to use Twitter to its fullest advantage. Then next year, when you get back on OldTweets, you’ll see a more effective Twitter picture.

Yeah, it's got a hemi.

Lifrepeatedly banging door closed) No! No! No! NO!

I love Twitter.

Not because I can sit on my couch with my touch phone and tweet things like “sitting on my couch tweeting on my touch phone.” I love it because it’s making me a more effective writer. No, really.  I noticed this by accident when I was trying to fit an anecdote into 140 characters. Below is the story I had to tell.

My husband Andy was driving on 9-Mile Road, a dirt country road near his hometown. He was driving in his new car, which has a hemi, which, of course, means he was speeding. No one else was on the road except a cop, who hung a U-turn and pulled Andy over. The cop said, “Don’t you know what the speed limit is on this road?” and Andy said, “I thought it was forty-five.” The cop looked at him like he was insane and said, “If you thought it was forty-five, why were you doing seventy-one?”

That’s 482 characters, which amounts to 3.44 tweets. No good, so I started whacking away.

When you have only 140 characters, every word must count. You can’t mess around with unnecessary adjectives, filler words, etc. You have to distill your story down to its essence, to the core of what you’re trying to say without wasting your readers’ time. How great is that?

Here’s the resulting tweet:

Andy drives country road. Cop stops him. Says, “Know what the speed limit is?” “I thought it was 45.” “No wonder you were doing 71 then.”

137 characters. Made it with three to spare. True, it’s not Dostoevsky, but you get the point without me talking your ear off. Still not getting it? My brother just couldn’t wrap his mind around the whole Twitter thing, so I tweeted him this:

Tweets are like haikus

Easy to write, fun to read

Even morons can

]]> http://brainstormes.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/twitter-as-editing-coach/feed/ 0 brainstormes hemi http://brainstormes.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/youtube-for-entrepreneurs/ http://brainstormes.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/youtube-for-entrepreneurs/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:54:57 +0000 brainstormes http://brainstormes.wordpress.com/?p=151 ]]> Over the past decade, the Internet has become the fastest and easiest way to access or dispense information. One of the most popular Internet sites is YouTube, where videos with content of all kinds are posted. You can access videos for any and all topics of interest. Religion to politics. Cartoons to newscasts. Famous musicians to your next door neighbor singing karaoke. If you want your fifteen minutes of fame, post a video of yourself singing a song or performing a stunt and you can bet that, within a few days, hundreds to millions of people will have viewed it.

With YouTube being so accessible and popular, why wouldn’t you use it to promote your business? Part of the hold up often is that low-tech types fear it as an unknown. But if you can type, you can use YouTube.

So how do you get started? Do you use your home camcorder or rent a high tech video camera? Can you film something yourself or do you need a professional’s help? What should you film? Can you talk over the video while it’s rolling? If you want to advertise on YouTube, what do you need to know? The great news is that not only is it much easier than it looks, but it’s also completely up to you to determine what you film and how you film it. Here are some tips that you can use when promoting your business on YouTube:

First, set up your very own YouTube channel. After you’ve signed up for your free account on YouTube and signed in, you can upload your videos (shorter than ten minutes in length) and you’ll have a special URL for each video you upload. You’ll now want to include your YouTube channel URL on all written and virtual material related to your business — business cards, flyers, brochures, calendars, etc. Be sure it’s prominently displayed in your email signature and on your website too.

Be creative. For instance, if you’re a realtor, don’t just show yourself on video talking about one of your listing properties. When buying a home, it gets tedious to continue looking at home after home hearing the same speech again and again. If you want potential buyers to get excited about your listings, make a video of the inside of the home. Also include footage of the neighborhood, nearby shopping areas, and landmarks that would entice buyers.

As you film the inside of a home, overdub your voice describing to prospective buyers the variety of different things they can do with rooms of the house, such as using a spare room as a guest room, office, or playroom. Saying these ideas out loud can spark new ideas in the mind of the buyer that they perhaps had not thought of. Picture yourself buying the home you’re filming and talk about aspects of the house that would entice you as a buyer.

Although millions of people visit YouTube daily, your video won’t get much notoriety unless you let people know that you have a video up. Susan Boyle became an overnight phenomenon on YouTube not because she posted a video of herself singing, but because one person watched it and told his friends who told their friends who told their friends until over one million people had seen the video of her singing. Once your video is on YouTube, post an ad about it on Craigslist, post it as your status on Facebook, post a bulletin about it on MySpace, and be sure to put a link on your Twitter page. Within days, you too could be as famous as Susan Boyle. Okay, probably not, but people will be watching your video.

Use what you already have access to. Maybe one of the best things about YouTube is that posting videos on it is free. That’s right—absolutely free. Use it because you can. If you get a bit creative, you can manage to get a high-quality video that shows off homes you’re selling for thousands to view without using a penny of your own money. If you own a video camera, use it. If you don’t own one, borrow one from a friend. Don’t rent an expensive camera—the quality won’t be different enough to matter.

Use video footage of several of your listings while you use your overdubbed voice answering frequently asked questions. That way, you are completing two tasks at once by audibly answering questions and visually enticing the viewer. Make sure that at least once your contact information shows up on the video. Make sure that anyone who views this video knows immediately how to contact you. Post your email, website, phone number, address, and any other contact info that you think is pertinent. You want to interest your viewers enough to turn them into buyers.

Using YouTube can turn your business into a gold mine if you use it to your advantage.

The most compelling reason to use social networking is cost: there is none. You can set up an account on any of these sites for free, effectively giving you a multi-faceted marketing campaign for next to nothing (next to nothing because the time you spend working on your social networking accounts is very valuable, of course).

One thing to keep in mind is that while industry-specific social networking sites are great, they only keep you in front of peers, not prospects, and that’s where you want to spend your time – in front of prospects.

So how can you use this phenomenon to its fullest? Start by getting on to the various sites and looking around. This is your research phase. Check out how the pages look, what the culture is like, how others are using it, etc. Really dig into it and jot down notes about what you might do on each. Next set up some accounts – no more than three to start out. You don’t want to end up spending all your time on these sites. It can happen – many people find these sites incredibly addictive.

Now you’ll want to formulate your goals for social networking and devise your strategy based on these goals. Don’t just go off willy-nilly and start setting up accounts. If you’re unsure how you can use these sites to your advantage, check out some how-to books on the subject.

Next, using the sites’ contact feature, get in touch with past and present clients and ask them to add you to their friends or contacts list. This in itself will get you connected to exponentially more people than you ever imagined. Adding yourself to a circle of contacts, each of whom have their own circle of contacts adds up quickly.

Next, be sure to use photos on your pages to add to visual appeal. If you’re a blogger or a podcaster, be sure to add your RSS feed to your pages so that all visitors can access your feeds. If you don’t blog or podcast, think about starting. It will give that many more facets of information – and therefore interest – to your pages.

If the site allows, add links to your listed properties so that visitors can see what you have to offer. If you have video, be sure to give access to it to increase interest.

Last but not least, be careful what you post. It’s becoming clearer all the time that the Internet can be a very efficient form of professional suicide. A few hints (these may seem painfully obvious, but you’d be surprised): never bash the competition. Never use profanity. Don’t get too personal – it’s okay to talk about your cats, but don’t vent about your marital woes. Always be professional. Always be courteous. Always be helpful, because in the social networking universe, you’ll get as good as you give.

Have fun and let your personality come through. This is a great way for prospects to get a feel for who you are and how you do business.