Central Perk

vineri, 14 septembrie 2012

Seth's Blog : Two seminars in October

Two seminars in October

First up, a free, small-group seminar in my office near New York City for leaders of non-profit organizations. Check out the details and apply via this form. The deadline for applications is next Friday, so don't delay.

I'll be hosting about fifteen leaders on October 15, and I apologize to those that I can't accomodate. Here's a recent review of the day-long office experience as well as a shorter review of a previous event, and a video from 2009.

Second, for entrepreneurs, freelancers and people working for organizations seeking to make a ruckus, a weekend seminar at the fabulous Helen Mills Theater in New York on Saturday and Sunday, October 20 and 21.

The Helen Mills is an intimate space with less than 125 seats, so there will be a lot of connection going on. Expect to be interacting with CEOs, up and comers and independent writers, impresarios and agents of change.

Sunday adds a new format, and I'm hoping you'll come for both days and see how far it can take you.

A weekend devoted to small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and anyone in a larger organization that wants to take responsibility and make something happen. The internet has opened doors, made connections and created leverage. The post-industrial age is here, and it brings with it the opportunity to carve a completely different path--for you, for your team and for your organization.

People who have attended previous events have left with new strategies, new tactics, and most important, new resolve on how to get through their Dip. Knowing that there are other people in the same place, and being able to establish lines of support can really change the way you do your work.

The format: I'll set the stage with an hour-long talk about the role of impresarios, the connection economy and the chance to create work that matters. From that, we'll shift to a wide open Q&A session in which attendees share their stuckness, talk about their strategies and mostly ask about how this new way of thinking (and doing) can help them. I've discovered that by spending more than six straight hours leading the discussion and answering questions, I can start to get under your skin and help you see how this revolution is open to you.

For the entire day, you'll be surrounded by fellow travelers, by people in just as much of a hurry as you are. I'll provide lunch and snacks (and lots and lots of coffee) and we'll go at it until about 3:45. It's a long day, but worth the effort.

That afternoon, you'll have the chance to connect with other attendees and (if you're staying for Sunday) dive into your homework. Dinner that night (optional, dutch treat) will be divided across ten restaurants throughout the city, with groups picked to maximize cross-pollination. If you don't meet someone who significantly changes your outlook and your future projects, you probably were hiding...

The next morning, the Sunday attendees will reconvene bright and early at 9. For Sunday's session, we're moving out of the theatre and into the group space upstairs. We'll spend the day alternating between group work, assignments, presentations and feedback from me.

Both days include lunch, snacks, Q&A, surprises but, sadly, no dancing monkeys.

This is my last public event until my book launches, and I hope you'll be able to join a very motivated, very talented group of people for a weekend that will both frighten and empower you to go do the work you're capable of.

Get tickets here. There are a few early bird discount seats for blog readers.

PS To be clear, Saturday is a classic Seth Godin Q&A session, designed to help you think through the challenges you're facing and to see the common elements that so many successful projects share. Sunday is that plus group work, presentations, thought exercises, the Shipit workbook and more. It builds on Saturday and is a smaller group, with more airtime for all.

If you have questions, drop a line to michelle@sethgodin.com

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West Wing Week: 09/14/12 or "Eleven"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, September 14, 2012

West Wing Week: 09/14/12 or "Eleven"

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President and his administration commemorated the 11th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and addressed the attack on the American embassy in Libya. We also took the "Rhodes Traveled" for a look back at the meaning of honoring 9/11. That's September 7th to September 13th or "Eleven."

Check out today's West Wing Week.

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

President Obama Discusses the Attack in Benghazi, Libya
President Obama condemns the attacks on an American diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya and praises the service of those who lost their lives.

Honoring Team USA at the White House
President Obama and the First Lady honor the Olympic and Paralympic teams at the White House.

President Obama's Rosh Hashanah Greeting
The President extends his warmest wishes to all those celebrating the Jewish High Holidays.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:25 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily

10:05 AM: The President and the First Lady welcome the 2012 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams to the White House

11:15 AM: Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

1:25 PM: The President departs the White House en route Joint Base Andrews

2:15 PM: The President and Secretary Clinton will attend the Transfer of Remains Ceremony marking the return to the United States of the remains of the four Americans killed this week in Benghazi, Libya; the President and Secretary Clinton will deliver brief remarks

3:15 PM: The President arrives the White House

7:00 PM: The President attends a campaign event

Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Structured Social Sharing Formula - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 13 Sep 2012 07:57 PM PDT

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

Sharing content via social media is simply the next step after hitting the "Publish" button. How do you ensure your shares on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are optimized? With a little planning and coding, you can make them look their best so that they go viral and track effectiveness in analytics. In this Whiteboard Friday, Dana Lookadoo unpacks the Structured Social Sharing Formula (SSSF): 10 steps for optimizing Web pages and social shares. The process includes:

Marking up pages with microdata (Open Graph Protocol)
Best practices for formatting
How to find and use hashtags
Tagging URLs to track social referral data in analytics

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a supplemental post from Dana offering detailed steps from her Community Speaker presentation at Mozcon 2012. To learn more about social markup and tagging, download the free Structured Social Sharing Formula!

Video Transcription

"Hi Mozzers. All right. What we're going to talk about today is the structured social sharing formula, and I'm going to go over 10 best practices for rocking your SEO with a markup and how this is going affect Google+ and Facebook. So I'm going to run through these, and then we'll delve down a little bit.

So the first of your five items that you would cover are actually going to do with meta tags that are Open Graph protocol. We have the title tag and the description and the OG image and the type of the website and the URL.

Actually, in five of these, four of these are required. The title is one of the first required items, and we're going to break down that in a moment The meta description is not required, and the image is going to actually become your thumbnail image. The type has to do with your website type, and that's going to actually be default. If you don't put anything in there, they're going to assume that's a type value. The other values that you can look at are author, profile, book, video, and you can look more at OGP.me if you want to look up more about types. On your URL, that's your canonical URL. So it's your permalink. So that's pretty easy.

Then we're going to go over your UTM variables so that you can track your campaigns, and that way you're going to make sure that you're getting your social referral data. We'll talk about your share blurb that goes on Facebook and Google+.

Hashtags, we're going to delve into a little bit on best practices. We can't do a demo on here, but at least you'll get an idea of what to do and what not to do. Moving into the best practices for Twitter and then best of all on how to document and track this. I'm going to save that for last.

So in looking at that, let's break this down. So if you look over here, we have the anatomy of a share snippet. The elements on Facebook and Google+
are the same. You have your avatar, and then you have your name. So it's starts out with your share blurb about the post, and then as move into this, you're looking at . . . okay, here's your title tag, which is actually controlled right here by the OG title. That actually becomes an anchor link to your page, to your URL. So keep in mind those two are related.

Then your description, this could be your meta description from your page. You may want to copy it, but you're not limited to the same amount of space. So you have about 188 characters or less before Google+ will cut that off. Interestingly I have seen last week that about 453 characters on a description. So I don't know if Google is testing things or if I'm part of that test group, but keep it around 188 or less.

Talking about length on the title tag, that's actually . . . I saw 134. I can't imagine a 134 title. So just follow best practices for title. I go to about 80.

All right. So now we are at our image, so your OG image, and you want that to be square. You want it to be 150 x 150 is optimal. The minimum is 120 x 120. This is very important, because if you do not put in the proper image, you can actually put in the code. You could put this OG image directive in the code. Facebook will honor it. Let's say the image is too small and it's not 150 x 150. It may be 110 x 110. Then it will show up on Facebook, and you'll have an image, but Google+ either won't put anything, or they're going to draw another image to the page. If you have ads on your page, you may end up with an ad showing there instead. So this is where you can really rock your engagement because images are everything and people are looking at them. So that's important to get that right and remember how they're working.

One other thing I want to keep in mind in this is we're using Open Graph here and not Schema.org, Why use two tags? We're just doing this all in one. This is an all in one formula to do it all at one time.

All right. So now let's talk . . . . we're done with the five meta tags that are going to go in the head, and so let's talk actually about your UTM variables. Your UTM variables are actually going to start with you have your URL, and you're going to start with your source. So in this case, we're sharing it on Google+.

Then you're actually going to use your medium. So how are you doing it? The medium here we're sharing it on social, so that's the medium. Actually your campaign, this is a Whiteboard Friday. So by doing this, you have voila your social referral data. Keep in mind this is really important because you don't get this unless . . . you're not going to see that something came from Twitter unless it actually came from the Web itself. TweetDeck doesn't send this information. So this way you can keep track and you can track all of your social shares.

All right. We talked about the share blurb. But I want to go into that a little bit more, because on this share blurb, so what you're actually putting in the "What's on your mind" or "What's New" box, that's really important. Obviously, it's important for people reading it, but when this actually becomes in search plus your world for personalized search, that actually can become a SERP. So when that snippet is actually showing, guess what the title of it is? It's your blurb. So you may want to think SEO. You may want to frontload keywords. So think about this. This isn't just a blurb. There's actually some SEO benefit on personalized search.

Let's talk a little bit more about hashtags. As you're entering in your description, you can type in your description and type in the # sign on Google+, and you're going to see an autocomplete. This is SEO. You're typing in "#S" and you can see a list of related. Start over "#SE" and you're going to see SEO. But what's cool with this, a little pro tip, you're going to see what the latest trends are is what people are showing. So if you want to show up within those trends, you can use the hashtags.

Two more things on hashtags. Facebook, just don't do it. Facebook is not Twitter. On Twitter, you could use tagdef is one that has autocomplete. There's twubs. You can out hashtags.org.

All right. So let's move back and talk a little bit more about Twitter moving on in our formula here. You want to make sure that your tweets are retweetable, but what you want to start with is you want to do your campaign variables first, then create you short URL. So you've got this. You're entering all this. It may be bit.ly or it may be a custom URL shortener, and then as you're creating that, you're going to want to create the title of your post and then the bit.ly or the short URL, your at, your by, your at profile, and your hashtag. That whole length should be about 140 minus 5 minus the length of your profile. So at that point, that gives you enough room so that you have space, and voila you've got a retweetable tweet and you have your social referral data.

Okay. Last thing, document and track. I have a worksheet, and this was actually we're doing a Whiteboard Friday as part of MozCon, and I will be speaking about this tomorrow, on Friday. By the time you see this, it will be after the fact. You'll be able to download a worksheet, and that will be in the information below on the post that you will actually in that worksheet be able to enter in there will be a field for each of this information. You'll put in your campaign variables. It will automatically create your URL for you. All you have to do is cut and paste so that when you cut and paste your information into Google and Facebook, all you have to do is you could paste in your URL, and what Google and Facebook will do is they will parse the page and they'll look for those directives. You'll end up with a structured shared snippet.

I think that's about it for today, and thank you very much. It's been nice."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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brightonSEO: Live Blog

Posted: 14 Sep 2012 01:50 AM PDT

Live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing their insights and thoughts; all 19 of them! Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.

We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)

10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.

Pure = theory, like the art you see in galleries, or poetry. Applied = practical, like advertising

Dave suggests that, when it comes to creativity, we follow the essential Bauhaus principle – form follows function.

In other words, everything we do needs to have a reason and try to solve a problem.

Practical creativity is to ensure what we do is remembered. Everything we do sits, naturally, within the context of our industry. What you need to do is distinguish yourself and what you’re doing. Don’t blend into the background; you need to stand out.

Predatory thinking is about getting ahead.

Dave talked about three stages of advertising:

Impact
Communication and
Persuasion.

Most marketers focus far more on Persuasion than on anything else. However, it would be far more useful for them to focus on Impact. This is because most advertising, 90% in fact, isn’t remembered at all. It fails at the Impact stage.

The key point here is that it doesn’t matter how persuasive you are if no-one remembers what you do.

The problem is that people are over-exposed to advertising. This means that the have very selective perception when it comes to what they see.

In fact, we are very binary. Ideas either stand out to us or they don’t. And if they don’t stand out then we simply forget about them.

So, in order to have Impact, you have to stand out. You have to be different in order to be remembered and so have any chance of success.

People are either opinion formers or opinion followers. There are, of course, far more opinion followers than opinion formers. You want to really engage with the opinion formers rather than opinion followers (particularly if you can't throw lots of money at your advertising and simply buy numbers) because they will disseminate the information and it will travel downwards to everyone else. This doesn’t happen if you’re only attracting opinion followers.

To get opinion formers interested you have to stand out and be different. That's what they’re looking for.

Dave’s now talking about how to solve problems you can’t solve.

He’s used several examples to show how to go about it. Here’s one:

People used to have a lot of chip pan fires. No matter how much information people saw about the dangers of leaving chip pans unattended and how bad chip pan fires were, it didn’t change their behaviour.

They looked at the effect this was having, and it was causing a huge number of fire brigade call-outs. So they changed the problem. They decided to try to minimise the number of fire brigade call-outs.

So they started a campaign to teach people how to put out chip pan fires. This resulted in a drop in chip pan fires of 40%.

What predatory thinking is about it changing problems you can’t solve into ones you can.

You’ve got to go upstream and work on a problem higher up.

It’s all about getting ahead!

Another great example is the iPod. When Steve Jobs created it, he’d invented what was, at the time, the best way to listen to music on the go. And, it was picked up by the coolest people.

However, the problem was that everyone who had one walked round with it in their pocket, so no-one knew they had it.

So Steve thought outside the box. He went upstream and thought “How can we make everyone who has an iPod noticeable?”

And what did he think up? Headphones. Everyone has to wear headphones and at the time everyone had identical, black ones.

So he made iPod headphones white.

Immediately, everyone who had an iPod became a walking advert for the product. Genius!

DO YOU SPEAK BRAND? Antony Mayfield

SEOs like to be diva's where there's always talk about when search is going to be dead.

There are adversarial dialogues between the different disciplines such as social vs SEO or Paid search vs. SEO etc. But people miss the opportunity of bringing all these elements together in order to create real value and real impact.

The most powerful thing about search is that it's a database of insight in to consumer's intent.

Lucky seven. Anthony explained how a woman used to be really fed up of searching for things like holidays or furniture and always getting the same, bland shops and results. So what she started doing was, when she'd done a search, go to page seven of the results and start looking there. She'd bypass all the optimised results and start with more random offbeat ones.

Apologies for the infrequent updates folks. The wifi at the dome is pretty horrendous. I’m actually stood outside updating this post via 3G at the minute. It’s the first coffee break. So we’ll probably freshen up a bit and come back for more updates.

Seth's Blog : If you want to get paid for your freelance work

If you want to get paid for your freelance work

...then access to tools is no longer sufficient. Everyone you compete with has access to a camera, a keyboard, a guitar. Just because you know how to use a piece of software or a device doesn't mean that there isn't an amateur who's willing to do it for free, or an up and comer who's willing to do it for less.

...then saying "how dare you" is no longer a useful way to cajole the bride away from asking her friend to take pictures at the wedding, or the local non-profit to have a supporter typeset the gala's flyer or to keep a rock star from inviting volunteers on stage.

...then you ought to find and lead a tribe, build a base of people who want you, and only you, and are willing to pay for it.

...then you need to develop both skills and a reputation for those skills that make it clear to (enough) people that an amateur solution isn't nearly good enough, because you're that much better and worth that much more.

...then you should pick yourself and book yourself and publish yourself and stand up and do your work, and do it in a way for which there are no substitutes.

It's true, if someone wants professional work, then he will need to hire professionals. But it's also true that as amateurs are happy to do the work that professionals used to charge for, the best (and only) path to getting paid is to redefine the very nature of professional work.

Scarcity is a great thing for those that possess something that's scarce. But when scarcity goes away, you'll need more than that.

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vineri, 14 septembrie 2012

Seth's Blog : Two seminars in October

Two seminars in October

More Recent Articles

West Wing Week: 09/14/12 or "Eleven"

Structured Social Sharing Formula - Whiteboard Friday

Structured Social Sharing Formula - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

brightonSEO: Live Blog

brightonSEO: Live Blog

Seth's Blog : If you want to get paid for your freelance work

If you want to get paid for your freelance work

More Recent Articles

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Arhivă blog

vineri, 14 septembrie 2012

More Recent Articles

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More Recent Articles

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