Wilmington has a awesome arts community and they’re showcasing local artists downtown during the 1st Annual ARTblast Festival.

Check out CoolWilmington.com for the deets: http://www.coolwilmington.com/

In case you’ve been living under a social media rock for the past 48 hours, Old Spice has launched the current mother-of-all viral social media campaigns.

Apparently, they’ve assembled a crack creative team and locked them in a Portland, Oregon bunker with cameras, a shower and a live internet connection to answer questions posted at various social media sites.

When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was going to poke all sorts of holes in it. Yeah, a big company with a well established character & brand could do this sort of thing with deep pockets, but it really doesn’t do any good for the little guys. Local businesses could never pull this sort of thing off.

But why not?

I mean, yeah, you couldn’t do it on this sort of scale cranking out 87 videos in 11 hours that get national attention, but how about on a micro scale?

Maybe one a week?

With some sort of interesting delivery?

Educating & informing your potential customer base instead while entertaining them?

It could be done.

But you’ve got to have something of value and be interesting first.

Clickbrix QR Codes for Real Estate: via Brand Flakes for Breakfast

QR Codes are nifty little things. I’ve even spotted a few  in the wild locally in Wilmington and we spotted them in a few places around Washington, DC while we were on vacation.

Basically, they are bar codes that can be read by smartphone users. The information that they can contain varies, but the really cool application is that you can use them to direct smartphone users to a web page. Realty companies in the area are starting to use them on for sale signs to direct potential buyers to listings and I’ve seen them at Lowes linking to information on plants & plant care.

They’ve been around in Japan for a while now, but you can generate your own with one of several online tools. Put them in your ads, on business cards or on various items in your store and lead customers to more information to complete the sale.

Part 1: Refollow

I’ve tried a lot of twitter tools and some are painfully slow or borderline useless. Yesterday, I decided to thin the number of people I’m following and used Refollow ( http://refollow.com ) to thin the herd.

It was awesome. Fairly quick to use once it loads your info and offered just about every way possible to sort Friends/Followers.

** This is a unsolicited/unpaid, yet glowing endorsement

Part 2: General Social Media Philosophy

While I was going through the list of people that I followed, I started to notice that quite a few people weren’t following back and I started to get a little miffed. I’m not talking about celebrities either major or minor (for a good take on that look here: What Twitter is For ). Some were people that I knew personally and others were businesses that I though, “Well, heck. why wouldn’t they want to follow me???”

You Can’t Take Social Media Personally

After getting a grip on myself, I started to really think about why someone doesn’t follow back and I’ve put this in a nifty web friendly scanning unordered list for your viewing pleasure & enlightenment.

• They Don’t Use Twitter The Way I Do
  Believe it or not, a lot of people use social media for *gasp* socializing with their friends. Even business accounts are going to skew towards friends & associated because they’re run by real people. They’re not so much interested in links or (as in my case) the occasional anonymous dry sarcastic comment. They’re communicating with their real life circle and that’s a good thing.
• I’m Not Offering Anything of Value
  My Twitter account is a mix of professional and personal items and leans heavily in the personal direction because I feel that blatant self-promotion makes me look sleazy. No offense to anyone who blatantly self-promotes; it’s just not encoded in my DNA. Still, posting design related items doesn’t always attract local business people because they’re worried about other things… like staying in business.

  Along the same lines, I don’t follow everyone back immediately. I only reciprocate after I look at their profile & recent tweets and decide that they’ve got something I’m interested in. I also am not prone to follow someone if I’ve already got an expert in their field in my list. For instance: I’ve got my goto guys for SEO already.

• I Haven’t Engaged Enough (or at all)
  Guilty as charged. I see a lot everyday that I think is cool or interesting. A Retweet isn’t always enough. I’ll be making a effort to engage more beyond my normal circle.
• I Haven’t Shown Up On Their Radar
  Many Twitter users follow thousands of people. I don’t know how they keep track of it all. Unless you’re making a regular effort, you’re going to miss some people.

In Closing

Getting upset about the whole who-follows-me-and-who-doesn’t social media game is a lot like cursing the darkness; the darkness doesn’t care. The best thing to do is be yourself and try to be interesting. All the cool tools & tricks in the universe won’t gather you anything of value if you’re not trying to do those two things first.

A client called me last week about re-shooting a video his friend shot for him. I knew I should try to sell him on the fact that I could make it look better, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Why?

I didn’t really think he needed to re-do it.

You see, he’s this really nice gentleman that hand makes turkey calls. They’re beautiful. In this world of slick plastic produced by borderline slave labor, he makes each of these things by hand. There’s a real art & craft to what he does. It’s not high tech. It is very low tech, but it has this human element to it that makes it rare.

He sells them for far less than what they are worth.

The video is DIY, very much like what he does and for that reason, it fits him. But, it also *works*. It shows his calls and how they work. You can hear the sounds and if you have a trained ear you can appreciate how effortlessly he’s producing these sounds.

He’s already had 350+ views on his video and it’s helped him sell calls. I could make it look better, but I doubt that it would make it more effective.

And so I talked him out of it.

Yes, I’m a horrible salesman, but I hope that it’s because I’m more concerned for my clients than my own bottom line.

Social Media badges on every page?

Why?

Once customers come in your shop, would you send them down to the coffee shop (where all their friends hang out) just to sign up for your mailing list?

Heck no.

So, now that they’re on your website, why would you make it easy for them to go to Facebook where there are a thousand other distractions?

Once they visit your site, you’ve got their attention. Do something quick or you’ll lose it.

What follows is part of a email that was sent to a client this week concerning some problems we were having with Google Analytics.

“Ok, first thing is first. I can’t personally guarantee 100% that I’m going to resolve this. There’s several things outside of my control that could be causing anomalies; the visitor clicks on a link before the analytics code loads, GA hiccups, or the planets haven’t aligned properly. It’s Google Analytics and it’s free and so that means no direct support. There’s no person to contact at Google to say ‘Why isn’t this working?’. They have a support forum and it’s like panning for gold in there. Sometimes you find a nugget, but mostly it’s dirt and dead bugs. I’ll keep pounding at it, but at some point I’ve got to say that there are parts of this that are out of my hands.”

I can’t say I stated everything as eloquently as I should have. I was a little frustrated with the problem seeing as how I thought it was resolved. Some of it was my fault and the rest of it I can’t determine because I haven’t worked my search engine voodoo well enough to find the answer. But I walked away from this with some key lessons.

• Google Analytics isn’t 100% Accurate
  Don’t believe me? Here let me Google that for you. When you’re looking at those numbers, you have to realize that they’re not the gospel truth. There’s some stuff missing. It’s the nature of the beast.
• They Crowdsource Support
  Google provides this service free. If there’s a problem, the only official form of support is the Google Analytics Support Forum. There’s a lot of good infromation in there, but you have to hunt to find it & that takes time. There’s no 800 number, no email address; just a forum with a search function and the wisdom of the masses.
• Some Issues will never be resolved
  It does some cool stuff, but sometimes it goes goofy. Chances are that there is a answer to the problem somewhere out there, but there’s a smaller (but significant) chance that it isn’t. We’re not paying for it, so we don’t exactly have the backing to make ‘em fix it. Free is good, but it has it’s drawbacks.

So, like it, love it, hate it; but it is what it is.

Cool? Yes.

Free? Yes.

Accurate? Not so much.

Frustration Free? Absolutely not.

I saw a Re-Tweet of this tweet (profanity warning) Sunday night and it got me to thinking that with all the new location based services like FourSquare, Gowalla & TriOut, we really face the possibility of check-in overload. It’s not a new thing. When Brightkite came out and one could push their updates to Twitter, there was a similar outcry of, “Hey, go easy on the updates!”.

I mean, really, who cares if I’m checking in to the KFC for the 5th time this week?

But, on the flip side, if someone might see something out of the ordinary and post a picture of it (like the monster pancakes from @CosmicKitchen) then I’m more likely to look at it and go, “hey, that’s pretty cool.” and file it away mentally for future reference.

So, maybe the strategy shouldn’t be to get all your customers to broadcast every single time they check in, but offer something different & unique that’ll be tweet-worthy. Good marketing tells a story so give them something that they *must* tell their friends about.

Inspired by a semi-panicked client email today & because I know you were wondering how to do it:

Microsoft Office Online: Create a backup copy of my Contacts

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/ha011127411033.aspx

Google knows all, my friends. Google knows all.

via Wooster Collective