December 9, 2011

Awesome Foundation Invades Pittsburgh

Awesome came, Awesome saw, Awesome awarded $2,000 in microgrants. After months of planning, on Tuesday night Pittsburgh became the latest home to the Awesome Foundation, a global network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe. 

For Mike Capsembelis and Matt Gaston, two of the driving forces behind Awesome Pittsburgh, the model was a no brainer for our area. “Pittsburgh has a strong entrepreneurial spirit and sense of community. Lots of great ideas” said Gaston. And he wasn’t kidding. During their first ever round of submissions, they received 71 proposals representing a wide range of topics including art, music, education, and technology—even more impressive when you consider their total was 50 more than the second place city over the same period of time.

Although Awesome chapters typically award one $1,000 grant each month, Awesome Pittsburgh decided to do it up right and give out two to celebrate their Awesome launch. The winning proposals were a pop-up photo booth (hiding a puppet show) by Murphi Cook and a pop-up co-op storefront by Talia Piazza, Christina Robertson, Grant Ervin.

Has all this talk about awesomeness inspired a great idea? If so, Awesome Pittsburgh is accepting submissions for their next award. 

• Facebook
• Tweet
• StumbleUpon

Categories:

Leave a Comment »

December 8, 2011

EdgeRank: Why Just Showing Up On Facebook Just Isn’t Enough

We’ve all heard the overly-used motivation quote “80% of success is just showing up” made famous by Woody Allen. But, thanks to the complex algorithms being used by Google and Facebook, just showing up just isn’t good enough.

As a small business owner, it’s no longer enough to just “be” on Facebook or to just “be” on the web. Success is all about engagement and engagement requires a rock solid strategy, lots of tender loving care, a boatload of rich and interesting content, and some data analysis and number crunching.

Earlier today, the folks at Argyle Social, a marketing software startup located in Durham, NC, hosted a webinar titled Figuring Out Your EdgeRank. If you’re not familiar with EdgeRank, it’s the algorithm Facebook uses to determine where, when and for how long what you post will appear on the news feeds of your followers. It doesn’t matter if you’re quoting Buddha or launching a huge marketing campaign, every status update, picture, video, and philosophical quote must ultimately bow down before the EdgeRank algorithm. In other words--pretty important stuff.

I always find webinars like this are INCREDIBLY valuable—especially for small business owners. They’re almost always free (which was the case with Argyle’s session) and they almost always provide at least one valuable nugget of information that I can take away and use to help my business (case and point--Figuring Out Your EdgeRank was jam packed with useful insights).

Most importantly, during today’s webinar Jill Carlson and Chad Wittmann provided a handful of best practices designed to help you improve your EdgeRank. I’ve included them below along with my interpretation and/or commentary. 

1. Provide exclusive content and deals for fans. You have to make it worth their while to check out and engage with your Facebook page. Make the benefits of being your fan obvious and rewarding.
2. Give your brand some personality. Think about all of your close friends—the people you really enjoy hanging out with. How many of them have little or no personality? I’m guessing you hang out with people you find interesting. The same rule applies on Facebook.
3. Feed their competitive spirit. Most people like the thrill of some friendly competition. Look for opportunities to channel and direct their energy and passion. Contests can be an effective way to build awareness and engagement in the short-term, just make sure you’re attracting people that are into your business more than they’re into the chance to win a free iPad 2.
4. Use campaigns to drive your content strategy. Move beyond thinking about individual posts to uncover broader trends. Stronger campaigns = higher engagement = higher EdgeRank = happy you!
5. Use a clear call to action. If you want someone to share your status update, ask them to share. Doesn’t get much easier than that, does it?
6. Focus on engagement, not size. A lot of small businesses who are new to Facebook are hell bent on amassing a huge following but, over time, algorithms are going to be looking at level of engagement.
7. Stir the hornets’ nest.  The riskiest of the best practices. Sometimes the best way to get attention is to be polarizing. However, if you go that route, you just need to make sure you’re being true to your brand. Personally, I have much more fun being contrarian. When a writer from Fortune.com asked me to comment on Yahoo firing their CEO over the phone instead of doing it face-to-face, I went against the grain.

What did I learn from today’s webinar? 1) Woody Allen is totally full of crap (I actually kind of felt that way prior to the session, but now I’m certain) and 2) you have to make every post count.

By: Shawn Graham

[Image: Flickr user Marco Paköeningrat]

• Facebook
• Tweet
• StumbleUpon

Categories: Customer Engagement, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing

Leave a Comment »

December 7, 2011

The Faster Way To Make Your Business Idea Happen

Lots of people have lots of great ideas but most never act on them. Instead, they spend all of their time creating detailed multi-year strategic plans, trying to account for every possible doomsday scenario. They become so fixated on “business planning” that they forget about “business doing.” And opportunities quickly pass them by. 

In Zoom: The Faster Way to Make Your Business Idea Happen, authors Ian Sanders and David Sloly focus on one simple thing—helping you move your business from idea to action as quickly as humanly possible. That means forgetting about mundane details (ex. spending countless hours worry about what font you should use on your website), avoiding unnecessary distractions (ex. watching a Mad Men 24-hour marathon on TV), being able to make important business decisions in under 60 seconds (see font example above). In Zoom, Sanders and Sloly provide a guide to help you launch a business in as little as 60 days.

A few things I immediately loved about this book:

• I’ve always cringed at the notion of creating incredibly detailed 5-year strategic plans. As they point out in the book, today’s world is moving way too fast to be able to predict the future. That way of thinking is outdated and usually only gets you bogged down in minutia.
• They include case studies and links to video interviews from a smattering of successful entrepreneurs including one of my all-time favorites, Richard Moross, CEO and Founder of MOO.com.
• The chapters are short and sweet. After all, if you’re writing a book called Zoom, it better not be a Harry Potter-length novel.
• They used salami as a visual for helping readers break down huge projects or challenges into smaller more manageable slices. The frame of reference was spot on and salami is delicious. I’d say that’s a win-win.

The biggest takeaway from the book is for entrepreneurs to focus on action. If you’re going to be successful, you can’t be afraid to make decisions or to experiment. You need to find a way to free up as much time as possible for “doing.”

And, if you’re still looking for a little extra boost, I’ll leave you with my favorite motivational quote from the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

"Ricky Bobby (Insert Your Name Here) is a driver. He is a doer. And that's what you need to do. You don't need to think. You need to drive. You need speed. You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine. You need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra!"

As a disclaimer, I use affiliate links for some of the products listed. They are all products I absolutely love and trust and would recommend regardless of whether they have an affiliate program.

[Image: Flickr user Tony Hall]

• Facebook
• Tweet
• StumbleUpon

Categories: Marketing Inspiration

Leave a Comment »

« Previous Page