This series has led to quite a few compliments, and people are watching and subscribing to the videos on our site, on YouTube, and on Vimeo. I think that limiting the length to around 5 minutes has helped keep viewers engaged. 5 minutes only requires viewers to digest one concept at a time, and it isn’t a huge commitment on their part.

Camtasia for Mac has been a wonderful piece of software for getting these up so easily. (There’s a Windows version too.) My first screencast was challenging, but it didn’t require too much effort to get up to speed with how the software works.

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Have you ever noticed that some magically have pictures next to them, and some are disinterested looking block face guys?

These images are called Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars). I know, super nerdy. Why didn’t they just name them Galactic Klinginoids and just call it a day?

The gist of Gravatars:

• You upload a square image of yourself (or whatever) at gravatar.com.
• You associate the image with an email address.
• The picture that you uploaded shows whenever you enter that email address in a blog comment form.

Sure, your Gravatar won’t show up on websites that don’t support them. But it’s a nice way to have a photo that you control appear next to your name with little effort on the sites that do support it.

Here’s what my Gravatar looks like on most blogs:

It’s best to choose a photo that will look good as a square like the one above. You’ll be forced to select a square section of the image after you upload it.

As you can see in my example above, I chose to chop off the top of my head. (It looked weird from the top of my head to the bottom of my lips or centered.) That’s probably how a head shot will look best for you as well. Be sure to play around with it a little and see what looks best.

For more info, check out the video that they have posted on the Gravatar home page:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Branding, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, commenting, glass case, gravatar, internet marketing, Social Media, wordpress

There’s a problem here: I read this, and I’m in Columbus, Ohio. And approximately 98% of the people who saw this message were anywhere but Illinois. In essence, roughly 98% of people who read it were disappointed that they couldn’t get dollar subs. Reading the comments on one of these posts reveals that.

Social media when done best is about building meaningful relationships. I’d argue that Jimmy John’s would have done better to not post anything at all.

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Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who read TechCrunch daily (and who power-use multiple sites with “tagging” and who subscribe to 100+ tech RSS feeds) need to occasionally turn off the PC, put on some clothes, and head down to the local Walmart to spend some time hanging out with the mainstream.

As exciting as all of this new technology is, we’ve just broken through the early adopter phase of this new-fangled Interweb.

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I am a fan of FeedBurner. But URLs are permanent.

What happens when you have visitors subscribe to a standard feeds.feedburner.com URL?

• People subscribe to a URL owned by Google.
• If you want to discontinue the use of FeedBurner, you’ll lose those people because you don’t own the feedburner.com domain.

FeedBurner was really cool to offer their MyBrand service. Basically, MyBrand allows you to point people to your domain name instead of theirs. For example, when you subscribe to my feed, you’re subscribing to feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com. But under the hood, the feed is powered by FeedBurner.

This is awesome because if I ever wish to discontinue using FeedBurner, or if they ever discontinue their service, I can still host my own feed at feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com/glass-case. Basically, I won’t lose anyone in the process.

This requires a little bit of technical wizardry. If your web guy or hosting company cannot handle it, then you may want to consider switching web guys and/or hosting companies.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, feedburner, glass case, google, mybrand, rss

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon a slightly controversial blog post about an industry issue just after it was posted. It generated 108 comments, and I’m sure that thousands of people viewed it. Many people read some of the comments, and mine was there first. My comment also included a link to my blog post in response, which I drafted up as quickly as possible.

What’s cool about running this project is that I can share some of the analytics and marketing results with you. I don’t think I’ll get into trouble with anyone for doing that.

Can you tell when my comment was made by looking at this graph of daily visits?

Lots of extra exposure, as you can see. And exposure is exactly what the project needs.

What about conversions, which are downloads of the actual framework code (the primary goal of the site)?

As you can see, we’ve only had 1 zero-download day since then. Discussion in the community forum has been picking up as well. There were even a couple comments on that blog post with people praising the project.

So here’s a testament to doing social media the right way. It’s not about blasting your me-me-me’s on Twitter or Facebook. It’s about being timely and relevant when the opportunity presents itself.

And this was a measurable way of evaluating results as well, which a lot of marketers have a lot of trouble dealing with these days.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, cfwheels, coldfusion on wheels, internet marketing, marketing, open source, Social Media, social media marketing

Video

Video on your website and landing pages causes conversion rates to soar. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. OK, so it has to be at least a decent video, but it really does help. And people are gobbling up video on YouTube at astronomical rates.

Record voice narratives and screencasts using software like Camtasia, Captivate, or Jing (if you’re on Mac).

Record yourself on your webcam while talking about a topic that your audience would be interested in. It can just be 3-5 minutes. Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich demonstrates how effective you can be with a webcam and small whiteboard in a simple video about automating your finances.

Learn how to be a good marketer via video because this is more highly effective than you can imagine. And post everything to YouTube where more people will find it!

Audio

Maybe not a full-blown podcast, but you can come up with some good stuff using the poor-man’s alternative to video. A good free choice for souped-up editing is called Audacity.

Articles

I think that article-writing is different than blogging. In fact, what I’m doing right now should probably be an article and not a blog post. Do as I say, not as I do. I really need to fix this!

You (and I) should probably be writing more articles for other websites as well.

Presentations

The opportunity to give presentations online is becoming more common. Some bigger companies host speakers via webcast conferencing software like WebEx and Acrobat Connect (amongst others). And there’s always the old-fashioned way: doing them in person at local networking events.

If you don’t have an audience, post some captivating PowerPoint slides on SlideShare. This presentation on SlideShare about The Brand Gap is one of the best I’ve seen on there.

Be creative. Use plenty of imagery.

Blogging

Yup, a good way to reach out if you can stay consistent. WordPress is by far the best platform for doing this.

Document Sharing

Kind of like articles and blogging. But sometimes you can make cool documents, spreadsheets, and flowcharts that people would find interesting. Like all of this stuff, a little creativity can go a long way.

Aaron Wall did a great flowchart about SEO a while ago.

You can also share your documents on Scribd. Their documents sometimes get you some extra exposure in Google and Yahoo!.

The hard part: commitment

For some reason, I’m really fired up about this tonight. I probably won’t be as fired up in a couple days. I should be producing and planning more than one social artifact when I’m in an over-caffeinated mood like this. I’ll probably stay up late tonight and work on it some.

I hope that you’ll see more from me, and I hope to make announcements of a variety of social artifacts that I produce and how you can get your hands on them. I’m really going to try to lead by example here.

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Your intranet could show a stream of alerts for key events (55 orders placed before lunch, a critical backup just completed, Richard is going on vacation tomorrow, etc.) as well as communication between team members.

And it could give your team members a chance to express themselves a little personally. Why not take the water cooler aspect of Facebook and focus it on helping your employees build closer relationships?

It’s interesting thinking of the ways that business information can be displayed and interacted with. This is becoming a new passion of mine. It also makes me realize how uncreative I am compared to the visionaries of companies like Facebook.

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If you haven’t taken the time to download and read 279 Ways to Overnight Success yet, I am another person telling you to do it. If you’re doing any kind of social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, flickr, etc.), then you’ll want to read it.

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The theme of the campaign is What will you do? It encourages students, staff, and alumni to answer the question via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and via their desktop wallpaper. The prompt is simple: start a short post, a photo, or a video with the words “I will.” This simple prompt is actually very inviting and powerful at the same time.

This is a really cool way to reach out to an audience that is increasingly becoming more social online. And the execution of having so many community touchpoints is slick. I found out about the campaign through Facebook, but I very well could have found out about it on any of the other sites.

Kudos to Capital for making me proud.

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