MetzMash

E Street Band's Danny Federici - R.I.P.

I don't know how many of my readers are Springsteen fans, but the E Street Band's Danny Federici passed away late last week. There's a truly touching video on the Boss' website, containing what looks like his last performance with the group, from 3/20/08. Awesome stuff; the bond between Springsteen and Federici is amazing. This is a real loss; he was a great musician, and a real influence on my growth.

Making Your RSS Feeds Actionable

I altered a lot of my daily media diet recently. When I moved to Oakland almost two years ago, the local paper offered my wife and I a free subscription. We turned it down. Aside from books, I haven't consumed that much "tree-based media" (thanks, Dan Kaplan) since 2006. And a few weeks ago, I severely trimmed down my newsfeeds to stuff that I truly consider actionable.

I figure it this way; if what I'm reading during the workday isn't actionable, then I should be reading it for leisure, not during the workday.I've thought of setting up a leisure-reading RSS for all of the fun blogs I like to read in my spare time (Pitchfork, Jack & Jill Politics and Huffington Post all come to mind.) Set that stuff up as the "Sunday Morning" feed. Read it whenever you're not on the clock. That feed's not generally going to help your social web strategy unless you have some time and space to think about it.

So, here's how I do it for the day-to-day feeds: I've got my RSS cut up into the following actionable categories:

1. Brands - Usually branded product blogs put out by vendors that I really like (37Signals, CDW,etc.) - keeps me off of their email lists, and on the cutting edge of new features that come up on products that I use on a daily basis.
2. Consumer - A series of consumer advocate blogs like Consumerist. I mainly read them to save my company (or my family) money.
3. GTD - I've used a modified version of David Allen's Getting Things Done to take care of my workflow. Reading tips like this keeps me in top form.
4. Music - I follow a number of music blogs, more to keep track of upcoming concerts and new albums, so that I have cool things to do when I'm not working, or cool music to listen to while I'm working.
5. PR - I keep tabs on a few of the leading PR blogs to see how far social web strategy is evolving in those spaces. So far, not much, as far as I can tell.
6. Shopping - I subscribe to an Amazon Gold Box RSS feed to see if any cool things go on sale, so I can get presents for my wife.
7. Social Media - This is the main course - there's gotta be 15-20 solid strategy and analyst blogs in here. These are the people that I really comment on very often, and these blogs are where I derive much of my actionable stuff from.
8. Tech - These are the news roundups of the tech world (or at least the parts that I care about). The Mashables and CNETs would be in this bucket.
9. Client - These are client blogs; only actionable really to spellcheck and Monday-morning-quarterback, really.
10. Hardcore Surveilance - This is a combination of a few homegrown tools that my company has invented for client and client competition monitoring, as well as a few alpha-stage vendor solutions that I'm testing. This is the stuff that I don't share. A lot of actionables are also derived from here.

If you'd like a copy of my OPML feed (the combination of the few hundred blogs and feeds that I follow), leave a comment on this post. Per my usual "advice", this post was composed according to my one drink, one album-side rule (WL Weller 12 Year Bourbon, Fleetwood Mac's 'Mirage'). And yes, I wrote it last night, not at 6 a.m. this morning.

MetzMash Featured In PR Week

Well, I never thought that a social web strategy blog would get featured in PR Week, but I guess stranger things have happened. The team at PR Week was cool enough to run an article about some of the things I picked up while writing "There Is No Secret Sauce."

The article is an op-ed piece entitled, "Social media is crucial for an agency," and PR Week has agreed to run a fee-free version of it, so anyone can read it.

Here's a little taste:

I spent much of the summer and fall of 2007 assembling my first electronic book on social-media strategy, There Is No Secret Sauce. I wrote the book because while there are thousands of brands that can afford to work with agencies like mine to devise its social-media strategy, there are others that either lack the budget or manpower to engage an agency. I wanted to provide a blueprint for getting started and getting to the point where the organization understands the value and potential of social media. Without tangibly seeing that promise, no organization will care enough to want to take it to the next level.

A big thank-you to Jason Mandell of LaunchSquad who helped me edit the article. If you want to check out more, hop on to the PR Week website.

Tools For Establishing Your Personal Brand On The Job Hunt

My cousin called me from Boston yesterday; he's in the middle of long job hunt; he's looking for a basic I.T. position (network manager, desktop support), and he's having a lot of trouble. We talked about having him use the strategic method to job hunting and working with a job coach.

Then it hit me - he has no personal brand online. While following all of the steps from "What Color Is Your Parachute" may have been totally adequate for a strategic job hunt back in, say, 2005, the book doesn't totally cover what's needed right now.

A quick scroll through the table of contents of the 2008 edition shows a "How Much Help Is The Internet" chapter, which, undoubtedly, was ten years in the making - good stuff.

On page 11, the author actually puts "Using The Internet" at the top of the list for "Worst Ways To Find A Job." And, as far as I can tell, there's no reference to creating a personal brand online anywhere in the book. And I really hope that Richard Nelson Bolles, the book's author, fixes that next year, because his book has helped millions of people find great jobs, myself included.

So, here's what I would propose including in the chapter, if you're searching for a job in the United States. Setting this stuff up would probably take ten hours, and an ongoing commitment of about two to four hours per week.  But if you've read "What Color Is Your Parachute," you know that a 12-week, full-time job hunt is par for the course; that means that if you started today, you'd have about an 86% change of success by July 4.

I'd stack on the following items to Bolles' advice:

1. LinkedIn  - Take a look at my complete LinkedIn profile. This took me a few hours to set up and while I have a relatively small network (142 connections), it has served me fairly well. If you're operating with under 60 connections, you're probably being underserved by this network, according to their blog. If you want to pursue the informational interviews that Bolles advocates, you're likely going to have to throw down $25/month for the Premium version.
2. Facebook - Make a tasteful Facebook profile, and take down all of the beer bong pictures from college, or at least change the privacy settings on them. Today's employers know how to use Facebook and MySpace quite well; if you doubt this, you may waste a few weeks of your job hunt on a position that didn't pan out because of something stupid you did on a Saturday night in 1999.
3. Blog - For about $10 a month, you can get a killer TypePad blog. That'll take about two hours to set up properly. Write two times a week about the field that you're searching for a job in. This may well be more important than any resume you send out. I know I've read individuals' blogs in painstaking detail before evaluating their resumes. People need to know how well you communicate in writing.
4. Twitter - Take five minutes and set up a Twitter account; do some intelligent link-blogging about your industry. For the ten minutes this takes every week, it shows that you read good info about your job market and you share it.

By the way, if you're noticing that the information on my LinkedIn profile is intentionally vague, that's because I'm in the middle of a transition myself. More news on that in the coming weeks.

Business Social: Late March 2008

Business Social is a roundup that I write once a month to chronicle actionable developments on the social web for brands. No pranks here, folks.

From my stats, I can tell that these wrap-ups are my most popular posts, and I've learned that the shortest ones do the best, so, without further ado, let's get into the most actionable developments on the social web in March 2008.

Development #1: Non-profit OpenSocial Foundation announced

Business Value: CNET's Caroline McCarthy calls it the "Justice League of social media," but I see the board, which should be formed by late June, as more of a "NATO", going beyond stabilizing the influence of Facebook (not an Open Social partner) on the social web, but acting to keep any one corporate partner (e.g. Google) from dominating the OpenSocial platform.

Actionable: Know which parts of your company's social web collateral are OpenSocial compatible, and what is not. Develop an action plan to get crucial widgets and helper applications ready to be cross-platform. Don't let your entire social web strategy rest in one tiny social network (i.e. Facebook). Diversify.

Development #2: Groundswell Data Tool released

Business Value: Using this tool may be able to save you time in determining which social web tools your current customers and prospects (and employees) prefer to use. This could save you a ton of money in  conventional marketing spend (surveys and focus groups)

Actionable:If you have a demographic profile of your current customer base, use this solid tool to begin to get a read on the types of tools that they might be using, at this point in time. Caveat: Not combining this aggregate data with your own to make some sort of blended assessment is just plain stupid.

Development #3: Eric Goldman Releases Social Media Slides

Business Value: Eric Goldman is a top-notch social web legal blogger. While his blog is not offered as legal advice, he has sharp opinions on cyberlaw and digital intellectual property. Seeing the presentation of a great communicator like Eric can galvanize your team into understanding, and possibly, action.

Actionable: Make a presentation as succinct and visual as Eric's for your team so they know what they social web looks like and feels like, even if they are unfamiliar with it.

Development #4: H&R Block Models A Totally Transparent Social Web Strategy

Business Value: It really is blatant advertising using social web tools, but it's pretty well done. And proves that your company can (maybe) do it too. 

Actionable: Write a debrief of a social media marketing effort from your company's recent past, and see if it was indeed (1) transparent, (2) engaging, (3) human and (4) fun. Thanks to Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer for a solid case study of that campaign.

Things to look forward to in April:

1. Rohit Bhargava's awesome new book "Personality Not Included," which is going to turn branding on its head.
2. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's new book, "Groundswell", which is basically the Funkadelic of social web books. This book is going to free a lot of minds, and a lot of asses are going to follow.
3. Enterprise RSS Day of Action - Enterprise RSS usage has gone way up in the last year, and this April 21, a whole bunch of awesome enterprise RSS innovators  have banded together to celebrate the progress and future of enterprise RSS.