spatially relevant

May 11th - Relevant Links

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Sharing the links for the day:

Need Blog Cred? Go to a conference

Friday, May 9th, 2008

So conferences are crazy things! Drinking, music, slides and conversation - not in priority order, but after the event there is apparently a ramp your Technorati authority. The Conference Authority Impact (CAI) is a fairly interesting phenomena which appears to increase your Technorati authority just for attendance, more or less.

So here is what I’ve noticed: spatially relevant’s “authority” went from minimal to horribly mediocre in just days, with NO apparent justification. Oh wait, I know why this may have happened. A bunch of people linked the attendee list and created “blog reactions” which have since my last point of reference raised my technorati authority.

The CAI might just be an interesting thing to understand. What is the credibility of any social media benchmark?

So back to being an opportunist….

So I’ve think there are 3 things I have decided might theoretically extend the CAI: Write (novel), payback (appropriate) and provide a little visibility to the lessons learned directly or indirectly from the event. This is an indirect post.

Conferences as an Authority Generation Strategy

Conferences aren’t just a narrowcast placement opportunity for sponsors, but apparently for the participants as well. Most of these folks hopefully descended on Chicago with products to position and promote. Events represent a promotion channel for the participants’ product, their blog. Apparently not only can brands become humanized, so can bloggers.

So as you think about attending a conference, it might be important to develop an outreach plan to manage the lead nurturing cycles which could deliver increased authority, visibility and a follow up plan on how to use the CAI spring board post conference.

At the end of the day it appears conferences are essentially promotional channels for hocking your brand/blog and sharing tip, tricks and links from others in the room.

With CAI potentially being a real thing, I’m gonna plan a little better…. I’m contemplating logo swag for the next conference and an iPhone giveaway for the most insightful post on currency fluctuation.

Question: Is Authority Generation an expected, warrented or unintended by-product of attendance? Curious, as I’m not sure I did anything new except write a check, eat a bunch of room service and meet some folks.

…Another consideration could be that Technorati’s authority algorithm might need a change.

Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Lessons Learned: Bigg Night In Chicago

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

With just enough of learning to misquote. - George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron (1788–1824)

It’s always a little difficult to open a post with a quote, but sometimes you have to try. A kernel of knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing and a fact many, myself included, forget all too often. So with that fundamental baseline, I’m in Chicago to learn and meet good folks. Every day represents a new opportunity to drive change, improve your understanding of stuff and develop relationships - day 1 was of SOBCon has provided all 3 for me at least.

The first thing I have learned is we all want to meet others like ourselves and be part of a community. A quick/ad hoc survey of the attendees last night easily represented all four corners of the US and around the world. The diversity in geography is only matched by the diversity in expertise and passions which are distributed amongst the attendees I’ve spoken to so far.

While it seems that the blogosphere is littered with marketing folk and productivity leaders, this meeting represents participants who have diverse editorial agendas - parenting /homeschooling, education/international culture…. While I met a good deal of folks (ok Emily did - she was my introduction wing chick), we spent the majority of the evening engage in just a few coversational circles. It’s not the quantity, but quality and I was able to find some quality insights without a doubt from everyone I spoke to.

One of those more interesting and rewarding conversations was with Mary-Lynn and George, from Bigg Success. So today, I thought I would post the 3 things I learned from Mary-Lynn and George:

Cards are good
Get ahead of the game
Play into your strengths

Cards are Good

Yup I love pinochle, but this reference is about a different type of cards - business cards. Ok - nearly everyone I met reinforced this lesson along the way. Apparently everyone makes their own cards - CRAZY creative cards which convey their focus.

Style, substance and brand are just part of having your own cards, but they also serve the very tactical purpose, follow up. You will invariably meet so many smart, cool and interesting folks throughout an event you can’t possibly remember everyone, even though you try. Essentially it appears that your cards are an extension of your brand.

Lesson learned - get cards - CHECK!

Get ahead of the Game

Last night I spent the better part of the evening honing my introduction pitch. The pitch organically meandered into an overly verbose apology for the lack of business cards while rolling into explaining that I’ve been traveling for three weeks and that my recent content shouldn’t be seen as characteristic of what I’m trying to do at spatiallyrelevant.org. I’m actually not sure what I am trying to do here which is another reason I am here at SOBCon08.

While I did reasonably hone this intro, my sheepish/apologetic intro pitch to George and Mary-Lynn teed up an immediately valuable retort on the importance of staying ahead of the game. George made it pretty straight forward: plan, write, edit and post. Seems simple enough - stay 1-2 weeks ahead. Initially I thought this was uniquely related to audio, since Bigg Success focuses on high quality audio production, but no it’s all things content since all content requires planning and execution. George confirmed this by providing an overview of their hybrid approach leveraging text, audio and newsletters for their readers.

So the key thing to remember for me was to stay ahead of the curve on content production. If I can practice this seemingly straight forward concept, I just might be able to avoid the horrible content holes which continuously creeps up by accident or by conflict here. So hopefully, the conflicts of my life, travel and the absence creativity can be avoided by staying ahead of the game with my content.

Play into your Strengths

So while I have multiple ways to look at this, Mary-Lynn and George put it simple: “We plan, we produce and leverage core skills which makes a better product in our opinion”, or something like that. So I took a little time to think about this. My conclusion - it’s as much about as skills as it is about reputation. The talented folks I have met here already have a common thread/quality - they are leveraging their past experiences to drive credibility and authority.

Bigg Success’ Mary Lynn is an example of this with proven/verifiable career in radio, as is George who brings to bear a life of lesson’s learned in business and an academic approach to sharing the information they provide on their shows. These folks are an example of how we should use our knowledge, skills and integrity to deliver value to our readers/listeners in a medium that best suits a person’s abilities. This is just what they have done.

While video may be killing the radio star, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Bigg Success, they are hopefully at the start of their online hockey stick, but for them it is more than stats.

George crisply summarized what “Bigg Success” would be for he and Mary-Lynn: “If we can help a single person with each program then we have accomplished a big part of why we are doing this”.

Posted in Basics, Life, Social Media | 8 Comments »