Twitter Header Contest and The Darwin Thing

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Change Your Twitter Header Image Now -

The Darwin Thing

Twitter isn't going to put your new header up for you this time. It takes less than ten minutes to change and those who haven't changed will look old hat in a few days or a week. You don't want to be the LAST to make a change like this since being last creates dissonance. If you or your company wants to be a contemporary force little exercises like changing your Twitter header images is an action that reinforces that positioning.

The strong, cool and FAST survive now so make sure you are in the vanguard on simple stuff like changing your Twitter header image. So much of what we Internet marketers do these days is about understanding us and our companies well enough to consistently articulate our values, to be real. Amazing how much hard work it takes to be real (lol).

I wish the "be real" muscles were as developed as the advertising muscles. We lived for a long time chasing a false God. Advertising in a Mad Men like way seemed to be the key to brand awareness, to trial and repeat sufficient to keep the ships afloat and at sea.

Serendipity is a bitch. Serendipity created the false God. Even in the Mad Men period you couldn't advertise your way to success it just FELT that way. You had to have good products then, but there weren't as many good products and very few GREAT ones. The noise level was low.

Now the noise level is deafening, consumers are hard to reach and cynical on any first interaction and GREAT products are the new standard. Having great products and services is the cost of the game we play, the table stakes. To win you must share, share and share some more. You must learn faster than your competitors and NEVER let an opportunity to lead like changing your Twitter header pass you or your company by.

Never let Darwin get the best of you (lol). It's the Darwin thing.

Find more details on Atlantic BT Blog: Twitter Header Image Contest

Twitter Header Image Best Practices

Best practices for Twitter header images are being created NOW, so stay tuned this list will be updated as best practices emerge:

Twitter Header Image Best Practice #1: Image speaks to background

The Twitter Header Image only appears on direct load. There are several other views where the header image needs to be felt even if it is not present. I changed the background colors on @ScentTrial to Jackson Pollack's color palette since I used his floor as my image. Mitch, our designer at @Atlanticbt, did a great job having a dialogue between header image and our Twitter background:

Viral Marketing – How To Cross Moore’s Chasm

Geoffrey Moore wrote one of my favorite books. Crossing the Chasm describes product adoption’s magical bell curve. Moore’s focuses on technology but his famous Chasm Bell Curve applies to almost everything including products, brands, ideas, memes and content.

Crossing The Viral Content Chasm

Moore’s brilliant idea is people who start trends aren’t the same ones as those who make them ubiquitous. Early adopters start the acceptance train, but many ideas die before climbing the Everest of adoption.

Moore’s “Majority” lives up the mountain. I learned to climb the mountain the hard way when the specialty gift company I co-founded, Found Objects, attempted to sell Magnetic Poetry Kit to Barnes and Noble. Magnetic Poetry Kit (MPK), words on magnets created by a poet in Minneapolis, was the first real blockbuster product Found Objects discovered and brought to market. It was selling like gangbusters in small specialty gift shops.

Carol, a Barnes and Noble buyer, stopped by our booth at the Gift Show in San Francisco. She wanted to know about MPK. My heart stopped. Having a Barnes and Noble buyer in the booth was like having Gordon Gekko stop by.

Carol acted like the villain of Oliver Stone’s movie about Wall Street. She didn’t wear a badge, the big buyers rarely do. She was dismissive and nasty. Ego was writing checks Carol’s skills couldn’t cash. It took two years to cinch the deal to put words on magnets into Barnes and Noble.

The fault wasn’t Carol’s alone. I pitched Magnetic Poetry Kit to Carol by sharing how well it was doing in the small specialty gift shops that made up most of Found Objects customer list. Carole and Barnes and Noble didn’t care about mom and pop gift shops. My bad.

If Borders just left the booth and was going to order by Christmas Carol would have written an order just to mark her biggest competitor. Now BandN’s biggest competitor is Amazon and much of the brick and mortar dynamics have changed as ecommerce and the web continue to take share. Reading Crossing the Chasm before pitching Carol would have cut a year out o the buying cycle.

Carol’s delay built Magnetic Poetry Kit demand. The other good news is MPK sold out fast once it hit the front counter at Barnes and Noble.It took two years, but we were able to get a big box retailer to do what they are good at - amplify an existing trend taking it to a new level.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Don’t pitch “majority” buyers with early adopter logic.

The Viral Content Chasm

Your content climbs a bell curve with a chasm too. Most of what you write and share will be accepted by your loyal fans and supporters, but fail to cross the chasm, fail to achieve viral lift. The “Event Horizon” is the cliff between early adopters and acceptance by the early majority. Acceptance by the early majority means you have a good chance to climb the viral mountain.

Tips To Cross Content Marketing’s Chasm

• Develop a network of PowerRetweeters.
• Surf an existing large cultural story.
• Be Funny.
• Be Relevant and New.
• Make it easy to share.
• Create self-fulfilling prophecies.

Develop A Network of Power Retweeters
Find people with large followings in your industry, follow and ReTweet them. After you've built a relationship appeal to them directly when you are passionate about content your team has created that is related to their interests. Don’t abuse the relationship, but ask for a ReTweet. Say thanks by reTweeting their pickup and sending a direct message if they follow you. Best time to develop any network is WHEN YOU DON’T NEED IT. You develop networks by helping others caring about and supporting what they are doing.

Surf Existing Stories
David Meerman Scott, a former Wall Street trader, has written several important books on how to surf the news, how to “newsjack” a story. Even if I don't newsjack I still look for powerful trends I can learn how to surf. Read Real Time Marketing and PR for starters and NewsJacking after that.

Be Funny
Funny is tough because what you and I think is funny could be very different, but if you’ve tested something and it works and is perceived as “water cooler” funny then go for it. Water cooler funny is your audience feels your funny story; video or link must be shared with five friends.

Be Relevant and New

New unproven ideas are death to viral lift. Opposite of what you thought right? The Heath brothers described the art of making something sticky in Made To Stick. The biggest lesson from my reading?

Use existing ideas and analogies to pitch new ideas. Made To Stick has a  piece of duct tape on the cover and is a great example of the “use something known to pitch the unknown” concept.

New is fuel to a new tribe of hunter/gathers. New ideas that are highly relevant to your tribe will be shared as long as they aren’t SO NEW they are unproven. Unproven ideas don't get picked up UNLESS they are wrapped in an analogy or idea the audience understands.

Make It Easy To Share
Amazing I have to include this tip since sharing technology is everywhere, but some know how to make ideas easy to share and some don’t. Pre-fill your tweet link with a cool link and copy. Don’t be overly self-serving. Klout is a good example of overly self serving in their auto-fill. I modified this example of their auto-fill and it still is way to KLOUT-centric:

I gave @liveconnection +K about Community on @klout because they rock. http://klout.com/liveconnection/topics?i=501459&n=tw&v=plusk_gave

Let me amend that, if you don’t know how to be anything other than be self-serving do that since it is more powerful to do something than nothing. The real opportunity is to have a pre-filled link so cool and fun your audience wants to keep every word.

ASK FOR LINK LOVE and be appreciative when you get it. Don’t be above asking for Link Love. Be sure to tell your benefactor how you are using their gift. Anyone who puts his or her social capital in your service should be thanked and included.

Create Self Fulfilling Prophecies
When something looks like it MIGHT cross the viral marketing chasm give it a shove (lol) by:

• Put a counter on it and share with the public. 
• Thank a supporter in public (with permission). 
• Write a piece about viral lift (a favorite of mine). 
• Be authentic and real. 
• Come from a place of passion and love. 
• Be confident. 

I modified Moore's Chasm Bell Curve for content marketers in Why Content Gets Shared And May Go Mega-Viral on Atlantic BT's blog. See the "event horizon". Cross that huge chasm and you are good to get to the top of the viral marketing bell curve. Your content may keep going. Less than 5% of your content is going to be shared in a mega-viral way (whatever your average share is X 100). Once you have content get into the "mega-viral" category try to understand what you did to make that happen and do it again (lol).

Create more and more content faster and faster and better and better (link to my piece on the secret of Internet marketing) and your content will cross Moore’s chasm and ride the magic roller coaster bell curve that is Internet marketing.

If you have content already going viral congratulations and you should pat yourself on the back, sit down for five minutes and then get back to creating more great content. Remember to “feed the monster”. Keep in mind the Internet marketing content monster only ever gets MORE hungry (lol).

Follow and Join ScentTrail Marketing

If you liked this article please share your comments, throw some link love our way, JOIN ScentTrail Marketing by clicking on the button on the left, follow @ScentTrail on Twitter and Martin Marty Smith on Scoop.it.

Thanks, Marty

Is SEO Emotional? Dinner With @1918

Is SEO capable of planting an emotional hook? That was the question my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) and I debated last night over great burgers at Chuck's. Phil reiterated a favorite marketing truth, "People buy with emotion and justify with logic." He also asked the right question. Is SEO capable of setting an emotional hook?

My reaction is NO. SEO is about detailed engineering according to some now defunct rule book. Phil agreed stating that much of what he does needs re-evaluation. One reason Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm changes love site heuristics such as time on site and pages viewed is those metrics are the only way Google can judge relevance. Relevance is the key to the higher conversions I'm convinced live in Internet marketing's very near future.

Storytelling is key to relevance. Phil shared a story from SEO Moz's MozCon. He attended MozCon Seattle at the end of July (and I was appropriately jealous :). SEO Moz's founder Rand Fishkin asked what makes content great. He showed a heart wrenching video of children battling cancer asking a simple question, "What does SEO have to do with telling an emotionally compelling story?"

I wrestled with this question of SEO value in The Best SEO Is No SEO too. I would never say don't be intelligent about titles, onpage copy and keyword research. Aligning how you think and speak with how customers think and speak is always a good idea. Telling a boring but well optimized SEO story is NOT a good idea anymore.

Google's new stance makes the value of such "over optimization" clear - it will land you in a penalty box. You can't win from optimization alone in a sea of social signals. Optimization without corresponding social support only draws attention to YOU. Any such "over optimized" content screams "we are gaming the system" and will be quickly destroyed according to Rand's read on what Google is up to with Panda and Penguin.

Google's most insightful comment may have come from Matt Cuts. Cuts encouraged webmasters to create great content and let Google worry about sorting it out. Google will decide who go on the first page for a given keyword based on an expanded algorithm, expanded to include social/search.  MozCon pointed out the folly of the old ways. Once the system became both means and ends we focused our efforts on SEO optimization instead of creating greatness. Poor sites well optimized could win in the old days. Not so much anymore.

Follow Phil @1918 and visit his 1918.com site to learn about the new SEO.

Web Analytics and the Myth of Fingerprints

Fingerprints aren't as infallible as Perry Mason led us to believe. Fingerprints are interpretations of a closed loop system, a system where only a small priesthood knows about whorls and loops. Fingerprints supported an entire industry, an industry that was self perpetuating.

Self perpetuating industries, those who have their continuation as a main goal by either stated or understood objectives, tend toward solipsism. The only people who can comment are inside the fence so the diversity of perspective and wisdom slowly drains in favor of a belief in the inherent rightness of a relative idea.

Web analytics is formed from modeled data about modeled data. Today's unique traffic data is "modeled" because its meaning is tied to other numbers. What if you only had 10 unique visitors yesterday. Is that good or bad? It is neither, but you can understand what any web analytics number means by trending, tying or comparing:

• Trending collapse and normalizes time easily graphic and so turned into a more meaningful picture.
  
• Tying connects one Key Performance Indicator to another. If your site received 10 conversions on 10 unique visitors means you are on to something great or your family is visiting your new website (lol).
  
• Comparing benchmarks web analytics and Key Performance Indicators to others in the space. Scoop.it provides a good example. On Sunday my main Scoop.it page Martin Marty Smith was off by 20%. Instead of panicking I looked at the Scoop.it leader board. Observing most of my benchmarks were also slow the fault was in the day not in my scoop.it account. 

Use web analytics to form ideas, theories and frameworks instead of rules, absolutes or immutable plans. We Internet marketers are sand castle builders. We must work furiously on the beach since the tide is always coming in. Build beautiful Internet marketing castles, but don't get too attached since to do so is to believe too strongly in the myth of fingerprints :). M

ScentTrail Marketing To Break 100K Views and Top ScentTrails

In a few days the little blog I started in 2007 to teach me about how Google thinks, as if such a thing was knowable, will break 100,000 views. This little blog has helped me connect with new friends, learn new things and share content around the world. None of these accomplishments would be possible without readers, friends and community.

Thanks.

Most Popular ScentTrails of all time include:

Bridge The New Idea Gap (3,508 views)
Biggest Multi-Channel Marketing Mistakes  (3,292 views)
Five Fingers of Web Design (2,574 views)
How To Price Your Product or Service (1,122 views)
Save Martin, Save The World (937 views)

Trending This Year

Internet Marketing Degree, Do I Need One
Internet Marketing Platforms vs. Websites
People Not Things Sell
Best SEO Is No Seo
Sprint 0 First Agile Marketing Meeting

My Favorite ScentTrails

Working With Seth Godin
Monkeys On Main
Julio And The Schoolyard
My Dad's Hunting Lesson
Meeting Robert Rauschenberg

The ScentTrail Story

The little blog I started in 2007 has over reached (lol). I started by looking for a phrase with no documents in Google. I wanted a phrase that was open territory, as close to tabula rasa as possible.

Scenttrail returned 4 documents in 2007. All 4 of those documents were about deer hunting. I thought about the scenttrails we depend on as we surf the web, the scenttrails that confirm we are in the right place, the scenttrails that show us the way home.

I decided to create content applying a deer hunting term to marketing. The advantage to finding a phrase with only 4 documents in Google is I could build a house and that house should stand in Google too. Little did I know that an author would write a book about perfume and want "ScentTrail" for their own.

Fighting back the charge from Amazon by creating content such as ScentTrail Defined and Scenttrail 2 and other content defining the term was educational and somewhat painful to read now (lol). Content marketing requires presence, persistence and picking yourself up when knocked down. I knew these things going into the ScentTrail Marketing experiment and truths such as more and more, faster and faster and better and better have been reinforced.

We don't climb the Mt. Everest that is contemporary marketing alone. I don't personally know the 40,000 or so people who have visited ScentTrail to create 100,000 pageviews, but I am indebted to every visitor who has commented, shared a link or helped ScentTrail overachieve its initial objectives. Thanks! Please keep your comments, ideas and thoughts coming. Together we climb Internet marketing's new Mt. Everest to enjoy a view few will ever see and that changes all who do.
I'm working on a new design for ScentTrail Marketing, a design to focus this blog to its most popular topics such as Internet marketing, social media marketing and the toys and tools we all love to play with.

THANKS to everyone who has read, followed, shared, commented and helped. You guys ROCK.

Marty

If you have favorite blog designs please share as I am looking hard right now to find a new design for ScentTrail. If you have suggestions for topics or other ideas for ScentTrail Marketing they are always appreciated and used.

Square's BI Strategy As Money Dies and Too Big To Fail Banks Slumber

My friend Therese Torris is a smart marketer. I met Therese in Scoop.it and follow her thoughts and Scoops closely. The other day she scooped an interesting article about Square becoming a Business Intelligence (BI) play. The death of money is making payment processing potentially disruptive, disruptive to the POWERS THAT BE.

Disrupting MONEY isn't easy since the companies that run that space don't take kindly to you messing with their kid's college tuition payments or there strangle hold on the most important content network, the one that controls the zeros and ones that translate into MONEY. Square is disruptive. The question is are they disruptive enough. Here is the conversation we had on my Curation Revolution Scoop.it feed:

From the Scoop
Jack Dorsey recently offered a look at the early days of Square, but today at the Techonomy Detroit conference, he was asked about the company's future — specifically what Square will look like in five years

Therese's comment: Let's hope Square has a future in payments, too...

Marty Note
I agree with Therese. Seems a good idea to conquer one world before dreaming of conquering others. My other reaction is how crowded the Business Intelligence (#BI) space is about to be since everyone seems to fancy their tool and the next great, BI hope. The problem with BI is gold you haven't mined yet can't be worn around your neck :).

Therese Posted A Follow-up
Marty, a friend of mine called Nicolas Guillaume (FI entrepreneur and very good analyst of financial markets... in French) opened my eyes about this: Jack Dorsey talks about BI but what he really wants to do is direct marketing à la "Groupon meets Cardlytics".

It makes sense to me: the 2.75% commission on a payment transaction is horrendously high but 1) it will go down and 2) there may be not much left of it for Square after everybody in the payment chain gets their cut. Merchants don't want to pay such fees for payment processing anymore. But they are definitely ready to pay for new customers.

Square will not sell the data but the prospect! It will send a voucher for MacDo to a regular customer that did not visit for 2 days and a discount on the pants to the lady who bought the suit's jacket. Your take? »

Marty Take
Thinking about Square again after your friend’s comment it all comes down to how disruptive are they really. Your friend and Square’s actions indicate not disruptive enough and I tend to agree. As far as spreading out into strategic areas such as cart abandonment and coupon creation and redemption go I wouldn’t invest in there personally if my money was guaranteed since my time wouldn’t be (lol).

I’ve used “cart abandonment” tools and they work. They require finesse since to go directly at an abandonment can create “Big Brother” fears, but the concept works like a charm. Square could be a player in that kind of 2 step BI if they want. Two step because you have to have business rules and intelligence that recognizes conditions then fires messaging systems ti create the conversion.

Square won’t be the first in the abandonment space (MyBuys is large and in charge in there for carts but not strong in mobile yet). Visa and MC are sure to come in with something similar and play a MAD (mutually assured destruction) pricing game with Square. Square has to create enough value add to justify their existence and growth when they are knocked off (as is sure to happen).

The problem is, and I work in an industry rife with this, not just anyone can morph into a strategy play. Those outside the fence under count the complexity. I see how a BI base could provide much higher margin engagement since "marketing services" pays better than CC processing, but jury is out on GroupOn-like couponing for me.

Groupon's idea is to disrupt a market using a single tactic - price. Short term such disruption can be massive and painful especially to the Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) NOT paying "stay alive" protection money to Groupon. I'm an old school brand strategist and so I HATE selling on price. Selling on Price is the last refuge of the truly desperate.

That price translates so well online is not a mystery. Any comparison engine reduces the world to its lowest common denominators. When you are a hammer, to quote a piece I wrote this morning, everything looks like a cheap nail. My Internet marketing friend swears by the juice Groupon shares, but I wonder if Groupon doesn't poke a mortal wound into a restaurant, fitness center or other local businesses. Is there appreciable brand loyalty and profits from repeat customers or just a raid?

Big brands can afford a few GroupOn-esque games. Their reputation is established and they are trying to push out to the margins. Little guys don't have as much brand elasticity. They establish their tribe and brand advocates with every action. They sing for their supper daily.

I don't deny that there is BI gold in them there payment hills since money is the ultimate "can only use once" vote. Given the coming squeeze Square is sure to face I can understand the desire to run up the "BI Strategy" flag. The question is will anyone salute. Any data that can provide persona characteristics combined with actual purchase history is valuable right now.

In fact, it is the "actual purchase" data that continues to vex Facebook. What my former direct marketing bosses taught me is to FEED THE MONSTER. You will never see more or better marketing focus than among a tribe of direct marketers. DMers don't know from "branding". They do things that make money or they stop doing them. Creating a feedback loop to conversion is and will always be valuable. 

Nice to know my Facebook followers love Tom's, drive hybrid cars and eat natural foods. My personas are stronger with such profiling data, but the missing piece is how did/do they spend their money. The virtual vs. social identity thing creates dissonance between how we consumers SEE ourselves vs. how we actually ARE (lol).

If Square can add the missing piece to the puzzle, where the money goes, they will create value. While I see their squeeze now better thanks to your friend I don't envy Square the journey. Money only really has one "job" - to replicate itself. Those who understand how to do that better and faster tend to accrue benefits that make attack hard to impossible.

This is why banks become "too big to fail". Networks, according to one of my favorite books Linked by Notre Dame network researcher Barabasi, do much the same thing. This is why there is always a gold rush-like scramble for territory as an Internet empowered market opens. Territory grabbed at the beginning costs less and may make the difference in the end as Facebook may prove yet.

I thought your original point, that the market Square is attacking is sufficiently arduous that it should demand full concentration, was valid and insightful. There may be a tiny spec of blue ocean in the payment BI space for a second or two so getting in and grabbing probably makes sense. Not knowing the exit strategy I can't judge for sure.

I bet the exit is acquisition with enough money to live next to a sandy beach and have frosty drinks with little umbrellas served at a moment's notice. Actually, like most entrepreneurs I've met, I bet the exit is to have enough cash to not worry and start something new. Either way carving a niche playing against the "rich get richer" nature of two markets (BI and money) takes courage. Wish them well. They will have to disrupt and create a new value proposition.

Can be done, never easy :).M

Social Marketing Flow IV - Social Marketing Flow Managers

Social Media Flow In Four Parts (this is the last post of a 4 part series).

Social Media Is Like Jazz

Social Media Flow Managers are charged with mining the gold from the social media flood. They operate in real time and against the clock. Social media is 24/7/365 so Social Media Flow Managers should be organized around the clock and calendar. They should have “soft” and “hard” conversion goals such as:

• Viewership (soft).
• Membership (harder).
• Money (hardest).

Eventually Social Media Flow Managers should spend 100% of their time monitoring and channeling flow, but in the beginning Social Media Flow Managers may create and curate content to stoke a company’s content engine. You will know it is time to remove content creation and curation duties when one trip around your content velodrome takes long enough there is enough new feedback in need of response and further curation that another loop needs to start.

Social Media Flow Managers will eventually focus on making the circuit around your content velodrome faster and faster producing more and more feedback (via content curated in, created or responded to). Social Media Flow Managers are fishermen casting a content net into a deep blue ocean. They are charged with learning where and what to cast and judged by the clear results they produce.

Why Social Media Flow Must Be Managers
Many companies will seek to staff their social media with the lowest cost employees they can find. If that is your approach, please come compete with me and the companies Atlantic BT helps create Internet marketing for. Your social marketing team must be the fighter pilots of your marketing and sales group. Social Flow Managers need to know your product line inside and out, have an extensive personal network with KLOUT and be seasoned enough to know the difference between real gold and fool’s gold.

The Social Media Flow Managers must be connected to your branding, PPC, SEO, mobile and web development teams. If you create a webpage design without feedback and input from your social meida fighter pilots you are nuts. Social Media Flow Managers are going to be focused on things such as the ease of sharing, what tools you use for sharing and the benefits and liabilities of each content sharing approach.

How can an Intern or recent college graduate know how to translate what they see into what your company needs to know? A: They can’t and shouldn’t be asked to attempt to do so. Interns and recent college graduates are important since they have been swimming in social media longer and may know cool tricks and tools, so include them on the team, but don’t expect them to lead.

A social Media Flow Manager is combines key roles including:

• Sales.
• Customer Service.
• Marketing.
• Merchandiser.
• Copywriter.
• Programmer.

Key Performance Indicators For Great Social Media Flow Managers (SMFM)
KPIs for SMFMs include macro things like site traffic and micro things like views of a particular piece of content (since their curation is what put the content in your customer’s reach).Here are some metrics to use to know when your SMFMs are really rocking:

• Web Site Traffic Doubles in less than a year. 
• Form completion (i.e. sales leads for B2B or site sales for B2C) goes up by at least 25% (2x traffic doesn’t translate 1 to 1 to form completions). 
•  Email List size doubles in less than a year. 
•  Cost of content creation declines by 10% or more even as content created or curated at least doubles.

When your Social Media Flow Managers do all four of those things and you should bonus them and ride them around on your shoulders. If, after reading all this, you think social media is a stupid game PLEASE come compete with us (or hopefully you already are).

I know there is amazing ROI in social media, but I believe in the large tableau of currency. I believe in ATTENTION, TRAFFIC, COMMUNITY, CONTRIBUTION and SHARING as forms of hard currency, money in its early stages for Internet marketers. I also believe in the breakdown of US and THEM:

Read Social Media Marketing - The Most Important ROI

This is the last of a 4 part series on Social Marketing Flow. If you missed one here are links to the others:

Social Marketing Flow In 4 Parts

Social Marketing Flow II - Model And Tools

Social Marketing Flow III - Examples

Social Marketing Flow III - Examples

How to Use Social Marketing Tools With Each Other

I had a customer ask if his team should use Tiwtter or Facebook. The answer is YES and it confused him. Each tool on the list above does different things. Here is the list again with each tool’s strengths outlined:

• Scoop.it – Near real time feedback loop, hub of social media publication.
• Twtter – Like radio Twitter is great for things happening NOW, lousy for stuff that happened as long ago as yesterday (lol).
• A WordPress blog – Sometimes you need to go long form in an SEO friendly environment.
• Pinterest – The best visual feedback loop on planet earth, when your images get repined keep track.
• Google Plus – Best at long form and don’t copy and paste from any other publication, write new summaries.
• Tumblr – A rolling visual micro-blog somewhere between WordPress and Pinterest can help create groundswell NOW.
• Facebook – Thanks to edgerank your posts don’t get shown to all your followers, so keep that in mind when you evaluate what gets pick up. Look for Facebook as a great focus group. Ask question and be prepared to modify your course based on feedback. Be sure to close the loop and credit any change back to your Facebook community.

I’m looking at my 12 Scoop.it Revolutions as I write this. New content has been published to every revolution in the last 12 hours. Some revolutions such as Business Intelligence Revolution have had several articles curated into them. Here is the viewer counts for the 12 Revolutions at 5:37:

1. Curation Revolution
Has 46 views today with 12,600 all time. It is on its third article in the last 12 hours. The Forbes article Social Media Marketing: What’s the Point? Doubled viewership since being shared at noon. Curation Revolution won’t be changed again until after 10 pm tonight.

2. Design Revolution
Has 21 views today and 1,500 all time. Design Revolution is on its second article. Why Being A Website Design Minimalist Is A Good Idea and So Hard To Do doubled viewership since it was shared at noon. Design Revolution is good until 10 PM tonight.

3. BI Revolution
Has 19 views today and 3,500 all time. BI Revolution views have tripled since Soccer Embraces Big Data To Quantify The Beautiful Game went live at noon. BI Revolution is good until 10 pm.

4. Thank You Revolution
Has 16 views today and 1,800 all time. Thank You Revolution views tripled with The Manly Man’s Ultimate Guide To Pinterest was put up at a little after 10:00 am. Thank You Revolution is good until 10 pm.

5. SoLoMo Revolution
Has 2 views today and 1,200 all time. The content hasn’t been changed since yesterday. Since SoLoMo has the lowest view count today and it hasn’t received new content for more than 24 hours I just used Scoop.it’s social content spider to find a SlashGear post on how the iPhone 5 will probably kill the iPhone 3GS from being an active offering in the iPhone line. I supported the post with a Tweet since my last Tweet was 2 hour ago. I added the post to Tumblr and Linkedin because I know anything Apple works well across LI, Tumblr and Twitter. In less than a minute viewership doubles on SoLoMo Revolution and SoLoMo Revolution is now good until 10 pm.

And so on….

Social Media Flow Manager - New Job Description For A New Kind of Marketing

Many readers of the flow example will be asking, “Where is the ROI, why are you doing all this work.” In less than a year almost my Scoop.it feeds have received almost 30,000 views. My core Scoop.it page has a Google PageRank of 4. I’ve owned the absolute #1 position on the keyword phrase “Curation Revolution” or over a year beating out more than 700,000 other pages for that honor.

I can hear the financial purists chomping their bits, “What about the money?” Any Internet marketer can explain money is the last success marker. First people have to know you exist, so you fight for ATTENTION first. Next comes caring enough to click. Clicks go by another Internet marketing term – TRAFFIC. The traffic lands on one of your websites and you fight to have an ever increasing amount of traffic do what you want or CONVERT.

Conversion depends on a million variables, so more information is always better than less. Thanks to my social flow work with Scoop.it, Twitter, Facebook, our blog and other tools I know important ideas, ideas sure to translate to Attention,Traffic and Conversion such as:

• Use the More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better rule to publish content.
• Some content is more viral such as Ultimate guides and Top X lists.
• When in doubt use Infographics, but don’t overuse.
• Anything visual beats anything textual (who reads anymore).
• Controversy sells ATC (Attention, Traffic and Conversion).
• Nothing beats immediate social presence, nothing.
• Closer to REAL TIME breaking events we are the more viral impact our content has.
• Evergreen or highly viral content can have a second act, 3^rd acts are rare.
• At least a few “Power ReTweeters” are needed to create an viral content storm, viral storms can’t be built without at least some BIG Twitter accounts supporting.
• Even viral business content follows the SDR rule (Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll) where “rock and role” also refers to novelty or in early on something from a trusted source.
• Viewers and members aren’t created by the same content. Viewership needs more SDR (Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll), members need more “Like Me” signals.

And so on…

The value of those ideas in the right Internet marketer’s hands is significant. Companies who want to excel in what comes next will need dedicated social resources in real time. Companies will need Social Media Flow Managers.

Tomorrow, more on Social Media Marketing Flow Managers.

Social Marketing Flow Part II - Model and Tools

How Does Social Media Flow Happen?

You may be managing your social media as a task or a series of tasks. You hang laundry on a line, it dries and then you fold. Social media is happening all the time. As I write this sentence a million pieces of information related to things I care about are being loaded into Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and websites. How are you going to hang a million towels on a line?

You can’t. Instead you create a system of proxies and trust agents. There is another term for a system of proxies and trust agents – social networks. Your social network is the flexible membrane you use to wrap your need to curate an impossible infinity of information. Social networks are like the fine skin of a delicious spring roll, a paper thin skin you see through without being able to distinguish detail.

You load your army of content pickers onto trucks and head into the fields daily. “You” can be you as an individual or you as a company. The single difference, at least as far as social media flow is concerned, between individual and company is the number of pickers and trucks. If your company doesn’t have an order of magnitude more pickers and trucks than you find another company since that first one isn’t long for this world.

A social media flow model and approach should include:

• Metrics tool capable of real time or near real time feedback loops. 
• A Manager or several Managers capable of publishing and watching social media 24/7/365. 
• Tools to amplify reach, create alerts and organize curation and creation. 
• An archive of curated or created content. 
• A tool capable of spidering the web by keyword on demand. 
• A Content Management System (CMS) capable of incorporating new content. 
• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capable of lead nurturing and scoring. 
• Predictive analytics based on business rules that tighten the conversion funnel in real time: 
• Reduces costs because content created is more likely to convert. 
• Increases profits because buyers reach “like me” sales point faster.

• Able to expand content inputs across multiple authors, topics organized by tagging and approved and managed algorithm based exception reporting. 
•  Engine that functions like a top spinning faster and faster, learning more and more and producing better and better results.

No one has created a complete Social Media Flow model as described above, but we can see pieces. It is possible to enter a “social media flow state” using some off the shelf and mostly FREE tools including:

• Scoop.it.
• Twtter.
• A WordPress blog.
• Pinterest.
• Google Plus.
• Tumblr.
• Facebook. 

Tomorrow Social Media Flow III: Examples.

Yesterday: Social Media Marketing Flow In Four Parts (introduction to the series)

Social Marketing Flow In 4 Parts

Social Marketing Flow
Flow, a psychological state described by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi roughly akin to being “in the zone” is important to social marketing success. Larry Mullins provided a great overview of Flow in an Amazon Review:

Flow are those inexplicable moments of indescribable happiness that we experience at rare intervals, when we are "surprised by joy." These precious moments seem to be gifts, almost accidental peak experiences in which life seems rich with meaning, joy and wonder. When and why do these magic episodes intrude upon our humdrum existences? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's answer may surprise you: "Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments of our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times ... The best moments of our lives usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary moment to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen ... For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves."

Csikszentmihalyi's theme is happiness. This philosopher-psychologist points out the Aristotelian concept that all other things we seek, riches, fame, power, etc. are valued only because we believe they will make us happy. Based upon decades of research on the mystery of happiness, Csikszentmihalyi defines it as moments of self-forgetfulness when we are totally absorbed in the process of life ... intervals of peak creativity and self-expression. He expands upon the research of Abraham Maslow and agrees that peak experiences are within the reach of us all.

I don’t copy reviews as a rule, but there are key ideas Larry’s Flow review such as:

• Flow challenges our minds perhaps close to its limits.
• Enter Flow When we are after something “difficult and worthwhile”.
• There are thousands of chances for FLOW or peak experience everyday.
• Flow is total absorption.

I’m heavily involved in social media and FLOW is a critical concept. Social media marketing happens in near real time. Any interpreter of social media market’s real time signals will be taxed fully challenged. Social signals must be watched, fed and reacted to immediately.

Social Marketing Flow Part 2 Friday
Social Media Flow Part 2 Tomorrow followed by 3 and 4 including a new Job Description for a Social Media Flow Manager Friday and through the weekend on ScentTrail Marketing.

InstaKeeper Cool Instant Photo Captioning Launches

Caption Pictures NOW With Your Phone
I hope you are blessed with good, smart generous friends. I am lucky. Good smart friends make the journey fun. One of the best Internet marketers I know, Molly Freudenberg, launched a very cool thing a last week.

InstaKeeper Captions Your Photos In Real TimeThe best ideas make you smack your head and say, "Why didn't I think of that." InstaKeeper is an app that captions your photos "in the moment" when you take them. Could have used this app on Martin's Ride To Cure Cancer. We took thousands of photos on our bicycle trek across America. Looking back now every mountain and town looks the same. It is hard to remember where we where and what we were doing when we took many of our pictures since only a handful made it to Martin's Ride on Flickr.

Molly's InstaKeeper brilliantly solves this problem allowing captioning when you take the picture from your phone. Even cooler you can create templates and auto-caption. The next time I ride a bicycle across something we can create a Martin's Ride template that will be applied to our pictures. When we were in Colorado we could have created a CO template or a CA for California. Too cool!

Molly's cool app is sure to BLOW UP. Get in there and be one of the first to have something sure to be one of the next cool things since it solves a common problem elegantly.

Go to InstaKeeper.com,
Request An Invitation to Molly's new cool app. She had 100 people sign up on the first day, so her app has hit a nerve. Next Martin's Ride InstaKeeper goes along for the ride :).

Note InstaKeeper.com isn't indexed in Google yet so drive some links in there to help get Google to recognize Molly's cool new app.

Love crafts? Molly does too in fact she has created one of the largest craft sites on the web. Take cool pics and go to Molly's other site to learn how to make fun stuff out of them, find a community of crafties and share your tips and stories:

CraftIdeasWeekly.com