We get asked all of the time, “who should I call to raise money for my latest idea?” We usually point them to the Texas Startup Blog’s Venture Capital Directory, but more recently we have been excited about the work Jeff Williams of Hunt Ventures has been doing. Read more about, ‘Jeff Williams, hottest VC in Dallas!‘.
This weekend we had a nonpartisan mayoral runoff election here in Dallas. I supported Tom Leppert in the election and signed up at his website to have a yard sign placed in at my Greenville Avenue property. Tom won the election, but I was pleased to find a short email in my inbox from Tom’s team thanking me for my vote. Community efforts, like elections, are only possible through the efforts of community members, remember to thank them!
Less than a week after we decided to build and launch ServiceGuy, the final logo has arrived. Thank you for your comments, suggestions and ideas. What do you think:
Hopefully ServiceGuy grows on you. It is not certain that ServiceGuy will catch on outside of Dallas, but the team is excited enough to invest a week of their lives to see. The guys are in Portland for RailsConf and should start in earnest next week.
Allen Gwinn has a blog where he talks about city politics and other related issues. Most interestingly he offers several databases with interesting tidbits such as Dallas employee salaries as well as credit cards. The credit card spending habits of city employees is most interesting. Check it out here. Perhaps Allen could start monitoring the police as well…
So what? The Pawn Gallery’s first location was MySpace, on December 1st they move into our space. The art gallery built a following on MySpace ensuring their grand opening was a huge success. Very nice work by a local company!
The company explains:
The Pawn Gallery at 2540 Elm in Deep Ellum is celebrating it’s grand opening on December 1, 2006. We are here first and foremost as a champion of the artist. Artists pawn their integrity, self respect and style in order to have a gallery to show their work. Then the creations are sold like a slab of meat at the butcher shop. We are attempting to showcase the creators of the world in an unadulterated form. [via]
I gave a Blogging 101 talk at the Dallas Roundtable on Tuesday at the Park City Club. I've met a bunch of the DRT folks at events, but this was the first time I got to address the whole group. A super sharp gathering of folks. The goal of the DRT is to bring together business leaders from every segment (one from each vertical) to share knowledge and networks. With the DRT, it's likely that you're only one degree of separation from any business leader in the DFW area.
Here are the slides I did for that talk.
Here are links to a few of the sites we discussed:
Here’s an article I did for Floral Management Magazine. It’s meant as a list of real world blogging tips for marketers who want to really put the new tools in play and change the way they talk to customers. As Mike says: it’s time to get real about how hard it is to really have a bunch of ‘edge’ communications. Love to hear what you think.
Living on the Edge: Blogging in the Real World
Ok, we get it: blogs can be really good for business. Over the past 18 months, a lot of words have been laid down to get people to think about blogs as more than online journals, places for cat photos and outlets for political rants. Big companies like Sun, Microsoft, Boeing, GM and a number of others have embraced blogging as a critical way to have conversations with those who matter to their business. A new blog comes online every second, according to blog search service Technorati. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have just published the definitive book on business blogging – Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.
Blogs are here to stay. So, how do we actually do this stuff?
As my friend Mike Manuel noted at the New Communications Forum this past week, it’s time to move the discussion out of theories about blogging and social media and into the raucous to & fro that is actual conversation. Once you get the big idea (that as marketers our job is to enhance conversations, not try to control them), you need a new set of approaches for getting the job done. The bad news: there are no hard & fast rules. As customers produce their own messages (through blogs, videos, podcasts, photos) at the edges, our marketing has to be flexible, flowing, transparent. Honest. Here’s a handful of real world thoughts to get you started on your own adventure with blogs and other social media:
Get Small Fast.
Social media is an embarrassment of niches. Blogs make small players look bigger & help big players get small. If mass media wastes your message on those not interested, social media helps you offer sharp, targeted stuff that is high value to the right readers. So, you’re not just the floral expert. Maybe you’re the wedding flowers guru. Or you’re the one who’s going to show us the value in everyday flowers. Or you’re going to launch a flower-a-day blog to help us branch out a bit. Drill down. Slice your area in half. And again. Go niche and you’re on your way to better blogging.
Just Do It.
How do you learn to blog? By blogging. Badly at first, but improving with each push of the publish button. See, you’ll quickly learn what gets a response. People will comment, link to you, totally ignore posts that don’t matter to them. Don’t fret endlessly over what platform to use (choose one of the top ones and get cranking). Don’t overdo the fuss over your design (do something clean and sharp that lets people get to the info they want). Don’t overthink it. Start writing a little bit, and see what the world has to say.
Link, link, link.
The most important thing to do in a blog post is provide good links. The second most important thing is to provide really good links. And so on.
Write a Little. Often.
Readership and improved search engine rankings happen through this magical formula: lots of frequent, short posts with links. Have a big idea? Chop it up into a series of posts. Make your blog look alive with routine posts.
Listen. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s a conversation, right? How can you learn anything if you’re always running your mouth? Pay attention to comments. Respond to them. Use Technorati and other blog search services to track what people are saying about your company, your service, your area of expertise. Respond on their blogs. Great blogging is really about reading, understanding and synthesizing. The writing is mostly flourish.
Ping, Don’t Pitch.
My geek pals & I have a phrase we use when we tap each other for something: ping. When reaching out to other bloggers, don’t approach it as you would an old-school media relations pitch. Offer something of interest to someone you know says Josh Hallett. A great formulation. Engage other bloggers. Comment on their stuff. By all means, let them know what you’re up to. (You’re proud of your content, right?) But, don’t do it in a mercenary way. Focus on sharing valuable, relevant links & material.
Spread the Words.
All blog software creates a feed that is automagically updated each time you post. (Sometimes you’ll see an inscrutable orange box that says XML or RSS. That’s what we mean.) Use these feeds to help you spread the word. You can reflow (or syndicate) your blog content to other parts of your Web site. Make sure to prominently feature your blog feed on your page, on your home page, etc. Let readers get your blog posts via email if that’s what they want. Include your blog address in your email footer.
Search Me.
As Elisa Camahort so rightly pointed out the other day, the phrase ‘blogs are great for Google juice’ gets repeated as though it were a form of magic. Can blogging help you show up better on Google and other search engines? Absolutely. It’s a nice, organic byproduct of having real conversations with people. It doesn’t happen by accident, though. Think about what you want to be known for. (Again, go niche.) Then write about those things. Use those terms. And give it time. Blogging is a long-term play with no good shortcuts. As Jeremy Pepper cautions, though, "don’t just go into blogging for ‘Google Juice’ but because you have passion." Without passion for the topic, the blog won’t continually pull an audience.
Think Beyond the Blog.
When I say ‘blogging’, I really mean all the new tools we can use to self-publish our ideas. Blogs, sure, but there is also flickr and other photosharing services;delicious, digg and other bookmarking communities; podcasting at iTunes, Odeo, AudioBlog and other listing sites; YouTube, Google Video and other video sharing sites; forums, mailing lists and so much more. When you start looking around, the Edge suddenly feels endless. And very exciting.
Updated:
Mike Sansone adds a great point (Rebecca Blood’s incremental value process at work):
Share Your Knowledge. Mike highlights a key part of the blogging way — sharing know how, linking out, providing value as a ticket into the conversation. This is fundamental, and I’m glad Mike added his voice to this piece.
Technorati Tags: better+blogging, brian oberkirch, elisa+camahort, flickr, mike+manuel
Jeremy Kleindl rocks the house by posting the audio from the Barcamp Dallas presentations that happened in the main room. This is going to be a feature in future BarSpy runs.
Updated: Even better, here is a podcast feed with these presentations, created with Podserve. Thanks, Alex.
Technorati Tags: adam+keys, barcamp, barcampdallas, chris messina, jeremy+kleindl, alex+leverington, raven zachary, raven zachary, tony+lewis
I totally dug hanging out at Joe T. Garcia’s yesterday at the Fort Worth Ad Club Luncheon. Here is a clickstream for the talk I gave — a little social media jumpstart link kit:
Blogging Buzz/Confusion
BusinessWeek story — "Blogs Will Change Your Business"
Forbes paranoia — "Attack of the Blogs"
Blogging Delivered
Blogging Not Exactly Delivered
The Situation: Attention Scarcity
Long Tail blog on Mainstream Media Meltdown
John Moore on the influence of word of mouth
Brand Hijack manifesto
Sifry’s latest state of the blogosphere
Wrong! NY Times on tv-style ads on mobile devices. (Note: don’t try this at home)
Extinction Management
Tools
SixApart (Typepad, MovableType)
Wordpress (hosted option as well)
About RSS
Bloglines
NetNewsWire
(Example of syndicated headlines at Architel site)
Technorati
IceRocket
Delicious
Digg
tech.memeorandum
flickr
Odeo
iTunes podcast support
Robert Scoble
Jonathan Schwartz
English Cut
Stormhoek blog sampling
The Bad
Dell Hell
Dude, You’re Getting Dell’d
The Ugly
Essential Reading
Cluetrain Manifesto
Naked Conversations (check out the blog, too)
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Useful Marketing Stuff
MicroPersuasion
GapingVoid
BrandAutopsy
What’s Your Brand Mantra?
Church of the Customer
Media Orchard
New PR Wiki
Marketing Begins at Home
HorsePigCow
Like It Matters
PDF of my slides. (9.67 MB)
Technorati Tags: ad club fort worth, social media, Weblogs Work
Who knew?
AT&T billboard on I-35 (Stemmons Freeway across from the INFOMART) in Dallas, Texas.
Weblogs Work (along with Architel, SimpleTicket, Big in Japan and many others) is sponsoring Barcamp Dallas. It’s an “ad hoc unconference” — a chance for creative technologists interested in social media, open source projects, whatever, can get together and get their collective geek on. We’re excited because we’d like this to jumpstart a routine series of meet-ups, working sessions and general hanging out (San Fransocializing right here at home) that improves the vibe here.
January 28th. At the Infomart.
Check out the wiki here. Sign up, do a demo of your latest whiz bang idea. Spread the word. We look forward to seeing you.
Technorati Tags: architel, barcamp, biginjapan, simpleticket, Weblogs+Work
The Architel corporate web/blog site has been launched. The open source WordPress architecture allows the company to launch the site and make continious changes to it over time. So you can never say a site is ‘done.’ Kudos go to Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits for the xhtml/css design (as well as the new Architel logo). Weblogs Work integrated the xhtml/css into WordPress (actually three WordPress installs).
Architel is a boutique IT support company located in Dallas, Texas that supports small businesses (20-100) employees. Their unique IT service delivery model (one flat-monthly-fee for all-you-can-eat support) aligns the interests of the small business owner and Architel. The company was a pioneer in this space and is now a pioneer in the ‘blog as corporate website’ meme. Here are screenshots or just visit the site yourself here @ architel.com.
The site was entered in the website design contest at SXSW conference and we are crossing our fingers that the judges will enjoy the tight integration between the blog CMS and Dan’s xhtml and css. What do you think about our work?