Here are the players in this video: Shel Israel, a social media maven who was a co-author of Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble and Richard Binhammer, communications big dog at Dell computer.

A few years ago, their service and their computers produced more cursing than most anything else. There was talk of “Dell Hell.” They lost market share and the company was starting to feel the big hurt in the marketplace.

It’s changed. Their negatives turned into positives. What happened? They started listening and reacting and developing relationships with their consumers. This is worth a watch if you are in the marketplace, regardless of the product or service.

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Where did the first news of this week’s earthquake come from?  CNN?  New York Times?  Other television networks?It appears that Twitter users in China were the first to get word out about this terrible tragedy.  Read this post from Rob La Gatta of Real Lawyers Have Blogs.You familiar with Twitter?  It’s a social web tool.  Wherever you live and work and whatever your age, you should be familiar with it.  For some good links explaining Twitter, check my post from yesterday. 

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Want to see what a good city council member blog looks like?

Check out this blog from Seattle City Council member Sally Clark who in her May 6 post talks about an incredible perk of holding office.

Read her blog and you will get a feel for her values, the type of person she is and what makes her tick.  You also get her insights on city issues.

Her writing voice seems very natural and real.

Share your reaction.  Does her blog work for you?

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Here they go again, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) are continuing to lead with using social media to advance their business interests.

For their mid-year legislative meeting in Washington, D.C., they have created a Twitter network.   You can follow happenings as they happen and have them sent to your computer of cellphone.

Not familiar with Twittering?  It’s micro-blogging:  Lee Lefever of Commoncraft explains Twitter in this short, but extremely clear video.

Have you used Twitter for your business or organization function?

(Thanks to Laura Bergells for the tip)

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Continue to think about the community for your blog. It’s vital that you identify it. From that knowledge, you can more effectively research, write and publish your posts.

Here’s some help from Geoff Livingston, author of the book, Now Is Gone, and a blog by the same name:

  • Community: A group of people living together as a smaller social unit within a larger one, and having interests, work, etc. in common.
  • Communities assume interaction is always a possibility, that two way communication can occur in a variety of ways at any time, and that there’s a deeper relationship between parties.

Do you have your community on your radar?

Can you visualize who they are?

It’s worth your time to go through this exercise, particularly before you start your blog.

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This is a tuffy for people in our state–Michigan–and others to figure out for their blogs:

  • How do you determine who is in your community for your blog?
  • How is a community different from an audience?

Don’t expect to wrap your head around this in one visit.  The marketplace has changed fundamentally in the way it communicates.

Think about it:  Businesses, politicians and non-profit organizations have communicated by having a message and by communicating that from the top down to the people or the audience who they wanted to hear it.  These groups would use mainstream media like newspapers, radio, television, magazines and media like that.

No more.  The marketplace has become a series of conversations where the consumer wants a voice with those they are dealing with.  They want to be heard and they expect transparency from those they are dealing with.

Many don’t get this . . .yet.  Look in the left margin of this blog and under Resources, click on the Cluetrain Manifesto and read the first ten of its 95 Theses.

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Save this blog post from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net.  Bookmark it.

In it, he writes about pro-blogger Leo Babauta who tells about the “tipping point” for his blog.  He got his first readers and then engaged them in a conversation about what they wanted to read, the kinds of information they would find useful.

Their response shaped his blog, what he wrote about and how he presented it.  He said:

By listening to my readers, and having a conversation with them, I was able to figure out what they really wanted, what kinds of posts would be most interesting and useful to them, and to give Zen Habits a character that was not just mine but theirs as well.

Has anybody struggled with engaging your readers?

Do you know who your readers are?

Do you know who is in your community?

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More and more people, right here, smack dab in the middle of Michigan, are starting to ask me questions about blogs and how they fit with other communication tools on the web.

During the past four plus years that I’ve been blogging, it’s been hard to engage serious interest in this tool that they have commonly associated with political activists who bloviate for or against somebody or something.   Many have also connected it to teenagers who talk about music, dating problems and who’s hot.

Most didn’t take blogs seriously.  They never saw it as a destination for serious information regarding the day-to-day adult world.  That’s changing.

The average person in our part of the Midwest goes to blogs for all kinds of information.  Real estate blogs are not yet front and center, but they are on the radar as a mechanism for real estate agents to use to develop relationships with their buyers and sellers.   Some elected officials are starting to use them, as well as ministers.

I’m being asked more and more to share what I’ve learned about blogs and blogging.  I have coached some through the process of getting blogs up and running and maintaining them.

I have seen where many Michigan bloggers get stuck in their understanding and practice of blogging and become discouraged with the return they are getting.

That’s why I’m going to start a brain dump of these various items.  I visualize this as a running series of posts.  Most will be short and sweet and many will have links.

But, it will be my attempt to share what I’ve learned and to encourage questions and input from others.

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Sure, more pastors are putting audio of their sermons online. But, is it worth the effort?

Here’s one answer from Pastor Mark Batterson of the National Community Church in Washington, D.C. who shares stats from his website about downloads of his sermons. In his blog he reports:

“Our digital pastor, David Russell, just shared some interesting webcast stats with me. Total viewing time in 2007 was 14,958,439 seconds or a little more than 173 days. We delivered 1,132,691 megabytes of total data. And our webcast reached all 50 states plus 83 countries. Can you say word of mouse!”

Fifty-four percent of the church’s attenders visited the church website before coming for the first time.

He said, your website is the front door to your church! It’s your first impression.

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My son, Justin, is at a conference in mid-town Manhattan. Around supper time, he called on his iPhone from Times Square. As we were chatting about his day, he asked if I’d search Google for best free wi-fi near his hotel.

Where do you look for good solid local info about restaurants, realtors, doctors and, yes, best free wi-fi. I went to Yelp. It’s a social media site where users write their own reviews of services in all kinds of categories in a variety of areas.

I was able to give him a link that provided the names and places with reviews of places with free wi-fi. Check it out. Leave a comment about what you think.

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