Derailed [Book Review]

January 23, 2010 By 14 Comments

Most of the business books that are published focus on teaching you what you can do to improve your sales, marketing, customer retention, productivity or a number of other business-related goals.  The case studies in these books typically highlight role models of the concepts being described and then have actionable tips that you can follow to achieve similar results.

Well, Derailed (affiliate link) by Tim Irwin takes the exact opposite perspective but that’s what makes the book so great.  Derailed reviews the decisions, personalities and eventual derailments of six high-profile leaders.  Irwin finds that:

deficits in authenticity, humility, self-management, and courage become more dangerous as we take on more leadership, and can cause us to ignore glaring signals that might otherwise save us from catastrophic demise

It is from these derailments that Irwin puts together a list of five lessons can we can all implement into our lives to avoid current or future failures in leadership if we’re currently in an executive position or seek to obtain a position in the future.

Catch more of my review in this quick video review.  If you can’t see the video, you can grab it over on YouTube.

Note: Apparently there was some background noise from my washing machine, or who knows what.  Sorry for the little annoying hum.

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Have you read the book?  What were your thoughts on it?

Disclosure: This book was provided as a review copy.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Business, Reviews, Videos Tagged With: , , ,

Sharing Content in Another Stream

January 21, 2010 By 21 Comments

On a daily basis I will generally run through between 400-800+ feeds.  Of those, I share the top posts, usually around 30 or so, that I think will be useful for you.  Realizing that a majority of you don’t follow my Google Reader feed or may use a different feed reader, I wanted to provide another option for you to access those articles.

Sure, I push my Google Reader shared items through FriendFeed and I share a handful of posts daily through my Twitter account.  But, seeing that the majority of my community hangs out in Twitter more often than most other services, I wanted to be able to share with you through there.  Therefore, similar to what Louis Gray (@lgshareditems), Robert Scoble (@scoblemedia) and Chris Brogan (@broganmedia) have done, I have created a new handle on Twitter: @jlevymedia.  This will be, as Chris calls it, a pure stream of the content that I share or produce from around the interwebs.

Besides trying to provide you with, what you will hopefully find as a resource, what I like about having this Twitter account is that it allows me track all of the links that I share through Google Reader in Bit.ly.

While this might not be totally useful as of yet, it will still help me to gauge whether or not the info that I share is useful to you.  As time goes on I will tweak what based on feedback and stats such as Bit.ly clicks, retweets and more.

If you think it will be of interest to you, I hope that you’ll come join me over on @jlevymedia.

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Filed Under: Google, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machine

January 20, 2010 By 28 Comments

Imagine if you walked up to a vending machine, dropped in a couple dollars, made your selection and a soda popped out.  Seems completely normal, right?  Now, what if another soda came out. Possibly the computer on the fritz but kinda cool, huh?  But, what if it kept spitting out soda after soda, started pouring the soda for you into a glass, gave you some flowers and a pizza?  Think that would cause a group of people to gather ’round the vending machine?  Of course it would.  Now, what if that was all captured on video and shared online.  High chance of going viral? Yep.

Well, that is exactly what Coca-Cola has done as part of their “Open Happiness” global marketing campaign.

As MediaPost explains:

Coke set up a special vending machine on a real college campus and rolled footage of students’ surprised and delighted reactions as the machine proceeded to dispense everything from free bottles of Coke to flowers, a whole pizza, a six-foot sub and balloon animals.

Coke couldn’t have scripted better responses: Students laugh and jump, pass the Cokes and gifts around, and even thank Coke as they hug the vending machine. But the footage is “all real students and real reactions,” according to Christy Amador, digital marketing manager, Coca-Cola global interactive marketing.

The video is the first video that Coca-Cola has released that was created solely for digital distribution without use in TV ads.  Want to know if it was a success for Coca-Cola?  Well, in the week since the video has gone live on YouTube, it has received over 700,000+ views.

Without further ado, here is the hilarious video from St. John’s University.  If you can’t view this video, head over to YouTube.

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Coca-Cola has been garnering a lot of applause from the social media community as of late, first, with the release of their 3 page social media policy and now with this.

Do you like the concept?  How could other brands learn from what Coca-Cola has been doing?

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Filed Under: Social Media, Videos Tagged With: , ,

Email or RSS: Which Do You Prefer

January 13, 2010 By 41 Comments

In a recent survey of their customers HubSpot found that their customers preferred to subscribe to blogs via email subscription nearly 12 times more than their preference for RSS.  HubSpot serves mostly small and medium businesses in a cross-section of verticals.  Therefore, the results are not surprising.  In doing educational seminars and speaking to a variety of different groups, I usually have to describe what RSS actually is.  Most will admit to see the RSS logo on websites that they visit often but not knowing what it was.  Those of us that live and breath technology and digital marketing channels such as social media tend to take for granted that we integrate technologies into our lives well before mainstream society.

Comparing email and RSS subscribers of this blog reveals the exact opposite trend.  Only 5% of you choose to subscribe via email.  What’s interesting about this is that if you take a look at this blog, you’ll notice that the email subscription call-to-action is larger and more prominent than the 2 calls-to-action to subscribe via RSS.  While there are many reasons why this may occur, I think it boils down to a couple of reasons:

1. This is possibly due to topics that are covered around here and the subscriber that attracts.
2. It could be that many of you feel overburdened with email and therefore do not want yet another email to have to read on a daily basis.
3. Some may not like providing their email address due to a fear of spam and feel that if they subscribe via RSS it is easier to opt-out.

For those that are in the 3rd bucket, I can assure you that on this blog your email is held confidential (see my pledge to you on my Newsletter page).  But, I can understand the hesitance to provide your email address especially since every big box retailer, restaurant chain or other business asks for your email address.

I only subscribe to a couple blogs via email, mostly blogs that I manage to ensure that everything is working properly.  There are only a few others that I subscribe to via email because they provide a daily digest of the news within the vertical that they cover.  Otherwise, and more often, I prefer to subscribe via RSS.  Currently, I’m subscribed to 200+ blogs and read, in general, between 400-600 articles per day.  If I was to subscribe to even a portion of these blogs via email, I would have a full inbox at the start of the day before business and personal emails began to fly in.

Where do you fall?  Do you prefer to subscribe via RSS or email to blogs?  If you use both methods, what factors weigh in your decision?

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Photo Credit: HubSpot

Filed Under: Email, Hubspot, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Reply to Facebook Comments via Email

January 12, 2010 By 15 Comments

Today Facebook launched the ability to reply to comments (status updates, photos, videos, and Wall posts) via email.

While this isn’t a major platform upgrade, it would appear that it will drive more engagement with Facebook.  This will occur for 3 main reasons:

  1. Many of us live in our email therefore we’re likely to respond faster to an email then if we have to log in to Facebook to leave a follow up comment.
  2. This reduces the number of steps required to post a response to Facebook once an email notification was received.  Prior to this upgrade you would receive the notification, click the link in the body of email, log in to Facebook, and then leave a comment.  Now, you receive the email notification, hit “Reply”, type your response and hit “Send”. Much simpler, if you ask me.
  3. As ReadWriteWeb notes, employees who work at companies where Facebook is blocked will now be able to engage on Facebook throughout the course of the work day.  They may have been able to make these updates via a smartphone like an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid previously but the risk of getting caught is much higher.  We all know that person that we’ve seen with their head down in their lap all day long texting, playing on Facebook or checking Twitter from their phone.

In my experiences, I tend to respond faster when I can use email as the communications tool.  When I moved my blogs over the Disqus commenting system, I immediately began responding to comments faster because I could easily respond via email.  I think the same thing will happen with Facebook.  I do a decent job responding to comments on Facebook but definitely think that this will increase my engagement with the platform.

Over the past several months of working on my book, Facebook Marketing (affiliate link), it has been very interesting to watch Facebook continue to evolve.  Besides always trying to stay up on everything going around around the social web, I have kept a close eye on what’s happening with Facebook.

Now if they could just enable email notifications for Facebook Pages, the world would rejoice, fireworks would be shot from rooftops and we would all sing carols.  Well, maybe not the fireworks but it would still be very helpful for those of us who manage a Facebook Page, nevermind for those who manage a handful of them.

But, until that happens, I’ll focus on this newest update.  What do YOU think of this new update to Facebook?  Will you engage more via email?

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Photo Credit: Tom Whitnah

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media Tagged With: ,
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