Blogs Of Best Topics U Can Find

The following is a guest post from Dean Hunt. What leads me to putting up this post is two-fold. One, Dean is a very energetic and determined man. He has goals, and he intends to meet them. Two, Dean shares his experience of drawing similarities between learning how to be a “pick up artist” and how that relates to speaking. Why that’s interesting is that I saw the entire first season of the VH-1 show, The Pick-Up Artist, and thought there were actually some communications lessons hidden in their less-than-savory intentions. Human nature is what it is. The TV show chose to apply it in ways I wouldn’t, but the information wasn’t inaccurate.

So, with that as a backdrop, I give you Dean Hunt:

Learning To Become a Great Public Speaker by “Picking Up” Women

Flashback a few months and I was dreadfully afraid of public speaking. And being a buzz marketing “guru” meant people weren’t expecting show and tell about my goldfish in front of 5 year olds. They wanted me speaking in front of hundreds of people who had paid thousands of dollars to be there.

Well it’s hard to be a “guru” when your knees are knocking together and sweat is dripping off every part of your body. Obviously, something had to be done– and fast. The problem was that public speaking is BORING. Most people run off to Toastmasters (which I tried), read a bunch of books (which I did), and even throw some hypnosis or NLP in there for good measure (I did this as well)

Luckily for me, I’m NOT most people. I decided to do what I do best, turn this into something exciting and fun, so I am learning public speaking by “picking up” women. Why? Because meeting women can be just as terrifying as public speaking, and it basically involves a lot of the same skills. Let’s take a look at a few:

Self Confidence – No one will listen to a speaker who isn’t confident in their own abilities. Pick up artists require the same self confidence or a woman will smell their fear and send them home with their tail between their legs.

Body Language – Public speakers need to display confident body language, understand what messages their body is sending, and read the body language of the audience. Well, pick up artists do exactly the same thing.

Vocal Tone – Public speakers tend to slow down their speech and lower their vocal tone to display confidence. Pick up artists… you guessed it.

Charisma – Boring people have a very hard time making a living as public speakers. But everyone one loves the charming, interesting, and funny person at the party, bar, or on stage.

Performance – You don’t have to be on a stage to put on a performance either. Pick up artists actually use routines that can range from magic tricks to conversations with seductive hidden undertones.

At the end of the day, public speaking and meeting people are intertwined with the same skill sets. While “picking up” women may sound sleazy… what it really means is making yourself more attractive to the opposite sex. I.e. Making yourself a more interesting and appealing person.

So, whether you’re in front of thousands of people or in a more intimate setting, you should be practising the skills mentioned above. It just so happened that meeting women was more fun for me than trying to conquer stage fright.

And that’s the most important lesson here: the more fun you’re having, the more you’ll learn. So try to find ways to learn skills that motivate you, not terrify you.

Have you ever found a way to “cheat” your learning system like this? Have an amazing pick-up or disastrous public speaking story? I’d love to hear from others that feel my pain. Or just challenge me to make your own goals more fun.

I will do an update post on here in a few months, with the specific things I have learnt, techniques I have developed etc.

Dean provides a bio:

Dean Hunt is the net’s leading buzz marketer. He is also a high-end business consultant, and is famed for his killer bunnies, entertaining insights, oh… and getting over 260,000 unique visitors to his blog in an 11 day period…. for FREE.

You can read his rants and tips at www.DeanHunt.com,receive over 7 free buzz reports at www.BuzzProfits.com and find out more about his services by emailing dean@buzzprofits.com

Marketing a product is hard. Think about it. If you’re the chief storyteller of Skype right now, what are you going to say about the product that will encourage more usage, more uptake, more awareness? The product is fairly solid, has a known set of features, and is one of a few “name brand” products in the Voice over IP space. So what can you say about it?

Companies face this trouble all the time. What will you say about Pepsi? How will you talk about the Ford Flex tomorrow? What should Titlist tell you about their Pro V1 balls?

The Stories You Can Tell

• Talk about the people. Who drives a Flex?
• Talk about success. Who used Pro V1 balls to change their game?
• Talk about change. Did Pepsi help a community with an important project?

One often-used point of view for storytelling is of the newcomer. For instance, in the upcoming movie Coraline, the story features a young girl who discovers a mirror world where things are much darker and more strange. We see this world as she discovers it, from over her shoulder, so that we’re both discovering it, Coraline and you, at the same time.

Companies are looking at Blogger Relations programs like this. Find storytellers who can explore something and discover it with you over her shoulder. It’s a way to shut out the omniscient voice of marketing from above and to introduce the perspective of someone from the outside looking in.

If you’re Skype, maybe the story becomes how a small village in a corner of Romania learns how Skype connects them to the rest of the world. The story becomes about the people who bring the service to the village, and how things change with it in place. No part of the story talks about emoticons, video in mood, or any other features. It talks about humans and how they experience the product.

Tell Small Stories Well - Idea Handles

When I discover new things, I share what I learn. You probably do, too. When we learn new things, one way we retain them is by teaching others as soon as we have opportunity to do so. Can you tell small stories that come complete with “idea handles?”

Giving your ideas handles means that you create a small story that’s easy to understand, with a clear point, and an understandable value transfer. It’s brief, and snackable, and people can use it in different contexts. Here’s an example:

Glenda Watson Hyatt is a powerful voice advocating for people with disabilities. She has published a book, and keeps up a regular blog of useful information. One thing that makes Glenda unique is that she does this all using only her left thumb. Yes, the “left thumb blogger,” as some call Glenda, is a woman with determination, kindness, and a passion for helping people master the challenges of accessibility for all. Do you know someone who could benefit from knowing Glenda?

The story above is simple, easy to consume, and wrapped into a tiny package that you could take with you. Perhaps you know someone with a disability and it made you think of them. Maybe you’re wondering how well your company or product complies with issues of accessibility and you want to hire Glenda to help. But do you feel the handles of the story? Can you pick it up and run with it?

Look for Stories Everywhere

When you finish this post, stop and think. Where are the stories about your products, your services, your organization, you, the people or places you write about? How are you telling those stories? Are those stories useful? Do they resonate with people?

What comes next in all this is understanding how to move from talking about features into telling stories that make us want to be a part of them. And even when you’re not officially in charge of storytelling at an organization, it’s part of the job. It’s how we learn. It’s a powerful way to convey information. And it’s the way our brains are wired.

What stories do you tell? How do the new tools of the web enable new ways of storytelling? Do you see past the technology and into the human exchange?

Photo credit Kuripan

Comments are currency. I learned this first from Liz Strauss. They are the ultimate in social proof, because if we’re all supposed to be about joining the conversation, and yet you aren’t getting a lot of back and forth in the media you’re making, it might be time to look at this a bit more. If comments matter to you, read on. Here are some thoughts to help improve your back and forth.

A Crash Course in Comments

First, the Basics

1. Give to get - If you’re not leaving thoughtful comments on related blogs without spamming them about how awesome your blog is (or how awesome you are), then you’re missing the first big secret of comments. Comment elsewhere. Find the good stuff, add your two cents (and not just “great post!”), and watch the authors and other readers visit your site.
   
2. Double Vision - Double check that your blog design puts a “comments” link at both the top and the bottom of every post.
3. Please Spammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em - Make the sign-in process super easy. (Annoyingly difficult CAPTCHA is a quick vote for no comments.)
4. Spread the Comments - Comment platforms like Disqus are now much easier to integrate with your site, and have lots of added features. (See an example at my Dad’s Poker Blog.)
5. Patrol your spam filter to make sure good comments aren’t being eaten. (Happens often to me.)

Getting Comments By Tailoring Your Content

The truth is, once the mechanics are out of the way, here are the most likely ways to improve your blog to get more comments.

1. Brevity rules - The shorter the posts, the more likely people will stop and comment.
2. Answer “WIIFM” - If you write posts that answer any reader’s primary question, “What’s In It For Me?,” you’re far more likely to get comments.
3. Ask questions - I always encourage your feedback. Why? Because the value you give me in my comments section is way better than anything I could ever write myself. Ask questions.
4. Reply as often as you can - I am the #1 commenter on my blog. I’m not always as responsive, and I don’t always answer every single comment, but I learned early that if I respond back, I get more follow up thoughts and ideas in the comments.
5. Give your ideas “handles”- If others can take your ideas and run with them, they’re apt to comment on their gratitude, and/or their new variation on what you did. Encouraging that is a great way to build more conversations.

The Bonus Round

1. Promote others- Finding ways to promote the people who visit your blog, to praise your community, to engage them on their own blogs and sites, are all ways to build a relationship that gives back.
2. Offer some tech help - On my blog, I use a WordPress plugin called Subscribe to Comments. You might offer that, and/or an RSS subscription to the comments feed. In fact, if I were clever, I’d add that RSS to my comments section. It’s often better than the post.
3. Experiment - I’m not sure why we don’t, but if you’re writing the same thing over and over and no one’s commenting, STOP WRITING THAT THING. If something doesn’t work in the mainstream media world, editors make changes. They fix it. Do the same.
4. Be Your Own Editor - That’s one position most media makers don’t seem to give themselves. Edit your posts to be better, tighter, more punchy, more useful. The better your work, the more comments you’ll get.
5. Use an outpost strategy to get more attention.

In Lieu of Comments

One quick note: when folks don’t have time to comment on a post, but they like it, what I hope they at least do is share it via the various social systems. Meaning, if you don’t have time to comment, but you’re reading a good post in Google Reader, share it. It’s as rapid as hitting Shift-S. That one gesture does something for the work. Ditto using StumbleUpon or Delicious. Using social sharing gives a post more chances to be found and enjoyed by others. Doing this gives more back to a blogger, so when you can’t comment, consider sharing something forward for others.

What’s Worked for You?

I don’t have all the answers, for sure, but I’m grateful for the comments I do receive. What’s worked for you? Did I miss anything you’re doing that’s worked for you? What else haven’t we covered here? Oh, and did you notice how blog design and graphics make a difference?

Photo credits polandeze, KevinDooley, Rita Banerji, and iandeth, in that order.

I am fascinated by Angry Camp Tracy’s Basement. It’s a little event that just happened, and that somehow slipped right past might radar. What I like about it is how the Twitter users who participated all changed their avatar to reflect the site design for the event. The result was visually obvious on Twitter.

Participants in ACTB as it was called (and they used the #actb hash tag in their tweets) stood out. I saw two of them at different times in my stream (of over 30,000 people) and that drew my eye. Then, I researched. Then, I felt sad I didn’t attend. (Can’t attend everything.)

If you plan events of any kind, what a wild and powerful thing they did here, just by joining together and making a very visible statement of their participation in the event. Hats off, ACTB-ers. And more power to people who figure out just how easy it is to make a loosely-joined conference with very minimal planning, provided everyone pitches in.

Do you like learning about magic tricks? To me, the best magicians are the ones who share what they know. Penn and Teller are like that. They love deconstructing tricks in front of you? So, do you want to learn some blogging secrets from me?

If I say they’re secrets, you’ll treasure them more, but the thing is, I share this with you daily. I do it right in front of you. But just this once, I’ll slow it down, and walk through it all. Fair?

27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community

Starter Moves

1. An intriguing title goes a long way towards getting people to the blog. Failing that, posts with numbers seem to work. Especially weird or odd numbers. 27 is odd.
2. A picture per blog post has been my trick for a while. It draws your eye, whether or not you want it to. We’re wired for it. I use Flickr Creative Commons photos to do that. (Make sure you give them adequate credit. I show that in this post, too.)
3. Did you ever notice most of my posts open by asking a question? That’s a secret. When I do that, you stop and think about the question. But more importantly, it shifts your mind to the “what’s in it for me” sphere that you started reading from in the first place. Make sense?
4. Break things up visually. Notice that I have an H3 tag (html speak) title repeating the top title, and that I’m using a list to give your eye some natural “chunking.” Go back and read cafe-shaped conversations for an example.
5. Oh, maybe I should’ve started the post by saying that it helps if you write something useful for people. People want posts they can use to improve themselves or their business.
6. Brevity rules. I mention this a lot. People just don’t read long posts (usually). There are exceptions. I read every word Ann Handley writes, and often wish for more.
7. Write “unfinished” posts. Having ways that others can add to a post or improve on it invites participation. This might just mean asking for ideas or getting a sense of what others’ experiences are.
8. Mix up the length of your posts, so that people can read varied length articles, like magazines and newspapers do.
9. Consider an editorial calendar, where you write down which TYPE of blog posts you’ve written lately, and which you intend to write. This helps you from doing recurring posts, and gives some variety to what you’re writing.

Technical Stuff

1. A nice clean blogging theme goes a long way. I’m a huge fan of Thesis for WordPress (so much so that I became an affiliate for it).
2. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your post. Most people stop at putting a big orange RSS button up in the corner of their blog. Check out my sidebar. Check out the Financial Aid Podcast. Look how many ways we show people how to stay connected to the community. That’s not by accident.
3. I’ve said it before. Claim your blog in Technorati. You don’t have to like Technorati. You don’t have to think it works well. But it triggers mechanisms you need.
4. Consider changing your permalinks structure. (In WordPress, this is in Settings/Permalinks. Where is it in MT or Blogger?) I learned this from Chris Pearson. Change it to custom and put /%postname%/. If you click on any post including this one, you’ll see it all written out in plain English without extra info. (This is a preference).
5. If you worry that a post might get “lifted,” or if you encourage people to repost your work with attribution (which I encourage), include a few links in the original post that will politely show people where the content came from. I learned this from Christopher S. Penn.
6. Consider every plugin and widget. Do they improve your blog or slow it down? Do they help you blog smarter?
7. Learn a little more HTML, just a bit. Learn how to make links, how to add photos, how to bold and italicize things, and that. If you’re stuck, Google or “view source” on blogs that do what you want to accomplish. (For example, I had to learn how to stop and start a numbered list with ol start=”10″ to write this.)
8. Don’t force people to register for an account to comment on the blog. Lots of people won’t. (Your mileage may vary, but corporations try this all the time because they’re worried about someone leaving a “your company sucks” comment on the blog. It doesn’t fix that. It slows down real discourse.)
9. Technology should serve your community and your content, not just be there. Consider every technological change with that lens.

The Bonus Round

1. Share your posts politely via social platforms. In Twitter, I usually ask a question, and provide a link to the blog post to see what people think. I don’t “blurt” the blog posts automatically. Not every post is worth Twitter.
2. Facebook has tools like Simplaris Blogcast that integrate your blog into Facebook. So does LinkedIn. This falls into my outposts strategy.
3. Link out to other blogs often.
4. Comment on other blogs often. Thoughtfully. Adding thoughtful comments to other people’s posts builds friendships. I was a passionate commenter on Copyblogger back when I had 10 subscribers on my blog. Brian was still really nice to me.
5. Remember to comment in your own comments section. Conversations with your readers turn them from readers into a community.
6. Showcase your community. I do this with my Rockstars page (which needs updating) and by taking the occasional guest post.
7. Be consistent. You don’t have to blog daily, but if you blog once a week, get at least a post a week. Need blog topics?
8. Repoint to the old stuff occasionally. It’s often still useful to new community members.
9. Keep giving. When you can’t think of what else to give, give some more. Being helpful is the #1 thing you can do for your community. Share your secrets. You can’t execute them all anyhow.

Need more? I have a collection of my best advice about blogging.

Your Ideas

What would you add to the list? Which blogging secrets have helped you? Are there any questions my thoughts gave you that I didn’t adequately answer? Let’s talk about it more.

(Oh, and that’s a secret, too).

Photo credit, Trials and Errors

I’ve got a plan. Let’s all try to do less of certain things in 2009. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll catch on, and we’ll have an accidental movement on our hands. Maybe we’ll get tee shirts printed up. Maybe we’ll all get on Oprah for it.

What do you think? Willing to try?

12 Things to Stop Doing in 2009

1. Stop writing about Twitter. (See also)
2. Stop writing “inside baseball” posts.
3. Stop putting yourself down.
4. Stop waiting for something to come that will make everything better (if only).
5. Stop thinking you can read minds.
6. Stop trying to do it all yourself.
7. Stop trying old things in new places, unless they’re really old.
8. Stop making excuses for not doing things to move your career ahead.
9. Stop presuming everything will get better because someone else will fix it.
10. Stop writing “me too” posts, or doing “me too” work. Build on the body of work.
11. Stop beating yourself up when you don’t create something on a given day.
12. Stop striving for perfection, and strive for execution instead.

Here’s the Secret

The secret is this: it’s ridiculously hard to focus on STOPPING anything. Think about the beginning of the post. How do we print up tee shirts and rally around “No ____.” It’s just not nearly as cool as getting behind something you want to support. So maybe let’s you and me throw out the first list (don’t tell people who skim blog posts, and maybe they’ll just stop those 12 things), and let’s do some new things in 2009. Cool? And because it’s hard to actually remember 12 things, let’s just do 6 things in the to do list.

6 Things to Do in 2009

1. Find a new way to improve someone’s day (and determine if there’s value in it).
2. Synthesize new ideas from outside your audience’s circle (and help us make meaning from them).
3. Promote the great people out there ( and and keep doing it).
4. Learn from brilliant people (and share what you learn).
5. Work on interesting projects that matter to you (and empower others to participate).
6. Discover your passions (and share them openly).

What do you think? Does any of it grab you? Am I full of it? What’s your take?

Photo credit, rightee

I’m going through my databases, checking up on who I haven’t talked with lately. I realized that a LOT of people I know have lost their jobs or moved on. This means that many of their corporate email addresses aren’t any good to me. Think on that.

Either get a gmail/yahoo/hotmail account, or buy a domain that can be yours forever. Use that email for secondary contact with any business contacts you might want to retain across many relationships. Do your work on your work email, but keep a “stay in touch” channel alive.

And work often on your own databases. Repeat after me: you live or die by your databases. I learned that working with Jeff Pulver. It’s a lesson that sticks with me to this day.

When I say this, I don’t mean anything especially difficult. I might just mean different types of contact lists. And by different types, that’s the power. My company, for instance, has a database of names who might be interested in marketing, PR and business communications. My company has a database for our events. It’s how we know who to reach with appropriate information that they want.

But personally, I’ve got databases of people I’ve reached out to like you, and I’m working on those databases.

For instance, I just took the contacts from my various mail software, the contacts in LinkedIn, and a few other sources, and I pushed them all into BatchBook, my web-based contact management software. In there, I’m slicing up those contacts into “people I want to touch base with more often,” “people I can reach out to with a project,” “personal advisory board,” and “family.”

Now, with those lists in place, I can then either send individual emails and check in, or if it’s a group type of thing, I can use Blue Sky Factory, my email platform, and send out a batch of mail.

Contact is important. Keeping your networks alive is important. Having more than your corporate email address for me to reach you is important.

In 2009, I can tell you this is all very important.

What are you doing about any of this?

Photo credit SC Fiasco

In software terms, a kernel is the deep core functionality of your operating system. It’s really that which defines the rest of what follows. Kernels are tiny cores from which everything else flows.

Saying J.P. Rangaswami is brilliant probably would be selling his multi-faceted self short. I read his blog all the time. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him and many more thanks to an invitation from Laura Fitton this past year. Though we didn’t talk much, I was happy to see that he was every bit as engaging in person as he is on his blog.

But, the real point is this: J.P. ’s kernel. Yes, he has a kernel for his blog.

I’ve read it before. I’ve actually read it about four times over the last year. But the idea is brilliant.

Could you distill your blog down to a simple operational kernel around which you’d write the rest of your “code?”

What do you think?

Photo credit That Girl

The Official Google Mobile blog reports a new service: Google Latitude, which overlays Google maps with information about where your friends are, in real time. It’s opt-in, and there are privacy features already in place for it, so don’t get all crazy on us now. But I think this is a point in time to consider. I’ll explain in a moment.

First off, Google Latitude has the ability to spread ridiculously fast. In its mobile form (and that’s really the only version users should care about), they’ve got versions working for Android(naturally), Blackberry, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile. Missing (and what the hell are you thinking?) is the iPhone version. It’s the right tool for our phones, and it’s a great tool for those of us who don’t have only two locations in our daily map: work, home.

And yes, for some of you (I’m looking at you, BrightKite), this announcement is a bit scary. If I’m a mobile map-like product, I’ve just been served notice.

But, where this gets interesting is that the applications between Google Local, with its voting features and its review features, and now with Google Latitude with the ability to annotate the world ( I’m a bit obsessed with the concept), we’re on to something. Do you see it?

Sidebar: If you haven’t read William Gibson’s Spook Country, now’s the time to pick that up. Laced into the plot are ideas for where this could be really interesting.

Data overlaying real space has been considered in many ways before. How could we put digital markers up? How will notation by friends (because really, throwing spammy ads all over a map just means I won’t read your map) change how I interact with businesses? When I get to Denver, will I check Latitude to see which of my friends has marked the map to where the best sushi is, the most fun of the three hotels over by the school?

That mix of local, of maps, and of annotation is powerful. Storytellers, marketers, journalists, and others who think about information as more than something to read while eating cereal, I’ve put you on alert.

Dream harder.

Want to see if it works for your phone yet? Go to http://google.com/latitude from your mobile device and see what happens. (This works on your desktop browser as well).