Hey, look at our new look!  Thanks to Sara, Jill, Jennifer and Web Grand Master Tom for making this improvement…a shiny new skin, without any painful cosmetic surgery or awkward recovery period. It’s nice for the blog to NOT look like the RefreshWeb site…makes it feel a lot fresher to those of us who see our site every day.

It’s been months since we posted, which is not good form if we’re trying to teach clients about how to do this blog stuff right. To our credit, you should only write when you have something to say, and while there’s been lots of news, new clients and interesting projects, I can’t say there have been insights that are generally applicable. Interesting projects for bigger clients are just more sensitive and full of proprietary information, so you won’t read those findings here. When we see the results, we may be able to draw some useful conclusions…but for the time being, we’re not telling who’s having a little work done!

Seems like all our clients are asking the same question these days. They pay us to give them helpful answers, but hey, it’s a Saturday and I have a little free time (because I don’t have Tweetdeck turned on!). My apologies to the Bard:

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler to spend your work hours on Twitter
Following news of outrageous behavior and misfortune,
Or to take to your keyboard and get back to work,
And by un-following, end them. To work, or to tweet
No more; and by an unsubscription to say we end
The dull conceit and the thousand unnatural shocks
The web is heir to â€â€� ’tis a mental nirvana
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die to Twitter;
To sleep, perchance to work. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep or work, to what purpose our time,
When we have logged off this persistent stranger,
Freedom must give us pause. There’s the disrespect
That makes calamity of online life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The anonymous poster, the proud arrogant insult,
The pain of willful misunderstanding, manners’ decay,
The insolence of contempt and the spurning
Of patient merit and reasoned conversation,
When we ourselves can our own quiet make
With a blank monitor? who would follow the chatter,
To linkshrink and retweet instead of work,
But that the dread of being laid off,
The unpaid, inactive state from which
No coworker returns, strengthens the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of…

I just listened to a recording of John Jantsch with Duct Tape Marketing, interviewing Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. They covered a LOT of interesting topics related to small businesses and our current economic environment, including why Godin doesn’t Twitter! Godin is a believer in being the best in the world at a few things, rather than being average at a bunch of things. I was multitasking while listening (being average at a bunch of things), and I still got a great deal out of the interview. Seth’s final request of the audience was to “just start” — so, I am hereby just starting by blogging about it! Tell me what YOU are going to start.

Some people make resolutions around this time of the year. If you like them, great. I have no use for them. I prefer challenges and goals, things with restrictions and deadlines, things that demand work every day. The problem with resolutions is that they’re so nebulous, so open-ended. For me to be successful, I need a community, too. Back in college, a bunch of friends and I did the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. I never would have signed up on my own. Never ever. The community of friends was only way I wound up standing in front of a lake, watching the sun come over the horizon with a few hundred women.

The secret wasn’t support, though that was great. It was having to be accountable on a daily basis for working toward a goal. We hired a coach. We learned to run and to swim together. We were stunned at our successes and marveled at the unexpected roadblocks. Almost every single big, personal accomplishment in my life has a similar structure. NaBloPoMo was easy compared to NaNoWriMo (next year, so help me God, I will get to 50,000 words).

I’m a writer, and I mostly live in the land of words. That’s not all I do. Right now, I take pictures every day. Every single day. If there weren’t flickr and the various groups and challenges and projects and photo friends, I think it would be really hard to do. It’s the same with anything. When people ask me about adding various social media aspects of marketing to what they’re already doing in marketing, the main point I try to make is that it doesn’t create itself. Yes, it’s free and available to everyone, it’s not hard to do, but you actually have to DO it.

We all have computers, pen and paper—how many of us write books or poems or stories? The idea of sitting down to write a book is incredibly daunting. Writing for an hour or so a day for a month? Not so bad. You can do all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in 60-90 minutes of writing a day. You can do social media in far less time. A huge part of successful social media is being involved with the community. You don’t have to blog every day. Blog on Monday mornings. On the other mornings, you come in to work, grab your cup of coffee, and spend 20 minutes reading what other people write. Make pertinent comments. Internalize what they say. Not only does it foster relationships and bring you readers, it makes you informed and creates something for you to write about when it’s time for you to sit down and say something.

My challenge to you isn’t to make resolutions or identify places that could use some work, but to actually find something small to add to your daily routine that will make a big difference in aggregate. You don’t have to be a writer or a social media expert or incredibly clever in snippets of 140 characters or fewer. You just have to do the work.

It’s my “turn” to write a blog post. After listening to my whining for all of half a minute, our Blog Overlord said, “We have this great blogroll right there on our blog. Go read it. Find something interesting and link to it.” Very sympathetic. As it turns out, it was excellent advice.

The very first blog post I read was titled, “Blogging Lessons.” Its very first point? “1) It’s hard.“  (yes, it was written in bold.)  Now, that’s serendipity.

I just knew I’d found the I-Told-You-So blog posting to shoot back at our Overlord and get me out of having to ever blog again.  Nope. I realized she was right – again – to withhold sympathy.  Blogging IS important.  And it’s a commitment.  And it is hard.  Even for folks (like Spike) at Brains on Fire who blog all the time.  So, I feel better.  No more whining. For now.

Seriously, do read their work.  Very enlightening stuff.

Here are some numbers from page 42 of Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

From a sample of 10,000 online US consumers, the percent who say they do the following things monthly:

Use Twitter – 5%

Write articles, stories, poems, etc, and post them online – 7%

Use RSS – 8%

Listen to podcasts – 11%

Publish / update their own Web pages – 11%

Publish / maintain / or update a blog – 11%

Post ratings / reviews of products or services – 11%

Listen to or download audio/music from other users – 14%

Contribute to online forums or discussion groups – 18%

Add comments to someone’s page on a social networking site – 18%

Update / maintain a profile on a social networking site – 20%

Read blogs – 25%

Read reviews / ratings – 25%

Visit social networking sites – 25%

Read online forums or discussion groups – 28%

Watch video from other users – 29%

Those of us in b2b marketing must keep in mind that business-to-business happens person-to-person. And more and more, folks are getting together online to swap stories in one way or another…are your prospects there?

…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “defineâ€Â� social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trendâ€Â� that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

My son has mastered the cable remote, which means he’s no longer a captive to Boomerang. Suddenly he can take himself to the rest of the kid’s channels…and be doused in their calculated and scheming heaps of commercials for a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness a friend taught us about “What’s The Lie?� About 15 seconds in to a commercial for sneakers, my son shouts “The lie is that those shoes can make you jump as tall as a building and have cartoons coming out of your feet!� The next one is easy – after a couple seconds he says “The lie is that having that will make a lot of cool-looking kids want to hang out with you.�

The third commercial is for markers made to mix a pair of colors when they write…he has some first-hand data here. “That they work after the first time – that’s the lie,� he says as wryly as a child can be wry. The next up is a public service announcement against kid’s smoking. “No lie in this one, right mom? What’s it called again, a PSA?�

What turns out to be the last commercial in this set is for a boxed set of radio hits from the 70’s. A tough one…My candidate for the lie is that the offered price is a bargain, but what comes through visually is more an assertion that dancing to this music will make you happy…and, well, that’s true.

Here at the office, we more and more frequently are in dialogue about how to assess ROI for the not-quite-so-analytics-friendly tactics - like articles and press releases and blogging, for instance - in our quiver as part of a really thorough web marketing campaign. The ROI here – it has to be about trust, right?

The return on investing the time and resources to educate, inform, inspire, and interact with your customers is that they become invested in your relationship. (Yes, there are benefits that translate into something you can show on a graph or include in a report) The point of these tactics that aren’t exactly marketing isn’t about ROI in the way that PPC advertising campaign management is. The return on that is calculable, downloadable directly from the service in a variety of file formats.

The return on actually sitting down and interacting, on giving away information that helps and enriches your customers, that’s the kind of return you can’t show a direct correlation in a quarterly report. But it is the difference between loving and loathing in a lot of cases. If you go in saying you’re interacting and real, but the whole thing is about ROI and selling, your customers will spot the lie faster than my son can tell you breakfast cereal won’t make you friends with cartoon leprechauns.

It’s spring, and my brain is in overdrive. I don’t know if it’s the usual seasonal restlessness or if it’s a combination of a lot of ideas and influences percolating at once, but man oh man, I cannot stop thinking. For once, my thinking is turned to work. I usually think of travel, of art, of letting my body and life fly as fast and free as my mind. A creative, relaxing trip to Spain with one of my best friends is in the works for June, so that beast is quiet.

Instead, I’m tenaciously drawn to excellence, to actually identifying and solving the problem, to being utterly devoted. It does me no good to be devoted to serving the next big thing, to being an early adopter for the pleasure of “been there, done that” once everyone else picks it up. I’ll do that for my own enjoyment. For clients and friends and readers, though, I want to bring them what they need and want. My question to them shouldn’t be, “Have you seen this cool new thing?” It should be, “How can I help you? What can I do to make your job and life easier?”

To that end, I’m putting together questions and a survey to actually sit down and ask how we’re doing, what we could do better, and what you need to know about in the sphere of web marketing. The companies and people that you see and want to emulate are awesome because they know their audience and serve them well. They encourage and enable their people to go out and do their thing and do it well.

I love this video. That’s what we want to do for web marketing. Ask us your questions, tell us what you want to know, what you need, and we’ll answer. We’re marketers first and foremost, and we want to be your partner in web marketing, plain and simple. Not to sign you. Not to market to you. We care about making your job easier. About helping you make sense of the million things you could do and the few you should do. We want you to be able to answer the questions you get asked. We want to make you look good in front of your boss. Seriously.

I’m working from home today, nursing the cold/allergies/mystery SXSW bug that has attacked me (and, it would seem, a lot of others). I get a giant FAIL on the liveblogging of panels, but I *did* take notes. I’ll work through posting the ones that seem most relevant in the next couple of days. When the podcasts of all the sessions come out, I’ll post links to those with a downloadable copy of my notes for the panels I attended. If there’s a panel you were really interested in and want our thoughts, holler and I’ll listen and analyze it. Probably even go find better analysis than mine and point you to it… A lot of what I got out of the conference, aside from the euphoria at being with so many fellow nerds, is either applicable to RefreshWeb or specific clients of ours. Some of that will wind up gradually changing some things around here, so as to be more relevant to you guys. I took a few people out for dinner after one of Gary Vaynerchuck’s fantastic wine parties (yes, he is that awesome in RL). We were talking about what we’d gotten out of SXSW, and they could hardly wait to get back to work and start doing what they’d learned. As for me? I wanted to get back and do things too, but what I really wanted was about a week to sift through everything and figure out who it would help, how to do it. So that’s what I’m doing. I’ll post on the new tools I saw, what people were doing right and really wrong, and more.