Free Infographic Tools
Attributed to Mark Twain via Benjamin Disraeli The phrase takes a life of its own with Visual Infographics that almost any marketer can use due to the number of tools that are out there in the marketplace today.
I am a fan of a picture tells the story much better than words but this is no more important than when one looks at infographics. My fave Web 2.0 communicator @AmberMac just did a great post on Fast Company on a feature that i would encourage you to bookmark or subscribe to just because of the quality of the content. It discusses Infographics and follows on an interview with Nicholas Felton
AmberMac – Thoughtfullness and Prolific Valuable Content
I don’t miss an item that this prolific author and speaker produces because of the tremendous value she delivers. And delivers, and delivers. She has a bestselling book that came out last summer Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business
If that were not enough you can also find her on Twit.Tv weekly with Sarah Lane on The Social Hour as well as Canadian television show Webnation and a commentator on Canada’s CTV Television network. Add on that she is a mother of a toddler and a sought after consultant with her firm mgimedia.ca and keynote speaker around the world and she is a busy,busy person.
I am an unabashed fanboy but herein I sense is the real magic that I appreciate so much about Amber. She so willingly shares this information to assist others to grow and succeed in all of her forums.
Having just listened to Mitch Joel, on his Six Pixels of Separation podcast with Tim Sanders, author of Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence
Who knows what you might be able to convey using some of the new infographic tools.
Filed under Audio-Visual Presentation, Marketing by 
The evolution of social networking has changed the world of Marketing forever.
If you are one of my regular readers, you will know that I have been writing about social media and books about it a lot in the last year. Perhaps because social networking is changing some of the established players in marketing or because it can be the most cost effective ways to promote your brand or build awareness and engage people on your values, the way you operate and why they might want to “Like” you in Facebook terms or be your friend in any number of social playgrounds. The author of the book Socialnomics, Erik Qualman has a You Tube Video which I have embedded below that outlines the massive channel change that is occurring. This video is an update with newer statistics on an earlier video which showed up on YouTube in 2009. It had over 2 Million views.
The next video filmed 2 weeks ago at TedXLansing continues on the subject:
The concept of social media being the engine of social commerce is not far away. As Qualman says we will have automated local search and QR codes to provide instantaneous discussion right at the point of sale linked to your friends opinions. His example of the reach and power of Social Media is clearly outlined with the You Tube video by the Sons of Maxwell musical group in “United Breaks Guitars” which has had close to 8.7 million views at the time I am writing this post.
Businesses that are not participating and listening to what is out there are acting at their own peril. Ignore the hype, embrace the channel change. It is of little wonder the number of new books and videos appearing today. If you are interested in learning more about the many no-cost ways you can use Social Media for your business or practice you can read Power Friending by my friend AmberMac who will give you a quick education on listening and acting to grow your business. I look forward to your questions and comments . Join the conversation below and let me know what your thoughts are.
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- Fortune 100 Companies’ Social Media Savvy (STATS) (huffingtonpost.com)
- 3 Social Media Tips for Small Businesses by Author Erik Qualman (hubspot.com)
- Finding New Heights in Social Media (and in Your High Heels) (socialmediatoday.com)
- FIR Interview: New Media Author and Speaker Amber Mac (nevillehobson.com)
- How YouTube made superstars out of everyday people (guardian.co.uk)
Filed under Marketing, social media marketing by
A little bit of the book launch frenzy for AmberMac’s new Social Media book Power Friending. Amber is interviewed by Matt Harris for the Butterscotch.com show “On Deck” at the launch.
If you are interested and want more on this visit the fansite at Power Friending
Butterscotch.com, a division of tucows is a Toronto based provider of great content. Check them out at Butterscotch. You can find shows,freeware, and A lot of tutorials that will help you with everything from Chrome to Windows Find the stuff you need at free software.
Filed under Brand Building, Marketing, social media marketing, Video by
If you want to increase your visibility, build your brand and help people to understand your subject or passion you can write a book.
I went to my first book launch party last night for a first-time author, my friend AmberMac whose book which I have talked about in this blog . It was a pleasant affair with friends, family,colleagues and media personalities present. The book PowerFriending was being released yesterday in the United States and is an imprint of Portfolio Books, a division of Penguin Press.
There were several authors there including Rahaf Harfoush, author of Yes We Did An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand and Jeremy Gutsche of TrendHunter.com Exploiting Chaos 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change. Rahaf had flown in from Geneva. The key point having read these books is that they all shared some information that provides value in the reader’s eye, they were timely, and were pertinent to my interests and were good reads.
Authors will tell you they do not make many dollars writing books. They use them to share and promote their expertise and content. This assists any author in building a tangible hook, to establish immediate credibilty and create further interest in their brand. Interestingly enough the three authors I have mentioned are all top keynote speakers for conferences,conventions and the like and are represented by the global speakers bureau The Lavin Agency. All of these authors are also engaging and are appreciated by their audiences.
They all have day jobs and these speaking engagements help to make them more visible across many more markets and locations . If you have an expertise and have a publisher this is one of the fastest ways to promote your brand. Are you doing it?
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Filed under Brand Building, social media marketing, Training by
Social Media appears to be one of the hottest topics of discussion and noise in the online marketing universe right now.
There are businesses being created and products arriving almost daily. So-called “gurus” are coming out of the woodwork faster than hamsters can mate. Whenever I see this kind of market behavior I step back and wonder if they all have a blind focus to the newest shiny things or there is something truly worth looking at.
Social networking is not something new per se. You could argue that it has being going on in , living rooms,lunch clubs,golf clubs,the YMCA ,coffee clatches, and beauty parlors for a long time now. The corner coffee shop in small towns or the local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary luncheon was where a lot of business networking was being done.
What has changed is that the technology has emerged and our tools of communication have changed from the simple telephone to the cell phone to the broadband world of new media ,ipads, ipods.The Web world has changed our lives and tools of communication forever. Written communication is also occuring in 140 characters more than in full page letters between people. It is also occuring verbally in podcasts and YouTube Videos.
After last years election of Barrack Obama as President of the United States, fueled by intense personalized communication and cultivation and growth of his base, social media became much more mainstream in the mind of the public.
What was once thought of as the world for early adopters and geeks, is now totally mainstream. Facebook the 500 lb gorilla in the room now has gone from being an invention of frisky geeks in their dorm rooms trying to meet girls to a tool Grandparents and families are using daily for communication instead of something that was though was just used by the “kids”. The pace of change globally is so rapid it is difficult to keep up with all the new services out there such as Twitter,Tumbler ,FourSquare ,Posterous ,Orkut ,Friendfeed and Diaspora just to name a few.
As where the people go, so go the marketers and communicators. But the lessons to be learned are the same as would be asked in traditional old media terms. Who is my market? Where do they live and play and how can I find a way to play in their playground. How can I make new friends. How can I get my friends to tell their friends why they would want to play with me.
Like in the world pre Web 2.0 you need to plan and develop a strategy to do just that, and join in on these new listening posts. Get into it, embrace it and converse with your customers rather than than just talking at them. But a strategy and tactical execution honed by listening and research will allow you to meet your market where they are.
I you are interested in learning more about how you can get into new playgrounds, using these new tools I would encourage you to read the new book by Toronto based Amber Mac called Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media To Grow Your Business or by attending an online education seminar series she will be teaching in early June called Social Media Bootcamp.
As you may know, Amber Mac is one of the leading social media experts in the online world today. That’s also the opinion of people like
Steve Chen (the founder of YouTube), Dina Kaplan (co-founder of blip.tv) and Kevin Rose (founder of Digg and Revision3), who each
recommend Amber as a visionary in the always-evolving fabric of the social web.
Here are a few other sage commentators on Social Media Strategy:
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How To Develop a Social Media Strategy: A Roadmap for Integration … – Social media strategy should typically be a subset of an existing strategy — will yours be a subset of an HR, marketing, PR, customer service strategy, etc? Stand alone social media strategies tend to either operate in a silo — or …
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10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations « Web … – John Furrier, Robert Scoble, Jennifer Jones, and Jason Lopez myself and others from the PodTech crew visited Intel, one of our fantastic customers last week. While I’m not going to give away any secret plans or strategies, …
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The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of Social Media | Social … – Don’t be deceived by the title. Advertising will never ever ever ever go away. Despite what Al and Laura say in their book, Advertising still works and is here to stay! However, social media is taking the market by storm for several …
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3-2-1: My Quick Social Media Strategy – I’ve been using this strategy for social media management for a few months now, and have found it to be extremely helpful. It has proven to be effective with all of the companies I’ve used it for. I.
Filed under Internet Marketing, social media marketing by
