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Blackbird Pie Enables the Embedding of Tweets

Yesterday afternoon Twitter released a very cool feature they are calling Blackbird Pie. This new function allows you to insert a link from an old status update & it will create the code to embed this tweet directly into a other places. So maybe you are referencing a tweet by someone in a blog post, or in a press release. The old form of sharing this information, was to do a screen capture & then upload the image into your blog. The problem though with this was that the names were not clickable to visit the links in screenshot. Nor could the person simply click on the followers username to see more of the conversation. That was until yesterday afternoon.

Now, users can embed tweets directly into other sites with live clickable links, usernames and even hashtags # for a topic. First below, you can see an example of an embedded tweet I recently sent out to some of the co-hosts of the online radio show, Social Media Edge:

Hey @thekencook @jasoncrouch @mikemueller have you guys ever had any #blackbirdpie? http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/less than a minute ago via webJeremy Blanton
jb140

This quoted tweet now adds value to a post much more than just the screen capture of it. A person can now click on each twitter users name to visit their page, they can click on the link in the tweet to see what I was referring to, and they can also follow the stream of conversation regarding the topic #blackbird instantly. Now that I have shown you what it is, let me show you just how easy it is to create an embedded tweet:

And if that wasn’t easy enough, here is an even simpler way to embed tweets. To set this up, simply go grab this Blackbird Pie bookmarklet & drag it to your toolbar on your browser. By doing this, you can get the code for any tweet in three easy steps. Here is a quick demo of how it works:

Is Blackbird Pie a gamechanger for Twitter and the way we use the network? Probably not, but it is a pretty cool new toy to enhance our experience there.

Social Media Training – Three great webinars next week!

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Next week, we will be offering three classes online. Two of them are “encore” presentations, and one is completely new.

On Monday, April 26th, at 10am Eastern time, we will offer a two-hour class entitled, “How to Chug Google Juice AND Get 15 Years of Fame”. This course will focus on:

The importance of blogging
Finding good local material
Composing SEO-friendly blog posts
Using images (and where to find them), and
How to build a solid online following of loyal readers

Sign up at http://budurl.com/chug for this one. The cost is $60. For a $10 discount, use this code on or before Saturday: 210

On Tuesday, April 27th, at 2pm Eastern, we are teaching “Cashing in On Your Social Media Investment”. In this 2 hour webinar we will cover how to build your social media strategy to increase your business. Many people try social media networks but get sucked into the social end and forget the purpose they joined.

We will teach you how to listen to your consumers as well as add valuable content to connect with those around you. We will discuss how to maximize your efforts on:

Facebook
Twitter
Posterous
Flickr
YouTube and More!

In addition, we will share our tips & tools that we have used to build our own personal business. This class will also be priced at $60. You can sign up at http://budurl.com/cash210. For a $10 discount, use this code by Saturday: 210

If you’re interested in taking BOTH of the above classes, you can do that for $90, which is a $30 savings.

Lastly, on Thursday, April 29th, at 1pm Eastern time, we will be teaching a one-hour class entitled “Fundamentals of Facebook”. This is basically a beginners guide to using Facebook effectively to promote yourself and your business.

By the time you finish this 1 hour course, you will know:

The difference between Facebook Pages & Profiles
The basic elements to running a successful page
What to post
Choosing the right title for your page
How to get fans to your page and how to get them interacting on your page.

If you have been hesitant with using Facebook for your business or think it only about throwing sheep and mafia wars then this is the class for you.

As an experiment, we are offering this class for a phenomenal intro rate of ONLY $19! Here’s the link (sorry no discount code on this one – it’s already cheap): http://budurl.com/facebook101

If you want to take all three of these courses, the cost is $109 for FIVE hours of solid social media training. Our normal rate for coaching is $125/hour, so this is roughly an 83% discount. 🙂 In order to take advantage of that offer, please contact Jeremy at jeremy@210consulting.com.

If you are interested, but you can’t make it to the live classes, go ahead and register and we will send you a recorded version that you can listen to at your leisure.

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If you have any questions, feel free to call or email anytime. Thanks!

Facebook logo photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/88526923@N00/2114874155/

I have over 11,000 Followers on Twitter – How much value does this have?

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I remember getting invited to check out Twitter over two years ago. Shortly thereafter, I remember thinking that it seemed useless. Months passed….I got lots of random emails that said things in the subject like, “@delicioushair is now following you on Twitter”. WHAT?!? Why?

The notion of someone following me used to strike me as both odd and off-putting. I guess it sounds catchier than saying that someone is “paying attention to you on Twitter”, or “interested in what you have to say on Twitter”, but that’s basically exactly what this means. I prefer to think of my subscribers, friends, contacts, and followers as part of my online audience. The better you are at building an audience, the more likely you are to convert this to actual business growth, in my opinion. Granted, the analogy isn’t perfect, since being part of an audience implies something more passive, but you get the drift.

Over time, I started to get the hang of it with Twitter, and I finally jumped in with both feet in September 2008. I’m thankful that I did.

So, I now have over 11,000 people paying attention to me on Twitter. What’s the significance of this? Well, by itself, not much. A friend of mine mentioned to me after I crossed the 10,000 mark that quality is more important than sheer quantity. Despite the fact that he is probably a bit jealous, I agree wholeheartedly. I think having BOTH is pretty nice, too. 🙂

I consistently see Twitter users with 20,000 or even 50,000 followers who have really only built a very big and delicate house of cards for themselves. They never converse with anyone, and they are still trying to use Twitter like a traditional marketing channel, by broadcasting information rather than hanging out and listening.

A few months ago right here in Austin, I was happy to be able to attend a local “tweetup” (Twitter-based meetup) with author Shel Israel. I even got to sit next to him at dinner, which made my day. Shel is the author of “Twitterville” and co-author with Robert Scoble of one of the seminal books on business blogging, “Naked Conversations”. During dinner, we had an interesting discussion with my local friend Mike Chapman about the fact that no politician has truly utilized social media yet, including President Obama. Obama’s campaign certainly did a very effective job of using the tools to broadcast their message, but that’s not the same thing as listening and joining the conversation. Shel noted that it would be newsworthy (and bookworthy) for a candidate to do this.

As with the candidates who jump on the bandwagon to appear hip, the same thing goes for anyone attempting to use Twitter to build his/her business. You MUST listen! The old saying about God giving us two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak is really appropriate when it comes to new media channels. Sending links from your blog posts, or just having a profile is not enough. What if someone responds to your post but you aren’t even there to see it? In much the same way, having a giant number of followers means nothing if they are all spambots, or if you are never around to converse with them. Raw numbers are not the important part – engagement is. While I’m happy to have garnered a good-sized following, I recognize that the key to success in any social medium is being consistent.

Part of my goal for 2010 and beyond is to use Twitter as a springboard to more face-to-face meetings. I have always said that social media is not intended to replace the “in real life” meetups, but to enhance them. With the advent of more geolocation tools such as Foursquare and Gowalla combined with Twitter, finding friends and valuable contacts has never been easier. I saw this in action several times at SXSW Interactive last week, and I only expect that these tools will experience explosive growth in the years to come.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderferret

How to Create a Custom Facebook Page ~ A Workshop with Mike Mueller

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How to Create a Custom Facebook Page -A Workshop with Mike Mueller

Not too long ago Facebook turned 6 years old. During the same week, they announced that they had crossed the 400 million member mark. Facebook has morphed from a college photo sharing to a mega-networking platform with endless capabilities. Basically, it’s THE place to be these days. Many though are not even aware of the fact that Facebook is not just for farmville & friends, but that it can actually be one of the most powerful business tools available for your business. Also, if you are using a profile for business you always run the possibility of getting it suspended by violating Facebook TOS. Section 4.2 states this: “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain” Pretty self explanatory.

But Jeremy, you just said that it can be one of the most powerful business tools available to your business. Yes, I did, and let me explain how. While you cannot use your profile, you can set up a Custom Facebook Page to create business. These pages are designed solely for business and is encouraged to be used that way. The other great thing with a Custom Facebook Page is that they can have unlimited number of fans & can be really customized for your business. They will also offer the ability to be “sell” your business on Facebook.

So, if you aren’t yet sure how to build a custom Facebook Page for business, I might have a nice solution for you next week.

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th at 2pm Eastern time, 210 Consulting is hosting a workshop with our good friend Mike Mueller on How to build a custom Facebook Page. In this class, Mike will be teaching us how to create a custom Facebook Pages. Mike has created roughly 200 custom Facebook Pages for his clients, and we are honored that he agreed to teach this for us.

Included among the topics next week:

How to build a custom Facebook Page
How to fully customize your Facebook Page once you have it built
Creating and adding custom tabs to your Facebook Page
The differences between the page categories and which information is displayed with each on your custom Facebook Page

The session will last 90 minutes, give or take. We wanted to make this phenomenal instruction affordable for our clients and friends, so we are only charging $49. I promise that you will get more value than you pay for this session.

Seating is limited, so be sure to go ahead and register now if you’re interested. Visit How to Create a Custom Facebook Page to save your spot or simply register below. I’m sincerely not sure when or if this will be offered again online. Mike has taught these techniques in person to individuals around the country, but not online in this way before. He graciously agreed to do this for us since he is our friend. This is (for now at least) an exclusive offer from 210 Consulting only.

If you have any questions at all, let us know in the comments below.

5 Tips For Using Video Effectively

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Video is quickly becoming a more and more popular way of connecting with the public. It is a quick and easy way to get your points across, keeps the audiences attention, and attracts another sphere of consumers. YouTube is now the second most used search engine next to Google due to the rising popularity of video.

So, with more and more people entering into video, the importance of doing it right is so important. Here are a few tips to increase your success with video.

1. Reduce background noise as much as possible. Have you ever seen a video where the main person you cannot understand because of the crowd noise around them? If you are in a noisy area you may not be able to get your points across because your audience will be distracted by other sounds. If consumers get frustrated by not being able to hear you, or the quality of audio is low, they will leave. An easy fix is to either record in areas that are not noisy, or if you have to record there, find a camera that allows you to use an external microphone.

2. Use a tripod! It will help steady your picture so you don’t give your audience motion sickness. Have you ever watched a video like this? No Matter how steady I tried to keep my hands, it looks like there is a constant earthquake happening the entire time I am recording. Setting the camera on a tripod will remove all that. If you don’t have a tripod, try just setting it down on a table, or some other flat steady surface. It will achieve the same effect.

3. Don’t rush! Take your time when panning around a room so that people can soak in all the details of what you are trying to share with them. Plus if you go too quickly it will make the video jerky and possibly give them nausea. Also, unless you have a really high quality camera, it will blur everything together & the details will get lost. While you are there in the room, and your eyes are moving that quickly with no problem, the consumers aren’t there & they have to rely on the speed of a camera which is much slower. Use slow steady fluid movements when panning.

4. Make sure things are lit properly. If your area where you are shooting your video is too dark or too light, it will not give the people the effect you are trying for. The great benefit of video is you can make your audience feel like they are right there in the same room. A poorly lit room will also lose a major amount of video quality. Things will get grainy and not convey exactly what you want. On the other end, don’t go too overboard or you will wash out all of the vibrant colors. You will look pale and as if you have not been out in the sun in 12 years.

5. Use music. Music helps people to relate to things and helps to give them better memory of a certain thing. It can be great for intros & endings for a video. Depending on what you are doing, you may want to use some music for the entire video. If you are going to have music play throughout the entire video, make sure to lower the volume during times that someone is speaking. If not, the music will overpower the speech. Also, pick music that goes along with the topic of the video. Obviously, you wouldn’t use heavy metal with a real estate video, or lullabies with an interview. Whatever you do, make sure you only use music that you have permission to use, we don’t want any lawsuits.

Here are two videos. The first is a video I made in a hurry to show a rental property to my brother who wass moving from Austin, TX back to Myrtle Beach, SC. I made this video in a matter of 5 minutes and spent about 2 minutes editing. You will notice that I did not use any of the five tips listed above. My guess is that anyone who would watch this video would be turned off from watching in no time.

Wasn’t that video rather boring? Now, this second video was produced by someone at my church to share with new visitors about all of the different ministries that are offered. The 5 keys above were used to the fullest extent and the final result was an awesome video that keeps your attention from the beginning to the end. If you watch closely, you will even find me show up a few times throughout the video participating in the many ministries I am involved in. Hope everyone enjoys!

I hope these 5 tips help you to improve your final video products. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

5 Tools to Cash In On Your Social Media Investment

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Whenever I start working with a new client, I always try to ask in the first meeting the same question: “What results would you like to accomplish from being on a social media network?” 9 out of 10 times the response I receive is: To make money of course! But, unfortunately with the ever changing amount of networks and new platforms being birthed almost weekly it seems, many become overwhelmed instantly. You run away never to come back.

Then comes along a request from a good buddy and you figure you might as well at least try it out. So, you join the network and slowly start participating. You realize quickly that you just connected with 20 different friends that you haven’t talked to in the past 20 years. Once this happens, many begin to lose their focus and reason that they originally joined this network and it turns into a cocktail party of fun for you. Now that you have found that comfortable place, you begin socializing with your friends & associates and completely lose site of the purpose you joined was to make money.

A few weeks ago I wrote about The Importance of Listening with Purpose To Your Consumers. This post talks about how listening to what consumers are saying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook can lead to increases in business. I mentioned how each network has certain applications available to assist you in tracking what consumers are saying about their needs for your services or goods. The two that I talked about in that post were TweetGrid and Facebook Search.

I decided that today I would share a few other tools that I have found to be beneficial in Cashing In On Your Social Media Investment. Of course, a solid blog is before any of these items, as that is your foundation to any social media marketing strategy.

1. Google Alerts- I have Google alerts at the top of my list for a reason. In case you aren’t familiar with what it is, let me first explain. Google alerts is a notifying program produced by Google. You can set up an alert to be notified of any keyword/search term you wish. For me, one of the terms I use is my name. Why? I want to know every time Google is picking up my name. It lets me know if someone has either re-blogged a post of mine, mentioned something good or bad about me, and allows me to know what is being said about me. I have this alert set to notify me immediately. The other day when Jason Crouch wrote about our first webinar, How to Chug Google Juice & Get 15 Years of Fame, I received an alert in less than 8 minutes. In fact, it came so quick, that I received that before Jason’s email stating that he had included my name in the post!

Some other ways you could use this is to set up some alerts for the keywords you are trying to dominate in the search engines. That way, you will know when your posts are being indexed for those keywords, and also know what your competition is saying on the same type of terms. Google Alerts are a must have for any business you do.

2. A Solid Twitter Application- There are plenty of different platforms available here. I am not going to say one is better than another, but I will say that you need to be running some sort of program other than just the web version. Applications like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, & Hootsuite are some of the most popular ones and they allow you to filter your lists into different categories. For example, I have an entire column just for closest friends, another for local people, one for specific terms and several others. With one of these applications, you can set up different columns for your target audiences, friends, and for those who can supply you with great valuable content to enhancing your business or to relay onto your clients.

3. A Mobile Photo Blog- Normally when I start talking about this one, I begin to lose people. I actually have two mobile photo blogs. Both bring me a ton of traffic as well as some really great connections & Google juice. One photoblog, currently has 490 email subscribers to it. My other photo blog which is hosted on posterous, is currently averaging around 800-1000 views per photo. This is HUGE! One of the beautiful parts of a photo blog like this is that it takes virtually zero effort to post to. Once you have things set up properly, you simply shoot the picture with your mobile phone and email it to a specific email address with the subject line being your photo title. The rest is automatically handled as your photos will be re-sized & formatted to fit well on your post.

Speaking of mobile phones, that leads me to my next point.

4. A Powerhouse Mobile Phone If you are seriously considering taking your social media strategy to the next level, a good smart-phone is essential. I am not going to get into what is the best to use, in the past I have used an Android platform phone, an iPhone, and several Blackberries. Currently, I am back on a Blackberry 9700 and love it. All of them though are going to be more than sufficient and offer the same basic features: phone, camera, web, email, and the main social networks applications. The key is to pick what you like. For me, touch screens are hard to use, especially while trying to concentrate on other things. I am a button pushing type of guy, so I like the blackberry more for that simple reason.

Once you have a good phone, it will allow you to begin to participate on the social networks when you have a few minutes waiting on a client, or when standing in line at the Walmart to check out. Also, the ability to connect with consumers quickly & efficiently is priceless. I had someone once tell me that most consumers want to be responded to in less than 2 hours or they will move on to someone else. Having that ability to respond quickly and painlessly, even if it is just a response of: “I am in a meeting, let me call you later this afternoon” can do wonders for your business.

5. A Video Camera While this does not seem like a big deal, this one can be so crucial to a social media strategy. Did you know that YouTube is the second most searched site in the world? One of my favorite choices is a simple handy Flipcam. It doesn’t have to be a hi-tech machine or anything. These are fairly affordable at under $200.00 and by far are the easiest video cameras to use. Simply shoot the video, flip out the built in USB and connect to your computer. To give you an idea of how popular video is, I have 25 videos uploaded to YouTube that have received a combined 71,000 views!

These are just 5 of the tools I use on a regular basis to cash in on my social media investment. Implementing these tools into your social media plan will definitely help you to achieve your ultimate goal and turn these networks into income producers for your business.