Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

All in all, this was fantastic. If you have a chance to see Peter speak, do it, you’ll love it.

A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.

• Just hooking something up to your rss feed
• Pretending to be a company, instead of yourself
• Following everyone you can
• Only posting once a week
• Posting every hour
• Not replying to people

I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.

It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.

Building on my last post, Chris Brogan just put up a guest post on mashable about building and managing your brand on the web – whether it’s personal or business. Definitely more comprehensive than mine. Definitely worth the read.

Remember, your brand is your responsibility, and it’s not going to happen on its own.

Let me start by saying that I probably visit too many social sites. I’ve cut back, but it’s still quite a bit. However, one thing that I do is always try to get the same name at each one (covati) and always use the same picture.

I know it’s fun and cute to use a new picture of your child, cat, boat, favorite martian, etc. But when it comes down to it, you are creating a personal brand, and that brand needs to be identifiable.

So I would recommend the same for you, if you have a presence in multiple locations, try to keep it the same. Even though they are different services you want your audience to be able to immediately identify you no matter where you are.

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

The guys over at google are always introducing great new products and apps. But it’s not always the products they introduce, but how they introduce or educate you about them. Check out this video from Google Russia showing what you can do with gmail. It happens to be in russian, but it’s still a great video to watch.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCNSWwAJNZE[/video]

For more info and detail into this video, check out the blog post from google’s blog.

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers – and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

I just got a little more PR for myself and Bronto yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at DMNews, the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of bounce messages, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article – 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages – the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.

As the title states, it’s nothing more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

So here’s the deal, a blog post I wrote got picked up (and then re-written by me) to be featured in imediaconnection, an interactive media and marketing site. The article is titled The best way to expand your email list, which was their choice, not mine. This article is about using the forward to a friend functionality to grow your list.

I’m not sure I’d endorse it as the best way to grow your list. I do think it is a great way to add like-minded people to your list, but it’s effectiveness does limit it’s overall usefulness.

As I said in my last post, this is all part of the continued up tick in PR for Bronto, and I’m happy to ride that wave and contribute to the growth.

Update: More plugs (just cause I can) – my article got mentions from a few of the people that I admire most in the email blogosphere – Tamara Gielen (at the top) and Mark Brownlow (down at the bottom).

I saw a story on DMNews that J.C. Penney is now on trying to get on people’s desktops. Basically they want an avenue to advertise to customers. It’s not too surprising to see J.C. Penny playing in this space. They were recently listed as #12 in Internet Retailer’s top 500 list, so I expect to see them making waves and trying new things.
However, this move has me asking the question, isn’t this the point of the internet itself? I don’t think the problem is that people don’t know how to subscribe to your email list or check out your webpage. It’s that you aren’t actually providing compelling content that keeps me coming back. I’m not sure asking me to download an app to run on my computer is going to change that, even if you include a calendar(!!). Delivering this type of info is exactly what RSS feeds are for. Attempting to circumvent that via your own app just serves to clutter people’s lives more.

I guess this is just an attempt to get out in front of all the people who are confused by or scared of terms like RSS. And this tactic may work for the first few companies who try this, but it certainly won’t scale. You can’t have a JCPenny, Barnes & Noble, Gap, and HomeDepot tool running all at the same time. Beside that, people grow weary of self serving apps like this – why do I need to give you space on my machine to directly advertise to me unless you are providing some immense value that I can’t get elsewhere? I know I don’t need JCPenny on my desktop, maybe I’m just not their target demographic. Alright, I know I’m not.

Update (6/26/07): While surfing around I happened across some one else pushing these BDAs (Branded Desktop Apps) as a solution. Since he’s the VP of the website, I guess I can see why he thinks it’s the solution to the problem. I still think it’s just an awkward paradigm.