There’s a really good reason people love apps, and in particular applications from brands. They are often streamlined and simple versions of a company’s website or serve a specific purpose. There’s no annoying copy in marketing speak, no flash banners slowing down the page load, no pop-ups and, often, no confusion on where to go to get what you want. Why? Because mobile or tablet/iPad apps are supposed to be simple, serve 1-2 purposes and get out of the way.

Which is precisely what most users want from a corporate website.

A couple of years ago, everyone wanted to build desktop widgets. The thought was to take the core functionality of a website and make it easily accessible from one’s computer desktop. For Nationwide Insurance, for instance, it might have been a widget that helped you search for a car insurance quote by model and make. It probably didn’t do anything else, but that’s okay. It was a desktop widget.

The problem with desktop widgets was simply that tech people called them “widgets.” Mainstream consumers don’t know what a widget is. From 2006-2008, “What is a widget,” was in the top three or four questions I answered in every client meeting.

Now that Apple has made mobile and now tablet apps all the rage, what do we really have? We have a streamlined, narrowly purposed function-driven subset of your corporate website in an application that resides … on your device’s desktop. It’s a desktop widget for a smart phone or tablet, only we call it an app. Nationwide’s app — Cartopia — allows you to easily comparison shop for cars and find appropriate insurance afterward. It’s a neat app. And, to my knowledge, contains no pictures of company executives. (Thank goodness!)

Want to make your website kick-ass? Build it like you’d build an app. Think of the 1-2-or-3 things your main audience wants from your website, or cool stuff you can give them. Then just deliver that. And while you’re at it, build a little app-like icon that can reside on any desktop that takes people right to your website. Give them a mobile app that can live on any device … even a PC.

You think I’m crazy? Wait until you see the iMac Touch. (Which wasn’t rumored to be what Apple announces Wednesday, so we’ll probably have to wait.) What do you think will populate the desktops of Apple’s next big idea? Apps. Why not take them to everyone’s desktop now and beat Apple to the punch?

Don’t worry. Mr. Jobs has already conditioned the masses. As long as you don’t call it a, “widget,” it’ll work.

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There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminders for a client’s digital marketing and social media strategic plan. I go through notes from client meetings, make lists of potential strategics or tactics, throw broad concepts and ideas up, enumerate client concerns, brand values and relevant research and then I study the board for a while.

As I was doing so last night I realized a picture of the board might be helpful for those of you out there working on strategic plans for your organization. No, we don’t all think or process information similarly, but when I see how someone else does it, I always get an idea or two. So here’s my board:

For obvious reasons, I made the image small and even blurred some of the words, but look at what you can read:

When I see the image, the first few things that pop off for me are these words:

• Goals
• Target
• Business Goal
• Primary Concerns
• SEO
• Insights
• Core Values
• Content
• Needs

No, you can’t read all those because of the resolution of the image, but those are the items that pop off the board to me. There are other ideas and concepts there, tucked away in the greens and oranges and blues. (No, there’s no system to my color coding other than to separate ideas from one another.) But the important things I think about have little to do with blogs or Facebooks or even monitoring solutions. I’m focused on the task at hand: what are the client’s goals, who are they talking to, what do they want to say and what does success look like for them?

Whether or not analysts, social media bloggers or even my friends on Twitter think my client work is innovative or pioneering or even good at all matters not. The only person whose opinion does is the client. This is what I focus on when I’m writing strategic plans or thinking about overall strategies for the people I work with as a digital marketing consultant.

What about you? What do you focus on? How do you think and process? Do share. We’ll all be better for it.

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Would you like to be a regular blogger at Social Media Explorer? I’m taking suggestions (not applicants … it’s not a job) and nominees for smart thinkers, status-quo challengers, tool reviewers and people who understand social media marketing better be about business or you’ll be flipping burgers soon. I want to share this platform with thought fire-starters.

We are smarter than me.

But I’m going to be picky. I want people who are committed to teaching social media, blogging regularly, sharing their experiences and thoughtful opinions, helping others understand not just how to use social media but what it means to be social. I don’t want guest posts from PR hacks or desperate start-up junkies hocking their product or service. I want people who have some experience, have an audience or following of their own, or can show tons of smarts otherwise and understand the responsibility and value of sharing a platform with some meagre credibility.

I’d love to have different perspectives … an agency person, an entrepreneur, a business owner,  a wicked-smart business person who is a n00b to technology or social media. Perhaps even an analytics junkie, an email fiend, productivity enthusiast … even a gamer. Ideally, I’d love a lineup of 6-8 authors who can help keep the audience informed, entertained, but most certainly challenged with their thinking about social media, marketing, advertising, public relations and communications.

I am not going to stop blogging. This isn’t a cultural shift in Social Media Explorer or what it does. It’s an expansion of the resources to provide better content more frequently. It’s a call on my community to challenge the thinking: mine, yours and the echo chamber’s.

If you’re interested and meet the requirements (and don’t meet the bad ones) above, email me. Tell me why you’d like to write here, what you’d like to write about (think of it as your beat), what you think our readers will get out of your contributions and yeah, what you’ll get out of it, too. (If you need me to tell you why blogging here would be beneficial to you, then you probably won’t make the cut. Just sayin’.)

Understand that I may not pick you. I’m making room for a few, select folks. If the quality isn’t there, I owe it to this audience to not pick you. It’s not personal.

And you’re certainly welcome to not pick me, too. I’m only interested if you are.

Thanks for reading!

In February, we talked about social media monitoring newcomer Viralheat and how they were lowering the barrier to entry for social media monitoring by offering quality results at lower-than-typical prices. Now the rising start-up is doing even more to shake up the monitoring landscape by offering a top layer of monitoring results through its Charts feature to anyone … for free.

The offering is an expansion of their Social Trends feature, available since the product’s launch, which allows paid users to make part of their keyword searches public for all to see. If a client has set up a monitoring profile for the iPad, for instance, and make that search public, anyone can go to Social Trends and see the results. (Seventy percent of Viralheat’s users made their results public.) Social Trends was also free for anyone to use, so long as a paid subscriber (or Viralheat folks) had set up a search for the term  you were trying to find. If not, you could pay for an account and set it up yourself.

The new Charts feature allows anyone to build a comparison search. Now you can search, compare and contrast multiple brands (e.g. – iPad vs. Kindle vs. Smart Pad or others) and not only see the results, but grab the embed code and offer up a real time chart on your blog or website. (Awesome idea for a transparent company wanting to show people online chatter and sentiment for their brand vs. their competitors.) The company’s open API for paid users also allows  to tap into the usefulness and build out dashboards for the data. (Social Trends has a free API which allows you to pull out the publicly available data and use as you like.)

CEO Raj Kadam told me the information they’re making available to everyone for free has previously only been available to big brands with big market research dollars. I would add that some of it has also been available to bloggers and journalists in product demos, but typically only the iPhone or iPad data. (Someone please do a different default demo search. Heh.)

Kadam said Viralheat gets a lot of requests from journalists who are interested in the real-time, online buzz about a certain person or topic. Now the reporters can do the search themselves and embed the results right on the story page on their website. And if you’re about to say, “Yeah, right. Like journalists would even know how!” Hold your fire. ESPN is using Viralheat’s open API to create real-time buzz tracking dashboards of NFL teams this fall.

Oh, and sentiment scoring on all those results? Included. Free. (Kick ass.)

Viralheat also told me they’re making their library of infographics open and downloadable for anyone to use. They’ve got a pretty interesting collection worth checking out, for certain.

As for the paid version of the software, you can still get the Cadillac version for just $90 per month. Plans start at $10. At those prices, I don’t have a lot of problem with Viralheat execs calling themselves a “disruptive” social media monitoring company. They kinda are.

My friend Edward Boches had a crappy experience at a Marriott Hotel last week. Like any good content producer, he blogged about it. Social media more than any other communications mechanism before has done more for placing market control back in the hands of the consumer. The barrier to entry to the web is a pulse and scant brain waves. If you are moderately functional, you can publish.

Boches, who has far more brain waves than most of us, offered a fantastic suggestion to any business in his post. He saw through his frustration to offer up a customer bill of rights of sorts for Marriott. He suggested it look something like this:

1. We guarantee your satisfaction.

2. We guarantee your room will be clean and that everything works: the clock, TV, lamps, bathroom.

3. If for any reason your stay with us was unsatisfactory we will make it up with comparable accommodations on us.

4. We will take any complaint and suggestion seriously and respond as quickly as humanly possible.

5. We encourage you to Tweet, blog, and post images and video of anything you find below standards or unresolved.

Certainly, the customer bill of rights idea is noble. Many of us in the power-to-the-consumer world of social media immediately nodded and virtually high-fived Boches for the concept, even if it was less original and more a reminder of what companies should be doing.

When Boches got his response from Marriott and they offered apologies and explanations and engaged commentors on his original post, he followed up with a lessons learned kind of story. In it, he offered these thoughts for customers to keep in mind as a sort of quid pro quo for brands who grovel accordingly:

We should make our issues public.

It’s smarter to offer suggestions than criticism.

We should welcome any brand or individual who tries to learn and engage.

If we want brands to deliver better service, it’s partly our responsibility to guide them there and hold them to it.

And the congregation said, “Amen.” Right?

Maybe not.

While I’m certainly supportive of the idea that brand should treat their customers with the utmost care and respect, least they flee to hungry competitors or even to the interwebs to vent their frustrations with them, I think enumerating these ideas as requisites for the general consuming public is idyllic and naive. For every consummate professional out there (like Boches), there exists about 15 dipshits who will only bitch to bitch. Or bitch to get free stuff.

The customer is not always right. In fact, sometimes the customer is quite an asshole.

Should consumers hold brands to a higher standard? Yes. Should we unleash the huddled masses, trailer trash and mouth-breathers on Twitter and Facebook and blogs to whine about every misstep or oversight they encountered while buying Natty Light and Marlboro Light 100s at the Circle K? I’m thinking no. Half their problem is that they wouldn’t have hurt themselves stepping on the pop-top if they were wearing shoes, or were paying attention to where they stepped rather than yelling at their baby-daddy on the prepaid cell.

Yes, the portrait is exaggerated, but to illustrate a point. Not everyone is a civilized consumer. Not everyone plays fair. And this country is as mired in moany, bitchy negativity as it frankly needs to be, in my opinion.

Maybe I’m just having a bad week, but there’s a big difference is a polite blog post pointing out a bad consumer experience and a web full of Springer plots.

Thanks to Boches for opening the dialog. Thanks to Marriott for learning from the experience and participating in the conversation. But don’t we owe it to our sanity to establish some limits? Or is sufficient brain waves to figure out how to publish online enough?

A penny for your thoughts … unless you’re barefoot in public. The money would be better spend on footware. Heh.

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Someone asked me a question about blog commenting recently that I thought peculiar. It’s a question that many brands, marketers and public relations folks have asked, for sure. But for whatever reason, the question just seemed odd to me. The person asked:

“What is the best way for a corporation to comment on a blog without seeming to promote their products?”

The root of the question is the company’s desire to not be spammy with their blog comment activities online. I’m thrilled marketers are asking that question. But it still seems peculiar to me. Maybe my perspective is a bit different, but here’s how I answered:

“The best way for a corporation to comment on blogs without seeming to promote their product is to comment without promoting their product. I know that sounds flippant, but take it literally. If the comment is to correct a misstatement about the price of a phone, for instance, you’d say:

‘Hey, It’s Jason from Verizon. Just wanted to clarify a mistaken number in the post. Our Droid X retails at $199.99 with a two-year contract if ordered online, not $249. If you saw it listed for that price, let us know so we can let the retailer know that’s not kosher. Thanks!’

You don’t say,

‘Hey, I work for Verizon, the greatest phone company on the planet, and our Droid X is now just $199.99 with a two-year contract and if you order online, but only until Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. So hurry down to your local Verizon store an save, save, save on the best smart phone known to man. This thing will mow your lawn. We’ve got apps! We’ve got savings! We’ve got the lowest prices in the tri-state area! Verizon rocks. Verizon rolls. Gotta love your Verizon Smart Phones! (Void where prohibited, fees do not include titles, tax, license or ferrets.)”

Is that so hard for people to understand? I don’t see why.”

So is it so hard to understand? Why?

NOTE: I used Verizon Wireless as an example for analogy only. They sponsor Social Media Club Louisville, of which I serve as president, but are not presently a client or sponsor of this blog.

There’s lots of buzz around “social CRM” software, strategies and programs these days. It’s getting the kind of play “social business” did about this time last year when the analysts at Forrester jumped ship for Altimeter and Dachis. They had to invent new phrases to sell their services to the C-Suite. If you don’t have an innovative-sounding name for what you do, then I guess you don’t attract as much attention.

Social CRM is being hawked by monitoring services, market research firms, traditional sales software and — if you can believe it — Twitter applications. Brand managers, marketing managers and agencies everywhere are anxious to get them some of that social CRM, by golly. Sadly, most of them don’t even know what CRM stands for.

Before you go and plop down money for software that does nothing if you don’t understand the purpose for it, let’s look at what social CRM really is. (It’s customer relationship management, in case you were wondering.)

Fanscape has a nice report out called The Value of a Social Relationship in which they put some mathematics around the value of a customer. It’s worth the download, even if the math is more complicated than ObamaCare. In it, they say:

“The aim of CRM is not only to maximize the revenue from a single transaction, but to build a lasting relationship with the customer, thus increasing the customer lifetime value.”

I would generally agree that is the goal of a CRM program: to increase the lifetime value of a given customer to a company. By building stronger relationships with your customers, you can foster and encourage more purchases over time that the one-and-done method of straight sales. The part that makes it work, though, is the relationship building. Good CRM has to be customer focused, not company focused.

CRM software was (ironically) created to try and automate some of that relationship building. Instead of the labor- and time-intensive act of one-to-one communications, technology allowed marketers to build in automatic direct mail pieces, emails and even telemarketing calls to prospects, customers and advocates around campaigns, calendar dates or issues to keep those audiences invested in the brand at opportune times.

But a lot of CRM software is really just sales management software that tracks how many times you ask someone to buy stuff. That’s not really CRM. CRM is about tracking all communications, gathering information and informing your decisions around a particular customer. It’s not always about the sale.

When most companies say they sell “social CRM” software, what they’re really selling is a contact database that includes fields for a customer’s Twitter handle, Facebook account and other social media profiles. They don’t actually do much to allow you to build relationships in manual or automatic fashion. They just have the links.

True “Social CRM” systems not only help you know where your contacts are, but allow you or, even more importantly, those contacts, to manage how you communicate with them, how often and for what messages. Think of a good Social CRM system as email opt-in on crack.

Then the system allows you to leverage your contact’s public social data and even private communications with you to better inform your timing and decisions to communicate with them. Many thinkers in this space also think of Social CRM as allowing you to pull collective intelligence from your customers to improve products, etc. I don’t discount that possibility, but a forum will do that, too. Besides, that thinking is company-centric, not customer relationship-centric, so I tend to not focus on it as a primary function.

There are a lot of companies out there who claim they have a good Social CRM tool. I’m sure several of them will jump in the comments and lay it on thick. But one that I’ve been experimenting with I really like is JitterJam.

JitterJam allows your company to import your email lists, Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers and more into a database. You can tag each individual or groups of individuals anyway you like, making filtering and custom outreach by group easy. As you have contact with each person, those conversations are captured into each person’s profile. The system allows you to track and gauge when someone moves closer to your funnel, going from contact to prospect to customer to advocate.

The above graph shows the progression of contacts, prospects, customers and advocates for World’s Best Cat Litter, which is using JitterJam with and through its agency partner, MicroArts. (The big jump midway through represents awareness brought about by a DirecTV campaign … yes, traditional advertising! Oh my!) Anytime someone interacts with WBCL on Twitter or Facebook, joins its email list or otherwise has a connection to the brand online, they’re brought into the JitterJam platform. From there, the brand can reach out to the person in the medium in which they connected and give them what JitterJam calls a “Make Me Happy” ask where people can opt in to company communications and specify which mediums are acceptable. (See JitterJam’s Make Me Happy page here.)

Seeing the rise of the customers thanks to their efforts, you can visualize how effective your outreach has been.

“We needed something that was going to be more than a reporting solution,” explained Drew Schulthess of MicroArts. “We needed a better context to the relationships we’re building with our customers. We need to know who our customers were, who our evangelists were and how we were connecting to them.”

But JitterJam has much more to it than managing contacts. You can create and post social messages, emails, text messages and more, distribute those to everyone or filtered lists of your contacts, monitor the social web for conversations around your brand or your chosen keywords then funnel the individuals in those conversations into your system as new contacts, too.

When I think of a good Social CRM platform, I see one that has a little bit of everything … social media monitoring, influencer identification, email marketing, SMS capabilities, social outpost management, list management, segmentation ability, contact assessment and measurement and so on. JitterJam has almost everything in one package.

The challenge for using a platform like JitterJam is similar to the challenge of using any robust platform: You have to really master the software to get the most out of it. Yes, it’s one of the most powerful platforms out there, but you’re going to need to learn the ins and outs before you can really milk this thing for all it’s worth.

Still, all its worth could be golden for your company. Imagine communicating with 50,000 people at once. Now imagine communicating with all 50,000 in the medium or mechanism they choose to receive messages from you in and powered by intelligence that allows you to cater the message to customer groups in more relevant ways. JitterJam accomplishes this.

Yes, there are competitors out there that have nice platforms (I’m diving into Shoutlet next, which has some cool DIY tool creation with it) and do a lot of the same work. No, this review is not meant to say that JitterJam is the end-all and be-all to Social CRM. But it’s awfully powerful and worth a look-see.

And with tiered pricing starting at $290 per month, small businesses can afford the tool, too. Sure, the more sizable your lists or volume of your keyword searches, the more you’ll pay, but the pricing seems awfully fair for the functionality to me.

What does Social CRM mean to you? What software have you used to accomplish that and how did it fit your needs? If you use JitterJam, tell us about your experiences. The comments are yours.

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For the better part of the last five years, companies, agencies, consultants and managers have been sifting through all sorts of different platforms, softwares and programs, looking for that one social media tool that will solve their company’s or client’s problem. I have personally wasted about 57 aggregate days of my life sitting through hour-long demos on everything from Twitter clients to social media monitoring platforms and CRM solutions to WordPress plugins.

For the record, and for all you sales and marketing tools out there … er, um … people who sell and market tools, let me give you a few suggestions for your demos. First, keep it to 15-20 minutes. We’re busy. Second, get rid of the company background slides. I don’t care who founded or funded you. I care about the thing your stuff does that I can’t do better without it. Third, show me a real use case using a real client that outlines their problem and shows how your tool solved it. If I can’t connect your tool to a real solution, I won’t remember it.

But then there’s the age-old paradox of tools. They really become useful when someone figures out a different reason to use them.

It’s like my Cousin Johnny’s method of getting rid of a ground hog. To rid his backyard, garden or farm of a pesky ground hog, he uses three tools: a shovel, a five-gallon bucket and a six-pack of beer. Think about those tools for a moment and make assumptions on how he would use them.

To get rid of a ground hog, Cousin Johnny places the bucket, upside down, beside the ground hog’s hole. He drinks the six-pack of beer. By the time he’s finished, the ground hog pop his head up. He whacks the varmint on the head with the shovel.

Social media tools, too, can have a paradoxical nature. Social media purists have claimed for years that you blog to engage your audiences. Compendium Blogware (a client) has proven time and again that you can also use a blog to win search results and drive leads to your business, even without any measurable level of engagement. Those same purists claim Twitter is a conversational platform and one-way blasting of messages doesn’t work. Still, many mainstream Twitter users enjoy the fact they can follow feeds of companies or media outlets to just get the news of the day. (See @cnnbrk, @NBA, @MarthaStewart or @GStephanopoulos, all top 100 Twitter accounts, or even a feed like @BayerUSNews, which keeps media and pharma industry folk updated on the corporation’s goings on.)

More importantly for brand managers and companies buying tools, there’s the paradox of expectation. You expect a social media monitoring tool to monitor the Internet and take that burden off your shoulders. But the tool monitors nothing. It only presents information in an organized fashion so that you may monitor it more efficiently.

You expect a market research firm to tell you how to run your brand or make marketing decisions for you. But it only presents information about your audience, brand, market or competitors that enable you to make smarter decisions. An enterprise management system like Valuevine will not manage the Facebook and Twitter presence for the 150 separate locations for you. It will give you a mechanism to manage them, however.

The tools, in and of themselves, are not important. What you do with them is.

So the next time you’re suffering through a product demo, listen through the sales pitch and propaganda and ask yourself, “How can I use this tool? Who will manage its use on my team? Can I afford it in both fiscal and human resources?”

Those answers will help you pick the right tools for your social media marketing efforts.

NOTE: No actual ground hog was harmed in the writing of this blog post. While you’re welcome to complain about the violence Cousin Johnny uses to get rid of ground hogs, he hunts deer, too, so your concerns will probably fall on deaf ears. Sorry if his methods offend you. For good measure, here’s an article that explains more humane ways of ridding your property of a groundhog.

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I joke that Dan Zarrella has too much time on his hands. The “social media scientist” has been researching the social behaviors behind many social media tools long before HubSpot noticed and gobbled him up. The insights that he’s produced from that research over the years has been a mixed batch of awesomeness that has helped build better tools and refine social media marketing behavior for more efficient use of the tools.

Now Zarrella has turned his attention to conference presentations and, more specifically, how to amplify the effectiveness of them through social media. Since I give a lot of talks, I am interested in his insights. Since many of you may either presently, or in the future, take your social media expertise to the podium, I wanted to share some of those with you. I asked Dan for a sneak peek at his research, which he’ll present with a free webinar on August 19, and he was kind enough to share a nice takeaway with us.

From Dan:

In my research, I found that how often your audience can Tweet about your presentation is limited by how much time they have (labeled as “trying to focus” in the graph above). If they find your talk engaging and interesting, they will probably want to pay as attention and can have some difficulty in pulling themselves away for a few minutes to mention you on Twitter.

I also found that 6.5% of people who took my survey only Tweeted “pithy” soundbites. Soundbites that are under 140 characters and can be understood on Twitter, outside of the greater context of the presentation.

One easy way to add a bit of contagiousness to your presentation and take advantage of my findings is to use “Tweetable Takeaway Slides.” I gave a webinar in June about Facebook marketing that was the 8th most Tweeted about topic, and I credit the takeaway slides for part of that success.

My takeaway slides used the format shown above. I included my username and the webinar’s hashtag as well as Twitter bird logo to really drive home the fact that these were “Tweetable.” Slides like these will allow you to pause for a second to let your audience Tweet about your without losing focus or missing anything, and it they will for you to write pithy sound bites perfect for Tweeting.

The takeaway slide insight is just one of the many cool ideas Dan will share on the webinar and in the ebook (also free). You can download the eBook now and register for the August 19th Science of Presentations webinar. See you there.

Oh, and Dan is also the author of The Social Media Marketing Book (affiliate link) which is well worth your investment.

What ideas do you have leading into Dan’s talk that might help make your presentations more conducive to Tweeting, sharing and generating online buzz? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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If you subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you know when it comes to location-based services, I’m quite partial to Whrrl. Unlike Foursquare or Gowalla, there’s more to Whrrl than checking in and getting coupons. Whrrl allows you to annotate your visit with notes, images and more to create virtual scrapbooks of your event or visit. (Think a child’s T-ball game.) When there are more Whrrl users at an event, you can tie the stories together on the location’s page and see what other users are adding to the scrapbooks.

But the system is more than checkin and build content. There’s a full gaming component, recommendations and referrals and even real world activation for businesses and corporate partners. (Yes, Whrrl has opportunities for you to partner with them to drive real foot traffic to your location and take the concept of viral spread off-line. Watch the video. You’ll get it.)

During my recent trip to Seattle, I visited Whrrl’s offices and sat down with parent company Pelago CEO Jeff Hoden and product manager John Kim to talk about Whrrl.

Check out Whrrl. And if you’re close to a Murphy USA, give that a spin too. You could win free gas and more. Nice!

Two weeks from today I will help kick off Blog Indiana for the second year. And I want you to join me there. It’s in Indianapolis August 20 and 21 with a neat Social Media 101 course on Thursday, August 19 for those in need of some basic knowledge. Frankly, Blog Indiana has a little something for everyone.

I’ll be opening the event with another exploration of the Art of Conversation. Yes, I’ve given this talk before, but it’s an evolutionary discussion and changes each time with each audience’s input. I’m diving into the issues of building trust and relationships and marketing through conversations from a brand perspective. It’s a fun talk and I want you to be a part of the exchange because I learn as much about the topic as you do. We are smarter than me.

But when you look at the other topics and speakers, it’s hard to believe this is all had for a few bucks in two days. Chuck Gose will talk about seducing your customers with a blog, Ryan Cox is diving into mobile to help us learn more about why and how to be thinking along those lines. There are sessions on publishing, marketing, business, blogging, SEO, technology and more.

My buddy Doug Karr will tell you why your website sucks. Another pal, Compendium Blogware CEO Chris Baggott will dive deeper into our joint study on blog visitors and talk about the myth of your website audiences. Bill Dawson will go over the email marketing lifecycle … and that’s just halfway through the first day.

Other speakers include Kyle Lacy, Erik Deckers, Chad Richards, Duncan Alney, Carissa Newton, Heather Sokol and Lindsay Manfredi whose session on ghost blogging will no doubt get a rise out of a few folks (and may even point fingers and call me names).

But more importantly, you’ll get to meet and hang with these folks and the other great people who will be attending. I remember vividly last year, sitting in the lobby at IUPUI with my friends Chris Brogan, Krista Neher (who hijacked my TweetDeck while I took a client call), Jason Bean and others, just talking shop, laughing hysterically and enjoying one another. I even met Sonya Beckley and chatted about my new Volkswagen. Six months later, I’m freezing my ass off in a Louisville ally doing a photo shoot for Das Auto.

Indianapolis is a great tech, web and social media community and Blog Indiana is a banner event for them. Noah Coffey and Shawn Plew do a great job and make it an top-notch event for you. So come, wouldya?

Visit the Blog Indiana Registration Page and sign up. Use the code “”SPEAKTOME10″ and get 10% off, just ‘cuz you know me. And then come see me in Indy.

(And I hear there might be a surprise drop in visit from Jay Baer, too. Trust me. Come. It’ll rock.)