Bottom line, McNamee illuminates, among other things, why HTML5 is so important and how Microsoft, social media, and I say traditional network TV, are all on the decline. In their place there will be a wave of “highly differentiated content,” and the thusly-empowered creators of this new breed of content will quite literally own their own stores—and, just to be clear, those are media “stores.”

In other words, as if we couldn’t already, HTML5, iPads and mobile distribution will enable those of us with our own “bands” (teams & other creative resources) will be able to seize the controls of our own destiny, in the web sense at least. (And, along these lines, I love McNamee’s concept of “full contact investing” where he uses his rock band’s marketing as an experiential testing ground.)

Obviously, content marketing has laid some of the ground work here, and so has blogging. But his vision is bigger than that.

Content creators with the hutzpah and the resources to develop real destination websites can include new, highly integrated forms monetization to produce extraordinary opportunities in the very near future. The time is now to act on these phenomenally potent changes. Please watch the videos below to understand more.

I’ll certainly be doing my best to do so as well as to educate you how to take advantage of these changes via NewMarU.com. So please STAY TUNED!

If you prefer to read a text summary of some of McNamee’s key points, check out Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over

Here are the videos:

The Course Will be Offered on Four Thursdays:
May 17th, May 24th, May 31st & June 7th

TIME:
4:00PM – 5:30PM PDT
7:00PM – 8:30PM EDT
NZ: 11:00AM on Friday

Registration includes access to the recorded versions of the sessions, a full year membership in NewMarU, a copy of my new ebook, “Internet Marketing: 8 Key Concepts Every Business MUST Know” (as soon as it’s finished), as well as special supplemental PDF’s and other resources.

I will be sharing my screen providing you with live demos of applications such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and much more.  One hour of teaching with interactive demos of multiple applications and 30 minutes of LIVE Q&A.  Registration has been limited to be able to provide more one-on-one time during the Q&A time.

Special Savings!

• $343 if registered by May 5th
• $397 after May 5th

When you attend this workshop, you will learn:

• Why Content Marketing has become Mission Critical for virtually every organization
• The Best Practices of Creating Sustainable & Active Facebook Pages
• Why “Lead Nurturing” is the Next Generation of Email Marketing
• The Secrets of “SEO 2.0″: Social Media Optimization including Collaborative Link Building
• How Authentic Voice is the “Heart” of New Marketing
• How to Use YouTube Videos as Lead Capture Magnets
• How Blogging is Best Utilized as the Hub of your Social Media communications
• The Best Ways to Leverage LinkedIn as Your Business-to-Business social media channel
• Why Twitter is most valuable including the use of Twitter for lead acquisition and market research

This workshop is packed with actionable information. You will come away with a fresh, energizing perspective and a list of next steps that you can take to increase your organization’s online visibility. Most importantly, you will learn how to effectively attract and engage new prospective customers and generate new revenue.

Then again, maybe it’s not such a big surprise… As I’ve mention in earlier blog posts—with all props to Twitter, which now links to photos inherently—social media is no longer a text medium. More and more, it’s about images and, yes, videos. (More on online video soon.)

Meanwhile, Google+ is getting people talking cuz many think that their newly updated “more beautiful” look is just Facebook timeline-esk. More to my point here, it’s definitely more visual, and a clear strength of Google+ has been and continues to be the way that it handles photo sharing, i.e. it’s more visual.

From the business side, I found Business Insider’s perspective on the Facebook acquisition cogent, albeit with a new kind of valuation model. There is actually a reason why Instagram is worth a cool billion to Facebook.

And what really got me going to write this post is that I just saw this cool InfoGraphic (shown below) that covers Instagram’s own timeline. I just had to share it with you here. I like the way they went all, well, visual to tell the Instagram story. (Thanks to the peeps at Visual.ly for making it embed-able.)

Oh yeah, here’s my Instagram (via ejpix, I’m “jleland”) in case you want to hook up there

This is my “signature” Internet marketing workshop, “Mastering the Social Media Marketing Mix.” On this occasion I’m custom designing to help creative people, performing artists, solo-preneurs & small biz owners to expand their audiences/client base.

In addition to the mission critical ideas that I’ll be covering in my new ebook, “Internet Marketing: 8 Key Concepts that Every Business MUST Know,” here are some of the main things you will learn:

• Why Content Marketing has become a valuable strategy for virtually every organization
• The Best Practices of Creating Sustainable & Active Facebook Pages
• Why “Lead Nurturing” is the Next Generation of Email Marketing
• The Secrets of “SEO 2.0″ and Social Media Optimization
• How Authentic Voice is the “Heart” of New Marketing
• How to Use YouTube Videos as Lead Capture Magnets
• How Blogging is Best Utilized as the Hub of your Social Media eco-system
• Best Practices to Leverage LinkedIn as Your Business-to-Business social media channel
• Why Twitter is most valuable for listening to your customers and market research

This workshop is being offered live in San Francisco at Ft. Mason on April 24th, 2012 at 6:30PM.
Please Click Here to Register or for More Details on the Live SF Event

Also, FYI, this workshop is going to be offered starting in mid-May as a Four-Week Online Course via our sister website, NewMarU.com:
Please click here for more details on the Online Course

Pinterest is much more than the latest and greatest “hot” new social network. Because of it’s visual nature, I believe that this upstart social network reflects the next generation of socially networked communication. In the current and coming stages of the evolution of the Web’s social revolution, the written word is no longer sufficient.

In case you haven’t tried it yet, Pinterest is essentially an online vision board. It lets people “pin” images that they find inspiring, useful or beautiful and then share their collections of images—called “Boards”—with others. When people “re-pin” the images, they are essentially “retweeting” or sharing visual communications in a state-of-the-art social media style.

This naturally compliments the ways that video and photo sharing have become majorly important. In fact, the array of visual communication innovation that we are seeing right now is indicative of the dawn of a new age. The web has quickly become a more dynamic visual medium. Text and hyperlinks were a foundation, but only a beginning. And we are still in the early stages.

Let’s Get Visual!

This trend isn’t new, but it does make a big difference. For example, Facebook power users know that when you share pictures, not just text updates, it fuels increased engagement in a big way. In other words, you get more “Likes” and comments when there’s a visual component to what you post.

Elsewhere, Tumblr has extended the Twitter-powered popularity of micro-blogging in a much more visual direction, and the popularity of using Instagram to share and talk about photographs is also surging (and is poised for major new expansion when the Android version of the Instagram app is released soon). ReadWriteWeb even reminds us that it is this mobile-phone-powered digital photography trend that slew the former photo corporate dragon: “Death by Smartphone: How Mobile Photography Helped Kill Kodak.”

And then there’s YouTube which recently announced that 24 hours of video is uploaded to their site every twenty-four seconds. The video visual media explosion is so dramatic that YouTube itself produced this quick little 45-second video in an attempt to make its mind-boggling growth comprehendible:

If doesn’t clarify this explosion for you, Time Magazine recently ran an article, The Beast with a Billion Eyes, which characterizes YouTube as “the most rapidly growing force in human history.”

Blogger/consultant/author Jay Baer  says: 

“This is the year that photos challenge writing as the lingua franca of the social web… If you’re not taking and posting pictures to dedicated photo networks and cross-posting (when appropriate) to Twitter and Facebook, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your network and see the world through the eyes (or cell phone cameras) of thousands of new friends.”

The fact that the verb “pinning” has been showing up in conversations that aren’t even specific to Pinterest is a huge testament to the fact that people are captivated. If you think about how many times a day the verb to “google” is used to mean “search,” you can see that we’re on to something.

Why Is This Important for Business?

According to the Wall Street Journal, traffic to the Pinterest website has grown tenfold over the past six months. In January, the number of visitors on Pinterest was already almost a third of that on Twitter.

But Pinterest’s impact of web traffic may be even greater than Twitter’s. Based on a recent study conducted by Sharaholic, Pinterest drove more referral traffic to sites in January than Google+ (with 100 million users!), Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and MySpace all combined. Those are big-time numbers for the new kid on the block.

But, is there really room for another player in the social media VIP room? New York Times technology columnist David Pogue in his review, A Scrapbook on the Web Catches Fire, gives three good reasons why there definitely is:

1. It’s clean. No ads, no pop ups, no blinking anything. It’s a pure and relatively simple rest for the eyes.
2. It’s personal. Broadcasting isn’t the focus, rather your own interests take center stage in an authentic way.
3. It’s humble. Pinterest Boards are about beauty, inspiration, information, passion, not self-absorbtion. It’s not, “Look at how great I am!” It’s, “Isn’t this GREAT!”

The blogger Beth Hayden sums it up well when she says Pinterest can  “…start making your social media strategy more beautiful, one little pin at a time.” When you add to this the fact that the early research seems to show that it will also make your social media marketing more engaging; and, when done appropriately, it will also help connect you to your constituencies at a deeper level: What’s not to like?

——

Our Other Pinterest Post:

Luscious Links to Unlock Pinterest: Free Resources Show How to Pin Your Marketing

I’ll have more to say about why I think Pinterest is a real trend setter in a future post. Meanwhile, here is a choice selection of way luscious links that will help you get started or understand more, no matter whether you’ve already pinned your first board or not. These free resources should be useful in improving your understanding of how to create effective social media marketing via Pinterest. Or, perhaps you might prefer to start by checking out my Pinterest boards by way of example?

Pinterest:  Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012′s Hottest Startup
InfoGraphic and impressive data from Mashable.com

The Remarkable Rise of Pinterest:  Chart
Get the picture literally via this chart from Business Insider.  See how many people are already spending more time on Pinterest than on other big social sites like Twitter and LinkedIn!

The Big Picture, Big Changes.  How Pinterest is Leading the Way for “The Next Social Networks”
An intelligent perspective from “Trust Agent” Chris Brogran

How Pinterest is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business
Jason Falls makes the case for Pinterest for business on Entrepreneur.com

Pinterest: 13 Tips and Tricks for Cutting Edge Users
Mashable’s how to guide will help you maximize you Pinterest activities.

56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest
A cool & comprehensive blog post by Beth Hayden

30 Resources, Tips and Tricks for Marketing Your Business on Pinterest
A very useful collection from Jeff Bullas that also includes many more “luscious links”

The Ten Most Followed Brands on Pinterest
Mashable’s selection shows the woman-leaning bias of Pinterest, except I’m a Whole Foods and Mashable kinda guy and those companies are way into Pinterest too

Dozens Of Major Companies Failed To Secure Their Brand Names On Pinterest
The name game is under way and lots of businesses are not paying attention… at their own peril. Are you and yours all set with the Pinterest name you love and deserve?

Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look
Research firm RJMetrics delivers some fascinating insights about Pinterest’s rapid growth as well as its “growing pains”

A Pinterest Board of Cool Pinterest Stuff
And, what selection of Pinterest links would be complete without a link to a Pinterest Board packed with cool Pinterest stuff? This is also a great example of how a Pinterest Board can be useful, interesting and creative.

Enjoy and please comment. Do you like this kind of link aggregation? Did you find this post useful? Thanks!

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse.  — Carlos Castaneda

We all know that every moment is precious, yet we seem to need wake up calls. My old friend, Robert Rabbin’s wake up call is a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. But he’s not taking it as a “curse.” He is turning up the volume on his life’s work which is all about authenticity.

Last year, when Robert and I had an online conversation (via my educational site NewMarU.com) about how crucial authenticity is to Internet marketing, it changed the course of my work and I edited a ten-minute video of the essence of that conversation.

This year, the urgency I am feeling from Robert is several “octaves” higher. I think this is a conversation you will not want to miss. It may change your work and your life, unless of course you are already fully satisfied that you are doing everything you can to live the life you are meant to live. Personally, I don’t know too many people like that.

So, if you are looking for inspiration to live your life more fully, you are Invited to… 

The Challenge of Authenticity: You Can’t Let It Wait

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 — 4:00pm – 4:30pm US Pacific Time 

Join me and my friend Robert Rabbin, author of The 5 Principles of Authentic Living: How to Live an Authentic Life in 10 Words as we talk about how even life’s most difficult challenges can be used as opportunities to live a more meaningful life. If Robert can do this with his stage 4 cancer diagnosis, what challenges do you have that can’t be transformed into enlivening opportunities?

I am uplifted by Robert’s commitment to respond to his challenge by deepening his commitment to his life’s work. He has turned it into not just an opportunity, but an extraordinary one. His insights are transformational. Please don’t miss this very special event. Be part of our conversation. It is completely free, live, and will be interactive via the embedded chat. It will be available online via video or streaming audio, or by telephone. Once you sign-in online, there will also be long distance phone lines (local charges may apply) and these will be available for Australia, New Zealand and the UK, as well as for the US.

Online, there will be live video of both Robert and I during the event. If you register, a recording will also be available (tech gods willing); but it will probably not include video of our lovely faces.
—
Addendum: In case you missed it…
Robert and Jon talked about how even life’s most difficult challenges can be used as opportunities to live a more meaningful life. This is an authentic conversation that will inspire you to live your life to the fullest. If you missed the live event or just want to be inspired all over again, here’s the recording:

“Hello, my name is Jon, and…

I’m an App-aholic.”

Apps is me. I love ‘em and I love to share ‘em. And, just for the record, I consider my obsessive behavior with apps of all kinds, especially iPhone apps, iPad apps and small business productivity-oriented web apps to be a healthy addiction. Well mostly healthy. At least I’m learning about the future of mobile computing… and I’m definitely having fun.

Here are my mini-reviews of my favorite apps from 2011 (more to come in 2012). I look forward to your comments and to hearing your recommendations via the comments below.

Note Taker HD: Hand-Written Notes Come to the iPad
This is the app that changed my life. It’s a powerful tool for writing on the iPad in a totally hand-written natural way. I used to prefer using yellow-lined paper writing pads for meetings, and would journal in notebooks, but Note Taker HD has shown me that I can write almost as fast on my iPad tablet (using a stylus) and I’m eliminating the clutter of scraps of paper all over the place.  I use it now for meeting notes, journal entries and brainstorming sessions; and I just love the natural feel, especially the way that Note Taker HD’s window system lets me write nice and big while my writing is automatically resized into a page-sized virtual sheet. This app is so easy and just plain fun that I find myself swiftly moving into the promised land of an (almost) paperless and less cluttered office.

The Hit List: To-Do List Nirvana
In the incessant quest for the holy grail of an Organized Life, I’ve taken more than a few laps around the track with various to-do list programs. Now, I think I’ve finally found the one I’ll stick with forever because, for me at least, this to-do list offers the right balance between features and simplicity. It’s snappy name is The Hit List.  It’s Mac-only (via the Mac App Store), but I also use it on my iPhone and iPad. I can organize lists into categories by client, by project, or by any number of other categories. It’s very intuitive with due dates and priority settings as well as a space for notes on each item. I also like the way that it synchs between platforms and the few dollars I pay per year for that service is well worth it. I’m really pleased I’ve found something that works for me, and I highly recommend that you check it out.

Zite: The Future of News Reading
My new favorite news reader is an iPad app that trumps Flipboard. Zite is personalized news at its finest. It’s infinitely customizable in a very effortless and seamless way. Zite filters what I like according to my initial preferences, and then I continue to let it know what I like and why as I go along. As I interact with it, the app gets smarter and gives me an increasingly better fit for my interests and sensibilities in a clear, interactive, easy-to-read format. The results in terms of valuable articles is the ultimate value, but it’s also easy to share what I read, which is certainly a requirement for me in this social media world of ours.

Google Docs: My New Standard in Groupware
More and more of my clients and team members are now collaborating with me via Google Docs. I gotta believe that that’s because it works. One previous concern of mine was the lack of change-tracking features that are frequently required and available in MS Word. Now I’m enthralled with the newish “See revision history” feature in Google Docs which I like even better than the “Track Changes” equivalent in Word. I am also surprised by the ease of the collaboration process. If you haven’t seen this, you need to try it: When I’m working with someone and we’re both updating a document at the same time, it’s just seamless. You can even see what the other person is doing, in a distinct color, while you are also editing—all via the Web, of course. All the value of sharing and online collaboration is built in. Google Docs is now a standard part of my workflow.

Summify: Socially Aggregated News Delivered Daily
Facebook coined the term “social graph” to describe the mapping of social relationships online. There are clear advantages to extending these virtual relationships via other websites in order to create new kinds of information collections. Summify is just this kind of real time source of aggregated news and blog posts. What I read, pretty much every day at some point, is being sourced by Summify from my own social graph (my online relationships) via their neato web app (a web browser-based app). Summify leverages my network by sending me daily emails containing a linked list of news articles that have been referenced (linked to via Facebook or Twitter) by multiple people from within my social graph. When multiple people from my networks share the same information, that clearly increases the likelihood that I’ll find it interesting. And it works. The consistent quality of what Summify delivers has been impressive. And I like that it can be delivered by email too. I don’t have to go to the app or website to see what they’ve found for me. This is a useful and, to me at least, a valuable preview of the growing power of our social media matrix.

Nimble: Cross Social Network Messaging Power
This start-up company is a recent investment of Mark Cuban and a definite app to watch. Nimble is a new breed of virtual CRM software that connects your contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and Twitter into a single interface. From within Nimble’s web-based interface, I can message people on different social networks from within one platform and that message, along with all the others that may have been sent from other sites, is available in one place. Note, these aren’t post or status updates, but the embedded messages from within the particular sites themselves. This is very convenient because you don’t have to go to LinkedIn, for example, to send a LinkedIn message to someone whose regular email address you may not have otherwise. Thus, Nimble is also a great way to keep track of the increasing number of online conversations, all in one place.

Scrivener: Larger Written Documents at Another Level
I want to give an “honorable mention” to Scrivener, a marvelous and powerful writing/document management program. I’ve used it to organize references and new resources by subject area for the social media workshops that I’ve been developing and delivering. But I’m only scratching the surface of this feature rich program. It’s powerfully sophisticated, so there’s a real learning curve involved. However, I’ve heard from multiple, reliable sources that this program has been enthusiastically received by authors and others who work with king-sized pieces of content and/or research. If you’re one of them, I think Scrivener is definitely worth checking out.

iPhone Photography
My app review of the year would not be complete without talking about iPhone photography apps. Taking photographs and playing with the images on the iPhone is a source of great pleasure and fun to me. My favorite app so far is Camera+ by Lisa Bettany. I can crop and I can process with a very creative set of presets. It’s got some great filters and I can also put all kinds of artsy frames on my images, plus it easily posts to the social networks (although I’ve recently started using Instagram for that because it also connects to Tumblr). I’m just starting to explore Camera+’s actual camera features…

ProHDR makes a big improvement over the built-in HDR on my  iPhone. If you haven’t checked out HDR (Higher Dynamic Range) photography via the apps, you must do.  It just makes a huge difference and I can’t imagine doing iPhoneography without it.

Finally, I’m a fan of Auto Painter, which I use on both my iPad and iPhone to create very cool painterly effects on my photos. It’s been a big source of creative delight. And recently I’ve had some fun with SketchMee which turned a picture of my newly-wed son and his bride into a lovely pencil sketch, if I do say so myself.

Bonus List
I had the pleasure of catching up with my favorite uber-geek, Brett Terpstra (@ttscoff) at MacWorld and noticed he posted an awesome 2011 Favorite Mac Apps list. Click to discover more cool stuff.

Thanks for app-ing with me – I’m really happy to share all of this with you. Like I said, more to come (subscribe to this blog above if you want to be notified). I wish you happy app-ing in the year ahead, and I hope you have as much fun checking out these recommendations as I have had exploring them. Please let me know what you think.

Bottom line, the difference between being online and watching TV is blurring as a hybrid experience of the multi-screen experience and social TV comes to the forefront. Contextualized advertising, watching TV with friends who aren’t actually in the room and integrated TV/web browsing are just a few of the changes I expect to shake up the way we think about watching television as well as the TV industry itself.

1. Google TV Isn’t Going Away
Despite its slow start, Google TV is re-emerging as its Android platform is being integrated into more and more Internet-enabled TV sets. Thus, Google is re-entering the TV market via at least four TV manufacturers: Sony, Samsung, LG and Visio. All four will be including Google TV into their internet-enabled televisions.

2. Social TV is Already Attracting Significant Investments 
The social media and mobile Internet revolutions (and I don’t use the term “revolution” lightly) have led to the rapid growth of people using mobile devices to interact while watching TV. This has resulted in an assortment of “second-screen,” social TV solutions, which allows users to hang out on the “virtual couch” with their friends while watching TV.  The fact that one of these apps, Zeebox, has just received at eight-figure investment from the News Corp-controlled pay-TV firm BSkyB shows how serious this new media playground is becoming. Neat Zeebox promo video and more details here. (Meanwhile, Forbes magazine thinks GetGlue has taken the social TV lead.)

3. TV Advertising Gains New Power
I think this is great news for small businesses. Google AdWords has already fueled Google’s approach to becoming a $40 billion/year company. Now its TV Ads product is expanding its reach through a new deal with a major cable system operator (MSO). Google TV Ads has signed a new deal with Cox Media, the ad sales extension of the big cable operator Cox Communications.

We can only hope that our ever-splintering attention level will serve as motivation for content-creators to offer deeper meaning, connection and context, within whatever social platform we happen to be sharing, at any particular moment.

If you’d rather watch than read, my video report starts at about 20 seconds into this clip:

Stay tuned.

The US “premiere” of this workshop will be in San Francisco, next Wednesday, October 12th. The producer, Linda Kosut just sent out an email announcement to her list with the headline, “Social Media IS Our Future” including a commentary about how she personally resisted this idea for a long time.

"Social Media Marketing Mix" workshop in NZ

When I was in New Zealand, Mark Lowndes of the law firm Lowndes Associates described his experience this way:

“A year ago I was certain social media had no relevance to our commercial law firm.  Today I am convinced I was wrong. Social media will be an increasingly important part of our interaction with our clients and the business community at large. As with many businesses, I now believe there is no option but to learn how to engage effectively using social media.”
— Mark Lowndes, Lowndes Associates

When I speak about how important I think it is for companies and professionals of every variety to engage in social media marketing, I compare it to the ’80′s when I used to tell business audiences that email was as important as their toll free phone line. (Yes, amazing but true, not everyone recognized email at that point as an important customer service and/or sales communications channel.) I told these business people that they have to respond to their customers, and your customers have the right to communicate via any communication “channel” they want to use.

Now, your customers are “calling” you via social media. Of course, I think you should be pro-active in this new arena. But, for openers, if your toll free phone line was ringing, or you were getting email from a prospective customer, you would answer, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Well, if you’re not engaged in social media marketing yet, please consider this your social media marketing “call.”

And, here’s a real invitation: If you are in the SF Bay Area, please do not miss the chance to experience the whole 3-hour presentation of “Mastering the Social Media Marketing Mix” at Ft. Mason, Wednesday, October 12th, 6:30 to 9:30pm. Frankly, the $99 registration fee is a remarkable value. My four-week online version of this workshop which will be announced shortly is expected to cost $397.

So this San Francisco live presentation, to a small interactive group offers great value. It will also deliver great inspiration that will motivate real productivity. And there will be tons of great information. I promise all of this, and I hope to see you there. Please click here to register and/or for more information. Thanks!