Credit: 4PIZON

Imagine what the world of advertising or public relations would be like if TV disappeared tomorrow… You see, both of these industries (along with marketing and branding) use every medium available to them to get their message across.

Well, the internet is just another medium. But while it’s just another medium, it’s also distinct from other media (print, radio, TV, etc.) in two important respects.

First, the internet is the multi-medium. In a nutshell, it allows you to feature text, audio, images, and video (the mainstays of the other media) all on page.

Second, and more importantly, it’s the multi-direction medium. It allows message to be communicated from the top-down, from the bottom-up, and from peer-peer-peer. None of the other mainstream media (N.B. the internet is pretty f**king mainstream at this point) can do that.

What this means is that the internet is a social medium. It lets brands talk to consumers, consumers talk to brands, and consumers talk to other consumers.

And it’s always been this social. Some of the earliest instances of the internet were inherently social, from IRC to chat rooms to message boards, people have been talking to masses of other people online (with all that dialogue being archived) since the beginning.

It was quite a while ago that word-of-mouth started moving from being peer-to-peer to being peer-to-peers. It’s just that only recently did it reach a sufficiently critical mass that marketers finally started to notice and realize the potential of talking with consumers instead of at them.

The thing with the internet being a mainstream, multi-directional medium, though, is that suddenly what the ad-hack does affects the spin doctor affects the salesman, because it’s all online, it’s all logged, and it’s all accessible to everyone.

This means that marketers have to take great care to ensure that their message is consistent across all channels and across all disciplines. Because if your average customer experience doesn’t reflect the public perception of your brand being touted by your public relations and advertising campaigns respectively, that inconsistency isn’t only going to be glaring, but glaringly accessible, and you’re going to look like a hack.

So in the age of so-called social media, it’s paramount that marketing departments provide clear direction to their advertising and PR people. After all, if marketing begins when you decide to fill a demand, then it precedes any attempt to create a story through branding, tell it through advertising, or teach it to consumers through public relations.

Online video can be a lot of different things. But when it comes to video blogging, it doesn’t matter if it’s a complicated, high production affair. After all, video blogging is still just blogging. To a degree, it’s supposed to be a bit gritty and straight to the point.

That being said, what makes or break a video blogger is their personality — their “stage presence” and their ability to communicate a message with nothing more than its most essential pieces.

Well, if you’re still with me on this one, so far, I recently posted 10 Simple Video Blog Ideas on BloggingTips.com. The original post contains much more detail about each of the genres (that means click-through and show me some comment luv), but here are 10 easy video blogging ideas that require little-to-no hardware, software, or video editing skills to produce:

1. The Rant
2. The How-To Video
3. The Screencast
4. Video Event Coverage
5. The Video Interview
6. The 5×5 Video
7. The Lip Dub Video
8. The Karaoke Video
9. The Parody
10. and The Video Prank

And if after reading more, you’re still not convinced that successful video blogging can be done with little-to-no production and think that I’m blowing smoke out of my a**, then I invite you to consider Boxxy. Between 3 videos, she got over 8 million views, made headlines, and became an internet meme in and of herself, and all because she had some personality and web cam.

When speaking with a journalist, choose your words carefully.
– Walker Lamond

Credit: 999"

When you’re building a brand, you have to get your story straight. You have to lay it all out in advance, and stick to it. Because every time you run an ad or PR campaign, you’re  going to be telling that story, so it needs be consistent.

This means choosing your words very, very carefully. It means choosing words that can’t be taken to mean something other than what you want your story to convey. It means being aware of what you’re saying.

But what happens when you’re too consistent? When that story becomes that same old story?What happens when we choose our words so carefully that they just don’t ring true anymore?

When your story is too rigid, it will only fit so many contexts.  You risk crossing the line from being self-aware to being self-conscious, and then you just seem awkward. And that doesn’t fly in an age where we interact with so many of the brands we consume.

You see, the whole point of a brand story is that it helps you connect with consumers. It makes you seem more like something or someone that people can relate to. And people relate to other people — people with personalities, and personalities with depth.

So maybe the trick to branding in an age where consumers have almost as much of a voice as brands isn’t so much to be transparent, but to be responsive. ‘Cuz while neither you nor consumers will gain anything from you sharing what it was you had for breakfast, there is something to be gained from your brand approaching situations outside the sale funnel, accepting them for what they are, and engaging consumers on those terms — on their terms.

Credit: -Chad Johnson

You know how almost everyone is good for a at least a few great ideas in their time? Well, what’s the cloud going to do to that?

Now, people can share everything all the time. And it’s all on record.

So it becomes really hard to say anything that hasn’t been said before — never mind trying to say something original on a regular and consistent basis. Suddenly, hardly anyone is good for even a single original thought in their time.

When a brainstorm includes everyone and all topics all at once, it becomes a cloudstorm. We’re collectively pumping thoughts into the cloud, and they’re all be indexed and retweeted.

This really takes the idea of a collective unconscious to an entirely new level.

What I’m wondering is whether this is going to end the way we think about creativity, or is going to produce some smack-genius-s**t by raising the bar just within reach.

Mourning is just extended self-pity.
– Donald Draper

Credit: Stu Sherman

I let a domain expire yesterday. It was one of the first domains I ever registered — possibly the second or third. It was also the domain for the second blog I ever really invested any serious time or energy into.

It wasn’t a very focused blog. It didn’t really have a niche or a topic. It was founded on the belief that my reckless charm would catapult me to internet stardom.

Well, it never really got me there. In fact, the only place it ever did seem to get me was in trouble — both professionally and in my personal life. But it did teach me a few things a few things along the way.

First, it taught me that it’s not enough to try and get by on your charm and your wit. You have to have a purpose. Charm and wit can go a long way in fulfilling that purpose, but they can’t be your purpose in and of themselves.

Second, it taught me that what happens on the internet, stays on the internet… and there’s really no such thing as anonymity. Sooner or later, we all get outed, and when that happens, the best you can hope for is that, all along, you were lacking in purpose enough that no one really notices or cares when you get outed.

Third, it taught me about personal branding. About how your personal brand needs a purpose, and should be grown around that. About how you can’t put a round peg in a square hole, and no matter how good you are at some things, if your personality doesn’t fit the mould, you’re to have a hard time getting people to take you seriously.

I would like to say that “most importantly, it taught me to let go,” but it didn’t. The truth is that I kept renewing that domain long after I stopped blogging there. I even put up a custom parking page for a while. And then I took it down, put back up the blog, and tried to revive it all over again.

The thing became a time suck. A distraction from thinking about something more useful, something more meaningful, something with a purpose. It haunted me…

So when I got a renewal notice, I asked myself “do I really still want this thing in my life?” I understand that I should hold on to it for intellectual property reasons (or whatever) but don’t we bury our dead so that we can move on?

So I decided to let it go… Because its time in my life was up, I had finally learned from it what it could teach me, and that it was time to move on…

So last week I was down at SMX East 2009 in NYC. I had a blast, both during business hours and afterwards. During business hours, though, I was blogging and video blogging for NVI. Well, of all the video interviews I did, here’s the one I enjoyed doing the most — and I’m not even in front of the camera.

This is the first of three installments of a chat with Rand Fishkin and Guillaume Bouchard. They discuss where they think search might be headed in the coming year.

Rand is the CEO of SEOmoz, Guillaume is the CEO of NVI (my boss), the two of them are good friends, and they have both forgotten more about search engine marketing than most of us will ever know. All in all, it was a bit of an intimidating experience to be hanging out with them both.

I just got back from SMX East 2009. It was a helluva trip. I got to meet a lot of new people, and I got to see a lot of old friends. One of the new people I met was Tamar Weinberg. In addition to being just an overall internet bad-ass, Tamar also wrote a book.

Here’s an interview I did with Tamar for NVI. We talked about how social media, user generated content, and social networking are affecting search engine marketing. She shared some insights from the book, and explained how brands should be approaching both SEM and social web in an integrated way.

A good chunk of my head is cut off. The only camera I brought to SMX East was Flip Mino HD. I bought it two days earlier, hadn’t really test it, and didn’t know what I was doing. But hey, if you watch the video, it’ll be for Tamar and not me, so all is well that ends well…

iPhone Version

Meet Agustin Vazquez-Levi. I work with him at NVI. We’re both down at SMX East 2009 in NYC this week, and he’s on a panel called Analytics for Social Media. I thought I’d ask him what he thinks about quantifying social media.

iPhone Version

Here’s the second half of my interview with Shel Israel. In this installment, Shel chats about his career over the last 30 years, how he got into social media, and when it clicked for him that Twitter was going to be a big f**king deal. I hope you enjoy…

iPhone

A couple weeks ago, Shel Israel was in town and I got a chance to chat with him on behalf of WatchMojo. We chatted about his new book, Twitterville — and about what a whole bunch of other social media voodoo means… I even put him on the spot, but then I felt like a jerk for doing so, so we edited it out. In any case, here’s Part I of II.

iPhone Version