Yesterday I shared the slideshow embedded below at the International Association of Business Communicators – Las Vegas Chapter luncheon seminar (the event description is on my events blog). It was a very fun opportunity for me to be back in Las Vegas and reconnect with some of my former professional colleagues. Thanks IABC/LV for inviting me!

Some key Pinterest takeaways for me are:

• The platform has the third highest social media site traffic based on unique monthly visits (Facebook is first, Twitter is second; as ranked recently by comScore)
• 80% of content on Pinterest are repins, so there’s a lot of engagement and re-sharing
• If you can graphically display your story – pictures, infographics, designs, videos – Pinterest is an awesome platform to use
• For business, a Pinterest presence helps support activity on other social media platforms – a blog, Facebook page, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, SlideShare, etc.

But with the advent of Facebook, it’s so easy to:

1. Remember when it’s someone’s birthday, or rather, be reminded, and
2. Wish them a happy birthday.

Those Facebook birthday reminders are so ubiquitous that one of my favorite wall posts from my birthday this year was an e-card that read:

Happy birthday to one of the few people whose birthday I can remember without a Facebook reminder.

This was sent from a college friend who shares my same birthday. Let’s hope she can remember my birthday!

Not only have I received Facebook birthday wishes, they’ve also been extended on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.

For all the complaints about social media I believe the tools sure make birthdays more fun. I can’t tell you how many people have posted on my wall or sent me messages, people I have known for decades as well as for shorter periods of time. I feel like I’m seeing all my relationships flash before my eyes. It’s really a wonderful feeling.

So thank you everyone for the endearing birthday wishes. My wish is that all of you can enjoy the same sort of love and support I have enjoyed on my birthday this year.

Here’s to a bright future for us all!

The course so far has mostly been a rehash of many marketing principles I learned in college in the early 90s. The textbook content is good, but the tone makes it difficult to read. It’s a large-sized book with small 10 point font and way too many words per page.

Of particular note is a class conversation we had last week after a student asked about research demonstrating the success or failure of social media in marketing efforts.

What followed really surprised me.

The professor made two statements that pretty much negated the practice of marketing through social media tools. One in which he said everyone knows an equal amount when it comes to communicating and marketing using social media, and another in which he said no one has found success using social media for marketing.

And this was after he talked briefly about the agency HubSpot and the many inbound marketing case studies and newsletters he has received from them. HubSpot is a good example of how to successfully use social media for marketing, both for themselves and for their clients.

The professor’s comments provided a good lesson for me not to make overreaching, blanket statements when I teach and present, unless the purpose for doing so is simply to encourage discussion. But he didn’t allow for discussion. Instead, he kept plowing through his immense PowerPoint slide deck, covering some 15 points per slide. His comments were so definitive that they work to his own discredit.

Of course everyone’s entitled to an opinion. Some people may really dislike social media and believe it’s useless for marketing communication, public relations and even for online search placement. But why should an opinion like that (an uninformed one at best) prevail in an academic setting designed for the sole purpose of preparing executives to succeed in today’s business environment?

To ignore social media or state that it’s completely ineffective—grouping every human into the same bucket of limited social media marketing knowledge—is simply disappointing and strangely naïve for a university marketing professor tasked with teaching MBA students.

So many studies have been published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Nielsen demonstrating both activity and engagement through social media. And yes, even success.

There are also many credible online publishers who discuss and present success stories from the world of social media marketing, including Mashable, PR Daily and Social Media Explorer to name only a few.

Pew recently published this case study on the Kony 2012 effort that has taken the Internet by storm, becoming the most viral video of all time. I brought up this example in class two weeks ago, encouraging my classmates to watch the video and check out what the organizers have accomplished using social media, but it didn’t receive any additional discussion by the professor that day or the week after.

Also, when it comes to business blogging, there was a great study done by Nielsen/McKinsey, released earlier this month, addressing the fact that there are millions more bloggers and blog readers than there were just a handful of years ago. This is one social media tool through which many businesses have been able to successfully reach and market to other businesses and consumers. Check out this great post by Mark Schaefer on the 10 best corporate blogs in the world (Jan. 5, 2012).

And these are only two very recent, limited examples.

Which leads me to this: Academia is challenged when it comes to keeping up with technology. It’s easier to use curriculum developed when you first start teaching rather than work each semester to keep it current.

How’d you like that definitive statement?

Of course I don’t believe this applies to all of academia. I have seen many professors in the public relations and marketing industries in particular struggle to keep up with the digital times (case in point).

I’ve also seen many professors revise their curriculum, even develop entirely new courses, to include applicable strategies and tactics from the social media world. I’ve taught courses of my own at UNLV, online through the UCI Extension and on behalf of the University of Utah’s professional education division.

Just last month a professor of marketing in the Kellogg School of Management asked for permission to use Integrated Marketing in the Digital World, an e-book I co-authored with Duane Sprague, in his MBA marketing class at Kellogg this spring.

So, there are some professors embracing the new reality of marketing. And for their voices, I’m grateful.

We do our best to stay current, attending webinars and workshops, but sometimes travel and carving time out of a busy workday just isn’t in the cards. That’s where the trend of do-it-yourself online training comes in to play.

Billed as your field guide to the Internet and named one of the best startups of 2011 by Business Insider, Grovo.com is an excellent place to learn more about all kinds of online tools, from About.me to Zillow.

Grovo delivers lessons on more than 1,000 Internet tools, from business topics, such as how local merchants can use Yelp, to consumer topics like getting started on eBay.

About 25 new lessons, containing groups of one or two minute video tutorials, are added each week. The courses are presented on a custom-built platform with content produced in-house by Grovo’s team of writers, editors, and voice-over talent. Courses are available for both free and $9-a-month membership levels.

User groups allow anyone to create public or private group and collaborate with other users in the online educational environment. Corporate communicators, marketers and public relations professionals can create groups for teams, colleagues, professional associations, and even clients to teach and learn specific Internet tools together.

The collaborative group learning space allows users to assign lessons and activities to others, and for dialogue back and forth. Anyone can be a teacher or learner.

Users can add tips and tricks to Grovo’s video tutorials, which are then served-up as annotations to the virtual lesson, making the content truly dynamic.

The site includes “tracks” in which users answer a series of questions about what they want to accomplish—launch a blog, for example—and the virtual tutor recommends a set of courses and lessons to help accomplish that goal.

Each course comes with online and downloadable course and lesson summaries. The summaries also include user-generated tips and tricks, helping users learn from other Grovo community members.

Grovo courses consist of watching video tutorial lessons, taking a quiz and becoming certified. Depending on the course and the user’s level of knowledge, the average class time is anywhere from five to 25 minutes. The great thing about Grovo’s delivery is that it can be personalized for an individual’s pace and used for a specific consumer or business-related need.

The Grovo Expert Series provides interviews with leading entrepreneurs and Internet pros, some of the very people who’ve shape the way we use the Internet. Grovo introduces interviews with new experts each week to help visitors better understand not only how to use popular websites and tools, but why, all illustrated through real-life examples and experiences.

This year Grovo plans to add 1,000 more lessons to ensure its content remains updated and relevant.

If you’re looking to study up for a new opportunity, or simply step up your Internet skills, Grovo is an excellent place to start.

I’m in a marketing class now that uses the Markstrat marketing simulation software. We’re basically in charge of setting product pricing, hiring a sales force, investing in research and development, and allocating an advertising budget, all in a virtual environment.

I find it disheartening that the software doesn’t take into account allocations for public relations or online marketing, but like some of the other curriculum I have encountered in the EMBA program, it’s dated.

I’m enjoying the conversations surrounding marketing strategy. This week we received the results of the first week decisions for the five teams in our industry. I’m happy to report that, from an equal starting point, our team achieved the highest market capitalization and stock value.

For those of you who are interested, or perhaps doing Markstrat research of your own, the decisions that primarily impacted our first place rank in period one are:

Focus on sales force — We invested in a sales force of almost two times that of the second place team. We had 200 sales reps compared to 113, 110, 66 and 70 sales people for the other teams. The teams ranked 1 to 5, respectively, following the size of the sales force, except for teams four and five where other factors caused the team with 70 sales people to rank last.

Keep advertising cost low — Of all the teams, we were last in our allocation for advertising. I’ll list the team rankings, based on market capitalization (1 is first and 5 is last), and respective team advertising allocations for period one:

Team 1 = $5,100
Team 2 = $7,200
Team 3 = $7,250
Team 4 = $6,450
Team 5 = $8,250

Set your pricing carefully — Determining adjustments to the product price occupied quite a bit of our team’s discussion. Each team had two products, a high-end and low-end product. I’ll list the teams (again by market capitalization with Team 1 obtaining the largest share of the market), and the product price changes each team implemented in period one.

Team 1 = -12.4%| -2.2%
Team 2 = -20% | 0%
Team 3 = -10% | 0%
Team 4 = -8.4% | -10.2%
Team 5 = -16% | +16.6%

Legend: Team Placement = Low-End Product Price Change | High-End Product Price Change

Those three areas seem to be the largest drivers of results. I’ll keep you posted on how future periods turn out.

It has been too long, I know: two-and-a-half months since my last post. You may feel abandoned, even sad. And for that, I’m truly sorry.

About a year ago, at age 40, I decided it was time to do something a little different with my career. Sure I’m happy working as a consultant and have enjoyed owning and operating Codella Marketing since 2002 (minus a couple agency gigs in the mid-2000s), but I felt it was time to stretch myself.

Given my spark of inspiration and tendency to think big, I applied and was accepted into the 21-month Executive MBA program at the University of Utah (ranked 33rd in the US). I kind of thought I’d apply and be rejected and that would be the end of it. But such was not the case.

The University did ask me to take an algebra class this spring, which I dutifully, albeit begrudgingly did. My 1995 fine arts degree from Brigham Young University didn’t require me to focus much on math and science. It’s not my bag anyway, and I’m just fine with that. I did manage to get a B in algebra this spring, so that met the University of Utah’s last criteria for my official acceptance into its Executive MBA program.

The EMBA program began with a bang at the Snowbird resort in Park City in August. We spent a week there getting to know one another as a class and working our way through a few reams of reading assignments. Little did I know that was just a small taste of what was to come.

I’m writing this at year’s end, after completing basically one semester of the EMBA program and receiving a handful of grades. It has been a bit of a shock for me to be back in school and taking quizzes and exams after 16 years of work. But it has been a good wake-up call and is certainly stretching my professional capacity. I think that’s what any good graduate degree should do.

I do apologize if my digital public relations blog posts are few and far between. No doubt 2012 will be a very busy year. I’m optimistically looking forward to May 2013 when I expect to receive my MBA. Until then, we can still be friends, you just may not hear from me as often as before.

Here’s to a very happy and prosperous New Year for us all!

Your friend,
~Pete

The beta service was introduced last December and ifttt was made open to all last month.

You can glean a lot about the service and people behind it by their “learn more” page URL: ifttt.com/wtf (thus the title of this post). Love it!

Here’s the scoop:

Let’s say you’re interested in saving the tweets you favorite on Instapaper or Delicious. You can automate that.

Maybe you’d like to capture any Facebook photos you’re tagged in by sending them to Dropbox? Done!

How about receiving an email or text message if the local forecast calls for rain or snow? Would that be helpful?

Perhaps you’d like all your Foursquare check-ins to be logged in a Google Calendar? It could help you keep track of where you’ve been, and if you print your calendar each month to accompany your saved receipts, it would come in handy if the IRS comes calling.

This is all possible, and so much more, using ifttt. In about a half-hour’s time I connected to 29 different channels and now have 3,034 possible automated task combinations. How cool is that?

The New Web

The whole concept of, “if this happens on that site, then do this,” is really great. It’s moving us toward a more seamless Internet and social experience.

You can automate tasks on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Evernote, Tumblr, Posterous, Google Reader and more.

You can convert all links that go through ifttt to use your Bitly account, so you can keep track of your links and view stats.

When you get started you’ll have to authorize ifttt to access your accounts. Then you can let your imagination and creativity run wild adding tasks and connecting channels.

At first, the easiest way to create a task is to use existing recipes, which you can sort by what’s hot, new and popular. The recipes are useful tasks already saved by other users. You can also filter recipes. So, for example, you could filter by Facebook to see all the saved tasks that just have to do with that platform.

I love how ifttt connects with phones and text messaging. How’s this for a task?

Rescue me from a meeting: Send a text message to ifttt with a specific hashtag (like #help) and the system will dial your phone number (mobile, landline, you name it). Your phone rings and you politely excuse yourself from the meeting to take the call.

I’m warning you now, there are so many channels to connect and different fun, creative task options that it’s easy to get sucked-in to the world of ifttt.

But don’t worry, if someone asks what you’re doing, you can just tell them you’re doing Internet research for work. And if you get caught in a long drawn-out conversation when all you really want to do is play around with more channels, tasks and recipes, you can use the task that calls your phone so you can excuse yourself from the conversation.

Sign-up and learn more about If this, then that at ifttt.com. You can also check out their blog for additional information.

Feel free in the comments below to share your creativity with others by letting us know what tasks you’re able to create.

For this blog post I am providing a list of recent topics with links so you can check out some of the social media and PR goodness:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – A PR pro’s guide to choosing keywords for your Web content

Website Grader and WooRank – A PR pro’s guide to making killer websites (and showing your IT staff you mean business)

LinkedIn – 8 areas where you need to pay closer attention

Kapost - New platform helps Web editors better manage their sites

Also, feel free to check out my summary from May.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Kurzweil or his idea of ‘The Singularity,’ that’s basically the time when human life becomes intertwined with machines (check out the Technological Singularity entry on Wikipedia). Kurzweil suggests that within a couple decades we’ll have man-made, electronic parts embedded within our bodies.

I know that’s already a reality, but the type of technological parts Kurzweil’s talking about would fundamentally change mortal humans to immortals.

The question is raised in the documentary: “When do we cross the line from being human to being a robot?”

Good question!

To augment human brain power may be beneficial. But where do you stop?

If you buy-in to The Singularity, is it something to be longed for or protected against?

One idea suggested in the film is that a world war will occur between two schools of thought: those who want to become part machine and those who believe the best approach is to stay as far away from it as possible. That war wouldn’t necessarily involve nations, but individuals belonging to two polar-opposite groups.

As I heard Kurzweil talk about a future where microscopic robots roam our bloodstream to make us immortal and digital chips implanted in our brains send our thoughts out to others like we now use email, Facebook and Twitter, I couldn’t help but wonder if the social media tools we see today will play a role in human robots of the future.

Yes, it sounds crazy, I know. But think about the utility of it: instead of typing on a keyboard, you could think, “I need to send an email to so-and-so,” then summon your built-in Internet connection, compose a message in your mind and fire it away to be received by the digital chip in the mind of the recipient.

And if you wanted it to be public, like a Twitter feed, you could just mark the mental message as public and it would appear on some virtual billboard of everyone’s thoughts. Sounds a lot like Twitter doesn’t it?

Think of how smart you’d be if you could Google anything in your mind. Academia would find it very difficult to prevent cheating.

While I value the advancements science and technology have made to preserve human life and enhance life expectancy, I find little value in turning this life’s temporary experience into a forever experience.

Kurzweil fears death and is obviously still deeply affected by his father’s death. I think he lacks belief in any kind of an afterlife. He has a whole storage unit full of his father’s memorabilia so he can build an electronic entity that will include all his dad’s thoughts and memories.

I’m a fan of living this life to the fullest, then moving on to the next step in our progression. To me death is just the end of this chapter and the beginning of a very exciting next chapter.

Your thoughts?

What do you think about Transcendent Man? Have you seen it?

Do you think a social media type of technology will eventually be implanted inside newborn humans so they can communicate with the world?

Seems far-fetched to me. And sad.

I like my imperfect, mortal existence. And I like being unplugged and offline every now and then.

Here’s a short overview on a few Google+ basics.

Signing Up

Once you’ve got a Gmail account you can sign-up for Google+ at plus.google.com. Or you may already have an invitation to join from someone else on G+.

You’ll have to set-up your Google public profile in order to participate.

One challenge I’ve had is that I use several different Gmail accounts, including a Google Apps account for work. But Google+ doesn’t yet work with my Google Apps account.

The fact that Google+ connects directly to your email contacts makes G+ very seamless. You don’t have to search for your friends on the network because it already knows who you email and connects you if they’re on G+. You’ve just got to choose a Gmail profile for your Google+ account and stick with it.

Keep in mind that G+ is just for individuals for now. No business profiles are allowed . . . yet.

Creating Circles

Something G+ does well is allow you to categorize your connections into specific groups, which Google calls circles. Then you can share messages specifically with the contacts you’ve assigned to specific circles.

G+ circles do a great job of virtually creating the different social circles in which each of us operate.

Hangouts

You can create a hangout for your circles which opens a free webcam enabled virtual community where many folks can join in conversations, see and hear one another. Hangouts function like Skype with multiple participants.

Sharing Content

Like other social networks you can share just about any kind of content: text, photos, links, videos and locations. As expected, G+ easily connects to YouTube videos and Google Places.

Tip: A cool feature of G+ is the ability to bold and italicize text in your posts. Any text between two asterisks (*) is bolded and between underscores (_) is displayed in italics.

Keep in mind that, depending on your settings, content shared can be visible to the world on your Google profile, sent to circles of friends, or shared privately with individuals.

On Google+ you hyperlink to other users using +Their Name, just like the @Their Name nomenclature works on Facebook.

Also, similar to how the Facebook ‘like’ icon works, the ‘+1’ is Google’s way of saying, “Ditto that comment,” or “I really like this.”

So if you like this article, you could +1 it on Google+ or like it on Facebook.

Privacy

Be sure you understand how to configure your privacy settings on Google+. Visit that gear-icon in the top right for options, then select Google+ settings. This takes you to your Google account settings and a page just for Google+. A cool feature here is that you can control other Gmail account settings in the same section.

I elected to turn off all mobile phone and email notifications because I just can’t deal with all the noise. When I want to know what’s going on in Google+, I’ll login.

New Features

If you’re curious to find out the latest developments on G+, once you’re logged in to your account you can check out the recently launched “What’s new in Google+” from the options gear-icon in the top right of your account under Google+ help.

Observations

If you don’t use the Google Chrome browser, I highly recommend downloading and using it as you browse Google+.

While Google+ is certainly the shiny new tool in the social media toolbox, its application for PR and marketing communication is still limited. Once it grows up I suspect the platform will be home to many brands and conversations just like Facebook is now. Consider the future Google Search benefits of branded conversations on Google+.

Still, with existing platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, it’s difficult to imagine just how many additional platforms we need.

If you have Google+ take-aways, tips or observations, please feel free to share in the comments.