Confession time! I am one of the most disorganized people on the face of the earth. My desk is always cluttered with papers, books, a dish or two, whatever you can imagine, it’s probably on my desk. See? Well, try to see. The sun coming through my window makes it a bit difficult to see.

This is my desk. It's messy.

Organization is not on the top of my list of character traits. Which is ironic, considering that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder as a result of my ADHD. But, I’m only OCD about certain things, like my hands being dirty and my inventories on video games having to be in a certain order. So, what in the world are you supposed to do if you’re disorganized like me, but have to get stuff done?

One of the biggest ways that I stay organized is to make to-do lists. I love to-do lists so much. When I was in college, before I got diagnosed and treated for my ADHD, I used to make to-do lists all of the time. I would have one big to-do list of things that I needed to do by the end of the week. Then, I would break it down into what needed to be done every day so that I’d be done with everything on the big list by the end of the week. It was almost too structured, but the structure helped me to keep my attention issues in check.

Another way that I stay organized is by asking someone else to help me. My “sister” comes and visits me about once a month for various reasons, even sometimes just to visit. When she comes, we get all of the stuff for my freelancing business together and makes sure that it’s all in order. Granted, I have it all together, it’s just… in a giant pile of papers and Excel sheets and what have you. If you need a bookkeeper or a buddy to help you keep everything in order, just do it! It’ll make it easier in the long run.

Post-it notes are my best friend. Well, not really, but I appreciate them a lot. I have a horrible memory when it comes to… well, almost everything. I don’t remember birthdays (thank God for Facebook on that one), I can’t even keep a calendar appropriately because I forget to put stuff on it. I am just forgetful. Since college, I have combated this forgetfulness by using post-it notes. I put them everywhere. On the books I have to read, on my desk, on my computer, on my window that is in front of my computer. If I need to remember to do something, I will even put post-it’s on my bathroom mirror. It sounds silly, but trust me. It helps.

Do you have as hard of a time getting organized as I do? What tips do you have for the eternally forgetful? How do you stay organized when your personality tells you that you really aren’t? Have a great weekend, we’ll see you here next week!

Let me tell you a story that I told last night when I taught at our youth ministry. I was coming back from winter break my sophomore year of college. On the way back through, I picked my best friend up from her house. My car already had some stuff in it, and then we had to put her stuff in it too. Needless to say, this didn’t end very well. It took two and a half hours to get back to our college, and, during that time, you couldn’t even see my best friend because she was underneath all of our stuff. I could barely see out the back window, and it was a blessing that I didn’t get pulled over. This is what happens when you put too much into something.

That wasn’t the best story I’ve ever told, and it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about today except that it’s a story. Most everyone I know loves a good story. It’s what drives Americans to spend billions of dollars a year on movies, books, video games, and TV. Part of the reason I like to tell stories is to make people laugh; the other part is because I know how engaging personal  stories can be if you want someone to pay attention to your message.

I teach in the youth ministry at my church on a regular basis, and I always tell personal stories in order to get the kids more interested in what I have to say. Do you use stories when you speak or blog? Here are some handy tips that I try to follow when I tell stories.

- Have a beginning, middle, and end. Don’t just cut it off. Now, there have been times that I’ve pulled a “to be continued” and not finished the story till the end of my talk, but I always finish it. Have a lead in, have a couple sentences of content, and end it.

- Express emotion – even if it’s text based! Whether you’re writing a blog entry or leading a seminar, express some emotion. It’s easy to laugh and smile when you’re talking in front of people, but what about text? Emoticons work, but I also pay attention to my word choice as well. In my story above, I  used the phrase “Needless to say, this didn’t end very well.” If I used it correctly, you probably could imagine a bit of a chuckle in my voice when I “said” this.

- Don’t ramble. Don’t be like me. I know that sounds funny, since I’m the one telling you how to tell stories, but I can ramble sometimes. Part of it is just simply forgetting what I’ve said (ADHD is horrible sometimes), but I also like to talk. If you see that you’re losing your audience, end your story. Internet writing, on the other hand, is meant to be brief, so don’t take 5 paragraphs to tell a story that could be told in one or two.

Do you use stories in your writing or speaking? How do you use them? Do you have any other tips for fellow storytellers? Share your thoughts in the comments!

I’ve shared on here before that I work with students on a volunteer basis. I love working with teenagers, except when there’s drama. Drama makes me want to put my head through a wall. It hurts everyone involved, can tear apart groups of friends, and make kids cry, a lot. More than once. I’ve had a teenager apologize for “snotting on me” cause of drama. Yes, that means what you think it means. I’ve had many a snot on a shirt from a student hugging me and crying. Is this what being a mom feels like? Maybe.

I didn't put this whole in the wall. But drama makes me feel like doing so! Photo courtesy of Hey Paul via Flickr CreativeCommons

Do you know the two biggest reasons for drama? Too much communication (via gossip) or a lack of communication. Now, why am I telling a bunch of professionals about snot and teenage drama? Well, because you know as well as I do, that drama even happens in adulthood and in the workplace. It’s not fun. Today, we’re going to look at three things we can do when communication breaks down.

1. Don’t make assumptions. Please, please, please don’t listen to hearsay when it comes to communication breaking down. Don’t make assumptions based on the amount of trust you have for the messenger. Talk to the person directly, and try to be as objective as possible about the communication issue. This is probably the most difficult thing for anyone in a communication issue to do. Why? Because we do things based on our past experiences, and so assumptions are frequently made. Please try to be objective, even when the communication seems to have gone awry.

2. Don’t use a liaison. Don’t communicate via a liaison. If you want another party involved, use them as a mediator instead. Don’t deal with the “he said she said” stuff. 90% of what we say is what we don’t say at all, including our body language, voice influx, and whatever else you can think of. If you’re passing words through someone else, or even via an electronic liaison like email or a cell phone, stuff can be lost in translation. Don’t depend on those things! Instead, talk to the person face-to-face, or, if you can’t do that, at least use the phone. Hearing someone’s voice is better than just seeing their words.

3. Move forward quickly.  Don’t let communication barriers continue to be up for too long. A lack of communication breaks up trust and rapport, and your company, friendship, or whatever else this is based around will hurt for it. I’m not saying that they cannot be reprimanded for their actions.  One thing I’ve seen from teenagers is that they let stuff smolder way too long; we’re adults, don’t do that! Get the actions done that need to be, and move forward. It’ll be better for everyone in the long run, trust me.

So, don’t let a lack of communication break apart whatever you’re trying to do. Don’t assume, talk it out face-to-face, and

Of course, I’m in it, so I’m biased…

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Robyn over the couple of years. Every time we speak it seems to lead to happenings in the tech world. She’s the Silicon Valley insider and I’m a lone tech geek where I live. After a few of these “tech discussions” we thought to our selves “this is good stuff, we should record this.”

That’s how The Web Tangle got started. There are already some good tech podcasts out there like This Week in Tech (TWiT) and Marketing Over Coffee, but we have our own unique dynamic. Robyn’s take on technology is invaluable from her years of experience ranging from starting her own company to becoming the community developer at Yahoo. My passion for tech helps steer the conversation each week and hopefully it’s as fun for our listeners as it is for us.

Below is the link to our latest podcast. Normally we do a podcast each week but the cold virus has affected our schedules a little bit lately. Enjoy our January 17th podcast and we’ll have a new one up soon!

The Web Tangle Podcast

Okay, I admit it. I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. The funny ones, the witty ones, all of those things that catch your attention and keep you tuning in. Now that I admitted it, you should too. You know you watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, especially when you don’t care about the teams that are playing in it.

Why am I talking about the Super Bowl and commercials? Well, first, because I keep seeing previews on various websites of the Hyundai Super Bowl commercials. Second, because I think there’s a few things that we as marketing professionals can learn from those goofy advertisements.

Image courtesy of juggarnautco, via Flickr Creative Commons

- You need to catch people’s attention. What commercials are your favorite year in and year out? Are they the ones that spit information at you quickly, or are they the ones that make you chuckle or catch your eye? In order to get your message heard, you really need to take the time to catch people’s attention and quickly, which brings us to our second point…

- We live in a world of quick messages. Commercials used to be 45 seconds to a minute long. Some of the most well-liked commercials nowadays are 15-30 seconds. Super Bowl commercials usually don’t last more than 30 seconds. Of course, part of the reason for that is how expensive advertising time is during the Super Bowl, but the other reason is that Americans have adapted to getting information quickly. The internet, smart phones, and television have all trained us to get what we want, when we want it, and as quickly as possible.

- People are constantly wanting to be entertained. I don’t want to watch dull infomercials. There’s a reason that they aren’t popular and they’re played in the middle of the night; they help people fall asleep. I want to be entertained, and so does everyone else in our society. “Entertain me” is the cry of the younger generations. If you don’t hold a person’s interest for the short period of time that you have it, then they most likely won’t remember what your advertisement was even saying.

So, readers, how can we use these to the best of our abilities? First, I think that we need to be aware of these trends. We’re in a high-tech, high-speed, entertainment driven society, and our advertising and marketing should reflect that society, or our advertisements will attract no one. Second, we need to realize that we all aren’t going to have the awesome ads that the Super Bowl puts out, but we can base our advertising on the same principles.

What other lessons about marketing can we learn from Super Bowl commercials? How can we use this information to make our marketing models more complete and relevant? Do you even like watching Super Bowl commercials, or would you rather let the day go by without any fanfare or commercial watching?

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you here next week!

I take a lot of online surveys. No, not the kind that give you hopes of working from home; usually the ones I do give me points toward Amazon gift cards. The point is, one of the companies that I take surveys with always asks me one question at the end of the survey. “Companies are starting to cater more to what customers want. Do you see such personalization as a good thing?”

Personalization. I like that people know what I want. I like when I go to Amazon and they give me suggestions based on my past purchases (most of which involve games or electronics). I like that I get personalized subscription emails from Bath and Body Works based on my favorite scents or the things I buy from them the most. It’s great to feel like my likes and dislikes are valued by the companies I buy from the most.

But, as marketing professionals and bloggers, should we consider personalizing more? As I think about this topic, there are a few pros and cons that come to mind that I’d like you to chew on as well.

Pros

- People feel more connected to our writing and/or our company. This makes sense. If I’m writing to my audience, then they should, hypothetically, enjoy what I’m saying. I will sometimes ask the Facebook fans of my freelancing business what they’d like me to write about on the three blogs I write for. I want people to feel like they have a say in what I’m saying.

- We have less of a chance of having writer’s block.  Another reason I reach out to my readers is because I get writer’s block on occasion. More than once I’ve stared at a blank WordPress page with no idea what to write about. If my readers are telling me what they want, that helps me in formulating ideas for what I want to say and do in future writings.

Cons

- Personalizing too much can thwart our creativity. On the other side of the coin from writer’s block, if we focus too much on what our consumers are saying, there’s the possibility that we may lose the creativity in our writing and/or marketing.

- We may lose the original purpose of our company. Focus too much on personalizing toward your customers and you may even lose your voice and purpose. This is probably an extreme, and doesn’t happen often, but I do think it’s something that we as marketing professionals need to keep track of.

So what is the key to personalizing toward your audience? Balance. Personalize enough so that your consumers are involved and feel like a vital part of your company, but don’t personalize so much that you lose the integrity and point of what you’re doing.

How do you personalize your blog and/or marketing toward your audience? Is there such thing as too much personalization? Can you see any other pros or cons that I failed to mention. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Every time I speak on Community Management, I hear from folks who are interested in gaining the skills necessary to become a community manager.  Let’s face it, we have the coolest job in the world but also the weirdest entry path.  How many of us started as volunteers?  I know I did 16 years ago.  How many started by starting their own forums or by being amazing bloggers with a ‘knack’ for community?  Some of us started as PR folks and others are 20 year veterans of the customer service industry.  Our career path is weird, and I know that discourages many wannabe community folks.  I’ve been at a famous purple tech company, a TV Network and now am the community manager at the most awesome technology blog (more of my story here).

There’s also not a great deal of dedicated training out there for budding community managers. Sure, some of us old timers have released books, but when I reached this epiphany last year, no one was really offering a full scale community education.  That’s why I teamed up with Get Satisfaction to create a community certification process.

Get Satisfaction is such a leader in community management tools and learnings already, I knew they were the right people to work with, and they have been wonderful in helping me create this curriculum.  The community certification program is a series of 10 classes, over a 5 week period, 1 hour each live, online lesson.  We tackle moderation in the first 2 weeks, dealing with enforcing existing guidelines, abuse, career paths in community and exploring community tools.  In week 3, we jump into the community management portion of the course, going deeper into messaging, engagement, setting the tone and turning a negative environment back to health.  Finally, we focus on creating policies and procedures and measuring your community efforts.  There’s at least one case study in every lesson, though there are several real life community examples throughout each lesson.

Honestly, I’m so very proud of what we’ve created.  The classes are all recorded and each session comes complete with detailed class notes, the deck, the recording and typically an assignment to help the community manager apply what he has learned.  He’ll also walk away with sample community guidelines, processes, SLAs and a sample abuse grid.

In short, this is how I wish I’d been trained in community management.  It has taken 6 months of my life, but putting it all down for future generations of community managers to learn from has been so rewarding.  We took our first group through a portion of the training, in Community Moderation, last fall, but this is the first time we’ve offered the full Community Management portion.  If you’re interested in taking the class, you can register on the main page, Community Manager Training by Get Satisfaction.  If you have any questions, please let me know (robyn at sleepyblogger.com).

Helping people with terminal and/or chronic illnesses is something that I’m really passionate about. Since I got my driver’s license, I’ve been an organ donor. I’ve gone to Hershey Medical Center with one of my teenagers who had to get testing for some pretty serious diseases. I lost my grandmother and mom to cancer within a year and a half period between 2009 and 2010, and since then, I’ve donated my hair to Locks of Love once and am working on doing it again. In short, I do whatever I can in order to help people in need of medical care.

Did you know that daily, thousands of people die because suitable donors cannot be found for various necessary organ donations? Did you know that you can help stop this from going on, just by choosing to donate your organs after you pass away? And, did you know that only 30% of people actually make sure that their wishes about organ donation are known to their loved ones before they die?

Mysendoff.com is one company that is helping people to get everything in order so that they can donate organs after they pass away, and I want to applaud their creativity in how they’re doing so. Yesterday, they launched a Facebook application called “Giving Means Living” that you can find on their Facebook page.

When I heard about this, I decided to try it so that I could share with my awesome readers how it works.  At first, it looks like any other Facebook app; you allow the company to take your information and have the option of letting the application post to your wall as you. Then, after you get in, you’re presented with a picture of the human body.

Image from mysendoff.com's Facebook Application.

As shown in the image above, the picture has text about the importance of being able to donate each specific organ. For example, the heart statistic really got to me, because 1 in 10 people who need a heart transplant are under the age of 18. That’s sad to start with, and as someone who works with teens on a regular basis, it breaks my heart.

After you choose which organs you would wish to donate, it is then posted to your Facebook wall, which is an easy way to allow friends and relatives to see what you wish to donate after your passing. Then, you are given a list of articles that you can check out about organ donation.

Mysendoff.com was inspired when celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber threw their hats into the arena with support for organ donation. Countless people have been saved because people cared enough to plan ahead so that other people may live. They then decided to utilize social media in order to help get the word out even more.

This is an awesome and innovative way to get the word out about something that is really, really important for everyone to be informed about. What do you think about mysendoff.com’s way of getting the word out? Would you consider doing something similar with your company’s Facebook page? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Social media. If you haven’t used it before, it can be intimidating. For example, I’ve been an avid user of Facebook for years.  Adding Twitter onto my repertoire of social mediums that I am familiar with was scary! I used to say that Twitter was a “glorified Facebook status” and now, after doing research, I understand that it’s not that way at all!

So, reader, are you bewildered by the wide world of social media? Don’t be! Today, I’m going to share some thoughts on marketing with the four major social media available.

Facebook. Facebook is definitely the social medium that I am most familiar with. I made a page for my freelancing business that I link my blogs to, and I’ve found it very handy for increasing my traffic. I also keep my followers updated on what new projects I am working on! The best part about making a fan page is that my friends and/or clients can communicate with me and give me suggestions. In turn, I can ask them what they’d like to see when I blog.

Twitter. As I mentioned before, I’m definitely not as familiar with Twitter as I am with Facebook, but I have my Twitter feed and my freelancing business’s page linked. I use Twitter in the same way that I use Facebook; I keep my followers updated about new projects and the blog posts that I write up! Twitter’s a nice, quick way to put out what you want to say to your followers. You can also communicate with people of like interests via retweeting and posting with hashtags (which, granted, I’m still getting used to too).

Google+. Honestly, I have not used Google+ at all; I don’t even have a profile with them yet. From what I understand, it’s very similar to Facebook, but it’s run by Google instead.  When reading about the medium, though, I discovered one thing that Facebook doesn’t have: video conferencing via their “hangout” function. Now, you can get video conferences via Skype and other VOiP clients, but having it via social media without having to give everyone your Skype information? I think that’s a win-win situation. I plan on signing up for it soon and checking it out more.

Linked In. Linked In, like Google+, is a site that I don’t use often. Unlike Google+, I do have a profile on it. From what I understand, it’s meant for professional networking, which can be utilized in your marketing efforts. Having connections always helps when trying to get the word out. Also, some freelancing and personal contractor jobs are listed on Linked In, which is why I signed up for it in the first place. Because of this utility, you can use it for leads as well!

What are your thoughts on these four social media? How do you use them in your marketing and advertising? Do you like being able to keep in touch with your clients and/or “fans” via these technologies? Leave your thoughts in the comments, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you here next week!

Many of us are familiar with advertising on our blogs. Most of the time these are banner ads on the side or top of our webpages, or pay-per-click methods of earning some money on our sites. Did you know that isn’t the only way for someone to earn a little extra dough on their website?

There’s a company out there known as CPAlead that is the leader in a particular type of advertising that I’d never heard of until yesterday, even though the company has been around since 2006. It’s called “click per action” marketing. The company uses a model referred to as the Content Gateway Marketing model. Let me break it down for you as I understand it.

First, if someone on your site wants to see premium material, instead of dealing with potentially annoying banner ads, they have to do something in order to see it. Play a game, take a poll, watch a video. When that’s been done, that’s it. No banner ads, no hoops to jump through, no signing up for anything, and best of all, no money out of your consumer’s pocket. Your consumer is done, you’ve been paid, and advertisers have gotten their word out.

CPAlead works with publishers and advertisers so that both parties can succeed in their goals.  Advertisers do not get charged if a consumer doesn’t complete the action. CPAlead works with advertisers to target groups based on various criteria (like geographic location and topic of the website) so that advertisements aren’t falling on deaf ears.

On the other side of things, publishers don’t have to sit around and hope that they get clicks on their banner ads. Advertising is brought directly to the consumer, making interaction with the advertisement more available and enticing, which gives you, as the publisher, more of a guarantee of income.

The best part is that not all of your content has to be behind the gateway. If you decide that some of your content is premium content, instead of forcing consumers to pay for it, make them do a simple task and they can see whatever information they want.

I think this is a great idea. People are likely to do an activity in order to get the information they need and/or desire. Come on, think about it. In this economy, we’re all looking for stuff that is essentially free. On a related thought, isn’t that why the whole SOPA/PIPA protest happened? Don’t we all want access to free information? Yes, time is money, but is 5 seconds going to kill you in order to see free content? I really don’t think so. I know that I wouldn’t mind doing this in order to see premium content.

What are your thoughts on this type of advertising? Would you use it for premium content on your website? Could this be the future of online advertising? What nontraditional types of advertising have you used on your webpages? Leave all of your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll see you here again tomorrow!