Oddly sometimes we even crack the problem and forget to celebrate our achievements.

It’s too easy to pass GO and not bank the $200.

I can always recall my boss and mentor from French Connection telling me stories about lasers and the power of focus. 20 years on I can only remember the title of the story. His laser story was famous. It got told many times – in fact the story of the story was more memorable than the story.

 

That’s something quite profound. Be known for something. Be known for persistence.

 

Stuart was an awesome mentor to me. He inspired many. Perhaps, we joked and teased his quirky eccentricities, but we all respected his drive and passion. You could never get to the office before him. He’d be there with his coffee and his cigar. He’d be willing to tell you stories and share the challenges of the day. He was a big believer in the power of possibility.

 

My earlier post “Thank FCUK I asked” tells a story of how Stuart sent me on a mission. Nothing seemed impossible to me then.

The Duality of Persistence

It dawned on my lately that persistence is a two way street. Persistence is a battle of wills. People can persistently ignore you. People can acknowledge you and do nothing. People can jump in and act. I wrote before how “People are like Leaky Balloons”

One thing I omitted in that post is the accumulated impact / cost of negativity. Rejection can be cumulative. Rejection can be internalized.

There are two balloons being filled or emptied. Your own internal balloon (your belief in an idea) and then the balloon of acceptance that each person has for each idea they choose to potentially embrace.

I got to rethinking my balloon metaphor. Balloons are membranes - bi-directional membranes.

If you live in a world of innovation, you will be rejected many times. I have. I brush it off, I ignore it. Or, so you think. There can be a hidden cost – a hidden bill to pay.

Innovation is Bidirectional

Acceptance and belief in innovation is bidirectional. You can diffuse ideas and other people can embrace them, or if you let it, you can internalize their rejection of your idea. Persistent or accumulated negativity can sap your energy. Every once in a while you need to out down tools and regroup.

You need to expose yourself to new people, find new sources, find new data, find new energy. Refind your focus. Refind your persistence and belief.

I’ve just had one of those periods. I’ve been recharging. I am recharged. I’ve mentally gone through the process of “Firing and ReHiring” myself.

One tip I have learned is that if you get lost; go back and revisit your achievements, your life. Reread your old posts. Re-examine your energy and beliefs. Perception is an amazingly powerful beast, you know you can do it. Sometimes you just need to recap and regroup. It’s all in the mind.

In the last 18 months Shyam and I have really extended and built on what I think of as the “Listly Machine“. Listly is a living beast – an energy source. That’s what it has become. It has a life of its own. In the early days I made lists and shared things frantically and it had an impact. Today, that’s no longer the case. The reason is simple: the numbers are too big. The impact I have is by sowing the seeds of tomorrow. On reflection, that’s a strange transition – the difference between jump starting a startup to growing a business.

Listly is a growth machine. More content, more users, more engagement.

Today we make decisions based on data to make small changes that have a big impact. We’re iterating and refining our machine. We’re removing friction and accelerating growth. We keep feeding the machine, refining it, oiling the wheels, shining the brass, raising the flags and tooting the horn.

It’s been quite the transition, but I’m really enjoying it (now that I’ve embraced the transition).

The Mighty Sexy Email Machine

For the last 12 weeks we’ve been cranking up our email newsletter and it’s working. Take a look at our prior newsletters – better still, put the advice into action.

Chris Brogan got me thinking as Social Media Camp 2012 that email is the “ground zero of social networks”.

Here’s the audio recording.

Email is sexy – so says Chris.

We’ve put that belief into action and it’s working. Our active email lists has been growing each week and so has our user base. Each morning I awake to check our metrics. Each day brings growth. This week we made the top 20k sites on Alexa.

That is a great achievement. A celebration.

An opportunity to stop and realize how far we’ve come. A chance to empty the negativity balloon.

It’s also a great time to look back and appreciate the journey for what it is. Yes, there are tough times, but there are also great things to celebrate along the way. And those great things are what makes it all worthwhile.

Do you take time to celebrate and appreciate the journey?

The post Persistence, Focus + Repetition: Kills Doubt, Earns Attention appeared first on via @nickkellet.

What does it mean for your content to have a social life?

Can content be truly social? Can content have life?

Does your content pass from person to person?

Do friends of friends share with friends of friends?

Does your content have a life when you are not present?

What does it take to make social content?

How long can it live? Does content grow and evolve or is it static? Does your content have a life cycle?

Can we manage the life-cycle of content? Can we elongate it?

Can your content pro-create? Does one idea spawn another idea?

Can we make content more or less social? How so?

What is it that makes an idea travel? What is it that makes an idea make new friends?

How many friends does an idea need to keep it alive and to let it spread?

How many friends will keep an idea being invited to the next party?

Where does your content go? Who does your content befriend?

How does it travel?

Is your content truly social?

Does it just pass from one person to another or does it keep travelling?

Why is that? What makes an idea pass this test?

Do people notice your content?

Is is just the title? Is it the intro? Is it the brevity? Is simplicity a differentiator?

Do people augment your ideas? Does the story grow as it travels?

Does your content get invited back? Do your content get to party?

Image Credit: jdhancock via Flickr.com and Creative Commons

The post 37 Questions: Does Your Content have a Social Life? appeared first on via @nickkellet.

They are skimmers

• Hurried
• Hassled
• Commitment averse

They want snacks. Infosnacks. That want fast food for the brain.

Don’t take 500 works to make a point if 300 will suffice. You should know this. You skim. You guard your time. You like short sentences.

You run away from long paragraphs and complex sentences. If you try and introduce one idea, while diverting to another, and while pontificating over a cornucopia of wisdoms, your audience will be thwarted.

Did you turn and run? Or are you still here? Save the fluff for bunnies. Explain your ideas for 6 year olds or your reader will run and hide. Actually 6 is too old. Think 5. 

So what if your audience skims. Suck it up. Brief is the new black.

Feed them snacks. Help them skim more. Feed their frenzy.

Give them infographics. Give them lists.

Fight this at your peril. Don’t suffer the fate of King Cnut. Don’t fight the tide.

How many words will it take to convince you that brief is best?  How many?

400 words feels bloated. Twitter thwarted our attentions. We crave and reward simplicity.

White space is a readers friend.

Seth Godin writes 250 word posts because they work.

One idea is all you need

• Give them a feast and they may just leave with indigestion
• Give them a taste and they may just bite
• Give them brain candy and they will come back and snack again

One time soon, they will come ready to buy your wares.

They won’t be snacking any more.

Image Credit : swanksalot via Flickr.com and Creative Commons

The post Snackers Are The New Lurkers appeared first on via @nickkellet.

Are all the sites you explore looking the same?

I don’t think it will end well for many.

For me many of these tools/apps began in different places with unique missions, but they now all look the same.

My sense is they have denied themselves their differentiation.

When so many startup  decided to jump on news feed as a metaphor I thought we were set for trouble.

I wrote this headline maybe 4-5 months ago as an idea for a blog post and promptly forgot about about.

The Facebook announcement to refocus around news and the acquisition of Pulse by Linkedin jogged the memory.

Many have commented has Facebook has responded to look more like G+.

A while back, I’d noticed Klout had given up it’s 16 part segmentation to classify your user style, which I liked,  chosing to focus on news instead. Kred followed with KredStory.

I was surprised to see Empire Avenue has also taken a conformist step to focus on sharing content, which was odd as EA had such a unique proposition.

Pulse, Zite and Flipboard are the ones defining this trend, with a healthy dose of Pinterest visualization and fluidity thrown into the mix (and a splash of Instagram)

They have been playing leapfrog and catchup, but it’s still hard to find a consistent experience across all devices.

The trend for responsive themes have made so many blogs look like news feeds too, adding to the confusion.

Read it later apps have also added to the confusion by offering yet another unified ad-free way of consuming content.

Now add to mix Google’s decision to kill off Google Reader and the foundation of news reader shudders.

We have yet more people thinking and focusing on news centric consumption. The idea of being both device and user aware is on the rise. Many titles have reclaimed their right to know their users by adding a connected layer on top of the regular G+, Twitter and Facebook logins.

• Don’t you think all these site look the same?
• How do you choose to consume your news?
• Do you feel any emotional commitment to any of them?
• Can you explain the difference between all the different tools that look like social news feeds?

My sense is people will settle to use less tools, not more. Trying to differentiate yourself by looking like a newsfeed will get you  lost. You will simply get forgotten or overlooked.

Triberr is one app that has a unique spin on news consumption. They want to be the place bloggers consume, comment and share content – all via a collaborative tribal platform. They have argued for a while that RSS was dead/broken.

I’m a big fan of Triberr and I’ve written about their approach to collaboration before. I happen to believe in their vision and strategies for community building. If you blog then it makes total sense that you would want to collaborate and work with other bloggers and I see synergies in the consume, comment and share workflow that their new version makes even more evident. Have you tried Triberr? I know I’ve met some great people because of the platform.

Along with Listly, they also launch a new release on Monday 18th March.

What’s going to make you loyal to any specific service?  Which do you use?

I’m thinking this is madness and close to suicidal. Death by news feed. How about you?

Image Credit: pagedooley via Flickr.com and Creative Commons

The post Hey Honey I Shrunk My Differentiation: Death by News Feed appeared first on via @nickkellet.

Do you even understand the questions? I sense today to most people these terms are interchangeable.

As a software industry veteran, tools and apps have always carried unique meaning for me.  I inherited this thinking from my time at Business Objects where we debated long and hard the definitions and merits of each.

“Apps” got hijacked by mobile and iPhones and the App store.

I found myself asking if the tool/app distinction was still valid. That question led to this post.

My answer was yes. I believe understanding the tool vs apps distinction is highly valuable, and not just for software companies. I believe it helps in the selection process. Let me define the terms and share why I think it’s important.

Tools

Tools are highly generic. They perform multiple tasks. A Word Processor would be an example of a tool. You can use a word processor to do many things, e.g. to write a book, create a resume or produce a menu. Tools are universal. The downside of tools is you need to be given ideas on how to use them.

Spreadsheets, presentation tools, email and even Twitter are all tools.

Applications

Apps on the other hand are highly specific, they perform a single function. A resume app is highly focussed on the task of making resumes. You couldn’t use a resume app to make a menu.

Apps get you somewhere very fast, but because they have a specific goal and often specific logic, it’s not easy to use them for anything that varies from their core task.

Tools vs Apps

Apps are often tools applied to do a specific job.

For Twitter chats: Twitter vs Tweetchat

For Sharing : Hootsuite vs Buffer

I’m sure you can think of your own examples.

So which are betters : Tools or Apps?

There’s no simple answer to this question, except that if you use more tools and less apps you have less to manage. The downside of tools is you have to do the work and come up with the ideas to make them useful.

Fewer tools will do the job or more apps and there’s value in that. That can make life simpler, but it often comes at the price of needing more skill and imagination.

Tools tend to be able to do more, but sometimes at a price of usability.

I think today the line is a blurred because the finesse that can be applied to a user experience can sway your to using a specific app or tool.

Ultimately there’s a cost of every solution even if it’s free.

How many tools do you use today, everyday? How many apps?

My sense is in a world short on attention there’s an appeal to using apps, but having too many apps leads you to forgetting or not finding an app. You can have too much choice.

If you have multiple tools/apps to do the same job something is wrong.

Apps are usually higher value as they include business logic.

I think the success of apps like Instagram have added a new dimension – Apps tend to do less because they make the experience simpler. Simplicity tends to be more viral.

Simplicity is often a technique used today to displace an incumbent solution. Instagram only makes square photos, it’s only recently that you could rotate an image. Your filters are limited, but the experience lets just about anyone share great looking images. Instagram leaves you with a good feeling.

Apps tend to think about a bigger process and focus on the experience of delivering on a compete task. Instagram doesn’t just take a photo, it enhances it and shares it. It’s part social network.

If you use a tool every day then it becomes easier to grasp it’s building blocks. It becomes easier to apply the same tool to do many jobs. The more you use it the more creative you get.

Photoshop would be a great example of a tool. It’s highly capable, but may require more skill to know how to combine multiple smaller features in order to achieve a specific outcome – a polaroid photo, for example.

I know if I use Photoshop frequently it’s easier to be proficient. If I use it rarely I use very few features.

I often use SimpleDiagrams instead of Photoshop because it keeps more focussed on making something simple. Less design choices helps me design better images, but then I’m only a pretend designer. In that context less is more.

If you don’t use something very often, then an app tends to be easier to deploy because they do less, do it well and are easier to pick up and put down.

How about you? Have you ever though of the distinction. The words have been hijacked but the distinction lives on.

Today, I think I’m thinking about workflows as being the key distinction.  Simplicity and completing tasks has big appeal.

These things go in cycles. There’s been a huge swing to apps. Will tools return to favor?

I always thought of Twitter as a swiss army knife. It did many things just about OK – you needed other tools and apps to really make it useful, but Twitter arrived at a time when we were seeing too many apps.

For me this an interesting debate and it’s fun to observe the changing patterns.

Perhaps we need some new vocabulary.

The post Which is Best: Tools vs Apps? appeared first on via @nickkellet.

Here’s why:

Giving and receiving of advice is a strange and unique pursuit, a delicate balance.

There is very much a giver and a recipient in an exchange of advice.

Taking advice and embracing feedback is an acquired skill.

Sometimes you can choke on the best advice. That advice can be too strong or too much, or both.

Too much advice can often prevent you from taking any advice. You can be overwhelmed by change and choice.

Just like mustard, it’s easy to dispense too much advice.

Most advisors dispense too much, which often means no advice is taken.

Like mustard, advice is an supplement to the main course – an optional extra.

It’s easy for an advisor to see what they think someone needs, but advice is harder to give it in small bite-size portions.

Just like writing a short post or a short note, giving brief advice takes more effort and time. More consideration. Brief focussed advice takes effort to distill the bare essentials.

Often, if you give small pieces of advice, they get implemented. You recipient can develop a trust and a taste for something stronger.

I know I’ve learned to give people a first action – one step. I’ve learned to do this as a test. Will this person act. If so, they earn more of my attention and willingness to help.

It’s often hard to see that you need advice. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and to crave the steady path. Perhaps you are used to life without something extra to challenge your perspective.

Advice is harder to take. Advice can be too hot to handle.

As with mustard, most advice is left on the plate.

You need to really want to put the advice into practice to go through to pain and the effort to listening and implementing. You have to believe and want the outcome.

When giving advice you should make sure it’s hot, hot enough to make a difference, but equally not too hot to handle.

That’s a hard balance. You should give advice in small portions, recognizing that most advice is left on the plate. Don’t let your advisee choke of indigestion. Be careful to dispense the next most needed piece of advice, so people take your advice and put it into action.

There’s a touch of the Mary Poppins to giving advice. You need to know which is the right spoonful of sugar.

Quality advice is meant to be hard to consume. There’s a lot of truth to the saying “no pain, no gain”.

Easy advice is not really advice. It’s fluff.

Obvious advice should not really need an advisor. Overloading people with obvious advice is not helpful. It’s noise.

Often advice is given for free, making it easy to ignore, easy to let go to waste.

I’m sure even advice that’s paid for is still ignored. When you are being paid it’s easy to think you should give more.

Far better to give just the right amount and have your advisee coming back to ask for more.

Before giving advice you should determine if someone is happy with their status quo – are they in need of a supplement. Do they need spicing up? Often advice is given from your perspective and not from that of the advisee.

Some movement is better than none.

What is the right dose? What’s your experience? Have you been given too much advice. Have you left suplus advice go waste?

Image Credit: alexbrn

The post Why Giving Advice is Like Hot Mustard appeared first on via @nickkellet.

When it comes to having an effective long term content marketing strategy, sites like Facebook create the wrong behaviours in your marketing team. It happens slowly, but these sites are designed to get you hooked on feedback.

They turn decent marketing folk into sinners.

What’s the word for these sites? I think the term is “social destinations”, in some case they are social networks, but not always. People go to destination sites to converse,  be amused and informed and to share what they find with others. They are where people hangout. They are simply the modern water cooler. The coffee break that never ends.

Other examples of social destination sites includes Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. You can participate there in the conversation, but you don’t control where it goes. Each has their own distinct culture. Facebook aims to filter what you consume and contribute. Reddit is highly moderated. Other sites do not limit what you see, for example G+ and Twitter, but the problem is, you don’t know what may change tomorrow.

Social destinations have an allure. Good luck not getting addicted. Think about how you approach these sites. Have you thought about the sins your are committing? 

Be Your Own Social Destination. Own Your Own Destiny

Sites like Facebook are where people hang out and that’s the lure as much as it is the trap.

Brands want to achieve both reach and control with the media they utilise to engage their audience. Brands need to avoid a silo-minded approach to their media usage. Content is becoming more and more fluid and reusable.

It’s tempting to create content to engage people on a destination site (i.e. where you first found them), but this is flawed logic in the long term. Once you begin to engage with people on the destination site, it won’t let you leave. You need to begin relationships the way you want them to go on.

So if you want customers/prospects to enagage on your blog in the long term, you’d better make that your primary goal. It’s harder to begin that way, but it gets easier with time and as momentum builds.

Bait them on destination sites, switch them to engage on media that you own. You don’t want Facebook to be your landlord.

Tempt people away from destination sites to your site. That should be your mission. You need to be your own destination. You need to own and control your own destiny.

Owned, Paid, Earned & Shared Media

You can boast engagement metrics on destination sites, but what have you really built?  What do you own? You can’t bank yesterday’s attention.

If you don’t keep delivering content you will be forgotten like a long lost love. There is no commitment to you. You are simply part of the noise on the destination site.

You own your blog and your websites. They are what’s called “Owned Media”

Facebook on the other hand is “Shared Media”. Destination sites for the most part are shared media, with an element of earned in the case when other people willingly and freely create content about you. You have no real control over where or how content travels through a destination site. Pinterest is another example. Believing that you have control on these sites is a delusion.

Content on Facebook or Pinterest is neither yours nor your customers. The term is “shared media”, but really it’s Facebook’s or Pinterest’s and let’s not forget it. You are building Facebook for Facebook and not for you.

The same applies to every social destination

How do you feel about social destinations? What’s your strategy not to ensure you drive traffic to media you own.

Image Credit: shareconference

The post Social Destination Sites: Do You Own Your Content Destiny? appeared first on via @nickkellet.

The bad news is it takes planning. You’ll find it much easier to write a series if you start with than intention.

Ready for really bad news? Blog post series = link admin hell. The good news is there’s a fix. The second bit of good news is blog post series help you get found.

Why Linking Blog Post Series is Hellishly Dull

Linking your posts gets exponentially more complex as your blog post series grows. Longer series are more valuable, but more complex to administer and create. This chart compares the effort required, based on the number of posts in your series, based on updating  each old post on the release of each new post.

Let me explain

The Traditional Approach to Blog Post Series : 3 Post Example

• 1st Post
  • Create your 1st post
• 2nd Post
  • Create your 2nd post (linking to 1st)
  • Update 1st post (and link to the 2nd)
• 3rd Post
  • Create your 3rd post (and link to the 1st and the 2nd)
  • Update your 1st post to link to the 3rd
  • Update your 2nd post to link to the 3rd

The more posts in your series, the worse it gets. Now imagine that was a 6 part series. 15 edits in total. Horrid, right?!

That’s why people don’t insert all the links. Too much effort right. It explains why readers don’t find all the content in your series. In researching series I’ve found many bloggers don’t make their series obvious to the reader. Don’t make your readers work. Nobody wins.

If your audience can’t find your content, your audience loses out and so do you. There has to be a better way.

The Simpler More Scalable Solution : Lists as Content

• Create and name your Listly list
• Publish each new post and add it to your list
• Grab the same embed code for your list and paste it into each post as you write it

The work to add the second post is exactly the same as the work to add the 10th. It takes just a second. Much simpler and you don’t need to edit any posts again. Here’s the other posts in this blog series.

Blog Post Series - A Collection of Posts on How & Why Blog Post Series are Effective Content Marketing

Listly by Nick Kellet

Blog Post Series - A Collection of Posts on How & Why Blog Post Series are Effective Content Marketing

Blog Post Series are a very powerful technique for bloggers, but traditionally they are far from simple.

This is a series to explore the topic and document best practices. And to ask questions.

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1. 

   No1: Why Writing Blog Post Series is Like Fishing with Nets

   A simple metaphor.

   A single blog post is like a "hook: vs a blog post series is like using a "net"

   1st in a series of 9 blog posts

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   No2: Link and Share Your Blog Post Series

   When it comes to blogging it’s easy to slip into the linearity trap. It’s easy to think about your story as the writer and not a reading or consumption mindset.

   Blog post series are not for you. They are for other bloggers your customer.
   Let me explain…

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   No3: Linking Blog Post Series is Chore. Here's a Hack

   If people can't find the posts in your series, your audience loses out and so do you. Here's a really simple way to remove the chore of linking your posts

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   No4: How to be a serial guest blogger. Take Your Blog Post Series on the Road

   Blogging and guest posts can be combined and to good effect. So what's stopping you creating a roaming guest blog post series?

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View more lists from Nick Kellet

It’s simply a Listly list that manages the whole process. I can go back at any time and extend and curate the list. The links between all the posts remains intact.

Your series can get found on Listly, on your blog and, of course, by organic SEO.

My First Blog Post Series

I first arrived at these conclusions after I created my first blog post series on The Wonders of Lists.

You can imagine my joy when I uncovered how painful it was to cross link a blog post series.

As the co-foudner of a startup that manages Lists, we make that process super simple.

ReWorking Your Bi-Products

Series-linking isn’t the main goal of Listly. It’s a free side benefit. I loved the book ReWork from 37 Signals Co-Founder Jason Fried. In that book Jason extols the virtues of reusing your waste. Exploit your bi-products. I think it’s an awesome piece of advice and something I look for at every opportunity.

So have you ever written a series? What’s stopping you? Go rework some of your old series. Give it a try.

Image Credit: bknittle

The post Linking Blog Post Series is a Chore. Here’s a Hack appeared first on via @nickkellet.

I found these inspiring slides by Michael Pranikoff, Global Director, Emerging Media PR Newswire and they got me thinking. They certainly validated a lot of my thinking, but they also asked new questions. They are well worth a look. There’s some great content on the need for the merging of silos.

I’ve really liked  the idea of slide 34 . I believe Michael adapted/inverted the idea from Daniel Goodall. I think this is a valuable tweak to the model, as the goal for such a chart should always be to be in the top right.

What type of media gives you reach and control?

Isn’t that the question brands should be asking?

So what would a media look like that would give you control but also reach? How could a controlled media give you optimum reach? Reach comes from other blogs, other news sites, social sharing etc. Reach comes from making it incredibly easy to share and reuse your content. If you don’t make content easy to reuse, you know people will copy it or adapt if for their own purpose, just like I’ve done here.

The current model for slideshare doesn’t support that kind of collaborative adaption. What would collaborative storytelling really look like?  What if you could re-mash and reuse existing content in a way that didn’t force you to copy and force you to break a connection to the source? These are interesting questions and an opportunity for someone to displace slideshare.

We think of Listly as Slideshare or YouTube for lists, but with the twist that a single list can accept content from many contributors and that a list can evolve over time. In the context of media, Listly lists are very much a new type of “Living Media”.

I extended Michael’s slide to include this new category. It extends to occupy the prestigious slot on the top right where control and reach can be maximized.

Brands get media. Media is how brands scale. To articulate your value to a brand you need to tell your story in the context of media. This led me to begin exploring paid, earned, owned and shared media.  It’s a space that’s clearly shifting and evolving right now.

I believe living media is a place where consumers and brands can engage as equals.

My belief is simple, people (as in consumers and bloggers)  share, embed and promote stuff they care about. To quote a prior post that asked “Will Passion be the Metric of the Future?“.

Passion is promoting. Passion is the new permission. People give permission to brands, ideas and beliefs to enter their brains.

Consumers care about their passions. Consumers care about caring. You need to speak to your customers’ passions or provide some value on their journey to explore their passions. People don’t care about brands per se, they care about brands that support them in their journey. Consumers care about what’s in it for them – we all do. It’s my view that living media helps consumers achieve their goal.

Two things are clear to me right now in the context of List.ly

1. Control: Listly brings control to a brand. If a brand builds a social list on Listly, they are inviting input and ideas from their community, but ultimately they control the content. They can moderate which ideas make the list. Despite how you may tell a brand that social media is about giving up control, brands are simply more drawn to options that leave the controls in their hands. I guess it’s human nature.
2. Reach: Listly brings reach to your content along three dimensions (on Listly, on your blog and on other blogs). This model is much like YouTube and Slideshare, but there’s a twist.  All this helps you get found.  The twist is that when you embed a list, you receive 100% value for the text in the list in your blog (if you use our WordPress plugin). That’s a big win. From my experience, most people don’t know that embeds/iframes don’t give you any SEO value on your blog. Google actually ignores iframes and script tags. With Listly, you ensure that this doesn’t happen and that you have more opportunities to be found.

I’ve given examples before of the reach/view/impression amplification that Listly can deliver.

Above is a chart of a graphic I used on this original post to explain how Listly amplifies brand exposure. I’ve refreshed the numbers. Between July 31st 2012 and 20th Jan this list’s views jumped from 24k to 47k. The amplification grew from 24x to 47x. Amplification is measured compared to how many times the source blog post has been viewed. I’ve then indexed that number against views on Listly and views on other blogs that have also embedded the list.  That gives you a sense of the power of amplification.

This list has been embedded many times as you can see:

Today we expect the content we publish to remain static, but that’s just a function of history. As media evolves so will our expectations.

Lori Kozlowski in this Forbes post talks about “Living Media”, a term Ptch.com use to describe themselves. The video in the post explaining Ptch shows how content can be repurposed and re-mashed and republished. Today we all want to share our own perspective. We are all producers, creators and curators. I quote Ed Leonard, CEO of Ptch and former CTO of Dreamworks from the Forbes post as follows.

 “Right now when you watch a video on the web, you can’t really change it. If you really like it and you want to do something that’s kind of like it but reshape it a bit, you’re kind of stuck. You have to go remake the whole thing, which is a real investment of time.”

I also highly recommend watching these two videos by Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company. He talked about fluid content and liquid media, which really supports the notion of evolution, listening and conversational media.

Beyond Ptch and Listly, Storify is an other example of republishable media. Your story in Storify can evolve over time. Content curation tools fall into this category – tools like Scoop.it and Paper.li all act to republish content, typically on a daily basis.  All these tools offer control and reach. They are all strong examples of living/liquid media.

Reuse isn’t new, reuse is the norm. Reuse is our expectation. Reuse is not pure copying. Reuse allows you to add context and insight:

• Tumblr and the reblog.
• Twitter and the retweet
• Pinterest has the repin.
• Listly has the relist

I’m not sure if the term that will emerge will be living media or liquid media, or perhaps one of the following terms.

• Agile Content / Agile Media
• Living Content / Living Media
• Real-time Content / Real Time Media
• Contextual Content / Context Media
• Communal Content / Communal Media
• Me Content / Me Media

I like the term “living media”, but I love the concept of what it empowers far more. I think the name is up for debate, I sense the media category is new but will emerge to be clearly understood.

So how do I define living/liquid media? I’ve taken a first stab at defining it here. I’m sure this will evolve with feedback and input

So what’s your thoughts on achieving reach and control? What’s your reaction to living media? What’s missing?  What other examples can you think of?

Image Credit: tomtolkien

The post Can Consumers Help Brands Win Control & Reach with Living Media? appeared first on via @nickkellet.

Read on Macduff. You will soon discover most people are not thinking about context, well not if you believe google search words.

Context is being used as a magic bullet. The new open sesame! It’s no shortcut for engaging with real people.

I was curious to hear Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book “The Age of Context” for release in 2013. I am looking forward to their thoughts.

I’ve been tracking “The Post Information Age”  since 2003 so the notion of a “contextual age” is fascinating to me.  There’s no winner yet for what term will be coined to represent the “post information age”, but Age of Context, or Contextual Age would definitely be on the short list. I’m curious to explore what people really mean by “context marketing” and whether we are ready for it. Are we culturally on board with the idea? For this age is so much less about technology and so much more about people and being human.

I made a list of interesting posts on “context marketing” and began to read on the topic. I found one post dated 1998. So clearly, this isn’t a new concept. Feel free to add posts you think are significant.

Peppers and Rogers coined the term “1:1 Marketing” in 1997, perhaps a little earlier than technology could really enable and certainly long before people were ready to experience context marketing.

We’re all converging on content marketing as this deck explains.

• 1:1 Marketing – Peppers & Rogers
• Persona Marketing - David Meerman Scott (Tuned-In) & Pragmatic Marketing
• Our slow and steady adoption of frictionless sharing – Facebook, 4SQ, Instagram etc
• Mass Adoption of Smart Devices – iPhone/Android/Blackberry
• Preference Graph in Real Time (via big data)

Context marketing is about communicating with an individual based on:

• Where they are
• Who they are
• What they are doing
• How they prefer to receive the information we’re sharing

In some ways context is another way of saying preference/interest graph. This is the holy grail we all seek.

Ray Wang takes this thinking a little further in the list of Seven Dimensions of Context in this post, I turned them into a list. I thought it was a pretty neat segmentation.

Which ones do you think are most significant. Is he missing any?

I’m sure the real meaning of context will emerge over time, but I’m sure there will be a huge element of automation.

I’m not sure that’s good, but it’s a typical brand response to want to automate and scale the task of creating meaningful engagement with your customers and prospects.

Real deep human engagement comes from real deep human engagement. I’m not sure there is a short cut. I’m sure you can supplement  actual humans and that you can do it effectively, but don’t expect to bypass the need that real people have to talk to real people.

As I researched, I got the impression Context Marketing was hot in the inner marketing circles, so I wondered how much of a mainstream search term it has become. How well adopted is the term? My hunch was right. It’s far from mainstream.

There’s 37 million searches each month that include the term “marketing”.

Internet marketing comes top with 1 million searches per month!

Context marketing accounts for a mere 3,600 searches per month. Tiny, right! That’s right at the bottom of the top 50 marketing segments.

Persona Marketing didn’t even make the 50. I added it for context.

So what do you think? Are we ready for Context Marketing?

Image Credit: 21496790@N06

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