Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

As part of my ongoing series documenting and analyzing social media power users and influencers, I thought it would be interesting to learn from industry-current professionals making a difference in the space.

John Boitnott, Social Media Strategist at Village Voice Media was kind enough to answer some of my questions. Village Voice Media owns and operates 15 of the largest weekly newspapers across the US. John has more than 15 years experience in both traditional and new media, is a top Digg user, and is skilled at developing ultra-popular web content.

There has been some good feedback from readers about the social media power users and influencers series – and I plan to continue writing these to share more smart, influential people with you. The real value here isn’t to scan my posts though, the value is to study what makes these people successful in spreading ideas so you can learn what they do right.

Before drafting additional parts in this series, I thought it would be interesting to note some things I have learned from studying influencers who are successful at spreading ideas across platforms. These are takeaways if you too seek to build a trusted following:

Be positive

People are tired of those who are overly negative, cynical or jaded. Simply put, the world has enough of that – be the change you want to see, and others will gather around you. Optimism spreads to others just as negativity does.

Many of you reading this already know who Matt Cutts is. For those who don’t, he is Google’s head of webspam. Simplified and in plain English, what that means is he helps make sure those Google results you receive for your queries are of high quality and spam-free.

But this post isn’t about webspam or SEO. What’s even more interesting to me as a communications professional is that in many ways, Matt represents the future of PR as a transparent, seamless process internally for sophisticated, industry-leading companies.

There’s a lot of great thinking from Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others about the future of PR.

In the beginning of 2009, I compiled 22 smart, inspirational quotes from bloggers to share with you. Today I thought it would be fun to mash-up the quotes with visuals to make them come alive (be sure to view full screen):

I’ve written previously on the idea of entrepreneurial journalism and writers as brands where I gave a few examples of successful individuals doing just that. Today I was lucky enough to convince pro blogger Sarah Perez to give us her story and share some insights on the themes presented here.

First some quick background: Sarah worked in IT up until 2008 when she became a full-time pro blogger. She writes for several publications in the niche of Technology including Read Write Web, Microsoft’s Channel 10, Sticks of Fire, and The Social Geeks to name a few and also has her own blog: sarahintampa.

Sarah represents what I believe is the future for the industry: she’s a smart, agile writer with a deep understanding of her niche who not only makes a living off blogging, but also uses social media to it’s full potential as an enabler for success.

image credit: victor nuno

Today is the final day of the year 2008. Our society’s numbering of years always bothered me and makes little sense from a logic perspective – it is a system based on culture, not science. This isn’t the 2008th year the planet has been around. Alas, this is what society has decided to use, so we’ll go with it for now.

Also, yesterday was the final day of my 25th year on this by-chance, life-supporting planet we call Earth. Always a retrospective time of year for me, and probably for you as well.

Most bloggers make lists of their most popular posts of the year, but instead of doing that (you can browse the archives here if you’d like) I thought I’d do something different and piece together a few smart/inspirational quotes from several bloggers I’ve been reading this year.