Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

I’m reading a fascinating book titled Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. It’s essentially the psychology/sociology of traffic, and offers the most in-depth look at interactions expressed through driving I’ve ever read.

An interesting bit from the book explains something you’ve probably experienced. Andrew Velkey, a psychology professor at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University uncovered the following conclusion after he studied the behavior of parkers at a Wal-Mart in Mississippi (paraphrased):

Let me preface this by stating that I really do like Chris Brogan – I link to him frequently, share his posts across social media, and am a fan of what he does. But, if the blogosphere is great at one thing – it is bringing all sides to something, which I’d like to spend a minute doing.

Chris wrote a post yesterday titled: Spread Your Wings- Get More Retweet Action Today. I’m not sure why this rubbed me the wrong way, maybe it is because I think it is a better strategy to make good content that isn’t tailored to a specific platform than try and design something for one network.

After reading through his post/comments and thinking about how much has been written on Twitter-specific strategies as of late, I have a few points I’d like to remind everyone:

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.

After more than 12 years of socializing on the web I have come to a simple conclusion: it’s not about technology or being able to manipulate tools “better” than anyone else, rather – it’s about ideas. The technical aspects are totally democratized, and becoming simpler to implement every day. Internet marketing isn’t directly about technology, rather it’s about ideas that set it on fire.

It’s about ideas that spread, ideas that are sticky, ideas that connect us in meaningful ways – with each other, with businesses, with causes. Whether that idea is simple or complex technically is not relevant, and in fact some of the most successful examples are ridiculously simple. With that said – even to be able to come up with simple ideas you have to be fluent in how society connects and communicates and have a comprehension of all the tools available today and tomorrow.

Of the last 100,000 visitors to The Future Buzz, 2,145 – or around 2.14% were using iPhones, iPod touches or Android devices. So in an effort to make things easier for readers on the go, today I have done two things:

1) Installed the WP Touch plugin

The guys at Brave New Code made a slick little plugin which auto-detects if users are browsing via an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android powered device and serves a beautiful mobile version. It’s simple to install and makes any Wordpress powered blog look clean on leading mobile platforms. Fire up The Future Buzz in your iPhone to have a look, you’ll get something like this (I’ll work on customizing it further in the future, lots of neat options in the plugin):

What if…?

You lived everyday like it was all that mattered.

You put your passion to work 24/7.

You changed everything.

The structure around you was just an illusion.