BrandingFire Blog

All of this talk about social media, Web 2.0, and all of the other new-fangled Internet buzzwords can be a bit confusing. While I’m already talking about stories today, the folks over at Common Craft have created some great videos that explain a lot of different Web 2.0 stuff in plain English. No geek speak. No tech talk. Your mother could understand it. And they do it just for you.
Here are some good ones:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc]

Social Networking in Plain English

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU]

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in Plain English

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

Wikis in Plain English

(And just for a little fun, here’s a parody from Kelly Stewart)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7kRLQkbRHs]

Technology in Plain South Carolina English

If you’re from South Carolina, don’t be offended. This is a play on the Miss Teen South Carolina fiasco.

I’ve mentioned before that I think a great way to connect people with your brand, no matter if that brand is Coca Cola or Daughters of the American Revolution, is with stories that are meaningful to them. New online technologies are making it easier and easier to tell those stories, be it through websites, blogs, video, podcasts, Twitter, Jaiku or any number of other technologies emerging daily.

Someone Who Gets It
I’ve found one guy who “gets it”. And he’s in a place you might not first think to look for him. He’s 8th Grade teacher Eric Langhorst. He’s so passionate about using technology to teach history that he maintains a blog about it and does speaking engagements on the subject. And his passion for history and teaching the subject are so contagious that others are noticing. Mr. Langhorst was just named the 2007-2008 Missouri Teacher of the Year. (Perfectly fitting that he podcasted about it.) In addition, he was awarded the 2007 Governor’s Humanities Education Award. (Congrats to him!)

Check out his blog here. I’ve subscribed. He may be officially teaching 13-year-olds, but I know I can learn a lot from this guy!

Who inspires you? Where do you go to learn how to better promote your organization or tell stories that fan the flames of passion for history in other people? Add a comment to this entry or give me a shout out and tell me about them.

Here’s a great blog post from the Brooklyn Museum on how they did a recent test with Twitter. While the result wasn’t a resounding success, they should be roundly applauded for having the guts to test out an idea. I hope they get the opportunity to do it some more. They also deserve massive kudos for sharing the results on their blog. Heck! While we’re at it, I’ll throw them a high five for even HAVING a blog!

Great job, Shelley Bernstein & the Brooklyn Museum!!

Blog - A blog, short for weblog, is an online collection of news, thoughts, lessons, journal entries, punditry or other writings published in chronological order on a website. They are sometimes hosted by the blog owner and sometimes by a third party such as Wordpress, Typepad or any number of other hosts. While they were originally diary or journal entries online, the use of blogs has expanded to include many other uses. Some people have even used blogging platforms to build whole websites on (possible, but not generally recommended). General Motors-Europe appears to have built their whole Social Media Newsroom on a blog platform. (Smart!)

Not Enough History Blogs
Now that we’ve gotten the whole definition thing out of the way, you probably know or at least have a good idea of what a blog is since you’re reading one. But in the history arena, I wonder how many people really understand the power of blogging. The activity of blogging has been “mainstream” for nearly half a decade now. Yet, I did an unscientific poll of 150 random websites for historic houses, history museums and history-related organizations. Of those 150, about 5 had a blog. Of those 5 only about 3 were very active. Wow! That’s 1-2% of my sampling who were using a blog to reach out to the public and start a conversation. That’s shocking considering there are millions and millions of blogs out there and thousands more come online daily. These are numbers that would make a Luddite proud. I have several reasons I suspect are behind this, but those can wait for another post. Today, the question is…

How Do We Change This?
Solving this problem is really, really easy and cheap. Solving it well is a bit tougher, but nothing we can’t overcome. First, starting a blog can be done easily and free. Go to Wordpress or Blogger, register for a free account and start up a blog. I recommend Wordpress because it’s a great blogging platform and is fairly customizable. This is the best option for someone who hasn’t kept a blog before. If you’re more experienced or more adventuresome, you can download blogging software to run on your own servers or use a hosted pay service such as Typepad (also very good).

Second, before you start your blog sit down and make a list of what you hope to accomplish with it. Is it for community outreach, to talk to your membership, to seek out new members, to generate new visitors or a combination of these things? Know what you want to accomplish.

Third, what kind of information are you going to put on the blog. (This ties in somewhat with #2.) Will it be organization/company news, personal observations, historical facts, biographies or some combination? There are a ton of things you can write about, but select carefully and then stick with it. Don’t change what you’re writing about unless you feel you need to and the change is on purpose. The reason being that readers will quickly come to expect certain things of what you write. If you write about your historic house events for two months and then you suddenly start talking about your dog Wolfie and your mother-in-law, they’re going to be confused and go away. Keep in mind, though, that it doesn’t have to be stale, dry, boring information. Write about things that will entertain and get your readers personally involved. Write stuff that starts conversations with them. It can even include personal stuff if that’s the voice you want for your blog. It’s your choice, but whatever you do, do it on purpose and with purpose.

Finally, decide who will do the blogging. It can be one person or several (a group blog). Both kinds have been successful. Just make sure whoever is writing WANTS to do it and is passionate about conversing with your audience. If you’re merely forcing them to do this, readers will see that.

Have questions on starting a blog for your history-related organization or project? Give us a holler and we’ll lend a hand. We’ve already got the branding fire going and the irons are getting hot!

If you’d like to have our blog entries herded over your way, you can subscribe at this link.

Podfade - This occurs when a podcast ceases production or is distributed so infrequently as to appear out of production. The reason for this generally boils down to:

• lack of time
• lack of listeners
• lack of goals
• lack of things to talk about

What’s really interesting is that podfading isn’t limited to amateur broadcasters. It’s happened to professionals as well.

How do you limit your chances of podfading?
Here are a couple of ideas on how you can limit the risk of becoming another podfader:

• Understand that podcasting requires a time investment - Podcasting is easy and cheap to get into, but be sure there is a time investment required for recording, editing and uploading the shows. And the more popular your podcast becomes, the more time you will need to invest in it to keep it popular.
• Make sure you have a reason for podcasting - Even if it’s just to entertain people, you need to have a purpose for producing a podcast, otherwise you’re likely to lose interest when the next “cool” thing comes along.
• Recognize that it may take a while to build a following - Don’t expect to be the big dog on the block by episode #10. It’s possible that no one will listen to you for quite some time. Hopefully, you’ll give them something interesting to listen to and have something remarkable to say, thereby building a following. But it could take a while.

Good luck and happy podcasting!

we received a direct mail piece at our house a couple of days ago that came from a major big box toy retailer. After a good chuckle, it went straight into the trash. Do not pass go. Do not spend $200 at their store. We laughed because the whole direct mailing was so messed up that it was unusable to us. Here are the three things they did wrong.

1. They sent mixed messages.
The back of the envelope said, “A special offer just for you.” Teh front read, “To the Dickey Family - or current resident.” OK. Which is it, a special offer just for us or a generic offer for anyone who happened to open the envelope? Don’t assume your audience is stupid and won’t notice things like this.

2. They sent the mailing Bulk Rate.
Direct mail is generally sent one of two ways: first class or bulk rate. First class is more expensive, but is processed and delivered right away. The post office makes no guarantees, but first class mail generally arrives in 2-5 days. Bulk rate is less expensive, but can take longer since it does not get priority processing. In all honesty, bulk rate is a great way to send a direct mailing and is recommended if arrival time is not an issue or if you’re mailing well in advance. However, bulk rate can take two weeks or more to deliver. Not a good choice if you’ve got a call-to-action in your direct mailing, especially if the deadline is looming large. If your direct mail campaign has a specific time component - an “act by” or event date, bulk rate mail is a gamble and a bad idea. It can lead to your direct mail recipient saying…

3. They delivered the piece too late.
Yup, our direct mail piece arrived three days after the week-long sales event had ended. I don’t know what happened, if it was late art, delayed client approval, a data file or mail fulfillment snafu, bulk rate mail delay or simply a misdirected letter. As a consumer, I really don’t care. In fact, the discount card they included with the letter may have still been usable, but I didn’t look and didn’t care. Their message int he letter was, “Come celebrate our birthday with savings and specials this one week.” That time period had passed. Their expensive mail piece was D.O.A. - only landfill material as far as I was concerned. What a shame.

Bonus takeaways to help you with your direct mailing:

• Plan your direct mail campaign early and pad your schedule to allow for unforeseen incidents. They will happen!
• Have a “Call to Action” in your mailing. Ask for the sale and ask for it now. Open-ended offers tend to be ignored. “I’ll take advantage of that later if I have the time.”
• If you have a limited time the customer must act within, mail first class if you can afford it. If you don’t have time-sensitive material, mail bulk rate and save the money.

I’d like to know more about you. What are your interests? Who do you admire? Tell me something about yourself. I really want to know.

Are you shy? How about if I break the ice and go first?

My name is Darrin Dickey. I live just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. My main interests are entrepreneurism, marketing and history. I enjoy spending time with my wife and son. I like to travel (some), but don’t get much of a chance to. I like to hang out with people who know more than I do about my interests, so I can learn from them. I admire smart people who are able to keep balance in their lives and still be successful.

See? It’s not so hard. Now it’s your turn. Tell me something about yourself. If you want it to be public, you can comment on this post. If you’d rather you can e-mail me at darrin (at) brandingfire (dot) com. I can also be found at LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Come “Friend” me!

Here’s one that definitely needs to be filed under “It’s a Small World”. I recently blogged about how Which Wich feels the love from their customers. In a very cool move, the president and founder of Which Wich, Jeff Sinelli, commented on the post about how they LOVE their customers. He also pointed me to their blog, which I had to check out.

You see, I’ve loved Which Wich since they opened up their local store. I keep two of their sandwich bags on my desk (I know, I’m strange). Once is from one of my first sandwiches there. The other is one with franchise information. I won’t be getting into a franchise anytime soon, but I really love the place and the concept and was enamored to learn more about them. I even read articles on Mr. Sinelli and hoped to meet him some day, to at least say hello and thanks.

My chance may come soon. When I read the Which Wich blog I saw a post about getting a free t-shirt. Since free is my favorite price, they had my attention. I read that someone had set out on an adventure to have all 51 varieties of Which Wich. The shock came when I realized I know the “someone“. Chris and I worked together at the same company for two years.

Here’s the really cool thing: Jeff Sinelli, or someone on his team, apparently has alerts in places like Google so that he’s notified whenever someone writes about Which Wich on the Internet. (Hint: If you’re not doing this, do it TODAY!) That means Mr. Sinelli can find people who are hot for his restaurant and fan that passion into a roaring fire. It also means he can head off customers’ troubles and deal with them immediately… and personally. Mr. Sinelli found out about Chris’s adventure and called Chris to support him in his endevor.

The Which Wich folks have even created this limited edition t-shirt (scarcity = demand) in honor of Chris (love your customers) and have offered them free to customers (love your customer… and collect their contact info). In addition, Jeff Sinelli and some of his team will be traveling to Nashville, TN to have lunch with Chris and 50 of his closest friends (love your customer, event marketing… & good PR) to celebrate. This is all such freakin’ great marketing that I almost can’t stand it. But it’s not normal, everyday, ooh-I-feel-icky, fake marketing. This is passion-for-your-brand, love-your-customers, open-the-lines-of-communication, un-ordinary marketing. I’ll be at that lunch, and I just want to shake Mr. Sinelli’s hand and say, “You and your team are awesome!” And to Chris Thomas I say, “Congrats on being the first one into The 51 Club!”

Now, I ask again, do your customers love you that much? Do you love them that much?

BTW, just found out the shirts are all gone.

Are you confused by the meaning of Web 2.0? Don’t feel bad. I think lots of people out there are. They might have a vague idea that it means something new on the Internet, but they’re not quite sure what. Truth be told, there’s not an “official” definition, but there is a generally accepted one. If you want to read the long definition, go to this Wikipedia entry.

Here’s a quick overview of what we mean when we use the term: Web 2.0 is simply the Internet taken to a collaborative/conversational level. The original World Wide Web allowed you to put up a website and communicate with the world. However, it didn’t really allow the world to communicate back easily or directly. Forums helped some, but they just weren’t enough.

Enter Web 2.0! Around 2003-2004, new web applications started to emerge that would help users of the Internet connect and communicate in a more immediate and fulfilling manner. The conversion of large numbers of users to broadband connection helped to fan the flames. Users could suddenly start adding information to websites instead of simply reading them. Good examples are Wikipedia, eBay, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and mySpace and Facebook.

What does this mean for the history-based organization? It means there’s a whole new world of possibilities to tell your stories. And at the moment, almost no one in this space is using them. What do you want to tell the world? Maybe we can offer some new ideas on how to do it. Add a comment to this post or give us a holler.