Shane Life

I got interviewed on Monday by Whitney at Spiral16 about some of the exciting projects I’ve been working on in the four months since I joined Cerner. It’s the start of a series that S16 is doing on their blog about people who work with social media every day, but don’t work for strategy or analysis agencies. It was exciting and nerve-racking to represent my employer this way, but I’m really pleased with how it all came out.

The interview is 16 minutes, but it’s all great stuff. [Spiral16 is] trying out a program that records Skype phone conversations, which explains the ugly watermark on the video.

If you interested in learning what I’ve been up to since I joined the Kansas City-based healthcare company, give it a watch. I talk about our exciting new social network uCern, our efforts in Second Life and getting involved in social media at a large corporation. If you’re not interested, well…

Just for fun, I thought that  I would try to post something new every day in May. It wasn’t a part of any official NaBloPoMo or anything, but here we are on May 31 and I’ve got 30 posts up.

I’ve had some decent posts and some bad ones.

But I did it.

Possible upcoming topics for June:

• Another redesign
• Another post inspired by Micah Baldwin about My Greatest Moment
• A review of Phoenix in June (preview: it’s hot)
• Summer movie reviews (seriously looking forward to seeing Up, Transformers 2, GI Joe)

What would you like to see or read?

Kansas City with the Russian Accent’s Meesha V. caused quite an uproar in the social media community with his post this week that lambasted the case study that Kansas City social media tracking company Spiral 16 did regarding the blogger preview of AMC’s Fork & Screen.

I’ve got a lot invested in this one. Not only did I attend the blogger preview (and blogged about it here), but I have made friends with AMC’s Justin Gardner, Spiral 16’s Whitney Mathews (who wrote the original and completely unattributed case study that Meesha liberally lifted from in his post) and other bloggers who attended the event.

There are always going to be people like Meesha who believe that as marketers we should just leave some things alone. That may be true. But I cannot fault Justin or AMC for trying something new when it comes to marketing to this demographic. The world that we live in has changed significantly over the last two years. Twitter (where Justin originally reached out to the KC Twitterati) has experienced 1,382% growth from February of last year to February of 2009. Facebook, which was already huge, still grew a staggering 228% during the same time period. Social media is the new word of mouth. Marketers who do not figure out how to be a part of the conversation are going to be left in the dust.

Tools like those that Spiral 16 provides are helping those of us in social media and online marketing to help measure results and show value to the people that we report to. Folks like Meesha may not like that, but it’s an important part of the process. One of the beauties of social media is that you have the ability to unsubscribe, unfollow, unfriend someone if you don’t want to hear from them. There’s also always the beautiful “Mark as Read” button. But exercises like AMC’s with bloggers and the Fork & Screen are going to continue to happen. I need only point to Universal Studios notifying seven people about the new Harry Potter Theme Park and getting it viewed by over 350 million people within 24 hours. That’s the power of social media to marketers. Traditional advertising and marketing isn’t working as effectively anymore and so we are looking to new avenues to find our customers.

For the last year or so, I’ve been a part of the Social Media Club of Kansas City, a group of bloggers, marketers, and ad folks who get together on a semi-monthly basis to talk about the challenges and pitfalls of this new online world that we’re dealing with. Speaking with some folks at Friday’s breakfast about this post and what it implicates was interesting. Accusations of “shilling” don’t sit well with me, especially since I’ve gone back to the Fork & Screen time and time again, paying full price each time because I like the experience. Others may not. That’s their opinion. But to accuse people of “shilling” just because they got a free movie…that’s attacking my credibility. I’ve always done my best to be myself on this blog and in person. Pensive Girl hit it on the head yesterday:

be yourself. be true to who you are in real life. the digital space is just an extention of you. don’t foreget this. don’t be fooled by how easy it is to just say whatever you want to say and “be” whoever you want to be. don’t use the digital space as a platform for creating the person you are not strong enough to be in the real world. be you. becuase if someone gets to know you this way. through your tweets and your blog and your thoughts. and if this person then meets you in real life, and you’re nothing like your blog or your tweets or whatnot, there is a huge disconnect between who you really are.

Now that part of my job is applying my knowledge of the web and social media to a large organization like Cerner, I only see the crossover between personal and business becoming more pronounced. This may rub some people the wrong way. But there are some of those people who use “online monikers” and “web personalities” and even their participation in social media isn’t entirely genuine.

The challenge as a marketer like myself who also uses the web as a personal outlet is to always remain authentic. Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that there’s no difference between the real-life me, @shaneomack, Shane Life blogger, and the corporate marketer I am. In fact, for anyone to suggest otherwise is insulting.

I know. I know.

I’ve been completely absent from the blog lately. I haven’t had much to say in long form. But you can follow me on Twitter. I blasted past 4,000 tweets a couple days ago.

I promise I’ll bring it back to the blog. I just need to have something to say.

I detailed my experience at the AMC Best Picture Showcase already, but one thing that I didn’t talk about was how I got to hang out with some other bloggers and twitterers during the day and even shot a video with JJ and Jeff for (jeff)isageek.net. I show up about 3 minutes in…

Web designers around the world swoon every advent season when Drew McClellan puts up his 24 ways and this year was no exception. With a sexy new design from Made By Elephant, 24 Ways was back with great new tools and an extra special gift under the tree for visitors to the site using a browser that supported the CSS3 spec — opacity.

The subtlety of 24 ways use of alpha channels combined with the release of Wordpress 2.7 (which proudly powers this site) inspired me to take a more comprehensive crack at a new blog design. Feed readers, I know you probably don’t care much about what I’ve done here, but it took me much longer than I had imagined. Converting those hex colors I wanted to use for my scheme into the more complex RGB colors was arduous, but if you visit my site now with a newer browser (Firefox 3 or Safari are preferred, although Google Chrome should work), you should get the full translucent experience.

I’ve also taken Derek Powazek’s advice to embrace my bottom by pushing some of that sidebar stuff to the bottom of the page. I’ve lost all the links from the sidebar…I plan on adding a page of just links to the blogs that I read, but for now, I hope you’ll manage without my referral links.

You’ll also notice at right the many other places you might find me online. I use Twitter more than any of them. Some of the others I’ve signed up for more with the intention of seeing what they were about than anything else.

Anyway, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the new design. Especially if they confirm my awesomeness.

Now, on to the next project…

Through some Wordpress trickery and a nifty hosting maneuver, I was able to successfully switch my full Wordpress install from my prior topfivedesign.com sub-domain to my new, sexy TLD, shanelife.com. After going back-and-forth several times as to whether I should migrate to Tumblr, I decided it was best for me to stick with what I know and continue rocking Wordpress, the wonderful Automattic software I’ve been using since January of 2006.

Feed readers aren’t going to see a bit of difference. Since I run my RSS feed through Feedburner, it was an easy switch.

I’m almost certain to lose some of my readership and it’s possible that I’ll lose some of my advertising, but honestly, I don’t really care. I like the domain too much not to use it and there’s no going back now.

If you link to this blog, I’d be super duper appreciative if you’d update your links.

A redesign is forthcoming, but that might take a while.

This morning — at the invitation of my friend, Steve — I attended a KU Professional Edge Breakfast Seminar at the Edwards Campus called, Blogging Down to Business: When/Where Mass Communication Gets Personal presented by this guy, Dr. David D. Perlmutter (his blog), a so-called expert on the subject. After all, he did write a book with the word “blog” in the title…

The problem is that Perlmutter’s book was about political blogging, while I actually attended the seminar to hear about business blogging. And Perlmutter spent the first 40 minutes of the hour introducing the group to the history of blogging (heavily focused on its basis in the political realm) rather than spending any extended period of time discussing the practical application of blogging in business.

Now, it’s true, I probably know more about the subject than Perlmutter, I know that many in the audience did not. I attended the seminar because of the invite from Steve as well as out of curiosity. However, Perlmutter’s presentation was littered with self-aggrandizement (he showed video of himself on the Daily Show) and just plain WHA? moments where I failed miserably to see how what he was talking about had ANYTHING to do with the subject. I couldn’t ignore it.

The worst part was that in his attempts at impressing us, he went over his time and left out 8 slides at the end that actually might have saved the presentation — case studies on uses of blogging in different industries. TIME MANAGEMENT FAIL.

So here’s what I’m offering…my simple 9-point plan to blogging for business:

1. Have a purpose. It can be as simple as “to increase the keyword-rich content on our site”, but just make sure that you know what your purpose is and always refer to it when writing.
2. Be compelling and write well. If your content sucks, there’s no point in having a corporate blog. Have something compelling to say or don’t say it at all. And when you do say it, make sure it’s run through a spell-checker. Some browsers have built-in spellcheckers, but they don’t catch everything. It’s not hard to proofread and it’s worth the extra step.
3. Host it yourself. For the love of God, don’t pretend a Blogger or Wordpress.com account is actually hosted by your company. People who consume news this way on a regular basis (read: nerds like me) will see right through it. Not only that, but it’s lazy and cheap, two things you typically don’t want to be associated with unless you are Walmart.
4. Integrate it into your overall site. Link to it from the home page. Make it fit. This may require the use of a Web designer, but it’s worth it. Ahem.
5. Encourage dialogue. The format of blogging encourages dialogue (for more on that dialogue and how it relates to design, read Jason Santa Maria’s excellent article). Make sure your customers have the ability to comment. It allows them to feel invested in the conversation. If you are doing a good job with your customer service, your comments shouldn’t be too negative.
6. Do your research. There’s nothing worse than a company that blatantly lies on its official blog. Slightly less bad is being easily proven wrong with a simple Google search. That means you should always cite your sources.
7. Link liberally. And don’t launch a new window. That’s what the back button is for. If your writing is compelling and your information useful, readers will return.
8. Test before launching. If there’s one thing that really grinds my gears, it’s people who only test their sites in their browser of choice. I hate Internet Explorer as much as the next guy, but I always test in it. Internet Explorer still accounts for over 70% of browser usage, so you cannot discount it yet.
9. Stick to the schedule. You don’t have to post daily (although that would be great), but you should post at least once or twice a week. Schedule your posts so your customers know when new content will appear. (Side note: if you don’t publish an RSS feed for your readers to subscribe to, don’t even bother with a blog.)

These are all suggestions. I’d like to hear yours.

I made it through NaBloPoMo!

Posting every day is tough. I don’t know where some people find the time to do it. But I managed to make it through with only a little filler. I feel good about how I’ve done for the last month…I talked plenty about the Chiefs, Top Chef, my dog, my upcoming plans for this blog, I reviewed a couple movies, I shared some pictures of me and my buddies playing football on Saturday, and I even shared a sermon.

Today marks the end of another November. I spoke at church today on the same day that my niece was being blessed with 6 other children. I was very honored to be a part of the service today and I felt good about my message. I got some nice compliments from folks afterward, which always feels good.

For December, I’d look for a possible move to ShaneLife.com. I’ll keep this space active for a while if I do move and the feed won’t change, but I’ll probably change the layout as well.

Have a great last few hours of the long weekend!