Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Pot, Kettle, Black

Kurt Greenbaum is the director of social media for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In a recent post, he mentioned how he’d been pro-active at contacting the employers of someone who left a vulgar comment on a blog post. The person in question resigned.

The flak started flying in in the subsequent comments, and Greenbaum refuted he stepped over-the-mark, maintaining that the comment had been vulgar.

Hmm… pot, kettle, black, anyone? Or is it okay to be abusive yourself about an “abuser” whose job you played a part in taking away..?

Hollow Victories

We’ve been brainwashed into thinking the materialistic matters, but without those that matter to share with the materialistic is hollow.

Do we really need to send that final email? Make that last phone call before calling it a night?

There will always be jobs for those that want to work. It may not be the jobs that we want, but they will be there. Loved ones… not so much.

Don’t let your victories be hollow.

Blogging, Transformer Gloves and Integrated Solutions

In preparation for the upcoming winter fest, my wife bought me some Thinsulate gloves. These things are the coolest ever – transforming gloves!

Basically they’re fingerless and have a strip of velcro attached to the back of each glove. Attached to the velcro (and sewn to the glove itself) are mitten tops.

So, I get the best of both worlds. I have driving gloves if I want them, or simply fingerless gloves if the weather’s cool but not too cold for full-on gloves. Yet when the cold snap comes in, I just flip a (velcro) switch and pull the mitten part over, and I have full gloves. Genius!

And as I flipped the Transformer glove from fingerless to full this morning, I thought of how we can transfer this to our blogs…

Make Your Blog a Transformer Glove

There’s a lot of information available at the minute, and we’re providing it to each other every day. It could be on Twitter, LinkedIn groups, PDF or ebook downloads, video uploads, Slideshare presentations and much more. Yet a lot of this is fractured.

Sure, we may offer (or receive) great information via any one of these mediums, but are we really taking advantage of what we can present and help with? Are we concentrating too much on one medium or solution and not seeing the bigger picture?

For example, are businesses offering a full solution to both consumers and partners/clients, or simply offering mouth service to one while the other chooses from the full menu? While some information needs to be kept separate, a lot doesn’t (or can be a stripped down version).

Here’s how it could work.

Integrated is Not Hard Work

Let’s say you’re a business with a new product and you need to educate both retail partners and prospective customers about all the great features and benefits. You know that social is one of the best ways to market this information, but how do you satisfy two different audiences?

You don’t – instead, you satisfy them together, as one.

Set up a blog as your information hub. This is where all the cool stuff will stem from.
Make cool video snippets about some of the best features and how to make the most of them and embed on your front page and rotate regularly.
Build relationships with expert bloggers in your product’s niche and ask them if they’d be interested in guest blogging with exclusive access to your product range. This helps cement brand loyalty and collaboration with your existing audience, who can help you grow while they, in turn, are officially recognized as product experts.
Regularly include your audience by asking what they’d like to see on the blog.
Have a Twitter account that can answer quick and easy questions from both consumers and sales reps. For more in-depth questions, direct to your blog hub.
Write up the best tips and advice into downloadable content (ebooks or slide deck presentations). Encourage sharing.
Award regular visitors and contributors with special discount offers or free samples.

See how quickly you can build up a resource centre for what is essentially two different audiences, yet can benefit from a single source point? And the single source builds itself, by allowing others to take the reins.

The Transformer Glove switch bit? That’s your behind-the-scenes area for retail only. You have all the front-end support for both customer and retail channels, but then you have a password-protected area where only retailers can sign into, for special incentives and rewards on selling your product. This information can be delivered via point-of-sale messaging or similar.

Your Transformer Glove

Even if you’re not in business, you can still make your personal blog your very own Transformer Glove with integrated solutions. Make your blog a little home from home to offer more answers about you.

If you look at my navigation menu, you’ll see I’ve added a Photos feature. These are basically my Facebook photos, but all collected here (via the Fotobook WordPress plug-in). Now, instead of having to go to Facebook to see more personal stuff, you get it here.

This offers a two-fold solution – it brings fractured networks to a single point, and it also offers a little bit more about who I am. By sharing that I enjoy photography and music, for example, I’m offering a more personal side to the business voice that might normally be found here.

If you want to use a business analogy, it’s (hopefully) building brand loyalty between provider (me) and consumer (you, the readers), just like integrated solutions for business can appeal to both consumer and client/partner channels.

Can you see the benefit of this approach? What else would you use?

photo credit: Jentymom

Navigation Made Easy with Headway 1.5 WordPress Theme

Most people know by now that I love the new Headway 1.5 premium WordPress theme. If anyone asks what theme they should go with on their blog or website, I always recommend Clay Griffiths’ theme.

Now that Headway 1.5 has been officially released, however, the real power behind it will start to show as more people start exploring its engine room. This goes for normal bloggers like me as well as hardcore developers and coders.

For example, one of the features that some WordPress theme developers are talking about is the drop-down navigation menu. This is a really useful option to let you highlight features and services that you might offer but would otherwise take up space on your navigation bar. The problem is, most other themes need you to mess with the CSS code just to enable drop-down navigation. Not Headway 1.5.

In fact, not only can you set up a drop-down nav menu, you can rearrange the tabs as you go, as well as the position of the nav menu itself. And did I mention this is all without a single drop of CSS coding? And better still, all the changes happenin front of your eyes – no need for jumping back and forth between saves to see the changes.

While content may be king, you can’t dismiss good site design and Headway 1.5 makes it simple for anyone to have the latter taken care of.

And who doesn’t like simple?

Note: This blog no longer runs on the Headway framework. Instead, it’s a custom WordPress design by Lisa Kalandjian of SceneStealer Graphics.

Disclaimer. I?ve been impressed with the Headway premium WordPress theme from the start and it?s the only theme I?ve ever set an affiliate account up with. If you?re thinking of buying Headway 1.5 and do so via any of my links, 50% of the affiliation revenue will be donated to the current 12for12k charity on your behalf.

Introducing Friday Five

Kookaburras Taking its cue a little from Twitter’s Follow Friday tradition, Friday Five offers a slightly different take. It’s still a recommendation engine, if you like, but with a wider scope.

It won’t always be the same, either. It may be a Twitter user, a Youtube channel, a blogger, a news story, a DVD you need to watch, a band you need to check out, a blog post from the archives and much more.

Look at it as a little diversion to ease you into the weekend.

Hopefully you enjoy, and if you like the idea, why not leave your suggestions in the comments? Or share your own list at your blog and link back so we can see what you’ve come up with.

Cheers!

Blogger Corner. If there’s one thing I love to do, it’s read, and most of my reading is of other blogs. One of the best out there belongs to Kneale Mann. A veritable Jack-of-all-Trades, Kneale is one of the best-kept secrets in both the blogging and marketing world. Genius, smart and warm, check out Kneale’s blog and subscribe today – you won’t be disappointed!
Twitter Inspiration. Twitter is many things – a business tool, a customer service tool, a news feed and a place to simply make friends. One of these friends is Justin Parks. Not only is he super smart when it comes to social media, he’s a fellow WordPress geek – and that is never a bad thing! Someone I need to have a beer with soon.
Audiotastic. Music is a huge part of who I am. From classic R&B to UK indie bands, Motown to punk rock and more, I can pinpoint various parts of my life by the soundtrack at the time. One of my ever-presents is a UK band called The Twang. Check out their song Cloudy Room and see what you think.
Blast from the Past. I’ve always been fascinated by inspirational stories, and I like to try and share these with you from time to time, and see how they can relate to what we’re doing today. One of these was The Little Boy That Could, which shows us that it really is only ourselves that holds us back.
Video Manana. Sometimes a video just comes along that needs no introduction other than it’s brilliant. From the British chat show Jonathan Ross, the legend that is Christopher Walken and his take on Lady Gaga’s Pokerface.

photo credit: Powerhouse Museum Collection