The Steve Rubel Stream

16 Jun 2010

Obsession + Topic + Voice = Content

Marco Arment captures how John Gruber and Merlin Mann consistently create compelling online content...

Gruber says that when he’s writing Daring Fireball, he’s picturing his ideal reader — a copy of himself — and conceptually writing just for him. With everything he writes, he’s writing to and for that one ideal reader, not trying to boost his SEO for target phrases or appeal to an ever broadening demographic.

Simple formula, but it's rare people follow their interests so obsessively that they want to create content around it. Be that guy or gal before someone else is. Walk in the footsteps of giants. Give a listen to the full podcast that Marco links to as well. It's worth the hour spent. #

16 Jun 2010

Finding the Write Words with Data

1st Web Designer on finding the right keyword:

1. Define the keywords that people use to find your business
2. Find out how many people are actually using the keywords you have selected
3. Define your competition and make sure the keywords you have chosen are relevant
4. Finding the best keywords
5. Breaking keywords into pages

Great advice. But swap out the word website and substitute any content that ends up online - blog posts, videos, press releases, journalism. Everyone who aims to be creating findable stuff needs to sweat the data.

#

1 Jan 2010

Three Ideas to Rock Your 2010 Part I: Correspond to Connect

Happy New Year and welcome to the next decade - "the teenies," as some in the UK are calling it. Today is great day to take inventory and think about what you want to accomplish in the new year - or even the new decade. Over the next three days I will cover a few ideas that anyone can ride to new heights in 2010 and beyond. These can help you no matter what line of work you're in. Of course, given my world view, they apply most to those interested in social media, marketing and communications. Here's the first...

Correspond to Connect

Thomas Jefferson's polygraph was used to keep identical copies of the 20,000 letters he wrote in is life. (Photograph by Jim Merithew/Wired.com via "Tommy J’s Crib Is 18th Century Palace of Gadget Geekery")

In 2010 to succeed as individuals and businesses we need to embrace connecting with people globally on three levels: one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many. As dancer Twyla Tharp describes in her new book The Collaborative Habit, great work comes through collaboration. Success requires thinking and acting on all three levels. And it means listening too.

Today Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and the next big things in connecting socially will allow us to innovate in how we connect with stakeholders, colleagues and friends - and on all three levels. But some things never go out of style. I get more email than ever - and I love it. Businesses should too. Connecting offline remains important. Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls this Management by Flying Around. So my advice is in 2010 vow to correspond to connect as much as you realistically can.

Need inspiration? How about Thomas Jefferson. Sure he connected with and inspired millions with the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But he also answered his mail thousands of letters - connecting with countless others. He even devised a clever polygraph machine to keep copies of all correspondence.

From the Monticello web site...

"From sun-rise to one or two o'clock," he noted, "I am drudging at the writing table." Jefferson wrote almost 20,000 letters in his lifetime, among them, scholarly musings to colleagues, affectionate notes to his family, and civil responses to admirers. He wrote John Adams that he suffered "under the persecution of letters," calculating that he received 1,267 letters in the year 1820, "many of them requiring answers of elaborate research, and all to be answered with due attention and consideration."

This year, vow not to lose sight of the art and importance of daily correspondence. Reach out to new people - even those you don't agree with or those in other countries. Solicit and share new ideas.

As for me, I try to answer any correspondence that deserves a response. Sometimes it takes me time but I do so on three levels: my one-to-one communications (email and Twitter direct messages), one-to-few (Facebook comments, Twitter replies, etc.) and one-to-many (blog comments, interview requests, etc.) I also reach out to new people as well who I want to get to know better. Don't begrudge the volume of communications, focus on it - but the right messages.

Wouldn't it be great if organizations and the people who work for them all aspired to live the same, just as Jefferson did.

6 Dec 2009

Taking Brainstorming to the Twitter Hive

Jeff Kirvin is open sourcing his novel by turing to Twitter (the hive) to help. I bet this will become even more common going forward...

"But because I was too close to the source material, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. So I asked Twitter.
jeffkirvin
How would you kill something that had nanites in its blood that repair damage (injuries, aging) almost as fast as they happen? #research"

Link: Brainstorming with the hive mind on jeffkirvin.net

29 Nov 2009

A Social Network for Wordies

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. Clearly, it's intimately tied to what I do. But sometimes it's also a fear that grips me. I struggle to find the right words, which result in my re-using the same ones over and over again (doh - like the word "over.")

Hacks and tools help clear my thinking so I can write. This is why I am a fan of Mindmanager and WriteRoom (Mac/iPhone) and WriteMonkey (for Windows). But I haven't found a tool yet until now that can replace a good thesaurus - every writer's best friend - by taking a new approach.

Enter Wordnik, a great reference I just stumbled on. It's for people who love or (at least need to live with) words. Unlike a static reference, Wordnik is made for the real-time web. Each word page of course offers the usual in the way of definitions, but Wordnik goes a step further by pulling in images from Flickr and the latest tweets.

Here's the most interesting part, though. Wordnik is also a social network for words. If you login with Facebook Connect you can favorite words, comment on them and more. I have no idea what the business model is but Wordnik raised $3.7M in financing - even during the Great Recession. The site's approach has me hooked so I am rooting for them to grow so that they can become a more comprehensive resource.

Obsession + Topic + Voice = Content

Finding the Write Words with Data

Three Ideas to Rock Your 2010 Part I: Correspond to Connect

Taking Brainstorming to the Twitter Hive

A Social Network for Wordies

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