Apparently, even the former marketing director at Facebook (and sister of Mark Zuckerberg) gets blindsided by Facebook’s privacy settings from time to time.
Update: My favorite take on this story yet: Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About `Human Decency’ and if you’re curious about the details of Facebook privacy settings, Marketingland has a nice write up on the details: How Facebook Tagging Helped Make Randi Zuckerberg’s “Private” Photo Go Public
While the terms of service changes (and reversals) over at Instagram didn’t bother me much (they probably should have bothered me more), the changes did inspire me to have a few conversations around where original content should live.
It seems the WordPress mobile posting and syndication tools have come a long way in the past few years I want to see what it would mean to have my blog be the primary source for my content.
With that in mind, over the next few weeks, my plan is to think “blog first” whenever I feel inspired to share a link or post a photo and see what that looks like when implemented… For those of you who follow along, hope you enjoy the ride!
I’ve had a blast over the past year putting together the CredibilityLIVE events with our team at DandB team. We’ve been able to bring some great guests to our small business community including:
As I prepare for this Thursday’s event with Brian Tracy (How to Overcome Professional Obstacles and Grow your Business), I’ve been thinking (and documenting) the different pieces that go into creating a successful interactive video event… and thought it might be interesting to share some marketing and production tips that go into making a successful event. .
Marketing/Promotion
Of course, getting people to show up for an event is not as easy as you might think, even for free events with great guests. So what have we been doing that works?
With each event, we always look for our strengths. Does the guests bring a natural audience? Is it something that would appeal to the DandB email database? Is this something we can get people excited about through social outreach and/or social ads? Is there anything unique we can bring to the marketing?
For example, for this upcoming event, Brain Tracy recorded an intro video. Because he has a great studio at his offices, this was a no-brainer for his team to create and I think makes a great case for joining us:
This was a great “extra” piece of marketing we did for this last event and something I know we’ll do more of in the future! Of course, developing the marketing/promotion plan is not all that hard… It’s all about executing to get people to show up and that’s something that should never be discounted!
Productions
The production behind these events isn’t trivial either… especially as our events have grown we’ve increased the quality of each event as we’ve progressed. While early events were recorded over Skype, our last round have all been done in studios… most done with multiple cameras, teleprompters, green screens and often streamed on location!
The real trick with the production of a live-streaming event is to test, test and test some more. Test (and retest) the upload speed of the internet connection. If you’re running multiple cameras, test that your “hub” can handle it during event settings. If there’s natural lighting involved, make sure to test the lighting at the time when you’ll be streaming. If you’re in running a green screen, test what everyone is going to be wearing. During a live event, you can’t always know what’s going to go wrong, but at least you can minimize the chances of technical problems if you test, test and test some more!
While running a live video event isn’t trivial, it also isn’t nearly as complex as you might expect. I’ve got some great software (Wirecast) that runs on my Macbook Pro and can create quality video shots (including shots from multiple cameras, screen grabs and more) and push them directly to our streaming service providers (some popular ones are LiveStream, uStream and Justin.tv). Throw in a tool like Facebook’s Live Stream that lets people chat in real time while watching the video and you’ve got yourself a very compelling set up!
The best part of these events really is the interaction with prominent educators, thought leaders and business executives. It’s always fun to see where the audience is going to take a conversation!
Hope that gives just a taste of some of the marketing and production work that goes into creating our events. If you haven’t seen one of our live events, then definitely sign up to attend our next event with Brian Tracy. He’s a great speaker and we’ll be running it out of his studios near San Diego, so there’s sure to be tons of great value (and did I mention it’s free?)…
Earlier today, I gave a talk to DandB employees where I shared what they should know about Facebook Timeline.
I got some great questions (and feedback) from the folks who showed up and the talk inspired my latest blog post on the Credibility Insights: 5 Things to Check Before Making Your Facebook Timeline Public.
(and thanks to Jess for taking the photo!)
I may have been a bad blogger here at 4realz over the past few months, but have been working away on some projects with the Dun & Bradstreet Credibility team that are just now coming to fruition… and so I thought I’d share some of what’s been keeping me so busy. While working with D&B Credibility, I’ve hired a social media outreach team, created and updated numerous social media profiles (such as our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and WordPress accounts), helped develop strategies with the business development team, played numerous ping-pong games, and spearheaded a project that’s near and dear to me: CredibilityLIVE.
Built based on my experience running Spinnio events, we designed CredibilityLIVE to be a series of monthly events where business owners will get a chance to learn from experts on issues around credit and credibility. I’ve had the chance to have extended discussions with our first three speakers: John Assaraf, Robert Berkman and Paul Chaney, and can positively say that they’re all fascinating people who will be sure to host informative and interesting conversations!
To take part in the first event with John Assaraf, you need only show up at CredibilityLIVE at 11am PST and use the Facebook chat widget to ask questions!
Interestingly, organizing this series has been a lot more time consuming than any Spinnio endeavor to date… and included rebuilding the platform from the ground up. The new platform has all the stuff you’d expect from a company like D&B Credibility, with an integrated registration system, white labeled video streaming, well thought out watermark design, and a top-notch marketing/PR campaign… (plus lots of testing!).
There are already over 600 people registered for the first (FREE) event with John Assaraf where he’s going to be talking about how business owners can use the latest in brain research to help reach their potential! Please, please consider joining us and if you know someone who would be interested, don’t hesitate to invite them! (It’s free, remember!)
By the way, for some interesting insight into what’s got me so excited to be working with the Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp team, check out this interview with CEO Jeff Stibel by Ben Kuo of SoCal Tech. In the interview, Jeff gives a nice overview of the process of raising $200M to buy and grow the small business unit of D&B and the crazy hiring going on out of our Malibu office.
*** UPDATED ***
Even better than the slideshare presentations, NAR just published the video recording of my Getting Started with WordPress presentation. If you’re interested in learning about why and how to get involved in using WordPress for your business website, I did my best to explain here:
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It’s been a busy few weeks since returning from New Orleans and I’m just now getting around to posting my presentations on Slideshare.
I was pleasantly surprised at the interest in my talk on social media optimization… It was one of my simpler presentations as I focused on only two concepts:
Here’s the presentation in full:
The second presentation was the opening session for the Real Estate WordPress Camp that I helped organize with NAR… and what a great event that turned out to be. Some great speakers and I heard nothing but great feedback from the audience. My presentation for this event was really just meant to describe how professionals can use WordPress as their online marketing hub… and in particular how it can fit into the various elements of an agent’s business cycle. Here it is:
Interestingly, in the last few days, I’ve started to nail down more than a few speaking engagements for this upcoming spring. I’m always interested in educating professionals on how to get the most value out of their online marketing, so if you know of someone looking for a speaker, don’t hesitate to reach out!
[by the way, the header image is from Reggie and NikNik’s great presentation during Real Estate WordCamp on Leveraging WordPress Plugins and Themes]
Check out the SEO article I just posted on socaltech: 21 Strategies for Generating Irresistible SEO Benefits (and add to the conversation!)
The BuzzRE OC event was so awesome… I met so many great people and the speakers came through with awesome presentations. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to join us!
Some of the highlights were:
And it all couldn’t have happened without Linsey Planeta putting a ridiculous amount of time and passion into the day. She rocks!
One of the things I most enjoyed about helping to organize BuzzRE was organizing the presentations… I had every speaker email me their presentation in advance so I could fit them into one solid presentation that didn’t feel like it was jumping around too much. I’m pretty darn proud of the final product and super-happy to share it with you via slideshare.
What a great day! It really is awesome to see so many folks get excited about implementing advanced strategies and websites. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out this page of advanced real estate websites.
And after such an awesome event, it’s now time to turn to organizing another awesome BuzzRE in Portland in early June. Want to get involved? Let us know!
If you have feedback about yesterday’s event, I know all of us would sure would love to hear it!
Super-sweet!
The HomeQuest Team just launched a WordPress plugin that adds Facebook’s new Like button to every one of your blog posts! SWEET!
You can download it (free!) here: http://u.pdat.es/ejprq
It’s really easy to use. I added it to both 4realz.net and Rain City Guide in under 5 minutes…
Here’s what it looks like on RCG after a few folks have hit the like button on an article:
Here’s what I did to add it to both sites:
That’s all! Now Facebook’s Like button will be displayed at the bottom of every blog post.
Test it out here:
Yesterday, Jeff let me know how Facebook launched the “like” button yesterday and a bunch of other social plugins, and it’s been a non-stop conversation around the M Realty office this morning.
The default “like” button didn’t work so well within my P2 theme, but I was able to get the recommendation plugin working with almost no effort at all… and it rocks!
It not only shows the number of folks who are sharing each article on my site, but will make personalized recommendations to you for articles based on the articles that you’re friends are sharing! So slick!
To get it launched on 4realz.net, all I had to do was
It’s so darn easy, I decided to post it in this blog post!
![[updated] NAR Presentations on WordPress and Social Media Optimization](http://dustinluther.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/reggie-and-niknik-940x198.jpg)