Disney Social Media Moms – Chris Brogan

We’re back from lunch, and many of us had our pictures taken with Duffy the Bear, and we had little stuffed Duffy bears at our seats. Star Wars music… Minnie Mouse as Princess Leia just joined us. (My husband would love this.) Last summer, Star Tours went offline. Hot off the presses – Star Tours: The Adventure Continues back with more characters and more Star Wars fun! It re-opens on May 20. (Do we get a sneak peek? Please?)

Chris Brogan is back this year with the same Zulu greeting as last year. “I see you” is what it means. Seeing someone and recognizing what they do is so much more than the nebulous terms people use to describe social media.

Chris says he won’t be answering any questions about Facebook privacy settings. “That ship has sailed.” He says that Matt had some really great information earlier, but all he could think of was, “Which one was he in the movie?” Confession: I did the same thing.

What’s important is the way you face the chairs. You don’t want to make yourself the center of attention, but rather the catalyst for making things happen. Ask yourself “Why?” Because “how?” is the most boring question to answer. You can get someone else to do that. Ask yourself “Why?” a hell of a lot. It can stop you from doing dumb things all the time. He says it’s the opposite of what Fran was saying earlier. Her saying yes all the time has gotten her through some amazing doors, like swimming with manatees and signing books on the tops of mountains. His  doors usually open up to him doing things he doesn’t want to do.

We are all in the business of customer service now. Those of us who want to know how to monetize their sites need to stop thinking that “sales” is evil.

There is recurring values to adding service to other people. The verb “do” is very important. Business comes from trying new things.

Play is important, but make sure you’re taking care of your business. Read “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal about why video games are better for us than we thought they were. (So there’s hope for my World of Warcraft habit?) There was no magic in that old silk that they found. The magic was in the work they put into it. Keep asking yourself “What next?” Take those chips into a more difficult game. Don’t let yourself coast. “I hope there’s a special hell for knock knock joke makers. Especially that banana guy.”

Attention is currency. How do you get attention? You have to give it to get it. Leave comments on blogs. DON’T sign comments with your URL at the end because it makes you look jerky. (He grants absolution to anyone who has done it in the past if they stop doing it now.) Help raise people up; don’t be like the crabs in the bucket that pull each other back down. The mom blog sphere is unique in its cattiness. Guess what? Brands aren’t going to want to work with you if you’re crapping on other people. Brands aren’t going to want to work with the bitch.

Be the go-to person. Be the connector. Be the elbow of every deal.

“I don’t know what this note means, so I’m going to skip it.” Like “underwater fish,” a blog topic he intended to write about, but he had no idea what it meant.

Always start with YOU. Make YOU whole first. Put your oxygen mask on first; that’s a good life lesson. You have to save YOU before you can save other people. You can only carry so many people on your back.

He just sang, “If you liked it, you should’ve put a ring on it.” LOL

Then start with the “other YOUs.” He wants to learn about YOU. The YOU turns into commYOUnity. (Yep, I like that.) Chris says he takes business cards from trash cans for a living.

About Facebook taking your stuff. Your blog is your home base. But places like Facebook are your outposts. Put a call to action in your outposts that relates to your revenue stream. Walmart and the mafia are the ones who’ve really get distribution. You really want distribution. You have to figure out a new way to monetize than ad clicks. Comments are not currency anymore. Facebook likes are also currency. Social sharing is a great way to get a bigger audience. Chris gets somewhere between 400-500 new followers every time he tweets hip hop lyrics because people are like, “Wow, he likes Kanye West?”

Chris is not a Foursquare fan. It does fit into the whole “I see you” thing, though. He doesn’t know what “the next Twitter” is, but he knows it’s not Foursquare.

93% of people have opt-in relationships via email, compared to 15% with Facebook and 4% with Twitter. Email marketing is alive and well – if you do it right. HTML-formatted email no longer works in the iPhone age.

He wants Groupon with lightsabers.

“I’m going to talk about CRAP now.”

• Connections – Work on your network every day.
• Referrals – If we need to see more business, we need those referrals.
• Attention/Awareness – You have to be everywhere doing really great things.
• Presence – Be places. Be online. Be ready and consume. Have content moving all the time.

How often should you blog? Well, how much attention do you want? “We have ADD, don’t we?” [pause] “We have ADD, don’t we? Squirrel!”

Money. People are weird talking about money. People are willing to talk about how broke they are, but they aren’t willing to talk about how much they want to be making. We don’t talk about our goals for it. (Honestly? I want enough money to buy a bigger house, Chris. At least $250,000. Can you help me with that?)

By the way, Chris makes $4,500 a month – three times his mortgage – on something that was a whim, selling lists of blog topics for $9.97/month.

“My bank doesn’t care what my Klout score is.”

Implement wptouch, a mobile translation plugin that will make your blog look better on mobile phones.

With six minutes left, he’s talking about time management. He writes himself notes on his “myPad,” a 3×5 card. Stop saying YES to things. Stop keeping all of those extra tabs open on your browser; they’re not working as well as you think they are. You’re not going to focus. (Yep, every time that little (1) pops up on my Facebook tab, I always click over. Did it about 20 minutes ago.)

“How I make content.” He writes blog posts in 20-40 minutes. Good enough is good enough. Don’t waste 5 hours trying to make it perfect. (Chris, I’ll make sure all of your commas and semicolons are in the right place. I do care about typos.)

Question time.

Chris still stands by not feeding your blog posts directly into your Twitter RSS. Customize your message so you’re tweeting more than just your blog titles.

Don’t tweet, FB, and LinkedIn the same exact message at the same time. People who follow you in one place probably follow you in the other places, and some of them will get irritated and decide to stop following you on some of those platforms.

Oh, and don’t have 72 social sharing buttons. Stick to one or two. All you really need are the Facebook Like button and the RT this button.

Don’t let yourself get discouraged. It took Chris eight years to get his  first 100 readers. He started in 1998 back when it was called “journaling.” (Me too! Livejournal FTW!) He also likes commenting on “virgin blogs” that have no comments.

Prospect for new customers all the time. Don’t stop blogging for yourself even if you’re doing so much for other people. Clients and customers go away, so make sure you always have new ones. Shake things up with a video post once in a while. (I did that recently. There’s the sad one and the happy one. What did you guys think about that?)

YouTube is the #2 search site in the world. You need to have a YouTube presence. Look into TubeMogul for putting your video out there in multiple places. Brevity is key. Don’t do “throat-clearing” in your video. Editing is good manners. “The audio is more important than the video.” (Yeah, I need to work on that.) He puts his  videos on his blog to keep the conversation there. He doesn’t pay any attention to vicious YouTube commenters, because most of them are 12 or 13 years old with nothing better to do.

Why does Chris like forums so much? They are less threatening than Facebook and Twitter. The technology works on every platform. Information threads let every voice appear.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.