Have you ever heard of TechCrunch’s “Elevator Pitches?”  I had not, until yesterday afternoon when the CEO of Yovia came down from his top floor, magnificent view,  warm and cozy with an espresso machine, office and asked for my help to record a video.  Excited by the prospect of stepping away from my computer and relaxing my bloodshot and tired eyes for a moment I jumped up and followed him upstairs.

He was going to record a video to submit to TechCrunch Elevator Pitches describing Yovia.  I listened in awe at the grander picture.  Listening to him speak, I thought to myself, “He did it!  We are exactly what and where he’d always promised he would take us.”

Don’t forget to Check out the Video!

WriterRiver.com is a social news site intended for technical communicators. If you’re familiar with Digg.com, it works in much the same way. Users can submit news articles (called “stories”). Newly submitted stories initially appear on the Upcoming Stories tab. When five people float the article, it moves it to Front Page Stories tab, which is the default site view. You float the article by clicking the Float link on the blue Vote button to the left of an article.

This site is powered by Pligg.com, which is a Digg.com clone. As a long-time fan of Digg and the Diggnation podcast, Tom wanted a similar site for technical writers. He also wanted to highlight the many excellent blog posts that are being written by 200+ technical writer bloggers, and enable a news mechanism where anyone can discover cool content on the web.

Below is a little blurb about the man who created Write River Tom Johnson:

“This may sound a bit boring, but really technical communication touches many areas, such as usability, marketing, information architecture, content management, XML, Web 2.0., management, graphic design, web design, and of course just plain writing. Technical writers are often learning and working with the latest technologies. I touch upon many of these topics in my blog.”

If you would like to know more about Write River or Tom Johnson just visit his personal blog I’dratherbewriting.com.

Written By : Michelle Amos

A man on a crowded New York City Subway Train yells out to the masses,

“ Would you like $1,000,000 cash?  Please come take my $1,000,000!”

The passersby look at the man in disgust, with rolling eyes they walk past the man and never look back.  They don’t discuss the absurdity with anyone and have completely forgotten about the man by the time the train stops at their final destinations.

Another man, on the same crowded New York City Subway train stands quietly next to a middle-aged woman.  He says “Hello” to the woman when she glances over her shoulder at him.  She returns his salutation.  The man then whispers to the woman:

“I am running an experiment and happen to have $1,000,000 in my bag right now.”

The woman looks at the man in confusion.  He says,

“I’m serious I have $1,000,000 in my bag and my intention is to give it to someone on this train today.  Can you help me?”

The woman, still skeptical asks the man

“What can I do?”

The man replies,

“Simple!  All you have to do is tell one person what I have told you.””

The woman turns away from the man and tells the young gentleman standing to her right in a very low voice the same message she was just given.  When she is done she looks back to the man holding the money.

“Thank You.”  He says with a smile and a wink. “Now just watch what happens.”

Soon the man was bombarded by money hungry New Yorker City commuters. He had told only one person about the money, but that‘s all it took.  They people surround the man with inquiries.

“Where did you get the money?” one man calls out.

“Why are you giving it away?” another stranger asks.

“What kind of experiment are you running anyway?” a blonde waitress questions

An old man asks “When are you giving it away?”

“Please sir,” a scruffy transient pleads. “ I could really use that money.  My father is in the hospital and this money could save his life.”

Soon people were not only asking the man with the money questions, but they were talking amongst themselves.  The news of the giveaway spread throughout the entire subway train with rapid speed.

As marketers we have to learn to get personal.  We need to befriend our consumer audience in order to engage and sell them on our product or service.  Consumers have been abused for too long and marketers who rely on conventional advertising are becoming an endangered species.

You have to get personal.  Even with a huge motivating factor blasting the message falls only on deaf ears.  We are all too skeptical to buy into conventional marketing anymore.  What has worked in the past is no longer working, let’s evolve before we are extinct.

Remember:

Put your message out in the right way and let your consumers do the pushing.

Written By : Michelle Amos

The other day, I was involved in a rather heated, yet enlightening discussion with a dude who really hates marketing; and I don’t blame him. Here is an excerpt of one of his comments from our conversation:

“Yes, consumers want to be heard. They also want the option to NOT be annoyed by marketing. They want the option of not having to put up with marketers exploiting a medium meant for communication and turning it into one more TV commercial. Consumers should not have to spend time and effort to block marketers. Consumers do want a choice - given their druthers, most would choose to have no marketing at all.”

He was responding to a comment I made about consumers demanding to be heard online; and even as a marketer, I unequivocally agree with his assessment. In later comments, he said that he was tired of marketers like me just “talking about having conversations with consumers” and that there is way too much “talking about talking” and very little two-way communication. I agree.

A lot of marketers, including myself, talk the talk and rarely walk the walk. I often write about the need for marketers and brands to engage in “real” conversations with “real people” i.e. their customers; and I am sitting back asking myself … how the heck am I going to engage in such conversation on the internet?

It’s one thing to write about conversational marketing (and I know that some of you hate that term); but it’s another thing to actually do it. And, I agree that many marketers still don’t “get it”; and either don’t use social media as a conversational channel or use it to spam everyone. But there are some companies that realize the true value of conversations . Well, that leads me to my next point.

Are conversations really the holy grail of social media?

I think I may have been wrong with this one. Anyone can have conversations. Go to a used car lot and you will be bombarded with them the moment you step on the lot. Used car salesmen are some of the biggest spammers on the planet!

It’s the content of the conversation that is the core. It needs to be presented with a “real voice” and relevant to the other person. Isn’t that the true nature of human interaction?

Real voice, relevance = valuable conversations = trust = the beginning of a “real” relationship

Written by: Michelle Amos

The New York Times is reporting that Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial a google lead alliance.

Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.

When you have kids, you naturally censor yourself when you’re around them (or at least you try to - sometimes you just let an expletive slip out). But when you’re in marketing, is there an obligation to keep it rated PG?

“Crispy Frickin’ Chicken” isn’t exactly an expletive but it sent a PA family over the edge when the following image appeared on a billboard in their hometown of Harrisburg.

While I snickered at Sarah Silverman’s “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” on late-night TV, it was quickly and widely distributed over the Web within days (current count of this version: over 7.8 million views). Jimmy Kimmel came up with the rejoinder in his equally as funny/disturbing “I’m F*cking Ben Affleck” (currently at just over 4 million views). So, this content isn’t remaining in the sole domain of late-night viewing.

There are always going to be sensitive eyes & ears about any variety of things. The politically-correct movement is always trying to change our phraseology so no one gets offended, but the reality is, someone is always going to be offended by something. My question is: with the ease of syndication, embedded videos, and widgetized content, is their anything we can do to minimize the exposure of tiny eyes and ears to this stuff? Or is doesn’t it matter any more?

As to the above, I guess this family won’t be eating chicken fricassee any time soon. Maybe they’ll be frickin’ Jimmy Kimmel…

A few weeks back I wrote a post on a myspace forum, proposing that we all lend a helping hand in the endless plight for more traffic. I simply stated that I worked for a company with a vast network of blogs and asked if anyone would be interested in exchanging links.

Of course I expected to be flooded with emails and requests. Such was not the case! Rather I have received maybe a total of 3 requests for link exchanges and none of them made much sense.

Take the one I received this morning for example:

“Hi,I run the following website it is a financial website, I averaged last month $37 per day in adsense revenue, Looking to raise it to new levels hope you can help”

The first thing I can say to you is you have probably reached your maximum potential with Adsense. It doesn’t get much better. Remove the Adsense and start getting Real with people.

What if I visited your blog everyday and commented. What if I was a loyal viewer of your content? What if I had established myself as a solid part of your regular reader-base and identified myself as such? What if I cultivated that relationship with you, blog owner, by making chit chat and offering you key tips and pointers I’ve picked up along the way? What if I outstretched my hand in FRIENDSHIP with no apparent need for myself involved? Sounds nice doesn’t it? I would be more inclined to help a friend than ANYONE else. Would you help me if I established myself in your community in that way?

My instinct is that you would. No Doubt! We are all on here trying to figure it out. We would all like to make some money along the way. What has worked best in ALL of my experiences is to be completely transparent and REAL. To approach others as friends and nurture those friendships before asking for help. What it comes down to is there is no better advocate than a friend.

My advice Dear Adsense Revenue making man is to take down the Adsense, make more friends, generate a more natural and lasting form of traffic among those friends. Create awesome content that will be engaging and post it everyday. Then, and only then, should you begin your advertisement plastering crusade!

Please visit my newest friend Danny, the inspiration for this blog post at A College Dropouts Guide to Investing.