Improving Family Life, One Blog Post at a Time

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and My Kids’ Adventures, join the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss starting over (but not quite from scratch), paying careful attention to where your followers are sharing your content, and staying top of mind for people every single day.
Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast.

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• From ExactTarget, a free whitepaper entitled The Mobile Idea File.
• From Cision, a free ebook called Power Your Story: Content Marketing Essentials.
• From Janrain, a free guide to improve your conversion rates and your data quality.
• And from Expion, a free report on the top 50 retail brands’ social media use in 2013.

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:
[podcast]http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/25jc54/SocialProsEpisode83.mp3[/podcast]
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http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/25jc54/SocialProsEpisode83.mp3
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Tweetable Moments

“It’s all about making sure only the best make it through.” -@mike_stelzner (tweet this)

“Content marketing without social is, frankly, stupid because that’s just broadcasting.” -@mike_stelzner (tweet this)

Starting Over

After founding colossus Social Media Examiner, Mike Stelzner wanted a way to devote more time to his kids, so he added pet project My Kids’ Adventures. The photo-centric blog for parents gives multitudes of ideas for fun projects, games, and adventures to embark on with kids.

Since the project is focused heavily on visual media as well as writing, Mike hired Cynthia Sanchez of the Oh So Pinteresting podcast to run My Kids’ Adventures’ Pinterest page. With all the moms using Pinterest to share ideas and tips, My Kids’ Adventures is seeing its content propagate through Pinterest. And as parents do the activities, they take photos of their kids and share them on social media and in the comments section of the blog.
Mike also talks about the balance of how much we want to involve our kids and their photos on the internet; not everyone is comfortable putting photos of their children on websites. Mike says that they often recommend that parents (and their bloggers) take photos from behind to help maintain anonymity. They’ve tried to create a safe space within their community, though, and a lot of parents have embraced it.
Something Mike has learned, as distinct from Social Media Examiner, is that busy parents (often code for “working parents”) have less time to tweet about activities and also might be more hesitant to share this type of thing on their Facebook feet. He is gearing up to start experimenting with deploying new content at night, instead of during the day, to see if that works better with this demographic who might not be looking at this type of blog doing the work day.
Furthermore, Social Media Examiner has the “retweet” button right at the top of their posts, whereas My Kids’ Adventures has a link to share on Facebook. This is what makes the most sense for where they’re getting engagement – people prefer to share about their kids on Facebook rather than in a public forum like Twitter.

Don’t Forget!

Throughout the month of October, the online conference Social Media Success Summit will be going on. Join 2500 people from around the world to gain morsels of knowledge from more than 45 top social media marketing professionals.
With a headliner name like Jay Baer, you really can’t go wrong.

Social Media Stat of the Week: 1,700 Attendees at Content Marketing World

Jeff remembers the first Content Marketing World Conference, when they were hoping to get 300 attendees. With representatives from 40 different countries, this is not just some isolated American marketing phenomenon; the energy surrounding this is only continuing to grow.

In many ways, the content marketing bridge is much easier for companies to cross than the social media bridge. On a certain level, content marketing has been going on for hundreds of years in various forms; we just haven’t been calling it that or directly measuring its success the way we can today. That means that embracing content marketing is just a slight paradigm shift, whereas embracing social media requires you to act differently as a business.

Four Your Information

How did you get involved with social media?
“I sent a LinkedIn request to Ann Handley,” and she said she only did Facebook. Mike had thought it was just for college students. She became his first Facebook friend, and he began to notice that a lot of marketers he respected were jumping on the social bandwagon.
What do you like best about social media?
Mike loves the accessibility: he can communicate to anyone on Twitter, and they are willing to communicate back. It’s a direct communication channel that makes networking so much fun. It’s less so today, but social still empowers consumers in interactions with brands.
What do you like least about social media?
“Social media has made some people think they’re bigger than they really are. My wife often humbles me.” There are, as it turns out, several levels of fame, and people sometimes let their follower count go to their heads.
If you could do a Skype call with any living person, who would it be?
J.K. Rowling. Mike would like to write children’s novels someday, and he would love to find out how she comes up with her stories and get some tips.
See you next week!