Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 377

The Real World

If there's one acronym I hate, it's this one: IRL.

IRL stands for: In Real Life. People talk a ton about what they're doing online versus what they're doing in the real world. People often talk about meeting-up in the real world once they've connected in places like Twitter or Facebook.

Let me ask you this: when you're on Twitter or Facebook or Blogging are you not in the real world?

When you're online, are you fake? Is your online avatar simply that: a representation of who you would like to be instead of who you really are? As the great philosopher, Popeye, used to say: "I yam what I yam." People will look at me sideways when I say that online social networks are the real world. They don't buy it. They think that you can't create and nurture a "real" relationship online. Anything "real" has to take place in the "physical" world. This is not clear to me. It's confusing, and it often confuses me when I think about it. I am typing this Blog post right now in the real world. I am using real world emotions. I am using real words. I don't consider any of this virtual. I don't consider any of this fake or inauthentic.

All of this exists in the real world.

Take a look around you. The chair you're sitting on. The screen you're staring at. Look at the four walls. Look at the clothes you're wearing. Think about these words. Let them sink in. Does any of this not feel real to you? It feels very real to me.

The words we use create the world we live in.

If we say that everything online is not "the real world," we are - to some extent - diminishing it, dismissing it and making it seem less substantive than it is. Does this Blog post hold less value to you because it's not on a page stapled to other pages with similar articles and ads? Don't get me wrong, pressing the flesh and meeting in our protein forms is critical. This is not about removing the human factor and the amazing collaboration that happens when we meet in person, but when you're online, you're still in the real world. When you're online there is still a human factor and real collaboration does happen when individuals are not in the same room.

This is the real world. This is real life.

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Missed Opportunities

There are no absolutes. There are no hard and fast rules.

The truth is that Marketing is changing, shifting and adapting. A lot of those changes have to do with Social Media, but not all of them. Prior to Social Media, we still had people connecting and sharing ideas (online and otherwise). The platforms and channels continue to evolve and what works for one brand may not be the right solution for another brand. You'll also note that there are a plethora of online pundits who are quick to distill the "rules of engagement" which are, ultimately, personal rules that worked for them (your mileage may vary).

You are doing it wrong.

I'm frequently asked by brands if what they're doing in these digital channels is "wrong". The phrasing of the question is off. The question (really) is: "am I optimizing this experience for the consumers that are doing their best to connect with us?" At that point, it's not about being wrong... it's about missed opportunities.

What are some of the more common missed opportunities?

Not even knowing that someone is talking about you. Whether you're using a more complex Social Media monitoring tool like Radian6 or Sysomos or using free tools like Google Alerts and Twitter Search, there really is no excuse not to know what people are saying, where they're saying it, how much of a network they're connected to, and what the overall sentiment is.

Not sending a simple, "thank you." You don't have to become their friends, they don't have to like you on Facebook, and there's no need to sign them up to your email blast. A simple "thank you" goes a long way and (for most) it's more than enough. Let the consumer choose if they would like more engagement and communication.

Not responding back to someone on their Facebook page. Brands love their corporate Facebook pages. They tend to leave nice messages to those who have connected with them... on their page. Why don't more brands head over to the individual's page and thank them there? The navel-gazing desire to have everyone connect to the brand on their own page (and nowhere else) creates a feeling of, "build it and they will come."

Not engaging in the comments on someone else's Blog. This is tied into the previous point. There are countless Blogs where individuals are talking about a brand or the industry that the brand serves. More often than not, you'll see that many of these brands have fairly active corporate Blogs, but those Bloggers spend zero time in the community. The expectation is that people will come to them (their Blog) or they simply don't have the time or desire to be truly active within the community - beyond their own garden.

Not helping people out when you know they won't buy from you. Jeffrey Gitomer (author of the best-selling business books, The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling and the other Little Book... series) was recently speaking to a group of mortgage providers and this is what he told them to say to prospective clients if they wanted to up their game and increase their sales: "I am going to find you the best mortgage possible... even if that means you will be buying it from someone else." There are too many brands who only respond to direct inquiries or those of their direct competitors, and not enough time helping those who have questions and needs about the industry they serve.

Not asking for permission to connect to someone. Just because someone leaves a comment, friends you, likes you, gives you a thumb's up or whatever, it does not mean that they want to be a part of your community or have a desire for more engagement. A simple, "would you mind if we stay connected?" will go a long way. It's a sign of a respect to your consumer and their attention. Beyond that, it's also a sign of submission... and this is powerful. Allow the consumer to control the level of engagement and connectedness. If you start the engagement from that point (with them leading charge and giving permission), you'll never fall into their spam filter (literally and figuratively).

Be of service. Don't be self-serving.

The brands that are of service to their consumers (and their potential clientele) are the brands who win (in the long term... not the short term). The brands who use these digital channels in a self-serving way are the ones who may be gaining friends and followers now, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out in terms of both longevity and loyalty in the long run.

Too many brands are missing too many opportunities. What are some of the other, obvious, missed opportunities that you see brands making?

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Make Your Presentations Resonate With Nancy Duarte

Episode #232 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

I frequently Blog about the power of giving an amazing presentation. When I do Blog posts like that, I often cite Nancy Duarte. Along with running one of the most prestigious agencies, Duarte Design, for helping brands to create better presentations, Nancy is also the author of the recently released,Resonate - Present visual stories that transform audiences. She also authored,Slide-ology, and Blogs frequently on the topic. We finally got around to having a conversation about the state of presentations and her latest book. Here it is. Enjoy the conversation... and please excuse some of the Skype weirdness (it only happens once in a while)...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes ): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #232 .

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social media marketing

strategy

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twitter

The Groupon Story - One Billion The Hard Way

It's one of the biggest and most interesting business stories of this year... and in the history of business.

Groupon will forever be known as the first company in the history of business to reach one billion dollars in sales the quickest (making it the fastest growing business ever). If that wasn't interesting enough, the company recently turned down a six billion dollar acquisition offer from Google. It's the kind of story we thought we would never hear again after the dot com implosion.

It's a great business model.

Groupon works at the hyper-local level. They find local businesses (mostly service-based) who can offer up an incredible one-time deal. They help the business set-up the price and the reserve (a certain amount of people have to commit to purchasing the deal for the reserve to be met). This happens daily. As the company evolves, they are opening their services up to more and more cities. As their popularity continues to grow, they are faced with many copy-cat companies as well as more traditional companies (like newspapers and yellow pages) running their own Groupon-esque like deals.

Watch this...

Two days ago, Groupon founder, Andrew Mason, was on Charlie Rose. Unfortunately, the Charlie Rose show does not allow their videos to be embedded, so you have to go here to watch this fascinating interview: Charlie Rose and Andrew Mason.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #25

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

GPS addict? It may be eroding your brain - MSNBC . "Is GPS eroding our brain? When you get in a taxi, you can tell the driver where to go, or how to get there. Navigating by destination is more complex and involves more of the brain than simply going turn-by-turn according to instructions. But that may be what the GPS has done to our brains. In November, McGill researchers showed that how we navigate today may affect how well our brains work tomorrow." "(Alistair for Hugh).

Google Zeitgeist 2010 . "It's been said that you're never more honest than in your search bar. If that's so, then our collective searches are our collective consciousness, and each year, Google plays it back to us. Here's Google's 2010 edition of what we searched and how we spent our time online. Given how much time you spend at the Googleplex, I'm sure you know all this - but it's still full of interesting insight." (Alistair for Mitch).

"Be Someone or Do Something": Innovation and the new world of post-competitive business - Unfinished Business . "What is the relationship between innovation and competition? What is the difference between a brand-driven business and an innovation-driven business? Here is a sketch of a hypothesis." (Hugh for Alistair).

David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit - Movie Line . "If you communicate for a living - and who doesn't - then it's worth taking time, once in a while, to absorb the advice of some masters. For instance, I read Orwell 's ' Politics and the English Language ' at least once a year, to remind myself of the importance of clarity. Here's playwright and screenwriter David Mamet 's memo to the writing staff of the TV series, The Unit , explaining how to write drama." (Hugh for Mitch).

Letter From Canada: Why Is America So Furious About Wikileaks? - TechCrunch . "I tried to avoid the whole WikiLeaks story for the past little while on my Blog. In following the story and reading a lot (but not all) of the commentary, I came up with a Blog post that did not look at the legal or moral aspects of WikiLeaks, but rather the important lessons that businesses and marketers can learn from the events that continue to unfold (you can read that Blog post here: 7 Lessons That WikiLeaks Teaches Us ). Wouldn't you know it, the comment flow immediately went to the moral, political and legal opinions of the individuals. I know the Blogger ( Jon Evans ) behind this TechCrunch Blog post, and it's not only an interesting (and political) perspective, the comments following his post add a ton of differing perspective and insight. The point? We're all over the map on WikiLeaks... and the story is not over yet." (Mitch for Alistair).

Social media invades book world - Financial Post . " Kobo is rolling out a new service called, Reading Life, to make books more social. Hugh constantly argues that it's not about the device or the app... it's about the content... the real information in the pages, and the company that will win the ebook wars will be the one that is not all that focused on the hardware, but the one that makes the content as readily available as possible for the most reasonable price. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Can a Social Media app change the ebook landscape? What will Amazon , Apple and the big book retailers do to play along or catch up? The good news is this: people are still reading and people are still buying books." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

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wikileaks

7 Lessons That WikiLeaks Teaches Us

Too much has been written about WikiLeaks .

Most of the debate is about the legalities and moralities of what WikiLeaks is (and what it means). If you take a step back, and look at it (without prejudice and without passing legal judgment), there are many lessons about how new media acts (and reacts) that are excellent business lessons as well. Consider this a cautionary tale.

Here are 7 lessons that WikiLeaks teaches us:

Transparency first. If your default position is to hide information and keep it secret, the new world is going to cause you many sleepless nights. WikiLeaks shows us that businesses will be best suited to lead with transparency first and (when no longer possible) shift to secrets as a form of integrity-based decision making to protect their "secret sauce" (whatever that may be). Leading with being secretive has no place in our new, more transparent, world. As people divulge more and more information about themselves online and connect to more and more people, that is becoming the cultural norm, so any actions (be it by business or government) that do not have that level of transparency will be seen and felt as "hiding" or being "secretive."

You are media. Any individual can have a thought and then be able to publish that thought in text, images, audio and/or video to the world for free (or close to it). This doesn't just mean that everyone is a publisher, it means that every individual is (or can be) a media channel. WikiLeaks is a media entity (Mathew Ingram nailed it in his Gigaom Blog post, Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a Media Entity). If we agree with this sentiment (and we should), all media properties need to be protected (to some degree) by our first amendment rights.

Publishing has changed. This ties directly into the last point. We may not like it, but WikiLeaks is both a publisher of content and a media channel. So is this Blog. That means that we - as a society - need to re-evaluate our definition of publishing. A while back, Christopher S. Penn asked on an episode of Media Hacks if something written and published in the MMORPG game, World of Warcraft, should be considered a book? That's a question/debate for another Blog post, but we can all agree that it is - without question - a form of publishing. Would the mass media and academic intelligentsia consider that publishing? These newer forms of publishing threaten their business model and question their legacy (people don't like when you do that). But, let's face it, publishing has changed.

Information travels fast. Legal or not. It's no longer about crisis management of better public relations, we have shifted to the real-time Web. And, the news has shifted along with it. We do not find out about a plane crash on CNN. We find out about it because the survivors are tweeting, shooting videos and streaming it live. Information doesn't travel faster now... information is happening in real time.

Decentralization is real. While WikiLeaks has passed the massive amount of content over to some major newspaper media outlets to turn the information into snackable content for the mass public, the structure and organization of WikiLeaks points to a new regime. The new company is (and can be) a decentralized organization - one that runs on a handful of laptops and smartphones. They are a credible competitor. The idea of a few people working from their local Starbucks when compared to another business with a fixed address and infrastructure used to be seen as both laughable and unprofessional. No more.

Credible Anonymity. This will - without question - become one of the biggest trends we will start to see in the digital channels. Think about it this way: when reading a customer review on Amazon about a book, who would you trust more, Sarah P. from Sioux Falls or an anonymous reviewer who says that they work for one of the biggest book publishers in the world and that they read 3-4 books a month (total book worm) but can't identify themselves because the book that they are reviewing is from a competitor? I would chose the anonymous book worm. For all we know, Sarah from Sioux Falls is a lunatic who walks the streets with Kleenex boxes for shoes. Who do we know at WikiLeaks? What do we really know about Julian Assange? Even with these pending criminal charges, does that make the content they are publishing any less credible? As Social Media allows individuals to open up, publish their lives and share everything, there will be many other places where anonymity will prevail, and the content will be as (if not more) credible than the content where full disclosure is happening.

We are not ready. The shocking part of WikiLeaks is how everybody else (those who do not understand Internet culture) is reacting to it. They are not used to this type of organization. They are not used to the way it looks. They are not used to the way it feels. It's awkward and because of that, it feels both strange and threatening. It simply validates that we are not ready for the massive changes that are happening and that will continue to happen (for more on that, please listen to what Don Tapscott - the co-author of Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics - had to say about technology and the digitization of everything right here: SPOS #225 - The World Of Macrowikinomics With Don Tapscott).

With all of this in mind, can't we look to the ongoing WikiLeaks incident as an amazing opportunity to listen, understand, grow and adapt?

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Give The Gift Of Knowledge

It's not an iPad . It's not a Kindle . It's not a Xbox game. Sorry.

To some, this is going to sound like it's coming from the person who gives young children socks as gifts for the holiday season. I don't. But, let's face it, we live in a world of abundance (not everybody, but most of the people who read this Blog have it fairly good). We don't need more things made of plastic with lights and buttons on it, and we don't need any more gift cards to a major electronics retailer. One of the most powerful gifts you can give someone is knowledge. I've seen countless posts on great business books as gifts (I'm guilty of writing many of them!), so instead, here are just-released books that most people have (probably) not picked up... just yet.

Bonus!

Think beyond the giving of the book. Every time this person picks it up, they will think about you. Every time they take a note, or when the content spurs a new idea, they'll think of you. Maybe something within these pages will help them reshape their careers, their businesses and/or their relationships. They'll have you to thank. You can even inscribe the book with a personal message about why you think this special person will enjoy the read.

That's a real gift worth giving!

Content Rules - How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business by C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley.

The Dragonfly Effect - Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith.

Making Ideas Happen - Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky.

The Master Switch - The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu.

The Mesh - Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky.

The Naked Presenter - Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds.

What new books are looking to pick up (either for yourself or as a gift)... emphasis on "new!" (as in recently released ;)?

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The iPad And The Marketing Professional

What is your holiday season going to look like?

The holidays are around the corner. The road rage of parking at the shopping mall and elbowing your way through the aisles to get that special something for our loved ones (and those mooching off of us) is upon us. It's amazing how the happiest time of the year has become such a stress-inducing labour of disdain. For many, it's become so hopeless that they have reduced the love of gift buying down to stocking stuffers of gift cards ("let them figure out what they want!").

Another big transition is the giving of virtual goods.

Everything from Facebook Credits to loading up someone's iTunes account to buying tractors in Farmville or subscriptions to Netflix. Virtual gifts have truly become the gift that keeps on giving. There's no doubt that the future of technology is both portable and virtual. Look no further than the pervasiveness and explosive growth of the smartphone and tablet market. One of the hottest holiday gifts this coming season (for the young and old alike) is Apple's iPad. Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO, described the iPad as the device that lies in between your computer and your mobile device during his presentation to launch the tablet in January. The staggering media hoopla surrounding the device (Oprah recently chose the iPad as one of her "favourite things") has helped it become a runaway success. Competitors Dell, BlackBerry, Samsung, Google and others are rushing tablets to the market (some are available, while others are said to be arriving in the first half of 2011) in a hope to capture market share.

The App Economy.

Beyond the physical tablet are the apps (or software) that people load onto these devices. The app economy continues to blossom with thousands of developers creating powerful applications every single day that not only make the iPad such an incredible experience, but they are also pushing the device to do things that you can't do on laptops and smartphones. While most first-generation tablets are best suited to the consumption of media, they are also becoming amazing tools for business.

Here are some of the best iPad apps for business professionals...

Dropbox . Not only is this a great looking app, but it's a crucial one. Dropbox allows you to back up all of your important files to a secured online location. This makes all of your files synchronized online. So, if you're running Dropbox on your laptop, your files will be updated and backed up - in real time - and readily available from your iPad when you need them. The iPad app and 2 GB of storage is free, the premium edition pricing is based on storage space and a monthly fee.

iA Writer . It's not simple to type on glass, but we're all going to have to get used to it. iA Writer helps with this transition. The font type is beautiful and the typing view is clean. You can even lock the screen to focus on the sentences you are currently working on, instead of being distracted by the entire document. iA Writer not only gives you a word count but an estimated length of time that it will take to read your document. You can easily email the text file or have it sync directly to your Dropbox. iA Writer is $4.99.

FlightTrack Pro . I've clocked more air miles than I care to admit. If you travel for business, you need FlightTrack Pro. This app (especially when combined with TripIt Pro) offers the most robust flight tracking and travel experience optimizer that I have come across. It gives you details like gate information, alternate flights, seating information from SeatGuru, push alerts for delays and cancellations and even a screen with the percentage of time your flight is delayed (and by how long). The best part? Airlines don't like telling you when a flight is delayed (they like having everyone at the gate), but FlightTrack Pro seems to be tied into another system because on countless occasions it has notified me long in advance of a delay while the airline says the same flight is on time (it's still wise to always double-check with your airline). FlightTrack Pro is $9.99.

Flipboard . This iPad only application grabs your Twitter and Facebook feed and turns it into a beautiful magazine. It's best at grabbing the links that people are talking about and it shows you (in a stunning layout) both the articles and tweets. From there, you can comment, share or save the content. You can also choose pre-defined pages (business, technology, etc ...), so you're not only a reader of a magazine, you are also the editor and publisher as well. Flipboard is free.

Digital currency is also a great gift!

If you're still stumped and don't know what to get the iPad totting business professional in your life, consider an e-gift certificate for Kindle, iBooks or Kobo and this way they can buy some e-books. If they're not big on business books, magazines like Wired and The Economist also offer iPad-based digital editions of their monthly magazines via monthly subscription. Did you ever really think the day would come that a virtual gift would be more valuable than a physical one? If that doesn't speak to the changing landscape of business and the new consumer, I don't know what does.

What iPad apps do you think are critical to Marketing and Business professionals?

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Dreaming of a geek Christmas with every Tweet I write .

Vancouver Sun - Not yet published.

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google

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ibooks

ipad

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itunes

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media consumption

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wired

How To Start Your Very Own Business Book Club

Read anything good lately? If you have, why not share it while networking at the same time?

On April 15th, 2004, I started something called the Montreal Business Book Review. People were constantly asking me what I was reading, what they should be reading or what I thought about a particular book. I did some investigating and realized that there were not many business book clubs anywhere in the world, and it seemed like a great place to share ideas, brainstorm, discuss current events and have a light evening of heavy discussion.

It worked!

While I no longer run the business book club, it was an amazing learning experience. It was also a fairly simple and easy thing to pull together. Every so often, I get an email asking me for tips on how to set-up a business book club. In fact, I got one today from Danielle, so here is how I pulled mine together (and you can feel free to do the same).

How a business book club can work.

I wanted to keep it simple, so this is how it worked:

It was all done via email (if you want to get fancy, you can use a platform like MeetUp, a Facebook page or even a simple Blog platform).

Interested individuals emailed me their full name, title, company, email address and phone number.

There was no charge to take part in business book club.

We discussed one book every month. The next book would be announced at the event.

The discussions took place in person and they lasted about an hour, but people always hung around after to jam on ideas.

The discussions were held at Twist Image in our boardroom.

There were usually anywhere from four to fifteen people at a session.

Because it was one book per month, there were no strings attached, so people could come to the session/book discussion that interested them without missing anything from the previous sessions.

All book selections were made by me with tons of help and suggestions by the members, friends, Blogs, etc...

Here were the rules of the business book club (that I sent to people who wanted to attend)... 

The first rule of The Montreal Business Book Club is that there is no Montreal Business Book Club - OK, that's from Fight Club but I am always dying to use that line. It's out of my system now.

Please RSVP to me by email if you are going to be coming.

Please let me know if you RSVP'd, but then can't make it.

Please read the book selection.

Show up on time.

Have an open mind, but bring many questions.

Bring as many snacks and drinks as you like - we all share.

You know what they say about opinions.

Play nice.

No pitching your business. This is a business book club, please respect that.

What I learned about doing it...

All communication through Email was simple and worked. There was no need for a "page" anywhere.

I made sure that people looking for work didn't fill the room. I know that may not sound like the nicest thing to say, but there is a chasm between those looking for professional development and those looking for a job.

I always provided simple snacks (chips, fruits, drinks, etc...).

Having the monthly meetings forced me to stay on top of my own reading.

Meeting in person turned out to be an amazing way to network and grow my business... it also helped to build my reputation in the local business community.

The events were held right after work, so the people that came really wanted to be there (instead of being at home with their family). They cared.

You can easily do these in 30 minutes instead of 60 minutes - you have to get a feel for the group.

I would have a list of questions about the book (conversation starters), but I often defaulted to the group to initiate the conversation.

Choosing the book allowed me to choose something I was interested in (this kept me hunting for different and fresh titles).

People will always disappoint. They'll say that they are coming and not show up. Don't let that get you down.

People will come even though they didn't read the book. Don't let them overtake the conversation. I'd often shoot down people who would start a sentence with, "even though I didn't read the book, I think..."

Encourage networking. Discourage pitching. We once had a financial advisor come, not say a word, then as we were breaking for the night, he sprung into action whipping out his business cards like they were ninja stars.

Invite the author to attend by webinar, Skype or phone call. You would be surprised how often the author was flattered to take part (and how excited the group was to connect with the author).

Ultimately, my vision for The Montreal Business Book Review was to create an environment where business professionals could grow and learn from the latest business books coupled with the insights of their professional and intellectual peers. I was also hoping to foster literacy in the business community in hopes that one person would read a few books and pay it forward to their employees and colleagues.

Don't let it end.

My travel schedule and increasing demands from the agency made it hard to maintain a regular schedule, so I shut it down and turned the concept into an audio Podcast called, Foreword Thinking, where I would have conversations with business and motivational authors. In the end, I realized that the content was just as relevant for the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast, so I brought it all together under one roof. I miss the business book club, and it was an incredible experience with many layers of learning, friendship, business development and networking.

I have not heard of too many Marketing Business Book Clubs... why don't you start one?

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Make Your Content Rule

Episode #231 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Content Rules is a book whose time has come. It was written by C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley. C.C. you already know. He was instrumental in getting me into Podcasting and along with being a close friend (and a co-host on Media Hacks), he is currently a freelance digital marketing strategist and pushing his new publishing space, Digital Dads. Ann is the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs and was one of the co-founders of ClickZ. Content Rules focuses on the importance of content (no, great content!) in a world of Blogs,Twitter, Podcasting, Webinars and more. Prior to the Web, publishing content was an expensive and complex process, now the tools of publishing are cheap, free and easy-to-use. The one component that hasn't changed is that creating valuable content is still as difficult as it ever was, so here is your primer on creating powerful content that connects. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes ): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #231 .

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