I’m happy because I wasn’t expecting any type of refund and boy did I get a BIG surprise with no questions asked.

Thank you GoDaddy!

GoDaddy put a BIG smile in my face is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

If you spend a good amount of time on the internet then I’m sure you’ve heard and watched OK Go’s latest video masterpiece. These guys have built a following by their sheer video producing talents. I didn’t know who OK Go was until a few days ago, when I watched the above video, it was enough for me to do some research and conclude that their music isn’t appealing to me but I have much to say about their dedication to producing pretty damn good videos.

Their videos alone are word of mouth worthy!

The band OK Go is probably more famous for their videos than their songs. That’s more a testament to the greatness of their videos than anything else. When these guys put out a video, you can be sure it’ll make your jaw drop at least once or twice. "How did they do that," is a typical reaction.

And that, is exactly what you want. To be known for something!

Just like Common Craft has built it’s reputation on creating ‘explanation video that anyone can understand’ and own that space in people’s minds, OK Go is doing the same with their music videos.

OK Go probably didn’t set out to differentiate themselves with videos and most likely didn’t have a ‘what do we want to be known for?’ brainstorming session. Most likely they started experimenting with ideas and kept going at it until something stuck and became so good at it that they can do these videos on a single take!

The takeaway here is you want to experiment with ideas with the goal of doing something distinctive that pushes boundaries. Do you think you could produce videos like OK Go? You probably can but have you ever tried?

Ask yourself: What do I want to be known for? And experiment with something that will push your boundaries.

What do you think? What are you experimenting with?

To be known for something push boundaries like OK Go is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

To help you answer the ‘Why’ we recommend you read Jay Bear’s 7 step process on how to develop a social media strategy and then come back here.

Thanks for coming back, now on to the ‘How’.

Framing the challenge

Since we’re always in the ‘let’s shake things up’ mood we’re testing a new approach to develop strategy, here are some questions to help you ideate a social media strategy around the most important things:

• In what ways might we spread the word about our product or service?
• In what ways might we create a following on Facebook and/or Twitter?
• In what ways might we create content?
• In what ways might we publish content?
• In what ways might we create engagement?
• In what ways might we help people subscribe to our newsletter?
• In what ways might we help people share our content?
• In what ways might we help people take useful action from our content?
• In what ways might we show people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we prove to people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we make our product or service be talked about?
• In what ways might we convince our customers come back?
• In what ways might we convince our customers to tell their friends about us?

These questions are meant to open your mind and create a list of possible options. The next thing you have to do is get a group together of no more than 5 key people and brainstorm around these questions and stop once you have enough answers for each question. At this point you have all sorts of ideas and now it’s time to start making choices depending on your strategic goals.

*For another approach check out Steve Koss’s comments below and clickthrough to his website for more depth.

Strategy should be unique to you

Next, to get really creative instead of going out and seeing how other businesses within your industry would answer these questions, think about how businesses in other industries would answer them. Why? Because all the good ideas in your industry are already taken and they’re called best practices.

The whole idea of strategy is not to replicate what your competitors do but to create a strategy that’s unique to you. 

We’d love to know what you think? What’s your approach to developing a social media strategy? What questions would you add?

13 Questions to help shape your social media strategy is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

This is a question I get asked a lot and it usually comes accompanied by an Alexa ranking remark: My Alexa ranking says I’m at 1,890,898 and last week I was at 2,589,723 but nothing is happening…Correct!

Link Building, the part of SEO that gets valuable inbound links to your website, is very time intensive. Most of the top websites have complete dominance over certain keywords because they’ve been linked to hundreds of thousands of times with those keywords. You would have to replicate that same output to try to rank in the top 3 results in Google, there are many ways to do this but it’s incredibly time intensive and the results are not immediate.

SEO is quite relevant still but the game has changed and:

As most things, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that following each and every single point here will only get you so far as other factors come into play such as competition for your keywords and the amount of competition your up against.

With the rise of social media it’s not surprising to see most websites get the most of their traffic from social networks such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook where factors such as immediacy and freshness play a bigger role.

SEO has matured, the game has shifted to social media and the benefits are superior.

Alexa is just a measurement tool that compares you with the rest of the web based on it’s criteria, but it’s not something you should use to measure success. It’s really easy to lead most people to think that Alexa is what you should monitors as opposed to looking at your search results, twitter mentions, blog comments, etc…I’m not saying Alexa is wrong it’s just not that relevant anymore as a yardstick.

Unless you have a big search advertising budget to pay for keywords, what really matters is the social media engagement metrics I mentioned above.

Again:

Your best bet is to optimize your website with these factors in mind but focus most of your marketing efforts in creating relationships, bonding with your audience and giving the best possible brand experience, social media makes this possible in ways SEO can’t.

One last thing, the basic formula to follow for SEO is: Publishing more = organic traffic from search results.

But:

It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

Are you link building or relationship building?

Why we don’t do link building is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Found via ReflectionOf.ME

How to get people talking Gap style is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

I’ve always been impressed by the Jordan Brand and how it puts excellence into everything it does and releases. It’s to be expected as that’s what it’s legendary namesake stood for excellence on the basketball court.

Michael Jordan was known as a nightmare opponent, and this characteristic is reflected in it’s ‘Nightmares never sleep’ program for the release of the Air Jordan 2010. The captivating commercial features the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade unleashing his inner monster and terrorizing the court on his way to a dunk.

The shoes are top notch as expected and even the YouTube Channel page has a pleasant introduction that you’ll remember. And for those who just like MJ like to be challenged, there’s the interactive website which features 4 different games that will certainly test your hand eye coordination skills. My test results are below:

The results are also posted to your Facebook news feed if you want to tell your friends what you’re up or just outright challenge them!

The point: The Jordan Brand understands what it takes to stay relevant, it never sleeps.

Groundbreaking commercials, innovative sneakers that combine style and performance, people with respect, quality presentation and rabid fans make the Jordan Brand a powerhouse!

Jordan: a brand that never sleeps is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

So how do we go beyond attracting attention to building trust?

By changing from a consumption mindset to a take action mindset. We want people to consume our content (attention) but do we really care if they take action on it (share/implement it)?  To build trust we have to care what they do with our ideas, I think that’s the key. This takes time but then again Rome wasn’t built in a day and real relationships take months to build.

With some much content getting pushed out there we have to be mindful of people’s time, so the question is: are we doing enough to help them solve their problems?

Ask yourself: Would I trust myself?

What say you, are you out there to grab attention or build trust? Which comes first?

On building trust is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Researchers found that popular stories often inspired a sense of awe by tackling a broad topic and requiring the reader to approach the subject from a fresh angle. Researchers say these articles are popular because they create emotional connections between the person sending the article and its recipient. “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” the researchers said.

A picture is worth a thousand words and if I could present these findings in visual way I think the picture below speaks for itself, doesn’t it make you go AWE?

Create AWE and your content will spread is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Want to know what your natural persuasive way of communicating is? Take the F Score Fascination trigger test from Sally Hogshead and find out, it takes less than 2 minutes! Sally Hogshead is the author of Fascinate where she uncovers the 7 triggers that brands use to persuade or captivate us and the test is designed to tell you which triggers you use to persuade on a consistent basis.

I took the test a few moments ago and found out that my primary fascination is Mystique, which knowing myself isn’t that far off and neither are the rest of the results to tell you the truth! Although there is no detailed action plan after taking the test you do get some insights on where and what you can improve on.

I was fascinated with the ideas from the accompanying Change This ebook that I have the book incoming and can’t wait to read it…the trigger of lust won me over!

Follow Sally on Twitter and let her know your result!

Which triggers are you using to persuade or captivate? is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Here are a couple of kids across the border in Tijuana that earn their money by entertaining rather than blowing fire from their mouths or just outright asking for it. If you didn’t already know, wrestling is BIG in Mexico and what you see here is very very good wrestling entertainment from a couple of 12 year old kids who after school go to an intersection near their home and put on a show.

They’re making around $30 – 40/day (dlls not mexican pesos) while only doing this for a couple of hours. Compare that to others who might not even make it to $10 in a week cleaning cars!

A few months back we saw these kids in person and were captivated and inspired by their creativity that to honor them we created the illustration below which is now our main character, he’s the differentiation superhero.

The principle of ‘being different’ is very simple: Think and act like a kid and don’t be afraid to be wrong.

So if you want to partner with us in the future, now you know where we’re coming from. How are you being different?

Are you really different? is a post from: Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency