How Steve Jobs Changed the World: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Social media channels this week were among the first to reveal the passing of one of the world’s greatest innovators—Steve Jobs.
Social Media Examiner’s founder Michael Stelzner was on a webinar with Guy Kawasaki, former Apple chief evangelist, just as the news broke. Here are Mike’s words:
Ten minutes before Guy Kawasaki was to keynote Facebook Success Summit 2011, Guy said to me, “Mike, we have a problem…” I said, “Guy, what??” My heart started pumping hard. He said, “Steve Jobs died…” I was shocked, and didn’t believe him at first! He said, “Go to CNN.com” Knowing that Guy was the former evangelist for Apple and that Guy had a very strong connection to Steve, many things started going through my head “What do I do…” Guy said, “Do you think it is appropriate that I talk about Facebook marketing or my life experience with Steve Jobs.” After some discussion, I decided it was best to let Guy share what was on his mind and heart.
What follows is Guy talking about how Steve Jobs was his hero and how Steve has forever changed business:
Listen to Guy Kawasaki pay a tribute to Steve Jobs and answer questions from callers.
Keep reading to discover other social media news from the past week… 
The Art of Enchantment: How Guy Kawasaki Will Change Your Business
I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com and the author of the bestselling book, The Art of the Start. His latest masterpiece is called Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.
In this interview we talk about what makes for great content, how he came up with the title of his latest book, what Enchantment means for business, why businesses need to embrace nobodies and how he promoted his book. (Be sure to listen to the MP3 of this interview below.)
Mike: Most of our readers are marketers and business owners. Can you explain what Alltop does for them and why they might find it useful?
Guy: One of the functions of marketers, PR people and social media people is they need to keep on top of things.
The vision of Alltop was that we should aggregate RSS feeds for people by topic and create essentially an online magazine rack so that you could go to one place and say, “Okay, these are all the social media blogs and websites aggregated in one place.” It’s the five most recent stories from each source, and we give you a preview of the first paragraph of each story so you can see if you really want to click through.
The Social Media Examiner Story: Proof Social Media Works
Back in October of 2009 we launched SocialMediaExaminer.com. The response was immediate and it was big (I’ll share some of the back story in the video below).
We relied 100% on social media tactics to drive traffic to this site.
In less than 5 months, Social Media Examiner was declared the #1 small business blog in the world by Technorati, added more than 13,000 email subscribers, brought nearly 100,000 people a month to the site and is ranked as one of the top 4200 websites in all of America by Alexa.
We didn’t advertise, didn’t rely on the press and almost none of our traffic is coming from search engines. Nearly overnight, this site has become a top destination for businesses.
The Secret to Growing Your Blog Following and the Pitfall You Must Avoid
Looking to grow your blog following? You might be surprised that the best way to gain a following is to focus on other people’s blogs.
Outreach is key to having a blog that actually works for your business, yet it’s the one element many professionals ignore. And it’s contrary to most competitive thinking because it involves spending time away from your blog.
Done correctly, however, reaching out to other bloggers in your field will actually create more business opportunities, increase traffic to your own blog, and enhance your business brand more than any other tactic you could employ.
Here’s how:
