Shashi shares how Twitter became a core component of Network Solutions’ social media strategy.

You’ll learn how Network Solutions uses Twitter to monitor and improve their reputation. And Shashi also shares some valuable tips for you to monitor your brand’s reputation online.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to figure out if your customers are on Twitter
• How to turn around a negative reputation through Twitter
• Why you need to harmonize customer expectations across the different social platforms
• Why you need to respond within 29 minutes when something breaks on social media
  
• How to prepare for a social media crisis
  
• How to look at social media as a tool to build human connections

Learn more about Network Solutions’ DomainStorm app. Connect with Shashi on Twitter @shashib and check out the Network Solutions blog.

Do you use Twitter to monitor your brand and connect with customers? What tips do you have to share about using Twitter? Please leave them below.

During this interview, you’ll learn about his latest book, his views on the state of the publishing industry and about his new venture The Domino Project.

Mike: Let’s start with Poke the Box. What exactly does “poke the box” mean?

Seth: If you’re a computer programmer and you want to figure out how something works, the way you do it is not by reading a manual or following a map. You do it by trying something, seeing what happens, learning from it and then trying something else. That’s how we figured out how the world worked when we were 5 years old, and it’s the way we figure out how to do something new in a changing world.

The reason that I wrote the book is that somehow we’ve lulled ourselves into this feeling that we need to wait for someone else to tell us what to do and give us permission to do it, as opposed to taking action and doing it ourselves.

Mike: You mentioned in the book it was your uncle who designed the “box” and put it in the crib of one of your cousins?

Seth: My uncle has a PhD from MIT. We call him “the admiral” because he was in the Navy ROTC program. He worked with lasers and all sorts of technology.

I have this vivid memory of when I was just 10 or 12 years old. My cousin was born and my uncle built a box—it must have weighed three pounds—in gray steel with one of those big, thick, black electrical cords. It had on it three or four switches and dials, and when you flipped a switch, something happened. A buzzer would go off or a light would flash. You’d turn a dial and something else would change. He plugged this thing in and threw it in the crib.

His thinking was that it’s natural for a kid to play with things, to figure out how they work. In a stable world, we don’t necessarily want people to do that because we want them to work on the assembly line and do what they’re told. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t a stable world anymore.

Mike: Let’s talk about your new book and how it’s different from all the other books you’ve written.

Seth: Well, it’s like The Dip, in that it’s very short. I’ve started a new publishing company called The Domino Project and the book was written with that in mind.

The Domino Project is trying to make ideas easier to spread. I think books are important and book publishers are basically trying to kill books. They’re making them too expensive, too long, too slow, too hard to spread and too hard to find. So the public is just ignoring them and moving on to the next thing.

I wanted to make it easy for someone, if they’re moved by the idea in a book, to hand it to someone else or to hand it to five other people or 50 other people, and say, “This is the way we’re going to do things around here from now on.” That’s what books are great at, and I want to optimize for that kind of conversation.

Mike: I also notice the book doesn’t actually have a cover title on it. It’s just this cool icon of a guy leaping forward. There were no chapters in the book either, so I guess it’s designed to be just one continuous read?

Seth: Sure. Because our publishing company is powered by Amazon, our main source of interaction is going to be online. If a book is shown online, it doesn’t need to have words on the cover because right next to the cover are all the things you need to know if you want to buy it. That wasn’t true in the bookstore, but it’s certainly true online.

Once you get it, if it’s sitting on your desk and it has words on the cover, then everyone knows what it is. But if it doesn’t and someone sees it, they’re going to say, “What’s that?”

Mike: That’s exactly what happened, Seth. Someone was in my office and they picked it up and started reading it because it just grabbed them.

Seth: We looked at every convention of publishing that’s out there and asked, “Why does this convention exist? Should we throw it out? Should we start over or should we do it differently?”

Last week we did a promotion to ask people to sign up for our newsletter.  As a result of the promotion, we ended up lowering the preorder price of this book to $1 on the Kindle. Why would we do that? Well, anyone who preorders it is already a fan because why would anyone spend $1 for something if they don’t know what it is? If you preorder it, and I can sell you the electronic version for $1, I’m not losing any money doing that, certainly. Now what I’ve done is seeded the book to my best customers—to the people most likely to talk about it.

Sure, I’ve lost the opportunity to charge those people a lot because they would have paid a lot, but on the other hand, what I’ve done is used that as my marketing effort. My marketing effort is if I can get 10,000 people in the world excited about the book and talking about it, then in March, I’ll sell another 50,000 or 100,000 copies because those 10,000 people spread the word.

Mike: In your book, you say, “When the cost of poking the box is less than the cost of doing nothing, then you should poke.” What does that mean?

Seth: When I started out in business on my own, I had to walk down the block to buy laser printing output because I couldn’t afford a laser printer. The world wasn’t filled with Kinko’s and it wasn’t filled with WordPress, and it didn’t have Google driving traffic to somebody who didn’t have a storefront. It wasn’t organized around individuals finding out how things worked.

That has shifted. If you want to do recombinant DNA research now, for $500 you can buy a kit and do it in your kitchen. You don’t need a whole lab. If you want to design a car, you can design a car using all sorts of off-the-shelf components. You don’t need a factory in Detroit. For that reason, the cost of finding out is much, much lower.

On the other hand, the cost of doing nothing is going through the roof because people who do nothing end up with “cog jobs.” They end up being told what to do and getting paid less and less.

We’re seeing this in our economy. If a job can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be. As a result, you have to be the only person who can do it, and the asset that’s almost impossible to take from you is initiation—the idea that “I’m the guy who pokes and comes up with the next thing.”

Watch this video from Seth.

Mike: You talk about Google in your book. What can Google teach businesses about innovation?

Seth: Google is such a special case, like Apple in so many ways. Google has a fountain of money. Since we started having this conversation, Google made more than $1 million in profit, and they do that over and over and over again.

Most public companies just take the money and the problem is that three years from now, the money stops coming in. So Google takes a significant portion of the money and they do things they think will fail.

That’s the secret to initiation. Even if you’re not making $1 million every 10 minutes, the secret of initiation is simple. If you’re only willing to do things that will succeed, then you will fail. But if you’re willing to do things that might fail, you have a shot at succeeding. That’s the magic of Google.

Mike: Where do you think ideas come from and how should we act on them?

Seth: Everybody has ideas all the time. That’s part of being human. But the real question is where do they go? My answer is we have conditioned people to hide them or discard them or ignore them, and winning is in acting on them.

Steve Jobs didn’t really invent any of the products that Apple sells. Other people had all of those ideas first. It’s that Apple acts on stuff.

Mike: What do you mean when you say, “The person who fails the most wins”?

Seth: The statement doesn’t mean that you fail so badly you’re out of the game. What’s implied is you have to keep playing the game. The person who gets to keep playing the game and has the most failures has the better life, and likely has created the most value.

Take the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Who knows how many times he failed? He hit a jackpot in the end. Congratulations. But in general, what we see is that if you have this mantra, “I’m going to keep failing my way up,” it’s what we were born to do, and we’re great at it.

Mike: You talk about success being tied to defeating the fear that holds us back. How do we defeat the fear that holds us back?

Seth: By not being held back, everybody has a different way to defeat his resistance. Steve Pressfield’s brilliant book, The War of Art, talks about this in detail. I can’t tell you how to do it. Everyone does it differently. Picasso did it differently than Dali who did it differently than Jackson Pollock.

I don’t know anyone’s answer. I just know it’s the problem. Once you acknowledge that it’s the problem, it’s much more likely that you’ll seek out and find the answer.

Mike: What’s wrong with traditional book publishing? Can you elaborate a little bit more?

Seth: It’s filled with really smart people whom I like, who don’t get paid enough and do good work. The problem is that they think their customer is the bookstore.

The other problem is that bookstores demand a very slow cycle of a year to bring a book out, demand books that meet a certain expectation and demand full return privileges on those books. At the same time, that industry is stuck paying big advances to big-name authors, most of which lose money.

When you add all these together, you end up with an industry that has a lot less flexibility and doesn’t realize that its real job is bringing ideas that spread to people who want to hear them. If they embraced that as their job, I think the industry would do far better and the readers would benefit as well.

I’m not going to be able to change the industry all by myself and I have no illusions that we’re going to dominate anything. But I think that a lot of people are going to copy some of the notions that we’re trying to lay out here, and if they do that, I’ll be really pleased.

Mike: Let’s talk about The Domino Project. It’s a publishing company, correct? How do you describe what it is exactly?

Seth: Yes it is. The goal is to reinvent the way publishers think about authors and readers and distribution and pricing and packaging, and the very notion of the relationship between the author and the reader.

We have a really wide mission. We’re starting with Amazon as our backend, which gives us an enormous amount of leverage (Amazon hasn’t done this arrangement with anyone else) that lets us understand who’s buying what and how they’re buying it, and play with different formats.

We’re starting with a series of short books we call manifestos, which are about 100 pages long. There are five or six in the pipeline already. This is an experiment and I have no idea exactly what’s going to come next.

Mike: When you say Amazon is your backend, do you mean as far as distribution and that’s where people buy the book?

Seth: Yes, and they can buy it at a bookstore. Amazon owns a company called Brilliance that makes audio books, and they have a salesforce that regularly sells to bookstores.

We’re also going to sell our books around the world because what we’re discovering is bookselling isn’t local. It’s worldwide and it’s not right to tell someone in Hong Kong they have to pay $85 to get a copy of something.

Mike: So you simultaneously release a print book, an ebook and an audio book every time you do one of these, or at least that’s what you’re doing with Poke the Box, right?

Seth: Right, and a collectible. The collectible is because sometimes you want to treasure the book and touch the book and know that you have a special one. The collectible for Poke the Box costs $75 and is hand-signed with a bookplate. The cover is hand-printed on a letterpress and it comes with a hand-printed letterpress poster as well. We only made 400 of them and they’re on their way to selling out.

Mike: If people want to learn more about your book and The Domino Project, where do they go?

Seth: Just Google “The Domino Project” and there we are.

Mike: Seth, I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy day to talk to me, and I wish you the absolute best with your new book and your project.

Seth: It’s absolutely a pleasure to talk to you, Michael. Keep up the great work.

Listen to the complete interview below…

Click here to download MP3.

What do you think about Seth’s ideas? How have you poked the box? Leave your comments in the box below.

Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

You’ll find out why social media is the new phone and what this means to your business. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to find out what people are saying, what your competition is doing and what’s happening in your industry
• How to tie your monitoring back to metrics to measure social media results to improve awareness, sales and loyalty
• What the Red Cross does right in social media
• How blogging and social media impact your metrics
• Whether controversy is a good idea on your blog
• Where to learn how to integrate social media into your business

Read the book Amber co-authored with Jay Baer, The Now Revolution, to find out how to be a social company and how to engineer social from the inside out.  And connect with Amber on Twitter @ambercadabra, at Radian6 and on her blog, Brass Tack Thinking.

How do you measure your social media activities? What tips do you have to share on creating a social business? Please leave them below.

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.

This way, if your audience went to social-media.alltop, for example, they would see several hundred sources aggregated in one place, the five most recent stories from each source, and in seconds they could scan through hundreds of stories and get a good feel for what’s going on. That’s the vision of it.

Mike: Now you can create your own custom Alltop, right? How does that work?

Guy: Yes. We have about 850 topics ranging from adoption to zoology. A person who has a greater interest than just social media might have a few favorite tech blogs. Maybe the person has a desire to adopt kids, is a foodie, is a Macintosh user and is a real hockey buff. So he or she would want a couple of hockey blogs, a couple of tech blogs, a couple of social media blogs, some food blogs, an adoption blog, and that would be the person’s custom magazine rack. What we let you do is select from any of the 40,000 blogs that are at Alltop, and you can create what’s called “My Alltop.” That’s your custom magazine rack.

The difference between us and Google Reader is Google Reader says, “We’re giving you a container. Fill it up.” We say, “We have preselected 40,000 blogs for you. Just click on a plus sign and you’ll subscribe and create your own shelf.”

Mike: Obviously, you’re looking at a ton of content, and Alltop is really not just any content—it’s from the best content providers. Thinking about content, in your opinion, what do you think makes good content? What separates the best of the bunch? What makes certain blogs stand out?

Guy: For me, one of the easiest, quickest and most effective ways to determine if content is really useful is if it uses either unordered or ordered lists; i.e., bullets or numbers. Maybe it’s just my mind, but whenever I go to a blog post and I see 1), 2), 3), 4), 5) or bullet, bullet, bullet, my mind says, “Better organized, better thought out, more easy to use.”

When I go to a blog post that’s just paragraph after paragraph with nothing in bold and no sort of navigation tips, it’s hard to find the value. The ones I hate the most are “How to Be a More Effective Social Media Marketer” and you go to the post and it’s just paragraphs. There are no bullets. So you have to dig out of each paragraph what the tips are. Where are the tactical, actionable items? I think one very good indicator of a good blog post is, “Is it in bullet list format?”

Lots of people say, “Guy, that’s such a superficial way to look at things,” and “It’s not my style to write in bullet points,” but try looking at the world through the bullet point filter, and I think you’ll see that the best information is bulleted.

Mike: I’ve often said that I think the path to the mind is through the eyes, so if you can get the attention of an eyeball through formatting, then ultimately you can ensure your content makes its way into the minds of people. I think what you’re saying resonates true. It’s all about the way it’s presented, first and foremost. And you know, if it’s crappy content, then people won’t pay attention to it, but if it’s great content and it’s presented in a way that accommodates the eye, then I think you’ve got a magic formula.

Guy: With a bulleted list, I would make the case that even if it’s crappy content, it will be easier to determine it’s crappy with a bulleted list because you won’t have to dig through the crappy paragraphs to determine it’s crappy. You could just glance at a bullet, which is much faster.

Mike: Most of us are becoming inundated with content, so we have to make it easier for people to digest, and that’s where bullets come in.

Guy: I think a second and related point to this is that the greatest headlines to me are “Top 10 Tips…”, “How To…”, and “The Art Of…”. It happens that I’m a very tactical, action-oriented person. I’m looking for ways to do things better. Just give me what to do, tell me the 10 things to do.

Mike: Let’s talk about your story a little bit. Let’s talk about Enchantment. What is that word in your mind? What does it mean? Why did you choose it for your book? It’s quite an interesting word.

Guy: Well, I came at it from two directions. One very pragmatic, which is I needed a word that Guy Kawasaki could own in the same sense that Tom Peters owns the word excellence and maybe Geoffrey Moore owns the word chasm and Clayton Christensen owns the words innovator’s dilemma. Everybody has his or her word, and I needed a word.

The genre of this kind of writing is influence or persuasion, and those kinds of things.

Mike: Cialdini has the word influence, right?

Guy: Right. Cialdini owns influence. He’s also my friend, so I’m not going to try to steal the word from him. So when it came right down to it, coming from that pragmatic direction, enchantment was the word.

Coming from the other direction, which is a more philosophical direction, I wanted a word that went beyond influence and beyond wooing and beyond persuading. I wanted something that took it to the next level. It’s one thing to influence another person—it’s another thing to enchant the person.

Mike: What does that mean, especially for a business?

Guy: I think that a business that enchants a customer has a customer who’s beyond loyal. It’s delight. You can influence me and you can woo me and you can persuade me, but when you enchant me, that means that I’m head over heels in love. It’s the difference between like and love.

Mike: I think of Walt Disney World fans. People who are fans of Disney are enchanted, and they’ll do anything to participate in any of those kinds of activities endorsed by Disney because they’ve been enchanted, right?

Guy: Yes, and of course, the greatest example of all is Apple. What other company gets people to buy a phone that can barely go one day without charging, and that has the worst (until a few weeks ago) carrier in the world exclusively? That’s the power of enchantment. Anybody can sell a great phone with a great carrier.

Mike: What’s the benefit to a business of enchanting its customers?

Guy: Two levels. One is loyalty, repeat business, forgiveness at times. It just makes sense to have this relationship, this Nordstrom-esque kind of relationship with your customer. So that’s an obvious sort of business return, bottom-line answer. But I also think there’s a higher-level answer, which is that it’s a lot more fun to have a customer relationship based on enchantment rather than arm’s-length, sort of tit-for-tat, quid pro quo. I think that permeates the entire organization.

That’s a very different attitude than, “Oh, let’s just get up and see what our click-through rate is, and can we get a better CPM deal? How are we being rated in a statistical survey?” It’s a very different outlook on life.

Mike: Well, in Chapter 4 of your book, since we’re talking about Apple, you say the following about Steve Jobs: “Steve Jobs can enchant the shell off an egg without disturbing the yolk. But without Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, or iPad, Steve wouldn’t have anything to sell.”

You worked for Apple and you worked with Steve. Can you talk to me a little bit about the connection between being enchanting as Steve Jobs is, as you talk about him in your book, versus having something that is enchanting? What’s more important?

Guy: Neither, or both, actually. A great enchanting person with nothing to sell has nothing to sell. And a great product, without people who can enchant people and evangelize people to embrace, it is also a half-completed project.

Apple has this sweet spot of a CEO who really can enchant people with just his keynotes alone, and he has an enchanting product. So if you said to me, “Guy, you can either have an enchanting person or an enchanting product. Pick one,” I would pick the product. I would say, “Give me an enchanting product and then I can train people to be enchanting with it.” Whereas, if you give me enchanting people but a crappy product, it’s a lot harder to fix the product.

Mike: What makes an enchanting person?

Guy: I think an enchanting person starts off with a fundamental basis of being likeable. If you think about it, have you ever been enchanted by someone you can’t stand? Probably not.

The second component is trustworthiness, because you can like a person—you can like a Hollywood star, or their persona anyway—but that doesn’t mean you trust them. So the second component is trustworthiness.

The example I cite in the book of trustworthiness and competence and likeability is someone like Terry Gross of NPR. I don’t know her personally, but in listening to her on Fresh Air, you have a very good sense of her that she really is competent. She really can conduct a great interview across many, many subjects. She’s laughing, she’s teasing. You have a sense that she’s just not reading off a teleprompter that some producer put up 30 seconds ago.

So it’s between likeability and trustworthiness and knowledge and competence. And the difference between knowledge and competence is that knowledge is what you know, competence is the ability to apply it. A knowledgeable, competent, likeable, trustworthy person is enchanting.

Mike: Now let’s flip it over to the enchanting product. What are some qualities of an enchanting product? Can you give us some examples?

Guy: Sure, there are basically five or so key elements to the product. The first is depth—a product that is feature-rich. It does a lot.

The second thing is that it’s intelligent in the sense that its makers have intelligently figured out the customers’ problem and a solution to their problem, maybe even before the customers have.

The example I like to cite is that Ford Motor Company has a product called MyKey. What that enables you to do is program the top speed that the car can go. Imagine if you bought a really hot Mustang and you had to loan the car to your teenage son. You could program it so that the car could go no more than 60 miles an hour. I think that’s a really brilliant idea!

The next quality is completeness. Great products, enchanting products, they’re not just a physical entity and they’re not just a download. There’s a totality of the experience, which would be a string of enhancements, online documentation, technical support, all the good stuff. It’s not just the car. It’s the totality of the experience.

Another quality is elegance in terms of user interface. Someone has cared about the interaction between you and the product. That’s where Apple really shines.

The last thing is that I think enchanting products are empowering. That is, they make you feel better about yourself. A Macintosh is enchanting because it makes you feel more creative and more productive. Some computers you fight and some computers make you better.

Mike: I like the way you’ve analyzed that. I think a lot of businesses can really be thinking about this when they’re developing their products and services.

Guy: The acronym is DICEE. It’s deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering.

Mike: Let me switch into a totally different discussion. You talk about the importance of embracing nobodies in your book. I’d like to explore this a little bit with you because so many people simply go after who they think is the highest profile individual when it comes to trying to get endorsements or support. I like the fact that you’re kind of going countercultural here and saying maybe you should not just look at those people. Can you explain what it means to embrace nobodies and why it’s important?

Guy: My theory is that nobodies are the new somebodies. In the old world, information came down from the mountain and trickled down to the masses. You had to look up at the mountain and see god, and god was the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune and Forbes, Wired and CNET.

So in a world dominated by gods or goddesses on a mountain, you had to suck up to the gods and goddesses, hoping that they would like your product so they would tell the great unwashed masses, “We, the gods, have decided that you should like Facebook, and you should like Twitter, and you should like Macintosh, and you should like Shutterfly, and you should like Delicious.” I guess Delicious is a bad example now.

That’s the old world. In the new world, with blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and all the other stuff, I think it’s just as likely that someone you never heard of who has absolutely no platform compared to any of these publications will love your product and spread the word.

LonelyBoy15 on Twitter might tell 200. But it may be that LonelyBoy15 who is really a database administrator telling people about your product is more powerful in aggregation than this godlike person on the mountain.

I’m not telling you to ignore the gods, what I’m telling you is that the LonelyBoy15s and the Tiffany65s, they all add up.

Facebook grew because nobodies signed up for it and these nobodies created this total force. Now the somebodies have to say that Facebook was interesting, and they had to cover Facebook because if they didn’t, they’d look stupid.

My theory is that you don’t know who LonelyBoy15 is. It’s not like there’s a LonelyBoy15.com that’s ranked according to Alexa or Compete in the top 500 sites on the Internet. What you have to do is plant a lot of seeds, and you just hope that some of them are LonelyBoy15s.

Mike: What kind of practical tips would you give to your fellow marketers who want to try to plant seeds with nobodies?

Guy: The more seeds you plant, the more likely some will take root. With my book, the typical business book rollout involves inviting a few hundred reviewers. Obviously, you try to get The New York Times and The Washington Post and whatever. That’s the traditional method.

I happen to have a very valuable asset that’s kind of unique in the world, which is I’m the co-founder of Alltop, which has 40,000 blogs created by 20,000 people. I sent an email to all 20,000 saying, “I’m coming out with a new book. Would you like to review it?” Of those 20,000 people, roughly 1,200 said yes, so 1,200 people are going to review this book.

In a perfect world, I’m going to send out all 1,200, so on or about March 8, there’ll be 1,200 reviews of Enchantment. I don’t think that all 1,200 are going to come through, but let’s say 500 do. I don’t think there’s ever been a book that rolled out with 500 reviews, to put it mildly.

One of them might be Silicon Valley moms blog, or it could be the homeschooling blog because I have homeschooling.alltop, so homeschooling bloggers got my email. If they responded and said, “Yes, we would like to review your book,” then my book might be reviewed in Homeschooling World. Homeschooling World might only have 1,000 readers, but God bless them.

Mike: And they’re probably very influential people, I would imagine too.

Guy: In homeschooling, absolutely they are. So do I care if the person who’s the homeschooling main blogger tells all the other homeschoolers, “You have to read this book”? That is my best-case scenario!

Don’t get me wrong. I would love for The New York Times Book Review to say, “Everyone should read this book,” but that’s highly unlikely. On the other hand, I think I’ll get a lot of homeschooling blogs, I’ll get travel blogs, I’ll get mommy blogs, I’ll get food blogs.

Mike: And social media blogs.

Guy: Social Media Examiner. And they all add up.

Mike: Just a few closing comments. I was skeptical at first, I’ll be honest with you, because I wasn’t sure what you were trying to accomplish with the word enchantment. But having read through it, I believe that it’s really powerful what you’ve done here, and I think that time will prove that what you’ve done is created your next bestseller, so congratulations.

Guy: Thank you. Everybody has to have goals. Do you know the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie? That book is totally awesome. It came out in 1937, and it has sold roughly 15 million copies. If you go to Amazon today, you’ll probably see that it’s in the top 200 sellers to this day. That’s kind of my goal.

Mike: You want it to be a timeless book.

Guy: Yes.

Mike: That’s awesome. I want to close with this last question. If folks want to learn more about you specifically, and your book Enchantment, where would you like them to go?

If you want to find out more information about Enchantment, go to Facebook.com/enchantment. It’s a fan page where I post all my information. Mari Smith opened my eyes to Facebook and she introduced me to the Facebook programmer who did my custom work. She also introduced me to Wildfire, that is doing an Enchantment quiz for me.

Mike: Guy, thank you very much. I know that you’re a busy man and I greatly appreciate your taking the time out. We look forward to seeing more great things from you very soon.

Guy: Michael, I know you would do the same for me!

Mike: You know it!

Listen to our complete extended interview (below) to hear some of the interesting ways Guy promoted his book, as well as the dark side of enchantment.

Click here to download MP3.

What do you think of Guy’s ideas? Leave your comments in the box below.

In this interview, we talk about social media marketing, Jay’s experience writing the book and about where this crazy, fast-moving industry is headed.

Mike: Jay, what’s the single most important thing that marketers or business owners need to know to be successful right now?

Jay: It’s a terrific question. One of the things that we talked about a lot in the book is the fact that you have to act quickly as an organization. The example that we use to kick off the book is if you’re at a hotel and you’re having a bad hotel experience—it’s dirty or gross or whatever—historically, you might go down to the front desk, or call the 1-800 number or write a letter.

Now you can just dial up Yelp or TripAdvisor and leave a bad review or a tweet in two seconds. Now that particular hotel has to respond to whatever you’re doing as a consumer. Every customer is a reporter now.

In a world like that—where every customer is a reporter—each employee ends up having to be in marketing. Your company has to move so fast, to capitalize on both the good and the bad, that you really must have an incredibly strong and consistent corporate culture.

We don’t have time as businesses anymore to call a committee meeting and talk about what we’re going to do about this tweet or this blog post or this Yelp review. You have to empower your people in the organization to make decisions that are culturally appropriate for your organization.

We believe that culture is the most important factor around social participation and doing social media right. You have to focus on how your company is going to be social, and less about how your company is going to do social.

Mike: What you’re saying is that speed is the thing you want people to take home, and it’s important for them to respond. Secondly, that every customer or every prospect who has a bad experience is like a reporter. They can let the world know about their experience and that can be a bad thing. Thus, everybody in your organization needs to be like a marketer and respond quickly.

What does this mean to someone who is a small business owner?

Jay: From the small business perspective, where you may not have dozens of people in your organization, it means that you have to be a multitasker. You have to be operating your business while simultaneously listening to the social conversation. Not just from a response perspective—waiting for somebody to mention you—but looking for opportunities.

We talk a lot about the “opportunity economy” in the book and the ability for companies to find ways to interact with individuals on the social web in a way that’s contextually appropriate and relevant.

Let’s say you own a volleyball camp in California. You set up Twitter searches around the search term anyone know + volleyball. You’re going to find people who are asking questions about volleyball—some of those questions you can answer as an organization, and some of those people whom you help with those answers may end up being customers.

Mike: Something else you talk about in your book is how social media is kind of like the new telephone. What exactly do you mean by the new telephone, and what does this mean for businesses?

Jay: That’s actually a paradigm that was started by Amber Naslund’s employer, Radian6. Amber is my co-author and the vice president of social strategy for Radian6, the social media listening software company that many Social Media Examiner folks may have heard of. Her CEO, Marcel LeBrun, developed the metaphor of the social media telephone.

We think it’s particularly apt because customers are increasingly turning to the social web both to punish and praise brands. You see, “Thanks very much Southwest Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, Social Media Examiner,” or “Convince and Convert,” or anything else, as well as criticism.

So the same way that your actual telephone in your organization has both good news and bad news on the other end of the line, the social telephone does as well.

The other way that metaphor makes sense is that we believe over time, the same way that everybody in your organization now has an email address and a phone on their desk, everybody in your organization will eventually be active in social media in some way, shape or form. In fact, the guys at CoTweet, a client of mine, really believe that eventually most folks will have two different Twitter handles. They’ll have a personal and a business Twitter handle, the same way that most of us have a personal email and a business email address.

Mike: It’s quite interesting, this metaphor of the new telephone, because if you think about it, you have people now who have iPads, iPhones and Android devices on their person every waking moment of the day and even when they’re sitting on the couch. The only time they don’t really have it with them is when they’re sleeping. So it seems as though the consumer or the customer or the prospect is now “on” all the time.

That’s really a paradigm shift for businesses because customers are active whether they’re on the couch or stuck in traffic. In the past when they were home, they were dealing with personal stuff, and when they were at work, they were dealing with business stuff. Now it seems to be all the time, and means a shift for businesses, doesn’t it?

Jay: Oh, clearly. Social media doesn’t stop at 5 o’clock and it doesn’t stop on Friday. In fact, there have been lots of studies that show there’s actually more sharing behavior on Facebook on weekends because people are using it a little bit more personally and more likely to share content, so you’re exactly right.

If you look backwards, every time new technology was developed, we fundamentally changed our businesses to meet that challenge.

Yet we have not fundamentally changed our businesses to meet the social media challenge in any way. What we decided to do was put together a Twitter account and throw up a Facebook fan page and maybe a blog, and call it good—and that’s not going to get it done.

When every customer is a reporter and it’s a 24/7 world, we’re just scratching the surface of what businesses are going to have to do, so we wanted to write a playbook that shows businesses what they’re going to have to do over the next two to five years to transform themselves from the inside out to meet the challenges of the Now Revolution.

Mike: This is pretty mind-blowing. Talk to me about a story in particular, or a business that you discovered in the process of writing the book that might be doing this right. Is there any particular business that stood out in the process of crafting this book?

Jay: Almost every example in the book is of a small- or medium-sized business. I would say 90% to 95% of the examples in the book are purposely from small- and medium-sized businesses because we didn’t want to write a book for Ford or IBM.

One that I like best is Martell Home Builders. They’re in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. The owner is Pierre Martell, a young guy. They’ve been in the homebuilding business for four years, and while the Canadian homebuilding market hasn’t had the catastrophic declines that we’ve had in the U.S., it certainly hasn’t been an easy road.

When Martell first started out, they had to rely quite heavily on realtors to bring in prospects and help them drum up interest for their houses. That first year, 92% of all of their sales were through realtors, so they were paying commissions, and commissions in Canada are higher even than they are in the U.S.

Pierre decided that they ought to tell their own story, instead of having realtors tell their story. “He was prodded along by his brother, Dan Martell, who is actually the CTO of Flowtown, a company I think you’re familiar with, and some of your readers and listeners may be as well. Dan said, “You’ve got to get on this social media train,” and convinced him to do it.

Mike: Sure, the rationale was, “If we can sell a house without a commission, we just take most of that money and return it to the company,” right?

Jay: Precisely. They started telling stories about the organization in a really fantastic blog, and the blog isn’t really about them at all. It’s about winterizing tips and what you can do in New Brunswick, so it’s really fun marketing—it’s “unmarketing,” as Scott Stratten would call it. Pierre has a very successful Twitter account where he just talks about relevant issues and helps people and does it in a very authentic and natural way.

Martell's Blueprint Blog provides information on what needs to be done to winterize your home both outside and inside.

But then they do some crazy stuff. This is the one that really blew us away. Their foremen, who are actually out there helping customers and building houses, all have GPS tracking devices in their work trucks, so if you’re a customer of Martell’s and you ask, “Where is the guy? He’s supposed to come over here and fix my ceiling,” or whatever, you can dial up the web page and see where his truck is at any time.

They have completely adopted this 2.0, storytelling, authentic, executional approach, and two years later, they went from 92% of their deals through realtors to 12% of their deals through realtors and a 300% increase in sales.

Mike: Just so I understand, they decided to go ahead and blog and create outstanding content that was going to be really valuable to their community—their prospective buyers, if you will—and probably an even larger audience. A lot of people found great value in that, and some of them said, “I want to learn more about these guys,” and that’s how it got started as far as getting the word out?

Jay: Yes, everybody just comes directly to the company.

Mike: And then they employed some really cool full transparency: “If you want to know where we are, this is where we are.”

Jay: Yes, because you’re talking about a huge purchase, and the psychology of homebuying is you’re always nervous. So what they’ve done is humanize the company. They’ve reduced the perception of risk by putting together all these tracking mechanisms and date guarantees, and you can find your foreman, so they’ve created humanization.

As a result, what they have now are direct sales—people come in and say, “I don’t need to hear any more. I want to buy a house from you because I believe in your company.”

One of the success metrics they use is the time to close a sale. When you’re trying to sell a house, it can be hours and hours, and Pierre says that it used to take them three or four hours, sometimes as many as eight hours. He said their new record from somebody walking in the office to signing a house agreement is 35 minutes.

Mike: Their blog has probably enabled them to build a lot of trust with people before they even get to the point of purchase.

Jay: They’re already sold when they walk in the door.

Mike: That’s outstanding. Their profits must have gone through the roof.

Jay: Yes, because that money all drops to the bottom line. Not paying those commissions is essentially free revenue for them.

Mike: What would you recommend for someone who wants to get smarter about social media? Where exactly would you say they should start? What would be some smart tips for a business to get this thing underway wisely?

Jay: Once you’ve moved past the question of “Should we do social media?” and you’ve moved on to “How should we do social media?”, I always then start to look at it through a metrics prism. If you accept the premise that you should be doing social media, to what end? How are you trying to improve your business? Are you trying to sell stuff? Are you trying to sell the same amount of stuff, but have a higher average order? Are you trying to increase loyalty? Are you trying to turn your existing customers into a volunteer marketing army?

Each of those things is significantly different at the execution level in terms of social media programs, so you have to really understand why you’re doing social media, what you’re trying to achieve as an organization, and then put together success metrics that help you determine whether what you’re doing now is accomplishing that.

There’s a chapter in the book about success metrics and how to pick the right ones. If your objective is to create loyalty among your existing customers and you hope they will buy from you again and again, Facebook is a particularly good approach because Facebook is a brand community.

In large measure, your Facebook audience is already converted; otherwise, they wouldn’t have become your fan on Facebook. The people who like you on Facebook are people who actually like you in the real world, so that’s a perfect place to create loyalty, repeat customers and repeat purchases.

Yet a lot of companies think that Facebook is where they’re going to create new customers—that it’s a customer acquisition medium, when quite clearly it’s not.

Mike: It’s a community tool, really.

Jay: Yes, but a lot of companies don’t see it that way. They see social media in general as primarily a new customer acquisition mechanism. I think for almost all companies, it really is better as a loyalty and retention mechanism. So having that sort of clear-headed approach about what you’re trying to accomplish and the kind of metrics that you can put in place and know whether it’s working, I think is really the bridge behavior between “Okay, we’ve experimented” and getting more serious about it.

Mike: I just want to reiterate something you said that I think is ultra-wise—the why and the what. So many businesses aren’t sure why they’re doing social media. They’re doing it because everyone else seems to be doing it. But what’s the real reason and what in the world do they hope to achieve?

Jay: Yes, because it ain’t free, right?

Mike: You’re spending a lot of labor to do it.

Jay: I stole this line from Charlene Li, but social media is not inexpensive; it’s just different expensive.

Mike: So the question is why you’re doing it, and if you really don’t know, then you’re not going to find a lot of value in it because you won’t know whether it’s successful or not. I’m with you 100% on that.

Looking down the road two years from now, which I know is a long time in the world of social media, in your mind how is the landscape going to change for marketers?

Jay: I’d say in three areas. First is decentralization; we talked about that a little bit earlier. Social media will be a skill, not a job. You won’t have a social media department any more than you have a typing department. Someday it will seem crazy that you had one person in your company listening using Radian6 or a tool like that. That will seem insane. Eventually it’ll be on everybody’s desktop and listening will be part of everybody’s job, as will responding.

The second one is integration. We’ll start to see more of a convergence of social and CRM and email and other communication tools, a lot of the R&D being done out there by the smart software company that is trying to bolt together other parts of marketing, which will make it a lot more powerful.

Then I think the third piece that I’m really excited for is optimizing social media; adding more of the science in social. I can do a Google AdWords campaign and figure out whether having a comma in the second line as opposed to a period has virtual impact on results, yet I can’t send two different tweets to each half of my list. I can’t do any sort of testing or optimization other than somewhat anecdotally in social media. That’s an issue, so there are a lot of people working on it as well.

I’m really excited to see where we’re going to be in two years when they really have a lot more sophisticated data and testable hypotheses and things like that. It’s going to make social a lot more like email in terms of having that availability of data and testability and optimizing, which will make it a lot easier for CEOs and company owners to understand whether it’s working, just like we talked about. When you’ve got richer data, you can make better decisions.

Mike: Jay, my last question is if people want to learn more about you and your book, where would they go?

Jay: The book is called The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social, obviously available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and anywhere books are sold. The website for the book is NowRevolutionBook.com. Also, on Facebook, just search for “Now Revolution.”

You can find me at ConvinceandConvert.com or on Twitter at jaybaer, and on occasion, you can find me on the world’s greatest website, SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Mike: Jay, thank you very much for some really interesting insights that you provided myself and fans of Social Media Examiner today. I really appreciate your time.

Jay: Always a pleasure. I appreciate it.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) to hear some of the amazing ways Jay promoted his book and how he thinks the world of social media will change for marketers two years from now.

What do you think of Jay Baer’s ideas? Leave your comments in the box below.

You’ll discover the steps needed to build your own brand equity with social media, along with some great tips for both the self-employed and people who work for large companies.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Why you need to carve out your position and brand equity
• How to start branding yourself on social media if you don’t have any brand equity online
• Why you need to use your name on social media
• How to brand yourself on your Facebook business page
• How Mari brands herself and what she does to craft the brand she represents

Connect with Mari on Twitter @MariSmith, on her Facebook page and check out her blog.

What do you do to build your brand equity?  How has your branding helped you? Please leave your comments below.

You’ll also learn about the hot concept of the 118 rule and how to create the digital version of your elevator pitch.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Why you need to focus on the key questions to ask about your business
• Why you only have 8 seconds to hook someone and 110 seconds to sell them
• How a Chief Listening Officer can help develop your business
• Why it’s not about what you say your brand is but how you deliver the message
• What people are doing wrong on social media
• Why you never control your brand and what you need to do instead
• Why 1/3 of all businesses get social media straight away, 1/3 eventually get it and 1/3 will never get it
• How good marketers use a blend of communication tools

Follow Jeff on Twitter, check out his website and look out for his new blog, the Change Agent.  This year Jeff has a new book coming out and you should be seeing him on television too.

What do you think about the mirror test and creating your brand?  Do you have a digital elevator pitch? Please leave your comments below.

To help you take your blog to an entirely new level, here are 7 tips from the best-of-the-best in the blogging and social media arena. Every expert below has created a thriving blog with tens of thousands of subscribers who engage with their posts on a regular basis. If you want to know how to create and grow a successful blog, make sure to take notes (and take action)!

#1: Measure Your Blogging Success

“If you’re blogging for business, rather than blogging about your cat, baby, fashion addiction, or crush on Taylor Swift, you need to set some success metrics,” says Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert.

Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?

However, within the business blogging arena there are a wide variety of potential metrics to gauge your momentum. It’s imperative that you select the most relevant ones that match with your blog’s purpose.

The first step in that process of course is to know why you’re blogging. This sounds simple, but it’s shocking how many bloggers aren’t clear on the core business rationale behind their blog initiative.

As I see it, you have 3 options:

• Blogging for Content
  This is the scenario where you are writing a blog with considerable emphasis on search optimization, attempting to drive traffic to the blog via strategic content creation and keyword inclusion. Your metric is search traffic.

• Blogging for Commerce
  Related to the first, but commerce-oriented blogs are more interested in conversion events than in traffic generation. Funneling traffic from the blog to some other web destination (typically a corporate site or lead form) is the primary objective. Here, your metrics are leads and conversions.

• Blogging for Community
  These blogs seek to build a consistent readership that interacts with the blogger(s) and advocates on behalf of the content on other social outposts.

Determine the main reason why your business has a blog and pick success metrics to match.

#2: Pursue Guest Blogging Opportunities

One of the best ways to get exposure for your blog is to blog for other people. Rich Brooks, president of Flyte New Media, offers some great advice to start building relationships for potential guest blogging opportunities.

“Find the influential bloggers in your related industries,” says Brooks, “and read their blogs. As appropriate, leave intelligent, thoughtful comments that further the conversation. This can drive traffic to your blog and may open up opportunities for guest blogging at their blog as they become aware of you through your brilliant insights. However, this must be a win-win for it to work. If you leave comments for completely selfish reasons, you can expect limited results.”

#3: Reframe How You Look at Business Blogging

“I often hear people complain that they don’t have time to write on their business blog or they don’t know what to write about,” says Denise Wakeman, founder of The Blog Squad. “Yet a blog is one of the best tools you can use to distribute your message across the web.”

One way to move away from this mode of thinking is to reframe how you look at blogging. It’s not about writing on a blog; it’s about taking advantage of a powerful marketing tool that works for you 24/7/365. Then, schedule writing time so it doesn’t slip through the cracks in the course of a busy day or week.

Here’s a 4-step process to get you started:

1.     Block out your writing time on a calendar.

2.     Plan your content in advance. Create an editorial calendar and plug in your topics 1 to 3 months in advance.

3.     For each of your blog categories, list a minimum of 5 topics you can cover related to your company, products and the solutions you provide.

4.     Pop them into your editorial calendar as prompts so you’re never at a loss for ideas when it’s time to create content.

#4: Add Keywords to Your Blog Titles and Posts

Rob Birgfeld of SmartBrief says keywords are the secret sauce to a successful business blog.

“It’s easy,” Birgfeld says, “to write blog posts on whatever topic springs to mind. But chances are your blog was created to help achieve business goals. In order to reach those goals, take data from your search engine marketing efforts and develop an editorial plan around your top-producing keywords.”

Gather your top 10-15 keywords or phrases and write blog posts specific to each one. Keep the content compelling, but be sure to sprinkle the selected keyword (and synonyms) throughout the post.

Most importantly, be sure to include those all-important keywords in the blog title and in the tags that you select. Not only will a keyword-driven blogging strategy help you build and plan out your editorial calendar, it will help you reach company goals via proven search engine marketing data. Thus providing you with something that’s hard to come by in social media: An easier sell to your CFO.

#5: Interview the Best in Your Industry

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, suggests, “Hire a videographer and go to the biggest trade show in your industry. Interview all the leading book authors and thought leaders.”

When you do this, you’ll end up with tons of content you can release on your blog over months. And chances are, when the big names see your video, they’ll share it with their fan base, driving new traffic to your site.

Here’s Mike Stelzner interviewing Scott Monty of Ford at Blog World 2010. This is a great example of attending the best events in the industry and connecting with the influencers.

#6: Create Persuasive Calls to Action

“You’ve got anecdotes, case studies, top-ten lists, provocative insights and more on your business blog. Hats off to you. That’s a huge achievement, particularly if you’ve been publishing a blog for a year or less. But what’s your call to action? And by that I mean, what step is a visitor prompted to take after landing on your blog?” says Debbie Weil, expert blogger and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

What obvious callouts do you have to attract a visitor’s eye after he or she reads your latest blog post? Think about it. Your blog reader, if a first-time visitor, has most likely typed in a keyword phrase and ended up on your blog through search results.

Readers may not even know that it’s a blog. So you’ve got their attention, at least for a few seconds. This is your real-time moment to prompt your visitor to take the next step. If I sound all salesy here I don’t mean to. This is permission marketing 101. It’s offering something unanticipated but relevant at the exact moment your visitor is looking for it.

Here are a few ideas for persuasive calls to action from Debbie Weil’s Social Media Insights Blog:

• Download our white paper
• Join us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• Ask us a question
• Download our e-book
• Sign up for our free webinar
• Request our toolkit
• Sign up for our e-newsletter
• Request a demo

#7: When it Comes to Video Blogging, Forget Acting

“I remember the first time I was on camera,” says David Garland, founder of The Rise to the Top and author of Smarter, Faster, Cheaper. “I was trying to be someone I wasn’t… with an awkward spray tan. (Stop laughing.)”

For some reason, our personalities can sometimes change when on camera (something about that scary lens). What the audience craves is to see the real you. All the good stuff, quirks and everything else.

Try this. Invite someone over with whom you are VERY comfortable. Have him or her ask you a question and simply answer it. Then, have the person hold a camera and try it again. Rinse, wash and repeat until you feel comfortable. When you talk into the lens, picture that person. It will make all the difference.

Here's David Garland interviewing Mike Stelzner about the success of SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Want to Learn More About Blogging for Business?

If you’re not fully leveraging the power of blogging, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Most businesses are just now getting started with blogs.

There’s one easy way to take your blogging efforts to the next level. By attending the web’s largest online blogging conference, Blogging Success Summit 2011 you’ll become empowered to use blogs to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

The great part is you’ll be learning from 23 blogging experts. Join Technorati’s CEO, Scott Monty, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Michael Stelzner and experts from McDonalds, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, Sony and Procter & Gamble as they reveal proven blogging tactics at Blogging Success Summit 2011.

It’s the web’s largest online blogging conference. Go here for a free sample and to learn more.

Now it’s your turn! Have you used any of these great blogging tips already? Do you plan to implement any into your blogging strategy right away? Share your thoughts and comments with us in the box below.

All photos from Shutterstock

David explains why you need to become a social business before you can become a social brand. You’ll also find out where to start your social business planning and what to expect in the future.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to prepare your business for social media
• Why you should start with small projects on social media
• Why social media ROI is an excuse for inaction
• How to identify more economic metrics other than sales
• What success is for businesses on social media
• Why the ability to create a social experience is critical

Connect with David on his blog Logic + Emotion, on Twitter @armano and check out Edelman Digital.

What are your thoughts on social business? Please leave your comments below.

As marketers, we often look for the next big tool to differentiate ourselves. But did you know the most powerful content-creative tool was invented long before social media? It doesn’t involve keeping a Kodak Zi8 in your pocket, either. And you don’t need a fancy new Twitter strategy or some snazzy FBML.

The most powerful content tool is also the oldest. It’s the tool that brought us some of the most compelling moments in history—from fallen leaders to pop-culture confessions. It’s the tool that made Oprah arguably one of the most powerful brands on the planet. And the same one that Barbara Walters used to reach the most influential people of our time.

Your Content Advantage: The Interview

Yes, the interview. Powerful interviews create timeless content. Yet when it comes to blogging, we neglect to use our most powerful weapons. Master blog interview tactics and your content will surely make an impact—in any situation.

Interview-based content is valuable to your readers and more likely to be shared.

Famous rocker Glenn Danzig once said, “unfortunately, I have to say, one out of every 100 interviews I do, I get a real journalist.” So whether you write for yourself, your boss, a client or an industry analyst, leave the impression of a professional. Blog interviewing is a must-learn tactic.

Interviews can be recrafted into unique blog posts. The trick is asking the right questions.

Here are 11 lines of questioning you can use to extract great material:

#1: Informational Post

Q: What are the three biggest benefits to your target audience and why?

Many writers mistakenly focus on whiz-bang features, measures or accomplishments, but readers often have difficulty relating to these. By focusing on benefits, you push the interview subject to think outside of features and bells and whistles. Benefits are far more persuasive than features, and they are well-received by a larger audience.

#2: The Numbered List

Q: What are the [insert #] top questions asked by your [customers, readers, followers]? What are [#] more?

By using a two-part question, you force the subject to rank the priority of each item—space is limited. The second part of the question allows you to open it up, but you’ll know the items that really matter in your subject’s mind. Prioritized lists are important because many readers judge the value of your post by the first few items.

Numbered list posts often gain broad reach via social media. The two-part approach brings the reader in more effectively.

#3: The Mini Case Study

Q: Tell me about a day in your life—before and after the solution you chose.

By asking the subject to speak about his or her life, in personal rather than business terms, you’ll better extract how quality of life or work was improved. This leads to deeper and more unique follow-up questions and a strong emotional connection to your audience.

Ford continues to deliver a more “human” approach with case studies, making them more compelling blog posts for a larger audience.

#4: Link or Resource Round-Ups

Q: If you had a list of ‘best-kept secrets’ [websites, books, coaches] you’d recommend, which would you include and why?

By asking for resources outside the mainstream, you’re likely to get a round-up that’s far more unique than other round-up blogs that mention the same mainstream thing.

#5: Expert Guide

Q: What tips can you recommend that you’d only share with a close friend (and everyone reading this blog)?

This line of questioning will force the subject to think outside the box. The subject benefits because he or she becomes even more of an expert, while your readers will be all but guaranteed unique content.

#6: Common Pitfalls or Problems

Q: What are three hard-to-spot pitfalls that are critical to avoid?

Even people who have moderate knowledge of a topic know about obvious pitfalls. Focusing on the most difficult hurdles to spot will make you a hero in the eyes of the people you save.

#7: Predictions or Trends

Q: Looking out 3 to 5 years, beyond the obvious trends, what do you think will be the next big change in your industry?

If you focus more than a year or two in the future, you’ll push your subject to stay away from the obvious. Example: If you’re a marketer, you don’t get much value from your subject telling you that social media will be huge next year.

By focusing beyond the near future, blog posts are more likely to offer unique, rather than trending, insights. This means original content, more links and broader reach.

#8: Response to Another Blog or Current Event

Q: When you first read that [article, blog post, comic, etc.], what was your gut reaction

This phrasing gives the subject psychological permission to tell you his or her honest opinion and not necessarily the prepared one.

#9: Inspirational Post or Client Story

Q: What are three things you’ve told yourself that kept you going during your darkest hour?

This question immediately turns the interview subject from an interviewee into a coach and sage. You’ll be surprised at how this single powerful question can literally transform an entire interview.

Building an emotional hook early in the post inspired readers to continue reading and likely share the story with others.

#10: Personal Profile or Biographical Q&A

Q: What are three life memories you recall most frequently and why?

The memories we recall most are often the ones that have had the biggest impact on our lives. You’ll likely learn a lot about your subject by following this line of questioning.

Asking questions that make your subject a storyteller reveals his or her real voice and creates a more compelling storyline.

#11: Product, Service or Book Review

Q: What was the most difficult thing you decided to exclude from this review and what was your reasoning?

This question opens the interview subject up to a discussion about some of the things that may have been important but were not included for a variety of reasons. External factors like time, space, politics or other issues often don’t let reviewers include everything they’d like.

These eleven questions can help you craft great content for your blog. By interviewing, you’ll generate content that gives you tremendous reach.

I’d like to hear from you. What other lines of questioning have you used to enhance your blogging? Feel free to add your own in the comments below.