Mike & Mary Beth Krebsbach

Oh, you know its going to happen, brand marketers left and right asking their teams to “get me some of that Old Spice” social media magic. This recent campaign will be another benchmark of social media achievement. I know this because CNN (CNN International, actually) interviewed me on Friday to get my take on the campaign. As with previous, alleged big success stories - BMW Films, Subservient Chicken, Elf Yourself - this one demands that we answer three big questions:

1.Was it successful?
2.What about it made it so?
3.No, was it really successful like did it drive sales?

I found this at the ““Digital Influence Mapping Project.”

It has lots of great information!

Yesterday was tough. We just listed our house for sale. We have been here for 12 years. It is the best house we have ever owned and we will never have a house as nice again. The good news in all this is that when the house sells we will be able to leave Packer Land (Green Bay Packers football) behind! A lot of work to do to get a house ready to sell….

I have attended a number of seminars recently that have something to do with Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, and the others. One comment that comes up from small business people is “Social Media is a major time suck”. I know how easy it is to spend way too much time on Facebook and Twitter. Part of the problem that some people have is simply that they follow too many people.

One of the best principles I learned was from Valdis Krebs who suggests following fewer people to get to the many in his classic post ““So Many People, So Little Time.” (The link is: http://bit.ly/ciOetE - I use the service at bit.ly to shorten links to use in Twitter and to track the link analytics. The actual link is: http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/2009/01/so-many-people-so-little-time.html) In this post he makes this observation:
The trick is to find the people that reach many social circles and follow them. Of course, we need to find more than the minimum of people to follow — you want some redundancy in your network so that there are multiple paths to places of interest for you. Finding these key nodes is what social network analysis is all about.

Because I have chosen them carefully, I want to actually read the tweets of the people I follow. A small part of my “following network” is always in churn, but the number of people I follow on Twitter never exceeds 100 [currently I follow about 70]. Those who follow thousands of people readily admit that they can not read the fire hose of tweets they get every day.
So if you are serious about using Twitter to keep on top of certain topics you should follow Valdis Krebs’ advice. I know that I will keep it in mind as I go forward with my own Twitter account.

I am starting the process of changing the things I will be blogging about. The purpose of this blog was to help stay in touch with family and friends. Facebook has completely eliminated the need to use a blog to stay in touch with family! I really like the privacy that Facebook gives us. I know that sounds strange with all the news about Facebook’s lack of privacy. What I mean is that the only people that see the things I post are my Facebook “Friends”. The only people that I am friends with on Facebook are family and very close friends. That is it. No work people, neighbors, or people I just know who they are.

Over the next few weeks I will be changing this blog to talk about things that I am interested in that don’t pertain to family stuff. I will be writing about current events, interesting people, and my current passion - Social Media for small companies. The family stuff will stay on Facebook. I also have a Twitter account that will be used for non-family stuff as well. You can find me at Twitter.com/mikekrebsbach.

I hope you find the new postings interesting and helpful.