Everyone wants to know how I’m able to help my clients get their stories in the Buzz section of StumbleUpon, in Tweetmeme or on the front page of Digg.

Sh! Social Media Success Secrets!

You can’t sell access or ranking in any of these social media sites,and buying votes is a tactic that doesn’t bear up, strategically.

What I am able to do is coach my clients on how to use social media, how to build their online and offline networks, how to be authentically influential and how to create content that their desired audience finds compelling.

That way, when their content is naturally discovered or promoted, or on the sites that allow it, submitted by them, they don’t make it to the pre-popularity stage, only to be taken out of contention for the site.

What I do in that regard is no secret.

How is it done? That seems to be the big deal. Greater minds than mine have attempted and failed.

My answer is that it’s not just what you know. It’s not just who you know.

It’s whether you can get those pivotal people, that critical network, and the user base at the site in question to move the way you want them to — and that’s whether or not you’re talking about social media sites, or just life in general.

I approach social media the way I approach most areas of success in my life. I use strategies that magnify the tactics everyone else is using exponentially. While everyone else is looking at their next move in Checkers, I’m thinking about my next game of Chess.

In the Social Media Success Package, I’ll teach you how to do with 100 — 1000 people what other people can’t seem to manage even with 100, 000 friends, followers, or connections.

Because it’s not about the number of followers. It’s nice to have several thousand or even a hundred thousand people following you for show.

But it’s really about what you can get people to do, and why. Can you get your content in places that it will be discovered? Can you write content so compelling that people can’t help but share it and save it? Can you do this over and over again, consistently?

And can you build yourself a fan base, an alliance or a network that willingly supports your endeavors without having to rely solely on collecting and trading favors?

It’s really about how you add so much value to the discussion that the right people want to return it to you.

It’s not enough just to have influence but it IS a huge component to social media success.

Since strategies and tactics go hand in hand, included in this package is a quick guide to how you can get duplicate my method of getting 27,000 StumbleUpon users to a site in one week. To highlight that, for the next 24 hours, I’m going to cut the price of this package by $20 — until 3:33 pm tomorrow, you can get it for just $47 $27.

You can get a sample of the document directly from here until this time tomorrow.

After that, you’ll have to sign up to my newsletter to get a free peek.

Look in the upper right hand corner for the download link.

It’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind at some point: what will happen to my business during hard times?

It doesn’t seem to matter what business you’re in, or whether the news says it’s getting a little better or a little worse.

Every business owner’s mind drifts to the recession at some point.

We wonder: are we headed for another Great Depression? Or will we just be tightening our belts to ride out the latest storm?

Wish I had the answer to that but I have no clue. I’m a website promotion specialist. How
would I know?

What I do know is that I’m not participating in the recession — I’m too busy and I haven’t got a *thing* to wear!

I say that with tongue in cheek, but due to an expensive health problem I’ve had since 1992, I really don’t know what it is to have an adult life where you can consistently indulge in extras — mine always went to meds or physical therapy, or back-pay on doctors’ bills. So for me, it’s Always a recession.

But I believe you can turn just about any circumstance into a positive, and sure enough, it puts me in a unique position to tell you how to get your business to prosper in a time when it feels like the economy is in a tail spin for some indefinite amount of time.

The answer to recession for me?

Market harder, and market better.

Doing better, faster and more creative marketing has always helped me move my business forward, even when I was having a hard time — even now when it seems like Everyone is having a hard time.

I was no genius when I started thinking this way, so don’t think that just because website promotion and marketing is my business, this strategy can’t work for you.

So what does marketing harder mean? Or marketing better, for that matter?

I’m not saying that if you were spending $2000 a month on advertising that you should now spend $3000. Nor am I saying cut back. There are basically two steps.

First, spend your advertising money *smarter* –make it go as far as it possibly can. Really look more closely at what is working the best to bring your business leads, sales and in the case of the web, traffic, and focus your money and attention there.

Reduce or eliminate everything else. If it makes you feel better, put it on hold and resume it when you have more in your pocket.

In other words, if ezine ads have always set your sales on fire, but pay per click has always been iffy, move more of your ad budget into ezine ads until the economic storm passes. Once your company is in better financial health, you’ll be able to afford to hire an expert to tweak your pay per click if you need it.

Some sites seem to be made for pay per click, but get hit and miss results with press releases. In that case it would be better to reduce, but not end, press release campaigns, and shift that money to PPC until you have more profit to risk.

The second step would be to append that advertising with more cost-effective marketing, especially in whatever area you’re not doing now. If it will only cost you a few hundred dollars in the short term to implement a tested technique that will get you results for years to come, investing the time is a wise move.

Let’s say you’re doing article marketing by posting to hundreds of directory-style sites.

Awesome.

Now get those same articles distributed directly to ezine publishers that have better
reach, and are more exclusive about who they accept. Need to test them out first? Run a classified or top sponsor ad.

And don’t stop there. Once your name gains recognition among your peers, take your expertise marketing to the next level and do some interviews.

Find ten people with targeted audiences and do 10 interviews. You can even cut those ten people in on the profits by offering their audience a special offer and paying them a percentage per sale as a referral fee.

There’s all kinds of creative marketing you can do that you can start with quickly, from blogging, article marketing or social media to organic search strategies. And of course ther are also all kinds of twists you can put on whatever you’re already doing.

How do you find them? For at least 30 minutes today, sit down and write marketing ideas. I learned a tip from a brilliant man named Allen says that after your mind has been working on something for 30 minutes, it just keeps coming up with more ideas on autopilot.

I’ve found that the longer I go, the better my ideas get. So even if you have to stop after 30 minutes, take that pad and paper with you.

And no matter how silly any idea seems, write it down. It may inspire something else later.

When you’re done, pick the best one and go do it, or assign it to your marketing team if you have one. Research who does something similar, and follow their successes.

It’s the ultimate recipe for getting a business through hard times — market harder, market more creatively, and do it in addition to, not instead of, advertising. Some marketing takes a little time to work.

The people are still out there. Your business still helps people. A recession or hard times just means you have to work a little smarter for the same amount of money.

You can do it. Don’t abandon hope just yet.

It boils down to this.

No matter who you are, it seems comparatively easy to get 100 people to do the same thing, to go in the same direction.

By comparison, especially if you’re new to online marketing, it seems much more difficult to get 10,000 people to do the same thing.

You may find yourself wondering if you even KNOW 10,000 people or if you have that kind of reach.

With the Mini-Viral Success Formula, the pressure is off. At the same time, you’ll find that once you get the hang of generating 100 unique visitors, 250 doesn’t seem that hard. And eventually you’ll come to realize that you can get to 10,000 visitors by repeating what you did to get 100 visitors, 100 times.

Instead of trying to gain 10,000 followers in Twitter during your first week out, you learn how to get the same results with only 100 or 1000 followers. By the time you actually get to ten thousand connections, they’ll be as effective as the next person’s 100,000.

Creating a series of small successes is also a much more sustainable model than attempting to recreate the conditions which must exist for one massive viral campaign to be successful. Aiming to get to the Buzz page in StumbleUpon several times a week is easier than attempting to get on the front page of Digg every month, and the rate of success rate is much higher.

How much does it matter to you whether you get 40,000 visitors in one day, if they aren’t the type to buy, click or subscribe? If you can get 40,000 visitors in two weeks, and convert them at one percent, isn’t that better? For most business people, creating a series of mini-campaigns is better for business because it takes less time, and involves more profit.

I was living on blog island.

And it sucked ASS.

What’s blog island?

What’s more important than what it is, is how you get there.

To get to blog island, the first thing you have to do is start blogging.

And you do all the regular stuff that they say bloggers are supposed to do.

You figure out all the basic stuff like:

• how often to write
• what to write.…
• how to create buzz…
• how to write persuasive and engaging blog posts…
• when to send trackbacks.…
• why to comment thoughtfully on other blogs…

… all that sort of beginner blogger stuff.

And people start to notice you.

Then you make a left turn at My Poo Don’t Stink Avenue, and suddenly you’re on Blog Island.

Maybe you stop responding to comments on your blog. Not because they’re too many, but because you just can’t be bothered.

Or perhaps now that you’re becoming a BFD, you don’t see the point of stooping to comment on other people’s sites anymore. After all, you paid your dues right?

And why have a blog roll? Linking out to other people’s sites is stupid right? Because then you can hold them captive! Forever!

Could be you get such good results from blogging that you stop and use the excuse that you have all this work to do.. (Yep. That one’s about me. And not in a pat-self-on-back way…)

Blog Island is the place you end up in when you stop doing the things that made you a successful blogger in the first place.

Like…

Writing about other people you admire . and linking to their posts.

Or being passionate about something, then writing about it with every drop of that passion.

Or reading your favorite blogs, and linking to your favorite blog posts.

Blogging is as much about consuming, commenting on, and linking to great content as it is creating it. All 4 activities work symbiotically together to turn you into a great blogger whose posts are read by actual humans.

Stay off blog island. No excuses.

You have an existing business, and you want to make, say $10,000 a month with it, with an average $100 sale. About 100 sales. For easy math we’ll say between follow-up and first time visitors, 2 percent of the people who visit your site end up becoming buyers by the end of the month.

So to get to your goal, you need 5000 targeted visitors a month — not to the site, to the sales pages. To make it even harder, we’ll pretend that only half of the visitors to the site will even look at a sales page by the end of the month, though if we set up our sites, email newsletters, and blogging strategy correctly, we know that’s not true.

Which means that regardless of how often they come back, we need to have 10,000 unique visitors a month. Let’s round that up to 334 unique visitors a day.

Where can we come up with 334 unique visitors a day, starting from zero?

One place is the Mini-Viral Success Formula.

You see, most people are banking on this huge response from social media and the rest of their traffic generation projects. And if they miss the mark, they go home with nothing.

But what they don’t know is that, it’s fairly easy to get several low to medium viral success programs working. And this is usually how the huge viral effect is achieved, over time.

No one expects to prepare a perfect dinner their first time cooking, on their quest to become a great chef. But you expect your 50th meal to be better than your 2nd, though hopefully not as good as your 1000th. And over time, more and more that you cook for may enjoy your food.

And if it gets, in practice, from good to spectacular, people will start coming back for more.

Then they start bringing their friends. And one day your preparing your 1000th feast, and it seems like you’re suddenly famous for your signature dish. But actually it’s just been building so slowly and naturally that it feels like forever.

This is what you want to do with social media, in particular with blogging. That’s the Mini-Viral Success Formula — it’s a plan to build several small successes in a way that builds momentum towards the goal of continually becoming a mini-sensation.

The goal, after all, with a business blog isn’t to become famous. It’s to make money. Most of us would rather have our 100 monthly customers than 10,000 visitors than turn into 100 leads. And that’s what the system is designed for — to help you make money with your blog, to turn your browsers into customers.

This is where the change in strategy should be — this is the kind of thinking that can revive the state of blogging, never mind social media. This is why the connection is so important, and forming real relationship beginnings that mature offline.

Social media to amass hundreds and thousand followers as an end in itself, with the hopes of making a quick buck is for people who are building fan clubs, not businesses. They’re for movie and media stars, not business people.

Of course, you may yet end up with several hundred thousand subscribers, followers or monthly web visitors after a few months or years.

And if you lay out a good strategy now, it may well be worth it.

Really soon, we’ll talk about the shortcuts you can safely use in social media and blogging.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.

Not That Kind of Shortcut.

I usually just say “Shortcuts are just the long way to failure.” That’s not entirely true, it’s just a sound-bite. (More on the sound-bite tactic later.)

REAL Shortcuts actually work, by definition.

It’s the Shortcut Mentality that doesn’t work.

Let me explain.

A shortcut is defined as a route to a destination that is shorter than the long one.

There are all types of reasons why the shortcut route isn’t always the default road.

While it may have fewer steps, it may occasionally take longer in time spent. Think of highways versus city streets.

A shortcut may encourage us to go off on side missions.

The shortcut might be new, and not have existed at the time the long road was first built. You may have had a static website. Now blog software like WordPress can build you a web site without even using the blog functionality until you’re ready.

So yes, shortcuts work. So what is the shortcut mentality, and why doesn’t it work?

The Shortcut Mentality is the premise that taking the work out of a process will still bring you the desired result.

Some people think they can use PLR content, or other sub-par content to create or update a blog and it will still “work”.

Every time I’ve seen this process followed, I’ve seen it fail. Blogging is work.

It’s not work that necessarily has to be done by YOU, but someone does have to do it.

Preferably someone with personality who is knowledgeable about your topic matter enough to be able to competently fuse the personal touch with the spread of information.

That means when your local company starts to blog, whether the prime objective is more visibility or better customer service, it has to connect.

Blogs are connective technology. Implementing them to divorce yourself from the public partly defeats the purpose.

This is a fairly controversial topic and some people will Strongly disagree with me.

They’ll say the point of blogging is the software and what it can help you do in the search engines.

They’ll claim the aim of blogging for business is different from that of personal blogging.

I would counter that no matter why you are blogging or what the ultimate gain is, if you intend to blog without making connections, it’s as effective as having a conversation using only a monotone voice.

Communication will result. But if you’re going to use resources to achieve that aim, and what amounts to ten percent more effort will make that mission ten times more effective.… why not?

If you have the tools, use them. Especially if it can give you a leg up on people who don’t get it.

There are blog shortcuts that work. And there are those that dismally, sadly, can only be said to work if you download your definition of something “working”.

So why say that shortcuts don’t work, when in a literal sense, they do?

Not just because the world rarely plays out literally.

Also because people who intuitively know I’m talking about the mentality, instantly get it, even though I’m speaking in sound-bites. And people who don’t, and want to know, I can normally engage and explain.

I find that when I talk or write in sound-bites, people listen, and I’m able to then engage the ones I really need to talk to further, in order to relay the true message.

We’re turning into a Headline Culture. It’s a necessary tactic, and perhaps not even an evil one.

If you can’t sum up what you have to say in a headline, is it worth your time to get the details?

Tell me what you think.

And share your favorite recipe for chicken too.

Because if I was a headline right now I’d read “I’m Sofa King Hung Ray”.

This week:

• Social Media — Isn’t it already shortcut?
• Why doesn’t the shortcut mentality in social media work?
• Why and how does the shortcut mentality in blogging specifically, fail repeatedly?
• Which shortcuts can you safely take to blogging and the rest of social media?
• How do you avoid the shortcut mentality in social media?
• What are some of the worst examples of the shortcut mentality in social media?

On Twitter the other day, someone asked me why I don’t put my site in my Twitter profile.

1– I don’t want the focus to be on my site from my profile. When people meet me via Twitter, I want them to interact with me before going to my sites.

2– I want the focus to be on their site and whether I can help them, not me and how great I think I am.

3– Being semi-retired, I cherry pick my clients.

It used to be that I had to work with everyone who asked for my help, HAD to because if not I was gonna go broke.

Now I work on cases that fascinate me, with people I like, at prices that make sense for both of us.

4– When you can get traffic on demand, you no longer see everything as an opportunity to get more traffic. That sounds like horseshit to some people, so let me try an analogy.

Have you ever noticed that money isn’t as urgent a concern to your rich friends? It’s because they’ve solved the problem of money in their lives. They have other things to focus on.

It doesn’t mean they don’t care about money.

It means that now that they know how to get it, and what to do with it, it’s just a tool.

They don’t feel urgent or desperate about it any longer. If they lost all their money, they’d be able to get it all back in a couple of years– because they understand money.

Just look at how many times Trump’s companies have been bankrupt. He always bounces back, because he understand how to get money.

Asking me why I’m not using the same traffic techniques every one else is using is like asking why Hugh Hefner doesn’t have a profile on eHarmony. Hugh Hefner is like, 147 years old and has three young girlfriends.

Who know about each other.

So yeah, even though he probably knows how to get more women — if he doesn’t need them, what’s the point of internet dating?

That’s how I feel about web traffic and marketing and leaving my site link in every possible corner.

I unofficially launched this site on Wednesday night. It’s Sunday. It already gets 100 visitors a day and I have yet to promote it.

That’s more visitors than the majority of commercial sites get after years of being live.

I can get visitors any time I want. Twice this week I’ve had it happen totally by accident, to this site. Traffic? Is not my problem.

Okay, so when I want people to visit my site from Twitter, what do I do?

I tweet a link. To compelling content that I believe my audience will want to read. I try not to have a good ratio of conversation to random thoughts to retweets and link tweets.

By engaging with the people who follow me on Twitter, I’m much more likely to inspire them to action when I tweet.

An example, The first post I made on the day I unofficially launched this site was retweeted 7 times.

Now if it was on post I’d made after years of being online, I’d be expecting a combined comment plus tweet total of 70 or so, after a bit of promotion.

7 tweets with no promotion other than sharing the link is okay by me.

Just wait until I start showing off.

In the meantime, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put your link in your Twitter profile. But if you do, just think about why you’re doing it, and what effect it has.

Want to lease space in your client’s minds, by leveraging the time they spend on the web?

Then it’s time to wake up.

To continue from our last discussion on this topic, the thing to wake up from is this dream of hyper-viral-marketing through the combination of blogs and social media.

Most people never will never be on the front page of DIgg. Most people don’t need to be on the front page of Digg, despite the links and traffic it can generate. Most popular sites have never been, and aren’t actively seeking that as a strategy.

That’s because they know that for a business to thrive, while you do need those links, you can generate them elsewhere. And while you do need visitors coming to your site, you need the type that convert. It’s not that DIgg traffic never does, it’s that there are more cost-efficient solutions, not to mention time-efficient ones for the majority of websites.

And yet the dream of a mega-viral accident is often the selling point of building a blog.

It goes like this.

Jack hears about this cool site called Digg. He’s new to the Web, and doesn’t get how these things work — all the better for him on one hand. On the other, it’s that much easier to get caught up in the hype, if the whole internet used to be hype to you. You find yourself questioning all of your beliefs about marketing, when you see how easy it is to start blogging.

That is, if you’re like Jack.

So you put together the fact that most Joe Schmoes who end up on Digg got there from blogging. Mostly people who’ve been blogging for a while. So you start blogging. And you start submitting.

After all, how often does the regular person or tiny company get featured coverage on sites like Digg or Mixx without a blog?

And even if they never achieve that objective, there are many avenues for blogs to have a series of mini-viral events, such as being retweeted on Twitter, or shared on Facebook enough to get one of the prized homepage-sidebar spots.

There are few for static sites. None for offline companies that aren’t somehow plugged into the sharing network.

And so that balance is coveted by Jack. But Jack can’t get there, and because he started blogging to get on Digg, he stops.

Few achieve the dream — which IS attainable by the way. It’s a long shot but it’s not impossible. The main secret is that anyone can get on the front page of Digg — very few people can STAY there.

Back to our discussion.

The fact that it’s getting harder to achieve viral success could be another reason why blog growth is slowing. If one can’t get one’s blog link retweeted 10 — 100 times a day, it feels like blogging is pointless. It looks so easy to get people to retweet you, from the outside looking in, so you feel like a loser if you can’t do it on your first try.

When more people read blogs often, we were all more in touch with the fact that success is not instant. We often climbed the two year journey of becoming an overnight online success together. So we saw the pains it took. We were both in the audience and behind the curtain, as either fans of a blog or as bloggers ourselves.

This was part of the magic of blogging.

If you’re paying attention, you can see why these heights of coverage are increasingly difficult to attain. Much of it goes back to the Laws of Media, particularly in being copied and shared. Those are the things we need to be successful in Social Media, as well. It’s not just the fact that we have to catch the eye of the person who is adapting to streaming content.

It’s in forgetting these laws, because we’re not reading blogs and other resources as deeply. Based on just two of the laws in Kelly’s presentation which we talked about in the previous post, it becomes clear why the pace of blogging and promoting via social media is increasingly difficult to sustain.

First, the elements that can’t be copied are few, and getting fewer. There was the first blog post about business blogging, then the first blog dedicated solely to it.

Now there are thousands of each. The ones that stand out do because they’re doing something special that is well marketed to a large audience that wants to read about it.

Second, being both shareable and uncopyable is a delicate balance.

To be shareable though, at the same time as you maintain this marketable specialness, you have to make your work portable, but still own-able by you or at least traceable to you– that’s if you intend for content to ultimately market you.

They have to at least be able to copy the whole if not the parts– perhaps by embedding the video but not being able to change it. They need to be able to reference it, if not rip it — if it’s an article in your blog there at least has to be a link to be copied and passed around.

So how do you write this mystical, magical blog post every day, at least while you’re launching — that will always be the thing everyone wants to talk about, read or share?

You can’t.

It was hard enough before you had to compete with Facebook and Twitter for eyeballs.

That is so much the where and why of blogs for business are dying — the airy seduction of possible mega-viral stardom is no longer just outside our grasp, it seems like it’s on another planet.

You have to be remarkable, full time, to even be seen. And if you have no other new media strategy, being seen is all there is. As little as a year ago, to have that kind of exposure, it was enough to be first, best or on-and-off “pretty good”.

Trying to keep up the pace of performing at your peak on a daily basis is exhausting.

Unless it’s your full time gig, how will you pay bills and blog? People who are able to do this are writing, researching and commenting all the time, every day, some even have rotating staff whose only job is to write, or to follow RSS feeds to get scoops.

Rarely is it the entrepreneur anymore.

Because when you as a business person are able to create this shareable special-ness, one of three things happens.

No one cares.… or it seems that way because you were so busy creating, you couldn’t market, making it an exercise in speaking into the wind… or…

Everyone cares… and now you have a scaling problem of time, cost, resources, or knowledge.

Who is going to write more of this brilliance?

Who is going to pay for all this bandwidth?

How can manage the growth that occurs from becoming popular?

How does this popularity translate into money?

Even if you’re prepared for it, it’s no picnic.

In the final scenario, if neither of those two extremes happens, you may have a medium lukewarm caring that barely puts you ahead of where you are.

If you’re mainly blogging as an entry into search results, that’s not much of a big deal. Of course, blogging will then always give you this lukewarm reward. Just make sure you’re still writing above the level that will get you subscribers, links and sales or you’re spinning your wheels.

Of course, if that’s all you wanted out of blogging, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Because then business blogging becomes this thing you have to do because your competitors do it and you don’t want to lose market share in the search engines. You know that’s the easiest in if you have the right strategy, but the question becomes how to implement it in a fresh, new way.

So what IS the right New Media strategy for Business if it’s not just about paving an entry into search engines?

That’s the question we’ll answer next.

So today, I woke up particularly refreshed and jazzed about a workshop I want to give.

I asked people what they wanted, and they said a series of hands on lessons that will teach them how to use new media tools more effectively, and teach those of them who don’t know how to use them, where to start, and how to fit it into 15 — 30 minutes a day.

Then I realized how absolutely bored I was with answering the same questions about blogging and social media that I was 5 years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, it is fun applying the answers to new niches.

But I wanted to write something today about new media, and today, well I just felt like everything has been said.

I’m not alone in this, or at least in thinking along these lines.

Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone, created a new hash tag on twitter, #futureforward, so we can all discuss what’s happening after social media.

Steve Rubel, who is now lifestreaming, wrote a piece on how to capture attention in the era of the constant information flow.

And in reading comments on his blog, where you used to be able to find some of the most mentally stimulating conversations among my peers, I see a lot of .…

Well, bitchassed-ness, to be frank. Credit to Puff Daddy for the phrase.

(No, I am NOT calling him P. Diddy — you get ONE name change with me. It’s bad enough I ever called him Puffy.)

Which makes me ponder — is it time for me to start talking about what’s on the horizon?

Or will I be a part of the spammy fiasco that I feel partly responsible for when I started talking about RSS,  and later, Facebook?

Before we even get into that, though, it’s important to pause there. Because I only have ideas and theories, I don’t actually KNOW. I seem to make good guess by asking myself…

What IS Next?

Business Blogging got swallowed by the leveraging of Social media. It’s time for social media to start morphing into something greater. And yeah,  Steve has some good ideas in a later article and a mindmap about the future of blogging.

Which refined my question — as far as Business Marketing goes, what is the next step after blogging? Obviously the rest of social media. The two go hand-in-hand. But what comes after that?

Next, we’ll look at some of the usual suspects for blogging.