This event is highly recommend, if you want to know more about the Byron, Lennox or Bangalow Networking Breakfast introduce yourself to Rosemarie and Arnold at the Bangalow Networking Breakfast Facebook Page.

Here are the cliff notes;

The Ground Work

• We live in a analogue world with a digital overlay.
• We live in a connected world, who’s connected to you.
• We communicate in an environment of infinite information, attention is a commodity.

The Power Plays

• Relevance
• Empathy
• Authenticity
• Transparency
• Consistency
• Visual Messaging

Image Credit: Byron New Media on Flickr

If you want to lead, if you want to change things or make an impact in your market, you’re going to need Influence.

To have Influence in this highly digital, highly connected world. You are going to need to create content that matters. Emails, blog posts, videos, podcasts, content that moves people and improves their lives.

I’ve discovered a poorly kept secret. It’s a key to creating more meaningful content, more rapidly.

Don’t do anything!

I know that sounds contradictory or even ridiculous.

However more and more I’m finding, it works a charm. If you can outline the content you want to create, and leave it. When you return to finish the creation process, the content will just flow onto the page, camera, mindmap, canvas, whatever.

When I just leave it, sleep on it (preferably). I come back to creating, back to the page (so to speak), the meat of what I’m creating flows out.

Use A Staged Process

With so much opportunity in the our lives it’s easy to feel harried. You might feel you need to get something out fast, or you’ll miss the boat. However if you use a staged approach to content creation, you will create better content and more of it.

Try this 6 step approach.

Outline It > Sleep On It > Chunk It Out > Leave It > Polish It > Publish It

This is very much inline with the technique Ed Dale has taught in The Challenge for the last few years. It sounded so simple that I ignored it. Now with my hand on my heart I’m telling you, it works.

Outline It

Use a mindmap, back of an envelope, Evernote, Simple Note to get down the main points. There should only be 2 or 3.

Don’t force things, just work quickly and dump what’s in your brain, then leave it.

Sleep On It

As I’m sure you know there are many parts to our mind. The mind is often explained as having two parts; the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

When we force ourselves to pump out content on the spot, we don’t give our subconscious mind it’s opportunity to shine. To work on our content in the background, and provide us with the sparks of inspiration, that make OK content into Compelling Content.

When you outline your content and then leave it or sleep on it, your subconscious works away in the background. If you don’t believe me try it.

Try it half a dozen times and you’ll be amazed how much easier it is to complete the blog post, video script, podcast interview, etc once you’ve let it breathe.

Chunk It Out

Now you’ve given your content time to breath, now it’s time to fill in the gaps. I find it valuable to do this rapidly. I use a version of the Pomodoro Technique to keep me focussed and creating with mild urgency.

Not the clenched teeth, slam-this-thing-out panic, that I have done in the past, but with creating with focus and intent.

Leave It

If I can, I then like to leave the content again, even if for an hour. Preferably not a week or a month, just stop and do something else for a little while. Then you can come back to your work with fresh eyes.

Polish It

Without labouring come back to your content, check spelling and grammar (if it’s text), check the details, make sure nothing is missing.

You might be able to write a better headline at this point. If fact I recommend writing a “sacrificial” headline or title early, knowing that a better one will come to you in the Polish stage.

Publish It

You’re done. Publish that sucker.

Support The Process

After you have been doing this for a while you will have a repository of outlines, a workbench on the content you’re working on, and a growing mountain of published work.

You might find it helpful to create a Kanban Wall 1 to track content through the creation process and spot gaps and opportunities.

I’d love to hear about your content creation process. What works for you?

I use this process every day. This process, in combination with writing in Markdown, has massively increased my output. But writing in Markdown 2, that’s another story.

One that’s already outlined and ready to write.

You want to work so badly, it makes your tummy churn. Sometimes in a good way (butterflies), sometimes, not so good (knots).

Having been there enough times have an inkling. Not so many times as to say “here is the gospel, you can call me Mr Guru now”. I’ve launched little projects and mutli-million dollar ones and I can say, that the closer you get to letting yours loose.

The closer you get to letting your project, art, startup out into the open.

The greater the push back, fear, resistance¹.

You may not be able to see it. But others at arms distance can.

Recognise it’s coming and push through.

What you’re doing is important. Push through.

Case studies: Media publisher versus content marketer



Weight Watchers has a tremendous content marketing operation. It produces high volumes of content about dieting and exercise, most of which avoids any mention of Weight Watchers itself. Let’s compare it with a site like Fitness Magazine, which has similar content for a similar audience.

Fitness likely generates around a $6.50 effective CPM for the ads that it runs, a blended rate for its direct-sold and remnant inventory that is consistent with industry averages. Assuming that three ads are run on each page and that the average visitor visits five pages, Fitness would have an ARPU of about $0.10.


Weight Watchers, on the other hand, does not run ads, but tries to convert visitors into becoming paying customers. Given its $194 price point and a conservative 2 percent conversion assumption, the ARPU for Weight Watchers is $4. What we see here is a 40X ARPU difference between the media publisher and the content marketer.

Other comparisons yield similar results. Linux Magazine is a tech site providing content to programmers and system administrators. Given the higher CPMs in the tech industry, its ARPU likely is around $0.15. Rackspace is a major provider of web hosting, and it has a content marketing operation serving programmer and administrator audiences. At a $100/ month price point and 2 percent conversion, its ARPU is $24, an over 100X difference.


Curbed is a highly successful site providing real estate content with a likely ARPU around $0.15. Redfin provides discounted real estate services and blogs regularly about content relevant to home buyers. On a $300,000 house, Redfin would earn its 1.5 percent, or $4500, putting its ARPU at hundreds of times of Curbed’s even at the most conservative conversion rates.

Read the full article at Why Marketing Will Fund the Future of Content

Tagging Other Facebook Users

Tagging Locations In Your Post

Toggle Privacy On Each Facebook Post

To see a video walk through and to read a comprehensive post see http://www.facebook.com/about/sharing

Google Plus is gaining some serious momentum. The latest function is a Google Hangout button on every Youtube video.

This of course means that you can now watch a Youtube video with friends. Imagine what this could mean for Social TV.

To  start a Google+ Hangout with a YouTube video, directly from YouTube. Click the “Share” button underneath any video, and then click on “Start a Google+ Hangout” in the bottom right-hand corner.

More Signs Google Plus Is Here to Stay

• Louis Gray Is Joining The Google Plus team I have a great deal of respect for Louis and have closely followed his insights and thinking for many years.
• Google Plus Adds Games
• Google Plus Posts Now Appear In Search Results This is probably the biggest driver of Google Plus.

Follow Deano and Byron New Media on Google Plus

Hat Tip to Brain Glick for surfacing this

Update: Gives you a small insight into how much utility Google Plus is going to have when Google integrate it with all their services.

Think about a hangout with a Google Docs spreadsheet, discussing Google Analytics Results with your web team via Hangout, or discussing where to meet friends for dinner via a Google Places search and Hangout.

With talk of Google Plus Business Pages not too far away, Foursquare (a location based social network) has announced pages for businesses and brands.

Will this push Google’s plans forward? Will Foursquare be crushed as Facebook and Google slog it out? Or will others players (looking at you Community Engine) emerge that allows people to create hyper local networks with more utility and meaning.

Today we’re making foursquare Pages self-serve (to the great relief of our BizDev team). Any brand, organization, or publication can now create their own Page, gain followers, share Tips, check in, and reach their fans. Join the likes of MTV, the New York Times,Tiffany & Co, NASA, and Scanwiches by creating a Page for your organization now!

There are a bunch of features that make this perfect for brands:

• Reach the whole foursquare community with your Tips and check-ins (and push those check-ins to both Facebook Pages and Twitter).
• Let entire teams of people manage the same Page. With our new tool, you can make multiple people Page ‘managers,’ so that they can all contribute. It’s perfect for big organizations.
• From the web or your mobile phone, you can upload photos to your Tips and check-ins. It’s great for making them really shine for all of your followers.
• And, when your page is complete and you’ve added a few Tips, you’ll be featured in our Page Gallery.

To get started, just head here. It takes just one click to sign-up with your organization’s Twitter account.

It’s not that information has lost it’s value, it’s just that attention has become more scarce.

Your ability to profit from the said info is diminished because there is so much of it and so much of it is fluff.

Six times a year I have been writing an article for Pam Brossman‘s Social Media Woman Magazine. I have been honoured to have my articles appear in the same publication with luminaries such as Mari Smith, Lewis Howes, Lynn Terry, and Ali Brown, not to mention a cast of dozens of other very savvy contributors.

The single most important reason I will say yes anytime Pam asks me to contribute, because each month Pam fills the mag with useful information. Every magazine has actionable cutting edge content that you can implement in  your business.

If you can see value in marketing your business in 2011, you will get value from this magazine.

Top Secret: Whether you’re a woman or a man, you’ll get a lot of value from this magazine.

This edition features Mara Glazer and her dad, Marketing legend Bill Glazer, Carren Smith, and my good friends Sue and Steve Soucy.

You can it for FREE right now at Social Media Woman Magazine

Image Credit: Dave Pinter, on Flickr

Two thoughts after you enjoy this razor sharp insight from James Shelley.

What does it mean when most of our attention is consumed by the pursuit of attracting the attention of others?

It was back in 1971 that Herbert Simon suggested that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”1 and now the difficulty of capturing people’s attention (“a highly perishable commodity”)2 has some theorists suggesting that the future “attention economy” will have “its own different implicit rules, roles, cycles, values, etc.”3

If everyone has everyone’s attention the value of attention is nullified. Thus to avoid mental bankruptcy, navigating an “attention economy” means saving, investing and being cunningly conscientious of your own attention. If you treated your attention as a monetary value, would you be considered broke, middle class or well-invested?

1. Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press [↩]
2. Thomas Davenport, John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001), p. 11 [↩]
3. Michael Goldhaber, The Attention Economy Hypothesis in Brief, http://goldhaber.org/?p=197 [↩]

Thoughts On The Attention Economy

1. James Shelly is really well worth you attention, I highly recommend subscribing JamesShelley.net
2. Attention bankruptcy is an emotional and mental wasteland, it may well be the epidemic of our time. The content and the platforms I see rising are economic in their attention demands. Keep content focussed i.e. Tumblr and focus socialisation on enabling the content to be more helpful i.e. Instagram. In other words be respectful and reward attention with great consise value

It’s no secret we have been more and more enamoured with Tumblr, it’s not just the numbers (which are compelling it’s the ease of us. We’re not the only ones who think so, check out this quote from Rick Sanchez

That’s where Tumblr comes in.

It’s what Goldilocks would call, “just right.” It’s not a full-blown blog and it’s not a one-sentence message service. It is, as Steve Rubel noted last week, a “hybrid,” a platform that is “…a social >network for both original and curated content… longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature.”

And that’s what makes it the newest and potentially one of the best tools that journalists now have.

In a month where Facebook may have lost as many as 6 million users in the US, and Tumblr — with now over 20 million blogs — >[surpassed wordpress.com in size], Tumblr is about to hit the >critical mass necessary to make it useful as a platform to broadcast and receive news.

If you’re not yet using Tumblr, check it out. Maybe start with searching terms that realate to your niche, market or industry, have a look at what people are talking about. If you are we’d be honoured if you’d follow us on Tumblr