I read a lot of books in preparation for my DishyMix show each week. I’ve amassed a whopper stack and I would like to send DishyMix listeners a copy of any book you want.

Just post your desire on the DishyMix Fan Page and make sure to email me your physical address.

I’ll mail it out to you.

The Age of Engage    Denise Shiffman
Boom    Mary Brown & Carol Osborn, Ph.D.
Click    Bill Tancer
Connection Generation    Iggy Pintado
Digital Outlook Report    Razorfish
The Dip    Seth Godin
The Element    Ken Robinson, Ph.D.
The Frugal Millionaires    Jeff Lehman
The Gort Cloud    Richard Seireeni
Groundswell    Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody    Clay Shirky
Honest Seduction    Scott Brinker, Anna Talerico & Justin Talerico
Ignited    Vince Thompson
The Leap    Bob Schmetterer
Open Brand    Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D.
Peak    Chip Conley
The Perfection of Marketing    James Connor
Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends    Pete Blackshaw
Search Engine Optimization    Rebecca Lieb
Stopping Identity Theft    Scott Mitic
Trust Agents    Chris Brogan
Who’s Got Your Back    Keith Ferrazzi
Word of Mouth Marketing    Andy Sernovitz

Thanks for listening to the show!

Simon Van Wyk: Host of Hothouse Interactive Podcasts carried these books back to Sydney during his recent trip to SF.

Simon Van Wyk

Brand Digital Allen P. Adamson
Branding Only Works on Cattle Jonathan Salem Baskin
Click Bill Tancer
Revolutionary Wealth Alvin & Heidi Toffler
Rubies in the Orchard Lynda Resnick
Saddle Up Your Own White Horse Saundra Pelletier

DishyMix episode 72: Simon Van Wyk, Australian Media Expert on “Lessons Learned” from DishyMix Guests: Blogs, Search, Social Media, ROI and Marketing as Conversation

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Celia Francis, WeeWorld.com

Celia Francis
CEO

WeeWorld

Favorite Web Aps of European Entrepreneurs from Traveling Geeks Trip

This is sixth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the sixth response, from Celia Francis, founder of WeeWorld in the UK.

Celia’s List:

Kodakgallery.com (used to be Ofoto in the olden days) – I post photos every month for my extended family in the UK and across the pond.
Facebook and LinkedIn – For the usual social/professional fun.
WeeWorld.com – Of course! WeeWorld is one of the most popular browser-based social games or virtual worlds for young teens.
Skype – So my kids can video chat with my parents.
Google Maps – To see exactly where I am going.
Etsy.com – Pure love of handmade items and beautiful design gets me back to this site all the time
Wolfram Alpha – Actually quite useful. It gave me the average temperature in Almeria, Spain in February. Graph and all! I like Bing too – much prettier than Google.

Image by sekhmet1776 via Flickr

Image by SusanBratton via Flickr

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Favorite Web Aps of European Entrepreneurs from Traveling Geeks Trip

This is fifth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the fifth response, from Jack Lang, EIR at University of Cambridge, Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Jack is also the author of  “The High Tech Entrepreneur’s Handbook.”

Jack recommends Worldcard mobile. He saw this post of mine:

If CardScan, CaptureTalk and MagicSolver Had a Baby…

Jack says, “I’ve been using Worldcard mobile, and while not perfect (the OCR often needs some manual editing, and it would be nice to add pix and logos ) it has the advantage of capturing the business card then and there. It integrates to Outlook address book, which can then propagate.”

http://worldcard.penpowerinc.com/worldcard-mobile-standard.html

This is fourth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the third response, from, Andraz Tori, Founder of Zemanta, my favorite new ap.

Andraz Tori

Founder of Zemanta, a blogger's best friend

Andraz’s List:

Here are the coolest web apps by my standards:

s3:// a firefox extension. Simple yet powerful browser through your S3
data store/backup.

Google’s ‘essential’ Pack – Docs, Calc, Reader, Calendar, Blog Search
and Search
Sharing docs, data and news items has never been so easy and so useful!

Pearltrees This has been shown to me when I was in Paris. This is cool,
and sexy and I have absolutely no idea how to use it.

And naturally Zemanta, blogger’s best friend
Easy and simple.
My wider observation is that I don’t go and “use apps”. I go and “do tasks” which happen to include a mix of apps.
Now if I only could drop the requirement to “go to” certain web applications and those tools would instead seamlessly come to me wherever I am and whenever I need them…

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This is third in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the third response, from Alan Moore, Founder of Small Medium Large ExtraLarge Limited.

Alan Moore

Follow Alan on Twitter @alansmlxl

Read the SMLXL weblog on marketing communications innovation

Alan’s List

Noteflight is a great musical collaboration tool

Scrivner for organising chaotic ideas for writing

Novamind for mind mapping

The BBC iPlayer – what a media player should be

I just had the most amazing photos taken by Lesley Bohm, LA celebrity photographer. I’m working on some new information products to follow Talk Show Tips and wanted to update my “look” to my current styles.

I met Lesley at a Mastermind event and we hit it off. Once I saw her work, I realized I couldn’t live with anything less. Lesley is a celebrity portrait photographer. She LOVES to connect with people and make them look beautiful.

Lesley and Susan

Since so much of our contact is made online now, it’s more important than ever to have images that reflect who you are and bring out the best in you.

Here are some images from my shoot and photos of Lesley’s studio and of her working with another client.

New M&A Report from John H. Doyle II: Managing Director & Founder, Peachtree Media Advisors, Inc.

Web aps and mobile had most significant growth. Social media had largest decline in M&A deals.

John Doyle II, Peachtree Media Advisors

Here is a 2009 Mid Year Digital Media M&A Report summarizing digital media transactions in the first half of 2009.

Click here to download.

According to John:

“Although the first half of the year was lackluster for digital media M&A when compared to the first half of 2008, keep in mind that interactive media deal-making did not fall off the proverbial cliff last year until Google missed their numbers in July 2008 and the infamous Sequoia presentation.  At that point, everyone in the digital media sector felt susceptible to the effects of the economic downturn (previously thinking it was a newspaper/television problem).”

“On a relative basis, we expect the extreme opposite case for deal-making in the 3rd and 4th Quarters of 2009 versus 2008 because of the heavy drop-off in the latter part of 2008.  Expect a significant increase in the next two quarters versus the same two quarters in 2008, which is a good thing.  Only note that the steep gains are due to the drastic fall off in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2008 when the following headline appears “M&A Increases 400% in Q4 2009 versus Q4 2008!”

Listen to John on DishyMix.

John Doyle, Peachtree Media Advisors on Digital Media M&A, 2008 Capital Raises and Social Media Co’s Out of Biz

Whether I’m keynoting or participating on a panel or even at a party, socializing and talking business, I get the same basic question over and over.

“How do you manage to be everywhere at once?”

They are not talking about my physical body, which is mostly planted in my Aeron chair moving Personal Life Media forward. What they are talking about is the level of conversation I keep up online via Twitter, on Facebook, in my LinkedIn page, on my blog, with my weekly podcast. And everyone wants specifics. Exactly what do I use and how do I connect all the disparate services together?

I use a couple of really good meta-tools that lay on top of the various social nets, allowing me to write once-post many with my written content and my photos/videos/images. This syndication is at the core of my work and simplifies and radiates my work to my friends and followers across multiple networks.

My constellation of tools includes:

1. MobyPicture for syndicating my photos from my iPhone and Mac across ALL my socnets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty) Read my Post Once Appear Everywhere review of MobyPicture here.
2. TweetLater Professional (there’s a free version) for pre-scheduling Tweets to come out over time about my DishyMix podcast episodes, other shows on Personal Life Media and some of my better blog posts, of which I hope this is one
3. Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts
4. I’m also testing uberVU in their private beta as it’s a threaded listening/commenting system, because once you syndicate your content across multiple networks, you get comments coming in from all those places and you need a single UI in which to manage the conversations
5. and a Twitter Custom Search bookmark on my Firefox browser toolbar that @DaveTaylor taught me how to do: “dishymix” OR “susan bratton” OR “@susanbratton” OR “personal life media” OR “talk show tips” (learn how from Dave here)

Note: MobyPicture is a Dutch company, founded by Mathys van Abbe. More about MobyPicture here. TweetLater Professional is a Canadian company, founded by Dewald Pretorius. Trackur is a US company, founded by Andy Beal. uberVu is a Romanian company, founded by Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca. We met an amazing number of social media start ups on our Traveling Geeks tour which you should check out.

This post will focus on how I use Tweetlater Pro to schedule and use “spinnable text” so that I’m promoting my work over time across Twitter. I do link my Tweets to Facebook, so they appear there as well.

This is an excerpt from my elearning system, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret Master Host Techniques in which I teach you how to prepare for a conduct interviews but also exactly how I use social influence marketing to promote my shows. TweetLater Professional is a mainstay in my strategy.

Using TweetLater Professional to Manage Your Twitter Schedule
I am so glad Dewald Pretorius (love that name!) had the organizational foresight to invent TweetLater Professional. I follow him on Twitter @dewaldp. I want to be in the Twitterverse on a consistent basis, but I have a business to run and a life to lead. TweetLater Professional “TLP,” for which I pay $29.97, a month is completely worth the price for its time-saving features.

I have a lot I want to Twitter about. I blog, I have my podcast, we do 39 other interesting shows on the network, I find other blog posts and articles I want to share, I like to post about where I’m speaking, I want to “crowd source” answers to my questions…I love to interact on Twitter.  I take a proactive approach to much of what I Twitter. I like to write a whole series of Tweets and then schedule them to appear at times when I know my East and West Coast friends are most likely to see them. Then I supplement those pre-planned Twitters with all of the spur of the moment things about which I want to communicate by Twittering on the fly.

I also know that any one follower may not likely be watching their Twitter stream when I’m Twittering about a specific subject. For important things, like my weekly show, I want to be able to Twitter about it more than one time.  I will write 4-8 different versions of a Twitter about a single episode and schedule them to appear over a 1-3 week period. That way, if one post doesn’t catch your attention or your fancy, another one about the same show just might.

Here is what the basic TweetLater data entry screen looks like.

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

Here are examples of four Twitter posts I scheduled through TweetLater Professional (using Spinnable Tweet Text – more below)  to come out in one month about one single episode of DishyMix:

Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/

Notice that they all have the same TwitPWR url?  That way, which ever ones get RT’d, give more power to that single url and reinforce my standing at TwitPWR. I also save draft tweets that include text and a TwitPWR url in it if it’s a really good episode and I’ll want to promote it for weeks afterward.

Spinnable Tweet Text

My very favorite feature of TweetLater Professional is not just scheduling tweets that will be published every X number of hours, days, or weeks. The “Spinnable Text” feature is BRILLIANT. To avoid having the tweet say exactly the same thing every time it is published, you can provide alternate tweet text options (multi-level spinnable tweet text) from which the final tweet text is compiled every time a recur is published.

My Spinnable Text post for the above four Tweets about Bill McClosky’s interview on DishyMix looked like this in the entry box:

{Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/}

Note: You can always cancel or pause these kinds of recurring Tweets if they become noxious or are no longer viable. Also, the directions for how to do Spinnable Text are very well done on the TweetLater console.

In addition to the advanced scheduling, another feature I like in TLP is the ability to schedule for multiple accounts. I manage my own Twitter account @SusanBratton, I also manage the Twitter stream for @PersonalLIfe and I contribute to the Association for Downloadable Media’s Twitter feed, @ADMTweets. I can write any Twitter and decide to post it to one, two or all three of my accounts using TLP.

TweetLater Pro Accounts

Note: I also own @TalkShowTips and @DishyMix and send potential followers to @SusanBratton to follow me there.

Track Your Keywords on Twitter with TweetLater Professional
I have set up alerts and track a list of keywords using TweetLater Professional too. I use it like I do with Trackur, which I view about once a week. I like getting the Twitter digest every day in email so I can discover new people to follow or who I can tell about TalkShowTips. You can also use this feature to track your @replies, though I keep up with them through TweetDeck when I’m at my desk and Twitterific on my iPhone. It feels more timely to me to get them at those places, than TweetLater Professional.

I am actively looking for Twitterers who are posting about their latest show, so I can ping them about this book or respond to them in general. Here are my current list of keywords and phrases I track:

“latest podcast”, “my podcast”, “my show”, “new episode” ,”new podcast”, “new show”, “personal life media”, @susanbratton, #adtech, #TG2009, dishymix, podcast advertising, show host, susan bratton, susanbratton, talk show, talk show host, talkshow, talk show tips, talkshowtips, plm

This is how the email digest of results from your Keyword Tracking in Tweetlater Professional looks. These are a few Twitters, mostly from others, about DishyMix:

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

The Big Brouhaha About Twitter Automation
I must warn you. There are some features of TweetLater Professional that are unpopular with the “Twitterati*.”

You can set Tweetlater Professional to automatically follow anyone who follows you, even with a 72 hour window to manually review your new followers before you confirm them. Turn about is fair play. You can also autmatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Fair enough. You can also automatically send a message to anyone who follows you. I like to thank my new followers, but a LOT of big name Twitters do not agree with me. They feel it’s spammy. They hate what are callled “Auto DM’s.” It’s a personal choice. If someone is really going to unfollow me because I thanked them for following me, then OK. I can live with that.

I am a mannerly woman and I like to say thanks. You should choose what feels best to you. Here’s a post I did on a dozen things to know about managing your online reputation. Always go with your gut. Here’s my SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says if he’s not pissing somone off, then he’s doing something wrong. With 150,000 followers, he can afford a few unfollows.

Twitter is a big social experiment and you have to have the confidence to feel your way through, apologize for mistakes and try new things! I find an apology is all it takes if you cross someone’s boundary.

Now you know the set of tools I use to “be everywhere” and a bit more detail about how I leverage TweetLater Professsional. Let me know what additional questions you have and tools you like for managing across social nets.

* Twitterati means the celebrity people on Twitter who have a large share of voice. Like the Glitterati or the Digerati… They can wield a big stick with their opinions.

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I’ve been working with John Cecil of Innovate Media on a series of Video Spokespersons for the landing pages of our new information products. Personal Life Media has launched a publishing division where we are selling downloadable content direct to consumers. These virtual products are created by experts whom we’re highlighting with video spokesperson technology from iAds on the sales pages.

Video Banner from Innovate Media for Talk Show Tips on DishyMix Blog

Here are three examples of video spokespersons, the third being “not suitable for work*” so please beware that it’s an adult-education, sensuality product for couples.

Talk Show Tips http://talkshowtips.com

Speak Up with Power and Influence http://speakupwithpower.com

Expand Her Org*sm Tonight http://expandherorg*smtonight.com

In addition to shooting the video spokespersons in their green screen studios in Orange County, they shoot clips usable for video banners, skyscrapers and medium rectangles. We put these in our affiliate marketing service, RevShareNow, for our partners to use to drive sales.

These are the three formats iAds created for Talk Show Tips, my elearning system for show hosts. You can see the skyscraper live on my blog too.

CLICK HERE to see the video skyscraper live!

Here are samples of my ads:

1.  Skyscraper – http://bit.ly/5IY7k - runs in a standard IAB ad unit
2.  Lower third – http://bit.ly/2Uqkk - overlay
3.  Box – http://bit.ly/3DJuH - runs in a standard IAB ad unit

I like how the Box ad looks like I’m kind of flirting with you. blink blink

John Cecil, Innovate Media and Susan Bratton, Talk Show Tips

John Cecil says the click through he’s getting when the video ad matches the video spokesperson is fantastic. I also notice I’m getting really high click through rates on my animated .gif banners running alongside the video banners. It’s increasing the overall click through and conversion rate having the video banners on the site.

These video ads and spokespersons work particularly well in our situation – where we’re selling the expert’s products. I think this would be great for other people who are brands, like Jack Canfield for example. John says even if he uses actors/actresses for brands that don’t have a single person associated with them, that they click through and conversions are significantly higher.

Innovate Media Video Shoot

Here is my interview with John on DishyMix where he talks about testing various models as spokesperons against a brand’s market segments. Very interesting show. Enjoy!

Episode 91: John Cecil on Video Spokespersons, Pickle Fights and Surfing in OC

*NSFW but definitely suitable for your personal life. Amazing work by Dr. Patti Taylor.