SMOjoe.com

Pro Bloggers know that some subjects are really hard to write about, and it takes mad skills to subtlety broach sensitive topics, especially in 3rd party social networks, blogs and discussion forums where you can’t completely control the reaction.  Now let Smojoe show you two women who make it look easy…

Enter two creative writers Skye Blue and Elizabeth Rose. These girls write good content on tough topics, like disease, bad sex and heartbreak. Believe it or not, there are lots of women out there who can’t talk about sex, even with their lovers, and they’re ashamed of getting personal and can’t communicate important emotions.

Met Another Frog is a dating blog, a catharsis? an therapy with a feminine perspective that tackles tough questions and comforts readers. Unfortunately at this time the site is almost completely void of pictures, and my first piece of advice was to get images in there, and try make it a visual blog and more FUN.

Smojoe charted their future in his crystal ball. On Thursday Feb 11th, I both diagnosed maladies and prognosticated on the success of a bold new path… for in the fog I could see one schematic for success.  I told them that I hoped they would continue to encourage comments… and grow a readership. Then one day without fear they might implement a vBulletin discussion forum to grow a community within a readership and then start a newsletter. Grow the permission based email newsletter to 1000 subscribers by hosting real life singles events and condo parties, then gradually over time, evolve the content portal into an interactive dating website and then ultimately a sophisticated dating service for executive women.  Elapsed time: three years.

Should Ontario Fund Single Gender Education Schools?

Earlier this month, with the help of school staff and borrowed photographs from St. Andrew’s College I wrote an article on Orato that details the advantages that single gender education over co-education models. The piece chronicles Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty considering the idea of funding some all-boys schools in the future in response to the problem of declining male academics. The very idea has outraged some folks who see it as a giant step backwards in the battle for equality of the sexes. But when I was in grade school in Percy Centennial Public School in Warkworth Ontario, I lived in fear of a black leather strap that was contained in a drawer in the school Principle’s desk. I saw the strap once, and Jamie Jenny showed me his hand after it had been struck with the strap - just once. It was red.

So now there’s an new idea floating around that all-boys schools are friendlier places where boys can be boys without fear of corporal punishment. I started a discussion on my favourite discussion forum to poll the Greater Toronto Area and find out if the public thinks private schools are actually any better, and if so why? Toronto Forums: Are private schools better than public schools? Do you think kids enrolled in all-boys, or all-girls schools think co-education public schools are better? Are single gender education schools better for kids? I wrote that on Blog.ca

Do Over Day is coming up, Feb 26th is the day, once again…

Last year was the first ever Do Over Day and Smojoe helped spread the word. I went on a couple dozen blogs and discussion forums and asked folks to “…picture yourself re-experiencing the fabulous meals you’ve eaten, the exotic lands you’ve visited, the epic raves you cannot recall attending. Conversely, visualize yourself making amends for your life’s imperfect moments – the time you made a pass at your wife’s sister (and got caught), or the night driving home from the pub when you accidentally ran over your neighbour’s pet…” Hahaa that’s good web copy. I didn’t write it, but rather, I found it on the DoOverDay.ca website along with a whole lot more light hearted easy reading.

Three Lenzr Photo Contests Come to an Exciting Conclusion on March 1st 2010

Three very engaging Lenzr photo contests are approaching a predetermined temporal mark that’s the official finish line. I write it that way because most contests continue to get submissions long after the time period expires… not sure exactly why, but it could have something to with drugs and alcohol.  Should be interesting to see who wins in this batch of photo battles. The first two challenges are pretty much locked up now, but the Best Gourmet Food photo contest is still wide open and The Wine Ladies have put up an amazing prize, an eastern Ontario Locaboire wine tour vacation, to help promote their own wine blog. This challenge could be because its a late addition to the series; the contest just launched last week.  Already Mommakoala and Satsuma are both actively promoting their pictures on other social networks, and it makes for a fun morning of watching Google Alerts.

Last week I asked London Ontario Phronk to post on Lenzr photo contests because I absolutely love the way he approaches a paid post, and the total transparency he exudes, and because Lenzr pretty much writes itself.  Stay tuned to see what’s up for March / April; I think you’re gonna love it.

David Himel is one of North America’s foremost experts on Vintage Leather Jackets. He’ll tell you that he’s the world’s top expert, and this might be true; his blogspot The Art of Vintage Leather Jackets is currently ranked first on Google for that popular keyword, and receives over 500 visits a day . The blog is great; it’s a campy photo journal full of awesome unique information. It’s cute and catchy, but it doesn’t convert.

David Himel is an expert in an age when the search for experts drives the internet.  He writes bi-weekly posts detailing the construction of replica jackets, including the leather source and treatment, and the name and manufacturers’ address and model numbers of period zippers and buttons. Some of his replicas are sold to celebrities, and his blog highlights the jackets worn in movies. Some costume designers have approached him before their movie begins shooting to consult and secure perfect replicas for historical films (Amelia) and all this adds to his street credentials.

How does David Himel make money from his blogspot?

Right now he doesn’t. One piece of the cash machine is missing - David doesn’t have a buckstop.

David’s blog is under monetized. The Golden Age of Ebay is over and he counts himself among the millions of people who can no longer make a living using the auction sales website. But he continues to maintain an eBay store with about 65 items for sale and a leather repair and assembly shop and storage facility in downtown Toronto, with a large inventory of about 1500 coats.

Look at the Google pay-per-click rate / traffic stats for this popular keyword.  Sixty thousand people went online looking for vintage leather jackets last month, and David’s blogspot is probably the first place they picked to visit.  To summarize, David’s fledgling ebusiness has two out of three components necessary for success – he has merchandise and he has handcrafted excellent social capital that’s now yielding lots of traffic.  But he lacks an effective buckstop, which is what Smojoe calls the mechanism by which readers become buyers.  The only way a visitor can become a customer here is to click a relatively small button in the top corner of the blog sidebar and then travel to eBay, which is not effective, and so his coats remain on the shelf.

What would Smojoe recommend?

On Thursday last week David Himel asked Smojoe a simple question, “how can I best turn this popular blogspot into an ecommerce business?’

I pondered the dilemma… He needs an e-store, but the Blogger software he uses doesn’t give much of an option for that, and the widgets that do exist will cost a % of his revenue.  The problem is that his fun and easy-to-use blogspot is owned by Blogger (which is owned by Google) and so he’s spent almost four years fixing up a piece of online property that he doesn’t own. Now it would be a crying shame to walk away and close this portal forever in favour of another site, even if the replacement comes custom built with a proper payment portal. It might be that Dave will never get back on top of the search rankings again with anything but this blogspot… So what’s the solution?

Smojoe advocates a using David’s campy but popular blog to drive a new e-store catalog website with a small network of affiliate bloggers helping out.

Indeed, what Mr. Himel must do is actually very simple. He should build another website that is a slick e-store with a shopping cart and a proper payment gateway. Smojoe recommends the site open up right into a catalog of colourful vintage leather jackets and merchandise in which every item on every page is a separate URL – that way stories can reference and anchor right to individual pieces that are for sale.

David should keep blogging same as before, but truncate material on the old site, and leave links to MORE on the new site. Reduce frequency of posts to one a month on old blog, and post like a bandit on the new site. The new catalog site should have all new original articles, and lots of period photos and keyword rich content. Smojoe recommends David re purpose some of the articles on the old blogspot and bundle together themes into ebooks with long keyword rich excerpts that can be published again on the new site (where content can be downloaded and sold as an ebook).

David should create affiliate marketing badges and place the biggest and best example in the sidebar of his blogspot. The old blogger blog should be edited full of new text links too – stories and photo descriptions should link deep into the new e-store.  Over time the new catalog website will benefit from the links and attention of the blogspot and it too will rise in prominence.

In addition to this primary feed, the new catalog website can attract other affiliates and pay them a percentage of each sale. I know that 69 Vintage on Queen St here in Toronto now has a blog, and popular individuals like Lisa Charleyboy Urban Native Girl Stuff are always looking for cool fashion to represent. Depending on the split, I’m sure other artists and fashion bloggers would also come on board as affiliates. These people would come in handy to help promote David’s future fashion shows and events.

One thing is certain, David Himel and his blogspot have certainly become a very interesting Smojoe case study and pondering his predicament helps answer the question, how do experts convert social capital into cash? Keep your eye on this guy and his The Art of Vintage Leather Jackets blogspot and let’s see if he takes my free advice.

Last week, Smojoe built a beautiful Wordpress blog for TellOscar.com.

If you haven’t heard about this place yet, let me explain Canada’s first user driven complaints website. This web destination might be better described as a customer service reports index, and by that I mean a place that lists both good and bad stories; both compliments and complaints can be recorded.

But very few people bother to write nice things or record pleasant observations here.  No, this site runs on complaints and preserves warnings to consumers researching specific goods and services.

How does TellOscar work?

If you owned a business, and suddenly found your beloved establishment written up in TellOscar’s archives, you’d do whatever possible to get the problem resolved. Am I Right?  You’d pay whatever fees necessary to access the forum and respond to the complainer, personally one on one.  I’m certain you’d pay money to make them happy (or at least keep them quiet), and that’s exactly what Tell Oscar wants you to do: That’s the business model.  When this website gets busy, all of Canada’s biggest corporations will pay a monthly access fee to be able to respond one on one with their unhappiest customers.

Why TellOscar works?

As a savvy consumer, I get frustrated with cut rate customer service departments, foreign call centers and automated telephone messages. People who naively write emails to managers, or letters to head office should not be surprised if their correspondence vanishes into a corporate chasm. TellOscar works its wonders because the complaint is so public it embarrasses the subject into action.

What about Twitter? Isn’t that already the world’s largest complaints website?

Unlike Twitter, which limits each entry to a 140 characters, TellOscar.com lets writers enter pages of details.  There is no limit, and no expiry date. The system preserves each submissions in the vault forever, until they’re resolved, and even that data is archived for perpetuity.  Also noteworthy is TellOscar’s primary focus on Canadian consumers - they have representatives who deal directly with Canadian manufacturers, merchants and service providers and are positioned as impartial advocates for conflict resolution.

Introducing the TellOscar Blog

TellOscar’s new blog is what every customer service blog should be - its the primary conduit for communicating new information and insight into the particulars of a business, and reflections on an industry in general.  This simple Wordpress blog will digest news media, profile other authors and experts and showcase some of the more vitriolic complaints that have been submitted to the site. There’s lots of very interesting content on this website, and the blog can bring even more attention to the best of the best user submitted complaints.

Check out these remarks filed under bad customer service. These are heartbreaking stories.  I want you to look at this alleged assault at McDonalds. Imagine if you were the general manager, and you became aware of this story by reading about it online, what would you do? It’s interesting to learn how two different managers at that franchise became more and more eager to find resolution. They fired the employee, offered coupons, and finally asked what else they could possibly do to get the issue resolved…

Creative complainers are every corporation’s worst nightmare, and with its spiffy new blog, TellOscar.com has just become an even more powerful place to complain.

Everything Smojoe knows about how to market an event in Toronto will be revealed on Weds Oct 14th, 2009 starting at 6:00pm - 8:30pm inside the Spoke Club 600 King St W, Toronto.  Get tickets in advance here they’re cheaper.
https://secure.gettickets.ca/?event=15422

Deb Lewis has certainly outdone herself with this picture she has created to help promote the upcoming How to Market an Event in Toronto seminar at the Spoke Club. This is why Deb Lewis of City Events is one of the best event marketers in the city. Her Photoshop creation is strangely compelling and the bees represent buzz, but they might also represent the honey that I’ll be dispensing to reward audience participation.

Can Social Media Work for Event Marketers?

Social media is defined as using online networks to connect and share stories and information with friends. But its my opinion that effective social media marketing campaigns need time to generate interest before they can affect strangers outside the storyteller’s own sphere of influence.

Most marketers are disappointed with their results after they attempt to use online tools like Facebook and Twitter to sell tickets and ‘put bums in seats’ at actual live events. Nine times out of ten it just doesn’t work, and if you are starting from scratch then building short term solutions is doomed to failure.

Because online media lasts forever, good stories should be used to engineer audiences in long term scenarios.

Smojoe has lots of experience event marketing weird things like ballet movies for Empire Theatres, plays at Shaw Festival and comedy at Second City.  My moment of epiphany came while marketing the Miss Teen Canada-World pageant event this summer. That’s when I went on a quest to find and index all manner of online services that are built to capture event listings. That’s what I’ll be talking about on Weds. There are so many ways to shout out so many different types of messages, but unless you’re actually having conversations with your audience, it isn’t really true social media. Twitter followers and Facebook friends have real value to event marketers, but only if they are niche targeted and qualified to appreciate the messages.

Online Marketing is different than Social Media Marketing

When people ask to use my tools to help sell paid attendance to events, I generally caution that social media shouldn’t be used like that, and any money spent creating perishable stories will be wasted. Rather, I would digitally market their event using Craigslist and Kijiji.com and Eventful etc more on this Oct 14th * You can build widgets on Eventful.com that can be posted on your friends’ homepages.

How to use Social Media Marketing to Build Ready Audiences?

I would attend and document the artist’s event and make videos, take photos and write stories. Then I’d comb the media for the very best story hook. I’d certainly write about any celebrities that attended, detail the fight that happened outside, the forgery that was discovered, the food… whatever I’d combine the media in wonderful stories split across classic Smojoe story funnels that spiral down to the artist’s gallery and blog. I’d hope these destinations have proper conversion tools necessary to sell paintings or register subscribers so the artist’s work is better known and easier to market next time they host a live event.

For three years, Rob Campbell the prime innovator at Smojoe has been experimenting with conversational marketing using the social web to affect Google search results for strategic keyword targets.

And now I, Rob Campbell am the first Smojoe Centurion, because I can deliver one hundred stories with links.

Smojoe Social Media Manual, version #3 outlines exactly how social marketers should engineering multi platform brand stories, and how they should measure results. It’s available right here for $19.00 CAN and is thirty seven pages of detailed information about how to market websites.

Social Media Marketing is without a doubt the fastest growing new sector of advertising in the world.

Each Smojoe Centurion is a one man marketing army and a respected contributor and member of one hundred different niche communities, and probably has one of the most findable avatars on the web.  Grounded in their own expertise they are comfortable with, and indeed profit from being, internet celebrities.

Having so many different passions means a social marketer can influence different types of people by creating primary, secondary and tertiary media in different niches.

Using articles, blogs and discussion forums these Jedi Warriors are the best idea sneezers in the business, and their participation in any campaign yields valuable social capital for the client website.

Lenzr has been a terrific catalyst for trying new things, and writing final reports every sixty days necessitates regular patrols of the landscape.

The simple lessons that I’ve learned, and the hundred places where I can go talk about my clients with links and photos have made me a Smojoe Centurion.

Story Funnels To Buck Stops

The best online storytellers leave different bits of the same brand adventure in articles, blogs and discussion forums all over the web.  The mechanism of this successful   marketing ideology can be crystallized in one simple observation; they build story funnels to buck stops.

The search for experts drives the internet, but the search for stories rules the social web.  Building story funnels to buck stops means hand crafting a dozen different hooks (things that people might find interesting) before publishing anything, and then using the bits of content to funnel readers toward the client’s website or primary conversion page.

The client website must have ‘conversion tools’ by which readers can be converted into customers. This is a magical place, and the subject of a different blog post. Right now we’re just building the funnels.

How to plant multiple platform brand stories on the social web

There is a method to Smojoe madness, a ritual exists wherein certain elements are planted first to build and compound with other elements.  For example, pictures are posted on Flickr and Photobucket first thing so they can be embedded later in blogs and niche discussion forums.  Little bits of text with links are prepared and assembled opposite links to photos on a HOT SCRIPT document.

Smojoe plants the content top down. After research and preparation, I start writing the most compelling stories as exclusive articles (or photo essays, factoidz, or videos) and then cycle down through four types of less exclusive user submitted content digesting ideas and leaving links back to clients. Second stage is blogging, third stage is discussion forums and it all ends with someone micro blogging and bookmarking the best content that was created at the end of each cycle.

The interesting thing is that readers usually encounter these story cycles from the back end first; they hit a blurb on Twitter, and then come to a discussion forum where they find a link to a blog post with a Flickr photo gallery widget in the sidebar. The Flickr images have descriptive text with links to an article in a popular niche eZine which links to a product page in the client’s e-store, the buck stop.

Story Funnels to Buck Stops is particularly effective when marketers can compel readers to follow their ideas across four different social media platforms to brand their minds forever. However, at the end of the day, the most measurable result is the increase in Google search traffic over the target keywords.  This is because the Smojoe Centurion who started all the conversations was careful to target just one or two keywords in the link text back to the client. The increase in 3rd party links buried in rich media conversations positively affects the Google PageRank algorythme and the target site will appear higher in SERPS for that keyword  after the next update.

Rob Campbell the Smojoe now sells honeybee propolis right on the company blog. This is the real thing, scraped off the hives of Campbell’s honey in the summer of 2009 by yours truly. Eager to learn more about the stuff, I researched it, and have filed a detailed report here on this blog.

While extracting white clover honey from comb frames at Campbell’s Honey in Warkworth Ontario this summer, the third son of the beekeeper collected 2 kgs of genuine Canadian bee propolis from empty honey supers using nothing more than a metal hive tool.

Would you like to buy 100g of this exotic substance for $15 US + $10 shipping?

What is Bee Propolis?

Propolis is a dark brown sticky substance that honeybees use to hold their hives together. Some colonies make so much of this gum it’s hard to pry the hives apart, or lift heavy supers off metal or plastic queen excluders. Propolis sticks to everything, and honeybees use it to hold everything together.

Is honeybee propolis good for you?

Who knows? … But propolis is definitely good for honeybees. The substance stops drafts, insulates the brood chambers and sanitizes the bee’s tiny feet as they walk about their home. The pine resin and other vegetable compounds in propolis give the gum special germ killing powers. Scientific research shows propolis has antiseptic, antibiotic, antibacterial, anti-fungal and even antiviral properties.

Canadian beekeeper once told me that he once found a dead mouse completely entombed in propolis inside a healthy hive. He believes the honey bees protected themselves from disease by stopping the decomposition of the dead animal, which was too big to move. The mummification of small animals fascinated ancient Egyptians, who reputedly still use bee propolis in a wide variety of natural remedies.

What is the exact composition of bee propolis?

The sticky recipe and components for honeybee propolis are different all over the world. Indeed they are different from hive to hive inside the same beeyard. That’s because honeybees just use whatever they have available, from a variety of different plants, throughout three different growing seasons (here in Canada).

One thing we can all agree on however is that propolis is made by mixing beeswax (and other honeybee glandular secretions) with resins from the buds of conifer and poplar trees. Worker bees gather sticky natural substances from trees, especially pine gum and other plant resins using their mandibles. They pack bits of gum and tree resin into their corbiculae (pollen baskets) on her hind legs. Each of the 100mg units represents months of work.

Beware Chinese bee propolis

It’s a fact that sometimes bees collect man made material too, and use inorganic material the same way they would combine natural resins with their beeswax.

Some experts have suggested that Chinese bee propolis contains measurable amounts of paint, road tar and furniture varnish, all of which might have been collected naturally and added to the product by the honeybees themselves. Their product is unsafe due to availability of toxic pollutants in the south Asian ecosystem.

How is propolis harvested in Canada?

Bee propolis is not something that’s regularly collected at Campbell’s Honey, and to my knowledge it’s not something that’s ever been made widely available to the public before last decade. In the past couple of years however there has been a renewed interest in almost all beekeeping bi products because of their alleged medical properties.

Curious to learn and share my research and information about this natural substance, I scraped the hard and crumbly deposits from the tops of the super boxes while working in the honey house. I made a special pile of propolis atop the hoist as I unloaded individual honey frames into the stainless steel uncapper machine central to the extracting room.

Check out this chunk that I left out in the sun by accident. That’s a chip of hard propolis that once filled a crack between two honey supers. The heat has brought puddles of oily resin to the surface. The tree gum orange portion on top of picture was inside the hive, while the hard brittle bottom part of this flat chip faced the outside.

What is bee propolis used for today?

Bee propolis is used in the manufacture of some medicinal chewing gums * will research, cosmetics, creams, lozenges and topical ointments. There was a story in the paper about propolis being investigated as a dental sealant and tooth enamel hardener.

Acording to some reputable websites (smojoe cant decide who to link to here yet*) there are a number of studies have tested its effectiveness in humans and animals as a treatment for burns, minor wounds, infections, inflammatory diseases, dental pain, and even genital herpes. Successful results were achieved for many conditions including some throat cancers, infection of the urinary tract, gout, and sinus congestion

It’s been used to treat influenza, bronchitis, gastritis, and diseases of the ears. There is some case history for periodontal disease including bile infections and intestinal infections. It’s listed as a treatment for ulcers and eczema, and even pneumonia.

How is bee propolis prepared and used as medicine?

Andrew Weil, M.D. recommends using bee propolis as a topical treatment for uncomplicated wounds, and as a gargle (or in spray form) to treat irritations in the mouth. He writes that he uses propolis in tincture form to treat canker sores and even sore throats.