I enjoyed this series of short videos by Brian Solis titled "Ideas Connect Us More than Relationships." There are several points here that are relevant to thought leadership, and how social media changes the game.

Overall, I appreciate Solis's comments for bringing social media down to earth a bit. Other analyses about social media boil down to: "it's so cool because everybody can say anything about everything, whenever; aren't you doing it yet?" That's mind-boggling but not useful.

Solis states that the democratization of information does not give us license to say anything all the time, but gives us the opportunity to be curators of content. The notion of a curator implies responsibility and control, which I appreciate. "The folks that we network with will find those curated updates to be more profound than others," he says.

Solis's notion that we are connected by ideas, and not our relationships (e.g., Twitter followers, Facebook friends) is important. "It's not a popularity contest," he states, "It's about changing the way you share information, and how people are getting information."

Sheer numbers of "friends" and "followers" are meaningless unless the content published at the hub of relationship has meaning to all the people connected to it. In fact, the groups connected to content are always in flux, but the content itself needs integrity and consistency to find its audience.

Companies with something to say will be thought leaders when they embrace the role of content curator.

Labels: blogging, social communities, thought leadership

We are launching our blogletter—an email newsletter that is built on top of our blog. What a concept!

How does it work? Instead of putting long articles in our e-newsletter, or creating new web pages for the articles, we simply post the articles to our blog. They make great blog posts. Then, we send out our e-newsletter with brief, easy-to-read introductions to the articles, and links to the full versions in the blog posts.

Not only is the blogletter handy for communicating to our clients and friends, but it's also efficient:

• Our content goes out through multiple channels, but we only have to author it and publish it once.
• The articles in the e-newsletter can act as search magnets, especially in blog searches, instead of being "trapped" in emails.
• Subscribers who prefer email to RSS will sign up to our e-newsletter list, so we only have one list of emails to manage (instead of separate subscriber lists for the blog emails and the e-newsletter).
• Articles, along with reader comments, are automatically archived in the blog.

What's more, the blogletter is also more interactive than a standard e-newsletter. Readers can leave comments on the blog, and read the comments of other readers. They can also read other blog posts, download our white papers, and check out our web site.

We didn't invent the blogletter, but we will spread the word. Here are a couple of marketing blogs that put the term "blogletter" out there first:

• How and Why I Combined My E-Newsletter With a Blog, Debbie Weil's BlogWrite for CEOs
• Where Do Your Email Newsletters Go? Email Heaven? Anything Goes Marketing

Labels: blogging, blogletter, email marketing