JournaMarketing

Babies and dogs...

Okay, you've got to indulge me on this one. I have to share this picture of my daughter, Jessie, and our dog, Fish (so named because he followed home our other dog, Chip. Get it? Fish and Chip?) Neither dog nor baby was harmed in the taking of this photo.

Promoting yourself by shutting up

Could you offer new, interesting information to your organization's most important friends every day for the next 30 days? Could you do it without self-promoting even a little bit?

Jason Calacanis writes today that he has recently made a concerted effort to stop self-promoting -- and has seen a subsequent spike in the number of people who are following what he says.

Based on this I'm formulating the "Scoble's Law" which is currently stated as: The less you talk about yourself, the more folks will talk about you. This is, of course, based on the fact that Robert Scoble never talks about Robert Scoble... and he's the most popular independent blogger in the technology space.

Based on that, Calacanis plans to blog every day for the next month, with every post about something other than his current project. Even if you can't keep up that kind of schedule, try it for a week. It'll be good for you, good for your organization, and good for the people who are benefiting from the information you offer.

Technorati Tags: nptech, PR, marketing

Letting go, and letting others tell your stories

The Donor Power Blog shares the story of Christian organization Compassion, which paid for 15 bloggers to travel to Uganda to write about what they see there. These bloggers took photos, recorded video, and told stories about how children in Uganda live -- and how Compassion is helping those children. Ås Jeff Brooks points out, it costs a lot of money to send all those people from North America to Africa. But how much more powerful is the resulting content, compared to the slick brochures Compassion could have produced.

The question to ask about your own organization is whether you're doing all you can to enable people to tell the stories of what you do. If you're not, another group that's competing for the same dollars will do it in your place.

p.s. One tip, Compassion, in case you read this: change your flickr photo set to use a Creative Commons license! I wanted to use one of the photos from your set for this post -- and I'm sure others would love to do it, too -- but it's marked "All rights reserved."

Technorati Tags: nptech, storytelling

File sharing made simple

Just found a fantastically simple new service called Drop.io. It's the simplest way I've ever seen to share large files with people, and it gives you multiple ways to do it. Go check it out, if you've struggled with the question of how to share large files off-site.