One of my must-reads is Brian Solis’ blog, and having had the pleasure to meet Brian at BlogWorld Expo a couple of months ago, I found him to be a pretty modest, smart and very funny guy.

In his latest post, “Inbound Marketing:  Get Found,” he reviews the book of the same name written by  Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot.  Often, the most sophisticated observations and the most simple and elegant.  I have not yet read the book (but am putting it on my Kindle list now), but I love the concepts laid out in Brian’s review:

This book is an exceptional guide to understanding the landscape of creating and maximizing presence. Inbound Marketing refers to the act of consumers discovering your brand through various forms of online media, without your direct engagement necessarily. In the interactive Web, I refer to this practice as SMO or Social Media Optimization – the art and science of escalating the findability of social objects within social networks and the blogosphere.

My dos centavos?  This is directly in line with my personal experience.  I suppose that it my own way, I have built a mini-marketing effort simply by establishing and maintaining a presence, first in blogs, and later in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us and now on Posterous — which I am still playing with but I think has a lot of potential.

My biggest surprise and evidence of all of this was, without trying, I found myself on top of the Google search rank for “Mark Story.”  I have a somewhat unusual name, but there are numerous other Mark Storys — a Kentucky sportswriter, a programmer (with the mark-story.com domain), a photographer and some a**hole who is parking the markstory.com domain and is probably a cyber-squatter.

How did I climb to the top of Google?  By honestly attempting to engage people in online dialogue, and hopefully offering something of value.  I simply did things that I love, played with new tools and gadgets that interest me, and whammo-bammo, there I was with a stream of inbound marketing.  By no means do I consider myself an “A-Lister,” (I would say “D-Lister, but Kathy Griffin makes my skin crawl), but I have received offers to speak, opportunities to freelance write, podcasting fun as well as my latest gig, a correspondent to what I think is the best podcast out there for social media, For Immediate Release.

Again, I have not read the book — but will – but it seems to me that if one is genuine and dogged, if you do indeed build a better inbound marketing mousetrap, the social media world will beat a path to your door.

And Brian, being about a million times smarter than me, provided a quote for the book that nails it on the head:

In the social Web, we are presented with a privilege to establish meaningful dialogue and collaborative relationships with the people who define our markets. This is an incredible opportunity to establish relevance and discoverability. Remember, consumers have choices. We’re not part of those decisions where we’re not present. Inbound marketing serves as the bridge between those seeking information, direction and insight and those willing to provide guidance and support.

So be your own best marketing guru and provide an inbound path for marketing opportunities – without even trying.

Mark

Hey everyone,

Finally got around to testing Posterous tonight and I have to admit, it’s pretty cool.  As good as advertised – through a single email, you can post to your blog, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr — about anything.

Pics below emailed from my iPhone.   And The Boy snuck in the picture at the last second..

Posted via email from Mark’s Ponderous Posterous

Ok, David Wescott did it, so I’ll push out some emotional gruel for your consumption this morning.  I am grateful for:

• My family, my family, my family.
• My children are happy and healthy.  Period.  Full stop.
• I have a few jobs.  A lot of people don’t even have one.
• The ability to have built a pretty successful consulting practice – as a part-time gig.
• The Simpsons.
• In a year in which way too many people lost their homes, I gained a second one.
• My friends – those relationships that have developed and grown over the years.  You know who you are.
• Gaining new friends through social media – and meeting them in person.
• The ability to laugh.
• The fact that I get to try cool stuff in social media – and love it.
• Baseball, specifically the Boston Red Sox.
• Having the time to coach my son in baseball and basketball, and watch my daughter become an accomplished Irish dancer.
• The word “w00t!”
• To live in a country in which your career is often what you can make it.
• When my former students come back to me for advice.
• Meditation.
• Speaking another language that is my passport to forming friendship with people with whom I would not have the opportunity otherwise.
• Knowing that every day I try to touch someone’s life in a positive way.
• Our soldiers who have either made the ultimate sacrifice, or as I write this, are missing their own families to protect the freedoms that we too often take for granted.
• Pizza.
• Walks with my dog.
• Cigars.
• (I am stealing this from David Wescott) – the two people who read this blog.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  I like days like today that make people stop and thing about what they are truly grateful for.

Mark

I’ll make this short because not everyone who reads this lives in Washington, DC, but the longtime owner of the Washington Wizards/Bullets and former owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team, Abe Pollin, died yesterday.  He was 85 years old.

I rarely post anything in this space remotely related to an obitutary, but I started work in Washington, DC in 1987 – they say that if you have been in DC for more than two presidential administrations, you are a native.  So, despite my strong New England roots, I suppose I qualify.

Abe Pollin did more for the city of Washington, DC than anyone else I can think of.  From today’s Washington Post article, here are just a few tidbits of of his life story:

• He arrived in Washington more than 75 years ago, the gangly son of a Russian metal worker named Morris Pollinovsky who came to America a poor man speaking no English.
• In addition to building thousands of units of housing for a range of incomes, he was the pillar of countless charitable and civic efforts, culminating in his building MCI Center (now Verizon Center) in 1997 and triggering a stunning renaissance of Gallery Place and surrounding neighborhoods.
• He..built the Linda Pollin (his deceased daughter) Memorial Housing Project in Southeast Washington, with three- and four-bedroom apartments to accommodate large families.
• Mr. Pollin was well known for his philanthropy, which touched global efforts such as UNICEF, while never forgetting local causes such as the I Have a Dream Foundation. He championed improving the lives of children, considering it an obligation of those who could afford to do so, and his contributions over the years were believed to be in the multiple millions.
• In December 1984, Mr. Pollin read an op-ed column in The Post about 40,000 children dying daily from malnutrition in Africa. He called the writer, inquiring whether the number was a misprint. Mr. Pollin was assured it was accurate and was given a phone number for UNICEF’s top U.S. official. Mr. Pollin organized a trip to northeastern Uganda to observe the pestilence first-hand and later spearheaded UNICEF relief drives for Africans, and then for Kurds in Northern Iraq, and for women and children to survive winter in Afghanistan.
• Mr. Pollin worked summers [in construction] for his dad, hauling bathtubs on his back to prove to his co-workers that he was more than the boss’s son. A back injury he suffered during the heavy lifting rendered him 4-F when he later tried to enlist during World War II.
• In 1999, along with several international humanitarian organizations, he began funding research into the long-term effects of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons on Kurds in Halabja, a town in northern Iraq. In 2002, Mr. Pollin and his wife established the Pollin Prize, a $200,000 annual award for pediatric research.
• Mr. Pollin’s fierce sense of mission and risk-taking was most evident in his construction of the Verizon Center, which he opened after several years of wrangling with District government. Mr. Pollin again recruited O’Malley, along with numerous business allies, to lobby city officials to invest more than $150 million in public resources in exchange for his moving the Wizards and Capitals to the downtown site at Gallery Place. When the financially strapped city balked, Mr. Pollin decided to build the arena himself.
• After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Pollin led several efforts to aid the victims and families of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. He put his company name to one of them, an educational fund benefiting the children who lost a parent or guardian in the attack. Abe and Irene Pollin made the first donation of $100,000.

Finally, in a story he told The Post in 1991, Mr. Pollin was sitting by himself in a Washington restaurant. A man came up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Are you Abe Pollin?”Mr. Pollin looked up, anticipating a complaint about one of his teams. “Yes, I am,” he replied. “You don’t know me, but you changed my life,” the man said, “You built that Linda Pollin project, and I moved in there, and that’s the first decent place we ever had to live. That changed my life.”

In an age in which there are so many sports owners who view themselves as celebrities and, in Montgomery Burns-like fashion, want to make their millions into billions, Abe Pollin was one of a kind.

Rest in peace, Mr. Pollin.  You were and will always be a part of Washington, DC.

Mark

Yesterday, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine who has dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship and is currently living in Canada.  We assiduously avoided the topic of politics, but healthcare sneaked into the conversation, itimating that universal healthcare was a right bestowed by the almighty.

Um.. unless your Canadian insurance company finds picture of you frolicking on the beach on Facebook.

Yep.  Read that one again.  I’ll wait.

According to a Washington Times article, “Insurance cut over Facebook bikini pictures“:

Nathalie Blanchard, 29, took long-term sick leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, more than a year ago for severe depression. She was receiving monthly benefits from her insurance company, Manulife.

When Ms. Blanchard called Manulife to inquire why the payments dried up, the insurance company said that “I’m available to work, because of Facebook,” she told CBC television.  She said that Manulife cited several pictures Ms. Blanchard had posted on her social-networking Web-site page, including some showing her enjoying herself during a male strip-tease show at a Chippendales bar, celebrating her birthday and sunbathing. Based on these postings, the firm claimed Ms. Blanchard was no longer depressed.

Ouch.  So maybe Canada is not the healthcare standard of the world, one that so many on opposite sides of the healthcare debate hold up as an example.  The bigger picture?

In the past, as my students prepared to launch full-time job searches, I stressed that having TWO Facebook profiles was a good idea.  One that is public with you in a suit grasping a law book or something, one that this is private that shows what you REALLY do on the weekends like kegstands.

I won’t even enter into the debate about Ms. Blanchard’s depression (although they do say that Vitamin D from the sun is great cure for depression), but this is yet another piece of evidence that:

1. The Internet is FOREVER.
2. What you post online you must assume is completely visible to everyone.
3. Think of what is out there online about you that has the potential to impact your life in the future.

Facebook and privacy?  Remember the uproar over Project Beacon?  Recently, Facebook enabled people to comment on their revised privacy policy.  According to ISP Geeks, if more than 7,000 people had commented on it, an automatic vote of Facebook users would have been triggered.  So SURELY, of the millions of Facebook users, 7,000 people gave a damn, right?

No hanging, pregnant or curious chads.

453 people commented.  That’s right.  453 people.  So the current Facebook policy:

“..advises users to make full use of the social network’s privacy settings and application settings to control how much information they share, and with who they share this information with. Facebook provides controls, but it is up to individuals to check and ensure that appropriate settings are in place.”

So do kegstands or appear on the beach in a bikini or at a male strip club (shudder) if you are being treated for depression, but for God’s sake, update your Facebook privacy settings.

And if you are getting the cold sweats reading this thinking of all of the picture of you that are tagged out there, below is a handy-dandy little screen shot of how to change (and make restrictive) your privacy settings in Facebook:

Mark