ION Digital

Robert Scoble doesn’t strike me a media baron. When I had lunch with the technology evangelist a few years ago, he came across as likeable, interesting, curious and of course connected to everything technology.

But looks can be a little deceiving. Since co-authoring Naked Conversations in 2006, he’s built up an army of followers and now wields influence that would make a media buyer drool, particularly in Silicon Valley, home of geeks and early adopters.

Super bloggers like Scoble have evolved into influential media powerhouses, often blowing by the traditional media. Most are not as well known as Scoble, but they often wield influence in their areas (for a glimpse of the new media in one niche, check out this list of top 50 social media and technology blogs). Now if you want to get your story out, you have to deal with the super bloggers.

But how can you connect with the new media elite? How can you get busy bloggers to write about your company, CEO, product-or interview one of your experts? (For now, I’m talking about the individual super bloggers vs the magazine style new media players like Huffington Post, or TechCrunch…although many of these tips still apply) (more…)

This week’s Inbound Marketing Summit provided a nice display of some of the best thinking on social media on the planet. They were preaching to the choir here, folks who believe the social media movement is long overdue.  So you didn’t get a lot of contention or debate. What you did get was some exhilarating ideas, strategies, tips and techniques.

Many of the sessions were only 20 minutes so speakers had to blaze through their material, but most pulled it off smoothly. It was an interesting mix of consultants, web types, businesspeople, freelancers, former journalists, marketing and PR people and others that I couldn’t quite categorize (I met two people out of work; jobless, well might as well hang out with the social media crowd).
The conference ended the second day as strong as it began, with Louis Gray providing tools to deal with the information overload and Tim O’Reilly giving a spirited speech based on “creating more value than you capture.” Along the way hosts Chris Brogan and Justin Levy kept the trains running on time and the mood upbeat.There were too many great sessions to cover all of them  but here’s a sampling of key takeaways for me. (more…)