If you're passionate about your message, then money is not the issue.

Let me start by saying I love the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. I want that place to make it. Let me also admit I have let my membership slip since Buck O'Neil died. It's kind of like 18th and Vine disappeared from my radar for a while...and I feel bad about that. But some of the blame falls on them for their internet strategy, or lack of it.

I don't want to get into all the junk and politics going on around the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. You can read about it here and here if you need to catch up. I'll just set this up like this: I pitched Bob Kendrick about 7 or 8 years ago while I was at MoonWire. They said they did not have the budget to do the things that needed to be done to establish a real online presence. A couple weeks ago, after reading more about the problems they were having I emailed Bob just to tell him I hoped things picked up and how surprised I was that they still had no real online presence, especially when it comes to a social media: no Facebook, no Twitter, no blog. A whole generation uses the web through those channels, and the NLBM was not visible anywhere. They have basically closed the blinds on today's internet user. Bob emailed back that he agreed, and he hoped they would be able to get some budget increases so they could get involved on those things. There it is again. Budget.  

I don't post this to pick on Bob Kendrick. From what I understand, Bob is dealing with a lot of crap down there right now. And the times I have met him I have really liked him. A lot. And again, I'm not in the loop over there to see what they are really working on. I'm just going with how it looks from the outside. His thoughts about creating an online presence are common with a lot of people and businesses. They don't really understand today's social web. It is so different than it was even 7 to 8 years ago when Bob and I first met. I know with Buck O'Neil gone, it has gotten harder for the NLBM to get attention and spread the word. Buck was a social giant. They need to find a way to start talking to people without Buck. No better place to do that than online. And it doesn't take stacks of money anymore.

Being successful online these days has less to do with budget and a lot to do with passion for your message. Especially for something like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. I'm hard pressed to come up with another group that would be as exciting to build an online community around than the NLBM. And it would cost very little to get going. It should be every social marketer's dream to pitch them ideas. It's got to be the easiest job in town to get immediate results from. My head is spinning with ideas.

Here's one...

Live Tweet history. Baseball season is starting in a couple weeks. Live tweet some historical Negro League games. Act is if they are happening right now. If a game was played on May 1st 1925, then on May 1st 2009 tweet the game as if it happening right then. Give me the pitching match up, standings prior to the game. Tweet the first pitch. Then from there sometimes you might tweet crucial at bats pitch by pitch, other times  you might just tweet once for a whole inning if they were up and down in order with nothing exciting. You know how the game ends. You know where the drama is and what at bats prove crucial to the outcome. You could tell an amazing story doing this.

The best would be if you could do a season. Pick one game a week or a couple from the same season and let us follow that season from beginning to end reliving (most of us living for the first time) the season. The problem would be, do we have enough records and score cards to tweet 2 important games a week for a whole season? I don't know the answer to that. But I imagine there is enough to get started.

I think you could get a lot of buzz by using the shiniest new internet darling, Twitter, to bring history alive. And this takes little money. It just takes the passion to want to tell people about it.

How about this...

Give me some short video tours of some of the exhibits, given by some ball players and post them to a facebook page. I'm just talking about 3 minute videos by someone like Joe Carter (he's in town). Have him show us a piece in a current exhibit and maybe give a little background. A teaser to the full exhibit. Put out at least 2 a week. Or go after current ball payers that are in town to play the Royals and have them come over and do a short tour on an exhibit. This does not take a budget - this just takes some passion.

There are so many possibilities to use social media to spread the word.

The NLBM has the unbelievable responsibility of teaching us about an important part of our country's history. They hold a lot of that history behind their walls. Unfortunately - instead of spreading the word, they are locking it up in a web site from the nineties and acting like the reason they can't tell anyone about it is because of money. That's silly.

It doesn't take money. With all the tools available to the internet marketer today, it takes passion. I hope all that passion over there did not die with Buck O'Neil.

Blunt watch is off - but...

Roy Blunt has already started with Google Ad Words for his 2010 Senate campaign. Here is a screenshot from my blog. Notice under my friendfeed widget, I run Google AdWords (hey my kids love Ghostbusters...shut up). 

Seems early - but I doubt they are having to pay much for it right now. I don't imagine there are a ton of clicks on it. But he's getting his name out there. I'm curious what keywords they are bidding on right now. He has ads on searches for both Robin Carnahan and Sarah Steelman...not sure what else (besides his name obviously). 

Unfortunately for Roy, the link takes you to a site that looks like it was built in 1996. I'm pretty sure that's the same site he had when I worked for him. Seems odd to be so proactive on so many things that drive people to a site, but so backwards on the site you drove them to.

Blunt watch is off though (before it even started). The idea of only watching Blunt's use of social media is silly. Plus I'm not sure who I'm rooting for yet.

Im in ur n00sfeed - bean ur frend

Currently fan pages on Facebook are useless in my opinion. As a user, there is absolutely no reason for me to join one, except to tell people I joined it or to write on the wall of the page I joined. Those reasons suck. If I want to see what's going on with the brand, celeb, politician I can still go over to the page without being a member of the page. As a fan I don't get any special notification when they add content to their page. There is very little benefit to being a fan. The fan page is not part of the social aspect of Facebook. They are outside the social graph. Or were. Yesterday Facebook made some announcements and the biggest one in my opinion is that Fan pages can now have a status and will post to thier fan's news feed.

As a content provider of a fan page, the biggest draw back is (or was) that when I did something on my company's fan page, like announced a new sale, uploaded a new video or pictures of new designs, etc - our fans did not know about it. They were not notified by anything that we had made changes. We could send them an update, which we do from time to time, but I'm not a big fan of facebook messaging. Especially the fan page update notifications. But now, we can get our "status" and other posts to show up in the news feed as if we were one of their buddies. This is huge...if used properly.

The best part of Facebook is without a doubt the news feed. It's how I keep up on everyone. I never just go to someones page unless I end up there by clicking on an item in the news feed. The ability to get our message into the news feed is going to change the way we communicate with our customers on Facebook. We are going to be able to keep them updated on sales, new collections, store events nationwide, etc in a whole new way. And we will be forced to do it in 160 characters or less. I consider this a very non intrusive way to keep them up to date. Much better than a fan page update sent to nowhere.

Allowing the fan pages to update the news feed is going to open up some viral promotion for brands and public figures. If we can post a picture of a new collection to our wall, and have that picture post to our fans news feed, then get a few of those fans to "like" the new designs and that "like" shows up in their friends news feed that have never heard of us...that's fantastic.

I'm sure there is a fear by some that you're going to lose "fans" by showing up in the feed. But those are fans you don't need probably. Quality over quantity. And there will be complaints by users that the brands/public figures are adding too much additional noise by jumping in the news feed. Again - your not really losing anything by losing this type of person as a fan. They did not want to hear from you anyway. I'm sure you will lose some fans and I'm sure there will be complaints. But I think in the end you're going to pick up a lot more with the viral possibilities getting in the news feed creates. Not to mention that the ones you do keep are people that really want to keep up with your brand and hear what is going on...and buy.

I'm looking forward to becoming a "fan" of more brands and political figures now that there is actual benefit in doing so. And I guarantee, now that our fans will be watching us in their feed, we will make sure we are providing better value to them with our page.

I want to put Twitter conversations at the end of each post.

Is there a Twitter widget that will let me post a stream of tweets to my blog based on a search? I know I can add my most recent tweets to a blog in the side bar, or could do an RSS feed of a Twitter search in the side bar, but that's not what I want. I want to be able to post a stream based on a search at the end of an entry, in the body. Not the sidebar. Similar to Google News Headline widget.

Google recently released a wizard that lets you generate code to put a Google News headline box on your site. You can provide a box running a news search on the subject you are talking about. The good thing, is I can put it right in the middle body of the post. Like this:




The bad things is, I don't really want a Google News headline box on my post. I want something like this for Twitter. So if I'm writing about something I can have a Twitter search at the end - showing maybe the last 3-5 tweets on the subject.

Kind of a "here is what the web is talking about on this same subject". I don't want news stories - I want conversations.

Is there anything like this? There should be.

How do we pull all this social together?

I like the thought behind what Skittles.com is doing (using Twitter , Flickr , Facebook and YouTube as the content of their site), but it doesn't really work. Too fragmented of an experience, and really no value. But, like I said, I like the thought of it.

They are trying to figure out the problem that most everyone is trying to figure out. Not just companies and organizations. There are so many social networks to be involved in, where do you focus your time? So many of these social networks overlap with each other. Should Skittles put videos on YouTube, Flickr or Facebook? All of them? If they have decided to use YouTube for video, how do you tell the people looking at pictures over on Flickr or Facebook (where you chose not to put video) that you're using YouTube for video?

Now honestly, I have no idea why anyone is interested in watching videos or commercials of Skittles. Unless you can drop them in a bottle of diet coke and create some sort of fizzy explosion - personally I'm not interested. But I'm not really talking about Skittles here. I'm talking about all the companies that are trying to figure out how to use social media. With so many different sites you need to participate in, how do you unify that experience for the customer? Is there even a way to unify the experience?

It's the same for individuals. Do you make a snarky comment about the guy next to you on the bus on Facebook or Twitter? Do you use Ping.fm to send it to both? Are your friends the same on both networks? Mine aren't.

Do you post the pictures of your kids birthday party on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, or that one with a fish? Maybe you don't want the whole world to see, so what relatives and friends have joined with which site?

And if you're going to spend so much energy on these social networks, what do you put on your own site or blog? Friendfeed helps with this, but does not go far enough. Ideally, everyone would open the doors to their data so we could post most of this on our own sites. Instead of putting an annoying floating navigation widget on the top of everyone elses page, we would be able to pull in the information from those social networks better. There are small steps being made in this direction, but I doubt it will go all the way. The idea of the internet as the social network will never really come about unfortunately. So how do we piece it all together into on cohesive presentation?

I didn't write this post with any solution in mind.