While in a single blog post I can’t tell you how to be a good writer, photographer, or producer, I can offer things you can think about when you’re creating your content. Look at the following list as a checklist before and after you create the content. Always ask yourself, does my content achieve these elements?

Eight things to consider when you’re creating online content:

1. The headline sells the content

Your content’s headline is the advertisement to get people to open and consume the content. Don’t take it lightly. I often begin my blog posts with a headline idea, but then revisit it when I’m done with the post to see if I can make it more enticing.

2. Social networking is not broadcasting, it’s thru-casting

To get the network effect of social networking, your audience needs to pass along your content. If you create a piece of self-serving content that no one else would want to pass along then all you’ve done is broadcasted your message. You want to go through your audience. Want content can you create that someone wants to pass along?

3. People pass along content that makes them look good

People don’t forward content for egalitarian reasons. They share content for selfish reasons. Those reasons are often very subtle and that’s why no one calls it selfish, but if I share a piece of content about “The Celtics” I’m advertising to others that I’m a fan of the Boston Celtics. It makes me feel and look good to be associated with the NBA team. No one sees it as selfish, but that’s what prompted my desire to share the content. I’m not sharing it because I’m working really hard to get the Celtics more publicity.

4. Does the content have a purpose?

All good content does one or more of the following: it entertains, informs, or provokes an emotional response. If you can do all three, then your chances for pass along increase that much more.

5. Tell a personal story that others can relate

When you create story-based content you’re giving your audience the option to sympathize and relate. No matter what content you create, can you connect it to a story so that it’ll be memorable? Whenever I blog, my most popular articles involve a personal story. I get an even better response if that personal story is me complaining about something. But that’s just my brand.

6. Interview others

You don’t have all the answers, nor should you let your audience believe you have all the answers. If your audience sees you interviewing others it increases your sphere of influence. Through social media and search, the act of connecting your brand with others’ knowledge and stories raises your visibility.

7. Create a lot of content

You never know what piece of content is going to stick and people appreciate and recognize publishers who generate a lot of content.

8. Don’t follow models

Tons of people will tell you that you need to write in lists, create “how to’s,” or some other standard technique that consistently ropes people in to your content. Yes, these techniques work, but they’re tired. Your job is to find your own voice and brand and get people to gravitate towards that.

This is far from an exhaustive list of how to create good content. In fact, it’s just an initial guide of questions to ask yourself as you’re building the content. Are you addressing all of these issues? And to those of you creating great content, what questions did I forget to ask?

For more, read my article on Mashable, “HOW TO: Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer.”

Creative Commons photo credit to reinvented, christopher.woo, splorp.

One of our favorite techniques that we haven’t talked about much is actually a throwback, and that’s supporting your community. What that means is providing support to networks, often non-profit or generating very little profit, so that the communities can still exist and function.

Being a community supporter is huge:

• You’re providing a much needed product or service.
• You’re providing the funds necessary to allow the community to exist and the members to stay connected.
• In turn you’re seen as a connector and a provider to the community.

The community support could be (and is often) as simple as purchasing jerseys for a local little league team or buying bagels and coffee for an industry meetup.

Tie that into social media and content production and it can actually be an incredibly powerful marketing technique.

• Build industry leadership and recognition through community support.
• Connect to the most passionate members of the community. They’re the ones actively involved in community networking events.
• Be seen as an influencer and a connector allowing the community to thrive. That goodwill comes back to your organization in spades.

Have I convinced you of the importance of being a community supporter? If so,…

How can you support your community?

Here are some suggestions of ways you can provide value to your community, and in return receive value back.

• Interview industry luminaries: If you’ve got connections with the elite in your industry, reach out to them, interview them, and share that content with your community by publishing the content on your blog and the online community’s blog. This just falls into the overall advice of creating and publishing media for and about the community group.
• Promote the community’s events: Use your channels-social media, email marketing, website, and blog-as additional marketing channels for the community group.
• Volunteer services: Community groups need the same services that most businesses have. Got an accountant, a designer, or even a community manager with a few extra hours? Volunteer their services to help out.
• Sponsor community meetups: This can take the form of just giving money, or offering to host meetups in your office.

These are just some initial ideas, but I wanted to stress the importance of small community events and how they can impact the overall goodwill of your business. What I’d like to know from you is what experience have you had supporting community events? How have you brought about support and what value has it returned to you?

Creative Commons photo attribution to tony4carr, BigDuff.

Some of Facebook’s most popular services such as Photos, the “Like” button, and Video have been a result of internal hackathons. In fact, Facebook’s hackathons have become so popular for their business and the employees that they’ve become a regular part of the company development and workflow. They’re currently being produced four times every year. Employees so love hackathon development and culture at Facebook, that they participate in the weekend hackathons voluntarily, for no additional pay.

Hackathons are not just for developers. I’ve seen business planners and designers work alongside developers in hackathons. Plus, there are hackathons for all other kinds of business and business development, such as management, creativity, and film production.

To understand how you and your business can take advantage of hackathon-style culture, we have to first look at what makes hackathons so popular.

Hackathons are unlike a traditional work environment in that participating in a hackathon gives you a chance to:

• Participate in a creative cultural moment – Not everyone has a creative job, or if you do, you may only be able to be creative in a box. Hackathons give you a chance to be freely creative and be around the energy of others being creative.
• Not be hampered by the structure of the needs and wants of the organization – Most projects are bogged down by project management, people’s time, and client demands.
• Work with eager, self-motivated, like-minded, new, and usually smart participants – Those people who are participating chose to out on their volition. A hackathon is a challenge of your skill and knowledge so participants are also usually talented and bright.
• Operate under a short time limit – This project isn’t going to go on forever. We all know it’s going to end at a specific time.
• Operate in a pressure-induced, yet friendly, environment – You have the time pressure to get a project done, but it’s pressure to succeed in a game. It’s not intrinsically tied to your job and therefore there’s no career-level stress.
• Leave real work behind – Facebook’s hackathon requirement is that you have to do something that’s not related to your job.
• Work intensely for a short period of time, but with a known ending – We all work hard, but much of what makes hard work exhausting is because it keeps going on and on with no specific end in sight. This is a case where you will work hard, but clearly know that there is an end, and it will happen soon.
• Produce something or not – When the time limit is over you’re going to have something, although many people don’t make it to the end. Of the hackathons I’ve seen, only about half of the participants that enter actually make it to the end and have something to present.
• Participate in positive-only career development – So many possible career-changing events can happen if you participate in a hackathon: You could create something that could make you great money. Your talent could be seen from others eager to hire you. You could meet and work with people who you may work with in the future.
• Be recognized by your peers and the industry – Hackathons are a great way to show off your talent, and it’s a great way to discover great talent.
• Win something – Amazingly this is towards the end of the list as it’s not really the motivator that gets people involved, yet you could win a few bucks.
• A chance to continue the project – You can’t help be strongly attached to or repelled by working with someone for 24 hours in a row. At the end of the project you’re going to be eager to continue to work on the project (or something else) together, or you might never want to talk to them again.

Hackathon tips from a hackathon addict

Zac Bowling has participated in more than 80 hackathons and was recently profiled in Wired Magazine. At SXSW this year, I interviewed Bowling on what it takes to succeed in a hackathon.

Can you apply hackathon principles to your business and career?

On a day-to-day basis, I don’t think it’s possible to maintain hackathon principles and behavior in your business and career. So much of the success of a hackathon is that it’s a departure from normal business procedures, plus it’s an extremely intense period of work, often with little to no sleep. Maintaining a hackathon’s frenetic pace on an ongoing basis is not possible in a standard work environment. Hackathons are and will continue to be seen as a special event which requires a certain amount of down time before and after.

You as an individual or a company can create “hackathon moments” to regularly juice you to participate similar to what Facebook does, or you can seek out or participate in hackathons. If neither option is available to you, given your location or your profession, then you need to produce a hackathon yourself.

The answer is yes you can apply it, but make it a special event and organize it correctly. How do you organize it and make it successful? Listen to my interview with Peter Morano, organizer of the hackathon at last year’s SocialDevCamp in Chicago. He gives the lowdown on the physical and promotional elements necessary to pull off a hackathon.

Creative Commons photo credit to hackNY.

If you want to be seen in search and traded in social media, then you need to make sure your digital marketing strategy, whether it has traditional advertising or not, includes at its core, a content strategy.

It’s easy to say you need to have a content strategy. The question is where do you start, and what considerations must you take into account as you’re building your strategy? Here are some of my thoughts, plus some additional thoughts I culled from a discussion on Quora (“How important is content in a digital marketing strategy?”).

1. Know the breadth of your audience

Your audience is comprised of potential customers, other knowledge leaders, those who see you as a thought leader and pass your wisdom along (a.k.a. “advocates”), and to some degree also your detractors. You want to speak to the needs of that entire audience because they all have potential to help you in their own unique ways.

• Potential customers – Revenue generators
• Advocates – Word-of-mouth marketing force
• Knowledge leaders – Source of more content
• Detractors – Passionate about the space. Can be converted to advocates.

2. Fill the knowledge gap

Your audience requires information to be able to move forward. The question is, “What is that information?”

“[It] rests in the gap between what they do not know, what they conceptualize but wish to understand, and what they understand but want to hone and refine,” said Bonnie Nadri.

3. Utilize content as a relationship builder

“It is said that content is king. I say instead that conversation is king. Content gives people something to talk about. Remember that media is not social, people are,” said Jon Yoffie.

Nathan Ketsdever, a social media & education researcher, echoed Yoffe’s comment saying, “Without content you don’t have any sort of relationship development with a potential customer.”

Years ago I asked the extremely popular blogger Chris Brogan why some of his posts get dozens if not hundreds of comments and others only get a few. He said that the posts that get more conversation are not finished. He purposely leaves them open ended, inviting conversation. The ones that get less response are often him pointing to content somewhere else, sending people off of his site.

4. Hit the street to find sources of content

The people at the highest levels of your organization are often the worst people to ask for expertise as to what are your audience’s top concerns today.

Charlotte Ulvros, CMO at Mynewsdesk advises, “Check with customer support, your experts in R&D etc and maybe even your internal communicators for ideas. They have so much knowledge about the product, the customers and the internal happenings but are often forgotten.”

5. Resist the urge to talk AT your audience

To deliver a successful content strategy you have to lose the marketing attitude of all corporate communications being about delivering your “message.” No one, and I mean absolutely no one, cares about your message. They care about themselves. To reach that audience, you need to lose the broadcast attitude and step into the conversational attitude.

Nadri echoes this belief: “Most business drivers seek to tie strategy to desired outcomes and this often either bypasses or obliterates the mutually beneficial exchange that most digital seekers crave. Anyone can talk AT them, some can talk TO them, but the core of a solid digital marketing strategy is to find the path to engagement and interaction–to talk WITH them.”

6. Extend your knowledge through curation

You can’t know everything, and if you do know everything you garner that intelligence through others. Always seek value from others. As mentioned earlier, look within your organization, but then look to your partners, experts, customers, advocates, and even detractors.

7. Map content strategy out for best SEO results

Just pushing out content with no actual editorial plan is the equivalent of flapping your wings and standing in place. You’re doing something, but it’s not aiming towards an end goal. Have a strategy as to what your voice and content will be, and actually work with an SEO team that can help you determine what those keywords and phrases will be to attract the most traffic over time.

8. Deliver content at time of need

“Content Strategy is not about pushing content into channels–there’s no shortage of content out there–it’s about anticipating needs and delivering relevant information that supports your business objectives,” said Derek Phillips, Content Director at Critical Mass.

Timeliness of messaging is an obsession in advertising and it should also be an obsession of content creation. There are simple things you can do to plan for content creation in time of need (e.g., “Last minute tax tips” in early April) and you can also be curating feeds of information (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, blogs) to see what’s top of mind right now.

9. Support your sales cycle

Content can feed all five stages of the purchase cycle:

• Phase 1: Discovery
• Phase 2: Research
• Phase 3: Purchase
• Phase 4: Use
• Phase 5: Additional Purchase

“Relevant content needs to be mapped to the journey the buyer takes from stage 1: uninterested and unaware in your firm to the final stage: loyal customer. Mapping what content is relevant at each stage and how you plan to deliver that content is the issue,” explained B2B marketer Chris Fell.

For details on how that works, read my whitepaper, “Be the Voice^SM” – Build Your Business by Becoming your Industry’s Thought Leader.

This is your job

This advice applies to everyone. And as summation, I thought I’d include this gem from Gary Vaynerchuk quoted by Timo Mouton, Online Marketing Manager at Explania.com:

“Regardless of what business you’re in, you’re really in the content business.”

Creative Commons photo attribution to Shane Kelly (2), Ed Yourdon, and Stuck in Customs.

Influence measurement services such as Klout and Kred are trying to ride that wave of attaching a numerical indicator of our ability to influence others. I’m a little down on these services solely because they predominantly just measure Twitter behavior and they give higher credence to the sharer of content than the creator of content (read: “Do Online Reputation Measurement Services Like Klout and Kred Support a New Kind of Plagiarism?”)

Regardless of the debatable quality of these services, they’re being used to easily determine influence. The question is do we understand the theoretical underpinning of what creates “influence?”

When do you influence?

When we talk about “influencers” we’re looking for those individuals that have the ability to affect others.

Here are some theoretical thoughts on influence:

• You can’t bestow the title “influencer” to yourself: While you can call yourself a doctor, lawyer, or whatever other profession, you can’t call yourself an influencer. That’s a title that’s bestowed upon you by someone else, and never directly to you. Someone who values your thoughts and content will refer to you as an influencer to another.
• Influence is different than having an audience: An audience member is one who is tuned in and entertained by what you do and say. To influence goes a step further and causes one to take action Or they can cause you to make a behavioral/emotional change.
• We are all influencers: We all have the ability to influence our family and friends.

In a discussion on Quora about “When can you call yourself an influencer” there was amazing consensus that influence is not about counting followers, retweets, etc. Influence is just about your ability to affect change in another person. I’d like to believe that’s true, but people keep saying they don’t look at the numbers, yet it’s the only thing we actually look at when we refer to someone as an influencer.

Enough of the warm fuzzies, how do I know who are the influencers?

Regardless, of the theoretical there is still a desire to uncover who is influential online. That’s why the influence measurement services have done so well. They put a rating to the person and provide the methodology. Problem is no one looks at the methodology. They just look at the number. I see your number is higher. That means you’re more influential, right?

In the discussion, my favorite response was from Yuriy Gumen, VP, Product Management at mBLAST, who in the midst of the theoretical discussion about influence pushed others to realize that we still have to solve the issue of discovering who is influential online. He boiled influence it down to five factors. I added a sixth one, Quality:

• Volume: How much content the person produces?
• Quality: What is the value of the content produced? (this weeds out content farms and spammers)
• Popularity: How many people are “listening” to the person?
• Authority: How many experts are “listening”-citing the person?
• Relevance: Is the content created by the person relevant to your area of interest?
• Action: Can this person produce a butterfly wing effect?

We actually do have ways to measure all of these things, yet the current measurement systems are doing a poor job. They mostly rate popularity, authority, and relevance but only within Twitter. I’d like to see influence measurement systems take all six into account.

In other news, TIME released its list of 100 most influential people today. I made TIME’s list of 100 people they didn’t consider influential.

Creative Commons photo attribution to Anirudh Koul, Photos by Mavis, and laubarnes.

Show me yours before I show you mine

The reason these “install this app” requests were so universally abhorred is because they were asking to give up personal information with no perceived return in value. The app gets to track everything I read and broadcast it out to my entire personal network? What I do get out of it except reduced privacy?

One may argue that the return in value is the actual article itself or the knowledge of what your friends are reading. But that’s already happening. People share articles they want to share and there’s no requirement to be tracked by an app on Facebook in order to read it. What’s the value return for me? My personal online behavior has a lot of value. I’m not just going to give it up because of one interesting article I saw that I could easily view by another means.

Luckily, I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in these apps. Hopefully they’re vanishing.

We accept usability tracking when we really don’t understand what’s going on

Even though our behavior online is being tracked via online ad networks, it’s generally confusing to us as to what’s being tracked and how we could opt out of it. But when we’re asked point blank, “Do you want your behavior to be tracked online to better serve up ads and other content,” the answer is most often, “No.”

Four years ago I attended a conference called the SWAT Summit where a representative from the research firm IDC presented a study that showed that people didn’t want their online behavior tracked to serve up ads. But then later in the study the representative showed that a huge percentage of people used free webmail programs like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail that are advertiser supported and DO track the content of your email to serve up more targeted advertisements. I asked the IDC rep, “Have you actually done a cross analysis between the people who said, ‘I don’t want my behavior tracked to serve up better ads’ and the people who use webmail tools.” She didn’t, but she said she would get back to me on that. It’s four years later, and I’m still waiting for her to “get back to me on that.” (As a side note, in the history that I’ve heard that phrase, “I’ll get back to you on that,” no one has ever “gotten back to me on that.”)

It was amazing to me that IDC hadn’t seen that obvious headline. “People’s Desires for Ad Behavior Contrast their Actions.” This may because of ignorance, or it may be out of laziness, or it may because they’re willing to give up personal information if they are FIRST presented with a very positive value exchange. (e.g., “How would you like this really cool free email program?”)

Automatically sharing our online behaviors is a combination of noise, a privacy intrusion, and phenomenal behavioral data

Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about how sharing will be the default action of any online behavior. So much of what we do is being shared, sometimes with our knowledge, and sometimes without. For example, I often don’t realize it but every time I listen to a song via the service MOG, it gets shared out to my network. Don’t you have guilty pleasure music? Would you want that information spread to ALL of your contacts?

With regard to the automatic sharing of articles that people are reading, this is completely inappropriate because the reader hasn’t had a chance to judge whether the article is worth sharing. All that’s been proven by this application is here’s a headline that is enticing enough to get your friend to click on it. Is there a way to take that broadcast back and say, “Wait, I clicked on it but then quickly realized it was useless and I don’t want my followers to think that I approve and recommend this article”? Yes, you could do that by deleting your post, but it’s already out there before you made the decision. There’s no need for these services except as a privacy intrusion. People are already sharing articles and they’re doing it after they’ve made the decision that it’s worthy of sharing.

Ironically, this overwhelming volume of content was the number one complaint that I heard at the SXSW conference. Here’s a video I shot at the Mashable party at SXSW for Dice.com where people were talking about their social media pet peeves.

Here’s the full response to that Facebook status update. What do you think?

Creative Commons photo attribution to marc_smith.

Use an augmented reality product and your reaction is, “This is useless.”

Augmented reality kicks ass in demonstrations but fails miserably in usability. That’s because for augmented reality to work we need a screen to overlay around the world. While our phones have screens and are small, to hold them up in front of our face as we’re walking around is not realistic. It simply doesn’t work.

Some other examples of augmented reality don’t require any movement, such as augmented reality over a magazine picture. Here’s an example of that.

Also, at ad:tech in San Francisco this year, I saw one potential usable version of augmented reality and that’s animating equipment, such as an office printer, that shows you how to fix it on your own. Once again, while cool, I think an instructional video could also accomplish the same result.

The history of augmented reality up until now has been testing, cool one-off tools that get a tiny spike in buzz, and really fun demonstrations. Read my summary of the history, benefits, and problems of augmented reality from Gene Becker, an augmented reality expert from LighteningLaboratories (“What you can and can’t do (but soon will do) with augmented reality.”)

While we’ve all been wowed by virtual reality and thought, “Gee, some day,” we simply haven’t found any real practical uses for it. We realized that augmented reality won’t become a reality until we have wearable computers that are truly seamless with how we move about in our lives. Check out this video I produced back in 1999 for ZDTV. It’s all about wearable computing and we were obsessed about it back then.

The big news from Google that blitzed everywhere yesterday, even on NYTimes Bits, is that Google has begun testing its own augmented reality glasses in a project called “Project Glass.” While the initial prototype glasses were very clunky, the new ones that they’re presenting in the photographs are very lightweight and fashionable. And Google also provided what appears to be a simulated video of all the things one could do wearing a pair of these “Project Glass”-empowered glasses.

Of all the demonstrations I’ve seen on augmented reality this one does two things:

• It’s seamless: It shows real usability in everyday life that doesn’t require one to actually pull out another device to operate.
• It integrates current social behavior online and offline: It takes into account how we’re communicating and associating with each other today.

Google’s introduction of “Project Glass” really explains a lot about how to leap over the industry’s inability to go from demonstration to actual usability. Now understandable we don’t all have the dollars of Google to pretty much pull off anything we want, but when you’re introducing your product, demonstrating everyday usability is absolutely key. And to get to that point you need to do real world testing and engaging with beta testers.

The more stories you can create out of usage the better your audience can see how they could incorporate your tool into their daily lives. I know after seeing these videos I’m eager to get a pair of “Project Glass” glasses. The question is, will they fit over my current glasses, or can I get a new prescription that’s got “Project Glass” built in? Eager to find out.

Photos provided by Google.

Success in engagement requires flipping that thinking. How can you help your audience express themselves or have a desired experience through your brand? What environment can you create that allows the customers create an experience on their own. You will never have any success if you try to force them to engage by shouting at them with marketing messages. In fact, that usually delivers a negative engagement, explained Paul Greenberg, godfather of CRM, who talked with me at the Zoho User Conference, Zohlics, at Burlingame, California (Disclosure: Zoho is a client of Spark Media Solutions, my business).

The main trick to successful customer engagement is to give the user a desired personal experience through your brand. Let’s take a look at some successful examples:

Examples of good customer engagement techniques

• Simpsonize or OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself” – Perfect example of personalizing something through a brand. In both cases you’re uploading a photo of yourself that’s then being converted via the brand’s image.
• Photo booths – Let people take fun photos of themselves that are post produced with your brand.
• Twitter chats – Give people an avenue and voice to engage with your audience through an event that’s sponsored through your brand.
• American Girl store experiences – As Paul Greenberg explained to me, the American Girl stores allow girls to get their hair done with their doll, see a play with their doll, or have lunch with their doll. When he talked with dads who took their daughters, they all admitted they paid an absurd fortune to do it but would do it again because their daughters loved the experience which is often very difficult to place a price tag.
• Thought provoking questions – If you nail the right nerve, a good thought provoking question via a blog, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever can spark others to express themselves.
• Coupons – The most popular of them all. No one is forcing you to use them, but the company is giving you the option to engage with them in the most preferred method, with their products and services.

In all cases you want to create an environment for a shareable and repeatable experience. If you want any of these things to go “viral” it’s very important to make the sharing experience as easy as possible. Any extra hurdle will reduce sharing dramatically. For example, I’ve seen photo booths that will get your photo online in four days and others that make it available immediately after you take the photo plus there’s a station that allows you to share the photo right then and there with your social network. Guess which photo booth was more effective? The moral is to reduce all barriers to sharing. And I mean all barriers. If you can reduce a single click, step, or action, do it.

What’s your favorite customer engagement technique?

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of all the different ways one can spark customer engagement. I’m eager to hear your favorite techniques. Please add them in the comments below.

Creative Commons photo attribution to Amycgx.

At the show, I talked about this with Lance Ulanoff, Editor-in-Chief of Mashable and Gary Vaynerchuk, author of “The Thank You Economy” (see my video interviews, reporting for Dice at SXSW, below) and we joked about how it was often impossible to make forward progress of even 50 feet because we just keep running into people we know. Gary Vaynerchuk boiled it down when he said, “When you get this many smart and innovative people in one small tight space, serendipity is inevitable.”

David Spark interviews at Mashable party at SXSW

For me, these “moments” with people I know and those I just meet for the first time are what make SXSW such a memorable conference. It got me to thinking, could this kind of serendipity translate anywhere else? Is there a way to fabricate it, or maybe facilitate serendipity in any other environment?

It got me thinking about all the ways we can coax serendipity:

Location based apps at conferences

Facilitating friend connections wherever you are has been the promise of applications such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, and now new entrants Highlight and Banjo. In normal everyday life, I find these applications to be a nuisance and also a personal safety issue. But in large industry-specific conferences they’re incredibly valuable because a good portion of your online social world is now physically all in one city. Where in that city you don’t know, but with a location based app you can find out when you actually care. At SXSW and at CES I’ve used these apps to find what parties my friends are currently attending. That information most often dictates where I’m going next.

Closed campus-like environments

Let me qualify that last comment that these location apps are only valuable at a larger conference where there are thousands of attendees are sprawled across in multiple locations in a city. In a small conference where everyone is physically in just a few rooms, there’s no point to these services, but at events like SXSW and CES where events can happen in hundreds of different locations, they’re very valuable. Location-based apps are also valuable at universities, military bases, and large corporate campuses.

Reaching out to industry luminaries via social networks

If you want to bump into people you know at conferences you need to know a lot of people. The only way to do that is to network. That means pressing flesh at events, but it also requires engaging with people in your industry via social networks. In particular, comment on industry bloggers’ blogs and engage with them on Twitter. Your previous online discussion will give you a point of context when you meet them at a conference.

The old adage about networking is very true. You need to network when you don’t need it. Too often people go into panic “I need to network” mode when they’re looking for a job. Don’t fall into that trap. Always be networking. It’s always valuable no matter what your situation.

Social sign on for event registration

Many event scheduling services such as Eventbrite and Meetup allow for some type of social sign on which allows you to not only see a list of people registered for an event, but in some cases click through to view and read their profile. If you spend just a little time looking at the attendees you’ll pre-know the people you’re going to meet in person for the first time. You’ll have a point of context to engage and it will impress the person that you made the effort to learn about them, making your meeting all that more memorable for them.

Search Facebook and LinkedIn for people in a particular city

Whenever I travel I simply search my Facebook and LinkedIn networks to see who lives in the city I’ll be visiting. I could do the traditional “are you available for lunch” email to particular people but that becomes a coordination nightmare if you’re trying to make it one-on-one. Instead, I simply open up an invitation, saying, “I’m coming to your city, meet me for lunch/drinks at this location. Let me know if you can make it” and then show up. Some people will RSVP. Some won’t. Some who said they will come, won’t come. And those who do come will probably bring a friend.

Post a public “meet me in this city” event

Similar to the above tip, I have also posted public events “Drinks with Dave” on Facebook and surprisingly have had people I don’t even know join just because it was a chance to meet some new people.

Talk a lot about an event you’re about to attend on Twitter

I’m always pleasantly surprised when I meet someone at a conference that follows me on Twitter. If you talk a lot about a conference you’re about to attend, then your followers who will also be at that conference will look out for you.

What’s your advice for orchestrating serendipity?

While many of my tips aren’t truly “serendipity,” they do play into the ability to facilitate that face-to-face engagement with people you know and don’t know. I’m always looking for new ways to connect with people in person, so if you’ve got any suggestions, please add them to the comments.

Creative Commons photo attribution to Dice.com and Shelbysdrummond.

Luckily for me and a fellow classmate, Sheldon, the demand for statistics tutoring was at an all time high. The two of us were in incredibly high demand and we fortunately made a lot of pocket cash during college.

The greatest benefit of teaching and writing about statistics at that time was that I really got to learn the subject. While studying and taking tests was valuable, it didn’t lock into my brain until I began teaching.

Since those days in college I’ve noticed that my understanding of subject matters are always heightened if I actually write about the subject. It is for this reason I suggest you do the same.

Here’s my advice on how to learn through publishing (NOTE: My suggestions are very focused on taking notes at conferences and events):

Taking notes is not enough

So often I see people taking notes at a conference and it appears to be just busy work. Many people feel that if they’re not taking notes, they’re not actually doing anything. The problem is we rarely take the time to look through our notes and make sense of the information. While the act of writing something down helps in the memorization process, it isn’t until you review that content, organize it in your own thoughts, and then regurgitate it with your own spin that it becomes a part of what you truly understand.

Don’t just submit a summary report for the office

If you’re sent to a conference by your company, you’re often required to come back and report on your findings. Why people treat this as some sort of top secret mission, I don’t understand. All the content at the conference (except for private conversations) is public information. There’s no reason your report should be isolated to just your company. Anything you write for your office that doesn’t have specific private mentions of what your company is doing should be made public as a published blog post or other type of media (e.g., podcast).

Publishing helps you organize the data collection process

If you know you’re going to be writing some content from a conference or some other event, you will (if you’re smart about it) collect the information in a logical way. When you’re done collecting the content, you want it to help you with the writing of your final product. For example, you might write a summary post of the highlights of the event. In such a case, you’ll start to note the best stuff at the event as you’re collecting information. BTW, you don’t learn this overnight. It takes a while to start to understand how to efficiently collect information for production.

Challenge the status quo

Often you will hear information at an event that doesn’t settle with you, or doesn’t make complete sense. Don’t assume it’s gospel because the keynote speaker, who got paid $10K, said it. Challenge the claims. Engage in debate. Ask a question during or after the session. Write about it on your blog and send the speaker a link to your article asking him or her to weigh in.

Attract like-minded people

By putting a post out on a certain subject you have announced to the world that this is an area of interest to you. The act of reading your article qualifies you as someone who is also interested in this type of content. Publishing is essentially an excellent “interest” matchmaker.

Ask your audience questions

It’s one think to attract like-minded people, but to actually know who they are and learn from them, you need to ask questions. Go for more introspective questions beyond stating your idea and then saying, “What do you think?” which unfortunately comes off as “What do you think of my brilliant idea?” If they agree with you, they won’t bother. If they don’t agree with you they’ll also not bother, as they probably don’t want to waste their time engaging with you. Instead, show some humility and admit you don’t have all the answers. Say that you’re truly looking for input on said issue and you’re hoping others can offer up some experiential examples.

With that said, I’ll ask you the reader, how do you best learn from others? Does the act of publishing help you, and if so do you have any specific techniques that help you learn better? If not publishing, what other methods do you use?

Creative Commons photo credits to kpwerker, MissChatter, thebrandery.