All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Social Media

21 Of The Top Black Social Media Influencers

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I know a few of you are saying “hey, didn’t Mitch do something similar to this at the beginning of the year? Actually yes, in December I did something I called 8 of the top Black Individual Blogs. That was a tough one to research based on my criteria and the fact that I didn’t really have a place to start. This one’s a little bit different.

Before I tell you what I did, I want to tell you why I did it. This year, I’ve seen a lot of lists from people that announce the top blogs or top influences or top social media whatever for the year.

There are tons of lists telling you “this is someone you should follow.” I think that’s a wonderful idea, because it’s always great giving a bit of love to people that deserve it. Where my gripe is in that almost never are there any black people on the list. This week was a great example. One list came out highlighting 25 women bloggers you just have to know; the other was 50 social media influencers you had to know. Neither list had a single black person on it. Asian sure, but black person; not one.

The argument one gets is “I don’t know any of those people”. Sorry, I’m not buying it. That argument pretty much says “I don’t care to know any black people” because we’re here. Heck, I’m here. This blog’s been out 3 1/2 years, and my business blog has been out at least 6 years.

Why is this important? Beyond the fact that everyone deserves being known if they do pretty good work online it’s also got a monetary consideration behind it. When people are known for their influence they get invited to conferences, whether to speak or just to participate. Often they get paid; who’d turn that down?

Do we need another list with Chris Brogan, Gary Vanderchuk, Darren Rowse or any of those other top guys that are already millionaires on it? Maybe, but not today. Today is the 10th anniversary of my being in business, so I get to do it my way, to help highlight some folks I believe really deserve it.

This is a group that needs a list But I didn’t want to just find any ol’ people and put a list together. I wanted a list that had some kind of meaning after all. I had to have some standards, and I think the one I, and the person I’m naming first off this list, came up with.

Her idea was to maybe do something based off Klout. I wasn’t sure, as I’ve written about Klout twice before. And yet, it’s an easy measurement to track. Pretty much like other stats that people either believe or disbelieve, the better your number is the more influence you probably have. There may be flukes that keep you ranked lower but there’s no fluke that ranks you higher.

So Klout it is, but I still had to have some standards. I wasn’t about to try to go through every person in the world that’s on Twitter; I’m not crazy! What I did was go through people I’m connected to on Twitter. Now, Twitter isn’t the only determinant for Klout influence. They have a connection with both Facebook and LinkedIn now. So, that means that their algorithm is supposed to be an amalgam of all of these, although LinkedIn is pretty new for them so it probably has little influence thus far.

And they’re still not connected to blogs. I used that as a major gripe when I had a chance to talk to a Klout representative during a Twitter chat session once, and the lady said that was something they’re working on. I tend to believe that many people would greatly benefit if our blog rankings were included, or the number of blogs we have meant something.

So, here were my rules. One, I looked at people I’m connected with already in some fashion. Two, every person except one that’s on this list had to have at least one blog; I’ll name the person when I get to him. Three, no celebrities; sorry Shaq and Oprah, you don’t count. And four, as much as I could determine, you had to be an individual; no group bloggers on this list. Sometimes that’s hard to know, but so be it.

I don’t make any claim that this list is perfect. If someone’s missing it either means no blog or I’ve never heard of them; believe it or not all black people don’t know each other. I hope you visit these people and I hope you find something to comment on so you can tell them they’re on this list. I even personally know a couple of these folks; they’ll probably be shocked to see their names on the list. Actually, I’m wondering how many of them will pay attention to find out they’re on this list in the first place; hmmm…

Oh yeah; I thought about creating a badge of some kind, but I really have no creativity when it comes to that type of thing and didn’t want to create something I consider cheap like last year, so all I have is what you see above; it’ll have to suffice. And I know I’m missing some folks, but man, it took almost 3 hours to find the folks I did; seems the plugin I used to help me get it done slowed things down considerably. So, I apologize to those of you who should be on this list that I missed.

And in case you were wondering, as a point of comparison as I’m writing this my Klout score is 63. Now, to the names:

Ileane Smith @BasicBlogTips 53
It was Ileane’s idea to put a list together with this kind of criteria, so I thank her for it. Ileane’s got a very highly ranked blog and it gets lots of attention so she definitely should be showing up on people’s radar. http://basicblogtips.com/

Scott Williams @scottwilliams 69
Scott talks a lot about leadership and social media, with a religious background. http://www.bigisthenewsmall.com/

Wayne Sutton @waynesutton 69
Sayne talks a lot about social media and technology. http://socialwayne.com/

Justice Wordlaw IV @justicewordlaw 67
Justice is a young guy that talks a lot about social media and internet marketing. http://justicewordlaw.com/

JAWAR @jawar 65
Jawar is the only guy on this list that doesn’t have a blog, but he’s got over 111,000 tweets and is kind of a multimedia mogul, so there’s no way I could keep him off this list. http://www.jawarspeaks.com/ Update – turns out he does have a blog, which you can find here.

Ronald Jackson @ronaldjackson 63
Ronald talks about historical issues as they apply to minorities and he’ll keep you on your toes if you’re strong enough to hear it. http://nowandthen.ashp.cuny.edu/

Fields Jackson, Jr @fleejack 62
This one’s pretty easy; Fields talks a lot about diversity issues. http://racingtowarddiversity.com/blog/

Jill Hurst-Wahl @jill_hw 62
Jill is a local celeb of sorts in that almost anyone that knows anything about social media knows who she is. Her background is in library science, and she travels the country giving presentations at many conferences. http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/

Faydra Deon @faydra_deon 60
Faydra is a former officer in the military that’s taken social media and internet marketing by storm. I have a story in a book that she’s marketing on Amazon. http://myqotd.com/

Rachel Rodgers @RachRodgersEsq 58
Rachel is a lawyer, hence the “esq” after her Twitter handle. You don’t get a lot of lawyers that blog; I like that. http://rachelrodgerslaw.com/blog/

Tami Gaines @tamicgaines 56
Tami talks about a tough subject, premature births, and gives counsel to parents of those children. http://www.preemieparents.com/

Shallie Bey @ShallieBey 53
Truthfully, Shallie hasn’t written anything in her blog in a long time, but she should. She’s a small business coach with lots to offer, but maybe needs more time and encouragement to blog more. http://shalliebey.blogspot.com/

Yasmin Shiraz @YasminShiraz 52
Yasmin’s going to be big, and probably already should be there. Books, movies, speaking engagements… she’s got energy to burn and a lot to share. http://www.yasminshiraz.com/

Kelvin Ringold @kelvinringold 51
I’ve known Kelvin about 12 years now. He’s moving into the direction of motivational speaking but also knows a lot about marketing. He has multiple websites and a motivational daily newsletter, along with this blog. http://ringoldnet.blogspot.com/

Darnyelle A. Jervey @darnyellejervey 51
Darynelle is a business coach and consultant who’s also a published author. I’ll admit that some of what she writes feels above my head, but other stuff is right on point. http://www.darnyelle.blogspot.com/

Andrea Amir @AndreaAmir 50
Andrea talks a lot about ways of saving and managing one’s money, along with help in getting out of debt. http://smartmoneychicks.com/

Lisa Irby @2createawebsite 50
Lisa Irby has the highest ranked blog on this list, so high that I’m stunned her Klout score is only 50 and that she’s not being invited to every social media conference that’s out there. http://blog.2createawebsite.com/

Marlee Ward @marldble 49
Marlee talks about online and internet marketing and gives a lot of great advice through her usage of video; great stuff. http://marleeward.com/

Leesa Barnes @leesabarnes 46
I’ve known Leesa the longest of anyone that I met online, as we originally talked when we were both on Ryze. She talks a lot about making money virtually, while also being a favorite at a lot of events in Canada. http://virtualeventsuccess.com/

Vernessa Taylor @coachnotesblog 47
If you look to the left and see the image for my book, Vernessa made that for me. She does online business development and coaching and talks a lot about technology. http://www.localbusinesscoachonline.com/coachnotes/

Beverly Mahone @bevmahone 45
If you read this blog often you see Bev’s name here a lot. She’s a media consultant, helping people learn how to get known in a variety of ways to help increase visibility. She also has multiple blogs and websites that you might enjoy. http://www.beverlymahone.com

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Internet

Doing YouTube Video Correctly

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I’m writing this post with the expectation that everyone else was doing things the right way already, but maybe not because they’d never thought about doing what I was trying to do. Yeah, clear as mud, but don’t worry because you know I’m about to explain things.

When I loaded my first video back in January, I came into things with some rules for what I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see any negative comments on my YouTube channel. I didn’t want a lot of nonsense in any fashion. I didn’t see myself putting any advertising into the video unless I was going to do a review. And I wanted control over who would see my videos.

So, when I uploaded my videos to YouTube, I changed the setting to “unpublished”, which meant people could only find the videos if I basically sent them the link, or if I embedded the video somewhere. In my mind, that was the best way to go and still have control over everything.

And it worked; kind of. I had control, but not total control. What was lacking?

It seems that even though one has an account, if you select unpublished you can only find one video at a time. And I don’t only mean visitors, I mean the account holder as well. I’d been wondering why I could only see one video even though I’d uploaded 5 videos; actually, I wondered after the 3rd video but I kept questioning myself on it. Finally with this one I just had to solve the issue.

The issue was with “unpublished”. It seems that if you select that one you’re also saying you don’t want visitors that see that particular video, whether they see it elsewhere or decide to pop over to YouTube, to see anything else you might have produced. It doesn’t even tell people you’ve got another video up.

Well, that wasn’t quite control, was it? So I went in and took a look at all the settings. I found two things. One, publishing so any visitor can see all the videos available was the main option, and thus it’s probably what everyone else already knew. Two, there’s a secondary option which allows you to denote how you want to handle comments. I decided that I would moderate comments; therefore, no comments will show up on YouTube on any videos without being approved.

Yeah, I know, I talk about moderation on blogs all the time so what gives? The difference is that if a comment is over the line on the blog I’ll know about it almost immediately and can go in and remove it if I have to; luckily, I haven’t had to so far. On my YouTube page, nasty stuff could be there for a long time before I saw it; I decided I just wasn’t having that.

I won’t over-censor there though. Since I don’t expect very many people to find anything I’ve got there unless they know me I shouldn’t have many visitors; I can’t figure out what someone would put into a search engine to find it, since it’s not under “Mitch Mitchell”, which is also odd since, if you remember back in January, I said I never even knew I had a YouTube account to begin with. But it eliminates any confusion with the more famous Mitch Mitchell, so that’s good.

Anyway, if you happen to be someone that did what I did and went through what I went through, now you know why you can’t find your other videos. If not, well, you can laugh at me for trying to control everything, but now I am controlling everything; Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha! 🙂

Oh, while I’m talking about YouTube, I shared this video on Facebook about a month ago, and my wife is still laughing about it. And if I got her laughing, then you’ll enjoy it as well; poor dog:

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Web Stuff

Stop Falling For Scams

35 Comments

Last week a TV pitchman that I’ve seen from time to time was indicted on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy, wire fraud, promotional money-laundering, and transactional money-laundering; nice laundry list, eh? His name is Donald Lapre, and he sold and franchised online what he called “The Best Vitamin in the World”.

major league creep

I see this stuff on TV all the time, all these commercials telling us how great something is that frankly looks pretty ridiculous. It seems to take time for law enforcement to decide how to handle these folks, and often their commercials disappear and they’ve moved on before criminal prosecutions are made. Still, I always wonder how people get scammed by this stuff so often.

I’ve talked about certain scams on this blog. I mentioned secret shopper scams, survey scams, website money making scams, internet marketing scams, domain name scams, Craigslist scams, SEO scams, and affiliate marketing scams. Frankly, I assume that most of the folks that read things I’ve said about scams can count themselves among the educated and aren’t falling for scams anymore; can I get a witness?

Yet, it’s not always so clear. Man, some stuff just starts sounding really good at times, doesn’t it? I’ll go on record and talk about MLM, most of it, as being some of the biggest scams on record. Some of you might not see it this way but in my mind, the Mary Kay model is a scam, and if you do the math you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s just a scam with an air of legitimacy, and most women that sell Mary Kay will come to that realization in an epiphany one night as they’re getting ready to put in their next mandatory monthly order, even though they still have lots of inventory on hand, and feel, well, what’s the woman’s word for emasculated?

Most of us get scammed because we want to be trusting of others. We really think that most people are out there to help us. Yes, there are a lot of people ready to help us, but sometimes we need to be more circumspect in who we trust. Goodness, we have the internet; we have Google! Everything imaginable can be looked up online. The internet is replete with websites telling you about scams, just as it is with websites proclaiming that these scams aren’t scams at all, at the same time they’re trying to sell you something from that company.

The thing is that one has to do a few things not to be scammed. First, you have to take the effort to look stuff up. Second, you have to take the effort to sort out who’s trying to make money off something and who’s actually telling you the truth. Although this was a rant about hamburgers, it’s something that happened to myself and a friend of mine, it has pictures, yet there are a number of people that say “I love that place” or “that didn’t happen to me”. Yet, as I described in that post, the majority of people writing online had the same view I had. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Well, in this instance we’re probably both correct, yet a reader will still gain pretty good perspectives and know what to expect by reading both good and bad things about it if neither of us has an agenda.

And that’s how you avoid a scam; you have to determine the writer’s agenda. If there’s an affiliate link read with a bit of doubt if you don’t know the writer. If the person hates on a product or company but doesn’t give any specifics, don’t get all absorbed. But if you see multiple people in multiple places ranting about the same thing over the over, stay clear, run away fast, and go wash your eyes and your brain. Forget you ever had the thought about purchasing or joining whatever that was and go back to enjoying your life.

Heck; now I have to go wash as well. 😉

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Blogging

5 Ways Your Blog Might Be Irritating People; Part Two

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On the last day of May I wrote a long guest post for Ileane of Basic Blog Tips called 5 Ways Your Blog Might Be Irritating People. For whatever reason it turned out to be pretty popular, probably because Ileane has a larger audience than myself. The funny thing is that almost everyone focused only on one thing I mentioned on that blog, that being popups that we seem to encounter more and more each day. Hopefully some of the folks that have popups read that and will eliminate them, although I noticed no one supported popups, which means those people that didn’t comment were probably the ones with popups. lol

Near the end of that article I said that I had more things to address, but decided to stop because that article was getting way too long. I’m going to add 5 more things here, but I hope not to make it as long as the guest post. By the way, that guest post was proof of what people say in that if you’re going to write a guest post, you need to give it as much attention as you would a post of your own. And here we go.

1. Test your comment system. You know, I visit lots of blogs, and I leave a lot of comments. I don’t receive close to as many comments on my comment. Most of the time I had figured that the writers just aren’t interested in replying to whatever I’ve had to say, but then I noticed on some return trips that indeed they had responded, but I never received any notification.

That’s just irksome. With each new blog I’ve created the first thing I did after writing my first post was to pull up another browser and do a test comment to see if I received notification of it. Then I’d comment on the comment to see if the commenter was going to receive a notice from me. Obviously many people aren’t doing that because they don’t know people aren’t receiving their comments. I hate to say it but some of you that comment here often don’t have your answers to comments showing up via email. I’m not going to call anyone out here, but I will encourage you to test your system. You could ask people, but if they’re not getting your email responses then it’s a useless effort.

2. Pick a comment system then leave it alone. Some folks are consistently changing their comment systems. I understand doing a quick test of a system, but I don’t think you’re actually testing it but adding it then leaving it alone for awhile to see what happens.

Here’s the thing. Y’all know I’ve mentioned that there are some blog types I’m just not subscribing to, and it’s because of the commenting system employed. A few I’ll just grin and bear it, but if I don’t already know you well trust me, I’m not subscribing because I’m probably not commenting.

Thing is, every once in awhile I get roped in because the commenting system is one way, and suddenly it’s changed to something I don’t like such as Disqus or Intense Debate or something else of that ilk. If I unsubscribe because I don’t like those and then you realize you don’t like it after awhile and change it back, I’m probably never going to notice and neither are other people that don’t like it. Of course some of you don’t have to worry about me unsubscribing if I already like you, but I may not comment all that often. 😉

As Sire discovered in his post asking people about Disqus, nearly 50% of responders said they wouldn’t comment on a blog with it, but around 50% of those who said they would indicated they’d do it only if they knew and liked the person that wrote the blog. I’m just sharing…

3. Don’t have stuff start playing when I arrive at your blog. Man, I hate when I visit blogs or websites and suddenly I hear music or some video starts or some person walks into the picture and starts talking to me or the main blog page is flash instead of the article I came to see. When people click on your link, they have an expectation of what they’re going to see. If you shock people with something else, most of the time they’re not going to like it. Think about why MySpace is failing; we hate the anarchy. Of course this could go back to popups again, but we’ve already talked about those on Ileane’s blog.

4. Toolbars; slow down already! I hate toolbars with a passion.

Having said that, let’s talk about why I don’t like them. I don’t like them because they get in the way. I have my print enlarged on my computer so I can read things easier; I can read smaller print but I have this big ol’ widescreen 22″ monitor so why would I make myself struggle?

The thing is that the larger I make my screen to read, the larger the toolbars get, and suddenly they’re blocking stuff and irritating me to no end. Whether they’re at the top or the bottom I don’t like them. I especially don’t like the ones on the side because as I enlarge the screen, suddenly the printed article is covered up, and for me to read things I have to shrink the screen.

I get it; you read an article saying that adding toolbars helps people promote you better. Personally, I much rather the advertising, which in general I don’t have a problem with to tell you the truth because at least it stays in its place. If I have interruptions in reading your content then I’m not going to read it and I’m not going to comment on it.

Now, even if I don’t like it I might still comment on it, but I’m going to ask you folks that have stuff like toolbars or other things popping in from time to time to test your blog by enlarging everything (Ctrl-scroll your middle mouse button to shrink or enlarge) to see if those things start blocking your content. If they do, decide if you really want to keep messing with your visitors like that just to encourage one or two of them to retweet your stuff.

5. Believe in yourself. Okay, this last one is more of an opinion than something that irks me, but I figured I’d comment on it anyway; those other 4 plus 5 are enough for ranting. I was reading a post on Brankica’s blog earlier today (she’s changed her commenting system so I won’t be writing a comment there, but here will suffice) asking if bloggers are self centered. She was ranting because some guy on Facebook wrote something where he said that he could write anything better than any of the guest posters he’s ever had on his blog. She didn’t like it one bit.

I’m going the other way, but only slightly. If I didn’t believe I could write my blog better than anyone else I wouldn’t write it. I expect everyone that writes their blog believes they can write their blog better than anyone else; I certainly hope so. At a certain point I’d hope that I not only knew myself well enough but started to learn the style that suits both myself and visitors.

A guest blogger won’t have that kind of knowledge. They’re not emotionally invested in my blog as much, so they shouldn’t be. That doesn’t mean that what they write isn’t good; many guest posts are excellent. What it means is that its excellence can’t top anything you write on your own blog, just as any guest post you write for someone else’s blog will never top their excellence on that blog.

People really need to believe in themselves and what they stand for and what they represent. They need to be able to put it out there with all the confidence and boldness they have. They can be funny, serious, educational, ranting, whatever… they just have to be sure of themselves, say what they want to say, and they’ll have an audience that will love them… okay, will like them a lot. lol

And that’s that; I’m done. This isn’t as long as the post on Ileane’s blog, and I’m betting y’all are happy about that. Still, I’m sure you’ll have something to comment on as well, so let’s get to it, being assured that when I respond to your comment, you’ll know it. 😉
 

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Business

Best Buy Doesn’t Understand Social Media Or Customer Service

26 Comments

Best Buy seems to be at it again. Of all things, they seem to have forgotten a big time rule in business; have a sense of humor and roll with the punches. Some folks never learn.


by Lynn Lin

All of this comes on the heels of a post I read by Adam Singer of The Future Buzz titled Best Buy Meets Streisand Effect. In it, Adam explains how Newegg, a technology products company, did a commercial where they poked fun at Best Buy. Best Buy decided to respond with a cease and desist letter, which was pretty ominous stuff. Newegg responded the way most of us would; they popped the letter up on their site. You can see a copy of at the link I provided above.

In many communities these days Best Buy is almost the only game in town. Here in central New York, unless you want to find a small store or an office supply company, you can only pretty much get everything you might possibly get at Best Buy. In my opinion it’s one of the reasons they’re one of the worst companies in the country when it comes to customer service. I don’t say this lightly. I know a little bit about customer service and often I have stood or sat at Best Buy waiting to buy something only to be ignored.

At least I’m not blaming them for being racist by ignoring me since I know they do the same to pretty much everyone. My friend Pat wrote about them, calling them WorstBuy, which is a pretty neat play on words, and of course I’ve had my own issues with Best Buy, once writing about it in a newsletter. I even briefly mentioned it when I was talking about my purchase of Windows 7; waiting around while being ignored seems to be a common complaint about them.

Anyway, what’s happened is there’s been an online backlash against Best Buy for the strong arm tactics. It’s showing up in many places including The Consumerist, Techno Buffalo, 404 Tech Support, WebProNews, Maximum PC and a host of others. I’m wondering if they’ll end up getting a threatening letter for posting it like I did with Finish Line.

Here’s the thing. It seems that the companies that are ready to quickly threaten or sue over stupid stuff like this are the ones that deserve to be outed the most. Best Buy could really care less about most of us, but if they ever do decide to try, customer service needs to be the first thing they work on. Sure, when you’re buying a $2,000 TV or a $2,800 set of LG washing machines they’ll genuflect quite nicely to try to get the sale. But when it comes to almost anything else, the employees don’t care, management doesn’t care, and obviously the administration doesn’t care.

By the way, I’m not giving any link love to Newegg either since they killed their affiliate program through Commission Junction, a company I didn’t talk about in my rant against some CJ affiliates because if an advertiser expires, they take out everyone and not just me. Nothing personal this time around, but hey, they took money out of my pocket as well. lol

Anyway, in the long run, social media will be Best Buy’s Pandora’s Box because once the masses start rising, there will be a competitor, one that learns from the bottom up how to treat customers. That’s what killed Comp USA, and what will eventually get Best Buy.

Of course, if Best Buy is listening and it needs a customer service trainer…
 

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