Call me a product of a liberal arts education, but I firmly believe one’s worldview should be informed by as many sources and experiences as possible. Reading the latest book by an expert in your field is great. Consuming as many blog posts and news articles as you can about your industry is helpful. Attending conferences and sitting in on presentations to advance your career is advisable.

But it’s also important to look outside the usual orbit to help form your perspectives. There’s a great big world out there, and if you’re not taking advantage of it to the fullest you are missing out.

With that in mind, allow me to defer to the Kings of Rock, the progenitors of hip-hop, Run-DMC, and what they taught me about social media.

You Talk Too Much

Everywhere that you go, no matter where you at / I said you talk about this, and you talk about that … You talk when you’re awake, I heard you talk when you sleep / Has anyone ever told you, that talk is cheap?

The classic knock against Twitter has always been “I don’t care to read about what people had for lunch.” While it’s clear that there is more utility to Twitter and other social media channels than just detailing one’s culinary habits, it is possible to over-share.

There is plenty of research and the accompanying infographics providing evidence for the optimum number of social media shares per day. I’ll assume intelligence on your part and not expound further on that which is readily available.

Rather I recommend simple common sense in the matter. Nobody likes to be deluged-slash-spammed, even if they’re opted to subscribe to your posts. Quantity in no way trumps quality, especially if it means annoying your followers to the point of exodus.

It’s Tricky

It’s tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, it’s tricky.

One of the primary goals of social media engagement is amplification: convincing your fans and followers to be advocates of your brand and message by resharing your content. These followers are also following many other brands, celebrities, and their personal friends. How do you cut through all that other noise and inspire action?

One way is to optimize your posting times to help make your content stand out. There is no shortage of data that suggest certain days and times are better for posting content so it is more likely to be seen. It’s a good idea to take advantage of this data and do all you can to get your content out in front.

Hollis Crew (Crush Groove 2)

Got rhymes so def, rhymes, rhymes galore / Rhymes that you never even heard before / Now if you say you heard my rhymes, we’re gonna have to fight / Cause I just made the super-def rhymes last night.

As each update makes them smarter, search engines scour content more and more the way human beings do. This means they, like your readers, prefer original content. Content that is new and constantly fresh with your own (or your brand’s) unique perspective is crucial to gaining and maintaining a following.

It’s all to easy to cheat your way to fresh content by repurposing or republishing press releases or syndicating content. You have to make sure you’re publishing content that is interesting, relevant and valuable, and above all original. Otherwise you have no unique value proposition, and you’re not providing any new information or insights. That’s a quick way to a social media ghost town.

Unless you are on a premium, enterprise hosting platform, it’s difficult to get enterprise performance with a CMS like WordPress. Load sharing, backups, redundancy, replication, and content delivery don’t come cheap.

Many IT representatives view platforms like WordPress and use them because they’re free. Free is relative, though. Put WordPress on a typical hosting infrastructure and a couple hundred simultaneous users can bring your site to a grinding halt. To assist in my blog’s performance, this week I modified my installation of WordPress push all of the graphics from Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service). This leaves my server to simply push HTML via PHP/MySQL.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

To convert the site for Amazon S3 took a bit of work, but here are the basics:

1. Sign up for Amazon Web Services.
2. Load the Firefox Add-on for S3. This provides you a great interface for managing content in S3.
3. Add a bucket, in this case I added images.marketingtechblog.com.
4. Add a CNAME to your Domain Registrar to point a subdomain from your site to Amazon S3 for virtual hosting.
5. Download and install the WordPress plugin for Amazon S3.
6. Set your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key and click update.
7. Select the subdomain/bucket you created above for the Use this bucket setting.

The next steps were the fun part! I didn’t want to just serve future content from S3, I wanted to serve all content, including ads, themes, and past media files.

1. I created folders for ads, themes, and uploads in my bucket on S3.
2. I backed up all my current content (image and media files) to the applicable folders.
3. I modified my CSS file in my theme to pull all images from images.marketingtechblog.com/themes.
4. I did a MySQL search and replace and updated every reference to media content to be displayed from the S3 subdomain.
5. I updated all image references for ads to be displayed from the ads folder on the S3 subdomain.

From here on out, I simply need to upload media to S3 rather than using the default image upload dialogue for WordPress. The plugin does a fantastic job in putting an S3 icon in the same location of Upload/Insert icons in the WordPress admin.

Moving all of the data and running on S3 for a couple days now has resulted in $0.12 in S3 charges, so I’m not concerned about the fees involved – perhaps a few dollars a month is what it will cost. On the plus side, if I get a ton of visitors, I should be able to handle many more than the current platform handles. My site is loading the home page in about 40% of the time that it used to, so I’m quite happy with the move!

The nicest thing about this move is that it didn’t actually require any development!

I had the pleasure of meeting with Jim Brown, President of EverEffect, a few weeks ago and it was an engaging conversation that extended a good 30 minutes over our time! Jim’s newest endeavor is an evolution in Interactive Marketing Strategies. To put it bluntly, Jim ‘gets it’. It’s not always about the award or the graphics, it’s about defining business goals and creating the strategy that’s going to carry you there.

EverEffect has just launched and is the latest in some talented startups here in the Indianapolis marketing technology scene. I wish EverEffect the best of luck! Only the most driven and open businesses will be ready for the results that EverEffect offers. Their approach is simple and follows all the rules of strategic database marketing… create overlapping strategies that find, get, and keep customers.

The $1,000 Giveaway only needs 4 more contributors and we’ll be off and running!

1. The Marketing Technology Blog – in for $100 + costs.
2. Recursive Function and Formspring are in for $100 + a $150 Silver Formspring package.
3. Hanapin Marketing and PPCHero are in for $100.
Search Engine People and the Search Engine People Blog has contributed $100!
4. GoCollege has contributed $100 (and advice to save you much more!)
5. Jim Brown and the Team at EverEffect are in for $100!
6. Reserve this spot now!
7. Or this one!
8. Or here!
9. Or here!

Click on the $1,000 bill for additional information on contributing to the contest: