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Ted Murphy

Ted Murphy
In

Image is Everything

Over the past few months I have been gearing up for my big keynote on personal branding during IZEAFest at SeaWorld in October. One of the foundations I will touch upon during my presentation is the importance of imagery and design in building a brand. Corporations invest millions of dollars developing graphical assets for their brand and as an blogger you should be investing too (though probably not on the same scale ; ).

While your logo and blog design are your most important graphical assets you can’t forget about supporting assets like photos. I am amazed by how many big name bloggers have crappy headshots or no headshot at all. We constantly struggle with bloggers to provide us with quality images for our sites and other promotional efforts.

On blogger who stands out from the crowd is Sarah Austin. Check out the speaker photo she provided for the IZEAFest website. It is fun, professional and truly reflects her personal brand.

Sarah Austin

I have been using this self portrait since 2005. While I like the photo it doesn’t really reflect my personality or my brand. I mean….where is the tongue in that photo??? It was time for a change. I linked up with orlando photographer Adam Wiggall to create a series of photos that I can use for promotion of myself and IZEA. I absolutely love what he came up with, I can’t wait to share these photos with the media. You can see the whole collection here.

Ted Murphy

Ted Murphy

It’s time for you to get some quality photos taken as well. If you can’t hire Adam (which you should if you live in central florida) find a local photographer and make it happen. Professional photos can add signifcant value to your personal brand.

Ted Murphy
In travel

Clear to Cease Operations

This past Friday I renewed my Clear membership for 2 years at a cost of about $200. Clear is (was) a service that allowed you to skip through the security line at airports. Tonight, just a few days later, I received this email. I am sad to see them go, it was a great idea. I hate standing in the airport security line with all the donkeys that don’t understand that a watch can’t go through a metal detector.

Another victim of the economy I guess. I wonder if I will get my $200 back?

Clear to Cease Operations

Ted Murphy
In travel

AirTran Rocks WiFi

I have been traveling non-stop for the past couple months. Last week alone I was in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Tomorrow morning I will be up at 3am for a flight to New York. Despite all my travel I would not consider myself loyal to any particular airline. I use Orbitz to book all my flights and generally go with the best price regardless of the airline… but that may soon change.

AirTran Wifi

AirTran has outfitted a good number of their planes with Wifi. You can connect to the Internet in flight for $9.95. Not only is it reasonably priced, it’s fast! So fast that I was able to have a video conference at 30,000 feet. I took three flights on WiFi enabled AirTran planes last week and averaged about 2Mbps for downloads. I love that I can be connected with my team back at IZEA while in the air.

This was a great move for AirTran. Not only is it an additional revenue stream, it has converted me to a loyal customer.

Ted Murphy
In sales & marketing

Sponsored Tweets are Nothing New

I thought I would make a quick point about sponsored tweets given all the discussion going on. Direct and indirect monetization of Twitter is nothing new.

My buddy Mike over at TechCrunch has been doing sponsored tweets for some time. I think TechCrunch actually helped pioneer sponsored tweets.

twitter-_-michael-arrington_-thank-you-techcrunch-spons

The only difference is that TC is pointing you back to a sponsored blog post, which also happens to be surrounded by tons of ads that advertisers pay for on a CPM basis. The more people that click on the link above the more money TC makes.

thank-you-techcrunch-sponsors

Not only is TC getting paid for the tweet, they are getting paid for the post and the display ads. In fact, every tweet that drives people back to TechCrunch.com is monetized. If that isn’t a sponsored tweet I don’t know what is. I commend TechCrunch. It is a smart business move for them to integrate all of their social media assets into their advertiser offering.

What we are doing is cutting out the middle step. Instead of pointing someone to a blog post, that then points them to a sponsor we are simply pointing to the sponsor.

sponsored_tweets

Either way it is sponsored, our method just generates better results for the advertiser because it is directly sponsored. It’s more efficient, you don’t lose anyone in the pass through.

Ted Murphy
In sales & marketing

Let’s Talk Sponsored Tweets

I had a discussion with Brian Morrissey of AdWeek yesterday about the upcoming launch of Sponsored Tweets. To be honest I didn’t expect a story to be published just a few hours later. The site is still in development and not available to the public. I didn’t share very much about the service and had nothing visually to show him in terms of how it would work. However, the blogosphere is abuzz this morning with many sites echoing the same story. You can check out some coverage here:

AdWeek
Mashable
ReadWriteWeb

Do we plan on launching a solution that allows people to monetize their twitter influence? Yes. Are we trying to do so in a way that provides disclosure, autheticity, freedom of voice, ROI for advertisers and some level of moderation? Yes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but we have been playing around with Twitter publisher monetization models for some time now. The goal is to best serve tweeters, advertisers and readers.

I have always been open to discussion on any topic. There is more than one way to approach this and I am all ears. If anyone wants to do an interview, podcast or just talk shop drop me a line at ted@izea.com and we will schedule something soon.

Ted Murphy
In health,

SeaWorld Social Media Case Study

As many of you know I have been working with SeaWorld on a variety of social media programs over the past few months. They are truly wonderful people to partner with, my interaction with the SeaWorld team has become a highlight of my job at IZEA.

I recently completed a case study for two of the programs I worked on with SeaWorld. For those of you who are marketers or bloggers you can see how it all came together.

Ted Murphy
In life

Happy Monday!

What’s that? You’re weekend was too short and lacked a substantial amount of smiles? No worries. Bonzo has got you covered : )

Ted Murphy
In sales & marketing

Using Keynote for Video

Most people think of Apple’s Keynote as a PowerPoint replacement for making presentations. While it does kick the crap of PowerPoint as presentation software it also doubles as great video creation software. You may remember the sponsored conversation video I posted a few weeks ago. Guess what? The entire thing was put together in Keynote. The assets were created in Photoshop and Illustrator then composed and animated in Keynote (in HD no less).

Apple Keynote

The built-in text and image transitions in Keynote make it a breeze to put together great looking videos. I hired Chris Davies at ProVoiceUSA.com for $125.00 (a hell of a deal) to do a professional vocieover for the presentation, then exported it as HD video using the share feature. If you need to produce educational videos fast and on the cheap you might want to check out Keynote and give Chris a call.

picture-3

Ted Murphy
In events

Ted’s Treasure

tedstreasureIf you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed the #tedstreasure hashtag on a number of posts. I am using this hashtag to identify tweets that are part of my Ted’s Treasure promotion. What is Ted’s Treasure? It’s pretty simple actually. As I travel the country I am randomly leaving a trail of prizes in my wake. I take a picture of the treasure, drop a pin on Google Maps and tweet out the hints. Whoever finds my treasure first gets to keep it. So far I have dropped cash and prizes from Pancheros and X-Shot.

If you have something of value that you would like to provide as a treasure please let me know and we can chat about it. I am not charging anything to participate, I do it because I like giving people free stuff. Here are a few picture from recent winners:

pic_a4l_l

@ElizabethB won a free burrito from Pancheros

Ted's Treasure

@Brittanylady won a brand new X-Shot