Posts from — February 2009

Today I have started a new chapter in my career as a social media sherpa (consultant). As of today I have begun working with Symantec and their GoEverywhere project as their social marketing manager. GoEverywhere is one of Symantec’s incubator projects and it’s a pretty amazing product.

It allows you to aggregate many of your web apps into one convenient webtop with one convenient sign in. It’s a godsend to productivity and a boon to small businesses / startups who can’t afford expensive software. Plus you can backup all of your data to Symantec’s cloud.

That’s just the beginning here’s a few other features:

• Synch and open your files with Zoho, Google Docs, and more to come.
• Store all your passwords in a secure location and access your accounts quickly.
• Make presentations with Preezo & documents with Adobe Acrobat without leaving the webtop.
• Access your bookmarks, data, IM, and more all in one window.
• Much Much more and more to come

I am incredibly excited to be working with this project, and to help manage the community. I will be manning the GoEverywhere Twitter account so stop by and say hi. I wanted to have this disclosure open and out there so when I talk about the company and the truly awesome work being done you know that I am working for them right now and you’re not feeling mislead.

Thank you for reading, and following this project
Josh Peters

P.S. Here’s where you go to get a free GoEverywhere beta account!

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You suck at reading people, and so do I. But that’s fine because we have polls and surveys so that people can let us know what they are thinking. Today’s GSMM post is being hosted by Peter Korchnak over on his awesome Sustainable Marketing blog.

Surveys and polls: Can you read people?

Go take a look, and there’s a great poll on there I’d like you to take, and in the comments please leave links to any polls you create so we can take them as well.

Thank you for reading, and following this project
Josh Peters

Delicious Tags GuerrillaSocialMediaMarketing Marketing SocialMedia

Business Week Topics Social Media Marketing

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As I’ve said while I’m finishing my Masters cert. in Internet Marketing my time is going to be a little sparse, but then while getting frustrated with some people who were confusing strategies with tactics I had an idea.

Everyone can benefit from learning the basics of internet marketing. Whether it’s defining common terms, discussing various trends or basic topics everyone who runs a business online, wants to run a business online, is in marketing, wants to be in marketing, going to schools (you get the point) can benefit from this type of information.

This series is kicking off on the RoyalAnts blog but will be continued here at Shuaism for the duration. If there are any topics you’d like to see covered let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Last week Dave Fleet put up a post about the 8 Questions to Ask Your “Social Media Expert”. Personally I don’t like the term Social Media Expert. It’s vague, it’s over used, and it’s impossible to be. How can you be an “expert” in something that is literally growing and changing everyday? Are you an expert in all the bleeding edge stuff right as it goes beta? I doubt it.

Personally I prefer Social Media Sherpa. There is literally a mountain of information and it keeps growing. The tectonic plates of Social Media Land move much quicker than the earths and as such the landscape and content changes constantly. When looking for an “expert” look for…

To read the rest of this head on over to the Shua Consulting blog for Answering the 8 Questions to Ask Your “Social Media Expert”

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Ever feel like people are talking about you? If you’re sitting by the bean dip alone at a party that would be an uncomfortable feeling, but if you’re a business you want people talking about you. WOM (word of mouth) marketing is one of the greatest tools out there for ANY business owner. But how do you start that conversation? You can’t just walk into a room (online or offline) and just tell everyone there to start talking about you. It just doesn’t work like that, people will think you’re either crazy or a self absorbed jerk. What you need is a mechanism to get the words rolling, and that’s exactly what this is episode is all about.

This Guerrilla Social Media Marketing topic is being hosted by the indomitable Chris Brogan. I feel truly honored that he let me take over for an afternoon and put this project on his blog. Big thanks to Chris, now go check it out.

Getting People to Talk Behind Your Back on ChrisBrogan.com

Thank you for reading, and following this project
Josh Peters

Delicious Tags GuerrillaSocialMediaMarketing Marketing SocialMedia

Business Week Topics Social Media Marketing

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A couple of days ago Craig Sutton, the brains behind The Bit Boss, asked if he could interview me for his series about getting to know the people he talks to on Twitter. I remember thing thinking to myself “that’s a great idea”.

I’ve thought about doing a Get to know a Guru series for a while and interviewing the “A listers”, but Craig highlighting people in his Twitter community who aren’t exactly the “Elite” is just plain awesome.

Thank you Craig for this opportunity, it was fun to answer your questions. If you’re reading this then you should go check out the article. It’s titled Getting to know Josh Peters, and in my opinion it’s a great read .

If you’d like to follow Craig on Twitter (and I highly suggest you do) click on his name above and it’ll take you to his Twitter page.

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Shua Consulting has officially launched!

The first post being hosted is What is social media and why do I need it?

I’d really like to get your feedback not only on the article but on the site.

Thank you for reading, and as soon as I get confirmation from the host’s there should be 2 GSMM coming up very very soon.

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing posted up a work flow he dubbed his Social Media System. It’s a really good read and several other great bloggers like Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund have done the same. All three are great looks at how they get things done. John encourage people to do the same so here I go.

The Tools
FireFox – Tabbed browsing and customization at it’s best. I use Google Chrome for somethings but you can’t beat FireFox’s massive line up of plug-ins.
TweetDeck – The multiple columns of TweetDeck make it so easy to sort and follow people that without it Twitter gets difficult to manage at times.
Foobar 2000 – I have to have music. I got nuts when it’s totally silent and I don’t get any work done. Foobar is a light weight player and unlike iTunes it actually plays all of my music.
Gmail – I have several (5) gmail accounts I manage for either myself, Shuaism, RoyalAnts, or ShuaConsluting so I have them open all day.
HTC G1 – I love having all of my gmail accounts and docs synced to my phone. Plus full web browsing capability just plain rocks.

The Setup
I usually get up between 7 – 8 am and after brewing some coffee and taking the dogs out I settle in for some work. I open 2 FireFox windows, TweetDeck, and Foobar. I have two bookmark folders labeled Work and Work2, I open one in each of the FireFox windows and get to work.

Work has FaceBook, LinkedIn, CampFire and WetPaint loaded in them and I use them to communicate and work. I’ll check LinkedIn about 2x a day, and FaceBook about 3x a day to see what’s happening in groups and if there’s anything interesting or some work to try and get.

Work2 has each of my google accounts loaded to a tab, Google Reader, and Business Exchange open. This is where I go for research or to take a reading break.

The Workflow
Once I get this up and running (takes about 5 minutes) I scan TweetDeck for anything interesting or someone I want to say hi to.
Check email for anything urgent or that I didn’t get to yesterday and take care of it.
Go to school (I’m working on my Masters cert in Internet Marketing online, I’ll be done in a couple of months).
After that I scan a couple blogs and look for blogging ideas.
Spend an hour or so blogging or getting future posts ready (like ones for the GSMM series).
Hop in to FaceBook and LinkedIn for a quick look and check my Twitter and Google Alerts in Google Reader.
Look for consulting gigs, send out inquiries, and work.

While I have all of this going I work on my projects and build my knowledge base with research. This is all a constant process and when I’m not at my computer I use my G1 like crazy. After seeing it put out in writing it seems to me that my work flow could use some work, it’s more like a work rush than a work flow.

I can see areas where I could use more structure and some more planning. Maybe I don’t need to check somethings as much as I do and focus more in some other areas. This was a great exercise, I learned a lot about what I do, how about you? Do you feel there’s value in writing down your system and examining it?

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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