Not so much. Yes of course there will be discussions about the benefits of one layout versus another but our capacity for dealing with this type of change I believe is becoming more adept at coping. We are faced with regular often unannounced changes all the time, particularly on our favourite social networks.

This leads me on to talk about changes at ST (Social Tailor); building a business is an evolutionary process and being small and agile allows us to accommodate client requests much more proficiently.

We provide:
Marketing Strategy (no change)
Crisis Management (no change)
Fashion Design (no change)
Marketing and Business Development Training (no change)

The change is the very fact that we’re no longer talking about DIGITAL or SOCIAL MEDIA – yes clearly that part is ingrained in our very soul but it is now becoming an integral part of business life that those terms are beginning to have considerably less relevance. We are merely providing a service that stimulates ongoing demand.

On a slightly more personal note dealing with change lately has been quite the revelation.

[I've been asked by Steve Unwin to repost this article: it was originally posted by Gary Vaynerchuk on Linkedin on 4/26/13. Gary is a social media pioneer and the co-founder and CEO of Vaynermedia. You can follow him on Twitter at @Garyvee and find him on Facebook at facebook.com/gary]

People often ask me how I stay on top of tech. It’s literally one of the top three or four questions I get at Q&As when I give talks. It’s always like “well, how do you stay on top of it? There’s so much going on!” And I often answer “it comes to me,” or “well, Phil Toronto vets a lot of my deals and brings be stuff because I’m an avid angel investor.” And then, obviously, I keep an eye on Techcrunch and Techememe.
But the reality is that now in my resurgence to blogging, I’ve decided to follow up on my 19 People That You Should be Following on Twitter but Aren’t (Part II) with a series based on my favorite number in the world: Five.

Five has been my favorite number in the world ever since I was five (the jersey from when I was a kid in this video is #5). So I’m going to do something as often as I possibly can called Five Companies You Should Be Paying Attention To.

My main theory behind it is going to be “five companies that most of you haven’t heard about” — companies that might not have have gotten their first big piece of press yet. I’m on this new obsession, more than ever, to bring value, and I think this is a huge value-add. I’ve scoped out a lot of the other influencers on LinkedIn, and I think I’m uniquely positioned to be able to deliver this consistently with the help of my team. So here are the first five of companies that I think are exciting and worth your attention, in no particular order:

Small Girls PR

This was cofounded by two actual small gals (5’3” and 5’, I think), Bianca and Mallory. Two young ladies whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a little bit, and who have enormous drive and enormous hustle. One of my favorite things about them is that they started their business with a bootstrap mentality. They didn’t go out and raise money. They started it with the first client’s paycheck, much like AJ and I did with VaynerMedia, so I’ve always had a kinship with that starting point. I think that they’re just doing a really good job. This comes down to two individuals who really get where the world’s going. I think PR is being disrupted dramatically more than what you hear about. There is some major evolution happening to traditional PR, especially if you’re paying attention to what’s happened with the relationships that digital agencies, social agencies, and PR agencies have with big brands these days. I give enormous amounts of credit to these two because of their pure hustle, and their smarts and wits about what’s relevant in the tech/PR world these days. They’ve been able to make a huge impact, and are clearly blazing a path to young, female entrepreneurship that excites so many today.

WunWun

Co-founders Lee and Calvin have produced a very interesting platform. I am completely obsessed with operations, and so there are a lot of people playing in the space of “doing your thing for you” (Taskrabbit, Fancy Hands, Exec), but what WunWun’s done for you here is a very lightweight mobile execution of the idea. I’ve been playing around with it, and Phil Toronto (our emerging tech guru here at VaynerMedia) even got a guy in a Mickey Mouse suit show up to his birthday party. Whether you need someone to pick up your cleaning, or you need something delivered for you, this NYC-only app (for now) reminds me of the way I felt about Fresh Direct in some ways. It’s a very NYC thing now, but I see enormous opportunity for it to scale out. Even if you’re not in The City you can still download the app and see where it’s going, and in the spirit of this article, if you’re in a city where you think this would do really well, I highly recommend you reaching out to them and saying so. So check it out! I am completely obsessed with the intersection of technology and real-world. It’s why companies like Uber and Airbnb excite me so much because they’re using technology to make our world better, and I think WunWun’s got a chance to play in that space.

Kickfolio

Kickfolio is a company that I noticed from afar several months ago, but then I got to intimately enjoy one of their presentations at a 500 Startups event in NYC. To me, phone apps are a very lucrative and important space. I really think this startup brings huge value to the people that use it. When you can preview an app in a desktop environment, it crosses over a huge number of desktop users who also use mobile devices and gives them a chance to experience your app while they’re surfing the web and stumble on it. Moreover, if you review apps, it gives you the experience to actually test the apps in a browser experience. To me, this is an extremely powerful product. I’m excited that it’s coming from Australia and not from Silicon Valley or New York other typical startup places. It’s also exciting that they’re getting great engagement from users (People actively engage with Kickfolio apps for 1 minute 31 seconds on average). I’m a pretty big fan of things that bring value to promotion, and Kickfolio sounds exactly like that company. Check it out, I think you’ll find it tremendous.

Audicus

Audicus is a startup that I desperately wish I’d funded. They may still be raising, but I’ve been a little bit more conservative in my angel investments and dragging my feet. This feels like “The Warby Parker of hearing aids.” Now I know you’re laughing, when you read me saying that, but what I can tell you is that this is the kind of business that I fall in love with. Patrick intimately knows the space. He’s done a lot of homework in Europe, and now he’s applying his learnings by bringing a consumer packaged good to the US market (which is $6bn, by the way). I actually see this having a deeper impact than just hearing enhancement. This is a very fruitful company and I think anybody reading this who has hearing issues (and I can tell you, even I don’t hear as well as I did five years ago, so you don’t have to be 80 to pay attention to this), or more importantly if you have an aging parent or grandparent that could be affected by hearing loss, this is a company worth checking out. There is something about this company that excites me. I feel like it has the chance to be a huge winner, and a very valuable company one day, so it’s important for me to post it here not only to make a statement about which companies I think are going to be successful (as is the energy of this article), but also to bring value. So I hope that there are a few people reading this who have hearing issues or know people who are struggling with hearing and will check it out.

Betamore

Greg Cangialosi, one of the cofounders of Betamore, is a dear friend of mine. In fact, I used his company’s email platform as Wine Library’s email service provider. I met him at the first tech conference I ever went to, which was Tech Cocktail in Washington DC back in 2007, but what I love about Betamore is not that Greg is a great dude, but that it’s putting Baltimore technology on the map. It’s an urban tech campus for entrepreneurship in downtown Balitmore. It’s a huge coworking space with a curriculum (think like Indy Hall meets General Assembly), and the reason it’s on the list is strictly one thing: I am completely passionate about tech startups and innovation coming from many other places besides NY and SF (and more, and more: LA). Think places like Omaha, or Detroit, or Austin. I feel like these three co-founders are going to drive this to huge success and really create Entrepreneurship 2.0 in the Baltimore region. If you’re in Baltimore or visiting, this is a company you need to reach out to and check it out. I hope this project inspires someone in Des Moines, I hope it inspires someone in Walla Walla, WA, I hope it inspires someone in Hunterdon county, NJ.

So that’s it! That’s my first list of five. I hope to be doing this more often. I’m curious, though, for you to leave a comment on LinkedIn and let me know how many of these companies you’ve heard of before. (Seeing a lot of “0”s will make me feel rad!)

2. Aside from Google Analytics, try Curalate to track Pinterest and Instagram analytics, also try Sprout Social for Social Media Management – although consider Facebook engagement drops when delivering updates from a third party app.

3. Go outside the industry for inspiration – generally speaking if you do what others do you’ll get the same results

4. Use the same hashtags from successful campaigns so they become quintessential to the brand. For example, even after Bergdorf’s #BGWindows Instagram Challenge ended, fans continued to use the hashtag.

5. Pinterest and Facebook win for driving sales for brands. Pinterest sells because users pin with the intent of getting inspired and potentially shopping. Facebook sells simply because it’s well ahead of the curve in terms of metrics and ad targeting.

6. Organic success on Facebook is all about understanding and staying up to date on the algorithm that dictates which posts are seen. We’ve found at the moment that Facebook photo albums and posts without links are more engaging than posts with links or single images.

7. Allow for spontaneity. Off the cuff posts that remain true to the brand are often the most successful.

8. We’ve found that content around shoes, puppies, booze, beauty, politics (in and out of fashion), or wishing a popular celebrity “Happy Birthday” are recipes for getting fans “talking about you,” particularly on Facebook.

9. So what about Vine? If you’ve not got an iPhone you can’t access it – boooooring! It’s about taking offline, online. A particularly impressive Vine user is Pinot. Think of Vine as visually authentic, whereas Instagram glorifies a moment.

Credits PR Couture & Dara Bru

Last week, Google made a rather dramatic change to how YouTube accounts are managed.

In case you didn’t know, Google+ Pages could be managed by multiple people. Most large businesses use this feature to spread the workload of running a Google+ Page out over multiple people.

Well, people who are managers of a Page will also have management options to the YouTube channel
associated with the Google+ Page.

Check out this quick article by Mashable for more info (see below).

If you have a YouTube account associated with your Page as well as Page managers, be aware that they
now have access to your Page’s YouTube account.

I know some of you should be concerned about this.

You don’t want some managers to have the power to change your business’ YouTube channel!

http://mashable.com/2013/04/11/google-plus-youtube/

With thanks – and all credit to Brian at UpYourPlus.com for pointing this out.

So, knowing that I have a lot of young fans, this may not resonate, but for all of you “older peeps” like me that are lucky enough to have two children…

Something interesting happened the other day. We had some great friends over, Erin and François. They have three children, and Erin was getting their middle child ready. Their third child was laying on the ground, legs flailing in the air, and I got thinking about how Lizzie and I are handling Xander compared to Misha, and I realized “My God…”

I asked Erin, “Would you ever let Sebastian (middle child) lay like that?”

She was like, “Absolutely not!”

You start realizing a very common joke around people that have young children is how differently you act with the second child than you do with the first.

With the first one, you micromanage. Everything is video-taped; its first fart, its sixth day, “it’s six days and three weeks after the first time it ever sneezed on a Tuesday!” I mean everything is focused on, everything is micromanaged, everything is over-thought.

I’ve been paying attention to a lot of people running businesses, and from corporate America that wants every little ROI tight, to entrepreneurs who have never been through it before – thus are micromanaging dumb shit that doesn’t actually matter, it’s very obvious to me that the best piece of advice I can give at this moment is this:

Treat your business like a second child.

Nothing is perfect. Nothing in business is black and white. All the magic is in the grey. Have patience. Nothing is the worst thing that ever happened, and nothing is the best thing that ever happened.

Celebrating the way you raised money is just the beginning. Being devastated thinking it’s over when you lost the deal isn’t the true reality. It’s always somewhere in the middle. And if you understand how to raise a second child, and realize the difference between “Little Timmy’s eating dirt, and that’s ok”, but you would have NEVER let big sister Janet do that, that is the same way that I think you need to look at your business.

Nothing is the end of the world, and nothing is the greatest thing of all time. Embracing the chaos, the nimbleness, the things that you can’t control, is the complete definition of a leader that’s going to be able to navigate through the chaotic, never-predictable business world.

So relax. Grab a coffee. Take a shot of vodka. It’s all going to be ok. Treat your business like a second child.

If you are in marketing you used to identify opportunities to accelerate the promotion of your product by booking bill-boards, radio, TV and so on – now it’s a case of identifying well connected individuals or brand aligned businesses that with one status update can spread the word. But of course buying their time is crass and easily seen through – so is the only way forward to monitor their conversations and open dialogue when the relevant topic is discussed? Or maybe if you are a clever, quick thinking individual drop in a challenging yet humorous anecdote and build a rapport that will provide opportunity further down the line?

There are many tacks to take but this one is proving a very effective way of building brand awareness with an engaged audience.

Ms. Guinness is an appropriate influencer for my generation with an interest in the avant garde side of UK fashion – a very specific market; who have you identified?

Child Abduction
by Maxahiss (Deviant Art)

Due to the nature of the majority of our business: Crisis Management in Social Media we have to sign lots of Non-disclosure documents – so consequently can’t talk in any detail about what or who we work for. However being at this networking event has made me realise that I can share some elements… so here we are.

Most of our clients are UK based (read London) and in the Retail / FMCG business with one or two others. I was explaining to this networking group what we’d been faced with in the past 3 weeks – child abduction in a shopping centre, embezzlement by a financial Director and a suicide that had minors taking photography of the incident on the door way of a client premises before the area could be cordoned off…

As you might imagine the viral nature of these incidents on social platforms (mostly Twitter and Facebook) can gather pace very quickly. So we have plans and tactics to limit or manage the flow of information but recently it’s been more challenging than ever and yet we continue to succeed! Our role is to minimise share price fluctuation and protect brand association.

ps. we have a group on LinkedIn called Crisis Management in Social Media, feel free to join us.