Personal Life Media

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show I have live, in the studio the beautiful Kyra Reed from Markyr, a social media agency. I got to meet Kyra recently down at the Mastermind Guru event in Ally, and we met each other at the bar and completely hit it off. We got into this little rat hole about community development. And I begged her to come visit me in the studio when she came up to Northern California and tell us all about everything she knows about the latest in social media marketing, social influence and community building. So welcome Kyra.

Kyra Reed: Thank you for having me Susan.

Susan Bratton: It’s so fun to have you here in the studio. I love to do live shows. So Markyr is a social media agency, and you are really focused on three things: community development, blogging development and maintenance and expertise, high levels of expertise in Face Book and Twitter. You have this really neat integrative model that I want to talk about, but before we do that tell us about some of the clients in the work that you do at Markyr.

Kyra Reed: Our clients actually have a, there’s a wide range because we believe that social media is completely scalable on any, in any industry. So one of our longest clients – two and a half years now – is the Roxy Theatre, legendary venue on the Sunset Strip. And we started with them when they had nothing but a static website and no other web presence whatsoever. And we helped them take, in an industry where it’s very proprietary and very secretive and very competitive, we said it’s time to drop that and start embracing community. So part of that included a blog strategy, part of that included reaching out into the local community, to other venues, to the fans, to the bands, and fast forward a year and a half, they ended winning the VH1 Rock Honors Best Rock Website of the Year. It’s been, the owner’s been on the cover of several magazine in the industry now, one including Nightclub and Bar. The title of it was The Roxy That Turns to Relevance Through Listening and Communicating. Today they are, they have ten thousand followers, they’re the number one venue on Twitter. They’re the number one Twitter in West Hollywood. And I just got an actual press release that they are – along with The Viper Room and The Comedy Store – going to be doing a call, and between each of the venues there’s going to be a scavenger hunt – and get all the information on Twitter. So Nick Adler, the owner of the Roxy Theatre, has just done an incredible, incredible job that just continues. And I love the case study because it shows that social media isn’t about a campaign, it’s about a strategy. It’s the long term future. I mean it’s just a great example going from knowing absolutely nothing, in a world where it’s very secretive and competitive and taking a venue that’s been around for 35 years that was once a haven for musicians and actors, and it died and he had completely brought it back using nothing but social media and the philosophy of community and openness and transparency and engagement. And he’s using Flickr and Twitter and Face Book and his blog and a bunch of other applications just so beautifully that it’s just such a great demonstration. We hear a lot about corporations, large corporations and their successes with social media, but it’s really the small businesses best friend.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. I think that there are so many small businesses trying to figure out their opportunity. You just were recently at WITI, Women In Technology, what’s the other I for? Women in technology…

Kyra Reed: I don’t know.

Susan Bratton: I don’t know either. But it’s witty.

Kyra Reed: It’s witty.

Susan Bratton: And you were up here and a lot of the women who were at that event were small and medium business trying to figure out social media as well, right?

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: What was the level set on that? What did you notice in being WITI? Where are people in their understanding of social influence marketing?

Krya Reed: It’s really interesting because people have bits and pieces of information. But it’s not yet enough for them to even know what the right questions to ask are, and I got that over and over when I spoke to people. I was there as a facilitator to help out and help educate people on social media. So most of the people that were there were at a very base level understanding and I could tell that a lot of information they were getting was just adding to the pile of confusion because there is, each person has a different bit of information and knowledge and they don’t really know yet how to tie it all together or how to really look at it. So I think the biggest issue that people need to… Or the first step, I should say, is understanding how social media is different from offline marketing and public relations. And then once you understand community versus competition and transparency versus proprietary and all of those differences, really then the next step is how do I create a strategy around that? And the biggest issue that I see people having with it is they look at how other people are using Face Book or using Twitter, and they say, “Okay, well the way that that’s being used I don’t see how that works for me, so drop it in with the bath water”…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: It’s not about how somebody’s using it, it’s about educating yourself on the tool and what the tool is capable of doing…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: And once you do that your creativity is boundless. You can do whatever you want once you understand how the tools work. You don’t have to copy anyone. You can do whatever you want if you understand…. You know, you can drive anywhere you want once you understand how to drive.

Susan Bratton: When I asked you what you do, you told me that you’re so busy doing everyone else’s strategy that you don’t have time to spend a lot on social media yourself. When you think about these strategies that you’ve been developing for people, what are, what are the common threads, or how are those strategies playing out that there could be something at an overarching level you could teach us on this show today about how you’re thinking strategically about social media across multiple clients?

Kyra Reed: Well one of the first things we have to do is assess a couple of things. First of all, how are you a natural content generator? Because we’ve got blogging, we’ve got Flickr, we’ve got Face Book, we’ve got Twitter. So of course the first thing that people say, “I don’t have time. It’s too overwhelming.” So what we do is we try to pull it down and say, “Okay, are you a photographer? Do you like to write a lot? Do you like to share information? Do you, are you constantly surfing the web?” Because everybody does have a natural content generation, unless you… Most of the time if you’re not, you won’t be on the web very much. It’s all about sharing now. So we take whatever the proclivity is for content generation and we start with that. Because rather than trying to kind of get, jump full steam - “Okay, I’m going to do this with Face Book, I’m going to do this with my blog” – you’re going to get overwhelmed, you’re going to hit a wall and you’re going to stop doing it all. So you take one piece at a time. What do you do, what do you like to do? What are you drawn to do first? The next this is education on the tools. Because, like I said before, you’ve got to understand how those tools work because it’s really about your creativity. So, and the third thing is when you’re creating a strategy, it’s not about a campaign. It’s not, “Okay, we want to launch this project…”

Susan Bratton: Right, it’s sustained.

Kyra Reed: It’s sustained. You are going to be doing social media for many, many, many years…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: And every relationship that you build now you want to carry into the future with you. So how do you develop these relationships in a sustainable way? How do you create a strategy that allows you to be flexible? Because that’s another problem we find, is you get a strategy set, you launch it and you start to get feedback. It will inevitably happen, your strategy will change. You have to come to terms with that, because you’ll start to get feedback from people. And that’s great, that’s a wonderful thing. I mean, you know, if we’d been able to get feedback immediately from people watching television and whether they like the advertisements or not, a lot of those companies probably would have done very different things. So we have that opportunity now. So keep your strategy open ended and flexible, and be ready to accommodate and to go with the flow of what people are asking you for. Another important thing to keep in mind is that you are now, we’re going from a world where it was about me as a product or a company telling you the consumer, “Push, push. This is what you should believe, this why you should buy it, this is what you should think.” It’s now the other way around. Now to be a really successful company in the future, you have to be about innovation and service and value; “So I have this product, how do you want to use it? How do you want me to sell it to you? How do you want to interact with me?” You know, there’s an amazing author who’s, he’s actually the director of the Havas Media Lab at Harvard. His name is Umair Haque, and he wrote an article recently about un-ovation and companies that are not allowing themselves to grow in this area and be innovative so they’re becoming un-ovative, by not listening, by not being willing to step out in this arena and hear what their consumers have to say and tailoring it to what their consumers need, and that’s really the baseline of what you’re doing if you’re a company and you’re getting into social media, as you’re opening that doorway.

Susan Bratton: It’s interesting because I just, I was just in Amsterdam and I keynoted the Marcom Conference over there. It’s their, that’s kind of their AdTech of Holland. And my, they had this theme of superheroes, it’s the year to be a superhero, so my speech was Social Media Super Powers. And what they wanted me to talk about was certainly how I use social media marketing for Personal Life Media, but also for my personal brand, for Dishy Mix and things like that. And it turns out that my presentation was exactly what I’m going to ask you to talk about…

Kyra Reed: Okay.

Susan Bratton: My presentation on Social Media Super Powers was about the power of syndication…

Kyra Reed: Mmm.

Susan Bratton: It was the power of how everything in social media is, can be tied together so you write once and distribute many. And you were talking to me when we were prepping for the show about this kind of integrative microcosm, that a lot of times when clients say, “Well which one of those should I be in, Twitter? Should I be in Face Book?”, and you say, “Well I got to tell you, you’ve got to be on all of them, but here’s how it works…” Describe this microcosm, kind of one of your classic examples of how this all goes together.

Kyra Reed: Okay. So there’s Twitter, there’s Face Book, there’s Flickr, and then there’s your blog, and those are the four main tools that people are using right now. And we can look at each of them as individual entities, and people have a natural attraction to a couple of them, but not usually all of them. So fortunately we have amazing developers and all of these are open so that people can write applications for them, and there are many things that have been built to tie these things together. For instance, if you have a blog and you have a Face Book fan page, you can write something on your blog, write an article on your blog, and you go to your Face Book page and you, there are two things you do. One, on your fan page you subscribe to your blog through your fan page, ‘cause everything that you do on your blog will automatically be put up on your fan page okay, so there’s, lets take out one step right there. The next thing you do is you put it in your status update. Just put up a new blog post, okay; “Please pass this on if you think this is interesting”, and that’s one thing that we always tell our clients. In this world it’s okay to ask nicely. If you want…

Susan Bratton: Okay, talk about the number one, the number two word.

Kyra Reed: Yes, there is a metrics done on keywords for re-tweets. And re-tweets are when someone picks up your Twitter feed and passes it along, giving you credit. So rt, with your handle, the @ symbol and your handle and then whatever your information was. And this is a way of sending out information in a viral manner. So if you say, “Please re-tweet”…. Okay, back to what you were saying before; the metrics were drawn on what the keywords and re-tweets were. The number one and number two words were “please re-tweet”. So it goes to you show you that people are open to being asked and being, to doing it and we want to help each other. We want to help each other more than we want to help a corporation or an organization that we don’t have any connection with. But if we like you as an organization, we want to support you and all you have to do is ask, and most people will be happy to. So there’s the Twitter and the Face Book and the blog all being tied together because you also, when you put in your status update, you put that in your Twitter feed as well. So now you’ve got an article that has now three places where it’s, people are being directed back to your blog and it’s taken you the one article and the same information in your Face Book and your Twitter update. You can also have your Twitter and your Face Book connected, so anything you put in Twitter automatically goes to your status update in Face Book. So now we’ve got four channels and we just cut out two actions…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: So, and now you’ve also got the potential through Twitter and Face Book to have it go viral within each of those networks. So you’ve done one bit of work, you’ve posted a re-tweet, which has then gone into Face Book, and now you have the opportunity for hundreds of people to pick this up without even trying. That’s it, that’s all you have to do. And your network will take care of the rest of it for you. So often times people get really overwhelmed, they don’t want to work in all of the platforms, but you really have to, you cannot bypass Face Book and you cannot bypass Twitter. You have to integrate all of them.

Susan Bratton: Do you want to hear about my two favorite applications that fit right into your ecosystem?

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Okay. So the first one that I started loving was Tweet Later. And…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Do you know about Tweet later?

Kyra Reed: I do.

Susan Bratton: I love Tweet Later because I can do a blog post and then I can write five things about that blog post and schedule it in Tweet Later, and then have it go out over three or four weeks where I’m still calling back to something I spent hours working on or a show that I did that’s a really good show and there’s like sixteen things that are great about it. Sometimes what I found with Twitter Later Pro is that I’m over Twittering and I needed to dial it back a little bit, and people told me, “Hey, oh my god, I’m seeing you everywhere.” Like, when they’re saying “I’m seeing you everywhere”, what they’re saying is “You’re Twittering too much.” Like, “You’re out of control girl.”

Kyra Reed: And you don’t want to do that because you don’t want to a) in Face Book you don’t want to be hidden. I don’t want to be hidden out of somebody’s activity feed. And you don’t want somebody to un-follow…

Susan Bratton: Un-follow. Exactly. But what’s good is people will let you know when there’s something they don’t like. People are very vocal, so you’ll know if you’re doing it too much. So that’s one that I like. And then my newest greatest love is MobyPicture.

Kyra Reed: I saw that. I also am a fan of MobyPicture.

Susan Bratton: I think it’s fantastic because what I didn’t like about Twit Pic was I’m a big photo person and Flickr’s a big part of what I…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: what I do for my personal life. And I like to share all my photos when I go to parties and things like that. And so the thing that I like about Moby is that it does even more of that work for me where I can take a video or audio or a picture, not just a photo, but any multi media type, and I can upload it to Moby Picture, and it sends it automatically. If it’s video I can put it on my YouTube, I can, it Twitters it for me, it puts it on Face Book, not as a link, but as an actual photo and deposit it in my photos on Face Book in addition to putting it on my news feed. So it’s doing a lot of extra work for me automatically…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: that I used to have to do and I could only do it with photos, now I can do it with more video and all kinds of stuff. So I love that.

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: That’s a new one too, and I just think it goes, it’s all about their syndication…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: That’s what it is. It’s all about…

Kyra Reed: That’s right.

Susan Bratton: that thing you’re saying and that I’m doing and that we both agree is create it once, start with your blog as the foundation or your photos as the foundation, whatever it is, and then use those tools to radiate it in all of these place, and that takes a lot less work than people think it might. They think you’re super busy, but you’re not that busy ‘cause you’re actually just creating once and distributing many, and that’s the beauty of it.

Kyra Reed: Exactly. The hardest work that goes into social media is in the set up and the strategy development. You’re absolutely right. There are a lot of really amazing tools that will help you to manage your Twitter account and your Face Book account – mainly your Twitter. If you’ve got an iPhone or a Blackberry, there are hundreds of applications that you can sign up for that will help you do that, but I agree with you, MobyPictures is the best that I’ve found so far for that. And just a little trick; if, we’ve, one of the things we’ve developed for a strategy for a client of ours, they are going to be asking people to send in, you know, user generated content. So one of the things that I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t do when they want to solicit user generated content is that they don’t give people all the tools that they need. So if you are someone who is going to be asking for UGC from your listeners or your audience or your fans, you want to tell them, “Hey, I suggest using Moby Pictures, because you can do all of it, and here’s how you should tag it.”

Susan Bratton: Right, “Here’s the hash tag”, exactly.

Kyra Reed: Have you seen Tagal.us?

Susan Bratton: No. How do you spell it?

Kyra Reed: Taga dot, no tagal, dot us (Tagal.us).

Susan Bratton: Thank you. Okay.

Kyra Reed: And Tagal.us is the hash tag dictionary. So if you need a definition on what a hash tag is look it up on Wikipedia. It basically helps you to label and event or happening or an experience that you want to be able to follow a conversation around. So if you are creating a hash tag for your event, I highly recommend that if you have a business or a product go to Tagal.us and create a hash tag around it and define it because you’ll be the first person to define that. No one can own a has tag, anyone can come up with any hash tag they want, but Tagal.us now allows you to define it. So I high recommend doing that. There’s also another one, I’ll just give you one more; Tweet Reach.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Kyra Reed: Have you heard about Tweet Reach?

Susan Bratton: No.

Kyra Reed: Tweet Reach will take your Twitter feed and tell you what your reach is. So what it basically does…

Susan Bratton: So it’s not just who follows me, but how many followers…

Kyra Reed: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: follow my followers.

Kyra Reed: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Got it.

Kyra Reed: So you can see, “Okay, I did this one Tweet and it got a reach of 75,000 people.

Susan Bratton: Oh it tells you an individual Tweet and it tells you that through Re-tweets.

Kyra Reed: It will tell you, it will tell you the Tweet, it will tell you the handle.

Susan Bratton: I got to go do that the minute we’re done here.

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: That sounds like super fun stuff.

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: I love all the Twitter vanity apps, you know, like Twitter Karma, Dossie and all those things, they’re fun.

Kyra Reed: They’re fun. They get overwhelming, so if you’re just starting out using Twitter there are some basic tools that you need so that you don’t get overwhelmed. I highly recommend starting with the organizational tools and the functional tools, and then getting into the fun stuff.

Susan Bratton: Well tell them what those are.

Kyra Reed: Tweet Deck or Twirl…

Susan Bratton: I use Tweet Deck.

Kyra Reed: They are applications that allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, to manage multiple groups, to do Tweets, Tweets that you then get published at a later date. Tweet Reach, which I just mentioned. Twitter Search or Sumize.com, which if you are on Twitter, if you are a product or a company or a brand, you must search yourself at minimum weekly, but daily if possible. You want to know what’s being said about you constantly. So those are the most important ones. You want to be able to manage your accounts. You want to be able to control what you publish. And you want to be able to figure out what your reach is. So start with those and then move into the others. But those are the ones that have been around the longest. They have the most following and developers behind it. So they’ve been around a while, they’re really stable, I highly recommend those.

Susan Bratton: I did a really good interview with Dave Taylor, Ask Dave Taylor, at South By Southwest, and he explained in painstaking detail and super gerberized how you use Twitter Search to set up an automatic query of all of the words that you track for your brand, for your company, your vanity trackers, all those things, in a single search query with the right place for the parentheses and how you write the ‘or’ and the ‘and’ and all those things. And then he taught us how to put it in our browser toolbar, so all we do is an automated customized Twitter search for all our keywords. I have it. I just click my browser and it pops open Twitter Search with the results of all the things I want to track. And that you can get on my blog, which is dishymix.com. Just search for Dave Taylor and there’s his interview where he explains all that. He’s coming back on the show ‘cause he’s fantastic.

Kyra Reed: That sounds awesome.

Susan Bratton: It’s a good one. So we’re going to go to a break…

Kyra Reed: Okay.

Susan Bratton: and when we come back we’re going to get more Kyra Reed from Markyr, and we’re going to get to learn more about her, not just about social media. But we are going to cover some of your best practices for creating your finding, your online community as a brand marketer.

Kyra Reed: Excellent.

Susan Bratton: Great. We’ll be right back. I’m your host Susan Bratton. Stay tuned for more fun.

Susan Bratton: We’re back and I’m with Kyra Reed. Kyra is with Markyr, a social media agency based out of L.A. We’re talking of course about social media. Where I connected with her at a really good level was around community when I first met her because she just had some level of neurons that I’d never experienced in thinking about creating community for particular brand, product or service. So Kyra, first of all, what’s the first thing that we need to think about if we’re toying with the idea that we think we have a brand that might want to have conversation around our product, our service, our content, whatever it is, what do we ask ourselves? How do we get started going down the right path?

Kyra Reed: Well when you’re thinking about building community the first question is, “Do I build it or do I join it?” So there are some companies who have built their own communities that are kind of useless. Firs of all, what is your, do you have an offline following already? Do you already have a community of people surrounding you; an author for instance or an actor, somebody that actually has a community that they can take from the offline world and communicate with online. That’s a great person to have in community. If you are selling dog food that’s not anything special or unique, do you really need a community around that? I don’t think so. You would be much better off joining communities, joining forums, joining chats, joining group where it’s a, dog lovers, that kind of thing. So you really have to distinguish, “What is that I’m going to talk to these people about? What can I give them that they can’t find anywhere else?” And really the people that should develop their own communities are ones that have a lifestyle product or have unique information to share that people want. For instance, I work with a woman named Susan Federshlone and she does Global Manners. So she teaches people how to have manners, especially diplomats and CEO’s going to foreign countries, and she’s now going to be moving into doing social media. Social media manners is something that I don’t know anyone is doing. So it might actually be a really good idea for her to build a community. And with things like Ming now where you can go and sign up as easy as you sign up for a Face Book page, okay, why not. There is, I’ll just really quickly give you an example of another non product related community who I think is brilliant. It’s called Navy Moms. And there is a group of navy moms that got together and launched a network, and it’s nationwide, and now they all help each other out with their kids. And there was a story I heard about a woman whose son had been flown back to San Diego, he was injured, she couldn’t get out there, so she asked one of the navy moms to go down and stay with him until she could get there. Now that’s spawned Army Dads and so on and so forth, so there’s a reason for these people to connect. So if you have a reason, a legitimate reason for people to connect and share information, launch a community. If not, there’s Face Book, there’s Flickr, there’s Twitter. There are other places for you to go find the people because if you launch a community and you don’t have a reason to have… If you sell Macaroni and Cheese, how much more can you do besides give people recipes? You really can’t. So that’s really the question; why? And how, and if you’re taking something from offline online, do you have a following already?

Susan Bratton: What do you think is the non intuitive part of creating a community? Where do people in your experience get caught up or have problems?

Kyra Reed: Trying to be like everybody else. “Well so and so’s doing it, so this is what I should do.”

Susan Bratton: Like what? In what way? What do you see them copycatting that doesn’t always work from brand to brand?

Kyra Reed: For instance, “I’m going to sign up for this application that lets me get ten thousand new followers a day.” That’s, it’s not, the game is not about how many. The game is about which ones. That’s the biggest one I see. The other one I see is people taking their offline marketing intuition and trying to do that online, which still has that element of push information, and that really alienates people online. They may sing up to follow you quickly, but they’re not going to do it for long. People don’t want to be pushed at. The other thing is what you touched on a little bit earlier, which is over Tweeting, over status updating. Over information gets, it just becomes a part of the noise. The other thing that I see people do is not explain why. “Here, this is why you should follow me on Twitter. This is why you should read my blog. This is why you should be a fan of mine on Face Book, because I will give you this.” Set expectations for people. Let them know. If you just randomly follow and you don’t tell them, then it, a) leaves you open for ambiguity. Well and then you’ll start putting your personal information in and information that’s irrelevant, and you’ll lose people. But if you say, “This Twitter feed, thank you for joining my feed” or “I’d like you to join my feed”, “This is exactly what you can expect from this feed. I will give you tips and information about xyz, I will give you maps to the places I’ve been”, whatever it’s going to be. Tell people so they know what to expect, because there’s a massive amount of following and un-following, there’s a massive following and collecting that’s going on right now, because everybody’s racing to Twitter and trying to do what everybody else does, which is have a lot of friends. What’s going to happen I predict over the next six months to a year is there’s going to be a lot of un-following going on. Because people who are actually interested in using the tool, there are going to be a lot of people who friend everybody and have everybody friend them and then go, “This is just all noise, I don’t want to do it anymore.” The ones who find it and like it and stick with it are going to start un-following. And you are going to be a part of that un-follow if they look at your feed and see that you’re not, they’re just noise, they don’t get anything from you, they don’t know why they should be following you. If you tell people exactly what to expect and they will follow you and stick to you because you deliver.

Susan Bratton: One of the things that I heard rumblings on was that Face Book was creating what I call circles - I think they had a different name for it - but this idea that if you have three thousand followers on Face Book that you’d want to have these, there are lists now that you can put someone in a, you know, “ This is my high school friend, this is my family”, whatever, but there isn’t really an effective way to filter that information or to filter those news feeds or to communicate with a group of people in an easy way. Are there some advances that I’m just not aware of in that category or do you think that’s still to come?

Kyra Reed: I think it’s still to come, and that’s exactly why I think that Face Book, you must be on Face Book. I mean if we look at where it’s been in just the last year… Have you been on it for the last year?

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, definitely.

Kyra Reed: Okay. So we can see that its gone from being a profile similar to other social networks that we’re on, to be a community tool. And Face Book is really on the cutting edge, and they will continue to do so. And we are going to see roll outs of innovations in Face Book every single month for years to come because they know they have to stay on the cutting edge. Twitter’s a different story. Twitter is the tool that it is, and there’s not going to be a whole lot of innovation around how that information’s delivered. Face Book is a totally different story and it is going to be, I think culturally it’s going to start reflecting back to us our native state and desire for connection with people and the natural process of selection. So yes, those filters are going to get better. We’re going to be able to say eventually, “ I want this kind of information going to this group and I want this information not going to that group. And I want to see information from these people, but I want to see a little bit from those people.” You’ll be able to do that eventually, because that’s where we’re going. It’s an inevitability. There are some other things that are going on, not in Face Book, but there is one thing that I do want to mention, which is the Google Wave.

Susan Bratton: Mm, tell us about that.

Kyra Reed: The Google Wave is an in browser collaboration tool. And the reason that I am bringing this up outside of Face Book and Twitter and everything else is because this tool is, I think I read three or four people saying it was the biggest technological release in the last four years. This is another thing to watch about, how the direction that we are going in culturally and how we communicate and collaborate with each other, because if you own a small business things are going to be equally important to you as the social networks that you are apart of. We are moving in a direction where all of your business is going to be conducted online eventually. So Google Wave is a really important thing to keep in mind as well, because now you’ve got the ability to collaborate in real time with everyone on your team. You can even see what people are typing as they’re typing it. You can take out chunks of a conversation and turn it into a document. You can rewind and play things back. And you can all sign and Tweet (unintelligible) profile. It’s just the extent to which we are evolving online is intense.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Kyra Reed: And the ability to share and filter communication is, those are the advances. How do we share and how do we filter it? That’s what’s going to happen in the future.

Susan Bratton: There was another thing that you were excited about, that was the combination of Bing and Flickr. Tell us about that.

Kyra Reed: Well Bing, as much as I do not like to promote Microsoft, it is their new search engine, and I was not real impressed with the idea of it at first because, you know, Google’s pretty much cornered the market on that. But they have done a nice job, I have to say. And their photo search, their image search is really topnotch. And they pull information, just like Flickr does, or I’m sorry, just like Google does, from websites that have photos on it that are tagged with the keywords you just searched. One of the sites that it searches is Flickr, so that ties in. And it’s the same with Google. It isn’t just Bing, it’s just the way that Bing organizes that search information and it’s much easier to use than Google. It’s one long, extended page. The photos don’t feel like they’re on top of each other. There’s more information. It’s just a much better interface for photos. The reason that I brought that up with you earlier is I wanted to make the point to you that Flickr is the third most popular social network in the country and often the most neglected in a social media strategy. So my client the Roxy Theatre, Nick Adler, he likes to call them breadcrumbs. So he’s got these breadcrumb sites. Well what he does is he puts information up there and he uses that to bring people back to his blog. And I do want to make a point in saying that all of these - all of these different avenues that you have, the Face Book and the Twitter and Flickr - it all must lead back to your blog. Hopefully you have a blog. The whole point of it is to bring traffic back to your command center. That’s where you control the message, that’s where you own the content. So always drive information back to your blog; encourage people to go back to your blog, place your articles on your blog, feed it back to your blog. But Flickr is a phenomenal breadcrumb.

Susan Bratton: So you’ve written a book called Blog 101…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Did I get that right?

Kyra Reed: Yup.

Susan Bratton: Why you…. You say it. You know it by heart, I have to read it.

Kyra Reed: It’s Blog 101: Why You Need a Blog and How To Make it Successful.

Susan Bratton: And do you have some copies of it for Dishy Mix listeners?

Kyra Reed: Of course I do.

Susan Bratton: Now it’s kind of hard to personally autograph…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: a downloadable e-book…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: But just the fact that you got it from Kyra is almost enough. So we’ll get a couple copies for Dishy Mix listeners…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: And you probably know the drill, but if you’re new to the show there is a Dishy Mix fan page on Face Book. You can just go to dishymixfan.com, it takes you right to my fan page, and you can just post if you’d like to be one of the people that we select to get Kyra’s Blog 101 downloadable e-book for instant gratification. Just post your desire on the fan page and I’ll select a couple and we’ll get them out to you. And by the way, of course please fan me while you’re there because what do you get if you fan me? See, Kyra’s teaching it. Here’s what you get: I maybe send out one email every three to four months about something interesting, and I give away products from the show all the time. So that’s a worthwhile fan club. Personally autographed books and all kinds of goodies.

Kyra Reed: And you’ll be doing events, so you’ll be able to let your friends on Face Book know when and what your shows are going to be about…

Susan Bratton: That’s right.

Kyra Reed: so that they can accept it and put it into their event feed.

Susan Bratton: There you go. That’s what we need to learn, all those good things. So one last quick business question, then I want to get into some more kind of fun personal Kyra stuff. What’s your favorite blog or a blog that you could recommend that Dishy Mix listeners would enjoy and would allow them to keep up with Bing and Flickr and la, la, la and all the….

Kyra Reed: The latest and greatest social media tools?

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Kyra Reed: Mashable.com. And Mashable is a site that was started by a very young man in Ireland or Scotland, Pete Kashmar. He is a genius, and it has grown from a nice little blog about social networking to pretty much the premier site on Face Book and Twitter and anything new in social media, and it’s all about social media now, they’ve got some incredible writers. And the information for a new person or someone who may have some questions whose got a little bit of understanding about social media. They’re archives, you know, they do a lot of top ten this, top ten that of Twitter applications, top hundred and forty Twitter applications, then reasons why you need a Face Book page versus a group page. All of that information, go to mashable.com and query that stuff, put it in a search, and it’s just such an incredible resource. Mashable.com.

Susan Bratton: Okay, I’m changing gears now, and I have a crazy question to ask you.

Kyra Reed: Okay.

Susan Bratton: This is like the fun ending to Dishy Mix where we get to do more dishy stuff. If you were, if you had a power animal, what would it be? Do you have a power animal? You are from Sebastapol originally so…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: So from Sebastapol, if you’re born in Sebastapol does a power animal come with you?

Kyra Reed: Well I was born in Point Reyes.

Susan Bratton: Oh Point Reyes, okay. Alright, so it’s close enough…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: I think anybody in Point Reyes also probably has a power animal as well. So do you have one?

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Or do you need one?

Kyra Reed: Power animal…

Susan Bratton: You know, your spirit totem…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: No, I don’t have one.

Susan Bratton: Okay. Well we’re going to have to come up with one for Kyra. So here’s what I’d like you to do: I am going to come up with a few guesses, but if you have an idea of what kind of power animal she should be send it to her. I’m thinking raven because of your beautiful dark hair and your dark eyes and your pale skin, you look like you could be a raven. So that’s the first power animal that comes to my mind for you. But I’m also thinking about a chipmunk and I don’t know why. I think maybe chipmunk because there’s just something sweet and fuzzy and adorable and you just would want Kyra to sit in your hand and you would just want to pet her and her fuzzy little tail because she’s super cute. So I would go for that one. And she’s a little bit devilish and she’ll run away. You have to be careful, she’ll run away, so… So there you go, you got a raven and a chipmunk…

Kyra Reed: Okay.

Susan Bratton: We’ll find out what those mean.

Kyra Reed: Okay.

Susan Bratton: Alright, so you told me recently that you decided to stop dating losers and date… You didn’t know I was going to use this on the show, did you? Surprise! So you decided to stop dating losers and you decided to start dating like powerful men. What have you noticed is the difference between losers and powerful men?

Kyra Reed: The car they drive and the money in their wallet.

Susan Bratton: That’s it? They’re all the same?

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm. I mean, it’s completely and totally unfair to say they’re all the same. But, yeah, in my experience there hasn’t been a whole lot of difference. I mean, you know, there’s one is more ambitious than the other, but, yeah I, no. I… (unintelligible).

Susan Bratton: Of course I did. Well let me ask you what you’re looking for. What’s the perfect combination for Kyra?

Kyra Reed: The perfect combination for Kyra is somebody who is very ambitious and…

Susan Bratton: Because you are and you like to work…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: You like to think, make your mind work all the time…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: You’re always up for the challenge of thinking…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: And you need someone who can meet you in that. And so that’s probably the representation of ambition for you, but it could also just be like massive intellectual curiosity and…

Kyra Reed: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: conversation and things like that…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Like if they were some kind of a person who did some really unique work but didn’t make a ton of money, like fabulous research for a university or something, you’d probably still like that, right?

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Or do you need him to have, do you need him to have a big old wallet and fast car?

Kyra Reed: No, I don’t need a big old wallet and a fast car. I thought I did for a while, but I also realize that a lot of men at that point in their life are also really unavailable. And not that I’m really available either, but there has to be some kind of… I think that what happens is that they get so dedicated to what they’re doing that their own internal work takes a backseat. And I need somebody whose had some time and some energy and desire to do some internal work on themselves, because I’ve been doing it a long time and now I’m, I know, I know who I am.

Susan Bratton: What’s the most helpful personal work that - you’ve done some personal transformation, some personal growth work – what’s the single thing that helped you the most or made a big difference in your life and the work that you’ve done?

Kyra Reed: Having a life coach.

Susan Bratton: Do you have a life coach right now?

Kyra Reed: I do.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s great.

Kyra Reed: I’ve been with him for four years…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Kyra Reed: And it’s, I have to say, it’s really nice having that hour every week where it’s all about me.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: And now that we’ve been together for four years, he knows what I’ve been through in the last four years. He knows what my pitfalls are, he knows when I’m angry and  being childish and how to pull me out of it, and he knows how to really support me when I’m doing well and remind me of how far I’ve come. So that’s been really, really helpful. But there are a couple of authors who’ve really helped to transform things for me. Esther Hicks…

Susan Bratton: Yeah. Oh you like Abraham Hicks stuff?

Kyra Reed: Oh yeah.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Kyra Reed: She is just, it’s just such, so beautiful to me.

Susan Bratton: Talking about source and how it’s all within you….

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh. Yeah, it’s almost like teaching you how to be responsible for your own…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: your own life right?

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm, mm hmm. And David Deida…

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Kyra Reed: Which is how in a long way around you, and he and I have met…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Kyra Reed: And he talks about the three stages of relationships and how, you know… A friend of mine who works with him says that he sells the ultimate dream, which is, you know, a truly spiritual and expansive relationship with, you know, your partner…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: And it includes this spirituality and the sexuality together with moving kind of beyond that stage where a lot of us are at, which is all about compromise and we’re 50/50 and we’re equal, and it’s kind of more about moving into the feminine and the masculine…

Susan Bratton: I love that. I found that Deida work, The Way of the Superior Man and the feminine/masculine energy balance, ‘cause I’m so strong…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: You are too. We’re both so strong and we love to think and talk and rah-rah-rah, and to be with a man who is quieter but smarter than I am…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: and to learn how to be in my feminine self as well as in my masculine self… I could do masculine really well, in my sleep. When I did the Deida stuff, I suddenly realized how much fun it is to be feminine, and now I spend all my time, as much as I can, being as feminine as I possibly can and like making up for lost time ‘cause I’m a product of the 70’s and…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: our moms taught us to, you know…

Kyra Reed: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: “I am woman”, you know, I sang Helen Reddy songs. I know how to roar. But I didn’t know how to be playful, fun and open, and that’s best fabulous attracter is that combination.

Kyra Reed: And vulnerable.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. Right.

Kyra Reed: How do you knock that shell off? And I guess, okay answering that question you asked me before about what I want in a man, I want a man who’s a man. And, you know, have…

Susan Bratton: That’s hard. That’s a totally unfair statement because all the guys listening are thinking, “What does that mean?”

Kyra Reed: “What does that mean?”, yeah.

Susan Bratton: What about someone who’s fully present to you when he’s with you? ‘Cause I think a lot of times that masculinity is also just being willing to be right there with you.

Kyra Reed: Yes. Yes. And that is, as a strong woman, something I’ve had to grapple with easily sometimes the man that I’ve been around can be broken by me, and I don’t, I never intend to do it. It’s never, I have a lot of really amazing men in my life and I love and adore them, I would never want to emasculate them. I want to build them up, I want them to be as much of a man as possible. But me being who I am and expressing myself sometimes, they internalize that as if I’m attacking them and going after them, and that to me is, I don’t want to be with a man like that because he’s a little too fragile for me. You know, I want a man who can look at me and go, “Okay.”

Susan Bratton: Right. I love it when I’m having my feminine energy rager, whatever that happens to be in that moment with my husband, and he looks at me, he’s like, “Okay, is that all you’ve got, ‘cause you can give me more. Give it all to me.”

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: It’s fantastic.

Kyra Reed: In one of his lectures Deida says for men, you know, you have to understand that women are like weather, and you’re not going to walk outside and say to Mother Nature, “Are you going to rain today? Because if you are going to rain, I am not going outside.” No, you take an umbrella with you, if it rains you pop the umbrella up. You learn to ride with it…

Susan Bratton: The energy.

Kyra Reed: Yeah. And you know what, when you can ride with it…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Kyra Reed: you can actually control it more, because…

Susan Bratton: That’s true.

Kyra Reed: Right, because Tim is able to talk you down out of that rage because he goes, “Give it to me”, and you go…

Susan Bratton: “Actually I’m done now.”

Kyra Reed: Exactly. And you see….

Susan Bratton: “I just had to have a hissy fit, but thank you…

Kyra Reed: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Thank you for holding my hissy fit for me and…

Kyra Reed: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: standing there and not trying to fix it. Just being there while I have it, you know.”

Kyra Reed: Completely dissipates it…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Kyra Reed: And allows you to really feel okay about being feminine. And…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Kyra Reed: when I read The Way of the Superior Man, I cried from cover to cover.

Susan Bratton: Oh my god.

Kyra Reed: It was the first time I realized I had been trying to make myself like a man…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Kyra Reed: to be attractive to men.

Susan Bratton: Right.

Kyra Reed: And that’s not what I need to do. You know, I went from being a woman who said, “I can’t even boil water. I hate cooking. I will never be in the kitchen”, to now being an incredible vegan cook…

Susan Bratton: I love vegan.

Kyra Reed: and I have incredible dinner parties regularly. People will come from the eastside of L.A. to come and have my dinner. So it’s like I wanted to start exploring more of that feminine energy, and as I’ve gotten more into my femininity, I’ve needed a masculine man more and more and, you know, it all changed, a lot of it changed for me when one of my younger brothers, he works with animals a lot and he was raised riding horses and doing rodeos and that kind of thing. And we had gone to a fair and we working at, the family had a booth there and so we were coming back and we had these animals for the petting zoo. And he said, “Alright, we’re going to drop some of these animals off here and then we have to go to another place”, and there’s this calf in there with these long black eyelashes and adorable face, and he said, “Keep the door shut”, and I opened it up and I’m like, you know, to my friend, “Can you take a picture of me and the cow?” And the calf took this opportunity to push his way out of the trailer…

Susan Bratton: Oh no.

Kyra Reed: and then take off.

Susan Bratton: Oh no.

Kyra Reed: And my brother, who I have always been opposed to what he did with the rodeo stuff, I always found it was just horrible treatment of animals and whatnot, he charged that calf and got that calf down on the ground safely…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: And, it was just over within a matter of two minutes. If that calf had gotten out into the street we would’ve been, it would’ve been a nightmare. But seeing that demonstration of masculinity right in front of me where I was terrified of this calf, and his ability to be there and face that moment because he’d been trained…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Kyra Reed: how to do it, it gave me such a different understanding and appreciation of the masculine that can stand there in battle, that can stand there against an animal that weighs ten times what he does and could do some serious damage, no fear, “I know what to do and I’m here to take care of the problem.” That to me whether it’s, whether it’s about building a house or dealing with finances or, whatever it is, that that energy comes to the table and meet the situation, that to me is masculine.

Susan Bratton: That’s hot.

Kyra Reed: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I think we have a great end to the…

Kyra Reed: To social media conversation.

Susan Bratton: Well it’s about authenticity, so…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: we’ll tie it back to social media that way, but… Yeah, so for all of you guys who are looking for a fabulous woman and you wonder why you can’t have her, maybe trying the David Deida stuff is good. Or if you’re a woman and you feel like you want to be more feminine, that we haven’t had the opening and the experience to let ourselves be that, you know, this is great work and it’s all available and still out there, and you built the community for Deida….

Kyra Reed: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: You are the director for… Well you’re not the community director, you were the strategic vision…

Kyra Reed: Strategist.

Susan Bratton: You were the strategist behind the Deida events, so…

Kyra Reed: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Well great. Well Kyra I had a super fun time…

Kyra Reed: Me too.

Susan Bratton: Thanks for coming to the studio…

Kyra Reed: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: I’m glad you were up here WITI. Thanks for sharing all of your latest and greatest info and come back on the show soon.

Kyra Reed: I will. It’s a lovely studio you have here Susan. Thank you for having me.

Susan Bratton: Thank you. It’s my pleasure. Alright, I’m your host Susan Bratton. I hope you had a great time today, and I hope you’ll tune in next week, although I don’t know, this one could be a tough one to top. And I hope you enjoyed the show. Have a great day. Bye-bye.