It was a program build on digital relationships about digital relationships. However, you can manage those conversations by listening, participating, and caring.   Which has me thinking more about the challenges of building trusted digital     relationships using social media. Please share your One Secret on how you build trusted digital relationships using social media . This week Dana VanDen Heuvel , Bill Flitter and I will be on the road to Seattle for the last stop of our mini road trip for the American Marketing Association Hot Topic Workshop -  Digital-Centered Marketing .

Last Valentine's Day I asked a few marketers how to develop great business relationships . With so much of our time spent in the online world I wondered how people were developing digital relationships. posted on Diva Marketing and sent off a tweet asking .. What is your "secret" to building digital relationships through social media? It seems appropriate that the response are a Valentine's Day post. The responses were insightful and smart. I

 Relationships don't matter .. Bloggers like to build relationships with the people who pitch them stories; however, that is not always the case for content publishers like Jeffry Pilcher , of The Financial Brand.  A few eMail exchanges and a comment on a Diva Marketing post might not a deep relationship make; but they opened a door that resulted in an interesting exchange and this blog post about how one publisher finds content for his online site. to some people. I'm a one-man show running two businesses.

I was struck a few weeks ago when I read this article in the Chronicle about the rise of anonymous giving this year.  I suspect that this is due to these donors not wanted to be stalked by causes. the giving cacophony for causes is bad enough in a good economy, but the incessant pressure [...] ...Tags:

In contrast, newsletters feel personal because they arrive in users’ inboxes, and users have an ongoing relationship with them. Feeds don’t form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build. Hmmm, among other things, this suggests that a free service such as Zookoda , which allows bloggers to send a weekly branded newsletter with digests of blog posts, would be more effective than RSS at building relationships Any nonprofit interested in effective online communication should check out the executive summary of a fascinating study -- by the highly regarded Nielsen Norman group -- on e-mail newsletters , how to make them user friendly, and their value compared to web sites and RSS (also known as web feeds or news feeds).

But developing a campaign that transformed his vision and personal qualities into an intimate relationship with millions of volunteers and voters should be what social marketers and other change makers need to focus on. This is not using new technology, this is using technology in new ways - to build relationships and honor the people formerly know as the audience as co-creators of their experience. How did Barack Obama do it? Pundits and scholars have already given this a thorough going over and I will not go into all here, but clearly, as John McCain said in his concession speech

Thanks to Kristina Shands for her advice on cultivating relationships with the media. Take the time to cultivate media sources and you’ll see the results pay off with stronger relationships and great media coverage.   I’m in Greensboro, NC today teaching part of the CFRE Review Course.  While I’m away, a colleague of mine has written this information piece for me. 

Sometimes more time is spent talking about the need to call a donor than actually spent in developing a relationship with the donor. Countless hours are wasted in nonprofit organizations discussing the next move to do with a donor. Ten minutes in a personal conversation with a donor is more valuable than ten minutes planning a personal conversation (you should still spend time planning these conversations- the point is to spend more time in these conversations).

In the arts we often talk about our relationship to the work we sent to create. It's a vital relationship and one that merits discussion. To be more specific, what is your relationship to your audience going to be? Your relationship to your audience can be uniquely your own. What I try to do, through this blog and other methods, is always ask this question: How does the audience fit into all of this?