BlogWorld Expo

November 9, 2007

Creating a Coherent Social Media Strategy

Back from lunch and in the presence of two powerhouses -- Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Brogan. I’m not worthy.

[Jeremiah is schmoozing with the crowd and I’m hiding like a shy little girl. I just got up to avoid being in a photo. Seriously. His level of awesomeness scares me.]

Jeremiah says him and Chris first met at the Blog House, an event done at PodTech. They invited 600 bloggers into a suite about at the Bellagio and it was all about community. They said there was absolutely no drinking involved. None.

Jeremiah asks how many people are satisfied with their social media strategy. No one raises their hand. Chris says he wants to start with the question first: What keeps you up at night? What are the things that are worrying you?

• What are your experiences? Which sites to use and how do you push specific content to specific social networks? -- Jeremiah says there at least 100 video networks. There are 80 companies that like you white label their services.
• How do you integrate mobile?
• More stats to help sell stuff to corporations. Stats for measuring success.
• Even before stats for success, they why? Who is out there and what they saying? How do you research the target market?
• How do you avoid having a bad experience the first time?
• How do you get people to care if your target market isn’t necessarily the classic social media market?

Chris asks who has no idea why they’re here. Ha.

Jeremiah defines “strategy” as the long term decision making for your Web site. It meets three spheres -- users (community), business objectives and technology. Jeremiah anoints us all Web Strategists. Ooo, a promotion!

Are you listening?

Chris says one thing that’s interesting about the way people communicate is that they talk about how to use services to push content. However, very few people think to ask the question “how do I hear where these conversations are happening?” How do I know what people are saying about me? This is about engaging conversations, not putting out fires. To hear, you have to be still. If you’re making a lot of noise you won’t be able to hear.

Jeremiah lists some things you can do to help yourself hear:

• Set up Google Alerts around your brand, your executives, your name, etc.
• Do it for your competitors
• Use Technorati

Jeremiah says there are a ton of tools to listen to and that’s the first step.

When you set up these alerts, you find out who is talking about you? Google will find these instances and report them back to you. When it becomes too much for you to handle, then you have to look at other tools. It’s really important to measure at the first phase because it gives you a benchmark to use later on.

To sum it up: Use tools to listen, find out who is saying about you, organize it and create a benchmark.

Chris says bad marketers are those that blow a blow horn at you. He says we should turn blow horns into party hats. In other words, create a social experience, don’t talk at people.

Got it.

We’re in the nation of Digg and TechMeme where there’s lot of voting on what’s important and what people want. It makes sense to bring that concept into your company. Ask your customers what they think. Remember that your customers are spending time and attention with you. Make that valuable

Tools that are great for energizing your community into a conversation are online forums, Pligg or social networks.

Someone asks a question about using directories to get attention. Jeremiah says that if you do a good job of listening to your community and being part of that community, then the directories aren’t important because people will already know you’re there.

Don’t avoid the elephant in the room, instead pet it. When someone says something bad about you there’s a few things you do. You run it up the flag pole. If you wrote today that BlogWorldExpo is stupid, the BWE organizers could do several things. They could pretend they didn’t see it, they could write that you’re a jerk or they could not just get in that mess. Any time someone craps on you, say thank you because that’s better than not saying anything. Chris is that guy that when a restaurant messes up his order, he never complains. He eats it but then never goes back.

Case Studies

Integration occurs in traditional media: Jeremiah uses the Dove campaign as an example of a company that has integrated their campaign across many mediums and embraced social media.

He deployed a social media program for Hitachi Data Systems. They hired a company to measure what was happening in the social sphere

They decided to launch Executive blogs that were designed to reach out and energize the community. They linked out to people who were talking about them, both good and bad. The blogs were integrated into the mix, creating thought leadership and global discussion. The blogs became a living white paper. It became a door opener for sales, ongoing training and served as a rapid response tool.

If you are managing corporate blogs and you make people jump through hoops to comment, people won’t comment. If you’re afraid of the bad comments, realize that’s why the comments are there, to bring the negative conversation into your neighborhood so that you can handle it and it doesn’t spread elsewhere.

Another thing they did was build an online forum. It was originally built for customers to support customers. He told other bloggers in the industry and built the community that way. Pictures and media where then integrated into the community.

Jeremiah shows what the forum looked like. The most viewed thread is the “behind the scenes” thread. What’s in there? Jeremiah took a camera and recording actual customers to show the human side of the company.

They created a resource for the entire industry called the Data Storage Wiki. It wasn’t branded as Hitachi. What they did was link to everything that a customer could want to make a decision – links to bloggers, podcasts, custom search, glossaries, competitors, etc. He made his company more relevant by joining the party.

Chris says being helpful is an excellent marketing strategy. When you’re only talking about your company you’re being “that guy”.

Question & Answer

How do you know which tools to use?

Listen to your customers and find out where they’re at. Find out where the party currently exists before deciding which tools you’re going to use. All the tools out there serve different purposes. Chris said the CEO is not always the right person to blog, nor is the marketing department.

How do you integrate mobile?

Find out if that’s your audience because it may not be the sane way. If it is, follow the advice below.

Which networks for what?

Facebook has more people. They’re all there lying around. It’s a question of can you engage them, can they feel like they’re participating, can you do things with the content and what kind of people do you need?

Twitter is service that when you first see it you think it’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard of. You can use an IM client, a mobile phone or a Web browser. It has dramatically improved Chris’ personal branding and his blog.

Jeremiah says someone came up to him and told him he looks like his Twitter avatar, heh. He calls Twitter a chat room.

I use Twitter for personal reason. I blog for the LA Times Travel section and we’re trying to figure out how to use Twitter there.

Jeremiah says to look into how people used Twitter for the recent California fires. Tell people they can get instant updates from your Twitter feed. Put your face on Twitter, not the companies. People want to have a conversation with you, not the LA Times.

What about the SEO repercussions of microblogging?

Chris says he’s seen that in his own personal brand, with this Twitter profile ranking nicely.

How do you get the over 40 people to care?

You can’t force it. People care about what they care about. If you want your father to know about YouTube tell him to google “Frank Sinatra”. He’ll get it.

Jeremiah says the Internet is the number one media in the workplace and the second one at home.

How do you start? It’s so overwhelming? How does the local corner store do it?

Chris’ mom started with a blog and talking about why she started her business. She put her blog URL on her business card. The question is, where are your customers and what do they want.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 9/07 at 2:43 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Social Media

November 8, 2007

Finding Your Voice

I just want to say that I’d kill a man for some Starbucks right now. That’s all.

David Lawrence, Jurgen Wolff, and Jim Kukral are here to talk about finding your natural voice. Or at least that’s what they promise. Right now there’s some arguing about zip codes and football teams and who beat whose hometown. I don’t know. I need coffee.

Jurgen is up first. He says this is a quality audience because people are willing to go to a session that doesn’t have the word “monetize” in the title. Nice.

He says there’s a fear at first to be yourself on your blog because people don’t want to turn off their audience. He has a cautionary tale about a jazz announcer.

The announcer was a Beatnik. He looked the part with a goatee and a beret. He was portly and always wore jumpsuits. He told Jurgen a story about when he tried out to be the host of the Tonight Show (this was before Johnny Carson). The musician showed up and did this bit and the guy from NBC showed up and said, “I’m not sure about that beret…or the jumpsuit” By the time they were done with him, he no longer looked like himself. And when he had been neutered that way, no one liked him. He later said he would have rather failed on his own terms. Jurgen uses that story to remind himself that you have to be who you are and hopefully enough people will like that.

A lot of times finding your voice just comes from keeping on, especially during those times when you don’t know what to write about. That’s when something real emerges. People want real stories and a sense of connection. We’re lucky because these formats (blogging and podcasting) allow us to do both of those really well without all the usual gatekeepers that there usually are between us and the audience. If we take advantage of that, we’ll find our audience.

Jim Kukral is up next. He says he’s the blogger contingent on the panel. Jim said he found his voice because he was trying to reach a goal, which was to get more customers. He says preparation is extremely important in finding your voice. He used to just blog about whatever was on his mind. He found that if he took time to put his thoughts on paper and decide what he wanted to say before he started writing, then the post ultimately came out better.

David says that your natural voice will find you. You’ve already found it, you just don’t know it. Everyone’s natural voice is unique. Your natural voice is what will help you gather a large audience. The more natural your voice, the closer you are to being you and the more your audience will like you. You also attract advertisers this way. You want to persuade and influence listeners. You will generate rapid fans who will sing your praises to all who would listen. Keep your voice in ready condition.

Your natural voice is steady, is it calm, clear and reassuring. It’s powerful regardless of who you’re speaking to. It’s effortless. If you have to strain to reach your natural voice, that’s not your natural voice. It’s the voice that you use when you’re as enthusiastic as you can possible be. Your natural voice is you. Whether you think it’s whiny (or others do. Hi, Danny!) or high pitched or nasally or filled with rocks, that’s your natural voice. Embrace it.

Your natural voice is not harsh, annoying, pukey, a strain, awkward, false or someone you’re not.

David says that finding your natural voice is about finding yourself. When your natural voice comes through, that’s when the magnetism occurs.

From here, David starts talking a lot about podcasting.

He says that your voice is two sets of muscles. You have to exercise it. If you’re not blogging today, write gratuitously. If you’re not podcasting today, join Toastmasters. You’ll be able to hear the difference. You speak 14,000 spoken words a day. (One smartass audience member asks if that number changes based on whether you’re male or female. He thinks he’s super funny. I bet he’s single. [Not to mention falling prey to a made up and demonstrably false statistic.--Susan]) You hear 250,000 words a day. We move closer to people talking softly so we can hear what they’re saying. When they speak loudly, we back up. Temper your volume.

He outlines a list of tools for podcasters:

• Headphones – Keep your headphones at a low volume level. You’ll naturally speak louder because you’ll try to hear yourself.
• Scripts: Don’t use them. Use notes.
• Recording devices.

If you’re a podcaster, things that will help your voice are water, clear juice, mild soups, and easy does it hot chocolate. Things that hurt your voice alcohol, sodas, coffee, etc.

Stand up while you’re speaking. It will give you more energy.

Podcasts are different because podcasts are not broadcasts. Today’s broadcasts are not broadcasts anymore because the noise floor has now risen. People have so much choice that they’re confused. We need guides to tell us what’s good. That’s why we still have the TV Guide.

When you blog or podcast, speak to one person, just be specific. Talk to your target. Write for the ears, not for the eye, so that when people read it, they hear it easily. Paint yourself into their corner. Voice work/writing should be friction free. You should know what you’re going to say and how you’re going to craft.

Jim asks the audience what we looked to get out of this session. I, for one, did not think I was going to be hearing about what juices I should drink while podcasting. I was hoping to learn how to be who I am offline online. Or how to sound more genuine. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get any of that. Oh well.

David advises bloggers and podcasters not to take up so much of people’s live all at once. Post more, shorter blog posts. If you’re doing a podcast, do six episodes of ten minutes each, not one 60 minute podcast.

When you’re writing your blog post or your podcast, you have to let your world view shine through.

In Jim’s experience with blogging he writes like he talks (me too). He wrote his presentation 3 hours ago as a script. He wrote it the same way he’d say it. Some of his most successful blog posts have been sessions. Or a good headline and a sentence and a link. (Hey, Susan, can I do that?) [No. --Susan]

Don’t do your show or your blog for anyone other than you and your team. As Jurgen said, don’t neuter yourself. Get rid of the things that people will tell you they want you to do. He used to tell people that he couldn’t care less of what his listeners thought of his radio show. He knew someone who spent 2 hours doing a podcast and then 6 hours editing it to take out all the “ums” and “ahs”. Don’t do that. That’s the color of your speaking. Speak more, write more. Don’t take the time editing that stuff out. Think of all the stuff on TiVo you could be watching if you weren’t editing out all your breaths and pauses.

He’s doing his Bill Cosby impression and people are cracking up. It’s seriously hilarious. There are almost tears.

People do a lot of what they heard when they were growing up, not what they hear today. You don’t have to tell people you’re back from a commercial. They know. They can hear/see you. You don’t have to do the niceties. You don’t have to be formal or have a “thing” that you do.

How has it helped you as a person to have that authentic voice?

Dave says money. Now that he uses his natural voice, he has more of it. Finding your natural voice gives you a level of confidence that no matter where you go you can make money. Finding your natural voice benefits you in so many ways.

Using humor. The best humor is done in the moment completely deadpan. If they don’t know you’re being funny, adding the smiley face isn’t going to help them.

The lesson of the session: Be yourself and accept that that’s okay. Hugs! [I feel so affirmed. Also I'm going to be actually editorial here and point out that Lisa covered this topic very well last December with "When You’ve Lost Your Blog Voice" as well as in April and June of this year. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 8/07 at 5:27 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Branding

Building an Online Community

So a slight changes of plans. I didn’t realize I had set myself up to cover the same session twice (I’m a genius) so instead of recovering the Creating Conversations session that we gave you yesterday, I hopped on over to the Building an Online Community panel. I’m sure we’ll learn lots of great information.

This session features Wendy Piersall, Dave Nalle, and Matt Colebourne (greatest accent ever.).

Wendy says the session will be a conversation between us and them. Wendy asks what we’re expecting and what burning questions we have.

Here’s what the audience wants to know:

• Overall expectations of how long things take. Rules of thumb as to what we can expect.
• The issue of censorship and whether or not it should be done/allowed. How do you deal with that?
• Are there any good numbers in terms of percentage of comments you should have for each posts?
• How do we know our online community is growing? How do you analyze those numbers?
• By joining in conversation on social networks, can you rank well in Google. Using conversations to enhance search engine optimization?
• What’s the best way to start a community from scratch and make it profitable?
• How can we leverage a community or comments?
• How do keep the comment conversation civil and on track?
• Tools or technical tips on how to get more of your readers to comment.

Matt kicks things off with some numbers. What’s the norm for comment/post percentages? The best figure he’s seen for the number of comments per post is about 3.2-3.3. If you’re doing better than that on your blog you’re ahead of the average. On coComment, they have 650,000 users. The average comment per post is 11.8. That’s not surprising. Who would use a comment tool if they don’t intend to comment? Obviously their numbers will be high.

In case you’re not familiar with Matt’s company, coComment tracks conversation. A user can track all the comments they’ve left from a single location. They’re a window into the comment-osphere (did I really just type that?).

Dave says not to get discouraged if people aren’t leaving comments. Articles can generate interest, awareness and education without generating comments.

Wendy talks about posts she’s written that she thought would generate a comment storm and flopped. On the contrary, sometimes she’ll throw up a quick post and she’ll get 40 comments out of the gate. Sometimes you don’t want users to comment. That’s not always what you need. Not all posts are conversation posts. Conversation is a medium. It’s not necessarily the medium that’s going to meet all your goals.

Matt talks to a lot of media sites trying to catch up with the blogosphere. They’re scared about mean comments and get themselves into a situation where they try and presuppose which posts which get negative comments and then disable them. His advice is to put the capability to comment on every post. If you’re going to allow conversation on your site, then put it everywhere. If you’re not, then don’t. You don’t know where you’re going to get an active conversation. That article that you think is going to get people jumping can just as easily spark nothing. What’s exciting is when you get comments that move the conversation forward. It becomes almost disputational. He’s seen people post the comments they get as a second follow-up piece.

Dave agrees and says comments can be used to feed the conversation, as well. A lot of the times it’s the best articles that don’t get comments. If you want comments, it’s easy to get them. If you’re a political blogger, all you have to do is say something about Ron Paul. Heh. Controversy brings people in but it can also bring chaos. You walk a fine line. Humor helps a lot, too.

An audience member asks Wendy what success criteria she uses, if any.

Wendy responds that it depends on the goals for that post. There are definitely posts that she writes as link bait, stuff she hopes will get a lot of conversation and a lot of links too. She could get no inbound links except one from iVillage. Would that be a success? Yes! She balances it on a growth projectory. There are going to be ups and downs, but as long as things are growing and getting better, she’s cool.

Dave starts talking about censorship. Bloggers have had an ongoing issue with censorship because many of us are foul-mouthed and/or psychotic. The key thing to making comments work is that you can’t take yourself too seriously, nor can you take anyone else too seriously either. You don’t want to get to the point where you get so offended by people’s comments that you end up shutting them down. Treat everyone with respect and let them say their piece. Most of the time this will make them respect you and encourage them to play nicely with others. He used to have a policy where he never censored anyone but eventually he was pushed into allowing some censorship because people got out of hand.

One other thing that is effective is to be very active in your own comment section. He uses his own comments to guide the discussion in a positive way. If you get enough people interested in promoting that kind of environment, the result is that eventually the good comments overwhelm the bad comments and people tend to go along with the flow.

To put a slightly different perspective on it, Matt says he went around and talked to a lot of big media sites. He found that the legal frameworks in those places are different in terms of your liability as a publisher of content. There is an international aspect, too. If you’re operating in the US, you have a lot more protection because of our freedom of expression.

He says that as a company that provides a tool to outsource comments, he has started to take a different view. The issues involved with editing are that (a) you put yourself on the firing line and (b) you run into the same problem that newspapers do where you don’t have enough bodies to moderate all the comments coming in. They’ve started looking at ways to build tools that will help site owners. As a tech provider, they want to give tools to users so they can just ignore people and not even have to view what the idiots are saying.

One audience member asks Matt if his platform also allows individual or agencies to have multiple blogs to moderate conversations.

Other tools exist to do that. He’s just solely focused on the comments.

Wendy steps in and says she’s never had to ban a user or moderate comments in her life. She believes the reason she has a successful community is because of the tone that she sets there. She also has a very strong comment policy, as well. The tone that she sets in the post is extremely personal. It’s a business blog but she gets as personal as she possibly can while still staying relevant. It helps show readers that there’s a real human behind that blog. As a result, people are very respectful of not only her, but of each other. That personal aspect has encouraged people to join the conversation more. When she shares personal things, people are touched emotionally. Of course they want to comment, it’s not just about business anymore.

In doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. The more personal you can get, the more people are going to talk.

One audience member says he works for a laser tattoo removal company. His medical director is the star of Dr. 90210. He went out and saw there are a lot of Dr Will Kirby fans and they had to hit them head on. It was good to have these people on the site to defend the doctor when people left negative comments, but he also has to make sure the site doesn’t become a Dr. Will Kirby fan site. How does he do this?

Dave says you have to keep people on topic. The philosophy he takes is that you can only expect a certain number of relevant comments and most of them will come early on in the discussion. If a comment stream is going on for a week or more, it’s already gotten all the exposure you’re going to get. You don’t have to worry if the comments get off topic. People are probably only coming back to read those comments anyway.

Matt suggests pushing them to other relevant content.

One thing that drives comments is to have a snippet of the most recent comments on your blog. They may come for one reason and end up talking about something else. He calls it essential for branding your blog.

When you have a small community, as it grows how can you encourage the new users who don’t feel part of that community to participate?

Wendy recommends that any time you do see a new comment come in to make a quick stop and reply to their comment or shoot them an email. One of the things she did was to make her blog user friendly for varying experience levels. She put something in her side bar especially for new visitors to give them a user's guide to her blog.

Matt chips in that you shouldn’t make them register. People don’t like having to register.

Another audience member says she rewards the top commenter by either using a Top Commenters widget, offering up monetary prizes, etc.

What’s your take on requiring registration and validation of members?

Matt says there’s an interesting Facebook group about the Todeka Project that is looking into how you can confirm someone’s identity online. He says that requiring someone to register on your site is not going to prevent people from pretending to be you somewhere else. Highlight the positive.

Wendy talks about pushing your readers to talk to one another so that they can answer each other's questions. She also encourages group writing and group research projects where blog readers have to work together for a common goal (oh sweet Jesus, do people really do that?). Within your own niche there’s always ways to make sure your readers are connecting with each other. Highlight certain readers, write a post about a frequent commenter. Put them in the spotlight.

When you think about starting the conversation among people, what about adding forum-type setups to your blog?

Dave says he hasn’t had success with that. If you want to have sub-communities, it's better to split them off and start a whole new thing focused on that new topic. From what he’s seen from forums, the level of comments is almost worse than the level of quality of blog comments.

Wendy thinks blogs are a more powerful tool because the readers get more of a spotlight because it’s not about you, it’s about them. As long as you keep making it about them, they’ll want to keep coming back and participating.

Dave says profitability on a blog is a wonderful dream but it won’t come to most of us immediately. It typically takes 2 years to make your blog into something.

Wendy says she had a bit of an “a ha” moment when Shoemoney (there’s your link, Shoe! Now leave me alone! :) ) said the stickier that your blog is, the more readers are invested in the content, and the less likely they are to be invested in your ads. Building your community and monetizing your blog don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes you have to make a choice. The best way to monetize a blog is through direct advertising or if you’re selling your own products.

Matt says the way around that is for bloggers to group together. You’re a blogger, you’re into a business development. Trying to monetize your own site through AdSense is going to make you a lot of money.

Wendy says that’s exactly what she did. She launched 6 new blogs on the site so now she has other people to drive up traffic and increase page views.

Dave says that one way to be successful to become associated with a bigger site.

Can you explain “sticky” vs “monetized content”?

Wendy says basically if you have readers that are extremely engaged in your content and they want to stick around and they want to stay. When they leave your site they’re going to go to related sites to continue the conversation.

If you’re writing monetized content, they’re coming for information. They want to know what the author thinks about a company or a product. She’s just saying, this is a great product, you should check it out.

Other than good content, how have you built your community?.

Matt says the number one thing he did was to create ways for people to bring other people into conversations.

Dave says that if you have more than one person writing for the blog, show the interaction between those people. (Hi, Susan!) [Hello, Lisa. --Susan]

Wendy says to be as open and as honest and as personal as you can. People aren’t on your blog just to read content. They’re there to connect with you.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 8/07 at 5:11 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging

Building Your Online Reputation

Lunch is over and we’re back. This time Steven Van Yoder is here to talk about how to go about building your online reputation and branding strategies for a Web 2.0 world. And he can talk as long as he wants because I’m sitting next to the power outlet. Who’s the smartest blogger in the room? Me!

Steven hands out a personal fame assessment. I don’t need to take it. I already know that I’m totally famous.

The genesis of his book "Get Slightly Famous" went back to his years as a working journalist. It was about how the media works and the role of subject matter experts. The media wants to give you free coverage because they need story ideas. The media are looking – can they find you?

The 6 Step "Get Slightly Famous" Marketing Model

Steven’s "Get Slightly Famous" marketing model has six steps:

• Target the best prospects: Don’t leave success to chance, Look at your total marketplace. Know who your competitors are. Looking for the openings. Drill down and focus.

• Develop a unique and focused market niche.

• Position your business as the best solution.

• Maintain your visibility: Make sure your best prospects know who you are.

• Enhance your credibility. Get quoted in magazines, be a guest on podcasts, speaking during conferences, etc.

• Establish your brand and your reputation.
  

This is the model you want to apply to your own business. He’s going to be focusing on creating a multimedia approach to getting slightly famous. He says he reads the blogs and thinks they’re the best marketing inventions ever created. They’re going to stick. They’re not going anywhere. They’re the best way for small business owners to develop their own platform and become a thought leader. However, don’t forget about traditional media. Traditional media is here, bloggers have a seat at the table and it can be a symbiotic relationship where everybody wins.

A message for Web 2.0 evangelists:

• One media does not fit all markets.
• Increasing competition in the big world.
• Google makes the rules.
• Traditional media still has credibility.
• Take a multimedia approach.

Success story: Kiva

They wanted to make a community portal for people who want to donate to other organizations around the world. A person is trying to start a business and Kiva connects them and lets other people make loans to them. In two years, they’ve raised 14 million dollars. They used media to expand the reach of their company. Realize that traditional media is part of your growth.

Be a Thought Leader

Who is your sphere of influence? It’s the journalists, online communities, offline media conference planners, other people in non-competing related industries, industry watchers, analysts, bloggers, search engines, etc.

It’s about positioning yourself as a thought leader. A thought leader is communicating via online content, public speaking, blogs, media interviews, podcast, white papers, strategic partnerships, books, articles, etc. You want to be findable the moment users are looking for you.

It starts by putting together a traditional media public relations plan. How do you do this? You identity target media, build a media list, study publications and then pitch to editors.

[I think half the people in this room are playing with Twitter as Steven is speaking. Awesomeness.]

Getting articles into print magazines offers up a number of benefits. Published articles provide high credibility, they’re low cost/high impact marketing materials, you don’t have to be a season journalist to get started, and you can get one to three magazines pages devoted to your business

Success Story: A Fitness Trainer/Podcaster lands in the NYT

The trainer knew that on Jan. 1, a lot of stories would come out about staying fit. He wrote a press release and sent it to the media and said “I have a product”. Someone picked it up and he was featured prominently in a NYT article. That NYT article was then run in other magazines. All he did was follow the news cycle. This stuff is possible when you add mainstream media into your marketing mix.

Speaking Strategies

Get with the program. If you’re not embracing public speaking, you’re missing an enormous opportunity. You can speak live or telecast. Steven does both. Hunt for conferences on Google and follow the listed speaker guidelines. If you do enough of these, people will pick you up. Do a few more and even more people will pick you up.

Teleseminars offer a telephone bridge line and you can hold your own seminars (bring in people from your mailing lists).

Success Story: Ted Demopoulos

“The meeting planned called and said 'I don’t know what a blog is but I’ve been reading yours since we got off the phone. You’re perfect for the job. If you want to speak, we’d love to have you' I knew I was on the something then.”

Syndicate articles online

Take a short online-friendly article (750-1,000 words) and publish it on Web sites that reach your target market. He talks about an article he published when his first book came out a few years back. He wrote the article pretty quickly, found Web sites that gave business advice and submitted that article. To date, 200 or so people have syndicated that article. It’s a big source for leads for him. He also gets calls from journalists questioning him about it and other things. It’s a good way to be found by journalists because they do their research online. Establish yourself as an expert.

It’s also good for search engine optimization because it create backlinks to your Web site. Focus on high authority/niche sites.

See your topic and anticipate many uses for it. A good blog post can become a short article, which can be turned into spoken form, which can be made into a speech or a book.

Question & Answer

When syndicating articles, can it be the same article or do you have to write different articles for each publication?

As long as they're non-competing companies, it can be the same article. Most people don’t care.

I have no marketing background. Any suggestions for tweaking my perspective so I can identify new markets?

Two things come to mind. Before you start grabbing tools off the shelf, talk to people. If you’re starting out in a niche and you want to know what’s going to work, talk to people who already know those people. Talk to non-competing businesses. Find out what people are going to gravitate to. Attend trade shows and talk to vendors. Immerse yourself a little bit and find out where the high impact areas are going to be.

When it comes to articles, do you actually completely the article and send it out?

Steven is going to be doing a seminar on this tomorrow at 1pm at booth #128 for free. The easy answer is no. You don’t write the whole article. You write a query letter and see if people are interested. You don’t write the whole article.

An audience member stands up and gives us a case study about her business.

[I don’t know. I’m feeling kind of slimy after this one. Like I just spent $499.99 to sit through a motivational seminar on how to change my life or lose 30lbs through the power of positive thinking. ]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 8/07 at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Branding

Corporate & CEO Blogging

After last session's sound debacle, I’m not taking any chances. I’m front row, on the aisle for this one. The Lisa is going to hear Every. Word. You just wait and see!

Debbie Weil is moderating this morning’s session with speakers Paula Berg, John Earnhardt, Pete Johnson, Jennifer Cisney, and Brian Lusk.

Debbie asks a room of bloggers who thinks blogging is just incessant barking like a dog? No one raised their hands. Shocking! She says that’s one of the first things you do in corporate blogging, tune into your audience and see what they think. Okay.

Executing a corporate blog takes work. There’s a host of questions you have to ask yourself. Will you allow comments? Will you run it through Legal? It’s a very creative endeavor and it’s also very strategic. This is a revolution. We’re still in the early stages. It’s really how companies speak to their customers, whether it’s PR, customer service or gathering marketing intelligence. She thinks it’s fair to say that this is at least a beginning of a revolution.

Why aren’t more CEOs and companies blogging? Because of the fear of being criticized and the fear of losing control. When you have your own blog, you control it. This is your editorial product channel that you’re creating, You set the rules.

She shows a comic about blogging that I have on my bulletin board at work. I giggle.

Most companies don’t start with a dedicated blogging team. It’s a let’s-see-if-this-works-first kind of a thing. There are very few CEOs who can write really well and have the blogging DNA and the disposition to do this. For most CEOs, they open their mouths and out comes corporate speak.

Kodak Blogs A Thousand Words

Up first is Jennifer Cisney. She works with the Kodak blog and is an information designer. She’s had her own personal blog for 8 years now. She blogs every day.

A year ago when her company wanted to start a corporate blog, she was a natural fit. When they started to blog, the idea came out of the PR & communications department. They were behind the idea but she still had to pitch it to the executives. They host their blog offsite because they weren’t interested in getting into the business of building a blog platform. They wanted to focus more on content. They have a unique perspective on their blog. They don’t do a CEO blog. Their blog is about regular people who work in the company and love photography and what they do. They have a lot of passionate people in their company. It’s a great way to get their stories out there and inspire other people.

Kodak has a consumer blog called A Thousand Words. They’ve gone through about 50-60 employee bloggers. Employees submit stuff and then the blog group puts it up for them. They don’t edit the content. Jennifer came up with the design. The best way to find out more about the blog is to go and read the stories. They’re amazing and touching.

Story Examples: A young woman who sees her premature baby through a photo for the first time, pictures of the recent California fires, a woman who was in a near death experience and then rediscovered the world through photos. There are also a lot of funny posts, too.

They’ve also launched A Thousand Nerds blog that comes out of Kodak’s R&D department.

HP’s 50 Blog Team

Up next is Pete from HP. A big part of what HP IT is about is being a showcase for their IT customers out in the market. His group provides the platform on top of which the different HP bloggers build their content. They have about 50 blogs. They take a very distributed approach to it. Anyone who can make a business case for having a blog can have one.

Their most popular blog is by Vince Ferraro, the Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for the HP LaserJet Business. There’s a broad gamut of the bloggers and their intent for using the platform. They’re at the point now where they’ve outgrown the platform they’ve been using for the past few years. They’re in the process of finding funding for a new platform. For them it’s about providing a platform so people don’t have to worry about setting up a blog themselves. They just have to write the content.

When you’re starting to open up to a wide variety of people, you have to worry about if they’re giving away proprietary information and that they’re crediting people correctly. They want the comments to be meaningful dialogue, not a support emporium. The bloggers can’t fix your printer. Hee.

Cisco and Blogging

John from Cisco is next.

He’s blogger in chief from Cisco where they use the Web to extend reach. His job was to extend that reach. They had a small global team and ask themselves how do we get the voices out there?

When they launched the blog, John didn’t know he worked with a lot of lazy people (awesome!). The blog really became a platform for John to write about what was going on and various public policy issues. It wasn’t meant to be that, but he was the only one writing and he had to keep it going. It was definitely a let’s ask for forgiveness rather than permission. He went through Legal to get the disclaimer that says he was posting for himself and not for the corporation. A year later he’s mentioned in the Wall Street Journal as a high level executive who blogs.

That notoriety helped them to realize that yes, they are already out there in the marketplace, so how can we extend our reach? Jon came back into the PR team in 1999 and really looked at what messages they were trying to push out. They have 20 initiatives this year. They called it their Blue Sky plan. They’re identifying bloggers in their division who can go out and participate in the blogosphere and say, hey, here’s what we think about these issues.

Cisco has a PR person attached to each one of the blogs. That person is ultimately responsible for whatever gets picked up and the conversations that may occur. They’ll publish anything, they don’t care. And the content, if it reaches one person, fantastic. They have about 90K page views on their corporate site. They have about 15 official Cisco blogs.

In terms of CEO blogging, their CEO is extremely energetic and actively and out there. He loves the idea of blogging and is able to talk a mile a minute but he’s not a typist. So about 6 months ago, they went out and bought a camera. The idea was that they would follow him around as he travels and allow him to give quick 3-5 minute highlights. That didn’t work out so well. Now the CEO has committed himself to creating one short video a week. He sees it as a platform that can reach a different audience. He can put his message out and it’s unfiltered. It takes him about 5 minutes to knock them out. They give him three questions to answer and he just answers them and talks to people.

Blog Girl and Blog Boy dish about SouthWest

Up next are Blog Girl and Blog Boy from SouthWest airlines. They actually have names. They’re Paula and Brian.

Their blog isn’t the first blog in SouthWest. They had an earlier blog connected with the Adopt a Pilot program so they already had a background in blogging. They knew that the conversation regarding SouthWest was already going on online in other circumstances. They wanted to add their voice and control the conversation. About 18 months-2 years ago, they began exploring the idea of a corporate blog. They moved forward and created a presentation for their planning committee, who eventually bought off on the idea.

From them, blogging was natural. They’re from a company that is known for its transparency. They’re not afraid to take risks with exposing their employees to the public. The first blog when up in April of 2006. They have a team of 30 employees from all walks of the company. They have one officer that’s regular on the blog team, mechanics, flight attendants, etc.

Paula says blogging is a major time commitment. She has a full-time job outside of blogging. They’ve seen a huge media benefit from it. They’re constantly pitching bloggers to the media and their beat reporters are looking to the blog for information. They went into this with pretty pure intentions. They wanted to give employees a chance to interact with customers. It’s become a virtual focus group.

As an example, Dana talks about SouthWest’s open seating policy. Their CEO announced they were going to open seating and it blew up. There were about 700 comments with 85 percent of customers wanted assigned seating, NOT open seating. That post caught the attention of their executives.

(I have to say, I’m with the majority. I few SouthWest for the first time on my way up to Vegas and the open seating thing totally confused me. I had to text my BFF Tamar Weinberg on assistance. Could I sit anywhere? Like anywhere anywhere? I was confused.)

Dana almost mentions the mini skirt issue that hit the airwaves where a woman was kicked off a flight because her outfit was too revealing. It generated probably 1500 comments on the blog in a weekend. Sex sells.

They learned to have thicker skin because people got very personal and attacked Brian. Dana says they didn’t handle that situation as well as they could have. They didn’t do a good job of expressing their point of view and allowed brush fires to break out all over the Web.

The SouthWest blog is completely moderated. They feel like they have to do it to protect their brand. Brian says when they started the blog they had to worry about protecting intellectual property. That was the reason for the moderating. They have no problem posting extremely negative comments. They moderate out individual customer service questions (where’s my bag?) or personal attacks.

Question & Answer

So, SouthWest doesn’t allow any posts that are customer service issue to be up?

Brian: Not a specific individual. If someone has a concern in general, they’ll post that. It has to be of interest to everyone.

Dana: If it’s something that needs personal research or resolution, that’s not something we can answer on the blog. If it’s policy based, than that we would post.

Brian, explain your blogging users guide.

Brian: It lays out that it’s a moderated blog and offers the guidelines for what they will and won’t post. It’s also a “welcome to the blog”. They thought it was important to be upfront.

To John of Cisco: The PR person assigned to the particular blog post, do they edit or are they in charge of getting out in the blogosphere?

John: They push the content. They’ve gotten to the point where people are seeing the impact for what they can do with the blog. We don’t edit anything other than grammar.

How do any of you reach out to other bloggers?

John: We don’t have them blog on our site but we treat bloggers like reporters. We do outreach to them. We include them in announcements and pitch to them. We treat them similar and interact with them and give them a heads up if something’s coming.

Brian: We link out to other blogs too. We even have a link to the Delta airlines blog and they link to ours, as well.

We consult with a lot of Fortune 500 companies. How do you get an organization to make the investment to build the infrastructure and then feel compelled to join the blogosphere?

John: We’re cheap. We don’t pay for anything. We use Movable Type. It’s not a full time job for anybody. Everyone is contributing to the effort, from the blogging side, the IT side, to just looking for content. Yeah, it is kind of scary. We’re doing a real big push on internal blogs. From a workplace standpoint, we use them as a platform to have almost real-time conversation about a concept and turn it into a collaborative effort.

Pete: One of the cool things about blogging is that you can start for virtually no cost.

Dana: She thinks some their most contentious posts have been the best ones.

John: You have to be careful from a legal standpoint. You have to be able to accept some of that risk.

Do you have to have an inside evangelist?

Everyone says yes.

Brian: Not everyone should blog. The blog isn’t going to change your culture. It will just expose you. (Excellent point.)

Do you think it’s been easier for SouthWest given the culture of the company from the very beginning?

Dana: Yes. Our blog matches our culture. But Delta doesn’t have that same reputation and their blog seems to be doing okay.

Brian: Our legal department hasn’t even been involved in it because they’re used that kind of risk so it’s not a big deal for them.

Have you been asked by your organization to measure the result of your blogging? If so, how?

Jennifer: We get traffic reports, but that’s not what we were in it for. For us, it’s about the comments. If other blogs are picking up links off of our blog, that’s more what we’ve been looking at. Another big benefit has become that internally the blog is this place where employees can go to learn more about their own company. It’s become a mouthpiece for them.

Dana: A lot of the benefit for measurement is that nobody knows. Take all the great things that have gone on that month and show the execs. You define what success is.

What about internal blogs? What tricks have you learned are great for getting people interested in participating?

John: We don’t ask people to blog. People ask to blog. That’s kind of how we approach it internally. Encourage people to use RSS.

Ben: But that’s touchy. If it’s an internal blog, you have to make people use one specific feed because the feed isn’t public. You don’t want outsiders reading your internal blog.

Interesting stat: Only 1.5 of the companies offer a link to their blog from the home page.

With regard to moderation (comments, entries), we heard from the speakers from SouthWest. What are the other speakers policies? What’s the impact of delay?

Jennifer: We let the comments go up immediately. We have a person who gets copied in on the email and if she sees something, she’ll take it down. It’s a not a huge problem for them. They don’t get a lot of inappropriate comments.

John: They moderate and they get dinged sometimes for not being more immediate. They go through every comment before they post it.

Pete: It’s up to the individual blog owner to do that. A lot of the executives will do their own writing and farm out moderating to someone else. (Like a minion!)

Are any of you using the blog as an extension of your advertising campaigns?

Jennifer: Once in a great while if we’ve come out with a great product someone from development will talk about it on the blog. If they’re giving away stuff, they’ll blog about that.

Interesting Note: Debbie says the reason Google doesn’t allow comments on its main blog is simply because they don’t have time to moderate them.

What do you think about the CEO who will dictate thoughts and then someone on the staff edits it and publishes it?

John: The authenticity of some of the CEO blogs is certainly questionable. He recommends CEOs recording their posts and then publishing the audio so it’s in their own voice.

A ghostblogger in the audience chimes in. He ghostblogs for Fortune 500 CEOs, executives and his mother’s bed and breakfast. He disagrees that ghostblogging takes away from the authenticity of blogging. Blogging is no different from speech writing.

(Totally disagree. Blogging should be the total opposite of that. Someone remind me to blog about this next week. [*makes note* --Susan])

Dana says it depends on the person and the situation.

And with that it’s lunch time. Or at least time to charge my laptop. See you in the afternoon!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 8/07 at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Branding, Social Media

BlogWorld Opening Keynote: Matt Mullenwag

Good morning! I hope you guys had a hearty breakfast because with sessions running from 8:45am until after 6pm, we’ve got a long day ahead of us. Actually, I guess you get to go away and read these recaps whenever you want, huh? It’s only me that has to go straight through. Hmm, never mind then.

Staring things off will be a keynote with WordPress developer and Automattic founder Matt Mullenwag. Ed Sussman of Fast Company will be doing the interviewing. A big thanks to Fast Company for the pretty blue pens and note pads they’re handing out. If there’s anything I don’t have enough of it's promotional pens. :)

Okay, I’m done being snarky and it’s time to start. Huzzah!

Matt says this is the earliest he’s ever been up in Vegas. Nice. Is he even old enough to gamble? Seriously, how old is this kid? [Twenty three, according to Wikipedia. I feel old again. --Susan]

Matt explains how WordPress got started. At the time he was blogging the world’s worst blog and using Movable Type and taking lots of photos. He switched domains and began using an open source platform and was very happy with it. Over time the software he was using went away and he needed something else. Someone left a comment on his blog encouraging him to create something and he did.

He talks a bit about how he starting working CNET. Basically, they offered him a job with a great salary and said he could work on WordPress most of the time. Sweet deal. He was there for a year before founding Auttomatic. The idea being Automattic was that it was basically a hack. They’ve done two products – Akismet and a hosted version of WordPress. Those two projects are how he makes his money.

He has 18 people working for him. WordPress.com has 1 million global uniques. He’s one of the top 25 biggest sites in the United States.

Ed asks Matt how you stretch 18 people to support that big a site?

Matt responds that there’s a lot of caffeine. They hire very, very deliberately. About two people a quarter. They’re looking for the super stars. Open Source attracts great people. The first two years of WordPress there was no money to be made. People were doing it because they loved it. It wasn’t work, it was fun. They have one support guy for 1 million users. They’re looking for another guy to come and help him out. Heh.

Ed comments about how Matt is the number one “matt” on the Internet. He’s a head of Matt Damon, Matt Drudge, (Matt Cutts!) and everyone else.

What makes a compelling blog?

Matt says when he first approached blogging he thought it was something that was more unique and that it would need very specific tools. You had to have 14 posts on your front page, you had to have trackbacks enabled, etc. But as the media has matured, the one universal thing is that you have to find what’s unique about you and you have to love what you’re blogging about. You have to find that topic that you absolutely cannot NOT blog about. When you find that topic it just flows naturally. You’re thinking about your next blog post in the shower, while you’re putting your kids on the bus, etc.

Matt says the reason he blogs is for the comments. He likes the back and forth. We do too. You should all comment more. Go do it now and come back.

Okay? Good.

Ed asks what are some of the tricks bloggers can use to get noticed? How do you get visitors?

Matt comments that it might be idealistic but he thinks fantastic, passionate content rises to the top. There’s so much bland stuff and marketing copy out there and we all lose. He often reads the blogs of the people who leave comments on his blog. They support him so he tries to support them back. The beautiful thing is that if you’re following Technorati it makes it easy to find people who are talking about your or your subject area. You can find blogging friends that way.

Ed comments that social media and social networking are very buzzy right now. How do social networks and blogging and bloggers fit in together?

That’s a really good question, says Matt. He’s on a bunch of different social networks because his friends can’t decide on one and are all over the place. His social profiles are kind of crappy. He’s never sure who he should add. He thinks the best profile out there about him is his blog. If someone has a blog, he’ll read 6 months of archives and it will give him an idea of the person that is not possible from something else. He thinks blogs need to become a larger part of social networking profiles. Maybe that’s a widget, maybe that’s Facebook’s note feature on steroids. He doesn’t know. Matt comments that out of the box, WordPress doesn’t do a ton to help people with social networking.

[Just a note: It's almost impossible to hear in here. We’re about 10 feet from the exhibition hall with only a curtain to block the noise. Bad planning, people.]

What about the future of WordPress and your company? They’re not the same thing right?

No, they’re not.

Future of WordPress: I think on the Wordpress.org site, there are two different directions. On one hand, it's becoming more of a platform. It’s enabling more of these generic things. People are using it for amazing things. The software is getting small, faster and lighter but what you can do with it is growing up.

The other direction is that WordPress, at its core, is about writing and publishing to the Web. That’s the soul of WordPress. He still thinks in terms of writing on the Web, the tools suck, WordPress especially. You can’t take it offline. The comment system is really rough. There’s no identify that travels with you. There are things that are fundamental about blogging that they’re still not working. Blogging in five years will look nothing like it does right now. We want to make it easier for people to create stuff on the Web. There are a lot of technical barriers that they’re working to break down.

What’s the rough ratio between people doing video blogs vs text blogs? How’s that been going? Are you seeing trends?

Matt comments that some of his favorite blogs are photo-based because they’re rich media while still being scannable. You can’t scan a podcast. He thinks a lot of the video blog content is republished stuff. It’s not original content. It’s hard to upload giant files and code them just right. He’s still a fan of the written word. [Can I get a 'Hell yeah!'? --Susan]

What about Automattic? Where is that going in a year? In five years?

He likes the Craigslist model. If you ask them (Craigslist) why don’t have ads on the site, Craig says it's because the users didn’t ask for them. That’s what surprises Matt the most about Craigslist -- that they listen. A lot of the companies he interacts with are like a bad date. That person just doesn’t stop talking. They never ask you how you feel. There’s no back and forth. They don’t care how your chicken is. Matt wants WordPress to stay in line with their user base. They want to stay as small as possible, but logistically it’s going to get bigger. They’ll always be open source. It’s not a business decision, it’s a philosophical decision.

Are you actively planning strategies as to how you can better monetize? Is that in your forefront?

Making Automattic a for-profit company is a very conscious decision. They just took a small amount of investment money a few years ago, but if you look at the most successful companies, the stuff that’s had the biggest impact, they enable other people to profit. It’s about looking beyond just yourself and helping others. There are forms of advertising that are tasteful and forms of monetization that are tasteful, hopefully we’ll find them. I think you have to find your user model before your business model. They’re making money and they’re growing, but they haven’t found that perfect balance yet.

Question & Answer

This is going to be fun because there are no mics for the people asking the questions. So they have to shout. Heh.

What is WordPress’s mission?

To him, when he first started WP he thought, wow, this is totally going to democratize publishing. Web 2.0 allows for real interaction between people. He calls Open Source the future because it lends itself to the Googles of the world. If we can create a framework that is Open Source that allows not only the software, but the data to be open, that would be very cool. WordPress is a small slice of that. He wants a majority of the content that is published on the Web to be Open Source. They’re trying to find a tool that the world can use to publish with, for free.

How can political bloggers monetize their blogs?

The answer was to start two years ago. It’s one of those things that you have to start early. Political bloggers are incredibly seasonal. You may not catch this round, but for the next one, start now. Find the campaign managers and make friends with them. Learn as much about your readers as possible and then give that information over to the people who are writing your checks. Tell them who your readers are. (Um, ethical question there?)

Ed comments that he’s wondering whether this question gets to the one of the ethical questions which is do you have a hidden agenda where someone might be influencing your blog because they’re paying you money and you don’t make it totally transparent. He thinks that this is potentially an ethical problem with blogging.

Matt chimes back in saying that political blogs monetize terribly. He thinks things that sponsor posts without disclosure can kill blogs. It’s the biggest danger we’ve faced so far. This medium is trustworthy above everything else. Journalists have this code of ethics, but he trusts blogs more because he feels like its closer to the source. Sponsored posts, pay for posts, it can be a really corrupting influence. Your integrity is all you’ve got and once it’s gone, it’s just a matter of price.

Ending things, Matt says there will be a WordPress Meetup tonight at the Hard Rock at 6:30pm if you’re in town.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 8/07 at 10:11 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Social Media

November 7, 2007

Creating Conversations with Your Readers

Last session of the day features Alex Hillman and Jake McKee. Welcome, fellas.

Alex and Jake are going to interview each other and let us watch. Oh wonderful. This is going to be tons of fun to blog.

Let the fireside chat begin!

Alex asks Jake what kinds of blogs he reads.

Jake responds that a big part of the answer is the pre-work of that question. How much time do I have in a typical day? I have about 500 sites in my feed reader. Jake is a big believer in trying to get influence and input from as many mindsets as possible. He tries to include a lot of things that aren’t necessarily part of his core task. His feeds are categorized into groups. For sure he reads the Huffington Post, Commoncrap.com, and Socialcustomer.com every day.

Alex answers his own question, saying that since he’s from a fairly tech background, he reads a lot of design-based blogs. He namedrops 37 Signals. They don’t isolate the non-technical people, while still being able to excite the technical people.

Jake calls blogs great conversation tools because they give you the illusion of an individual conversation. Bloggers may not respond to every comment, but there’s this idea that if Mark Cuban responds to one comment, then everyone is part of a larger community. Readers think to themselves, hey, if Mark Cuban came into his blog and read that one comment, then he must have read mine too, right? Well, maybe, maybe not, but that’s the perception.

The best types of blog comment moderation are the ones where the only stuff that doesn’t make it through is the duplicates. You don’t want to moderate dissent. Pass as many comments through as you can and then try to engage the audience. If you have a good comment thread going on, it encourages people to keep visiting that post in order to see what’s being said.

Alex quizzes Jake on the idea of communities. He says we’ve talked a lot about different types of blogs and motivations for blogging. He thinks the one common thread is the concept of community. Alex asks what kinds of parallels Jake sees between what people try to do on their blogs and real world community building?

Jake says that good conversation is typically built on a good relationship. It requires a certain level of understanding or connection to a shared interest that you have to determine first. I think that any of these social media tools come down to how you build the relationships themselves. The “how you do it” part is actually much simpler than we think. A lot of clients don’t understand that we’re just building relationships. At the end of the day, just because we’re using one tool or another, doesn’t mean that offline relationships are any different from online relationships. Every relationship has its own different context.

In terms of building a community, Alex says you can test the waters with your audience and see what your readership responds to and what they won’t tolerate. It’s about eliciting the intended response and getting to know your audience.

Jake agrees and says it’s the getting of the intended response that’s crucial. Yes, you may write about things that are of interest only to you, but writing for yourself probably isn’t the purpose of your blog. Most people are looking for positive interaction with their audience. You have to find the balance where the readers are getting something out of it, but you’re also getting something out of as the blogger. You want everyone to go home happy.

Jake asks Alex more about the Coworking concept he mentioned last session.

Alex says that when they set out to do it, it makes more sense to do it than not. They have a lot of independent workers, so putting them all in the same place made sense. They set the foundation of how people will interact with each other.

Jake: How does the offline component come into play? We all have an offline presence, as well. How do we make that work together?

Alex answers that it’s about work/life balance. There’s only so much you can do online. Real face to face conversation is not the same as reading an emoticon. In a day to day interaction you have the ability to perceive things. You can only judge the quality of someone’s work based on track record. What better way to perceive their track record than by looking at their work history? It sounds good, but all of that can be forged. Instead, with coworking when you’re working side-by-side, you can watch others work and see how they interact. You can see if that’s someone you want to work with or not. Working with others helps you to understand real human interactions, which in turn allows you to be more success interacting online because it increases your ability to perceive things. If the majority of what you’re doing online you’re going to be less likely to perceive things online.

[My brain is now mush.]

Jake mentions how Engadget has its meetups and an interesting phenomenon that seems to occur. He says that if you read their blog comments the week after the meetup, the whole tone changes. There’s not as much snipping, people are talking to one another and engaging. Aw, how sweet. People acting like grown ups.

Why do people go to conferences? Because they want to check up on what their friends are doing. Yes, we have Twitter and blogs, but it’s so much more gratifying to hear it face to face.

Alex comments that he was just reading something about how people tend to blog at extreme emotional moments. He says this is why blogs provide such a terrible view of the world, all people see are the extremes.

[Jake questions Alex about his company’s relationship with their sponsor Belkin. To be honest, I tuned out. The short story is that Belkin has been super supportive, and that no, just because they’re a sponsor, it doesn’t mean Alex has to paint his walls with pro-Belkin material.]

I did catch this snippet regarding their partnership:

“The goal is to make their walls not be the same as the banner ad column as a blog. That’s not sustainable because eventually the customer will get banner blindness. The goal was to create sustainable relationships. They’ll give us a product, we’ll continue to use it. When things go well we’ll talk about it, when they don’t, we’ll go back and tell them about it.”

Jake asks: How much difference do you see between online vs offline these days?

Alex responds that his line is so blurry that he needs glasses to see it. He thinks there’s a lot of room for professionals to come in and help social media people figure out where the end is. The reason a lot of people work themselves to the bone is because they’re so passionate that it’s really hard to turn themselves off. Where is the line?

Jake: Is there any difference between today and a few years ago in how people do things online vs offline?

Alex: Meeting people online first and meeting people offline second has become way more acceptable. A few years ago if you told someone you were meeting someone you met online, they would assume it was a date and that it was creepy. Today it is far more acceptable. (Unless you’re telling your mother. Then she’ll make you promise you’ll bring mace.)

Jake: Have you seen any good examples of bloggers connecting people?

Alex responds that he’s done it personally. For example, someone may leave a comment on his blog about something he’s not well versed on. Alex will then help the person out by putting them in touch with someone who is an expert. It’s part of creating non-redundant communities.

[I feel like I need to mention that it’s really hard to pay attention to this session when neither one of the speakers are looking at the audience. They’re just addressing one another and it makes me feel rude to keep staring at them!]

Jake: How come we see so much distinction between the social networking functions online and my ability to leave a comment on a blog?

[What?? – Lisa]

Alex apparently understood the question and says it's an evolution of utility. There are things like Open ID where when somebody comments you can click on their Open ID name and get access to a wide variety of resources about them. Privacy may be another reason. Sometimes you comment some place and you don’t want people to know where else you’ve been. I think it’s difficult for the contribution to be as valuable without context. Without identity you lose a large amount of that context.

And that’s it. More blogging coverage tomorrow. I’m off to figure out what this whole “Vegas” thing is about.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Social Media

Survival Tips for Network Bloggers

Back from lunch and listening to some kickass Evanescence in the session room. I’m rocking out. You guys are totally missing it. Anyway, it’s time for some more blogging. Blogging is delicious. So are Oreos. I wish I had some Oreos.

This time around our panelists are Leora Zellman and Mary Jo Manzanares. Not that I’m keeping track but it’s the first time all day we’ve seen women on the panel. It’s about time.

Mary Jo asks: Why do we blog? In order to thrive as a blogger you have to know what your motivation is.

Leora blogs for a living. It’s her main source of income. She’s supporting her husband and their two bunny rabbits. It’s something she loves to do. It was a hobby but now she’s getting paid for it.

Mary Jo says she has a day job so she has stability and benefits. She does it because its fun and because it helps establish her and gives her credibility. She says it’s important to identify why you blog so that you can set your own goals.

A Day In The Life Of A Blogger

Both panelists describe what it’s like to be a full-time blogger.

Mary Joe outlines a typical day and says the biggest struggle for her is not to become a recluse when she’s at home. She can sit in front of the computer, have her coffee and never get out of her sweats. She looks the same at 5am as she does at 5pm. Being a recluse sounds fun but it’s really not. You have to find the balance between your day job and doing nothing but sitting at the computer. That balance is vital. Her blogging is more fact-based than opinion-based so she has to do a lot of research at home. She carries a notebook and file folder wherever she goes. She picks up guidebooks at hotels, rips things out of magazines, takes flyers, etc. She picks out information when she travels that she can use at home.

She recommends keeping an editorial calendar. Plan out your week/month so that you’re writing about a variety of different topics. Schedule your blog posts and what you’ll publish and when.

She says also spends a fair amount of time Stumbling, reading blogs and doing that kind of stuff. She also leaves event posts on Craigslist that send her a lot of traffic.

Now it’s Leora’s turn. She says that she, too, blogs in her pajamas. She encourages bloggers to get out of their houses and write in coffee shops so that they’re interacting with other people.

What do you do when your hobby becomes your job? When Leora was little, she told her parents she wanted to watch TV today and they laughed at her. Now she’s an entertainment blogger so that’s all she does -- watch TV all day. She needed to find a new way to unwind. You still need to have your relaxation time. You need outside hobbies. She started volunteering at an animal shelter. It’s relaxing to her because it has nothing to do with blogging.

The Interpersonal Stuff

Set dedicated work hours. It’s easy when you work at home to work constantly. Set hours and stick to them. Do not blog from bed. Have an office or a desk that is dedicated to your work. It will help keep you organized.

Leora has Skype buddies that she can virtually poke over the cubicle because it’s very difficult to be by yourself every day.

Hold on to your offline friends, as well! Don’t let those relationships dwindle away.

Blogging is emotional. You have to have people who you can call and talk to and who will agree with you and tell you that you’re wonderful and perfect to help you through the bad times. (This is why I keep Susan around. She lies to me and tells me that I’m pretty.)

Alex Hillman is in the audience and talks about Coworking, calling it the next evolution of the work place. It’s like a café that doesn’t kick you out. It’s a hybrid between a café and a desk. Coworking Wiki may help you find a Coworking group in your area. It helps to put your around other people. It’s a neat idea for creative people who are often stuck working alone.

Question: If blogging isn’t your full time job, how do set limits for yourself?

You have to set boundaries. A lot of it is trial and error. For Mary Jo, it is a maturing process. She’s become more selective about her time and what she says yes to. But she realizes that’s not easy. Therapists make thousands of dollars simply because people can’t set boundaries for themselves. You just have to work at it.

Hee! Greatest way to end a session ever.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 4:18 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging

Amping Up Your WordPress Blog

These sessions are flying by today. Probably because they’re about blogging and are oh-so-awesome. Up next are Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith to talk about amping up your WordPress blog aka “Taking WordPress to 11.” Sexy.

Brian starts off by saying that we’re here to talk about Word Perfect. Word Perfect? Yeah, he means Word Press.

Brian calls search engine optimization the key to getting your blog found. Huzzah for SEO! He advises to call a duck a duck. Don’t just make your site look great, make sure it’s doing the job of telling Google what is important on your site and that it’s driving the right kind of traffic to your articles. Make sure that your headers are all labeled with <h1> (and <h2>, <h3>, etc, as appropriate). Google is going to use your HTML as a clue to tell them what each page is about. Use a Google Sitemap to allow Google to come into your site and quickly find how your site is organized and what your site is about. Use the SEO Title plugin.

Brian talks about Matt Cutt’s WordCamp 2007 presentation and the duplicate content issues associated with WordPress blogs. To get around this, use a noindex, nofollow tag. Tris chimes in to say that the SEO Title Plugin actually does this for you. Good to know.

Mark says another great way to attract users is to create unique content. Sprinkle relevant keywords while you’re writing your posts. That doesn’t mean spamming it. Ask yourself: If you were trying to find your own content, what terms would you be searching for? Integrate those words into your content.

General Performance Issues

WP-Cache Plugin – Will help your server performance by caching all the pages it is serving out to your readers. This will increase response time.

If you have a lot of static files, it helps if you host them on another domain and on another machine. This helps performance-wise so that one machine is not trying to do both at the same time. It also helps because browsers are limited by the number of concurrent requests they can make to the same domain.

CSS <link />ed in the head section. Don’t use style tags. Just stick it in a single CSS file so that your browser can cache it and only request it once.

Put JavaScript at the end of the body since JavaScript can’t be loaded concurrently. If it’s in the middle, the page will half generate, pause, and then continue. By putting the JavaScript at the end, it allows the content to load first. People perceive this to be faster, which is important.

Optimize your blog for a better user experience, not server experience. Get a stopwatch. Start it, hit the site and stop it as soon as you can start reading the content. If you’re dong optimization and it’s not changing that number, what’s the benefit?

Most Common WordPress Plugins

• Subscribe to comments: Allows readers to really join the community of your blog. Whenever they add a comment to your site, there’s a check box they can click so that they’ll get an email any time someone else leaves a comment on that post. It’s a great to bring users back to your site.
• Related posts
• Clutter Free: Lets you take out sections of your blog that you don’t use (hence, removing the clutter). This includes fields like trackbacks. By just unchecking the box you can strip your interface down to the bare essentials.
• Akismet: Helps with comment spam. Every time a comment or pingback comes in, it gets submitted to the service, which then looks at IP addresses and other stuff, to decide if its spam or not spam.
• Spam Karma 2
• Bad Behavior: Ideally should be used with either Akismet or Spam Karma 2. It stops bad robots from accessing your site.

Spam Management

Even if you are using a spam plug-in, you should still use the greylist (moderation list) to help limit the amount of spam getting through. Be careful using the blacklist. Don’t just put keywords in there. Yes, 99 percent of comments mentioning “cialis” are spam, but sometimes people are just saying they’re a “specialist” and their comment is getting deleted. Heh, I heart Mark.

Wrap Up

Tris is sitting in the audience and comments on Defensio, a new spam plug-in that was just launched into public beta. He’s been playing with it for awhile and recommends it. He says its catches things better than Akismet. It rates the percentage of likelihood that its spam (80 percent, 90 percent). You can opt not to see things that are X percent likely to be spam.

Firefox has a great plugin called Firebug. It shows you exactly how your site is loading, how long it takes, at how the images are being loaded, how the CSS is formatted, etc. Brian calls it an “essential tool”, especially if you’re doing other Web design work.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 12:50 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization

Creating a Powerblogging Toolset

While my battery is dying, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Tris Hussey are here to talk about a Poweblogging Toolset. Toolset? Like the SEOToolSet? No? Never mind.

Marshall Kirkpatrick starts things off by introducing himself.

Powerblogging Basics

Tris says that these are the core tools you must be using. If you’re not, start now.

• Web Browser: Firefox or Flock
• RSS Reader: Bloglines, Google Reader or FeedDemon

Marshall joins in to talk about RSS, and according to him (or at least his slide), RSS feeds the need. He lists some of his favs:

• Google Reader/Mobile
• NewNewsWire (Mac)/FeedDemon (Win)
• Netvibes/Pageflakes
• Zaptxt
• Gmail Webclips
• Use feed consolidators to give you hot news
• aideRSS
• FeedHub

Every opportunity you have to see a headline increases the likelihood that you’ll clickthrough and won’t miss stuff.

Tris expands on the stuff Marshall listed. A must have add-on are the new feed aggregators like aideRSS and FeedHub. You export your feed list and it analyzes the content from all those feeds and tells you what the rest of the Internet is talking about. These aggregators help focus where your eyes can go. I have no idea what Tris is talking about but I’m definitely going to look into that when I get back to my hotel later tonight.

Marshall doesn’t use the kind of aggregators Tris talked about. He’s okay with leaving RSS feeds unread and declaring feed bankruptcy.

Building Relationships

Twitter is paying my rent – Marshall Kirkpatrick

He wrote a post a few weeks ago titled “Twitter is paying my rent” after noticing that he’s gotten 45 percent of his stories from stuff he’s picked up in Twitter. It was real high value stuff. He had 6 posts on the front page of Digg. Similarly, on Friday, he threw up a post on RWW about a conversation he had with an old man in a coffee shop who mentioned something he read in the paper, which Marshall then blogged and got a huge amount of traffic from. Grow your circle.

Blogging is about relationships in many, many ways. Your comments and your links to other blogs go a long way. When someone links to you, comment and say thank you. When you read something that you like, link to it. It forges a connection between you and someone else. That’s how you get stories, that’s how you get feedback, how you get Diggs, Stumbles, etc. That stuff all feeds into itself and gives you a rich blogging experience.

Marshall talks about the emails you get from people proposing to do a link exchange with your site. That’s cute, but there’s a better way to exchange links. It’s by linking to people you like. This helps your readers and puts you on other people’s radar.

Another set of resources he finds essential are the right search engines. He uses Ask’s Blog Search (w00t!) because they have the lowest amount of spam. They only index feeds that have a certain number of subscribers. (Really? Do they only index certain blogs? Interesting.)

Other search engines to monitor: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Google Custom Search Engine, and IceRocket. All of these searches have RSS feeds. Use them!

If you can organize your RSS feeds, make those your quick hits so you can flow through them quickly.

Other stuff to add to your blogging toolset: A Flickr account for photos and a microphone for recording. Pictures, video and audio make for richer blog posts.

Toolset Intangibles

There’s also that other stuff that helps your blogging like your speed and thoroughness, adding value, opinion, being sincere, and having passion and integrity.

If you’re not first, you can be the smartest.

Tris says one of things that bugs people the most about TechMeme is that when a big story breaks there’s 30 different posts but no one is saying anything new. If you can’t add any value to a discussion, don’t even bother commenting on it. Your readers can read that anywhere. Your readers what to know that Apple said this and this is why you care about it. They’re looking for the opinion.

For full throttle problogging use Paint.net or The Gimp for imaging editing and use offline blog editors like Windows Live Writer (Tris’ favorite), Ecto, Mars Edit, ScribeFire and Flock.

Wrap Up & Question and Answer

• Read, Read, Read
• Write, Write, Write
• Link, Link, Link
• Comment
• Blogging is still about passion and relationships; successful power bloggers keep feeding these.

Snitter is the best Twitter app out there.

How many blog entries should you post a day?

Tris says to do no more than 3-5 posts a day, unless it’s a real breaking news item that you have to publish. Beyond that people will just skip over your posts. You can watch your stats to see how people are interacting with your blog depending on how many posts you published. You can schedule your blog entries so that they’re published at regular intervals and readers don’t feel bombarded.

The final lesson from the boys: Scotch and blogging do mix.

We are definitely in Vegas, Toto.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 12:17 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Ask, BlogWorld Expo, Blogging

Thriving as a B-list Blogger

Leading this one are Jeremy Wright and Allen Stern to talk about attitudes regarding B-list bloggers.

Jeremy says there’s not a lot of value being added by A-listers. There are better sites than TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb out there. Blogging is about creating your personal A-list and reaching your own success goals.

Allen Stern is up first to rant a little. Oh goodie, Lisa likes rants.

As his company (CenterNetworks) has developed, it’s because harder and harder to grow. The A-listers and the aggregators are set up to promote the A-list and keep that group really tight. It’s hard to break into that group. If you look at a site like TechMeme, the way that it works is that the sites that are big get more presence than the sites that are new. The sites that get the big headlines are the A-listers, even if it was a little person that broke the story. Allen considers himself King of the B list. Heh, don’t we all?

He says to figure out your own goals. Not everyone wants to be on the A-list. He’s from New York. There is no second place there. As you grow as a blogger, it becomes more difficult. You have to find creative ways to get over that hump and get to the next level.

Jeremy quizzes the audience on their goals. Audience members say they want to provide information, enlighten people, and offer a unique point of view.

Tony Hung twittered in a question: How easy is to blog from the East Coast about Silicon Valley when you don’t live there?

Allen says being in New York, there is a huge opportunity. He moved there because no one was covering the area. It’s very hard to cover the Silicon Valley events because the local A-listers get access directly to the Facebooks, the Googles, the Yahoos, whereas in NY you don’t have that. In NY, you have a thriving Web community. There are benefits to being anywhere you are. This is the Internet, people.

Why did you start CenterNetworks? What are your key goals?

Allen: He started CenterNetworks to get a voice for consulting and to make sure people knew who he was and found his voice credible. The key goal when he started was to get work. He needed to make money. Now it’s to increase his reader base. He likes when people recognize him on the street.

Jeremy Wright jokes that he’s really big in Romania. Or, at least, I think he’s joking. Jeremy reminds me of my cousin Philip where I just nod and smile at everything he says and ask questions later.

Jeremy: What have you found are the key ways for you to grow your traffic?

Allen: In terms of content, what you’ll find is that the sexier stories are the ones that sell best on any of the social networks. He struggles with writing sexy stories or writing stuff people actually care about. He doesn’t get a tremendous amount of traffic from Twitter, but it allows him to share news quickly. It’s like a quicker RSS feed because it’s instant. One of the keys before you go out and play with these social sites is to make sure your server can handle it. Over time if your server can’t handle it, it’s going to look really bad.

Audience member Alex Hillman asks: How do you avoid the echochamber effect? That’s the biggest problem with the A-list. What are the sources you use to find original content?

Allen: That’s definitely a problem. In the tech category, that’s a huge issue. When Facebook comes out with their new advertising platform, you’re going to see a thousand posts about it and 90 percent of them are the same. He tries to stay away from that. People don’t want to read that. The key is determining what voice you can add to it. That’s what they want to read.

Jeremy: Are people coming to give you stories exclusively?

Allen: One of the coolest things about Center Networks is that four or five months ago, he started to get press releases when everybody else was getting them. In terms of exclusivity, he thinks everybody should get the news at the same time. He won’t name names because the session is being recorded. Hee. There are so many outlets out there today that having exclusives that he doesn’t think it’s important. For him, the key is just getting the news the same time they give it to everybody else. And by “everybody else”, he means the A-listers.

How do you find content on the site once it leaves the home page. How do you make sure people find it as a way to market yourself and your brand?

Allen: Last week he was speaking with four companies that all do something in this space. Having a search on the top, putting tabs on the page, etc, it ensures that people will always be able to find the good bits of content on your site.

Jeremy wants to interview other bloggers in his room. Watch as I crawl under the table.

He calls on Deb. She gets her content ideas from the comments she gets on her blog. Hmm, our comments are usually just people making fun of me.

How do you get your name out there?

Allen: It’s easy to submit your site to Digg or StumbleUpon, but you’re not going to get much. You get your name out there by joining the conversation and by seeing who’s talking about what you’re talking about. Leave a comment and leave a link to your blog. It opens up a dialogue. When someone comments on your blog, answer the comment. So many of the big bloggers out there don’t do that. He mentions Mark Cuban. He writes posts but never responds to their comments. Steve Rubel is the same way. He writes good posts but never responds to the comments.

Jeremy: Who are bloggers you look up to and why?

Allen: Tony Hung writes really good content. The guys at Read/WriteWeb. Outside of the tech center, Stephanie at Back In Skinny Jeans. There tons of blogs out there. Look outside the Technorati 100. Look at the top 1,000.

It’s much more important for you to be known in your community than for you to be an A-lister.

Alex Hillman joins the conversation again and says that by nature blogs give you the power to do that. Seth Godin talks about how your goal should be to be the best of what you do in the world. But you get to define your world.

Allen says the key is to know who your segment is. Create a business card with your blog on it and handing out when you meet people ensures they’ll remember who you are when they get home. He never realized the value of the business card, but in the blogging world, it’s really important that people know who you are.

Everybody who comes to my blog are bloggers. How do you get the non-bloggers?

Be creative. Use Facebook.

Allen recommends using Twitter even though he’s not the biggest fan. He thinks there’s a benefit there. You can reply to someone directly. That’s how you grow your tree and branch out. If you stay in your own network, you can’t grow.

Alex Hillman says don’t underestimate the power of natural search. Write titles the way people search.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 11:50 AM | Comments (1)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging

How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog

[I think I’m in the right room? There are lots of round tables with cups and saucers and silverware. Are we eating or are we blogging? Why am I the only one in the room? What’s going on?

...Okay, that was totally, definitely not the right room. But it’s okay because we’re better now. And I’m sure that the 200 yard dash I just did to get here on time will help balance out this giant cup of coffee I’m enjoying. Life is good. And I hear my luggage, which was accidentally sent to Omaha, should be arriving in Vegas shortly. Huzzah!

Okay we’re starting.]

Jeremy Wright is doing the introductions. I recognize Jeremy because he was at WordCamp. He explains that Brian Clark is not yet in Vegas so Tris Hussey is joining us in his place. Hi, Tris.

Funny title aside, this session is going talk about how to grow your traffic using social networks. We’re going to talk about Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Twitter. So basically, just another day at the office for us.

Bowing to the Digg Fanboys

Aaron Brazell starts the conversation talking about Digg, calling it the penultimate social network. It was the first site that took the whole concept of democracy online and the idea of what’s popular and what’s not and applied it to the Web. Stories go in, they’re submitted by users and then users can choose what gets popular and what doesn’t.

He uses a post he wrote that made it to Digg entitled HP Gives Consumers the Middle Finger that brought him 12,000 page views in an hour. Yowsa.

Tris says there are a couple of lessons in that. The headline Aaron used in the post was something Digg users like (i.e. it was inflammatory). Use things people can relate to. Controversial headlines get Dugg because people want to find out what it’s all about. Writing a good headline is really important. Many people will base their Digg almost entirely upon that.

Jeremy asks what happens when you get Dugg, become Digg popular and get this massive influx of traffic? He says that it has brought the b5media servers down plenty of times.

Digg users don’t like when you submit your own post. Its okay to Digg it yourself, but you have to get someone else to submit it. The submitter should have no visible connection to that network whatsoever. That makes it look like you’re not trying to game the system. If it seems like you’re a blog network trying to game the system, the Digg fanboys will toast it.

Aaron tries to define the concept of a “Digg fanboy” and say it is really important to understand how Digg works. Digg users are unlike any other group of users on the Internet. They defy logic in so many ways (hee!). He likens Diggers to gatekeepers. They’re guys between the ages of 18-24. They think they know more than you. You have to have thick skin in order to participate.

People who benefit the most from Digg are those working off a page view-based payment systems. Hardcore Diggers circulate their entire Internet activity around Digg. They’re not going to stick on your site. They’ll come in, see your story, they may Digg it, they may leave a comment, but then they’re going back to Digg. Don’t expect to get loyal users from Digg. It’s great for traffic and if you’re getting paid based on CPM. It’s not going to bring sticky users. Digg users come in swarms and then leave.

What About StumbleUpon?

Aaron talks about StumbleUpon. Unlike with Digg, it’s okay to submit your own stories. Aaron says he Stumbles every one of his.

Tris says that the great thing about StumbleUpon is that it works very well with Digg. He talks about the Digg Shouts (which I hate) where your friends can send you a “shout” asking you to Digg stuff for them. StumbleUpon will bring continuous traffic to you over time. (This is something we’ve seen a lot on the Bruce Clay site.)

What happens is that you Digg a post and then you Stumble it. It gives people a better chance for longer term traffic. What you do is hit the Stumble button and it will randomly pick another page that they think you’ll like based on listed preferences. The sites you submit and you say you like, your friends will get as well. This is why it’s good to Stumble all your own posts. It generates long term growth traffic. You’re not going to get a huge explosion, but you’ll get a nice, steady increase of traffic. As a growth strategy, it goes hand in hand with Digg.

Aaron brings up his traffic numbers to see the power of StumbleUpon. Basically, SU is his leading referrer.

Tris calls the Stumble button very much like the I’m Feeling Lucky Button on Google because you never know what you’re going to get.

Tris talks about Reddit and says it doesn’t have a lot of presence. I silently hiss. He says he also uses Delicious. It’s different in that it’s not a popularity driver, you’re sharing bookmarks. The power of Delicious is sharing links and having people subscribe to that link feed.

Twitter for Breaking News

Aaron says if you’re not using Twitter, you need to start. It’s his favorite social networking tool. It drives a tremendous amount of traffic when used properly. The best traffic, the sticky traffic, develops out of relationships, out of knowing and understanding people. With Twitter, it’s all about the relationships, who you’re following, who’s following you, etc. When you say, hey, I have a post here or I’m sending people to this link, it drives traffic.

Twitter is great for saying right now I am interviewing this person. It’s great for breaking news. It’s immediate.

Closing Thoughts & Key Tips

Digg is like playing the stock market. You can get a fast growth but then it might fall.
SU is like a money market. It grows over time.

Don’t Digg your own post. When you do Digg something, spread it around your network. When you Digg your friend's post, Stumble it.

The ultimate sticky traffic thing is Twitter because it’s all about relationships.

What do you think about Facebook?

Aaron – it hasn’t been fantastic for driving traffic. It’s great for relationships. He uses FB to import his RSS feed from his blog. His connections on FB are people he’s also engaging with via other social networking channels. It may be a way to expose your content to new people.

An audience member says that Digg is more male-oriented. If you have a post about saving money on something female oriented, it gets laughed off Digg. It’s better to Stumble your “girly” posts or make your headlines more masculine.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 7/07 at 11:30 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Social Media

November 2, 2007

BlogWorld & New Media Expo Session Schedule

‘Tis the time to tell you where I’m going to be and when for next week’s BlogWorld. Are you excited? I am. It will be my first-ever BlogWorld conference and my first time in Vegas. Trouble Lots of hard work and blogging is promised to take place.

Day 0: Tuesday, November 6, 2007

~ 1pm: Depart BC’s headquarters and head for the airport.
5:45pm: Arrive in Vegas.
5:47pm: Pray this is not the last time people see me alive.

Day 1: Wednesday, November 7, 2007

9:15am-10:00am: How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog
10:15am-11:00am: Thriving as a B-List Blogger
11:15am - 11:45am: Creating a Powerblogging Toolset
12:00pm-12:30pm: Amping Up Your WordPress Blog
2:30pm-3:15pm: Survival Tips for Network Bloggers
3:30pm- 4:15pm: Creating Conversations with Your Readers

Day 2: Thursday, November 8, 2007

8:45am-9:45am: Opening Keynote
10:15am-11:45am: Corporate & CEO Blogging
1:30pm-2:30pm: Building Your Online Reputation
2:45pm-3:45pm: Creating Conversations with your Readers
4:00pm-5:00pm: Finding Your Voice
5:15pm-6:15pm: The New Media Moguls Roundtable

7:30pm-9:30pm: Pajama Party at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel! (No, I’m not blogging this. I’m just excited. I shall wear my over the knee toe socks!)

Day 3: Friday, November 9, 2007

8:45am-9:45am: The Future of New Media Publishing Tools
10:15am-11:45am: The Cult of Blogging
1:30pm-2:30pm: Creating a Coherent Social Media Strategy
3:00pm-4:00pm: Building Relationships with Bloggers
4:15-5:15pm: Closing keynote with Mark Cuban (!)
5:30pm: Head to the airport and get back to Southern California!

I really looking forward to the BlogWorld show, however, I’m going sans my Bruce Clay and SEO posse. So, if you see me or a lost dark haired kid who you think may be me, do come up and say hello.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/ 2/07 at 1:42 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in BlogWorld Expo, Blogging, Social Media