From the category archives:

Blogs

Why There’s Room for Mahalo (and Microsoft!): Google’s Algorithms are Woefully Lacking

by Steve Broback on May 21, 2008

Okay, so there’s a lot to love about Google’s efforts that go beyond search, (Google Docs and Reader are awesome IMHO…) but I sense that they may be neglecting their core business in a big way.

We all know that a Google Blog Search largely results in — well, crap. We’ve made a small business out of de-spamming the results for clients. As most people who monitor brands can tell you, the posts that appear in these searches are largely garbage, which means that to most surfers, the spammers are winning. This is also the foundation for Calcanis‘ offering — Mahalo.

Yet in one case we know of intimately, a high page rank site with almost four years of consistent quality content delivery, and thousands of inbound links from trusted sources (Like Scoble, Rubel, Molly, Matt, Jeremiah, etc, etc.) has apparently been incorrectly delisted. Our Blog Business Summit site no longer exists (as far as Google is concerned….)

Why? We don’t know for sure — but our best guess is a post made on May 5th where we discussed two popular blogs (and listed the search terms they rank highly for) apparently raised the ire of the robots controlled by engineers in Mountain View.

Two days after we published hundreds of terms related to digital photography on a high page rank site that didn’t fall inside our usual subject area, our traffic plummeted, and clicks from Google searches dropped literally to zero.

C’mon guys, check out who is linking to, and talking about the site. How smart does an algorithm have to be to know that we’re legit? Especially when search results these days are riddled with dross.

We had a client recently come to us wanting help in leveraging facebook — not because clicks to their sites were not satisfactory, but because they wanted to diversify themselves away from Google-generated traffic. They felt the level of dependence was unsound. We agree.

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“Built to build relationships” - How SobCon Grew a Conference from a Comment Box

by Teresa Valdez Klein on January 17, 2008

Liz Strauss is easily one of the top ten people I look up to in the social media space. On top of being a real sweetheart, she’s got a wonderful instinct for community building. After our last chat, I went back to my blog and implemented some of her community building strategies. Lo and behold, I’ve seen a huge increase in the quality and frequency of comments on my blog. And thanks to the stellar input of my good friend and co-blogger Andy, great conversations — like this one — happen with encouraging regularity.

Given Liz’s penchant for community building on her blog, it’s no surprise that her conference — SOBCon, now in its second year — grew completely out of the community of commenters on her blog. I called her up in Chicago to talk about how this all worked.

Liz took over her blog — www.successful-blog.com — in December of 2005. For the past two years, she’s been building it into a community of bloggers. “I didn’t want it to be about blogging,” she told me. “I wanted it to be about bloggers.”

She began hosting open comment nights on Tuesdays. The conversations that took place, she says, were like “Twitter on Quaaludes.” That is, they were complete conversations, run more like a chat room than a stream of consciousness. Just like at a neighborhood bar, the regulars began to develop relationships with one another.

Very soon, commenters were suggesting a real-world open comment night. Everyone would come to Chicago, they joked, and do the whole thing in person. And thus, SOBCon was born. [click to continue...]

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Josh Hallett: Mostly Right About Blog Monitoring, But Not About Sentiment Analysis

by Steve Broback on October 23, 2007

Social Media guru Josh Hallet posted on 10/21 that he was at the PRSA show and was investigating blog monitoring tools.

“There are a number of firms that all ’say’ they can automate the monitoring of blogs (social media) and provide metrics, tonality, sentiment analysis, etc. It should be noted that a number of these services cost a pretty good amount of $$$.

What’s interesting about the search is the I have long said (as have many of the colleagues in this industry that I know/trust/respect) that the free tools and a trained staffer can do the same thing.”

I totally agree that many expensive services offer the same functionality that can be achieved with a staffer, but I don’t agree that sentiment analysis is a slam dunk. There is no free service offering that except ours (while in testing.) True, a staffer can do it, but an automated system can shave many hours that staffers would spend down to almost zero. We can easily process hundreds of posts in minutes.

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How to Bring Multiple RSS Feeds into Facebook - A Facebook Tutorial

by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 29, 2007

Many of us geeky Web-oriented types have blogs — sometimes more than one of them. And it’s only natural that we should want to share all the goings-on in our bloggy worlds with our network inside Facebook. We want to share our content and our opinions because sharing content starts conversations, and conversations start communities.

Just look at Scoble. His blog is a community in and of itself, but he’s using Facebook to suck in his content. He’s starting a conversation inside Facebook and that has expanded and enhanced his ability to build community around his passions and interests.

It’s commonly known that Facebook allows you to suck in only one RSS feed, but with a little trickery using Google Reader and Feedburner, you too can bring two or more RSS feeds safely and effectively into Facebook. Here’s how:
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