Word on the street (OK, in MediaPost) is that Google is starting some very smart experimentation in e-commerce revenue solutions to bring in new revenue.
I think that’s a really smart move. As many successful online people like Brian Clark and Yaro Starek will tell you, you’re going to make a lot more money by actually selling something than by just trying to serve a lot of ads.
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As we start getting ready for the Blog Bling Mixer on the evening of October 23rd, I’ve started to throw ideas around in my head as to what tips I’m going to be sharing with people.
The mixer is meant to help people of all skill levels, so some tips will be geared at beginners (like how to add polls to your sidebar) and some will be aimed at more advanced users. Here I’m going to share one aimed at more advanced users: how to create a custom sidebar style.
Not everyone can go mucking about in their stylesheet directly, but chances are you can. In WordPress, for example, you can actually access your stylesheet right from the dashboard interface.
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Ars Technica already has a fairly thorough review of NPR’s new beta “NPR Community,” so for the nitty-gritty on how it all works, I’ll let you read their post.
The NPR Community reminds me a lot of the New York Times social experiment dubbed Times People that debuted several months ago. At the time, I called it a new social network, much like Ars refers to NPR Community as a new social network.
In retrospect, I’d change my verbiage: these are not new social networks.
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I get the Online Media Daily in my inbox every day, and yesterday they carried an article about the lawsuit that Electronic Arts is facing as a result of the DRM software bundled with their new, fantastically fun game called Spore.
For those of you who aren’t closely following the case (I think that’s probably most of you), the problem is that Spore came bundled with a set of anti-piracy software that, among other thing, limits you from installing the game on more than three computers, ever.
In other words, if you think you’re going to have more than three different computers from this point on in the rest of your life, and you want to keep playing Spore for the rest of your life (admittedly unlikely), you’re SOL.
But the real issue here is how completely EA mistrusts its customers.
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I just found Twitter Counter. You know those little feed chicklets that feedburner provides so that you can show off your high feed count? Twitter Counter basically provides the same kind of chicklet to show off your high follower count:
Yet another little tool to add to the list of cool Twitter-related utilities like TweetStats, which gives you graphs like this:
I think we’re still seeing the first wave of Twitter API innovation.
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As Mari Smith correctly notes in her basic guide on how to create and promote Facebook fan pages, fan pages get indexed in search engines, unlike anything else you do in Facebook.
That’s pretty cool, because Facebook is a pretty giant presence on the web, and most of it isn’t crawled by Google or other search engines. Just Fan pages.
If you’re lost at sea in the Social Media world, setting up a Facebook page can be one of the more basic but confusing (yes that makes sense) steps to take - it allows your brand to have a presence on Facebook without breaking the Terms of Service, or more importantly, the social norms within the community.
Go check out Mari’s guide - it’s pretty complete.
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That’s kind of a silly question. In social media, your picture is incredibly important. It’s how people learn to spot your tweets or see if you’ve RSVPd for an event on Facebook.
Mari Smith and Tris Hussey, both people who know very well what they’re talking about, recently tweeted about the importance of having a picture that looks like you:
Trishussey: Tip for conferences: Use a good pic of yourself for Twitter etc. It’s easier to put a face with a name that way. Goes double for Facebook.
Marismith: Upload your avatar to http://gravatar.com
Many blogs use Gravatar to pull in pics of commentors. Helps w/ visibility to have your pic.
Of course, I recently wrote a list of 21 ways to promote your business on Twitter where I recommended making your twitter icon your business logo. So which is it? Your business? Or yourself?
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Back in March I said that Twitter is the new Facebook. So far the hype is living up to expectations. With all kinds of businesses starting to talk about the potential behind Twitter, I still think we are at the beginning of the bell curve.
As the flood gates open, it’s going to become increasingly important that your social media strategy involve spending time on Twitter.
For many businesses, social media is a scary place, and Twitter is no exception. But consumers are increasingly tired of corporate messaging, and they want to find companies with real people that they can relate to. Twitter is an excellent tool for that.
Here are 21 ways to market your business on Twitter.
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“[TagTrade's] judgment has often proved to be more accurate than the company’s official forecasts.”
If you read Groundswell, the book by Josh Bernhoff and Charlene Li from Forrester Research, then you’re already familiar with Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, the internal social network where employees are invited to gripe about company policy or parts of the system that are broken.
But you might not have heard of TagTrade yet, the company “stock market,” where employees are given $1 million fake dollars to trade stock on various projects, products, or strategies.
I just finished reading a Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) about it, and I’m really impressed with how Best Buy is embracing the wisdom of their employees using social software tools.
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Have you ever stared at someone else’s blog, wondering how they managed to get that polls widget in the sidebar, or why their images don’t run over the edge of the page, or what font they picked (because it looks way better than yours)?
If not, chances are you could show people how to do all of these things.
We’re announcing the Blog Bling Mixer, to be hosted at Thinkspace in Redmond on October 23rd 2008 starting at 6:00 and running until 8:00, give or take a bottle of wine.
The idea is to get a bunch of local bloggers together to share their tips and strategies for making online real-estate look snazzy.
Those who know their way around their blogging engines will have a chance to show off their mad skillz, and bloggers who are just getting started can get the instruction they need to bend sidebars to their will.
The mixer is open to bloggers of all technical skill levels.
I’ll be sharing a few tips on blog layout - things like adding Google Ads below your posts or how to build a cool-looking custom style for something in your sidebar. Thinkspace’s very own Peter Chee will be showing off how he set up his super-sweet polling widget.
RSVPs aren’t required for getting in the door, but it would really help us do the legwork right. If you think you’re going to show up, drop us a comment below saying “I’m going,” or “Me too,” or “Phleebledorp” or something to let us know you’re coming.
Alternately, you can RSVP on Facebook or drop your name in the bucket over at Upcoming.
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There’s no question that Twitter is quickly becoming an essential tool for business promotion. Top bloggers are building their audience on Twitter. Reporters and editors are mining their tweeps (twitter peeps) for tips and breaking news.
Take a look at the picture in the top right of this post. Those are the top referring URLs to Web Community Forum today. After direct traffic, it’s number four on the list. Fred Wilson recently showed a similar breakdown for his blog A VC.
As a business, the question is obvious: How do you build your business brand on Twitter?
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We’re hosting a presentation for small business owners and operators here in Redmond at our office on sept 26, 2008. The focus is on business blogging. Our great new digs are at Thinkspace, hope to see you here.
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“Listen to any song in the world for free,” invites the home page at Grooveshark, and as far as I can tell, it lets you do exactly that.
I was fortunate enough to meet Steve Spalding and Nate Thompson at Gnomedex, and had a chance to talk to them a little bit about their service. They’re diving into the social music space along with the familiar players Last.fm and Pandora, although their model is a little bit different (and probably a little bit smarter).
Grooveshark plans to make its real money from selling analytics back to the record companies, indie labels, or individual bands who use their service.
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When I introduce myself as a social media strategist, the second most common question people ask me is “How do I know if social media would help my business?” (the most common is “what exactly does that mean you do?”).
The truth is that social media is not the best strategy for every company in the world. But it can be useful in a surprisingly large number of businesses.
Why? Because the web is a long tail of niche markets, and owning that niche effectively can be as powerful as being the most well-known store in town.
There are three important questions you can ask about your business to find out if using social media makes sense for you. Let’s look at an example.
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I decided that it’s been long overdue for us to do a comprehensive review of all the major blog search engines. Several planets aligned that made me decide this was the time.
1) The ongoing effort on the behalf of clients to feed our sentiment tagging engine with complete and accurate content as it appears. For our band monitoring projects it’s search results that get analyzed for sentiment, so we want to capture all the posts that matter.
2) To make sure we’re prepared for our big CES blogger bash, we need to identify all the bloggers who work the consumer electronics beat.
3) Splogs are threatening the social media ecosystem, and I am curious as to which engines are managing the problem well (or not so well.)
4) I just wanted to see how the MacBook Air stacks up against the new HP Voodoo Envy.
So far, 5 engines have been analyzed for the results the provide. More are being added.
We’ve categorized the results as mostly either “original content” (the good stuff) or “splogs” (the bad stuff) with a few other categories we’ll describe in a later post.
At this stage, let’s look at just the results deemed to be original content. See the graphic below. On the left you can see we have dozens of individual sites deemed “good” and what engines displayed them when I searched using HP Voodoo Envy along with Macbook Air terms.
Engadget content was captured only by Digg and Technorati, while Gear Live was captured only by Digg, FriendFeed, and Twitter.
Some quick conclusions can be reached here. One interesting one is that Technorati captured the greatest number of relevant posts. Note that since they offer the option to filter by authority, I took advantage of that and sought only sites with “a lot of authority.”
The big conclusion is for complete brand monitoring you can’t get away with using one engine alone. Even two won’t likely cut it. A bunch of sites were presented by Technorati that Google missed and vice versa. FriendFeed captured links that Technorati and Google both missed etc.
More to come…
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