Archive for the 'Blogs' Category
Web Directions North is a Wrap
There are many reasons why one should attend conferences. It’s a great way to meet new people, share ideas, learn from your peers and see what everyone else is doing. But more importantly, for me, the main reason is to convince myself that I’m not alone. Others have had the exact same problem and may have a solution that they can share. This year’s Web Direction North conference did just that.
Josh William, the founder of Firewheel Design and founder of my favourite invoicing system, blinksale gave a great talk on how he took his company from the bedroom to the boardroom. His presentation was very insightful and made me realize that some of the business issues I’ve been casually sweeping under the carpet, will need to be addressed soon.
Tara Hunt presented a series of examples where citizens have come together and created solutions to better their cities, transit and build better communities. Although I wish her talk would have provided more examples of government sites as the title had promised, she managed to convince me that we can’t wait for governments to take action and fix everything. By trusting their citizens, governments can use eager web developers who build websites and web applications and build better communities or change their way of thinking.
Indi Young also demonstrated how people are the ones who need to be listened to and influence the web. When coca-cola came up with their new formula a few years ago, they weren’t fixing any problem, but instead just focusing on their product and the result was a disaster. Innovation doesn’t happen when people create great products, but rather, when they fix people’s problems. Using mental models, Indi Young discussed a series of examples where she showed us that by asking the right questions she was then able to look at marketing and product opportunities. As a result, her mental models enabled me to think of a new way I can visualize web projects.
This year’s Web Directions North conference was a great showcase of how people are using Web 2.0 technology and web apps. The message that stood out for me, was that webmasters no longer have roles to play but every site needs a “community manager”. The Web is no longer about “The Company” or “The Man” but rather about communities. For the past year or so we’ve had a huge increase of requests for blogs and content management systems (cms) at Bluelime Media. As a result we’ve been building more and more sites using WordPress and our clients seem to be happy, but Boris Mann’s presentation made me think that other types of cms may be better or at least worth a look. I haven’t downloaded my copy of Drupal yet and I’m not 100% convinced, but I may need to follow his advice or at least attend a drupal templating meeting just to see what the fuss is all about.
As with every conference, my brain is full and I’m knackered, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Wired - Blog Post Mapping
The new Wired magazine arrived today and in it (p132) is a great map of “The Secret Life of a Blog Post” - a cartographic view of what happens between hitting publish and your post reaching its audience. Apparently when you post, your musing goes through several scrapes, pings, indexes and crawls automatically before reaching the reader.
Well that might be the case for blogs hosted in a blog service like Wordpress but I have found that for corporate branded blogs that are an extension of a companies web site that this is not the case at all: you have to do the legwork yourself if you want your blog to be picked up by all the right creepers.
Here are some tips:
- Always remember to set up auto pings or manual pings with blog engines like: Technorati so that these servers know your blog is out there and crawl it for updates and new posts.
- Remember also to submit the blog URL to search engines and set up auto pings with those too.
- And lastly submit your blog feeds to RSS aggregators or appropriate on-line media mashers.
Once you’ve done that go back to the 
map, track the process and you should be good.
Ways to leverage your Facebook network
The first concept in using Facebook (or any social media for that matter) is to stay top-of-mind with your friends/network. You can do that subtly by showing up in their news feed and more overtly by sending various invitations.
Concept 1: Stay top-of-mind in your network
There are a lot of different ways to show up in your friend’s news feeds. Here are a few:
- use status updates as a way to broadcast what’s new with you. Announce an event, a launch, something that interests you, or simply how you feel that day.
- import blog posts, shared RSS items, social bookmarks, etc. automatically into your profile. This also lets your network know about things that interest you.
- post photos of your life, work, events, etc.
- tag other’s photos
- seek your friends’ wisdom: ask questions with the “My Questions” app.
Concept 2: Expand your network
As well as reconnecting/staying in touch with people you already know, social media is a good way to make new connections. Here are a few ways to do that:
- join your Neighbourhood to meet people around you
- join a group that interests you, or start a new one and invite others to join. There’s bound to be a group that interests you.
- create an event on Facebook for a real-world event. You can send invitations and get RSVPs.
- set up a page for your business, product or organization. Invite your friends to become a fan of it. When they do, their friends will see “Jane Smith became a fan of…” in their news feeds.
I think with all social media it’s important to be authentic. If you share information or do activities that feel right for you then your friends are likely to accept it and may be interested in it. But if you post really pushy messages or do stuff that is clearly selling, you might push people away — into filtering your news out of their feed.
If you want to learn more about Facebook and marketing through social media, here are some good places to start:
- Capulet’s social media eBook - these guys know their stuff.
- 12 Ways to use Facebook Professionally
- 24 Ways to market in Facebook
- 6 Ways to promote your cause in Facebook
- How Non-profits can use Facebook
P.S. I wrote this post as part of a series of introductory tutorials on blogging and Facebook.
P.P.S. Tell us, have you observed or tried anything around networking in Facebook? What’s worked or not worked for you?
Don’t Risk Losing Control of Your Brand
At a new media session at CES that I attended last week the panelists cautioned companies to ignore new media (especially blogs and social networks) at their peril. If companies insist on being ostriches with their corporate heads in the sand, they risk losing control of their brand.
Last weeks furore over Tim Horton’s employees and their Facebook antics is a case in point. With over 3,400 members, the “Rules of Ordering and More” group lists 80 or so tips that customers should take to heart if they want good service. Apparently the group is administered by Timmy’s employees unbeknownst to their employer. Its actually quite funny - you should take a read.
Had Tim Hortons (the famous Canadian Donut franchise owned by Pepsico) been monitoring the Internet effectively, the company would have been aware of groups like this much sooner and could have put contingencies in place to protect its brand or HR policies to outline appropriate employee conduct on the Internet. Had it been more proactive it could have channeled the publicity it received last week to its benefit rather than detriment.
Companies cannot ignore web 2.0 technologies any longer. They must, at the very least, be listening to what is being said about them even if they are not ready to be contributing to the conversation: in that way they have a chance at least of maintaining some control over their brand.
Introducing W Media Ventures
We are happy to announce the launch of the W Media Ventures blog. Following a very successful career with adebooks, Boris Wertz left the company a few months ago to set up a new venture company. Together with long-term partner Burda Digital Ventures, W Media Ventures aims to partner with entrepreneurs that want to build remarkable companies in the fields of digital media, e-commerce, social networks or platforms. Their blog will provide updates from their portfolio companies, announce new investments and comment on industry news.
2007 was the year I fell in love with WordPress
A few posts ago I mentioned that business had changed at Bluelime Media. Here’s how. We started working with WordPress almost three years ago now but only sunk our teeth during the later part of this year. I owe it all to Haig Armen and Mark Busse over at Industrial Brand. I met with them back in the summer and we talked about possibly helping them out with some WP build. Mark assumed that the entire Bluelime website was done using WP. Only the Bluelime blog was using WP and at the time I had no idea how the whole site could be built with WP and just dismissed the idea. But I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head and if you’re reading this post from an RSS reader, you may want to check out our site. During the Christmas holiday while you we’re no doubt enjoying the festivities, I worked on setting up the whole site in WP. It was much easier than I thought and the result makes for a website that is much easier to maintain and update.
Of course this would not have been possible withouth the experience that we’ve gained this past few months. Setting up websites using WP just made so much sense. We use to build a lot of customized CMS. We’d set up the database and then build an admin interface, but WordPress just makes all that work disappear. Interestingly enough, WP can be used for sites who don’t even need to look like blogs. Threads Gazette is such a site. When setting up this website, we created a page for the home page, while posts from three different categories make up the content for the showroom, classifieds and events section. The Belvedere Senior Living website was created by setting up various pages, while the news section is the only one that using the “blogging” feature.
The best thing about WordPress is the number of plugins available. Every time myself of Tzaddi have thought, “how can we do this”, a simple search of the codex allowed us to find someone who had the same idea as us. I can’t help but feel a sense of power when working with WP and look forward to continuing building sites using this blogging platform.
Northern Voice 2008
Registration for Northern Voice 2008 is now open. This two day conference is an amazing conference for the price. Sixty dollars buys you two days of conference about blogging and social media. I learned a great deal last year and look forward to it this year. It sells out every year, so if you are interested,hurry up and register.
Getting to First Base
Now if that isn’t a catchy title, I don’t know what is. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo have just released their eBook Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. I’ve only read a bit of one sample chapter and already learned a great idea: to make a social media resource page on corporate websites. That would be similar to a press kit, but for the age of citizen journalism. They also include a quote from Dirty Dancing. How apropos.
Blogging at the VIFF
The Vancouver International Film Festival has come and gone for about a month now. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the blogs on the VIFF website. The way the website is set up makes it very hard to find any information about the films as each film has its own blog. I’ve been poking around their site and selecting films randomly and I finally found a few entries but nothing too exciting. As you can imagine, because their website is not user-friendly, there is no discussion to be found.
Blog Action Day was a Success
Thanks to the 20,603 blogs who participated, Blog Action Day was an unprecedented success. The statistics are staggering.
20,603 - Blog Participated
23,327 - Blog Posts (Google Blog Search)
14,631,038 - RSS Readers
You can view more statistics on their website and read selected articles.
Blog Action Day will be returning in 2008, bigger than ever. If you’d like to participate, check out their site and sign up.