Google Is The Number 1 Lead Generator

logo-Google At least in our company, we get most of our client’s through Google searches done by companies looking for a blogging consultant or looking to hire a blogger for their company.  I ran through our client list to see the number of companies that have contacted us to provide a professional blogger or to consult them on a social media campaign.  One of the things that struck me was that a large number of them that had reached us or found us as a result of a Google search.

The conversation that prompted me to look at this in this light was a phone call from a prospective client.  We had discussed our services and he was happy with our business model and thought that we would probably do business in the future.  He then told that he had a difficult time finding a service such as ours, but eventually had found it through search.  He explained the roundabout way he happened upon our site, and I recognized a common theme to his search.  Everyone of the other clients had a similar story.

As a small business without a corps of sale people and without a huge marketing budget and a advertising team providing our message, we rely solely upon word of mouth, and being findable.  I preach the same to each of our clients.  In order for your business to be successful, it has to be findable.  It’s nice to see the sermon actually works for me as well.

 

The Death and Perhaps Destruction of a Social Network: A Sad But True Story

soflowlogo In the early part of 2005, I became a member of a social network called Soflow.  This social network was an early vision of its founders.  They could see the future and power of growing one’s profile and gathering contacts for business, and other benefits.  I thought that it was such a good idea, I also invested some of my own time and energy to become a moderator of a group within the network called “Blog Buzz”. 

We would discuss everything doing with the blogosphere and itsblogbuzz_small affect on  business, including advertising, marketing and PR.  The group became 220 members strong and this was before the time of mass invitations we see now with social networks.  There were over 150 forums started and some great conversations took place as a result.  Many advertisers, marketers and PR people were able to enter into the forum and ask simple questions, difficult questions, and ask for suggestions on growing a blog readership, what platforms were available and what blogs could do and what they were capable of accomplishing.  I decided it was important enough of a group to migrate it over and make it a Facebook Group.

Adrants was also a group located in the Soflow network and it had over 4000+ members according to Steve Hall.  It was probably the largest group in the network, but nonetheless, following what people are saying now about the networks’ demise, it’s like losing your favorite pet.  People love to have a place to go and talk with like minded people.  This is what makes social networks so popular.  It’s like a 24/7 cocktail hour. 

 So what are they going to do with all of the data, and all of the information and the gathering of people that have joined in Soflow? At this point it is unclear.  Perhaps the back end will throw a switch and all of that information and wonderful and informative content will be lost.  It this point I know that that principals appear to be moving on to a new application and have asked all of the members to migrate to anwisdmlogo application called Wis.dm.  My feeling is that the people at Soflow could not compete with the likes of Facebook or Myspace, and decided that they could not keep a hold on the people that they had nor could they garner more subscribers.   Wis.dm is obviously not the same type of network as Soflow, but perhaps it was the business model that they wanted to change.  It makes me wonder why there was no purchase of the network or perhaps a merging with Facebook or another network.  The doors close on Soflow on July 31, 2007.  I hope I can resurrect the group to continue the conversation.

 

A Product Problem is Great Blog Fodder

One of our clients have a great communication tool in their hands with a contact page on their blog.  Many people that have purchased their product can come and get information about the products they sell and the industry news and information about the company.  In this particular case, a customer-service consumer had a problem with their product after purchase.  They found the blog on the company website or through a search engine, and used the contact page on the blog.  They could have also used the comment section of the blog as well, but chose to use the contact form.  They explained their problem in the contact page and the blogger was able to immediately help them connect with the proper person to correct their problem or to allow an exchange of the product if necessary.  This all seems very common in many cases, but it also provides a great opportunity to show other consumers that you are on top of customer concerns and work hard to resolve their problems if needed. This scenario offered a chance to post an article about the product problem, the reporting of the problem, and any resolution that has occurred as a result.  This allows other customers to find perhaps the same problem and use the same process for resolution.  A blog can also serve as a great customer service tool, and the resulting service can be used for some very important blog fodder.

[photo by Customers Rock]

 

Truth Can Lead To Involuntary Transparency

Transparency always comes at a price.  Normally the price is honesty and integrity, but sometimes it can come in the form of justice and wrath.  While following along with Twitter today, Anil Dash of Six Apart provided a link to a post by Adam Kuban at the Serious Eats blog that comments on an article in the Wall Street Journal by David Kesmodel and John R. Wilke about comments in forums by “Rahobed”. Now that all the attribution is out of the way let’s discuss the story.

wfimage It seems that John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, has been out in the web acting as the pseudonymous Rahobed, a backward spelling of his wife’s name Deborah, and posting in forums and other places about Whole Foods and its competitor Wild Oats.  I am always amazed at what can be found by using some backend tools to uncover the identity of commenters on blogs and those in forums.  This seems to be the gist of his comments:

“Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing …. OATS has no value and no future.”

Should he have used his own name? Perhaps commenting and conversing in forums was not the best way to achieve the conversation about his industry.  I might suggest that instead of acting as a sock puppet and making comments and disparaging statements about rivals in forums, it may have been better for Mr. Mackey to have started a blog to discuss his thoughts on the industry, about his competitors or what he thought about his own haircut.

Yes, it is a fine line when dealing as a public company where any misstated item could come back to haunt a company.  Statements made to manipulate stock prices is obviously illegal, and of course any slanderous comments or libelous articles still come with criminal penalties as well as civil.  This can all be a difficult path, but a CEO of a corporation should not be out there on the Web doing this type of activity.  For the obvious reason of the possibility of getting caught.  The results now are for worse than if he had just started the John Mackey blog.

 

Social Networks Bring Families Together

I was reading some of the Twitter entries I received from my friends when I ran across an entry from Jeremiah Owyang.  I enjoy reading his blog and he always comes up with some really cool links.  He said I should check out a new application for genealogy enthusiasts called Geni.com.GeniBeta  We talk so much here about how social media and social networks can help a business, we rarely speak about how it all can help a family become closer or how it can educate a person on their everyday life.

I have a huge mountain of notes about my family and my wife’s family that has been collecting dust in my office, so I decided I would give it a try.  I opened the app, and in no time I was adding names and information to our family tree.  14 hours later, I was beginning to see more John’s and Mary’s in our tree, and I may have married some that were not previously married and gave children to those that didn’t have any previous to my addition.  I looked up and I had added 579 profiles of people with birth dates, dates of death and other random information.  I discovered I had some really cool tidbits and other information that I am able to share with the rest of the family.  My wife’s tree actually goes back to the late 1600′s in Talbot County, Maryland.

Now comes the social networking part of the application.  Every time I add a profile, it gives me the ability to invite that person via email to join the network.  Now I know that most of the people I entered either are deceased or would not have a clue how to answer email, but for a number of family members, I was able to send them an invite to join in and begin their own branches of that family tree.  My Aunt was able to fill in some details and my brother’s wife was able to start her own branch and came up with a number of names herself.  This is acts like a quasi-wiki in that other family members can add information and tidbits about relatives from stories and information about our family history.

It also allows us to download pictures of family members and adds those to the profile page of every person entered.  Granted I may not have a picture of that sea Captain from Norway in 1895, but I do have a picture I can scan of my Great-Great Grandmother, that somehow made it into a copier and was sent around 15 years ago.  Technology is allowing us to share and do so much more online, and now I can share that information with family I have never met and have never before seen.  If they have an email and want to join in the family network, it will really bring us together.

 

Too Many Social Networks Causes Headaches

I’ve been hearing of many people getting to the point of overload on the number of social networks they belong to and the number of networks they are following.  I have a handle on the feeling and have experienced the same headaches that many suffer from as a result.facebooklogo

I spent Sunday actually building my community of social networks.  I try to make sure that I always know how to use the tools available and to be knowledgeable about the use of the latest of the networks out there.  The first social network I tackled was Facebook.  This seems to be one of the largest growing social networks lately and I decided I better get on that  bandwagon.  I added friends I knew and some I actually didn’t know personally.  My apologies if I sent you an invite to be my twitterfriend as I ran the easy to ask application that spams all your email files. 

I have been an early adopter of the Twitter social network and have really enjoyed Twitter as a way to follow along with my friends, clients, and peers.  I have spent a long time growing the number of friends and the number of followers to my Twitter page.  This does cause problems when you ever want to switch to another social network that might be very similar or the next generation.  Such a thing happened when I decided to check out the Twitterish type of application in Jaiku.images

Jaiku was the next type of Twitter type social network that offered a different user interface and some other features.  I was not very enamored with the service and barely stayed long enough to see if it was worth my time.  It was not the most favorite of networks following the Twitter explosion, and was launched to close to the same time.  This was not the same with the latest of networks to launch.

pownce_logo The next network I decided to try was Pownce.  This network in my opinion launched at just the right time.  They took the best attributes or the other networks, expanded them somewhat and made it very nice to look at as well as operate.  I was able to grow this community much faster than I was when Twitter first came on and it could be because I promoted the building of my Pownce page and community through the use of Twitter, which in itself is an irony.

www.STADTAUS.com_btn3910742 Tomorrow is our scheduled radio show at Blog Talk Radio.   We will be discussing this new onslaught of social networks and we will talk about the headaches others are having as a result of trying to keep up with the the madness.  We are always going to be able to tell our clients about these applications and how best to keep up with them.  Our most beneficial service is actually providing a social media manager or community watcher for companies. 

UPDATE:  [7-3-07]  Thanks to BL Ochman through Twitter, she points us to an article by Mashable about Mini Blogging, where they compare 8 different applications.

 

FeedBurner FeedFlares give your RSS feeds and posts an added kick

Are you using FeedBurner to republish your blog’s RSS feed?  Yes?  Awesome!  Now are you using their FeedFlare service/feature?  No?  Well you should, not because it’s cool (okay it is, but that’s not why), but because FeedFlares give both your feed and blog posts added boosts that can help promote your blog, make it easier to subscribe to, and make it easier to submit to social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon).  From DoshDosh come their 15 favourite FeedFlares:

If you?re using Feedburner to manage the site feeds for your blog, you might have noticed the Feedflares option, which allows you to include a simple footer at the bottom of each blog post in your feed.

According to Feedburner, this allows your feed subscribers to easily email, tag, share or act upon the content that you?ve published.

These feedflares can promote your blog posts outside the boundaries of feed readers: Utilizing them effectively can considerably impact how your subscribers interact with your blog. Source: 15 Feedburner Feedflares that Promote Your Content and Website

In case you’re wondering, I generally activate these for all our client sites that we design and develop.  Not using FeedFlares is like getting hot, fresh, homemade bread put on the table and not using the butter that is sitting right there.

Blog layouts are versatile, powerful, and adaptable–Just ask AOL News

Thought the very familiar three-column layout that typifies was only for blogs or bloggy things?  Think again, the “blog style layout” is excellent for any information-rich website, just ask AOL News:

The new design lays out news in an blog-like fashion, with excerpts of all the day’s main stories laid out chronologically from top to bottom. Source: AOL launches new blog-like news site – Download Squad

I talked about one facet of the Download Squad’s point, which is, does the blog-style layout work, on my own blog, here I’m going to look at another facet; using blog templates for “general” websites.

As blog engines, WordPress especially, have matured, they are becoming very real options for companies to run their whole web presence on top of.  Of course a blog engine tends to use a blog template, not just the technology of templates, but the whole blog-style.  Columns, excerpts, sidebars.  All of these features are what we recognize blogs as having, but think about how you can use these things on your own site.  Highlight a new promotion on a sidebar.  Have a quote displayed from an asides category.  Powerful and easier to implement than even a couple of years ago.

Think you are limited in design options?  Think again.  There are thousands of free templates available for WordPress alone.  Take one of those templates, modify it to suit your tastes, needs, even colour scheme, and viola! You have an amazing, easy to read, powerful website.

Again, if you don’t believe me, ask AOL.

The Digg Nation Not My Blog Log Community

digg A couple of days ago, Tris wrote a blog post for the b5Media blog he writes for at Pimp Your Work, and the post made it to page 1 of Digg.  In that post he did a link to this site as an example of how to  do an email signature.  As a result, the all the people at Digg also came to this site following the link.  The mention caused us to get approximately 100 people an hour visiting the blog.

I followed along with the spike in traffic and looked a little at where the people that were coming to the site were coming from and looking at patterns.  I checked the analytics, and was wondering if this increased our subscribers or perhaps whether it made for more readers that would return. 

mybloglog Finally, I looked over at the My Blog Log widget in our sidebar and it dawned on me that the visitors it showed had not changed for most of the day.  Those of you that know how that widget works, when you visit a site with the widget installed, and you are also a member of the My Blog Log community, your avatar shows in the widget.  I explain this because with hundreds of new visitors that day, none of them were members of My Blog Log.  This meant that the people at Digg (what we call the Digg Nation) are not also members of the My Blog Log Community.

This makes me wonder if people go with one social network and stay with that network, not also belonging to other groups.  Do people go with Facebook and not also go with MySpace?  If you use one tool do you not always use a competitor tool?  One thing for sure, with all of those visitors, if they had been My Blog Log members, that widget would have been smoking.

 

BTW…WordPress 2.2.1 released

 Although I might have been able to blog this first last night…

WordPress 2.2.1 is now available for download. WordPress 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release. Some of the highlighted bug fixes include:

[snip]

The upgrade from WordPress 2.2 to 2.2.1 went smoothly for me. However, I had to go back to the original version of ExecPHP. I had mod the codes in order for ExecPHP to work with 2.2. Since 2.2.1 addressed that bug, my ExecPHP plugin didn?t work until I switch back to the original.

If you?re still on WordPress 2.1, then now would be the time to upgrade to the latest WordPress. WordPress 2.2.1 Available For Download John Chow

 I opted to sleep and then work today.  Like upgrading about a dozen client blogs, friends’ blogs (yes I have friends), and our blogs to WP 2.2.1.  Yes, 2.2 just came out, I know.  Yes, 2.2 started out as a nice to have then became a “do it, do it right freakin’ now” upgrade, at least there isn’t any doubt this time.

It’s also a pretty easy update.  It didn’t force a database upgrade so I just needed upload the new files and overwrite (unlike John above).

Also as much as we might complain, the improvements to WP over the past year are quite amazing.  Now maybe I’ll wander down the street and see if Lloyd is up coding.

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