You Need Your Own Disclosures Page. Here’s How.

On January 14, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
DVD cover for Full Disclosure - Copyright 1989...

Full Disclosure

If you publish content (whatever that may be) about the industry you work in, I think you have an ethical obligation to disclose any potential conflicts.

It is not practical to disclose conflicts of interest in every tweet, blog post, location check in and Facebook status update. You’re going to miss something sometime. So I highly recommend that you build a disclosures page.

With the FTC rules  yet to be clarified it’s better to be safe that sorry. The FTC guidelines will require case law to determine what they actually mean and trust me you don’t want to be the case.

This is a really simple fix:

  1. Create one about page for all your disclosures. It doesn’t have to just be disclosures, it can be one all inclusive “about” page.
  2. Link to that page from all of your accounts.

Because I have so many places I publish to I wrote a post on my Posterous site www.tacanderson.com/tac-anderson. On this page I link to all my blogs, my employer and a separate more detailed disclosures page. I now link to this page from all of my profile pages (I’m sure there are a few I’ve missed but as I find them I’ll change them).

This is something that most reporters, especially in the business sector, do.  Kara Swisher has an Ethics Statement on her WSJ blog

Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

From there she links to a page which lists EVERYTHING. She was right that it lists more than you want to know.

What if you don’t have a blog? You could use LinkedIn this way. You could also use a Google Profile page or even a single post to a blog site like Posterous Tumblr or WordPress.

Am I just being paranoid? How are you handling this? Do you have your disclosures posted somewhere? Leave me a link, I’d love to see your approach.

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Bloggers Love Self Reflection

On January 4, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
FriendFeed vs Twitter

I do so enjoy self-reflection. I’d promise this is my last reflective look of 2009 but I’m afraid I’d make a liar out of myself.

Off to the right of this blog you’ll see the Top 10 posts according to the WordPress Popularity Contest widget as well as the Top 10 posts according to PostRank. PostRank puts a premium on recent activity while Popularity Contest puts a premium on overall activity which is why you see the discrepancy between the two.  Here are my top 10 posts of 2009 based solely on Traffic:

  1. This is Why Google Scares the Sh*t Out of Companies
  2. There is NOT too much information
  3. My GTD Moleskine Hacks
  4. Forget, Unfriend. The new put down is the Un-Retweet.
  5. Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious.
  6. Leaving HP. Back to Agency Life.
  7. On Being an Influencer and Marketing as Media
  8. Wikipedia is the best thing ever!
  9. You Do Not Have to be Social Media Famous.
  10. Top 5 Predictions for the Next 5 Years in Business Social Media

[UPDATE] Melanie over at PostRank sent this for me as well. Thanks.

While you’re waiting with bated breath for the Top Blogs, to equalize out the post rankings between WordPress and PostRank a bit, I took a quick look at your analytics in our system and pulled up your top posts for the year according to PostRank. (The widget only looks at the last 50 posts, so this is for the whole year, based on total engagement points per post, which I’ve noted in brackets at the end of each title.)

  • Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious. – Nov. 4 (643)
  • Leaving HP. Back to Agency Life. – Apr. 20 (641)
  • You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Aug. 27 (435)
  • This is Why Google Scares the Sh*t Out of Companies – Oct. 29 (411)
  • On Being an Influencer and Marketing as Media – Sept. 25 (324)
  • You Do Not Have to be Social Media Famous. – Aug. 10 (284)
  • Brizzly is Funny. Obviously Wants to Be More than a Twitter Client. – Oct. 3 (270)
  • Top 5 Predictions for the Next 5 Years in Business Social Media – Dec. 21 (262)
  • Twitter for News and Facebook for Tech? – Oct. 17 (259)
  • So Shut the Tweet Up! – Aug. 7 (249)
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Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious.

On November 4, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
Image representing Posterous as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Posterous has been gaining a lot of attention lately. Most people see it as a great way to fill that gap between a tweet and a blog. Some people see it as a next generation content management systems for the Web. Other people see it as a lifestream. Whatever you want to call it Posterous is gaining in popularity.

One of the biggest drivers of technology adoption is the group known as curators or collectors. This is the noise 10% on Twitter sharing all those links. It’s also the group that flocked to FriendFeed. It’s that same profile that made Delicious the early New Media breakout service 5 years ago. That is until it got acquired by Yahoo.

In my (not so) humble opinion, the biggest missed opportunity was all that valuable data Delicious users where creating. They tag, curate, comment on and share tens of thousands(?) of links a day, the very thing that has been, arguably, the biggest value of Twitter.

del.ff.post

But I’ve seen a trend lately. A lot of people I follow on Posterous and Twitter have started using Posterous for their curation and sharing instead of Delicious or FriendFeed.

Granted this isn’t a fair comparison because Posterous wasn’t intended to be a competitor to Delicious but between great features, a very slick bookmarklet and integration into services like Feedly it becomes a much more feature rich substitute for bookmarking.

On top of that Twitter favorites and Reader shares are also starting to replace this saving and curating activity. It’s still too early to tell if Delicious traffic is really headed down or if it’s just monthly movement but for what it’s worth my favorite bookmarking service Diigo has had slow but steady growth. Of course they have a ton of features Delicious doesn’t have.

Why is any of this random speculation and juxtaposition of traffic data worthy of a blog post? Because as I mentioned before, the curator/collector group is a powerful group if companies can tap into it like Twitter is and Delicious/Yahoo failed to.

What say you?

[UPDATE] It looks like Delicious managed to stay ahead of Posterous for the time being. But I wonder for how long?

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Being a Social Media Ninja

On October 23, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I’ve blogged here almost every day but not yesterday. But I did post, A LOT not just here. Why? Well because I was putting into practice some of the things I’ve been talking about here and consulting on with my client. I actually got to get my hands dirty, something I don’t do much of lately when I’m just doing strategy for clients.

I got to help launch Microsoft’s first store yesterday. I’ll be down in Callifornia next week opening the Mission Viejo store too. It was a great experience. You can see everything I was doing here on the Microsoft Store Posterous site.

It’s been great and we’ve had some wonderful success I’ll share with you when it’s all said and done (I’ll also share some valuable lessons about dealing with haters and trolls) but for now I’ll leave you with a clip from a post I wrote back in July:

New Comm Biz » Be a Social Media Black Belt with Posterous

If you’re on top of things managing your social media you have a Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account plus a blog. If not go do that right now. Even for the most conservative companies out there, it’s pretty standard now to have Twitter, Flickr and YouTube set up. If you don’t and you think your company/client won’t go for it, try asking, you might be surprised.

If nothing else YOU should have a Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account. If not, I don’t know why you’re reading this.

Now to earning that Black Belt: (For the benefit of those with uber anal legal departments we’ll leave out blogs).

Assuming you now have all 4 of these accounts set up (Posterous, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter) go into your ‘Autopost to Everywhere’ setting in Posterous and enable posting to these other accounts. You can also set to post to Vimeo, Facebook, Delicious, your blog and many other services, but we’ll focus on the big three because they’re the ones I use the most.

Now take a picture or a video on your phone and send to post@posterous.com. If you sent a picture, you just posted to Posterous, Flickr and Twitter. If it was a video you just posted to Posterous, YouTube and Twitter. Score!

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What the Heck is a Lifestream?

On October 16, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Waves of energy from the Lifestream
Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday at day 1 of BlogWorld, I sat in on Steve Rubel’s presentation on Lifestreaming and business. He had some solid observations and recommendations for businesses to become ubiquitous Online. If you’re familliar with Steve’s blog (if you’re not you need to be) or read this blog regularly then you’re familliar with most of what was discussed.

He talked about Posterous (which BTW is pronounced ‘pause-terous’ not ‘post-erous’ like I thought) and how he uses it for a hub and spoke model of publishing. I’ve never thought of Posterous as Lifestreaming. FriendFeed to me ia lifestreaming.

While Steve calls Posterous his Lifestream I don’t really see Steve using it like that. To me Lifestreaming implies a certain ammount of frequency of posting. Steve has only posted 12 times this month to his Posterous account. His Twitter account has significantly more and FriendFeed has even more than that because it pulls in several of his Online services.Now my point isn’t to nitpick on Steve. Honestly my personal take that if Steve wants to call his site his life stream then that’s what it is. Heck, he could call his Twitter account, corporate bio page or his cat his Lifestream and that’d be fine with me (okay maybe not the cat).

But it raised an interesting question for me; What is Lifestreaming? So I asked Steve what he thought. The general concensus is that the practicle application of a what is a Lifestream is still being determined. But he did recommend the Lifestream Blog, which I found has a pretty good description of what a Lifestream is on it’s about page:

What is a Lifestream?

In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it.

Where did Lifestreaming Originate?

Lifestreaming originated as a concept in 1996 as a project at Yale by Eric Freeman and David Galernter. The original concept has come to fruition with the ability to create and distribute content utilizing many new technologies. Here is an interview with David Galernter where he provides more insight.

At this point I don’t think it matters that much what people call their Lifestream, but like I’ve said before we have these debates in order to come to some comcensous and that standard definitions are important to moving the industry forward.

So I’d like to know how do you define Lifestreaming? What does it mean to you?

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How to Blog. A Lot.

On September 24, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Playing with the TypeDrawing app.
Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

I get asked a lot lately how I’m able to blog so much. If you look at the bottom of my right hand column you’ll see I’ve had this blog for ~2 1/2 years. You’ll also see that as of the first of this year, my posting went up dramatically. Here’s how dramatically:

  • For the first 23 months I posted 242 times. That’s just over 2 posts a week
  • For the last 9 months I posted 293 times. That’s about 8 posts a week

What happened? I got serious about blogging.

The first step is to decide to blog every single day and then do it.

The best advice I ever received about blogging came From Jeremiah Owyang. He told me to take the first hour of my day and before I do anything else to read blogs and then blog. He also told me that a post should only take twice as long as an email of the same length.

Some days you may not feel like you have much to say. Some posts will be better than others. But over time you will get better. This is the only reason I watch my stats. If my visits, subscribers and number of times people share my posts goes up, I’m doing a good job.

Be a collector and use the tools.

I use Google Reader w/ Feedly, Twitter’s Favorites and Diigo to collect interesting things I find as I read throughout the day. I also use my Posterous site to collect things when I’m mobile. Then when an idea reaches critical mass I use ScribeFire or Windows Live Writer to pull it all together when I’m ready to write.

Zemanta then helps speed up the process by recommending links and pictures to use.

Remember: I am not advocating that popular blogs have to post everyday. The goal of posting every day is not quantity. The goal is consistently good content. But in order to get there you first have to blog a lot.

This is the short answer. Every blogger has tools, tips and tricks that work for them and there are probably hundreds of blogs dedicated to blogging. But until you make the commitment to start blogging regularly all the tools in the world won’t help you.

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How Do You Prioritize Your Social Media?

On September 2, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...
Image by luc legay via Flickr

I’ve recently received a few inquiries from friends. They’ve noticed that I haven’t been as conversational on Twitter lately. I still highly value the conversations on Twitter I just don’t actively participate as much as I used to.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you know that I’ve been busy. (That statement was made as yet another entry to the understatement of the year award).I have several mechanisms set up to allow me to continue to post *to* Twitter but you can’t automate conversation (nor should you try).

FriendFeed allows me to cross post items I share in Google Reader or songs I bookmark in Pandora from FriendFeed to Twitter. Posterous allows me to automagically post my short thoughts, pics, screen grabs and collections of ods and ends from Posterous to Twitter (and Flickr and YouTube and Facebook) which all end up in FriendFeed (BTW Mark Z, I know you’re reading this and give a rat’s ass what I think, but please don’t shut down FriendFeed, ever. kthnxby).

With my ever-shrinking, finite time I have to prioritize where and how I participate. I love Twitter. It is my social network of choice. But, for me, blogging is too valuable to ever give up. It’s become an integral part of my thinking process. It’s so bad that half the strategy docs I write for clients sound like blog posts. It’s an easy style for me. Even when I have something that’s not appropriate for the blog I have to send a a blog style email to someone to get it out of my head.

My hierarchy of social media goes something like this:

  • Google Reader
  • Blog/Posterous
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Yammer

There’s a very real long tail effect here. I start my day with Google Reader at 5:00 a.m. and check it constantly through the day, sharing the posts I find most interesting. Between my blog and my Posterous account I average 10-15 (or more) posts a week. Tweetdeck is running constantly at work and I check it frequently, I just don’t jump into many conversations. FriendFeed usually gets checked a few times a day and Facebook about once a day. LinkedIn and Yammer get maybe one or two visits a month.

What about you. Where are your social media priorities?

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Why Would You NOT Blog?

On August 20, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Playing with the TypeDrawing app.
Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

Following yesterday’s post (and months of posts really) about how easy Posterous makes blogging, why would you NOT blog? Seriously it’s so freaking easy?

If sending an email is too tough, check out Tumblr. Pulling an RSS feed doesn’t get any easier. Check out my music blog http://tacanderson.tumblr.com/. The only thing I have to do is use the bookmark song feature for songs I like in Pandora or tags certain bookmarks in my Diigo as ‘music’.

It doesn’t get any easier than that!!!

I know, you think you have to have something really important to say. That’s just plain stupid. Start writing and posting and you’ll come up with good stuff to say. You’re not going for a book deal you’re learning and engaging with people. It’s the online version of what you do every day.

You don’t even need a blog to blog. Flickr, FriendFeed, Delicious, StumbleUpon and even Google Reader shared items have “blogs”.

If for some reason you still don’t have a blog start with Delicious. Start bookmarking and curating interesting content. We can work with you from there.

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Mobile App Blogging Thanks to Posterous: Regator vs MeeHive vs Byline

On August 19, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

If you haven’t noticed, I like Posterous. I think they may have single handedly made email relevant for me again. Here’s my Posterous blog. I also like using tools in ways they weren’t meant to be used. That’s the case with this post. Please note that none of these apps were designed for mobile blogging so my review of them is completely irrelevant to the real reason people made them.

The main way I use Posterous is for mobile blogging. If I’m at me desk I’d just as soon use Windows Live Writer with the Zemanta plugin. Most of my mobile blogging is done from Byline. Byline is an amazing app that synchs with Google Reader making my RSS feeds portable. Byline is my secret weapon for reading hundreds of blog posts a day. But Byline has another cool feature: Mail Link to this Page. The mail a link option in many mobile news readers turns them into a mobile blogging app thanks to Posterous.

Last night Louis Gray turned me on to two new apps. Regator and MeeHive.

My problem with Byline is that it’s a little ugly for blogging. Heck it’s even a little ugly for an email. The link it sends is the feed proxy link not the Web URL or permalink.

My typical process is to copy and paste a section of the post, then select the email a link option. This redirects me to the iPhone’s mail program which I have linked to my Gmail account. I then paste the pull quote, edit the message of the email, which is the title of post and usually add a sentence or two of my own thinking.

Bellow is a screen shots of a post I did with Byline. As you can see the link at the end of the article is kind of ugly.

Byline

Byline2

It’s a little dirty but it works. Posterous is even kind enough to convert wordpress.com into a link even though I didn’t send it over than way.

Next are two quick posts done with MeeHive and Regator:

MeeHive

MeeHive1

Regator

Regator2

Regator wins hands down for pretty links. Even if you’re only sending an email and not blogging it seems like a hyperlink would be nicer to get than a raw proxy link. Granted if they view email in plain text then it will separate the link out anyway but it can’t be any worse.

MeeHive did a cool thing though when I highlighted text it inserted that into the email. That was cool.

No real conclusion here, I’ll continue to use whatever app I’m in to do quick blogs but I have to wonder if, as blogging continues to get easier, this is something app builders will need to take into account.

Anyone else out there mobile blog? Any tips or tricks?

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Posterous plus PostRank equals Pretty Cool

On August 12, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

I love it when I get to talk about how to combine multiple products into something even cooler. This is one such post. This may not be new to some of you but I just figured it out.

Do you use Posterous? (If you haven’t set one up yet email your reason why to post@posterous.com if you’d like to set one up email the same address.)

Do you subscribe to lots of other Posterous blogs? If you’re like me you do and I get them all in one daily email. I had thought of going through each account and subscribing individually to each post. But that was too much work so I haven’t yet. The problem with the emails is there are too many of them and they aren’t mobile friendly.

The other problem is that people use Posterous like a scrapbook. Not those frilly scrapbooks where people spend hundreds of hours making them into works of art but real scrap books where we keep all our raw thoughts and collections of stuff.

That’s a lot of noise. Good noise but still noise. How do you filter just the good ones?

Fortunately I found a fix to both problems.

You will need FireFox (my stats tell me that’s half of you), Google Reader (the 800 lb gorilla in the feed reader market), and your PostRank account.

If you have all of those go to this address http://www.postrank.com/postrank/firefox and install the FireFox extension. Now go to this address http://posterous.com/reader and subscribe to that feed in Google Reader (assuming you haven’t already).

PostRankerous

PostRankerous

What you’re seeing is PostRank rankings next to each Posterous post. It’s on a scale of 1.0 to 10.0 and the darker the orange the bigger the number. If I use the drop down menu I can just select to view All, Good, Great or Best. If I’m in a hury this allows me to quickly filter out a certain level of noise and get to the good stuff.

The great thing about the PostRank plugin is that it works with all your Google reader items. But I usually use Feedly to view those if I’m on the Web. (Hey Feedly meet PostRank. PostRank meet Feedly. It would be *really* cool if I could combine those two services.)

And by subscribing to the reader view, anytime I follow a new Posterous account it is automatically added to that feed. Brilliant! Love it.

Photo credit: Tac Anderson

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