Marketers as Aggregators Creators and Distributors

On June 25, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

As I get ready to call it a day and I reflect back on all the content I created (I’m sure I’ll have several less subscribers tomorrow), I’m struck by the importance of workflow.

People think that 2 or 3 blog posts is hard. It’s really not. I didn’t create that much new content that I wasn’t going to create anyway. What you read today was content from emails, social bookmarking and tweets. What was original content was expanded thoughts building off of that content or heated, in the moment thoughts as I discovered something new or thought provoking.

I’ve also posted using multiple tools. I’ve used Windows Live Writer and Scribefire, both with the Zemanta plugin. I’ve posted text, pictures and audio. I’ve used the WordPress blog interface, Diigo and Gmail via Posterous (right now I’m writing on my iTouch in Gmail). In addition to the content you see here there were also posts to the Studio D WaggEd blog, posts on Posterous that didn’t make it hear and a post to my Tumblr blog. Plus I have 3 posts already for tomorrow.

And I did all this with a full day of client meetings and still getting deliverables done on time.

I do all this not because I think you are all that interested in my every thought (actually I think I over did it today) but because I know that other than strategic thinking the ability to create and distribute targeted, real time content will be marketers #1 most needed skillset. #2 is the ability to teach that to others. And the only way to do that is to know the tools and they aren’t word processors and presentation decks.

Posted via email from Zemashup

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • • • •
 
View Comments Comments
Leave A Response

How I moved up 300 spots in AdAge’s Power 150 in 4 months

On May 5, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

How I moved up 300 spots in AdAge’s Power 150 in 4 months

First off I would like to say that I do not blog for fame or fortune. I don’t think having a high ranking blog is ever a means to an end. But gaining greater exposure to you content can help meet many a marketing goal. I have said in the past that I blog for three main reason:

  1. I believe that blogging makes you smarter. I would continue to blog if no one ever read this blog. Believe me that there were many times when it really felt like that.
  2. I learned so much from all of you and all of the blogs I read that blogging  is my small attempt to give a little something back. It’s with that intent that I share this post.
  3. By learning what works here on this blog I am able to apply that in my work.

When I started this blog I signed it up for the AdAge Power 150 list not with any hopes of having a high ranking but mostly because I could (so can you if you have a marketing focused blog). The name of the list is a little misleading, there are actually almost 1,000 blogs. If you’re not familiar with the 150 you can get the back story and methodology here. I’d like to point out that there are many great blogs ranked lower than this one that I think are far better. There are also many, many blogs not even listed on the 150 that would crush mine if they were on the list.

Just give me the goods

Don’t want to read this long post but just want my tips? Here they are.

  1. Blog 3 times a day or close to it
  2. Use the right tools
  3. Find a network and engage

Blogging 3 times a day

One of my New Years goals (I don’t really do resolutions) was to blog much more often. I try and blog every day, multiple times a day if I can. But I don’t kill myself trying to do it.

This was the first trick to moving my blog up the ranking. since I first added my blog to the Power 150 this blog was always listed in the 400’s somewhere. (As of this writing I’m at 148. Who knows how long that will last.) Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere found that one thing all of the top blogs had in common was that, on average, they post at least 3 times a day.

What’s funny about that is that 3 times a day has been the Golden Rule of blogging forever. It’s considered the magic number for SEO and it appears to be the magic number for attracting readers.

I don’t have time to do 3 huge posts a day. Honestly I don’t average 3 posts a day and there are many, many successful blogs that only post a few times a week. But if you’re wanting to make your blog better, blogging more often makes you a better writer and keeps people coming back.

Using the right tools

Like I said, I don’t have time for 3 long blog posts a day. Instead I try to throw out several short posts a day and a few longer ones each week. As I’m reading all the various blogs and news each morning, I come across articles that I find particularly interesting and I feel I have some value added thoughts to add. I use the ScribeFire blog editor to grab a link and some quoted text, I add my thoughts (be it what they may) then use Zemanta to add images, links and some related posts then hit post. The whole processs takes about 10 minutes on average.

ScribeFire lets me post quick short posts as I’m reading inspiring material. Zemanta allows me to quickly add all the extra stuff that makes a post a little extra special. Zemanta is also a valuable tool for gaining links, helping me discover other similar blogs and help my blog get discovered on other blogs by adding my posts to the related articles suggestions.

These are the tools that work for me but it’s important to find the ones that work for you.

Find a community and engage

This one ranks second only to having valuable content. One could argue that it is just as important for having a successful blog because if people can’t find your great content then it won’t matter.

I blog a lot about Twitter because I think it’s super cool. I also blog about it because it has by far been the highest value community I’ve been involved in. By being as engaged as I have been with Twitter it has allowed me to meet some wonderful people, share stuff I find cool and allow me to promote my own blog in the process.

Social networks are the #1 source of traffic to my blog. That’s a huge difference from last year. Last year Google was the main source of traffic. This year of all the social networks, Twitter is the main source of traffic.

Weather it’s Twitter, FriendFeed, a network of your favorite blogs, an email distribution list, whatever; get engaged, comment, share.

Beyond even that the main value I get out of being engaged on Twitter is the feedback. The community involvement makes me not just a better blogger but also a better marketer.

Final Thoughts

Much of my progress has corresponded with AdAge’s updates as they’ve tried to make their algorithms better. It’s also important to note that these tips work now but it’s ever evolving. I think these core tipss will always be fundamental but how you apply them will vary from blog to blog and as this space adjusts.

Happy blogging.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • •
 
View Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Tools I Use – Zemanta

On November 26, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

It’s been a while since I wrote about the latest Web 2.0 or blogging tools that I use, and there are a bunch of new ones.  The latest and greatest Blog tool I’ve been using is Zemanta.

If you’ve been a regular follower of my blog you’ll have noticed the links in the bottom of my posts and a *Reblog* button.

I don’t remember who’s blog I first saw Zemanta on but I started using it a while ago and have really enjoyed the extra layer of information and ease it adds to my blogging.

I use Zemanta on all of my blogs, even the ones at HP, where I just coordinate the actual blog posting for some of our VP’s

The Zemanta Plugins

WLW Zemanta

I use a blog editor almost every time I write a blog post.  My editor of choice was originally Windows Live Writer but after a while I started using ScribeFire, especially for shorter posts.  When Zemanta first came out as a FireFox plugin, I would write my post in ScribeFire, save it as a draft in WordPress and then open WordPress and make a few final tweaks using Zemanta.  It was an extra step but I found it worth it.

But when Zemanta came out with a Windows Live Writer plugin this sealed the deal and brought me back to my once beloved Windows only blog editor (seriously it’s one of the main reasons I don’t completely switch to Linux for personal use).

Zemanta shows up in a right hand panel in WLW (see screen grab to the right). It offers links to Wikipedia, home pages and maps. It also makes it easy to add links to other related blog articles from around their network as well as Creative Commons images.  All of these are simple to use, just click on any object and Zemanta automatically embeds the object in your post. Very slick.

If you don’t use Windows Live Writer, besides the FireFox plugin they also have an Internet Explorer plugin.

I Love Links

Way back in the early dawn of blogging having a lot of links in your post (ones that didn’t just link to your own posts that is) was a good thing. It’s a rare post of mine that doesn’t have at least 5 links in it.  Oh sure your SEO’s out there will tell you that your giving up valuable Google juice, but who cares.

Zemanta makes it easy to add links to Wikipedia, as well as Amazon. If you have an affiliate account with Amazon it will even add the code needed into the link.  I especially love the related articles by Zemanta. I don’t know why but I really enjoy offering additional resources not related to my blog.

I Love Pictures

Over the last 6 months I have really tried to make more liberal use of photos. It just makes blogs more fun to read.  Zemanta makes this easy as well. Zemanta pulls in tons of images from Flickr and Wikipedia. If you have your own Flickr account it will even pull your photos into its suggestions.

Just Plain Cool

I had a chance to meet some of the Zemanta guys at BlogWorld, and then again at Defrag.

I found out that Zemanta originally started off as a service for matching related articles inside a large media company in Eastern Europe. They have recently received VC funding from Fred Wilson’s firm and continue to announce cool new partnerships with other cool Web 2.0 companies.

After talking with the guys it became obvious to me that besides just blogging there are a lot of applications inside the Enterprise, but I’m sure that’ll come later.

Zemanta is totally free. I’m not sure what their revenue model will be. It seems like some sort of freemium model will make the most sense or maybe they’ll enter the Enterprise sooner than later. Either way, I’m a big fan and I wish them the best of luck.

If you want to try Zemanta without having to download or install anything just hit the reblog button on the bottom of this post, go ahead you know you want to.

Technorati Tags: ,,,,,

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • • •
 
View Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Content Explosion and Re-Aggregation

On June 12, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

There have been two huge enablers in my online publishing habits. FriendFeed and my BlackJack 2.

i'm armed and dangerous

I’ve always had a variety of desktop *publishing tools* but my BlackJack has enabled me to create content on the go, and FriendFeed pulls all that content together. While Louis Gray is the real maven on FriendFeed and all things aggregated I wanted to share with you how I’ve gone from being an avid blogger to being a Constant Content Creator.

I’ve also recently added to my online publishing arsenal: Jing and BrightKite.

Jing is a free service I’ve been using from TechSmith. You can use it for screen grabs (pic and vid). You can even set it up to publish your content online instantly. I’ve set up Jing to publish my screen grabs to my Flickr account.

BrightKite is still in closed beta but I got an invite from Justin Foster. BrightKite lets you send status updates from where you are. You send in text messages with as much location information as you can and it uses Google Maps to locate you (not GPS).

If Twitter is “What am I doing?” BrightKite is “Where I am?”

So I’m sorry to give you all that back history and flurry of links but I thought it was important to set the stage first. If you look at my FriendFeed you’ll notice I currently use 17 of their over 40+ services. The real power isn’t just the aggregation of content but the aggregation of the conversation.

flickr on friendfeed via mobile

If you notice this picture on my FriendFeed account, I took the photo with my phone, sent it via MMS to my flickr account with a descriptive title of what I was doing, “taking a lunch break away from the pc” not some artsy title like “Tranquility Among the Corporate Chaos“.

FriendFeed’s real time aggregation of content has turned everything into communication about what I’m experiencing.

You’ll also notice that there is a place for people to comment on the photo if they want (as a surprise Easter egg, I’ve left a comment over there for you). I then took a screen grab of my flickr picture on FriendFeed using Jing, which then sent the photo to my flickr account with the title “flickr on friendfeed via mobile”, which has commenting enabled on flickr (is your head spinning yet?).

But it doesn’t stop there.
Traveling to RedSky PR

Here you’ll see my travels to a meeting with Jessica Flynn at RedSky PR’s new offices. Remember these post in reverse chronological order.

By themselves Twitter, BrightKite and flickr give you pieces of what I’m doing but combined they provide a much more rich experience. Now if I had just videoed some of our conversation and sent it to YouTube you’d have a true multimedia experience.

Pandora on FriendFeed
If I used Pandora on my mobile device and bookmarked the songs I was listening to on my way over you’d also have the soundtrack of my travels.

And it turns out that Marco, who has a great (and much shorter rant) about FriendFeed and early adopters, shares my taste in music.

FriendFeed is the Meta Social Network

Ever since MySpace went mainstream and everyone else decided they wanted to be the next MySpace people have talked about a social network that could overlay all the social networks and allow communication between them. While this will never happen completely FriendFeed gets us as close as I think we’ll ever get.

No longer does it matter if I still use Twitter and other people are moving to Plurk we’ll still see eachothers updates.

It won’t matter that I use Diigo and Mike Manuel use Ma.gnolia, we’ll still see eachother’s bookmarks.

And as new services get added to FriendFeed they’ll continue together more of the conversation. FriendFeed has already won.

When I hear people ask if this is all necessary or if it’s just a fad (they asked the same thing about blogs) I keep going back to my new favorite quote which I first mentioned in regards to wiki’s and the military:

the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly – the side with the better learning organization – usually wins

I know that this seems like a lot, and I’m not suggesting that everyone jump into the deep end of the pool but things aren’t going to slow down. Most of you don’t see the business value in this yet (honestly most of us early adopters don’t see the full value yet either).

My suggestion: Start small. With 40+ services and growing there is probably some content you are creating that FriendFeed can aggregate. From there it grows organically. You’ll only use the services you see value in (I promise there is value).

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

If you want you can even see this post on FriendFeed and see the comments there.

Related articles
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 42% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • •
 
View Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Chris Finke: the keeper of the blogging flame [Interview]

On April 28, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I’m a huge fan of ScribeFire and with every new update it keeps getting better. Since switching to Ubuntu Linux on my personal laptop I find myself using SribeFire almost exclusively.

I’ve been using ScribeFire off and on since it was originally the Performancing blogging plugin for FireFox. SInce it became ScribeFire I was never really sure who was running it these days. I did a little homework (it wasn’t that hard) and discovered that Chris Finke was the driving force behind ScribeFire these days.

I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to answer a few questions and encourage all of you who blog to
A) make sure you’re using FireFox and
B) get the ScribeFire blog editor.

So who is Chris Finke?

I’m a 24 year-old software developer from Minnesota, married, out of college, and I work full-time for Mahalo.com.

How long have you been working on ScribeFire?

I’ve been involved with ScribeFire since February of 2007, or about 14 months.

Were you involved in the original development?

No, I took over on the project after the original developer, Jed Shaw, abandoned it, due to lack of time, I suppose.

How did ScribeFire end up being separated from Performancing?

When the Performancing.com/ PayPerPost deal was initiated, Performancing split off the blog editor as ScribeFire, since it wasn’t something that PayPerPost was interested. (Note that this happened shortly before I became involved with the project, so I don’t have any more details than that.)

(For those of you not familiar with the Performancing/PayPerPost deal you can read more here. Long story short: It didn’t go through but Performancing did get purchased by Splashpress Media.)

Are you the only one working on Scribefire?

No; in addition to the work that I do, there are several other developers that contribute patches and help with issue tracking (Evan and Alaa, specifically), as well as about a dozen translators, and of course, all of the users that submit feedback and bug reports.

You also do dev for Mahalo right?

Yes, I’ve worked for Mahalo since November of 2007.

Is that tough doing both projects?

It takes a lot of time, but since I’d choose to work on open-source software in my free time anyway, it’s not a stretch for me to make working on ScribeFire my hobby-programming, and working on Mahalo my work-programming.

Any other projects you have going on?

I’ve always got a handful of projects going, although none of them are currently demanding the same time commitment as ScribeFire: I’ve written 10 other Firefox extensions that I update occasionally, a few Wordpress plugins, and I do some contract Firefox extension work on the side. (The Compete Toolbar was one of mine originally, but I believe that they’ve hired someone fulltime to update it.)

What are the plans for ScribeFire longterm? Any up-n-coming features we should be looking forward to?

We just released the Quickblogging toolbar – a way to quickly update your blog posts with pictures, videos, quotes, and links. I see ScribeFire’s future as making it as easy as possible to update and edit content. Any features that help with that will certainly make an appearance.

Do you ever see a point where it might become it’s own stand alone app, or being integrated into other browsers?

It certainly couldn’t be integrated with a browser like Internet Explorer without thousands of hours of work – the platforms are just too different. It is possible, however, that it could be made into its own app via Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, but that’s not currently in our plans for the near-future.

Are you happy with ScribeFire?

I’d say so. The community behind it is great and very opinionated, and it’s definitely the best blog editor for Firefox. I don’t know if it’s the best blog editor period, but it’s our plan to make it that.

If you don’t run Windows then I would argue that ScribeFire is the best blog editor available to you.

I’ve mentioned before how I use the ScribFire blog editor. When I wrote that post Windows Live Writer was my main blog editor. Today I only use WLW at work when I have a larger post to format and I’m pulling together on and off line content.

I really like the convenience of ScribeFire’s in-browser editor and it has 90% of the functionality of WLW. If you use flickr and YouTube for your photo’s and videos you should definitely be using ScribeFire since the new Quickblogging toolbar makes adding those to your blog post a snap.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 14% [?]

Tagged with: • •
 
View Comments Comments
Leave A Response
Go To Top »

Bad Behavior has blocked 6369 access attempts in the last 7 days.