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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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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• You can see the original post: Capitalism as a Metaphor
• You can see the adapted page The Book: Social Media Trifecta
• You can read the flurry of blog posts I did late last year all categorized as The Book
• Now I’ve turned it into it’s own wiki-blog SocialMediaTrifecta.com

What’s a wiki-blog and why are you using one?

[Update: This blog has been taken down]
[Warning: This blog got hacked, partially because of this plugin and partially because I wasn't managing it well]

What: If you take WordPress and install the WP-Wiki plugin you get some wiki functionality built into your blog. I’ve been wanting something like this years. So far I love it.

Why: The main reason I wanted a wiki blog is that I think it would be an ideal format for writing a book. You get the benefits of a blog like CMS and the syntax and collaboration of a wiki.Being this is a book about social media and it’s benefits I thought I would eat my own dog food here.

For a great demonstration on what a wiki page looks like see the How-To page. For more about the site you can see the About page or the first post.

In the true wiki spirit the site will be constantly evolving as I move over the content I’ve already created here, add to it and edit it. As always I’m not totally sure what I’ll do with the book; self publish, seek a publisher, just leave it as a wiki-blog or if I’ll actually ever finish it. Who knows.

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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

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Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

This last week I was doing some old school Web research for a few clients. It’s work that I normally don’t get to do but is important to know how to do and is good to do every now and then. Things like back link checking and finding influencers across various industries via social networks. Here are some random facts I learned this week that you may not normally think about.

Robert & Mike generate the most buzz

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington generate more new blog posts than pretty much anyone else in the tech bloggosphere. OK, that may have been obvious but here’s how much of a difference there is. This isn’t a perfect science but it’ll give you the idea. This is for one client on the same story:

• Robert – 1 post = 25 new posts
• Mike  3 posts = 67 new posts
• All of Mashable 4 posts = 15 new posts
• All of ReadWriteWeb 7 posts = 25 new posts

Ars Technica is geekier than TechCrunch

OK, again not earth shattering news but here’s how that manifests:

• TechCrunch generates links mostly from Twitter and WordPress blogs
• Ars Technica generates links mostly from Laconi.ca and Drupal blogs

Bloggers are better self promoters

Yeah again earth shattering news, I know.  Bloggers will almost always post a picture on their LinkedIn profile (you may be surprised how many people don’t). The notable exception to this is bloggers who work in IT Security. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in that industry that posts pictures of themselves anywhere (paranoid much?).

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• Blogging used to be something that was only used by the geek elite.
• Then 4 or 5 years ago people started talking about how companies could “theoretically” use blogs to communicate directly to their customers.
• Today it is something that the largest brands and enterprises use as a key tool in their communication arsenal.

I wonder how much more saturation we’ll achieve? Not every company or every person is going to start a blog and by the time everyone is reading blogs will they even be blogs anymore? By then they’ll just be standard features in Web pages and articles.

Blogging Has Come a Long Way, Baby – eMarketer

“Blogs are now mainstream media,” said Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati. “You’re also seeing mainstream media coming in the other direction by adding blog content.”

This point of view is echoed by David Tokheim, of Six Apart Media. “The lines are becoming blurred between a standalone blog that might be created on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress and blog content that’s created by The New York Times.”

eMarketer estimates that in 2009 96.6 million US Internet users will read a blog at least once per month. By 2013, 128.2 million people, or 58% of all US users, will do the same.

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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

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: zemanta,blogging,blogging tools,Windows Live Writer,FireFox,plugin

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Logoworks has added blog design to the services they offer and in true Logoworks fashion they are giving away 20+ free WordPress templates. My faves are Gray Splat and On Fire.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Oh sure they give away a free template and then get you on the logo design.” Well, that wouldn’t be a bad deal but on May 12th they’re re-launching their free logo design tool, Logomaker, as… (wait for it) Logomaker 2.0.

So you can go today, get the free WordPress theme AND get a free logo with the current Logomaker tool ala Logoworks and HP or go download the free theme, play around with it (if you’re like me it’ll take you a few weeks to get all the plugins and such the way you want them) then on May 12 go over to Logomaker 2.0 and get your free logo ala Logoworks and HP.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging program.

Technorati Tags: Logoworks,Logomaker,WordPress,Themes,Blog,Design,HP

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