Blogging Elsewhere

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Intel Software Network*

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

  • I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.

Recent Links

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

What Are the Characteristics of a Great Community Manager

Social technology growth marches on in 2009, led by social network sites

Who Matters Most in Social Media? Not You!

Back To Practice: Flying With The Altimeter Group

Eight Twitter Habits That May Get You Unfollowed or Semi-Followed

Can you judge a book by its cover?

5 Tips for Getting More From Social Media Marketing

How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

Two New Yahoo Pipes Classes for September in Portland

I will be teaching 2 new Yahoo Pipes classes in September. I found that the Monitoring Conversations course was a little too intense with too much information crammed into 2.5 hours, especially for people who are new to Yahoo Pipes. It’s a bit overwhelming to go from creating your first Yahoo Pipe to more advances uses in  just a couple of hours, and I would like to have a little more time to devote to the exercises. As a result, I’ve decided to break the classing into a 2 part series held one week apart to give people more time to digest the content. Here are the details:

Basic Introduction to Yahoo Pipes

Abstract

Your customers are talking about you, your competitors are revealing information that you want to know and you need to keep tabs on your industry in the most strategic way possible. Can you find the conversations and information quickly and efficiently now? This Yahoo Pipes training course is designed for people who are new to Yahoo Pipes and want to learn how this tool can give you an edge. In 1.5 hours, we will cover the basics of why online tracking is so important for your business, how to build your first Yahoo Pipe and what are some more advanced uses that can be employed to impress your boss and your clients. This class is ideal for bloggers, public relations and marketing professionals, as well as community and content managers or anyone involved in customer care.

This course will teach you how to create your first Yahoo Pipe. It is a pre-requisite to the Monitoring Conversations Using Yahoo Pipes.

Upcoming Course: September 23, 2009

9:00am – 10:30am
MacForce 100 SE Salmon St. Portland, Or 97214
Early Bird (ends Sept 16, 2009): $75
Late registration: $100
Visit the Basic Introduction to Yahoo Pipes page for prerequisites, a course outline, and more details.

Register Now

Monitoring Conversations Using Yahoo Pipes

Abstract

Would you like to become more responsive to your customers and quickly know what people are saying about your company and products? This Yahoo Pipes training course is designed for people who are familiar with Yahoo Pipes, but who want to learn more about using it to monitor social media websites and fine-tune techniques. In 2.5 hours, we will also review the basics of building pipes using lists of keywords and filtering to find the content most interesting to you.You should know how to build a basic pipe and have experience using the following modules: fetch feed, filter, and sort and know how to use the debugger to inspect feeds. If you are new to Yahoo Pipes or want a refresher, you should take the Basic Introduction to Yahoo Pipes class first. This class is ideal for bloggers, public relations and marketing professionals, as well as community and content managers or anyone involved in customer care.

Upcoming Class: September 30, 2009

9:00am – 11:30am
MacForce 100 SE Salmon St. Portland, Or 97214
Early Bird (ends Sept 25, 2009): $125
Late registration: $175
Visit the Monitoring Conversations Using Yahoo Pipes page for prerequisites, a course outline, and more details.

Register Now

Who Should Attend

  • Public relations professionals
  • Marketing managers
  • Brand managers
  • Social media managers
  • Community managers
  • Web Strategists
  • Content managers / bloggers
  • Customer care specialists

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Intel Software Network*

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN)

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

  • I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.

Recent Links

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Using and assessing feedback from online communities

Building online communities for business: How to kill an online community in 10 easy steps

5 Features Of Really Strong Communities You Can Embrace

Fear and Loathing in Social Media: The 10 Rules of corporate denial and blatant overreaction

The Future of Facebook

Turning bad buzz around for Best Buy

The Ethics of Ghost Blogging

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

Using Yahoo Pipes to Filter Results for Iterasi PositivePress

I’ve been beta testing Iterasi’s PositivePress for a while and was excited to finally see it released to the public! It’s a great way to track and archive blog posts and articles from across the web while creating reports with links to certain articles that can be delivered to clients or friends. CNET did a great job of covering the release, so I won’t rehash it here. I encourage you to read the CNET article for more information about PositivePress.

Since PositivePress uses RSS feeds as input, I decided to do a quick video showing you how to use Yahoo Pipes to filter results from your RSS feed to make sure that you are only archiving and reporting on the most relevant results. This video shows you how to take a list of feeds from a CSV file, fetch the results, and filter them for a set of keywords. The end result is fed into PositivePress and a new report is generated from the filtered results.

If you haven’t already watched the rest of the Yahoo Pipes Video series, you might benefit from watching these other videos first. They provide a little more background on the concepts used in this Yahoo Pipe.

This Yahoo Pipes video series is also available as a podcast on iTunes, and as a separate feed.

You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (30 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.

More Details on the Pipe:

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Yahoo Pipes with Iterasi PositivePress pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of a CSV file. Here is the example we used in the video.
  • Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item.
  • Filter Module (Permit). Filter by a couple of keywords to permit only the results that match at least one of your keywords
  • Filter Module (Block). Filter out any results that match undesired keywords.
  • Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
  • Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.

I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.

Online Community Research and Social Media Planning

As I work with clients to build online communities, I find that external community sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming an increasingly important part of the overall online community strategy. As a result, I was excited to read the results of Bill Johnston’s recent Online Community Research Network study on this topic. The study looked at how organizations are incorpating external communities and social media sites in their online strategies. Bill posted more information about the results in his post, but here are a few of the highlights.

Twitter and Facebook are the highest priority external community sites for most organizations followed by LinkedIn. This is consistent with what I have been hearing from clients. My clients also tend to ask about YouTube and occasionally MySpace.
social_media_sites
Each organization’s business goals for using external community sites are slightly different, but some of the most important goals included:

  • Educate and inform
  • Peer-to-peer evangelism
  • Retain customers / loyalty

The most surprising part of this research is the number of people who don’t think they need a plan for these efforts. I disagree.

soc_media_strategy

It’s important to approach your external community efforts (including social media) with clear goals and some thought (i.e. plans) for how you want to approach each site and how everything fits together. The plan should include objectives along with roles and responsibilities that clearly outline who will update each site, how often, and with what content. Without good planning, your corporate presence is likely to look either disorganized and scattered or abandoned and barren.

I think this helps highlight the difference between knowing how to use communities and social media for personal pursuits and knowing how to engage in them to meet the specific objectives of an organization. I don’t have a plan for how I use social media in my personal life, but I do work with clients to help them put together strategies, plans and content roadmaps for using external online community sites. If you don’t already have a plan for your external online community engagement, you should find someone (internal or external) who has experience building corporate online community strategies and plans to help you get organized. You don’t need to spend months on the plan, and it doesn’t need to be a 100 page document, but you should have some kind of written plan.

Does your organization have a plan for your external community efforts?

Want to See Me Speak at SXSW?

panelpicker-formulaIf so, you need to vote!

SXSWi is my favorite large tech event held every March in Austin, TX. If you don’t already plan to attend SXSW, you should consider it, especially since the conference fee is only $395 for a five-day event. SXSW is also referred to as spring break for geeks, not that I expect the parties to sway your decision to attend (*cough*).

Here’s how it works. People who want to speak at SXSW submit proposals and other people vote on them. The popular vote makes up 30% of the decision for whether or not your session is selected.

I currently have 2 presentations that are in the running.

  • Techniques for Monitoring Online Conversations with Free Tools: Learn about the latest free tools and advanced techniques for monitoring online conversations across the social web. People are talking about the topics that interest you, and people are talking about you, your company and your competitors. How quickly and efficiently can you find this information now?
  • Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy: Some companies participate in online communities and the social web with finesse, while others engage in sleazy practices that send potential customers running away. Learn some best practices and tips for engaging with communities of people online, and learn how to avoid some of the most common sleazy mistakes.

While you are there, vote for some other cool presentations. I think Rick is putting together a list of other Portland proposals for the Silicon Florist blog if you want to hear some other local people speak at SXSW.

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Intel Software Network*

Legion of Tech*

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

  • I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.
  • I am a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech. This is an unpaid, volunteer activity.

Recent Links

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

How To Kick Start A Community –an Ongoing List

The Evolution of Blogging

Online Community Building: Gardening vs Landscaping

Twitter and Facebook – Marketing teams new misunderstood tools

Happy Information Overload Awareness Day! Here’s Some TIps for Reducing It!

How to always be behind the social media curve

HowTo: OPML for Twitter subscription lists

How To: Backup And Search All Your Friends’ Tweets In Google Reader

You can find all of my links on Delicious.