I recently started a weekly summary with links to my posts appearing on other blogs. Here is this week’s update:
Shizzow
Legion of Tech
In case you missed it, here is last week’s edition of Blogging Elsewhere.
Category Archives: General
Blogging Elsewhere
Most of you know that I have been blogging on a few different blogs, so I thought it would be good to do a weekly summary with links to my posts appearing on other blogs.
GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily
Top Fast Wonder Posts for 2008 and Some Silliness
I was looking at my Google Analytics for 2008, and I thought it would be fun to share some of the info.
Here are the top 10 posts or pages that generated the most page views for 2008:
- Taking Your Idea From Side Project to Startup
- Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks
- Starter Kit: Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business
- Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one
- Consulting
- Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups
- Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities
- Web 2.0 Starter Kit
- Hiring a Community Manager
- Starting Point
Most of my traffic comes from the typical sources: Google, Stumbleupon, and Twitter, but I also had a fair amount of traffic from ReadWriteWeb, eLearning Technology, Silicon Florist, and Metafluence.
The most common search results included: dawn foster, best community software, mozy restore, facebook for companies, community manager, shizzow, fast wonder, mozy sucks, and blogging tips.
I also enjoying going to the end of the list to find search results that brought a single person to my blog. Here are a few of the most amusing / interesting:
- beer consultanting
- breakfast places near san francisco bridge where king of jordan ate
- bubble tea facility
- clarinet atari
- death of myspace
- what is going on with all the social networking sites like wikis,blogs and twitter
- man + woman + online communitties
- handy tips + how to change a fluorescent kitchen unit bulb
- green dragon dawn foster
- facebook rss stalk
- community manager career — why?
- “highly illogical” spock
- bill gates quote faster
OK, enough silliness for today. I hope all of you have a happy new year!
Comments for One Author on Multi-Author WordPress Blog
I wanted to have a way to find all of the comments posted on any of my WebWorkerDaily posts, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in WordPress (I don’t have access to plugins, since it isn’t my blog). As always, I turned to Yahoo Pipes for the solution, and I made it customizable so that others could use my pipe. Since I wrote this pipe for my use, it supports the configuration I needed, and I also tested it on TechCrunch, Mashable, and GigaOM. However, there were quite a few multi-user blogs where it does not work, so please pay close attention to the caveats below before using my new Comments for One Author on Multi-Author WordPress Blog pipe.
Caveats:
- Works only with WordPress Blogs
- Works only with blogs using Feedburner
- Will not work under non-standard URL / feed formats
I suspect that the WordPress / Feedburner combo is probably the most common configuration for multi-user blogs, so it should work for many blogs. However, if you aren’t using the configuration supported by this pipe, you should be able to clone the pipe and tweak it pretty easily to use other formats.
Usage:
- Go to the Comments for One Author on Multi-Author WordPress Blog pipe.
- Enter the URL for your Feedburner feed.
- Enter the author’s name.
- Grab the RSS feed output.
Please feel free to leave any thoughts or suggestions in the comments below.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
Shizzow: Adding the Bay Area and Bootstrapping
Today we have a couple of announcements about Shizzow. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shizzow, Shizzow is a social service that was built with the goal of making it as easy as possible to find and hang out with your friends in the real world for happy hours, parties, nights out on the town, co-working sessions in coffee shops and much more. Shizzow provides the technology for you to find nearby friends on a map, get a list of people currently sitting in your local coffee shop or pub, and find specific friends. We want you to spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.
Shizzow is currently a labor of love that is entirely bootstrapped (in other words, we have no revenue, and we are working on Shizzow in addition to our full time gigs). I still do online community and social media consulting to pay the bills, but I spend my free time managing the Shizzow community. We have talked about getting VC or Angel funding, but part of the announcement today is that we are going to continue to bootstrap Shizzow. Bootstrapping gives us more control over the company, and allows us to focus on the product rather than having to focus on courting investors.
The first wave of the Shizzow private beta was only open to people in Portland, OR. Today, we are sending invites to people in the Bay Area, CA, so the second part of our announcement is that people in the bay area can now get invites to Shizzow. If you live in the bay area and would like an invite, just send me an email: dawn at Shizzow.com.
You can find all of the details about both of these announcements on the Shizzow blog.
New Open Source Conference Coming to Portland
Were you sad and dismayed to hear that OSCON was moving out of Portland? Are you looking for more open source events to attend? Would you like an open source conference organized by the community? Want one more tech event to attend in July? Need an excuse (any excuse) to visit lovely Portland, Oregon in July? Do you like to help organize events for fun in your spare time?
If you answered yes to any of my obnoxious questions above, I have a great solution for you: The Open Source Bridge event.
Open Source Bridge will bring together the diverse tech communities of the greater Portland area and showcase our unique and thriving open source environment.
Open Source Bridge will have curated, discussion-focused conference sessions, mini-conferences for critical topics and will include unconference sessions.We will show how well Portland does open source and share our best practices for development, community and connectedness with the rest of the world.
Lots of ideas are buzzing around in our heads, and we’d love to talk about them with you! If you’d like to contribute to the effort, stop by the town hall event October 30, 2008 at Cubespace. We’ll have another meeting November 6th, and it will be announced on Calagator.
At the town hall, you’ll have a chance to meet the members of the core organizing committee, and pick up a responsibility or two. We’ll be breaking off into teams for each of the major areas requiring organization, and distributing the work across many people. We will create a mailing list after this first meeting for those who just want to hear about what we’re up to, or participate in some other way.
(Quote from Selena Deckelmann)
I encourage you to attend the Town Hall to share your ideas with the team and to talk about how you can get more involved in the event. The key to community driven events is that they require a lot of work from volunteers both during the planning stages and on site during the event! If you want this event to be successful, I encourage you to pitch in to help.
Images above are also from Selena Deckelmann.
Companies and Communities at the Corvallis SAO
I spent yesterday evening in Corvallis presenting at Corvallis chapter of the Software Association of Oregon on the topic of Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy. I always enjoying spending time in Corvallis. It’s a fun college town with some very interesting and innovative technology companies: Strands, ViewPlus, ProWorks, and many more.
This SlideShare presentation is what I used last evening to lead the discussion:
Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one
I cannot put enough emphasis on the importance of using monitoring dashboards to understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more. The information obtained can be used as ideas for blog posts, marketing messages, competitive analysis, product feedback and much more. In addition to providing inspiration, they also help you become more responsive to your customers by knowing when and where people are talking about your company and products. I usually include monitoring dashboards in my consulting proposals for anyone building a new community or trying to have a more effective social media presence through blogging or Twitter, since knowing what people say about your company and your industry is such a critical element of community management, blogging, and other engagements with the community.
Who Should Use the Monitoring Dashboards
It is important to get as many people as possible within your company to use the monitoring dashboards. Each person or function within your company will notice or take action on different elements. As a community manager, I focus on people mentioning us on Twitter or in blogs. Product management and engineering might use the information to gather ideas for new features. Bloggers within the company can respond to what others are saying about your industry. Marketing can see how people are interpreting, misunderstanding, or resonating with the existing marketing messages.
The Format
The format really isn’t that important from my perspective, since these monitoring dashboards can take a variety of forms all with the same content. Each person should be free to customize it and use whatever format is most natural for them. I’ll briefly give a couple of examples of how they can be used to help you picture what they might look like for your company.
Quite a few people like to see it in a dashboard form, similar to the example below for Shizzow (click for larger image).
Other people who already live in their RSS reader would prefer to use their existing tools to monitor what people are saying about their company. In this case, you can maintain an OPML file that each person can import into an existing RSS reader.
Content is King
It is critical that you monitor the right types of content for your situation. In general, I think that most of the monitoring falls into 3 general buckets: vanity, industry and competition. I’ll give some examples of what to monitor in each of these three areas along with some tools you might want to use; however, there are many different methods and sources to monitor with no way to ever cover all of them.
Vanity
- Blogs. Use feeds from Google Blog Search, Technorati or similar services to find people mentioning your products, your company, and key people within your company. You should also be using Google Blog Search to find people linking to your blog or websites using the link syntax (link:blog.yourdomain.com).
- Twitter. Even if you don’t have a corporate Twitter account or actively use Twitter, I would still monitor what people are saying about you on Twitter. I have a Twitter Sniffer for Brands that I prefer to use, since it picks up a few things that individual services (even the Twitter search) miss.
- Depending on your company, you might also want to monitor what people are saying about you on other social sites: YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Magnolia, etc.
Industry
- Thought Leaders. Find at least the top 6-12 thought leaders within your industry and add their blogs to your monitoring dashboard. These people will have general insight into the industry and will provide ideas for future blog posts. You should also be following these people on twitter.
- Keywords. Use Google Blog Search or similar services to monitor keywords that apply to your industry to see what other bloggers are saying about your industry. These will need to fairly narrow words and phrases in order to filter out the noise, so pick something more specific to track.
- Aggregation. Services like Techmeme can also be interesting ways to find the hot topics in your industry. I recently wrote a Techmeme Keyword Alert Pipe that can used to monitor keywords mentioned on Techmeme.
Competition
- Competitor Activity. Put the feeds from your top competitors blogs, news pages, job boards, Twitter, and anything else you can find with an rss feed in your monitoring dashboard to keep track of what they are saying about themselves.
- Support. If your competitors have public support sites (discussion boards, Get Satisfaction, etc.), you will want to track those, too.
- Keywords. Again, you’ll probably want to track a few keywords (competitor names, products, etc.) to keep a pulse of what others are saying about your competitors.
- Individuals. Find a key employee or two from your top competitors who are very active on social websites. Add their twitter feeds, delicious bookmarks or other interesting information to your monitoring dashboards. At a previous job, I gathered a lot of very interesting information from the delicious feed of an employee at one of our competitors who liked to bookmark pages along with notes about how they could use the ideas to improve their product.
Getting Started
Overwhelmed yet? It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Chances are that you have people in your company who are already tracking some or all of this information. Now, you just need to find them and get them to share with the rest of you.
Here are a few steps to help you get started:
- Send this blog post or a similar list of the types of content you need around to your employees and have each of them gather a list of feeds that fall within these three categories.
- Have someone very smart and insightful review these lists to pick out the ones that are most relevant and important. You can only track so much, so you are better off focusing on the important ones rather than trying to track everything.
- Find someone with advanced knowledge of RSS who can use Yahoo Pipes or similar services to help filter some of the content and then create the dashboards or OPML file.
- Distribute the monitoring dashboard to any employee who wants to use it. You may want to spend some quality time with the head of marketing, bloggers, and other key employees to make sure that they understand how to use the dashboard or OPML file.
- Revisit the dashboard occasionally to update it with new information. For slow moving industries, you could probably update it once a quarter while others might need to update it every month.
The monitoring dashboard will be completely different for each company. Some will not care about certain types of content that I described above, while your industry may have very specific and unique items that will need to be monitored. Find the content that is right for you and your company, and find a way to monitor it.
Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities
As most of you know, we launched Shizzow last week, and we began using the Shizzow Twitter account with it. I’ve been doing most (but not all) of the tweeting from the Shizzow account, and I wanted to share some best practices for using a corporate Twitter account effectively without being spammy.
Starting points
This post assumes that you are already familiar with Twitter and are using it for a personal account, but if you are new to Twitter, you’ll want to start by reading Tara Hunt’s Tweeting for Companies 101.
I am also assuming that you have already read my post about Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business. If not, you might want to start there. It has quite a few tips for how to interact with social media sites and online communities that apply to using Twitter, but are not covered explicitly or in any detail in this post.
Best Practices
- Know what people are saying about you. After you create your Twitter account and have the name reserved, but before you start using it, set up some tracking tools. You will want to know when people are replying and what people are saying about you on Twitter. Yesterday, I released a Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe that will help you keep track of the conversations about you on Twitter. I’ve found that the Twitter Search (was Summize) actually misses some Tweets that will be caught by this pipe. This is a copy of the pipe that I am using to keep track of the conversations about Shizzow. I monitor the RSS feeds most of the day when I have time, but no less than 2-3 times per day. For extra credit, you should also be monitoring what people say about you on other blogs (Google Blog Search with RSS feeds or alerts might help).
- Respond frequently and sincerely. Knowing what people say is only helpful if you actually use the information and respond to people. You will want to keep the responses public by using @replies wherever possible instead of DMs unless you are exchanging non-public info. Going back to my Best Practices post, you also need to be sincere and remember that it is not all about you when you respond to people. Be honest about what isn’t working well and how you plan to improve your products or services. Help people find information when you see them struggling or asking questions on Twitter. Respond to the tough, critical questions in addition to the easy ones.
- Follow back. You will want to follow people back when they follow you on Twitter. It will help you listen and respond while allowing people to send you direct messages. See the ‘don’t proactively follow people’ section below for some cautions about following people.
- Have a personality. Companies are made up of people, and you’ll want to show some personality in your tweets. Nobody wants to listen to a corporate drone or regurgitated marketing messages. Personalize the information and act like a real person in your responses.
- Variety is Important. Include a wide variety of information in your Twitter stream without focusing too heavily on any one element. I try to shoot for a mix of informational posts (new features, blog posts), links to other people’s blog posts or retweets, @replies to questions, alerts about any issues or downtime for maintenance, meetups, and fun posts.
Things to Avoid
- Don’t be a link spam account. This one is a little controversial, and some people will disagree with me here; however, I don’t think that you should use your Twitter account just to post links to blog posts. If people want your blog posts, they can get them via RSS. It is OK to link to informational blog posts, but I always put some text around it so that people can decide whether or not to click through. You should also be linking to posts from other blogs that are relevant to your company or industry as a whole. These should be a fairly small portion of your overall Twitter posts (see the variety is important section above).
- Don’t go overboard. You should be providing information and replying to people, but you shouldn’t go overboard. I would say that posting no more than 5-10 times a day on average is a pretty good goal. Some days will have more and others less depending on the situation; however, if you post too much, you’ll start to lose followers who can’t keep up with the volume.
- Don’t be too self-promotional. You should use your Twitter account to promote your activities; however, it should be a part of what you do. If every post talks about how awesome your company is, people will lose interest fairly quickly.
- Don’t proactively follow people. People will find your Twitter account when you @reply them, and you can use your website / blog to promote it. You don’t want to start by following a few hundred (or thousand) people who don’t care about you or your product. It seems creepy to be followed by a random brand that you aren’t already following, and it just makes you look spammy. See the follow back section above for how to do this right.
For more information
Jeremiah Owyang just wrote a couple of interesting posts about corporate usage of Twitter: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter and Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter. They provide some additional information and a slightly different take on how brands use Twitter.
Related Fast Wonder blog posts
Twitter Sniffer for Brands
Many of you are probably familiar with my Twitter Reply Sniffer. This pipe is a variant of the Twitter reply sniffer, which only looks for @replies, while the Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe finds other mentions of your brand on Twitter along with @replies.
I’ve found that many of the Twitter search services are unreliable, and they return different results when searched. Even Twitter’s own search misses some tweets. This pipe currently combines three separate Twitter search engines into one result with duplicates filtered out and everything sorted by date.
Usage:
- Go to the Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe
- Enter your Twitter username and click “run pipe”
- Grab the RSS feed output
If your brand name is not the same as your Twitter username or if you want to track multiple products, you can repeat the steps above and grab several RSS feeds. If your brand name contains a space, you will want to put it in quotes in the ‘Enter your Twitter username or Company name’ field: “green dragon”, for example.
The pipe will work best for brands that have an uncommon name. You can always clone the pipe and add some filters if you are getting too many irrelevant results.
I want to thank Justin Kistner at Metafluence for creating the first rev of the Twitter Reply Sniffer. Please let me know if you see any issues or bugs by leaving me a comment on this post.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: