Tag Archives: Posterous

Facebook, Sharisax Is Out There

Facebook for Business, Blogging, Posterous and more:

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Twitter is like my personal bookstore, but so is most of Web 2.0

photos by Howard Blum
photos by Howard Blum

Sharing is one of the amazing benefits of Web 2.0, so it’s no wonder that Twitter is so important to me — both as a source and a repository. Here are some of the articles I read and Tweeted and Re-Tweeted this week:

  1. NYT article on Facebook for Business
  2. Blogs better Hubs than Twitter
  3. Social media will be your local marketing tool
  4. Future of Marketing – PR Squared
  5. Scoble’s video interview with Posterous

New York Times tips for Marketing on Facebook

Quick Tips worth repeating over and over [until people get them ingrained]: (a) Identify goals; (b) Share personality; (c) Engage, don’t shill; (d) Use Facebook data Here are some article highlights:

  • Be where your customers — and prospective customers — hang out.
  • Start small and add tools & apps slowly
  • Enliven page with photos and useful information
  • Buy-buy-buy messages do not work
  • Offer value and be patient

NYT article on Facebook for Business

HUBSBlogs are best HUBS for your content

Here are seven reasons why:

  1. With a blog, you control the agenda, whether you’re communicating on behalf of a company, or for personal reasons.
  2. Your blog can cater to a sub-group of your Twitter friends or a different audience altogether.
  3. A blog is less dominated by spam than Twitter.
  4. You can embed images, audio and video on your blog.
  5. Blog posts can be of unlimited length. You can express yourself in more than 140 characters.
  6. With some environments, you have almost unlimited control over the appearance, functionality and arrangement of your blog.
  7. Many blogs include the ability to offer contact forms, polls, chat and other functionality. You can even embed your Twitter stream into your blog.

Blogs better Hubs than Twitter

Local audience — where the money is

flowers Nope, even traditional media admits social media is NOT a fad. Local bloggers are being paid for page views. Viral nature of social media is fountain for success. Social media provides 2-way communication. Social media will be your local marketing tool

Facebook & Google win social network marketing race

“In the future, the Web you know will be based on the Web that knows you.”

“Social Media has simply become an unstoppable force.”

“Making special offers based on known behaviors and connections, will be automated.”

Future marketing outreach: “Maybe you’ll also reach out to one of the baker’s dozen’s worth of active baking-related groups on Facebook.”

Future of Marketing – PR Squared

Robert Scoble interview with POSTEROUS for the “GEEKY-ER” among you:

Top Geek-Thought-Leader Robert Scoble posted a video interview with the two creators of Posterous, a platform on which anyone can post content via email. Steve Rubel  stopped publishing his highly regarded marketing communication blog Micropersuasion in favor of a Posterous stream. Video is 17 minutes long and features Robert’s questions for Posterous founders: Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan. Highlights:

  • Purpose is to provide a simple, clean platform for rich media and mobile application.
  • Only four full-time engineers do all the work.
  • To serve 1.8 billion people who don’t want the hassle of a traditional blog
  • Future business model to offer Premium features — far in the future.

Check out more of Howard’s Awesome photos on his website: http://faces-and-places.net/indexa.html

Blogging, Facebook

Let’s get the blogging story “straight” — a glimpse of the Technorati report

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A colorful futureJust over six months ago [in April 2009], I wrote my first blog post with the announced intention to aim for “A-List status.”

Four months later I wrote an article about the “day I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven” — it was actually a report of a panel discussion headlining Steve Rubel among other social media thought leaders discussing a Roadmap for the future.

How very exciting it had been to introduce myself to Steve, who’s been a role model.

I told Steve of the lofty goal I was working towards, and he said,

“You might want to reconsider, Shari. Blogs are losing their status, and you might aim, instead, to be an A-List Thought Leader,” he advised me.

During the panel discussion Steve elaborated on this view:

I do subscribe to Steve’s Posterous stream, but that’s in addition to more than a dozen other blogs I keep up with pretty regularly. [Check my blogroll on the right hand sidebar.]

So . . . every time I read a headline like Brian Solis’ “Rumors of the Death of the Blog are Greatly Exaggerated,” I am encouraged to keep on “keepin’ on,” i.e., BLOGGING towards the A List.

Commentary on the PR 2.0 summary of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report

Technorati is a search engine for blogs, and it catalogs more than 112 million blogs. Every year the site comes out with a State of the Blogosphere Report and this year’s findings include information about these topics: professional blogging activities, brands in the blogosphere, monetization, twitter & micro-blogging and bloggers’ impact on US and World events.

The report also includes interviews with more than a dozen well-known, well-respected, and well-read bloggers including Steve Rubel.

Brian Solis’ blog PR 2.0 featured an indepth view of the report

This article will pick out and share pieces of the report that I found interesting and helpful to me as a fairly new blogger.

Brian’s post included color-coded charts recording responses from four categories of bloggers: (a) hobbiests; (b) part-timers; (c) corporate; and (d) self-employed.

1) About 70% of all bloggers felt that “Blogs are getting taken more seriously as sources of information” while 60% agreed that “More people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs than from traditional media in the next three years.”

HOWEVER

2) Fewer than 40% agreed with the following two statements:

a) “Newspapers will not be able to survive in the next ten years.”

b) “Blogs are often better written than traditional media.”

Re: “Prolificness”

Brian wrote that “those bloggers who rank among the highest according to Technorati Authority post nearly 300 times more than the lower ranked bloggers.”

One Technorati survey question asked “How frequently do you update your blog?

  • 20% post once or twice a day
  • 27% post 2-3 times per week
  • 33% post at least once a week
  • Interestingly, 3% of self-employed bloggers post 10 times a day or more! AND 7% post 5-9 times a day.

Why do bloggers blog?

“Self expression and sharing expertise are among the primary motivations for bloggers,” Brian wrote.

To measure the “success” of their blogs, survey respondents chose from the following ten factors, ranked from the most popularly selected to the least:

1) Personal satisfaction

2) Number of unique visitors

3) Number of posts or comments on the blog

4) Number of links to my blog from other blogs

5) Number of RSS subscribers

6) Accolades from other media

7) Number of people favoriting you

8) Blogger’s Technorati authority number

9) Number and quality of new business leads

10) and, finally, in last place for hobbiests/corporate bloggers was revenue; HOWEVER, 39% of part-timers admitted that revenue was an important measure of their success.

What activities do bloggers participate in to attract visitors?

The four most popular activities included (a) Listing the blog on Technorati; (b) Tagging blog posts; (c) Commenting on other blogs; (d) Listing the blog on Google.

Other activities were the following [from more popular to least popular]: (e) Getting listed on a blog directory; (f) Produce content for other blogs or websites; (g) Create a blog on a broader blog network; (h) Attend conferences for bloggers; (i) Pay for online advertising.

The future of Blogging

Here are the eleven blog ideas and tactics proposed for the coming year [from most popular to least]:

1) Blog more frequently

2) Expand some of the topics already blogged about

3) Publish a book

4) Begin using the blog to get speaking engagements

5) Add advertising

6) Begin guest blogging

7) Add video

8) Blog through mobile device

9) Start a new, independent blog

10) Start a new blog on a blog network

11) Blog less frequently.

According to Brian:

“Technorati believes that the next generation of blogs will be more action oriented, not just documenting real time happenings, but driving actual events.”

If you’re a blogger, how would you have answered any of the Technorati questions?

If you don’t blog yet, has any of this information convinced you to “dive in” and start expressing yourself?

FURTHER READING:

Blogging Basics