14 posts tagged “vox”
This is my last post on Vox. Today, I’m excited to launch SocializeMobilize.com.
On it, I’ll be publishing articles about social media, web 2.0, mobile,
and mobile and web convergence. You’ll also find all of the legacy
content from this Vox blog, which I started in 2006, in easily searchable format.
Why did I start a new blog when I already had one? Read about why I started SocializeMobilize and check out the features of my new Wordpress blog here.
At Ryan Kruder's suggestion (http://ryankuder.vox.com/), I decided to give "Blog It" a try. Blog It is SixApart's Facebook app that allows you to update your various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook Status.
BlogIt is an interesting idea... Being able to broadcast your thoughts from one place outward is great. And, yet, doing it from within Facebook is a painful proposition on several fronts - mainly because Facebook itself is slow but also because the app lacks the WYSIWYG functionality of the blogging sites I've used before. Sure, I could use HTML, but why bother, when Blog It says, "Some services may remove tags that are not allowed."? I also haven't figured out how to tag posts from Blog It.
Ryan brings up a great question in his most recent post, "Do you think of Facebook as a destination for things other than interacting with your friends? What makes something a good FB app v. a stand alone destination site? Would you think of going to Facebook as the place where you write your blog posts?"
I've tried to use Facebook as a destination for other things before. When I consulted for SocialMedia Networks, I loaded and played with a ton of Facebook apps. The more apps I added, the slower Facebook got. And, it seems like the more apps I have on my profile, the more regularly the apps crash (which could be perception as opposed to reality). Regardless, performance probably won't always be the case... As with all web services, I'm sure Facebook will only get faster as it evolves towards improved scalability.
For now, believe that any complex web services/ apps should remain stand alone destinations with the ability to somehow link to Facebook and other social sites. I'd like to see a bookmark mechanism within Facebook that allows me to click to my favorite sites and, ideally, add a button to them that I can press (or an automatic setting that I can establish) to let my friends know when I've been active on those sites. Having to go into Facebook to post a note that lets my friends know that I've updated my blog is one more step that I'd rather not go through.
Speaking of steps I'd rather not go through... BlogIt has gotten me to thinking... If SixApart can create a Facebook app that can simultaneously publish to Vox and TypePad, why can't it create an upgrade mechanism that allows me to transfer my Vox blog into TypePad? I've been asking about this for a while, and no one has been able to suggest a way forward besides manual cut and paste, which would, after a year and a half of blogging, take forever. When I started blogging, I didn't care who was reading or what posts generated the most interest. Now, I'm curious. I would love to transfer my account to TypePad and pay for extra features, but I don't want to lose my existing posts or my URL.
Fingers crossed that since SixApart has demonstrated that it can push text up to multiple blog sites at once, they'll soon offer vox users the opportunity to transfer/ upgrade their existing content to new platforms.
In addition to consulting for SocialMedia Networks and Covered Communications, I now consult for ShoZu Inc., the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from their mobile phone.
ShoZu allows users to engage with social media from their mobile phone, making it easy for them to keep in constant contact with preferred social networking services from the handset. ShoZu is a light weight, mobile application that allows users to publish photos, videos, comments, status updates, blog postings and more to their favorite online sites …in one click or less. With it, you can:
- Publish to multiple sites with one click (pictures, video, metadata, geotags, etc.)
- Subscribe to content feeds
- Blog
- Make new friends
- Discover new communities
- See what friends are up to
ShoZu also works with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, BBC, Kodak Easy Share, and a ton of others (click here for the full list). And, the app is pre-loaded onto a ton of mobile phones. ShoZu just released a new version ShoZu 3.3, which is available for download from your mobile browser or by clicking here to go to the self-provisioning website.
I'm working ShoZu to bring more social networking properties on board. If you're a social networking site that would like to integrate with ShoZu, please email me.
Today, on Webpronews, Steven Bradley addresses some interesting questions raised in a couple of other blogs - namely:
- Is there an optimal post length?
- Will shorter posts help to retain readers and even lead to more links?
- What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?
I struggle with the same questions when writing my own blog. Plenty of my readers tell me that they appreciate my more in-depth (translation: really long) posts. But, I seem to get just as many comments (if not more) on short posts as I do on long posts. Bradley’s blog made me realize that we still have a lot to learn about social media and web 2.0 optimization:
- What are the best ways for companies to engage customers through social media?
- How should individual bloggers and social media mavens (i.e. those who set up social networks/ groups on sites like Ning, Vox, Gather, etc.) structure their content to best engage with their peers around areas of mutual interest?
There are certainly a lot of assumptions to test. So far, it seems that marketers and bloggers are throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks. In time, there will more scientific ways to answer these questions. Marketers are only beginning to understand the "science" behind web 2.0, social media, and targeted delivery of information to customers. As web 2.0 and social media evolve, there is a growing buzz about:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
- Social Media Optimization (SMO), and
- Website Analytics/ Testing/ Website Optimization, which includes things like A/B Split Testing and , Targeted Content Delivery based on the profile of a specific visitor, and Predictive Delivery / Cross Selling, etc.
There are a some interesting players in the testing and optimization spaces (Offermatica - which, in the interests of full blogging disclosure, is a company that I recently interviewed with; Optimost; Touch Clarity, which was recently purchased by Omniture; Kefta; to some extent Google; and others). If you are a marketer with experience working the products/services of any of these (and similar) companies, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their usefulness. In my opinion, web marketers are only just starting to realize the value of testing and web optimization. It will be very interesting to watch this space as web 2.0 and social media continue to grow.
If you're interested in web optimization and testing, the following are links to blogs that you might like: Optimize & Prophesize, This Site Is Dead, Out of My Gord, Thinking Aloud.
Web 2.0 is changing the way that people publish, access, and spread news. Newspaper subscriptions are down, and the number of bloggers is up. Six Apart and other companies are making it easy for everyday people to self-publish on-line “blogs”. Gone are the days when journalists and authors were the only ones who could voice their opinion. Now, anyone can do it. At the same time that conventional newspapers are struggling to keep up subscriptions and bloggers are growing in numbers, the book market remains stable. There’s something special about books beyond the words printed on their pages and the stories they tell. For me, it’s the way that they look together on a shelf, their unique smell, their simplicity and tangibility. Laptops and Sony Readers haven’t replaced coffee table books. Bookshelves still sell well, and bookstores are still profitable. The problem with books is that until now, it has been difficult and expensive to self-publish books. San Francisco-based start-up Blurb is changing that.
Blurb is capitalizing on the rising interest in on-line self-publishing (e.g. blogs) and the continuing popularity of books. In their beta release, they’ve made it simple and inexpensive for people and businesses to self-publish hardback and paperback books in both small and large quantities. Blurb allows people to self-publish all types of quality books up to 440 pages– blog books, photo books, text and picture books, cookbooks, poetry books (coming soon), personal portfolios, novels and dissertations (coming soon), and more.
My favorite Blurb concept is the "Blog Book". Bloggers, who use TypePad and WordPress (and soon Blogger, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type), will find Blurb’s “Blog Slurper” technology particularly useful. Blog Slurper imports and maps blog text, comments, images, and links into a draft book, which can then be customized. I sent a note to Blurb yesterday asking whether VOX will be a supported platform for their Blog Slurper, and I’ll update this entry if/when I hear back.
I also like how easy it is for everyday people (non-bloggers) to easily create books with full-color pictures using Blurb’s BookSmart application (compatible on both Mac an PC). Blurb offers templates for a variety of different types of “ready made” books – baby, dog, cat, and more. Imagine what the ease of self-publishing means for families, friends, students, professors, small businesses, and more!
The best part about Blurb from a Social Media perspective is that it offers users the ability to promote and sell their books to others via Blurb’s on-line bookstore. Blurb is making it possible for aspiring authors to leverage the Internet to start their own publishing empires – just like musicians Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and others did on MySpace. I wish there was more of a community aspect to Blurb, where users could join “groups” like Vox and Gather and talk about their favorite “blurb” books written on specific topics. Who knows, since the current version of Blurb is a beta, that functioanlity may come in time. In the meantime, I like how easy Blurb makes it for everyday people almost anywhere in the world to self-publish books, inexpensively. Pricing starts as follows, with 10% discounts for 25-199 books, 15% discount for 200-400 books and larger discounts for even bigger quantities:
I just added a new custom banner (of the San Francisco skyline) to my blog. Let me know what you think.
As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)... Six Apart doesn't provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.) I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX "neighborhood" or leave comments. As far as I'm aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc. Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I'm doing in the blogging universe. But, Technorati only tells part of the story.
This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati. When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th. This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog. That's over 700% improvement! Unfortunately, that's not at all impressive when you explore what it means. Technorati's rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times. The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes.
When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:
- Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice - both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
- People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
- Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites... By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content. Take, for example, "MySpaceRIP.com". (I won't hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com's Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.
If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you're a non-voxer (and can't leave a comment), email me, and I'll post your comment manually.
ComScore and Federated Media (FM), which represents social media sites including Digg, PROTRADE, BoingBoing, and Dooce recently announced that they would be working together on a "research and development initiative designed to provide comprehensive measurement of conversational media such as blogs and community-driven sites."
I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome of this research, especially as the current ways of measuring traffic on blogs and community-driven sites are lacking. Technorati, for example, while useful in showing who links to who doesn't account for traffic volumes in their ranking of blogs. Similarly, Alexa shows how many hits certain blogging sites get, but in the case of Vox, it doesn't show which blogs get the most hits (beyond the mention of a few blogs on the site). By way of example, Alexa doesn't allow me to track the traffic my blog gets.
As blogging as a hobby and profession increases, bloggers want to know how many hits their blog gets AND how many people are linking to it. In addition, it would also be useful to see how many times a blogger's name is mentioned in the context of a topic but a blog link is not provided.
I've just launched a new VOX group called Social Media. If you're interested in joining, click here! I've linked all my blogs to this group, and I hope that others who are interested in Social Media, Social Networking, Marketing, Web 2.0, Mobile 2.0 and other colliding topics will add their relevant blogs too!
Everyone in marketing is talking about “social media” these days. I’d be tempted to add the term “Social Media” to my “bullshit bingo” card, except that as you can probably tell from my previous blog posts, I like social media. In 2007, developing an effective Social Media strategy is an important part of developing a successful and multi-pronged marketing strategy. The problem is that with so many companies jumping on the “social media marketing bandwagon,” so quickly, marketing-focused social networking sites are running the risk of reaching saturation point, and many marketers are not taking the time to think strategically about how to use social media to their advantage.
There are many examples of social media marketing efforts that have reaped excellent results, but there are even more examples of such efforts that have gone awry, sucking valuable marketing dollars without having much impact. Yesterday, blogger Jerry Bowles wrote an interesting blog on FASTforward. In it, he discusses how corporations are using social media to capture new audiences. The article mentions successful uses of social media in corporate marketing like MyCoke.com and Carnival Connections as well as ineffective attempts like MyDream.tv by Lincoln and Ford Bold Moves. At the end of his blog, Bowles concludes:
“The major truth of corporate-sponsored social media campaigns is that no matter how good they are or how sensitive they are to the concerns of the “community,” they won’t improve the bottomline unless you have something to sell that people want.”
I couldn’t agree more with Bowles final comment. Adding to it, part of the problem with failed social media marketing campaigns is that they’re not well devised from the start. Let me explain…
There are two basic ways to employ a social media strategy:
Create a stand-alone social media site, or
Leverage existing social media sites to your company’s advantage (e.g. YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Second Life, etc.).
In an ideal universe, before deciding which tactic to employ, companies should be very clear about the objective(s) of their social media marketing campaign. Many companies aren’t clear about their objectives, and I believe this is because:
- The “science” of social media is too new and largely undocumented/undefined and
- Companies who do not yet have a social media marketing strategy feel pressured to come up with something quickly, lest they fall behind the curve.
If the goal of employing a social media marketing strategy is to bolster enthusiasm for a specific product among a group that is already using that product, or expose existing customers/ enthusiasts a particular product to a new product from the same company, then developing a stand-alone social media site, like MyCoke.com, may make sense. However, before building a stand-alone social media site, a company must already have a very strong base of customer enthusiasts who like to talk about their experiences with products on-line (i.e.: Coke, Apple, Mini Cooper, etc.) and be ready to offer something materially different/ better than those users can get elsewhere. Creating a stand-alone social media site is an expensive endeavor, but if it is done correctly, for the right reasons, and targeted towards the right contingent, at the least, the likely result is increased web traffic to the company’s website. MyCoke.com and Carnival Connections (both mentioned in Bowles’ blog) are two good examples. Whether having a well used, stand-alone social media site translates to higher sales remains to be seen, but increased web traffic from customers can’t be a bad thing.
However, in a world where consumers are increasingly being bombarded with so many social media and social networking options, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to succeed in creating stand-alone social media marketing sites that have a sustainable and positive marketing impact and drive traffic. In my opinion, the safest option for marketers that are trying to attract the attention of prospective customers that are not yet familiar with their specific product, company, or brand, is piggybacking off of existing social media sites – like YouTube, Friendster, MySpace, Gather, Vox, Second Life, etc. to attract attention to their products/services. It helps to learn how to walk before you try to run.
