Category Archives: social media

Barcamp 2 – day 2 – Saturday morning roundtable for bloggers

Got up a little late today, but finally arrived at ATDC for Day 2 of Barcamp.   Sitting in on a discussion about blogging.  Folks are talking about what they blog about and what platform.  WordPress seems to be the most popular.  Drupal is mentioned, but generally considered overkill if all you are doing is blogging.

One guy has a blog written in the voice of his dog. Is also considering an anonymous blog about an honest take from an entrepreneur’s perspective.

Some folks are using them for technical posts, and putting youtube videos up.  Michael Mealing uses Drupal for some of the space industry realated blogs, but they are not blog only communities – moght drop Drupal for something more email friendly.

We have a Chyrp user – similar to Tumblr – very spontaneous.  Aggregator for things he is looking at.

Discussion is moving to platforms and hosts. WordPress stays on top.

Plug-ins can add value.

Question about Google Gears in WordPress, but nobody knows the answer this morning.

Much kudos for Akismet anti-spam.

Also posted in Barcamp Atlanta, commentary, Live event | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Barcamp 2 – How to get buzz without being a scumbag spammer

Wow!  A Barcamp topic with marketing appeal.

Yes, I’m still furiously tyoping this out live at Barcamp.   This is not a marketing event, it is targeted to developers and technologists, but hey sometimes world’s collide (in a good way).

Moderator is Micah Wedemeyer – hacker not marketer.  Has a couple of startups.

Assumptions from the moderator going in:

-you’re promoting a website

-your site is actually useful

-your marketing budget is small or non-existent

-maybe you’ve been accused of spamming before

Marketing is real work! (amen brother)

It won’t happen overnight

Time is your resource and you’ll spend a lot of it – think about you ROT – return on time.

Identify your taerget audience – be as specific as you can – the more qualifiers the better.

Smaller the target – easier to hit.

If you don’t know – ask your user “who are you?”   Get the info to guide your focus.

Find the bloggers – where does your community hang out online.  Bookmark the relevant sites about your community. Read the comments – check out the sites.  Try to find at least 20 blogs relevant to your community (more if you can manage the time)  Add them all to you RSS reader and check it constantly!  be on top of the timing – timing is everything.

Engage in the community – be a part of the community.   Start your own blog.  Keep your blog content to information relevant to your community.   Suggestion to hang your blog off you main domain — generally I think this is a good idea, but there are  some disadvantages.

Set up a reasonable goal – a reasonable pace for how frequently you will post.    Bloggers share two things – egos and writers block! (love that comment!)

Get involved and comment on people’s blogs.  Commenting first gets more readers.

Give yourself a “Gravatar” – basically a picture that gets associated with your email address so your picture (a logo, your face, etc) is put next to your comment – builds your brand awareness.   Reinforces Recognition.

Decide your identity when your commenting – are you you? or are you the company rep?

Link to your site from your name.  Add relevance to the conversation you are participating in.

If you write an analysis about someone else’s post always include the Trackback url.   This lets the other author know that you have written about his/her post and they will most likely check out what you wrote.   Add value – don’t just regurgitate what they wrote.

Curing writer’s block – contact the other blogger and ask for a write up.  Use their preferred contact method.  Ask, don’t beg (or hound).   Don’t oversell it.

Bloggers are powerful – getting buzz can be helped by getting in their good graces, but don’t abuse them or you will suffer a backlash and/or shut-out.

Also posted in Barcamp Atlanta, commentary, context, Live event, networking, Other Interests | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Steven Kloeblen to speak at TAG Enterprise 2.0

As you may know I’m on the committee for the Technology Association of Georgia’s Enterprise 2.0 Society, so I thought I would plug our next event:

This will be our biggest Enterprise 2.0 event to date. If you haven’t registered yet, it is not too late. Our very special guest speaker for September 3rd is Steve Kloeblen, IBM’s VP of Business Development for their World Development Initiative. He is doing some amazing work across the globe and has previously spoken at Wharton and Harvard Business School. Here’s the summary info:

TAG Enterprise 2.0
Date: September 3, 2008 Time: 7:30am – 9:30am
TAG Enterprise 2.0 Speaker Series: IBM – Steve Kloeblen, New Growth Platforms
Steve Kloeblen, VP Business Development – World Development Initiative, will be discussing proactive approaches to business transformation.

Special Location: GTRI Conference Center, 250 14th Street, NW, Atlanta,
Georgia 30318, Phone: 404-407-6017
http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/conference-center
To Register: https://www.123signup.com/event?id=tcttg
TAG Enterprise 2.0 Society info: http://www.tagonline.org/tag_enterprise_20.php

Also posted in Live event, networking, Other Interests | Tagged | Comments closed

where personal branding and technology meet

Just wanted to point you to a nice interview on Dan Schawbel’s blog with Sarah Lacy, journalist and author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.  Sarah comes across as very down to earth and drops some great branding thoughts as she discusses her career and her opportunity to interview some of the innovators and success stories of Web 2.0.  Here are a few gems that jumped out at me:

” That’s the most lasting way to build a brand, one relationship at a time.”

” It just takes building your credibility and trust over time. Put another way: your brand within your small sphere is crucial to build before you can build any sort of larger brand in the world.”

and my favorite

“And second, business reporting done well are just stories about people. People love stories about people.”

Thanks Sarah and Dan for sharing this people story!

Also posted in Branding Thoughts, commentary, personal branding | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Atlanta should skip Web 2.0

I love Atlanta. I’ve been here for almost 12 years and I think it is a great city. We’ve got millions of people,  great neighborhoods, great restaurants,  a major airport, lots of free wi-fi, plenty of diverse businesses, a healthy laptop per capita ratio in any coffee shop you should happen to wander into, but somehow I think that Atlanta is not living up to its potential as a great center for web innovation.   And I don’t think I am alone in this opinion.

I’m not saying there is no innovation here, but I think as a city we are a little behind the times.  I offer as example the reluctant adoption of Web 2.0 in Atlanta.  Web 2.0 as both  a term and a practice seems to have only grudgingly been accepted in the Atlanta business world.   Sure, there is a growing pool of adopters leading the charge at events like SoCon07 and 08, AWE, and Barcamp, but to call them early adopters would only be accurate in a geographically limited definition.  They’re early for Georgia, but not for the world.  I’d like to see that change.

I think Atlanta should skip Web 2.0.  Not skip as in miss, but skip as in skip ahead.  Instead of playing perpetual catch-up with innovation centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and NY, we should leap-frog those places and boldly invest in our time, money, thoughts and effort in redefining the context of the Internet.  The web has become the plumbing of our lives. Business is changing, marketing is changing, socializing is changing, lines are blurring, but we drag our feet and take incremental steps toward ideas that come to us from the west coast.

There are people in this town who would like to see Atlanta at the center of the discourse – a legitimate force in shaping our collective destinies through technology and its catalytic effect on human interaction.  And there is no reason why we can’t be, but we won’t get there by being a follower.  We need to figure out what Web 4.0 is, or 5.0, or maybe dare to embrace a term that isn’t Web x.x anything, but something new, something ambitious, something risky.  We might look silly, but we also may find a point of view, a value, a context that re-centers the discourse.

Let’s start talking.

Also posted in Barcamp Atlanta, commentary, context, mad scribblings | Tagged , , | Comments closed

"Soulful Excellence"

That’s a nice pairing of words; “soulful excellence”.  Highly evocative, together they smack of quality and emotion, like art – not clinical quality, like a spreadsheet.  So few pairings of words smack of anything so I just had to point them out.  I wish I could say they were mine, but alas credit must go to the remarkable Joey Reiman who uttered that phrase yesterday during a presentation for the Technology Association of Georgia’s Enterprise 2.0 Society. Yesterday we had a fabulous meeting featuring Mr. Reiman, Thinker & CEO and Elizabeth Clubb, Thinker & CSO, of BrightHouse.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the phrase itself is that it was used in the context of discussing new enterprise technology solutions.   The social computing mindset is different: powerful and enabling and dangerous to old modes of thinking.  It is changing the way we brand and the way we work.  They are becoming one. “Soulful Excellence” is evidence of that.  Chew on that phrase and watch out for more.

Also posted in Branding Thoughts, commentary, context, Live event, Other Interests | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed
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