Social Media Optimization

5 Reasons Why I Blog - Tagged by Stefanie Sigurdson

1. Knowledge: In my line of work, everything is cutting edge. Though the rules might not change from day to day, the game itself shifts and turns. If you don’t see the curves or anticipate what you’re going to do around the bend, you’re going to be left behind. If I’m in this for the long haul then I have to be on peak game all the time. Keeping this site forces me, on a daily basis, to stay in touch with the world of social media optimization.
2. To Shake Down the System: It doesn’t matter what field you’re in. From real estate to fashion design, people get stuck in a frame. They refuse to get out of the box or even to consider that what is out there might be worth looking at. If you’re one of those people and are in the search business, I have my sights set on you.
3. Community: I have spent the better part of the last 5 years building communities online. Most of these have overlapped with life outside of cyberspace and that’s something I enjoy very much. Part of social media should be about building the online portion. If done well, this will translate offline. I’m all about social media building real connections.
4. Experimentation: With new social media optimization sites, services, and tools being introduced all the time I could read all day long and never fully grasp the power inherant in any of them. Having this place gives me a place to play.. to try new things and weigh their pros and cons.
5. To Share: What’s the point in anything if you don’t share it with others. Even Siddhartha on journeys into his inner self set to share the experience with others. This is my life. These are my thoughts. Take them for what they are worth.

Guess it’s time to pass these like the good little chainmail buddy I am

I’ll pass the phatty to:
Web Marketing Watch - Alex McArthur - Lyndoman - David Wilson - AkPandaMan

greg :: Feb.04.2007 :: Social Media Meme :: 7 Comments »

Day 3 here at SMOmashup and things seems to be chugging along smoothly. Of course I still haven’t knocked #1 off of my list from yesterday so I decided to spend a bit of time doing that as well as perhaps giving all of you a few things to look through when you’re not reading here. That’s right I’m flushing out my links and trying to see what’s out there in the way of Social Media Optimization news and views.

The following list will be my starting point and everyone is encouraged to drop me a new link or a tip if you think it’s worth checking out, ’cause Knowing is Half the Battle!

The SMO blogs:

Smogger Social Media Blog

This blog is run by the hot and funny Postergirl. Her blog is very visual, articulate, and exudes the 2.0 mentality. It is updated a few times a week and always offers something different from what you’d see around most anywhere else. Fun times and good reads. Recommended for those in the scene looking for something a bit out of the ordinary.

S-M-O Blog

Run by David Wilson, this blog is very straightforward and informative. What it lacks in fun and style it makes up for in thoughtfulness and professionalism. He has some good ideas and a nice understanding of the climate. I guess the only thing missing from this is getting a great grasp on him and his personal involvement in the land of Social Media Optimization. However that’s not essential to running a blog and this is one I’ll check on the regular.

Micropersuasion

Steve Rubel explores how the digital citizen is transforming marketing, media and public relations. Sounds fascinating, eh? Well this blog is a mix for sure. It’s obvious from first glance that Steve knows the ins and outs of the industry and though it’s not exclusively Social Media content, his topics keep coming back to that, but from a very almost executive position. I don’t know whether that means he’s someone entrenched in the game or just a the life of the party but he always has the latest play-by-play from the industry.

Guy Kawasaki

This is one of the few blogroll entries here that isn’t really about Social Media Optimization. Instead it’s much more along the lines of the whole fucking world is social, and there’s media… so where do you fall into the mix? Another person who comes across as and insider, Guy has a very nice resource for all of those who are in the marketing frame of mind. Fresh ideas daily, that if worked correctly, could turn you and your business around. It’s too bad Realtors haven’t figured out the internets yet… if they found this blog, we’d all be in trouble

Influential Interactive Marketing

What sort of tool would I be if I didn’t include the guy who coined the phrase who started all of this? This blog is run by Rohit Bhargava who gave us all the leway that we’ve taken by coining a phrase which encapsulates the entire blog for which I stand. I know how hard it is to coin a phrase and believe me, this dude did it right. On top of all that, he runs a site that covers not only social media optimization but general approaches to marketing in a 2.0 world that are beneficial to all in the web commnunity. Thx mang.

greg :: Jan.03.2007 :: SMO Linkage, Social Media Optimization :: 4 Comments »

About 5 seconds after I thought I had completed the setup of SMOmashup a few things occurred to me:

1. It is impossible to ever be finished getting ready for anything.
2. For a site that’s dedicated to the Web 2.0 world, it feels very 0.9
3. None of the SMO-esque sites I’d seen actually used any social bookmarks
4. Neither did mine

Well, regardless of my inherit unrest I totally didn’t feel like working on a new theme and the only thing I could think of was trying to hook up #4, which would then fix #3 and make a little bit of headway towards the first two concerns.

In no time at all I had come across not one but two different approaches to adding Social Bookmarks to a blog.

The first one is the one that I decided upon and is the wonderful Social Bookmark Links Wordpress Plugin from TwisterMC. Currently in version 0.5.1 it has options where you can pick and choose your favorite Social Sites to display with your post in text form or toss them all in a dropdown menu.

It’s super easy to install and looking at the PHP file it also appears very hackable so that given 15 minutes or so you should be able to add anything you feel the author might have overlooked. Though I would think from the 45+ choices he gives you, that’s probably not likely in the near future.

I would give this a 4.5/5 stars. For future versions I would like to see the ability to order the results in the text format instead of only being able to display them alphabetically. That plus a bit more control over the individual dividers. Other than those wishes for down the road, I highly recommend this for anyone looking to add the easy plugin functionality of Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, etc to their Wordpress setup.

The 2nd option that I found was an online Social Bookmarking creator by iFeedreaders that lets you choose from essentially the same options as the plugin and when you are done it spits out a clean bit of HTML code that you can drop right into your blog or static page to achieve a similar effect as an actual plugin.

This worked well and fast and would serve the purpose if nothing better was available for your particular setup (*cough* Postnuke *cough* Static Page *cough*). But since just about everyone who would be interested in this sort of feature probably isn’t using something dated I can’t think of what purpose this would serve on a regular basis. Still handy to have around I suppose so we’ll give 4/5 stars for doing what it’s supposed to do.

greg :: Jan.02.2007 :: SMO Tools, Social Media Optimization :: No Comments »