You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.

But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted.

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:

We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.

I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.

Community recommendations are becoming all the rage these days. While, Twitter and FriendFeed are popular ways to get recommendations within your personal networks and within a community, they don’t specifically cater to finding the most popular content within. Here are four great sites that give great recommendations of popular content within your own personal community and more!

BlogRize

BlogRize organizes communities around sites instead of the usual organization method based on friends. Unfortunately, because BlogRize is in “beta”, a site must reach a certain amount of members before it can become an open community. There are currently 4 site communities that are open: Louis Gray, Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, and Lifehacker. However, you can add your list of sites that you’d like to see a community built around and pray that others like it just as much as you do.

Within each community’s page, you’ll see popular shared items by other fans of the site and what the ratings for each article are. BlogRize sports a rather unique ratings system that users will benefit from. You’re not rating on a scale of 1-5. Instead, you rate whether an article is interesting, funny, insightful, lame, disagree, or facts wrong. You may find this more helpful then the lame 1-5 stars.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these BlogRize Reviews: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers, BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

LinkRiver

Last month, I called LinkRiver my personal Techmeme (Corvida on LinkRiver). I still stand by that statement.

LinkRiver goes the by the standards by allowing you to see what’s popular amongst those that you are following based on how many people have shared an item through their Google Reader linkblog and also the LinkRiver bookmarklet. However, it does an even better job of showing what’s popular amongst the entire LinkRiver community! On the LinkRiver Popular page, you’ll find more than enough popular content to get you through the week.

For more in-depth coverage, check out my LinkRiver review “LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme“.

Social Median

A new comer to content recommendation, Social Median gives you the hottest content from all across the tech community. Recommendations are based on the number of “clip its” an item has received. You can “clip” an item using Social Median’s “Clip it” bookmarklet.

There are various popular networks you can join to get better news recommendations sent to you. Also, if you don’t have time to check into the service, you can have Social Median email you the most popular content of the day or at a particular time.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Social Median: Former Jobster CEO’s Social|Median Incubating in Alpha, Social|median: Personalized News Filter - 1000 Invites

Blern

Blern is another new comer to the content recommendation niche. The difference between Blern and the others services is that Blern attempts to learn your reading habits in order to better serve you, instead of basing recommendations entirely off of the community like the others.

You can help Blern learn your reading habits by importing your feeds from services such as StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, and by visiting your recommendations page often to give feedback on recommended content.

When you run out of content, Blern also features buzzword and feeds pages so that you can get the latest items from your feeds and also find popular content from buzzwords of your choice.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Blern: Blern Makes A Mistake From The Early Nineties, Blern.com - Blogs and Articles Recommended to You

The Power Of “You” And “Community”

In this day and age, finding content really is a simple as putting in a keyword on Google. With plenty of filters going around, nothing seems to be the filtering effects of yourself and a great community. All of these services can help to filter and provide you with better content, better sites, and even better people.

It is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes - to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers. But if your business has put off starting a blog for far too long, here is why you should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to your overall business marketing strategy.

Human face
You don’t really want people to think of your company as “big box” or “typical corporate America”. And blogging can actually put a human face to your company, since the company now has a voice it can relate to when it reads your blog. When you consider how much money companies put into creating a human face for their business, doing it with a company blog is a relatively inexpensive way to humanize your corporation.

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored. If there is a scandal or other negative publicity surrounding your company, you already have a platform ready to release information that doesn’t involve sending press releases to the media or subjecting your CEO or other employees to a press conference.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it. Since press releases are rarely sent to announce something your company hasn’t done yet, a blog is an easy way to get the word out and build anticipation.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Soft selling
Now, you don’t want to do a hard sell in your company blog, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with soft selling products or services in a blog… in fact, many readers will expect it. Just don’t go overboard with every post being promotional in nature. But it can be a great way to market your products, particularly ones that people might not be as familiar with, whether lower sellers or simply new to the market.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry. And since blogging is such a low-cost marketing strategy compared to paid advertising, you are saving money to place your identity in front of people.

For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies. As long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool.

by: David Polinchock

I was doing an interview for a new book about experiential marketing and I was asked about the importance brand ambassadors. My response was that while they were certainly very important when you were doing marketing events, the truth is that there shouldn’t be a select group of brand ambassadors. Every employee that you hire should be a brand ambassador. We’ve written about the importance of retail in the past and updated our thoughts:

Retail Grows in Importance: Retail spaces will become even more important as a connection point between the consumer and the brand. And the people you hire to run your retail is becoming even more important today.

Do you hire to save money or to find the best people possible to represent your brand? The consumer will know the difference.

So think about that the next time you’re getting ready to hire someone. Would they be a great brand ambassador or are they simply a warm body that you can get on the cheap. Yea, I know money’s tight, but give your employees something other then money to motivate them. Give them a passionate place to work. Give them the tools they need and let them make decisions. And don’t be pissed off when you’re employees don’t care about the company when you cut their salaries/benefits while announcing that upper management made tens of millions in bonuses for saving the company money. If you’re not going to treat them like they’re important, they won’t act like the company is important.

I’ll remind you again of something we wrote back in 2003 for Event Marketer magazine. These rules are even more important today then when I wrote then 5 years ago. So read them and learn them. Your survival depends on knowing them!

1. Make it compelling. Is there a narrative story that the audience understands? Is there a narrative at all? What is the story that you tell to your customers every day? Could you define it? More importantly, can your audience? Make the product experience as good as the marketing experience. Ursula LeGuin describes a story this way — What makes a story is - you want to ‘find out what happens next’ - this bit of the story leads you to the next one. When people interact with your brand, are they really interested in finding out more?
2. Deliver on your message and don’t use slogans to deliver an empty promise. Do you say that you’re committed to total customer satisfaction and then create rules of engagement that are of benefit to you and not your customers? Do you train your customer service staff to only say yes to a request after the customer has asked a certain number of times? Are you prepared to live your slogan in everything you do, and not just the easy things?
3. Make it a movement. Jim Ward, vp-marketing at Lucas Films, said recently that the next generation of brand marketing is creating a movement. Would people camp out in front of anything for up to three weeks for your product? Many companies have created movements—just listen to any Mac user talk about PCs. Is your brand a movement or simply a product? Are people passionate about your brand, your products, and your services? Do they sincerely want to share their stories of your brand with other people? Are you telling the same story with all of your employees? Are they telling the same story to your customers?
4. Be authentic. If you need more answers, talk to consumers. Be who you are and leverage what your company stands for. I recently had the opportunity to work on a product for a Fortune 100 company, helping to position them to a specific target audience. They wanted to talk about speed, but as anyone who has worked with large companies knows, speed is not one of their authentic story lines. They had many other authentic stories to tell, but it took a while for them to understand that and work with different language. Note that stories must be organic and can’t be rushed.

Social bookmarking tool Yoono has been in the works for quite some time now, and it’s finally emerging from private beta. With over 1 million users, Yoono isn’t really much of a secret, but now you have a chance to play with this player that’s making itself known in the social bookmarking and aggregation space.

You may recall that Yoono acts as a browser add-on that lets you chat and share items with friends instantly, while offering recommendations as you browse the web and also enabling you to update your status across various networks and bookmark items for personal use as well.

So even though Yoono claims to be everything Flock should have been, how does it actually stack up to the competition? Let’s compare Yoono to some of its rivals, including Flock, the recently launched Vysr, Digsby and Minggl.

Ease of Use

Yoono and its competitors are all downloadable applications, but beyond that, how easy is it to use Yoono? So far, Yoono isn’t quite ready for IE support, but Firefox is good to go. Flock is its own browser, while Vysr supports all major browsers. Digsby is a standalone application that sits on your desktop and Minggl isn’t available for Firefox just yet.

When it comes to basic use scenarios, Yoono is no-intrusive until you begin interacting with it. The screen will gray in order to view images and video content overlaid on your browser window. Flock takes more setup time in order to get all your supporting accounts set up, while Vysr is a very quick 1-step process. Digsby is a longer download and setup process and I’ve had some trouble with some of its recent updates crashing the service, while Minggl takes a bit of education for consumers in order to us the service optimally.

Status Updates and Lifestreams

Microblogging is central to web activity, so having a central location to update your status across multiple sites is a requirement. All of the services except Vysr has this option at the moment. As an aggregator for your friends’ lifestreams, Vysr is missing this as well.

Yoono has a very handy filter capability that allows you to dig down into your friends’ content across networks and stream content, though this can still be a slightly disparate process with Yoono. Digsby is probably the next runner up in this particular category, as it integrates life-streaming and email messaging capabilities, with direct interaction for all your updating processes.

Shareability

Yoono is also a chat tool that lets you share items from the web immediately with your friends. Drag and drop items from the web into your Yoono sidebar tool, whether it be a selected piece of text, videos and images, and it will become immediately available to your friends, depending on what chat tool they’re currently using.

As Yoono supports chat for AOL and MSN, amongst others, you’re likely to capture all your friends for the chat tool. Digsby also supports chat, including the recently launched Facebook chat tool, though it’s lacking the drag’n’drop simplicity of an in-browser tool. Flock also has drag’n’drop sharing capabilities, and all of the comparable services support or are planning to support personal bookmarking tools.

Differentiating factors

While Yoono, Flock, Vysr, Digsby and Minggl all dabble in personal data aggregation of some sort, each service also branches over into a couple of different areas.

Yoono has an interesting combination of personal aggregation of life-streaming and bookmarking, as well as chat.

Flock, as a browser, also has the capabilities of presenting its tool as a platform for future development for other social tools, though it often finds itself looking to natively integrate the best aspects of browser add-ons we see for Firefox.

Vysr, though it has chat, does not particularly act as a profile aggregation tool. It’s major point of comparison for this article, however, is its potential as a “personal startpage” as a browser add-on. Both Yoono and Vysr both take some of the social features that startpages like Netvibes are trying to do with initiatives like Ginger. Click here to see a video intro of Vysr from my meeting with founder Guda Venkatesh at the Web 2.0 Expo last week.

Digsby has an interesting desktop application that is highly interactive, minimizing the necessity of trekking across various social networks. As we’ve seen with the success of Twhirl, such integrated desktop apps currently have a lot of promise.

Minggl’s personalization tools allow for complete control of the presentation of your social networking profil, enabling you to create separate interfaces for various audiences, on top of its browser plug-in.

Social networking websites, or social bookmark sites are a good source for traffic to your website or blog. After using social network websites, you will notice a nice increase in your blog’s traffic.

Today I want to talk a bit about StumbleUpon social network website, and how to use it to increase your blog’s traffic, and some stumble tips to get targeted traffic.

Blogs Traffic From StumbleUpon

A nice feature in stumble upon social network site is their toolbar, that makes it easier to submit your posts, and vote (give a point) and reviews to posts you like, or negative vote/review to the ones you don’t like.

How To Vote Or Review Posts On StumbleUpon

It is so simple to vote or review your and other’s posts on stumble upon …. It’s all done through stumble upon toolbar. You will find two hands on the left side of stumble toolbar, the hand pointing upwords (thumb up) is “I like it” and the hand pointing downwards (thumb down) is “I don’t like it” … Then if you were the first to discover that post, a popup will appear for you to chose the title, description , and category for that post ….. The description here is your review about that post, incase you weren’t the first to vote, you will have to click on the “review” in the toolbar (the one at the right to “send to”), then in that page you may write your review.

Adding Friends On Your StumbleUpon Account

Using stumble toolbar you may also send your posts to your friends, and receive their’s too … so make sure you add friends sharing your same interests, so both of you will receive and send what they are interested in!

To have the ability to send and receive from your friend, they must add you back to be “mature friends” … you may try to send them a nice message, telling them that “we both share the same interests, and if they like to add you back so we both may share our posts, etc…” (use whatever words to tell so!)

How To Send And Receive Pages At StumbleUpon

To send use the send bottom on the toolbar …. And when you receive pages from your friend you will see it as a red number next to the stumble logo at the left side of the toolbar.

Those where the simple steps to get started with stumbleupon, and some tips to get your posts shared with people sharing your same interests … Other uses of the toolbar is to check your friend’s friends posts, to check stumble images, stumble videos, etc….

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website. 

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

In this guest post Steven Snell (who writes about social media at Traffikd) examines the topic of generating readership for your blog through social media.

Image by shoothead

If you spend much time on social media websites, I’m sure you’ve noticed that you tend to see many of the same websites and blogs on the front page receiving the most exposure. A few months ago I wrote a post at Daily Blog Tips that posed the question Do Small Bloggers Have a Chance with Digg? Through my observations and through the comments from many readers, it’s clear that large websites and blogs have a distinct advantage over smaller blogs when it comes to social media. Obviously, this can be frustrating to new bloggers who are looking to get some much-needed exposure from social media, as it seems to be the rich just getting richer.

One question that needs to be addressed is, what is the most significant factor that leads to the success of these large websites with social media? Is their content just that much better than smaller blogs? In my opinion, many times this isn’t the case. Is it because they have a larger existing audience? I’d say this is often a bigger factor than the quality issue. Very popular blogs tend to do well with social media, and with their incredibly large subscriber bases, they have a distinct advantage.

Take for example the front page of Delicious. Typically it takes about 100 bookmarks within 24 hours or so to get to the front page. It seems like almost every day there is a post from Smashing Magazine or Zen Habits on the front page. With over 60,000 and 50,000 readers respectively, a small percentage of subscribers can easily put these posts on the front page with a bookmark. On the other hand, a smaller blog with only 100 subscribers would need one bookmark per subscriber to make the front page.

So how does this affect smaller bloggers who want to get better results from social media? Essentially it shows that great content alone is usually not enough. It takes a gathering to build a crowd. Meaning, your gathering of existing readers and your network of friends can help to result in a bigger crowd that comes from social media sites.

New bloggers that are targeting social media, or those who have just been disappointed with their results to this point need to focus on building the gathering before the crowd will come. Networking is probably the most significant activity for bloggers in terms of gaining social media traffic. A blogger’s network includes readers and subscribers as well as friends and contacts who are bloggers themselves. Members of your network will be much more likely to vote for you on social media sites, plus you can openly ask for their help when you need it the most.

There are several different ways to get social media votes:

1 - Visitors of social media sites can see your link at the social media site and vote there (example, a Digg user visits the upcoming page, clicks through to your link, returns to Digg and votes for your post).

2 – Visitors of your blog can vote by using a button, widget, or link on your blog.

3 – Visitors can use a toolbar to vote (examples, StumbleUpon and Delicious toolbars).

4 – Social media users can share your post with their friends (example, the shout feature at Digg).

5 – Bloggers can email (or IM) others in their network to request a vote.

The only one of these that is not affected by the existing “crowd” of a blog is #1. Getting votes from the upcoming page is not really affected by how many readers you have at your blog, rather it is affected by how many people see the item on the upcoming page, the quality of the title (in terms of attracting clicks), the quality of the content once people click-through, etc. Certainly there are some small blogs that have success this way without a network, but this seems to be the minority.

All of the other four are affected by how many people are seeing the page and how many people are in the blogger’s network. Let’s quickly look at each one. For #2, the more visitors a page has (which is impacted by the number of subscribers), the more opportunities it has to get votes through a button. If a post only gets 5 visitors, the most votes it can possibly get through a “Digg This” button is five. On the other hand, if the post gets 5,000 visitors, its potential for votes just multiplied by 1,000. The situation in #3, visitors voting using a toolbar, is exactly the same scenario.

Item numbers 4 and 5 are both impacted by the blogger’s network of friends and contacts. If you have a large existing network and you’re willing to ask them for some help occasionally, you can get some quick and easy votes. Whether you’re using a share feature at a social media site or simply sending a private email, your success will depend on the quality and quantity of connections you have made in addition to the quality of the content itself.

I Don’t Have a Crowd. What Can I Do?

Understanding how all of this works is good, but if you’re a new blogger with a limited network and a small base of subscribers it doesn’t help you very much, yet. If you’re looking to improve your results with social media, do what you can to get one step closer to blogs that have a bigger reach than you. Work on building your network and send as much traffic as possible to your posts.

Here are a few tips:
1 – Still focus on content

In order to build your crowd you’ll need to give them a reason to consistently read your blog. Publishing high-quality content is the best way to do this. Although I said earlier that the existing audience is often more important than the content itself for social media success, the content still needs to be of a certain standard of quality.

2 – Dedicate time to networking

Most bloggers network casually whenever it happens. This is fine, but you can step up your network by making it a priority. Use social media sites and other blogs as opportunities to connect with other bloggers and get to know others who share some of your interests. Be active on blogs in your niche and make an effort to get to know those bloggers. Don’t limit your involvement with just A-list bloggers. Make an effort to get to know other bloggers who are at the same stage in the blogging lifecycle as you. In this case you’ll be able to help each other as you both grow your blogs.

3 – Funnel traffic

Most bloggers create posts from time-to-time that they expect to draw some attention from social media. When you have a post that you want to get some exposure, don’t just focus on getting Diggs or Stumbles. You can use smaller social media sites and niche social media sites to funnel traffic to the post. As visitors come from other social media sites they may also Digg or Stumble your post. If you have some other way to get traffic to these posts, such as getting a link from a friend or from a community website, do so. The more visitors you can get to the page, the better your chances will be of getting some votes.

4 – Don’t be afraid to ask for a vote

Some bloggers and social media users don’t like to ask others for a vote. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, I’ve found that other social media users who are legitimately your friends (not just someone you added as a friend at Digg) will be happy to give you a vote if your content is worthy, and you can return the favor for them as well. I get a decent number of requests each week, and as long as it’s from someone I know and not just a spam request, I’m happy to at least consider the vote.

After The Gathering is Built

Once you have built a gathering of subscribers and those in your network, drawing the crowd from social media will be incredibly more realistic. Not only will it be more realistic, but it will happen more frequently, as you can observe from the larger blogs mentioned at the beginning of this post.

What’s Your Approach?

How do you go about getting votes for social media? Is your success with social media impacted by your network?

Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs.

The results reveal a fairly striking winner - Google.

The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing - but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results.

Darren posted a timely response a few weeks ago to the NY Times article that talked about bloggers blogging until they drop.

Despite the fact that some readers felt the subject was over-hyped – and quite rightly pointed out that blogging isn’t necessarily any more or less stressful than many other jobs – you don’t have to be a medically-qualified doctor to notice that many bloggers have extremely unhealthy habits…erratic sleep patterns, junk-filled diets, overloading on caffeine, no exercise.

The previous “healthy blogging” posts I’ve posted here on Problogger have yielded some excellent advice and collective wisdom from readers. Here are some of those nuggets:

On balance:

Courtney
“I find that my blogging is a lot better when I maintain balance. That means I need to work out, eat right, and maintain healthy, social relationships. Once I let myself get out of whack, my blogging starts to suffer because I’m not as happy.”

Sheamus
“I’d file the ‘risk’ of ill-health to blogging alongside the scares surrounding people playing video games excessively; while the odd freak person might do it to a point where they get ill (or worse), for most (normal) folk it won’t even be an issue. It’s always a balance; everything is 50/50.”

David
“I think it’s all about balance. An addiction to anything is usually unhealthy, as it pushes other healthy aspects out of your life. It can be blogging or playing worlds of warcraft. You can even be addicted to exercise, for crying out loud.”

On what to eat & drink:

Lance
“I’d also like to stress the importance of staying away from processed foods and drinks. It is so easy to grab a can of cola and a bag of chips as a quick snack to curb the hunger, and quickly get back to the online networking frenzy. Give your body the nutrients it is begging for, not the processed chemically synthesised junk foods that have zero nutritional value!”

NoCaf4Me
“Tea, coffee, cola, energy drinks and chocolate share the same nerve toxin (stimulant), caffeine. Caffeine, which is readily released into the blood, triggers a powerful immune response that helps the body to counteract and eliminate this irritant. The toxic irritant stimulates the adrenal glands, and to some extent, the body’s many cells, to release the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol into the blood stream.”

Evan Hadkins
“If you battle to know what is healthy for you probably the best thing to do is keep a food diary. On one side of the page you record EVERYTHING that goes into your mouth. On the other side how you feel - you can use a scale 1 for great to 5 for poor to make it easier.”

On stress:

Foxnomad
“It’s better (for you and the people around you) to make it a business. Set hours for work and define your objectives. Ever since I began doing this a few months ago I’ve produced better quality posts. The extra free time also made my relationships with other people and commitments smoother…”

Tish
“If the content isn’t flowing freely from my head through my fingers, I need to do something else for awhile and go back later. I use the same “walk away” strategy when I become frustrated with the technology I’m trying to use. Sometimes I leave it for a couple of days and when I get back to it, things magically come together.”

JQK
“Stress can nip away at our health without our even realizing it. Being in a prolonged battle with an undefeatable opponent is among the worst of stressors. When a blog is allowed to be viewed as an ‘opponent’, to be conquered, it can be devastating, over time. I try to see it as a friend, a demanding one perhaps, but a friend nevertheless. A friend that I enjoy spending time with…on my terms. The key factor is enjoyment, when my blog turns on me, as it sometimes does, it is no longer enjoyable or healthy..it’s time to walk away…for awhile (guilt free).”

On exercise & posture:

Rainmaker
“For me, exercise is critical to clear thinking. I can get totally engrossed in what I’m writing for hours and days. One of the best things I do is instead of grabbing that mid-day caffeine, I take a brisk walk for about 30 minutes. The problem is dragging myself out of the chair to do it. The trick I learned is to set an alarm in my calendar for about 2pm. This does two things for me:

1. I see it every time I look at the to-do list.. because, if it’s not there, I’ll totally forget to do it.
2. It interrupts me with an alarm… AND I don’t turn off that alarm until I get up to walk (I may snooze it every 10 minutes for a couple of hours, but I won’t actually turn it OFF until I get up).

Melissa
“For stretching I try to stop every hour; stand up and use a jump rope to stretch out my upper back and chest. I take the jump rope and extend the rope above my head at shoulder’s length width and slowly I rotate my shoulders bringing the rope behind my back so it’s even with my shoulder blades. This is an amazing stretch…it can be a tad painful if you are really stiff but it will help open up your chest muscles and corrects your posture.”

On healthy habits:

*Miss Universe
“If possible, blog by a window. The natural air that trickles in does wonders for your lungs. Also the natural light is more harmonious that just florescent or incandescent. If there is too much sun, just pull down the shades , you will notice a nice glow that even makes your screen look better…”

Frugal Dad
“Blogging, like anything else, requires the discipline to stand up and walk away every now and then. I’ve fallen into the trap of writing, commenting and researching for hours on end. I try to force myself to stand up and walk around the house, or go outside for a brief walk, or spend some time with my family as a small break.”

Sharon Sarmiento
“Two things I find to be health lifesavers are:

1. Taking a break every hour or so, to get up, eat a little something, walk around, go outside, stretch
2. Changing my work schedule with the seasons so that I have more time to play outdoors.

Right now I’m doing a Springtime schedule that gives me free time between 8:30am and evening (I work in the early morning and the evening so the day is free). Experimenting with unconventional schedules is something that most of us can do, and it really helps with morale too!”

There is a clear link to your health and your success as a problogger; you just might not notice that link until your health is gone.

Lea Woodward blogs about life, business and a lifestyle of permanent travel.

Twitter is a new social media service that is being used by many power bloggers to keep in touch with their audience on a more personal level. It is called “micro-blogging” and rests somewhere between Blogging and Email. The basic concept is that you can subscribe to get short and brief commentary in the form of live alerts from other members by SMS, Instant Messenger or Email. These people can send it to you via their mobile phone or IM. You too can become someone who others choose to follow and get updates from… but it is very hard to create a large fan following on Twitter from scratch, unless you already have a huge audience that subscribes to you blog. Twitter picked up in popularity around 2007.

By following many individuals on Twiter, you can get a very fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback. You can very easily follow thousands of users and listen and enter into conversations happening between multiple users at any point of time. By using Twitter actively, you can also push out messages to others and use it as a self promotion and marketing tool. Twitter can be used for both a professional and personal life, and its addictive - but once you understand how to use i, it can be a very effective tool.

Catch me on Twitter my URL is http://twitter.com/mediamavens and be the First to know everything, even before it is posted on this Blog….. Yes it’s Cool!

Definition from Wikipedia (skip this if you know this stuff already)

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email

But how exactly do these peer influences work? What motivates a person to share a piece of media with a group of friends or participate in an online community? How does one person’s purchasing behavior affect another’s?  Who are the consumers doing the influencing? And how can you design for influence? In this article, I discuss the motivations to share, how the location of a person in a network plays a role, and whether you can market to those influencers. I then provide tactics specific to the retail sector to take advantage of peer influence.

Motivations to Share

Abraham Maslow emphasized that personal value precedes network and social value in his hierarchy of needs theory. He argued that most people are not selfish but self interested  – they are always searching for an answer to the question – what’s in it for me?  This applies to the web domain where people don’t share and allow peer influences to take place just for the sake of it. People share online when they are incented to and when there’s potential for personal value to be realized.

Clay Shirky and Peter Kollock also point out that once a person has been able to derive strong individual benefit from a particular experience, the motivation to share increases significantly. This happens as the user realizes that through the collective action (or experience) there’s opportunity to derive even more personal value from it.

What are the implications of this? When you design a website or online marketing campaigns, remember that if the experience isn’t valuable to one person, it won’t be to a hundred, a thousand, or a million people. Tied to that, consumers must be able to derive greater value through the act of sharing for them to make that effort. For example, a person would be more likely to share a piece of media to influence a peer if the act of sharing enhances his reputation among those peers or if it encourages the peers to participate in the social activity too.

Location in the Network

Not everybody is inclined to play a role in influence either. People use the Internet in different ways, and their usage patterns dictate how likely they are to share information and influence each other. But more than that, their location in an online community or social network heavily influences their likelihood of playing a role in influencing others.

The closer a person is to the center of the conversations, and the more people he is connected to, the more likely he is to influence his peers. Because he is directly involved in many different conversations, his peers typically treat him as a credible or appealing information source. They get used to getting information from him and get used to sharing information with him, providing him with something to respond to in turn.

As a result, this person is in a much stronger position to influence a peer than someone who only occasionally participates in the conversation or is just loosely connected to the group. In fact, this is how the influential bloggers work too – because they are at the center of conversations sharing a lot of information themselves, they have lots of influence.

The same philosophy applies to networks of friends and how they share information online. Why does this matter? It is important to recognize that not every Web user is a candidate for peer influence. Only those that are at the center of their networks communicate actively and regularly with their peers and can play this role. Look for those people, and meet their needs as you design for influence.

Influencers are not Brand Advocates

A report from JupiterResearch highlights that nearly 25% of all online adults are brand advocates. They are more likely to research and purchase products online too. But as the reported pointed out, these brand advocates focus on gathering product information and purchasing them, rather than spreading the word through social media sites. They are not the most important influencers.

Rather, the most important influencers are the people who play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision. These people are in the consumer’s network – online and offline. They serve as validation points sharing their own experiences of a product with the consumer, pointing the consumer to resources that can affect the purchasing decision, and weigh in with their own opinions. How do you reach them?

Contrary to traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategies or even viral marketing, you don’t. You let your potential customers, who are in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision, reach out to them. Why? Because these influencers don’t vary by product, rather they vary by consumers. And it is difficult for you as a marketer to know who the core influencers for a brand consideration or particular purchasing decision are. In some cases, it may be the consumer’s parents or it may be the friends, or peers at work or relatively anonymous peers in a discussion forum, or maybe a combination of all these.

Tactics for Success

So if you cannot reach these important influencers that are having a far greater influence on purchasing decisions than any other form of marketing, what can you do? You can formulate your web strategies to allow for those peer influences to take place. I introduced some tactics in my previous article, here are some more but specific to online retail experiences –

1. Integrate more deeply with the social networks. Yes, your consumers are spending a lot of time on these social networks, and that won’t change anytime soon. Office Depot allows consumers to post messages directly to their Facebook profiles, or into their newsfeeds, about products they are interested in. It does this from the product page on its site. It makes it easier for a consumer to solicit feedback from his peers.

Other e-retailers should follow by integrating directly with the social networks allowing consumers to get feedback more directly during their purchasing process. For example, a consumer should be able to take a product from a retailer Web site, post information about it in his social network, and solicit feedback via a poll from his network seamlessly. No one does this today.

2. Point customers to third-party review sites. Consumers are going to go to third-party review sites regardless of what you tell them on yours. So rather than trying to stop them, point your consumers to the most authorative and credible ones out there. They will appreciate this and return to your site once they are ready to make a purchase. Most sites point to favorable product reviews in the mainstream media, but that’s not enough.

By pointing to the blogs and review sites themselves, consumers will know where to look for more information, and they’ll find communities of peers looking to make similar purchases. These are peers that can positively influence them.

3.Tie more directly with the offline shopping experience. Consumers move between the online and the offline space as they make product purchasing decisions. The iPhone and other mobile devices that simplify web surfing are making this happen more. In fact, Google has seen a 20% increase in searches from mobile phones in the last few months.

Therefore, as you think about an online shopping experience, keep in mind those offline scenarios and how social influence can support them. A consumer might be surfing to your web site or broadcasting to his Facebook network asking for advice while standing in a retail outlet looking directly at your product. So for example, consider publishing the customer reviews for a particular product that were originally published online in the retail store itself. Staples is already doing this successfully.

4. Make the product a strong discussion point. We’re used to thinking of products in terms of features and specifications in relation to other products on retail Web sites. Separately, we think of online communities and social networks as places where people talk to each other. Those two worlds can blur if you allow for more conversations around the product. It’ll lead to more peer influences.

Amazon has started doing this with their Customer Discussions. These aren’t customer reviews, rather, they are forums to discuss the products and everything about them. They are designed to enable conversations about a product that people are interested in.

5. Leverage your employees to build online communities. Both Best Buy and Circuit City in different, but exciting ways, encourage their employees to participate in their online communities on their retail Web sites. These employees answer customer queries about specific products, advise each other on technical issues and demonstrate that there are real, authentic people who care behind the brand.

Why does this matter? Because when these employees play authentic and personal roles in online communities where consumers are making purchasing decisions, they blur the lines between sales representative and peer influencer. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily which is why these retailers, and others, should encourage their employees to participate in third-party online communities too – as long as they do so honestly, authentically, and appropriately.

Social Influence Marketing™ takes many different forms. As we’ve seen, at the root of Social Influence Marketing™ are the peer influences that can positively affect brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Taking advantage of social media, by tapping into the Social Influence Marketing™ concepts, requires a more rigorous understanding of those peer influencers. Only through a focused understanding and appropriate design tactics can you take advantage of one of the most important dimensions to marketing today.

Embracing blogs to connect with a company’s network of customers is fait accompli for the tech industry, but what about the rest of the planet that doesn’t put its every movement up on Twitter?

Here are four retailers that are using blogs and social media in an attempt to better connect with customers.

Revenue: $375 Billion
# Locations: 6,800
Notable URL: http://www.checkoutblog.com/
Notable post: “Great News About WalMart’s Milk” (over 230 comments)

After several failed attempts at blogging, most notably the reviled “WalMarting Across America” shill blog, the planet’s largest retailer might be starting to get its act together.  In 2007, the Bentonville, Arkansas company launched the “Checkout Blog,” a group blog penned by nine of its corporate buyers that covers topics from the garden to video games to sustainability.  A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.

Revenue: $23 Billion
# Locations: 30,000+
Notable URL: http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/
Notable post: “A Trip Down Memory Lane” (Good handling of a troll in the comments)

WalMart wasn’t the only retailing behemoth to receive derision for its initial forays into blogging.  McDonald’s, too, had its challenges. (Hopefully, you missed the fake “Lincoln Fry” blog, about a french fry shaped like the 16th President of the United States.  Yes, it was as abysmal as it sounds.)

The company behind the golden arches now has a “Open for Discussion” blog with weekly postings on topics regarding “Corporate Social Responsibility.”  While certainly better than the LIncoln Fry, there are still some challenges here:

1)  It looks to me like someone at McDonald’s headquarters has committed to some sort of MBO of “one blog post per week.”   As such, the posts are infrequent and not heavily trafficked.

2)  While it’s great to spread the wealth, all the most recent posts on the site (March-April 200 are from different authors.  Accordingly, each post is starting with a “who I am and what my role is” statement.  This also means that the revolving cast of characters hasn’t a chance to connect with readers.  It’s drive-by blogging.

3) To their credit, comments on the blog are open.  However, the paucity of comments makes me think that either (a) the blog is receiving almost no traffic or (b) the comments are being heavily moderated.  The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: “McDonald’s owns any comments or other content that you post on this site. That means that McDonald’s has the right to make, have made, offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit, display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without compensation to you. McDonald’s also has the right to use your name in connection with any use of your submissions.”  This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer.

Revenue: $9 Billion
# Locations: 15,000+
Notable URL: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
Notable post: “Vote For All Day Bold” (Giving contrarian viewpoints their due)

Of the four retailers profiled here, Starbucks has gone the furthest with respect to using social media to not only connect the organization to its customers, but to enable customers to rally around ideas as a community.  Their “My Starbucks Idea” site is a venue where customers can submit suggestions to the organization, vote on the suggestions of other individuals, and see which ideas are going to actually be implemented by the organization.

The best part of the site is not the technical implementation but, rather, the cultural one.  Starbucks does not seem to be censoring comments about their organization in any way, even when the feedback is less-than-stellar.  For example,  one representative comment on the site states:

“Decaf drinkers want strong coffee also. I go (or used to go) to Starbucks because of the decaf Sumatra, Verona etc. I can get Pikes Piss coffee from Tim Horton’s or McDonald’s. My grandmother makes stronger coffee. Starting today I am no longer a customer of Starbuck’s coffee except for whole beans. I urge everyone reading this to follow my lead and make Starbuck’s understand that the reason we (used to) spend our money on their overpriced coffe is because it is the best and no one else offers a strong decaf. There is strength in numbers - walk away today!”

The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway.  If this site didn’t exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog.  With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.

Revenue: $4 Billion
# Locations: 270+
Notable URL: http://wholefoodsmarket.com/socialmedia/blogs/
Notable post: “Slow Down and Green Up” (Rich conversation)

Although their CEO got himself and the company in some hot water by commenting negatively about a competitor using a pseudonym (n.b. the investigation into his actions has now been concluded), Whole Foods has a farmer’s market full of blogs, podcasts and videos they are using to give customers a variety of methods to learn more about the organization.

With social media marketing, numbers get thrown around a lot. How many visitors did you get to a particular post? How many visitors were sent from which social media sites? How many inbound links were gained? While these are some of the reasons that most of us are involved in social media marketing, it’s easy to get distracted by the numbers an lose focus of what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Ways that numbers can be deceiving:

1 – Visitors from social media can’t accurately be compared to other types of traffic sources

Getting 1,000 visitors from StumbleUpon is much different than getting 1,000 visitors from search engines. It’s also different than getting 1,000 visitors from online advertising. It’s very difficult to compare social media traffic stats to other sources because it is so much different. The standard answer is that social media traffic is less valuable than other types of traffic, but this isn’t always the case. Niche social media sites can send highly-targeted visitors, and there are plenty of other traffic sources that aren’t the highest quality. Try to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

2 – Visitors from one social media site can’t be compared to another

Each social media site has it’s own unique audience. It’s very difficult to compare the the traffic you get from two different social media sites. Digg may send 20,000 visitors to a post, but the 1,000 you received from a niche social media site may have been more valuable. Because each site is different, try not to judge one audience simply because it doesn’t compare favorably to another social media site in terms of numbers.

3 – Social media can be manipulated

Social media marketing sometimes blurs the line between optimizing a site for social media and manipulating the results. A website that draws huge numbers of traffic to genuinely high quality content will have better long-term results than one that gains an advantage in order to send traffic to content that isn’t of the highest quality. Essentially, manipulating the results may produce impressive numbers, but the results will be disappointing if the content isn’t worth the attention that it got.

4 – Return on investment is difficult to calculate

With other types of marketing and advertising, return on investment is going to determine the success of the campaign and future efforts will be built around these results. With social media it’s difficult, if not impossible, to calculate ROI accurately. There are so many elements that are involved with social media marketing that don’t produce results that can be measured with specific numbers.

5 – You can’t rely on traffic from social media

If you have 50,000 visitors from social media to your blog in one month, the next month you could have 200 or you could have 200,000. It simply is not consistent and predictable. This can make it difficult for selling or buying ads if the site relies heavily on social media. One big month unfortunately doesn’t mean that the blog has turned the corner and that traffic will be lasting. It may or it may not. Of course, if you learn throughout the process, your chances will be much better of maintaining or improving traffic levels.

6 – CPM can be thrown off

If you are trying to calculate the value of your visitors, this can greatly vary depending on what percentage of your visitors are from social media. Visitors that come from social media tend to ignore advertisements, so your click-through rates on AdSense will be lower.

7 – Subscriber numbers may be inflated

If you reach a larger number of visitors in a day with a site like Digg or StumbleUpon, you may see that the next day your subscriber count experienced a big jump. Frequently, it will drop a bit the next day. I’ve learned through experience to expect a percentage of those new subscribers to be gone quickly. This doesn’t always happen, but it can be very disappointing if you’re not prepared for it.

8 – Numbers can’t show impact

Just because a post receives a lot of traffic through social media doesn’t mean that anything has really been accomplished. Hopefully it does have an impact, but visitors alone do not mean much if they never come back, they don’t subscribe, they don’t click on an ad, etc,

What Does This Mean?

1 – You need to know what you want to get out of social media

If you’re using social media to gain exposure and grow your blog, you need to know specifically what it is that you want to accomplish. Without a plan you’ll be left with nothing but some number that really don’t mean anything.

2 – Don’t rely too heavily on social media traffic

Because it’s not consistent, you shouldn’t rely too much on social media. I’m all for optimizing your website or blog for social media and doing what you can to help your chances, but sometimes it just won’t happen. Focus on building diversity in traffic.

3 – Keep trying to improve the results and effectiveness

The learning curve with social media marketing is pretty sharp. By that I mean that you can quickly learn a lot of things that you can immediately put into practice to improve your results. Analyze your results and find the methods that work the best for you in terms of achieving your goals.

4 – Don’t be too quick to judge

Because the numbers can be so deceiving, don’t judge a particular social media site or method of marketing before you’ve given it a fair chance. Don’t give up on a specific social media site because you didn’t become popular the first week you were using the site.

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you feel about the numbers that are involved with social media? Do you agree that they can be very misleading? Why or why not?

Last week, I started reading more on how you can drive traffic to your website using Twitter. Several bloggers that I read use Twitter daily to help find new readers and meet new people. I really didn’t grasp it at first, but I definitely got sucked in to Twitter quickly.

For those who don’t know the Twitter factor, I will drop a few stats on you.

Last week, I started actively using Twitter. Not really to drive traffic to my site, but to find new blogs that I could personally read and start following.  Immediately, I noticed a huge traffic spike to the blog. So I decided to look into it a little further.

• Since I started actively using Twitter (last week), I have increased my RSS subscribers by 32. This isn’t an unheard of increase, but I know that most of those new readers should stay around awhile.
• My website views have increased by almost 300 hits a day. Once again, if you are a large blog, that might not seem like much. But for an upstart, that is quite a bit of traffic inflow.

Those are just the raw traffic numbers from the website. What I wasn’t expecting were the tons of compliments via Twitter, users going to my band websites from my About page and complimenting my music, and meeting several people who I have since had nice and meaningful conversations with. I have also found many, many new blogs which I have subscribed to and read daily.

So, how did I do it?

These are the steps I went through in order to build the traffic and increase my followers. There are a few people who look at these types of methods as spamming, but they key to it is to NOT spam, and use your newfound connections properly. I have yet to post a link in a tweet (which is a message) attempting to drive traffic to the website. I may from time to time, but this method works to build a grassroots following similar to how I used to promote my band on MySpace.  When I promoted my music on MySpace, I would find a similar artist to my music. I would go through and then attempt to add their friends and message them. The mindset was ‘If they like this artist, there is a better chance they would like my music than if I picked a random person off the street.’ Instead of spamming them, I would message them personally and ask them to che