Social Media Mavens / Experts

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.

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?

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

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?

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

Image Credit: mario party

Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!

Todays viral post is going to be a little different, but I wanted to share a few tips for going viral that have been on my mind this week, so here goes:

#1 Think about the audience - You need to research out the group of people you will be targeting, and the social communities they use. There are a ton of targeted social networks out there, but trying to get on them all with one post is just plain silly. Angling Masters is one of the biggest social networks for fishermen, but probably not the best place for a viral piece about fashion disasters. If you know you can create a viral piece about going Green, or something to help the environment then finding the social communities for eco-friendly stories is what you want to be looking for. Go and check out the stories that are popular, or that have made it popular in the past. Find the ones that have received the most votes, and research out the titles, content and exactly just what made them go “viral”.

#2 Create Amazing Content For Actual Readers - Don’t just think $Dollar$ signs when creating a content piece you want to go viral. The truth of the matter is very little stories that go viral actually make people any money. Especially the ones that go viral on some of the bigger communities that are out there like Digg, Reddit or Delicious. How you benefit is from exposure, and the links that will be built up over the months and years. I have stories that made the front page of Digg years ago that still get new links every week, and I still see traffic from every single day. Thats right - EVERY SINGLE DAY! Why? The content is worth reading, and content worth reading is worth sharing and sharing again.

#3 Think Like A Viral Marketer - Now when you get good at this, it will scare you. You will be doing normal everyday stuff and think to yourself - “That could make a good viral post”! Sometimes its even sickening … The other day I was driving and right in front of me (I am talking RIGHT in front of me) a HUGE car crash … someone blew threw a stop sign and t-boned a truck toeing a trailer, and that truck started spinning right towards me. The first thing I thought of? Get my iPhone out and take a picture, and my second thought was that I wish I had a camera to capture that because one of my clients is in the Trucking safety industry, and there has got to be something I could use that video on!!! Then the ideas started flowing - “10 of the Craziest crashes ever caught on video” or “10 Of The Craziest Crashes Ever Filmed By An Amatuer”. You get the point - my mind is sick and wrong. Its funny because even the simple everyday interactions with my kids - I have a never ending supply of viral posts because of all the funny stuff they do for anyone in a kids industry!

#4 Networking - It is one thing to just become a “member” of a social network and vote on stuff, but if you can truly understand the point of the community, become a good active member of it, and contribute to it, you will see amazing results. Make friends, vote on their stuff, share it with others of every single network you are a part of, and in turn they will do the same for you. Just today I saw a post of mine show up on another targeted social network for women from a person I made friends with about a month ago. It all does come back, so don’t be greedy with your time or participation.

#5 Have Fun - If you can’t have fun, or make fun of yourself and what you are doing then you have no place in the social networks. People who thrive in the social communities and have stuff go viral all the time are the ones that love what they do. They live, eat, breathe, and drink social media. I am not saying you have to become that crazy, but if you love what you are doing, then you will become good at it. If you are new to social networking my biggest piece of advice would be to have fun, make friends, contribute to the community and enjoy the networks that you are a part of! You will see it pay off in the end!

If you enjoyed this Post and have something to say then please post a Comment

Social media websites have changed the way people discover new media and there are many websites out there that use some sort of social media format so my criticisms are not directed at all of the sites, however one of the supposedly leading social media sites is Digg.com which I believe has many shortcomings and rather than being a place where diverse points of view are expressed it is looking more and more like a site full of marketing hype and political plugs.

Having been turned off by Digg (although I admit to still submitting some articles there in hopes that there are still a few real users there who may be interested in my content) I have begun to look at other social media websites such as Reddit.com, Propeller and Mixx. Something that these sites have in common compared to Digg is that they have markedly lower vote counts for the stories that make the front page of the site. This is because, unlike Digg, these sites don’t provide a conducive environment to inflating vote counts. Digg is set up in such a way that users on the site add friends and send “shouts” to one another to digg stories.

On the surface this system of sending messages to users who may find your content to be interesting makes sense but in practice it leads to “power users” on the site (who I am guessing are paid to do this sort of work by someone else) that spend their time trolling lists of users and adding and removing friends to achieve the perfect combination of users who are most likely to digg their stories, often exchanging the digging of their stories in return.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look through the Digg “Popular” pages and you will see an abundance of Apple and Ipod themed articles as well as numerous articles about the U.S. political elections. I find it very odd that a large company with a large advertising budget such as Apple and politicians who are essentially trying to buy votes find their way to the front page so often of what is touted as being a next generation user supported social media site. To me Digg is starting to look a lot like MSN.com or any other similar generic news website out there.

The friend and voting systems on the other social media websites seem to be less conducive to this sort of thing which I believe leads to the lower vote counts on these sites for top stories rather than that they necessarily have a smaller number of active users. If you want to test what I have said for yourself, create an account on Digg and go through and add a few hundred friends to your profile, be sure to add a few of the users who are submitting the articles that are making the Digg front page. After not long you will be bombarded by “shout spam” which is literally a torrent of your “friends” asking you to Digg their worthless articles.

I wonder if the owners of Digg are aware of this and choose to do nothing or if they are actively working on a solution to this issue. Regardless, I encourage those who have a genuine interest in social media to broaden their search as there are a lot of sites out there to try and you may find yourself not missing Digg after long if you find another site you like. I still believe that this is an issue that plagues the majority of social media websites but at least it seems some of the sites are taking measures to reduce this problem and hopefully at some point we will see it eliminated. All that I know for now is that you can put your vote in by using the sites that don’t encourage this and shunning those that do as sites like Digg.com will eventually have to straighten out if they expect to continue to receive large volumes of traffic.

As I mentioned, social media should not be about the hard sell but about outreach: creating a means for customers to interact with you in as simple a way as possible. A typical example happened to me earlier.

I have been thinking about the possibility of an audio or video element to the blog for a while and felt that Utterz may be the way to go to see if either format worked for me. I duly created an account then called the UK Utterz phone number to record a test that would get automatically posted over to the blog.

I recorded a short piece of audio but on playing it back found that it was virtually incomprehensible - it sounded as though it had been re-sampled, shrinking the length and raising the pitch - a chipmunk with a stutter. Needless to say I deleted the item.

I imagined that it would have been a temporary glitch but, just in case Utterz was having an issue, I posted a message on Twitter asking if anyone had been experiencing problems.

A couple of hours later I received a reply from @chrishanaka who works in a customer service capacity at Utterz asking that I contact him so he could look into the problem. I mailed him the details and then received a response advising me that an engineer had dug the recording out of the trash and was looking at what could have happened.

How’s that for service?

Without even having to approach Utterz directly they have been actively monitoring their brand online and have a presence in place to deal with this type of issue. Any company that deals with the public should be heading towards this type of model and converting a negative experience into a positive one.

For every business taking such a proactive approach there will be the competition struggling to build their reputation because they do not take this type of action. Some companies have to a degree been doing this for years by having ‘unofficial’ representatives hanging around forums that relate to their products but offering customer support using social media as an official channel is exactly the way things should be moving.

Thank you Chris and thank you Utterz.

Yahoo Buzz, a more elementary competitor to Digg and other vote-based link aggregation and promotion engines of similar ilk, has showed be quite popular in the months following its February debut. Though Yahoo has been criticized for failing to provide a more collaborative, social structure with the service - which remains in beta, we should add - it has proven to be an immense boost to a select supply of publishers. Yahoo notes sites like HowStuffWorks and RollingStone as the recipients of millions of page views.

Today the company is adding to the functions of Yahoo Buzz, introducing a widget-generation utility which website publishers can use to embed on pages to showcase stories listed on Buzz, whether they be general items or specific to categories, like sports, business, or science and technology. Yahoo has also established RSS feeds for top stories as well as individual categories.

As for improvements made to the main site structure, Yahoo has a few new inclusions, one being a simple “First Buzzed By” tag in which it designates a particular Buzz user with submitting said link or story, and another being the option for users to roam their personal voting histories.

May 1, 2008 — 09:17 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski

Over the past month or so there has been a distinct feeling of unease spreading across the web with bloggers appearing to be increasingly insecure about their position in it. This first became really noticeable with the discussions surrounding the problem of fractured conversations.

Having their posts spread across the web by aggregation services with no control over the conversation and the subsequent arguments over commoditisation of content caused a number of bloggers to question their worth.

Louis Gray played devils advocate by suggesting that blogs had no inherent value and deserved no advertising revenue - the backlash was hardly surprising. Michael at Remarkablogger questioned the term blog asking if it was unprofessional and holding us back and I asked a similar question of the term social media.

Louis has now rocked the boat again by asking if bloggers should be accountable and display their stats - a sensitive issue with bloggers at the best of times. Bloggers are renowned for being stat obsessed; it’s an element of vanity that goes with the territory of putting yourself out there but no-one likes to talk about it in public in case they are accused of bragging etc.

Finally, Steven Hodson posted yesterday echoing the sentiment that blogging needs to be called something else and his post was the catalyst for me to write this - the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.

What is happening?

Are the majority looking at the likes of Robert Scoble and Darren Rowse and becoming jealous of the success (and consequently the income) they have received from blogging and related Activities?

Is there a fear of becoming lost at sea amongst the myriad of new bloggers appearing all the time,  many of which are perceived as adding no value to the conversation?

Is it a fear that other forms of media such as podcasting and video blogging as well as micro blogging are taking over? The two ends of the ‘new media’ spectrum are spreading further apart and there may be a concern that they are leaving a vacuum in the middle ground: the traditional blogging space. A number of bloggers seem to be increasingly precious over the format just as others are saying that this particular dog may have had its day.

Self preservation

Is the self preservation instinct kicking in now that blogging has gone mainstream and the elite are moving on to new things? Is this problem limited to just blogging? Look at the discussion recently around whether social media is going, or will go, mainstream - myself included.

Is this a cry for validation? A lot of people are investing a lot of time, money and effort in the web and perhaps the current financial climate has got a lot of people looking over their shoulder.

Where do we go from here?

If not bloggers then what? Self publishers, authors, writers, journalists, what? As Steven mentioned where is the line which means we have “outgrown the confines of the concept people have of blogging” - the old image of a personal ‘web log’. As I said before, the term blog has become a part of modern language and everyone knows what one is, if we try to move the goalposts are we making a rod for our own backs?

What do you think?

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