Business Unusual » Technology

Pushing for Transparency: How Scribnia is Leveling the Blogosphere

Clément Yeung — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:52:00 +0000

In this Huffington Post interview I catch up with Scribnia community manager, David Spinks, as he explains why, where and how bloggers need to be networking in order to gain more exposure and more readers. A must read for those of you that have your own blogs or columns.

» Read more here «

If you don’t yet have a blog, and you have your own business, click here to find out why you absolutely should be business blogging and how to start.

Pushing for Transparency: How Scribnia is Leveling the Blogosphere is a post from: Business Unusual

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WordPress Plug-ins To Turn Your Business Blog into a Traffic-Puling, Lead Generation Machine

Marj Galangco — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:27:06 +0000

If you are a small business / solo entrepreneur marketing your business online, I hope by now you are already blogging as part of your internet marketing strategy.

Traffic and conversion are the two main things you need to get right when you are actively marketing your business online, so it helps if you configure your blog to have functionalities designed to help enhance these areas.

(If you don’t have a business blog yet, head on over to watch our free videos here about why you need a business blog.)

If you have a business blog already, take a look at the following plug-ins and install the ones your blog is lacking.

Plug-ins that Help Boost Traffic

All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog so that Search Engines are more likely to find your page, get indexed and therefore benefit from more traffic from the Search engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger - How would you like it if every time you post something to your blog, several other websites are notified? Well that’s what “pinging” is. Services are only pinged when a new post is created (not when an existing post is edited).

SEO Friendly Images - automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match, giving you more chance of pulling traffic using the images you use.

Twitter Tools – creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

SEO Slugs – SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from a post slugs to improve SEO by making it more search engine friendly.

Subscribe To Comments – enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to adjust what notifications they receive. The result: some commenters end up coming back to your blog.

SEO Smart Links –can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. It also lets you set it up so that certain links are nofollow and open links in new window. Bottomline, it provides automatic SEO benefits for your site.
WP-Post Views - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Great to use as a social proof-boosting element.
Google XML Sitemaps - generates a special XML sitemap which helps search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to index your blog more efficiently.

FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this seamlessly without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed.

Ping.fm - Integrates with Ping.fm’s Custom URL feature to collect pings and post them to your blog. By default, status updates are posted to a sidebar widget and blog/micro-blog entries become full-blown WordPress posts. Many other options are configurable at the settings page.

RSS Footer – Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles. Great to use for your Calls to Actions!

SexyBookmarks – adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. Social bookmarking can help boost your traffic.

Plug-ins that Boost Engagement

CommentLuv – When someone comments on your blog, this plugin shows a link to the last post from that person’s blog. So what? Well, it rewards your readers who also happen to be bloggers, and it also encourage more comments from other bloggers (which is really helpful, because if you established great relationships with other bloggers they could promote you to their tribes).

Disqus Comment System – makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
Smart Youtube – lets you insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.
podPress – gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.

Popular Posts - Displays a highly configurable list of the most popular posts in your blog. This gives you an insight as to what topics are hitting your readers’ spots. You just need to write more about those topics to boost further engagement.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - At the end of each blog post you publish, this plug-in adds a list of related blog entries. Very useful as it encourages your readers to read another article related to what they just finished reading, thus boosting page views!

Amazon S3 for WordPress – Allows you to retrieves objects stored in Amazon S3 and post them in WordPress.

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry that they commented on.

Audio Player – a highly configurable but simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customize the player’s color scheme to match your blog theme, have it automatically show track information and more. Great if you plan to post a lot of audio interviews, music, or any audio file.

Wapple Architect - Mobile marketing is the new frontier. Nowadays there are 5 Billion mobile phone users but there are only 1.7 Billion internet users. This plug-in makes your blog mobile phone-friendly!

WP-Super Cache – Helps your site load faster and protects your server from massive traffic surges.

Plug-ins That Make Your Blog Look Better

Fancybox WordPress - Acts like a JQuery Lightbox but looks 100 times sexier and adds additional functionality rarely found elsewhere. A definite must for displaying images and hyperlinks on your blog.

MaxBlogPress Favicon – Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files. Adjust your settings here.

Plug-ins for Monitoring / Measurement

Blog Stats by W3Counter – Display stats for your blog on the dashboard and add the tracking code to your site with a widget.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

Pretty Link – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet but using your own domain name. Useful for tracking affiliate links.

Post Views Summary - A dashboard plugin that shows the most and least visited posts and pages.

Plug-ins for Stress-free Maintenance

Akismet – checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

Login Lockdown – Keeps hackers out by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from any given IP range.

Scissors – enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality.

Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors.

Really Simple CAPTCHA - Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for the Contact Form 7 plugin mentioned above.

WordPress Plug-ins To Turn Your Business Blog into a Traffic-Puling, Lead Generation Machine is a post from: Business Unusual

Geotagging for Business – Why It Matters

Clément Yeung — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:08:48 +0000

About a week ago I created a proposal for a local restaurant aimed at tackling a public relations crisis it had stirred up. One of the tools I felt the restaurant could use to not only improve their public reputation, but also drive sales through the roof was a social geotagging service.

What is geotagging?

Geotagging, as defined by Wikipedia is:

…the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

Social geotagging networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Google Latitude and Plancast are essentially, social media ecosystems that thrive on geotagging.

All but Plancast (enables the planning of future events) offer the same kind of experience, which is to say people can “check in” to a latitude and longitude that points to anywhere in the world (be it a park, restaurant, tube station or demilitarized zone – OK maybe not a demilitarized zone) and share information about that place with their network of friends. The service is used to create a running commentary of their worldly travels, but with the added layer of community.

I’m going to talk about Foursquare from now on as it seems to be winning the social geotagging network war.

A typical day on the profile of a Foursquare veteran might look like this:

Just got to the office. Karl is being an arse which is normal @ Pentagon Design (73 Clayton Avenue, Leeds)
Lunch time = Sushiiiiiiiiiiii @ Yo Sushi! (The Promenade, Leeds)
Just got back home – anyone going to the pub later? @ Carliol Square (Sandy Lane, Leeds)
Onn thye way home noww . i thynkn i had a bit too mucvh @ Random Gas Station (Random road, Leeds)

Ok even though the last part was a joke, it really happens (at least in the UK)!

But what does this have to do with BUSINESS?

via @Percival's Posterous

We all know that humans can’t resist a good rewards system, even if the rewards are intangible… and unsurprisingly, Foursquare implements one. A brilliant one, in fact.

Users get points and badges for checking in to locations. If they check into a café more than anyone else, they will be awarded the “Mayor” status which is like being the King or Queen of that Cafe in Foursquare. Pretty cool right? I mean, who doesn’t want to be a Mayor but have none of the Mayor-ish work and the greying hair that comes with it?

Even if you don’t get the Mayor status, you’ll build up your check-in points and badges over time.

At the moment Foursquare doesn’t have a way to spend these points but very soon they will. They’ve hinted on their website that they may be used to help fund charitable causes, although I’d think a more realistic approach would be to use the points to do that AND gain access to premium and discounted affiliate offerings.

The competitive spirit alone will be pitting people head to head at venues where they will spend money.

Offering the Mayor a freebie – which is what a handful of businesses have been doing since Foursquare gained traction in and around April 2009 – will massively incentivise repeat custom and new interest.

Users are able to share tips with their friends about locations

Furthermore, social networks engage people simply because they’re fun (most of the time). Sharing is FUN. If you have a choice between doing business with someone that is encouraging you to have fun as opposed to someone that is not, to whom will you be more likely to give your hard-earned cash? Reputation goes a long way in extracting money from your target market, and seemingly trivial marketing strategies like using Foursquare can have massive repercussions three, four or five rungs down the relationship ladder.

It’s kind of a no-brainer when you think if Foursquare and services alike would benefit your business and gets you wondering why it isn’t being adopted more than it already has been. Evidently, businesses now understand the importance of being present on Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent, so why not Foursquare?

Massive Lead Generation

Foursquare, Gowalla and the other social geotagging networks tap into already-existing friend pools by linking to Facebook and Twitter.

When someone checks in, earns a new badge or becomes the Mayor they can choose to tweet/update this to their friends and followers on the respective networks.

The lead generation potential for businesses is huge!

The Pros of using this service

I recently approached a local coffee shop to tell them about how they could boost their business by encouraging their customers to use Foursquare. Time will tell if they take my advice, but the following reasons will hopefully win them over:

It’s free marketing - all you need is a large, clear print out that tells customers of the offers and rules – everything else is handled by the customer and their network of friends
It’s viral - friends will check each others recent check-in’s to find out where they like to eat/drink/dance etc. and they’ll end up trying them out too which will have a knock-on effect
It’s targeted - people visiting or real-life local friends of customers will be able to check out the details and location of businesses being visited and decide whether or not it’s for them
It’s warm - the probability that people will try a restaurant or bar based on social proof far exceeds the probability of them doing so from an advertisement in traditional media

The Cons of using this service

Although there seems to be every reason for a business to get involved with services like these, there are also reasons for businesses to avoid them. Avoid these kinds of services if:

you sell a fad
you have an exorbitantly overpriced product or service
you have less-than-excellent customer service

If you qualify for any of the above and you start to engage people on via any form of social media, you’re going to be in for a shock. People can also spread bad news as fast as they spread good.

Is it a trend that will last?

Update: the massive online directory, Yelp just today added the “check-in” functionality to their platform. This puts Yelp ahead of both Foursquare and Gowalla by sheer numbers alone – their userbase is around the 1.25million mark compared to 200k for Foursquare and similarly for Gowalla.

The question we need to ask is “Why are social geotagging networks so popular?” and I think the answer is this:

By nature, people are social. Being social means sharing, and in their pursuit to share more and share faster they generate enough demand to justify networks like Twitter, Facebook and now Foursquare.

Foursquare fills the void where Twitter and Facebook remain absent. It enables people to rate and leave tips for locations and adds an element of competition into the mix to encourage activity.

Although the tools and platforms over which they are delivered will change and be replaced with time, the needs of the people will always be more or less the same.

Scobleizer recently mentioned that Foursquare could potentially conquer the Chinese marketplace (due to the overwhelming success it has achieved at home) – more proof of the massive demand driving the expansion of these social geotagging networks.

Whether Foursquare lives or dies, the demand for the ability to share this level of intimacy with our friends, family and colleagues will stay.

Conclusion

If you’re a retail business, tourist attraction or a place that would benefit from more visitors – get involved with any of the social geotagging services mentioned in this post sooner rather than later. Foursquare looks like the best bet at the moment as it seems to be the most popular with Gowalla in a close second. It wouldn’t hurt to jump into more than one in the hope of engaging with more people.

Geotagging for Business – Why It Matters is a post from: Business Unusual