A brand-new Blogrollr feature – RSS feeds of recent activity

Playing with a brand-new Blogrollr feature: RSS feeds of recent activity.

What’s Blogrollr? A “live blogroll” powered by your own browsing activity. No need for static blogrolls that get stale over time. More here: http://blogrollr.com/

Cameron at Blogrollr was kind enough to give me access to my Blogrollr RSS feed. (Thanks!) This means that I don’t need to use the Blogrollr widget — which doesn’t work on a WordPress.com site like mine. Check out the Live Blogroll section in the right hand side.

Yes, there is some funkiness around repeated blogs and Google Calendar… but I’m sure the Fictive folks will sort that out soon enough.

Trying out P2, a new WordPress theme. Think of P2 as “Twitter meets WordPress”. Short-form blogging is what it’s called. More here: http://tr.im/hfFk

I like this. A lot. Because it addresses shortcomings in both traditional WordPress and Twitter:

My gripe with traditional WordPress themes is that they encourage “long form blogging”. To create a well-formed long-form post takes me 30-60 minutes, including first draft and edits. It’s hard to find that time in the day, especially given other priorities.

But Twitter has its own shortcomings, too. The 140 character is great because it encourages short form posts that one can easily knock out. But crunching down a meaningful thought down to 140 characters is hard. And nuances get lost.

So, there are a number of posts I simply don’t make since they won’t fit into 140 characters, but I don’t have time to express them in the long-form blog comment. That’s the conundrum.

Let’s see if P2 changes that.

How to optimize the AddThis social bookmarking widget

Do you have web pages — not blog pages — that you want to encourage visitors to share on social bookmarking sites?

If so, the AddThis widget to be the best choice for non-blog pages. The reason: its menu opens up when the user hovers. No click needed. ShareThis, on the other hand, requires the user to click. Seems like a minor detail, but hovers are about 5x more common than clicks. That means a potentially 500% better view-to-share conversion ratio.

The problem is, AddThis shows a number of bookmarking services that are irrelevant, based on this report, and will only distract users. To keep the user focused and maximize conversions, use the following customization for AddThis. The extra line I added is in red.

<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var addthis_pub=”your_addthis_userid”;
var addthis_options = ‘email, facebook, myspace, digg, twitter, stumbleupon, more’;
</script>

<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20″
onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)”
onmouseout=”addthis_close()”
onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”>

<img src=”http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif”
width=”125″ height=”16″ alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”border:0″/>
</a>

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/200/addthis_widget.js”>
</script>
<!– AddThis Button END –>

This will show only the most relevant services on the main display for the widget: Email, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. A More link lets users access other services.

A further customization would be to display logos with better brand recognition — Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. — similar to what Sociable does for WordPress blog posts. AddThis allows this customization. But that is a tutorial for a later date.

Update: I added to the tutorial. Here goes:

To display an image with better brand recognition, change the src parameter in the img tag code above…

<img src=”http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif“
width=”125″ height=”16″ alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”border:0″/>

…so that it uses your own custom image. For example:

<img src=“http://alsargent.com/addthis.png”
alt=“Bookmark and Share” style=“vertical-align:middle; border:0″/>

This displays the logos of Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. You can see this in action on the bottom of my personal web site, alsargent.com. (WordPress.com strips out <script> tags from postings; otherwise I would have just shown the example on this page.) Feel free to use this addthis.png on your own site, if you like.

Another little tweak to help the conversion rates is to add a bit of CSS to the img tag…

<img src=“http://alsargent.com/addthis.png”
alt=“Bookmark and Share” style=“vertical-align:middle; border:0″/>

… so that it vertically aligns with the text prompt, Share this using:, which helps the user understand what the widget does. Summing up, here’s the modified code, with all changes marked in red:

<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var addthis_pub=”alsargent”;
var addthis_options = ‘email, facebook, myspace, digg, twitter, stumbleupon, more’;
</script>

Share this using:
<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20″
style=”border-bottom-style:none;” onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)”
onmouseout=”addthis_close()” onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”>

<img src=”http://alsargent.com/addthis.png“
alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”vertical-align:middle; border:0″/></a>

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/200/addthis_widget.js”></script>
<!– AddThis Button END –>

I know, this is quite a bit to optimize a small widget. But remember, attention to the details is important. This steps can increase the number of people who post your page to social media sites, and in turn can drive more traffic to your site.

Your turn

What do you think? Do you prefer something other than the AddThis widget? What customizations have you found useful?

Focus social bookmarking on Email, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg

Social bookmarking widgets have appeared on many blog posts and other web pages. It’s understandable why: they drive traffic to your site, and they increase inbound links and thus PageRank.

But which social media sites should your social bookmarking widget include?

After all, there are dozens of options for sharing. In fact, Sociable supports over 100 social media sites.

It’s a dilemma for online marketers: present too few choices, and you risk missing a popular bookmarking service. Provide too many, and you will confuse your visitors.

ShareThis just shed a bunch of light on this question with this report. The highlight is this breakdown of social media services by popularity:

ShareThis breakdown of social bookmarking popularity

The most popular social media services are:

1. Good ol’ email, with a whopping 57% of usage.
2. Facebook, with 21% share — and the fastest growing service
3. MySpace, with 5% share but declining
4. Digg, with 2% share
5. StumbleUpon, Twitter and Technorati all have <1% share

(Update: turns out that AIM was not in the top five, based on corrected information from ShareThis. So I’ve removed them from the list above.)

This data is surprising. First, where’s LinkedIn? (Perhaps people don’t want to share interesting articles on a site used primarily for professional networking.) Why is Twitter so low in the rankings? (For all Twitter’s press, it’s important to note that its traffic is still well below that of Facebook.) And MySpace is hanging in there quite well.

So, when you set up your social bookmarking widget, focus on the most popular services: Email, Facebook, MySpace, (maybe) AIM, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Technorati. Of course, this breakdown won’t work for all types of visitors. For instance, technical audiences would probably want to post to Slashdot and Reddit.

What do you think? Is the ShareThis data valid in your opinion? Do you track which bookmarking services your visitors use?

A simple Robots.txt file for WordPress

I like to practice what I call Lazy SEO. I am “lazy” in that I like to get my blog SEO configuration done quickly so that I can return to what matters: actually writing. I bet others that read this have a similar outlook.

With that in mind, here’s a robots.txt file that I just put together for one of my clients. It’s not the most sophisticated robots.txt out there, but it seems to get the job done for a business that’s has modest SEO needs: ensure that Google’s search results do not contain any irrelevant pages, such as admin pages.

I put this together based on what I learned recently using Google Webmaster Tools and Ask Apache. It assumes a self-hosted WordPress instance with the Google XML sitemaps plugin installed. Hope you find it useful. Here goes…

User-Agent: *
# don’t search for files in these directories
Disallow: /_*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/backup*
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: */trackback/
# For Google XML sitemaps
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml.gz

As you can see, this is pretty simple. For instance, it intentionally leaves out specific entries for different kinds of bots (Google image, Adsense, Adwords, etc.) since we don’t see those bots as critical to the needs of my client’s (simple) business.

So what do you think of this approach — good enough or woefully lacking?

Why traditional PR is dead – and what to do about it

I recently read this post at Brian Solis’ PR 2.0 blog on Social Media Marketing and wondered — why is PR changing?

I believe PR is changing is because different people are doing the writing.

We’re shifting from a media landscape where stories are written primarily by journalists, to one where a large chunk of stories are written by domain experts who blog and contribute to online forums. (For the sake of brevity, I’ll call them bloggers, even though they’re published online in blogs and online forums, and sometimes offline in books.)

Bloggers are different than the journalists they are replacing. Bloggers are often experts in their field, active practitioners who have built up their knowledge over years. Journalists tend to have a low-level of expertise in the domains they writing about. Their training is in writing and, well, journalism. In the course of writing a story, they cannot even come close to the level of expertise of a blogger writing about their area of specialization.

Journalists in theory have no agenda, and a commitment to objectivity, to report both sides of the story. Bloggers are likely to have an agenda, and have no commitment to objectivity. Online publications, seeing the influence of bloggers, are inviting them to write stories as guest contributors, further reinforcing their influence level. Bloggers are happy to oblige, since this increases their readership, AdSense revenue, and number of lucrative speaking engagements.

So how does this affect PR?

In the past, a public relations firm with little knowledge of a product or market could sling press releases or info packets to publications run by editors and journalists who a) had a low ability to detect vendorspeak (also known as BS); and b) wanted to cover all sides to the story, i.e., all leading vendors. Slinging worked, with a more or less predictable conversion rate.

Today, slinging doesn’t work. Bloggers hate it. I believe this is because bloggers are different than journalists, as described above. They require contact from someone who:

• Understands the domain reasonably well
• Knows the blogger’s personalities, agenda, alliances, and the perspective the blogger is likely to have concerning the product/service being promoted
• Can gracefully enter the conversation in a way that is respectful and provides value to the blogger in exchange for the their time.

In short, PR is shifting from a slinging exercise that’s the domain of someone who’s worked with various publications, to one that’s best conducted by a knowledgable evangelist. Evangelists aren’t new. Nor are they some kind of rare, exotic role. They are simply knowledgeable outbound marketing folks, freed from the obligations of having to manage a product or meet a sales quota. They are able to travel extensively, without any obligations other than getting the word out to as many people as possible. Guy Kawasaki was one of the more prominent evangelists in the 80s. I’ve worked with numerous evangelists in the 90s and this decade. Traditionally, they’ve been the person you rolled out to the speaker circuit and to help clinch your largest deals. In addition to these activities, I see their role evolving to include meetings with top bloggers.

That’s the crux — social media requires an evolution of the role of evangelist. And perhaps as traditional pubs decline in number and importance relative to blogs, our industry needs to shift headcount from traditional PR slingers to social-media-savvy evangelists.

But that’s it. Evolution, not revolution.

So, what steps should an organization take to shift to PR 2.0?

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and VPs of Marketing should ensure their PR staff have deep product, marketing, and domain knowledge. Either ramp up existing PR staff, or bring in new team members who have been successful evangelists, product marketing managers, sales engineers, or consultants.

PR staff should ramp up their product and domain expertise, fast. I believe that a proficient PR team that has done this should be able to produce Social Media Plan to complements their Traditional Media Plan. The SMP should contain a list of all influential bloggers, links to their online presence points, their "influence index" (using data from Technorati, Google, Compete, etc.), their agenda/point of view, their alliances, their actual or expected opinion of your product, and how to contact them. The Social Media Plan should provide a prioritized list of who to contact, and how to gracefully enter their world.

Product (Marketing) Managers with revenue responsibility can no longer safely assume that the PR department has things under control. They should become more involved, because often, they are one of a handful of people with the product and domain expertise required to succeed in the PR 2.0 world. Because PM’s and PMM’s have plenty to do already, they should lobby their CMOs to "upskill" the PR team.

In summary, PR 2.0 = evangelists – PR flacks + Social Media Plans.