SEO Werkt!

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There are four aspects they will cover in this session.  Ryan Boyles of IBM, Patrick O’Keefe of ifroggy and Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy on the panel.

• Roles – a challenge of who own what part.  How do you identify the community editor? What is the community site content?  Are there content experts?  Community managers help steer communities toward specific topics (Laurie).  Choosing the manager is based on quality and attitude – not quantity.
• Community structure – guidelines, rules and what people will find at the site.  What is expected at the site itself?  Communities form in response to gaps in needs.  Communities need a seed of content to grow.
• Community Participation and Cultivation – Love your readers. Even if you only have 3 readers.  How can you highlight people? Member of the month?  Interviews? Awards? Incentives?  Know that each community is unique and has different needs.  Talk to them to foster communication and collaboration.
• Community Monetization – Monetize the traffic itself or indirect by selling product through the community.  Affiliate links, ads and more are direct.

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Commentary – one thing I noticed is that Ryan talked much about the community and being able to see everything without logging in.  I was curious what site he was talking about for quite a while.  Yes the forums on IBM are read ready (no sign in) and then you create an account to post. But there is so many of them.  Someone finally asked and he mentioned he was talking about ProjectZero.org based on Websphere sMash.

There is much that goes into running and growing any community and the task can be overwhelming. I believe that taking the time to actually know the content your community is looking for and to guide them in those directions is a key in community growth.  Offering content (yours and theirs) that is in demand will bring more members.

Today is the Social Media Business Forum down in Durham, NC.  There are 3 tracks (I am speaking in one) but I wanted to see this session.

Jeff Cohen, DJ Waldow (BlueSky) and Alison Bolen were the panelists.  All have business blogs and assist companies with business blogging.  The majority of the room have company blogs and many of them are the company bloggers.

If one of your approaches to blogging is answering questions people often ask, it becomes high search results since people are asking those questions.  A great way to build visibility to your blog.

Who should blog is the next topic that came up.  You learn the voice of who is writing.  Is the top CEO the best choice?  If they have a good voice.  Having PR write as someone else is often transparent.  If the person you want to write is not capable, don’t cheat the readers.  Have someone else write it.  Someone that is passionate about the brand.  If someone leaves a comment, they would expect it from the person “writing” the blog.  Not the PR person ghost writing.

While at BlogWorldExpo, Wayne Sutton and myself had the chance to talk to Jermaine Dupri (music producer, rapper, founder of SoSoDef and more) about his movements into social media.  He provides some great insight how record companies, artists and himself can benefit with the use of social media.  I also dig into his branding and his blog, YouTube and Twitter work.

I personally have followed JD since his beginnings and watching the growth of a label, brand and, well, empire is amazing.  Finally getting a chance to ask about his understanding of how these changes in media relate to his philosophy on the future was met with very candid responses.  Exactly what I would expect.

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Now this is a scary, honest and eye opening session.  People in the audience stand up at the microphone, give their blog address and take some critique and helpful comments from some of the top people like CopyBlogger, Super Affiliate, John Chow and ProBlogger.

Here is comments on the blogs as they were critiqued:

• expect two years before you see money return of your blog
• don’t take the small money now and give up the big money later
• the more you tell the more you sell
• get users to subscribe to newsletters and register
• breaking the million page views a month mark helps get you into money, like $10k month to advertisers
• OIOpublisher is a WordPress script to serve banner ads onto your blog
• don’t ask for names on subscribing to the email newsletter.  the less boxes the better for conversion rate
• membership sites with monthly charging when you have custom content works better than one off charging
• networks that run ads on your content, meaning you don’t build your own site, want you to stay o their network and be ignorant about growing your readers.  Someday you have to break away
• blogads network is a huge site to find companies willing to pay to advertise
• highlight your content before ads. sell yourself

Cali Lewis, of GeekBrief.tv walks us through a quick 30 mins on video production

Choosing the right camera –
Go for biggest lens, best glass and external mic jack for a camera that you can afford

• Kodak Zi8 has a handheld HD camera with external mic around $180
• canon vixia HF200 is an ecellent upgrade camera around $550
• Canon Vixia HF D10 with 1080p and the rest for almost $1k

Visit CamCorderInfo.com for all the in depth information on cameras with reviews and benchmarks.

White Balance-
Orange, blue or yellow is a white balance issue.  Find, use and test white balance every time and bring something white along to use as a base.  Shooting in the same room everyday it is not necessary to whitebalance, just when you make a new site.

Do not move the camera.  Motion then happens in front of the lens and makes it rough, bumpy.  A better way to hold the camera is to make cuts instead of a swinging camera.  Stay away from zooming in and out.

When you have to buy lights –

• Kino Flo makes Diva-lite 400.  Indoor lights mainly. About $700 for a kit. They stay cool and use low energy.  They are dimmable without changes.
• Litepanel in 1×1 are about $1500 but last 10 years with no bulb replacements for a long time and are portable.  Also can be battery powered.

Audio –

• Buy wired mics to save money.  There is even $9 short wired lavalier mics.  Audiotechnica is about $40 and can be found online.
• Lectrsonics Wireless Mics are high cost and for when y are making money.  Popular with film and tv production.
• Sennhieser wireless mics are good, but have issues.
• Rode VideoMic is a good boom mic from reviews and comments.

Shooting blue or green screen-

• Chromakeying takes out the background color.  Final Cut handles this well.  Live demo from Neil and they use blue screens at home
• Green is mathematically better for keying, but blue can be worked with
• DvGarage and Final Cut Pro/Express.  BlogWorldExpo has a coupon under Cali09 for $35 off (video filters – > key -> smoothing and select. Then into DVgarage and select the lightest and darkest parts of the blue or green and choose foreground and keys it out.
• iMovie is harder and some plugins dont always work.  Bring the picture in first and then the video.

The final section was on what site to use to upload/broadcast and more.

The panel, comprised of Wayne Sutton, Robert Scoble, Amber Naslund and Patrick O’Keefe, will be focusing on seven trends:

• The unforgiving nature of the loud minority – the quick posting in social media allows for quick responses.  We all listen to critics more than those that like us.  Criticism is more public than ever before.  We are past the days of email where it was private communication.  Public commenting allows for everyone to participate, both good and bad.
• Mob mentality – Don’t trust everyone implicitly.  Know what you are building as a brand or product.  If we demand credibility as citizen journalists, if we plan on making postings that infuriate the masses then we need to take accountability.
• Unreasonable time expectations – Do people have unreasonable expectations to your response time online.  This was pointed at Scoble.  Scoble stated he tries to get back to everyone, but it isn’t always possible.  If you have not read my stream or what I am posting then you don’t care about my message or timing.  For example, a PR person that calls while someone is in the hospital and you have tweeted it.  The PR person should have taken the effort to know more about your content before blindly reaching out.  Amber states from a business standpoint, humans do not scale. Both in person lives and accessibility.  Sometimes it is a matter of saying you are human with so much capacity and you apologize and try to fix the issue.  If you are going to be engaged publicly, some people think you are a 24-hour service center.  As a blogger/twitterer saying you are headed to a dinner, kids event or whatever let’s people know you are stepping away.
• Self entitlement – Do you do it for attention or do you feel you are entitled to something based on followers or rss readers?  Robert says it is a bad way to live it you get angry over what you can;t control, like who follows you.  You control on who you follow, not the reverse.  As a person you have to earn every reader and follower.  None are entitled.  Focus on what you can add in value to bring more followers and readers.
• Forcing everyone to use all tools and communities the same way – Wayne states that if everyone used the same service the same way, it could stunt growth of the service.  The community helps decide how they want to use it.  This increases new features and removes obsolete ones.  Use that is wrong is not the same as use that is different.
• Sock puppets – We as consumers, from Amber, need to tell companies why we don’t trust this action. It is more than saying you did it wrong, but why you did it wrong.  An example is acting as if you aren’t affiliated with a company, but then talk highly or promotional comments about that same company.  Disclosure and trust are key areas.  As content creators, says Wayne, state when you get something free and promote it or when you work with/for a brand and promote it to help build trust.
• Why do I care if social media grows – businesses have learned to treat customers more human due to feedback.  The growth of social media is a mechanism for this feedback and the sharing of information and ideas. Scoble says the more than share is part of the joy.  Geography is removed from the equation, from Amber.  Wayne cares because it is how we learn, communicate and educate.  Ground rules are important in growing the infrastructure.

Tee Morris, well known author/podcaster/blogger and more, starts with his computer locked and a screenshot with some humor about scanning his fingerprint, voiceprint, height, weight and more humor.  After some biological deposits, he is allowed in his computer.  His point is how we are fighting against being active in social media without revealing too much information.

Passwords was the first forefront in his fast (30 minute) session.  The bother of strong, unique and hard to guess passwords versus usability for the average user. The butterfly growth effect:

• blogging
• podcasting
• social bookmarking
• social networking

When is information too much information.  How much is too much is the question we need to ask ourselves.

What is social media up against in common attacks?  Denial of Service (DOS), phishing scams, spammers, SQL injections, XSS.

So what do we expect from our vendors of the software?  Updates, security patches and even plug-in updates.  Privacy filters and application management.  Overall what we need from any vendor, common sense.

User error was hitting the timeline of this blast session.  The rest of the session had to move to the outside error.

Fifty People, One Question: “We had an idea. Go to a place. Ask fifty people the same question. Film their responses.”

Great concept for a video series, one simple question leads to compelling content.

In particular I’m a fan of the New York City vid. In 5 minutes the video encapsulates so much of what I love about NYC – the sheer diversity of the people and cultures, and also the fact that New Yorkers (like most people) are generally intrinsically ‘good’. People often scoff when I suggest that New York is one of the friendliest cities in the world… but really, the fact that this many people coexist on such a small piece of land really shows that we can all just get along.

Check it out (RSS Readers click through for video):

Fifty People, One Question: New York from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Many thanks to Nicky Yates of my favourite non-profit charity:water for the link via Twitter!

Louis has a unique perspective given his background with FriendFeed and other real-time tools.  I placed my commentary at the end.

Real-time Search and Discovery-
Google presents on perfect answer to every question.  Unfortunately, we need more information than just the basic link.  Sites like Twitter provide what people think and say.  In a constant moving flow, real-time.  Google stays static for periods of time until their algorithms update the rankings.  OneRiot is a real-time search for the real-time web as a new example.
Louis mentions FriendFeed, which does provide the real-time search.  However, it only shows what people have uploaded into FriendFeed, not the entire web of real-time.

Aggregation sites and updating intervals-
PSHB (pubssubhubbub) is the new middleman between your content and the sites.  it powers FriendFeed, Google Reader Shares, FeedBurner and more. It becomes the hub, based on an open source protocol extending RSS & Atom, to allow polling of one central site instead of each service polling the same URL over and over.
Reader2Twitter allows you to connect your Google Reader shares with Twitter.
Pingie has instant RSS to mobile notifications

Eliminating the refresh-
Many of us don’t like having to hit refresh to see the updated data,  My thought is as long as the site has a pause feature that allows you to stop the real-time flow to be able to concentrate and read the information as presented.  Once you have too many friends, you are stuck with filtering the information once again to find the relevance.
Google Wave was given as an example with a subject and constantly updating threads/emails. Louis gave Wave a 7 and a 5 on implementation.  I am still stuck at a 3.
LazyFeed brings together the massive amounts of feeds by topic.  Grab the feed and stick it in Google Reader and off you go.  Aren’t we back to filtering here and finding the relevant informaton.  This defeats the massive amount of real-time flow in mass.  Focused real-time adds value in my opinion.

From there we went to demos of these and more sites and Q&A.

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Louis and I agree in many areas on real-time management  But, it was nice to see his full perspective.  I try to trim the number of feeds I follow and use good filtering services to narrow the list.  What this means is that I follow some feeds that do not always post what I want to read about at that moment in time.  So going through hundreds, or even thousands, can be a drain.  Instead of adding more feeds all the time, getting into filters and real-time search tools becomes the choice for me.  I need to find specific information sometimes, and detailed information constantly.

I engage a few filtering services to narrow the reading list and then leave the larger one to Google Reader, organized well by groups and tags.  This allows me to move quickly through massive amounts of information and feeds with the most value.