For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, I suggest taking a look at Grader.com, a tool provided by web marketing gurus HubSpot.
Their website grading tool provides a host of useful information that can help you fine-tune your site.
I’ve been playing around with their tools for the past few months, and they’ve been extraordinarily useful in terms of tweaking things to make them more search engine friendly. Also useful is their Twitter profile grader.
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Nathan Bomshteyn discusses his experiences installing and configuring BuddyPress, a social media platform that installs on top of WordPress MU.
This is #4 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
Alas, this post is a lament.
Way back when, there used to be a website called Askme.com. A friend of mine introduced me to Askme, which filled a niche similar to Yahoo! Answers today. Unlike Answers, people needed to specifically register to answer questions in a particular category, and in doing so indicate how they were expert in the topic. Users of the site rated answers in the standard manner, and experts were ranked both overall and in their categories of expertice.
The Askme community is probably the most vibrant of all of the online communities that I have been involved with over the years. In every category in which I was active, there were users who I truly got to know – both experts and people asking questions. People stuck around for years, and got involved in maintaining their categories.
Unfortunately the company decided that running a free website to showcase their technology was too expensive, so they shut it down in order to focus on selling their software to Fortune 500 companies instead. The hundreds of thousands of committed experts floated away along the internet’s pipes, and so far I have yet to find another site that I truly felt at home participating in to the same extent. From what I’ve heard, I’m not the only one.
This is #3 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
I’ve seen this a lot lately: some little flyspec place a million miles away from anything decides that they need to be bleeding edge. So they build a virtual world that duplicates the whole town and everything in it, and then try to provide municipal services through it.
My chief question is whether they have virtualized garbage collection and property taxes. I’d love to be able to pay my property taxes in Linden Dollars.
I don’t see anything wrong really with the notion that municipalities need to find more ways to connect to residents (as long as they do it right). I think the critical factor is that they need to realize that Social Media provides a different set of features and opportunities to other, older ways of “interfacing”. If their goal is to give their residents a way to contribute to the community then good for them. If they think that throwing up a 3d VR version of City Hall and then hoping that people will vote them in again next time around, then they should understand up front that they are wasting taxpayer’s money.
This is #2 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
The idea behind corporate blogging is to somehow build a more effective connection between a company and its customers. By allowing customers to have a say in how the company functions – giving them “ownership” in a certain sense – there is both opportunity and risk. The risk is more obvious: what if they say bad stuff about us? The opportunity has been well documented by people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki – there is something incredibly attractive about a company that is truly willing to open itself up and “embrace” its customer base.
The truth of the matter is that I don’t have too much first experience with this idea. Yes, I’ve blogged in the past, but it was always more of a personal thing to amuse myself and my friends. Yes, I’ve played around with social media for marketing previous companies that I’ve been part of, but again this was in some way a half-hearted effort; not much more than randomly broadcasting “here I am” to anyone who would listen.
When I started Lichtman Consulting, I wanted to do things better, in a way that I had always somehow felt attracted to, yet never quite did – often because I couldn’t get buyin from my stakeholders (and other times because it is hard and takes real work). My goal was to build the kind of company that I had always admired from the distance. A company that listen to its customers. A company that gave them a say in matters. A company that is committed to Open Source, to community give-back, to making the world a better place. Not just words, but for real.
When I think of embracing my audience, I think of:
I’m not convinced that I’ve totally nailed it yet. I mean I’ve seen other people do it, and do it well. People you’ve heard of too. I know I’m still new at this game, and that there is a lot to learn if I’m going to be any darn good at it.
Have some good ideas on embracing your audience? I’d love to hear from you!
In my experience, build traffic to a site is easy – it just takes work. The same goes for building a following on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. If you’re willing to dedicate the time to posting regularly, promoting diligently, and continually learning new tricks, eventually everything will come together.