There’s a Blog in my Soup

Corporate Blog, or Corporate Blog Network?

A corporate blog, is of course a wonderful way to build seo, and recognition of your company. Most corporate blogs only have a few writers, and blog posts are often few and far between.

Enter the corporate blog network.

What if you had everyone in your company write 1 blog post daily? Say your company is a call center and you have 1000 employees. You give each employee who wants to blog, 45 minutes to do their research and blog. You could even do this just as a test project and only accept a certain number of applicants.

One good thing would be to train them on blogging. Blogging is NOT just about writing blog posts. It is about socializing and bringing a conversation to the table. To be successful at this, you would need to hold regular training and teach them how to use conversational marketing techniches and build relationships.

You’re best bloggers are a goldmine, and if you can afford to, it would be well worth it to make them full-time bloggers, give them weekly requirements, make sure they’re in the know with company happenings, and they could also be the managers of the lesser bloggers.

You can manage the tone of the blog, by making sure that each blog post is edited first for professionalism, language, and grammer. If someone isn’t cutting it, whether they’re not proofreading or using the best language skills, you can drop them from the program and add new bloggers.

If you’re a company that sells products you could have each blogger blog about certain makes / models, give reviews, etc.. The key here is building keywords. You want as many related and relevant keywords pointing from google to your website as possible.

6 Conversation Marketing Tactics to get you Started!

1. Link out to other’s blog posts as often as possible.

2. Comment on related blog posts EVERY time you have an a+ article. An a+ article is a top notch article that you’re certain will bring value to your site. Usually it’s lengthy and in-depth. When you comment, instead of using your website address, use the address directly for that blog post.

3. All bloggers working for the corporate site should have full-profiles on as many social networks / social media sites as possible, and they should have as many contacts as they can add without distracting them from their writing. The top three networks to focus on, are facebook, linkedin, and myspace.

4. Use video. Social media is huge right now, and getting a video on youtube can bring huge results - especially if it’s humorous. You may also have your corporate staff do interviews with bloggers.

There are many bloggers who would love to interview a CEO of any big company - all you need to do is ask. Also note - When submitting videos, don’t just limit them to youtube, submit them to all the big video sites.

5. Along with conversational marketing should be an emphasis to get people to subscribe to a newsletter AND to your blog feed.

6. Use Twitter. Twitter is huge right now, and there are plugins that will automatically post blog updates to a twitter account. There are many plugins and tools for twitter. You should use twitter, and so should all the corporate bloggers. Twitter is a great place to get feedback, and build relationships. There are also some clones, and similar sites, some good ones include: friendfeed and plurk.

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It seems that wordpress has released their newest update - wordpress 2.6.

So far I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.6, without any hitches, most of my plugins seem to work.

Here’s a list of new Wordpress 2.6 features from the official wordpress blog:

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1 [Maybe the horizontal rule issue is fixed]
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Wordpress 2.6 Poll:

Have you upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 yet? If not are you planning to? If so, when?

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Image via Wikipedia

Friendfeed driving you nuts!?

Friendfeed is interesting, I’ve logged in a bit - but I find that it’s extremely hard to keep up with everything going on.

Yes it’s nice to have all this info in one place, after all it is the information age, but sometimes it just bombards us and we can’t make heads or tails.

Enter Moopz. Moops aggregates friendfeed conversations and groups them into relevant categories, it then features conversations which include links to the same “interesting story”.

Basically Moopz claims to weed out pointless banter that doesn’t link to anything exciting. On top of that Moopz tries to pull only the best information possible from each story to give readers a preview, so they can decide for themselves if they want to read more, or move on to the next.

Each story is tagged with related keywords, so you can search for stories quickly and efficiently by tag cloud or keyword.

Finally, you can also browse the “popular” category, for the most active conversations in the past 24 hours.

Moopz may be the answer to ending the clutter on friendfeed, only time will tell.

Have you had experience with Moopz? Please share your stories, ideas, and thoughts on this social network tool.

Related articles:

• Get A Less Noisy FriendFeed With Moopz
• Moopz.com - Reduce Noisy FriendFeeds

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Geeks, tired of waiting for the flying saucers to come and abduct them, have decided to build their own working version.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy, form the University of Florida, has submitted a patent for a viable flying saucer. The craft can hover, and take off vertically.

The government has been toying with the idea of circular aircraft since the 60s.

The WEAV(Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle), only measures 6 inches across, obviously designed for mice and other small creatures, is scalable and could be modified for larger crews.

Without getting too technical, the WEAV uses a process called magnetohydrodynamics to create lift. You can read more about the technology from the source: [WEAV via gizmag]

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Obama is somewhat of a newcomer on the political scene, and yet he has garnered a huge following.

He has beat great odds to become the number 1 candidate for presidency. He is even beating McCain out by many points in states that normally go to republicans, like Montana.

Why is this?

Because Obama has embraced web 2.0.

He has embraced sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube. He, and / or those on his marketing team know the power that social media holds. Not to mention many fans of Obama can be found embracing social media - for instance this popular video by Obamagirl.

Obama, is also the only candidate suggesting a cabinet position aimed at web / technology.

I personally believe that Obama’s use of web 2.0 and social media may be the beginning of a paradigm shift in America. I believe that we may be on the verge of a new era in US politics. Call me optimistic, but I believe with social media, politicians will hold less power, and more power will be put in the hands of the people.

Most Americans believe that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Many believe that a huge catastrophe is on the horizon. Whether natural or economic, our future is not certain anymore.

All things change, and many things always need change but go unchanged. I believe for America to survive that there will come a day of reckoning where the great minds of the country will have to get together and re-organize our country from the ground up.

The reason we have a representative democracy and not a full democracy is mostly because in the days of the founding fathers it would’ve been a logistical nightmare. They didn’t have the lines of communication that we have today.

If you’re a skeptic on the power of social media, you really should check out opencongress.org it is a refreshing social network brought to us by: Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

This is a great site for following the politicians that you want to follow. You can see their voting patterns, history, etc. You can also see other politicians like them, or those who are totally the opposite.

You can follow the issues that matter most to you, like Access to Health care, Abortion, etc…

You can actually vote on the issues, and bills that you’d like to see pass legislation.

The site doesn’t get as much publicity as it should - yet. But I can see it becoming a huge playing field for bi-partisan politics to take hold.

Those who aren’t net-savvy may miss out here on this great opportunity to share their voice / opinion, but I believe this is a great start to a new democracy 2.0.

To read more about the features of OpenCongress.Org check out this article at ReadWriteWeb.

Here are some good related articles:

• The Facebooker Who Friended Obama
• Obama and the Facebooker
• Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, Has Big Role in Obama Campaign
• How Barack Obama won Facebook

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Today, I’ve decided i’m going to try my hand at podcasting.

This is my introduction to the world of podcasting. I will be delving deep and revealing my results as to how well podcasting can help improve a blog’s reach.

Feel free to subscribe to my podcast.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Downloads 93

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You should notice the add above under the search button.

It basically tells anyone who has IE to get a better browser aka firefox.

For each of those who download firefox I receive a buck. But why waste the space if a viewer already has firefox? Obviously they’re not going to download it again, right?

You can do this easily if you follow these steps:

1. Download and install “Who Sees Ads”
2. Add this code to your header file for your theme:

<?php function ae_detect_ie() { if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && (strpos($_SERVER
['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’) !== false)) return true; else return false; } ?>
</head>

3. Next you will need to configure an ad context in Who See’s Ads. Go to the admin panel for the Who Sees Ads plugin.

    - Choose a name for your ad context. I chose ‘firefox’.
    - Now go down to second option from the bottom it should say:
                    X if (<scroll box>) {<display>}
    - You will want it to look like:  
                    X if (<(ae_detect_ie())>) {<display>}
    - Now drag and drop that row below where it says Active Rules.
    - Put your ad for firefox in the form that says: Ad code.
    - Click Save Context.
    - Now go back and create another context and call it -  ifhasfirefox.
    - Find the rule:  if Any condition  then

    - Move this to Active Rules and Put your adsense code in the Ad code area and save.
    - Now go back to the first context you made and put the following rule under the previous rule in active rules.                   if Previous conditions fail, try context   

Basically this will tell the script that if the first condition is not met which would show the firefox ad, then show the second ad which is the ‘ifhasfirefox’ ad.

You can see this script in action on my site - just load my page in firefox and internet explorer. Let me know if you have any questions or need help with this.

 Please note in order to promote firefox and earn money you will need to be a member of adsense you can sign up here:


 

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