All Things Cahill

Lenovo Opens Discover Social Media

Just when I thought there was a Social Media Review site for everything, Lenovo’s turned the hose back on Social Media itself and launched Discover Social Media - a site with social media reviews of social media sites.

The site has been built under the umbrella of the LenovoSocial.com which offers a range of social offerings, some Lenovo specific such as the Lenovo Blogs and Lenovo Forums, and others such as the lenovoVideoLibrary and lenovoPhotoLibrary which are more general in nature.

Running right now as a lead story on the Discover Social Media page is a story entitled “Building your global business with social networking” which serves as and excellent primer on the subject.

The one issue I have with the site so far (and I have not gotten that far into it yet, but will) is that the articles don’t have bylines on them, and I do wonder where the content is coming from. The stuff I’ve read so far is great!

Esteban Glas of Lenovo (and a frequent link here…) posts on his blog “Social, baby, Social!“:

Our aim is to build a community site where newcommers to Social Media can get up to speed with all the trends, sites and services around Social Media. Reviews and best practictices are written and revised by peers. For the time being the site works very blog-like, but that will transition to something more complex and social Networky.

Here’s an excerpt from our welcome message:

When you hear about “social networking,” just know that computing is getting more personal, more about you, your success, your family, your interests and the ability to connect with people and information that can help you. Social networking is people talking… about everything under the sun and much more.

As usual the best part of this projects is the people I get to know.

Mitch Ratcliffe is in charge of much of the reviews you’ll see on the site. He’s done a terrific job, and, I must admit, I feared for his sanity, since he had to actually use all those services. And using them means Signing up and spending time on them. In case you don’t know Mitch I strongly encourage you to subscribe to his ZD|Net blog.

17 Nov 08 | Community Building, Personal, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | Comment (1)

Kiss a Pig

Sometimes you really need to kiss a pig, and yes, that indeed, is me...on the right

Yes, sometimes it’s in our best interest to do something we don’t really want to do, to literally kiss the pig.  Nothing could better typify this than the great ad debate, that age old fight that occurs in media wherein the editorial staff seeks to maintain their supposed journalistic credibility by running a publication that is utterly advertising free, while the ad staff is running around trying to turn your hallowed publication into The Want Advertiser.

When I worked in print, the editorial staff barely deigned to acknowledge the existentence of the advertising (in fact, most editorial content management systems in print media do not show the ads, only the blocked out holes where ads will go) while the advertising team referred derisively to the actual content of the paper as the “News Hole” (making the purveryors of such “newsholes”).

In some ways, things have been worse for online media, especially niche media.  Online, many of us were able to build out our sites without the benefit of advertising, channeling the Field of Dreams mantra “build it and they will come.”

Unfortunately, many of us found that we were simply too small to attract the advertisers we wanted.  We found the endemic advertisers with in our niches were generally too small to foot the bill for what we wanted.  In the end, many of us found we either had to sell or buy, that owning a single site wasn’t enough.

In the past few days I’ve seen a miraculous transformation on Reel-time, the site that I started with.  The site finally hit the radar of the NameMedia sales team, and all of a sudden, I’m finding there’s a lot of interest in what turns out to be a huge reservior of potential page views.

The funny thing is that they’re now talking with people who would never have returned a phone call from Reel-Time a year ago.  If we’d even bothered to make the call.

So, in the long run I’ve learned the big secret of publishing: you’ve got to love advertising, and in particular your ad sales guys.

11 Nov 08 | Community Building, Online Media, Publishing Technology | Comments (0)

Write to Done: Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do

A great post I had to share from Leo Babauta at Write to Done.

One of the reasons I was able to draw so many readers to Zen Habits within the first year was that I treated the promotion of Zen Habits as you would any other product — I branded it.

Of course, there are other reasons as well — I really focused on creating as useful content as possible, for example — but branding is what really helped Zen Habits take off so quickly.

When you think of your blog as you would a brand, you have to create a consistent message and have everything you do — on and off the blog — send the same message. And you have to repeat the message as often as possible to your target audience until it’s stuck in their head.

Leo’s right, of course, if you want to build a real readership, stay on message.  Not a skill I have been demonstrating here of late (oh look, a butterfly….), but one that you should be considering in your writing.

Along with his action list, I’ll add a couple of my own:

• If you can’t reasonably stick to your topic, then provide decent “silos” in which you categorize content, and stick with them.  
• Spend time optimizing landing pages for categories, if you’ve got more than one.
• Live it and love it - if you’re just covering a topic because it’s a potential money maker, you’ll sound hollow.  
• You might want to consider multiple blogs, if you can’t handle the previous three items.

06 Nov 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

New Post on Dad-o-Matic - “Ward Cleaver Did Us Wrong”

I’ve joined Chris Brogan’s group Dad blog at Dadomatic.com and my first post is up.  

Dadomatic itself is an interesting effort, as Chris has brought together a very intersting group of dads to cover a range of topics.  Personally, I’m looking forward to bringing the voice of the regular down to earth dad.  Anyone can tell you that while I may try my hardest, I’m no Super Dad.  

This post actually starts off by attacking the myth of the Super Dad:

As much as I’d love to think I’m Ward Cleaver, dressed ever so nattily in a wool suit, pipe clenched lightly in my lips as I prepare to pass judgement on the Beaver’s latest antics, I’m not.  Unfortunately, in my heart, I suspect I bear a closer resemblance to a certain donut loving animated character, and I’m betting a lot of you are do as well.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Tags: Chris Brogan, dad-o-matic, super dad, ward cleaver

30 Sep 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

Geek.com Relaunched

For the past couple months I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to the re-release of http://www.geek.com - the online technology resource and community for technology enthusiasts and professionals.  We’ve added a lot of social networking tools, and also done a general wordpress/bbpress upgrade which will allow us to easily take the latest releases in the future.  

This is important on a couple of levels, first off, this is a site that has over 10 million unique users a month. That ought to put to rest the “Wordpress doesn’t scale” talk I hear around the net.  Wordpress scales just fine for large sites if you set your server up properly:

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Tags: geek.com, Social Networking, technology enthusiasts, technology news site, technology resource, Wordpress

24 Sep 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Content Management, Publishing Technology, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0, Web Design | Comments (0)

The True Gold of Blogging - Link Relevance

Throughout new media, we keep hearing one term over and over again: relevance.  The ad networks seek to provide relevant ads, we try to provide relevant content, we all seek relevent metrics to judge our success.

Merriam-Webster defines relevance as:

1 a: relation to the matter at hand b: practical and especially social applicability : pertinence <giving relevance to college courses>2: the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user

Many of the links we get aren’t really relevant.  This morning I had a few that were caught by Akismet from various sploggers where they had automatically grabbed my summary and posted to the site with a link back.  Basically they’re running a low value Google Adsense farm.  You might want to occassionally look at those links though, as just this week one of the sites I work with had to send a DMCA take down notice to a splogger who was copying their material wholesale (legally, I am told we lose our copyright if we don’t protect our copyright).

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Tags: Blog Metrics, Building Blog Readership, Chris Brogan, relevance, relevant ads, relevant content

13 Sep 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Technology | Comments (7)

Building Blog Readership - An Evolving World

When I started this site in March, after I stopped working with Vario Creative, where I had previously been blogging, I expected that the same traffic building steps that had worked for me before would work here.  After 5 months, I can safely say, that’s not the case.

You see, when I started blogging at Vario, the important keys to getting readership were Technorati position and getting trackbacks from other sites.  In today’s world of sploggers and spammers, the trackback is dead, and Technorati is increasingly irrelevant.  In fact, now Google Blog Search is really the source for accurate linking information, so much so that Wordpress has a feed of links from them in the blog dashboard.

My stats have been looking really good, upwards of 240 readers a day, but when you dive into them, you’d find that the majority of the traffic is coming from Google and is associated with an image of a shark eating someone.  It’s driveby traffic, they come into the site, and it’s one and done.  No long term readers, no comments, no added value.  Yesterday, Google realized the error of their ways and my image is no longer showing up in Image Search.  The Google well has run dry.

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Tags: blog readership development, field test, online community building, reader involvement, traffic strategy

10 Sep 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Content Management, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Design | Comments (31)

Week 4 - Online Community Building Field Test

The march to success continues.  This week:

• We’ve jumped to 112 registrations from the first day of our trial.
• We’ve had several users starting to post on their personal blogs.
• I had a request to create a new forum for the Bicycle Commuter - and got the forum up in a couple minutes.
• We were helped by the news today that Lance Armstrong will return to next years Tour De France.

Tags: bicycle commuter, field test, lance armstrong, online community building, tour de france

09 Sep 08 | Community Building, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

Online Community Building Field Test - Week 3

(If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…)

I was really, really caught up with other issues last week, but even with that, the experiment somehow managed to continue rolling along on it’s own, which honestly is a big surprise to me.

• The cycling.com server was upgraded to use the Akamai Dynamic Site Accellerator system, which has greatly increased page rendering speeds.  It’s not something a user would generally notice, but a fast site helps to create a good customer opinion.
• We’ve had three User Generated Articles uploaded, and I’ve got one which is quite good live on the homepage right now.  This was unexpected at this stage, and is very exciting.
• Since the little experiment started, we’ve registered 87 new users.  That is about as many as had registered in the previous 4 months.  The registration pace appears to be accellerating.
• The forums aren’t really being used.
• We haven’t had any impact on the Google Analytics - currently  traffic is somewhat static.

Next steps

• I’m not the right person to really build that site.  My theory has always been that to really build niche media you need some credibility in the field.  While I’ve got that in the Saltwater Fly Fishing space, I don’t have that in the Cycling space.
• It’s time to develop a plan to start engaging users.  A newsletter to subscribers recapping Olympics coverage, and outlining a plan for the next month might be the ticket.
• The site needs a real moderator.  Someone who is at home wearing lycra and talking about biking issues.

There are a few other things I’d do if I had the time, on a system level.

• We stupidly didn’t build an email alert into the system to warn us when a new bit of user content was uploaded, such as an article.
• BBpress needs to be removed and replaced with a more full featured forum package.  Maybe it’s just me and my vBulletin snobbery, but I find that system doesn’t meet my minimal expectations for functionality.

The total time commitment I put in last week was virtually nill.  I honestly was thinking that I was going to have to admit that I wasn’t going to be able to have an impact.  Now I’m reinvigorated, even though the time constraints I face are still a huge impediment.

Tags: niche media, online community building

02 Sep 08 | Community Building, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

Week 1 - Community Building Field Test

(If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…)

We’re moving right along on Cycling.com - and it’s beginning to look like the site now has a pulse!

Things improved dramatically after we got our login issue fixed.  Here are the basics for the week:

• 40+ users registered
• Several new photos added
• Comments starting to come in
• 2 new regional cycling groups were created by users
• The first weeks poll had 65 votes - and I only seeded it with 10 votes…
• We had our first ‘real’ forum post, i.e. one that I didn’t write

No doubt a lot of you are saying “gee, that’s not many users” and you’d be right.  The thing is, as low as that use level is, it’s much higher than the previous couple months, in which all we had was spam being posted.  The secret of community building is that when you start from ground zero, it take a while.  If things are going well, I expect to see a geometric progression of traffic for the initial period.  The problem is, that is very hard to do when you aren’t actively marketing the site and you’re left with only guerrilla techniques.

That comes with only a modicum of effort.

• Olympics articles updated every day or so, as time permits
• New videos are upload as soon as I find something worthwhile on YouTube
• Forum posts are created pretty much daily

Next steps

Since we started registering users in March, I’ve decided we’re going to send out a newsletter.  I wanted to do it today, but unfortunately time has gotten away from me, so we’ll be sending tomorrow.  The basic play will be “We’ve got Olympics coverage” but deep down, the message is more simple, “we’re alive, come visit us.”

I’m looking to have stickers made, but I’ll admit that CafePress is an utter let down.  I don’t think a simple oval sticker is worth $2 per in a 50 unit increment.   So now I need to actually figure out what the design will be and go to bid with the traditional vendors.  Anyone have any luck recently?

Findings

It’s too early to make any prognositcations.  I have been surprised by how much I’m learning about the platform we’ve built, and most of it’s good.  I really like the ease I can post stories, the ability to easily post videos, the way user generated content is handled, and way that users can easily interact.  On the negative side, i really don’t believe that BBPress is a competetive solution for forum software.  Even though we enhanced the heck out of it, I don’t feel it is close to Simple Machines, or the gold standard in my mind, vBulletin.

Surprisingly, I have found that which Sal commented on in the first post in this season - the user interaction is spread all over the site, and that makes it that much harder to see what’s happening.  I’m wondering if we missed something by restricting you to seeing only what your friends are doing on the site, but deep down, I know we were right on the privacy issue.  Perhaps a homepage widget that boils up all public activity, such as wall posts, blog posts, forum posts, comments, etc. to show “What’s happening right now.”

Tags: community development, online community building

18 Aug 08 | Community Building, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)