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.

Perhaps the problem is that the UI stays with you like a bad burrito...

Yesterday morning I sat at the counter at Puffins Restraurant in Millbury having a wonderful plate of Eggs Latin, and as I struggled to read The Worcester Telegram while eating, I realized the problem with newspapers in print: the User Interface is pathetic.

Here are just a few of the UI problems:

• The newsprint is too thin - trying to fold the paper into something you can handle with one hand is virtually impossible.
• Ink stained fingers - it used to be a sign of a well read person. Now it’s a sign of someone who doesn’t get their information in an efficient manner.
• Page jumps - In order to read the stuff on the front page, I was forced to dive back into the back page, plus a couple other pages.  On the web, I have a back button.  In print, I have to get all WWE on the thing to bend it to my will.
• Poor categorization - I’m not necessarily interested in all the news, just the parts I want.  On the web, I can easily have access to most if not all the days news from a single homepage.  Here I have to wade through all the days happenings, for better or worse, because its so…linear.
• Recyling - I left the paper on the front seat of my wife’s car.  She came in screaming at me that I had to remove my junk and return her car to her the way I left it.  It was as though I’d left a puddle of toxic waste there.  The problem here is that the delivery mechanism is obsolete for anything other then lining the cat litter box the minute your done reading it.

I’m pretty much done with newspapers and newspaper technology, at least for a while.  I grow tired of chronicling the demise of an industry and instead choose to look forward.  ‘Tis a sad day when a boy whose dreams were of newsrooms, deadlines and worldly old copy editors walks away in disgust.

As my grandfather watched the death of his trade (he was a linotype operatator), I watch the entire industry crumble.  But fear not, in time it will be reinvented…

This video is from the legendary Isle of Wight Festival.

• Companies are going to have to restructure - those that are configured for rapid growth will need to realign to a more conservative posture.  Jim Louderback sums it up for many companies here…
• You need to provide value - the company needs to get what it’s paying for, and the smart people provide a lot more than they’re paying for.  It’s a fact of life, get used to it.
• Bad things happen to good people - yes, Joe or Sue were good people, sad what happened to them.  It’s not a reflection on them, as often it’s the project or the group that’s taking the cut.  Especially in round 2, 3, etc.  Keep your network up to date and help out where you can.  Remember, this isn’t personal, its business.
• The 40 hour week is for losers - winners don’t work hourly, they get jobs done and turn in successful projects.  You can find success by turning the Google 20% rule around and doing that exploratory work outside of office hours.
• Find cost savings - Simple things like switching to using Webex as a first line of customer service and sales before putting someone on a plane save big.  Or using Skype for internal communications first.
• Think revenue - when I’m looking over a bunch of tickets for fixes, I look for the ones with revenue attached to them first.  Then I look for the ones that fix user problems,  Then I look at the ones that “improve user experience” and ask why even bother. The days when “hey wouldn’t it be great if…” was a justification for firing up the code editor are over, if they ever existed.
• This is a knife fight, not a church social - actually, it’s more like a gang rumble.  If you’re wearing my Gang Patch, I have your back.  If you disgrace the colors, I’ll shoot you myself.

Tough times require tough people.  Tough times are also often the place where opportunity lives.  Find your success!

Please share your suggestions - what do you do to increase your value and make yourself key to the companies success?

• Akismet - this one comes standard with Wordpress and it’s a decent anti-spam program.  Although this morning for the first time in recent memory 8 spam comments found their way through…
• All In One SEO Pack - I’ve done a bunch of rewrites on this package for other sites, but the out of the box SEO functionality is great.  Take the time to configure it.  Perhaps this plugin is worth a post of it’s very own at a later date.
• Feedburner Feedsmith - this reroutes my RSS through Feedburner so I can get some meaningful stats on the black hole that is RSS usage.  I love metrics…
• FlickRSS - I’m using this to pull in photos from my Flickr account.  I’m not a huge fan of this…
• Google XML Sitemaps - a great plugin for SEO - BUT you have to limit it to 5000 posts if you have a large volume in your system. I have seen this plugin bring two sites to their knees.  Limiting to 5000 fixed that issue for both.
• MobilePress - I just installed this, because my new wider format wasn’t mobile compatible.  Hence, I can’t render a true opinion here. (Note: after this post, I found this plugin was rendering the mobile version to everyone, and I turned it off.  I am fairly certain it is a wrong setting, but I can’t recommend the plugin until I see it work properly)
• ShareThis - a great plugin to add links to the social networking sites.
• Simple Recent Comments - There should be a simple hook to grab recent comments in Wordpress, but there isn’t.  This adds one.
• Subscribe2 - This allows you to have users sign up for email digests.  I’ve been using it for 4 months and I’m the only person signed up.
• Twitter Tools - A plugin that will post all your blog entries to Twitter and all your Tweets to the blog.  I only use it to post my most recent tweets to the sidebar.  If you were to actually use it, you’d look like a Twitiot…
• Vipers Video Quick Tags - a great video plugin.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - the need for this goes away in the next release so don’t even bother.
• WP Super Cache - this program utterly rules - it creates a cache that cuts down on bandwidth usage and makes your server much better able to handle high loads.  I will probably have some stats to share on this one in a week or so as I am testing it on a site at work.

Absolutely avoid plugins such as:

• Anything offering “live” statistics or user tracking -  These plugins will create ginormous tables as they track every single hit to your site.  They also add a hit to your database which negates the benefit of having caching.
• Anything that offers “easy database access” - It may be possible to hack your admin console, don’t use a plugin that would allow anyone to run queries from your console.
• Anything that hasn’t been updated in over a year - that would mean that it wasn’t vetted for the watershed Wordpress 2.5 release.  I guess it’d be okay if the plugin was very simple…

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.

In making this change, I thought it kind of funny how few blogs have moved to a 1024 screen layout, while most websites have.  800 x 600 is dead…and if you’re using it, you’re damned used to seeing sites that are broken for you.  In my case, the right column will hang off the page, which is a suitable result for me, as I’m not a huge fan of fluid designs.  If you’re still on a 800 x 600 presentation, I suggest it’s time to change.  Especially since 800 wide design looks like a postage stamp when viewed on a wide screen laptop.

The funny thing is I am working on a site right now where we’ve still got a fair number of users coming in at the small screen resolution, and even using the AOL Browser.  If you want a real experience, try surfing the web at 800 x 600 via an AOL Browser.  Better, yet, do if via dialup for the full experience.

Coincidentally, I called Charter Cable this morning on a support issue and the nice account rep offered to “review my services” which is usually sales speak for “sell you something you don’t need for more than you need to pay”.  To my surprise, she offered to double the bandwidth of my internet connection for $10 more a month.

“Why yes, I would very much like to double the speed of my connection, thank you!”

So today, I am playing with power.  It’s not that my bandwidth was low before (5Mbps), but with the streaming video I do, it was starting to lag occasionally.  And at 10 Mbps I am noticing a big difference.  Hmmm…I wonder how much their 15 Mbps service would cost…

Okay, you’re betting I’m gonna get all snarky on them and tell you how they don’t know what their talking about. Actually, just the opposite, they’ve come up with a very good, very simple guide that is worth passing on to the SN newbies you know. It just might keep them out of hot water in the workplace.

Actually they had one bit that I hadn’t really thought of before:

Don’t forget others can see your friends

Unless you’ve opted to keep your friends list private, your friends can see the contacts you’ve made. So in addition to keeping your friends’ risque pictures and comments off of your profile, be cautious about whom you friend and when.

“Connecting to five people at Company XYZ after a day of vacation is a sure sign you are interviewing,” Vergara cautions.

Ouch - that could make for a very awkward closed door meeting with your current employer and a fast transition for you to the world of ex-employee.

It’s worth a read.

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.