Nov 29 2007
Welcome to Flying Cloud! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and thanks for visiting!
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Nov 27 2007
My colleague Dave Martel has been diligently looking for tools that let you create automatically create a blog post from Delicious links assigned to a tag. As I pointed out in my post Delicious: How to Use Social Bookmarking for Collaboration and Branding, the default tool on the Delicious site creates a post of all the sites you bookmark. As I use Delicious to bookmark sites for several audiences, I was always editing out extraneous sites from the blog posts. In the end I turned it off because it was too hard to keep up with.
Here are the fruit of his labors:
Once I get my blog moved onto my new hosting site using the installed Wordpress software, I will give these a try.
Another idea I had for leveraging Delicious for branding and for managing your blog is to bookmark each post you write in your own account. Once bookmarked, you can easily see how many other Delicious users have bookmarked your post and can even go to their page to find our more about them.
Here are my posts: http://del.icio.us/sllarsen/flyingcloud
Nov 27 2007
Social Media
Design
General
Site Hosting
Speaking of which - I chose AN Hosting for four reasons:
Northern Light
Nov 27 2007
In case you plan on turkey for the Christmas/New Years holidays, these are my favorite recipes:
Include mashed potatoes, steamed green beans, a nice Pinot Noir and you have a delicious and not to complicated holiday meal. I served veggies and dip and bread and cheese to keep people from starving before the meal. Mom’s apple pie, pumpkin bread, and Gram’s chocolate/coconut/gram cracker death bars for dessert. Can’t wait to eat it again!
I love to cook - what are your favorite holiday recipes? Also, I’d love suggestions for wines to serve with turkey.
Nov 17 2007
Delicious (http://www.del.icio.us.com) is a social bookmarking tool. You can use it to save links (or bookmarks) to sites you want to find later or that you want to let others know about. Each bookmark can be assigned one or more tags as well as a summary or some notes. While you can save favorites in your browser of choice, Delicious allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer (yours or someone else’s), to save links for other Delicious members, and to create an organizational structure for your links by using tags.
As a result Delicious can be used to feed information to your colleagues by saving links for them or suggesting that they subscribe to your bookmarks using an RSS reader. Your colleagues can subscribe to all your bookmarks or just to those assigned to certain tags. Because it has many plugins and widgets, Delicious can be used to augment your online personal brand by integrating your bookmark feed into your Facebook profile and by posting them on your blog.
First, create an account using your online username and upload your picture or avatar. As I mentioned in Getting Started with Twitter for B2B Marketing, for branding purposes it’s important to use the same username (if possible) and picture throughout your online presence. This helps your fans to recognize you from site to site.
Second, install the browser toolbar. During the installation your existing browser bookmarks are uploaded to Delicious and tagged with the folder name where they were found. I haven’t tired the IE extension, but the Firefox Addin allows you right click on any page and save it to your Delicious account. It also allows you to view and manage your bookmarks from within your browser in a window on the left.
Firefox Addin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615
Internet Explorer Extension - http://del.icio.us/help/ie/extension
The buttons (bookmarklets) (http://del.icio.us/help/buttons) are links you add to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar. They are better than nothing, but no nearly as useful as the full toolbar integration.
Third, start saving and tagging the sites you like. You can use any tags you like to organize your bookmarks. Each bookmark can be given as many tags as you think make sense so you can find it again when you need it. Tags must be a single “word” but you can combine words into phrases by using capital letters or punctuation, for example - web2.0 or personal_branding or SocialMedia.
By default all bookmarks are public and available to anyone that comes to look at your bookmarks, are included in the public feed, and are posted in any syndication you set up. However, you can turn on the ability to mark certain bookmarks as private by clicking on the “settings” link (in the upper right of the page) and then on “private saving” under the Bookmarks heading.
Over time your bookmarks and tags will start to add up so you will need to go through them to delete and reorganize. This is much easier to do using a browser addin than on the Delicious site. You can view your tags on the Delicious site as an alphabetical list, as a tag cloud or in bundles. I like to bundle related tags together to make browsing through my tags easier. I find that managing my bundles is actually easier on the Delicious site. You can get to the bundle manager from a link in the bottom right or from the “settings” link.
There are a number of ways to leverage your Delicious bookmarks around your social networking profiles. I’ve included links to several collections of tools at the end of this post, but the two I recommend implementing immediately are the Facebook application and a feed to your blog.
A cool feature that I played around with was the daily blog post “thingy” which can be found in the Delicious settings. It creates a blog post of all the links you saved in the last 24 hours and posts it automatically to your blog. The trickiest thing about setting it up was figuring out the out_url and the out_time. Theory is the Reason provides very helpful instructions for WordPress in From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links. I decided to turn it off as there were many sites I saved for work or for fun that weren’t really on target for my blog. But it may be possible to export only bookmarks associated with a particular tag. Any ideas about fine tuning this tool would be appreciated!
You can subscribed to a feed for any Delicious page by clicking on the “RSS feed for this page” at the bottom of any page. Others can use this link to subscribe to your posts and you can use it to subscribe to anyone else’s posts or to posts with a specific tag. I subscribe to the Hotlist and to “links for me”. I’ve tried other general Delicious tags but there are just too many posts to keep up with. Many The Hotlist contains the most saved posts on Delicious and can be strange but interesting.
http://del.icio.us/sllarsen - My bookmarks on Delicious
http://del.icio.us/rss/ - Feed for the Hotlist
Us.ef.ul - A beginner’s guide to the Next Big Thing from Beelerspace
The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users from Slacker Manager
Become a Del.icio.us Power User from Web Worker Daily
Top 10 Ways to Use del.icio.us from LifeHack.org
del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions: All 150+ hacks from eConsultant
DEL.ICIO.US TOOLBOX: 180+ Del.icio.us Tools and Resources from Mashable
Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection from Quick Online Tips
From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links from Theory is the Reason
Nov 16 2007
Blogging
Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore from Marketing Profs.
“Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging.”
Branding
“You control the page. Making the page before a Fan or a competitor is critical. You want to be able to send the messages, edit or remove sections, and control the information to an extent.”
SEO
Northern Light
Nov 03 2007
Well, I’ve been using Twitter (somewhat irregularly I admit) for a couple of weeks (follow me - http://www.twitter.com/shlarsen) and wanted to share my first impressions.
Why use Twitter? 
First, Twitter is a good tool for product research and brand management. You can search through Twitter posts for mentions of your brand, products and services by using a Twitter search tool like Terraminds (http://www.terraminds.com/twitter/). Research shows that Twitter’s audience contains a large group of first movers in the internet and software markets. According to Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com), Twitter “reaches approximately 43,830 U.S. monthly uniques. The site is popular among a more educated audience.The typical visitor reads Techcrunch.” If you have access to Forrester, check out Microblogging For Marketers. The analyst, Peter Kim, talks about the report in his own blog, “I just don’t get it.” [i.e. Twitter].
“Our data shows that 6% of US online adults use Twitter regularly.
If you want to reach an affluent, well educated, and early adopter audience, there might not be a better communication channel out there.”
This means you can get some early feedback regarding the good and bad features of a product or service and a sense of the sentiment of the toward them and your brand among this audience.
Second, Twitter is great for building your own personal brand. As implied in the Forrester report, you should think of Twitter as a micro-blog. It’s easy and quick to post and doesn’t require the research and editing of a full blog post. It provides an opportunity to post your thoughts, interesting links, and news that promote your brand. However, as ProBlogger points out in Why Twitter Isn’t a Waste of Time, “Twitter messages are archived and searchable. Forever. Remember that.” So it’s important to be consistent and professional with your Twitter posts.
How to use Twitter
First, create an account using your online username and upload your picture or avatar. For branding purposes, it’s important to use the same username (if possible) and picture throughout your online presence. This helps your fans to recognize you from site to site.
Second, find some experienced business Twitterers to follow. You can get started by checking your favorite bloggers to see if they are on Twitter. Follow the market research analysts or journalists that cover your space. Look through their archived Twitter posts and monitor their current activity. When you feel comfortable, start posting. Once or twice a day is fine, there’s no reason to post every five minutes about the minutia of your day. Look for interesting links, post your thoughts on the major news events of the day. Comment on the posts of the people you follow. The nice thing about Twitter is that you can dip in and out, missing hours of tweets without guilt. 
Third, install an application that lets you use Twitter away from Twitter.com. Using the native interface at Twitter.com for posting for for monitoring the people you’re following is a pain. There are several good tools for interacting with Twitter from your browser, phone and desktop that make the experience much easier. I found Twitter 4 Skype (http://k2works.sub.jp/twitter4skype/) too intrusive for the desktop, but it’s good for using Twitter from your smart phone. Having the Skype window constantly popping up with posts is just too distracting. Twitbin (http://www.twitbin.com/) is much easier to live with. Twitbin is a side bar for Firefox that displays the posts from the people you follow and includes a simple way to post directly to your own account. It can be turned on and off with a click of the mouse. I also like the Twitter widget for Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com), but it doesn’t show as many posts at a time as Twitbin. I will devote a whole post to Netvibes in the near future - so more about that later.
Syndicating Twitter 
Once you’re posting regularly, you can syndicate your Twitter micro-blog. Start by installing the Twitter Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) application (if you don’t have a Facebook profile, make one!). This application includes the option to update your Facebook status with your Twitter posts, but micro-blog posts are generally not related to your “status” to I recommend not using that feature. Why post a link to an interesting blog post as your Facebook status? On a side note, I’d still like to find a tool for updating my Facebook status from outside Facebook, but Twitter is not it. There are also Twitter widgets for blogs and most of the other social media sites as well. You’re spending the time creating this new micro-blog - let people see it!
Further Reading
Newbie’s Guide to Twitter from Webware
A Guide to Twitter from WebProNews
10 things to do when you start using twitter.com
Twitter for Personal Branding from Marketing Pilgrim - check out the comments on the post.
Twitter-fan wiki - online help from Twitter users, but not an official Twitter site.
Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter from Web Strategy by Jermiah provide a great overview.
Microblogging For Marketers from Forrester Research.
“I just don’t get it.” [i.e. Twitter] from Being Peter Kim, the Forrester analyst who wrote the previous report.
Why Twitter Isn’t a Waste of Time from ProBlogger
How to Write a KickAss Twitter Post from B.L. Ochman’s weblog
