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Why I won't likely visit your blog again.

mel — 2009-11-09T11:47:31-08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adobemac/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I joined a group of folks at a gathering the other day. It was a relatively small group. I don't really know if there was anybody there I would've recognized as they all seemed to be behind some amorphous veil. I couldn't really see them. And, it wasn't like I really had an opportunity to hear from many of them, anyway, since they seemed sort of quiet. Too bad, really. I would've wanted to get to know some of them.

As for the host, I only sort of knew him. We hadn't really spoken with each other before; we weren't drinking buddies, or anything like that. To be honest, I was just walking by this room where he was speaking and caught a few words that related to a topic I was interested in. I decided to peek in. And, since the sign said "welcome," I took a seat and decided to listen a while.

The speaker was interesting. Although I didn't necessarily agree with everything he was saying, I knew our differences were minor and his points expanded my perspective of the subject matter. He continued to hold my interest. (Why was everybody else so quiet?)

I also liked that he was conscientious. He seemed careful to pause every now and again to invite comments or other points of view from his audience. And that's why I found it curious that, given his eloquence and the interest-factor, there didn't seem to be much active "give and take" between the speaker and his audience. So, I decided to wade into the conversation. What a bummer that turned out to be.

Right before the next break, and when the host took a moment to pause and invite comments, I bit.

But, rather than quickly raising my hand to say something pandering like, "good point" or "I agree", I wanted to take a little time to organize my thoughts on paper.

The way I saw it, regardless of whether I agreed or not, I respected this guy enough that I wanted to make sure what I said was respectful of his forum, his time, and his perspective. I also hoped others would react, in collegial fashion, to what I say and continue the conversation.

Only, none of that happened. It turns out, my respect was misplaced. I was diss'd.

After taking time to draft my considered response, I finally raised my hand and, at the appropriate time, spoke. Funny thing... he didn't seem to hear me. In fact, nobody else seemed aware that I had uttered a word.

I looked around to see if I had missed some cue. Maybe I busted some unknown group culture and should be embarrassed. I looked left, right, down and scrolled my eyes up a bit...then I found it.

There was a little sign I didn't see earlier. Not that I would've seen it anyway since it apparently doesn't materialize until after someone in the audience decides to join the conversation. But, sure enough, there it was. I recognized it immediately since I've seen it before. In teeny-tiny letters were the words:

"Your comment is awaiting moderation."

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Crap...! It's 3 o'clock in the morning...Somebody's in the house.

mel — 2009-11-04T16:35:39-08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/grimages/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

(Note: This qualifies as one of my occasional off-topic posts.)

This is a true story... for some inexplicable reason, I faded awake at about 3:00 this morning. As I was dozing back to sleep, the sudden reflection of light caught my attention.

I opened my eyes and could see light reflecting off the part of the wall along the top floor landing that I could see from bed. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it wasn't reflecting from somewhere outside. Rather, I recognized it as light from the floor lamp in the living room.

The lamp had inexplicably winked on...INSIDE our house.

A quick headcount told me all I needed to know. My wife was next to me. Everybody that should be in the house was accounted for. Nobody else was authorized. Yet, the floor lamp in the living room just came on; that shouldn't be the case.

"Crap," I thought. A charge streaked through my mind, "I've got a bonafide 'no-shitter' here."

For reasons of security, I wont' share in this public forum what weapon I had available. Suffice to say, I grabbed it. Then a beeline out the bedroom door, over the landing and down the stairs. It was all of about 5 seconds, but it felt like a lot longer than that. I was expecting confrontation.

Instead...nothing.

I made a quick tour for any open doors or windows. All locked from the inside, as they should be. Did somebody break in and then lock the door after entry? I checked every nook-and-cranny downstairs: behind doors, under tables, slapping drapes, opening closets.

Nothing...nobody. Thank god? Yes.

Turns out, the switch on the floor lamp was on all along. Only, the electrical cord had loosened from the wall outlet earlier in the evening causing the lamp to wink out. Later, due to atmospheric or other subtle natural forces during the course of the evening, the 'trons reconnected causing the lamp to wink back on.

Needless to say, it took me a while to get back to sleep. I was pretty keyed-up, so I had some time to think: I would like to have done some things differently.

First, when I rushed out the bedroom door, I should have shut it and locked it behind me while engaging the door stopper we installed for just such a worry. That would at least keep another layer of separation between what I was worried about and my wife inside the room.

Secondly, we should have kept at least one of our mobile phones upstairs. If our worse fears had materialized, I would have wanted my wife making that emergency call ASAP. Instead, all phones were in their respective chargers--downstairs.

Thirdly, short of installing a panic room, I would have wanted my wife to have her own avenue of defense--and escape--in case I was, you know, incapacitated. :(

This non-event definitely got us thinking. A good thing. The three points above are the immediate steps we've remedied. But, while we have the luxury of time, we're taking other measures, as well. For security reasons, I won't share them all, but suffice to say, many of the "common sense" preventative measures will be the first line of defense: reinforcing doors with strike plates, jamb locks and window braces are definitely in the offing.

In any case, I thought I'd take a moment to share this non-event with you. As the holiday travel season looms, it might be a good idea for you to revisit some home protection measures before taking off. And, if you have any additional good tips and thoughts to share, I'd love to hear them.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some of these interesting articles with some good prevention tips to consider:
o 3 Ways to Prevent Home Invasion using Home Self Defense, Andrew Youtz
o Home Invasion Robbery: Protect Your Family With a Security Plan, Chris McGoey
o Home Invasion Defense, Doug Wright

Be safe!

Free Social Media Listening Tools You Should Use. Part 2 - Search Results In RSS

mel — 2009-11-03T21:19:15-08:00

Okay, if you weren't already optimizing your efficiency before with an RSS reader, then you should be now. That is, assuming you read--and followed--the instructions in my post yesterday about RSS. At the end of that post, I promised to show you how to automate your searches by adding keyword search results to your RSS.

First Things First

You need an RSS feed reader set up. If this isn't the case, do so now. Read yesterday's post to find out how. (Uh, no. I wasn't trying for a rhyme just then. It's one of those things.)

Now that you have an RSS feed reader going, congratulations! You're doing it right. :)

Now keep it up. Do the following.

9 Steps to Set Up Search Results In Your RSS Feed Reader

1. Navigate to blogsearch.google.com.

2. Type your name (in quotes) in the search field. Here's an example.

3. Click the Search Blogs button.

4. In the left sidebar of your search results page, find the link that says "RSS". Right-click it and select "Copy Link".

5. Open a New Tab or New Window in your web browser and navigate to your News/Feed Reader page. (If you followed yesterday's post, this will likely be www.Google.com/Reader.)

6. In your feed reader click the Add Subscription button. (The image below assumes you're using Google Reader.)

7. In the field that appears, Paste the link you copied from Step 4 above.

8. Click the Add button.

9. Wash, rinse, repeat for other keywords or phrases that have interest for you. Here are some suggestions you might want to consider:

Create an RSS feed for search results using the name of your business in quotes.

How about the name of your product(s)?

Create another for a major project (or projects). For example, I've created variations of search results for a book I just wrote. A chapter was dedicated to the topic of Monitoring the Conversation. I can tell you I've already had a couple of readers test me and my co-author to see if we were listening. (Hmm... how'd I know that, I wonder?) :)

How about the name of your blog?

Consider search results for causes, charities or activities you care about. In this way, you can be contribute with your own comments and join conversations where they happen online.

Those are just a few things you might want to consider. The sky's really the limit. And, if the number of feeds you have created begin to feel a little unwieldy, group RSS feeds into folders. Google Reader, as with most other feed readers, allow for the creation of folders to help organize your feeds. (I have about a hundred feeds at the moment, for example, all grouped into about a dozen folders.)

Don't Forget Twitter and YouTube

Of course, the steps above only account for instances of your searches that appear on most blogs that syndicate their content via RSS. Since a lot of conversation these days also happen on Twitter, you should consider doing the same steps above, only this time use search.twitter.com in place of blogsearch.google.com in Step 1.

And, if you're inclined, I'll also encourage you to create similar feeds for favorite keywords and phrases for searches on YouTube.

RSS Syndication Doesn't Prevail Everywhhere

Finally, it'll help you to know, too, that not all search engines give the benefit of RSS syndication for all search results. Even Google, for example, doesn't offer an RSS feed for search results for the web in general. i.e., those that go beyond blogsearch.

It's for this reason, that in tomorrow's post, I'll show you how to set up a few key alerts. Alerts are similar in purpose to the steps I showed you above. Like RSS, they help you monitor conversations online that concern you. But, they function a little differently in the sense that alerts come to you by way of email, instead of RSS.

I hope this helps! I'll see ya in the next post.

Free Social Media Listening Tools You Should Use. Part 1 - RSS

mel — 2009-11-02T21:47:57-08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In my post a few days ago about Monitoring the Conversation, I mentioned the importance of Listening and promised my ASTD-OC friends that I'd post an article about some of the free automation tools I use to help me listen to online conversations. And it's here in the automation discussion that a related question sometimes comes up about whether or not it's ever a good idea to use bots or automation engines when engaging others in the social web. In a nutshell, yes. I said as much in an article I wrote this summer, Automating Social Media - Good or Bad?

The gist is this: leveraging automation, bots, engines, and so on, to alert you to topics, keywords, phrases and conversations that are of interest to you = good idea. But, when you respond in places where those conversations are happening, don't automate that part. That's the personal part that should come from YOU, not an assistant nor a 'bot. Easy enough?

With that said, here's the first of several tools/techniques you can easily start NOW to get a leg up on who's saying what.

o RSS. This is also known as a news feed reader. RSS means "Really Simple Syndication." But that's not important. What is important, is that it's a tool that allows you to "subscribe" to your favorite blogs, news sites and even search results from some popular search engines. The cool factor is in the one-stop-shop setup it affords you for getting updates from all those places.

In other words, instead of having to alternately go to each of 10 sites (or 50 sites or 100 sites) whose content you regularly follow (or would like to if it didn't take so long to navigate to each of those sites!), you can instead subscribe to their "RSS feeds" (I'll show you below) and view updates on one web site containing all those subscriptions. Wala: One-stop-shopping (well, reading, you get my drift).

First things first: Sign Up for An RSS Feed Reader

1. If you don't have a favored RSS feed reader at the moment, you might just as well go to www.google.com/reader and start a Google account, if you don't already have one. Otherwise, sign in.

2. Open a new window or a new tab in your web browser and navigate to one of your favorite blog sites and look for a little "RSS button." It looks like this: . Right-click it and select "Copy Link." (Hint, and, shameless plug: There's a similar button in the right sidebar of my blog. Feel free to start with that one.

3. Now, go back to Google Reader and click the "Add Subscription" button. It looks like this:

4. In the field that appears, Paste the link you copied from Step 2 above.

5. Click the Add button.

6. Wash, rinse, repeat for each blog you typically follow.

Henceforth and forever after, all you have to do is go to your Google Reader site to read any new updates on each of your subscribed blogs. (Unread articles will be highlighted in a slightly different color or typeface until you've read it or marked it as having been read. In this way, you can easily scan what's new and what's not.)

I hope that helps! In my next post, I'll tell you how to add keyword search results to your RSS feed reader.

Nice Finds From the Week of October 25 to 31, 2009

mel — 2009-11-01T11:39:26-08:00

Here's my list of "nice finds" from last week.

o Google Social Search. From Google Labs, this is an experimental feature that allows you to refine your search results to filter relevant public content from those in your social circle.

o Pandora sharing and gifting integration. Last week TechCrunch reported on Pandora's move to open its music box up a bit more to social sharing. Now, you can not only listen to music according to what it learns about your musical preferences across 400 distinct musical characteristics, but now you can also share some of those results with friends and social connections.

o eLearningLearning. I've had my blog networked through eLearningLearning since Tony Karrer first published the widget for fellow bloggers a year ago (next week). I was reminded again just last week about what a great resource it is for Learning Professionals when I used it to research some topics in eLearning and Social Media.

o Grieving chimps. And, my picture of the week has got to be this one snapped by National Geographic's Monica Szczupider that reminds us, once again, that humans are not alone in experiencing complex emotions.

Have you got any "nice finds" you'd care to share? Please post 'em in the comments below.

Related post:
Nice finds from Oct 18-24, 2009 (First in the series.)

Monitoring the Conversation

mel — 2009-10-27T21:11:07-07:00

Yesterday, I summarized the Hubs-and-Spokes framework from Chapter 3 of The Social Media Report. Hubs-and-Spokes is a metaphor I used in our book to help think about the way we can share our values, interests, expertise and passions with those we establish relationships in other social networks. Part of that model showed blue bubbles as placeholders for activities related to listening.

In Chapter 4, I talked about the importance of Monitoring the Conversation. As your relationships continue to grow, and the information you share through your blog resonates with more people--positively or negatively--it'll be increasingly likely that others will link to your articles, piggy-back their thoughts about your opinions in their own blog posts, share links to your posts, discuss or mention them in forums, twitter, and so on. It's important to know when these events happen so you can respond, comment, or further the dialog. It's one of the ways in which conversations happen on the web today.

Listening Posts

In Chapter 4 we talked about Listening Posts as events, supported by automation, that trigger alerts for you when keywords and phrases you're interested in are created somewhere on the web. Some of these tools can be as simple as the use of search engines and keyword alerts, while others may be as sophisticated as customized third-party "dashboards" and analytics for which it may make sense to pay a nominal fee as your business grows.

Listening posts differ from the traditional feedback tools like focus groups, interviews, surveys and polls. They're different in the sense that Listening Posts give us clues about the online conversations happening around us now. To help you here, you'll want to get technology working for you to trigger alerts or filter information based on keywords or phrases that give clues to industry trends, customer perceptions, competitor behavior, technologies, politics, and so on.

Now, I'm totally in love with some of the dashboard analytics of providers like Radian6, Compete.com, Hubspot, Sysomos, and others. But, these are paid services and, for many of you who've been gracious to put up with my rants and raves on this blog, it's probably worth first looking into some of the free services.

In my next posts on this series that highlights key points in the Social Media Report 2010, I'll share some of the free tools I use to monitor the conversation in the social sphere.

But, because I know some of you will be wondering what an analytics dashboard from one of the paid services can offer, I thought I'd share this demo Matt Dickman was kind enough to put together about Radian6. It's a good overview that'll show you what's possible beyond the simplicity of the free tools I'll be talking about in the next post.

Revisiting the Hubs-and-Spokes Framework in Social Media

mel — 2009-10-26T22:12:25-07:00

I had the pleasure of co-facilitating a WebEx meeting this evening. It was a wrap-up to a social media discussion series I co-hosted over the span of several months this summer with folks from our local ASTD Chapter. At different points tonight I revisited a metaphor I've written about before in previous posts and in Chapter 3 of the Social Media Report 2010.

When I talk about the Hub, I'm generally talking about that thing which operates as the central focus in our social media activities communicating our values, interests and expertise. It helps in trust-building by giving interested people who visit our Hub from any of the Spokes (social networks along the periphery of the diagram above) a place where they can get a sense of the "real you."

Now, some might interpret the Hub as being a web site with marketing messages, an inventory of things to sell, lead capture forms and other engines from which to enable e-mail drip campaigns with visitors who visit your site. While I don't have anything against these tools, they're not really your strongest suit for building trust.

Instead, you'd be better served to include a site that is search engine friendly, easily linkable, highly indexed and frequently updated.
Blogs as the Hub
It's for these reasons that I've recommended a blog--or your business website with a frequently updated blog attached to it--as a key feature of the Hub of your Hubs-and-Spokes network.

Blogs, if frequently updated with quality content, are highly indexed by search engines and frequently linked to--and shared by--other bloggers and social networkers.

As for content that helps you to connect with others, it is one of the best vehicles for indirectly communicating your personal and/or brand characteristics to your visitors in a way that doesn't blatantly shout "do business with me."
The Spokes
Looking at the big picture, think of the spokes, as your way of casting a wide net. They represent Outposts of culturally distinct networks where you engage potential customers in the places where they prefer to engage others in conversations online. Suffice to say, each network is different, with its own unique culture that should be respected. In addition to differences in feature sets and their look and feel, each one has a different tone and different sets of expectations amongst its members.

The concept of establishing Outposts can be as simple an idea as staking out a profile and participating in "communities of discussion" on forums such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. While it may be true that the more Outposts you're engaged in, the greater amount of exposure you're likely to have. However, it is also true that a hundred outposts won't necessarily make you more effective. It's better to focus on only a few and make sure that the information that passes through--and the relationships you establish because of them--are high in quality.

Your objective: to build genuine trust, credibility and acceptance in each of the Outposts you engage.
So How Can We Orchestrate Hubs and Spokes?
As I mentioned earlier, consider the center of your influence--the Hub--as the focal point of your online networking activities with all other platforms placed along the periphery like Outposts radiating from the Hub.

Meanwhile, populate the "in-between" spaces with engines that help you listen to the discussions in the Outposts. These Listening Posts can be automated engines (e.g., Google Alerts, RSS, third-party analytic engines, and so on) that clue you in to the tone, trend and volume of conversations that relate to you, your brand or your niche.

I'll talk more about Listening Posts in my next article. Or, if you've already purchased the Social Media Report 2010, check out Chapter 4 where I talk a bit about Monitoring the Conversation.

Out of curiosity, what are some of the Listening Posts you use to monitor online conversations?