We love talking about Best Practices here at the Bivings Report, and today we’re offering up a very meta look at best practices in company blogs. Every business has a point of view or way of delivering their products and services – and what better way to share that with the world than on their sites? At last night’s June Social Media Club DC event, the panel discussed the strategies and challenges of their respective companies’ blogs.The speakers ranged from AARP, to Jess3 to the Nature Conservancy and their wise words (along with our perspective) could be distilled in the following list:

DO

• Leverage your company’s unique point of view to create great content. There’s a reason your company does what it does: so share it with the world
• Be Authentic. Chances are – if a reader is checking out your company’s blog – it’s because they care about your products, services, or brand. Or maybe they just think the colors are pretty. Regardless, your blog isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a way to share your organization’s perspective about relevant topics.
• Blogging takes a sustained and concerted effort. This means posting content on a regular basis, and not expecting your first 300 word post to get picked up by Mashable. Your blog WILL find its voice and niche audience,but getting there will take work and dedication.
• Great content leads to great SEO (not the other way around). Don’t spend so much time worrying about keywords, and more about what you’re actually writing. Sure, its nice when google picks up your content, but the content itself is what will drive traffic (as well as fame, fortune, and new business leads) to your site.
• Get lots of people in the mix. Allow all types of employees to have a voice. The programmers probably have good advice, as do the upper management. Involving many different authors also allows for more even workload distribution.
• Measure. Web analytics can help you see the full picture when it comes to traffic. Tracking the data over time can show valuable trends. Are old posts still getting lots of pageviews? Maybe that’s a good opportunity to revamp them.

DON’T

• Stop posting if the blog isn’t an overnight success.
• Forget to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets.
• Aim to sound like your competitors.
• Forget to make sure any guest posts/cross-posted content is OK with your lawyers

We also noticed that most of these users were tweeting from the web using standard browsers – which very different than the trends we often see with SURLP140-tracked events. The tweets themselves were longer than average; and chock-full of questions about jobs, the economy, and the debt ceiling.

SLURP140 – TBG’s twitter monitoring tool has been redesigned and re-tooled to be better, faster, stronger…and more accurate. We’ve mentioned the product time and time again on the IW blog, but this new re-design is serious business. The biggest changes have been the re-tooling of the twitter-stream as well as the addition of the Klout Score. Now you can log into your twitter account and participate in the SURP140-tracked conversation right from the page itself. Likewise, you can now see just how popular or influential members of the leader board really are.

All of these functionality changes are all in addition to making the site much more visually appealing. The new streamlined design (with added customization functionality) is aimed toward conferences and events who have SLURP140 up on their screens continuously. It also follows TBG’s mantra of practicing what you preach with good design and best practices in social media marketing.

Our signature tracking charts are still in full effect and can be relied upon for accurate monitoring of events that in progress as well as those that have already passed.  And now every user who pops up on the leaderboard can now check out their own Klout score as well as see how well they rank when it comes to tweets and @mentions.  For new instances of SLURP140 in action, you can take a look at:

• Earth Day 2011
• The release of Obama’s birth certificate
• the April Georgetown Day holiday
• And, of course, tracking ImpactWatch

This is the full screen-shot of the product of our hard work. And don’t forget – it’s still completely free to use for conferences, events, and organizations. All you have to do is fill out the contact form on the left-hand side of http://www.slurp140.com/

What do YOU think of the new SLURP140?

Many American University students were tweeting up a storm using the ipad (1 and 2) while others were glued to the TweetDecks on their laptop screens. Overall, tweetdeck won as the most popular twitter service by a long shot. The #SLS11 hashtag was officially trending in Washington, DC by mid-afternoon on Saturday – thus bestowing the official social media stamp of approval on the student-run conference.

Big props go out to the AU Social Media Club (@AU_SMCEDU), specifically Alex Priest- the founder and president of the AU club.

Read Write Web may have said it best:There’s very little gray area on this one: You’re either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.

Watch the video about video and face tagging (and how it can be synchronized with augmented reality mobile software) and let us know what you thought in the comments:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

In comparing the Facebook pages of the top 86 magazines by circulation, while those with the highest circulations generally had the highest number of Facebook fans, much like our newspaper study this presents a problem when trying to quantify engagement. In short, how do you avoid biasing your results towards magazines with a small, but engaged numbers of Facebook fans.

For a magazine like Playboy with 2.3 million fans, what is the best approach  to compare engagement on their Facebook page to engagement on Time’s which has over 2 million fewer members? While there are some  statistical methods can compensate, at the end of the day we believe  it’s going to come down to a qualitative, rather than quantitative judgment. In this respect, we present our own views as to the top ten magazines on Facebook. If you agree / disagree or have a better method please let us know in the comments!

Please feel free to share or embed this image on your blog w/ attribution: Download at http://bivin.gs/i93iiJ.

See the speadsheet of our raw data after the jump -

Here at ImpactWatch, we’re not only interested in what people are saying on Twitter, but also the means by which they are saying it.  This week, we took a look at some statistics gleaned by our SLURP140 tool from the State of the Union address as well as the WhatsNextDC conference that happened in Foggy bottom a couple of days ago.

The audience sample size in the SOTU address was much larger, but it was also very clear that many more citizens were tweeting from mobile devices and on-the-go. While many DC social-media-types are using stationary applications such as tweet deck on their laptops and smart phones.  Using the twitter.com web interface was not even listed in the top 10 sources of tweets during the SOTU, but it ranked third during the conference.

These are a couple of those statistics pages that we pulled from other SLURP140 sites.

Greater Greater Washington - This blog has over 40 editors who contribute at least 4 lengthy articles to the site every weekday. GGW often features graphs, charts, and research conducted by the authors themselves (as opposed to aggregated data from other news outlets). Likewise, many of the pictures of the site are ones that the authors take using their own cell phones or cameras. GGW also provides handy links to useful (smaller) community pages that even allowed members of the TBG staff to sign up for a Glover Park email listserv.

Prince of Petworth – This hyper-local blog, run by Dan Silverman, focuses on the news, real estate, and events happening in Petworth, Columbia Heights, Park View, Adams Morgan, Pleasant Plains, U Street,  Logan Circle, and Mt. Pleasant neighborhoods. Unlike the DCist, PoP talks quite a bit about area real estate and development issues – while letting their commenter run wild with other topics and open questions.

TBD (for it’s aggregation capabilities) – We know that TBD is affiliated in a local news service (ABC 7), but their focus on the social media information aggregation in the DC community is pretty commendable. The make google maps of cool bars, link to community news, and allow you to create a user account and customize your TBD news experience. We’re also HUGE fans of the @TBDCommute twitter account – which you can follow to get up-to-the-minute tweets about escalator outages, traffic accidents, and other WMATA issues.

DCIst - We may not be breaking any ground here by mentioning a blog in the city-ist sphere. However, DCist can always be relied upon to not only provide relevant news, events, and links that keep us entertained throughout the week.

Also honorable mentions: FamousDC and FishBowlDC which both feature great content.

Curious about other things that are popular in DC nowadays? Check out the Washington Post’s DC Tweeps 2011 list – which recently held a vote to determine the most popular twitter users in a number of categories.

Did we forget to mention your favorite DC blog? Let us know in the comments below

While we do encourage our clients to create and maintain blogs for their  organizations as a way of reaching out to clientele and discussing topics of mutual interest, those topics should still be related to your organization’s mission and profile. Or if nothing else, always follow rule #1 and “do no harm,” and be especially wary of bringing up divisive topics like politics or religion tends. In short, leave the commentary to the commentators and keep your blog on topic. In this case, The Black Squirrel appears to be swimming far outside their assigned lane as many on Twitter are outraged over this line which has a particularly divisive opinion about undocumented workers. Commenting on the fact that  the man convicted of murdering Leavy was an illegal immigrant:

While the author attempts to walk back this generalization about undocumented workers, the last line of the last paragraph does not help: 

“Well-meaning souls on both sides of the political aisle can wax eloquently in favor or against illegal aliens. This is not to take a position on that. That is to suggest that it should not be played to cheap laughs, not when too many Americans have been vicitimized [sic] by it or live in fear of it.”  Emphasis here is my own. 

After this first broke on Twitter, it was soon picked up by the very popular Washington D.C. based political satire blog Wonkette, where in a short time it picked up another 847 views, 36 comments and 10 re-tweets.

Update: since I started writing this the Washington Post has also picked up on the story!

Of course, we created a instance of Slurp140 to track the buzz.

Given that I created this 30 minutes ago, we did not capture some older Tweets about the topic, but nevertheless the vast majority of these comments are very much negative in sentiment against the Black Squirrel. So far we have tracked at least 92+ people who say they will not be going back to drink or dine at the Black Squirrel. 

To sum it all up, when thinking of topics for your businesses’ next blog post, do no harm, consider the cost / benefit of swimming outside your lane and of course, check your spelling.