Flowers in the neighborhood

This is my fourth BlogHer Conference.  I look forward to the event because it helps inspire me.   This year I selected sessions based on a personal goal - to improve my blog.   There are two focus areas -- design and writing.

I'm staying with a dear friend, Amy Lenzo and fellow girl geek of the world cafe, who writes a blog called "Beauty Dialogues" and is an amazing photographer.   She also happens to be a web designer who works with typepad!   We sat down together and had a talk about ways to clean up the clutter and simplify the mess on this blog.   With Amy's expert help, I was able to come up with a strategy for this. 

I've been blogging here since 2003 and have over 3,000 posts.  One of the biggest problems with clutter on my blog is that I have too many categories and was not very consistent in my organizational scheme.  As a result no one can find anything, including me.   I know that many people discover posts via google, not from the top of the blog - but I do get a lot of emails asking where posts are.   Also, if someone is new to my blog and wanted to explore, I imagine the overwhelming number of categories might send them away quickly.   My sidebar is also way to cluttered with images, links, and other stuff.

Amy helped me think through how to consolidate the side bar.   Most importantly, how to deal with the categories using a feature on typepad called typepad notes which allows you to be free from some of the templates.    I need to come up with a sketch of the new information design:

• Think about the sidebar in layers so there is less scrolling. 
• Conceptually group links -- think about the order importance
• Use the typepad "notes" feature so you can consolidate and include links to graphic items using less real estate
• Create a smaller group (maybe 10) of meta categories each linking to a page with sub-categories and description of what can found in each

Amy showed me how to create typepad notes and pages and the order for approaching this:

• Come up with map of meta categories and sub-categories
• Review my existing categories - and decide which ones need to be deleted, changed, or combined

Amy Gahran gave a writing workshop at BlogHer that was very inspiring.  I lent her my laptop so wasn't able to take notes at the time, but Amy Lenzo has a great summary on her blog.   All of the advice about "getting to the point" is what I hope to put into practice in the coming months.

• Set context. Tell them right away why what you’re going to say matters.
• Then make your points.
• At the end, after you’ve built momentum by making your points, send them off in a useful direction (call to action, suggestions for next steps, ask questions they might consider, etc.) This can even apply to personal expression or fiction.
• Average reading speed online: 200-300 words/min. Call it 250. Use that to calculate target word count, and try to stick to it. Great exercise. Check your own reading speed.
• Amy’s triage editing tips for improving readability quickly.

What's your advice about improving your blog design or writing?

Flickr Photo by Veesees

Elise Bauer, a food blogger who writes Simple Recipes.   She does this talk because she gets a lot of traffic.   She has 1,000,000 feed readers.   She has been experimenting over the past few years.

Content

• Why do you want traffic?   Has to support your goals and capacity.   
• She looks at traffic building in three elements: content, community, and technology that you use to support. 
• Content:  Three most important elements of content - useful, entertaining, or timely.   Do at least one or all well.
• Focus: If you want your audience to grow, you need to focus.  This is important in terms of community building.
• Post frequently but not at the expense of quality, use images and photographs, write well, compelling headlines, shorter posts, keep it real, and use different formats.  If you want to build an audience, use punctuation.
• Invest in a dslr camera - quality good images manner
• Blog about something you care about
• Keep at it

Community

• Difference between broadcasting your message and engaging
• It's not about you unless you are extraordinarily interesting
• It's not about putting your words out there and letting them go ...
• Leave thoughtful comments - don't being an annoying self-promoter
• Plan and participate in events
• Be generous
• Link to blogs at are at the same stage as you

Technology

• Make it easy to load
• Everything in your side bar should have a purpose - a car with a bunch of bumper stickers and can't see the car
• Font size important
• Know the basics of search engines optimization (see the page in her presentation, there are some great tips)

What are your tips for getting traffic to your blog?

Photo by Britt Bravo

Britt Bravo facilitated a meet up session yesterday for bloghers who write about social change and nonprofits.  She compiled a list of all in attendance and I'm sharing it here ... why not add a few new blogs into your reader? 

Abbey McDonald, Debroff Debrief
Abby Jaramillo, Urban Sprouts
Amy Lenzo BeautyDialogues
Anna Barrett, Way Out Wax
Ayelet B, Pursuing Adventures
Barbara Rozgonyi, Wired PR Works
Beth Terry, Fake Plastic Fish
Britt Bravo, Have Fun * Do Good
Christine Chase, Green Seal, Inc.
Elana Centor, Funny Business
Evan Miller, Aveda
Gina Stepp, Family Matters
Jenny Sturiale TinyChoices.com
Joanna Eng, Idealist.org
Julia Smith, Idealist.org
Karen Solomon, Opportunity Green
Kate Marshall, Greenopolis
Kimberly Magre, Weber Shandwick Worldwide
Lorelei Kelly, The White House Project
Monica Danna, CosmoPolitician and New Living: Healthy Home Essentials
MamaBird, Surely You Nest
Marnie Webb, ext337
Maryanne Milker,  Green Options
Mary Hunt, In Women We Trust
Michelle MacKenzie,  Green Bean
Mitzi Emrich, Check Out Blog
Mehdi Yahyanejad, Adoptic
Monique Hartt, RecycleBank
Rachel Frederick, Six Apart
Rhona Mahony, Wild Bee
Sally Falkow, PRoactive
Siel, Green LA Girl
Skye Kilaen, Crafting a Green World
Susan MacPhee, Greenopolis
Squid  Rosenberg, Can I Sit with You? and the adventures of leelo and his potty-mouthed mom
Tammy Lynn Gilmore, SXSW Interactive

And if that isn't enough - Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great round up of favorite Bloghers over at Read/Write Web.

Photo by Dubaddict

Earlier this week, I raised the question 'How can you be an effective and responsible social media evangelist?"    The word "evangelist" with this definition in mind: an enthusiastic advocate.  Someone who can see the possibilities of integrating social media, but was not blinded by their enthusiasm.

Emily over at Not Exactly Roughing It really captures the idea of a responsible evangelist when she says:

I think that sharing awareness of common pitfalls is a huge part of being a responsible social media evangelist.  It shows that it’s not a brand-new, completely untested idea.  It shows that you’re informed and honest.  And it provides a more complete map to guide our organizations.

It is hard not always to find stories about what didn't work, but recently I came across a couple of posts describing what doesn't work.

This post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read/Write Web "Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money" describes a recent study by Deloitte on the  corporate use of social networks, and finds that most are
small and inactive.  Marshall asks "Are company-built social networks for customers to socialize in really smart?"

Marshall points out that according to the study's author, the biggest problems are the following:   

• Overpriced, shiny features.
• Insufficient and inexperienced community management. (See Read/Write Web's post on community management earlier this week.)
• Bad metrics and criteria. Though Moran says most companies can talk the talk, saying they are looking for engagement and word of mouth, they end up measuring in page views. He says that's bad. It probably wouldn't be so bad if they were getting any page views.

Marshall is especially critical about this online community focused on cat litter.

Emily sums it up the problem as:

The fate we’re all trying to avoid is that of Michael Scott, who unthinkingly follows his car’s GPS straight into a lake and then insists that technology tried to kill him.

What's your advice about what NO to do as a social media evangelist?

Photo by Terry Bain

This week we have been discussing and building Module 3: The Social Media Ready Nonprofit Organization: Dealing with Resistance as part of NTEN's We Are Media: Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits project.  Last week in Module 2, we covered how to think about social media strategically so it supports your organization's mission and reaches your target audience.  But as many nonprofits have discovered before they can use social media to change the world outside their organizations, they may need to implement a social change strategy behind the organization's firewall

As part of this week's discussion, we've identified what organizational resistance looks like and some tips for being an effective social media evangelist.  For today, we're talking about the question - What are appropriate social media policies and how to create them?

This includes organizational blogging policies for staff as well as social networking persona policies - and answering questions like one from yesterday's workshop: To what extent do you moderate the discussion in a socnet space or blog so it isn't antithetical to your mission?

So, if you have examples of an organizational social media policy, a story about how your organization create it, or tips, please share them.

Wendy Levy, BVAC

I'm in the Bay Area for the BlogHer conference which starts today.  Yesterday, I taught a workshop at BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) as part of their Nonprofit Institute for New Media Applications.  When I entered te office space, I was greeted by Wendy Levy's dog, who is one of the official greeters!  (BAVC has a bring your dog to work policy)

The institute connects Bay Area nonprofit organizations to emerging digital media technologies to better serve their constituents.  I did a version of the social media game that focuses on strategy, adoption, and selection of tools.   The wiki for the workshop is here.   

Since this group of participants were more or less at the same level - had some knowledge and experience using social media both personally and on behalf of their organizations.   They were looking for guidance on how to incorporate a social media strategy into their plans. 

The questions articulated by participants at the beginning were excellent and have given some good ideas for future posts. 

Screenshot of Trendpedia

Very interesting there are more posts mentioning the word "dogs" than the word "cats."   This graph was generated by a site called Trendpedia.  Here's the description:

Search blogs — discover who’s discussing what, where, when and how. Trendpedia finds trends in social media. You choose the topics, enter the keywords, and click “Search Trend”.

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trendline from three months ago up to today.

Trendpedia collects posts about your topic per day. Click on the trendlines to find the articles about your topic posted on the date of choice. Watch the articles appear in the tabs below, organised according to topic and date.

How might you use an analytics tool like this to evaluate your social media strategy?