ContentRobot

ContentRobot’s WordCamp New York Wrap-Up

Karen Jackie — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:31:31 +0000

On a rainy Sunday morning, the ContentRobot team took the train south to check out WordCamp NY. Jonathan Dingman had the tough task of gathering the WP geeks into warm room in the Sun headquarters. Here’s what we experienced:

Keynote with Matt Mullenweg

Matt praises the State of the Word as “strong,” and he gave a bunch of usage/download stats that were just amazing. The room was a-buzz as they were happy to be part of this wave - we were, too!

This year, Mullenweg concentrated on meeting as many users as possible at various WordCamps all over the world and spreading the open source gospel. Some quick facts from Matt:

Automattic wants to evolve WordPress toward the FireFox model of updating, stats, and usage
Sees plugins as a free market of features that allows them to adopt core functionality in a democratic way
Average plugins per blog was 5 - our clients tend to hover around 10
WordPress 2.7 is coming in November and has a totally customizable dashboard/interface
Improving comments were on Automattic’s top-of-mind, especially with comment threading coming and the integration of their recent purchase of IntenseDebate
An integrated library of themes and plugins with a promise of one-click updates on the way
Looking forward to easier implementation of rich media - audio/video, etc.
Sees the blog as a one-stop place that brings together all different modalities, such a tumblr log, Flickr pix, Twitter stream, Facebook, and more

Making it into the Big Leagues with Aaron Brazell

Aaron focused on atracting big audiences with marketing, message, and branding. Stuff we especially liked from his discussion:

90% of your users are new and come from search engines
Your marketing activities that will keep them coming back
Create content that is relevant and consistant
Determine who your audience is, what they want, and keep giving them it
Word of mouth will shape your brand, so your interactions with your customer will define it - not you
Develop a pattern of deliverables from web site, print materials, blog writing, etc. that enforces your brand
Participate on others’ blogs and develop a repore with other bloggers
Grow your audience via newsletters and RSS feeds

Running a Blog Network with Jeremy Clark

Young Jeremy is responsible for a global, multi-lingual site that holds lots of challenges. Tho his discussion was a bit more technical than some of the audience would have liked, he was entertaining and had some great points to make.

Keeping the overall design simple, so it can be easily integrated any blog in the network
Decide on what the core features are and stick to your guns
Focus on security by upgrading (especially to stay ahead of the hackers)
Learn how subversion can help the upgrade process go quicker and easier

We enjoyed our day at WordCamp despite the lack of WiFi at the event. The food was awesome and we had fun meeting a variety of fellow bloggers.

ContentRobot Loves Lorelle Who Loves WordPress

Karen Jackie — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:57:15 +0000

ContentRobot had the pleasure of meeting Lorelle VanFossen at BlogWorld Expo last month. She chatted with us about her involvement in WordPress and Woopra - it was really great to meet her. Then, she whipped out her video camera and asked us “how has WordPress changed your lives?

She showed the resulting video at WordCamp Portland and a very-tired ContentRobot made the cut! Here’s the YouTube version … or click over to her site to watch the Viddler version and read more about the project. Watch the whole thing or skip ahead to the 7:40ish mark to see us.

Thanks, Lorelle, for letting us be a part of your video and all you do for the WordPress community.

What Can Business Bloggers Write About?

Karen Jackie — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:15:33 +0000

ContentRobot has always said that business blogs are easy to start, but hard to keep going for the long haul. Mostly, biz bloggers get writer’s block, feel like they’ve said all they need to say, or just run out of ideas.

SEO Optimize recently posted 50 Blog Post Ideas for Business Blogging, and this handy list will help you find inspiration for that next story.

We especially liked these 10 angles:

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
How does the current economic crisis effect your industry? What does it mean for your customers, partners, clients? Then expound.

5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
Go to your favorite online bookstore (Amazon or Barnes & Noble are great choices) and do a search on related books. ContentRobot, for example, features blogging books for both summer and holiday reading.

6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
What do people say that just isn’t true? Write about what is incorrect and use industry stats and facts to back it up.

22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
Connecting with bigwigs is a great way to create credibility for your blog - even just having a conversation with any of them can re-energize your writing.

23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
While it’s tough to promote bad news (and you might want to hide from it), you’ll find that sharing best practices can make you look like a hero rather than a goat.

31.Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
Compare how Coke or IBM, for example, handled something similar in their recent past. What did you learn from them? How does it help your company and your clients?

39.Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
Social networking tools, particularly Twitter, is a popular trend in the online world. Can you explain to your readers how to get involved with these tools?

47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
Plug into these resources to see what others are talking about, then add to the conversation.

48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
The best way to get ideas is to help others. If you find that you are part of a great thread on another site, share it!

49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
Nothing like the power of the people to help you to see new angles and get inspired. The Twittersphere is always happy to help, just make sure you help in kind.

The common thread here - be engaged and you’ll engage others! Blog.on biz bloggers!

Give, Give, Give to Get

Karen Jackie — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:15:43 +0000

One of the prevailing themes that a lot of the speakers at BlogWorld promoted was to give as much as you can and you’ll get so much back.

This seems to be especially true in Twitterland where one of the best ways to engage your audience is to be a great resource and provide solutions - albeit in 140 characters!

One of the master practitioners of this movement is social media expert, Chris Brogan. We loved his post today about how to get more from his content - basically take it!

Never be at a loss for writing thoughtful blog entries, Chris is always there to help. Thanks!

Technorati’s Annual State of the Blogosphere Published

Karen Jackie — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:13:28 +0000

Techorati published The State of the Blogosphere / 2008 yesterday. ContentRobot was lucky to get a preview of during at Richard Jalichandra’s keynote at BlogWorld Expo this past weekend.

Some highlights of the report:

Blogs are …

Blogs are pervasive and part of our daily lives
Blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream
The numbers vary, but agree that blogs are here to stay
The lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear
Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere

Who are the Bloggers?

Personal, professional, and corporate bloggers all have differing goals and cover an average of five topics within each blog.
On average, bloggers use five different techniques to drive traffic to their blog, an average of seven publishing tools on their blog, and four distinct metrics for measuring success.
Blogging is having an incredibly positive impact on [blogger's] lives, with bloggers receiving speaking or publishing opportunities, career advancement, and personal satisfaction

Blogging for Profit …

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800
The mean annual revenue is $6,000 (with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month)

Brands Enter the Blogosphere …

Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently
90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)
Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers.

As a blog development company, ContentRobot continues to be excited about blogs and have been enjoying their continual evolution.

WordPress News: Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate

Karen Jackie — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:43:22 +0000

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Intense Debate is now an Automattic joint.

Intense Debate is a richly interactive comment system that includes cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles.

We know that WordPress’s commenting features were lacking and we were hoping some improvements were forthcoming.

Interestingly, we met with the IntenseDebate team at BlogWorld Expo this past weekend and we were impressed with their offerings.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - we’ll be watching!

Don’t miss your chance to meet the ContentRobot/WeFixWP team and other WordPress wizards at WordCamp NYC

Karen Jackie — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:23:16 +0000

The ContentRobot/WeFixWP Team is heading to WordCamp NYC on October 5th.

We are really looking forward to seeing the latest tools and techniques we can offer our clients.

About WordCamp NYC

Date: October 5, 2008
Time: 9:30am-6:00pm
Where: Sun Microsystems Office 101 Park Avenue, 4th floor New York, NY
Cost: $30

Go now and get your tickets - we’d love to meet you!

WordPress: Where Art Thou at BlogWorld Expo? - #bwe08

Karen Jackie — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:53:01 +0000

<rant>
ContentRobot touts ourselves as “the blogging and WordPress experts.” We are committed to the WordPress platform and exclusively recommend it to our clients. So, it was very painful to see the huge presence of rival Six Apart at BlogWorld Expo and a very tiny (and even surly contingent!) of WordPress.

To us, WordPress has a superior blogging platform, so why were they not at blogging’s biggest event of the year? One guess is that they are concentrating on their developers and they’d rather spend their energies at participating at the various WordCamps instead.

In contrast, the SA team had a big part in the opening keynote (in fairness, Matt Mullenweg keynoted last year) and set the stage for what blogging is and what it means to them. Then, who’s booth was first as you entered the expo floor? Needless to say Six Apart’s area was big, very well “manned,” and they were more than ready to help.

So ready, in fact, that our buddies in the Newstex booth (who were next door) told us that they heard repeated stories about how easy it would be to convert bloggers to a more “secure platform.” In stealth mode, we decided to see what they had to say - luckily for WordPress, their story didn’t go much beyond that SA is less hackable. We were not convinced - sorry, Andy Wibbles! - but it gave us a bad taste in our mouths anyway.

When we finally found the WordPress team, they were just part of a small booth. Worse, they put forth an unhappy WordPress.com team (and believe us we were not the only ones who felt that they were uninviting and uninspiring). Thanks for the stickers, pins, and tattoos, but we could have been better cheerleaders for WP.

In fact, we were! We twittered that our team was there to help assist anyone having and WordPress questions or issues. The WordPress.com team followed us with a similar tweet, but we don’t know how effective it really was.

Another overt WordPress fan - Lorelle VanFossen in the adjoining Woopra booth - was encouraging visitors to tell their “we love WordPress” stories and getting it all on video. This is just the kind of involvement and excitement WP needs to elicit and sustain.

Automattic, please go to BlogWorld next year - show off how great your software and solutions really are. You have tons of loyal users (including ContentRobot) that would be happy to help you with a booth, twittering, or whatever you need to showcase, highlight, or support the WordPress platform.
</rant>

BlogWorld Expo Sunday Wrap Up - #bwe08

Karen Jackie — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:55:01 +0000

BlogWorld Expo Sunday was another busy day for the ContentRobot team, and we concentrated our efforts on attending the keynote and the expo floor.

The Keynote

Rohit Bhargava, Timothy Ferriss, Mike Shinoda talked about building a personal brand. They offered these gems for thought:

Be more interested than interesting
Be vulnerable and open about your shortcomings and others will be more apt to help you out
Be approachable, not an a$$hole
Be consistent with who you are not what others want you to be
Make a promise to your fans in terms of what you have to offer and honor it
Don’t be the best in your category, create a new one
Never underestimate “unimportant” people, be nice to everyone
Define your goals and know what it means to meet them
It’s more important to have the right eyeballs, rather than a random number
Find your muse as it can help you to create a revenue stream
If you think it’s good - it probably is. Don’t worry about those who “don’t get it.”
Achievement + Appreciation = Success

The Expo Floor

We were in search of any and all cool product and service offerings that we might be able to bring to our clients. Here is a rundown of the favorites that we saw and the people we talked to:

coComment - This is a maturing external commenting toolset that easily snaps into blogs. coComment’s helps to enabling conversations and building communities. By increasing exposure to comments and bloggers, it can create a richer user experience that we thought could be quite useful.
DISQUS - Another powerful external commenting solution - do we see a trend here? - that connects your community with 30,000 other websites. Designed to making blogs more interactive, we will give these guys another look.
GooseGrade.com - As writers, we should be concerned with eliminating typos and mistakes in our work, and this tool allows others to help you edit your blog posts. Social editing could be good for those who are less comfortable with their prose and wanting some external traction. Thanks for the drink coupon, too!
IntenseDebate - Guess what? Another commenting tool! This one helps your website to help drive traffic with reader engagement. UPDATE: Automattic likes this one too, cuz they bought it soon after BWE.
JS-Kit - They offered some interesting widgets for comments, ratings, and polls. Guy Kawaski mentioned them in his lunch time keynote at the E&E conference as something to check out. Also, they had the cutest kitty stickers!
Layered Technologies - ContentRobot is always on the lookout for great hosts. We were pleased to see their deep plans and will check them out further.
Lijit - Lijit’s tools help publishers to increase page views and reader engagement with keywords and search ad revenue. We met this team last year and they continue to impress.
MindTouch - An open source collaboration / wiki tool that looked fairly simple to implement. Looks good for intranets and companies that are dispersed in various locations. We got a great Deki demo and Dana got a nice t-shirt.
Newstex - We met Newstex last year and think that their full-text feeds can add much interestingness and eyeballs to many companies’ blogs. Hi again to another Connecticut-based company!
SezWho - We also met SezWho last year and they continue to have some great, evolving tools. They engage the community with, yes, amped comments as a way to bring eyes to your sites.
Woopra - This is a feature-rich analytics tool that we have been testing on our blogs. Bonus: We got to chat with WordPress goddess Lorelle VanFossen at the booth.
Zemanta - With a simple plugin, bloggers can link to relevant audio, video, images, and other sites easily to provide a more rounded post. Thanks for the great demo, we are watching you guys.

BlogWorld Expo Saturday Wrap Up - #bwe08

Karen Jackie — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:27:43 +0000

ContentRobot had the pleasure of attending these BlogWorld Expo keynotes and sessions on Saturday.

The Keynote

Richard Jalichandra of Technorati gave us a preview of the State of the Blogosphere. He indicated that it is active, influential, branded, and money-making. Expertise and self-expression remains and big reasons for personal bloggers and the sharing of ideas were important for corporate bloggers.

Anil Dash and Chris Alden of Six Apart discussed happenings with their blog products. They believe that bloggers want to connect, everyone is their own media company, and blogging 2.0 included big social aspects. They project by 2012 that 77% or 74 billion people will be reading blogs in their daily internet activities.

Making Money Online with a Blog Session

We listened to these successful bloggers on this most interesting session: John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker. They shared the ways they make money with their blogs:

Most of them took the time in the first year or two to establish credibility and create trust. They also chose to blog about topics that they were passionate about so they could write for the long haul. By becoming a thought leader, you can then influence your readers to buy products.

Advertising: AdSense, Chitika, sponsorships, (in sidebars, interstitials, and newsletters)
Sales: affiliate and direct
Freebies: give them something free (like an e-book), but get their name on your newsletter list (building that email list is real important)
Promoting Yourself: Give away schwag, ebooks, consulting, etc.
Connect with Your Audience on Other Sites: get involved in Flickr/Google Groups, forums, Twitter etc. to share your expertise
Word-of-Mouth: These visitors are more important (and more lucrative) as relationships lead to repeat buying
Add to Your Pitch: Get others to give you reviews and testimonial
Balance: Ensure content value and promotions are mixed for maximum effect
Consistency and Repetition: Each does at least 1-2 promos per month and 3-10 posts per day to send their message out (they do work hard for their money)

Microjournalism: Breaking News in 140 Words or Less Session

These blogging rockstars (Laura Fitton, Robert Scoble, and Doc Searls) enlightened us on using Twitter. Here are the highlights:

Twitter has spawned home-based data sources and “man-on-the street” reports
Information will be easily found on Twitter before a major source can break the news (examples of fires and earthquakes were noted)
Centralized news is gone, participatory news is here
Adding these new citizen journalists creates richer data experiences
Moral: get thyself to Twitter, befriend, learn, teach, and share for everyone’s benefit

Creating Customer Loyalty with Social Media Session

Toby Bloomberg, Becky Carroll, Frank Eliason, Tony Hsieh, and Brian Solis chatted about making personal connections with today’s technology. They said:

If are going to blog or Twitter, what will you be talking about and what resources do you have to keep it going?
Use phone, email, IM, blogs and Twitter to reach out as a PR, customer service, and marketer all in one
Get involved in the platform that your customers use (search for them, find out what are talking about and engage them there)
Portray your company’s culture in your tweets (and other communication) consistently
Help to create or reinforce your brand’s personality so others want to interact with you
Each panelist twittered for about 1-2 hours a day!

It was a day full of good stuff - onto the TechSet.TV party!