Photo Credit: edenpictures
I just helped my friend Carl redesign his blog.
It was A LOT of fun and I think it turned out incredible (if I do say so myself)!
One major discovery that we made was the massive amount of social proof that we didn’t even know about. We are using the same WordPress theme over there that I use over here. The beauty of Standard Theme is that it has quite a few integrated functions that other themes require plugins to accomplish.
Once we turned on the ability for people to share his content over facebook and twitter we were able to see that many of his previous posts were already being shared via these two very popular social platforms.
Carl had been completely missing out on conversations about him and his blog. As soon as he signed up for twitter he had publishers and the like following him. They saw his blog theme update and the fact that he was now on twitter and instantly joined his follower list.
I wonder how many of you are missing out on the conversations being held in your honor (or detriment). You want to be involved in as many conversations about you or your brand as possible.
Here are some tools to consider that will help you be more involved in these hidden conversations.
1. Google Alerts
Set up several of these using some key words that are associated with your brand. Your personal name is a good idea as well. You aren’t always going to get notified by other content producers that they are talking about you. Use the power of google to help you. Google will send you updates daily any time your keywords are found online.
2. Make it easy to share your blog
If you are using WordPress you need to install the plugins, Add To Any and Tweet Meme and FbLikeButton. If your blogging software doesn’t allow you to do this simply it’s time to make a change. If you are a podcaster make sure Tweetmeme is [disabled] for your RSS feed.
3. Have a real contact page
For goodness sakes have a contact page that’s actually useful! Just today I was trying like crazy to let someone know I was sharing their content. I couldn’t because they had none of their contact info on their site, anywhere. The only thing they had was a contact page with a stupid contact form on it. Take a look at mine for an example.
Just these few changes may be enough to discover the hidden proof that someone is spreading your message. Don’t you think you need to know about it?
First of all allow me to thank you once again, over here this time, for the awesome redesign of the blog. Along with the design just being cool and more user friendly it has incorporated social media tie-ins that I’ve been reluctant to use in the past and am finding myself enjoying very much. The whole thing has actually been challenging me to find ways to do different things with my blog than I’ve done in the past while retaining what has kept people coming back all these years.
There is a lot of exciting stuff about blogging and social media happening right now and it is fun to finally be in on it rather than on the outside looking in. Even though I have yet to truly understand its full potential, I’m excited about it all.
Well, it was a lot of fun and I’ve been able to discover even more of the power that the Standard Theme offers.
What I’m real excited about is to see how turning on all this social media affects your traffic. I’ll be watching your google analytics to see.
Thanks again for letting me push you into making this change, lol.
Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing that too. I notice over the last few days of doing it that I have A LOT to learn about how to get twitter to be more than just a way to shoot little chat messages back and forth to people. I want to use it for that but also want to learn how to tweet stuff that people will want to retweet.
And there is the whole goal of all social media!
To create an environment where people want to share and re-share each other’s content.
Great post, Jimmy. I love your web admin knowledge. Second (third/fourth?) career you have here, buddy!
The titles just keep piling up, don’t they!
I’ve been having a blast with all these web sites I’ve been building.
Currently I’m taking a multi site wordpress installation and taking 2 of the 4 sites and breaking them out into their own installs.
I’ve learned quite a lot.
Whoa, sysadmin-fu.