Who should be blogging?
By Mitchell Hislop | February 22, 2010
I have had several chats with people recently about blogging, and want to share some thoughts on it. There are several groups of people who should be blogging:
Students:
As a student myself, I see blogging as the #1 way to set yourself apart. It does not matter what industry you are in, you should be blogging. Accounts can talk about and show their knowledge, marketing people can show off their chops, political science majors can show their opinions, report the news, and give analysis, and artists can use it as a portfolio. I challenge you to give me a major where it would not help to blog.
Business owners:
If you have a business, take one hour a week to blog. It can be from a teaching perspective or a company news perspective, whatever it might be, make sure you are getting it out there and sharing your knowledge and expertise.
Moms/Dads/Parents:
This is a perfect way to document your kid’s childhood, to share your child with everyone, and to share (and gain) tips and tricks with other parents, or soon-to-be parents.
Job Seekers:
Basically the same as students. You can use this to show your potential and what you have done. It is a great way to share what you would want to do with your current employer, without mentioning names, without the risk of confrontation.
So yes, this basically covers everyone. One thing I tell everyone is that others are blogging about it, you should be too. This applies especially to students and job seekers-for instance, I am a student, and I blog. This will help put me over students who dont blog, putting them at a disadvantage.
I will blog next week about the benefits of blogging-the less obvious ones, not the “you can get exposure” ones.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Why You Should Love Wordpress
By Mitchell Hislop | February 15, 2010
It is no secret that I have something similar to a love affair with the open source content management system Wordpress. I have stickers all over my laptop and notebooks, and even on a lamp in the office.
People often ask me why I love it so much, or why they should use it themselves. I have finally written down my answer:
Some of the things I love about Wordpress:
- Ease of use:
- Wordpress has a very nice back-end, which allows anyone to be able to add or edit content site-wide.
- It is also very easy to add functionality using plug-ins.
- Design is handled by themes, allowing you to either use one you like or create/modify an existing one.
- Reliability:
- Wordpress is one of the top content management systems, and has a vibrant community around it. This allows it to be updated constantly, making sure there are no bugs.
- It is also really easy to get support for because of this community.
- Power:
- Wordpress can handle anything from a simple one page blog to a massive website, and anything from no traffic to 100,000 unique visits a day.
- Wordpress can be completely customized, allowing people of every level of expertise to leverage it
Why you should use Wordpress:
- It’s free
- It’s easy
- It’s powerful
- It’s supported
- The community behind it is there for you
- Any business can benefit from having a blog.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
The Buzz about Buzz
By Mitchell Hislop | February 10, 2010
Yesterday, Google made another move in the direction of owning the Internet with their announcement about Buzz, their new social platform built into GMail.
This platform leverages your existing social graph that you have built up while using GMail. Much the same as it remembers the contact information of people you email often with, it will add these people as your friends in Buzz. You can also direct people to your Google profile, which will allow them to follow you on Buzz.
There are also location based features built in. You can Buzz from your iPhone or Android phone (running 2.0), and it will tag your location.
It feels a lot like FriendFeed to me, which was a place to aggregate content and comment on or discuss things. It is akin to a long form of Twitter, with comments and likes similar to Facebook. Facebook recently purchased FriendFeed, and some think that Buzz is because of that.
Currently, Buzz is mostly early adopters talking about how cool it is. It will be interesting to see over the next month which direction it will take: will it be the geeky-cool place for the tech people to chat (like Friendfeed), or will it be a platform everyone can leverage (like Twitter).
Buzz seems to be best for times when you want to create more long-form content, yet you don’t want to do it as a blog post (either it doesn’t fit, is not valuable enough, or it is directed at people). You can direct your messages to people while still having them be public. It is the interesting niche between a blog, Twitter, and chat.
It can also import content from other sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, and blogs.
It is currently being rolled out to everyone, and should be active completely by early next week.
Topics: Social Media | No Comments »
ROI of Social Media: Customer Service
By Mitchell Hislop | February 3, 2010
This is the first post of a series that will delve into what social media can do for your Rate Of Return, aka ROI. Let’s start with customer service:
I host my websites with MediaTemple (MT). I chose them because of the support they provide, and the fact that the package they had to offer was just what I was looking for. As a geek, I have my laptop covered with stickers of companies I use and love. One night, I tweeted out that I wish I had some MediaTemple stickers for my laptop. They responded with a very quick reply that I should send them my address. I did, and three days later had two sheets of stickers and a handwritten note!
Now, this is a short interaction. All this probably took MediaTemple less than 5 minutes and cost them less than $5. However, in return they turned me from just a customer to a loyal fan. If I get just one person to look at MT through my tweets, I have made them money.
In addition, I am less likely to switch hosts now. This means that they made even more money off their interaction.
This is not an isolated case, either. Comcast regularly leverage their Twitter account for customer service, as do many companies.
So, how do you measure the ROI of this?
One of simplest ways to measure your ROI is to have your Customer Service Representative (CSR) team trained on how to listen/interact (~$1000) and set up Twitter accounts. Then, use your existing ROI metrics for your CSR’s.
For instance, lets look back at MediaTemple. My hosting is $20/month. I have gotten one person to try it out, so that is making MT $20/month off their $10 investment. In addition, I am more likely to stay with them, which translates more or less, to an extra $100.
So, that is at least $120 over the next 6 months, or a 12x ROI.
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Topics: Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »
The social media value proposition
By Mitchell Hislop | January 27, 2010
“What is the value of Social Media?”
I have been asked this question countless times, both as an honest question and as an attempt to push my thinking further.
When asked, I usually bring up the low cost, high potential and how to measure your ROI.
However, as a business student, I want to know the real answer. I want to know Social Media’s value proposition.
So, I did some thinking about it. And asked you about it.
In my own opinion, the value stems from a few areas.
For one, Social Media is everywhere, and it is something that we use every day. Anyone who is on Facebook is using Social Media. This means that you do not need to learn anything new, nor leave behind your current social network. They are very user-friendly and relatively open. These sites allow you to see what is going on, “listen” in on conversations between brands and people, and interact with others.
In my words, it simmers down to:
“Social Media is an open, easy to use tool for users to engage with each other and brands, fostering more openness and communication”.
These are some responses I got back (unedited) when I Tweeted this question:
GirlMeetsGeek: Human Connection: Where technology can only go so far- real hands can reach.
Jo Roberts: Social media **as a tool** makes it easier to create sustained meaning/value with people you connect with in real life.
What is your definition of Social Media’s value proposition?
Topics: Social Media | 1 Comment »
Using Tweetdeck as a cross-platform
By Mitchell Hislop | January 15, 2010
Want an easy way to manage all of your Social Media from one place? Of the many applications available, there is only one application that I have found to be great for doing just that - Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck is a cross-platform application that allows you to update your Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin information from one central spot. It also allows you to curate the people you follow, making it so that you never miss an important update.
It syncs with Twitter lists, allows you to update fanpages, and will even clean the kitchen sink for you (ok, so maybe thats in the next update).
It’s real benefit is that it gives you only one place to go, and you can send an update to multiple places at the same time. It saves time, increases productivity, and allows you to streamline your workflow.
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The Ultimate Wordpress Pack
By Mitchell Hislop | January 15, 2010
(NOTE: I am back from CES! It was an amazing time as well as a super geeky time. You can find all my coverage here, and pictures here.)
I had a flash of inspiration last night. I noticed that, while building websites, I was uploading the same things over and over, so I created something for everyone to benefit from.
I am calling it the Ultimate Wordpress Pack. It is a collection of all the top plugins and themes, baked into one file for upload. Try it out, give me feedback, and benefit from my lack of sleep.
This pack is meant for anyone who uses Wordpress, from beginner to expert. Everyone can save time with it. All you need to do is upload it to whatever website you would like to use Wordpress on and follow the steps to install it. You will find the pack pre-populated with all of the popular themes and plugins, and a few that I thought should make the cut.
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Live from CES!
By Mitchell Hislop | January 6, 2010
I will be reporting live from the Consumer Electronics Show for the next four days, covering new, cool and exciting news!
You can follow my updates on Twitter, the CES page of my website, or my lifestream page, where it will all get aggregated with the pictures that I will be taking.
If there is anything that you would like me to track down and look at, please shoot me a reply on Twitter (@mitchellhislop), or email me (mhislop [at] smcpros [dot] com).
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Death of RSS? I think not!
By Mitchell Hislop | December 30, 2009
What you see above is how I am able to stay current on 350 blogs, yet still get real work done. The above image is a snapshot of Google Reader, my main content hub. I am perusing it every morning with my coffee, every night before bed, and with any bit of free time throughout the day.
According to Wikipedia, RSS is “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.” In laymans terms, it allows you to stay current with all your favorite content sources without having to constantly check them. And this goes beyond blogs, too. My dad, despite having a twitter account, follows my feed in his RSS inbox. That way, all my posts are right in front of him, where he wants them.
There are people all over the web (rss is dead return 123 million hits on google) claiming that RSS is so last year, and that social media is replacing it. However, they are missing a few points:
- Social media does not allow you to follow blogs as closely as RSS does, guaranteeing every post showing up in your reader.
- RSS powers most of the articles that you are finding on the web.
- Using social media to follow content sources such as blogs result in “filter failure”, in a recent episode of “This Week in Google”, the comment was made that the true concern on the web right now is filtering. If you are using Twitter to follow a bunch of people, as well as trying to receive all your news, you will miss things, and will get distracted. You will either see things that need to be replied to, or retweeted, and you will miss the TechCrunch story. To me, this is where RSS shines. You end up with your own personal newspaper that is not only curated by you, but is FULLY searchable. I cannot tell you how often I skim over a story, realize later that I should read it closer, and am able to find it in my Google Reader within 15 seconds.
- It requires less effort. If you are following these sources via social media, you still have to hunt down the post within Twitter or Facebook, whereas with RSS it is all right there.
The way I see it, not only has RSS become a backbone technology for the web, it is still the best way to stay on what is current.
Topics: Industury Analysis | No Comments »
SMCpro’s crystal ball into 2010
By Mitchell Hislop | December 24, 2009
Many people have been predicting what social media marketing will be like for 2010, we here at SMCpros have put together some thoughts of our own on what to expect for the New Year. Here are what the employees had to say about what they saw coming for the online world next year:
Mitchell Hislop:
- Businesses will learn that they need to leverage the internet with more than just a static website.
- Humans will experience a shift in how they naturally communicate.
- Companies will become more transparent.
- We will see several networks close their doors, get sold, or merge with other networks.
- We will see legislation passed regarding social media.
- There will be a greater connection between social media and IRL events.
- Twitter will be fully mainstream, not just a joke.
- Either LinkedIn will cement itself as a top network, or a new startup will round out the “Big 3″.
- There will be major discoveries in the way humans interact with data and the internet.
- We will discover even more than we already know about social media. I am of the opinion that there is no way we are using its full potential, and am constantly searching for what these full potential are.
Joel Feder:
- The term “Social Media” might transform into something else.
- SEO will become less important as search engines become more sophisticated.
- Google Analytics will be much more advanced.
- Twitter will evolve and add more features.
- Twitter will become highly profitable.
- Foursquare will either evolve or die out.
- Gowalla will burn out.
- Facebook will continue to make more changes and users will find fault.
- Traditional advertising will fall even lower on people’s priority lists.
- Twitter applications (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc) will become more advanced.
- We will see more cross pollination between platforms/sites.
- Apple will release a new iPhone and also a new tablet. They both will sell like hotcakes.
Adam Maikkula:
- Businesses will begin to adopt social media as a complement to their existing business initiatives.
- Social media will begin to be seen as a necessity rather than a “what kind of ROI do I get?” conversation.
- The ROI discussion will fade as businesses realize that social media was built to be social…Why do you think individuals started using these sites in the first place; let alone the early adopters who happened to be (guess what) college students who like to socialize.
- Platforms evolved because of the millions of people who wanted to be social outside of their immediate environment – just like AOL Instant Messenger was big when I was in high school.
It wasn’t until businesses saw the potential energy lying dormant within all of these virtual places that they started trying to make social media adapt to business, but it should be business that adapts to social media. No intelligent business would ever walk into a movie theater or a play and start shouting with a bullhorn all their great specials, promos, or how awesome they are. That would not be appropriate…They would, however, figure out how to adapt to the environment (platform) by leveraging the resources available to them (think running a traditional ad on the screen before the movie, or product placement within the actual movie).
My primary point here is that it all comes down to the social aspects of social media. Those who lack social skills will have a hard time fully leveraging these products.
My projection for 2010 is that business will learn to adapt to social media in order to avoid polarizing themselves from the users who are at the heart of the sites.
Tim Barsness:
- LinkedIn will become useful.
- Twitter will earn money.
- Interoperability between big players (FB/TW/LI) will increase.
- Tweetdeck will become web based.
Sarah Shehata:
- Facebook will continue to upgrade their platform and add more features.
- LinkedIn will be used on an even more professional level by businesses. The direction it is heading in is not necessarily advertising their services/products, but rather more along the lines of building brand awareness and showing their level of expertise within their industry.
- Twitter will be used as a live tool for instant questions, answers and quick research.
- A new platform will compete against the current ‘big 3′ social media platforms.
Tyler Olson:
- Twitter will start charging for upgraded accounts.
- Geo-location social media tools will begin going mainstream towards the end of the year.
- ROI track ability applications and integration will increase significantly.
- SMCpros starts rocking to a whole new level!
Topics: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »
