Browse My Stuff » Best

Associations Social Media Opportunity

Tony Karrer — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:54:04 +0000

This morning I had one of those wonderful social networking moments. I received a note that I had been accepted into the smchat ning group - a group that meets once a month for chats. I joined last week’s chat and thus signed up to the ning group. When I visited this morning, I saw that they also had a LinkedIn group, so I joined that as well. This is a great way to get a better handle on who was in the group. The second person who’s profile I looked at was Deirdre Reid. She had a posted listed in her profile Be a Renegade – Bringing Social Media to Your Association. Because I think of social networks as a big cocktail mixer in the sky, this was one of those great moments when you feel like - wow, let’s talk about that a bit.

Deirdre points to a feeling that many of us have - the associations where we are members or staffers should be doing more with social media. This is felt elsewhere How to Become Your Association’s Social Media Champion:

We often hear, and it was recently affirmed in the Angerosa Research Foundation’s Web 2.0: How Associations Are Tapping Social Media report, that the reason many associations fail to execute social media initiatives is because they lack an internal champion or advocate.

So Deirdre’s suggestions on how to become that renegade (or champion) is right on the mark. She asks the question:

How can they somehow work the system and get their leadership to see that social media can help their association achieve its goals and so much more?

She has some specific suggestions for actions:

Review strategic plan and determine where social media fits
Set up Google alerts
Find staff, members, leaders who already are on social media sites
Make your plan
Engage with others

Her post is a really great resource. I would immediately add to her list to visit the Association Social Media Wiki to find great case studies that you can help to use as examples.

I wanted to really highlight something that Deirdre barely mentions. The real value of many associations are the members. If you can harness the power of that membership, you will be a winner. Many associations see themselves as providing services to the members, creating stuff for the members. With social media, members can create the value for other members more directly and the association can be the enabler of that.

In her post Deirdre tells us:

A huge concern to any CEO about social media is the amount of time it requires. This is a valid concern and one that you should be ready to address. It’s why I haven’t mentioned blogging as part of this plan, although it may be something to consider depending on your association’s resources.

While I agree that it’s an open question whether the staff of an association should spend time blogging, very likely many of their members are already blogging and creating great content that would be of high value to other members. So, the real question is how do take advantage of that activity?

Two approaches to consider:

Learning Circuits Big Questions this is a monthly question - organized by a member of the association (ASTD) that asks bloggers to contribute their responses. It takes only a little bit to set up this kind of blog. And it’s a quick way to engage with the membership and help to build a community.

Browse My Stuff - aggregates together content from existing sources, relies on the members activity for social filtering to find the best stuff, and has wonderful long tail seo effects to bring more traffic. This results in sites like: eLearning Learning, Southern California Tech Central, NonProfit Tech and Nonprofit Marketing Zone.

To me, the real question is more how to harness the power of the members’ existing social media activities to benefit other members and the association.

Some other resources on this topic:

Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Finding and Connecting with Bloggers - 30+ Resources

Tony Karrer — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:36:01 +0000

A big value proposition that comes with Browse My Stuff is that it provides a great opportunity to build a relationship with bloggers in a particular field. In Learning, Extended Brain and Topic Hubs, I discussed my experience in launching Speaking Pro Central. I realized that I should know a lot more about professional speaking and thought that it would make sense to create a Topic Hub that around professional speaking to help my own speaking services. It also helped me meet many of the top players in that space.

Along the way, I’ve come to realize that there’s quite a bit to learn about how to effectively work with other bloggers. I’ve been collecting information on this topic for a bit and some of the best resources on Blogger Outreach, Blogger Relations, Blogger PR and Blogger Buzz are:

Some suggestions from these resources and based on what I’ve done in the past:

Search for related bloggers via Google Blog Search or by using delicious and the tag “blog” in addition to keywords. For example: http://delicious.com/tag/blog+elearning
Scan the blog first to make sure it’s a good fit
Search for past discussion of the topic
Collect some of those discussions so you can add value later
I keep this list in a Google Spreadsheet. It contains the blog names, URL, where I found the blog, name of the blogger, and their email address, status information, last contact date, next step, date of next step and notes.
Subscribe to the blog - it’s best if you can read it for a while to get to know the blogger before you ever contact them.
Comment on the blog while you are getting to know them.
Be transparent in your communications
Customize your emails
Grammar and spelling do count
Don’t disregard smaller bloggers
Add value when you write to them, provide interesting information and show you’ve done your homework
Give bloggers link love - often the best way to engage them is through a blog post that links to them
I personally like to set up a 30 minute call if it’s appropriate. Most often it is for what I’m doing, but it’s different in different situations.

Problems I still have:

Many bloggers make it hard to contact them. It’s easiest when there’s an email address, but often you are left with a contact form or by leaving comments. These sometimes seem to go into a black hole.
Sometimes it can even be hard to find their name.

Long Tail SEO - 60+ Articles

Tony Karrer — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:50:33 +0000

One of the value propositions for Browse My Stuff is that it organizes content in a way that should be good to help long tail SEO (search engine optimization). When we were in the process of designing Browse My Stuff, I had a hard time finding good resources on how to go about long tail SEO. I’m still constantly looking. If I’m missing something good, please drop a comment.

I thought it would be helpful for me to share what I’ve found so far. As I find additional materials, they will become available through the site on the appropriate pages such as long tail seo.

The following are the top items I’ve collected so far based on social filtering.

Related Keywords

You can use the related keywords from the long tail seo page to find additional interesting pages such as: Long Tail SEO Keywords, Long Tail SEO Meta Tags, Long Tail SEO and User Generated Content. There are also some other pages that I’ve found pretty helpful such as those related to specific issues such as 301s, Google Penalty.

Please Help

Again, I’m trying to find good information on this topic. I’d appreciate any pointers.

Blog Topics

Tony Karrer — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:55:42 +0000

In this blog, we will be discussing a variety of different topics that all relate to what Browse My Stuff does. These topics include:

Long Tail Search Engine Optimzation / Long Tail SEO
Aggregation
Topic Hubs
Curation
Social Curation
Social Media Marketing
Distribution
Blog Networks
Content Networks

This will evolve over time.

What is Browse My Stuff?

Tony Karrer — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:46:36 +0000

Browse My Stuff allows the creation of topic hubs around virtually any topic. It is flexible in its use, but it is generally designed to allow the creation of either:

Public Topic Hubs
White Label Topic Hubs

Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.

There is also an interesting aspect of network building and community creation through working with bloggers. This can be an interesting part of social media marketing.

Value of a Topic Hub

High Quality Content - The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content from as defined by the community.

Easy to Navigate - End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.

Sources - Normally, content comes from from high quality sources such as top bloggers, web pages and other sources as defined by community members.

Keywords - Content communities are organized according to keywords. Activities within the community and other kinds of social signals are used to help identify the best content.

Jump Off Point - To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.

See below for more on the value of Browse My Stuff to end users and bloggers.

Who is Behind Browse My Stuff?

Browse My Stuff is the brain child of Tony Karrer and was created by his company TechEmpower. It was initially built because Tony wanted it to organize his content across various topics where he was active.

Each community is a partnership between Tony and leaders / bloggers in that community. Browse My Stuff provides the underlying capability, but it’s up to the community to determine content.

Why Google Ads on Public Topic Hubs?

The goal for each community is to provide value to the network of bloggers and to end users who might not otherwise find that content. However, to provide this it costs money in terms of software development, hosting, maintenance, operations, etc. Google Ads provide a small (and we do mean small) amount of money that help to defray the costs. We hope to create enough different, vibrant communities that will allow us to recoup our costs.

We also would very much welcome sponsors for communities that would allow us to remove Google Ads. If you are interested in sponsoring, please contact Tony Karrer: akarrer@techempower.com

Value to End Users

Most end users of a content community are people who do not regularly subscribe to the bloggers and other content sources involved. The goal for end users is to provide high quality, current content organized in a meaningful way.

Easy to find good quality content - the community helps to surface quality content.
Easy to navigate - keywords make it easier to navigate for people who are less familiar with the space.

Value to Bloggers

Browse My Stuff was designed by a long time blogger with the intent of addressing several pain points that bloggers face.

Bloggers most often have a network of fellow bloggers who write about similar topics. However, this network is not understood to people who are not regular readers. Blog rolls help. A content community helps identify members of the network to newer visitors to that network.
Other aggregators pull in full-text of posts, Browse My Stuff only displays snippets. The goal is to push traffic back out to the bloggers in the network. For most bloggers who participate in a vibrant content community, the content community becomes one of their top referral sources.
Other aggregators provide their own commenting capability. Browse My Stuff does not. It always pushes users back to the original post. Comments are made on the original post not on the aggregator.
Automated organization. One of the challenges as a blogger is how to keep my tags/labels/categories up to date. Adding a new tag means going through older posts to add those tags. Frankly this is a lot of work. The keyword widget provides a means of automatically organizing content.
Long Tail SEO. As an individual blogger, you likely write posts that cover several topics. But you only get to choose one title and URL. The title and URL are incredibly important for SEO, but having only a single shot makes it hard to do it right. Because a content community comes from many sources, it can organize the content in a way that provides the best stuff from across the network. This is attractive to searchers. As a blogger, if you write a good quality post on a topic that has high social signals, it will be available to searchers using a variety of keywords. There really is no effective way to do this as an individual, but the network can do it.
Low Page Rank and Keyword Terms Only. One concern that many bloggers have about traditional aggregators is that they will steal search traffic from their blog. With Browse My Stuff, this is not the case. Pages are organized according to keywords and therefore it is unlikely that there is a page with a similar title to your post. Other aggregators create a page with exactly your title. We specifically do not do that. In the event that your post title is very similar to keywords on the site, because the very low page rank of individual pages on the site, it is extremely unlikely that the Browse My Stuff page would rank higher in the search results. In the words case scenarios where someone clicks on the Browse My Stuff page instead of the bloggers post via a search, it is highly likely that the post title and a snippet will appear on that page because of a very high relevance score. Thus, there’s still a good chance that the traffic will be sent to the blog. In practice, bloggers who participate report that they receive a significant net increase of traffic and that traditional conflicts with aggregators do not occur with the Browse My Stuff approach.
Keyword Widget Signals a bloggers topics. The keywords shown in a widget for an individual blogger is based on the frequency they blog about that topic as compared to other bloggers. This makes the keywords indicative of the specific topics that each blogger talks about.
Participation is Simple. It is simple for bloggers to become part of the content community.
Better Navigation and Search Results. Navigation and Search results also show related keywords and the “Best” section helps to surface content based not only on relevance, but also based on social signals about the quality of the content. End users report that this is of significant value. So do bloggers. Many bloggers find that they will use the site themselves to find old posts. Do you find yourself using Google to do a site: search of your own blog because the built in search engine is not good (ahem Blogger)? Search and navigation within the content community site is better, especially for Blogger/Blogspot blogs.

Here are some unsolicited comments from fellow bloggers about content communities:

Tracy Hamilton - Discovery through eLearning

“simple”

Collin Kromke - Web 2.0 Work

“I’m LOVING the way the label widget works!”

Kevin Jones - Engaged Learning

“I like your widget a lot. Kind of a linear tag cloud.”

Wendy Wickham - In The Middle of the Curve

“looks pretty cool”

Ben Bonnet from mLearning is Good

“The cc.mlearnopedia.com community has already benefited me by providing exposure to content I normally would have missed.”

Michael Hanley - The eLearning Curve Blog

In my view, the value is threefold:

It’s a single location when you can access the cream of blogs and commentary from a diverse range of contributors

Those contributors write some of my favorite blogs … as well as a bunch of really interesting blogs I’m looking forward to getting to know.

It’s an easy-to-use interface for viewing content from the main page area, by keyword or blog name. Similarly, find content using the search functionality.

John Tropea - Library Clips

“blogs on a topic have proved their worthiness (blogosphere self regulates reputation) and coalesced into one convenient space.”

“a brilliant blog aggregation site”

“Basically, it’s a convenient one stop shop daily read on what a bunch of bloggers are saying about Communities and Networks.”