I am reading this right now and I can’t stop talking about this book. I think Tara Hunt has done an excellent job of explaining how social media can be used to build social capital. I am especially fond of this book because I think it is written in a style and tone that anyone can understand, you don’t need to have a twitter account to know what she is talking about.
I first met Chris at Podcamp Pittsburgh a few years ago and I enjoy reading his blog (ChrisBrogan.com) on a daily basis. I am looking forward to reading more of his thoughts on the subject of using online tools to build trust – I think this might be a great follow up read to The Whuffie Factor.
Chris Brogan has posted a video review of this book here. Tara Hunt discusses Gary Vaynerchuk and his social media successes in The Whuffie Factor and I am eager to read more.
Full Disclosure: The links on the page are Amazon Affiliate Links – which means if you click the link and order something we get a small percentage of the sale. Feel free to buy these books from your favorite book store too.
I have been playing around with the website BackType today and I think that this could be a really useful tool for doing more “listening” to what others are saying about a topic. One of the most useful things about social media is to use the tools to “listen” to what other people are saying about your brand, organization, group, issue. Check out Chris Brogan‘s post – 5 Tools I Use for Listening for some other examples of using social media for listening.
Here is how BackType can help you listen to more:
You can set up BackType to send you an alert when someone mentions your url or a key word in a comments – this takes you a step beyond just searching blogs, now you can see when your url/keywords are in the comments – which is often where more conversation takes places
BackType has just launched a feature called BackType Connect- which lets you see all of the conversation around a particular article or post from different platforms like digg, reddit and other social media on one page. They also have a browswer bookmarklet avaialble that you can add to your browser – so you can quickly click and see the conversations around a particular topic from multiple platforms.
The blog Library Clips has a nice post on BackType and compares BackType to YackTrack with some examples of searches from each website.
Do you use a comment tracking service? or comment trackign service? What do you think about the idea of connecting coversations across websites?
WordPress is very very easy to use and I think it is one of the best blogging platforms out there. Almost everything you can set up yourself and you usually don’t need any help to quickly get a good looking blog up and on the web. But sometimes you want to take things to the next level or sometimes you start messing with code that you aren’t quite sure what are doing. Where do you go for help? Many of my friends call me and I tweak it til it gets fixed. Who do I call for help? Well until recently – I wasn’t sure.
I was really happy to learn about this site WeFixWp.com. I think I learned about this site from Chris Brogan and I am going to hire them to help me fix up the back end and the theme on IheartPGH.com, which has had more than a few hiccups in the past and to help me update the theme. It is time for a blog makeover and I think getting some outside help with that will help improve the whole blog.
When I set up IheartPGH – I didn’t know what a blog was and I wasn’t planning on setting up an ongoing site that would actually get traffic so I found the cheapest web hosting I could find. As the site grew I forgot about the hosting and it finally came to a big bad crash and we were offline for almost a month. the folks at El-chepo- hosting were of no help. I blogged a plea for help and thankfully an old intern came to the rescue and moved everything over to a hosting account at Media Temple. Thus far – Media Temple has been great – no down time and they have 24 hours phone support. Meida Temple also allows you to host multiple urls on 1 hosting account. There are still some kinks on the back end and I have been afraid to upgrade wordpress ever since. So I am turning to the folks at WeFixWP.com to help with the repair/upgrade.
Some more reading about taking your blog to the next levle
I have spent many an afternoon trying to set up a reblogging feature on WordPress but I have never had much success. Reblogging is publishing post from other blogs on your blog. So I was interested in checking out this little link. The REBLOG link takes you to the website for Zemanta. Zemanta is a tool that suggests related content and pictures to your posts. Zemanta can be used in 2 ways – You can add it as a plugin to WordPress or there is a browser extension you can add to your internet. I am writing this post using Zemanta and so far it is a dream. In one click I was able to link the words “browser extension” to the wikipedia page. Zemanta also suggested about 20 pictures that might be good for this post. With 1 click I was able to add the image of the screenshot above.
Zemanta also suggests some related blog posts, if you would like to read more about Zemanta check out some of these posts below. This is also a great feature because I discovered some blogs I have not seen before.
What I say is immensely important than who I am. Let the search be for the meaning and substance in my words rather than the intricacies of my existence.
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