Tag: Google

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Still not convinced on the topic of curation? Read on…

Curation is now a necessity. The web is full of content. More than a person could consume in several lifetimes if all they did was sleep a couple hours per day and surf the web, life after life.

Google can’t help us with our internet A.D.D.  Nor can Facebook or Alltop.

The best we’ve been able to do so far to harness the massive information overload is use tools like Google Reader and RSS feed aggregators like Alltop.  They’ve helped, to be sure, but no one is going through all that information and picking out the best of the best and making sense of it all for you.

Rather than start a new site with the goal of creating a bunch of new content, it’s time for people to think about being content curators.  Organizing and commenting on the best content around a certain topic.

Curators still use blog software to publish their content, but the vast majority of each post is made up of carefully reviewed and organized 3rd party information.

via jackhumphrey.com

Jack Humphrey says it well here and I encourage you to follow the ‘via’ link and read his 11 reasons. Me? I am the self-styled ‘king of curation’ and my ‘e1evation workflow’ allows you to curate content better and faster than any other system I know of with maximum effect. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…

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Here’s my new, favorite Firefox plugin…

“Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader notes, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr, twitter, and ycombinator. You can also e-mail the web page directly to a friend.” Shareaholic – The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly

If you’re a blogger, one of the most important things you can do is to get your content out into the social media stream is to share, share, share. Shareaholic is the fastest, easiest way I’ve seen to do that so far…

6/29/2011 My old friend the ‘Blog Post Promoter’ tells me via this post that I’ve been officially loving Shareaholic for over three years now. Although I have moved from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser, Chrome remains the one extension or add-on that I could not live without. While I’m not a Chris Brogan or Darren Rowse, when an internet mechanic like me says this extension rocks, I’d suggest you find out why…

;-)

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Blogging? ProBlogger has an interesting perspective on monetizing your blog… 

It has been a year now since an eventful day when I was browsing the Internet and clicked on an advertisement that seemed an obvious scam: Get 90% off a new iPad. “Yeah, right,” I thought. But I wanted to check it out anyway since I seemed to recall seeing the same ad previously, and I wondered if it was a new type of scam I should be aware of. As it turned out, it wasn’t a scam, just misleading advertising … and thus began my blog on penny auctions, which are a class of entertainment auctions.

I found the idea exciting enough to blog about. I was just getting interested in multi-player game theory and thought that auctions are a nice field to study. The problem was, I had no experience of problogging at all. Like so many others, all I previously had was a blog for my random musings but nothing serious. I had a very elementary knowledge of SEO which I gained working as a freelance writer. I knew nothing about how to rank well in Google or how to use backlinks effectively. As a writer, the only promotional tool I did know about was article marketing.

I started this blog in May 2010, and it’s been growing for one year now. Looking back, I have learned so much and there is still so much to learn. Here is my journey in a nutshell.

via problogger.net

You can follow the ‘via’ link above if you’re interested in the ‘journey’, but personally, I wouldn’t start something like this on a Blogger blog. Despite what you might think, they are not at good at driving Search Engine Optimization [SEO] as WordPress. I mean a Google product should produce great Google search results, right? Wrong! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…

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Do you tweet? Or twitter? Victoria Harres does…

“The other day I sat down to write something about Twitter. I struggled with my thoughts, threw some words down, and came up with a question: “Why are you twittering?” I knew the answer people would give. I know Twitter, and I know the type of people who tweet. I know why my husband is on his iPhone flipping through tweets at 1:30 a.m. He insists on reading every tweet from every person he follows. Personally, I’m guilty of recently tweeting after midnight with a couple of people who tweet for major newspapers. So I know my husband and I are not the only ones afflicted with this social addiction.” Source: Why People Twitter – in one word.

So? Do you? Spill the beans in the comments…

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Long before I was a website developer, I was in sales and sales management. The other day, I had a convo with a fellow sales puke and we were discussing the top 3 sales movies of all time. They were, in our opinions, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room and, of course, Tommy Boy! Here’s the best sales team meeting of all time imho [warning: NSFW!]…

Blake, Alec Baldwin’s sales manager character says ABC means ‘always be closing’, but if you’re a blogger I say ABC means ‘always be curating’!

In my weltanschauung [worldview for those of you behind on your German], blogging, on one level, is little more than the public e-mailing and bookmarking. After all, what is a blog post but a “to whom it may concern” memo to the world? Because most people save bookmarks and send e-mails and links to one another they already have the basic instincts they need for thought leadership marketing. They are however using tools that are sub optimal for the task at hand. Even the person who has 1 million people in their address book cannot match the reach of a tool that can reach out to 2 billion people on the Internet.

What then are the right tools? I believe they are the 10+ tools in the elevation workflow…

  • Google Chrome
  • Gmail
  • Google Reader and Feedly
  • Shareaholic
  • Posterous
  • WordPress
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • MailChimp
  • YouTube
  • Dlvr.it

I firmly believe that anyone who wants to be a thought leader can use this combination of tools to establish their public point of view. Many people are using some or all of these tools but have not aligned them in an optimal fashion.

I want to take a moment to talk about Shareaholic. When teaching social media I tell my classes if you only add one extension to Google Chrome [or Firefox], make it Shareaholic. Why? Because Shareaholic is the one tool that allows you to always be curating. With the Shareaholic extension installed I am always ready to share content to the appropriate channel in my vast Internet publishing empire. Shareaholic, I have said earlier, is the Swiss Army knife of sharing. Allow me to demonstrate…

Curation not only adds authority to your public brand, but it will also rock your SEO. Shareaholic is the secret to my success, because with it, to paraphrase Night Ranger, I’m curating and blogging 25 hours a day…

I believe that the elevation workflow is a kick ass solution for thought leadership marketing. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization — I’m always available for Personal Digital Coaching on the ‘e1evation workflow’…

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With the official announcement of Google’s Nexus One yesterday, I’m going to go out on a limb and say “It’s time to sell your RIM stock”. This slurp from Mashable came out almost a month ago before Google’s announcment and the BlackBerry was in trouble then…

“As you may know, we’ve been conducting our weekly Lunchtime Poll and getting Mashable readers’ opinions on the topic of the week. This week we pitted six smartphone platforms against each other in our Smartphone Smackdown and asked you lovely folks to cast your votes.

We put RIM’s BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, the Symbian OS, Palm’s webOS and Windows Mobile head-to-head and sat back to watch the votes fly. At the end of the day, all had a respectable showing on the scoreboard, but there can be only one winner…

… and in this case the victor happens to be Apple’s iconic iPhone — the platform that kicked off the mobile app store craze that other mobile players have followed. With a commanding 43% of the vote, the iPhone was the champion, although Google’s (Google) open source Android (Android) platform was not too far behind at 29%. RIM and Palm both took 9% of the tally, with Symbian and Windows Mobile bringing up the rear at 5% each.” Source: Mashable Readers Vote: iPhone Wins the Smartphone Smackdown

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for over two years now and the products that are coming out today make the BlackBerry look like DOS compared to a Macintosh 15 years ago. When my chance to renew comes up I’ll be getting an Android phone so fast it will make your head swim. Until then, I’m stuck with this stupid Curve that looked so cool a couple of years ago…

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Sweta of GlobalThoughtz has an interesting blog post on the topic of corporate blogs…

“How do you follow your favorite company? How do you come to know about their latest launch or what’s cooking in their labs? My answer to this would be their ‘Corporate Blogs’. Not only does it give me a constant update about the company I like but also makes me feel connected to them. It gives me the feeling that they are listening to me. 

Today as a consumer, I have several products to choose from for each of my need and certainly my choice is driven by my affinity to a particular brand. Just like Internet presence had become crucial a few years back, corporate blogs are absolute necessity now. After all we live in the world of Social Media.

Its not just web companies that need to engage their consumers with their blogs. Few of the most loved companies in the world also house must read blogs. One of the best example of corporate blog is Official Google Blog, not only does it provide an insight into the company but also provides useful information to its readers. Corporate blogs such as McDonald’s Corporate Social Responsibility by McDonald’s, Check Out by Walmart and Fast Lane by GM have made these most loved companies even closer to their consumers. The Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter constantly update their users with their blogs The Facebook Blog and Twitter Blog.” Source: Why a company must have a blog.

Here’s the real payback, however, and the real reason why these corporations do it: HubSpot says that companies that blog get 55% more visitors, have 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages [which are valuable from a search perspective]. Better yet, customers who are engaged by a corporate blog and social media spend 30% more than their disconnected counterparts, according to MarketingSavant Dana VanDen Heuvel…

I guess you don’t really HAVE to have a blog, but at a time when many companies are fighting for their economic survival, I think it’s good to know there’s a good, fast and cheap tool that delivers these kinds of results. Question? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page…

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Last week, I posted that I had been chosen by Erin Davisson of WFRV TV in Green Bay to talk with her viewers about Google Reader. That segment was aired this evening…

http://www.wfrv.com/v/?i=123863049

Here’s the transcript…

Need to do a lot of online research? There’s a Google tool that can help make you a lot more efficient. It’s called Google Reader. It’s a free, web-based reader of RSS feeds, and once you find out how useful it is, you’re going to want to use it.Todd Lohenry is the owner of e1evation llc, and a social media expert. He’s a big fan of the Google Reader.

“Google Reader is a tool that lets you track the sites that you trust to search for terms that you want to know about and to track the people that you trust and turn the tide of information from chasing websites, hoping to find something good – to making the information you want flow to you,” said Lohenry.

The Google Reader is able to bring content from your favorite websites, blogs and topics to one location by the use of RSS feeds. Lohenry says RSS feeds are like the antenna on top of a television station. It broadcasts a signal to anyone who chooses to receive it. Google Reader is one of those receivers.

Google Reader also offers extras like personal stats, and keyboard shortcuts. You can track topics by using an RSS feed of a Twitter search. Lohenry says mastering the Google Reader means freeing up massive amounts of time, and says, “It makes all the difference in the world in terms of what you are able to accomplish on the internet.”

It will take some time to set up your Google Reader. but once you’ve found all your RSS feeds- it’s very handy.

via wfrv.com

Thanks so much to Erin Davisson for featuring my thoughts on ‘personal news aggregation’ with Google Reader on ‘Online with Erin’. Comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how Google Reader applies to your organization…

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In many ways, blogging is no more difficult than sending an email and much more effective in the long run…

“If you’re a great baker or known for your mad IT skills, chances are you get asked the same things over and over again. You probably also end up fielding distress calls from frantic friends struggling with a pie gone awry or a blue screen of death. Instead of typing out the same email responses repeatedly or talking yet another person through a troubleshooting process, slap up a web page with your own personal Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) and answers.

Next time you’re tapping out 2 single-spaced pages to Aunt Gertrude describing photosynthesis in all its glory and splendor, consider emailing it to something like Posterous instead; then, fire Aunt Gertrude a link to the page. Now, not only will Trudy have all the chlorophyll-related knowledge [she] can tolerate, but Google will probably stop by and maybe send some other interested parties your way. And the next time somebody hits you up about it, you need only send them a link to that thing you already wrote instead of rehashing the same crap all over again!

We think that’s a pretty ingenious approach to helping people out with a minimum of impact on your valuable time. Of course, there will always be times when you’ll want to help someone directly instead of pushing them off to a web site, but building a personal FAQ is still a smart idea. Your friends and family will probably appreciate it, too, since they might feel weird about bothering you during the dinner hour to help them solve a problem. This way, they don’t have to.” Source: Create a Personal FAQ for Friends Who Want Your Advice – Troubleshooting – Lifehacker

I originally started blogging when I became chairman of a local volunteer organization. I didn’t want to spam members with every great article I found so I posted the ‘just in case’ info on a blog so I could save ‘just in time’ info for emails — that way I didn’t offend members with too much information and they actually kinda paid attention when I sent an email because they knew it wasn’t just another good website I found. A year later, I was stunned to see that my posts had attracted 25,000 pageviews from 93 countries and I was hooked on blogging forever…

This blog has evolved from the simple strategy outlined in the source. In many ways, the blog is little more than a repository for all the cool stuff I find every morning in my ‘virtual newspaper’. Like the source author, if I have something brilliant to say in email or a resource to share, I post it first and then send it based on the principle that if it’s worth sharing with one person, it’s worth sharing with billions. The fact of the matter is you don’t have time NOT to blog! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…

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via makeuseof.com

Same applies to websites or almost any other type of technical work. If you’ve heard me speak, I’m always talking about “good, fast, and cheap” tools. There are a few — like Google Apps for Business — that are all three! Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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