Sarah Fowler

I like to think I’m a good communicator, and then I watch Chris Brogan.

This, he says, is his favorite keynote he’s given. That means quite a bit. It’s only 10 minutes, and well worth it.

Picture by michelphoto53 en Rénovation on Flickr

So you’ve built a blog on WordPress. You see the Plugins section, but you have no idea what to do with them. Do you need them? Do they serve any purpose? What plugins are available?

There are plugins for almost everything you can think of, from linking your blog to Twitter to making it easier to insert photos in your sidebar.

There are a couple basics every blog should have, though; most related to either making your site easier for your customers to find (whether they know they are looking for you or not) or making your content easier to share. (NOTE: These plugins are available when you install the self-hosted version of WordPress–ie, your own URL– not with a blog hosted at WordPress.com)

First of all, when you install WordPress it comes with a plugin that helps block spam comments called Akismet. You will need to create a WordPress.com account and get an API key to activate it, but it’s well worth it because it will block 99% of spam comments in all but the most trafficked blogs. (If you find you need more help blocking spam comments, there are many additional plugins to accomplish this.)

If you have a Google Analytics account and plan to use it to track links and traffic to your blog (which I highly recommend), save yourself a lot of time and heartache by installing Google Analyticator, which automatically adds the necessary JavaScript to make that happen. You will have to enter a few things on the plugin Settings page to set it up initially, but after that it will do all the legwork for you!

Next you will want to install a few plugins to help make your blog easy for search engines to find and index.

• The All in One SEO Pack is an excellent place to start; once activated it gives you a way to add keywords to the code of each blog post so posts will appear in relevant searches.
• Google XML Sitemaps is another really helpful plugin. (It doesn’t just create and submit Google sitemaps; it will do it for all the major search engines.) Search engines don’t only search sites with sitemaps, but it makes the process easier and you can make recommendations for how often their bots come through. You can even make exceptions and keep the bots from scanning certain pages. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you would be well served by finding someone who knows a bit more about SEO, especially in the initial setup of your site.)

Finally, you’ll want to make your content as easy to share as possible.

• A popular one-size-fits-all option is the Add to Any Share/Bookmark plugin, which adds a menu to the bottom of each post offering sharing options on many popular sites.
• There is a Share on Facebook plugin to add that specific button, or you can use the code from Facebook’s own site to add their official button.
• The TweetMeme Retweet Button plugin is very popular as it is an easy way to share the post on Twitter and also displays the number of times the post has been tweeted in a graphic in the post itself.
• The Twitter on WordPress plugin creates a widget in your sidebar that will show all your tweets live.

This is just a start. There are hundreds of other plugins that do useful things like changing the way your blog archive appears or changing the “Next” “Previous” links at the bottom of the page. It’s worth searching anything you think of you might like to change; which you may have to change the code yourself to make some changes or add some functionality, the great developers who contribute to WordPress may well have already done the work for you! (And don’t forget to donate to those developers if you possibly can.)

Enjoy making your blog better with plugins!

It’s very common for me to have a conversation with a potential client that starts something like this:

“I know I should be on social media; I keep hearing that. But I don’t get it. What can I use it for?”

Let’s start with how you do business already– there’s no need to totally reinvent the wheel.

1. Host a town meeting or focus group– via UStream, Twitter or another chat service.
2. Host an educational seminar (in this case, a webinar)– use UStream, GoToMeeting, or another service.
3. Publish educational content– via a blog (WordPress, Blogger, Facebook or another platform) or as multimedia (on YouTube, SlideShare, etc.)
4. Provide top-notch customer service through Twitter, Facebook, or any number of forum or chat platforms.
5. Send a newsletter– use ConstantContact, Emma, or the bevy of other products available. (By permission only, please!)
6. Distribute informative literature by posting it on your website, Facebook fan page, or other platform.
7. Send invitations or spread the word about events– store openings, special sales, educational seminars, campaign rallies, whatever! Use MeetUp, Facebook, Evite, or a range of other options.
8. Distribute coupons, discount codes, or event tickets individually via email or generally to online fans/followers.
9. Organize volunteers to political events, community service opportunities, or other causes (MeetUp, Facebook, Evite, etc.).
10. Make announcements or distribute press releases. You can do this through regular communications on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, on a section of your website, or officially either through direct communication with reporters or by using a service like PitchEngine.)

(PS – This video on the social media revolution is worth seeing.)

With new small business clients I often get questions like

“Yeah, I know I should be on social media. But what would I use it for?”
“I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this, but I want to jump in. How can I start?”
“I’m not ready to set up a profile anywhere. Is there a way for me to dip a toe in another way?”

These questions, and others like them, will be answered over the next few weeks.
I’d love to get everyone’s input and look forward to further discussion.

Ted’s Montana Grill is Ted Turner’s eco-friendly restaurant chain most famous for their bison burgers. They currently have a solid online presence and a very vocal raving fanbase. Here’s how they’ve done it:

1. They knew raving fans existed and they wanted to leverage them to build more raving fans.
2. They started email marketing, gathering email addresses from an easy-to-use signup box on their homepage. Emails are generally about specials or special events, not at set intervals. 
3. They started a Facebook Fan page, and began offering a few special deals just for Facebook fans.
4. Later they did a month-long trivia contest using the Fan Page Updates and the Wall where the first person to post the correct answers to three trivia questions each Friday won a gift certificate.
5. Finally they launched a huge contest where fans had to create content (art, sound or video) about what made them the biggest fan of Ted’s bison burgers. The winner would get a new Prius and free food at Ted’s for a year.
   After a submission period (marketed by a few emails, but mostly on their Facebook page) Ted’s picked the top three submissions for the final round of the contest, and asked their fans to pick the fourth (out of ten selected entries). They have a YouTube channel for this purpose, as well as having the options easily accessible on their website (with voting highlighted on their homepage). Just a few hours after announcing this turn of events the contest had well over 6,000 votes.

The fans in these videos talk of flying to Ted’s locations (currently the chain is only in a few states) just to have a burger, taking their four burger-loving toddlers, going faithfully every week after church, knowing the names of every waiter at their local restaurant, the health benefits of bison over beef and the huge variety of burger toppings, among other things. Let me tell you, these fans are evangelists–and there are thousands of them.

Ted’s online marketing strategy is pretty simple. They started with a solid, easy-to-navigate website; added email, then Facebook. It is not an inordinately expensive campaign, nor do the Ted’s staff have much direct interaction with fans (such as Twitter or back-and-forth on Facebook). They’ve just set up a forum for people to share good things, and given away a few (in the long run, also fairly inexpensive) incentives along the way to get more people involved.

How can your business replicate their success? Where are you raving fans, and how can you reach them so they can reach others for you?

[Edit: Alexa Scordato shared this great SlideShare presentation in the comments: The Fan Economy.)

If you’re considering building an online community from scratch (rather than leveraging one of the thousands that already exist), you’ll need to either find a passionate, socially-inclined niche or create a forum for people to share what they can’t share elsewhere.

ClosetCouture.com has done the latter. They know how women deal with clothes in person– they go shopping together, talk about clothes over lunch, flip through each other’s closets, and come over before dates to scrutinize. The next step is to move this interaction online.

Each user on the site uploads a photo of each piece of her wardrobe against a white background. She can then put together and save outfits, which can be sent to friends for a rating of 1-5. Friends can also suggest outfits for each other, or users can pay professional stylists to put together outfits and suggest new pieces (with links to those suggestions on retail partners’ sites).

The site was recently featured in Vogue magazine, where Jane Herman demonstrates why this is a profitable concept:

Forget Facebook. Give me an interactive Web site that lets me post pictures of my clothes in a virtual closet that other style-minded users can access to create looks they think will look great on me. My idea of a useful social networking site is one that involves a continual dialogue about clothes.

Jane doesn’t just want to socialize. She wants to socialize about clothes, like she does when she’s physically with her friends. She’s certainly not alone; the site was growing by approximately 150 users a day before being featured in the publication that reaches more women passionate about clothes than any other medium. (To recap: these women are so passionate about fashion they didn’t balk at taking the time to individually photograph every item in their wardrobe.)

Girls have liked dolls, paper dolls and fashion plates for centuries; and now this concept has not only gone digital but become a way to connect with friends (both real-world and new online acquainstances). Partnerships with designers, stylists and retailers shows the site is having no trouble monetizing (a problem the non-niche Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook are having).

In short, the same advice applies to building an online community as it does to any marketing venture: know your audience, and give them what they want before they even know they’re looking for it.

This morning, thousands of people in Florida and Georgia awoke to “SOS Only” service on their AT&T cell phones. While only a minor annoyance for some, for others (like me) who use the phones to run their businesses and/or have gotten rid of their land lines, this constitutes a major problem.

I called AT&T and sat on hold for fifteen minutes. A customer service representative told me they were aware of the outage and it would be fixed within 24 hours. 24 hours?! That is a long time to be without cell service. I asked if this service interruption would be eflected in my bill.  I was put on hold again, and then was told I would be given a 48-hour credit ($4.79). That’s good, but doesn’t really address the larger business problem I’m encountering by being without cell service!

I began searching Twitter to see whether others were having this problem. Many were. Soon local station Central Florida News 13 was talking about it on Twitter, getting lots of responses and starting a hashtag for the event: #attfail. The Orlando Sentinel picked up on the story too, and began live blogging the updates they received from AT&T’s spokeswoman.

Facebook isn’t searchable in the same way, but news about it has definitely been going around my newsfeed.

AT&T was nowhere to be found. As far as I can tell there was no acknowledgement of the problem on their website (although the system was so clogged I couldn’t log in to my account online), and no use was made of their Twitter account to respond to the growing number of people making this problem very public.

Etan Horowitz, an Orlando Sentinel technology journalist, wrote a blog that the outage had been confirmed by AT&T and began actively updating the blog entry and Twitter (even @-replying to each complainant he found via a Twitter search) to keep people informed of AT&T’s official response. In short, he was doing precisely what AT&T ought to have been doing!

If your company ever has a service crisis like this, how are you equipped to respond? Will you rely on a local newspaper reporter to assure your customers that something is being done? (Are you willing to trust the media to communicate as well as Etan did with your customers?)

If you are not active in social media (especially Twitter), you are not set up to control your own message through a crisis. That’s a dangerous place to be.

Don’t worry – traditional PR is not dead… yet. And traditional PR agencies will not die if they adapt new methodologies. PR will always be built on relationships and good content, regardless of how the media changes. There are just new ways to build those relationships now!

Say you’re a  small- or micro business and you want to “start doing some PR”. Where do you start? Do you hire a PR agency? Maybe, but first you should try doing a few things yourself.

1.  Write a press release.
   If you’re not an excellent writer, hire someone who is– preferably someone with specific experience writing press releases. If you haven’t written them before, even if you put the main content together yourself make sure to have someone look over it before you send it. A traditional press release will include information about the newsworthy event, a few quotes from relevant people, and a final paragraph or two about the subject of the release (you and/or your company).
2. Submit it to the traditional channels.
   You can use paid methods like PRNewswire, especially if you’re looking for international attention. If you’re launching a groundbreaking technology product this might be the way to go, but for most purposes this route would be an expensive waste. Instead, think more personally. You should have a contact at your local newspaper (perhaps from a Chamber of Commerce networking function, a nonprofit organization you are involved in, or another special event). If not, leverage the network you do have to find out if they have an “in” with any editor or reporter relevant to your subject matter. It doesn’t have to be a major deal, but email the press release directly to them. Don’t call to ask if they got your press release. This will peg you instantly as an amateur! In addition to the local paper and television news stations, use the same method to submit the release to relevant industry journals, alumni magazines, and other traditional media. (Best if you’re a subscriber to these already and/or involved in the organization from which they come.)
3. Submit it to non-traditional (new media) channels.
   HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a site where you can sign up to get a few emails per day from reporters asking for specific things. They may be looking for stories about a certain kind of business, people in a certain category to interview, or any variety of other things. By signing up at the site you agree not to send the reporters anything they didn’t ask for. Obviously the timing might not work out precisely on your schedule, but it’s a great way to build media relationships and get your content visible when relevant pieces are being created. (Urgent requests go out often on Twitter, so be sure to follow skydiver when you subscribe to the emails.)
   Another valuable resource is PitchEngine, which helps turn your press release into a social media release. (Make sure to also become a fan on Facebook, because they often share new features or other news with Facebook fans first.)
   Recently a collaborative effort was started to list all the Media on Twitter. Following the people on this list relevant to your audience should be an early step in your Twitter usage. Once you’ve been interacting meaningfully with and around these people, you can submit content to them directly too.
4. Share it in social media.
   Important caveat: You are only allowed to share your own content via social media if you have already spent time building relationships, contributing content, and generally getting involved in two-plus-way communication in a helpful, social way. If you know there are people to whom your are connected who will be interested in this content (especially if they’re interested in passing it on), go for it. If, however, you use social media only to broadcast press release-y content, you’ll never get anywhere; it will actually hurt you and your brand.

If you’re interested in “getting your feet wet” in PR, try it out yourself or use an experienced marketing consultant to help you out before  full-out hiring a PR firm. If nothing else, you will learn precisely what you want out of a PR firm and not pay for something they can’t provide!

The first thing companies often want to do to “jump in” to social media is start a company blog. They put together a nice-looking page, build a sidebar of links to their site (ahem, perhaps try linking to other sites too), and write a few helpful posts. Within a few weeks, I usually hear ‘Why aren’t we getting any comments?’

Well, let’s see. Do you read blogs? (I hope the answer is Yes, because if not we have a lot to talk about!) Assuming you read blogs, and quite a few because there is lots of great content (get thee an RSS reader!), do you comment on blogs? How often? What kind of comments? (ie, are you actually contributing to the conversation or saying things like ‘Hey yeah, me too’?)

In order to “do” social media, you have to interact. And no matter how good your SEO or how big your brand, no one is going to know you’re available to interact until you find the people already in the space and initiate a conversation.

Assuming you’ve done a basic social technographics profile and determined that blogging is a good way to reach your audience and that your target base contains a decent percentage of Creators and Critics, the only reason you’re not getting comments should be that the people you’re trying to reach haven’t found you yet (unless commenting is unduly difficult on your blog—such as requiring a registration. Try leaving a comment on the blog from a computer outside your office and make sure it’s super simple.). Reach out a little, and the people you touch will help more people find you along the line. I believe in inbound marketing, but I never promised you could literally just sit back on your butt and watch the sales roll in!

(If the first part of the last paragraph sounded like scary gibberish to you, you haven’t read Groundswell yet! I recommend you do that before embarking on any of this, especially if you think you’re just going to “get your feet wet” and don’t really understand how social media can help build your business.)

If you don’t know where exactly to jump in—or worse, read very few (or no!) blogs— start by asking existing customers, coworkers, your marketing team, your friends, and anyone you can get ahold of what they read online. Most of those sites will lead you to other places… and then you’re off!

An additional great tip for learning about improving your blog: listen to or particpate in #blogchat on Twitter, which happens every Sunday night at 8:00pm CST. If you have no idea what I just said, shoot me an email and I’ll introduce you to some Twitter basics.