As part of some recent consulting work, I spent some time looking at the new people-search engine from Squidoo called SquidWho (it is not Squidoo I was consulting for). SquidWho is an interesting service that may or may not be worth using (in most cases I think not) but there are a lot of things the team is doing very, very well. It's worth checking out the site's user experience and use-flow; it's all quite well put together.

The one thing I haven't been able to get out of my head in the weeks that have passed since I tried the service out is how easy it was to get started with SquidWho. It's simple, really - and I was kind of kidding about using the word unforgettable in the title of this post, but I really do keep thinking about it. It's more like it's unnoticeable for once!

Easy login is important because there are so many web applications launching every day that yours should be as pleasing to use as possible at every step or you'll loose out on the use and advocacy of early adopters - at the very least.
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One of my favorite clients that I've consulted with in recent weeks is a Massachusetts based company called Softrax. I helped put together a unique and powerful newswire system for their website RevenueRecognition.com. The site's subtitle is "revenue management resources for today's financial executive."

Softrax came to me with almost no experience in using new web applications and by the time our work together was done they had a topical OPML file, a system to easily aggregate industry news on their website and a solid initiation into the web 2.0 experience. This case study is an example of one sort of plan I help clients strategize and implement.
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In case you're interested in joining us for any of these, I recommend them all highly. Big thanks to organizers for the invites.

New Media for Nonprofits
Meyer Memorial Trust

I'll be leading a session on "the ROI of blogging." There will be 3 or 4 other sessions as well, about things like online video and RSS. If you're in Portland and into npo work, you might like to join us.

Friday, October 19th at PNCA in Portland

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey
mediasurvey.com

Sam Whitmore does weekly by-subscription teleconferences with media pros (including new media ones, apparently!) and has been one of my heroes for some time. It's a real honor to be a guest there. Sam's site is by subscription only (free trials available) but he does have a new, public blog that's worth subscribing to. If you're not familiar with Sam, you'll start noticing his name around some of the best tech podcasts on the web now that you've read it here.

Phone call is Tuesday, October 16th at 1:00 PST

Blog World Expo
blogworldexpo.com

I'm speaking a couple of times at the BlogWorldExpo on November 7th through 9th in Las Vegas. It's going to be a very good conference, judging from the speakers list and the background of organizer Rick Calvert, a long time trade show man who has dove in head first to social media.

November 7th - 9th in Vegas, flights and registration are inexpensive - you should really think about going. See http://blogworldexpo.com

I keep saying that I'm going to write up a particular case study here about one of my favorite recent clients, the Massachusetts-based accountant trainers at Softrax. We worked together on a major project for their site RevenueRecognition.com. I'm just a few days from having something long to post on it, but I did get a nice quote that I can post now. More on the way about the very interesting work we did together. I like to work with people in a wide variety of industries, these are accountants.

Marshall provided us with a very effective and manageable system to bring a wide range of relevant news content onto our site. He did a great job managing the project - it required minimal technical resources and was very cost-effective. Our percentage of returning visitors and our depth of visit metrics have both improved since the implementation.

- Gerry Murray, Director Corporate Communications, Softrax

Thanks Gerry!

I've been getting lots of inquiries about my consulting services since leaving my day job to join Read/WriteWeb and do more consulting - but as they say: just because you've got work now is no reason to stop lining it up for the future. Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss what we could do together.

My friend Justin Kistner has started a blog carnival of sorts that he's calling Advanced Operators, all about working with new tools online. He's had smart people contribute posts on all kinds of topics on their blogs and I thought I'd participate in this round.

The topic this week is "my favorite tools." Justin has posted a good long list on his site (as well as the snazzy picture here that he designed himself!); I decided to focus on three tools in particular that I'm particularly jazzed about right now.
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I'm excited to announce that my work life is changing; I've resigned as Director of Content at SplashCast and joined the team at the excellent web 2.0 industry news blog Read/WriteWeb. I'll also be putting a new level of time and energy into my consulting practice, something I haven't been able to give the time it deserves in recent months.
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Ever since I got into this business, I've wanted to spread the basic tools at the core of what's changing the internet to as many people as possible. Today, my consulting services often end up being more substantial than is appropriate for people just starting to engage with new tools online. In those circumstances, I've been able to offer blog posts to share what I've learned and I often answer questions for people quickly and at no cost.
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One of the consulting services I offer companies is in launch strategy planning for social media promotion. Over at SplashCast we've done two major product launches in the last week and I thought I'd offer some observations here based on those experiences. If you're interested in reading about SplashCast's use of social media for marketing in general, check out this post.

The launch of our NPR Podcast Player was covered at Webware, StartupSquad, Mashable, Download Squad, WebProNews, CenterNetworks and Technically Speaking so far. Last week's announcement was covered by TechCrunch and Mashable. Big thanks to everyone!

Here's some things I have found to be helpful in efforts like this:

Writing a pre-launch FAQ is one of the first things I advise any company does before reaching out to bloggers. I believe a good FAQ includes all the basic background information that would be communicated in a solid telephone conversation: company history, funding, executive backgrounds and possible if not already available use cases of the product. Based on my experience covering startups at TechCrunch I found the majority of telephone conversations with CEOs to be frustratingly long, slow and unneeded. Tech news and review bloggers are hungry for content and if you give them all the info they need to write, in an easy to consume fashion, they will appreciate it and be more likely to write about you. This FAQ document should also include a good logo image and screenshots that can be included in any write up. An embeddable screencast or demo video is great but good looking screenshots go a long way too. Here's an example of a good launch FAQ. Update: That page is now down, a good example of why you should save a screenshot of key pages before you leave a job! None the less, here's a cache of that document, minus all the media.

Once you've got all this information available on your website, you can send a 2 or 3 line inquiry out to bloggers. "We're launching a thing-a-mabob. Here's the info if you're interested. http://mycompany.info/thingamabob Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about it. Thanks." That works great, especially if you are emailing bloggers that you've already built relationships with. For more on pitching bloggers, see also my list of links on the subject.

There's probably more blogs worth reaching out to than you think. When we launched SplashCast in January, I reached out to about 25 bloggers, ranging from the big ones to some smaller, up and coming ones. We also put out a press release, attended the DEMO conference and employed a successful PR firm, Horizon Communications. The agregate result of all this was more than 250 blog posts about the SplashCast launch. Just TechCrunch and MasterNewMedia coverage alone lead to tens of other blogs writing the company up in the following 24 hours.

Many of the smaller blogs that wrote about that first and subsequent launches send significant traffic as well. Traffic can come from unexpected places - for today's NPR launch, for example, StartupSquad is sending us more traffic than almost anyone (their coverage was included in Robert Scoble's link blog, for one thing) and our press release got picked up by Mashable, which was then linked to by WebProNews. We've never reached out to WebProNews before, but the point is that some coverage leads to more coverage when you make it easy for the ball to start rolling.

How do you find the blogs to reach out to in the first place? Some good tips can be found in my post here titled How to find good blogs on almost any topic, which I'm proud to say is the #1 Google search result for the phrase "how to find good blogs."

There are any number of strategic details to take into account as well, but I hope that this post will prove useful to readers doing social media promotion. If you're interested in working with me on a project like this for your company drop me a line at marshall@marshallk.com. My other consulting services include development and design feedback reports (because you've got to have something great to launch!) and working with companies to leverage OPML for competitive and market intelligence.

In answering some one's question about work in online video I made time to fix a resource I had put together some time ago for SplashCast team members - an RSS feed containing only blog posts containing the word "video" from a number of the biggest Web 2.0 blogs online.  It's a handy way to catch all the big, topical stories in the news - or news blogs anyway.  I thought some of my readers here might like it too.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarshallsTopBlogsOnVideo

That feed above contains articles from the following blogs that contain the word "video"
TechCrunch, Mashable, Gigaom, PaidContent, ArsTechnica (all top web 2.0 generalist blogs) and my personal blog Marshallk.com

If you're real interested in online video, I'd also recommend reading Beet.tv and NewTeeVee.  (What other video focused blogs would people here recommend?)  Every post in those blogs is about video though, so I kept them out of the aggregate feed above.

How does it look?  Check it out at the end of this post, after the "more" link.

Here's how I made that feed.

I identified domain leaders in my topic of interest.  If you don't know how to do that, one starting place is to go to http://technorati.com/blogs/MYTOPICOFINTEREST and look around there.

I grabbed the RSS feed of each blog and spliced them together using the wonderful service FeedDigest. One of the many options there is to filter for a "search query."  I entered the word video there.  This service does a lot (including displaying the feed live here in this post) and I gladly pay $50/year for it.

FeedDigest produced a combined and filtered feed for me.  I took that RSS URL and entered it into FeedBurner because it makes everything pretty, it lets me make lots of changes to the base feed without disrupting the readers' experiences, etc.

Then I posted here about it so share this info with anyone interested.  Just imagine how much fun you could do creating feeds like this for yourself or your friends!  The folks at SplashCast like it quite a bit.

Want to see the output?  Check out this link... (more...)

I noticed last week that there was no Wikipedia entry for Blogher, the women-centric blogging conference, blog aggregator and now VC funded company.  Shocked, I twittered that this was the case and my buddy Jeremy Pepper replied asking whether he should write an article.  

This was the second time in a month someone has asked me a question about whether they should be the person to write an article in Wikipedia so I thought I'd share some of my thoughts here.  A Blogher article in particular makes an interesting case study.

Wikipedia has great Search Engine Optimization, can be a good traffic generator and is a good reference source.  People like to have an entry in Wikipedia for their projects for a variety of reasons.  In this case, there ought to be a Wikipedia page about Blogher just so that people can go to this widely trusted source to learn about the project. Who should start writing that page, though?

In general - here are a few things I think are important when considering whether you ought to be the person to write about something in Wikipedia.

1. Conflicts of interest: If you have an antagonistic relationship with something, you probably ought not write about it.  If you have a financial interest in that subject's success, I am of the belief that it may be ok for you to write about it so long as you practice...
2. Disclosure: Make sure your user page identifies who you are and what you do for a living.  Being open makes a world of difference.
3. Value add: In addition to a neutral point of view, make sure your post adds important value to the Wikipedia community by being truly informative.  Also, the more you have contributed to Wikipedia in general the more any specific contribution will be respected.  
4. Time invested: In some cases, like if a PR agent is writing about their client, I would recommend that in addition to disclosing the fact that you are a PR agent on your user profile page, you should also consider editing the article live in Wikipedia.  Multiple edits over time, even if from the same user, demonstrate time spent on the article in Wikipedia and help demonstrate respect for the platform.

To answer Jeremy's question about Blogher I first searched in Technorati for his name and the word Blogher, to see what his relationship with the group was like.  He had written some supportive blog posts about the event, which received favorable comments from some people I understand to be leaders in the Blogher community.  I know that Blogher is generally supportive of participation by men.  I also did a google search for this query: site:http://blogher.org "for wikipedia."  I found one forum thread about the fact that there is no Wikipedia article for Blogher.  The conversation seemed supportive of the idea, people were just wondering who should write it and how it should be done.  The thread seemed to taper off without any clear answers for that question.  That lead me to believe that there wasn't any clear reason why the Blogher community did not want an article about Blogher in Wikipedia.

I suggested that Jeremy write one up and post it while logged into a Wikipedia account that was clearly tied to him personally.  That way people could see who was responsible and contact him to discuss it if they wanted to. He hasn't written that article yet, but that's ok. Eventually someone will write it and I think this is a good opportunity to talk about these questions.

If he does write this article, here's how I suggest this and other articles begin.  In addition to maintaining a "neutral point of view" and sticking to the facts, it's important that an article be long enough to satisfy the community of Wikipedians who dislike very short articles.  I've had articles be deleted because they weren't substantive enough.

Since Blogher is an active online community there's an opportunity to make sure that participants there know that a new Wikipedia entry about them has been posted.  Emailing them or posting to the Blogher forum could be good ways to let them know. Once they know about the article, they will have a chance to edit it as they see fit and help watch in case this new article gets nominated for deletion, as does happen frequently.

Finally, I'd suggest that if you add a new entry to Wikipedia that you check back daily for the first week after posting it to see if any conversation about the article has been posted or if the article has been nominated for deletion.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your entry's history, but there doesn't appear to be any way to track by RSS whether your article has been nominated for deletion.

If it is nominated for deletion, there will be a discussion and vote.  In that case, you can let people know and provide the URL for the voting page so they can participate in the conversation and respond to any concerns that the Wikipedia community may have.

Those are some of my thoughts about writing articles on Wikipedia.  There's no guarantee of success in Wikipedia, but if you make a good-faith effort to contribute value to the community (with any interests of your own weighing less heavily than the interests of the community) then odds are good.  You'll learn more about online social media from the experience of engaging, so in most cases I say yes - write that article.  

I'm going to email a link to this post over to one of my Wiki-loving buddies and see if we can flesh out answers to these questions all the more.