Archive for the ‘Build Community’ Category

I told myself I wouldn’t share this secret with anyone until I tried it out myself. Well, over 2 years since conception I have a full time job – which is good news – however, it means that I haven’t optimized my own content. Oh well.

This my seem formulaic, but with social media optimization, formulaic is what we want, despite how much that might piss off your traditional social media enthusiast who thinks there should be no rules.

Here goes:  ... Read This »

• First.  let’s say you want to optimize your website to get more StumbleUpon stumbles. You would make sure that you have content geared toward the StumbleUpon demographic: something interesting, different, intelligent, creative, etc.

Social media enthusiasts still haven’t agreed on a definition for “social media optimization,” but if we are to call it “optimization,” there must be some basic science behind social website design.

The vast majority websites are designed as billboards out in cyberspace with which the user has almost no interaction, other than to view, comprehend the site, and possibly buy something or to be directed to buy something somewhere else. The most common entrance to these websites is through a search engine like Google.

Social media optimization is concerned with getting the most out of your visitors by harnessing their influence. Rather than simply reading your content, alternative options for your visitor could be to:  ... Read This »

1. Subscribe to your content via email newsletter or RSS
2. Link out to your website from one of their websites (provided that your visitor happens to be a webmaster or blogger)

Networked Blogs, the almost official blog directory & syndication application on Facebook, offers users the ability to subscribe to, rate, comment and share blogs with their friends. I would advise any blogger to add their blog to the directory, but I would not suggest that you funnel all of your Facebook friends to it. While Networked Blogs offers some nice features and indexation in a fairly high-traffic blog search engine (2 million visitors / month with close to 1 million users), the application is too many degrees removed from both your blog and Facebook.  ... Read This »

Facebook is a relatively simple machine that can be reduced to an empirical formula. I am SMOBOT, and I see the world in numbers. OK, not quite, but let’s have a crack at it.

The platform was intended for college students almost exclusively upon conception. Word-of-mouth spread across dorms clogged with students, each connected to the internet, and all in close, isolated proximity to one another. There was a need to connect, and the means by which to do it. Students would have a way to connect, communicate and show off their connections, which was an incentive for them to recruit others to join the Facebook network.

Having saturated the college scene, Facebook opened things up to high school students, each connected via mini networks at school. And as soon as the PC became a staple good, Facebook opened their doors to anybody with an email account.  ... Read This »