The blog posts from around the Piedmont Triad that I enjoyed reading this past week:

Local interactive shop BEM Interactive launched a new division called BEM Technology today, focusing on small office IT solutions (hosted Sharepoint, Exchange, etc). Congrats all!

When brand partnerships work, they can be wonderful things, as David Horne notes from a recent Whole Food shopping experience.

Ryan Shell, a local marketing blogger doing interesting work that I enjoy reading, is up and leaving the area for a big move to NYC.

Though I’m likely going to miss it again (client travel trumps all…), John Cass gives a great sneak preview of the next Greensboro Tweetup (now called “gso3″ – coming on May 20th) with a blog interview of Michael Grossman, Director of New Media Content at the News & Record here in town. I had the pleasure of finally meeting John over lunch this week, and I’m looking forward to eventually being able to attend an upcoming Tweetup.

Local agency Trone takes a look at the Nestle Facebook fiasco (maybe “fiasco” is too kind of a word. Nightmare perhaps?).

Bob Knorpp is back today with his weekly installment of The BeanCast (links to an MP3). I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but it’s one of the few must-listen marketing podcasts in my opinion, so just go check it out.

*Photo by digitaltree515 on Flickr via CC License

Related posts:

1. Triad Tuesdays for 4/27
2. Going to ConvergeSouth 2010 in Greensboro? Of course you are…
3. A short review of podcasts worth listening to

Given I’ve got a small but growing list, I thought I’d shared some of my favorite posts each week. This list is by no means comprehensive, just my own curation of posts I liked.

Know of any other great posts or bloggers from the Triad that are must reads? Please leave a note in the comment section below as I’d love to learn about (and meet!) more.

The list for this week:

Ryan Shell launches CUonTwitter.com a “tool that highlights credit unions that are using Twitter well.” Looks like six credit unions are up now, a nice concept overall.

Bob Knorpp posted yet another fine episode of The Beancast, this one focused on how Facebook rocked the Internet last week.

The team at Burris flagged an AdAge review of the iPad as a retail tool.

John Cass of Pace Communications noted an interesting finding from the “24 Hours: Unplugged” research report, that should resonate with anyone who makes heavy use of IM, texting, and social networking – when cutoff, the sense of loss isn’t so much about lack of access to news or information, but about loneliness.

Iconfactory, makers of the awesome Twitteriffic iPhone app, released a set of icons based on the original Clash of the Titans film. (not strictly a blog post, but cool in any case)

Danielle Hatfield posts over at Mobile Local Social about the new Facebook “Like” button.

*Photo by digitaltree515 on Flickr via CC License

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2. The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach
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And, anecdotally at least, it seems to me that long-form blogging is less of the centerpiece of the conversation for most of my extended social network than it was just a few years ago, and more of a compliment to the day-to-day (or second-to-second) sharing via Twitter and Facebook that now dominates.

So it’s interesting to note some new research pointing to the rise in popularity of blogging among the last group I would have expected – the Millennials.

Over 40% of the blog writers surveyed fell into the Millennial age group of 18-25, and why they are blogging hints at the advantage blogs still maintain over microblogging and social networking – it’s a platform for self-expression.

Video still trumps text for self-expression, but the technical and psychological barriers to jumping into videoblogging aren’t trivial, so it makes sense that “old-school” text-based blogging still has a home among those who are seeking an outlet for self-expression.

*Graphic source: eMarketer

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There’s been a lot of talk over the past few months (and really, years) about how content curation is the next wave of social media. The reasoning goes that with the massive rise in new information channels spewing a flood of content at consumers, we’re teetering in the midst of an attention crash of sorts.

Better content filtering – feed searches and such – is one way to cope, paired with dedicated tools and even people whose job it is to curate all that information into useful collections for the rest of us. The tools – social bookmarkers like Delicious for example – help everyone who uses them become a vast web of curators in effect. Newer tools like Alltop in effect attempt to curate blogs around selected topics. And link sharing via Twitter and Facebook are exploding the concept even further, with more focus on realtime push and less on the archiving and organizing aspect found in social bookmarking.

I’d like to highlight an older kind of Web content curation, that I think often gets left out of this conversation: the link blog. It wraps the “filtered and trusted firehose” style of link sharing found on Twitter with a touch of commentary and editorial that ads real value and context to those links.

By way of example, take two very popular blogs: Boing Boing and Daring Fireball. Another great tool for this sort of thing by the way is Tumblr, but I won’t dive into it here.

Boing Boing, kind of the granddaddy of all link blogs, bills itself as “A directory of wonderful things.” Which it truly is – it’s a firehose of content in its own right, but of organized content sprinkled with light editorial provided by interesting authors, serving as something of a guided tour to all the quirky parts of the Web.

Daring Fireball, the link-ish blog of John Gruber, in contrast is mostly focused on the Apple community and in particular the Apple developer community. Lots of small links, with a sentence or few of editorial, interspersed with a longer article here and there.

Neither blog is designed to really “curate” content for long term categorization and reference in the way a social bookmarking tool does, yet they do spew out links in much the way you’ll find on Twitter. The value, and the difference, lies in the commentary attached to each link, commentary coming from sources whose judgement and authority many people trust.

It’s because of this short form editorial, from authoritative authors, that they are both among my first stops in the morning. I trust the Boing Boing crew and Mr. Gruber to find and share interesting, relevant links and I enjoy the bits of commentary they provide on each.

In the current era of mass link sharing via social networks, Boing Boing and DF can appear to almost be anachronisms. After all, blogs are soooo 2007, right? But their continued success and relevance I think points to a larger point: everyone has their own preferences for how they consume drips from that grand firehose of Web content, and no one tool or format is the “right” one.

Some people prefer to consume curated content in 140 characters or less (Twitter), some want it only from close trusted friends and in lower volume (Facebook), and some enjoy it with a bit more commentary fed out via RSS readers (link blogs). Which is why I see a future filled with a variety of Web content curation tools and styles, and tend to discount all the frantic stories that surface about how the rise of App X will kill Apps Y, Z, and everything else for that matter. In the case of Web content curation, we have a wide variety of tools and styles already co-existing, as people select what best suits their needs and taste.

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When I made the full time switch to Mac, Live Writer was the #1 piece of software I missed. The OSX options seemed, at the time, slim pickings: ecto, MarsEdit, or some browser-based options. I’ve since tried them all, and finally fallen back in love with the one I originally dismissed as too complex while paradoxically lacking in features: MarsEdit.

Why? Better media and Flickr support for starters. Tag and Tumblr support help. Also, it turns out I was just being lazy, and not really learning the power of the customizable markup options.

See, MarsEdit provides a kick butt live preview window, but no true WYSIWYG editor. Adding a bulleted list is still fairly painful as a result, but the ability to fine tune your markup is something I’ve come to adore (as do others). No more hunting about in a WYSIWYG editor trying to figure out why the hell my blockquote now indents three times instead of one, or why an extra word is captured in a hyperlink.

Also, I contribute to (at least) four blogs on a semi-regular basis, and the ability to bounce across all of them, adding posts on the fly, is a breeze. That alone pretty much sold me.

Finally, the guys at Red Sweater seem to be committed to updating the app, unlike so many abandoned blog editing tools for both Windows and OSX. To keep them at it, I gladly contributed my 30 bucks.

Are there shortcomings? Sure – the image editing needs some work, with more flexibility around in-post resizing (I have to use ImageWell for that right now). But nothing that blocks my workflow or forces time-sucking workarounds.

So hats off to Red Sweater – if you blog on a Mac, go grab yourself a copy of MarsEdit.

Related posts:

1. Creating a Simple Mac Workflow for Posting Blog Images
2. 6 Recurring Posts Topics for your Company Blog

If you really want to throw caution to the wind, you can dive into one of the very cool embedded, external comment systems such as Disqus, IntenseDebate, and Echo.

What are they? Broadly speaking, they are all hosted web services that attempt to link comments by individuals across the blogosphere, embedded in your WordPress install with a plugin. They also, to varying degrees, attempt to expand on the idea of ping/trackbacks – links to your post from other blogs – and display all inbound links from across the social media landscape, such tweets, social bookmarks, and so on.

They also make commenting a bit more fun, and coherent, for your readers. Using a single sign on they can track their own comments across the blogosphere – or at least, across any other blogs that happen to be using the same commenting system (maybe someone can create a tool to integrate your comments into one viewable pane?).

I should note – this isn’t a review post, as I haven’t used all three systems enough to make a properly informed judgement. This is just to highlight three alternatives to help make your blog comments a bit more interactive.

However, based on the various reviews I’ve seen, the cheat sheet version based on my own quick judgement is:

• Disqus: Most established player, in wide use, new updates. Works decently well on my current blog.
• IntenseDebate: Owned by the guys who built WordPress, so lots of hope for future development, though enough complaints on current stability to give me pause.
• JS-Kit Echo: Newest entrant, loaded with interesting functionality and a clean UI, though this one is a “premium” (you pay) plugin.

Disqus

From my incredibly unscientific scanning of the Web, armed with patented Mark I Eyeballs, Disqus is the “grandpa” of the crowd, having launched first. It offers very easy integration with WordPress, a nice moderation screen (both in WP dashboard and external), and a fantastic sidebar. I use it on my Social Mallard blog and have seen it in heavy rotation throughout the blogosphere, though that may reflect their early entrance into the market.

The Disqus team launched a recent update (August 25, 2009), effectively splitting the service into two parts: Disqus Comments, the comment management system for bloggers, and Disqus Profile, a separate comment management system just for commenters.

IntenseDebate

A relatively recent (one year ago) acquisition by the team at Automattic, I’ve been hesitant to try it on my blogs due to some bloggers having significant challenges with it (example) To be fair though, I’ve come across a lot of bloggers who love it and prefer it over Disqus. To each their own.

The fact that ID is now run by the guys at Automattic inspires a bit of confidence, as they put out some world class products.

See the complete feature list.

Echo (or JS-Kit Echo)
The new kid on the blog, Echo looks to be off to a promising start. One nice upside is CommentLuv now works with Echo.

See the complete feature list – it’s fairly exhaustive.

A big difference between Echo and the others? Echo isn’t free – $12 a month for the “Live” version, and I can’t locate a totally free option.

Related posts:

1. When is WordPress.com just good enough?
2. A/B Testing with WordPress (h/t Carsonified)
3. Are free WordPress themes a dying breed?

Will 2010 be the year of the Daddy Blogger?

2009 has clearly been the year of the mommy blogger. Brands have recognized this through their engagement of these influential women.

Mainstream media has brought mom bloggers and their stories of buying power and word-of-mouth success stories into the folds of newspapers and on television screens across the country. We’ve also witnessed the notoriety lead to controversy, drama, and some may argue, scandal…if only just perceived.

However, I’ve been noticing a quiet trend. The stealth mode of the “Daddy Bloggers”.

Jessica’s argument centers on what she calls grit, reach, “Mars and Venus”, fresh voices, and ready to rock and roll. Go read her post for the full and very compelling argument.

My take? Yes, 2010 will see the dad bloggers attract significant attention from brands. Here’s why:

• The model is proven: Mom blogs have been thoroughly embraced by brands ranging from auto manufacturers to consumer products to TV networks. Entire conferences and niche consulting practices have sprung up about connecting marketers to moms, with a significant focus on moms who are active in social media. It’s not a huge leap from moms to dads, especially the not-insignificant number of stay-at-home-dads, and dads who play an increasingly active role in management of the household, many of whom are active on blogs.
• Dads may appeal to a distinct set of brands: Be it stereotyping or accurate market segmentation, many dad blog product reviews* tend to focus, unsurprisingly, on products traditionally associated with dads: gadgets, technical gear, sports, outdoors, etc. It’s not unreasonable to see many brands that haven’t found a suitable niche with mom blogs to latch on to dad blogs as their own way to ride some of the social media wave. (*My own casual observation)
• Marketers flock to the appearance of trust and authenticity: Just as mom blogs gained traction as storytellers of remarkable honesty, emotion, and humor, dad blogs are doing the same. Trust and authenticity, married with relevance, creates loyal and often broad bases of followers. Marketers love this, as a product endorsement given by someone you feel an emotional connection vastly outweighs one given by a generic review site.
• The potential is largely untapped: Some of the examples outlined below notwithstanding, relative to the mom blog community, dad blogs are an untapped market for brands. Some of the better known dad blogs are seeing commercial success and are flooded with product pitches, but you’re not seeing, yet, the proliferation of highly trafficked and pitched review sites written by accomplished dad blogs. As the Sony DigiDad campaign illustrates, there are lots of opportunities for creative engagement.
• The mom blogs are reaching a saturation point: This may be a controversial point, but my spidey sense is telling me that the mom blog community, in the midst of a full-on goldrush, is approaching an attention saturation point. The established, unique bloggers with passionate followers will always be able to command attention from major brands. However the next tier down is seeing a massive amount of review sites go live, creating pressure to grab more readers and potentially diluting some of the original appeal of the mom blog community. Dad bloggers, still heavily loaded with storytelling blogs, may represent an attractive and available adjacent segment for marketers.

This argument isn’t entirely new, but the beginnings of this shift are finally starting to appear: The NY Times and AdAge both covered Sony’s recent effort to engage gadget-oriented dad blogs, driven in large part by Chris Brogan (who has his own Dad group blog at Dad-O-Matic). Commercial success is cropping up for dad bloggers such as the guys at DadLabs and the blogger-turned-book author Danny Evans at DadGoneMad. Even Wired is in the game, with the dad-blog-firehose known as GeekDad (your RSS reader has been warned).

There is also a group of smaller, but growing Dad group blogs and communities, such as Dad-Blogs.com (disclosure: I’ll be starting a guest column there shortly), CC Chapman’s Digital Dads, The Art of Manliness, Geek Dads @ Home, and the previously mentioned Dad-O-Matic, among many others.

Dad blogging may be the Internet’s tiniest niche; or at least it’s least lucrative. - Shawn Burns

That may be about to change.

Disclosures: In addition to the guest column I’m planning to write at Dad-Blogs, I’m also a newish author of my own storytelling blog about being a dad. So yes, I’m making this argument from someone in a position to benefit from my own predictions coming to pass. So caveat emptor. That said, I stand by comments, just run them through your own BS filter. I also make a number of assertions based on observation rather than published data. Again FWIW.

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I was lucky enough to attend Gnomedex ’09 late last week, the third time I’ve joined Chris Pirillo and team for one of my favorite annual tech conferences. If you follow tech blogs, or can wade through the spam on the #gnomedex hashtag, you can find thousands of great recaps of the parties (which I couldn’t attend) and the many presentations (which I made it for most of). So many quality recaps, in fact, that I’m not going to do my own traditional-style conference trip report blog post.

Rather, I’ll just leave you with my #1 takeaway from it all: Those who create, win.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon, shown above, is one of my favorites. If I could afford the limited addition print of it, I would slap it up on my office wall and breathe it in every morning.

“Create or die!” is an extreme way of putting it (most everything Hugh does comes off as extreme, which is part of why he stands out), but it dovetails nicely with so much of what I came away from Gnomedex thinking.

At the event, we heard from people who created a movement, created masterpieces of YouTube buzz (the secret being naked people farting, in case you’re wondering) along with a documentary on hope and opportunity, an online movement towards healthy skepticism, a physical art form version of nerd-dom, a kind of spammy but still very useful and wildly popular Twitter meme, and a fairly tale about digital life (Ignite presentation…sorry, can’t find a useful link). Among many others.

These excellent presenters all built wildly different things, but they still got out there and created something that expressed a bit of themselves and had an impact on others. They didn’t just analyze, discuss, or pontificate. They put something out there for the world to see and make what it would of it.

These are the kinds of people I get energy from, and why I love Gnomedex and eclectic conferences like it as sources of motivation and inspiration. Nice work Chris and team! Now, off to work on my own bubbling pots of creativity to see what comes out of it all.

Side note: I highly recommend buying the album “Maisha Magumu” from the documentary Bongo, filmed by Jay and Leah with GiantAntMedia. It’s for a good cause, yes, but it’s also great music for window-down driving on a sunny afternoon. Enjoy.

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Blogs look better with nice in-post images, just admit it. Yes, content is king, but pure text without some eye candy is just plain boring. Continually adding images though, from a blogger’s perspective, can be a real pain, from finding them to editing to ensuring fit and finish. To keep things simple, here is my workflow:

1. Find the Image
If you have an expense account and are looking for solid rights to generally high quality images, go over to www.istockphoto.com and search to your heart’s delight. There are some wonderful images for incredibly reasonably prices. However, thanks to Flickr’s fantastic use of Creative Commons, and the Advanced Search feature (check the CC search option towards the bottom), finding legally usable, high quality, and relevant imagery for your everyday blog posts can be fast and easy.

Just *always* remember to check the type of CC license, and ensure you provide proper attribution to give the photography credit for their work.

For screen caps and shots, the easiest tool I’ve found is Grab, which comes with OSX (search for it in Spotlight). Add this handy utility to your Dock.

2. Understand Your Layout
Figure out how wide your main blog column is, so you know the max image width. An easy and fast way to do this is by using the Firebug extension for Firefox. Right click somewhere over some text in one your blog posts, select Inspect Element, and then look at the bottom right window. Select Layout, and look at the first number (e.g. 520 x 190) in the center box. That *should* be the pixel width of your main blog content column. Your mileage may vary.

3. Use ImageWell Templates for fast editing
I highly recommend ImageWell for fast image editing on a Mac (and no, that’s not an affiliate link). It may cost $20 or so, but it’s well worth it and saves you from trying to string something together with iPhoto or firing up that beastly overkill known as PhotoShop. Open ImageWell, drag your saved image into its window, click “edit” and resize/crop the image to your desired width.

If you use full column width images on every post – which makes things much easier by obviating the need for text wrap, IMO – you only need to do this once by hand in ImageWell. Set up the max width, ad a border if you like, then select “Add Template” and name it. From then on, every time you edit a photo in ImageWell, just select “File > Templates > yourtemplatename” and done. Your image will be resized, border applied, etc.

4. Upload and enjoy!
You can either use the handy “Send To” feature in ImageWell to FTP the image directly to your blog’s content folder, or use something like WordPress’ image gallery upload feature to get the image where you need it.

Once you get the hang of it, the longest part of the process will be fretting over which image to actually use. The download/edit/upload process should take mere seconds, and you’re on your way to blogging bliss. Good luck!

Photo within the screen shot is by vernhart on Flickr via CC License. Screenshot itself taken of ImageWell during a sample editing process.

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Monday morning. Blog posting time. Blank screen. No ideas. Panic time.

If you’ve run a company blog, you’ve probably been there. No matter how well you build out a content plan, there may come a time where the well has run dry and the “just in case” reserve has been used up. No new customer case studies have been published, no product news to announce, no webinars or trade show events to talk up. What next?

Try adding in a set of recurring post topics to your regular posting schedule. These are simple posts, set for publishing on given days of each week (or alternating weeks, or 3rd Tuesdays…whatever works), with content largely pulled from outside the corporate firewall. Look at these as wonderful opportunities to point the blog lens outwards and participate a bit more in your user and industry communities. Here are five common types of recurring posts to consider adding to your own content plan:

1. Must Reads
Each week in your normal blog, industry news, and general online reading the research, bookmark articles and sites of particular interest. A hot new research report, an insightful blog post, key news about trends in your business, whatever they may be. Sign up for a social bookmarking tool such as Delicious, Instapaper, or use the Google Reader “share” function to capture them throughout the week, and then post on Friday or Monday a quick run down. It’s a great way to send some link love out – one of the best ways to get links back in – and it will provide real value to your regular readers, provided you stay on topic (no “oh so adorable” LOLcats, unless that’s the focus of your company).

2. User/Member Profiles
These go by many names: “Featured Commenter” “Customer Profile” “Star Contributor” and so on. They can be long and in depth, complimented by a podcast or video, or they can be quick and simple. On the latter, grab a headshot photo, some relevant info, a link or two as appropriate, and some nice words on their contribution to your community, support forums, blog, or success with your products (if they have approved a testimonial or case study). These work wonders for any company with an online community or forum aspect to their site, and they are a great way to showcase case studies or testimonials if you’re lucky enough to have a steady supply.

3. Employee Profile
Sometimes shining the spotlight back inside the company can do wonders for your brand. Develop a stock questionnaire, including some quirky questions – favorite customer story, most embarrassing day at work, what one thing you’d find on their desk, etc. Collect these plus a headshot photo from willing staff, and post these once a week or so. They add a degree of humanity to your blog and company, and help your readers and customers connect with your brand and team on a more direct and personal level.

4. New Content Digest
For content-heavy sites, especially if you churn new content on a fairly frequent basis, a fast, easy, and very helpful recurring post topic is the new content digest. Highlight new articles, whitepapers, case studies, releases, how-to’s, and so on. Keep it short and sweet, and link directly.

5. Old Content Salvage Post
Sometimes great content gets buried, even on well designed sites. Don’t rely on site search or your no doubt awesome SEO efforts to expose great pages, posts, articles, and the like – highlight the best of them in a recurring post series!

6. Forum Thread Of the Week
If you host a user or customer forums – support, ideas, feedback, self-help, etc. – consider flagging one thread each week that is either uniquely interesting or is drawing above average readership or participation. Write up a post to draw attention to it and invite your readers to participate. This is also a great way to highlight and celebrate a featured forum contributor (see #2).

Mix and match as appropriate, and plan ahead so you have a few of these in your back pocket come crunch time.

Remember, if you need help with your blog content planning, writing, or blog development, drop us a line!

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