soulati.com

Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

Soulati-'TUDE!

This Business of Breasts

By

October. The. Pink. Month.

Who doesn’t know by now that Is this the month that companies must do or die? The local fire engine is now pink — really? How many tax payer dollars were used for that?

(Aside: This is not a post against victims and survivors of breast cancer; I have the utmost compassion for their plight.)

I’m wondering how the gents feel each October; I wonder if prostate cancer should have a huge splash, too.

This business of breasts is quite the marketing opportunity for companies to show ‘raderie. Heck, it seems girls and women’s bodies are incredible treasures of opportunity for pharmaceutical companies.

 Merck’s Gardasil

Gardasil, the Merck creation of a series of three injections for pre-sexual teen girls to ward off human papillomavirus which causes cervical cancer, recently …albeit the drug launched in 2007. Turns out one of the side effects was fainting on the day of the shot (do you think that was purely anxiety for these young ladies?).

The Texas governor Rick Perry mandated all girls get the shot while 24 states launched legislation requiring all school girls to get the shot in 2007 prior to safety studies.

Barr Pharma Plan B Contraceptive

How about the from Barr Pharmaceuticals called Plan B, to all the teen-age girls’ families throughout 50 schools in the 1-million student body?

The Associated Press broke the story Sept. 26, 2012 .

It’s being given to teenage girls many who have yet to have intercourse and to parents who have the option to opt out of the program. Only 1 to 2 percent of parents refused.

Here’s more:

  • More than 7,000 New York City girls ages 15 to 17-years-old get pregnant each year.
  • More than 2/3 of those pregnancies end in abortion.

A parent and president of the parent association at a high school on Staten Island quoted in the story by the Associated Press said, “The children nowadays are not going to abstain from sexual intercourse. How many unwed mothers do we need?”

How Do You Feel? 

As a mother of a 10-year-old girl, I cringe. The message I hear for our daughters is one promoting promiscuity with a drug safety net. Let’s not even address birth control measures for teenage girls, either.

Boys and Condoms

Here’s what I’d like to know…are condoms being passed out to families and all the teenage boys in high schools? Are boys suffering the consequence of teenage pregnancy as well as the girls? Do boys have to carry around the computerized babies that actually throw a tantrum, puke and poop in the night? I have never seen a boy carrying those faux babies; but, they should!

From what I’ve read of late, the consequence of teen intercourse is a one-sided situation skewed to the girls. When pink October arrived with a bang on the heels of the Gardasil news last week and the morning-after pill the week prior, I knew I had to speak.

This about firing up your blog pushed me over the edge to publish.

I’m a concerned mother of a pre-teen daughter, a business owner who sees females being exploited in pharmaceuticals, and a parent on the fence about these new fixes that may or may not be a good thing. I just don’t know yet.

What I do know is that gender inequality about this business of breasts and sexual promiscuity is alive and well.

Bring it…

 

 

 

The Future of Blogging Is Mobile Technology

By

This is post #351; how cool is that?

The future of blogging is mobile technology AND motivated bloggers, that’s my add. This week, I took Mark Schaefer’s blog post about dim lights ahead for bloggers with little that’s new and added my perspective. Read Mark’s post there; read my post here.

In comments, the community heard from both Mark Schaefer and Danny Brown. Each weighed in to put some more insight to what’s around the bend for bloggers.

What they said is too valuable not to make into a post:

Mark suggested he purposely kept his post about what’s new in blogging (July 2012) a bit thin to prompt conversation and chatter about the direction we’re all going. What he clarified in comments on the blog yesterday was more on the influence of mobile technology on blogs.

Mark proffered, “ As smartphones increasingly become our first step to the Internet, the utility of our blogs is eroding day by day. Our beloved medium is becoming harder to read, harder to engage with and less useful – and writing better blog posts won’t change that.”

What he also alluded to is mobile platforms remove the bells and whistles from a blog’s appearance. When people use smartphones and tablets to read a blog, all the widgets and plug-ins in the sidebar disappear. Who we are becomes next to invisible when mobile technology is used.

Enter Danny Brown.

Danny shared fabulous tips in comments I’ll paraphrase and quote:

  • Bloggers are lazy and short-changing their audience.
  • Bloggers have no reason not to be mobile for readers’ convenience and at minimal cost.

“Free platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com already offer great mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized designs, and if you’re on self-hosted WordPress, plugins like WPtouch Pro offer a great solution, too,” said Danny in comments.

“Yet, the best one – and very inexpensive – is a true, responsive design. This adapts your site or blog to whatever browser your visitor comes in on, so it’s not just optimized for mobile for older browsers and different displays.

You can grab a responsive design package from the likes of Studiopress and their Genesis framework and child themes for as little as $80.

If you’re serious about your blog and your readers, go responsive. Don’t look to blogging’s future as being at stake – think about you as a blogger, and your responsibility to user experience,” he concluded.

Responsive Design

According to Wikipedia responsive design is “an approach to web design in which a designer intends to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”

If you’re really a geek, you may want to try and read the rest of the page after sentence one; I couldn’t make heads or tails about it, but it certainly becomes the question to ask designers of websites and blogs.

Do you do responsive design?

About That Technology

Mark Schaefer will tell you what a scaredy cat I was back in the day when I insisted on tweeting instead of blogging – for a whole year! Mark would try to convince me, and I’d cringe about the technology.

I still hate it because I’ve not mastered it. The things you hear me whine loudest about are the things I fear – big data, analytics, technology, and my new iMac.

Deploy New Plug-ins

What the leaders are saying is for a blogger to grow to the next level, technology is the answer. Go get WPTouch or WPTouch Pro:

From Brave New Code on the plug-in: WPTouch (lifted exactly)

WPTouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

Now Available: WPtouch Pro! Totally re-written top to bottom, with a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, Web-Application mode, and more!

Awesome iPad theme support is now available in WPtouch Pro, now at version 2.7!

So, to wrap it up — run and get some new mobile-type plug-ins for your blog; we have to or else Mr. Brown is going to keep calling us lazy critters!

Credit: Brave New World WP Touch

 

 

Who Knows The Future of Blogging?

By

There is no one I admire more than Mark W. Schaefer, and we launched on Twitter at the same time…how’s that for forever ‘raderie?

Yet, since his blog post over the summer about what’s new and exciting in blogging and his disillusion about what to expect, the blogosphere is still awash with posts, podcasts and conversation pro and con on the topic.

Last week, Jon Buscall (another dear friend and colleague I met on Mark’s blog back in the day), president of Jontus Media in Sweden, invited me to be his guest for the third time on his podcast. (He’s a phenom in podcasting, you know, and also has an amazing marketing firm in Stockholm).

I have to bring our conversation from audio to my blog and try to help Jon get a better answer. We skirted the issue very well, and Jon wrapped up the show still seeking a spot-on solution for the future of blogging. I think I let him down because my crystal ball predicts that the future of blogging depends on the blogger! That’s you and me.

So, let me try to recap what I circled with Jon about right here:

Mark’s cred is off the chain. As a leader on the Interwebz, it’s his wont to rustle feathers, be a provocateur, and toss about theory that needs proving. When someone of Mark’s caliber suggests there’s nothing new ahead for blogging and the future of blogging looks dim, what does that do for we bloggers ramping up growth plans?

Exactly…the lights go out and passions dim, too.

My Take on Blogging

  • If you listened to any of my podcasts with Jon, you may hear my encouragement and excitement about this channel, also called owned media.
  • Blogging gives each of us the opportunity to control a message, share insight, show personality, build community, influence a brand, and sell.
  • After 12 months of straight blogging three times a week, things begin to happen; trust me, I am speaking from experience. No one should derail the blogging journey unless they just want to take a break and come back, like Mark Harai and Paul Roberts (who just returned last week).
  • I’m not going to amplify my own echo chamber; I’ve written so much on blogging already…my archives are rich with passionate content about blogging.

My answer about the future of blogging is this — stay the course, put in your time, find your voice, build community, and become an expert. What your future is depends on you. Comparing yourself to another bloggers’ journey is like apple and oranges, but it bears no fruit.

20 Ways To Build Blog Community

By

Creative Commons License: Dr. Kelly Page

This blog, Soulati-‘TUDE!, has the most amazing community, evah. Not lying; it’s vibrant, insightful, buoyant, supportive, accustomed to a good blog-jack, and full of ‘raderie. I love this community, and it wasn’t built overnight.

I’ve been “accused?” of being an excellent community builder; I cannot lie, I had no idea what that meant when someone shared that with me the first time. So I started to pay attention, and here are my tips on how to make your blog community blossom:

20 Tips to Build Blog Community 

1. Engage with a commenter! So often when I hit a new blog and leave a comment, it’s crickets and I never go back.

2. Genuinely thank people for taking their time to come by and leave a thought. How many blogs are there now? A couple million? Good grief.

3. Be exceptionally welcoming (not drippy) to newcomers. You know who they are! It’s so cool when someone new stops in; thank them.

4. People’s time is so valuable; you have to respect those who stop in…until you get to know them, and then you can become more personable.

5. Mix up your topics. I did a test that Ralph Dopping was aware of…I wrote a post that was purely about public relations and he was the only one who commented. We deduced the post was not general enough and didn’t appeal to a wide audience.  A general topic promotes more engagement; people feel more comfortable participating because the topic isn’t over someone’s head.

6. Do what I just did…take more time to go to someone’s blog and grab their latest blog post and insert it as a hyperlink in your post. When you do that, I’m getting a pingback, and I know automatically I’m coming over to say thank you.

7. Don’t just put a Twitter ID in your blog post when you mention someone because they are totally unaware they’re being called out.

8. Send a note on Twitter to the folks you really want to read your post; ask them/invite them to your blog. Kaarina Dillabough is perfect at this practice when she guest post; she’ll send me a note and I try to get there as often as I can to support her. She also informs me when I’m tagged in an article.

9. In comments, ask another question like Shakirah Dawud does. She’ll comment on your comment and then pose a question back to bring you back. Smart commenting.

10. Join Triberr. Can’t say enough about Triberr. You may think you don’t need it, but every blogger needs Triberr. I’ve written about this too many times to go on a Triberr tirade here; just trust me on this one.

11. Your comportment says so much about the community you’re trying to build…are you personable, laughing, flirtatious, serious, professional, funny, witty, open-minded, welcoming, consistent, paying attention? (Yes, blog communities demand all of that and more.)

12. Do you comment and return that favor on others’ blogs? I believe that commenting IS quid pro quo…you comment at my house, so I better show up at yours. What do you know about that? I’ve done some experimenting and have deduced it’s true. Commenting on others’ blogs definitely leads to community building.

13. I have often wanted a roll-call menu so I can tick off my name to say I visited; sometimes I don’t want to leave a comment, but I want the blog owner to know I stopped in. So, when you stop in and don’t leave a comment, think of something anyway and do let the blogger know you’ve come over…it’s like a courtesy. Commenting is not ding-dong-ditch!

14. Make a point of remembering peoples’ writings and recall that in comments.  I cannot stress this enough. When you engage in comments and recall a post about someone recently wrote, then that visitor is impressed because you’ve made a point to make them feel special.

15. Ask for help, opinions, insight and expertise. No blogger knows it all; your community is a resource for you. When you ask for that knowledge, then you can build on it in a new post.

16. Reward your community with lists. Wait! Don’t yell at me…apparently, people hate lists that are link bait. I get that, but I don’t adhere to that practice. I do do lists and I do them infrequently; yet, when you see one here, it’s the real deal, written from the heart.

17. Help a newbie! When you see someone in your community struggling to get readers, commenters or topics, take them under your wing and try to help. Ask them to write a guest post for you, single them out in comments, use commenting systems that enable you to tag someone so they stop in…there are many ways to keep a community growing, and these are mine.

18. Add Comment-Luv or Lifefyre or another commenting system that allows commenters blog posts to be visible when leaving a comment. It’s a courtesy for visitors, and I love it because I can see what others are writing and jump there with one click.

19. Blog! You have to blog consistently to build community; no kidding. If you post once per week or less, or your blog has fallen off for more than a three-week hiatus, you’ll find your community disappearing or never growing. The consistency of posting is the secret sauce.

20. I’m done…no more tips! What’s your 20?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q&A With FeedBlitz CEO Phil Hollows

By

I didn’t know what a merry ride of inspiration this last week and more would be when all of a sudden Feedburner stopped distribution of my blog. It was something I didn’t monitor, didn’t care about, and didn’t want to learn; until it was broken. Then it was forced attention; the kind I love to hate.

Miraculously, a direct email campaign arrived in my box from FeedBlitz, “” with an ebook. That was all it took; didn’t care that I had to pay after a 30-day free trial (most things cost something) and didn’t care to do my research for something better. The timing was right and FeedBlitz has a reputable brand.

On my merry-go-round that is still circling, I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with who manages support questions, to my surprise.

A series of posts , and last week launched the Feedblitz series on about 10 blogs with many more conversations about the whole RSS thing. It’s still a confusion for me, but it’s because I’m stomping my feet and trying not to pay attention.

Phil was nice enough to play along with me and answer a few questions for bloggers that don’t know why they need RSS, don’t know why FeedBlitz is so special, and generally are on the fence about migrating from free and dead Google Feedburner to something robust with email marketing and publishing.

Thanks, Phil for taking time from your Sunday to share some thoughts:

Soulati-‘TUDE! — What is RSS?

— RSS is a standard format for producing a machine-readable form of your blog. (Jayme: what does machine-readable mean? That the blog can be read on all devices, desktops, tablets, notebooks and laptops, etc.?)

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Why do bloggers need RSS?

— RSS is the glue that ties your site to other services and platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Every service or plugin that takes your posts and makes them appear somewhere else is using RSS to make that happen.

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Should every blogger have an RSS feed?  Why?

— Every blogger already has an RSS feed! All blogging systems produce an RSS feed by default. It’s actually work to disable. And yes, you should publicize it, so that visitors who don’t want to subscribe vie email can add your site to their RSS readers (such as Google Reader) and have your content pushed to them automatically.

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Do you cater to the largest bloggers or do you also realize that small bloggers grow to become big girls and boys?

FeedBlitz –– Every blogger starts with zero subscribers!  We at FeedBlitz welcome people who are just starting out – and we also serve the RSS feeds for some of the best known bloggers around, such as @Copyblogger with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Soulati-‘TUDE! — What are your differentiators over other options on the market today?

–– You need to track RSS statistics so you can monetize your blog better. FeedBlitz is the only RSS service offering both RSS feed statistics and email / social media subscription options.

Unlike the only other service with both options, Google’s FeedbBurner offering, which is currently failing to deliver any metrics and is completely unsupported, FeedBlitz is fully supported, continually under development, and has much greater flexibility in terms of RSS and email management.

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Your service charges based on subscribers; Feedburner didn’t. Tell us about cost per subscriber and whether a large blogger with many subscribers might be forking over a lot of cash for the privilege of using Feedblitz.

FeedBlitz — FeedBlitz charges for email subscribers; RSS readers come along for the ride at no extra cost to our paying customers.  FeedBlitz is price competitive with other premium email subscribers, but offers RSS serving and metrics and much more flexibility for blog email subscriptions than anyone.

A full list of features compared to Feedburner is here . As I write, FeedBurner hasn’t produced any metrics for anyone for over four days straight, and is completely unsupported. If you depend on your blog to generate business, and you depend on your subscription service to get your word out, the benefits of a small monthly fee (and working with a partner that respects you and your audience) compared to the current cost of free is surely obvious. If your blog is valuable to you, surely its subscribers should be served by a vendor that values them. (Jayme ponders: EXCELLENT point!)

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Why are you managing support questions yourself? You’re the CEO!  Is that like sweat equity? Or does it also give you the pulse of your customers?

FeedBlitz — I like the Craig Newmark (Craig’s List) approach – get on the front lines, see what’s what. We’re all hands on deck as FeedBurner has imploded. Finally, my being here makes everything real. I care about our clients and their communities and how we make a difference. Standing up and supporting them is a key differentiator. I’m happy to do it!

Soulati-‘TUDE! –– What are the top three reasons a blogger should migrate to your service? i.e. what sets you apart?

FeedBlitz — Support, greater flexibility to reach your subscribers and superior branding.

Soulati-‘TUDE! — Tell me your impression of mid-tier and smaller bloggers — someone in my community suggested your marketing campaign is not tailored to all sizes of bloggers…obviously the largest blogger brings you the most money, but…

— We’re tailoring our messaging right now to people who feel frustrated with and abandoned by FeedBurner. Everyone using FeedBurner faces the same challenges, no matter how large or small their site is. Size, in this case, really doesn’t matter. We want everyone using FeedBurner who wants a better, supported replacement to feel welcome here.

Soulati-‘TUDE! How many subscribers does your blog have? 

FeedBlitz — FeedBlitz News has about 30,000 subscribers, mostly via email.

Soulati-‘TUDE! Do you think subscribers are the de facto metric when it comes to blogging, or how do you measure blogging success? 

FeedBlitz –– Engagement is the winning metric; it indicates quality. I’d take 1,000 committed subscribers over a list with 100,000 people in it but nobody reading what we’re saying any day.

This has been a with Phil Hollows, CEO, of FeedBlitz. Bring on the questions for Phil, Peeps!