ContentRobot

One of the prevailing themes that a lot of the speakers at BlogWorld promoted was to give as much as you can and you’ll get so much back.

This seems to be especially true in Twitterland where one of the best ways to engage your audience is to be a great resource and provide solutions - albeit in 140 characters!

One of the master practitioners of this movement is social media expert, Chris Brogan. We loved his post today about how to get more from his content - basically take it!

Never be at a loss for writing thoughtful blog entries, Chris is always there to help. Thanks!

Techorati published The State of the Blogosphere / 2008 yesterday. ContentRobot was lucky to get a preview of during at Richard Jalichandra’s keynote at BlogWorld Expo this past weekend.

Some highlights of the report:

Blogs are …

• Blogs are pervasive and part of our daily lives
• Blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream
• The numbers vary, but agree that blogs are here to stay
• The lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear
• Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere

Who are the Bloggers?

• Personal, professional, and corporate bloggers all have differing goals and cover an average of five topics within each blog.
• On average, bloggers use five different techniques to drive traffic to their blog, an average of seven publishing tools on their blog, and four distinct metrics for measuring success.
• Blogging is having an incredibly positive impact on [blogger's] lives, with bloggers receiving speaking or publishing opportunities, career advancement, and personal satisfaction

Blogging for Profit …

• Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800
• The mean annual revenue is $6,000 (with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month)

Brands Enter the Blogosphere …

• Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently
• 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)
• Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers.

As a blog development company, ContentRobot continues to be excited about blogs and have been enjoying their continual evolution.

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Intense Debate is now an Automattic joint.

Intense Debate is a richly interactive comment system that includes cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles.

We know that WordPress’s commenting features were lacking and we were hoping some improvements were forthcoming.

Interestingly, we met with the IntenseDebate team at BlogWorld Expo this past weekend and we were impressed with their offerings.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - we’ll be watching!

The ContentRobot/WeFixWP Team is heading to WordCamp NYC on October 5th.

We are really looking forward to seeing the latest tools and techniques we can offer our clients.

About WordCamp NYC

Date: October 5, 2008
Time: 9:30am-6:00pm
Where: Sun Microsystems Office 101 Park Avenue, 4th floor New York, NY
Cost: $30

Go now and get your tickets - we’d love to meet you!

<rant>
ContentRobot touts ourselves as “the blogging and WordPress experts.” We are committed to the WordPress platform and exclusively recommend it to our clients. So, it was very painful to see the huge presence of rival Six Apart at BlogWorld Expo and a very tiny (and even surly contingent!) of WordPress.

To us, WordPress has a superior blogging platform, so why were they not at blogging’s biggest event of the year? One guess is that they are concentrating on their developers and they’d rather spend their energies at participating at the various WordCamps instead.

In contrast, the SA team had a big part in the opening keynote (in fairness, Matt Mullenweg keynoted last year) and set the stage for what blogging is and what it means to them. Then, who’s booth was first as you entered the expo floor? Needless to say Six Apart’s area was big, very well “manned,” and they were more than ready to help.

So ready, in fact, that our buddies in the Newstex booth (who were next door) told us that they heard repeated stories about how easy it would be to convert bloggers to a more “secure platform.” In stealth mode, we decided to see what they had to say - luckily for WordPress, their story didn’t go much beyond that SA is less hackable. We were not convinced - sorry, Andy Wibbles! - but it gave us a bad taste in our mouths anyway.

When we finally found the WordPress team, they were just part of a small booth. Worse, they put forth an unhappy WordPress.com team (and believe us we were not the only ones who felt that they were uninviting and uninspiring). Thanks for the stickers, pins, and tattoos, but we could have been better cheerleaders for WP.

In fact, we were! We twittered that our team was there to help assist anyone having and WordPress questions or issues. The WordPress.com team followed us with a similar tweet, but we don’t know how effective it really was.

Another overt WordPress fan - Lorelle VanFossen in the adjoining Woopra booth - was encouraging visitors to tell their “we love WordPress” stories and getting it all on video. This is just the kind of involvement and excitement WP needs to elicit and sustain.

Automattic, please go to BlogWorld next year - show off how great your software and solutions really are. You have tons of loyal users (including ContentRobot) that would be happy to help you with a booth, twittering, or whatever you need to showcase, highlight, or support the WordPress platform.
</rant>

BlogWorld Expo Sunday was another busy day for the ContentRobot team, and we concentrated our efforts on attending the keynote and the expo floor.

The Keynote

Rohit Bhargava, Timothy Ferriss, Mike Shinoda talked about building a personal brand. They offered these gems for thought:

• Be more interested than interesting
• Be vulnerable and open about your shortcomings and others will be more apt to help you out
• Be approachable, not an a$$hole
• Be consistent with who you are not what others want you to be
• Make a promise to your fans in terms of what you have to offer and honor it
• Don’t be the best in your category, create a new one
• Never underestimate “unimportant” people, be nice to everyone
• Define your goals and know what it means to meet them
• It’s more important to have the right eyeballs, rather than a random number
• Find your muse as it can help you to create a revenue stream
• If you think it’s good - it probably is. Don’t worry about those who “don’t get it.”
• Achievement + Appreciation = Success

The Expo Floor

We were in search of any and all cool product and service offerings that we might be able to bring to our clients. Here is a rundown of the favorites that we saw and the people we talked to:

• coComment - This is a maturing external commenting toolset that easily snaps into blogs. coComment’s helps to enabling conversations and building communities. By increasing exposure to comments and bloggers, it can create a richer user experience that we thought could be quite useful.
• DISQUS - Another powerful external commenting solution - do we see a trend here? - that connects your community with 30,000 other websites. Designed to making blogs more interactive, we will give these guys another look.
• GooseGrade.com - As writers, we should be concerned with eliminating typos and mistakes in our work, and this tool allows others to help you edit your blog posts. Social editing could be good for those who are less comfortable with their prose and wanting some external traction. Thanks for the drink coupon, too!
• IntenseDebate - Guess what? Another commenting tool! This one helps your website to help drive traffic with reader engagement. UPDATE: Automattic likes this one too, cuz they bought it soon after BWE.
• JS-Kit - They offered some interesting widgets for comments, ratings, and polls. Guy Kawaski mentioned them in his lunch time keynote at the E&E conference as something to check out. Also, they had the cutest kitty stickers!
• Layered Technologies - ContentRobot is always on the lookout for great hosts. We were pleased to see their deep plans and will check them out further.
• Lijit - Lijit’s tools help publishers to increase page views and reader engagement with keywords and search ad revenue. We met this team last year and they continue to impress.
• MindTouch - An open source collaboration / wiki tool that looked fairly simple to implement. Looks good for intranets and companies that are dispersed in various locations. We got a great Deki demo and Dana got a nice t-shirt.
• Newstex - We met Newstex last year and think that their full-text feeds can add much interestingness and eyeballs to many companies’ blogs. Hi again to another Connecticut-based company!
• SezWho - We also met SezWho last year and they continue to have some great, evolving tools. They engage the community with, yes, amped comments as a way to bring eyes to your sites.
• Woopra - This is a feature-rich analytics tool that we have been testing on our blogs. Bonus: We got to chat with WordPress goddess Lorelle VanFossen at the booth.
• Zemanta - With a simple plugin, bloggers can link to relevant audio, video, images, and other sites easily to provide a more rounded post. Thanks for the great demo, we are watching you guys.

ContentRobot had the pleasure of attending these BlogWorld Expo keynotes and sessions on Saturday.

The Keynote

Richard Jalichandra of Technorati gave us a preview of the State of the Blogosphere. He indicated that it is active, influential, branded, and money-making. Expertise and self-expression remains and big reasons for personal bloggers and the sharing of ideas were important for corporate bloggers.

Anil Dash and Chris Alden of Six Apart discussed happenings with their blog products. They believe that bloggers want to connect, everyone is their own media company, and blogging 2.0 included big social aspects. They project by 2012 that 77% or 74 billion people will be reading blogs in their daily internet activities.

Making Money Online with a Blog Session

We listened to these successful bloggers on this most interesting session: John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker. They shared the ways they make money with their blogs:

Most of them took the time in the first year or two to establish credibility and create trust. They also chose to blog about topics that they were passionate about so they could write for the long haul. By becoming a thought leader, you can then influence your readers to buy products.

• Advertising: AdSense, Chitika, sponsorships, (in sidebars, interstitials, and newsletters)
• Sales: affiliate and direct
• Freebies: give them something free (like an e-book), but get their name on your newsletter list (building that email list is real important)
• Promoting Yourself: Give away schwag, ebooks, consulting, etc.
• Connect with Your Audience on Other Sites: get involved in Flickr/Google Groups, forums, Twitter etc. to share your expertise
• Word-of-Mouth: These visitors are more important (and more lucrative) as relationships lead to repeat buying
• Add to Your Pitch: Get others to give you reviews and testimonial
• Balance: Ensure content value and promotions are mixed for maximum effect
• Consistency and Repetition: Each does at least 1-2 promos per month and 3-10 posts per day to send their message out (they do work hard for their money)

Microjournalism: Breaking News in 140 Words or Less Session

These blogging rockstars (Laura Fitton, Robert Scoble, and Doc Searls) enlightened us on using Twitter. Here are the highlights:

• Twitter has spawned home-based data sources and “man-on-the street” reports
• Information will be easily found on Twitter before a major source can break the news (examples of fires and earthquakes were noted)
• Centralized news is gone, participatory news is here
• Adding these new citizen journalists creates richer data experiences
• Moral: get thyself to Twitter, befriend, learn, teach, and share for everyone’s benefit

Creating Customer Loyalty with Social Media Session

Toby Bloomberg, Becky Carroll, Frank Eliason, Tony Hsieh, and Brian Solis chatted about making personal connections with today’s technology. They said:

• If are going to blog or Twitter, what will you be talking about and what resources do you have to keep it going?
• Use phone, email, IM, blogs and Twitter to reach out as a PR, customer service, and marketer all in one
• Get involved in the platform that your customers use (search for them, find out what are talking about and engage them there)
• Portray your company’s culture in your tweets (and other communication) consistently
• Help to create or reinforce your brand’s personality so others want to interact with you
• Each panelist twittered for about 1-2 hours a day!

It was a day full of good stuff - onto the TechSet.TV party!

Gary Vaynerchuk gave a very energetic and inspiring closing keynote address - a great way to end the first day. His topic focused primarily on the importance of building your personal brand, something he has done a super job with. Here is what we learned from Gary Vee:

On Branding …

* American love brands and you must do everything you can to create as much personal and brand equity
* Determine why you matter and why people should listen to you
* Work hard to network, sell, and learn
* Talk about what you are good at
* Get help for what you are not good at

On Encouraging Community …

* He works to encourage a community 2-3 hours everyday
* Make relevant (not spammy) comments on other blogs that link back to your blog
* Answer every email that comes in your inbox
* Respond to every comment on your blog
* It is your job to make a personal connection in the blogosphere, which will also will help to build name recognition
* Inducing conversation leads to money (consider a BIG email me button)
* Consider publishing your instant messenger address to show availability and transparency
* If you see something negative on Twitter - address it with the author - and learn from it

On Blogging …

* Create at least one blog post per day
* Don’t focus on the number of readers, but how many dollars you make
* Work to bring lots of eyeballs

On Marketing …

* Content is King, but marketing is Queen
* Learn what Google Adword terms are important in your space and exploit them
* Sell schwag!

ContentRobot really admired his enthusiasm and willingness to share his experiences with everyone.

ContentRobot headed to our next session: How to Seduce Your Tribe and Create Raving Fans, which was lead by Deb Micek. She gave us some great tips:

• Myth: You need a million dollars to start your own company and spread the word.
• Tools & Technologies You Can Use: Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Ning, Reddit, and more
• 5 Channels: Blogs, podcasts, video, social networks, social filtering (ex: digg)
• It’s Not About the Tools: It’s about you because your consumers are in control of what they want from your business
• E³: Be Emotional or Entertaining or Engaging to connect
• Two Tribes: Professional (PCs vs Macs) and Personal (hobbies and interests)
• Tribal Seduction: People + Participation + Persuasion
• Tribal Marketing: People are tribal, business is personal
• What’s Your Story?: Provide lifetime client value for pre-qualified profit without selling
• CHARM: Cultivate attention, Hook emotion, Advance trust, Radiate desire, Motivate to Action

This was an enjoyable, even fun session. We really liked how “Coach Deb” encouraged us to twitter things and repeat key things to remember.

ContentRobot is pleased to announce our latest venture - We Fix WordPress Blogs. Complementing our full-service blog development capabilities, WeFixWP is designed to assist WordPress users who need simple fixes such as:

• theme updates and enhancements
• blog functionality additions
• blog and database repairs (particularly after hacking!)
• WordPress software and plugin upgrades
• blog migrations
• blog conversions
• and more!

Go check it out at: http://www.wefixwp.com!