Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 103: Commenting on Blogs

In one sense, a blog is just a Web site.

A Web site that, because of easy-to-use and free software like WordPress, anyone can publish. You could decide to use WordPress.com as your content-management system, to produce your own one-way Web site. All you would have to do is turn off the comments feature, either for the whole site or for individual posts. In this way, you would have an easy Web publishing system.

But what sets blogs apart from traditional Web sites (Can you believe that? I used the word “traditional” to describe something that first started in 1994!) is the ability to invite comments and create conversations.

That’s what makes blogs interesting.

Yet most people who read blogs never participate in the discussion by leaving a comment. Forrester research indicates that about 33 percent of Internet users are “Spectators” who read blogs, listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos without leaving any comments, and 52 percent of users are “Inactives” who don’t even read blogs. (I think the inactives number is overstated because, as I said earlier, a blog is just a Web site. People are going to blogs without even knowing it.)

In keeping with our SMUG goal of getting people to stretch into new areas of social media, in Blogging 103 I hope to help some of those Inactives and Spectators move up the Forrester Ladder of Participation into the Critics category.

Just complete the assignment below, and you’ll climb a rung or two.

Assignment:

Click the “Comments” link at the bottom of this post. It looks something like this if no one has commented yet:

Or if some people have commented, it will have a number in front of the word “Comments” – like this:

Then you’ll see the full post reload, showing any comments from others, and at the bottom you will have a chance to add yours.

I’ll bet you can figure out how to fill in that comment form.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to participate most effectively, but for now, it’s important to just take that first step and make a comment.

You’ll note that I have set this blog to accept comments without being approved by me. In other words, I’m not “moderating” comments in advance. So you’ll get the immediate gratification of seeing your comment show up right away after you submit it, provided you’re a real human being. I use Akismet to weed out the automated comment spam that unsavory characters use to promote their herbal Viagra alternatives and the like. More on that in a future post, too.

But I also know that one reason why people don’t comment on blogs is because they don’t know exactly what to say. So I’ll set you up with a couple of questions to prime the pump, just to make it easier for you to dive in.

Is this your first time commenting on a blog? If so, what has been the main barrier that keeps you from commenting?
If you do comment sometimes, what are the factors that cause you to join the conversation?
For extra credit, what social media topics are most interesting to you? What questions about social media would you like to see answered and discussed further?

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Blogging 114: Categories vs. Tags

It’s fun to work with people who are new to social media, because they often have good, fresh questions that aren’t colored by familiarity with these tools. And they make me take a minute to think through some basic explanations.

For example, I was helping a colleague get started with a blog yesterday, and he asked me:

What’s the difference between categories and tags when I’m doing a blog post?

Great question! And it gave me a chance to combine two SMUG courses (I had planned to cover these topics separately) into a single post.

Category Coolness

Categories are internally focused for your blog, to help users navigate and find posts on similar topics. Once a user has found your blog, categories provide organizational structure to help them discover what your blog is about and to navigate efficiently.

So, for example, I have categories for Blogging, Facebook, Book Reviews, Marketing, Advertising, News Media, Conferences, Personal and a few more. So if people want to see all the posts I’ve live-blogged from conferences, they can click “Conferences” under the Category heading. Or they can click the Book Reviews category to read about all the books I’ve highlighted on SMUG.

A post can belong to more than category, but generally you would want to limit the number of categories you have and how many categories are selected for each post. One category I don’t use much any more is Social Media. Ever since I renamed this blog “Social Media University, Global” it hasn’t made much sense to put posts in the Social Media category; almost every post would belong there, and if the whole blog is about a topic it doesn’t makes sense to use that as a category.

This particular post, as you can see below, is in the Blogging category.

Categories are like the Dewey Decimal System for your blog: they’re your way of organizing content in a way that makes sense to you and hopefully your users. Except you don’t have the funky numbers like 330.94 for European economics. And while there’s no limit on the number of categories you can have, I would advise you to limit them. If you can’t see yourself doing several posts that would fit a category, use a broader one instead. So, for example, I have a News Media category instead of having separate categories for Radio, Print, and TV. That’s because the major division in this blog is between traditional, mainstream media (what I categorize as News Media) and Social Media. (But again, since most of the posts are about social media, I don’t use that category very often.)

After you’ve done a few posts, you might discover some themes emerging. Then you can go back and apply whatever category labels seem to make sense, like the apocryphal college that didn’t lay down its sidewalks until it saw where students had worn paths through the grass.

Tremendous Tags

Tags, by contrast, are externally focused. They’re aimed at the people who haven’t yet found your blog (and the search engines that guide them.) So instead of trying to find the one or two labels that best describe your post (as you do with categories) you can and should apply multiple tags to a post, based on words others might use to describe your post…or words they might be searching on to find relevant content.

So for this post I used not only the tags blog, blogs and blogging, but also social media, socialmedia, tags, tagging, categories, vlog, vlogging and others. While social media isn’t a particularly useful category for this blog, it is a good tag (and so is socialmedia, because some users doing a Technorati, Google, Blogpulse or WordPress.com search might leave out the space between social and media.)

If you click on any of the tags at the bottom of this post, you will find a list of blog posts on WordPress.com that used that tag. This is really helpful to users exploring a topic, because they can easily find a group of relevant posts. And if you use several related word variations, you’re not requiring users to choose your exact tag (e.g. blogs vs. blogging) in order to find your post.

So, within reason, with Tags it’s a case of “the more, the merrier.” If you add tags like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Justin Timberlake or other famous names to your posts in hopes of attracting more visitors, it won’t do you any good. Unless, of course, you happen to be doing a post about one of those people. If you “trick” people into visiting your blog by using irrelevant tags, they won’t stay long.

Another benefit of Tags is that you can use a “tag cloud” (see example above or in the sidebar at right) to graphically show visitors to your blog the main topics you cover. The most frequently used tags are bigger, and if people click in your tag cloud (at least on WordPress.com), they get a list of all your posts that included that tag.

Assignment:

Write a post on your own blog, and assign it to one or two categories and add multiple tags.
Include a sentence at the end (with a link to this post) that says something like, “I sure am learning a lot from Social Media University, Global…including how to add tags and categories for my blog posts.”
Following those two steps will create a comment on this post (via Trackback, to be discussed in a future course), so that your fellow SMUGglers (the phrase Jim Streed coined) can follow it back and see how you’re doing in applying what you’re learning about categories and tags.

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Blogging 121: Time Travel through Blog Posts

I just noticed a feature in WordPress.com‘s blogging platform that I had seen in other platforms such as TypePad: the ability to schedule posts for a future date and time. Even without this feature, I still thought WordPress.com was a far superior service and offered many benefits either free or at ridiculously low prices, but one of its drawbacks was the inability to delay publication of a post, and have it then publish automatically.

Maybe I had just missed it earlier, or maybe it’s a recent addition, but it’s a really important new feature, particularly for businesses and other organizations.

Why?

Because it enables WordPress to serve a a full-blown content management system for a Web site, of which a blog is just one subset. Many organizations have news announcements that they want to make public at a certain time, perhaps even on a weekend. With the ability to schedule automatic publishing at a future time, they don’t need someone to log in and manually convert a draft post to “Published” status. And by setting a time up front when writing the post, it reduces the likelihood of a post being inadvertently published by someone who accidentally hits “Publish” instead of “Save.”

So I’m giving it a try, with this post.

I’m writing this post on the bus on the way to work, but I’m going to schedule it for publication at 8:15 a.m. CDT on August 12, 2008, when I’m going to be in the middle of a meeting.

To do this I will click the Edit link next to “Publish immediately” in the right sidebar:

Then I will adjust the time as below:

When the post is finished, then you just hit Publish as usual.

I think that’s all there is to it. I’ll update this post later to tell how it worked.

But then again, if it didn’t work, you won’t see it in the first place.

Update: This is an update before the scheduled publish time, but here’s how my “Manage Posts” dashboard
currently appears:

It shows that the post is scheduled but not yet public. Looks like it’s working.

The other nice thing is I could update the Blogging Curriculum page with a link to the new post, even in advance of publication. I’m not sure what the user experience would be, though, from following a link that is scheduled but not published. Maybe I will Tweet the link to find out.

Further Update: A couple of my Twitterbuds told me the result from having a link to a scheduled but not yet published post is less than satisfactory. So I had a friend capture a screenshot. Here’s what it looked like:

Take-away: Wait until the post goes live before including links from already-published pages. If, however, you had a page (or several posts) scheduled to publish simultaneously, you could put in those reciprocal links and have a good outcome.

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Blog Birthday

Today we celebrate the second birthday of this blog. I don’t know how big the “we” doing the celebrating is, but it has definitely grown in the last year.

When I started it as “Lines from Lee” with these three posts on July 30, 2006 I had no idea what a great adventure I had begun. In fact, it was more than a month before I wrote another one. But by the end of September I had pretty much decided to go for it. I described the first full year a year ago today with this post: Looking Back: One Year of Blogging, which closed with this:

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

Little did I know that just a few months later I would become Chancellor of an on-line institution of higher education!

In that last year (and particularly in the six months since Lines from Lee became Social Media University, Global – SMUG), traffic has increased by about 600 percent. The number of RSS subscribers is up 800 percent. And we have 134 members of our SMUG Facebook group. This is my 530th post over two years, and Akismet has spared me nearly 50,000 spam comments. Thank you, WordPress!

While in last year’s wrap-up I highlighted some specific posts, this year I would just direct you to my Rebranding the Blog post and others from January. They describe what we’re all about at SMUG:

using free or ridiculously cheap social media tools

to learn how to

use free or ridiculously cheap social media tools

for real business/work-related projects and for more in-depth relationships with key stakeholders.

But as I think about it, there have been a few other key highlights I should mention:

My 12-Step Social Media Program for PR Professionals was a precursor for SMUG, in that its popularity helped me see the need for an orderly, step-by-step introduction to social media. And while I’m not aware of the post being translated into any other languages, it has been edited and adapted for publication in magazines or newsletters for association Executives and veterinarians.

Other posts and pages that have gotten significant traffic include:

B2B Facebook: Limited Profile (which has since been improved and updated by Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy)
Facebook Business
Top 10 Facebook Business Uses, and
The SMUG Curriculum

But the best part of blogging has been the people I’ve met through this journey. Among those I’ve gotten to know a bit without meeting face-to-face (yet) are Ben Martin, Kelsey Thompson, Scott Meis (a Chicago snowstorm prevented our meeting), Brycie Jones, Steve Levine, Sidney Williams, Toby Palmer, Jennifer Texada, Hilary Marsh, Rick Sauter, Aruni, and Peggy Hoffman. I hope that in the coming year they’ll become in-person acquaintances, like Chris Heuer, Rick Short, Katie Paine, Chris Martin, Tim Collins, Susannah Patton, Hillary Weber, Scott Hensley, Kevin Hoffberg, Michael Masnick, Bonnie Sashin, Sally Falkow, Jeremiah, Erik Giberti, Lee Odden, Charlene Li, Dennis McDonald, Jim Long, Sallie B, Michael Brito, Andy Sernovitz, Adam Brown, Michael Rubin, Kami Huyse, Chuck Hester, Paula Cassin, and many others. Daniel Rothamel is an in-between case: I haven’t met him, but we did talk via Skype videoconference.

These are just a few of the folks with whom I’ve gotten connected over the last year or so, and they all have enriched my life. So have the scores of additional people I’ve met through conferences, or virtually through Twitter, blog comments or the SMUG Student Union. For those whose names I should have mentioned but didn’t, please just chalk it up to the lateness of the hour.

And of course, Facebook has helped me reconnect with many friends from the foggy, distant past.

If you haven’t taken the social media plunge, I encourage you to immerse yourself. To borrow a phrase I heard someone use in the last few months to close an on-line video:

“If you enjoyed it half as much as me, that means I enjoyed it twice as much as you.”

But even if your social media enjoyment is 10 percent of what mine has been, you’ll find it well worth the effort. And you could start by clicking any of the links above, which would introduce you to an interesting person. These are can’t miss recommendations.

Blogging Vacation

No, I’m not taking a vacation from blogging…I’ll be blogging about vacation…to the extent I can. We’re in Atlanta at the Marriott Marquis for Bible Bowl 2008, where my daughter Ruth and son Joe are competing in this national competition. I blogged about the Bible Bowl experience last year; it was pretty amazing. I’ll have some highlights and dispatches from the competition over the next couple of days.

Another amazing feature about our Atlanta trip is this hotel. Here’s a taste of the elevator trip to the 41st floor, where we’re staying.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV_DCHngUJg]

Some of my family members get a little nervous about the heights, but the view from our window (at the top of this post) is pretty sweet.

The sweetest part is having all of our remaining kids together (the ones who aren’t married and/or college graduates) together for this week, and to have my parents along for the trip. We wish Jacob and Rachel (and Kyle and Evelyn) were along too, but we’re thankful for this nice getaway week.

The only downside for frequent blogging is that the daily charge for Internet access is $12.95, which is a bit pricey for family vacation. But in the food court across the street at Peachtree Center there is free wireless, so I’m just coming over here a couple of times a day to sync my computer and post updates. Probably good on vacation to not be doing too much computer activity, but this does make it nice to capture some of the moments, so that when we do our Christmas letter (as we did last year and the year before), we have some photos and videos to which we can link to tell the story of the year.

So some of the coming posts will be of a more personal nature, but for SMUG students they are:

A) A way to get to know the Chancellor and his family a little better, and

B) An illustration of how you can use your blog for multimedia family updates instead of sending photocopied Christmas letters. Not only will this method save you money (at First Class postage rates of 41 cents or whatever it is now…it’s probably been a year since I’ve purchased stamps), but the product is much richer and more interactive.