Introducing the Social Eyes Theme for WordPress

The importance of owning your own online real estate is becoming more obvious every day. Why make others rich off the sweat of your labor and your passions?

So if you’re in love with all the traffic and reach that social networking sites provide, you’ll want to take a long look at one of the latest creations from Copyblogger Media’s StudioPress division — the Social Eyes Theme.

By all means, stay engaged with your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn communities. But do it smartly, by bringing them back to a socially-optimized place of your own.

Here’s a quick look at what you’ll get “out of the box” with the brand-new Social Eyes theme:

• Quick-change between two different color schemes without touching a line of code
• A beautiful social networking feel for your website design
• Evolve with your site’s growth using six different page layout options
• Show off your latest content using the featured article function
• Logical navigation & category layout that lets your readers get to what they want, fast
• All the SEO, security, and design benefits of the Genesis Framework
• Unlimited updates, domains you can use the theme on, and support (you’re not on your own)

Click here to dig deeper into the Social Eyes theme.

Or, click here to get more details on the Genesis Framework and find out why it’s the smartest way to build any WordPress site.

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The Financial Cost Of The Egyptian Revolution

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While everyone around the world was concerning themselves with the quest for freedom by the Egyptian revolutionaries, there were other matters that needed to be taken into account. There was some quiet talk about the financial fallout from the uprising by those reporters who wondered what happens to any economy when the web goes down, but the real consequences weren’t known until recently.

Now at least some of these numbers are coming in and the cost is staggering and should be a lesson to any of those depots out there who think the best way to getting their way is to repress people’s freedom of speech by shutting off their Web. Read Write Web has recently reported the money number is $90 million for the financial cost of the Egyptian Internet blackout, and they think the real tally might be much higher.

Reporting on that number does not suggest the revolution was in any way unnecessary or counterproductive. There’s no way people in North America should criticize those that need to go to extreme measures to get the basic freedoms we all enjoy. In fact, those numbers should be a lesson to all the despots around the globe that think shutting down the Internet while they line their own pockets is the way to keep their riches flowing.

The point here is that cutting yourself off from the rest of the world might seem like a good idea but everyone needs to take a more long range view of what the internet means to a modern society and that includes what social media can cost when you lose it.

It’s important to keep in mind these are people who rely on tourism, sure, but there’s more to it than that. There have been estimates that place damage to the outsourced call centers that the country relied on for part of their income that serviced overseas customers in the millions.

Forbes even made some calculations that include commerce lost on the fact that Egypt’s ecommerce industry was out millions a day. The point here is clear in that while everyone was getting excited about how the Internet was driving a new social fabric for Egypt, they forgot about how important it was going to be to the new economy when that starts to arise.

It’s worth remembering the web has worked its way into many different areas of life right across the world and while social media is the big driver for change, the tools that are emerging to change history will also be needed to help rebuild and support economies after that change is accomplished. The people of Egypt started a revolution based on their knowledge of what social media was about and they’ll be there to implement it into their financial institutions as well.

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Corporate Blogging Insights From C-Suite

Corporate blogs (and blogging in general) get run through the ringer of “Is it a dead art?” to “It’s essential for online success!” and all stops in between. Many fear blogging due to concerns about time, risk / reward, exposure and the list goes on.

eMarketer brings us a corporate some insights from a survey done by Blog2Print (an interesting idea, btw). Here are the reasons why big companies blog according to CMO’s.

The most prominent reason might well have been named “If you can’t beat’em, join’em”. When you say that you are essentially “giving in” to do this then you wonder just how sincere or genuine the effort will be moving forward. I think it is safe to say that if there is passion behind a blog the chances of success through reaching the other goals desired goes up exponentially. But hey, it’s not often we confuse Fortune 1000 companies with passionate companies is it?

As for the attributes of what makes a corporate blog a success? Well, they seem to be a little more in tune on this one.

In the end, it is true that part of the cost of doing business today is having a business blog. It’s the expectations around the blog that are what need to be examined or even taught to most business people. The ‘build it and they will come’ approach (referred to here as the Filed of Dreams Method) doesn’t fly. The “Let’s make this a pure sales vehicle’ approach is obvious and unattractive.

What most markters should be concentrating on is the entire ecosystem of the online space that the blog is a part of (Oh brother, did I just type that?). In plain English, it’s just a part of the bigger puzzle. It’s a way to get links, it’s a channel to get some play in the social media world and it’s just another way to simply do business.

Is a corporate blog a requirement for success? I would say not. It is a requirement, however, for greater success in the digital business world we all live in today.

Your thoughts?

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Big Good Tips From A Little Book And Other Stuff

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There’s lots of advice for writers out there today—books on how to write and what to write about, where to submit your work and how to get your literary foot in the front door when you want to be published. Some of the advice you can get is helpful and some is just thinly disguised advertising designed to get you to buy something someone has to sell.

It all comes around full circle in the end to a little book that I got way back in the day when we worked on typewriters and smoked in newsrooms. The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White is a timeless manual for anyone that wants to be a writer because it is clear and concise and it tells you what you need to know about expressing yourself with the written word and leaves out what you don’t need.

And that brings me to other stuff. Has anyone else been following the social  media trending that been going on lately? I just read a study from the business experts at Deloitte that said while a fair percentage of new and forward thinking business is looking into social media, a large percentage still don’t understand what it’s all about and what kind of ROI they can expect on their investment. That makes me wonder if this is a real tool for business to use or just a fad that will slip from prominence eventually.

From a seo standpoint, Facebook or Twitter can drive traffic to your site but you need to be aware of the fact that these social media sites don’t work with keywords and links in the same manner that traditional seo does. Still, if enough people are talking about these sites being the next big thing, then they are bound to be some kind of self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that business will continue to flock to them regardless of their seo effectiveness.

So all that brings things back full circle. Regardless of whether you want to write for the social media or the seo world, you need to know how to write well. The medium doesn’t really matter in the end, it’s the message that counts. So here’s a few more techniques that you can use to make sure that your words attract attention.

Self editing always helps. I’ve just read an article that says you should read aloud when you’re proofing and only use a spell checker as a first screening. Remember too that Less is More. Usually the best way to write something is with the fewest words

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Twitter Opens Advertising Opps to the Masses

For quite a while now everyone and their brother has been lobbing the “when are you going to really monetize Twitter” bombs into the micro-blogging giant’s front yard. It’s a popular thing to do but as of late that cry has lost a little steam (in part due to having real business people like Dick Costolo at the helm) and the latest move by Twitter could put a dent in one of the Internet industry’s favorite pastimes for sure.

The Next Web first reported the new Twitter for Business section and reported

The new version of business.twitter.com will provide business owners with twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources. Some of the tools included are information on promoted products and tutorials one how to communicate with customers using mobile.

Twitter’s business tools range from basic tips “What is Twitter” to more in-depth information on analytics, case studies, API integration etc.

The main page looks like this and the big attention getter is on the right side, which might as well read “Give Us Your Wallet”

Twitter is no longer just giving advertising a try with a few select folks. Now it’s official that Twitter is really open for business. It’s kind of sad to watch the old “Twitter is cool but hasn’t made a red cent” days go away. Now we have to look at Twitter as a legitimate business. Now whether what they do is meaningful is whole other story.

Along with this new way to get into advertisers pocketbooks, Twitter has updated its Twitter 101 offering with a new presentation of its old material and additional updates.

It appears now that Twitter is moving into the next phase of its development. How well it will work remains to be seen. Does advertising on Twitter give advertisers the best bang for their buck? Will more advertising be a positive or negative influence on the overall experience? To listen to Jason Falls tell it to ReadWriteWeb you certainly get one possible side of the argument clearly.

“Selling trending topics is like gaming Digg,” Falls said.

“Twitter is inviting marketing money bags to completely ruin the organic nature of the tool. When I look at something like that, I tell clients, ‘They’re just whores for your money.’ It’s obvious they’re making Facebook-like errors to try and compensate for the fact they never had a business model in mind when they built this thing.”

Yikes.

It’s too early to tell anything at this point but it does appear as if 2011 will be the Year of Real Revenue Generation for Twitter. If it isn’t then how much longer will investors put up with the excuses / reasons for not making much to this point?

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Report Says Blogs Still Vital

With all the talk about social media these days, you don’t hear a lot about blogs anymore and the blogosphere has taken a secondary place in some discussions to talk about Twitter and Facebook and other forms of social media.

That doesn’t means that blogs have disappeared or will anytime soon. A new report from the Internet marketing firm eMarketer tells us at least half of all the people that get information on the Web still read blogs and 12% of Internet users in the United States have updated a blog in the last month.

What does all that mean? Well, it’s clear that search engine optimization techniques using blogs as their vehicle will never really go away for several reasons including:

• The fact that social media doesn’t directly affect page ranking. Sure, you can get traffic to your site from places like Twitter and Facebook, but you need the keywords and links that Google searches for page ranking and that doesn’t happen with social media platforms. Losing blogs or some form of longer content restricts the results you’ll get from any Internet marketing campaign.
• Blogs tell the whole story. Remember you’ve only got 140 characters to describe what you need to on Twitter. That means you should point those snippets somewhere if you want your tweets to have some impact. In short, social media works well as a beacon pointing to where you want readers and prospective customers to go. It’s the means not the end. That’s still the domain of the blog and other forms of longer content.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

The report also stresses a very good point you already know if you pay attention to the Internet, namely that blogs will continue to change and by 2014, 60% of Internet users will be reading some kind of blog. Remember that’s some kind of blog because blogging has always meant something different to different people and as they morph, the trend toward more and more people reading them will continue.

Here is another great point. As blogs evolve, people may be reading something they might not even consider a blog in the more traditional sense. That could push the positive numbers higher so even more people are reading and involved with blogs.

It all comes back to content in the end. Always does and more than likely always will. Blogs will be part of the internet landscape for good because blogs, in all their different forms, have consistently been part of what drives the Internet forward. Putting a different kind of fuel in your car doesn’t change the fact you still need wheels to drive it.

Every time some new way of spreading information across the Internet comes out that has the potential to reach more people quickly, the death knoll sounds for blogs. That’s just the people talking who don’t understand content and blogs will constantly be evolving and people will always have more to say and a product or service to sell that demands more than 140 characters to get the point across.

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Earned Media or Cash Register Ringing? Social Media Says Cha-ching!

Do you think that a bad economy can’t make just about anybody consider anything for a buck? Well, new research shows that the pristine and highly moral world of the bloggers are more for sale than ever before. Of course, I am being just a bit facetious because basically at heart the blogging world is pure and strictly here for the greater good. Rats! There I go again. Maybe there needs to be some research to settle this issue?

Fortunately, eMarketer and IZEA has done that and it appears as if the idea of “earned media” sounds much better as theory rather than reality. Are you really surprised?

Social media advertising company IZEA surveyed Twitter users, blog writers and other social media publishers about their openness to sponsorship of their social content. More than half said they had already monetized their activities, and almost a third more wanted to. Overall, 71.3% had been offered some kind of incentive, like cash, free products or coupons, for a blog post or tweet promoting a brand.

Asked about the idea of being paid for content, it sounded good for about 89% of the bloggers surveyed. Apparently, the economy has taken its toll on accepted payment methods because social media content generators are not so much interested in barters or coupons, they want to be paid the old fashioned way: cash. (I personally like gold bars but I am different for sure).

The most startling part of this research is as follows

In December 2009, the US Federal Trade Commission released new guidelines designed to protect readers of social media content from undisclosed sponsorships, but according to the IZEA survey more than a third of PR, social media and marketing professionals have not heard of the rules at all. Only 29.9% said they had read and understood them.

So what happened to the idealism of the world of social media? It went the way of just about every ideal that makes everyone sound so great when talking about it. Where is that? It ran headlong into reality where people have to make a living.

So how do you feel about the apparent blogger for hire social media world we really exist in? Is it OK or is it ‘not the way it is supposed to be’?

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