Blogging

After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.

The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a “multimedia dashboard” with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and “video status update” start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network’s young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.

The funny irony is that Digg reportedly once walked away from a $100 million acquisition offer from Current.

“The new pace of democracy is real-time,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint release. “Current is helping Twitter amplify the opinions, news, and trends that matter right now. Together, we’re influencing more than media–we’re evolving conversation.”

Election night on Current will also feature (naturally) commentary, projected results, and a state-by-state map. So it won’t be all fun and games and Kevin Rose, y’know.

Here is the original:
Current TV to broadcast Diggs, Twitters on election night

The term “social media” encompasses several different types of sites, and it’s important to use all of them properly in order to really be effective at social media optimization (SMO). Blogs are of course one of the most common forms of social media, and there are significant benefits to having your own blog as well as building name recognition and credibility for your company through other industry blogs.

But what separates SMO from SEO is that search engine optimization is about owning a top spot in the search engines for your website on a specific term, while social media optimization is about owning the entire first page of the search engines for multiple sites that point back to you for a specific term. So, here are some tips for using different types of social media sites for SMO.

Discussion Forums

These are a place to showcase your expertise in a non-promotional way. For example, in an SEO forum, telling everyone how great your agency is at SEO is suicide; but displaying your knowledge by offering expert tips on title meta tag creation or non-spammy link building is brilliant.

Social Bookmarking

Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Searchles are great places to spread the word about your own thought leadership content as well as, and even more importantly, positive coverage your company gets from other bloggers, journalists or analysts. But to really drive serious traffic from these sites, you need to know how to play the game with “power users” and the community. You can find some great posts on capitalizing on social bookmarking sites on Social Media Today, and no one has written more great stuff about using Digg to drive traffic than Chris Lang.

Wikis

A wiki is another place to share your knowledge of a particular topic with a community or the world. You can do this by either writing an encyclopedic article about a topic; adding to or editing an existing article; or adding links to your own thought-leadership content as supporting material. Wikipedia is the best known but also the most difficult to work with; that leaves an opening for alternative wiki sites such as Google’s Knol, open-site.org, Freebase and others which are less contributor-hostile.

Video

Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island for the last four years, you know that online video is hot. YouTube now draws more than 70 million unique visitors per month. Business video production is growing exponentially because video is engaging, repurposable (for example, you can use a video on your website, at tradeshows and in presentations; post it on YouTube; use it as an asset for blogger outreach or a channel sales tool; add it to social media press releases; etc.), potentially viral, and increasingly searchable.

Two other quick points to note about business video:

• Creativity is more important than expense; think “big idea” before “big cost.”
• Paradoxially, the investment required is inverse to company size. A small company needs to be concerned with professional production values in order to be taken seriously; big companies are better served by informal, low-bidget videos that make them seem more human.

Social Networking

At the least, social networking services like LinkedIn, Facebook and Konnects provide increased exposure for your company (and your “personal brand”) while also providing SEO and reputation management benefits. At best, these sites can help you make valuable new business connections.

Using all of the tools of social media, ideally in an integrated fashion, maximizes your potential for exposure on key search terms among the widest possible audience. And it just may enable you to “own” the first page of the search engines for important long-tail search terms—SEO on steriods.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

See the original post:
Using ALL the Tools of Social Media Optimization

Digg has always made its message clear: it’s not social news, it’s democracy.

The company’s executive team–founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson–thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users “dugg” a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through “town hall” events webcast live four times a year. So it’s perhaps fitting that for the company’s third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the “Big Tent” new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a “Big Tent” sponsor.)

It’ll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a “Digg Dialogg” event series, in which executives ask users’ questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a “perfect alignment of Digg and elections,” interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN’s iReport.

“They’re your raw questions,” Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. “They were completely unfiltered.”

To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics–its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.

The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the “shout” communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories (”I hate this!” Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as “not safe for work.”

Most of Rose and Adelson’s answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of “good suggestion, and we’re working on it.”

One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. “We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other,” Adelson said, but added that he’s working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.

Rose was less enthusiastic. “Everyone has forums and it’s always the same crap,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through.”

A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested “geotagging” for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. “Yes,” Rose said. “We’ve thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you.” Adelson added that Digg has “a few projects on the way…think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff.”

Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear beause it’s where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site’s direction. “It’s really important to know what you guys are thinking. it keeps us honest,” Adelson said.

The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6–two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.

Go here to read the rest:
Digg town hall: Local news options, forums on the way?

Yahoo’s Digg-a-like Buzz is opening up to the world tonight. Until now, while anyone could see stories that had been Buzzed and vote them up or down, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that it was always Yahoo’s intention to open up Buzz, but that it kept the service restricted while it worked out bugs and refined the product. One might wonder what is so hard about building a site for submitting and rating products. There are tons out there. Yahoo made things a bit more difficult for itself by setting a unique goal for Buzz: it’s designed to feed stories to the Yahoo home page. And unlike pure community vote sites like Digg and Reddit, Buzz’s algorithms also take into account search engine popularity. (Yahoo’s editors still program the Yahoo.com front page manually; Buzz is a feeder system.)

Want some Yahoo juice?

Buzz also can leverage other Yahoo communities. Delicious, Flickr, and Upcoming could get prominent Buzz links to feed items into the system. That won’t appear initially, but links the other way will: When you buzz something, you’ll also be able to share it on Delicious, or on Digg, StumbleUpon, or other services.

It’s tempting to discount Buzz as just another content voting site, but that misses the point. Publishers (like Webware publisher CNET) cannot afford to ignore Buzz, since popular stories on the service can get placement on the Yahoo page, and that could drive large amounts of traffic back. It’s a big carrot. Competition for Buzz votes is going to be strong.

I’m still hoping Google buys Digg. That would make things really interesting.

Buzz starts rolling out at 7 p.m PDT Monday. It may take some time for the new features to hit all the company’s servers, I was told.

Continued here:
Yahoo Buzz opens to everyone

Getting blog coverage for your product or service is now just as (if not more) important than getting written about in traditional media. Blogs are now mainstream, as almost 80% of Internet users report having read a blog within the last year. Blogs are also influential, trusted sources of information for buyers, particularly in the B2B space; the most recent ITtoolbox/PJA IT Social Media Index Wave II report updates earlier findings and concludes that “IT decision-maker and influencer audiences (now) spend more time consuming or participating in social media than they do consuming editorial media or vendor content.” Blog coverage helps increase awareness, build credibility for your brand, and helps with SEO.

Yet many PR people stumble badly when reaching out to bloggers, with blog outreach efforts a mix of good, bad and ugly. As previously noted here and elsewhere, making pitches both personal and relevant is the first step to getting a blogger to write about you. It’s also helpful to provide bloggers with useful assets such as images, video, audio and research findings (with original source links if it’s not your own material) that they can incorporate into posts.

But how do you get beyond the basics? What really motivates bloggers to write about whatever it is they write about?

It’s not about money—at least not primarily, for most bloggers. Therefore, outright bribery is a bad idea all the way around (that generally includes free products too, although there are a few exceptions to this rule, such as books).

Bribery is bad for you because you don’t want your company to become known as a firm that has to pay to get coverage. If your product is unique and interesting, it should be blogworthy in its own right.

It’s bad for bloggers. The vast majority of bloggers don’t want to ruin their credibility by accepting money to write positive reviews. And the minority who are willing to write pretty much anything they’re paid to write aren’t the ones you really want covering your product or service.

And it’s bad for readers. Blog readers want to be able to rely on bloggers for objectivity. Marketing brochures they can get from the vendor.

So what do bloggers want? While there are a wide variety of motivations for blogging, at some level with virtually every blogger it comes down to ego. Bloggers write to be respected and read. Respect is shown by practices such as personalizing communications and providing bloggers with access to key executives and internal experts.

Readership is an even bigger issue. Help bloggers increase their audience through writing about your product or service by linking to posts about your company:

• from your website (examples include ON24 In The News and the illuminate Solutions Bloggers page);
• in your company newsletter;
• in your own corporate blog (if applicable); and
• on any social networking sites where your company is active (e.g. Digg, Sphinn or Searchles).

In contrast to bribery, focusing on respect and readership creates a win-win situation. The blogger benefits from increased traffic; has a strong incentive to write a well-crafted piece (which is good for readers); and by helping increase traffic to that blog, you increase valuable third-party exposure for your own company.

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Read the rest here:
How to Get Bloggers to Write About You