Know your RSS from your elbow

We’ve decided to eat our own dog food, and that’s pretty pointless if we don’t share how sweet it tastes, so here’s a quick overview of how bpodr has been getting it’s fill in the last month…

Popular Posts. Our Google analytics shows us that our two most popular posts of the month were those introducing and discussing Socialprise. We posted these in response to a press release we read, and within 24 hours found ourselves on the front page of Google when searching for Socialprise, which then drove traffic for these posts, and our web site in general. (Notably, our blog attracted over 82% of all our traffic in March)

Extending our Reach. We’ve been busy adding new features to our blog to make it easier for our readers to er, read, and to further our blog tools to broaden our readership. These features include:

• Technorati Tags. We now let Technorati know more about our content, and allow our readers to find similar content of interest.
• Subscribe by Email. We added the ability for our readers to get email alerts when we post new content. Thank you Feedburner.
• More useful RSS feeds. Feedburner has also helped us add more features to our RSS feeds, which allow readers to easily email our posts, digg posts, or add posts to their social bookmarks.
• Wordpress Stats. We have also installed a wordpress stats plugin, which has started gathering accurate information about our post views, we will soon know which are our most popular posts by number of times they have been viewed.
• Graham’s Twitter Feed. You can now catch Graham’s ‘tweets’ (what’s this?) from right here on the blog.

So a lot of house-keeping on our blog, but all should lead to a better experience for our visitors, and wider exposure on the Net for us.

Twitter, Twitter. Grahams Twitter activity has led to him being quoted by a well known Social Media thought-leader from the States. Although of no direct benefit, each referral helps us in building credibility for bpodr as a valuable resource for businesses here in the UK. (Follow Graham on Twitter here)

LinkedIn. Graham’s LinkedIn profile lead to an old work colleague who was interested in how our services could help them re-invigorate his business, which led to a business meeting, which led to drinks, which may lead to…

We may share future success - both ours, and our customers’ - in this series of ’should-be-about-once-a-month-but-may-not-be’ posts. If you want to stay tuned, easily, then just subscribe to our RSS feed on the right-hand side (that little orange icon… up a bit… that’s it!) and have future posts delivered to you.

You don’t have to eat any dog food, but you may develop a taste for engaging with your customers - and the Web - in new and exciting ways.

Social media can seem extremely anti-social at times. For those looking in from the outside who have yet to fully comprehend the benefits or who simply choose not to ‘get it’, messiahs of connectivity and conversation can often appear lost with their heads buried up to their shoulders in their lower intestines. That’s not a position that inspires confidence.

The tsunami of blog posts and a Karakatoa of social networking tools - accompanied by commentary and e-books aplenty - can leave even those most tempted by the apparent common-sense approach of engaging your customers feeling alienated and most definitely running well behind the curve. When the word ‘conversation’ starts coming up repeatedly in what, at first sight, appear to be monologues, accompanying social media terminolgy starts to lose its credibility.

These feelings can be exacerbated here in the UK. It’s partly a cultural thing, which still rewards reticence over ebullience even at the CEO level, and partly a market thing: viewed parochially, the market size for any UK-focused business is vastly smaller than the equivalent US market. Add to this an inbuilt distrust of anything that smacks of ‘relationships’ and ‘getting to know the customer’, and pitching social media to an established enterprise here in the UK can seem a Sisyphean task.

So what to do?

Clarify the message, for a start. That’s hard, though. Why? Because the social media solution for every business is as unique as the combination of that business and its audience. Sure, the overarching sentiment and the ultimate aim may be common but nobody makes a sale by talking generics.

Then we need to show social media in action. Case studies are good. But better still is being able to say, ‘this is what we did for ourselves and look what happened!’

We’ve been lucky since we started bpodr at the end of last year. We’re involved with a number of start-ups who already knew they wanted what we were selling. On top of that, we have a couple of clients who already knew that without change they would stall. Stall and disappear. So, in a way, we haven’t had to sell too hard. We just turned up and made the most of contacts. Nice work if you can get it, of course but it leads to complacency.

We think we need to start eating our own dog food. In bigger amounts. To a certain extent we have, of course because we embrace many of the ‘typical’ social media tools. But it’s time to talk directly about results and how they could relate to situations within your business. That’s what this new series of posts will be about. Whenever you see a [Dog Food] prefix, you’ll know what’s coming: a story about a success - or failure - in our own use of the tools out there. With a bit of luck, the successes will outnumber the failures or it could be a short series!

Meanwhile, if there are social media tools you’re struggling to come to terms with or which you cannot see offering any advantage to your business whatsoever, leave a comment or send us an email at ask AT bpodr DOT co DOT uk.