If you don’t really feel like searching over 112 million blogs to find out what your customers / competitors / industry leaders are talking about, why not let Technorati do it for you?
Technorati is a blog search engine, tracking over 112 million blogs to bring you all the hot stuff from the blogosphere. As well as looking at blog posts, Technorati also makes use of ‘tags’ to allow authors to categorise their own content, and tracks the relationships between blogs and authors (who’s linking to each other, leaving comments or responses) - this all adds up to a comprehensive, real-time look at whats happening in the world of blogs.
Technorati easily allows you or your business to track what bloggers are saying about topics that are important to you. It’s a great starting point for tuning into the conversation.
We have incorporated Technorati tags at the bottom of each of our blog posts to allow us to tell Technorati a little about the subject of the post, as well as helping to categorise where this blog post should be found. You can view our Technorati profile at http://technorati.com/blogs/www.bpodr.co.uk%2Fblog.
Graham has also placed a not-so-subtle technorati button to the right hand-side of this blog, so you can mark us a Technorati favourite. (he’s too good to you!)
In the (very-near) future, we’ll show you practical ways of using Technorati to tune in and stay tuned to the conversation that matters most to your business.
What are you doing? It’s a simple question and often the perfect start to a conversation, for Twitter though, that is the conversation. in 140 characters or less.
Twitter helps build social networks for sending relevant, up-to-date and quick updates to your connections. The peeps at Commoncraft have done a great job in explaining how it works:
You can follow Graham and myself on Twitter and stay up-to-date with what we’re doing (You lucky, lucky things!). You can also see what we’re doing from our new widget on the right of this very blog. We’ll share our Twitter findings and experiences back here, along with a future post looking at how Twitter can benefit you (Quick tip: Does your resident industry expert have an active network on Twitter, commenting on industry updates?).
Do your customers care what you’re doing? Twitter.com
Graham has been talking a lot about Socialnetworkslately, and I can see why - it’s a massive part of the Internet’s appeal and a natural extension to how we enjoy interacting in the real world (well, that and the fact that Graham generally has a lot to say anyway). However, what is a Social Network?.
A social network is a collection of individuals who are, in some way, connected to one another. This connection usually takes the form of a current or past friendship, but can also take the form of a shared interest, shared vision, sexual preferences or anything else you care to imagine. The key component to a social network are these connections:
Any individual can be connected to any number of other individuals,
New connections can be found easily through existing connections,
Your connections’ connections (?) can be easily seen.
The concept of Social Networks has been around for a long time, but the Internet has provided us with many powerful tools to connect networks and people far more easily than was ever possible before. The power of a social network is in allowing people to connect very, very easily, and then allowing those people to benefit from their network very, very easily (perhaps by introducing them to new friends, finding potential business opportunities or by finding new people to share and discuss your interests with).
There are a huge number of social networks which have become very popular for connecting people. Some networks exist to connect people through friendship, other networks connect people through a niche, shared interest. some of the most popular networks are:
You’ve heard people talking about them, seen links to them littered over the Internet, and occasionally wondered what on earth they actually are - Blogs. The fact that you are reading this, and that this is in fact a blog, means that you have certainly been exposed to at least one blog - and you are about to find out what a blog is and more importantly, how one can work for your business.
A Blog (pronounced blog, short for weblog) is a small website which allows its owner (or blogger) to post entries on any subject they care to write about (blogging). A Blog might contain news or information about a niche subject, a personal diary, or a corporate means of making announcements. Just about every imaginable topic has a broad array of blogs with an army of bloggers, blogging. (blogsearch.google.com is a good starting point to begin your searching blogs.)
There are a lot of sites around for creating a blog (blogger, wordpress, typepad…), and a large number are free. The fact that blogging is freely and easily accessible by everybody means everybody can become a published writer. Everybody can have a voice - a published voice, with an audience ready to listen to what you have to say.
Why should my business care?
Your business can benefit from starting an on-line conversation in several ways…
Start conversations with your customers. Tell them about upcoming events or promotions, new services or what your working on. Well established blogs even find their customers responding to posts with comments of their own - providing valuable feedback.
Position yourself as an expert in your business field. Publish your thoughts, ideas or reactions to what happens in your field and establish yourself as a leading authority on your business subject. Show your customers why they should choose your business and its expertise instead of a competitor.
Reach a new audience. Increase the exposure of your business, get listed in blogging directories, and reach a wider audience.
Be your own editor. Say what you want, when you want, and however you want. Give your business a voice and start talking with your customers.
Boost your search engine ranking. Google loves bloggers! Google loves content that is relevant and up-to-date. You’ll love being ranked higher in Google!
RSS stands for really simple syndication. So, you know that RSS is all about syndication, and that it is simple - really simple - but what does it mean to you and your business, and more importantly: why should you or your business care?RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content¹ directly to those people who want it. Web content could be your company’s latest news, blog posts or your new product range - whatever content your customers may be interested in hearing about. RSS feeds allow web users to automate the task of checking their favourite websites for updates - the updates are delivered straight to them. (for more on how feeds work and how you can use them, the BBC has a great section on it here)More important than the technology is what it can mean to your business; you can deliver news and information quickly (in seconds), cheaply (for free) and easily (the click of a mouse) to those who want to hear what you have to say. RSS feeds are allowing people to control exactly what they read and when they read it. If your customers want to hear from you, how are you helping them?RSS allows you to reach hundreds/thousands/millions of your customers in seconds, and not just any customers, but fully qualified ‘I’ve signed up to your RSS feed to learn more about what you have to say‘-type customers. And they’re your favourite type. (right?)In a future post I’ll look at how you can use RSS as an effective communication tool (and point out some companies who are already benefiting from it). If you would like to read more about RSS feeds and other web technologies that can help your business why not subscribe to our RSS feed? you’ll find our feed to the right of this post (click that pretty orange button), and you’ll find a list of RSS readers here.
