Rob’s blog
Five ways to work on your blog when you aren’t online
Originally posted on BlogWorld Expo.
Flaky wireless connections are a fact of life for bloggers on the move. If it isn’t tortoise-slow downloads, it’s a password that never seems to “take”. If it isn’t a connection that keeps dropping, it’s…
Can you resuscitate your dead blog?
It’s official – I’m the cartoon blogger for BlogWorld Expo, coming this October in Las Vegas. And as part of my duties, I’m running a weekly cartoon on their blog. This post originally accompanied one of them.
It can be hard to admit, but blogs have a …
My entry in Fast Company’s Influence Project
The social media world has been chewing over Fast Company’s Influence Project lately. And the initiative has sustained heavy fire from critics who point out that their method for determining who in the online world has the most influence…
Create a u…
Join us at OSCON – and catch the session on Open SoSi!
Later this month, we’re packing up the tents, band instruments and trapezes, and taking the show down south to Portland, Oregon for a week to attend OSCON 2010.
I’ll be cartoon-blogging the event – and Alex and I will be presenting a session on our Ope…
Is it ambush marketing, or conversation?
Last week saw much gnashing of clothes and rending of teeth over the fact that Nike (which is not a World Cup sponsor) is outdoing Adidas (which is) in Twitter mentions, blog references and a few other social media metrics.
Nike isn’t alone. Coke is…
Northern Voice: The Book Broads on turning your blog into a book
New media turning into old? It’s not as counterintuitive as you might think, as Angela Crocker, Kim Plumley and Peggy Richardson of The Book Broads explained.
Northern Voice: Alexandra Samuel on coping with social media
Setting aside my bias (like I could actually do that), I think Alex rocked this talk – and the audience did too. Check out the Twitter stream.
Here are my notes on how Alex uses social media to cope (as opposed to coping with the stress of social media!):
New Twitter feature lets you embed tweets in your blog posts with original formatting
Updated: Thanks to Mitch Cohen for this comment pointing to a one-click bookmarklet – even easier!
Blackbird Pie (kind of a gruesome name, if you’ve grown attached to the Twitter icon) is a new Twitter service that lets you post individual tweets to your blog or web site – keeping that good ol’ Twitter formatting intact, while picking up elements of your site’s design (such as the typeface) as well.
Now, because of certain style overrides we have on SocialSignal.com, the result isn’t quite as picturesque as we might like:
Finally! A tool for blogging tweets about the new tool for blogging tweets! http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/less than a minute ago via TweetDeck
Rob Cottingham
RobCottingham
There’s a certain amount of overlap and such. But it’s still pretty sweet, especially since our workflow used to be:
- Load tweet in browser.
- Capture screen. (We use Skitch, so we don’t have to…)
- Crop screen capture image and save.
- Upload image file to our site.
- Paste a link to the image file in our blog editor.
- Add alt text with the contents of the tweet.
With Blackbird Pie, the workflow is:
- Copy tweet URL.
- Paste into Blackbird Pie, and copy resulting embed code.
- Paste embed code into blog editor.
So much easier. And now the text is selectable by others – not a minor issue from an SEO standpoint, either. And it preserves hyperlinks to the original tweet, the Twitter client and the originating Twitter profile.
I like that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is making it easy for people to see the larger context of a tweet: a conversation, for instance, or the user’s Twitter stream. And if you’re trying to blog about a longer Twitter conversation, citing several tweets, this could save you a whole lot of time.
There are plenty of caveats – among other things, it doesn’t work on Tumblr yet, and I keep having to fight the urge to call it “Blackberry Pie” – but it’s a handy tool to have.
This is the age of miracles and wonders
It's a small thing, I know. But one of the fine little pleasures of this era is posting a cartoon, and then watching it get retweeted on Twitter. Especially as the evening goes on, and the North American tweeting dies down... and I start to see people in India pick it...
Free Social Signal ebook: 10 Ways Your Blog Can Provide Real Value to You, Your Organization and Your Brand
For anyone who’s been told to cut the blog from their communications proposal…
…for anyone who knows their social media activities could pull more of their own weight on the bottom line…
…for anyone who wants to take their blog from the experimental stage to having real-world impact – and real-world value…
…we have something for you.
Today we’re launching Social Signal’s first ebook, called 10 Ways Your Blog Can Provide Real Value to You, Your Organization and Your Brand.
It’s based on one of our most popular blog series, and we think you’ll find it timely. Budgets for organizations – whether they’re corporations, non-profits or government agencies – are tighter than they’ve been in a long time, and every program has to justify itself. That’s especially true when we’re talking about something as new as social media.
One thing you won’t have to justify is the purchase price for this book: it’s free, in the Open SoSi spirit.
This ebook will help you make a business case for your blog (and for other social media channels). But more importantly, it will help make sure you get as much value from your blog as possible: by building capacity for your team, putting a human face on your organization, creating a crisis communications channel, and more.
It’s illustrated with Noise to Signal cartoons, naturally, and licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license (which basically means you can’t sell it, and if you reproduce it or portions of it, please attribute it to Social Signal with a link to this page).
We would love your comments. Even better, we’d like to hear your ideas for getting value from blogs and other social media tools.
In times like these, organizations have to make every bit of effort and investment count. We hope this book will help make that happen… and we hope you’ll join in.
WordPress and Thesis: How to make a drop-down menu with post titles
Here’s how you can use a new built-in Thesis feature to create a drop-down menu with the titles of the most recent posts in a given category.
CPAWS seeks Ottawa web intern
Tell me this isn’t someone’s dream internship:
Our friends (and The Big Wild clients) at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Committee are looking for an intern to help them make their web, email and social media presence a thing of grace and beauty. If that sounds like someone you know, do pass along the details:
Deadline: March 30, 2010
Start date: May 10, 2010
Length and type: Full-time, for 3 months
Salary: $14/hour
This position will play a role in improving, updating and analyze CPAWS’ web activities.Responsibilities may include
- Making updates to CPAWS-managed sites as directed, using our CMS
- Using public domain image repositories to find appropriate images for projects
- Coding HTML emails
- Suggesting ways to improve existing sites
- Assembling statistics on our email blasts, websites and social media accounts for analysis
- Organizing and tag images from our collection
- Using services like Google maps, Twitter, etc. to create interactive tools for our sites
- Researching and compare online service providers.
- Working with our chapters to improve their websites
- Writing and editing text for the web
Why, yes — I’d LOVE to speak at your event
Public speaking and speechwriting: the essential guides
Looking for advice on public speaking, speechwriting and leadership communications? Here are some of my most comprehensive posts, on topics that people ask me about most often.
