Today’s guest post is written by Shonali Burke.
When Gini and Lisa asked me to write about Twitter chats for Spin Sucks (ok, “tweetchats,” if you must, I’m going to stick with the former, I’m old-school, whatevs), I scratched my mane.
I’ve written so much about TCs in the past, I was worried about what I could share with you that wouldn’t be same old, same old.
But then, a friend who currently runs a popular Twitter chat DM’d me to tell me he might be shutting it down. The reason? Life has taken over, and he’s finding it tough to keep it going with the same level of verve and vigor as he did in the past.
My response? “Don’t do that. Ask <person who is well known for focusing on the discipline> if they can do it. It’s a good chat. It teaches people.” (Or words to that effect.) Continue Reading »
Everyone always wants to know what is the secret sauce to building a community. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s simple, really.
Stroke people’s egos.
Seriously. That’s it.
You’ve heard this from me before; it’s not a new concept. But it truly is the secret sauce. Continue Reading »
Today’s guest post is written by Paul Sutton. 
How long do you think you could go without using an Internet search engine?
I asked my friends and networks the question, and two thirds of the people I asked said that, on average, they use a search engine more than 10 times per day. They don’t think about it, they just do it. And they have total faith in the results they receive. Think about the power and influence this gives search engines over the way we see the world.
I wanted to find out just how vital search engines have become to our everyday lives, so I decided to give up Yahoo! and Bing for two entire months.
Something interesting is happening with Google+. We’re all freaking out because we can’t import our Facebook and Twitter friends (you can export Facebook friends into Gmail now, if you’re patient and have a tiny bit of tech savvy).
Here we’ve spent years (in most cases) building communities on something we don’t own and guess what? Our friends and fans aren’t moving to the newest platform with us. Or they are but we don’t know it because not only do we not have their email addresses, we don’t have their Gmail addresses.
This is why it’s so important to build community on a platform that you own. Sure, you need all the social tools and the content curation and the fun apps that make your stuff look cool, but they all should drive people back to something you own.
In this case: A database.
Following are 10 things to consider as you add the newest social network to your toolbox. Continue Reading »
We clearly have a pretty active and vocal community here at Spin Sucks. But I look at our analytics every day and see it’s a very small percentage of visitors who are doing the majority of commenting.
That’s natural, and I have no problem with that. It doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t always been curious about the rest of you.
There has been much discussion on blog commenting in the past few weeks.
Check out these other resources if you haven’t already:
That’s when I decided the time was right to blog about first-time commenters.
Then Monday John Falchetto must have gotten access to my hard drive and taken a draft of the post because I echo his thoughts completely. So lets talk about HOW to Lose Your Commenting Virginity. Continue Reading »
Guest post by Marijean Jaggers, vice president, Standing Partnership.
It may sound funny, but I have a true story of how pie and social media helped build community.
I decided a couple of years ago I would master the art of pie making and therefore become the relative and friend everyone knows for making really fine pies.
When I’m not baking, I work in public relations and, more broadly, reputation management. Dealing with intangibles all day made me crave hands-on activities. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as rolling out a crust at the end of a long day, filling it with something sweet, and presenting it to my family or friends for an all-too-brief period of consumption. Continue Reading »
Guest post by Len Kendall, co-founder of the3six5 project.
For years now, since the concept of user-generated content has become commonplace in the marketing and PR world, companies have thought of crowdsourcing as a shortcut to building community that will mean less work for them.
Here’s how the conversation usually goes:
“Let’s put together a contest where target X can create Y content and upload it to our community. The best contributor will win a prize and gain status amongst their peers. We can just sit back and watch the community build upon itself.”
The challenge I would like to address is the misconception that the above is an actionable idea for most parties undertaking it.
The intentions are positive, of course, but the execution can appear lazy or short-sited if the proper investment of time and people isn’t applied. Continue Reading »
As a former journalist and current manager of Spin Sucks, a proud outpost of branded content, many of my old colleagues would probably say that I’ve gone over to the dark side.
When I was a cub reporter at a small newspaper on the central coast of California nearly a decade ago, a respected veteran reporter on staff, upon resigning from her post, left me a note saying she was certain I would run a publication one day. Continue Reading »
Catherine Novak over at WordSpring wrote a great post Tuesday on the merits of content versus conversation. As the word count on the comment I began to leave for her continued to grow, I realized I just might have a blog post of my own on my hands.
In her post, Catherine quotes Cory Doctorow (via Clay Shirky): “Conversation is King, content is just something to talk about.”
When I blog, my primary goal is to strike a conversation. Some people write for catharsis. Some to preach. Some to sell. I write for conversation.
“But this very post is published on a business blog,” you might be thinking. “Isn’t the point of a business blog to sell?”
And it would be difficult to argue with you – or with Joe Pulizzi, who wrote a solid post of his own on Tuesday entitled “Sales Is the Reason Your Content Exists.” But, wait, hear me out. Continue Reading »
After reading an interesting article about another social website that popped up, I had this yearning feeling to share and discuss it, but with whom?
I didn’t want to share it on my personal Facebook page, as most of my friends and family couldn’t care less. I thought about Twitter, but I only check that once a day so the conversation would mostly stop after one or two tweets. Then I thought about posting the link on the Arment Dietrich Facebook community, and I stopped myself and thought, I should find a community where all members are interested in the same types of news that I am outside of my company. Continue Reading »
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