TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Engagement - 4 tips for Startups & Established players: using digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and google to build your community

Companies on the web (speaking in terms of 2.0 startups here) can be sorted into two categories - those that actively engage their communities, and those that don’t.

I base that on my first 2 month’s experience blogging here. Some reviews have been actively commented on over time by the company reviewed - take a look at the Collanos post, for instance: the Collanos folks are all over it with opinions, other ways of looking at things, feature updates, and so on. Same thing with Teqlo - lots of conversation flowed from that post.

Most reviews, however, haven’t gotten any attention from the firm in question. SuTree? TxtVox? Meshly? Hellooooo…?

There’s a number of ways that engaging Bloggers with comments or trackbacks is valuable for web companies (or any, for that matter) new or old:

Establishing a relationship often turns critics into advocates.
Share your side of the story: supplement, complement, and correct.
Gather feedback.
Gain eyeballs - posts with good discussion get more readers.
Build brand equity - your company looks better if its approachable and engaged.

Anyway, the benefits of Naked Conversations have been endlessly hashed out elsewhere.

So - how to go about realizing these benefits? Doing so does not have to be arduous or time consuming, nor do you necessarily need to rush out and hire a community manager. There’s 4 simple, fast ways to identify, track, and stay on top of conversations about your company:

Technorati: Subscribe to your tag. Enter this in your browser: http://technorati.com/posts/tag/YourCompanyNameHere. For example, here’s the Collanos page. Then, subscribe to it (there’s a nice RSS link right there). Now, you’re instantly updated in your feed reader whenever someone out there properly tags a post about you. For thoroughness, be sure to subscribe to feeds for all variations and misspellings of your name.
Google: bookmark searches for all common variations of your company’s name, as well as things like “YouCompanyName Review.” Try searching for “SuTree Review,” for instance. My SuTree post is on the first page.
Did you know you can subscribe to Digg search results? Well, you can. And you should. Digg weilds undue influence - you should be commenting on posts about your company, and ready to throw out a “Welcome Diggers!” message onto your site if a post goes front page (you should have a page ready to go, designed to convert notoriously shallow-browsing digg readers into members). Here’s the digg search for SuTree - the subscribe icon is innocuous, but there.
Del.icio.us: You should be following what’s getting bookmarked about you - your company, reviews, and so on. Read the user notes - those capsule summaries provide a good window into how your brand is perceived online. Finding yourself on del.icio.us can be cumbersome, as del.icio.us uses their own id strings for URLs. Here’s SuTree for example: http://del.icio.us/url/76ff772c19d0c546a3b70fc4e24b6080. Click that link though, and you’ll see a URL search box: enter yours there. And, if you scan all the way to the bottom, there’s an RSS feed for it too.

So there you go: adding RSS feeds to your reader from Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Digg, and bookmarking a few Google searches will keep you generally up to speed with what’s being said about your company. Following those feeds is a matter of minutes in your feed reader. Now, the onus is on you to act on that: get out there and comment - engage your community and enjoy the rewards.

EDIT: Guy Kawasaki posted an article today about DIY PR by Glen Kelmann. The 4 tips above would be good tools for someone going the DIY and engaging customers and stakeholders directly.

blogging, community, delicious, digg, feeds, google, howto, reputation, rss, startups, technorati tips

8 Responses to “Engagement - 4 tips for Startups & Established players: using digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and google to build your community”

Janet Johnson | May 30th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

Great recommendations, Rod! Most communicators are just learning the nuances of sites like Digg/del.icio.us/etc. and your advice is timely and sound.

As another word of advice, Attensa’s free RSS Readers (www.attensa.com) will watch those sites and more for you - I have watches set up for myself and all of my clients (Attensa is one of my clients), and results of my “persistent searches” come just-in-time, right into my Outlook.

Talk about a tool PR professionals should use - RSS is the glue that holds it all together.

And another benefit for business blogging that I talk about (almost) incessantly: Building not only brand equity, but thought leadership. Especially in niche markets, a good company blog will raise that company’s awareness in their industry, in their search engine results, and in the media.
» Blog Archive » Collanos Creates Global Network for Free Team Collaboration | May 30th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

[…] Techfold […]
Phil | June 4th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

Hi Rod,

Thank you for your interest in TxtVox.com and for your constructive criticism. We have been out there talking to as many folks as possible, but apparently we haven’t been doing enough. We will definitely increase our efforts to engage reviewers, bloggers, our members and the rest of our community. As part of this increased effort, we will be launching the TxtVox.com Blog this week. The URL will be http://www.TxtVox.com/blog.

The TxtVox.com site is still in beta and we are adding a lot of new functionality and unique and interesting content. The next few weeks should be very exciting!

Thanks again.

Phil Nadel
President
TxtVox.com
Rod | June 4th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

Hey Phil - thank-you for your comment. Don’t take it personally, I certainly didn’t mean to single out TxtVox, and as a very small blog, I’m used to most of my content being un-responded-to anyhow; that being said, the tools I suggested I think provide a good way for any organization to stay on top of discussion at whatever level they choose to participate at.
Rod | June 4th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

Janet - thanks for stopping by, sorry about the slow response to your comment (I’m failing at engagement in my own post on engagement - sheesh). Attensa is coming up in both my dayjob and blogging pastime more and more - I’ll take a good look at them shortly, and in the meantime, thanks for point them out!
Janet Johnson | June 4th, 2007 at 1:12 pm

Rod, it’s great to see the conversations you’ve prompted with this post. I’m going to check out TxtVox as well. So much for your content being un-respnded-to!

Keep up the great posts.
Jason Striegel | June 7th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

Hello from Meshly!

Sorry I missed your first post - I really appreciate the feedback and we’ve been doing our best to participate in the conversation. Obviously, we need to do better

The most important thing for us in this alpha stage is to get as much feedback as we can, so that we can be conscious of people’s needs and wants as we continue to develop the platform. We have a really great working concept now, but I want Meshly to be the absolute best way for communities to share links.

We only get there by listening to those communities we want to serve.

So, great article, and thanks for calling us out. We need the kick in the pants.

Also, if I could add a resource for your readers, it’s Google’s blog search (blogsearch.google.com). If you search for your company/site, then click sort by date, you’ll get the latest scoop on what people are discussing. There’s an RSS feed for the results, as well, so you can add that search feed to netvibes, igoogle, etc.

Thanks Rod!

Jason from Meshly
Rod | June 8th, 2007 at 4:46 pm

Jason - thanks for stopping by, and sorry about the delay in reply. I can very much understand how difficult it is to stay on top of conversations from a time management perspective - hence my slow responses in this comment thread. So don’t take it personally that I mentioned meshly - it was just a convenient comment-free thread!

And - thank-you for pointing out Google Blog Search. It sounds like a great resource, and I’m looking forward to getting familiar with it.

Thanks again and all the best with Meshly!