TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

WordPress Tip - Schedule your posts

I just discovered a great thing about WordPress - you can schedule the publishing of your posts in the future. This means that I can start posting at 7:00 AM (well before I wake up), so that the east-coasters have something new in their RSS reader first thing in the AM. It also means that I can set up a bunch of posts for my Banff, Glacier Park, Montana roadtrip next week, and hopefully not have a total traffic die off.

The basics: on your “write” page, in the right hand column, check off the “edit timestamp” box and enter the date and time you want your post to “go live.” Hit publish, and that’s it! Better, detailed instructions are here.

howto, tips wordpress

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Planning a Hike

Never mind the crazy Google Ad placement, just scroll down and check out this great methodological way of planning a hike. BTW, I’m going to be off hiking & mountain biking starting June 29th. First a 4 day backcountry traverse across the Canadian rockies around Banff, then down to Montana’s Glacier National Park and Flathead regions. Good times!

How to: Plan a Hike

hiking howto

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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:

1. Establishing a relationship often turns critics into advocates.
2. Share your side of the story: supplement, complement, and correct.
3. Gather feedback.
4. Gain eyeballs - posts with good discussion get more readers.
5. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Quick iTunes Tip

From the Negative Margins blog, a quick but very useful tip on how-to make mp3’s remember their position like podcasts do in iTunes. I have a weird habit of skipping around between many different songs, and different parts of songs, and so this feature is great for me - particularly as the fridaylistening post is just around the corner…

apple, howto, itunes music

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!