Thursday, November 29, 2012

WordCamp Victoria 2013 Workshop: Non-Technical Hacks for WordPress Content Marketing

Nontechnicalhacks

Image Source: What Would the Intenet Do? 

My 2013 WordCamp workshop is for anyone who enjoys exploring limits. If you understand the basics of html, use browser extensions, and use social networks, and would like to learn interesting ways to generate content using Word Press, come geek out. You don't need be a programmer to set up your ideas so they work.

We'll be weaving together a few clever IFTTT formulas, and exploring plug-ins and applications for being creative with your blog or website.

Here is one of the articles that inspired this workshop: How-to Create a Bloggers Newsroom with Ifttt and WordPress

WordCamp Victoria will be held on January 12th, 2013: http://2013.victoria.wordcamp.org/

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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Saanich Police Social Media Article in Saanich News

Posterous is terrible at pulling images to facebook, so (if you see my cheesy avatar) click through to see the link.  

The Saanich Police Department social media training is one of a the most interesting communications projects I've had the pleasure to work on. Lots of legal issues to consider, lots of cool things they can do with twitter and facebook, and the media monitoring dashboard will be super useful.

Nice to see our work featured in the Saanich News:

Saanichpolicesocialmediaarticle

Here's the links to their newly redesigned social media accounts:

One of the most difficult parts of this project is the management and oversight of multiple community liason accounts for Facebook and Twitter and how to create trust and accountability while respecting citizen's privacy.

Great design work on their Facebook and Twitter Pages by+Amee Nijjar Thanks for the opportunity +Stikky Media 

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How to Create an Intelligence Engine with the RSS Aggregator Fever via @StikkyMedia

When Google announced back in April (2012) their acquisition of PostRank also meant its ultimate demise, I started a board on Quora asking what alternatives to PostRank exist for determining the relevancy of an RSS feed. The Quora board received a flurry of attention when Google Reader ended support for PostRank, including notable comments from the former Co-Editor for ReadWriteWeb, and now CEO of PlexusEngine, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who introduced me to RSS feed management as a "Social Media Cheat Sheet" in 2009.

 

 

Aside from people commenting that they are also looking for alternatives to PostRank and Google Reader, the board quieted down. I was stumped. Stuck sorting through thousands of RSS feeds of "dirty" data, counting numbers of keyword mentions and then comparing them using Google Search Trends to find posts that held relevance and value. This lasted from May until August before I finally discovered something that promised to be similar to the PostRank and Google Reader combination. The answer was in an excellent post from Smashing Magazine, by Vasilis van Gemert, entitled: The Art of Staying Up To Date. The product: Fever

A Brief History on Why PostRank was so Awesome

PostRank integration with an RSS feed managment service, such as Google Reader, rates the activity surrounding posts on a 1-to-10 scale. How many clicks a link has received, how many comments a post had received, and social signals, like tweets and likes, were all included in the PostRank algorithm.

Combining factors with another layer of qualification, such as a social bookmarking network like Delicious, and you have a bird's eye view of breaking blog buzz and emerging trends. This data can be used for new-jacking, tracking keyword trends and evaluating reasons for stock market fluctuations. But, as in any maturing system, independent (localized) tools always succumb to the (regional) control of a larger entity.

So, on May 1, 2012, the Montreal start-up that was known as PostRank was absorbed into the Borg that is Google Inc. Back on the Quora Board, I posted about the promise of Fever to offer similar capabilities as Google Reader incorporated with Postrank. A few days later, one of the people following the board, Steve Wiildeman, aka SEOSteve, uploaded a Screencast  of him setting up Fever and offered to let me use his membership and give it a go. Yet, another reason Quora is the best social collaboration tool I have ever used. 

This is one of my more recent in depth articles for Stikky Media. It shows in detail how to create a content marketing cheat sheet. If you're interested in that kind of thing.

See the full post to learn how to always be ahead of the trends.

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