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As I mentioned in my introductory post, I blog utilizing several personas:  JeSais for my personal blog, Carmen Electrode is my work affiliated online persona, and Joe Welder for my boss.  It sounds more complicated than it is.

I won’t go into too many details about my personal blog–  mostly because it’s not really relevant to search engine optimization.  I started it learn more about blogging.  I would note, however, that if you do blog, keep in mind you are not necessarily as invisible as you think you are.  My own personal rule of thumb is to never post anything online that you would not want your mother or future employer to read.

The company I work for, Arc-Zone.com, sells welding accessories. Primarily an online business, we serve a variety of clients from independent fabricators to industrial manufacturers around the world. For work I manage the two company blogs:  CarmenElectrode.com and JoeWelder.com.

One way that I distinguish the voice of Carmen Electrode from Joe Welder is by selection of topic.  I use the CarmenElectrode.com blog to (hopefully) dispel some myths about the kind of work that welding is, and the kind of women who actually weld.  I also write about equality in the workplace, and other issues of importance to women welders.  And Rosie the Riveter–I blog about Rosies.  I repost articles profiling the original Rosies, stories about the Rosie the Riveter Parks, statues, and memorials, and I also write regular profiles of women in the industry for a section I call “The New Rosies.”

The Joe Welder blog is primarily my boss’ platform (who is the owner of Arc-Zone.com) so the posts are topics that reflect his history in the racing industry and as a master fabricator as well as his personal interests:  So Cal culture, cars, mountain biking and green manufacturing to name a few.  One regular feature is Ask Joe for write-ups of technical inquiries, and the solutions our company experts provide.  We also post about customer service, new products in our webstore, and how we differentiate ourselves from others in the industry.

Another tool I use to distinguish voice is diction and word selection. For Carmen Electrode I tend to use more flowery, “feminine” language… a voice that is probably closer to my “real” voice (though maybe a bit more hip and fun!).  Jim (my boss, aka Joe Welder)  writes many of the posts himself, though I do edit them for him. I strive to maintain his diction and his use of words like “dialed in” or “check it out” or “bitchin” even when writing posts as “Editor.”

Whether I’m online as Carmen or Joe, because these are business blogs there is a level of professionalism that we always maintain.  It is one of our company’s core beliefs that in order to flourish, we must maintain a positive atmosphere.  The blogs are not places to dish dirt on the industry, on our competitors, or on vendors that let us down. Instead they are places to celebrate the industry that we contribute to and benefit from.  I’ll talk about this in more depth in my next post on maintaining integrity.

–
Jennifer Simpson, aka JeSais
DID I BLOG YOU?
http://akajesais.com/

Akismet is good at combating most comment spam, but it doesn’t catch everything.  Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if someone took the time to read my blog and comment, or if they just posted a generic comment.

If you comment, “nice blog,” or even post a longer comment that does not mention me or anything about my blog, I won’t publish your comment.  I’ll assume you wrote out a generic comment to a Word doc, such as, “Most of what I read online is trash and copy and paste, but you definitely add value. Bravo,” and you copied and pasted that to numerous blogs without reading those blogs.

To everyone who takes the time to read and comment on my blogs, I appreciate your comments.  Though, unless you mention me, my blog, or something relevant to the topic I blogged about, I can’t decipher whether you read my blog and wrote out that comment or if you just copied and pasted generic comments to random blogs.

The purpose of blogging is to spur conversation.  Posting random comments to random blogs without reading those blogs is like pretending to have a conversation with a person, while nodding, thinking about something else, saying ‘right’ every few moments, and leaving without any notion of what that person just said.

Perhaps, you’re thinking, ‘Who cares?  A comment is a comment.’  I don’t think the laziness of SEO content writers or bloggers who cut corners should be rewarded.  Let’s keep the conversation going by respecting one another enough to post comments that encourage conversation.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

So, I found some more great CMS to talk about; but, as I said last week, I’m over that.  So, I am going to wait a while before I talk about CMS again.  Over the next three weeks, I am going to talk about boosting your social media marketing by implementing blogging and microblogging.  I am only going to do one site a week.  For this week, I am going to talk about an open source blogging platform called LifeType.  Then, I will do microblogging platforms the two weeks after that.  If I can find more OS blogging and microblogging platforms, and I am sure they’re out there, I will write about two or three a week.  Now, onto LifeType.

Of course, LifeType includes various cool features, so I will cover some of my favorites.  It is a WYSIWYG program (What You See Is What You Get), which is cool for people like me who only have enough knowledge of html to interpret the SEO value of someone’s Website.  After that, my html knowledge ends at being able to hold a somewhat intelligent conversation about it with my computer programmer friends.  Speaking of which, this is a great time to tell you that if you want me to help you with any SEO projects, I would be more than happy to work with you.  Now, let’s move right along to some other great features.

For those who have been blogging for a while, you know those spammers are always so generous with their comments.  Kudos to my buddy Mike for setting up my WordPress blog so I wouldn’t need to deal with that.  LifeType comes with a built-in anti-spam filter.  And it is also includes comment moderation, captchas, and trackback validation.  The nice thing about LifeType is that it locates the trackback URL of blogs you read.  Okay, so here’s a feature you will want to know about.  LifeType includes Mobile blogging (Moblogging).  This way you can offer low bandwidth versions of your site for cell phones.  Check out their other great features.

For the programmers out there, here are some nifty things about LifeType you will want to know.  It is based on XHTML 1.0.  You can also create customized URLs, which we should all know is important for SEO.  And LifeType is based on a model control viewer framework.  If you want to know about more of their great features, read about them here.

For those who want to know more about LifeType, you should know that they offer plenty of Plugins, Templates, and more.  If you would like to see what you’re getting from LifeType before you download it, you can view their snapshots.  Before you do any downloading, you can read more about them, peruse their FAQ section, join their forums, or just jump right in and start downloading.

Okay, so that’s it for this week.  BTW, if you have an open source project you think I might want to blog about, comment here or send me an e-mail.  For those open source projects who have started following me on Twitter, you’re awesome and I thank you for the follows.  I look at every profile and through every site I come across, but if you send me an e-mail I am more apt to write a blog about you quicker.

Okay, so I will talk about a couple of microblogging platforms next week and the week after that.  I’ll search around for some more, but that’s the schedule for now.   Statusnet will not be one of those; however, I did blog about them.  And I have some other projects on the burner I’ll keep you updated about.

For those who want to follow me, check me out on Twitter or Facebook.

Be well,

Erick

Happy Cyber Monday! I ran into a Website that offers social network analysis software so powerful that it goes on my top ten list for creating a social media marketing strategy. Techrigy offers a social media monitoring and analysis tool called SM2. It will help you promote and advertise your blog, strategize your social networking efforts, and minimize the time it takes to conduct that pesky social media research.

Always a sucker for free stuff, I set up a freemium account, which allows me to use most of the tools, but with way less results. The freemium version allows you to create a search based on 14 categories, using five keywords or terms, that gives 1,000 search results. For this blog, I will review five of those categories.

Overview

Let’s start with Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows webmasters to view who went to their Website or blog, thus enabling them to strategize how to draw attention to their site or blog. SM2 works in much the same way; however, SM2 allows people to do a type of reverse search, focusing on social media.

In the freemium version, you can compare two categories over two sets of dates. I compared ‘social networking’ to ‘seo content’ from 11/22-11/28. Load dates and two line graphs appears. Within my preset time period, people used the term ‘seo content’ more often everyday of last week than ‘social networking.’

Share of Voice

A bar graph showing seven categories appears. Since seo content appeared the most, I am more interested in that term. In that time period, seo content appeared in various social media platforms 192 times; though, it appeared in blogs 53 times. Below the bar graph, there is a line graph that tells me seo content appeared the most times in blogs on 11/25. If I want to know why, I can use the themes category.

Themes

When you first use themes, you will have to set up the search. Since, I am interested in seo content, I will filter my search for that term within the opted social media networks. Then, I set the dates and click finish. Since I am using the freemium version, SM2 won’t allow me to run this search (I already have one set up); though, there is a basic and advanced theme. The basic theme creates a tag cloud; whereas the advanced theme creates a balloon graph (I think that’s what they’re called).

Tone of Content

This shows me that on 11/25, of the 22 blogs written that used the term seo content, 21 blogs had a neutral or positive tones. Below the bar graph, a list of the blogs appears, all with sliders preset to show you the tone SM2 assigned to each blog. You can review those blogs, thus looking for a running theme as to why bloggers mentioned seo content on 11/25.

Top Authors

I want to create relationships with other bloggers. According to SM2, Robert Laidlaw mentioned ‘seo content’ eight times last week. When I click on the various links in his results they lead to webmasterforums, but his name doesn’t appear. I know how Techrigy’s algorithm works. I dug a little deeper. Robert is the webmaster, perhaps the owner, of webmasterforums, as well as president of Verticalscope, Inc. Since social networking is about making connections with other bloggers, social networkers, and the like, I am going to e-mail him to let him know I linked to him.

Conclusion

Okay, so there is so many other ways SM2 can help you with your social media marketing, but there are great tutorial videos in all of the categories. For anyone who needs a little boost with their social media networking, such as blog traffic exchange or social network development, SM2 will help you market your blog, set up a social network business plan, or offer more targeted social media marketing services. Meantime, if you need someone to write SEO Content for your site, write your blog, create a social network, or help you with your social network, check out http://www.seobridges.com/, and let me know how I can help you.