Some really good posts and information for Social Media and Wordpress integration

• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and Wordpress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for Wordpress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice Wordpress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

Today I am attending Blog Carolinas a social media conference being held in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park (that’s halfway between Raleigh and Durham). I am particularly interesting on hearing Andy Beal’s session on Online Reputation Management. Andy recently launched Trackur, an online reputation monitoring service (which I am interested in using for Zenoss).

Here’s what I expect to get out of today’s conference (paraphrased from their website)

• How Social Media is impacting Marketing and Communications Strategies
• How Community can serve as a model to improving organizational productivity
• Network with experts in the fields of On Line Reputation, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0 Technology and On Line Community Building

Not sure what the program will be like but just the fact I get this kind of content five minutes from my house seems very cool to me.

Technorati Tags: Andy Beal, BlogCarolinas, online communities, RTP, Social Media, trackur

This is the funniest video on Social Networking ever. Thanks to Roebot for sharing.

{Updated: For some reason the Adobe file doesn’t render right, the picture is now linked to the original video.}

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Humor, MySpace, parody, Social Media

I was referred to the origins of the term Social Media Optimization(SMO) from an old ProBlogger article about Google’s treatment of blogs.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

While I think video and other tactics are important especially given Google’s inclusion of video in search results. One trend of growing importance is optimizing web pages by including microformats:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Examples of microformats are

• hCard – For people and organizations
• hCalendar – Calendars and Event
• XFN – Social Networks

A broader list of microformats can be on the microformats wiki.

I think the key thing to consider when optimizing your website for audience (Whether it be readers or search engines) it’s important to make it easier for the website to be be consumed. That means syndicating content, offering multimedia when and where appropriate. Now I have one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to throw around along with my geek-speak laden vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, optimization, SEO, Social Media

If you are a social media hound you probably have a Flickr Uploader, a web browser chock full of extensions, maybe a Twitter client like Twhirl, and a slew of other tools for interacting on the web. Maybe it’s time to consolidate all these tools into your web browser. That’s where Flock comes in it’s a web browser for the collaborative web. 

Open Source  Collaboration

Flock is an open source web browser built on the same Mozilla architecture that Firefox is built on so many of Flock’s features should be familiar, like tab-based browsing and the ability to add extensions. However, there are a number of cool new features that appeal to the social networking crowd. First their are additional tools that can displayed in a tool bar on the left hand side of your browser (RSS reader, People feed, Web Clipboard, and a media bar that displays your photos and video across the top of your browser window.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Blog, Blogging, del.icio.us, Flock, review, RSS, Social Media, Twhirl, Twitter, Web 2.0, web browser, WordPress