Trunk.ly is My Jam

Twitter has re-branded itself as an information network, and tools like Trunk.ly support this effort. It allows you to follow just what links your Twitter friends share on Trunk.ly. It’s like a personal recommendations Google Reader thingy and I love it.

This is very helpful for me, as I write a weekly “news roundup” style post for my company blog. It’s great for curating content from the community and reviewing what the popular topics were that week. If you’re interested in that content curation type of stuff you might also like Packrati.us, which not only will collect the links that you share on Twitter but also the links that you Favorite. So, essentially it’s assumed that the links you RT you’ve already read, correct? But I think you and I both know that people don’t always do that. If you want to Favorite the Tweets with links that you want to read later though, it’s a way of bookmarking them. Packrati.us will collect those and then you can save those to read when you have time (which most likely isn’t at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday when you see the Tweet, correct?)

Hope this is helpful!

How to: Comment on Industry Blogs Without Coming Off Like A Spammy Jerk

It’s a fine line – you want to join a relevant industry conversation where people are talking about something related to what you’re selling. So you head on over to some blogs and leave some comments. Hypothetically, they may come out all…

(On my oneforty blog)

“My social media thingamajig is exactly like the ones you listed! You missed mine though!! Boo. You want a free demo? Head on over to http://www.socialmediathingamajig.com”

(On the Blue Sky Factory blog)

“For more email marketing tips like these check out http://spammyemailvendor.com)”

Get the point? These types of comments are not engaging or conversational. They’re just really really really annoying, completely selfish, and don’t add anything to the conversation. And you know what sucks the most? It’s that you probably had your heart in the right place when you did this, you were just rushing through things and came off wrong.

I absolutely loved this HubSpot post that outlines some great tips on how to leave great blog comments. Definitely read their post, and keep these tips in mind:

• Actually leave a thoughtful comment about the post itself. Show that you read the post. Refer specifically to what they said, or summarize part of it… (“I liked your tips on making the most of blog design, especially #5 and #6 in regards to designing a nice header and sidebar.”)

• I think disagreeing with a blogger is actually a fantastic way to comment. It shows that you read the post, after all, and it engages the blogger in a conversation. Healthy debate moves us forward. But, be respectful. Behind every Disqus avatar is a real person with real feelings and a family and friends and a job and better things to do than feel bad about nasty comments. Remember, it’s just the internet! Don’t be one like one of those pompous TechCrunch commenters, please…

• No-follow links: A lot of times when people leave a link to their website in blog comments, they are doing this because they think they are getting SEO value from it. That’s actually not true. Many websites have a “no-follow” tag in their code, which means basically that it tells search engines not to give that link any SEO credit from that site. People stick the “no-follow” tag in their site to prevent spam comments. Makes sense, right?

• The real value in blog commenting is building relationships and networking. Honestly, it is so exciting to get comments on your blog! It’s fun to write about topics you are passionate about and when people talk to you about those things in blog comments, you’re that much more excited to connect with them. (It’s like when you take a chick on a date and you’re supposed to ask her about her stuff and not talk about you the whole time.)

So that’s my social media advice: Ask your blogger about her stuff.  Or in other words, if you make it about other people, you build relationships. Relationships are much more valuable than some rushed comment just for the sake of leaving a comment and crossing it off the to-do list. I say, take your time to leave one good, thoughtful comment instead of 20 crappy, spammy comments each day. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t try to boil the ocean.

What do you guys think? Any other tips for commenting on industry blogs?

Open Groups on LinkedIn: SEO vs. Private Community

Now that LinkedIn offers open groups, community managers have the option to change their group settings. Switching to open groups means you go from members-only content, to offering your group discussions as public conversations that are indexed by search engines.

Coupla’ of things:

• Current and past posts and discussions are not indexed by search engines, just the new stuff. Old stuff is archived in a super secret non-searchable section for members-only.
• If you switch to an open group, LinkedIn notifies group members.
• In open groups, anyone on the interwebz can view discussions, and discussions are sharable on Facebook and Twitter. However, there are manager controls available so you can restrict who actually is able to post in open groups.

I’m pondering the benefits of having a closed community versus an open community, and if the SEO advantages of open groups make it worth the extra moderation. Clearly SEO advantages are hugely important. However, in my mind your company only wins if people go from the LinkedIn group to your website. If people are just seeing the results in Google and not clicking through, or just reading the publicly available discussions and not doing anything beyond that, to me it feels like we’ve just exposed ourselves and compromised the conversations in our community for no reason.

I participate in and run closed communities and open ones. You can’t make a blanket statement and say that open or closed communities are better or worse than the other. It depends on your community’s content and goals. I’m a member of a closed Facebook group for community managers. Joining is invite-only, and beyond that, the moderators control who is let into the group from there. With a small group of only 100 people, the conversations, information and debate are high-quality. Is it snobby to keep some people out? Well, no. If this amount of moderation is what prevents Spamcakes from blowing up a productive group with stuff like “Come check out my webinar/ebook/social media thingamajig!” then I agree with it.

I run a Q&A site for social media questions at oneforty Answers. We get some great conversation over there. The community has grown to the point where a core group will take off and have these awesome discussions on their own without me having to lead or push. The overall quality of the questions on oneforty Answers is not great as the discussions in our (new) closed LinkedIn group, though. It requires moderation. We get a lot of spam. We also get a lot of random and off-topic stuff that I have to sort through. However, everything is indexed on search engines so we get traffic to Answers from that, and we get traffic from Answers to oneforty.com. So, the openness benefits us…

…or does it?

Having an open forum is an easy way to get content and followers at first. But if you aren’t benefitting the community with quality content and making it easy for riff raff to join and post garbage in your forums, people won’t stick around – at least the people you want to have stick around. SEO gains are great, but (and sorry to be all rainbows and butterflies) so are loyal evangelists of private communities.

I say, first, look at your goals for the community – in this case, a LinkedIn group. Is it another venue to push out your own content, or are you really focusing on the member conversations? I think if you figure that out, you’ll see how you feel about the SEO benefits vs. increased need for moderation of an open group. I’m still evaluating what I’ll do with my LinkedIn group, specially looking for ways that I can possibly get the best of both worlds: have the content indexed by search engines but maintain the quality conversations that we’d get in a private community.