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Community, communication, consideration. The three founding principals of marketing your blog to an audience, whether general, or specific. People want to get be a part of the next thing, so give them a chance. 1. Community Whether you start up your own community, or join others, via means of MyBlogLog, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and others, this is a guaranteed and proven way to get visitors, to get hits, impressions, and often quality traffic, because you know that these people haven’t just clicked on a random link or search engine listing, but have seen you or your website’s profile, and followed it through to your homepage/landing page. The best ways to get the profiles themselves noticed? See below… 2. Communication I don’t mean ’spam’ by this either. Get involved in genuine discussions, with other people of similar interests, start up a civilized, profitable, knowledgeable discussion, then when you’re finished, ask if they’d take a look at your blog or website. You’d be surprised how many loyal readers have come to my own blog in this way. Simply leave comments in communities, on social networks, on other blogs, etc. Still not quite your way of dealing with people? 3. Considering All the time, you have to consider the reader. Who are you writing for? The reader. Who will be navigating your blog? The reader. Who should you devote your time, energy and attention to? The reader. Consideration is important, and you can show this in many ways. Either by having a clutter-free, easy-to-follow design, or you could alternatively try getting the readers involved, by asking questions in blog posts, or website statements, and opening up comments. If people comment, strike up a conversation with them, and keep them coming back. Answer their queries and requests with solid, reliable, dependable answers, and take note of the feedback they leave by using it, and putting it into action. If someone states that your text is hard to read, change the colour to stop it clashing so much with the background, or simply make it slightly larger. There are lots of ways you can show consideration to your audience, and it shows just how loyal you are to your readers through this. If someone spots an inaccuracy in a blog post and tells you, don’t be lazy. Go change it! They’ll keep coming back, they’ll tell their friends, and in turn this C will do word-of-mouth marketing wonders. The Element of Surprise You’ve looked at both SEO, content and the ‘C’s now, but my last tip is probably what has brought me the large majority of my visitors, both loyal and one-off traffic hoppers. Differentiate yourself, do something different. Be daring, be random! Try something wild, or something completely unheard of, whether it’s outrageous, or greatly beneficial to the reader. Sometimes, even beneficial to the writer! (http://www.techzi.net/donations/) Mad things work out great sometimes, other times, they really can lower your reputation, so it’s time to take calculated risks here. My advice? Follow your instincts. Be an entrepreneur. Take that risk. Make it happen. Throw a competition (http://www.techzi.net/competition/), for all the good it will do. Stand out and be different. Darren will sure know what I mean by that…

Atlassian Confluence 2.2.10 Confluence has multiple personalities: a collaboration tool, intranet, document repository, and project monitor. Throughout it all, however, the system stays true to its wiki roots. Spaces hold pages that are easily organized, can reference attachments, and turn into discussion forums using comments. Moreover, everything is searchable - subject to enterprise-grade security that extends permissioning to individual pages.

Social network sites are the latest generation of ‘mediated publics’ - environments where people can gather publicly through mediating technology.

Persistence. What you say sticks around.

Searchability.

The challenge I have been running into is convincing CTOs, CIOs and CKOs that there are network effects. These people have invested heavily in pre-Web 2.0 "knowledge management" solutions. They view blogs and wikis as a threat to the possible success of their existing investments. They fail to realize that adding a wider range of productivity tools to the Intranet will add value to existing tools, rather than take away from them.Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate this.

A short answer to your question is that in such cases an appeal to corporate competitiveness might make the most sense. Enterprise Web 2.0 (or to use the emerging enterprise 2.0 tag) evangelists such as Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe are always on the lookout for corporate success stories to publicize. I'd pay close attention to what they have to say. Often in public presentations they are challenged by corporate audiences to "prove that this stuff works." They always like to point to public examples -- when they can -- in order to rise above the hype. Being able to point out that a comparable or competitive company "is doing X already - why aren't we?" can be a powerful motivator.

As a cost-conscious consultant I would first want to know whether the existing knowledge management system can be augmented with newer collaboration, social networking, and relationship management features in order to extend the investments in infrastructure that have already been made.

  Salesforce's new mashups will deliver full componentization of its analytical dashboards - enabling users to create, share, and combine data components. Essentially this means that customers can pick and choose the best analytical components from a variety of vendors; combining them into a single view on their salesforce dashboard. Salesforce is hoping that lots of new components will be created and shared on their AppExchange.

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.

Personal Value Precedes Network Value The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost.

However, Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words, they’re for getting attention only. Del.icio.us tags, on the other hand, provide personal value each time someone uses them to recall a bookmark.

Rashmi Sinha A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one) Dan Bricklin Systems without guilt where every contribution is appreciated

There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.

These key users should: be open to trying new software be influential amongst their peers, thus able to help promulgate usage have the support of their managers Users who are potential evangelists should be identified at every level of management, not just amongst the higher echelons, or amongst the workforce.

3. Convert key users into evangelists Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.

Nearly 30% of survey respondents (19 of 66) said their organization recouped their investment in immersive technologies in less than nine months, once their project(s) launched.

The top motivations for investment in immersive technology in 2008 /1Q 2009 were enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, increased innovation, and cost savings or avoidance.

Early implementers are choosing the simplest use cases first. The most common were learning and training (80%, or 53 of 66 respondents focused on this use case) and meetings (76%, or 50 of 66 respondents). Some intend to take on more complex use cases in 2010 or 2011.

Developer support is crucial to the success of Google Wave

the genius behind Google Wave is

in the way Google has assembled a set of existing technologies into an attractive platform for developers

The browser battle renewed today

Microsoft's hand may have been moved by the launch of Wolfram|Alpha

much promise in connecting people to knowledge

Connected futures

New social strategies and tools for communities of practice

community managers, designers and conveners