Monthly Archives: March 2009

Take control of your comment history with Backtype

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In my 11th grade history classroom, a poster of a large Rooster hung on the wall with a caption that read, “What do you call someone who gets his girlfriend pregnant and then flies the coop?” I am not making this up. And it does have a point.

I often read blog posts, occasionally make comments, and then never return to the original post to see what conversation has transpired. I never subscribe to the RSS feed for a post’s comments and usually uncheck the box asking if I want to be notified of follow-up comments via e-mail. I cut and run. I wouldn’t call myself a chicken, as it’s more of a lack-of-time thing than an I’m-too-scared-to-see-what-other-people-said-after-me situation. But admittedly I’m not very good at staying engaged in conversation at a blog once I’ve made my initial comment. I don’t like having to bounce all over the Web to different sites, trying to remember where I’ve left comments. Enter BackType.

backtypelogoBackType is part comment aggregator, part monitoring tool, and part online community. You create an account (mine is here) and add your avatar, web address, and profile information. Then you enter all of the Web addresses you’ve ever listed when leaving comments on blogs. For me, this included my old and new blog sites, my Twitter address, and my Unhub address. BackType then crawls blog posts to find comments that you’ve made and allows you to “claim” them under your profile so that they are credited to you. You can also do a search on your name and claim other comments that you’ve made. It gathers all of your comments into your profile, where you can share, tweet, permalink to them, or click back to the original post. It gives you a fantastic line of sight to all of the comments you’ve made on blogs, all from one simple interface.

From a monitoring standpoint, BackType also allows you to search blog comments for terms and keywords, so you can monitor your brand, business, or personal reputation and see what’s being said about it in blog comments. I tested this out by typing, ahem, “Georgia Bulldogs” into the search box and BackType returned 93 blog comments from a variety of blogs. You can sign up to have an e-mail alert or RSS feed on your search terms delivered or just view them via the dashboard when you login to BackType.

BackType also includes a social networking aspect in that you can friend other BackType users and see what comments they’re making on blogs. The most followed people on BackType are who you’d expect: Chris Brogan, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Jeremiah Owyang, etc. It’s a great way to see what comments people are making throughout the blogosphere without actually having to run all around the blogosphere. Additional features include BackTweets, which allows you to search links on Twitter, and BackType Connect, which tracks links from other social services. The service launched last summer and announced these two new features earlier in March.

chickIt’s so easy to lose track of conversations on the Web, especially with the variety of channels for sharing and exchanging information and opinions. The comments section of a blog post is often an arena for heated discussions. If you leave a single comment and never return, you may not even realize that the seed you planted with your comment spurred follow-on comments or in-depth reflections. BackType allows you an easy way to check in with comments you’ve made and see what’s developed. It also creates yet another online presence for your “personal brand” and can show others who visit your BackType profile where and how you’re engaging and what contributions you’re making.

So don’t be a chicken. Don’t comment and run. Use BackType to stick around and see what’s born out of your ideas.

Hat tip to David Spinks. Image from Flickr user JOE M500

How I ported my blog to WordPress.org

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I’m getting settled in here at my new home on the web, after moving from my free wordpress.com blog last weekend. The process to move my blog over to a self-hosted wordpress.org account was actually much easier than I anticipated, thanks in large part to my tech-obsessed husband, but I thought I would outline the basic steps for anyone else looking to move from a site like name.wordpress.com to a WordPress.org site. Here’s how I did it:

1. Purchased my domain name and hosting

There are two steps here: I had to register the domain and then pay for a hosting service where I can store my Web site’s files. I think it’s substantially easier to buy the domain and hosting from the same place, so do some research to find a good hosting service that you’re comfortable with and then register your domain name with them. I would recommend using yourname.com if it’s available. If you’re not yet ready to move to a self-hosted site, you should still consider registering your domain name just to reserve it. I used hostmonster.com for both domain name registration and hosting and have found it to be really user-friendly, inexpensive, and to have great customer service.

wordpresslogo2. Logged in to my hosting service and installed the WordPress.org software

With Hostmonster, this process was extremely easy as it has an “Install WordPress” icon on the control panel – it was literally the click of a button and WordPress was installed. WordPress gave me a temporary password to use (the username is “admin”). You can change this password to something easier to remember. Make sure that your hosting service’s easy-install option installs the most current version of WordPress.org.

3. Found a Wordpess theme design for the new blog and uploaded it.

There are thousands of themes available – many more so than with WordPress.com. The choice can be overwhelming! Make sure you choose a theme that’s widget-enabled (most are) so that you can install cool plugins on your blog. I found a theme I liked and downloaded it to my desktop. Then I went back to my hosting service, logged in, and uploaded the theme to WordPress.org. You can upload several themes if you want to test out different looks for your new blog.

4. Exported and imported content from my old blog to new blog

This part was much easier than I thought it would be. In the old blog at WordPress.com, there is a “Tools” menu on the left hand side with an “Export” link. I clicked on this link, made sure the “All Authors” option is selected and then clicked “Download Export File” and saved the file to my desktop. Then, I logged in to the admin console of my new WordPress.org site. In the new WordPress.org blog, I clicked the “Tools” menu on the left hand side and clicked “Import” and then found the file that I had saved on my desktop. I checked the box to import all media and then imported my old blog. (*If you’ve been blogging on WordPress.com for a while and your export file is larger than 2MB, you may need to contact your hosting service to see if they can increase your limit so that you can import your blog in one shot.)

5. Played with the look and feel of the new site

My new blog was then populated with all of the old blog’s content, including tags, comments, categories, and pictures. Easy peasy! I played around with the theme and cascading style sheet to get things looking how I wanted them. I changed some font colors, background colors, header pictures, and more. I experimented with plugins to add functionality to my blog. Ari Herzog has a list of 23 great WordPress plugins that he uses; there are thousands available.

(6. Repoint domain name server to the new site)

I didn’t have to do this, as this step only applies if you previously had your free WordPress.com blog at your own domain name (so if you were already using yourname.com but had it hosted at WordPress.com and were using the free WordPress.com software). This step involves repointing your domain name to the new site at your new host. You would need to go to your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, whatever you used) and repoint the site to your new host. Your hosting service usually has step-by-step instructions on how to do this that are specific to that host.

movingtruck7. Notified my friends that my site moved!

I asked people who had me listed on their blogrolls if they could kindly update their links to point to my new site. I placed a link at the top of the mengelmusings.wordpress.com site informing visitors that the site has moved and linked it to my new site. I inserted a sentence at the top of each blog post, since I didn’t have too many, that informed people my site had moved and gave a link to the same post at the new site. I published a final blog post at WordPress.com and let readers know where I moved. I also put a link to the new RSS feed for the new blog on the old site so people could find my feed and resubscribe.

A word on permalinks and redirects

If you have been blogging for a long time and have tons of posts, you may need to think about redirecting old permalinks so that they automatically trip to the new site if you change domain names. I didn’t bother with it because I only had about 15 posts on the old site. But if people stumble across a blog that has linked to one of your posts on the old site, you’ll want to make sure that they end up on your new site. Here is a document that talks about permalinks and automatic redirects. It is a big deal for people who have established blogs with lots of incoming links and thus, Google or Technorati ranking. Do some extra research on porting your blog if you’re part of this group. I figured that I was in the clear and didn’t really need to worry about permalinks with my whopping 12 readers and three incoming links.

This is meant as a very general outline of how I moved my site over. There are myriad resources on the Web that offer additional instructions and are specific for moving different platforms onto WordPress (LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, etc.). The main thing is not to be too fearful of the process, as it’s relatively simple. And if you are thinking of moving to a self-hosted site, I would do it sooner rather than later. The longer you blog and the greater the readership and links you build up, the harder it can be to make sure everything syncs up with the new domain and people find you! If I had it to do over again, I would have started with my own amymengel.com domain name from the getgo.

Here are a few more links to help you out:

Michael Martine offers an excellent analysis of  moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Problogger also explains moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Digital Inspirations shows that it’s easy to go from a Blogger/Blogspot blog to WordPress
Foliovision offers a step-by-step for moving from Typepad to WordPress

Images from Flickr users koka_sexton and Custom_Cab

Don’t let the “experts” intimidate you

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brainThere’s been much discussion on blogs and Twitter recently about people proclaiming themselves social media experts or gurus or a host of other terms. Is there such a thing? Can anyone already claim to be an expert in such a nascent space? Will shoddy “experts” tarnish the reputations of those who really and truly are adept at using social media to enhance communications strategies? Is it bragging or bravado to call yourself (or allow someone to call you) a social media expert?

The reality is that many people who are actively engaged in social media could be considered an expert at some level– simply by the fact that they’re learning about the tools and using them. When you spend all day on Twitter with people like Todd Defren, Jason Falls, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund and Mack Collier, it’s easy to forget that some 5.99 BILLION people in the world don’t use Twitter and probably have no idea what it is capable of. Or that 5.82 BILLION people do not have Facebook accounts. They have never heard of FriendFeed, Flickr, Delicious, MySpace or Plurk. Heck, I have customers who run businesses and they don’t have an e-mail address! Even if you only know one-tenth-of-one percent as much as the Todds, Jasons, Beths, Ambers and Macks of the world, you are still ahead of the curve.

Now I am not saying that just because you have a Twitter account and a blog that you should christen yourself a social media expert and start selling or representing yourself as such. But you CAN teach people about social media and demonstrate its effectiveness. You CAN share your knowledge with co-workers and customers and suggest ideas for how to incorporate social media into existing communications and outreach efforts. Don’t be afraid to try things out simply because you’re not an “expert” about social media.

Experts are those whom others go to for advice because they are more knowledgeable about a particular topic than the average Joe or Jane. As Scott Hepburn said, “They chop lettuce.” The people I listed above are social media experts to me, and I have a huge amount of respect for their knowledge and skills in this space. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t add any value to people who know less than I do about the topic. I can give my co-workers blogging tutorials and explain social networking to my customers and try to help my parents figure out what it means to subscribe to my blog.

The only way people typically become expert at anything is to try something, fail a few times, learn from mistakes, and try again. No one is born as an expert at anything– expertise only comes as a result of knowledge and experiences.

Remember to keep things in perspective: the vast majority of the world is still in the dark on social media. So don’t let the social media experts intimidate you. Learn from them and then don’t be afraid to let others learn from you.

Image: Flickr user dierk_schaefer

Well hello there!

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Glad that you found me! After just a few months of blogging, I realized that the free WordPress.com platform just wasn’t giving me the flexibility or control I wanted over the look and feel of my site. I’ve now upgraded to self-hosted WordPress.org and I hope you like the changes! It’s a work in progress, so I’ll be playing with the design, pictures, plugins and features over the next couple of weeks. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you were one of the very generous people who subscribed to Mengel Musings at the old site, please grab the new feed here.

And if you happened to have any links to me on your sites or blogrolls, I would greatly appreciate it if you could point them to www.amymengel.com.

Welcome to my new home on the Web!

Is Facebook the new AOL?

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exitWhen I was in middle school, EVERY family I knew that was on the Internet was on AOL. It seemed like the only way you could get online. Everyone had AOL e-mail addresses, AOL Instant Messenger handles, and those somewhat stalker-enabled AOL Profiles. There were some alternatives, like CompuServe, but essentially you were on it because everyone else was.

Fast Forward 10 or 15 years and enter Facebook. Lots of people are joining the site because, well, everyone else is on the site. People in my parents’ generation have started to join because they’re being left out of information and conversations that happen on the site. Grandparents are joining Facebook because that’s where pictures of their grandkids get posted. My husband calls his parents in Pennsylvania to fill them in on the health of a neighbor who recently suffered a stroke. My in-laws live 500 yards from this man, but since my husband has friended his daughter on Facebook, he knows much more about how the neighbor is recovering than my in-laws do – despite that fact that we live 250 miles away. If you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing out.

But Facebook made changes earlier this month to its home page and the way information is presented. It now emphasizes friends’ status updates and photo posts and makes it hard to tell if they’ve joined a group, friended someone you know, became a fan of something, or installed an application. You have to visit their profile page for that. The process for things virally spreading through Facebook has been hampered, in my opinion. And according to TechCrunch, a new Facebook poll shows that 94 percent of Facebook users don’t like the changes, either.

In many industries, customers can “vote with their feet.” If they don’t like something, they leave. They take their business elsewhere. As alternatives to AOL began sprouting up, people began doing just that. They opted for a more open Internet, better connection service, less controlled content. But with Facebook, there doesn’t seem to be that option. How do you vote with your feet when there’s nowhere to go? MySpace is old hat and has its own set of issues that make it less user-friendly than Facebook. If all your friends are on Facebook and that’s where the action is, it doesn’t make much sense to leave in protest unless you can all go somewhere together. So as much as people are griping about the homepage changes, Facebook doesn’t have a ton of incentive to revert to the old site. Where are people going to go?

Facebook has shown willingness to listen to customers in the past – notably with its Beacon advertising platform and its recent changes to its Terms of Service. And several users weren’t fans of the 2008 design change, but Facebook stuck with it (those changes were more subtle). It has the luxury right now of being the biggest game in town. But judging by what became of AOL, that’s not a position that Facebook should get too comfortable in. Eventually, if Facebook users remain unhappy, expect a newer, cooler kid to roll in and start attracting attention – and users.

Image: Flickr user Scoobyfoo