Posted on August 4, 2008 - by Elliott
Our Online Toolkit
To have a successful blog, we need to interact with potential readers in as many ways possible. In this post, although a little off topic, I will share the ways we are trying to gain eyeballs.
Delicious
Delicious defines itself as
a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
When an interesting link gets past around the office we make sure to put it into our delicious bookmarks, which can be found here: http://delicious.com/bjgisresponsive. Readers can subscribe to our bookmarks, become our friend through delicious (that way we can share links directly to one another). I am also working to get our new links posted on our blog once a month for more crossover activity.
Twitter
Twitter is a
service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
What does that mean you ask? I think of Twitter as a chat system/blogging platform and social networking all rolled into one. Your entries are related to 140 characters (pretty hard sometimes). You can “follow” people and then get their updates almost immediately. With twitter, you can have conversations with people halfway around the globe that have common interests.
At first I didn’t know how to find good quality people to follow. Twitter, at the time, did not have a search function. But a website called summize.com did. Summize, which recently was acquired by twitter, built a search function on top of twitter using twitter’s api (application programming interface, a fancy way of saying twitter opened it’s data up to summize).
Using summize, I searched for key words (revit, leed, usgbc, architecture, etc.). Whoever said those words, I “followed”. The true twitter-ers want a conversation, not spam pointing them to your blog. That is the difficult part, but also the fun of twitter.
Come start a conversation with us. http://twitter.com/bjgisresponsive
Scribd
Scribd is an interesting social network centered around the sharing of documents. There are other ones out there (i.e. slideshare.net) but Scribd is the only one I have found that you can share the most variety of documents (word, excel, presentations, pdf, etc.). This is also a great way to share documents on our blog. See any one of our posts with embedded documents.
Interesting note, the document with the most views is a presentation Teresa gave on green teams to Sustainable Silicon Valley.
You can check out our documents here.
Vimeo
is a thriving community of people who love to make and share video.
This is pretty new to the BJG online strategy. We have posted a number of screencasts from our Pleasanton open house. I have hopes of posting fun videos from BBQs, presentations, etc.
Find us at http://vimeo.com/bjg
Feedburner
Some people use RSS (really simple syndication) to read our blog content. It is a way to stay on top of our latest news without having to come to our site. To use RSS, many people use netvibes, igoogle or other feed readers.
This is great. I love for people to read our content. The only unfortunate part is that the people who still read our content, but don’t visit the site, don’t get counted in our page views and uniques and such.
In comes feedburner.com. When someone subscribes to our feed, it is diverted through FeedBurner so that we can track how many people have subscribed, click through, etc. FeedBurner also has ways to monetize your feed. Pretty neat.
Google Analytics
Oh, Google Analytics, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. So much data, so many fancy graphs. I use the free Google Analytics to track visitors to our blog. It is really powerful, but I use it to graze over information such as unique visitors, time on site, etc. Easy integration with wordpress through a plugin.
Digg
Digg is
a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.
Another recent entry into the BJG aresnal of online tools. Digg is somewhat like delicious in that you can share links, but it is much more social. Digg goes above and beyond just a link sharing site to adding commenting abilities and perhaps most importantly voting. Each registered user can digg (vote for) or bury (vote against) any story on the site.
Find us at http://digg.com/users/bjgisresponsive
Technorati
Technorati is a blog search engine. It indexes the web live. For example, the instant I post an article on our blog, Technorati automagically comes by and indexes it for us.
Find us at http://technorati.com/people/technorati/Responsive
Netvibes
Netvibes is a good tool for last. If you go to http://www.netvibes.com/bjg you will find our netvibes universe. It acts as not only a feed aggregator of all of our online activity (delicious, digg, vimeo, etc.) it also acts as a way to organize feeds that we think are of interest. Right now we have a couple of tabs (architecture, bim, etc.) and on each tab we have a couple of feeds displayed. This is similar to a blog roll, but provides you with a little more information.
Netvibes is trying to build a social network around what use to be solely a place to go for your personal start page (igoogle, pageflakes and my yahoo are others). Users can favorite stories, interact with other people’s start pages and comment on start pages.
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