Not since I saw an article about a service that prevents you from dialing certain numbers after you’ve been drinking have I seen something that could so revolutionize the often painfully awkward world of modern dating.
I’m an avid screener. Whether it’s my mother and sister (who seem to call on a daily basis, particularly Mom, who calls to see if I am okay if she hears about a car accident anywhere in the state), a telemarketer, or anyone else intruding on my evening, I’m almost always going to let it go to voicemail.
But nowhere is the power of the Screen more important than in the dating world. Awkward first date calling to ask you out again? Voicemail. Drunken ex-boyfriend at 2 in the morning? Voicemail. For that matter, sober ex-boyfriend at 5 in the afternoon? Voicemail.
Of course, letting things go to voicemail means you’re stuck either returning the call (which could be painful) or looking like a jerk (no one wants to be a jerk…except maybe jerks, which explains a lot about my dating history).
One of my buddy Amanda Gravel’s clients and a product of technology communications company Mobile Sphere, Slydial allows you to send voicemails to any mobile phone without having to take the chance the person will pick up. Just dial 267-SLY-DIAL (267-759-3425), and follow the prompts. From there, you’ll have to listen to a brief ad, and then leave your message. A missed call from the number you dial from will even appear in the recipients call list.
The campaign for the service is pretty slick and humorous, with a page of videos discussing the various situations you’d use the Slydial to fake phone tag–my favorite was the girl trying to avoid getting stuck on the phone with a boring relative. It may sound mean, but again, isn’t it better than just not calling at all? Technology is so beautiful.
And has there ever been a better solution for letting someone you’re dating down easy without that difficult conversation? Girls, how many times have you had to tell a girlfriend, upset that her latest guy just stopped calling, that he was clearly a coward who didn’t want to have to confront you with the news that it wasn’t working out?
Sure, a voicemail breakup is no picnic (take it from the girl who got dumped on IM earlier this year), but at least it’s a conclusion.
Calling your mom back without having to hear about how your sister’s cat got eaten by a wild animal (not that this happened to me or anything, sigh)
Calling in sick to work
Checking in with a co-worker without disturbing them during a meeting (yay, a non-nefarious use!)
Calling a friend or relative with belated birthday or other greetings after they’ve gone to bed without waking them
There’s really almost no end to the possibilities. While I usually say I will use a service and then forget about it, this is one I might actually put to good use.
After the presentation, I started to think of different techniques I use to produce and promote my blog posts and came up with some big bucket categories. For those getting started, here’s a quick run through of what I do, from start to finish.
1. Composing The Post- I use WordPress for my blogs, but I never compose posts within the WordPress editor. Instead, I use Windows Live Writer. It’s free, and it’s really easy to use. I also sometimes post to more than one blog, and Windows Live Writer lets you post one post to as many blogs as you want.
When I’ve completed a post, I choose to “Save Draft To Weblog” rather than publish directly to the blog.
2. Editing The Post- Once I’ve published a draft, I’ll log in and edit the post. That way I can add tags, trackbacks, categories, etc.
Additionally, this is the step where I use the Zemanta plugin, which I mentioned yesterday. Zemanta will look at the content of my post and will suggest relevant articles and photos.
3. Check out related posts- If Zemanta suggests similar posts, I’ll go check them out to see what others are saying about the topic I’m writing about. This way readers are able to see other perspectives on the same topic.
4. Trackback- If I’m linking to other blogs, I’ll then send them trackbacks, letting them know I’m linking to them. Many blogs will send links back to my post for sending a trackback, creating a chain of similar posts on one topic.
5. Post- Hit the publish button in the editor.
6. Visit the post- Take a look at the post to make sure everything looks okay (this is especially necessary when embedding video, etc).
7. Make a short URL- I copy the URL of my post and go to a service like TinyURL to get a shortened URL.
8. Post in twitter- I’ll then take the TinyURL and make a tweet, saying that a new post is up. I’ll first do this in the blogstring twitter account (@blogstring), and if it’s a particularly interesting post, I’ll post it in my personal twitter account (@nathanwburke)..
And sometimes……
If I have a post that I really think is helpful or interesting, I’ll submit the post to social news sites (reddit, digg, mixx, etc), and stumbleupon. But I don’t do this often, as it definitely seems spammy.
So, this will be the most self-referential blog post I’ve ever done. I’m here at podcamp Boston 3, giving a presentation on Discovery- how people find blogs, video and podcasts they love and what that means.
After looking through all the panels and presentations available at podcamp this year, I noticed that most were dealing with content creation, and social media marketing at a very high level. But I didn’t see anything tactical. So, I decided to tailor my presentation toward tactical promotional efforts. Things you can actually do to get your stuff in front of people.
Since I am primarily a blogger, I’ll be talking about ways to promote blogs and blog posts first, though much of what I’ll be talking about applies to podcasts and video as well.
Part One: Finding Great Stuff
I’m addicted to finding great new stuff. But all of the things that I’ve found and said “this is the best thing ever” were found when I wasn’t looking for them. I don’t usually say “I’m looking for a funny video of an animatronic band playing an Usher song.” Why? Because I didn’t know that existed.
Instead, finding stuff is somewhat random. But here’s the short list of places I’ve used to find great stuff:
1. Reddit- Reddit is a social news site that’s a lot like digg.com. The content is refreshed constantly, and reddit is consistently a good source for finding topics, posts, videos, etc. that are just starting to take off.
2. Hacker News- While reddit is great for finding items in a wide variety of topics, hacker news is better for finding technology related posts. It’s heavily slanted toward web startups and entrepreneurs.
3. BuzzFeed- BuzzFeed is mostly concerned with pop culture stuff, and it looks for hot topics on the web. It then aggregates the posts about the topic and puts them together. If you’re looking for something new and breaking, buzzfeed is great.
4. Techmeme- This one should be a no-brainer for most. It’s an aggregator that finds hot tech topics and displays the most discussed stories.
5. GetSatisfaction- GetSatisfaction is like a large-scale customer support forum for all web 2.0ish companies. But it’s also a great place to find new stuff.
Part Two: Getting Your Stuff In Front Of An Audience
#1 Super Dope Ill Ninja Secret Trick: Zemanta
Zemanta is a plugin for blogging that reads what you’re writing in real-time, and suggests relevant photos and blog posts. So I’ll give you an example of that right now.
This is interesting in a couple of ways. First, it helps you find other articles to reference and read for more information on your topic. But what’s really cool about it is when you select these other articles to link to, Zemanta automatically sends a trackback to that site. So, if you’ve got a topic that’s covered by, say, mashable and techcrunch, simply linking to them with Zemanta sends a trackback, therefore giving you a link on their page. Badass.
#2 Super Dope Ill Ninja Not-at-all Secret Trick: Twitter
You may think this is obvious, and you’re right. But here’s what I do: I have a personal account and a blog account. So, I’m @nathanwburke and the blog is @blogstring. So, that way, people that are interested in getting updates whenever a new post is up can get notified via twitter from @blogstring. This is one of those subtle psychological tactics. Personally, I don’t like following someone on twitter that is only there to promote their blog posts.
#3 Super Dope Ill Ninja Somewhat Baffling Trick: StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a blog discovery engine that learns what you like and recommends blogs to you. But instead of using it to find blog posts, I use StumbleUpon to promote my blog posts.
StumbleUpon has a browser toolbar that let’s you share sites you like, rate them, etc.:
So, after posting, stumble your post (and encourage others to do the same), and you’ll get some traffic. Trust me.
#4 Super Dope Ill Ninja Stroke My Ego Trick: Blogged.
Full disclosure: blogged is a partner of my employer, matchmine, but I’ve been using blogged well before the partnership.
Blogged.com is a blog directory that focuses more on blogs than posts. If you’re a blogger, you submit your blog, they have actual human beings review it, and they then give you a score on a 1-10 scale.
As you can see, my blog, blogstring.com has been rated 9.0 out of 10. Not bad. So, I proudly display that on my blog’s sidebar. Blogged is now moving away from just focusing on blogs, and is now also indexing and presenting individual posts. I get some fairly strong traffic from blogged.
#5 Common Sense You Already Know Trick: Write For Other People
This is a no-brainer, but it works. Write in other places. For example, I write on my company’s blog, this blog, I’m starting to cross-post to nathanwburke.com, and I also write for media bullseye once in a while. Each post links back to blogstring to increase the link love. The more incoming links, the better, and the fact that each blog has a new audience gives me a chance to get an intro to people that don’t already read my stuff. Out of all of these, this is by far the best for many reasons.
Podcasts
So, when I came to podcamp last year, I’d never listened to a podcast before. Now I’m doing a live one every day called object:location. We talk about the newest shiny beta thing, and then data portability. So I get to play around with new stuff, then my co-host gets to talk about the really cool cutting-edge hardcore tech stuff. I like to think of us as a geek version of love line, except I’m not funny and we don’t talk about sex.
Anyway, we use BlogTalkRadio to record our podcast. It’s insanely easy to use. You just call a phone number, it records the podcast, and gives you code to display on your blog as well as an mp3 file. So here’s what I do:
1. I set up the segment on blogtalkradio and get the embed code.
2. I then go to objectlocation.com and embed the code, and then write what we’ll be talking about.
3. I do the same thing on this blog.
4. I announce the show on twitter on my account and the blogstring account along with the phone number
What About You?
So, what do you use?
The Powerpoint Presentation from my panel is available here.
Hey, Nate posts his podcast on Blogstring, so from now on I am joining the fun. Media Bullseye’s Roundtable podcast goes up every Friday. Jennifer Zingsheim and I host the show, and usually welcome a knowledgeable and delightful social media guru, blogger, podcaster or other communications pro (and once we even had Nate!) to the program as well.
This week, we had Debbie Weil with us, and we discuss corporate blogging (is it easier for smaller companies?), creative marketing (will you watch HBO’s new series after their creepy and creative social media push?), and Michelle Obama on BlogHer (authentic or flunkie?).
Nate already covered this yesterday, but I had to throw in my two cents–I am psyched for this weekend’s PodCamp Boston 3. I had a few goals, and I figured if I put them in writing it might make it more likely I follow through on them:
Meet LOTS of new people–at the last PodCamp I tended to stay within my comfort zone a little too much, I think. Not that Paull Young isn’t a valuable guy to hang around, but after two days of sitting next to him at every session and meal, I realized that maybe I should have broadened my horizons.
Recruit Fresh Meat for Media Bullseye - CustomScoop’s magazine, Media Bullseye, is having a great first year. I’d like to make it even greater by plunking a copy of our summer print edition in the hands of everyone I meet and asking them to write for us. It’s fun to get paid for writing about what you like to write about already, right?
Have Fun - Okay, this isn’t a real goal, but rather an inevitability.
Hope to see you there! I may be participating in Nate’s panel, even though he didn’t ask me. Hmph.
This morning was one of those times when I realized what a true web dork I am. I found out yesterday that the .me domain names were going on sale at 11 this morning, and I desperately wanted to get aweso.me. Godaddy had a little countdown timer for the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the names were available to buy.
When there was one minute remaining, I opened a new firefox tab and typed in aweso and set the dropdown to .me. The minute counted down, I hit submit, waited and……
Success! Aweso.me was available. So I bought it for two years and went through the checkout. Seconds later I received the following email:
Aweso.me, right? I was so excited and dreaming up what I was going to do with it. Then I got another email:
Whaaaa? So I picked up the phone and called. What ensued was a circular conversation about how Godaddy was completely unprepared for a “land rush”, how it’s likely that none of the good .me domain names were available at launch anyway, as they were probably “pre-registered”. I asked about the pre-registration process, to which I was told “I don’t have insight into that process, but know it exists”.
So, thank you Godaddy for both making then ruining my day. I’ve always used GoDaddy to register my domain names (20ish), but I’m bummed.
Oh yeah, and this has happened to other people I know today, and yes, Godaddy did charge us all for the domains they said were available then decided they were not. Refunds “should be available within the next 72 hours.”
Blogstring will be representing full force at podcamp boston this coming weekend (meaning Sarah and I will both be there, but it sounds better when I refer to “blogstring”). I will be there as a kind of split personality, as I will be wearing the blogger hat (not literally, unless I can find a hat that just says blogger. in that case, I’d definitely be wearing that), and the matchmine hat, as matchmine is a sponsor.
Also, I’ll be running a panel discussion on Sunday at 1:30-2:15 entitled “Discovery- How people find blogs, podcasts, and video and what that means to you.” I have a couple of panelists ready to go, but I’m hoping to find some more. So if you’re interested in participating in the panel, please let me know via email (nathan dot burke at blogstring dot com). Here’s what I’m hoping for:
Since podcamp is mostly aimed at helping content producers learn how to better produce, distribute, and promote their content, I wanted a panel on how consumers of UGC find the things they watch. How do people find the podcasts they end up subscribing to? With the millions of YouTube videos and blogs out there, how do you find your favorites? And on the flipside: as a content producer, how can you best leverage the different distribution networks, directories, and search engines to promote your content to people that would love your stuff?
I’d love to have representatives from both sides of the same coin: representatives of companies that help people find stuff (examples: YouTube, Odeo, Podcast.com, BlogTalkRadio, Blogged, Technorati, Revver, etc), and content producers that have found innovative ways to get their offering out there.
So again, please contact me if you’re interested, and definitely stop by and say hi.
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Not since I saw an article about a 
Nate already covered this yesterday, but I had to throw in my two cents–I am psyched for this weekend’s PodCamp Boston 3. I had a few goals, and I figured if I put them in writing it might make it more likely I follow through on them:
Blogstring will be representing full force at podcamp boston this coming weekend (meaning Sarah and I will both be there, but it sounds better when I refer to “blogstring”). I will be there as a kind of split personality, as I will be wearing the blogger hat (not literally, unless I can find a hat that just says blogger. in that case, I’d definitely be wearing that), and the matchmine hat, as matchmine is a sponsor.