Social Media Sea-Change Part 1: Blogs and How to Join the Conversation

By Sherry Heyl, Julie Keyser-Squires Social Media Sea-Change Part 1: Blogs and How to Join the Conversation

Blogger: any individual who and a restaurant case study will hopefully strategic objective: retain customers. In maintains a blog. Bloggers con- encourage your participation. The goal is its first year, the Horsefeathers restaurant verse with each other and anyone who reaches their site by writ- to provide enough information so you will blog received 50,000 visits, which helped ing their thoughts in comment understand how social media works and the restaurant appear prominently in search sections or by linking to other teach you basic tactics that empower you to results and possibly boosted new customer blogs within their own post. join the conversation. acquisition. Would a simple blog strategy here do guests, operators and like this help your organization? Before you others in our industry turn to What is Social Media? answer, you need to first listen to conversa- Wfind information about cities, ho- Social media refers to a family of online tions already going on about your company tels and events? The library? The mailbox? peer-to-peer communication formats such in the blogosphere. No. They logon to the Internet. Today the as forums, blogs and wikis. Social media Web has shifted from the transactional to the is one of the most visible effects of Web 2.0 The First Step: informational. Not only can travelers com- in which Web-based communities such as Find the Conversations pare rates, view amenities and book a room FaceBook, facilitate collaboration and shar- Some say the hospitality and travel online, they can also read property reviews ing between users. blogosphere is as active as the business and post their own comments on sites like marketing village. To learn what is being TripAdvisor® and Travellerspoint. Many Restaurant Tallies 50,000 said about you, your first action is to conduct properties have experienced the impact of Visitors in Blog’s First Year a blog audit, or conversation audit. Each this first hand. In the book “Naked Conversations: conversation has a community around it; Social media’s wake-up call to hotel How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses so you must find and then listen to your operators is clear: any person with a com- Talk with Customers” authors Shel Israel and communities of interest to understand each puter can broadcast an opinion about you Robert Scobel discuss Horsefeathers, an eat- one’s culture. and your company. Today, understanding ery located in a four-season sports vacation Technorati (www.technorati.com) is what social media is and how you and your destination, Mount Washington, N.H. Of the one of the most common search engine organization can benefit by joining the on- restaurant’s $3 million in annual revenue for all social media indexing including line conversation is critical to your success. 60 percent comes from repeat customers. blogs, photos and videos. Here you can An overview of the social media landscape Its owners started a blog to achieve one search for conversations around industry

What is Social Media? An overview of the landscape. Blogs Social editing Widgets and mashups Podcasts Internet syndication Videologs New media Social tagging Social network community Media Social search Virtual sharing environments Chart courtesy of What a Concept!

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terms, company names and URLs to see who is lines, click on the blog or news source Social media is about showing talking and linking comments to specific sites you would like to read. All the news passion, knowledge and experience. or articles. Go to Technorati and type in your from that source will automatically be It is not a place for repurposed press company’s name, or your hobby if you want to counted as having been read. If you releases or marketing content. Also, have some fun with the process. would like to keep a post as unread, social media enables conversations, You will notice Technorati also assigns a check the Keep New box at the bottom both positive and negative. It is much number referencing the authority of each blog. right hand corner of the given post. better to facilitate those conversations Authority is based on the number of links coming To manage your growing list of RSS within your own territory rather than into the site from various other blogs. It also feeds, click the edit button at the top of in a community where you have no measures people within the community who are the left hand sidebar. You can click and influence. The blogosphere’s tone of conversing with each other. drag the RSS feeds to reorder them or honesty, transparency and authenticity It is important to understand that finding the move them into folders. provides unlimited opportunities for a dialogues does not prepare an organization to Now that you are technically set company to shine. respond to the conversation. Each community in up, you can go back to Technorati the blogosphere sets its own rules of engagement (www.technorati.com) to find bloggers Sherry Heyl is the CEO for What and has varying levels of influence. having conversations that interest you. a Concept, one of the first social media agencies. She can be reached at How to Listen: Part ll: [email protected]. Julie Keyser- Use Bloglines to Subscribe to Blog Develop a Blog Strategy and Squires, APR and CFO of Softscribe RSS Feeds Participate in the Conversa- Inc., is passionate about connecting Once you find conversations that interest tion people and ideas. She can be reached you, you need to listen, and the easiest way is by In Part ll of this series we will ex- at [email protected], or make using an RSS feed reader such as Bloglines (http: plain how to develop a blog strategy and a post on her business blog http: //www.bloglines.com). participate in conversations. //blog.softscribeinc.com.

What is an RSS Feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Information syndicated from frequently updated Web sites that can be subscribed to using a feed reader (like Bloglines). In newer Web browsers such as Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 subscribing to an RSS feed is as effortless as clicking on the orange feed logo found on most blogs. We like to say RSS feed readers are the math equation you must understand before you can participate in social media. Prepare to invest about two hours and some mental energy to set up your reader and practice subscribing to RSS feeds that interest you. Although Bloglines is one of the most popular RSS feed readers, we also like Google Blog reader (http: //blogsearch.google.com/ ) for finding additional blogs that interest you.

Subscribing to an RSS Feed To make subscribing to RSS feeds easy, you need to save a subscribe with Bloglines ‘bookmarklet’ into your favorites drop- down menu. To install the button, go to http: //www.bloglines.com/help/easysub and simply right click on Sub with Bloglines button, then select the Add to Favorites link. You may see a warning dialog, click OK to continue. Once you have successfully subscribed, you are ready to read your feeds. On the left hand sidebar within the feeds section of Blog-

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