Connie Bensen

One of my goals for 2009 was to expand how I communicate with all of you. I love writing & that’s what my blog is all about. Photos are fairly 2 dimensional so I’m adding podcasting & vido.
I have to give a huge THANK YOU to Adam Helweh for his tireless patience over the lat 2 weeks. (Don’t believe any of his stories!) And Sukhjit inspired me to provide you with the option to reply with video comments! My friend Thomas Knoll, Seesmic’s Comm Mgr should be proud! It’s for you guys, live it up!

One of the guys at Techrigy was teasing me that podcasting & video is all so 2001, but it’s been a process for me to get the hardware & integrate it into my blog. (No I didn’t buy a Mac & Yes, I’ll show you my new tools in a future post) It had to be easy for it to have happened. And the most important aspect is that I really wanted to! (I thought I”d be too self-conscious for the video aspect).

If you see my tweets you know that we’ve been having some very cold weather here in Minnesota. If you complain about your weather you may hear something about my temp. It’s my duty!

Today started out at a nippy temp with a high of -13. Some people ask if that’s the windchill? uh, no – that’s the real temp. Subtract another 20 degrees if there’s a wind.

So here’s a bit about Minnesota weather in January.

Yesterday I made a video of my husband blowing snow on a warm day. The high was a balmy 10 degrees! (Now the Techrigy guys were complaining that 15 was cold & we’ll be having a talk about that when I go out there).

These are my furry feet warmers on the weekends. (I put my feet up on my task chair & yes they’re under there).

So what do you think? Adam thought that the world may not be safe anymore?!!!

AHA! this is going to expand my horizons. My friend, Dave Barger has invited me to speak at his Memphis’ Social Media Expedition Breakfast on Wed!
And now I can attend the Singapore social media breakfast without flying half way around the world (for now anyway)

This is the first step in Nattergalen’s strategy to re-energize the FohBoh community. You can read about the entire project here.

FohBoh News Section

This is the first stage of the plan and will be the first section accessible to the community members. The template for this section is based on the web page called the Drudge Report. It’s basically a news aggregator. It is not member generated, the Drudge Reports site managers scan dozens of online news sites daily for stories they feel will be of particular interest and they post hyperlinks to those stories on their site. The hyperlinks appear on their site as simple typed headlines. It’s a really popular site because it’s simple, easy to navigate, and it saves time, people can scan multiple news properties by viewing easy to read and understand headlines, and they can navigate quickly to the articles they are most interested in from a single point.

The FohBoh version is very similar in form and function. The main difference is the community aspect, unlike Drudge Fohboh has members and their feedback will be instrumental in determining which links we post. Another example of this type of aggregation is SocialMediaToday.com and it’s sister sites. In their case the members of the community feed in their blog’s RSS & an editor chooses which articles will be published on the site.

How to set it up

Setting up the page is simple. It’s a separate page on the site, accessed from the main toolbar. The page itself is simple and clean (like the original Drudge page). Loading information is also simple, the headlines are simple hyperlinks in a typeface font, no graphics. Selecting the online blogs and publications to link to is a combination of research and asking the community members what they like to read. Once a good initial list was generated the stakeholders of the online publications and the blog writers were contacted. This isn’t required to do, you can link to a web site without permission and most of these sites have RSS feed setups on their pages already. This step goes back to the fourth section of our overall plan for FohBoh: transitioning FohBoh from a static point on the web to an anchor of a greater web presence. The goal is to introduce FohBoh to community at large. The goal is to have the online publications and blogs aware that they are being linked to in the news section because that awareness will make them realize what FohBoh’s vision is towards collaboration. This is a networking operation, it’s more than just linking to their content. It’s creating a bridge between the sites and offering an enhanced experience to a member base that is shared. The goal is for the site to be located at a busy intersection, not the end of a dead end street, and the purpose of this news section is to create 2 way traffic, and make FohBoh an intersection between multiple websites that have real relevance to it’s membership.

It is already known from member feedback that the restaurant industry professionals on FohBoh read A LOT. The restaurant biz is a lot like the social media biz: it isn’t just a job, its a lifestyle, and people really immerse themselves in it. By creating a single point of access to lots and lots of relevant information, one that is easy to scan and navigate, the goal is to create an opportunity for FohBoh to grow from a place to discuss issues to one that is part of the members morning newspaper and cup of coffee routine. This will increase page views and time on site, and increase value to members by giving them the information they crave in a “one stop shopping” type format, in an environment (the FohBoh community) that lends itself to deeper discussion of issues raised in news articles and blogs with other like minded professionals.

Scott’s excited about this first step. He said,

We expect to see some real results quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing your take on your blog, and like I said, I will be watching for your readers comments and hopefully some of them will look into creating a similar news section on their own sites. It’s a big project at startup, but one that is fairly simple to maintain and offers tremendous value to community members.

After talking with Scott about this I had a few thoughts:

• it’s going to provide a lot of value to the readers
• it’s a great reason to research who your extended community is & network with them
• my suggestion is to pull content from inside the community and also put that on the ‘news page’. Then it will direct readers into the community too.
• creating this news page has the potential to establish FohBoh has a leader & in the niche online – aggregating has that powerful effect
• adding a voting component would add the ability for readers to choose their favorite content

Not too long ago someone had expressed concern about offering inks that take your readers away. This plan will do that initially, but it’s a good example of the big picture in that you want to establish relationships & awareness of your community. One they start linking back to your community, traffic will be going in both directions.

Check out the page here. What are your thoughts?

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