Connie Bensen

I never want to be too far behind Jeremiah Owyang, so last Saturday I installed Google’s Sidewiki. Piece of cake! but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to claim my blog.

Everyone needs to stake their claim online for a number of reasons. In this case it allows you to post a comment that stays at the top. My guess is that more functionality may come. Best practice in branding says you should own your own domain & all related.

On Saturday I spent 2 hrs fighting with it to get that green box to show up. I installed Sidewiki in Flock. Then in Firefox. It was so frustrating! I am very stubborn when it comes to technology. I was almost ready to ask my sister even! (she maintains my blog – don’t EVEN assume that I do!).

So tonite I invested another half hour. And I found the answer! The instructions that I was reading left out one *ahem* major point. And it’s my duty to save you the time & pain.

1. Install Google Sidewiki if you haven’t.
2. Install Google Webmaster Tools if you haven’t previously done so. (yes, you need to put code in your blog*, but I was able to figure it out, so just do it.)
3. Open your blog/site, click on the Sidewiki icon and there you go! The option to claim your site! I see that you can add up to 1,000 sites That link provides examples. I’m going to add other pages on my site.
4. The last step is to write a note there for future Sidewiki users. Bill Hartzer has a couple nice examples (but his instr’s leave out step 2).

And I’m quite pleased now. I asked my Twitterati to test it. We all like comments, huh? Now you can gather Sidewiki comments too!

* If you’re using WordPress, click on Editor on left & then click on Header on right.

Look! It works!!

(Sister, Heidi & @SecretSushi – are you guys shocked & amazed?!!   )

Communities have various ways of encouraging participation. At the DeFrag conference there was much discussion about leader boards for internal communities. Personally I prefer featuring those that are adding value to the community rather than just those that are the most vocal. This allows you to highlight contributors for a variety of reasons rather than limiting your own incentivization program. (is that a word? It looks good though). I met someone who leads a community that does this very well. And the best thing is that it’s a community for those of us that specialize in social media!

It was a total pleasure to meet Robin Fray Carey, CEO & Co-Founder of SocialMediaToday at the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco last week. It’s always inspiring to meet women who are making a difference in the social media world.

SocialMediaToday.com is a unique community that offers bloggers a great springboard to share our thoughts & ideas. Here is why I love it: It aggregates them all in one place allowing us to read each others work, vote on it & comment. I have met new friends there & keep up with old ones. The value that it brings me is that my blog is syndicated there where it is exposed to new readers. They can click thru & explore my blog more fully because permalinks are offered. And they’re doing it in such a way that search engines don’t see it as a duplication & frown on it for SEO purposes.

I have been evangelizing SocialMediaToday for quite some time. I included it in my guest post on Problogger as a great way to take your blog to a new community. It really does give your blog legs! And if your focus is small business then you can syndicate your blog in their sister site, MyVenturePad.com. They have recently launched a new site for marketing specialists called TheCustomerCollective And I see that they have TheEnergyCollective too.

How can you add your blog & join the community? (I highly recommend it)

• Register for a profile
• Follow the instructions
• Your blog’s RSS is fed in & their fabulous Community Manager/Editor Jerry Bowles reviews the posts & chooses which to display.
• Sign up for their weekly newsletter – it rocks! by highlighting news & popular posts

Here’s my post from last week on using Twitter for Business that has been on SocialMediaToday. To date it’s had 524 views! And they kindly highlighted a link in the newsletter.

A huge thank you to Robin & Jerry for providing us with a place to aggregate our collective knowledge. It’s a rich source of information for those aspiring to learn & share our knowledge.

I happened upon a meme-like post at social media snackers. And just yesterday someone asked about Evernote on Twitter so it must be time to talk about my favorite social media tools again.

My top 10 tools & platforms are:

• Livewriter (am blogging in it as I type!) — update on Livewriter features
• Evernote – the most awesome desktop organizational tool ever! I live by it
• Facebook – my networking lifeline (I have a profile/resume in LinkedIn but…Facebook is far more useful)
• Twitter – where I have ‘face-to-face’ conversations with my friends
• Skype is becoming more important
• Copernic – desktop search tool allows me to find email & files fast
• Wordpress brings you this blog
• Digsby is a great chat aggregator – love talking to Facebook friends!
• Snag-it totally rocks for screenshots! & blogging
• Google alerts for brand monitoring

What are your favorite 10 social media tools/platforms?

Connect with me on Facebook & Twitter if you aren’t already. I’ll be glad to share more info on these app’s that save me time!

Listening is an integral part of monitoring the conversations. As a community manager I’m not only actively listening but also noticing how other companies are listening & participating. It’s exciting to to see more corporations using Twitter! How do I know that they are? Well, upon mention of a product or company within minutes the brand or a representative is following me.

As a customer this means that I have direct contact with the company. It’s very powerful! And the personal touch means a lot to me.

Who are actively using Twitter?

• @MarketingProfs,@BulldogSolut (Bulldog marketing), @evernote
• people representing indeed.com, radian6 and many more!

The other part of this is monitoring what people are saying on Twitter about your brand. I use tweetscan.com in the same way that I have GoogleAlerts set up: a daily report on @cbenson, @cbensen, acdsee and ‘community manager’

@jowyang recently listed a number of helpful Twitter app’s.

And if you’re wondering what Twitter is – Lee LeFever of CommonCraft has a video on it:

If you’re not on Twitter yet, sign up & follow me @cbensen

Connect with me on Facebook (link under my photo on left – works for Twitter too!) & I’ll be glad to help you with Twitter.

*update* 2 more corporations found me today: @HRBlock & @carnivalcruises

And I shouldn’t have forgotten my friends at @batchblue & also @perkettpr

*update* here’s an excellent article on why Companies Should Use Twitter