A Personable Brand

Sweeping generalization: most people don’t look good, sound good or sound intelligent when they’re being filmed. Even if your subject matter is interesting, video blogs make it seem less so.

Very few people have a gift in front of the camera. The best come across as natural and engaging. Marc and David Perel of From the Couch have that gift. Their content is cool, but they also seem likeable guys themselves. You never feel they’re behaving artificially in front of the camera. As a result they’re memorable, and link that personable nature to their brand.

Dynamic Duos Are Better Than Stale Singles

One person talking directly to the camera is rarely entertaining. If you’re simply going to read out your content then you may as well write it instead. Think of television. How many shows are one person talking to camera all the time? I can’t think of any.

Look at morning shows around the world. The format is always the same – two presenters. Two presenters give a more dynamic result. David and Marc play off each other, interrupt each other, even get into arguments. The whole presentation seems far more natural, and more interesting because of that.

Organized With A Hint Of Anarchy

I don’t know how David and Marc put their show together, how much planning they do. My guess is that they have a basic idea and have some notes, but they don’t overplan. Overplanning any kind of presentation can make it seem too rehearsed. It’s the same reason why every book on public speaking says that you shouldn’t read text directly, because it won’t sound natural.

The opposite also holds true, if you try and speak without planning at all it’s going to be chaotic and sound dumb. You need to find a happy medium. Enough planning that the topic gets covered and you demonstrate that you know your stuff. Enough flexibility that your presentation sounds natural and unrehearsed.

So Video Blogs Are Still Rubbish?

I still don’t like them. I thought it was the medium. What From The Couch demonstrates is that it isn’t the medium, but the presentation. Video blogs shouldn’t be a replacement for what you could have just written down. They need to use the dynamic of live action, and natural human behaviour, to present information in a different way. Don’t read out a prepared text, don’t just present something on video because you can. Look at From The Couch, and realize that to make video blogging worthwhile you have to do something a little bit different.

I wanted to highlight two I’ve come across recently that can really benefit your social networking life. They’re very different from each other, but both can help you to develop wider and more worthwhile relationships in the blogosphere, and give you the opportunity to add value.

Twitter2friendfeed – because you’re leaving Twitter, right?

That’s the trend anyway. Too many people annoyed at Twitter’s downtimes. Friendfeed’s increased functionality and reliability. And because it’s the fashionable thing to do right now, yes?

Except you’ve got hundreds of people you follow on Twitter, and it’d take forever to add them all manually on Friendfeed. So you add the few most important and live a life split between Friendfeed and Twitter because you can’t move your entire contact list over.

Until you use Twitter2friendfeed at least. It automatically runs through all of the people you follow on Twitter, and subscribes to every match it can find on friendfeed. Simple, but highly effective. And in a cool retro text program format!

It really was a lifesaver for me, because I wanted to increase my usage of friendfeed but didn’t have time to manually move my contacts over. And that was just following 113 people. Can’t imagine how useful the app could be for people who have several hundred or a thousand people they follow on Twitter.

I still use Twitter regularly, I’m not jumping ship because despite the problems I still like the app. But now I can get the best of both worlds, maximising my Twitter and my FriendFeed usage.

Comment Info Tip – rubbish name, cool app

I genuinely can’t remember which blog I saw this on first. I guess kind of a hint there, that I remembered the app before I remember the blog. Comment Info Tip is a recently developed WordPress plugin that gives some public information about your commenters, and interactivity with their blogs.

It’s particularly good for your regular commenters. It’ll list the last three posts that they commented on, highlighting their contribution to the discussion. And if they have a blog it’ll grab a snippet from their last blog post, with a link to that post. All of which appears in a mini popup when you mouseover the commenter’s name. It’ll also highlight pingbacks and trackbacks.

All of which is great for developing a more interactive relationship with your visitors. It highlights and rewards the people who contribute regularly. The link to their last post is particularly handy. Unlike the similar CommentLuv plugin (which I also like) it checks this link in real time. CommentLuv adds a link back to a commenter’s latest post at the time of their comment. The Info Tip gives a link back to their latest post as of now.

Main flaw for me so far is with the interal links of the popup. I use SEO friendly URLs with WordPress. But when the popup links to “last posts commented on” in my blog it uses the default www.blogname.com/?p=35 addresses. That doesn’t impact on functionality, but does have a minor impact on SEO and also isn’t great for analysing web stats.

Twitterholic

It took me a little time to work out that the joy of getting involved in Twitter is the ability to follow anyone. Even if they’re not interested in following you back, keeping updated on tweets by industry leaders and experts is invaluable. Some of those individuals you can probably identify easily from their blogs, but if you can’t, or if you’re new to the social networking arena, then Twitterholic is invaluable.

It’s pretty simple. Twitterholic lists the Top 100 Twitter users based on either followers, friends, or number of updates. Handily it also provides minimal profile information for those users on the main ranking list – so you can quickly check a blog or homepage of a popular user to see if they’re someone you should be watching.

Twitterholic lets you identify some of the users you can’t afford not to be following, and it’s also possible to take a look at your own stats and trends. That gives it an added functionality that can give you a good overview of the development of your Twitter network over time.

Who Should I Follow?

Of course if everyone just followed the big names they’d discovered on Twitterholic then it would be a pretty samey and boring Twitter experience. In developing my own network of followed and followers I wanted to be able to find users with similar interests to my niche. And I also wanted to have a look at people who might be potentially useful contacts in geographical areas I might want to find work. This is where Who Should I Follow? comes into its own.

WSIF drills down a bit further to provide you advice on who you should be following. You can tweak your preferences to get suggestions of popular or less popular users, or specify a geographical location and get suggestions of users from there. As an example, I’m going to be moving permanently to Southeast Texas in the next year and so I used WSIF to find Twitter users interested in social networking and website design from the Houston area.

If Twitterholic is going to give you the heads up on great people to follow to stay informed, WSIF seems to be the option that’s going to help you find people to develop more communicative relationships.

Strawpoll

Not so directly useful to an individual, I’ve picked out StrawPoll as an example of using Twitter in a clever way. Every day the site posts an either or question – e.g. “Webmail or Desktop Client?” – and develops a live bar chart of tweets in response. You simply tweet back to @strawpoll with your choice, and any comment you might have. The choice is logged and impacts the chart, while the comment is posted on the page as well.

The presentation is excellent and it’s worth taking a look at some of the surprising results the polls sometimes come up with. But it’s also a demonstration of some of the wider functionality of Twitter, how the application can be used for different purposes.

Function with some fun

In the quest to be a social networker it’s sometimes easy to fall into the trap of seeing it as a chore. Hopefully the options above will help the effectiveness of Twitter as a tool, but also make it a more interesting and enjoyable application to use.

Why the StumbleUpon toolbar is genius

Unlike most site submission/sharing sites like Digg, Mixx and others, using StumbleUpon basically requires the installation of their toolbar. When I first came across StumbleUpon this was actually a slight negative – I don’t like sites that require me to install add-ons to work properly.

Now I wouldn’t do without it. The genius of the StumbleUpon toolbar is that it makes you want to use the service, it makes you an addict. There’s always time to stumble a few more sites and give them a quick thumbs up or thumbs down. It makes site submission a breeze and lets you quickly check reviews and add your own comments to any stumbled site. Basically it makes you addicted to improving the resource constantly, which is only to the advantage of you, other users, and StumbleUpon. I think it must be the single biggest factor in StumbleUpon’s success.

The only current limitation is that the toolbar is only available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. That leaves other browser users out in the cold, and that’s particularly an issue with Safari which figures suggest is gaining a toehold in the Windows market now as well as with OSX run Macs. Sure there’s a workaround, but the standard user wants to be able to install the toolbar easily in their browser of choice.

Why twhirl is best at making you twitter

Twitter is the “buzz” social networking portal at the moment, and far more useful and valuable than it initially seems. But the trick to Twitter is that you have to stay reasonably active, keep yourself involved in conversations, otherwise it’s really just spouting random chatter at you all the time.

Obviously continually checking your twitter page in your browser isn’t the most practical way staying involved in a number of conversations at once. Firefox offers a number of add-ons that work within the browser – like Twitterbar. But let’s face it, even the most ardent web junkie is not concentrating on their browser window 100% of the time.

Enter twhirl, which takes advantage of Adobe Air to bring Twitter functionality to a desktop client. It’s all very simple really, once twhirl is installed (and one of the joys of Adobe Air is that it makes its applications installable cross-browser) you simply tell it your Twitter username and password and it lets you listen and tweet within a self contained application. twhirl also lets you cross post to the similar apps Pownce and Jaiku.

For me this makes Twitter more like a large scale instant messaging service, and seperating it from the browser makes it much more accessible and useful. Desktop alerts of new tweets mean I can respond quickly even when working with other applications and not paying much attention to my browser window. And the setup is good enough that new tweets appear basically instantaneously, making it easy to react quickly to information.

Why Alert Thingy ensures you miss nothing

And for everything else there’s Alert Thingy. Another Adobe Air powered desktop client, it links in with FriendFeed to ensure that you’re kept fully updated with all your social networking – whether that be blog posts, submissions to news sites such as Mixx, or indeed new tweets on Twitter. Once you’re set up it gives you far more functionality than the actual FriendFeed webpage, which you’ll probably only ever visit again to add new contacts.

FriendFeed itself is a great service because it brings together your contacts from all the different social networks and posts all their updates onto a single page. But the interface is slightly clunky for my tastes and it’s more effective for less time-critical services such as submissions to Flickr.

Alert Thingy brings a much faster and more convenient way to read updates to the desktop. It acts in much the same way as twhirl in that it updates whenever new content is added to your contacts’ social networks – whether that be a submission to Digg or a new tweet. It even updates with new comments on your contacts’ blog posts (as well as your own). I never really found FriendFeed particularly useful until Alert Thingy came along, because the mish mash of different styles of social networks it brought together just didn’t work effectively as a web page that you needed to visit and/or refresh regularly.

The latest version of Alert Thing (v1.2) even adds the ability to send tweets as well. This is great new functionality and really widens the scope of the application. That being said, I don’t think it trumps twhirl on that score yet. Updates to Alert Thingy are slightly slower than with twhirl, approximately a five minute delay. This is not a major issue, but for social networkers who might be keen to be the first commenter on a new blog post at a major source like Mashable, that delay in receiving the tweet can be important.

Alert Thingy is, of course, also reliant on your contacts being on FriendFeed as well. That’s again not a major issue with less time critical networking such as Digg or Flickr, but is important in regards to tweets which you need to keep an eye on more regularly. Hence another reason why despite the increased Twitter functionality on Alert Thingy I’ll be keeping twhirl running on my PC.

No doubt there’ll be more along soon

Those are certainly my “top three” add ons/applications that have really made a difference to my social networking recently. As I’ve said on my earlier posts about developing blog traffic growth I’m still learning about maximising social networking to increase visitors to this blog. One thing I have learnt is that if you’re adding value to your social networks then that’s the best way to get reciprocal value in terms of visitors and interests back. The three things I’ve highlighted above go a long way to helping you achieve that added value, to the greater benefit of all your networks.

So, I’ve named my top three, what are your favourites?

Relevant links

• Alert Thingy: FriendFeed on your desktop (downloadsquad)
• Look Out Twhirl, Alert Thing Adds Twitter Support (TechCrunch)
• How to ‘Stumble’ without the StumbleUpon toolbar (stevelawson.net)

Design

First impressions are not good. In face SiteHoppin’ looks to me like some of the worst examples of mid-90s site design. Garish, cluttered and unattractive, it put me off from the first moment. And things don’t get much better once you sign up and log in.

Navigation is clunky and unclear. Editing your profile doesn’t seem to be working properly. Setting up any kind of profile and preference system is confusing, and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of help system. And text appearance of pages is further hampered by the lack of any left and right margins at all.

Once I’d finally noticed the main ‘Menu’ drop down button (randomly situated about a third of the way across the top navigation bar and not highlighted) I did manage to find the how to section (unhelpful) and other functionality, but it’s all unstyled and hugely unattractive.

So basically if I hadn’t seen the SiteHoppin’ buzz and instead had just come across the site one day, I think I’d have browsed away immediately just because of its looks and design. Not only is it unattractive but its general usability is poor. Apparently it’s also targetting the mobile browser market, but I can’t imagine such poor design and clutter is going to show up any better on a small mobile screen.

How it works

Like StumbleUpon users can randomly browse through a selection of submitted sites (either generally or by specific category), and submit sites they find interesting. You also, once you’re registered, add “Your Hop URL” which I think is the site that you specifically want to drive traffic to – and this is an important part of the system.

SiteHoppin’ is a “browser within a browser”, i.e. the sites appear in a frame under the SiteHoppin’ banner. Not as elegant as StumbleUpon’s toolbar, but it does the job. Each site you see you can rate from 1-5.

Importantly, every time you hop to a site you earn 1 beer credit, and every time you rate a site you earn 5 beer credits. This is important because each 10 beer credits is supposed to give you at least one hop to the “Your Hop URL” that you’re trying to drive traffic to. The idea presumably being that the most active members of the SiteHoppin’ community have the greatest opportunity to drive traffic to their site.

Spammer’s paradise

The model of beer credits=hops is hugely flawed. The concept behind it isn’t too bad – that active users gain more weight. Except that rather than requiring users to actively hop from site to site, they’ve incorporated a “slideshow” button.

John Chow identified how much of a danger this is. It means that you can set the page to autohop indefinitely, racking up beer credits, and not have to take any active part. I left it alone for about an hour and ended up with 206 beer credits, which is supposedly good for 20 hops to my designated website. A spammer could simply designate their commercial site as their “Your Hop URL” and leave their browser site hopping in the background, racking up thousands of beer credits.

And if that wasn’t enough they’ve made the problem even worse by allowing for the transfer of beer credits between users. So it’s not just that one spammer who’s gaining credits and guaranteed hops to a particular site, it’s potentially hundreds all transferring their credits to benefit one commercial site.

33% is in Beer Stocks

In addition to earned beer credits you can also buy beer stocks. These are paid Wiki pages based on a keyword that you purchase at (currently) $10 per vowel and $1 per consonant. So for example you could buy sitehopping.com/sex. You can do whatever you want with that page once you’ve got it – embed your blog, e-shop, whatever.

33% of all SiteHoppin’s traffic is guaranteed to go through these Beer Stock sites, divided equally among them. Which is not a bad model for developing traffic, but again leaves itself open to spammers.

Not keen

SiteHoppin’ just looks…cheap. There are a couple of reasonable ideas in there but it’s cluttered and badly designed, and is just begging to be taken advantage of by spammers. Beer Stocks are probably the concept with the most long term potential impact, but not implemented like this. In the immediate future I’ll be staying away from SiteHoppin’

Related Links

• Make Money Online With SiteHoppin’ Beer Stock (John Chow)
• SiteHoppin’ and Beer Credits (Mashable)