We’ve discussed on many occasions about the dangers of underblogging. You can’t build a community or following if you’re not posting enough original content.

I applied my own rules to this blog yesterday and the results were a lesson in blogging that I didn’t think I needed to learn. Apparently, I was wrong.

If you want to build a strong community and following, you have to get it right. You can’t have a post littered with spelling or grammatical errors. You especially cannot post a spelling error in the title. Yesterday, I did, and it hurt.

What credibility does a blog have if it has simple spelling mistakes? I was in a rush to get out the door and I really wanted to get that post out, so I spit it out without proofreading. The results were awful.

New rule: if you don’t have time to proofread a story, don’t post it. If you don’t have time to check the facts, don’t post it. It’s better to be late than to be wrong (even though many would disagree). Blog well. Blog without errors. The good ol’ days of a “personal weblog” are behind us if we really want a following. It’s an easy rule to follow.

It’s also an easy rule to skip.

Don’t skip it.

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Thankfully pointed out by many fans and Nissan Puyallup.

Gaining guest posting opportunities on credible blogs and websites has been a staple in the Internet marketing strategies of brands, businesses and bloggers for the past several years. Building and maintaining social relationships with bloggers and audiences has always been the foolproof formula for achieving such opportunities.

Marketers worldwide have been frequently making use of Email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to solidify their relationships with bloggers, thought leaders and key figures within their niches. However, many Internet marketers have given very little thought to how guest posting could actually be severely damaging their social standing with the very individuals they are trying to connect with.

The following article tackles and showcases the four major pitfalls that guest posting could land Internet marketers in.

Getting Caught Out

There are Black Hat strategies towards every possible Internet marketing campaign and guest posting is no exception. One of the biggest pitfalls marketers make is submitting spun or unoriginal content to numerous websites. Now, you may very well get away with such an approach in terms of beating the Google bots, but when it comes to maintaining that social relationship with bloggers and Webmasters, you’re going to find yourself in a whole world of trouble.

If you Tweet/ReTweet, post or share unoriginal/spun content on your social medias the chances are it will get spotted very quickly by your social media audiences, the leaders in your niche and of course the individuals you actually submitted the post too. This will put you in a very bad social position. If the thought leaders of your niche see what you’re up to, you will rapidly receive a bad reputation online, your posts will more than likely get taken down, and the relationships you worked so hard to build will most definitely be gone instantly.

Think of guest posting as a marriage, you wouldn’t cheat on your partner, so don’t try to deceive bloggers and website owners either.

Losing Your Personality

One of the biggest ways to ‘turn off’ your social following as a blogger, brand or even as a business is to lose your online personality. The reason an online audience Follows you, adds you as a Friend or adds you to their Circle is because they are interested in what you’re doing, and what you’re posting about. Yet so many marketers forget about this.

The social media websites of guest authors are constantly full of blanket Retweets and link filled automated posts, which are about as engaging to an audience as staring at a blank wall. Marketers overuse apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite in order to cut down on the time and effort they have to put in to keeping their social medias updated. Although, abusing these tools is one sure fire way to lose your social following, and kill those valued connections with bloggers, site owners and thought leaders.

Look at your social media profiles, if each day there are more blanket, linked filled updates than personalised or ‘human’ posts, you’re going to quickly start losing those engaging audiences you sought after to benefit from guest posting in the first place.

Don’t lose your personality as a guest author. Spare a few minutes each day to make each social media status update personal and personable. If you don’t, you’ll soon see both your audience and your guest posting relationships begin to disappear.

Making Posting A One Way Street

Guest blogging marketers are all about ‘getting the link’, they’ll do whatever it takes to get their link in their post. in order to boost their website traffic, get SEO value and make a name for themselves as a guest author. This activity in itself isn’t a bad thing at all, in fact it’s the sign of a good Internet marketer, but sometimes in their quest for their link they forget one of the most standard human attributes – being polite.

It’s worth remembering that a blogger or Webmaster may actually really want your content to benefit their website, but more often than not they are doing you a favour by letting you post on their website. They are in reality ‘giving’ you a link, letting you connect with their audience/subscribers and allowing you to take traffic from their website and send them to your own site. That’s one staggeringly big favour they just did for you, so do you ever repay the favour?

Politeness shouldn’t just stop at a polite conversation. If you want to solidify and maintain your guest blogging relationships you should never make guest posting a one way street, always try and reciprocate. Allow bloggers (if they wish) to guest post on your site. By allowing the same privileges guest bloggers give you, you’ll be able to maintain your guest blogging relationships far more effectively.

Not Making A Connection

The only thing worse than not maintaining a relationship with bloggers and site owners, is to fail to make a connection with them full-stop. As guest bloggers are so ‘link hungry’ it’s very common for marketers to fail to make a connection with those individuals giving them their guest post opportunity.

Typically connections are lost if a guest author hasn’t been successful in achieving their desired post, but just because a site doesn’t want a guest post, doesn’t mean you can’t build a connection. Thank users for their time in actually replying to you (whether they reject your post or not), ask if you can connect with them on social media websites and always be as polite and positive as possible throughout your exchanges.

If you can build a connection with bloggers and key individuals by making your social exchanges memorable, you may be able to benefit from such a relationship later down the road. Users you make a strong connection with may re-post your social activity, suggest you to other powerful individuals, and help you to build a stronger more prominent social status.

Summary

By understanding the common social dangers that come with both achieving guest post opportunities, and promoting successful opportunities, you can help to keep your connections with your audiences, bloggers, site owners and thought leaders as strong as possible. These relationships are extremely powerful for Internet marketers and should never be overlooked no matter how busy you are, how small a bloggers website is, or how tiny their social following may be. The time and effort you put in to creating and maintaining these prosperous relationships will undoubtedly prove to be priceless in the long run.

I was only partially joking when I said that Michael Arrington should buy Soshable and turn it into his TechCrunch beater. Unfortunately, he didn’t return my calls.

Why should he? Soshable has very few claims, and none of them are to fame. Under-staffed, under-edited, under-funded, under-achieving, the site has been a nice niche blog for those looking for help with social media, particularly for business. It has hit 6-digit monthly traffic 4 times in nearly 4 years and has, in the past, gone a month between updates.

When I found out you were leaving TechCrunch, I thought I’d take another stab at a TC refugee. You can, of course, get a job with any publication that’s willing to “take a risk” on a loose-canon journalist with a tendency to speak his mind regardless of who gets offended (which excludes very few outside of mainstream media publications) and they could probably offer a little more money than we can.

That’s not the point.

The point is that we unofficially declared earlier this month that we’re putting more attention and effort into growing the blog into a powerhouse of tech and social media freshness and you should be involved. That’s it. I’m drained and can’t think of any actual good reasons, but the offer is there.

Tweet me.

Journalists will hate hearing this. Bloggers will hate it even more. I’m to the point where I’m starting to hate myself for thinking it.

Michael Arrington has some good points about TechCrunch, CrunchFund, his role in blogging/journalism, and the conflicts of interest (or lack thereof) in having his cake and eating it, too.

There, I said it. Let the thrashing begin.

He IS A Journalist

No matter how many times he says that he never claimed to be a journalist and doesn’t consider himself one, bloggers for the last decade have fought too hard and too long to attain a level of respectability for him to try to differentiate between the two. He certainly has no qualms about getting press passes for himself and his former team at Techcrunch for events where only “journalists” are allowed to attend. He doesn’t mind the massive traffic that TechCrunch is able to command, much higher than hundreds of websites that are distinctly run by journalists.

That argument is done. It’s not true. When you post an article stating an opinion or shedding light on facts that gets read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you’re a journalist. You might not be one by training, but the concept of journalism is not dictated by a classification system. It’s decided by reach. If TMZ is journalism, so too is TechCrunch.

He IS an Investor

It doesn’t always take money to become an investor. Over the years, Arrington has profited from startups one way or another. He left the direct investing realm two years ago, but was still able to make a profit on various startups, conferences, and products without having a direct monetary investment.

With CrunchFund, many people are pointing to his desire to stay attached to TechCrunch and continue to write for them as a problem. Others are saying that the wealth of information that TechCrunch gets from startups makes it unethical to try to do both at the same time.

It’s in the last part that I call BS. It’s not as much wrong as it is naive. Investors get information about startups that go well beyond the tips and interviews that publications receive. Journalism (or blogging, if you must call it that) is in the business of letting that information get out there. They don’t horde the data and use it to their advantage, and a TechCrunch led by a CrunchFund-minded Arrington would continue in this direction. They won’t keep a “Michaelstash” of juicy data. They’ll write about it. It’s they’re job. It’s what they do.

As far as swaying the people when writing about investments, potential investments, competitors, and potential competitors, that’s another issue altogether. Thankfully, it’s the easiest one in which to root for Arrington.

He IS at the Mercy of Readers

Without the tremendous readership of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington doesn’t exist, not in the way he does now, at least. He is TechCrunch and TechCrunch is Michael Arrington.

Had he been allowed to continue at TechCrunch, the site would be under such scrutiny from everyone – the readers, AOL, the government, other investors, his investments – that they would have been forced to walk along the straight and narrow more than they ever have before. Disclaimers would have been posted. If they weren’t people would call them out in the comments and on social media (and eventually at other publications, including this one).

Readers would leave once they smelled a rat. The rat would never have appeared, not in its truest form, simply because the site couldn’t afford to play in that realm. If anything, the site would have been happily more critical of CrunchFunded startups. While I have never met the writers and editors, I’ve read enough to know that they would rather accentuate their disdain towards manipulation for financial gain than bow down to it, even if the order came from the founder of the site himself.

In Essence…

I’ve gone back and forth on this since the beginning. At first, I lost faith in the credibility of the site. Then I blamed AOL. Then I thought that Arrington was ignorant to think Huffington and AOL would allow him to continue like this. Finally, I’m seeing it all a little more clearly now and I realize that I was most right by blaming AOL.

They did have an opportunity to play this right. They could have met with Huffington and Arrington and put together a plan to make TechCrunch, CrunchFund, and the Arianna Empire stronger as a result of all of this. Instead, they acted poorly, reacted more poorly, and now all three entities involved are weakened as a result.

This was a controversial move by Arrington, one that was not done the right way. Still, the concept wasn’t awful. Some would think it’s a good idea (particularly his investors and the startups they funded). Either way, Michael Arrington wasn’t all wrong about this. Some of the things that he was (and is) trying to do make perfect sense once you step back and look at it as a whole.

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Read more controversial opinions on this Social Media Blog.

By noon, Monday through Friday, at least one person has asked me, “What should I post about on my blog/Facebook/Twitter?”

Some days, it gets up to 4 or 5 clients, friends, or even co-workers who ask about it before dinner time.

My answer always has 3 parts:

1. Universal Truths – There are certain basic guidelines nearly every social media profile strategy should follow when deciding what to post. “Think of social media as the humanization of your business. Reach out. Talk to people. Express the company’s and your personality through the medium. Look at your competitors and see what they’re doing. Look outside of your industry for ideas. Define your goals within social med…”
2. Personalized Response – Each business, publication, or organization has its own specific needs, assets, and resources that can be used or must be addressed in social media. I’ve seen two companies in the same vertical have completely different approaches. Perfect example would be two separate automotive clients – one is building their strategy around highlighting local charities, the other is focused on getting “planking” images of all of their employees and as many customers as possible. Both campaigns are proving to be effective. The point is that everyone who asks the question needs a personalized response.
3. Ask – This is the one that throws nearly everyone off, but it’s also the most important part (and happens to be the subject of this article).

For those who have found the power of asking, of using social media to guide a social media strategy, can often skip steps one and two and go straight into delivery. Here’s how:

Option 1: Poll Questions

There’s often no better way to get an answer than to ask a direct question. This is easier for publications than for businesses, but any page can and should do it to some extent. Just come out and say it. When people see a question, particularly a short one, they are more inclined to answer.

Facebook makes it easy through their Question feature. Multiple choice is nice, but you can even ask it in your status update and have people answer through comments. On Twitter and Google+, we’ve seen some incredibly lively discussions about branding. Facebook pages should also enter into “discussion mode” and not rely solely on polls.

Option 2: Test and Monitor (Better Known as “Trial and Error”)

Combing through all of the analytics, insights, and every other piece of data at your disposal can be tedious but it’s worth it. When something works, you either repeat it or improve on it. When something doesn’t work, you either improve on it or stop doing it altogether. The same rings true with social media updates across the board.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on building your blog, engaging on Facebook, broadcasting your message through Twitter, or any other social media activity. Take not of the high points. Look into the most successful posts (based upon traction, engagement, clicks, etc) and learn from them for future ones.

Skittles is an example of a brand that has built up a groundswell of supporters by simply being funny and working in their branding from time to time. As you can see below, they have some that work great and others that show low numbers for a page with nearly 20 million likes.

The biggest challenge with this technique is that it really only works well with a large base of fans/followers/likes/subscribers. Remember to keep relativity in mind. 7,000 might seem like a lot of likes, but it’s lower than normal for that page. Be mindful of it.

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Alright, I can mark "use a Knight Rider reference image in a blog post" from my to-do list. With that said, no I didn’t mean that I was blogging from a car dashboard (even though I bet KITT could do some mad blogging back in the day).

This is the first ever blog post written on Soshable that is not written through the WordPress software installed on the site. I am writing this post from a Search and Social Dashboard, and I actually really like it.

Those who use blogging software know that there are advantages to writing away from the standard WordPress interface. It’s normally easier and if you have the right software (such as the one I’m using right now) you don’t lose much of the native interface.

This new dashboard, part of TK Carsites upcoming Search and Social launch, allows me and our clients to work directly from a single interface. They can manage and monitor Facebook and Twitter, upload videos to YouTube, monitor their Google Analytics as well as their rankings in search terms (as well as the rankings of their competitors), monitor the Internet for reputation management and customer service needs, and prepare a strawberry cheesecake directly from their Dashboard.

Did I say "strawberry cheesecake?" Sorry, it’s lunch time. I meant to say that they can manage and post to their blog directly from the single interface. The convenience factor here is huge. No need for multiple clients, multiple windows, multiple log ins – it’s all here.

Can’t wait to launch it. Let me know if you want to see the whole thing in our sneak peek beta launch later this month. In the meantime, have some strawberry cheesecake.

There is a lot of controversy lately regarding the role of social media in journalism.  Traditional journalistic standards require a process of vetting and fact-checking that is not required in social media.  With the popularity of blogging and iReporting, anyone can report on a topic or event at any time.

This has both positive and negative consequences.  News stories can break faster with more minute-to-minute detail than before.  We no longer have to wait for a reporter to show up on the scene and transmit his broadcast to us; witnesses can instantly upload images and video to the internet.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan is a good example of this.  However, the negative aspect is in the lack of fact-checking that occurs in social media.  Anyone can post anything they want and claim that it is a fact.  Someone could have uploaded images from Japan but claimed that they were in Taiwan, causing panic and confusion for many families.

Historically, an editor would check the facts of a story before releasing it to the public.  Now that is often not the case.

Who or what will replace editors in the brave new world of social media?  Unfortunately, the public must be more wary than ever of what they consider ‘news’.  Most blogs, iReports and social media sources should be considered potentially no more reliable than a tabloid newspaper running stories of UFO sightings.  Traditional news sources, such as the Wall Street Journal or ABC news, will still need an editorial staff to sift through the facts before releasing the information to the public.

In fact, this profession may become more important than ever.  While people are interested in blogs, opinions, and iReports, they also still want the hard news.  As social media continues to expand, I think that consumers will need to become savvier than ever at recognizing what is ‘real news’ and what is rumor, lies or speculation.

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Read more about the future of social media on this social media blog.

Social media and universities have a lot in common. The future leaders of the world are at both. They foster the latest in thought and take pride in looking to the bleeding edge while establishing the cutting edge. Young people want to be there. Creativity and empirical thought thrive there.

With such commonalities, it’s amazing that few universities have truly embraced social media as a way of collegiate life. The students may be on them, but only a handful of universities are truly engaged.

The Oregon State University is clearly trying. Here’s an email and a video I received from them today:

“We just finished this video project. We ventured out to just do something for the fun of it. We feel like if universities around the country could free themselves up, just a little bit, to do something without restrictions their department would grow as a whole. I think it would be a good example for other universities. It might give them a chance to argue for projects like this, of their own.”
~ Kegan Sims, Web Communications, Oregon State University

They have created a nice hub page for all things social at the university, including an area where students, faculty, and groups can create their own blog. What a fantastic idea! If the thought-leaders of the future reside in the halls of universities, wouldn’t it make sense for these schools of higher learning to want to encourage more writing from the future leaders of the free world?

Every university in the world should follow the lead of Oregon State. Why wait until after graduation to allow students to make a difference? Why limit the potential of current interaction to only happen in class? Blogging is many things to many people, but when you take an educated person and encourage them to express their thoughts, findings, and opinions about certain aspects of the world in a free-form venue such as a blog or social network, the potential for exponential collaborative expansion of thought is unparalleled on the Internet.

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Read more about cleaning social media and education on this social media blog.

The emails have been ringing off the hook. “What’s happening at Soshable? Where are the posts?”

Thank you all for noticing – Soshable hasn’t had a new post in 3 days. I would have left a “BRB” note had I known it was going to be missed. I’m pleased to say, we’re back, and here’s where we’ve been…

A New Blog Network, That’s Where

There are a trillion blogs and a million blog networks to support and connect them. As many of you know, we love a challenge, so we decided to throw our names in the hat a couple of months ago to put together a network of blogs that will take over the universe make people happy. Building a blog itself is not challenging. Putting together the right combination of content, design, promotion, and connections is proving to be nearly impossible.

Nearly.

It seems that we’re almost done.

Old vs New

There were some in our group who thought it would be best to keep it internal and only work with brand new, fully-controlled properties. We already have an automotive blog network that is strong and diverse, covering most major brands and boasting 600+ blogs on the roster. The challenge is the quality – the content is unique and high-quality but everything else is weak. In essence, this is a network designed to support automotive marketing clients, not turn a profit.

The decision to create partnerships with established blogs was made for 3 clear reasons:

1. Consolidation of Talent: When you have more writers and editors contributing to the cause, it makes it easier to be stronger overall.
2. Pre-Established Power: At Hasai, we are a social media marketing firm that helps people generate traffic to their websites and blogs. While it would make sense to wield our weapons in our own directions, there is something that can be said about a rolling start. As such, we have been building relationships with aged blogs to make the start easier.
3. Shared Assets: Beyond talent, the assets that different people have can help the overall cause.

That’s not to say that we won’t build new blogs. Over time, we will be working towards building up brand new properties, but it’s simply easier to get started with experience.

Join Us

If you are a blogger interested in being part of the network, please contact me. Don’t think AOL or Gawker. As powerful and robust as those networks are, they simply do not possess the flexibility that we want. Instead, we want blogs in our network to maintain their own individual flare, assist with the network, and reap the benefits as a result.

When AOL bought Techcrunch back in September, 2010, they announced it with a story titled, “We Got Techcrunch!”

The first thing that came to mind was, “Yes, but do you really know what you’re getting?”

Many anticipated that the antics of Michael Arrington and his independently-minded crew of writers and editors would be a flavor unfamiliar with the boring palates at AOL. Over the months since, this anticipation has turned into reality and in most cases it seemed more like a chest-pumping to demonstrate that Techcrunch was not going to bow to the whims of their new overlords.

That thought came to mind again when I saw the headline today on Techcrunch, “AOL Asks If We Can Tone It Down.” After reading the article by Alexia Tsotsis (pictured above with Digg co-founder Kevin Rose), all I can say is, “You go, girl!”

A representative from Moviefone (a sister site in the AOL family) arranged for Tsotsis to interview Duncan Jones and Jake Gyllenhaal at SXSW about the upcoming movie, The Source Code. As many know, these interviews are normally supposed to be fluff pieces to help promote and expose movies. Most in the industry cater to the fluff requests because they need to be invited to more interviews to do more fluff… and so goes the Hollywood publicity circle-jerk.

This is Techcrunch. While I disagree with some of they ways they conduct themselves and wield their power (and have never considered defending them in a blog post before), one thing I’m all for is that they say what they mean and mean what they say. Injecting them into the Hollywood fluff circle is like asking Michael Bay to direct a Downy Fabric Softener commercial. The results are predictable.

In this case, the results were comical and rather spot-on. Tsotsis took the Silicon Valley approach of breaking down what was really being done in this buzz campaign to market the movie to techies. There is so much win in that article that I can’t contain it in this post.

The Moviefone representative responded with very nicely and tactfully written email asking Tsotsis to consider toning it down. This message, relayed from the company representing the movie, was clearly and without hesitation going to be posted on Techcrunch. Moviefone responded but (no offense to their editor Patricia Chui) they came across as fitting in nicely with the AOL stuffy blogging attitude. It’s definitely the AOL Way as well as the Hollywood style at Moviefone.

It’s hard to say, but in this case, “We’re With Coco Techcrunch.”

Update: …and so the backlash begins: