If you like to keep up with what is going on with your friends on Facebook then you may like this handy little social blogging plugin. The plugin requires WordPress 2.5 and above.

To quote from this social blogging plugin’s homepage:

this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard.

This social blogging plugin enables you to keep up with your friends without having to visit Facebook. Handy if you are not able to log into Facebook for any reason.

Do you use Google Reader as part of your social blogging. It can be a very handy tool to have in your pocket, particularly as you travel the web keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to.

As part of my social blogging I subscribe to a various feeds using Google reader. As you visit new sites you can quickly add anything of interest to your feed list. It can also be a handy little bookmark tool. Every now and then as I come across an article that I want to hang onto for future reference. I don’t want the whole feed, just the one article.

One of the little known features of Google Reader is that you can add single articles without subscribing to the whole feed. There is a handy little bookmarklet that lets you find that article in a feed and just grab the single article.

Being able to grab and share single articles rather than the whole feed can be very useful. Now you can do it. It is a little tricky but try it out a couple of times and you will quickly get the hand of it.

“As always with WordPress, we don’t claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be better than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one thing we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve.” - Matt Mullenwegg, founding developer of WordPress

WordPress 2.5 gives you many new options in your social blogging. Here is a partial list of the upgrades:

• Cleaner, faster, better organized,less cluttered dashboard lets you really focus on your blog
• Dashboard Widgets
  • Fun stats about your posting
  • Latest comments
  • Who links to you
  • New and popular plugins
  • WordPress news
  • (Customize any widgets to show, e.g., news from your local paper instead of WP news)
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• Search both posts AND pages — perfect solution if you use WordPress as a content management system
• Tag management — Add, rename, delete, tags, no plugins needed
• Password strength meter
• Few-click plugin upgrades — automatic download & installation of plug-in upgrades
• Friendlier visual post editor — it doesn’t mess with your code anymore
• Built-in galleries — you can embed whole galleries of photos in a post
• Salted passwords — much greater protection against hackers
• Secure cookies
• Inline documentation — explains functions and when to use them
• Database optimization — the process is now a bit faster
• Improved “Add Media” button function

If something goes wrong in your social blogging, it’s probably a plug-in causing a javascript error. A new button allows you to turn off all your plug-ins, then turn them back on one by one.

There’s more. You can read the complete, detailed list of Wordpress 2.5 social blogging features.

Keeping your social blogging simple is getting more and more complicated.

You know there are a gazillion distractions these days, making it tough for your articles to get attention and tougher to keep it. You want your writing to pay off for you, so you optimize.

• You optimize a headline that offers a great benefit and/or arouses curiousity and/or is controversial.
• You optimize the first sentence of your blog post because if the headline got them this far, now you must hook them into reading the rest of your article.
• You study StumbleUpon and Digg and the other social bookmarketing media so you can optimize your entire blog post to capture votes, not to mention hearts and minds.
• With your keyword list in hand, you optimize your post to attract your target market searchers who use the search engines.
• You go back over each sentence to find the places where you can optimize the humor or irony or alliteration or word picture or plain old intellectual impact (See? Alliteration!).
• You optimize “you”s vs “I”s, so you are writing about your reader, not about yourself.
• All these optimizations have certainly left something messed up, so you go back over the whole thing and re-optimize spelling and grammar, so the darned thing makes sense.

Pretty good plan. Have we missed anything?

Well, yes. How about … was there a point to your post? In the midst of all this optimization to attract eyeballs, did you actually give them some valuable insight or information? It’s not that unusual in social blogging to totally lose sight of the fact that a real live reader is looking for actual value. And if you trick them into reading something without value, they won’t be back.

So, definitely keep it simple. But add one more optimization to your social blogging: make it good!

7 Tips To Achieve Viral Marketing With Your Blog:

1. Define exactly who your market is and what they want more than anything. In every market, there is certain information people search for and have a very difficult time finding it. Which makes it very valuable to them. Don’t assume you know what that information is. Find the real people and ask them what they want. Ask them what they search for and just can’t find. Then give it to them.
2. Technorati ranks blog posts by how many inbound links they get. It’s a great viral marketing indicator for you of what information people are most desperately looking for. Search Technorati to see who are the real “power bloggers” in your niche and which of their posts generate the most comments. What do the visitors say?
3. Keep a record of these really popular posts so you can link to them in your own social blogging, giving you the chance to get traffic from trackbacks. And with each of these popular posts, consider how you might effectively take the exact opposite position in your own article. Controversy can be a viral marketing reader-magnet.
4. Schedule ahead and stick to your schedule. Which days will you post? Your readers will be more comfortable and predictable when you have them on a schedule. Get articles ready in advance, so you eventually are 3 or 4 weeks ahead. If something major comes up, you can write about it and insert it immediately, and move back the other lined-up posts. If you don’t stick to a set schedule, you will discourage your readers.
5. Tell your story in your “About Me” page. Display a photo. Engage your reader. Write your bio so she can see that you and she are kindred spirits.
6. Set up a constant stream of resources on Google News or on your RSS feed, so you have a lot of ideas to choose from. Grab the best ones and react to them in writing. Come from a different angle. You want your readers to see you as one-of-a-kind, a viewpoint they just can’t get anywhere else in social blogging.
7. As you look over the new daily idea feeds you’ve set up, consider how to use them to frame a resource list or list of “how-to” tips. These are your best bet to be a viral marketing hit with readers.

The more of these proven, tested elements that you consistently combine in your blog articles, the better your chance of creating a viral marketing boost to your business.

Here are some changes you might test to see how they affect your social blogging results:

1. When a visitor arrives, one of the first social networking features they should see is a Feedburner subscription icon …
2. And they should immediately see (prominently displayed) your “About” page and contact info. Many visitors will leave in a hurry if they can’t quickly see who you are.
3. Remove clutter from your sidebars, such as “Recent posts” and “Recent comments” modules - both are wasted space, potentially distracting visitors from your social blogging content. The fewer distractions, the easier it is for the visitor to simply scroll down your homepage posts.
4. Have a manageable category list - maybe a dozen categories. People get overwhelmed by those huge category lists you find on some blogs.
5. If you have a “Reviews” module (visitor reviews of your blog), feature it prominently.
6. Feature “Best of the Blog”, your all-time classic reader-loved posts.
7. To make your blog the most “social marketing-friendly”, test displaying just the first few sentences of a post with a “More …” link. Visitors who click your social media buttons will then be bookmarking a single article, which is a much more effective traffic-generator than bookmarking the blog homepage.
8. Effective social blogging requires a good headline swipe file to help create strong blog post headlines. (Search “headline swipe file” if you don’t already have a good one.)
9. Displaying a good eye-catching, related image will usually increase readership of any blog post.
10. Test writing less frequently, but offering longer, more detailed posts … maybe “Top Twenty” lists. These types of post are popular with many of the social media users.

These are some creative tests that long-time bloggers have used to improve their social blogging results.

In effective social blogging, you write about your experiences which strongly connect with some picture in the minds of your readers - your target market. You share some common problems with them, and you need to keep these in mind when you write.

Who exactly are your readers? What drives them? For your social blogging success, you need to dig and really understand what problem it is that your readers are most desperate to solve. What problem do they have that they keep searching for answers to … but have a devil of a time actually finding anything that helps?

Read a lot of other blogs with the same audience as yours. Read the discussions in forum communities that draw your target market. What problems do the participants talk about over and over and over?

Communicate with your current readers. Ask them what their biggest bugaboo is, related to your blog focus … which they’ve been unable to find a satisfactory long-term solution for. Your readers are beating their heads against the wall over something. It may be obvious, it may not be. You must find it for sure. And then you solve their problem.

You can also get an idea what people really want by using your favorite “search” tool to see what terms they search for. For example, a friend in the network marketing arena says that of the top 20 search terms in that business, 15 of them involve “leads.” Do you think that getting good leads is a problem those people just have not solved?

When your reader has a problem they can’t solve, a problem that totally stops them in their success track, they get really frustrated. They post their question in forum communities. They search and search and search, but it seems like the information they want is buried someplace where they can’t find it.

And in comes you, the Knight on a White Horse. You know the problem, because you have focused your social blogging on finding problems exactly like this. You understand the problem, you can explain every detail of it (including some that your reader may not have even thought of), and you can give them the tools they need to solve that problem.

You can build a big fan club if you know what it is that your readers want, but which they just can’t find. THAT is social blogging that will build you an unbreakable network.

Flickr is a very useful tool to social bloggers, because a blog post with an image starts out with a definite advantage over a blog post with no image. A picture book is easier to read than “War and Peace.” The image on your blog post will draw in people who wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. And a GOOD image will make your words more memorable, more effective long-term.

Flickr hosts a seemingly endless stream of images, and you can freely use many of them for social marketing, no strings attached. Many images can be used commercially. You can even modify many of these photos. What’s the catch? Just give attribution to the photographer … a link under the image, back to their website.

If you also need photos for your commercial blog, go to Flickr and search only within the Creative Commons photo area … millions of photos are available for commercial use. Just click on the “Attribution License” category to find photos available for commercial use and which you can modify as you like.

Now click on “browse popular tags” and click on the appropriate keywords. If you don’t find them, use the Flickr “Search” box to enter keywords about the image you’re looking for. It may take more than 1 search (different keywords) to find what you want. When you see a result you like, click to see the full-size image. If you like it, then clicking “some rights reserved” brings up the Creative Commons license.

If everything checks out, download the image and use it on your blog as you want. Be sure to add a photographer credit under the image (”Photo by …”). Link the photographer name to their Flickr profile page.

A social marketing friend was playing around one day and discovered a new way to leverage the social content he writes. There are few things more satisfying than to get MORE use out of content you’ve already created.

Anyway, he dipped into his social blogging archive, back to April about 2 years ago. He published 14 articles that month. So he opened that file, and he opened a new text file. And then he took one paragraph at random from the first blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the 2nd blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the third blog post … well, you get the idea. He copied 8 paragraphs from 8 blog posts, then closed the blog archive to see what he had.

And you know what? This new “article” wasn’t half bad. The social content almost made sense as-is (or as-was). My friend chose a couple of new keywords to focus the article. Then he went into each paragraph, changed a word here, a sentence there, smoothed it all a bit, and in 5 minutes, he had a finished product. Sure, it sounds crazy. But try it … I’ll bet you can really leverage all your past years of social blogging.

Some other leveraging ideas:

• Look over your past blog posts for the best of the best. Take one that’s really good, get out your video cam, and film a 2-3 minute segment. Upload it to YouTube. Link to it from your site and MySpace and LinkedIn and any other social networking profiles you have.
• Keep track of every question that is emailed in to support, and every answer you give. Some of these Q & As probably suggest a “how-to” video you can do. Others may be appropriate to combine into a blog post.
• Outline an ebook you want to write. Write out the title for each chapter and section. Now write your blog posts with each of those titles as the headline. In maybe 2-4 weeks, you’ll have an ebook.
• If you have an active blog readership, do one blog where you ask questions about what resources people use to achieve certain results, or why they choose product A over product B. Then compile the results into a report to entice new readers.

To squeeze every last penny’s worth out of every single thing you do, plan ahead. Before you do it, whatever it is, think what other uses your social content could have. Blog. Article directory. Video. Podcast. Comment on someone else’s blog post. Ebook chapter. Free report for new subscribers. A somewhat different spin gives you a whole new article. The more you target multi-purpose content production, the more effective you will become.

There was a time when having a good social marketing network was a great asset. Today, it’s a 100% necessity. You can be certain your competition is constantly using online resources to build their own strong, experienced, knowledgable, wise, nimble network. With today’s avalanche of information heading your way, you’d better have not only a great network, but also a great way to quickly sample lots of good stuff, or you will spend your life sorting through garbage.

Tumblr.com is a micro-blogging utility. The idea is to build a social network of connoisseurs who pick through the information smorgasbord, delivering you only the tastiest snacks.

You have the option to host this social blogging platform on your own domain. You can use Tumblr to quickly post small bites of text, pictures, audio, video, & links. It’s similar to Twitter. Every person in your social network becomes your own personal editor, constantly focusing on content to publish only targeted key points, deciding this resource is important and that one is not. Then YOU glance at each thumbnail and instantly decide whether to look deeper.

Similar to the idea of the Blog Marketing Journal - but much shorter.

This is as easy and quick as social networking gets. You don’t even have to go to the Tumblr website. Just click on a toolbar icon to post a quote, picture, content, etc. You can even post content from mobile phones. It’s perfect for a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to spend their time writing a detailed blog post.

You can also feature as many as 5 RSS feeds, which means you can leverage the time you put into your social blogging. Tumblr is well-positioned to help solve your information overload problem, while making social networking much more productive for you.

“I’ve found headlines with numbers tend to produce more clicks, and longer headlines tend to produce less. Also my recent post titled “Weekend Fight & A Birthday Party” did well, I can only assume it’s due to curiosity. ‘What was the fight about?’”
Michelle MacPhearson
Social Marketing

Twenty years ago, the top direct marketers told you that your headline only had 7 seconds to capture a person’s attention. Today, in the internet social marketing age, you probably have half that time to attract a reader. Let’s say you’ve got 4 seconds to pull in your targeted social networker. How do you do that?

A few social blogging headline tips:

• Good titles are direct. They tell the reader exactly what benefit they’ll get from reading your blog post.
• Or - good titles arouse curiousity. You’ve hit the mark if you can get your reader to say, “Heck! What is THIS all about?” They have to read your post to find out.
• Better yet - really good titles do both.
• A specific number adds credibility to your title.
• Use strong action verbs to help spark an interest that gets the reader to read your blog post
• Don’t forget your SEO benefits. Your primary keyword needs to be in the title - the earlier, the better.
• Your post itself must have insightful, useful, valuable information. If you trick a social networker into wasting their time reading drivel, you have lost them forever.

If you do these things in every blog title you write, then you will write titles that get people to read your blog posts. To make that easier on yourself, focus on exactly who your target audience is. Then use a title structure to more effectively rivet social networker attention.

When writing a title, even if you don’t care about the SEO benefits, you should always have your keyword list open and visible. Those keywords are hot buttons for your targeted social blogging market. Use 1 or 2 of these keywords in your title to help pull your reader into your post..

A simple way to ensure that you get the social blogging keyword right up front and that you write a good title is to make the keyword your first word, followed by a colon. Then write a short title that follows the other principles.

A little practice can get you a big payoff. Get out your keyword list. Go to your MySpace page and click through some of the profiles. Notice 2 things: the line under the person’s name (on the left) and the first line of the “blurb” (on the right). These are critical titles - which most people waste. You know you want to create a magnet profile, so use your social blogging keyword list to improve each title to do that.

The more you practice, the more effective your own blog headlines will be.

BlogCatalog.com, the social blog directory, is putting the finishing touches on a new tool that will, on a single page, automatically cross-network and promote to your friends - and maybe their friends - all your social networking interests. Result? A realistic chance to go viral every time you Digg a new blog article or post a video to YouTube.

BlogCatalog’s new dashboard will be like the ultimate social network RSS feed. You will instantly get the social networking activities of all your friends … and they will get yours.

The new social blogging dashboard automatically:

• Displays your latest activities across social networks like Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others.
• Posts your profile updates, Digg submissions, Twitter comments, etc., right to your friends’ Dashboard - and maybe their friends, also, giving you a headstart on viral marketing.
• Energizes your profile page, causing other bloggers to return again and again.
• Streamlines your social networking, so you accomplish much more in much less time.

This viral social marketing tool was conceived to be the “dream team” of social blogging time-savers, taken from the wishlist of some of the top bloggers online. We’ll report on it again, as soon as it goes live.

At first glance, Prologue sounds like a cool tool. But you have to be using WordPress to get any value out of it. That’s not a bad thing.

Some folks are saying it will murder Twitter. That’s not likely to happen and Mike Bogle makes a good case. Nevertheless, I see a useful application of the theme.

First, Prologue is a theme, not a widget. Keep that in mind. And it’s WordPress.com, not dot org. That is a drawback because it means you’ll have to change your current WordPress theme if you want to use Prologue, and if you are using the WP software on your own domain name it isn’t available. If you like your current theme then you’ll have to give it up - ah, sacrifice! Otherwise, you’ll have to do without this unique social feature that takes WordPress.com to an entirely different level.

Personally, I’d like to see this as a WordPress widget for the dot org users.

To see what Prologue looks like, check out this demo blog.

On a personal note, didn’t this wii tennis player and member of the WordPress team sing that song about saving horses and riding cowboys?

Honor, prestige, and wealth are the things a bloggie won’t bring you says the 2008 Bloggies website. But I say wrong. A great number of bloggers have been honored and have become rich all because of blogging. And as with my predictions for this year, more and more bloggers will get paid as blogging goes mainstream and even becomes more popular.

It’s a new year and that means another round of the blog awards. The 2008 Weblog Awards is an annual non-profit competition that determines the best of all blogs through nomination around the world.

Nominations are now open for the following categories:
Best Web Application for Weblogs
Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog
Best European Weblog
Best Latin American Weblog
Best Canadian Weblog
Best American Weblog
Best Photography of a Weblog
Best Art or Craft Weblog
Best Food Weblog
Best Fashion Weblog
Best Weblog About Music
Best Gossip Blog
Best Entertainment Weblog
Best Sports Weblog
Best Weblog About Politics
Best Computers or Technology Weblog
Best Topical Weblog
Best GLBT Weblog
Best Teen Weblog
Most Humorous Weblog
Best Writing of a Weblog
Best Group Weblog
Best Community Weblog
Best-Designed Weblog
Best-Kept Secret Weblog
Best New Weblog
Lifetime Achievement
Weblog of the Year

If you’re going to nominate SocialMarketingJournal, do so with the “Best Topical Weblog.” There’s always a first.

One often overlooked aspect of social media marketing is blogging. People sometimes tend to put it into a difference category altogether. When done right, blogging is social marketing. All you really have to do to make an impact and get a little link love and additional content on your blog is to make a list of your competitors and link to them. You can see this in action a few posts back on this blog.

Linking to your competitors in this manner does a number of things:

1. It builds camaraderie with other industry professionals
2. Plus, you’ll get great comments in return - from your competitors, who will drop by to thank you for including them in your favorites list, from others who admire them as well as you do, and from contrarians who disagree with your list or who may think that certain of your favorites don’t belong on it; at any rate, you’ll get comments and that’s a huge value
3. Other people could link to your list
4. The people on your list will likely trackback to it so their readers will see it
5. You’ll increase your traffic counts
6. And you may even pick up a few additional regular readers from your increased traffic

You can see this in action again at the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Notice the comments. Not all will be good, but that’s OK. Let the contrarians have their say. Those types of comments tend to generate a good discussion and that will mean more comments, more traffic, more regular readers, and a better blog all around.