i’ve written a post on search engine land on the future of your company’s pitch.

the landscape of corporate public relations is changing fast. first the press release died and we told you how to write a press release for the social media audience. now the elevator pitch is dead and here’s how to adapt.

visit search engine land to find out how to adapt.

Technorati Tags: search engine land, social media, twitter, elevator pitch, twitpitch

hi! if you're new here and like what you read, you may want to grab the rss feed so you can always be up to date. thanks for visiting!

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb on how the content promotion algorithm is making the quality on the front page of digg suffer.

note: this isn’t meant as an attack on any user and his or her submissions. all the users mentioned and displayed on the graphs are my friends and i respect their submissions. this post is just meant to point out the flaws of digg’s content promotion algorithm.

read the full article.

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, social media, quality, algorithm, content promotion, readwriteweb

thanks for the overwhelming response to my presentation at the web 2.0 expo san francisco 2008 on social media optimization and marketing. here are the original slides along with all the references i used within the presentation.

i have disabled downloading for now but you can embed the presentation on your site using the code.

| View | Upload your own

references:

1. industry rules for social media optimization
2. comparative analysis of technologies used on fortune 500 and inc. 500 corporate web sites [pdf]
3. how to build a ‘digg culture’ on your blog
4. three month overview of social news and bookmark popular topics
5. link attraction factors [pdf]
6. the 10-second rule: how to write for diagonal readers
7. writing headlines for regular readers, search engines, and social media
8. high impact content “above the scroll” in four easy steps
9. the social media manual
10. how to shout on social media sites without screaming
11. understanding the digg algorithm
12. leveraging social media sites to increase search visibility

part 10 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

so many new services are launched everyday that you can hardly keep up with all of them without completely losing sight of your actual goals. at the same time, it is hard to ignore these services and not feel as if you’re out of the loop and not using the web to its fullest potential. to the untrained eye, it seems that our options are limited, but as we have shown, by following a few simple rules, you can be successful and largely free of complexity in 10 days (or even less).

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

part 9 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

your mistakes and your failures are what force you to strive to better yourself everyday, and nothing is more valuable than that.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

part 8 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

trust is one of the most important elements of any relationship. whether it be the relationship between a writer and her audience, a consultant and his client, or an individual and his fellow community members, without trust, the system screeches to a halt.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

there has been plenty of debate about the merits of the two most popular lifestreaming services, and i have gone on the record saying that i prefer socialthing over friendfeed. but you don’t have to take my word for it, why not try socialthing and make the decision for yourself? please leave a comment if you would like an invite (don’t forget to use an actual email address).

Technorati Tags: lifestreaming, friendfeed, socialthing, invites

before we discuss the button, here are the positive and negative voting options on the 4 main social news sites: digg allows people to either ‘digg’ the story or bury it as duplicate story, spam, wrong topic, inaccurate and ok, this is lame, propeller allows users to either vote on a story or ’sink’ it (and separately report a story as broken link, duplicate, inflammatory, inaccurate, lame, and spam) reddit allows upvoting or downvoting, and stumbleupon gives you the option to vote either ‘i like it!’ or ‘no more like this’ on a given story.

as you can see, the options for burying content are quite robust and allow the algorithms behind these sites to accurately determine how much people dislike the story and want it gone, but the options for promoting content aren’t as developed. for example, the question i ask myself whenever i’m voting for stories on social news sites and come across something truly outrageous is: yes, i want the story to receive more attention so the issue can be resolved, but do i really like what is happening? of course not. while in practice it’s not really a problem, in spirit i don’t want to be ‘digging’ or ‘i like it’ a story about child rape.

in fact, i think that when we vote on stories, we should have just as many options to ‘vote as…’ as we do when we bury something. here are some of the classifiers that i would like to see:

1. general vote.
2. vote as funny.
3. vote as interesting.
4. vote as important (timely/time-sensitive).
5. vote as outrageous.

just as different ways of burying something carry different weights (for example, something that is buried as spam will be removed from the queue where as something can be promoted, marked as inaccurate but still stay on the front page) different ways of voting on something should also carry different weights. something that has the most amount of votes as important (breaking news, heath ledger’s death) should probably be promoted faster than something that has lots of votes as funny (pictures of a cats).

furthermore, we can actually display a tag next to the story so that once it is promoted to the front page, visitors can decide wether they want to read a story or not based solely on the tag (funny, important, outrageous, etc.). the one site that does a somewhat decent job at that is fark.

what do you think of this idea and what kind of ‘vote as…’ or ‘promoted as…’ tags would you like to see?

Technorati Tags: social media, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, fark, vote, bury

blogs are the big show, im/social-hubs are backstage pass, twitter/micro-blogging is afterparty. it’s about layers of access.

follow jonathan fields on twitter or visit his blog.

Technorati Tags: twitter, jonathan fields, blogs, social media, twitter, micro-blogging, access

part 7 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

not everyone has to like what you have to say. not even most people have to like what you say. if you can get enough people to love you and hate you enough to be interested in what you have to say and respond to it, you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch