Social Media

The WordCamp Atlanta name badge was a booklet with the agenda, maps and a QR code that you could scan at different points during the day to get WordCamp info.

Speaker John Saddington (@tentblogger on Twitter) shared his secrets for crafting posts and building an audience using WordPress.

Jane Wells (@janeforshort), user experience designer, and Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), founder, of Automattic.

Since its first release in 2003, WordPress has not only become the world’s largest blogging platform, it has evolved into one of the world’s largest providers of content management and website development. Much like the Apple brand has created thousands of spinoff businesses, WordPress has created jobs for designers and developers who can create the templates, themes, wikis and plugins that make WordPress a thriving industry. Also like Apple, WordPress has raving fans and devotees, many of whom gathered in my city this weekend to pay homage and learn from their peers at WordCamp Atlanta.

Thanks to Judi Knight, Russell Fair and their volunteers for doing such an amazing job of planning the two-day conference, including securing the event space at SCAD. The event sold out quickly and had a hungry waiting list, which was a testament to the caliber of speakers and the thoughtful agenda. We even received a surprise visit from Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Matt and Jane Wells, a leader of design experience and community building for WordPress, fielded questions from the audience this morning.

I have been using WordPress for about two years now; it’s the platform for both this blog and my entire alisonlaw.com website. I’ve also used the site for my clients’ blogs and websites. I’m not a beginner, but I’m also not a WP ninja, and yet I felt right at home at my first WordCamp Atlanta. I’m eager to continue my education about the possibilities available to my clients, friends and myself from WordPress.

Are you using WordPress? How does it work for you? Share other thoughts or ideas in the comments.

Hello to a New Year! I wanted to share this phenomenal report I received from WordPress with stats from the Lawthenticity Blog in 2011. It’s called Your 2011 Year in Blogging. Like any good marketing professional, I love data. Even if you don’t share my enthusiasm about the stats, you will appreciate the fireworks.

Here’s to an even bigger and better 2012! If you have ideas for blog posts you’d like to read here, please share in the comments.

CoolRoz@yahoo.com 2008

A funny thing happened in the middle of a social media conference. After attending the first day of SMIATL, I went to my website and got the dreaded 404 Page Not Found error. A quick visit to my WordPress dashboard revealed that my entire website was in disarray. My home page and about us page were missing, as were images and a working top navigation menu.

Fortunately, I had attended an Atlanta WordPress Users Group meeting earlier this year in which the local experts advised backing up with VaultPress. They said this is the only way you can safely back up your WordPress site’s content and design settings. Since VaultPress is a product of Automattic, the same company that created WordPress, I signed up and started spending $15 a month for the service. Today, I feel like that is money well spent.

I’m still not sure how, when or why my website went wonky. I’ve explored the issue with both VaultPress and my hosting company. I like to think ninja hackers found my site and decided they had to take all the goodness for themselves, but it could easily have been operator/owner error. I remember being in the site dashboard while I was on vacation, so maybe blender drinks make for bad online marketing decisions?

It took me longer than I would have liked to recover my site. I was only able to communicate with VaultPress via their email system, M-F. Plus, my clients have been keeping me more than busy these days, which always means that my own marketing efforts get thrown into a proverbial heap on the floor in a dark corner of my subconscious.

Using the VaultPress dashboard, users are able to see all changes made to their WordPress sites and a list of backups. If I had one suggestion for VaultPress, it would be to add a visual snapshot of your WordPress site at each backup. If I could have seen what my site looked like on various dates and times – happy, shiny site versus post-Apocalypse devastation – it would have been much easier for me to identify the right restore point. Once I had that, VaultPress zoomed into action and I had my site back.

I never made it to the second day of SMIATL. Fortunately, I learned a lot on that first day and got to spend time with some old and new friends in social media. And I got a copy of this book from keynote speaker, Jason Falls. I’m looking forward to reading it once things slow down a bit. Yeah. Soon.

Finish Line Photo Courtesy of jayneandd on Flickr

This post concludes my commitment to 31 days of blog posts for the 2011 WordCount Blogathon. In many ways, I am sad to reach the finish line of this challenge.

My goal at the beginning of the blogathon was just to do it. Before May, my blogging had been sporadic at best. My clients and their work have always come before any personal or Alison Law Communications endeavors, and the Lawthenticity Blog suffered from being at the bottom of the list of priorities. Plus, it’s so intimidating to start a blog. You wonder “What do I have to say that hasn’t already been written about, spoken about, blogged about in other places, a thousand times and a hundred times better?”

Yet, here I was, advising my clients that they needed to make the time to blog and create content in order to build their businesses.

Participating in the blogathon helped me develop the discipline of writ ing something every day here. I learned that I don’t have to always draft a masterpiece. To the contrary,  some of the posts that I slaved and fretted over the most were the ones that went overlooked. The shorter, how-to posts were well-received. I will continue to share posts on the “Tools I Use” because I love discovering free or inexpensive tools and figuring out how to incorporate them into my daily routine. This is a must for freelancers or small business owners like myself.

I didn’t anticipate that I would see such a huge surge in readership. My WordPress stats quadrupled in the month of May. I don’t know whether to attribute that to the frequent posting or the introduction of other blogathoners, but I’m thrilled either way. It really takes both – consistency and audience - doesn’t it?  I found myself peeking at my WordPress dashboard a lot in May, eager to see how people were finding me and what they were clicking or reading. I can’t help myself: I’m in marketing and geek out over data!

I also didn’t anticipate connecting with some of the great people who were participating in the blogathon. I met (virtually, of course) people from different states and countries. I read a lot about writing and books, which are two of my favorite topics. But I also read blogs about gardening, motherhood, translation, mountain climbing, relationships, baking and health care. We read and commented on each others’ blogs, shared via the blogathon Google group and tweeted each other up. My only regret is not having more time to read, comment and connect with more of the 200+ blogathoners. I’ve already lined up a few guests posts and blog swaps for the coming months, so you’ll get to meet some of these fine people here. I have started a list of people who I’ve met through the blogathon, their blog URLs, their Twitter handles, etc. so that I can stay in touch. Make sure you comment below if you want to be added to that list. To view a blogroll of all the participants, you can visit here.

My sincere thanks to Michelle Rafter of WordCount for hosting the blogathon. I can’t imagine how much work went into managing 31 days of blogging and the quirks of 200+ participants all over the globe.

Here’s a final thought: Social media is nothing without the real, live people behind the avatars. I’m so grateful to each of you who took time away from your other commitments to visit here and get to know a little about me. Please stay in touch and let me know how I can continue to support you.

Hard to believe, but today is the next to last day of the 2011 WordCount Blogathon. It has been a challenge, but I’m proud to say that I’ve posted every day in May (so far). Today is another theme day for the Blogathon. The above image is a Wordle. It’s like a tag cloud, a visual representation of the most used terms from the Lawthenticity Blog. Enjoy!

RSS feed icon

I don’t care if you think Microsoft is The Evil Empire and you can’t go a day without fondling your iPhone. I live and die by my copy of Microsoft Outlook. We kick it old school with our mutual friend, the CrackBerry, and party like it’s 2007.

In addition to using Outlook to organize my email, calendar, contacts and tasks, I use it to read blogs. Outlook offers users the ability to receive blogs and other information via RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds.

Add this RSS Feed to Outlook? Why, yes!

If you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox for web browsing*, you can click on the orange RSS feed icon in the user or address bar to subscribe to blogs or other web pages with RSS content. If Outlook is open on your computer, you’ll get a pop-up asking if you want to add the RSS feed to Outlook. Click Yes to automatically add the feed to Outlook. Note: you don’t have to have Outlook open in order to subscribe to an RSS feed and have it delivered to Outlook.

After you subscribe, Outlook will automatically create a folder with the name of the RSS feed and will start populating blog posts or other syndicated content there. You’ll find the folder in your RSS Feeds folder and other mail folders in the left Outlook navigation pane. Every time Outlook initiates the Send/Retrieve process, it looks for new RSS content and pushes that content to your RSS Feeds folders like it delivers your emails.

To read a new blog post, I highlight and double-click the post in Outlook, just as I would a new email. Some blogs don’t offer full blog posts via RSS. That means I get to read a sentence or two from the blog before being forced to click a link and visit the blog online to read the rest. I hate this. I understand that we all want and need blog traffic, but don’t we also want and need RSS subscribers? Give me everything on my own terms, people. Don’t force me to hunt for it or I won’t subscribe and I probably won’t visit your blog at all.

I currently subscribe to more than 30 different blogs using Outlook. I love having the content delivered directly to my folders. I can rename folders or organize them by topics. This appeals to my obsessive compulsive tendencies and offers me fresh content from my favorite bloggers. Good stuff. For more detailed instructions on how to add an RSS feed to Outlook, visit here. You can test your new blog subscribing skills by click on the RSS icon at the top of my blog page, or click here to subscribe to the Lawthenticity Blog.

* I don’t use Safari, so I don’t know how to subscribe to RSS feeds with this web browser. I am a regular user of Google Chrome, but find that when I click on the RSS icon, Chrome automatically sends me to Google Reader, a popular web-based content aggregator.