This month at the KLCK bloggers network we’re going to be talking about WordPress plugins. Some of our favourite plugins including Askimet, a spam filter for your comments require you to have a WordPress API. If you have a WordPress.org blog (self hosted) this can be quite confusing so this week we are giving you a step by step guide on how to get one.

• Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for an account (even if you already have a wordpress.org blog)
• Click ‘Sign up now’ on the right hand side of the page

• Fill in your details and tick the box ‘just a username’ at the bottom
• Click ‘Next’

• You will receive an email from WordPress including a link that will confirm your email address.
• Once you have done this log in.
• Click the ‘My Account on the top left hand side

• On your profile page click ‘API Key and other Personal Settings’

• On the next page WordPress will provide you with your API key.

Next week I will be showing you how to use this API key to add a profile picture to your WordPress.org blog and to activate the Askimet spam filter.

We’ve been inundated with your suggestions for the Rules of Social Media since we asked for your help here last month.

We’ve managed to narrow our intial list down to 39 suggestions with 7 of these recurring 3 or more times (see the charts above).  We noticed that people seemed to be particularly concerned about Linkedin with issues such as ‘Linking your Twitter account to your Linkedin profile’ ‘Engage in groups that you join’ and ‘Don’t spam Linkedin groups’ all being metioned.  The top gripe however was people only pushing out sales messages through social media.

We’d like to narrow down this list a little further so are looking for your help again.  Vote in our poll by clicking here and  let us know which things really work for you or really bug you.

This week I’m  delighted to feature a guest post written for us by Shaun Fagan of iSoft. I met Shaun earlier this year and am fascinated by the online community he has set up for his customer user groups.  I asked him to tell me more about how he set it up.  This is part one, Shaun will be back with part two soon.

A big part of my job is to manage our customer user groups. We now have quite a few across the UK and Ireland, meeting somewhere in the region of 150 times a year. The user groups serve a wide range of customers, each with their own unique requirements focusing on their own particular geographies and software solutions. We realised early on, when setting up most of the groups, that we’d have to introduce some degree of consistency of approach otherwise it’d simply be impossible to maintain.

Communication is of course, central to most of what we do (or should do) with our customers. How could we enable and facilitate the necessarily robust, open and hopefully vibrant dialogue required for the company and its multitude of user communities? Email lists? Google or Yahoo Groups? Nope. Whilst these may have been OK a few years back what we needed now was something far more sophisticated and tailored to our needs – what we required was a User Group Portal, (which was interesting, as it the time I wasn’t sure if such a thing even existed!).

We set about google and straight away we started to find examples of customised websites hosting online communities. But what exactly were our requirements and what is the purpose of user groups anyway?

• To work with customers to help drive better product development?
• To give users a feedback route to the supplier, helping improve service and support delivery?
• To nurture and forge improved communications and customer relations? or
• To act as a subtle sales mechanism?

Answer – All of the above!

But how you do you start to build a website that has the capabilities to handle this wide array of challenges? Start by identifying your core requirements. Take each high level area and in turn map the website functionality that is necessary in order to help achieve the respective goal. We ran a half day workshop (with customers and internal representatives from the departments mentioned above) and ended up with the following list as being the pre-requisite building blocks for our portal. For each user group community we would need:

• A News section
• A Calendar function
• A Document repository
• A Forum or message board facility
• A voting or rating ability (specifically on development requests)
• A Blogging ability

Next time – how we turned paper based requirements into reality!

Today’s blog post is slightly different as Amanda tells us about the second meeting of the KLCK Bloggers network:

It was a busy day for Spiderworking.com and the KLCK bloggers network yesterday.  I was invited along with Lorna Sixsmith from Garrendenny Lane Interiors to go to the Edwina Grace show on KLCR96fm to talk about KLCK.  Edwina was great and we couldn’t have felt more relaxed chatting to her.

I only just made it back to the office in time to grab my computers and head straight back out to the Talbot Hotel, the venue of the second KLCK Bloggers Network.  I couldn’t believe how many people were there when I walked in the door.  22 Bloggers in total from all areas of blogging, some business bloggers, some personal bloggers and some who hadn’t started blogging yet but were keen to get going.

Participants were truly nationwide with people traveling from as far as Limerick to join in.

For those who couldn’t make it in person I livestreamed the event via webcam and Twitter, we had 4 viewers on the night, if you missed it you can view the recording by clicking here.  Paula Sheridan from Candle Designs gave us some great tips on using Flickr and Ruairi Brown from Kro.ie took us through the steps to set up a WordPress hosted blog.  You can download Ruairi’s presentation from  his blog.

After all the formalities we retired to the bar where we did some more relaxed networking.  It was a great evening and we’ve had so much good feedback that I can’t wait for the next one.  Photographs from the night can be viewed on the Flickr group.  If you would like to know more about the KLCK Bloggers network join our dedicated Facebook Page.

The next meeting will take place on Monday 13th of September at 7pm in Portlaoise (venue TBC).  We’ll be talking about ‘Plugins’.  It’s free to attend and all are welcome whether you are blogging, thinking about blogging or just want to know what a blog is.

There are many advantages to re-tweeting, it’s a great way to pass on useful, helpful or even amusing tweets from other users that might interest your followers.

If you follow someone who tweets great content that is interesting to both you and your followers it can be a great way to remind them you are there, if they don’t follow you back yet it could encourage them to do so.

If you are generous with your re-tweets others are more likely to re-tweet you as well, spreading your message accross Twitter.

It is important to think about what you are re-tweeting however, it’s not a good idea to re-tweet a message that is not valuable to your followers as although you may be attracting the attention of the original Tweeter you could be alienating some of your existing followers.

Re-tweeting can be quite confusing as there are two options available.  The ‘old fashioned way’ and ‘the new twitter way’.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both:

1 Re-tweeting the old fashioned way

The original re-tweet option this can be time consuming when used directly from Twitter on the web.  Here’s how to do it.

• Find something you want to re-tweet:

• Copy and paste it into your status update box:

• Before the user name add RT(space)@:

• Send the tweet

The advantage of using this re-tweet method is that the tweet will show up in the @replies of the original tweeter, meaning they will easily see that you have re-tweeted them.

If you are using a client such as Hootsuite to access Twitter, this form of re-tweeting is often integrated into the software making it alot less time consuming and easier.

2 Re-tweeting the Twitter way

A quick and easy way to re-tweet from the web application

• Find something that you would like to re-tweet, hover your mouse over the bottom right hand side of the tweet until the ‘re-tweet’ symbol appears:

• Click the re-tweet button.
• A dialogue box will appear to check that you want to re-tweet the post to all your followers, click yes

• The tweet will then appear in the streams of all your twitter followers as being re-tweeted by you.

The disadvantage of this is that unless the person you are re-tweeting checks their re-tweets on a regular basis they could miss your tweet. The other disadvantage is that some Twitter clients don’t show this kind of re-tweet in your stream meaning that you could be limiting the audience that the re-tweet will reach.

This week, we return to the whole area of blogs and blogging. Diarmuid O’Connell from O’Connell Copy and a commercial writer with many years of experience puts forward the argument for getting someone to do the dirty work – the writing!

Ghost-Blog your way to higher sales

There’s nothing spooky about it. Hiring a professional writer to come up with and write blogs for your business brings sparkle to your online presence and a shine to your social media strategy. And from about €60 a blog, you’ll not find better bang for your online buck.

But you may well be thinking … what would I need a blog for? As for writing it yourself, many folk shudder at the thoughts of it. They usually say…..but I hated English in school and cannot stand writing about myself.

I know the feeling – I gladly ask an accountant to handle my tax and a recent technology meltdown was resolved in minutes by my IT guy.

You’ve read other company blogs and you know how powerful they can be. A professionally written blog, optimised for Google and other search engines will ensure your website has a much, much better chance of getting hits. More hits… a bigger audience…more sales.

It’s easier than you think. My clients usually send me a few bullet points by email or just give me a shout. And over the phone, we come up with a few ideas to get you started. I’ve written for over 30 industry sectors from technology to tourism and from finance to politics and everything in between.

If you love writing your own blog, just keep in mind what you want to ‘say’. Sounds obvious but a good blog post makes one point clearly and retains the right characteristics of your personality and that of your business.

But, if you want to have your blogs ghost-written by a professional writer and put the fear of God into your competition – get in touch….today! Log on to www.oconnellcopy.com or email me at diarmuid@oconnellcopy.com.

We’re often asked which blogs people should follow and over the last year there are three that really stand out, they provide great, easy to digest information on social media and have at least some content that is aimed at our target market; micro business and SME’s.

1. Social Media Examiner

Our absolute favorite blog is Social Media Examiner.  Great articles including dos and don’ts, case studies, tutorials and comment at least once a week there is an absolute gem.

2. Brian Solis

Brian Solis is well known in the internet world for his genius in Internet marketing.  His blog although sometimes be a bit in depth for beginners also has some great articles, statistics, information that are easy for even a social media novice to make the most of.

3. Mashable

Mashable is a mine of information covering user friendly technology from the Kindle to Facebook.  We keep an eye on the Social Media section on almost a daily basis.  A huge amount of information here but some really great articles too.

Is there a blog missing here?  What are your favorite Social Media blogs?  Leave your comments below and if we agree we will feature them here.

Monday saw the Inaugural meeting of the KLCK Bloggers Network, a group of like minded people living in the Kildare, Laois, Carlow, Kilkenny area who share an enthusiasm for Blogging and Internet marketing.

Amongst those who attended were those who write professionally, those with popular blogs, those who were just taking the first step in blogging and those who were on the cusp of getting started.

The aim of the group is to share knowledge, put our heads together and see what we can achieve both individually and as a group.

Meetings will continue every second Monday of the month and all are welcome to attend whether you are living in the four counties or not and whether you are already a blogger or not.

Our next meet up will be on August 9th at the Talbot Hotel Carlow. Paula Sheridan from Candle Designs will be talking about using Flickr for business and we will have a second presentation on the basics of setting up a WordPress blog and useful plugins (speaker tbc).  If you’d like to come along or if you have expertise to share with the group you can RSVP on Facebook or on Linkedin or by leaving a comment on this blog post.

This week we’re asking for your help, we need your gripes.  We’re compiling a list of social media rules, the do’s and don’ts of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc and we want to know what bugs you!

What would make you unfollow someone or unlike a page on Facebook?

How do you choose who to follow or like?

What lessons have you learnt?  Is there something you have done that has resulted in loosing followers or annoying your Facebook community?

How to help

Leave your rules below in our comment box, post on our Facebook page, leave a comment in the ‘Facebook For Business Ireland‘ Linkedin group or Tweet at us @spiderworking!

There will be a prize for the best suggestions.

Often when we start out using Social Media to promote our businesses we are stabbing around in the dark, trying things out.  There is nothing wrong with this to start with,  many of us learn from our experiences but many others end up giving up on their campaign before they’ve had a chance to  find their feet.

Whichever of the above categories you fit into having a social media strategy will save you time, energy and give you goals and measurable.

Here are our 4 top tips for creating a Social Media strategy.

1. Your Target Market

Who is your customer?  Think about where they hangout online, which sites and blogs do they already follow? who do they listen to online – who are their influencers? what they are interested in and what sort of content you can provide that will draw them in?

Some markets are easy to identify online.  Business to consumer businesses can almost be sure that their customer is on Facebook.  Those selling predominantly to other businesses are more likely to find their target market on Linkedin.

2. Monitoring

To find out where your target market are hanging out, and to assess what is already being said about your brand and your business it is important to spend some time monitoring social media.  There are a number of free tools available, some of which we have showcased here on this blog and in our podcast.

Our current favorite free tools are:

Google Alerts

Twitter Advanced Search

How Sociable

Who’s Talkin

Social Mention

and

Addictomatic (for a bit of fun!)

Monitoring will show you who is already in your space and how they are using social media.  Your next step is to do something subtly different which will draw attention to your business.  As with all marketing it is your USP that will appeal to your audience so it is important to know what it is.

3. Your Goals

What do you want to achieve from your campaign?  Obviously brand awareness and sales but how are you going to achieve this?

You need to consider what you are going to measure in order to know if your campaign is successful.  Some common measurable metrics are:

Traffic to website:  How many unique visits are you getting when you embark on your campaign and how do these figures change throughout your campaign.  For this it is important to keep a chart of your social media activities against the traffic you get to your site. (see basic chart below)

Engagement: Engagement is a crucial factor in a social media campaign.  The more interaction you achieve on your Social Media pages the further the message spreads and the more your community will feel it has some ownership of your brand.  Engagement is easily measured.  How many comments do you get on your blog? on your Facebook page? how many @replies on twitter?  All these can be charted in a similar way to your webstats above

The size of your community: How many followers do you have on twitter? How many ‘Likes’ on Facebook?  How many people read your blog or subscribe to your newsletter.  This is the easiest matrix to measure but I often feel these are vanity stats.  It’s the quality of your community and how much they are willing to do for you that is important.

Reach: How far is your content being shared, how many RT’s do you get, how often is your content shared on Facebook?  Harder to measure but how viral your campaign becomes can be an important sign post as to how well you are doing.

4. Measurement and Review

After a set period of time, we recommend 3 months as this is usually how long it takes for a campaign to start paying off, see how close you are to achieving your goals.  If you aren’t quite there try and see what isn’t working and what is.

Spiderworking.com offers a 4 hour Strategy brainstorming session that will take you and your business through the process of creating a strategy leaving you with the tools to implement your campaign to it’s full potential. If you would like us to work with you on your strategy click here.