Thursday, November 20th, 2008
Before you read this post, you might want to know a little bit more about subscribing and rss so that you can keep things in context! Got it? Great.
Feedburner is a tool that many bloggers (including myself) use to:
a) Provide blog readers with an rss feed of their posts
b) Track their rss subscription statistics (ie: how many people are subscribed to their blog)
Without a doubt it’s a decent tool, but here’s the problem: it’s not terribly reliable. Just check out a screenshot of my supposed subscription stats over the last couple of weeks:
Feedburner Stats
These stats lead me to believe one of two things:
1) I have extremely fickle blog readers and lost 10% of them one day and gain back 15% the next day (not to mention on some days all of them stop subscribing and then the number jumps back up the next day)
2) The numbers aren’t accurate
Neither a terribly good conclusion to draw, and I’m even more incredulous at this because Feedburner has been owned by Google since 2007. Given the great stats provided by Google Analytics, why has nothing been done to increase accuracy with Feedburner after almost 18 months?
But besides the fact that inaccuracy bugs me (and many people on Twitter), there is a bigger issue. Remember point a? That Feedburner actually provides the link for readers to subscribe? That’s what scares me. Should Google decide tomorrow that Feedburner isn’t worth what they paid for it and shut it down or leave it to die, means that all our blog readers will be pointed to a metaphorical dead end. And given the lack of innovation and current state of affairs, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that were to happen eventually.
I know when I switched rss feeds from the old blog to this I lost a lot of readers and traffic, but that was my choice. I would certainly hate for it to happen because of poor maintenance or a poor business decision in 2007. Do you worry about this? Does it bug you that your stats aren’t accurate? Be heard!
Tags: bloggers, feedburner, feedburner reliability, Google, migrating rss feeds, rss feeds, rss statistics
Posted in Google, Poor Practices | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
The travesty. It has been a week since I last blogged! Don’t worry, not a sign of things to come, but rather a sign of a c-r-a-z-y week. I have loads of posts lined up including the costs of not being involved in social media, clarifying my stand on “make sure your product doesn’t suck”, a guest interview with Todd Murray of Active Channel, my worries over FeedBurner, an example of media convergence that I do like and why some people don’t get Twitter, among other things. If any of this sounds good to you, check back frequently or why don’t you subscribe via RSS for free, and have it delivered to you when it’s published? And speaking of RSS…
RSS
Steven Hodson tells that Why RSS feed adoption sucks doesn’t get any simpler than this, and I can’t agree more. The problem he talks about - clicking on an RSS feed sign and getting gibberish HTML - happened to me at least twice before I finally adopted RSS. And there were months in between those instances.
Blogging
I have an audio comment on Six Pixels Of Separation #128 by Mitch Joel, sparked by his blog post which asks when is it okay to delete blog comments? I couldn’t believe the number of people who said “My blog, my rules”, so I turned the question around and directed a question at those very same people: “Would it be okay if a company said “my blog my rules?” and went around deleting negative comments?”. I deliberately didn’t blog about this so that the discussion can take place on SPOS, so do give it a listen!
Social Media
The 5 Critical, Current Responsibilities of a Social Media Expert - I dislike the term social media expert because I don’t believe they exist, but in any case, if you’re into social media and adopting it for your company, you need to read this.
More importantly, you need to watch this video from Christopher Penn of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast titled Building Blocks of Social Media: Social Media Prerequisites.. Awesome stuff from beginning to end. The Q&A at the end was very enlightening to me. Usually when we deal with social media plans we jump to the solution, Chris’s questions remind us how important analysis is as well. I can’t embed the video and it’s pretty huge, but definitely worth a watch. And the podcast is worth subscribing to as well.
Research from Epsilon shows promise as to where companies are turning their marketing mix attention to. I personally believe the numbers to be inflated, but nonetheless, good info if you are looking for more stats for corporate buy in.
Podcamp Singapore
Claudia gives us a full recap from what went on at Podcamp Singapore. I definitely would have loved to be there, loved to have spoken and participated, but this is a close second!
That’s it for this week, as always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
Tags: #podcampsingapore, active channel, building blocks of social media, christopher penn, claudia.sg, deleting blog comments, feedburner, marketing mix, marketing over coffee, media convergence, mitch joel, podcamp singapore, responsibilities of a social media expert, rss adoption, six pixels of separation, social media, social media prerequisites, social media research, spos, steven hodson, subscribe via rss, todd murray, twitter, winextra
Posted in Links, social media | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Just got back from the IDC Web2.0 Conference today (thanks to Debbie and Joyes for granting me access!) and have some immediate thoughts before I go into detail about the various topics discussed.
Main thought: People need to do more research before coming for these conferences.
I estimate about 200 people in the room, and when the room was asked who used feeds (RSS), less than 30 people raised their hand.
Now I’m not judging, but I think if companies are going to spend $240 to send people for a three hour conference, they need to be able to absorb what is going on and follow the discussions. If only 30 people understand feeds, how many would understand the rest of the topics today? Wikis? Co-creation of content? Social networking? User-generated content? I have my doubts. I think companies owe it to themselves to do a little bit of research before going, so that they can truly engage in the discussion.
The thing is there was some good content at the conference. One speaker mentioned it’s not necessary to be front and centre of the content-creation, just a curator. And I wonder how many people got the reference.
Edit: Maybe next time after a conference I should walk up to people randomly and ask “So what do you think the takeaways are for your business?” and see what answers I get.
Finally, a question was asked towards the end of the day: “Is there research to show that using IM and Facebook increases productivity? And are some professions more suited than others to using social media in education. For example, would it be applicable to medicine?”. A muted groan rippled through the room.
Firstly, obviously there is no research to show that. The people who question the benefits of IM, Twitter and Facebook are those who are not on it or don’t understand it or are suspicious and un-trusting of their employees to be on these applications. Do you think people aren’t using the office phone for non-productive uses? Or the office email? Or the office printer?
The reason why this question comes up, to me, is because companies want to see this instant gratification. Are you using Facebook to generate a sales lead or close a sale? No? Waste of time. But it doesn’t work that way. Facebook, Twitter and IM take time to produce results. I spend a lot of time in the office on Facebook. I joke that it’s “research”, but finding out how people use Facebook and interact is very important. If you don’t know how your consumer is using their tools, how can you ever hope to be relevant?
Will there be employees who abuse this trust and throw sheep or superpoke friends at work? Sure. But I don’t feel that’s a reason to shut down access, because to me, the benefits outweigh the cons. Let’s keep this all in perspective. It’s the people that abuse the tool. Not that there’s anything inherently “wrong” about the tool.
Secondly, what a crazy question! Can the medical profession use social media? Of course! I honestly and truly question why this person was at this conference at all. The whole morning people were talking about interaction and content sharing and co-creation and wikis and transferring ideas and collaboration via Google Docs.
You mean you don’t see how medical knowledge can be pooled together, developed and refined via these tools? Or did you seriously mean doing away with practical surgery sessions and teach it via social media? Which is absolutely ridiculous too.
It is people like that, that are holding social media (and your company) back from advancing. The new consumers are not going to be convinced by an advertisement in the newspaper. If it’s not timely and relevant, forget it. If your business is not showing and interest in discovering how the new consumers think and behave, you might not be around in 10 years when they graduate and choose to spend their disposable income with a company who does.
Tags: close sales, co-creation of content, curator of content, facebook, facebook and productivity, facebook at work, feedburner, feeds, generate sales lead, generation y, google reader, grand copthorne waterfront, IDC web2.0 conference, new consumer, rss, Singapore, social media conference, social media singapore, social networking, twitter, user generated content, wikis
Posted in Singapore, Wikipedia, social media | 10 Comments »
