All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Social Media

Your Profile Is Missing

22 Comments

Last week I highlighted Wayne Sutton of Social Wayne on that week’s Black Web Friday post. Earlier that week Wayne had put out a shared circle on Google+ of nearly 400 black participants, including me, such that if any of us wanted to hook up with that circle we could, and then if we wanted to hook up with people in that circle individually we could do that as well. I thought it was a great idea and I know it had to take him a long time to put it together.

I hooked up to the circle, then started looking at some of the names and checking out profiles of many of the people. I stopped after about 25 people and was somewhat dismayed. That’s because out of the nearly 25 people, only 4 of them had completed profiles on G+. Some of them had links to their Twitter accounts or Facebook accounts, but no other information about them.

I thought that was a major waste of resources, and I didn’t even consider adding any of those people to my personal stream. I mean, how long can it take to fill in some business information, which I assumed was the reason they signed up for it, or to put a link to a website or blog and get some link love or publicity from it?

I have to admit that I’ve wondered about this sort of thing for awhile; why do people create accounts on social media sites and then never complete any information on them? This isn’t only an issue with G+; there are many people on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter that don’t put any information in either.

Now, Facebook I can kind of understand because people worry about the privacy aspect, and although it can be used for business many people don’t use it for that purpose. Facebook is really more for personal use, and if people just want to connect with their friends and nothing more, so be it.

Twitter and LinkedIn are another matter. Let’s talk LinkedIn first. It’s for business networking; there’s no other reason to sign up for an account. If you don’t want to network with other business people, then why are you there? No one wants to hook up with anyone that hasn’t completed their business profile, and if I don’t know who you are I’m not hooking up with any account that doesn’t have some kind of picture either.

Twitter is a duplicitous animal. I almost never reach out to anyone first on Twitter these days; it’s hard enough trying to get people I am connected with to talk to me. Twitter allows you to put a brief bit of information about yourself in your profile, but it also allows you not to put anything in.

If you’ve created an account only to talk to specific people, and you’re protecting your account, I can understand why you don’t put in any information. But if you write anything that looks like you’re in business, why don’t you have a link of some kind, and a legitimate one at that? What’s the purpose of cloaking your link? I’m not clicking on any cloaked links, and thus I’m not following you. And if you haven’t put any info in except a link, I’m probably not following you either. And sans image; nope, I’m moving on.

Here’s my point; nothing says you have to be on social media to begin with, but if you’re going to participate at least do the bare minimum of participation in whatever platform you’re creating an account on. Just like I say about people who create blogs and then abandon them, you look worse creating a profile and not doing anything with it than not creating one at all.

At least those are my thoughts; am I alone here? Come on, someone try to justify why you think this is a good thing to do.
 

Black Web Friday

Black Web Friday – 03/02/12

12 Comments

Yup, time for another episode of Black Web Friday, and I’m starting off today with an interesting history fact. On this day in 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks while playing for the Philadelphia Warriors, the only person in professional basketball history to score triple digits in one game, and my favorite basketball player of all time. Wilt was the man!

Black Web Friday

With no controversy going on that’s enough to cause a riot let’s get right into it today. I’m starting with one of my longest online friends, DeAnna Troupe of Learn Small Business. I met her on Ryze back in 2004 and she’s been a loyal commenter on this blog for many years. She’s done a lot of things concerning small business, affiliate marketing, and writing, and if you’re looking for the antithesis of some of my long posts visit DeAnna’s blog and you’ll find shorter posts that get to the point and then move on. Of course I’m working on her to write longer posts and to get rid of her captcha, but I’m like that. 😉

Kris Cain writes the blog Little Tech Girl, and it’s a wealth of information about technology, blogging, social media and every once in awhile some off-topic stuff; actually, a lot like this blog. It’s a Disqus blog so I’ve never commented on it, but I laughed when I read one of her recent posts, which was short but I felt it, on breaking one’s glasses, something I’ve done a few times in my life but also something I fret about often. There are some sales posts as well, including the glasses post, but come on, some of us should be allowed to try to make money right?

Terrance Gaines writes the blog Brotha Tech, which of course means he talks a lot about technology. Let me say this; he has the coolest header I’ve ever seen and I wish I could find someone to make something like this for me. One of the things I like is that he talks about Android phones and apps, since that’s what I have and haven’t quite been one of those people that searches apps on my own. Traditional blog commenting system with one of those captcha systems that’s at least easier to read, even if I still hate captcha. lol

Finally, let’s meet Arie Rich, whose blog KMP Blog (keep me posted) is about media, fashion, and pretty much what’s going on now. It was on her blog where I learned that the latest Muppet Movie will be coming out on DVD on March 20th, a movie I reviewed back in December. It’s definitely got a younger person’s spin on it, which helps make it fresh and entertaining, and there’s a wide range of topics she covers. It’s an Intense Debate blog, so I’ve never commented on it, but I like how it reads just the same.

There you are, 4 blogs this time around. I’m thinking that I might have to start seeing if I can find Twitter accounts on these sites and if so including them when I post the link on Twitter at least once so people can find themselves here; what do you think? Enjoy your weekend.
 

Blogging

Bad Comments/Spam The Same?

31 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I had to do something I hadn’t thought about doing in a long while. I had to turn on the Akismet spam plugin once again after a major increase in the number of spam messages I was starting to get. I had hoped that the GASP Anti-Spambot plugin would have taken care of all of that, but it seems people have found their way around it.


I’m eating a cupcake;
don’t ask lol

Even with both programs running, spam is at an all time high for me. It’s not unexpected as the ranking of this blog moves higher, and I don’t think it’s gotten to the level where it’s driving me as crazy as it does some of my friends, who often go to extreme measures trying to kill it, even turning off comments sometimes, which I don’t like as you know.

Part of the problem, of course, are what are considered “bad comments”. On my 1,200th post back in January I mentioned a conversation I had with Adrienne Smith and her contention that some comments aren’t worth keeping on your blog and that she just gets rid of them so that she can respond to everyone else and show a 100% response rate on her blog. What we both believe is that there are a number of people paid to post comments and have links going back to other sites, and most of these people are paid so little that it’s all in the numbers for them, not the quality of the comment.

This begs the question as to whether bad comments and spam are the same thing. It can be a volatile question to respond to because the kneejerk response is “yes”. And yet, I haven’t quite gotten to that point yet where I consider the two as symbiotic 100% of the time.

I’ve read some bad comments with a lot of grammatical errors and thought that it might be spam, but the comment was touching upon the subject matter so I follow the CommentLuv link back to its source and see the same type of writing on the blog. Suddenly that’s not a bad comment, just someone with lousy writing skills.

Is a bad comment a one-liner? Well, that’s up for grabs because I’ve been told by some people that on some of my posts I really don’t leave much for anyone to say if they agree with me on the topic. Frankly I buy that argument only half the time because I’ve always been able to comment on a blog with more than a one liner and make sure the author knows I read the post. But not everyone can do that so how does one judge that? I do judge those posts, and I eliminate a lot of them, just so you know, but not all of them.

What makes a bad comment is almost the same thing as what makes spam. Ergo, some highlights:

* Repeating the title of the post in the comment

* Repeating specific phrases from the content without adding anything new to it

* Writing something so generic that it applies to everything and nothing at the same time

* Writing a lot of nonsense and then popping my name in somehow; that’s pretty sneaky

* Trying to slip a link in that has nothing to do with the topic but everything to do with linking back to your site; isn’t CommentLuv enough for you?

* Writing one comment that looks passable, immediately followed by another comment that’s from the same IP address on the same post; what could you be thinking?

I think that’s enough to think about. Here’s the big question up for debate; do you think bad comments and spam are the same thing? The secondary question is what do you do about it?
 

Books

How To Get On The News Without Committing Murder – Book Review

18 Comments

My friend Beverly Mahone will not be showing up on any of my Black Web Friday posts. She doesn’t have to because I’ve written so many times about her and mentioned her so many times, including this interview with her that she’s like one of the family. If you don’t already know enough about her by reading this blog, then including her on one of the Friday posts won’t do any good.

How to Get on the News Without Committing Murder

How’s this instead then? Let’s talk about her latest book with the long title How to Get on the News Without Committing Murder, which I got to read an early copy of and which is, obviously, now released. This is a book that teaches you how to use your skills and age, if you happen to be of baby boomer age, in getting attention from the press, to the point at which they start calling you as the expert in whatever field you’re representing, and thus helping to increase your presence and your business. How cool would that be, having people calling you up to work with them because they saw you on TV, and it was free publicity to boot?

Bev does this and more in a relatively short book, less than 55 pages, and it’s a very easy and quick read, no fluff. My wife actually read the book, and she’s not a big reader, and she obviously likes Bev’s style because she read Bev’s last book Don’t Ask, which I wrote about here.

In this book she gives you 8 tips for how to get the media to notice you, then goes into detail with each tip. I’m not about to give up the entire book, but I’m going to mention 3 tips and hope that encourages you to at least take a look at what else there is. Here they are:

* Use Your Age And Experience As Advantages

* Build Media Relationships

* Learn How To Write A Dynamic Press Release

I have to tell you that while reading an advanced copy of this book, I decided that the second point I listed was one I needed to take advantage of. I happen to know a lot of local media people, but always thought it wouldn’t be right to try to leverage it into anything else because I didn’t meet them in other than social situations. After reading that section of her book I decided to contact a couple of them to tell them what I did and offer to be a differing point of view from an older perspective if they ever needed it.

Both of the people I contacted thanked me, said they’re always looking for new perspectives and said they really didn’t know that’s what I did, even though one of them had seen me at a live event where I gave a presentation, but unfortunately we were up against each other (I drew more people lol).

This is a great book to read and let me add this; guess who wrote the foreword for the book! 🙂 If that doesn’t get you juiced up enough to at least take a look at the book I don’t know what will. And if you want to see more testimonials and reviews about the book How to Get on the News Without Committing Murder, click on that link to her site.

Go buy this! 😉
 

Blogging

3 More Things To Know About In Your WordPress Admin Area

29 Comments

For some of you I hear the question now: “Why only 3 more things?” Because if you’ve followed this blog for awhile, or not, you’ll remember that I had my first post in September 2010 on 5 Areas You Should Know More About In Your WordPress Admin Area, followed a month later with 5 More Things To Know About Your WordPress Admin Area and finally 4 Things You Can Do With Your WordPress Blog You Might Not Know Already. Frankly, I think I’ve shared more about the admin area than almost anyone else except WordPress.

So today I have 3 more things I’ve discovered that you might not know about or haven’t paid any attention to. I have to make sure I’m not copying myself either; let’s see what happens.

1. Did you know that when you’re addressing comments if you hover over a person’s link under their name on the left side that WordPress will bring you an image of their website or blog? That’s pretty neat and it might help you decide if you want to keep the comment or not, deciding that a site might not be one you want to help promote via CommentLuv or through the link to the side if it’s just a website.

2. Did you know that, if you’re running CommentLuv, you can remove the “luv”, if you will, while keeping the comment? I don’t do this often but there are times when I look at the link and decide “no, this thing looks dangerous”, especially in combination with the first tip I just gave you. Of course if you’re like me most of the time you might have decided the comment isn’t worth keeping either in which case just delete it all, but this is another option if the comment seems legit.

3. Did you know that you can install plugins directly from your WordPress menu instead of downloading and then uploading them? All you do is go to Plugins over there and slide down to Add New. Once there, you can type in the entire name of the plugin you want, or if you’re unsure just type in a few words and do a search, and most probably lots of choices will come up with a ranking system from 1 to 5 stars. Much easier and saves time as well.

That’s it. What, you wanted more? Maybe next time! lol