Eric Schwartzman

Official Le Web 2011 conference bloggers Luca Sartoni (@lucasartoni), Karin Hoegh (@karinhoegh) and Nebojsa Radovic (@eniac) discuss the tech scene in Paris, this year’s scheduled keynotes from Eric Schmidt of Google, Sean Parker, Daniel Ek of Spotify, Brian Chesky of AirBNB and Kevin Systrom of Instagram as well as what type of coverage to expect from the blogger panel.  

Europeans are less aggressive networkers than Americans which makes it easier to meet the big name attendees. Networking opportunities last year with Robert Scoble, Matthais Lufkens and conference speakers.  

LeWeb brings together the most influential audience in the Internet ecosystem. Top industry entrepreneurs, executives, investors, senior press & bloggers gather to focus on the key issues and opportunities in the web marketplace.  

Sean Parker (pictured left) is an entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies that reinvent ways to spread information online.   In 1999, at the age of 19, Sean co-founded Napster and changed how people think about and share music. 

Two years later, Sean co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral engineering technology for updating contact information. Sean served as Plaxo’s president until 2004, when he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to develop the online social network Facebook.

Sean was Facebook’s founding president, helping transform that small start-up into an industry giant.  

In 2007, Sean co-founded Causes, which promotes on-line philanthropy; in 2010, he joined Airtime as a co-founder, reuniting with Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning at a social video company backed by Founders Fund.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Shira Lazar, Host and Executive Producer of the weekly live interactive show and 24/7 news hub, “What’s Trending” discusses:

Hosting live streaming programming for mainstream audiencesSelling online content to advertisersWorking with online influencersPremium appsLeo LaPorteEmotional ties to social mediaThe future of web search And the mistake which ended her distribution deal with CBS News

Named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology and Huffington Post’s “Women in Tech to follow on Twitter”, Shira has been the talent on many live-streams on the web including, The Oscars and The Grammys among many others.

If you were denied a proper Cotillion or never had a chance to be presented at the debutante ball, it’s not too late for you.

You can still learn how to act and behave politely from Philip Galanes (@SocialQPhilip) who writes the Social Q’s column in the New York Times every Sunday in Style Section. 

Social Q’s offers lighthearted advice about awkward social situations and is sure to prepare you to present yourself appropriately in social circles.    

Philip's new book "Social Q's:  How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today," which comes out November 1, 2011.   How Philip's book is different from Dale Carnegie’s “Win Friends and Influence People” and Emily Post’s “Ettiquette” which were both recently revised for the digital age.  

Are companies like Facebook and Netfilx being rude when they change their services?   Snooping on your friend’s Facebook feed without leaving likes or comments, showing your humanity, chiming into the newsfeeds of younger Facebook friends  

Appropriateness of married men friending married women without friending their husband first.  

Mattheis Lufkens's Twitter Diplomacy at Le Web last year showing that not all heads of state follow their own ministers. Is that rude?  

Geno Church who's daughter used Facebook and her cell phone to plan and actually run way from home.  When it comes to monitoring how your children use social media, is it rude to set up software to monitor your child’s online behavior without disclosing it to them?  

Using smart phones in social situations.   In the world of search marketing, the term “black hat” refers to a search marketer who uses unethical practices to try and game search algorithms to come up first. 

But what if those marketers come from other countries and cultures where unabashed capitalism is NOT necessarily frowned upon? Are they still unethical, or do we need to adjust our expectations of fairness?

In preparation for my second German-American Social Media Boot Camp in Berlin, I assembled an expert panel of digital communications professionals to discuss the state of social media in Germany, and the start-up scene in Berlin.  

Germany has come a long way since Fredric Lardinois wrote on ReadWriteWeb that the country is still 5 years behind with lots to learn.  But that may not be true for all companies.  

Big organizations are hiring big agencies and jumping in feet first. But privacy concerns among small and medium sized businesses have stymied adoption.

In fact, Xing’s compliance with local privacy laws has allowed the service to lure more users in Germany, despite a veritable lack of features and some municipal officials are still scared to launch Facebook Pages.  

Berlin’s start-up scene, including SoundCloud and Etsy, is creating jobs for the digitally literate, but the post industrial generation is still left out, because they lack the skills to compete in the digital communications marketplace and almost now formal trainings opportunities exist for them to learn these important new job skills.    

Our Panelists:

Thomas Praus (@stylewalker), managing director of Panorama 3000, a member of Box Network Europe and an advisory board member for Social Media Week Berlin 2011 Oliver Gassner, (@oliverg) conversation evangelist and Blog Coach at carpe.com communicate GbR. Sebastian Vasta (@sebastianvasta), Australian expat, former digital strategist and community manager, most recently for @Optus.  

This episode also includes a tribute to the great Liza Minnelli and her inimitable performance in the Oscar winning film Cabaret.

Photo by Stefan Widua on Unsplash

How do you find and retain the best WordPress Designers?  

WordPress, web software built by hundreds of community volunteers to create websites and blogs, currently powers 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from just 8.5% last year, and the latest data shows that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

WordPress has over 15,000 plug-ins and has seen 200 million plug-in downloads. In the fastest upgrade in the platform’s history, WordPress 3.2, the latest version, had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, according to a talk Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of WordPress, gave in August.

WordPress is easy to learn and easy to use and has given rise to an exploding community of website designers and website developers who use the platform to build new sites for themselves and their clients. But because this community of specialists is still so unique, and because, at least based on my analysis, demand for competency, professionalism, and quality appears to outstrip supply, finding the best WordPress designers requires a working knowledge of the platform, the people and its pieces to hire to identify and retain the right specialists to get you up and running.

Voce Communications, which was purchased by PR firm Porter Novelli earlier this year and which counts Matthew Podboy and Mike Manuel as key team members, has grown it’s business over the last few years and expanded its operation with the inclusion of web development as part of its portfolio of services, and most of the sites the build run on WordPress.

Voce Communications employs a full time team of WordPress experts and with us today to talk about hiring the best WordPress designer from Voce Communications WordPress Designer Jeremy Harrington (pictured right) and WordPress Developer Chris Scott, who have built dozens of high-profile WordPress sites for the agency’s clients. They’re going to tell us everything we need to know to find and retain the best WordPress website designers.

Wordpress Open Source Topics Discussed

Advantages of WordPress over Joomla and Drupal and the extensive documentation on the framework that exists.

Wordpress.org versus Wordpress.com hosted sites: What are the advantages and drawbacks of either option, and how do you decide which one is right for you?

The difference between Wordpress designers and Wordpress developers, who does what and who do you need first?

How to hire the best WordPress Designers and the right questions to ask to identify the best WordPress Designers. One place to look for good WordPress Designers is https://codepoet.com/

How to you hire the best WordPress Developers and the right questions to ask to identify the best WordPress Developers.

Have they contributed any patches to the WordPress core code?

Have the built and released any Themes?

Have they developed any Plug-Ins?

What’s their WordPress.org user name and what does their profile look like?

Have they answered any support questions in the forums on WordPress.org

Do they have any code samples they can share?

Ask specifics about what their hand was in the sites in their portfolio.

WordPress Themes, Premium WordPress Themes and WordPress Frameworks.

Finding the best WordPress themes by using the theme directory.  Pay special attention to the featured themes on the main page, and the themes by popularity in the right-hand column.

How to upgrade a WordPress website and how to safely back-up a WordPress site prior to updating a site.

The advantages of premium themes like Genesis and Thesis.

WordPress Designers who focus on specific WordPress theme: Is it a better idea to go with a designer who works with a bunch of different themes, or are there advantages to hiring someone who specializes in one WordPress Theme?

The best WordPress Plug-Ins, how to pick them, where to find them and distinguishing between Plug-ins and Themes.

Deciding between whether to sue a WordPress Managed hosting services like Page.ly, and WP Engine and WordPress Unmanaged hosting services, like DreamHost and Media Temple.

Migrating websites to WordPress without losing your search rank and the future of page rank, according to Jay Baer.

How to structure your agreement and what sort of benchmarks to build in.

Shout to Hyku blogger Josh Hallett.

What is the future of elearning?   How do you design online training courses?   How do you keep people interested? And how, if at all, will gamification and the social web change the way we learn?

Keeping up to date with the latest changes to software and web services we use for work has become a huge challenge.  And learning to use new software and online services requires a significant investment of time and energy.

Sure, there are plenty of options for coming up to speed. You can search Google for example, but you’re on your own to vet the results.  Or you can attend a workshop or seminar, but it’s expensive, you usually have to travel, and they teach to center of the class, which is either too slow or too fast for beginners or advanced users.

Online training provider Lynda.com had a library of 53,000 on-demand, online video tutorials which it makes available on a subscription basis. And 95% percent of those videos are produced in house.

In this episode, Michael Ninness, Vice President of Content at lynda.com provides an overview of how to design an online training course and the state and future of online training. Topics Discussed:

How lynda.com grew based on customer demand.What makes a great online learning course.Formal versus informal presentation styles.What type of Internet training do tomorrow’s professionals want?Lynda.com’s online social media training courses on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.The episode of the Xyleme podcast, in which George Siemens argued that the future of online learning is not necessarily instructor led, on demand training, but rather, a more chaotic, participant organized environments.  Delivering compelling elearning to mobile devices.Globalization and technology have increased productivity, largely at the expense of workers.  How can online training improve efficiencies.Are activity streams and social networks a better way to locate information than directories and catalogs?Is gamification the key to keeping people interested?

Blogging statistics, including counts on blog readership and blog traffic, were presented by Technorati CEO Shani Higgins to public relations agency leaders at the PR Summit in San Francisco.

Much of the data she shared was a preview of the blogging stats to be included this fall in the Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report.

These blogger statistics revealed provide critical insight into best practices for pitching stories ideas to blogs.

Business Blogging Statistics  

71% of bloggers only write about brands they think are reputable

Mommy bloggers get 500 pitches a day

Only 20% of bloggers like the pitches they get

Blog accuracy perception continues to rise, the credibility of mainstream news outlines continues to erode, mommy bloggers are the toughest to pitch, more brands are compensating bloggers and brands like Vogue, Samsung and Ebay are all more invested in blogger outreach programs than they were a year ago.

Professional bloggers are broken down into three groups:

Corporate Bloggers

Part-Timer Bloggers

Self-Employed Professional Bloggers

For brand marketers, the most important earned media mentions come from Self-Employed Professional Bloggers, since they have more at stake.

Business Blog Usage Statistics

33% have worked within traditional media

27% are still employed by traditional media

3% blog for their traditional media employer

65% say blogs are being taken more seriously

  8:16 Bloggers are heavy users of social media.

Statistics on How Bloggers use Social Media

87% of all bloggers use Facebook

81% use Facebook to promote their blog

64% use Facebook to interact with readers

45% say Facebook drives more traffic to their blog than it did a year ago

73% of hobbyists and 88% of professional bloggers still use Twitter

More than half of all bloggers link Twitter to their blog

34% of bloggers say Twitter is a more effective traffic source than it was a year ago

10:19 Bloggers are Talking about Brands - Nearly half of non-corporate bloggers write about brands. One-fourth of bloggers overall post products or brand reviews monthly, and one-fifth post weekly. 20% of corporate bloggers post daily about products and services.   Brand Reputation Matters to Bloggers - Bloggers care deeply about brand reputation so brand acceptance is required if companies want bloggers to write about them. 

Statistics on Brands that Blog

42% of bloggers say they blog about brands they love (or hate)

34% say they never talk about products or brands on their blogs

Among respondents who say they do blog about brands, 51% said they rarely review brands, services or products among companies

Among respondents who say they do blog about brands, 48% say they post reviews weekly

33% of hobbyist and more than 50% of professional bloggers look at reputation when determining what to write about

64% of bloggers say brand representatives treat them less professionally than they'd like

13:16 Mommy Bloggers talk about Brands More - Even though women only represent 5% of bloggers, they are the most coveted blogging segment by brands because they blog more about brands.

Mommy Bloggers Statistics

92% use Facebook to promote their blog

75% use Twitter to promote their blog

55% follow brands on social media sites like Facebook

54% have been approached by a brand

Half say a brand's reputation influences their decision to write about it

72% of mom bloggers are being taken more seriously than they were a year ago

15:44 Blog reliability and blog accuracy, as perceived by readers is on the rise.

Statistics on Blog Trustworthiness 

46% trust traditional media less than they did 5 years ago

35% believe blogs are taken more seriously

19% believe blogs are written better than traditional media sources

17:35 Blog pitching success increases dramatically when you know how to identify the most influential bloggers who cover your topic.  Understanding how to research and select bloggers, though is not discussed in this podcast, but can certainly be attained through social media training.

21:02 Bloggers are looking for audience value in a blog pitch. Investing in the quality of the news pitch, customizing high-quality of content and offering the blogger recognition never goes out of style.

23:44 Blog Trends - The level of professionalism among bloggers is on the rise, as is giving bloggers opportunities to become true brand advocates. Bloggers are also becoming more savvy about compensation and are well aware of how they are helping brands achieve goals. More brands are establishing brand ambassador programs that compensate bloggers to attend conferences and amplify their brand messages through blogs and social media.

25:13 Shani Higgins included several interesting Blogger Relations Case Studies, including:

Walmart and Vogue brand ambassador blogger outreach programs

Samsung Galaxy S product review blogger outreach program

Ebay Inside Source website online traffic generation blogger outreach program

30:30 For bloggers, expanding reach is essential. The focus should be on the quality of the writing and integration into social networking platforms. Writing frequently and entertaining opportunities from brands will help to increase reach.

Conclusion

You can't track progress without benchmarks comparing these statistics. These historical statistics on blogging provide an excellent framework to compare current blogging stats against.

Life on Mars, space colonies and inspiring innovation with Peter H. Diamandis (@peterdiamandis) Chairman and CEO, X PRIZE Foundation, a key figure in the development of the personal spaceflight industry.

Peter has created many space-related businesses and organizations, including the X PRIZE Foundation, an educational nonprofit prize institute whose mission is “to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”

The foundation, which presents a $10 million award to the first team to achieve its current goal, is best known for the Ansari X Prize, a competition to launch a reusable, manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. This was the first private-sector manned spaceflight.

Citing anecdotes from X PRIZE competitions in exploration, life sciences, energy, environment, education, and global development, Diamandis shares stories of innovations that are changing the way we think, work, and educate future generations.

He promotes intelligent risk-taking, maverick thinking, and environments where failure is allowed and celebrated. Diamandis reveals how organizations can incentivize breakthroughs for new products and strategies and reinvent their industries.

His presentations address technology and how to spur innovation. A Passion and Business Savvy for Spaceflight. Diamandis is an international leader in the commercial space arena, having founded and run many of its leading entrepreneurial companies.

Among many other ventures, he is the co-founder and managing director of Space Adventures, a space-tourism company, the co-founder and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company which offers weightless flights to the public, and the chairman & co-founder of the Rocket Racing League.

Diamandis co-founded the Singularity University, an academic institution who aims to foster thoughts leaders who will work on humanity’s largest challenges.

Diamandis also co-founded the International Space University (ISU) where he served as the University’s first managing director. Prior to ISU, Diamandis served as chairman of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), an organization he founded at MIT in 1980.

SEDS is currently the world’s largest college and high school-based student pro-space organization He is the winner of the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Innovation, the 2006 (inaugural) Heinlein Award, the 2006 Lindbergh Award, the 2006 Wired RAVE Award, the 2006 Neil Armstrong Award for Aerospace Achievement and Leadership, the Konstantine Tsiolkovsky Award, twice the winner of the Aviation & Space Technology Laurel, and the 2003 World Technology Award for Space.

Peter Diamandis attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he received his undergraduate degree in molecular genetics and graduate degree in aerospace engineering.

What’s your online influencer score?

In this episode, you’ll find out why your influencer score matters and what you can do to increase it.

Klout was one of the first company's to use social signals to improve upon Google’s Page Rank algorithm as a way of measuring influence.  

Klout’s API had 2 billion calls last month and is working with over 3,000 partners and brands.

The service began by attempting to measure the influence of users on Twitter, and has evolved to include activity on Foursquare, and last week added Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram and Last.fm.

Our guest Megan Berry, marketing manager at Klout, Blogger, social media junkie and Stanford grad, talks about how your online influencer score is surmised.

She also shares tips on how to increase your online influencer score and why it’s in your best interest to have the highest Klout score you can.

Megan had a Klout score of 71, which put her ahead of previous guests of this podcast.

Kara Swisher, the co-editor of All Things D at 70, Natalie Petuhoff had a 54 and yours truly hasd a 56.

Online Influencer Scoring Topics Discussed:

How Klout establishes online influence

The Klout Perks program

Overcoming the shortcomings of semantic analysis

Measuring popularity vs. influence

Klout’s value proposition to marketers and individuals

Measuring individuals vs. measuring media

Ethics of establishing influence based on ReTweets

+K feature which allows you to give influence to others

Photo by Athena Kavis on Unsplash

If you’re interested in tech news, you will find this very interesting. If you’re a media relations professional in tech pr, you’ve just hit the mother lode.

In this podcast, Cathy Brooks, who currently handles marketing for Draper Fisher Jurvetson backed Israeli mobile search app provider DoAT interviews All Things D co-editor Kara Swisher about her tech blog’s personality, the hamsterization of journalism, balancing accuracy against speed in the quest to be first and what makes All Things D different from other tech news outlets.

Kara splits her responsibilities overseeing the coverage of All Things D with Walt Mossberg. 

Kara also discusses:

The scandal at News Corp’s recently shuttered News of the World

Rupert Murdoch’s depth of knowledge over his business units and All Things D,

Her plans to expand their coverage to include gadget, game, and app news and reviews and add another industry conference

Arianna Huffington’s shill for higher standards in journalism while excluding AOL employee Michael Arrington from their corporate policy that bloggers not invest in companies they cover

New York Times consumer technology reporter David Pogue was reprimanded for speaking at a PR conference, which I think was a hypocritical comment to make while discussing how to pitch All Things D at a PR conference.  Pogue never “advised” PR agencies.  Reporters speak at PR conferences all the time. I’ve moderated panels of reporters for the Public Relations Society of America and can’t see how any of those sessions compromised anyone’s journalistic integrity. 

By enlightening PR firms about how to pitch, journalists are improving the quality of the information that flows their way, and that’s a good thing.  It means they’ll get better, more impartial content from companies. 

Whether they’re compensated or not, reporters are not obligated to provide coverage.  Is an expert witness less credible because they’re compensated?  What’s wrong with being paid to provide expert testimony? 

This interview was recorded at the PR Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 28, 2011. 

I keynoted the conference later in the day, after this interview concluded. 

The PR Summit Conference SF was produced by Shaun Sanders of Berkeley-based Grafitti PR. 

While this interview was in no way offensive, lewd or obscene, there was some profanity used so please be advised.