If you are a Wordpress user (either Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org) based around Sillicon Valley interested in knowing more about this popular blogging platform, then check out Wordcamp San Francisco.

Hosted by the amiable and effervescent Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Wordcamps look at blogging from all angles. If you are wondering how to drive more traffic to your blog, Matt Cutts of Google will be running a session on how Google treats blogs. If you are trying to build a community site, then check out presentations by Andy Peatling (developer of BuddyPress) and Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. Other notable speakers include Tim Ferriss, John Lilly of Mozilla, and Scott Porad of Lolcats fame.

Check out the full schedule or my coverage from the morning sessions last year.

Why am I ‘bigging up’ this conference so much? Of all the tech events I attended in 2008 (when budgets for these still existed), Wordcamp was by far the most rounded and inspirational. Less hype, more talk, could be one way of putting it.  I’ll be there covering the event, so if you can’t make it, check back after the event for a roundup of the sessions I make.

Should you ensconce all your social media buffs into one team? Geoff Livingston wrote a great post against this siloization (is that a real word?) claiming that social media can touch every part of the organization and so doesn’t deserve to be hived off in a special unit (normally within marketing or communications).

He makes the point that for social media to be effective, it needs to be integrated with the organization. It’s about two-way communication between a company and its constituents, and everyone can have a role to play.

Whilst I broadly agree with the underlying message, I see strategic advantages in consolidating social media skills within a central function.

This is particularly true when considering those parts of the organization that are most affected by emerging communications technologies. Marketing is one department: gone are the days of broadcasting messages at the target audience. These days marketing has a strong role to play in obtaining feedback from prospects and customers, and where necessary picking up external threads and championing these within the organization. The customer support team is another example: social media can help them get closer to their constituency and interact in ways previously not possible. This isn’t to say these functions should remain siloed. As an example, if marketing (through its social media monitoring) see a Tweet from a prospect asking a technical question, they may need to engage a product expert to frame a response.

Another key role for a social media team is to act as expert facilitators. Although they may not run every campaign, they can still have valuable input (for instance advising on etiquette on a network like Twitter). In many respects, this is what is happening in PR. Whether it be through blog posts, forum threads or a discussion on LinkedIn, more people within the organization are becoming communicators on behalf of the company they represent. Does that mean we don’t need PR? No, on the contrary, we need professional communicators who can guide and coach employees who are unwittingly becoming company spokespeople.

A centralized social media team can also ensure that best practice is isolated and transmitted. Whether this means letting a blogger know that their post received more visitors than any other, or finding out how one product team managed to build engaging discussions on LinkedIn, there is value in pulling this activity together. A social media manager can help motivate disparate teams and ensure good practice moves rapidly through the organization. They can also be the ones that sell the story at the executive level and build a case for more involvement in this area.

So, my vote goes strongly in favor of setting up a social media department, albeit one that is open to the whole organization and doesn’t just focus on its own projects.

News highlights

Twitter Is Not a Strategy (The Exception Magazine)
To steal the punchline: it’s a tool. You need a strategy on how you use a tool like Twitter. Simple stuff, but how often do we confuse this?

Corporate Blogging and Sled Talk with Chris Reid of Yamaha
Yamaha’s perspective on the touchy subject of using an external agency to run a corporate blog.

Social Media Marketing Industry Report (880 marketers surveyed)
A survey of almost 900 marketers on their opinions on social media and what it means for them in practice. Twitter crops up time and time again. Traffic increases for as little effort as 6 hours a week.

Twitter FAQ: RT, HT, OH Explained (Brent Ozar)
If your new to Twitter, this is a great introduction on some of the abbreviations used to keep messages under 140 characters. Other random facts like the artist who designed the Fail Whale.

Twitter and Facebook Post Huge Growth Numbers in March
Twitter grows 77% in a month; Facebook 23.4%. The adoption by mainstream media is cited as a contributing factor. Follow-up story:
Compete: Twitter surpasses New York Times in audience
When thinking about PR and who are key influencers, should you take these stats into account? Given that this community is still growing at 1202% per annum, how soon before mainstream news sites become irrelevant?

Businesses divided over the value of blogging (Business Applications Blog)
Although businesses see bloggers as an important and influential audience, 63% of tech companies do not blog, according to a study by Eurocom Worldwide and Simpson Financial and Technology PR (it’s not clear, but I think this is a European study). The time required for these initiatives is a major factor, coupled with the lack of perceivable value.

Tweetdeck blog allows you to post comments to blog and Twitter simultaneously
Is this feature set to grow? Makes sense to me.

Is Twitter Killing RSS? (Venture Chronicles)
You should really put your blog content onto Twitter. Or so the argument goes…

Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg
Tracking links from Twitter will become a bigger deal for online marketers. Services like bit.ly could be at the forefront of this.

What An Executive Blog Editor Needs to Know (Chris Brogan)
Chris Brogan proposes you think of business value when it comes to content creation:
‘[Blogging] can be built around solid business intentions, such as content marketing (writing posts that are intended to deliver action, or at least actionable information), thought leadership (ideal for consulting opportunities), or even media sales model (typical “write good stuff and put ads against it” thinking).’

Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post
It’s one thing writing great content, but you also need to get out there and peddle it (although funny that this article comes from Mashable: one of the few blogs with such massive natural readership it has little peddling to worry about).

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The very sharp Sandy Carter asked a question today that had been playing in the back of my mind but being the weak marketer I am, I never really fully got my teeth into: if you put out a promotion on Twitter, how can you measure the effectiveness of that tweet?

Twitter, like every other web presence, should allow for easy measurement. So if your promo attracts 1,000 clickthroughs from your well-crafted tweet you should know about it. Right? Unfortunately those wonderfully effective URL shortening services that that help you keep your Tweets under 140 characters can get in the way.

For instance if the shortening service uses Javascript for the redirect, this can show odd referral data in your web logs. Another scenario is where you use the same link across different Twitter accounts (say, if you hit that magical pulse and find yourself heavily retweeted).

If you use any of the Twitter clients out there, you’ve probably noticed that many offer a host of shortening services. Each of these has its relative merits. So if you are in the position where you really want to know how many clicks emanate from your wonderfully crafted Tweets, some services work better than others.

I thought I’d ask my diminutive Twitterverse what they thought were the most ‘trackable’ URL shortening services. Richard Barley proved most helpful, pointing me in the direction of bit.ly.

A key advantage of this service is it doesn’t matter whether or not you create an account: you can still have access to the excellent stats, which start off like this:

There are further stats on geography and which accounts have used the shortened URL and crucially you can see if there are other bit.ly codes for the long URL.

The advantage of creating an account is that you see all your links collected under one interface (great for comparison). If you sign up for a premium account you get even more features such as detailed referrer stats. Interested? Here’s a few examples of how the service works:

Twhirl and bit.ly

To use bit.ly with the Twhirl desktop client you need to setup a bit.ly account. Then go into the tools section and find the API key. Twhirl will ask you for this information when you try to shorten a URL. This is great because all the URLs you post using Twhirl will be listed in your bit.ly account.

Tweetdeck and bit.ly

Tweetdeck takes a different approach by not asking you to sign in (for the record, bit.ly is the default URL shortening service in Tweetdeck). This makes it easier to shorten URLs right off the bat without having to setup a 3rd party service. But then how do you track links? bit.ly has a nifty use for the ‘+’ sign. Append this symbol to any of the bit.ly URLs to receive stats on that link. Here’s an example:  http://bit.ly/45dHIx+.

Web browsing and bit.ly

You can incorporate bit.ly with any web browser. Once you set up an account, you can drag the boomarklet to your toolbar and use this to shorten the URL, with the option to post directly to Twitter.

There are other uses of the service and it integrates with other clients (and I’m sure the iPhone), so if you have more information, feel free to comment. Now let me drift into speculation on the power of bit.ly and what it means for the web.

Taking on Friendfeed

I’ve been a heavy user of Friendfeed for some time: it’s a great tool for taking content from anywhere (including Delicious links) , aggregating it, and posting it on to Twitter/Facebook (for the uninitiated, here’s an explanation of Friendfeed). However, Friendfeed has gone down the route of concentrating more on engaging discussion around the content and does not yet offer publishers decent stats on which links have attracted most clicks. Is this a potential Achilles heel? It’s making me reconsider recommending the service for business/marketing purposes.

Taking on Digg

Beware Digg, you mighty news aggregation service: there could well be a significant player in town. Gigaom recently reported that bit.ly has received $2 million in funding – interesting given the statistics bit.ly offer could turn it into a compelling Digg-like service. When people use bit.ly to shorten a link, they are indirectly voting for it (in much the same way Google treats a link from one site to another as a vote in the PageRank algorithm). If you pull all this information together, you have a great social bookmarking system. Those links that have created the most stir (eg. through retweeting on Twitter) will be ranked the highest. I haven’t seen in practice and there maybe some kinks to iron out (how do you categorize links?) but the idea is intriguing.

Taking on Google???

OK, so we’ve stated that these links become votes. You could also argue these links are more social than the ones that Google tracks by looking at website relationships. Bit.ly already has a search engine, but this could bloom into a major feature if the service becomes widely adopted. It’s been noted that Twitter is replacing Google for certain queries (I received better information for this article from Twitter than from Google), and as bit.ly is a link between Twitter and the wider web, the service is in a good position to show which web pages are most useful to people. Why doesn’t Google report on these links too? At the moment many of these services fall outside of Google’s domain given that the Javascript tracking they use can render links invisible to the major search engines. This goes for most URL shortening services: not just bit.ly (although some services are beginning to offer more Google-friendly links).

Will Twitter get into the fray?

As a final point there is much speculation floating around about how Twitter will moneytize its service. Offering premium services to corporate customers seems highly likely. Could one of these services be the kind of statistics that bit.ly dishes out, if Twitter gets into the URL shortening business?

I, for one, think the URL shortening space is looking increasingly interesting, and at this point bit.ly is well poised as a major player.

At our recent DIALOG user conference I managed to catch up with marketer/IT consultant/uber-blogger James Taylor. He was there as a live blogger and attracted awe from the other journalists for the pace at which he could get out informative yet opinionated posts. Beyond that, James is one of the early adopters of corporate blogging as a marketing tool and is an authority blogger on the subject of business rules (and the larger discipline of business intelligence).

Live blogging

James is what you could call a veteran (if such a term is applicable in this nascent industry) in the area of live blogging and it shows: he is one of those rare writers who can cover sessions real-time. James claims it’s all about ‘how quickly you can edit’. Getting thoughts down isn’t a problem, but organizing these into a coherent flow is the hard part. It’s easier when the presenter has a clear structure but can be more troublesome for panel events where the sequence works well live, but not so well on paper.

From emailer to blogger

James was effectively blogging before the medium existed. Whilst holding a senior marketing role at Fair Isaac, he began sending out his interpretation of articles he found online via email to the sales and marketing organization. Keeping the distribution list organized was a problem with this approach. As blogging was emerging as a communications tool, James realized that this would be perfect to deal with his distribution problem. The blog was rapidly picked up by the inside sales team and officially went live in 2005. By mid 2006, the blog was outranking the corporate website on Google for key terms like ‘business rules’ and ‘brms’ (as it continues to do to this day).

A lot of this success he puts down to not trying to position the blog as a promotional tool for his own company, but rather was more interested in participating in the growing online discussion. Many companies fall foul of this distinction:

“A problem many corporations run into is confusing blog technology with a blog.”

James explains you can use the blogging technology to put out press releases, event notifications or other news that has inherent corporate bias. This is a different approach to an individual who writes about an industry or who tends to write posts that are responses to other articles. This naturally is not promotion. Following on from this idea, James believes “to write a blog you have to read other blogs”. Blogging is all about being engaged in a conversation online. This cannot be automated.

That doesn’t mean that you should ignore expertise within the organization: sales engineers are a good source of information as they are technical but also clued in to the customer base and what are their needs and pain points.

Blog management

So, what advice for the blog owner/manager? Given a blog’s reliance on search engines to deliver traffic, the blog owner should ensure that the blog takes in SEO (search engine optimization) best practices and that the bloggers are aware of target keywords the blog should be ranked for. A good point given that most corporate blogs still receive the majority of their traffic from the Google.

When it comes to structure and layout, corporations will have to start acting more like media: showing the content that changes and injecting more personality. Most corporate blogs could segment more and move away from the traditional single scrolling page, especially as these blogs generally cover a number of topics or subject areas. For instance, you could follow the approach of USA Today and include channels for each author of a multi-author blog. On the subject of personalization, having a photo of each author is a good idea.

Just as traditional media generally demarks editorial and advertising content, on corporate blogs the corporate messaging (eg. PR section) should be separated from the personality-led blogging.

Maintaining a blog requires both resource and widespread organizational acceptance. So if senior people are willing to participate, this really helps.

Use of Twitter

James’ view is that few companies write interesting Twitter feeds. Many offer little value on top of already-existing RSS feeds. This makes sense given that the tool is great for aggregation and output. Developing good content is the tricky bit.

James suggests setting up internal feeds and then being the traffic cop – that is moving content where it should go and deciding what should jump the firewall.

Measuring blog value

When it comes to measuring success, do not get obsessed about the metrics: concentrate more on building up your place in the blogging community and thinking whether something should pique interest. If you get this part right then the traffic will come. Having said that, James does keep an eye on where his blog ranks for key searches (and I presume occasionally pepper keywords into content for lower-ranked terms).

Deriving an exact ROI for a blog can be tricky. One of James’ blog objectives is to drive up sales of his book [link]. However this is tricky to calculate. The only thing James can say is he is surprised at the number of inbound leads for his consulting business that come through the blog.

For more information, read James’ EDM blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.