Evan Bartlett ’s blog

Time is flat on the web today!  If the blog post/web page you’re currently reading doesn’t have a date, you’re stuck using design cues in the hopes of carbon dating what era it came from (flashing text, and animated jpgs?)

Twitter is coming to address some component of this issue, but they still face the same problem as google, delicious, etc.  How to represent time in your search results.

Here’s how I see the issue of “time relevancy”:

For example in the “Google Web” category, if I’m looking for advice on how to choose a DSLR Camera (the bigger format digital cameras with swapable lenses) google brings back articles from 2002 and 2003 which no longer applies to todays cameras.  I could go to twitter, but I don’t necessarily need advice on the camera that came out today, those are too expensive!

How do we solved this for everything in between the Way Back Machine and the Real time web?  Do they all need timelines?  Ones that look better than mine….

Just noticed facebook added a feature to allow you to pull other services in (a la Friendfeed).  Check out the screenshot below:

Go to your profile, and click the “Settings” button on your wall

I’ve been managing Kiva’s social media initiatives as part of the community outreach team since Feb, and one of my biggest problems has been tracking metrics.  Sure, “real time” web tools are all the rage, but none of them seem to suit my needs ( I want distributed Google Analytics for social media), so I’ve gone low tech; URL shorteners.

Bit.ly to the rescue!  I didn’t quite understand this before, but a URL shortener like Bit.ly that provides metrics can serve as a decentralized stats tracking tool.  Unlike something like Google Analytics where you have to have access to the site where you are tracking stats, with bit.ly you can release your unique shortened URL and you can track the stats wherever it goes!

I discovered the idea by accident, and posted a quick version of the test earlier, but for this post I wanted something a little more robust.

Starting Point:

Kiva Twitter Accnt (on 6/12/2009) :  5,758 followers

Kiva Facebook Accnt (on 6/12/2009) : 44,039 fans

The Setup:

I was posting a link to the newly released Kiva App Directory and I wanted to track the clicks this link would get on Facebook vs. Twitter to get an idea of how engaging either service is.  To do this I needed to create two different short URLs on services that provide real time link tracking.

I chose bit.ly to generate the link that I would post to Twitter (bit.ly/PdKQ5) and the SnipURL to generate the one I’d post to Facebook (http://sn.im/jzph9).

Results:

Raw Data:

Chart 1:  Day 1 10am - 4:46pm

Keep reading…

Just posted a link that I shortend with two seperate shortening services to Kiva’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.   Found some interesting stats, and wanted to post them quickly before going back and writing a full post.

Here are the stats after two days:

Bit.ly (posted on Twitter)

SnipURL (Posted on Facebook)

Given that our Twitter account has around 5k followers and our Facebook account has 42k fans, I was surprised how many clicks that I got from Twitter.  I’ve already run more “serious” tests and I’ll post the results.

You probably heard about it through facebook or twitter, but last weekend I participate in the first Kiva Developer Garage.   The idea was to promote the launch of their new API, and get a bunch of new projects kick started.  Though Im not a developer, I attended to motivate, inspire, and provide some ideas on which direction the apps could take.

In short we had 25+ coders show up and we proposed a handful of general projects:

1) Javascript Loan browser - to make the browsing experience sexier

2) iphone App

3) better Facebook app

4) wordpress plugin

5) google friend connect

My main interests where around the Facebook application and the Wordpress Widget.  If we can get to the point that every someone Facebook account makes a loan or gets repaid, they post it back to their news feed, we’d be set.  People would learn about the lending and loaning experience through their friends, and would be more comfortable checking out Kiva.org for the first time.

On the wordpress widget, the idea is that many bloggers are out there lending to Kiva and they want to show their kiva street cred.  We want to display our portfolios and our stats to the world in the hopes of challenging more people to get involved.

Both of these projects got off to a good start, and once I track the links, I’ll post them.  In the meantime, here’s the video:

My friend Rachel is traveling the world doing all kinds of crazy things, and you can see her wordpres travel blog here.  The problem is, she’s got no pics in her posts!

So she needed to know how to post pictures from her flickr.com account into her blog posts on wordpress.com

Here goes:

Adding a Flickr Photo to a Post on Wordpress.com

Fred Wilson put up a good post almost a week ago about blogging for a cause, which lead me to Zemanta’s (Fred invested in them) Blogging for a Cause campagin.

Since I’m already on quite a roll about Kiva, I figured why not post one more time about why I think they’re such a great organization:

1) Transparency

In todays world of stock market scandals and top secret government documents, I want to see whats going on behind the curtain.  Kiva takes transparency to the max, and it shows in every aspect of their business.  Here they are working with Ernst & Young to be more transparent, and here’s a group of hard core supporters dedicated to making Kiva stays transparent! 

2) Scalability

Kiva has the ability to touch a lot of people and make a difference.  They’ve loaned out $73million from nearly 500,000 lenders to 175,000 entrepreneurs.  Wow.  Those are some huge numbers, and they’re growing every day.  The more time I spend on social media for Kiva, the more I realize how many future lenders still don’t know about Kiva.org!

3) Efficiency

In only four years with under 30 full time employees they did all this!

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This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

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After getting the “@kiva” name on twitter I wanted to get the word out that Kiva.org now officially had a twitter presence that people could remember.  Prior to that we had been using @kivacs and @kivadotorg, and people were mistakenly assuming that we were @kiva.

Inspired by Charlie O’Donnell’s co-opting of Follow Friday to promote the launch of his company, path101, i wanted to do the same for Kiva.  The idea was to get as many people as possible recommending @kiva for Follow Friday using the #followfriday hashtags, in the hopes of gaining 1k followers.  To set the scene, we emailed all of kiva’s mailing lists (700+) and 20+ of the top people I could think of on Twitter (which isn’t exactly an impressive list).

Here are the rough stats we got on Follow Friday May the 15th (which we started with around 2400 followers):

New Followers :200

Follow Friday Recommendations : 90

I did a quick run through of those 90 people who gave us a shout out, and combined they had 46,000 followers.  Thats 500 followers on average, so we’re not talking about a bunch of new accounts here.

We also posted about the initiative to our blog, and to our Facebook page, which had 40k fans at the time. Later in the day 2pm PST, we even got posted on@micah’s (the creator of follow friday) www.followfridays.com Feature Followers section.

Here’s what the day looked like on TwitterCounter, you can just barely see the graph curve up a bit more  on May 15th  We went up from gaining an average of a 150 users each day to over 200:

Since my goal for the day had been to add 1k new followers, I was a bit dissapointed.  I’d love to know what other people expect when doing this kind of campaign.  My buddy Dan Martell has a similar post on his blog, which can be used as a comparable.  A guest blogger, @coryschop , does an 8 hour experiment and gains 83 new followers.

As part of Kiva.org’s Community Outreach team, I was working on trying to get the “@kiva” account rather than continuing to use our “@kivacs” and “@kivadotorg” accounts.  I had contacted Twitter’s official support site, one of their investors, and googled the heck out of “how to get your organization’s name on Twitter”.  None of these yielded results, so I contacted the @kiva user directly.

After several “@” messages and looking at her tweet frequency I realized she wasn’t actively using the service and probably wasn’t receiving my messages.

At that point I got the idea from @ryanmilini to follow all her friends, hoping that one of them follows me back or checks their @’s.  You can see my desperate attempts here and here !

Apparently that got through because very soon after I had a tweet from Kiva (yes, her name was Kiva!) telling me she would be happy to hand over the user name!  Great to see that people are willing to help out for such a good cause.

Hopefully this trick can help other nonprofits / orgs/ charities get their names on twitter too.  Stalking her friends wasn’t immediatly apparent to me!

At the ACA conference this year in Atlanta, there was a renewed interest in blogging, so I thought I’d put together a list of resources for the investors looking to grow their readership.  As social media and personal branding reach a wider audience, I think its a great idea for investors to blog, tweet, and comment their way to a broader reach with entrepreneurs.

Commenting

I judge blogs by the quality of their comments (which doesn’t say much for this one!), and to keep up there are a couple tools that can make your life easier.

First, get rid of your blogs commenting engine and install a third party commenting system like disqus, intense debate, or even facebook connect.  I use disqus.  The benefit is that your readers won’t have to fill out their information each time they comment, and with system like discuss they’ll get notified via email each time a new comment comes in.  See Fred Wilson’s site AVC .  He has very active discussions and a great community, but the only way he could possibly keep up with the conversation is by replying to comments via email on his blackberry!

Next, you probably want to know everything thats happening in comment discussions across the blogosphere, and BackType can handle that for you easily.  You can subscribe to recieve alerts anytime a particular term is mentioned in the comments section of a blog, and you can even get email updates on comments you’ve made on other sites that might not use a commenting engine like the ones mentioned above.

Distribution

Building traffic by word of mouth and by google can be a slow proposition.  Lots of people use 3rd party tools to get further distribution.

Digg is probably the most popular, but Delicious has a very tech focused crowd that could also drive traffic.  With Delicious, you can just bookmark and tag your own post to make   Stumbleupon, Technorati (more of a blog directory), and Reddit may also help get your writing out to a larger audience, but you’ll have to research the various techniques for doing so, because each community is different.

Twitter

Its one of the fastest growing social networks, the conversations are real time, and the messages are quick.  All of these factors point to Twitter being an integral part of your blogging approach.  You can use it to tweet out each time you write a post, follow up with discussions, or to find new people that can feed you interesting ideas to write about.  I’ll follow up with a post about which people to follow on twitter.

Analytics

To track your traffic progress, the standard seems to be Google Analytics.  Sign up for an account, copy and pasted the javascript code, and you’re ready to go.  I also like adding MyBloglog to my site, to get a better visual representation of whos visiting.  MyBlogLog has some light analytics, but its really much better for seeing the pictures on the right hand side of your blog of all your visitors (see mine on the right)

Reading

If you’re still reading RSS feeds, then Google Reader is the way to go.  Its got amazing keyboard shortcuts, along with powerful sharing features.  Its definitely the best tool for processing mass amounts of information.  The only shortcoming I’ve found is that it can’t handle password protected RSS feeds, in which case you can just download NetNewsWire for those feeds.

After overdosing on information through Google reader you may come to a may organic process of discovering and reading articles.  Twitter is a great way to get news from a hand selected group of people that you find interesting, while Instapaper is a simple easy way to save those articles for later.  Instapaper’s bookmarklet “read later” lets you copy the article to your “instapaper”, so it can be read through their beatiful simple text reader, or their iphone app.