Janet Fouts

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Social capital is one of the new buzz words of the decade. Basically it’s a ratio of the size of your network and how much of that network listens to you, trusts you and takes action based on what they’ve read. How much Klout you have is one way to measure it. Tara Hunt calls it “ Whuffie “ Whatever it is, the better your social capital the more likely it is your followers will take action.

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

As I said in yesterday’s post , I spoke at the the Public Radio Program Director’s conference, and it was full of amazing people who are passionate about what they do. People like Valerie Geller, who teaches broadcasters to “not be boring&# and create a powerful radio presence. Boy, that’s something all of us presenters could use.

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Janet Fouts

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Well, at least in social media circles anyway. Here’s what I mean by that. Say you send me a friend request on a social network. If I don’t know you I’m going to go look at your profile. I’ll look to see if you seem like somebody I’m interested in knowing. Then I’m going to look to see who you follow. If you’re following interesting people too then there’s a likely connection.

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Janet Fouts

AUGUST 5, 2010

It’s no secret that I think Wordpress is the best blogging platform, and I recommend it for Websites too. Wordpress can enable you to create an online presence for a fraction of what a traditional web site costs and have an easy to use content management system (CMS) to boot. Installing, configuring and training on Wordpress is a big part of our business at Tatu Digital.

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Janet Fouts

AUGUST 17, 2010

Twitter announced today a new feature called “ Twitter Tales “ The idea is to feature the stories of users and how Twitter has impacted their lives. The first story is about Natasha Badhwar (@ natashabadhwar ) from New Delhi, who writes micro-poetry and stories that inspire and entertain as well as fragments of insight into her life as a mom, film-maker and self-confessed multi-tasker.

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

While I write here about social media (hellooo I’m a social media coach!) I read a lot of blogs on other topics of interest too and Danny Brown recently posted a challenge on his blog to share some blogs we read who aren’t the usual suspects. So, some of these are frequent commenters on my blog, Facebook or Twitter and some are just favorites I go to for inspiration.

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

I just listened to the live Ustream broadcast of Twitter’s big announcement thanks to @Scoble and Ustream. Well, me and over 4500 other viewers, so I thought I’d give you a quick re-cap. A few stats: 375,000 new users sign up per day, 16% of those are on mobile. There’s a greater need for people to be able to use it on mobile devices.

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Janet Fouts

DECEMBER 29, 2010

One of the beauties of social media is the opportunity to ask your network and extended networks a question and get an answer quickly. Often it comes from from people with hands on experience. If you need to know about how long an open bottle of wine will last , a trick to make your web site load faster, which video camera to buy or how working remotely differs from in an office, there’s somebody out there who knows and is happy to help.

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Janet Fouts

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

It’s no shock to anyone who knows me that I’m not a big fan of Facebook. It’s not personal really I just think they’ve treated their less tech savvy users pretty badly in the past by simply not making the user interface easy to understand, constantly changing the layout and options, much less the security gaffes. But that just might all change now.

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Janet Fouts

AUGUST 10, 2010

Recently there have been several injection exploit attacks on WordPress through specific hosting companies. Godaddy , Network Solutions , and most recently Media Temple hosted sites were targeted for the attacks. The one I just dealt with on this blog (and 23 of my own and client blogs) was called JohnnyA. It inserted a Javascript that re-directed my site to a spam site and then spread PHP files through the site like fwrite.php, fclose.php, eregi.php and modified several including index.php.

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Janet Fouts

NOVEMBER 23, 2010

You know what really bugs me about the holiday season? That we wait until it’s “the season of giving&# to give a damn. Non-profits who serve the needy know that over the next few weeks they will suddenly see more interest in their work than at any other time of the year. They also know that if they don’t get into the limelight they might not get what they need to survive the rest of the year when they are mostly forgotten.

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Janet Fouts

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

What again? Every few months somebody proclaims that blogging is dead and being replaced by micro blogging and other media and this post on the Forbes blog by Jeff Bercovici seems to say that Facebook and Twitter are replacing blogging. “It’s hard to recall these days, now that most bloggers are corporate drones (*cough*), but blogging was originally the pursuit of hobbyists. &#.

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Janet Fouts

JULY 9, 2010

I thought I knew quite a bit about search engine optimization until I found this nifty new tool called Scribe. Even though I optimize sites for search engines as part of my daily duties, it can be tedious and there is always more to learn. Unless you do this for a living it’s probably not the central part of your day now is it? So how do you learn SEO techniques and see how it relates to your own content online?

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Janet Fouts

OCTOBER 25, 2010

One of the questions people ask in our initial social media strategy sessions is “How will I know if I’m doing it right?&# The easy answer is something like “your metrics will show you&# or “you’ll be the most popular man in the universe&#. Of course it’s not rally that simple and that leads to the inevitable and important metrics discussion.

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 22, 2010

The number one question I get about social media is: “How can I do all this social media stuff and still get my work done?&#. Great question isn’t it? I mean, OK, I confess I spend all day attached to social media like an IV but that’s my job. People hire me to watch out for them and find new opportunities to engage and new tools and it’s all candy to me, but it shouldn’t be for anybody who wants to run a business that isn’t around social media now is it?

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

I know I know, I just wrote a post on how important it is to be a regular blogger and here I am not having blogged in days! Weeks even! Maybe I jinxed myself. Frankly, I’ve been busy coaching clients and speaking and traveling and that’s all good, but it’s not an excuse. I expect you might have been here too. You let the ol’ blog post slide for a day or two thinking you’ll get back to it and then it dawns on you that you STILL haven’t posted and now you’

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Janet Fouts

AUGUST 16, 2010

I had lunch today with a friend and we got to talking about creating a personal brand online. It was a really great discussion and I wanted to share some of it with you. I don’t care where you work or how happy you are in your job right now, you still need to build your own personal brand online. That means separate from your identity as a business or even as the head of a department or your own company.

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Janet Fouts

JULY 19, 2010

Every successful blogger or blogging coach will tell you it’s important to blog regularly to maintain the interest of your readers. How often is up to you, but often it’s helpful to set a sort of schedule to your blogging so people begin to expect to hear from you on a regular basis. It can be disappointing to go through your feed readers and see that many of the feeds have not been updated recently.

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Janet Fouts

AUGUST 19, 2010

Up to now Groupon has offered deals for local retailers and it’s been a boon to the niche businesses to get access to a bigger market. Even a tiny business can get a lot of bang for their buck out of a Groupon offer. With today’s offer from the Gap though, the game has shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for Groupon and it’s users, and I might even buy this one for my niece, but does it spell doom and gloom for the niche businesses it has served so well

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

If you’re interested in the social media channel for your business you should check this out. My posts are now included in a new topic hub focused on social media called Social Media Informer. The idea is to pull together respected content producers and sort them so they are easily digested by topic, concept, tools or type of content. Wanna know what’s going on in WordPress ?

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Janet Fouts

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

I spent last weekend up to my ears in public radio, and happily so. I was invited to moderate a panel on social media strategy at the Public Radio Directors Association ( PRPD ) conference in Denver. While NPR is certainly an obvious first thought when you think of public radio, there are so many stations out there doing supremely cool stuff. This conference was full of people creating inventive and thoughtful programming to offer to public radio stations for their programming.

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Conference Social Media iPhone Strategy 132

Janet Fouts

AUGUST 12, 2010

Social media has had such a huge impact on small businesses, both to reach out to a global audience and to their own backyard as well. I love to see local business flex their social media muscles and offer specials to local residents, through innovative and fun marketing, deepen their relationships in their neighborhood and support the community as a whole.

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Janet Fouts

JUNE 17, 2010

I was on a panel today at CFP entitled “ Privacy, Activism, & Social Networking: Protecting Privacy While Running a Media Campaign in 140 Characters or Less &# with Tamar Gubins, Deborah Pierce, David Roth and Danny O’Brien and I’ve been going round and round in my head about my own position on privacy online and looking at social media from the viewpoint of an activist who may have a deeper need for personal privacy for safety reasons.

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Privacy Social Networking Aggregator Issues 130

Janet Fouts

JULY 8, 2010

I’m a big fan of group coupon networks, deals and discounts offered through Twitter. In these times what’s not to love about buying a coupon for a dinner at 40 or 50% of it’s market value? It’s a win for the vendor too because they get new faces in the door and most times we spend more than the coupon. Sometimes I even forget I bought it and the money I spent stays in the pocket of the vendor.

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Janet Fouts

JULY 6, 2010

Fast Company has been a darling of the geek set since it first launched. The magazine is full of the coolest gadgets, the hippest companies and really good information and the website is a vibrant community. So what went wrong with the “Influence Project&# ? The site which recently launched entices a user to enter their name and view their social media influence.

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Janet Fouts

JULY 2, 2010

If you’ve got a great story it seems only natural for PR to reach out to bloggers in your space and get them to write about you right? Yeah… well that seems to be the latest problem for bloggers who get tons of emails and press releases every day trying to get them to write about whatever product or service. So if you really want to connect with bloggers you need to read these best practices first.

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Janet Fouts

DECEMBER 23, 2010

The holiday season is upon us, and the days following December 25 tends to be slow for most people. That makes it a perfect time to take stock in your online presence. When was the last time you updated your web site? What social sites did you join and then never use? I know, I know, somebody, maybe even me, told you that you need to protect your brand by reserving the name on a social media site so somebody doesn’t get it and use it against you or in ways you don’t want related to y

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Janet Fouts

JUNE 22, 2010

What it takes to be a success in social media is the ability to be fluid and organic in your approach. To move quickly and decisively as new issues develop, evaluate new tools and networks for their usefulness, usability and appropriateness. To interact with your users and community and listen to what their needs and desires are. You need to be able to evaluate opportunities quickly since things come and go in a flash in this environment.

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Janet Fouts

OCTOBER 12, 2010

There’s a saying in social media that goes something like this “You know you’ve “arrived&# when you’ve got trolls commenting on your work&#. It’s true, the more connections you have on social media networks the more likely someone will disagree with you. Now, just disagreeing doesn’t make somebody a troll though.

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Janet Fouts

DECEMBER 14, 2010

This year flew by and the sheer number of new social networks and applications is simply stunning. Keeping on top of it all is definitely a full-time job, and for those of us who learn new stuff for fun, it’s been fantastic. I wanted to take a moment to thank just a few of the people I’ve learned from this year and I asked them to share an answer to the following question: What was the most important thing you learned about social media this year?

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Janet Fouts

NOVEMBER 12, 2010

Generosity is a huge part of the social media experience. The sharing of links, news and information are the most obvious examples of this, but even more important is generosity in supporting others. Even if they may be your competitors. This is a difficult attitude for a lot of companies–both large and small–and for some it’s insurmountable. Some of my coaching clients have really resisted it until I could show them the value of sharing more than broadcasting their own value 24/7.

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