The following is a guest post by Olga Ionel. Her bio is at the end of the article. Blogging can be its own reward. It helps the blogger understand his subject—be it himself, his business, his hobby, or something else entirely—better than he did before. It improves the blogger’s writing ability. It encourages discipline, hard [.] Guest post: Get more followers for your WordPress blog was written by Cendrine Marrouat for her social media blog, Creative Ramblings. Blogging Guest Posts blogging tips traffic tips MORE >>

Stay Akamai: Phew! Here we go another year. Another year of measuring social media ROI. I’ve kicked off a couple with some easy to use, downloadable templates for strategy and KPI. But I really should have done this post before those two. Because first, we should dispel some myths about measuring social media ROI. Sometimes the truth really is inconvenient. I’m an advocate for social media ROI, but before we can measure social media ROI, we have to kick these myths to the curb. Then we can get down to business. Myth #1: Invest nothing. Reap returns. Returns require investment. MORE >>

There’s a social network for everyone. Twitter, however is vying to be the network for information gathering and sharing – from breaking news, to funny pictures, and insightful content – it plasters my feed daily. But, the more you get involved with twitter and other social networks, the more challenging the become to use. You add users, followers, tweets, Facebook integration, etc. It’s madness. So you try to find a tool to solve the problem – whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube – all of the tools have drawbacks. Should I continue? There’s plenty to do. MORE >>

I don’t know if it’s acceptable to wish you a Happy New Year when we’re two weeks into 2013, but seeing as how I haven’t talked to you in 2013, I think it is. So Happy New Year! Is it a good one so far? You’ll recall that before we left 2012, I told you I was going to India for a long overdue trip home. Well, we had a wonderful time catching up with family, friends and high school buddies (my class’ 25th reunion!). and he petted numerous street dogs all over India. Here’s a look at the Flickr set of our trip : Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. MORE >>

About a year ago we introduced something we had been working on for years, our  online community lifecycle.    The lifecycle was based upon  Iriberri and Leroy's initial work  and our own research and experience. It was the sum of everything we had learnt about communities until then.    If there is one single thing every community manager should know about communities, the lifecycle is it.    Using the lifecycle you can identify exactly where you are now and where you need to go next.  Your role evolves with the community. MORE >>