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From Twit to Tweep: A Groundling in the Twitterverse

Yesterday, I participated in an odd, one hour, “web session” with the Twitter Small Business advertising team where you submitted questions beforehand in anticipation of getting real world answers you could use to promote your small business on Twitter.

Instead getting helpful, direct, answers I was pricked back in time to the beginning of my blogging life and the excellent startup FeedBurner service.

Do you remember this fiery, iconic, logo?

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LEET! We Now Have Over 1,337 Boles Blogs Followers!

LEET!

Today, thanks to you, we celebrate yet another milestone here on Boles Blogs: We have surpassed the 1,337 Followers mark!

Here’s the latest morning addition to our WordPress.com Trophy Case:

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Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million

We reached the One Million — 1,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors milestone for the first time (again!) here on BolesBlogs.com since we became the consolidated Boles Blogs a year and five days ago.

Reaching a million of anything is an accomplishment and a joy, but it also forces you to reflect on what was and where you once stood as you wonder if you’d stayed the course and kept a finite focus, readership would likely be over Ten Million — 10,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors today instead of just a million.

In November 2007, when we were only the Urban Semiotic blog — we were close to smashing the one million mark — and we did just that a few weeks later!  It’s hard to imagine how many millions of readers we’d have tallied by now if we’d stayed a single blog.

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Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

There’s nothing quite like the joy of being recognized by our respected peers for the work we spin and propagate into the wilds of the worldwide web, and when we received a welcome, and now more familiar, email last night telling us the great, good, news that our article of the day — Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns — was the latest WordPress.com Freshly Pressed editor’s pick, we were shining in shadow:

Hi, David!

I hope your blog is ready to welcome some new readers — your post ( http://bolesblogs.com/2014/01/21/repressing-the-american-dream-rural-villages-as-retirement-communities-for-younguns/ ) will be featured on Freshly Pressed as a WordPress.com editors’ pick!

Another thought-provoking piece, as we’ve all come to expect from you — thanks. It’s a great post that deserves a wider audience.

FYI, you can now spread the good news by sharing the link http://discover.wordpress.com/, which lets anyone see the Freshly Pressed showcase whether or not they’re logged in to WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is the biggest and best blogging community because awesome bloggers like you make it the best. Thank you for publishing with us, and congrats! Have fun with your new readers.

Cheers,
michelle w.

Continue reading → Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

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Winding Up 2014

As we wind up into 2014 — and by “winding up” I mean a tightening of the dramatic coil, not an unwinding of tension — it’s time to contemplate where we go from here as a community of intersecting minds.

My first thought is that since 2014 is the Chinese — “Year of the Green Wood Horse” — and in every way that tells me, as a Wood Dragon, that this year is going to rock in predictable and amazing ways.

My first hope for the union is that since there’s a longer term budget deal in Washington, much of the vitriol and hatred spewed by the politicos in Washington, D.C. will die down a bit.  I realize the cruelty will never really go away, but lowering the temperature just a little bit will help us all get along just a little bit better.

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You May Now Buy the Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013)

It’s that time of year again for 2013 reflection and to get set for racing into 2014 and the New Year, and that means we are pleased to announce the — Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013) — now for sale on Amazon!

BUY NOW!

Over the years, many of you have asked for a way to promote the ongoing publication of Boles Blogs and to also have a way to read some of our best writing when you’re offline.  The solution has been a “Best of” series of books published by Boles Books Writing & Publishing that we sell on Amazon for your reading pleasure.

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Carrie Underwood’s Wooden Live Performance in the Sound of Music

I wasn’t planning on writing about Carrie Underwood’s painfully wooden live performance last night in NBC’s misbegotten, and ill-fated, “dead” re-enactment of the fabulous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, “The Sound of Music.”

All the promotional wind leading up to the live event immediately prickled senses in the wrong direction.  The show was being sold as some sort of feel-good, happy children, sparkling story full of singing and wonder and dancing when, in reality, the musical is actually extremely dark and threatening and dreary.

The musical moments in “The Sound of Music” drive the frightening plot forward into a total, creeping, Nazi occupation — and it is in the artful context of that delicate balancing between whistling in the graveyard while staring death straight in the face — that made Rodgers & Hammerstein musical geniuses.

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Back Channel Blog Comments: The Wages of Sin for Not Facilitating Your Own Social Media Stream

I’ve been professionally writing for most of my life.  In 2004 or so, I bet big on daily blogging, and found a lot of success in the prairie days of the early, roughshod, internet.  Years before that, I was writing for paper and online magazines.

One thing I missed in my dedication to longform writing was the initial wave of mixing traditional work with social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.  So what I did, in effect, was to give over control of the discussion of my articles to the wild internet where — through back channel conversations of which I was not aware — my work was being discussed and evaluated.

Boles Blogs readership has remained vibrant and steady throughout the years and, lately, we’ve even been growing lots of Followers and LIKErs.  All numbers are up across the board, so I wasn’t searching for a cause — or even begging a reaction — concerning our direct-response comments flow.

Funny that people didn’t want to login using Twitter to comment on my articles here, but they were perfectly fine “discussing my work” on Twitter while logged into Twitter.  I understand that meme-shift, though.  Commenting here is participatory.  Starting a new Twitter stream makes you a publisher.  It’s all about dynamic control and perception.  You fight that sort of back-channel co-opting by being there and being alive and watching and responding.

The remedy for that missed meme was to not just propagate new articles into Twitter and Facebook, but to be more proactively lively in the Social Mesh to make more of a difference and to be more easily found.

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Seeding the Social Mesh with Sprout Social

I’ve been testing several social media managers to continue the brand consolidation of everything Bolesian — and to help make updating the Social Mesh a much easier, and more centralized task.  I used to spend all day writing new updates for each, individual, social network.

Yes, handcrafting unique updates is always best, but sometimes time and tide work against that noble effort because you’re propagating old work instead of creating something new.  The rise of Google+ Pages Vanity URLs broke the handcrafted dam.

My first shot into managing all the social profiles — LinkedIn, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages — was HootSuite.  I ultimately found the Hoot experience overwhelming and brittle and I hated using their image network and link-shortener.

Next, I tried Buffer — a good choice, but the vanity URL shrinker did not reliably work across all profiles, and images posted to my Twitter stream would not natively expand in view.  You had to click on the images to get them to show even though they were in the Twitter image bin.

Enter Sprout Social.  Yes, Sprout Social is expensive — a free 30-day trial does not equate with a free account like HootSuite and Buffer offer — but I knew NYU and other big organizations were using Sprout Social and, I thought, even though I now have over 20 social profiles to manage, and Sprout Social limits me to 10 accounts on their $39.00USD per month first-tier plan, I should still give them a try.

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