SocialDitto Not Ready for Prime Time?

[Update: The primary developer for SocialDitto contacted me this morning to address the concerns I enumerate in this article. He and I are in the midst of a congenial discussion about what he can do better and what I in fact got wrong. I'll add another update to this post based on that discussion as soon as possible. - Will]

SocialDitto aims to be a simple online tool that lets you embed individual Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus posts in HTML documents (such as your website or blog.) You just copy the URL of a public post, paste the URL into a box at SocialDitto, and grab the resulting code.

The embedded posts are fully functional, displaying the user's avatar, a link to the post, and accompanying links. In some cases embedded posts include photo thumbnails, video stills, and link previews. In all cases, posts must be public to embed them; this is a good thing, as it protects users' privacy.

Here's one of mine:

Follow @willconley777 Will Conley
@willconley777 Please hold. My computer is digesting a cow. #fb
3 days ago via Echofon · powered by @socialditto
 Reply  · Retweet  · Favorite

What's It Good For?

I was planning to play around with SocialDitto as a blogging tool. I wanted to hand-select and embed some of my best tweets and Facebook posts as new blog posts elsewhere, to perhaps lure new, similar-minded people into my social media universe. I might also have used the service to collect some of my favorite posts by others around certain themes.

Unfortunately, SocialDitto just isn't ready for prime time. Either that, or I don't know how to use the Internet as well as I thought I did.

Commence the Tedious Litany of Problems

SocialDitto is not without its kinks; it's still a new-ish product as of June 1, 2012. Every embedded post relies on a huge chunk of script and HTML. Tweets are a visual disaster. If an embedded tweet comes from a profile that uses a tiled background image, you get an ugly two-tone border. Even when you can get the preview to look right, it might not resolve properly when actually embedded. I managed to embed the above tweet and make it legible by turning my own Twitter profile completely white, but how many other profiles are like that? Not many.

Line breaks in Facebook posts disappear when embedded with SocialDitto, leaving you with one run-on paragraph. Google+ posts work great with SocialDitto—including line breaks—but link previews don't appear. And after my experience with the Twitter aspect, I didn't bother trying to embed either a Facebook post or a Google+ post. (You can try, if you want. Let me know how it went, in the comments here.)

The post URL box at SocialDitto appears to be all-in-one, but you really need to click the Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ logo above before pasting the URL into the box. Even then, you might get an error message; refreshing the page and trying again sometimes helps.

What SocialDitto Needs to Work on Right Now

SocialDitto was created by WebProNews—the same company that produced Twellow (awesome service) and LinkNotify (I've never tried it.) So I do have some faith in the company.

Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. That's highly possible. Right now, I think WebProNews needs to either simplify SocialDitto's embed code into one neat line of script, or eliminate all script and use plain HTML to standardize the way embedded posts appear. I recommend the latter, as script doesn't work in certain blogging platforms like WordPress.com. (It does work in Blogger, sort of.)

FINISH HIM!

Lots of bloggers seem to think SocialDitto is the bee's knees, but I think it's just an awesome idea, hastily executed.

Flawless Victory.

-----
All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.

Props Where Props Are Due

This should come as a surprise to the good people at Growthink.

I owe my recent interest in crowdfunding (and angel investing, venture capital, and business planning) to Growthink. They graciously offered me the chance to assist them with my writing services. In so doing, they gave me an introduction to the interesting world of seed and early-stage business management.

Therefore I felt it only fair to give them a shout-out here. Growthink is a business plan consultancy, middle market investment bank, and feasibility study service. Since 1999 they have helped over 2,000 businesses raise $1 billion in capital.

Visit http://growthink.com to get an overall sense of the company.

Visit http:/crowdfundingformula.com to view a tantalizing video by Growthink co-founder Dave Lavinsky.

This is NOT a paid advertisement. Just props where props are due.

Feedback requested! Should I keep writing about business topics? Sample article within.

Hi there.

I am testing the waters to see whether my business writing is of worth to you and your networks. Depending on your feedback, I will continue to write about angel capital, venture capital, crowdfunding, and other business investment topics. I will also attempt to research and answer any of your questions about such topics, to boot.

The more valuable my writing is, the more likely you are to link to my articles and share them with your networks. The more links and eyeballs my articles get, the more revenue shares I rake in.
On the other hand, if my business writing is not compelling enough to warrant viral distribution, I make bunk and it isn't worth my time financially (even though I do rather enjoy it.)

That's why I am asking for your feedback.

Please read my article "How to Determine Whether a New Company is a Good Candidate for Venture Capital Funding" on eHow. It is one of many I have written, but I am choosing this one for testing the waters.
If you like the article, pass it around like the town bicycle. Also click the blue "Like" button, as spotlighted in this gratuitous screenshot:


Cheers, and I look forward to your feedback. Should I keep going?

My Video Review of the Red Hot Referrals Chapter of Business Network International (BNI)

I attended Visitor Day today at the Red Hot Referrals chapter of Business Network International (BNI). This is my review of the experience.

What is "Red Hot Referrals"? It is the White Bear Lake, MN chapter of an international real-world network of business professionals, called BNI. Similar to a chamber of commerce, members give each other business referrals.

Pretty straightforward.

What sets BNI apart from a chamber of commerce is that each chapter allows a maximum of one member from each type of business. For example, there is only one lawn care specialist in the Red Hot Referrals chapter, based in White Bear Lake. This creates an atmosphere of "preferred referrals" within the chapter and "locks out" the competition. If you join BNI, you will never see a "rival" company in your chapter. This lets you breathe easy and just be yourself. And trade lucrative business referrals with other members.

Pretty smart, right?

It costs about $400 a year to be a member of BNI. You have to attend meetings about once a week. "It's not netsitting, it's not neteating, it's networking," as they say.

The benefits of the organization became obvious to me when I attended Visitor Day today. Many long-time members attested to the effectiveness of the organization. Some members said they get as much as 70% of their business from Red Hot Referrals alone.

Everyone seemed to me very real, very genuine. I detected little to no bullshit whatsoever.

Those at RHR who I spoke with, please feel free to get in touch with me via http://willconley.extendr.com. Also: Comment right here freely.

Those who are not in BNI: Consider joining. It's awesome. And comment here freely.

I hope you enjoy the review.

Product vs. Brand: An Anecdotal Résumé for a Brand Revolutionary

For a rote employment history please view my résumé on LinkedIn. For an anecdotal résumé, please enjoy this post.

Youth was not wasted on the young.

Not in this case, at least. Here are some of my happiest branding memories from the days of yore. (Or my, as it were.)

---

The Product: Homemade Cookies



The Work: Sold a big plate of homemade cookies for 50 cents apiece door-to-door at age 6. Made six dollars, paid my sweat shop worker (mom) a dime.

The Brand: Big Brown Eyes

---

The Product: Greeting Cards and Stationery



The Work: Sold greeting cards, gifts and stationery for Olympia Sales Club (R.I.P.) during my pre-teens. Again with the door-to-door.

The Brand: Gumption. Strangers were impressed by a young person selling things to them.

---

The Product: Money



The Work: Put in my hard time as a telephone fundraiser for powerfully peppy librul organizations. Learned how to sell an idea to a stranger for $270 in under 60 seconds.

The Brand: Peace and Solidarity

---

The Product: Art



The Work: Post-college years: Assembled a collective of like-minded (and un-like-minded) artists, musicians, writers and misfits to throw shows and sells zines. (What's a zine?) Afunctionul, as the group was called, was more than just about the art. It was about the movement. It was about the method. It was about the activity itself - especially the marketing.

The Brand: Activity

---

The Product: Ad Space

The Work: While at tiny alternative weekly newspaper Pulse of the Twin Cities (now gone the way of Belushi and Cobain, R.I.P.), co-opted behemoth rival City Pages' Minnesota Music Directory and used it to market ad space to musicians. City Pages sales director threatened "legal action" for having "filched" their public list but ended up offering me a job instead.

The Brand: Big brass balls of steel and impudence.

---

The Product: Ad Space



The Work: I built a classified advertising section for Pulse from the ground up. Kept it humorous but classy.

The Brand:

---

The Product: Street Promotion

The Work: Passed out promotional flyers on the streets of Manhattan. The challenge: Holding a piece of paper in front of a New Yorker is like saying "Here, you throw this away." Solution: target one person and start talking to them a half a block before they reach your position, then lunge with the flyer as if jousting. Score.

The Brand: Pure golden sunshine energy charged in the palm of my hand and released.

---

All Grown Up Now...

But I will never forget those formative years. I never knew I was learning the difference between products and brands.

How to Use Twitter for Business

A few rules of thumb for businesses using Twitter. For beginners and experienced Twitter users alike.

Are you considering using Twitter to promote your business and communicate with customers and prospects? Whether you are a beginner or an experienced Twitter user, the following rules of thumb will help your business get the most out of Twitter.

1. Relax, my friend! It's a cocktail party, not a sales presentation or board meeting.

2. Link your Twitter profile to your website or blog (and your website or blog should include easy links to the rest of your entire Internet presence.)

3. Have a to-the-point but interesting Twitter bio. Include your title and business name, but follow it up with something personal, distinctive or even wacky. You're a human being, act like it.

4. Tweet. Duh.

5. Vary your tweet content and style. Again, you are a human being living on Planet Earth. Don't try to tell me that your business is the only thing you care about. If something random but interesting comes to mind, tweet it.

6. Balance regular tweets with replies. Reply too seldom and you will be correctly identified as self-absorbed. Reply too often and you will be properly pegged as a follower not an initiator. Find an instinctive balance and I might just think you're human.

7. Be genuine. Are you seeing a pattern here?

8. Make your promo tweets AWESOME. Study great newspaper headlines and commercial tag lines. Take note when you see a great tweet and analyze it to find out why you love it. Apply what you learn to your tweets.

9. Time your promo tweets to coincide with UNUSUAL sales, promotions, events, etc. Timing is everything.

10. Help others. Freely re-tweet great tweets.

11. Share great links you think your followers might love.

12. Make friends. This goes along with that whole "try to pretend to act like a human being" thing.

The take-home lesson here is be human, interact, promote others as well as you and your business, be human, be brilliant, be human, and be...

What's the word of the day?

Five Online Supplementary Funding Resources for Nonprofits - CardPartner

(Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps)

This morning I began a five-part informational series about free online resources for nonprofits that are looking for some emergency funding during the Madoff Recession. That's right, I am going to go ahead and name this recession after Bernie Madoff, the $50 billion Ponzi scheme ripoff artist who single-handedly tanked so many of the nonprofits, even though he is hardly the one to blame for the economy as a whole. It's just that Bernie Madoff exemplifies everything that is just so darn beautiful about the deregulated market.

Now more than ever, we need solvent nonprofit organizations. If you are in nonprofit management, then tune in to this series, as I will be reviewing five prominent funding sources you can use right now--not just to save your organization from annihilation--but to shoot for the moon. (Why do anything halfway? I ask you.)

Last post, we covered GoodSearch, the Yahoo search engine that donates a penny to your organization each time one of your supporters performs a search. We now move on to CardPartner.

2. CardPartner

That image you see up top is an affinity credit card designed by the Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps through CardPartner.com, a free micro-affinity credit card program designed to help smaller non-profits raise supplementary funds. CardPartner is unique in that it is geared towards smaller nonprofits. Up until 2008, only the largest of nonprofits and charities could take part in an affinity program. Why? Short answer: high start-up costs.



CardPartner's approach is to instead allow organizations to upload their own credit card designs to the CardPartner website, and then use their online marketing toolkit to get the word out to existing supporters. Every aspect of the service is totally free because CardPartner gets paid by the bank.


(Reach Out and Read)

So what are the benefits? Simple. Each time one of your supporters applies and is approved for your organization's (beautiful, quirky, what-have-you) co-branded Visa Platinum credit card, your organization gets $50 from UMB upon first use of the card. After that your organization gets a percentage (30 basis points) on all retail purchases. One early adopter has already raised about $10,000 on card activations alone since mid-2008.

So what about the card itself? Is it the kind of thing you would want to foist off on your valuable supporters? Answer: It's a Visa Platinum. Need I say more? There are some extra perqs involved as well--my favorite is free lost luggage replacement--benefits which are exclusive to the CardPartner program.

A participating client organization recently said on the CardPartner Facebook Group:

"As the economy tightens, non-profits should cheer new sources of revenue like this. At the same time, it's a neat way for cardholders to leverage every purchase they make in support of a cause they love. A complete no-brainer all the way around."


(The Hope of Survivors)

The only problem I can see with the CardPartner program is that the image uploading process can be a little confusing if you don't know much about image formatting. That should not be a major problem, however, as the staff of this promising young start-up are very hands-on and willing to help over the phone. To date they have helped well over a hundred small nonprofit organizations. Yours could be next.

Questions? Good! Most of them are answered on the CardPartner website. Meantime, you can begin your application without committing to anything.


Next up in my five-part series about free online fundraising resources for nonprofits:

3. cMarket, the online charity auction site to end all online charity auction sites! Stay tuned.

Five Online Supplementary Funding Resources for Nonprofits - GoodSearch

Today I am releasing a five-part series on supplementary funding resources for nonprofits. I can't think of a single reason why that would be a good idea.


Image: underthebutton.com

Yeah, I dunno, I just thought this would be a fun way to pass the time. Not that there's any urgency to the matter.


Bernie Madoff

It's like this. Nonprofits need help now, and they need to start getting creative. If you work for a nonprofit, why not start here and now?

This series will focus on online services that help nonprofits raise money, free of charge. All of them are easy to implement, but they vary as to the amount of funds they can raise. Some methods will make your organization a few bucks for a packet of printer paper; others can raise you thousands. In view of this blog's theme of social media, I chose only the services that use some form of the Social Web to raise money.

On the docket for review are GoodSearch, CardPartner, cMarket, eBay Giving Works, Google for Nonprofits, and Grassroots.org. Stay tuned all day (you can subscribe to my feed at the upper-right corner of this blog) as I review the five services one at a time. First up:

1. GoodSearch


Tell your supporters to use GoodSearch as their default search engine. GoodSearch is powered by the Yahoo search engine (which is almost identical to Google Search). Users simply go to goodsearch.com, select the name of any registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit from a drop-down menu, and then search the Web as normal. A penny is donated to the selected cause each time a search is completed. The resultant rewards come from a cut of the advertising dollars.

Not sure if your school or nonprofit is on GoodSearch? If you are a registered 501(c)(3), then you are in the database. Accidental ommissions do happen, however, so check the list to make sure. If you see a glaring omission of your organization, you can apply for approval using a simple form.

How effective can you expect GoodSearch to be? As effective as your promotional efforts. Hundreds of millions of searches are performed each day; you can take at least a few thousand of those and use the funds to buy office supplies. To promote the use of GoodSearch, use these promotions suggestions. There is also a free GoodSearch toolbar available, which your supporters can dowload for free and use it to "search and support" without having to go to the (slightly unattractive) GoodSearch homepage.

2. Tune in later today! Drop a line if you're following the series, and please feel free to opine or ask questions as we go along.

IWearYourShirt.com Begins its Print Newspaper Bonanza

iwearyourshirt.com on front page of Florida Times Union (Metro section)
Originally uploaded by iwearyourshirt

As predicted, Jason Sadler of IWearYourShirt.com fame is starting to get some attention in the print newspapers. Expect more ink spilled on bigger broadsheets over the next few weeks as Sadler's one-man marketing juggernaut continues to broach the digital divide.

Jason Sadler a.k.a. iwearyourshirt.com Goes Live

I just think this is fascinating. Jason Sadler wears your branded shirt for the price of whatever day in 2009 he wears it (e.g., January 1st is $1, December 31st is $365). The shirt can depict anything you want, as long as it's not too profane or inappropriate. He doesn't pimp your company out loud, necessarily, unless he feels like it. Buyers can request he salsa dance or do ten push-ups while wearing the shirt, but again the extras are up to his whim.

To get your brand seen, Jason:

• Walks around and lives his normal life in Florida
• Runs a live stream on ustream.tv every day for an hour or so (while wearing your shirt)
• Twitters his doings
• Connects with people on Facebook
• Puts up photos of the shirts on Flickr

And whatever else comes to mind.

The live stream he did today, which ran four hours in length, was an interactive bonanza. His viewership averaged a steady 150 throughout the live stream, many of whom chatted with each other and with him in real time. He showed us his closet with the 365 hangers. He shorted out his ceiling fan in his apartment. He got his girlfriend's family on the phone to do some promo shoutouts for iwearyourshirt.com...

...and everybody just more-or-less had a goofy time of it.

People are excited about Jason's ploy. Yes, it's a transparent scheme to get money in a troubled economy, but that's what's so endearing about it. He's just a guy. He uses words like "sweet" and "awesome" to promote your brand. Not that this is all that new. For years people have been tattooing brand names on their skulls, selling their bodies as billboards to guerilla marketing firms, and so on. What's different about Jason's idea is the era in which it is taking place.

Twitter, Facebook, the proliferation of live personal video streaming--all this is relatively new, and even less understood as a marketing medium. The business colleges and universities of the world continue to hold onto traditional marketing for dear life, if only to safeguard their graying jobs. As print newspaper models (see the Tribune Company) plummet in profitability, social media is a wide open field. In these early stages of social media, little guys can profit. Give it a few years, and we'll all likely be shoved out of the way by the mega-conglomerates. The whole dream of an open Internet will become but a collective longing for a bygone era.

That bygone era is NOW. Jason Sadler is using it while he can, and so should you and I. As for Jason's project itself, I suspect it is going to command a lot of ink in the (dying) print media. As I said, this is not a new idea, but his execution is mesmerizing for its interactive capabilities. I myself plopped a few comments into the chat stream while he was running his live promo today, and he responded on camera immediately, laughing along with his viewers.

No day is safe from Jason's campaign. Christmas Day has already been sold. He'll even wear your shirt if he has a wedding or funeral to attend.

Jason doesn't mind making a fool of himself. He's already sold the shirtspace on his back to half a year's worth of companies. The Royal Botanical Gardens already bought a week's worth of shirt-wearing, and they're even flying him to London for a good time. All told he is poised to make about $66,000 in 2009. With the backing of his day job and a few hundred early followers/fans, he should be able to raise the price in 2010.

Now that's creative marketing. At this point he could spin this into anything he wants. So what if you call him a corporate whore. You and I both know it's brilliant.

Check Out iwearyourshirt.com NOW

Hey all, breaking news: go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iwearyourshirt-daily-shirt-show right now and watch this guy's live stream. He's live, chatting with his viewers right now, 2pm Eastern, talking about his idea. He wears your branded shirt for a day at face value: January 1 is $1, December 31 is $365, and the first 160 days are sold out. The guy is hilarious and he is ubiquitous. Your brand will benefit, for sure. Bound to get maximum ink.

eHow.com Wins Blogger's Choice Open Web Award

One of my revenue sources, eHow.com, won a Mashable.com Blogger's Choice Open Web Award in the category of How-to yesterday. For those of you who don't live and breathe the Internet, the Open Web Awards are a BIG DEAL. Mashable is the leading online magazine for all that's new and wonderful in the world of social media.

More likely, you have heard of eHow.com, but here's the quick intro, and then I'll get back to our story: eHow.com contains advice for "How To Do Just About Everything", as goes their slogan. In recent months, however, eHow has expanded its repertoire to include "About", "How Does" and other article formats. Although the website is designed to encourage its readers to submit and monetize their own articles, the majority of eHow's 250,000-article library are written professionally by a small army of paid-up-front contributers from around the United States.

I am one of those contributors. To date I have published 112 articles about, well, just about everything for eHow.com, like:

What Is a Poem?
How Does the CIA Work?
About Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
How to Live Homeless
How to Talk to a New Yorker
How to Avoid Getting into a Bar Fight
How to Position Lights for Photography
How to Print a Page From Google Books

Titles range from obscure to hilarious to downright indispensable. There are no limits. After all, eHow is run by Demand Studios, whose parent company is Demand Media, which is a creation of Richard Rosenblatt. He's the man who helped raise MySpace to superstardom and brokered the deal to sell it (along with its parent company Intermix) to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

"Attach a cable to Richard Rosenblatt and you could power a small town," said Forbes.com. You're dealing with a major go-getter here, is the point. So far Demand Media has shelled out well over $10 million to its army of writers, copy editors, filmmakers, transcribers and title proofers. That's not including any of the administrative or infrastructure overhead.

In theory, eHow makes its money on ad revenue. I worry about this business model. I suspect eHow is not turning a profit, but Rosenblatt is crazy like a local car dealership commercial. With four night clubs, a multi-faceted partnership with Lance Armstrong, and dozens of other irons in the fire, who knows what kind of capitalization this man's got up his sleeves? There's something he knows that I don't.

Whatever the case, Rosenblatt should be proud of eHow and its production factory Demand Studios for coming this far. They really have been slogging through some massive technical problems on both the production and distribution ends of the operation. As a contributor I can attest to their overall improvement over the last few months. Kudos to Rosenblatt for hiring a such a committed and patient editorial and administrative team over at Demand Studios. What those people do--manage a thousand writers every day--is akin to herding cats.

I just hope Rosenblatt doesn't go selling Demand Studios to Fox News' sugar daddy like he did with MySpace.

UPDATE: Want to know more about Richard Rosenblatt? Check out the following links, courtesy of Demand Media SEO Manager Jeff Grant:

Demand Media Company Profile
Web 2.0 Summit Profile
Web 2.0 Summit Presentations
Follow Rosenblatt's Tweets
Richard.tv

Social Media Follies

The thing about social networking is it takes the pants off your company. I'll just say that for now.