Essential Plugins For Your Wordpress Blog | Small Business Trends

One of the reason so many bloggers flock to Wordpress has to do with the number of great plugins available to help them customize the experience for their readers. There are plugins to help make your blog more spiderable to the search engines, plugins that foster community building, those that make media integration and breeze and lots more.

Here are some of my personal favorite Wordpress plugins that I think bloggers and small business owners can benefit from.

Feel free to share some of your personal favorites below!

Spam

• Akismet: If you’re using Wordpress, then you probably already know about Akismet. It does a pretty good job of detecting spam comments and holds them in a moderation cue for you to approve or delete on your own time. Also neat is that it’s designed to “learn” what is or is not spam based on what you’ve told it in the past. So, the more you use it, the more effective it becomes. Can’t ask for much more than that.

SEO/Techie Plugins

• All-in-One SEO Pack – The Ultimate SEO Wordpress plugin, allowing you to easily set custom titles for posts, pages, categories, archives, tags and searches. You can also designate noindex for duplicate content areas like archives, tags and categories reducing potential canonical issues in the search engines.
• Google XML Sitemaps –Creating an XML Sitemap can be very technical process, but with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, you just activate it and customize the settings. Keep in mind that if you’ve signed up with Google Webmaster Central and Bing’s Webmaster Center tools, you can get notified of any crawl issues they’re experiencing.
• Headspace2: Headspace makes tagging and managing your meta data much more streamlined. Once activated, you can use Headspace to “suggest” tags for a particular post, which are generated from the content of that post or through Yahoo suggestions (you decide). You can also mass edit meta data, as well.
• Robots META: Use Robots META to prevent the search engines from indexing extraneous or duplicate content areas like your search results, feeds, login and admin pages, privacy pages, archives and more. You can also use this plugin to easily validate your account with Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer.
• CformsII: Highly customizable form builder plugin that allows you to create custom contact forms for specific pages on your site. Setup auto-responders, tell-a-friend functionality, file attachments and comprehensive form tracking. It offers very simple customization and cloning.
• WP Super Cache: Are you expecting a lot of people to visit your site? Use WP Super Cache to reduce potential problems with your host and survive a flood of traffic without the site going down! The plugin works by serving HTML versions of a page to visitors versus the heavier, PHP scripts. If you plan on being “social” this is a must-have.

Media

• All-in-One Video Pack – All-in-One Video Pack includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists, etc.
• Widget Locationize: Use Widget Locationize to define where your widgets should be displayed. Assign widgets by tag, category, single pages and exclusions of those.

Usability

• WordPress Thread Comment: If your blog receives a lot of comments, it can be overwhelming for users to follow a conversation. With threaded comments, they can more easily see who responded to whom without having to sort through dozens of unrelated comments.
• Comment Redirect: This plugin gives your first time visitors a unique experience by redirecting them to a page on your site (maybe a newsletter sign-up, upcoming events or even a custom page designed just for your first time visitors). Make them feel welcome and they’re more likely to visit in the future.
• Sociable: Sociable is the power plugin for social media integration. Use it to add social buttons to the bottom of your posts making it easier for users to share or bookmark your content. Select which social networks your users are most likely to be a member of and embed it at the bottom of your posts or in the template of your site,
• Related Posts: It’s important to cross-link related content on your site for both users and the search engines. Use related posts to generate a list of similar posts based on the content of that specific post. This will be automatically generated each time you publish a new post and you choose the number of posts to display.
• Subscribe to Comments: Allows commenters on your blog to subscribe to comments via email so that they’re notified that the conversation is continuing.
• What Would Seth Godin Do: Allows you to welcome new visitors to your site and encourage them to sign up for your RSS feed or newsletter. A nice way to personalize your site for new eyes. (One of my personal favorites for community building.)

There are a TON of great plugins for the WordPress platform, but these are some that I’ve found to be extremely valuable. Definitely check out the plugin directory for additional ones or share your own personal favs in the comments.

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via smallbiztrends.com

I started following Lisa Barone on social media this year and find her insights to be well very insightful.

This article is no exception. Lisa lists out some of her favorite plugins for Wordpress and does so in her usual clear cut fashion. Thanks Lisa!

Posted via web from dianestein's posterous

Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teenagers

Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

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Tim Shaffer for The New York Times

Kristen Nagy, 18, sends many text messages, but never on Twitter.

Tim Shaffer for The New York Times

Teenagers, it seems, would rather chat with close friends than tweet to the masses.

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“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.

Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.

Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.

Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.

Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.

Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.

“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”

Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”

The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.

Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)

Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)

“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”

For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.

Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.

Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Technology (1 of 15) » A version of this article appeared in print on August 26, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.

via nytimes.com

This article does a god job of clarifying the evolution of social media and the demographics involved. Anyone who is attempting to harness the power of social media for business purposes needs to constantly work to stay abreast of the trends and articles like this by Tim Shaffer are quite helpful.

Posted via web from dianestein's posterous

Customer Service and Social Media: A Marriage Made in Heaven or Hell?

I just finished reading Frank Reed's article Social Media Gives Execs the Willies and was glad to see that more executives are seeing the value of social media in the area of customer service - 64% to be exact.

Today a customer can communicate their love or their hate for a company, service or product in the blink of an eye so today's business owners need to be prepared to respond just as fast.

For the company that can see the potential value of pro-actively establishing social media for customer service they may very well end up with a marriage made in heaven. For those that are continuing to stick their heads in the sand on the subject of user generated content well the future looks bleak. Mighty bleak.

How Did You Make Your Customers Feel?

via thecustomercollective.com

In today's market place how you handle your customer is more important than ever. The five questions to ask yourself in this article are great and really make you think about how you handle a customer from the first moment to the last.

Posted via web from dianestein's posterous

Twitter versus Hollywood: Social Media Can Make or Break a Movie

I love movies of all kinds - action, comedy, drama, suspense, chick flicks and even horror.  They provide a much needed escape into another world where I can laugh, cry and shout for joy.  Since I also love social media it was a no brainer that I would post what I thought about a movie the instant the credits rolled.  

Michael Sragow’s article in the Baltimore Sun this week on how movie studios are trying to gauge the impact of tweets was pretty interesting to me.  His article Twitter Effect rattle Hollywood was a good read.  

Posted via email from dianestein's posterous

Simple Things to Do When Your Online Image Stinks!

I have worked in the area of crisis management since 1989 so when I came across this article by Celine Rogue of course I had to take a minute and read it.  It was worth the minute.  This article Fix Your Track Record: What to Do About Embarrassing Projects from Your Past has great advice for anyone looking to improve their image online.

It is vital that businesses and individuals understand that with the introduction of the internet, and then social media, the rules of engagement have completely changed and you need to change with them.

Since 84% of people will search online before they try, buy, go see or do something it is imperative that people and companies take control of their online presence. 

So take a minute and read this article.

Posted via email from dianestein's posterous

Big Companies Making Big Money on Social Media

I just finished reading "Live From eTail: Dell Does $3 Million in Sales on Twitter" When asked the secret to their success Dell simply states that they use people on Twitter who are not corporate figures but who are real people and that they post as themselves. I would have to agree that this simple plan is a good one since it follows the basic underlying principle of social media - it is social!

Posted via email from dianestein's posterous

Why the "Name Random Thoughts..."?

I guess the answer is that I like a lot things, some of them more than others, and I like to share them with, well, everyone. So when I started blogging I would try to stick to one subject but I found it to be very, very hard so I created Random Thoughts. RT, for short, is a simple blog about social media, online PR, public relations and a collection of stuff that I just think is fun!

 I hope you enjoy...

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Switching to Posterous or Am I?

So I have decided, on a whim, to try out Posterous. 

I was reading "The New Influencers" by Paul Gillin(again) and came across Steve Rubel's name (again) and decided to pop online to see what he was doing today. When I Googled him I found him on Posterous and after a quick spin around I decided that I would switch over to see how it handles and if I like it or not.

If I like it then I will permanently switch over - if not then Random Thoughts will remain on Blogger.

Posted via email from dianestein's posterous

Some of My Favorite Stories from Last Week!

Malls Use Social Media to Connect With Shoppers

3 Social Media Aggregators That Bring It All Together

A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide

Pentagon Social Media Czar Pushes Web 2.0, Despite Ban Threat

Mad Men Use Social Media To Promote Old Media

Obama courts worldwide following through social media, but is playing catch-up - Kansas City Star

Business Mistakes in Social Media

I just finished reading an article in the Houston Chronicle by Mary Tuma called "Companies in new age of networking". The article is an interview with the president of the International Association of Business Communicators, Julie Freeman. This article and the interview gave very safe suggestions for businesses looking to add social media to their PR and marketing campaigns. However, the reason I am linking this article to my blog is the comments that were posted in response to the story. While there were only three comments they are very vocal opinions on the potential commercialization of social media.

goofyguy77 wrote, "I sense a corporate 'follow the leader' frenzy here that will blow out in a few months when the failure of these schemes becomes way to obvious to spin anymore (and some ad budgets run dry)"

As someone who works with business owners looking to engage in social media, I am consistently disappointed to find shell profiles, boring blogs and pointless status updates. These are the most common business mistakes in social media.

If business owners took a moment to understand what social media is all about and how it can be used to engage their target public then they would find themselves participating in a means of communication that is both powerful and rewarding.

The Top 20 Business Reasons To Use Social Media Marketing

I just finished reading The Top 20 Business Reasons To Use Social Media Marketing by David Carelton. This article does indeed list 20 reasons for businesses to use social media marketing and all of them are great reasons. So great that I am listing them out here:

The Top 20 Business Reasons to Use Social Media Marketing

Improve customer and prospect relationships

Conduct inexpensive yet effective market research

Build brand awareness, authority and credibility

Drive traffic to your website

Ability to obtain insight into targeted niche markets

Find new distribution channels

Improve search engine rankings through link building

Find and research targeted decision makers, prospects, customers and contacts

Monitor reputation - what are people saying about you or your company

Attain expert status for you, your company or your brand

An effective form of communicating with past, present and future clients

Share information used to educate prospects

Spy on your competition

Provides increased visibility for you, your products or your brand

Generate more leads

Get more referrals

Find joint venture partners

A new vehicle to post PR, events and articles

Provide better customer service

And of course - INCREASE SALES!

More importantly however, this article stresses a very vital component to using social media successfully and that component is simply that the skill set used in traditional marketing is not the same skill set used in social media marketing. In order to succeed in today's market place PRs and marketers are going to have to constantly strive to stay on top on the many new tools available to them AND learn how each of these tools can be used to obtain the products that they used to obtain through traditional channels.

Using Video in PR Campaigns

With YouTube touted as the #2 search engine behind Google, video content is already an important part of any comprehensive PR and marketing campaign.

I just finished reading Online Video: Why We Advertisers Have It All Wrong and the author, Kevin J. Nalty lists out some very valid points on using videos. Whether you are interested in using video for branding or simply want to know what mistakes to avoid, this article is a good read for both the beginner and the person who has already cannon balled into the deep end of the pool.

The ways in which video can be used to make a person, business or product well known and well thought of are varied and numerous, but in order to be as effective and efficient as possible in a world of ever shrinking PR and marketing budgets it is a must that you understand how to use this tool to create the biggest effect possible.

How to Create a Winning PR Campaign

I love public relations. I consider it to be a scientific art form because it is both a precise technology with definite laws and specific results as well as a means of communicating ideas, beliefs and feelings as if it were a fine painting or a beautiful concerto.

A professional well trained in the tools of PR can weave a tapestry of such fine and delicate communication that the fate of a person, a group or a nation can be changed for the better.

So why do some people smirk when PR is mentioned as if it leaves a bad taste in their mouths?

My guess is that at some point in their life they were the victim of or witness to the misuse of the technology of public relations. PR is essentially communication. The communication is delivered through a vast array of tools. These tools include the old standbys or press releases and events as well as the new Internet darlings such as social media, Twitter, Facebook and countless others. However in order to truly communicate the message must be based on fact.

A fundamental law in PR is that what is communicated must be true. Now that I have the Internet to get out my client’s messages I am even more aware of the need for campaigns to be based on accurate and factual information. Campaigns based on fact win and those that don’t leave a lot of people smirking.

So before you send out the next press release, Twitter the next tweet or simply update a status on Facebook, remember that you have one chance to create a true work of art.

Quick Tips for Effective Search Engine Marketing

First, Google is the top search engine by far and controls over 70% of the Internet market. The second largest search engine behind Google is Youtube and 1 in 5 searches currently being done are for images. Youtube and image entries are also now showing up in straight Google searches so they are key to page ranking. The Internet is a fast paced and ever changing world so you must stay on top of the latest trends in order to put together a campaign that gets good results quickly and efficiently. To do otherwise can mean a lot of wasted time and effort.

Second, the Internet is becoming more and more important to a business. Currently, over 70% of American adults are online and when they want to know something 80% of them go to the Internet BEFORE they buy, try, go to, etc. With that said the average person never even makes it off the first page of a search and unless you are in the top five entries you may very well miss out. This is one reason why your online reputation must be constantly tracked to ensure that what is being said about you and your business is what you want your target audience to know.

Finally, it is imperative that you have a complete PR and marketing campaign laid out before you start. This is the biggest mistake I see made on any attempt to raise page ranking or handle online reputation issues. Without a campaign you are simply engaged in a hit or miss game of creating endless profiles, joining countless networks, groups and directories and keeping your fingers crossed that what you have done will keep you ranked highly on the search engines.

Why You Need an Online PR and Marketing Campaign

I was talking with a potential client the other day about the use of online PR, social media branding and search engine marketing for a business and she was quick to pipe in that she had just hired someone to handle this for her company. She hired a freelancer and gladly told me that she was very happy with the results as she had moved up on a page on a Yahoo search but since she did not really understand the use of the Internet in PR, marketing and branding that was all she could tell me. I was confused and told her so as prior to this conversation I had done a search engine marketing analysis on her and her business and found that the only entries I could easily find for her were negative. She assured me that I needed to look again as that had changed. Afterwards I popped online and did a quick search for her and her company. The results were bad, really bad. Not only is she and her company still hard to find, especially on Google, but the reputation damaging entries are still scattered across the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN. The person she hired to build her brand online is not getting the job done and she did not even know it – in fact she thought he was doing a good job.

How did this happen? Usually this happens because a business owner tries to handle the online PR, marketing and branding themselves by joining every social media and networking site they can find. Simply joining Facebook, Myspace or one of the numerous other sites does not in itself guarantee any page rank results as that is not what they are designed to do. They are a great vehicle for capturing and cultivating an audience that you can share ideas with and promote to and used correctly this can increase website traffic.

I suspect though that this happened to the business owner because the professional she hired did not have a campaign. Instead this person seemed to operate on a shotgun approach of joining and linking to as many online groups and social media networking sites as possible knowing that some change had to eventually occur for the better.

Without a well planned PR and marketing campaign even a professional can come up short in the results department.

A true campaign must take into consideration the target public for what is being promoted, where this public hangs out online, the best online tools for use and must know which social media, online networking, blogs, newsgroups, etc. get the best result for the campaign being created. The person putting together the campaign must be well versed in both the standard tools of PR and marketing as well as the Internet itself and how it works. This is what an online PR and marketing specialist brings to the table – the knowledge to take all of these tools and put them together in a campaign that gets results. And that is why you need an online PR and marketing campaign – to ensure you get results.

Getting the Most Out of Social Media

I just finished reading "Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter"on Forbes.

This was a fantastic and very well thought out look at how top executives and business owners can use these platforms to their advantage.

In case you haven't noticed, social networking is not just for teenagers anymore. It is a fast paced, exciting and valuable new means of attracting attention, maintaining relationships (personal and business) and generating new business.

These tools can be used to market, brand and make known your products and services to thousands of people with the click of a button. Used wisely they are exactly what this economy needs. Used unwisely they can be a PR nightmare.

The solution is simple, before you start to Tweet or use any other social media tool you must have a well thought out plan that not only incorporates the new online methods such search engine marketing and social media branding but also the basic tried and true methods of PR, marketing and publicity. Having such a plan as well as monitoring the results of your social media actions will ensure that your time online is well spent.

The First Step in Creating a Search Engine Marketing Campaign that Gets Results

The number of new ways to connect, share and hook up on the Internet can be overwhelming, especially to a business owner attempting to take advantage of search engine marketing and the social media craze.

Today you can create blogs, micro-blogs, share information using around forty different means of linking, emailing and Twittering, create at least sixty profiles and in general spend a great deal of time “marketing online” with little to show for it other than maybe a lengthy list of friends or followers.

In order to get the most our of your efforts you not only must know the tools of search engine marketing and how to use them but also have a strategic plan and campaign laid out that will take you and your business where you want to go.

Randomly creating profiles, joining online groups and posting may give you the illusion that you are getting the word out on what you do but the reality is that if you do not have clearly defined goals, purposes and products for these activities then you are not getting the true value of your actions and may be wasting your time altogether.

A vital step in putting together a search engine marketing campaign for your business is to identify your target audience and determine where they can be found online. This is not as easy as it sounds and if this step is omitted you could find yourself marketing your gourmet meat and cheese speciality shop to vegans.

There is a lot of advice out there on how to use social media tools to market and quite a bit of it is very good. But in order to truly expand your business online you need a specialist. You need someone who not only knows the social media and search engine marketing tools but who also knows the technology of public relations, publicity and marketing.

So the first step in creating a search engine marketing campaign that gets results is to do yourself a favor and hire a specialist who will take the time to layout a real plan and a true campaign that will increase your online presence, make you and your products or services well known and drive more traffic to your website.

What Role Does Social Media Play in PR?

As someone who has been in the field of PR for the past 20 years I was intrigued by the concept of using the Internet in public relations and as I usually do I simply rolled up my sleeves and dived in. After several years of using social media branding, search engine marketing and SEO information I cannot imagine doing my job in PR without these tools. In fact I consider what I do now is not just PR but Online PR.

Today I was doing my regular online search to find out "what is new in PR" and came across a wonderful article by Sarah Skerik, VP, Distribution Services, PR Newswire in the Bulldog Reporter which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/b24aym

Sarah states quite simply the key points that someone needs to understand in order to become proficient in the mixing of PR and social media. A person who knows well the rules of PR and publicity and who also understands the role that social media and search engine marketing plays will have a tremendous advantage in 2009 as well as the years to come.

Are You Using Search Engine Marketing (SEM) To Expand Your Business?

If not you should be. The Internet is so much more today than it was even just a few short years ago. Over 80% of American adults use a search engine such as Google to research a product or service before they buy it. If you do not know how to correctly market to your target public then you are not only behind the times but are most likely behind your competition. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a must for any business no matter the field or size.

Some companies try to short cut the system and will create shell profiles on social networking sites, ghost blogs and phantom groups in an effort to raise themselves in the search engine page rankings and while that might result in a short blip on the radar it will not produce the long lasting expansion that a true marketing plan will.

To succeed in search engine marketing you need to create an online presence that is real, useful and aimed at your consumers. Generic may be a smart choice when filling a prescription but not when you are making yourself known on the Internet.

Correctly done you can increase business from your existing clients and generate business from new clients using the Internet.

So, are you using search engine marketing to expand your business? Do you know how? Does your competition?