Word Camp Miami – (@BrianBreslin )

- Personal Site: www.brianbreslin.com

- Founder of REFRESH: Miami

- What does it mean to be social?

• To communicate with other people.
• How do you integrate your social graph (social networks).
• Connect your site to social networks
• Make your blog as sociable as you!

- Social Networks? Build up or build on.

• Build on top of existing social networks. Less friction, already have the following.
• Integrate Facebook Connect (http://www.sociable.es/facebook-connect/)
• Use BuddyPress if you want to build up.
• However, there is some friction involved when using BuddyPress, because people are not going to want to sign up for another social site. Just leverage Facebook, if you have it.

- Putting the social in your social media

• Bookmarking Sites (Delicious, Digg, Reddit)
• Social browsing sites (StumbleUpon)

- Turning your blog viral

• If you simply use your site, you spread it.
• Make reading your blog infectious
• Think of viral, as the flu. You don’t intentionally go out and give your friends the flu. Simply by breathing, and being you, you spread the content.
• Turn your readers into your promoters.

- Best Practices

• Understand the culture of social networks. Don’t force your culture into sites or communities where they don’t belong. Be relevant, it’ll have a higher rate of return. Don’t just blast your content to every site. Be intentional. Be specific.
• Treat the community with respect.
• Don’t think of your blog as a destination site. Most people visit an average of 12 sites a day. To get in that rotation of 12 sites, is freakin hard! You’re going to have to go through social media marketing, not just simply by blogging. Most of the visitors to your blog will stumble onto your blog by Digg or similar sites.
• Engage your community wherever THEY want to.

- Things to Avoid

• Spamming? Seriously. Stop it.
• Treating it as a one way outbound communication. Social media/marketing is a two way street. It’s an open conversation, that’s why there are Trackbacks in Wordpress.
• Diving in without testing things out first.

- Simplifying social

• Plugins to Integrate

1. Sharethis
2. Sociable
3. Disqus

- Role of SEO in Social Blogging

• Prepare your content for consumption
• Prepare your content for distribution
• Best SEO Plug-In

- The future of the social blog

• Distributed social networks (DISO)
• Identity Providers (OpenID)
• Activity hubs (activity.streams)

- Useful tips

• Set up a list of goals (more traffic, audience, engagement)
• Focus on your efforts on your niche (where do they hang out)
• It’s all about the content

- Q and A

• Ning is a great way to create your own social site. However, if you build off NING, you hand over all of your info about your users to NING. If you want to move from NING, you’re screwed. All of the info is theirs.
• Also, NING has 3 million users, but the average NING network has 9 people. It might just be easier to leverage Facebook.