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[muhammad.saleem]

Venture into the world of social media with news, commentary, and reviews, from social media maven Muhammad Saleem.

Tip’d - A community for financial news, ideas, and tipsOctober 14

Hey everyone, wanted to announce the launch of Tip’d, a socially driven community for financial news, ideas, and tips. Please drop by, sign up, and give the site a try. I have taken the responsibilities of ‘community director’ at Tip’d, so if you have something to say, please get in touch!

It’s the Quality, Stupid!September 24

Erick Schonfeld’s discussion of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere said something quite alarming,

Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.

The way I think about it, there are two paths you can take:

The quantity game: Write a lot of posts and hope that something sticks.
The quality game: Understand your audience, put thought and effort into what you write, and spend the rest of your energy promoting the content.

You may call it linkbaiting, I call it value blogging. What game do you play?

Technorati Tags: blogging, social media,

The BETA Tag: Crowdsourced Product TestingSeptember 24

Royal Pingdom asks a very pertinent question today, why is half of google in beta?

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

I think the best explanation for this (not necessarily for Google but for most other startups) is that because web based services aren’t tangible products, because there is an almost negligible cost of delivery, and because there is instant feedback (from a targeted audience), companies creating these services and applications open them up to a small group of people so that these people (who think they’ve been done a favor when they get a beta invite) can do product testing and provide feedback on how to make products better, for free.

This makes sense for the company because it lowers r&d costs and ensures more targeted development (if they listen to the feedback), and it makes sense for the consumers because they get to give input on how to improve the products they see themselves using in the future.

The other way to look at it, however, is that the beta tag has become a license to release half-done products (or platforms, i.e. product

Understanding ‘Real People’ - Are You Creating Value?September 24

‘…people can and will carve out the time for social media IF they see a reason to.’

There is a prevailing thought among pundits that ‘real people’ don’t have time for social media, which, if true, has major implications for anyone behind a social web startup wanting to build a monetizable audience

To understand ‘real people’ and their usage of social web properties, you have to remember that the assumption that everyone using social media wants to use it for some business-related purposes is simply not true (this can be anything from exposure, branding, connectivity, relationship building, customer service, reputation monitoring and management, and so on). It may appear that way to us because we’re a part of that hyper-connected, early-adopting, digerati that acts that way. If you have to ask questions like “how much does it cost?” (in terms of time investment in this case, but otherwise also monetary investment), then you are also one of those people. People who use social media for business-related purposes may not only use different services (or experiment with them) but are likely to use them with different frequency, and because they have different intentions (goals) they will participate differently too.

attending blogworldexpo 2008? attend my panel, let’s meet upSeptember 4

i will be at blogworldexpo 2008, speaking on a panel along with dan gray, michelle naranjo, and scott monty (confirmed so far). We will be covering topics related to establishing blogger credibility and how to be taken seriously on the web.

in order to properly review a product, you have to experience it first hand. how do you get past the gatekeepers and unlock the doors that grant access to people and products? what can you do to stand out from the crowd and achieve true credibility? from software to sports cars, this session shares the lessons learned in over a decade of working the angles, along with perspective from the communications and marketing side of the fence.

if you will be at the panel or at the conference in general and would like to meet up, please leave a comment below or contact me via email with the subject ‘blogworld meet up’.