Brea List Guest Post: The Laura List
Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I know what you’re thinking: who is this Laura person we don’t care about and what is she doing on Brea’s blog? WE WANT BREA!
Who am I? My company helps people like Brea keep their online empires happily humming along. I do things like explain the weird intricacies and etiquette of twitter and make sure that her facebook and blog are linked up. When something breaks I fix it, and when something is confusing I explain it. You can catch me on twitter as @lkr.
As for why I’m on her blog, Brea ask me to do a guest Brea List while she’s away in London. I thought I would theme my list around my favorite web resources, and give you a little sneak peak behind the scenes of the Brea Grant Web Empire.™
Twitterrific (for brea) & TwitterBerry (for me): When you spend all day running around (bad unintentional pun) like Brea, a phone app for tweeting is a must-have. Who am I kidding, I spend EVERY day in front of a computer but TwitterBerry allows me to get my fix from the beach as well!
FeedSmith, CommentLuv and Twitter Widget: These are some of my favorite plugins, I use them on pretty much every project. Despite its frustrating, wildly fluctuating numbers, feedburner is essential for tracking the metrics of your blog. I think commentluv is a great way to encourage comments, and I love being able to give a little “reward” to commenters for taking the time to say hi. Twitter widget makes it dead-simple to embed your twitter feed into your blog which is great for driving traffic to your twitter account.
Yotify: Social media types know that what we call listening (basically looking out for mentions and media pertaining to the client) is probably the most important element of online strategy. For monitoring Brea, I’ve been playing around with a new site called Yotify. It can be annoying with all of the multiple set-ups, but it allows more targeted, in-depth searches than your standard google alert.
Gary Vaynerchuk: When Brea and I started discussing her jumping into the whole social media thing, I sent her a link to this Gary V speech. As you can guess, she was not only immediately sold on the power of all this stuff but totally fired up about the possibilities.
thanks for the heads up on Yotify - hadn’t heard of them - will have a play later on today - we love guest posters
That’s great Laura! We all appreciate what you and your company does! Working with computers and media systems is a lot of hard work I imagine! You’re doing phenomenal! p.s Any professional criticism for my own site? It’s pretty new. Just click my underlined name and it should take you there! Thanks!
Great post, and a nice list! I recently organized WordCamp in Vancouver, and one of talks centered around Twitter and WordPress. Most people in the room admitted that they get more traffic to their blogs via Twitter (when they Tweet the title and a link to a new post) than they do through regular channels. So social media is definitely important these days. Check out the plugin WordTwit, it’s another one people use a lot these days with WordPress.
Duane Storeys last blog post..Change Of Seasons
Awesome info, now got a twitter feed on my blog
Catherines last blog post..Back at uni
This was an awesome list! Can’t wait til Brea is back, but definitely not disappointed with this.
Shannons last blog post..ellebishop: is brain dead and should be sleeping
Laura, just came here via the Chris Brogan interview. Have you checked out the social media firehose for social media tracking? http://tinyurl.com/firehose
I’m happy to hear people enjoyed my list!
@Jaz Thanks! As for your site, if you want to blog I would strongly recommend that you use a blogging service like blogger or wordpress so that people can easily comment and share your entries with others.
@Duane Yeah Brea gets great blog traffic from twitter, and she hardly ever tweets about her blog its from people clicking it in her info
@Kingsley I just tried it out, pretty cool but I wish it had some sort of notation showing the source instead of being one long list.
@Laura. Thanks so much for the feedback! I really wanted to have something that would allow people to comment but I wasn’t sure how. I’ll see if I can add those things. I’m not really sure what I’m doing, I’ll play around with it a bit. if I have any questions I’ll twitter you (that sounds so wrong!) Thanks again and keep up the great work!
I use CommentLuv on every blog I touch as well. It’s a great wee widget.
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nice thank you very much for this article.