Thursday, August 18, 2011

Social Crush Blast


Social Crush exploded in "Famously Hot" Columbia, SC this week. Hundreds of social media practitioners flocked to the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in anticipation of upping their social media skills. We were not disappointed.

Tim Moore and Ty Downing brought a host of experts with them, including Michael Brito of Edelman Digital, Silicon Valley; Glen Gilmore, Esq., Gilmore Business Network; Victoria Harres of PR Newswire; Skeeter Harris of Mac Village Pro; Kipp Bodner of HubSpot; and Bostjan Spetic and Tin Dizdarevic of Zemanta.

I'm spending the next few days (ahem... weeks) trying out several of the tools I learned about. I've just installed Zemanta, a content enhancement tool that suggests links, tags, images, and further reading for blog posts. Very nice.

One of the key takeaways from Bostjian and Tin's presentation is: The Web is made for linking.

One might think this statement is self-evident. Based on my experience last week while adding some news releases to a website, I think it's not obvious to most news providers. Perhaps they are still thinking in paper press terms. Just cutting and pasting an article from print into a digital format doesn't work for the web. I found myself searching for links to studies cited and to companies referenced in the articles. Not only is it bad web form, it's one of my pet peeves.

Using Zemanta is a great time saver, doing much (but not all) of the footwork for you. I'll keep tweaking it, but I think this tool is going to stay in my toolbox. Oh-- and it's free.

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