Tag Archives: robyn-tippins

Eric Marcoullier Leaves MyBlogLog

Last Friday, blog social network MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier posted on the official MyBlogLog blog his “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” post, announcing he would be leaving the company with the most commonly displayed blog widget, a company which Yahoo! acquired for $10 million earlier in the year.

Every MyBlogLog blogger will have some relationship with Eric. After all he’s the default “friend” when you join the network.

eric marcoullier

With Eric’s departure, will new MBL members be greeted by Yahoo! Community Manager Robyn Tippins?

It was just a little over a month ago that MyBlogLog ran their ad on StandoutJobs to hire two wickedly good developers.

eric marcoullier todd sampson

In the video ad, Eric, seen with MyBlogLog co-founder Todd Sampson were talking about the atmosphere at the young company, and it’s a pity to see Eric’s departure.

He’ll be gradually phasing to becoming one of the bloggers in the MBL community, creating the moniker bpm140 and will be blogging over at marcoullier.com.

I’m thinking bpm140 could be an abbreviation for Continue reading

Social Traffic Site MyBlogLog Goes 2.0

Insiders at the recent blogger convention SOBCon revealed plans about $10 million wunderkind social network site MyBlogLog. In the mix: a rebranding, a new widget and features to protect against social spam that is becoming more pervasive on the networks.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

  • A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
  • Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
  • Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to Continue reading

The Magazine Meme And Niche Research

I was tagged by PepperJam Head Honcho Kris Jones as part of the “What Magazines Do You Read?” (and have a titbit for niche researching Internet Marketers).

I don’t read many magazines, reading most of my content and feature content online.

Besides reading the print edition of Singapore’s major English daily, The Straits Times, which comes with weekly tech, fashion and lifestyle “magazines”, on the rare occasion, I check out:

  • Revenue (I read the online digital edition when I can)
  • Skymall catalogue found on most domestic flights
  • Tabloids like US, People

Tabloids and rag mags are a good opportunity to Continue reading

“The One Skill All Internet Marketers Must Possess…”

I was thinking about SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins‘ reply to our discussion whether onsite blogging provides value: “I find it so difficult to live-blog a session and actually pay attention to the speaker. Some are better at this I think.”

So the conversation seems to have shifted from whether “onsite blogging” provides value, to how difficult it is to “liveblog a session” because of the multiple tasks involved:

  • Pay attention to the speaker
  • Live blog the session

Here’s a secret I learned as a former journalist. I together with the reporters from the Reuters, Associated Press and Bloomberg news wires, sat listening to Microsoft, HP or some other company make their announcement, and we used our strategies, following that, we’d file our reports (the newswire guys generally filed their reports within 30 seconds to a minute to someone in the newsroom), the reports would go live.

Due to our ability to effectively process the information successfully, their reports would be circulated all over the world, and my news stories would make it to page one of Singapore’s business daily, or it’d make the front page of the tech session.

Compared to everyone else, we have the same brain, the same abilities, but yet we’re able to achieve different results.

So the question is:

What made the difference?

Before we get into that, consider all the tasks you have to get through every day.

You need to:

  • Check and respond to email
  • Collaborate with joint venture partners
  • Develop your own products (or project manage if you’ve outsourced it)
  • Update your blog or submit news articles/press releases
  • Manage the sales team in following up and marketing your services
  • The administrative stuff like filing paper, and probably the least exciting activity (at least for me…) filing your taxes

On top of that, we all only have 24 hours to finish this in.

So again: What makes the difference?

Your time planning and execution strategy you use make all the difference.

I won’t go into time planning, but focus on the execution aspect.

Many business owners and new entrepreneurs fail because:

  • They fail to realize what’s important
  • They fail to do what’s important
  • They fail to follow up on what’s important

The Pareto principle states that 20% of the people in a city in Italy owned 80% of it’s wealth. Since then, the Vilfredo Pareto’s principle has been generalized to:

“20% of what you do will lead to 80% of your results” — So of the 10 things you do, you need to complete 2 of them to become really successful. The problem is that most people choose to do maybe 5 or 6 things.

Unfortunately, those 5 things Continue reading

Does Onsite Event Blogging Provide Any Value? And Nicole Eggers Video Broadcasts

Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins questions whether live blogging at the sidelines of an event has much value (Liveblogging Of Any Value To Those Not There?)

I can identify with her sentiment that: “I’m wondering (aloud I suppose) if I’m the only one who finds the typical disjointed, rambling liveblogging posts are of any real value to offsite readers?

Here’s my take:

It’s nothing to do with whether the blogging is live or not.

It has everything to do with your content and your presentation.

As an example, look at presenter Nicole Eggers on WebProNews.

webpronews nicole eggers

Nicole Egger, WebProNews video news update presenter

Besides being very easy on the eyes, Nicole presents WebProNews updates throughout the day.

What makes readers continue to come back is the amount of useful information they get within the 2-4 minute video broadcasts.

No medium is perfect however, Continue reading

Cutting MyBlogLog Spam With Your Cloak Of Invisibility

Social traffic is fantastic because:

  • It’s highly targeted
  • It’s immediate
  • It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

On social community sites like MyBlogLog, Eric and his team have instituted several measure like: limiting personal messages to 20 a day (with an innovative reciprocal message feature in place) , and eliminating animated GIF avatars in favor of single (static) image ones.

But that still doesn’t quite solve the problem of ‘widget spam’ where people with link baiting avatars feature on your sidebar widget that appears on the right of this blog.

Fortunately, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins informed me that MyBlogLog includes features to Continue reading