SU Comments

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This past Monday, we had our 16th Plurkshop. This was the first one I’ve hosted, so I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous, especially since it was also the first Plurkshop in over a month.

Nowsourcing was also on hand to help answer questions, which I greatly appreciated. He started the discussion off by suggesting that people share their SU profiles, which lead to a discussion on adding people as friends.

For years, if I followed you and you followed me on StumbleUpon, we were considered friends. There were 2 problems with that though.

1) SU had a 200 person follow limit, so you needed to be careful about who you added, and

2) friends affected what pages you’d see if you clicked the stumble button, so following a RL (real life) friend might mean you’d get pages you weren’t really interested in.

Recently SU made a major change that addressed both of these issues.

First they removed the limits! Now on SU, you can follow as many people as you want.

Second, they separated friends and followers. Now I can choose whether I want to see what my friends are stumbling or whether I just want to be friends with them. By choosing to follow someone, you’re saying you want to see their stumbles.

The nice thing about friend requests is that you are sent a message on SU advising that so-and-so wants to add you as a friend. You don’t get that notification about followers, and have to look to see who’s new on your Subscribers page (add /fans/ when you’re at your SU home page to see your subscribers).

Keli asked “What are the basic differences between SU and Digg?” Ethnicomm suggested a great article by Tim Nash that I hadn’t read before, but explains the differences well. (Thanks, ethnicomm!)

Nowsourcing went on to explain that “StumbleUpon is more like a discovery engine, like channel surfing on TV. Digg is more of the crowd effect.”

LChamp asked “What is the benefit of the SU community?”

SU is great about helping to get the word out about topics that interest you. When a page first gets discovered, it is added to the system to be shared with others. If your page is tagged correctly, the people who see it will be people with similar interests.

In addition, if you write a review about the page, that review is added to the Recent Reviews of everyone who follows you. If they like the page and also add a review, that review will go out to everyone who follows them, and so on and so forth.

Gassho asked “Does everyone find that most visitors from SU tend to stay .01 seconds?”

Nowsourcing mentioned that he had found SU traffic to have one of the lowest bounce rates of the large social media sites and both sonnygill and sleepymarci agreed. We discussed again the importance of making sure that your page is catorgized correctly so that you’re getting visitors who are interested in exactly what your blog is about.

Sonnygill asked about the many features of the toolbar. Unfortunately, both nowsourcing and I have changed our toolbars from the default, so instead I recommended the free ebook Using the Toolbar which goes into each part of the toolbar in detail.

BarbaraKB clarified: a “thumb down means, ‘I don’t wanna see more like this’ rather than ‘this is an awful site’ and a review means others read the reason?”

To which I replied “Yep. And a thumb up means I really like this and want to see more like it.”

Aivzdog added “Stumbleupon is my life…almost.

Finally, I wanted to mention that trading stumbles or asking specifically for stumbles for a site is against their TOS. This surprised people and questions ranged from “Can they enforce that?” by LChamp to “Why do they have the sendto then?” by nowsourcing.

As far as I know, they’ve mainly enforced it with sites designed to trade stumbles, but that doesn’t mean they won’t decide to in the future. As far as the sendto page, I think it is to share interests with your friends, not send out group stumble requests.

Nowsourcing mentioned that “the more evil sites out there just have random people stumbling ya. Use them and prepare to be banned, your site too.”

Here’s the link to read more about what StumbleUpon has to say regarding requesting stumbles.

I added that I love when friends send me pages they think I’ll like. It’s fun seeing what they’ve found.

There’s a quite a bit more discussion in the Plurkshop thread, I’ve tried to hit most of the highlights here. If you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll try to answer them. It’s likely someone else is wondering the same thing.

If you’d like to add me on Plurk or SU or any other social site, please feel free. I love meeting new friends!

If you’re not on Plurk yet, but would like to try it, here is my link. It will add you as a fan, but please click the “Add Teeg as a friend” button and request friendship, I’d love to get to know you!

This morning, I did a very brave thing. Our power had gone out, Ken was at work, and I was the only adult in the house.

I have a laptop, but it didn’t have enough power to last all day, and the modem and router didn’t have power so I couldn’t use the internet at all!!!

Arrrgh! A full day without being able to get online and see what was going on in the rest of the world?!? No, the thought was unbearable. I had to face my fears and brave the dark basement where the fuse box was hidden.

Now, to explain why I don’t like basements, I need to go back to before I was born. My mom (Alice) likes to sew, so Dad (Jesse) decided to buy her a mannequin.

Not, please understand, a dressmaker’s mannequin. Instead it was a full body humanoid like you’d see in the window of a store.

Mom wasn’t sure what to do with the thing, but it definitely needed to be dressed, so she put one of her outfits on it and threw a wig on it’s head. Then she asked Dad to take it to the attic.

Photo by Colin Rose

Mom and Dad lived in a duplex at the time. Two families were separated by a thin wall, but they shared the attic upstairs.

Sue and Herman had just moved into the other duplex. Sue was up in the attic working, when she happened to notice the mannequin against the back wall.

When it didn’t respond to her, she rushed back downstairs and phoned her husband at work. “Herman, you have to come quick. Jesse’s killed Alice and hung her in the attic!”

When I was 12, we moved into an old house with a large, dark, basement.

I had always been a little scared of the dark, but old houses make noises. Lots of creaky, creepy groaning noises…which sound especially loud in the dark.

Did I mention that my dad was a practical joker?

He thought my fear of the dark was rather silly, so one day he sent me down to get something from the back corner of the basement…where it wasn’t very well lit, and where the mannequin was also being stored.

Guess who was hiding behind the mannequin?

I think I jumped a foot in the air. Dad laughed and laughed.

Even guests weren’t immune to Dad’s mannequin pranks.

Dad would take them down to the basement on some pretext or other, and watch when they discovered the “woman” in the corner. I can still hear him laughing and as soon as they realized what it was, they’d join in. 

I don’t know what ever happened to the mannequin. But I still can’t go down into a dark basement without thinking of it.

A while back, Gwen Sutton (known to many Plurkers as Mama Sutton) asked me if I thought Plurk was fading.

I said I’d write a blog post about it, and then never got the post finished.

This morning, after participating in separate conversations started by BarabaraKB and ethnicomm about the same thing, I’m finally sitting down to write the promised post. Sorry it took me so long, Gwen!

In order to write about this, today I’ll start by discussing the elephant in the living room, Plurk Karma.

Let me say first, that there are some aspects of karma that I like.

I like the fact that you have to participate to raise Karma.

I like how karma keeps many of the broadcasters away from Plurk.

I like how karma helps keep spam low.

That said, there are also things that I don’t like about it.

Once I’ve shown that I know how to participate and be friendly, I don’t need karma anymore.

Karma drops if you don’t plurk for a while, even if you respond to others. That is probably my least favorite thing about it.

Because Karma drops for things other than spamming, it is not a good indicator of whether you should follow someone. So outside of a personal number, Karma has no clear value.

Here are my suggestions on how Karma could be improved:

1) End it at 50. Once you’ve reached 50 karma, you’ve shown that you know how to participate.

2) Don’t drop karma from non-participation. There are many reasons for having to be away from Plurk for a while. I know of people who’ve gone overseas on vacation and didn’t have internet access, people who lost power (especially during the hurricanes), and friends who have been in the hospital, unable to Plurk. Losing karma over something like that is ridiculous.

3) Once you’ve reached 50, karma shouldn’t drop for anything less than spamming. Karma could be a great way to keep spammers off of Plurk, it has the potential, but right now that potential is blotted out by all the other ways to lose karma.

So what do you think about Karma? Should the A-team keep it like it is, or could it be improved?

Last night I was talking with NowSourcing. He has an experiment going on where he’s taking social media “to the streets.” For the next 10 weeks, he wants to start meeting the people that he’s interacted with, bringing a personal touch back to social media.

Several months ago, Dr. Mani shrank the number of people he was following on Twitter down to 40. I watched this experiment with interest, curious to see how it would work, and the results were amazing. Instead of growing dissatisfied with Twitter, having only a few people to follow allowed him to interact with each person individually and to become real friends with them instead of acquaintances.

We like to say that social media is about the people and conversations, and it usually is as we’re getting started. But once we’ve gotten settled on a site and added more than a certain number of friends (whatever the number is that you can keep up with easily), the conversations tend to get lost at worst, or become sketchy at best.

When DoshDosh had a friend drive on Plurk, back when Plurk first opened, I added more than 100 friends in a day and went from being able to enjoy long conversations with friends and keep up with each post, to having to MAAR (mark all as read) way more often than I’d like.

I used to love StumbleUpon’s 200 friend limit. I didn’t feel guilty about leaving people as fans because everyone knew about the limit. And with 200 or fewer friends on a site, it’s easy to develop real relationships, turning them from online friends into real life friends.

So how do you stay social as your friend list grows? I really don’t have a solid answer yet, although there are a few things I do. I’ll list those and I’d love to hear your ideas too.

1) Use private messages. A short private message from a friend, something like, “I’ve been thinking about you, how are you doing?” always makes me smile.

2) Don’t be afraid to move a conversation. Some of the best relationships I’ve developed have been because we moved the conversation off the site we were on. If you’re nervous about giving out your usual e-mail, create a social one that you can use. Chats over IM are fun and flow faster than conversations on a social site, so it’s easier to talk.

3) Are you an aural person? Use a site like Skype or consider a broadcast site where some people can type and others can call in and talk. Even though I’m more visual than aural, I have enjoyed participating in broadcasts on TalkShoe, Skype, and Stickam so far. It’s fun hearing (and sometimes seeing) who you’ve been chatting with.

So what am I missing? How do you maintain relationships as the number of friends you have increases?

I’ve been thinking about Plurk, and what could be done to improve the site.

One complaint that I have heard quite often is the steep drops in karma that can occur when you away for a while, even for something as simple as sleeping!

This had never really bothered me until recently, because I work from home so much.

This past weekend though I had to travel out of town, and was gone for nearly 24 hours.

The drop was quite significant, although in the context of the rest of my life, it hardly matters.

It could be something for the A - Team to consider though!

If enough people get disillusioned with the drop in karma when they are spending time with family, or working, or, heaven forbid, sleeping, they might just move on to the next big thing!

There’s enough competition out there now, and it’s increasing all the time.

I plurked earlier today asking friends what one thing they would like to see change about Plurk!

There have been some interesting answers.

1. being able to search for friends inside of threads

2. Start with the oldest plurk first, on both updates and responses.

3. Message threading and being able to ‘bookmark’ conversations.

4. Staff responding to “Contact Us” messages.

5. Being able to add a search and any posts that match would come in to my timeline.

Interesting responses from people who enjoy Plurk, and want to continue using it.

What one thing do you think would improve Plurk?

Allan Cockerill

This post was written with the help of my Plurk friends, and contains some insights from them that may just help you to build strong online friendships.

I began by asking a series of questions over the past day or so about their relationships on Plurk, and other sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Contrary to the opinion of a lot of self styled marketing experts, social media users are not some group of avid consumers waiting to run and check the latest offering on their website.

These are normal everyday people from a range of backgrounds and interests that meet together on this, and other social platforms.

What Bugs These Folks?

People who Plurk or Twitter 50 times a day, yet never respond on to others.

People who spam with links and or products.

Other things that upset them is plain rudeness, and sharing too much “intimate” information.

The message is plain! Be friendly, reply to others and be respectful.

Sharing the occasional link is all right, but do it too much, and you begin to lose friends.

Once that happens, it really doesn’t make that much sense, does it?

Okay, I know that Teeg is the explorer, and I’m the writer, but today I think that I may just have scooped her by signing up to Posterous first!

Posterous is a very simple blogging site that you can post to by using email or sms.

You can link your account to Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and a number of other platforms.

Once you have set up your account, you can add the services that you want to link to, and they will be updated each time you post to Posterous.

You can send any type of file you like, including .doc and pdf, as well as different image and video files.

Links from Youtube and other video sites are automatically embedded.

Here’s the blog I started there today

I will share more about the site as I use it more. The blog I started today was there just minutes after signing up, and I believe that this is one reason that the site will be successful.

It’s obviously in a similar market space to Tumblr, but I found it much easier to use, and more appealing to the eye!

Please note that I am not connected to Posterous.com in any way, other than just having been converted to this simple blogging method!

Follow this link to go to Posterous!

Allan Cockerill

If you saw the new page I posted Monday evening, you might have noticed that we’re adding a new member to the SU Comments team.

Allan Cockerill, who writes Coffee with Allan Cockerill is no stranger here. He’s written frequent guest posts, including the 10 Minute Guide to Facebook - Adding Friends, that still gets hits on Google, 7 months after it was posted!

When Allan told me he was thinking of making some changes and moving different topics to new blogs, I knew the perfect place for his social media writing.

Allan is the Facebook expert I call on whenever I have questions. He has been instrumental in bringing attention to much needed changes in some Facebook apps (such as the ones that required you to add friends before you could use them).

Allan is also the one who pointed out to me that my fears over Facebook’s TOS were not unfounded, when he showed me Wink and all the information that can be found there.

In addition to Facebook, Allan enjoys playing on other social sites as well. Off the top of my head, I know he can be found on Friend Promote, Blog Catalog, StumbleUpon, and Plurk. Stop by and say Hi on any of those sites.

If you can’t tell, I’m excited about this! I hope you will enjoy it as well, especially since it means more posts here.

This month marks the 3 year anniversary of SU Comments! To celebrate our birthday, we’re making a few changes, including the unveiling of a new and faster layout that I hope you’ll like as much as I do.

I was the culprit, I’d read the page this morning and found it interesting. I had meant to add a review on StumbleUpon, but got sidetracked. It’s a list of the 50 strongest blog directories, which surprisingly are NOT the first 50 that show up when you do a Google search for “blog directory“.

While we were chatting, bloggeries mentioned that unfortunately the stickiness of stumble traffic is like teflon…it doesn’t stick.

Now, if you know me, you know there are three subjects I can’t keep quiet about. Social media, Plurk, and StumbleUpon. Plus, it’s Digg traffic that’s not sticky.

Stumble traffic can be sticky, if you remember a few things.

First, most Stumblers use Firefox. The vast majority of my traffic even now uses FF, but back when I was only writing about SU, 97% of my visitors were running Firefox.

Why does that matter? Because Firefox has a program called Adblock Plus. I first learned about it on StumbleUpon, but now it’s one of my very favorite FF programs. What it does is blocks any ads that I don’t want to see. I don’t see insta-ads especially, but I can also choose to blog other types. I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, after some friends were complaining that stumblers never clicked any of their ads. End result? If you’re wanting SUers to come to your site and click on your ads, I’d say fergit about it.

But what if you’re just wanting them to explore your site some? Before I started tracking analytics on my blog, I used to hear people fuss about how bad Stumblers were for visiting a page and leaving.

You know what? They’re right. Stumblers like to surf or they wouldn’t be using SU very much. BUT that doesn’t mean you have to let them go gracefully. Make it hard. Make them want to stay!

I’m not a huge fan of bounce rates. Sure, it gives you an idea of how many people visit more than one page on your site, but to me, measuring repeat visitors is a much better measurement. After all, especially if I’m a repeat visitor, I’m not likely to go surfing through your site unless I’m looking for something specific. Most likely, I’ll come read the new page and leave, then come back the next time you make a post.

But, if you are a fan of bounce rates, here’s something to think about. From September 20 (when I started sucomments.com), through June 3 (the day before I started using Plurk), my bounce rate was usually between 30-40% with around a third of my traffic coming from StumbleUpon (Plurk has raised my bounce rate - I think it’s time for some site revising).

My favorite thing about StumbleUpon traffic is that for the most part it is directed traffic. When you register on SU, you select topics that you’re interested in. If you click the stumble button and visit a new site, you are taken to a site that fits one of the topics you’ve chosen.

Occasionally there are sites that are mislabeled, though that’s almost always accidental. The bad thing is, a mislabeled page won’t bring the right visitors to your page, so it’s worth your while to make sure that your pages are listed in the right category.

If your page isn’t categorized correctly, fixing it is a simple matter. If you scroll down on the right you’ll see “Something wrong here?” with a dropdown box underneath it. Just choose the correct category from the options to have it changed. If you’re not the discoverer of the page, getting it changed might take a while, but SU is really good about correcting category errors. As a note, blogs are listed as weblogs if you’re trying to change to that category.

So now that you’re getting just the right traffic, how do you make them want to hang out on your site? Why by giving them something to look at, of course! And the nice thing is, you know what they’re interested in…what brought them to your site in the first place.

Remember, people like things to be easy. If it takes much time or is too hard to do, they’ll leave (and I’m talking to myself too, I’ve realized one of the reasons my bounce rate is up, and it has everything to do with a change on my site and nothing to do with Plurk).

So make it easy. Want people to visit a link? Put it where they can see it and click on it. Want them to read past articles about the same subject? Then post a list of similar articles.

I’m reminded of an article that Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote a while back about heat map tracking. What he discovered was that at pause points (where people have to decide what to do next), readers will click on links more than they will anywhere else.

Because SU traffic is targeted, you can guess that most will take the time to at least read over your page. By using pause points to supply relevant links to other pages on your site, you can make it easy for that stumbler (or anyone else) to explore your site instead of stumbling off to the next new thing.

By the way, if you haven’t tried Plurk yet and would like to, here is a link to join. If you’d like to know more about Plurk, here is the 10 Minute Guide and other Plurky stuff.

Yesterday, Connie Reece the social media maven who is known for her pink hair and feather boa (and shh, don’t tell her, but she is also one of my role models as I turn my love of social media into a business), led a Plurkshop titled Second Life: The Value of Immersive Experience.

Now first, I should probably explain that Plurkshops are community workshops that were created by the Plurk community. We have had eleven plurkshops so far, including discussions about social media, marketing, Plurk, and blogging.

Second, let me say I have absolutely no experience with SL (Second Life). I remember when it first came out, but I was already playing 2 massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) and figured that was enough. Plus I had a rather old computer at the time, so was concerned that it wouldn’t handle SL very well.

Over the years, I’ve been told multiple times that I needed to get on SL. I don’t know how many times I’ve downloaded the program, ready to start, but for some reason I’ve never once completed the registration to use SL (or if I have, it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten and the system has erased me, it definitely didn’t recognize my e-mail when I checked last night).

In fact, my lack of experience was why I volunteered to write this review of last night’s Plurkshop. In part because there was a lot of information and writing out some of it would help me wrap my brain around it, and because there was a great mix of SL pros and newbies, so there were a lot of great questions asked and answered.

For a few days before the Plurkshop, Connie had a questionaire about SL posted on plurkshops.com, the best place to go if you’re wanting to know about an upcoming Plurkshop or find information about a prior one. Some of the questions really had me thinking. For instance, can you guess how many active users there are on SL (people who have logged on within the last 60 days)? Care to guess how much businesses invested in virtual worlds in 2007? Any idea how much real money people spend on virtual goods? (Here are the answers.)

In addition to Connie, (who is Reece Llewellyn on SL), we were honored to have 2 SL pros, Patricia Anderson and Sarah Hutchinson.

Patricia (Perplexity Pleccable on SL) is an Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of Michigan and helps with SLUM (Second Life University of Michigan). She is also active on both Plurk and Twitter as pfanderson.

Sarah’s blog, Grid Life, is written by her SL character Kippie Friedkin. Sarah mentioned she has been active in SL for about 2 years and started out working for an interactive developer for a company that offered SL services. She is also a mentor in SL. On Plurk and twitter, she is known as kidmarmite.

Since there were a couple times last night that I wished I had a SL dictionary, I’m going to start by mentioning a few of the terms that came up in conversation.

Second Life - Defined by Connie as a virtual world.

Immersive Experience - Defined by Connie as a way of learning which involves as many of the 5 senses as possible during the learning experience and by pfanderson as meaning you have to be there to understand. Showing isn’t the same thing.

Machinima - Defined by moomoney as movies made in a 3d gaming platform, by pfanderson as machine video and by rickwolff as machine + cinema.

Blingtards - Defined by moomoney as people with big hair, ridiculous bodies, and glowing attachments.

Griefers - Definied by moomoney as people out to cause trouble.

Simulation - Defined by rickwolff as a place with buildings, garden, etc. where avatars gather regularly.

At most plurkshops, there are several threads of discussions running through the conversation, which is at the same time one of my favorite things about Plurkshops and one of the things that can make them difficult to follow.

This one was no exception. With topics covering everything from companies using SL to healthcare to getting started, there was a LOT going on during the 1.5 hours that it lasted.

Pfanderson started the discussion off by asking about the value of immersive experience. Moomoney suggested that the value is directly proportionate to what you put into SL. Pfanderson mentioned that she was surprised to find SL so useful and engaging since she hadn’t come into it from a gaming background.

Bethharte wondered what the easiest way would be for someone to immerse themselves in SL after they get registered and are ready to play. In addition to stories about griefers targeting new people, some good ideas were made for getting started from a suggestion by girlfromkansas to look on YouTube for orientation videos, to Connie’s offer to run a plurkshop IN SL, to many of the experienced SLers offering to help those of us who are just getting started.

Connie said that a good way to get introduced to the best aspects of SL is to attend events there such as BlogHer, Relay for Life, and Nonprofit Commons. Pfanderson added that just giving SL 15 minutes a day can make learning it a lot easier.

I found it surprising how many businesses are using SL. Large companies like Dell, may have a special last name for their employees to use. Some, like Cisco and Sun require employees to create SL accounts as part of employee orientation according to kidmarmite. Connie pointed out that B2C (business to consumer) companies such as Coke, Toyota, etc. are more likely to be there than B2B (business to business) companies.

Even non-profit companies are using SL for events and meetings. As kidmarmite pointed out, holding meetings and events in SL saves time and money.

Pfanderson also pointed out that metrics on SL don’t look like you’d probably expect. Although most avatars are created by people under 30, it’s people over age 45 who actually spend the most hours in SL. Connie added that the median age of users is actually in the early 30s and in regards to the nonprofits companies on SL, the age is actually much older.

To me, one of the neatest uses of SL was as an educational platform, from Italian professors who us SL for language immersion experiences, to truck drivers learning to parallel park, to a pandemic response simulation and crisis response. Pfanderson mentioned other educational options, from Genomics training labs to historical immersion experiences.

Of course, this is only a small part of the chat that went on last night. You can read the rest here.

I have to admit, I’m really looking forward to registering and trying out SL now!

Resources:

www.kippiefriedkin.com - Grid Life: Life in SL according to Kippie Friedkin

slum.wetpaint.com - Second Life at the University of Michigan

mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ - Includes the slideshare Getting Started in Second Life among other interesting posts.

http://www.kippiefriedkin.com/2008/07/25/second-life-viewer-cheatsheet/ - kidmarmite’s Second life Viewer Cheatsheet. Wow!

slfreestyle.blogspot.com/ - How to look stylist in SL for free!

www.slconvention.org/register/ - Second Life Community Convention registration

slhealthy.wetpaint.com - a wiki collecting health groups in SL

http://del.icio.us/tag/education+slurl - A list of SL educational resources on del.icio.us

fleeep.net/blog/sl-calendar/ - Fleep’s SL Events Calendar

http://writersinthesky.blogspot.com/ - Books, writers, and SL