January 12th, 2010 by Michelle Moore

In the last year or two, a lot of small business operators jumped onto the social media bandwagon. It’s been a rough ride and several have fallen completely off because proper management of social media can be pretty time-consuming – and let’s face it, most small business owners are control freaks and simply don’t want to give over control of their online reputation to anyone else.

CoTweet!

Fortunately, there’s a tool out there that can help make Twitter management a little easier to share without giving up total control of your Twitter account. CoTweet is a browser-based tool that allows you to set up a parent account, and connect it to a Twitter account via good old fashioned oAuth connectivity. This means, that when you, as the Twitter account owner, gives Twitter permission to let CoTweet access your account, that’s the only time you need to log into Twitter.  From then on, anyone whom you authorize in CoTweet can Tweet through that Twitter account without you giving them your Twitter login.

At first, this may not seem like such a big deal, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you want to hire someone to come in and read through 20 sites that you’ve hand-selected, and then tweet out 100 interesting tweets based on the information gleaned from these sites over the next three months…

You can go into your CoTweet account, invite your temporary help to create an ID under your parent CoTweet account so they can create these posts, and then they can schedule these posts to go out once a day for the next 100 days. There’s your three months worth of tweets and you didn’t have to give that person any personal information. When they’re done with their task, you can disable their access to your parent account and you don’t have to change your password.

Why Stop Here?

Now here’s what I’d like to see… someone needs t take this app and run with it, get Cotweet plugged into WordPress. You see, I have to manage sometimes half a dozen WordPress blogs at a time, keeping up tweets and posts for all of them. And all of them currently have my personal login information plopped right into that little Twitter plugin. What happens if my WordPress installation is somehow compromised? It would be much better for me, as the owner of several blogs and several Twitter accounts, to be able to put the invited SUBACCOUNT login information from CoTweet into my WordPress plugin rather than using my actual login and password… WAY better. If I ever suspect my WordPress data has been compromised, I just remove the invited CoTweet ID.

Anyone ready to take that project on?

June 1st, 2009 by Michelle Moore

Something I’ve noticed over the last year is that there is no shortage of “ultimate” WordPress plug-in lists floating around. So why have I created another one? Simple – because the other thing I’ve noticed is that most of these lists are created by AdSense bloggers. Folks who are blogging for dollars using Adsense have a different goal than, say, a person who is blogging to create personal branding or corporate buzz. These folks don’t need 6 ways to impose Adsense ads, or disguise affiliate links. They need a different set of tools.

Getting Better Social Media Mileage Out Of WordPress

There are a handful of plug-ins that go into every blog I put up, whether it’s one of my blogs or a blog for a client. These are social media related plugins that make it a snap to share articles, create bookmarks, and generate buzz.

The first and most basic of these are the social bookmarking links - those little icons at the end of every article that are designed to remind you to add this article to your Delicious bookmarks or post it to Sphinn or Digg or Technorati or Yahoo Buzz or… well, you get the idea. The reason I add this type of tool has pretty much nothing to do with expecting readers to use it – it has more to do with reminding bloggers that they are their own best promoters. There’s not a blogger alive who doesn’t load up the finished article to admire it when it’s posted. Ok, so go bookmark the thing yourself and get the ball rolling. Additionally, these types of tools are so widespread that not having one installed is a disservice to the readers who have come to rely on those links instead of browser plugins (which slow the browser down).

Bookmarking plugins I can recommend:
Social Bookmarking RELOADED
Add to Any: Share, Bookmark, Email
Damn Sexy Bookmarks
Sociable

The next set of “socializing” tools I install covers things like status updates and article distribution. If you are even in the earliest stages of pervasive SEO, you should be working at least two blogs (one self-hosted and the other free), a Twitter account, and Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn. One of the most basic steps you can take to simplify your pervasive updates is to “connect” some of these accounts to each other so that they share updates. There are tons of  Twitter badges floating around but with the right plugins, you can do more than just demonstrate that you’re connected to the Twitterverse… For example, Twitter Tools will allow you to share updates – you can tweet your blogs and/or blog your tweets.  Twitter Friends will let you display a block of your Twitter Followers in a widget, to demonstrate the quality of your following. Dandy ID services lets you create an aggregatation of all your social networking identities which can be displayed easily through a WordPress widget, allowing your readers to quickly hit your other social accounts to see what all you’re up to. With a tool like Easy Twitter Links, you can automatically share the Twitter love – this tool recognizes @ tags and # hashtags and links to them for you, so you can interconnect with other Twitter users.

Twitter Tools
Twitter Friends
Easy Twitter Links
Dandy ID

There is also a list of general purpose tools that no WordPress installtion should be without. These tools cover most of the basics required for good SEO and link circulation, which are essential for getting the best mileage out of your articles. The most basic of these tools are the SEO enhancement tools, which give you the ability to customize meta data, title tags, headlines and other things in your articles without just repeating the settings for the main blog page itself. Then there are tools designed to provide things like robots.txt files and XML site maps which automatically update with the permalinks for your new articles. And no blog is complete without a set of tools designed to spread the word AND return the favor when this happens… My basic WordPress toolkit always includes the following essentials:

All in One SEO
Google XML Sitemaps
Comment Luv
Yet Another Related Post Plugin
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Comment Luv embraces the circular linking that is the reason people blog… use this tool to make sure your blog embraces the notion of offering titled links to other blog writers who take the time to leave comments for you. YARPP allows you the chance to publicize yourself a little more by including a list of other related articles at the end of a post. A “ping optimizer” is a tool that controls how often your blog pings  out that it’s been updated – while I can’t say I particularly like the marketing emails I get from MaxBlogPress every week, I do value this plugin’s ability to make sure that while I’m correcting my typos, I’m not spamming the ping servers with every single article update.

The plugins for SEO and XML sitemaps are usually essential to anyone who wants to get indexed properly. You don’t have to use these specific tools, but if you are not using a theme that gives you some control over SEO customization on a per-article basis, you should install some sort of SEO management tool. If you aren’t manually generating sitemaps with links to your permalinks, you should be using an automated XML sitemap generator. Using both these tools will make your life a little easier. The XML sitemap tool might be called a “Google” sitemap generator, but the auther does also provide updating for MSN, Ask and Yahoo.

Remember, WordPress is a pretty powerful platform, but part of that power resides in the massive user support provide through all these nifty, cool plugins. Don’t foget to think about the ultimate goal for your blog and then go research appropriate plugins to help you acheive that goal.