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How to Replace Your RSS Feed Automatically With Facebook’s Like Button

Posted on February 20, 2012 by jessestay

As I seek to make this blog more and more a part of the social networks you participate in (I call this “From Fishers to Farmers” – something I speak about in my talks), I’ll be documenting my progress along the way. I just showed how I’m doing this with Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing on this blog (just click through to the blog, and click the link over on the right to start adding these posts to your timeline). There’s one more piece though which I think is dwindling. Some call this the “RSS is Dead” argument. I actually talked about the RSS Subscription problem here. What’s happening is the subscribers to RSS feeds such as the one on this site, through analytics sites such as Feedburner, are either slowing or diminishing.

This process is natural as more and more people receive their news on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and away from sites such as Google Reader or traditional RSS Readers. Those tools simply aren’t social, and much less interesting than a typical social network. Therefore I argue content owners need to be looking towards more social ways of distributing their content. I’m doing this specifically on Facebook with an app called RSS Graffiti.

Enter RSS Graffiti and Facebook Open Graph

RSS Graffiti is a Facebook app (it also integrates with Twitter) that will apply any RSS Feed to a Facebook Page you specify (see why I say RSS isn’t dead?). The cool thing about it is on Facebook I can make any website a Facebook Page.

On this blog, if you view the source, do a search for “og:url”. This, and a series of other meta tags (og:site_name, og:description, and og:image, as well as fb:admins are all useful for this) tell Facebook that this URL is also a Facebook Page. To register it with Facebook, just make sure the “fb:admins” tag is in place and lists the id of your Facebook Profile as the value, and go to Facebook.com/Insights to register your URL.

Once you do this, your Blog is now a Facebook Page as far as Facebook is concerned. Now all you have to do is add a Like Button Social Plugin to your website as you see at the top of this site above, and people can “like” your website! Seriously – click through to this blog and go click “like” at the top!

Here’s where it gets cool though – now that I’m listed as an admin of that URL, I can send posts to the fans of that URL. Every person that clicks “like” above I can send my articles to. It’s the same as subscribing, but much more social!

How to Create Your Own Social Distribution Channel Using Facebook and Open Graph

Here’s what you need to do to make this happen:

Add the following HTML within the tags on your website or blog – fill in the “content” sections with the appropriate values for your site or blog:
Go to Facebook.com/Insights and click “Insights for Your Website” (the green button in the upper-right) – enter the domain you specified from the “og:url” meta tag above, and click on the “Get Insights” button. Your site is now registered (and you can go back here to see stats around your domain!).
Now go to apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/ and find your website on the left (it will be under the name you specified in “site_name” above). Go there, and add your site’s RSS Feed. Save it, and it will automatically start posting content to your Facebook Page for every post you make!
Now you just need some subscribers. You’ll do this with a Facebook Like button, just like you see at the top of this blog. Go to developers.facebook.com/plugins – click the “Like Button” link. Now, just fill out the form – be sure to add the URL you specified in the “og:url” tag above! Click the “get code” button, and now copy and paste that code where you want your like button to go!

If you perform the above steps you should have everything you need to allow your site’s visitors to subscribe to your site through a simple Facebook “like”. Now, when they click “like”, not only do they subscribe to your site, but their friends see it too!

If you want to take this further, you can add the above tags to the other pages on your site, with an og:title tag to specify the title of articles. This will allow you to customize how Facebook sees each article on your site as it shares it out to the fans of your website. If you want to get more specific, be sure to see the documentation of the OpenGraph Protocol over here.

What about Google+ or Twitter? As I mentioned, RSS Graffiti supports Twitter, so you should be taken care of there if you wanted to add a “Follow” button at the top of your website. However, there’s nothing for Google+ at the moment. I think Google would really benefit from either allowing apps to publish to at least Google+ Pages so apps like RSS Graffiti could do something similar with the +1 button. Google+ currently allows you to tie +1 buttons (through Page “Badges”) to Google+ Pages, and if they just allowed apps to publish to Pages you could theoretically do the same with Google+. Maybe if they allow that I’ll post how to do that here as well.

Stay N Alive Supports Facebook’s Open Graph

Posted on February 20, 2012 by jessestay

Just the other day I got approval from Facebook that the “read” action, available for Facebook’s Open Graph “Frictionless Sharing” was approved for StayNAlive.com. What this means is that if you click the link on the right of this blog, under “Click below to post to your Facebook Timeline when you read articles on Stay N Alive”, every post you read on this site will be automatically shared to your Facebook Timeline under the “News” section of your timeline. This means your friends will see what you read here, just like anything I were to share to Facebook. (Some day I need to design it so it’s more enticing to authorize this – hopefully soon)

You may have seen this done before with other blogs and news sites, such as the Washington Post Social Reader. When your friends see articles you read, they are more likely to click through and read them because they’re associated with someone they’re familiar with. Then, they can read and participate in the experience with you.

I just wrote about how traditional blogging is dead, and instead needs to evolve to more social models of content flow. This is one way I am trying to make that happen. Like I said, this blog isn’t dead. It’s just that it will become more and more a part of the social networks you most actively participate.

If you feel so obliged, please click through to this article and click that link over on the right. It’s one of the best ways you can spread the word about what I write, and the things I stand for. Or, just click below – I’m embedding the form right below via a Facebook Social Plugin (click through to the article to see it on the blog).

In a future article I’ll share how I did this, on a Blogger.com blog, nonetheless!

My Official (and Obligatory) "Traditional Blogging is Dead" Post

Posted on February 20, 2012 by jessestay

I fought it – I even ridiculed people like +Paul Allen for moving towards it (for that I apologize). However, I think I’m whooped. My page views are down. Comments and engagement on the blog itself are lower than ever. Looking over other blogs I manage, some with even more frequent content than my own, I’m seeing similar. As sad as I am to see it, I think blogging really is dying. It’s a really tough way to make a living, and will become even more difficult in the future, in favor of more traditional news sites and people able to share and post personal opinion on social networks such as Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.

Does that mean that personal opinion and citizen journalism is dead? Does that mean that sharing is dead? Does that mean engagement is dead? In fact, it’s even greater than ever. I always preach to use the best tool for the job. The fact is, sites like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as bookmarking and sharing sites such as Pinterest allow us to share, and engage in ways we never have before! I’m seeing greater engagement than I ever have on my blog. I’m seeing more shares than ever before. My audiences have skyrocketed on social networks! All this while, despite at least weekly posts on my blog, my audience and engagement there has diminished to almost nothing.

Does this mean I’ll kill my blog? Of course not – it just means I have to adapt its focus. I have to make it more focused around the social network. I still argue you still need a home base. It does mean I likely won’t make much money off advertising like you used to be able to on a blog. It does mean it will be used more and more as a source for SEO, and helping people find interesting and useful content on search engines (which, in and of themselves are using social networks more and more to find content). It means you’ll see more howto articles and content-focused posts than breaking news. It means my blog is now becoming an extension of the social networks, and not vice versa.

I predict in the future blogging will be back in a more social form. Right now, traditional blogging is dying, and having fought this for years now as the subject continues to be brought up, I’m finally seeing what the other bloggers out there are seeing. That means something coming from me. Am I sad? Of course. That said, there is tremendous opportunity out there as we move forward. We just need to figure out what that is – I don’t know right now.

I can’t wait to figure out a solution that can bring it back into a modern state. How do you think blogging should evolve?

(Expect a future post from me on potential solutions for this problem, and where I see blogging still working really well, and where it won’t work – stay tuned)

Xydo Pivots to a New, Targeted B2B Content Model for Your Business Newsletter

Posted on February 8, 2012 by jessestay

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you clicked on a link from my newsletter to get it. If you didn’t, go over to the right column of my blog and subscribe now! (or just click here) One thing I haven’t been able to divulge until now is that there’s an innovative company that I’ve been using to provide these weekly emails that provide customized news from my social news streams, and today they launched to the world. Today, a company I advise, Xydo, pivoted to a pure B2B model that provides custom, automated email news for a business’s customers based on content it is trained to provide.

Previously, Xydo was a consumer-facing product that learned from your social presence and the things you read, providing a customized news feed similar to Digg, or Reddit, for your consumption in a way that was tailored and customized to predict what each individual user would like. Today, Xydo leveraged their targeted news consumption platform, and built a way for businesses to leverage that customized news format to build simple, automated, and customized newsletters that adapt based on the interests of their subscribers and customers.

The way it works is simple – you customize your newsletter, based on social feeds you can configure based on your audience, and it then does the work for you. It determines the most relevant content for your audience, tracks clicks and reads of that content, and adapts your newsletter from week to week based on the things your audience is most interested in.

The result is a highly targeted newsletter that increases clicks by up to 5 times your normal click rate, and 300% more shares on social networks. I’ve seen this personally on my own weekly newsletter.

If you’re in need of providing a customized, targeted, newsletter for your users or customers, go check out the new Xydo.com now.

If you write about it, let me know! I’ll be including links back to all relevant articles below:

Techcrunch – “Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform”
Dain Binder – “XYDO Redefines Newsletter Relevancy And Engagement Performance”

Path’s Privacy Problems Aren’t Path’s – They’re Apple’s

Posted on February 8, 2012 by jessestay

The world is up in arms about how the mobile application Path, which I covered here as one of the next social networks to watch, has been sending users’ phone directory data back to the service. As someone that knows the founders and trusts what they’ll do with the data, I didn’t give it a second thought, but the concern is valid. I’d like to suggest that the problem isn’t Path’s though. In fact I warned about this before.

4 years ago, back in 2008, as Apple launched their own app platform and directory for developers to the public, the mobile app Loopt went through a similar controversy where it automatically sent an SMS to everyone in the user’s phone directory, without their permission. In this case, just like Path, the service assumed that users would be okay with sharing this data in order to make the service better. In both cases, there were many offended that this was happening.

I responded with an article of my own (again, this was in 2008!), suggesting that Apple needs privacy controls on their devices. Before any application can access phone numbers and other sensitive data from the phone, the operating system itself should be warning users that data is being retrieved, and ask the user’s permission. In fact, Android devices already do this to an extent, and services like Facebook do this before any application can access sensitive data about an individual.

It’s hard to believe that Apple has taken 4 years, and still hasn’t implemented any such controls. It’s, to me, not too much of a worry that apps like Loopt and Path are accessing this data, as both apps are good companies run by good people that have good intentions for this data. However, there are many applications out there that may not have such good intentions. In every case, it should be up to the user to decide, and know when their personal data is being transferred to a 3rd party application on their device.

So I’d like to turn the argument back around to Apple, not Path – why are you allowing 3rd party applications to access my data without my permission? It’s time well overdue to give users some control over their sensitive data.