A big dependency is the platform you’re using. Or rather, the platforms. If you’re using Twitter, with its 140-character limit, posting less generally means posting more. (That is, fewer words leads to greater frequency). Plus, it’s really easy and you can do it while you’re on the go. (There’s that use of interstitial time again.)

Here’s something that’s almost cheating: Pipe your Twitter updates into your blog using an embeddable widget, and it’s a way to pass updates to your blog without doing a full-on blog entry.

And what about that full-on blog? In the Time Demands video (from the Solution Stars Video series), blogger/author Tim Ferriss says that, contrary to some rules that others advocate, he generally posts twice per week… but he’s sure to put effort into those two posts. (Of course, you would expect that, since he advocates for The 4-Hour Workweek). So it’s the quality-versus-quantity approach.

At the If You Build It, Will They Come? event, Frank Warren of PostSecret shared the method behind his unique variation of this — he updates once a week, on Sundays, which not only sets up his blog entries as appointment programming, but it also enforces an artificial scarcity: It keeps people always hungry for more. Obviously, this approach won’t work for most folks, but it goes to show that more isn’t better — better is better.

This ties in to the very important setting of reader expectations. If you know you’re going to be posting relatively infrequently (a couple of times per week, or even per month, or only when specific events happen), be upfront about it. Let people know what to expect, and provide ways that they can keep tabs on your blog. I’m thinking specifically of one-click RSS-to-e-mail solutions that pop off an e-mail when you update (Feedburner, among others, offers this) — it works great for blogs that don’t update that frequently.

Then, think about ways you can streamline your publishing workflow, and how you can optimize it to your writing style. Also at the If You Build It event, Rohit Bhargava said his ideal blog week consisted of three posts, with his typical posting schedule starting on Sunday night, with a goal of having a completed blog entry ready to publish at 1AM Monday, and two half-completed posts to work on during his train ride commutes during the rest of the week.

The most important thing to consider when looking at posting frequency is looking at your readers. Not just the analytics, but also commenting and other reactions and feedback. See if you can discern patterns in your traffic that relate to your posting schedule. You probably won’t be able to do strict A/B testing, but you can see if time of day or day of week posting affects your metrics. And try to find out from your readers if they’re getting what they need from your posts — whether they want more, or if they could do with less. Ask and listen.

Whatever you do, please avoid the temptation to shovel in filler posts to boost your post frequency. Filler posts dilute the value of your “real” posts. Just don’t do it.

I don’t think I’ve covered any new ground here, but I’m curious to hear about your posting schedule, and how you came about it. If you’d like to share, leave a comment below — when it comes to your posting frequency, are you a “more” or a “less”?

Event sponsors were Network Solutions and Johns Hopkins University – Montgomery County Campus, with support from marketing blogger Mayra Ruiz. The event was held at the JHU campus in Rockville, Maryland.

Here’s my event recap; there are few holes in my notes, so you can use the power of distributed social media to get a near-complete transcript of the interesting bits by looking for items tagged “#socstardom”, including photos, Twitter posts (don’t miss Mayra’s posts, @marketingmisfit), blog entries and more.

Here are some highlights. First, here’s Frank Warren:

If you’re not familiar, PostSecret started as an art project a few years back. People mail Frank their secrets on postcards, and of the 1,000 he receives weekly, he chooses 20 that he posts every Sunday to the Web site.

PostSecret doesn’t follow the traditional blog model. It’s very minimalist — Frank doesn’t have commenting, archives, or ads on the site — nothing that would distract from the primary content (the secrets).

He acts as a curator for the content that people send him, and he hasn’t tried to guide the community that formed around the secrets, save by crafting the narrative that comes from choosing the 20 weekly cards.

Also, by posting only 20 secrets every Sunday, he enforces an artificial scarcity (by not including archives, he keeps people from gorging themselves on secrets — they can always buy one of the book collections), and he turns his weekly update into appointment programming.

Since the main PostSecret site is all about the secrets, a lot of the other community interaction you’d expect happens on related sites — PostSecretCommunity.com, the Facebook page and MySpace profile, each of which serves a different purpose.

Other observations from Frank:

* He used to see ebbs and flows of secrets, depending on media coverage, but now it’s a constant flow, so perhaps he’s reached media saturation.

* His biggest mistake: Not collecting e-mail addresses from visitors for the first 2 years, so he couldn’t keep them updated on new developments.

* He ends every week’s posting with a question, sees that controversy can be good, and incorporates interesting feedback into the posts to provide an example, as well as an incentive and notoriety for commenters.

Frank’s a tough act to follow (and apparently even worse to precede) but Rohit Bhargava was game:

Rohit is a blogger from a more traditional mold, though he also has a book — Personality Not Included.  Some of his insights:

* When he posts, being useful is more important than anything — he doesn’t try to entertain or provoke thought; he uses a lot of lists

* He always thinks of potential posts in terms of titles (which he spends a lot of time thinking about.)

* One of the first techniques he used to build traffic and attention around his blog was writing posts that he thought influential people would find interesting, and sending them the posts.

* A popular early post was 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization. Instead of trying to become the “SMO guy”, he leveraged that traffic to blog what he really wanted to blog about (marketing stuff in general)

* He entered a presentation contest (winning an honorable mention) to get the attention of Guy Kawasaki, whom he got to write the foreword to his book.

* The main drivers of traffic to his blog early on were accidental and viral; now, they include Google, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. Also, getting a high percentage of traffic from e-mail forwards is great, because it shows people are e-mailing the links to others.

* In order to keep up with new social media platforms and tools, Rohit will sign up to try new things during boring conference calls. This keeps him current, as well as reserving his username. The next tier of tools are things he actually uses, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. And he knew he was getting serious about Twitter when he found himself thinking before posting, “Is this worth a Twitter post?”

* An ideal blog week for him is 3 posts — the first posted by Monday at 1am (to catch international readers), with two more half-written posts that he finishes over the week.

Both talks were lively, as was the Q-and-A period. As I said, you can get a fuller feeling of the questions and content by searching for items tagged with “socstardom” (I’ll do a roundup post of these items later on).

Lastly, in terms of the event title — if you bring in speakers like Rohit and Frank — yes, people will come.

If you’ve got your own event writeup, thoughts on the speakers or photos you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.

What’s it called?

The event is called: “If You Build It, Will They Come?” and it is an exploration of social networks, including what’s working now and how to build and nurture a community.

Why Should I Attend?

Hear their story on how they succeeded… What Social Media tools they used for their success… What worked and what didn’t… And learn how communities are created.

About Frank Warren

Frank Warren is among the top 20 bloggers in the world and is a inspirational speaker and author of 4 books, including A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book.

About Rohit Bhargava

Rohit is Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence. He is the author of “Personality Not Included” and among the top 50 marketing bloggers in the world.

How do I sign up?

Go to eventbrite to this page to sign up. Admission is free and so is the parking.

In this episode our stars were able to provide some great insight on managing the demands on your time when you add social media into your bag of marketing tools.

Some highlights include:

- You don’t have to write everyday. It is all about quality over quantity
- Figure out what you want to say
- If you are using social media to interface with customers you need to “be in the trenches”
- Evaluate paid advertising to drive traffic and awareness to your blog
- Carefully manage your resources
- Solicit content from your users and customers. Including guest posting, case studies and testimonials
- Ask yourself “what would you do for the next 10 years if you couldn’t make money”. That is the passion you have and that will show to your customers, even on a blog.

The stars in this episode include Chris Baggot, Rohit Bhargava, Toby Bloomberg, Chris Brogan, Paul Chaney, Tim Ferriss, Tony Hsieh, Jennifer Openshaw and Wendy Piersall.

Here is the full episode:

If you’ve been enjoying the events that we’ve been bringing you, then you will NOT want to miss this one! This one requires no travel you can attend it from the convenience of your office or home! We’ve created a free video conference that’s jam packed with insights & online marketing tips for small businesses!

Mark your calendar because on October 29 at 1 pm we’re providing the Solutions Stars Video Conference! Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone, & Network Solutions Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda met with 32 top bloggers at BlogWorld Expo. We asked them to share their insights & tips on online marketing for small businesses for you. It was all captured on video & now we have a conference features nine different documentary style video sessions:

• Building Web Presence
• The Social Opportunity
• Start with Listening
• Strategy Drives Outreach
• You Need Social Networks
• To Blog or Not to Blog
• Visibility Through Search
• Rising Above the Noise
• Time Demands

In addition to the Solutions Stars Video Conference site, please visit the event pages on Facebook and Upcoming.

Here are the steps:

a) Bookmark this page – http://www.solutionsstarsvideo.com/

b) Create a calendar event for themselves

c) Choose the event time

d) Come up with good questions for the chat room

We’d love it if you’d grab a badge for your blog or site.

Rohit Bhargava is rising star in the PR and Social Media world. Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy – a leading group in helping clients around the world navigate the social media universe. He publishes the award winning Influential Marketing blog which listed as one of the top 50 marketing blogs in the world by AdAge magazine. Rohit is frequently featured in media worldwide including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Marketing China (China) and AdWeek (Australia).

The last event with Rohit that was hosted by Network Solutions was very well attended despite the massive storms. Tonight looks like it is going to be a scene from Monsoon Wedding as well. Rohit must be someone who can “bring the rain” instead of “bring the pain”, but I digress. There was some great coverage from two previous posts. The first post covered all the different blogs and interviews from attendees and the second post was of Johnny Goldstein’s podcast “Johnny’s Par-tay”.

Here is the play-by-play of the event…

Tonight we are at the Network Solutions HQ here in wild and exciting Herndon, VA. There are about 75 people here and the room is standing room only. We started the evening with an intro by Frank Gruber, Product Manager of Social Platforms for AOL. Frank is a very prolific blogger and social media junkie. His blog, SomewhatFrank.com is about all the bright and shiny technology things that he comes across. He and Rohit were talking about their first time meeting where Frank had a camera attached to his head.

The idea of this book is about setting yourself apart as a company through the personality of your brand. One of his first ideas was to create a “choose your own adventure” marketing book but that was revealed to be a VERY BAD idea. He wanted to make the book so that it was relevant to how you operate in business every day. He spent time putting in real stories because that is what people really connect and relate to instead of a marketing “expert” telling them how to operate their business.

The other key is the advice section that makes the book useful all the time. He provides some very useful lists…

One powerful thing in companies are the “accidental spokesperson” who become the impromptu go-to person for all things related to “your company”. Frank goes on to ask about big versus small companies – does size matter? It is a myth that all big companies are faceless and all small companies are quirky and hip. In a big company there are more challenging because of “slios” – web dept, marketing dept, product dept. etc. They are a located in different places, lead by different people and paid differently with different missions.

Karmic Marketing is Powerful, but fuzzy. Look at Zappos, their customer service team is empowered to make the decisions (like send a client flowers) and really affect brand loyalty for the positive.

Frank takes the devil’s advocate position as a product person and asks about what happens when you have a great product.
- Twitter is a great example. Twitter is failing alot lately and user experience is suffering greatly. So what do you do when it comes to personality? It is alot like being in an abusive relationship, but who is the enabler – twitter or us?

Rohit brings up the first generation iPhone and when they dropped the price so quickly. Apple is a great case study in good brand marketing, however, they don’t let their employees blog, talk, or communicate with the press unless they tightly control it.

Frank decides to move away from technology companies and ask about how this approach works in other industries. Rohit talks about the time he went to a restaurant called “WD50” which uses a technique called molecular gastronomy to create food. Then, there is a restaurant called “mini-bar” which is inside of Cafe Atlantico in Washington, DC. – which is also one that focuses on serving six, that’s right SIX (6) people per dinner every evening in two hour blocks and twice a night. This creates an experience that is UAT (Unique, Authentic and Talkable.

Lastly, you need to take on the approach that is what he calls “Curiosity Marketing” that is really described as more of a viral marketing strategy, but could definitely relate to social media as well. One of the things that intrigues people is when you give them a secret to hold.

Now we go to the audience:

Q: Does this apply to Non-profits
Rohit: Definitely. This really fits the “passionate enthusasts” model. We used Kiva as a great example in the book.

Q: Does social media allow us to share our stories and more of our personality?
Rohit: Absolutely. I didn’t want to write another “Blog book” and I wanted to go broad enough but it is where something like social media these days, versus five years ago, you have to have incorporated into their strategy.

There are some more great questions and Rohit answers them for the audience. Check out the video below for the full presentation and Q&A.

Rohit’s talk covered a wide range of issues from stories out of his book to fun facts he learned while he put together his book. Throughout the evening the in-person and online audience was super engaging and peppered Rohit with questions dealing with a variety of topics including the need today for not only large businesses and non-profits but also small businesses to create an engaging brand while also having a unique personality.

During the presentation, Rohit covered examples of companies that have effectively engaged the online community and ways for marketing and differentiating yourself as a small business.

In response to one question from the audience, Rohit provided a roadmap for small businesses that are just starting out on how to begin the process of building a brand, a unique personality and most importantly a relationship with the community.

Missed the evening for some reason ? Watch it here. http://blip.tv/file/965449/

Also do not worry, Network Solutions is planning more of these events so please say tuned. Add your name here to be notified of future events http://solutionsarepower.com/event-registration/. We want to see you at the next event.

Photos credit : Nahum Gershon

Special thanks to Jonny Goldstein for being a great moderator on Wednesday evening, Scott Stead for doing a fantastic job for coordinating the live stream on the web, Jill Foster for her super hard work pulling together all of the details of the event and finally Busboys and Poets for the wonderful set-up and food.

For those of you out there who have never been to Busboys and Poets, check it out. It is really a great place in the U Street corridor. Also thanks to all of the attendees. We know you could have easily gone home and skipped this event and stayed out of the pouring rain.
Thanks for making the event a success. Last of all, please feel free to send us any suggestions about this event or suggestions for future events.

We can’t wait to hear from you.

Blogs and buzz about the event.

The fact is, there are several big reasons that marketers need to revisit the importance of the domain name in their strategy. Here are a few points that many businesses have forgotten about domain names:

1. The domain name should come first. When planning a new tagline or strategy, consider the domain name early in your process. This is not to suggest that every good tagline should be thrown out when a domain is not available … but consider who has the domain registered and be realistic about how important it is to your strategy to have it. People WILL search for you based on the most logical domain name. f it’s gone and you can’t get it, maybe it’s time to rethink the strategy.
2. Domain names aren’t gone forever. Remember those “domain troll” companies that registered thousands of domain names in the early 2000s in the hopes of selling them for megabucks? Well they are all out of business now and their archives of domain names they gobbled up on five year deals are now expiring and coming on sale.
3. People can’t spell. They never could before, but with the rise of spellchecks and a new generation without the necessity to spell correctly (and finding a new lexicon for text messages), registering only a single spelling of a domain name could be a recipe for disaster. Make sure you register the common misspellings of your domain name, otherwise you risk being victimized by the “typosquatters.” These are the people who register your common misspellings to siphon off your traffic and potentially mislead your customers.
4. Alternative TLDs do matter. As Internet users get more familiar with domain names online, the use of other domains beyond “.com” will continue to rise. Keeping an eye on additional Top Level Domains (TLDs) added and what is available in your domain name will be well worthwhile. Though I couldn’t get www.influentialmarketing.com registered, I do now own the .biz, .info, and .org versions of it. Perhaps I can convince Ropers to let me have the .com version some day … and in the meantime, I will have to make do with my “official” registered URL for my blog www.influentialmarketingblog.com.
5. Domain names are the ultimate search marketing tool. As anyone who has studied search engines or professes to be a Search marketing expert will tell you, a good domain name that mentions certain keywords will go a long way to helping your site appear on search engines for the right searches. And the best part of all? You may be able to avoid paying for those keyword ads on Google and invest that money elsewhere.

So these things lead to five very simple rules you can follow to get smarter about your domain name strategy:

1. Register domain names early in your business planning.
2. Set up email alerts to let you know when domain names with certain keyword combinations become available https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/keyword-login.jsp and bid on soon to be expired domain names, or names that may be up for sale.
3. Register common misspellings, and use Google’s keyword tool to research a list of common misspellings
4. Register other TLDs for your chosen URLs.
5. Consider registering common keywords as part of your URL or as part of alternatives for your URL so you can attract search traffic for those keywords.

Any other tips you have about domain names and how best to use them for marketing. Email me at rohitaustralia@gmail.com and let me know!

Rohit Bhargava  is author of the anticipated new marketing book, Personality Not Included  and an award winning blogger at Influential Marketing Blog .He is also a founding member of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team, a part of one of the largest marketing and communications agency groups in the world.