Latino Rebranded: Latinos and Social Media

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That bald guy, walking in front of the pharmacy is…you guessed it – Me!

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Subtitle:  My commitment to blogging.

Blogs are an interesting format, for readers inadvertently discover that they at the whim (mercy?) of blog owners.  Happily, sometimes sadistically readers follow their chosen blog not blindly, but faithful that great content will reward their loyalty.  If unfulfilled, they dutifully leave in droves.

This weekend, I was reminded that I have limitations – I hit a wall and needed a few days to recover, thus the reason for this late post, as well as my absence yesterday here and other social media portals over the weekend.

From this, I’ve had some realizations:

1. My my voice is unique and cannot be duplicated by a ‘ghost writer.’ I’ve no intention of hiring a ghost writer (although it’s a fairly common practice, but not a fit for me right now); I’d rather let someone else blog here if I could not for an extended period.
2. Quality over quantity (related to the above).
3. I’m not stressing social media, but enjoying it.

I hope my regular readers were not deterred by 1 1/2 days of absence (I don’t usually blog over the weekend), and continue their readership and input here.  I’m here for the long haul and have many more new features and interesting content to offer.

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Subtitle: From blogs to microblogs and back again.

My blog is quickly becoming my favorite social media portal.  Re-wind a few months ago, and I would of had said Twitter.  But, I’ve come to re-appreciate my own pulpit.

There is pride to be taken in the creative process, more so in the ownership of one’s output.  There are those who are insanely successfully on Twitter or Facebook, yet when it comes time to direct traffic from those portals toward their own they fail miserably.  Why?  Because they truly haven’t established an independent and successful fanbase.

You see, a blog is your foundation…Facebook…Twitter…MySpace are all illusions of true networking.  With all this technology that surrounds us, it is easy to be seduced by shortcuts.  If you’re a successful blogger, you will take those concepts to any network and easily dominate them with the networking principles that you’ve learned from blogging.

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As I buckle down and provide more relevant and consistent content, so too will more features be added.  Below is a list of some recent additions applied.

MOBILE

There’s a new Wordpress mobile edition installed.  By default, the site was too “beefy” for mobile platforms by trying to load rich media, full picture sizes, sidebar widgets and full posts.  Now, the site is streamlined for smaller mobile screens by fitting 5 posts at a time with limited text, pictures are fitted to a smaller format, rich media like video and scripts are disabled, and only certain widgets remain.

COPY RIGHT

Infrequently talked about is the common practice of larger and well known blogs ‘borrowing’ content from smaller blogs without giving link-backs.  Creative commons was installed to protect my posts with attribution credit.  What this means is that other’s are free to copy and distribute this work, but they must give credit to this humble blogger for the content.   “Homey, don’t play that.”

REVIEW

There’ll be a week in review post to capsulate the week’s content.  We’re all busy and no one has time to read blogs every day, so this will serve as a summary of what was talked about with easy links to follow for the full post.

SUBTITLES

As I’m always thinking of different packages to deliver content, you’ll see subtitles as an addition to the original title in an effort to capture the different modes of thought I have for a post.

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Latino Rebranded is proud to offer the first Weekly Roundup post. I’ve started this series today, and am included the past two weeks (2/15 – 2/26) as a special treat, because I know you’ll not want to miss any recent news or musings. =P

Next week, I’ll post more social media observations, Latino media insights along with more improvements for this blog. As always, I’m open to suggestions and welcome any feedback concerning this new initiative.

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Subtitle:  Spam Justifies My Online Existence

Yesterday, Latino Rebranded received its first comment spam…and I’ve been waiting for that to happen.

You see, in some twisted and almost ironic dark side of a blog’s importance or popularity, there is invariably an influx of ‘comment spam’ along with legitimate audience contributions.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jumping for joy but am reluctantly accepting the challenge.

What is Comment Spam?

“Comments are a great way for webmasters to build community and readership. Unfortunately, they’re often abused by spammers and nogoodniks, many of whom use scripts or other software to generate and post spam. If you’ve ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you’ve encountered comment spam.” - Google, Webmaster Central

Some Ways To Combat Comment Spam

• Turn on Comment moderation – Comments won’t appear on your site until you approve it.  Upside is you get to approve all comments; downside is visitor must wait until you approve comment, also imagine what happens if you have to go through hundreds of comments on a daily basis.
• Use “nofollow” tags – Basically, tells search engines not to include comments in their calculations for page ranking.  Doesn’t help with spam, but helps with search engine permission.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments – Many spammers use hyperlinks to directly link to their site either to have people click through or serve as attribution to their own site ranking.
• Disallow anonymous comments – Most likely, you want to know who your audience is anyway.
• Turn off comments after a specified time period passes - From experience this helps.
• Turn off comments – drastic, but most effective.

Comment spam were a plague with my old blog that proved to be a challenge for a good 6 years – there were hundreds even thousands of comments with the most notorious of key spam words.  Fortunately, blogging platforms and the communities that add value to them have improved in anti-spam technology.  There’s actually an industry built around it – Akismet is one such example, which I may try.

For now, I’m staring at a little ‘1′ encircled within an orange circle next to the Comments link in my Wordpress dashboard which denotes the new comment spam, and I’m bemoaning the next step.  But…onward.

I hope this helps or at the very least prepares some future blogging stars out there.  There are some other methods of combating comment, I am sure.  What’s yours?

UPDATE 02.24.2010: I dug a little deeper and contacted Akismet to provide some data.  Below is a snapshot of the current state of comment spam each year – notice the blue ‘ham’ area:

Here’s another graph of yearly compounding comment spam:

Spam anyone?!?

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As it turns out, they are everywhere that everyone else is and more.

Hispanics are going to websites that the rest of the world are using which are Yahoo, Google and Microsoft but at the same time there are niche websites that allow Hispanics to socialize within their own communities as well as to search for information such as news, sports and entertainment within Latin America.

Social media, in the same stride is a great place to find ‘real-time’ Hispanics.

Go over and read my friend Frankie’s blog – a contributing voice to the online Hispanic dialogue (the post is a few months old, but still relevant because people ask me this all the time).

Update: Related – Breakdown of Hispanics online.

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With the announcement of Google Buzz, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Comments feature in blogs.  I don’t want to say that Buzz is necessarily bad for blogs, but it can de-augment a very powerful pillar of blogging – the Comments section.

Let me back up a little.

In October, I talked about the importance of publishing your content on a blog that you own versus a social media site like Facebook or Twitter.  I subtitled the post as “Centralized Me,” to build on the concept of concentrating your content to one main platform.

The Comment’s section of a blog is the site’s social component, for without it a blog is only a new media site with a one way conversation void of reader interaction.

Google Buzz, in essence does to your blog’s comments what other social media sites does to your content – spreads it far and wide.  If readers use Buzz the exposure of your blog will be multiplied, which is every blogger’s dream.  But I have to ask, will those who use Buzz also comment on your blog?

Latino Rebranded integrates a button called TweetMeme and if you look, more people Tweet posts than actually comment.  On Facebook, my followers comment or “like” my blog posts, as well as Networked Blogs – a Facebook application that delivers new posts to people’s inbox and utilizes an RSS feed as well.   Now Buzz, can be added to the list.  (I just had the thought that an opportunity exists for a program to pool together all these outside conversations and dump them into one spot – the Comment section.  Maybe it already exists?)

Taking all of the above into consideration, the ‘push-button’ interaction that they all offer will subtly deter comments because in the mind of the reader they already have commented – in the form a tweet, a buzz or a ‘like’.

I’m not saying to not use any of these services, because they are great tools that leverage your blog’s exposure – and that’s what you want!  But, with the awareness of conversations happening outside your Comment section you can start thinking of ways to harness them for the benefit of your blog.

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