The final objective of this project was to gather bloggers insights about social media: how they use certain sites, why do they use them, what are their likes and their objections to each particular social media site.

I hosted here the Sphinn section, hoping to see some of the frequent sphinners have their say about their favorite network.

These are the articles we’ve got to this section of the group:

• Front Page Sphinn by Simon
• Some Quick Notes On Sphinn by Karen Zara

I want to thank Simon and Karen Zara for their thoughts, and for finding the time to submit their articles.

I also want to thank the 4 sphinners who thought this project might be useful for the Sphinn community, and gave their vote for it: bhartzer, DoshDosh, planetc1 and SlightlyShadySEO. It is easy to figure out that my submission never made the front page. I didn’t do it for the traffic. I don’t need traffic from social media. I did it because I really wanted to hear from people who use Sphinn every day, why they use it and how is that useful for them.

When I submitted, I was 99% sure the post will make the front page, and I’ll see at least 8-9 articles written as a consequence of my announcement. The post never got sphinners’ attention and this was probably due to a few possible reasons:

• The group of active sphinners who actually make things happen in there, is very small. They would gladly vote for each other’s stories, because they already know that they submit only quality stuff. Probably most of them don’t even check out submissions from people they don’t know, and this is perfectly understandable in this world suffocated by spam.
• Although I like Sphinn and I used to spend some time there every day, I don’t submit too many articles, nor do I comment very often on other submissions.
• My approach of the Sphinn community was wrong: instead of just submitting my announcement, I should have contacted one of the top sphinners and ask him to submit the story for me. Then the whole core community would have given their votes: if an opinion leader, a trend setter, asks you to help, you’d gladly do it. But I am not comfortable with the idea of emailing people who are probably too busy anyway. I believe one has to be shameless to do this, but I can understand this is how things work and I accept the consequences.
• Sphinn is an extremely focused community. They deal with internet marketing, they discuss the new, the events, the stories which are exclusively about internet marketing. They can write about their cats and get the attention of their colleagues, but this is only because their cats are the cats of internet marketers. My cat is of no interest for them.
• Sphinn is an ongoing competition between friends. They fight to be the first to discover and submit great stories to the community. They strive to climb the social ladder of quality, so they would not vote for a story which has few chances of hitting the front page. They would damage their profile. It’s like in school, students who had only the highest grades where very proud of being the best, and for them, getting an A- would have been a disaster.

If you want to stay informed about internet marketing, visiting Sphinn every day is useful. If you want to enter a closed community and make friends there, you first need to prove something to them: you need to prove them that you are committed to their community, to enhancing the knowledge there, you need to be the first who submits the news in internet marketing. Briefly, be prepared to spend some two months of your life chasing great internet marketing stories and submitting them to Sphinn.

If you just want some backlinks for your pages, Sphinn is not the place for you, so don’t waste your time in submitting your posts in there.

Social Media Success Is About Approach And Action

On every other blog out there, we can read about the importance of communication, of participating in social networks, of becoming a “power user” (how I love these words!). But most of it is just talking. Telling people that something is important, and that this is the way things should be done, and not doing what you preach, is a bit strange. Actually, if it was that important, you would have done it more often yourself.

Somebody told me about two people who were trying to make money online, and after 6 months of reading two of the blogs in that niche, they were still not making any money.

Of course they don’t. Reading alone doesn’t help. It’s what you go and DO after you finish reading, it’s how you apply the knowledge you’ve got, that brings you results.

Hundreds of bloggers agree and write about the importance of “writing good content”, of “commenting on other blogs”, of “participating in group projects”, and then we get only a handful of interested people (out of the thousands of RSS feed subscribers we have) who have something to say.

What do you think?

In Romanian, this sound is something like “Kotkodak”… funny… in Romanian… as if Romanian chickens would ever need to learn English to speak with Londonese chickens… I suppose chickens just have a natural talent for languages, so for them it’s easier.

OK. So, chickens kotkodak because they want to share their effort’s result with their peers.

And they are successful.

This is not a blog about zoology, so you probably ask yourself how does this ChickenStory relate to blogging?

It does more than you think. As a blogger, you can lay great eggs (to be read “have great ideas” or “write great articles”), but if you don’t kotkodak over them (read “write every single day about your achievements”, or “email important & significant bloggers to tell them the great things you’ve just done”), very few of your peers will ever know or care about your precious eggs.

Thus, did the big G reward you with a big, juicy PR? Kotkodak!

Did you write an ebook? Kotkodak!

Did you give an interview to some important other in your niche? Kotkodak!

Please don’t get me wrong. I love chickens and I think their way to let the world know about their biggest achievement is absolutely wonderful. They don’t even care that millions of chickens lay millions of eggs every day. For them, it is an unique event, each and every time. Bloggers are very much alike.

I’m not so much of a “kotkodak” person, but I feel frustrated by all this blogging noise, in which a great initiative I’m proud to be part of got lost. So, this is my kotkodak post to you, and I hope I’ll have the success of other chickens out there:

The Social Media Mega Project

This is a collective group writing project we didn’t kotkodak too much about, and it seems we were wrong. Briefly, we want to collect as many opinions and thoughts about the main social media websites, and we need all bloggers who care about social media to write a post about whatever network they wish, then to submit it to the appropriate host of that part of the project. You have time until March 22nd, and you can read all details here.

Please, contribute. It is very important to us. Besides, one of the group writing projects hosted on Inspiration Bit (the main organizer of this project) got Dugg, and we all got a lot of second-hand traffic from Digg as well. I hear bloggers complaining every day that they don’t know how to get traffic, or that they have the writer’s block.

Come on, my dear fellows, now you have not one idea for a blog post, but a few: if you write about all the networks we study, you’ll be busy for a week. We are waiting!

Later update: I suppose almost all bloggers are busy getting paid to do surveys, as we haven’t heard from too many of them.

For those of you who don’t know, LinkedIn is a place where you can connect with people all over the world, a sort of who’s who, where everybody can have a presentation page for free. In order to get connected to other people, you have to have something in common: a school you’ve both attended, a workplace where you both worked, or a person who is connected to both of you.

Another way of getting in touch with people is to answer their questions. There’s a special place on LinkedIn, where members can ask questions, then read and evaluate the responses they get from other members. It was like a game, and I got addicted for a while, so a few people gave me good ratings and we became contacts to each other.

Then I discovered that if I fill in all the places I’ve worked in, I might be able to find some of my former colleagues in there. So I did, and I found one colleague, who was now living in another country. I was so happy, I started to write him a message, then…

… I stopped just before sending it out, as I realized that he’d never guess who that message was from, because I used my pen name, and not my real one, when I built my profile.

Being the lazy person I am, I didn’t bother to start building another profile on my real name, but I still see LinkedIn as a cool place to meet people you’ve once known and forgot about them, a place to start building new connections, and why not, a place to check on your potential bosses or partners.

Besides, LinkedIn has an Yahoo group called LinkedIn Bloggers, which is very active, and where hot issues blogging-related are discussed.

This is my contribution to the Social Media Mega Project, for the LinkedIn section, hosted on AlphaBlogs.

If you want, you can contribute, too. We are all waiting for your articles on social media.

These days, whenever I hear “can you digg this for me please”, or “I’d appreciate a Stumble, or a reddit, or a sphinn”, I remember Esperanto. Somebody who would enter the online life today would have to learn the language first, before establishing a good communication with others.

Last year, the word “Sphinn” was added to the social networking vocabulary. Now, I’m making it the topic of this group writing project, and I invite you all to participate.

“How Do You Sphinn Today” Group Writing Project Rules

1. Write a post on your blog and share with us how do you integrate Sphinn into your blogging, work, tell us about your good or bad experience, how would you compare Sphinn with other social networking sites, what do you like or don’t like about it, how did you benefit from becoming a frequent user of this site, what secrets have you learned about it, what tips or warnings would you like to inform others about?
2. Contact me (simonne at alltipsandtricks dot com) with your name, email and a permalink to your post. If you don’t have your own blog, you can always write a guest post on my blog, or simply send me your thoughts by contacting me in person.
3. Once I collect the links from all participants and publish them on my blog, you can write another post and link to either all or only your favourite articles by other bloggers.
4. You are allowed to contribute only one article per project/site. You are more than welcome to visit other participating blogs that host projects dedicated to the different social media sites and take part in those projects by submitting your articles about other social networking sites.
5. Time frame:
   1. Submissions start: Monday, January 21st
   2. Submissions end: Friday, February 22nd
   3. I will publish all entries on my blog on February 25th
   4. Collaborative entries (please read below) will be published on InspirationBit, on February 29th

“How Do You Sphinn Today” Is Not Alone

This is a baby-project of the Social Media Mega Project, organized by Vivien at InspirationBit, project which aims at putting together an ultimate list of resources on Social Media sites.

This project’s brothers (and sisters) are:

• digg and reddit. Host: Vivien from InspirationBit
• del.icio.us. Host: Aaron Stroud from On Financial Success
• Facebook. Host: Ina from Inspiring Wear
• Flickr & Zooomr. Host: Brian Auer from Epic Edits
• Twitter, LinkedIn. Host: Isabella Mori from Change Therapy and Alphablogs
• StumbleUpon, YouTube, MySpace. Host: Karen Zara from a1-fan-fun
• Second Life. Host Dandellion from Metaverse
• Mixx, Netscape, Squidoo. Host: Pearl from Fresh Perspectives
• Sk*rt, Blogging Zoom. Host: JHS from Colloquium
• Monica from Me Like the Interweb: Technorati

If you have something to say about your experience with any of the social networking sites mentioned above, you are welcome to share it in writing and send it to the respective baby group project. The deadline is the same for all of them. You can’t submit the same article to more than one baby group project, but this will allow you, for example, to delight your readers with a mini-series of articles about social media.

The idea of this mega-project is to uncover advantages and drawbacks for each of the social sites, in order to allow the readers to choose which ones fit better for their blogs.

Now I’m getting personal: the more submissions I get, the bigger are my chances to win this competition with my above mentioned buddies. Will you help me build the most successful project of all?

Later update: the project was extended until March 20th, so there is still time for you to write about Sphinn and contribute to this group.

While visuals are not bad at all for a presentation (if properly used, they can emphasize your points and ease memorizing), the avalanche of text slides on the screen is rather harmful:

1. If you know you’ll have the slides projected, you won’t learn them so well, so you’ll get tempted to read from the screen, thus losing the eye contact with your audience. Imagine what a disaster if the power goes off and you have to tell everything from your memory! Should you be keen on having text slides, keep them at a minimum information (headlines only) and learn by heart what you want to say.

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2. If you disregard the Guy Kawasaki rule and put a lot of information on the slides, your audience will be too busy to read to have time to also listen to your words. Don’t force your audience do two things at a time: watch you and read the tons of stuff you put on your slides. If you feel the need to give them all than info in written, you could give them handouts, but don’t put all that on the screen.

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3. What’s the difference between an actor and a presenter? Both have a text to learn and to interpret for other people, in order to transmit them information (be it emotional or logical). Likewise a bad or just unprepared actor, who needs somebody to whisper him the words, the unprepared presenter shall read from the screen. Don’t you think your public is smart enough to feel the difference? Never underestimate your listeners!

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4. Are you more of an artist rather than a technical person? Then why would you like to embarrass yourself by asking for help because the projector just went off, or because you have to whisper all the time “next slide, please” to the technical person who’s handling the technology for you? Body language can successfully replace any kind of visuals. You just need a lot of rehearsal and maybe some drama classes. Colorful metaphors can be of a big help if properly used.

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5. My boss wanted to embed audio effects in a presentation. So she did, but she found herself in front of people from 10 countries, with one slide which went like “mooooo…” and we were not in the cows business. Actually she had embedded an applause effect, but something went wrong and we had an unexpectedly funny moment. If you decide to use a presentation software, then test everything 10 times before declaring it complete.

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6. If you won’t present from your own laptop (which you actually should, but sometimes it is just not possible), ask the organizers to let you rehearse your presentation in the final setting, one day prior to the event. Shall I tell you here about my other boss who came to a presentation with a flash pen in his pocket only to realize that the pen was broken and he was not able to deliver his presentation to his brand new team? Actually he was new, the team was old, and he lost a big deal of authority by doing a chain of small mistakes like this one.

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7. If you decide to get rid of the presentation software and give a free speech, learn it damn well, rehearse it loudly in front of the mirror, in front of your friends, or even tell it to your children. Or shall I tell you how I got speachless in front of 100 people who came to listen to me, only because I refused to rehearse my speech, being sure I knew what I wanted to tell those people? Rehearse even if you know your presentation by heart. There’s a huge difference between thinking and loud speaking. Take it seriously.

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Later update: I’ve just found this funny PowerPoint presentation example at Jim Kukral. Besides the funny side, it is also very useful for people seeking to improve their presentation skills.

How are you doing your presentations? Would you rather overcome the disadvantages of presentation software and use it, or would you speak freely, using your body language to transmit your message?

Did you ever experience the frustration of visiting a foreign country and not understanding the language at all? Luckily, English is pretty much international these days. However, when I visited China I had the surprise that many people did not speak anything but Chinese, so my knowledge of three languages was rather useless, as long as I was not able to speak, read or even understand a single Chinese word.

No Language, No Fun

I felt so frustrated in the beginning, because I always like to talk to people in foreign countries I visit, I enjoy conversation, I want to feel the spirit of places, and for this, I need at least to understand the basics of the language spoken by those people. On my way from the airport to the hotel, I started to pay attention to pictures and signs, and as some of them were bilingual, Chinese-English, one hour later I was able to recognize the Chinese word Beijing, even when it was not accompanied by the English spelling.

No Language, Lots of Fun

That was the beginning of the most amusing game I played for three weeks, the duration of my Chinese experience. I looked at things, pointed at them and my host was telling me their Chinese names. Then I repeated until I managed to pronounce correctly. Every now and then, we reversed the roles: my Chinese friend pointed at things and I had to name them back in Chinese. I was astonished to discover that I could remember almost everything: it seems like association is the natural learning way of the brain (indeed, children learn their native tongue by making associations).

Why Learning a Foreign Language Naturally Works Best

Back home, I gave it a thought and this is my explanation of my unexpected evolution:

• all progress was made on the spot, with no translation or memorization required
• I had immediate feedback on all attempts: my friend rated my prononciation on the spot and made the eventual corrections, sol I always knew where I stood
• the learning process was continuous and gradual: we played the game all day round, I never know when she’s going to ask me something, and the topics were more and more difficult every day

It is also true that I’m clever Now I’m going to learn Turkish, but this time I want to make it a little bit faster, so I’m going to open an online account with Rosetta Stone
, because they use the same natural way of learning that worked so well in my case.
Their free demo convinced me to give it a try, and the 6 months money back guarantee with no questions is the longest I’ve seen so far. (Special note: Europe residents interested in trying the free online demo of Rosetta Stone, please follow this link: Rosetta Stone Language Software

What foreign languages do you wish to learn? Do you think that speaking many languages can bring you benefits?

Until you figure this out, you should know that you can easily earn some “bonus points” with only two words. You can make people see that you care. You can make them understand that you appreciate and respect them. You can make someone’s day.

Try to picture this: since childhood, you had tasks to do, and doing them at your best was the “normal”. You knew that, and you know it today, so you don’t expect any praise or rewards for all normal things you do at school, at home or at work. But there are times when you feel better. If I asked you, you couldn’t tell what triggers these feelings.

May it be because the sun is shinier some days? Maybe.

Or may it be that you have just achieved something you are proud of, and that changed your mood? Possibly.

Or maybe did you hear the two magic words that made your day?

The words I’m talking about are: THANK YOU!

Many times, you can motivate people to keep on doing things, with a simple thank you (although you know, and they know it too, that it was their job to do that).

Let’s imagine some situations when you could experience the magic power of thank you:

• You are a team leader, and your colleagues have just accomplished a difficult task. Acknowledge this by a thank you, whether or not can it be accompanied by a more substantial reward
• You are the proud mom of a child who has just put his room in order. Don’t say something like “you should have start doing this a long time ago”. Just smile and say “thank you for being such a help to me”
• You run a blog project where people send you articles. Send them a thank you note immediately after you receive the material. There’s no big effort in this; you can use an auto responder. And it makes a great difference to your readers.

Such situations are endless. If you don’t believe it, try it for yourself for 10 days. Notice the changes in people around you. Notice the increase in their motivation. Notice how they smile back to you. Does it feel better already? Then why not making it permanent? We can definitely live in a better world, but nobody’s going to make it better for us. Leaders are very few. Most people are followers. Lead those around you to respect and love and you’ll be rewarded with harmony. Lead them to wars and you’ll have hatred and selfishness all around you. Don’t do anything and somebody else will lead you to his/her picture of reality, which you may not always like. It is true that we create our reality. If we don’t enjoy it, we can create a change.

One more thing: don’t start tomorrow (as tomorrow never comes). Start now!

P.S.: Thank you for reading my article. It means a lot to me.

Can I see an interview sample?

If you want to see how the page about you will look like, go see the AllTipsAndTricks page (yes, I’ve been the One Blog of Today). Or go to any other page: lose weight with The Diet Pulpit, or go Outside the Beltway, or go to see for yourself the other interviews.
They are worth reading, that’s for sure, and I’m proud to find myself in such a select company out there.

The first contest on EzMoneyOn.Net. For those of you who may not know, EzMoneyOn.Net is a joint venture of Diana and myself, aiming to help people making money online, by giving away tips, tricks, reviews about the most known advertising programs and other money making methods out there.

Prizes:
First prize: $100 cash (via PayPal or MoneyBookers)
Second prize: 1000 Entrecard credits
Third prize: Free 125×125 banner design

Rules:

1. Write a post about this contest, containing at least 100 words and include 2 links, which you’ll be able to see in the contest page.
2. Subscribe to EzMoneyOn.Net RSS feed through a reader - you will get 2 entries in this contest;
3. Subscribe to EzMoneyOn.Net feed by email - you will get 2 entries in this contest;
4. Write a recommendation for EzMoneyOn.Net on Entrecard - you will get 1 entry in this contest.

Please also leave a comment on the contest’s page to let us now that you’re in, and how many entries you’ve got.
We will use random.org to choose the winners.

End date: 11 March 2008. On 12 March we will announce the winners and you’ll get a link back to your announcement page.

Anyone from any country may enter. We reserve the right to discard your entry if your blog is spammy, pharmacy, adult content, etc.

Take a look at the contest and please join! We are waiting for you.

 Now, the 6 contests which rocked in the past:

With so many blog contests going on, I’m sure it is hard for you to remember and to track all of them. This is the review of the ongoing contests (in random order):

1. Mind Map your resume for a better job and win a MindManager license at eDragonu (put your brains on paper with this prize and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog: it is full of resources on how to get things done)

2. SEM Scholarship at MarketingPilgrim (hurry up, it ends on April 6th and the prizes are unbelievable)

3. Second Contest with Inspiration Bit (the name may not be telling much, but you can choose your desired prize; besides, InspirationBit is a “must read” blog for all bloggers; hurry up, April 5th is the last day)

4. eMoms birthday party contest at eMomsAtHome (it has just started, the prizes are great and eMoms blog rocks)

5. What do you think? Review contest at The Thinking Blog (prizes are favicons and blog redesigns, done by a real artist – you can see examples of his work in the article)

6. Amazing trick at AllTipsAndTricks: find out the explanation to the illustrated phenomenon and win free hosting for one year. There are three prizes and no winner yet.

Consider yourself invited to participate in all these contests. You’ll benefit in prizes, links, connections, having a good time or just getting some creative ideas for your own blog’s contests. If I missed any ongoing contest, feel free to add it to the comments, and don’t forget to include a link.

What is the use of inspiration? Find out with Inspiration Bit, a very young but promising blog, with an inspirational touch that leads to knowledge:

“Knowledge comes from an inspiration - one bit at a time.”

Written by Vivien, Computer Science literate and mother, Inspiration Bit provides information about web design and development, art and photography, web 2.0, computer and internet tutorials, special websites reviews, and many more.

I often find myself scouring the internet looking for either answers to many questions I have or websites that inspire me, sites that I can learn from. On what topics you might ask - any topics that interest me, anything from web design to art and photography, from blogging to entrepreneurship, from programming to open source.

If knowledge came one bit at a time, inspiration travels in packs of 8 bits (or multiple of 8):
- 8 bits of colour inspirations brings to you some useful colour resources on the web
- Get inspired by 8 bits of unique navigation provides you the occasion to see 8 websites highly creative in terms of navigation facilities
- 8 remarkable Wordpress themes – Vivien’s choices of beauty and functionality

Some bits of humour come with the very explicit post about what digg can do with your website. If you don’t want to see your site going through that process, then you can try these 29 traffic generation tips that actually work.

Not monetized, the blog is very readable, clean and not cluttered, focusing on facilitating the readers the access to its best bits (aka Top posts) and to people keeping the dialogue bits alive (aka Top commenters).

Original in both content and design, creative and thoughtful, Inspiration Bit brings a fresh perspective to internet communication in general, and to blogging in particular.
Thank you, Vivien, for the inspiration highway you are building for us, 8 bits at a time. I invite you to take your Rolling Blogroll badge and display it on your site.

This review is part of the Rolling Blogroll project.