Social Media

I have a confession to make. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been a little worried about my creative output for ViperChill. More specifically, I’ve feared that I would run out of blog post ideas. The simple reason for this is because I cover topics in so much depth that I don’t ever really need to write about them again.

You can find blogs that will give you a few link building tips each week and then I go ahead and write 15 in one post. You will find blogs with tips here and there on WordPress SEO, and I go and write what I think is the only guide you’ll ever need. Thanks to a very productive hour I spent last week, I’m now no longer worried in the slightest.

Though I’ve written about working as the social media manager for brands like Nissan, Land Rover and Hewlett Packard, I’ve never talked about many of my achievements in this space. For example, you might not know that I helped one newspaper go from a limited social media presence to helping them hit the Digg homepage over 40 times.

Or, how when I worked with Bacardi we drove so much traffic to their site that we took down their servers. Twice. I have plans to cover these stories in more detail in the next few months, but to start the coverage of Social Media here at ViperChill I wanted to bring in 9 other experts in the field to share their thoughts on leveraging social media as a whole.

I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for WordPress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.

Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your WordPress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.

This blog post is quite long so you probably shouldn’t read it. To the 50% of visitors who are still with me, I’ll say now that less than 1% of you will get to the end so you may as well leave now. The value here is in reading the whole post; not in skimming. Now that we’re left with just a few people, let me say first say “Hey” and secondly say “This blog post will go against 99% of the things you’ve ever read about blogging.”

I’m going to be controversial and I might even upset a few people. I’m not being controversial for the sake of controversy and I’ve been told I’m actually quite a nice guy. I’m simply telling the truth, and giving you the real state of the blogosphere for no other reason than it’s about time something like this was said.

I’m a huge fan of personal development. For the last 19 months I blogged about very little else and like to think I made a mark on the industry – despite my age and “total nobody” status. I don’t really write about self improvement anymore but I still actively work on improving different aspects of my life.

Without books like The Power of Now, Psycho Cybernetics, and Tribes, I really don’t think I would be where I am today. In fact, I think that the majority of my success online is thanks to the life lessons I’ve pushed myself to learn and the knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few years.