Over the weekend I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, which was to organize my Google Reader feeds. The problem I had was that I was trying to follow over 50 blogs and other miscellaneous feeds but there was no organization to it. Some feeds were much more important to me than others but I hadn’t made it easy on myself to get to the preferred feeds quickly. I’ve known for some time that Google Reader allows you to create folders so it was time to give it a shot. I created the following for my use:

• Top 5 - The top five blogs I read to stay aware of what’s going on in new media marketing. These are Seth Godin’s blog, Mashable, TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels blog.
• Friends - Blogs that my friends write.
• My Stuff - Anything I do that has an RSS feed.
• Clients - Blogs and anything else I’m monitoring for clients including some Technorati feeds and Tweetscan feeds.
• Everything Else - Catchall for anything I want to check in with from time to time.

So far it’s been great. I find myself using Reader more now than before. A nice little surprise for me was that Google will aggregate all the feeds from a single folder so I can quickly see what’s new from my Friends blogs for instance. I should have done this a while back but I’m glad it’s set up now!

Last week I was in a meeting with people from a number of different organizations all discussing a common issue. I was the “social media” guy at the table with a few traditional marketers with various specialties along with non-marketing people working through an particular situation. During the course of the discussion I realized again how stark the difference is between the way I approach marketing and promotion compared to some more traditional marketers. I attribute this difference in thinking to people like Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, and Robert Scoble…all of whom have provided books and blog that have formed the way I approach the new technology for marketing purposes. I took some notes of my thoughts at the time and here’s what came out…

It’s not that television as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that newspapers as we’ve known them don’t matter. It’s just that they don’t matter as much as they used to.

It’s not that radio as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that marketing, advertising, public relations, and any other form of promotion as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that the way you’ve been marketing isn’t effective anymore. It’s just that it’s less effective today than it was yesterday and it will be increasingly less effective tomorrow, next week, and next year.

The lesson here isn’t that you have to make a total switch to social media marketing today. The lesson is that you need to be moving toward social media marketing and as you do, you can’t think about it the same way as the old way you did marketing.

All bloggers want more traffic to their site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a professional blog or some random musings from your life, you want more traffic if you publish a public blog. Sure, you know about blogrolls and link exchanges, but do you ever link specifically to posts to bring some traffic to you blog? You can. Here’s how.

Linking to posts (called trackbacks or pingbacks depending on what your blog tool calls them) is a way to show that you wrote a blog post specifically talking about a post on another blog. That referring link then shows up on the original blog either under the trackback area or in the comments. That referring link can then send people to your blog to see what you had to say on the topic.

For instance, if I wrote a post about how Seth Godin gives a good explanation on the types of people who use Firefox rather than Explorer, I would link to it as I’ve done here and grab the trackback link at the end of his post. That trackback link can then be inserted into a special trackback field within Wordpress (some blog tools can do this automatically…just check how your blog platform deals with these or try this). Then my post referring to Seth’s post would show up on his blog.

Wordpress is especially generous to pingbacks. If you were to link to this post for instance (the permanent link) it would show up in the comments. Wordpress works like this for all users unless the blog’s author has specifically turned the feature off.

The strategy here is that you add value to the conversation and get to bring people over to your blog to see what you’ve said. It’s better than a comment because it shows you took some time to really respond to the blog post. People who read the comments will be more likely to click over to see what you said because they also recognize that you took the time to write it.

One final thought here…don’t be a jerk. Don’t trackback unless you have something valuable to add. There is such a thing as spam trackbacks and spam pingbacks and you don’t want to be one of those. Just add something to the conversation and you’ll be fine.