Enter our 1st. contest of 2010 and win a blog in exchange of a simple Tweet. Seriously.

But… aren’t there like a million free themes available everywhere? This is not a theme, this is your Ready-To-Rock, unique and fully-loaded blog.

So get all the details right here…

What Does “Fully-Loaded” Mean Anyways?

While it has a very simple design, this blog is loaded with all the tools you need. Here are the specs. Besides changing the logo and your pic, you get:

• It’s built over Thesis Workframe so the license is included (your welcome…)
• Your social profiles are linked to the blog and displayed on the sidebar
• Sharing options: Tweetmeme button and ShareThis System
• Disqus Commenting System (the default is just weak sauce)
• FeedBurner RSS & Email subscriptions
• Social feeds (Twitter and Facebook)
• I’ll setup and configure Google Analytics (I’m not kidding)

Seriously… Just A Tweet?

Yes, all you need to do is:

1. Follow @SocialMouths on Twitter and…
2. Tweet this message exactly as it reads here (just copy and paste and you’ll be good):

“Follow @socialmouths and Retweet to WIN the FREE Fully-Loaded Blog contest – http://bit.ly/ceS384“

Important: Do not change the URL. The tweet must be exactly like that.

How Is The Winner Announced?

The last day to enter is Monday February 22nd and the winner will be announced on a post at SocialMouths on Friday February 26th. Don’t forget.

Just Making Clear That…

• I’ll be cool and work with you to get setup, but this offer doesn’t include customer service, customization or tech support. You can hire me for a couple of hours if you like.
• You need to have a domain and a hosting package, if you don’t I suggest you get everything from GoDaddy.
• This is WordPress self-hosted version.
• I’ll leave everything ready so you can input your content. I do NOT put in the content for you.

You still here? Go Tweet…

Share

Yep… The conversation has left the building and you might not be aware of it.

Do you know exactly what happens to conversations on the social web? How far they go or where they die? Are you aware of the real impact created by your latest blogpost? Once the conversation leaves the blog, we lose visibility of it, but that doesn’t mean it died.

Let me give you an example, we’ll pretend that you wrote and published an article on you blog and posted a link on Twitter. If you want to see if you had any retweets, you go to your @mentions page on Twitter and you see the actual tweets. Now, here is the question, what happens when somebody tweets about your content and doesn’t give you that @mention? Look at the following graphics:

The first graphic shows a tweet that includes 2 elements that make it easy to track. First, the mention of the Twitter handle of the author which will automatically display on the @mentions page. Second, it is using the same URL and that will let you track it, in this case it is an Ow.ly URL.

This is a different case, and you might be thinking right now that the author didn’t get credit, but this is awesome, a person is sharing your content. The reason it doesn’t look like the one on top is probably because that person arrived from a different source, it is clearly not a Retweet. Here is the question, how do you even know this ever happened if you are not mentioned and it is using a different URL?

So What Do You Do?

You need to track reactions related to that specific post. Sounds easy? It is. These reactions are happening on different social networks, somebody makes a comment on your blog, another person Diggs your story or submits it to Reddit. Wherever the conversation goes, you need to follow it.

Why? Think about this for a second, if you are creating content to attract more prospects and there is an existing conversation somewhere out there about what you said… aren’t those your prospects? shouldn’t you be involved?

How To Follow The Conversation Around You

As usual, I will mention some specific tools you can use, in order to find out who is talking about you.

UberVU

UberVU gathers all the activity related to one specific URL, it doesn’t matter if it was tweet, a digg, a stumble or a comment on your blog. This way, you’re collecting data even if you were not mentioned or the person didn’t use your tiny url…

The other feature I love is the alerts. You can setup email notifications to stay up-to-date on every reaction that happens on the social web. UberVU also generates charts for easier analysis.

Disqus

Is the commenting system that you see in this blog. Disqus actually displays all reactions right at the bottom of the post and it doesn’t generate any analytics for you, but what’s important about this platform is that it literally takes the conversation out of the blog. I have to clear that up because the last time I said that, someone asked me “what’s the point of taking the conversation out of the blog?” and the answer is that it is really not up to you. What Disqus does is give you the possibility to keep up with it.

Bit.ly

As you probably already know, Bit.ly is a URL shortener, but there are a couple of things you might not know. It recently passed TinyURL as the most popular URL shortener and more importantly for you and me, it can be used on Facebook and it tracks the number of shares you get by your friends. If you look at the following graphic, you’ll notice that it is tracking the number of clicks on the URL you create and the ones created by others under the same service, but it is also tracking the number of conversations in different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or Backtype.

Take a quick look…

There are ways to take a quick look and have an idea of what’s going on, mostly with Twitter. If you use websites like Topsy or Tweetmeme, you can see who has been tweeting about you or your content. You’ll be surprised of how different the results are. In this story shown on the graphic for example, which is my latest post “10 Reasons Why I Use HootSuite… And You Should Too“, Tweetmeme says it got 18 retweets while Topsy says it was 24, but the count is useless if you don’t do something valuable with all this.

Wrapping Up

Do you still wonder why focus groups and surveys are dead? Companies are listening to this stuff because it is the real deal, people talking about one specific topic without any restrictions. See it this way, that is your prospect out there, she is talking to somebody else about your service and doesn’t know you’re listening…

A final thought to wrap it up, how about you connect with these people, there is nothing more targeted than this.

What do you think?

Having a blog is only step one if you are trying to provide any kind of content. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote the post 5 Social Tools To Help You Spread Your Awesomeness Outside Your Site in which I talked about coming out to spread your content and generate some traffic back to your site. This week we’ll go over some tools to implement inside.

The objectives of implementing these tools are:

• Build a better user experience.
• Promote user interaction, after all, a blog is a conversation platform.
• Make it easy for your visitor to share and promote your content.
• Make you look like a real pro.

So here is the list of tools, they are all fairly easy to install:

1. Facebook and Twitter Sharing Buttons

While you want to provide the possibility to share to a wide variety of networks, it has been proven that displaying individual buttons for the two most popular sites increases the chances of getting your content shared. Also, if you have been active on Facebook and Twitter and other sites, you have already experienced that most of your traffic is coming from these two sites.

Facebook provides its own code to install directly into your content and while Twitter doesn’t provide its own, you can use Tweetmeme, which is the one you have probably seen already in the majority of sites.

2. Sharing To The Rest Of The Web

Of course Facebook and Twitter are not the only sites and your visitor very well can move in other circles, make it easy for them to share your content to any network. Applications such as ShareThis or AddThis make very easy to implement, usually through a plugin that you can install from your dashboard and a little configuration.

Look for a service that can give a little more, in this case, both services provide analytics.

3. “Follow Me” Links

Another very common practice and a great way to stay connected to your tribe when they are not on your site. If a new visitor likes your content, he/she would most likely love to network with you in other places. Make it very visible on your site and include only the main ones, if you have profiles in 15 different networks it can get a little confusing.

4. Commenting Systems

Commenting systems are a great way to take the conversation to the next level. Services like Disqus or IntenseDebate are now very popular and their installation is as easy as creating a profile and adding a plugin on your blog dashboard. The main feature is that they take the conversation out of your blog into common places making it easier for your visitor to keep the interaction flowing instead of being just a single comment that they can otherwise forget.

Another great tool in this field is Echo, integrating activity from different social networks.

5. Facebook Widgets

Leverage form the most popular network in the planet. Facebook now allows you to display different widgets inside your blog. These widgets include commenting boxes, fan page badges, live streams, fan boxes and, in case you didn’t know, you can now connect your Facebook status to update your Twitter.

6. Promote Inside Navigation

One of the things bloggers usually watch is their “Bounce Rate”, visitors that come in, read one article and surf away from your site. A great way of engaging the reader into navigating your blog a little more before he/she leaves is by promoting related articles. LinkWithin is a plugin that inserts links with images to other content inside your blog at the bottom of each post.

Your visitor mostly likely go for a couple of more clicks if he/she enjoyed your article and is presented with similar stories.

7. Crowdsourcing

If you use your blog to promote a product or a service, social media allows you to give your customers a voice. Crowdsourcing is a fairly new concept that allows a community to become part of the development process by sharing their ideas, feedback and even voting for the best ideas on how to make your services better.

If you are concerned about having a complaint made public think about this, social media is about honesty and transparency, and there is nothing better that solving a problem in front of everybody…

UserVoice lets you create a forum where your customer can express that feedback and easily integrate it into your site.

8. Polls

Another way to provide different kind of content and engage your reader to participate. PollDaddy is a free and very user-friendly service you can use to configure any kind of poll and generates the code to just grab and dump right into your content. The truth is that people love expressing themselves and finding out what others think about the same topic.

Create a post that features a poll or display one to your blog’s sidebar.

9. Social Toolbars

You have probably seen them at the bottom of a blog, they not only add sharing capabilities to networking sites but can also integrate external tools such as your Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter feed come live in your site. Great examples of these bars are Gigya and Wibiya, both free and made available through simple plugins you can install directly from your blog’s dashboard.

Another popular toolbar is Meebo, which integrates instant messaging right on your site. Just be careful and make sure these services are not making your site too slow to annoy your readers.

10. Use Of Other Media

User other forms of media when possible, video for example has proven to be an excellent way to engage the user. Other ways are to use clever photography or even add podcasting to your site. Blogging platforms have made it very easy to add these types of files to your content and you can probably add some rich content with just a couple of clicks.

Don’t limit yourself to text, give your visitor a more visual experience.

Final Thought

Content will always be king, focus first on providing value through it. Having the latest technology will not compensate for not having it.