The Presentation Slideshow is below.

BuddyPress is an extension to WordPress which will allow WP to be a full fledged social network. This means, that you can use it to make your own “Facebook” of sorts.  It’s currently under development but it is very close (they are predicting December).

BuddyPress is well thought out.  It lets you (as the administrator) customize different parts of the installation to suit your needs. For example, if you are making a network for dog lovers, you can add your own fields to each user’s profile like (I have __ dogs.  Favourite dogpark: ___.  etc)  It also lets you have private messaging between members, friending and photo albums.

It’s pretty crazy that this is free and open source.  WP is getting more and more impressive.

WordCamp SF presentation by Ben Huh creator of of icanhascheeseburger.com

Download the presentation slides for LOLcats and the Secret of Virality

Facebook is viral, but is it spam?

Why Facebook is spamming (you know all those emails you get from your friends telling you to sign up for the next latest app?)

• You can ONLY use these apps, if you invite a ton of people, then some will sign up and then you can use it
• They make you spam?
• It’s a serial process, you can’t just send to 1 person, your chances suck.
• So Facebook is addicted to invite based virality
• It gets in your system you send them, everyone clicks it, but then you get to the service and you realize it sucks.  Don’t be a dick.  It can only piss off your user.
• The Invite-Virality is not what you want. You want the slooower process that is sustainable and you wind up with users that LIKE YOU.

Invite-based pros and cons

Pros

• fast
• fast
• fast

Cons

• You are a virus - you just generated a negative experience for 99% of the people that add you
• churn and burn

Why are you on this site?

• I was suckered by an email
• OR I like this site enough to return to it
• “Too many people are flagging our emails as SPAM”. Uhh it is spam.

Sustainable and slow pros and cons

Pros

• Trust and goodwill
• Real traffic
• You’re not a digg
• Realistic return on value

Cons

• Slow.Er.
• Requires a quality product
• May not be possible

SPAM invites are the equivalent of telemarketing

Viral Coefficient can be changed so that teh # of invites occurs of the LIFETIME of the USER. Build reasons to invite.  Lolcats makes their photos available for use on their blogs. They don’t make them spam it.

Reasons for Inviting

• Create content
• Preferencing
• Personal Messages
• Comments - people want to be appreciated for their feedback.
• Feedback and Replies
• (Find reasons for your site)

Tracking Conversations

• Track a group of people (a cohort) that go through a particular process.  So maybe give cohort A one message and Cohort B another message. You measure the end result of each.
• Andrew Chen - runs a blog on virality
• The Loop.  Like ShareThis but from a marketing perspective, much prefer to have links. On engrishfunny.com they focused on just 6 big sharing buttons.  (They may change myspace to twitter eventually, but the key is to react to the conversation and the tools that are popular right now on the internet.)
• Friendfeed or microblogging has a real impact on how quickly your content gets out there.  Twitter lets you communicate with a very specific audience, so the conversion rates from Twitter are much higher.
• Detecting virals: WP Metrics - pageviews.  Put that page in analytics and reverse the curve. You can track over time. You will not get a single referrer if it’s viral. The true viral ones have no referrer because they were actually emailed from a friend.

Achieving viral virility means not being a dick.

How do you determine the stickies - the users that stick around with your site

They divide into Consumers and Contributors.  Have a genuine dialogue with the people who buy your product. Get them to tell you about reviews they’ve written, posts they’ve made about you etc. If you communicate with them and ask them how they feel, they will blog about it and give you more positive feedback.

I’m getting settled into our new apartment and tomorrow I’m heading out to WordCamp in SF. This will be my first conference since we’ve moved here. I’m excited to meet other bloggers and network.

The speaker line up looks good, considering it’s just one short day. I hope I can just go and absorb and get inspired from other bloggers. It’s kinda cool they’re using our gravatars for our name tags (in the true spririt of blogging).

I’m looking forward to:

• Alan Levine on The Future of Education and WordPress
• Chuck Lewis aka the SEO Rapper (see video below)
• and of course Matt Mullenweg himself.

I’ll try to post some updates tomorrow!

Keeping track of where my time goes has been so important as I’ve recently transitioned from “full time in the office” to “full time at home” to “freelance all over the place”.

These two tools have let me stay accountable to where my time really goes.

Tool 1: David Seah’s Printable CEO Series (old school)

I say “old school” only because it uses pencil and paper, but it is definitely modern and a gorgeous way to plan out your day.  These printable CEO and day planners make it so easy to work on a project especially when you are jumping back and forth between tasks.  They are a joy to work on cause they look so hot.  David has definitely thought through usability and what it’s like to have  ton of work to do and to focus on what’s important.  You will need to have a colour printer to get the full effects these awesome planning sheets.

Tool 2: RescueTime (new school)

When perhaps I let my pen and paper tracking slide, RescueTime always has my back. It’s a neat little app that constantly runs and records which programs you have open.  You can then review the time you spent in each and “tag” each application or URL.  Tagging what you do is the real brains behind the operation, because you can also assign a tag a “level” of productivity from -2 to +2.

For example, when I see my own blog URL in the list, I tag it with “blogging” and I give blogging a productivity level of +1.  Then, you can easily see how productive you are over time  (for example, on my list, youtube.com gets a -2 on productivity).

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the program’s intelligence and its ease of use.  It’s saved my butt more than a few times, when I tried to remember what I was working on the day before.

Usability-wise,  I feel the app could use a little more ajax in their app to aid with multi-tagging items, but overall the information it gives me is invaluable.

I’ve been putting off writing this article for a while now, because it’s long been my “game plan” to make at least 10 comments a day on other blogs.  For some reason I just can’t get into the rhythm of it.  Thus, this article is as much an internal exercise for me as for anyone else who reads it. I need a kick in the commenting pants!

I’ve been blogging now for about 3 months and I still have a very small readership.  (Nothing like the image above I borrowed from Flickr!)  Even still, I’m motivated because every once in a while I get a decent comment on something I’ve written. Heck, at this point, I don’t even care if it’s decent, just as long as someone is there on the other end and they aren’t spamming me.

Why comment?

If you don’t blog write your own blog, then you may not have felt what it’s like to post and wait for comments:  You post your article… you wait a bit, you twiddle your thumbs.  You refresh your inbox for potential comments.  You wait.  Days go by.  Check analytics.  Wait.  Check feedburner.  Gradually, your enthusiasm fizzles.

But that one comment, that one jewel that pops up unexpectedly is enough to keep you going.

Comments = Blogger’s currency

If you read someones blog and you love it, then comment on it!  Participate in the conversation the author has started.  Add a new point, a counter point, or a similar link/post you may know of.  If you find yourself in awe of how great the post is, and you notice yourself adding it to your faves, then say that too!  Think of your comment as a donation or a vote for the author and what they are doing. Let them know you appreciate it.

Join the 1 Percent

One percent of people are producers.  1 percent of all the people who use wikipedia write all of the content for it.  1 out of 100 people will ever comment on a blog.  Probably only 1 percent of people who eat at a restaurant will post up a review on Yelp or other review sites.

The other ninety-nine percent absorb and don’t actively participate.  Which isn’t wrong, but I wonder if for some people (like me) it’s as simple as forgetfulness.  Commenting hasn’t been hardwired into my routine - almost like forgetting my manners when I’m ripping through my feed reader.

For more on where I got these numbers, see my post called The One Percenters.  While you’re there, notice that the first comment on this post was from Jackie Huba who authored the book I was writing about… and she totally made my week when she did!!  Comments really are love.

Show them some love! Why? Cause just as everyday relationships, a freelancing relationship is a two way street.  If you are expecting them to be there when you really need them, you better show them you care.

Realize that often a freelancer’s livelihood often depends on a steady trickle (or flood) work.  Make sure that you tell them you appreciate them often and remember to give recommendations in public places (like LinkedIn) if you can.

All of these will lead to a happy freelancer and a happy relationship.

A few ideas for sharing the love

• Buy them something on their Amazon wishlist.
• Write them a fabulous recommendation on LinkedIn
• Read their blog and comment!
• Keep in touch especially in times when you don’t have work for them to do.
• Give them a heads up if there may not be work for a while.
• Give them a tip if they really go above and beyond!
• Ask them to go to a conference with you.
• Write a nice little blog post about how great they are if they help you out.

The past few weeks I’ve had my blogs posting on auto as I’ve been scurrying around packing and tying up loose ends before our move to San Francisco. Today I’m stealing an internet connection from our neighbour, sitting in the middle of a house with no furniture and trying to back up photos to Amazon S3 with limited bandwidth.

Two days ago Jesse and I shot Mark and Kelly’s wedding. It was a beautiful day but it was SO hot.

I may be unreachable for a while, but I’ll be checking email periodically. We fly on Tuesday.

Good news though, I’ve been added to the team at Synonym. I feel honoured to be in the midst of such talent. I still need to send along a little blurb about myself for their about us page!

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about my blog’s name.  “That’s what she said” seemed funny when I started about two years ago, but the humour in the name is entirely lost on anyone who doesn’t follow (and love) The Office.

It’s awkward because

1. For one, it’s really hard to communicate in text the emphasis you need on the word “she”.
2. Given the sexual connotation of the quote, it doesn’t help my cause of being (1) a woman, (2) a blonde and (3) wanting to be taken seriously.

That said, I don’t want to be a prude. I value the free, raw and unedited nature of the web.  The web is true democracy - it gives everyone their voice.  It flies in the face of formal edits, re-writes and the stodgy “company speak” that awkwardly spews off company websites and brochures (who talks like that anyway?).

I’ve been thinking about my voice and how I write about what I’m passionate about.  It’s taken a while to get into the groove of writing what I really think and not apologizing for my own opinions. I can’t tell you how many posts are still sitting as drafts!  It’s also taken a while for me to see that it’s OK to write articles, even if  everyone around me doesn’t agree with my opinion.

Of course, I can’t be so brash as to say I’m always right - far from it!  But at least I can say everything is up for discussion and nothing is off limits when it’s mine and its here in my blog.

I need a blog name that’s really me.  I’ve got to stop hiding behind the word “she”.  Something really x10.

I’ll keep you posted…

no pun intended.

How do you open the doors for conversation between your company and your clients?  How do you really know what your clients value?  How do you really know what your employees value?

Remove the barrier between your employees and your clients - the barrier being “the company”.

Let conversations happen between real people. Stop with the rhetoric and the protocol and let employees take ownership of their relationships with clients.  You’ll be surprised how much creativity can occur with a few small changes.

A few ideas:

• Get Basecamp and use it freely with every client. Don’t edit anything. Don’t hide stuff. Be transparent.
• Don’t monitor employee email or employee IM.
• Empower your employees with decision making power. If that means giving them a budget to work with do it! Stop stifling creativity by making yourself the go-to decision maker on everything.
• Reward your employees for having conversations with clients.  Make it OK for an employee to take a client’s side on an issue.
• Encourage your employees to criticize your internal processes - how else will you grow and change?
• Put your product(s) or your company on GetSatisfaction.com and get your employees in there joining the conversation. This gives everyone a name and a face and really shows you care.

Today I signed up for Plurk.  It’s kind of like a graphical Twitter, which I have trouble updating anyways (!), but I saw the Plurk timeline and I was intrigued.  I like how it promps you with words for your status.

“Christen likes…”, “Christen hates…”, “Christen was…” really helps you come up with something to write if you’re a little shakey with the whole status game - hmmm maybe Facebook could give that a try too?

Anyways, on to Social Capital…

It caught my attention that Plurk uses Karma points to keep track of your participation in the community.

Certain features (changing your Profile title), that are only available to you once you “give back” to the Plurk community.

A week ago I listened to an awesome interview on social capital.  So seeing  my Karma score on Plurk immediately got me thinking about my own Social Capital.  And perhaps if my whuffie (the currency you accumulate based on your reputation and your interactions with others) could be affected by how I used this tool.

It’s true that certain web apps like Yahoo Answers are trying to someone track and display social capital by giving points for the number of questions you answer.  You then accumulate a credibility “rating” within the Yahoo Answers system.   The problem with it is that people realize that all they have to do is respond to a million questions and their score will go up.  It doesn’t mean they have to write something worth while.

I think Plurk may be getting a lot closer to a measure social capital but still it’s still far off.  They avoid some of Yahoo’s pitfalls by deeming the quality of actions as increasing or decreasing Karma.  The basics are:

Get karma by:

• Updating your profile (picture, location, birth day etc.) will gain your more karma
• Quality plurking each day
• Responses from other plurkers will gain you karma.
• Inviting your real friends will boost your karma

Lower your karma:

• Karma will be lowered if you request friendship and get rejected
• Getting unfollowed by friends will lower your karma
• Spamming other users will lower your karma
• Inactivity for a long period will decrease your karma

But can you really track it?

The feeling of losing Karma really sucks. I just logged in and it said I’m at zero.  That kind makes me feel embarrassed in this little plurk community.  “Hey be my friend, I have zero Karma”.

I also feel like Social Capital may be really difficult to track cause as soon as you put rules on it, people figure out a way to capitalize on it. Whether it’s building an app to post for you or adding Plurk accounts for all your clients etc.

It also makes me wonder if I should stop signing up for every little app under the sun if I have poopy scores of zero sitting there for the world to find.  Quality over quantity, Christen!  Perhaps weigh Twitter vs Plurk and commit already! :)

Tara Hunt, author of the The Whuffie Factor (and the intervee above) explains that Whuffie can’t really be tracked by normal stats tracking like we do for page hits etc.  Your social capital is extremely valuable simply because of that… because you can’t “buy” it like ad words or quick fix it like other SEO.

If you’re interested in listening to the whole interview with Tara it’s here.