Defining Blog Success
Diva Marketing
Last week, the Wall Street Journal covered a new study from Forrester Research that showed business blogs as unimaginative and unsuccessful. Toby Bloomberg takes their criteria and wonders if it really applies--for example, does a blog need comments to be successful? "I find Forrester's own blog well done and informative, however you'll notice that most posts do not receive many comments. Question Charlene Li or Peter Kim or Jeremiah Owyang or John Cass .. does Forrester consider The Forrester Blog For Interactive Professionals a success? If so why or if not why keep on truckin'?"

Smaller = Better?
ProBlogger
As Twitter continues to frustrate users, Darren Rowse has been exploring Plurk, a similar microblogging tool. His overall experience has been positive, as he notes that despite having far fewer followers on the newer tool, he is getting better results. He also praises Plurk for updating its features regularly. "There is some great development happening around Twitter by developers (I've recently loved playing with TweetDeck for instance) but Twitter itself has had few new features added to it. Plurk on the other hand has had new features being added every week (if not every day or two). It's not perfect and still has bugs from time to time (and I wish it'd release an API to let developers build tools for it) but there's an energy and feeling of excitement about it that I really enjoy."

Social Media No-no
Six Pixels of Separation
You can pitch, you can ask politely, you can work your contacts, you can do any number of things to get link love in social media. One thing you can't do, according to Mitch Joel, is demand it. I can't agree more. Oh, and do not charge people money for appearing on your podcast, that's not an interview, it's advertising. "If you're considering to start a Blog or Podcast, keep in mind that people should never pay to be interviewed by you. It's really quite the opposite, you should be honoured that anyone has agreed to take their time and effort to help you create content for your community (you owe them, they don't owe you). And, if you would like to get on their Blogroll, you should not have to ask. They will naturally put you there if you create compelling content that is relevant to them (and their community). Telling someone that this is "required" demonstrates that you do not understand how these new channels really work."