A social experiment…

Just Posted: Apple Likely to Give Education Rather than Resolution for iPhone 4 Antenna Issues

So, with a keen interest in social media, and generating revenues from such ventures, I’ve decided to run an experiment with this blog to see how current social applications affect such a thing as a blog, as well as their impacts on revenues (if any) driven from that. So without further ado…

Let’s assume right now I have 0 readership, 0 RSS subscribers, and $0.00 revenue driven from ads. A good starting point. I’m going to use some twitter, digg and delicious as my starting blocks for self-promotion, and social/viral marketing. Feedburner will run my RSS feed/stats, and Google Analytics will be my stats engine. I’m also going to use Google Adsense for my revenue stream on web and RSS.

Pretty simple setup, and over time I will look to add more social applications to the mix to see how they stir things up. For now I’m using 3 which I will briefly discuss:

Digg
I’ve implemented a Digg badge to every article posted. This is an auto-generated badge which either shows the number of diggs for the article, or a handy linky to submit the article to digg. I’ll submit the articles myself to digg once I have published them for now…

Delicious
I’ve also included a nice Delicious badge to the bottom of all articles which enables you the user to add an article to your delicious bookmarks, and also see how many other people have added it.

Twitter
I’m a Twitter convert. Right now I’m having to manually tweet any blog posts, and will continue to do that until/if I move over to something more customizable like WordPress. In the meantime I’ve also added the Twitter gadget so that blog readers can view my recent tweets, and follow me for more random thoughts.

Timing for social posting is definitely going to change. I’ll be publishing articles as and when, but any tweeting, digging or delicous-ing(?) will be done at around 1pm GMT to maximise exposure for North America. Will experiment, but also think weekend posting may be fruitless to begin with.

Goals – well short term I’d like to generate subscribers to my feed, as well as followers on twitter and digg. Maybe a little ad revenue too. Long term would be to earn enough from ads to run my blog elsewhere on my own server, and custom software… who knows how long away that is.

Content-wise I will continue to offer what I am currently offering… random thoughts about leadership within “nu” organisations, social media thoughts, technology observations, and tutorials on anything nice I am working on that may help the common man.

I’ll continue to feedback progress on this, new endeavors and changes to my strategy for success. Will report epic fails too of course