After each new post on this site, there is a natural spike in traffic from those who have subscribed to this site via RSS. Traffic increases again significantly when I tag items for facebook newsfeeds. So much so, that it’s now part of my post-publish routine. Friends and colleagues more often refer to my “facebook feeds” than their own RSS feeds.

Call it the natural beacon effect?

Whatever you want to call it, as a blogger or marketer you need to incorporate a facebook strategy as part of your overall marcom plan. 

Blogger tip: Add social bookmarking to your blog template so that people can tag your article to their favorite tool. Also include a twitter push so that everytime an article is published you will automatically tweet your followers with link.

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook - but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing - they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great - instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once - much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) - I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed - so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion - build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

Nearly a month ago I decided to launch a new blog - but this one would be focused on the ski industry. I spend a significant amount of time on snow in the winter - and usually a few weeks in the summer too. I’ve enjoyed writing for this blog so much; I figured it would be double the fun to add a second.

Thanks to the power of the interweb 2.0, it literally only takes about five minutes to setup your own blog through a free service like blogger and wordpress.  Unlike in the old days, sites are now longer built as stand-alone pieces of art. Sites today are built on content management system (CMS) which means that content lives separately from the function and design of your website. This means you can update the “theme” of your website easily and quickly without affecting your content.  Before CMS based websites, you had to update each page seperately offline or by playing with page masters in web developer applications such as dreamweaver. It used to take me hours or days to roll out a new site theme. Now it can take seconds.  

A CMS website also means you can repurpose your content for other purposes - like setting up RSS feeds or creating a mobile version of your site. Want to learn more about this? Check out this classic:

After registering a new domain for my ski blog and auto-installing the blog scripts, all I had to do was pick a theme and I would be ready to add my voice to the ski industry online. I started by doing a google search for “wordpress templates.”

Within 5 minutes of research I forgot about my ski blog and found myself drifting towards a new theme for this blog.

Three weeks, 50 sites, and over 1,000 themes reviewed later, I was thrilled to activate a new theme…for this blog over the weekend.

Although it’s really easy to update your theme, the hard part is finding one that matches your brand and the tone you’ve established with your published articles. It’s taken me nearly a month to land on the current theme…so I hope you like it. 

Now back to that ski blog…