You’ve seen them on blogs as handy visual aids that spotlight keywords from page content. Word clouds make it easy for web surfers to determine if any given blog or post interests them enough to keep reading. But for marketers, word clouds offer communication tools that can be used outside the blog as well.

At their most basic level, word clouds make text on a page look more exciting than, well, text on a page. You can use them to convey data and information in a way that breaks the mold of standard presentation formats like slides, spreadsheets and pie charts.

Looking for a creative way to share marketplace feedback to your executive and board leaders? Instead of a report with lengthy quotes and testimonials, consider presenting a word cloud that displays what consumers are saying in one quick, easily digestible image. Information that’s easy to absorb at a glance resonates more with readers.

Word clouds can also help you take a keen look at the content on your website, particularly if you’re not employing search engine optimization and marketing tactics. In seconds you’ll know exactly what words appear most frequently on key pages. You can use the results to assess whether or not you’re communicating what you want—and don’t want—to say. Try the same thing with key pages from your competitors’ sites to compare and contrast key messages.

And speaking of your Internet presence, do you know what’s being said about your organization online? Word clouds are a great way to determine if your online press is positive and aligns with your key messages. Search on Google for your organization or a specific topic, then enter text from the search results into a word cloud app. You’ll get an instant visual representation of your online image and what it says about you.

Your consumers and employees have suggestions for improvement – do you know what they are? Word clouds can help you figure it out. Just as they can be used to draw attention to your strengths, they can also uncover weaknesses. Without making it public, try making a word cloud to zero in on specific areas needing improvement.

There’s no shortage of word cloud generators available online. Look around on sites like Wordle, Tagxedo and Word It Out (to name just a few). Pick the app you like the most and discover what it can reveal about your marketing and communication efforts. Why not start right now? It’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s fun.

Many of our “100th Tweet thoughts” are still true today, and we’ve added some tools to make our Tweeting even better:

• Our main focus with Twitter remains keeping up with the Search Marketing community and their blogs, re-tweeting information and linking to posts that will help keep our clients updated on digital (and traditional) marketing trends.
• Each day, we highlight our five most recent Tweets on our website home page, ensuring constantly updated content for visitors to the site.
• We track our favorite blogs in Google Reader as the primary source of our Tweet material.
• Each time we update our blog, a Tweet goes out to notify our followers.
• Our tweets are used to update our status on our Facebook page.
• We use TweetDeck for desktop as a personal real-time browser to update our status and to follow the Twitter stream of lists, hash tags and friends.
• We registered g-3.me to use as our Custom Short Domain, then mapped that URL to bit.ly pro. This allows all of our Group 3 Solutions Tweets to be branded with the g-3.me shortened URL.
• Each week or so, we compile our messages into a Tweet roundup blog post.

Has our Tweeting been a game changer for us? Not really. But it has allowed us to improve our knowledge of the real-time information network as we assist our healthcare vertical clients in their social efforts and introduce business-to-business clients to how they can enhance their marketing program with social networking.

Where is real-time information networking heading? Let’s take a look at what is happening in the ever-changing field, and what others are saying.

• Real-Time Search. We think Twitter, and other services like it, will continue to have an impact on search engine marketing, with real-time search results becoming increasingly important in the future. Danny Sullivan, the authority on SEO industry reporting, took an early look at Google’s real-time efforts. Here’s Google’s page on the topic, and Bing has information here.
• Social Media Marketing. As marketers seek to tap into the 120 million or so Twitter users (as of July 2010), new advertising companies are being formed, small agencies are expanding their offerings, and larger ones are buying these smaller firms or establishing their own social marketing divisions. “Ad spending on social networks worldwide is expected to rise 14% this year (2010) to $2.5 billion,” according to research firm eMarketer. “Although social media represents only a fraction of the $55 billion online-ad market, it is one of the fastest-growing segments,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
• Multimedia. ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter may soon be displaying images and video inline, perhaps “betting that 140 characters just isn’t enough anymore.”
• Real-Time Advertising. Is Twitter best for public relations, or will the new advertising platform be better for ROI? Mashable suggests keeping in mind the affinity already built with Twitter as you consider going to Sponsored Tweets or other advertising opportunities on the service.
• Competition. Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) such as Foursquare may vie for marketers dollars with Twitter. “The time for marketers to get involved with LBSNs is coming,” Forrester says.

So … a lot has changed while other aspects have stayed the same between our 100th and 1000th Tweets. What will change as we work toward 2000 Tweets? Follow us on Twitter to find out!

Oh, we know, what’s hard about blogging? Just pick a topic that you know a lot about, sit down at the computer, add a few links, and you have a post. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times, and you have a blog. How hard can it be?

But then you start thinking that someone might actually read it. So you go back and edit your post a little. Then a little more. Then you try to keep your blog fresh by writing a lot of posts. But you start running out of topics. And time. And energy. And you realize good blogging is hard.

We know. Our background is in writing. We did it in high school. And college. As an advertising professional. Even free-lanced for a now-defunct local newspaper. So we like to write. But to do it often, and hold the reader’s interest, is not easy. That’s why we have a lot of respect for folks who do it well. Consistently. With passion.

We thought we’d recognize a few local Kansas City blogs that we think do a good job of giving their readers a reason to come back for more.

• When it comes to writing, Joe Posnanski is some kind of freak. No other way to describe it. The former Kansas City Star sports columnist and current senior writer for Sports Illustrated calls his blog, “Curiously Long Posts” because, well, he writes really, really long posts. And apparently just for the fun of it. As we mentioned, he writes (very well, we might add) for a living at SI, and even still contributes to the Star now and then. But then he writes some more on his blog, which has no ads, so he’s not making money on his posts. The man just appears to love to write, and his blog lets him go in-depth, and off topic, and in all different directions. But he always gets there (wherever there is) and he’s a pleasure to follow. Oh yeah, and when he’s not writing for the magazine or the newspaper or his blog, he’s Tweeting. Great stuff.
• Sam Meers is in our industry, so we suppose he’s a competitor or something, and we shouldn’t plug his blog, Smoke & Meers. But it’s good. And we think you will like it if you’re involved in the advertising world. Sam’s premise is often to take an everyday experience – good or bad – ponder it, ask a question about it. He then relates the answer to that question, or the outcome of the experience, or the extension of the metaphor, to how you or he or – most often – an advertiser client could use that experience to get better results. Sam’s consistent, he’s conversational and he’s creative. A nice combination.
• Hearne Christopher’s blog is the future of journalism. Not in and of itself. But his concept is where journalism is headed. The Internet changed things for newspapers. Google exacerbated it. And we’re not going back, no matter how hard Rupert Murdoch tries. The future of journalism is hyperlocal. Talented people getting together in their neighborhoods, their towns, their cities and writing about local events like nobody but ingrained locals can. Like KC Confidential does. Hearne and his band of bloggers, former KC Star staffers, and other talented writers follow the local news with the bite and the sarcasm and the salty language and the passion that no conglomerate can. He’s on to something here, and word has it that he’s hiring and growing and getting bigger and better. It’ll be fun to watch.

So we hope these Kansas City bloggers give you some inspiration. To start a blog. To resurrect an old one. To write more on your current one. But remember … as Will Forte/George Bush would say, “It’s hard… it’s hard work. Frankly, we don’t know why- why anyone even wants this job, you know… cause it’s hard. You know, a lot of people… working at meetings and… you know, it’s hard work and…”

Know other Kansas City bloggers who we should know about? Drop a link so others can check ‘em out.

WordPress.com Stats

If you’re already using Google Analytics for WordPress (see our post on Google Analytics for WordPress) then you already have a ton of information about your blog’s traffic. So much information, in fact, that it may be hard to get a bird’s eye view. That’s where WordPress Stats comes in. Simply give it your WordPress.com API Key (see our post on Akismet for detail on this) and in return you’ll get a dashboard item telling you the quick and dirty version of what’s happening on your site, with a wealth of additional information just clicks away. And don’t worry about server load: WordPress Stats is a hosted analytics solution just like Google Analytics. Great stuff.

Check out the WordPress Stats plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself.

Other Great Plugins to Explore

There are lots of great plugins that we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks (FeedBurner Widget, Flickr Feed Gallery and NextGEN Gallery for example). Which ones would you recommend? Post below in the comments or drop us an email and let us know which ones you find most useful. =)

What some people don’t realize is that having your own blog gives you a stage to share ideas and have a continuous channel of communication with the world. Why not take advantage of this arena of information exchange? Here are some reasons to consider blogging (if you haven’t already):

• Blogs allow you to share important news and information with your clients, customers and industry in a timely and convenient manner.
• Blogging displays real dedication and excitement for your industry. Many won’t be able to sustain blogs over long periods of time with regularity, but those who can separate themselves from the crowd and develop loyal customers and followers.
• Blogging can be a great method to help promote your products, company or yourself.
• Blogs allow a direct line of constant communication between you and your customers.
• Blogs, even old ones, are valuable and continue to be read for years. By optimizing them for search engines, they also continue to live in indexes for years.
• You are the master of your own domain! Blogging allows you to have control over your own content and how it is presented.
• Blogs add value to your website as a whole, adding more value with each blog post.
• Blogs can increase visitors to your website. A well-written and well-optimized blog can attract search engines and traffic to your website.
• Blogs play a huge role in social media. It’s as essential as having a Twitter and FaceBook account.

Now get out there and blog!

Flexi Pages

WordPress has come a long way since its humble beginnings, and these days it’s more and more common to see it being used not only as a blog but also as a content management system. The built-in Pages widget does a good job of listing, well, pages, but its options are limited. Which brings us to Flexi Pages, a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. It even has a special option to include a Home link, which can come in handy if the title of your home page is something other than Home. =) You can specify the sorting order, pages to exclude/include, and even specify if subpages are displayed. Very handy, and great tool to have if you’re doing more than just blogging.

Check out the Flexi Pages plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover WordPress Stats, a great tool to get a quick and dirty overview of your blog’s traffic without having to leave WordPress.

Advanced Category Excluder

A lot of blog themes use a post’s category to handle pages differently. You might have a category, for example, just for items that you want to show upon the home page. Your theme’s homepage PHP code would sniff out only those posts with the Home category and then display those, and only those, on the homepage. In a case like this, though, you don’t want Home showing up in a normal sidebar category list. What to do? If you’re a coder, or just a savvy WordPress user, you might use replacement Category widget provided by Widgets Reloaded (see our post on Widgets Reloaded) to exclude the Home category’s ID. But for non-coders who don’t even know how to determine a category’s ID, there’s Advanced Category Excluder. Whew!

But Advanced Category Excluder doesn’t just let you omit categories from the category list. It lets you omit categories from just about every form of item there is. You can even specify categories to be omitted from your RSS feeds. It’s glorious!

Check out the Advanced Category Excluder plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Flexi Pages, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.

Widgets Reloaded

The built-in WordPress widgets are great, but were designed for simplicity and ease of use. If you want true control over the output of your widgets (like to exclude certain items, change the order, or display the results of a custom query) you need something more sophisticated. And that brings us to Widgets Reloaded, the wonderful little plugin that replaces the existing Archives, Bookmarks, Calendar, Categories, Pages, Search, and Tags widgets and also adds a new one called Authors. Each of these allow you to specify a wide range of parameters as if you were calling the individual functions directly from your template’s PHP code. The result is flexibility and control like never before. Non-coders beware. =)

Check out the Widgets Reloaded plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Advanced Category Excluder, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.

Wordbook

Having a presence on social networking sites like Facebook is almost as important as having a website at all (even more so in some cases). So when it comes to getting your message out, it’s handy to be able to post it to your blog and not have to turn around and then also post it to Facebook. That’s where Wordbook comes in. It’s a great little plugin that takes each blog post and submits it automatically to your Facebook feed (photos and all) without having to install a special application at Facebook. Once activated the plugin will ask you to visit Facebook and generate a “one-time code,” which is similar to an API Key like we’ve discussed in previous posts. The Wordbook settings screen provides a link to Facebook that will generate this code, so it’s all very easy to do. Just click the link, login to Facebook, follow the directions and it will spit out your code. Then take that (copy and paste will do nicely) and give it to the Wordbook settings screen and voila!

One caveat, though: If you go back and edit a blog post after it has been published, Wordbook will immediately repost it back to your Facebook feed as if it’s new. Avoid this by temporarily deactivating the plugin just before you make the edit and then reactivate it after the edit is published.

Check out the Wordbook plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Widgets Reloaded, a great replacement for some of WordPress’s stock widgets.