All things being equal, the new FeedBlitz v4 user interface will be on by default for all users starting Monday, January 16th, 9:00am eastern. You can get a jump start on it by visiting www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 if you haven't already done so.
Starting this afternoon, active FeedBlitz publishers (well over 72,000 of you!) will be getting an email, letting you know that your account has been readied for the new capabilities of FeedBlitz v4.
FeedBlitz v4 is significantly easier to use than the current version, enabling you to work faster. If you've found the current FeedBlitz web site a challenge at times, then you'll find FeedBlitz v4 delivers a significant leap forward. Beyond better usability, though, FeedBlitz v4 also delivers insight into your site's entire audience across the social web.
If you have any questions about FeedBlitz v4, need help making better use of FeedBlitz in general, or just want help with your current setup, don't hesitate to contact tech support at support@feedblitz.com or read our knowledge base. We're more than happy to help.
You can always get a jump start on the new look and feel by going directly to www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 - you don't have to wait for the email to arrive!
Meanwhile, if you're curious about the changes that are a-coming, check out the video below.
FeedBlitz will become exclusively v4 in early the New Year.
FeedBlitz v4 is ready for its close-up, Mr. De Mille! At a little over three minutes this short video gives you a quick view into using the new user interface (and a link to get started too). Take a peek and then start your adventure into v4 (it's backwards compatible with "old" FeedBlitz).
If the thumbnail below is too small, click through to YouTube where you can watch it all the way up to 1280p HD!
Klout and services like it seek to measure your influence - that's not a bad idea.
Where Klout goes wrong, I think, is that it then conflates all the different metrics down to a single score. I'm currently a 61 (See http://klout.com/phollows)
So what?
Inevitably, the issue becomes not about your influence per se, but your influence compared to everyone else's. Great for gamification and, depending on how you're doing, your ego, but we all know where a "mine's bigger than yours" mentality gets us in the end.
I am not Robert Scoble, nor Ashton Kuchner, nor Lady Gaga.
Nor are you.
Comparing our Klout scores is therefore a meaningless, apples to oranges exercise. It fails to answer the question I posed above: So what?
What is not important is your influence compared to everyone else. What matters is your influence among the people you want to influence. See the difference? Your influence is only important within your community (or, more cynically, within the community you're trying to reach).
So what you really need to do is find out who the key influencers are within your community. That's what PR agencies are good at in more traditional media.
But there's an additional factor in play here: Attention.
It doesn't matter at all if you find the right people if you can't influence them. What you need to do is find the people with influence - one degree away from you, as it were - and who are also giving you their attention. If you can find an influencer who's paying attention to you, you're in great shape. To be fair, Klout tries to give you some insight into that with the "influencer of" data - but it seems to select people you chat a lot with rather than people who really wield the power you may be seeking. It rarely seems to be right for me.
FeedBlitz v4 (which will be out next week not this due to some travel commitments and last minute performance tuning) has the ability to tell you this vital information. It can tell you who the influencers are that are also paying attention to you. It's part of v4's enhanced social media integration.
Every person we've shown this to has found out something interesting about their followers (it's largely a Twitter-centric feature right now). It will enable you to be much more focused when you're reaching out to key people in your community and your sphere of influence. Not a single, apples to oranges score, but a list of people who are listening to you and can massively amplify your message. You save time and energy by gaining insight into the influence-brokers in your audience.
FeedBlitz v4 will also email you a report about your important followers (and unfollows), so you can spare your inbox from the death by social media notification emails. One daily digest to tell you who's new, who's gone, and who matters.
"So what?" I asked. Well, FeedBlitz v4 can tell you. Rolling out next week. Promise!
The next version of FeedBlitz radically rethinks navigational organization for lists, feeds and social media marketing content distribution. It's faster to find what you want when you want it.
But we haven't stopped there. We've also simplified the pages used to manage your blog's email settings as well. For example, here's a screenshot of the v4 settings page for this blog.
The first thing to notice is that there's just one page - all the settings are accessible from there. They're also presented in more or less plain English, so it functions as list documentation - something that wasn't available anywhere in prior versions of FeedBlitz. To change a setting, click the linked text that refers to it, and a popup appears. Make your change there and then - easy.
Advanced users who want to get straight to brass tacks can click the "Edit Settings Inline" button and get to a more traditional, form based approach.
Next week you'll see several posts about v4 countdown ... because we're opening this baby up the week of the 11th!
Continuing our "sneak peek" series into the next version of FeedBlitz - aka v4 - this post is about how v4 takes the opportunity to add more dashboards and metrics.
The "always on" navigation I mentioned last time enables more opportunities to provide meaningful insight into your subscribers at more opportunities. Beyond that, we've simplified the "in screen" navigation and replaced the cascading series of menus with clear, simple, task-centric buttons.
The Main Pane: Delivering the Goods
There are new site dashboards and multi-site summaries. We've added site thumbnails, audience metrics and Alexa rankings.
Within each site, you can see at a glance how your audience divides between the different social media channels, email and RSS. You can quickly see what's growing and what's not, essential data for the modern social media blogger and marketers.
Major task: The green button
At each level, the big green button upper right takes you to the main task for that screen or element. The green button always represents the most valuable sub screen at that point in the navigation. So, for example, at the site level the most important task is editing the settings for the site itself. At the mailing list level, it's sending a mailing.
Other tasks: Orange buttons
The orange buttons represent other significant tasks you can do. Yet more options are available in the rest of the screen or any displayed widgets.
Widgets
At many places in v4 you will find screen elements called widgets, like this one from an RSS feed:
Text in the lower dark bar is clickable, taking you directly to the applicable option for that widget.
Also note that we've tried making the screens more useful. There are no intermediate menus any more; clicking on a feed or a list gets you real data right away.
Next time, I'll drill into the mailing list area, to talk about the new capabilities and ease of use changes there.
A day later than promised, here's the first post in our countdown to the brand new FeedBlitz user web site. As I've mentioned before, we took on the challenge of making a great (but fairly complex) service more approachable by a wider group of people, bloggers and companies.
Put another way, the goal is to make it easier and faster for you to:
Find where you need to be;
Do what you need to get done.
The result? Well it's a lot different from the current user experience (not such a bad thing, in many ways, I know). It really, really meets these goals.
Finding Your Way Around
New Navigation
No more tabs. No more hunt and peck to find what you need. No more working through page after page to find where you need to go.
All your navigation is now in the left side bar, available all the time. Click the orange and green to open up each section; click on the titles for the relevant dashboard or the individual entry to work with that element.
All wrapped in a more contemporary look and feel with a dash of added drama.
Sites are the Key
Your content the way you think about it
When you think about your site or your blog, you think about your site or your blog. The "Site" is the intuitive way to arrange related subscriptions and social media, because that's how you think about them.
And that's how the new UI works. It organizes FeedBlitz elements the way you naturally think about them: By site. Open the site you want in the navigation and everything related to it is right there - nothing more (and nothing less). Easy to find, quick to use. There are dashboards at multiple levels (more on these in a later post), as well as site thumbnails and latest Alexa rankings.
Finally, we've also simplified some of the more complex individual pages. Mailing list settings, for example, are now presented in in english, with simple popups to change your settings right there. Fewer clicks, easier to understand what you're working on.
Existing features more readily available
The new "always-on" navigation also makes it possible for us to raise the profile of core features you may be under-utilizing or even unaware of. Custom fields and segments, for example (at the bottom of the sites area). Affiliates can jump directly to a client. You can manage your subscriptions much more easily here than before, too. There's also a new "breadcrumb" trail above the main pane and a new "utility bar" across the top.
Next up: Dashboards and Widgets
I'll cover these in the next update in a few days. Meanwhile, comments welcome!
The changes we have been making in private beta will be revealed starting Monday as part of our countdown to general availability. It's faster, cooler and generally full of social media and email marketing yumminess.
posted at 11:46 AM
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The Main Pane: Delivering the Goods
New Navigation