Groups are essential for keeping abreast of topics.

Here’s some worthwhile LinkedIn Groups for web writers to join:

Freelance Web Writers

Web Content

The Content Wrangler Community

Freelance Editing Network

Seasoned writing and editing pros

The National Union of Journalists

STET: Professional Copy Editors

LinkEds & writers

Here’s a useful introduction to Sidewiki:

Here’s some examples of how it’s been used:

• John Maeda, President of RISD, adding to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic physician, adding to CDC website about flu shot myths.
• Lonely Planet journalist Tom Hall recommends the Scottish Football museum.
• ProPublica General Manager Richard Tofel gives context by quoting ProPublica author Christopher Favelle on an article they featured.
• See many other examples by following googlesidewiki on Twitter.

Here’s my screencast showing how to see the comments:

The comments are not controlled by the site owner. Some organisations I’ve recently talked to are fearful of this lack of control. Others point out that conversations could be going on outside of the usual blog comment systems set up by bloggers. This BuzzMachine article and the accompanying Sidewiki comments are a useful contribution to the debate.

What can you do?

If you have a Google Webmaster Account – and have therefore proven that you are the site owner – you can write a special entry that will remain at the top of the comments. Just sign into Google, click the Sidewiki button on your browser and leave a short comment that everyone will see.

You should also closely monitor what’s being said before wading in there and replying to the comments. Thankfully Google makes Sidewiki comments available to anyone with an RSS reader (Firefox, Google Reader, My Yahoo etc). All you do is subscribe to this feed:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.YOURDOMAIN.com%2F/default?sortorder=updated&includeLessUseful=true

I’ve subscribed not just to feeds for domains that I manage for my clients, but to other interesting domains such as The Guardian, The BBC, The European Union, Google …

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.