Social networking for virtual endeavors

Me and my numbers. Actually, “our” numbers. And very nice Ener on your post about me pimping you out* (nice bikini btw). =D

iliveisl blog statistics dropped this week and I should have suspected a possible error on my part. We added Feedburner to our strategy this week as well as changing a few SEO and traffic plugins.

Since we look at multiple traffic indicators such as the stats in Flickr and Blip.tv, as well as things like grader.com, we feel pretty comfortable with the accuracy of any of those numbers. If traffic is a steady 1,000 visitors a day on the blog, you would also expect supporting stats for our sites that point to it to stay steady.

Some of those “organic” indicators are Facebook friend comment activity and Twitter reach (see below).

If blog traffic suddenly goes down and you have not changed your efforts (such as blogging frequency, content, authors) then digging into other stats are warranted. The iliveisl blog is hosted on the bullet-proof servers of Media Temple which come with Urchin statistics.

Once I pulled those numbers, all was right with the world (and actually higher than before the drop – what a geeky world I live in!).

So what does this have to do with Second Life?

Promoting ourselves is obvious, but we also encourage in-world businesses and venues to use the many free social networking tools out there to achieve greater success.

I do consulting for individuals and small businesses in the real world on social networking and use iliveisl as my “living” example. Ener does a great job in-world with encouraging residents to use these tools as well. You can see those efforts with some of the links in the iliveisl blog’s sidebar.

So be smart, don’t let social networking become a “time suck”, and have fun with it (maybe don’t get so obsessed with traffic numbers!). =)

nice chirping Ener!

so this and 4 cents will get you one snapshot isl!

* Look for a possible offering of virtual world space for meetings, functions, and eLearning providers. We host a few corporate meetings on the iliveisl estate for free. However, there is a need from some of our clients to have “tighter” virtual space that is more business-like and less expensive. Enter what Ener mentioned below – Reaction Grid . . . stay tuned.