Today, I’m excited to launch SocializeMobilize.com.  On it, I’ll be publishing articles about social media, web 2.0, mobile, and mobile and web convergence.  You’ll also find all of the legacy content from my former blog, socialmedia.vox.com, which I started in 2006.  Under “services” tab, you’ll find more information about me and the consulting practice I’ve been running since 2003.

Why did I start a new blog when I already had one?

In 2006, I started a blog about social media and mobile on Vox, a community powered, free blogging platform run by SixApart.  I originally started blogging as an online experiment, prompted by conversations I had with colleagues at SplashData, who I met while consulting at Palm, Inc.  SplashData made a mobile blogging platform that was acquired by SixApart, and they encouraged me to try Vox, which had just launched.  Interested in the socialization of the web, and curious about blogging, I used Vox as a way to express my thoughts and start conversations about web 2.0 and, occasionally, mobile convergence.

I experimented a bit with other free blogging platforms like WordPress.com early on, and at the time, they weren’t nearly as easy to use as Vox.  As I grew to enjoy blogging and started reading more about the features of other blogging platforms, I contemplated moving away from Vox to a more feature rich platform with:

• analytics so that I could see how many people were reading my blog, determine which posts had the most views, etc.
• interactive social features that would enable readers to easily share my posts via their favorite social networks
• universal commenting so that anyone – even those outside the Vox community could comment
• search facilities that would allow me to search not only for tags but also for specific text in posts
• etc.

Unfortunately, there was no clear upgrade path from Vox to a more robust platform.  I held onto Vox for a long time having heard rumors of an upgrade path to TypePad, but when it didn’t materialize, I decided to leave.  After talking to a variety of consultants, bloggers and reading a lot of reviews, I embarked on the process of migrating to WordPress.  I learned the hard way that once you’re on Vox, moving is a difficult and largely manual process.  I hired a great WordPress consultant (Kim Woodbridge at AntiSocial Development), who helped me implement a semi-custom theme based on one I purchased from Woo Themes).  And, for the last several weeks, over hours of evening television, I painstakingly and manually copied the hundreds of posts I originally had on Vox to this new website.

If you’re out there shaking your head at me and mumbling, “I could have quickly written you a script to do that”… Rest assured, I talked to a ton of consultants, and the only one that said he could write a script to migrate all of my posts (not just the first 10 posts or excerpts of all of my posts) provided me with a bid that made McKinsey & Co. look cheap.  (Note- If you still think you can write a script like this easily, go for it!  I bet there’s a lucrative business opportunity in migrating power Vox users to other blogging platforms.)

I’m excited about SocializeMobilize, not only because I now have analytics, interactive social features, robust commenting, and search capabilities but also because I’ve merged my blog with new information about my business development, strategy, and marketing consulting practice and clients.

I hope that you’ll find this site easy to navigate.  If not, let me know. I’d love your feedback.

Blog Features:

SocializeMobilize is written in WordPress (WordPress.org), using a semi-customized Woo Theme.  It’s also readable through your mobile browser at the same URL and via RSS (by clicking the RSS icon in the right banner).

Here’s what you’ll find as you navigate the site:

• About: My bio
• Services: Information about my consulting business
  • Consulting Services: What I do for clients and how I can help you.
  • Clients: A list of my past and current clients.
  • Recommendations: Hear directly from my clients.
  • Events: This is my public calendar streamed from Google. In it, you’ll find events I’m attending.
• Contact: You can contact me via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Facebook or email using the icons in the right banner, or use the contact form on this page.

For those of you who are into technical details, SocializeMobilize uses the following plugins:

• Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
• All in One SEO Pack: Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog
• cforms: contact form
• DISQUS Comment System
• Exec-PHP: Executes <?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith: detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps
• MobilePress: Makes your WordPress blog into a mobile website
• Simple Tags
• Sociable
• SRG Clean Archives
• TinyMCE Advanced
• Tweet This
• Twitter Tools
• WordPress.com Stats
• WordPress Database Backup

What’s next?

Tomorrow, I’m going to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and Wednesday, I’m off to CTIA in Vegas. I’ll be live tweeting and writing about interesting things I find at both shows.  Stay tuned.

If you’ve got interesting mobile or social media products you’d like me to review, upcoming social media or mobile news, or other ideas for posts, please ping me.