Apr 24 2008
have you met sparky at Social Spark yet?
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Prepare yourself, I’m about to get wordy. I know go ahead and tell me, I’m always wordy, I never shutup -lol- This is Social Spark. You might not have heard of it yet since it’s in Beta, but you may still recognize some familiar faces from Izea (aka Ted Murphy and those guys at PayPerPost.) And they’ve had Sparky the Spark to the crew, okay so he’s a logo and not really a crew member, but he’s cute either way.
Social Spark is completely different than PayPerPost. Yes, there are paid opportunities that you can take and post on your blog. I’m not going to lie to you, this is a paid opportunity from the new Social Spark marketplace, the very first one I’ve taken. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way I can tell you that there are so many other great features. It’s a social network, you make friends and stay in touch, you can even leave comments for each other, very similar to how FaceBook works in that way.
How about I quit babbling and we take a look around? This is the Social Spark homepage, a good a place to start as any;
I know there is a lot going on there on the home page at first glance, and upon just arriving it might seem intimidating, but it does really all come together as you learn your way around. The homepage gives you a bit of a sneak peek at what’s going on everywhere in SocialSpark. It shows you who has been by to visit recently, a few opps and sparks that are available, a featured blogger, and so much more!
Now, let’s head into my profile page. This is what you see when you come to my “blogger profile” in Social Spark. I’ve also got an advertiser account attached to it that I can switch to if I want to list opportunities or create “sparks.” I’ll explain a spark in a just a minute, don’t want to get too ahead of myself. Blogger profile retta719 (that’s me -lol-)
Mostly this page in SS is about me! That’s right, as if you hadn’t heard enough about me already, then you get a whole page of me! It shows you what I’ve been up to in Social Spark. Friends I’ve made. Bloggers I favorited get a special little place in the Fav 9 there on the page. Comments from passers by down on the bottom, very similar to your blog comment space, or your wall if you’re a FaceBook user. And on the right hand sidebar we have more about me, my blogs, and even a little screenshot and feed snippet showing my latest blog posting.
Now, what I really wanted to talk about in Social Spark is not the paid opps, not the profiles, not even ME! But, I want to talk about sparks. A spark is created in your advertiser profile in much the same was as an opportunity is created. You go to the opportunity listing and click on the SPARKS tab at the top. There are four tabs by the way, All Opportunities, Sponsored Posts, Blog Sponsorship, then Sparks is the fourth tab and it’s bright orange.
This is probably going to become my favorite feature in all of Social Spark. A spark is like an opp, only there is no payment, no money, just bloggers blogging about bloggers and what those bloggers do or have done, said, showed off, whatever. It’s a goldmine full of blogging ideas to blog about.
You know those days where you want to blog, but don’t know what to talk about, or just aren’t feeling any ideas? Sparks are just that, sparks of ideas. A quick glance around the sparks list and I see not only the spark I created for Easy Wahm Websites, but also a spark about Earth Day, an iPod contest, the @Zappo’s Twitter contest, a call for Mommy Bloggers and so many other wonderful things to write about. Let’s take a closer look at a spark and then I promise to shutup and let you move on with your blog perusing.
The first thing you’ll see is that “this opp is FREE,” as in zero dollars. It’s just something cool for you to write about. In this case that cool thing is the @Zappos twitter contest that’s been going on. If you’re into Twitter you might have noticed a lot of people tweeting @Zappos last week trying to win some free shoes, and even a trip to Las Vegas. Well, this spark was all about those fun contests and good reasons to add @Zappos on your Twitter follow list. At the bottom of the page you can see who visited the spark, who commented on it, and even who wrote about it on their blog.
So, there you have it. For me that is what puts the spark in Social Spark. There’s actually a ton of other cool stuff, but I’ve been rambling on and on here for awhile and I do have a ton of stuff to do today. Take a few minutes to click around over there and see if there’s anything that catches your eye. You might just find that perfect spark.
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Wow, Retta – what an awesome post on Social Spark – talk about thorough! Great job!!
Lisa Marie Mary’s last blog post..Give Me Back My Words, Migraine!
wow this is a detailed info about social spark eh.. good work
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gr8 resrch bro…