Have you signed up for SocialSpark yet? I would assume that you probably have heard of it by now if you are reading this blog. But maybe you haven't made the leap. Do it! I had the good fortune of getting in to the Private Alpha early with one of the Golden Tickets from Ted Murphy. Which meant, get in there, poke around and try and break stuff and tell IZEA what I found. I think I could be a pretty decent QA tester after all of that.

I love the social media aspect to the format of SocialSpark. I can add people as friends and I was doing that pretty steadily and finding some great blogs in the process. Then the floodgates opened and well there are so many people on right now. I think when I last looked at all the friends that Ted has there were 2338. That is all the bloggers and advertisers together. That is a lot of people in a very short period of time and there are tons of great new bloggers joining each day. I still haven't gotten to see 3/4 of the users on SocialSpark, how can that be? Probably because adding friends for me as it takes a long time as I go through each user, view their blogs decide to friend them and also to prop them.

I like the Props and Drops options. As I have been adding friends I have been giving them props. I mean, if someone is your friend they deserve props right? I've noticed that the props are kinda low all over, are people just not giving out props? Am I too free with my propping? I wonder, what is your opinion on Props and Drops?

The thing I really like though is the ability for bloggers to create Sparks.

Sparks are free opportunities that you can take and blog about. What this means to the average blogger is that if you have a fantastic post that you wrote you can get the word out about it. Rather than commenting on a ton of blogs and causing a nuisance of yourself (I did that once when I was a naive blogger) you can simply write up a Spark opportunity about your post and to entice bloggers to write about it. One way to entice bloggers to take your Spark is to choose the Blog U Back option. This means that in return for the hard work that a blogger put in to blogging about your post you can reward them with some link love to one of their posts or to their blog.

Here is my suggestion for making this work for you. Write up a great blog post on your blog or grab one from your archives, one you really spent some time on. Then ask yourself, why should someone read this post? Come up with some reasons why and write them down. Use these as reasons why a blogger might want to write about your post when you create your spark. Give the bloggers as much information as they need to write about your post, pose a question and ask them to answer it in their post, give them some direction. Make it fun and interesting. For example, If you have a cooking blog and you blogged about a great recipe ask bloggers to write about that recipe and ask them if they could add one ingredient to the recipe to make it better what would they add and why.

Then follow up. With Social Spark you get a list of all the bloggers who have taken and completed your Spark opportunity, you get links to the posts and you can also link to the user. Go and read each post, comment on the post. If it was good prop the blogger and their blog. You can add them as a friend, leave them a comment on SocialSpark and send them a thank you message too. If you are using the blog you back option for your Sparks ask the blogger if they would like a link to a specific post of theirs or if they'd just like a link to their blog itself.

There is also the ability to add a blogger to your street team, I don't know enough about this option yet but am anxious to find out more on it. I added some of the best bloggers who took my first Spark to my Street Team. What I am saying is think of the things that you wish an advertiser would do for you once you've taken a post, wouldn't you like to know what they thought of it? Wouldn't you like a little recognition of your hard work and feedback so you can do a better job on the next Spark you take? I would also love it if there was an ability to rate each post and leave feedback to the user.

So, have you joined social spark? Have you created your first spark yet? What has the response been so far? Let me know I am anxious to find out how other people are doing with this awesome service.

Drew writes four blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also does a mean cake plow. He recently completed taking 1000 consecutive photos in 1000 days. You can visit him at The BenSpark, The Wired Kayaker, Read To Me, Dad, Google is not God.

Posted by BenSpark at 02:44 PM in Featured , Posties , SocialSpark | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)