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Why Livefyre and Smart Sharing? One of a bloggers needs, certainly one of  my biggest needs as a blogger is engaging with YOU my visitor, you that arrives here and gives me your time. I want to give you a reason  to interact with me on this blog on some level. That’s why I have been looking for an easier way for YOU my reader to share anything you may feel worthy.

Creating Nurturing an environment for “rapport” is essential for me to know if I am delivering the content you are looking for, if you are getting enough of it and in the right language? Hearing your thoughts, suggestions, experiences and ideas is like you throwing me gold coins.

So get interactive with me while I try out a couple of new wordpress plugins, Livefyre Comments and Smart Sharing that hopefully makes it easier for us to engage.

Smart Sharing

For a webmaster getting your content shared, FB liked, Stumbled or dugg is great for rankings (ego) and readership. Smart Sharing is a plugin that wrapped all hose together and it’s free. I was looking around to get some info for a post, when I arrived at the WPBeginner website, there is a LOT of good wordpress stuff on that site!

Anyway I decided to sign up to their newsletter, the 1st response in their auto responder had the download for the Smart Sharing plugin.

On this blog there seems to be some conflict that I have to figure out, probably another plugin, but I do have it installed on affiliatebuddy.com and it works OK over there. The Smart sharing scrolls up and down in the readers browser out of the way of the content but very visible none the less. I love the look of it on the screen, the background colour was really easy to change too.

As well as the background colour the customisation also allows you to adjust the distance from the top and the edge of the page. The only down sides (bar the compatability fix) is you can only display the smart share plugin on the left hand side of your blog but that looks cool enough I think. However I did have to disable my old fb likebutton for the plugin to work properly at affiliatebuddy. (I’ve added some code at the bottom of the post for extra buttons)

Livefyre

This little number I literally stumbled across whilst commenting on another blog! I’m trying hard to think which blog it was but I honestly cant remember.. but again it’s a very visual plugin and I love the simple way thelivefyre comments are stacked ad the gravtar is auto enabled.

There is a lot more to Livefyre than meets the eye. It’s the first comment system “that I have come across” that easily integrates facebook and twitter into the comment stream and promotes cross platform conversations.

Livefyre comments are integrated with the social web to boost social interaction. Users can connect their twitter account and facebook account. This lets them tag their friends in your site’s comments. For example when we comment, we can mention any user that we follow by simply adding the @username. It will also notify the user in the specific network. If that person choose to reply to the tweet or facebook status, that conversation will be pulled back to the specific post.

That quote was pulled from WPbeginner as well, ad while I think about it that was where I first saw livefyre too! There is a bit of concern from users about readers having to “log-on” to leave a comment, but with the ammount of spam I get to real comments I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Installing on your wordpress is a snip too, as this Livefyre video shows.

 Extra bits for Smart Sharing…

I found some code after a bit of digging that you can just paste into the custom field to give you the linkedin ad google+1 buttons.

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”top”></script>

<p>

<center><!– Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render –>
<g:plusone size=”tall”></g:plusone>

<!– Place this render call where appropriate –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
  (function() {
    var po = document.createElement(‘script’); po.type = ‘text/javascript’; po.async = true;
    po.src = ‘https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js’;
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
  })();
</script>

All I added was the <p>to space out the buttons a bit and I centred the google +1 with <center>as it floats to the left.

Well I hope this get’s us all chatting together and I’ll catch up with you soon.

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