For the past couple weeks, I’ve been looking for a discreet means of promoting Corporate Blogging for Dummies without blasting advertisements or spamming my networks. I was actually going to design a footer bar until I happened across Wibiya on Arthur Charles Van Wyk‘s blog.
The Wibiya toolbar is highly customizable and incorporates Translation, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Buzz and a ton of other tools that you can configure and align however you’d like. There are tons of themes to choose from as well. The best part is that it has a Notification system where I could post a note about the book that will fade in and fade out discreetly when someone visits the Corporate Blogging Tips site.
The Twitter integration displays the latest tweets from the account of your choice as well as any mentions about that account:
The Facebook integration displays the latest wall notices as well as all your fans:
The toolbar also tracks usage statistics on what was clicked. It’s a fantastic package, loads quickly, and incorporates all the great social features that I’d like to promote on the blog within my social communities.
To remove the powered by and have 2 toolbars, it costs about $10 per month. If you want more, there’s also a package that offers 5 toolbars and some additional features. The pricing model is a bit strange… seems like if you’re giving a free account away to any registration that a paid account should get much more than 2 toolbars. I wound up signing up for 2 paid accounts to get 3 toolbars (one on this blog, one on the corporate site, and another on Corporate Blogging Tips).
If you’re running WordPress or any other major content management system (including Ning), there are also a number of modules and plugins to make installation simple. One other minor problem I ran into, the social sharing feature interfered with some of the Ajax features I installed on the blog using jQuery (Facebox popup of the videos), so I removed that feature from the toolbar.
Other than these minor things, it’s an outstanding toolbar! I hope they add a StumbleUpon integration soon – would be a great addition!
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