I think I’ve got Ping.fm, and the PingPressFM WordPress Plugin figured out now. Not perfectly, but enough that we can start using it to some good effect. Ping.fm is a website service that allows you to post once and have it published to a whole list of your Social Networking accounts. So if you have a number of communities that you want to get your information out to, it saves you the effort of going to each one and re-posting your content. The PingPressFM plugin for WordPress lets you connect your WordPress blog to the Ping.fm account, so when you are posting content to your blog, your posts will be distributed to your Networks without ever leaving your site.

The trick is to work out the settings and selectors in BOTH the PingPressFM plugin on your site, and then in your Ping.fm account for each of the services you want to broadcast to. You don’t want to have absolutely everything you put on your blog to go to all your services all the time. You want to be able to choose what content goes to each audience. With a little work, you can set it up so you can determine which posts go to which services, or if it goes out to any service at all.

Configure the Plugin

In the PingPress.fm plugin settings, you  choose from a preset list of Triggers that are designed to work with each of three kinds of Social Networking services you may want be publishing to:

• Microblog (140 characters or less, like Twitter)
• Status Update (200 characters, like Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Blog (any length, and HTML formatting is preserved. For services like Livejournal, or WordPress.com blogs… yes, you can blog to another blog)

you can also create your own custom Triggers, if those categories are sufficient to your needs)

The trick to controlling each trigger is an option to designate selectors based on combinations of categories and tags. So for example for Micro-Blog posts, you might determine that the post must be in at least one of Category1, Category2, or Category5 (but NOT Category3 or Category4). The key then is that the post would also need to have at least one selected tag—like microblog, or Twitter—in order to meet the criteria to be sent to your Ping.fm account as a MicroBlog post.

The process is the same for the other triggers. If you want to be able to choose which service your posts are sent to—on a post-by-post basis—you just need to make sure that there’s a different Category/Tag combination for each one. A good strategy to consider for this might be to allow for ANY/ALL of your Categories to work as selector #1 (unless there are particular categories that you would NEVER want posted to your networks). And then set up one or two specific Tags for each of the different service types.

Using this strategy, a post with the category “Category2″ and the tag “microblog” might be sent to Twitter, and a post with the same category “Category2″ but the tag “status” would be sent to Facebook. And if both tags “microblog” and “status” were used, then the post would be sent to both Twitter and Facebook.

Configuring Ping.fm

So with my triggers assigned in the PingPress.fm plugin, I thought I was all set. But when I checked the different services to see how my broadcasts were working, I found that my content was duplicated in most places. I checked my settings and tried again—with the same results. The posts were showing up twice in Facebook and Twitter, albeit the duplicates were formatted a little differently.

So where had I gone wrong?

Investigating the settings in my Ping.fm account, I found that each one of the different services I was using had it’s own individual settings panel. And each one had multiple triggers that could activate it… So Twitter was being triggered by BOTH “microblog” and by “status”, as was Facebook. And in the case of WordPress.com and Livejournal, they were being triggered by “microblog,”  “status,”and by “article” (my trigger for long blog-type entries). So on those services I was getting triplicate content. Oops!

I’m sure there are lots of strategies for how these settings are employed—I’m new to this broadcast style of posting. But for now, for my purposes, I wanted to be able to specify exactly which service each of my posts was going to. So I reset the settings for each service so that they each would accept only one type of trigger. Next time I tested, everything worked as I’d expected it to. The “microblog” post went to Twitter, “status” went to Facebook, and  “article” to LiveJournal and WordPress.com.

I’m going to keep experimenting with this and adjusting settings to see what else I can get it to do. But if you have any suggestions or comment you’d like to make—another plugin or another strategy you want to share—please chime in.

In the meantime, I’m setting the trigger combination on THIS post to category “Blogging” and all three tags: “microblog,”  “status,”and by “article.” So this post will be (intentionaly) shared on Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, and WordPress.com… But hopefully not in duplicate.

(Check the dates on the posts to see if they match up, in case this post has aged a bit)