Signore Web Design

2012-01-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

The declining value of a "Like", Rising value of a "share"

There has always been a hierarchy to Facebook's viral aspect:

Getting a comment - This was great as it automatically did two things

Posted your fan page status on that persons wall
WHILE creating discussion

Getting a share, which posts to all their friends without discussion
Getting a like, which essentially did the same thing, minus a little multimedia

With the recent layout changes that include the real time activity box on your upper right hand side of your wall, the like which really only appears there, has been pushed down even further. Essentially for a like to have value all the "likers" friends would really need to be looking at that box at the same time for it's existence is short lived. The stream of activity pushes it to an quick grave much the same way the twitter stream will.

I officially declare the like dead, but that may be premature.

All that said I will reiterate something that is always open for discussion: Share or comment. I say comment because, hey facebook is social, social is discussion and discussions are interesting.

So as always, try to post in a way that elicits comments! (Why people often use inflammatory statements to get the ball rolling).

A short post today. Get over it!

Article written by Adam Signore
Adam Signore is the owner of Signore Web Design. A company providing Web Design, Social Media Marketing and Custom Facebook Application Development.

Adam also operates Roving Recordings, A company providing HD video/HQ audio of live music events in the Boston area.

To learn more about Adam check him out on:

Link Juice, The most important meal of the day.

2011-12-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

The juice behind SEO and an oft missed opportunity (for some).

In a phrase: Inbound links
AKA: Link Love, Link Juice, etc.

What is that you might say?? Well put simply it is when someone links to your website.

Sounds simple enough but of course these days nothing ever is. Here's a little old school info about a method of getting inbound links that has zero value (if not negative value).

Are you a website owner who has gotten an email from redeem_points_peggy@mail.ru saying something like:

Hey if you put link to my website on your website I'll do the same?

Personally I am hoping the answer is no but my hopes have been getting crushed for years so why start being correct now.

Back in the old days a link trade worked as Search Engines would infer your websites value by simply counted the links pointing to your website. This laid rise to the "Link Farm" where a savvy website owner could buy them pesky inbound links.

Well it didn't take long for the Search Engines to figure out the game and since then it's really been about the quality of the inbound link. Now to finish up on the link exchange scenario with a little math:

You have a "valued" website, the exchange requester has a "valued" website: End result = Juice sort of cancels out.
You have a "greater valued" website, the exchange requester has a "less valued" website: end result = Juice sort of flows downhill to them.
You have a "less valued" website, the exchange requester has a "greater valued" website: end result = Juice sort of flows downhill to YOU.

Quiz time: What types of websites do you want to get an inbound link from???

OK, that was so easy i won't even answer the question, but obviously you might be asking what types of websites have the best value?

Well there's generally an accepted list (in quasi order):

Education Institutions (i.e. Dot edu)
Established news outlets (local news/newspaper websites too!)
Established blogs
Established Wiki sites (ding!)
Established Press Release services
Other websites that are influential on your "Topic"
Any website that is not a link farm, spam source, adult content, etc.

So how do you get an inbound link from these sites, well that's not such an easy question to answer. But here goes:

You can always contact website owners and request a link, but I think you can see a couple issues here:

People are pretty busy and you can imagine this request will go over like the Hindenburg. I mean seriously what's in it for them??
You might get somewhere but you'll surely get a reciprocal request (See math above)

Pay for a link:

Welcome to my boom stick! Google and company are pretty good at figuring out what these are and it can potentially have a negative impact.

And the best is always saved for last. Create compelling content:

This will make others in your industry stand up and take notice. They naturally want to link to you because it's also good for them. But it is a difficult, long road to hoe but reaps the real rewards.

OK, so I'm sure by now you are wondering where is this oft missed opportunity you speak of????

Well it's an opportunity that comes easier to some than others but in my years of experience it is almost always missed by all. If your lucky enough to have an dot edu or established news outlet contact you to do an article on your recent art exhibit, by all means do the interview but press (pun intended) for a link back to your main (or desired) web property. Press hard. Say "It's really important to Adam" if you must.

Dohhhh alert:

Be savvy about the link back you request for. If you are an artist, musician, author, who has multiple internet properties (or a single website with sections) make sure to link back to the correct one. Especially if you are linking back to a single website. Don't just link to your homepage. The ADD web surfer gets easily lost and you want to help them find relevant stuff!

But you want to know something cool! Sure you do. Well the search engines can be thought of as an ADD web surfer (sort of). They categorize your website content by topic (which makes multi topic websites harder to SEO) and these link back might help them know you that much better and hook you up better (i.e. RANK HIGHER) for those juicy search terms that you should be already optimized for.

Schools out. Have a nice vaca kiddies!

Facebook changes and the brave new lie of Social Media Marketing

2011-09-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

It's now Friday 9/23/11 and we've all been buzzing about recent and planned changes at Facebook.

I've been keenly watching as these changes affect me directly, but I'm also enthralled to see how Facebook will annoy people. Blah Blah Blah. We've beat that to death.

Well today a former co-worker posted a link to an interesting article about one proposed change. It is on slate.com and called "Not sharing is caring". Great read on how Facebook is going to take away the meaningfulness of you "share". While that is a travesty for the users of facebook, I mean think of it: Everything you do being shared by default. Where's the value in your vote, gone i tell you... gone. R.I.P. like button.

This change has a great impact for facebook and a not so great impact for Social Media Marketers though. But you can count your chickens on this for some time to come: The act of going viral just got a whole lot easier!

OR DID IT???????

Actually it has gotten only more difficult (to track that is). What has gotten easier is the appearance of going viral. For the forced share, for some time to come, will give a leg up to the impressions your content gets.

Let's digress for a moment. Impressions are a one sided metric that most people judge incorrectly. while we are all happy to get 14 million zillion impressions, it doesn't really tell us how many people were compelled to act on our content. See the difference (Thanks Vince!)

So in days of old, a share happened because a person liked your content enough to be compelled to share it. The impressions created under this model were a valuable vote.

In this brave new world an impression will happen because you have a catchy title or tagline. What a user does with that impression is less likely to be understood and calculated. The value of an already one sided metric has gone down immensely. anyways, hopefully you are following other metrics to make sure a potential follows through the funnel to the intended goal.

Now I'm sounding the alarm and it may not all go down this way, but seems to me that for a while anyways we'll have a whole lot of meaningless "Going Viral" going on!

Is Google Dead?

2011-06-04T06:56:00.001-07:00

Is Google Dead?

Not for quite a while at the least, but you ought to take notice.

I read a great article on Tech Crunch today written by Ben Elowitz and aptly titled: "How Facebook Can Put Google Out of Business". Ben makes some great points and businesses that currently put their efforts into SEO ought to consider them heavily.

Google may in fact be facing the dragon that they will ultimately not be able to slay but that battle will take years and Facebook needs to move in certain directions to bring it to a head. The later being a matter of "When", not "If".

Much in the same way that the phone book became obsolete to having a website, Google is facing the same obsolescence. Recent activity by Google bares this out with such things as their new +1 activity, not to mention Eric Schmidt's own lamenting

How does this effect me?

As a business owner with a web presence you surely invest time and effort into making your web site searchable. Should you forsake those efforts now? absolutely not.

Even when Google is viewed as obsolete there will still be vast numbers of people finding businesses that way. Hey some people still pick up a phone book first.

But what you should be doing is figuring out or hiring someone to fit current social functionality into your website and also begin building your presence on facebook.

One word of caution here, use a Fan Page not a personal profile to build out your presence. I am stunned at the frequency that this mistake is occurring at. You really close the door on functionality and customization when you do this.

As Facebook sharpens it's teeth on commerce, which it now does with paid advertising it will become a dominant advertising platform. When Facebook turns to search they will be able to achieve a relevancy in returns that Google can only dream of and dominate there as well.

There's just no getting around the need to have your ducks in a row on facebook. Start now and you wont be playing catch up when it's in full swing.

So why will facebook do it better:

Currently Google works tirelessly to succeed from a particular starting point: "Making a best guess at what is relavent to you based on an entered keyphrase". They tirelessly try to understand the difference between searches like these:

1) Storm Window

2) Storm Windows

The first might be a request for information on when an approaching storm is coming and the latter might be looking for a contractor to install Storm Windows. A huge difference in meaning riding on one letter. They do a fine job but it's still really guessing.

Facebook on the other hand starts from a more advantageous starting point: "We want to know everything we can about the individual person".

When you apply the vast knowledge of the individual searcher to the example above facebook will have a huge leg up on knowing what the person is searching for. Something Google is so late to the game with that catch up is probably not realistic at this point.

Untangling Social Media Connectivity Part 2

2011-04-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

This is a follow up to a post called: "Untangling Social Media Bridge Services". That post's name being a meager attempt by your humble narrator to coin a new industry phrase. Oh well.

Well things have certainly come a long way since then and i have essentially been able to consolidate all those services via one pretty spiffy app called Hootsuite:

In one convenient place I can now take my Blog's rss feed (and my clients blog rss feeds) and pipe them to any social media properties I or my clients have. Here's a list of benefits:

Replace Twitterfeed for rss distribution
Replace Twuffer for tweet & fan page scheduling
Don't need to logout and login to manage multiple client social media properties.
for small monthly fee ($5.95) I can manage an unlimited number of feeds and profiles through a Pro account.
Also links into MySpace, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc.
Allows for unlimited configuring of connections between feeds/social profiles so i am configuring all my clients in one interface. Set it and forget it!
The Pro account will also hitch up with Google Analytics for better metrics.

I could go on but i think you get the idea. I would say that the only drawback is that the interface can get a little overwhelming when you have a bunch of different clients loaded up but if your only managing one biz's social presence than this is not an issue.

I highly recommend it!

P.S. for nice consolidation of activity on all your social media outlets, check out Nutshell Mail.

Facebook Page Owners, Your pages will be a changing!

2011-02-21T11:08:00.000-08:00

Here Ye, Here Ye!

Well this probably isn't the biggest news around but Facebook will be forcing Fan Pages into the new Profile view layout. Like the proverbial square peg. Not really that bad but if your a fan of the Tabs at the top of the page get ready to suck it up.

There's actually some good points, new features and per Facebook mandate a whole bunch of Buggy items. Ah we do so love programming in the Facebook API, it's like the wild west. There's a new sheriff in town and his name is Reggie Zuckerberg! But per my mandate, I do digress.

Here's what we see as ultimately cool about the changes:

FB did seem to listen and in the new layout are still allowing a default landing page. Important news for biz's that brand their page for new fans. But per the FB bug mandate on a few of my pages some tabs (now links under the logo image) do not show up in the list. History has shown that in a few weeks they'll just be there.
The new layout is nice and looks like profiles allowing for recent images to be prominently displayed at the top.
Custom App's that define a avatar for the App get a nice FavIcon style link in the new layout.
As of yet though, the continued support for FBML App don't have a way to customize the FavIcon for the link. You get the ugly <> representation next to the link text. How bogus (and not an issue w/beloved Tabs). There may be a way to do this, more to come.
The new "Use facebook as" feature.

That's right folks, you can now post to a FB user as your Fan Page! This is a pretty cool new feature. Look for it on the upper right side of the page under the Admins Facepile.

As someone who is doing a lot of custom facebook app development I am glad that we can easily brand the custom links for our app's.

It is quite important for Fan Pages to be able to highlight custom content to their fans. Custom content makes one fan page stand out over another.

Click to enlarge

Overall this is what i'd call one of the least painful forced changes that has come down the pike. I can certainly understand your imense trepidation about the upcoming changes but I'd say relax and go with the flow on this one.

Like you have a choice anyway (Check your page after 03/12/2011).

Not!

Add a Facebook Fan Page and they will come.

2011-02-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

The Problem:
The road to most unhappiness starts with mismatched expectations. In relationships I have a favorite saying: "Once you know what to expect from a person they'll never let you down". That requires a real honest look at people (as well as yourself) but for the most part I am no longer dismayed when people I know do something that is a little less then friendly. But I digress, as I often do (get used to it and I won't let you down).

The same can be true for business relationships and client expectations. Truer words could not be said on the topic of marketing web brands in the new "Social" world. More specifically, I often see clients and others starting a project that involves a website and inevitably say: "We need to do this social networking thingy you know". That means a lot of different things to different people but at the core is often the desire to find the golden (and mostly nonexistent) secret formula for instant web success.

Dissecting the Problem:

The problem is essentially a human one, not a technical web design one. It is so like us to think that the tried and true ways to success; hard work, consistent dedication to an effort can be replaced by the magic formula that makes it all happen for us. In the world of web design and social media that mismatched expectation is multiplied to unimaginable levels. Everyone thinks they have the video that will go viral right out the gate or that their facebook page will have 1000 fans on the first day. If you do a lot of leg work before the fan page goes live that might just happen.

Take YouTube. There are several YouTube sensations that had viral video's out the gate but considering a service that hosts over (and this is a hard to define number) 80,000,000 videos the odds of going viral all on it's own get's lower all the time. Plus these sensations started slowly and probably put in the hard work it takes to be an instant sensation.

So how does a video (or other social thingy) go viral? Here's a bunch of steps in a semi particular order. They don't even comprise all you could or should do, just making a point about the simplicity of viral. Be it a video or other social "thing" you need something that appeals to an audience and done in a style that is crafted for that audience. Things that don't happen all by themselves, takes thought and planning. Not to mention understanding your target audience. Is that all it takes. Heck no!

You have to create it (blog post, fan page content, twitter post), upload it and tag it optimally as well. Will that do it? Probably not!

Actually before all this work is where the hard work is. You could do all your heavy thinking on what your audience is, the right way to craft your content for them but what you should really do first is locate social (blog, facebook, twitter, etc) outlets that you can use to share knowledge of your "thing". It's a little anti-climactic to burn the midnight oil creating something great and then after all that need to jump to square one and start looking for ways to get the word out. Sort of an anti Gestalt Psychology downer.

The point here is not to explain all you should do to go viral and certainly not to discourage you from trying.

This discussion centers on how mismatched expectations hurts the customer experience. It really is important to have customers understand that growing socially is a long term effort. It can never be a "Set it and forget it" effort.

clients who are active on social networks in their private lives can understand the quickest once you walk them through what captures and holds their own attention in this wonderful marketplace. And I've said it before, if you don't think you're being marketed to on facebook your sleeping through the experience. But alas, again I digress.

Clients who aren't really active on social networks just think of it as this wunderkind that is the answer to their projects dreams. A little harder to get the message through.

So, What does it take?

Again, not covering the steps to social success here. Just helping to explain where your expectations should be.

Think of all your favorite social media interests and outlets, from addthis.com to YouTube (addthis.com will help you understand how many there are). None of those operations came on the scene and went instantly viral. Good old marketing efforts with a slant for getting it out on the internet is where is starts.

Remember that holding interest is important. I'm not saying you need to be on twitter 24X7. The frequency is not a magic number. In fact too much can be irritating. It's a combination of what you realistically are capable of doing and how much content you can create. It's always nicer if the latter is a greater number. Store e'm up for later use.

So if you can blog, twitter or comment on your fan page once a day, once a week or even once a month there will be a steady stream of relevant content to keep people feeling your valuable love and look fresh enough to new visitors.

All in all the point here is that it takes work, hard work and a consistent dedication to an effort. No magic potions here. Just trying to help untangle misunderstood success stories where the greatest misconception is someone just did something, one single thing and they were an instant internet superstar.

Not.

Untangling Social Networking Bridge Services

2009-12-11T12:56:00.000-08:00

This post is a very preliminary stab at describing the use and untangling of Social Networking Bridge Services©. Very preliminary...

In fact this post describes the actual first pass at creating a strategy to simplify and automate the social networking efforts for the Joy of Sox Movie project. I'm sure that others who have tackled this before will probably know of a better way to do some of these things. I'd be glad to hear suggestions for improvement or other services that might fill the void better!

In the work being done for the client I had one goal. Make the clients blogging efforts be the primary source that feeds all the other SocNet efforts.

What are social networking bridge services anywho?

Simply put they are third party services that facilitate communication between the main social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. They also enhance functionality of the main social networks.

Here's the list of what was used in this strategy:

TwitPic - Allows for uploading of photo's and binding to a Tweet. Enhancement.
TwitterFeed - Will listen to your blogs Atom Feed and create Tweets with mini-url's to blog post. Bridge Service.
iTwitter - MySpace Twitter module that allows Tweets to display in your MySpace page. Bridge Service.
Facebook's Twitter import - Listens to your Twitter presence and imports your Tweets as status updates. This was set up through the projects Facebook page NOT an individual Facebook profile. Bridge Service.
YouTube's Blog import - Import your blog postings into YouTube. Bridge Service.
LinkedIn's Twitter Module - Allows LinkedIn updates to be posted as Tweets on your Twitter profile. Bridge Service.

Here's a graphical map of the strategy:

Of course being in the early stages the strategy has not achieved perfection. The main problem is that the Joy of Sox Movie Blog is not the only source of information intended for the social networks. So consequently if a post originates in Facebook, it posts to Twitter which in turn posts it back to Facebook. But so far this is only a problem for your humble narrator as he makes the post and subscribes to the page that in turn receives it from Twitter. Not a biggie by any means.

There are some obvious things that are not being used right now such as Facebook's Blog import via the notes function. This was a decision in the name of untangling the multiple paths of communication that all these systems are offering.
A clean path of transmission.

I think that if TwitterFeed grows to include and multiplex more input and output streams it could be the end all of feeding Social Networking Cross Platform Communication (did i coin a new phrase again!)

Oh and BTW, I think I'm the first to use the phrase Social Networking Bridge Service © , So there!

Your humble narrator.

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Content in the above posting is not meant to be the definitive last word on anything.
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Facebook Page Promotion Pointers

2009-07-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

Some things to consider with facebook pages:

A client of mine has put up and is building a following for their FaceBook Page. Some discussion about that got me to thinking (again) about a few pointers to consider when spreading the word of your page. See list below. Some are rehashed from previous posts, some are new thoughts:

Make posts to your page in a slow steady pace. Don't dump a ton of updates at once
Try to make your updates relevant for your intended audience
Try to have some media as well (images and video are more interesting!)
Try to word your posts, from time to time in ways that are a little inflammatory (if appropriate for your image and audience) . A heated discussion is better than no discussion
Try to word your posts in a way that elicits a response. People need to be asked questions to get them talking and discussion and comments put the V in Viral!
You should send out updates to blast info to your audience but also replicate the info sent on the FaceBook page itself. This keeps the page looking fresh, new info is automatically placed at the top so new visitors see recent posting dates and will be more likely to decide that this is an active page and worth joining. Ding!
Another good reason for replicating on the page itself is that updates sent to your fan base lack a comment utility! Comments put the V in viral!
Leave comments on your posts or try to have a network of friends that do it for you.
Leave comments that try to elicit a response. The comment discussion is at the heart of the viral mechanics. This is when knowledge of your page grows beyond your circle of friends to your friends' circle of friends. Comments put the V in viral! Ding! Double Ding!!!
It's also a good idea to talk about more than just yourself in your updates. If there's no human element for people to connect with then it just feels like old fashioned marketing and people get turned off.

More on the last bullet item. Look, we're all grown up here and if you hadn't realized it yet you should have: "Social Media" is the new marketing tool. but having said that the game is slightly different. When you do your marketing on FaceBook, if you just talk about yourself, your accomplishments or otherwise about yourself, quite frankly you'll be putting people to sleep.

I haven't decided on an exact ratio but from time to time you do need to throw in some comments that are just your opinions on a current event, even something as simple as the the weather. Maybe even try to rile people up. Since this is marketing under the veil of "Social Media" you need to show them there's a person behind the page or people will just get that old "marketed to" feeling and vanish from your fan base. It's important to appeal to events in peoples' lives so that they get that warm and fuzzy connection to you.

You can also apply the list above to twitter and MySpace marketing. I can't tell you how many times I've tweeted for a client, then had the thought: Oh, this is too many posts about ME (the client) and gone and checked the fan base only to find that 2 or 3 people have stopped following. Conversely I have tweeted about things not directly related to the client but when people see it they feel connected by the human element of the comment, check us out and start following. Ding!

FaceBook Pages Analytics

2009-03-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

FaceBook Pages have their own analytics you know!

I put together a FaceBook Page about a month ago for a local Boston band called Clutch Grabwell. If you like to go out to a club and come away with a little ringing in your ears, go see these guys. They are one of the most enjoyable bands I've seen in years. Their signature sound comes from a horn section that can reach in and rip your soul out. They like to mix it up with plenty of covers and do the most imaginative covers i have ever heard. Talking Head's "Burning down the House" or Alice in chains' "Man in the box" with screaming horns. Yeah

So what does that have to do with FaceBook Page analytics. Nothing! Just go see them if your in the beantown area.

Alright, alright. Well for you facebook page owners all i can say is check out the insights link if you have not done so yet. Click for full size image of the FaceBook Page analytics screenshot

The page analytics show you some interesting things about your audience that most analytics just cant, like gender and age. They also show you how well your media and content are being used. This is really invaluable info on how much excitement you generate.

Clutch Grabwell is a naturally viral topic as they have a well established following and have a lot of content to put up on their page.

You can use this information to formulate your strategy. In the case of this client we can see that if we can get the drinking age lowered to 13 we can easily expand out fan base in that demographic. OK, not the most realistic use of analytics, but i think you get the idea.

Make sure you check out your page "insights" and try to really think about how and why your FaceBook Page gets used. It will help you see more clearly what your doing well and not so well.

Twits and Tweets

2009-03-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

A little about this Twitter and social marketing thing:

A recent comment from a client about Twitter made me realize it was time to poke around that place and see how the "Social Marketing" worked over there. I mean I hope you guys realize that FaceBook, MySpace and now Twitter have become the latest rage in marketing to you!
FaceBook has smartened up. We "Page" makers can even purchase Pay Per Click advertising on Mother F. now, they have become the latest marketing powerhouse. Probably not what Mark Z. had in mind when FaceBook got created. Or was it ;-)

It's actually the way i like marketing best. In this brave new world at least, the golden marketing rules basically seem to be:

1) Keep the interactions real!
2) Keep the content relevant!
3) Talk about the ups and downs of your product (and maybe learn from it)
4) Let the customers enjoy your online identity with humor
5) Let them participate in the discussion that revolves around you
6) Don't just pitch yourself. Can you say boooring!

Even Coke has figured out how to do it correctly. They have the second most popular FaceBook page on the site with something like over 385 Trillion fans (or was that the US deficit $). They have a nice looking page with constantly update imagery and comments.

I made a comment about friend or fan quantity not equaling quality a while back and added "except maybe for Twitter". Well scratch that. In a nutshell the only difference between marketing on Twitter and FaceBook is that you do it all in sentences no longer than 140 characters. So what does that mean??

How it's done on these different sites:

Well on FaceBook you get to set up a neat looking page (which they change the appearance of randomly, thanks) and upload media, start or participate in discussions, list events, etc and wait and build up your fan base. Once this fan base is built up you can blast the whole group with announcements and keep the love alive.

With Twitter you get to (and have to BTW) do all those things. You just do it in said 140 characters. So one might ask, how do i upload my 200MB video if all i get is a little box that accepts only 140 characters?? Well one answer is FaceBook. Everything you upload there can be linked to. But have you seen the size of their links. ouch. I think most are about 200 characters long, so where's the room for the marketing message?

Well I'm glad you asked.

Thanks to a tweet from my SEO Mentor Jill Whalen at High Rankings I found out about a great short URL service called "Cligs". It's like tiny url but it gives you analytics tracking so you can tell how many people used your link. Yay. You can turn a huge link into a few characters and have plenty of room for your short, sweet and relevant comment.

A little wrap up:

I did an expirement and had some pretty interesting "short cycle" results. I found that if you search the topic your marketing on search.twitter.com, find really relevant results that you can @reply to and point out your clig url you can get about 50 hits in a day with about 10 minutes of work. Since this is taking advantage of the search on Twitter and activity happens at a fast rate, your reply will drop off the charts quuickly too. But the point is you can have a direct impact with little effort a day and get youself noticed. 50 hits/day X 365 Days = 18,250/year hits for 10 minutes a day. Not bad ROI and not a bad way to build that fan base.

That stratergy should be part of the bigger goal to do on Twitter what you do on FaceBook, build up a fan base. On Twitter your building up a "following". Same animal. Like the best practices of any social marketing you should do the following:

Reply to only relevant tweets. If you reply to a tweet about someone not feeling well with a comment that points out your vacation web site, you'll get a resounding go F... yourself. If you reply to a tweet about not feeling well with a comment that is real and point them to this great site you know of with self help remedies for their ailment, you'll get a thank you and widely noticed. Maybe even pick up a few followers
Worry about your Twitter reputation. That means talk about something besides your product. Talk about your life, be part of the "community" not just a marketer. That later will bore and annoy people. Actually contribute.
Follow people and get people to follow you. This is one of the more important long term goals with Twitter (and the others). When you have a big following and you make that comment that mentions the wonderul web site with the self help books, your followers get it right in their Twitter homepage.
Remember with all social marketing, put it out their as a friend not a seller of something. How would you feel about your FaceBook friends loading you up with a sales pitch??

Marketing in the brave new social site world.

2009-02-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

Social Media, Social Marketing, Blah, Blah, Blah.....

This is a little byte about using FaceBook to market yourself. There's a little difference between FaceBook and other mediums. There's also a different attitude you need to have when you work this route.

Although marketing is always about reaching people who are interested in what you've got, and that will never change. The methods with social marketing are sort of counter intuitive to some. You don't ant to use a medium like FaceBook to blast as many unknown people as possible about your great new widget.

That's just social spam.

The idea here is the "tell two friends" method. And the pinnacle of using that method is to get FaceBook friends to comment on your shared links and posts (more on that later). The unspoken contract here is that you respect your friends, and your friends friends and their friends. So you don't treat them like a flock of sheep.

People come to FaceBook to get away from that.

In this medium (and on other social sites except maybe twitter):

Quantity != Quality

There's some simple truth's you need to decide for yourself before you do the "Social Marketing" thingy:

Is your new product or service really that interesting?
Does it appeal to people emotionally?
Are you prepared to be open to criticism on your efforts?

The wider the appeal the better you will do. I dabble in this for my Web Design, that's almost a waste. I only appeal to people interested in finding a web designer.

I also do this for a local Boston band, their appeal: anyone who likes music. aahh ha!

People won't be put off by status updates about a band they like. They will be about my Web Design Company blog postings. uhh oh.

So, anywho back to this thing about the pinnacle of the Facebook posting. Here's the deal kiddo's. For the "tell two people" thingy to work. You need your friends to comment on your postings.

Try to share your links and other posted items in a way that elicits comment. That is the viral hook to move beyond your "circle of trust" to the greater FaceBook world outside. Better yet, craft your postings so that people will want to share it themselves and tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on........

The Portable Device Revolution

2009-02-22T07:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a little post that has nothing to do with web design.

Unlike the masses who run out and buy an overpriced iPod and have it good from the start, I like to find the cheapest set-ups and see what it takes to get them going.

Hence, when i decided i wanted portable video too, buying an iPod or getting a Verizon cell phone was out of the question. I decided to focus on two of the most promising looking items with the lowest price tags:

The Sansa Clip e280 - 8Gig MP3/MP4 player, $49.00 (refurbed)
The Sony PSP 3000 - MP3/MP4/Skype/Internet Radio/Web Browser/ PSP games and Movies. $169.00 at BestBuy.

Hands down of course the winner was the PSP, but first the short review of the Sansa Clip:

It's a neat little unit. I don't think i need to list the pro's for an MP3/MP4 player with FM radio and a voice recorder, so here's the cons:

If all your MP3 ID tags are not version 2 (IDv2) the player can get locked up and you need to go through a painful process to force the player to wipe the memory and reinstall the OS (yeah, i mean it, my jaw's still on the ground)
You need to use a proprietary video converter that rotates the video 90Deg to fit the widescreen that runs from top to bottom. not side to side. Hence you watch a video holding the player on it's side.
The now converted videos become useless on any other platform
Unless you have superman vision, forget watching video's on this.

The PSP is pretty impressive. Being a Sony they had to find a way to give it a drawback and that would be the memory stick for memory expansion. But I found a way around that!!!!

The PSP 3000 is fairly cheap. It plays converted videos very nicely (but getting to a "converted video" is a learning process)
It has a mryiad of features that i like:

The screen size is just right so us old types can enjoy video on it.
It plays video games (umd)
It plays movies (umd)
It's an MP3 player
It's an MP4 player
It's an image viewer
It has a fairly decent browser (even FaceBook recognizes the PSP and serves up a modified page)
It does Skype flawlessly
The internet radio is slick
The wireless network set-up is pretty easy

The Cons:

Memory stick (See my solution below!!)
Your sort of left hanging for how to properly convert videos (A++ Solution)
If you want to use poster files for you lists in the player make sure the image is named the same as the video, put in the same folder with the video and a width no greater than 160px! (thanks for not telling me that anywhere sony!)
Memory Stick (sorry ;-)
There's not a lot of movie selection for the UMD format, but with the MP4 player, so what??
The internal speakers could get a little louder.

So tell me about this Memory stick issue????

Here's the problem. An 16Gig memory stick costs like $100 bucks. can you say OUCH!!!
An 16Gig Micro sd card can be had at Amazon for $35.00 bucks!!!!

Well, Add this:		To this
	+
and you have 16Gig of memory stick for under $40 bucks!

Email and the happy inbox

2008-03-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple of pointers on issues I see from time to time. The first is an quick discussion on housekeeping and avoiding your inbox from outgrowing the space quota it's got. The second is a discussion to highlight a particular setting used most often by people who want to view there email account from multiple locations and have access to all emails (in the POP3 environment not IMAP).

Inbox health and you!

There is one main issue to consider with inbox's in general and that is exceeding your designated inbox limit. You might ask what that means and what happens then?

You inbox is typically given a quota in MB's that it can not exceed. Every email and every attachment takes up some amount of space (Kb, MB or beyond?). The total of all emails and attachments can not exceed the mailbox's size limit.

Well what happens if it does?

You will not be able to send emails but more importantly everyone who sends you an email will get an error stating the users mailbox is over it's limit. Unless they are diligent enough to keep resending it until it works, there's very little chance you'll ever see the email.

One of the main ways to avoid this situation is to delete email that are no longer needed or move them to locally stored folders.

If your shouting at your screen right now: Hey now Adam wait just a minute, I delete emails all the time!!! You've got a screw loose.

I might just have, but that's fodder for another post. But what I do need to say is: Until you have emptied your deleted items folder the emails have typically not been removed from your mail server! haha!

If you've been humbled and are moving on to the next point: What's a local folder?

Let's take outlook for example. If you look under your "Outlook Today" folder you'll see your inbox, sent and deleted items folders. Your inbox and deleted items folder might represent emails still on the server if you have a setting called "leave a copy of messages on the server" checked off. This setting is the crux of the next discussion BTW. If you right click the "outlook today-->New Folder" selection, the resulting folder will represent a local folder. Anything you move there is stored on your hard drive regardless of the above mentioned configuration. Multiple local folders are the best way to organize your emails and keep the server healthy.

Do you need your email account available at multiple locations?

The "leave a copy of message on server" configuration is the crux of making this possible. If you don't leave a copy on the server then you have downloaded it to a particular PC's hard drive. Once this is done it obviously can't be seen by PC's at your other locations.

There are trade offs with the capability of configuring for multiple locations the most important of which is the mailbox exceeding it's limit. The best way to avoid this and maintain usability of this type of environment is to do a couple of things:

Whenever you move an item to any PC's deleted items folder... EMPTY IT to remove emails form the server. Multiple deleted items folders on multiple devices can spell trouble.
Select one PC to be the repository for items that you will move to a local folder. A second option is to move them to a mobile device that can be synced with the repository. Failing to do this will result in the "I now I saved that email but where is it" or more commonly referred to as INISTEBWII syndrome.

Hopefully these discussions can help you avoid a bad situation that only your friends will tell you about, your customers shore wont tell you an email bounced!

Got them to your site? Now what? Why your site needs a search function!

2008-03-06T04:59:00.000-08:00

Web site owners get very focused on what will get their web sites found in the search engines. What will bring in visitors to their spanky new web site and they should get focused on that.

Of course we all want users to find our own sites and just love them.

But one should not assume that because site visitors are showing up in dribs and drabs (or droves) that they are getting what they want.

You might look at it this way:

Getting hits on your site is only 1/3 of the puzzle. In general terms you should think of your web site recipe like this:

1/3 Good SEO
1/3 Good content
1/3 Good understanding of site visitor's needs and wants

OK, Good SEO makes sense and I'll run right out and clone myself so i have enough time to always be creating good content but how the heck do i understand what the site visitor wants?????

Well there's a couple things to become familiar with once the cloning process is completed. I hear it makes you feel like half the man you used to be, but anyway I digress.

Google Analytics
Some form of site search avec reporting functions

BTW, Signore Web Design set's them both up when we do a web site for you!

Google analytics and Bounce rate

The first item, Google Analytics™ is a great tool that provides you with detailed unbiased information (compared to web hosting tracking tools) on site visitors activities on your site. The pinnacle of this information is the "Bounce Rate".

Bounce rate tells you how many people get to the first page on your site and high tail it out of there. It's a great indicator of weather your site is completely disgusting users or drawing them in. Believe it or not, typical bounce rate runs around 40%. Boy that seems high, but based on the ADD nature of web surfers it does sort of make sense.

The response to a bad bounce rate can vary. One of my sites GBI-Avis modular Home has a bounce rate that runs around 20%. Yahooooo! that's half the industry average. If you look at the site you'll find it's pretty enough but not flashy. No flash intro's (bad idea anyways) and screaming graphics, rollovers, etc. It does more with a focused text box (text with a bordered div around it) than you would believe. The point here, lowering bounce rate is not about "flashing up the site". It's about finding out what your visitors come to your site for and make those items stand out.

So where bounce rate lets you know there's a problem, site search helps you determine what it is.

Site Search

There are a couple of free services, atomz.com and freefind.com that we have integrated into client sites. These services provide a customizable form & customizable results page that integrate into the site but also provide statistical reporting. This allows you to see what the site visitor TRIED to find on your site. Coupled with Google Analytics you can tell if they ever found it. If a predominant portion of your visitors search your site for the same terms (and that term describes something you offer) then it's obvious your not presenting the product or service clearly enough.

To sum it up, getting them to the site wins the battle. If you don't capture them
quickly then you've lost the war.

Organic SEO - I need to get higher in the rankings by Tuesday!

2008-02-27T07:15:00.000-08:00

How quickly can i get ranked higher in organic search results?

Well that depends on where your starting from and what type of changes are being made:

This is brand new domain:

Well in this case, If SEO has been done from the start your in for a little bit of a bumpy ride. take Google for example; They'll give new sites a boost in the first couple months of operation but then the site will fall off somewhat. The site will fall off sharply if no SEO efforts have been made.

This is brand new web site on an old domain:

Once again attention to SEO will have an impact. If the site structure has been radically changed from what Google has cached, you could disappear for quite a while until your new content is re-ranked (6 Months or more?). There's some things to consider in site redesign:

Has the file names and file structure been preserved. This change will foul up the weight Google gives the current site. To transfer your current page rank you should use permanent redirects (301) in your .htaccess file (or other similar method) to point Google's cache of old pages to the new/replacement pages.

This is the same old site on the same old domain, just getting SEO for the first time:

It might not be that long, a few months perhaps.

Final thoughts

With any SEO campaign, that's done ethically and designed to have long lasting results the time frame for those results is not short. It can be from several months to a year to see tangible and predictable results.

Organic SEO is not as simple as PPC where well written ads and a budget can get you in the sponsored results that day. Actually PPC should be considered on a short term basis to fill the void.

Organic SEO is a more hand to hand combat situation where you need to outrank your competition. and do it in a world where page rank,quality content and quality inbound links have a lot of value in that fight. Where search engines will take months to respond to the value of your site changes it just can't be promised in a day.

If someone tells you it can, I'd look elsewhere for the SEO work.

*******************************************************
Content in the above posting is not meant to be the definitive last word on any topic.
*******************************************************

Template sites and Templating. What's the difference

2008-02-27T06:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, what's the difference

In a nutshell template sites are pre-packaged web sites, typically containing a menu structure pointing to a few pages. There are some attributes about them to consider:

They are rigid. How was the navigation designed. Does it use graphical elements (almost always)? What if you want to change the menu structure then?
Was it designed to be flexible in other ways? what if you change the logo at the top will it skew the page display?
How do you feel about several other web sites having essentially the same look?
What if you need to add e-commerce, a blog or some other functionality? again, will the framework be flexible enough for these additions without major rework?
If you select a template site and modify it and "break something" who will fix it.

these are a few considerations but certainly not all.

What do you mean by "Templating"?

Weather your designing a site from scratch or creating template sites at some point you need to design the first "Template" that other things flow from.

Template site designers do not need to consider any customer specific customer needs at this point they just come up with a pretty design that they hope will sell.

Web site designers also "Template" but we do it at a point where the unique customer design needs have been considered and we do it with future flexibility in mind (because hopefully we will be the go to person for updating the site.

Spam - Some things to consider about email and your inbox

2008-02-25T13:26:00.000-08:00

All of us get spam. It's impossible to get away from.

Below is a very simple discussion on email habits. It's by no means "The complete guide"
but rather a good place to start.

There are some general practices to consider when it comes to your inbox:

Don't Open that email!!!
Don't open an email unless you know the sender or at least it is clear that it is legitimate. Spammers consider a legitimate email address to be gold. They typically embed images or other web-bugs to let them know your address is good. When you open the email you've made their day!

But if you must:
If you must know what this email is about here's a method to help you know this email is a fraud and keep you from opening it (An outlook based answer): In outlook right click the message of interest and select "Options" from the pop up menu. You'll get a bunch of text like this (the email headers):

Received: from ([76.96.62.55])
by sccrmxc17.comcast.net (sccrmxc17) with ESMTP
id (20071022161557s17005ktpde); Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:15:57 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [76.96.62.55]

Received: from dsl88-248-1763.ttnet.net.tr ([88.248.6.227])
by IMTA24.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast
id 3UFF1Y00Y4ttjZk0000200; Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:15:57 +0000
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:15:16 -0800

From: "some"
To: kced1z3@comcast.net

Look at the areas highlighted in purple you'll notice that the From: address at the
bottom of the email headers does not the received lines (also marked in
purple). Also the display name in the headers is "some" , this is not a name any legit email sender would choose to show. This is not a foolproof check but it can give you a good idea of an email legitimacy. Also, the To: address
(bottom line) is not my address but i received this email in my inbox.
Had i opened this i could have warmed the heart of some spammer somewhere by letting them know it was sent to a real email address.

The email has an attachment, should i open it?

You should know my answer by now! But in case you don't: NO!
Unless it's from someone you know or an email you expect. There's no good reason
for strangers to send you attachments (potential viruses) .

Anything else to consider?

You really should have some basic security app's on your PC. Virus, PC firewall ,
phishing protection should all be installed. Most services charge ~$30 per year to
keep subscriptions current. If you think that's a rip-off then i would figure
you've never been through a disastrous infection on your PC. You can wipe
out 10 times that in one event when you factor in lost information, productivity
and not to forget loss of private information.

Things to remember:

* Don't let spammers know they've reached a legit email address.
* Don't open unless you know who it's from.
* If you must look at it. Look at email headers first to determine if it's legit.
* Make sure you have up to date security app's on your PC. Don't skimp here!

Is my web site ever really "Completed"? Content VS. A.D.D.

2008-02-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

Will my web site ever be done?

Regardless of why your asking that question the answer is: NO!

There's two important reasons for this:

Once site visitors figure out there's never any fresh content why would they come back?
Once the Search Engines figure out there's never any fresh content why would they come back?

Search Engine spiders have been designed to be as picky as humans about keeping their interest piqued. There needs to be a regular dose of fresh content for your web site or search engines will simply spider your site less often and give it a lower ranking.

There's a good reason for this. To make search results more useful the Google's of the world have decided that new content is best for the people using their search engines.

NOTE: The search engines spiders can pretty well read your text and determine if it's well written for a human or just spam, crammed full of key phrases to try to rank higher!

You might well ask "What about the ADD web surfer? Don't I only have 7 seconds to capture and retain them.

Well Yes that is true, but then you need to ask yourself "Well what do I offer them now?".

Think of it like this:

Have you ever been to a web site that took too long to download?

A web site that didn't immediately focus you on the information you were looking for?

What did you do then? Well if your like me you spent as close to that 7 seconds
as possible and then moved on. Lets assume for a moment though that your attention was caught in that seven seconds. You saw clues that what you were looking for was on this site. what did you do then????

You started reading!

Well how would you feel if you then discovered the page had the same old content, no new information. Or worse yet was just a key word stuffed, SEO unethically optimized useless piece of %@#%@#$%@#$. Pretty P.O'd I'd think. I know i am when it happens (or when the result is just another page of results and not what I'm looking for).

So if you ask yourself the "what then?" question raised above you should realize that the A.D.D. web surfer is not so A.D.D. after all. One of my testers put it quite nicely:

Once i realize that the site has what I'm looking for I'd read War & Peace to get the information! Just not over and over again.

So you decide, is your web site ever going to be done?????

About this page!

2008-02-22T06:47:00.000-08:00

Hi and welcome,
I plan on using this section to comment on a wide range of topics that i hope will be useful to techies and non-techies alike.

I'm just starting this up in the secon quarter of 2008 so it will be a little sparse right now.

If you've got something you'd like to hear my comments on drop me an email at:

adam@signore.net

Thanks,
Adam.