Back in August Google first started piloting “Author information in search results” (Matt Cutts YouTube Videos 1 & 2) giving authors more prominence in SERPs
One of the final steps requires you to add the pubs you write for via the “Contributor to” link. The “Contributor to” link is not so easy to find so I embedded a screen grab of it here. Click the image for a larger version.
This should not take more than 15 minutes start to finish to set up.
It looks like Google is now also giving more favorable rankings to the Google+ profile accounts over other profile platforms in SERPs. More on that, a Techworld article expounding on a Danny Sullivan article.
To summarize all that – You need to get your profile up on Google+ ASAP!
After it’s set up with you’ve got your pic, pub links up, and your articles have your email address in them, (how that happens – see dev team) and Google waves their magic wand, your picture will pop up along side the search result, along with links to other articles you published, your Google+ profile, and social/sharing platforms, among other things.
Not only will you will be the coolest (and one of the most prominent) results in Google, but all your competing editors and authors will be very jealous. Do it for the bragging rights of increased traffic AND enhanced celebrity exposure.
You are going to have to get your email in your profile and that email address must appear in the post. More spam – maybe. More web traffic – for sure.
There are other ways to comply but this might be the easiest for most companies. Either way you will need to involve your dev team.
And – You’ll need to get the dev teams on this soon so you are not the last one to the party.
How to Pitch Upper Management:
Push this deliverable hard with upper management as a high-value low-impact way to increase page views for existing and future website content. “Page views = sales boss!”
Get a meeting with the dev team, have them watch the Matt Cutts videos and read the full post on Google before.
How to Pitch the Dev Team:
You can tell the dev guys to think of Google as job security, if they don’t already realize this. “And our CMS should do this automatically so we are not bugging you every day to update our posts,” you’ll say to reinforce the benefit to prioritizing this project. Set a near-term deadline and make it happen.
Yes it’s just another thing that Google is making you do, but it is a must do – soon.
The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.
If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.
Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:
Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.
And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.
While browsing the Web today you’re probably seeing the response to the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been introduced into the U.S. Congress. Many major web companies feel that this legislation will have a negative effect on the way the Internet/Web works and some of them (including Google, YouTube and Wikipedia) are taking down, altering, or limiting their websites to raise awareness of the bill.
I was honored to be asked to write an article for our favorite Chicago-family-focused website (and Astek client) Families in the Loop. Find out my top tech picks for parents in 2012:
Bob Dylan was righter than he knew when he warbled that the times, they are a-changin’ — and this was before the iPad. Nothing changes faster than technology, and as this new year dawns I can’t tell you how excited I am to see what the world comes up with next. Every year seems to bring… [read more]
As we entered the new year, one thing that most of us face is the overwhelming amount of information we dissect every day. As a community manager for several different clients, the amount is amplified. While trying to find a way to continue to provide relative and useful information for our clients and their communities, I finally decided to check out Yahoo Pipes. I’ve heard people talk about Yahoo Pipes, even used programs and services that stated they used Yahoo Pipes, but I had never know exactly what they were.
According to Yahoo, “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” In plain language, you fetch information, add filters and produce specific content you desire. What is so nice about Pipes is it has drag and drop modules that requires no programming background. In addition to creating your own Pipes, you can also view Pipes that others have made. How about using Pipes as an eBay price watch for certain items?
So far, I’ve only created a simple RSS feed for search Twitter for Tweets using the #cmgr hashtag, but making sure it includes common keywords. This is then sent to my Google Reader as an RSS.
Have you used Yahoo Pipes? What ways are you finding to use them? Just hearing about Yahoo Pipes? How do you see them being useful?
I got a text message from a friend on New Years Eve, to myself and another friend. And then I got the other recipient’s reply. I didn’t think much of it until I got the above text message yesterday (from a friend with an Android phone) and went to reply that I couldn’t make the birthday festivities. Before iOS 5 such group texts didn’t show all the other recipients, which is another matter of concern perhaps. The sender of such a message might assume and want the same behavior as BCC’ing on an email. When I saw the difference in this text, I wondered if it would reply-all, and if so if there was a way to specifically reply only to the sender. Not seeing a way, I went ahead and replied.
No one else replied “Hey who is this?”, but researching my suspicion confirmed that all the other recipients would have received my text. The only way I can see to send a reply directly to the sender would be to draft an entirely new text. There is also a way to safeguard against this behavior entirely, but it’s annoying because it means that you have to disable MMS entirely. And I would rather not do that because I want to be able to send photos to people who don’t have iOS devices (iMessage lets you send photos to other iOS users without MMS). But if you want to do it yourself, you need to turn off both Group Messaging and MMS in your Messages settings (note here that I have left both on):
Dear Astek readers, clients and awesome individuals. I am very excited to announce that I have trekked across sidewalks, airport terminals, taxi cab lines, and up four flights of stairs (with three over-the-weight-limit bags in tow) to set up shop in New York City! That’s right Astek has officially taken Manhattan. I personally have traveled to New York City very regular since I was 17, and have wanted to move there since that time. So now I can finally say that I have done just that!
Don’t worry, I shall be coming to Chicago quite frequently. I adore the Windy City, and will never fully leave. I however am very excited for the challenge ahead and to see how Astek grows out here on the East Coast!
Until then, I give you my view from my taxi cab. Cheers!
2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.
Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!
Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:
In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.
Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.
We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.
At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.
In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.
As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.
We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.
Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.
And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).
Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!
Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?
Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.
The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.
This month we are sharing things that inspire us. Personally, crafting is my passion and is a huge influence on my personal aesthetic. My work on various crafts has informed the way I look at form, function, materials and, yep, even web design.
And in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share a simple craft project that is an olfactory delight – cloving oranges!
Over the weekend, we sat down to decorated some oranges with cloves for the Astek conference table. Now the whole office smells like Christmas! If you want to decorate your own oranges it is very easy. Here’s how we did it:
Simply take some oranges…
And a bowl of whole cloves (available with the spices in any grocery store)
Press the pointy end of the clove into the orange. Make patterns or images.
We couldn’t resist turning a green spot on one of the oranges into the Astek logo.
If you want to get really fancy you can take a zester or a tool like this v-shaped pumpkin carving tool and peel away just the top layer of skin for additional patterns and decor options.
Place in a pretty bowl and display where ever fragrant holiday cheer is appreciated. The best smells come for the first 48 hours, but display can be left for a week or more, though oranges may shrivel a bit after a few days. Enjoy!
How to Stand Out in Search, or Google+ = Just “another” thing Google is making me do… 
This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
