We get this question regularly enough that I wanted to share a few quick talking points you can use to convince your boss that engaging with social media is not optional. The longer you wait, the more you’ll miss. A common reaction to social media is that companies don’t want to use another marketing channel, or they don’t have time to join yet another social networking site. Well, it’s time to make time. The good news is you can control how much you get involved — just be sure to get involved.

1. Low cost of entry

The key thing to realize with social media is that it costs very little to get started. Free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are available to connect directly to people and get your message out. Free services like Google Alerts give you a glimpse into what people are saying about your company. Free blog hosting makes getting started easier, though we usually recommend spending a nominal amount on some custom branding and consulting so that your blog stands out and is found on search engines.

Rather than money, what social media requires most from you is time: time to participate, time to contribute, time to engage. If you are fighting an uphill battle in the office, then you may have to consider investing your own time off the clock to get the ball rolling and produce some tangible results. Try one or two services at a time until you become comfortable with the medium. You are better off fully engaging with one or two social media tools than signing up for all of them at once.

2. The conversation is happening. All you can do is join.

Social media is less about delivering a one-way message and more about engaging with your clients. The fact is that people are out there having public conversations about your company or products. Social media is your opportunity to meet them on their own turf to talk about their experiences, complements, and complaints. Think of it as an opportunity to gain insight into the mind of your clients rather than a burden.

It’s important to listen before you join a conversation, as you would at a party. Make sure you understand the conversation and represent yourself honestly and transparently. Be sure to disclose your relationship with the company and express your genuine opinion, update, or concern. People will often tell other people about the interaction just because you bothered to reach out. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.

3. Demonstrate credibility

You are good at what you do. Your boss is even better. Your clients know that, but bringing in new business requires convincing new people that you have what they need. Starting a company blog and/or podcast, commenting on other sites such as forums and wikis, contributing to the body of social expertise that is being constantly updating and expanded are all ways to show people who you are and how you think. And chances are you offer services with which even long-standing clients aren’t familiar, which could lead to more business when they see what you publish.

What results can you expect?

People respond positively to increased customer service with responses to comments wherever they are, access to real representatives from a company not hiding behind phone banks, and direct timely expertise in the form of blogs and commentary. These are all tools that work together to deliver leads and expanded trusted networks.

As long as you consistently represent your brand and exercise full disclosure, people will remember where the information came from. It won’t happen overnight, but over time you will see benefits as people become more deeply aware of what you offer, whether or not you’ve done business yet. If you combine social media with traditional relationship building, you’ll increase the chances of earning their business.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

With billions of web pages out there, the web would be utterly useless without search engines and tools that help us label and categorize content to make it easier to find. This taxonomy breaks down into “meta data,” which is extra information that you attach to a piece of content to help describe it, and the content itself. A good example is a digital photograph. It’s likely that you usually only look at the photo itself, but your camera automatically attaches meta information such as date/time and perhaps location. New face recognition software makes it even easier to find that particular photo you’re looking for in your library of thousands.

What do categories, tags, and keywords all have in common? These are all tools we use to organize and classify information in order to make it easier for people to find when they need it. I’ll describe each below using this blog post as the consistent example to illustrate the differences.

I’m going to start with categories since they are the most intuitive. Categories are used to define general topics of interest related to a subject. You can see the Astek Blog categories listed to the right of this post. Categories serve two very useful functions when applied to blogs. 1) It helps the readers know at a quick glance the general topics being covered by the blog. 2) It helps the author(s) stay focused. Blogs are best when they are focused around a certain set of topics and this is an easy check to make sure the blog post is still on track. It is common to see something generic like “General” as the only category. While this can be applicable in some cases, it’s typically not an effective way to label your posts.

Categories are common in blogging software. You can typically define the categories you want to write about, and each time you write a post simply select the categories that apply to that post. If you find yourself commonly wanting to write about a category that isn’t in your list, go ahead and add it. Just remember to keep your list relatively short (fewer than ten) to make it easy on the reader. In this case, I used the following categories for this post:

Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

As it becomes easier and easier for anyone to create and distribute content of all types on the Internet, categories quickly start to become a fairly limited way to organize information. Enter tags, which have become popular in the past few years. While I recommend putting a limit on the number of categories you use, there is no practical limit the number of tags you can attach to your content. Any significant concept word that is related to your text is worth putting in as a tag.

Tags are single-word labels that you can add to as you go. A tag “word” might actually contain more than one word, but it’s important that the tag have no spaces for consistency. Whereas I felt limited to five related categories for this post, I assigned ALL of the following tags to describe the article I’m writing:

Tags: apple, astek, blog, bookmarking, categories, community, content, design, distribution, how-to, information, internet, keywords, Marketing, media, publishing, search, seo, sharing, social, socialmedia, tags, Technology, tip, tool, Web, web2.0, writing

To get an idea of all the specific areas we cover in the Astek Blog, check out our tag cloud:

Okay, that looks cool, but what does it mean? Notice how some of the words in the tag cloud are larger and bolder than others? Technology, Web, socialmedia, Entrepreneurship, etc. The more a single tag is used to describe each post on this blog, the larger and bolder that tag will become in the tag cloud. This makes it easy to see at a glance which topics are covered more than others, which gives readers a more detailed topical view of the blog content. Click on a tag to see all the posts related to that word or concept.

Tags emerged from social media. Delicious.com and Flickr.com were at the forefront of developing this technology a few years ago. Since then, tags have become the commonplace method of assigning labels to vast amounts of information to make it easy to find later. I recommend you sign up for a free account at Delicious.com to store all your web bookmarks in one location (great for accessing from various locations). There is also no better way to demonstrate how tags depend on the community to make sure people are using them consistently. When you bookmark a site in Delicious.com, the community suggests several tags that other people have used to describe that web site. Typically the community gets it right, which means you have to think less about what tags to use. It makes everything quicker and more reliable.

In the following example, I tried to bookmark Apple’s web site in Delicious. Since I had already bookmarked it, Delicious shows me all the tags I had already used (highlighted in gray boxes). However, since that was awhile ago, the community has applied many new tags to describe the site. All I have to do is click on the new tags I want to assign to the bookmark.

Then, when I want to find a particular web site, I can use tags to filter my bookmarks. In order to find Apple on my Delicious.com account, I might type the following tags:

Tags: computer hardware ipod

In that example Apple is the only site that has all three of those tags attached to it. If I remove the “ipod” tag, I get six results (including Apple) that are related to “computer hardware.” Go ahead and try it yourself.

In the blogosphere, prominent blog search engines like Technorati and blog authoring tools like WordPress collect tags from all the people who use these services. When you write a post on WordPress, it suggests tags that others have used based on the content you are writing. The more people consistently use tags to describe content, the easier it becomes to discover content that relates to other web sites. We’re moving away from meticulously crafting the taxonomy, and instead tossing it all in the bag. The trick is if we put a tag on everything on the way in, we’ll know where to grab it on the way out.

Last, but certainly not least, we have keywords. I’m going to save an in-depth discussion of search engines for another ePiphany, but keywords are used most heavily when using sites like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. to find specific content on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also called search engine marketing.

If you’ve stuck with me so far, you might be asking yourself what the difference between a keyword and a tag is. The key difference between the two is that tags are attached to content and keywords are IN the content itself. It’s a special combination of art and science to properly optimize a page on a web site. First we find the keywords that people are using to find that type of content, which is not always intuitive and requires research. Then we integrate these keywords directly into your content through strategic copy writing to allow search engines to find them contextually. The trick here is preserving the integrity of the authored material while making it searchable.

Gone are the days of loading up meta keywords behind the scenes and being done with it. A good SEO strategy requires consistent monitoring and tweaking.

A Few Things To Keep In Mind:

Pluralization and alternate forms are always a bit weird with tags. I usually just put both forms in. You never know if someone will search for “finance” or “financial” or “finances.”

Spelling is something common to all of these. A misspelled tag or keyword will result in the content potentially not coming up. Some people optimize for misspellings to grab some low hanging fruit (e.g., micorsoft).

There is common confusion about the “rules” of tagging. Particularly when you get into the semantics of multi-word phrases like “social media.” My advice is to use any variation of the tag you think is appropriate. In that case I would use “socialmedia,” “social,” and “media” as separate tags.

Feel free to post questions in the comments.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

I wrote recently about how easy it is to import your blog posts into Facebook. Though this still stands for those of you who write a blog by you and only you, for those of us who are a contributor to a blog with multiple authors, things get a little hairier. So I thought I would write out some simple to follow, step-by-step instructions.

If you follow my previous directions, the posts will come in with no authorship attributions, so it will appear as though you authored every post. In fact, it will show up in the news feed as “[Your Name] wrote [Blog Post Title]” even if you did not in fact write that particular blog post.

The Facebook import feature is so basic that there is really no way (that we found) to parse out an individual author. It took some doing, but we eventually figure out a way to import only the posts of a particular author into their Facebook profile using a service called FriendFeed.

Using FriendFeed (and some duct tape and a hammer) we followed the steps below to force a single author RSS feed we could use with Facebook.

1. Open a new FriendFeed account.
   • Skip the step asking you to “Find your friends“.
   • You should only use this FriendFeed (FF) account for the blog(s) you write that you want to import into Facebook. So if you’ve already got a FF account with a bunch of other stuff on it start a new one. If this is your first FF, start a second account if you want to use FF as it was originally intended.
2. Click ”Me“ in the left hand column (Red box in image below).




3. Click ”Blog (Green box in image above). You will come to this screen:



4. Enter your blog URL.

5. Select the box that says This blog has multiple authors.

6. Enter the ”author’s name“.
   • NOTE: For a WordPress Blog, this should be the name the author uses to sign in to write posts. For instance, my display name on the Astek Blog is Katie Hawkey, but my sign-in name is khawkey. No data was imported when I used Katie Hawkey, but khawkey works perfectly. 

7. Click ”Import Blog“.

8. Click the ”Feed“ tab and you should see your posts and only your posts in the feed like this:



9. Repeat steps 3-8 to add any other blogs you write for that you wish to appear in Facebook.
   • Since you will be named as the author of the post by Facebook you should only import blog contributions that you write.

10. Look for the RSS feed symbol at the bottom of the screen next to ”Other ways to read this feed:” (marked in image above with a red rectangle).

11. Right click on this and copy the link/shortcut. 

12. Log into Facebook and go to: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import.

13. Copy your RSS feed link into the field.

14. The last 4 letters of the URL will be “=atom”. Change this to read “=xml”. 

15. Accept the user agreement and click “Start Importing”.

16. Accept the imports and you are all set!

One drawback of doing it this way is that you will only get the titles and dates of your posts imported. On the plus side, each post will be marked with your Blog name which should increase awareness of your blog and the single link will hopefully drive traffic to your blog. You may want to go into your profile and add a Notes tab if you don’t already have one.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, General, Social Media, Technology, Web

So I’ve had this minor issue with my iPhone for the past year and a half. I have never been able to sync music from my music server and everything else (photos, contacts, calendars, applications, etc.) from my laptop. I use a separate music server, partially for storage capacity and backup, partially to have my entire library on a fixed server for streaming music throughout my home and syncing to all portable (iPod/iPhone) devices. This is a minor issue because I have plenty of access to my music on iPods and throughout my office and home. Generally I prefer not to consume my iPhone’s valuable battery with music playing, but I don’t use most of the storage space so I’d like to have some music on there just in case.

Apple baked the functionality for this into iTunes pretty near the launch of the original iPhone. My problem seemed to be that I had synced music from my laptop, then unchecked the box to remove the music in hopes I could mate this function to the music server. Every time I’d tried to do it in the past, I was faced with this message:

The main reason that I was timid about a reset was the large number of Notes on the iPhone that I didn’t want to risk losing. Apple STILL doesn’t sync notes (or tasks for that matter), which is really odd since they now have notes and tasks as parts of Mail in Leopard. Luckily, with solutions like Evernote and Mark/Space Missing Sync for iPhone and Notebook there are easy work-arounds. I’ve used the latter for iPhone note syncing for months and am gradually switching over to the web-based note system that is Evernote.

Since I finally got around to getting an iPhone 3G (was holding out for something new at MacWorld and I’ve recently discovered the bluetooth on my iPhone is not working correctly–I’d always blamed my Prius–sorry Lola), I thought this would be a good time to give it another shot.

After some futzing and re-syncing I was getting the same warning message. Since everything seemed to sync to the new phone (even notes, though applications were in a different order on the phone), I decided just to try the Erase and Sync on the music server as I’d been advised that the music server should be synced first. Rather than erasing the phone, it synced only the music to the iPhone, leaving everything else alone.

So the message was a false alarm and taking the leap of faith paid off. Your mileage may vary and I’m still not exactly sure whey I was caught in this weird music syncing limbo to begin with, but now everything seems fine.

Bottom line, if you are getting this message even after you’ve un-syncing music to the iPhone from your main computer, it MAY work to just go ahead and Erase and Sync. There are so many variables here, though, that you may also end up erasing all the other info on your iPhone. In this case, just sync the music computer first, then check everything OTHER than music on the main computer and it should work fine.

If you are trying to sync music from two different computers to one iPhone (e.g., laptop and music server), you should check out this guide from Andrew Grant at Shiny Things. It involves some light hacking, which I don’t think would be difficult for most users. It’s not necessary for me, so I’ll skip it. The greatest worry here is that some future version of iTunes will make the hack stop working or worse yet corrupt some settings you changed.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology