A few weeks ago I was interviewed about Astek by Alice Truong from Medill. She wanted to write a story focusing on how a small company like Astek gets through a tough recession. We’re very happy with the way it turned out, and encourage you to read on.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Web

The right CMS allows you to focus on your website content rather than the tools that run it. Numerous options meet the demands of countless websites. Astek designed Webany for you.

By now you should know why you need a CMS and how you can use a Content Management System to keep your website up to date. I wanted to share some tips about choosing the right CMS to make your Web life easier and more productive.

There are four basic types of CMS:

1. Open source applications that require configuration from a Web professional
2. Boxed desktop software that allow you to edit your website from one computer
3. “Boxed” hosted software that requires configuration from a Web professional
4. Hosted software as a service (SAAS) applications that relieve you from the burden of worrying about the backend

Here is some more info on each type of CMS to help you make the right decision:

1. Open source means that the code used to create the software is publicly available and takes advantage of a huge pool of resources (programmers) to develop. There are advantages and disadvantages to open source software. Since development is not regulated by a single entity, it also means that version-control isn’t 100% predictable or reliable. Typically this weighs on the side of advantage since there are a number of passionate, dedicated developers to fix problems that arise.

Open source developers create add-on modules or plug-ins to provide extended capabilities including forums, blog, wiki, web-stores, photo-galleries, contact-management, e-commerce, etc. It can be time-consuming to find the right plug-in, verify it works with your website and does what you need it to do, but chances are there is a solution out there for you. You will typically need to work with a developer to install, configure, and develop an open source CMS for you to use.

We like to use Wordpress for blogs, which is an open source CMS for publishing. For blogs it’s nearly perfect, but we find that for creating more complex websites it has some limitations that inspired us to create Webany.

2. You can purchase boxed CMS desktop software like you would a word processor and run it from your computer. Adobe Contribute is a fairly capable desktop-based CMS. Typically these are designed for one person to manage one or more websites from one computer. While they can sometimes handle multiple users, this gets expensive quickly since you have to purchase additional licenses of the software for each person.

Some boxed CMS products are far more expensive and do offer a greater array of features. These also require set-up from a knowledgeable professional and rarely work perfectly “out-of-the-box” as their packaging might suggest. Again, these products are usually not designed to handle highly complex websites like our solution.

3. There are a few “boxed” hosted solutions out there that are not open source, but may still offer a suitable range of options for your Web needs. These are “boxed” solutions in that they are purchased as a single license, but are not designed as do-it-yourself products. You will need the help of a Web developer to install and configure these products on your Web server, as well as train you to use them. Telerik’s Sitefinity is a good example.

4. That leaves us with SAAS or hosted Web CMS. These have a big advantage in saving you time and money with set-up since they are maintained by the company who provides the service, which means you don’t have to worry about it! Some hosted CMS’ have pre-made templates for you to use, and only a few allow you to use a custom design.

You may still need the skills of a Web professional, especially if you are custom-designing a website to match your brand and specific needs. Astek specializes in this type of development, but we were consistently disappointed with CMS solutions that sacrificed features for ease-of-use, or packed in so many features that that they became cumbersome to use. Rather than settle for another solution, we decided to make one that meets our ideal for a CMS.

Webany is just right. She offers more flexibility than you’re likely to need while maintaining an intuitive design that makes managing your website a snap. You can update anything from words to photos to movies to custom forms without any knowledge of HTML. Use a custom design from Astek or anyone else.

Most importantly, Webany makes sure that your updates won’t counteract the effort and money you put into creating a custom-tailored look and feel. Auto-archiving and user workflow ensure a painless approach to website maintenance.

If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us for a Webany demo.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Corporate blogs benefit greatly from a collaborative effort to produce and maintain. While it’s easy for anyone to start a personal blog in seconds, a company blog takes considerably more thought and planning to execute.

We are fortunate to have talented and engaged clients and want to highlight a couple of our most successful blog launches for The Alter Group and Bliss PR, which each benefit from multiple contributors. These projects engaged talented designers and thought leaders outside Astek who were essential to the end results. Both blogs run on custom installations of Wordpress.

Astek’s focus on helping our clients produce blogs over the past few years is especially rewarding since the client has so much influence over the life of the end product, which changes nearly daily.

Case Study #1
Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire blogs featuring podcasts
Business Focus: One of the nation’s preeminent corporate real estate development firms.
Blog Focus: Corporate Real Estate, Finance, Economy, Healthcare
Approx. Combined Monthly Visitors: 4,800+
Original launch: April 10, 2008
Redesign and ALTER+CARE Inspire launch: April 6, 2009
Featured in: Alltop.com

Astek worked closely with The Alter Group team over several months to hone the voice and focus of the blog, identify and train contributors on software, design the feature set needed, and deploy a flexible platform for growth. The initial budget was low to make sure appropriate resources could be committed consistently and to prove ROI before “going big.” Once the process and message proved stable, we engaged a designer to add the finishing touches that make the blog what it is today.

Dramatic color and imagery set Alter NOW apart from other blogs:

Consistent and careful use of relevant imagery in each article pulls the reader in:

The footer of each article features a ShareThis link for easy distribution across email and other web sites (important for viral growth to reach new readers), the author photo, name, relevant categories and tags, and a link to leave a comment, which invites readers to become part of the ongoing conversation blogs present. This article also features a link to the corresponding podcast on the subject.

The sidebar features easy subscription links, quick links to the podcasts, and prioritized standard blog features such as search and recent posts:

Both blogs are featured prominently on The Alter Group home page for easy access:

Case Study #2
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders blog
Business Focus: Business-to-business strategic media relations and marketing communications
Blog Focus: B2B marketing, public relations, professional services, financial services, and healthcare

Working with BlissPR to design and launch their blog was, well, blissful! They had been planning this launch for some time so the overall strategy and content development were in good shape. BlissPR primarily needed a partner to help with design, production, and blog deployment and integration strategy.

BlissPR wanted to integrate the new blog into their existing Web site, which presented a unique set of design opportunities and challenges. The new design features a prominent masthead for the blog with subscription links and a search box. Each article on the home page is clearly delineated with a green title bar, photo of the author, and crafted abstract leading to the full story. The “Share” link has plenty of room to breathe, highlighting the importance of this word of mouth feature.

The side bar focuses on the people behind the blog to provide context to visitors. A brief description of BlissPR is immediately followed by photos linking to bios of all the authors. This is a great way to add personality to your blog. The sidebar is followed by standard blog elements like tag cloud and recent posts.

We’re very proud of our clients’ ongoing success with these publications. Please check them out and remember to leave a comment!

Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders

Here’s a succinct list of five things you can do to improve your corporate blog. The three blogs featured above stand as testimony to these recommended tactics.

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

I’m typically skeptical of new whiz-bang Web sites, tools, and features that set out to “change the way we work” until I’ve actually seen the benefit. Google Wave seeks to do just that. Rather than piling on one more piece of technology or layer of abstraction, they cleared the slate by asking, “How should all of this work?” rather than, “How could what exists be better?”

I’m intrigued because I’ve been having a lot of the same thoughts and discussions lately. Email has existed more or less the same way for well over a decade. People have built new interfaces, ways to tie conversation threads together, and new free services, but fundamentally the idea of sending messages with attachments back and forth in a time-shifted manner is the same.

Google Wave seeks to reinvent real-time interaction and collaboration by treating these interactions in a centralized, consistent manner. This makes sense to me. The more applications we layer on and rave about being “the new thing” (Twitter comes to mind), the more fragmented our communication becomes.

Google Wave may or may not be the answer, or it may just be a step in the right direction. At a glance it seems to be trying to solve something that’s been nagging me for awhile. We are so focused on the tools, we often lose sight of what we are trying to communicate and the value contained therein. At the end of the day, what matters is that we want to share ideas and messages with people who will find them relevant in the most efficient manner possible, no matter when or where they happen. If we’re developing a global hive mentality through our communication technology, it will depend on messages seamlessly interacting across mediums, languages, locations, and context. This is a lofty goal, but it’s one worth shooting for.

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

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.

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

As much as I’m enamored by the potential of all the new social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, it’s important to reflect on the one technology that still ties many of these others together. Email, or electronic messaging, has been around in some form for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that standards began to tie together the various systems that had evolved. The 90s saw a sharp increase in usage with ISP’s like AOL getting into the game. Universities have always led the effort as well.

We take it for granted most of the time. Everyone has an email account these days, or at least everyone with an Internet connection, but we’ll talk digital divide another time. The point is that I don’t see email going away anytime soon. Even as new social media sites pop up, I still generally use my email accounts to keep track of all the updates and messages. Nothing compares to email in terms of being able to ignite a word of mouth campaign and empower someone to send direct trusted messages to their network.

In terms of generating a message that resonates with people, we can all take a cue from the Obama team, which managed to keep 13 million subscribers even after the campaign was over. It’s a delicate balance of appropriate messaging and respect for people’s cluttered inboxes and busy lives.

Is it safe? Generally, yes. But it’s important to remember that email is unencrypted and therefore anyone who intercepts it (or has access to one of the many servers your message passes through) could read your mail. There are tools that help you protect your email, but until everyone adopts a new system, we won’t be able to reliably call email “safe.” For now, it’s best just not to send anything through email that’s sensitive. If you must, create a password-protected PDF for the information and attach it to an email.

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

If you’re curious about journalism entering the virtual age, this is worth a watch:

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

And it’s a good thing. Since the newspaper industry, much like the music industry, resisted the Internet rather than embracing it, they shot themselves in the foot. Rather than proactively identifying opportunities they missed the boat entirely and are now suffering badly. Reminds me a bit of how Kodak could have OWNED digital photography if they had a bit of vision a few years ago. Instead they are playing catch-up, too.

In the newspaper’s race to play catch-up, they started giving it all away for free since that was the culture. We all grew up on a free Internet (I even remember when we used to think there would be no ads. HA) and that is being threatened in various ways.

The opportunity now is for newspaper’s to collectively demonstrate their worth by asking people to pay for the content they provide. Everything business has to do this, they have just been around so long they took their status and distribution model for granted.

I’ve been a little hard on mainstream media and probably sound like I want social media (blogs, etc.) to replace it. That’s not quite right. I believe they are complementary and both necessary. We need in-depth reporting and someone who can afford to put a correspondent in Iraq. We also need citizen journalists who are not influenced as directly by big business.

Here is a good explanation of why media must charge for web content. I think the key to pricing lies in micropayments, which use new technology to charge a very small amount of money (cents not dollars) for each piece of material you consume rather than paying full price for a newspaper you only read part of anyway. We just need to find a way to make it work on a small, local level.

Read this great article describing some real world ramifications of a future without mainstream journalism from The Atlantic. Kinda scary.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, General, 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.

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

Amazon launched an iPhone app for the Kindle. This seems to position them more firmly in the eBook distribution category than eReader manufacturer. Of course the Kindle is still the better reading experience for a long period of time thanks to its E Ink screen, but I could see them opening up the store to all kinds of devices, even competing eReaders. I was a little gun shy about buying eBooks due to the limited device compatibility, but this makes it easy to access my Kindle library from either device. Cool.

In other Kindle-related news, McGraw-Hill is piloting a program with Northwest Missouri State University to bring textbooks to students via eBooks, which could save the both school and students a substantial amount of money.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Social Media, Technology, Web