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.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

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.

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

Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet? Sign up!

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

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

There has been a lot of discussion recently about URL shorteners, which have exploded in popularity due to the limited character count in Twitter (140 characters). Rather than wasting precious message space sharing a long URL, turn it into a small one that redirects people to the proper place.

TinyURL was the most prominent one initially, but many have sprung up, each offering various services and features. The allure is being able to track the specific URL that you created, which means that you can track your social influence by seeing who passes on your version of the particular link.

Bit.ly is one that does a good job of providing metrics and analysis to help you figure out where your link has travelled, but Digg.com is getting into the game. They have devised an elegant approach where you simply put a URL after “http://digg.com/” and it automatically turns it into a shortened URL, displays the site you linked, and a toolbar across the top with more options. Try it out:

http://digg.com/astekblog.com

URL shortening doesn’t come without implications for the structure of hyperlinks, which still rule the Web roost. Adding one more layer of interpretation has the potential to slow things down, cause more errors, or just complicate the system. Additionally, you should be aware that search engines place a substantial amount of weight on the keywords that you have in your URL, so if you are relying on inbound links (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth considering that search engines will not count these shortened URL’s in the same way as the permalinks you’ve worked so hard to optimize. For example, notice the category and title keywords in the URL for this blog:

http://www.astekblog.com/index.php/marketing/try-diggcom-for-url-shortening/

I see URL status moving in two directions, which should each be considered and used appropriately. 1) Permalinks (links that search engines see and won’t change like the one above) will continue to be essential in creating and classifying content on web sites. We will use search engines to reach these links. 2) In the social sharing world, shortened URL’s will gain more popularity as people start tracking their individual influence. It’s natural for Digg to get on this bandwagon since the entire point of Digg was to give people credit for “digging” URL’s, sharing them and gaining notoriety for finding cool things. Perhaps one or the other will win out. If it’s the latter, then sites will need to start building this social tracking capability directly into the permalinks themselves, which must be short enough to share.

It’s not going to take long for monetization to enter this game, where people receive more than social currency for initiating a link chain. One’s social network will become an even more valuable tool as advertisers begin to see the value of tracking recommendations amongst individual people. These recommendations will be more directly attributed to sales, which gives companies incentives to offer cash compensation or commissions to people who did the referring.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

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

The point is well taken, if with a grain:

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, 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 

 Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet?  Sign up! 

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

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

Okay, most of them are on MySpace, too. But I’m not over there much these days. Some great apps to check out in this round-up, including a Snood-equivalent time-sucker called Bubble Town, some gorgeous Facebook art, and a SUPER addictive word game called Twirl. Well, if you’re into words.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

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

I was trying to share seven photos (22MB) with some family from a recent trip to Austin, TX. This is just slightly beyond the capacity of most email systems, so we need to look at other ways of sharing the photos. I didn’t really feel like posting them on a public photo sharing site like Flickr or even MobileMe. Since I know that the recipients are also Mac users, it seems like a perfect time to use the Public folder on my iDisk. Seems…

It took me several years to join .Mac (now MobileMe) as it was always one major feature short of being worth it. The photo gallery automation with iPhoto (part of Apple’s iLife suite) is fantastic. The automated backup is okay. The iDisk has been disappointing. It’s sluggish compared to FTP. And the ease-of-use that should accompany a solution built into the desktop is compromised by the non-responsiveness of the folder. To a user, it needs to behave nearly identically to other folders or you’d better make it look like something else so they don’t have unrealistic expectations.

One of the inherent issues with networked file servers is that of file permissions. This pertains to which users have access to the files at all. But it also relates to whether or not computers on the network think the file is in use. If another user is accessing the file, it won’t “release” it to another user. The problem is when a user is done with the file, or has logged of the network, or whose computer has crashed. Sometimes the file isn’t properly released for use.

Last night I was having a slew of issues uploading these seven photos. Access denied, copy aborted, etc. Eventually it just hung with a Finder status bar until it actually crashed the Finder altogether. I logged back in this morning, rebooted the machine a couple of times. Only on the second reboot was I able to delete the half-uploaded folders and finally upload the new complete folder without error. What a pain!

I’ve been experimenting with using MobileMe for offsite backups as well. So far, I’m not impressed with the inefficiency of zipping up all your files for upload every time a backup is scheduled rather than only uploading files that have changed since the last backup.

I’m on a MacBook Pro with the latest version of Leopard. 4GB of RAM. Shouldn’t be having these issues. Am I alone? I’m really hoping I just hit Apple at peak load time (makes sense right before Christmas).

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Technology