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.
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!
A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!
While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.
I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”
She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”
We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.
I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.
Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.
As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.
I have never been able to get into Digg or any of the other sharable interest-tracking type tools. This weekend I heard Pinterest mentioned to me at least 8 times so I figured I finally needed to check it out. What a FANTASTIC tool!
Pinterest is a service that allows you to create online “Pinboards” for things you are interested in. Looking for new curtains for your living room? Create a “Living Room Curtains” pinboard and each time you find one you like, “Pin it” from an easy button you can drag and drop into your browser tool bar. Afterwards you can go back to your board to view everything you pinned, make your final choice and follow the photo back to the original page.
When you create an account you can easily find your Facebook and/or Twitter friends and identify categories of stuff you are interested in (DIY/Crafts, Home Decor, Photography, etc.) and you will see the pins from prominent pinners in these categories.
This is a very easy site to use. I suggest you request an invite today! You will be glad you did!
Not all of your online interactions with your customers happen on your website. Emails, social media, mobile – there are a plethora of ways you connect and more being invented all the time. Luckily, there are a wide range of analytics tools out there that make tracking
! Today, I’m going to cover two of these tools: one that is quick, easy and free and one that is full featured at a reasonable cost.
Bitly Bitly is a URL shortener tool that also shows you excellent analytics about how your link is used. You can get a LOT of information from this awesome, free tool.
Let’s say you are having a sale or special on your website and you want to distribute a link via a regular email and on Facebook and on Twitter. But if you just start sending people to your homepage, you won’t know if they are coming because they were going to come anyway or because they saw you promoting your sale. Create a Bitly link using their URL shortener and always use the Bitly link when talking about your sale. Then after the sale is finished, you can log into Bitly and see how effective your promotions were!
Using the Referrers Detail, you can see who came in from each website or social media platform you distributed the link on. The “direct” refers would be ones that came from emails. You can also see when people were clicking and where the people who clicked are located.
Bitly also plays nice with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Webtrends, as well as social media management platforms such as…
Sprout Social Sprout Social is a full bodied social media management tool with excellent built-in analytics that allow you to view your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Analytics from one, beautiful interface. They also offer additional social media management tools like integrated feeds from multiple accounts, smart search to find new customers, contact management to track communication history, and a powerful scheduler tool. Accounts start as low as $9/mo.
Social media was created by individuals for individuals. Let’s make that clear up front. As far as businesses are concerned, they have done some fantastic things with social media to connect with their client base via customer service, engagement, charity, or just seeming “cool”. The businesses who have done this well are looked upon as models to other businesses to the point of some saying, “We need to do what they did and we’ll be successful!” I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not necessarily true.
If you are a business and say, “We need to be social.” I ask you this: “Why?” Granted, social media is fun. I would tweet all day if I wanted to! But so many businesses start with feeling they need to get on specific platforms – mainly Facebook and Twitter. However, as a business, you may not be appropriate for social media. In the financial sector, most companies only allow their personnel to be on LinkedIn. You may run a manufacturing facility – not sure if Facebook is really the best platform for you.
So before you get all platform-crazy and want to be on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+…. take a step back and answer the question, why do you want to be on social media? What is the business goal here? Most of the time, it’s to gain more clients and increase business. Or it’s to engage with existing clients and maintain them. Or it’s to just know everything that’s being said about you and your competitors to gauge where the market is going so you can model marketing plans around the consumer voice. Whatever it is, figure it out. Then we can talk about platforms.
Now, the next huge debacle – do you have the resources to manage these presences? If you want to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you better make sure you have a plan on who is going to be creating that content and when. And whoever is responsible, make sure that person or group of people is knowledgeable on appropriate community management skills.
Does the person running your social media communication know that there should be a generic company Facebook profile (i.e. mine is Rachel at Astek) to manage your company Facebook page so his/her personal profile is kept personal? Does he/she know that the you should always have more people following you on Twitter than you following – and that you actually need to engage on Twitter at least 12-15 times a day (and those are in conversations, not just status updates)? And finally, whoever is managing your social media presence, does he/she call him/herself an expert? If so, find someone else!
The term “expert” in social media land is almost the equivalent of a four-letter word. Those of us who make our careers off of social media and innovative technologies know that whatever we do know, there is twice as much stuff that we don’t know. Pride is not a good feature in a community manager. Make sure this person is innovative, creative, and always reading and trying to learn on what’s going out there in that scary land many call a “cloud”. For example, Google+ brand pages are just around the corner. Do you have a plan in place for when that happens – whether that plan includes engaging in that platform or focusing on something else?
Now we enter into that precarious zone of agency management. Many businesses stat that they want to be active on social media but don’t have the time. So they want someone to do it for them. And no, don’t hire an intern to manage your social media. Going back the qualifications of a community manger, you need to make sure that a certain skill set is present in this individual – plus you need to make sure he/she knows your brand, is trustworthy in protecting and representing it, and if he/she leaves, you’re not left going, “Now what?”
Therefore, if you do hire an agency or someone externally to help you launch a social media presence, fantastic! Have at it! But I would strongly suggest that messaging and content creation come from someone internally, and just have the agency train you on appropriate messaging and to set expectation on what level of engagement is realist for the company to maintain. Because if the agency can send out 15 tweets a day, that’s great, but if your internal bandwidth is only 5 per day, then you have a problem. It is perfectly reasonable to hire an agency to take over social discussions on a one-off basis such as for an event, conference, Twitter chat, etc. But full-time ownership should be created internally unless that agency is almost grandfathered into your business or if they give you a clear exit strategy so you know how to keep up with the presence they created for you after they’ve left to go to the next client.
Social media is not a buzzword, and it is and will continue to grow into being vital for business successes. You should not ignore it, but just like any other business decision, make sure you have a plan on how to use it and why you are using it in the first place. Have questions? Do you have good examples/case studies? Please share as we easily could’ve missed it on our Twitter feed!
An old college friend who avoids social networks addressed an intriguing problem recently:
“I’ve just decided what it is I don’t like about Social Networking… it’s the idea that it, when push comes to shove, my people can bury your people… Please, tell me I’m wrong, that the end result doesn’t allow those with the most connections to dominate society further for their own benefit at the expense of those with the fewest connections. Much like the rich vs. the poor struggles of yesteryear, only now we can rise above money – look, it’s purely about fame and how well you’re liked.”
As an indirect middle finger to bullies of the past who gained advantage by physical body size, bullies in the social networking world are often the geeks! One of the reasons people are racing to Google+ is that it’s easier and more natural to organize friend groups based on the way humans naturally organize themselves rather than feeling like you’re a database admin trying to maximize the efficiency of a friend database.
Somewhere deep within Facebook are the tools and settings to make sure the people you care about show up before the “bullies.” Also, perceptions are skewed when Facebook’s algorithm tends to give people exposure simply for talking more rather than saying something you’d necessarily care about. Google+ Circles seem to move this in the right direction by making it easier and more intuitive to share certain info with specific groups.
I’m not 100% sold on Google generally, as it often behaves as one of the biggest bullies out there. I think all of this is perhaps the greatest social experiments we’ve ever witnessed, certainly the most public. And like all things, once our fascination with the technology wears off we can just get back to being people. Until then, I agree that human nature seems only to fight against the true potential of this technology: to bring us together and make people more efficient and benevolent. It unfortunately tends to provoke paranoia, greed, and ego as well.
Humans and other primates are intoxicated by celebrity. Social media has elevated many of us to a level of semi-celebrity, but still lends power to those with means and connections above the masses. I’m not sure this will ever change, as I do believe it’s part of our very nature, for better or worse. I share the dream of technology enabling collective good, but feel that we are quite far from fully realizing it.
Are you on Google+ yet? What people are calling “Google’s take on Facebook” is already at 10 million users in the first few weeks of its full release. After digging into it myself, I have to say I’m really liking it. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of Facebook. That doesn’t mean I’m not on it, but I primarily use it as feed for people to see all the articles I write and stuff I post, etc. As for status updates and conversation – I leave that to Twitter.
Let’s start with the basics. You can create a Google+ account by going to plus.google.com. There you set up your profile which basically takes the place of your existing Google profile if you already have one. I set mine up similarly to my LinkedIn Profile actually, considering that not only can you find people to connect with through your address book, but also by searching for keywords. So for my ‘headline’ I entered in the keywords that apply to my industry and my interests in general.
As soon as I added all my web profile links and synched my contacts, it was time to start playing with Circles. Yes, Circles. Instead of putting your friends in a series of lists, Google+ has you put your contacts into different circles. They have the basic defaults of Friends, Family, etc., but you can also create your own. For example, I created a Social Media / Digital circle. I also created circles for different Twitter groups I’m involved in, a circle for my blog, a circle on fashion, etc. etc. Then when you are on the home page of Google+, you will see a stream of updates from people in your circles (very similar to your Facebook Wall). What’s really cool though is that you can select which circles you want to view, and when you update your own status, not only can you tag an individual but you can also only share it with that one person (again, ONLY that one person) or with just a select circle or two. And if you add someone to a circle who’s not on Google+, they will get an email from your account so they can still see the information you want to share with them!
The privacy settings are very well-tuned on Google+ versus both Twitter and Facebook. However for those of us who have 1,000+ pictures on their Facebook profiles, never fear, there’s a plug-in for that! If you use the Chrome browser, you can download the plug-in, Move2Picasa, and move all of your Facebook photos or just a few selected ones into your Picasa and/or Google+ account! Mine transferred with the click of a button!
There’s also a sort of ‘newsy’ portion of Google+ that I equate to either the LinkedIn news and headlines and also some Twitter lists you can make or even categories in your Flipboard iPad app. Instead, Google+ calls them Sparks. Sparks provides you with topics of interest that you can follow and glean from based on whatever topic you decide to follow.
And probably one of my favorite functions of Google+ is their Hangout platform. By starting a Hangout, you can actually video chat with up to ten people at a time, and see each person as sort of thumbnails on your computer stream. Talk about taking Skype to a whole new level!
On the mobile side (this is one instance I’m so happy I have a Droid vs. an iPhone besides the Google Maps turn by turn directions), the Google+ app features a GroupMe type quality with its Huddles function, which is essentially group texting to members of your circle. Definitely ideal when coordinating with a group of individuals.
There are many other features to Google+ including some shortcuts, typing tricks and even plug-ins to create your own Google+ vanity URL! For lots more tips and tricks, check out this handy topic guide via Mashable.
How are you using Google+? Thoughts? Ideas? Let’s compare notes!
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 | 
And probably one of my favorite functions of Google+ is their Hangout platform. By starting a Hangout, you can actually video chat with up to ten people at a time, and see each person as sort of thumbnails on your computer stream. Talk about taking Skype to a whole new level!
