No, I’m not talking about Google being talked up in the news, blogosphere, or twittersphere.  Although I do think Google’s new Buzz concept is newsworthy.  I haven’t really caught any “little b“ buzz about it except within ”big B“ Buzz itself (although there are some news articles to be found about it).  Buzz is Google’s answer to Twitter and Facebook’s news feed.  I’m a longtime GMail user, so I saw it when it rolled out to most users yesterday.  I guess I did see one tweet and one GChat status about it when it apparently soft launched on Tuesday, which had me investigating in advance.

It was interesting yesterday to see people experimenting and wondering what it was all about, through the Buzz interface itself.  It’s apparently not totally intuitive for everyone.  I generally like it and get it though, and I’m not the only one.  There was a lot of people posing questions or concerns through Buzz status updates, and other folk responding back about how they thought things worked and made sense.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web

People have been serving customers in “real time” ever since there have been customers. So this is not a new concept. In fact, we’re using technology to correct a problem that technology introduced–distance between company and customer.

If someone walks into your store with a problem, you fix it immediately. If a customer calls you on the phone, you talk to them (hopefully) immediately. But what if someone posts something negative about you on Twitter or to an Internet Forum? What then?

Real time search allows you to monitor those types of interactions, complaints, and complements. It’s still your responsibility to respond, but the time needed to find such messages has been greatly reduced.

The lines between marketing and customer service are blurring. Quickly responding to someone on their own turf in a respectful manner has potential not only to set them straight, but also increase the likelihood they will tell other people about your remarkable effort to make it right. And your public response will serve as a permanent record for anyone else who sees the comment.

Twitter is currently the primary source of real time content, but expect others to get on board quickly. Twitter’s success has driven the major search engines to add real time search features to their products. But Twitter still manages the majority of real time traffic, so you can use Twitter’s built-in search engine as a place to hear what people are saying about you. Otherwise, expect popular online listening tools to start accommodating real time search in the near future.

This certainly won’t pre-empt any traditional forms of customer service, but people are out there talking about you online one way or another. You’ll be better off if you’re aware of it, since it’s not just going to go away on it’s own. At the end of the day, you should view this as an opportunity to serve people better.

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

Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Google is getting smarter and scarier all the time.  Now inserted at the top of regular search results you can find the “latest search results”.  Tweets, news, and Elvis sightings that someone might have posted even seconds ago.

To see it in action put in a Google search for: Coke, or Ford, or even Elvis Presley Lives. Then click “show options”, a new series of “options” will populate the left rail. Scroll down to “Any Time”, and click “Latest”.  A new page will load of all the latest stuff. And if it’s hot it you will start to see the news scroll by. And when aren’t Elvis sightings hot news!?

From an SEO perspective it’s a way to watch the conversation on Google and participate in real time. Twitter is probably the fastest way to get into the stream and make some noise if you choose.

Google put together a video on the new search feature. If you want more click the start button on the embedded video below.

Happy Birthday Elvis!

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Tom Lynch Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story, google

Before we start, a quick note about Wordpress.COM verses Wordpress.ORG – there is a big difference:

Wordpress.com benefits:

• Free, hosted service
• Easiest, fastest, cheapest way to set up a blog
• Ideal for an individual wanting to try out non-monetized blogging

Wordpress.com drawbacks:

• Very limited customization options – You must upgrade to a paid subscription even to change the font colors
• Even with paid subscription, customization is limited
• URL will always display as http://yourblog.wordpress.com
• Limited Widgets and no plugins

To get branded, custom templates and to take advantage of all the amazing, free Wordpress plugins out there, you need to set up a Wordpress.org blog – this requires some programing skills and access to FTP. For anyone wanting to start a blog for their business, we suggest contacting a professional web company (like Astek!) who can make sure your blog set up is done right.

Ok, now that that is cleared up, here are Katie’s 8 easy tips for a strong start to a personal blog on Wordpress.com:

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, How To, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web

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

Disclaimers up front: This is just me – I haven’t heard anything remotely “official,” but I’d just like to call it right now so that I can point back to this blog post and yell “I told you so.”

My prediction – Facebook is about to put some heavy restrictions on Event invitations.

I don’t know about you, but I get about 6-10 invites a day – about 90% of them the equivalent of spam or non-events (“You are invited to the event Donate to my favorite charity” or my personal favorite… “I lost my phone so send me your phone number! Will you attend this event? Yes/No/Maybe”). This is a complaint about Facebook I am hearing more and more.

Facebook grew to its #1 status and has held onto it for years by not falling victim to the mistakes of MySpace and others – it did not become the playground for spammers and weirdos. Almost every post in my news feed these days is stuff I care about – Since the last major up date to the News Feed I hardly even see those annoying quizzes anymore. The same cannot be said for the “invitations” I receive to “events.”

The problem is that individuals and Fan Pages have figured out that event invites are one of the only ways to get a message right to the inbox your entire friend (or fan) list. Regular messages have restrictions of 20 carbon copies. It’s not unusual for FB users to have hundreds of friends. This is resulting in people (myself included) “inviting” people to non-events just as a way to send a mass email to all your Facebook friends.

Too much abuse of this “privilege” and Facebook is going to do what it has always done, restrict, filter or otherwise stop those who attempt to game the system – most likely without warning. And even if it makes my job as a Social Media marketer a little more difficult, I can’t say that I will be sorry to see them do it. Making changes like that is what keeps Facebook a vibrant social networking site and fertile social media marketing ground!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web

An open letter from Mark Zuckerberg posted on the Facebook blog last night announces some important changes to privacy settings on Facebook:

• Facebook will be removing regional networks
• Facebook will allow you to set privacy settings on “each individual piece of content you create or upload”
• “In the next couple of weeks” you’ll be prompted to review and update your privacy settings.

Whether you use Facebook for business or strictly limit your “friends,” privacy settings are an important part of managing your online reputation. When you see the prompt from Facebook to “review and update” your privacy settings, take the time to consider how your Facebook content will impact your professional reputation and adjust your privacy settings to appropriately protect or promote yourself.

Mark’s letter can be found here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=190423927130

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web

My daily “SmartBrief on Social Media” is always a wealth of fun facts like this one today:

“Twitter” was the most commonly used English word in 2009, according to the Global Language Monitor, followed by “Obama,” “H1N1,” “stimulus” and “vampire.”

Full story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10405994-93.html

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Social Media, 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