Users Trusted LA Times Over TMZ
I posted a personal rant the other day about how TMZ broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death way before a lot of the network news outlets did. One of my blog readers Simon Owens sent me a note that I found interesting today on Facebook, here’s an excerpt from his blog post:
TMZ has received a fair amount of coverage over the last few days for being first to break the news of Michael Jackson’s death, beating both the LA Times and CNN (which waited until the LA Times confirmed the death to report on it). But as a blog post in the LA Times pointed out today, sometimes it’s more important to confirm a fact than be the first to report it.
I will be the first to admit that there is something to be said about credibility and caution when it comes to journalism and reporting. The thing that I have learned about getting my news via the web or social media (Twitter and Facebook) is that you have to first consider the source. In the case of Twitter, you can just ask Jeff Goldblum or Britney Spears, who were recently rumored to have died, you have to consider the source. Before retweeting or sharing anything I hear on Twitter with my friends or co-workers I always run it through Google News to see if there are any other headlines out there from credible sources to substantiate the story. Usually traditional media will pick up the stories and report them within an hour or so if there is any truth to them, if not I dismiss the story as rumor.
I guess the point that I am trying to make is that I basically get my news from a variety of sources online but usually the first source for breaking news for me is via Twitter, but before it actually becomes factual news in my mind that I am willing to share, I have to also see it being reported by another credible news outlet.
Here’s an excerpt from the LA Times that Simon pointed out on his blog that brings up a good point:
Has technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship — and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts.
Network News Needs an Enema!
This past Thursday was a huge news day, we started the morning with more details coming in from the mysterious runaway governor scandal and there were even had a few fresh glimpses into what’s going on in Iran too. A short while later we learned that Farrah Fawcett had passed away…
Just when we were all able to get the image of Farrah’s famous poster from the 70’s out of our heads and finally return to work we started seeing reports that Michael Jackson was dead on Twitter. Knowing what I know about social media, I knew not to buy into the story that he was dead just because I saw it on Twitter, but after about an hour or so I noticed the volume of traffic on Twitter and Facebook spike dramatically and there was no one questioning the legitimacy of the story. Usually when a rumor breaks on the social networks, if it’s not true, it’s squashed or tagged “FAKE” pretty quickly, and I didn’t see anyone disputing the news.
I quickly flipped over to CNN to see what they were reporting, they said that he had been rushed to the hospital, flipped over to Fox, same thing. I pulled up my favorite tabloid website TMZ and I was shocked to see that they were also reporting his death. I just assumed that if TMZ and Twitter were both reporting his death that CNN and Fox were soon to follow so I watched for a little while and what I witnessed amazed me…
Both networks, obviously trying to adhere to some code of responsible journalism or something like that, didn’t confirm his death until an hour or two later. I wasn’t the only one that noticed this either, several people on Twitter mentioned that it looked like CNN and Fox were doing everything they could to keep from saying that he was dead. Now before you get the wrong idea, I understand the responsibilities that a news agency has to adhere to, and I understand responsible journalism and accurate reporting, I get it. As I sat there and witnessed Harvey Levin’s brainchild, TMZ, beat two of the most powerful news networks in the world to the scoop on possibly the biggest news story of the year by a couple of hours I realized something…
If Network News doesn’t learn to incorporate social media into their reporting a lot better, people are going to stop looking to them first. A simple disclaimer like, “this is unsubstantiated, but according to the social networks, Michael Jackson has died”, and I honestly thing that could have helped them save face. I know that CNN has done a great job embracing social media, but it blows my mind how they danced around announcing that he was dead. Fox News is a distant second in embracing social media, in my opinion, but I honestly thought CNN missed an opportunity to shine on this one. Eventually CNN did mention that some other news outlets were reporting that he was dead, but they could have just checked Twitter two hours earlier and reported, “okay, half the world is on Twitter right now reporting Michael Jackson is dead” and saved face…
Stephen Wolfram Discusses Wolfram Alpha
In my spare time I have found myself playing around with Wolfram Alpha a lot, it’s an addictive toy in that it is probably the only computational knowledge engine or database of it’s kind on the web right now. The guy behind the project Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research and has participated in a wide variety of projects in the past including Mathematica.
One thing that I have found playing around with Wolfram is that it’s an extremely intelligent application. Here’s an example based on an instance where I used the application this morning. I was curious as to what the population was for Jacksonville, Arkansas. I went to Wolfram and typed in Jacksonville (without the Arkansas) and within seconds the application returned to me key facts about Jacksonville, Arkansas. I just knew in the back of my mind that it was going to return Jacksonville, Florida because of it being a larger city, but it didn’t. I got to thinking to myself how it knew what I was thinking when I didn’t express my search query more specifically. Obviously it used my IP Address to determine that I was in Arkansas and it pulled up Jacksonville, Arkansas instead. How cool is that? I really, really like this.
If you haven’t checked out Wolfram Alpha yet, I recommend it. It’s probably one of the most impressive things I have seen in a while. I found a video that was posted a few weeks back where Stephen Wolfram was talking about the Wolfram Alpha project to a group at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. I am impressed with this guy and the work that he is doing…
Stephen Wolfram’s Sneak Preview of Wolfram|Alpha on Vimeo
Every Company Needs a Blog…
I deal with a lot of clients today that have been with me since I got into this industry almost a decade ago, and for the most part my partners and I have had a hand in developing every aspect of their web presence from the bottom up so when they see their competitors launching these things called “blogs” they naturally reach out to us for advice as to whether they need one or not. My answer 90% of the time is yes, and here is my reasoning…
Your corporate website is what it is, it’s a great resource for information about your company, products & services, etc., but a blog can bring so much more to the table. A blog is a lot more personable and interactive in my opinion, and in a lot of ways it should be viewed as a direct link between you and your consumers where they also have the opportunity to communicate their needs or perspectives on your posts. This can be extremely valuable not only in making sales but also in improving your product or service offerings.
A lot of the companies that my partners and I work with on a daily basis have blogs, and for the most part I subscribe to each of them if for no other reason than to stay in the loop with what’s going on within their organization, but it has also helped me to find additional products and services offered by these providers that are well suited for our company.
If your company isn’t providing a blog right now, you could be missing out on establishing a much closer relationship with your existing clients as well as reaching new ones. One misconception we run into is that given the fact that some organizations we have worked with might already have 20 or 30 thousand dollars already tied into their web presence, they instinctively think that adding more functionality to their site is going to be expensive, and that could not be further from the truth. Adding a blog to your existing web presence is extremely cost effective and can possibly have a larger return than any other component of your web presence if it is managed correctly…
For more information about adding a blog to your corporate or business website, please don’t hesitate to contact my partners and I for a free consultation, click here.
#militarymon Tribute Video…
Carson Daly has been promoting something pretty cool on Twitter for a while now called Military Monday’s (#militarymon) and I wanted to first publicly thank him for such a cool idea. Military Monday brings attention to our US Troops that are still in service in various parts of the world. I have had a lot of fun tagging along and retweeting the names of these guys that are on the front lines, and have even gotten some thank-you’s back from a few of them, and I quickly respond thanking them instead for what they are doing.
Well, today, instead of listing a group of military folks that are in service that could use our support via Twitter, I figured i would send them a music video instead from one of my favorite groups of all-time, Everlast. Not only is this a great song, but it also paints a very common picture. It’s been out a while, but If you haven’t seen it yet here ya go… (…and please stop what you are doing and say a quick prayer right now for those who are so bravely fighting on our behalf so far from home.).
Project Management w/ Basecamp for Web Developers
Now that Pleth has 3 locations (Batesville, Conway, and Jonesboro) being able to manage multiple projects at the same time has grown way past the enormous whiteboard at our Batesville office, and being somewhat OCD, I have always looked at a whiteboard in my office as more of a hindrance than a help anyway. In the past our internal project management has always been up to whoever was heading up a project. Each one of us have our own unique way of management. I am a strong Outlook user and have used Tasks to manage projects that I had going on in the past but my partners have always relied on their whiteboard pretty heavily. We have also used a pretty robust intranet solution from Vialect (which I also highly recommend) to store our client proposals, track hourly time, etc.
A few times in the past I have collaborated or freelanced with other companies on various projects and on a few occasions I have had the opportunity to use Basecamp before, so it was totally unfamiliar to me when we first started using it this past week. Our reasoning for using it was we have found ourselves collaborated with a few outside agencies and providers that we partner with from time to time on projects and it was more or less their recommendation. Being a minimum of 2 hours away from the rest of my team I am open to anything that will help us collaborate better on projects. I am also a big fan on archiving past work, I literally have every file I have ever coded or created for a client since I got into this business about 10 years ago. Basecamp has some excellent archival methods built in, which is pretty cool, but here are some of the things that I am really getting hooked on…
- Universal – Odds are that when we involve freelancers in the future on projects they will already be familiar with Basecamp because it is extremely popular within our industry. Even though it is a really straightforward solution, it’s nice to know that we don’t have to spend that extra hour of time getting someone up to speed on our system.
- Customizable! I have no idea why this is as important for me, but it is. As I mentioned earlier, I am a bit OCD when it comes to tools and things I work with and for me, just being able to work inside a clean, well laid out environment. I know that this probably doesn’t matter to a whole lot of people as long as the solution works right? But trust me it does affect my level of participation.
- Dashboard – 37 Signals has done a great job w/ the layout of the dashboard on Basecamp, and honestly I don’t remember it being this user friendly the few times I logged my work in the past but it might also have something to do with the fact that I understand project management a little bit better now. There also some obvious things you notice about the Dashboard too, for instance, late items appear in red at the top of the list as well anything that is due within the next 2 weeks. It’s also pretty cool to see what all we have assigned to each member of our team, not that we are consumed by performance or efficiency, our concerns center more around quality than anything else.
- To-do Lists – Being a power Outlook user I am extremely familiar with Tasks. I have tracked every client project that I have ever worked on using Tasks. The To-do Lists in Basecamp pretty much serve the same purpose, but with a little more flexibility in that where I would normally track each project as a task of their own, I can now break down the elements of a project into stages (ex. Pre-Flight, Development, Testing, Launch, Bugfixes). Furthermore, each of these elements can be assigned to a different member of our team, therefore eliminating the need to pass tasks back and forth to each other. There is also some sort of endorphin high, or adrenaline rush when you check off a task from your list, or at least there is for me. Another pretty neat feature of the to-do lists that I like is the fact that you can add items that are only visible to “need to know” members of your team, this will come in handy I am sure when we are outsourcing elements of projects.
- File Sharing – In our industry we often find ourselves working with a wide variety of files (ex. Artwork, PDF’s, Documents, and Compressed Files). Being able to retrieve these files 6 months to a year after a project is launched is nice, because believe me, this does happen from time to time. I had to retrieve a vector logo file I created for a client about 4 years ago this past week and being able to locate it in about 20 minutes from my previously mentioned archival system was nice. Having this flexibility companywide is going to be nice.
- Message Boards – I know that email is still the killer application but sometimes shooting interoffice emails back and forth is not the most effective way to communicate. With the message boards inside of Basecamp all messages are displayed in reverse chronological order and the best part, files can be attached to messages in the message board, so this actually makes this part of the application even more collaborative. You can even categorize the messages inside the message board area.
- Milestones – When I speak to a client on the front end they always want to know 2 things upfront, costs and timeframe. Sometimes the costs aren’t near as important to them as the timeframe, especially if they are trying to rush along a product release or capitalizing on a promotion. I like to give my clients 3 tentative milestones when we get our initial payment for the project. The first milestone will be the start date, since we often times manage multiple projects, sometimes it’s not feasible for us to start on a new project the day we get our clients deposit, so we have to give them some sort of tentative start date. The next milestone is the test date, and of course a lot of this has to do with when I have all of the required assets from the client to get started, when clients drag their feet providing me with logos, content, etc., this can move the testing date back later than originally projected. Another milestone is the launch date, and this is sometimes hard to call and really dependant on the first two milestones and how quickly they come together. With Basecamp I can project these milestones and stay on track and prioritize my time a lot better than ever before. Also, Basecamp allows you to subscribe to your Milestones in iCalendar format, and they are even color-coded inside of Basecamp, which also really helps me visually to see the big picture.
- Time Tracking – For us, our billable time is our bottom line, it is for this reason that time tracking is so critical. With Basecamp we can log our time on project elements and see a full log of our time entered on a project, therefore giving us another valuable look at the big picture. Tracking time against to-do list items might be one of the biggest advantages to this software for a company like ours.
- Project Overview – Speaking of getting the big picture on a project, the overview section for each projects shows you everything, including milestones (late items are listed in red), and things that are due in the next 2 weeks are listed in the mini-calendar area. There is also an RSS Feed for each project which is also an added plus. With the project overview you can also see who is assigned what and it’s a great motivator, especially if the ball is in your court and there are others waiting on something you have to provide.
- Comments on Messages – I really like the way to communicate to specific members of our team on components that require their involvement. For instance, if I get as far as I can in the development process and I need Matt or Greg to do something server side before I can continue, I can add them to that particular element and send them a message letting them know that the ball is in their court. They can also provide comments back in the event they should have questions, etc.
- Expandable – There are a lot of add-ons and extras out there that are available as add-ons for Basecamp. These extras and add-ons can do everything from subversion to accounting. Since we are adjusted to our internal accounting solution we probably won’t jump into any of these anytime soon, it’s still pretty nice to know that these products are already on the market and mature in their feature sets and stability should we ever decide to transition.
Granted, I know that overall standardization for project management in our industry is non-existent, that’s probably due to the fact that we are all more or less pioneers since the Internet hasn’t been around all that long, but when a lot of organizations the size of our company and freelancers alike all start embracing tools like Basecamp, we can lay the foundation toward standardization and efficiency.
I speak from the perspective of a partner in a web development firm, but I can honestly see where Basecamp could also be a very useful tool for other industries out there, even further than Graphic Designers and Content Writers, but also wedding and event planners, teachers, consultants, etc. If you are like me and always on the lookout for ways to improve your business, take a look at Basecamp and see what it can do for your business. Here are a few companies that utilize Basecamp already in their operations:
Memorial Day Thoughts…
My wife forwarded me this email on Memorial Day and I have to admit that I was somewhat touched by the story, and for me that’s saying a whole lot. I checked out the story of the 13th hand on Snopes and it’s true. I never knew this. I figured I would repost this for everyone else to enjoy:
Six Boys And Thirteen Hands…
Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capitol, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall’s trip was especially memorable.
On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history — that of the six brave Marines raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.
Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, ‘Where are you guys from?’
I told him that we were from Wisconsin. ‘Hey, I’m a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.’
(James Bradley just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington , DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)
When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.)
‘My name is James Bradley and I’m from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I just wrote a book called ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ which is #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.
‘Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called ‘War.’ But it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old – and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.
(He pointed to the statue) ‘You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph… a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima . Boys. Not old men.
‘The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go kill some Japanese’ or ‘Let’s die for our country.’ He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead he would say, ‘You do what I say, and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’
‘The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona . Ira Hayes was one who walked off Iwo Jima . He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, ‘You’re a hero’ He told reporters, ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’
So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken).
‘The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky . A fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, ‘Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn’t get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.’ Yes, he was a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.
‘The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin , where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say ‘No, I’m sorry, sir, my dad’s not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don’t know when he is coming back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada . Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell ’s soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn’t want to talk to the press.
‘You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn’t see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, ’cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a caregiver. In Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died in Iwo Jima , they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.
‘When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, ‘I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.’
‘So that’s the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima , and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.’
Suddenly, the monument wasn’t just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.
We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in, freely, but also at great sacrifice
Let us never forget from the Revolutionary War to the current War on Terrorism and all the wars in-between that sacrifice was made for our freedom.
Remember to pray praises for this great country of ours and also pray for those still in murderous unrest around the world.
STOP and thank God for being alive and being free at someone else’s sacrifice.
God Bless You and God Bless America ..
REMINDER: Everyday that you can wake up free, it’s going to be a great day.
One thing I learned while on tour with my 8th grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is . . that if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of ‘hands’ raising the flag, there are 13. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were 13, he simply said the 13th hand was the hand of God.
Great story – worth your time – worth every American’s time
A Few Key Ingredients for a Successful Project
A short time ago my my partners and I launched a startup project of our own and within 4 months time we had picked up national exposure to the point that we were negotiating 4 potential sponsorships and had requests from at least a half dozen or so other parties interested in being a part of our project. A couple other things that are worthy of mention is that during that 4 month timeframe we had accumulated over 1,000 followers on Twitter and had approximately 20,000 Facebook Fans.
For the sake of this post I will not mention the project itself because these principles apply to pretty much any project, instead I will discuss some key ingredients that went into growing that project in such a short period of time.
Consider the Focus of your Project…
Fortunately for us we had a very popular topic and were able to draw from a very loyal fan base. Whatever your project is, be sure to have modest expectations when trying to measure your success. It stands to reason that a website that caters to fans of Football is going to draw more attention than a website catering to the bread making community. Also keep in mind where your audience is located, if you are launching a website that reports news and events for a small region of the United States, you obviously can’t expect to see the same amount of traffic or have the same kind of impact that a similar website has that markets to a national audience. I am not saying that you should change your focus of your project either, I know many successful websites that only cater to a niche or regional audience.
Tips for Development
If at all possible, I recommend using one of the popular open-sourced frameworks that are out there. A couple of things that I would look at when trying to decide on a framework or CMS would be the size of it’s support community and how well you like the management process, because I promise you that you will spend more time managing the website than you think.
My preference for most projects is Wordpress, many websites today are built upon Wordpress and there are a couple of reasons for this, one is because it has probably the largest community of developers and users than any other CMS on the planet and secondly because it’s extremely flexible, I haven’t ran into many situations where I couldn’t build in some kind of functionality into my wordpress projects that a client was asking for, it’s extremely versatile. A couple of other solutions that are out there that are also probably worth looking into are Drupal, Joomla, and ModX. If you go with one of these as your foundation I don’t think you will have any problems scaling your project as it grows down the road.
When working with a developer on the front end, be sure to lay out your vision for the project as clearly as possible, this is extremely valuable because it helps the developer know what your needs might be 6 months to a year down the road and he can often times allow for this more acutely during the development process.
Design is Huge!!
If you do not have an eye for design, or maybe you think you do and others have told you that you don’t, do yourself a favor and hire a graphic designer to assist you with the logo, layout, and any other graphic elements of the site. Making a first impression is extremely important while trying to build a community. The website needs to have very slick graphics, attractive layout, etc. I have seen it time and time again, a website can be thrown together without any of the basic elements of design and have the best content in the world and it will flop, of course there are a few sites like craigslist.com that will continue to defy the laws the nature but it’s always a good idea to look good!
Every aspect of the project also needs to mesh well and be consistent with other portions of the project. We wrestled with this on our project because in addition to our wordpress application we also had a simple machines forum running with approximately 400 members on it that were active daily. We eventually came up with a theme design for our forum that meshed well with our layout for the wordpress site but it took some time to get these exactly right, or at least in my eyes and I am somewhat particular when it comes to design.
Never stop tweaking the site, if you see areas of the site that could possibly perform better or be more visible to your users, be sure to tweak them on the fly, your visitors will appreciate that you have their ease of use in mind each time they recognize these edits.
Cast a Huge Social Net…
Social Media is the buzzword these days, it actually has been for a couple of years now inside the industry. By social media I am referring to where people hangout online. For instance I have friends who still hit myspace just about everyday, but the vast majority of my old classmates are all on Facebook, a lot of my friends from within the tech community all interact on Twitter. These are all examples of social media.
Being able to identify who your audience is is very important, but what is equally important is how you plan to connect to them inside these social networks. There are tools out there that will allow you to build a following, or you can hire my partners and I and we will be happy to consult with you and point you in the right directions. The first process for doing any of this is to figure out where to invest your energy first, for us we had a startling revelation on the front end of the project, we thought that our younger fan base would be on Twitter and were shocked when our page went viral and picked up almost 20,000 fans in a weekend.
Let’s say your project has to do with college football and you want to connect to College Football fans on Twitter, there are about a half a dozen or so proven ways to connect to other fans. Some of these methods only require a little bit of work on the front end but I have found that the quality approach isn’t as easy as others would have you to believe. There are some issues to consider with each of the social networks such as follow limits on Twitter and Groups versus Pages inside of Facebook. Again, this is where a company like Pleth would come in and help you identify the best approach for your social campaign. It’s not a shot in the dark like you would expect, we actually have some methods in place that have proven to be effective.
Work it Everyday!
Just having an impressive following on the social networks is one thing but maximizing that following is another story. There are a couple schools of thought regarding Twitter especially, some companies follow back their followers regardless, and some do not. It is my belief that the quality approach is to become involved, sure it’s nice to set back and post links to Twitter and Facebook knowing that a few of your followers are actually going to click through based on the law of percentage, but what would happen if you actually engaged in conversations with your followers? My experience has been that the more you engage your followers the more likely they are to be loyal visitors to your project, and also the more likely they are to invite and share your content with their friends.
I would routinely budget 2 hours a day toward social media management and could have possibly devoted more time if I had it available. I would engage other users on their comments and they would do likewise. I would also occasionally post links back to competing projects just to show that “it wasn’t all about my project” and was more or less about the common interest we had with our followers.
Make it Easy for Visitors to Get Involved…
Probably one of the smartest things you can do on the front end of your project would be to incorporate some user authentication tools like OpenID or my favorite one so far, Facebook Connect. By doing this you allow even the first time visitor to your website the ability to post a comment on your content with just a few clicks of their mouse. Without these authentication tools they visitors are forced to register on your site alone and for the most part they have to really like what you are doing to devote the minute or two it takes to do that. Be sure to promote the fact that you use Facebook Connect on your site, I have found that it does encourage your visitors to comment more.
Give the Community Part Ownership
With our project we quickly identified about 10 or so bloggers that were posting blogs up on various services on the web such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. We put out some requests asking for Guest Bloggers to offer their perspective on issues. Within 4 months we had approximately 10-12 bloggers posting anywhere from once to three times a week. That’s content that we didn’t have to write but what’s most valuable about this is that they can offer a perspective totally separate from your own which helps your project become more diverse in it’s offerings. For instance, we had a blogger who provided posts with an editorial type of flair to them while we had another blogger who could honestly have you rolling in the floor before finishing the first paragraph of their posts. We also had a writer who would only post about a paragraph or so each week but it was possibly the most informative weekly columns about our core topic I had read anywhere else on the web. Keeping your content diverse gives visitors to your website the impression that you are actually a lot larger than you really are, and this never hurts anything.
There is another positive about getting your Community involved with your project, they take on a sense of ownership and will help promote the community in ways that you might not be able to. For example, we had a forum on our project that was extremely popular, we posted a note asking for moderators and within a week or so we had appointed one volunteer as global moderator for the project and another dozen or so managing specific portions of the forum. I can’t count the times that I would run across these same peoples facebook profiles and tweets where they had links posted back to the message board.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Granted this is something that always comes up on the front end of each project with our clients because for the most part there hasn’t been a grand awakening to the general public yet that being ranked high in Google isn’t a necessity anymore, there are other ways to receive traffic thanks to the social landscape. Now, am I saying that you shouldn’t do whatever is in your power to get to the top of Google? No, that’s not what I am saying at all, rather I am saying that we shouldn’t fixate on where we are at in Google like we did a few years ago when search engines were the ONLY way visitors found our content.
Fortunately for us we had a very good SEO campaign going, we actually showed up on the first page of Google for at least 3 or 4 key search terms and probably a lot more than that but I didn’t spend a lot of time researching out our rankings because it wasn’t a top priority.
Keep Track of Your Analytics, Do Comparisons
One of the most useful tools for me with our project was a free tool provided by Google called Google Analytics. These analytic tools gave me all of the information I needed, for example, what was the most popular types of posts we had on the site, I noticed a quick trend that our visitors all seemed to favor nostalgic and historical posts moreso than posts that covered current events, so I quickly started allocating more posts to that category and our numbers continued to climb exponentially each week.
One other thing that helped me out a lot was knowing where our visitors came from each week. We saw a large number of returning visitors which was comforting to know that we had a good product that hooked our visitors in. With Google Analytics you can also track referrers. This tells you who sent your visitors to your site, the primary ones for us were Twitter, Facebook, and then Google. Exactly in that order. The fact that our visitors were three times more likely to come from Twitter than they were the front page of Google helped motivate me to work our Twitter account following even harder, and trust me being in this industry for as long as I have, it was an eye opening experience to see this firsthand. I can’t emphasize enough how important social media plays with todays landscape.
Wait Until the Time is Right to Monetize!
When you first launch your project, don’t expect to throw adsense on your site and start making money overnight, I don’t think that there are many out there these days that actually have that expectation anymore anyway, but I always try to let our clients know on the front end that they need to budget on not making any money for a while that way they don’t have any false expectations going in.
Yes, we did make some money on Adsense through pay per clicks, were we making more than other websites that catered to the same community? Yes. We stumbled upon a few ways to inject adsense into content that we sent out to our follower in a way that wasn’t obtrusive or detracted from the quality of our content. It took us a little while to get this process down, but once we eventually figured it out we did make some money.
Affiliate Marketing is another story altogether, selecting the right brands to associate with your project is not something you should take lightly, you have to be wary of who your readers are and what their interests are to accurately provide ads to them on a large scale. Another thing that I am really big on is not going overboard, for me a small 120×60 banner is just as effective as one of those long creepy sidebar ads that advertisers all recommend. Respect the value of your online real estate also and don’t jump at an opportunity just because it appeals to your niche, negotiate to get the best return percentages on leads and sales you generate, after all you are the one providing the service.
While PPC, Adsense, and Affiliate Marketing are great, there are only a few rare instances where I have seen these actually make a project profitable. To make the real money you are going to need to produce a media kit with basic information about your project, break down ad sizes and figure out what you want to charge for each of these ad spots. Once you have this media kit in hand you can then go forward and pursue bigger fish for direct advertising on your site. As I mentioned earlier we had 6 sponsorships in the works that were each commited to paying pretty good money each month for their ad placements and several more that were contacting us with interest. Once the project takes off you will hopefully spend more time pursuing this end of the business than you will in the actual day to day management of the site.
Promote, Promote, Promote
One of the things that I did a lot of was to go on podcasts that catered to our same demographic and promoted our project. I would sometimes go on two shows a week and initially we didn’t see a huge jump in traffic but over time we could definitely tell it was helping. We also granted interviews with every newspaper outlet that asked about what we were doing and made sure to brag on the community aspects of the project, we picked up several loyal community members through these efforts that just happened to read about us in the newspaper.
I also contacted several friends I had in the media industry that I thought would be a good fit for what we were doing and provided RSS (really simple syndication) of our content to them to use on their website, these arrangements were a win-win for both us and the media outlets because they were getting free content on their websites and we were getting traffic we would have normally seen.
These are just a few of the key ingredients that I feel like were important to quickly get our project off the ground. These are pretty much the same staples that we advise our clients on everyday to maximize their web presence.
Rupert Murdoch: “Internet Will Soon Be Over”
Honestly I don’t think that I have ever in my life seen someone as successful as Rupert Murdoch be as far off base as he is right now trying to get a grasp on what is happening with corporate media. It’s nothing new, and it’s been going on for longer than you think.
Rupert, it’s not hard to get on board and monetize your content, and please don’t think for a minute that people are going to start paying for your content at this late stage in the game, especially when there are other content providers out there providing a comparable or better service than you currently provide. I promise you some people out there will pay for your content, but the majority won’t. For the most part you will be left holding the bag, kind of like that time you bought that company, what was it called… oh yeah, MySpace.
Do yourself a favor, retire, and don’t ever do yourself the injustice of speaking about something you obviously know nothing about, the Internet. If I was you, I would be on a boat somewhere off the coast of Destin pulling in Dolphinfish right now… There comes a painful time in all of our lives when we just have to know when to hang up the spurs and ride into the sunset…
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.
The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.
This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.
“Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, (Murdoch) replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that,” reports the Guardian. “Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
Murdoch’s newspapers and TV networks, which include Fox News and the Asian Star Network, have seen profits plummet from $216m to just $7m year-on-year. MySpace.com is also floundering despite a recent move to replace the company’s entire management staff.
It was all but over for the Boston Globe this week, following a threat to close the 137-year-old publication after net losses of $85 million this year alone. Only a last minute cost-cutting agreement on behalf of its owner, The New York Times Company, and The Boston Newspaper Guild, saved the newspaper.
But it’s not just establishment newspapers that are struggling to survive – social networking websites like Twitter and corporate online video giant You Tube are also deep in the red. Apparently, paying out millions in server fees for half the population of the planet to watch clips of cute puppies isn’t a sustainable business model.
This is why You Tube is being forced to pursue lucrative partnerships with giant production studios and broadcasters, at the expense of user generated content which has been relegated to a sub-section of its website, taking the “You” out of You Tube altogether. Content that may be deemed harmful to You Tube’s corporate agenda and its multi-million dollar partnership deals, like The Alex Jones Channel, is being systematically erased from You Tube’s website under the pretext of flimsy copyright infringement claims.
The jig is up for the corporate media. If they continue to allow free access to their content they will go out of business because there’s not enough advertising revenue coming in, whereas if they charge for content they will lose a huge chunk of their audience and their influence in shaping the news agenda will wane completely.
This is the price the corporate media has paid for lying, spinning and obfuscating on behalf of the virulently corrupt power elite and expecting the population to eat it up without question.
The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power, which is why they are aggressively supporting moves to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.
This what Murdoch is really getting at when he assures us that, “The Internet will soon be over” and it’s down to us to stop that agenda from being realized.
Rupert Murdoch: “Internet Will Soon Be Over”
Video: Central Arkansas Refresh 3
We had our third Central Arkansas Refresh Meetup last night at The Flying Saucer in Little Rock and it was awesome! Darren Huckey from MonstorGraphix spoke on Drupal CMS Framework and did an excellent job despite the fact we didn’t hold up to our end of the deal on the projector. Hopefully we will be a little better prepared this next go around.
Brant Collins from StationX also spoke about InnovateArkansas and all of the good work they are doing for startups in the state. I haven’t spoken to anyone who got an accurate headcount for those in attendance but I know that we ran out of swag shirts and dvd’s a lot sooner than I had expected. Will definitely do a better job next go around.
It’s great to see that this group is taking off, and just as we had hoped it would do, it’s bringing together some of the top web people from within the Central Arkansas area to network, collaborate, and share ideas. Our next session should just be a continuation of what we have going right now. We are going to be announcing speakers soon, we are likely going to discuss monetization, wordpress, and possibly touch on a little subversion-ing.
If you are involved with the web and live in Central Arkansas, it doesn’t matter if you are a part time hacker enthusiast or do it for a living you should definitely join our Facebook Group, here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48929112127
We meet on the last Tuesday of each month and the meeting announcements are sent out via Facebook and Twitter. You can follow the Central Arkansas Refresh Group on Twitter, @refreshca and we utilize the #refreshca hashtag.
Here’s a funny video slideshow from our meetup, keep in mind that I am a webguy and yes, I ripped off the audio track, sorry about the quality…
Video: Central Arkansas Refresh 3 : Central Arkansas Refresh Group
Update: a few people tweeted this past week that they didn’t realize we now had a website for the group, the web address is: http://refreshcentralarkansas.org. Be sure to check out the website for news related to the group, etc. You can also follow us on Twitter, http://twitter.com/refreshca
