Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

Working with Trinity Applied Internet Part B: Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

You know the staff. Now, what is the process? How do we approach your project?

The term “applied” in the name of the company is no accident. A cumulative thirty years experience in software and web development speaks volumes on behalf of the partners, and is directly applied to every project we produce, problem we approach, and product we deliver. The process behind your website or web application development is not piecemeal or made up as we go along.

Consult, research, facilitate, plan (and plan and plan some more), design, develop, test, adjust. Rinse and repeat. Every time, for every project. It doesn’t matter the size or the complexity of the project at hand, we spend the time at the beginning on analysis of your company, research, and planning. In fact, if you have already been through an estimating and proposal process with us, you know we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you before we’ve ever even won you as a client.

Think every shop that advertises their easy and cheap WordPress package, or their hosted solution you dial right into, does that on your behalf? They don’t. Believe us, because we hear time and again from clients who tried out the competition first because of a really attractive price point, and since have realized they didn’t need a cookie-cutter approach. Or they went with a big media and advertising agency and were shoehorned into marketing decisions based on what the agency was “really good at,” and how it wanted to promote themselves as a full interactive shop.

Well, that strayed from the topic a bit, but the point is, at Trinity Applied Internet you get specialized, considerate, and tailored service that addresses your needs specifically. If you are a marketing department working with some IT constraints, we plan for that. If you are a small organization with one paid staff member and no time for teaching yourself website administration, we plan for that when we design your project, rather than discovering it at the end (or not at all.)

The adage about “prior planning prevents…” at best catastrophe and at worse any number of irritating little hassles. We take it to heart, to the extent that we are researching, discussing, and planning your project before you have even officially engaged us.

9 Tips for Your LinkedIn Company Page

Maybe you have heard about the relatively new LinkedIn Company Updates?

These updates are a huge step toward engagement of your company brand on LinkedIn, something that has been missing from the platform for quite a while.

Enabling your company updates allows you to specify who can post for your company (as long as they have stated your company as their present position within their own LinkedIn profile.) This means you don’t have to be the one making the updates, or, even better, you no longer need to give out your personal login information so someone else can do this for you.

Other benefits may not be obvious, or to savvy social media types, maybe they are obvious and have been a long time coming.

This Hubspot post, 11 Reasons your LinkedIn Company Page Sucks, actually taught me a few things and gave me some ideas for updating TAI’s own LinkedIn company page as well.

Some of the things I found most useful and interesting:

Ask For Followers.

It is important for you to have followers; otherwise, your company updates will be like a tree falling in a forest. No one will hear it, know it fell, or care.

Fill Out Your Products Tab.

Although this sounds obvious, Hubspot points out that you can be creative here and use things like webinars, free eBooks, and other services rather than just products one would traditionally assume can be used here.

Ask For Product Recommendations.

This is a crucial step in Linked In. The more recommendations, the better chance someone will try your services, or buy your products.

Customize Your Products Tab.

Another interesting tidbit I didn’t already know, is that you can customize your Products tab to be specific to an audience. The Hubspot guide has more on how to set this up, but it sounds like a great way to set yourself apart from, and above the competition.

Set Up a Products & Service Spotlight.

You can set up a Products & Services Spotlight by using a YouTube video (if you have those in your marketing handbag) or up to three images that will scroll across the page and can be linked to URL’s you specify. This is something we will be looking into setting up on our TAI company page, as well.

In the News?

Another thought is that if you are a company that has been (or expects/ hopes to be) in the media, make sure you check the “Share News about My Company” box. You see the option for this on the company overview page when you are in “edit” mode.

Put Your Company Blog in Its Place.

Make sure you are feeding your company blog into your company page. This can be set up in the “overview” of your company. This is kind of nice, since you have previously been forced to put your company blog on your personal page, which wasn’t necessarily the best plan for your customers to see it or find any value in it. Also, it means you have the option of using a personal blog again on your personal profile.

Use the Connections.

Due to the fact that LinkedIn is specifically structured for job recommendations and promotion of work networks, it is extremely valuable to utilize your “career” tab (assuming you have open positions) in order to bring the most talented and technology savvy applicants to your company.

Mind the Metrics.

Last but definitely NOT least, are analytics. LinkedIn provides several analytics that can help you to shape your LinkedIn campaigns to best utilize your target audience and promote company engagement.

Your Thoughts?

How do you use your LinkedIn Company page? If you have other ideas that you would like to share, please let us know in the comments!

Facebook Fan Page

You have been hearing about how your business needs to get ‘social’. You already have a personal Facebook page, but you’re wondering how to set up a Facebook Page for your business?  Believe me, you aren’t the only one asking!

Before we begin discussing the steps to creating a fully functional Facebook Page for your business, it’s important that you keep one thing in mind: You will make mistakes.  Not you might – you will.  Every business has a different ‘feel’ to it that makes it unique.  Maybe you will jump into the social business sphere and everything will go smoothly and easily – you will still make a mistake – but that’s okay.  Don’t be afraid; yes, the internet has a long memory, but showing you are willing to try new things (this Facebook Page thing for instance) and making mistakes is part of the key to showing that your brand and your business is run by humans. Only humans can connect to other humans – a brand by itself, cannot.  So – human good, mistakes okay, now we’re ready to go!

Facebook is Personal

You must have a personal Facebook account in order to create a Facebook Fan Page. (More evidence that you have to be human to connect.) If you don’t have one, get one; it’s free and easy to start (click here for a video that takes you through step by step.) You don’t have to have a million friends (or even two) before you can set up a Fan Page for your business, but you do have to be willing to have your name as an administrator on the business page.  Why wouldn’t you want to promote your own business or brand? Don’t be afraid to stand behind (or in front) of your business and proudly declare, “I made this!”

Why the “Fan” Page

I know it says “fan” as if you are some eighties big-hair band with a bunch of groupies running around fainting when you look at them, but this is serious business. Who doesn’t want customers who are (fanatically) happy about your product or service? Especially one who wants everyone they know to see that they “like” your brand?  This is the ultimate boost for any company, word of mouth, but with a viral spread attached! Think, if your brand or business could touch as many people as the flu, and help them out as much as the flu makes them sick?! It would be amazing – an epidemic of Fans of you! Think that might generate some brand awareness?  We do, too.

Set It Up

If you are still reading, you are definitely on board for getting your Facebook FanPage set up!  Let’s go:

1. Login to your Facebook (personal) account.
2. Scroll to the bottom of your News Feed page.
3. In the footer, click on ‘Create A Page’
4. Pick your type of business and fill in the information.
5. Make sure to read the Facebook Pages Terms, then click Get Started.

Facebook will walk you through all your options for how you want to set up your Page from here.

Post Something

Post something, anything; it doesn’t matter what. Get yourself used to regularly posting as your brand. You can switch between your personal page and your fan page by going to your account (toward the top right) and either clicking “Use Facebook As Page” or “Switch back to “your name.”  Find all your friends, and other businesses you like or frequent and “Like” their Facebook page (while you are using Facebook as your brand.) You won’t be walking into hundreds of fans right off the bat, but the more you post — and the better you become at communicating with the customers you have — the more fans you will acquire.  It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

Social Media Profiles and SEO Ranking Revealed

SEO experts everywhere, including SearchEngineWatch.com and Technorati are recommending the use of social media profiles as ways to increase traffic, dominate SERPs with mad Google juice and expand your brand reach. But is a ‘go forth and multiply’ approach alone successful with these myriad of social profiles, or is a strategy also important? While most businesses are jumping on board the “Big 3″ social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin), there are many smaller platforms (Ning, FriendFeed, Flavors.me) that are growing in popularity and therefore, importance. Which ones should you be on? Which can you skip?

In any business venture it is ALWAYS best to have a plan. We all know that things don’t always go according to plan, but no plan is a sure bet for disaster. When approaching social media, it should be a part of your overall marketing strategy and while it has its own way of contributing, it should still move the business forward in the direction of achieving your vision. So, what does that mean? It means – don’t do anything without a purpose and without being tied to a tangible, clearly defined goal.

What is your goal with each social media platform? (Yes, goals can and should be slightly different for each.)

Facebook is a great place to get connected to your target audiences, to engage them on a daily basis and build trust and respect, as well as periodically informing and educating them about your product or service. So maybe you would link to a product page on your website for the product you are promoting that month (in your profile) – or set up a promotional page on Facebook (maybe using my favorite custom tab creator, ShortStack) that links back to your featured product page on your website, rather than just the home page.

Twitter is a succinct message (I think of it as a message in a bottle flying through the rapids with a bunch of other bottles) so it needs to be eye-catching. People generally see your profile when they click on the button from your website or search for you on Twitter. Your profile here will be more useful if you keep it interesting and shareable – according to Technorati.

Linkedin is about professionals. Make your profile reflect your professionalism – but don’t strip it of personality all together. It is always important to be authentically you, even SeoMoz (Whiteboard Fridays) agrees. People search for your company on Linkedin in order to establish your legitimacy, but give them something to comment on or inspire them in your profile and you will make many more connections than a boring resume that is just like everyone else’s.

YouTube is different than the other platforms for several reasons:  its potential to go viral is much higher, it is a more preferred medium, gets shared more often, and personality is REQUIRED. One big way to make an SEO impact on YouTube is to think about the keywords you are targeting in your SEO for your website and use them in the file names of your videos – a fantastic idea (meant for Facebook, but it still applies to any video content) from GetBusy Media - since videos are not text, only the titles and file names are crawled by search engines! Also, make sure you have your accounts set to Public – or Google won’t even see the great stuff you have to share.

Overall, social media profiles that are created correctly CAN increase your search results, direct links, spread brand awareness and funnel potential customers to your website, but they are NOT a cure-all. As awebguy.com explains in their blog post on the subject – setting up your social media profile is a beginning – not an ending. You must be active in the community that you are creating by setting up your profile, to truly reap the benefits they have to offer.

This isn’t as difficult as it seems – you can post responses in the Q&A section of Linkedin, as Technorati suggests, you can solely share your opinions on topics that are trending in Twitter (by using the “Top Tweets” sidebar on Twitter), you can share to your own site when you see a company or individual video on YouTube that inspires you, and you can interact with the things your fans are saying on facebook about your brand – or your competitors.

Content is and will always be King – so pay your dues in the Social Media kingdom, but don’t forget to make yourself stand out with targeted, specifically awesome, profiles about how wonderful and unique you and your company are. Make something worth sharing!

How To Improve Your Local Search Results

Once you have a basic understanding of what local search is and why it is important, there are a lot of ways to improve your business’ local search results. Lets start with the basics:

Website Content and Structure

You can do a lot to improve your website’s local search performance just by changing the content on your site. One of the most important and most basic tactics is to add your phyiscal address to the footer of each page. Other tactics can include placing location names in URLs, Geotagging the website pages via page Meta Tags (ICBM method or Geo Tag Microformat), adding your phone number with area code to the site, Geo-tagging photos and videos, or even providing a KML file of your business locations.

Location Based Indexes

The next thing to do is to created listing for your business on location based indexes:

• Google Places
• Bing Business Portal
• Yahoo! Local Listings

Here is a detailed walk-through of setting up your business listing on all three indexes (Google, Bing and Yahoo!)

Location Based Social Media

• Foursquare – A location based social network focused on mobile devices. People are now using Foursquare as a location based search engine and this is a trend likely to grow.
• Gowalla – A location based social network a lot like Foursquare. Here is a brief article contrasting the two services.
• Yelp – User based reviews of local businesses.

If you want to go further in depth and learn how your online media impacts local search, this info-graphic on Web Equity and Online Presence is a great place to start figuring out how it all work’s together. I also love this local search ranking factors guide (warning: it is a lot to take in if you are just getting started.)

What is Local Search?

Local Search is the idea of associating your businesses online content with a particular geographical location or area. A quick example would be to search for food carts in a major city. When I search for “Portland Food Carts” links to food cart/truck websites come up in the search results. Google and Bing both place local (geo-based) results at the top of the first search results page. Those search results look something like this:

Local Search is somewhat related to (and can often be confused with) Localization (translating content to be relevant for a foreign languages/culture), Geo-targeting (providing content based on a user’s browser location settings), and Geo-location (the act of determining where a browser or mobile device is geographically located).

So why should a business care about this listing? Note the locations of the addresses and phone numbers in the above search results – it is an instant mapped based “yellow pages” type listing. On mobile devices being on this listing is even more important – the mobile devices can provide one click to a phone call or to a GPS based directions program.  In the early days of search the idea was to get your business content indexed as the most relevant content on the web. Several years ago, Google and other search engines begin trying to relate most relevant content to a specific real world locations. They figured out that users searching for tires in Seattle, WA did not want to find tire shops in San Francisco, CA.

Most businesses never even realize they can be proactive with targeting their content to a specific location. Businesses must be proactive with the indexing of their content, either take the lead as the authority for information on your business or Google’s Search Engine will try to do it for you.

So where do you start? See my post on improving your local search results.

Bit.ly Analytics: From First to Obsolete?

The Need for Twitter Analytics

Once the social sharing platform began to hold interest for initial, brave online business marketers, the industry realized that it was necessary to provide clients with data to justify the time and energy being spent on Twitter.  For some time this was an unfulfilled need; then along came bit.ly – the answer to the need for Twitter metrics.

Bit.ly pioneered tracking for social interaction and link sharing on the growing social media sharing platform called Twitter.  Several companies have since popped up with similar tracking and reporting abilities, but bit.ly was one of the first and has been used by default on Twitter since 2009 (when it replaced Tiny.url.)

The way this technology works is that it creates a shortened link from your full URL (which is extremely helpful when you only have 140 characters to work with in the first place) and tracks how often that link is clicked or shared.  This service is free and you can then look at a report that explains the amount of traffic being received from Twitter to your website and how many times each of your links were clicked and sent people to your content (or your website.)

Bit.ly‘s service has been promoting Twitter by displaying its social marketing power ever since — and for FREE!  But now, Twitter has decided to get onboard and it’s new shortener (t.co) will re-shorten all links (including the ones used with bit.ly) in order to provide its own tracking dashboard.

Twitter Web Analytics, according to Christopher Golda, will provide three key benefits that include tracking sharing from your website across the Twitter network, tracking inbound links to your site from Twitter, and the effectiveness of your Twitter integration.

What does that spell out for Bit.ly?

In my opinion, users will no longer continue to use other URL shortening sites when they will be modified by Twitter’s t.co system either way and will already be tracked by Twitter.

I appreciate all the hard work you did, Bit.ly, to get this social media giant to recognize the need for analyzing it’s ability to meet our online marketing goals, and it’s unfortunate that your insight is leading to your own services becoming obsolete.  (Of course, once you and those like you have fallen by the wayside, Twitter will probably decide to begin charging for the service!)

The Content Crunch: Getting Past the Blank Page

In years past (well, way past, but if you’re my age it really seems like yesterday) building a website was akin to creating a really nice print piece. You planned, you drafted, you paid attention to design and detail, you built it – and then you left it.  Your website gave users great information, such as what you offered, where to find you, how you differentiated your business from all those others. It will have allowed customers or clients to contact you, and might even have gone so far as to sell your product or capture sales leads for you. But, chances are you weren’t even thinking about rewriting it until you started to feel a little pain, or that it lacked something.

By 2011, with the adoption of content management systems, blogging for business, and social media, some websites are re-written almost daily.  A company may have a core group of followers that are listening in for wisdom, tips, and the next good deal, or they may constantly be testing and re-purposing content in order to continue attracting a stream of new customers — or both.  Now, especially in certain industries, if you are not continually adding new information you will be at a real disadvantage in both naturalized search and keeping your audience engaged.

Let’s say you have assigned your resources and planned accordingly. Your new website, with a couple solid pages, has launched to rave reviews. You have a blog ready to be filled up, and social media set up to push your blog content to. What now? How, exactly, do you come up with valuable content that will support all the work you have already invested in this marketing effort?

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 1:  Start Simple

First, just … start. My completely non-studied or academically supported opinion is that writing great content is about 60% getting past the point of procrastination. Take twenty minutes, write a few words down about what you know (your product is a great place to start.) Keep in mind that depending on your site design, three paragraphs and 400 words are usually more than enough for a page. Leave it for a day, then go back and edit it, and – do not be afraid to post it! Hit publish on that blog! Update that page!

You can (and will) always get better, later.

The flip side of this is, if you are a prolific and careful writer, you will need to pare down what you’ve got. Pretend you are summarizing your 15 page article into a three paragraph abstract. That’s all you need (for now, and possibly forever.)

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 2: Work Ahead

Web content management systems offer a really neat feature: the ability to use the system not only to put the content up on the site, but to draft and review it. You can create a page or a post with not so much as a whim of an idea, leave it in your queue until you are inspired to expand and finish it, send it out to your team for review, and edit it comprehensively before it ever gets published to your website or blog.  Take advantage of this to leave yourself starters for later, when you don’t feel so full of ideas. Start a page on a new product or service and keep adding to it as you get more information, so that by the time you know what you’ve got, you are mere moments away from publishing it.

This is especially essential when a team of people is responsible for updating your content. Case in point: here at TAI we have four blog contributors, who are all busy people. By working ahead and having a number of fully finished or even partially drafted posts in the system, when one writer is delayed, another post can pop in and take its spot. It took us a long time to figure this out, but it works pretty well.

Next time: Step 3 and Step 4, and more ideas as to how to generate valuable content for your readers.

Make Corporate Branding Personal

Corporate Branding

“Hearts and minds first, wallets later” – this quote from a post on brand strategy by BiG, popped out at me as I was reading about corporate branding.

It isn’t enough these days to just have a good product or service. You have to get your customers to fall madly in love with your product or service if you want to be wildly successful.  The best companies don’t see this as a hindrance – they see it as a challenge.

As consumers, we Americans continue to demand more from our products and the companies that provide them.  We don’t just want a shirt, we want a specific design on certain fabric in a special shade of our favorite color – and we want the product and the company to have a soul. We demand ethical sourcing AND low prices but we want the company to be ethical and frugal across the board as well. We want quality in our products, our services, and our dealings with suppliers and salespeople alike.

So how does a corporation take that step and what creates the kind of fanaticism that today’s brand loyalists have in spades?

Well, the answer is that it depends. Which is a classic answer in business – and almost always true.  What it depends ON is your corporate and product or service brand.  What is it that your company stands for? How do you interact with and engage your customers? The first question to really ask yourself (corporation) is: What makes us unique and special?

Ok, so there are eight companies that sell whosiewhatsits – but what is special and unique about YOUR whosiewhatsit? Something must be causing your customers to come to you rather than your 7 other competitors – what is it?  Even if you think you know the answer – you should still ask!

Make it Personal by INVOLVING your customers in the process!

Social media channels have made this more simple than ever before – jump on your company Facebook Fan Page, or your company Twitter account – and ASK ASK ASK the questions you need answered.

Once you know why your customers pick you over your competitors, you can capitalize on this information – and the relationship you have begun by engaging your target audience.  Remember, building your brand is also about building relationships between your company and your intended customers. Relationships take time to cultivate, so don’t rush it and overwhelm your audience; provide helpful information and more of what they told you they like about your company, product or service.

Speaking from your company brand directly to the emotional engagement of your clients and customers is what will transform them into raving mad(happy?) brand loyalists.

Engineering Socially: Traffic Spikes and the old new Old Spice Guy

A while back, we did a little promotional project to tie into Old Spice’s online marketing campaign running on YouTube.  It was very spur of the moment, since we launched the project after the Old Spice campaign had already started.  Because of how fast we needed to get something working, and the size of the potential exposure, some of the engineering issues were more prominent for us than they have been in the past.

Engineering Challenges

We knew right away that if we got any pick up at all, we’d be looking at a significant traffic spike.  While we were hoping for the best in regards to traffic, that also meant preparing for the worst – a huge traffic spike.  The big engineering challenges were:

1. The promotional page must not impact regular operation of the other websites we manage for our clients
2. It must not negatively impact bandwidth allocation from our hosting partner Slicehost.  And by negatively impact, I mean cost us money.
3. The hosting must be able to scale easily, so we weren’t looking at a lot of server errors, or being offline completely.
4. Ideally, the hosting for this should cost as little as possible, since it was pretty much a one shot deal.
5. We knew the campaign was already going on, so we needed to get it up and running fast.
6. The application had to handle several large data sets, namely: Twitter feeds and Facebook, Digg, YouTube and Reddit comments.

Clearly, we weren’t going to be hosting it on our own servers.  Too much risk of a slowdown causing denial of service for our customers.  The sites we host generally don’t get the level of traffic that warrants the engineering investment in load balancers, content delivery networks, redundant servers, etc.  And setting all that up for a spur of the moment deal like this just wasn’t worth the investment of time.  We also didn’t want to afford the cost of setting up at least one, but possibly several, new virtual servers, since we would be paying the full monthly cost.

While there are many virtual application platforms out there, such as PHP Fog, Heroku, and Google App Engine just to name a few, the short timeline and my previous experience with Heroku made it an obvious choice. Since we had no idea when Old Spice would declare a winner and end the campaign, we set ourselves the goal of having something up and running the same night.

Because of its close integration with rake and git, Heroku seemed like the best choice to host the application.  Heroku makes it easy to create, deploy and scale rails apps, and has lots of seamless automation to make maintaining them easy.  A bonus for us is that they only charge you for the time you actually use.  So we could scale up our processes (to serve the app) during the initial rush, and then scale down again when it was over.

Also, Heroku is a Rails 3 hosting service and Ruby made the app a breeze to build (satisfying the time constraint).  I went from idea to working site in an evening. I built the app as a single page, which updates the data on a fixed interval.  While I could have used Heroku worker processes to remove  the refresh process from the page display code path entirely, that would have added to the final bill, so I stuck with refreshing the data during page load and causing an occasional slow request.

Implementation Challenges

While it would be nice to say everything went smoothly, despite all this planning, there were occasionally problems, but surprisingly all of them were from our outside data sources.  We used Google Fusion Tables as mass storage for the collected tweets, comments and feedback that we were mining for “votes.”  I discovered the hard way that very occasionally the comma separated values (CSV) formatted output from the Google Tables API was not quite as CSV standard as Ruby would have liked it to be.  Comments from Twitter with newlines in them were occasionally showing up without being enclosed in double quotes.  In fairness, this might have been a garbage-in-garbage-out issue from the software that was scanning Twitter, but the time we had the problem, it was much too late to fix the Twitter side of things, as the data was already somewhere amongst the tens of thousands of records in the raw Twitter feed table.

Fortunately, we could exclude records from our API calls to Google, but we needed a unique record id to do it.  Unfortunately, Ruby’s CSV parser was somewhat unhelpful about exactly which record was causing the problem.  And the web front end to Google Fusion tables doesn’t have a way to jump to a specific record easily in any case.  Paging through a table with tens of thousands of records a hundred at a time is no way to do things.  And of course, rather than returning nothing, or the data up until that point, or trying to recover, the Ruby CSV parser just throws up its metaphorical hands and raises an exception when the CSV data isn’t up to its standards.  So it was a perfect storm of mediocrity.  While the argument can be made that that’s exactly what the Ruby CSV parser should have done, having it return nothing meant that suddenly our numbers were all over the place.  I did eventually track down the offending data and hide it from the Ruby CSV parser, but it would have been much more helpful to have a parser that could at least try to continue in the face of corrupt data.  I think the robustness principle applies here.

Lessons Learned

We learned several lessons from this exercise:

1. Plan to be inundated with traffic.  We got more than 25 thousand unique requests the first day.
2. Make sure you have a backup plan when relying on remote data.  You never know when or why problems might crop up.
3. Secure a domain name or other stable URL sooner rather than later.  After all that work, we almost blew it by announcing too soon, before we could be sure our domain name was working.
4. If you think you might need to scale, plan ahead.  It’s much easier to take advantage of someone else’s infrastructure which was designed for scalability than to roll your own or try to shoehorn it in after the fact.

But all in all, we learned a lot from this about how to handle high profile events.  We also had a lot of fun doing it.  And hey, a shout out from the Old Spice Guy is pretty cool too.