Hack4Reno: Choosing a Project

Headed to Hack4Reno this weekend? Choosing your project can be difficult. The Hack4Reno organizers offer some guidance on brainstorming ideas. We’ve come up with a few hints of our own to help you get those creative juices flowing, along with a little advice.

One way to get ideas is to go and look at what data is available. The City of Reno provides several data sets to the public, and the Hack4Reno organizers have put up a Reno is Artown.

Our advice is this – consider whether the data you’re showcasing encourages repeat viewers. Raw statistics, such as crime data, while being a curiosity, usually lead to something people check once and never revisit. And if you’re planning on integrating social media, having something offer not just this weekend, but a month, two months or a year from now is an important consideration. People want to share new things with their friends, not data from six months ago.

Happy Hacking!

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!

Hack4Reno Is Coming!

Calling all developers and designers! We are super excited to be a part of the fun happening in 5 short days.

If you haven’t heard yet, The City of Reno and Reno Collective are organizing the first ever Hack4Reno – a 24-hour ‘hackathon‘ which is a team competition where apps are to be built to benefit the community. Apps can be anything from serious and potentially life changing to something fun and light hearted.

Why are we participating?

We want to help get the community involved in giving back with their mad designer and developer skills to the city (and region) and to promote the openness of platforms and data.

We are not only forming a team (Go Trinity!) but we are also sponsoring the kick off luncheon for participating teams on Saturday at noon, and coffee for participants later in the evening.

Perhaps it is not for the faint of heart: let’s remember that this is October in Reno and the competition is being held outside (out in the open – like the open public data), but it will be 24 hours of having a great time with fellow developers and giving back to the community.

Come root on the Hack4Reno teams this Saturday, October 15th at noon at the Pioneer Center for the kick off and if you are really excited you can join us and stay all night! Or come back on Sunday, October 16th at 2:30pm for the announcement of the winning team!

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.

The Content Crunch: Setting Your Project Up For Success

We focus on content management systems here at Trinity Applied Internet, but we are constantly reminded that for our clients, the system is not the difficult part when putting together a website redesign. (Probably, that’s because they are relying on us to work the magic.) The system, the code, custom plug-ins and even (to an extent) the design and user interface are usually relatively easy compared to… that’s right… generating the content itself.

In fact, we have worked with some outstanding organizations and businesses that, despite having an awesome story to tell, have no writers, no time, or no inspiration to get the story down on the page.  I understand their plight, having agonized for days over exactly what to write this blog post about, and how to write it.

The key to the success of your new website, depending on its goals and purposes, is probably writing some solid copy that will engage your audience and leave them wanting more. (More product. More information. More of your smiling face or your stellar services. ) This takes time, technique, and at best some experience. And while it is tempting to say it takes talent, the truth is it takes very little talent and can be learned over time.

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 1: Make the Time

So, you are designing a new website for your company. You have a list of features and functionality you need, you have completed your branding, you have plans for both online and offline campaigns to drive traffic and be supported by the website, synergistically. Now, you need to take some time out and plan for, collect and craft your content. We urge the companies we work with to do this during the few weeks or months when we are heads-down coding. We, or your developer of choice, will be busy working on things that won’t be ready for review for a while; you can be busy sharpening your pencil and crafting that content!

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 2: Assign The Right Resource(s)

Your company may have a marketing department, you might be lucky enough to have an agency, or it might all be up to you, as the owner, executive director, or team member who drew the short straw. We have a content team that can be contracted to write your copy, if that’s helpful. But in any case, someone is going to sit down and begin writing and it will be easier, faster and smoother for everyone (your audience included) if your staff or contract resource is the right resource. If you love to write, are excited about the prospect, and can spend a little time reading up on web copywriting –then go for it, you’ll do great! If (and we see this every few months or so) you break into a cold sweat at the prospect and suddenly it feels like you are back in the eighth grade with a big report due, then you are probably not the right resource for this task. Trust me. It will be agony for you, and probably not turn out very well.

Make sure you know who is going to write this (preferably before you start a single thing), and take care that that person or team is the best person or team available to you. Setting your project up for success by attending to these two (easy! simple!) tasks will jumpstart the process and have you just that much closer to some outstanding web content.

Thanks for reading. Next month…The Content Crunch Part B: Getting Past the Blank Page.