TAI Extends Client Websites With Both Third-Party and Custom WordPress Plug-ins

Last week saw the launch of another Trinity Applied Internet custom WordPress website for northern Nevada short sale and foreclosure experts GreenStreet Realty. It features the new custom sidebars plug-in Patrick is getting ready to release to the WordPress open source code base, allowing for each section, or even each individual page, to carry a completely separate set of widgets in the sidebar. This allows the template to be infinitely more flexible and takes WordPress one step further towards being able to handle content like big brothers Joomla! and Drupal.

We also got the opportunity to play around with the IDX integration piece offered by GreenStreet’s MLS listings vendor, and are happy to report it was smooth sailing. The listings appear in various places throughout the site, and can be searched from the sidebar widget. Clicking a property listing brings the user to GreenStreet’s results page which is actually external to the website, an integration that looks seamless to the user.

Our content department (Erin, Nicole, and for layout, Rachel) contributed extensively to this project as well, with support including social media set-up, research and copywriting. And, there’s more to come! Stay posted for more exciting project updates…

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!

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.

Which Social Media Management Tool Should I Use??

There are several social media platform management systems out there – Hootsuite, TweetDeck, TweetMe, Ping.fm, among others. The basic idea is the same for all of these systems – make it easy for users to be active on social media, without taking all the time to login and logout of each individual platform as well as reduce redundancy of creating posts by allowing the user to choose which platforms they want to post to all at the same time.

There are minute differences in each system, and often it comes down to whichever system layout you prefer, or the customizable options it offers. In my opinion, the most user-friendly option is Seesmic. The reason I like Seesmic is that the help desk is super easy and available, it allows you to add fanpages from Facebook (where many others only allow you to post to your personal Facebook account), and you can set up how often you want it to refresh your streams of information separately, rather than all at once – this is useful for twitter as its feed goes much faster than Facebook or LinkedIn.

All of the platforms are free – and most, including Seesmic, have a free iPhone app that you can download. Again, Seesmic is very customizable even as an app, which is very helpful so that you are not using your iPhone space for things you don’t need or use.

It is important to note that all of these systems (just as the platforms they post to) have glitches and sometimes stall out. This is, unfortunately, still a part of internet social media platforms; however, I have not seen many problems with Seesmic, and the few I have seen have been very superficial, as opposed to shutting down the ability to post or claiming to have posted to your accounts without actually doing so.

Overall, for this kind of system, I believe Seesmic provides the functionality and customization mix that is needed to be successful in managing the social media platforms currently used, as well as the option for future growth or use of other platforms.

Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011

WordCamp was packed with informative and entertaining presentations, humor, and a community call to action this year!  Not to mention the many local and travelling WordCamp-ers who were eager to share stories and ideas and meet up with other interested parties.

Several of the TAI team were in attendance, but for Rachel and I it was a first time experience.  We decided to get the most from the experience and split up to cover as many of the presentations as we could.  Some of them proved to be WAY over our heads, though. By the time the lightning rounds were done, we were mentally exhausted.

Who knew there was so much to learn about one platform? Of course, WordPress is capable of more than many other platforms out there, I was still surprised by all the topics!  Some of them included: child themes, common mistakes, community involvement, using WP to create a newspaper site, security on WP, typography, integration, and our personal favorite – Drupal vs. WordPress – the illustrated version! (Kevin Jones had the best presentation of the day!)

All in all, we both enjoyed ourselves and are looking forward to attending again next year!  I am even thinking maybe I can help out with some of the arrangements – that way we could have heat on in the presentation halls and coffee in the morning… (it wasn’t pretty with these things missing – people REALLY love their coffee).

Thank you to all who helped to make this event possible – it couldn’t have happened without you!  We are proud to have contributed ourselves and it was well worth the time.  See you next year!

Trinity Applied Internet Launches Nevada Immunization Coalitions Website

Ta Da!  This past September, Trinity Applied Internet completed the redesign for the Nevada Immunization Coalitions website — www.immunizenevada.org.  The launch happened to coincide with a very busy time of year for NIC, the start of the traditional school term and beginning of flu shot season.

ImmunizeNevada.org features the new version of our Content Gadget content management system. (2.0), as well as a suite of custom tools that operate News, Events, Newsletters and Publications, among other items. The organization, which provides education, resources and advocacy about immunzations for patients and medical professionals, has been working with Trinity Applied Internet since 2005.

Extra kudos are due to NIC for establishing their own Facebook page and joining the social networking community. To join their Facebook group and help provide awareness and consistent immunizations for Nevada children and adults, visit the www.immunizenevada.org website and click through the Facebook link on the right hand side.

WDYWTK answers: Online Networking Tools – Intro

Bill Sims of the Nevada Small Business Development Center asked a great question (read full comment):

As you know we have been considering adding a forum to our site, for exclusive use by our clients, our “Alumni”. The purpose would be to provide a networking system so that they could share experiences, trade stories, seek assistance and advice from each other etc. Web 2.0 stuff, social networking, etc.

My own hesitation lies in the fact that I have never seen, nor participated in, a forum that seems to work out as intended. Most of them just sit there, great tools that are little used, or are often abused.

Are there better models out there, tools that are working? Or, is it simply another case of proper marketing, using all available channels, to make folks aware of the system and get them engaged in the conversation?

At the recent symposium we attended in New Orleans, Wiki’s, or the use of a system such as InCircle was suggested.

I think that your choice of tool for this problem depends on your goal. The three most common online networking solutions (Forums, Wikis, and Social Networks) are related but have different foci. They are not mutually exclusive. Just because you have a forum doesn’t mean you can’t enhance it with a Wiki etc.

If your goal is to create a knowledge base for alumni to tap into then I would go with a Wiki which is better designed to organize knowledge based information. This will need to be heavily moderated to prevent bad data.

If your goal is to share experiences, trade stories, seek assistance and advice from other alumni then I would go with a forum which is designed to promote threaded conversations, feedback, and advice. It can be harder to mine for information and is easily abused – the squeaky wheel can hijack conversations of value – so it to will need to be heavily moderated.

If your goal is to provide current students and alumni an online network to promote themselves or their businesses and possibly give them an ‘in’ into other industries –then a social networking service is the way to go.

One or more of these will accomplish what you want – all three have the high possibly of becoming, as you said, great tools that are little used, or are often abused. Again you hit the nail on the head – in order for them to succeed you must get your alumni engaged in the conversation and then be patient until your forum, wiki, or network gains momentum.

I’ll create five mini posts on this subject:

• What is a wiki? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• What is a forum? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• What is a social network? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How do you get your audience engaged in online tools?
• What are the perils of user submitted content?