All Things Cahill

Category: Web 2.0

  • Top Ten Posts from 2008

    Following Ari Herzog’s example, here are my top 10 posts of 2008.

    It’s a hard choice to make, but the votes are all in and I’ve got the envelope from our friends at Price Waterhouse containing the winners:

    Its mildly surprising to me that my best posts from 2007 tended to center on small business marketing, online marketing and content management.  Of course, I was working with small businesses then, so that I guess makes sense.

    Did I miss any important post?  Quite probably, but this is a fairly solid list.  Tell me, which is the best of 2008?

  • Branded Community or Sponsoring Niche Communities

    Paul Gillin posted on a topic that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days: Branded Communities.  I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again here and now: why would you buy a build a branded community when you can rent one instead?

    From Gillin’s post:

    Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration withGlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.

    Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution.

    David Churbuck posted on the issue and asked one very pointed question:

    Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?

    The classic example would be Nike+ – where they’ve built a fairly successful brand community.   However, I  think a yogurt community might be a tough sell.

    That said, building a branded community is a daunting task.  Potential issues:

    • Time to Market – do you have time for a 6-9 month dev cycle?
    • Core Competency – do you have people who can actually build and manage a community?
    • Expense – do you have a budget to build, and even more importantly, a budget to maintain a community?

    At NameMedia, I work with Niche Community Sites, and we’ve been coming up with interesting ways to put companies and their brands in touch with the customers they want to reach, and we’ve got some compelling stories about new and innovative ways in which we’re doing this.  A couple brief examples:

    It took Nike over 2 years to build their community.  We were able to get the Brother campaign up and running over night on Craftster.org.

    Okay, this isn’t meant to end up sounding like an ad.  My point is that you can get real results fast working with Niche Communities and Niche Social Media.  While I’d love to tell you that NameMedia has the market cornered on creative sponsorship, there are a lot of other creative folks out there.

    Or course, we’ve  got 20 million visits a month, over 30,000 conversations a day across our sites, in niches like outdoors, photography, technology, gardening, crafting, and astrology.  Our list of sites.

    If you’d like to hear more about the creative campaigns we’re doing, get in touch with me or leave a comment here.  I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and there are probably better folks than me to tell the story.

  • New Journalism in Action – Using Twitter as a Photoblog with the Iphone

    The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages.  I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment.  The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize.  You can check out the full tweet stream here.

    Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.

    Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations.  Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment.  Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.

    When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum. (more…)

  • Experiments in New Journalism – Live Tweeting the Sutton Chain of Lights Festival

    I’ll be live tweeting today from the various events of the Sutton Chain of Lights celebration, in Sutton, Massachusetts.  You can find my tweets at http://www.twitter.com/mncahill or by searching in Twitter for the #suttoncol hash tag.  

    My tweets throughout the day will include pictures of the event via my Iphone, and later today I’ll up load a photo gallery of the pictures.  If your out and about in Sutton, I encourage you to tweet using the same hashtag and I’d be happy to put your photos into the photo gallery I post later.

    I you aren’t tweeting and just want to catch up, I plan to be that the National Gallery and Gift Shop on Putnam Hill Road at 1pm.

  • PC Magazine To Kill Print Version

    PC Magazine announced last week that their January issue would be the last issue they actually print, from then on, they’re a web-only publication.

    From The New York Times:

     

    It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.

    “The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

    While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.

     

    There are only two surprises here, first that it took them so long to realize that online was the only viable medium for them, and that they continued to call themselves “news” got so little play to begin with.

    I’ll leave the inevitable “if it’s online only, can you still have ‘magazine’ in the title” snark alone for the day.  The real news here is that some news is best delivered over the web, and Tech News is one of those things.  The long print cycle lead times ensured that by the time the magazine would turn up on your doorstep, the news content would be old and moldy, having been macerated to death by various blogs, news sites and forums.  The key factors for moving Tech News online:

     

    • Tech readers definitely have computers and high speed access to the web.
    • Tech news cycles move too fast for print.  Web news can be delivered in minutes or hours, while print is right for 3-6 week delivery.
    • Tech news in print demands the most costly of print, high quality glossy magazines.

     

    In the end, doing tech in print now means deep analysis and rigourous testing (both of which PC Magazine has always excelled at).  Yet, those can be offered online, and with a richer presentation.  Back when I started editing Reel-Time.com I remember new writers would always ask “How many words do I have?” when we talked about their weekly columns.  I always had to laugh, the notion of specific column length being so “print-centric.” On the web, we are free to throw as many pixels as we need at an issue.

    I believe we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg.  Those that can make the jump will start to make that jump quickly.  Notably, I expect to see trade journals become a relatively rare beast.  Ivory towered experts lecturing professionals about their profession is a thing of the past.  Instead, users will gravitate to profession-based niche social media.  The journals will slowly cease to exist, and the magazines that remain will be serving the less technical of the professions.

    For all the talk, er, converstation, going on about Social Media, we really haven’t got there yet.  I think the next year will the telling time, when we see more application of the prime tenets towards the professional space.  Where as we may have proposed a network for surfers last year, which we might monetize someday, this year, we’ll be proposing a network of plumbers, which we’ll be monetizing starting day one.

    Once again, we’ve had a “Genie is out of the bottle” moment, and things have again changed for print.  There’s a digital diaspora going on, and we’ve seen a steady wave of carpetbagging print journalists, so it only makes sense that the institutions themselves attempt to make the move.  It’s the publishing equivailent of breaking down the presses and moving them where the money is.

    So, if you’re in print, think about this: how can you better leverage social media online now to allow you to make a transition later?

    And one bit of information to remember: in the 1970s print still used Linotype machines for typesetting.  There were tons of highly skilled linotype operators out there setting type for everyone.  When the first Atex systems came along, they started to put those guys (my grandfather was a life-time linotype operator by the way) out of a job.  About a decade later, the job no longer existed anywhere.  

    Are you a potential digital carpetbagger, or will you go the way of the linotype operator?

  • The Dour Marketer – Churbuck.com

    The Dour Marketer | Churbuck.com.

    David nails it.  Marketing is changing fast, and it’s all about the ROI.

    With those markets off 40% from their highs in the fall of 2007, marketers are also feeling very dour right now, and despite feeble exhortations that now is the time to double down and crush the competition, all signs are in place for a major flattening and decline in global marketing programs from advertising to PR. It is an article of faith that one of the first expense items to get whacked in a downturn is marketing and other corporate services perceived as “soft” and nice-to-have versus essential to make payroll and keep the lights on.

    Some marketing activities will survive and continue through these hard times, and I believe it will be the newest techniques and tactics which endure thanks to the simple fact that they can be measured so well. These are the days when every dollar or Euro spent on marketing has to defend itself from that king tyrant Le ROI.

    David gives us a real world view.  Not the airline magazine version, but the “been backwards and forwards through the numbers a thousand times looking for nickels and finding pennies” view.  Then from there, he offers real advice, and even better a commitment to providing more info going forward.  For now, his advice for a couple zero cost marketing wins:

    1. Open a blog. WordPress.com. Stop. Go no further. Go there. Open a blog. Go battle with your PR and legal teams and before you visit them do a quick Google search for “corporate blog policy” and print out one of the many policies held up as classics by the experts. Do a search and replace and put your organization’s name in the appropriate places. Get permission. Start blogging. Cost: zero.
    2. Monitor what other blogs say about your organization. Google Blog Search. Technorati. An RSS reader. Google Reader. Bloglines. Whatever. Learn them. Set up RSS search feeds on your brand names and start reading. “Engaging” with bloggers? Google search on the topic. There’s more advice out there than a herd of consultants could impart for a fee in a year. Cost: zero.

  • Lenovo Opens Discover Social Media

    Just when I thought there was a Social Media Review site for everything, Lenovo’s turned the hose back on Social Media itself and launched Discover Social Media – a site with social media reviews of social media sites.

    The site has been built under the umbrella of the LenovoSocial.com which offers a range of social offerings, some Lenovo specific such as the Lenovo Blogs and Lenovo Forums, and others such as the lenovoVideoLibrary and lenovoPhotoLibrary which are more general in nature.

    Running right now as a lead story on the Discover Social Media page is a story entitled “Building your global business with social networking” which serves as and excellent primer on the subject.

    The one issue I have with the site so far (and I have not gotten that far into it yet, but will) is that the articles don’t have bylines on them, and I do wonder where the content is coming from. The stuff I’ve read so far is great!

    Esteban Glas of Lenovo (and a frequent link here…) posts on his blog “Social, baby, Social!“:

    Our aim is to build a community site where newcommers to Social Media can get up to speed with all the trends, sites and services around Social Media. Reviews and best practictices are written and revised by peers. For the time being the site works very blog-like, but that will transition to something more complex and social Networky.

    Here’s an excerpt from our welcome message:

    When you hear about “social networking,” just know that computing is getting more personal, more about you, your success, your family, your interests and the ability to connect with people and information that can help you. Social networking is people talking… about everything under the sun and much more.

    As usual the best part of this projects is the people I get to know.

    Mitch Ratcliffe is in charge of much of the reviews you’ll see on the site. He’s done a terrific job, and, I must admit, I feared for his sanity, since he had to actually use all those services. And using them means Signing up and spending time on them. In case you don’t know Mitch I strongly encourage you to subscribe to his ZD|Net blog.

  • My WordPress Plugins

    Over the past couple weeks, I’ve seen a lot more people making the switch to WordPress.  Why not?  The system is utterly configurable, with a plugin (or 5) for virtually every need.  The problem is that not all plugins are of the same caliber.  In fact, some are downright site killers.  Since I’ve had a close look at a lot of them, I thought you all might benefit from a look at the plugins that I use on my personal blog.

    • Akismet – this one comes standard with WordPress and it’s a decent anti-spam program.  Although this morning for the first time in recent memory 8 spam comments found their way through…
    • All In One SEO Pack – I’ve done a bunch of rewrites on this package for other sites, but the out of the box SEO functionality is great.  Take the time to configure it.  Perhaps this plugin is worth a post of it’s very own at a later date.
    • Feedburner Feedsmith – this reroutes my RSS through Feedburner so I can get some meaningful stats on the black hole that is RSS usage.  I love metrics…
    • FlickRSS – I’m using this to pull in photos from my Flickr account.  I’m not a huge fan of this…
    • Google XML Sitemaps – a great plugin for SEO – BUT you have to limit it to 5000 posts if you have a large volume in your system. I have seen this plugin bring two sites to their knees.  Limiting to 5000 fixed that issue for both.
    • MobilePress – I just installed this, because my new wider format wasn’t mobile compatible.  Hence, I can’t render a true opinion here. (Note: after this post, I found this plugin was rendering the mobile version to everyone, and I turned it off.  I am fairly certain it is a wrong setting, but I can’t recommend the plugin until I see it work properly)
    • ShareThis – a great plugin to add links to the social networking sites.
    • Simple Recent Comments – There should be a simple hook to grab recent comments in WordPress, but there isn’t.  This adds one.
    • Subscribe2 – This allows you to have users sign up for email digests.  I’ve been using it for 4 months and I’m the only person signed up.
    • Twitter Tools – A plugin that will post all your blog entries to Twitter and all your Tweets to the blog.  I only use it to post my most recent tweets to the sidebar.  If you were to actually use it, you’d look like a Twitiot…
    • Vipers Video Quick Tags – a great video plugin.
    • WordPress Automatic Upgrade – the need for this goes away in the next release so don’t even bother.
    • WP Super Cache – this program utterly rules – it creates a cache that cuts down on bandwidth usage and makes your server much better able to handle high loads.  I will probably have some stats to share on this one in a week or so as I am testing it on a site at work.

    Absolutely avoid plugins such as:

    • Anything offering “live” statistics or user tracking –  These plugins will create ginormous tables as they track every single hit to your site.  They also add a hit to your database which negates the benefit of having caching.
    • Anything that offers “easy database access” – It may be possible to hack your admin console, don’t use a plugin that would allow anyone to run queries from your console.
    • Anything that hasn’t been updated in over a year – that would mean that it wasn’t vetted for the watershed WordPress 2.5 release.  I guess it’d be okay if the plugin was very simple…

  • Kiss a Pig

    Sometimes you really need to kiss a pig, and yes, that indeed, is me...on the right

    Sometimes you really need to kiss a pig, and yes, that indeed, is me…on the right

     

    Yes, sometimes it’s in our best interest to do something we don’t really want to do, to literally kiss the pig.  Nothing could better typify this than the great ad debate, that age old fight that occurs in media wherein the editorial staff seeks to maintain their supposed journalistic credibility by running a publication that is utterly advertising free, while the ad staff is running around trying to turn your hallowed publication into The Want Advertiser.

    When I worked in print, the editorial staff barely deigned to acknowledge the existentence of the advertising (in fact, most editorial content management systems in print media do not show the ads, only the blocked out holes where ads will go) while the advertising team referred derisively to the actual content of the paper as the “News Hole” (making the purveryors of such “newsholes”).

    In some ways, things have been worse for online media, especially niche media.  Online, many of us were able to build out our sites without the benefit of advertising, channeling the Field of Dreams mantra “build it and they will come.”

    Unfortunately, many of us found that we were simply too small to attract the advertisers we wanted.  We found the endemic advertisers with in our niches were generally too small to foot the bill for what we wanted.  In the end, many of us found we either had to sell or buy, that owning a single site wasn’t enough.

    In the past few days I’ve seen a miraculous transformation on Reel-time, the site that I started with.  The site finally hit the radar of the NameMedia sales team, and all of a sudden, I’m finding there’s a lot of interest in what turns out to be a huge reservior of potential page views.

    The funny thing is that they’re now talking with people who would never have returned a phone call from Reel-Time a year ago.  If we’d even bothered to make the call.

    So, in the long run I’ve learned the big secret of publishing: you’ve got to love advertising, and in particular your ad sales guys.

  • CNN on the Does and Dont’s of Social Networking Sites

    Check out the CNN article here…

    Okay, you’re betting I’m gonna get all snarky on them and tell you how they don’t know what their talking about. Actually, just the opposite, they’ve come up with a very good, very simple guide that is worth passing on to the SN newbies you know. It just might keep them out of hot water in the workplace.

    Actually they had one bit that I hadn’t really thought of before:

    Don’t forget others can see your friends

    Unless you’ve opted to keep your friends list private, your friends can see the contacts you’ve made. So in addition to keeping your friends’ risque pictures and comments off of your profile, be cautious about whom you friend and when.

    “Connecting to five people at Company XYZ after a day of vacation is a sure sign you are interviewing,” Vergara cautions.

    Ouch – that could make for a very awkward closed door meeting with your current employer and a fast transition for you to the world of ex-employee.

    It’s worth a read.