All Things Cahill

Category: Web 2.0

  • Write to Done: Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do

    A great post I had to share from Leo Babauta at Write to Done.

    One of the reasons I was able to draw so many readers to Zen Habits within the first year was that I treated the promotion of Zen Habits as you would any other product — I branded it.

    Of course, there are other reasons as well — I really focused on creating as useful content as possible, for example — but branding is what really helped Zen Habits take off so quickly.

    When you think of your blog as you would a brand, you have to create a consistent message and have everything you do — on and off the blog — send the same message. And you have to repeat the message as often as possible to your target audience until it’s stuck in their head.

    Leo’s right, of course, if you want to build a real readership, stay on message.  Not a skill I have been demonstrating here of late (oh look, a butterfly….), but one that you should be considering in your writing.

    Along with his action list, I’ll add a couple of my own:

    • If you can’t reasonably stick to your topic, then provide decent “silos” in which you categorize content, and stick with them.  
    • Spend time optimizing landing pages for categories, if you’ve got more than one.
    • Live it and love it – if you’re just covering a topic because it’s a potential money maker, you’ll sound hollow.  
    • You might want to consider multiple blogs, if you can’t handle the previous three items.

  • Moving Up When Things Are Down

    Yesterday the Interwebs were all a twitter after a couple A-list-types were laid off and the production schedule pared back at Revision3.  We need to get over it.  Companies have to adjust to the new reality of our economic misfortune. It would be utterly irresponsible for a company not to act, but that doesn’t make it easier for any of the folks affected.

    It was all fun and games for Twitter when it was Joe WebDev at Seesmic, or Jane Marketing at Pandora who got their pinks.  Now it’s the faces we know, and it’s becoming serious, because we’re slowly realizing that next time it could be us.

    I’m not a financial expert, but those that I trust for such information are painting a fairly bleak picture, particularly for startup companies.   That said, stable, profitable companies would be the place to be.

    Coming from a place (Atex) where there were perpetual layoffs, I can offer a little advice:

    • It’s Time to Get Old School – provide as much value as you can to your employer.  The days of 9 to 5 are over.  Think of your company in a fight for survival and find a way to become an integral part of the machine.
    • Have a Self-Improvement Project – now is the time to begin investing in your product, which is yourself.  Find ways to have even more to offer.
    • Have a Side Project – now is the time when you can get in on the ground floor with a video or web project.  As companies contract, opportunities for independent producers open up.
    • Rainy Day Funds Rule – what can I say?  Stashed cash can help keep the wolf from the door, and it can also allow you to take advantage of opportunities.

    Remember this: Things are never as bad as you fear, nor as good as you hope.

  • Twitter’s Achilles Heel

    Okay, maybe this isn’t the only flaw of Twitter, but it’s a good one, and I suspect, eminently fixable.  The problem is that we’re forced to drink from the fire hose when we look at our main tweet stream.  If you follow someone, you get everything they tweet, the good, the bad, the ugly.

    As I posted the other day, I’m utterly sick of the ceaseless tweeting about politics, much of which would make Josef Goebbels blush.  Last night I’m sure many of my followers were annoyed with my incessant tweeting on the Red Sox post season opener against the Angels.

    The problem is pretty obvious, hash tags have given us an easy way to group tweets by topic via search.  We also need the ability to exclude tweets by hash tag as well.  This is very easy to do, and won’t impact Twitter service as well, as we’d just have to ask people to tag their topics appropriately.  Thus I could have my Twitter client show me anything you have in your general or personal stream, plus anything related to #sm for social media, while excluding #pol tweets so I don’t have to unfollow you during the election cycle.

    Tweetdeck is well setup to handle something like this, and I’ll be forwarding the suggestion to them later today.  As any Google power user knows, have of the magic of search is not the stuff you include in your search, it’s the stuff you exclude to help bring the things you want to the top.

    As a side note, the #redsox tweet stream apparently brought Search.Twitter.com to its knees half way through the game.  Because Tweetdeck does it’s sorting at the client level, it kept on working without a glitch throughout the game.

    (Update: Iain Dodsworth, the founder of Tweetdeck got in touch to say he was contemplating a filter at the bottom of every column.  I think this would be a tremendous killer app.  Especially if he made it so you could tweet and reply from the column so that you hash tag would be added much as a reply tag is added now.)

  • Jeremiah Owyang: Why “Friending” Will Be Obsolete

    Like a secret handshake, only electronic

    Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting piece up entitled “Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete” and it’s struck a nerve with me.

    I hate the term friends.  It’s misleading and it’s a disservice to the the actual social linkage that’s going on.  Let’s face facts, just because I may let you see my Facebook page, it doesn’t mean that your my friend (no slight intended there folks).  Similarly, I may not want some people who might be friends or more likely family to see my page.  Hence the dilemma, although we call them friends, it’s really electronic acquaintances. (more…)

  • New Post on Dad-o-Matic – “Ward Cleaver Did Us Wrong”

    I’ve joined Chris Brogan’s group Dad blog at Dadomatic.com and my first post is up.  

    Dadomatic itself is an interesting effort, as Chris has brought together a very intersting group of dads to cover a range of topics.  Personally, I’m looking forward to bringing the voice of the regular down to earth dad.  Anyone can tell you that while I may try my hardest, I’m no Super Dad.  

    This post actually starts off by attacking the myth of the Super Dad:

    As much as I’d love to think I’m Ward Cleaver, dressed ever so nattily in a wool suit, pipe clenched lightly in my lips as I prepare to pass judgement on the Beaver’s latest antics, I’m not.  Unfortunately, in my heart, I suspect I bear a closer resemblance to a certain donut loving animated character, and I’m betting a lot of you are do as well.

    Check it out and let us know what you think!

  • Jeff Bennett: How Businesses Can Benefit From Social Networking

    We hear a lot of prognostication from the consultants about how business can benefit from social networking, but not as much when it comes to actual businesses that are using it.  Jeff Bennett, COO of Namemedia, Inc. blogs on this topic and gives real examples of how we’re (Disclosure: I’m a Senior Software Engineer at NameMedia) using social networking within out company.

    Businesses need to foster enhanced methods for employees to communicate. Lotus Notes was the standard for early collaboration, but there is opportunity to enhance the ways for employees to connect and collaborate with more transparency. At our company, NameMedia, we have enhanced communication and collaboration with with our Twiki, which is a wiki application allowing for employee databases, personal pages, schedules, work flow and more. There are so many additional ways this can be deployed and other tools to be added for sharing information, enhancing collaboration and improving productivity.

    As a developer, it’s easy for me to know what’s coming up for release, because the release engineering schedule is in the Twiki.  We’re of course using a ticketing system (Jira) for deficiency and task monitoring; but more over as a process control that allows us to control exactly what is getting pushed to our myriad of live sites (NameMedia owns something on the order of 900,000 domains).  We work remotely with coworkers in the Ukraine, the United Kingdom and around the United States via skype, plus our own internal IM system.

    It’s true, we do use these tools throughout our daily worklife, but even more, we’re constantly looking for new ways to work more efficiently.  We’re currently looking for a better way to manage our work flow and documentation and will probably end up with something that integrates completely with Jira.  I’m hoping evaluate Yammer in the coming weeks as a means of keeping up with the current tasks our disparate workforce is handling.

    You’ll want to add Jeff to your regular reading schedule, he brings a voice of experience, not just theory.

  • Social Media and Politics – All Lips, No Ears

    As the election cycle proceeds, I’ve noticed that the level of monologue in supposed discussions has increased to a fever pitch.  Take Twitter for example; it seems the chatter is now 20% political.  The problem is, I never signed up to listen to what everyone’s political viewpoint is.

    I know, I can simply unfollow everyone that’s into political discourse for the moment, but the truth is I like some of the other stuff they have to say.  Too bad I can’t simply filter out a posts with a few words in them.

    The problem I have is this: most of the folks looking to “discuss” politics really have no interest in discussion.  Even if they were interested in discussion, being limited to 140 characters is unlikely to be enough to convince anyone to vote either way.

    The trouble is so many of us are staking our “personal brands” on our online personas, why would we want to be identified in a way that would potentially alienate 40% of the populace?

    That’s right.  We talk about how potential employers look into our blog posts, at our LinkedIn and Facebook pages, so why would we want to share our deepest political views? Even worse, for some reason, everyone seems to think that naturally everyone will agree with them.  Why would you, when even in a landslide win, 35% of your fellow voters will have voted for the other guy/gal?

    Maybe we’d all be better off if you just tweeted about what you had for lunch…as long as it wasn’t a cheese sandwich!

  • Playstation 3 + PlayOn! = Killer Home Video Setup?

    I’ve had a glimpse into the future of home video and it surprisingly comes from a device I already owned, the Sony Playstation 3 (and it works on the XBox 360 as well, but I haven’t tested).  By downloading and installing a small app to my windows machine, I am now able to access online content from Hulu.com, CBS.com, Youtube.com, ESPN.com and soon, CNN.com and Netflix.

    The software is PlayOn! which is currently available as a 60 day beta trial, and when released is expected to cost $30.00 when it reaches full release.  It’s made by a company called MediaMall who’s got the tantalizing mission statement: “MediaMall Technologies enables Low-Cost & Widely Available Media Services, delivered over Broadband to the Entertainment System, via the PC.”  Now how can you possibly go wrong?

    The software isn’t completely perfect yet, but it still gives me a better picture than I get with my standard, non-HD cable line.  I have occassionaly had some jerky delivery, but I’ve found it I pause for a few minutes, go make some popcorn or something, and come back, whatever I’m watching runs fine.  Navigationally, I find the PS3 controller a bit challenging to use, but my 9 year old daughter is getting around like a pro. (more…)

  • Shel Israel on Social Media Scalability

    I missed this one last week and it’s the kind of post that I think most Social Media wonks will gloss over – “Social Media Scalability, the New ROI Question” from Shel Israel at Global Neighborhood.

    Scalability is an issue for anyone who introduces something new online and wants to grow. It was true for the pioneers who predate social media like ICQ [LINK], for the Stanford start up team for a search engine called Google. It was true for the college project that is now Facebook and so on. The technology that you start with may not be right for large scale. The people that begin it may not be the right people to run it on a large scale. The costs you start with may not fill the petty cash box a year hence.

    Wikipedia defines scalability: (more…)

  • The Big Blogging Secret – Linkbaiting

    I was listening to This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte yesterday (Twit 171 – The Lemondrop Kid) which featured appearances by Jason Calicanis, Andrew Horowitz, and Geoff Smith.  At some point Laporte asked Calacanis about his decision to stop blogging (he hasn’t really stopped, but he has drastically cut back) and Jason said he’d realized that being at the top of the blog food chain, the return on value wasn’t there for him.  (I am paraphrasing here, and not directly quoting him.)

    The problem is attributed to linkbaiting (from wikipedia):

    Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[5] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.

    For Calacanis, it became such a huge time waster, he had even posted “Linkbaiting Rules” in April of 2007. From his post: (more…)