Are you with it? (social media marketing)

Many companies have already realized the benefits of implementing Social Media Marketing, but for those who have not yet come to terms with this idea, now is the time to get with it! 

It is a proven fact that during difficult economic times, startups with semi-grounded footing flourish, because they can see opportunity where others see turmoil. The cosmetics industry was formed in exactly this way. During bad times they saw that by simply providing a cheap luxury to women, they could turn a huge profit. Nice. 

The same is true for marketing tactics. Social Marketing brings people together like no other previous marketing tactics- ever, and now people want to come together. Companies need to take notice, especially those who are just gaining marketplace footing. 

There are a few simple ways (small) companies can take advantage of this cheap marketing strategy. No need to hire an expensive marketing firm here!

• Engage your audience with Twitter, but be sure and follow Beth Harte’s Advice.
• Write a company blog- this might take a bit of effort to get set up and looking nice, but it creates a conversation with your audience unlike any other. This gets the conversation started, and allows for comments, and for others to write about your blog in their blogs- oh and then there are trackbacks and pingbacks, very useful.
• Add links to your blog for your audience to digg, stumble, float, or add to technorati, reddit, xanga, or del.icio.us.
• Engage in local Social Networking events by hosting a group like RefreshDallas, or some other Social Group in your specific industry- they are out there, try looking on Upcoming.org or Meetup.com
• Monitor your success through such Social Media Monitors as Google Alerts, Google Trends, BlogSearch, Twitter Search and others. 
• Create a forum for your users to talk about your product, ask questions, ect. 
• Take full advantage of your website, and put it to work for your brand and your company. Represent yourself well, and hopefully you will be well represented throughout the blogosphere. 
• Email Marketing- I know I know, you are saying this is not a social media, but think about it, if your reader clicks into your landing page and fills out a contact form, they are socializing with you, because you first reached out to them. 

Brand Reputation Management: Part 1

We are seeing the trend of using Viral Marketing concepts such as Social Media take a dramatic turn upwards with the economic downturn. It’s virtually free, and is fairly easy to track- and best of all it is reaching more and more folks than traditional marketing media, such as advertising, and analyst reports.

Tracking social media is rather simple using an RSS reader, and a few subscriptions. Just take a look at the list of Social Media Trackers below:

Technorati, Digg, and Reddit

These three offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of any search. By simply entering in your company name/product name, (or your competitor’s name) and subscribing to the search feed, you will be automatically notified every time an article appears which contains your search criteria.

Twitter Search

You can use this tool to search Tweets for those mentioning your brand or company- and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria.

Blog Pulse

Searches through the blogosphere for mentionings of your brand or company name, and allows you to subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria. BlogPulse also has a great portfolio of free tools such as BlogPulse Profiles (beta), which allows you to enter in the URL of a specific blog, and get information such as their recent blog posts, trackbacks, common keywords, blogging trends, and find similar blogs. BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to search for a specific criteria, and see the “buzz” surrounding that brand/item/company.

Google Trends

Allows you to compare multiple search terms’ recent trending. This works a lot like BlogPulse Trend.  I searched “Apple” and “Windows”, and found that the search term “Windows” has consistently higher volume of search than does “Apple”.

Google Blog Search

Google searches the blogosphere for blogs containing your search criteria. This is great even for those of us who arent social marketers, but who would like to stay up to speed on product releases ect. I am using it to track Adobe Thermo, which has been in Adobe labs existence now for over a year.

Google Alerts

Alerts you via email every time your search criteria is mentioned. This can help you to watch for copyright infringement, as well as monitor your brand’s reputation. I prefer the RSS feeds to daily/as-it-happens emails, but for some this is the way to go.

And rounding out this week’s list is:

Compete

This is one handy tool! It allows you to track the Stats of up to 3 sites at a time in one chart. Very handy for, well, spying on your competition!

Stay tuned for more… I will be releasing the other half of this list in the next week or so…

Are your financials in the green?

With the economy in chaos, most Americans are trying to find a way to save, and to get in control of their finances. Mint personal finance management tool can help you get back into the green! Mint came out of beta earlier this week, and so far I am loving its massive array of features. 

This super cool, and free tool, logs in to all of your personal bank, credit, loan, and investments account to give you a complete overview of your financial status. For those of us who are wanting to keep up with the debt to income to investments ratio, this tool is perfect! 

I started testing out mint last night and was superbly impressed- it took less that 20 minutes to get all of my credit card, bank, and loan data imported. Once the data was imported it was aggregated and parsed together to give a clear graph of where you stand financially. I try to sit down once every 6 months or so to really understand what is going on with my money, and it is usually a 1/2 day affair, but with Mint, I can just open up my web browser, log in, and see exactly what is going on- without wasting half a day! Fabulous!

Creating a Favicon

Creating a nice little favicon, is relatively simple to create using Photoshop. To begin you will need to download the ICO Plugin for Photoshop from Telegraphics.

Installing the ICO Plugin

Once you have the plugin downloaded, you need to place it in your Photoshop>> Applications>> Plugins folder. When you next startup Photoshop the plugin should be automatically detected. If not, try shutting it down and restarting Photoshop.

Create your Graphic

With the plugin installed all you need to do is create a graphic for your icon. Create a new Photoshop document and for now you can set your canvas size to 64×64px (you will resize this to 16×16px later).

Create the graphic for your icon. Now all you need to do is scaled the image back down to 16×16 and Save it as a Windows Icon.

Uploading your Icon

Now simply drop your new icon into the root folder of your website. Viola! You have an icon.

Testing, 1, 2, 3…

To get your icon to show, you may have to clear your cache and restart your browser. If you are running Safari, you will specifically have to reset the favicon cache. To do this go to Safari>> Reset Safari, and check “Remove all website icons”.

Are you a freelancer or a “synergistic” startup?

If you are a Dallas area freelancer, missing the interaction of being in an office environment, then you should check out the Big in Japan Dallas Co-working Office Space. Becoming a tenant is free, but requires you reserve your space. You can chose to reserve the space for the month, or if you prefer just reserve it for a few days out of the month. The amenities of the space include:

• Drop Ins* and Monthly Registrations- FREE, but all require reservation. Not all monthly registrants will qualify- synergistic startups are sought.
• Hours- 7am to 7pm (door code will be given to new applicants after 30 days)
• Features- Foosball table, Wii (with rockband), small kitchen, free cokes, conference room, recording studio, in building bar and cafeteria. Check out the pictures!
• Ammenities- Free Phone (Cisco VoIP), Free WiFi and dedicated IP, 1/4 colocation cabinet in data center (5mbps bandwidth)

Are YOU relevant?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about relevancy in design, and prioritizing features ect. Today I am asking the question, are you relevant? Are you keeping yourself up to date on current trends/products/softwares/skills ect. in your industry? And even more, do you know which skills will take you where you want to go?

To remain relevant you must take a small timeout regularly to do a mini-evaluation of what you are doing, where you are going, and what you need to get there. But more than that, doing a major evaluation, say, once every six months, is also a good idea. While you are at it, dust off your resume, and check it for relevancy and accuracy.

Just something to think about….

Whats going on in DFW this week…

This is a very busy week for professional social networking! There are several events going on this week- check them out!

• DFW Joomla Users Group Meetup- (Monday October 13th; 7pm)This meetup group meets bi-monthly to discuss all things Joomla! This month the meeting will be held at Obzeet. This meetup is free, but they ask that you purchase dinner from the restaurant in exchange for their free hosting generosity.
• Dallas Interactive Marketing and Internet SEO/SEM Meetup- (Tuesday October 14th; 7pm) This month the meeting will be held at the High Tech Bar at the INFOMART. Last Month the meeting focus was Search Engine Optimization, and there is yet to be a specific topic listed for this month’s meeting, but it’s bound to be interesting.
• DFW Visual Communications Meeting- (Wednesday October 15th; 11am) This working lunch costs $35 for non-members, discusses Quark XPress 8 and takes place at Olmstead-Kirk Paper Company.
• DFW SEM Meeting- (Wednesday October 15th; 7pm) The meeting topic is TBD, and takes place at the Reniasance Dallas.
• Presidential Debates- (Wednesday October 15th; 8pm) I know this is not a social networking event, and may not even be informative, but I thought I’d throw it in here anyway
• Refresh Dallas- (Thursday October 16th; 7pm) This is one of my favorite area social networking groups! This month’s meeting is presented by Aaron Hursman, and will cover effective Dashboard Design. It is sponsored and hosted by the folks at Ackerman McQueen.
• DFW FlexCamp- (Friday October 17th; 9am) Special Day Camp just for everything Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, hosted at the Marriott at Legacy Town Center.
• DFW Adobe Users Group- (Saturday October 18th; 11am) This month the meeting topic is everything CS4! Yay! The meeting will be at Nerdbooks.

I hope to see a few of you out and about this week!

Love what you do, do what you love

At the STC Meeting this week Rich Maggiani spoke on discovering your inherent skills. Most of us are not as fortunate to be able to do our discovering during a 6 month hiatus in Hawai’i like Rich did but the concept is still the same.

Rich’s plan includes a few simply stated steps:

• List your life stages/time frames (can be overlapping- ie. worked while going to school)
• From your chronological list of life stages determine your defining accomplishments
• List the skills that each accomplishment required by major and minor skills
• Break those skills into larger skill sets or groups and determine whether they are skills you acquired/inherent and whether you enjoy the activity

Be warned: although Rich’s plan is pretty simply stated, the concept requires deep reflection.

Rich’s plan is ultimately a great way to determine what it is you like to do, and what skills you need to work on to get to do the things you love the most. It also helps you to see what the driving factors are in your life- why do you like traveling? Is it the discovery? The adventure?

Very nice Rich, thank you for encouraging us all to do a bit of reflection!

Maintianing Relevance…

I heard a quote recounted by Garrett Dimon at a recent Refresh Dallas meeting:

If everything is important, then, nothing is.

This is the most relevant golden nugget of knowledge bestowed me as of late. The sentiment is relevant in many places, but is especially relevant in product/application/website design.

Prioritizing features is a must to ensure your user understands that one thing is important over another thing. For example, color coding items in a list of messages by severity, allows the user to sift through the things that require immediate attention, and leave the lesser important stuff to deal with later. Users need this prioritization and direction.

Before beginning development on any type of project you must know the projects goals, whether they be to make waves in your industry, to track bugs, to get people to buy your product, to monitor web traffic, to display your talents or to perform usability testing. Design your product, to do one thing and do it well, and prioritize its features so that it gives the user direction. Convoluting the goals of the product/application/website will only create a less usable and more clunky product.

For example, Adobe has perfected this sentiment with PhotoShop, Illustrator and FireWorks. PhotoShop’s purpose is to edit photos, while Illustrator is fantastic at creating vector graphics, and then there is FireWorks, whose purpose is to create phenomenal web graphics. Each product does their job, and does it beautiful, but what would happend, if these products were morphed into one large, clunky, and difficult to use product? People would probably move on to an easier program that just did what they needed it to do.

There are many other such examples- not to be cliche, but Apple does a great job of this, and Microsoft does not. Microsoft tries to make everyone happy all the time, rather than making simple, easy to use programs that do exactly what the person needs them to do and nothing more.

Instead of conquering a market giant, know your limitations and develop a complementary product, that adds value to the products people are already using. Value added products are usually more welcome faces on the market that competing products, which consumers/users have to wade between to find the right fit. Just something to think about….

So, first things first, develop a list of features, cross some off, and re-assess, repeat until you have a product, that does the exact thing it was designed to do, and leave the extras, to other products, who also do exactly what they were designed to do and nothing more. And, design your product to give users visual directions within the product.

Agile Development

I recently attended a Society for Technical Communications meeting where Kathryn Poe and Matt Stringfellow spoke about Agile Development. Kathryn and her Matt did a great job explaining how Agile development can impact those of us a the end of the waterfall, this is what I took away from their informational speech: 

Agile Development allows us writers, and software documentation specialists to have roleswithin product development- especially in the realm of software development, rather than below or after development roles. 

Documenting, writing Q.A. and developing basic marketing slicks or website text after a product is completed puts us in a bind. We are the last straw to getting a product to market, and as such in this role we are under the waterfall of the product deadline. If the development team falls short of meeting a deadline, whose time are they eating up? Most likely the person who’s job is put into the perspective of “just checking a checkbox”, or whose job is last on the to-do-list. The product documentation ends up being done in 2 weeks, for a product that took 2 years to develop- not cool!

I learned from a recent DFW-STC meeting, that Agile development allows the writers, documentation specialists, Q,A. people, and marketers alike to over come the waterfall effect that always seems to happen in a development schedule. 

The key, it seems to overcoming such an obstacle, is to document, while the product is being developed, by breaking up the development cycle into chunks. By developing one feature at a time until it is finished (feature has been bug tested, wired up with the GUI, documented, Q.A.’d - finished) you can come out from under the development schedule and join it. Developing in this manner is supposed to help keep the team afloat as well, by encouraging the meeting of shorter more concise deadlines, as opposed to only thinking about the end- that huge looming deadline 2 years in the future, (or however long) that the entire product is supposed to be configured. 

This type of development it seems, also causes less re-working, and re-configuring of features, because once a feature is finished it takes a lot more work to re-open it, and start over. It is much more work, and it makes a feature that was only supposed to get 2 weeks of development time, eat up 4. 

All in all, I think Agile is a pretty good option, if you have a development team large enough to work on one feature at a time, and still meet the end product deadline. I’m not sure what happens when you work in a very small development environment.

If you are interested in learning more about Agile Development please check out Agile Alliance the Agile Community Website or the book The Art of Agile Development.