TweetI’m the guest speaker for the August meeting of the Social Media Breakfast in Waco. I’ll be giving a short talk social media strategy and what Wilsonart International has been doing in social media spaces for the past 18 months or so.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
7:30 – 9:00 am

Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q
2510 Circle Rd.
Waco, TX 76706

If you’re in the area, please stop by and say “hi.” Oh, and Rudy’s has some great breakfast tacos and coffee – that alone is worth coming.

Visit Eventbrite for more information and to get your complimentary ticket.

Thanks to Caryn Brown and CJ Jackson for organizing this event and inviting me.

See you there.

photo credit: Amy-N

TweetThe other day I had a short, but very interesting conversation on Twitter with Tim Walker and Julie Hunt, two Austin-area web marketing pros. It all started with this tweet from Tim:

As more people get involved in more and more social media settings, there is a temptation to try to automate posting as much as possible. There are services which will allow you to post in once place and the service will automatically send that post to the other selected services. Some services, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have bots or applications which will grab your postings from other sites (mostly Twitter) and pull them into your stream on their service.

On the one hand, this seems like a handy way to be involved everywhere at once. But there are some downsides you need to be aware of:

1. I wrote about the downside of cross posting from Twitter to Facebook earlier this year. (This is one of my more popular recent articles, too.) In that piece, I point out that if you port tweets with links from Twitter, Facebook won’t pull the nice description and thumbnail into the link. I think the link with the thumbnail is much more eye-catching.
2. Something noted in the comments of the article about Facebook noted above is the use of hashtags (the “pound sign” as in “#subject”) which are commonly used on Twitter to help people track comments and conversations on the service. These aren’t used on other services and can cause confusion to those who are not into Twitter.
3. On Twitter, if you want to send a message to someone’s attention, you add “@” to the message, something like this: “@rehor this is a great topic.” Like hashtags, these are lost on other services. Although Facebook has adopted this, it’s really more of a Twitter thing.
4. Speaking of “@” messages: If you’re cross-posting your Twitter feed to other services, only the “@” messages from you in a Twitter conversation show up in your stream. Your followers on those other services will only see half of a conversation, which won’t make much sense to them.
5. As Tim pointed out in our conversation, sending all your tweets to LinkedIn does cause some clutter. This is especially true since LinkedIn combined all messages from and about contacts into one stream like Facebook’s wall.
6. I find that my followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are made up of quite different audiences. I only “friend” people on Facebook I actually know, and most of them aren’t interested in my comments on social media or web development. I recently set up a separate Facebook page for this blog so those who want can follow more business-related stuff from that page.
7. The 140 character limit to tweets does not apply on Facebook and LinkedIn. While the character limit does force Twitter users to be concise, sometimes to the point of confusion, why limit yourself if you don’t have to? I’m not advocating writing War and Peace in your Facebook or LinkedIn comments, but a little extra verbiage can sometimes be a good thing.

For a time last year, I did run my Twitter feed to my Facebook wall. I found I spent so much time answering questions about things which made no sense to my friends there that it wasn’t worth whatever benefit I might get from being more active. I do still port my Foursquare check ins to Facebook, though, mostly so folks there can know what I’m up to.

What about you? Do you automatically cross post your Twitter feed to other social media services? Why or why not? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Last week Google announced it was pulling the plug on Google Wave. When introduced, it was touted by some to be a revolutionary new way to communicate online. Some opined it would replace email, instant messaging and a host of other communication methods. I didn’t think it was “all that and a bag of chips” and certainly not a replacement for email, but I found it quite useful for collaborative projects and described why in my November 2009 article entitled, “Google Wave – Great Potential For Collaboration.”

Many have pointed out Wave’s flaws, and there certainly were some as there is in any new tool. Here are good examples, some which have points I agree with:

• “Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures” by Danny Sullivan
• “Why Google Wave Sucks, and Why You Will Use It Anyway” by Martin Seibert on TechCrunch
• “Google Wave’s Unproductive Email Metaphors” by Robert Scoble

Most of the people I talked to about Wave either didn’t get how it could be useful (an argument I hear against using Twitter all the time, too) or that it was too slow (which it was at times).

Despite its shortcomings, I found Wave to be rather handy and used it in a number of collaborative projects. There were others who saw the potential it had and used it with some success, notably Chris Brogan, who wrote a number of times he used it on a project with his Trust Agents coauthor, Julien Smith.

• “How I Came To Love Google Wave” by Chris Brogan
• “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” in the L.A. Time Blog
• “Google Wave In Real Life” by Mitch Wagner on Computer World

So, in the end, was Wave a colossal failure? Was it a good idea gone bad or an innovation looking to fill a need that wasn’t there? Call it like you see it. No matter what anyone else may believe about Wave, I applaud them for at least trying.

Sometimes you just can’t tell if an idea is good or bad until you try it out. In cases like with Wave, what looks great in the laboratory just doesn’t quite make it out there in real life.

I will miss Wave on occasion, but not too much. I’ll go back to doing what I was doing before Wave came out. I”m sure another tool is in the offing. Perhaps one a bit easier to “get” and use.

What about you? Did you like Google Wave? Why or why not?

TweetSometimes we techie types take for granted that certain things need to be done as a part of our web marketing efforts. Because of that, we sometimes neglect to tell others why we do what we do. Once we convince someone they absolutely need a web site, even if their business is small-ish, they wonder why we want to look at web statistics and see who’s visiting and what they’re doing on the site.

You may be one of those reading this and thinking to yourself, “My web site is small, why do I need to bother analyzing my web traffic?” Read on. I think you’ll be convinced by the time you finish this article.

Even if your web site is a one page starter site, it’s a great idea to start tracking your web traffic now. Sometime in the future you will update your site. Establishing baseline data now can help show if your changes brought in more or less traffic.  If your site has more than one page, it would be great to see what your customers view – which parts of the web site are more or less popular. This knowledge can help you better understand what kind of information you might need to add, enhance or delete.

Another good set of information is what kind of browsing capabilities your customers have:

• Which web browsers are most popular among your users? If the majority of your customers are using Firefox and Chrome, you might want to avoid using ActiveX controls on your web site since that’s an Internet Explorer-only technology.
• Which operating systems are most prevalent with your customers? If you find that 75% of your customers are iPad users, you might want to avoid redoing your site in Adobe’s Flash since the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
• What kind of connection to the internet do your visitors have? If most of your customers are still languishing on dialup, you might want to avoid doing a lot of streaming video because that will slow the site down too much for them to be useful.

If you’re going to consider doing any kind of ads on the web (Adsense, banner ads you purchase on sites, etc.) it’s a great idea to track your web referrers (those sites which send you traffic) before you start. As your campaign goes on, you’ll be able to spot rather quickly if you’re getting a traffic bump from your advertising efforts. Later, if when you decide to have a presence on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you’ll be able to easily track what kind of traffic you’re getting from those sites, too.

Every so often I see an email from a web site operator claiming they set up a test ad for a company and would like them to pay to keep the ad going. Invariably, there is a claim they sent hundreds of “qualified buyers” along with their request for payment. A quick check of web site stats will show whether those claims are true or not. (Not one has been true thus far, by the way.)

So, I hope you will set up analytics on your site today. Google Analytics is a good choice because it’s free, easy to implement, and has a lot of great information available in it’s built-in reports. Even if you’re not an analytics geek like some of us, set it up and check it out once a month or so. You’ll be surprised what you can learn.

Check out my Google Analytics Primer series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) for more information on this topic.

TweetI’m going to PubCon in Vegas in November … are you?

PubCon Vegas promises to be an excellent conference. There is a great slate of speakers lined up ready to fill your brain with lots of information about all things web marketing. For a taste of what’s in store, check out my summaries of previous PubCon events.

If you’re still on the fence about attending, perhaps I can help you make up your mind. I have a 10% discount code I can’t use which I’m going to give away to a reader of The Crossing in a random drawing. Here are the details …

To sign up:

• Use the “Contact Me” Form.
• Enter “PubCon Discount” in the subject box.
• Make sure you enter a valid email address in the Email Address box.
• Tell me a little about why you want to go to PubCon in the Message box.
• Entries must be received by 11:59 PM Tuesday, August 10, 2010.
• The winner will be notified by email and announced here.

Terms & Conditions:

• The discount is valid only for new registrations – if you already signed up for PubCon Vegas you can’t use it.
• If you win the drawing, you must register by 10-31-2010.
• The discount is 10% off the going rate at the time of registration. See the PubCon registration page for pricing information. The earlier you register, the better the price.
• Neither I nor the folks at PubCon are responsible for technical glitches or user error related to signing up.
• Only one entry per email address.
• The 10% discount is only good for the conference registration. The winner is responsible for all other expenses related to attending.
• Please don’t enter the drawing if you’re not going to sign up for PubCon.

Good luck to everyone who signs up.

Update (7/5/2010) – I just read on the PubCon blog there will be a special keynote session featuring Brian Clark, Brian Solis, Chris Brogan, Scott Stratten and Sarah Evans. This session alone will be worth attending.