Are these Gnomedex atten­dees geekier than you?

Last week I attended the Gnomedex 10 con­fer­ence in Seat­tle, and I asked speak­ers and atten­dees what makes them a true geek. This video is the result of that interview.

This video was shot for Dice, “The career hub for tech” and a client of Spark Media Solu­tions. For more on Gnomedex, read my roundup “The cool and not-so-cool from Gnomedex” plus for more videos from the event, check out Dice’s Face­book page or read the lat­est sto­ries on Dice News.

There’s no trick to it — just a lot of hard work

What Hol­ly­wood has dis­cov­ered is that peo­ple can be really pas­sion­ate about sto­ries and char­ac­ters. Fans are so emphatic they just want more. Hol­ly­wood appeases them with addi­tional con­tent such as t-shirts, extras on a DVD, and maybe a podcast.

But what if the entire pro­duc­tion is fully shut down, yet the fans want the story to con­tinue? This was the ques­tion Steve Fisher and Mike Dougherty asked about the TV series “Fire­fly” and its sub­se­quent movie “Seren­ity.” They were avid fans who wouldn’t be sat­is­fied with just another piece of fan fic­tion. They set their sites on cre­at­ing a movie. They first asked for per­mis­sion from the series pro­ducer, Josh Whe­don, made a call out to fans to help, and spent two years orga­niz­ing and pro­duc­ing the film “Brown­coats: Redemption.”

It took 160 vol­un­teers, a lot of work, a ton of favors, and only $27,000 to pro­duce the film. In the end, all the pro­ceeds from the film will go to five dif­fer­ent char­i­ties con­nected with Firefly’s orig­i­nal cre­ator and cast members.

When Fisher and Dougherty are asked, “What’s the secret to pulling off a crowd­sourced film?” the two of them sim­ply said, “We just did it.” There is no trick. It really is that hard to do. Above is my inter­view with the two film­mak­ers at Gnomedex 10 in Seat­tle. I was shoot­ing a series of inter­views for Dice and Dice News at the event. I asked Fisher and Dougherty about the project and some of the hur­dles they had to overcome.

For more on Gnomedex, read my piece, “The cool and not-so-cool from Gnomedex” and check out other videos from the event on Dice TV and Dice Out Loud.

Here’s the trailer for “Brown­coats: Redemption.”

I’ll be giv­ing a webi­nar on social media press releases, along with Mark Budgell of Hewlett Packard, in a Bull­dog Reporter/PR Uni­ver­sity event on Sept. 9.

Social Media Release Update: Use the Lat­est Tem­plates, Tips and Inside Tricks to Boost Pick-Up will show par­tic­i­pants how to cre­ate and write your own social media releases, the best and most prac­ti­cal SMR tem­plates to use and which social media wid­gets to include.

In the 90-minute online pre­sen­ta­tion, we’ll also cover how to dis­trib­ute social media releases and how to mon­i­tor and mea­sure the reach of your new, super­charged press releases, result­ing in greater reach and results among online influ­encers cov­er­ing your brand, prod­uct or company.

If you use social media releases or can point to some inter­est­ing exam­ples, please share them in the com­ments below — and let me know if I can use it in my presentation.

Webi­nar details:

When: Thurs­day, Sept. 9, 2010, 1 p.m. EDT, 10 a.m. PDT

Cost: $299 per reg­is­trant. Ses­sion details. Reg­is­ter here.

How: All you need is a com­puter and an Inter­net connection.

What you’ll take away:

• New Oppor­tu­ni­ties: How to become an expert in issu­ing the lat­est Social Media Releases
• SMR Update: Lat­est devel­op­ments, recent tem­plates, who social media releases reach now — and how they are being used to build a big­ger dig­i­tal footprint
• Com­mon myths and exam­ples of social media releases
• How to incor­po­rate social media ele­ments into tra­di­tional releases — and how to update your online news­room to include these ele­ments, as well
• Con­vinc­ing Data: How to sell SMRs to skep­ti­cal man­age­ment and clients
• Strate­gic Plan­ning: How to incor­po­rate a Social Media Release Strat­egy in your PR plan this year

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Even with social media, half of suc­cess is just show­ing up

Social media as we all know is not a panacea to achieve your goals, but rather an enabler. If you want to land your dream job using social media, it still takes a lot of work. I chat­ted with Adria Richards of But You’re a Girl, who believes the secret for dream job suc­cess starts with attend­ing events and build­ing your rela­tion­ships in person.

Are you a lit­tle shy about meet­ing peo­ple at con­fer­ences? Do you not know the best ways to fol­low up? Richards has some great answers to those ques­tions. Watch this 4-minute video.

This inter­view is part of a series of videos I pro­duced at Gnomedex 10 in Seat­tle this week­end as I was report­ing for Dice and Dice News. They’ve got a fun con­test to win an iPad on their Face­book Page. Just explain what makes you a true geek and you’re entered to win (August 31 is the dead­line). Plus, check out Robert Scoble’s tips for get­ting started in social media.

Here’s a lit­tle proof that Twit­ter is now not sim­ply loca­tion aware, in terms of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude or address, but is now place-aware.

I checked in to both of these places on Foursquare and Twit­ter rec­og­nized these places by name:

Then, I decided to click on the Trader Joe’s, Falls Church link beside the lit­tle map marker, and lo! there was the fol­low­ing pop-up win­dow, which is very much aware of not sim­ply loca­tion any­more but they’re fol­low­ing the trend of Face­book Places and the other location-aware social net­works by start­ing to con­nect to businesses:

Pretty inter­est­ing devel­op­ment — what do you think about this?

Via Mar­ket­ing Con­ver­sa­tion and Chris Abra­ham

Photo by tan­tek on Flickr

Since I have become addicted to Foursquare, the loca­tion check-in ser­vice, I set out to find the best tips to get to the top of Foursquare’s leader­board while play­ing fair.

Here are the top 5 tips I discovered:

1If you want to become mayor, check in to places that you know that you’ll be able to check in to fre­quently, as many times as pos­si­ble. Didn’t find your place on Foursquare already? Add it. Don’t for­get and don’t neglect — some­one else may steal your may­or­ship from you.

2Foursquare resets its leader­board on Sun­day nights. To max­i­mize your weekly tal­lies, make sure you start early in the week.

3Check in to new places — every time you do so, these grant you 5 extra points, and these can add up quickly.

4Get famil­iar with how to unlock your spe­cial badges and work on unlock­ing them. Here are two great badges lists: TonyFelice.WordPress.com and TheKruser.com.

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Google Web­mas­ter Tools is a phe­nom­e­nal free resource.

Guest post by Danny Dover
SEO moz

For as long as I can remem­ber, the best way for me to learn has been to do. I have gone through count­less check­lists while try­ing to under­stand search engine opti­miza­tion. The fol­low­ing is a com­pi­la­tion of the most use­ful check­lists I have com­pleted in order to learn SEO. My intent is that this list can be used by peo­ple who are inex­pe­ri­enced in SEO but want to learn more.

Learn how to build a basic website

Before div­ing into SEO tech­niques, it’s impor­tant to know the basics of web devel­op­ment. The fol­low­ing tasks will develop the nec­es­sary web devel­op­ment skills needed to become suc­cess­ful at SEO:

Learn how to code a basic web­site with­out using a WYSIWYG edi­tor – Don’t fear the word code, writ­ing HTML is much eas­ier than you think. If you can make a sand­wich with two pieces of bread and put some­thing in the mid­dle, you can write HTML. For help, check out this excel­lent tuto­r­ial. Remem­ber, don’t worry about SEO tech­niques at this point. Focus on learn­ing how to build a web­site first.

Code a web­site that con­tains the fol­low­ing:

• All styles with CSS. No tables!
• Home­page has 3 unique para­graphs about you
• 3 pages total; home­page, con­tact and portfolio

Pick your key­words — Pick key­words that are uncom­pet­i­tive. This is very impor­tant as the words you choose will become the cen­ter of your SEO efforts. I rec­om­mend using your name. Go to Google and search for your­self. If a small amount of low qual­ity web­sites show up, use your name as your key­words. If your name is com­pet­i­tive to rank for, find a vari­a­tion of your name that is eas­ier. Exam­ple: Danny Ben Dover.

Reg­is­ter a domain name and find host­ing — This is not nearly as dif­fi­cult as it sounds. I rec­om­mend Site­Ground as good option. How­ever, there are lit­er­ally thou­sands of choices. Use your best judg­ment, but remem­ber you shouldn’t be pay­ing more than $7 a month and the domain name should be included for free. Your only require­ment is that your host can’t have immov­able ads. These could be crawled by the search engines and ruin your rank­ings. For your domain name, use your key­words from above. Eg., dannydover.com or dannybendover.com. If your key­words are not avail­able as a domain name, choose dif­fer­ent key­words. (Note: In this exer­cise, the key­words you are opti­miz­ing for and your domain name should be the same. Although this is not always the case in the real world, hav­ing sim­i­lar key­words to your domain name makes SEO much easier.)

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It’s amaz­ing how upset peo­ple can get from a letter

On Fri­day night I appeared on KQED’s “This Week in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia” dis­cussing the open let­ter Google and Ver­i­zon cowrote to the FCC propos­ing new broad­band require­ments for mobile and some type of sec­ond Inter­net. The let­ter bent every­one out of shape and caused a flurry of response from tra­di­tional jour­nal­ists and blog­gers. While the protest at Google on Fri­day was a dud, anger in the blo­gos­phere remained very high, with most every­one try­ing to extrap­o­late what Google and Ver­i­zon meant with their rather vague pro­posal. Google and Ver­i­zon responded to these var­i­ous the­o­ries try­ing to clear up some myths that had devel­oped over the week. But in the end it appeared the two ele­ments that most upset every­one, mobile and this “sec­ond Inter­net” being exempt from the FCC’s net neu­tral­ity reg­u­la­tion, were still very much on the table accord­ing to the two powerhouses.

If you haven’t been pay­ing atten­tion, or need an overview, watch my five minute seg­ment from the KQED show with Belva Davis.

Image by smi23le on Flickr.

Guest post by Anthony Piwarun
SEO­moz

Like most in the SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion) com­mu­nity, I’m always look­ing for ways to improve con­tent for my clients. Whether it’s a web­site, blog or a press release, there is always a way to make it rank bet­ter. Recently I began opti­miz­ing pro­files on LinkedIn, the social net­work­ing site for busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als. Using my own LinkedIn pro­file as a test, I’ve dis­cov­ered that the same prin­ci­ples we use in the SEO field.

For two months, I altered var­i­ous fields of my pro­file and logged the effect on the num­ber of searches that it appeared in accord­ing to LinkedIn ana­lyt­ics. While I’m not one to rely heav­ily on a sin­gle method of mea­sure­ment, LinkedIn doesn’t offer an option for ana­lyt­ics so my pri­mary method of mea­sure­ment was the in-house track­ing sys­tem. The results I found were con­clu­sive: It is pos­si­ble to opti­mize your LinkedIn pro­file to rank bet­ter in search.

Before div­ing into the results of my study, I’d like to point out a few areas that I believe are key to achiev­ing an opti­mized LinkedIn pro­file and also give a brief “how-to” on opti­miza­tion techniques.

How to han­dle the pro­file headline

The first and most impor­tant field to opti­mize on your LinkedIn pro­file is the head­line. The head­line field can be most equated to a meta descrip­tion in SEO ter­mi­nol­ogy. It’s a way to explain what you do and how you do it (in as few words as pos­si­ble) to the world with­out hav­ing to use one of those awful labels known as a “job title.”

For my head­line, I opted to go with three key­words and my con­tact infor­ma­tion. For those that aren’t too famil­iar with LinkedIn, con­tact­ing a non-connection isn’t easy unless you’re in the same group or you have a mutual friend, so adding con­tact infor­ma­tion is help­ful for new busi­ness devel­op­ment. Like its SEO coun­ter­part the meta descrip­tion, it’s the first thing a searcher sees when search­ing on LinkedIn.

Pro­file summary

A LinkedIn sum­mary is a chance to describe who you are, what you want to accom­plish, and what you aspire to be. In SEO terms, I like to think of it as the first 100 words of the page. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to add a ton of key­words, related terms, and longer, more descrip­tive strings. While it’s impor­tant to use your tar­geted phrase a few times through­out your sum­mary, keep in mind this is a pro­fes­sional pro­file and if you sound like a robot you most likely won’t win the bid, get hired, or be able to go more than 4 con­sec­u­tive hours with­out your cowork­ers call­ing you R2D2. Just like any effec­tive web­site, a LinkedIn pro­file opti­mized with user expe­ri­ence in mind will get the sale long before a keyword-stuffed can of Spam.

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My friend Effie Kap­salis helped make some­thing very, very cool. Some­thing bril­liant, actu­ally. Some­thing you need to check out: Anthol­o­gize.

A bril­liant idea is defined by how hard you slap your­self in the fore­head, say­ing, “gee, that’s awe­some — but so obvi­ous, why didn’t I think of that?” Anthologize is that sim­ple, ele­gant, “it never occurred to me” idea that I have been wait­ing for for­ever: a WYSIWYG way of drag-and-dropping together a lin­ear nar­ra­tive out of what is often an amal­gam of reverse-chronological, jumbled-together, blog posts. Export it into an online, web-accessible “book” or even a proper ebook in the PDF, ePUB or TEI for­mats that can be exported and popped into your favorite ebook reader like the Ama­zon Kin­dle or Sony eReader.

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