January 22, 2013

How to go from student to master of your domain

George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon of the Beatles, circa 1960.

Want to be a social media pro? Learn by doing

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketing professionals, geeks, general public.

While Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his book Outliers: The Story of Success that you need to engage in a challenging 10,000 hours of experience and practice before becoming a master, don’t let that theory overwhelm you. The belief that you need to accrue all 10,000 hours of practice and experience before you sell yourself as a social media maven isn’t necessarily accurate.

All you need to do is know more than the person who hires you to become a professional. It is in taking the risk upon yourself to fake it till you make it, to make mistakes while you’re making magic, and in learning and knowing more so that you can win clients who are smarter and more sophisticated. Continue reading →

December 17, 2012

Turn your website into your social media brand HQ

Image by elycefeliz on Flickr

Make your website your communications hub

Target audience: Businesses, brands, developers, marketing professionals, SEO specialists, geeks, general public.

At the end of the day, none of us owns anything we do on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus. What we do own is our personal properties.

No matter how many hours I spend at the Java Shack or Peregrine Espresso, I am just a customer. Social media and its social networks may feel like a home to some of us, but they’re really just private public spaces, similar to coffee shops, the Politics & Prose reading area, or the ballroom at the Rosslyn Marriott. Continue reading →

December 14, 2011

Social media success demands talent above technology

In response to The Social Media News Release explained in detail, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz’s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king.”

Continue reading →

November 9, 2011

Max SEO with 8 simple Google+ steps

Let me boil my last post, Here’s why it make sense to use Google Plus, down to practical pieces. Part of what makes a technology premature is that you have to be careful how you use it, because it isn’t mature enough to just work no matter what you do with it. To help you carefully handle Google+ for maximum advantage, I’ve assembled eight steps that help you get the best search visibility from your Google+ posts. These tips are simple, but some are easy to overlook. I hacked this awful-looking graphic as an example:

Here’s a list of things that you need to consider before you invest your time and energy in Google+:

Make sure all your posts are Public. You can add more circles in order to spur interest among your friends, but be sure you explicitly tell Google, through your willingness to share publicly, that they can index your content in their public search engine. Check this every time because sometimes Public isn’t always selected, depending on the situation. Here’s my Google+ public profile.
Use a clean URL when you add your content to Google+. Google+ hasn’t been translating URL shorteners well, so use a link from the source. This will not only allow Google to better populate the content as you see above, including the Title, Blog Name, Description, and an Image from the post, but it will also allow that content to be cross-referenced to any Google +1 “likes” from others within Google+ and the rest of the Googlephere. Site URLs are translated the way they are on Facebook. You need to paste the URL into the “Share what’s new…” text box.
Prefixing names with a plus sign links that name to the person’s profile on Google+. You can include your friends and people you’re connected to on G+ in a similar way you do in Facebook, but Google+ has a gimmick that you may know or not. In the graphic above, you’ll see a light gray-blue rectangular box around the names Arsh S and Jenna Levy — I did that by adding a plus symbol (+) before each name while I am writing the article. G+ then populates a pull-down, offering pre-populated names of people I am connected to. I just need to select and go. Sometimes the profile’s privacy setting prohibits the link reference to persist after posting. Linking to people is a good way to engage, inform, and initiate conversation.

Continue reading →

June 1, 2011

Google wants me to put Google +1 buttons on my blogs

I just popped into AdSense, as I do as obsessively as anyone online, and something new popped up:

Recommendations
Add the +1 button to your pages
Adding the +1 button to your pages allows users to recommend your content to friends and contacts on Google search. As a result, you could get more and better qualified traffic.

How exciting! It has all begun today! I clicked on “Get the code snippet” and here’s what I saw:

I am probably going to wait the week or so until someone releases an easy-to-use and easy-to-implement plugin for my WordPress and Drupal installs so that I don’t have to hack the template.

Any recommendations for Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress.com solutions for those of us who want to add Google +1 ASAP to all of our fun sites and blogs?

November 29, 2010

Have you made your site mobile-ready?

How Socialmedia.biz looks on an iPhone 4 without WPtouch Pro, left, and with it.

WPtouch Pro plug-in: Better than creating your own app

The other day my partner Christopher S. Rollyson asked, Why haven’t we optimized Socialmedia.biz for mobile users?

Truth be told, we have so many balls in the air that I hadn’t heard of WP-Touch or WPtouch Pro — WordPress plug-ins that make your site really nice-looking on a handheld device. With use of smartphones exploding, this is now a must-have in today’s marketplace. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker predicts that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

So let’s get geeky for a minute here and do mobile visitors to your site a huge favor. Because you definitely don’t want your site to appear like the BEFORE image at the top of this post.

A couple of months ago, we paid to have Appmakr create an app for Socialmedia.biz. You can download the Socialmedia.biz app to your iPhone — just search and install “Socialmedia.biz” in the App Store. Since we’re an editorial site, the app doesn’t do anything beyond nicely displaying headlines and text summaries sucked in via RSS feeds. Behold:

Screenshot of Socialmedia.biz app in App Store

Screenshot of the Socialmedia.biz app in the App Store

Now, the big drawback here is that very few people are likely to install an app just to read a single website. What you really want is for your site to be mobile-enabled across a wide range of devices — with no download required on the user’s part. Here’s how to do that.

WPtouch Pro: Buy a license for up to 5 sites

I quickly discovered that WPtouch Pro from Canada-based BraveNewCode was my answer. If you run a business, nonprofit or personal site using WordPress and you haven’t mobile-enabled your website or blog, you really need to spend the few bucks and 5 minutes it takes to make it happen.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to the BraveNewCode site and buy a license. Need it for just one site? $39 Canadian ($38.16 US). Need it for two to five sites? $69 CAN ($67.52 US). It was $10 cheaper when I bought the 5-pack about two months ago.

2. Download and install the plug-in the same way you install all your WordPress plug-ins. Activate it.

For most online publishers, that’s it! Now go to your favorite browser on your mobile device — say, Safari or Firefox — and you’ll see your website reincarnated and mobile-ready. Your latest blog posts will look something like this:

Your site will be mobile-ready for 90% of the marketplace

What devices does this support? iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry Storm. Or, as the BraveNewCode folks put it: “Over 90% (and growing!) of the mobile-web surfing world will see your incredible mobile website with WPtouch.”

One coding caveat: If you use WP Super Cache, you’ll need to go to your plug-in’s settings and click the checkbox to enable “Mobile device support.” If you use W3 Total Cache, you may see some caching issue. Originally none of our posts from the past 10 days were appearing, but now it’s working fine.

Another bonus: WPtouch Pro will display not just your most recent blog posts. Users can call up other pages or sections of your site, and they can email friends with a link to the post, tweet it out, add a social bookmark, add and read comments and scale images (although in my experience I haven’t been able to enlarge the text, though it’s sufficiently readable).

If you’d like to see a video of how this all works, take a look at the YouTube video WPtouch WordPress Plugin Demo for the Lifestream Blog. My understanding is that the free version of WPtouch is still available but is no longer supported, and you won’t get the free updates that come with the paid 2.0 version.

How to grab screenshots off your iPhone

By the way, some of you may be wondering: How do you take a screenshot on the iPhone without using a special screenshot app? Simple. Apple changed this process during the summer, so here’s how it now works:

1. Call up the page you want to capture.

2. Simultaneously hold down the “Home” button at middle bottom of the iPhone’s front AND the “Sleep” button on top right of the iPhone. Press them for just a second or two. The iPhone screen will flash white for a moment as the image is added to the phone’s Photos.

3. Navigate over to Photos or Camera Roll on the phone and email or text (MMS) the picture to yourself. It comes as a .png or .jpg attachment. (Or, go wild and use it as your wallpaper.)

Does all this make sense? Have you mobile-enabled your blog or website? Continue reading →