A lot of sites have attempted to serve this up with a big heaping helping of irony and skip the linkback. I chose differently.
Tag: postaday2011
Twitter Basics: Tweeting the Right Way
Lately I’ve had a lot of people asking me about Twitter, the popular microblogging platform. Usually the conversation centers around “How do I do it right.” In actuality, doing Twitter “right” is a lot like good sex; it’s about connecting with someone in a way that’s mutually satisfying.
As with sex, there is no one formula that works for everyone the same way. But there are some basic principles that will help save you time and grief during and get past that awkward Twitter virgin stage.
It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
Why you want to Tweet? What do you hope to gain from it? Building your business or personal brand? Build relationships with existing or new clients? Provide customer service or support? Make new friends? Learn something? Just as there are a million ways to use Twitter, there are as many reasons to do so. Regardless of your reason, you need to begin by thinking about that reason. Once you know what your goals are, tweet them!
Friend or Foe? Identify Yourself!
Now that you’ve sent your first tweet off, it’s time to take a look at your profile. Does it reflect who you are and what you are all about? Your goals should be pretty clear to anyone who visits your profile. Upload a photo of yourself. People like to interact with other, real people, not a logo. Add a little bio that says something about who you are and why you’re here. This alone will set you apart from the spam and drek.
Follow Smartly
Keeping in mind your goals for Twitter, search for and follow people who can support your objectives. You can do this by searching for keywords that relate to your reason for being there. For example, if you’re there to share hiking tips and meet other hikers, you might search Twitter for “hiking” or “outdoors” and even include cities, parks or popular hiking areas around you. This will show you people who are tweeting on the subjects that interest you. Follow the ones that look interesting (check their profile first). Sometimes they will also have lists that match your interests. Lists can be a goldmine of great Twitter-ers that someone has already gone through the trouble of finding for you!
You should go through this exercise periodically, growing your list and pruning the people who you decide really aren’t interesting to you.
Reciprocation
As you follow people, you’ll find that many of them will automatically follow you back. This is called reciprocation. It’s not a requirement, so don’t feel compelled to “follow-back” everyone who follows you. Instead, choose the people that you really would like to learn from or connect with and who can support your goals.
It’s useful when starting out to look for and follow the “connectors” — the people who have a lot of followers and seem to be doing it “right.” Over time, make a note of how they tweet, the kinds of things they tweet or retweet, and how they use hashtags and mentions. You can learn a lot from observation.
Speaking of Hashtags…
What the heck is a hashtag and how do you use it? Well, it’s simply a key word prefixed with the pound or “hash” symbol. Hash tags only work on a single, contiguous string of text, so sometimes you’ll see people string words together as a “single” hashtag, #likethis. In general, hashtags can be either something useful for you or your circle of contacts, or sometimes they trend — becoming a popular meme that people use to show how clever they can be. Read more about hashtags on Twitter.com.
Mentions
A mention is a way of replying or referring to another Twitter user. To do this, you simply type their Twitter username with the “@” symbol in front of it. My Twitter name is jeffhester, so to mention me, you would type @jeffhester anywhere in your Tweet. This is a powerful way to get people’s attention, but don’t abuse it. People like to be mentioned, and you can see who has mentioned you on your Twitter page. Be kind and thank people who mention you! Read more about mentions on Twitter.com.
Quantity vs. Quality
Some people advocate tweeting frequently. Scott Stratton (@unmarketing) decided to really give Twitter a shot and tweeted over 7,000x in a month. His follower count grew exponentially. But the thing to keep in mind with both tweet and follower count is that it’s really not about the numbers. Sure, consistency is a good thing, and having a lot of followers can feel good, but when it comes right down to it it’s about connecting with people and having conversations.
In this respect, having more followers can make this even more difficult. So start small. Pick a few people that you follow and whom follow you and create a Twitter list. This will help you reduce the noise and pay closer attention to those connections that are really important to you.
Then begin the conversation! Share things that are interesting or useful. Have a goal to share three things each day that are really awesome — really worth sharing. If it really is awesome, soon people will start sharing — retweeting — your tweets. Congratulations, you are on your way to becoming a Twitter Power User!
There’s a heck of a lot more to cover, but this is a good start. I’ll post more tips next week. Until then, be sure to also check the excellent Twitter Help Center.
If you’ve got a question about using Twitter more effectively, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below and I’ll respond.
SEO Basics with Scribe
SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” is the process of improving the ranking of a website or web page in organic search results. The desired outcome of higher ranking is more page visitors, based on the simple fact that most people won’t look past the first page or two of search results. If your site doesn’t show up there, the chances of organic traffic from those search results drops precipitously.
The good news is that WordPress makes the process easy with the addition of a specialized plugin service called Scribe. I’ve been using Scribe for several months now, and I’m putting together a detailed tutorial on how to use Scribe to improve a post’s search relevance. Before I jump into that, I’m going to start by covering a few basics.
First, you need a either a theme that provides support for Scribe or an plugin that adds the necessary functionality. For a great theme with built-in support, I recommend the StudioPress Genesis framework. Genesis is cleanly coded and provides built-in SEO options in the basic framework and the various child themes.
If you are using a different theme framework or have created your own, you can add the necessary functionality via a WordPress plugin. I recommend the All in One SEO Pack. There are other compatible options out there, but these are the choices I can personally recommend.
Whichever route you choose, you will see a new SEO panel in the page and post edit views, and in that panel there are three basic fields that require your attention:
- Title – This should be a maximum of 60 characters, and a minimum of four words. This title can be different from the page or post title. Why would you do this? The title of the page or post is what WordPress displays on the page to the visitor. Sometimes you may want to use a clever headline there, but in this field, your focus should be on the primary keywords — the words or phrases that you think people would search on to find this page.For example, the title of this post is SEO Basics, but the title in my SEO panel (which is displayed in the title bar and used in search results) is the longer SEO or Search Engine Optimization Basics. This longer version includes two variations on the keywords, so in theory someone could search for the acronym or the full words and find this page.
- Description – This should be a maximum of 160 characters. The text is displayed by some search engines directly beneath the title in search results. Make this descriptive. Use keywords. And tell the visitor what they will see if they click through. Pretty simple.
- Keywords – These are the words or phrases that you think people would use to search for pages like this. Each word or phrase is separated by a comma. For example, on this post I used “seo, search engine, optimization, rank, pr, ranking, search, results, wordpress, scribe” — all keywords that someone might search on and that I would like to see this page do well with.
These fields are optional, but you should complete them on every page and post where you care about search ranking.
There’s no real magic to SEO, in spite of what some SEO specialists will tell you. Create good, valuable content. Write smart titles, descriptions and use keywords intelligently. Repeat. In time, you will see your website and pages begin to climb in the ranking.
Ready for more? I’ll be posting this tutorial in multiple parts over the next week, but if you just can’t wait for more, check out this video overview of Scribe for WordPress.
The Physics of Cities
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who has researched and studied the dynamics of large cities; how and why they grow, and the patterns that emerge. His findings are surprising.
New York Times Magazine has a great article about West’s research. West found that he can predict with 85% accuracy the average income of a city’s inhabitants or the size of their sewage system. Basically, larger cities — in spite of their unique culture — are predictably the same in almost every other measurement.
And largely, cities are more efficient and sustainable than suburban towns. The efficiencies of scale at work.
Why do people live in cities?
This excerpt from the NYT article really stuck out:
Cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
This reminded me very much of what I like to say about knowledge management (KM): that KM is all about connecting people, and not about the “tool” (infrastructure). This is precisely why enterprises that drive their KM actvities as an Information Technology (IT) initiative almost always fail miserably.
Sharing knowledge is an exchange between two (or more) people. Technology can either assist or get out of the way.
Remembering the Ones We Love
Last month, my grandmother passed away at the age of 95. Ruth Vanderploeg was in amazingly good health, living independently in the home she and my grandpa had shared for over three decades, walking regularly, entertaining guests and even teaching English. She suffered a massive stroke, and never regained consciousness. She passed away a few days later. She was a terrific woman, and I will always remember the difference she made in my life.
As our family gathered and began taking care of the house and belongings, we discussed what to do with the boxes of old photos. There were some terrific old photos of family and friends, some of them over 100 years old. A rich tapestry of family history that really belonged to all of us. We split up a few of the obvious ones — I got a lot of pictures from my childhood — and I suggested that for many of the others, we could share them online.
Why share them online?
First, our family is literally spread all over the world. My mom is in China, my brother in Denver, my kids in Tennessee, New York City and Maine. Aunt Mary lives in New Mexico, Pat lives in Eureka… you get the picture.
Secondly, in many of the photos we couldn’t place the location, date or even some of the people in them. Posting them online allowed the entire family to share their knowledge. “Oh yeah, that’s Uncle Alf!” or “That one’s from 1952!”
Finally, sharing them online would allow everyone a chance to download and print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. By sharing them on the web, we all have a copy.
How to Create a Photo Archive Online
One of the first things I had to do was decide where to share the photos. I considered Flickr and Facebook, but not everyone has (or wants) accounts on those platforms, and it was important that everyone be able to add comments. So I decided to create a photoblog using WordPress (which is free). I’ll be building it on the StudioPress Genesis framework (I already have a developer license) and starting with the Landscape child theme. I’m hosting it on my own server, and I’ll be creating a mailing list using MailChimp (also free up to 1,000 subscribers). And I’ll scan and upload several new images every week, along with an email update to the friends and family that have subscribed.
My plan is to have one photo per post, though I may group photos from a single event on the same post. Each post will be tagged with relevant names, places and dates. This way you could easily retrieve all photos of Grandma Moeller, or from a specific year or place.
The entire project will be hosted at http://photoarchives.www.jeffhester.net/
Have you created a photoblog? Got any advice or tips to share? Leave a comment and pass them on. And I’ll be sharing updates on my progress as I get further into the project.
The True Value of Social Networks
Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, LinkedIn and the long list of other social networks vying for attention have captured plenty of media coverage as millions ofpeople jump on the bandwagon. The tools make it easy to build large lists — a “network” of followers, friends and so-called colleagues. Many people forget that it’s not about how big your network is.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar pegged the optimal number of meaningful relationships at about 150, theorizing that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, andthat this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” As Jeff Pulver likes to say (and emphasizes in his 140 Characters conferences) it’s about building relationships. It’s about strengthening existing relationships and building new ones. Relationships allow you to grow personally and professionally. Relationships allow companies like Zappos to build fanatical customerloyalty and grow your business.
If you are not using these tools to build relationships, you’re missing the true value of social networks.
How are you using social media to strengthen connections with friends, family, associates or clients?
6 Bluetooth Wireless Gadgets for Better Living
Bluetooth wireless technology has been around since 1994, but I never realized what a positive impact it’s made on my own life until I paused recently, realizing that I now use no less than six Bluetooth devices on a daily basis. Not only are they indispensable, but they have simplified my life and given me great flexibility. And much coveted geek cred.
Most people use Bluetooth wireless headsets for hands free operation of their mobile phones. And some have Bluetooth keyboards and mice. All are common applications. But if that’s all you use Bluetooth for, you might want to take a closer look at my list.
Here are my favorite Bluetooth gadgets, listed in order of acquisition.
#1 & #2 – Logitech Mouse and Apple Wireless Keyboard
I bought these at the local Apple Store to use with my Mac Mini at home. No cables, and no clutter. The Apple Wireless Keyboard
The Logitech VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse
I’ve been using both the Apple Wireless Keyboard and the Logitech Bluetooth Mouse for over two years and love them!
#3 – Jawbone JAMBOX
The Jawbone JAMBOX
Check out this video for a “day-in-the-life” of a Jambox, and you’ll understand why I love this gadget.
#4 – Pioneer AS-BT100 Bluetooth Adapter
The Pioneer AS-BT100 Bluetooth Adapter
#5 – Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth Stereo Headset
I love to listen to music when I workout. I could be lifting weights, on a machine or running down the beach trail — the music gives me energy. The problem I always had was my damned earbuds. They’d be constantly falling out (not a problem when I’m sitting relatively still, but never fails to happen when I’m running). And the cord was constantly getting snagged on something; my watchband or a branch. Very annoying.
The Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth Stereo Headset
#6 GOgroove FlexSMART X2 Bluetooth FM Transmitter
My 2005 Nissan Xterra has a great Rockford Fosgate stereo system, but it doesn’t have a auxiliary input or iPod/iPhone support. Ugh. Yeah, the 6-disc changer will play MP3s, but that’s too much like work — compiling playlists and burning CDs.
The GOgroove FlexSMART X2 Bluetooth FM Transmitter
And when I get a call, my music is paused and the audio quality both ways is great!
So there you have it — six, great little gadgets that I now use every day. I know there are plenty more. What Bluetooth wireless gadgets are on your list?