The New York Times published an article a few days ago discussing how Proctar & Gamble and other large organizations have tried to advertise using social media, specifically on Facebook. The article explains how the companies are struggling with social media. In my mind, there seems to be a clear distinction between those who are successful with social media, and those who see blah results.
Here is the difference: Perceived Motive.
By perceived motive, I mean “What do others think I am trying to achieve by connecting with them in social media sites?”. To have a successful social media campaign, you have to remember to be social. Am I stating the obvious? When being social, say at a meet-and-greet after a day at a conference, do you come off as, “Hey, you really need to buy our products. We are really awesome.”? No, you introduce yourself, and try to understand and connect with the person you are talking to. The same goes for interacting with potential and current customers in social media. Showing that you care and understand who you are talking to should be at the highest priority.
Now some may say, “That’s all fine and dandy in a perfect world where you don’t have to worry about the costs of your campaigns, but I want to see returns”; but, I would argue that you will, most definitely, see great returns, but in non-traditional ways. By truly engaging and understanding those that are listening, you begin to build great respect and the attention. I believe that social media campaigns played correctly have the potential for exponential returns, compared to typical print, tv or radio advertisements.
Plain and simple, social media will not work for you if you do not care about who you are trying to engage, but if you take the time to become active in your community of potential and current customers, showing that you really care, social media may become the strongest tool for your marketing strategy.
Took me a while to find a way to break out of jQuery each loops, so hopefully this will help anyone out needing to do the same. To break out of a jQuery each loop, simply “return false” from within the loop. This will act as a typical “break” command in other languages.
For example:
$("p").each(function(){
alert('hello world');
return false;
});
The above code will only show the alert once, no matter how many <p> tags there are (unless there are none).
This article, authored by Tony Wright, is a nice breakdown of the traits of two types of entrepreneurs; builder entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs. Builder entrepreneurs are those who “designed, coded, played sysadmin, and played all sorts of other production roles for their startups”. Tony goes on to write that business entrepreneurs don’t “really have a useful role to play in the very earliest stages of a software startup”.
After reading the article and browsing around Tony’s site a little, I found a cool product that Tony’s current startup is working on, called RescueTime. It is the Google Analytics and Mint.com of “what I spend my time on when on the computer”. RescueTime calls itself “ridiculously easy time management software”. Just as in Google Analytics you see nice dashboards and graphs of your website visitor statistics and just as in Mint you can easily understand where your money is going without doing much at all, RescueTime allows a user to download a plugin (Mac or PC), the plugin then aggregates data while you are using your computer and with no extra work involved at all, RescueTime shows you charts and graphs about where you are spending your time. If you often complain about not getting things done during the day because of X, Y and Z. Use RescueTime to find what they are.
As social media continues to sneak its way into the mainstream, several are trying to figure out the optimal way to engage their users, clients, members, students, opportunities, constituents… the list goes on. The best way to start understanding how social media may work for your situation is to start with simple social web research. The Social Web Research (www.socialwebresearch.com) service answers the question, in the form of a basic report, where are your users on the social web? Once you have this basic understanding, the steps at the bottom of this article are a nice start to starting a social media marketing campaign.
I found a handful of interesting links this morning from my Google Alerts I thought I would share, all having to do with social media and how it is playing a big part in today’s world.
The next article is an interview with David van Toor, the senior vice president and general manager of Sage CRM Relevant Products/Services Solutions North America. He gives several insights into how Sage is starting to integrate social media into customer relationship management. (Shameless plug: if you are looking for a CRM system for your business, check out SugarCRM) - http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=1010035OTKKH
Lastly, a longer and less compelling read but interesting nonetheless, an article about the fight going on between the traditionalists and social media believers in the corporate world. The writer, Venkatesh Rao, goes on to conclude that social media will win in the long run. - http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=621
What is that, you ask? Social Web Research is something for everyone. The world is changing. Traditional marketing mediums are losing their competitive edge. Look at how president-elect Obama took the election, with a grass-roots, very much web-enabled approach. By using the social web mediums, Obama and his team were able to mobilize volunteers and spread his campaign across the nation. Organizations try, over and over again, to engage their customers and opportunities with traditional mediums, with little luck and/or trackability. I hope you know or are becoming to know that you should engage all of your users and opportunities on the social web, but where do you start? You start with Social Web Research. Social Web Research finds where your users live (yes, live) on the social web across several social networking platforms. Using already public-facing information and given your client data set, we quickly provide a report showing a general overview of where your users are on the social web. Along with the results, we provide our suggested plan of action to engage your target audience. Our goal is to bring awareness of the social web to organizations and to show others how it will be an important and effective tool for their organizations in the future. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the service, please contact me. I’ll be happy to answer. Oh yea… and this is another project from those Big Tech Onoins.
How about some practical examples:
I am associated with an educational institution. We know our students are actively using the web. We really want to find ways to enable and engage our students on these internet mediums. - We would love to help you out. Social Web Research is the right place to start. Don’t waste time spinning your wheels on ideas that don’t line up with where your students live on the web.
I am niche-market company who sells a gadget, but mostly to an older demographic. We see the changes in the world and understand that we need to engage this very mobilized and younger generation to keep business strong for the coming years. - With basic research and some solid recommendations, Social Web Research will show this example organization how to take their business to the next level.
I am in a band, currently have a MySpace page, and have seen positive results from it. But, that is all I have. I have a fan list that I email regularly. I would really like to see where else my fans are on the web. Would they benefit more from a MySpace application? a Facebook application? Interaction via Bebo or LinkedIn? - All of these questions will be answered from the results of Social Web Research report.
I am a politician, I am intrigued by the web tactics used by opponents engaging their constituents. We have been collecting data on our voters for years, surely it could be used for this research. - Absolutely. With Social Web Research, you and your team will have the information needed to know how to fully-engage your voters on the web.
Although I would rather the election to have gone the other way, in McCain’s favor, I feel Barrack has the potential to do a lot of good. So, in short, this is all I have to say. Congrats Obama.
A few of my friends are convinced that they need to learn a programming language, and I am very excited about that. Having web programming experience is unbelievably valuable, especially if you plan to do any business in the web-o-sphere. Before you can lock yourself in your room for a month and learn a programming language, I think it is very important to know how the web stack works. The stack I will describe is the most widely used among the web.
The process of developing and delivering a worth-while web application is quite involved and a complex task. To break things down a little, I like to categorize the stack into the following four groups: web server, server-side languages, relational database and client-side languages.
The web server portion is the weak point in my knowledge of this stack, in terms of installing, configuring and securing, but I know enough to know explain its purpose and give a few suggestions. The web server is a piece of software that is installed on a computer (the more commonly referred to server). This software enables the computer to host a web page and serve it to requesting users. For example, Google’s web server is what delivers the web page to your browser when you goto www.google.com. Domain Name Servers (referred to as DNS server) are also involved in the process of delivering a requested page to a user. A DNS server deals with routing the request from a user to your web server. For example, when a user enters www.google.com in the browser, the DNS server determines and redirects the request to the actual I.P. address of the Google web server. There are many web servers that have been proven in action. I have experience with and recommend the Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers. This list would be a good starting point if you want to see a more comprehensive list of web servers.
Server-side languages live on the web server and provide the functionality for developers to develop a portion of their web applications. When a web page is requested on the web server, the web server executes the server-side code and the script will return data to the requesting user. Examples of server-side scripting languages would be PHP, Ruby, ASP and Python. Many of these server-side languages have development frameworks that allow for improved organization and scalability. Examples of a few popular frameworks are CakePHP (PHP), Rails (Ruby) and Django (Python). The key point to get from server-side languages and how they work is that all of the processing is done server-side and once the server responds to a user request, the server-side code is finished with its work.
Databases are made up of structured tables, and tables are populated with records. There are several ways to design a database, in terms of models, but the most common in regards to web applications are relational databases. Relational databases loosely mean that records form one table can relate to records of another table. For example, if I have a table of banking accounts, I may also have a table filled with account holders; there would then be another table that relates records from each table through the individual records unique ids. The previous example describes a many-to-many relationship. There are also one-to-many relationships; where, in my previous example, an account holder can have many accounts, but an account can have only one account holder. On heavily trafficked websites, the database will live on its own server hardware separate from the web server, but it can also live on the same server. Examples of database servers are MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle or PostgresSQL. The most popular, being open-sourced and free, is MySQL. Through server-side programming languages, databases are able to be accessed. For example, when a user fills out a web form, the data in that form is received by the web server, read and inserted into the database by the server-side language. Using databases allow a developer to accomplish several things; including, creating user accounts for a website, storing any sort of form data, and anything else requiring data to be re-visited at any time in the future.
Lastly, client-side programming is what is making the latest web apps as useful and user-friendly as they are. To show where it fits into our cycle, when a user goes to a website the DNS server resolves the web server address, the web server determines what server-side script needs to be executed, the script is executed, databases are accessed as needed and data is returned to the browser. At this point, the client-side languages can act on the data returned to the browser. The majority of the time, XHTML is returned from the server. XHTML is the child of HTML and interpreted by the browser. XHTML is strictly a markup language that presents all of the data and information to the browser. CSS is the language that describes what the XHTML should actually look like. The last important client-side language is JavaScript, not to be confused with Java. JavaScript allows for modifying the XHTML markup, improving the user interface and even re-accessing the server for additional requests (referred to as AJAX, a buzzword…). Similar to server-side programming frameworks, JavaScript has libraries that speed up development time and abstract browser differences from your code. If you plan on doing any sort of JavaScript coding, please consider using jQuery, YUI, Scriptaculous or any other JavaScript library. It will make your life much easier. The important thing to know about server-side languages is that all server-side languages are only as good as the browser they are running in. Browsers that do not adhere to XHTML, CSS and JavaScript standards and cause headaches for developers. The ideal situation would be that a developer can write client-side code and no matter what browser it is displayed and used in, it will look and act the same. Microsoft, especially with Internet Explorer 6, has tried to do their own, non-standardized, things with the browser and failed. If you remember one thing from this post, remember this: follow web standards, follow web standards, follow web standards.
Having said all of the above, it is very important to know how all of these pieces work together to keep in mind the scope and possibilities of a project or idea. I have added several links for further reading into specific products or topics. After understanding these basic concepts and if you are still interested in creating a web application or site, be sure to start researching specific languages and servers mentioned above. Above all of this, I am open to any questions. If you are stuck somewhere, or do not understand what I wrote, please give me a holla. I want to help.
Last night, a few friends and I had dinner with Michael Staton, a founder of Inigral. Michael has been in Abilene this week visiting ACU. ACU will be piloting Inigral’s Schools on Facebook. In our conversation, an interesting topic was brought up about the make up of a successful start-up. In my past, so far mostly unsuccessful, I have learned a few guidelines that I will follow on my next venture. Here are the first two: 1) All co-founders must have some sort of programming ability 2) All co-founders must be personally interested in the utility the project will bring; the opposite of being interested because it is a good idea, because it could make a lot of money or because it could lead into bigger and better things, etc. etc.
To me, having all co-founders with the ability to crank out some code is a very valuable asset, especially for the early stages of a start-up. The ability to work on the idea intensely and get out something as quickly as possible is very important for a web start-up. The web moves fast and more likely than not someone has either implemented or working on your idea in some capacity. Getting early feedback from potential users is also helpful and smart to seek out. To investors, a prototype with some alpha users could never be a bad thing. Michael only half way agreed with my first guideline, and rightly so. He explained that there will always be things that, as a developer, I will not want to mess with: payroll, accounting, HR, and the list goes on. These things will always be there, but in my mind it seems reasonable to believe that I can find a business-minded person, a great HR-minded person and a great you-name-it who happened to take the time to pick up some coding skills. Michael stressed to the other two at the table (non-developers) at how picking up a language would be the smartest thing they could do right now. He told them to find the right book on the desired language and lock yourself in a room until you get through it. Hopefully the guys at the table were listening. The business developer with coding skills will most likely never get to the level of the behind-the-scenes code monkey, in terms of software development, but having at least a knowledge of how things work will help in many places in business development. When a potential partner approaches my bus. dev. guy who has a sense of how development works, he/she can sift through the buzz words and bull crap he/she might hear. When we need to hire a new developer, my code-experienced HR person can handle the entire interview him/herself with minimal interruptions to the hard-core developers. The ability to throw some working code on the page goes a long ways.
Secondly, all co-founders need to have a genuine interest and users of the final product or application. I think this quality in a start-up team helps significantly with follow-through and the hard times. The reasons a group wants to start a company is one of the first things I like to know about when talking to start-ups. I think is an important indicator to speak to their future success. When someone tells me making a ton of money is their primary goal with their start-up, it is an instant red flag to me. Money is a big influence on most people in most situations, but it will only get you so far. For those of you that have made that website, under-priced with scope-creep off the page, for an acquaintance that you thought would be easy and some nice cash on the side, you know what I mean when the “how much I’m making” wears off. On the other hand if I were working on a cause I believed in, plus getting paid (in cash or equity), my personal feelings towards the project are easily positive and I want to see the project through to the end even more. Michael Staton has a passion, he wants to solve big higher education problems by being creative with the social web. He has been working hard at Inigral for several months now and has just recently found out how they will do exactly that; solve higher education problems. Had Michael thought co-founding Inigral would be simply a way to make a name and a fortune, I have a feeling he would have been done a long time ago. Now don’t get me wrong, I hope making a name for himself and a fortune along the way are by-products of Michael’s efforts, but let it be known he has a much higher chance of being successful at Inigral in the long term because he has genuine interest in the cause he is working for.
What is that, you ask?