Chad Hutchins

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).

Be sure to view the jQuery Docs.

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 following article does a fine job explaining how social media played a large role in the latest presidential election, written by Brian Solis of kNow Media. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/15/is-obama-ready-to-be-a-two-way-president/

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

As always, send me your questions or comments.

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.

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.

In the process of moving data from my old pc to the new macbook pro, I have had a terrible time trying to get my development environment to run smoothly. After trying to get the apache/mysql/php stack that comes with leopard to work, I scratched it and thought I would try something simpler for time’s sake. I downloaded and used MAMP for a while, but the web app I deal with most of the time, SugarCRM, didn’t like the default ports MAMP ran on, so I tried to change them. This, of course, caused several more conflicts. Tired of dealing with MAMP and with a suggestion from my personal mac genius, Chris Faulkner, I downloaded and installed XAMPP. I have used XAMPP on the Windows side of the virtual pond, so I was pretty comfortable with it. Everything seemed to be running with no problems. Great. Now all I need to do is move over my database. Only problem, the phpMyAdmin version that comes bundled with the Mac XAMPP installer is an older version. Whenever I tried to import my file full of SQL queries, phpMyAdmin would error out with a vague “File could not be read” message. After trying everything to fix the problem, I scratched trying to fix the old version and just downloaded the latest version of phpMyAdmin, dropped it into the XAMPP htdocs folder and it worked like a champ.

Another thing to keep in mind, if your file is too large and cannot be uploaded due to php or phpMyAdmin restrictions, there is a very simple way around it. Open up your phpMyAdmin config.inc.php file. On the Mac, that is found in XAMPP/xamppfiles/phpmyadmin folder. Search that file for “$cfg[’UploadDir’]”. If the quotes are empty, give it a directory name such as ‘upload/import’. Whatever folder you assign the variable, make sure the directory(ies) exist. Place the large file you wish to import into the given directy. Now, go back to phpMyAdmin in the browser and click on the import option. You should see a drop down underneath the place you would usually click to select the file you would upload. Select the file you moved to the given upload directy and press go. That should do it for you. Feel free to leave any questions or comments.

It has been a crazy week and a half. Starting with FOWA, Jon Hinson (code monkey and co-founder of TeacherHubs, sole-developer of Get a Roomy) and I had a great time listening to all of the speakers. We were able to meet Kevin Rose of Digg and Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary TV. The networking opportunities were great. At the FOWA after party, we were able to meet the creator of CakePHP, Blaine Cook the developer of Twitter, one of the Ustream guys and many others.

Being in Miami was a first for me. Missing my flight from Miami to DFW was also a first for me. How in the world do you miss a flight? Well, after a really late night with the Villij and Socialthing! guys. We had to be at Miami International Airport at 4:30am to catch our insanely early flight. Jon and I got back to the hotel around 3am, and somehow I thought I would be a good idea to sleep for an hour. One hour turned into four hours, and it was quickly 7am. So, we hurried to the airport, waited in a few lines, explained our situation, and we were on our way in no time. I have to say, I have been impressed with American Airlines this past week.

Once I got back to Abilene Saturday night, I was able to hang out with Carla for a little while. I can’t wait to take her with me on these trips! Sunday morning, the rest of the TeacherHubs team and I got up and started our journey to Boulder, CO. Arron of villij was a huge help by giving us a few rides and letting us stay at his place for the week. During our stay in Boulder, not only did we crank out a lot of code and get several things lined up for TeacherHubs, we attended Boulder Open Coffee, Boulder New Tech Meetup and most importantly TechStars for a day. I was able to meet so many people. The community in Boulder is quite incredible. It is definitely a future Silicon Valley. I talked to more entrepreneurs and investors during those three days than I have my entire life. Unfortunately, Thursday morning finally came, and I had to head back to the reality of all the school and work I had missed, but hey, I got to see Carla again

For a few more firsts, Jon, Jordan and I left Boulder by bus at 10:30am. Once we arrived at Denver International, we learned that all flights in and out of DFW had been canceled for the rest of the day. Who would have thought a huge snow storm would have rolled through Texas in March?! This was the first time a flight of mine was canceled. So after a couple of hours of being in and out of phone calls with American Airlines, we had all nailed down new flight arrangements. Another first, I would be spending the night in an airport. As the night progressed, Jon left on a lucky route from Denver to Houston to Abilene, and Jordan and I actually found a United Airlines flight from Denver to Dallas at 8:30pm. So we took it. After riding the sky tram at DFW a couple of times and checking out the international hub (which is extremely nice and looks like a mall) of DFW, we headed back to our gate, found a few airport supplied cots, and slept.

The next morning, Jordan flew off to Shreveport where his parents would pick him up, and I had a flight to Abilene at 9:30am. Due to all of the planes needing de-icing and other delays throughout the states, my plan didn’t pull out of DFW until 2:00pm. I finally arrived in Abilene and was picked up by Carla at 3:30pm on Friday.

During all the time at the airport, I did manage to get some work done. I created a simple twitter mashup for a very active web-savvy teacher, who goes by coolcatteacher. She had found Pulse of Open Source one day and thought it would be cool if there was a Pulse of Education. Having stumbled upon her comment, I thought it would be simple enough. So I bought the name and made it happen. Check it out: Pulse of Education.

All of that was a ton a fun, but as I said earlier, I did miss over a week of school and work. It is going to be crazy for the next week.

During FOWA, Emily Boyd of RememberTheMilk.com (RTM) showed an awesome application of their task list web app. First off, RTM allows a user to create different tasks for different categories (personal, study, work, etc.). Tasks may be described with a quick description, given due dates and assigned levels of priority. That is great and all, but it is just another site for me to have to go to, to manage a simple task list. The great thing about RTM is the sweet RTM+Gmail plugin. Normally, my task list would be a series of several emails from myself labeled with a red-colored ToDo label, maybe starred, that would sit in my inbox until I completed them. Having the clean Gmail-like interface with all the functionality of an awesome task list right inside of Gmail makes my life more simple and organized. Great work over at RTM! I highly recommend it.