Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Demographics & Online Usage

As successful online communication strategy needs to be based on good data related to your target audience. Pew Internet, a non-profit organization studying internet behavior, has been an invaluable resource since 1999.

"The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005, to 35% at the end of 2008." After the news that 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts, this number is certainly to be taken with a grain of salt. The most common internet activities remain e-mail, searching and finding information on various topics and the news. So, a successful online strategy starts with great website content, and an e-mail notification system.

A snippet of the most popular activities among the different generations is shown in this graphic (click on it to see a larger version):



Quoting the Report summary:
"Compared with teens and Generation Y, older generations use the internet less for socializing and entertainment and more as a tool for information searches, emailing, and buying products. In particular, older internet users are significantly more likely than younger generations to look online for health information. Health questions drive internet users age 73 and older to the internet just as frequently as they drive Generation Y users, outpacing teens by a significant margin. Researching health information is the third most popular online activity with the most senior age group, after email and online search. "

The full stats are available in this report: Pew Interent: Generations- Online in 2009

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Friendfeed: Three Examples Richer discussions, more Live-Stream Experience

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More ScreenShots: LinkedIN, AllTop, posterous

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Slideshow: RSS Feeds & Social Media

Flickr RSS Feed

Flickr also offers a full set of feeds with various customization methods. Worth checking out:
http://ping.fm/Jlk4l

Digg's RSS Feeds

Digg offers a whole set of RSS feeds: It offers directory feeds per category, individual user feeds and customized search feeds. A great way to listen in on the internet conversation. http://ping.fm/iCwtr

Twitter and RSS Feeds: How to start?

"I am on Twitter, now what?" Isn't that what many new Twitter users think? The abandon rate of Twitter accounts is extremely high (around 60%), as is the rate of 'inactive' users, (56% not following anyone, 55% never tweeted, 53% no followers) (Hubspot stats, June 2009). One of the problems might be the lack of a fancy web site with a lot of movement or flashy stuff. It's not like a new TV channel that you can switch on and watch for awhile, and decide whether or not it's something for you.

Twitter doesn't come easy. When I started out with Twitter awhile back, it finally sunk in after six or eight months, and I understood what Twitter could mean to me. I still have a hard time explaining Twitter to a novice, though. And, my stream is so geared towards my own personal preferences, that it is hardly of use as an example to change most peoples' perceptions. Acute nerd alert!
Detour for Twitter Beginners:
Before you continue, read the New York Times' article David Progue's Twittering Tips for Beginners

All I can do now is provide a starter kit for working with feeds and Twitter applications, and a set of 'trusted people' to get everyone started. "Follow" recommendations are marked with an '@' sign, followed by a short name. This is the syntax convention when referring to a person's twitter account. This blog's twitter account is @SoMeTech (read 'some tech').

Everytime you see what looks similar to an email address in a twitter stream, it is referring to another Twitter user. When you click on it you will arrive at that user's twitter profile and latest tweets (= posting). The new language alone must drive novices nuts!


What can you see in the pictures:
1) Four Twitter Apps: Twitter.com Account administration and web interface for posting, follow, friends list and favorites. Now also with search box and Twitter Trends
TWitPic.comshare snapshots on Twitter
Tweetdeck.com a desktop application that allows for multiple panes, grouping and multiple accounts.
tweetfeed.com an online service for auto-posting of feeds to twitter
List/graphic: courtesy of @Mashable (http://www.mashable.com/).


2) RSSFriends allows you to look at your followers, friends and favorites differently. The twitter.com web site is so rudimentary, that there are literally hundreds of twitter applications out there that make up for the short comings of twitter.com.
Many people actually do not speak of twitter as a web site, but as a platform, and there are rumors that extending the API (application programming interface) for commercial use might be a better business model than plastering advertising all over it.



3) Twitterfeed.com will auto-post any RSS feed you deem fit to post, and will do so automatically. The feed can be from your blog, from a client's blog or from any other RSS feed.
Twitterfeed allows you to prefix and postfix the tweets.
If you have an account and an API key for your url shortener (i.e. bit.ly, Twitterfeed will use it to shorten your blog url, and allow you to keep click-through stats for your posted Twitter links.




4) TwitterSearch is probably the best way to familiarize yourself with Twitter, by searching for a topic of interest. Just entering a few keywords will show you a set of Twitter users, talking about your chosen topic. Click on their Avatar (= profile picture) to check out the "ppl" (= twackrynom for "people"), and their other tweets (= posts to Twitter).

Sometimes a group of people (ppl) tweeting about a topic agree on a so-called hash (#) tag and a twackrynom, to post together on a particular topic. Southwest Florida Twitterers (also called "tweeple") post under #swflorida or #swfl. A trending topic right now is "#iranelection". Tomorrow starts the AAUW Bi-Annual National Convention, and you can follow #aauw09. If you would like to review the Google I/O conference (end of May, 2009), search #googleio.

List of Trusted People
...

If you are interested in technology news, follow @mashable or @techcrunch and or @CNETnews and @Wired

I have found http://www.muckrack.com/ to be a great resource for finding journalists online. MuckRack is a directory of journalists that are on twitter, and it follows them providing a twitter stream outside of the twitter website.

For social media topics, you can follow a subset of trusted sources: From a list of New Jersey News @chrisbrogan @pgillin @PaulDunay @dmscott @charleneli @jdlasica @mitchjoel. If you would like to recommend someone, please leave their twitter handle in the comment section.

In January 2009, Amarendra Bhushan of CEOWorld magazine (@ceoworld) posted a list of Top Technology Celebrity on Twitter.

And, if you search with the right keywords, you might find other people that come up with useful lists or directories. If you find some, please post them as comments to this post.

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Technorati Claim post

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Read about Techorati Blog Directory, Searches and Claim on About.com: Claim Your blog on Technorati

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Feedblitz Example

A series for screen shots from feedblitz web site, creating an RSS feed and newsletter from the blog, including sign-up embed code for the site.

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The posting mechanism for various multi-posters vary very much. This is a message from ping.fm Thanks for all good tips!

E-mail Marketing Services

With 93% of all American Adults using e-mail as primary online communication tool, any content distribution strategy will need to entail e-mail marketing solutions. So it is not wonder that e-mail subscriptions for Blogs and other sites are important and need to be optimized. Three features should any e-mail marketing system have: RSS Feed driven newsletters, support for CRM systems and a flexible API that allows access to the open/click statistics per subscribers. Among the many companies offering e-mail marketing services, I have only found one that has all features and then some. We looked at Feedblitz, Jango Mail, Constant Contact and MailChimp. Our clear favorite and we are not getting any money from them or other perks, is MailChimp. It is easy to use - very important for our clients -, it offers back-end integration with a reliable, extensible API and offers integration with major CRMs as SalesForce, Highrise and Batchbook. The flexibility is quite impressive. We built various web sites that integrate via the API. Out of sites registration procesee synchronizes the subscribers list and allows access to open and click statistics per subscriber. We have published our API Wrapper for Coldfusion as open-source to remove barriers for other developers to use the system.


With Mailchimp you can create a great usage history with your contacts, you would be able to target specific groups of subscribers and be more flexible yourself in managing relationships. After all those features, we gladly embraced them even more when they allowed RSS driven campaigns to automate the updates from our blog. The team around MailChimp seems to have quite some fun at their site and with their customers, which makes it even more enjoyable working with them.

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Almost done with the example set-up for syndicating information via various networks. Working on www.ping.fm now

Your Feed on Facebook Pages


If you have not yet created a Facebook Page you might want to start on this page:

Facebook: Create a Page or Manage Existing Pages

Some technical difficulties on facebook have made it quite difficult to integrate Facebook Pages with RSSFeeds.We will keep trying and hope to have an example soon.

In the meantime we have successfully integrated Ping.fm with Facebook and are now able to post on various places through Ping.fm.

Here is the link to the help site created by Ping.fm.

Here's how to set up posting to Facebook Pages.

Now looking at the Social Media Technology Facebook Page we will recognize the Ping.fm posting in the feed among the suggested links.

Public Google Reader page

As with Twitter there is a way to follow someone's feed without being their follower. Google reader provides you with a Puplic Page for all your shared items. And example is for this site: Social Media Technology on Google Reader.

Now this is the first post that is cross-posted to a blogger blog. Waving at new visitors there.

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