Saw this banner ad over the title of an article about mortgage foreclosures on the New York Times site today. Funny and sad. Cause and effect.
Contextual Advertising?
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Author Archives: David
Podcast: Interview with Jeremiah Owyang on Measuring Social Media
I am working on an article for Associations Now about how to measure social media success. The questions I am exploring: How can you measure success with these tools? How do you know you are creating value with a blog, podcast, wiki, RSS, etc.? What’s beyond the page view?
I interviewed Jeremiah Owyang, about this issue last week. Jeremiah is with PodTech, an online video network. Jeremiah has been writing about social media, and metrics in particular, quite a bit this year. He even started a Facebook group on social media measurement.
In the recording attached to this post we discuss the idea of measuring engagement, subjective vs. objective measures and what the near term future might look like. Jeremiah shares several tips on getting started with measuring social media (follow the link for a write-up of these). Thanks Jeremiah!
Drop me a line if you are using social media at your association and would like to share your experience for the article. You don’t have to have solved the problem (if you have you can write the article!) but I am very interested in talking about the value you think your efforts are providing and issues related to measuring that value.
Update: Jeremiah has posted a few additional comments and links related to what we discussed in the interview.
World Bank 2.0: The BuzzMonitor
I just heard about a new open source application for tracking discussion of specific issues in social media (blogs, tags, podcasts, wikis, etc.) online: The BuzzMonitor. This was developed by the World Bank for their own purposes and then released as an open source application. From the about page:
Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.
We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a “super aggregator” that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.
I asked Pierre Guillaume, who announced it on the Social Media Measurement Group on Facebook, how they are using it internally at the World Bank. His response:
Thanks David. We are rolling it out to communicators across the bank with a guide on how to use tagging, voting, rss feeds etc…there is, not surprisingly, a bit of a learning curve both in terms of “getting” social media and using the tool but some champions are emerging, embedding findings obtained through the buzzmonitor in their regular comm and web reports, adding relevant bloggers to their contacts etc.. We also feature the most recently voted on items on a page available two clicks down from the intranet home page, for all staff to see.
Sounds like a great tool for raising awareness of how issues important to the Bank are evolving online. I recommend listening to the online conversation as a key activity for any organization and this looks like a great tool for assisting in that. I have downloaded the application and will give it a try this week.
Web Site Redesign Resources
I sent out a few links to articles and blog posts I had written on web site redesign issues recently and thought I would share them here as well.
Things to Think about Before a Web Site Redesign
Three questions you should answer before a web site redesign.
Avoid “Me Too” Web Site Benchmarking
Too many web site design project start with benchmarking efforts that result in a laundry list of ‘me too’ features rather than focusing on how to best create value for members and the association. Learn how to avoid this situation and identify valuable benchmark sites.
Five Critical Steps for a Successful Web Site Launch
These five steps will help your web site launch go as smoothly as possible from a technical standpoint.
Less Is More on the Home Page
Learn why creating chaos on your home page by putting too much on it is an indicator that your site is not aligned with the overall goals and strategy of your organization.
Google Custom Search Business Edition
Google launched a new hosted search product this week: Google Custom Search Business Edition.
This will give you a Google-based search engine for your site, running on Google’s servers, without advertising or Google logos on it. You can also get search results as XML, which makes it possible to create a completely custom results page or to embed search results in parts of your site as related content.
However, you cannot index any content behind a login, which will rule it out for most membership-based web sites. Searching secured content will still require one of their appliances.
It costs $100 a year for up to 500 pages and $500 for up to 50,000 pages.
Is this feedback really necessary?
I received the following error on a web site today:
An unexpected error has occurred and technical information regarding this error has been reported to the site administrator.
In order to improve the quality of our site, please contribute helpful feedback using the form below. Otherwise click here to return to the site.
This text was followed by a feedback form. There are a couple issues here:
- They already know what the problem is here. What feedback could I provide other than, “Fix it!”?
- On the other hand, I’m not entirely confident they have been alerted to the problem automatically.
- In fact, I’m not too confident the feedback form will actually get feedback to them, given the current error.
So I left the page and came here to post about it instead. 🙂
Pay attention to what your error messages say. Everyone has issues on their site now and then (I got a server error from the New York Times just yesterday). You should review all the standard error messages your site can generate and make sure they convey the right impression.
In this case, a form for an e-mail address and an offer to let you know when the problem was resolved could have been a good alternative to a standard feedback form.
Integrating Third Party Web Sites: Don't Forget the Template!
A common issue I come across in my work is the effective integration of third party services with the overall web presenece for an organization. And I don’t just mean the login system, although that’s been a hobby horse of mine for some time.
I mean that the visual and navigation experience of moving from the main site to a hosted service is often jarring and off putting. If your audience includes folks who are still a bit skittish online, you’ll lose them if they are not positive that the hosted site is actually yours. We can thank the phishing scammers for that.
What is a third party site? It is one that an organization has contracted with to provide a specific service, content or features that they either cannot or do not wish to develop on their main site. Job boards, search engines, discussion forums, social networking tools and blogs are all examples of these kinds of services.
The solution is to make the ability to use your overall look and feel, including navigation system, on the hosted site as a primary selection criteria. Many managers don’t explore this fully and end up with a service that has their logo on it but otherwise bears no resemblance to the main site. Exploring this fully during selection and contract negotiations will prevent a lot of user pain down the road.
And to you service providers out there, making it insanely easy to support an organization’s overall look and feel would be a good way to stand out from your competitors.
Surfing Like It's 1994
Woo, someone recently posted a 1994 vintage video produced by DEC on this new-fangled web thing. Spotted over on John Batelle’s blog.
Have to say, I don’t miss grey backgrounds!
My Wikipedia Contribution Lives On
Deane at Gadgetopia recently discovered the Unconference entry on Wikipedia. This is a topic I created on Wikipedia back in November 2005. It caused a bit of a kerfluffle with Dave Winer at the time, who slammed me indirectly for getting the attribution on the term wrong.
Since I created the entry, it has been edited hundreds of times (only a few by me) and is a nice comprehensive, yet concise, article now. This is one of the reasons why I love the Internet and the Web.
Ah, Modern Yearbook Anxiety
This story in the Washington Post brought back memories of being a yearbook staffer (I was even co-editor in chief my senior year!):
From Facebook To a Yearbook, Teens Get a Jolt – washingtonpost.com
This story is about how the yearbook staff of a high school lifted a bunch of pics posted by students to Facebook without permission. Not smart. They don’t mention a yearbook advisor in the story, but I see it as a failure of the the high school staff to inform and monitor the yearbook students. Looks like they are moving on the ethics education piece, which is good.
What they ought to do next year is create a yearbook group on Facebook and use it to get photos submitted by the students for the yearbook. Leverage the trend, don’t fight it!
C. David Gammel, CAE 