The Social Media Club Workshop is on June 11th in Palo Alto, I’ll be one of the presenters. We’ve got a little contest to see which speaker can attract the most folks, and we’re using discount registration codes to track.
Shel is promoting his code from his blog (and announcing Giovanni to kick off the conversation) he promotes his code, but mine’s better. Why enter that extra letter (his is four characters) when you can enter three and save yourself a keystroke.
To registered with the streamline, optimized code, use OWY and get a discount. I know a lot of you who read this blog are doing social media at your corporation, I’d really encourage you to attend and register.
If you want to check out the agenda, here’s the details, the topic I’ll be covering the following which makes sense given my dive into the tools and most recently ustreaming at web 2.0 expo.
I’ve got some other notes I’ll be publishing, but in the meantime, here’s a little interesting tool that if you’re managing a website to know about.
I’m at the Google Developer day here at the San Jose convention center and had a nice close up tour of the Web Master tools that Google provides.
Did you know that you can see who’s linked to you, and export the data? While the data is alpha organized and a bit raw, it may have data (or richer data) than what Technorati brings to you. You can also check out Google queries, and how people found your site, and which keywords they used. I found out that I show up as the fourth Jeremiah in search results. (The Google folks were impressed!) By putting this data next to your Analytics, you can get a better sense of how folks are finding you. I also discovered my blog has a ton of 404 links, likely due to my site being down from dreamhost. Overall checkup? My site’s doing well, although I should upload a sitemap using my RSS feed. Yet another way to observe the User Experience.
Did I tell you I hate the term “Webmaster”? It’s so reminiscent of the sys admin in your IT department that built your first corporate website with flashing graphics.
Update: I’m not the only one that doesn’t like the webmaster title.
Running a conference with limited bandwidth? How about a large campus or even home owner association? Even if you manage a city (like SF) Wifi is a great attractor for new tenents that are tech savvy.
I’m sitting with Chase Phillips of Meraki Networks which is a company in Mountain view that is helping to provide internet access to everyone, How? They offer a repeatable mesh network that encourages others to share, and bring internet access to others.
Meraki is a Greek word that means “From the soul, or from the heart” and in the spirit of Web 2.0, giving to get more is the mantra.
You can check out their website where the Meraki Mini is for sale for $50 bucks. Worried about how many people may use your network? You can control the bandwidth.
Of course I challenged Chase that cities and large companies (like Google) will want to offer this, so this market is still virgin territory. If you believe the network should be for the people check out the website “free the net”.
Their still trying to figure out how to get mass adoption, so if you have any ideas give ‘em a call.
Many startups out there need to keep track of customer, prospect, and partner information, including the status of those relationships. For many, SalesForce is too expensive for their needs. Since we’re all living the the ‘new’ web world where software is everywhere, I’d thought I’d put together a list of CRM systems you could use, please add to the comments of other CRMs systems
List of Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs):
SalesForce
Daffodil CRM
Centric CRM
SugarCRM
CRM Solution
Sales Boom
Free CRM
Boss CRM
Klyptix
Boss CRM
VTiger
On Contact
Zoho CRM
Highrise, 37 Signals
VTiger
Solve 360
Big Contacts
Net Suite
ProspectSoft
Instant Sales Tracker
Patoo
Terasoft
Patoo
Easy Customer
Pipeline Deals
Sage software
Goldmine
Avidian
Heap CRM
IT Factory
Batchbook
Geez, what a crowded market.
Other Resources
-Web Worker daily has some analysis of just a few of the above that I listed.
-eCRM has a partial list, they include other applications in addition to CRM, such as Helpdesk, communication tools etc.
-You can glance through this comparison matrix in this vendor showcase, very helpful.
You always get what you pay for, so I’m sure you’ll be a savvy consumer. As you add comments, I’ll add to this list over time.
I’m really glad to see that the Zooomr guys are getting their site (which has been offline for more than a week) back in order. Their site went down as they tried to launch the third release of their product, sadly, this is a disaster. They lost data and there have been some hardware issues. I know that there were some issues with funding of Zooomr, and I can see where additional resources are critical in keeping a website alive, funding is critical for a rainy day (and when it rains it pours).
I’m really impressed with Sun, (they love startups) a big ol’ behemoth enterprise company has provided data storage hardware to Kris and Thomas, and Zoho is helping out from their data center. (If I were still in my previous role as community manager at a data storage company, I would have tried to help too) We should applaud both those companies for helping out. Scoble has the story.
Kris and Thomas are doing all that they can to keep the lines of communication open, they are ustreaming live, blogging, and leaving comments (even Zoli is watching). Good luck you guys, call me if you need anything. Keep an eye on their blog, which shows they are getting close to completion. I hope this saga ends on a good note.
Portals are Dead. Portals are Dead. = the mantra of Web 2.0, content is distributed, open, and amorphous.
The Web Portal, which gained fame in the late 1990s was a web application that was intended to keep eyeballs on one page by providing all the information in a dashboard type style at once. From 2000-2003 I was the UI designer on the MyExodus customer portal, it was a lot of fun.
An Aggregator, like a feedreader, techmeme, page flakes, netvibes, and myyahoo (and now facebook) is designed to collect all the information you want on to one page. If you think about it for a moment, Google search results is actually an aggregator too.
So what’s the difference between a Portal and an Aggreagtor? Not much, if you ask me. So if portals are dead, then are aggregators too? While sure, the resources required to create the modern portal/aggregator or low, the strategy is the same: bring all the resources to one page.
Conclusion: Portals aren’t dead, we’ve just renamed ‘em.
Robyn of Edezines first contacted me because she was interested in advertising on my blog. (which I think is a fantastic). I’m not quite ready for ads on my blog, although the topic is coming up more and more lately.
I checked out her site Edezines, and found that it’s really an online resource for the Web Design community. It looks like a resource to me, so I asked her to describe it in detail:
“Edezines.com is a self-proclaimed web design directory. In this case that means that Edezines has resources for those interested in both hiring a web design firm and learning how to do their own site designing. On one hand there is a directory of designers and specific details about each, including a handful of featured firms, as well as some articles addressing who you should hire and why for your specific site needs. For those interested in doing their own design there are a number of web design articles on such topics as usability, use of Flash, and more. For those just looking for a quick fix there are also some helpful design tips available…”
While I’m not sure how a firm becomes a “featured design firm” there appears to be come good resources for those seeking to buy or sell web design services. I’d like to see them create a web design directory that lists many firms, maybe by customer rating. See their web design resources section as well.
Additional Resources
Have you read my comparison of all website design process and workflows? If you’re trying to price a web design project, here’s some resources I’ve collected. If you’re a design firm and are looking to get your name out, you can leave a comment on this post.
I’ve heard from two people now that my blog is causing browsers to crash, maybe it’s the large pictures, videos, Google analytics, or maybe a tag that I’ve not closed in the HTML.
I’ve reduced the amount of posts that can be viewed on this blog, (it’s now 15) so please let me know if you’re having any issues.
So if you’re reading this in a reader, can you please go to my blog and check?
I know most of the “Community Managers” in Silicon Valley and beyond, many of them are my friends, I read their blogs, see them at events. A small group I help them to grow, and mentor them as Shel Israel did to me, so I know the Community manager role well.
We also know that the Community Manager role is appearing at almost every company, (learn more about this role) and every PR firm is starting to have a division to focus on this area as well.
This is a great list of questions that arm anyone that’s going into a role that requires them to be involved with social media. James Durbin has spent some time to help the job seeker make sure they don’t get into a firm or agency that asks them to do something un-authentic, awkward, or just boring.
List of Social Media Interview Questions by James Durbin
There’s a few questions that I would add:
-How is success measured, and does that impact my income?
-Does social media only imply online work, or does it include real life events
-Will I have resources and time to attend industry conferences, workshops, and events?
-How will I be encouraged to learn and stay on top of the fast moving curve in social media?
-Important one: Will I be encouraged to make mistakes, hopefully so our clients don’t have to? (I’m fortunate to be a role where this is ok)
-How much do you value social media in the future of communications?
-How much freedom will I be allowed to craft out this new role?
Posted on May 30th, 2007 in:
Events
Another successful event, I’m told it was 120 guests, for this bbq event, which included aprons “Cooking up your network”, the sign up post exploded this morning with maybe two dozen sign-ups.
NetGear’s digital living room was very cool, PodTech video crew was there to capture some video for our client, and interviewed many folks, including Drue Kataoka who’s a resident bay area artist in the form of traditional Japanese style “Sumi-E”, the bubilicious team, Web Developer Brian Stephens (who has the famous Chocolate Blog), Web Developer Michael Gobaco, Web professional Chris Salazar, Waili and friends from Savvis (who should host the next Lunch 2.0 and do a data center tour), Jeremy Toeman, and many others.
It’s pretty amazing the amount of press this event is getting, as it was on the front page of the SF Chronicle, funny photo of founder Terry.
Updates: Here’s some links of blogs, images, and videos:
-Bub.blicio.us: Our friends have harnessed ustreaming!
-Here’s their archived Ustream video, and here
-Mario Sundar’s take on the event (with some community marketing ideas)
-Drue has a wrap-up
-Christopher Salazar enjoys the networking
-Ubergizmo likes the geekery and the digital lifestyle room
-Check out Ubergizmo’s video
-The always cheerful Lisa got a kick out of hearing how Brian makes his gourmet chocolates
-Holly has a video, but she also wonders if this has become a PR thing.
-Michael met some folks at Lunch 2.0
-Jessica Mah enjoys the free food.
Here’s those videos interviews by Bub.blicio.us crew.
Above: here’s the video that Podtech created for our client Netgear
