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Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Mommy, My CMS Is Being Mean To Me!

Getting straight into it, a lot of SEO and Internet Marketing Specialists – including myself – have been using Content Management Software applications for some time now and, let’s face it, in practice, it’s not the Promised Land textbooks praise it to be.

In most cases, implementing a CMS isn’t as much the Marketer’s idea, as it is forced down our throats by copywriters, translators, or any other professionals dealing with large masses of text. Now admittedly, it does lighten these guys’ workload. However, I came to the conclusion that a CMS serves SEO and Usability purposes, about as much as Paris Hilton serves world culture.

Any CMS package just takes too damn long to load anything. It injects a gigantic databases into your website – a database comprised of the Software’s applications, style sheets, functions and the content itself – and generates a large lag, forcing any page to open 5-10 times slower than it usually would. There is no way around this, as most professional CMS platforms simply store all style sheets and scripts are locally, instead of uploading them on external hosts. Furthermore, the CMS also adds a blob of a code to any page and calls it up before the content itself, upon refreshing the page. Apart from that, the system also usually messes with page names and metas automatically, when you update any old content, thus rendering any real-person content management effort obsolete.

The above mentioned little impediments have determined me to look for alternative methods of managing content. My quest has brought me no further than Social Publishing systems. Now these platforms still have a long way to go, but I think the industry is rapidly growing and, as opposed to conventional CMS packages, they are open source and can be naturally embedded on any page, without them eating up precious kB space.

I have already tried Scribd, Issuu and Wetpaint...

Issu I have been slightly unimpressed by, as it does have some small issues – pardon the pun – with displaying Document Archives and Related Documents and some pretty heavy issues with hyperlink management. Besides, your documents will be loaded with previews of other files totally unrelated to you, which sometimes might provide a small benefit, in terms of visibility, but it does make your work look unprofessional and it distracts the attention of anyone reading your work. Plus, you files risk being associated with dubious content, as the platform is free to use for anyone on the WWW.

Wetpaint really made the grade, in my opinion, as it handles hyperlinks, ads and content pretty well and it offers a pretty neat sign-on integration system. On the minus side, the platform pretty much begs for user-generated content, so, if you’re not going for that sort of mechanism for your website, Wetpaint won’t be the best choice for you.

Scribd is the champion of this lineup. It is highly user-friendly, very versatile and the experience is customizable. It also features two interesting applications, namely iPaper, allowing you to embed documents into webpages and a very own API, usually employed to juice third-party applications, such as Acamin – which also uses Scribd’s iPaper system for sharing files on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Scribd gets my vote as a very classy substitute for traditional CMS platforms.

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14 Sep 2009
Tags: cms, Social Media, usability
Posted in Internet & Technology | No Comments »

Where The Wild Tweets Are

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg couldn’t have left a Web movement untouched. And what’s hotter right now on the WWW

The Twitter Addiction

than Twitter? Earlier this year, Rose created WeFollow, a user-powered Twitter directory. Since the announcement appeared on Rose’s Twitter stream – it is interesting to note that Rose did not use any traditional means of advertising to promote his new project – WeFollow has been creating a huge buzz amongst Tweeters. However, Rose is not the only one offering such services; there are quite a few good high-profile directories worth checking out. I have taken the time to post some of them here and to offer a brief introduction to each one. The directories are listed in no particular order.

WeFollow is a fresh new way of grouping Twitter users by interest and organizing them by tags. Users can add themselves to the directory using up to three tags and are ranked in accordance with the number of their followers. Some of the more popular – or, rather, populated – tags are #celebrity, #news, #actor, #sports, #nba and so forth. But there is also a wide variety of “professional” tags, which can be used to further your Twitter account. Some examples include #seo, #internetmarketing, #copywriting, #socialmedia.

Just Tweet It works similar to WeFollow, in that it lets Tweeters categorize themselves according to relevant fields (or tags). It has a very large array of such tags, ranging from Accountants to Writers. Unfortunately, not so many people are listed, but the community is growing. This could, however, be due to the fact that there appears to be something wrong with the whole mechanism. Once you click the Add your name to the directory link, you’re prompted to select a category, but, once you do that, the damn thing just keeps loading infinitely. Plus, there is no neat filtering when browsing categories. Hopefully, these problems will soon be remedied, or they will quickly force the site to become JustQuitIt.

Twitter Counter is a sort of Web Trends calculator for Twitter. It ranks Tweeters in terms of followers and creates charts based on these figures. It also provides a Twitter Remote system, which allows you to track people who visited your blog or website. Albeit fun, Twitter Counter serves, no real purpose, in my opinion, other than to fuel a High-School-ish I’m-way-more-popular-than-you attitude. In regard to relevance, I don’t really see the point of generating Twitter follower counts. In addition, the system generates probability computations, meaning you get an estimation of how many followers you’re likely to have in a couple of months. Again, I think it is highly counterfactual to assess the number of future followers, based on arithmetic deduction. I will specifically ask 100 people to follow me in the next couple of days, just to overload the Twitter Counter fortune-teller.

TwitterHolic is trying to compete with the previously mentioned Twitter Counter, offering statistics and rankings based on the number of followers. You can find out how many followers a certain user has added over the past few months, or how many people have been following him from the start of his Twitter existence. Although the data isn’t as extensive, the accuracy is similar to that of Twitter Counter. ‘Holic also provides a Top 100 list, but the standings are pretty deducible, as Tweeters like CNN, Barack Obama or Britney Spears – the actual Top 3 – are likely to have many followers. Following in at numbers 4 to 10 are Ashton Kutcher, Twitter, Jimmy Fallon, Shaquille O’Neal, The NY Times, Lance Armstrong and Al Gore.

TwitterLinkUp is somewhat tedious for today’s fast-paced Web society, as it recquires users to sign up. It allows for a higher degree of customizability, but their community is rather small, counting well under 300 members. It does give you a sense of personalization, due to the aforementioned level of customizability involved in creating your profile, as opposed to competing directories, where you are just prompted to list your name among tens of thousands of other names, but the small user count makes it less appealing.

Twellow is definitely not the looker of this lineup. With its encumbered layout and poor design, the general look and feel of this page reminds us of the grim Wild-Wild-West days of 90’s free Geocities websites. It does, however, feature a large number of users and an equally large number of categories, structured in a very traditional Yahoo-inspired fashion, e.g. Arts, Sports, Society, Family, Education, Entertainment, Religion & Spirituality. Personally, I find the abundance of categories rather confusing and amateurishly savage. New categories are being constantly added and there are already about 500 (!) of these bad boys, some of which really seem superfluous. I mean, come now, are categories like Agnostic, Antitrust Law, 3 Nintendo tags (Nintendo, Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii) or Sheep really vital to the Twitter community? On a technical note, their updates fall a few days behind actual Twitter posts and the pages take time to load.

TwitDir. I can’t make heads or tails of this directory, as it seems to always be down. I’m starting to think this is a phantom site.

Who Should I Follow offers suggestions for new followers, who might share your interests. You can filter the results by popularity and location. The results are usually pretty relevant and you have a good chance of finding interesting people to follow, based on your passion or profession. Another positive is that the results don’t seem to feature people you already follow.

Garfield, the New Age philosopher

TwitterVision is a Twitter locations tracker, using Google Maps to display the location of random Tweets. A certain stocky, orange philosopher used to say: That was fun. Useless, but fun.

Media On Twitter is a pretty straightforward Wiki-style catalogue of reporters, journalists and mass-media professionals active on Twitter.

Social Brand Index is a directory of corporative Twitter accounts. They are indexed by category and it is very easy to find specific companies, like, for instance, Service Providers or Internet Hosting firms.

Tracking Twitter, as their own website states, is a real-time listing of the top media, entertainment, and consumer product feeds we’re currently following on Twitter (The we stands for Electric Artists, a digital brand management and strategy agency and owner of the directory).

Brands That Tweet is a directory featured on the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog and listing Twitter accounts of big-name brands. Unfortunately, amongst the genuine brand accounts, Paul Dunay, who manages the list has also let quite a few account hijacks slip his vigilance. So you may find your favourite company listed there with an account that they don’t own in reality.

C-Level Tweeters is another list provided by aforementioned blogger Paul Dunay. There you can find a host of confirmed C-Level Executives that are active on Twitter.

Ultimate Small Business is another one of those user-generated lists. It features, as author of the list Anita Campbell describes, a list of the people and organizations to consider following on Twitter if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of small businesses.

Twibs is a business directory listing approximately 8000 businesses and counting.

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14 Sep 2009
Tags: Internet Marketing, Social Media, twitter, twitter directories
Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »

All Your Memes Are Belong To Us

When Richard Dawkins first introduced the term “meme” in his 1976 thesis on Evolutionism, The Selfish Gene, he probably had no idea of the future development of his notion. Today, memes aren’t so much associated with Genetics, as they are with Pop Culture and, more specifically, Internet Culture.

Zero Wing: "All your base are belong to us!"

In our day and age, memes are used interchangeably with a derivation of the term, namely Internet meme. Thus, memes came to be associated with the propagation of certain content amongst various members of the online community. Notable examples of such phenomena are All Your Base, Rickrolling or the O RLY Owls. Needless to say, with such high visibility, people will try and cash in on the phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, however, the people who are sucking big bucks out of Internet memes are rarely the ones who actually create the files.

The most recent success story involving Internet crazes is that of the Lolcats. Starting as an inside joke on 4chan – the birthing grounds for Internet memes – the Lolcats soon gained World Wide Web recognition with the help of two Honolulu residents, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, who created a website dedicated to the Lolcats, icanhascheezburger.com – Google PR 7, mind you - also as an inside joke. But the joke caught on and, before they knew it, the creators started receiving offers with double figures from several investors to sell the website.

In 2008, Nakagawa and Unebasami sold the icanhascheezburger Website for a staggering $2 Million deal. Now going a bit beyond the social tragedy of a Grammatical holocaust turning into a Million Dollar deal, as well as the bitter irony of moot, the actual creator of the Lolcats, who didn’t get a penny out of the deal, one can not help but acknowledge the importance of memes for today’s web community. And, in terms of profitability, I think there is a lot to be said about marketing memes.

Alternative Rock band Weezer pioneered meme hijacking as a source of income in 2008, posting the video for their single, Pork and Beans on YouTube. Although melodically and lyrically mediocre, the clip featured a flurry of famous Internet memes, which assured its online popularity. In only 10 months, the clip already recorded a total number of 17294741 views – that’s 9 times the viewer ratio scored by one of the most celebrated Internet memes in history, All Your Base. After this gigantic success, Weezer “pulled a Napster” and made the video unavailable to the general audience, so people would buy the record. Apparently it worked.

With high profile success stories like the ones previously mentioned, along with merchandising hits, such as Joecartoon and the Chuck Norrris Facts, maybe it is time for Internet Marketers to consider Meme Marketing as part of their online campaigns. If we can all agree that celebrity testimonials work wonders for traditional Marketing, why shouldn’t Web Marketers start putting Internet celebs to work for them?

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14 Sep 2009
Tags: Internet culture, Internet Marketing, Memes, Social Media
Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »

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