As more organisations realise Social Media is something that can benefit their business it is important to remember that Social Media has matured beyond just having a Facebook and Twitter account.
To maximise benefit though you need a strategy. Remember that Social Media is about engaging your audience. You could actually alienate people or damage your brand if you do it badly.
Get Informed
You can get ideas by reading articles such as this - http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2046657/steps-developing-social-media-strategy
Rules of Engagement
It is important that everyone from your organisation is clear on the Rules of Engagement. Here is a good example. - http://channel9.msdn.com/About/
Remember that everything someone from your organisation says online represents the organisation so you don't want people saying things they shouldn't. You should also decide who from your organisation should be posting comments or feedback. Should you have a consistent voice or do you prefer having many personalities engaging your users/customers?
Keep Users Engaged
Will new content be posted regularly? At least once per day is a good start.
Set Goals
You should have some clear goals up front. Is it all about the traffic or is also about quality of information or getting to know your users.
We recommend setting up an account with http://sproutsocial.com to measure the results of your Social Media campaign.
If your website audience is spread over different countries then you would want to rank well in the local Google searches for those countries. This article covers only sites that are in one language – English. If you have a multi-lingual site then there are other rules you also need to follow.
A good place to start is the Google support pages - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#1
Basically Google does it’s best to determine who and where your audience is by using things such as:
- Domain Suffixes (.au, co.uk, etc)
- Where your server is located. Locally to your audience is better.
- If your site includes local addresses and phone numbers on the pages or the use of local language and currency
- links from other local sites
- Use of Google Places
Gotchas
As having a local domain for the same site such as .com.au and .co.uk should theoretically improve your rankings in both Australia and the UK, it is tempting to apply both domains to the same site. The problem is that Google may penalise you for having duplicate content. (Read more)
A way around this is to create different content that appears based on your visitors location. Obviously this requires creating more content as well as your site being able to handle displaying different content based on users location.
Keep it Simple
For most people the best strategy would be to:
- Use a domain with a generic suffix such as .com
- If possible tailor content to apply to your target countries by providing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses in those countries.
- Generate links from sites that are hosted in the location you are targeting.
- Use Google places and Adwords in the local countries.
- Research if users in other countries are searching with different terms and optimise for those terms.
To set-up your homepage to be accessible only through / url you need t:
- Use following key in <appSettings> section of your web.config:
<add key="CMSDefaultPageURL" value="~/" />
This prevents putting .../default.aspx in the url.
- Go to Site Manager -> Settings -> Web site, and set default alias path to your home page alias (e.g. "/Home")
Also on the URLs and SEO, turn off Redirect document aliases to main URL.
Note - this is a slight disadvantage, because you lose the ability to benefit from this setting.
- In CMS Desk, go to Properties -> URLs of your Home document, and set Custom URL path to "/"
That should ensure that any request on the root or /home url will be kept at the root domain path, while still showing content of the home node.
To move the Viewstate down the page when using Kentico Portal Model you need to override Render method on the ~\CMSPages\PortalTemplate.aspx.cs file e.g.
protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer) {
System.IO.StringWriter stringWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter);
base.Render(htmlWriter);
string html = stringWriter.ToString();
int StartPoint = html.IndexOf("<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"__VIEWSTATE\"");
if (StartPoint >= 0) {
int EndPoint = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2;
string viewstateInput = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint);
html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint);
int FormEndStart = html.IndexOf("</form>");
if (FormEndStart >= 0) {
html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, viewstateInput + Environment.NewLine);
}
}
writer.Write(html);
}
More info on this method can be found here
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MovingViewStateToTheBottomOfThePage.aspx
Webcoda may be a small team of web developers but we know we can compete with any company when it comes to speed of development and code quality. How we know this is because we use the best tools on the market. One of the tools that really allows us to build custom admin pages in seconds is PLINQO. If you are a developer and haven’t checked it out, here is the URL http://plinqo.com.
Basically what it is Codesmith’s implementation of LINQ to SQL. Apart from the fact that it also allows you to build the UI and not just the DAL is that you can make updates to your DAL and when you regenerate, PLINQO will not overwrite your changes. Other advantages are consistent code quality adhering to company standards as everyone works from the same templates and great database structure as PLINQO is most effective when your DB is properly designed with proper foreign keys and normalisation.
No one in the company can imagine not working with this tool anymore. It is really that awesome.
Does Twitter live up to the hype? As with most things that depends on who you are, what you do and how you do it.
A lot of people who have tried Twitter have written it off as a waste of time citing headlines such as Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'.
That may be true but 80% of TV and pop music are rubbish but there is still enough decent stuff that we can just take what we like and ignore the rest.
This is why I believe Twitter works…
You can follow only people you want to hear from.
I pick up lot’s of great news and tips about web development, current affairs, politics etc because I follow people who are in the know. There are no ads and if someone is wasting my time I stop following them.
The information comes in small bite size chunks
We live in the era of the sound bite. So many people only skim headlines anyway as so much news is free online. A lot of the time a Tweet is a link to a story. If you like a Tweet, you can click on the link and read the full story.
From a marketers point of view it is easier to Tweet than to create newsletters.
Dell has made over 3 million dollars from Twitter related sales. It costs nothing but someone’s time. Think about the effort that goes into sending newsletters. Newsletters is the tried and true method for keeping customers engaged but you cant send more than one marketing newsletter every few days without it looking like Spam. Twitter can be used to have a continuous dialog with customers reminding them about you and your services or products.
As a consumer, the information comes to me
I don’t have to go looking for the news I want. It arrives by itself, tailored to my interests.
Twitter is a real time barometer of what’s going on
Use tools like TwitScoop to see what is happening in the world in real time. We no longer live in an age where only marketers can spot the trends. Now anyone can.
Twitter is an amazing tool and definitely will have it’s place on the internet for a while to come. It can also be a big time suck.
After all if you listen to Tim Ferris, the author of The 4-hour work week we shouldn’t even be listening or watching the news. Oddly enough though, even he is on Twitter. - http://twitter.com/tferriss
I guess if you only work 4 hours a day, you probably have plenty of time to spend on Twitter.
Lately, there has been a boom in online website creation tools.
These sites allow you to create your won sites that can be really easy to set up and very (very!!) cheap.
The best ones I have seen are
http://www.wix.com – For building cool looking Flash-based sites
http://www.squarespace.com/ – Very comprehensive HTML based sites
http://www.wordpress.com – Old faithful but limited functionality although there is an iPhone app.
http://www.mrsite.com – Haven’t used it but the portfolio looks pretty good.
http://www.tumblr.com – pretty cool if all you are after is a basic Blogand also has an iPhone app.
http://www.goodbarry.com - Just added this last one long after writing this blog but it looks like it may be the best. Will give update soon.
WIX.com
Starting Price: Free unless you want to use your own domain name
The Good
- The interface to WIX is incredible!! So easy and so much fun to use.
- Tons of cool functionality
The Bad
- It’s all Flash. No matter what anyone says, I am yet to see how Flash sites can compete against HTML sites for SEO friendliness
- Your design options are limited to the templates provided. Granted there is a lot of scope for customisation.
Verdict
If SEO is not your main concern then this is a great option.
So easy to use my Grandma could build a great looking site in minutes.
Squarespace.com
Starting Price: $8 per month
The Good
- Beautiful interface. These guys really take their design seriously.
- Very flexible layout and CSS customisation options.
The Bad
- Limited functionality.
- Although it is well designed will still require a decent amount of learning to create a site.
Verdict
If you are money poor but time rich then you can create a very decent site.
As long as you don’t need any specific functionality (or ever will) then definitely worth trying the free 2 week trial.
If I was creating a brochure site on the cheap then Squarespace would be my pick.
Wordpress
Starting Price: Free unless you want to use your own domain name
Although technically Wordpress is blog software, the fact that they allow you to add non blog pages to your site means that a lot of people are using Wordpress for their main site.
The Good
- It’s fast, easy to use and cheap and works very well if you just want a good Blog.
- It’s very widely used so there are a lot of third party add-ons and a large community.
- Very SEO friendly
- If you just want a blog you can download the Wordpress software and add it to your site.
- All open source so if you have a PHP developer handy, you can really do what ever you like with it.
The Bad
- To utilise third party add ons or create your own themes/skins, you will need to either host the site yourself or find a hosting provider. Wordpress won’t host customised sites.
- If you want a decent public facing site you will have to choose this option as the Wordpress hosted sites give you minimum functionality. This is fair enough as it is not really designed to be a full CMS.
Verdict
Great for Blogs but wouldn’t cut it as as a stand-alone CMS.
Final Conclusion
I haven’t tried Mrsite.com but it looks good. Also www.tumblr.com is worth a look for those wanting a cool blog site.
The online tools for creating websites are getting better and better. Squarespace.com is certainly a very mature, effective and highly usable piece of software.
If all your organisation requires is a good looking brochure site then with a great web designer you should be able to achieve your requirements very cheaply.
If you need any custom functionality such as integration with internal systems, Shopping Carts etc then you will always need a proper CMS system such as kentico or Sitecore
There are times when websites have different domain names but point to the same code base. The most common is a CMS system that hosts multiple sites.
As the robots.txt file sits in the root of a website it will apply to all domains running from that codebase.
A easy way around this issue is to use the free ISAPI rewrite DLL from Helicontech for IIS.
First create 2 files in the root of your site
robots.block.txt – to block acess
robots.allow.txt – to allow access
Once you install the DLL and go into the editor just add the following
Depending on the domain name of the visitor, this will either read in the content of the block file or the allow one into a robots.txt file.
Note: Your files need to have a .txt extension and the robots.txt file should not actually exist otherwise.
How many software products do you use everyday and how well do you know those products?
Being in IT I probably use more than most but accordingly I would be expected to understand these tools better than most.
If we take the attitude that most features are built into a product for a reason then it is safe to assume that we could probably improve our productivity or processes by doing a little study of those hidden capabilities.
Start small – get a list of keyboard shortcuts for software you use all the time.
I use Firefox all the time and here is the list of short cuts - http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts – I have just looked at it for the first time.
Here are a few shortcuts that I never knew existed
The last one here is one I have always wanted and never knew was possible. 1 min research for a lifetime of knowledge.
Imagine if you just spent a minute learning something new about the tools you use very day.
My only tip is to limit that time to a minute. There is always something to learn and our poor little brains can only handle so much.
It’s almost free because you need to be using the premier edition of Google Apps which is $50 per user per year- http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
If you use Google Apps Premier, Outlook 2003 or 2007 and have an iPhone and would like to sync your email, contacts and calendar then this article is for you. The rest of you will just have to imagine what it would be like.
Just to be clear here when I say Sync, I mean true 2 way sync. If I delete a contact on my phone I want that contact deleted in my Gmail and in my Outlook. Same if I delete from Outlook or Gmail.
Google is the hub. We sync iPhone to Google and Outlook to Google.
Syncing iPhone to Google
Overview here
Email
You probably already have email set up – Instructions here. This works fine and there is nothing to change.
Calendar and Contacts
Although there are third party tools out there such as Neuvasync and Soocial which are pretty good, they didn’t seem to offer anything that Google wasn’t offering out of the box.
To configure iPhone Cal and Contacts follow these instructions. - http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740
The only extra thing worth noting is that if you have multiple calendars or share calendars with other people in Google,
(i.e I can see my wife's google calendar and she can see mine.) you can choose which calendars to sync on the iPhone by following instructions here -
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206&ctx=sibling
If you are not sharing calendars then you are missing a great feature of gmail.
Syncing Outlook to Google
Google has just released Apps Sync for Outlook.
All the info you need is here
Note that this will set up a new Outlook profile for you. The old profile will remain intact.
My biggest gripe is that I can’t see my shared calendars in Outlook. I hope they change this.
Second biggest is that filters in gmail don’t affect Outlook. So you have to set up rules in Outlook if you want mail to go into specific folders.
The problem with this of course is that if you change your pc you lose your rules and will need to migrate them manually.
Tips
Make sure you have everything backed up before you sync anything. The iPhone deletes all your contacts when you set up a new sync account.
What I did was get all my contacts on Gmail first and back gmail contacts up. This is your master list.
You can back up your contacts to gmail by using iTunes – Instructions here
The Google Apps sync lets you import your contacts/calendar from your old profile. When you do your first sync they will be copied up to gmail.
You will most likely end up with duplicates (we did). Fortunately gmail has merge function. I couldn’t see a way around this.
When you update an event on your iPhone it can take up to an hr to display in Gmail so be patient.
Issues
I did have some issues with this. The worst being that my Outlook mail stopped syncing and I had to reset up another profile and re-download all my mail again. It’s worked properly for a couple of days now so I’ll update if something more happens.