Why we should be happy for Instagram

Tuesday, 10 April 2012 04:41

And not so concerned about Facebook buying them..

Most people read yesterday’s news about Facebook buying Instagram for a cool 1 billion dollars and thought, “wow that is crazy!”

But did you know that just a few months ago, and up until the present day, Instagram was a small team of a handful of people that occupied an “office” that was literally a conference room in Twitter’s old office building? At the time of the video above, Instagram had 4 employees. At the time of the sale, they had 13.

Talk about amazing productivity, right?

Price tag and company-size aside, there sure is a lot of controversy over the future of the service. From what I’ve been able to piece together from Twitter and tech blogs, people fall into one or more of the following camps.

Facebook bought Instagram. I hate Facebook, therefore I hate Instagram.

This is a little irrational to me. Until we see how things change (or stay the same) at Instagram, there really isn’t a reason to dislike the company for selling to Facebook. Like the band who once played in dive bars, slept in their van and sold cassettes out of the back of said van but later signed to a major label, plenty of folks are going to call Instagram sell outs. If you feel that way, go and watch the video up top again. These guys were occupying dozens of square feet, not thousands. They are young, smart, ambitious and want to change the world. Kind of like Facebook’s early beginnings, no?

Facebook will own my photos.

Technically they will. But guess what? Your online identity is only yours if you don’t have one. That is to say, the only way to fully protect yourself online is to not post anything. If you put a photo on a web site, then inevitably someone can and will be able to see it and or download it – if they care to. Instagram is a photo sharing app so at its very core, sharing is implied. I doubt that photos taken with Instagram today that are locked to specific privacy settings will just one day be unlocked and viewable by everyone.

Instagram will be less cool with Facebook users on it.

I have a suspicion that most people post their photos from Instagram to Facebook or also to Facebook in addition to Instagram’s social network. Personally, I rarely if ever just post a photo to Instagram and have about 2 friends there.

Again, how will a service you find cool today, be less cool with people contributing photos from more than one source? I have to assume that part of the reason Facebook bought Instagram was to integrate the two platforms together.

What does bad SEO and Pink Slime have in common?

Wednesday, 04 April 2012 22:37

via Cleveland.com

Are you loading your site with filler in order to get ahead in search?

The race to profits in the food industry brought pink slime to the world, just as competition for search engine rankings have brought spammy search optimization practices from unscrupulous SEO’s. Is your web developer or search engine optimization agency filling your site with digital fat in order to improve your results?

What exactly is pink slime? And how is it comparable to bad SEO?

Used as a filler for ground beef, it is made from fatty trimmings that are more susceptible to contamination than other cuts of beef, and are therefore sprayed with ammonium hydroxide

via Yahoo News

Keyword stuffing, cloaking, computer generated copy, duplicate content and link exchanges are just a few examples of additives that actually can hurt your product – that being your web site. And you don’t even need to douse them in ammonia!

But whereas the USDA may require you to label your pink slimed beef, Google will show a lot less tolerance, and can read it all over your content without the need for labels.

Now, don’t expect your SEO to come out and just say that they are doing any of the activities above. It is your responsibility to educate yourself on how SEO works – if for no other reason than to know what you’re paying for.

Don’t be a passive observer when it comes to an agency or a consultant adjusting content on your site. Is your carefully worded content being loaded with keywords beyond what a normal person would expect to find? Do you feel like a robot when you read your site? Are you paying for links from other sites that aren’t in your industry? Is your site completely designed in Flash, without access to a text version of your content (not that any SEO worth their salt would do this but it does happen)?

If so, you may have been slimed.

As I’ve argued here before, Search Engine Optimization can be used for evil and has contributed, in large measure, to a polluted Internet. Thankfully in recent weeks, big G has teased at new over optimization penalties that will skim the garbage from the search ocean’s surface.

There are no shortcuts to long term success in search. Google is constantly evolving their technology to seek out and find the best, most relevant sites on the web. You may be able to pass off your site as 93% lean for a little while, but rest assured, eventually your ammonia soaked 80% chuck is going to be found. And when it does, it won’t be pretty.

Re-imagining the celebrity app

Tuesday, 03 April 2012 17:49

Adrian Grenier / via The House of Turtle

Why doesn’t Adrian Grenier’s iOS app make me feel like part of his Entourage?

Recently I’ve come to the realization that most celebrity mobile apps suck. Nowhere was this more evident than in Adrian Grenier’s “Reckless” app that was released last week.

Before installing the app I read an extensive write up about it on PBS Media Shift, and while I won’t lie and say I was excited that Vinny Chase now had an iPhone/iPad app, I can say I was curious to see if he followed in the steps of Britney Spears and Samuel L. Jackson in creating a sub-par, gimmicky personal app.

Here is what Adrian had to say about his new personally branded app, and the platform its built on, called Reckless.

The medium and the format are really just the tool. It is about the personal voice of the artist that makes it unique. Twitter is only 140 characters, but it is the unique voice of the individual that allows people to differentiate themselves. I can see the Reckless app being more than just a platform for me. I can see other people using it to connect with their audience, their fans and their friends. I don’t know how much we need to reinvent our wheel; we need to spread it and share it.

So far so good, he is saying the right things. The voice of the artist. Personal connection with fans. This would be a truly original app if it lived up to his expectations. Let me hit up the app store to check this sucker out, I thought.

Here is where the written medium fails, because if I was on video here talking about this app I’d have my head in my hands, or if I was on a radio show there would just be dead air silence.

The app reminded me of a bunch of mashed up social networks with a sprinkle of ugly thrown in for good measure. I was disappointed. This was definitely not the app I’d have pictured coming from the star of Queen’s Boulevard.

There’s an app for that… its called Twitter.

I don’t have anything against Twitter (well, that isn’t completely true) but how lazy is it to create a social app and then just dump in a twitter feed? If you’re going to do it, then at least format it nicely, maybe make it seamlessly integrated with the rest of the app or at least filter so your tweets are what’s displayed first?

Teenage Paparazzo and Reckless Films goes to the exact same thing, an advertisement for a movie that Grenier stars in. No problem with plugging your own stuff, in your own app, but the design here is unimaginative and having two of the four sections of your app going to the same content is a little strange.

The Fansnapulous section is a photo and camera app that lets you take a photo of Adrian, or select from a list of included photos, and place an “autograph” on it. I’m not going to call this awesome, but it isn’t terrible. The end game here is I can share my fake picture and fake autograph of Adrian with my Facebook and Twitter friends. This is going to make me infinitely more popular!

Okay smarty pants, let’s see you do better

I am going to attempt to re-imagine this app for Adrian Grenier. In truth, someone should be doing this for all celebrity mobile apps because like I said from the outset, they leave a lot to be desired.

Let’s go back to Adrian’s motivation for doing this, in his own words.

The medium and the format are really just the tool. It is about the personal voice of the artist that makes it unique. Twitter is only 140 characters, but it is the unique voice of the individual that allows people to differentiate themselves.

Alright, so mission one is get fans an authentic, personal voice from the artist that doesn’t rely on 140 characters. Righto, so basing all communication with fans through my new app isn’t going to be relying on a Twitter feed (at least, not from the standpoint of primary messaging).

What else might be interesting for fans of Adrain Grenier, who lets face it, most people still associate with Vinny Chase. What would fans of a celebrity might want from a personally branded celebrity app?

What’s going on in their life?
Photos
Upcoming projects
Where they can see me?
How they can contact me?

The personal voice of the artist

Let’s start off with some basics. First, I think Adrian’s fans would appreciate large photos of him. I mean, I suppose you’d say he is a heartthrob, right? Maybe they’d want the ability to put large pictures of him as the wallpaper for their device? Let’s be honest, if you are going to invest in providing a celebrity app for someone to download, you have to assume they are fanatics, bordering on stalker, right?

Next, how about a personal message from him that isn’t confined to the limits of Twitter? We’ll write the message in a first person perspective (as if it comes from him) and make it personal and addressed just to me (e.g. wanted to share this with you).

We’ll have all the frills that iOS provides – inline image viewing, fades and the like. You know, make it look like every other iPad or iPhone app.

We could even go beyond this and have an audio message from Adrian.

In the old days, I worked with a company named Utterz to host audio messages from a few of the dance instructors on Dancing with the Stars that was put on a social networking site for fans to listen to. I’m certain something like this could be set up to let Adrian call in and leave messages for his fans, that would then show up each day on his app.

Photos

From a photo perspective, I would take inspiration from other popular iOS photo apps like Instagram, Camera+ or even iPhoto for the iPad. I don’t hate the Fansnapulous feature on his current app, I just think its a little limited and boring. Integrate all the photos from not only other fans, but also from your own updates into one place.

Lets give fans quick access to all of the photos, and give them a swanky indicator to show them when there is a new one. Of course, we’d also bake in notifications to the device in case they aren’t in the app.

I liked the idea of the camera function in his current app so I left it here. But, it would be pretty sweet if it had some rockstar level filters to add glitz and glam to any photos taken. Maybe a partnership with Instagram?

Wallpaper download, as well as marking favorites feels like a no brainer – lets include those too.

What does Adrian have going on?

According to IMDB, Adrian doesn’t have a film in production. So what is going on with him? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place to go look, like say, his app?

You’d be able to see his current project, be it film or charity work, shown above. Icons on the bottom of the project description could lead users to a conversation about it, maybe a trailer or a project blog with those personalized updates. Photos could work here as well. And why not a social media “street kit” to let fans promote the project?

Let me talk to him

Finally, I would really like to see a well-thought out way for a fan to talk to an artist via social media. Sure, there is Twitter and sending @messages to people, but thats a crap shoot. Who knows if they actually viewed your message. And, good luck on actually ever getting a response. I find that celebrities tend to answer or re-tweet the most inane things.

Know what would be cool for our new Adrian Grenier app? A way to send him a message within the app, see when it was read and be notified on a response.

I admit, it would be a tall order to get a celebrity to spend the amount of time it would take to respond to each and every message. But since I am spit balling here anyway, why the hell not?

What would you pay for an app that had beautiful color photos, slick transitions and constantly updated content from your favorite celebrity or hero? With a built in way to get in touch with them? Adrian’s app is currently free, but I bet he could offset some of the cost of having a development company create him a new one with these features.

I know I’d pay pretty much infinity dollars for an Anna Torv app that had all of this stuff!

It takes an elephant to blog

Monday, 02 April 2012 23:06

Elephants / via safari-partners

Which is to say, you need to have thick skin.

When you start a blog one of the things you first notice is that, unless you’re writing for an established brand or company, you aren’t going to have any readers.

This kind of thing is to be expected, of course, but the next question becomes (assuming you are blogging because you want to be heard, not for some mindless search engine optimization exercise) how to find an audience?

Not only must you compete with literally millions of other blogs for attention, you’ve got social networks like Facebook and Twitter to distract potential visitors away. What’s worse? Most young blogs rely on those same attention sucking social networks to bring people to their blog in the first place!

I have found that persistence, patience and the ability to have thick skin are all key in growing your blog.

So what is a blogger to do?

Until you build up a readership that reaches critical mass (large enough that your readers will promote your content for you) you’ll just have to suck it up and use Twitter, Facebook, search optimization, link sites like Stumbleupon, Reddit and other blogs to find traffic.

The last thing that you’ll want to do, after writing a long-form, thoughtful blog post is to go and promote it. But, promote it you shall, if you want anyone to see it.

Here are a few resources you can use to make the process of promoting your blog content online a little more bearable.

Twitter can be, and usually is, a great way to promote your content. Problem is, everyone uses Twitter this way. So how do you do that without getting trampled by everyone else desperate to promote their stuff?

First, I’d recommend a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. These are sites where you can schedule tweets to be sent out at defined intervals (or in the case of Buffer, at random times). From my experience, you’ll want to make sure you tweet out a link to your blog posts more than once. As you know, people tend to follow hundreds if not thousands of people on Twitter. What that means is your link can quickly be lost in a sea of other links in the feed. Since you are going to be tweeting the same link numerous times (don’t be a jerk and spam it more than a few times, several hours apart), you might as well play around with alternate ways of promoting your tweet. Try using #hashtags with keywords that reference the subject of your tweet (for example, a post about SEO might have a #seo tag).

I actually tend to get more interaction and clicks on my blog posts via Facebook, so don’t discount using that. The people you are connected to on Facebook are, by definition really, you’re friends. Most of the folks I follow on Twitter (or who follow me) are total strangers. Friends tend to take a look at what you’ve written and better still, comment. Just don’t expect them to comment on your blog itself unless you made it really easy for them. Installing Facebook Connect as the commenting engine for your blog, for example, increases the chance of your readers commenting.

Stumbleupon is a cute little gimmick to get web traffic and some views. I only really care about qualified views on my site, but some people want to goose traffic numbers. Stumbleupon is really just what it sounds like – a site to go to to be fed random links. The idea is as you are served these random links, any links you have submitted to the service get showed to someone else, etc. Typically there isn’t a lot of loyalty with visitors from Stumbleupon, as you might expect.

Reddit has made a resurgence in the demise of Digg. In its simplest form, sites like these are social news site where stories bubble to the top as a result of the community voting on them. The potential to draw lots of traffic to your blog with a site like Reddit makes it worth submitting links to, if you have something that appeals to its tech savvy audience. I wouldn’t expect a lot of traffic from Reddit if you are blogging about health care, education or anything non-video game or pop culture related. Your milage my vary.

Ass kissing helps in any endeavor

Pressing lips to backside never hurts in the pursuit of traffic (or even attention) to your site. Many a social media expert was born by retweeting and writing summary blog posts praising a particularly popular internet celebrities. Everyone likes to feel special.

I can assure you I don’t resort to this particular tactic, but I can also assure you that I know it works.

Reading and commenting on other blog sites, especially written by people you admire and respect, yields positive results over time. Be a part of the communities that spontaneously pop up on other sites, contribute something worthwhile and maybe those people will check out your site.

Speaking of things everyone else does? Blog comments and links. It makes me feel dirty, but even in 2012 this still works to get links to your site, as well as traffic. If you must leave a link to your site in the comment of someone else’s blog post remember two things. First, try to make your comment at least thoughtful. For the love of god, have something to say, don’t just drop a link and click send. Secondly and most important, don’t get bent out of shape when your comment is trashed. For some reason, bloggers think that if you let someone who left a constructive comment on their site then you are stealing their audience. Its pretty ridiculous, but such is life. Many blogs these days moderate comments, and I’ve seen about a 80% rate of comments with links never making it past moderation.

Grow big

The more you write, the better you’ll get at it. Along the way, search engines will find your huge mound of fresh content and start to assign your blog posts to search results. If you have been optimizing your content (or just wrote something good from the start that is highly informed/relevant) you shouldn’t have a problem finding natural traffic coming to your site. It will take longer, but its one of those self-sustaining types of things that will let you focus on the content and not so much the promotion. And who doesn’t want to do that?

If you are doing your job, and writing well-researched posts, then you probably have at least seen another post somewhere on the web that you got an idea from, disagree with or just thought was interesting. Link to that post in yours. This provides a great service for your readers, enhancing your content, and might earn you a reciprocal link down the line.

Finally, ask questions.

One of the most frustrating parts of blogging, at least for me, is spending an hour writing a 1200 word post that gets zero comments. I know people are reading (by checking analytics) but why aren’t they replying? Did you ask them to reply? Maybe ask their take on your post, or if they have any tips or tricks they’d like to share.

Speaking of – these are my suggestions for building your blog. Many of them I am implementing here on my site. Do you have any others to add to the list? Let me know!

Do you need a content strategist?

Saturday, 31 March 2012 20:46

Sun Tzu, the Original Strategist / via Flickr

One of the more popular buzzwords in internet marketing today is content strategy or content marketing. It’s often nebulously defined and encompasses a myriad of different concepts, from alignment to taxonomies and metadata. It’s virtues are espoused by those who call themselves content strategists.

I realize I am painting with a wide brush here, but as often is the case in posts written on my site I try not to be a boring, wishy washy blogger. Not everyone will fit into this broad description I am about to lay down for content strategists but I am witnessing a disturbing trend of people who are applying a new sexy name to something has been around for years. Content strategy is nothing new, and the good news is, you might already be a content strategist all on your own.

In my mind, content strategy comes down to this:

Knowing something people want to learn about that you can deliver

I really don’t see this as being an oversimplification for creating and distributing content at all.

Making it complicated for complicated’s sake

Recently I’ve been seeing a deluge of blog posts about content marketing, from content strategists.

Here are a few links that, to me anyway, illustrate a problem with the way today’s content strategists talk about what they do:

No-pout Routes: Ways to Do Content Strategy on a Budget

Workflow That Works

Alignment: The Secret to a Successful Content Strategy

After reading those posts, do you feel like you have a better understanding on what content strategy is? Does it feel like something you could put in front of a client and they’d understand? I can tell you from personal first hand experience that talking about content in this way rarely if ever leads to success, that clients feel like this language and approach creates an unnecessary technical roadblock to getting started with focusing on the importance of their content.

I sometimes think that people try to make what they bring to the table so technical and complicated that is necessitates you hiring them to teach it or better still, do it for you.

My intent here is not to make anyone look bad (including myself). I absolutely think content is the most important factor in whether or not your web site or marketing campaigns are successful. I just don’t believe that you have to get so down in the weeds with it, or to be so very technical about it. And from what I’ve seen recently (on blogs, Twitter and Facebook), content strategists have a hard time explaining what they do, which is a little ironic because it should be the easiest thing for them to explain, right?

Back to my simple definition:

Knowing something people want to learn about that you can deliver

Factor 1: Know something

Factor 2: That people want to learn

Factor 3: That you can deliver

You might decide that employing a person to focus on any one of those three factors is worthwhile, and in that case a content strategist might make sense.

On the other hand, if you are someone already concerned about your content, or already producing it, you probably have a handle on at least 2 of these factors. In that case you may not need a content strategist.

Some potential scenarios

Lets say you have some content already that you think is pretty valuable. The problem is you are having a hard time getting it to the people that you know are looking for it. For the purpose of this example, lets say it is online content. You might not need a content strategist but instead a search marketing specialist, or a social media marketing specialist to make sure your content is seen by search engines or influencers on social networks/blogs.

Heres another scenario. Its clear to you that there is a need for certain content that you don’t already have produced. You might contract with a copywriter then who can do research, hold interviews and craft that content for you.

Finally, we’ll assume you have some content already produced and have a way to deliver it via your existing web site or social media channels. Your problem is the audience for your content isn’t established yet. Maybe you should be talking to a public relations firm to help educate people on why they should be interested, or aware, of what you have to offer.

You may not need a content strategist for any of those scenarios. However, if you are missing 2 or more of those factors above, you might want to consult with one to make sure you get started on the right track. Many content strategists say their work is holistic, and I believe that it is. I just think that they often sell their service as the start and finish to marketing, that without content strategy you can’t be successful online or build for the future. To me, it isn’t. I also take issue with how complex they make content marketing seem when it need not be.

Author Archive

What does bad SEO and Pink Slime have in common?

It takes an elephant to blog

So what is a blogger to do?

Ass kissing helps in any endeavor

Grow big

Do you need a content strategist?

Making it complicated for complicated’s sake

Some potential scenarios

Get in touch

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