Notes on Social Media for Missionaires

Here are my initial thoughts on social media for missionaries. I’ve written extensively on Church 2.0 at Compassion in Politics as well:

1) Aggregators (Alltop, Netvibes,etc)
2) Social bookmarking and Delicious (also tagging)
3) Widgets
4) Ning
5) Podcasting (iTunes and Transcription)
6) Wikis
7) Tangle (formerly Godtube)
8} WordPress
9) Flickr
10) Video (Vimeo, Blip TV, Vimeo, YouTube, and language specific)
11) Social News like Digg
12) Document collaboration like Google Docs

Best content management systems for mac

To me the search for the best content management system for the macintosh is a bit of a misnomer. If you want a good CMS it will likely work via the web (or whats known as cloud computing). Most cloud computing and software as a service applications I know work on both the PC and Macintosh platforms.

Using Open Source Content Management Systems
To answer the question, however, I would suggest that WordPress or Drupal is the best content management system if you are on a Macintosh. Both are free systems and only require minimal investment to get started. For instance, you should be able to create a content managagement system that works for you for under $500. For instance, with WordPress you can pick out a low cost theme like Revolution or Thesis and pay for someone who knows php to upload it to the server.

Using Wikis and Ning for Content Management
Another content management system that can work for users of Apple Mac products is a wiki (I recommend PB Works or Wetpaint–one caveat Wetpaint is not compatible with Safari, only Firefox). If you are publishing your content, but want on open publishing platform (in other words, one which is searchable by search engines like Google). You can also get private wikis, if you would prefer, however I haven’t researched those options. (I believe you can use Ning as a closed system publishing platform.

Content Storage and Collaboration with Google and Basecamp
Finally Google Docs and Google wav are decent as content management systems. However, it can be difficult (for me at least) to see all my documents in Google docs. Also, at a very low price point is Basecamp, which is one of the industry standards for project management and collaboration. Its great for collaboration on research and editing. In fact, Basecamp has a suite of online software products which provide idea management services.

You may also like this post where I compare WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla as content management systems for churches and nonprofit organizations.

Go Daddy Launches Search Engine Visibility + SEO Tool

The Whir reports:

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Giving its customers more of a chance to complete with the more than 200 million websites in existence, domain registrar web host Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com) has released “Search Engine Visibility,” a new search engine optimization tool that walks users through a step-by-step process to make their website search engine friendly, not only making a search engine more likely to index the entire site, but also to help the website rise in search engine rankings.

According to Go Daddy’s Wednesday announcement, Search Engine Visibility walks users through a process to optimize their site by defining keywords, analyzing content and tracking keyword performance. Search Engine Visibility also provides a “Top 10 SEO Checklist,” which helps identify commonly made mistakes and techniques on how make a website stronger.

Searchology May 2009: Google Search Options

The latest changes from Google are quite impressive:
Time line option
Wonder wheel for related topics

New SEO Offering

SEO Starter Package:

Professional Blog development (custom design options available)
Training
One month of content

SEO Starter Booster Pack

Competitive Analysis
Keyword Analysis
Blog Ecosystem Analysis
Traffic Analysis

Monthly SEO Maintenance Package:

Weekly article syndication for a total of 4 per month.
20 articles per month, including magazine-style photo.
Link bait resource for link building
Blogger relations
Strategy updates

Best SEO Books: The Truth about SEO

Wondering what the best SEO books are?

Here are the top books about search engine optimization (SEM) and search engine marketing (SEM)

The Truth about SEO (on sale for $12.91)

SEO Book by Aaron Wall ($100)

SEO on an Hour a Day ($20–on sale for $7.48)

Purple Cow by Seth Godin (???)

Also very relevant to search engine optimization:

Web Analytics on an Hour a Day by Avinash (about $20)

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (about $30 and well worth it)

Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash (about $20–on sale for 18.89 right now)

What is your favorite SEO book or resource?

Best SEO Book Videos by Aaron Wall

Here are some free SEO tutorial videos which will help you as you outline your search engine optimization strategy. I’ve provided some bullet points suggestions from Aaron which include fantastic tips, techniques, and strategies. Whether you are looking to increase SEO for your nonprofit, small business, or ecommerce site these smart SEO tactics should be extremely helpful.

Initially, Aaron Walls’ “Preparing & Planning for Internet Marketing Success” has basic, but strategic recommendations for building your brand and search engine ranking online.

• Pick a strong domain name
• Site name, site age, and site trust is key
• Build links to relevant sites and directories
• Create resources (aka link bait) similar to SEO Books tools and videos.
• For instance: blackhatseo ranks for domain name, domain age, and a couple of quality links
• Also, make it easy for the press to contact you
• Topical expertise is self-reinforcing
• Easier to establish it now in 1 hour vs. 4 or 30 hours later.
• Cost is minimal versus the potential reward

Aaron gives 7 reasons to start blogging now, here are 6 of them:

• Blogs easy to set up and maintain (WordPress)
• Many feedback mechanisms–so you can track your success.
• Easy to join the conversation
• Its easy to track how ideas spread (experiment. launch ideas and track how they spread) Aaron also explains RSS feeds and why to subscribe to them. Its important to remember: the web is one big conversation. You can join the community and create community marketing ideas, which can be quicker than yelling at people with adversing by building trust.
• Subscriptions via RSS can allow you to build audience and influence. One way messages spread is via aggregators like Techmeme.
• Blogs have many signs of social proof
• It does seem like they are reading

• Think about users and usability. Steve Krug wrote a great book about web usability and user center design called “Don’t Make Me Think.”
• Search-marketing
• Dan Thies calls out specific groups, which converts far better than most
• Example: crop insurance services (ie no diversity–mix things up a bit)

• Need links in content
• Need call to action
• Call out who its for (specific)
• Heading with keywords (and mix it up with oder and natural sounding modifiers)
• Wordtracker is a great keyword tool (they have free keyword offerings)

• Quintura is a search engine which helps you mix in modifiers, which help you rank (for reasons of latent semantic indexing or LSI)
• Google tool
• Google Keyword tool
• Look at legitimate authoritative web sites in your niche (match up)
• SEO for Firefox is a free tool that provides great data
• Remember: mix it up with keywords, use bulleted lists, and subheadings
• Also, link back to past coverage of an issues. This drives more relevance for user and helps Google.
• Example: create a resource like a glossary
• Unless you are addressing specific sub audiences with individual pages, you may want to consolidate content.

Chinese Social Media and SEO Strategy

When creating a social media marketing strategy for the chinese market its important to think deeply about your audience. Once you have a search optimized content management system (CMS) in place like WordPress or Drupal you can drill down to the exact needs of your audience, how they tick, and how all that relates to your content strategy for SEO:

• First, an understanding of their wants, needs, and desires.
• Second, what types of searches does your target audience make? What nuances do their searches reveal about their intent? What do the trends reveal about their search behavior?
• Third, what are the types of visual
• Fourth, what types of social proof expect about your organization?

The next step in your strategy is to look at your competition. You want to take a step back and look at your competition like your potential customers view your competition.

• What is your competition doing to drive traffic?
• What are they doing to drive links?
• How are they winning in the search engines?
• What types of content on their site are most magnetic and appealing?
• How are they driving conversions?
• How are they positioning and branding themselves?
• Are they doing SEM, SEO, and PPC?
• Are they using community or social media optimization?

With these questions in hand, you can move on to outlining a course of action to more directly address the perceptions and needs of your customers. As you do your work you should probably focus on Baidu and perhaps Google and Yahoo. Baidu is the largest search engine in China, so it should be the large focus of your SEO efforts.

Next, think deeper about your search engine marketing in China.

• What is the asian market looking for?
• What are your four Ps? (Price, Produce, Place) For instance, what provinces do you serve? And what exactly are the problems you solve? Often, your visitors coming to your website will be coming with either a specific problem in hand or a branded product search. By addressing these two issues you can help optimize your website for search engines.
• Spend a lot of time thinking about what your products are and what your customers want and how your competitors are addressing these needs.

Deploy your strategy. Test your strategy with analytics like Google Analytics or Omniture and A/B test your results. Revise your strategy and retest your conclusions for the best search engine ranking, branding, and sales results.

Guide to Finding Visual Communication and Infographics: Social Media Art and Community Creativity

(image credit: Jesse Thomas and Brian Solis)

I’m really facinated by the rise of visual communication and infographics to explain our world. Hopefully as we learn to communicate more visually, it will transform our human relations in a positive way.

The following is an exercise in free form blogging (which develops in ebbs and flows) which provides about two dozen resources for design inspiration to create compelling visual stories or perhaps some infographic link bait.

Just thought these were cool! Enjoy!!!!!

Phase One: Confessions of Guy Kawasaki Fanboy : Alltop Design and Oddities. Those in the design field find inspiration Ffffound and some may even find odd inspiration at oddities.alltop or perhaps deviant art. Of course design.alltop.com. and popculture.alltop.com can also help inspire the uninspired.

Phase Two: Fun Interfaces for Inspiration Oh…and check out this Death Cab for Cutie video by Ross Ching by that I found with one of Vimeos tools err toys called pulse. As the web goes more social and visual search engines proliferate…such will be the ways of the web. (for now Diagram Diaries on Flickr is pretty sweet)

Phase Three: Community Creativity Vlog Your Face I haven’t looked at a lot of the faces….but at a minimum it seems like a cool concept. This is more a metaphor for how data organization or aggregation or taggging (perhaps even with a ranking component could work). Digg has several toys which are worth investigating in this regard.

Phase Four: Fantastic Photos and Your Finger Tips There’s a great guide to adding ffree images and photography to your posts from We Build Pages. Of course istockphoto, the stock exchange, and dreamstime all provide fantastic for pay options for an extremely low price point.

Phase Five: Do it Yourself visual communication and info graphics. The web and social media is all about DIY. Whether its making authentic presentations like Beth Kanter, creating “Back of the Napkin” stick figures like Dan Roam, or making diagrams like of David Armano author of Logic and Emotion. You might even try what Common Craft or what Blend Tec did Will it Blend.

Phase Six: Mind mapping Your Way to Greatness (Or How to Win Friends and Influence People…Online) If that doesn’t work, we all know mindmaps whether freeform or created like a flowchart are the new black. You can even post your mindmap on Mind meister.

Phase Six: Crowd sourcing Your Creative You could also crowd source to find your design at Crowdspring or 99 Designs if you want to invest (or go with a more mainstream link baiter who focuses on visual posts).

Phase Seven: Eye Candy from the Creative Commons You could play around with Flickr toys and tools…or check out the flickr stream on PopURLs. Thomas Hawk is one of the more popular photographers on flickr. You can also re-verse engineer some of the best flickr photographers by checking out Stumbleupon, Digg, and delicious.

Phase Eight: I Can Has Funny Of course its hard to go wrong with Lolcats at ICanHasCheeseburger or the funny punditry at Graph jam. (See also: This is Indexed or the educational infographics at Good Sheets produced by Good Magazine)

Phase Nine: Aggregators of Visual Communication A great example is 27 Visualizations and infographics to understand the financial crisis, of which the most famous is probably the credit crisis visualized. Visual Edu is quite interesting, but Info Viz is far more useful and is a fantastic repository of visual communication.

Bonus: And for mac geeky good measure…heres how to hackintosh a Dell into a Macintosh.

Best Buy on Crowdsourcing Trends and the ROI of Social Media

Crowd souring is certainly a robust phenomena and trend. He really only scratches the surface with leveraing twitter, social media, and web analytics to discover whats inside the head of your consumer. For more case studies on crowd sourcing, companies who crowd source, and crowd sourcing resources.

(image credit: trendspotting)

KPIS for SEO campaigns

What are the KPIS for search engine optimization campaigns?

KPI #1: Engagement (as determined by time on site and comments)
KPI #2: Traffic (over time)
KPI #3: Rank (over time)
KPI #4: Conversion to RSS/email subscription
KPI #5: Conversion to download
KPI #6: Conversion to call
KPI #7: Conversion to sales

What are your key performance indictors for SEO campaigns?

Washington DC Social Media: Technology Titans

Top DC Tech Titans in the Washingtonian

The Washingtonian just launched a feature issues on the May issue, including social media, tech startups, and more traditional tech and business leaders called “Tech Titans.” Garrett M. Graff reports:

Sean Greene, cofounder, LaunchBox. Now helping others jump-start their ideas through LaunchBox’s resources and training programs and with the Twitter-based rating-site start-up Thummit, Greene founded the Away.com travel network before selling it to Orbitz.

Rob Jewell, founder and CEO, Gratis Internet. SocialCash, one of Gratis’s main products and the latest from Jewell’s company—which pioneered online incentive marketing such as iPod giveaways—helps developers make money from all those trendy Facebook applications.

Ted Leonsis. While gossip-column readers might be excused for thinking that Leonsis’s first name is Billionaire, it’s hard to overstate his role in the local tech community as a longtime AOL exec, investor, adviser, talent scout, movie producer, philanthropist, and sports magnate.

Marissa Levin, founder and CEO, Information Experts. Often honored for her entrepreneurship, Levin has led her team from annual revenues of $19,000 in 1995 to more than $6.5 million today, with clients including AOL, Marriott, and the World Bank.

Chris McGill, CEO, Mixx.com. The founder and self-described “troublemaker-in-chief” of Mixx—which lists user-recommended sites, photos, and videos—has a successful history at firms such as Yahoo and USA Today.

Hooman Radfar, cofounder and CEO, Clearspring. The McLean-based firm, founded in 2004, might be the most successful Washington tech company you’ve never heard of. It promises “Your Content. Everywhere.” And with more than 470 million unique users of its widgets across more than 80 platforms and sites, it’s close to delivering.

Pete Snyder, founder and CEO, New Media Strategies. The Rosslyn-based communications firm, headed by Snyder since its 1999 inception, is a leader in online promotion for everything from movies to C-SPAN.

Barg Upender, senior partner, Intridea. The DC-based development firm—whose name, Upender says, is a combination of “interactive” and “idea”—has been on the cutting edge of developing applications for social-media tools.

Mark Walsh, CEO and chairman, GeniusRocket. Walsh’s career has spanned media, tech, and politics. If its model takes hold, his latest company will be a worldwide leader in the networked workplace of the future: distributed teams that come together digitally for single projects and rarely meet in person.

Brian Williams, cofounder and CEO, Viget Labs. The trendy Falls Church–based Web-strategy firm is, in the words of a competitor, creating a “brain drain” of talent by luring the likes of up-and-coming designer Samantha Warren to Williams’s 38-person firm.

DC Social media is certainly taking off. You can check out my social entrepreneurship posts at Compassion in Politics where I cover technology, social media, and design for the base of the pyramid (the folks that live in poverty on less than $2 a day)