Author, Speaker and Consultant
Peter Morville is the master of establishing his link estate on the Google search for his name. If your online presnece is not as robust as his when you search your own name in Google, you might want to work on your Flickr account, Linkedin profile, Digg profile, Stumbleupon profile, person and work blogs, and conference proceedings. Case in point:
Strategy: Assure you’re going to conference A, next week. You’re really excited becuase you have some great material (or not), and you’d like to use the mateiral to it’s full advantage. Web 2.0 can help you. Instead of a document that exists as a pressentation at only one location in space and time, you can let your information out to many differnet outlets by blogging, Twittering, sending guest posts, and uploading your Powerpoint slides to slideshare and telling your Twitter community about it (something Peter Morville does excellently).
I. You’re going to the conference A in a week. Post on your (professional blog) (personal blog) ” I am going to be presenting next week at PLACE.TIME (LINK TO CONFERENCE) — I will be talking about (TALK ABOUT IT). II. When you’re at conference A. Post on your (professional blog)(personal blog) “Hello from PLACE - these people are here (LINK TO THESE PEOPLE), and how SWEET they are because they’re presenting (talk about what they’re presenting). II.5 On Twitter, while at conference A, write “I am at (LOCATION) about to present at (link to conference)”. II.75 Use Mac’s Address Book to immediately enter in business card information,
Twitter names, ect during the table breaks. Also write how/where you met them in the comments section (put their history, what they spoke about, and how their expersite can benefit your future self). III. After conference A, post on your (professional blog)(personal blog), the conference proceedings (photos (use Flickr), briefs of (also link to this from Twitter (use tinyurl.com to make the url length shorter). IV. If conference has site, try to post on their site with a copy of your speech/ lecture/presenation/powerpoint, or your profile. Also comment on the conference on the conference website (if possible) to network with other conference visitors. V. Post on socially conscious websites who are repositories of information on micromanaging…ect. End goal: Emulate Peter Morville’s online presence. Over time, capture as much of the google search results page about your name as possible. /2008/05/16/lesson-2-7-ways-to-expand-your-online-presence-through-sharing- conference-proceedings/
Productivity Tip: Using RSS as a Search Engine Filed Under (creative management, freeware, information society, keyword tracking, lifehacking, optimization, productivity, resource networking, rss, rss feeds, search engines, searching, seo, strategy, twitter, user tracking) by Amber Case on 30-06-2008
If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.
One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail. The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be
searched through at the same time. This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds. Categorizing Data: Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize. The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.
The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.
With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.
(0) Comments Jun 29 Productivity Tip: Using Summize to Tweet More Efficiently Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Amber Case on 29-06-2008 Twitter. Like anything, it has its lovers and dissenters. And, like anything, it can be used productively, or it can suck the time out of your day. (If you’ve never heard of Twitter before, check out the brilliant commoncraft video Twitter in Plain English). If used wisely, Twitter can help you network like a jolt of amphetamines, keep you up to date on local news, traffic jams, construction work and accidents, as well as providing data on all the bars your friends are at. You can use it to
get business advice, new clients, and joy and happiness. Or, you can get lost in followers, following others, endless updates about tooth brushing, bowel movements and new hair colors without really getting much out of the whole experience. For best results, follow Twitter etiquette: Provide relavent, descriptive info-links. If you think the information is really useful, then provide a description of that information and a shortened link to that information. Else, you’re wasting the time-value of your followers and your own credibility. Don’t Overmarket. If you write 10 new blog posts a day, don’t post them all on Twitter. Don’t even say that your blog has a new post when you link to it. Just provide a useful description of what the post pertains to. If people want to click on it, they will. If they don’t, craft better posts. Posting objectively will allow you to rank your posts based on content, not coersion. Use Short URL’s: Tinyurl, Snurl, and is.gd are all quick and easy url snippers. ● is.gd is my favorite, because it provides the shortest url-length. ● Tinyurl has a Firefox plugin that can be downloaded here, although it is not yet available for Firefox 3. The plugin allows you to right click to shorten the url, and it saves the url to the clipboard. Networking. Tie your online experience into your real life. One head is good, but thirty are better. Using Twitter to network is all about shared resources and experiences. If you have a service to provide, provide it. You’ll undoubetly be rewarded for your generosity. Twitterers are known to be extremely friendly and social both online and off. It is just a matter of finding where they meet up, and then hanging out and having a good time. Use the Twitter in junction with local event calendars like Yahoo’s Upcoming Calendar to find events in your area. Attend the events, make friends, and exchange Twitter ID’s, resources, and business cards. Following them on Twitter will allow you to learn about new events, parties, and bar meetups. 3. Add Summize queries with your @ ID to your RSS reader. I’m a rather noisy person on Twitter, and I also follow a lot of noisy and wonderful people. If they @ me, it’s often difficult for me to keep track of it all, when these @’s are mixed in with all of the other results/updates/posts. Instead of looking to Twitter to see if anyone’s @’d me, I used to type @caseorganic into Summize a few times a day. Then I subscribed to the “Feed for this Query”, and now I can just follow my @’s through my RSS reader. (If you don’t have an RSS reader yet, you can read my post about Using RSS Feeds as a Search
Engine). (0) Comments Jun 29 Networking Power-Ups: Amping-up your Twitter-Experience Filed Under (Uncategorized, community building, guidelines, information society, lifehacking, networking, new media, online presence, online visibility, optimization, productivity, resource networking, social, social media, social networking, tracking users, twitter, user experience) by Amber Case on 29-06-2008
Twitter. Like any Web 2.0 app, it can be used productively, or it can suck the time out of your existence. (If you’ve never heard of Twitter before, check out the brilliant Commoncraft Video Twitter in Plain English). If used wisely, Twitter can help you network like a jolt of amphetamines, keep you up to date on local news, traffic jams and construction work, and provide data on all the bars your friends are at. You can use it to get business advice, new clients, and joy and happiness. Or, you can get lost in followers, following others, endless updates about tooth brushing and new hair colors without really getting much out of the whole experience. For best results, follow Twitter Etiquette.
Provide Relevant, Descriptive Links to Awesome Resources: If you think the information is really useful, then provide a description of that information and a shortened link to that information. Else, you’re wasting the time-value of your followers and your own credibility.
Don’t Overmarket: If you write 10 new blog posts a day, don’t post them all on Twitter. Don’t even say that your blog has a new post when you link to it. Just provide a useful description of what the post pertains to. If people want to click on it, they will.If they don’t, craft better posts. Posting objectively will allow you to rank your posts based on content, not coersion. Use Short URL’s: Tinyurl, Snurl, and is.gd are all quick and easy url snippers. ● is.gd is my favorite, because it provides the shortest url-length. ● Tinyurl has a Firefox plugin that can be downloaded here, although it is
not yet available for Firefox 3. The plugin allows you to right click to shorten the url, and it saves the url to the clipboard. Real-Life Networking: Tie your online experience into your real life. One head is good, but thirty are better. Using Twitter to network is all about shared resources and experiences. If you have a service to provide, provide it. You’ll undoubetly be rewarded for your generosity. Twitterers are known to be extremely friendly and social both online and off. It is just a matter of finding where they meet up, and then hanging out and having a good time. Use the Twitter in junction with local event calendars like Yahoo’s Upcoming Calendar to find events in your area. Attend the events, make friends, and exchange Twitter ID’s, resources, and business cards. Following them on Twitter will allow you to learn about new events, parties, and bar meetups. Patience: Sometimes you lose followers. Sometimes you gain them. Sometimes people that follow 3,000 people but who are followed by nobody ask to follow you. Sometimes you don’t feel like Tweeting for a few days, and sometimes you make 40 updates in a day. The key to it all to have fun and enjoy. Tweet happily, and the whole Twitter world will benefit. Else, you might feel lonely on the powerline. Want to come to Tweet-ups and other Portland networking events? Feel free to follow me on Twitter.
(1) Comment Jun 27 Case Study: Brand Design and Expandibiltiy Filed Under (color schemes, design methods, development, experience economy, interface, product design, user experience) by Amber Case on 27-06-2008 Successful brands must be both memorable and expandable.
Mint Analytics is the epitome of this requirement. It has both a memorable name (http://www.haveamint.com), and a website analytics package that is tailored to that name.
Why is this brand successful? It invites consumer memory by engaging multiple senses at once. First, the brand name gives the website a natural color scheme. Mint green is an enjoyable color scheme. The word “Mint” conjures up color: that particular pastel shade of green. There’s also the taste of mint. Peppermint. Wintermint. Mint gum. Minty breath. There’s freshness and newness. And then there’s the fact that mints are where money is made. That conjures up an entirely new set of images. The word Mint is a Lego brick, because it forms the base component of a dozen different words. Because of this, it also invites memorable modules and extensions. In other words: expandability. Peppermill is the name of one extension that’s been programmed into the software. Some of the other module names include Prank, a module that provides Page Rank data, and Crushes, like the peppermint kind. A service must be packaged in a user-friendly format. The user experience of Mint goes above and beyond my standard user experience with Google Analytics. The brand invites me to enjoy a delicious environment while I view statistics, and this makes doing web analytics faster and more profitable to my employers. (2) Comments Jun 26 Tapping Lead Users for Product Development Filed Under (Web conventions, anthropology, design methods, development, future, guidelines, information prediction, prediction, product concepts, product design) by Amber Case on 26-06-2008 The lead users of a product are those who use it the most. They are also the first to ‘break’ the product, or find limitations in it. Increasingly, they’re more likely to blog about those weaknesses or limitations, and even fix some of them. It has never been easier to be near those who will adopt your product. Using some simple techniques borrowed from Anthropology, you can find out exactly what your consumer needs, and how to implement it. All you need to do is find the earliest adopters and lead users of a product in your niche and observe what they are saying about the product. Once you’ve developed a product from their advice, you’ll find a lot of other consumers adopting that
product as well. Why does this happen? The needs of lead users are the future needs of mass consumers in a given niche.
The key is to follow the advice of the most voracious adopters first. Bring your product to a shared work location like Portland’s Cubespace, where dozens of supporters will be poised and ready to give constructive feedback and advice. Ask this group of people what they find themselves frustrated with. What current limitations do they face in technology? Follow them around for a day, and, with their permission write down what they do. What is efficient? What is not? What products do they keep coming back to again and again? Then, pick a problem and engineer a solution. Market that solution, and test it with the lead users. If it fails, it’s probably not going to move to the next stage of early adopters and routine users. Who were the lead users of Twitter? Why did they find Twitter to be useful? Did it help them communicate during their travels to tech conferences around the world? Product development is about asking a lot of questions, and engaging yourself with your consumer’s needs. You can’t just get a group of geniuses together in a conference room and tell them “lets develop a product!” I’ve done that countless times, and it is really fun, but creating a product seperately from the consumer’s input is generally a hit-or-miss process that often ends up in tears. Embed yourself in your target market. Invest your time researching the consumer’s needs. This product is for them, not you. The more you make it for them, the more they will like you. Product development is engineering success by engagement and inference. /2008/06/