Sphere

Just received my Sphere invitation. Gonna take it for a spin this week.

Posted in Asides | 1 Comment »

Launching a new service and guerilla PR (part 2)

In a previous post, I started pointing out a few tips that might help launching new web 2.0 online services. In this post you will learn why the blogosphere ( ) is important and how to get it on your side

Key element No.2: The Blogosphere

While planning to write this post I was thinking to use some numbers, but I found that even though you can find some up to date numbers, most articles consider them quite irrelevant. Because of this I want to point out the following:
When I say blogosphere in this context I am not referring to the basic understanding but I understand the few relevant blogs for your niche.

Why the blogosphere is important?

John Hiler points out a few things:

• Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power.
• Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges.
• Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capital-J Journalists.

Going a little further, the blogosphere it is important because:

• It can generate natural links so necessary for a Google ranking.
• A well targeted post about your service will generate a few dozen other satellite posts from the readers of the original article.
• It’s free advertising, sometimes much better than contextual advertising.
• News Services are starting to incorporate blogs in their sources

How to identify which part of the blogosphere to address?

As I was saying in the beginning, trying to target all the blogs will be a useless and impossible task. Going targeted it will be more efficient. Make a new Excel file and proceed with the following steps:

• Identify a few keywords describing your service (bookmarks for example) and a few buzzwords (ajax, web 2.0 for example). When you are done, go to a few blog services and have a look at their tag clouds; try to see if some of the bigger words can naturally be attached to your service. Make a new sheet in your Excel document for every keyword you have identified. To be focused try keeping your list under 10 keywords
• When you are done building your keyword list, go to technorati blog finder and identify a few prominent bloggers on each keyword. Write on every sheet the blog name, the URL, the name of the blogger and contact information.

How to get the blogosphere on your side

• Read the blogs you have identified in order to spot blogger’s likes and dislikes. Try identifying language patterns. Write down in your Excel file anything you identify, you will use it later.
• Build a template email in informal language in which:
  1. You describe your service
  2. Invite the blogger to a private beta
  3. Ask for their opinions about your service. Ask for constructive criticism.
  4. Encourage them to write about you and give them contact details (address, phone number) that they can use to obtain further details. If possible try establishing a conference call with them
• Write personalized messages for each blogger. Change words whenever possible to fit their language patterns. Send the personalized messages individually and NEVER EVER use CC or BCC. Sign your messages with your full name and position in the company.

After you have done this consolidate your work through:

• Always answer to the emails you are receiving from people you have written. Don’t use auto-responders.
• Make a new watch list in Technorati for the name of your service and monitor every post that appears, whenever possible try commenting on the post and engage in conversations. Use again your full name and position.
• Make accounts at social bookmarking services (del.icio.us for example) and bookmark all the posts about you. Tag them with the name of your service and the keywords you have identified.
• If possible try implementing in your service any feedback you receive from the blogosphere.

Used properly those 2 tips (Beta and blogosphere) in your marketing campaign, will bring a lot of visibility, targeted traffic and valuable feedback. But keep focused on developing a usefull service without that you will be forgetten pretty soon.

Good Luck

Bibliography

1. John Hiler - Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem
2. Steve Rubel -Behind The Blogosphere Numbers
3. Yahoo Blog – You the media
4. Wikipedia – Blogosphere

P.S.
Even though not necesarilly web products related, a must read it’s the new article from Kathy Sierra: How to spend your marketing and ad budget. Check the new marketing strategies suggested and you will see also the role of blogging

Launching a new service and guerilla PR

I don’t think that it was a month this year when at least one Web 2.0 application wasn’t launched or announced. It is an interesting experience and I wonder how many will survive a year and how many from those that will survive will be rock stars. But that is another separate discussion.

This post wants to point a few of the PR strategies involved in creating a public image for new web services.

Key element No.1: Beta (and private beta)

Almost all the applications have borrowed something from Google. I am talking here about the BETA concept. Used by Google on almost all its new applications the BETA concept serves a few goals.

• Protects the company from attacks. If something goes wrong PR people or spokespersons pop-up shouting “Hey we told you it was a beta, we know is not perfect”
• Creates a bound between end users and the companies. Users feel involved in the development process and develop an intimate relationship with the applications and the companies.
• Gets you a huge free QA team. Not all the Beta users will be willing to submit bugs and from those that will submit a large part of bugs are in fact undiscovered features, but you will still get valuable data.

Downsides to overusing the Beta concept:

• Quite the ones that started the Beta craze unveiled its downside. Keeping an application or a feature too long in the Beta stage could lead the users to think that it’s a dead or abandoned project. From my own experience an interval between 2 to 6 months it’s the best solution.
• Betas work best within large, well established companies. For example I am not too willing to participate in creating content for a no name company that I am not sure that will be still on the market after a few months.

But beside the BETA concept, Google, starting with Orkut, has also introduced a new concept: Private BETAs. Basically it implies that a “select group of users” gets an account.

Goals:

• Gradually testing scalability. This is very important as I recently discovered and cannot be easily accomplished within a single company no matter how large it is.
• Create the feeling of elite within the selected users. Remember the Orkut and Gmail craze?
• Makes people yearn to get in.
• If you are in a competitive market, releasing your project to a small group of users that you know or that agree with an NDA protects the intellectual property you are creating.

Downsides to overusing the Private Beta concept:

• Users that are not in the private beta will be frustrated and if you have the bad luck to ignore beta requests from a blogger with a large number of readers you’re quite toasted.
• If you are using a private beta strategy to protect your application there are still big chances that an unwanted user will get in.

Bottom line for this:

• Used carefully the beta and the private beta are strong weapons on winning the market.
• There is no assurance that only using those elements your application will be a success. Always keep in mind the Orkut failure. Your goal should be creating a quality service.
• If no privacy is involved use a randomized method to get people in and make sure everybody knows that. The new Yahoo mail Beta is a good example.
• Try as much as possible to have a personal relationship with the beta testers. Avoid auto responders. Listen to their feedback and give back personalized responses.
• If you use the private beta concept don’t give users accounts right away. If you use a form for collecting addresses of people wanting to get in, send them a confirmation mail after 2 days or so. This will make it look like you have evaluated their credentials and you agree they are worth to receive access to your product.
• If you plan to charge for your product give to the beta users free accounts forever. This way they will continue to speak about you and it’s a bigger investment then contextual advertising.

Flock Browser extensions (extended)

Just had a look at my Awstats and saw that a lot of visitors are coming here this month searching for Flock extensions because of this post.

At this moment you have a few ways to get some Firefox extensions on your fresh Flock browser. To name a few:

• Official flock site
• The directory mentioned in the previous post

BUT

How about making yourself your favourite Firefox extension work in Flock? Wouldn’t that be cool?
So. Let’s get our hands dirty now.

Step 1. Go to the Firefox Extensions website and locate the extension you need.

Step 2. Right click on the “Install now” link and choose “Save link as…” and save the extension on your hard disk

Step 3. Unpack the extension in a folder. XPI files are in fact archive files. If you are like me and use Total Commander, select the xpi file and use ALT+F9 to unpack

Step 4. Now you have a folder that should have a file called install.rdf and a directory named chrome.

Step 5. Now we will start playing progrramer Open “install.rdf” file in your notepad. I will use now a real example to make you better understand. I will use the rdf file of the MeasureIt Extension. It will look like this:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>



    

        {75CEEE46-9B64-46f8-94BF-54012DE155F0}
        MeasureIt
        0.3.3
        Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
        Kevin Freitas
        http://www.kevinfreitas.net/pro/extensions/
        chrome://measureit/skin/measureit.png
        chrome://measureit/content/about.xul
        
            
                content/measureit/
                skin/classic/measureit/
            
        

        
            
                {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
                0.9
                1.4.1
            
        

    

Now you will have to insert some piece of code to make it compatible with Flock. After insertion of the code it will look like this:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>



    


  
    {a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}
    1.0+
    1.0+
  

        {75CEEE46-9B64-46f8-94BF-54012DE155F0}
        MeasureIt
        0.3.3
        Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
        Kevin Freitas
        http://www.kevinfreitas.net/pro/extensions/
        chrome://measureit/skin/measureit.png
        chrome://measureit/content/about.xul
        
            
                content/measureit/
                skin/classic/measureit/
            
        

        
            
                {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
                0.9
                1.4.1
            
        

    

The code inserted being:

  
    {a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}
    1.0+
    1.0+
  

Be careful to insert that just below:

Step 6. Save the install.rdf file and unpack install.rdf and chrome directory (ALT+F5 in Total Commander). Rename the extension of the archive from zip to xpi and you just have a new fresh Flock compatible extension

Step 7. Open your extensions window from flock.

Step 8. Drag and drop the downloaded extension into the extensions window

Step 9. Restart Flock and enjoy your hard work

Notes:

• Don’t be an asshole and publish the extensions you customize on the net and claim you made them. Eventually drop an email to the author and asks for permission to do that
• Don’t start complaining if something gets screwed.Take this post as it is

Posted in General | 5 Comments »

SEO case study - an eclectic model (part 1)

Someone asked me last week to give some advice for a digital artist trying to promote himself on the net. It is a pretty interesting case, because is that annoying case for every SEO guy where a client with almost no content wants to score high on competitive strings.

So, we are talking here about a website composed of a few image galleries and a link exchange page and the following characteristics:

• Only main page indexed by google
• No image in Google images
• Main page has links to the rest of the site in JavaScript
• Main page has spam text with font size of size -7

First step:

In the first step is needed to clean up the site and make it search engine friendly.

• clear spam
• make normal links instead of JavaScript’s ones
• research keywords using Good Keywords(freeware) and build meta keywords and then build unique meta description tags for each page
• make unique titles for each page
• make descriptive URLs for galleries
• put ALT on images and link them to the bigger images.
• use proper formating on page: h1 tags for Gallery titles, text links for images with descriptive titles, use if appropriate strong and em tags

Second step:

The client MUST understand that especially on his particular case, counting solely on Google is a bad business model and he needs traffic, targeted traffic that will convert in customers and reviewers. Usually when you try to explain this they leave and usually get stuck with some black hat seo that will quickly rank him for about 1 week only to bury him forever.

If they are still around when you are done with explanations you can proceed to the next step.

Third step:

If the client understood that at least in the beginning Google is a lost cause you will need to give him alternatives. Those are:

• exposure
• blogosphere
• social bookmarking sites
• Google images *

* I know that in the second step I said that Google is not the solution but I was talking mainly about regular results. In this particular case, Google images can be an achievable target on short term

Tommorow I will give details on the third step. Feedback and discussions welcome and encouraged

Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

To feed or not to feed

Search engine journal brings in discussion the case of Craiglist blocking Oodle from republishing its feed.
Motive? Loosing visitors.

This problem doesn’t apply only to this case. In our days publishers are more and more driven by revenues and when doing this they start using some gurilla tactics for protecting their regular visitors. This is not always in the advantage of the end user.

Let me name a few guerilla tactics that big and small publishers are using and that I find annoying:

• Publish an abstract of the feed. By doing this they imagine that it acts like a strong teaser that will atract visitors. Nothing could be more far away from the truth. If I am reading let’s say 100 daily updated feeds I really don’t have time to check all the half posts. And lately the teasers are for garbage content. If you write an interesting post then you could be sure that at least a significant part of your readers will drop by to comment.
• Using RSS advertising. One of the worst ideeas at this moment. Contextual advertising doesn’t blend into the content and is everything else but not contextual. Amazon ads by Feedburner fit into the same category. I used some I gave up. For a 3% clickthrough rate is not worthing. A 3% clicktrough rate doesn’t mean profit, no matter you have 10.000 subscribers. It means that 9.7000 of your readers find your advertising crap. If you are a small publisher you will just drive away your small base of users.
• Publish anything for the sake of publishing. Not speaking here about personal blogs. You can write as much as you want about your cat. I am speaking here about proffesional blogs. If I am reading a profesional blogs. If you consider yourself a powerful blogger at least be empathic with your readers and think for a second that they might have read the same thing. If you cannot add an in depth review or unique analysis try to find an original subject or go have a walk in the park. It’s good for health

Those are just a few mistakes but the list is far from by complete. Before writing this I have unsubscribed from around 10 “proffesional feeds”. If you want the publishers to change the way are treating you, you should do the same.

Want to see an example of a good publisher? Check “Creating passionate users“. An excellent blog with:

• Great articles every time
• Full feed
• No bullshit “contextual advertising”

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

A9 toolbar for Firefox beta 1.5

Just got released. Grab it here. I really missed my diary feature

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Flock extensions available

For all the Flockstars here you can find a list of 12 Flock compatible extensions.

To install:

• Right click on the extension and choos “save link as“
• Open your extensions window from flock
• Drag and drop the downloaded extension into the extensions window

Off topic: just discovered that the regular Firefox sidebars are not in this developer release

Posted in Asides | 1 Comment »

Flock beta 0.5 is available

Flock (6)

Originally uploaded by 0401.

The new Flock browser has just been released last night to the beta testers.

Some features from the release notes:

• The Blog Manager
• The Flickr Topbar
• RSS integration
• Favorites with del.icio.us integration
• The Shelf
• History Search

Obviously Flock is not here not fight with Firefox or any other browser but to be a powerfull tool for power users, and they are doing a good job from what I am seeing.

(The image shows Flock using the Flickr sidebar and the blog publishing tool)

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Google Toolbar for Firefox 1.5 beta 2

Finally Google upgraded the toolbar to make it compatible with Firefox 1.5 beta 2

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