ToddHDow Studios

Category: Technology

  • Facebook

    Facebook

    This is part 4 of my blog series entitled Set Up Your Tools.

    FacebookFacebook is a monster in the audience development space. Facebook has grown into the biggest, most influential, highest traffic site on the Internet. Its reach is astounding, as it is the current reigning social networking site. I attribute this to a couple of things:

    • Being in the right place at the right time – there was no other established social media site that came close in terms of knitting together all of our relationships.
    • The price is right – classmates.com should have owned this space, but they charged for access and people weren’t that nosey about what happened to their old classmates.

    Facebook hit the market at a time when MySpace was big. MySpace was the original glamour site for people to post everything about their interests and it faltered with the launch of Facebook, LinkedIn and the gang.

    Facebook has emerged as the king of the hill. Alexa ranks Facebook as the top site on the Internet: Alexa Topsites

    ‘Nuff said.

    So… what does this mean? How should I use Facebook?

    Well… for starters, you need to have a presence. There are a few ways to have a presence on Facebook:

    A Facebook account
    This is your main presence on Facebook. You enter some information about yourself (name, age, location, school(s) attended, etc.). You can upload photos and you can share pretty much anything you wish to share with your friends: status updates, big events, jokes and more! I am particularly fond of VagueBookers. Note: don’t be a VagueBooker!
    Facebook pages
    According to Facebook, Your page is your business or organization’s home on Facebook. This is a spot where you can create an awareness of a brand. People can interact with your brand through this page. You can build an audience by sharing content including stories, photos, upcoming events, etc.
    Facebook Groups
    Facebook Groups provide a closed space for small groups to communicate about shared interests. Facebook Groups differ from Facebook Pages primarily in that groups typically have a small privacy-controlled audience whereas pages are generally open to anyone.

    And, Facebook is constantly changing. So, not only do you need to build a presence, but you must also adjust it over time as Facebook changes.

    Not only do you need to build a presence within Facebook, but it is also a good idea to integrate with Facebook. Embedding likes or comments on your blog or website helps keep your web presence relevant within Facebook.

    Facebook also does a great job offering cross-platform support. Facebook is everywhere that it matters to be:

    This isn’t unique to Facebook, as Twitter, Google+ and the gang all have a cross-platform presence as well. What that means is that you must have a presence across a myriad of platforms. You must have presence on the web and on the leading mobile platforms as well. More and more traffic is migrating to mobile devices, with some organizations seeing more of their traffic coming from mobile devices than from traditional desktop browsers.

    And, just yesterday, Facebook announced their latest Facebook feature, Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search will allow people to harvest information from your social network. You could search for “favourite movies amongst your male friends aged 25 to 34”, for example. There is a lot of potential here, but, the biggest problem will be the quality of the search results. I don’t know about you, but my Facebook profile is far from complete or accurate. I think that I last updated my profile over a year ago. And, I think that makes me a keener. And, my posts are typically a collection of random items that I’ve found interesting online. Others are similarly skeptical as well: Jesse Brown in Macleans, “Why Facebook’s ‘Graph Search’ is not enough to woo this investor”, and others – just google Facebook Graph Search for more (wait… you mean a good search engine already exists? Who knew!)

    Note: Facebook Graph Search is currently available only to a small number of users, but is expected to be rolled out to everyone shortly.

    Bottom line: you need to build and understand your presence on Facebook. One of the costs of living online is that you have to be where the people are. And pretty much everyone is on Facebook. So make sure you build a presence within Facebook and then interact with your Facebook profile, page(s) and/or groups on a regular basis to help grow your online community.

    Todd

  • Twitter

    Twitter

    TwitterIn our last post, we talked about WordPress, which is where you’ll host your content. Now, we’re going to talk about how to promote your content, how to drive traffic to your site and how to generate buzz. Twitter is one of the best ways to promote your brand, keep in touch with your peers and to build community. And Twitter makes it really easy (or hard if you lean towards the verbose) to communicate with your audience.

    Remember those old Reader’s Digest condensed books? They were basically a shorter, or abridged, version of complete works. These were the precursor to the Cole’s Notes which came along later. Yes, I’m probably showing my age now. Well… Twitter is like the Cole’s Notes of blogging.

    Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service. You use Twitter to “tweet” quick updates to your “followers”. Each tweet must be 140 characters or less. This forces you to be brief, which should translate into the ability to convey more meaning in less space – although, this is not always the case. But that is the goal.

    SIGN UP

    Twitter is free. Simply sign up at twitter.com and you’re in business. Make sure that you align your twitter name with its purpose: your real name, your company name, your alias, etc. It’s important to keep it meaningful.

    FIND SOME FOLLOWERS

    who to follow From there, you’ll want to find some followers. Twitter offers a few ways of doing this. On your main activity page, Twitter suggests “Who to follow” (left hand side, under neath my profile summary widget).

    Twitter also helps you out by offering a Find friends feature (bottom of the “Who to follow” widget mentioned above. This feature allows you to search your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL contact lists for people that you know that already have Twitter accounts.

    The key here is to start following some people. They will be notified when you follow them and hopefully they will follow you back.

    TWITTER WORDPRESS WIDGET

    You’ll want to enable the Twitter widget on your wordpress blog. This way, blog visitors will be able to see your latest tweets and they’ll be able to follow you as well. And, you’ll want to enable the Publicize feature for Twitter as well. This will tweet your new blog post each time a new post has been published.

    They key here is to get people to follow you. The larger your follow list, the larger your reach.

    From there, start tweeting. Say what you want, 140 characters at a time. You can include URLs and photos. Twitter integration is everywhere nowadays. New Macs running OS X 10.8 have Twitter integration built in for many native apps. iPhone and iPad Twitter integration is there as well. The list goes on.

    So get yourself a Twitter account and get busy tweeting!

    Todd

  • WordPress

    WordPress

    Wordpress LogoToday, we’re going to talk about WordPress, a popular content management system. The main tool discussed in today’s discussion is:

    1. WordPress.com

    For centuries, the Christian Church controlled communication by refusing to translate the bible into local languages. This ensured that access to the Bible remained strictly controlled by the “haves” of the day, namely the priests and clergy. The common folk, or the “have nots”, regularly attended church and remained dependent upon the church to communicate the good news of scripture.

    Everything changed in the 15th century with the introduction of the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention allowed for the fast dissemination of the printed word by the masses. The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first items mass produced on Gutenberg’s machine and it led to the democratization of the Christian Church, partially enabling the Protestant Reformation.

    The Internet is the 20th century’s equivalent to the printing press and WordPress is arguably the best “print shop” within this framework.

    Building a website can be as simple as putting a single text file on the internet with a bunch of text on it. Picture a scroll where you have a single piece of paper where you just keep adding content to the top or the bottom of the page. But this would quickly become overwhelming. The page would eventually get really really long and you wouldn’t be able to easily find anything. It would just be a jumble of sentences, paragraphs, pictures, etc. So yeah… it’s easy to put a website up on the internet. But it isn’t as easy to make it easy to post meaningful, organized and good looking content.

    That’s where a content management system (CMS) comes in. Most CMS’s provides a few basic features:

    1. an editor: this is where you enter your content – text, pictures, video, etc.
    2. a content repository: this is where the content is kept. Text is usually kept in a database, pictures and videos are usually kept in a file system
    3. a presentation layer: this is a fancy way of saying that your content is displayed to site visitors in a fancy, eye-pleasing way

    There are plenty of CMSs out there. WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, and plenty of others. How do you choose the right one? There are a few considerations:

    1. features: does the CMS give you the things you need? Integration with your favourite social networks, including Facebook, Google+, etc.?
    2. the ability to migrate content to or from another CMS
    3. Ease of use
    4. self-hosted, hosted by a hosting provider or by the company that runs the tool(s)?
    5. total market share
    6. stability, security and ability to recover in the event of a problem with your site
    7. long term viability of the product
    8. I could go on… this list could be endless

    The most popular platform out there today is WordPress. And for good reason – it ranks at the top for all of the above-listed considerations when determining which platform to use. WordPress is stable, secure, easy to use, easy to backup and recover and the total market share ensures long term viability of the platform.

    And best of all is the price: WordPress is free!

    You can download the WordPress software and install it on your own server or hosting platform. Most major hosting companies including Bluehost, Dreamhost, Go Daddy and others provide a “one click install”, allowing you to set up your paid hosting account with these providers and then quickly and easily install and start using WordPress. It really is that easy in most cases.

    However, setting up a blog with these hosting providers does have its limits. These hosting providers provide you with a small slice of a server to host your site. If you start to get a lot of visitors to your website, your web server will have a hard time keeping up and your site will get slower and slower, to the point where people will stop using it because the pages will load too slow.

    At that point, you’ll have to move your WordPress install to a premium hosting provider or host it yourself. In this respect, you’ve got a couple of options:

    1. Use a premium WordPress hosting provider like WPEngine or WordPress VIP. WP has a very reasonable plan that starts at $30 per month. WordPress VIP doesn’t publish pricing on their site, and they are more expensive than most. But they are also the best – WordPress VIP is run by the same folks that run WordPress.com. So yes, they do know what they are doing.
    2. Build and host your own server: You could use Amazon Web Services or a similar cloud service provider or you could do it the old fashioned way with a dedicated server hosted at your favourite data centre

    There is one additional option here though. And this is the option that I’d recommend for pretty much everybody: WordPress.com offers free blogs and hosting. This is by far one of the best offers on the web and it provides one of the best ways of democratization of speech on the internet. WordPress offers the ability to set up your own blog, choose the layout and design from over one hundred free layouts (or “themes”), and the ability to post new content from anywhere, by using only a web browser.

    You are slightly limited with this setup though: you are not allowed to embed ads in WordPress’s free blogs and you are limited in the layout choices offered to you. But this option is hassle and maintenance free. You are always on the most recent version of WordPress, the WordPress team ensures that your site is always secure and your site does not suffer from performance issues, no matter how many visitors your site gets.

    WordPress.com does offer a few “upsells”. I recommend that you get the custom domain feature, which for $13 per year allows you to register a custom domain for your blog. I use this option so that my blog has the address wirepaper.com. With this feature, you essentially have a WordPress hosted site for just over $20 per year ($10 for your domain registration from Go Daddy and $13 for your domain mapping with WordPress.com).

    Once your blog is set up, you need to:

    So what are you waiting for? Head over to wordpress.com, sign up and start blogging!

    Talk soon!

    Todd

  • Custom domain names and email

    Custom domain names and email

    Godaddy & Google AppsToday, we’re going to talk about getting a custom domain name and email. The two basic points here are:

    1. Register a unique domain name with godaddy.com (approx $10 per year)
    2. Use Google Apps to set up a custom email address ($free!)

    The first, and most important, piece of your website is your domain name. Your domain name is your brand. Your decision here influences your audience’s perception of you and/or your business.

    Some people are fine having a myname.blogspot.com website URL or a bigguy1975@hotmail.com email address. But those names aren’t very professional. The key is to have a meaningful domain name that describes your site or business. So pick a name that is meaningful. Ideal names include your name (barackobama.com), your business name (apple.com), your book (fourhourworkweek.com) or some other important concept (google.com – this is no longer just a company, but is also a verb!).

    Make sure you pick a name that is meaningful. And stick with a .com address. .com is still the default web address. .ca or another country specific domain name is an appropriate additional name, but make sure you have the .com as well. The rest of the domain name space is very specialized but not overly critical to secure. At most, get the .com and .countryname where you operate and maybe consider the equivalent .org if it makes sense (typically used for a non-profit or other similar type of organization).

    You may find that your name is already taken. My biggest IT regret is not buying dow.com (my last name) when I was first experimenting online. Dow Chemical Company picked up that domain really early on. It would have been perfect for me, but, not the end of the world. I simply got creative: toddhdow.com. If you do find that your preferred domain name is taken, there are a few options here:

    1. find a more creative domain name – combinations of your name, your specialty, etc.
    2. buy the domain name from the current owner – approach the domain owner directly and ask – you never know what value the current owner has assigned to the domain name, or
    3. participate in an auction – in some cases, investors buy domains so that they can resell them. These people are sometimes affectionately known as domain squatters. Sex.com was reportedly sold for $14 million in 2006. Most domain names can be purchased for much less than that. I recently saw a domain name for a friend of mine (his first name and last name.com) for about $1,000.

    Personally, I’d prefer to find a creative domain name that doesn’t benefit a domain reseller, but, if you’re set on a name, negotiate your price. Domain brokers are a good idea if you don’t want to tip your hand – for example, it would be a bad idea to try to buy todd.com by using my name. The seller will know that I am biased towards the name and could increase the price accordingly. A domain broker could help make the negotiation less personal and offer the seller less information to assess the value that the buyer may be willing to pay.

    How do you actually get a domain name though? You use a domain registrar. I personally use godaddy.com but there are many other reputable domain registrars including namecheap.com and 1and1.com. These sites all make it really easy to purchase a new domain name for about $10 per domain – the sites walk you through the process in just a few easy steps.

    From there, your next step should be to set up a custom email address. Something like todd@wirepaper.com is more professional looking than rockstar99@yahoo.com. Google offers Google Apps which is a great service that allows you to set up custom email, calendaring, document management, sites and more. Google Apps is free for up to 10 user accounts. It’s a bargain as it can power the communication and collaboration needs for most small businesses – all at no cost! Google Apps allows you to set up your own custom email addresses associated with your own domain name (todd@wirepaper.com, for example). And, the best part is that it uses exactly the same interface that Google’s public tools use (Gmail, calendar, etc.) so it’s bulletproof and instantly recognizable to anyone that has used those tools in the past.

    You’ll need a bit of technical expertise to set all of this up. The domain registration and Google Apps registration are straightforward. Answer a few questions and pay using a credit card for the domain registration and you’re all done.

    Setting up the custom email will require a bit more work. You’ll have to:

    1. verify that you own the domain; and
    2. set the MX records and custom domain URLs;

    I personally set the following custom DNS records for my domains:

    CNAME calendar ghs.google.com.
    CNAME docs ghs.google.com.
    CNAME mail ghs.google.com.
    MX 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
    MX 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
    MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
    MX 10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
    MX 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

    So yeah… today we’ve talked about setting up a custom email domain and custom email. Next up, we’ll talk about WordPress – the great equalizer in terms of publishing on the web.

    Talk soon!

    Todd

  • Set up your tools

    This is the first part (of four) in my series entitled, So You Want To Start Blogging…

    Electricians, mechanics, doctors and carpenters all invest heavily in the tools of their trade. Publishing on the web is no different. You need a set of tools to help you communicate with your readers. In this section, I’m going to walk you through the tools you need to set up in order to start talking to your audience.

    1. Custom domain name and email
    2. WordPress
    3. Twitter
    4. Facebook
    5. Google+
    6. Mailing Lists
    7. The shiny new thing that just came out last week!

    Sit tight and enjoy the reading. And do let me know if I’ve missed anything or if you disagree with any of my advice.

    Todd