The topic I presented on was called “Social Media Strategizin’” and covered the way I like to approach social media and used some illustrations and case studies from my experience working in social media for Wilsonart International. Here is the slide deck:

Karla Patterson took notes and provided a great summary of the presentation, which is posted on the Waco Social Media Breakfast blog.

One group I met were from Squeeky Wheel Marketing in Belton, TX. They’re the guys behind wacoboard.com. This is an interesting concept from some guys who were looking to fill the need of helping incoming freshmen to the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and Baylor University find businesses in the area. It’s a also a fun way for businesses to connect with customers. I’m looking to interview these guys for an upcoming post … stay tuned for that.

Special thanks to Caryn Brown and CJ Jackson for organizing this event and inviting me,  the wacoboard.com guys for letting me us their 25′ VGA cable, and to Rudy’s in Waco for allowing us to meet there.

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap … And Others Don’t

Each of the eleven companies which met their “good to great” criteria had some key things in common. Collins isolated six characteristics found in each company which helped put them over the top from good to great and describes them in detail in the book:

• Disciplined People
  • Level 5 Leadership - a great leader who built a great team. A servant leader with an eye for talent and team building and setting up their people for success.
  • First Who … Then What – the Level 5 leader gathered around him or her the best people available. They were selected because of their work ethic as well as skills and abilities. They got “the right people on the bus and into the right seats.”
• Disciplined Thought
  • Confront The Brutal Facts – the leadership team looked at the reality of their situation: their business and the marketplace, and made decisions which helped them succeed no matter what. It was not “whitewashing” the truth or “pollyanna” thinking, but a knowledge they will prevail no matter what.
  • The Hedgehog Concept - the business found its core – what they could be excellent doing and stuck to it. There wasn’t a lot of side business or growth through acquisition; rather, the team stuck with what they did best.
• Disciplined Action
  • Culture of Discipline – the members of the team worked together for the mutual success of the organization. Because each person was trusted to do their part so bureaucracy and micromanagement were virtually eliminated.
  • Technology Accelerators – these days people latch on to technology for the sake of having the “latest and greatest.” These great companies evaluated technology and only chose what would help them do business better.

The book itself is easy to read and digest and has a lot of takeaway lessons anyone can start using today. While leading a company to make the jump from good to great may take some time, there are many things anyone can begin doing to get started on the path. The lessons in the book are not only for corporate leaders, but for anyone who wants to learn more about team building, leadership for success and personal growth.

For the statics geeks there are plenty of charts and numbers to help you understand the research in detail and how Collins and company chose the corporations for the study. There is also a couple math proofs to show the companies they chose for the study weren’t just flukes, but genuinely went from good to great.

Photo by Joel Grimes

It’s also important for those who take the lessons in the book and start down the path from good to great to keep up the work. One of the companies of the eleven singled out for study was Circuit City. They had a great plan, great leadership and a company which was outperforming their competitors by a large margin. Given that advantage, should they not have prevailed through the recent economic downturn and competition from Best Buy and such? Although I don’t know for sure, but I would guess the leadership in the company failed to keep working in the six areas outlined above and eventually fell behind. It would certainly be an interesting follow up study.

I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about leadership and team building. There are lessons for everyone regardless of their place on the corporate ladder.

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap … And Others Don’t by Jim Collins (Amazon Affiliate Link)

You can get more information about Jim Collins on his web site.

Kids are on social media. It’s part of their culture and embedded into their lives in a way even the most social media-savvy adults I know don’t fully comprehend. Because it’s such a part of how they interact with others, it’s essential we teach them about online safety when they are young much like my parents taught me not to talk to strangers or look both ways before crossing the street.

As I ponder on this idea and talk with parents, it hits me that most of us are pretty well versed in teaching our kids about online safety, but when it comes to kids’ online reputations we are far less prepared. Quite often I get asked about teaching kids about social media safety; and, when talking with other parents we usually come to the conclusion that we’re not doing too badly teaching our kids about that. But my next question always is: “What are you doing to teach your kids about protecting their online reputations?” That usually results in a blank stare from the other person.

I don’t think the blank stares result from carelessness or neglect on that parts of those parents. I believe it stems from the fact that we are not as plugged in as our kids.

in the 1960s Timothy Leary popularized the counterculture phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Today, that phrase could almost be said among our web-connected kids. They are turning on to social sites via their portable devices, tuning into what other kids are doing there and dropping out their own contributions to the web of conversation. As younger and younger kids get smart phones capable of text messaging and connecting them to Facebook and MySpace they start setting up an online footprint sooner and sooner. As much as some of us adults contribute to the collective conversation, our kids will out-contribute us before too long.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, because these young ones are “on there” we need to help them understand that their online reputation will follow them wherever they go – for good or for bad.

At one point, not all that long ago, if a kid had a bad reputation at a school the parents could move them to another one either by placing them in private school or moving. This tactic may not work if the kid’s reputation problems follow them online. All the kids at the new school need do is a quick Google search and *BAM* the new start is stopped quite abruptly.

I also wrote in the article referenced at the start:

Kids need to understand that online is pretty much “forever.” Once something is posted and indexed by search engines it’s nearly impossible to get rid of and it can pop back up during searches for who knows how long. Younger kids talking smack and older kids posting pictures of themselves acting the fool at parties may be all fun now, but they can come back to haunt them later. Though this point probably applies more to older kids and young adults who may be soon entering the workforce, it’s important that kids learn early on about the basics of online reputation management.

Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt has chimed in on this topic, opining that one day everyone would have the right to change their name upon reaching adulthood so their youthful indiscretions would not follow them. While this idea may seem incredible to many, it is no secret that many who do hiring for companies will search a person’s online reputation to screen out applicants who have derogatory information posted somewhere.

As parents, we needn’t panic. What we need to do is arm ourselves with information so we can arm our kids to learn how to take care of themselves. If you are totally clueless about online reputation management, I suggest you check out Radical Transparency by Beal and Strauss. While this book is more about the marketing aspect of social media use, there are some great tips for personal reputation management you certainly learn from.

Start talking to your kids now about their online behavior just as you do about their behavior elsewhere.

What about you? Do you have any tips for parents who are bringing up social media-savvy kids? What do you tell your kids?

photo credit: wickenden

While I think it’s a great idea to get on this bandwagon now, I’m not so sure about putting a lot of effort into platform-specific applications. Even though the iPhone is the current market leader, does it make sense to develop an application which only runs on that device? From what I read, Android devices are coming up fast. And who knows what will happen with Windows phones, Blackberries and such. For many businesses, it doesn’t make sense from a cost perspective to put a lot of effort into creating applications which only work on one device.

This reminds me of the debate I used to hear about coding web pages so they would work properly on a Mac or in a browser other than Internet Explorer: Why would you purposely alienate a potentially large percentage of your audience because you choose not to take their browser or operating system quirks into account? I think a similar question holds here, only it relates to smart phone browser or operating systems quirks.

Enter The Web App
In my mind, a cross-platform application makes a lot more sense. And what could be more cross-platform than a web-based app which runs in a mobile web browser? While there are still design challenges involved in dealing with the various mobile browsers, the application  code remains the same. What works on the iPhone will, in all likelihood, work on an Android or Windows phone, too. While it is true that platform-specific apps have more potential for “bells and whistles,” a mobile web browser app can look good and be extremely useful.

Here are some advantages of mobile web apps over platform-specific ones:

• Cross-platform compatibility
• Web browser apps are easier to deploy, update and maintain.
• Because web browser apps predominately run on a central web server, there are no distribution issues like trying to get into the iPhone app store.
• Instead of having to train someone to code for a specific platform or outsource development, companies can use the in-house expertise they already have.
• If a framework such as .NET is used for web development, the same code that powers current web applications can be reused for the back end processes of a mobile browser application. This will cut development time and cost.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. While discussing the release of their iPhone app, the Jason’s Deli tweeter indicated they are going to follow up with a mobile browser-based app. The reason: it works on any phone.

What about you? What do you think about mobile web apps? Do you lean towards browser-based or platform-specific apps? Let us know in the comments.

photo credit: Symic

Last week my colleague deployed an update to one of our many web sites. This particular site was originally coded in Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. She updated it in Visual Studio 2008, successfully using the automatic update tool VS offers to run when you open up a project created in an earlier version of whatever VS you open it in. There were no issues when we ran through the site on our test web server.

All was looking good until we moved the web site code to our production web server. All the apps on the web site were working properly except for one file upload application. For whatever reason, this one hunk of code decided to malfunction. We’d run into problems similar to this one which turned out to be caused by a missing patch – so that was the first place I looked.

Sure enough, for some reason our WSUS server didn’t push out all of the service packs for the various versions of the .NET Framework to this server. To fix this, I ran Windows Update on the server. As it started the service pack install I got an error: 0×643. Bummer!

A quick search found the solution on Microsoft’s support site in Article ID 923100. The short version: manually uninstall all versions of the .NET Framework, reinstall them and then run the service pack install. Easy enough, I supposed.

I spent 2 1/2 hours of my Saturday uninstalling and reinstalling. When I was all done I opened up the web site only to find it was erroring out with the “Yellow Window” generic error message. Time to stop, think, and not over-react.

Thankfully, we have a VPN and Remote Desktop so I could multitask from home that day. After taking time to swap laundry loads from the washer to the dryer it hit me to check the web site settings in IIS. Good thing I did because there was the problem, bigger than Stuttgart (as we used to say when I was in the Army) – the ASP.NET version selected in the ASP.NET tab in the web site properties was 1.1xxxxx instead of 2.0.50727. A quick change and a restart of the IIS Admin Service got everything working as it should.

I can only guess that the IIS settings were automatically changed when the .NET Framework 2.0 was uninstalled from the server. It makes sense – and it makes sense that one would need to go reselect the proper version of the Framework. Since that wasn’t spelled out in the Microsoft article, I’m warning you here.

Hopefully you won’t have to go through this yourself. If you do, though, don’t forget to check the IIS settings before declaring yourself finished.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
7:30 – 9:00 am

Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q
2510 Circle Rd.
Waco, TX 76706

If you’re in the area, please stop by and say “hi.” Oh, and Rudy’s has some great breakfast tacos and coffee – that alone is worth coming.

Visit Eventbrite for more information and to get your complimentary ticket.

Thanks to Caryn Brown and CJ Jackson for organizing this event and inviting me.

See you there.

photo credit: Amy-N

As more people get involved in more and more social media settings, there is a temptation to try to automate posting as much as possible. There are services which will allow you to post in once place and the service will automatically send that post to the other selected services. Some services, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have bots or applications which will grab your postings from other sites (mostly Twitter) and pull them into your stream on their service.

On the one hand, this seems like a handy way to be involved everywhere at once. But there are some downsides you need to be aware of:

1. I wrote about the downside of cross posting from Twitter to Facebook earlier this year. (This is one of my more popular recent articles, too.) In that piece, I point out that if you port tweets with links from Twitter, Facebook won’t pull the nice description and thumbnail into the link. I think the link with the thumbnail is much more eye-catching.
2. Something noted in the comments of the article about Facebook noted above is the use of hashtags (the “pound sign” as in “#subject”) which are commonly used on Twitter to help people track comments and conversations on the service. These aren’t used on other services and can cause confusion to those who are not into Twitter.
3. On Twitter, if you want to send a message to someone’s attention, you add “@” to the message, something like this: “@rehor this is a great topic.” Like hashtags, these are lost on other services. Although Facebook has adopted this, it’s really more of a Twitter thing.
4. Speaking of “@” messages: If you’re cross-posting your Twitter feed to other services, only the “@” messages from you in a Twitter conversation show up in your stream. Your followers on those other services will only see half of a conversation, which won’t make much sense to them.
5. As Tim pointed out in our conversation, sending all your tweets to LinkedIn does cause some clutter. This is especially true since LinkedIn combined all messages from and about contacts into one stream like Facebook’s wall.
6. I find that my followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are made up of quite different audiences. I only “friend” people on Facebook I actually know, and most of them aren’t interested in my comments on social media or web development. I recently set up a separate Facebook page for this blog so those who want can follow more business-related stuff from that page.
7. The 140 character limit to tweets does not apply on Facebook and LinkedIn. While the character limit does force Twitter users to be concise, sometimes to the point of confusion, why limit yourself if you don’t have to? I’m not advocating writing War and Peace in your Facebook or LinkedIn comments, but a little extra verbiage can sometimes be a good thing.

For a time last year, I did run my Twitter feed to my Facebook wall. I found I spent so much time answering questions about things which made no sense to my friends there that it wasn’t worth whatever benefit I might get from being more active. I do still port my Foursquare check ins to Facebook, though, mostly so folks there can know what I’m up to.

What about you? Do you automatically cross post your Twitter feed to other social media services? Why or why not? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Screen shot of the main Google Wave page

Last week Google announced it was pulling the plug on Google Wave. When introduced, it was touted by some to be a revolutionary new way to communicate online. Some opined it would replace email, instant messaging and a host of other communication methods. I didn’t think it was “all that and a bag of chips” and certainly not a replacement for email, but I found it quite useful for collaborative projects and described why in my November 2009 article entitled, “Google Wave – Great Potential For Collaboration.”

Many have pointed out Wave’s flaws, and there certainly were some as there is in any new tool. Here are good examples, some which have points I agree with:

• “Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures” by Danny Sullivan
• “Why Google Wave Sucks, and Why You Will Use It Anyway” by Martin Seibert on TechCrunch
• “Google Wave’s Unproductive Email Metaphors” by Robert Scoble

Most of the people I talked to about Wave either didn’t get how it could be useful (an argument I hear against using Twitter all the time, too) or that it was too slow (which it was at times).

Despite its shortcomings, I found Wave to be rather handy and used it in a number of collaborative projects. There were others who saw the potential it had and used it with some success, notably Chris Brogan, who wrote a number of times he used it on a project with his Trust Agents coauthor, Julien Smith.

• “How I Came To Love Google Wave” by Chris Brogan
• “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” in the L.A. Time Blog
• “Google Wave In Real Life” by Mitch Wagner on Computer World

So, in the end, was Wave a colossal failure? Was it a good idea gone bad or an innovation looking to fill a need that wasn’t there? Call it like you see it. No matter what anyone else may believe about Wave, I applaud them for at least trying.

Sometimes you just can’t tell if an idea is good or bad until you try it out. In cases like with Wave, what looks great in the laboratory just doesn’t quite make it out there in real life.

I will miss Wave on occasion, but not too much. I’ll go back to doing what I was doing before Wave came out. I”m sure another tool is in the offing. Perhaps one a bit easier to “get” and use.

What about you? Did you like Google Wave? Why or why not?

You may be one of those reading this and thinking to yourself, “My web site is small, why do I need to bother analyzing my web traffic?” Read on. I think you’ll be convinced by the time you finish this article.

Even if your web site is a one page starter site, it’s a great idea to start tracking your web traffic now. Sometime in the future you will update your site. Establishing baseline data now can help show if your changes brought in more or less traffic.  If your site has more than one page, it would be great to see what your customers view – which parts of the web site are more or less popular. This knowledge can help you better understand what kind of information you might need to add, enhance or delete.

Another good set of information is what kind of browsing capabilities your customers have:

• Which web browsers are most popular among your users? If the majority of your customers are using Firefox and Chrome, you might want to avoid using ActiveX controls on your web site since that’s an Internet Explorer-only technology.
• Which operating systems are most prevalent with your customers? If you find that 75% of your customers are iPad users, you might want to avoid redoing your site in Adobe’s Flash since the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
• What kind of connection to the internet do your visitors have? If most of your customers are still languishing on dialup, you might want to avoid doing a lot of streaming video because that will slow the site down too much for them to be useful.

If you’re going to consider doing any kind of ads on the web (Adsense, banner ads you purchase on sites, etc.) it’s a great idea to track your web referrers (those sites which send you traffic) before you start. As your campaign goes on, you’ll be able to spot rather quickly if you’re getting a traffic bump from your advertising efforts. Later, if when you decide to have a presence on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you’ll be able to easily track what kind of traffic you’re getting from those sites, too.

Every so often I see an email from a web site operator claiming they set up a test ad for a company and would like them to pay to keep the ad going. Invariably, there is a claim they sent hundreds of “qualified buyers” along with their request for payment. A quick check of web site stats will show whether those claims are true or not. (Not one has been true thus far, by the way.)

So, I hope you will set up analytics on your site today. Google Analytics is a good choice because it’s free, easy to implement, and has a lot of great information available in it’s built-in reports. Even if you’re not an analytics geek like some of us, set it up and check it out once a month or so. You’ll be surprised what you can learn.

Check out my Google Analytics Primer series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) for more information on this topic.

PubCon Vegas promises to be an excellent conference. There is a great slate of speakers lined up ready to fill your brain with lots of information about all things web marketing. For a taste of what’s in store, check out my summaries of previous PubCon events.

If you’re still on the fence about attending, perhaps I can help you make up your mind. I have a 10% discount code I can’t use which I’m going to give away to a reader of The Crossing in a random drawing. Here are the details …

To sign up:

• Use the “Contact Me” Form.
• Enter “PubCon Discount” in the subject box.
• Make sure you enter a valid email address in the Email Address box.
• Tell me a little about why you want to go to PubCon in the Message box.
• Entries must be received by 11:59 PM Tuesday, August 10, 2010.
• The winner will be notified by email and announced here.

Terms & Conditions:

• The discount is valid only for new registrations – if you already signed up for PubCon Vegas you can’t use it.
• If you win the drawing, you must register by 10-31-2010.
• The discount is 10% off the going rate at the time of registration. See the PubCon registration page for pricing information. The earlier you register, the better the price.
• Neither I nor the folks at PubCon are responsible for technical glitches or user error related to signing up.
• Only one entry per email address.
• The 10% discount is only good for the conference registration. The winner is responsible for all other expenses related to attending.
• Please don’t enter the drawing if you’re not going to sign up for PubCon.

Good luck to everyone who signs up.

Update (7/5/2010) – I just read on the PubCon blog there will be a special keynote session featuring Brian Clark, Brian Solis, Chris Brogan, Scott Stratten and Sarah Evans. This session alone will be worth attending.