Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

Twitter is useful as either a conversation you have among friends to share common experiences OR a professional conversation where you only talk about one thing.

I’ve been squatting on my personal twitter account for almost 3 years now.  I finally hooked up a client to alert me to tweets in real time.  After hooking that up, I promptly dropped a whole pile of professional acocunts I had been following for products or services I was interested in.  I dropped them because Twitterrific would keep popping up with some company saying stuff like “Good morning Twitterverse”.  Are you kidding me?  How annoying.  I assume these companies think they need to keep talking to keep their name in my face.  Well, there isn’t a single company I kept following that does stuff like this.  I don’t care how much I liked your product or service.

Don’t mix professional and personal tweets in your professional twitter account.

People who follow you professionally will end up dropping you if you throw too much fluff in there.

I’m guilty of getting too technical in my personal account.  I’ve tweeted when the fedex and ups api’s have been down.  I’m confident that 99% of the 30 people following my personal account don’t care about that.

So I’m going to stick to things on my personal account that may be of some interest to family and friends.  Any professional stuff needs to go elsewhere.

Personally I’ve started a twitter list for professional food related stuff in the Chicago area.  I’ve picked out mostly local folks who stick to talking about food almost all the time.  It’s something I’m passionate about and am excited to keep tabs on.  There’s some cool organizations and chefs which I’m not including in the list though because they’re mixing way too much personal in with the professional.  If half of my list is inside jokes and talk about what tv show they’re looking forward to, the list would get real boring, real quick.

I hope more and more professionals can catch on.  There’s some professional conversations I’m really interested in but don’t have the desire to put up with the noise that follows them.

Search Engines are often blind to the content of video or audio files but this is starting to change. The new google audio indexing service uses speech recognition to turn audio into text and then indexes that text. The ability for a computer to understand what an audio file means has far reaching implications. This is something to think about for the future but is not anything to build your whole marketing message on. The google audio indexing service is helped by clear pronunciation of words and low background noise. This technology allows for identifying sounds to assign to known words.  As for the visual portion of the video, we do not have a clear definitions of all the movements that could occur.  It is not possible at this time to pull accurate information from potentially complex visual movements.

I posted some tips on making websites for search engines at the office.

A canned website doesn’t have to be horrible

I’m putting together some new marketing websites and need to come up with a design.  I can either pay a designer or find a premade template.  In past years, website templates have looked very unprofessional.  I started looking around at the current state of website templates and am impressed with the stylish xhtml/css options at Template World.  They offer some solid free selections, I’m going ahead with the $50 bucks for the members section since the templates are so good.

Adding some spices

With any of the templates I pick here, I’m going to take a little time to tweek things.  Template World doesn’t take the same approach as other template sites.  They offer a relatively small number of higher end templates rather than countless thousands of low end templates like the other guys.  So I’m not going to be able to find a template that has everything where I want it but with a little css work and some istock photo shopping I’m get something really slick.

It seems like there has been a resurgence in a video file with an audio track automatically starting when a website loads.  I see that there are two reasons for this, the first is new video ads, the second is that people think it’s cool.  This is really annoying.  I was checking on a page on the ColdFusion developers journal just to be blasted with some stupid video ad starting up.  I’m listening to a podcast right now!  Sometimes I’m listening to music.  Eitherway, it’s arrogant to think that someone coming to your site isn’t doing anything else but looking at your site.  There should only be one reason that a video file with an audio track or an audio file should start playing right away and that’s when links used to get to the page make it clear that sound is expected.  For adverts, this means NEVER!  Everyone should know by now that marketing on the internet is a conversation because more interesting stuff is just a click away.  When you start to talk at someone without them wanting to talk to you, the best you can hope for is just to be ignored.

Time to give away a secret. Squidoo. This site allows you to create a page on something you’re interested in (a lens). On this page you can include items for sale that you’d get a cut from, books from amazon, itunes tracks, etc. The cut you end up getting is pretty small though. The big benefit of Squidoo is the authority given to page in google results. Search for my daughters name, Georgia MacDougall (search) or how about Learning Adobe Flex (search). You should see my Squidoo Lenses as result #3 at the time of this writing.

I didn’t give any marketing related thought to either of these pages and still ranking is pretty solid.

Think about it a bit and put up something useful on Squidoo … you’ll end up becoming an authority on the subject pretty quickly.

I just came across this cool article from the SEOmoz folks who interviewed several well known SEO’s, asking them to weight the various SEO best practices in use today. I also have personal confirmation from a good buddy of mine, responsible for millions in online revenue that this info is on the level. I’m considering signing up for the paid service for more articles and tools. If I do, I’ll post any interesting thoughts.

Speaking of SEO, nichelaunch.com is a friend’s directory service. It will be worth the effort to get your name out there.