The second of the all in one PC security suites I tried out turned out to be the winner, no further experimentation required with any other software. This one did everything I expected and needed straight away. Continue reading Bullguard Internet Security
Category: Internet Tips
Basic, Beginner’s Guides to the Internet.
How Do YOU Come Across Online?
Several online acquaintances were kind enough recently (I didn’t ask them!) to offer me some super critical feedback on how they saw my Social Networking and Branding efforts online. From their ‘comfortable distances’ they pointed out the flaws in some of the things I say in my Twitter and Facebook feeds and advised me to desist from certain activities. Having relatively recently ‘found my voice’ and style so to speak through things like Twitter and Facebook among others, and feeling fairly confident that what I was saying on these sites was generally interesting, enlightening, funny or useful to my audience in some small way at least, I wasn’t too happy with this criticism and it came as a bit of a shock..
I can’t say for one second that it’s going to make me censor myself online and I hope to continue saying it like it is, calling people out, alerting people to good and bad service from companies, occasionally cursing when needed and calling a spade a spade but it at least made me aware that I should try imagine how I sound to others. With just a little ‘out of body’ thought, you might realise that the largely IT/Techy crowd on Twitter don’t necessarily want to hear about your cat or that family and friends on Facebook don’t want to be bombarded with businesses stuff. ‘Know your audience’ and tell them what they want or need to hear seems like apt advice.
My moral is basically this – think before you speak, brand yourself and your business as honestly and effectively as you can but if you feel something needs to be said, say it. And if you are being honest to yourself and your gut instinct then you should eventually gain the majority’s respect. The rest can fuck off!!
Leon
Online PR and Press Releases
Something interesting and unexpected happened me recently (like yesterday!). I built a new website last week and, as you do, tried to promote it best I could a few days after it went live. I used the usual channels, ie – wrote a blog post here and on my other sites about it, Facebook, Twitter, etc..I also decided to submit a press release for free through IrishPressReleases.ie which I’ve done a few times previously for some of my other sites but without any great effect. That press release got picked up by a prominent Irish Technology News service Silicon Republic who deemed it worthy to republish on their site pretty much in it’s entirity complete with images and web links, both to the new site and my main Reverb Studios one.
Silicon Republic publish all their stories on Twitter to (currently) 3,727 followers and also to their Facebook page. The Twitter side of it is what interested me most. They also include a “Retweet this” button on their articles and the article about my new site has been retweeted by 12 different people so far. Drilling down a little I was able to find these people’s Twitter url’s and see how many people in turn followed them. The follower numbers ranged from 59 to 12,300.
By my very rough calculations, I’m guessing in the region of 27,000 people worldwide on twitter alone have been potentially exposed to Silicon Republic’s article so far and by extension, to both my new site and this one and all for about 15 mins writing the original press release! You wont get that with an ad in the local paper!
Here’s my Google stats for the day:
Leon.
Protecting Your Brand
I was reminded recently why it’s important to keep an eye on what people are saying about you, your business and brand, especially online where people say what they like a lot of the time (me included!). A follower of mine on Twitter and fellow web designer had some time on his hands one Saturday evening and decided to let me and a large client of mine know that the site I built for them used an off the shelf template. His tone suggested that I’d done something wrong by using an existing template and not telling anyone or crediting the original template creators. He misread my footer link on the clients site, thinking it said “a Reverb Studios Designed blog” when in fact it said “a Reverb Studios Design blog”, quite different things really! I used an outdated and freely available template, heavily customised and modernised it both back end and front and felt I didn’t have to credit the original designer for these reasons. Something which on reflection, I’ve now changed and included a credit to them just in case.. I also didn’t charge the client an arm and a leg for a custom designed site from scratch, instead charging my usual budget price so I don’t believe I done anything wrong.
The consequence of ignoring or not spotting this kind of thing is that negativity about your company can spread quite quickly and damage your brand and future earning potential. It was made easy for me on this occasion as the moaner in question communicated his imagined problem to me at the same time as my client but things will not always be that easy. Apart from keeping a very close eye on things like your Twitter and Facebook streams, you can also use an excellent service like Google Alerts to let you know when you’re mentioned or when someone links to your site.
If you know stuff was said about you in public then do the best thing you can and defend yourself there too.
Leon.
Fix Your Facebook Like & Recommend Buttons
I’ve rewritten this article after ‘proper’ researching and realising how Facebook Like and Recommend buttons ACTUALLY work! The original article was prompted by Channelship pointing out that there seemed to be a difference between clicking Like V’s Recommend, ie – clicking Like only posted a tiny link to your profile page whereas clicking Recommend seemed to publish the link to your wall resulting in way more exposure.
Some background:
As some of you may know, Facebook have relatively recently rolled out an external “Like” system whereby content outside of the Facebook site itself can have Like buttons. Straight away tons of sites (this one included) added the Like functionality through embedding code manually or using plugins. I have personally used the FB Like WordPress plugin for this blog and find it works well but here’s the manual code for your self-hosted WordPress blog if you prefer. It should be pasted in your “single.php” theme file ideally:
Check your code:
What I realised is that it makes no difference whether you use the Like or Recommend verb for your button. The important thing is to make sure that you either use the XFBML version of the button code or if using the IFRAME version, make sure to use the “Standard” layout with at least 450px width. Doing it either of these ways ensures that people will be given the option of leaving a comment and it’s this comment that ensures the article link goes on your wall. All is explained in this paragraph from the Facebook manual code link below:
When will users have the option to add a comment to the like?
If you are using the XFBML version of the Like button, user’s will always have the option to add an optional comment to the like. If you are using the Iframe version, users will have the option to add a comment only if you are using the ‘standard’ layout with a width of at least 450 px. If users do add a comment, the story published back to Facebook is given more prominence.
Get manual code:
Here’s the link to get Recommend/Like button code for your site or static page. The link also has some important information about the distinction between Like and Recommend and leaving comments:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
Here’s the manual code again for your self-hosted WordPress site:
Since Liking/Recommending in this way is akin to ‘Sharing’ and to avoid the ambiguity between Like & Recommend, here’s a link to a decent WordPress Facebook Share plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-on-facebook/
Conclusion:
It has already been proven via stats that bloggers have started to get a lot more traffic after installing Like buttons so make sure you have yours!
PS – Please “Like” this article if for no other reason than to see how it works!
Leon.
No More Email Auto Responders
I meant to write this post a while back when I pissed off a prominent Irish blogger with email spam, totally by accident. Luckily my keyword alert radar notified me of his moaning on Twitter! What happened was, my partner was in hospital for a week and for once, I was going to be away a lot visiting her etc..Not sure if some of my clients could cope without me and because it seemed like a professional thing to do at the time, I setup a quick email auto responder to alert people to the fact that I’d not be able to get back to them as quick as I normally do.
I regularly leave comments on other forums and blogs and a lot of these sites now have automated systems which email you when someone has responded to a thread that you left a comment in. When the automated system emails you and you have your responder setup, they will get replies everytime they email you. Some comment threads can get very big so that’s a lot of automated emails flying about and you will not be liked by the forum/blog admin. I’d left a comment on this guy’s blog and he had new comment notification turned on for the thread so he got a pile of my auto responders in his inbox every time someone left a new comment!
The upside is that hopefully he will now remember my business name forever!
Here’s a few other reasons not to setup auto responders:
- If spammers know there’s a working email address they’ll spam some more,
- Sites that send out Newsletters don’t want a ton of auto responders back at them,
- No one likes getting a non personal email response.
I believe Auto responders are generally useless these days because very few people will bother to hang around until you get back from your lovely holiday to email you again. They’ll either look for a response from someone else in your company or go elsewhere. If you are a one man band kind of business like I am then you really have to check email all the time and it’s easy to do via smart phone or laptop while you’re away.
Promote Your Business With FourSquare
I’ve been playing with location based Social Networking site Foursquare for a few months now and trying to figure out what use it might be for me from a business point of view other than simply another site my business details are listed on. I havn’t managed to come to a conclusion on that yet but I reckon businesses with an actual shop front or public location (unlike my private home office) should sit up NOW and take notice. Continue reading Promote Your Business With FourSquare
Website Effectiveness
Well done on having a website for your business but is it doing what it should, ie generating hits and sales leads? Here’s a few things you should really be doing to measure and improve your website’s effectiveness if you feel its not doing anything for you: Continue reading Website Effectiveness
Ticket Scams and Google Accountability
Lots of talk today about fans of Miley Cyrus (or their parents!) getting ripped off by fake ticket sites as they desperately try to secure seats for their kids. The usual rules apply when buying anything online:
- Only buy from secure “https” URL’s.
- Only buy from well known sites.
- Don’t buy tickets from an untrusted or unknown source no matter how pro it looks.
- Ticketmaster.ie is the only place you should really be buying tickets from for major gigs in Ireland.
- Visit the Ticketmaster.ie site only by typing it in your browser as opposed to clicking a link in an email or search result.
However, there is another issue here and one that I was reading about only yesterday – SEO is dead, long live SEO in which the author talks about Google turning a blind eye to cynical and possibly illegal practices whereby companies buy links and use dirty tricks to get themselves up the search engine results at the expense of more honest companies who use traditional SEO methods.
What happens in our problem above is that people Google “Miley Cyrus Tickets” or whatever and as well as the legitimate sites coming up in results, you also see a number of fake or “phishing” sites that may only just have been put up a few weeks ago or may even be using Google AdWords to get to the top of the pile.
The question is, should the search engines be doing more to vet or block out these kinds of sites and by doing so wrestle control of the web and safe browsing back from these criminals?
I think so..
Leon.
Social Media Marketing Comedy
Are there any people out there who might be considered knowledgeable in matters of SEO, Internet Marketing or Social Media/Social Networking and often find themselves getting laughed at when they try to explain Facebook, Linkedin, Blogging and especially Twitter to others!? I am one such person and I’ve witnessed others on the receiving end of this too.
I can maybe understand people laughing at Twitter with all it’s funny acronyms – Tweet, Twitterer, Twits, etc..but I’ve been trying to figure out why people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about this stuff in general and why they think you’re joking when you say this is probably the most important thing you can do to promote your Website/Business at the minute.
My best guess is that the amount of information you often need to convey about how to use each service/site and exactly what it all means and what it can do for people is just overwhelming to the listener and they can’t fathom where to begin or where they’ll find the time to do it all.
So they laugh out loud in frustration!
If you are one such person who doesn’t get it and who laughs at us poor nerds thinking we know it all, then please don’t and here’s a simple definition of what we’re all talking about when we mention “Social Media Marketing”:
Social Media Marketing means making friends online through various different websites with the ultimate aim of letting as many people as possible know about your product or service.
Nothing funny about that!?
Reverb Studios Design 