Social Tech

8 Step Cycle of Search Engine Optimization with Blogging

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:02:32 GMT

We will be training our lawyers shortly on the value of blogging. This diagram is my take on the SEO lifecycle as it pertains to blogging, and it I hope that it illustrates the concept enough for good comparison with traditional media, like articles and print.

It should also be perfectly applicable to social media in general.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of using the following steps to maximize your search result ranking and areas of expertise on the major search engines.

1. Write
Your new post is given a URL to uniquely identify it on the internet.

2. Share
Start or join in on a conversation via LinkedIn, Twitter, email, or comments in another blog, by referencing your post's URL (Alt+D selects your current url, Ctrl+C copies it for later).

3. Discuss: A conversation occurs, with URL references to content in posts and articles on the web.

4. Archive: Google notices the conversations, and records ('crawls') it, following the path of URLs. This occurs roughly 2 weeks after posting. The actual time period varies between sites. [How often does Google crawl the web?]

5. Reward: Google identifies the topics discussed, and boosts the rankings for the participants and sites involved. The measure of the boost is based on the size and impact of the conversation.

6. Search: 250 million searches are made on Google alone each day, across every topic (vertical) imaginable.

7. Subscribe: Over time, you will start to gain subscribers (or followers) to your content. When you add new posts, your subscribers will be notified. Most social networks including have some method of subscribing to their users.

8. Grow: The audience grows for future conversations by author, topic, etc. There is a snowball effect as the cycle continues.

Wrote an Inverted Blog Engine

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:19:53 GMT

50+ Practice Groups, across the entire spectrum of legal services. It is difficult to write a solution for one group, that is useful or even applicable to the others. Abstraction is an extremely important tool around here.

Content Managment
A few years back, when we were rebuilding our website, we abstracted the idea of web content down to a very basic level, then made it extensible. New content types were created by a few simple instructions. Content mainly contained a title, body, and was associated with various practice groups and lawyers. Content types like news, press releases, and articles were a slightly different spin on the same formula. The content manager interface rendered itself, appropriate to which content type was currently in context. It worked nicely, and was only a little more difficult to write than a static content manager would have been.

'Original Content'
Culturally speaking (and this should go without saying), a mid-sized law firm blogging is a difficult concept to sell. We are a pretty savvy group when it comes to tech, but some things just need to surface on their own. We created 'Original Articles' instead: Blog posts with the format & depth of formal articles, that were reviewed and approved, and did not allow comments or syndication. For the meantime, we were getting content in, which got the ball rolling for blogging. As lawyers and our Marketing Department posted Original Article items, they associated the content with authors, practice groups, and keywords.

Finally
We started hearing murmers from the law geeks that wanted to blog. Some associates had personal blogs. Their friends and colleagues had Twitter feeds and law blogs ("blawgs") of their own. The Tech Law team led the charge, and we purchased techlawblog.com. At this point, we were looking at a 3rd party solution, or possibly something custom that was separate from our website. This route would have led to a few different complications that would have hurt our chances of this being a success:
- New content management per blog (1 post that applies to Intellectual Property, and Tech Law would need to be posted separately in each blog), new app for lawyers to learn & manage
- SEO symbiosis between the blog sites and whdlaw.com would be a missed opportunity. Inbound links to the blogs should help our main domain.
- Tagging, categorizing content takes work

Inverted
We decided to keep the solution in-house, and build off of what we already had. We created a 'Blog' content type, wrote in support for comments and a slick approval system so the author can approve from their Blackberry, and a generic page to generate rss feeds depending on the context of our visitor.

Our lawyers can now write blog posts just like the Original Articles they were already familiar with. They make their regular practice group and author associations as before, and possibly add some keywords. As soon as their post is approved, it appears on our main blog stream. If there is an associated practice group that has never had a post before, it shows up automatically as a new blog in our nav bar. Feeds can be created and consumed by practice group, author, or even keyword. In the end, we have all the features of a blog, without any extra work on the lawyers' behalf.

Observations
I am amazed at how few people understand syndication and subscriptions, especially considering that the icon is literally everywhere. It may be another couple years before people start to see the value in it.

Aggregator is a painful word for such a cool idea... I think I will try using reader more, though I think it sounds too passive.

The law industry is really buying into social tech, especially blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The community right now feels very much like the developer community did, 5 years ago. It is refreshing. Maybe it's just me though, as I am watching the legal sector while these technologies are finally going mainstream.

Thoughts on Social Media For Mid-sized Businesses

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:47:14 GMT

I was asked to provide some quick insights on the pros/cons of social networks as they apply to busineses:

Benefits:

- Networking on a global scale

- Indviduals develop & strengthen marketing skills & awareness (Professionals market themselves more often, more effectively)

- Search engine optimization (if we link back to our website often)

- Access to realtime news, industry-specific activity

Drawbacks, Concerns:

- Potentially global audience includes adverse parties, so training is important

- Personal activity reflects on the Firm

- Frequent change, new social networks appear often, and and turn over quickly

- Social Network services are decentralized, 3rd party, difficult or impossible to manage internally

Some law-people on Twitter (create an acct, and follow them, and if you want, me)

(and their comments for why they think Twitter is valuable to them)

Kevin O'Keefe is constantly providing fresh insights into social media as it applies to businesses, marketing, and law.

Craig Niedenthal, Birmingham, AL, trial attorney focusing on products liability cases:

"Use twitter to make contacts of other lawyers and those in other fields i.e. tech, marketing, to help me grow as atty and person"

Tony Hartsfield, Co-founder, Society of Legal Learning Professionals; Sr Analyst, Learning Systems at Bryan Cave LLP:

"Twitter keeps me informed on trends & issues in legal IT."

Lindsy C. Doucette, lawyer, Omaha, NE:

"it's my foray into social media 2.0 - I'm seeking examples of how to use the web effectively and I'm developing relationships."

GiveCamps: Geeks Giving Back

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:24:59 GMT

Overview: A Give Camp is a gathering of professionals (developers, graphic designers, database ninjas) that volunteer their time and resources to design and implement solutions (websites, applications, content-management systems, etc) for various charities and non-profit groups. Proposals can be submitted by non-profit groups and charities before the camp, and they are reviewed and selected, and teams of volunteers are organized to represent a project, create a plan and execute it, all over the period of a single weekend.

Projects / Features:
Web sites, new sections
Access Databases
Mobility Projects
New Content Management System (Graftiti, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint)
Intranet
Membership Tracking App
Paypal integration
Hosting
Training
Social Media Presence & Advocacy

Volunteer Qualifications:
Most importantly: A desire to contribute
Development experience (any level of expertise)
Sharepoint
Database Administrators
Developers! (.Net, Java, C++, PHP, Excel, Html)
Flash Developers & Designers
Photography
Social Media

Other GiveCamps:
Upcoming:
- Indianapolis, Indiana, January 23-25, 2009
- Milwaukee, WI, TBD (Nov-Dec, 2008?), Scott's announcement
- Northwest Arkansas .Net UG, TBD, Jay's announcement

Past:
- Dallas, Texas, January 18-20, 2008
- Kansas City, April 25-27, 2008
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 11-13, 2008

Important URLs:
- Givecamp.org
- We Are Microsoft: 18 projects for charities (brief case studies! - click links to see project details)
- Jennifer Marsman's review of the Ann Arbor Give Camp
- Twitter chatter "givecamp"
- GiveCamp Facebook Group

People:
- Chris Koenig, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft, Founder of first GiveCamp
- Jennifer Marsman, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Dave Bost, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Larry Clarkin, Architect Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Scott Isaacs, President of WI .Net Users Group, leading up GiveCamp MKE
- Paul Hacker, leading up Indianapolis GiveCamp
- Jay Smith, President, Northwest Arkansas .Net User's Group

Accomplishments to date:
- GiveCamp #1: "We Are Microsoft" 18 projects from the first GiveCamp in Dallas, TX
- GiveCamp #2: "Coders For Charities", Kansas City, Missouri (overview)
- - Boy Scouts Troop 813
- - Berean Bible Church
- - Task Force Omega of MO
- - Missouri Pit Bull Rescue
- - Metropolitan Org to Counter Sexual Assault
- GiveCamp #3: Ann Arbor, Michigan (15 projects, charity names only, no details found)

Getting Started:
The GiveCamp cookbook

Media Coverage, spreading the word:
- Local news (Kansas City Fox 4)
- Press Release (Kansas City)
- Radio (Kansas City, Dick Dale Morning Show)
- Twitter
- Blogs
- Camp homepages
- GiveCamp.org

This post will be updated as I find more info for each section, and I will have a series of posts on our Milwaukee GiveCamp as it comes together. I am sure I have missed people and news, but this should serve as a good start to encapsulate the GiveCamp movement as it takes off.

If The John Galts Spoke Like Steve Jobs

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:21:32 GMT

1. I would buy into Brandstreaming (uhhh... if they let the JG-types out of their caves to do some streaming). [Pheedo coins the term] [RWW gives it some love] [Twitter chatter]

2. Mesh [clients/"platform experiences"] could see some serious adoption among regular people, many of which have more than 1 pc, iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Mobiles, and Macs in the family. [Mesh blog] [LiveSide.net blog]

3. Atlas Shrugged would only be 1140 pages and we would all be objectivists. [Amazon, highly recommended] [Objectivism wikipedia]

My initial thoughts about Mesh...

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:18:58 GMT

Update 7/28/08: LiveSide (http://www.liveside.net/, or Twitter @liveside) posted that Mobile Mesh is out in a limited capacity (no folder IO sync yet), http://m.mesh.com from your Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, or Symbian.

Update #2 7/29/28: Mac client was out briefly today, but was quickly brought offline. Screenshots for this & mobile are at http://www.liveside.net.

First and foremost:The platform sells itself: The key is getting people to install the client, add something to their Mesh from one device, and 'consume' it from another. Nevermind the details, they complicate things. Erick at TechCrunch stated in April that Mesh is 'aimed at developers'. What? Why are they aiming? Throw it out there with some simple user stories and see what happens. Share photos, back-up your important stuff, access your favorites from any computer, write your own news stream. It could be compared to the functionality of many social apps: flickr, google docs, twitter, all the recent sync/backup services (that's the trend lately I guess)...

Wish my Blackberry had a Mesh client. I would love to sync images/videos taken with my camera, view files from my laptop, home pcs, work pc, from my blackberry... Mobile clients are due in late '08.

Wish Mac had a Mesh client. My boss has shifted to the Mac camp, and I don't really blame him. Ours isn't the only enterprise with a chance to convert from MSFT to Mac/Linux in the next 3-5 years. Non-windows clients for the Mesh platform won't keep this from happening, but it will reduce the growing 'painting myself into the corner' feeling that MSFT technologies tend to have. Mac clients are supposedly due for release late this year.

Source control??? Sharing of files & folders, reporting, versioning, syncing, and for extra credit: realtime collaborative authoring (at the very least, via remoting)??? Still unsure about how many requirements Mesh meets here, still playing around with it.

Smaller bits from the blog team: This is probably rediculous, but Twitter is ruining my taste for verbosity. I guess there should be some detailed anchor content that is thorough, and it's as good a place as any. I have to wonder though: If the Mesh team posted more frequently on much smaller stories and concepts, Mesh adoption may increase, and the details would flesh themselves out via posts from the developers they're targeting (like me).

Public Mesh: It may not be practical in a Mesh topology, but it would be cool to be able to watch how other people are using Mesh, and it may create opportunities to broaden networks.

Competing with Google: MSFT needs to go live with a model that makes me feel like they're giving it away. I am sure they will have priced tiers for their services, but the 'free' service should be generous enough that I don't feel like I get more from Google. Let people appreciate the value of the cloud before they are even asked to pay for it in any way.

Hotkey: I love notifyicons, but I love hotkeys more. I don't like to have to hunt for my icon to view remote documents or interact with my colleagues. It needs to become a natural extension of my Windows experience, like OS X's F12

Social net awareness: Import my friends from {twitter, gmail, facebook, linkedin}. Mesh should give me as many opportunities as possible to bridge my social nets together - this complements its goals of bridging apps and devices. Friendfeed does an amazing job at this, but will probably always be just a social net.

Depot, an exercise in Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:43:59 GMT

No downloads or pics, just a quick rundown of a very cool app idea while it's in my head.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a small winforms app. It's stayed very rough around the edges and hasn't gone anywhere from the original prototype. This prototype (I called it Depot) was written as a proof-of-concept of the simplest possible community-sourced bookmarking / tagging / searching tool that could possibly exist. A self-organizing business-specific link / text library could provide immense value to a company.

Depot hinges on 4 basic features common with collaborative apps:

1. Producing: Adding content in the form of URLS and/or text (2 different fields that can be used individually or combined)

2. Tagging

3. Searching for any item by any combination of title words or tag

4. Sharing: All content is automatically shared, and open to edit & extend, by anyone within the network

The search is an autocomplete textbox, that works with any combination of title words and tags. Typing 'catering' displays all catering items, but as you start to type 'catering madison', the suggestions filter appropriately. As you would expect, changing the text over to 'thai madison' updates to items tagged or titled with thai and madison.

The url + text fields is an interesting feature - a user may want to toss in a quick note for a catering url someone else added, like "Beware the red curry!!!".

The app seemed to work beautifully, but the algorithm is not built to scale up yet. Everything is cached heavily on the client-side. There are no concurrency checks. Also, to be fit for production, it will need some kind of user-auditing, history, and probably some kind of browser integration (or at least bookmark / favorites sync).

I don't know yet what will become of Depot. I hope to find the time and motivation soon to dust it off and start polishing it up for a pilot group. If nothing else, I got an ornery hog of a tag-search algorithm that may come in useful someday.

Shrinking the 'App Surface' - Microsoft Mesh

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:58:30 GMT

I have lost track of how many social networks I'm involved with. The 'app-surface' is too huge to manage.

In my work, we struggle with a problem of custom development: another system means another place for the lawyers to worry about their data.

We are maintaining apps that were designed for a specific purpose but are being used by 25% of the organization.

Occasionally, I will bang out a new prototype app that may or may not take off. It helps keep the innovation conversation going, but it broadens the surface of possible apps to work in. This is a problem. The solution is buried somewhere within the combination of service-enabling application data, creating dashboards and pluggable architectures, notification systems, unified communication, etc... Lately we have been talking about Sharepoint as the ultimate solution because you can wire all of your enterprise libraries into web parts and slap it all onto a single webpage. What about mobile data then? What about non-web types of collaboration? What about persisting a conversation between meetings, email, and phone? The problem too big to solve with a website. It may be too big to solve with a platform, but it sounds like Microsoft is having a go at it with Mesh.

The Mesh is composed of 'mesh objects', which are standardized feeds (SSE, which is now FeedSync) of data. Mike Zintel from the Live Mesh Team talks about Mesh in his "Live Mesh As A Platform" post:

... a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses...
... one instantiation of a mesh object is as a local (shared, aka Live) folder on a PC. This same mesh object might be instantiated as a slideshow on a web site, and as preview and upload UX on a mobile device with a built-in camera. A Live Folder is but one specialization of a mesh object. A mesh object could also represent a range of cells in Excel or a To Do list that can be accessed from anywhere...

I want this so bad... My collaboration post here shows where my head is at when it comes to communication channels and their disconnectedness from each other. I think speech-to-text and text-to-speech, combined with data-to-feed and feed-to-data (bidirectional feeds especially, with FeedSync!) are going to tie things together and shrink our app-surface to a managable level. The Mesh, as far as I understand it, is the first technology that makes this seem possible.

In the meantime we will keep juggling (and forgetting about) our socnets along with our various calendars, emails, meetings, and apps...

What may have been http://ep.iphano.us

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:40:14 GMT

Still on the subject of Atwood (3rd post in a row) & stackoverflow.com (2nd in a row)... this is it though...

In Jan 07 I jotted some stuff down, called it ep.iphano.us (don't know if the domain was available then, it isn't now). I wonder how close the stackoverflow.com vision is to what I had in mind? I invisioned urls as answers, but it seems like Jeff & Joel want their own knowledge base of fresh answers. Pasted notes from my tiddlywiki:

Overview
Digg-like community where users submit ideas or questions, and other users submit URLs as answers to them. Users can endorse questions, as well as responses. Each user has 2 scores: QEndorsements, and AEndorsements. The front-page effect is used for 2 lists, both chronological: Left lists requests (ideas/questions) that have passed some threshold of endorsements, and Right shows Responses that have exceeded some threshold of answer endorsements. Users can subscribe to filtered sets of questions and/or answers. Submissions (requests or responses) can be categorized, described, discussed, and tagged. Users can subscribe to their own sets, which may be as simple as all requests that are either tagged 'movie' or categorized as 'movie'.

Use Cases
- Submit new Idea or Question (request submission type)
- Submit new response (as url, to a request)
- Create filtered set for request- Create filtered set for response
- Grab feed url for filtered set
- View set
- View front page (requests, and responses)
- Endorse request
- Endorse response

Db Tables
- SubmissionType {Request, Response}
- FilterType {EndorsementCount, CategoryType, SubCategory, Tags, UserEndorsements, UserEndorsements, User, Filter}
- CategoryType {Technology, Science, World & Business, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming}
- User
- Submission
- UserEndorsement
- UserFilter (UserSet)
- SubmissionTag
- SubmissionSubCategory
- UserSubmissionTypeScore

Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:10:06 GMT

I have been a HUGE fan of Digg.com for years. The content is generally good, the community is fun and (again, generally) intelligent, but the model: Submit/Vote/Discuss/Report... brilliant.

MyStarbucksIdea.com, and Dell's IdeaStorm.com follow the Digg.com model, but in the context of innovation focused on a business. They are crowdsourcing their innovation to the world, and their future offerings are going to be more organic than ever before. The new tool on their belt gives them a clearer idea of their actual customers' wishes. Minimize the assumptions. Outsource your innovation to the one group the really cares about your product, and spend next to nothing for the data you get from it... brilliant.

Wikipedia (currently) defines Crowdsourcing as "... the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call."

I am in the habit of repurposing (or desigining my own) social-network ideas as internal solutions, and along the way I have occasionally had my share of failage/lesson-learnage, but I've also scored some wins. Like everybody else that thinks they have a new idea worthy of its own name, I have started calling it 'community sourcing'.

I reformed the definition above to fit my needs:

Community Sourcing
The act of taking a task traditionally performed by a specific member of the group, or consultant and exposing it to a controlled, generally large group of people who share the same interest as the group, in the form of an open call.

The term seems to be out there (google 2080 hits), and the purpose looks similar.

As far as walking-the-walk goes, we have working 'community sourced' systems used every day for content-management, marketing, and project management. Newer and (therefore, I hope) less-used solutions include link-tracking (think del.icio.us), and yes, a submit/vote/discuss/report app, which, in my humble opinion, is... brilliant.