Socrata

Remember when you were a kid and other kids said you were slow, had “four eyes” or buck teeth? How did your mom tell you to handle that situation? “Just ignore them!” she’d say. Well mom is wrong, at least with respect to what others are saying about your company online.

Everyone in your company should be following what people are saying about you. It’s your brand. It’s your service. It’s your identity. What good does it do to monitor what others are saying?

• It lets you know what you’re doing right and wrong. People are more inclined to talk about you when they are either very happy or very disappointed. As a company you need fix the problems that make people unhappy and amplify doing the things that make people happy.
• It lets you participate in conversations that are happening about you whether you’re there or not. This is a great way to offer ad hoc support and to collect ad hoc user feedback.
• It connects the people within your organization with the people using your service outside your organization. I find this to be incredibly helpful for programmers who usually aren’t talking to customers on a regular basis.
• It helps you identify who your most passionate users are.

Monitoring what people are saying is easy once you have the basic tools in place. I thought I’d share with you what I use.

• Set up a Google Alert using your company name as the search term. The easiest way to think of a Google Alert is that whenever their crawler encounters a new page containing the term you specify, Google will alert you via email or an RSS feed. I find it most useful to have alerts delivered as they happen but if you get too many alerts, you can change the frequency to daily.
• Monitor twitter. There are a few ways you can do this but I use two approaches. I created an RSS feed by performing an ad hoc search using twitter’s built in search (formerly Summize). Once you run an ad hoc query there is an option to save the query as an RSS feed, which means that you’ll get updates in Google Reader (or whatever you use to read feeds). The second approach I use is TweetDeck‘s built in search. It’s dynamic and practically real-time. As new tweets containing your term are tweeted, they show up in the search pane.
• Google doesn’t index the comments on most blog posts. Fortunately backtype does. It works very much like Google Alerts does for web pages and blogs. You enter a term and tell it how often you want to be notified and whether you want to be notified by email or by RSS feed.

Monitoring what people are saying about your company is important, easy and pretty fun. All you need to do is spend 15 or 20 mintues setting things up and from there it’s up to you to participate.

I’ll be attending Transparency Camp this weekend in Washington DC. It’s yet another way that new media is working its way into government and I’m super excited to take part. It follows the “unconference” user generated conference format popularized by BarCamp. Tim O’Reilly organized the first Foo Camp. Foo Camp begat BarCamp in 2005 and the format has been picking up steam ever since. Unlike conventional conferences which have a preset agenda and identified speakers, bar camps have no preset agenda and no preordained speakers. Sounds odd doesn’t it? What happens instead is that any attendee can nominate a topic by writing the idea up on a whiteboard. Other attendees might do similarly or might “sign up” to participate in one of the topics already suggested. That process goes on for an hour or two and then like a combustion engine, small groups explode into passionate discourse about the various topics. It’s attendee sourced agenda development and attendee driven participation. It’s social media taken to the physical world of conferences.

The success of this format hinges on the participation of the attendees. From the list of people who have signed up already, it looks like there’s going to be some great discussion. Check out just a tiny sample of who’s going to Transparency Camp:

Jon Udell
Leslie Bradshaw
Craig Newmark
Tim O’ Reilly
Chris Messina a.k.a. Factory Joe
Mike Diliberto
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Mark Drapeau
Bev Godwin
Peter Corbett

If you’re going to Transparency Camp I’d love to hear from you. Follow me and send me a message via twitter: http://twitter.com/kmerritt. If you can’t make it and want to follow vicariously via twitter, monitor #tcamp09 and/or follow tcamp09.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to guest author a post on TechCrunch – How Obama Will Use Web Technology. In December I was also fortunate to author a guest post on Get Rich Slowly – 10 Essential Steps to Take Before You’re Laid Off.

Many friends have asked me to share my secrets for landing guest posts on highly visible and heavily trafficked sites like TechCrunch and Get Rich Slowly. So without further ado, here are my top 10 steps to land a guest post on a popular blog:

1. Write for the audience of the site where you envision your post running. The readers of your own blog are likely different demographically than the readers of the blog where you hope to be a guest author. Write for those readers, not your own.
2. Write the post first and then ask to have it run second. I have no empirical data to support this, but it seems logical to me that making the effort of actually writing the post is a great indicator of your desire to have the story told. It also isolates the approval to your post specifically and not a blanket approval of you as a guest writer generally. Even if you write the post and can’t find a place to run it, worst case you can always run it on your own blog.
3. Which brings up the next point, you must have a blog where you write regularly. You need to be able to point to your body of work as both a writer and as authoritative on the subject matter.
4. Don’t be too advertorial. Erick Schonfeld politely turned down the first story I wrote for TechCrunch. Here it is on our blist blog for reference. It’s all about how President Obama is using blist. When Erick turned it down, I immediately rewrote the entire story from scratch, this time about how the Obama Administration is using web 2.0 software from a number of companies – Salesforce.com, Google (YouTube), Facebook, twitter – and blist. The second time around Erick liked it and agreed to run it. A few days later I ran the original blist focused post on our own blog.
5. Do as much of the work as you can so that it’s as frictionless and painless for the editor to post your story. Hyperlink everything that should be linked. Include a great teaser photo. Deliver it as HTML ready to drop right in to their blogging system. Make it easy enough to “paste and publish.”
6. Be willing to be edited. Guess what, even professional journalists have editors. Erick Schonfeld is a better writer and editor than I am. That he’s willing to make some minor edits is both flattering and improves the quality of the post.
7. Ask for it. Once you’ve written a great post, send a brief email to the editor asking if they would like to run the post as one from a guest author. It should include the full HTML of the post itself, a cover letter introducing yourself, your background, links to your blog and any other relevant posts you’ve written. If possible, have a private preview of the post online and include a link to the preview. Make sure it’s just a preview and that you haven’t published it yet.
8. Be exclusive. By that I mean if you are going to try to find an outlet for your story by approaching multiple blogs, offer your story sequentially. Ask the editor of the blog to make a decision. Don’t run the post on your own blog or anywhere else. All sites want fresh, exclusive content.
9. Write well. Most of the really good bloggers I know are, like Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, aspiring writers who love to write. You’re chances of being granted a guest post improve dramatically if you write reasonably well. You don’t have to be Hemingway – you are a programmer or marketer or CEO after all – but you do need to be clear and coherent.
10. Tell a good story. I deliberately saved the best for last. Getting your story posted starts and ends with telling a great story that has to be published and needs to be read.

From what I’ve learned, these are the 10 most important factors in landing a guest post on terrific and popular sites like TechCrunch and Get Rich Slowly.

Hi all. Sorry about the last few posts being password protected. We’re working on some cool stuff here at blist, but we aren’t ready to share it just yet. I needed a place to test it out so I made a few test posts.

It’s kind of like when they test the fire alarm in the building isn’t it? Annoying! Well, I’m all done testing now.

If you haven’t seen the site before, you should spend some time checking out ProPublica. It’s a terrific and interesting concept. In these times when all newspapers are cutting back, some are failing and others are being acquired by new corporate parents, ProPublica aims to preserve investigate journalism. ProPublica is supported financially by The Sandler Foundation and is led by editors and journalists from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

They recently digested the 1,071 page economic stimulus package approved by the House and Senate on Friday. Here’s where the spending will go:

Source: ProPublica.org

Many moons ago I was a twenty-something programmer with the social graces of a twenty-something programmer. Two or Three months into a new job I was invited to a party at the home of Jim, a co-worker whom I hadn’t come to know all that well. Jim was a kind of quiet guy. He was our application architect and as an early career programmer I wasn’t yet exchanging a lot of banter with the architect. I didn’t think he even knew my name actually.

I showed up at Jim’s house and he greeted me at the door. “Come with me said.” He led me to some guy whose name I don’t remember, but whom I’ll just call Dave for now. Jim proceeded to introduce us. “Kevin this is Dave, a friend of mine from college. Dave, Kevin started working with me a few months ago as a programmer. You guys are both huge 49er fans, you both like to race mountain bikes and you both inexplicably waste perfectly good Saturday mornings luring unsuspecting trout from idyllic streams. You two have much in common. I’ve got to circulate and mingle, but I thought you two would hit it off.”

I learned a lot that night about the power of a genuine and authentic introduction. Jim knew more about me than I knew he did. He recognized that I’d be coming to a party where I wouldn’t know many people. He broke the ice and provided a context to start a dialog with someone with whom he thought I’d have something in common.

Since that experience I pay a lot more attention to the introductions I make and receive. You should too. What does it say when you try to connect via Linkedin but won’t even bother changing the default greeting? What does it say when you won’t even compose an optional greeting when you send a friend request through Facebook? What’s the implication when you make a half-hearted introduction between two people without providing context?

Every introduction you make contributes to your reputation and has a dramatic impact on the reception of the introduction itself. Make the 10 minute investment to provide a genuine, authentic introduction.

I told you that I love data. So do the geniuses at SEOMoz, led by SEO industry expert Rand Fishkin.

Effective search engine optimization starts with understanding how search engines view your website. While most of us view our websites through a browser and a few of us view our websites through page level HTML source, a tiny handful view it through the lens of a web crawler. Google has a web crawler. So does Yahoo and MSN and a handful of other vertical search engines. The job of the crawler is to slurp the content on your site and send it back to the massive compute farms of these search engines, where sophisticated software tries to make sense of it all.

When you type a term into Google’s search page, Google does a great job of finding the pages that contain the term and displaying those pages in order of relevance. How Google determines relevance is both an art and science in its own right. Most folks who know about search engine optimization (SEO) apply many rules of thumb, lessons learned and any other technique they can think of. But what makes SEOMoz so smart is the way they approach SEO. They determined that the only way to understand how Google will rank and order a site’s pages is to try to build a web crawler and back-end processes that emulate Google as closely as possible. And that’s what they set out to do. And they succeeded.

The crawler and the service on which it’s based, LinkScape, are still relatively young as far as web crawlers go, but already SEOMoz is seeing fascinating data. As an example, SEOMoz has determined the 500 most important domains on the Internet. What does that mean? Your site’s rank – its authority – has a lot to do with not only the number of inbound links, but the authority of those links.  The relationship is recursive. Your site’s authority is influenced by the authority of sites pointing to you. The authority of those sites is determined by sites that point to them and so on. If you follow the pecking order all the way up, you’ll find the sites with the most authority.

So if you want your own site to rank highly, try to get one or more of these most important domains to link to you. Easier said than done I know, but at least now you know what the goal is.