The Official YouTube Creator’s Playbook
Although this clocks in at 70 slides, if you only read and apply the first 30 slides your YouTube channel will be better than most. Indeed rather than producing something overly complex with tons of fancy buzzwords YouTube has put together a fairly concise (and free) outline of how to best utilize the platform. So will this put amateur YouTube ‘mavens’ ‘evangelists’ and other ‘ninjas’ out of business? Perhaps we can only hope, but as General Patton said, having proper instruction (or orders) is only worth 10%:
“The remaining 90 percent consists in assuring proper and vigorous execution of the order.”
While most of the suggestions here are indeed relatively straightforward, if you have not tried to set up annotations or design a custom background before, it is advisable to at least set up a testing account before making modifications to your organization’s official channel. Sometimes it can also be hard for subject matter experts in their own fields to take a step back and think about how their target audience, and the general public at large views their content. In this respect, retaining the services of qualified advisors can help in adding perspective.
Slurp140 Tracking #AskObama Twitter @TownHall
If your interested in seeing a live, completely unfiltered view of all the tweets related to Wednesday’s 2:00 pm EST Twitter TownHall hosted by our friend @Jack Dorsey at the White House we humbly present Slurp140. http://www.slurp140.com/askobama/
In addition to following all mentions of #askobama and @townhall, we will be updating the complete archive of all Tweets captured that you see bellow. Following the event, we will turn to the excellent Excel add-on archiveNodeEX to do some further analysis of the data. For more info about the event see Twitter’s blog post.
Updated: AS of 3:12 PM EST we clocked over 153,136 tweets from 59,000+ users!
Is Cyber Squatting Bad for Politics? ICANN Help!
Earlier this week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or (ICANN) made a significant announcement that starting in January 2012 they will begin accepting applications for new “generic top-level domains.” As David Sarno wrote in the LA Times “ICANN approves open Web domain name rules: .anything is possible"
“The body that controls the way Internet domain names work, known as ICANN, has voted to open up the naming system so that any established organization with enough cash can apply to create its own version of .com, .org or .gov.
In the for-profit world, that means that instead of going to coke.com or nike.com, you might be able to go to drink.coke or justdoit.nike. Nonprofit groups could reserve the .school domain… Cities could consolidate their online presence at .nyc or .losangeles. And interest groups could stake out their own corner of the Web by offering every auto junkie a .car domain name, every law firm a .law address…”
As Sarno alludes to, beyond having $185,000 to pay for the new domain, organization must also pass a background screening that checks for “general business diligence and criminal history; and history of cyber squatting behavior.”
So where does politics fit into the picture?
As you might have heard, former Ambassador / Utah Governor Jon Huntsman announced he is running for president. While the official campaign site does come up in the first page of a Google search, if you were to type in jonhuntsman.com you would instead be taken to what is clearly a parody site that someone connected to his former boss (President Obama) put up.
While partisans on both sides have increasingly become fond of these types of shenanigans (TimKaine.com redirects the contact page of the Communist Party) for political parties registered with the Federal Elections Committee or by individual states, ICANN should wave their anti-cyber squatting requirement and give political parties their own .top level domain (for instance .gop or .dems) as a place for candidates to host their campaign websites. While very few if any real voters are probably ever fooled by parody sites, having a standard gTLD for candidates would be especially helpful at the local and state level where resources are scarce.
techPresident has more on another one of this year’s more comprehensive parody sites targeting former congressional candidate Jane Corwin.
You can read ICANN’s entire 352 page application guide here.
New White Paper: SEO Basics for a Social World
In June of 2008 The Bivings Group released SEO Basics which was our first comprehensive overview of how one should approach configuring websites for maximum search engine optimization. While this document did an excellent job of covering the the use of meta tags including keywords, title and descriptive tags as well as the role of content, site structure, links and the CMS in SEO, after almost three years it was time for an update. In this latest version we have expanded on these topics to include such changes as:
- The impact of changes to changes to Google’s algorithm (The Panda Update)
- How Google and Bing are incorporating activity on social networks into their search results
- The rise of new competitors such as Blekko, Qyo.co and DuckDuckGo
In coming weeks we will be releases several follow-ups to this document that cover in more detail how to actually configure Drupal 7 and WordPress 3.13 to be search engine friendly as well as more tips and tricks to take advantage of activity on social networks to create a dialogue that drives traffic to your website. While this is not the end-all, be-all of SEO how-to’s we hope you find it useful.
While every site we build is configured for maximum search engine optimization, if you are not happy with your ranking on Google and would like some professional help, please reach out.
Friday Afternoon Twitter Flush: Reviewing @tweepi @FriendOrFollow & @untweeps
Is your Twitter stream getting an little overwhelming? If so, or if your just looking to improve your @Klout score or kill some time on a rainy day, one thing to consider is purging your Twitter list of people you are following, but who for whatever reason are not following you back (shocking right?).
As using twitter.com for this would be very tedious, several developers have created applications that you can link to your account to automate this task. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, a couple of our favorite tools include:
Free, easy to use interface that allows you to display all the users who are not following your account as well anyone not following you back.
Includes stats about users such such as their # of follows, how long ago their last Tweet was sent, total number of tweets and Klout score. You can also sort you list of follower / non-followers by these metrics. In addition tweepi allows you to preview profiles and follow / follow en bulk. By far the best tool I have found so far.
While this does have an option to export a CSV file of users your following or who are not following you back as well as an option to filter verified from non-verified accounts, when I tested it the hover-over feature in which it displays details about a user’s profile and allows you to un-follow was not working. However, if you are looking to quickly and simply to screen people to follow back this tool works very well.
While unTweeps does not have the additional features that Tweepi and Friend or Follow do, I keep it bookmarked just in case these other services start charging. While somewhat useful for flushing stale followers, it lacks the ability to sort users and only displays a list of people who have not sent an update in a given number of days. Not sure why you would want or need their paid option which allows you to use the service more than 3 times per month.
Others: TwUnfollow is something I recall having used in the past, but as of this writing their site is experiencing issues and was currently down. Anything else you have seen or used?