Jul

2

LinkedIn explained for the common folk!

Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life, Social Media | Leave a Comment 


Every time someone asks me to explain why I use and promote LinkedIn, it seems I have a good 15 or 20 minute conversation coming. Then they invariably want to check out my profile and see who I’m LinkedIn to.

Now I’ll just point them to this excellent CommonCraft video. Simple, easy to understand, and entertaining. And they can easily get their own LinkedIn account.

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Jun

26

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment 


Hey! How’ya doin’!
There are many ways to define your blog’s success; Hits, Links, Trackbacks, Comments, PageRank, Subscribers, etc.

These are all good indicators of activity. Your blog is busy. You’re getting a lot of pageviews. People are hitting and reading and crawling the pages and posts of your blog. All is good, according to the numbers.

But those are only numbers, not people with goals and needs — your visitors and their reason for visiting your blog. How do you measure up in the Visitor metric? I bet you won’t find that one in many web analysis textbooks.

Did you find what you’re looking for?
Good question! Because short of receiving email or comment posts telling you about a problem or concern, you have no idea if the 30 unique visitors to your blog today managed to achieve their goal for visiting! You just know that they visited.

Current web analytics platforms like StatCounter, Google Analytics, Microsoft AdCentre Analytics, or even the cool new live analytics application Woopra (more on that in another post), can’t really tell you if any visitor actually read and learned something from your latest post. They can only tell you what that visitor did while they were on your blog. Period.

Ask the question.
’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently launched a free, cool little web application (4Q) that will allow you better understand your visitor behaviour by presenting them with a friendly and polite ‘exit survey’ when they leave your blog.

The way it works.

4Q employs a two-stage invitation process. When visitors arrive at your site, they will be presented an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, will be launched and will wait in the background for the visitor to complete his or her session. 4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.
(from the FAQ)

What’s in it for me?
Knowledge. Direct feedback. 4Q survey results enable you to know that the sampled visitors said they’re happy, or unhappy. You know that they’ve said they’ve achieved their task or goal. And you’ve asked them for specific feedback so you can improve. All benefits for anyone who cares about improving the visitor’s .

So, to really know if your visitor was satisfied, you need to ask them. Nicely, politely, but ask them. It shows you care about your visitor’s .

Now you know, and you’re much better off that simply guessing based on the numbers. Oh happy day!

*** Update ***
Apologies for the images not showing up. Bad formatting for Brad.

As well: as I noticed when replying to Margaret in the SocialMediaToday version:

…Also, one thing I neglected to mention in the post, the survey doesn’t
appear for every visitor. You can scale the sample rate in the
application. The default sample rate is 10% of the unique visitors, so
one in ten will be asked to participate…

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Jun

23

Tweaking your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin to support Wordpress 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | Leave a Comment 


FeedBurner Logo (© FeedBurner, Inc.)
Creative Commons License photo credit: magbag

Sorry for the uber tech in this post, but I thought this was a simple fix that anyone running a Wordpress 2.5+ blog could do if they wanted to enable ‘Tag Feeds’.

Before I get into the how, let’s explore the why briefly.

Some background:

  • Feedburner is the service I (and many many other) bloggers use to improve RSS Feed performance and measure readership of our RSS feeds.
  • The FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin is a component for (the blogging platform I use here) that simplifies the administration and implementation of Feedburner.

The current incarnation of the FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin doesn’t support the new feature of RSS Tag Feeds. No big deal if you don’t care about allowing your visitors to subscribe to your based on Tag. But you’re missing an opportunity to allow your readers to better filter the if that’s the case.

For example, lets say a visitor is only interested in receiving my posts on photography. They don’t care about all this technology, web , usability, or search engine optimization that I may be about. They only care about my photography posts. 2.5+ allows you to subscribe to any Tag Feed or Category Feed. But not if you’re using an unmodified FeedSmith plugin. Fear not, I’ve got a fix for you in a moment.

The way the current FeedSmith plugin works is that it takes all my feed subscription requests (comment, category, tag, etc) and returns only the main blog RSS feed, which is the main feed at Feedburner. Not good if you want to have an RSS Feed of only my photography tagged posts.

The workaround is quite simple and requires slightly modifying your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin. Here’s how:

  1. Navigate to the main Plugins page. Scroll down until you find the Feedburner / FeedSmith plugin. Click on the Disable link in the right-hand column. When the page refreshes, scroll back down and click on the Edit link.
  2. The Plugin Editor screen will open. Scroll down in the edit window until you find the function function ol_feed_redirect()
  3. In that section you’ll be adding text to a line of code. Change the text that reads
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&
     to read
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && !is_tag() &&
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and press the Update File button.
  5. Then, go back to the main Plugins page, and re-enable the FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin by clicking on the Enable link.

Congratulations, you’ve just re-enabled Tag RSS Feeds for your 2.5+ blog whilst maintaining Feedburner compatibility for the main feed.

Bonus for the advanced student: Since your Tag RSS Feeds are now separated from the main blog feed, you can set up discreet Feedburner feeds for select tags. Unfortunately the little above won’t automagically redirect RSS Subscriptions to Feedburner for you, as the FeedSmith Plugin does. You’ll have to manually publish the Feed URL, thusly:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogbradgriercomWordpress">My tag feed hosted on Feedburner</a>

Which would render thusly:

My Wordpress tag feed hosted on Feedburner.

Jun

20

How has the Logitech G15 (v2) fared after 6 months?

Filed Under In the life, Review | Leave a Comment 


You may remember that I went through a rather interesting guarantee replacement with Logitech over the wearing paint on my original G15 keyboard. The short version is that they happily replaced it with a new, Version 2 G15.

I thought I’d take a moment and update my thoughts about it.

  1. I miss the three-key wide layout of the original G15. for , the bank of keys laid out three wide were much better than the existing single bank vertically aligned.
  2. I miss the blue key lighting. Amber is neat, but I still like the blue.
  3. The LCD display is a bit smaller. I may have to get reading glasses (not yet) to read my custom LCD Studio display…and that’s a neat thing.
  4. LCD Studio works fine with it. This allows for custom displays that you can configure for anything from in-game messages to current ammunition levels.
  5. USB Ports seem more stable. On the original G15 the seemed to draw more power, causing my computer to give me issue. With this the V2 G15, they’ve all gone away.

And as for the key paint? I’m getting a bit of shine on the space-bar and other commonly use keys, but the paint isn’t wearing through. I’m keeping my fingers crossed (which makes typing darned difficult!).

Jun

19

Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5-6, 2008

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Review | Leave a Comment 


Wild Abandon
Creative Commons License photo credit: dandy_fsj

To wrap up this interview series with Krista Vieira, we’re featuring the Key Messages generated by conference attendees.

If you missed the interview series read these:

Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5-6, 2008

  • We need a clarity of understanding of what our website is for.
  • To much choice = no choice.
  • We must focus on what our customers want. Why are they coming to our website? What task are they trying to complete?

Customers

Customers are:

  • Harsh, demanding and difficult
  • Skeptical and cynical of authority
  • Have the power on the web - not the organization
  • Dictators, not kings
  • Impatient
  • Quick to use they’re favourite button - the Back button

Web reality #1: The web takes the power to control information away from the organization and gives it to the people.

The web is about giving real information and facts. The web allows people to get to know a subject better or make a better decision. People can comparison shop; read reviews; find out what other people think, etc.

The web is the land of A.D.D. We live in a money rich, time poor economy. Time is our most valuable resource. We measure our website’s success by the time it takes users to do something; the quicker they perform the task, the better. The sin of the modern economy - though shall not waste my time.

Web reality #2: Using the web is not a planned activity; it’s rushed, impatient and hurried. People are searching the web in between commercial breaks, after they’ve put the children to bed, when they’re tired. Accept this: the web is ALWAYS fitted in between something else.

Building Trust

  • People trust people like themselves, not authority figures. They will trust the factory worker more than the CEO.
  • Give the truth on the web not PR or marketing. This will build trust.
  • No one believes an organization is perfect, so they don’t expect it.

Importance of Simplicity

  • We read on the web like we’re riding down an escalator.
  • needs to be direct and to the point. Think speed of action and clarity of message.
  • The web is an active doing medium, so use the language of action. Don’t talk about what you’ve done or what you’re going to do. Don’t become the passive communicator, become the active facilitator of the .
  • Every time you add to your website, you complicate things. There is always a trade-off with simplicity. To make something more simple means something else will be more complicated. Focus on doing your top task well, then worry about the rest of the website.
  • Something that’s easy is immediately doable. Show by doing; don’t talk about it. For example: doesn’t have to explain to you how to search. The simplicity of it immediately makes it usable.
  • Don’t talk about an application form, let people use it.

Remember, websites are built from, and function, on words.

The Web is Self-Service or Having a Customer-Centric Website

Only having information on the web is the greatest mismanagement of a website. People are not coming to websites looking for information. Do you go to an information booth and just ask them to give you information? People come to the web to solve a problem.

Information only has value when associated with a task. Identify the most important tasks and make sure your customer’s can find them and complete them quickly.

Web reality #3: Sometimes we spend so much time doing things wrong, that we don’t have the time to do things right. The best websites focus on their top tasks and keep improving them. They find out how people are reacting.
3 core rules of self-service:

  1. Convenience
  2. Speed
  3. Price (the web is the land of the cheap deal)

If you can’t do price, you’d better do the other two really well.

Web reality #4: Having a customer-centric website means the focuses on what the customer wants. When an organization doesn’t know its customers or what they want, they end up with a put-it-upper website: can you put this up for me by Thursday? The 20,000 page website is built by put-it-uppers.

Economies that aren’t successful put numerous steps in the way of their customers. For example, in Peru it takes 289 steps to set up a company.

We measure web success by the amount of time it takes people to do something.

To have a customer-centric website:

  1. Identify the top tasks
  2. Speak the language the customer is using. Don’t make them use the organization’s language.

The web is where you go to do stuff. In order for a person to do something, a website must be useful. We must potty train our websites so we get rid of the we-we’s: We did this; we launched that.

We must focus on what the customer wants to do.

Additional Resources:

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