Nature reclaiming a building at Pear & Cary Streets, Richmond, VA. 2003. (since demolished)

[originally published 3/6/2009 on my old DotNetNuke blog, moved now to Tumblr & republished]

When this website ran on DotNetNuke, I had a module I created called TwitterDNN that loaded a real-time view of the five most recents posts (“tweets”) I’ve made on Twitter.  It did this via a call directly to Twitter’s API at the server level, and rendered the results out as the page loaded, as opposed to using the JSON callback that many other Twitter badges/modules use, which execute client-side Javascript to render out the results.

As a result of doing it through the Twitter API, the contents of my tweets appeared within the HTML of my pages when Google and other search engines index the site.

Case in point: several weeks ago I was having a conversation on Twitter with @StyleWeekly about the fake (IMHO, disingenuous) ads for Syke Energy Drink.  They are actually an anti-smoking campaign that is attempting to market to emo kids or something like that in an attempt to be hip and cool (reminds me of the L. Ron Bumquist character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I digress). There is no actual product called Syke Energy Drink.  Style published a great article summarizing what was actually going on with the Syke campaign.

During the course of our conversation they asked how I’d come to figure it out.  I replied that on the TV ads, in tiny letters you can see “VTSF” so I had Googled “vtsf syke” and came across some articles with more information about the campaign.

Ironically, that tweet, which was rendered on this site via the TwitterDNN module, got indexed by Google, and as of this writing [and still true 9 months later!] it appears on the first page of results when you search for “vtsf syke” and thusly has been sending visitors my way which caused me to notice it in my Google Analytics Keyword Referrer report, which prompted this post, which will probably get indexed by Google…

So anyway, I think my point here is that if you have a website, and use Twitter, then there is some value to rendering your tweets onto your site, and probably more so if the site content and what you’re tweeting are related so that resulting traffic is relevant. Since my module only shows the five most recent tweets, the “vtsf syke” one has long since scrolled off, and this article is now the only content I have here about it.

However, if you’re going to render out your tweets and you want them indexed on your site by Google, look for a module that does it through the API on the server-side, as opposed to the JSON/Javascript methods that seem to be more popular (and admittedly more accessible) because those methods don’t get indexed by Google the way they’re rendered out.

myparentswereawesome:

Paul

Submitted by Chris

Now that I’m on tumblr I can reblog this pic of my dad.

sdk7327:

I have been doing a lot of research on social media and its value, and I think it is interesting how many businesses want to leverage it to make money. The problem they come across when doing this is that they don’t know about the commitment social media requires to make it effective. It is not just about slapping up a blog or facebook fan page, its about building relationships with people.

Very true.  Helping them with the proper use of measurement tools like Google Analytics and its Goal Tracking can help prove the ROI on these efforts. For example of 50% of inbound traffic from Facebook leads to purchases (or whatever the goal), yet 1% of inbound traffic from Twitter accomplishes the same goal, then the commitment to Facebook is showing a much greater payoff.

Abandoned Brewery (2003) #RVA

sdk7327:

thatssodigital:

Interesting, candid interviews from some folks at Google, IDEO and more on what it takes to get a creative job.

(via core77)

(p.s., IDEO hires about 9% of those that apply, so if you land a gig there you’re something special)

In the past 14 years I’ve been involved in about a half-dozen start-up companies of one sort or another, and given advice to quite a few others. One thing I’ve noticed during this time is that entrepreneurs who focus too much on the meta of the business, or the things not directly related to getting new business and generating revenue, are the least likely to succeed.

I was guilty of this myself when I was 18 and wanted to start doing freelance computer consulting right out of high school.  I spent an inordinate amount of time designing and redesigning business cards, brochures, descriptions of services, creating detailed pro-forma cash flow statements, and other things that weren’t essential to the work I was trying to do — go to people’s houses and help them with their computers.

I’m not suggesting that anyone doesn’t need business cards, but the clients I got back then were all through word of mouth. My pager number (this was 1996 after all) was passed around more often on scraps of paper than the business cards I made.

In another venture I was involved with that never took off, the founder (a smart and inspiring person) was very focused on creating binders full of technical specifications for what could have been a relatively simple database program. Quite a bit of time was spent on developing and refining business plan documents, creating pro-forma financials, and exploring, in detail, all sorts of variations on the direction of the business.  Equipment was purchased before office space was acquired.  All the while burning through quite a bit of investment capital without even starting the activities that would actually generate revenue. At any given time that was always just two or three steps away.

In my mind this is “playing business” just like kids “play house” with their parent’s pots and pans in the kitchen.  These days the conventional wisdom seems to be to bootstrap your business, get to a point where you’re generating revenue as soon as possible, and fail fast if you’re going to fail.

Being distracted by peripheral tasks that aren’t critical to getting to that revenue generating point will prevent you from failing fast. It will just drag out the inevitable failure of a venture that isn’t going to succeed anyway.

Focus and move quickly on just the things you truly need to do to start pulling in money, and don’t sweat the things that aren’t absolutely essential to building real momentum toward your most important goals.

BOOM! Brown’s Island, June 1, 2003, 7am. #RVA

This town¹ has an amazing creative class of young professionals, many of whom have setup shop as independant consultants, freelancers, and small businesses providing their services for hire.

Unfortunately I believe this means that alot of this creative talent is also spread thin across the aspects of running a small business that aren’t directly production oriented: marketing, business development, accounting, project management, and other administrative tasks.

These things are no doubt important, but which is better: five designers who have to enter time, invoice clients, collect bills, and balance Quickbooks, or five designers who only have to enter time to be tracked?

There are certainly some companies of this size and scale around locally, but I suspect many of them got to their size through the use of serious investment capital. What I’m describing is more of a bootstrapped merger of many equals. Also, most of these other companies have a very top-down management and ownership structure.

It seems to me that if several of the small creative firms in town were to combine their businesses into one larger shop that they could realize some serious economies of scale.  They would be able to reduce what is, between the lot of them, quite a bit of overlapping administrative management and physical space/equipment requirements.  Each person would have more time to focus on their true passion, the direct production of creative work.

On the surface though, it seems like there would be some problems getting something like this to happen — things like trust, ego, work habits and technology/tool preferences, parity of finances and economic worth, and individual goals would all have to fall exactly in to place. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilema.

If this venture were approached like a traditional business acquisition or roll-up, no doubt a few people “at the top” would be looking to take unfair advantage of the talents of others. If it were approached as a “co op”, then there might not be enough cohesiveness to make the economies of scale pay off (and hold together) in the long run.  A middle ground would need to be found — a relatively flat management/partnership structure aligned toward common goals and fair pay-for-performance income distribution.

The goal here would not be to create a monolithic all-encompassing organization. Something between 20 and 40 people would probably be about the right size.  During the dot-com boom I worked for a company where I was about the 35th employee, and watched it grow to over 200 just in the local office.  All other things excluded, once we passed 50 people and kept growing things really changed.  Never should this be something where everyone doesn’t know everyone else’s name and who they are personally.

An argument can be made that an arrangement like this would make the organization more competitive as well. The people who are most skilled at business development would, if that is where their passion lies, focus on just that. People who are the best designers would have more time to design, the best programmers more time to code. In theory this would lead to a more productive, more focused, more successful company.

¹ I’m writing about Richmond, VA but also in an Onion-esque “area man” context.