Category Archives ⇒ Tech

Media: Sometimes I feel like I’ve been reinventing the wheel since I started my first zine back in college. Here’s some highlights from this category:

* The Ear­ly Blog­ging Days (2005)

Facebook consulting explained

April 13, 2010
· Martin Kelley

Over the last year or so I’ve been asked to do an increas­ing amount of Face­book con­sult­ing. Most weeks I get a cou­ple of emails ask­ing for help and ask­ing how this sort of con­sult­ing works so I thought I’d explain my experience.

First off: Face­book is not all that hard. Putting a great-looking Face­book page up to sup­port your group, cause or school does­n’t require any pro­gram­ming. But it can be con­fus­ing, part­ly because Face­book is always in-process. They keep adapt­ing it and tweak­ing it. If you bought a book on Face­book cam­paign­ing a year ago, it would already be out of date.
My first job is to ask a few good ques­tions about what you want to do on Face­book and then set up the begin­nings of a site. I spend too much of my time already on Face­book but I also keep up with a lot of Face­book blogs and have recent copies of such won­der­ful tomes as “Face­book Mar­ket­ing for Dum­mies.” In most cas­es my job is to rec­om­mend a Face­book strat­e­gy based on best prac­tices and then to start up a Face­book Page for you. There are cer­tain flour­ish­es I can give, such as pick­ing a good icon or mak­ing a cus­tomized tab for first-time vis­i­tors. But the real val­ue of Face­book is clients shar­ing infor­ma­tion direct­ly with their audi­ence so my most impor­tant work is get­ting you excit­ed about doing it your­self. I’m real­ly just a cheer­leader for you.
I typ­i­cal­ly spend any­where from two to eight hours help­ing a client put togeth­er a Face­book page. If it looks like a project on the small end of the scale, I just charge the expect­ed amount upfront. I do keep track of my time: if we go over a lit­tle bit, I let it slide; if we still have a bit of a bal­ance then I’m there for ongo­ing ques­tions. Face­book con­sult­ing is not the core of my busi­ness but it can be a nice break from a big six-month devel­op­ment project and it’s helps with the cash­flow. I’m also a nat­u­ral­ly curi­ous fel­low so I like learn­ing a lit­tle bit about the kinds of things.

Quakermaps: DIY Friends FTW!

April 12, 2010
· Martin Kelley

A few weeks ago Mic­ah Bales IM’ed me, as he often does, and asked for my feed­back on a project he and Jon Watts were work­ing on. They were build­ing a map of all the Friends meet­ing­hous­es and church­es in the coun­try, sub-divided by geog­ra­phy, wor­ship style, etc.

My first reac­tion was “huh?” I war­i­ly respond­ed: “you do know about FGC’s Quak​erfind​er​.org and FWC­C’s Meet­ing Map, right?” I had helped to build both sites and attest­ed to the amount of work they rep­re­sent. I was think­ing of a kind way of dis­cour­ag­ing Mic­ah from this her­culean task when he told me he and Jon were half done. He sent me the link: a beau­ti­ful web­site, full of cool maps, which they’ve now pub­licly announced at Quak​ermaps​.com. I tried to find more prob­lems but he kept answer­ing them: “well, you need to have each meet­ing have it’s own page,” “it does,” “well but to be real­ly cool you’d have to let meet­ings update infor­ma­tion direct­ly” (an idea I sug­gest­ed to FGC last month), “they will.” There’s still a lot of inputting to be done, but it’s already fabulous.
Two peo­ple work­ing a series of long days inputting infor­ma­tion and embed­ding it on Word­Press have cre­at­ed the coolest Meet­ing direc­to­ry going. There’s no six-figure grants from Quak­er foun­da­tions, no cer­ti­fied pro­gram­mers, no series of orga­niz­ing con­sul­ta­tions. No Sales­force account, Dru­pal instal­la­tions, Ver­ti­cal Response signups. No high paid con­sul­tants yakking in what­ev­er consultant-speak is trendy this year.
Just two guys using open source and free, with the cost being time spent togeth­er shar­ing this project – time well spent build­ing their friend­ship, I suspect.
I hope every­one’s notic­ing just how cool this is – and not just the maps, but the way it’s come togeth­er. Mic­ah and Jon grew up in two dif­fer­ent branch­es of Friends. As I under­stand they got to know each oth­er larg­er­ly through Jon’s now-famous and much-debated video Dance Par­ty Erupts dur­ing Quak­er Meet­ing for Wor­ship. They built a friend­ship (which you can hear in Mic­ah’s recent inter­view of Jon) and then start­ed a cool project to share with the world.
Con­ver­gent Friends isn’t a the­ol­o­gy or a spe­cif­ic group of peo­ple, but a dif­fer­ent way of relat­ing and work­ing togeth­er. The way I see it, Quak​ermaps​.com proves that Quak​erQuak​er​.org is not a fluke. The inter­net expos­es us to peo­ple out­side our nat­ur­al com­fort zones and pro­vides us ways to meet, work togeth­er and pub­lish col­lab­o­ra­tions with min­i­mal invest­ment. The quick response, flex­i­bil­i­ty and off-the-clock ethos can come up with tru­ly inno­vat­ed work. I think the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is enter­ing a new era of DIY orga­niz­ing and I’m very excit­ed. Mic­ah and Jon FTW!
Read more:

Google’s Sidewiki 101 for Brand Managers

November 23, 2009
· Martin Kelley

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the empow­er­ment of aver­age users. With Twit­ter and Face­book pages, indi­vid­u­als can now respond back to com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions with a few strokes of the key­board. Google’s recent­ly entered the fray with an intrigu­ing project called Sidewi­ki. Once again, com­pa­nies and non­prof­its inter­est­ed in man­ag­ing their online brands need to be aware of the new medi­um and how to track it.

What is Sidewi­ki?
Google start­ed its sidewi­ki project in Sep­tem­ber 2009. It’s a side­bar that can attach to any page on the inter­net via the Google Tool­bar. Users gain the abil­i­ty to com­ment on any page on the inter­net. Google uses a rank­ing sys­tem based on votes and var­i­ous algo­rithms to deter­mine the order of the comments.

When a user of the Google Tool­bar vis­its a page with Sidewi­ki notes they see a small blue but­ton of the left side of the page with two white chevrons (see screen­shot on the right). Click­ing on this opens the Sidewi­ki side­bar. Here they will see com­ments left by pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors. They are be able to add their own comments. 

Vision­ar­ies have long dreamed of a web with this kind of two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion but sim­i­lar side­bar com­ment­ing sys­tems have failed to gain enough momen­tum to become viable. If this were just anoth­er venture-capital-fueled attempt, it would be some­thing mar­keters could ignore unless and until it became wide­ly used. But with Google behind Sidewi­ki, it’s a ser­vice we need to take seri­ous­ly from the start.

Users Talk­ing Back
When we put togeth­er web­sites, we get to con­trol the mes­sage of our lit­tle cor­ner of the inter­net – we have the final say on the mate­r­i­al we present. If Sidewi­ki becomes pop­u­lar, this will no longer be true. Fans, dis­grun­tled employ­ees and com­peti­tors can all start mark­ing up our sites – yikes! But those brands that have embraced the Web 2.0 mod­el will love anoth­er place where they can inter­act with their audi­ence. Today’s mar­ket­ing goal is mind­share – how much of a user’s atten­tion span can you win over. The more you get vis­i­tors to think about your brand or your mes­sage, the more like­ly that they will buy or rec­om­mend your prod­uct or ser­vice. You need to be active on what­ev­er online chan­nel your audi­ence is using.

Watch­ing the Con­ver­sa­tions
What’s a good brand man­ag­er to do? The first thing is to make sure you have the lat­est ver­sion of Google Tool­bar installed on your work­ing brows­er (get it here) and that you have the Sidewi­ki ser­vice enabled (I’ve start­ed a Sidewi­ki for this entry so if it’s work­ing you’ll see the blue but­ton in your browser).

Brand Man­age­ment
Google allows web­site own­ers the first com­ment. If you are reg­is­tered as the own­er of a site via Google Web­mas­ter Tools, then you get first say: when you post to the Sidewi­ki of a page you con­trol, Google gives you the top spot. This is very good. Should you do it?

Prob­a­bly not. At least not yet. I don’t see peo­ple using Sidewi­ki yet. Most web­sites still don’t have any com­ments. Even Google’s projects often fail to gain trac­tion and there’s no guar­an­tee that Sidewi­ki will take off. If your page does­n’t have any com­ments, I would­n’t rec­om­mend that you make the first. If there are no Sidewi­ki entries, the blue but­ton won’t be there and vis­i­tors prob­a­bly won’t even think to comment.

If you notice that a vis­i­tor has start­ed a Sidewi­ki for your site by leav­ing a com­ment, then it’s time to log into your Google Web­mas­ters account and leave an offi­cial wel­come mes­sage. Even though you’re sec­ond to the con­ver­sa­tion, you will get first posi­tion thanks to your own­er­ship of the website.

The intro­duc­to­ry note should briefly wel­come vis­i­tors. It will appear along­side your web­site so there’s no need to repeat your mis­sion state­ment, but it is a place where you can give help­ful nav­i­ga­tion tips and stress any action­able items that the casu­al vis­i­tor might miss. You might con­sid­er invit­ing vis­i­tors to sign up for your site’s email list, for example.

The Future
Users can tie their Sidewi­ki com­ments into Twit­ter and Face­book accounts. They can leave video com­ments. If the ser­vice takes off there will sure­ly be a mini-industry built around com­ment opti­miza­tion. Spam­mers will get hard at work to game the sys­tem. But none is real­ly hap­pen­ing now. Despite a bit of fear-mongering on mar­ket­ing blogs, Google Sidewi­ki is a long ways away from being some­thing to lose sleep over. 

More Infor­ma­tion:

Slim Goodbody Facebook Fan Page

November 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Facebook Branding: Slim GoodbodyPop­u­lar chil­dren’s entertainer/educator Slim Good­body is one busy guy: most week­days of the school year find him spread­ing the mes­sage of good health in his trade­mark body suit (“When a Body needs some­body there’s nobody like Good­body!”).

He’s been doing this work for decades now and has a vast store­house of videos, prod­ucts and fans.
Slim came to me to build a brand­ed Face­book presence. 

A typ­i­cal work­load for a Face­book brand­ing project is:

  • Set up the Page;
  • Coor­di­nate with the client for a good pro­file graphic;
  • Adding a num­ber of pho­tos and videos;
  • Help set up a post­ing strategy;
  • Pro­vide phone sup­port to answer ques­tions on best practices;
  • Give feed­back on cam­paign (like Face­book’s “Insights” stats)

For Slim, we decid­ed to rely on Face­book’s native apps as much as pos­si­ble. This became espe­cial­ly impor­tant when Face­book shift­ed it’s feed lay­out (yet again) to focus less on user streams and more on an algorithmically-determined best posts. The more inte­grat­ed your site is with Face­book, the bet­ter chance your pieces will have of show­ing up on Fan’s user streams.

We used Face­book Markup Lan­guage (FBML) to cre­ate cus­tom Page tabs for inte­gra­tion with his exist­ing online store and list­ing of tour dates. We would have liked to use FB’s Events appli­ca­tion but it does­n’t allow for the vol­ume of tour dates nec­es­sary to cov­er a busy enter­tain­er like Slim Goodbody!

See it live: www​.face​book​.com/​s​l​i​m​g​o​o​d​b​ody

The Limits of the Real Time Web

October 19, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Beth Kan­tor’s non­prof­it blog has an good arti­cle ask­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ties for real-time web inter­ac­tion and asks whether it’s pos­si­ble for the web to let some­one be in two places at the same time:

What inter­ests me is if this is the next evo­lu­tion of the social web -
what is the cul­ture shift that needs to hap­pen with­in a non­prof­it to
embrace it?  Of course, I want to also know what the val­ue or benefit
is to nonprofits?

For
me, the eye-opening moment of real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion came last win­ter when I was plan­ning a con­fer­ence with two friends. The three of us knew each oth­er pret­ty well and we had all
met each oth­er one-on-one but we had nev­er been in the same room togeth­er (this would­n’t hap­pen until the first evening of the con­fer­ence we were co-leading!). A month to go we sched­uled a con­fer­ence call to hash out details.

I got on Skype from my New Jer­sey home and called Robin on her Bay Area land­line and Wess on his cell­phone in Los Ange­les. The mixed tele­pho­ny was fun enough, but the
amaz­ing part came when we brought our com­put­ers into the con­ver­sa­tion. With­in min­utes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started
cut­ting and past­ing agen­da items. Some­one made a
ref­er­ence to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the oth­er two
by Twit­ter. Wess had a sec­ondary wiki going, we were book­mark­ing resources on Deli­cious and send­ing links by instant messenger.

This is qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent from the two-places-at-once scenario
that Beth Kan­tor was imag­in­ing because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one
anoth­er. Our atten­tion was more focused on the work at hand.

I’m more skep­ti­cal about non­prof­its engag­ing in the live tweet­ing phe­nom­e­non – fast-pace, real-time updates on Twit­ter and oth­er “micro-blogging” ser­vices. These tend to be so
much use­less noise. How use­ful can we be if our atten­tion is so divided?

Last week a non­prof­it I fol­low used Twit­ter to cov­er a press
con­fer­ence. I’m sor­ry to say that the flood of tweets amount­ed to a lot of use­less triv­ia. So what that the
politi­cian you invit­ed actu­al­ly showed up in the room? That he actually
walked to the podi­um? That he actu­al­ly start­ed talk­ing? That he ticked
through your talk­ing points? These are all things we knew would happen
when the press con­fer­ence was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.

What would have been useful
were links to back­ground issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five
minute wrap-up video released with­in an hour of the even­t’s end. They
could have been coor­di­nat­ed in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had post­ed an Twit­ter update every half
hour or so w/one select­ed high­light and a link to a live Ustream​.tv link I
prob­a­bly would have checked it out. The dif­fer­ence is that I would have
cho­sen to have my work­day inter­rupt­ed by all of this extra activ­i­ty. In the online
econ­o­my, atten­tion is the cur­ren­cy and any unusu­al activ­i­ty is
a kind of mugging.

When I talk to clients, I invari­ably tell that “social media” is inher­ent­ly social, which is to say that it’s about peo­ple com­mu­ni­cat­ing. The excite­ment we bring to our every­day com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the judg­ment we show in shap­ing the mes­sage is much more impor­tant than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.

Elisabeth Olver, Artist & Painter

September 4, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Elisabeth Olver ArtistElis­a­beth is a painter and artist who spe­cial­izes in orig­i­nal acrylic paint­ings and giclee prints of nature and South Jer­sey beach scenes. Her exist­ing site was attrac­tive, but it did­n’t have online order­ing and she was­n’t able to update it herself.

We put togeth­er a fea­tures list and then went through a round of con­cept screen­shots which I built in Adobe Fire­works and Pho­to­shop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a cus­tomized Mov­able Type site. A spe­cial­ized tem­plate allows her to enter infor­ma­tion about the each piece: medi­um, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are host­ed on Flickr). Mov­able Type pulls these togeth­er into var­i­ous cat­e­go­ry and indi­vid­ual art pages, with automatically-generated Pay­pal “Buy” but­tons for avail­able pieces. We stressed search-engine vis­i­bil­i­ty so there are many cat­e­gories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Vis­it: Elis­a­beth Olver

Free as in Friend

July 31, 2009
· Martin Kelley

In Chris Ander­son­’s new book Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price, he looks into the mean­ing of the word free. The word has two mean­ings: free as in “free­dom” and free as in “price.” Most of the romance lan­guages divide these mean­ings into two dif­fer­ent words, derived from liber and grati­is. Our double-duty Eng­lish word comes from Old Eng­lish fre­on or fre­ogan, mean­ing “to free, love.” In addi­tion to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Ander­son quotes ety­mol­o­gist Dou­glas Harper:

The pri­ma­ry sense seems to have been “beloved, friend”; which in some lan­guages (notably Ger­man­ic and Celtic) devel­oped a sense of “free,” per­haps from the terms “beloved” or “friend” being applied to the free mem­bers of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)

This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the per­fect word for the ear­ly trans­la­tors of the Eng­lish bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:

Hence­forth I call you not ser­vants; for the ser­vant knoweth not what
his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I
have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not
cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that
what­so­ev­er ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I com­mand you, that ye love one another.

This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spir­i­tu­al trouble-makers in Eng­land in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they start­ed call­ing one anoth­er Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, new­ly freed of the tyrants of their age by their per­son­al expe­ri­ence of Christ as friend, spread­ing the good news that we were all free and all com­mand­ed to love one another.

Google Voice’s cavalcade of ringing phones

July 17, 2009
· Martin Kelley

I once read an insight­ful obser­va­tion about the geo-location rev­o­lu­tion that came about with the pop­u­lar­l­iza­tion of cell phones: In the old days of POTS (your land­line, lit­er­al­ly “plain old tele­phone ser­vice”), when you dialed a num­ber you knew where you were call­ing but you did­n’t know who was going to pick up. With cell phones this is reversed: you know who you are call­ing but you have no idea where they are.

Only, this isn’t quite true. To find some­one you have to call their house, their work­place, their cell­phone. What you are real­ly call­ing isn’t the per­son but one of their phones. Much of the time you end up with voicemail.

Well, the promise of the geolo­ca­tion rev­o­lu­tion has been tak­en to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion. I’ve final­ly got­ten my invi­ta­tion to Google Voice, for­mer­ly Grand Cen­tral, the per­son­al­ized tele­phone switch­ing ser­vice that the big‑G is open­ing up to U.S. cus­tomers this sum­mer. It’s free and it gives you the ulti­mate in vir­tu­al­i­ty: a phone num­ber that is not con­nect­ed to any phone. When peo­ple call your Google Voice num­ber, any num­ber of phones start ring­ing. Which one you answer depends on your geog­ra­phy and convenience.

I have three phones set to ring on Google Voice calls depend­ing on the type of call: my cell phone, my home phone and my com­put­er (a Skype plan with it’s own incom­ing phone num­ber). If I’m dis­sat­is­fied with the phone I’m on I can press the star key to have all my phones ring anew and trans­fer the call seam­less­ly (a very addic­tive past-time).  It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing evo­lu­tion of the phone into a vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion device.

Intrigued? You can sign up for a Google Voice invite from its site. It’s not a per­fect sys­tem. To use it most effec­tive­ly requires chang­ing your phon­ing habits and mak­ing a very seri­ous switch. I sug­gest Life­hack­er’s guide “How to Ease Your Tran­si­tion to Google Voice” as a good place to start.