Twitter—the wildly popular “micro-blogging” service—is making a giant impact on the internet, and joining the ranks of internet giants by doing so. If you’ve watched any cable news program in the last year, you’re probably already familiar with how it is helping to cure us all of the reckless habit of using sentences longer than 140 characters—this one is 163! (E-Gasp.) But, the lesser-known—and possibly more important—impact is how Twitter is helping to improve the traffic tracking tools online. The Back Story Twitter is a brilliant little shoehorn. Its 140 character limit was originally built into the system so that the service would...
Read MoreCharlotte Abbott released part two of our interview today—freeing it from the torment of pre-stage jitters. I have excerpted a few of the questions (and my responses) below. Please read the complete conclusion to this gripping yarn at Follow the Reader. What are the top two or three technologies have you found most valuable in engaging audiences online? Twitter for daily conversation. A blog as a conduit for book, author, and community content. Blip.tv for serving up high-resolution video with no size or time restrictions. For tracking your success and progress, ChartBeat, HootSuite, and Google Analytics are essential. [...] Do you see any downside to giving away...
Read MoreI realized the other day that I’ve now spent over ten years working with small business web sites. Has the internet even been around 10 years?! Was it really 13 years ago that I was ducking class and hiding in the school’s computer lab so I could “email” the fellow geek sitting at the computer next to me? (Apparently yes, it has been over ten years.) Over the last decade, I’ve built, rebuilt, optimized, launched, tracked, and torn down some pretty great (and pretty bad) sites. And I’ve learned a thing or two about how to squeezed the most out of a site’s visitor traffic. When business owners are looking to boost the effectiveness...
Read MoreLast week, Kat Meyer and I had the privilege and opportunity to lead a workshop at O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change Conference in Times Square. Kat titled it wonderfully: The Slow Marketing Movement: A Social Media Workshop for the Bookish. The benefits for book publishers and other companies that participate in the world of social media are well known at this point: community, word-of-mouth promotion, instant market research, etc. So we didn’t want to simply rehash the tired “Pie in the Sky” hullabaloo about social media. The folks attending our workshop were already sold on “why.” We wanted to present them with...
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