Alpha Mind Blog

Shel Israel, discussing how BuzzLogic Calculates Influence, says:

What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media’s goals is less tangible.

(emphasis mine)

What he’s referring to at the start of the quote is Kami Huyse’s wonderful work calculating the ROI of the Sea World San Antonio campaign that launched their new roller coaster. It was a great case study by a fast-rising star of social PR.

But I’m struck by that last sentence of Shel’s quote (and not only by the grammatical gaffe.) When I heard Shel Holtz discussing Kami’s work on For Immediate Release, as soon as he mentioned measurement of ROI, and before he got into the meat of the segment, I remember thinking “Who measures the ROI of having a desk or wearing decent clothes?”

Yes, when you launch a social media campaign, you ought to think about how you’ll define and measure success. But if you’re still on the fence about using social media at all, I believe it’s time you started thinking about having a presence (on Twitter and a blog at minimum) in much the same way you think about basic office equipment and your business wardrobe. No, a social media presence isn’t a minimum requirement of doing business, not just yet, but that corner will be turned so soon, so suddenly, and so quietly, that you’re safest–by far–turning the corner yourself as soon as you can.

Chris Carfi would have gotten a write-up here on The Alpha Mind in December except that my blog was so badly beaten up by hackers it took me well into the new year to get it cleaned up.

If I’d written about Chris, it would have been because he was in a tie for Best Conversationalist at a geek dinner in San Francisco. (No mean distinction, considering the tie was with Shel Israel.)

But the man doesn’t need me to help make him a star… cuz Chris Carfi was featured in some footage on CNN yesterday.

Congrats, Chris. Alas, the clip says nothing about Cerado and what it does. But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

And yet… and yet…

if you had just acted psychotic, you could have gotten a million views on YouTube, where that seems to be what passes for funny.

Mike Masnick asks: Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary? The answer is in this video on YouTube. Titled “Eyes On the Fair Use of the Prize,” it tells how an outstanding documentary from the 1980s has been effectively disappeared by copyright burdens:

So, to stay with the same topic for a while:

Bryan Person  blogs about Comcast’s efforts to use Twitter to improve customer service.

He makes the point that Comcast is paying attention to everyone, not only to A-list bloggers.

Apparently that is a real, rather hot issue. Note the number of comments on Scoble’s post suggesting that, because he’s an A-list blogger, Robert is trying to bully Facebook.

I’m pretty sure companies take a blogger’s Technorati influence score into consideration when they think about how to respond to a blogger. It’s good to know other are treating the social media more democratically.

And I salute Bryan for pointing it out. Companies that behave this way deserve as much love as we little people can send them.

A bit more about Rodrigo Sepulveda’s little problem with Facebook:

Last week, through PRobecast, I learned about the 2-word pitch. Very simply, it’s a pitch consisting of “‘Google’ + [one other word]“. Of course, you can only use it if you ensure that the second word is a search term which, when entered into Google, will bring up your site.

It may be a solution for over-zealous scanning algorithms on over-yenta social media sites that don’t want you ever to send one of their users out to another domain. Rodrigo is probably right that Facebook, like YouTube, scans messages and disallows URLs (although YouTube practices prior restraint–it scans as soon as you hit the “post” button, and disallows the comment if it contains a URL).

The solution, of course, is not to use the URL, but to tell your friends what to Google. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a single word. If your site contains a unique combination of terms (remember GoogleWhacking?), Google will bring folks to your site. And YT and FB will probably let you do it without whinging.

Scoble says Facebook still sucks. His evidence: The eviction of Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda from the social site’s hallowed halls.

Herewith a continuation of what will surely be a series about how and why technology doesn’t work. Why so SO SO much of technology doesn’t work.

Soon, I hope, I’ll start writing about why everything’s busted. For this post, though, in addition to the above links, I’ll only note that after Lee Hopkins asked his readers how to manage personal information, and the comments ran 3 to 0 in favor of low-tech, he has gone with the new flow and shopped for the proper configuration of pen and paper. 

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…

My last post included 2 YouTube videos. I created the post using Live Writer and Wordpress.

Since it was a nightmare, and…

since I spent an extra hour on the post, figuring out how to do it, and…

since ShandyKing’s post (which comes up first on when you Google “wordpress embed youtube videos”) doesn’t solve the problem, at least for me, and…

since I love Wordpress, and…

since I love my fellow bloggers and want them all to succeed…

… I’m going to tell how I did it.

1. Create the post you want, absent the videos. If you are using a posting tools other than WordPress itself, do all you want in that tool and then send it to WP as a draft.
2. In WP’s post editing page, click “Save and Continue Editing”
3. Click “Preview”
4. On the preview, make a note of exactly what words you put last in your post.
5. With the preview window open, get the page source.- In FireFox, that’s ctl-U (or alt-V, O).
   - IE7 it’s alt-V,C.
   - In Opera it’s ctl-F3.
   - In anything else you’re on your own.
6. Paste the entire page source into a text editor (Notepad or something better), unless your browser already put it into an editor for you. (Opera has its very own editor, how cool is that?)
7. Go to YouTube and get the source code to embed the video.
8. In the editor, paste the code exactly where you want the video to be. (I always put it between a <p> </p> pair, having intentionally left a blank line in my post to insert it in.)
9. Now, (still in the text editor, NOT in WordPress) select all the code from
   - just after <div class=”entrytext”> to
   - after the last closing tag that encloses the last words
   of your post. (Sorry that’s vague, but for example, if your
   last words were part of a link, the “last closing tag” may
   be </a>, while if you ended with plain text, the last closing
   tag is probably </p>.)
10. Copy this text.
11. Go back to the edit-post window in WordPress. Switch from Visual to Code.
12. Select everything in the editing window. Delete it and paste the code you copied from the editor.
13. Click Save and Continue Editing.
14. If it looks right, go on to the next step. If it doesn’t look right, you have something to figure out that I can’t help you with. But my 1st guess would be that you copied too much or too little code from the text editor. 2nd guess: you didn’t get the WP edit window completely empty before pasting.
15. Back in the WP edit window, again select and delete everything. Again paste (your paste buffer should still contain the correct code, right?)
16. Now Publish.

The key was making sure you re-paste the code into the edit window immediately before publishing. Because when you previewed, WP made a hash of the code, and what it put there must be eliminated.

I didn’t say it was easy, right? You have to be comfortable enough with HTML tags to know just how much code to copy from the text editor. But with that caveat, it’s really not all that hard. And it works, at least for me. Whereas WP messes it up pretty much every time I try to do it differently.

WordPress is updating fairly often. I imagine WP will have this problem figured out in another version or 2 or 3. Meantime, this is what works for me.

BTW, I’m using WP 2.3.1. My browser is FireFox 2.0.0.11, running on Windows Vista

del.icio.us Tags: WordPress,YouTube,embed,videos,how

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