Social Media Branding in the Age of Obama

"Optimizing social media is not an exact science. It's about using web analytics data to make informed immediate decisions and to formulate long term strategies". This is a quote from the book "Social Media Branding in the Age of Obama" by Eric Hamilton.

There has been a lot of talk about social media in the past 12 months. 2010 has just arrived and everybody claims to be a social media expert for 2010. If you are in business, then I am sure that you have been approached by a So-Called Social Media Expert. In addition, you probably have been getting a lot of pressure from colleagues, subordinates, managers, friends, news and other sources about embracing social media. News Flash: You don't need to know about the trendy buzz words in Social Media to be effective. Do you know about Digg, Delicious, Plaxo, StumbleUpon or Flickr? No? It doesn't matter if you do or don't.

Here's a tip for all of you business people trying to carve out a social media future.

LEARN THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO ASK...

There are many to ask, but I will give you one to remember.

Here it is:
"How many people from the social media site X are doing Y at my web site and how can I optimize Y?!?!?!?"

I will repeat:
"How many people from the social media site X are doing Y at my web site and how can I optimize Y?!?!?!?"

X = Facebook or X = Twitter or X = any social media web site
Y = "Sign up for newsletter” or Y = "Purchase my widget" or Y = “Any call to act”

If your So-called Social Media Expert cannot answer this question or if they cannot propose a comprehensive solution to solve for this question or if their answer confuses you more, then fire them and pick up a copy of "Social Media Branding in the Age of Obama" by Eric Hamilton http://www.socialmediaobama.com . This guide will show you how to configure, measure and optimize the most popular social media web sites. The guide is an easy read and uses simple language with large screen captured images. It's a must have for anyone planning to do business in 2010.

For more information on Social Media Branding in the Age of Obama visit http://www.socialmediaobama.com .

Eric Hamilton is the author of "Social Media Branding in the Age of Obama" and a Yahoo! Engagement Manager specializing in analytics.

Down with Newspapers!

So, I just started the Web Academy which is a non profit organization designed to provide FREE web design classes and FREE web design services. The IRS has strict guidelines for educational non profit organizations to acquire a tax exempt status. These guidelines include but are not limited to:
Having a Board of Directors
Directors Annual Meetings
Bylaws
Non-Discrimination Policy
In addition, the IRS requires my educational non-profit organization to place an ad in a newspaper to notify the community about my non-discrimination policy. What is an ad in a newspaper? Oh newspapers, those things made out of paper, which are for reporting current events. Newspapers, those paper things which are out-of-date the moment the ink dries.

My 1st thought was: “I will use an online notification to broadcast my non-discrimination policy”. No, the IRS is strict that my notification must be in a local newspaper. Okay, so I chose the cheapest option. I decided to advertise my non-discrimination policy in my local newspaper called the Hackensack Chronicle. I was appalled to find out that it will cost me $234 to advertise in one addition of that newspaper. This ad will give me only about 17,000 impressions! For those of you who are not familiar with online advertising, I can buy 17,000 impressions online for less than $20.

All of these newspapers need to wake up because (1) most people get their news online for free (2) who would pay 10 times the money for the same reach (3) there isn’t any detailed analytics about who is reading the ads. With online advertising enabled with analytics, I know, age, gender, area code, zip code, city, and overall interests of every person who clicks my ad.

The Solution:
As an avid consumer of information, I would like to have instant access to every newspaper, every magazine and every book ever written in the past 1000 years to current. I am serious. I would be willing to pay $50 per month for this unlimited service. Consumers (like me) would access these works through a wireless "Kindle-like" device. The authors and publishers of these works would be compensated from the monthly subscriptions based on the number of page views of their works. So, if a consumer spends 50% of his page views on The New York Times, 40% on The Wall Street Journal and 10% reading Thomas Freeman's book "The World is Flat", then $25 would be earned by The New York Times, $20 by The Wall Street Journal and $5 by Thomas Freeman. This scenario would be an advertisers dream as ads would be placed in not only magazines and news stories but also the books. The analytics data available on readers would be advertising nirvana. As an example, an advertiser could target specifically women aged 40 and up who live in Boise, Idaho and work in the medical field who love country music. The publishers/authors would be able to charge a premium of this type of ad inventory.

The writing is on the wall. All of these newspapers and magazine need to change their business models or they will quickly be old news like cave drawings and clay tablets. What do you think?

Are We The Borg?

So, I recently moved from Los Angeles to the New York city area . Upon arriving, my new place had no electricity. Oh no, 24 hours with out electricity for the Internet Guru. What is Imma gonna do?

No electricity? No problem for now because I powered up my laptop I noticed that a neighbor had not secured his wireless network. Cool, I was able to get on the internet. Thanks neighbor.

My laptop and Blackberry couldn't run indefinitely on batteries. So, I decided to charge them in my car. I don't have a car charger for my Blackberry but I have a portable car power converter which converts a car cigarette lighter into a regular wall outlet.

So, after a few hours on the laptop and talking on the Blackberry, I went to my car for some SWEET ELECTRICITY! With in 5 minutes of charging, both of my cigarette outlets died. What? What are the chances of that? I've used this power converter for 6 years with out incident.

No Blackberry, no laptop, no cable... It was like living in the 1970s or something. It got so bad that I wrote this blog entry using pen and paper.

I felt so disconnected. I felt like Hugh from the Borg on Star Trek. The Next Generation Star Trek fans feel me here. The rest of you are scratching your heads so please let me explain. Star Trek is a futuristic TV show which takes place in the 24th century. The Borg are a race of cybernetic organisms (half humanoid, half machine) who desire to convert all of humanity into Borgs.

There are millions of Borg but they are essentially one entity, one collective with one conscience in constant communications with each other.

There was an episode of Star Trek when the humans captured a Borg and named him Hugh. Our Star Trek humans then severed Hugh's "internet connection" with the Borg collective and Hugh "went out like a punk". Dude was pathetic and didn't know how to act.

Similar to Hugh, I experienced the disconnected feeling. I couldn't check my 6 email accounts, my Myspace email, my online bank statements, my online credit card statements, my stocks and 401K, or my Yahoo front page news. I couldn't even check or update my Facebook status. Oh no... I was disconnected from my collective and "Didn't know how to act".

So, my question to all of us: "Are we becoming like the Borg?"

The Motivation behind The Web Academy

The 1980s:
My technology colleagues will agree, nearly 100% of us are self taught. In 1981 at age 12, my parents purchased my 1st computer which was a Commodore 64 that had 64,000 bytes of RAM compared to computers now which come with a minimum of 2 GB (2 billion bytes) of RAM. I learned how to program in BASIC on that Commodore 64 by reading the guide that came with the computer. After learning how to write conditional commands and loop commands in BASIC, I wrote a text based game which allowed the user to go on a “Dungeon and Dragons-like adventure”.

In 1986, my parents purchased an office PC for their business. That same year, I developed a game (called the Alpha Zapper) which helped the gamer learn how to type by shooting missiles in the form of alphabet letters at the gamer’s space ship. The gamer would gain points by typing the appropriate letter to destroy the missile. In 1986, I had the luxury of a high school (Walled Lake Western) which allowed me independent study time to pursue my programming passions. In addition, I used my parents’ office PC to develop this game. (Yeah mom and dad, when I was supposed to be running orders for your business, I was developing my game. That was 23 years ago, so I hope yall ain’t mad.)

The 1990s:
In the 1990s while in college, I had an idea of creating a web site which would allow college students and anyone seeking a job to post their resumes online. Simultaneously, this web site would allow employers the ability to find employees. The idea was called Resunet (Resumes On the Internet). I had no idea of how to reserve a domain name let alone build an enterprise level web based application like this. Well, someone out there did know and in 1999 Monster.com was formed and the rest is history.

Also, in the 1990s my fraternity brother (we called him DP) was just beginning medical school. I approached DP with an idea. I wanted to take all of the practical knowledge that he was learning in medical school and build a web site that would use a simple algorithm to diagnose patient ailments. We would call the web site DrDP.com. Due to my lack of serious web knowledge, we never completed this project. A few years later WebMD was created and again the rest is history.

Before graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in Computer Science, I had one of my 1st opportunities to practice my "web craft". I was a lab assistant for Dr. Herman Hughes in the MSU High Speed Networking Laboratory. Using HTML, Perl and CGI, I created a content managed system (CMS) web site for Dr. Hughes before the term "CMS" had been used.

Millennium:
After my years of web development experience and my years of work experience with companies like Yahoo! and Netscape, I am in a unique position to assist the next generation of web entrepreneurs. What if a young person desired to build an application that ran on the iPhone and used Yahoo! Maps, used proximity detection technology such as Yahoo! FireEagle and other technologies to develop something that has never been seen or tried before? Where would this young person even begin? Well, The Web Academy is designed to solve this sort of problem with basic web development classes, advanced server side scripting classes, advanced database management classes and advanced application programming interface classes.

The Web Academy will teach our students how to stay current with technology and how to be self reliant to intellectually sustain themselves once they have out grown us. The Web Academy will be a simple door. The student has to walk through it.

With all of the talented young people in our communities I am hopeful that the big technology success story of the next decade will begin with a 22 year old talking about his/her experience as a 12 year old with The Web Academy.

The Web Academy is seeking students. If you are interested in becoming a student, please join our email distribution list at http://www.thewebacademy.org

HTML and Meta Data

Properly structured meta data on your web site allows the search engines to potentially better find content on your web site.

Special Thanks to...
W3 Schools
Web Developers of Detroit
Web Developers of New York
The Web Academy

HTML Forms

Accepting information from web site visitors is extremely important. Using HTML Forms is how you accomplish this task.

Special Thanks to...
W3 Schools
Web Developers of Detroit
Web Developers of New York
The Web Academy

HTML Frames

HTML Frames allow you to display more than 1 web page (and more than 1 web site) in a single browser window.


Special Thanks to...
W3 Schools
Web Developers of Detroit
Web Developers of New York
The Web Academy