The dust has settled after my back to back Web conferences in Austin: WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon South, and South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, and I thought I’d take a minute to compare the two. I’ll start by saying that any such comparison is beyond apples & oranges… the two conferences are quite different in scale, objective, and many other ways. Given that, here are a few areas of contrast:
Nov 192008
The title of this post might sound like a Bill O’Reilly sound bite, but it’s not. As a long-time community guy I suppose I should have known what a “fisker” was before reading Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. I didn’t. “Fisking” is responding to another individual’s email or forum post by quoting it extensively and responding to it line by line.
Aug 262008
Although the Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines are a few years old now, they are still a great starting point for anyone trying to boost their web results – ecommerce orders, business inquiries, and so on. While some of their ten guidelines seem obvious – “Make it easy to contact you,” “Highlight the expertise behind your organization,” “Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site,” to name a few – we have all seen many, many sites that fail to take these simple but important steps. I think there is another credibility indicator that the Stanford researchers overlooked: #11. Rank at the top of search results.
Jul 272008
Crowdsourcing has occasionally been an alternative to doing things the old-fashioned way by, say, paying an expert. While many indirect effects of crowdsourcing exist, there has been little direct impact on employees within a given organization. When Wikipedia let many thousands of users create its content, no professional writers or editors were displaced. Encyclopedia publishers didn’t all fire their staffs and start wikis. Travel reviews written by users haven’t put the big travel guides out of business, nor have those firms decided to cut staff and let travelers do all the work. An interesting post by Tom Foremski at ZDNet describes one of the first examples I have seen of one company cutting paid staff to let users do the work for free:
Jul 202008
It’s been a long while since I posted here, and I apologize to those readers who noticed. It’s been an interesting time in the last few months, including the sale of a major community website and taking on some new responsibilities in the post-sale environment. I have been keeping up my posting at Neuromarketing, and I hope a few of my readers here have followed some of the interesting developments in applying brain science to marketing.
Dec 182007
Got a brand new website you want to promote? Wondering how to get traffic and improve Google rankings? Google’s webmaster Svengali Matt Cutts clued us in at the recent Pubcon in Las Vegas: start a blog. (You were expecting, maybe, “buy a bunch of links?” 
) Matt pointed out that WordPress was mostly pre-optimized for search engines – the latest versions reduce duplicate content issues, page structure, titles, etc., fit Google’s recommendations, and keyword URLs are easy to generate. We’ve been blog advocates for years, but Matt’s blunt recommendations was still a bit of a surprise. Let’s look at why adding a blog to a new (or even old) site can be a good idea.
Oct 042007
Every community operator knows that it takes different kinds of participants to be successful. Some people come looking for answers, others come to help. Some like to expound at length, while others say little. Some are lurkers, others are prolific contributors. Researchers from Cornell and Microsoft have produced some interesting research that graphically represents different community roles.