Twittersheep (as you can see from the graphic to the right) is a really fun service that creates word clouds of the profiles of your followers.

Groovy!

Not too many surprises for me over there – social, media, marketing, association, technology, management, communications

But I love that “love” is so prominent!

(JNott should be proud.)

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;

Lots of travel in the past 8 days! The Top 5 Things That Are GREAT About Being Home:

1. Sleeping in my own bed (spouse included)
2. 10+ types of bourbon to choose from (southern California is a bourbon WASTELAND, people)
3. Being able to change my mind about what to wear 7 times in the morning without running through all my available options…twice
4. My own coffee (nobody makes it better, yo)
5. Even though they make me sneeze, my kitties

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;

My top 5 Favorite Sayings/Quotes:

1. Cheap – Fast – Good. Pick 2. (any engineer I’ve ever known)
2. I feel sorry for people who don’t drink – when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day. (Frank Sinatra)
3. Measure your life in love. (the musical Rent)
4. Tell me, what is it you plan to do – With your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)
5. Muriel Duckworth told me that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, and she is a 97-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She didn’t wait until she felt she could do things perfectly before she did them. (Audra Williams, This Magazine, March 2006)

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;Got some good ones yourself? Share them in the comments.

• The Dalai Lama’s tweets. Yes, @DalaiLama is now on Twitter. It looks like someone is probably tweeting for him, but I’m hoping for good things.
• Tapping the power of LinkedIn to be more than just a Rolodex that updates itself (I really need to get on this myself),
• JNott on how following “best practices” holds us back.
• Don’t put all your socmed eggs in one platform basket (but seriously, what’s up with the blonde?),
• Blast from the past – 1995 Newsweek article about why the Internet will fail – it’s a fad, I say!
• Confused, Conflicted, Clueless and Cranky – great piece about what’s going on (or not) in health care reform.
• Simple tips for promoting your blog.
• Just started Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Don’t really have an opinion yet other than to point out that’s she’s pretty much universally brilliant and I’ve loved her other books I’ve read, so I have high expectations.

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;

One of the most fun parts of Untech10 was the end of the day tweetaway session. Everyone was asked to capture their top takeaway from the day in 140 characters or less. Mine was:

“socmed doesn’t have rules – it has religions – need 2 provide diff spaces 4 devotees of diff sects (inc agnostics)”

This is nearly a direct quote (shortened for Twitter) of a statement made during the opening “fishbowl” session. It struck me as a really profound observation.

I’m not going to try to get too clever with this borrowed analogy, but while those of us who are involved in social media tend to operate in more than one space, I’d bet that most of us have a home platform that is our primary social media outlet. It’s the one that’s always open when your computer’s on and is the first thing you check – the first app you installed on your smartphone – the one people accuse you of being “addicted” to. And, much like different religions and denominations, they each have their own rules, norms, and ways of interacting.

In some ways, this is just another way of expressing the “LinkedIn is the business meeting, Facebook is the hallway conversation, Twitter is the cocktail party” concept so many of us are familiar with. Except there is a certain level of dogmatism attached to the platforms – not only is my favorite one my favorite one, it’s also the RIGHT one to be using for X, Y, and Z reasons.

So if you’re a LinkedInian, it’s the RIGHT one because Twitter’s ratio of signal to noise is too low and Facebook is too silly (Farmville overload, anyone?). Likewise, if you’re a Tweep, it’s the RIGHT one because you can pay attention to anyone you want to unlike Facebook that requires them to follow you back, and because it’s concise, immediate and engaging, unlike the LinkedIn business rolodex and resume focus. And on and on.

But much like with religion, the audience you’re trying to engage is likely to be a mix of different faiths. And you don’t have the option of just not talking about it in polite company.

So what do you do?

First of all, it’s important to acknowledge that there are agnostics/atheists in the Church of Social Media. Which means you have to maintain traditional ways of engaging, communicating, and marketing in addition to playing with all your shiny new socmed toys.

Secondly, you need to know your audience. What socmed faith do they pledge? And what does that say about how they want to engage with you and each other and what they’re looking for out of their interactions?

Third, remember that religion inspires passion. What are you doing to tap into the passion of your community and enable them to express it? Who are your proselytizers?

Finally, don’t confuse your own role. You’re not an evangelist for a particular faith – you’re a professor of comparative religion. Your task is to help your congregants understand the options available to them and see the core truth in all: these tools exist to help us find new ways of connecting with each other. (But I won’t make you sing Kumbaya.)

GREAT Pecha Kucha presentation on Strauss & Howe’s work around the Fourth Turning and how that will affect marketing to the Boomers as they age.

Bonus? Guess which Star Wars characters exemplify GenX?

(If you guessed Han Solo and Chewbacca, give yourself a gold star!)
addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;

Another post in my irregular but continuing series re-posting my articles from RSM McGladrey’s MUSE enewsletter….

In the fall of 2007, I had the opportunity to talk to Layla Masri, president of Bean Creative, about search engine optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex discipline. Entire companies specialize in ensuring that clients’ sites appear in the top five rankings across a host of search engines and portals when any of the terms the client has identified as key are entered. And some organizations pay thousands of dollars a month to take advantage of that highly specialized and focused expertise. But if that’s out of your organization’s price range, does that mean you’re forever consigned to page 25 of the Google listings for the industry you serve?

“Absolutely not,” stated Layla Masri, president of Bean Creative, an Alexandria-based web design and programming firm that focuses on the not-for-profit market.

“If an organization can’t invest the kind of money necessary for a full SEO engagement, they can still accomplish a lot just by investing some staff time.” Masri continued, “Five years ago, an association could be assured a good ranking in most of the search engines just by including the right title tags on their web pages. But companies like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have gotten much more sophisticated about their rankings, so your organization needs to be more sophisticated in its approach as well.”

What are the top five inexpensive steps not-for-profits can take to improve their search engine rankings?

1. Update your content frequently. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add a blog to your site. But, as Masri noted, “this requires a significant investment of staff time. The technology for creating a blog is easy. The hard part is making sure someone is adding well-written, relevant content on a regular and frequent basis.”
2. Encourage people to link to you. Again, one of the quickest mechanisms to accomplish this is to create a blog that includes a blogroll (the sidebar list of links featured on many blogs), which makes it easy to exchange links. “Request link exchanges with like-minded organizations,” advised Masri.
3. Become a recognized expert in your subject area. “One of the best ways to generate visibility for your website is to create something like a ‘top 10’ list or an authoritative article on a current topic that gets widely disseminated across the web,” noted Masri.
4. Become active on relevant listservs and discussion forums. “This keeps your association top of mind in your market. And, as increasing numbers of these forums are archived on the web, it increases your chances of generating links and becoming a recognized expert on topics of interest to your constituents,” remarked Masri.
5. Finally, make sure your web content is highly relevant to the focus of your organization and uses key words and phrases regularly. “Today’s more sophisticated search engines consider the quality of your content as well as its existence. If your organization’s key focus is women’s networking groups, make sure that wording and other similar phrases are used liberally throughout your site,” advised Masri.

What do all of these suggestions have in common?

They all represent great ways to get your members involved. Younger members sometimes shy away from the level of commitment required by committee or board service. However, they are precisely the members who are most comfortable with emerging technologies like blogs and social networking forums. While they might not be willing to volunteer for several years hard labor on your finance committee, they can be tapped to write occasional posts for your organization’s blog, to link to your association blog from their own personal or professional blogs, and to participate in discussion forums and listservs as a representative of your organization. And an involved member is a loyal member.

So let’s say you do have a budget, albeit small, to spend on improving your search engine position. What will give you the most bang for your buck?

“Google AdSense,” stated Masri immediately. “Google AdSense is an easy way for website publishers to create ads that will be displayed on other relevant sites. Because the ads are related to what users are looking for on the sites they surf, AdSense allows you to get the word out about your association while allowing the owners of the sites on which your ads are placed to earn some money and enhance the content of their own pages.” Because the site owners get paid when someone clicks on one of your ads on their site, you can set a cap as to how much you’re willing to spend, which makes it easy to stay within your budget, no matter what its size.

Masri offered some tips to get the best results from AdSense:

• Make sure your ads are posted on text-rich pages (not “Sponsored Links” or “Advertisements’”)
• Make sure your ads are placed “above the fold“
• Match the colors of your ads with the color scheme of the site on which they’ll be posted
• Make is easy for the site owners to blend your ads with their pages by using a transparent background and removing image borders

“The most important thing to remember is that all of these items take dedicated staff time, energy and focus. If you want to improve your site’s rank, you really do need to put in the leg work or pony up the cash for someone else to do it for you. There are no free rides!” concluded Masri.