Reviews:
New web applications and services are released daily. Books and blogs are constantly being published. The review category of the AgencyCritique blog helps sift the wheat from the chaff. To request a review use the contct form.
 |
|
Lee Lefever creates these wonderful videos that take what can be complicated tools and concepts, turning them into easy to understand primers. His first (or least first massively popular) video was RSS in Plain English. So this video on Google Reader is a great companion.
I recommend Google Reader to my clients as the best and easiest way to begin engaging in an “outward facing” web strategy. Google Reader is an effective tool to manage the first step, listening to others. It’s ability to easily extend this effort by sharing with others is another key benefit. The next step is to begin participating by commenting on some of the posts you read. I’ve started using Google Reader’s tag folders to sort my feeds into a few groups. My first group includes those bloggers I find most compelling and that I intend to read more thoroughly and potentially comment on more frequently. I can then scan the rest of my feeds a bit more quickly, sifting for a few nuggets here and there.
This video is an excellent overview of Google Reader. Chris Butler also wrote a great Web Smart newsletter on RSS and Google Reader with valuable tips. Take a look, and if you aren’t using RSS go ahead and grab a free account and get started. (I also embedded the original RSS video below.)
Social media is a hot topic these days. Books are being published faster than social networking sites, mashups and aggregators pop up. In any list of books on social media The Cluetrain Manifesto is going to be at the top. It deserves to be there if for no other reason than that it was written in 2000–a good five years before social media was on anyone else’s radar. The Cluetrain did indeed foresee the dramatic dynamics that the voices of crowds create as their voices are just as accessible as main stream media. Communications professionals are experiencing the challenges that come when a search for a popular brand can result in links to an angry consumer’s YouTube video or blogger’s dissatisfied rant. Power is shifting from brands to consumers. There are plenty of examples of social media corporate meltdowns. But despite the gaffes social media is creating an incredibly rich fabric of knowledge, community, and sharing that can be leveraged to the benefit of both corporations and consumers.
But this isn’t a review of Cluetrain, it’s a review of Groundswell. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are both Forrester analysts. Perhaps their slightly more professional context, or maybe their data orientation makes their book Groundswell clearer and more acceptable than Cluetrain. Their day jobs, advising large corporations and enterprise level executives, give them a voice that’s more considered and detailed. But don’t get the wrong idea, Groundswell is not at all dry or dispassionate. Both authors are deeply enthusiastic and excited about the benefits to be gained from the rise of social media. But they offer their vision and insight in a reasoned, balanced way that other books in the vein of Cluetrain do not. Where Cluetrain’s overstated assertions declare “all marketing is conversation,” Groundswell would say that in addition to other forms of marketing, social media presents opportunites to engage in conversations: listening, talking, energizing, helping and embracing consumers.
When I read Cluetrain I was inspired despite the arrogant tone of the manifesto. When I read Groundswell I felt inspired and hopeful, especially now that I have a book I could confidently recommend to my clients that will impart a vision for navigating the social media landscape.
Groundswell is surprisingly practical, providing a metric for evaluating the various opportunities that fall under the social media umbrella. They’ve developed a matrix called “The Social Technographics Profile” (a data analyst’s title if ever there was one). It categorizes various groups of people into social media participation tendencies. Groups are broken down as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Depending on the engagment level of a particular group across these traits, certain social media opportinties will be more fitting than others. They give examples such as “Alpha Moms.” Alpha Moms, according to their data tend to be critics and spectators more than creators or joiners. So for them an emphasis on forums, ratings and reviews would be more effective than social networks.
I appreciate Charlene and Josh’s patience with their executive audience. They understand that social media is not only new, but hard to explain and integrate into today’s corporate culture. They encourage people to begin by just listening to the groundswell before leaping in, or kicking off a “social media campaign.”
If you’re trying to get a foothold on social media pick up a copy of Groundswell. I don’t think there’s a better epicenter for orienting yourself to this rapidly spreading technological and communication shake up.
Website form generation can be a complicated procedure. Web forms need to be coded properly, and each field needs to be set with several attributes (maximum length, number of characters allowed, whether it’s required, etc.). Not are forms fairly complicated but actually making them work properly, on the server side, requires a lot of careful set up and testing. It’s easy to make a mistake and the cost can great. Imagine , after all the effort of web development, marketing a lead is lost because a website contact form wasn’t wired up correctly!
Leaving form creation up to a client is therefore a scary option. Too many mistakes can creep in. Yet, it’s often a website’s contact forms that are most desired to be created, added, or edited on the fly. They are after all a critical function of any website.
WuFoo is an online web service for web form creation and hosting. The hosting part is critical since many of the web form failures happen on the server side–sending important email contacts into Internet oblivion. With WuFoo you use their very simple interface to set up your form with all of the needed field types and and instructions. The form will run off their server, so all the backend scripting and server setting are taken care of for you. Once you finish a form you can either choose to post a link on your site over to WuFoo where the user can fill out the form, or more appropriately, an embed code can be generated and pasted into the web page so that the visitor can fill out the form on the original site (using an iframe). Of course the forms can be styled to match the look and feel of the site where they will be displayed. Their wysiwyg formatting tools are very easy to uses, and they also provide css inputs for more advanced formatting.
WuFoo offers a free option, allowing up to three forms and 100 entries per month. The free service does not allow you to redirect a form response page back to the site (it displays a “form by WuFoo page” instead). This makes the free option not very practical for any professional use, though it does allow you to kick the tires very effectively before buying. Their base paid option starts at $9.95 per month allowing up to ten forms and 500 entires per month (more than enough for most implentations). There are three more tiers leading up the the maximum $199.95 per month with unlimited forms and up to 100,000 entries per month.
I’m using WuFoo for the forms on this site. I’ve been very pleased with how easy it was to implement. Even though there are many WordPress forms plugins, they all still require some degree of configuration, validation and set up, not to mention the actual form creation. For the ease of use and implementation I choose to try out WuFoo and so far am very happy (I picked the $9.95 option).
WuFoo also offers custom form result reports. I haven’t played around with this feature yet, but it’s nice to see that feature available. If I encounter any specific problems, or other important features I’ll add a comment to this post. And please chime in if you’ve used WuFoo and have some feedback, or to report on other similar services and their differentiators.