Techpaulogy

Changing Gears -- PaulBiggs.com is Live

Ahoy readers! Some changes in the works. It's time to start evolving my personal brand a bit, and with that comes the beginning of a parallel blog to Techpaulogy over on PaulBiggs.com. I'm still going to keep this blog alive, but I'm going to focus on software reviews, mobile apps, and things of interest to the tech-savvy public (a.k.a. geeky stuff). On my new name brand blog, I'll focus more on work/life, between topics in online marketing and life in PDX. Hopefully that provides a better experience for subscribers -- you can keep an eye on me, you can keep an eye on techie stuff, or both.

The new feed is http://feeds.paulbiggs.com/PaulBiggs.

Thanks for sticking with me and my 2010 resolution to blog more!

Twitter Tools - Google Analytics and Favorite Tracking

I just ran across some cool tools for Twitter while doing a sweep through my Tweetstream:

[1] Google Analytics + Twitalyzer = Twitter Analytics

Want to turn Google Analytics onto your inbound Twitter traffic? Eric Peterson (@erictpeterson) of Web Analytics Demystified fame, and other local PDXers, have done just that. Pretty cool. Try it yourself here.

[2] Has anyone "favorited" any of your tweets?

Ever wonder if people have starred/favourited any of your Tweets? Here's a quick Google hack to see. Just replace 'jivesoftware' with your handle:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com/*/favourites+%40[jivesoftware]
(thanks to Justin Parks for the tip).

Analyst Report Hits the Wires - Congrats to Jive!

Forrester Research recently released its 2009 Wave report on enterprise-class Community Platform vendors, and look at where Jive is positioned - a market Leader!

I am so excited for the team here at Jive - everyone has been working around the clock like madmen, and it's great to get this kind of recognition from top-tier analyst firms. In this research, Jive won on 2 out of 3 categories: Current Offering, based on our software and services; and Strategy, based on our strategic vision and leaderhsip team. You can grab the report on our website.

Economic Downturn Boosts Reliance on Social Media Marketing Tactics

Marketing Sherpa just released the results of a survey they recorded, detailing Marketers' response to the current economic downturn:

SUMMARY: Every marketing tactic gets more scrutiny when budgets face the sting of a struggling economy. Here is a glance at how marketers expect to tailor their investments in digital tactics during a downturn.



...Not surprisingly, house email and Web 2.0 are getting high attention; both are relatively low-cost and the former, at least, has proven ROI. Web 2.0 is seen as having the same virtue, although it doesn’t have email’s well-documented ROI...

(Full article can be found on Marketing Sherpa here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30925)

Is this how my fellow marketers are reacting to the downturn? We're certainly tightening up marketing budgets here, and focusing on our programs with the best lead gen results (tied back to pipeline and closed deals). Less $$$ allocated to branding/awareness initiatives in the broader sense. We're putting down the shotgun and getting out the rifle, digging in our beachhead more around live customer webcasts, search (paid and organic), and community building... the later 2 are deeply rooted in social media marketing. For example, online communities can have a big impact on organic search/SEO. We did a webcast with Anvil Media about it recently: Boost SEO with an Online Community

Want to Get More Involved in the PDX Tech Community? Get Elected!

Interested in getting more deeply involved in Portland's tech community? Now's your chance: the Legion of Tech elections were just announced. There are 2 different LoT positions up for grabs, involving differing levels of responsibility:

• Legion of Tech Board of Directors - nominations are due November 1st.
• Legion of Tech Advisory Committee - nominations are due December 1st.

See the LoT blog post for details on the positions' day-to-day expectations and activities.

If you are interested in running for the Board or the Advisory Committee, please contact one of the current Legion of Tech Board members (e.g. me!) and express your interest in a nomination.

Clearspace just took enterprise collaboration to a whole new level - hello 2.5

I am so excited. Hunkered down here at the Jive HQ (Club Fed), our whole team has been cranking like never before. Engineering, Marketing, Product, Sales, you name it -- everyone has been heads down building, testing, re-mixing, and giving feedback on our Clearspace platform. We've been sitting on the 2.5 beta here for a month or two, and it is hands-down our best release ever. You can tell by how pumped everyone is here internally. We are so excited we literally bumped launch from September into August, effectively taking our launch runway from 5+ weeks to 2 (kind of a masochistic move). We just want to get it out there for everyone to get their hands on. I honestly can't imagine ever working for a company that doesn't have some kind platform like this to add a "social productivity" layer to its business underpinnings.

Ok, so what is so cool? Here's some highlights:

• Brand new text editor that can handle images and streaming video like butter. Drag, drop, re-size, publish. Never been easier (and you know that's what it takes to drive user adoption).
• Dynamic search that guesses what you are after as you type (broken out by Content, People, and Spaces). I barely need to even go to a search results page anymore.
• Social networking all over the place, including status updates, friends, groups, people search, etc. I mean really, Facebook for the enterprise. But a lot less spammy.
• Theming console for dummies. Now you don't need to know java or struts or freemarker (or whatever you needed to know) -- there's just a UI in the admin console, like popular consumer CMS/blogging platforms. And if you want to get ninja, there's an example CSS kit that you download, modify, and re-upload. Smooooth.

Anyway, go and check it out for yourself:

• Clearspace - connect employees with a comprehensive social productivity collaboration solution
• Clearspace Community - build customer communities and integrate your other online marketing channels (like SEO).

P.S. Props to the SWEET videos by Kalani (and edited in part by Sigler). And Sam is shaking things up at Go Big Always...

Connecting Online Communities to SEO Strategy

There's no question that Search Engine Optimization is BIG on marketers' minds these days -- it's a great way to engage potential customers in all stages of the sales cycle. Both researchers and decision-makers use search to make purchasing decisions for software, services, etc.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how online communities tie into search. I'll evolve this conversation as we go, but wanted to start putting it on the radar now so the general community can help move it forward. At a high level, how does a community fit into a company's SEO strategy? This slideshow demonstrates it:

SEO - Where Online Communities Fit In from Paul Biggs on Vimeo.

In short, the 80/20 rule applies here -- a Marketing team can focus on the 20% of core keywords that drive most search engine traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo, and the community take care of the rest of the keywords. A company is, in essence, capturing the "long tail" of search by outsourcing niche SEO content to users, that the main site (run by Marketing) doesn't have the resources to cover.

I'll be doing some research in this vein, and present my findings in a webcast: http://www.jivesoftware.com/news/webcasts. There will also be more conversations over on Jive's social software best-practices community: http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearstep/

IBM Data Visualization Tool Turns Out to be Amazing for Keyword Research

Wow. IBM's Many Eyes, a shared data and discovery tool, turns out to be a powerful tool for keyword research for MarCom and Search Engine Marketing purposes (hat tip to Sam Lawrence for piquing my interest in Many Eyes). I was trying to figure out what keywords and messaging to use for an upcoming product launch and the associated online marketing campaigns, and wanted to see how marketers are framing the conversation around some niche topic areas.

I started by reading a ton of posts from a selection of popular marketing blogs, but quickly became overwhelmed by the immensity of the conversation (marketers tend to, you know, be ridiculously verbose). So, if you know me, I quickly turned to data tools. In this case, IBM Many Eyes offered a great way to analyze text patterns and keyword density. It has two different tools to leverage.

First, you can create tag clouds out of any text. So I started with the Forrester Research Marketing Blog, and copied the 20 latest blog posts into Many Eyes (minus the author bylines to parse out repetitive names and dates). I set the tag cloud to 1-word display. My goal was to see what words were being used repeatedly. Here's what I found:

It was pretty noisy, but gave a good idea of recurring words. Then, I wanted to dig a little deeper, so I switched to 2-word analysis. This showed some more long-tail frequency, perfect for SEO and PPC:

Now we're starting to see some interesting results! Here's what's in the forefront of some leading industry analysts' minds. So, we know "brand monitoring" is a popular topic. With my SEO/PPC cap on, I also want to know what variations of brand-related terms are being used. Next, I turn to Many Eyes' Word Tree tool, and enter "brand" as the root word. After sorting by Frequency Order for easier viewing, we end up with this:

This gives us a pretty deep dive into long-tail terms, as well as what's the hot topic in the space. It makes sense that "brand monitoring firms" are pretty high profile, as there are a slew of acquisitions going on (JD Power bought Umbria, etc). And, it's pretty related to our space, as we recently evaluated a number of vendors, as well as explored a few partnership ideas.

Next time around, I am going to throw a bunch more data into Many Eyes from a variety of sources (it can take up to 1MB of data at a time) and get a wider slice of the conversation. You can also upload 2 separate blogs, and compare the 2 side-by-side on a keyword basis. Let me know if you have some even better ideas to use this (or other tools) to dig into social media conversations.