Amid the Noise and Haste

Free SEO Tools

seomoz offers a toolbox on their site full of free tools to help you with search engine optimization.  Really cool.  Check out tools to help:

• Determine the strongest pages on your domain
• Find out what other websites are hosted on your IP address
• Check whether your URL has been indexed by Google, Yahoo! and MSN
• Check your page rank

There are more too.  These are great tools for small companies with tight budgets to hop on the SEO bandwagon and help your website get found on the world wide web.

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Am Law 200 Firms are Becoming Social

By way of Doug Cornelius of KM Space and Kevin O'Keefe over at LexBlog, I found out that 8 of the top 10 Am Law 200 law firms, those with the highest gross revenue, have social networks on Facebook.  That's pretty big news.   Law firms have traditionally been slower to adopt less traditional means of marketing and business development.  But as Kevin points out, "Lawyers, amongst others, should focus on how examples of new media can
help instead of disregarding them because others use them in an
unprofessional or non business-related way."

Here are the firms with the current number of network members from each firm from Kevin's post:

1. Skadden, Arps 379 Members
2. Baker & McKenzie 728 Members
3. Jones Day 286 Members
4. Latham & Watkins 291 Members
5. Sidely Austin 199 Members
6. Mayer Browne No Network
7. White & Case 370 Members
8. Weil, Gotschal No Network
9. Shearman & Sterling 225 members
10. Kirkland & Ellis 192 Members

Scott Glavin from Enterprise 2.0 wrote about this, tipping off Doug Cornelius, and pointed out a few business uses of using a social networking site such as Facebook:

• exploring who else in your organization has the same interests and connecting.  Professional networking, but via the net.
• sharing media and updates with colleagues such as photo’s and business travel plans
• general exploration of how web2.0 can be supplemental to company goals

I think one of the biggest hurdles of adopting this new technology is eduction.  Scott's points are a fantastic entry point for why networking within a firm or company has benefits.  Internal communication is key to helping grow a business and social  networking enables this communication.  I encourage other firms and companies to adopt social networking as well. 

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Test Your Company's Customer Focus

From the department of common sense:

Shannon Holman over at If You See Something Say Something points us to A Three-Question Test of Your Company's Customer Focus from John Hagel of Edge Perspectives.  As yourselves this:

1. Who in the organization holds real decision-making power? Is it the organization that manages relationships with the customer or is it some other group?
2. What are the primary measures of performance for the firm?
3. What is the primary focus of the brand promise of the company?

From John:  "The companies that really succeed in the customer relationship business will have no trouble meeting this test.  All the rest had better decide which of the other two businesses they really want to focus on."

Pecha Kucha - "The Sound of Conversation"

You have a meeting, the conversation goes round and round, nothing is accomplished and worse yet people go off point, get distracted and you walk out wondering how to get that last hour of your life back.

Enter Pecha Kucha, Japanese for "the sound of conversation."

• 20 slides
• 20 seconds per slide
• Power point off!

That's it.  As Seth Godin so aptly states, "Tell me a problem that can't be outlined in six minutes and I'll show you a problem it's probably not worth having a meeting about."

Read more about Pecha Kucha in this month's Wired from Dan Pink. 

Social Resources Galore!

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing points us to Mashable's exhaustive resource list ONLINE MEDIA GOD: 400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musician.  All you could want and then some!

Shannon Holman at If You See Something Say Something points us to TechCrunch's comparison chart of white label social networking solutions for your enterprise.

Social Volunteering - Making a Difference

If you haven't heard of SixDegrees.org, I urge you to check them out.  Here is a description from their about page:

You've probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it's a small world. SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It's social networking with a social conscience. Through this web site, you can support your favorite charities by donating or creating fundraising badges — as well as check out the favorite causes of other people, including celebrities.

I set up my own badge which you can see in the right hand column just below the fold of my main blog page.  I choose Hands Together Inc., an organization which is close to my heart.  I worked with Hands Together in 1992 and travelled to Haiti with my high school, Cathedral High in Springfield, MA.  We brought medical and school supplies to different poverty stricken areas such as Cite Soleil and Brunette.  And I am pleased to see how far the organization has come since then.  Here is a bit more about their programs:

Hands Together carries out its mission through projects and programs aimed at improving the quality of life for the very poor - primarily in Haiti.

Through schools, orphanages, nutrition and feeding programs, medical clinics, sustainable development projects, and partnerships with local leaders and communities, Hands Together is building a better world for thousands of suffering people in Haiti. Hands Together volunteers contribute to this work through organized delegations and programs for those with specialized training like doctors & medical professionals, builders, water well technicians, mechanics and teachers.

You can learn more about Hands Together on their site www.handstogether.org.  You can donate to Hands Together by clicking on my badge or you can find your favorite charity by going to sixdegrees.org.

Are You Engaged?

Forrester has released the results of a new survey on engagement (this is a product).  Not the kind that leads to marriage, but the kind that keeps you in touch with your clients.  As they defined it, engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.

As they see it, these four components of engagement - involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence - can help you learn how to make better marketing decisions.  Their argument is the following:

...that companies need to start tying these metrics together to make sense of how engaged their customers actually are—and then make product and marketing decisions based on that knowledge.

Now, there's no clean and beautiful equation like e = mc². But as we continue this research on the topic and gather feedback (we've already seen some extremely polarizing reviews of the report), we'd love to get your take on the matter.

Sifting through the noise and haste, can you see how to better engage your customers?  If you don't have definitive metrics, I suggest open conversation with your customers.  Talk to them, or better yet listen.

 

Social Bookmarking - Video from Common Craft

The folks over at Common Craft have done it again.  Another great little tutorial video explaining social bookmarking and how easy it is.  I hand over the mic:

We made this video because we want others to feel the power of social bookmarking and how it works to make web pages easier to remember, organize and share.

This video is focused on Del.icio.us, but you could also try social bookmarking sites like Magnolia or Furl.

Click To Play

I have my del.icio.us bookmarks set in the right hand column of this blog, take a look!  You can also read more about social bookmarking in a few of my other posts:

• Social Bookmarking as a Knowledge Management Strategy
• Social Bookmarking to Generate Traffic for your Blog

SEO Tips and Tricks

The folks over at SEOmoz continuously provide great information about search engine optimization, link building and more on their blog.  They are always smart, on point, and relevant, though somewhat technical.  Here are some of my favorite posts:

• Answers to Ten SEO Questions
• Ever wonder what bounce rate, click rates or indexed pages really are?  Read A Complete Glossary of SEO Jargon
• Tracking your website click thrus and more?  Refer to the List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available

Amid the noise and haste of trying to track website usage and development, these tools are invaluable.  Thanks SEOmoz!