Community

8 Step Cycle of Search Engine Optimization with Blogging

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:02:32 GMT

We will be training our lawyers shortly on the value of blogging. This diagram is my take on the SEO lifecycle as it pertains to blogging, and it I hope that it illustrates the concept enough for good comparison with traditional media, like articles and print.

It should also be perfectly applicable to social media in general.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of using the following steps to maximize your search result ranking and areas of expertise on the major search engines.

1. Write
Your new post is given a URL to uniquely identify it on the internet.

2. Share
Start or join in on a conversation via LinkedIn, Twitter, email, or comments in another blog, by referencing your post's URL (Alt+D selects your current url, Ctrl+C copies it for later).

3. Discuss: A conversation occurs, with URL references to content in posts and articles on the web.

4. Archive: Google notices the conversations, and records ('crawls') it, following the path of URLs. This occurs roughly 2 weeks after posting. The actual time period varies between sites. [How often does Google crawl the web?]

5. Reward: Google identifies the topics discussed, and boosts the rankings for the participants and sites involved. The measure of the boost is based on the size and impact of the conversation.

6. Search: 250 million searches are made on Google alone each day, across every topic (vertical) imaginable.

7. Subscribe: Over time, you will start to gain subscribers (or followers) to your content. When you add new posts, your subscribers will be notified. Most social networks including have some method of subscribing to their users.

8. Grow: The audience grows for future conversations by author, topic, etc. There is a snowball effect as the cycle continues.

Wrote an Inverted Blog Engine

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:19:53 GMT

50+ Practice Groups, across the entire spectrum of legal services. It is difficult to write a solution for one group, that is useful or even applicable to the others. Abstraction is an extremely important tool around here.

Content Managment
A few years back, when we were rebuilding our website, we abstracted the idea of web content down to a very basic level, then made it extensible. New content types were created by a few simple instructions. Content mainly contained a title, body, and was associated with various practice groups and lawyers. Content types like news, press releases, and articles were a slightly different spin on the same formula. The content manager interface rendered itself, appropriate to which content type was currently in context. It worked nicely, and was only a little more difficult to write than a static content manager would have been.

'Original Content'
Culturally speaking (and this should go without saying), a mid-sized law firm blogging is a difficult concept to sell. We are a pretty savvy group when it comes to tech, but some things just need to surface on their own. We created 'Original Articles' instead: Blog posts with the format & depth of formal articles, that were reviewed and approved, and did not allow comments or syndication. For the meantime, we were getting content in, which got the ball rolling for blogging. As lawyers and our Marketing Department posted Original Article items, they associated the content with authors, practice groups, and keywords.

Finally
We started hearing murmers from the law geeks that wanted to blog. Some associates had personal blogs. Their friends and colleagues had Twitter feeds and law blogs ("blawgs") of their own. The Tech Law team led the charge, and we purchased techlawblog.com. At this point, we were looking at a 3rd party solution, or possibly something custom that was separate from our website. This route would have led to a few different complications that would have hurt our chances of this being a success:
- New content management per blog (1 post that applies to Intellectual Property, and Tech Law would need to be posted separately in each blog), new app for lawyers to learn & manage
- SEO symbiosis between the blog sites and whdlaw.com would be a missed opportunity. Inbound links to the blogs should help our main domain.
- Tagging, categorizing content takes work

Inverted
We decided to keep the solution in-house, and build off of what we already had. We created a 'Blog' content type, wrote in support for comments and a slick approval system so the author can approve from their Blackberry, and a generic page to generate rss feeds depending on the context of our visitor.

Our lawyers can now write blog posts just like the Original Articles they were already familiar with. They make their regular practice group and author associations as before, and possibly add some keywords. As soon as their post is approved, it appears on our main blog stream. If there is an associated practice group that has never had a post before, it shows up automatically as a new blog in our nav bar. Feeds can be created and consumed by practice group, author, or even keyword. In the end, we have all the features of a blog, without any extra work on the lawyers' behalf.

Observations
I am amazed at how few people understand syndication and subscriptions, especially considering that the icon is literally everywhere. It may be another couple years before people start to see the value in it.

Aggregator is a painful word for such a cool idea... I think I will try using reader more, though I think it sounds too passive.

The law industry is really buying into social tech, especially blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The community right now feels very much like the developer community did, 5 years ago. It is refreshing. Maybe it's just me though, as I am watching the legal sector while these technologies are finally going mainstream.

Thoughts on Social Media For Mid-sized Businesses

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:47:14 GMT

I was asked to provide some quick insights on the pros/cons of social networks as they apply to busineses:

Benefits:

- Networking on a global scale

- Indviduals develop & strengthen marketing skills & awareness (Professionals market themselves more often, more effectively)

- Search engine optimization (if we link back to our website often)

- Access to realtime news, industry-specific activity

Drawbacks, Concerns:

- Potentially global audience includes adverse parties, so training is important

- Personal activity reflects on the Firm

- Frequent change, new social networks appear often, and and turn over quickly

- Social Network services are decentralized, 3rd party, difficult or impossible to manage internally

Some law-people on Twitter (create an acct, and follow them, and if you want, me)

(and their comments for why they think Twitter is valuable to them)

Kevin O'Keefe is constantly providing fresh insights into social media as it applies to businesses, marketing, and law.

Craig Niedenthal, Birmingham, AL, trial attorney focusing on products liability cases:

"Use twitter to make contacts of other lawyers and those in other fields i.e. tech, marketing, to help me grow as atty and person"

Tony Hartsfield, Co-founder, Society of Legal Learning Professionals; Sr Analyst, Learning Systems at Bryan Cave LLP:

"Twitter keeps me informed on trends & issues in legal IT."

Lindsy C. Doucette, lawyer, Omaha, NE:

"it's my foray into social media 2.0 - I'm seeking examples of how to use the web effectively and I'm developing relationships."

GiveCamps: Geeks Giving Back

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:24:59 GMT

Overview: A Give Camp is a gathering of professionals (developers, graphic designers, database ninjas) that volunteer their time and resources to design and implement solutions (websites, applications, content-management systems, etc) for various charities and non-profit groups. Proposals can be submitted by non-profit groups and charities before the camp, and they are reviewed and selected, and teams of volunteers are organized to represent a project, create a plan and execute it, all over the period of a single weekend.

Projects / Features:
Web sites, new sections
Access Databases
Mobility Projects
New Content Management System (Graftiti, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint)
Intranet
Membership Tracking App
Paypal integration
Hosting
Training
Social Media Presence & Advocacy

Volunteer Qualifications:
Most importantly: A desire to contribute
Development experience (any level of expertise)
Sharepoint
Database Administrators
Developers! (.Net, Java, C++, PHP, Excel, Html)
Flash Developers & Designers
Photography
Social Media

Other GiveCamps:
Upcoming:
- Indianapolis, Indiana, January 23-25, 2009
- Milwaukee, WI, TBD (Nov-Dec, 2008?), Scott's announcement
- Northwest Arkansas .Net UG, TBD, Jay's announcement

Past:
- Dallas, Texas, January 18-20, 2008
- Kansas City, April 25-27, 2008
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 11-13, 2008

Important URLs:
- Givecamp.org
- We Are Microsoft: 18 projects for charities (brief case studies! - click links to see project details)
- Jennifer Marsman's review of the Ann Arbor Give Camp
- Twitter chatter "givecamp"
- GiveCamp Facebook Group

People:
- Chris Koenig, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft, Founder of first GiveCamp
- Jennifer Marsman, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Dave Bost, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Larry Clarkin, Architect Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Scott Isaacs, President of WI .Net Users Group, leading up GiveCamp MKE
- Paul Hacker, leading up Indianapolis GiveCamp
- Jay Smith, President, Northwest Arkansas .Net User's Group

Accomplishments to date:
- GiveCamp #1: "We Are Microsoft" 18 projects from the first GiveCamp in Dallas, TX
- GiveCamp #2: "Coders For Charities", Kansas City, Missouri (overview)
- - Boy Scouts Troop 813
- - Berean Bible Church
- - Task Force Omega of MO
- - Missouri Pit Bull Rescue
- - Metropolitan Org to Counter Sexual Assault
- GiveCamp #3: Ann Arbor, Michigan (15 projects, charity names only, no details found)

Getting Started:
The GiveCamp cookbook

Media Coverage, spreading the word:
- Local news (Kansas City Fox 4)
- Press Release (Kansas City)
- Radio (Kansas City, Dick Dale Morning Show)
- Twitter
- Blogs
- Camp homepages
- GiveCamp.org

This post will be updated as I find more info for each section, and I will have a series of posts on our Milwaukee GiveCamp as it comes together. I am sure I have missed people and news, but this should serve as a good start to encapsulate the GiveCamp movement as it takes off.

Depot, an exercise in Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:43:59 GMT

No downloads or pics, just a quick rundown of a very cool app idea while it's in my head.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a small winforms app. It's stayed very rough around the edges and hasn't gone anywhere from the original prototype. This prototype (I called it Depot) was written as a proof-of-concept of the simplest possible community-sourced bookmarking / tagging / searching tool that could possibly exist. A self-organizing business-specific link / text library could provide immense value to a company.

Depot hinges on 4 basic features common with collaborative apps:

1. Producing: Adding content in the form of URLS and/or text (2 different fields that can be used individually or combined)

2. Tagging

3. Searching for any item by any combination of title words or tag

4. Sharing: All content is automatically shared, and open to edit & extend, by anyone within the network

The search is an autocomplete textbox, that works with any combination of title words and tags. Typing 'catering' displays all catering items, but as you start to type 'catering madison', the suggestions filter appropriately. As you would expect, changing the text over to 'thai madison' updates to items tagged or titled with thai and madison.

The url + text fields is an interesting feature - a user may want to toss in a quick note for a catering url someone else added, like "Beware the red curry!!!".

The app seemed to work beautifully, but the algorithm is not built to scale up yet. Everything is cached heavily on the client-side. There are no concurrency checks. Also, to be fit for production, it will need some kind of user-auditing, history, and probably some kind of browser integration (or at least bookmark / favorites sync).

I don't know yet what will become of Depot. I hope to find the time and motivation soon to dust it off and start polishing it up for a pilot group. If nothing else, I got an ornery hog of a tag-search algorithm that may come in useful someday.

Stackoverflow.com = joelonsoftware + codinghorror

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:37:58 GMT

Jeff Atwood has paired up with Joel Spolsky and today they both announced stackoverflow.com, a new community support site that doesn't exist yet... but will be run by Jeff, created by the community for the community, and narrated weekly via podcast. Looks like a digg-like structure where diggable items are answers to questions posted by the community. Submit questions, submit answers, vote for answers...

[Jeff's announcement]

[Joel's announcement]

[stackoverflow.com]

[podcast #1]

This will be interesting...

The Thirsty Developer, Project Euler

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:28:31 GMT

I can't believe that I didn't post about this! My site was acting up when we did this, so I probably didn't have a place to post it.

Larry Clarkin & Dave Bost from Microsoft have a podcast called The Thirsty Developer.

Back in December I met up with Larry, Dave, and Damon Payne at the Ale House in downtown Milwaukee to talk about Project Euler. I remember having a lot of fun, despite being a bit nervous (my first experience on that side of a podcast!). It was very loud in there as well; I think Larry did a great job of editing.

[Here is the Project Euler episode]

[The Thirsty Developer]

[Subscribe to The Thirsty Developer Podcast]

[Subscribe to The Thirsty Developer Blog]

Noun-Verbing!

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:28:11 GMT

In the spirit of my last 2 posts... things are too serious around here, and it's bugging me...

Deeper In .Net 2008, 7AM tomorrow, Marriott in Waukesha, www.wi-ineta.org for details!

The headline to this video is the best part: Biker Nails A Perfect 380. Been there... concussions, dislocations and all... good stuff. They should have kept rolling, because it's not funny until he gets up and walks away from it.

Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:10:06 GMT

I have been a HUGE fan of Digg.com for years. The content is generally good, the community is fun and (again, generally) intelligent, but the model: Submit/Vote/Discuss/Report... brilliant.

MyStarbucksIdea.com, and Dell's IdeaStorm.com follow the Digg.com model, but in the context of innovation focused on a business. They are crowdsourcing their innovation to the world, and their future offerings are going to be more organic than ever before. The new tool on their belt gives them a clearer idea of their actual customers' wishes. Minimize the assumptions. Outsource your innovation to the one group the really cares about your product, and spend next to nothing for the data you get from it... brilliant.

Wikipedia (currently) defines Crowdsourcing as "... the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call."

I am in the habit of repurposing (or desigining my own) social-network ideas as internal solutions, and along the way I have occasionally had my share of failage/lesson-learnage, but I've also scored some wins. Like everybody else that thinks they have a new idea worthy of its own name, I have started calling it 'community sourcing'.

I reformed the definition above to fit my needs:

Community Sourcing
The act of taking a task traditionally performed by a specific member of the group, or consultant and exposing it to a controlled, generally large group of people who share the same interest as the group, in the form of an open call.

The term seems to be out there (google 2080 hits), and the purpose looks similar.

As far as walking-the-walk goes, we have working 'community sourced' systems used every day for content-management, marketing, and project management. Newer and (therefore, I hope) less-used solutions include link-tracking (think del.icio.us), and yes, a submit/vote/discuss/report app, which, in my humble opinion, is... brilliant.

Deeper in .Net 2008!

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:36:56 GMT

Deeper in .NET 2008 is just around the corner!

Our schedule is full, and all of the speakers are top notch! Jason Beres from Infragistics is returning again this year for his fifth visit. In addition, Mark Miller from Developer Express, Richard Campbell from Strangeloop and .NET Rocks, Charlie Calvert from the C# team at Microsoft and Scott Wisniewski from the VB team at Microsoft are on the schedule this year.

We're working with a number of sponsors to support the event. Our Annual Sponsors are listed on the side of this page -- please be sure to support and thank them. Additionally, we are working with a number of companies to provide many prizes to give away throughout the day.

Mark your calendars for April 5, 2008, and sign up now! Space is limited, and registration (FREE!) will be required for this event.

Free training! Free food! Free books and software giveaways!

[Register here]

Saturday, Apr 5, 2008 at 07:00 AM
Deeper in .NET 2008 will be held on April 5, 2008 at the Milwaukee Marriott West (Map & Directions).
Check-in will begin at 7:00 AM.