A couple I’ve made

Website traffic plummets when 301 redirects are turned off

This is from one of my clients Google Analytics stats. 301 redirects can take a reader from a friendly short url such as www.website.com/word – that they might type into their browser after seeing an advert in a newspaper – to something far more complex like www.website.com/english/html/subject/page.asp?123.

The public search for disease common names

Google Trends is one of my favourite visualisation tools. This shows how many more people search on Google for swine flu (the blue line) rather than the scientific H1N1 (red line). See Google Trends and try it out for yourself.

From the web

Newsmap: Google News stories

I like the macro and micro view of news stories and the way you can customise it by changing the url. This is business, national and technology news for the uk: http://newsmap.jp/#/b,n,t/uk/view/

Healthmap: collating disease outbreaks

RSS feeds from trusted health news sites combined with a Google map to show current disease outbreaks.

Smartmoney Market Map: the US markets

Quickly see which company stock prices are rising and falling in the US markets by sector: both at the macro and micro-level.

Visual Thesaurus: swim through synonyms

So much easier to use than the printed version. I have the CD, but I use the web version.

• Tell stories about what your brand means to people.
• Give people useful content. This is known as ‘marketing with meaning’.
• Connect people to the things they care about.
• Build a ‘social FAQ’. Take the top 10 questions that people have about your company and answer those methodically across the social web with content. All kinds of content: podcasts, webinars, video blog posts and of course text.
• Give readers what they want.
• Respond to negative comments: say thank-you, say sorry and finally say what you’ll do about it.

Come on my Harnessing Social Media Course to find out more.

However, the tools are pretty amazing. Here, I’ve embedded a Facebook Livestream app I just created. You can comment on this post by signing into your Facebook account.

He talked about his new book ‘Zero History’ and about writing science fiction and writing in general. William is my favourite source of quotes when teaching. “The future is here, its just not evenly distributed” being one of my favourites when I teach social media. And of course he invented the term ‘cyberspace‘.

Some quotes from the event:

On his latest 3 books:
“a decade long pinhole exposure”.

For aspiring writers:
“write all the time”.

On China:
“there is not enough novelty [for me to be interested in China]“.

On Japan:
“I’m a happy consumer of things from Japan”.

On being told that one audience member had highlighted a passage in his latest book on his Kindle, and then found that three other people had also highlighted this passage, William said:
“Is it possible to turn that feature off? I hate it when people write in books”.

On getting older and the future:
“I find everything increasingly interesting. When I’m older I think I’ll just gape at everything”.
“I want to know how future people see us. We have no self-knowledge”.

I’m just a little way through Zero History, looking forward to lots of traveling whilst training so I can finish it.

Groups are essential for keeping abreast of topics.

Here’s some worthwhile LinkedIn Groups for web writers to join:

Freelance Web Writers

Web Content

The Content Wrangler Community

Freelance Editing Network

Seasoned writing and editing pros

The National Union of Journalists

STET: Professional Copy Editors

LinkEds & writers

Here’s a useful introduction to Sidewiki:

Here’s some examples of how it’s been used:

• John Maeda, President of RISD, adding to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic physician, adding to CDC website about flu shot myths.
• Lonely Planet journalist Tom Hall recommends the Scottish Football museum.
• ProPublica General Manager Richard Tofel gives context by quoting ProPublica author Christopher Favelle on an article they featured.
• See many other examples by following googlesidewiki on Twitter.

Here’s my screencast showing how to see the comments:

The comments are not controlled by the site owner. Some organisations I’ve recently talked to are fearful of this lack of control. Others point out that conversations could be going on outside of the usual blog comment systems set up by bloggers. This BuzzMachine article and the accompanying Sidewiki comments are a useful contribution to the debate.

What can you do?

If you have a Google Webmaster Account – and have therefore proven that you are the site owner – you can write a special entry that will remain at the top of the comments. Just sign into Google, click the Sidewiki button on your browser and leave a short comment that everyone will see.

You should also closely monitor what’s being said before wading in there and replying to the comments. Thankfully Google makes Sidewiki comments available to anyone with an RSS reader (Firefox, Google Reader, My Yahoo etc). All you do is subscribe to this feed:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.YOURDOMAIN.com%2F/default?sortorder=updated&includeLessUseful=true

I’ve subscribed not just to feeds for domains that I manage for my clients, but to other interesting domains such as The Guardian, The BBC, The European Union, Google …

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.