#PSEWEB

As a personal user, the Facebook mobile applications have left me a little underwhelmed.

As a business user, the iPhone Facebook application is a great tool for anyone who has a Facebook Page – but doesn’t have any other properties (i.e. Twitter). Once you add Twitter, Hootsuite becomes a great tool but if Facebook is all you work with, then Facebook for iPhone gets the job done quick and easy.

The key is adding your pages to your favourites screen within the application.

Add Your Pages to Favourites

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
   
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
   
4. Click the “+” plus icon in the upper right corner
5. Click Pages in the bottom right
6. Select the page you would like to add from the list
7. Done!

Updating Your Facebook Page

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
4. Click on the page you would like to update
5. For a status update, go ahead and enter into the What’s on your mind? box
6. For a photo upload, click the camera icon to the left of the What’s on your mind? box

Huge thanks to @jjloa for this great tip at #pseweb last May!

I am an awful customer. I want and want and want and I have NO sympathy for your issues. You are getting paid to serve me.

I am very open about service (or lack thereof) that I receive. Rogers has done more than well by me, Netfirms has been surprisingly available (although, they never did fix the issue), and then there are the ones I talk about with less satisfaction.

This week, I signed a new one year contract with a company that has ridiculous red tape to service, high prices – and has in the past randomly withdrawn extra money from my account that I still have not received back.

Why? My health. Their product is the solution, and as much as it bugs me to give them business, I’m not going to ‘kill’ myself over it.

(Think about how often I am going to recount my woes to other potential customers – hopefully they will lose more than what I’m paying them, in the form of lost business).

None of this is really my point (thank you for reading though!). When I signed my deal with the devil, the front staff asked me about my history with products of this type, what I was looking for, etc. They asked why I wanted to try the service before signing on and why I was reluctant to do business with them despite the strength of their product.

And they sympathized! They are so friendly and nice, and getting paid next to nothing. We’ve all been there. Most of us have worked places that we would have changed if we could have at the time – from fast food to marketing. As much as I want to grouch through the sign on process, I can’t take it out on this innocent, sympathetic, my new best friend, front desk person. It simply would not be fair.

As the ‘face’ of a recent redesign – I need to become the front desk person. Separating myself from the changes coming down from on high is how a webmaster or mistress can best survive the roll out of a new look and feel. Not many redesigns are done solo, and the person with decision making power is rarely the messenger when it comes to unveiling and softly enforcing a new web onto a community.

How do you manage change across the organization? How did your web team go about introducing and implementing change?

Presenter: Terri Vaughan, Web Customer Support Specialist, Clemson University

Abstract:

Are you one of the lucky individuals who provide support for your organization’s Web content providers who have little, if any, Web experience? Does your organization think typing and word processing skills are all that are needed to be a Web content expert? Is the “Webmaster” role part of a job description’s “other duties as necessary,” If you answer yes to these questions, this presentation is for you. You can transform your Web content providers into Web content experts by teaching a few simple skills. Reveal the “magic” of the internet and how it differs from “the Web.” Show how their Word skills can help them create interesting and informative Web content. Explain writing for print and writing for Web and why it’s important to know the difference. Inspire your content providers to learn these skills and more to transform them into Web content experts and you into a Web support genius!

Notes from presentation …

Many content providers given the job without volunteering and without specific skillset (they can type).

What they want:

• Someone else to do it for them.
• Want their web files and folders to be organized like on their desktop.
• To never learn markup.
• Drag and drop.
• Word like interface

What they get:

• Unfamiliar file structure.
• Inadequate graphics tools – training.
• Unclear or hard instructions.

What they do:

• Put off content.
• Insert improperly formatted graphics.
• Create unfriendly urls.
• Upload documents instead of web pages. (Don’t make users download.)

Clemson is on cascade, good because feels like word processing. Content providers are happy. Don’t have the other skills

What do they need:

• Adequate technical experience.
• Learn web best practices.
• Easy to use img editting tools.
• Ability to adapt print to web.

What we should do:

• Select staff w the right skills.
• Develop training program.
• Require attending training.
• Provide positive reinforcement.
• Periodically check on their web and offer positive as well as support.

Training Regimen:

• Basic computer skills
• How the web works
• Web best practices
• Multimedia formatting and best practices
• Simple tips for writing for web
• Site specific hands on training w tools
• Basic html

How to teach Content Providers:

• Show them confidence
• Avoid tech speak
• Explain why skills are necessary
• Analogies that they can relate to
• Entertain and engage during and after
• Follow up w reminders, cool tricks and compliments
• If you can compare it to ms word, they will get it.
• Stress the increase in their marketability.

Content Providers Love:

• Copy paste from word
• Activate previous version of updated page
• Restore accidental deletions
• Wysiwyg
• Seeing their content live right away

Summary:

• Clemson has 460 content providers. Manual monitoring process. Run report to see what’s been touched. Go out and look at their sites – this is what my job should be.
• Clemson redesign had 4 templates – full, left, left + spotlight, right, in multiple looks.
• Decision makers don’t understand web any better than admin
• Training infinitely better when one on one
• With workflows, someone needs to be in charge.

Presenter: Brad J Ward, CEO – Blue Fuego

Abstract: I will walk through many of Google’s services and products and show attendees how they can use them to increase productivity within their workplace as well as provide a better experience for their website visitors.Sites featured include, but are not limited to, Google Docs, Maps, Alerts, Webmaster Tools, YouTube, Analytics, Forms, GTalk/GChat, Blogger and more.

Notes during presentation …

Recommended Reading: Free, Chris Anderson

First step: get a Google account that you will use for all of this …

Thought: stop and think whether other staff will ever need access – should you create a corporate Google account instead of using your personal one?

Next: set up Google Alerts – great way to get buzz about your institution.

Thought: I am almost anti-google-alerts … relying too heavily on it can cause you to miss a lot of important web content/buzz.  Remember to regularly search your brand (you’ll be shocked by how much didn’t show up in your alerts).

Brad’s Experience: Brad found out that Butler’s $13K mascot costumes had been stolen via a Google Alert.  Caught it early enough to hitch a ride with the buzz and blow tweets and youtube out of the water, even get mass media attention.

Thought: Best practice is to track down specific mentions of your brand, individual applicants commenting about their school decision.  Don’t try to do this for every social mention. Just don’t. Catch what you reasonably can, but unless you have a social army, it’s not realistic to respond to every tweet, blog post, facebook note, discussion thread. If you end up getting them all – great, but don’t hate on yourself for getting 90%.

Next: Google Search Commands

Google search command “Site:uwo.ca” will only search uwo.ca.

Example of use: School decides to change application deadline to December 1 from December 15. Use site: command to find instances of both options to track down any instances of the “old” date.  Now you know everything that needs to be updated (give or take – Google isn’t perfect).

Boolean operators (AND, OR) work on Google and Twitter and most search boxes.  Use them to create a more inclusive search query (results that include multiple versions of your school name all in one result listing, versus 5 separate result outputs).

Next: Create a Google Map

Steps:

1. maps.google.com
2. create new map
3. name & description
4. save
5. tag things – you can drop html right in there – images!.

Check out Sweet Briar College and what they’ve done.

Butler uses embedded, tagged Google Maps to show places to eat.

Next: Google Docs

Example: Uncovering Class of 2013 Facebook groups in December ‘08.  Within 2 hours, edu webbers had pulled together over 200 links to these groups – would have taken Brad forever to do alone.

Forms: You can use Google Docs to create little online surveys?

Next: google.com/webmasters/tools/

Have to embed a little bit of code onto your site to prove you own the domain.  Provides a lot of quality information on your site – top searches, crawl errors (404’s), who’s linking to your site.

Submit a sitemap – directly influence the key links listed with your school on google search results.  “This is what we want you to feature.”

Next: Google.com/talk

“Live answer solution for free on your website.” This is a way your institution could have that for free! Our MBA site wants this – note to self! Your users won’t need a google account, won’t need to sign in.

Next: Google Reader

FYI, you can run your Google Alerts through here.  Also, search.google.com results can be rss’d into here.  Chris Brogan quote: “Make Google Reader your listening station.” You could check every blog every day to see if they have new content, or you can let an RSS reader check for you, and also deliver the content to ya.

Next: Google Voice

Transcribes audio but not very well. Use it to transcribe your voicemail.

Settings > Call widgets > embed “Call me” widget. They enter their phone number, Google calls them and says “Welcome, now connecting you,” then calls you and offers accept, voicemail, listen to voicemail, transcribe. Fantastic! A nice way to set up your mobile number without giving out your actual mobile number.

Next: Google apps for education

take the cost of running your school email off your hands.

http://google.com/apps/edu

Next/First: Google Analytics

free, all sorts of data about the people coming to your site, allow you to track your campaigns, use google url building to track what kind of traffic you’re getting.

Next: YouTube – owned by Google

New YouTube channel design … 77% of ppl that come to YouTube intending to watch one video, watch several.   Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded.  Third most visited site in the US, behind google, facebook, etc.

.EDU channels – additional branding options.  Custom header option (see Abilene), branding on every video. Longer videos can be uploaded.

Next: Full list of all the Google offerings: http://www.google.com/options/

Also, Google Labs (check out email goggles! answer math questions before you can check your email in off hours)

How can you Google your workweek?

Googlers get 20% of work week to focus on labs-type ideas, that end up being their best products!

Google Wave – coming soon.  “Going to shake up a lot of how we communicate – as if enough of that hasn’t already happened. Definitely one to keep an eye on.”

Do you have a Max strategy?

CEO of Google – take whatever you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution.  Marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.  “Max strategy = Max attention.”  But it’s not always good to have 800 videos on YouTube if they aren’t good.

Think And, not Or -  Seth Godin

If you have time to put pictures on flickr and picasa, do both.  Do you really want to alienate the percentage that are on the second most popular service?

“Not everyone is going to want to interactive with you online. Some just want to pull info and send in their application.” @bradjward – good to remember this, amongst all these ideas.

We don’t know what the next big thing is.  Facebook is 5 years old, Youtube is 4, Twitter is three.  The Internet is 4 years old, it is still a virgin.  @bradjward quoting Gary Vaynerchuk.

Neat thought – only ppl looking for a car will go to vw.com.  People open to great content will go to facebook.com/vw.

Sidenote: Always annoying that major brands get magical different rules on Facebook.  We tried to register Facebook.com/Ivey and were turned down because it was too short – and yet Volkswagon has www.facebook.com/vw – harumph.