reader question

Twitter for Fun and Non-Profit

Posted on March 20, 2009

Geeky reader Justine from Chicago wrote in and said, “I’m not currently a tweeter and feel I am slowly grasping it’s potential and reach, but still don’t really know how I could best utilize this interest/stream?”

She was asking about Twitter specifically in relation to monitoring discussion about the non-profit that she works for, and their different products (for lack of a better word).

My answer? Twitter, Facebook and all the other tools that people collectively refer to as “social media” essentially make public the conversations that used to happen in people’s homes and over the phone. You can now listen in on a conversation that used to take place over a backyard fence.

So, you can use it in two ways: listening and/or participating. Listening is vital — just so you know what’s being said. Participating is optional, but can be a very powerful way to connect with your existing audience and build a new audience.

How you do that is up to you: you could tweet as yourself (which I would suggest) and/or as your company (which is less personal, but could also work). The key is to provide value either way. If you have a company account, make sure to not just tweet about what you are up to, but really engage with your industry as a community. (See also: my list of Twitter complaints from a few weeks ago. Specifically – Twitter should not be a replacement for your RSS feed. Give us something other than news releases!)

Listening

A selection of ways to monitor what’s being discussed in the Twitterverse:

search.twitter.com – Check the web interface anytime, or subscribe to an RSS feed of a given search. I monitor the words Geek Girls and Geek Girls Guide on Twitter via RSS, so I know almost instantly anytime someone tweets with those terms. If I choose, I can shoot those people a message saying hey, thanks how did you hear about us, etc.
BackTweets: Enter in a specific URL and get a list of tweets that link to it. What I love about this is that it also returns results from URL shorteners (tinyurl.com, is.gd, etc.). Twitter search doesn’t, so using RSS from Twitter search and BackTweets I monitor just about every Geek Girls-related tweet. (Or I feel like I do!)
Twitt(URL)y: Kind of like Digg for tweets. (Need a Digg overview? I did one here.) Monitor popular URLs that are being tweeted. What I don’t like about this one, is that there’s not an obvious way to search for a URL. Harrumph.

Participating

Here are a few resources to help you get started with using Twitter for yourself or your company:

Check out the book Twitter Means Business by @jojeda. I haven’t read it yet, but people I know have read it and say it’s a fast read and an informative overview on how to use Twitter for business purposes.
Here’s a selection of articles about using Twitter:
And, if you want to learn even more about how to use Twitter and other social media tools, join Nancy and I at Social Media 101 – A Beginner Bootcamp.

Digg the Delicious RSS

Posted on January 11, 2009

Geeky Reader Madge from Minneapolis asked, “RSS. Digg. Delicious. What the heck do they all mean and how do I use them?” Great question, mom! I mean…um…Madge.

Let’s digg in!

RSS

I did a three-part series on RSS a couple of months ago, which you can read here, here and here. In a nutshell, RSS is a way for sites to syndicate their content, and for readers to subscribe to it. Common Craft did a fantastic short video explaining it all here:

Digg

Digg allows people to share stuff they think is cool. The more people “digg” something (an article, video, or image), the higher it rises in the rankings. For example, here is a list of the most popular articles on Digg over the past 24 hours. On the left, you can see how many diggs each article has. (Getting “dugg” can result in a lot of traffic to an article, sometimes to the point that the site is overwhelmed with traffic and either goes down, or becomes very sluggish. This is sometimes called the “Digg effect.”)

Anyone with a Digg account can submit something they think is cool (like, say, a Geek Girls Guide article). If other Digg users see it and also like it, they “digg” it. Users also police the content by using “bury” on duplicate, spam, or off-topic items. And, it just wouldn’t be Web 2.0 if they didn’t allow you to build a “network” would it? So, you can connect to friends on Digg to share diggs with each other. Or…just install the Digg Facebook app.

Digg has a good explanation on their site as well.

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Wha? Okay…do you know about bookmarks in your web browser? If you don’t, read this paragraph. If you do, skip to the second paragraph. Bookmarks are a way to create a shortcuts to sites you really like. Every web browser has this (some may refer to bookmarks as “Favorites” but it’s the same thing). So, if you visit CNN every morning, you can create a Bookmark and click on it instead of typing “www.cnn.com” into the address bar every time. (Or, you could just subscribe to the RSS feed, right?!)

Delicious stores your bookmarks online. So, whether I’m on my computer, my mom’s computer, or the library computer, I can log in to Delicious to see all my favorite sites. In addition, I can “tag” the sites with keywords to keep things organized.

Here’s a snapshot of my Delicious account:

To the left is the date I created the bookmark, and the title. To the right is the number of other Delicious users that have bookmarked that page and below that, my tags. You can see that no one else has bookmarked Ghost Lake Lodge, and that I tagged it with “resort.” I can then click on the resort tag to see all Bookmarks that I tagged with “resort.” It’s a great way to keep track of your bookmarks and categorize them easily. As an example, here are all the sites I’ve tagged with “retro.”

That’s the bookmarking side. The “social” side is that you have access to other people’s bookmarks as well. So, if you click on the box that shows you how many other people bookmarked a site, you’ll see a list of who they are and other tags they used for the site. You can click on their username to see a list of all their bookmarks and tags. In addition, you can create a “network” on Delicous. (Personally, I have more than enough social networks in my life right now, but it’s there if you want it.)

To me, the most valuable part of Delicious is the ability to bookmark stuff and have it available to me in any browser, on any machine. The “social” aspects are nice, but I don’t have a lot time for them. But, it can be a good way to discover new sites. Like, here’s a random Delicious user’s list of “retro” links — I’ve already found a bunch of great sites I didn’t know about!

As far as the “networking” goes, a better idea is probably to download the Delicous Facebook app, which publishes your Delicious bookmarks to your FB profile.

And, of course, those awesome dudes at Common Craft have explained this as well!

So, there you go. RSS, Digg, and Delicious explained. Now get out there and play.

Everyone’s A-Twitter

Posted on November 19, 2008

After my first Twitter post, I got a follow-up email from our geeky reader, Maile. (By the way, emails are nice, but blog comments feel like a warm hug on a cold day). Anyway, in her email Maile mentioned that she follows the LA Fire Department and several police departments on Twitter.

Wha?! I had no idea that fire or police departments even used Twitter!

I did a little research and it seems that the Scottsdale, AZ police were the first ones to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. The LA Fire Department has been using it as well; they used it to communicate updates during the October 2007 wildfires.

So there you go. You learn something new every day.

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have a great user search utility so you’ll probably have to check your local police or fire department web site to see if they’re tweeting.

Thanks For Sharing

Posted on October 29, 2008

Geeky reader Ann from Chicago wondered, “How can I post one of your articles on Facebook? I really liked Cindy’s thoughts on women in the creative department and want to share it with my homies…”

Ann’s question alerted us to the fact that we didn’t have an easy way to share our blog posts directly from our site. LAME! So, we recently rectified that situation with the addition of Share This at the bottom of each of our blog posts. Now, if you want to share our awesome wisdom and knowledge (or our guest geeks’ awesome wisdom and knowledge) you can use ShareThis to post a link to your account on just about any social networking site. Look for it right below each post, above the comments.

If you select Facebook from ShareThis, it will take you to a page (on Facebook) where you can either send the link to a list of your Facebook contacts, or post it to your profile. If you post it to your profile, your Facebook friends will see this as part of your feed (the summary of your activity on Facebook that others see when they log in).

As for the specific question, you can also share links directly from Facebook. From your profile page, hit “Share Link” and paste in the URL you’d like to share. Facebook gives you the option of including an image (it allows you to choose from the photos on the page you are sharing) and a comment.

Geek Chic of the Week: Twitter

Posted on October 27, 2008

Sorry this post is so delayed, but I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy on Tuesday, October 7 and he is keeping me very busy! Anyway, I promised in an earlier post from the MIMA Summit that I’d talk about Twitter. Coincidentally, that same week we also got an email from geeky reader Maile in Los Angeles wondering: “Why should I use Twitter?”

Let’s start with Maile’s question: what I think she’s really asking is “Is Twitter relevant to me or is it some piece of crap I should ignore?” I can’t really answer that, but I can tell you everything I know about it and you can decide if it’s relevant to you, or if you want to file it under “stuff those crazy kids are doing on the interweb.”

What is it?

If I had to boil Twitter down into a brief description, it would be that it allows you to give others a brief snapshot into what you are doing, thinking, or looking at right now. It’s faster, easier and more portable than a blog.

Here’s what Twitter says it is: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Not to keep relying on Common Craft, but damn. Those guys make some awesome videos. Here’s how they explain Twitter:

Here’s how I use it:

I first heard about Twitter in March 2007, on an episode of Future Tense on MPR. It sounded interesting, and my personal blog was in a state of utter neglect; it was time to close the coffin and bury it. So, using Twitter as a sort of “micro-blog” was intriguiging to me. I liked the idea of keeping people updated on what I was up to without the commitment of a full blog post. I posted about Twitter on a Clockwork blog (speaking of neglected…) and a few co-workers signed up. Then I slowly started gathering non-work “Followers.” Some are friends who signed up for Twitter as it started gaining in popularity. Others are people I have never met and I wonder why they care what I’m up to. But, for some reason, they do.

When I signed up for Facebook last year, I saw that there was an app that would sync up your Twitter updates and your Facebook status. How efficient! So, now if I “tweet” something, it also shows up as my Facebook status. Handy.

So, what does one talk about on Twitter? Whatever you want to. In the past week, I’ve tweeted about: a vole in my basement (eek!), my grandma’s death, the presidential debate, the fact that the new macbooks all have glossy screens (boo!), the New Kids on the Block reunion concert and my newborn.

Here’s how you can use it:

1. Sign up at twitter.com.
You can enter your name (for a long time I had just Meghan, but recently added my last name as well. You can enter in whatever you are comfortable with). You’ll also select a username, which other people will see and will use to send messages to you (see #4 below). Mine is irishgirl. Click the “protect my updates” checkbox if you only want people you approve to be able to see your updates.

2. Type in what you are doing in 140 characters or less.

3. Find some people that you want to follow.
If you don’t know anyone on Twitter yet, you can follow me. Or Nancy. When you follow someone on Twitter, they are notified, and may start following you back. If any unsavory characters start following you, you can click the link that says “block” and they won’t be able to see your updates. The most common type of Twitter unsavory is the spammer (yes, they are everywhere). When you visit their Twitter page, you’ll know they’re a spammer because they’ll be following thousands of people and will only have a handful of people following them back. Don’t feel bad about blocking these people.

4. Talk “at” people and send them private messages.
On Twitter, my username is “irishgirl” and Nancy’s is “nylons.” So, if I want to tweet something to Nancy, but I want everyone else to see it, too, I would type it as follows: @nylons let’s have lunch next week. If I want to tweet something to her and I don’t want anyone else to see it, I would type it as D nylons let’s have lunch next week. This sends her a “direct message” that no one else can see.

Ready to get even funkier? I knew it!

5. You can also get Twitter updates on your mobile phone (as text messages), on your desktop, or on your browser.
Frankly, I don’t care enough about what people are doing to want to get a text message about it, but I do use Twitterific on my laptop. Whenever there is a new tweet from someone that I follow, a cute little bird icon on my desktop turns blue. Whenever I feel like it, I can check in on the statuses of those I’m following or post a quick tweet myself. I prefer this to visiting the Twitter web site, and I don’t even mind the little ads that show up. I also use Hahlo on my iPhone for posting mobile tweets and checking in on what others are doing. There are a bajillion other Twitter apps listed on the fan wiki page here.

6. Use Twitter search to see tweets on particular topics.
Want to see what the Twitterverse is saying about Palin? Check Twitter search and type in Palin. Voila!

7. Categorize your tweets with hashtags.
Uh, what? Yeah, this one is super funky. But, it can also be super cool. Here’s an example: I attended the MIMA Summit on October 1. Inside the program, they printed the MIMA Summit hashtag: #mimasum08. Some of the breakout sessions even had their own custom hashtag. This allowed attendees to see — in real-time — what people were saying about the Summit.

8. Post photos from your phone using Twitpic.

Wrapping it up

So, back to Maile’s question: “Why should I use Twitter?” Crap. I still don’t know the answer.

But — just like my earlier posts about RSS — I’d encourage you to try it and see if you like it or not. The only problem I’ve had with it so far is people who overtweet. Like, a million meaningless tweets a million times a day. But, that problem is easily solved by “unfollowing” them.

So give it a try. And as always, I’d love to hear how it’s working for you!

Linked In and People You May Know

Posted on October 13, 2008

Recently a geeky girl reader submitted a question about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional networking site that allows you to connect to and manage your professional contacts online. It’s sort of a modern day Rolodex, if you will. It’s handy in that you can connect directly to those people you know through professional association, like current or past employers, networking groups and associations, school, conferences, etc. If you don’t have direct information for whomever you wish to add to your network, you can connect with them via a current colleague or friend. You simply ask your colleague for an introduction through email and the respondent has the option of confirming or denying your request. A basic/free membership to LinkedIn is, at the very least, an excellent tool for keeping an up-to-date list of your contacts and colleagues. A professional membership, however, takes networking to a whole new level, giving you greater access to contacts with whom you may only have a peripheral association, and letting you take advantage of more advanced features like tools for recruiting and job postings and, on the other end of the equation, job searching. I know some employers who only use LinkedIn for recruiting and have great luck with the service. All of that being said, I think most people I know use LinkedIn as a way of automating the maintenance around keeping their contact network current. Based on what I know of her, I imagine our reader with the question is exactly that type of user – a casual subscriber who maintains her professional contacts list using LinkedIn.

Our geeky girl reader wondered about the People You May Know feature on LinkedIn. This feature shows up in your sidebar and recommends possible connections. Miraculously the recommendations are pretty darn accurate. Often those people you may know are actually people you DO know. The accuracy of these recommendations has increased LinkedIn’s creepy rating by a factor of ten. The service recommends people you may have never had any contact with through the website. And sometimes those recommendations are so obscure AND accurate it borders on mind-blowing. Our reader wanted to know how in the heck LinkedIn can figure out who we might know and how they can be so darn creepy about it — so I set out to find the answer. I searched the web over and, come to find out, the people at LinkedIn know just how creepy and accurate they are and they work hard to keep this secret side of their code, well, secret. There are a lot of techies and bloggers supposing how they do it out there in the webosphere. But there are no proven theories about how they get to their lists. After my own research I did the only thing a self respecting geek girl could do (pffft), I reached out to a member of the geek girls men’s auxiliary, one genius engineer and Director of Technology at Clockwork, Matt Gray. I got way more than I bargained for in that exchange. Matt sat both Meghan and me down and explained to us the intricacies of graph theory. I’ll never be able to do any of that justice here. Instead I’ll just give you my layman’s take on the discussion and invite Matt and other geniuses to comment on this post and correct me if I over-simplify it to the point of being wrong. Remember though, our goal here on the Geek Girl’s Guide is to keep things simple. And I aim to please.

In very very basic terms you can think about each one of your connections on LinkedIn as a line — from you to that person. If you were to draw lines for every connection you’d have a heck of a graph. Say one of your friends, we’ll call her Rita, knows a guy named Bob. Rita has a line from her name to Bob’s name on her personal (and invisible, hypothetical, stupid but useful for this discussion) graph. That line in and of itself is just a connection. But say another of your friends, we’ll call her Sarah, also knows Bob. Suddenly the line from Rita to Bob and Sarah to Bob is bolder in terms of how it relates to your network. Because not just one, but two of your connections know Bob, which increases the likelihood of you knowing Bob. Throw another person from your network in there with a connection to Bob and, doggone it, Bob might just be somebody you might know and that’s how he shows up on your list. The theory is that LinkedIn has programmatically harnessed graph theory to weigh your connections in terms of how they relate to everyone in your network. They automagically layer all of these graphs over each other and make recommendations of people you may know based on the number of people in your network that share connections and the likelihood that those connections should be yours too. They probably go a step further and factor in the invitations people send outside of their LinkedIn networks. If two or more of your contacts invite the same person to use LinkedIN it’s likely you know that person too. That’s probably how people you know, who aren’t currently using LinkedIn, end up on your People You May Know list.

There you are. An overly simplistic, but easy-to-understand explanation for why LinkedIn is so creepy in it’s accuracy. Thanks to Matt for his help in laying it all out. Thanks to geeky reader Ann for the question. Now go ahead, people. Comment. Tell me how dumb I am. Tell me the right answer. Tell me how I could have explained it better. I’m open to all of it.

Free is Never Free, But. . .

Posted on September 17, 2008

It’s counterintuitive for me to facilitate this discussion, but what the heck. Who knows why, but people are always asking me where they can get an easy, free or very inexpensive website. They want to be able to add content – photos, maybe a little video, text. Perhaps they are a consultant or small business and haven’t gotten to the point where their website is a real priority (perish the thought) or they want to have more than a blog to chronicle their family adventures. There are many really good free blogging options out there, WordPress being, probably, the best one. And, with some technical assistance and a little tweaking (the geeks call it hacking), WordPress can be a great web content management tool. But it still requires intervention from that geeky friend, brother-in-law, uncle who works in IT. I encourage you to jump in and learn a little about how WordPress or other blogging systems work and try the tweaking yourself. If you use the WordPress hosted option and you don’t install their software on your servers you can dive right into your website in no time at all. If you’re still with me, I’m thinking that what you want is a simple, intuitive option that lets you bang out and publish a site in short order. And maybe a ‘blog’ isn’t enough for you. To tell the truth, there are some easy, free options out there, but you didn’t hear it here. I don’t plan on making this post an exhaustive list of cheap, free or inexpensive web building tools. Instead, I thought I’d look at a couple of free (or, ultimately very inexpensive) options for building and maintaining your own website.

I recently stumbled on an interesting service called Weebly. Weebly is entirely web-based, which means there’s no software to buy and download or install. This is a good thing. You can build an entire site in just a few minutes. This service lets you use drag and drop options for adding content to your site, you can add whole pages with just the click of a button. The templates include all sorts of layout options. And you can pull in things like photos from your own collections or from photo sharing sites like flickr. You can drop in a blog for the day to day writing. Or maybe you want to share a youtube video. No problem. Signing up is really easy. The interface is very intuitive and the system walks you through the (seemingly) more complicated elements like pulling content in from these other websites. If you want to get really adventurous the Weebly even gives you the option of pulling in GoogleAds so you can make money through your website. Whoa! What a concept. Remember this, this is probably not appropriate if we’re talking about your small business website. There are more advanced features in Weebly, but you have to pay for them. The premium service let’s you password protect pages, have multiple websites, upload and store large files, use their proprietary audio player and get some more hands-on support. This service is pretty reasonable, though. It looks like it starts at around 4 bucks a month. Here’s the thing that I think makes Weebly worth a look — the pages look decent. Unlike a lot of canned offerings out there, these are clean and current in their design. If you decide next week you hate how your site looks, no problem. You can change that design on the fly. Another plus is you can publish your site to your own domain. If you don’t have one, you can get it through Weebly, for an additional fee, of course. This is great because you can build your own site and publish it to www.MYOWNBUSINESS.com in a very short amount of time. If that’s not a big deal to you, or if you just want a site to show off your kid’s macrame you can just be a subdomain on Weebly like mykidsstuff.weebly.com. Every time you log back into Weebly you get a snapshot of your traffic too. You’ll know right away when the family starts visiting to judge you for how you dress junior in his most recent pictures. All in all, I’d say Weebly is pretty impressive. I built a Geek Girls test site in all of 10 minutes. I could definitely see my lower tech friends and family members using this service.

There are other cool web building tools worth a look. Matt Wilson, president of MIMA and a Geek Girls Guide Men’s Auxilliary member (whether he likes it or not) mentioned Tumblr to me and I thought I’d take a look. I liked it right away for its ease-of-use and intuitive walk-through of my first post. It didn’t give me a global view of the features as they relate to my layout in the same way that Weebly did. But it did walk me through creating and publishing a post with a very elegant, user-friendly, step by step process. I have the same kinds of opportunities with Tumblr to add audio and video, and outside content to my site. I liked some of the mobile options – I can ‘tumbl’ from anywhere with my mobile phone or handheld device. I can also publish to my own domain. I don’t see Tumblr being as useful for a small business, or someone wanting a website with multiple pages AND a blog. But it would be PERFECT for the beginner wanting to share family photos or videos or maybe journal through a trip or whatever simple little stories you might want to share. In fact, Tumblr is really geared toward those people wanting to offer a more media-rich experience to their users. Its all about the video, audio, image-rich content. Start a vlog! Or a Photoblog. You’ll impress your friends and it’ll be SO EASY!

Don’t take my word for it, though. Try some website building services on for yourself and see what fits for you and your requirements. Here’s a few more for you to take a peek at:

blogger.com: The original web-based blogging software. Its a lot more feature rich, user friend and robust than it was when it first came along. If you know it, it might be time for another look.
clearblogs.com: Easy enough. And free. For the most part, anyway.
terapad.com: The basic service is free but ad supported. Nice feature-set. Great templates.
Xanga.com: Blogging + social networking = xanga.
Squarespace.com: Great interface. Intuitive feature set. Awesome designs.

There you have it. I’ve admitted some things can be free. But you always pay a price. You pay a price in terms of flexibility and scalability. You pay a price in terms of support. And, as you grow, you may really have to pay a price – to grow, and get more, and do more. But as a stepping-off point, these services are worth a look. I promise you, regardless of your level of competency with technology, if you can use a word processor, if you’re reading this post right now, you too can build and manage your own little website. So, what are you waiting for? Get on that!

Pay-Per-Click Advertising, by Nina Hale

Posted on September 15, 2008

Geeky reader Jamie in St. Paul submitted the following question recently: “Could you talk a little about google ads and google ad words? What’s the difference and how does it work? I have a basic idea but I’d like to learn more.”

I know enough about the topic to be dangerous, but contacted fellow girl geek and search engine maven Nina Hale to give a more expert explanation. She was kind enough to submit the following explanation of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. From Google Adwords and beyond!

What is PPC and how does it work?

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is the practice of bidding on specific keywords when they are typed into search engines. You bid in an auction system for an ad to show based upon the keyword, channel, time-of-day, geographic location, or other factors. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Common ad networks are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and more recently Facebook social targeting.

The advantages of PPC:

the ability to launch, modify, and stop rapidly,
the ability to get onto the front page of search engines,
the ability to take searchers to a very specific landing page of your choice,
the ability to easily measure leads and revenue from the channel.

The disadvantages of PPC:

the market is mature and generally has efficient competition,
you must be able to effectively convert your visitors,
unlike natural search—it costs money for each click and once you stop funding it, it’s over. Meaning that natural search takes a lot of time to optimize, but once you’ve done it right, there is a half-life of benefit (but that also goes away).
PPC can be complex to manage which may require outside help.

Funding PPC

As the advertiser, you identify how much you’re willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad, and you compete in an auction system with other advertisers who are also bidding on those keywords. You can specify a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword that will trigger an ad. A product that costs a lot of money and has a short time to purchase might be highly competitive. “Residential drug treatment” may cost $31 for each click. But “mouthguard for braces” might only cost $0.30 per click. But, even if you offer the highest bid you are not guaranteed the top listing; there is a complex system of ranking based upon a large number of variables.

You can set budget limits on campaigns for mere dollars a day, or go as high as the available volume of searches supports. You can also define geographic locations, times of the day, or where on the search result page you prefer to have your ad show.

Measuring PPC

Since you can track which keyword produces a lead or sale for your company, you should be able to know what CPC and conversion rate will make you money. For example: if you determine that the keyword “mouth guards” sells $400 for each 100 clicks, you should be able to set a maximum cost you’re willing to pay for each click. All the networks use credit card billing and most of them charge you after the fact rather than having you pre-fund your account.

Brand Considerations in PPC

Because part of natural search optimization (SEO) requires a site to have keywords in the page copy that someone has searched on, PPC allows you to portray a more appropriate brand image. For example, if someone searches for a “fat farm,” and you want your website to come up in natural search, the word “fat farm” has to be very apparent in the page content. In paid search you can have an ad trigger from the keyword “fat farm” but the ad and your website could say “luxury weight loss resort.”

PPC Channels “search vs content” Networks

Most of the PPC ad networks have multiple channels: search networks and content networks. Search networks show ads on actual search engines, so they are based upon someone typing the keyword into a search box – clearly a pre-qualification to sales. Content networks are web pages where the keywords or keyword themes are present in the copy. Hence someone might be reading about the topic on another web site and see your ad. Clickthrough rates for the content networks are much lower, and have variable results based upon the industry and target.

Facebook PPC

Facebook social ads are a middle zone that falls into what is called behavioral targeting (BT). You identify interests people have listed on their profiles or updates, and if it’s in the Facebook database, you can show ads to that interest group. I’m a member of a Star Trek group on Facebook and had an ad shown to me for a Star Trek t-shirt, which I promptly bought. The Facebook database is currently not as extensive as it could be, and word is that they are working to expand this.

Types of ads on PPC

While text ads are most common, most networks now offer image ads, mobile ads, and listings on local maps as options.

When to Use PPC Advertising.

PPC Advertising does not grow demand, it captures demand that is there. It should have higher close rates because people are further down on the funnel. If there are people who are actively searching for what you sell, PPC is an excellent source of advertising.

You have to be able to close. If you don’t have an efficient manner on your website to get people to buy or start an inquiry process with you, you need to start there. It’s the “lead a horse to water” idea, if there’s nothing for them to drink, you wasted your money.

You have to be able to measure. If you can’t measure what happens on the website once people get there from a paid ad, it is going to be very hard to justify continuing the program. You can measure engagement in terms of time spent on the site, page views, etc., as well as actual sales and leads. Conversion rates for landing pages on PPC average 3.84% for in-house management of PPC, and 5.4% for outsourced managed PPC. (source: “MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook – second ed. 2008” Covers both B2C, B2B)

If you’re thinking about a long-term natural search investment, PPC is a good starting point. You can use this to show that search does create leads or sales for the company. Or you may find that it doesn’t convert and that you either need a redesign, better call to action, or different form of advertising. Natural search also takes a long time to really take hold, depending upon the competition on the first page.

If the natural search competition is too intense, PPC can work well. Sometimes you just can’t get past the Wikipedia’s of the world, the huge directories that have been putting $100,000 annually into natural search optimization, or the millions of fans who have been linking to a site. However this works in reverse, if there is a very competitive term, chances are there are lots of companies willing to pay a lot of money for a paid ad.

If you want to get a message up fast, such as in response to an article about your company, PPC is an excellent way to launch immediately.

PPC is a good way to test new designs or sales offers. Since you can direct traffic precisely to a page, you can do A/B tests to bring in traffic, test the response, then turn off the ad.

When not to use PPC Advertising.

If you want to grow demand, search is going to be more expensive and have worse results. They are better channels for building your brand. Sometimes you have a product that no one knows about and there is no exact demand for it. In this case, you can’t even target a keyword that fits. In this case turn to PR or media.

If you have a product that has a long research process, or is an “ambition” item, PPC may be hard. For example, lots of people want to liquidate their lives and escape to Mexico to live simply, but not many do it. Lots of them may be searching at 11pm after they’ve had a bad day at work. So spending lots of money for PPC ads about cheap Mexican property may get you tons of clicks and zero sales. Low conversion rates and high interest can be an opportunity for natural search where the long-term investment will result in “free clicks.”

Search is ok, but riskier for “pain points” because the customer is higher in the funnel when they don’t really know what they need to fix the problem. The lead time is longer as they research, and harder to attribute the lead to the original search terms.

Nina Hale, Geek

Nina Hale is Principal of Nina Hale Consulting, a Minneapolis search engine marketing agency that works with brands such as Edina Realty, Lifetouch Portrait Studios, Red Wing Shoes, and the Hazelden Foundation.

Reader Question: Parallels for Mac

Posted on September 10, 2008

This (great) question was submitted to the Geek Girls recently by one of our geeky readers, Vickie in Seattle:

Hello ladies. Well, it’s time for me to install parallels on my beloved Mac. I’m so resistant to this — it’s silly really. But admittedly it’s due to my long-standing distaste for Microsoft and my recent nightmare experiences with Vista and Microsoft Exchange servers. So, I’m wondering if anyone out there has any thoughts as to bugs, install issues, desktop sharing, back-ups, etc. before I head into this. Oh, and am I going to get a stomach ache when I see Microsoft desktop icons on my Mac?

I asked our resident Mac expert, and official member of the Geek Girls Men’s Auxilliary, Michael Koppelman for his expert advice and he had this to say:

I would first take a look at VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/). It is open source and works very nicely on Macs, PCs and Linux boxes. Parallels is very nice, though, and is probably a bit more mature, especially in terms of devices such as printers and network connections. In both cases you need to own a version of Windows if your goal it to run Windows. You can virtualize Linux and other operating systems, though, as well.

As for the Windoze icon induced stomach ache, well, a little pepto in the desk drawer can’t ever be a bad thing. For the really specific information around bugs and backups, and every other little Parallels quirk, check out the Parallels Consumer Tech Blog.

Now, there may be some of you sitting there thinking, ‘what the heck is Parallels for Mac and why should I care? Also a good question. Simply put, Parallels for Mac is a program that lets you run Windows or Linux on your Macintosh computer (I know! Why WOULD you?). This is called ‘desktop virtualization’. You may not be running a Windows machine, but you can feel like you are with this handy program. So your desktop, your icons, your programs can all look and act like a Windows-based PC, when in fact you are working on your beloved Mac. For more information about Parallels visit the website.

I Ain’t Much for Book Learnin’

Posted on June 30, 2008

Ooh! Ooh! Our very first reader question!

Whitney in Minneapolis wrote:
“I’m a young female who just recently got into the world of social/interactive marketing. I must say I think I’ve found that one thing I could do for the rest of my life. I was wondering though, without there being a specific degree in this would it be better to go the journalism route, or the IT route? I have an AAS degree in music business already, but I’d like to get your point of view on this. I was also browsing your “Sites We Dig” section and noticed the Clockwork link goes to the Future Tense site, not sure if that was intentional or a misdirected link.”

Um, first of all, I totally fixed that link. Then I fired myself for being so stupid that I screwed up the link to the company I work for. Don’t tell my boss!

Second, I wouldn’t worry about the degree. I have a degree in Journalism, but that’s because when I was young and foolish I thought I wanted to be a copywriter and work at an ad agency. (Not to mention the fact that in those days they had a special tutorial on how to use this new thing called “email” so getting a degree related to computers that wasn’t computer science was impossible.) Even now, with technology as pervasive as it is, higher education hasn’t really caught up. So, as you’ve noticed, there’s not really a good degree program for people that want to work in Interactive. I mean, there is if you want to be a programmer or a designer (kind of) but there’s not a clear path if you’re like me and end up going into strategy/project management type stuff. And it sounds like you are on a similar path doing strategy and planning-type stuff along with content development.

In the past I considered doing a degree in human-computer interaction (when I was thinking about focusing my career more specifically on IA) but in retrospect I think I might have found that approach a bit dry. So, my advice to you would be to continue doing what you’re doing now which is gaining real experience working with clients, websites and social media. When it comes right down to it, a degree is nice but most people making hiring decisions in this industry are going to look at experience (either as a portfolio of sites you’ve worked on, or a successful employment history where you can demonstrate how your role on the project had a positive effect on its outcome).

I believe that to truly be successful in Interactive, you have to love it. You have to live it, breathe it, consume it, and create it. You have to enjoy doing it even before you start getting paid for it and most of what makes you good at it isn’t something you can learn from a book. I don’t think that’s necessarily true for other careers. (Accounting, for example.) But, the best Interactive people I have met — even programmers in many cases — are those who are largely self-taught. The ones who stay up late at night staring into a glowing monitor just for the love of the game. Because those same people are the ones who continue to learn and stay on top of what’s new long after dust has started collecting on the frame of their diploma. And in an industry that moves as fast as this, those are the people you want working next to you.