In this Social Media Strategy tutorial, we learned to put the strategy into the context of the organisation.

We identified the role of social media in “connecting our target audience to our core content” and looked at the roles of different social media tools.

But nothing in life is simple. A social media strategy is no exception. Let’s fine-tune our generic strategy.

Is social media only a means? Can it be a goal too? Can social media be “core content”?

In the previous parts of our series, we defined two roles for social media: either the sandwich men handing out flyers (using microblogging and social networking tools) or as the store front, making core content digestive, and pleasing to the eye (in the form of blogposts, videos, pictures,…).

But can social media also be core content? Can core content be stored in social media? The answer is “yes”, twice. An encouraging yes!

Even within the context of this tutorial, where we defined a social media strategy for a nonprofit agricultural research organisation, it is not all about research papers and scientific publications. Those are really the end result of a process, often covering several years. No, it is just as important, or even more important to also document the process itself. Describe the tools you use, the methodologies you try out, your experiences, your successes and failures, your experiments…

Here is a nice example of a CIAT scientist using video to document some of his process. He actually goes a step further and also uses video as one of his end products. In that way, social media becomes core content.

In same area, here is an example of how CCAFS used a series of video testimonials to document how farmers adapt to climate change.

The only question I would encourage you to ask yourself, for every piece of content is: “Is this core content”, or is it “meta-content”, leading into “core content”? Is it the “terminus” of the rail track you are traveling with your audience, or just “a half-way train station”? Practically, when uploading a video, is it supposed to introduce a research report, as core content? If so, it should have links to that report. The same with pictures, blogposts,…

Social media can also be “a simple publishing tool”

Sometimes, we just want to have a simple publishing tool, to put up content easily and fast.
See how ILRI uses a blog to assemble press clippings, and another blog to publish their vacancies. All core content! Check out how Bioversity uses a blog to publish about the latest additions in their library.

Because blogplatforms like WordPress become more and more versatile, they can be used as sophisticated tools, linking into databases or aggregating data from many different s0urces. Check out the CGIAR Ongoing Research site, a visual interface into their research projects, AMNK which aggregates complex climate data into a data modeling tool. All on WordPress!

Are there any other uses of social media?

In this tutorial, we mostly concentrated on one specific purpose of social media, within a non-profit organisation. Even more, it was done within the context of one specific type of organisation, doing agricultural research.

As we stressed in part 1 of this tutorial: Your social media strategy needs to be put within the context of your nonprofit organisation. This tutorial (in afterthought, maybe I should have called it a “case study”) was based on one of several possible  social media approaches, one within the context of an agricultural research organisation. This is not the “only right” stream of thoughts, not the “only good” social media strategy.

There are others, dependent on your organisation and the role you want to attribute to social media within your context:

• Stir up conversations, engage your peers, your audience: Many organisations use social media for the “social” part. Social media are very well suited for the exchange of ideas, feedback on projects, and general engagement with your audience. In that way, the audience would not only read, but also be part of creating core content.
• Productivity tools: social bookmarking tools like Delicious and Diigo are part of the social media family, though fit in less within our strategy to “connect our target audience to our core content”. I would classify them more as “productivity” tools. Collaborative social media tools like Wiki’s fall under the same category
• News sources: Many of us want to stay abreast of the news, in the specific areas of our work. Social media, through its social networking function, is an excellent tool to get first hand updates and news from our peers and target public. By curating your audience on Twitter or Facebook, you can stay up to date with the latest in your professional field
• Fundraising: Aha, an area we have not touched yet. While related to the generic use of social media as an advocacy tool, we could also use specific tools to actually fund-raise. A nonprofit I work with raised US$1 million, in 24 hours for the tsunami in Japan.
• Social reporting: We highlighted several times on this blog how social media can be used to report from events, conferences and meetings, as a way to engage the onsite and offsite audience, as a way to keep track of the event’s content and as an advocacy tool
• Odd ends: As you can imagine, any crowdsourced mass media tool can have all kinds of applications. I have used it to recruit people, to ask for help, to find real-time solutions to software bugs, as user support, to connect to people where I travel to, etc… You name it, somewhere you can find an application for it in social media…

About “social media reach” and “social media impact”

We have not touched upon figures and statistics in this tutorial. A crucial but also dangerous area… It is soooo easy to get stuck on “social media reach”, on figures showing statistics of your social media traffic.

A graph showing your Twitter followers going up, proving how many thousand of people access your Flickr pictures, the amount of views on YouTube videos and the number of “likes” on your Facebook links. Oooh and those Google Analytics figures for your blog. Njam Njam! Goody!

I love it. Everybody loves those figures. These are black and white. Objective. Nobody can dispute them.

But they don’t mean much actually…

Again, make sure those are figures for your target audience. Point one.
Point two: your social media content is not our target. It is not your goal. It is a means. Your goal is to bring your target audience to your core content: your scientific research, your reports, your impact measurements, etc…

So measure how much of your target audience reaches your target content. Measure that funnel, that flow of people attracted by the sandwich men’s flyers to your store window to your core content.

Measure how much of the core content is read, the progress of the access to it, how long people spend reading it, how much your core content is spreading, republished and re-digested on other websites and blogs.

THAT is what I call social media impact.

This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.
Looking for more inspiration? This list of social media strategies and policies will help you.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy Social Media Today

In this Social Media Strategy tutorial, we learned to put the strategy into the context of the organisation and identified the role of social media in “connecting our target audience to our core content”.

We identified three critical parts in our social media strategy: identifying our target audience and our core content, and how social media can be used to connect them both: as the window display of our store, and as the sandwich men handing out flyers.

Let’s look at those functions in detail:

The first function of social media: The window display of our candy store

I have my candy. I also know my customers, my target group… Now how to get customers into my candy store?

The first thing I would do, is to make a nice window display. Our store window should present all candy in an attractive way. We’ll show all the different kinds and flavours we have. It should catch the eye of anyone walking by.

Here lays the first role role of social media: blogs, videos (YouTube, Vimeo, BlipTV), pictures (Flickr, Picasa), podcasts (Podomatic), presentation (Slideshare),… I call it “meta content”. It is “easy to access, easy to digest” content which leads “customers” to your core content.

Each of the “meta content” tools should be used as our store window: they should present our core content in an attractive, enjoyable, provocative, teasing way. The content of these social media tools should tell a story, give a summary of our core content. It should stir enough interest for people to dig further, and read our actual target content.
This means this tier of social media tools should also be like a “digest” of our core content, easy to read with plentiful of links to our core content, so people can access that core content easily.

It is pretty obvious on how we can use blogs as a “window display”: for each of the core content we have, we write a blogpost with a story around that core content. Something which is enjoyable to ready, pretty short and attractive. Within the blog posts, we put the links to our core content, so if people like to know more, they can dig deeper, and check out our “candy”. Check out how we did this in the Research with Impact series, how it is done in this blogpost, leading into the research report proving there is sufficient water to sustain the population growth. See how CIAT is using their newsblog to lead into their core content.

Few organisations, however, use videos, pictures, podcasts and presentation tools that way. Most just publish these “as is”, without offering a way to dig deeper. A waste of effort, if you ask me. What good is it if 100,000 people visit your Flickr gallery if there are no links to your core content? Just as for blog posts, video and picture galleries, podcasts and Slideshare presentations can not be “the end terminal” of a train track. They are not the goal but a means: They are not core content, but meta content leading people towards our core content.

Let me give an example how to use Flickr pictures in a better way:
- for each picture, put an appropriate title. “Kenyan farmer uses drip irrigation to save water” is more significant and search-friendly than “DSC0433.jpg” as a title, no?
- Use significant descriptions and put links to your core content within the descriptions. Often Flickr picture descriptions are left blank, or just contain a copy of the title, or even less. Why not spend a bit of time to write a short description, linking back to your website? Or, in our context of working with agricultural research centers, why not put links to the scientific research reports related to the Flickr picture?

I have to say, it is encouraging to see how many CGIAR centers and research programs are already pretty far in using Flickr galleries as “meta content”. Check out this gallery from CCAFS, or CIAT.. Nicely curated, no? Check also how CIFOR is putting in links to their websites in the pictures’ descriptions.

The same also goes for your YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, etc… Why do I see so many cryptic titles and descriptions? Why do I lack a link back to the projects, or research reports related to these presentations? This is your store front, dear people, so use it as such. Don’t have people see your store front, get all excited, but keep the candy shop’s door shut! Invite them in…!

The second function of social media: Our sandwich men handing out leaflets

Now we have our store shelves in order (our target content is well organised and accessible on our webpage), our store window is attractive (we write blogposts and publish videos and pictures about our core content), and we are ready for business!

Well, not quite yet… We might have the nicest window display and the best candy, but unless if people know where to find us, we won’t get any customers.

This is the second function of social media, where microblogging and social networking tools have a crucial role: We will use these to reach out directly to our target audience, and hand out flyers saying “Big sale, 50% off on all candy (put the addres here)” or “Sugarless and still yummy? Our candy has both! (fill address here)”…

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other microblogging or social networking tools are like our sandwich men, mingling with our target audience. Each tool has its own social network, which we will use to make short attractive announcement (our flyers), with links to our store front content (the blogs, but also videos, podcasts, pictures…).

For each piece of meta-content we write or publish, we can tweet or publish an update on Facebook. Each then links to a blogpost, a Flickr gallery, a presentation, podcast, or video. A question of grabbing people’s attention in a flash of a second.

Social media: it is all about seduction

“Selling” is all about “slow seduction”. It goes step by step. That is why I am adamant NOT to use Facebook and Twitter, to link to our core content directly for instance. That is too big a step: The attention span to read a Tweet of Facebook post is counted in terms of “seconds”. You can not take people who –in a second- found your tweet intriguing and clicked on the link, only to throw a 200 page scientific report at them!

Nope. You get their attention in a second. A one liner-Tweet. This links to a nice blogpost, which is easy to read, pleasant to look at, and in the attention span of a few minutes stirs up enough curiosity for people to click on the links in the post, which, now, links to your core content.

Our social media strategy in a nutshell

So there you have it, your social media strategy: We use social media as an intermediate step to connect our target audience to our core content, in three steps:

1. Sandwich men handing out flyers (Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc..) in areas where our target audience hangs out (our social networks, filled with our target audience)
2. The flyers bring the people to our store front (mainly blogs, but also video, pictures, etc.. with links to our core content)
3. Once they looked at our display window, we encourage our public to come into our shop (our website) and buy our candy (read our key content).

Our social media strategy, as easy as one-two-three (“ABC, easy as one-two-three”, did they not make a song about that? The Jackson Five, no?)

You’re still with me? Then you will want to read all about “Fine-tuning your social media strategy” in our fourth and last part.
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy The Giallo Antico

In the process of defining a social media strategy in the context of nonprofit agricultural research, we defined the key role of social media in part 1 of this tutorial, as:

• Make research available and accessible, AND
• Document the research processes

In this part, we’ll convert these goals into a social media strategy.

Connecting our target audience to our content

Let’s cut to the chase: Within the context of an international nonprofit research organisation, we defined the core social media strategy as “Using social media to connect our target audience to our core content”.

This gives us three parts to concentrate on:

1. Our target audience: What is our target audience? Who are they? How do we reach and engage them?…;
2. Our core content: What is it? Where is it stored? Why is that core content? What is the value of it?…;
3. Social media as the link: What tools can we use to connect “audience to content”? What is the role of these tools? How to best use them?…

Running a candy shop

Imagine we run a candy store. In order not to have people pick on the example: say that we only have unique non-sugary candy, made out of natural ingredients, produced by ethnic minority groups, wrapped in recyclable paper.

We want:

1. to reach people interested in buying candy (our target audience);
2. them to know about our store (a role of social media);
3. the potential clients to come over and check out our store’s window display (another role for social media);
4. the potential clients to enter the shop (our website and repositories);
5. the potential clients to buy our candy (read our core content).

Step 1: Who is interested in our candy? Defining our target audience.

In a previous post, we explained a practical way how to identify a target audience. That’s the first step in any social media strategy.

This exercise is not a small feat: Go from a high level (identify your target groups), to the nitty gritty details (identify the actual individual people or organisations), to the mechanics (identify your audience’s social media channels and connect to them via those channels).

It is also a process which never ends: you should continuously update and expand this list. But, it is worth while, it is the core of your online presence: the people you want to reach and impact.

In this example, we defined the target audience for CCAFS, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, as:

• policy makers (working on climate change issues)
• researchers (working on climate change issues related to food security and agriculture)
• internal partners (partners within the CGIAR system, and staff implementing the CCAFS program)
• selected universities (partnering with them on projects)
• donors (both existing and possible future ones)
• public media (in general, not only those working on climate change)

In another example, as part of the social media work we did for IFWF3, The Third International Forum on Water and Food, our target audience was defined as:

• Donors
• Researchers, scientists
• Partners
• Development professionals
• Media
• Universities and youth
• The general public

In the latter example, you can also see how those target groups were fleshed out into individual organisations, and how we started listing their social media outlets.

Step 2: What candy do we sell? Defining our core content

Let’s continue within our example: defining a social media strategy for nonprofit agricultural research centers:

Given we have all our research on our website or online-repository, often it is buried amongst loads of other information. No wonder that for many organisations, it is a difficult and painful process to pinpoint their most valuable online information. Though painful, it is the first step of our social media strategy: “identify the core content”.

Mechanically, it is not that difficult: Our core content inventory can be as simple as a mere list of links to scientific publications, research reports, agricultural data, different research processes, progress reports,… As long as we have it on an online repository, we’re ok: be it a website, a slide-share presentation, Google Books,…

Check out a simple example of what content we defined as “core” for the IFWF3.

Oh, and remember what we said in part 1 of this tutorial: the research results are not the only important content for a research organisation. It is just as important to document the process one followed, the project challenges,….

Once we have this list, ladies and gentlemen, we have your candy. Now we are ready to sell!

Step 3: The Art of Selling Candy: the role of social media

Ready to sell candy? Are we? Before we start, though, let’s make sure our store is in order: we put the candy reachable, viewable in nice racks, in other words: we’ll make sure our website containing the core content is well structured, user friendly, fast, etc…

Now, we have the candy, and we know who is interested in your candy. But how do we connect those two? Our customers need to know where our store is located, what candy we sell. The candy has to presented in an appealing way.

This is where social media plays a crucial role: “Connecting our customers to our candy”.

For our candy store, I would:

1. Have sandwich men hand out flyers within areas where our target audience usually hangs out, teasing people to come to our store: “The best candy in town”, “Sugar free, and still delicious”,..
2. Make a nice store window display: once the flyers teased people’s curiosity, and walk to our shop, I want them to be able to see a selection of what we sell, displayed in a way which stirs up their interest even further, up to the point where they enter our shop.

Translating this into social media tools:

1. Our sandwich men handing out flyers, grabbing people’s attention in a second, will be the role of Twitter, Facebook, Google+,..: teasers, one liners which take no longer than a few seconds to assimilate. Each of them has a link to…
2. Our store front, our window display: blogs, videos, Flickr pictures, podcasts, etc..: this social media content takes more than a second to assimilate, but just like a nice window display, it teases into “checking it out some more”: each of those social media pieces will have a link leading to core content, our candy in our store.

More about the details on the role of social media, window displays, sandwich men and flyers in part 3 of this tutorial.
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Defining a social media strategy for an agricultural research center

Every nonprofit organisation has its own goals. You might be fundraising for a shelter in your city, or advocating for companies to ban the use of Congo blood minerals in their products. Your social media strategy will logically depend on your “raison d’être”, on your organisation’s goals.

This tutorial shows how we built up a social media strategy for some of the CGIAR agricultural research research centers. While they were the inspiration for this tutorial, the approach and process can be applied for many other nonprofit organisations.

Social media in the context of the CGIAR

At the CGIAR, our goal is: “To reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership. “

The key word in there is: “Research”. We do agricultural research. But what good is agricultural research if it is not “available” and “accessible”?

CGIAR’s AAA strategy strives at making research Available, Accessible and Applicable. It highlights that “research for the sake of research ain’t worth the value of the paper it is written on”. CGIAR’s research, funded by public sources, needs to be readily available and accessible by the very same public, and not locked up in copyrighted scientific journals or in file cabinets. Sure, as scientists, they need to publish our articles in peer reviewed journals, but it can’t stop there in order to convert “research” into “impact”!

Social media plays a critical role in this.

Social media makes research “available” and “accessible”

In the past years, the CGIAR has made great progress in getting the research material “out”. Research data and publications are readily available on most CGIAR’s research centres websites and public repositories. Check the efforts of two of the CGIAR centres: the CIAT publications, or the ILRI publications on Google Books for instance.

But… a website or a web repository can be just as difficult to access as a massive filing cabinet in an obscure room… Unless if you know the information is there, why would you look for it on a website? How do people know the information is there?

Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) and other mechanical tools can optimize the “find-ability” or “access-ability” of our data, but, ladies and gentlemen, social media has an even more crucial role in this: Social media can help in getting the research “out there”.

With several CGIAR research centres, we made these the corner stones of our social media strategy:

• Making research available and accessible, AND
• Documenting the research processes

With those overall social media goals in mind, we are ready to move into the details: On to the “candy store”

Continue to part 2: Social media strategies- about candy shops
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Long gone are the times where nonprofit organisations saw social media tools as a “nice add-on”. Time and again, social media has proven its potential in fundraising, advocacy, campaigning, live event reporting, knowledge sharing,..

Now comes the time where organisations’ media people are actively seeking to merge the “social” media with their more “traditional” media outreach.

Now, we have more social media tools on offer, than ever before. Which tools are the best suited for your cause? Which give the best return on investment? How do you use these tools best?

Now, more than ever, our management asks questions on our social media efforts. “What is its return?”, “What does it cost us”, “What is the measurable impact?”.

While I touched on the subject before, it is high time to tackle a core challenge for many organisations: “How to define a social media strategy”, and “How to integrate it into an organisation’s overall online strategy”.

Tutorial: How to define a social media strategy

In the past year, I have been fortunate to work with several international agricultural research centres, part of the CGIAR Consortium. With several centres, we’re engaging in a more strategic approach to social media. My work with the CGIAR was the inspiration for this tutorial, in which I will build up a social media strategy from the beginning until the end. Though this strategy is specifically applicable to the CGIAR, the process used, can be applied for many other nonprofit organisations.

The tutorial:

• Part 1: Social media strategies: put it in context
• Part 2: Social media strategies: about candy shops
• Part 3: Social media: about candy shop displays and sandwich men
• Part 4: Fine tuning social media strategies

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

If you have a selfhosted WordPress blog (WordPress.org), take urgent measures to secure your site from a recently discovered vulnerability.

Many WordPress themes and plug-ins use a script called “timthumb” (timthumb.php). This is the most common code used to create thumbnails from pictures.

End July, a vulnerability surfaced showing external users could dump malicious code onto your site. Typically, a short piece of .php code is uploaded via a timthumb backdoor. This hacking code then creates a wider backdoor to gain pretty much full access to your site.

It looks like the hackers were on holiday too, and are only gearing up their activity right now. Many sites were hacked in the last couple of days. As many sites use timthumb.php, we can foresee a major hacking spree in the next weeks.

So it is high time to secure your selfhosted WordPress site now.

How to check if you have been hacked via timthumb.php?

There is not one specific signature to this hack, contrary to the shared hosting hack last year, but here are some common things that seem to happen:

• First… Check if you actually use “timthumb.php” on your site. It does not come with the default WordPress installation, so check if any of your uploaded themes contain the file “timthumb.php”.
  Do a site wide search (with SSH or SFTP). Some popular plug-ins that use timthumb.php are “WordPress Popular Posts” and “WP Mobile Detector”.
  Many themes use timthumb.php, or a variation of it. E.g. the widely used “Thesis” theme uses it as “thumb.php”.
• If you find the timthumb.php in your plugin or themes directory, you’d better give your site a thorough check, so check further
• The hackers often upload .php files in the timthumb upload directory “/cache” (a subdirectory from the one where the timthumb script is stored). You should check that directory, and delete any non-picture files (.html .php,…)
• Often hackers upload .php files to several other subdirectories within your WordPress installation. I have seen them in the “/upload” “/supercache” directories (and their subdirectories) as well as in the directories for plugins and themes. Delete them.
• Recently, the hackers got bolder and entire subdirectories were uploaded. First a .zip file would be uploaded, it would be unzipped and an entire sub-site was installed in one of the WordPress directories. I have seen zipfiles called halifaxsecurity.zip, hal.zip, studentloanupdate.zip, student.zip. Malicious subdirectories I detected on other sites, were called /halifaxsecurity, /hal and /studentloanupdate. Delete those, if you find them.
• People also report direct hacks in .php files and style sheets, adding malicious code (similar to the last year’s hacks).
• Check your .htaccess files
• ..

Check also Sucuri’s blog for more hack signatures and scripts, and Mark Maunder’s blogpost for a full description of the timthumb vulnerability.
List of themes and plugins (non-exhaustive, though) using timthumb.php, you can find on Big Webmaster and Sucuri’s blog.

Deleting those malicious files is not sufficient, as it still leaves the backdoor open for future hacks, so you need to secure your timthumb.php code NOW ! Read on:

How to secure timthumb.php against hacks?

1. Locate all instances of timthumb.php (or any renames of it) on your site.
2. Download the newest timthumb.php code (Check also the plug-in’s home page)
3. Replace the old timthumb.php with your downloaded code.
4. While the new code is already secure, I strongly suggest to limit the access from external sites.
   Replace the line:
   define ('ALLOW_EXTERNAL', TRUE);
   with:
   define ('ALLOW_EXTERNAL', FALSE);

Good luck!

Picture courtesy TGDaily
With thanks to Michael Marus

Welcome to the 21st century, Blogger!

Well, Blogger catches on! They just announced a brand new user interface.

The last significant upgrade of Blogger was way back in 2007. Even though they added a new template designer and added a new preview function just one year ago, the basic user interface remained unchanged and archaic.

Not so with the latest changes. As of August 31st, they gradually release their new user interface to all Blogger users. Mine got enabled today, and I have to say, I am impressed.

How to switch to the new Blogger interface?

In the Dashboard, click on “Try the new Blogger interface” in the right upper corner. Simple as that.

What does the new Blogger interface do?

Loads of things. First of all, the user interface is much smoother, faster and more intuitive. Can’t resist that!

If you manage several Blogger blogs, like I do, your dashboard gives an immediate overview of all blogs, with some key figures (visitor stats, number of blogposts, followers,…

Each blog features the same settings functions, but again, presented in a faster and smoother way.

Mobile themes. Finally!

One of the things Blogger did not announce (dunno why), but definitively is a added plus: you can now enable a mobile theme on your blog. #Finally!

Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress.com had mobile themes since for ever, and I showed you before how to enable a mobile theme on WordPress.org blog.

Finally, browsing a Blogger blog on a mobile is a joy!

How do you switch to a mobile theme on the new Blogger?

In “Template”, click on the gear-icon, select your mobile theme, and off you go!
Works perfectly, even if your “normal” web template is heavily customized, as for my personal blog. And of course, it does not change your “normal” web template, when you browse your blog from a computer.

Enjoy!

Which content management system is the best?

“I need a website for my organisation”, people tell me, “which software should I use?”.

I answer with an other question: “I want to buy a car. Which car should I choose?”

The choice of a car depends on what you want to do with it: You need to go off-road? Transport goods? Race? Drive your kids to school,…? Unless if you defined your needs, you will never be able to choose the right car.

The same goes for a Web Content Management Systems (or CMS for short). Do you have simple hierarchical pages or is your content more complex? Do you need to access multiple databases to present data in maps and graphs, or is your content flat text and graphics? Do you need to support transactions, user groups updating different content, discussion forums, multiple languages? Do you have a specialised team to manage your web, or do you want to do it yourself?

It is a science and a skill to select a CMS. Some will even claim it is a science and a skill to understand the needs of anyone asking the question “Which CMS should I use?”.

The religious wars of CMSes

And yet, all the science and skills you use for your elaborate market study, might not matter. More often than not, you can still hit a wall:
- “You want to use Drupal ?! You gotta be kidding me, you need to use Sharepoint, our corporate standard!”
- “WordPress ?! That is a blog software, and not a serious CMS. Wanna do anything serious, use Typo3.”

So far for your elaborate market study, hey? From here on, my friend, it will be a long road for you. Trying to convince anyone in your organisation that their CMS of choice might not be the right one for you, can be nothing short of a crusade.

Why? Because for true believers of one or the other CMS, the devotion to their loved one, is nothing short of a religion. They might be motivated by their experience in one rather than the other CMS. One CMS might fit better within their server or support environment, etc., etc.,…

For each argument you bring, they will bring an other. For every expert opinion proving CMS ‘A’ is better, one can find ten others proving CMS ‘B’ is better. With each argument, each side always digs its heels deeper in the sand.

A religious war, it is, with often no winner.

My solution: a sprint contest

In my experience, if there is a way to win these religious wars of CMSes, it would be a “sprint contest”: a practical contest between CMSes:

1. Define a task to be done in different CMSes: to make a concrete website, with clear requirements, and several challenges, typical for your environment;
2. Invite an expert, or a team of experts for each CMS to join you, in your offices. Give them a blank server, and a sealed envelope. After opening the envelope, they have x days to complete the task;
3. Observe them while they do the work. Look over their shoulders to see how they organise the web development, how they jump the hurdles. Ask questions why and how they do certain things;
4. As a last task, when they finished, ask them to do several fundamental changes, which might be, again, typical for your requirements. See how they tackle it;
5. After one team is finished, get the next web development team in, doing the same thing, with the next CMS candidate.

During the whole task, ensure all interested parties within your organisation, participate in this exercise. It is in their interest too.

All of the “sprint” contests we  have done – and some were for pretty complex websites – showed a winner after three days. Or at least, it narrowed down the choice to maximum two CMS-es.

A sprint contest might not be cheap, as no serious web development company will do it for free, but you will learn a lot during the process. You will see how flexible the development is. You will better understand how the content is managed and retrieved, how easily you can change the user experience and how supportable the platform is.

If, after a sprint contest, the religious war still continues, then only God can help you.

Amen.

Picasa lets you edit, crop and compress pictures

I am often asked to review blogs and websites. One of the most common problems I find, is simply that blogs are “slow”…

A slow blog is no good. Believe it or not, most of the speed problems are caused by oversized and uncompressed pictures and graphics.

Many bloggers have difficulties to understand the difference between the actual size of a picture (in kbytes), and the physical size (in pixels) on the blog: A small 100 x 100 pixel picture on a blog can be several megabytes.

Here’s why: When you upload a 2000 px x 1000 px, 3 Mbyte picture onto your blog, and resize it to -say- 400x 200 px in your editor, the actual picture downloaded by your browser is still the original 3 Mbyte picture.

To display it properly, the only thing your browser will do, is resizing the original large picture to 400x200px on the fly, as it loads the page.

The solution is very simple, as described in my 7 key tips to speed up a blog: Before you upload any picture onto your blog, crop it to the size you want in your post, and compress it. Don’t resize pictures in your blog editor, ever!

Now that might be easier said than done. How do you resize and compress pictures? Well, I use a simple tool and free tool, Picasa desktop, as one of the ten free blogging tools I use daily.

Picasa scans your hard disk for pictures and organises them into libraries automatically. You can use Picasa for basic colour corrections, but I use it for mostly to crop and compress pictures before I put them up on my blogs.

Here is a short video how to crop and compress pictures using Picasa:

The Internet is talking. But are you listening?

In the old days, public relations people would save clippings of newspaper and magazine articles mentioning their company or organisation. Even though nowadays, news travels much faster and spreads wider, it seems public media people often no longer have their ear on the ground.

It sounds like a contradiction to me: In the current age of social media, just about anybody can publish anything about your organisation, and have it viewed by millions, in seconds, by the simple push of a button. Would you not want to know what’s being said about your organisation?

Even more of a contradiction is the fact that free Internet and social media monitoring tools are available, so what more do you want?

Beyond that, social media buzz monitoring would surely be a good tool to measure how far “your content travels”. It can be used to measure both “reach” and “impact” (for those who remember my previous ranting on that subject). See it as the new way of checking your “citations”. After all Thomson-Reuters defines the impact factor as:

The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period.

Would it not be interesting to monitor how many times was your organisation or brand, or your content cited in the past day, week, month?

Whatever your motivation is, The Internet Speaks. And you’d better listen! Here are three hearing aids, tools to monitor the buzz about your brand on the Internet. And they are free!

Icerocket: Monitoring your brand on the Internet in real-time

Icerocket monitors the mainstream social media: blogs, pictures, video, news (I guess using Google News), Facebook and Twitter. Or you can search all of these sources at the same time.
While you can’t refine a lot in your search criteria, it still lets you monitor your search in real-time, with an automatic refresh.

I did a test for CIFOR, the Center for International Forestry Research, and got this result. Pretty neat, no?

I’d wish Icerocket would build in an RSS output from any search so I could automate my monitoring, but hey, it’s an imperfect world.

Socialmention: Monitoring your brand on the Internet in style

Socialmention does pretty much what Icerocket does, but more… With the same example, using “CIFOR”, the Socialmention search returns something like this.

As you see, Socialmention’s search is much deeper, digging through many more sources.

The search results don’t just mention the results, but also does an analysis of the data, by source, sentiment, etc.. They calculate your reach (authors divided by mentions), strength (mentions of your brand divided by total mentions) etc..

What is more interesting, though, are the extra tools they offer: automated email alerts summarizing the mentions of your brand on the Internet. They also offer a widget with your search, which you can embed on your blog or website. If you are a programmer, you can use their API. Or for normal mortal souls like you and I, we can export search data into a spreadsheet.

You can also create an RSS feed for your specific search (again, see this example for CIFOR). And that, ladies and gentlemen, is something I like. I lllllove RSS feeds! We will use the Socialmention RSS feed in our third free social buzz monitoring tool. My do-it-yourself kit:

Do-it-yourself: A home-made kit to monitoring your brand on the Internet

You know that one can get pretty good Google searches delivered in RSS format, right? Here is an example of an RSS feed for the CIFOR search in Google News, and one for CIFOR on a Google Blog search. Wanna use it for your own brand? Just replace CIFOR with your organisation’s name in those two URLs, if you want to monitor your brand.

Add to that an RSS feed for a search on Humanitarian News, my mega aggregator of nonprofit news… (Here’s an example of a Humanitarian News RSS search feed for CIFOR)

Now what if… Hmmm.. Remember my post about Yahoo Pipes, and how to use Pipes to mash-up different RSS feeds into one? So, what if we would mix the Google searches, with the Social mention search, and mix in a search on Humanitarian News ?

How about throwing in an Icerocket search feed too, at least for a Facebook search? Oh, wait, Icerocket does not have a feed….?! Beh, for wizards like us (right?), that can’t be a problem. I will generate a feed with the Feedity feedgenerator! Here is the RSS feed I generate with Feedity, out of this Icerocket search result. Nerds we’ll be!

So using a simple technique, I combined these search feeds for CIFOR into this Yahoo Pipe. Using some Yahoo Pipes techniques, I also modified some of the feeds to add the source of the RSS feed to the title, and filtered some ads etc…

If you want to get really fancy, then you could use the RSS output from that Pipe, and import it into Feedburner. I did just that, and here is the Feedburner output, this time for the CGIAR.

To top it all off, you can subscribe by email to that Feedburner feed, and every morning, taraaa… you will get an email with an overview of ALL the buzz about your organisation, brand or company. Here is an example of a daily buzz-newsletter on CIFOR.

With these three free tools, there is no excuse anymore for you: The Internet is Speaking, so Listen!

Pictures courtesy Elle Dark and The Hamilton Project