Morgret Designs

This post is in response to http://www.prospectmx.com/charity-internet-marketing.

OER Commons, a project of the Institute of the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), is a one-stop website for teachers, students, self-learners, and parents searching for educational content that is free and open to use and reuse. While many people are familiar with the concept of open source for software, far fewer people are aware of open source for content - material that can be used or reused, often with a Creative Commons or GNU license. People can find textbooks, lesson plans, course materials from major universities, audio lectures, and more, all free to use, from K-12 through higher education. One challenge we face is trying to reach people who could benefit from our site, especially in an economy where resources are limited, yet many don’t even know that what we provide exists.

ISKME is an independent 501c3 non-profit organization which does not have a dedicated person to provide internet marketing. As site manager for OER Commons, I am able to provide some help regarding the online visibility of the site, but am aware of the limits of my time and knowledge in this area. I feel services from ProspectMX could be used to expand the number of people we serve via more visibility in the search engines, social media strategies to increase awareness of the OER movement, and more effective use of our small Google AdWords budget.

We need to make sure these users find our site useful to them, and that they have motivation to interact with and return to the site. We would like to expand some of the features of the site, and could use advice about the best implementation and design of these features. A review of our website copy, keyword use, call to actions, and newsletter strategy could help with this user retention.

An examination of our analytics logs could help show how people found us, what they are doing on the site, and where the exited the site. We have had Google Analytics installed on the site since its launch in early 2007, and would benefit from help in understanding the data we already have, and in configuring the analytics code to be the most useful to us in the future as we make changes to the site. For example, we would like to track clicks to outbound links, and to run a/b or multivariate testing with Google Website Optimizer.

Ultimately, ISKME would benefit from a comprehensive internet marketing strategy by being able to expand our outreach to our target audience, and we would be able to help maintain these gains with the resources we have in-house.

You’ve worked on a site, the code all validates, analytics are the way you want them, the proper files are excluded in robots.txt, and everything is great. Great, until you look back at the site a bit later and find someone else broke part of the code when they did a content update. Or released a new portion of the site from the development server and copied over the robots.txt file that now excludes the entire live site from the search engines. Or you want to see when your competitor changes a page. Or you want to see when your dream company updates their employment opportunities page.

Now you only need to wait until the morning after to see what’s happened. Pole Position Marketing’s CodeMonitor has been around for some time now (I’ve been using it at least two years), and it’s an automated free tool that once daily compares the current code on a site with the saved version of the code, and emails you when there is a change. I’ve had it save me a couple of times when a robots file was changed — I was able to get to the file soon after the change, before there was a negative impact in the search engines. While my monitoring has been fairly simple, Stoney deGeyter of Pole Position wrote a great post describing how he uses CodeMonitor, including great screenshots, how to monitor only specific sections of a page, and other ways of using CodeMonitor for competitive intelligence. I ran into some SEMs on Twitter who weren’t aware of this tool, but needed something like it, thus the post. Thanks to Pole Position for a great tool!

This blog has a few cobwebs on it, as I’ve not written much in the past year. I’ve not forgotten about it, and have thought of many ideas for posts, but have not felt I had the time to do them justice. The past few months I’ve taken what I might have once blogged and turned it into 140 characters of commentary in Twitter, or sent a tip to an expert blogger in a particular area. I liveblogged SMX West for Search Engine Roundtable, and will make a couple of guest posts on other blogs.

Here’s a laundry list of things I’ve been doing instead of blogging:

• Exhibiting at Maker Faire with the Western Warship Combat Club. We had a 30′ by 60′ pond set up, and battled 1:144 scale model warships. The ships fire BBs or ball bearings, and they do sink each other. Boing Boing TV has a great segment, showing the battles, how the ships are set up, and interviews with club members (our piece starts at 3:00 minutes). Gizmodo also has a short piece, and Wired has a blog post and a video with an interview of my husband (who I can credit/blame for getting me interested in this hobby).
• Listening to a variety of podcasts during my two-hour daily commute. I enjoy listening to Webmaster Radio, but also listen to some lesser-known podcasts about search. Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business was led by Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley in Fall of 2007, and includes lectures by John Battelle, Hal Varian, Dan Russell, Jan Pedersen, and more. Hearst led the same class in Fall of 2005, and Sergey Brin was one of the guest speakers (all lectures in that semester were videotaped). For variety, I add the Amateur Traveler Podcast, and a variety of educational technology podcasts.
• Scuba diving, though not nearly enough. I can walk to the ocean from my work, but our area of the coast is best known for the Mavericks Surf competition with its 50 foot waves, so I settle for going to the tidepools at low tide. I was able to go to the Philippines for a week last year, and try to get down to the California Channel Islands a couple of times a year.
• Getting back into amateur radio. I’ve been licensed since I was in elementary school (N6TME), but haven’t been active for several years. I found a deal on Craigslist on a specific GPS that integrates well with a ham radio and APRS tracker, so I’ll be installing that setup in my truck soon. On the way to PubCon 2006, I stopped in the desert with my brother, and a bunch of us launched a weather balloon that had a GPS, tracker, transmitter, and digital cameras. The balloon went to 106,000 feet before it burst; we recovered the payload and put the 1,100 pictures and details of the project on the web.
• Finding deals at electronics swapmeets, including this weekend’s deal of $5 for a laptop battery that appears to have at least a couple of hours or charge. We didn’t get the expensive soldering iron my husband was looking for, but that just gives us an excuse to come back next month.

Speaking of laundry, it’s time to go back into lurking mode and take care of some domestic chores.

My job at at an educational non-profit leaves little time for blogging, but it also has made me aware of some interesting sources for event listings in Silicon Valley related to the web and search. Here is a sampling of organizations or event listings, with examples of upcoming or recent events. Many of the archived events have notes, audio, or video of the event available online.

Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Instruction has two pages with cognitive science related events, and many gems can be found here. The CSLI weekly calendar, available by email, lists Bay Area events. The CSLI Local Area Events page links to dozens of classes, groups, and organizations with cognitive science events.

Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Seminar is open to everyone, and videos of past events are available. Guest speakers come from Google, Microsoft, IDEO, IBM, and more.

BayCHI has a calendar of HCI events in the Bay Area, and their archive of monthly events often includes detailed notes or audio.

• Learning to create engaging apps for Facebook: What works and what does not, by BJ Fogg, Dave McClure, and colleagues. Dec 11.

UC Berkeley School of Information event page.

• The Future of Search, John Battelle. Dec 3.
• How Search Engines Shape our View of Cyperspace. Nov 26.
• Convergence of User-Generated Content, Social Networking, and Mobile Services. Oct 2.

SDForum: The Emerging Technology Connection. SDForum has monthly general meetings, in addition to 18 Special Interest Groups. The SDForum also has a page for non-SDForum events that are of interest to their members.

• Semantic Web SIG: Intelligence at the Interface. Dec 13.
• Emerging Technology SIG: Friendsters at Work Displaying Social Media Streams in the Workplace. Dec 12.
• Business Intelligence SIG: Do you know what customers are saying about you and your products? Dec 3.
• Marketing SIG: Viral Marketing Unplugged. Nov 12.
• Web Services SIG: Building the Facebook Platform. Oct 23.

PARC Forum is hosted by the Palo Alto Research Center. The current speaker series theme (through March 2008) is Going Beyond Web 2.0.

• Chirs Anderson, The Long Tail. Jan 17.
• Guy Kawasaki, Truemors. Dec 13.
• Garret Camp, Stumble Upon. Nov 29t

MIT / Stanford Venture Lab

• Affiliate Event: Why Mobile? Why India? Why now? Dec 5.
• Introducing the Seventh Sense: Location Awareness. Oct 16.

Silicon Valley Web Guild has monthly meetings at Google HQ in Mountain View doesn’t seem to have regular meetings anymore. Topics have included Open Social, Online Platforms, and Mobile Advertising. A good way to see the Google campus, network, and pick up little Google schwag items to impress your son/daughter/niece/nephew/parent (yes Mom, I will get schwag for you next time, I promise).

Yes, I’m actually looking forward to doing homework! Last week I attended the trainings at Bruce Clay as part of the contest they sponsored. Just before the training I went to the Community Next Viral! conference.

I came away from the trainings and conference with lots of homework — pages of notes of ideas I want to try and changes to implement for the project I’m a part of (OER Commons) in addition to our organization’s main web page. I’m also part of a committee redesigning the webpage for a non-profit amateur radio convention, so I have three non-profit sites to keep me busy. When my 90 days is up (and I’m sure The Lisa will hold me to that date), I’ll write about progress on all three sites. Presuming I can still write by then. By that time, I may never want to see a computer or website for a nice, long time.

The SEOToolset from Bruce Clay will be of great value for my work on these sites. The Toolset automates some of the tasks I had been doing by hand, and does other tasks I have not had time to even attempt. We’re a small organization and SEO is only one part of my duties, so some of my homework will take some time to implement, but it is homework I am going to enjoy doing. Now if I could just get a HousecleaningToolset and LaundryToolset to automate some other aspects of my life, I’d be set!