What is good placement? Some clients insist on adding these icons every where regardless of display type (excerpt or full story). In my opinion adding icons such as those included in the popular sociable plugin to the excerpt list on the home page adds unneeded clutter to the content. It would seem to me that an end user is less likely to bookmark an item before reading the content in it’s entirety, at the very least scanning the content in it’s entirety. Thus the social icons attached to the end of a paragraph’s worth of content would seem to be rather unneeded?

Letting it slide. There are a few that I could see making sense as additions to excerpted content such as the Tweetmeme button. It seems to me that a button illustrating the number of times something has been shared across social sites would act as more of a testament as to how useful the content has been to others. Of course that to is up for debate, since a user with a rather large following on say twitter could tweet a crap article and immediately have it re-tweeted upwards of 100 times. None the less it is still being spread far and wide. In this case the button makes the article seem more appealing.

I am interested to hear others opinion on this. Personally I add these icons or links where I feel they become useful to an end user in spreading my content, primarily at the end of each full article. This however is not the case with everyone I come across.

Thoughts?

I have decide to republish this here because I think it is a good example of how you can use social media and general population feedback to monitor the successes and failures of client projects.

It is important upon launch of any new product, marketing campaign etc to collect statistics and feedback. That’s the obvious. Why? Because it allows you to improve in the future by learning from what has been successful and what has failed in the past.

Don’t get me wrong statistics such as those provide by programs such as Google Analytics are without question important data to be collected. Yet good old fashion I hate it because… or I love it because… feedback is priceless.

Implementing some type of monitoring is something I like to encourage my clients to do. I also like to do so for myself. One so that I am able to help clients as well as field questions about user feedback. Two, because I see it as a good tool by which I can learn about the work I have done and thus improve in the future.

Enjoy the following article, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

The social web, services such as Twitter have made it so easy to collect this type of information that it seems sill to me not to take advantage of it.

The idea of ‘Social Media Monitoring’ is nothing new so I am not about to share with you anything ground breaking, but I will share with you a “real world experience” type story that demonstrates just how this social media monitoring can benefit your business.

For most of you Twitter is no secret, you have probably heard of it at the very least and I hope that a large number of you actually use it. (If not shoot me an email and we can talk). So for those of you that use it you know of that little thing called Twitter search. Now without going into hash tags and so on we will jut have a quick look at the basic Twitter Search.

Let’s say for some reason I wanted to keep tabs on what people are saying about Nike. I head on over to Twitter.com, I log in and in the upper right I type the word Nike into the search box. Search does it’s thing and returns real time results for tweets referencing the word Nike. Sweet!

Now for me, I use Tweetdeck, in fact I have it open around 15 to 24hrs a day (yes somewhat geeky you might say). Now with Tweetdeck I can organize my twitter feed into columns. Let’s see right now I have All Friends, friends I categorize under “Design”, my @ replies, DM’s and last but not least a column for search.

That’s the one I need to get to here. So a few weeks ago I launched a pretty large and involved site for a client (by involved I mean lots of moving parts so we launched in “Beta” so to speak because we wanted some time to iron out any bugs). Couple of quick notes:

1. With the launch he did a bit of publicity so we expected some traffic right off the bat meaning we couldn’t really hide behind that “we haven’t been found yet” period in hopes to work out the kinks.
2. With the site there is also a few informational products, one of which would also get some publicity behind it.

What Am I Looking For In These Searches

Ok, so on launch I fired up a search for the domain in my last column of Tweetdeck to monitor what people where saying. It’s not foolproof and probably will not catch every muttering but it will catch a good number. Now sure I see someone say “awesome design” or “well put together” and it gives me a bit of an ego boost, but more importantly I can keep tabs on a few very key things.

1. The overall reaction to the product.
2. Someone experiences a problem, they are an active twitter user, more than likely they are going to tweet about it!
3. Someone has a feature idea I can take note. (Now I am of the mindset that first of all you can’t please everyone down to the detail and secondly you should not run off and make every change you see, but if those request start to pile up it is definitely worth having a look at. Sometimes, an idea is so smart it makes you say damn, I should have thought of that in the first place.
4. This allows me to get an outsiders view of the product. Let’s be honest working day in and day out on something you may overlook an obvious detail. The most important thing is those outsiders, your product end users, so it is good to hear what they have to say.

Real Life Examples

Here are a few things that actually happened through my monitor this particular site.

1. A feature idea was tweeted that will more than likely make it’s way into phase 3 of the site.
2. A bug, error, misjudgment what ever you want to call it was tweeted, I caught the tweet and had it fixed in minutes.
3. A consumer in another country wanted to purchase one of the informational products but could not because we had overlooked the country code on the order form. Now this one is really neat. First I fixed it, then I let the site owner know of the request. The site owner happens to have a twitter account for the site specifically so he DM’ed the original tweeter and let him know that he could now purchase the eBook. How’s that for paying attention to your “customers” needs.

Really what this is about is getting customer feedback in it’s rawest form and without really having to do much leg work to do so. Nobody here knows that I am keeping tabs on what they are saying about the site but you can be sure that their opinions (good and bad) are valued and looked at.

Are you taking advantage of social media to keep tabs on what your clients and customers/end users are saying about your product?

Start the Survey Now

Poll provided courtesy of PollDaddy.com

Why did I go with the self hosted Sweetcron, when there are hosted platforms like FriendFeed and Storytlr?

If you are like me and you like to be in control of everything from content to design you will understand my reasons for this decision. Sweetcron allows you to customize just about everything you can think of through a pretty slick templating system similar to the way WordPress works. The Sweetcron platform comes stock with two “starter” themes one of which can be seen in a customized form on Yongfook.com (also the creator of Sweetcron) and the other being a slightlty simpler version that I decided to pick apart. Beyond design customization you can also easily control how each of your feeds display using a series of inherit functions. (More on this later). And lastly I am able to add just about anything I can think of to my “stream” including RSS from a few other blogs that I try to publish to on a regular basis. So far so good.

After installation and on to customization!

Skipping through install and basic configuration which can be found in the tutorial mentioned above or the Sweetcron Google Group and heading straight to the customization. First you will need to navigate your way to the included themes by following the path system/application/views/themes. There I found the two themes mentioned above rightfully names “boxy” and the “sandbox” theme. I choose to use the existing themes to start with so I copied the sandbox theme and renamed it Simpleton based on the fact that my lifestream was intended to be simple and easy to follow. Then I started digging through the files one by one. My design customizations proved to be fairly easy, I simply edited the already available classes on the short and sweet CSS file included with the sandbox theme. I found reason to add a few of my own but due to the simplicity of my design I was able to get away with using most of what was already present. I then went to the admin panel and decided to start adding a few feeds to test this sucker out. Adding a feed is extremely simply, just navigate on over to the feed tab in your admin panel and click add new feed, like this:

Easy enough right? So I went about adding a few feeds such as Flickr, Vot.eti.me, Viralthinking.com RSS etc. and navigated to my lifestream homepage. At this point things were looking pretty nice I was happy overall but I saw some room to tweak it a bit. More specifically here I decided that pulling feeds from my other blogs was great but I would prefer to only show titles and no excerpts. I knew that in the boxy theme the feeds had been organized according to the source of the feed, so using that as a reference I started chopping up my own theme to display only a title, published date and a few tags. Here is an example of the code I used in the _activity_feed.php file (which controls how feeds display):

<!--Viral Thinking-->
<?php elseif ($item->get_feed_domain() == 'viralthinking.com'): ?>
<h2><?php echo $item->get_title()?></h2>
<ul class="item_tag_list">
<li>Tags: </li>
<?php foreach ($item->get_tags() as $tag): ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo $this->config->item('base_url')?>items/tag/<?php echo $tag->slug?>"><?php echo $tag->name?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

There now I had something I could live with. After styling every feed I plan to run through the lifestream and making a few final touchups to the styling of the theme I ended up with the nice little package that you can see now on lifestream.papertreedesign.com. You will also notice that I decided to stick with the fairly simple navigation using the paged feature at the bottom and the tag cluster in the sidebar. My theory here is that as with most social networking sites such as twitter, people are most interested in the here and now, in other words the most recent. However the tag cluster is nice because something might catch your eye. Sweetcron is available here. Happy lifestreaming!

I would like to note that Sweetcron also has a blog publishing function built in, technically you could use the platform as the face of your online presence. I chose not to use this feature being that my original intention for creating a lifestream was to serve up snippets of everything I am already involved in and 3 blogs is more than enough space to collect my ramblings

I have been toying with different ideas on how to incorporate some sort of a lifestream or “quick glimpse” of all my web doings for quite some time so when I ran across Chris’s article I had to at least give it a shot and see what it was capable of. I downloaded the program, ran a quick install through my MAMP set up and was good to go in about 10 mins. Then I went about adding a few feeds from my various social gatherings and walla I had a fully functional lifestream in under 20mins. Check it out.

Then I went ahead and decided to try my hand at a quick customization of the included Sandbox theme and a brief look at the stylesheet told me it would be a pretty easy task. Another 10mins or so and I crafted a quick and simple adaptation that might fit rather well with my soon to be released redesign for Papertree.

You can take a look at a few screenshots here on Flickr (sorry that’s where all of the images are going until I get this redesign fully sorted out).

With the coming redesign I will be sticking with WordPress for obvious reasons but I am definitely looking at the possibility of adding Sweetcron to the mix, possibly as an alternative page for quick viewing… perhaps. Either way I had a lot of fun working with the platform thus far it has a lot of promise. Come on someone give me the chance to put one together for ya… please!?