Ryan Glasgow » Other

Twitter Updates for 2009-02-20

ryan — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:18:00 +0000

redesigning his blog using Thesis.. almost done take a look and let me know what you think #
also looking for interesting people to follow that tweet about business, startups, design, or art…. any recommendations? #

On Gaming Digg

ryan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:08:41 +0000

I was recently hired as a social media marketing consultant to promote their online stores. Their main store acheived 900% growth in 2007 and was listed as one of Inc Magazines fastest growing small companies. After reading a book about social media marketing, the owner wanted to experiment with some of the strategies and assigned me $500 and one month to use social media marketing to improve the SEO on his store’s blogs. I proposed a laundry list of ideas, and after a lengthy discussion we narrowed it down to three ideas:

Develop power Digg and StumpleUpon accounts and promote companies blog content
Build solid blog rolls and network with relevant blogs or websites
Develop company twitter accounts for each store to become a resource for customers as well as push visitors to the blog content

Gaming Digg is an often discusses social media practice and I figured it wasn’t too hard. I researched the topic for hours, and my initial conclusion was that it’s no longer worth the time-investment. A year ago, the Digg community was significantly smaller, and there were less “power users”. I read several interviews by the top Digg users, and read as they discusses their decrease in influence throughout 2008, and how the promotion power of Digg is being spread so thin. One to two years ago, a power account could be established after a month of 15-20 solid daily submissions, but in todays community requires 2-3 months of skilled content promotion.

The method for gaming Digg is so sought-after, and attempted so many times it is no longer achievable. Also the ratio of content promotion between Digging other content versus your own is likely around 1:100. A once targeted social media practice has become diluted, and now the only cost effective method for significant Digg traffic is to unfortunately purchase influential Diggs through existing power users.

Do Startpages Help or Hurt Productivity?

ryan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:05:17 +0000

Within recent years, start pages such as my.Yahoo, NetVibes, PageFlakes, and YourMinis have become very popular among web users and have certainly made things more convenient. Instead of checking all of my favorite websites, email, news sources, and blogs, I can easily check my NetVibes homepage, which features all of my favorite feeds. This has certainly has increased efficiency, but it also seems to have increased my Internet browsing time. Even though I can now view more articles in less time, I find myself viewing more articles than I previously would have. Now every time I open up Safari, I’m greeted with 10 of my favorite websites, all with new interesting stories. This has become a major distraction because every time I use the Internet to do something specific, I am instead distracted by a new email or story, and forget what my original intentions are.

My new start page method is to feature only important feeds, including email, on my NetVibes homepage tab, and then I created an extra NetVibes tab with less crucial feeds to avoid distraction. My homepage tab now only features my email feed since it’s time sensitive, and also other boring feeds such as weather, stocks, and a to-do list. Now when I am interested in browsing blogs, news, etcetera, it takes an extra click to get there. At the same time they are all hidden, yet only one click away which makes them less distracting. So now when I use Safari to check or look something up online such as a homework assignment or a sports score, juicy stories no longer try to grab my attention.

Have start pages made me more productive? Yes. Are they a distraction? Not anymore