Author Archive
When to forward an email
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2009
Found this via a facebook friend’s update…and it was to good not to share. Just last week my dear mother complained about an email forward someone sent her, and not 5 minutes later emailed me the same forward. I could never tell my mom to shut up though, or most people for that matter – I had a high school English teacher who beat that phrase out of students’ vocabulary.
My Quest to Sync Google, Blackberry, & Entourage Calendars
Posted by Ben in Tech Notes on May 6th, 2009
I’ve had my mac now for a couple months and I’ve been absolutely pleased with it. Having been a big fan of Outlook on my previous pc laptop I transitioned to Entourage on the mac – Entourage leaves much to be desired but I stuck with it anyways. My co-workers in the office use Google calendar to share our schedules and since we all rely on that I wanted to find a way to sync the Entourage calendar with my Google calendar like I had done while using Outlook (using goosync.com).
I quickly found out there isn’t a straight-forward way to do this, and to complicate the matter I switched from a phone running Windows mobile to a Blackberry Curve mid-stream. While on the Windows mobile phone I was able to sync Entourage with my phone’s calendar using PocketMac for Windows Mobile ($30, running on the mac) and GooSync (free, on the phone), which in turn updated Google calendar – this is how I managed the process with Outlook as well. GooSync isn’t freely/easily available for the Blackberry so I set out to find another option.
First I tried the Google Sync app for Blackberry to sync the phone/Google calendar and switching to the PocketMac for blackberry to sync the phone with Entourage. The PocketMac app worked like a charm, all my contacts and calendar entries synced just fine, but Google’s Sync app won’t sync events from other calendar back to Google Calendar. This meant that the process only worked if new events were added to the Google calendar first as events entered in Entourage would never make it to Google.
After a week of trying, wiping out my calendar several times, creating wild duplicate events with all my testing I finally narrowed in on a solution. Here is what I found to sync my Google, Blackberry, and Entourage calendars, allowing me to enter an event in any of the three and trust that the others would be updated.
1) In Entourage go to the Prefernces and select the Sync Services item under General Preferences. In Sync Services you will need to check the second box for “Sync Events and Tasks with iCal…” This all happens behind the scenes and you don’t ever have to do anything with iCal – we’re just using iCal as a conduit to CalGoo in this case.
2) Download and install CalGoo Connect (Free) on your mac. Once installed you will need to setup a new connector in CalGoo – choose the first option to “Snyc an Apple iCal Calendar with a Google Calendar.” You will next be promped to select the calendar in iCal to be used as the sync source – select your Entourage Calendar. You’ll also need to select your Google Calendar which will be sync’d in case you have more than one. In the settings for CalGoo you can choose to automatically start the application at startup and automate the sync process, and even better, there is a feature to remove duplicate events from your calendar.
3) Download Google’s Sync app for Blackberry (http://m.google.com) and install that on your phone. In the settings for the Sync App you will need to enter your Google account info, and optionally, you can automate the process and select any of your Google Calendars to sync with.
By doing these three steps I was able to automate the entire process and I never need to connect my phone to my mac to sync calendars. I haven’t tried yet, but I suspect I can also automate my contact syncing using the Google Sync app as well.
I searched and searched for a way to do this without find a great soltution. Hopefully if you’ve stumbled across this it helped save you a bit of time and frustration.
It’s the people, stupid…
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on April 2nd, 2009
Another great session: It’s the People, Stupid – New Marketing Paradigms in a Web 2.0 World
Brian Oberkirch (www.brianoberkirch.com), Deborah Schultz (www.deborahschultz.com)
Again, I focused on the content and found a good summary
posted by someone who could type AND follow along…check that out here:
http://www.change-management-blog.com/2009/04/its-people-stupid-new-marketing.html
Thanks, Holger Nauheimer!
Web 2.0 Expo – Why Social Media Marketing Fails
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on April 1st, 2009
I was going to post my notes on this session for the folks back home but my notes FAIL in comparison to these:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=887
Summary of SEO Workshop
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on March 31st, 2009
I’m glad I accidentally flew in to San Francisco a day early… I ended up upgrading my conference package to include the workshops and the first session today was a 3 hour block on Search Engine Optimization by Stephan Spencer / Net Concepts. Great speaker and I took away a lot of good info – kind of blown away at the extent to which our site could change to be more SEO friendly.
Good takeaway in the first couple minutes: “A site without links pointing to is doesn’t deserve to rank”
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) vs SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEM covers SEO and adds to that paid placement (ppc), not to be taken as SEO is free – it is not. Doing SEO correctly may necessitate the purchase of keyword tools, or vendors/contractors to assist. Cheaper approach: If someone is doing it well – embrace and extend what they do.
86% of clicks on Google are from organic search results, only 14% are from paid search (based on eye tracking studies). However, people clicking on a paid ad are more likely to convert. In either case, when someone is doing a search they are primed and ready to act so placement pays. Clicks for the number one result are about 40% – this drops to 10% for the #2 result. Ranking in multiple areas doesn’t hurt either – natural results, paid placement, image search, content network search, etc.
Yahoo is no longer the #2 search engine – more people now search via YouTube, which has moved into the #2 spot
Keywords – the word the CEO searches for each morning may not be the best (except for your job). Pick the right keyword for your site, and speak your customer’s language. Kitchen electronics is a common product category, but not what customers search for. Baby products can attract more clicks via “baby names” than other keywords. Bottom line, keyword research is needed to identify what your market is searching for. Tools: Quintura (Free) or Google Suggest / Keyword Tool / Trends / Insight. Wordtracker is a paid tool, but based on less than 1% of the search market (dogpile and metacrawler users). Keyword Discovery is another paid service ($70/month), which shows historical trends and based on a larger user base. Advantage of Google tools is the large user base. Check out Google Insight for Search, extends the data found in Google Trends – can see top rising search terms
Getting crawled doesn’t mean you’re getting indexed. Getting indexed doesn’t mean you’re getting ranked. Getting ranked doesn’t mean you’re getting clicks and getting clicks doesn’t mean you will convert.
7 steps to ranking:
• Get your site fully indexed
• Get your pages Visible
• Build links and page rank
• leverage your page rank
• encourage click through
• track the RIGHT metrics
• follow best practices
Complexity can kill the crawl – Search engines are wary or dynamic pages (fear or spider traps)
Avoid:
• stop characters (?&=)
• session ids or long numerical strings that look like a session
• unnecessary variables
• frames
• redirects
• popups
• navigation in flash, java, javascript, pulldown boxes
Hurdles to indexing:
complex / long urls that add no value to the page keywords
content duplication
non-canonicalization
too many links and not high enough ranking (crawl equity) Higher Page rank at the top will allow more crawl equity for pages 10 clicks down.
Canonicalization: gvsu.edu/ should 301 redirect to www.gvsu.edu for all pages (no content duplication) same for / vs. index.htm. Use server header checker to verify 301/302 redirects and use google google webmaster tools to enforce this or live http header firefox extension.
Key word prominence is so much better than keyword prominence. Use a descriptive paragraph at the top of the page to introduce the rest of the page using important keywords. Title tag is the most important copy on a page and the homepage is the most important. Don’t dilute the title with your brand name – stick with the content keywords. Title tags and descriptive link text are will remain important SEO best practice.
Random things:
• seomoz.org – link scape
• Get more links – link baiting. Put out funny / useful content that others are baited into linking to – the SEO perspective of viral marketing
• use rel=”nofollow” to tell google to not index certain links on your site (use this to give less importance to login pages, etc.)
• seobrowser.com – tool for viewing a site as a crawler
• siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – check links into your site