Questions of social media monitoring vendors
Posted by Dan Katz in Measurement on September 2, 2009
For about a year, I have been using Radian6 that I selected after a rather exhaustive evaluation. Lately, I am less pleased with the tool and have begun to look again at the old set and search for new ones.
I started to put together a list of questions that never seem to be answered up front on sites, in demos or in the first round of sales discussions. or demos. I put this list together and then just today I found another helpful list from Scout Labs. The Scout Labs list is longer than mine and very good. But, I have some others as well.
- What are the content sources? Are they RSS feeds or paid content sources such as Factiva, Boardreader or others?
- How often and when is content imported? Basically, how quickly will it appear from when it is published?
- Is there a method to create “watchlists” for monitoring a set of sites?
- Can we place in a list of sites/feeds to be searched to be sure the content is included in the monitoring?
- Is there a way to check to be sure a desired source is monitored?
- Is the cost we see simply based on monitored items? Is there a limit on the number of profiles, user accounts, searches, or other aspects?
- If we end or pause a search, can we retain the content/monitoring from where this halted. If so, for how long?
- Are the monitoring volume fees based on new content per month? Or, is historical content billed.
Articles for Reference – First of More to Follow
Posted by Dan Katz in Article Lists on July 31, 2009
For quite some time I wanted to put up a list of good articles I have found as my own personal archive.
- 6 Promising And Open Source Social Networking Softwares To Create Your Own – A good list of solutions to set up social networks. I would add SocialText and MediaWiki as well.
- Beautiful Drupal-Based Intranet: Open Atrium – A framework for intranets that can get a well-functioning site together in 1/3 the time you would need for development from scratch. Little if any programming needed.
- Attractive Sitemaps With SlickMap CSS – A nice utility to make site maps that seems easy to use. I have been working on my CSS skills and this has been a good sample to practice.
- Backup And E-Mail MySQL Databases Automatically: Backup2Mail – I hate the chore of backing up my databases. This script has made it easy. Then again my web hosting provider also has a similar utility and for WordPress I prefer the Backup plug-in.
- Instant iPhone Compatible Websites: iWebKit – This is a nice set of scripts and CSS styling to make iPhone Web sites. It saves a certain amount of time if you want to design under their frameworks.
- Web Elements Kit (PSD) For Designing Faster – A collection of buttons, sliders and other elements in PSD format for jump starting designs. Probably not useful for designers. Very useful for hacks like me.
- Free HTML Form Builder: pForm – There are tons of free form builders. This is a nice one to add to sites that do not have a CMS for site admins or users to add their own forms. A good example of a free version that has a commercial version available with more features. Then again, rather than using this tool I would probably continue with WuFoo that is so easy to use.
- I think the JNJ BTW blog is a model of corporate blogging. Here are a couple of articles that I have found useful.
- BlogHer 2008: 1,000 Women Bloggers and Me – Support for the use of BlogHer to reach women.
- A Medical Wiki – Discussion of Medpedia as a healthcare industry blog. I do a bunch of work across healthcare and also this is a good example of how industries are establishing their own Wiki’s.
- Newspapers Swap Content Via Widgets with the Help of Newsgator and NewsGator’s Widget Publishing Tool – The Newsgator widget is a great way to distribute your feeds. Take advantage of the same tool major publishers use.
- Scott Rafer: Facebook Platform is Dead – This article reinforces my personal findings that people on Facebook are no longer installation and using applications, widgets, etc.
- Sprout Announces Fankits, Partnership with Sony – Sproutbuilder is an amazing tool to create widgets. I like to start here for widget creation and distribution because it is so easy. This article announced a commercial release and lists some competitors.
- Disqus Updates – Disqus is a great third party tool to add comments to any site. Some blogs use Disqus instead of the commenting tools in the blogs because this tool has some very rich features. Definitely better than what TypePad had to offer before Movable Type came out with their own similar commenting tool.
- Bootstrapped PollDaddy Kicking Ass and Taking Names – Need a poll. Try PollDaddy.
- Corporate Blogging 2.0: Southwest Airlines’ Blog Re-launches and Case Study: Southwest Airlines’ Corporate Blog and Crisis Communications – Great corporate blogging analysis.
- Over three quarters of reporters get story ideas from blogs – yes, blogging is important.
- Social media for social good (24 days left for Parade Magazine / Case Foundation Giving Challenge) – A set of examples of how a social media campaign was run.
- Don’t use a (dry) press release to promote your CEO blog – Boring press releases do not work in social media.
- The New York Times’ David Pogue says corporate blogs will become "a treasured tool in your tool chest" – Blogs are a corporate tool.
Track Copy and paste From Your Web Site
My colleague, David Leavitt, alerted me to a cool new tool yesterday he found mentioned on the Nieman Journalism Lab. Tracer allows you to track who copies and pastes from your Web site. You put a bit of JavaScript in your footer. Then when folks copy and paste items from your Web site it is tracked. How doe sit do this? When the person pastes the item into their document, site or elsewhere then it has a “Read More” URL link added to the text they paste. This URL tracks click thru via the Tracer service. This helps you get some sort of stats if people do not remove this URL from their item.
Overall very interesting and I am trying it out on my blog. It will be interesting to see how well this really works.
Share presentations for visibility on SlideShare
Posted by Dan Katz in Best Practice, Marketing on June 2, 2009
YouTube is certainly well known for the success it has shown with marketers. Another effective tool is SlideShare. SlideShare offers the ability to post a presentation that others can view, share and comment upon just as you would a video on YouTube. There are a number of similar services, but SlideShare appears to have a solid user base.
Easy to use and requiring nothing more than a PowerPoint deck, SlideShare is easy to test out for marketing and communications campaigns.
What makes this really easy is a nice Microsoft PowerPoint plug-in. This allows you to work with the SlideShare features and post to the site right from within PowerPoint. Get it here.
Drupal vs. WordPress
Let me start with a note on my bias – I love WordPress. This said, I have tried not to let it color this post that attempts to highlight when and where to choose between WordPress and Drupal. No matter, I look forward to some solid comments from all sides on these ramblings.
This evaluation really comes down to a definition of the task you desire. I have found that WordPress is the ideal selection for any blog. I have also found it to be an excellent choice for a small to medium Web site. Why? In two words, elegant simplicity.
On the setup side, WordPress is so simply to install, create themes, add enhancements that it is easy to get an excellent site up and running in a very short time. Then on the administration side, the user experience is an excellent one for those who are not familiar with technology. I have been able to bring luddites up to speed in WordPress post, page and comment management in mere minutes.
Drupal I have found to be more suitable to larger Web sites that require a greater level of development for custom applications, multiple themes, multiple languages and other aspects you would expect of a full bore content management system. For a blog or small Web site I find it to be overkill and adds a level of complication that adds too great an expense to sites that so not require custom applications.
This difference is apparent in the extensions to WordPress and Drupal. Drupal features a large set of modules to extend features. WordPress appears to offer many more. The difference comes not just in volume, but types. Drupal has a set that is clearly more technical in nature than WordPress. Also, a good number of the modules are seen as jumping off points for custom development. This is far different from the WordPress plug-ins that are targeted to the Web site maintainer who has little if any programming knowledge.
And this comes to the real difference I see with these two platforms. Drupal is clearly targeted first and foremost to code lovers and developers. This is readily apparent in the language used on the Drupal site, its blog postings and in general. Development discussions on the site are highly technical and constantly refer to a mix of PHO, JavaScript and JQuery as minimal requirements for Drupal development.
WordPress on the other hand has a greater balance between the average Joe that wants to have a blog/site and the developer. Surfing to wordpress.org you find that this is tailored much more to the layman than Drupal.org. WordPress also has a broad commercial path to get started via wordpress.com. Then when you do dive into development, you find that with minimal PHP skills you can customize and modify themes.
I find that this separate target of hard core a developer (Drupal) to the general population (WordPress) is clearly evident in area of theme management. In Drupal, the themes are all managed external to the Drupal interface. You compile and create the various layouts on the backend (as you do in WordPress) and then must manage these from the back end. In WordPress, you have access to theme templates form within the interface for modifications. This distinction is key. There are two levels of expectations here. In Drupal there is the expectations that the framework will usually require far more coding and management than should be permitted via the interface. WordPress on the other hand considers the possibility of editing templates to be something that should be permitted to the administrations right from its graphical shell.
Again, this comes back to suitability of task. I would not want a large scale site with numerous complex templates to be accessible by any old administrator – hence Drupal. However, if I have a small site where the admin, maintainer and developer are likely the same person and the theme is straight forward then the interface access is reasonable.
Here are some other side-by-side comparison.
Editing Interface
I hate the Drupal editing interface. The listing of pages without any management options means it takes me a long time to find and then adjust content. The content listing and editing options in WordPress are simply far more elegant than anything offered in the Drupal core or via any add on modules I have found. For this interface reason along I prefer WordPress.
Comments
WordPress has focused for years on its comment moderation capabilities. They are top notch. Drupal’s are rudimentary at best. Having now used both, I would have to eliminate Drupal as a blogging option for a site that expected high comment volume. Drupal is a fine technical solution. Drupal is simply not up to the task when it comes to the associated workflow.
Simplicity of Free Themes and Theme Design
WordPress and Drupal take a few minutes to install. Getting started with adding a free theme for WordPress takes a few minutes to find tens of thousands of items to get started. Drupal then takes quite a bit to customize even free themes. This difference real comes to the forefront with my experimentations. I can transfer an existing site with drop down menus and a couple of area designs to WordPress in half a day. The same effort took me (and an experienced Drupal developer) a week.
Media Library
WordPress offers a simple but elegant media library. And a couple of plug-ins really push it to an even better solution. Drupal’s media management is barebones. Media is considered a node or content element just like any other item such as a page or post. This is excellent when you want to develop a larger application on top of the framework. However, it falls short for a simple site.
Plug-Ins
WordPress offers not just one plug-in for everything imaginable – there must be three or four. The modules that extend Drupal are simply not as varied and there are less options for each task. More to the point, adding, testing and tweaking just seems to be so much faster and easier in WordPress than the developer focused interface offered via Drupal.
Here are some other articles for thought
- Consider using Drupal and WordPress. WordPress for the blog and Drupal for the application side of a Web site. This appears to be in use by companies such as The Bivings Group –See http://www.bivingsreport.com/2009/integrating-tweetbacks-into-your-wordpress-blog/
- An Apples versus Tanks analogy – http://www.elithecomputerguy.com/content/drupal-vs-wordpress-blogging-comparing-apples-tanks
- A kind of funny video version http://blip.tv/file/829821
- An article also about suitability but brings into the fact that the Drupal arena does not focus on marketing of its own efforts in a manner that encourages broader appeal. http://graduallythensuddenly.com/2008/05/04/wordpress-drupal-irrelevant/
- Here is one that has found a clear reason why Drupal may have an advantage over WordPress http://www.danmyers.name/wp/2009/02/drupal-vs-wordpress-why-i%E2%80%99m-having-second-thoughts/. Then again I have used a WordPress plug-in for two years that fixed the problem he has been having without ever having to do any programming
- Here is a side by side list of features http://mydrupal.com/drupal-vs-wordpress. I do not agree with the bulleted list of statements. One I find funny is this one. It says to choose WordPress “If you want ease of use and Navigation…” Okay, is this not one of the basic all time requirements of everything that has to do with any sort of Web site.
- A nice balanced evaluation is at http://www.thesitewizard.com/general/wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-expression-engine.shtml
- Some fun as folks snipe at each other on the Drupal site at http://drupal.org/node/257065. One person claims that WordPress has a “less active development community.” Personally, I have found this to be the reverse. I have found far more global WordCamps and help with WordPress than I have found from Drupal and its more limited meetings. In fact the tone is entirely different. The WordPress folks have been generally welcoming to newbies and encourages exploration by neophytes. My forays into Drupal have been met by cold responses that I should improve my PHP and CSS before I ask questions. Kind of like a family response WordPress) versus a clique (Drupal)
- A nice simple evaluation and balanced perspective from a developer who does not mind getting into the down and dirty of things http://www.webdesignstuff.com/web/designers/03/2009/drupal-vs-wordpress/
