SocialMediaBust

Hashtag spam occurs because when you follow a hashtag you will see ALL uses of it, even if some of the tweets come from people who you have banned. The current example on #custserv involves an account at @mindtouch. Hundreds of repeated messages have polluted the #custserv hashtag making all but useless. This shouldn't happen -- it's clearly a problem that Twitter isn't addressing.

However, the solution for the end user is simple, if you use TWEETDECK (and perhaps other clients that include filtering). In Tweetdeck, click on the wrench in the upper right hand corner (that's where your settings live). Then click on the Global filters option in the menu on the left.

You have the option of globally filtering by source, name, words, etc. Enter in #mindtouch in the "from people" box, and just for good measure add mindtouch in the words field. Save using the button on the bottom, and done.

Best is that you can filter ME out too, or really anything you choose. My faves to kiss goodbye are Trump, and MLM in the word field.

Please retweet this if you can.

(Here's what it looks like once done)

With all the hubub about social media as THE essential business tool, I get the impression that companies are ignoring or under developing their websites. One of the advantages of a website is that the content you have on there tends to be "evergreen" in terms of search engines. Articles and information tend to have value long beyond that which is found using blogs and social media platforms.

I'm sharing some numbers, which previously I'd kept confidential, about our success with website development. A few things to keep in mind.

• I'm a one person company (usually), so it's not like I have a raft or resources to use to build websites.
• I actually developed all of my websites, including all the coding and updating. As a result, the ease of use and slickness of all my sites is at least somewhat less than I'd like since I'm not that skilled at that stuff.
• Most of my sites are built to service people interested in certain niches. As you will see one of our most successful sites has been the one on performance management.
• We are now using the program "Artisteer" to add a a professional feel to our sites and blogs. If interested in more information click here.
• Our most successful websites have been on line for a long time, and longevity counts. You probably won't be able to generate the kind of traffic levels at this point in time.
• Of course, traffic levels don't necessarily mean profit. Unfortunately, that information I can't share with you. Suffice it to say, it's worked out well.
• The numbers below reflect traffic going ONLY to our websites, and does not include any blogs.
• I believe the numbers we achieve are a result of providing good content in the niches.

Customer Service Zone

Built as a springboard for my customer service books, the traffic has been absolutely traffic. Below is a graph that shows what we are getting.

Below shows the traffic, primarily for 2010. The site has been online longer than that, but this graph only covers from late 2009 to the present. The large green bar represents page views, while the blue one (the really important one) reflect actual numbers of people. So, in 2010, we got close to a million page views, and had about 400,000 actual people visit. (give or take).

Performance Appraisal Center

Our resource center for performance management and appraisal has had very similar results. Take a look

Communication Resource Center

Here's a bit of a weak sister but a site that has still garnered over 1,000,000 page views. it's a question and answer site about communication,

The point with these numbers is to show what a modest business can do outside social media, using simple, content rich websites.

In case you are wondering, we did experiment with adding commenting capabilities to our websites using a free third party service. Aftera number of months, we removed the capability since nobody was using it and it was slowing down our page loads.

No matter if you are using social media or not, your website should be your foundation for customer service, promotion and interaction. Best of all, YOU control it, and you become immune to changes in policies of third party companies like Facebook, and reduce your reliance on someone else for your business.

Your website can still be interactive if you want, but the key is something is to provide good, reputable content, so your site becomes the go to place for your topic.

The ease of blogs to get content online quickly and without knowing how to code html has been a boon to many businesses out there. It's allowed non-technical people a hands-on opportunity to have a voice. However, there are a few problems with blogs that cause your excellent content to fade from view on the Internet.

Blogs were designed as journalling tools, so they are chronologically based out of the box. new material appears on the front page, and a front page should be kept reasonable short. In any event almost no visitors will scroll down past dozens or articles so your older posts are, in effect, lost. Many blogs also do not index material well so a visitor can see what's available quickly. Menus need to be kept short.

While you can tweek blog templates and software to address some of these issues, the end result is that an article published on a blog gets a big push in visibility, and then very few people visit. The surge rarely lasts more than a day or two.

In addition, while I have no documentation, I believe search engines treat blog posts differently than regular web site pages. Blogs are quickly searchable in Google, but it appears that, once again, they quickly disappear in the depths of the rest of the search results.

When you take your writing work seriously, that means the effective shelf life of your posts is exceedingly short.

Our Solution: Move Older Blog Posts To Web Pages

We are starting to move articles posted in our blogs to static web pages so we can try to make them more visible. About 99% of our total traffic on the net comes from our web pages, with only about 1% coming from blogs, so this makes sense. We believe moving material will also make the material more authoritative due to the way blogs have been used -- more as informal chatting, than actual serious writing.

We're still deciding whether we'll move articles and remove them from blogs, or simply make copies available in our web page formats. I suspect eventually all of our older posts will end up removed from our blogs, let's say about a month after originally appearing, and we'll automatically redirect visitors from the blog page to the web page.

Of course, to do that you have to have a web site, and have the skill to move from blog to web page, but after all, if you use blogs for businesses it's worth paying for expert help, or learning to do it yourself.

This IS a speculative strategy. I'll report back if I end up with good data. If you have low blog traffic, as we do, it's a no brainer, since even if it doesn't work, worst case scenario is that we'll lose only a tiny amount of traffic.

In a blog post Richard Nantel shares his perceptions about using Twitter for discussions in an article entitled  The Challenges of Using Twitter for Discussion. It's a simple short article that hits the nail on the head. It's noteworthy as an exemplar of the emergence of more and more critical thinking applied to Twitter, and social media in general. Below is the comment I made on Richard's post.

I'm with you on all this, but more so. To add, the pace is such that there's an illusion of learning and communication on Twitter as one gets caught up in it.

What's interesting is to go to a chat transcript and read it, not having been apart of it, and the "conversations" are really laughable if you remove the frenetic pace. It's like being trapped in a fortune cookie factory.

There is SO much evidence of the limitations of twitter as an effective communication medium (ie. as touted as a medium for dialogue) that it's amazing otherwise intelligent people can't see the lack of depth of content.

Ironically, the characteristics that have made Twitter attractive initially (the buzz of fast participation) is exactly what keeps it from being an effective communication medium, and will also be the reason why it isn't long term viable as a business.

Anyway, it's interesting, that the huge majority of people who try Twitter leave it. And, the real though leaders, like Seth Godin, Jaron Lanier, Bing and others are slowly emerging as strong critics of both social media and Twitter.