McCord Web Services The Web Authority – Page 351 – Smart Digital Marketing, Real Business Results.

June 22, 2009June 3, 2009

HootSuite Reviewed

Do you have multiple Twitter profiles like I do? Then HootSuite is just right for you. I have a Twitter account for my business under the name mccordweb and due to popularity and name recognition I now have a second Twitter profile – nancymccord. For me it is a problem to do tweets in two places – too time consuming.

With HootSuite, I can post to both Twitter accounts or just one account with one click. I can even schedule tweets to one or both whenever I want from one online control panel. In fact that is the beauty of HootSuite, it is an online application that really saves you time. You can have as many Twitter profiles set up as you desire. Then when you want to tweet, just click on the profile icon to assign where your tweet will be published. It’s easy!

HootSuite even allows you to review @ replies and direct messages for each profile on one very handy screen. For me, the power Twitter user, this is excellent news!

Now the reality of the situation is that HootSuite does not replace TweetDeck for me at this point, hopefully TweetDeck will add a multi-profile management option in the future, but for now does not. Typically during the day I will have TweetDeck open to monitor Twitter traffic and topics and also a browser screen open with HootSuite. This way I can rapidly tweet with one click yet monitor my groups and traffic.

HootSuite is not an application to replace TweetDeck, which is still hands down the best Twitter aggregator that I have tried, but it does make posting to multiple Twitter profiles easy which you simply cannot do with TweetDeck.

Just be careful if you have multiple Twitter accounts in posting the same content to all. Twitter can consider this spamming and will close your account so be judicious about when you tweet about the same topic on multiple Twitter accounts.

You can sign up for access to HootSuite for free and check it out for yourself.

June 19, 2009July 8, 2009

Is There Such a Thing as Too Technology Heavy?

Yes there is a situation where you can work to make your website so technology heavy that you get bogged down and lose the ability to be nimble or become prone to service outages or hostage to your programmer.

I have one large client whose site I occasionally webmaster who has had this happen to him. It crept up on him slowly, but now the tech bloat is really coming back to bite him. big time. The issue is that now his site is so dynamic in nature, pulls in fields from his database from many elements that he is spending more time fixing things than he is spending growing his business. Right now his administrative control panel is down, broken when his developer added an interface to feed registrations to populate a store shopping cart. Then the developer broke the look and feel of the site when he set up a new password login. It is one problem after another.

Now if his database tied to his computer server in his business office has a hiccup, his website is impacted. It has become so sensitive and the problems now so fierce that he almost has had to set up a cot for his developer. All this for about 30 visitors a day to his website!

This is a situation where you don’t have to have everything fed into your website from a database. For a business this size they just don’t need this type of technological interface, in fact it is overkill.

At this point due to the nature of the problems, now the client is considering scrapping his entire site and all the technology that he has paid to be created and going back to a static site with an off-site place for certain transactions to keep the main site separate from the more dynamic problems. It is a shame that the client did not receive good guidance from the programmer to help scale his needs to his traffic and has ended up throwing money out the window. Technology is a good thing, but don’t let it drive your website before you really need it.

June 17, 2009May 3, 2009

Blogging on Toilets? Really?

Okay did you think you would ever read a blog on toilets or dual flushing kits? Well all types of businesses want and need blogs. With a great blog writer, you can take a difficult topic or product and create interesting content that will funnel readers into your website to find out more about your products.

Here’s a great example from another of our blog writers who has done just that – taken a dry or difficult topic and had some fun with it and made the blog interesting reading. You can view the blog at Dual Flush by SelectAFlush.

This writer has taken a perspective that the client’s product is something that every water conscious customer should install at home in their toilet. She has blogged on a variety of topics such as:

Although this blog may not be one that is up on your watch daily list, it is an excellent example of how business of all types and sorts are using blogging to drive traffic to their website with unique, interesting, and well written content. If your business is like SelectAFlush, now may be the time for you to contact me to check this writer availability to write for your topic too. With eight blog writers writing for McCord Web Services clients, we are sure to have a writer who is a good match for your needs too!

June 15, 2009May 3, 2009

Are e-Commerce Blogs Considered Spam Blogs by Blogger?

Blogger has a new protocol, if they think that your blog is spam, they lock it. That’s right, lock it.

We have an e-commerce client who happens to sell new issue stamps and we blog three days a week for him about interesting stamps, stamp trivia, stories about stamps, and cool information that you might not know about particular stamps. Blogger has decided that the blog is a “spam blog” as all links point to his website (to products) as do many e-commerce blogs.

As a result, Blogger has threatened to delete the blog if we do not request a review. It has now been two weeks since we requested a review. In fact actually the second time we requested a review as Blogger forgot after one week that we had already requested a review once. There is no time frame on the review, just the threat to delete the blog.

Additionally now to publish a post on the blog, we have to enter a series of letter or numbers into a field, proving that we are real humans not robots posting to this blog. I have to say that this is annoying but to the nth degree. All of our content is unique and not scraped. If there was ever a good reason to move to WordPress, this is it.

I understand that no one wants to read spam, but I feel that Blogger is being heavy handed here. They should have instituted a timely review process before they slapped down interesting content rich blogs!

In fact you can check the blog out to review it for yourself here at The Stamp Collectors Corner.