Recently in Hire Me Category

Hi everyone! ... crickets. Yea, I know. I've been busy. Really busy. Like the busiest I've ever been. For more than 18 months. But it's been worth it. Working with my agency, Genuine Interactive, we worked with Children's Hospital in Boston on the redesign of their new website, childrenshospital.org. Hope you like it. My big push, adding prominent social media elements on the front page, made the cut, which I'm supremely happy about.

I've also been writing for Genuine's blog and for MediaPost's Marketing:Health blog. We also launched a couple other sites in the medical space that have won awards: Qualis Health, a quality improvement organization in Seattle, launched a couple months ago, and earlier stemcell.childrenshospital.org launched, educates the public on the inner workings of and the importance of stem cell research. The stem cell site won a W3 award and was a finalist for a Healthcare and Wellness 2010 MITX award, which was a real honor.

I might go back through my blog and back/cross post each individual post to its original publish date, but I've got a few other things to knock off the list first. You know it's been a long time since you blogged when the password recovery email you generated gets sent to your spam folder. Yikes!

So I was listening to the on-demand archive of Twiter CEO and Founder Evan Williams' (@ev) conversation with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit) at the Online News Association conference and was stunned to hear a question I submitted posed to the founder.

My question "Do they plan to change the status box from 'what are you doing' to something else?" was answered at about the 23:10 mark of the video embedded below:

It was cool to make an appearance in such a session, but the question I submitted that I REALLY wanted answered was "Why is the search query for search.twitter.com limited to just 140 characters?"

I am in the middle of building or tweaking a few different Movable Type and Wordpress sites, including one for a friend who is now a client.

He sent me an email yesterday, asking me to weigh in on the following blog post. I had been meaning to weigh in on MT vs. WP for some time, and I actually wrote my take on things before I even read the post. After reading the post, I felt that my take could stand as is, so here's my reply:


I've always thought Anil Dash (who commented in the post you sent, FYI) made some great points in this piece:

http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html

Through my experience, I've noticed several advantages that Movable Type has over Wordpress. I'll list the ones I feel are most relevant to your site/needs:


INTERNAL PUBLISHING OF PAGES VS. DYNAMIC PHP:

This is the core difference between MT and WP. Wordpress is designed so that you design internal templates that are used to dynamically generate "pages" when you visit a URL for a Wordpress site. This means that there are no actual "pages" that are "published" in the traditional sense. One of the dangers of this is that if you are not very very fluent in PHP, you can inadvertently break your entire site with a small piece of bad code, and not even know it right away.

Conversely, with Movable Type, it's Perl-based publishing system generates actual pages that are stored on your file server. During that publishing process, if you use improper MT code, it often does a tremendous job of preventing you from publishing content until the conflict is resolved.

For example, let's say you have some code that starts with <mt:Entries> and instead of putting in the proper </mt:Entries> tag, you forget the slash. Movable Type will highlight this conflict and tell you what template and what line the error occurs in, thus helping you to resolve the conflict.

In Wordpress, by contrast if you have a similar error, every page that uses that template will display an ugly PHP error.

Sometimes these errors are obvious and easy to fix, but sometimes, you don't know right away, and if you were to make such a mistake on, say, a Friday afternoon, it might be several days before the site gets fixed.

From the conference site:
"Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign's record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign's online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics."

Speaker - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital

The important thing is recognizing that all clients have a bigger issue they're trying to get around.

How do you incorporate those actions around the world into the web site

We have a platform of tools we use, centered around a CRM tool

Early 2007 through present

More than 1B emails to 13 million addresses
>1m sms subscribers
200,000 offline events planned via the web - NOT official campaign events
35,000 local volunteer groups

14.5M YouTube viewing hours - Does NOT include Wil.I.Am - Cost for this viewing time would have probably cost $40-50 million

$770,000,000 35% Offline / 65% Online

Campaign was able to shift from state to state, they were able to already see who had started grass-roots groups and then parachute professionals into the


How did they do it

NOTE: This is what I have up to the break. Will add the rest later. Cheers!

This session was run by Connie Bensen, Techrigy SM2

Community is NOT boring, it's so exciting, the direction we're going in

My day job is working with a listening tool.

I don't like the term 'community manager' because you really don't manage anybody

Whatever you call your community manager person ... they're you're human connection

I have 3 philosophies
    - Community building applies to everything and everyone
    - B2C: If you provide resources and excellent customer service, people will buy from you and want to make sure you get reimbursed
    - B2B:  What used to be only available to b2c is now available to B2B

Titles don't matter any more when you're networking online. They interact with me because of the knowledge I have

It's shifting from us talking to our customers to our customers wnat to talk to us, and we need to figure out how to handle that.

I'm happy this isn't a room full of marketers ... happy that we have engineers, social media experts etc. This isn't only about marketing.

If you ignore your customers, they WILL go away

If you can build enough word of mouth, you can pretty much quit or cut back on your advertising. If you develop brand visibility, people will come to you, and if you're busy enough, you won't have to be cold calling.

Are you a twitterer in Quincy? Do you use the Internet? Do you have questions about ways to better take advantage of all of the tools that are out there? Do you like beer? Do you like the beach?

If so, come join @pinkshoe, @chadrem, @eesullivan and other twitterers at The Beachcomber Irish Bar, Thursday, June 11 beginning at 6:30 p.m.

This is known as a "tweetup" though we understand if you don't want to call it that.

Twitter is a growing online communications tool that's quickly making its way into the mainstream. Just today news spread that China is now blocking the service, so you know it must be making a dent.

There are several Quincy residents with sizable followings, and you can read more about them here. We're hoping to spread the word and (hopefully) help foster a greater sense of community among the "netizens" in Quincy.

But mostly, we just thought it would be fun to have a beer by the beach with other twitterers.

Hope you can make it!

I'm less than 24 hours away from joining 14 other fellows for the Knight Digital Media Center's inaugural News Entrepreneur Boot Camp May 16-21 at the University of Southern California.

All of the semi-finalists were asked to profile a news entrepreneur as part of a "homework" assignment. This is my profile of Shoba Purushothaman, co-founder of The News Market. I submitted the following profile on March 31 after meeting with her a few weeks earlier, on the day she made the transition from CEO to Chairman. Purushothaman will be speaking during the seminar.

I would like to extend a HUGE thank you to Silvio Carrillo, Erin Sullivan Capellman, Mark Micheli, Tom Oates and Pat Washburn for their help and feedback. Some of these folks are looking for new opportunities. All are worth checking out, as they rock in their respective fields.

-----

Building a Business by Bridging Divides

By CHAD CAPELLMAN

Once, Madison Avenue was where the rules of marketing and public relations were made, broken and remade. Today, just a few feet away, there's Shoba Purushothaman - an entrepreneur whose company, The NewsMarket, is helping change the rules in radical new ways.

Purushothaman hadn't thought about the irony of being near Mad Ave. She's too busy with The NewsMarket, providing an online distribution channel for broadcast-quality video of newsmakers from paying clients to more than 25,000 media outlets in 190 countries.

The day we met, the company had just announced that she would be leaving her post as CEO to focus on more strategic initiatives in her new role as chairman, and she had been tied up in numerous conversations and interviews about the change.

Despite the frenzy, she was engaged and thoughtful during an hour-long conversation that covered how she had arrived at this point, what sets The NewsMarket apart, and what challenges and opportunities the company experienced and faces in the future.

I don't know about you, but it seems like I've been getting much, much more email lately. And much of it I actually asked to receive. Group updates from LinkedIn, Facebook messages, newsletters, marketing pitches, special offers... Oy. Any one of these items can have value, but in a 24-hour period, the pile can make me want to run from my computer, pour a nice cocktail and watch ANYTHING on TV. That's not always practical, however, especially at hours like this one, when it's not 5:00 anywhere I do business.

But using my Gmail, I started on a little endeavor to buffer myself from the crush over the past week and am already noticing the results.

Here's what I did.

First, I made a "pending" label, but I called it "__pending" so that it would stay at the top of my filter list.

Next, I grabbed the email address of an email that I have a passing interest in, but don't want to flood my inbox.

I clicked on "Create a Filter" near the search button near the top of the page.

I added said email address to the From field, and hit the Next Step button.

I then checked the box next to "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)" and chose __pending from the dropdown menu of available filters. This automatically checks the box.

I then hit the "Create Filter" button.

I have done this 44 times so far and my only regret is not doing this sooner. I love this method as opposed to automatically diverting different messages into different filters because I have a one-stop shop for lower-priority messages that I might have an interest in reading, when I decide I want to. Also, with as much as I'm checking messages on my phone these days, each time I can spare myself from scrolling past such a message is valuable time I don't have to waste getting to the "real" messages that I most benefit from catching and replying to on my mobile device.

Now if only someone at Google Labs could make a "skip inbox and add to my chosen tag" button ;-)

Onward and upward ...

No one has ever asked me to be a professor of whatever they call "journalism" online. But plenty of people have been asking me questions about various trends and technologies, and some of them are also teaching. I also had the great pleasure to work with some outstanding interns from Northeastern University over the past couple of years.

And of course, I've spent many years in and around journalism and think tanks and training institutes and non-profits that are attempting to educate.

So I got to thinking. If I were to teach a course on something resembling "online journalism" what would it look like? What would it cover? What are the essentials that people should enter the world with an understanding of so that great journalism can be done with the wonderful tools that I am fortunate enough to play with nearly every day?

This isn't everything I'd want to include, but they are some things I think are important. I encourage you to add yours as well.

And who knows? Maybe someone will read them, and think about them, and start teaching them. Dare to dream...

Wrangling RSS - Using Yahoo! Pipes to divine meaning from feeds

Geo Metro - Understanding how longitude, latitude and mapping technology can have an impact on readers

Twend reporting - Using tools like search.twitter.com to glean insight into the minds of the audience

Crowdsourcing investigations - Use the leverage of the audience to demand, and vet, answers

XBRL - Where online journalism means business

Flash - No. Not unless you REALLY need to. (One day session)

A Web of Ties - It's not just about your content on your web site, but about extending it online

Online video - Dos, don'ts and how and where to publish to have the biggest impact

I just read Robert Scoble's "The worst thing for Twitter" about how if Twitter got bought by IBM or Adobe or some such outfit that would be even worse for it than being bought by Google.

A wave of emotion rushed over me. And it had nothing to do with any of those potential suitors. It has to do with newspapers.

I haven't written much about the death of newspapers, as I think there is about as much of a saturated market on that angle as there are "Social Media Experts" on Twitter. I started working in newspapers, worked five years at The American Press Institute, ran the web site for every We Media conference, and went to the same school / worked at the same school newspaper as Jayson Blair. I know pretty intimately, the reasons for the death of newspapers.

I thought about an alternate universe where as an ultimate act of swinging for the fences, every newspaper got together and made a bold, expensive gamble similar to the $1.1 trillion Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Lula Ignacio de Silva, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and the rest of the G20 pledged to the International Monetary Fund yesterday.

The action I pictured for newspapers: Buying Twitter. In a consortium brokered by either the World Association of Newspapers  or the Newspaper Association of America. In early 2008. Or at least after Facebook was rebuffed.

I have for years lamented decisions, big and small, that were made by newspapers that adversely affected their bottom lines. From straightforward steps like creating easier interfaces for purchase images both breaking local events, as well as from a paper's archives, or learning the lessons of Craigslist and Monster.com  and applying those to their often awful relationships with funeral home directors to protect their lucrative obituaries section from outside threats. [Disclosure: during a stint as Sr. Editor, Obits and Fun at Eons, I helped build the precursor to Tributes.com and may or may not have shares in that spinoff.]

Some of these things wouldn't have cost a dime.

@chadrem