Archive for January, 2010
Sweet HootSuite
I love HootSuite! HootSuite is a non-affiliated, 3rd party Twitter client that lets you manage all your Tweeting from one dashboard. You can easily shrink URLs and schedule Tweets to publish whenever you want. For testing your marketing messages, however, HootSuite has another function that’s as cool as the site’s little owl icon. Stats! I love stats. HootSuite’s stats show you how many clicks you’re getting for your Tweet-embedded links. I love being able to see what messages resonate with my Twitter following. I love being able to see traffic day by day. You can examine the stats on each Tweet, check out traffic by region or look at overall traffic for a specified period of time. This is a super tool for anyone wanting to squeeze more information and learning out of their social networking acctivities. Show this to a client and they’ll love you.
Why Text is King
The Internet is built on text. The foundation of the web was built with HTML (hypertext markup language) which provided tools for presenting text on a computer screen. That legacy remains the foundation of all Internet activity today. Of course, images, video and all sorts of graphic embellishments have been added to web site presentations, but images remain essentially invisible to computer search engines because computers aren’t very good at recognizing visual context. The fact is, computers don’t really even understand words, but they are very good at recognizing strings of letters and matching one string to another, which is the basis for search engines. (It’s also a pretty good reason to use spellchecking.) We can make images visible to search engines by attaching word tags, but in the end it’s still a matter of using words to communicate.
