Before the “age of social media” this commercial would have been just as offensive, but now mothers have a united voice online. Women allover have bonded together and expressed their disgust with this ad.

See twitter responses here:

See the original commercial here:

How do you think Motrin should respond to this conversation? Do you think their message (taken from motrin.com) is sufficient?

View and tag your transactions

You can see how you’re doing in any number of customizable categories. Most of your transactions will immediately go into the right category when you add the bank account.

You can also tag transactions… for example, you might have tons of expenses for a vacation. All of those expenses fall under a variety of categories (food, lodging, gas). If you tag each individual expense with “vacation” you can analyze your spending for that particular tag.

What gives mint its soul?

The vision of the Mint.com crew is not only to create a super-easy and super-helpful finance tool, but it is to shed light on the financial industry in a way that’s never been done before.

The average consumer is getting hosed by financial institutions. Mint provides consumers with information that lets them compare their interest rates on banking and debt. The software shows you which of your bank accounts may be charging you too much in fees, high interest rates on debt and provides options that help you know where you could get a better deal.

Aaron assured me that they evaluate each provider on Mint.com based on the value they provide to the customer. For example, in my screenshot example, they wouldn’t have recommended me the HSBC account if it involved fees that would screw me over. They really do make all their decisions on what is best for the consumer, not what’s best for their own pockets.

Mint vs Quicken

If you haven’t tried Mint for your personal finances yet, you should. Check out the website hit comparison of Mint.com and Quicken (courtesy of compete.com). Mint outshines Quicken with it’s sleek interface and ever-so-easy interface. No user manuals necessary!

** One caveat… if you are Canadian, you might not find your account in their yet, but they promise you will soon!

I decided to use his template as an exercise in simplifying my current resume into a high-level overview.  It forced me to be concise.

I like this format because it puts my skills and expertise into a separate area which helps to aggregate the “big picture” of who I am and what I have to offer.

Check out my new resume and let me know what you think.

This barcamp is sponsored by (us folks at) Synonym and we can’t wait to wake up Chicago with our first event!

First draft topics include

• Slogging through The Dip
• Knowing when to quit…
• Managing Life, Managing your projects
• Get away from the screen: Achieving Life/Work Balance
• Intraprenuers: A primer

Get in touch if you want to present or help out!

Face-to-face service can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived by your customer. You might have the greatest offering in the world, but one bad experience with a cranking customer service rep can change that customer’s opinion in a heartbeat. In this age of new media, one bad experience can be a big deal for your brand. Information spreads like wildfire on the web.

Service industries (restaurants, photographers, doctors etc) check Yelp.com and see what people are saying for you. If you are in a smaller city, without Yelp, then monitor local forums for ratings on your service.

A poor rating on Yelp isn’t the end of the world. Use it as valuable incite as to what you can improve. I’ve seen tons of companies on Yelp respond to a customer who gave them a bad review to apologize and ask what they could do to fix it.  Nine times out of ten, the unhappy reviewer returns to update their rating and explain how awesome it was that they were heard and what was done to make it better.

Companies and techies make sure that you are on Satisfaction - People Powered Customer Service.  Make sure you are listening to what your customers want from your product. Encourage feedback and open dialogue and encourage your employees to interact with the people who use your product.  If your users are techies and bloggers they can have a huge impact on how you are perceived by the blogoshpere and the technophile masses.

2. Monitor how users tag and keyword you outside of your own site.

One of the beauties of tagging and social media is how easy it is to see the tags and categories that your customers give your content.  I recently read a post by Jeremiah Owyang called Use Delicious to uncover your brand (and improve your SEO). He explains how to use delicious to see how people have saved your posts and pages.  He shows how sometimes we, as bloggers or content authors, categorize our post in the way that we feel is appropriate for the user… or maybe, in some cases, the way we want to “spin it”.  But using delicious, the truth and appropriateness of our own tags can easily be compared with how your users actually tag it.

This can also be extremely valuable keyword research for SEO and figuring out a more organized user friendly information architecture for your own website.

3. Monitor all of the web’s channels.

Monitoring your brand on the “web” is no longer a simple as maintaining your corporate website. In fact it’s more important to manage your brand on OTHER people’s websites.

There are so many different channels that make an impact on your overall online presence. This graphic called People Streams from Elliance SEO Services is a great illustration of the many ways people can find you online and thus can influence by your brand’s rep.

The technologies in this graphic will constantly evolve (for example, the channel of Microblogging like Twitter isn’t on this graphic).  However, the principle is still the same: Go where the people are talking.

(Read the book Groundswell for more info on how to keep up with the technology curve.

Do this for each channel:

• Investigate if your brand is already being talked about in the channel by
  • Searching comments and tags for your brand name and your URL
  • Monitor referring links in your web stats
• Determine if it’s a viable channel for you to be involved in regularly by researching the demographic most involved in that channel. PS. If people are already on there talking about you, posting about you and commenting about you, then that’s a pretty big hint that you should be there too.
• Come up with a plan for measuring each channel on a regular basis. Try to increase communication through a particular channel and monitor the results.

Optimize your title tags!

This was probably the most eye-opening thing I learned here about my blog. I’ve always auto-generated the <title> tag based on the actual title I put in my post. I’ve done it before in Content Management Systems and WP does this too.

Stephan said that re-using the post title for your <title> tag is a bad practice because people don’t often search for it the way you wrote it. You can be as witty and cute and lyrical in your post title as you want, for the article’s sake, but make damn sure your title tag doesn’t read that way! The title tag should be wordy, keyword rich and full of information.

For example, the title of this post is “My WordCamp Notes: SEO for blogs”, but if you look at the title bar at the top of the browser my actual <title> tag is “Easy SEO tips and tricks for bloggers, a presentation by Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008″. Way more search friendly.

• Decouple the post name from the title page
• The first words in the title tag get the most rank
• Hand craft the title tag
• Do keyword research on plural vs signal
• For WP, install the SEO Title Tag plugin - mass edit titles and add Custom titles for each
• Use related post links at the end of the post
• B2B Lead Generation Blog

Sculpt your PageRank.

You only have so much PageRank “flow of link gain” on your page and you want to make sure you don’t spread it around needlessly. Reserve true links for the important information. On all the rest add rel=”nofollow” to the link to tell Google it’s not as important as the other content on your site:

• Use it on all print and email links.
• Use it on links, trackbacks and comments that you don’t want to give “flow” back to if you don’t want your precious PageRank to pass from your page to this link.
• Use it where the link would be reciprocal.
• Use rel=”nofollow” on any internal links to date-based pages. No one searches in google for “what christen said on June 6th, 2008!”

Minimize Duplicate Content

• Craft optional excerpts on everything but the permalink page itself.
• For each post, write unique content (ie paraphrase) for the excerpt - don’t just use the first couple paragraphs!!! Don’t use the “read more” insert for WP, this creates DUPLICATE content!
• Meta robots noindex & rel-nofollow are your friends - printer friendly
• Make sure that each tag or category page (that pulls aggregate posts) has it’s own “sticky” post that resides at the top and explains the tag or category.  This unique chunk of text will allow this page to be indexed.

Optimize your Anchor Text

• Post title should be always be a link to the permalink page.
• Never link with the word “here”. Link text should equal the <title> tag of the post you’re linking to which is important for context.

BuddyPress is an extension to WordPress which will allow WP to be a full fledged social network. This means, that you can use it to make your own “Facebook” of sorts.  It’s currently under development but it is very close (they are predicting December).

BuddyPress is well thought out.  It lets you (as the administrator) customize different parts of the installation to suit your needs. For example, if you are making a network for dog lovers, you can add your own fields to each user’s profile like (I have __ dogs.  Favourite dogpark: ___.  etc)  It also lets you have private messaging between members, friending and photo albums.

It’s pretty crazy that this is free and open source.  WP is getting more and more impressive.

Download the presentation slides for LOLcats and the Secret of Virality

Facebook is viral, but is it spam?

Why Facebook is spamming (you know all those emails you get from your friends telling you to sign up for the next latest app?)

• You can ONLY use these apps, if you invite a ton of people, then some will sign up and then you can use it
• They make you spam?
• It’s a serial process, you can’t just send to 1 person, your chances suck.
• So Facebook is addicted to invite based virality
• It gets in your system you send them, everyone clicks it, but then you get to the service and you realize it sucks.  Don’t be a dick.  It can only piss off your user.
• The Invite-Virality is not what you want. You want the slooower process that is sustainable and you wind up with users that LIKE YOU.

Invite-based pros and cons

Pros

• fast
• fast
• fast

Cons

• You are a virus - you just generated a negative experience for 99% of the people that add you
• churn and burn

Why are you on this site?

• I was suckered by an email
• OR I like this site enough to return to it
• “Too many people are flagging our emails as SPAM”. Uhh it is spam.

Sustainable and slow pros and cons

Pros

• Trust and goodwill
• Real traffic
• You’re not a digg
• Realistic return on value

Cons

• Slow.Er.
• Requires a quality product
• May not be possible

SPAM invites are the equivalent of telemarketing

Viral Coefficient can be changed so that teh # of invites occurs of the LIFETIME of the USER. Build reasons to invite.  Lolcats makes their photos available for use on their blogs. They don’t make them spam it.

Reasons for Inviting

• Create content
• Preferencing
• Personal Messages
• Comments - people want to be appreciated for their feedback.
• Feedback and Replies
• (Find reasons for your site)

Tracking Conversations

• Track a group of people (a cohort) that go through a particular process.  So maybe give cohort A one message and Cohort B another message. You measure the end result of each.
• Andrew Chen - runs a blog on virality
• The Loop.  Like ShareThis but from a marketing perspective, much prefer to have links. On engrishfunny.com they focused on just 6 big sharing buttons.  (They may change myspace to twitter eventually, but the key is to react to the conversation and the tools that are popular right now on the internet.)
• Friendfeed or microblogging has a real impact on how quickly your content gets out there.  Twitter lets you communicate with a very specific audience, so the conversion rates from Twitter are much higher.
• Detecting virals: WP Metrics - pageviews.  Put that page in analytics and reverse the curve. You can track over time. You will not get a single referrer if it’s viral. The true viral ones have no referrer because they were actually emailed from a friend.

Achieving viral virility means not being a dick.

How do you determine the stickies - the users that stick around with your site

They divide into Consumers and Contributors.  Have a genuine dialogue with the people who buy your product. Get them to tell you about reviews they’ve written, posts they’ve made about you etc. If you communicate with them and ask them how they feel, they will blog about it and give you more positive feedback.

The speaker line up looks good, considering it’s just one short day. I hope I can just go and absorb and get inspired from other bloggers. It’s kinda cool they’re using our gravatars for our name tags (in the true spririt of blogging).

I’m looking forward to:

• Alan Levine on The Future of Education and WordPress
• Chuck Lewis aka the SEO Rapper (see video below)
• and of course Matt Mullenweg himself.

I’ll try to post some updates tomorrow!

These two tools have let me stay accountable to where my time really goes.

Tool 1: David Seah’s Printable CEO Series (old school)

I say “old school” only because it uses pencil and paper, but it is definitely modern and a gorgeous way to plan out your day.  These printable CEO and day planners make it so easy to work on a project especially when you are jumping back and forth between tasks.  They are a joy to work on cause they look so hot.  David has definitely thought through usability and what it’s like to have  ton of work to do and to focus on what’s important.  You will need to have a colour printer to get the full effects these awesome planning sheets.

Tool 2: RescueTime (new school)

When perhaps I let my pen and paper tracking slide, RescueTime always has my back. It’s a neat little app that constantly runs and records which programs you have open.  You can then review the time you spent in each and “tag” each application or URL.  Tagging what you do is the real brains behind the operation, because you can also assign a tag a “level” of productivity from -2 to +2.

For example, when I see my own blog URL in the list, I tag it with “blogging” and I give blogging a productivity level of +1.  Then, you can easily see how productive you are over time  (for example, on my list, youtube.com gets a -2 on productivity).

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the program’s intelligence and its ease of use.  It’s saved my butt more than a few times, when I tried to remember what I was working on the day before.

Usability-wise,  I feel the app could use a little more ajax in their app to aid with multi-tagging items, but overall the information it gives me is invaluable.