Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I thought I would take a momentary break from the inbound marketing content and post something from my engineering roots – standards. I’m heavily involved with the International Society of Automation and one of their key missions is developing automation industry standards. However, this could just as easily apply to any number of standards that inbound marketers need to deal with; syndication (RSS, atom), browsers, HTML5, etc…

This comic appeared on the xkcd site today and it made me laugh out loud. I’m sure there are more than a few automation professionals who can identify with this:

Continue Reading

A guy walks into a bar with a duck under his arm and orders a drink. The bartender serves him and says, “That will be one hundred dollars.” The guy exclaims, “A hundred bucks! Why so much?” The bartender reaches under the bar, retrieves a thirty page document and replies, “There was a sign on the entrance clearly stating that by entering these premises, you agree to be bound to our terms of service. Paragraph 23 of Section 2 of Article 12 requires patrons to pay a $90 cleaning fee for bringing animals into the bar.”

As jokes go, that one wasn’t very funny. Yet most of us chuckle about the fact that we agree to terms of service contracts on an almost daily basis without ever reading them. I was commissioned by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) to study and report on the terms of service for 13 social media sites. I’ll be presenting the results during the “Creating Successful Social Media Strategies for Today, Tomorrow and the Future” session at ACE11 on 16-June in Washington, DC. While I’ll be covering lots of important aspects, there were three terms of service common to all sites that I thought deserved special attention.

1) You’re On Your Own

Every single one of these services expressly stipulates that the service is provided “as is,” with no warranties of fitness, completeness or reliability. In other words, “it may work, it may not work, you’re on your own.” This is no great shock and in the era of the Never Ending Beta, we have grown accustomed to this. But the problem is that we’ve grown so accustomed to this and the services have been so reliable that we are unprepared when things don’t work.

Takeaway: Don’t make these services part of any mission critical service.

2) You’re Liable for Security Breaches

Another common aspect of these agreements dealt with account security. The surprising twist (to me) is that many of these services require you to notify them if your account has been compromised. If you don’t notify them, you could be held liable for any damages caused by the breach.

Takeaway: Take account security seriously, don’t share passwords and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.

3) You’re the Last to Know

Similar to the first caveat, nearly every one of these services reserves the right to terminate your account for any reason, without notification. In some cases, they go so far as to say that in such a case, your content may be irretrievable. Facebook, for example, has been in the news quite frequently recently for suspending accounts for a whole host of reasons (including having a name they don’t like). Although Facebook is notoriously slow at resolving these issues, they generally get resolved without further harm. Nonetheless, there’s no shortage of other services shutting down suddenly and without notice.

Takeaway: Have a solid backup plan.

I’ll be sharing more insights from this research with my newsletter subscribers, so sign up if you haven’t already!

Continue Reading

Chris Dunlap, ISA Boston Section Vice President, kicks off our October meeting on Livestream.

I hosted a Web 2.0 workshop at last month’s ISA Fall Leader Meetings that was an open discussion of social media and collaborative technologies. The overwhelming interest was clearly focused on using video conferencing for holding meetings and presenting information. Before, during and after that workshop I’ve promised at least a dozen people that I would put together a comparison of available services and some hints and tips for using them.

In this post, I’m going to compare four different free services for conducting online meetings and/or presentations; DimDim , Ustream, Livestream and Skype. None of them is a perfect solution and they all have trade-offs that need to be considered for their applicability to your specific needs.

The Big Picture

Meetings vs. Presentations

The first question to answer is whether the collaboration is primarily a meeting or a presentation. While all of these services support online chat, only two of them permit muli-party audio or video conferencing. For meetings that are primarily one-way, Livestream and Ustream will be the best option. If you require audio or video conferencing capability, you need to look at either DimDim or Skype.

Audience Size

This is another critical factor, and will frequently dictate whether or not one of these services will fit the bill. DimDim’s free service will limit the number of attendees to 10, while Livestream’s audience can reach 50 and Ustream is unlimited. Skype’s limitations depend on how you’re using it – it allows up to 9 video conference participants, 25 audio and 50 chat.

Cameras and Desktops

Each of these services (except for Ustream) supports simultaneous broadcasting of both a webcam and computer desktop in one form or another. In my opinion, Livestream does the best job at this by a wide margin while Skype’s is pretty poor. The quality of the webcam broadcasting is always limited by the bandwidth of your Internet connection, but they all offer decent to excellent quality as long as you have a high speed link. Skype’s video quality is hands-down the best, with Livestream and Ustream tied for a very close second.

Head to Head

Paid Alternatives

While this article was meant to cover some free options, it’s probably worth listing a few options that are available on a paid basis for comparison purposes.

A Word of Caution

And that word is “firewall.” Many corporate firewalls block Skype and video streaming sites like Livestream and Ustream. It’s important to understand who your audience will be and take this into account.

Continue Reading

Jon DiPietro will be hosting this workshop at the Marketing & Sales Summit on Wednesday, September 1st from 1:00PM to 5:00PM. The cost is $150 – visit the registration page today to reserve your spot.

Primary Goal

Participants will develop an understanding of the components of effective inbound marketing and its advantages over traditional, outbound marketing.

Abstract

Traditional marketing approaches like advertising, trade shows, direct mail, and cold calling are becoming less and less effective. Peoples’ attention spans are spread thinly across a wide array of media, making them harder to target and they are getting better at avoiding interruptive messages like commercials and sales calls. Outbound marketing is getting harder and more expensive.

Conversely, inbound marketing is an approach that uses the Internet to attract quality attention to your web site, generate leads, and convert them to customers. This workshop will describe how to craft compelling content and optimize it for search, share that content effectively on social networks, convert visitors to leads and leads to customers, and measure it all.

Outline

1. Introduction and Concepts
2. Content
   1. Being Remarkable
   2. Blogging
3. Search Engine Optimization
   1. Off Page
   2. On Page
4. Sharing
   1. Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
   2. Hosted Media (Slideshare, YouTube, Flickr, Scribd)
5. Converting
   1. Landing Pages
   2. Lead Nurturing
6. Measuring

Continue Reading

This presentation was given at the ACE 2010 Interactive Social Media Workshop in Chicago on 20-June, 2010.  It provides some tips for Twitter beginners.  You can also download the Getting Started on Twitter speaker’s notes.

Continue Reading