This is just a quick video on using the Bookmarks functions in firefox to very rapidly jump to a bookmarked webpage.

Courtesy: flickr echo_1123

On the tail of my recommendations for desktop twitter clients I thought I’d tell you about my experience with iPhone twitter clients.  I’ve tried half a dozen or so but in this space I think there is a really clear winner.  Unlike the desktop applications (that are all free) the iPhone applications are going to cost a cup of coffee.

Tweetie 2

Website: www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

Tweetie is by far my favorite iPhone twitter application.  In the past tweetie lived as a version 1 application and broke the mold a little on the iTunes app store by choosing to charge people to buy the new version of the app – in all honesty though it’s worth it.

• API Support – Tweetie has extensive support of all of the functions you would expect to find on the twitter website including following and unfollowing people, searches, list management and favorites.
• 3rd Party Apps – I haven’t seen another application come close in it’s support of 3rd party twitter services.  To name just a few: bit.ly, instapaper, yfrog, Follow cost and Tweet blocker.  It even has the ability to configure your own providers for things like image sharing and link sharing, I did this successfully with ejnr.com – my own link sharing web service.  I love the integration to instapaper!
• Local Tweets – The app has great integration to finding tweets in your vicinity with a cool little radar animation while it searches for people tweeting around you.
• Saved Searches – This let’s you save a search you might do regularly and then re-run it at a later time.
• Swipe shortcuts – There are a bunch of swipe based quick tasks in the app – like the ability to swipe a tweet that has a link and then rapidly send the link to instaper for later consumption.

The app is AUD$3.99 and well worth the investment, if you’re looking for a quick win then look no further.

Hootsuite

Website: www.hootsuite.com/iphone

A recent entrant into the iPhone app market, this is a port of the popular web based twitter client to the iPhone.  The main advantage to using this app would be if you are already wedded to hootsuite on the desktop.  It synchronises your configurations from the web to the iPhone which can be a great timesaver, however I’ve found that with the introduction of twitter lists this sort of synch’ing is only of marginal value.

The app is free however – so if you’re looking at price then this would be my choise.

Tweetdeck

Website: www.tweetdeck.com/iphone

Tweetdeck could have been a contender is this race however I think the developers attempted to perhaps bring too much of the ‘column style’ approach to the platform.  The iPhone screen real estate just isn’t well suited to this, and in attempting this mamoth task unfortunately created a very heavy application that doesn’t perform well.  Additionally they also ported the colour scheme across – which I know is only a small issue (and you can no doubt change it) but the black is just really heavy on the small screen.

The winner is by far Tweetie 2.

Courtesy flickr: novecentino

I’ve tried quite a few different twitter clients – and most of the time I talk about Hootsuite as my client of choice.  It made sense to talk about how I got to this point (and to be honest there are still a few things about Hootstuite I don’t like).

Tweetdeck

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac, Linux
Website: www.tweetdeck.com

Tweetdeck was one of the first twitter clients and I believe led the way for what is now a very crowded market.  It provides a columnar style interface allowing you to create different columns for searches, users, lists, mentions & direct messages.  It’s initial color scheme is a little off-putting for some, it’s primarily black and yellow, however it can be easily changed.  I find myself visiting a color scheme generating site to find a good mix of colors to re-skin the interface.

Tweetdeck offer good integration to all the features of the twitter service include list management and retweeting.  Additionally it also provides preview functionality for links and images.

My personal experience with tweetdeck is that I found it very useful however also found it a little unreliable.  There were time when columns that I had added like mentions or searches simply weren’t populating.  There were a couple of other reports of people having similar problems – with no real resolution.   In all fairness I haven’t tried tweetdeck for a little while and so this issue may well be rectified by now.

Pros: Multiple twitter accounts (plus Facebook, LinkedIn), Broad Functionality

Cons: Download/Install required, Not very intuitive (subjective)

Mixero

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac
Website: www.mixero.com

At one point in the past I was an avid Mixero user – in retrospect I wonder if it was only because I had a beta login to it.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good tool, but the learning curve is very steep.  Mixero takes a different approach to other twitter clients, rather than a column based approach it lets you build ‘contexts’ that represent different combinations of users/searchs/lists.  So you could for example build a context that lists 15 specific twitter users combined with a search for ‘iPhone’.  This provides a very powerful environment if you are will to put in the hours to figure it out.

A nice feature that I haven’t found in too many other clients is the ability to configure filters – so you can easily remove tweets based on a rule set you define.  It also provides previews of images and links in the same way tweetdeck does.

Pros: Very functional, filtering of tweets, ‘different’ to the rest

Cons:Download/Install required, steep learning curve

Hootsuite

Platform: Web based – I use Firefox
Website: www.hootsuite.com

Hootsuite is a web based twitter client which is a benefit if you are in a locked down environment where you need these tools.  Some IT departments (rightly) choose to deny you the ability to install software, hence this is a great alternative.

Hootsuite uses a columnar approach to twitter management, integrates to Facebook and LinkedIn and allows you to send one update to many accounts and services at once.  The color scheme is a little harsh sometimes with the blue and green – but you can look past that.

Hootsuite provide a business friendly function which allows you to have a number of different people managing the one twitter account – which I think is a huge benefit for many organisations starting in this space.  Additionally hootsuite includes it’s own URL shortening service (ow.ly) which works fine and integrates the statistics well however also presents an in-browser toolbar at the top of the viewed page which some people don’t like.  It does sometimes make it hard to grab the actual URL of the page and additionally doesn’t seem to work so well with tools like instapaper.

Hootsuite is only missing one or two elements to make it perfect (for me anyway).  I’d like the ability to add in my own URL shortenning service and additionally would like it to support the true twitter retweet functionality as opposed to the current “tweet with quote” approach.  However right now it’s my twitter client of choice.

Pros: Nothing to install, Multi-user support, good stats on your links

Cons: Minor functional deficiencies, Only one URL shortenner supported (it’s own)

There are dozens of other clients out there – let me know which one you use (and why).

Sorting (courtesy flickr: CC BY-ND 2.0)

Last year Twitter introduced a new feature called ‘Lists’ that I think a few people are still not sure about.  To be honest – using lists on the twitter website is a bit wasted, the real value of lists is when you combine a dedicated twitter client with a mobile twitter client.

Keeping in Sync

For some time most of the dedicated twitter clients for your desktop computer have had the ability to organise tweets into columns.  One column for your main feed, another for your replies and mentions, another for your ‘favorite tweeters’ and another for ‘clients’ (as an example of course).  Similar functionality crept into mobile tools also, however the problem was that there was no way to synchronize your columns between your desktop client and your mobile client.  So in simple terms – if I added you to my favorites column in hootsuite, then I would have to do the same on tweetdeck on my iPhone.  Crud!

Twitter lists solve this problem.  If I add you to a specific column (or list) on my desktop then you are automatically added everywhere.  Next time I look at that list on my phone then I see your tweets there also.

Many Interests

If you’re anything like me you also have many different interests however want to stick to one twitter account.  Twitter lists also provide you the ability to organise and sort your twitter friends into different groups based on those interests.  As an example I have a twitter list called “Know in real life” which is a list that I add people to once I have actually met them. I have another list for people that talk about social media, and yet another for participants of my seminars.  This makes it easy for me to see tweets based on what I’m trying to achieve, if it’s work time then I’ll watch the social media list – if it’s weekend time I’ll watch the people I know in real life.

A New Number Game

For many people twitter is unfortunately about getting as many followers as possible, and I can’t help thinking that twitter lists may fall into the same category.  I’m expecting someone at some point to exclaim how many lists they are on on twitter and hope people are impressed.  Twitter makes it easy to see if a user is on a list (anyone’s list) and also allows you to see which lists a user is on.

List Subscriptions

The final element of lists on twitter is that as a twitter user you have the capacity to follow someone’s list, which is altogether different to following an individual twitter user.  When you choose to follow a list – you get to see tweets from everyone in that list (even people you may have blocked).  It also means that if the list creator adds and removes people from the list then that also affects the tweets you see.  This is good and bad – in that you may follow a list and start to like tweets from a few individuals on the list (good) but then the list owner may remove those users and you no longer see that valuable information (bad).

Finally… right now you can only create 20 lists – but 20 is plenty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/

I feel I’ve spent the last 12 years of life, my career, trying to help people do things better.  Helping them make better systems, better experiences, better websites.  And I would expect that there are other people like me doing similar things for similar organisations.

But still I see so many organisations just getting it wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why.  Fundementally these organisations (I’m going to just say ‘people’ from now on) are making flawed business process decisions.  The decisions they are making about what to do on their website are being made with the concept being “how can I make this easier for me”.  Wrong!

It’s not about you – it should never be about you.

So what do I mean by ‘you’ – who is ‘you’?  You is the organisation you work for.  ‘You’ is the one making decisions about your business, your products and services, your communications and strategy.  ‘You’ might be the CEO, it might be the IT department, the marketing department, the membership team, or perhaps the worst offender – the accounting/finance department.

When you make decisions with ‘you’ in mind what you are doing is leaving out the customer altogether.  You are forgetting about their experience with your organisation and forgetting that without ‘them’ there would be a ‘you’ in the first place.

It’s the internet – and it’s instant

Put your hand up if your website has a ‘contact us’ form of some sort, perhaps something like the one used by the Zoom Teeth Whitening Centre right here in Melbourne.  My goal was simple – get an appointment.  If only the process was simple.

Firstly I found this organisation by doing a google search for teeth whitening melbourne, and at the top of the results was an advertisement for these guys.  Now I know a little about advertising on the web (in fact I know alot about it) and I know that anything that has a customer value of $495 is a highly competitive keyword search market.  Suffice to say that this organisation would be paying considerably for each and every click on that advert.  And to be honest it’s being waisted right now.

After taking a few seconds to look around their site I decided to hit the contact us form.  Alot of information requested but hey – if they’re asking for it then it must be important right?  And if you take a second to actually look at the form – it even asks when I’d like to have my appointment, day and time.  Hit the go button and sit back.

And then you wait.

And you wait some more.

And nothing happens.  Days go by and nothing happens.  Weeks go by and still nothing.

I don’t think my expectations are too high here – I think if I take the time to fill in your online form – provide all the appropriate information and follow the rules – then it’s common courtesy that you would take the time to respond to it.  I’d be happy to wait perhaps an hour, perhaps two, and reluctantly wait a day.  Anything more is just waisted time, effort, and dollars.  Not my dollars, yours.

Shouldn’t the response be instant?  Shouldn’t the receptionist be getting an email or an alert that says “someone did something you need to pay attention to?”  If I chose to pick up the phone then they would get an alert – a black box on their desk would ring.  Why is it so different with web forms?

I’d love to hear your experiences, good and bad.

This just has to stop.  At some point organisations operating like this need to realise that the thousands of dollars they spent building their website, optimising it for google and paying for the click through adverts is completely waisted if they aren’t taking the customer experience into account.  It’s not about ‘you’, it’s about ‘me’.

You’ll need your bit.ly username and API key and then need to grab the URL for the bit.ly API endpoint for link shortenning (below), and then merge it all together…

The bit.ly API url (adapted for tweetie) is

http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=%@&login=aaa&apiKey=bbb

Replace the aaa with your bit.ly username and the bbb with your bit.ly API key.  Then copy the whole thing and paste it into the “Custom…” part of the tweetie settings screen under Link Shortening.  I ended up putting it all together on my PC and then sending it in an email to myself which I then copy/pasted on my phone.

Good Luck!

• Starlight shares kids jokes
• Plan Australia shares news
• Red Cross become the expert
• Red Cross getting to the point
• Plan Australia sharing opinion
• Cancer research

Some example of different styles of tweets:

• Zappos CEO – Standard Tweet – Quotes that no doubt have helped him achieve his success
• Dell Home Offer – Standard Tweet with a Link – Special Offer
• Zappos Service – @Reply – Personal response
• Zappos Service – @Reply – Problem Solving
• Comcast Cares – @Reply – Problem Solving
• Ford – Retweet – Sharing success & ‘feel goods’

flickr: cliff1066 (CC BY 2.0)

Someone asked me today about building a website, and part of the conversation revolved around why the site needed to exist.  The answer was a few things but part of the answer was “it looks good on a resume”.

This made me think… what is it about building a website that would look good on a resume, which led me to think about what it means to have a successful website.

Success is measured in many ways, but for a website i think it’s critical that you establish what success means, even before you start building and designing.

This is no different to most anything you do in life, you need to have a goal of some sort so you know whether all your hard work is paying off.

It’s really weird how we inherently apply to goals to some things in life, and then completely ignore them for others.  Losing weight is a perfect example.  If  you’ve ever been on a diet or exercise kick then you have no doubt started by saying “i want to lose x kgs, or y pounds”.  This gives you something to work towards.

However i’ve seen so many businesses and websites start with things like the colour scheme, or the logo, or the domain name and give no thought at all to what you are trying to achieve AND HOW YOU’LL KNOW WHEN YOU GET THERE!

So without laboring any further on that, what does success mean for a website?

- Traffic: This is pretty easy to measure and tools like google analytics make it super simple to set up.  Traffic is typically measured in page views or unique visits.  The first is a count of how many web pages people see in a month on your site, the second is an indication of how many people visited your site in a month regardless of how many pages they clicked on or how many times they visited in that month.

- Revenue: If you are selling stuff on your site or doing banner advertising then this becomes pretty simple also.

- Speed of build:  Success to you might mean that the site was able to be built from scratch in a specific timeframe.  Maybe it’s a success if you got it done in a week!  Despite having no visitors… it’s still a measure of success.

- Business integration: Succes can also be measured by some specific business process were working with, as an example success might mean that someone can  fill in a form on your site and have the information automatically appear in your
customer management system.

There are other measures also, however importantly you need to have some indication in your head that you can use to say “i’m getting closer to my goal”, without this your just building another website.

What are you building and how are you going to measure the success?