Tuesday, 02 June 2009 04:08 Written by Spectacle

Get a show on a local AM Radio Station.

My client Karen C. Battoe, CPC of Career Advice Plus came to me to build a website and get her feet wet with social media. We built her a blog, got her on Facebook, and taught her to Twitter. She never embraced it, but she started trickling out tweets and collecting a small but loyal group of followers. Karen understood how the tools worked, but she didn't have the time or gumption to give it the attention it need.

Then AM580 WDBO offered Karen a radio show. It airs Saturday's at 1PM. They call it Career Advice Plus with Karen C. Battoe. So today she and I spoke to check her stats, and I about lost my mind when I saw she had gone from about 35 follower to 1200 in two weeks. Thats far more followers than I have. And more importantly, they're not just random people, they're other career coaches, job-seekers, recruiters -- people who have an interest in her message.

For an experiment, I sent out a tweet with a link to one of her blog posts. In about half an hour, we drove another 20 visits to that post. 20 visits in half an hour!

Now Twittering regularly isn't a luxury for Karen; it's a responsibility. We can move significant traffic with her Twitter account, and each day we don't, we miss out on opportunities.

Sunday, 31 May 2009 03:03 Written by Spectacle

Northerners know the first day of spring -- that first day after a long winter where you can put on a pair of shorts and have a picnic. In Florida, we don't have winters; we have summers -- oppressively hot, when it's ridiculous to be outside. For us, the first day of fall is like the first day of spring. Finally the air is cool enough to spend some comfortable hours out of doors. On the first day of fall a couple of years ago, while walking my dog, I could smell that grills all around the neighborhood had been fired up, the fatty fragrance of steaks and burgers wafting through the air. That night we had tuna casserole; and while i ate it, boy did I wish I had a grill.

In November my parents gave me a Webber for my birthday. They wanted to get me a gas grill, but Michele convinced them I prefer charcoal (I'm afraid that I'll burn my face off with a gas grill). And besides, doesn't a charcoal grill taste better. Don't answer: it does.

So here's my favorite part of grilling: sitting outside and drinking beer. Of course I could sit outside and drink beer without the grill fired up, but that's a little alch-y, right? Don't answer: it is.

Over the last two years, and over several beers, I've had the opportunity to learn the secrets of grilling. Here they are: get the fire hot, hot, hot; and be patient.

Getting the grill hot. I use a charcoal chimney and wood chips. Don't use briquettes and never use lighter fluid, unless you like your meat to taste like gas. With a chimney, you can make sure the coals are red hot before you put the meat on -- on fire hot. If the grill is not hot enough, it doesn't matter how patient you are, your food will come out raw, and you'll get frustrated. But if you let it get hot enough, the rest of grilling is all timing.

Timing. Here's how long it takes to get the grill hot: 2 beers. Maybe 3. Don't push it. When you can see fire coming out of the top of the chimney, the coals are hot enough. If you cooking chicken, put the coals around the edges, if you cooking pork or beef, put them in the middle. (All the fat in chicken is in the skin, and if you put it right over the coals, you'll get burnt skin).

Don't play around with the meat. Don't keep checking it. Know how long it needs to be on the heat and trust the fire. Here's some rules of thumb:

Steak: 3 minutes per side, or 1/2 a beer per side. I like to put butter on my steak while I cook it -- keeps it moist.

Burgers: 3-4 minutes per side. I make them well-done for the kids. 2-3 minutes if you like it the way grown-ups eat it.

Pork: 6 minutes per side or 1 beer per side. Take a little longer with the second beer -- you don't want to under cook pork.

Chicken: I don't know why chicken cooks so slow, but I cooks sloooow. And you can't really over cook chicken, so 10 minutes per side. Drink your beer slow.

Saturday, 30 May 2009 00:24 Written by Spectacle

Saturday, 30 May 2009 00:13 Written by Spectacle

I'm doing some research on Feedburner based upon interest from a client. Feedburner is now a Google product, and like most Google products, presented with little fanfare on a white page with a "here it is, use it" attitude. They must assume I already know what it's for, so why bother explaining it. Looking around online lets me know that I'm not the only one with questions. Here's what I get from it: Feedburner standardizes your RSS feed, makes it easy for people to subscribe to your feed, and give you stats. But I'm skeptical about its usefulness.

Here's the real reason: who subscribes to RSS feeds? Blogs have accessible to the masses for a good ten years, and RSS feeds for about that long, and they never became a phenomonon. I'm a web guy; I don't subscribe to RSS feeds. I know only a few people who ever were into RSS feeds. Google has a web based feed reader called "Reader" -- they say "Reader is like a magazine that you design." Although it sounds like a good idea, it never took off. Somehow it feels like work.

But Facebook and Twitter are essentially RSS feeds. When you become friends with someone in Facebook, you mutually agreed to subscribe to eachother's feed -- a feed you can update by entering yoru status, commenting on another posted item, or posting a note. When you follow someone on Twitter, you're subscribing to their feed. The difference is that Facebook and Twitter provide an easy way to contribute, and it turns out the motivating factor on Facebook and Twitter is to be heard -- the listening comes later. And people find out that the listening is at least as valuable as the talking, but that comes later.

Now as you get more into blogging and projecting your message using social media, RSS feeds take on a new value. You can use the RSS feed from you blog to publish on Facebook; you can use the RSS feed from Twitter to publish you Twitter feed on your website. Depending on what blog platform you use, you might have trouble integrating your RSS feed with other applications. I've had a little difficulty getting my Joomla site to publish to my Facebook page properly. That's one of the strengths of Feedburner: it formats your feed in a way that's easy for all sorts of applications to read. If I configure Facebook to get the feed from Feedburner, its more likely to publish properly than if I call it straight from my website's feed.

If you're into tracking your stats -- if you've ever hit "refresh" to see if you've gotten more follower in the last couple of minutes -- the reporting statistics that Feedburner provides may be interesting to you.