Social Kind

Web Presence & Communications

Social Kind at San Francisco Startup Weekend

Dec 4

Posted by Kevin in Uncategorized

Last week, I had a chance to participate in Startup Weekend in San Francisco. Our team leader Steven Echtman from Hear Planet pitched the idea of IntelliMed, a service that helps place reminder phone calls to an elderly family member checking in to make sure they have taken their dosage of medicate. The project was a great opportunity to use Twilio for an audience who’s unlikely to feel as comfortable sitting down at a desktop to connect to the web. Since the phone is also interrupt driven communication, it is a great vehicle for serving these kind of reminders.

You can read more from my teammate Shanti at http://perfwork.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/startup-weekend/.

Next week we are off to Paris, and we may get a chance to drop into another Startup Weekend that’s just before Le Web.

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Announcing TweetToCall

Aug 26

Posted by Kevin in Uncategorized

Last week we shipped our first Social Kind application. You can check it out at http://tweettocall.com/. TweetToCall lets you call your followers on Twitter without revealing your phone number. TweetToCall is a great tool for when you need to make sure your message gets across or you need a quick answer.

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Destroying your business in one easy step

Jul 7

Posted by Kevin in Security

HackedImagine your customer picks up your business card and decides to go see what you are all about.  Their first impression is a glaring red warning from their web browser.  What could be worse for destroying your reputation!

I just met with a new client who fell victim to this very problem. Fortunately for them, they reserved their domain months ago, but had yet to do anything with it. For small businesses that do business online, the effects could be chilling.

The client likely experienced this problem because of a keystroke logging piece of malware on one of their laptops. This problem is less rare than you think; there are millions of computers infected.  In a recent paper entitled Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything? researchers point out that phishing and key-logging schemes are the most likely culprits today. So by all means continue to use strong passwords, but this is useless if you allow malware onto computers that you use to update your website.

Many other businesses use FTP to update their website without knowing that the password they use to login is being sent across Internet in clear text for anyone to find. As Slashdot reports in a post R.I.P. FTP many attacks come from improper use of FTP to update sites. Instead, you should be using SFTP or FTP over SSH. If your hoster does not offer this service, find one that does.

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bit.ly versus digg

Jun 30

Posted by Kevin in Analytics

Earlier this month I wrote a post about Measuring your referral impact using a new service called bit.ly.  The excitement around bit.ly is heating up as TechCrunch this morning chronicles the brewing battle between bit.ly and a competing service Digg: Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And their Inevitable Clash with Digg.

If you are in the business of building your online presence, both of these tools matter.  Most of your customers don’t wake up in the morning and think about visiting your site.  In fact, most of them won’t think about it period unless they hear about it word-of-mouth from one of the sites they already visit.  Both digg and bit.ly are avenues for you to get the word out about your site, blog or press release.

I am rooting for bit.ly in this battle, because they help people that produce viral campaigns measure their effectiveness.  In my post linked to above I detail just how this works.  I have used digg before as well, and it’s a multi-step process I haven’t bothered to repeat in over a year.  Maybe this is why digg receives just 20,000 new links each day while bit.ly garners 2-3 million.

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Facebook grows up

Jun 16

Posted by Kevin in Facebook

Read Write Web reports that between May 2008 and May 2009 the share of 18-24 year-olds has decreased 9% on Facebook.  During that same time, the share of 25-34 year-olds has increased more than 12% while the 35-44 bracket grew 7%.

Social networking on the web started with teenagers sharing music on MySpace, but expect that this trend is here to stay.  Not only is that first generationg growing up and getting jobs, but their parents are also getting connected.

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World’s Tiniest VGA Display Uses Pixels the Size of Cells

Jun 12

Posted by Kevin in Remarkable

Today Gizmodo reports a micro-display that crams a 640×480 pixel display into a quarter inch.  I am impressed, and I cannot wait to see this hit the mainstream.  It gets my mind racing on the types of things you could do with this.  Earings that animate.  Business cards that really stand apart.  Super high resolution cell phones.

What itty-bitty thing would you put a display in?

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Time to double down on your neglected blog

Jun 12

Posted by Kevin in Blogging

The New York Times last week featured an article Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

The good news is that if you are passionate about what you are writing about; there’s room for you to get an audience.

QuickPressOne way to avoid procrastinating is to drop blog ideas into WordPress as soon as you have them.  You don’t have to write out the full entry, just a stub to remimd you and maybe a link to something that inspired you.  The Quick Press feature is a great tool for this.  As soon as you dash off a few notes, just click Save Draft.  Then when you are bored on a Sunday night, log into WordPress and see which draft looks the most interesting to fill out.

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Measuring your referral impact

Jun 12

Posted by Kevin in Analytics

bitlyA few days ago I read a great letter in Business Week from someone who had just lost their job, but was celebrating how it turned out to be a positive impact on their life. I love sharing good stories like this, and I have always wondered whether my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook are reading the links I sent, or if they fall on deaf ears.

Bit.ly is a great tool for figuring out what impact you have when you refer your friends, followers and site visitors to sites you don’t own. Even for your own site, where you can set up Google Analytics, you can figure out exactly which marketing helped you the most.

To get started, visit bit.ly and make sure to sign up for an account (otherwise, you cannot see usage data for URLs you shorten). Once you have an account, simply enter the URL you want to point friends to into the big textbox. The site even features a handy box to share your newly shortened URL on twitter.

The site doesn’t have a feature for sharing your most popular links itself, but here are a few of my best bits:

Go ahead click on them and stroke my ego ;-)

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