Nov 08, 2012
Like most technical people, I have many development environments running on my local workstation. I use a configuration of Apache virtual hosts and my /etc/hosts file to keep them sorted out. It normally works great but yesterday I solved a vexing issue and I thought I would share.
The issue was that whenever I hit a specific development environment, it would redirect me to my blog (http://www.contenthere.net) with a path that was based on the location of the Apache doc root. I hadn't used this environment in a while and so a lot of things could have caused the problem. At first I thought it was a DNS issue. Then I was certain it was an Apache configuration issue.
After trying all sorts of things, I realized that I had accidentally saved some .htaccess file to the root of my home directory. The doc root of this particular development environment (which was inside my home directory) didn't have its own .htaccess so Apache traversed up the directory structure to find one and applied the rewrite rules within it. Deleting this file made the problem go away.
I suspect that I accidentally copied the errant .htaccess file from a server by double-clicking on it in my FTP client. I had no idea that Apache would behave in that way. I spent ages searching through Apache configurations and the doc root. I looked into issues that might have been caused when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. But I didn't look in the root of my home directory until I searched for all of the .htaccess files on my machine.
One thing that I learned from troubleshooting (in addition to .htaccess behavior) was about DNSMasq. It allows you to create wildcard entries like .dev, which saves a lot of effort editing the /etc/hosts file. Pretty cool! So it wasn't a total loss of time.
Hopefully someone will learn from my experience.
Oct 26, 2012
John Allspaw (SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy) recently published an excellent article about what it means to be a senior engineer: "On Being a Senior Engineer". It's long but worth every word. It made me think of all of the colleagues that I worked with over the years. It also made me think of how little justice the title "Senior Engineer" does to this role. When recruiters look for senior engineers or senior software developers, they are basically asking for coders with some experience - perhaps on their second job out of college. Developers expect this title as a birthright after putting in a few years.
Allspaw's definition calls for characteristics that not everyone will acquire no matter how many years on the job. It makes me wonder if it would be more practical to use a different name for the role rather than redefine a term that most people use differently. The problem with the word "senior" is that it implies that it is part of a normal growth path. While I would love this to be the case, my experience is that most developers are not heading in that direction.
Another thought that I had is that most companies under-appreciate the role of senior engineer. Perhaps their businesses do not require need these talents. Maybe it is sufficient to have a project manager working with a number of non-senior developers. I would say that all web and software companies should definitely appreciate and cultivate this role. But does a bricks and mortar company with a commerce site on the side need a senior engineer? If not, what happens if the non-senior engineer starts to develop senior traits? Does she change jobs or do you move her out of software engineering to a pure management role?
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the article. It really made me think about recruiting and careers in technology.
Oct 04, 2012
I recently got an announcement for Perforce about their new Git Fusion product. I never really loved Perforce as a source code management system (I probably didn't used it long enough to get used to it like I did with StarTeam, SVN, and Git); but I love how the company is building new products on top of the Perforce foundation. This summer I caught a demo of their web content management product Perforce Chronicle and was impressed. You don't normally see sophisticated versioning and staging functionality like that in a CMS in that price point.
Nice work Perforce!
Oct 02, 2012
Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval) from Aha Media Group and I just published a sequel to our first white paper ("Three First Steps to Operationalizing Your Content Marketing"). This one is called Building a Content Marketing Operations Program and takes off where the first one ends — getting into deeper detail about process. I am particularly happy with the content lifecycle diagram that we developed and Seth Gregory designed.
What I like about the diagram is that it is simple. Other content lifecycle diagrams show a lot of detail that tends to overwhelm in non-academic settings. The key points that this diagram highlights are that:
-
Marketing operations should be an iterative process that uses results to guide continual improvement.
-
The lifecycle operates within the context of your overall content marketing strategy (who you want to reach and how) and governance (your constraints like style guide, budget, regulation compliance).
-
Publishing is more than just saving content in your CMS. There is a very important "promotion" element to make content findable, usable and actionable.
The white paper digs into those three themes and discusses the types of roles and skills that are necessary to be successful. Go ahead and download it. If you are intrigued and want to learn more, you can email me directly here or hit me up on any of the social networks that I participate in.
Sep 27, 2012
I am a huge Apple fan. I have a MacBook, an iPhone, and an iPad. I love the aesthetic of Apple's hardware and the software. I update software religiously. I don't mind paying the Apple premium because I believe in the superior quality. I suffer at work for eschewing the corporate standard platform and using my own machine. I get goaded into arguments by Apple haters.
Apple probably shouldn't have any reason to worry about losing me as a customer. Yet, I feel my own loyalty diminishing. Not because I lust after some other products; but because Apple has been doing many things to annoy me recently. I regularly toy with the idea of leaving Apple for what I think are inferior products. That feels like a big deal to me. I know that I am just one insignificant customer and Apple is a huge and insanely profitable company. But if a customer like me is starting to lose his loyalty, perhaps Apple's dominating position may be at risk.
Here are the reasons why I could see myself jumping off the fanboy bandwagon.
-
Patents
Apple's litigious behavior is getting downright embarrassing. Instead of being great, it looks like Apple is trying to milk profit out of prior greatness. Apple customers get so excited about what Apple is going to do next. How long can that enthusiasm last when Apple stops innovating?
-
Environment
They changed their decision after public outcry, but I question the values of a company that decides to pull out of EPEAT to save money when they are already wildly profitable. I also don't like how they make all of their products disposable by making the batteries non-replaceable. The battery is always the first to go on any piece of well built mobile gadgetry.
-
Authoritarianism
Apple has been steadily closing their ecosystem. At first, we were told that it was for our own good. But now it is clear that the primary reason is competition and those moves are at our expense. For me, the biggest frustration is Apple's childish attacks on Google like pulling Maps and YouTube. The latest releases have been trying to get me to use Facebook and I hate Facebook. Apple makes it really hard for me to use the services that I like like Google+, ReadItLater/Pocket, etc.
-
Low Wages
I know that Apple can get away with paying ridiculously low wages to Chinese factory workers and American retail associates, but that doesn't mean they should. Again, corporate values matter to me.
Apple is a brand company. They are able to charge a premium from the brand affinity they have built over the years. But their recent behavior is really pushing me away. My strategy now is to make this Mac last until a good enough alternative emerges. Obviously Apple isn't worried. But maybe they should be.
Sep 25, 2012
When the creative process of content generation is complete, there is a tendency to breath a sigh of relief and relax. In reality, however, some of the most important work still lies ahead. To have impact, content needs to be amplified by effective publishing processes just like a musician needs amplifiers and acoustics to fill a stadium with sound. When publishing anything, I ask these three questions. Is it findable? Is it usable? Is it actionable? Let's dissect them one at a time.
-
Is it Findable?
If your content is not found, it may as well not even exist. In order to be findable, a piece of content should be unique. It needs to answer a question or solve a problem that hasn't been solved before. Or be an innovative approach to something that people struggle with. Otherwise your content is just going to get lost in the fray. If you have redundant assets on your site, it is time to de-clutter. If are creating content that already exists in other places on the web, divert your energy to doing something original.
The second part of fundability is that it needs to promoted and linked from where desirable audiences are likely to be. This means promotion on relevant landing pages and navigation, social networks, user groups, etc. It also needs to be worded in terms that people are likely to search for. Findable content is content that appears where people are looking. Metadata like title and description are critical in ensuring that the content stands out on search results and other lists of content.
-
Is it Usable?
Now that your consumer has found your content, you want his/her experience to be a positive one. You number one concern is that it displays properly on the device the visitor is using. You shouldn't throw up dialogs that are difficult to dismiss on a tiny display. You shouldn't force someone to download an app just to read an article. If your content is paginated, make sure the paging links work properly. No matter how useful the information, an awkward user experience will leave a lasting impression of frustration and you don't want your brand to be associated with frustration. If you don't have the budget to test all of your content on all browsers and platforms, go for simplicity. This will reduce the likelihood that the presentation will stand in the way of the information.
Personally, I think content that requires filling out a lead capture form is not usable. I don't want to subject myself to being a sales target before I even know the content is any good. Judging from the information that people enter into lead forms, a lot of other people feel this way too. Marten Rapavy has written an excellent article called Content Marketing: 5 Tips How Not to Kill Your Leads. He advocates optional contact forms and calls to action in the content.
-
Is it Actionable?
Hooray! Your content has been found and enjoyed by a visitor. You have made a positive impression but that attention will not last for long. You have milliseconds to convert this positive experience into an action that benefits your business. You hope for at least one of two things. Ideally, you want the customer to engage directly with you and become a sales opportunity. This visitor understands the value that you offer and has qualified himself as a real potential customer. The opportunity is well along the sales pipeline, you just need to close the deal. Make sure you have an easy call to action like a simple form asking to be contacted.
The other outcome, which is nearly as positive, is that the visitor likes your content so much he/she wants to share it with his/her network. This could lead to brand visibility and many sales opportunities. To make sharing easy, make sure there is a direct URL to a page where friends can access the content. Complex, compound pages (like a portal or an application) can make this complicated. Don't make the Applebees mistake. A share link builder is useful here. This link better not require a registration form or login. People don't want to send their network into the jaws of a sales pipeline. Protected content does not go viral. Protected content just sits there safely unread.
To prove that your content drove action, make sure that it is properly instrumented. This means that configuring analytics software and tracking links to see how the content drives behavior such as filling out a contact form or driving other visitors to the site. If your content is not instrumented, you will never know what impact it had and whether it was worth producing and publishing it. You will also never be able to improve your performance.
Most companies undervalue the role of publishing both on external and internal websites. There is this myth that, with the right content management system, publishing is as easy as "saving" content. Yes, adding the content and making it available should be easy and usually are — just like what you saw in the software demo. But that is just the first step in publishing. The rest takes skill, commitment, and time.
Sep 18, 2012
I have a lot of conversations with Global Marketing Operations customers about global content marketing strategy. Even though it is a small world, there are many markets on this planet and you need to be strategic with your investments to reach them. The model that our customers find most helpful is where we break down markets into three tiers
-
Tier One
Tier One consists of your top revenue producers. This is usually your home market plus a couple of nearby markets that have been doing business in for a long time. Companies that are new to internationalization may have only a single Tier One market. — any business from outside the home market is purely accidental. Mature global businesses might have 3 or 4 tier one markets. Some of the larger companies have up to 10.
Tier One markets should have their own regional offices with marketing departments that are capable of generating original content that is tuned to the interests, culture, and calendar of local population. You can optimize the efficiency of these local marketing teams by translating and re-purposing content from your home market. But with that much revenue at stake, you should have a local presence keeping an eye on things from a local perspective.
-
Tier Two
Tier Two is made up of your fastest growing markets. Revenue may be small today and growth might be a short term anomaly, but you want to nurture these markets because some of them might have potential to be new Tier One markets for you. Collectively, Tier Two might be responsible for a considerable portion of your overall revenue grotj. You want to treat these markets with a first-class experience but you need to do it efficiently. Balance cost reduction with experimentation and responsiveness to opportunity in Tier Two. You want to tune and experiment to see what response you can get from these markets. But you don't want to over-invest because the long term potential may not be that great.
Most of the content that you serve Tier Two markets is going to directly localized (translated and adapted for cultural compatibility) from the home market. Of course, you want to be able to filter out what you know will not be relevant. You should invest in things like local search engine optimization and social media and be paying very close attention to web analytics and sales data. You may need a local marketing team to do this, or you may not. Perhaps you land the local marketing team when the market shows movement toward your Tier One zone.
-
Tier Three
Tier Three is the long tail — all the markets that don't fall into tiers 1 and 2. You want to maintain a quality digital presence in these markets but you want to do it cost effectively. If you are successful, cumulatively Tier Three could be a decent profit source and can be the farm system to recruit your next Tier Two markets. Otherwise you will either over-spend or one of your competitors will beat you into a market with great potential because you didn't invest enough.
Market tiers should also drive your content technology architecture. If you have multiple, distinct Tier One markets, you will need a CMS that supports multiple semi or fully autonomous sites. Depending on your governance model, you might need to be able to "lock-down" certain site sections to give centralized corporate marketing direct control. Some companies are totally decentralized and allow Tier One markets to operate their own instance of the CMS. I wouldn't advise different markets going with a totally different CMS platform. Doing is more expensive because you need to maintain more expertise and you might need to do integration in order to share content.
Tier Two might start out with a translation proxy as long as the proxy technology allows you to easily filter and/or replace content. As it inches toward Tier One, you might want to give a Tier Two market a sub-site as long as your platform allows you to efficiently replicate and localize home market content. Otherwise, supporting the sub site will be more work than it is worth. Whatever you do, try to discourage Tier Two markets from building out their own infrastructure. It is costly and will be difficult for them to maintain to the level that your brand deserves.
Tier Three markets should never run their own websites. This is where embarrassing happen like butchered logos and layouts that look like they were stolen from GeoCities or MySpace. In my opinion, translation proxy is 100% the right choice for Tier Three. A useful technique here is to build smaller "International Site" on your home infrastructure. This site is style-guide compliant and brand-worthy but has pared down content and functionality. You don't update it as often and you avoid time sensitive content like an "upcoming events" section. Then you use a translation proxy to efficiently localize this site for all your Tier Three markets.
Most companies stumble into internationalization after years of vague expectation. They know there is opportunity outside of their home market and plan to get there one day. Then they find some compelling event that initiates a poorly executed project. This could be rogue site implemented by a team without time or budget. Or it could be a monster project that gets scuttled when people start to realize how hard it is to retrofit a WCMS for internationalization. If this sounds like your company, don't feel bad. You would be surprised how big and well known companies struggle with this.
The good news is that by strategically targeting markets and making the right investments to get there, you can easily outperform most of your competition.
Sep 17, 2012
Scheduling meetings is hard but it is a lot easier when all of the participants are on the same calendar server (Google Apps, Exchange, etc.). Despite all of the advances in calendaring, coordinating with participants in other companies hasn't gotten much easier in all the years I have been working. Yes, there have been little victories here and there like Doodle and Tungle (which looked promising until RIM bought it), but overall, we are still sending times when we are available and hoping we stay available. This is an increasing problem as business relationships become more dynamic and less siloed by corporate boundaries.
Google Apps has taken a step in the right direction by creating a free/busy view of your calendar that you can share. But I don't love that option because that gives permanent access to that view. It would be better to generate an expiring link that would give the user a view of the free/busy times for a few days (until the meeting is scheduled).
Google, Microsoft, anyone in the calendar software business - please steal this idea! Just don't patent it so that only one customer community benefits.
Sep 10, 2012
Search Engine Optimization is one of the primary services we offer at Lionbridge Global Marketing Operations. Localization is more than just translation, it is adapting the content to be more effective in local markets; and local SEO is a big part of that. When talking with customers about SEO, I find that I need better language to describe what is involved. The term "SEO" is so vague and (at least with me) carries so many negative connotations. I have taken to use the following terms. You might find them helpful too.
-
Search Engine Compatibility
Search engine compatibility is making your site easy for search engines to crawl through and parse. Think of a search engine crawler as an honored guest to your site. You don't want to piss it off by being a bad host with issues like broken links, slow page load times, site outages, broken HTML, flash-based navigation, text in images, unstable urls, a poorly configured robots.txt… Googlebot is a busy little guy with a big web to crawl. Make his life easier.
I also put title tags and meta description in this category of search engine compatibility because when the search engine tries to display your page in its results, it wants to show a title and description. If those don't exist, then the search engine just has to make it up.
There are great tools like Google Web Master Tools, BrightEdge, and SiteBeam to help you with search engine compatibility. Use them!
-
Keyword Standardization
If you want a page to rank highly on a search result, you need to use language that people are likely to search for. Theresa Regli (@TheresaRegli) has a great story from her taxonomy work at Yankee Candle. Apparently, internally Yankee Candle calls those jar candles "Housewarmers;" but the rest of the world calls them "jar candles." Nobody but an employee (or the most loyal customer) would search for a "housewarmer." It looks like Yankee followed Theresa's advice and both terms are used on the site. I think that it is a good idea to have both because some people will see a candle (which is labeled housewarmer) and type housewarmer into a search to buy one. If you are Yankee Candle, you want your housewarmer/jar candle category landing page to be the top result.
All this keyword standardization sounds obvious. Of course you want to communicate with words that your audience thinks in. It is a little less obvious when you are dealing with a global site because you need to know what terms people in different markets are going to search for.
-
Search Engine Exploitation
Search Engine Exploitation encompasses the dark art of trying to understand how the search algorithms work and then gaming them to your advantage. We don't do this and don't recommend that you do it either. Any advantage you gain will be short-lived and possibly followed by penalties. It is much better to develop good content that a reader would like and work with the search engines to connect their users with it. That makes it a win-win. You should stay away from SEO experts that brag about their intimate knowledge of how the algorithms work and their ability to trick them.
More precise language is always better when communicating. Hopefully, these terms will help you have more productive conversations about increasing traffic from search engines. Start with search engine compatibility and look for the worst offenses. If your site goes down all of the time, fix that as soon as possible. Outages hurt more than SEO. Then verify that the robots can walk through your site. I have had a couple of clients with a robots.txt that denied all access to the site. In both cases, those directives were put in place before the site was launched and never removed. Good navigation also critical. Every page you want indexed needs to be navigable (linked to from somewhere). Once you have made your site accessible to the crawler, then focus on keyword standardization to tune how you communicate with how your audience thinks. This may change over time as you adjust your strategy and also as language evolves so you need to keep on top of that.
Sep 05, 2012
Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval) from Aha Media Group and I recently finished a new white paper called "Three First Steps to Operationalizing Your Content Marketing".
In the white paper we discuss the huge gap between strategy and execution. While marketing organizations often think about strategy, business results are achieved through sustained execution — not short term initiatives like task forces and website redesigns. This goes back to a theme that I have been talking about for years: your website is not a project. Back then I liked to talk about a website as a "product" that needs to be continually maintained and improved. Given that product management is not a common strength in organizations (why can't more people just follow the "make it suck less" philosophy?), I have started to talk about the web and other forms of digital communications as a "program." Still not great, but at least it sounds less cheesy than to say "it's a journey."
No matter what you call it, it takes time and effort to build the trust and attention of an audience. And the only way to do it cost-effectively is to be operationally efficient. You need to be able to prioritize your goals and commit to a plan; then have the team to execute it. This white paper has three parts:
-
Obstacles that stand in the way of organizations establishing effective content marketing programs.
-
Getting started. How to identify audiences and develop a strategy to reach them.
-
How to baseline where you are right now so you can measure the effectiveness of your activities.
You can get it here: Three First Steps For Operationalizing Your Content Marketing Strategy. If you are intrigued and want to learn more, you can email me directly here or hit me up on any of the social networks that I participate in.
Also... stay tuned for a sequel white paper about building a content operations program.