CWI Media, LLC

If your Web site crashed, or went down for any significant length of time, are you prepared with a remotely hosted back-up site, or what we call a “dark site?” If you are, congratulations! You can stop reading this post and go about your day. If you do not have a dark site, keep reading…

A dark site is a fully functional, branded site or blog that remains “hidden” on a separate server from your main site when everything is peachy keen. However, it is easily accessible from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser. It is also updated and ready to go public in the event of an emergency or if your main Web site goes down for any reason and you need to get information out to the public.

Most companies probably have secure and reliable Web site hosting, but every now and then, even the most reliable sites can have issues. Sometimes these issues are beyond the hosting company’s control, such as natural disasters. And there is always the risk of your site getting hacked, which actually happened to one of our clients. In an extreme cases, an event (good or bad) may trigger an avalanche of traffic to a company’s site that could overload the server and bring the site down. In this case, having a dark site ready to bring into the light is essential.

So, where can you host a Web-accessible dark site? There are several free services such as Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger or Weebly. Of course, even if you have a back-up site, how are you going to let your followers know that you’re site is down and direct them to the temporary site, or what we call a “dark site?” Simple. Social media and even the traditional media - if the public needs access to your information immediately.

Oh boy. There’s that phrase again. Social media. In addition to having a “dark site” ready in case of an emergency, your business or organization should be utilizing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social networking sites on the Interwebz today.

If your Web site goes down, and you have a Twitter and/or Facebook account, you can easily notify your clients, vendors, partners and friends that your site is down and provide a link to your dark site, which by now you’ve brought into the light.

Another option is to integrate the two. Many businesses are using content management systems (CMS) like Wordpress to build their sites and blog. At CWI Media, however, we have a static HTML-based site, but use Tumblr to host our blog. Now, when you’re on our blog site, it looks just like our static HTML site, but should our Web server ever fail, our blog will still be active. So in our case, our dark site is actually live, but because we designed it to match our Web site exactly, you can’t tell the difference.

Hopefully your business or organization already has these continuity of operations (COOP) plans in place, but if not, I strongly recommend you add it to the agenda of your next executive meeting. And if you have questions, or would like a free consultation on how to develop such a COOP plan, e-mail me at gary@businessbullpen.com.

I’ve gone dark. I’m off the grid. I’ve become a ghost. Well, sort of. I am speaking, of course, about social media and the ever-increasing privacy concerns that come with posting information about your life online.

It started some time ago with Facebook and MySpace. My profiles were at one time public and anyone could see them. After getting a ridiculous number of unsolicited “friend” requests from people I didn’t know, and even some from people I actually did know, it was time to restrict access to those profiles.

I also had a accounts with, Plurk, Plaxo, SocialThing, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Brightkite, Ping.fm and a bunch more sites. Clearly, I was on the social media overkill bandwagon. Well, no more.

In what a friend called a “scorched Earth campaign” against social media, I went through and canceled virtually all of my social media accounts, especially those that I don’t use any more. I was a bit shocked to discover that I had so many different accounts with varying degrees of personal information available to the world - some of it extremely outdated.

Here’s a partial list of the social media accounts I deleted:

• MySpace
• Digg
• Orkut
• FriendFeed
• SocialThing (bought by AOL, discontinued)
• MyBlogLog
• Squidoo
• 12seconds.tv
• Ping.fm
• Plaxo
• Brightkite
• Blogger (two blogs)
• Photobucket
• Plurk

Here’s a list of social media accounts I decided to keep, but with a restricted privacy level:

• Delicious
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Stumbleupon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Wordpress.com
• YouTube

My Facebook is locked down pretty tight. I created multiple friend lists and restricted access to my personal date to less than 90 people, all people I trust. They are either family or friends.

Twitter is set to private and after after pruning my list of “followers,” my list is down to less than 300. So, why the sudden shift in attitude toward social media? There are several reasons, but first, why did I put all that information out there in the first place?

There was a time when I wanted my name, opinions, thoughts and qualifications out there for the whole world to see. I gloated about how I dominated the search engine results pages (SERPs) when you searched for Gary Cope. There was a time when I didn’t even show up on the first few pages. Social media was huge and niche sites were popping up left and right to cater to virtually any audience. Being a web geek and web professional, I felt an obligation to try the new “it” things as they came out.

I still have a personal blog on Tumblr, but I went through all of the nearly 1,700 posts over the last three years and took down any pictures or posts about my son. They’re still there, but are “private” and only I can see them from my admin page. Sure, they might still exist in some search engine cache file, but there’s nothing I can really do about that.

Going forward, however, I have created a password-protected Tumblr site for family and some select friends. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s better than going completely dark. I also post to Facebook, which is where most of my friends and family are anyway, so it’s not hard to keep them updated.

The recent social media enema was long overdue. I had more accounts than I could remember and more importantly, I felt a need to get my personal info off the web as much as possible. No more pictures of me and my son. Flickr got privatized, as did Twitter and my blog on Tumblr. I no longer feel the need to let the whole world know what I am doing. The world doesn’t really care, but my friends and family do, hence why I locked the sites down.

I realize that I can’t control all of the information available on the Interweb, but I can attempt to limit it.

If you have too many social media accounts to keep track of, or you are concerned about people you don’t know having to much access to your personal information, consider a “spring cleaning,” or “scorched Earth” campaign of your own.

It can be time-consuming and tedious, but once completed, I felt so much more organized and at ease.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions and/or stories to share about your social media experiences, let me know.

By Gary Cope

We all know one. A person on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn who abuses their status as your social media “friend” by inviting you to join Facebook fan pages every other day, sending out 500 Tweets before lunch, or even worse, sharing links to get-rich-quick schemes.

There are a couple of folks that I know in real life (IRL) and am also “friends” with on Facebook and/or Twitter. But lately, they’ve started to annoy me with their endless recommendations for fan pages and shameless self promotion. The whole thing cheapens the overall relationship and damaged their credibility.

One person in particular has become a shill, not a living breathing human being. Often times they promote worthy causes, but when I get several fan page recommendations a week, I start to tune you out.

Perhaps you are well recognized and have an established personal brand - great! Good for you. Don’t cheapen it by treating your social media friends and followers with disrespect.

Be a person. Be real. If all you do is pimp something or send invites to everyone on your friends list, that’s not how social media works. That’s how spammers work. It’s the fastest way to get un-friended and/or un-followed.

By Gary Cope

Since joining Twitter in January 2008, I have posted more than 4,100 Tweets, received more than 500 “follow” notification e-mails and currently have 360 followers. At first, I did my best to weed out (i.e. block) the accounts using Twitter for the wrong reasons such as spamming, shameless self promotion or agressively pushing an agenda. But, with about 10 new follows a day, it became a bit time consuming to go through and block all the bots and jokers that started following me.

So, with so many new followers every day, why isn’t my “followers” list a little bigger? Well, that’s because Twitter appears to be doing a great job at suspending the suspicious accounts. For example, yesterday I got hit with four new followers whose user names all followed a similar pattern - a woman’s first name, a middle initial and a year. (See the image on the right.)

Though I have no information or research to back it up, my theory is that these Twitter spammers (Twammers) are targeting males by using women’s names and years - presumably birth years - to appeal to an age group that I might consider potential dating material. I believe these accounts are automatically generated using some API script to search for a specific demographic within the Twitterverse.

What I cannot understand is how anyone with half a brain could consider these accounts to be credible and return the follow. Any time you have a Twitter account with a disproportionate ratio of following/followers, that should be a red flag. If very few people are following a user, but they are following several hundred, be cautious. There are some accounts, such as CNN, that have a million-plus followers, but don’t follow very many in return. That’s acceptable in my book. Not ideal, but acceptable.

What other signs should you look for before you follow someone that has followed you on Twitter? Excellent question! Assuming you aren’t one of those people that likes to rack up the “followers” total on your profile, and you actually care about credibility and your online reputation; just using a little common sense will point you in the right direction. Here are just a few things that I look for:

Do they have a picture?

If the picture is of some busty woman in a bikini or provacative pose, that’s a huge red flag and grounds for immediate blockage. I prefer to see a face so that I at least feel like I might have the opportunity to communicate with a human and not some corporate mouthpiece. I do follow some Twitter accounts with logos or other non-personal images, but those are generally trusted accounts like CNET, CNN, LighterFootstep, etc.

What does their bio say about them?

This is probably the third thing I look at, right after their user name and profile picture. I want to know if they are real. If their profile is related to my interests and seems genuine, then I am more likely to reciprocate the follow. If there is no bio, 99 percent of the time I will not follow them. Take the time and tell me about yourself (in 160 characters or less) and you will more likely get more followers.

What do they Tweet about?

Content, content, content. It’s the Twitter equivalent to real estate’s location, location, location. What are they Tweeting about? Are they pushing links all the time with masked URLs from tinyurl.com, snurl.com and digg.com? If so, that’s a red flag for me. I get enough e-mail spam - I don’t want it showing up on my Twitter stream. Are they interesting, funny or posting informational content? If so, I am more likely to follow. If every other post is “People are dumb,” I would likely include that person in the aforementioned generalization and not follow them.

Also, if someone posts inflammatory or offensive content, I will “unfollow” them. I actually stopped following someone for their derrogatory and ignorant comments about President Barack Obama. I respect people’s right to free speech and the fact that everyone has their own opinion, but I also value my right to not listen. That being said, I don’t unfollow people for posting opinions with which I disagree, but if there is a pattern of offensive posts, you are going to get the unfollow.

How many posts?

This criteria is related to the previous two items in that I want to see how many Tweets this person has under their belt. If I visit a new follower’s profile and they’re following 500+ people, have two followers and only 1 update, that’s a pretty good sign that this is not a legit account. I have had legit newbies follow me and when I see their profile I see they are following 20 people, have 12 followers and a few posts. I will give that Twitterer the benefit of the doubt and see how they do. I am all about encouraging the use of social media, but only for the purposes of good, silliness, frivolity, tomfoolery and of course networking and knowledge sharing.

I think just using a little common sense will make your Twitter experience a little more enjoyable. And don’t be afraid to not follow or unfollow someone or something that you don’t feel comfortable with.

By Gary Cope

In part two of our series on “Connecting your cell phone to your social networking sites” we show you how to post pictures to your Twitter account using a third-party application called TwitPic. Now, with any third party application, you must trust the application before you use it. Why? Because to use TwitPic, you must provide your Twitter username and password. That being said, TwitPic has gained in popularity and appears to be run by a reputable developer. I have trusted TwitPic with my login info and so far, they have not abused that information. Even Shaquille O’Neal uses TwitPic.

Assuming you trust TwitPic with your info, go ahead and log in to TwitPic with your Twitter info, then click on the “Settings” link at the top right of the page. This page will display a custom e-mail address just for you that will look something like this: johndoe.1234@twitpic.com. All you have to do is save that e-mail to your phone’s contacts list and then when you take a picture with your camera phone, you can e-mail the photo to your TwitPic e-mail address and it will post the picture to your Twitter account, like so: The Hokie Bird at the Basketball Game.

You are not limited to sending photos from your cell phone, though. You can send the e-mail from your desktop, too. TwitPic also allows you to upload photos to its server and then gives you the option to post a Tweet on your Twitter account.

Pretty cool, right? Yes, it is. But, how can this help my business? I think the real question is how can it NOT help your business? Let’s take a real estate agent who just went to a house that is ready to go on the market. Usually the agent takes pictures, goes back and uploads them to their MLS listings along with the rest of the information. With TwitPic, the agent could easily snap some pictures with their camera phone and post them to their Twitter account via TwitPic and the listing will appear immediately on their Twitter account, which can also be linked to their blog. The possibilities and scenarios are seeminly endless.

And remember, social media and networking sites, while great business tools, require a certain degree of personality to be successful. If all you do is post links to your blog and sales pitches, you’ve relegated yourself to Twitter spam and you will lose credibility and people will stop following you. Engage your audience, talk with them, communicate and be personable. People want to work with other people, not spam bots.

If you have questions on how to use TwitPic for your business, e-mail me at gary@cwimedia.com.

By Gary Cope

Here at CWI Media & Marketing, we have preached the benefits and advantages of using social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you run a business, hopefully you’ve taken the initiative to set up these accounts. But, did you know that you can take those social networking sites on the road with your cell phone? At the very least, all you need is cell phone that can send and receive text messages.

In part one of our series on “Connecting your cell phone to your social networking sites” we begin with Twitter - specifically sending and receiving Tweets via text messaging. Let’s begin…

1. Login to your Twitter account at www.twitter.com.
2. Once you are logged in, click on “Settings” near the top right of the page.
3. Then click on the “Devices” tab.
4. Enter your phone number preceded by a plus sign (ex. +12125551212) and click “Save.” (Make sure you check the box below that gives Twitter permission to send text messages to your phone!)
5. The next screen will provide you with a random code that you must text to Twitter to verify your cell phone number. Send a text to 404-04 with the code as the message. Assuming you do this correctly, you should receive a text message confirming that your cell phone number is linked to your Twitter account.
   
   

Now, keep in mind that you can only have one cell phone linked to one Twitter account. So, if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can only have one of them linked to your cell phone. But, if you have a personal cell and a business cell phone, then your problem is solved!

One last thing - and this is very important for your sanity - go back to the “Devices” tab from the “Settings” page and customize when and under what circumstances you wish to receive text messages. Twitter defaults your account to send a text every time one of the people you are following posts a Tweet. If you follow a lot of people, this could be maddening and expensive if you don’t have an unlimited texting plan. So, I suggest customizing it. Personally, I only want to receive a text when someone sends me a direct tweet, so I changed my setting to “Direct Messages.”

You can also customize your mobile device updates for each person you are following. To do this, go back to your “Home” page on Twitter and then click on “Following.” Here you will see an option called “Device Updates” for each of the people you follow. If you follow a lot of people, this can be tedious and difficult to manage, but you can do it, we have confidence in you!

Moving on… To post a Tweet to your Twitter account via text messsage, send a text to 404-04 along with your message (less than 140 characters) and a Tweet will appear on your account. Twitter displays what platform you use to post your Tweets. For example, if you send a tweet via text message, Twitter will display “from txt” at the end of your message following the date and time). The same is true for other Twitter platforms like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Twitterific, etc.

Mobile Web Access If you have Web access on your cell phone, you can visit m.facebook.com for Facebook’s mobile site and m.twitter.com for Twitter’s mobile site. In case you hadn’t guessed, the “m” that takes the place of the traditional “www” stands for “mobile.” Ingenius, don’t you think? Anyhow, these mobile versions of the sites are scaled down so that they can load faster on your mobile device. Of course, if you have the iPhone or BlackBerry, there are applications you can download that will give you fuller, richer versions of popular social networking sites.

That’s all for today! If you have questions about Twitter, specifically how to get the most out of it for your business, send an e-mail to gary@cwimedia.com.

By Gary Cope

Ah, behold the power of Twitter. I’ve preached about the business benefits of using Twitter and shared examples of other Tweeple who have had problems solved when the company with which they were having issues with saw their gripe-filled Tweets and contacted them to fix things. Well, now I am one of those stories.

Last Wednesday, I wrote a blog post called My Beef with Google’s Web Master Tools detailing my frustration with their recently introduced “Link From” feature that allows you to see which external URLs are linking to non-existent URLs on your domain. The only problem, most of the time the tool didn’t work. I would get an “Our servers are busy. Try again later.”

After a couple of weeks of getting this message, I was fed up and blogged about it. I’d actually posted a couple of Tweets about it, too, but never got a response. But, my blog automatically posts to my Twitter account and later that same day, I got a Tweet from Sagar Kamdar (@skamdar) that read:

@garycope we are looking at the issue with the “Linked From” functionality. will get back to you when it is resolved.

I was floored! I could only assume that Sagar worked for Google. The next day, I got an e-mail alerting me that someone left a comment on my blog post. It was Sagar. He wrote:

The issue has been resolved. (link)

I checked the Webmasters Tools again and all but one “Linked From” function was working. I wrote back:

@skamdar Thanks! All but one of the “Linked From” links are working now for me. The first one on my list still returns “server busy” msg.

Sagar replied.

@garycope we’ll take a look.

@garycope we are unable to reproduce the issue internally. could you tell me the site and link that is ending in error.

This morning, I logged into Google’s Webmaster Tools and the link was working just fine. As a matter of fact, all of the links were working. I Tweeted back to @skamdar:

@skamdar The issue appears to be resolved. I logged into my Webmaster Tools today and did not receive any errors. Great job! Thanks!

I also told him via a comment on my blog that I would write a follow-up blog post (kinda like this one) singing the praises of Google’s development team. So, thanks Sagar and the rest of the Google Webmaster Tools team for using Twitter and actually taking the time to ready my blog and address the issue. It has been a tremendous help. All Hail Google! OK, well, let’s not get carried away. Take care everyone!

By Gary Cope

*This post is about Twitter, a microblogging tool. If you don’t know what Twitter is, click here for an explanation.

Twitter is no longer an exclusively techie/dork medium. Real estate agents, TV stations, newspapers, and even Britney Spears are using Twitter. Depending on your social media savyness, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to really get the hang of Twitter. And from what I can tell, media outlets, at least locally, are a little slower to harness the power of the Twitterverse.

I’m not trying to be critical, because I applaud them for even using Twitter. We can only hope that the “how” to effectively use Twitter will come soon.

In Roanoke, Va., the 70th ranked TV market in the country, only three of the four major network affiliates have Twitter accounts. WSLS, the NBC affiliate, only recently created an account, but has done an admirable job of posting timely and regular news updates. WSET, the ABC affiliate has been posting for much longer, but I have a beef about how they use Twitter, but I’ll get to that a little later. WDBJ7, which is my preferred local news source even though I used to anchor and report for WSLS, has a Twitter account, but has only posted one update. Lastly (in almost ever sense of the word), the WFXR, the Fox affiliate, does not have Twitter, much less its own news department - they pay the NBC station to produce the Fox 10 p.m. newscast.

Oh, and my favorite local news anchor (sorry Jay!) Natasha Ryan has a Twitter account. From what I can tell, only her and WSET reporter and weekend anchor Margaret Clevenstine are the only local on-air personalities with active Twitter accounts. Both are relatively new to Twitter. Natasha just started hers and Maggie has been on since July, but hasn’t posted a new update since Sept. 7. Booo!

Look, there’s not one right way to use Twitter and I suppose that certain Twitter patterns appeal to different people. But, the way I see it - Twitter is a “what’s happening now” service. And in that regard, WSET fails in my opinion. See the picture below which is a screen shot of what appears on my Twitter home page, which displays all of the Tweets from the Tweeple I follow. This is not what I want to see.

Clearly it appears that they have some automated system, probably something akin to TwitterFeed (or some poor intern) that blasts all of their news stories at one time. Uh, no. If I want all of your news at once at a predicable time, I would WATCH your news. I’m looking for you to post news AS it happens. That is the point of using Twitter.

Now, I worked in TV for a number of years and for the most part, there are still a lot of zealots running the show, so the transition and adoption of new means of communcations are slow to make their way to the newsroom. Which, is really mind boggling considering that these tools such as blog and microblogs are completely free and can be used with Mobile devices. If you can send and receive text messages, you can post and receive Tweets. It just takes some time to educate your staff and management - something I would be HAPPY to do for WSET and any other company that wants to learn more about Twitter.

Yes, I know, I can sign up for text alerts from virtually any news outlet and that’s cool, but I only get those after the stories have been filed and someone has posted them to the Web site which then triggers the alert to come to my phone. But imagine if a reporter is on the scene of major event, but is waiting for the live truck and the news director can’t be reached to authorize a break-in-programming live event? How cool would it be to read a reporter’s accounts of the news event as it happens?

For example: Let’s say we have a standoff (which I have covered as a photo journalist), but the reporter is just standing there while the photog (videographer) is rolling endless minutes of tape waiting for something to happen.

@tv-reporter: Camera is rolling and the SWAT team is getting into position, but police won’t say if or when they will go in. @tv-reporter: Gunman is yelling out of his window. Wants the police to back off. Threatening to shoot anyone that comes in. @tv-reporter: Lots of activity. Feels like something is about to happen - stay tuned! @tv-reporter: They’re going in! Camera is still rolling! Loud explosion from the flash-bang grenade. No shots - suspect in custody!

Now, this brings up a whole other issue, but one that the media has dealt with before: what if the bad guys are Twittering, too? Highly doubtful, at least now it is. Who knows in 5-10 years?

The bottom line is, this is a free tool that media outlets should be taking advantage of. Every reporter should have a Twitter account and giving viewers and readers behind the scenes information about the news they are covering, especially TV because we only get :30 to :90 worth of news per story and that’s not enough to tell the whole story.

The age of media convergeance is upon us. Newspapers like the Roanoke Times send reporters out in the field with video cameras to post video and interviews on the Web site. TV stations are having their anchors write print-style news for the station’s Web site, though they should really be using blogs at this point - especially Twitter.