Emerge Inc. Blog

Twitter is something I admittedly never saw coming. When I did see it, I never saw it reaching the heights that it has. I wasn’t sure that little 140 character messages would satisfy people, but boy was I wrong.

I find myself using Twitter a lot to search, especially current events and products I’m interested in. More often than not, I find myself with more information than I imagined I would ever find.

One of the other things I love is finding companies who are using the technology in an interesting fashion. Enter Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream from San Francisco, California. With an ever changing menu of flavors offered, they would tweet their loyal customers what flavors they’d have, among other tweets, and do it in a style of “ice cream with attitude.”

The article I found this information lists six great recommendations for those starting to use Twitter as well.

• First of all, listen
• Do not be boring
• A live version of a FAQ
• Create a focus group
• Soapbox for thinkers
• Starting small is fine

This all comes from a great article with even more great stories from the New York Times. Click here to read the full article.

The World Cup made its month long appearance this Summer to record interest here in the United States. While soccer has never caught on entirely here, it still is considered “The World’s Game.” With ESPN paying a lot of money ($100 million for English speaking rights through 2014), they tried to take full advantage by offering the games not just on television, but online and on mobile devices. Now to watch online, you did need to have an Internet Service Provider that had an agreement for their service and to watch on your mobile device, you needed to pay a fee for their App. In total, nearly 8.5 million unique users (7.4 million online over 1 million by mobile) accessed the World Cup streams during the tournament They consumed 17.2 million hours of coverage.

The only comparable sporting event to try this was CBS during the March Madness tournament. This past year, they streamed 11.7 million hours of coverage, a 36% growth from the previous year. With their success and ESPN’s success during the World Cup, it will be interesting to see how the networks begin to utilize the online medium more and more to bring users new content.

I’ve had my Verizon HTC Incredible, an Android device, for just over 2 months. In that time, it’s really changed the way I utilize the Internet and how I find information I need. It’s made it much simpler to consume information and gives me a new ability to find what I am searching for.

Below are a few ways I’ve been using my phone and some thoughts on how you might take advantage of the fast growing market.

Directions

I use an App that gives me turn-by-turn directions directly from Google. The great thing about this App, I don’t always need to know the address. If I know I’m going to a specific restaurant, I can speak or type the name and city, and it searches for the address automatically. It then gives me directions from wherever I am at that moment.

How to Take Advantage: Always make sure your public information is accurate in search engines, directories, and anywhere else you have it listed. Manage your Google or Yahoo directory listings to maximize the information people can quickly see about you. Be aware of the ways people are finding information out about you.

Surfing the Web

Depending on where I am, I’ll find myself searching websites to find information on something I’m searching for or just to keep up with what is going on. This has gotten easier on Smart Phones as Mobile Websites have become more popular. Mobile Websites will utilize the phone’s technology, which helps to enhance the user’s experience.

How to Take Advantage: Speak with your Web Developer to see if your website is optimized for a Mobile Site. See if it makes sense for you to have one set-up. Smart phones are getting better at reading full websites, but for your organization it might be best to have an optimized version for your potential users.

Search

The way I search on my phone is much different than on a regular computer. Searching on a desktop/laptop computer gives me time to go through multiple pages to find the best piece of information for my search. On my phone, I always gravitate to the first few listings of my search. I don’t dig as deep for the information so I look for the quality at the top.

How to Take Advantage: Search Engine Optimization. It’s a term you’ve probably heard but may not know what it means. In a nutshell, it focuses on getting the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) to rank you higher on their list during relevant searches. Speak to your Web Development team about putting a SEO plan together that makes sense for you in the long run.

As the technology continues to evolve and grow even more popular, people will consume more and more information on their phones than ever before.

Companies are always looking for the best way to deliver an excellent product while using less time and money to produce that product.  In order to save time and money while producing great results, companies that provide internet solutions and software are looking for the most efficient ways to develop these products.  On Thursday, Mike and I went to “The Path to Agility” conference which covered methodologies, structural changes, and tools that can be used to increase efficiency in that development process.

One of the focuses of the conference was a framework called Scrum.   Scrum was introduced in the 1990’s but hasn’t been widely implemented until recently. It is a framework designed to increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of project development while minimizing the cost and risk. This framework is vastly different than the traditional development frameworks. Scrum realizes that the development process is complicated and unpredictable and its focus is on flexibility and productivity over linear development. The project is broken down into smaller iterations known as sprints, where the team plans, builds, tests, reviews, then deploys after each sprint.  When a sprint is finished, the project is reviewed to see what adjustments need to be made which gives the project added flexibility.

Other than Scrum, the conference also covered topics such as agile testing, transferring the company to use agile, and ways to attract and hire agile developers.  I learned why some companies have not dedicated themselves to switching to the agile way, and what challenges exist in this transition. This conference also exposed me to a number of different practices and ideas being used throughout other companies.  When a company changes to agile, many areas of the company from management methods down to the production environment are altered in order to have a truly agile development process.  When viewing the results of companies that have made this change, it is apparent that the rewards far outweigh the risk.

On May 20th I had a chance to discuss ways to utilize the Internet in a more effective manner with the Women’s Business Owners Network. The environment was informal but that provided us an opportunity to discuss the topics that each member might have found interesting in more depth. We covered a variety of subjects including the use of Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter, Seach Engine Optimization, 10 ideas to think about when it comes to your website, and more.

The most impressive part was after the meeting and getting a chance to discuss some of the ideas of the group members more fully. One woman in particular had never thought of the idea of using a blog for her business, but saw some potential opportunity there. We discussed some different ideas to get started and how to try it out to see if it makes sense for her and her business.

I want to thank Karen Cheshire and the members of the WBON for inviting me out to speak with them.

We are excited to welcome 5 interns to the Emerge team for the summer. Ranging from a recent high school graduate to a recent college graduate, the new team members bring additional youth, energy and new perspectives on emerging technology.

During the summer, the interns will work in teams and focus on 10 summer projects. Each project has a written vision, scope, measurable goals and a definition of why the project is important both internally for Emerge and externally for the customers, constituents and stakeholders that will be involved.

We’ll share the details of each project over the next couple of months. In general, we’ve organized the internship the way I think it would be like to work in a lab. Each project is it’s own experiment, we think we know what will work and what won’t, but until we start testing, we won’t know for sure.

The following originally appeared on May 2, 2010 on LorainCounty.com

For last 2 years, we (the team that provides development support for LorainCounty.com) have debated the best way to connect LorainCounty.com to the social media wave that is rolling throughout the Internet.

While discussing the many different options, there were always 2 things we agreed upon:

1) LorainCounty.com shouldn’t try to be a social network (the site’s focus is geographically bound, whereas your social relationships are not)
2) LorainCounty.com shouldn’t spam facebook and twitter with every headline

Two weeks ago, Facebook provided an exciting opportunity to connect LorainCounty.com to social media.

The new ‘Like’ and ‘Recommend’ buttons on LorainCounty.com work like this:

1) View an article, event, business or political candidate on LorainCounty.com
2) If you like it, you can click the Facebook button (you’ll need to be logged in to Facebook first)
3) Your Facebook wall is updated with a phrase similar to “Ed recommends Bill and Bonnie Cutcher Present the History of Aviation in Lorain County on LorainCounty.com.”

As to the two items we agreed LorainCounty.com shouldn’t be, the Facebook buttons address these perfectly:

1) LorainCounty.com becomes instantly personal without having to create a social network infrastructure and ask you who are your friends
2) You won’t see every LorainCounty.com headline in Facebook, you’ll only see the one’s your friends decide have enough value to share

The exciting part of this is that LorainCounty.com users decide what is of value and worth sharing with their friends. Some of the things you might share include:

• Your favorite pizza shop
• The non-profit you support
• The candidate for County Commissioner you support
• An article on a business expanding in the County
• A festival or event you plan to attend
• Your companies profile in the Community Directory

What are your thoughts on connecting LorainCounty.com to the social media wave?

We at Emerge are very pleased to welcome Maegen Hurtado to the staff as a full-time team member.

Maegen will be the Lead Programmer and Visual Artist for our division focused on working with small to medium sized businesses with a goal of improving their business through the use of Internet technology, such as Web Development, Hosting and Interactive Marketing. She will also be assisting our programming team on the Custom Development side of Emerge.

Maegen brings not only expertise in visual design and content management systems, but also extensive knowledge and passion for video and social media strategies that will expand our deliverables for our clients.

We are very excited to welcome Maegen to our team!

Yesterday, we wrote that website speed now affects Google search results. Even before this change from Google, speed had impacts that could affect the financial performance of a website.

Shopzilla realized a 5% – 12% lift in top-line revenue. You can read the details in this article from the O’Reilly Velocity Conference. Or view the presentation:

Last Friday, Google announced that site speed now impacts search ranking within Google. In the case of two sites, all else equal, the faster site will be ranked higher in Google. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests/

Not Much Weight – Yet

According to Google, “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation…”

But, Google has long been a champion of Internet speed. I’m sure this weight will increase over time to encourage site developers to continuously improve the speed of their sites. Remember, the more pages we view, the more ads we see. And, since Google dominates online advertising, faster Internet is in their best interest.

Speed Analysis

Emerge is creating a speed analysis option for clients. We will use multiple tools to test the speed of your site and create a prioritized list of upgrades that will increase the site’s speed. If you are interested, please email me at Ed@EmergeInc.com.