Welcome to lesson 3b on Pressbooks.com. In today’s lesson we cover How to create Front Matter, Chapters, and Parts. It’s an exciting lesson so lets get started.

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Today’s lesson is about Front Matter. Front matter is the front section of the book, everything before the actual chapters of the book start. It’s lesson 3a because I only go through and define the different parts of front matter but I don’t go back into Pressbooks and show you how to create it. Creation will be lesson 3b.

IF your enjoying these videos please let me know. Also let me know if there is any particular aspect of Pressbooks you would like me to cover.

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I don’t usually talk directly about my other projects on this blog as it is geared to a discussion on social media and business. However I form many of my ideas for this blog by executing them over on The DADvocate Project or through other various outlets. Today however I’m going to solicit this audience directly. If you are a reader of this blog and you are a dad then please go over to The DADvocate Project and take the Survey. If you are a reader of this blog and are not a dad then you most likely have a dad and or are married to a dad. Please ask them to take the survey.

The DADvocate Survey was put together last year as an effort to define who today’s dads are. In the media and press dads tend to get a bad rap and honestly Dads are not a lazy beer drinking group who sit on the couch and do nothing. Dads are also no longer the sole bread winners in the family and our societal role as men in families is changing. By the way our spending habits are changing as a result of the family dynamic change too.

The DADvocate survey looks how and where we dads are spending our time and in some cases money. Over 390 people have taken the survey thus far and I’m closing the survey in May. I hope to have close to 500 respondents by then but to make that happen I need your help. Please take the survey now or tell some friends. Heck post about it on facebook, twitter or linkedin. Thank you in advance.

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CHOA – or Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is a terrific organization. We recently spent a weekend there with our son when he had RSV. The hospital is amazing. They make you feel comfortable, they have hundreds of services, they offer room service to the parents, they have educational tv programs for adults, there is a computer lab, they have wifi, they do everything necessary to make a hard and scary time easy for the kids and the parents. Children’s is flat out an awesome organization.

While I was at the hospital I was on my computer and decide to see what kind of social media presence CHOA had. It turns out they really don’t have any social media presence at all. This is a true loss of opportunity for an organization such as Children’s because it is such a cheap and effective way to reach their target audiences both customers and donors. The day we were in the hospital happened to be the day of the Children’s parade in Atlanta. Seeing only five tweets mention the parade or CHOA  amazed me and I posted one of them.

Children’s is way too valuable a resource to our community to have such little presence in one of the largest twitter markets in the country.

What would be the objective for Children’s to use Twitter. The number one thing to keep in mind is that social media of all kinds is meant for relationship building and to funnel leads into your sales funnel. So if I were positioning CHOA I would recommend focusing on a major goal of spreading the word for fundraisers and leverage the technology to inform and attract more people to charitable events.

The initial strategy and measurement for this type of work with twitter would be quite easy to implement. A landing page or blog post should be set up specifically for an event. Then  a URL shorten-er that tracks click troughs could be used to send tweets about the campaign.  That is the simple part, the larger part of the twitter effort would be to capture the brand image of service and provide users on-line the same service they get at the hospital. This strategy can be taken in many directions, such as providing nurses to respond to simple customer questions or having doctors tweet about the benifits of a particular surgery. The possibilities are truly endless.

Encouraging customers to tweet about their experience with CHOA would be another great objective and could be accomplished with a messaging campaing asking for feedback from parents. CHOA could choose to measure the success of this program simply by looking at the increase in tweets about CHOA from non CHOA accounts.

Ideally CHOA shouldn’t have to tweet about their parade on the day of the parade because their followers will do it for them but that won’t happen unless CHOA is out there actively interacting with the on-line social community.

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Metzger business has been used to keep track of my rambelings as an experienced Internet and ecommere business architect who is interested in social media. I am also very interested in small business and my community so I’ve decided to turn this endevor into an experminent. I’d like to help small businesses and my community by making this a platform for publishing. I’ve invited a number of small businesses jnthe community to start posting articles one a regular basis. I hanlve room for several additional business to post as well. On top of that I’ll be doing business reviews of businesses in the Marietta and Roswell comunities. I’ll continue to write about how I think social media can help both small and large business and how this site helps the businesses that participate on it.

You’ll see chAnges in the site Over the coming weeks and months but we are going to start slowly. So please enjoy drop us some comments and tell you friends in marietta and Roswell. If for a business and would like to contribute please feel free to reachout to me. Kevin [at] Metzgerbusiness [dot] com

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An interesting question was raised by Julian Smith about how people spend their time acting desperate to get seen by the big names in Social Marketing.  I formatted the following response but then realized it was more the length of a blog then a comment so here it is.

9 months ago I started my blog MySpellingSucs.com – an unedited discussion of my dyslexia and ADD and my daughters Cerebral Palsy. I started it just to start writing something and do it consistently. I wanted to just say what I felt and do it the way I wanted to. I was tired of listening to fast easy money crowd who really didn’t know what they were talking about and I just wanted to do it my way. I write about how I have learned from my children and parenting, specific issues on CP, and I occasionally interview or write about inspirational folks with disabilities. I love writing there and it has brough me great pleasure as well as some recognition. I was awarded 2009 East Cobber Father of the year and this happened when my readership was only from my local network of friends.

Then about 6 months ago I started getting involved in community – twitter, expanding Facebook and LinkedIn, commenting on other blogs and that kind of thing. I found more readers coming to my site and then I really started getting interested in and attaching to people who were leading this revolution. Julien – Yourself included.

After a few months I found myself backing away from the “Guru’s” and focusing in the “Second Tier.” I do this because they have more time they are just as educated and have as many new and innovative ideas and they communicate more. I know the “Guru’s/First Tier” used to communicate with their audience as much as the “Second Tier” now does but the “Guru’s” don’t have the time to communicate with new folks as much as they would like and they need to keep their loyal audiences loyal so they communicate with as many as possible and are diligent about communicating with the folks that have helped them along the way.

It’s been in working with this “Second Tier” of bloggers that I have found I have the most pleasure and have begun to get the most recognition from the Guru’s. It makes sense.

In any community you want Gate Keepers. A Gate Keeper helps you know who the good and who the bad are when you don’t have the time to figure it out yourself. If the people I trust vet you and say your good than I’ll (as the guru) take a little additional time to find out more about who you are.

I guess what I’m saying is I like the idea of being yourself. That may have something to do with connecting with the crowd but do it your way and find the folks you enjoy communicating with.

This was originally going to be a comment in response to the blog post Reeking of Desperation but was too long. Julien thanks for the inspiration.

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We have a wiki at the office. It’s not used much. There are a few reasons it’s not used. 1) You have to be on the corporate network. Our sales team who is remote is not set up for remote access or they simply don’t know ho to use it. 2) The wiki is dokuwiki which is somewhat easy to consume but a pain to add pages and info to for anyone who is less technical than a tech type user. 3) The biggest reason that the wiki has not been adopted is that the information out there hasn’t been all that valuable to the population at large.

I know #1 and #2 have to be addressed and they will be with an upcoming intranet project. We’re looking at hosting something on the cloud that we can use LDAP or AD to log on and maintain a single sign-on environment. We also want to find something that will be easy for user’s to add pages and intellectual property to. Finally it will have to serve as a platform for communication to the company. I’m very excited about this project but I’m going to have to reserve the rest of topics 1 and 2 for another post.

The third point I made above has been addressed with 2 initiatives I have completed in the last few weeks. The first was a long process of designing integration strategy and documentation including implementation documentation, project plans, risk scenarios, etc. The second was a simple Twitter page. I want to talk about the value of that twitter page today.

What I did:
I built a page on the wiki that consolidated all the current Twitter chatter about our company and all our competitor companies. I also set up a few searches to monitor our top customers and any discussion with those customers that focus on Shipping. I then showed this page to our Director of marketing, VP IT, director Sales Ops and a few weeks later our CEO. We now have a very nice little dashboard of all the conversations that are happening that are important to us.

How I did it:

1. Go to Twitter.com/widgets
2. Create a search widget for each Company name I wanted to follow, You do this by selection Search widget on the entry screen and filling out Google type search entry form.
3. I copied the code created by the widget
4. I created an HTML Table and started posting the widgets. I gave a cell in the table for each widget.

Marketing Impact/What we have learned:

1. End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
2. There is not much discussion about our company out there.
3. When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
4. If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
5. Most Important: our company needed a Twitter presence. Our customer’s are there and Our Customer’s Customer’s are there. We now have a service presence and I expect we’ll continue to grow from there.

I do want to make one point. The exercise to build this page took about 3-4 hours. It would take a more skilled person about 1-2. I could do it again now in about 45 minutes.

What are some of the ways you’ve used Twitter in your company?

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Yesterday I wrote a blog on using twitter for notes and used Chris Brogan’s speech at NMATL as an example of pulling twitter data for notes. I also decided to run some stats on the information I found and posted those stats. Quite frankly the stats are meaningless to anybody and everybody other than perhaps Chris and maybe Brad and Matt who organized the event. You can read the entire post here.

So why did I run the stats? Well imagine if instead of Chris Brogan’s speech we instead inserted Big Company Name X and looked at the same data. What useful information might we find? How could we use the information to better understand what our customers are thinking of us NOW! How many are tweeting about us? What words are they consistently using? I used a dump of twitter data and Excel pivot tables to come up with the stats I posted yesterday in merely 10 minutes for the fun of it (I’m strange I know) what could you learn about your company’s reputation in 10 minutes.

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In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.

My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.

Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis

I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Look for the first case study early next week.

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Google has started an add campaign on the radio to encourage people to advertise with Google. I have never previously heard any advertising for Google outside of the web and certainly not for their service. This is likely an early sign that BING is beginning to hurt their ad revenue. Non the less AdWords can be a very powerful tool for a business that does not have front page placement in the natural search results. I’ve put together a short video explaining how to sign up for AdWords and how to use it effectively to drive traffic to your site. The campaign I demonstrate is for local businesses that want to drive local traffic to their sites for advertising purposes.

Sign up Process

Click here to view the embedded video.

Create Local Ad

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you as a business have a web site that promotes your business but you do not rank high in the search engines then running local ads with Google AdWords is an extremely effective strategy.

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