Central Perk

vineri, 6 iulie 2012

Why we won on student loans

Good afternoon --

It's July, and because Congress finally took action, 7.4 million students no longer have to worry about the interest rates on their Stafford loans doubling.

That's great news, but it was far from certain. Just a few weeks ago, it wasn't clear that it would happen.

We got this done because of you.

Americans like you spoke up on this issue. You took to Twitter and Facebook. You sent emails and talked to your friends and neighbors. And in the end, your voices made all the difference.

Last week, we sat down with a group of students who were watching this fight closely -- because the choice that Congress made would have an impact on each of them. They talked about what this legislation means, and why it was so important to speak out on this issue.

What they had to say was a powerful reminder of how everyday Americans can make their voices resonate in Washington -- and it's the kind of thing that can get you fired up for the fights ahead. Check it out:

Last year, when you spoke out on extending the payroll tax cut, you changed the debate. We saw the exact same thing last week with the fight for student loans.

These were both huge victories for the American middle class that couldn't have happened without you.

And it's exactly the kind of effort we'll need in the weeks and months ahead.

We're working to make it easier for responsible homeowners to refinance their mortgages. We're pushing Congress to take action to create jobs and get our economy back on track. We're working to reward businesses that create jobs here in America instead of the companies that ship jobs overseas.

And we need your voices in every single one of those fights.

We'll be in touch with more ways you can stand with President Obama to move our country forward. But for now, check out this video to remind yourself of the power you have:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/why-your-voice-matters

Thank you,

David

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President

P.S. -- If you're a homeowner struggling to refinance your home, we want to hear from you. Learn about the President's plan to help responsible homeowners refinance and share your story:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/refi

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com.
Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

Leveraging the Power of Slide Decks to Boost your SEO, Social + Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 05 Jul 2012 08:03 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Firday, we are going to be discussing how you can use slide decks for web marketing. I've been leveraging the power of slide decks for quite some time now and would like to share a little bit about what I have learned.

Please share some of your own tips about using slide decks for SEO, social and content marketing in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about slide decks. A lot of folks talk about how different sorts of content can be used, can be powerful on the Web for content marketing, for SEO, for social. Slide decks are a particularly powerful and useful piece and one that I've made great use of and I've seen used in lots of different spheres. I think it's actually underpowered, and I think it's what I'd call underexploited or underused on the Web today, particularly in industries outside of technology.

Slide decks are easy for virtually anyone to see. They're a simple, powerful way to present content. You can present visual content. You can present charts and graphs. You can even embed video. You can do all sorts of stuff, and they are easy to make possible because you can screen capture elements from all sorts of websites and then quickly show attribution. If I want to say, "Hey everyone, here's how you do keyword research, and here's to watch out for the exact match portion in the AdWords tool," I can screenshot AdWords. I can screenshot the exact match. I can point that out. I can make that very visual and compelling, and I can have a progression that tells the story.

This is a great way to show off not just technical stuff, but anything where there's photography, where there are visuals, where there's information that lends itself to a narrative format. This common format that slide decks have, usually PowerPoint, is something that all readers can download and share, and that's another excellent thing because it gives your content the ability to spread further and wider.

I'd use this in all sorts of places. I recommend using it on the slide sharing platforms, we'll talk about those, embedding it in content that you've got on your site, possibly making specific landing pages for it. If you're tape recording or videoing audio over it, then what you can do is you can add those in as webinars or viewable video. There are just a lot of options for this type of content.

I wanted to provide some best practices and some tips that we've seen. A few things here. Number one, I want to talk about the process. Now, typically, what I recommend if you're doing a classic slide creation is to create your slide deck, upload it to one of these major services. SlideShare, Scribd or Docstoc, all of them have reasonably good audiences. My favorite right now is SlideShare, and the reason is that it's relatively easy if you get a decent presentation, get a good presentation, get it some traffic and attention awareness, particularly in the social world, so a lot of tweets, a lot of Facebook shares, a lot of LinkedIn shares. SlideShare will put content that does well on its homepage, and it can be featured and that means a lot more visitors who never would have seen your content otherwise. If you have a compelling title that's interesting to your particular audience and you've got a good first slide that captures the attention and awareness, even in the thumbnail format, you can do really, really well on SlideShare. This is true in Scribd and Docstoc as well.

The other one I recommend is Box.net or Dropbox. You can upload and embed from those services, and remember, you don't just have to put the slide on these services. You can then embed on a page on your website if you want most of the traffic, the attention awareness, and the experience to be controlled and owned by you. We do this a lot. I'll upload to SlideShare with one title, and then I'll create a page on SEOmoz, just a static page, embed the slide there, and you can expand to whatever size you want, and then I'll make that the URL that's shared and that works tremendously well.

Once you've uploaded, give your presentation publicly, whether that means it's a webinar that you do online, whether you're giving it in person. If you're not going to, you can skip this step. But if you do it, there's something really, really powerful being in front of even just a small audience, and that is you can do this. Once you start your presentation, say, "Here's my presentation. I've made all the slides available for download at this URL," and then you make a quick, easy to remember URL. I usually use bit.ly to shorten whatever the URL is so I can say it's at bit.ly/mytalk or bit.ly/inbound2012 or bit.ly/seoforstartups, and I've got a lot of these. This process is phenomenal because what you can actually do is get the audience to be sharing that content right away. Super, super cool.

Now, when you do that, make sure that you don't just say, "Hey, here's my URL," but also say, "If you enjoyed this talk," so you have it at the start, you finish your presentation, you go to the end slide and you say,
"If you enjoyed this talk, I would love if you shared the presentation download link on social media." Super cool way to go.

Number three, you can use and reuse the slide on your website or blog in a post on a page through the embed and then invite others who see it there to be able to use the content, but they need to reference back to it. This is a great way to get something we all need - links.

Number four, watch your stats. Watch your stats from your blog post, that kind of thing. Watch your stats on SlideShare Pro if you're using that. I've upgraded to SlideShare Pro so I can kind of see where things go and which presentations perform better, but they'll show you number of views regardless. From there, you can get a sense of what's performing well, what's not performing well. Keep doing the good stuff, not doing the bad stuff, and you can find other people's presentations and see, "Hey, what's been really successful for them?"

Finally, a few tips for the slides individually. Number one, link to the content. Let's say I've got a slide here. See how I've got the URL below the graphic? That's what you really want to do, and you want that because that will send a lot of traffic. People were curious like, "Huh, where's that chart come from? What site information? How can I learn more about that?" Click. Now, they come to your website. Now, you've captured them there.

Number two, let your slides do a lot of the storytelling work. If you're going to use this format, remember that the vast majority of people are not going to be in the audience listening to you as you present. They're going to be on the Web just looking at these slides, and so that means that you want to do number three, which is if you've got some extra narration work, some content that you need to say, let's say I've got a big visual, but I don't have any context for that, go ahead and put, you can put down here in the slide some text. Upload the version that has the text at the bottom. Present the clean version when you present in person, and this works phenomenally well, because then someone who's getting the slide will see that in there. They don't have to listen to any audio. If you can explain the slide in one or two sentences, that's perfect. Honestly, you shouldn't usually have slides that take 10 minutes to explain, 5 minutes to explain, a paragraph to explain.

Finally, make sure you have your download URL on the first and last slide of the deck, like I mentioned, because if you do that, you can get people sharing at the start of your talk and people sharing at the end of your talk, and people will always be asking you for that download link. This is a great way to make sure that lots of people are reaching these pages and getting your stuff.

Next week, I would like to talk with you about some of my tips for presentations, tips for building slide decks, tips for delivering presentations, and hopefully that will help. I'm even planning to send that video to the MozCon speakers. Hopefully, it will be some good stuff. Until then, hope to see lots more slide content from you all, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Peek Behind the Scenes of President Obama's Week

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, July 6, 2012

Peek Behind the Scenes of President Obama's Week

This week, the President traveled to Colorado Springs to survey fire damage and honor responders. He also celebrated Independence Day with a naturalization ceremony at the White House and a picnic for military families on the South Lawn.

Make sure you check out the video:

Callum Haywood – An Interview With The Brain Behind “We Know What You’re Doing”

Posted: 05 Jul 2012 05:02 AM PDT

According to Facebook, users upload more than 300 million photos, generate over 3.2 billion ‘likes’/'comments’, and have 526 million active users on average per day. But do we stop to think about where our information is being shared and what happens after an image or a post has been uploaded? To show users just how easy it is to access user's status updates and share it to the world, 18 year old Callum Haywood set up a website called ‘We Know What You’re Doing‘, pulling public status updates via Facebook’s Graph API that contain references to hating your boss, getting drunk, using drugs and changes to your personal phone numbers. The site created a massive media stir with questions being asked once again about online safety on social networks. We caught up with Callum to find out more about the man behind the website, and to ask what inspired him to set up the site as well as what users can do to ensure online safety.

Callum Haywood

Hey Callum, firstly, congratulations on your experiment, it's gotten you worldwide recognition; did you ever envision that this project would get you this much media attention? Thank you, I had never envisioned that the site would get anywhere close to the number of visitors it has had in its entire online life. I had certainly not expected the media to pick up on it.

Could you tell us a little bit about your career background and how and when you got into coding and web development? I’ve recently finished my A level studies, and will be starting university later this year. I started coding when I was about 13 years old, just learning basic HTML out of an old book. I then got into web design using CSS, and this lead me onto PHP which is what the site is written in.

What inspired you to set up "We know what you're doing?" Two things inspired me. First was Tom Scott’s video “I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago” in which he demonstrates, using live data, the amount of personal information that people put online. Secondly is the simplicity in which this information can be obtained; within a few lines of code you can query Facebook’s Graph API for public posts and output them.

Do you think employers ought to take things employees write on Facebook (and other social media sites) seriously? And as such, could posts on your website be used as grounds for dismissal? What are your thoughts? People have lost their jobs in the past because of what they put on Facebook. My site isn’t intended to get anyone in trouble, but people need to be aware that their employers can see this information if it is public, and that it is up to the employer to decide how they go about dealing with it.

How can users protect themselves from their posts being pulled via Facebook's social graph? The easiest way to ensure that you are protected is to go on Facebook, click the drop down arrow at the top right of the page, next to the home button, select ‘Privacy Settings’ and under ‘Control Your Default Privacy’, make sure it is set to either ‘Friends’ or ‘Custom’. Caution should always be taken when posting anything online, because someone on your friends list may pass this on to someone else, and you could get into trouble that way too.

Is there an upside to this? Can information and posts gathered via Facebook's API be used for "good" purposes? Since you can access all public posts through the API, there are a lot of good posts, which can be put to good use.

A follow-up on the last question; how can a website owner, or a business owner benefit from pulling in information via Facebook's API? Businesses can use the API data to see what people are saying about their brands or products, for example. This information could be very useful for businesses to analyse, and also very cost effective.

Why did you choose drugs, alcohol, slagging off your boss, and new phone numbers as your categories for the experiment? I chose those categories because they typically give interesting results. If the categories were boring it wouldn’t shock people, which is what the site is designed to do. Hopefully people who have seen it think twice about the information they share online and who can access it.

Looking ahead, how do you think online privacy will be shaped? In the future I think people will need to go to extraordinary lengths to protect their privacy online. If you are serious about online privacy, then social networks are not the ideal place to be hanging out.

What do you think Facebook should do? Are they doing enough to keep their users safe? Facebook’s privacy controls are very good when they are used correctly, but I also think they have a responsibility to let users know that their posts are public, for example a message to confirm whether they want to post, because it can be seen by anyone and shared via the API too.

Have you ever thought of trying your hand at SEO? I have not really gone into depth with SEO before. My friend who works as an SEO programmer suggested that I add in the Facebook and Twitter buttons (which really helped get the site known) and also to optimise the title tags, as well as the meta data.

You say on your site that in order to be a decent developer, you need to develop a logical mind. If there were 5 skills necessary to work for you what would they be? If someone was going to work for me I would want them to be a good problem solver, logical thinker, have an analytical mind, be focused, and be able to understand the technical aspects in great depth.

Has age ever been an issue when dealing with clients? Fortunately not, age has never been a problem when dealing with clients, which is a good thing. Even when freelancing, the people I have met never had a problem with someone my age (or younger before I was 18) completing the work for them.

How do you manage your time with school, work and a social life? In order to manage my time I created a personal planner, which contains 7 columns, one for each day of the week, and is divided into hourly slots. I print one of these off when I have a particularly busy week and fill it in. At the bottom there is a section for other tasks that need doing and other notes.

How are you dealing with your new found fame? How many six figure job offers have you received so far? :-) Haha I haven’t received any job offers, however before I launched the site I was looking for summer jobs just so I can earn money before university. I can now postpone that search, and also deal with any freelance work requests that come my way.

Yesterday, you launched a search function to your site, what made you open it to the public? I created it so people could enter their own queries and see what interesting posts they can find, as well as just the default questions that are asked on the homepage. Since it went live, there have already been a lot of requests, although the site only logs the quantity of requests, not the actual query or responses.

Finally, what plans do you have for the future? What other projects have you got in the pipeline and where do you see yourself in 5 years from now? I have a few ideas but they are at an early stage, so can’t promise anything. In 5 years time I would like to see myself running my own business using the internet.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Callum Haywood – An Interview With The Brain Behind “We Know What You’re Doing”

Seth's Blog : The declining problem of (Groucho) Marxism

The declining problem of (Groucho) Marxism

"I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member..." That's the (Groucho) Marxist credo.

You're invited to speak your mind online. To post thoughtful comments and tweets and posts. You're given a place where you can post your music, or your art or your photography or your take on the state of your industry...

Most of us refuse. We don't want to be part of a community that would have us, apparently. So we sit quietly and watch and take notes and absorb instead of joining the club of contributors.

Retweets are more common than tweets, and listeners are more common than singers.

Because we believe we don't belong. That we're not qualified. That someone with a louder microphone is better than we are.

Past tense perhaps.

Here's the thing: the number of people contributing is going up, and fast. The number of folks that are happy to speak up, to be a member of the contributing group, is as high as it's ever been.

Yes, we'd like to have even you as a member. Really.