I was researching an organization last week and visited their website, blog and social media pages.

So did I decide to “follow” the organization on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  Absolutely not. Since I had already subscribed to the blog RSS feed, I didn’t feel compelled to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  Why add clutter to my social media streams with information I can already get elsewhere?

I know it’s tempting to set-up pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms and populate them with posts from your blog or press room.  We’re all busy and most communications and marketing departments are stretched thin.  But posting the same information across platforms isn’t doing your organization any good. Why?

• By posting headlines that meet the least common denominator across platforms (probably Twitter, with its 140 character limit), you miss out on functionality offered by the other platforms.  For example, Facebook lets you post longer updates, upload photos and videos, include links, host discussions, etc.
• You don’t give your target audiences a reason to follow or fan you across platforms.  Just imagine this.  If you post complementary but different content across platforms, your clients, prospects and supporters might just follow you on multiple platforms, giving your company an incredible voice with those individuals.
• If you’re posting headlines from your news room, you’re not offering people the authentic, personal voice we’ve come to expect on the social media pages.

Here’s what we do at Matrix Group:

• Our website showcases our products, services, clients, portfolio, news and webinars.
• This blog, which is authored by me, Joanna, the CEO, features my thoughts and commentary on social media, marketing, communications, strategy, customer service, trends and gadgets.  This blog DOES feature website launches at the bottom of each page.
• Our Twitter page showcases our work and clients, but the majority of the tweets are about industry news, trends, how-to articles, and case studies.  Twitter will tell you who we are and what we’re reading.  We’re pretty chatty on Twitter; we post updates multiple times a day.
• Our Facebook page also showcases our work and clients, but we also post photos and updates about happenings in the company, including trainings, parties, fun events, etc.  Facebook will tell you a lot about who we are as a company and our culture.  For example, our staff pumpkin carving contest was featured on our Facebook page.  We’re less chatty on Facebook, just updating a few times a week.
• Our Flickr page is home to our photo library of company events, while our Facebook page has the “best of” photos.
• Our YouTube channel is a work in progress and will soon feature short interviews with senior staff about their areas of expertise, including branding, the user experience, software development and security.

As you can see, our various pages are all designed to showcase our expertise, clients and work but the user experience on each platform has been carefully crafted to take advantage of that platform’s capabilities.  And while the website is clearly a marketing channel for the company, we’re not very sales-y on our social media pages, focusing instead on posting useful and interesting links.

How about you?  How are you creating an integrated use experience across your company’s social media pages?  What’s working for you?

A recent article in Ad Age explores how some of the top consumer brands have Facebook pages with a fan base and interactions that far outstrip that of their official Web sites. Starbucks has 12.9M fans; Coke has nearly 11M fans; Oreo has 8.9M fans.  Of the companies in the article, only Starbucks has steadily increasing Web traffic.

All of this got me thinking:  What happens when an organization’s blog, Facebook, Twitter or other social media page gets more traffic than the official Web site? Is this the ultimate goal for marketers?  Is traffic on a social media site worth as much as traffic on a company Web site?  Does this increased traffic ultimately lead to more customers and sales?

I have clients who worry about redirecting traffic to social media pages, for fear of losing control over the conversations, not owning the Web property, or that the interactions are not quite official enough.  Others hold their social media stats in the highest regard.  Most of us  wonder what it really means when somebody chooses to “like” our fan pages.

How to make sense of all this?  Here are some thoughts:

• If your Facebook page is getting increased traffic and interactions, while traffic on your regular Web site is on the decline, ask yourself, “What is it about my Facebook page that’s working?  What’s making people “like” us, click through to articles and comment?  What are the lessons for content and opportunities for interaction on our official Web site?”
• Your goal should be to have your Web site, Facebook page, Twitter page, blog, e-mail campaigns, microsites, etc., all be part of an integrated strategy where each Web property is complementing the others and encouraging cross traffic.
• Ultimately, the goal should be conversions, whether that means more sales, more subscribers, more members or more donations.  Your goals should never be about traffic on specific platforms; that’s just a tactic.
• You need a way to track the effectiveness of followers, likes, clicks and fans across the different platforms.  Use tracking codes, cookies and marketing codes to determine which platforms are really helping your business to thrive.

Getting back to Matrix Group, here’s what we’ve learned:

• Traffic to our Web site has not declined.  On the contrary, traffic has increased as we have expanded our social media efforts.
• Our most valuable interactions still come from the Web site, where visitors get a chance to look at our work AND, most importantly, make a decision to call or e-mail us for more information or request a proposal.  We get several, high quality leads from our Request Information form every week!
• Our social media pages have proven to be valuable outlets for showcasing our work, sharing tips and resources with a wider audience, and demonstrating our expertise.
• The social media pages have also been a terrific way for clients, prospects and job applicants to make inquiries, give us feedback and comment on our work.

How about you?  What trends are you seeing across your Web and social media pages?  How do you value fans and interactions on Facebook and other social media sites?

• How Long Should Your Posts Be? We suggest that each post be no more than 4-6 paragraphs.  If your posts are too long, your followers may decide to read them at a later time and not come back.  But you want enough length to be able to cover a topic with enough substance.

• Create Visual Interest. Although followers follow blogs for their content, we believe that your posts will have more impact if they have photos, videos, event basic html formatting.  If nothing else, use formatting to make your content skimmable.

• Align Posts With Your Keyword/SEO Strategy. While I’m a firm believer that you can’t force keywords into headlines, do try to make your titles and opening paragraphs keyword rich.

• Create Compelling Introductions. Think about it.  You make a decision about whether or not to open an e-mail or click on an article in your RSS reader based on the title and opening paragraph.  So make your blog post introductions compelling to encourage clicks.

• Do Allow Comments. We understand that many organizations are reluctant to allow comments on their blogs for fear of obnoxious or irrelevant comments.  On the other hand, social media and blogging are all about user-generated content and user engagement.  Comments are a great way to solicit feedback, find out what critics are saying and respond to them, and let your community advocate for you.  In addition, most blogs (like this one) usually don’t inspire negative reactions, so why not just allow comments directly?  You can always delete offensive or spam-y posts.

• Your Blog Needs a Marketing Plan. It’s simply not true that if you build a blog, they will come.  Not anymore at least, what with the huge volume of sites and blogs online these days.  Be sure to create a promotional strategy for your blog that includes: promotions in traditional outlets, featuring on your Web site and social media pages, commenting on other blogs, and encouraging your members/customers/house e-mail list to follow and subscribe.

• Review Your Usage Reports Regularly. As with anything worth doing, if you don’t measure your progress, how will you know if blogging is worth doing?  Be sure to check your Google Analytics or other usage report package regularly.  And don’t forget your RSS statistics; how many people are signed-up for your RSS feed or e-mail updates?

How about you?  What are your favorite blogging tips? What has worked for you?  And why do you blog?

• What Are Your Goals? The most important thing is to align your blog’s goals with your organization’s goals. Are you trying to engage your target audiences?  Influence?  Foster specific actions?  Your goals should be measurable so that, at the end of the day, you know if your blog is a success.

• Who Should Blog? Shaun and I believe that anyone can blog, but for most organizations, you need people who have a 20,000 foot view of the industry or issues, enjoys writing (or is paired with someone who enjoys writing and is a good writer to boot), and is committed to pumping out content on a regular basis.

• What Should You Blog About? This is the $64,000 question!  Ultimately, you need a mission statement for your blog that guides your content strategy.  We grouped blog posts into the categories.  In practice, most blogs employ a variety of blog post types to keep readers engaged.
  • Hot items/News – These posts tend to cover what’s new in the industry, breaking news, etc.
  • Strategy/Commentary – These posts try to provide a perspective on specific issues and usually aim to persuade readers to take a certain point of view.
  • Trends - These posts report on market trends, trending topics, research and statistics.
  • How-To Guides – These posts are often a combination of text and video and aim to provide users with a practical guide to doing something specific.

• How Often Should You Blog? Shaun and I agreed that you should blog at least once a week; twice a week is gravy.  Blogging once a month, in our opinion, is not often enough to connect with your followers regularly.  On the other hand,  blogging too often (one blog we referenced had a single blogger who posted a dozen times a day) can exhaust your readers.  There are exceptions, of course.  Tech blogs, product review blogs, and magazine blogs often have posts throughout the day, but these blogs often function more like news blogs than thought platforms for organizations or leaders.

Okay, so this is Part One.  In Part Two of Blogging Best Practices, I’ll discuss how to write content that encourages participation, what we think about allowing comments on blogs, and how to promote your blog.

In the meantime, I’d love to know about your blogging success stories.  What has worked for you?  Do you agree or disagree with the best practices that Shaun and I outlined above?

Matrix Group work includes the following:

• Designed a blog that reflected Accession Point’s identity, as well as captured Stelfox’s personality
• Incorporated a content management system (CMS) to allow Stelfox to update her content on a frequent basis
• Assisted on content development, ensuring posts were effective and worked well on the Web
• Added a “share” function, allowing visitors to share Stelfox’s blog posts through social networking/bookmarking sites

Visit the Accession Point Blog

Our work included:

• A new blog where Campbell addresses financial issues, and offers insightful tips on how to prepare for retirement and sustain financial security beyond one’s working years.
• The incorporation of other social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to help establish a fan and follower base.
• The implementation of Expression Engine as the CMS.
• A fresh look and feel that serves  that highlights Campbell’s expertise and perspectives on the nation’s brokerage industry.

Visit Fire Your Broker

You can read a nice recap of the panel on the Solutions are Power blog, but here were my take-aways:

• Your customers, prospects, staff and potential staff are increasingly using social media and they expect your business to have a presence on the most popular platforms.
• We need to view social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook as vehicles for marketing, customer service, prospecting and conversation.
• But businesses should not view social networks as just another place to advertise. Social networkers (you, me and anyone with an account) are both suppliers and consumers of content. In order for businesses to thrive in the social media environment, they, too, must be suppliers and consumers of content.  In other words, companies and brands must interact with customers and prospects by engaging in a two-way dialogue.
• The vast majority of Americans’ initial interactions with companies and brands online, so we all better have a great online presence that tells our story, focuses on benefits, and talks to our customers and prospects in a natural, real way.
• When in doubt about where our prospects are and what content will interest them, all we have to do is ask.

What I loved about the panel was the diversity of our backgrounds and perspectives.  The panel consisted of:

• Jill Foster of DC Media Makers and Women Grow Business served as the moderator
• Danilo Bogdanovic of Loudoun Scene is a Realtor and social media consultant
• Terri Holly of Creative Marketing Solutions is a social media consultant and coach
• Brent Leary of CRM Essentials covered the data and CRM (customer relationship management side of the equation)
• Me, Joanna Pineda of Matrix Group International representing an interactive agency

If you were at the Grow Smart Biz conference, what did you think of the conference?  How are you integrating traditional marketing with social media?

So how come most organizations shy away from incorporating UGC on their sites?

I think it’s because most organizations are not equipped to deal with UGC, good, bad or indifferent.  And they are deathly  afraid of negative comments.  Here’s my take on UGC, why it’s here to stay and why most organizations need a UGC strategy:

• UGC can take many forms. A magazine site that allows visitors to rate articles support UGC.  A store that allows ratings supports UGC.  A blog that welcomes comments invites UGC.
• Sites that welcome UGC invite participation. And participation by the right people encourages more participation and more followers.
• UGC lets you tap into the expertise and experiences of your members, customers, and partners, which will enrich the content you provide.
• Supporting UGC on your site or application does not mean that you lose control. You can set up guidelines and moderate comments.  On this blog, for example, all comments are immediately posted but I get notifications and I spam (delete) all comments that look spammy. Yes, I get the occasional snarky or negative comment, but unless the post contains profanity, I leave it on the site.  The New York Times recently announced that Wikipedia, the site built on UGC, will soon impose a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
• Celebrating UGC lets you tap into most visitors’ need for true interaction with you and your organization. I read every comment on this blog and respond personally when I get a request for information or assistance.  I believe these interactions have helped Matrix Group make followers out of readers.
• If your organization is suffering from criticism re: transparency and responsiveness, UGC can help you face your critics directly. The Direct Selling Association launched a blog 18 months ago to counter false perceptions about direct selling.  Although apprehensive about allowing comments in real-time, the organization decided it needed to make a strong statement about integrity and transparency.  The results have been great.  Negative comments are opportunities to address criticisms and myths.  More importantly, the negative comments have been few and far between.
• Supporting UGC is also a wonderful way to let your staff, clients, partners and friends network and share their experiences. I was moved by the dozens of memories that members of the Matrix family posted to our 10th anniversary microsite.  I didn’t know about some of the antics and every single post was a treat!

How about you?  What’s your take on user-generated content?  What are your favorite UGC sites?  Has your organization taken the UGC plunge?

When I’m on vacation, I like to really unplug, which is why my husband and I go to places like Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Prague, Costa Rica. We go to places where we’re not tempted to go online and work because there is so much to see and do; often, the time difference makes it difficult to stay in touch.

In the past, I might have dropped an e-postcard or quick e-mail to the office from an Internet cafe. But these days, with wireless access everywhere and social networks broadcasting everyone’s minute by minute status, what’s a girl to do? It seems all my friends and colleagues update their status wherever they are: on a date, at the beach, at dinner, at Disneyland, out West.

If we spend our time tweeting,updating our status on Facebook and MySpace, uploading photos to Flickr, or blogging about our experiences, are we really on vacation? Will I lose followers if I leave the grid for a while? Will anyone even notice that I haven’t blogged, tweeted or updated my status in a week? I bet not.

So, even though I have been on the grid and broadcasted my whereabouts, thoughts and food adventures pretty much daily for the past year, for the next week, I will likely just vanish from the Internet.

Unless I get free wi fi from my iPod Touch of course and I can use Twitter….. Argh. Have a great holiday.

I’ve been so happy to see that President Obama is being just as innovative and engaging online.

• Google Moderator gives participants a way to submit questions and vote for the ones they want answered.  The White House launched Open for Questions and used Google Moderator to field questions for the President during in online town hall meeting tonight.  92,934 people submitted 104,049 questions and cast 3,604,964 votes.
• The White House maintains a blog.  Imagine that, a White House blog.  The President himself is not blogging, but the blog does a terrific job of making visitors feel like a White House insider.  Here’s tonight’s post on Open for Questions.
• The White House has a YouTube channel that features press conferences, the President’s weekly address, briefings and other events.  Some of the videos are available in HD; check out this beautiful HD video of President Obama’s March 21, 2009 address.  If you don’t see the video in HD, click the HD link in the bottom right corner of the video.
• The President’s weekly addresses are also available on Vimeo, a niche video sharing site that features only user-generated content, and has stricter content requirements.
• Recovery.gov claims to be “the main vehicle to provide each and every citizen with the ability to monitor the progress of the recovery.”  The Web site features news, the full-text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, agency budgets, and more.  I especially like the share your story feature.
• I love the slideshows that give us glimpses into the President’s and First Lady’s meetings and visits.

How about you?  Are you participating in any of these online initiatives from the White House?

A meal, however, is simply a metaphor for creating, nurturing and maintaining a relationship. The relationship is what matters. A meal is one really great, fun way to establish or further a relationship. Face to face meetings and social events are others. Can social networking help you nurture your relationships?  Here’s how.

• A really great blog lets you connect with your staff, customers, members. A blog lets you share your perspectives, talk about what’s important to you or your field, speak more conversationally about a highly technical or complicated topic.
• An authentic social networking strategy lets you share aspects of your organization’s culture and values. So don’t just tweet about your press releases!  Share tips and tricks through a video, tweet about Web sites that move you, and upload photos of your staff in action.

How about you?  How are you using social networking to support your relationship goals?

The key take aways from the webinar were the following:

• The social networking services (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) complement the social networking that non-profits and associations have been offering to their members for years through meetings, e-mail discussions and bulletin boards.
• It’s no longer enough to have a communications strategy that includes a Web site, e-mail, direct mail and newsletters. Customers, members and staff alike are craving, indeed demanding, engagement and conversation.
• Every organization needs, at the very least, a listening strategy so that you know what is being said about you, your organization and industry; you are aware of the conversations taking place between members; and you get a sense of the most pressing issues of the day for your field.
• We organize the SN universe into the following platforms: networking sites; friend networks; broadcasting (with conversation); rating and recommender sytems; sharing systems; and SN community platforms.
• Social networks are reaching close to 50% of all active Web users and 3 of the top 5 sites in the US (MySpace, YouTube and Facebook) are SN sites.
• You can use SN to recruit staff, raise money, provide thought leadership, engage members in conversation, provide customer service, promote meetings and events, and extend the learning and networking of events.

A point we tried to emphasize is this:  your SN strategy does not need to have everything but the kitchen sink. Every organization needs to craft an SN strategy that takes into account its organization type, size, goals, and internal resources.  For example, a research organization client of Matrix Group uses its Web site to disseminate its research, Twitter to announce new research, and a Facebook page to make consumers aware of their consumer-oriented research.  This organization decided against a blog because it is a neutral organization; as such, they don’t provide a whole lot of commentary on their researh.

Another client is using a CEO blog to provide thought leadership and have a dialogue with members, a Facebook page to reach younger members, and YouTube to gain a wider audience for their research and events.  Yet another client uses Twitter and RSS to engage the media, Flickr to share photos from their fabulous events, and Facebook as a way to generate leads and promote their events.

So which SN activity takes the most time?  Blogging, because it involves generating original content that provides a perspective on a topic, issue, profession or industry.  And yet, keep in mind that for every SN page that you create, you will need to cultivate readers, fans, group members, or subscribers, and that customer cultivation is ultimately where the greatest staff time will be needed.

But first, let me tell you about Chris’ speech, which was terrific.  Among the things he talked about:

• What is Google’s secret sauce? Chris says that Google has become a powerhouse because they take really talented engineers, present them with really big problems, and then give them lots of computing power to solve those problems.
• The 20% Rule. Evidently, everyone at Google can allocate 20% of their time to whatever they want, so long as: they log their actiivities in the projects database and they present their work to their peers every few weeks.  If a project is deemed worthy, the responsible staff will be given more staff time and computers.
• You only get laughed at when your ideas are too small. Google leaders Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page want all Google staff to think big and use their brains and computers to solve really big problems.
• The 150 feet rule. In addition to having over a dozen cafes on the Google campus, there are snacks every 150 feet to feed the body, feed the mind, and encourage socializing and networking.
• Search is going to get a whole lot better soon. Although the Google home page looks the same, the search technology behind it is getting better every day.  Google now tracks what we click on when we search; in the future, the search results for the same keywod may be different for you and me, based on our individual preferences and past history.
• Google Trends is not only cool, it’s surprising what we can learn from search patterns. Chris says that Google Trends can predict the box office success of a movie and where the flu will hit.

Okay, so back to stalking Chris.  I had read about FriendFeed (FF) a few months ago and decided to give it a try.  FriendFeed users can see what their friends are reading, listening to or viewing on the Web as a continuous stream of updates.  You can view the updates on a Web page, in your Google personalized page, via IM, or Facebook.  In a New York Times article, one of the founders, Bret Taylor, calls it a “blog that writes itself.”

None of my friends seem to be on FF, so I’m following just a couple of Web celebrities.  Chris Sacca provided his FF address so I started following him.  FF is like a firehose of information about the people you’re following. I follow 180 people on Twitter and love the updates and the diversity and randomness of the links posted.  I have 101 friends on Facebook and can easily scan the status updates and links.   I’m only following 3 people on FF, but every day, I get pages and pages of updates. I get tweets, blog posts, comments, links, favorite photos and videos, and comments from their friends.  I feel like I’m stalking Chris Sacca because I practically know where he is and what’s he’s reading and watching.  Do I really need this much information on one guy? Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said last year that FF is better than Twitter, but I’m overwhelmed. I think this is going to take some getting used to.

Anybody out there on FF?  How are you using it and what tools do you use to wade through the data?  Is it cool or just TMI?

1. Your Browser as the New Operating System. The Web browser is increasingly the platform for mission critical applications, like association management systems, intranets, document management systems and e-mail.
2. Conversation is King. We used to talk about creating a communications strategy.  Today, we need to create a conversation strategy because customers are interested in engagement, in two-way conversations.
3. Unified, Integrated Data. I call this the Amazon Effect.  Our customers expect us to know who they are, communicate with them in a personalized way, and give them personalized offerings.  We can’t do this unless we have a unified view of their activities and interactions.
4. Zen Tech Warrior. These warriors want information on specific topics, when they want it, on the device(s) of their choice.  Take me, for example.  I might want my magazine in print, news via e-mail, and alerts via text.  Can your database handle these preferences and can you execute on this information?
5. Green Computing. We all know that we need to do our part to reduce energy consumption and save the planet.  Data centers represent 1.5% of the electricity demand in the US.  Think green when you buy computers and peripherals.

Since my session was an Idealab, I got terrific comments and questions from my audience.  The liveliest discussion centered around creating a communications strategy because it intersects with the need to create a social networking strategy.  My top tips here?

• Monitor what is being said through Google Alerts and Twitter searches (that you can RSS).
• Create a social networking response team.
• Have a blogging strategy.  Even if your organization does not host a blog, what should you do when your organization is mentioned negatively in a blog?

Here’s a link to the handout from my session.  What about you?  What big trends are coming your way and how you are dealing with them?

I’m excited and fascinated by next week’s Inauguration.

• I’m following the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) (@obamainaugural) and loving the YouTube contest, the news about the inaugural activities, and the updates about various balls.
• I’m following the DC Government on Twitter (@Inauguration_DC) and appreciating the news about road closures, tips from the National Park Service, etc.
• I’m impressed with the Web site of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, especially the blog.    I have enjoyed reading about the rehearsal and the stand-ins, the concert at Lincoln Memorial is going to be fabulous, and the videos from Barack and Michelle Obama were a nice touch.
• The PIC’s Flickr account is full of beautiful photos of DC and the preparations for next week’s events.
• I plan to be part of the Facebook crowd watching the inauguration live and updating my status when the new President is sworn in.

For the first time ever, I feel like I’m getting an insider’s view of what goes into an inauguration and know about a lot of the activities.  The blog and photos especially are creating an intimacy to the event that I did not think possible, considering that hundreds of thousands (millions?) are going to be here next week.

However, I am more than disappointed, okay even angry, that Virginia will be virtually cut off from DC next week. With roads and bridges from Northern VA blocked, and metro sure to be in gridlock, how is someone like me supposed to participate in person next week?  I had hopes of attending a ball, but gave up after I heard that bridges would all be closed.  Come on, couldn’t the PIC have organized buses and car pools?

I guess I’ll participate in this inauguration virtually.  The few people working at Matrix Group on Tuesday will either watch the inauguration from outside City Hall in Alexandria or watch the inauguration live on CNN from our conference room.  Oh well.  At least we’ll be warm and we’ll have water and pizza, which is more than most people on the Mall will be able to say.

The requirements were laid out easily and I appreciated the sample message to send to your Web host. Why can’t every technical requirements page be this easy to understand?

Last thing: I love how every page on the WP site has this simple phrase in the bottom, right corner:  Code is Poetry.

If you don’t know MarketingSherpa, you should.  MarketingSherpa is my favorite source for news, information, case studies, how-to guides — everything about online marketing.  MarketingSherpa e-mails are the few e-newsletters that I read in their entirety.  I pass the articles along to my staff and clients.  The knowledge in MarketingSherpa case studies is amazing, the writing is terrific, and the know-how is real.

I remember meeting Anne at an iBreakfast, a pitchfest hosted by Alan Brody back in 1999.  Anne had an idea to pitch, a marketing plan, no money, but a lot of passion and knowledge about online marketing and research.  MarketingSherpa became one of Matrix Group’s first dot com clients.  At first, we helped her develop her technical platform and prototypes so that she could show investors more than a business plan.

After Anne cashed in her 401(k), quit her day job and went full-time with MarketingSherpa, we developed her site for her.  We gave her a CMS, e-mail subscribe forms, e-mail boxes, and e-mail lists.  Her site was the biggest in our network and we learned a lot about how to manage and host mission-critical sites.

We lost MarketingSherpa as a client when Anne sold the company.  And now, Anne has stepped down from the company.  It feels like the end of an era.

Anne graciously thanked Matrix Group in her last blog post and I’m proud that we had a small part in helping her realize her dream and building the powerhouse research firm that MarketingSherpa is today.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used mainly on Web pages to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. For example, humans can read distorted text on a graphic, but computer programs (most of them at least) cannot.

Here are some examples of CAPTCHA:

• On the Matrix Group Contact Us form, you have to pass a CAPTCHA test in order to fill out the form.
• If you click on Email Us on the same form, you have to pass another CAPTCHA test to view and click on the e-mail address.
• To send a message to John Grau on his blog, you have to follow the instructions and type “transmissions” in a box.

Here’s the problem.  Computer programs are getting smarter and smarter. “Spammers and malware authors are able to break Captcha process,” says Carl Leonard in an article in The Guardian.  As a result, CAPTCHAS are getting harder and harder.

On my personal blog, which I host on Blogger.com, I sometimes have to type the text 3 or 4 times before I get it right.  I sometimes look at the squiggly text and think, “you’ve got to be kidding.”  I just hit submit and hope the next test is easier, which I guess defeats the idea behind CAPTCHA.

BTW, new CAPTCHAs are being developed in an effort to foil the spammers, scrapers and bots.

• SQUIGL-PIX gives you directions and asks you to draw lines around the correct pictures.  It took me a couple of tries before I figured out that I had to draw the lines in the direction shown.
• ESP-PIX asks you to look at a set of pictures then select the word that best describes all the images.  Either I’m really stupid or this test is broken because, for the life of me, I can’t get past the first test.

My favorite CAPTCHA is RECAPTCHA.  This is a project to digitize books, which are scanned and run through OCR (optical character recognition). RECAPTCHA sends words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.  This is the CAPTCHA that we use on the Matrix Group Web site; it uses traditional, squiggly text but we think it’s cool to save books.

Of course, CAPTCHA is not the only answer to stopping spam posts on blogs, dictionary attacks against searches, etc.  This blog, for example, uses a spam filter to filter out possible spam comments.  We opted against a CAPTCHA as an experiment and because the Akismet filter we’re using has been so effective.

The final word on CAPTCHA?  I guess here it’s to stay, but it will morph into more complex tasks , and I will surely continue to struggle against these increasingly complex tasks that I need my CMU grad husband to help me figure out. :-)

While CNN, MSNBC, and all the networks showed the same footage of the Hilton’s wall falling off, and the Houston highway that was six feet under water, my in-laws wanted to know how their Clear Lake neighborhood was doing.  Did everyone evacuate?  Is everyone okay?  Did the bayou flood?  How much tree damage was there?  Does the neighborhood have power?

Slowly, and then more rapidly, especially by Monday afternoon, we got lots of information from the citizen journalists of Houston.

Here is a YouTube video of a couple driving down the highway looking for their boat.  This road is close to where my in-laws live.

A teenager chronicled the arrival of Hurricane Ike on YouTube; click on related videos; he has a whole series.

The local radio station, KHOU, hosts a forum about specific Houston neighborhoods.  We got great information about the Clear Lake neighborhood, including power and damage reports.

The Houston Chronicle encourages citizens to report on electricity being restored, and then compiles the information on a grid and a Yahoo! map. Fabulous!

Contrast the Chronicle site with that of Reliant Energy, the local power company.  On Sunday, the site reported that 90% of their customers had no power and basically said, “don’t call us, we know you don’t have power.”  No updates on where work was being done, and no estimates on when power would be restored.  Reliant finally put up a storm center microsite but it still contains scant information.  I give it a thumbs down for usefulness and timeliness.

In “We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information,” Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis describe citizen journalists as “active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information.” It seems that professional journalists are no longer the exclusive gatekeepers of the news.  Don’t you love the Web?

P.S.  Since many of you have asked, I’m pleased to report that my in-laws and their home are fine.  They went home on Tuesday to find that their property sustained a lot of tree damage, but thankfully, the house suffered no flooding, just minor cosmetic damage.  Even the power is back on.

Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers and Web marketing mavens, says CEOs can’t and shouldn’t blog because they can’t get away from the corporate speak.

But I say that CEOs can and should blog in order to:

• comment on what’s important in their field or industry
• provide thought leadership for customers, staff or members
• interact with customers, staff or members
• provide another perspective on the organization and its activities
• present a friendly (read not corporate speak) face to the world

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve had this blog for just a few months and since I write all the posts myself, I know that a blog takes work.  I have to be interesting, post about timely and important topics, and present a perspective that is candid, if not entirely unique.  (I’m not entirely sure I succeed all the time, if at all, but I try anyway.)  It’s a commitment to post twice a week; heck, I posted once while on vacation in Costa Rica last week.

Here are some of my favorite CEO blogs:

NECA Transmissions by John Grau, CEO of the National Electrical Contractors Association

CounterIntuitive by George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research

CNewmark by Craig Newmark, Founder of Craiglist

Blog Maverick by Mark Cuban, CEO of the Dallas Mavericks

I have a client who says her organization finally decided to put up a blog because industry critics were blogging and grabbing all the attention.  A CEO friend says he’d rather be blogging and representing his company; otherwise, it might be lawyers, disgruntled employees and critics blogging about his company.

Baseline Magazine says, CEOs should blog or die.

The strategy, which includes the site title, is most critical. It sets the tone and image you want to communicate. So, the Matrix Group blog had to have a movie-themed title. You see, every person at Matrix Group is assigned to a team and every team is named after a movie. Why? We’re all superstars around here. While movie names can be lighthearted, they can also be inspirational.

I am the leader of the company and I personally lead the new biz team, Lethal Weapon. Our Association Management Software (AMS) team is Reservoir Dogs. The Client Services teams are Fifth Element and X-Men – it’s only fitting, as most days, they are the superheroes around here. The Network Admin team is Fight Club because, well, you don’t talk about Fight Club. And the Administration team is First Contact.

Why the MatriXFiles? In case you missed it, “X-Files” is prominent in the name. Friends, family and co-workers know that I’m a huge X-Files and Star Wars fan. Although we’re not chasing government conspiracies or UFOs in this blog, I will comment on the interesting, the mysterious, the bleeding edge, and the crazy ways of the Web.