Archive for category Personal

5 Songs I’ve Been Listening to Lately

I get asked often what music am I listening to lately.  I’ve always found my taste’s to be pretty electic, so I’m going to try and share 5 songs including an oldie but goodie I’ve been listening to lately.

1.  Alex Gaudino’s “I’m In Love

This song reminds me of Daft Punk’s “Around the World”.  A simple hook repeated for over 7 minutes, but the beat is transformative and really takes you on a journey.  Props to Garrett Scott for introducing me to this one.

2.  Linkin Park’s “The Catalyst

I love the bridge in this song.  Linkin Park lately has been changing their sound and really growing up.  Minutes After Midnight sound wise was very different from previous efforts and I expect their new album to be even more of a drastic departure from the Linkin Park of old.

3.  Game’s “Blackout

Game has been talking about releasing the R.E.D. album for nearly two years, but at least he’s still active on the mixtape circuit with his recent release Brake Lights.  The mixtape is awesome and Blackout has a solid chorus to even get the anti Game fans humming along.

4.  DJ Magnet “Party and Bullshit” (Miley Cyrus Notorious B.I.G Mashup)

I have no problem putting this on the list.  Say what you want about Miley, but this mashup is off the charts.  The only thing that would make it more epic is 16 bars from Ludacris (the new king of guest spots…move over Nate Dogg)

5.  Zero 7 “Destiny

Destiny hit my iTunes on July 29th 2002 and is staple in chill out bad ass music.  If you don’t know Zero 7 pick up In The Waiting Line and enjoy.

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5 Commandments for Community Management

1. Be Fast
Google, Facebook and others often write about how important being fast is. Speed in any business is important. In community management responding to any support emails, questions or quickly letting the community know you are aware of the problem is imperative.  The reason speed is so important above everything else is my eyes is it leaves people with an impression about how serious you treat them.  Constantly I hear “Wow amazingly fast response!” or tweets like this.

2.  Know Your Product

This may  seem simple.  It isn’t.  When I say know your product, I mean know it better than anyone at the company.  In the case with Apture I pride myself on attempting to know more than @tristanharris (he has an insane ability to find things) when it comes down to bugs, general usage and workarounds to common problems.  The reason this is so important is it plays into commandment one, but it also frees up your engineers to keep working on larger problems.  When you know your product well a great majority of gripes users have can be solved without an engineer.  When you run a small shop engineering time is imperative, slowing them down should be avoided at all costs. One issue I’ve seen pop up since the launch of Apture Search is where users may install our javascript twice on a page.  When you know the entire installation process, how to read html, etc you can quickly walk the user through a solution to this problem quickly.  They’ll love you for this.

3.  Always Be Closing

As a Community Manager your job is to “manage the community” well a big part of this is growing the community.  You can only grow the community so much by being quick and knowing your product.  Start looking for potential new customers who you think would love it.  A quick tip for this is find a target on Twitter send them an @ message about how you have an awesome product for their site and you’d love to send them a demo.  They’ll usually reply. Who doesnt want to see a demo?  You can do contests and things to drive participation, but I’m a firm believer especially in new companies you need to use brute force to grow your business.

4.  Be Yourself

You probably spend a great majority of your day inside GetSatisfaction or inside your mail program replying to customers.  When communicating with people who are having problems be yourself, feel more like a real person than an automated reply.  If I’m talking with someone who runs a sports site, I’ll mention something about an article I read on their site or a player from a sports they like.  These types of things I believe break the ice with someone and give them comfort in knowing a capable person is on the other end, but they are also cool :)

5.  Connect on Twitter or Facebook with your customers

If someone has a great experience with getting help from you find them on Twitter or Facebook and connect with them.  You should not only build your community for your company, but increase your circle of connections.  Now when I go to SXSW or BWE I can say hi to Kate Buck Jr, simply because after talking with her a few times over Twitter about Apture we are now friends.  Relationships with people are not only beneficial personally, but if I need help promoting something for Apture I’m always going to reach out to her.  Just don’t post crazy pictures of yourself on Facebook or they may see them :)

I hope these tips help you become a better community manager.  If you have any questions or comments do not be afraid to reach out on Twitter or leave a note below.

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Apture Highlights, Chael Sonnen and Open Home Pro

A lot has been going on between Apture, a new venture I’m starting on the side and life, but figured no time like the present to update the site.

1.  Apture Highlights

Back in March Apture launched the Magic Search Bar, we’ve currently been distributing it to thousands of sites.  The key piece of the product has been the contextual search engine allowing readers to explore videos, photos and Wikipedia without leaving the page.

We received tons of feedback from users via surveys and emails about how awesome the search is.  88% of users surveyed said they would be somewhat or very disappointed if the product no longer existed.  When we dug through the numbers, we decided that with that kind of feedback we wanted anyone to have a chance to experience Apture.  Enter Apture Highlights.
Apture Highlights is a browser extension for FireFox, Safari and Google’s Chrome browser.  With Apture Highlights installed you the reader can highlight any text on any webpage and instantly explore.  Check out the video below and install it today.
2.  I recently added UFC 117 at the Oakland Arena.  It was my fifth live MMA Event and I have to say it might just have been the best.  It was one of those rare fights where it blew away the hype for the match.  Chael Sonnen was before the fight considered a decent fighter, not great.  He’d won the title shot after disposing of 3 opponents in a row notably Nate Marquardt and Yushin Okami.
What was most surprising is going into the fight Anderson Silva was between a -500 and a -600 favorite.  Chael obviously didn’t buy any of that judging by his repeated trash talk for 5 straight months.
And on August 7th Chael walked into the ring and did exactly what he said he would do.  He beat the living crap out of the invincible Anderson Silva for 23 straight minutes, winning some rounds 10-8 and then he got submitted in a triangle choke.  It’s the third fight in UFC history to ever end in the 5th round.  Only the third ever.  It was simply epic.


3.  Ever since my girlfriend started her job with Vanguard Properties I’ve been trying to find ways to make her more efficient with potential clients.  After brainstorming I came up with an idea and shockingly actually decided to get it built.  It’s called Open Home Pro and should be debuting very soon.


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Quora, Faithless and Stats Reports

As I mentioned last week I’m going to try and do one of these posts every week.

1.  Quora

I’ve covered Quora before.  I think their search is fantastic.  This week I’ve found myself late at night asking questions and getting answers to things I’ve always wondered from Search Engine Optimization to debating Instrumental Groups.  Well this week I asked a question to the community if Firefox would have Double Digit Marketshare in 3 to 5 years.  Within a day I had received countless replies from the current CEO of Mozilla John Lilly to the Co-Founder Blake Ross.  It was a pretty “magical” experience to have people directly related to the product responding, but was even crazier was TechCrunch found the question and wrote a story about it…sadly not giving me credit :(

2.  Faithless

The new Faithless CD dropped yesterday titled “The Dance“.  It’s pretty terrible.  I’m really dissapointed how a group can make so many epic songs then release something as derivative as this.  Luckily the lead single is great.

3. We are finally mailing stats reports to user of the Apture Search Bar.
What is cool about this is delivered to our customers every week is a detailed report showing them pageviews, popular queries, share numbers and engagement provided from Apture.  We’ve gotten lots of praise and only one complaint…make it less wide :)
statsformaynewsletter

If you haven’t signed up your site for the Apture Search Bar what are you waiting for?

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