Sometimes, it just feels cheap. Sure, you’ve built a substantial audience through “Likes”. You’re maintaining consistent growth. You’re sharing content with your audience. You even get stray comments here and there.

So why do you feel hollow inside? For me, it’s the overwhelming sensation that we’re once again marketing through a one-way channel. But social media gave organizations a new lease on communications by creating a two-way channel—an open dialogue between the customer and the company. Why can’t we get anyone to talk back? Why can’t we encourage a useful, productive dialogue?

Because Facebook isn’t a very good community platform. The hype is misplaced. As community expert Richard Millington points out, people get angry when you question Facebook’s ability to organize your community. To be clear, what Millington and other marketers point out is that Facebook can be an effective way to promote original content. But it doesn’t fare well in creating a productive dialogue or fostering a real sense of community.

But wait: there’s more. And you may find some of it frightening.

• According to research performed by All Facebook and EdgeRank Checker, only 17 percent of your fans get your average post. What your fans see is based on whether or not they interact with your content. Unless you’re producing compelling posts, your fans won’t even see your brand.

• After you “Like” a page, how often do you visit it? Interacting with the content on your newsfeed doesn’t count. Many of your fans will never return to your brand page, giving you little control of the conversation.

• Even if you represent a large consumer brand and have high activity per post, you’ll have too many comments for fans to keep track of conversations. No valuable dialogue can come from this because there is no way to respond in a direct, organized fashion.

The findings highlight a key takeaway: marketers have very little control on Facebook. If you’re trying to organize and rally your community, Facebook appears to be a pretty weak medium.

Are you having a different experience?

“There’s a module for that.”

“That’s a theming thing.”

“That’s a dev thing.”

“I’ll commit that to core.”

“I would never hack core.”

“So I ran into Dries at DrupalCon. He said that my idea was good.”

“I’ve been working in Drupal since 4.7.”

“Can’t you just use a Block for that?”

“You should use Panels.”

“Features are good.”

“We should turn this into a distribution. Lots of people would use it.”

“I mean, that’s one way you could have done it. I would have written a module that did it much faster.”

“Did you try flushing caches?”

“OH MY GOD!! Webchick responded to my comment!!!”

“Did you look at the issue queue on drupal.org?”

“Have you heard about the Omega theme?”

“I know, Drupal does have bloated markup.”

“Yah, that’s the Drupal logo. It’s a drop or something.”

“I always avoid using Semantic Views.”

“Is Boost turned on?”

“No, Drupal is NOT exactly like WordPress.”

“I’m going to take a mysql dump.”

“Wait, I’m using the wrong tpl file. Sh*t.”

“How many modules have you contributed to?”

“Why is that div wrapped in a div, inside another div, inside another div?”

“I do everything from command line.”

So what are your favorites? Feel free to add your own in the comments — we’re taking this to DrupalCon!

100 Sessions (is just the beginning)

Final sessions have now been selected. There are over 100 sessions across 8 tracks.  This includes new tracks for

• Non-profit
• Government
• Education

in addition to:

• Community
• Commerce
• Mobile
• Design & User Experience
• Business & Strategy
• Coding and Development
• Site Building
• Core Conversations

I know, that list doesn’t necessarily race your heart. So let’s look at some session title examples like:

• The Story of Energy.gov: The Ins and Outs of Turning Energy-dot-Blah into Energy-dot-Awesome
• We the People and WhiteHouse.gov: Citizen Engagement Powered by Drupal
• Changing the Tires at 60 MPH: How Martha Stewart Living migrated to Drupal

Are you getting the idea? This is not just a tech conference. It’s a celebration and sharing of incredible achievement on an international scale.  There’s 100 of these mind-blowing sessions and many with even cuter titles!

Informal Gatherings Drive Knowledge Transfer

But wait, there’s more. Your speaking proposal didn’t get into the event? No problem.  DrupalCon continues non-stop for 3 days and some might think for 24 hours each day with informal gatherings, code sprints (don’t ask) and birds of a feather groups. The fun and the energy are endless.

Duo’s Drupal Juggernaut

Duonians (we Duo worker bees) can’t resist a party. That’s why nine of us are heading out to Denver to suck up some of that Drupal goodness. As a Silver Sponsor we will also be staffing an exhibit and talking about some of our most recent Drupal successes including:

• Littler Mendelson
• Episcopal Church
• Bloomberg Current
• Bracewell Giuliani
• VDIWare

We are specifically interested participating in Enterprise Drupal discussions related to mobile drupal websites, content migration, configuration management, Drush, maturity of Drupal 7, in-depth module discussions as well as tips and tricks we can share and learn.

Are you going to DrupalCon in Denver? What do you hope to learn?

I’ll assume you’re using Ubuntu as a server, since that’s what I use. If not, you should be able to find the required packages in your distribution of choice.

We’ll need the following packages. If installing postfix prompts for a type of server, choose “Internet with Smarthost” and set the smarthost to localhost.

apt-get install postfix
apt-get install libsasl2-2
apt-get install libsasl2-modules
apt-get install ca-certificates
apt-get install stunnel4


Next we’ll want to configure Postfix. Edit your /etc/postfix/main.cf file and set the following options:

smtpd_use_tls=yes
relayhost = [localhost]:2525
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_tls_CAfile = /etc/postfix/cacert.pem


For the next step, you’ll need the username and password hashes that Amazon provides you when you configure a new SMTP sending account. They’ll look something like this:

Now create the sasl_passwd file in /etc/postfix with the following format:

[localhost]:2525 AKIAI2BEJ7D7WJNUI5KA:AmA/OOL9/M6mLG1wiR5Tf/LK2YVgf1+XlJpMd/YOQvWv


chmod it to 0400 and run the following command to create the username database for postfix:

postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd


Next well create the postfix certificate. Just run this command:

cat /etc/ssl/certs/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem | sudo tee -a /etc/postfix/cacert.pem


So far, we’ve been largely setting up Postfix to use the much-more-standard STARTTLS negotiation. Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t support STARTTLS at this time. At such a time that Amazon does support STARTTLS, you’ll be able to change the strings “[localhost]:2525″ in main.cf and sasl_passwd to “email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587″; re-run postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd and disable the stunnel stuff that we’re about to do.

stunnel is a dangerous package. We’re going to configure it very specifically, and we’ll keep the 2525 port closed in Amazon’s firewall. There is a chance that someone could somehow disable stunnel, set up a “man-in-the-middle” proxy on your server on port 2525 and manage to get your Amazon SES username/password combo. In general, though, anyone with that level of control over your server already has access to that information in the sasl_passwd file we created earlier. This would be more of a concern if the server was ever going to use more than one login to SES.

First we have to enable stunnel. Because it’s a dangerous package it installs disabled by default. Edit /etc/defaults/stunnel4 and change the line that reads “ENABLED=0″ to “ENABLED=1″

Now we’ll create the actual tunnel. Make a file named /etc/stunnel/000-amazon_ses.conf and put the following lines in it:

[smtp-tls-wrapper]
accept = 2525
client = yes
connect = email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:465


Now you should be able to restart stunnel and postfix and send email. Note that your From: address on any outgoing mail still needs to be verified by Amazon before it can be used, and you’ll still be subject to all the same TOS agreements that you would when using their other interfaces.

I hope you’ve found this useful. You can find more information at the following links:

Zhanshan Dong posted how to make Postfix relay to Gmail’s SMTP server here. This is the basis for much of this post.

Amazon’s documentation for setting up stunnel to work with SES
]]> http://blog.duoconsulting.com/2012/01/30/using-amazons-ses-with-postfix-as-a-smarthost-forwarder/feed/ 2 http://blog.duoconsulting.com/2012/01/30/using-amazons-ses-with-postfix-as-a-smarthost-forwarder/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DuoConsultingBlog/~3/m7jZzU4AGIM/ http://blog.duoconsulting.com/2012/01/26/do-you-have-a-mobile-strategy/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:42:06 +0000 Kelly Tetterton http://blog.duoconsulting.com/?p=5414 If you’ve been reading our blog series thus far and reflecting on your own website, you’ve probably identified your mobile audience (and its rate of growth), as well as what you can do to improve your site to make it more usable for mobile visitors. So it’s time to get started, right?

Not so fast! Although you may have a good idea of what to change on your site, you probably want to frame it within the context of a larger mobile / digital strategy.

Strategy? We Don’t Need No Stinking Strategy!

If your business or organization is like most at this point, you probably have a full digital ecosystem in play: a desktop website, email marketing, social media presence (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) — and now a mobile site too. How are they working together? How should they be working together? Before you start tackling the individual elements of your mobile website and what you want it to do for you, you should consider how you want to leverage it within your larger digital ecosystem.

Content Is (Still) King

Your desktop website is compelling if it has compelling, useful, fresh content for users. The same will be true for your mobile site and any other digital presences you may have. But how is that content working for you? Some questions to consider:

• Is any of my content re-used across platforms? for example, are blog posts on my desktop site used to populate my Facebook page?
• Does my content drive leads? for example, are my LinkedIn posts meant to drive people back to my desktop website to sign up for newsletters?
• Is any of my content completely custom? for example, do I tweet about items that I don’t post anywhere else?
• Does each platform have a specific tone of voice, or is it consistent across all platforms? for example, are my blog posts professorial whereas my tweets are quirky?

You get the idea.

The reason for this exercise? you may determine that your mobile site needs to have different content than your main site, or it may need to be prioritized differently. Does your full corporate mission statement need to be on your mobile site? does it need to be there at all?

Before you start crafting big, bold buttons for your mobile site, think about how your content is going to work. Those choices will factor into why type of mobile website you should be thinking about — and that’s our next topic.

Next question:  What type of mobile site should I have?

LitReactor is a destination for writers to improve their craft; a haven for readers to geek out about books; and a platform to kickstart your writing goals.

Kirk and Dennis aren’t new to the world of online community. When they met prolific pop author Chuck Palahniuk back in 1999, they enjoyed the experience so much that they launched a fan site dedicated to the author. ChuckPalahniuk.net became the leading destination for all things Chuck and even received the blessing of the author himself.

As the site evolved to include community functionality, Kirk and Dennis tried to extend the conversation into related literary topics. But they met with a key challenge: the audience, trained to receive Chuck-related news, wasn’t receptive to the extended conversation. The need for a new destination birthed the concept behind LitReactor.

After designing and developing the site, it was time to market it. “Through Chuck.net, we already had an audience to tap into,” Kirk reminisces. “But a much larger community of writers existed beyond our reach, and we wanted to engage that audience before we launched LitReactor.”

In order to build a buzz, Kirk and Dennis came up with a plan that can be described in six steps.

1. Find a focused interest. After building an audience profile, the pair created a list of authors that their community would find most interesting. The list included prevalent contemporary authors like Bret Easton Ellis, Craig Clevenger and Chuck Palahniuk.

2. Brainstorm on valuable content. Because they built the community for writers, Kirk and Dennis decided to put together a free compendium of writing advice from relevant authors. They reached out to the authors on the list and gathered content from fifteen of them.

3. Choose a primary medium. The destination wasn’t ready for community members, so they decided that email represented a personal channel with which to distribute the writers’ advice.

4. Promote through other channels. Kirk leveraged other social media channels to get the word out. Neil Gaiman, one of the authors included in the list, tweeted about the content to one-and-a-half million followers.

5. Include a call-to-action. In order to download the compendium, LitReactor required viewers to sign up for the community’s email list. By the time the site launched, they had already built a mailing list of 5,000 people that they used to promote the community and its launch.

6. Make it timely. They launched the initiative just a few weeks before the site’s launch, ensuring they wouldn’t lose the attention of their mailing list.

The initiative helped kick-start the new literary site, which Kirk says has performed beyond expectations since it launched in October 2011.

Presenters include experienced professionals like Matt Moog (Viewpoints, Built In Chicago), Marc O’Brien (Acquia) and Duo CEO Michael Silverman. The seminars will cover topics around Drupal, design, online community and content migration, marketing and strategy.

Each session will take place in the morning (8:30-10:30 AM) at Duo’s 20 W. Kinzie St. office, just north of the river. Admission is free. The first two sessions of the @Duo Seminar Series are detailed below.

• Drupal Content Migration: A Story of Community (MARCH 28) – Matt Moog, founder of Viewpoints and Built in Chicago, shares insights on the process of moving his online community from Ning’s proprietary platform to Drupal. The seminar will focus discussion around the challenges of migrating content and the benefits of working with Drupal. 

• Drupal Powers the Media (APRIL 18) – Some of the biggest names in media have jumped into the world of Drupal—and Marc O’Brien, VP & general manager of social business software for Acquia, is stopping by to share their stories. Join us for a conversation about how Drupal could become the future of online community.

Subsequent sessions will take place on July 18, September 26 and October 30. They will include stories and best practices around content strategy & marketing, responsive design and online communities.

Looking for more details? Read more and sign up here.

On Sunday, at around 3:00pm, one of our server instances began to fail. We received alerts from both Amazon’s monitoring and our external monitoring, which is based on Nagios. When I tried connecting to the instance it was refusing SSH and HTTP connections. I logged into Amazon’s AWS console and tried to reboot the instance. This looked like it was successful, but the instance remained unreachable. The next step was to try stopping the instance and starting it again. For a non-EBS-based instance this would have wiped the data from the server. The server indicated it was stopping but it never changed to the “stopped” state. Now it’s time to move from troubleshooting to recovery.

First I launched a new instance using the same AMI as the original. The new instance comes up with a “Fresh” root volume that we have little use for since it doesn’t have any of our server configuration on it. I log in to that instance to verify that it’s up, then I stop the instance from the console and detach the volume that was created for it. Next I created a new volume from the last hourly snapshot of the troubled server and attach that to the new instance as /dev/sda1. Now when I start the instance again, it has all the data from the original server’s last hourly backup. I move the elastic IP over to the new instance and the sites on that server return to normal functionality.

Creating an EBS volume from a snapshot

The total time to bring up the new instance is around 15 minutes.

I recently attended a bidders meeting for those who sought to propose a website for a well-known brand. I had reviewed the prospects overwhelming 63-page detailed request for proposal (RFP). I had a few questions.

Just Make it Work

The RFP had one reference to mobile buried in its browser compatibility section. Clearly an afterthought unworthy of any strategic consideration. It read, in brief, “Provide a website that works with mobile device operating systems.” What, I asked, did the word “works” mean? The answer told me that this prospective client needed to be educated about mobile.

That is, Work Like a Rolls Royce

They said they were expecting a responsive design website.  Well a website that “works” on mobile devices could hardly be inferred to mean a responsive web design. “Works” could be as straightforward as a mobile style sheet. You know, “Look at my cute little website with tiny print on this small screen on my phone.” On the other hand responsive design utilizes style sheet techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, to deliver a quality experience to site visitors no matter what size their display.  I suppose that “works”, too.  But for a different budget and time requirement.

Good, Better, Best or Right?

Having a website that works in mobile can be a lot of different things. And while there is a good, better, best that comes as a price, not every website needs to choose the best mobile solution. Rather, it is important to choose the RIGHT mobile solution.  And that begins with education.

You’ve Come to the Right Place

We’ve committed ourselves to building the educational assets we believe our clients need to make the important decisions about mobile.  We prepared a white paper, Do you need a mobile website? We are in the middle of publishing a mobile tutorial blog post series, Will Mobile Work for Me? And we’ve got an inventory of mobile blog posts – including video from our content marketing conference – that covers a wealth of factors associated with mobile.

Questions?

We’re quite gung-ho on continuing to address the questions our clients and prospects have about the confusing and complicated world of mobile.  Tell us what you want to know in the comments and we’ll point you to the answer or create a meaningful response.

Reputation

One significant constraint on successful email delivery is reputation*. When you send email through an email service provider you are riding on its reputation on the internet. Well, not quite true or accurate but in the ball park. Read on.

Unqualified Email Lists

The lower cost email service providers are more accessible and attract more senders who have unqualified email lists. Overstating for emphasis, high volume spam at low cost through an email service provider. Recipients of email from unqualified email lists mark the email they receive as spam at a higher rate.  Email you send is lumped in a group with those sending unsolicited email.

IT = Email Guards

Email is rejected by the recipient based on parameters set by their internal email IT administrator. Even lack of agreement between the sender’s email address (you@myfirm.com) the address of the real sender (email.emailserviceprovider.com) can increase the likelihood your email won’t make it. Perhaps you can see the levels of complexity getting email to the inbox.

Even the highest rated email service providers may have senders who generate a bad reputation. However, they are also more likely to manage this problem upstream (clients with qualified email lists) and downstream (reputation management).

Email.MyLawFirm.com

The best email service providers will sell you the option to have your own domain (something like email.mylawfirm.com) from which your email will be sent by them. In this way you will not be riding on the reputation of the email service provider’s other clients but only your own.  If you send quality email and don’t get a lot of spam dings you email will improve its success making it into the inbox. At least it will address one of many issues associated with email deliverability.

*Geek Speak

* The technical aspect of “reputation”refers to a history that is associated with a specific IP address which is commonly known as a domain name. So “email.myfirm.com” would be associated with a “fresh” IP address with no prior history.