Google recently released an update to its display of content called Real-Time Search. At first I thought this would be a better experience than twitter search or facebook search, because its from the king of Search, Google. Unfortunately it has become apparent that this was more of a knee-jerk reaction to Bing’s Twitter Search announcement less than 50 days earlier.

We knew that Google and others were indexing the tweet stream earlier this year, but this is a game changer in how they have integrated their display of tweets with standard results. 

Real Time, the Achilles Search Heel

So what’s the big deal? This content from twitter, this real-time search content that Google is now displaying in it’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is all available elsewhere, so this is just another evolution in the concept of universal search. Right?

True, but as any SEO will tell you, those positions on page one, from 1-10 on the first SERP are highly coveted and can garner significant respect and authority. Be it right or wrong a searcher will more quickly refine their search query then click to page two. A searcher will also consider items on page one of a SERP to have authority or credibility.

Tweeple have credibility and deserve SERP right?

Perhaps some of the accounts on twitter deserve respect and authority, but Google has not indexed it accordingly. Some quick tests have gone on to prove that any (non-private) account gets indexed and can show up on page one of a Google SERP.  Bing keeps the twitter search separate in http://bing.com/twitter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Google and Bing indexing tweets, I’d love to see them improve on twitter search, but I like Bing’s approach better than Google. It allows me to say, I’m looking for real-time information that could be unqualified.

How to abuse Google’s Real-Time Search

It’s fairly simple actually, find a search that returns a real-time result in the SERP, namtrok, davenaylor, tiger woods, or Copenhagen Climate, and tweet with those keywords in it. You will see your tweet show up. Now envision this search for sesame street, and a pedophile tweeting something to the tune of “Hey kids want to see more sesame street? Call me at 555-111-2222, I’ll show you how.”

I like every parent of small children suddenly got totally creeped out.

Do you see the possibilities? Do you see the problems? Do you see the spam and liable issues?

Granted the search for Sesame Street does not currently display Google’s Real-Time feature, but who gets to choose which search does and which doesn’t? It’s only a matter of time before this weakness in Google’s SERPs is exploited. (I assume that anything trending or popular gets Real-Time function added, how long till we make Sesame Street trend on Twitter?)

Bing poised, Google Cracked?

I am a Google fan, from day one when they took down Altavista. However, The giants always fall, remember MySpace? or Lotus? How about Windows? (too early?)

No matter how much I love Google and dispise Microsoft, I have to admit, Bing is the best thing Microsoft has put out in years. The only thing Bing needs to improve it’s results set is more traffic. Yup, the crowd when it shifts to the next search platform will help that platform improve it’s relevance and results. If Google were to make a false step now and 10%, or 20% of it’s traffic move to Bing, plus the Micro-hoo deal. Bing could be poised to actually challenge the search giant.

Will Google let that happen? I don’t think so. But if they don’t see the failure of leaving Real-Time Search results in page one of the SERP then perhaps they are too high on their own ego?

Besides I think the usability and pure function of the Real-Time updates are flawed. I much prefer Bing or Twitter Search itself. But thats just me right?

Do you agree?

Do you see the flaws in Google’s Real-Time search? Share examples of searches you’d like to spam or be concerned about being spammed.

Today is an American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and while the foundations of this holiday are different, the current culture dictates that there be a large family gathering with overeating and a turkey involved. There is another more subtle tradition of listing the things a person is thankful for. This is my venue of choice for listing my 2009 thanksgiving “I’m thankful for…” list.

God’s grace, mercy, and forgiveness.

Frankly I rarely have my act together and yet God loves me. When I dwell on these two concepts I often am dumbfounded as to why He chooses me/us.

My wife.

She has had numerous struggles in the past two years, major let downs, major health issues, and through it all she has perservered. She is an encouragement to me in how no matter what happens she gets out of bed each day and makes it through the day. I love you babe.

My two kids (plus the third on the way).

In the last 3 years since having kids I have laughed, cried, sleptless, and played more than ever before. My life and heart would be empty with out them.

Google.

Yeah here is where I earn my nerd credentials. I’m a search engine marketing specalist. Without google I wouldn’t A. Have access to a tenth of the information that I do know. B. Have a cool job like I do now. And C. Have access to free tools like Gmail, google analytics, google docs, and many others. I’m a nerd and I’m thankful for Google

My team at work.

There have been tough times and they will cone again. But no where else have I worked where I am valued as much as with my current team. Also I’ve never been more proud of my coworkers as I am now. I love my job.

Twitter.

By far it it my network of choice. It has extended my reach, helped my clients improve their numbers and taught me many many new things.

My iPhone.

No other device has so radically changed every aspect of my life and how I communicate. I write, plan, research, socialize, and connect more now thanks to it.

Centos and Linux in general.

(I told you this is a nerds thankful list) no other OS combines security, stability, and openess quite like Cent does.

Living on a farm in the woods.

Farming has it’s many challenges, but with as much tech I have in my life it is still amazing to connect with Gods creation and see how plants grow and animals provide for us.

My socio-economic status.

We’re a one income middle class family. I love being able to afford family vacations while saving money by being a one car family and carpooling. There are many joys and humbling experiences that come with middle class life.

The ability to help people.

Everyday I find myself training/instructing/helping others from clients to friends to the local mechanic. I am so thankful to be able to give to others what has been given to me.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May you express thankfullness in things small and large everyday.

(I owe a thank you to my wife for the suggestion of a non-traditional thankful list.)

What is On Page SEO?

On Page SEO is a term used to describe the work done to change Page content (Titles, Headings, Alt text, internal link text, keyword density, etc) in order to affect position (page rank) in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). We’ve been working with quite a few of our clients and copywriters training them to have an eye for optimizing on-page content in light of SEO and keyword positioning.

It brings good success. But we have learned not to stop there.

Website Promotion

To boil it all down, Website promotion is efforts at garnering links, either through increased exposure, through the blogosphere, through social networks, or through standard linkbuilding.

No matter how you look at it Website Promotion can be a more powerful tool than on page SEO.

Link building case study

To prove a point, I took a domain that had only one published page, and on that page had 6 words and two images. There were no keywords, no alternate text on the images, no headings and the page title was very similar to the domain name.

To say that this page had no on page SEO is an understatement.

I choose a keyword for which this page did not rank, The domain, page title, the 6 words on the page nothing contained this keyword.

I created 8 brand new blogs, one post each, with different content on each post, but all linking to that page with the link text of my keyword. And it worked

Within one month The keyword-less (the none on-page SEO optimised page) ranked on page one, a couple of days later it was up to position 5 on page one.

Quoting Search Engine Watch’s Eric Enge: “Unlike on-page SEO, Web site promotion nearly always continues to offer good returns.” and “Every minute you spend tweaking (and re-tweaking) on-page factors is a minute you don’t spend on promoting the Web site” He says more in his post on Website promotion

We all know our normal latin characters. We know them world-wide because English is the primary trade language.

We also know that the Internet has been based on the latin character set. There has been a shift away from this to UTF-8 encoding. But there is now a larger shift. We’re approaching the 20th birthday of the Web, and for the first twenty years the web has been based on Latin-1 for domain names. This is about to change.

English is still the predominant language on the web but, this will not last for long. The Chinese are quickly becoming the dominant player online despite the Great Firewall of China.

And so I want you to read a post by Andy, which does great justice to the background of this change and the moumental affects if will have on the web as we know it today:

Even though, in the foreground, this change will make the Web seem much more universal to all people, in the background ICANN has implemented a huge translation workaround that needed to be tested for absolute safety. And when you’re taking on well over 100,000 potential characters that appear in URLs as opposed to the 30 or so which were in use before, you really need to take care.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in Seoul. “The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online — people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives.”

In two weeks, all countries will be able to apply for Internet extensions reflecting their name and using their own characters. It will be interesting to see what impact this has on domains, trademark specialists, and on the domains we know and love. It will also have an impact on search engines.

The expression “keywords in the URL” will now have a truly global meaning and affect the way we manage global sites. Clearly, someone just put their foot on the global gas pedal.

Read more of Andy’s post on the SEO impact of double-byte characters in domain names

The SEO impact for local searches outside of latin character regions will be huge. But Search Engines will have to change their index algorithms to keep up with this. I’m waiting and watching, this could be fun!

I implore you to investigate Twitter lists. A New feature rolled out by twitter last week. A quote from twitter’s own non-micro-blog:

“We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.”

I have to underscore that. There are great list strategies and great twitter lists being created and curated everyday. I’ve tried to list some lists and catoroize them to give some inspiration. There is no way to include the thousands of lists, nor the many different list making strategies, I’ve tried to cover the basics with links to more information.

From lists that geographically tie people:

• http://twitter.com/SleepoverRover/local-las-vegas
• http://twitter.com/SuperDu/grand-rapids
• http://twitter.com/bcbeatty/chicago
• http://twitter.com/BillHR/grandrapids
• http://twitter.com/keithprivette/minnesota-twitheads

To lists that focus on people’s content

• http://twitter.com/PRsarahevans/social-groups-tech-app
• http://twitter.com/SashaWolff/socialmediaawesomesauce
• http://twitter.com/mashable/social-media-links
• http://twitter.com/chucksense/comedy
• http://twitter.com/glossolaliac/musicality

To Lists that are employment focused

• http://twitter.com/muckrack/chicago-tribune
• http://twitter.com/namtrok/team-ddm
• http://twitter.com/imaclurg/pomegranate-studios
• http://twitter.com/VarejoVerdeWM/walmart
• http://twitter.com/blackfridayweb/major-retailers

Or the lists that could only fall into the category of Too Much Information?

• http://twitter.com/jimconnolly/jims-inner-circle
• http://twitter.com/califmom/nutz-n-slutz
• http://twitter.com/damselesque/people-i-don-t-sleep-with
• http://twitter.com/lafix/guns-for-hire

Could The geographically focused lists fall into the category of TMI if a person doesn’t give their location away in their twitter account? Therein lies a significant problem with the list functionality: You are defined by what people list you as. Could someone add your account to a liars-cheats-conartists list? Could they be sued for defamation?

Possible Twitter List Strategies

No matter how you develop your lists, There are Etiquette and Strategies that are already emerging. As well as third party app support and integration for twitter lists.  But to me the most benefit of this new feature is the metrics this will enable.

Before twitter lists, one had to look at three numbers and 10 tweets to determine if an account was real and or worth their follow. Now we have a 4th number, listed.

For example, look at a famous twitteratti: Sarah Evans, She follows > 9,000 people and has 31,000 followers. She has posted 14,000 tweets. On these three numbers I am able to draw a few conclusions

• She either stopped following people in return, or she only follows a select few
• She is somehow famous in twitter, or ran a competition to get followers
• She posts a lot of content.

Now we add the list number; She has been listed over 500 times. This means that not only do people follow her for unknown reasons but now they specifically list her and essentially tell you why they list her. By glancing through the lists she is on a person can know what kind of content they will receive from her.

• marketing
• blogging
• social media
• chicago
• publicrelations
• must follow

Looking through these lists it also tells me what she is not

• photographer
• funny/humor
• west coast
• self promoter
• MLM entrepreneur

Twitter lists are a very powerful tool. It is your choice to use this power for good or for evil. I predict good will triumph in the long run but there will be evil shortly.

So what’s your Twitter List Strategy? Do you desire to be listed 100 times? Do you desire to gain respect and following by creating the most beneficial lists? A new fame could come from curating the best lists.

Thank you Flickr user xjy

Are you kidding me? He’s going to be just like one of those other SEO guys who blog about blogging or about blog content?

Yes, and No.

I have been struggling lately with this concept and so I’m going write my struggles and invite you into a process/growth/learning/development I’m going through.

Content is King

If you haven’t heard it before, please search on the terms content and king. You will find a wealth of bloggers discussing how it’s about the content you put out there.

It’s true: A Twitter profile, a YouTube channel, a Facebook fan page, a blog, these are all methods of putting content out there. So to be social, to take advantage of the new marketing style, one has to have content.

I thought it was about Listening or Listenomics

If content is king, then perhaps listening is queen? Or is it Duke? I never did understand royalty.

The long abused metaphor of the social web as a cocktail party helps us understand this relationship. Even the most popular person at a cocktail party will lose people’s attention if they only talk and do not listen. No matter what topic they talk about. This is not a speech, a monologue or a diatribe. This is being social.

So yes, spend time listening –a lot of time. But the converse is true. A wallflower at the cocktail party is not going to be interesting nor will he sell anyone on his next business idea. Not until he opens his mouth and begins to talk, aka provides content.

Produce Content and Listen

It’s a two way street, dialogue, etc. These all point to the fact that we were given ears and mouths. So please when approaching social media consider it a two-way media. You will be producing content and consuming content (also called listening).

What Content to Produce?

This is where I struggle.

Ad agencies in the past have created ads about their products, like a car driving on some nice street around a corner – with a tight shot of the wheel while talking about control. And this is the content they and the car companies produced. Focused on them, on their product, on its benefits.

That doesn’t work anymore. Granted these are targeted to a segment of the buying population, but the costs and the ROI on traditional messaging is not effective or beneficial anymore.

Take any statistic you want, people trust recommendations and referrals (Word of Mouth) over any advertisement.

Most of marketing is about selling a product or service. That’s the ultimate goal. So we use advertisements (traditional and non-traditional) to get the product or service sold.

Yet hearing from your company about your product is not going to make me talk about it. I’m not going to rave at how well you presented me with the fact that you think you are better than your competition.

What will get me talking about you?

So if it’s not product or service-focused content, is it industry focused?

Take the car example: If Ford were to talk to me about the process of launching a new product or the process of designing batteries or the process of choosing how to gear their new Fiesta for the American market, would I care? Would I care enough to talk about it?

What if they gave me a free car? Would I, an average-joe-american, rave about the car? Or about having a free car?

Is Word of Mouth Marketing all about Gimmicks?

Some call it viral marketing, others call it guerilla marketing. But, is that the only way to produce content that will attract attention?

Is it about being Edgy?

Mashable recently covered a law firm who tried an edgy marketing piece. Is that the only way to get attention in the 21st century, borderline lying?

I don’t know.

So what do I tell my client? How do they use the social web to sell more of their products or services?

In my opinion, my client needs to:

• Listen
• Provide a great product
• Provide great customer service
• Answer potential customer’s needs with content
• Produce remarkable content
• Produce highly relevant, specifically targeted content

It’s just that simple.

The Furniture City Sets the Table for the World of Art 2

Yeah, I’m a believer. I believe that Art is cool, but I’m not an artist. I’m a Michigan Citizen from a great town called Grand Rapids, The “Furniture City”. Starting on Wednesday September 23 2009 there will be a new competition called ArtPrize in town and I am loving the buzz and activity it is creating.

Typically I blog about social media, or strategy, or tactics like twitter and facebook, but this is different. This is about integrating art and social media, about using the new tools to reflect what we do in real life, faster and more efficiently. The organizers of Artprize originally claimed it was going to be an American-Idol-Style voting, what I didn’t realize was how much they were planning on leveraging Social Media. When I realized that the artists basically had to earn their votes in what ever means they could I saw the potential for social media. So that’s when I got involved. I am passionate about social media and business, I believe that all businesses could improve with the correct usage of social media. Just like these artists who are vying for a vote could get more votes with the correct usage of social media. – more on that here: micro blog on artprize

I wanted to write something about ArtPrize, to show why I care, and why you – those who care about social media and business – should care about ArtPrize. This is my attempt and showing why you should care.

1. 1200+

   Around 1262 Artists who submitted artwork for this competition. Only 10 people will win money from ArtPrize; there will be over 1200 losers. With those odds there has to be something more than just the money here. Why would artists submit to inevitable failure? Yes, they have a 10 in 1262 chance of winning ( Less than 1%) But they have a 99.3% chance of failing. I believe its about so much more than the money, In fact, I’ll go on record saying there are 1262 different reasons.

   Oh yeah and if you want to see all of the 1262 entries in the first week of voting you will have to see 180 new pieces every day.

2. Creative use of space around us

   Between the “We’re all connected 2.0” and the “Setting the Table” entries I like how the space we see every day is now being occupied by something to react to. Like it or hate it, the art is better than the blank wall.

3. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd

   I have a client visiting our office this week. I told him about artprize and how he should participate while he is here. The more positive things happen in and around our city the more there is to tell people about our city.

   Plus, take a walk downtown this week, you will see significantly more people here than normal. It already started yesterday, on a Sunday no less.

4. Art versus Christianity

   Oftentimes the western church, which is well represented in this town, doesn’t appreciate art, therefore life here is more about practicality than about beauty. I fall into this habit way too often. Artprize has however brought a new appreciation for art, and its definition to our community.

5. Is it about you or me?

   In general this world is full of people concerned about themselves. Believe it or not, the first week of this competition feeds the ego of everyone in town. It’s about what I think is art, It’s about what I like and don’t like. It’s about whom I know and who knows me. It’s about talking to (I) on social media. That is how votes will be earned. Stroke those egos artists and you may go places.

6. SMS

   Say what? Most people in the US don’t seem to know how to use their cell phone other than to call, unless they are on a smartphone and can do email/websurfing. What I’m getting at here is commonly called texting. there are a couple of ways to vote for artwork: online, or via a mobile device. The majority of artists have displayed the code you need to text in order to vote for their artwork. Bring on user education! I’ve heard some other plans for local organizations to use sms. To them I say “bring it”!

7. Local and International

   At the same time?  Local friends who live, work and essentially model the starving artists mentality in and around Grand Rapids, are on an equal playing field with those who are traveling here from Sweden or Denmark. Come on medium sized town USA, let’s show the world what we can do and call it Art.

   Do you want to see a local win? Or a “foreigner”?

8. Treasure Hunt

   Try this: Go downtown, take the bus or something. Then walk, see if you can find all the artwork for artprize. I bet  two things:

   • You can’t find em all!
   • You’ll find permanent installs of art that you didn’t know were there. (If you go before they are labeled)

   Go on, go map-less. It’s a great adventure especially before the competition begins.

9. Event art

   When I think of Art I used to think of things you can hang in a museum. But then I started working for a creative firm and found many cool things in art which occur in time and space. Not just space. Thanks to event art, like Rob Bliss’ Artprize entry, art is no longer static in my mind. This is why I am looking forward to the events that occur in time and space, not just space.

10. Social media and art

    Yes it does all come back to Social Media with me. This contest is really about popularity and how well you can leverage your networks. Don’t get me wrong, location and the artwork count too. But if you have over 1500 people you are connected to on a social network, and you can get them to vote for you plus a percentage ask their networks to vote for you… well then you have a leg up on someone who doesn’t have that large of a network. The most popular person has to have a good art piece to win. But without popularity I doubt that artist would win.

    I have seen some really great artwork and without knowing the story behind it I probably won’t vote for it.

    If you use social media to get your story heard then perhaps I might be more inclined to vote for it. Most art is communicating a message, But I’m terrible at deciphering it, so help me out, tell it to me via social media.

For those of us using Social Media for Business we have a lot to learn from this event. Watch, consume, read, vote. After it’s all done perhaps we’ll know how to leverage social media for our business in a more authentic way. Lessons will be learned.

For those of you who follow me due to my social media strategy, this is a little break from the norm. I am a nerd and I used a lot of resources to develop this script, so in an effort to give back to the community I’m gonna nerd out for a post.

The Problem with ISO-8859-1 aka Latin1

I am not an expert in character encoding, so I’ll break it down in human terms. Latin1 cannot hold as many characters as UTF8. This becomes a problem when you have encoding from applications such as Microsoft Word, or different languages. UTF8 on the other hand can store everything latin1 can and a whole lot more. As an example, and to learn more about how to make your websites UTF-8 compatible, see Geir Berset’s Mother of all UTF-8 Check lists.

Why not just convert to UTF8 from Latin1

Well, that’s the goal, but the problem is there are a ton of variables in this situation if you couldn’t tell from that checklist above, if you get even one messed up or multiple settings messed up you might (or might not) have a problem. IT gets more complex as you can store UTF8 encoded characters into a latin1 database. (Don’t ask me how, but we did – often!)

After scouring the interwebs for things such as mysql convert latin1 to utf8, mysql convert latin1 to utf8 iconv, and bash convert latin1 to utf8 I was left to believe that I was out of luck. Quite a few people suggested that they preformed some of the latin1 to utf-8 conversion steps needed but then spent 60 or more hours cleaning up the mess. This would not have been acceptable to me, and really not feasible in our situation.

The Problem: Our Setup or Why We’re still on Latin1

We’re a small hosting company, we have over 200 sites on our infrastructure; some code we control, but half or more is legacy code which needs to run but we don’t control. We have over 100 databases on our mysql server. We were also running an older version of Apache and PHP. In an effort to bring us out of the stone ages into a more compliant system we decided to move it to a current version of Apache, PHP and mysql. Fortunately I can do this is stages, but because I have to do it in stages there is no option to shut down the site, convert all the settings, the data, the code and then turn the server back on, check verify and clean. I would have to do that 200 times. That’s just not feasible. I’ll focus on the mysql portion of this conversion for now, because I found the help out there to be lacking. The rest of the conversion information is easily found online.

I made a separate environment for testing and I tried and tried the lessons I learned from the inter-searches and could not get the right mix. Mostly because I had UTF-8 characters stored in the Latin1 (ISO 8859 1) encoding.

Mysqldump, Iconv

Many sources suggest taking a mysqldump (not what you are thinking!) and then use the linux command iconv to convert the encoding of the dump to UTF8.

Lots of problems occurred here. What I didn’t know is that mysqldump is a client, and thereby has a character set that it requests from mysql. Mysql in it’s genius-ness can convert data to whatever format the client requests. So the UTF8 characters in the db were assumed to be latin1, and the encoding was lost when iconv tried to convert it.

Did you miss it? I did to. But another hint is that mysql itself can preform data encoding conversions. No matter what the data is in the table/database you can request it in a different format and mysql will do the heavy lifting of converting it. This means we don’t need iconv or any other conversion tool.

Once I learned this and with trial and error, and a bit of luck I found a 5 step method that works every time on our tables. It is a 5 step method, but it feels like a dance, kinda like the hokey pokey. Do this do that do this again and it works.

Five Step Mysql Latin1 Encoding to UTF8 Encoding Script Explained

1. Mysqldump, Force it to be UTF8

Grab the data from mysql and force it to be encoded as UTF8. One might assume this makes it all UTF8 and you simple import it, sorry charlie! We still have 4 steps to go. The Conversion engine gets tricked in this step I think. Since this is copied from a bash script you will see that I use variables, you’ll see the whole script in a minute, but hopefully you can understand this.

mysqldump -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} -a -c -e --add-drop-table --default-character-set=utf8 ${DB} ${DBTABLE} > $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE

The key is the

--default-character-set=utf8

2. Lie to Mysql; Tell Mysql the Data is Latin1

Inside the dump file there are two settings which tell the mysql server upon import that this is utf8 encoded. One says this is UTF8 data coming in and the other says this was pulled from utf8 data. We need to change one of those to say latin1. Reason? The Mysql conversion system saw that there were UTF8 characters in the table and then didn’t convert the data in step 1. This way mysql will convert the characters on import.

sed -i 's/utf8/latin1/g' $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE

If you don’t know sed, then you don’t know linux. Sed is a line editor which is doing a search and replace inline. Every instance of utf8 will be replaced with latin1 (the other instance of utf8 in the dump is actually utf-8 so it only replaces one.)

3. Import the Mysql Data

This is what hung me up before, once I do the above steps and then re-import the data I assumed that mysql’s conversion engine would put it into the table correctly. But it never worked. Stay tuned for Step 4, the magic.

mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} ${DB} < $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE

4. Mysqldump do not Specify UTF-8 or Latin1

The magic happens here. Until this point we still have two forms of encoded data, but now on export we have one, and it’ll clean up really nicely. No special magic to this command, just take a dump.

mysqldump -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} -a -c -e --add-drop-table ${DB} ${DBTABLE} > $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE

5. Import Mysql Data to a UTF-8 Environment

Again, nothing special here, except now that we have clean data in the file we need to push it to the server.

mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} ${DB} < $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE

viola, oh but then there is the clean up of Altering the table character set and the collation.

ALTER TABLE $DBTABLE CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

The Full Latin1 to UTF8 Bash Script

Feel free to use this script. You will need to tweak it to your server settings. Let me know in the comments if you have used this.

#!/bin/bash
# Use this to convert a table from latin1 encoding to utf8 enconding
# Written by paul@paulkortman.com see more here: http://paulkortman.com/2009/07/24/mysql-latin1-t…tf8-conversion/
 
# MySQL Hostname
DBHOST='localhost'
 
# MySQL Username
DBUSER='root'
 
# MySQL Password
DBPASSWD='(yeah right, get your own password)'
 
# temp file location
TEMPFILELOC='/tmp/'
# temp file name
TEMPFILE='tempfile.txt'
 
#Verify the Arguments
if [ $# -ne 2 ];
then
echo "USAGE: mysqlconvertutf8.sh Database Table"
exit 1
fi
#Grab the Args
# MySQL Database
DB=$1
# MySQL Database Table
DBTABLE=$2
 
#Alter Command
ALTERCMD="ALTER TABLE $DBTABLE CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;"
 
#meat of the script
#Grab data force UTF8
mysqldump -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} -a -c -e --add-drop-table --default-character-set=utf8 ${DB} ${DBTABLE} > $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
#change it to think its latin1
sed -i 's/utf8/latin1/g' $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
#import new data
mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} ${DB} < $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE #Export, without forcing char set mysqldump -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} -a -c -e --add-drop-table ${DB} ${DBTABLE} > $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
#import final data
mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} ${DB} < $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE #Data is converted now need to change table definitions. echo $ALTERCMD > $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
mysql -u${DBUSER} -p${DBPASSWD} -h${DBHOST} ${DB} < $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
 
#Cleanup after yourself, delete the tempfile
[ -e $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE ]; rm -f $TEMPFILELOC$TEMPFILE
 
exit 0

To use this script follow these steps

1. Copy this code,
2. use vi (is there anything else??) to create paste into a file called mysqlconvertutf8.sh
3. run the command chmod +x mysqlconvertutf8.sh
4. run the command mysqlconvertutf8.sh databasename tablename  (you have to change the last two to be your database, and your table names!)

Try this video on for size. It is how I try to explain why social media is important to your brand. Anything Social about your brand (on or offline) is important to sales. But don’t take my word for it:

Policies: The Blame Game?

I recently asked for help in Drafting up some example Social Media Policy and Strategy Documents, I have had a number of responses both on twitter and offline.

I’d like to highlight a couple of those today regarding Social Media Policy.

Social Media Policy – aka CYA

Yes that is what we’re trying to do when we call the lawyers and revamp our policy documents (or generate new ones). We’re trying to mitigate risk. What happens if Employee Joe tweets that he hates his client? Or what happens if Employee Susan posts drunk pictures of staff on facebook and tags them? What do we allow? What can we control?

I like how some of the topics have been covered by Hillary Danni Davis in Social Media Best Practices – Legal Considerations Specifically,

“Banning employees from social networking and social media sites is both ineffective because of mobile devices, and limits knowledge that can be gleaned from these sites. The key to minimizing risk is ensuring employees understand the policies for an organization.”

If you are looking for an example of policy that goes to far, consider Mashable’s opinion of the AP’s policy. The policy I recommend to adopt while dependent upon the regulations in your industry is simply reflective of your other forms of communication.

Do Current Policies Address Social Media?

Re read them, up date them, verify with a lawyer that they are safe.

Social Media policy could be as simple as including it explicitly (instead of implicitly) where you mention that all employees should mind their Ps and Qs in all forms of written communication. (You do have a policy about email right!?)

An Opportunity to Train

An owner of a small business in my neighborhood conveyed his opinion to me the other day, if someone from his organization were to tweet (or communicate) something that he didn’t feel was in line with their message, or their brand, or appropriate for their business he would view that as an opportunity for him to further train that employee. Perhaps they don’t get the brand/message? Perhaps they didn’t see what harm they could have caused. He would consider that a failure on his part in communication rather than a failure on his part in drafting a policy.

Granted this “trust and train” (or train and trust) method will not work with a large organization, but perhaps we have some lessons to learn from this. Did you hire employees whom you are proud of? Are you communicating/training them about your brand/policy/messaging enough so no matter what the medium (drinking with friends, meeting with clients, or riding the elevator) they will convey the image/brand/message you want for your business?

For those of you that want a concrete example (template etc.) I’m still working on that! Until then I’ll point you to this quality post: 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy (including an example!)

What policy examples have you seen? What has been good? Or bad? Does your office have a policy that limits what you can say in social media? (perhaps you can’t even comment about that!)