As a PhD or graduate student, gifts are really nice to get once in a while. While some may think the best gift for a grad student is cash (my wallet is so lonely!), the truth is that money isn’t exactly memorable. Here is 2021’s list of grad student gift ideas that I’d recommend. I have personally used most of them and the rest have come on recommendation from other grad student friends.

1. Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

($10) – Because grad school is hilarious as long as you don’t think too much about it.

2. Rocketbook Reusable Notebook

($25-35) – For grad students who like taking written notes, but are also into paper conservation, Rocketbook allows you to take notes with a pen, take a photo with the Rocketbook app (sending them to the cloud), then wipe the page clean with a wet cloth and start fresh. Having too many paper notebooks makes me wish I had used something like this from the beginning.

3. Logitech R800 Presentation Remote

($45-55) – Masters & PhD programs are really presentation-heavy so it’s good to have your own reliable remote. Admittedly, I’m a bit fanatical about the R800 (I made a fan page). I keep it in my bag at all times and it has “rescued” nearly a dozen student and professor presentations. It has a green laser, vibrating timer, and 100-foot range so you can walk around the room.

4. Philips SmartSleep Wake-up Light 

($40-55) – This is no ordinary alarm clock. This “dawn simulator” gradually lights up a room so that you feel like you’re waking up to a natural sunrise. It really does make a huge difference in quality of sleep, especially during darker months (as in winter, not thesis-writing). I know a couple of people who are fanatical about these.

5. The New York Times: 36 Hours 

($25-$35) – The book is a beautifully illustrated guide to 150 weekend destinations in the United States and Canada. It has maps and practical itineraries for any grad student who needs to get out and explore (I pull it out when I visit a new city for a conference). The 36 Hours World edition is on my wish list.

6. Hexagon Rotating Timer

($15-$20) – I notice a lot of PhD students get themselves through mini sprints of work by using a timer system. This is one of the coolest timers I’ve seen (in multiple colors) — I just flip the timer to the number of minutes I want in my countdown and it starts. I love the silent mode with a flashing light instead of noise (useful in a shared office with other grad students).

7. One Line a Day 5-Year Journal

($10-15) – A typical PhD program lasts 4-6 years, so having an easy way to record a single line from every day of that up and down journey is pretty satisfying (and some days, a line is truly all you’ll have time and energy for). It’s also fun to see what you wrote on the same day the previous year. My wife loves hers.

8. Weighted Blanket

($30+) Studies suggest that a weighted blanket can improve sleep among those who need it most, like insomniacs and college students with anxiety (they still need to study grad students). The cost of weighted blankets has dropped with the increasing interest and number of options, so I won’t recommend one in particular, but I would aim for at least 12 lbs or more. Wife loves hers.

9. Tile Slim

($20-30) – Tile’s newest credit card-sized Slim means that if you misplace your purse or wallet, just use the Tile app to ring your Tile device (or see the location it was last spotted). Misplace your phone? Tile Slim has a button you can press twice to ring it. 3-year battery life and affordable price make this a nice time-saver and worry-reducer for any grad student.

10. Aromatherapy Diffuser

($25+) – Some grad students and PhD friends just need a little relaxation and focus. With a diffuser and some scented oil, you’ll get quietly hydrated pleasant aromas for as long as you need. Most diffusers probably function similarly, but I personally like the minimalist look of this one.

11. PhD Comics

($10-15) Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics) is the quintessential comic book for grad students and comes in multiple volumes (sample the latest here).

Classic Grad School Books

A few books are classic resources worth owning and using both during and after a graduate program:

• How to Write a Lot ($10-15)
• The Craft of Research ($10-15)
• They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing ($10-20)
• A Manual for Writers ($10-15)

See there! A grad student gift doesn’t have to be complicated, whether it’s for Christmas, birthday, or a special occasion. Just relevant and thoughtful. And as you can see, some of the best masters and PhD gift ideas aren’t even expensive. I think the big key to selecting a gift for a graduate student is to pick something that:

1. They wouldn’t normally buy for themselves.
2. Fits with their current unique life stage and needs.
3. Doesn’t remind them of how miserable they are as a poor college student with an uncertain future trying to scrape out a lowly existence while functioning on minimal sleep, maximum stress and trying not to go insane in the process of reading, writing, researching, etc. (OK, it’s not nearly that bad)

The author may receive a small affiliate payment for products purchased through links above.

Original source: 2021 Best Gifts for Graduate Students (From a Grad Student)

Has more downtime given you the urge to upskill? Many companies have generously provided free short-term access to their tools, platforms, and previously paid instructional materials to help students and educators alike deal with the sudden whiplash of rapidly moving everything online during the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) spread.

For digital marketers looking to take full advantage of this unique window of access, here are some options for free training for professionals and students that have been generously provided during the quarantine/online-only period. It includes everything from digital marketing to photography to coding and design. Thank you to the many generous companies for providing this access.

• Moz Academy (free access through May 31) – In-depth SEO training on a variety of topics by some of the most respected in the industry.
• Skillshare (2 free months of Premium access) – Lots of courses for a variety of topics and tools, including many in digital marketing. Want to learn all of the Adobe design products? Learn Shopify site so you can sell stuff on your own site? Learn how to do affiliate marketing or consulting? It’s all there.
• BlitzMetrics (month of free training & community access) – Not exactly sure what’s in this, but based on what I know, I think it’s a lot of deep Facebook ad training.
• IBM Enterprise Design Thinking (free access) – Courses and toolkit activities to learn design thinking from some of the best.
• Ahrefs (free course) – Free access to their Blogging for Business course.
• DigitalMarketer.com Lab Plus (free access through the end of March) – Variety of courses and certifications on digital marketing topics; appears more hands-on.
• Harmon Brothers 14-Day Script Challenge (free 30-day access) – This company has made a lot of viral product commercials (Purple mattresses, Squatty Potty, Poo-pourri, etc), so this is a crash course in how to do it.
• Nikon School (free photography courses during April) – This set of 10 photography courses covers fundamentals and some advanced topics useful to any marketer-creator.
• Pluralsight (free access to all courses during April) – Very high quality technical training plus plenty of technical skill-building for creatives.
• Codecademy (free access through the end of the school year) – While not marketing training specifically, you might like to learn some code, which is often used in digital marketing, especially HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL.

And for students, don’t forget to check with your school about Adobe Creative Cloud access, which Adobe is giving to students of subscribing institutions for 2 months to assist with continuity in class projects.

Original source: Free Skill Training for Digital Marketers in Quarantine

Facebook just rolled out 5 new “Reactions” to complement the platform’s ubiquitous “Like” button: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. Unfortunately, “Troubled” isn’t among them to capture my initial reaction to the new features.

So what’s wrong with more choice? After all, “Like” doesn’t even begin to capture our full range of emotions, so surely this gets us closer to reality, right?

I won’t argue with that part. In fact, the other problem with “Like” is that it, to this point, has represented the only form of social currency on Facebook. You have to post something “Like-able” in order to score points. People naturally filter themselves in public, but “Like” means that people filter themselves further by misrepresenting their range of personal experiences as mostly positive. It’s no surprise then that Facebook use has been tied to a number of negative mental health outcomes as people compare their own realities to the highlights of others (the article I linked to was co-written by an ASU colleague of mine who happened to work at Facebook for a bit).

So will expanding the reaction options lessen the negative outcomes tied to the “Like” button? Facebook wouldn’t have made such a big change affecting more than a billion users without a lot of testing and forethought, right? Of course not. You just have to remember that Facebook is a publicly traded advertising platform, not a public health service. Facebook is not optimizing for global wellness. They are optimizing for engagement to drive and increase ad revenue, to maximize shareholder returns. Your interests and Facebook’s interests aren’t all that aligned.

With that said, I’ll describe a few of what I think are some likely outcomes from this new set of reactions:

• More Facebook engagement. Those who wouldn’t have reacted at all to something now have a way to do so. Those who wouldn’t have posted something negative now have a way to generate social currency with the equivalent of a “Like.”
• Faster usage. Emoticons give people an easy-out, emotionally. Sometimes they express what words can’t. But here, I think they’ll just replace words and replace time spent thinking about what words to say. Less time spent reacting to content will increase the amount of things you react to rather than decrease the amount of time you use Facebook.
• More polarizing content. With new social currency driving behavior, you know that more users will post content to optimize for that currency by tapping into the emotions of the new reactions. All of a sudden, there’s more incentive to share the inflammatory, the heartbreaking, etc. This may mean that users and page owners start sharing a broader mixture of content, since they’ll have more to draw from in order to keep engagement high. But this mixture will be high on the emotional intensity scale. The “clickbait” tactics use to create “surprise and delight” stories will now be used for “shock and horror” and other exciting combos.
• Less feedback. When people aren’t forced to articulate their reactions in the form of words, then content producers can’t really get a true sense of the emotions they are producing. I think of the range of verbalized responses that can come from a good joke posted on Facebook. But now a lot more of that verbalization gets funneled into a large bucket called “Haha.” This introduces a lot more friction into the feedback loop, making it harder for a comedian, for example, to tell just how much people liked a joke. Those who would have clicked “Like” now click “Haha” and those who would have commented now click “Haha” too, so it makes it much harder to discriminate across the range of genuine reactions because they all get lumped together in a single click.
• Less empathy. This returns to the theme of the easy-out emoticon. I think there’s something healthy and worthwhile about having to process negative or difficult material — the kind that can’t be emotionally resolved with a “Like” button. When you remove the need to process by funneling people into simple emotional reaction buttons, you remove the same processing that produces genuine empathy toward others. I wonder whether some offline relationships and interactions may become more shallow over time as a result.
• Less action. The new reaction buttons enable new varieties of virtual “slacktivism.” Just as showing “token support” online for a cause alleviates peoples’ motivation to do something tangible like donate time or money, I fear that showing “token sympathy” for someone by way of a button click will have the same consequence. There will be cases in which someone who might have otherwise offered to bring a meal to a sick friend decides instead that their offering of a “Sad” click is supportive enough. I think Facebook cultivates a form of emotional entropy that leads people away from “doing,” not toward it.

So while I see a lot of broad support for the new forms of expression, I am also a little concerned about the implications over the long term. For me, the gains aren’t worth the offsetting damage to emotional growth and human connection. I want to struggle and grapple with how to respond (verbally or substantively) to anything that can’t simply be “Liked.” If reactions come easy, they aren’t worth much, and neither are the stories and people behind them.

Original source: Why I WON’T Be Using Facebook’s New Reaction Buttons

Image credit

For many of us who have a “desk job,” sitting is life. I grew up convinced that the whole point of going to college was so I could get a job that lets me sit all day instead of work in a coal mine and get black lung. You know what I’m talking about.

Maybe you’ve got a nice mahogany desk with a Herman Miller Aeron chair. I sit in a small gray cubicle on an old duct-taped chair (but it’s nice black duct tape, so I’ve got that going for me). An occasional break or meeting, but otherwise, you’re chair-bound as your puny muscles slowly atrophy.

You’re not office warrior. You’re office schlub.

Is that what you want?

I’ve been testing out a couple of things that I think you should add to your office warrior arsenal, assuming you don’t want to be “office schlub.”

1. Watch and do these ridiculously easy, just slightly awkward, exercises to improve your posture. (You’ll thank me later.)
2. Get a Furinno A6.

The Furinno A6 is a sturdy adjustable laptop stand for working out of the chair and in the zone.

I’ve been excited by the promise of healthier office work since I first heard about things like the TrekDesk (and let’s not forget the hamster wheel desk).

But not everybody has the means or the ambition for one of these. Luckily, the Furinno is a commitment-light solution that falls nicely between high-end motorized desks and the precarious stack of outdated statistics books my PhD student friend uses.

With 3 adjustable hinge points, I can decide just how high I want it to sit or I can collapse it for easy storage.

Performance Review

After using the Furinno A6 for a week, I’ve reached a couple of conclusions:

• Standing work is an adjustment. It won’t feel very intuitive at first to be on your feet like this. I found it threw my focus off a little bit initially. But with repeated usage, that comfort has been replaced with motivation. Physically working a little bit for my work has made that work more focused and deliberate. It’s a feeling I enjoy.
• The A6 is really capable. It does what it needs to–disappear into the background. When you’re working, you don’t want your attention drawn to the stability of what you’re working on, like a wobbly chair. The A6 is surprisingly stable, given its lightweight aluminum body. Even when I leaned into the keyboard a little, I never had to worry. Granted, it’s no table, but it is solid for all types of computer work. You can also get side attachments for a mouse if that’s your style.
• The A6 is a great addition to my work toolset. I love working with it! I can’t say it will be a permanent piece of every workday because (1) standing work is fatiguing, and (2) you’re out of luck if you need a multi-monitor setup (unless you’ve got something else sturdy to prop up a monitor). But I’m excited to try out other configurations for working or even just having better posture by adding some elevation to my sitting work.

So definitely check out Furinno if you’d like to add some variety to your work and inject some healthier habits. The A6 comes in multiple colors, and there are other models like the X7 that come with a cooling fan.

Just because you’re not working in a coal mine doesn’t mean you should kill yourself sitting. So do something about it.

See more Furinno A6 colors and reviews on Amazon.com

Disclaimer: Furinno provided the model for this review, with no additional influence or compensation.

Original source: Get Your Desk Job Groove Back with the Awesome Furinno A6 [Review]

When our girls both wanted to be mermaids last year, my wife sewed them each sequined mermaid tails in their colors of choice. We hoped these would be multi-year Halloween costumes, but our little 3-year-old, Charlotte, had other ideas this year.

“I’m going be a fairy panda bear!”
“Do you mean a furry panda bear?”
“No, mom. A fairy panda bear.”

Points for creativity, kid, but don’t count on your mom sewing you a fairy panda bear costume in 2 weeks. We’ll get you fairy wings from the nearest store and some black paint on the nose if you’re really adamant about the panda part.

I jokingly tweeted about her innovative costume mashup and drove to work.

When I checked Twitter after lunch, I immediately knew something was up, seeing a mountain of replies, retweets, and “favorites”—the kind of volume never before seen around these parts. I discovered why. Amazon’s main Twitter account had retweeted me to 2.1 million followers and had responded.

Wow! After the initial shock and awe and a little back-and-forth by e-mail with “Tyler B.,” I was told to expect a couple of Amazon packages in the mail, on the house. No strings attached. Seriously.

The result?

One very happy fairy panda bear.

I wish I knew a better way to say thank you to the folks at Amazon. Who knew they even did things like this for regular people? I know the company has a solid reputation for service and customer centricity, but this was simply perfect!

So, panda fairies do exist. We thought so! 🐼✨@scottcowley https://t.co/X0ZKOfkn6L

— Amazon (@amazon) October 29, 2015

@scottcowley Happy Halloween to the happiest Fairy Panda Bear in all the land. — Amazon (@amazon) October 29, 2015

This real life fairy tale is nearly over, but guaranteed we’ll have the cutest little fairy panda bear in the neighborhood when we’re out trick-or-treating on Halloween night. All thanks to a fairy godmother named Amazon.

Original source: Amazon’s Fairy Tale Response to a Toddler’s Halloween Wish

Image Credit

Once in a while, you have a rare kind of sobering moment that makes you pause and consider your career and trajectory. I had one today as I helped remove everything from the office of a recently retired professor.

As background, this professor had been in our department for over 30 years. In his prime, he was one of the top researchers in the field and had published dozens of articles in our premier journals (most professors will never publish once in these journals). He did some groundbreaking cross-disciplinary research. By most accounts, he had an impressive career as an academic. And at the end, he left a roomful of artifacts from that career for others to dispose of.

Bookcases full of books. More stacks of books. Drawers and cabinets full of papers. Stacks on top of cabinets, papers on top of books. Year upon year of conference proceedings. A large stack containing dozens of copies of that award-winning paper he co-authored over 20 years ago. Some plaques and research awards. All placed methodically into a big, blue, sterile recycling container.

At first, it’s fun looking around, hoping to spot some new book worth adding to your own collection. And then you realize there’s nothing here published after 2000. And you realize just how many authors like to include the word “new” in their book titles. Now those books look ancient under a heavy layer of office dust.

And you see the old desk and the old CRT monitor and the old stapler and the old brown chairs and they all look like they must have been hot stuff for an academic back in 1989. But today, you feel like you’re in a time capsule.

And you find piles of continuous-feed paper (the kind with holes running along both sides). And you find little troves of floppy disks, hidden in odd corners, and an Iomega Zip drive, still in the box.

And you keep looking and you find a brown office fridge that has been frozen shut for ages.

And you find an unopened flagon of malt liquor. And a collection of beer mugs. And an ashtray with a pile of ashes. And you recall stories about a bygone period when the professor was free to smoke in his office.

And you find some old family photos wedged under one of the stacks of papers. And you see pictures of a little girl — the daughter you know died tragically young. And you find an empty bottle of anti-depressants.

And you realize this is what your life looks like when you keep coming to work long after the flame goes out. Unsettling.

Original source: What You Find While Cleaning Out the Office of a World-Class Researcher

#overlyhonestmethods We kept pushing buttons in our favorite stats software until all our results has stars next to them
— David Winter (@TheAtavism) January 7, 2013

Data are available upon request, but we really hope no one will ask #overlyhonestmethods
— Heather Piwowar (@researchremix) January 8, 2013

What we lack in meaningful results we make up for with a witty pun in our title. #overlyhonestmethods — Dr. Twittenheimer (@DrTwittenheimer) January 8, 2013

Following completion of the survey, we completely rewrote our hypotheses in order to have them agree 100% with the data. #overlyhonestmethods — Liam Pomfret (@LiamPomfret) January 9, 2013

Authors 3-7 were added to get this paper through the blind review process. #overlyhonestmethods — Spencer M. Ross (@srossmktg) January 9, 2013

LITERATURE CITED (but not actually read) #overlyhonestmethods — Dr. Twittenheimer (@DrTwittenheimer) January 8, 2013

We’re citing this marginally relevant paper because it was written by the journal editor and a likely reviewer #overlyhonestmethods — experimental error (@significance) January 8, 2013

A two-way ANOVA with repeated measures was performed because reviewer 1 told us to. #OverlyHonestMethods — Mark Burnley (@DrMarkBurnley) January 8, 2013

A sample size of 12 was chosen because a qualified statistician was not present to complete the sample size estimate. #overlyhonestmethods

— Mike K Smith (@MikeKSmith) January 8, 2013

The results of the study were presented in third person passive voice to maximize the sciencyness of the paper. #overlyhonestmethods

— Dr. Twittenheimer (@DrTwittenheimer) January 8, 2013

Data were analyzed using SPSS, even though SAS is better, because we have a pirated version of SPSS that doesn’t expire #overlyhonestmethods

— deonandan (@deonandan) January 8, 2013

Our methods extend the techniques used by Smith et al., who stole the original idea from us at a conference. #overlyhonestmethods

— Peter Edmonds (@peterdedmonds) January 8, 2013

I don’t understand these statistics, but at least my coauthor does. So talk to him, please. #overlyhonestmethods

— Alexis Rudd (@SoundingTheSea) January 9, 2013

Data analyzed using mixed methods because I maxed my knowledge of qualitative and quantitative analysis #overlyhonestmethods

— Jennifer Borgioli (@DataDiva) January 9, 2013

This paper of mine was cited so that I can rank higher in Google Scholar. #overlyhonestmethods

— David Mittelman (@evolvability) January 8, 2013

Outliers have been removed from the dataset because the second author was drunk when he took the data. #overlyhonestmethods

— Brent Neal (@BrentN) January 8, 2013

We used a grounded theory approach as we didn’t understand the literature we were reviewing #overlyhonestmethods

— Charles Musselwhite (@charliemuss) January 8, 2013

We put “Bayesian” in the title so all the other scientists think we’re cool. #overlyhonestmethods
— Matt Wall (@m_wall) January 8, 2013

Though further work is needed to extend these exciting new observations, my contract has expired & I don’t care anymore #overlyhonestmethods

— real_psycience (@realpsycientist) January 8, 2013

Stark honesty right there folks. If this convinces you to join Twitter, don’t forget to connect with me @scottcowley.

P.S. Apologies for the exclusion of equally hilarious tweets involving labs, chemicals, and test animals. Business researchers don’t have all those things and we have less fun as a result.

Original source: The 20 Most Hilarious Research Tweets from #OverlyHonestMethods

Google Plus is where the action is. Wait, actually it’s Instagram! No, you completely forgot about Pinterest. Oops, you’re late to the Vine game.

If you think the number of social media channels has become overwhelming, you’re not alone. Just a quick snapshot from NameChk and you’ll see all of the possible social sites where you may be tempted to have a business presence.

Make no mistake, we’re in a time when having a social presence is expected. And businesses can gain major advantage by being involved in the conversations happening across the web, about their brands and industries. The “help economy” is about companies being valuable even to non-customers, beyond their products and services.

So does your business need Pinterest? Or Instagram? More importantly, can you develop heuristics or a framework that will help you make that decision for every future social network?

The success of your business depends on you saying no to things. Especially shiny new things. This includes not getting distracted every time you read a case study about a company who’s capitalizing on a new platform. Keep a couple of things in mind:

First, you don’t have to be everywhere. Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies (those who should, by definition, have resources to devote to customer engagement) don’t have a corporate blog.

Second, you don’t have to stick with a channel. Of those Fortune 500 companies who don’t blog, many of them started, but abandoned the plan. Fail fast. That’s OK. Nobody rails on scientists who move on after a failed experiment. And choosing social media channels for business is often experimental—especially in new channels.

Content-Centric Social Media Perspectives

How do you pick which social media channels to invest in? Do you go by what’s popular or new? Where your existing customers are? Where your potential customers are? Do you follow your competitors’ lead? Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

The business doesn’t revolve around the social network. Social networks revolve around you. Your social presence and success on any given social network is only as good as the material you have to work with and conversations you’re able to generate and participate in. With this in mind, it’s critical to assess up-front whether you have the kind of content assets necessary to thrive in any available channel. Beyond that, this content has to drive meaningful business value or you’ll have an unsustainable social media strategy with no real leverage within the company.

Content “Natural Resources” & Unique Content Asset Production

A unique content asset is any type of content you currently produce or have the capacity to produce that would be considered both valuable and hopefully irreplicable within your industry. Doing an audit of your unique content assets involves identifying the type of content you can realistically produce and distribute, given your unique sets of “natural resources”:

• People/Expertise
• Equipment
• Location
• Products/Services/Solutions
• Organizational assets/Partnerships

And since each social network is media-constrained, you can break out your content assets by media type, like this.

Resources are well-adapted for certain kinds of assets. Your location (building, city, area) may lend itself well to images and video that can be leveraged for distribution and community engagement. Your location may also mean access to certain experts or businesses you can interview or collaborate with to create text-based content. These all represent sources of competitive content advantage, leading to greater visibility along with customer and community growth online.

Assuming you do a full inventory of all possible content categories you can then rank the content by quality and alignment with business and branding. What does this mean? Some content has a high potential to drive more interest and business within your community. Some does not. There’s usually a trade-off between high-interest and high business-driving relevancy, so you should balance type.

Your #1 question for social channel selection: Which channels are best capable of taking full advantage of the best unique content assets we have? Do these social channels provide enough incremental value (and do we have enough capacity) to justify adding them to the current social properties we’re invested in? Or are we better off treating this as an experimental channel and testing it for a few weeks before deleting it?

The benefit to adopting a content-oriented approach to selecting social channels is that it prevents you from investing in places where you can’t differentiate yourself or gain a meaningful ROI. It keeps you from getting “shiny social media syndrome.”

One final note: new channels may emerge that appear to have a lot of potential, but don’t necessarily provide access to new audiences, new content delivery advantages, etc. Google Plus had this challenge (in terms of market perception). How should a company evaluate this kind of channel?

One perspective says there are first-mover advantages for all channel participants. But this doesn’t mean you choose a new social media channel and shift your entire online strategy to support it. Short-term experimentation is an option. Using the channel for basic content distribution is an option.

Mini Case: Choosing Posterous Over Tumblr

What do you do when a couple of new channels seem to provide the exact same opportunities for your content assets?

A few years ago, we were selecting a more informal blogging platform to share some content. In the early days, there appeared to be no clear advantage of choosing Tumblr vs. Posterous. We went with Posterous. Posterous ended up shutting down its blogging platform while Tumblr grew to enormity and ubiquity.

We learned that we made a bad pick, but it wasn’t due to bad decision making. It makes a lot more sense to focus strategically on one platform than it would have to split efforts and distribute the same content on both Tumblr and Posterous. Do yourself a favor and be selective.

Final Thoughts on Strategy

As you plan your social channel strategy, you should always try to drive qualified traffic to your website, where people can be introduced to your business and offerings. There comes a point when the payoff from investing in an additional social media channel is less than the payoff from investing in the development of other non-social traffic channels.

Image source

Original source: Platform Paralysis? How to Choose Social Media Channels for Business

Want to learn SEO? You’ll find hundreds of websites and forums, and dozens of books and ebooks willing to teach you. That alone should suggest that it takes more than a simple “how-to” to learn how to optimize websites for search engines and people. Some resources get outdated more quickly than others. Others can be too generic to be useful. Every SEO, myself included, has an opinion on how to go about it because we get asked ALL THE TIME by anyone with a website.

How well are you going to learn SEO if you pick up a copy of Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing?

In all seriousness, I think you are going to be months ahead of someone who relies on a varied collection of websites, forums, ebooks, conference presentations, etc. to build their SEO knowledge base. I think that anyone who reads a foundational book about SEO is going to be rewarded, but Kris Jones is to be commended for really bringing the core of SEO to the reader in an accessible way in this third and latest edition that he was kind enough to send me.

Here’s an overview of how the book works:

Kris Jones wrote this book for somebody who appreciates visual, simple, step-based learning, which is exactly what someone new to SEO often needs. There are a couple of highly recommended, free online SEO guides, but these don’t actually walk you through the steps like this book does.

Each page has excellent screenshots and labels. Pages are designed to take you through a particular task that will be relevant to learning some aspect of SEO. Here’s an example:

Each task has an overview followed by steps to get through the task. The page layout is one of the really strong differentiators, in my opinion. I especially love this format for some of the more technical tasks, like working with .htaccess files and redirects. You don’t need to be a coder. Everything is right there for you.

The other thing this book does is provide a very generous amount of extra Internet marketing material, including topics like PPC, social media, shopping engines, etc. This is an added bonus, since most SEO’s are interested in expanding their marketing skills to become a “full-stack Internet marketer.”

This wouldn’t be a real book review without some observations and caveats, none of which is meant to detract from my overall praise for the book.

1. You’re going to be funneled into particular tools, conferences, and resources. Kris Jones has a good reputation in the industry. I haven’t met him, but I’d like to. It’s not a criticism to say that Kris has definite loyalties that impact his recommendations. He’s the Chairman of Internet Marketing Ninjas. This means that there are a lot of recommendations for tools and resources that are connected to IMN, but which may not be the most common, industry-wide. Who cares, as long as they do the job, right? Do I think it’s necessary for you to register for the SES Conference or “Like” their Facebook page as part of your SEO training, as instructed on the page example above? No, that’s silly.

2. You’re going to be given a certain “style” of SEO training. I would rather have one organized, methodical style like this book presents, than be given a whole slew of options with no way to differentiate between them. (Although the book will dump way more keyword research tools on you than necessary). As a practicing SEO, I find the style in this book to sometimes border on “old guard” thinking. For example, there is zero reason to devote pages to optimizing meta keywords or saying that text modifiers like bold and italic “can lead to higher rankings.” Tips like these aren’t harmful, but they are no longer helpful. I have to think that some of this may just be tied to how long IMN has been around (1999). As a result, you’ll get pages on adding forums with vBulletin or phpBB, how to create static HTML web pages (who does this?), and optimizing for Technorati and Ask.com. This is cool and all, but I question the present-day effectiveness a little.

3. There’s a certain type of content I think this book needs for the next edition. SEO is a continuous cycle, but the book can sometimes feel too siloed in its approach to teaching skills. For example, it would be great to devote space to organizing and modifying keyword research over time, measuring and improving rankings over time, link building to pages over time. See what I’m getting at? People need the tools to do SEO. They also need the strategic perspective that will help them run an SEO campaign and perform well in the long-run by means of measurement, analysis, and adjustment.

Now, as an experienced SEO, it’s interesting to examine a beginner-level book and wonder how much of my judgment is due to experience or legitimate issues. I think SEO (Visual Blueprint) is a work of art and fantastic at what it aims to do and how much it accomplishes. I think it’s the best SEO book available and I recommend it to those learning SEO for the first time, or more experienced SEO’s who are in a position to teach SEO (or just need a solid reference).

For more on what Kris is up to, you can check out his current company, ReferLocal and his investment fund, KBJ Capital.

Original source: BOOK REVIEW: Search Engine Optimization (3rd Edition) by Kris Jones

One of a content marketer’s main questions is how to use content strategically. For those who don’t have the resources to create all their own content, there’s curation–distributing others’ content in a way that builds trust and brand equity. My observation is that very few people really know how to curate well. Good curation is a component of consistency, timing, and taste. If not done well, curation has almost no impact on competitive advantage for a business or individual trying to grow an audience via social media.

One way to make up for a lack of time or taste for quality content to share is to rely on content aggregator sites. While there are plenty of aggregator/content apps, I prefer to work with simple web-based content aggregators that rely on algorithms or human/algorithm hybrids that reveal highly shared content. This list of content aggregators is my favorite, each providing a unique function or pulling from a unique content data source.

Algorithm-Based

Newswhip – I’ve been testing out Newswhip for several weeks and have been impressed by the virality scoring pulled from Facebook and Twitter, broken down by category and algorithmically incorporating timing factors. In my mind, Newswhip comes closest to achieving what the ideal content curation platform is capable of (but everybody is still pretty far from that ideal).

Rt.ly – Ever since Bitlynews was shelved, I’ve been hoping for a replacement to come along to rank content sharing by bit.ly link. Rt.ly is a new lab project by bit.ly that does exactly that. Data is algorithm-driven and displays rates of click-through. Requires a bit.ly account, but it does provide some much-needed search and filtering options.

Newsmap.jp – I love the visual format of Newsmap.jp. The clean visualization is generated by Google News data and features category filtering and multiple search options. It’s also cool how they display recency and importance by the lightness and size of squares, respectively.

Images

Topsy.com/Top100 – The normal content rankings are no better than Newswhip, but Topsy’s filtering by image is a good way to view photos and pictures currently going hot on Twitter.

Imgur – The image respository for 99% of the images on Reddit. There’s probably a lot of overlap between the two, but because Imgur is so big, this is a pretty good dataset, even though it’s full of memes and random humor.

Video

Viral Video Chart – Now this is cool. Unruly Media pulls together sharing data from Twitter and Facebook, plus blogs (presumably from embeds) to deliver categorized viral video listings, with some fantastic metrics and filtering options.

YouTube Trends Dashboard – It’s ironic that YouTube has access to so much video sharing data, but chooses to give us a tool almost not worth mentioning. But the Trends Dashboard does provide a good snapshot of what’s popular and includes some filtering options.

Algorithm Plus Voting

Reddit – The site has become the mainstream standard that other trending news sites check for ideas. When you spend time on Reddit, you’ve already seen that viral video people are tweeting about. You’ll also realize that Reddit is the crutch for many lazy content curators online. Check topical “subreddits” and the conversation threads of stories for better quality shareables.

Hacker News – The second most popular voting-based, algorithmic content aggregator. While most content is aimed at programmers and engineers and would be considered too technical for the average person, business and tech content is higher quality and more interesting than what comes from Reddit.

Reddit and Hacker News form the inspiration for other niche content aggregators with lower activity levels. Examples: Inbound.org (Internet marketing) and Layer Vault (Design).

Algorithm-Based Plus Human Curation

TechMeme – The big fish among tech blog and news site tracking. The TechMeme team occasionally exercises executive editorial privilege to change headlines and highlight particular content or swap a more comprehensive story with a less complete one.

Blogrunner – Over 12,000 blogs and media sources feed the New York Times-owned content aggregator, which determines topical popularity across the web, then combines headlines from popular news publishers with blogger opinions for any given news story.

RSS Aggregators

While not algorithm-driven, these RSS aggregators can help you quickly find the newest content from popular sites.

popurls – a short RSS feed of headlines and links to the 8 or 9 most recent articles on popular sites around the web, including Reddit, Hacker News, etc.

Alltop – a more comprehensive collection of headlines and links over a broad range of categories. You can even add your own site.

Image credit: Thomas Mathis

Original source: A Little List of Algorithm-based Content Aggregator Websites