• The Impact of Steve Jobs – We remember Steve Jobs like everyone else, but also debate which of his innovations had the most impact. iPhone? iTunes? The mouse?
• LinkedIn Opens Up To Brands – LinkedIn is embracing brands through a series of new features and we talk about how to use these for your own company.
• Using Facebook “Secret Groups” for Business – Many folks use Facebook groups in a private setting to talk with friends on various topics, but you could also use it for business purposes through a mini-community or product focus group. We debate the pros and cons.
• Four Ways To Prevent Mobile Malware – Chances are your smartphone or other mobile device (tablet, etc) is infected with malware. In most instances it is simply annoying, but in some it is siphoning money from your account. We talk about four ways to stop mobile malware from hurting you.

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What a difference a week off makes for the Q’n'D! Both Aaron and Kyle came back to show 96 ready to rumble, and it was obvious by the amount of information we dished out in this episode. Perhaps it was the fact that Aaron was on the road and not in the famous Q’n'D studios in Austin, but the show was loose from the get-go, with as much ‘quick’ as there was ‘dirty’.

Why even waste time, let’s get right to the show and hear the boys discuss:

1. Amazon Kindle Fire: Pretender or Contender?
2. Facebook Shows My Wife I Searched for Scarlett Johansonn’s Breasts
3. Google Analytics FINALLY Introduces Real-Time Stats and Premium Services
4. NASA Invites Twitter Followers To Mars

Quick’n'Dirty 95: Facebook Shows My Wife I Searched for Nude Photos of Scarlett Johansonn

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Rather than dive into those, which I’m sure we will in an upcoming episode, I wanted to talk about one that has folks a bit confused. Facebook now allows you to “Subscribe” to people without being their friend. This can certainly be a concern for folks who are using Facebook in a semi-private manner and really want to keep that network tight, or at least create some semblance of control. Fortunately, it is quite easy to turn off the subscriber capabilitiy in Facebook and I have done it for you below in a two minute video:

Bizzy, which was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, lets you “check-out” from the places you go. This can be done manually when you leave a location, simply by searching for the local business, whether it be a bar, restaurant, gym, or business. Or, better yet, by linking your Foursquare account so that Bizzy knows where you check-in, and then allows you to easily check-out from that place.

The Power of the Check-Out

When you check-out using Bizzy, you can share ratings, post a reviews and even photos of the location you are leaving. Bizzy then serves up a cute little check-out image, reminiscent of the bill you used to get at your local diner before it became a Starbucks. And, of course, you can link to Facebook or Twitter to connect with your already established connections and share your reviews with those networks.

The reason Bizzy is important, and should be used, is that it combines the power of review sites like Yelp or PowerReviews with the LBS functionality of Foursquare. This data can be parsed when you are looking for a place to check-into, and then you can check-out and either confirm or deny whether the recommendation was correct. The app overall is nicely designed, easy to navigate, and set up takes no time at all.

Bizzy Features: One I Like. One I Don’t.

One feature that I think is really nifty is when Bizzy will ping my phone about thirty minutes after I’ve checked into a location on Foursquare. I’m not sure if the time it pings me is random, but for some reason there does seem to be some intelligence in the fact that it waits a bit longer to ping me after a restaurant check-in compared to a pub. I’m wondering what would happen if I checked in at the movies?

One feature that I don’t like is the rating system itself:

I want some more options here between “Love It” and “OK”. For example, I was at a pizza joint in Hoboken this past weekend and one slice I had was delicious and another was…well, not. I struggled with the rating, and feel like we need a “Better Than OK”.

Tool Call: Try Bizzy

Give Bizzy a try, it is a fun app that is also practical for folks looking for good recommendations on food, drink, and other entertainment.

The sun is just starting to set over the New York skyline, it’s final light licking the buildings with warmth, and signaling the neon of the city to start tuning up for the night ahead. My ears ring with sounds of kids running, helicopters churning, sirens blasting, beer glasses clinking, and bands tuning. Although the pictures I post onto the web tell part of the story, they lack the sounds that make this city, any city, or really any moment, important and unique.

Although video is often touted as the “killer app” when it comes to the web, we often forget about sound. Not simply sound as a part of video, but simply sound. Seems an appropriate topic for a podcast, no? And this is how we started our interview in this week’s pod with Alex Ljung, CEO and founder of SoundCloud. Alex is a brash and confident leader of a company that is committed to making sound as critical an element to your web experience as video. In fact he talks about the mission to surpass video on the web, take on YouTube, help developers create apps on top of their platform, and how celebrities like Russel Brand and up and coming musicians use SoundCloud.

Listen to the interview with Alex now, or subscribe below and never miss a Quick’n'Dirty Pod.

On this pod you will also hear us go through some of the top news from the past week. Check out Aaron and myself discussing:

1) Instagram Reaching 10M Users and Staying Stable

Instagram recently surpassed 10M users, which might be a really small number when compared to Facebook, Twitter, G+ and others. But the magnificent thing about their rise is that it has come with relatively few issues for the platform itself. As robust users of Instagram, both Aaron and myself remark how we have never had an issue, and responding to some great observations in the chat room, it might just be that they have an active strategy to avoid non-iOS platforms. Is this a shame, or simply smart business? Listen or subscribe below, and let us know.

2) GetGlue Gets Gap

GetGlue, the entertainment check-in platform, announced this week they have brokered a deal with the Gap. The deal adds to the existing partnership with Entertainment Weekly, and rewards users who check in to one of EW’s 12 recommended fall TV shows with virtual stickers for a 40% discount at the Gap. Aaron and Kyle discussed what this means for check-in networks such as GetGlue, other potential partnerships, and how this could be used by other businesses. While Kyle said this particular deal would not lead him to use GetGlue more often, Aaron was pretty excited about adding another pair of chinos to his wardrobe. What about you? Listen or subscribe below, and let us know.

3) Where and What will You Check Into In The Future?

Check-ins have nearly become a part of our everyday lexicon, whether on popular sites like FourSquare, or more niche places such as GetGlue. But their are even more places for you to “check-in”, including into your outfit, or simply to alert your parents that you’ve reached your destination safely. With the advent of passive check-in, where it happens automatically, things are continuously changing and might actually bring even more people into the fold…or simply scare us all off. Listen as Aaron and Kyle debate the future of the check-in.

Quick’n'Dirty 95: SoundCloud Makes Some Noise | 10M and Stable | Future of Check-In

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What a week here at Quick’n'Dirty network studios! If you hadn’t heard the city of Austin is dealing with very devastating and tragic fires. My neighborhood was evacuated last Sunday and we ended up not being able to get back to our house until Tuesday. But for us the story had a happy ending, unfortunately for thousands of others it has not. We discussed the implications of social media within crisis communication on the pod, but please consider donating to help the victims!

Onto our topic overview, or just listen or subscribe to hear the full pod now:

1) Google Goes to Dinner

By now you know that Google has purchased the famous and useful Zagat’s. Known throughout the world for it’s restaurant review books, Zagat’s has evolved over the years to include digital assets including location-based abilities. However, Zagat’s was very late to the online world, and after failing to sell in 2008 it appeared to Kyle that this was a cheap and relatively easy gamble for Google. Aaron agreed with the latter point, and had some good insight into the potential location-based services Google could now inject into “Places”, not to mention the impact of the Google/Zagat buy on eateries. Inspired by the start of the NFL season Kyle and Aaron made a bit of a friendly wager on the pod concerning the price Google paid for Zagat’s, which was unkown at the time, find out who won and listen or subscribe to hear the full pod now.

2) The #FAIL of Local Mass Media and Rise of Social in Crisis Communication

As stated above, last week I was able to see for myself what it was like to be evacuated from your house due to wildfire and fear for your house and all of your belongings. Aaron and I discussed the situation as it happened to me last weekend and a few ways for mass media, as well as businesses, to deploy and even employ community social input during crisis. To hear all the ideas listen or subscribe to hear the full pod now.

3) Carol F***ing Bartz

This segment of the show revolved around one particular question Aaron posed, after the debacle at Yahoo!, the firing of Ms. F***ing Bartz, and her subsequent outpouring of anger is she employable as a CEO today within the Fortune 500? Although we disagreed on the answer to that question, we seemed to agree a bit with the need for more accountability for the Yahoo! board as a whole, and not just the CEO who seemingly was thrown under a very slowly moving bus.  Listen or subscribe to hear the full pod now.

4) And More!

As usual we ended up going long and discussed even more topics including the interesting location-based service Bizzy and the newest member of the Facebook board and what it means for the pending IPO. To get the FULL pod be sure to click on the iTunes button below and download/subscribe now.

Quick’nDirty 94: Social Crisis Communication | Google Goes to Dinner | Carol F***ing Bartz

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Texas Wildfires and The Failure of Local Media

Standing on my deck around 4pm on September 4th I first saw the smoke rising above the tree line, flames licking the sky, and ash starting to rain down. The inside of our house was set for a party, food spread out, beer on ice, and the oven baking the last few dishes. In fact a few guests had arrived with their children when I had an inkling that something was a miss with this cloud of smoke and we ran to the front of the house. Only a few minutes later cars starting streaming up from down the street, eyes of the drivers panicked, and one woman rolled down her window and literally screamed at us to get out, escape, now. The evacuation, although unofficial right now, was started by the calls of the people closest to the destruction. Unfortunately many of these folks were escaping from the area that would be hit the worst by what is now dubbed the “Steiner Ranch Fire“.

After our guests got their children and left we immediately grabbed our two children, put on shoes, got the dog and pulled out of our driveway into a very long line of cars. We didn’t grab anything except our family and our iPhones. No computer, no photos, no storage drives that I specifically had bought for such an occasion, no clothes, not chargers. It was a mad rush to escape what seemed to be increasingly dangerous predicament. Thinking back I’d do it the same way, I had everything I needed in my life (although, yeah, it would have been smart to grab a phone charger or my computer…). After we left the neighborhood we immediately turned on the radio and went to all the news channels, but nothing was on, not even coverage of much worse wildfires to our south in Bastrop. This would be a trend.

Hours went by as we waited to hear an update on the radio, and even after calling our family and closest neighbors to tell everyone we were safe there was nothing. Websites carried no information, so we headed downtown to stay with our great friends who opened up their home to us for the next two days. As we drove news started to trickle in on Facebook, Twitter, and SMS. Through these venues I quickly found an iPhone app that allowed me to scan the emergency communication channels (thanks Jason), two Facebook pages that would become the central point of information, and set up three Twitter searches for the neighborhood, our street, and our house number.

As the night wore on Facebook would light up with information about the fires and damage to the homes, as well as excited calls that our local NBC affiliate would be going live with info in ten minutes. Each time we would turn on the television, tune in, and immediately tune out. The info was always the same, nothing. There was zero work being done by these news centers to actually get information or, shockingly, use social media to their advantage. Meanwhile residents were posting live updates from those who did not evacuate, and two brave (crazy?) souls spent the better part of the next two days biking through the neighborhood and providing detailed updated that would either horrify or relieve their neighbors.

Why Not Get Creative? Or At Least Die Trying.

Mass media is going away. Their revenue model is eroding and tired. Money is no longer there to have truly powerful newsrooms. Reporters are stuck in a cycle of not having enough resources to do their jobs and producers who are not adapting to the realities of today’s media. Throughout the last few days I wrote down the following questions about local mass media:

• Why not create a Facebook page that would consolidate your reports, Twitter accounts, videos, and allow you to gather information from folks “on the ground”?
• Why not create a Twitter account that would be devoted to only providing information about this particular news story? In fact they should have had one for each of the major wildfires spreading this past week.
• Why not contact one of the folks on the ground who are Tweeting and reporting to Facebook and offer them $5K to the charity of their choice if they provide exclusive info to them that could then be consolidated in the ideas above?
• Why play reruns of the Good Wife, The Office, and Golden Girls rather than reporting about the fires when it had displaced a very large segment of your area, and these were a highly captive audience?

This week we had one of our most interesting guests in Dr. William J. Ward, a.k.a DR4WARD, who is a Professor of Practice of Social Media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Aaron and myself took up nearly the entire episode talking with DR4WARD, covering a large range of topics including:

• The continued evolution and growth marketing as an academic pursuit.
• How to provide real-world experience to students in a school setting, as well as how DR4WARD himself keeps abreast of what is actually happening outside of the university walls.
• The need for all students to participate in marketing courses, outside of their actual majors, to understand the impact of multimedia within their lives.

Episode 93: DR4WARD Interview | Marketing in Academia

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Episode 92 Recap

Is there anything worse than finding a place to live? The grind of going through stale open houses. Trying in vain to find information about the neighborhood you want to live in. The pain of finding the perfect house, and then seeing the price tag. The horrible joy of signing seven thousand pages of documents for a mortgage. Oh, and just try and get your cable switched to the new house, you would think you were asking for a perpetual motion machine. Well this week we were all about “location, location, location”.

1) Truly Trulia

Trulia is a real estate listing service. Well, it’s a listing service on steroids. You can use the site (or mobile apps) to find homes, apartments, condos, and more. But you can also find advice and recommendations on mortgage brokers, home owners insurance, and movers. Further you can see detailed crime statistics for a neighborhood, and peruse their library of infographics.

Our guest on Episode 92 of the Q’n'D cast was Trulia Head of Communications, Ken Shuman. Ken took us through the power of Trulia as a service for you and me, but also for brokers. We also discussed the power of visualization of data, from mapping to infographics. Not only is the conversation helpful for anyone looking to purchase/rent a property, but for marketers in any industry. Listen below now.

2) Jobs Replacement

As everyone knows, Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple. Aaron and Kyle discuss the ramifications on this, but not purely from the business standpoint, although that is important, but also the impact his leaving will have on technology and design innovation throughout the tech industry. Listen below now.

3) Bah-Bye Places

It was a short-lived run for Facebook Places, but now you are leaving us. We hardly knew ye. Does this mean that Facebook is giving up on the location game? Not a chance, in fact they may be doing what they should have done in the first place, make location a feature within Facebook, not a separate service. Kyle and Aaron debate, so listen below now.

4) GroupMe? GroupYou!

GroupMe was our final discussion, but not the merits of the service, rather the example of entrepreneurship they show to other start-ups. Here is a company bootstrapped by $11.5M that sold this week to Skype for $43M (or more, depending on your source). How do you know when to sell and how can you get your start-up the most value? We discuss in the Q’nD, so listen below now.

Episode 92: Truly Trulia | Out of Jobs | Bah-bye Places

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And while an amateur I might be, I can still tell you that using “time on site”, “time on page”, “pageviews”, and even simple “page conversion rate” as measurement tools are not making you look intelligent, and I can point you to dozens of deep analytical reports that help me each day. However, analytics is still lacking, we have not witnessed our sabremetric revolution.

Would Bill James Measure Time on Base Path?

Bill James gave credence to the idea of “sabremetrics” within baseball, which attempts to answer objective questions about the sport. Out of this came a revolution in baseball statistics and analysis that seemingly measures nearly every aspect of the game, many of which we could never have imagined. But at the core of all the statistics is the quest to gather data that can help teams make better decisions about personnel on the field.

Web analytics should serve the same purpose. Each time you analyze the data you should be gathering information that can actually help you make decisions for your site, your business, and more. Yet, even today, I see people blogging and tweeting about the importance of “time on site” and how they use it to make decisions. Interesting, but pointless, because TOS can mean several different things:

1. People LOVE your site and/or page so much that they can’t help but spend minute after minute perusing your amazing content (sarcasm heavy enough for you?).
2. People HATE your site so much that they visit, and immediately head to another tab and keep your site open (and forgotten) in the background, only to click away at some point in the distant future.
3. People can’t find ANYTHING they need on your site and they are spending an incredible amount of time flailing around your site.
4. People can find EVERYTHING on your site and they eschew time with their family to read and download it all.

What’s Next for Web Analytics?

Yes, simplistic examples abound above. Yet why do we still go back to things like time on site, pageviews, conversion rates, and other legacy web analytics? This would be like baseball continuing to put credence on only RBIs, HRs and batting average. Part of it, of course, is the fact that web analytics is still in it’s infancy. Take baseball again, it took more than a hundred years for us to move away from typical analysis to today’s modern day analytics. Will it take us the same amount of time to move web analytics, or do you think we are already entering a new era?

NEXT: Featuring some of the experts that might be the “Bill James” of web analytics, make your nominations below.