Much ado has been made of Google’s new offering, Currents, which is a Flipboard-like mobile app that presents you the news. What’s not been made mention as much is how powerful this app is for consolidating your personal brand as a publisher and blogger. You can do much more than just publish your blog through it.

Here’s a few power tips I’ve found that might prove helpful.

1. Unless you’re someone who already has a recognizable logo, use your head for your edition icon – literally. It instantly draws recognition and action in the mass of Currents icons.

2. Turn on and set up your Google Analytics. Currents shows up in your Analytics as a pathed page, so go to Content > Site Content > Pages and filter for the /currents path. You’ll see exactly what people are viewing and using in it.

3. Bring in your social! Did you know you can include Google+, Facebook, and Twitter feeds? You can. Look for the RSS feeds for each service and then use Publisher to bring them in as social feeds. For example, I wired up Google+, Facebook (page), and my #the5 tweets. Important: if you use the feed selection, you will be required to verify ownership, which you can’t. If you use the social updates selection, it won’t force ownership verification.

Facebook RSS Feed

The Social Feed option

Power tip: Twitter still has RSS feeds, but they’re hidden. Premium content subscribers to my newsletter should hit the back issues and grab the tutorial for installing these manually. I’ll re-publish that tutorial this week, so if you’re not subscribed as a premium member, now might be the time.

4. 302 redirect Google’s ugly URL. No one wants to try to remember that. I redirected mine through cspenn.com/currents for easy sharing. This puts handles on it that you can easily carry around.

5. Make it obvious on your site. Currents will display it in Search, but to make sure people are getting the right edition, promote it on your site and in your social outlets with the direct link.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a marketing post if I didn’t pimp it. Please subscribe to my Google Currents edition.

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One of the most dangerous things about a consumer-focused material goods economy, from an environmental perspective, is that in order for you to have a sustainable business, you have to consume resources. Not only do you have to consume resources, you have to consume a lot of them. That’s at odds with the long-term environmental goals we need to reach in order to keep things habitable for us on this little blue marble called Earth. There are other worlds out there that might sustain us, but moving the human race 600 light years to Kepler 22b isn’t really an option at this point.

So how do you keep a consumer economy running while mitigating its impact on the ecology? Here’s one answer that came up last night in World of Warcraft: sparkleponies. Its proper name is the Celestial Steed, which you can buy for your in-game character for $25. (on sale now apparently for $10). Here’s another variant, called Tyrael’s Charger.

Yes, it’s a shiny pony with angel wings that your character rides around.

What does this have to do with anything? In this case, it’s getting consumers to buy a virtual good, a consumer item that has no manufacturing cost of real world resources except electricity and the server farm that World of Warcraft runs on. What’s more, once the infrastructure is in place, there’s almost no actual cost to make one more sparklepony or one million more of these. They’re just rows in a database.

They’re rows in a database, however, that people will pay money for. Things like convenience and status in a virtual world are just as important as in the real world, and as we integrate technology into our lives more and more, these virtual goods become just as valuable as the physical goods we’re used to buying.

This trend can only accelerate. The faster we deplete natural resources, the more expensive it will be to manufacture physical world commodities. Thus, if you want to be ahead of the curve and taking advantage of consumer willingness to purchase virtual goods, figure out some way to add digital products or services to your current offerings. You’ll save the environment and make money at the same time.

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I’ve spent the last few evenings after logging off of World of Warcraft poking away at my new Linux box, which is running the 64 bit version of Fedora 15. What’s astonishing to me is how much the infrastructure pieces have changed since I last fully administered a Linux server at the command line level. So much of what used to be incredibly laborious, unpleasant compiling of software from source code has been happily reduced to sets of packages that are good enough to get the job done.

More important, the capabilities that come more or less out of the box now are vastly different than I remember. Take a look at just a few of the php packages I pulled out of the yum repository:

yum install php-ZendFramework.noarch php-PHPMailer.noarch php-cli.x86_64 php-eaccelerator.x86_64 php-email-address-validation.noarch php-fpdf.noarch php-gd.x86_64 php-mysql.x86_64 php-nusoap.noarch

Non-technical folks will look at that and completely gloss over, so let me break down the packages so you get a sense of what’s happening and why it’s important.

• php-ZendFramework.noarch: when up and running, this will make my blog MUCH faster than it currently is on a shared host
• php-PHPMailer.noarch: a powerful email library class that could, in combination with Amazon SES, let me become my own email service provider at very low cost
• php-cli.x86_64: who loves black screens with green letters? Me!
• php-eaccelerator.x86_64: In concert with the Zend framework, this will keep things speedier than ever.
• php-email-address-validation.noarch: all those email libraries I wrote years ago for validating email addresses have been superseded by one nice, compact library that will let me keep my mailing lists cleaner than ever
• php-fpdf.noarch: one-stop shopping for making PDFs on the fly at the webserver level. Imagine dynamic PDFs that are customized, generated whenever a user wants them! What’s amazing is that this capability used to cost hundreds of dollars just a few years ago. Now it’s free.
• php-gd.x86_64: the GD image library. I can make graphics on the fly, which is very useful for things like sign-makers and dynamic advertising systems.
• php-mysql.x86_64: enterprise database integration.
• php-nusoap.noarch: you know all those fancy web APIs that require tons of coding? The NuSOAP library makes that coding much less strenuous, which means I’ll be able to do more, faster, with services like Klout, EmpireAvenue, and the major social networks.

What’s amazing is that just a few years ago, you’d have to manually build these pieces from scratch, endure hours of testing, debugging, fixing dependencies, and more. Now you just type it all in one long command, and your webserver is ready to go. That means if you’re getting a Web 2.0 company up and running, it’s easier than ever and faster than ever to get up and running and be fully capable of doing business.

Here’s the most important takeaway from all of this: if you understand the underlying technologies that make up social media and digital marketing, you understand what capabilities and potential you do or do not have. If you don’t know what’s under the hood, you don’t really know what you’re driving. Even if you’re not a technologist, a developer, or an IT person, you should still have some passing familiarity with all of these pieces, because knowing what’s under the hood will let you know if you’re doing the technological equivalent of driving a Lamborghini Aventador (one of the top 10 fastest cars in the world) to the grocery store at 10 miles per hour, vastly underusing its potential.

Here’s a secondary takeaway: if you know what the pieces do, if you know that you have the potential to get them in place rapidly (even if you’re not a technologist), then you know what solutions you can provide. Here’s an example, the php-oauth.noarch package. You’ve heard of OAuth in the context of social media authentication and you use it every time you click a “Log in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook” button. If you know this software package is available on your webserver for free, you now know you can do a lot more with OAuth applications, which in turn means you can offer more capabilities to your customers and clients for things like custom sign-in forms.

You don’t need to be a car mechanic to know what’s under the hood of what you drive. Likewise, you don’t need to be a developer or a systems administrator to at least have a sense of what your website is capable of. Take some time to learn the basics, ask your in-house IT staff (IT people love free food, so buy them lunch in exchange for a tour), and you’ll be in a much better position to know what you’re capable of.

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Way back when I was writing Marketing White Belt, I wanted a better writing tool. Evernote was and is a wonderful tool for writing shorter content (like this blog post) but for managing very large documents, it can get unwieldy, even with folders and groups and notebooks. I started looking around for a better writing tool, and reviewed a whole bunch before stumbling across Scrivener from Literature and Latte Software.

Scrivener has a few things going for it that are deal-makers for me, the things that made me shell out $45 for it.

1. Export to Kindle and Nook. Formatting eBooks for sale on Amazon is a royal pain in the ass. Ask Chel Wolverton if you don’t believe me, she had to do the manual formatting for Marketing White Belt and was about ready to find whoever developed the .mobi spec and eviscerate them with a salt shaker. Scrivener supports these formats and will export to them very nicely, making it super easy to actually create an eBook for sale.

2. Outlines, notecards, and research modules. Each of these modules helps greatly for laying out the structure of a book. One of my less endearing traits is that I tend to jump around on various topics frequently, which can be really bad news for a book you’re trying to write if coherence is important. By having neatly organized “containers” for all the different parts of a book at my fingertips, I can jump around and write in different sections as I feel inspired.

3. Here’s the biggest deal closer for me: project targets. I absolutely love, adore, and worship this part of Scrivener because it keeps me on track. It’s quite simple: I dial up how many words I’m aiming to write for an eBook (I aim for about 10,000 words), dial in a due date as a goal to finish, and what days of the week I plan to write. For example, I aim to have Marketing Blue Belt written by the end of the year. I set the deadline as December 31, set 10,000 words as my target, and look what the program does:

That’s right: it gives me my overall target, progress towards that target, but most important: how much do I need to write today, in this session of writing, in order to make meaningful progress towards my goal and hit my deadline?

You can, of course, do the math yourself, but there’s something wonderfully inspiring and motivating about watching the little progress bar grow every time you tap out a word on your keyboard. I can push myself to write just a little bit more, just a few more sentences, just a few more thoughts and see my progress towards my goal.

Scrivener retails for $45. It’s not cheap by any means, though you can take a 21 day trial of it and see if it works for you. If you’ve ever thought, “I want to write a book/eBook/publication”, this might just be the tool that helps you towards that goal. Julien Smith says you’re bound to become a writer anyway, so if you plan to pursue it seriously, this might be a good piece of software for you to have.

I’ll issue the same caveat for Scrivener that I issue for all tools: the tool helps, but ultimately the hard work is up to you. Owning a nice DSLR won’t automatically make you a better photographer, and owning Scrivener won’t automatically make you a better writer.

If you’re interested, you can buy it here. (affiliate link) It’s available for Mac now in retail and in beta for Windows.

Full disclosure: this review was not prompted by anyone at Literature and Latte Software. I receive financial benefit via the affiliate links in the post.

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Today marks the rollout of Apple’s new iOS 5, the operating system that drives its devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Among the new features are a voice driven assistant named Siri and significant updates to the Safari mobile browser. Let’s talk about these two changes.

Siri provides, among other things, a voice interface to many of the common functions in iOS. As with all voice recognition systems, there’s a good chance that the easier something is to pronounce, the better the system will do. As this sort of voice interface becomes more widespread, it will impact your marketing in a few ways.

• Your business needs to be recognizable by voice. You know all those clever companies that decided to start omitting vowels from their domain names? A voice interface won’t necessarily realize you meant an intentionally misspelled brand name, especially if it’s not well known.
• If you have hyphens and other oddities in your domain name, now might be the time to buy an alternative. If you want someone to get to your site by voice navigation, the odds of a computer getting MarketingOverCoffee.com spelled correctly vs. i-want-2-make-ur-marketing-1337.net are pretty good. Pronounceable domain names matter more than ever.
• Search queries will get longer on mobile devices. If Siri works as advertised, queries could become entire, full sentences. Watch your queries like a hawk to see how things like query length and complexity change.

The second major change incorporates Read-it-later/Instapaper functionality right inside of the Safari browser. Among other things, this standardizes fonts, cleans up text, and removes navigation and advertisements from web copy. Take a look:

A few major impacts here:

• Sites that rely heavily on AdWords and other advertising programs? You just got pantsed. Reader cleans up all of those ads.
• If you’re not coding to standards and learning HTML5, there’s a good chance that your site will get chopped up in new and unpredictable ways. Part of HTML5 is incorporating tags like <article> inside your content, which then lets the browser find the relevant stuff and display it.
• When you’re blogging, you absolutely, positively need to be adding calls to action to your body copy. That’s what’s going to get seen. That wonderful template with the exquisite call to action buttons in the navigation? Look at the picture above. They’re going to fade away when someone uses the Reader feature. Here’s a quick sanity check for you right now: go subscribe to your blog and read it in something like Google Reader. Your ads, your navigation, your calls to action – all of them are gone and you’re left just with the core copy itself. The way around this is to be placing vital calls to action in the body copy itself so that it’s seen no matter how you slice and dice. For example, in my blog posts, I use a WordPress plugin called Shortcode Exec PHP that executes a snippet of text at the end of each post. Every platform I know of syndicates all of my calls to action at the end of each post, and chances are very good that iOS 5 will as well. Consider doing something similar.

So, that’s iOS 5 in a nutshell for marketers. Oh, there’s just one more thing…

… Twitter is everywhere. If you’re not currently active on Twitter, you’re going to miss out on the interactions with all the iOS 5 users who are. Get going.

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I was talking recently with a friend who is a job seeker, someone who has been out of work for more than a little while and was trying to add some new skills to their portfolio to improve their chances of finding work. His strategy was simple: learn PHP and MySQL and attempt to enter the Web 2.0 economy after leaving a biosciences background.

During our conversation, he indicated they’d be completely leaving behind the biosciences field as they pursued their new field and I suggested that was a huge, critical mistake. Why? PHP/MySQL folks are a dime a dozen. It’s one of the first combinations of platforms to be taught to aspiring technologists and as a result, nearly everyone has it on their resumes. It’s so common, in fact, that you can find an experienced developer overseas that will work for less than the guy flipping burgers at your local fast food joint. Unless you are the very best of the best, pursuing it by itself is not a formula for winning.

So what is the winning formula? The ability to code in PHP and MySQL in combination with something else. I said in conversation that these platforms by themselves are somewhat uninteresting now, but if you can combine them with something else, bridge the gap between different areas of expertise, then you’ve got something relatively rare and valuable.

For example, in my friend’s case, knowing how to write and extend web services while having a biosciences background and knowledge of the field means he can write very specific solutions for that field, knowing the ins and outs far more than an overseas outsourced contractor ever would. He knows what people in his field are looking for, what their problems are, and how they prefer to solve those problems.

The future for the successful job seeker follows one of two routes: either be the very best of the best, or find a niche that allows you to combine different areas of expertise together in combinations that are rare and valuable. Pursuing a commodity skillset or degree by itself will not guide you to the success you seek.

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This post was updated to reflect that Facebook’s deadline is October 1, not October 14.

As you may or may not know, Facebook will be requiring all custom App developers to have SSL certificates installed on their Facebook Apps in order to be published as of October 1, 2011. This is going to break a lot of apps, particularly those made by folks looking for simple things such as Like Gates and custom landing pages.

I’m pleased to offer stupidly cheap SSL certificates from Comodo, Verisign, GeoTrust, and more through a new affiliate partnership with the SSL Store. For as little as $30 per year, you can meet Facebook’s requirements for digital certificates on your Apps. My recommendation is Comodo’s Essential SSL Certificate for $30. Any Facebook Page owner should be able to spring for that.

Once you’ve purchased an SSL certificate for your Facebook App, you’ll need to install it on your web server or have your web hosting provider install it for you. A list of instructions for installing these certificates can be found here.

Note that this change doesn’t affect regular Facebook Pages themselves, only those Pages which have developed a custom App of some kind (like a Like Gate).

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Borrowing an idea from Tom Webster‘s social media monitoring, let’s take a look at your blog’s comments today.

Start with WordPress (any blogging software will do, however). Open up your comments section and look at only approved comments, as I assume you de-spam your comments regularly before approving them.

Open up your text editor of choice and begin copying and pasting the last 10 pages of comments into it. If you’re feeling more sophisticated than copy/paste, open up MySQL and do an export of the post text column only to simplify the next steps.

Dedupe it if your software allows you to dedupe by line. Remove any obvious formatting or data-only lines and you should be left with a large text file of your recent blog comments.

Now fire up Wordle and feed this large chunk of text into it:

Two questions for you:

1. Do the largest words in the cloud express an intended focus of your blogging? That is, if you blog about marketing or social media, are the comments you’ve received indicative of that? If not, your content may be somewhat off target.

2. Are there words or word associations in the cloud that you didn’t expect to find in there? For example, in my cloud above, I found that people was unusually prominent and it turns out that the word people is used very heavily when referencing how to build social networks like Google+.

Got a blogger you respect? Run their comments through the same mechanism and see if you have anything in common with their audience. Here, for example, is Chris Brogan:

So, what are people saying about your blog posts?

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The cloud sure is convenient. I can put stuff in it and never have to worry about managing or maintaining server infrastructure, system maintenance, etc. Someone else does all that, and I just show up, pay my dues, and have my stuff wherever I go. It’s perfect, right?

Except…

… when companies in the cloud get bought or go away, like CoHuman, which I had previously recommended and loved. One quick signature by its founder on a letter of intent and the service announces that it’s going away.

… when data is transient, like Twitter search. Tweets come and go, but not nearly as many are recorded permanently.

… when systems out of your control fail, like a major daily deal service experienced. Instantly their main source of income vanished.

… when, as Helena Bouchez pointed out, you run out of money yourself. Think carefully about how deeply invested you are financially in the cloud. Can you afford to pay for all those services if things get lean? How much of your business depends on cloud services that you might want to suspend until cash flow improves?

How dependent are you on the cloud? Have you investigated things like the Data Liberation Front?

Before you sign up for a cloud service, ask yourself these simple questions:

1. How easily can I get my data out?
2. How easily can I replicate the business processes that the cloud service provides? This is a lot harder than #1.
3. How dependent is my business on the accessibility and availability of the cloud?
4. What expense is there between the cloud and rolling my own, and is the trade-off worth it?

Based on your answers, you can judge whether you should be pursuing a cloud-based solution or doing something in-house. There are times when using the cloud just makes sense. Maintaining your own mailserver is a pain in the butt. I’ve done it, I don’t enjoy it, and I gladly hand that over to GMail to be their problem, with the understanding that I need to regularly back up my email on my machine.

There are other times when using the cloud is possibly the worst thing you could do because it locks you into a mission-critical solution that you lose control over, and if you can’t sustain the requirements of the cloud service, you’re up a creek without a paddle.

At the very least, before considering a cloud service, you should have in mind a completely viable alternative to it that’s local or self-hosted software. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same as the cloud, but it has to be good enough to fall back upon and still be able to manage your business. For example…

• If you’re a Salesforce.com user, you had better be aware of and able to install SugarCRM.
• If you’re an IM user, you should know what Jabber is and how to deploy it.
• If you’re a GMail user, you’d better know what Postfix is and how to get a hold of it.

Get out a sheet of paper and make a list of each cloud service and its non-cloud alternative. If you find a service that has no non-cloud alternative, and it’s mission critical to your company, be prepared to pay for it indefinitely or don’t use it.

Having those backup options will provide your business with the insurance it needs in case something goes horribly wrong with the cloud.

What’s your cloud backup strategy? Do you have one?

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Over the weekend at PodCamp NH, I gave a presentation about marketing your podcast. One of the little tidbits in there was how to load your podcast to Facebook and Google+. The trick with both of these services is that they have in-content video players, but no audio players. There are obviously apps in Facebook’s case, but those aren’t helpful to you for people who don’t have those apps installed or aren’t browsing your page.

So how do you load up a podcast episode? Very straightforward: turn it into a video. Start with a still image that accurately reflects the podcast. In the example below, I used a photo of John Wall and me at the doughnut shop where we record Marketing Over Coffee.

If you were really clever, you’d put some text on the photo such as calls to action or letting people know that it’s a video still and won’t be moving.

Drag and drop that photo into iMovie or the video editor of your choice. Adjust its duration to the maximum length allowed; for iMovie, that’s 10 minutes. Copy and paste as many times as you need until you’ve got enough “video” for the duration of your audio clip, then drop in your audio clip.

Once you’ve got everything lined up, render the project to a completed video file and upload to the respective services.

After the content is loaded, you’ll be able to have social conversations in-network about the audio, which is handy, especially if your own site doesn’t garner much in the way of comments or discussions.

Obviously, if you have actual video content, load that instead, but this is a fast and very simple way of getting your audio content into social networks using their default players.

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