TamTamy Blog

One of the most important elements to make your site or corporate blog known on the Net is its indexing by search engines such as Google (SEO).
Even if most 2.0 tools available at the moment (blogs, wikis, etc.) are already optimized so that contents can be well used and indexed, with some tricks it will be much easier to increase your Page Rank and have a good ranking.

- The title. As far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is concerned, it is not important that the title is particularly impressive, as it should be for the reader. It should rather be made of keywords that express the concept that will be developed in the post or in the article.
A good title will thus be obtained with a balance between these two values, so that both parts (SEO and readers) are satisfied.

- The “slug” = URL of the post. When you create a post, you must always check that the corresponding URL recalls its title. Most blog platforms already do this automatically or enable the user to set it (see WordPress). Always remember to check that this function has been correctly set and possibly choose a platform in conformity when you decide to open a corporate blog for yourself or for a customer or partner.

- Tags and categories. Tags and categories are generally always connected from a blog’s homepage through tag clouds or links. Consequently, the Page Rank of the pages of tag archive and category archive will increase “inheriting” part of the rank associated to the homepage. It is thus important that they are always used correctly.

- Opening of the post. The first two or three lines of the post are those which are read and found by search engines, so they must synthesize the subject that will be then developed in the post.

- Names of the images. When you insert a photograph or an image in a post or in a web page, you should not underestimate the importance of the name which will be associated to it, as well as the one inserted in the ALT tags.

- Links. When you link another blog, site or webpage in your blog, it is fundamental that you associate it to a word or a sentence which describes it properly. For example, it is recommended not to link words such as “here” or “in this page” when you refer to external and even more to internal links. If you are talking about companies, for example, you can insert the link on the word “Enterprise 2.0” or on the name of the company itself.
In this way, search engines will associate that word to a specific link and, should these be very numerous, this will help that keyword to appear in the first places in the lists of results.

As we have seen in the previous post, a very effective way for companies to keep informed on what happens on the market is the use of RSS feeds.
Once companies have learned to monitor what is around them, they will have to remember to keep an eye also on the opinion that the consumers and the Net in general have of them. Just as looking for news on a daily basis is a long and tiring job that can be made easier with news aggregators, there exist other tools which make it possible to automatically receive information on one or more chosen keywords. One of these is the activation of Google alerts.
To access it you need to have a Google account, but compared to the service offered it is a possible obstacle that can be easily overcome.
For every account, you can activate a variable number of notifications, starting for example from the name of your company, so that it can detect any post, news, site, comment, and in general everything that is published on the web concerning your brand. The report for every research will be sent to your email or through feed with the required frequency.
When matched with a research carried out directly by the companies, Google Alert is a valid tool to get to know not only what is being said on a specific brand, but also to identify those who speak about it, and thus analyze which sectors have raised the highest interest or curiosity. Consequently, companies can concentrate or modify the core of their business and the related marketing campaigns in a more effective way.
On the other hand, the research can be concentrated on the name of a competitor, on one or more main keywords for the market of your interest, on a specific product that has just been launched.
As I have already said, it is good to keep on monitoring the contents on the Net also with other tools or methods because, as useful as Google Alert can be, it is not infallible.

RSS feeds are maybe the simplest and most useful tool that companies can employ to be always informed on the market and on how it is evolving.
As we all know, the word RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. To give a very simple definition, we can say that RSS feeds are pieces of news which are automatically updated and directly go into the PC, Mac or email box of the user who has decided to subscribe to one or more of them.
There exist several RSS feed aggregators which make it possible to read and filter the pieces of news as they are inserted into the net on the sites or blogs of our interest. Two of the most popular and functional are Google Reader and Bloglines.
In the case of companies, even more than for consumers, it really makes sense to employ some minutes to create your own list within one of these (or other) aggregators. And this time is regained when compared to the energies and the hours that every company would otherwise have to invest every day to run after all the sources it usually draws on.
We have already mentioned that information and awareness of what happens on the market have a central role for all companies. The new trends, the evolution of technology, the analysis of competitors and – let’s not forget about it – the study of blogs or of the sites of influencers and experts will be this way monitored daily and with the least effort.
The use of RSS feeds can be fostered at any level within a company. Every employee should be always informed and updated on what happens outside in his/her sector, be he/she a programmer, an accountant, a marketing person or a PM.

One of the services offered by TamTamy is the blog, which can be used in many contexts in the company, as a tool for internal or personal communication or communication towards the customers.
In this post we analyze the process of creation and management of a corporate blog addressed to the customers.
Before creating a corporate blog, you must have a clear idea of what you want to say and to whom you want to say it. Afterwards, your objective is improving your own image and the services offered by listening to the people until you become a leader in the sector, with the help of the comments of the users around the network.
It will be then fundamental to make use of all the possible tools to create buzz about your brand, such as tags, word of mouth on forums and blogs, RSS feeds and social media like Wiki and FaceBook. We will get deeper into these concepts in the following posts.
And yet, in order to earn the trust of your interlocutors, you need to always follow some rules which give a great importance to transparency. It is useless to try and hide some elements or excessively emphasize others when you are not telling the truth. Users will feel cheated and the boomerang effect which follows is dreadful. Let us not forget that all that is written on the net persists and is always traceable, whether it is a positive or a negative concept.
The further risk you should try to avoid is being banned from other services: this would close a potentially important communication channel, and such a mistake is hardly made up for.
You should really be open to dialogue. Censoring the negative comments that users can express on your blog does not make any sense. It is much better to listen to them, understand and answer explaining your point of view and use them to get better.
It is also very important that your corporate blog is always fresh. The answers to the customers must be timely, and the contents must be constantly updated, so that people will keep their fidelity and be back or read the news through the RSS feeds of the blog.
Of course, the quality of the contents is very important as well. It is better to write posts that are a bit less frequent but deeper and more interesting than giving a generic view which would bore your interlocutors and kill the debate that would possibly follow.
You should always be updated on the news in the sector and keep an eye on other blogs, participating in your turn as people who work in a company and are its spokesmen. The good opinion that other people have of you will grow and your horizons will widen in an attitude of collaboration, and not only competition.
In the next posts we will examine also other tools that are typical of a social network.

A TAG is simply a label. But if so, what importance can a simple label have in the universe of the Internet?

Have you ever been surfing the Internet and found yourself in a site completely different from the one you had started from, with contents that have nothing to do with the original site? Or have you ever been unable to find the site or the piece of information that you had managed to find a short time before?

The thing is that surfing the Internet is often a bit like free-wheel thinking: you know where you start, but you do not know where you will end. Hyperlinks subvert any hierarchy, knocking down the barriers of linearity and the boundaries of navigation. The web, like our mind, follows the laws of quantum physics rather than those of logic and statistics.

In the case of web navigation, we can use “Bookmarks” to memorize an interesting link. But what happens after we have carried out the same operation for hundreds of sites? Who uses a minute of his/her time to reorganize bookmarks after navigation?
We very often end up with dozens of bookmarks within only one category, or even worse, we find them all with no category or logical order.

In this case, it would be very useful to be able to associate every bookmark to one or more labels such as: “quantum_physics”, “quantum_thought”, “physics”, “video”, “interesting”, “for_blog”, so that, when necessary, it will be enough to search in our tags to find the information again.
The habit of tagging (labelling) information in a personalized way gives us many further possibilities, when compared with the simple possibility to register it in only one category. For example, if I wanted to register a video on quantum physics, I could decide to create tags which describe its contents (“quantum_physics”, “quantum”, “physics”), the medium (“video”), a subjective judgement (“interesting”), a hint for a future use (“for_blog”) and a creative “conceptual extension” (“quantum_thought”).
Try and do the same creating a hierarchy of categories: can you do that at all?