Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Godin calls out Calliflower.

by alec on April 7, 2009

I’m pretty stoked. I’ve been sitting here for the last hour watching our web site numbers climb because of a link from none other than Seth Godin this afternoon. Yes, Mr. Purple Cow.

And I’ve also been racking my brains trying to think of a way to take advantage of this sudden attention, but more on that in a minute.

Seth is out to reinvent the conference call. Seth thinks, like his friend Sasha, that conference calls are a bad experience. He says “I hate them.” He likes Sasha’s suggestions to make them better, but adds his own idea. Conference calls should have an accompanying chat room. He even calls out Calliflower as an example.

And why does he think that?

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen.

The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

That has been our experience as well. As anyone who has used Calliflower will tell you, the combination of text chat and voice changes the conversation entirely.

Now, back to taking advantage of the attention — here’s what we’ve come up with so that everyone can experience what Seth and I are talking about. If you haven’t already signed up for Calliflower, then sign up using promotional code OFFER66. That will get you a 14 day trial — unrestricted access to everything Calliflower has to offer – without having to enter a credit card.

No strings attached, no commitments. Just try it. We think you’ll love it. Just do it before April 15, because that’s when the offer expires.

At the end of those 14 days you can decide to keep Calliflower Premium by choosing one of our 3 subscription plans, or you can do nothing and your account will become a Calliflower free conferencing account.

And thanks for the mention, Seth.

{ 1 comment }

Exploit Calliflower to promote your online events

by alec on April 7, 2009

Want some help promoting your teleseminar, or online event? Calliflower conference calls have a number of features that are designed to help internet marketers do just that.

Google Indexing

Each public call in Calliflower is Google indexed. Calliflower uses the Subject of the conference call as the <META> Title, and publishes the Agenda of the call as the <META> description. And, just like a blog, each public call is added to the apps.calliflower.com sitemap. The result is that Calliflower calls are naturally search optimized.

Here are some examples:

ReadWriteWeb Live recently held an online event titled “Online Tools for Career Discovery & Job Searching”. A Google search of Online Career Discovery displays this as the #8 result:

When Voxbone announced their iNum country code 883, they were interviewed on the SquawkBox podcast. A Google search on country code 883 shows this result as the #4 result:

To take advantage of this as a call organizer, you must:

Use keyword rich Subjects for your conference calls, and for the Agendas for your calls.
Give Google time to get it into the index. Calliflower is a large site, and it can take a day or two for calls to appear in the Google index. If you publish your event a week or ten days in advance, it will appear in Google searches for sure.
Link back to your event, in order to boost its search ranking. ReadWriteWeb Live events rank very highly because they frequently employ this strategy.

Facebook and Twitter Integration

One of the best ways to promote your event is via your social network. Calliflower helps you to automate that in three ways:

You can press the button on your call to cause a Twitter message to be sent about the call. The call URL will be shortened with bit.ly, and the message will go out on your personall Twitter account, plus the @Calliflower Twitter account.
You can set Calliflower to automatically tweet every new public event that you create as well. That way you never need to remember to press the Tweet This button.
On Facebook, if you have installed the Calliflower Facebook application, Calliflower will automatically add calls to your profile newsfeed. Note that you can achieve the same effect if you already send your Twitter stream to Facebook.

Best of all, because Calliflower uses bit.ly to compress URL’s, you can also track the effectiveness of those tweets. Simply create a bit.ly account, and then search for the compressed URL. Bit.ly will tell you how many people clicked on your call, when, and from where the clicks originated. Try http://bit.ly/info/gs2lZ – a bit.ly record of a tweet that was sent for a call a couple of weeks ago — to see what I mean.

Calliflower Best Practices for Social Media Effectiveness

When I create a public event with Calliflower I do three simple things.

I create the call in advance, with keyword rich agendas and subjects. That gets my call into the search engine with the keywords I care about.
I write about the call on this blog, well in advance of the call, including those same keywords. I may also put out a press release using PRFree or another link friendly service. My goal is to creates backlinks to my call and increases its ranking in the search engine.
I promote the call using Twitter and Facebook in order to create more visibility and to be able to track interest.

Calliflower was created to be search engine and social media friendly, and an ordinary conference call service just isn’t. That’s a competitive advantage that all of our customers should be exploiting.

{ 0 comments }

FriendFeed 2.0 is cool. I’m sticking with Twitter.

April 7, 2009

When Mike Arrington writes that FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses, it’s hard to disagree with him. I’m not a FriendFeed user. Not in any real sense of the word. Oh yes, my Twitter postings are echoed to FriendFeed, and occasionally I respond there, but Twitter is where I hang out. Most of what I need is there, or has been supplied by third parties for me. Twitter is good enough, and it’s where people are.

Read the full article →