Underground Web Designs Blog

I know, I know, everybody’s saying to use this or that social network to promote your business. Well, even though I don’t agree that every business should be using social networking, there are certainly some businesses that should use it, and use it well.

If your business is a local business– you’re offering a local product or service and don’t plan on shipping it all over the world — Facebook is the perfect way to promote it. In fact, a local business is the only type of business I would recommend use Facebook, for three reasons:

1. Local businesses match Facebook’s goals. Facebook is designed to connect you to your friends and let you share with them what you’re doing. If your business is a local thing, you can tie into this friend connection by creating a group for your business and getting friends to join, posting pictures of friends or others using your products, etc.
2. You can capitalize on interaction. Besides connection, Facebook is all about interaction — Who did what, when, and with whom. Use this dynamic to promote your product. Get people talking about you and your business with their friends. Make your business a part of their lives.
3. Make your business comment worthy. Facebook is all about short comments. Wall posts, picture comments, etc. Make sure that what you do is worth commenting on. If nobody comments on your business you will get no benefit from Facebook.

In order to promote anything successfully on Facebook, it has to be interesting to your current friends list. If you start a Facebook group for your business, remember that only your own friends will see it at first. If they find it interesting, it will spread. If they don’t, it will fail. If what you do is of no interest to your own friends, then don’t bother promoting on Facebook. Try something else. But if you can make what you do interesting to your friends — enough that they will comment and interact with you about it — you have the potential to grow a very large business using Facebook.

Now I’m just like the next guy — I won’t comment on just anything. But this whole post was inspired by a local business using Facebook for advertising and promotion. Take a look: Bake Me A Cake. Look at the pictures, read the comments. If you can do this with your business, then promote it using Facebook. If you can’t generate this kind of buzz, don’t waste your time.

Everybody wants better to make their website stand out on Google right? Well what if you could get a link to a map of where your business is located — in Google’s own search results? Think it can’t be done? Check out this live search results page.

Microformats are a way of adding extra data to the HTML on a web page so that both computers and humans can understand what the information means. This could be information about an upcoming event (date, time, location), or a person or business (name, address, email address, etc). In this case, Google is using contact information marked up using the hCard microformat to display an extra link in it’s search results that displays a map of the business’s headquarters.

Now, adding an extra link to the search results is cool, but it’s nothing compared to what can and will be done as microformats become more popular. Because they allow computers to understand the data on your website better, microformats can lead to smarter search engines, better organization of data, and less manual input of information.

The future of the internet revolves around programs doing their own research and sharing information with each-other, and one of the key technologies will be the use of microformats on the web. Best of all, using microformats has never been easier. If you use Wordpress, check out my recently released Micro Anywhere plugin for Wordpress. Install the plugin and you can be adding event and contact information to your pages and posts within minutes.

The internet has done great things by providing access to nearly unlimited information. The next stage of internet evolution will enable software to understand and process this information for us, so that we only see what we want to see, when we want to see it. Will your site be one of the first to make use of this exciting technology on a massive scale?

Automation is a big thing in the manufacturing industry. Factories use robots and other “smart” machines to weave cloth, build cars, and almost everything in between. But automation has just as many applications for the small business as it does for a factory — the difference is that small business don’t know about it, or think it’s too expensive.

Now, I’m not suggesting you purchase a robot to handle the paperwork, but I am suggesting that if we made better use of the computer power we all have on hand to automate certain tasks, our lives could be much less stressful, and much more productive.

Many people can dramatically increase their work efficiency by simply teaching their desktop computers to help them keep organized. E-mail rules and calendar synchronization are great examples. If enough people use a service like Google calendar, you can even subscribe to those that are important, so that your own calendar is always up to date.

One thing I’ve successfully automated has been the synchronization of my cell phone with my computer. Since both my Mac and my phone support Bluetooth, the computer simply connects wirelessly to my phone each day and the two devices update each-other with any changes. This keeps my contacts and calendar updated, without me having to enter the same information in 2 different places.

Or what about our websites? What if you used RSS feeds to put the latest 5 blog posts from your blog on your home page? Or what if you could pull up ANY blog posts on a certain topic, and reference them on your site — without you doing a thing? Both are possible and easy to set up, yet few people use them.

Could you help automate things for your customers as well? Microformats such as hCalendar and hCard allow websites to display event and contact information in a way that both humans and computers can understand. By providing your business’s contact information as an hCard on your “about us” page, you can make it that much easier for those who use hCard enabled web browsers to get in touch with you: instead of having to write anything down one click puts your contact information in their address book!

Next time you sit down at your computer, think about 5 tasks you do every day, and then spend 30 minutes researching how to automate them. They may take some time to set up, but in the long run automation is always well worth the setup time.

At the Webvisions conference I attended a couple weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about microformats and open protocols that would enable the next generation of internet applications to not only share data, but to understand more and more data that resides on ordinary webpages.

Indeed, standards such as microformats are not new, they just haven’t been used too much. Now is, I believe, the time to start changing that. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’ve been working on creating some plugins for systems already in use so that they can benefit from the use of microformats. Today the first of these plugins was finished, and has been released.

The plugin is an hCalendar plugin for TinyMCE. TinyMCE is the WYSIWYG editor used in many popular content management systems and blogging softwares, including MODx, my CMS of choice, so I hope that by making this plugin available to such a wide audiance, many more people will be able to use microformats on their webpages and in their blogs… even if they don’t fully understand how they work.

The plugin works by opening a dialog box where a user can input event details including the event title, location, url, dates and times, a description, and some tags, and then encoding that data into an hCalendar event on the page. Once the data has been encoded into the hCalendar microformat, any software that supports hCalendar can extract the event details and add it to a calendar, run a search for similar events, or anything else.

To download the plugin for your own website or blog, please visit the hCalendar plugin page on my main site.

I would love to hear your feedback about this plugin in the comments. I hope to create some more plugins, including plugins to handle hCard data and Geo data once I have some more time.