We talked to him about his history at the WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) and at Yahoo News, and about what he plans to do with the new organization.

Whiskey Chats — 04 — Neil Budde

How? A mix of advertising, optimizing for the open graph protocol, and Facebook Comments. I’ve distilled what we did to boost our likes and Facebook engagement and now, Facebook is our highest source of referrals. Learn the exact steps we took in this presentation to the WordPress Philly Meetup.

When it comes to branding an online property, one of the first things you should consider in the process of naming an entity is the availability of a possible domain name.

Like good real estate, the neighborhood and address you land at can help your online property thrive.

But good real estate gets speculated quickly, and with a finite number of memorable and catchy domain names available in the top-level .com domain spectrum, many brands are looking to international domains as an additional resource.

In the 90s, before the boom of web businesses, domain names came cheaply because market demand was low. Domains still cost as little as $9.95 to register. But because companies have moved quickly into the neighborhood, valuable online real estate is limited. Now, the market is controlled by individuals and companies that invested early, out of speculation opportunities or simply because they got there first.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures who has funded a number of recognizable online startup companies, says that a short, quality domain should be highly coorelated with investment:

We used to advise companies to spend $10k or less on a domain, then we upped that recommendation to $25k. We recently upped it again to $50k.

In line with our own plans for growth, Technically Media recently acquired Technical.ly, a top-level Libyan domain, a decision that did not come lightly. After the jump, some lessons in that decision-making process.

What is your brand?

For the past three years, we’ve operated Technically Philly, a local news organization focused on technology in the Philadelphia region. We own TechnicallyPhilly.com, TPhilly.com, and a handful of variable domain names that encompass the name of that brand.

Should we grow outside of the Philadelphia region, and taking that inevitability into account, we decided that a national brand name was necessary.

Two options became apparent: develop a new national brand name or take advantage of what we already had going. Quite frankly, the availability of domain names helped us shape that decision. None of the dozens of names that we developed were available as a .com, which should be a first choice for most businesses—it’s the most recognizable domain on the web internationally.

Having done a great job branding the Technically name both through our local tech news product and our parent company Technically Media, it made sense to take advantage of that effort. We decided to seek domain opportunities relevant to that name, and found one in Libya’s .ly domain.

Should you make an investment in a domain outside your country?

With the .com crunch evident, there are dozens of top-level domain names worth exploring. Many are sold through U.S. registrars, like Network Solutions: co, .de, .asia, and the new, controversial .xxx, as examples. International names are harder to come by because those countries often hope to keep the registration of their domains local: .me (Montenegro) and .ly (Libya) being a great examples. With those, expect to purchase from registrars that require some extra research for reassurance.

We found that you should ask why you shouldn’t invest in a domain outside your country. If it makes sense for your brand, it’s certainly worth exploring.

Who benefits from the sale of those domains?

In the U.S., companies like Network Solutions, GoDaddy and Dreamhost sell domain registrations, and they are overseen by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Libyan domain names have an extra layer: they are registered by several accredited for-profit businesses that are overseen by Libya’s national registry NIC.LY , which was given permission to accredit those for-profit registrars by ICANN.

Who is accountable?

In our research, we were certainly worried about a case of NIC.LY seizing at least one .ly domain; in that case, vb.ly, a URL shortener that catered to sexually explicit content (though clearly educational in nature), was found to be in violation of NIC.LY’s Terms of Service. An official at ICANN confirmed to us that NIC.LY is completely responsible for oversight of its domains and that no appeals process is available through the international agency. That’s unfortunate considering the situation at vb.ly, but we decided that since we won’t be sharing explicit content, we felt comfortable with the registry.

What have others experienced?

We wanted to understand who had purchased .ly domains in the past and from which registrar they had purchased them. We landed at several well-known entities that had purchased .ly domains, like the URL shortener bit.ly (which, in fairness, has since registered bitly.com) and Active.ly, a small startup based in Seattle. The latter, at least, had acquired a domain from Libyan Spider, a broker and registrar founded and run by Hadi Naser, based in Tripoli, Libya. With several identifiable western-market domain transactions, including a $100,000 acquisition reported by TechCrunch, Naser’s Libyan Spider seemed like a best fit. And Active.ly’s founders confirmed that experiences with Naser had been professional and enjoyable. Our experience so far has been the same.

What if that domain opportunity is in a politically volatile country?

We continue to worry about the future of Libya’s political strife, but with Arab Spring contributing to the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, democratic elections taking place, and the added oversight of ICANN, should strife result in unexpected consequences, we are as confident as we can be that our domain will remain ours.

What’s next?

We couldn’t be more excited about the new domain name. For now, we’re redirecting Technical.ly to TechnicallyPhilly.com, but it will eventually become its own entity. It’s opened up a ton of possibilities for us, and the punchy name feels just right.

For a room of Leadership Inc. class members, our Christopher Wink discussed why budding corporate and nonprofit leaders should take personal use of social media a bit more seriously than some may think.

See the presentation slides above or see them here.

Campus Philly is a small, regional nonprofit dedicated to a mission of attracting, engaging and retaining college graduates to the Philadelphia area.

Their mission rocks; they host popular events and lead interesting research.

Yet, in summer 2011, even they said their website sucked, and they had no clear strategy about what to do with it anyway.

Their platform was a dated, proprietary Lotus framework, their editorial interns had little focus for their content and the organization’s social strategy wasn’t much more than an afterthought from a busy staff.

Our job was to get their web strategy a little bit closer to the expectations set for an otherwise interesting and meaningful group that is the envy of graduate-retention program throughout the country. In six months time, from June to December, Technically Media did just that, by focusing on three clear efforts:

1. Create information architecture, develop user experience and lift a new homepage — The focus here was to look clean, simple and be incredibly easy and accessible for a staff with no full-time tech or web staff.
2. Create clear editorial strategy for the web and social space – The focus here was to use the existing workflow of a small staff to have the biggest impact and to begin follow the norms of the online world to welcome more traffic, links and attention.
3. Offer basic workforce development for the basic staff skills necessary to support the first two goals — Though entire degrees are based on the concepts, we offered a slew of bootcamps for Campus Philly staff around its platform management, web basics and many content creation topics. Much more is needed here, but the level of staff savvy went through an impressive upgrade in a half year’s time.

Lessons:

• Whizbang web solutions are not good recommendations for small staffs — Campus Philly needed a simple solution that its staff could largely run autonomously, so, after some deeper analysis, we recommended a WordPress solution and custom theme, designed by staff.
• Highlight staff assets and use them — Campus Philly had a great on-site designer who was fun to work with, passionate about the project and already had designed the look of the site. Rather than start from scratch, we welcomed her direction, worked with her to think more functionally about user experience and its relationship to existing WordPress structure. We offered further development assistant and partnered with a third-party firm to turn the design into a WordPress theme, continuing to focus it to Campus Philly workflow.
• Look for cost-cutting measures — Most often, organizations are underinvesting in IT and web architecture, but still, there are sometimes ways that organizations could cut costs, in ways like hosting, processes, third-party work and more. We found some in this project and were able to make our costs seem increasingly sensible.
• Focus and look to the future — Campus Philly also had a career site and other projects it had interest in moving forward. Rather than taking on too much or losing focus, we called to stay on point for our three clear objectives, noting that we can move on to other projects if there’s interest there.
• Facebook Comments ease nerves — There remains a lot of concern about authentication of comments. Though not perfect, implementing Facebook-based comments is of great interest to many partners.
• Happy staff make work easier – When we look for projects to accept, a priority of ours is a work environment that seems welcoming. Campus Philly was a small staff, but they were excited by their mission and genuinely interested in the project and the organization’s future. That made the project a much more meaningful and enjoyable one.

Some Results:

• Old: temperamental, dated, cluttered and ugly site
• New: dependable, secure, clean and fresh-looking site
• Old: Required third-party development for any additional features
• New: Supported by rich open-source WordPress community
• Old: No staff with wide-ranging ability to impact website structure
• New: Deeper, more flexible staff understanding of WordPress structure to website
• Old: No search, available archives or welcoming SEO taxonomy
• New: Standard search, a decade of archives and WordPress SEO-friendly URL structure
• Old: No clear editorial strategy.
• New: Developed staff and intern goals, editorial calendar and content basics.
• Old: No social workflow.
• New: Clear strategy for sharing and developing greater social audience.
• Old: No basic staff understanding of content basics.
• New: Documentation and bootcamps offering foundation for content creation.
• Old: No clear place for support, direction and education
• New: Ample documentation offered, in addition to clear open-source community for development and content lessons.

Nearly 70 percent of respondents reported that Technically Philly had at least an 'important' impact on the local technology community.

Nearly 70 percent of surveyed Technically Philly readers say the news site has had at least an ‘important’ impact on the local technology community.

This from a survey of 150 Technically Philly readers in December 2011, aimed at getting a sense of interest for membership opportunities and perceptions of the local technology news site. In Technically Media’s commitment to transparency, we’ve shared all the responses here.

Below find a slew of charts and graphs detailing the responses and some takeaways about what that might mean for other niche news sites.

MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION

A focus of this survey was to get a broader sense of customer interest in membership offerings and payment.

Roughly 7 in 10 respondents asked for discounts to new and existing networking events and existing local tech events. Nearly that many sought a directory, particularly focused on investing.

Responses showed most interest for in-person interactions, from discounted events and access to a database of investors to meet.

There could be an opportunity to push toward the $30 total, at least to begin.

More than 3 in 5 respondents requested a curated directory, and 2 out of five sought a careers site, an RFP board and self-publishing opportunities.. The bottom two options that receieved the lowest interest were for sponsoring content and for access to an investment fund.

Most interest is in possibly automated services.

Fifty four percent of respondents reported their businesses would pay between $75 and $250 for a membership.

The focus seems to be in and around the $100-$250 range for business services.

READER INFORMATION

One-third of Technically Philly readers reported the site had at least an 'important' impact on their business. More than 60 percent said there was at least a moderate benefit.

Local niche media can have impact on real businesses.

There is a diverse readership among type of work in and around technology. In the original survey, the distinction was made between for-profit, nonprofit and institutional work, though for simplicity's sake, these categories have been combined here.

The cycle of research, entrepreneurship, development and marketing is fully represented among Technically Philly readers.

One-third of Technically Philly readers reported making at least $70,000 in 2011.

Affluent readers do consume online-only news

Nearly 3 of 4 Technically Philly readers are in their 20s or 30s.

There is a focus among younger readers.

Almost half of respondents visited Technically Philly daily.

There is reader growth opportunities by increasing daily consumers.

Using the survey sample size, this gives a sense of reader locations. Thanks to Sarah Cordivano for making it.

Using this sample size of survey respondents, GIS analyst Sarah Cordivano kindly made a map showing the zip code locations of Technically Philly readers.

BEST OPEN ENDED RESPONSES

We also had a final question, letting people write whatever comment they wanted. Here are some highlights, both good and bad:

• “Not everyone reading your website works in the tech sector. I come to your website because I enjoy the content. The creativity and intelligence of a lot of young people in the Philly tech scene is interesting and inspiring. I like hearing about different projects going on in small coworking spaces and apartments around the city. I like hearing about the larger, more formal tech industry in Philadelphia too. Keep doing what you’re doing. The exit interviews are great, btw. More interviews with Philly tech people!”
• “Improve the website for TP. Not visually appealing.”
• “Need to expand your coverage beyond the folks you favor. More objectivity to established tech companies, you bash them too much, esp. CMCSK – whether you realize it or not, your tone in covering them is very negatively biased…..very unprofressional.”
• “I would like to see more non-internet and non-digital issues and news covered. My interests are primarily in physical but highly technical areas including physical prototyping, Aircraft parts manufacturing, high tolerance casting, etc. I haven’t seen anything along these lines communicated to the Phila public.”
• “TP has exposed me to a number of organizations and influencers that [my company's] local leadership should be tracking and /or conversations that we should work to be involved in.”
• “Please continue to use and update the Google calendar events!”
• “I strongly believe that TPL needs to deep into online video. #2: I’d love to see TPL create some kind of unique content that inspires the nation and maybe that implicitly communicates why Philly is such a wonderful place to live and work.”
• “Love Technically Philly to become the one stop aggregator of all tech events, meetups, etc. Big void, and opportunity, to really bring together everyone, and fix what is a fragmented and disparate situation.”
• “Continuing to ask the hard questions. Shining a light on teh issues facing the entrepreneurial community. Creating awareness of needs for the business and government organizations that can help entrepreneurship.”
• “be more aggressive in setting course for the tech scene in philly. There is no rudder, in my opinion, over it today, groups that do exist are incredibly self serving and narcissistic. TPHL has opportunity to provider a tremendous amount of leadership – consider broader expansion in the DelVal – too frequently TPHL seems bound to the Philly zip codes. Inject more of a voice to your coverage – appreciate the journalistic integrity, but the site lacks personality. expand contributors would also be a welcome change.”

We’re excited to announce that our technology news publication Technically Philly was prominently highlighted in a report generated by J-Lab, the journalism innovation think tank based in Washington, D.C, for a number of projects that it was involved with in 2011.

Working with various partners in Philadelphia’s journalism industry through grants funded by J-Lab and the William Penn Foundation, Technically Philly was active in shaping projects that, most notably, accelerated conversation about broadband connectivity and its future and another that researched abandoned properties in Philadelphia.

Broadband2035, as we’ve written in the past, generated close to a dozen reports about the state of broadband access in the region, and how it would be represented in the City of Philadelphia Planning Commission’s citywide strategic planning document, Philadelphia2035, the first comprehensive plan put together in more than 50 years. The partnership and project helped connect the niche communities of Philadelphia’s built environment and technology, introducing an important, yet often under-reported issue.

As the report says:

Technically Philly and PlanPhilly joined forces to report on the status of the city’s broadband adoption and tie it to the city’s issuance of a citywide master plan. The biggest contribution of the project, to date, has been to actively solicit reader recommendations on the conditions of the city’s broadband infrastructure and on city residents’ hopes for the future.

See the full report on Broadband2035 and its impact here.

And working with Philadelphia City Paper and PlanPhilly, Technically Philly helped to envision and create an online tool that visualizes abandoned property in the city. The full report on that project is available here.

It was a strong year for public affairs technology news coverage, including outside of the J-Lab grants. We spent much of the first half of the year working on Transparencity, a six-month project in partnership with the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation, which focused on, among other topics, the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Technology efforts to work with other city agencies to modernize, curate and disseminate data sets and other relevant information for third-party developers and other action. Finally, we finished 2011 by publishing an in-depth report on the state of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in the School District of Philadelphia.

We look forward to future collaborative efforts in Philadelphia and beyond. To read about other successes of the J-Lab Enterprise Reporting Awards in Philly, see the institution’s full report.

We call it our big board.

Every business creates goals, in sales, revenue, mission and output. We do, too, but in addition to those internal goals, we like to create a broader vision that we write up by monthly steps on index cards and stick them on a big foam board in our office to keep it in our faces. It keeps us honest.

So, why not look back at how 2011 went? And, heck, why not share that with the world?

First, and perhaps most importantly, in 2011, we had two major tracks of our business: Technically Philly and our consulting. So, our big board was broken up in that very way, with a third green column for the major Transparencity grant project we led.

In the interest of transparency and of holding ourselves accountable, here’s our review of how we did on our goals in 2011:

TECHNICALLY PHILLY

1. January (PTW sponsorship launch) We created sponsorship one pager and event structure.
2. February (Sponsorship push) We hit our sponsorship goals.
3. March (Big details) We launched a print supplement, confirmed event space and more.
4. April (Philly Tech Week) 65 events, more than 4,000 attendees.
5. May (TP direction) We agreed that consulting was a backend to our focus on growing technology news.
6. June (Membership plans) We decided to look into taking a membership platform seriously.
7. July (Redesign plans) We decided a redesign process would bring into the membership.
8. August (Advertising strategy) We’ve focused on PTW sponsorship, but a longer-term underwriting plan.
9. September (Growth plans) We want to roll out another technology news market, not in Philly.
10. October (Journalism efforts) To follow on our first-half grant work, we launched other projects, like this.
11. November (Launch directory) We launched an early version.
12. December (Gross receipts) We exceeded our goals.

TECHNICALLY MEDIA

1. January — Release (TM.com and seminars) We launched launched a consulting website.
2. February — New Editorial Direction (TP plan, another editorial in Philly?) We pushed the core decision back.
3. March — Foundation work (Journalism consulting or tech grant)
4. April — Outreach (speaking, new client meetings)
5. May — Small client
6. June — Medium client
7. July — Speaking Deks (3-5 pitches)
8. August — Infrastructure (templates, processes) The structure of our consulting practice was formalized
9. September — Roles — We pushed back on dictating roles to the organization
10. October — Expansion (other market pitches)
11. November — Large client
12. December — Gross receipts

We’ve been working hard to increase programming in the Content Strategy Philly meetup group, which we helped launch last year during Philly Tech Week. That’s why we’re excited to announce that along with co-organizers Monica Hays, Vanguard’s content strategist and Kelani Nichole, a freelance content strategist, we’re programming an upcoming event to discuss user experience and content problems on a handful of Philadelphia websites.

At the group’s next meetup on Tuesday, Nov. 29, at the Indy Hall coworking facility in Old City, we’ll work in breakout groups to give some therapy and solutions to these frightening sites. RSVP here.

We’re looking to the to you to nominate Sites that Suck. Tell us your least favorite local web site designs, looking to music venues, government sites, restaurants, museums, entertainment or other. We’ll choose the five best suggestions and break out into smaller groups to try and fix the user experience and content problems. We’ll end with short presentations.

This will be a great way to see how other content strategy experts work on-the-ground, share how you see content on the web, and work together to make results. Add your website suggestions here.

Early nominations from the meetup group members include: Philly.com, Phila.gov, South Philly Food co-op and RealWinWin.

Hope to see you there!

Lately we’ve been experimenting with ways to attract readers to our sites beyond just word of mouth and content partnerships. For the first time ever, we purchased advertisements.

However, our budget is rather limited so we decided to test the advertising platforms of what are arguably the three most important social networks on the web: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Below is the result of a tests conducted over the past 45 days for our technology news site Technically Philly. This test was not scientific, but we hope our experience can help educate your future advertising buys.

1. LinkedIn

Target: Those with “Information Technology” or “Entrepreneur” in job titles.
Geography: Greater Philadelphia Area

Our LinkedIn ad was a simple square that pointed directly to our homepage (see above). Above is the exact report from LinkedIn (click to enlarge). Once you’re done laughing at our .031 percent Click Through Rate, you’ll see that the ad buy was a complete disaster.

Not only did the ad not convert well, there is no LinkedIn “fan page” where we can keep people consuming our content. A $3.00 CTR is way too high for Technically Philly,  a site where we are not selling a direct product.

In other words, if we were selling widgets for $100 we could perhaps justify this ad buy as the occasional $3.00 click would result in $100 in revenue. But Technically Philly needs repeated engagement for it remain profitable.

2. Twitter

We started to explore Twitter’s promoted tweets product, but it turned out that you needed $5,000 minimum. No thanks.

3. Facebook

In its first two years, Technically Philly focused much of its efforts on cultivating a community on Twitter. We’re a tech news site and most of our readers spend their days on Twitter. However after checking our Facebook page and discovering a laughable number of likes earlier in the year, our egos required us to do something.

We implemented Facebook comments and experimented with posting different types of content to our Facebook page in the early part of the summer. After seeing a respectful growth in likes, we decided to explore an advertising buy.

There are many variables to a Facebook ad. Firstly, there are two types of ads:

1. “Sponsored Story” notifies you when your friend interacts with Technically Philly “your friend has liked Technically Philly”

2. Straight ad. You can link to your Facebook page or your website. We chose our Facebook page, as our primary goal here was to increase our “likes.”

You can also have an infinite number of target demographics which is a nightmare for testing. We tested in two rounds.

The first round:

Ad # 1- Sponsored Story

• who live in the United States
• age 18 and older
• who are not already connected to Technically Philly
• whose friends are already connected to Technically Philly

Ad #2 – Straight advertisement

• who live in the United States
• who live in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania or California
• age 18 and older
• who are not already connected to Technically Philly

If you thought the LinkedIn ad buy performed badly, the Facebook straight ad put it to shame with its .009 percent CTR. The sponsored story resulted in more connections, though I suspect that the 42 number is deceiving, as our likes rose by much more than that during the run of the ad.

After seeing the results of the two ads, we placed a third buy focusing on the success of the sponsored story ad buy with a bit more geographical focus:

Ad #3 – Sponsored Story

• who live in the United State
• who live within 25 miles of Philadelphia, Pa
• between the ages of 18 and 30 inclusive
• whose friends are already connected to Technically Philly

As you can see, the ad was seen an average of 18.7 times (!) by each targeted user. However connections doubled with the price of our buy suggesting that each like cost us roughly $1.86.

So, did the ads work?

You’ll see our monthly active users spike when we placed ads on Aug 8th and Sept 11th.

The amazing part is that the interaction held up even after the ad expired which suggests that the effect is cumulative.

Above is a Google Analytics graph that measures weekly Facebook referrals. Google anaytics traffic shows small but sustained spikes when we placed the Faacebook ads, and those spikes do not coincide with general traffic, suggesting that our ads had an effect.

So what to make of all this?

Our takeaways:

• Facebook ads promoting our Facebook page merit additional testing as early data suggest that Facebook advertisements have a cumulative effect that outlast the advertising buy.
• Since the ad buys, our Facebook page has received 289 additional likes.
• Highly-targeted sponsored stories worked best for us on Facebook.
• Twitter is expensive. Though if you have the budget, you should try it. Or, you could always do it grassroots-style.
• LinkedIn’s returns were so bad we stopped the advertising run early. Perhaps our ad could use some improvement, but we likely won’t be using LinkedIn for ad buys.