Social media, online marketing hints, tips and advice – Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal (Winnipeg)

Yep – it’s May 27. Almost one month after our original soft launch date. But today – finally – I hit the send button and a message was delivered merrily to our beta phase testers giving them access to the test site.

I’ve already had hiccups. The audio videos all sound like chipmunks – well they didn’t when I tested them ALL. SOS email already sent.

I pretended to be an innocent visitor tonight and treated myself to a short film posted to our site and loved it – even though it was 20 minutes long. I think I paused once to refill the wine glass. And I have the shortest attention span. I’m terribly impatient. A small personal achievement then.

Our beta test group is around 500. I’m prepared for the feedback. Some will love it, some will feel mediocre and others will hate it. I’m not in love with it – it’s not MINE per se so I’m feeling a sense of neutrality. Which doesn’t mean I don’t care. Far from it. I just know that you can’t please everyone all of the time. And I also know that this site was built after feedback from many so some of the better ideas (IMO) may have fallen by the wayside because others thought they knew better and they had bigger swords than me.

I read a very interesting article tonight on the Advertising Age website.

Fear not dear reader, I’m still in the land of the living.

Website tweaks and fiddles have consumed my time. And when I wasn’t doing that I was sipping chilled white wine, spending time with the husband or sleeping. Oh, and possibly shopping.

I’ve spent much time trying to upload video to YouTube and Yahoo! Video. Turns out my files were just too darn big. That’s what you get for being new to a lot of this. I almost broke out the champagne when it finally worked.

We’ve got a great bunch of video and audio interviews under our belts and will continue to gather more.

There is a tendency to just gather new content at break neck speed without giving much thought to what we’re getting or whether it’s worth it. My philosophy has always been (and will continue to be until my visitors tell me otherwise) that quality of content over quantity and frequency of renewal wins out.

So, most things are in place and we’re very close to soft-launching the site which will be the real test and will probably drive me to drink copious amounts of wine – heck, what’s new?

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re launching to a select group – around 500 people. Who knows what will be revealed during that all-important phase? It’s all a learning process.

I’m off to a conference in early June to learn more about all this jazz. Wonder if there’s anyone else out there dreaming the same weird dreams as me and dwelling on stuff that most people don’t?