Originally this post was titles 5 reasons I won’t use your web product! But I decided that these were all things that companies could change about their products so I am trying to make it a more positive post.

I get asked to try tons of new sites and services every day. Sometimes people want me to review them on randomsarah.com, sometimes people want them to be considered to be featured on What’s it all About, and many times it’s just friends and other people on twitter telling me about new tools I might not know about.

I love trying out new online tools. It is one of my favorite things to do. But there are a few things right of the bat, that will make me not want to use a site or service.

So here is my list:

1. The Sign-up process: The first thing a new user is going to go through when trying out your site or service, is the Sign-up process. If it is to complicated, or long, I won’t even continue with the process.

Tumblr‘s sign-up page is a great example. 1,2,3 and your DONE!

2. Design: both Graphic Design and User Interface Design. I am a design geek 100%. I love shiny tools. But I have said this many times before, I will not use your product because it’s ugly. When you are starting a site, PLEASE take the time to invest in a good designer. I can promise you that it will pay off. People do judge books by their cover, and they automatically form opinions about your site within the first 5 seconds. Simply based on what it looks like.

For years I did not use GMail because I didn’t want to stare at it all day. I thought it was ugly. Once GMail added themes, I was hooked.

3. Video Tutorial: I can’t tell you how many times I sign up for a service and once I am done with the sign-up process, I have no idea what they want me to do, I have no idea what the service does. This is where I look for an intro video. A simple screencast on how to get started is really all it takes. Sometimes your users need a little push to start using the site. They need to know how, and video is the easiest way to show them.

Screencast video tutorials are very easy to do, but if you can’t do it yourself you can always find people to do it for you.

4. Something like it already exists: This one is a little harder to change, but I think it is worth it when you are creating anything for the web to REALLY see what else is out there. If your site or product is not WAY better than your competition, then people will most likely not give you the shot you deserve. Imitation is not a business model. It is important to create something new and innovative that people will love, and the critical mass will come.

5. Community: While community is not something that belongs as a part of every site, there are some great communities in places when it may not have been obvious that they belong.

Take Yelp for example. Yelp is a site where most people go to find restaurant reviews and other reviews. People can read reviews and write reviews. Now this might not be screaming for a community, but the Yelp community is thriving. You can ask questions, see what your friends are reviewing, create events, there is a ton of stuff to do on Yelp.

Listen to your users, if they are asking for community tools, give it to them. Even if it is just a place to give you feedback or talk about the service, people love community. Creating a strong community will only help your company. Story communities create brand advocates that will be willing to speak on behalf of your product and practically eliminate your need to do any marketing.

Mike Davis talks to me about the new show, whatsitallabout.tv

Thanks to Bill Cammack for putting this together

What’s it all About is going to SXSW interactive! I know you guys already knew that I was going and you know how excited I am, but I get to go and tape episodes of the show down there!

We are currently looking for companies to interview at SXSW and we will also be doing some interviews “man on the street” style as well as talking to a few of our favorite geeks about their favorite web tools. If you will be at SXSW and would like to be on the show, or just want to know where we will be and what we will be up to, please drop us a line at sxsw@whatsitallabout.tv

Some of you may know that for the last few months I have been working on my podcast called What’s it all About. In late December I partnered with Ambush TV, the company that is producing Gary Vaynerchuk‘s new show Obsessed, with Samantha Ettus, and we started the process of re-launching a show.

You may remember when What’s it all about first premiered. It was back in September during Web 2.0 week in NYC. The first episode we did was explaining twitter, and it got quite a bit of attention. I was surprised at how people responded to a show that I put together in my bedroom with my iMac, but the response was good. At one point the show was featured in iTunes “New and Notable” category.

It was very exciting. However I soon came to realize that I wanted to do more with the show and I did what I never should have done and that’s doubt myself. I realized that I couldn’t put out the kind of quality show all by myself, without funding, from my bedroom. (I probably could have if I really tried, but I doubted myself and I didn’t try) I only made two episodes of the show before I got discouraged with technical difficulties and no one to help me fix them.

So I started to look for a way to make the kind of show I wanted. Ambush TV came to my rescue! My friend Tim Kres-Spatz was starting Ambush TV with his friend Mark and I thought it was the perfect solution.

Ambush.tv creates original video content based on the passions of fresh faces from across the internet. We transform great ideas into high value, high definition productions of broadcast television quality.

Ambush TV has a studio space not to far from where I live, and they had the equipment to help give me great production quality for the show. I still needed some help with the techinical side of things. I wrote the show and hosted the show, but my editing skills were never that great (I was using iMovie) and I had a vision for the website for the show that I could not exicute on my own. So I brought in my friend Rob Blatt. He is an award winning producer and has been a podcast guy for years. Rob is now co-producing the show with me, he edits the show, and he did all the design on the blog. He took what I had in my head and helped make it real and for that I am very thankful!

The show is still in the developement stages but we want to develop it with all of you. We want to hear from you about what you would like us to cover on the show. We want your feedback, and anything you could do to tell people about the show would be greatly appreciated.

The other day I was watching that first episode and I realized that in September when originally launched the show I had less than 300 followers on twitter. (These days it’s close to 1,400) it made me realize how far I have already come and I have this great community to thank.

Well here is the first episode of the show for your viewing pleasure.

It has been a long year for Random Sarah. I joined twitter, started a new blog, started video blogging, started a video podcast, created a community blog project, met a ton of people….man I’m tired already. But I had one goal when I started all this and that was to make it to SXSW interactive in 2009. I know it sounds like a strange goal, but I figured if I could only attend one conference all year I would pick that one.

The plan was pretty simple: Find a company that needed help during SXSWi and work for them for the week in exchange for a conference pass and accommodations. It was a plan that I had seen many other people execute before so it didn’t seem to difficult to me. However, over the last few months it has become very clear that this year we are dealing with SXSW recession edition.  More and more, companies didn’t have the same big budget for conferences that they once had. They were going to try and get by with as little as possible. And in this economy who can blame them.

But I still have a problem: I have a plane ticket to Austin and no conference pass. I am planning on shooting a few episodes of my show What’s it all about: Web 2.0 at SXSW but this all requires a sponsorship that I don’t have. So, I have come up with a new SXSW recession plan. I will be there for all 5 days of the conference. So I am looking for 5 Companies who would like me to represent their brand during the conference. (This idea was totally inspired by Girl in your shirt and I Wear Your Shirt)

The plan is simple: Each day I will wear the shirt of a different company. On your day I will be required to wear your shirt all around the expo and to any events I attend that evening. You would send me a company shirt along with something about your company that I would tell people every time they asked me about my shirt. I will be your active brand ambassador for the day. In addition to talking about your company, I will wear the shirt on my show that will be seen by many more people than just people physically in Austin attending SXSW. Your company will be the sponsor of that episode. All of this would only cost you $150 for the day! Seriously, I know you have $150 in your budget to sponsor a totally deserving blogger to go to SXSW!

UPDATE: In addition to having me wear your shirt and talk about the company for a day, and a sponsor spot on What’s it all about: Web 2.0, I will blog about your company before SXSW in a post about my SXSW Sponsors, and a post after SXSW, thanking my sponsors with links to all the photos, and videos taken of me during the conference. You will also get ad space on Random Sarah for the month of March. (125×125)

Why should your company do this? That’s easy! Because it would cost you a lot less than paying for my whole pass and hotel stay, and you get a up and comming girl in the world of social media to talk about your company all day. This is especially great for companies that may not have the budget to attend SXSWi this year. I will attend for you!

If you are looking for more information about me you can check out the rest of Random Sarah which is my personal blog, including my old video blogs. Check me out on Twitter and Tumblr. And check out my old episodes of What’s it all about: Web 2.0

Please contact me if your company is interested in me being your brand ambassador for the day.

Related links:

Want a brand ambassador for SXSW, meet Sarah (Sanford Dickert, Social Engineer)

I have been in the tech/social media community for about a year now, and I have met a ton of great people in our space, but I feel as if I am not doing enough. At some point you keep meeting the same people and none of it really leads anywhere. I have attended a lot of conferences, and been a part of lots of larger networking events. I have met some great people and more importantly some great new friends.

However, I would like to start networking on a smaller level. I love talking about social media and tech, and I always seem to be full of random ideas and references relating to media. So if you are in the NYC area and have any interest in meeting up with me in any capacity let me know. Even if you want to just get together and bounce ideas around, or if you are interested in getting into blogging or podcasting, I would love to meet you!

I am also looking for a company in need of a brand ambassador to attend SXSW, so if your company, or anyone you know, fits that bill I would really like to talk to you. I would love to work at your booth or do videos for your company.

The best way to reach me is to email me at: sarah.k.cooley [at] gmail [dot] com or contact me on twitter

A few things to note:

I am also available to talk via video conference if you are not in the area.

I am available for consulting at a small capacity.

I look forward to meeting more people and expanding my view of this world we call the social web.

This is a re-blog of a post I wrote for New York Tech Scene which just officially launched today. It’s a community blogging project that I have been trying to get off the ground for a while. Check it out!

I became compelled to write this post after seeing a twitter update from @naterkane.

I started to ask myself the same question. It seems like everything that I do, create, or attend seems to have 2.0 slapped on the end of it. Why is this? Why do we seem to have this fascination with this term? I decided to check the @replies to see what other people’s thoughts on the subject were. I found one from Jonathan Vanasco that was very interesting.

While I think it was a little harsh, he had a point. Adding 2.0 is you trying to say something about your event, product, etc; that you can’t seem to put into other terms. I myself have fallen victim to this trap. When it came time to title my video show I titled it “What’s it all about: Web 2.0″. While I don’t think that my offense is that bad because I am using the full term “Web 2.0″ I tend to have a problem with people slapping 2.0 on everything, especially in places where it makes no sense.

2.0 alone seems to refer to some kind of upgrade. There was version 1 and now there is version 2. It made sense and it was a system that worked until the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 where the term web 2.0 is credited for being coined. But now the term 2.0 seems to describe a group of people that are in the Web 2.0 community, and anything that they do, even when not tech related at all must have 2.0 on it.

At some point I guess we all excepted it as the norm, until someone comes along and questions it. But to end this on a light note, in my search I noticed a comment on Gary Vaynerchuk’s HUGE announcement today.

Today, Dec 15 is the final day that Pownce lives! Many started using Pownce after Kevin Rose talked about it on diggnation. We formed a bond, we crashed Y! Live servers, we created a yearbook!

It was one of the best communities I have ever been a part of. Everyone was so nice and Pownce was the first community to add me as a featured user! To have Leah Culver email you because she likes the content you are putting up on Pownce and ask you if she can make you a featured user, well it just made me feel like I was doing something right.

So we will all miss you Pownce, nothing will take your place.

Yesterday I attended Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle. With only a total of 50 people in attendance, SMJ08 quickly became the #1 trending topic on twitter. It was amazing to be in a room full of such influential people in our industry. Chris Brogan, Jeremy Epstein, Leslie Poston, Howard Greenstein, Dean Landsman, Jeffrey Sass, Nelly Yusupova, Brett Petersel, Oz Sultan, Steve Lubetkin, Jonathan Yarmis, Ben Grossman, Jamie Thompson, and Justin Oberman were the discussion leaders who talked about many different topics.

However one thing I noticed was that the term “Gen-Y” or “Millennials” came up a lot. This term of course refers to my generation, people who were born between 1982–2001. They are sometimes described as an “overachieving, over scheduled” generation. Many people will also sub-define this generation into the “MTV-generation” born from 1985-1990.

One of the reasons that these terms are used so much in social media is because of all the stats associated with this generation.

• 97% own a computer
• 97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
• 94% own a cell phone
• 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
• 75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily.
• 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
• 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
• 34% use websites as their primary source of news
• 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs
• 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
• 8% have confessed to having an online gaming addiction at some point in their life

While I am sure all of this is true, I feel that as an industry we really need to stop categorizing our users into stereotypes. I am not a big person on terms and studies so the idea of categorizing all people born from one year to another as having the same habits, behaviors, etc, really upset me. Of course this is my personal belief and I’m am sure someone can argue the other side just as well, but I for one am so tired of hearing the “don’t put up drunk pictures on facebook” speech. (we know already, we aren’t stupid…well some of us are)

When I first started making videos and blogging a lot of my friends seemed worried. “What happens when you want to find a job, your employers are going to see this!” I answered, “I SURE HOPE SO!” What I do online speaks for me, but it speaks in a good way! I know that I have managed my digital life well and in a way that will only work to my advantage when I am being interviewed for a job.

I think in social media we should try and consider everything on a user-to-user basis, while you might not think that someone who is 50 wants to twitter, they might! What surprised me the most about all the talk of Gen-Yers yesterday was that I know so few people my age who are anxious to try new digital tools. The masses are happy with facebook and myspace! (I have no idea why) But maybe we should start to figure out a new term for people who use the tools that we use, cause I don’t think it has anything to do with age!

Yesterday one of the presenters was saying how he always says he is the oldest guy in social media and then he made a joke about how he still remembers his CompuServe ID. HELLO….I STILL REMEMBER MY COMPUSERVE ID! I have been using the internet for just as long, heck I still remember DOS prompts! We need to stop talking about age and start talking about the level of the user! Age is just a number.

That’s just my 2 cents!

I wanted to post this episode of What’s it all about: Web 2.0 here on Random Sarah because I feel like I get asked about viddler a lot by my friends so I wanted to show you guys.