Facebook Timeline for Brands: Overview & Five Suggestions

As the March 30^th deadline approaches for businesses to update their Facebook brand pages to the new Facebook Timeline, marketers are busy trying to figure out how to best utilize the new layout of their profile pages to advance their social media marketing campaigns. I’ve already helped two organizations in the conceptual redesign of their profile pages and I thought I’d write a blog post to list some of the take-aways from our brainstorming sessions. Hopefully these suggestions can alleviate some of the pain points for businesses that are distressed over this transition.

1. The Cover Photo:

The Timeline based Facebook profile features a landscape oriented cover photo (suggested size is 851 x 315 pixels). For businesses, the cover photo provides an opportunity to express the tone and mood of their brand and their timeline profile page. While businesses can customize the cover photo to their liking, Facebook has prohibited specific promotional tactics such as calls to action for their customers (e.g. you can't ask followers to "like" or to click on certain tabs).

Brand managers should use the cover photo as a dynamic space to set first impressions for their products and services, and facilitate the right tone for an opening conversation with their future customer.

Example: I really like how Nissan has incorporated a really simple but powerful branding message “Our Most Innovative Year”. It gets people wanting to come back for the "reveal".

2. Milestones on the Timeline:

Since the Facebook Timeline changes the default profile page from a list of the most recent updates to a complete summary of an organization’s growth or its brand’s evolution, businesses should include events and achievements that symbolize various chapters in their development. This is especially important for what Facebook terms “Legacy Brands”, i.e. those brands that have decades of historical data that can be featured on the timeline.

In formulating the motif for a timeline, businesses should attempt to engage users through interactive rich media. The timeline should feature more than just status updates, and include photos, videos and location information where relevant.

If done right, the timeline should improve the stickiness for the profile page by allowing current and potential followers to scroll easily through the high points of a business – eventually creating more brand affinity.

Example: Check out Subway’s Timeline starting in the 1960s with the first use of the name ‘Subway’. 

3. Custom Tabs

Facebook’s older interface for business pages featured default landing pages that were invariably used for marketing campaigns and sales promotions. As a major change for many brands, the new Facebook Timeline will no longer allow directing visitors to custom landing tabs.

That being said, businesses can now select which of their tabs (icons) are displayed under the cover photo. These tabs provide the opportunity for businesses to feature the strongest aspects of their Facebook presence – whether it is stories or pictures from their customers, other content pages, or business-specific apps.

Brand managers should customize this space rather than accepting the default order of the tabs/icons along with the default fill images for these tabs. Positioning the tabs and using custom images should be considered to improve the look and feel of the timeline.

Example: Custom app images such as those created by Fanta offer a rich visual interface for the timeline.

4. Pinned Posts

To improve the visibility of selected content, brand page administrators can “pin” a post to the top of their Timeline. Pinned posts can remain at the top of a timeline for up to seven days. They can offer a useful means to broadcast critical information to followers as well as a mechanism to direct fans to contests and other promotions.

Example: Check out Starbucks’ pinned post publicizing its “Global Month of Service”.

5. Highlighted Posts

In addition to pinned posts described above, brands also have the opportunity to highlight important posts from their timeline. Clicking the star at the top right side of the post will increase the size of the post and make it span the width of the timeline, rather than just one column. This will garner more attention and make it very hard for followers to miss. Along with pinned posts, this feature allows brands to position their marketing and social campaigns front & center... literally :-)

Example: Oxfam USA uses a highlighted timeline post featuring a video that introduces the charity to its Facebook page visitors:

Hopefully this quick introduction to the Facebook Timeline for businesses will help you with your own transition to the new profile layout. While change is always painful, it is also inevitable, and there are benefits to be gained through new features and functions that weren’t available earlier. Some businesses have already started reporting improvements in their brand page engagement.

Have you already made the change-over? What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments section below, or fire me a tweet with your feedback on this article.

Academic Use Cases for Social Media

Note: The slides for my talk are available here (PDF format with annotations). To view the annotations, you'll need to download the file to your computer (your browser PDF plugin may not render the comment annotations).

I recently gave a talk on the use of social media in academia. Most of the audience comprised colleagues from various faculties across the University of Ottawa and their extent of use of various social media applications varied considerably (I conducted a quick online survey a couple of days before the day of the talk). While I had a few colleagues who were very well-versed in the use of social media in various settings such as classroom communication and course delivery, others had never even used Twitter. This, of course, made my task as a presenter a little more difficult to be able to cater to all skill levels, but I was kind of expecting this to begin with.

Note: I have an earlier blog post on Twitter Basics which may be of use to some of you who're just getting started with Twitter.

I had structured my presentation around the use-cases for social media in an academic context, primarily drawing upon my own experience as well as what I’ve seen through other colleagues. I figured this would be a much better approach to talk about social media rather than to give a demonstration of different tools individually. I think it worked well overall, and many colleagues provided positive feedback on the talk through email as well as in-person.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the presentation.



Five Primary Use Cases


I listed the main use cases of social media as pertaining to one of five areas described below:

1. Monitor Conversations & Content:

This is, by far, my personal most common use case for social media. I use Twitter and Google+ to keep track of news, events, activities, and publications relevant to my areas of research. While talking about this use case, I touched upon tools such as Google Alerts and TweetDeck that can streamline the monitoring process through customized content feeds and activity streams.

2. Generate Content: 

In this use case, I talked about the potential of blogging and microblogging, and also described the various ways that we as academics can provide value-added content through chiming in with ongoing conversations and curating interesting and relevant content for our online associates.

While the applications in this use case pertained to the use of standard content generation tools like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, we had a good discussion about the significance of content curation within the user-generated content paradigm.


3. Share Information:

Continuing with the theme of content curation, I also demonstrated my use of social bookmarking and collaborative tagging tools such as Diigo, and also highlighted the use of twitter based curation tools such as paper.li and storify.


4. Connect & Interact with Others:

I didn’t really need to say much about this use case since my audience survey before the talk had indicated this to be the most common use-case for social media for my colleagues. Whether it is interacting with colleagues through LinkedIn, or keeping in touch with family and friends through Facebook, most people get started with social media for networking and relationship management.

I did, however, mention the importance of establishing and participating in communities of interest and communities of practice through the use of tools such as LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Sparks and Google+ Hangouts. There are numerous opportunities in academic settings where these tools ican prove to be very beneficial.

5. Manage Profile & Identity: 

I deliberately positioned this as the last use case in my discussion to build upon the idea of profile, identity, and reputation online. With a relatively straight-forward recipe for managing profiles through LinkedIn and Google Profile, it’s somewhat more difficult to conceptualize identity and reputation. I attempted to explain this difference through some basic definitions. Also, this is where I drew upon my own research on member participation in online communities and I briefly highlighted the components that lead to building interpersonal trust in an online setting.

The discussion on identities and reputations also lent itself to our discussion about social media influence scoring tools, and I briefly highlighted the main features, and pros and cons of tools such as Klout, PeerIndex, and TweetLevel. A special mention went to Connect.me that I had only started using recently and was finding very useful.




Multiple Use Case Contexts & Special Mentions

In addition to the use-cases identified above, and the various tools that exemplified them, I also talked about a couple of my favorite tools that span multiple use-cases.






I shared my use of Yammer as the primary course delivery platform for two of my courses. I shared my opinion about Yammer as a social learning platform and compared it to other platforms that I’ve used previously – including blogs, wikis, LMS platforms etc.  Perhaps, I’ll do a separate blog post reflecting on my experience with Yammer as a social learning platform.












I also spoke about the usefulness of Mendeley as a cross between a reference management tool and a social network that fosters collaboration among researchers working in a research areas or those working on specific projects. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this tool and I’m thinking about writing a blog post on how I’ve started using Mendeley & Google Cloud Connect to help me with collaborative writing projects.


So that’s about it for a summary of my talk. Thanks to everyone who attended, and those who encouraged and waited for me to post this summary online. The annotated slides for my talk are available here.Please feel free to provide additional comments and feedback.

Social Media & Enterprise 2.0 Digest

I created a bookmarks list for Social Media & Enterprise 2.0: http://www.diigo.com/list/informatician/social-media

Prominent themes that I've caught up on this month include best practices, adoption frameworks, technology and strategy roadmaps for various types of social media and enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Tag Cloud for Social Media & Enterprise 2.0 Digest (August 2011)

JCrew, Canada & Social Media (My First Storify Attempt)

I attempted to use Storify to compile some tweets about JCrew's stores launch in Canada and the backlash from its customers about the higher prices in Canada. Here is the "Story"

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The 8Cs of Enterprise 2.0

While business use of social media has flourished over the past few years, there still is a hesitation on the part of many small and medium sized organizations in adopting enterprise 2.0 tools. I usually get asked about my recommendations for such firms who are interested in getting started with enterprise 2.0 but don’t know where to begin. Based on a recent conversation with a CIO of a medium sized enterprise, here are a few suggestions that I provided. While writing this blog post, I’ve tried to categorize my recommendations a little better into what I can refer to as the 8Cs of Enterprise 2.0.


1. Content:

Most people I’ve talked to already know the importance of good content, but it’s always worth repeating and emphasizing again. My own research on social media has shown high quality information to be a very strong predictor of use of these tools. Whether it is structured or unstructured content, it needs to be readily accessible, relevant to the person who needs it, and current and accurate to be of practical value. In the context of collaboration, if your employees trust the information to be relevant and useful for analysis and insights, they are much more likely to use the tools that you provide them to collaborate using these tools.


2. Context:

I’ve seen my fair share of enterprise 2.0 evasion due to a lack of context with the use of technology. Organizations need to train and encourage users to associate as much context as possible with various knowledge resources as they create and use them over time. For example, an up-to-date index of files in a document management system and discussion posts in an online forum tagged with the correct labels can help improve the use of these systems considerably. Similarly, having tools that create visibility into what their colleagues are working on can be beneficial to a workgroup’s collective functioning.


3. Connection: 

Efficient Connection tools are needed by employees to link with others across the organization and leverage the knowledge and expertise of their colleagues. Interactive employee profiles, org charts and company directories are a good starting point for this, but organizations can look at streamlining their knowledge flows by integrating these databases with other applications such as email, messaging services, and approval workflows.


4. Communication:

Suitable Communication tools should be in place to enable employees to send and receive information in a timely fashion. These tools need to go beyond enabling simple consumption of content and allow individuals to create their own content and personalize their preferences for receiving updates from various sources that are relevant to their jobs. In addition to email and messaging applications, tools such as blogs, microblogs, newsfeeds and notification spaces provide a useful starting point for communication functions.


5. Collaboration:


Collaboration tools are required to enhance organizational productivity by providing platforms that enable constructive knowledge sharing and information synthesis. Organizations have experienced success with employing tools such as wikis and community discussion forums, and many have also explored the crowdsourcing applications such as ideation platforms, polling, and surveys that facilitate convergence on strategies and actions (more on this next).


6. Convergence:

In my mind, a major reason why organizations struggle with the use of social media tools is that these tools are primarily used as a medium for divergent conversations around issues and concerns, and settling on specific decisions is often tricky. What needs to be understood is that collaboration is more than discussion. It’s also about converging on actionable conclusions to enhance the decision-making capability of the organization as a whole. Toward this, tools and applications such as polling, surveys and ideation platforms can support and facilitate the collective intelligence of the participants, consequently ensuring greater value from collaborative online interactions.


7. Control:


In addition to building the digital toolbox for social media, organizations also need to develop a governance model that supports their enterprise 2.0 strategy. In the initial stage, organizations can set out guiding principles for the use of social media by communicating their technology use objectives to employees. This may be followed by more formal policy training on issues such as the types of information that may or may not be shared through social media, and policies on the management of  personal data and the organizational brand.

A caveat about controlling the use of social media is to ensure that you don’t go overboard. Certainly, some oversight and policies are needed, but excess regulation can also discourage users from open discussions. The key is to foster organic growth of social media use in the organization while trying to curb the adverse effects associated with the unseemly use of these tools.


8. Culture:

Perhaps, the most difficult issue to address in the effective institutionalization of enterprise 2.0 is the that of fostering an open culture and a collective mindset that is conducive to collaboration. By leading by example, higher management needs to set the tone for experimenting with new tools and ideas and welcoming innovative attitudes. By encouraging information sharing and rewarding group efforts rather than individual problem solving capabilities, organizations can help overcome problems associated with knowledge hoarding. A culture of trust where employees feels secure and encouraged to propose new ideas and take collective ownership of successes and failures can provide an effective scaffold for the adoption of enterprise 2.0.


There probably are a couple of more recommendations that can be listed here... I can probably get up to 10 Cs if I think hard enough... but these were the top of mind during my talk. Please feel free to share your opinions and comments.

Some Twitter Tips to Get you Started

Over the past three months, I’ve started using Twitter a little more regularly than I used to. It’s grown on me and I’ve figured out the use-cases that fit my objectives as an academic. While upping the frequency of my tweets, I’ve also developed some familiarity with the conventions and terminology used on twitter.

In this post, I’m summarizing these conventions and terminology. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these tips useful.

What is Twitter?:

As a user, you will probably ascribe specific characteristics to Twitter based on what you use it for. Here are a couple of ways I think of Twitter:

• Twitter is a social networking platform that provides a microblogging service to its users. It allows users to post status updates called “Tweets” that are limited to 140 characters (including spaces and special characters).
  
  
• While many people would compare its functionality to that of a chat client, Twitter offers an open forum for many-to-many conversations.
  
  
• In addition to public messages, Twitter facilitates private communication among members (through direct messages)

·         For passive users, Twitter is a great monitoring tool to observe conversations among groups and posts regarding specific subjects.

Twitter Interface Basics:

Although Twitter can be used directly through its website interface (www.twitter.com), many people prefer using different clients to Twitter.com. My own favorite is TweetDeck (www.TweetDeck.com) which I use to monitor others tweets as well as to send my own updates.

• Your Twitter “Activity Stream” consists of you own tweets as well as tweets from others who you “Follow”. By following a user on twitter, you are adding that user’s tweets in chronological order to your timeline or activity stream. Following others is useful if you’re interested in the content and updates provided by them, and it’s also a recommended practice to foster reciprocity.
  
  
• It is also important to remember that tweets are public by default unless you restrict messages to specific recipients by including their usernames at the beginning of the tweets.

Essential Tweet Conventions:

Once you start tweeting beyond the basic / simple babble, you’ll start to realize the need for using direct reference to people, websites, and themes. These items constitute the three types of references you can include in your tweets:

• You can provide links to websites: While you can include the full URL of websites (http://...), you should get into the habit of shortening the URL. There are various URL shortening services available. My favorite is bit.ly (http://bit.ly).
  
  
• You can refer to other people of Twitter through a “Mention” by prepending the “@” symbol to their usernames. These mentions typically get reported to the person through an email or an alert within their activity stream.
  
  
• You can highlight specific keywords in your tweets by using the right “Hashtags”. A hashtag is a keyword with a “#” symbol prefixed to it. By utilizing relevant hashtags in your tweets, you can increase the searchability of your tweets by others. The key is to figure out hashtags that are used by others who talk about similar topics and utilize them within your own tweets if and where possible.

In addition to writing your own tweets, from time to time, you might feel the need to “Retweet” someone. By repeating a tweet from another user, you are amplifying their message and distributing it to your own followers. Again, this is a recommended practice to reinforce ties on your social network.  Remember that retweeting someone will make the original tweet appear in the activity stream of those who follow you on Twitter.

• You can retweet a message by clicking on the retweet symbol underneath that message. This is referred to as an automatic retweet.
  
  
• You can also retweet a person by copying the text of that tweet and prepending “RT @username” to identify that it’s a retweet from a specific username. This is referred to as a manual retweet.

Using Twitter as a Monitoring Tool:

• You can optimize your use of Twitter by creating “Lists” of different people you follow. For example, I have a list for my work-colleagues, and multiple lists that include professionals who talk about specific topics and subjects. This feature provides me with the capability to demarcate different social circles and communities of interest that I participate in. In the online Twitter interface, you can click use the drop-down menu underneath a person’s profile description to add them to a list (as shown below).
  
  If you use a client such as TweetDeck, you can display activity streams for your lists in different columns (I find this very useful for monitoring tweets).

• If you wish you use Twitter as a monitoring tool, you can save your searches and access them with greater ease at any time. Through the online Twitter interface, you can perform a keyword search using the search bar on the top of the screen, and click on the “Save this search” button.

This will make this search accessible to you through the “Searches” tab in your Twitter interface. Remember that the search results constitute an activity stream that will be updated as more relevant tweets keep getting posted.

• You can also mark tweets as “Favorites”. This is pretty similar to bookmarking important resources online. By creating your own list of favorites, you are really creating a catalog of tweets that you might want to come back to. The original tweeters receive a notification when you favorite one of their tweets.

Optimizing your Personal Interactions through Tweets:

You’ll probably get familiar with many customs and conventions of tweeting through your use of twitter, but here are a couple of tips to help you use the proper abbreviations and accepted vernacular.

• Use “via” to mention someone who pointed out something on Twitter. For example: “Here is a really great website http://shortURL via @username”
  
  
• Use “MT” to indicate a “modified retweet” when you are selectively quoting from a previous tweet. For example: “MT @informatician …”. While it is acceptable to use MT, it is good practice to ensure that you’re not changing the overall message.
  
  
•  Use a mention at the beginning of a tweet to direct that tweet to a specific person. For example: “@username hello how’s it going?” Referred to as conversational tweets, these messages will only be seen by accounts that follow BOTH your account AND the account you mentioned at beginning of tweet. Remember that if a mention is used elsewhere in your tweet, that tweet will be visible to all your followers.
  
  
• A variant of a conversational tweet is when you want to direct a tweet primarily to a specific person but also want your followers to see it. In such a case, you can prepend a period “.” before the mention. For example “. @username check this out: …”
  
  
• Use “cc” followed by a mention “@username” at the end of a tweet to get the attention of a specific person for whom that tweet may be relevant.
  
  
• While the above tips may be handy for interacting with others through Twitter, remember that you shouldn’t needlessly mention people in your tweets as this is considered a form of spam.

I think that’s about it in terms of a quick and light introduction to the use of Twitter. Like I said, you’ll probably figure out a lot more stuff on your own as you start using Twitter. These are just some tips that I hope you’ll find useful in getting started. Let me know what you think.

Happy Tweeting, and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@Informatician). I’ll certainly reciprocate.

Book Review - Enterprise 2.0 by Niall Cook (2008)

Recently I had the opportunity to write a book review on Academici for a new book titled "Enterprise 2.0". I thought I just as well post the review here too. The original review appears here: http://www.academici.com/blog.aspx?bid=5676

CITATION

Cook, N. (2008). Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work. Hampshire, England: Gower Publishing Limited.

DETAILS

Author: Niall Cook
Title: Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work
Publisher: Gower Publishing
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 978-0566088001
Price: (US) $89.95

LINKS

• Link to Book Page on Amazon
• Link to Book Page by Author

REVIEW

Constructive applications of social software within a business context have garnered a lot of recent interest from practitioners as well as the research community. After an influential foray on the Internet, Web 2.0 technologies are being touted by many to bring significant benefits to organizations through their ability to facilitate agile collaboration and efficient information sharing across business functional areas.

Niall Cook’s Enterprise 2.0 is an opportunely timed book that provides a managerial overview of Web 2.0 technologies for businesses. At a time when organizations are starting to get serious about their Web 2.0 technology investments, Enterprise 2.0 can prove to be a useful and practical primer for getting a grasp on Web 2.0 technologies for the workplace. As social software applications such as blogs, wikis, social networking, collaborative tagging, social bookmarking and microblogging start to move beyond the pilot stages of implementation in many organizations, executives, managers, process owners, as well as technologists will need to know how to effectively implement and institutionalize these applications within the organization.

Recent industry trends also show that organizations that have been experimenting with social software technologies will most likely be looking at deploying them in the form of an integrated solution comprising of a multitude of tools and applications. This shift in the market from individual technologies to integrated solutions, accompanied with the aspiration for enterprise-wide deployment will require qualified strategy formulation, careful planning, and capable project execution. Enterprise 2.0 delves into sufficient details about each of these aspects of deployment and use of social enterprise software within the organization.

The discussion throughout the book is tied together with the 4 Cs framework (Communication, Cooperation, Collaboration, Connection) which the author initially introduces as a classification scheme for social software. Progressing through the book, it becomes clear though, that the 4Cs framework is not only a valuable analysis framework for conceptually making sense of the types of social software applications and their uses, but also for performing an assessment of the organization’s technology requirements and translating them into functional specifications. The examples and use cases provided with the 4Cs framework foster a better understanding of the potential gains and improvements that can be achieved through enterprise social software. The book’s managerial style narration and its references to various real world case studies make it easy for the discerning executive to comprehend the business case for investing in key social software tools and applications.

After helping the reader gain a sense of the business case for enterprise social software, the author moves on to suggesting a methodology for implementation and institutionalization of these technologies. Significant emphasis is placed on the adoption of technologies and overcoming resistance from staff. Toward this, the author aligns himself with the notion of accentuating user value over network value – i.e. drawing attention to the benefits of social software applications to individual users before talking about their benefits to the business. This can prove to be especially useful in getting the passive or less active users on board with the program. Beyond advice, the author proposes specific tactics to encourage user participation and speedier organization wide adoption by offering guidelines that can be adapted for different social and political cultures.

The last part of the book is dedicated to a review of the literature on enterprise social software. As an invaluable resource for the academic readers, this section provides a current review of terms and definitions related to the subject, as well as a summary of the conceptual treatise of enterprise social software found in seminal works.

To conclude this review, as organizations embark on projects to implement comprehensive enterprise software solutions that integrate multiple technologies into unified platforms, they need to rely on guidelines and recommendations from prior research, practitioner experiences, expert opinions, and lessons learned by others in their projects. Enterprise 2.0 provides a useful synthesis of these resources in the form of a discourse that will appeal to both the industry and the academic communities.

Playing with Mashups - Part II : Integrating Dapper with Popfly

Update: The Popfly site was discontinued in August 2009, and this article is only been keep for archival purposes.

This blog post follows from a previous one where I experimented and mulled over the functions provided by the content mapping and mashup functionality provided by Dapper. In my first trial run, I created a mashup for an online discussion forum in which I participate on a regular basis. The mashup was pretty simple – yet, it was the result of composing several dapps together in an iterative manner using a variety of information output formats. In this post, I am summarizing how I was able to take the final dapp that was created in part 1, and use it as an input to Microsoft’s Popfly mashup creator.

The data flow schematic and the popfly screenshot below reveal the configuration between the dapp and the popfly mashup. What’s happening here is that the dapp is used to output an RSS feed which is then captured by the RSS block in popfly. The specific items from the RSS feed are then rendered as a table.

Dataflow Schematic - Dapper & Popfly Integration

click to enlarge

Popfly Screenshot - Dapper & Popfly Integration

click to enlarge

After reading the above, you’d probably wonder if this new configuration is really a “mashup” afterall in it’s strictest definition… and the simple answer to that is “probably not”… since the data in this case is being acquired from a single source, i.e. the dapp. However, the dapp itself was constructed in such a way that it fetches and formats data from multiple sources - so the original dapp itself was a mashup! That being said, the integration between dapper and popfly goes to show two important aspects of mashups: composability and reuse. The original dapp has now been composed with a different output stream, i.e. RSS and it has been configured with a new presentation format, i.e. table display in popfly. The end result is shown below:

• Dapper gathers feeds from the online forum and combines those feeds with last posters avatars into a data object;
• Popfly acquires the new data object and displays the data

Mashup - Dapper & Popfly Integration

*Embedded Content Removed - Popfly website is no longer available*

Playing with Mashups - Part I : Using Dapper for Content Mapping

This is the first blog post in what I plan to be a series of posts to share my experiences with various mashup building applications online.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been playing with the data mapping and mashup functionality provided by Dapper. Overall, my experience has been rather pleasant, and I would definitely suggest the service to someone who’s just getting started with mashups. It should be noted however, that on the outset, Dapper is more of a data mapping service than a mashup. The main features and functions of Dapper allow the end-user to extract pieces of information from websites and label and organize the information in a logical structure. The resulting information structure can then be output in various formats including XML, HTML, and RSS feeds, or it can be rendered in specific applications such as a Google Gadget or a Flash Widget. It’s pretty cool when you try all the available output options for the first time.

So to test out the basic functionality of Dapper, I set out on a simple task to query the Google Scholar search engine and fetch the list of my research publications. I thought this might result in something I would want to use in the future… and I was right. Other than the fact that Google Scholar still does not index many academic repositories and hence, the results are not comprehensive, I did get some results which I was able to formulate into a dapp. The resulting dapp was then rendered as a flash widget (shown below).

powered by Dapper

Here is a summary of the procedure to get to the results as displayed in the flash widget above.

1. Login to Dapper

2. In the section titled, Get any content from the Web, click on create a new Dapp

3. Enter the Google Scholar URL pointing to the search results you want to extract from.
In my case, I used: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=author:"Umar+Ruhi"&num=100&scoring=r
My name is specified in the author parameter. The num=100 parameter specifies the number of search results to show; and scoring=r specifies that I would like “r”(recent) articles to be listed first.
Under the form address bar, you can leave the format as Dapp XML.The output format can be customized later.

4. Once you see the google search results in Dapper’s virtual browser, you can select “Add to Basket”.

5. Ideally, at this point, it is recommended that you also give Dapper a couple of other similar pages (e.g. search results for other authors), so that Dapper can make some sense of the webpage structures. I didn’t really feel the need to do so in this case. If you want Dapper to just analyze the webpage structure of more pages, you can enter their URLs and “Add to Basket”. Once done, you can click on the Next Step button.

6. With the page(s) in the basket, you can start selecting areas of the page that you would like to save into your information structure for output. For example, I clicked on the titles of the search results which highlighted all the titles on the page. Sometimes, Dapper will select other non-related areas automatically, and you will need to manually de-select these by clicking the Clear link for the item(s) in the Preview selected content pane.

7. If you’re satisfied with the selection of information items, you can click on the Save Field button and provide a label for the field.

8. Steps 6 and 7 can be repeated to gather more information items from the webpage in the basket. With all the content fields identified, you can click on the Next Step button.

9. On the next screen, you will group the content fields and provide group name(s). These group names will be used to structure the resulting dapps. With all the groups specified, click on the Next Step button to proceed to the last screen.

10. On the last screen, you will be asked to save the dapp and provide a description. You will also have the option of making the dapp private, i.e. only you or someone who knows the exact address of the dapp or its output feeds will be able to access it. I use the private option for most of my dapps which I know have little utility for anyone else.
The input variables are meant to provide a mechanism for allowing an end-user to customize how the dapp is called. It is an optional feature, and you can click on the help link to learn more. Click Save when you’re done entering all the details of the dapp.

11. Now that the dapp is created, you will be presented with a variety of output options which you can play around with to see which option works best for you. As shown above, I selected the flash widget to present the results of my dapp.


That’s about it in terms of how the Google Scholar dapp was created. For everyone who’s interested in exploring Dapper, I also hope this mini-tutorial comes in handy for learning about other basic features of Dapper.