With the recent launch of Facebook’s New Pages Layout for Businesses, hopefully you have found it easier to take advantage of the benefits Facebook offers both small companies and major brands alike. Previously in this blog, we covered How to Connect Your Twitter Account with Your Facebook Page, so I wanted to show you how to do the reverse. With the new Pages layout, this process has gotten incredibly simple…

Facebook Fan pages are getting an updated layout and several new features to help you engage with your fans. A lot of what you see on the new Profile page layout has been carried over which makes it easy to transition between the two, but the improved functionality and control that comes with the new Page layout is what I am most excited about. Here’s some of what you’ll be getting: Notifications when fans interact with your page or posts; A place to showcase photos along the top of your page; A news feed for your page; The ability to Like and post on other pages as your page (FINALLY).

Preview your page and you’ll be given the option to upgrade early. All pages will automatically be upgraded on March 10, so why wait? Upgrade now – here is a “tour” to guide you through the changes…

TechNet’s Rey Ramsey and Twitter’s Biz Stone invite you to the launch of TechNet’s new nonprofit: ConvergeUS – Working With Tech. Winning With Tech.

ConvergeUS’ founding board members Rey Ramsey (TechNet) and Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) will provide their vision for a new age of tech sector collaboration. They will also preside over a town hall featuring questions from the live and virtual audiences, moderated by Andrew McLaughlin, former White House Deputy CTO.

Tech Cocktail’s DC Winter Mixer took place last night in Adams Morgan at the hip and open Slaviya in Washington, DC. Tech Cocktail has been hosting mixer events and writing about technology start-ups and entrepreneurs across the country since 2006. Tech Cocktail is a media company focused on better connecting, educating and amplifying the start-up technology community and showcasing the latest tech innovations. They are aimed at helping build and strengthen local tech start-up communities both online and off.

You may have heard the rumors, the buzz, the adulation, and now the complaints. There’s a new social media tool in town and it calls itself Quora. Quora describes itself as “A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” While I’ve been following the Quora surface buzz for awhile, it never struck me as anything more than an interactive wiki. In fact, I secretly thought its real appeal was its non-mass adoption and use by “high-ranking” social media folks in the know, and honestly, I didn’t want to take the time to play with a hip new toy that wasn’t useful to me. As it begins to fall from grace however, I find myself drawn to delve deeper into this seemingly web-retro tool and see what it offers the digital sphere.

Nearly all our client projects require some sort of email.  We make it part of our standard process to always have a staging environment for each of our applications.   The merits of a staging environment ensure that we always validate and can redeploy our applications at moments notice.   To that end occasionally we’ll want to transfer some portion of production data into one of our staging environments.   When we do that we never want to risk having an email triggered via crontab or user action that inadvertently sends an email to a client, from the staging server instead of the production server.   To avoid and allow validation of email transactions,  we have released a very simple rails+smtp service that allows us to have our staging environment talk to a real smtp server that can record each email.   This allows our QA engineers to easily verify emails are sending from crontab or specific user actions.   Here’s the project on github.  Deploying the service is just as easy as deploying a normal rails application.

cap deploy
cap smtp:start

The cap file would need to be modified before as we keep our host keys private and they’re targeted to our named hosts.  e.g.  o1 and tools

Planning to release more software in the coming months hopefully this is useful for others as well.

Yesterday marked the inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Marketers, PR Specialists, Web Development Companies, Technology Experts, Associations, Government Organizations, Social Media Addicts, and more converged on George Washington University in Washington, DC to listen, learn, share, and network. Whats Next, the brainchild of Tod Plotkin of Green Buzz Agency in Arlington, VA, was born of Plotkin’s frustration with the fluff and sales pitch-iness of typical events, and so he set out to create something different. His goal was to keep people engaged constantly with good information and make sure they got any questions answered that day. While not quite an “unconference” like Nonprofit 2.0, it was a veritable assault of information lined up with no breaks (except for a quick lunch) in short bursts with scheduled “niche conversations” and “floating experts” on the side. Captico sent 3 emissaries: our Lead Developer, Todd Fisher; a Project Manager, Bob Wolfe; and New Media Coordinator, Corrie Davidson (me).

Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Founder of SEOmoz.org, managed to stuff an inspiring presentation on “Advanced Tactics to Maximize SEO Opportunity” into a too-short 25 minutes presentation at the What’s Next DC 2011 Conference on Monday, January 24th. With organic search results becoming increasingly competitive, Rand’s specific tactics supplemented with examples and case studies had me eager to try some new techniques to pimp out our website. You can view his slidedeck here. (All photos by Nakeva Corothers). Some key takeaways included:

Bryan Eisenberg, Managing Partner at Eisenberg Holding was the second presenter at yesterday’s “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. He held the one of two 45 minute time slots with “The Future Shopper, How Offline is the New Online”. It was a great presentation on how the convergence of communications, logistics, and financial technology continues to evolve to reduce the friction in the customers’ buying process.

Yesterday I joined my fellow Captico mates on a trip down to DC to attend the What’s Next DC? Conference. Overall the event was a good one – my applause to Green Buzz Agency and other’s that helped to put the event together.