Yeah I think the point is that if you are using it as a sales channel then you should measure it closely because it probably isn't doing as well as you think. Social media is just an extension of customer support in its most effective use case. You can see Lucidchart responds to customer questions via twitter for example.
ditto. There are huge problems in filtering authority with such a massive source of real-time information that is so easily gamed. The barrier to tweeting a link is magnitudes easier than putting up a new webpage. I would argue that the only real value they are getting currently is rel="author" information with plans for giving value to other signals later. I really think the SEO hype about social media is an extension of the hype the article talks about.
If there were any compelling counterexamples, they would already be touting them already. Glad someone is calling out the emperor for wearing no clothes. Hope this idea gets traction.
Thanks for the tips. Wordpress was being extremely uncooperative. Wasn't parsing <pre> or <code> properly. I will throw that .js script up on the next release. Thanks!
I wasn't thinking about the LucidChart per say. I was wondering how an Web based-app could be intergrated into Excel such that a user was prompted to login and then import user specific data directly into a Excel spreadsheet range using an REST API.
Excel has had that capability forever. Excel VBA code had access to XmlHttpRequest as soon as Internet Explorer did, at version 5.0. XHR is a COM object that can be invoked from just about anywhere in Microsoftland. I was doing this in Excel way back in 2000.
Nowadays XHR is a bit limited as far as exception handling and other niceties you'd like for API calling. But Excel VBA can access anything through COM interop, such as a more robust C# library using .NET objects like HttpWebRequest.
Excel also has a notion of web queries, to populate a range by making an HTTP request and scraping a table out of the HTML. I think that existed as long ago as Excel 2000 and was brought out to the UI in 2007. It doesn't play well with websites requiring a login or a nontrivial click path, though. I have vague memories of wrestling with this, through the spectacular method of launching an IE window from Excel and relying on the MSHTML layer to share the login cookies between that and Excel!
Congrats!