Pro Twitter Accounts

by Lisa Barone
http://outspokenmedia.com/social-media/professional-twitter-accounts/

If you follow me on Twitter, subscribe to the Outspoken Blog or hang out at any of the other sites I write for like SmallBizTrends,Copyblogger or Duct Tape Marketing, you may feel like you know me a little bit. You may not have grown up with me or know the name of my first grade teacher (Mrs. Pizzardi), but you have a sense of what it’d be like to grab a beer with me. You know I have horrible taste in both TV and music, that I kickbox regularly, and that I use my Twitter account for equal parts educating and amusing. Because I tweet like a human, there’s a relationship where you’d recognize me in a dark alley or maybe a different blog. And through it, you begin to trust me, my content, and the SEO consultingcompany I represent more than you would if this connection didn’t exist. That’s how you use social media.

And it only works because I’m not full of shit.

It works because the version I present to you is authentic. When you talk to me, you get Lisa – the good and the bad, the useful and the ridiculous. You get all of it.

Every Monday night at 9pm EST business owners and marketers swarm Twitter to participate in #SocialChat. If you’re not familiar, Social Chat is an hour-long discussion hosted by Alan K’necht and Michelle Stinson Ross where attendees and a guest host talk about all the different aspects of social media and marketing. Last week’s chat was hosted by our friend Hugo Guzman and focused on basic Twitter etiquette and how businesses can avoid common social media missteps.
Here was one of the topic points and part of Hugo’s response from the chat highlights:

Q2. What is the most important thing to keep in mind that is different between personal tweeting & tweeting for a brand?

@HugoGuzman: “That really depends on the nature of your brand (and employment). Some people like @lisabarone have the luxury to tweet as they please and it connects with her audience… Generally, the agreement was that, when tweeting for a brand/business, it is best to maintain a reasonable degree of professionalism. The human connection and conversation is important, and it’s not wise to become overly stiff or robotic, but there’s no need to pour out your hear to your customers, either.”

I get where Hugo was going and I don’t entirely disagree, but can we stop pretending that it’s possible to have a corporate Twitter account? Because it’s not.

I recognize that I tweet differently than a lot of other brands. My tweets are honest, routinely unprofessional, and range in topics from SEO to social media marketing to the killer tacos I just had for lunch. But I still wouldn’t call my Twitter strategy a luxury. It’s a necessity. It’s how the audience around my brand and my content is built.

We are officially beyond the days where you can have a distinct “personal” and “corporate” tweeting style. You must decide who you are and bleed it. From all accounts.

Matthew Ingram nailed it over at GigaOm last week with a post called News Editors Still Don’t Want Journalists to Be Human. In it, he breaks apart the social media best practices document created by The American Society of News Editors, arguing that most of it teaches the OPPOSITE lessons we want to sharing, perpetuating the “don’t be human under any circumstances” approach to social media.

The problem is that approach doesn’t work. It’s tired, it’s boring, and it’s bullshit.

You cannot expect people to form a relationship with you if you’re not willing to share part of yourself with them. This isn’t rocket science, its human relationships 101. Surely, we’re not so void of real person-to-person contact that we’ve forgotten this. To make a friend, you have to be a friend. Otherwise, WTF are you doing?

My tweets are probably more ridiculous than yours. And that’s fine. I would not encourage anyone to mimic the way I tweet. What you need to do is find your own naked superhero. That’s how you should be delineating; it has nothing to do with what jersey you’re wearing.

That doesn’t mean you need to start filling your Twitter account with the most ridiculous news and tweets you can dream up (really. Don’t do that). It means that you need to decide which version of you is the BEST VERSION of you to get your message heard and out. What parts of your personality make you perfectly suited to excel at your job and to connect with people in the process? What version of your real self can you share with people to do your job better? What traits do you need to amplify to increase your value?

Once you know – that’s your naked superhero and the person you should be – whether you’re tweeting for yourself or a company.

If you work for someone else, define your presence and present it to your boss. Explain why this authentic version of yourself is going to make you a much more powerful evangelist for them and how it’s going to generate interest in your brand because you’re GIVING people something. You’re giving them you. Let them see there’s a thought-out strategy here and you’re not just tweeting your lunch because you went off the deep end. If you do that, a company that’s serious about its social media activity is going to at least give you a shot. Maybe they’ll ask to see a somewhat toned down version until they trust you, but they’ll give you the opportunity. If they don’t, consider why you’re there, what you’re doing, and why you’re investing in a company that won’t invest in you back. [#justsayin]

Social media isn’t a free-for-all for engagement. Not at all. It’s about deciding who you are, how you can best support the company and being that. Therein lies your strategy – regardless of whether you’re tweeting as yourself or a representative of a brand. But you’ll never accomplish anything by cutting the YOU from your social media persona. It’s your job to figure out how to blend it all in a way that benefits everyone.

You want to be successful in social media?

• Find your naked superhero.
• Play nice in the sandbox.

There’s your free piece of social media consulting for the day. Because the days of keeping completely separate personal and professional identities are over. It’s all blended and it’s either interesting or it’s not.

The Absurdity Of Yielding Your Presence To The Stream

by Adam Singer

http://thefuturebuzz.com/2010/08/23/yielding-presence-to-the-stream/

You would have to be crazy to completely yield your digital presence to services owned by other people.  There are so many reasons you should maintain an independent presence, and most of those who have been active digitally well before the popularization of privately (vs. independently) owned web services know this.

Yet still, there are tech-savvy people who get caught up in the hype and forget the benefits gained by maintaining an area all their own.  Leo Laporte recently succumbed to this, as noted in a recent post at his blog.  What happened is his content accidentally stopped being  imported into Twitter from Buzz for 16 days (he stopped using Twitter and was just bringing content over from one service to the other).  And not a single person noticed.  Not one email or comment to Leo about it.  Even Leo didn’t notice.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

Indeed.  While there are many reasons to maintain an independent presence (as linked in graph 1) Leo is experiencing the poor signal to noise ratio within these networks, and the fact that they simply are not places to carve out a voice for yourself.

The best part about this, Leo has a wildly popular digital radio show that is produced and broadcast via its own network.  And he clearly articulates how the benefits of this have increased over time:

Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I’m doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I’m pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

You would think that due to this, Leo would understand the importance of self-publishing all his content and simply using things like Twitter as outposts to grow interest there.  Building up outposts is not nearly as important as maintaining a place where you control the vertical and horizontal (this builds both equity and leverage).  Anyway, let’s wish Leo luck on his journey back into self-publishing and not simply working in a space where even with 200,000 followers he’s not listened to.

Meanwhile, The Next Web reported on this story and missed the point entirely:

Laporte says that from now on he’ll be concentrating on his blog….

It’s hard to believe Leo will stay away from social media for long. As someone who makes a living from discussing the latest developments in the tech sphere, he simply can’t maintain credibility is he isn’t active on at least some social media platforms – how will he know what he’s talking about if he doesn’t take part?

What?  Yet again more writers don’t understand that blogs are social media.  In fact, a majority of links in both independent and public platforms simply work to drive links and traffic to blogs.  Wouldn’t you rather be what the end goal is rather than just someone else pointing to that content?

Startups in 13 sentences

by Paul Graham, February 2009
http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html

One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?

When I made the list there turned out to be 13:

1. Pick good cofounders.

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

2. Launch fast.

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

3. Let your idea evolve.

This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It’s a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.

4. Understand your users.

You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That’s why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it’s harder to lie to yourself. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it’s not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it’s easy to know how many users you have.

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.

Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what’s possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They’ll be overwhelmed; you’ll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn’t scale, because it’s a way of learning about your users.

7. You make what you measure.

I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.

8. Spend little.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4]But it’s more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.

9. Get ramen profitable.

“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses. It’s not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It’s also great for morale.

10. Avoid distractions.

Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you’ll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.

11. Don’t get demoralized.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can’t be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you’d be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.

12. Don’t give up.

Even if you get demoralized, don’t give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn’t true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn’t become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren’t like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.

13. Deals fall through.

One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them less likely to.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I’d choose if I could only keep one.

Understand your users. That’s the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users’ lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it’s mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.

Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That’s the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.

Workflow Expectations

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 26, 2011

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/workflow.html

When we designed our 2-day seminar on application design, we partitioned the topic into 2 parts: workflow and screen components.

The second topic is easy to understand: it covers everything from individual controls, such asradio buttons and checkboxes, to more complex composites of widgets, such as forms design, to the layout of these controls. All very tangible.

Workflow is much more abstract, but actually more important for the application’s ultimate success. We’re no longer talking about visible stuff on the screen, but rather about user movements among various features. Workflow theory ranges from simple concepts, such asprogressive disclosure, to thorny ideas, such as inductive vs. deductive interfaces.

To illustrate the importance of workflow design, I’ll offer several concrete examples from recent user testing in varied domains. As the examples illustrate, effective workflow design builds on a simple principle: Have things happen when users expect them — either because of theirexisting expectations or because you’ve clearly communicated what to expect. (The former is obviously better; instructions automatically degrade the user experience by diverting users’ attention from their main task.)

Premature Requests: Asking Users Before They’re Ready

Lately, I’ve been sitting through many usability tests of iPad apps. After installing a new app, the first thing users typically see is a message in a dialog box: [This App] would like to send you push notifications. This message followed by two buttons: Don’t Allow and OK.

Uniformly, users press Don’t Allow.

People get enough junk already. After years of Web usage, people are extraordinarily weary of companies spamming them with “selected offers.”

In addition to engendering dramatically stronger customer loyalty by reminding them to use the iPad app, push notifications often provide helpful information that users might appreciate. So why would they refuse good stuff that could enhance the value of having a tablet?

Because the opt-in prompt appeared at the wrong stage of the workflow: it was grosslypremature.

The prompt appears when users open the newly installed app — which is, by definition, beforethey’ve actually experienced the application and understood its value. At this early stage, users have a very low level of commitment to the app. You can’t ask them for much, because they don’t think much of you yet.

Our user research with mobile apps has shown that they’re often intermittent-use applications. People download many more apps than they actually use with any frequency. And users know this; they’re not going to let an app impose an eternal burden on them when an a prioriassessment shows that it’ll likely be one of the many apps that they don’t really use.

(Yes, it’s possible to turn off push notifications later, but most users either don’t know how to change system settings or don’t want to bother.)

So, a much more fruitful approach is to first build up some credibility capital with users by offering a useful service. Once users have grown to really like you and know they’d actually benefit from updates, you can ask them to opt-in for push notifications.

Another example along these same lines: For many years, it’s been a key guideline for e-commerce checkout to let customers make purchases as “guests” rather than requiring them to become registered users of the site. When making an initial purchase, people aren’t yet sufficiently committed to a company to accept the hassle of registering. (Later, after a few purchases, they’ll probably register if appropriately prompted to do so.)

Final example: in our testing of B2B sites, business professionals usually rebel when a site attempts to collect lead information too early in the sales process — before the (prospective) customer has decided to admit the vendor to the shortlist. Premature request = no leads at all, as users proceed to more welcoming sites.

Questions That Only Make Sense Later

In testing social media features, we frequently see sites asking new users for personal information without explaining how it will be used. For example, people are asked to create a screen name when they register. Some users don’t realize that this name will be shown next to all of their future postings. Even worse, many sites make it impossible to edit screen names at a later date, when the user’s approach to the site has changed.

Knowing that the name would be widely displayed and not just used as a login credential would prevent people from being stuck with unfortunate names like SuperStud on a professional site.

There’s a fairly easy fix here: simply explain to users how each piece of information will be used. You might, for example, show them a sample of how their profile and postings will look, and let users edit their entries before committing to register. (Of course, any such instructional text should be concise and thoroughly tested, as we know users allocate minimal attention to instructions.)

Many Web-based applications are ephemeral applications, meaning that users view them as low-commitment transient encounters: a quick in/quick out of something they’ve never seen before and might never see again.

In this environment, we frequently observe usability problems caused by users’ weak mental models of the application workflow. People don’t know what’s coming later, and they often don’t even understand the application’s purpose. It’s thus hard for them to correctly answer early questions and they have little motivation to slog through set-up features.

One obvious answer to these problems is to reduce the set-up burden and enhance the usability of the early-use phase. Think of a gently sloping on-ramp rather than a wall that users have to climb.

Even the best designs can’t create perfect usability where everybody understands everything without any effort whatsoever. The goal is to set the stage for users to understand the workflow, without slowing them down. Clearly, this is one of the toughest challenges in online communications.

Better Workflow = More Use

As the examples here illustrate, the user experience is strongly impacted not just by what’s on the screen at any given time, but also by how the current screen relates to future states. It’s also impacted by how the current screen relates to past screens; here, the general guideline is to reduce the need for users to rely on their fallible memories.

Thus, one reason to care about workflow is simply that usability is enhanced when you consider the totality of the user experience and not just stand-alone screens.

But there’s also a more business-oriented argument for improving workflow usability: users can often overcome isolated usability problems, but a broken workflow is much harder for them to fix. Among the typical consequences of bad workflow design are

• undiscovered errors that occur when users don’t relate what happened on screen A with a (much-later) screen B;
• abandonment, where users simply give up on something they don’t understand; and
• frustration, which arises when an awkward process takes much more time than it should. (Individual design elements can also delay users, but a poor workflow takes considerably longer to complete.)

The bottom-line outcome of all three? People stop using your application. Conversely, if the process flows smoothly and users feel in control through all the steps, they’re much more likely to come back.

How Engaged Is Traffic from Social Sites?

APRIL 25, 2011 

Web users who follow links from social sites are less interested in their content

Person-to-person sharing has become a major way content producers hope to have their information disseminated as social media has offered the chance for content to go viral. Despite studies that suggest email is still the top way people share content, and that search is still the top way people find websites, social sharing—newer and more exciting—is in the spotlight.

According to data from Outbrain, just over 10% of external referrals are from social media sites, compared with approximately 41% from search and nearly a third from other content sites.

Referrals from social sites fall overwhelmingly into a few content categories. Social media users are eager to share—and click on—news and entertainment stories, which account for nearly three-quarters of all social media referrals. Industry watchers have posited that one reason for social sharing getting so much attention from the media is their outsize impact on media websites.

Significantly, Outbrain also found social media referrals were less engaged than those from search or other content sites. They had fewer page views per session and a higher bounce rate. Outbrain also developed a definition of a “hyperengaged reader” as one who views at least five pages per session. Social media referrals were less than half as likely to be hyperengaged as referrals from content sites or search.

The Outbrain report suggested that content site referrals were already in reading mode, ready to consume more content, and search referrals were actively looking for information, making them naturally engaged. Social media site users, by contrast, make up fewer referrals to content pages, and those who do click are less engaged.

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

by http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/2011/03/24/enchanting-guy-kawasaki/

I never tire of hearing Guy Kawasaki speak, so his recent address at the NRF’s INNOVATE 2011 Conference was a delight to attend.

He demonstrated a spirit of service and humility as he offered the audience the option of hearing a couple different presentations — and then indulged our urgings and delivered both of them with gusto!

 Guy speaks with a passion and authenticity that few professional speakers do – and he keeps his audiences laughing as he offers wise insights about business, marketing, and life. In a word, he enchants his audience, and so he’s the perfect author for a book with Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions as its title.

Here are the 10 points Guy highlighted from his book:

1. achieve likability
“No one has ever enchanted someone who wasn’t likable.”

To become likable:

• Use a genuine smile – French physician Guillaume Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A smile which in which you contract both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of your mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms “crow’s feet” around your eyes), and a smile which involves only the zygomatic major muscle. Many researchers believe the former, which they dubbed the “Duchenne smile,” indicates genuine emotion since most people can’t voluntarily contract the orbicularis oculi muscle.  (Guy definitely practices what he preaches!)
• Dress for a “tie” with the people you’re meeting (aka “equal dressing”). (Love that Guy, a titan of an industry ruled by CEOs in hoodies and Chuck Taylors, preached about dressing appropriately for your audience!)
• Shake it – check out this “formula” for the perfect handshake:

2. be trustworthy
Trust is a sequence; it’s not a chicken or egg thing. Trust others before they trust you.It’s no surprise some of the most loved companies — Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom – have generous return policies – they trust their customers. Life is not a zero sum game. Default to a “yes” attitude – think: how can I help others?

3. get ready
Do something; create something great.

Follow the “D.I.C.E.E.” acronym of great products:

• Great products are deep – they have lots of features – e.g., Reef sandal with a bottle opener built in.
• Great products are intelligent – e.g., the Panasonic flashlight which can run on 3 types of batteries, the Ford “my key” feature which enables users to program the maximum speed for a car (useful for parents of teenagers!)
• Great products are complete – they are created for the totality of the user experience – think service, support, etc.
• Great products are elegant – they have an elegant user interface and brand messaging that’s short, sweet and swallow-able.
• Great products are empowering – they enable people to be more productive, more creative.

Also, conduct premortems. Postmortems are conducted too late – everyone’s emotional, people are scattered. Instead, before shipping your product, spend time predicting all the possible reasons it could fail and then eliminate those reasons.

4. launch
Tell a story (nuff said).

Plant many seeds. With old fashioned marketing, you used to have to suck up to a select few oracles whose pronouncement on your product dictated its success or failure. With new marketing, you don’t know who is going to make your product successful so you have to plant many seeds. Guy sent his Enchantment book to 1500 bloggers including Betty, the Beauty Blogger, because you never know…

Use salient points. Talk about the things people care about. For example, instead of promoting how many gigabytes a music player has, talk about the number of songs you can load on it.

5. overcome resistance
The more innovative your product, the more resistance you have to overcome.Here’s how:

• provide social proof — e.g., the white cords of headphones drove the success of Apple’s iPod because people could see “proof” that you owned a cool product.
• find a bright spot — e.g., Jerry Sternin went to Vietnam to address malnutrition. By examining the children who were larger and healthier than most, he discovered important differences in their eating habits and diet. So he helped spread the ways the better-nourished families cooked and ate, and achieved great success in the fight against malnutrition.
• enchant all the influencers – e.g., at the premiere of his movie, Justin Bieber’s manager went out into the parking lot and gave tickets to a few fans. The good will this gesture generated was golden. (see Guy’s post on American Express’s OPEN Forum about “What We Can Learn from Justin Bieber” )

6. endure
Evolve – e.g., While other musicians try in vain to prevent piracy, The Grateful Dead actually sets aside place at their concerts for people who want to record them.  (Leave it to a 50-year old band to demonstrate the importance of adaptability!)

Invoke reciprocation. It’s not about using money, it’s about relationships. When you do something for someone and they thank you, be sure to respond with “I know you would do the same for me.” This tells them you’re an honorable person – and it, and sets them up to pay you back some day.

Build an ecosystem. To promote and distribute his book, Guy is creating an ecosystem of user groups, blogs, resellers, etc.

7. present

(Guy’s well-known advice for killer presentations):

• Pitches should follow the 10/20/30 rule — 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font size.
• Customize the introduction for your audience.
• Sell your dream.

8. use technology
Technology should be used to provide information, insights, and assistance. Be aware of technology speed bumps (features like Captcha which frustrate the user and make it difficult to communicate with you.)

And use technology to engage “fast, many, often” – fast: within 24-48 hours; many: with a lot of people; often: with frequency. In today’s business environment, social media is core, not context. Use it.

9. enchant up
How to enchant the people you work for:

• Drop everything at once – your boss is your customer. (Again, a refreshing contrast to the prevailing entitlement mentality of many from the digital generation, doncha think?!)
• Prototype fast – “don’t worry, be crappy.” It’s OK to ship first, then test.
• Deliver bad news early — never let a problem become a surprise – just tell your boss what happened and then tell her what you’re going to do to fix it.

10. enchant down
How to enchant people who work for you:

Give them what they really want – M.A.P.:

• mastery — show them how you are increasing their skill set
• autonomy – give them freedom
• purpose – connect what they’re doing to a greater cause

Suck it up — be willing to do the dirty work. Never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.

Involve them. Guy crowdsourced the image on the cover of his book, and got a butterfly named after himself in the process. He closed his talk by proudly showing off the “Kawasaki Swallowtale!”

Listen to this post as a podcast:

Right-click here to download the podcast

What’s an online campaign?

By Steve Daigneault, Apr 5th, 2011

http://labs.mrss.com/what%E2%80%99s-an-online-campaign/

This week, a client asked if I would help explain to their boss what goes into an online campaign. I actually get asked this question fairly frequently, so I figured maybe I should just quickly write up some thoughts to outline the anatomy of an online campaign.

Here’s what comes immediately to mind – and I admit that I probably am missing some tactics or maybe even big picture concepts – feel free to tell me what I missed in the comments and I’ll make an edit to the post. Hopefully this can serve as a resource to anyone who needs a good answer to that question.

Purpose. Campaigns need to have a purpose. You should be able to clearly communicate that purpose. The purpose should be a rallying idea – something that hits a nerve with your audience. That could be something fairly large and significant, like passing legislation to outlaw the death penalty in a state. Or it could be more focused, like asking Apple to remove an app from their store that is hateful towards the LGBT community. The purpose is the underlying reason why your supporters are banding together with you.

A campaign’s purpose should answer:

• Why now? The better your answer, the more people you’ll mobilize. And when I say “now”, I mean this very second. So the 24 hour news cycle is your friend here. What’s happening right now in the headlines that relates to your campaign? If not headlines, maybe you have information that you can share with your supporter that answers this question? It could be that your staff is about to visit a Member of Congress, and that meeting won’t mean anything if supporters don’t call or send an email to that Member’s office today. The best performing campaigns are hyper-relevant to the news cycle, so much so, that it’s often better to scrap a perfectly planned pre-existing campaign your team has slaved over for weeks for a back of the napkin response to late-breaking headlines. And when it comes to responding to news, perfect but late doesn’t help. Much better to be imperfect but on time.
• What’s the “crisitunity”? I first heard this term while I was at Amnesty International USA. “Crisitunity” means that right now, there is either a crisis or opportunity that’s about to unfold or pass us by if we don’t act. Every great campaign has a “crisitunity” moment. Someone is about to be put to death and they could be innocent. The House of Representatives released a budget zeroing out public broadcasting. Gorillas in Africa face a new hunting season after barely surviving a brutal drought.

Goals and Plan. Your campaign needs defined goals that make progress towards your stated purpose. You need to have a plan – and be willing and able to communicate that plan. That could be raising $50,000 to put organizers in local communities. Or it could be delivering 100,000 petition signatures to Apple’s senior staff. These goals need to be achievable, and something your audience believes will make an impact. Credibility here is key. Don’t launch a petition asking Newt Gingrich to defend social security – it’s just not credible.

Since this is one of the biggest weaknesses I see in online campaigns, here are a few examples of what this could look like:

• Tell them what you’re doing with their donation in very specific terms:

• Tell them what you’re doing with those petition signatures:

Timing. The life-cycle of a campaign can run the gamut from just a few weeks to several months or even a year or more. Sometimes you have a campaign that starts and achieves success in less time than that – often these are campaigns with very specific goals. The Humane Society’s campaign a few summers ago on dog fighting lasted several months and was fueled by investigative videos they released over time. AARP’s campaign on health care reform lasted over a year, but the issue stayed front and center in the headlines, so the news cycle made that kind of prolonged campaign possible.

Fundraising campaigns usually have a pre-defined end date, so that appeals can build up to a deadline. Advocacy campaigns can also have deadlines, though these are more typically focused on real-world events and so could more easily shift.

In general, though, most online campaigns take place over a period of 2 to 6 weeks.

Tactics. Assuming an average campaign life-cycle (2 to 6 weeks), here are some of the more common – and effective – techniques I use to help achieve the campaign’s goals:

• Email. It’s not a new tactic at this point, but based on our most recent 2011 e-Benchmarks Study, it’s still the most powerful tool most organizations have at their disposal. Not only do organizations have far more email addresses on file than they do social networking “friends” or volunteers, email can easily and quickly generate a lot of activity for campaigns. Email messages are easy to pass around. You can include links to do almost anything you’d want your supporters to do. And nearly instantaneous reporting tells you what’s resonating with your supporters and what’s failing to inspire. A four-week campaign might include a series of 4-6 emails to your list. (below tidbit taken from our benchmarks infographic)

• Website. This is where you’ll host your action page, or donation form, or give your supporters more information about the action you want them to take (or all of the above). Many campaigns have micro-sites or even nano-sites (one page websites) that have one primary focus – typically a petition page or a donation form. If you have an existing website with sizable traffic, you’ll want to aggressively promote your campaign – adding banners or even launching a lightbox or splash page.

• Offline integration. How does this online campaign support what’s already happening within the organization, either in the field or on the Hill? The best campaigns will tie the online tactics with offline programmatic efforts to build the campaign and organization’s credibility. Sometimes this can be as easy as showing a few images or pointing to a news story about an event, etc.

• Social Sharing. You want to give your supporters a reason to share your campaign’s goals and actions. You want to make sharing easy. Doing this will give your campaign’s purpose, your organization and your featured action all additional air-time. That means adding Facebook and Twitter share links on your key action pages. But it also means writing awesome emails – something that makes your readers hit that “Forward” button. At best, this type of “viral marketing” can catapult a campaign to prominence. And even if the sharing does not translate into a massive amount of new list members or donations for your organization, it will bring in a smaller stream of new recruits while also providing a key way to engage your existing supporters.

• Video. These don’t always work, but when they do they can easily eclipse the reach of other tactics. The right kind of video speaks to the viewer in a way that’s unique, shows something unexpected, and usually is short and easy to watch. Talking heads usually don’t play well. Interactive video where you connect your Facebook profile to create a customized video was all the rage a few years ago – and when done well can still pass the viral threshold.

• Messengers. Who does your target audience respect and admire? Whoever that person is, try to get them to be a messenger for your campaign. If your goal is to shut down Guantanamo – and your target is the military – a former army general is a great messenger. If your average online donor is a woman in her mid-50s, Robert Redford is the perfect messenger.

• Thermometers. OK, this may seem like a small thing compared to others, but there’s a reason Howard Dean’s fundraising campaign kept on using that bat. Time and time again, I’ve seen the last appeal of an email campaign – one that featured a goal that was just a little bit out of reach – out-raise earlier appeals by 5x. It’s in our nature to want to be a part of a success – and to have our donation be the one that put the campaign over the top.
• Talk about the Enemy. Sometimes the best way to mobilize your target audience is by clearly delineating who the antagonist is in your struggle. If you’re Human Rights First, that could be Liz Cheney’s group, “Keep America Safe”. Or maybe it’s Exodus International, the organization that built the “cure gays” app that Apple allowed onto its app store.
• Report back. There’s nothing worse than being asked to do something, getting excited about it, and then after investing your time, energy and money, never finding out what actually happened. Don’t make this mistake. It’s especially important to give supporters information about what happened during advocacy campaigns particularly if you were successful!

The goals we’re trying to achieve may change. We find new tools to use, and new ways to organize. But the core elements and strategies that make a campaign successful remain the same.

16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

By Jill Whalen

http://www.highrankings.com/

In my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it. 

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can remove from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

1. Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it’s easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.

2. XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn’t going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won’t help your pages to rank better in Google either!).
3. Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your “click here” link’s title attribute? (For example: <a href=”page1.html” title=”Spammy Keywords Here”>Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee’s knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that’s great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.
4. Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time in, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They’re simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it’s always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it’s wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.
5. Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn’t going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it’s especially not going to be helpful if that’s the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)
6. Keyword-stuffed Content: While it’s never been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today’s competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you’re having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you’ve used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
7. Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You’re not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You’re just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher’s question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren’t putting the one word “lawyer” into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word “lawyer” all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you’re providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don’t even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do “just in case” someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they offer. You won’t rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won’t make you any sales.
8. Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you’re offering there.
9. Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use this form of marketing – just don’t be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.
10. Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may offer lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it’s not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it’s a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, I do sometimes still see this technique work, but it’s still not advisable to do it.)
11. Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It’s the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you’re linking out to. ‘Nuff said.
12. Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can’t provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) is never seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there were something magical about doing this, again, you’re only talking about one keyword phrase.
13. Republishing Only Others’ Stuff: While it’s fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that’s all your blog consists of, it’s not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your own posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what’s good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It’s all about adding value.
14. Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.
15. Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you’re not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That’s all well and good, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won’t.
16. Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn’t. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don’t do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they’re in the category sections themselves.

A Checklist for Content Work

An excerpt of The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane (A Book Apart, 2011)

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-checklist-for-content-work/

In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. Content may need to have other qualities to work within a particular project, but this list is limited to qualities shared across all sorts of content.

If this looks like theory, don’t be fooled. It’s really entirely practical: if we consciously refer to principles like these as we go about our work as info-nerds of various kinds, we’ll have an easier time making good, useful content—and explaining our priorities when we’re called to do so.

Good content is appropriate

Publish content that is right for the user and for the business

There’s really only one central principle of good content: it should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and for its context. Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style and structure, and above all in its substance. Content strategy is the practice of determining what each of those things means for your project—and how to get there from where you are now.

RIGHT FOR THE USER (AND CONTEXT)

Let us meditate for a moment on James Bond. Clever and tough as he is, he’d be mincemeat a hundred times over if not for the hyper-competent support team that stands behind him. When he needs to chase a villain, the team summons an Aston Martin DB5. When he’s poisoned by a beautiful woman with dubious connections, the team offers the antidote in a spring-loaded, space-age infusion device. When he emerges from a swamp overrun with trained alligators, it offers a shower, a shave, and a perfectly tailored suit. It does not talk down to him or waste his time. It anticipates his needs, but does not offer him everything he might ever need, all the time.

Content is appropriate for users when it helps them accomplish their goals.

Content is perfectly appropriate for users when it makes them feel like geniuses on critically important missions, offering them precisely what they need, exactly when they need it, and in just the right form. All of this requires that you get pretty deeply into your users’ heads, if not their tailoring specifications.

Part of this mind-reading act involves context, which encompasses quite a lot more than just access methods, or even a fine-grained understanding of user goals. Content strategist Daniel Eizans has suggested that a meaningful analysis of a user’s context requires not only an understanding of user goals, but also of their behaviors: What are they doing? How are they feeling? What are they capable of?

Fig. 1. The user’s context includes actions, constraints, emotions, cognitive conditions, and more. And that in turn affects the ways in which the user interacts with content. (“Personal-Behavioral Context: The New User Persona.” © Daniel Eizans, 2010. Modified from a diagram by Andrew Hinton.)

It’s a sensible notion. When I call the emergency room on a weekend, my context is likely to be quite different than when I call my allergy specialist during business hours. If I look at a subway map at 3:00 a.m., chances are that I need to know which trains are running now, not during rush hour tomorrow. When I look up your company on my phone, I’m more likely to need basic contact info than your annual report from 2006. But assumptions about reader context—however well researched—will never be perfect. Always give readers the option of seeing more information if they wish to do so.

RIGHT FOR THE BUSINESS

Content is appropriate for your business when it helps you accomplish your business goals in a sustainable way.

Business goals include things like “increase sales,” “improve technical support service,” and “reduce printing costs for educational materials,” and the trick is to accomplish those goals using sustainable processes. Sustainable content is content you can create—and maintain—without going broke, without lowering quality in ways that make the content suck, and without working employees into nervous breakdowns. The need for this kind of sustainability may sound boneheadedly obvious, but it’s very easy to create an ambitious plan for publishing oodles of content without considering the long-term effort required to manage it.

Fundamentally, though, “right for the business” and “right for the user” are the same thing. Without readers, viewers, and listeners, all content is meaningless, and content created without consideration for users’ needs harms publishers because ignored users leave.

This principle boils down to enlightened self interest: that which hurts your users hurts you.

Good content is useful

Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose

Few people set out to produce content that bores, confuses, and irritates users, yet the web is filled with fluffy, purposeless, and annoying content. This sort of content isn’t neutral, either: it actively wastes time and money and works against user and business goals.

To know whether or not you have the right content for a page (or module or section), you have to know what that content is supposed to accomplish. Greater specificity produces better results. Consider the following possible purposes for a chunk of product-related content:

• “Sell products”—This is so vague as to be meaningless and is likely to produce buzzword-infested fluff.
• “Sell this product”—Selling a product is a process made up of many smaller tasks, like discussing benefits, mapping them to features, demonstrating results and value, and asking people to buy. If your goal is this vague, you have no idea which of these tasks (if any) the content will perform.
• “List and demonstrate the benefits of this product”—This is something a chunk of content can actually do. But if you don’t know who is supposed to benefit from the product, it’s difficult to be specific.
• “Show how this product helps nurse practitioners”—If you can discover what nurse practitioners need, you can create content that serves this purpose. (And if you can’t find out what they need before trying to sell them a product, you have a lot more to worry about than your content.)

Now do the same for every chunk of content in your project, and you’ll have a useful checklist of what you’re really trying to achieve. If that sounds daunting, think how much harder it would be to try to evaluate, create, or revise the content without a purpose in mind.

Good content is user-centered

Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users

On a web project, user-centered design means that the final product must meet real user needs and fulfill real human desires. In practical terms, it also means that the days of designing a site map to mirror an org chart are over.

In The Psychology of Everyday Things, cognitive scientist Donald Norman wrote about the central importance of understanding the user’s mental model before designing products. In the user-centered design system he advocates, design should “make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on.”

When it comes to content, “user-centered” means that instead of insistently using the client’s internal mental models and vocabulary, content must adopt the cognitive frameworks of the user. That includes everything from your users’ model of the world to the ways in which they use specific terms and phrases. And that part has taken a little longer to sink in.

Allow me to offer a brief illustrative puppet show.

While hanging your collection of framed portraits of teacup poodles, you realize you need a tack hammer. So you pop down to the hardware store and ask the clerk where to find one. “Tools and Construction-Related Accessories,” she says. “Aisle five.”

“Welcome to the Tools and Construction-Related Accessories department, where you will find many tools for construction and construction-adjacent activities. How can we help you?”

“Hi. Where can I find a tack hammer?”

“Did you mean an Upholstery Hammer (Home Use)?”

“…yes?”

“Hammers with heads smaller than three inches are the responsibility of the Tools for Home Use Division at the far end of aisle nine.”

…

“Welcome to The Home Tool Center! We were established by the merger of the Tools for Home Use Division and the Department of Small Sharp Objects. Would you like to schedule a demonstration?”

“I just need an upholstery hammer. For…the home?”

“Do you require Premium Home Use Upholstery Hammer or Standard Deluxe Home Use Upholstery Hammer?”

“Look, there’s a tack hammer right behind your head. That’s all I need.”

“DIRECTORY ACCESS DENIED. Please return to the front of the store and try your search again!”

Publishing content that is self-absorbed in substance or style alienates readers. Most successful organizations have realized this, yet many sites are still built around internal org charts, clogged with mission statements designed for internal use, and beset by jargon and proprietary names for common ideas.

If you’re the only one offering a desirable product or service, you might not see the effects of narcissistic content right away, but someone will eventually come along and eat your lunch by offering the exact same thing in a user-centered way.

Good content is clear

Seek clarity in all things

When we say that something is clear, we mean that it works; it communicates; the light gets through. Good content speaks to people in a language they understand and is organized in ways that make it easy to use.

Content strategists usually rely on others—writers, editors, and multimedia specialists—to produce and revise the content that users read, listen to, and watch. On some large projects, we may never meet most of the people involved in content production. But if we want to help them produce genuinely clear content, we can’t just make a plan, drop it onto the heads of the writers, and flee the building.

Of course, clarity is also a virtue we should attend to in the production of our own work. Goals, meetings, deliverables, processes—all benefit from a love of clarity.

Good content is consistent

Mandate consistency, within reason

For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world. Consistency of language and presentation acts as a consistent interface, reducing the users’ cognitive load and making it easier for readers to understand what they read. Inconsistency, on the other hand, adds cognitive effort, hinders understanding, and distracts readers.

That’s what our style guides are for. Many of us who came to content strategy from journalistic or editorial fields have a very strong attachment to a particular style—I have a weakness for the Chicago Manual of Style—but skillful practitioners put internal consistency well ahead of personal preferences.

Some kinds of consistency aren’t always uniformly valuable, either: a site that serves doctors, patients, and insurance providers, for example, will probably use three different voice/tone guidelines for the three audiences, and another for content intended to be read by a general audience. That’s healthy, reader-centric consistency. On the other hand, a company that permitted each of its product teams to create widely different kinds of content is probably breaking the principles of consistency for self-serving, rather than reader-serving, reasons.

Good content is concise

Omit needless content

Some organizations love to publish lots of content. Perhaps because they believe that having an org chart, a mission statement, a vision declaration, and a corporate inspirational video on the About Us page will retroactively validate the hours and days of time spent producing that content. Perhaps because they believe Google will only bless their work if they churn out dozens of blog posts per week. In most cases, I think entropy deserves the blame: the web offers the space to publish everything, and it’s much easier to treat it like a hall closet with infinite stuffing-space than to impose constraints.

So what does it matter if we have too much content? For one thing, more content makes everything more difficult to find. For another, spreading finite resources ever more thinly results in a decline in quality. It also often indicates a deeper problem—publishing everything often means “publishing everything we can,” rather than “publishing everything we’ve learned that our users really need.”

There are many ways to discover which content is in fact needless; traffic analysis, user research, and editorial judgment should all play a role. You may also wish to begin with a hit list of common stowaways:

• Mission statements, vision statements, and core values. If the people within your organization are genuinely committed to abstract principles, it will show in what they do. The exception is the small number of organizations for whom the mission is the product, as is the case with many charities. Even then, this kind of content should be supplemented with plentiful evidence of follow-through.
• Press releases. These may work for their very narrow intended audience, but putting them undigested onto a website is a perfect example of the how-we’ve-always-done-it mistake.
• Long, unreadable legal pages. Some legal awkwardness is acceptable, but if you want to demonstrate that you respect your readers, take the extra time to whittle down rambling legalese and replace needless circumlocutions with (attorney-vetted) plain language.
• Endless feature lists. Most are not useful to readers. The few that are can usually be organized into subcategories that aid findability and comprehension.
• Redundant documentation. Are you offering the same audience three different FAQs? Can they be combined or turned into contextual help?
• Audiovisual dust bunnies. Do your videos or animations begin with a long flying-logo intro? Do they ramble on for 30 minutes to communicate ten minutes of important content? Trim, edit, and provide ways of skipping around.

Once you’ve rooted out unnecessary content at the site-planning level, be prepared to ruthlessly eliminate (and teach others to eliminate) needless content at the section, page, and sentence level.

Good content is supported

Publish no content without a support plan

If newspapers are “dead tree media,” information published online is a live green plant. And as we figured out sometime around 10,000 BC, plants are more useful if we tend them and shape their futures to suit our goals. So, too, must content be tended and supported.

Factual content must be updated when new information appears and culled once it’s no longer useful; user-generated content must be nurtured and weeded; time-sensitive content like breaking news or event information must be planted on schedule and cut back once its blooming period ends. Perhaps most importantly, a content plan once begun must be carried through its intended growth cycle if it’s to bear fruit and make all the effort worthwhile.

This is all easy to talk about, but the reason most content is not properly maintained is that most content plans rely on getting the already overworked to produce, revise, and publish content without neglecting other responsibilities. This is not inevitable, but unless content and publishing tasks are recognized as time-consuming and complex and then included in job descriptions, performance reviews, and resource planning, it will continue.

Hoping that a content management system will replace this kind of human care and attention is about as effective as pointing a barn full of unmanned agricultural machinery at a field, going on vacation, and hoping it all works out. Tractors are more efficient than horse-drawn plows, but they still need humans to decide where and when and how to use them.

Of theses and church doors

One of the great images of the history of the Protestant Church is that of a German priest standing in the cold in front of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All Saints Eve, nailing his manifesto to its wooden doors.

The reality of the publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses is messier, and whether the church doors were really involved at all is the subject of academic dispute, but one thing is clear: Luther published his theses to begin an open, public conversation.

Our industry doesn’t lack for manifestos, some of them even explicitly modeled after Luther’s. This article—and the book from which it’s extracted—is not one of the firebrand, nailed-to-the-door attempts at full-scale revolution.

But it is intended to continue conversations we’ve been having for years, and to spark new ones, about the shared principles and assumptions that underlie our work, and the weird and interesting things we can build on top of them.

I’ll bring the coffee and doughnuts. See you on the church steps? 

Legacy Content Solutions

By Paul Boagg

http://boagworld.com/site-content/dealing-with-legacy-content/

An automated solution

An automated solution is good for two reasons. First, it doesn’t require anybody manually checking all of the pages. Second, it doesn’t require one person telling another that their content is going to be taken down. The whole thing just happens. People are much more likely to agree to an automated policy for content control than they are to being singled out as somebody who hasn’t maintained their content properly.

So how would this automated approach work in practice?

Automated review points

Essentially a review of a particular webpage would occur when certain criteria are met. This review could happen automatically or manually depending on your preference. However, in either case it requires your content management system being able to identify pages that have reached a certain age (or a certain time since they were last reviewed). In most cases this is something that already exists in a CMS or could easily be added.

An alternative to time based review points would be traffic based. This is designed to remove content that is not really used by users rather than out of date content. This review point would be triggered if the traffic to a page falls below a certain threshold over a given period. This would indicate that the page is of little interest and is simply making it more difficult for the majority of people to find what they are after.

This is a lesson Microsoft had to learn with its support pages. They had support pages for every conceivable issue. However, instead of helping users most of this content just cluttered up the site and made it harder for users to find what they really wanted. In the end they removed less frequented pages and their customer satisfaction shot up.

How often you choose to review pages or how low the traffic trigger is, is entirely up to you. This will depend on how often your site/organisation changes and how much you want to ask of your content providers.

When a page is identified for review an email is sent out to the owner of this page (either manually or automatically) asking them to check the page. Ideally this should simply involve the content provider logging into the CMS and editing the page in question. A simple check box saying that the page is up-to-date is all that is required. If that is not possible a reply by email saying that the page is up-to-date would be just as good.

If the content provider fails to identify the page as up-to-date within a set time period, this triggers a cleanup event (see below). Notice the default here. At the moment the majority of websites defaults are organised so that if the content provider does nothing the content remains online. This approach turns that on its head. No action leads to content being marked for cleanup.

What happens when a cleanup is triggered?

How you choose to handle the cleanup of webpages is up to you. However, here is my recommended process:

Mark the page as being old content

The first step would be to mark the content as old and potentially out of date. This can be done by automatically inserting a banner at the head of the main content telling the user that this content is potentially out of date. Below is an example of how this might look.

You might wish to also send an email update to the content owner of that page saying that the page has been marked as out of date.

Remove the page from the site’s navigation

If the content provider still hasn’t checked the page after a set period you might then choose to trigger a further event that removes the page from the navigational structure of the site. This will reduce the clutter that users need to navigate through to find the page they want. However, for those who still really want to access these pages they are still findable via search.

Remove the page from the search results

Of course there is also the option to prevent pages being returned in search results too. It can be hard to find the right page when searching a large site simply because of the amount of content being returned. If a piece of content is out of date then it makes sense not to return it in the search results.

This effectively orphans the page but keeps it online. You may wonder what the point of this is. Surely you would be better deleting the page entirely?

Delete the page altogether

There are mixed opinions about deleting content entirely. On the surface it seems like the most logical thing to do. If content is horribly out of date or is rarely visited what is the point of it being online?

As I see it there is no harm in keeping it online if it is clearly labelled as out of date and it no longer prevents users from finding content they really want. However, removing it can be damaging.

For a start there maybe third party links to that page let alone hard coded links within your own website. The last thing you want to present a user with is a ‘page not found’ error.

The only time I would recommend removing a page entirely is when the user can be automatically redirected to an alternative page that serves their needs better.

Conclusion

I am not suggesting that this approach is perfect. There is nothing stopping a content provider just checking the ‘this page is up-to-date’ box without properly reviewing the content. However, it does put the onus on the content provider to take action. This should automatically remove huge amounts of content from the site without battling with each content provider individually.