The Smoking Foot

Job Description: Website Content Manager

Summary

We are looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual with
experience and skills in web content management, writing and editing
for the web, graphic design and site management.

The website content manager will be responsible developing the voice
for all aspects of the organization’s online presence. In
addition to writing, editing, and proofreading site content, this
person will also work closely with the technical team to maintain site
standards with regard to new development. The website content manager
will also be responsible for crafting site promotions, email
newsletters, and online outreach campaigns.

The content manager will work closely with technical, business
development, and marketing members of our organization, so strong
communication skills are needed. The ideal candidate will also have
experience managing online marketing and outreach campaigns. Tasks
require a strong attention to detail and ability to work under tight
deadlines.

Responsibilities

• Create, develop and manage content for organization’s web presence (requires working with content management software)
• Coordinate web projects across departments
• Maintain a consistent look and feel throughout all web properties
• Working with a cross-departmental team, maintain and develop the master content calendar for all web properties
• Copyedit and proofread all web content
• Oversee freelancers, including writers, copyeditors and community outreach organizers
• Keep current with emerging web technologies through relevant blogs, listservs, and events
• Assure web-based information is archived for future needs and reference
• Track and report on all site metrics
• Work cooperatively with key team members, clients and vendors

Required Skills

• Exceptional communication and organizational skills
• Advanced knowledge of HTML and experience with popular content management systems (Drupal, Convio, Kintera, etc.)
• Ability to manage multiple projects in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment
• Basic Adobe Photoshop skills
• Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team
• 3-5 years experience managing content and production for high traffic websites
• Bachelor’s degree in English, Journalism, Technical Writing or a related field
• Passion, Integrity and Energy!

Job Description: Internet Director

Summary

We are looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual to direct
the overall growth and strategic direction of our organization’s online
presence. The Internet Director is responsible for developing and
managing a comprehensive online strategy, including internal and
external promotion, content creation, design development and
implementation, and on-line partnership building. The Internet Director
will also support ad sales efforts, editorial & consumer marketing
decisions, design plans, and overall strategic planning for the on-line
business. This is a leadership position that requires someone who can
motivate others to ensure the success of the department, and the
organization as a whole.

Responsibilities

• Develop an online strategy that supports the company’s overall goals and oversee all aspects of its implementation
• Identify opportunities for growth and execute strategies that take advantage of these opportunities
• Manage website development to incorporate new features and functionality
• Develop, expand, and manage current site designs and lead appropriate redesigns when needed
• Identify and execute strategic partnerships to acquire compelling
  content, features, and online tools that support the website strategy
• Build and lead a talented, experienced staff
• Alert colleagues to emerging technologies or applications and the
  opportunities to integrate them into our operations and activities
• Develop and manage the organization’s entire online budget,
  including website development and maintenance, outreach and promotion,
  personnel and operations

Required Skills:

• 7+ years online experience, including managing strategy development, content acquisition, and website development
• Strong knowledge of Website production technologies, including
  popular content management platforms (Drupal, Convio, Kintera, etc.)
• Extensive contacts in the online space
• Solid management experience and track record in motivating and building strong teams
• Experience enabling strong interdepartmental relationships
• Exceptional communication and organizational skills
• Advanced knowledge of HTML and experience with popular content management systems (Drupal, Convio, Kintera, etc.)
• Ability to manage multiple projects in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment
• Basic Adobe Photoshop skills
• Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team
• 3-5 years experience managing content and production for high traffic websites
• Passion, Integrity, and Energy!

Building a successful online team

A crucial component of realizing your online capabilities is ensuring
that you have the right personnel to help you achieve your goals. Our
experience has shown that by filling a few key positions, organizations
are able to not only implement the strategies we develop together, but
maintain and grow their existing websites and online organizing,
outreach and fundraising campaigns.

At EchoDitto, our goal is to empower organizations to
communicate with their members, constituents and customers in the most
effective way possible, using the most efficient, innovative and
appropriate technology available. As we like to say, we’d much rather
teach you to fish than give you a can of dolphin-safe tuna.

Below is a list of what we believe to be the five most crucial
positions required for maintaining and growing your
organization’s online presence. As you can see, the majority
of these positions are more strategic than technical, although the
content manager position does require some basic web development
skills. Depending on the size of your organization, and your online
goals and objectives, it may make sense to hire an internal web
developer/programmer/system administrator who can manage the more
technical aspects of your operation.

Of course, we know that few organizations have the resources (or
space!) to hire 5 new people at once. Depending upon the size of your
organization, it will make sense to fill these roles in a variety of
ways: one skilled staffer may be able to cover 3 or 4 of these roles
for a smaller organization and outsource the rest to consultants; the
online team for larger organizations may require a team double in size.

Essential

• Internet Director (Role: Strategy and Planning)
  Your organization’s internet director will oversee the successful
  strategic and technical planning and execution of online campaigns and
  initiatives, including online communications plans (email/blog/web
  content), and organizing efforts. In addition to coordinating among
  program areas and staff, this person would also be responsible for
  overseeing your organization’s relationship with other online
  community influencers (e.g. bloggers, social networking websites,
  online video outlets)—a role which could eventually evolve into
  its own full-time online organizer position (see below).
  
  Read a complete job description >>.
• Web Content Manager (Role: Content and Administration)
  Also referred to as a webmaster or web producer,
  this person is responsible for managing your organization’s
  online community presence on a day-to-day basis, such as implementing
  content or functionality associated with a campaign or initiative. The
  webmaster should be technically proficient for day-to-day site
  administration or design as well as have experience getting results
  through vendors or contractors. The webmaster works closely with the
  internet director to maintain and implement the online campaign/content
  plan. We believe that filling this position is not only cost-effective
  but, in fact, critical to the success of most online strategies.
  
  Read a complete job description >>.

Secondary Hires — for Building Capacity

• Online Organizer (Role: Outreach and Campaign management)
  Initially, your internet director and webmaster should be able to
  handle outreach to the greater online community, as well as manage the
  user-generated content associated with the various interactive or
  participatory features of your website. However, as your online
  presence grows, we recommend appointing a dedicated online community organizer
  whose primary responsibility will be to devise, create, and manage
  online communications with your community members (e-mail, blogs,
  discussion groups, feedback, etc.) and organizing or campaign efforts.
  Ideally, this person will also manage your organization’s
  relationship with other online community influencers, and will reach
  out to external blogs and online networks to promote your campaigns.
  
  Read a complete job description >>.
• Creative Director (Role: Design and Branding)
  Your creative director
  is charged with determining the best ways to visually represent your
  organization’s identity online. This is a people-oriented job
  responsible for developing high-level design concepts for projects
  under frequently tight deadlines. While most Creative Directors do
  their own design work, they are also responsible for recruiting and
  managing third party design firms as well as internal design resources.
  This role is appropriate for larger organizations. In smaller
  organizations, this role is usually filled by a design-savvy member of
  the internet team (webmaster / organizer / developer) or outsourced to
  an external design firm.
  
  Read the complete job description >>.
• Web Developer/Engineer (Role: Technical Development)
  While some organizations choose to hire a tech-savvy webmaster to
  handle minor technical updates and outsource the heavy technical
  lifting, other organizations find that it makes good financial sense to
  invest in a full-time developer. If your organization chooses the
  latter, look for someone with programming, database administration, and
  some basic graphic design skills. Your ideal candidate should serve as
  a strong strategic thinker and be familiar with emerging web
  technologies. Finally, ensure that your candidates have experience with
  the same technology powering your online infrastructure (e.g. don’t
  hire a PHP developer if you have a website running on cold fusion).
  Note: Consider delaying this hire if your organization is licensing
  software that includes monthly support from a product team that can
  implement custom campaigns (e.g. Convio, Blue State Digital, Democracy
  in Action).
  
  Read the complete job description >>.
• Database Administrator (Role: Data Coordination)
  While not strictly a member of the internet team, a Database
  Administrator, or DBA, is a crucial part of your overall constituent
  management strategy. As your systems for storing donor, volunteer,
  activist, and member data grow larger, a Database Administrator will
  work to keep them all coordinated, particularly if these systems span
  departments (Development to Communications to Field) or platforms
  (Raiser’s Edge to Convio to Salesforce and custom applications).

http://www.echoditto.com/onlineteam

Fair Use

24. Quotes and Time Frames
for Publicly Available Content

ML: Is there a rule of thumb for
quoting previously published, publicly available, reports and news stories.
Specifically, how much can you directly quote a publication before it
becomes necessary to ask the authors permission? How does this differ
for purchased materials (such as a research report from a think tank)?

For
newspaper articles that were once publicly available online and in print,
but are now only available online to publication subscribers (for instance
the New York Times Select or the Wall Street Journal, which restricts
non-subscribers from accessing certain articles after a set period of
time) are direct quotes allowed once the time has passed that they are
publicly available online? Thanks!

Pat
& Maura: No,
there are no reliable “rules of thumb” (in terms of time,
or percentages, or whatever). The Statement
of Best Practices in Fair Use however, is a reliable source of guidance.
Quoting from news sources is permissible under the same general principles
as filmmakers use—if the use is appropriate to the transformed use.
There is no difference between news and reports. You can quote online
materials just as you can quote others.

25. Quotation Limit

Kathleen L.: So I find something
I think is relevant and needs to be brought to the attention of my fellow
gatherer’s but it happens to be some one else’s creation, how much can
I quote, with acknowledgements before it becomes a violation of their
copyright? Most of the time some of us post links to the website, if there
is one. What if there’s no website to direct them to for the ‘rest’ of
the information… how much of a book or magazine article can we quote
without stepping on some body’s toes?

Pat
& Maura: According
to the Statement
of Best Practices in Fair Use, documentary filmmakers stipulated that
you can only quote from someone else’s material for as long or as
much as it takes to make your point. That doesn’t include, incidentally,
using others’ material just to save yourself the trouble of making
the point in your own words/own images. Please see the Statement
of Best Practices in Fair Use for more clarity.

http://us.oneworld.net/section/us/asktheexperts/fairuse#text

Google news allowing comments

Google News now allows organization and individuals that are quoted in the stories it indexes to post comments in reply. Here’s an example (hat tip to the Lost Remote blog).

This has the potential to be a much more efficient way to respond to online news than most others we have experimented with. It’s been a long time since I took a reporter to lunch, but I remember they used to tell me they often used Google News to research what other journalists had written about a topic before starting their own stories. [Erik Eckl, Beaconfire].

Here’s a link where you can see how it works.

http://searchengineland.com/070807-085103.php

Suppose your company, boss or political candidate discovers that
their Wikipedia article is wrong, or has subtle inaccuracies that
nonetheless paint them in an unfavorable light? Most people unfamiliar
with how Wikipedia works consider only two solutions: edit the article
or sit on their hands. Unfortunately, neither approach typically
results in the optimal outcome: a factually accurate profile containing
trustworthy information.

Search marketers and reputation management professionals should
know that there are legitimate ways to correct errors in Wikipedia.
Knowing the right way to fix things is even more important now that
Wikipedia results frequently appear in the top listings of Google
search results. The good news is that Wikipedia actually offers a broad
range of options for correcting inaccurate or negative entries, and
even better, all are easy to use and take little time to implement.

My last column
looked at examples of inappropriate editing originating from a United
States Congress IP address—meaning one politician’s staff was
attempting to use Wikipedia for less than ethical purposes. This time
we’ll confront the opposite problem: an anonymous vandal inserted false
information to the biography of United States Congressman Steve
LaTourette of Ohio. For four months, Congressman LaTourette’s staffers
were aware of the falsehoods but did nothing to fix them because, as
spokeswoman Deborah Setliff told the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, they feared a PR backlash if they edited the page.

The most serious problem occurred in the second paragraph. According to the Plain Dealer story:

“LaTourette’s anonymously authored biography on one of the
world’s most visited Web sites claims he once disrupted a law school
assembly honoring England’s Prince of Wales.”

The exact text as it appeared in Wikipedia was:

“A graduate of the University of Michigan, LaTourette
studied law at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and had the
dubious distinction there of disrupting a school assembly honoring
Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. LaTourette was roughly removed by
the Secret Service.”

The really damaging aspect of that allegation is how it bears a
tangential resemblance to the truth. There actually had been a student
disturbance when Prince Charles visited that law school. LaTourette was
enrolled at the time but had nothing to do with the incident.

Wikipedia and its volunteers do care about edit vandalism and the Biographies of Living Persons
policy makes this problem a special priority. LaTourette’s staff could
have e-mailed the Wikimedia Foundation, either directly or via the Open Ticket Request System (OTRS) that creates a tracking number for each query.

As a Wikipedia administrator I see the opportunity to go deeper than
OTRS and fix the underlying problem: this article obviously wasn’t
being watchlisted. Watchlists
alert active editors of changes to particular pages. These are among
the most powerful tools for combating vandalism. To solicit more
volunteer watchlisting, LaTourette’s staff could have contacted two
projects that are interested in the article: WikiProject Biography and WikiProject U.S. Congress. Most article talk pages contain links to one or more WikiProjects. A good general contact point is Wikipedia’s Counter-Vandalism Unit.
Inappropriate edits usually vanish within minutes when enough editors
watch a page. Best of all, the site’s volunteers will solve future
problems while you sleep.

Wikipedia also maintains noticeboards to address specific issues.
Here’s a short list that every search marketer or reputation management
professional should keep for reference.

• Requests for Page Protection:
  if a series of controversial edits hit an article within a short time,
  a week or two of edit protection usually resolves the problem
• Administrator Intervention Against Vandalism: administrators prevent continued disruption by blocking persistent vandals
• Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard: an informal alternative to OTRS for biography articles
• Administrators’ Noticeboard/Incidents: addresses urgent problems that don’t fall within the scope of other noticeboards

Site administrators insist on reports that include page diffs like the one displayed above for the vandalizing edit. These are accessible through the tab at the top of each article. Here’s the history of the Steve LaTourette article.

Each date-stamped line provides a (last) option at the second
column from left. Selecting that leads to a visual display of the
difference between that page version and the previous one. That, in
Wikipedia jargon, is the diff. It shows exactly what happened,
which account or IP performed the edit, and when the change occurred.
Cut and paste the relevant diff URL whenever you need to present
evidence. Standard wikimarkup is to enclose URLs in single brackets.

Now here’s where this knowledge becomes especially valuable: a
little wikisleuthing sometimes turns up other interesting information
that a reputation management professional can put to creative use. From
the diff of the vandalizing edit I get a full list of this IP address’s
contributions.

That shows a pattern of gossipy edits to biographies, mostly of Ohio
politicians. Some Wikipedia vandals exhibit a pattern of ideological or
profit-motivated edits. If I had noticed this IP during its spree of
March 6 and March 7 I would have blocked it from editing for a while.
Any editor can issue warnings
for clear policy violations. A word of caution: no matter what your
opinion about a user’s conduct, keep the legal angle offsite. Wikipedia
doesn’t mind if you actually take someone to court, but threats of a
suit have a stifling effect on discussion and could end your site
editing privileges. Other strategies may yield swifter and more
satisfying resolutions.

Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota got an unexpected
boost to her reelection campaign last year after an anonymous vandal
attacked her Wikipedia biography. Several strange claims entered the
article including a baseless charge that she was pregnant by a
nonexistent staffer. It’s uncertain whether the opposing campaign
coordinated the vandalism, but shortly afterward its campaign manager
sent an e-mail to several of the state’s bloggers
that cited the vandalized Wikipedia biography and added an accusation
that Herseth was a “home-wrecker.” Rather than damaging Herseth’s
reputation, the tactic backfired on challenger Bruce Whalen to such an
extent that the Rapid City Journal editorial board called for a public apology from the Whalen campaign. Herseth won the election.

More metrics

I’ll point out that trying to increase the time on site may well be at odds with usability
goals, which often are to *decrease* the time that it takes for
visitors to do things.

This obviously applies more to task-based scenarios than more general
advocacy one, but I’ll point out that the vast majority of people come
to most sites with a goal in mind – to find a piece of information, to
make a decision, take an action, etc. Facilitating their goals and
allowing them to quickly do what they’re hoping to do is a good thing.
Having so much great information that they’re compelled to stay and
read can be useful for the right sites, but I certainly don’t think it
should be the key goal of every site.

Overall, most user experience professionals dislike this concept of
“stickiness” – it implies that instead of focusing on what the end
user wants to do, we should try to ensnare them in things that will
keep them on the site. If it’s well done on the right site, a focus
on time-on- site can it can lead to really engaging stuff. But too
strong a focus can lead to clutter in too much cross-promotion,
content that isn’t useful, and if taken too far, user-hostile tricks
that literally make it take longer to do things, hard to leave the
site, etc.

So, basically, like everything else, it depends on what your goals
are. Though, of course, with Neilsen now picking up the banner, it
makes it harder to ignore.

My $0.02

Laura

–
Laura S. Quinn
Idealware

Metrics

“Google will see a drop to fifth in time spent, simply because its search
engine is intended to guide users elsewhere as quickly as possible. It
ranked third in pageviews.”

I think even the commercial folks realize that vist-length isn’t something
that can be compared site to site by iteslf. I don’t think anyone would
think that you should be penalized for having a rocking IA that speeds your
visitors to their content immediately – in fact, a decrease in visit length
may be a success metric for a redesign.

And wWho is doing the measurement, and what is their agenda? Keep in mind
that Nielsen is a business born in the era of 3-network TV, designed to
measure “eyeballs” as inventory for advertisers. As they have migrated
to the web and become a major player, they have a natural proclivity to
shift metrics to emphasize participation in rich-media content which
aligns with their TV business. Also, they have a site measurement
product to sell and they are clearly orienting it to sites that feature
rich-media content, thus helping those sites prove to advertisers that
they have an audience and therefore merit advertising money even if
traditional page-view metrics might indicate otherwise.

Technorati

Most of us use Technorati to find out how popular we are, of course.  If
your ranking is high enough, you get to sit at the cool kids’ table in the
lunchroom…

Um, yeah.  Technorati’s an interesting and useful tool, but I wouldn’t take
the exact numbers too seriously.  Theoretically, it’s tracking your blog’s
“influence” as measured by how many people are linking to you.  The
critical bits are the number of incoming links from other blogs, your
site’s “rank” (which shows the number of blogs that have more incoming
links than you over the last 180 days), and your “authority.”  “Authority”
seems to derive  from the number of incoming links, again over the last 180
days, and from the variety of sites those links come from (i.e., 100 links
from 50 sites seem to count more than 100 links from 1 site, though I don’t
know if links from more influential sites matter more than links from less
influential ones). Technorati also shows the actual sites that have linked
to you.

Technorati’s numbers fluctuate a lot (their system seems unusually buggy),
so I generally look at overall trends without focusing so much on the
details.  Main question: is my stuff interesting enough that other people
link to it, and if not, how can I improve it?  What kinds of articles tend
to draw the most incoming links and from what kinds of sites?  What other
sites are in my idea space, and what are they writing about?  The answers
to these questions can help you figure out how to build your audience and
promote your articles.

There are a ton of tips out there about building blog traffic, but the best
advice seems to come down to this: define your niche, post good content,
post frequently, pitch your articles to other sites if you think the
authors might be interested (but don’t overdo it), and look for other sites
that might run your articles with a link back to your main site.  I wrote a
few recommendations up last November, if you’re interested:

http://www.epolitics.com/2006/11/16/how-to-build-traffic-to-a-blog-ten-tips/

Oh yeah, that’s another one: occasionally post your articles to online
discussions, if it’s appropriate to the topic and adds value to the
conversation — but don’t do it so often that people make fun of you.

Avoiding the form bots

This kept our email addresses clean, but we did have a problem at one point.
SPAM bots kept going after one of our forms. We didn’t want to burden our
users with those PITA hoops of typing the barely legible string of
characters in the graphic tricks, so we tried something different. We have
two hidden fields on every form, and they all have a set value by default. A
real user with a browser cannot see them or change them unless they’re using
something like Tamper Data. So, the value stays the same. Bots see the
fields and change them. Our servers check the value of the fields, and if
they have changed, it doesn’t deliver the email. That has eliminated 99% of
the spam through the website.

input type=”hidden” name=”25e11d7f” value=”9e5510f” /
input type=”hidden” name=”103228ec” value=”2209ee31″ /

input type=”hidden” name=”3b8f8082″ value=”2148a195″ /

I’m assuming that the CFM file the form is submitted to compares these name/value pairs to ones it has set in the program?