Month: April 2008

Blog Post Ideas For the Technology Avoider

When an Internet marketing professional sees the phrase “blog post ideas” they’ll automatically think of two things: keywords and users. The hard core technology avoider lives on a different island; they are instantly lost. Only the hearty among them will ask, “What is a keyword, and what is a user?”

You and I know that they need to know some of this stuff to blog successfully. However, some of them may not need to know it all right away. Too much information would distract them, because there is a language and culture gap that they’re not ready to cross. You know who I’m talking about. You’ll see it in their eyes.

They’re the same people who go blank and nod politely when you try to talk about what you did today. When faced with getting web content together they get that deer-in-the-headlights look. Their web project frustration level may be pre-tuned to “high.” Some may seem like they’re ready to argue about every detail, when in reality they’re drowning, fighting to be in control. Sometimes they have created detailed plans in hopes of keeping the web site technology demon in check. Often those plans are based on misconceptions of how the print world might translate to online marketing. One symptom I’ve noticed is a determination to do what I think of as “leafleting,” by signing up for as many online “yellow pages” and directories as possible, though their own web site may consist of an under construction notice and a seldom-checked email address.

Don’t be surprised if in some cases there is a near-total disconnect between what you say and what is heard. Sometimes support will help. Some people may need to spend a few weeks with a Blogging for Dummies book before they feel ready to deal with a real live Internet professional, and some may throw up their hands and trot off to some form of DIY WYSIWYG hell. Let them go, if they need to go. The important thing for both sides is to be comfortable doing your best, whatever that is at the time; don’t let problems become stopping points.

Getting Content Gold From Technology Avoiders

First off, though this post was inspired by Jenn Osborne’s thoughts on blog post ideas for challenging industries, the truth is that I don’t think that there are any truly challenging industries. There are challenging mindsets – yours, mine and theirs. Try to put aside preconceptions and greet the adventure.

Avoid temptation to speak as if the technology avoider needs a vocabulary lesson. Do they start to zone out at the mention of unfamiliar terms? Get creative, and use alternative words that are not specific to the search industry. Try saying “Google” instead of “search engine,” or “article idea” instead of “targeted keywords.”

Don’t sidestep difficult communication by relying too much on keyword insight tools. Keyword insight may not get you to the low hanging fruit that can be a new site’s bread and butter. For the long tail and the low hanging fruit you are going to need user insight, and that’s probably going to involve getting the technology avoider talking about their customers, using specific, concrete terms.

Trust their knowledge. Get them talking about what they know. Take notes. Consider recording phone calls and keeping logs of online chat sessions. Try to listen at least as much as you speak.

Use what they already have. Customer questions can show what needs to be written about, and response emails can provide the bones of new posts. Ask about any previous writing. Any customer support type materials can be expanded upon online, where customers can review them at their leisure. Technology avoiders may not have considered that what they already have is useful as web content.

Ask specific questions. Be ready to prime the pump with some phrases from keyword insight tools, though you may not need to. Chances are they’ll have better insight into their customers than any keyword tool.

Don’t make the question list too long. Be aware of when that glazed-over, frustrated behavior starts to surface. Consolidate questions into related clusters, and let the client pick and choose. Be aware that in some people uncertainty leads to trying to take an overly authoritative posture on too broad of a focus. In reality there is no need to do it all, and certainly not all at once, and the business’s existing approach to authority and brand identity will probably translate to online just fine.

Steer towards short phrases that use concrete language. Help them boil answers down to words that are as specific as possible. For example, phrases like “our cheese is better” aren’t as useful as “local [county name] organic cheese.”

Here are some questions that may help get blog post ideas rolling.

  • List the client’s products and services. Add some issues associated with them, by listing ten things you’d like to tell a prospective customer about, in five words or less, using specific language.
  • Describe the customers. Are they individuals? Stores? Designers? Cooks? Daughters? Husbands? Sons?
  • Describe reasons for buying. Are customers purchasing necessities, gifts, treats? Are they buying for themselves or someone else?
  • What are customer’s frequently asked questions? What gets to them, in a good way? What bugs them, resolves their resistances, solves their thorny market-related compulsions?
  • Examine the research phase. Why might customers be searching for your client online? Are they researching something specific? Are they comparing products or services? Are they likely to pass on information to others?
  • Customer language. What informal and formal terms are they likely to know and use?
  • What are some customer problems and complaints? What do they worry about? What do they want to fix?
  • Unmet needs can become wish lists. What might they want more of? What do they wish they could find?

Breaking, Building and Leaning Into Limits

Nature fumbles all the time. Things break. Early sprouts freeze and die back. Erosion takes down hillsides, even hillsides where humans have not clear-cut. In the long run, our trying to catch up with nature is what ends up looking more damaged. Nature has built-in ways to compost and recycle what falls. We humans sometimes skip the recycling and head straight into rebuilding. Are we determined to live on the wet hillside with a view, or the ocean front flood plane?

I think it goes deeper than that. Maybe we need the possibility of “faux pas.” Maybe it’s part of an instinct for leaning into challenges.

I was thinking about inconvenient instincts this morning while watching my cat play with my bath water – such a joy. He is *fascinated* with the reflections and movement of water, *almost* to the point of wanting to get in on purpose. Once in a while there is a great scattering noise as he does whatever is needed to recoup his balance, but in a few minutes or less he’ll be right back at it.

When I pull the plug and the water has drained to about the last 1/4″ he often jumps into the tub: 1/4″ to 1/2″ is his kitty cat faux pas wet paws limit. He cringes a little as he lands in the wet bathtub. Fascination overpowers cringe almost immediately, as he races to watch the last of the water go down the drain, and then stalks and pats at water droplets rolling down the side of the tub.

I am like that when it comes to programming. I know how to do a few very small things with php, and it fascinates me. If I lean in too far, or get in over my head, it’s chaos. Wet paws are just enough, over and over again. I like patting at those water droplets.

My php tolerance has gradually increased. I remember when I felt the same way about html, and later on about css-based layouts. These transitions would not have happened naturally, without my encouragement, any more than it was strictly natural for humans to create culture protected by dikes and levies in Holland and New Orleans – but look at what we can accomplish. I like it, I work at it, and I protect it by building on what I’ve learned. I build my own version of dikes and levies – I look at what I can accomplish, and it makes me happy.

Lexi and iamlosts’s comments on my post, Sympathy for the Technology Avoider, led me to wondering about what makes us tick when we go for it anyway, whatever “it” is at the moment. As Jenn Osborne’s Blog Strategy series is on my mind this week, and I had planned to respond to her last post about coming up with blog post ideas for challenging industries, my next post is going to be about blog post ideas, with a little twist. I’ll be looking at how to approach blog post ideas for the technology avoider.

Ironically, I’ll be writing as it rains. We’re at the not-so-nice edge of Spring here, and I want to be doing outside things in between rain drops. I’m not going to glue myself to the computer until the sky is falling. When I’m outside I’ll be avoiding the rain. When inside I plan to glory in it.

Sympathy for the Technology Avoider

I have a friend who is not a fan of things computer. For a long, long time, I’ve been encouraging him to put his business online. He is very good at what he does, and he’s no dummy. After hearing two or three unfamiliar terms from an explanation of how a web site can help his business, he will turn a little green, as if his brain is about to melt. His web site is stuck at one really bad page, and I want to fix it. This week, all on his own, he arrived at a solid “maybe,” though the resistance and disorientation remains.

Take a few steps away from the web-comfortable niche of most of the people who are likely to read this blog, and I firmly believe you’ll find that his reaction is not unusual. You and I are different. We have different comfort zones. We can speak a different dialect, more than we know.

For most of the world, “search” means “to look for,” not the first part of “search engine” or “search term” or “search industry.” Most people don’t automatically check to see it they’ve closed their tags – they struggle with it, they avoid dealing with it. We’re a little different from the average bear. Trust me on this.

Here’s another example from someone else. Last week I got a very shy phone call from a very intelligent someone who asked if I could explain, again, how to make a link. He’s been blogging, though rather hesitantly, for over a year now. I know for a fact that the problem is not that he hasn’t had it explained before, simply, with both text examples and screenshots. So, what is it? What’s the disconnect? I think it’s a wobble of paradigm.

Have you ever made a faux pas in an unfamiliar language? I’m talking paradigm wobble like that, more than just not knowing words.

When I was a teenager my dad was stationed in Germany. I’m an army brat. I grew up with the reality of the Berlin Wall. My first TV memories are of Viet Nam war dead on the evening news. Different time. Different wobbles. In Germany, to my grandparent’s generation we were the valiant guardians who kept the Russians out of Western Europe. To many Germans of my generation we were the “amme,” Nato’s chosen “wet nurse.” We were walking, talking paradigm shifts.

At that time there were three ways to approach being American military in Europe. You could be unabashedly American and live and shop “on base” most of the time, or you could soak up the culture in “Germantown” out “on the economy” and be a part of where we were living, or you could do some combination of the two. In the two places where we lived when stationed over there, we did a little of everything.

One evening my brother, mother and I went out to eat at a little restaurant “on the economy.” My brother asked, in German, for “the bathroom.” The waiter shrugged and barely made it to the kitchen before breaking into a giggle. Now, in the restaurant, the boy wanted to take a bath? Hilarious.

In a few seconds we figured out that the problem was that my brother wanted to ask for the “WC,” but had fumbled while trying to remember how to say the German letter “w.” Instead, he did a direct translation to “bathroom.” Bathroom and restroom are more usual in the US, as we prefer not to say “toilet” as publicly. We have a slightly different communication paradigm.

I think that some people who are used to communicating online have a different communication paradigm, too. We may see web technology as a bridge, a set of tools, or a natural language, whereas the two people I mentioned at the start of this post see it as a barrier to get through. Re-explaining something may not work, at least at first, because the paradigm is different.

When the same people want to know, again and again, how to make a link, offer them a little good-natured pantomime in the form of a tutorial or a Dummies book. Though there’s nothing like a little understanding and patience from a human being, a web-hesitant reader will know that a book won’t giggle on the way to the kitchen.

Motivation From Nature

I have a love-hate relationship with living in Western Washington. Six months of the year we’re wet and gray and I am a poster child for S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder,) unless I’m glued to my computer, and then I forget about everything. I emerge from my cave about this time each year, squinting at the sunlight. Someone with my disposition should live closer to the equator. At the same time, there’s nothing like home. The other six months of the year I am ecstatic about our green greens and our culture. I love Puget Sound.

Eastern Washington is second cousin to the midwest – hot, dry Summers and frozen cold Winters. On the western side, especially near Puget Sound, we have (chilly) rain forests and more mold than you can shake an asthma inhaler at, mitigated somewhat by not freezing as deeply or as long as areas without our sheltered pocket of inland salt water. Also, we have some of the most beautiful Springtimes that can be found anywhere.

Yesterday we had our second day in a row of truly Spring-like weather. Today, after three, all is forgiven, even though the rains are due to return on Friday. Tuesday I saw my first hummingbird of the year – amazing. Last week it was freezing at night. Tomorrow we may be back to gray and dismal for another few weeks. This changeability reminds me of three things:

  1. tempus fugit (time flies)
  2. carpe diem (seize the day)
  3. making hay while the sun shines

Sorting the “Somedays”

Do you have 110 projects, lurking in the shadows of your imagination, camping out on 101 back burners? How many “someday” domains lurk in your account? How many “remember to” things are years out outdated, no longer even applicable to today’s real life?

When thinking of writing this post a thought wafted to the surface that one day I’d have to get the chocolate fudge cookie recipe. Chocolate fudge cookie recipe? That to-do was 25 years old, from when I was the baker for a cafe that has been out of business at least 20 years. Crazy. On the other hand, I do have a couple of wanna-do domains registered and waiting for food-related web sites. A cooking site would be a wonderful project to get going during the next wet, gray Fall. For Spring and Summer, there’s a local goings-on site I’d love to get off the back burner: tempus fugit and carpe diem, because that mellow weather won’t last forever.

When is the last time you took a hard look at what’s silly not to be doing? It’s nonsensical what gets back-burnered. Health. Family time. The “somedays” that are good for you, for which there really is time after all. Projects that are back lit by honest-to-goodness, heartfelt this-is-me.

Sometimes, I think we put off the good stuff because there doesn’t seem to be enough time to follow through in a thorough and complete way. We may be happy to chip away at a problem, while leaving the good stuff for some time when there are more days in a week. Why? Why not chip away at the happy task?

Life is short and time flies. Decide if a “problem” project really needs to be solved, then fix it or forget it. Pick a few wanna-do projects and get them started. Seize the day. Let the rest fade away, or get drastic and chuck ’em: there will be more where those came from.