Elizabeth Able - 5/12

How to Have a Blast With a Crash

You know, life is fickle, or maybe it’s just me. All together now, “It’s just you, Elizabeth. It’s all on you. You’re the only one who hears the voices. Nobody understands. You are totally, uniquely, unintelligibly…”

Heh.

Ever had one of those weeks when everything feels settled, the hard questions are anwered-ish for now, the reasonable happy plan is moving along… and then, lo and behold, that is exactly when the crapola hits the proverbial fan? In my case sometimes I care about something more than I thought did, and I figure this out right after learning that I don’t need to care about absolutely everything. This week, letting go of a couple commitments was a trigger.

It seems as if the moment I have an open space, there is the potential for a zillion points of light to seep through my theoretically solid plans, like beach sand that gets everywhere. At these times I get my best ideas, and my most exciting crazy-bad ideas. I may see how I can reinvent and recommit to good things I thought I had to leave behind. I’m also unsettled: am I breaking or flexing? Unsettled may be good for opening up possibilities.

If I’m getting enough sleep and remembering to embrace good friends who like to listen to me, these are way, mondo cool, growth times. If I pace myself, remember to eat healthy and take walks, and continue to get enough sleep, the next steps can lead to a very special creative and productive time.

Now you have some hints about why I didn’t share and polish that post about my benchmarks post yesterday. Yes, I’ve had a crazy couple of days. And, now, I do believe I have a few interesting weeks ahead.

The Have a Blast With a Crash Plan

When everything falls apart, a space for new opportunity is made. We can fill up that space with the chaos of trying to re-assemble what was there before. We can also let go and see if that space could shine with growth and creative change. This is how I would do it right, if I’d done it on purpose this time around.

First, get a little ahead, and stay a little ahead, working with a strongly organized system. Clear out the dishes, the laundry, unpaid bills, nuisance errands, etc. You are clearing space for choices, breakthroughs and room to breathe. Enjoy your creativity, but don’t worry about taking on groundbreaking creative projects. Be efficient, but, and this is Very Important, as you start to pull ahead, where possible do not make public commitments to get something done at a particular time. Hoard that open space.

Now, let go of something. Drop an unprofitable project. Sell the time-consuming yet beloved old car at a loss if need be. Drop an expensive hobby that’s lost its charm. Fire a client. Gather up the ex-sweetie’s stuff and pass it on. Leave behind some bad baggage habit thing. If weight loss is your big concern, drop your favorite fattening foods. Go ahead and agonize over the decision, but not too much. Like aches after exercise, the pain will pass. Go ahead and push, gently, firmly. Stretch into the empty ache of your newly emptied space.

Next, let your mind wander, and trust. Why let yourself wander, after having worked so hard to get ahead? Sometimes the mind becomes locked into an inflexible way of thinking, leaving us less able to free our minds to restructure problems or even take in helpful clues that are right in front of us.

“If there’s excessive attention, it somehow creates mental fixation,” he notes. “Your brain is not in a receptive condition.”

Joydeep Bhattacharya, as quoted in Scientific American

Be aware. Here there be breakthroughs. Notice what rises to the surface, pushed by the drive that has been freed up by your newly de-structured and emptied space. This time around I had some pre-existing puzzles to work out, but my ideas didn’t stop there. What surprises me is how many new ideas can appear in the emptiness after letting go of what is not working. Enjoy the flow.

Get support, and support yourself. Network with friends. Don’t skimp on sleep. Eat your spinach. Friends tell me I am fun to watch at times like this, unless I’m not doing so well with the sleep thing. I’ll have to take their word for it. I absolutely love brainstorming.

Think big, move small. The more fantabulous the ideas, the more important not over-committing becomes. If you’re underfinanced or if there are not enough hours in your day, being unprepared can be the dark side of breakthroughs – without being a little ahead to start with, the uneven momentum of inspiration can be disorienting. Try dreaming of small steps. Small is ok – just keep going. Big steps are harder to sustain. Small steps can be the building blocks of big steps.

And there you have it. My mastering the crash plan.

A Preface to my Bouncing Baby Benchmarks

Question: What did I want from my 101 days?

Answer: A sense of direction. An orientation beyond web design.

Question: Why couldn’t I just pick some keywords to write about? Use that to form a bridge between my beloved web stuff and a prospective audience?

Answer: Because keywords are only a part of the picture. Very often, the target audience is no longer a passive receiver. The Internet is in the midst of a paradigm shift that won’t be mastered by tactical logic… and, you know, maybe I am, too.

Question: Paradigm shift?

Answer: The one-to-many mass marketing that works so well via old school SEO is increasingly intermixed with not-so-little blips and sparks of one-to-one communication, and we natives are restless. Sometimes we don’t like being at the other end of one-to-many. Badly done online one-to-many is spam – the kind of thing that gives marketing a bad name.

With the explosion of social media, one-to-one is intermixed with one-to-many. People “talk.” Sometimes online one-to-one WOM is not marketing or gossip; sometimes it’s a real someone, or a someone we really know, who talks to someone else we know about the specific features and benefits of something that makes a difference in our not-so-unimportant, everyday, face-to-face lives.

Did Google see it coming? Was anticipating user’s hunger for one-to-one and social media part of why Google devalued potentially spam-like strategies? Did they read the writing on the wall, see that people wanted people, and there would be a backlash against being marketed at? Maybe it’s a chicken or egg situation. Some of the famous algorithm updates of the last few years were crushing to sites optimized for old school SEO, or Text Link Ads, or even sites optimized for Google’s own Adsense.

What’s a little guy to do, after Google rolls over? Erm… blog and network, perhaps? Try sharing, face-to-face-ish style, clumsily or slickly market-spammer-like, whatever you have at first, using whatever tool bypasses the search engines?

Those tools look a lot like social media, and…

Question: Excuse me?

Answer: …huh? Oh. Yes?

Question: Could we get back to the part about tactical logic and keywords, please?

Answer: Well, by tactical logic I mean strategies that give results that can be measured and anticipated in a quantitative way. If 100 people searching for brand x see a page about brand x’s product named keyword y, how many are likely to buy, move on, or ask for the product named keyword z? These things can be projected with statistical guestimates.

Social media and word of mouth traffic is more of a qualitative thing, more emotional logic than tactical logic. With social media you may get 1,000 people on the keyword y page, but if they’re not there for a reason targeted to looking for keyword y, the old quantitative projections are out the window.

Question: Why else would someone go to the keyword y page, if not looking for keyword y?

Answer: I believe that often those reasons are going to be less directly connected to wanting to acquire a product or service. There will be more dreamers, readers and self-educators, and fewer buyers. Want specific reasons? You name it, it’s possible.

Browsing favorite topics, for entertainment
Interest in a cause
Very early stages of research
Compelling title
Compelling image
Curious about what someone from some country across the world would bookmark
Curiosity about why someone notable liked it
Wanting to be seen bookmarking the same things as a rock star
Trusting the taste of someone you’ve “friended”
Building a social media profile
Promoting one’s own site
Curious about a friend’s site, or a friend of a friend’s site
Checking out a big brand’s really dumb typo
Looking for beautiful pictures of far away places, or of cats
Hunger for information and ideas
Browsing for recipe blogs
101 things I haven’t thought of yet

Question: Remind me of what this philosophizing and social media speculation has to do with a business blog, or a business blog strategy?

Answer: OK. It’s like this. There are about a gazillion small brick and mortars out there who lack a good web presence. A majority of their keywords are not intensely competitive when combined with local search, especially if there is some existing brand recognition from existing face-to-face marketing.

They’re out there among social media users who are not Internet marketers or make-money-online bloggers. And they’re watching. And when they feel ready they’re going to want a site that gets votes on Yelp or reviews on Stumble, or whatever. They won’t have a corporate budget. They’ll want a lower cost site that still has web 2.0 perks – perhaps a customized WordPress theme, and they may need a coach and a writer or ghost writer to help them get started. That’s probably where I’ll come in…

Question: Erm…

Answer: I know, I know. What does all this have to do with my 101 days?

OK. It’s like this. For me, at least, emotional logic – empathetic, qualitative judgment – requires getting in there and stretching but good, with an open mind. Change and growth must be both learned and felt, and I need a sort of an emotional and informational immersion boot camp to get there. Eventually, I start to surface with a strong philosophical frame of reference that helps to give me an anchor.

Besides, this web thing is not natural for a lot of the people I’ll be focusing on working with. If I stretch my own comfort zone I’ll have more clues and cues for how to help them through stretching theirs. That’s the theory anyway.

Question: Noooo, I was going to ask myself if I knew, when I started blogging here in November, that I’d be having these thoughts about this target market.

Answer: LOL. Well… Not really. There is so.much.change in our world today. Sometimes I really need to shed my skin to find out what’s underneath, and what shape and size I am. IMHO everyone should try it.

Question: And why is this post called “A Preface to my Bouncing Baby Benchmarks”?

Answer: Because statistics are meaningless without a frame of reference, there’s no way I’m talking benchmarks before making you read this other stuff. It’s all about the brand, baby.

It’s not about the traffic. It’s about the relationships.

My Blogging Benchmarks Post

Tomorrow I’ll bring out some observations about my traffic and content. I’ll be chatting about my own ideals, plus some of the benchmarks Jenn blogged about over at Search Engine People a week ago.

Today, me, myself and I are closing by asking if any of you reading this have ever wanted to interview yourself? This is new for me! I started off by asking myself a few questions to write about, and the Q & A format started to flow.

Questions for Readers, and a 101 Day Round-Up

I’m here with you and the spirit of WordPress, writing away on a gorgeous Spring weekend, to sum up a little of what’s gone on here over the last 101 days, and get reader feedback for some plans I’m cooking up for this site’s theme.

My hope is to arrive at how the thing called Internet bisects my values and things I enjoy that I’d like to do more of in everyday life. If I don’t find a destination, per se, that’s OK. The goal is to explore, joyfully and with dedication.

Ritual, Manners, Branding, Identity

100 days ago I committed to making 100 meaning-of life posts, and 101 days later I’ve added 60 posts to my tally. That comes out to anywhere from 1 to 7 posts a week, an average of about 4 a week. There were times when once a week was hard, moreso a few weeks ago than now. Four posts a week is a respectable clip for a one-person blog. Two or three is more reachable in the long run; at the same time, a little pressure is good for creativity.

I have projects coming up that may require me to cut back somewhat, but because my original commitment was to give it my all for 101 days of posts, I’ll do whatever I can to make the next 40 posts at the 4 post a week rate. One of my missions for the next 40 posts is to widen and deepen the blogging topic list I started the end of March.

This coming week I’m going to write about web strategy and content development for small brick and mortar businesses – it’s been an interest of mine just about forever. If I’ve worked on a site for you and in the next few articles you think I’m talking about you, it ain’t necessarily so. You are not the only one. Consider yourself to be an archetype, a sign of the times.

Another topic I’ve enjoyed a lot of late is social media, though I’m a little less settled about how I feel about the web’s current state of social media development. Community is good. Marketing is… sometimes tricky. Respect is almost everything.

This brings my joy of the Elizabeth-brand list of topics up to five. Pardon me while I give myself a big w00t and vava voom for adding to my me-brand.

Identity – Branding beyond logo and colors
Community – What sparks it and keeps it energized, online and locally, through social media and other kinds of venues, and any supportive roles that marketing can play
Culture – Specifically how the Internet can be a positive force of understanding and respect in this era of terrorism and military activism
Web content – strategies for small businesses, especially those that are new to the web or dissatisfied with their current site

But wait! There’s more! Read on, and please tell me what you think!

AbleReach will get a custom WordPress theme

If there is interest, I’m up for starting with the WP default and documenting what I change, tutorial-style, one step at a time. This is not something I’d normally advise for a blog with a large following, because ongoing change can confuse readers, and doing it this way will take longer, prolonging the metamorphosis. It might not be too terrible – after coming to my site, the most common next clicks are from Recent Posts or Top Ten Posts. If those two are both in an anticipated place we may not be too lost. Are you game?

Sometime soon I’ll decide if I’m going to make a new logo, maybe without the “Arts & Web Development” or “AbleReach helps you get online” lines. I have held onto this logo graphic for sentimental reasons, and I could easily keep holding on and layering on bylines. I like the bold, fat, scripty typeface, and all three taglines are a part of me, but so much has changed in a few short years! It may be time for a logo change, too.

Some day I’ll have to share the story of how that logo and my domain name came to be.

I Want More Feed Functionality

Is it my imagination, or are feeds getting cooler?

I like Ruud Hein’s use of shared items in his sidebar. Very sweet, and interesting brain food, too. I am feeling all hero-worshipy and am seriously considering following his lead by replacing part of my blogroll area with a feed of recent post titles from some of my favorite places.

I spend a LOT of time on StumbleUpon. I like the idea of shared favorite things, and somewhere in my travels I’m sure I’ve seen a feed of recent SU reviews in a blog sidebar. Would adding that be interesting, or overkill? And, is there a way to pull in only reviews from relevant tags?

And, I haven’t added a FeedBurner link for blog comments. If I added one, would you use it?

Blog Comments Will Soon Be Dofollow

I’ll be installing Lucia’s Linky Love, a nice little configurable dofollow plugin that I learned about from Donne Fontenot. Thanks, Donna!

No way am I going dofollow without a comments policy, but what do I want to say? I’m a hard case about some kinds of sites that are in reality perfectly legit. In all semi-snobby honesty, if a link leads to a blog where posts start off with several inches of ads, I’m likely to edit out the link entirely. Is that being a hard case? Would it get me hate mail? Hmmm…

Heidi-ho, SEO-ing Neighbors

Until now I haven’t made a strong effort towards optimized Hx, or added any keyword or description metas, or even customized any titles. True, metas don’t push up serps, but the description meta at least can help serps show a nicer snippet.

As for the titles, mia culpa, my mind was elsewhere. I was operating on the theory that nothing with power happens without a personal center. The moment I start adding SEO-ified bits I’ll start spending more time watching my stats and less with that groovy got-to-be-me centering thang. LOL. I’m feeling… erm… riper now, in a good way, and may start to add a few SEO-ish bits here and there.

General Pandering

Do you want to see my Amazon wish list? I promise to choose only cool stuff, like solar powered jet cars, bunny slippers, nerd books, etc. Did I mention solar powered cars?

I also need to promote and custom-design the My Top Spots widget, and add an advertising policy. Pandering is nicer with ethics and personalization, eh?

Got opinions? Please comment and share.

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:

tempus fugit (time flies)
carpe diem (seize the day)
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.

Blog Content: Values and Strategy

I want this blog to be open-ended. I don’t want to make content for a defined goal, in the traditional sense of writing to serve the audience of a niche. I want my “niche” to be my fascination with how connections happen online… or basically whatever makes me think, and I’m a pretty eclectic person. This poses certain problems when it comes to defining a content development goal. As Jennifer Osborne said in part two of her Blog Strategy series, “A strategy is the plan for achieving a defined goal. A tactic is the “doing” part of the strategy.” There are some key words in there: plan; defined; goal and strategy. Planning is difficult without defined goals.

Defining goals and objectives gives plans a frame of reference that allows for assessment, polishing and re-polishing. A goal might be to write a blog post two or three times a week, but is posting enough? I want my content to go deeper than facts about topics. I want to connect. How?

I think there are levels of engagement that can be inspired by the qualities of blog content.

Levels of Readership Engagement

Level 1. Regular Posting Simply writing a blog post twice a week is not enough of a goal to be interesting or productive, to myself or, probably, to a readership. We’ve all seen and written posts that don’t say much or do much, and they may have their place. However, the posts that engender engagement are a different animal.

Level 2. Content With a Strategy I’d be getting closer to engagement with a plan to write a one- or two-page post, twice a week, that will help me get the word out about a specific topic. The difference is that I’d be trying to “get the word out” about “something specific.” Is word getting “out,” or does it stop at my blog? Which posts work? Looking at why things develop helps a blog improve. Keyword strategy becomes possible here, as concrete terms start to be investigated more broadly.

Level 3. Value There’s still a missing piece: why do I care, and why should the reader care? Specifically, why is this one- to two-page post going to be valuable, and what values are fed by this post? When someone who writes intelligently is also writing from a place of values, their material is more interesting and useful, and I am more likely to be engaged. If the reader is lucky, the writer is also brave enough to share personal insight, and insightful enough to have it in the first place. My belief is that this is where branding starts to become more than slapping a logo in the header: there is at least some identity behind the content. With identity behind the content, readers are given a window through which to identify with the blog.

Level 4. Stewardship of a Readership A smart, practiced writer or blog content manager will support the creative vulnerability of level 3. If they’re good, they take care of another set of priorities above and beyond the twice a week one- to two-page post: care and feeding of the readership. Give readers what they expect, generally when they expect, and them give them something extra – get to know them, promote them, promote to them. Make friends. Be friends. Mean it. Shake hands.

Level 5. Being Community Community is bigger than what happens withing the private garden of a blog or a forum. True community includes a relationship between the smaller world of whatever happens on the site, and the wider world of the rest of a readership’s lives and interests. Community is when link building strategies and reader stewardship tactics quit being part of the development plan and start to feel like natural outgrowths of the character of a place.

Thoughts About Blog Content Promotion

Keyword strategy on its own is good for about levels 1 and 2. Crappy link bait might get to level 2 1/2. Friends who already have a connection with the writer will help out at level 2. A readership will evangelize at levels 4 and 5, which also helps organically created, keyword-rich link text to have real value. I doubt that so-called “viral” is possible without some level 5 type community in place to help circulate ideas.

You may have noticed that I just skipped level 3. I think that sometimes marketers do, too.

What marketing is not. Marketing is like the connective tissue of the Internet. It is not the heart and soul, and it cannot circulate lifeblood; it can promote – mimic lifeblood – in the same way a heart-lung machine can keep a human body physically alive. Marketing cannot create the natural circulation of ideas.
People socialize and circulate ideas. Marketing builds conduits that attempt to move products and services. Social media provides conduits that attempt to foster a sense of community. Conduits are only conduits. Infrastructure is only infrastructure. People move the lifeblood, the opinions, interests and ideas.
People need community and identity. Community helps us trust and want to communicate. Identity helps us empathize, gives us something to hang a hat on, interpret difference between the party hat, the floppy sunhat and the classic stetson. IMHO the lynch pin of getting information listened to and associated with the source happens at level 3 – value, value and a brand identity with some soul in it.

Setting a Blogging Objective

Content is not visible without promotion, and promotion is not effective without an objective that is connected to a specific, quantifiable goal… so here goes.

My ultimate goal at this point in time is to enjoy writing about the Internet while making people think.

“Making people think” means more people: more RSS subscribers and more StumbleUpon fans. Organic search traffic is nice and linked mainly to WordPress, and some of those visitors do community-style things like send me emails to say they’re coming back for more posts on other topics, so I’ll also continue writing the occasional snack topics like WordPress.

For starters on the deeper gist of the “think” in “making people think,” these are three of my favorite thinking topics:

Identity – Branding beyond logo and colors
Community – What sparks it and keeps it energized, online and locally, through social media and other kinds of venues, and any supportive roles that marketing can play
Culture – Specifically how the Internet can be a positive force of understanding and respect in this era of terrorism and military activism

Community keeps coming up as a part of what I want to do and talk about. Could opening up to guest posts about online identity, community and cultural relationships help to build a sense of community? In a few weeks that may be something to think about.

The “All About Me” Factor

Here’s a theory on the “Elizabeth stuff” I was obsessing about a few posts ago. I think that if content is quality, maybe it’s OK to put myself first, IF I am also respecting the reader: no trying to “sell” anyone on thinking or behaving how I would like. The value for me will be to be making a deeper contribution through writing about what fascinates me personally. The value for my readers will be there or it won’t. Without exploring the possibility, I won’t know.

I’ll think of it as starting at the top. I’ve got a built-in corner on keyword me, and I might as well see where it takes me. The longer I think it over, the longer I put keyword “me” on hold, and life is short and I am not.

Next: Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries

Jenn’s post for today will be “How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries.” LOL. I am so there. This week I’ll be following along again, as well as thinking through how to get my ideas from this post into more of a structured outline.

In case you, too, are interested in following along, I strongly recommend it as a way to re-think your own goals and self-imposed limitations. These are the topics that Jennifer will be posting at the Search Engine People Blog each Monday, throughout the five weeks of her series on Blog Strategy:

How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
How to develop a Blog Strategy What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

A Quick First Look at WordPress 2.5

Yesterday WordPress 2.5 became the latest stable release. I upgraded… and it was good.

If you want to get a sneak peek before performing the deed yourself, head on over to the WordPress 2.5 announcement. You’ll see that wordpress.org has a fresh new look, and that fresh new look is also the look of WordPress 2.5’s back end. Yes it’s true, WordPress’s back end just got a major face lift. [insert rimshot and laugh track, please]

Seriously, it’s lovely, and as the announcement post above states, it’s epic. More on that later.

First, I have two cautions.

Automatic Plugin Upgrades.

This is slick. From Dashboard > Plugins you can choose to automatically update any plugins for which new versions are available. One click, and WordPress will deactivate a plugin, install the new version, and reactivate the freshly updated plugin.

I test or use about 30 plugins, about half of which either had updates waiting for WordPress 2.5 or were previously in need of an update – I don’t always keep inactive plugins up to date. All but two made it through the automatic update process without a hitch. I’m not going to say which two, because I haven’t been able to reproduce the error. Those two that didn’t re-initialize vanished from the dashboard’s list of plugins, though their files were still visible via FTP.

Before upgrading a plugin, write down which one you are working with. The first time you upgrade a plugin after a WordPress version change, it might be wise to forgo the automatic option.
Redirect Problem.

This one I haven’t yet figured out how to fix. On a WordPress-based site that is not yet public I had installed more than one plugin that does redirects. Before upgrading everything was fine. Since upgrading, I can get into the dashboard but the site itself gives me an error message about bad redirects: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

Again, I’m not going to tell you which plugins are involved because I don’t want to point at the wrong culprit unless I am sure. I’d be tearing my hair out if this was a live site, or a site that I’d made for someone else. As it is, it’s not going to be live for another few weeks and by then all will be well.

The Good News

Changes are indeed epic. These are the most significant feature upgrades that rocked my boat.

Concurrent Editing Protection

Yes, WordPress grows up as a community support tool. Have you ever attempted to clean up a contributor’s article before posting, and had your changes overwritten because the author is working on the same post at the same time? Major pain in the patoo, let me tell ya.

With WordPress 2.5 there is now concurrent editing protection. Now, if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress will lock it and prevent you from saving until the other person is done. It even serves up a self-explanatory error message. This feature would have been welcome the day WordPress as a multi-author tool was conceived. That it took until now is a mark of the relative newness of the concept of blogs as community.
A Better WYSIWYG.

WordPress 2.5 claims not to mess with your code anymore. I’ll believe that one when I can’t break it. For now, they get the benefit of the doubt and a big thumbs up. A better WYSIWYG will make blogging easier and more accessible to thousands of non-techie bloggers. Better cooperation between hands-on code and what WordPress “wants” will make techie arteests and wannababe coders like me happy. Power to the people!
Automatic Plugin Updates.

Other than my caution above, wow, this is slick. In the long run, automatic plugin upgrades will help us all keep our blogs safer and running more smoothly, because upgrading will be absolutely painless.
More Better Security
- Salted passwords — WordPress now uses the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
- Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted.
- Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one. W00t.

Upgrade Success

All in all, upgrading was a pleasant and successful experience, much more than the move to WordPress 2.0. I am looking forward to getting to know my new WordPress installations.

Social Media: Can Broken be Better?

A while ago I noticed something slightly broken about the StumbleUpon toolbar. The send-to function doesn’t always make it all the way through to the recipient. It can take hours, or seem to vanish completely.

StumbleUpon Toolbar with a sent page waiting

Social Media, Social Testing

I got online with a few people I follow through StumbleUpon and sent some pages back and forth. Paul of North South Media was the first. We refreshed views, re-started browsers and rebooted to no avail, off and on over a few hours. Many hours later the pages started to trickle through. Paul was curious about what happens between different time zones, and at peak Internet use times. The commute between the west coast of the US where I am and the Scottish “back-back” where Paul lives shouldn’t be too awfully rough for a little digital blip between people who are not on dialup, but a mystery is a mystery and I was off to see what I could see.

I tried the same thing with Emory of Clickfire. Emory is in Georgia, only three time zones away. Some of our messages got through within twenty minutes or an hour, and some seemed to vanish until the next day. Better, but still mysterious.

My next willing victim was Moojj, also known as Adam of Adamant Solutions, creator of the StumbleUpon Alerter. Adam is a gazillion time zones away from me, in Australia. He did not believe that sent-to pages were getting lost somewhere. His theory was that if it seemed not to go through it was actually just not showing up for some reason.

Voila. We sent our pages to each other. I saw nothing. He saw nothing. He tried clicking on the “Stumble” button, and my page and message appeared. The same thing happened on my end. Mystery solved: the sent page is sent and received almost instantly, but if it’s stuck in the toolbar you won’t see any sign of it unless you push the Stumble button.

Clicking on the Stumble button reveals a waiting page from Fatgadget2

When something doesn’t fit I start to wonder. This time I’m wondering if there are cases where less functionality is better. Does slowing down SU help keep it more civil and less competitive? More share-friendly?

Is Gently Broken Better?

Humor me for a minute. If users (and bots) had full access to who responded to a SU thumbs-up request and how long it took to get what kind of action from users with certain characteristics, would that make the users who are the most willing to be “nice” into targets for spammers? Yes, if bots got into the system, I think it would. Maybe, for the good of the users, some information is better off shrouded in unreliability… not too awfully shrouded to the point of bad usability for the devoted users, just gently broken here and there from the perspective of a marketer who is looking to do more using than joining in.

Leaving it a little bit broken makes taking the time to make a real human connection even more important. For instance, to get a screen shot of the incoming sent page I used above, I sent a pm to Fatgadget2. I am more likely to look at a page that comes from someone whose SU reviews I am subscribed to. Without a note, I would have seen who sent it, but getting it wouldn’t have felt as… human, especially if the page was lumped in with all the other Stumbles I could go to via the toolbar.

Received page without a note

Are there things about your favorite Social Media application that you would like to see ever so gently broken?