10 Things You Must Do to Succeed in the Web Economy
May 15th, 2007 (6:11am) Anne Zelenka 31 Comments
In the past, being a good organizational man or woman was key to career success: obey your boss, respect the hierarchy, and put in your face time. The web changes everything, including what you need to do to succeed.
1. Reach out beyond yourself. Much was made of the news that people like to hang out with people like themselves (homophily), but less has been said about how useful it is to reach beyond your comfortable social sphere. Let’s call that heterophily for love of the different. Sociological and management research indicates that reaching across social clusters — from the ones you feel most comfortable in into different ones — is key to innovation and productivity.
2. Use multi-channel communications effectively. Go beyond email for communicating with colleagues and for creating new relationships. Effective web workers use instant messaging, text messaging, Twitter, blogging, wikis, VoIP, video conferencing, and web conferences.
Despite books and blog posts on the subject, there aren’t firm rules of etiquette about how to use these new channels. But you can watch carefully how people react to your communications — have you annoyed people by instant messaging, did you screw something up with email, do you need to improve your teleconferencing technique? Then modify accordingly.
3. Learn to write. True, podcasting and vlogging are gaining adherents. Video conferencing should take off now that most PCs come with built-in cameras. But text still rules on the web, whether it be email or blogging or wikis or instant messaging.
Not confident in your writing skills? Listen to the Grammar Girl podcast. Read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Blog, so you’ll get regular practice. And get to the point. Some channels are more forgiving than others of rambling communiqués, but your readers and colleagues will appreciate brevity and clarity in your writing.
4. Understand HTML and CSS. We’re moving from the desktop publishing era into the web publishing era. There’s no excuse these days for not understanding how HTML and CSS work together to separate your content and styling and then bring them together at just the right moment. On a wiki, you might use a wiki markup language, but the idea behind it is the same. It’s much more important on the web to know how to use markup languages than to understand how to format an MS Word document.
5. Get your mind around search. You need to learn to search effectively — using Google, in your email, other people’s bookmarks, and so forth — but you also need to know how search engines work and have some understanding of basic search engine optimization concepts. You need to know how to find what you want and ensure people find you and your work too.
6. Experiment. As a relatively new frontier for work, it’s not always obvious what you should do to achieve your goals in web work. Don’t hesitate to try something new, take some risks, then step back and see what happens. The web gives you a ton of feedback about how you’re doing with your online work, whether in the form of emails from potential new customers or stats for your website. You can take what you’ve learned and experiment some more.
UC Berkeley psychologist and self-experimentation maven Seth Roberts suggests that really useful discoveries almost always come about by accident — and he describes how self-experimentation can lead to this kind of discovery. He’s mainly focused on psychological experimentation, but you can do the same kind of self-experimentation on your career.
7. Question conventional wisdom. Is surfing the web unproductive? Do you need to work long hours to show your commitment to work? Should you keep your personal life and activities hidden from colleagues? Perhaps not. While of course you’re not going to want to toss out all the old rules just because they’re old, you should be willing to reconsider what you thought was true.
8. Manage RSS feeds. You need to be able to produce them for your own website or blog and you need to manage your consumption of them so that you get good information from the web without letting it overwhelm you. If you’re a Google Reader user, try these tips from lifehack.org to make your news reading more effective and productive.
9. Recognize good ideas. It’s just as important as having your own good ideas. We’re living in a wonderful soup of inspiration and innovation, but the person who thinks up something brilliant might not be the one who can successfully promote that idea or make it into a viable business. Human beings love to copy — and for good reason. It’s the basis of our reproductive success and it’s more efficient than each one of us trying to come up with good stuff on our own.
10. Show courage. It’s not always pleasant to leave comfortable old ways of working behind, to try new things in full view of the Internet, to experiment knowing you are very likely to fail a number of times before you succeed (and fail again after too). The web rewards bravery, so put yourself out there anyway.
31 Comments Post your own comment
Serge Lescouarnec says: May 15th, 2007 6:46am
Anne
Your top 10 goes to the heart of the matter.
I have room for improvement especially regarding the CSS part.
Sometimes it might be better to reach out to others and let them care of these tech issues or other tasks that you might not be especially skilled at.
It does not mean that you should not try to understand how it works.
As for experimenting and recognizing good ideas, it might lead you to change your game plan, how you view your business.
We all need to be flexible.
Have a good day
Serge
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Jeric Bilo says: May 15th, 2007 7:11am
I’d say 4, 6, 7, 10 are the same. Good Article nonetheless.
Craig Bovis says: May 15th, 2007 7:19am
You mention the use of Wikis as your guidelines, I fully agree in both finding information and sharing information via Wikis.
I was wondering, what platforms would people recommend for publishing your own private wiki’s?
nomadicalloy says: May 15th, 2007 7:26am
good article, one of these days I need to work on css.
Dave Good says: May 15th, 2007 9:44am
Anne;
You are dead on the money with the homophily and heterophily concepts. The hardest thing for me is to get non-tech people to understand what I do, and I consider myself a fairly good communicator. However, that may indeed be the best way for web workers to get their message across; to practice sending that message to those people that have the hardest time understanding it. By making the attempt to cross into “normal” space, we can allow people to see beyond the Ted Stevens’ interweb, television-with-a-typewriter-attached point of view, even educating them to the potential that is the net today.
Anne Zelenka says: May 15th, 2007 10:45am
@Jeric: those items are similar it’s true. However, you could experiment without being very brave (experimentation isn’t always scary, sometimes nothing’s at risk). You could experiment without questioning conventional wisdom too. At any rate, glad you liked the article.
@Craig: there are so many wikis to choose from! For a private wiki, I’ve used wikispaces and pbwiki — I think they both will support private for a small subscription fee.
@Serge & nomadicalloy — actually knowing how to do CSS is probably less important than understanding how it separates styling from content. Yes, Serge, you’re right, may make sense to outsource actual technical work to those who specialize.
@Dave: I’ve gotten some of the best insights about web worker daily material from my mom and my husband, who are both outside the web 2.0 community. It can be eye opening to see things from other people’s perspectives, but only if they’re different from you.
C47 says: May 15th, 2007 10:57am
Great list. Anyone have a recommendation for a good CSS book?
Stephen Collins says: May 15th, 2007 5:02pm
@craig – in terms of a personal wiki, depending on what you need (online, only on your pc, etc.), TiddlyWiki is pretty awesome. I use it as a notebook for all kinds of ideas and the like. I put URLs I don’t have time to visit, notes about ideas, research concepts, presentation notes. My copy lives on a USB key, so I can take it with me anywhere I go.
Lynn Wallenstein says: May 16th, 2007 1:45am
Great article. I sometimes need to remind myself to step out from my small group of friends and realize how important it is to “socialize”, even if it is virtually.
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tamgo says: May 16th, 2007 6:34am
Excellent list. It hits the nail on the head. Some of this points I have personally stressed to colleges. Other points are so obvious once you read them you question why you didn’t thought them up yourself.
Thanks.
Neil says: May 16th, 2007 8:43am
Great list! I would agree with you 100%. Like many others that have responded to the post, I am working on learning more CSS.
rusticlivingmom says: May 16th, 2007 10:12am
This is my second day in the blogging world….I have a website for my business…so I found your post extremely informative. Thanks so much!
Matthew Ramirez says: May 16th, 2007 10:49am
It all sounds great but I think you should go a little more in to the search engines and blogs this 2 things will help to drive more people to your site. But thank you for the list its was very helpful
xujincan says: May 16th, 2007 11:01am
thanks i folow
gossipshow says: May 16th, 2007 12:05pm
Very informative and useful. Good job :)
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Matthew Lowes says: May 20th, 2007 9:50am
Reach out beyond yourself, Experiment, Question conventional wisdom, Show courage. All these points pertain to streching one’s limits, and highlight the creative potential of the internet. As a writer, I’ve often thought of writing fiction as a process of making connections between a lot of different ideas, images, and voices. The above points could very easily be made in a creative writing, or art class.
Deanna says: May 20th, 2007 9:52am
Coming in a wee bit late here, but for the folks looking to really nail their CSS skilkz– this book was invaluable to me:
http://www.cssmastery.com/
It’s for folks that have a basic grasp of what CSS does, but really need to understand how it all comes together when building and tweaking their own stylesheets. Especially helpful in understanding layout techniques, and how IE and Firefox render things differently…
Moonie says: May 22nd, 2007 1:47pm
I must have came back to this site at least five times to finish up on a really good read. What really hit me like a hammer was the article no. 4. Get HTML and CSS under your belt. I know, I know.
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Daniel Schutzsmith says: May 30th, 2007 8:50am
Thank you for this post! All of the points hit close to home with me right now. I am making a leap into the consulting and web app space after a long time of working for other employers. All of these points are things that I have chosen to focus on so it makes me very excited to know I am on the right track!
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