Today I sent a note to a popular blogger, and at the end of the message I thanked him for his passion and enthusiasm. After sending the message, I wondered if my note would be read, let alone matter to him, but that kind of thing does matter, even if in the smallest way.

There are so many people who influence us in our businesses, from the bloggers who consistently provide us with helpful information to keep our businesses growing and thriving to the people in our spheres of influence who rave about us and keep clients and customers coming our way. They help us every day, and it is important to reach out and say “thank you” every now and then.

Even when you think it will fall on deaf ears, that it won’t matter to the person, or that he or she is probably inundated with messages every day, let the person know how he or she helps you in your business and that you appreciate his or her efforts. Say what’s on your mind and make it heartfelt — because for most people, it really will matter.

Someone sent me a thoughtful thank you note a couple of weeks ago, and I have thought about her message several times since then. She said my help and support had been “wind in her sails” that week; little did she know that that note would be wind in mine for weeks to come.

Take the time to thank the people who inspire you, motivate you and teach you. Instead of passing over the comment sections of their blogs again, thinking you have nothing of value to add, let them know how their posts are making a difference in your business. With so many jerks in the world these days, it’s really nice to come across someone who actually takes the time to be, well, nice.

And, to my favorite bloggers (The Bloggess, Chris Brogan, Dumb Little Man and Gary Vaynerchuk, to name a few), thank you.

What was the most heartfelt or meaningful “thank you” you ever received?

Photo by Flickr user vistamommy, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Have you ever heard of Raising Cane’s? It’s a fast-food restaurant that only serves chicken fingers. It started here in Louisiana, my home state, and now has nearly ninety locations around the U.S.

I love this restaurant, first because it’s a homegrown success story and second because I have memories of it in college, when it was just getting off the ground.

Their slogan is “One Love,” because it only serves meals of chicken fingers. That’s it. The founder, Todd Graves, had one vision in mind when he was in college, to start a chicken finger restaurant that had a fun atmosphere with good food and great people, and he held onto that vision until he was able to open his first restaurant in 1996.

That vision holds true today. The restaurant is still a lot of fun. (I can’t help but laugh when I go to the drive-through and the person taking the order says something like, “Welcome to Raising Cane’s where the chicken’s kickin’,” in the most upbeat cheerleader-voice I’ve ever heard.) The people are always friendly. The food is always good, and the restaurant provides a unique atmosphere with fun people who take pride in the company, from the person taking the orders to Todd Graves himself. I’ve visited so many of the restaurants around the state, and they’re always the same, which only goes to show how important the original vision continues to be even today, nearly fifteen years later.

Vision is important for building lasting success. I read once in Henriette Anne Klauser’s book “Write It Down, Make It Happen” that you must “hold it in your mind.” If you have a vision, you have to hold onto it, keep it at the forefront of your mind until you can make it a reality. Hold true to that vision. Make sure that everything that represents you and your company represents it, as Cane’s does throughout all of  its restaurants, with every single employee, and down to every last chicken finger.

If you’re in a state with a Cane’s or will be visiting one soon, be sure to check it out.

In what ways do you make sure to hold true to your vision for your company?

Image from the Raising Cane’s website

“You are in three businesses: the book business, the marketing business, and the people business.” — Michael Larson, as quoted in “Get Known Before the Book Deal“

It takes a while to appreciate the juggling you have to do as a business owner, but Larson’s quote wraps it up pretty concisely. Here are the three things you need to pay attention to if you want your business to thrive.

• Do what you do, and do it well. You might be a writer, a virtual assistant, or a publicist. No matter what your trade, work to be the best at it. Know your business, constantly improve, and have guiding principles that define how you work and who your ideal client is.
• Be systematic and consistent about promoting your business. The strategies and tactics you use to market you and your services or products are much less important than the regularity and consistency in which you do them. Pick the things that work for you, develop a plan of attack around those strategies, and take small and steady steps toward reaching your marketing goals on a daily basis.
• Nurture and grow your network. People mean everything to the success of your business. Take care of them. Surround yourself with clients and colleagues who inspire you to do your absolute best work, and then make it a two-way street. Be genuinely excited by their success, and they will be in yours.

As a business owner, it can be easy to neglect one or more areas of our businesses. We drown in the work itself and forget to take care of the people in our sphere of influence. We obsess over the marketing aspect at times, until our work suffers. The only way to lasting success is through taking care of all three areas equally.

How do you ensure that you take care of your people, your marketing and your business?

Image from Flickr by CuLeX-

Twitter’s most powerful — and largely unintended — success has been the ecosphere of third-party clients, applications, extensions and plugins that the service has enabled. One of the most ubiquitous extensions is Twitpic, a service that lets users post photos directly from their phones and computers to the web. Twitpic has enabled a form of photo-journalism that’s immediate and direct, but the service itself remains unsophisticated, lacking tools for analytics, location, sharing, archiving or metadata.

I have always wanted to post my Twitter photos to an existing, richer photo sharing site: Flickr. Recently, I’ve been trying out Steven Haddox’s Flickr4Twitter, a service that does just that — and should be useful for budding photojournalists, nano-bloggers and celebrity spotters with

Currently in a public alpha-testing phase, the service allows Twitter clients to simultaneously post photos to a user’s Twitterstream and Flickr account, along with URLs generated by Flickr’s own recently-launched Short URLs service.

Using the service is simple:

1. Create an account using the Sign In With Twitter option; your username will be your Twitter screenname.
2. Authorize Flickr to use the service.
3. Upload your photos using the web upload interface (kinda clunky) or Tweetie. Users of Tweetie 2 on iPhone can configure their client with a “URL Shortening API Endpoint” that sends photos to Flickr rather than Twitpic.
4. That’s it!

The service works invisibly and seamlessly when using Tweetie 2 (see my samples) and means that my mobile photos are instantly shared with my Twitter followers, and are also available on the world’s favorite photo sharing service.

Head on over to Flickr4Twitter to try the service. Incidentally GDZLLA have also launched a competing service, but without Sign In With Twitter capability.

What do you think of this Twitpic alternative?

In the wonderful world of marketing, every product must have a USP — a unique selling proposition that explains what the product is, what it does, and who it does it for.

In the wonderful world of web work, creating a USP for yourself can be a great idea. I’m not talking about creating a USP for your product or service here. I’m talking about yourself: you, the person, the professional.

Rather than reducing yourself or your capabilities to a single sentence, creating a USP can boost your self-awareness and expand your possibilities. And creating your own USP doesn’t mean you’re commoditizing yourself — on the contrary, it can give you a sense of where your professional self stops and your personal or social self begins.

Why USPs Matter for the Web Worker

In a world of constant connectivity, where social and professional networking services routinely cross paths and purposes, company web sites boast personal blogs, and the photos or video you took of an event today may well feature as part of tomorrow’s news report, the definitions of concepts like “personal” and “public” are most certainly blurred. Today, you’re a web developer. Tomorrow, a movie reviewer. The day after, who knows?

Beyond these obvious questions, additional issues can abound for remote workers who rarely, if ever, visit company offices. Without easy, casual, face-to-face opportunities for communication on professional or personal levels, your colleagues can begin to see you as “the stats guy” or “the monthly report girl”, rather than a well-rounded, engaging individual with a complex, extensive skill set, career ambitions and a hunger for new professional challenges.

Creating a USP for yourself can remind you of how you see yourself — within a given setting, such as the workplace, if you wish — and what you believe you’re about. It can then help you clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and what you want, in a forum that’s at once noisy, complex, disparate, and all-pervading.

Benefits of a USP

I think it’s the process of creating a USP that’s most important, although the USP itself can help you keep your boat steady through the unpredictable waters ahead. Here are the kinds of benefits creating a USP can deliver:

1. It lets you focus on the thing you’re best at.
2. It helps you to define what you want.
3. It lets you identify the people who will value what you offer.
4. It can help you focus your efforts, choose appropriate projects, goals, and communications channels.
5. It can help you secure more or better-paid roles.
6. It can make your professional and/or personal life more rewarding.

How can a USP do all these things? You’ll see, once you understand how to create one for yourself.

Creating Your USP

In marketing circles, the best USPs take the following form:

[Product or service] delivers [benefit] to [audience].

Simple, right? Wrong. If you’ve never done this before, you might think that this USP looks OK:

Coca Cola delivers beverages to thirsty people.

The problem here is that “beverages” isn’t a benefit. You could substitute “refreshment” for “beverages”, but you’d still be wide of the mark. The marketer might see Coca Cola’s offering as something like this:

Coca Cola delivers fun, energy and friendship to young, life-loving adults.

Take a look at some ads for Coke, and you’ll see what I mean.

In creating your USP, you need to look beyond the obvious to what you really offer, and who really benefits from it. As such, creating your USP requires you to ask the following questions of yourself.

1. Who are you?

You might choose to create a USP for your professional self, your public self, or for some other aspect of who you are. You may find it helpful to create individual USPs for your different “faces”, and compare them to see where they align, and where they don’t.

In creating my USP, I decided to focus on who I am professionally. I recently decided I wanted to shift my career focus from copywriting to article writing, so my USP begins:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers … “

2. What unique benefit do you offer?

If you’ve described yourself using your job title, as I have, you might be tempted to state what you do in answer to this question, but remember that we’re talking about benefits, not product.

As a freelance article writer, articles are my product. The benefit I need to deliver to the people I write for is the ability to reliably meet their, and their readers’, needs with quality content. So my USP now reads like this:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers the ability to reliably meet publications’, and their readers’, needs with quality content to… “

As you can see, my USP already gives me a clear area of focus: I’m not about putting sentences together. I’m about understanding publications’ target audiences, and providing quality content that will meet those target audience needs. I’ve also mentioned the publications themselves — I’ll provide the content to their timeframes, length and style specifications, and so on.

The only way I could work out what I really had to offer was to understand the people who operate in the industry I want to work in. This is essential in making sure the benefit you offer is needed and desired by your target audience. Let’s look at the question of audience next.

3. Who do you offer your benefit to?

Again, this element of the equation isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as it seems. Although I might easily fill in the gap with the word “publishers”, I need to think about the people I wanted to work with.

Similarly, instead of just dropping your current employer’s name into that space, you might like to think a little more broadly. Who else might be able to gain from the benefit you offer? Asking yourself this question may well open up whole new realms of professional or public possibility.

For example, I decided that I wanted specifically to target media outlets that focused on environmental issues, so I finished off my USP like this:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers the ability to reliably match publications’, and their users’, needs with quality content to media outlets that focus on sustainability.”

It’s OK, but it’s long. A long USP is hard to remember, which is a problem. You want a USP that you can recall easily so that when someone offers you a piece of work off the cuff, you can automatically assess whether it fits your USP, and respond accordingly.

Another issue is that “sustainability” is a pretty broad area. If I want to write about sustainability for ordinary citizens (rather than for business, government, technology buffs, and so on), I might rephrase my audience definition to reflect that.

Now, if I pare my USP back to the bare essentials, I end up with something like this:

“Georgina, freelance writer, reliably meets user needs with quality content for media outlets that focus on grassroots sustainability.”

What Can Your USP Do for You?

Remember those benefits I mentioned earlier? By now, you’ll be able to see how creating a USP meets them. In the example I’ve given here, I’ve really defined a professional goal. It’s not just any professional goal, though; it’s one that is inherently linked with what I personally believe are my innate, unique capabilities and interests.

If you’re already working in a role you want to work in, for a company you want to work for, you might use your USP to define yourself as the ideal person for that role in that company — as “the preferred provider of quality content that meets user needs”, for example.

The process of creating your USP has made you conscious of your desires, how you perceive yourself, how you want to be perceived, and what you want to do to achieve that reputation. Now that you’ve worked through the process, you can use this knowledge to inform your behavior, activities and interactions in your chosen public and professional spheres — including any new arenas that your USP might illuminate for you.

As an example, the USP I’ve created here alludes to my creating content other than just articles, and media other than straight print or text-based publications. But it goes much further than that. In my professional life as someone who understands what people want to know about the practical impacts they can have on the environment, I might research public opinions on the topic, study new developments that reduce the average citizen’s ecological footprint, participate in interviews, panels or conferences that deal with these issues, and so on.

If you’ve written a USP for your professional self in your workplace, it may prompt you to pursue new opportunities, take on different challenges, and engage with staff members you haven’t worked with before. If you’ve written a USP for your endeavors in your own business, it may help you to discern between promotional opportunities; assist you to choose which pieces of information about yourself and your operations you disseminate, when, and how; and drive your sales, customer management, and business development efforts.

Do you think a personal USP could help you focus your efforts? If you’re already working with a USP, tell us how it’s going.

If you don’t have a professional blog or web site, you may think that you don’t need to worry about content strategy. Think again. Celine gave some great advice in her article “How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Professional Blog,” but these days our blogs and web sites aren’t the only windows to our professional souls. If you use social media platforms for professional purposes, you should consider having a content strategy for the material you publish on them as well.

What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

As Google is issuing Wave invites in a steady trickle, those fortunate enough to have an account are trying to figure out how this new tool might fit into their workflow and help them better communicate and collaborate with their teams and clients.

While the small number of people who actually have an account right now is probably going to be the first hurdle for many teams who would like to try it out on a live project, I count myself among the lucky ones who got a Google Wave invite early and spread my nominations amongst some colleagues and clients.

One of my clients to whom I sent a nomination wanted to try it out on our current project, so I thought I would share some of the early lessons we learned and some tips from my initial dip into using Google Wave for a real client project.

1. Set suitable expectations. Despite the months of buzz, and blogosphere- and Twitterverse-wide clamoring for Google Wave invites, the product is still in preview and has some rough edges. Therefore, it does all parties good to be realistic, even if everybody is psyched to be the first kid on their block to use it on a live project. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll also encounter bouts of slowness, messages to refresh Google Wave, and perhaps even the random browser crash. Your project team’s level of tolerance for such things might vary.
2. Do a dry run with a Wave. The Wave concept is definitely a new model for many. It took me an impromptu “dry run” with my client for us to truly grasp the Wave concept and see how it could shape our online collaboration. For example, I could see how Wave could be used to keep all project information and communications online and out of our already cluttered inboxes, and it was great to able to see my client paste text as well as type into a Wave in real-time.
3. Take control of your Waves. It’s easy to get a little excited and end up creating Waves for all sorts of things, but you need to take control of the conversation in Google Wave, instead of letting Google Wave take charge of your conversations. For my project, we decided on one Wave per project document, for the sake of organization.
4. Use folders and tags. While the Inbox Zero and GTD crowd have yet to full plant their stakes in Google Wave, I must say that the use of folders and tags is prudent, especially because while the Wave platform breaks so much new ground, but folders and tags are concepts are familiar to many. I ended up creating a project-specific folder for all the Waves associated with the client project. My use of tags also came further into play as a tool to fine-tune my own organization. A simple tip is to remember you can resize the navigation pane to accommodate your folder list as it grows. By default, your folder list may not fully appear in the navigation pane.
5. Consider whether to use live editing or attachments. Google Wave melds email and word processing together. Thus, it is important to decide whether you want to collaborate on documents directly in Google Wave or via file attachments. Unfortunately, at this time Google Wave lacks version control for file attachments (thus putting the feature at the top of my wish list for a Google Wave extension). My client and I decided to work with file attachments for the project documents and write directly in Google Wave for direct communications with each other.
6. Have a Plan B. It’s cool to get jazzed as an early adopter, but if Google Wave isn’t enhancing productivity and communications, be sure that you have a fall back plan in case it end up causing more problems than it is worth.

While my initial entry into Google Wave on a real client project was really just scratching the surface of this new collaboration platform, I do see a lot of potential. However, with its rough edges, it may not be the collaboration platform for everyone just yet. Personally, I am looking towards more Google Wave extensions and gadgets going live, because my initial experience tells me that they are going to be key providers of critical functionality and user experience.

If you’re looking for more info on Wave, check out the report “Google Wave Explained” over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

Have you tried using Google Wave on any of your current projects? Share your experience below.

Yesterday I took part in my first Jelly session — and I’ve got to say it was a fun and productive experience that I will be repeating in the future. Jellies are informal, free coworking events that are open to anyone. There were 10 participants at the Jelly I attended, from a range of different backgrounds although they were mainly freelancers, as you might expect. At times, particularly in the morning, the atmosphere was studious and productive, but there was also some interesting chat and opportunities to make new connections.

I always find that a change of scenery does me good, but considering that I was working in a room with 10 other people, sitting around a conference table, and occasionally getting stuck into conversation, I was surprised at the amount of work I got through (and that’s despite the speed of the Wi-Fi connection getting a little slow with 10 people working away).

If you’re feeling a bit isolated at home (or perhaps you just want to brainstorm some ideas) and would like to try out the coworking experience, but perhaps aren’t quite ready to commit to membership of a coworking space, attending a Jelly would be a good first step.

The first Jelly was started in New York back in 2006 by roommates Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford, who originally wanted to recreate some of the benefits of working from an office (without having to work from an office): brainstorming, sharing and camaraderie. So they started inviting people over to work from their house occasionally, and thus Jelly was born. It’s an idea that has spread worldwide.

The Jelly I attended was organized by CoWorkingWest and held in the nice office space of The Office, Bristol, UK, but Jellies are held in over 100 cities all over the world. (Some of them are even held weekly.) If there isn’t one near you, you can always start your own — you just need to pick a venue and get some people involved. They are often held in people’s houses, but also take place in other locations, like coffee shops and offices. As long as there is space for everyone, power and Wi-Fi, you can have a Jelly.

Have you tried working at Jelly?

We’ve all read the news stories that identify social implications of a world increasingly conducted electronically, rather than in person. It seems that in an environment where individuals and organizations can manufacture themselves new personas, and nothing’s real until we broadcast it across a network of contacts, many web workers are feeling increasingly isolated.

It’s definitely true that it can be difficult to be heard among the clamor of communication online. The volume of information, insights and self-expression can be overwhelming, but those who work remotely also face the added challenge of physical isolation. Sometimes, it can be difficult to believe that you can have much of an impact when you operate remotely. Within this context, those who thrive in a remote web work environment have a strong sense of self, of perspective and of contribution.

The Opposite of Isolation

The antidote to isolation is participation. Participating provides an opportunity to develop self-awareness and respect, perspective, and of course, a sense of contribution. It’s also fun. But it seems that many of us forget the importance of participation from a personal standpoint. With deadlines, busy lives, exciting goals and work or family commitments, we can unconsciously replace willing participation with obligation. And that’s often a lot less fun.

Whether you choose to participate online — in a social network, work-related committee or team, community, interest or activist group — or offline through a club, charity, class or community group, you’re making a willing choice, which for some of us is a bit of a luxury. And the benefits of that participation can be considerable.

When I first moved to a new country town, and was working remotely, I felt pretty isolated. My colleagues were 100km away, and when I looked out the window, it was at a foreign landscape, apparently devoid of human life. So I became a volunteer for the local firefighting group. Bingo! I met a load of new people, made one or two close, lasting friendships, developed skills I never knew I’d have, and felt a whole lot more involved and less isolated.

Participation is Not a Life Sentence

Not all participation takes great commitment, so you can suit your level of involvement to your changing interests, time commitments, and desires. Joining your work social committee, organizational sustainability team, or taking part in corporate sports are just a few ideas for participating more within your work sphere. The key is to give something a try. No single friendship, workplace, or hobby club could hope to meet the needs of one individual, so diversify, and experiment with your interests in a range of different arenas.

A writer friend of mine who was unable to work had a growing interest in literature and books. He took a course in literature, had some of his work published on a few sites, and was then offered the position of managing editor on one of these. He grew the site, then decided to use social networks and online community tools to create a dialogue around the site, which would enable authors and readers to communicate with each other. By pursuing his interest, he’s made a lot of new friends, valuable contacts and deepened his passion and sense of contribution.

Perhaps over time you’ll find, as my friend did, that you prefer online participation. Alternatively, perhaps you’ll get so involved with your local sports club that you decide to stand for a position on the club committee. You never know where your involvement in a group or community may lead — and if you’re not happy with where it’s going, you can always take a break to try something new.

Have you ever felt isolated as a remote worker? What have you done to change things?

If you read Aliza’s post outlining the five best web working lessons she’s learned so far, you might have noticed a trend: all of those lessons were focused on control.

For the web worker who works remotely, relies on someone else’s technology, and/or needs to coordinate disparate, diverse inputs to some kind of timeframe and standard of quality, control is always going to be an issue.

Accepting the Limits

We’ve all had those times when an erroneous keystroke has undone hours (if not days or even months) of toil. The times when we’ve missed a deadline due to power outage or loss of Internet connectivity. The times when someone or something we needed urgently were simply unobtainable.

The nuances of web work dictate that we need to be able to relinquish our need for total control, because the environment in which we operate will not support such a goal. In some way, every new tool that’s released is designed to give users a feeling of greater control over what they’re doing. But the reality is that no matter how well you’ve bookmarked an article, uploaded a file, or composed that email, if the service, your web connection, or your contacts are offline for any reason, or a necessary device is out of power, it’s no good.

Perhaps rather than adopting the latest carefully-devised productivity philosophy or downloading a new work tool, we should accept that total control is impossible — we should let go of that idea. Then, we should work out the ways in which we might be able to influence our work success within a context of very limited control.

Managing the Uncontrollable

Of course, those cool apps we all subscribe to have their purposes. But there are other approaches we can take to help manage our work processes to take account of the uncontrollable.

• Delegation. Aliza mentions the importance of learning to delegate in her post. Recognizing and accepting the unique capabilities of each of the individuals you work with is the first step in learning to delegate effectively. Leaving them to do the work while you attend to other tasks, on the other hand, may take a little practice.
• Plan for unavailability. Web workers tend to be good preplanners, saving valuable information using decentralized means, backing up their work product, and operating around colleagues’ various commitments, timezone differences, and so on. But it’s also good to plan for the possible unavailability of services, people, and resources at any given time. If this means you need to get things done ahead of time, expand your remote work kit, or confirm and re-confirm the details of meetings, processes, and project plans, so be it. Perhaps, if you feel unconvinced about the reliability of an arrangement (a site, a meeting service, etc.) you’ll make your own contingency plans, just to be on the safe side.
• Accept the limitations of an offsite life. There’s no point getting frustrated that a contact’s not available, or that you left that important file that you need for your ten o’clock meeting in your home office. We need to accept that, as web workers, we must be super-organized and plan ahead. So make sure you have everything you need for a day on the road the night before. Don’t leave it to the last minute before you try to get in touch with a contact who has an input you need for your project. If you’re in a bind, don’t panic (too much). Remember that you’re at a the mercy of the online environment, and you can’t control everything. Then try to think laterally about how you could solve your problem.
• Learn when to step up and take the lead. We all know there are times when teams lack leadership, people place too much faith in the system, and we find ourselves in a train wreck waiting to happen. If you feel uneasy about the way a project’s going, think about what you can do to make yourself more at ease. This doesn’t have to necessitate your taking responsibility for the whole project, or taking control of aspects of the job that are beyond your sphere. But in some cases we can help work tasks happen more smoothly if we accept a little more responsibility. It can be hard to tread the fine line between responsibility and control; the key is to know and accept the point where your responsibility ends.

Are you a control freak? How do you handle the aspects of your web work that are beyond your control?

Usually, when I want to get out of the house for a change of scenery, I head to Cafe Kuvuka, a local coffee shop just at the end of my street, but yesterday afternoon I fancied working somewhere new. I haven’t worked in a library since finishing my degree years ago, so decided it was time to give my local library, the Bristol Central Library, a try, and thought it was worth sharing my thoughts on the experience here.

After working for a good few hours in the library, here are what I consider to be the advantages and disadvantages over working in a cafe:

Pros

• The library is a lot quieter than a coffee shop. There’s no music and conversation is kept to fairly muted, hushed tones. In fact, the academic, studious atmosphere is very conducive to serious “head down” work.
• Nice architecture creates a pleasant working environment. The interior of the Bristol Central Library is great Victorian architecture with a lovely vaulted ceiling, which can be see in the photo above. Large public libraries are often housed in impressive buildings (the New York Public Library looks like a great place to work, for example).
• It’s free. You don’t need to feel that you need to keep buying food or drinks to “pay” for your Wi-Fi. You don’t even have to join the library to use the Internet.
• Comfortable desks. Unlike the tables in coffee shops, which are primarily designed for holding drinks and food, the writing desks at my library are at a much more comfortable height for working, which is far kinder on my spine. The chairs were fairly comfortable, too
• Access to research material. Of course, if you need to access any research material you’re already in the library!

Cons

• No telephone/VoIP calls. You can’t make or receive phone calls while you’re in the building (except in the cafe). That’s OK for me on days when I don’t have meetings planned, but it means that this is not going to be a viable workspace for many.
• Not very much social interaction. One of the reasons that I feel like leaving the house is to have some chitchat with regular people — you can’t really get that in a library. Because you can’t have a conversation, a library is not going to make a good pseudo-coworking venue, either.
• You’re not allowed to plug in your computer. If you run out of power, you can’t plug in as they don’t have many outlets (not in the section that I was in, anyway). I was surprised by this, and would guess that more modern libraries probably wouldn’t have this restriction.
• No eating/drinking at your desk (except in the cafe). I quite like having a cup of coffee or tea while I work.

So, will I return to the library in future? Yes, on days when I really need to knuckle down and concentrate on a single project with zero distraction: it is a nice working environment that encourages concentration and hard work. I think it would be useful to, say, block out four hours of working time for getting a long article done, and head to the library to work solely on that task. However, on normal working days, when I’m merely looking to change my scenery and get a little pleasant conversation with some coffee, I think I’ll stick with my local cafe.

Have you tried library working? Does it help you to concentrate?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Last week, I met a new client who accepts that she needs to use the web much more effectively than she does now. Over the coming months, she’s planning to build her personal brand online, with the help of various promotions experts. Right now? “I just don’t have time for it,” she says. And when we discussed our next meeting, her suggested venue was her house — which is at least two hours’ travel time from mine.

The size of the job simply doesn’t warrant me traveling for four hours for a meeting. But my client’s professional services firm operates its business very much on a face-to-face basis, and both of us would prefer to meet like this, rather than simply talking over the phone. Other than meeting halfway, we could try videoconferencing. But how will I convince someone I’ve just met, who obviously isn’t particularly comfortable operating in the online sphere, to use videoconferencing technology?

I’ve often experienced resistance to technology among people who, whether they like it or not, work online. I’m sure you have, too — recent research has shown that collaborative technology hasn’t had as broad an impact in workplaces as we might like. As we know, overcoming such resistance can be a challenge, especially when we don’t know the person particularly well.

However, there are strong arguments you can use to convince people to give collaborative technology a try. None of these arguments, on its own, is likely to get someone over the line, though — usually they need to be combined to be effective.

Cost

My client is on a tight budget, so she won’t want to pay me to travel for four hours to meet with her. This could be a strong motivator for her to try a technology like using a webcam. By the same token, I expect she won’t want to pay for any technological solution, so I’ll need to suggest free solutions to this problem.

Cost is often a strong motivator for my freelance clients, but can be less important when you’re working within an organization. When I suggested to a remote colleague in a large corporate that instead of calling each other ten times a day we should just use IM, she had no motivation at all to do so: she wasn’t paying for the calls she made, so cost was not a motivator for her.

Convenience

One benefit of using multiple contact methods is that you can communicate with someone at virtually any time. Forget the old leave-a-voicemail-and-follow-it-up-with-an-email syndrome; you can do so much more than that. You can tweet or text your client or colleague a link or reminder; send them a quick message via IM; email them the minutes from your last meeting; call them using a free VoIP service.

How can you communicate the benefits of convenience to your colleague? Think of a specific case in your recent history with this individual where technology would have smoothed or sped up the process, or made a real difference to the work flow. Explain this to your colleague, and make clear the difference that your preferred piece of technology could have made to the situation.

Workplace Pressure

If enough people within an organization are using a particular application, piece of software, or technology, it can be difficult for others to maintain their resistance.

For clients who manage their own operations, or are solo operators, there can be less pressure internally to adopt collaborative technology. However, as in the case of my client, who runs her own face-to-face business and feels no such pressure, but is looking to expand her reach online, the pressure of external competition and the potential for missed opportunities may be a strong motivator.

Knowing that my client is looking to develop an online presence, I could suggest trialling video chats via Skype as a way to become more comfortable in the online space. Since she’ll be operating internationally soon, I could present the chance to skill up now as an opportunity to get ahead — it’ll make it much easier for her to communicate with key contacts in the near future.

Productivity Benefits

Studies have shown that collaborative technology pays off. That’s good, but it’s not likely to convince an individual who’s just trying to do their job with a minimum of hassle that they should change, or even augment, the way they operate.

Quoting statistics may not convince my client to climb aboard the collaborative technology bandwagon, but illustrating the realities of our situation may. The four hours I’ll need to travel, in total, to meet my client will not be productive time — that’s why she won’t want to pay me for it. If I travel to meet her, the meeting will effectively take up an entire day. For a client on a tight deadline, this is an enormous waste of time as well as money.

One the other hand, if we made a video call at nine in the morning, I could action the outcomes of the meeting on the same day. This would likely put me at least a half — if not a whole — day ahead of the face-to-face meeting scenario. I have the feeling this is going to be a very strong motivator for my client.

Support

Though it may surprise some of us, many people are still scared of technology. It takes a long time to set up, may not work properly, takes up valuable space on their computers, is yet another thing they have to learn,  means they have to carry more stuff around, leaves them with no free time — the list of arguments against using technology is almost limitless.

Worse still is the fact that most people don’t want to admit that we’re scared of the prospect of having to learn something new, to adopt it and make it part of our daily operations.

Offering support to colleagues as an encouragement for them to try a new technology may make all the difference to your professional relationship, as well as your productivity. If I were to discuss the prospect of setting up video calling with my client, I’d send her links to the service and help information, ask her to call me if she had any problems with the setup, and suggest we had a trial run video call a week ahead of time.

Personalization

As I said, my client operates her business almost entirely in person. Many people who are unfamiliar with technology feel that online communication is somehow less personal than face-to-face conversations. Whether or not this is true, the fact is that the more opportunities you create for people to communicate with you, and for yourself to communicate with others, the stronger your relationships with those people will be.

People will often communicate via chat in a far less formal, more personal way than they would in an email. The great thing about reading tweets that your contact has directed specifically at other individuals is that they give you an insight into other facets of that contact. If I really want to establish empathy and rapport with someone, I’ll call them rather than emailing or IMing. Each technology has its place, and I use as many as I can to get a clearer picture of the people I work, and are friends, with. This, in turn, helps us work more effectively together.

These are the arguments I usually use to convince a colleague to give collaborative technology a try. Ultimately, though, the success of my efforts will depend on how well I understand their situation, and their reasons for not wanting to try an alternative to the status quo.

What arguments have you used to convince clients and colleagues to communicate with you online?

It’s no surprise that working remotely can have benefits for your environmental footprint: Working offsite has knocked around 18,000 miles off my public transport usage from last year alone. But no matter how careful or responsible web workers might be, the reality is that first-world or “western” lifestyles and standards of living are inherently linked with resource consumption. You may be doing your bit, but you’re unlikely to be living a carbon-neutral life.

The inherent resource-intensiveness of the western lifestyle is undoubtedly the reason why people become overwhelmed by the challenge of climate change. It’s the reason why we often feel as if we can’t do much as individuals to make a real difference.

Perhaps you need to upgrade your software for work, which, unfortunately, necessitates the purchase of a new computer. Essential devices like phones, PDAs, cameras and other peripherals are built to become obsolescent within a given timeframe. You may buy green energy and recycled paper and refill your printer ink cartridges, but the very concept of printing a document entails the use of resources and processes that emit carbon.

Yes, our web working lifestyles necessarily produce carbon emissions, but there is a way to help decrease your carbon footprint, and your contribution to global warming: buy carbon offsets. Carbon Offsets 101

Buy a carbon offset from an accredited supplier, and you’re effectively paying the company to undertake a specific task to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Some tasks aim to prevent carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere — like methane flaring or investment in renewable energy technology. Others, like planting trees, aim to lock up carbon dioxide that’s already present in the atmosphere. Most of the offset sellers I’ve looked at specialize in one or two areas.

Most offset retail sites provide calculators that allow you to enter the details of your shopping habits, transport usage, power and food consumption, and give you a rough estimate of the amount of carbon dioxide you may need to offset. Some sellers offer different calculators for individuals and organizations, so you can obtain closer carbon estimates for things like business consumables, travel, and waste produced through your work.

Once you have your total, it’s a simple matter of entering your credit card details to buy the offsets. The cost of offsets varies with your carbon footprint and the service you use, but as an example, the cost to offset the 3.34 tonnes of carbon produced by my commuting (30,000 miles last year) and driving the Australian annual average of 6,000 miles in my large, old diesel-powered car was $68 AUD ($62 US)  through one offset supplier.

Carbon Offset Controversy

Carbon offsetting is a controversial area, not only because the results are yet to be proven, but because some retailers promote offsets as a means by which people can live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. Many offset companies estimate the carbon that will be sequestered or prevented  from entering the atmosphere on the basis of statistical and scientific analyses, and some argue that these estimates are inaccurate, involve double counting of the possible environmental benefits, and so on.

It seems the best way to assess the value of a given offset activity is to find out about it, by reviewing the offset seller’s information, plus any information your government or interest groups may have produced on the market and seller. In Australia, for example, we have an independent offset rating site which aims to advise on the credentials and capabilities of different offset sellers. Doing your homework on offset sellers in your country is vital.

Carbon Offsets for the Web Worker

Try as we might, most of us are unlikely to achieve a carbon-neutral lifestyle. Even the most environmentally friendly lives in developed countries necessitate the use of technology, devices, transport and consumables whose production or usage contributes to global warming and climate change.

Carbon offsetting is not an answer to global warming, and it’s still in its infancy as far as results go. But even though it’s unlikely to have the same impact as making changes wherever possible to reduce your carbon output, offsetting the carbon emitted through your remote working lifestyle may be a means by which you can compensate in some way for your unavoidable carbon emissions.

Have you ever bought carbon offsets? Would you consider building offsets into your annual expenses?

At this, the business end of the year, it can seem a bit like you’re stuck in a rut. While those in the U.S. may be happily heading for holiday season, most of the rest of us have a lot of plodding to do before any end-of-year-light appears in the work-day tunnel.

Northern hemisphere workers face the long downhill slide into winter, while those in the southern hemisphere strive valiantly to knuckle down and get things done before the summer and associated New Year business go-slow. There’s no time for holidays or breaks: it’s all action, whether we like it or not.

So I thought now might be a good time to talk about things we can do to make ourselves feel refreshed at work, even when we’re not. They say a change is as good as a holiday, after all…

1. Change where you work.

Remote workers needn’t be stuck at the same desk day in, day out. Try the library, a cafe, a coworking space or your friend’s studio.

Find it hard to work in public places? Fine. Change where you work at home. Move your office for a week — set up a desk in a different room — or revamp, rearrange or redecorate your current workspace. Buy a new album to play while you work, or try a new radio station. Paint the walls a different color. Make some changes, and see what happens to your mood.

2. Change your schedule.

If you’re right into routine — or simply find your life staked out by regular obligations — try a different approach for a week. Maybe you’ll work like you’re on vacation, chunk your work, or simply go off grid for a day or two so you can get more done.

You may also find it refreshing to blow off those regular events for a week, and do something different. Instead of your weekly yoga class, go and see a movie. Move your designated Invoicing Morning to some other time so you can use the time to go for a swim. If you prefer, try making more lasting changes to your schedule, building in regular exercise, lunch with friends or colleagues, or early finishes to help motivate you and mix up your week.

3. Change what you eat, and when.

Celine’s recent post about tactics to make sure you eat well may already have you reconsidering the way you fuel your work day. But changing your eating habits — how often, as well as what you eat — can make a real difference to your mood and motivation.

Since the seasons are changing, you might want to embrace the new-season foods. If it’s getting cold, cook up some hearty meals. If the months are getting warmer, lighten up with salads and fresh foods. Eat in a way you haven’t before — try new recipes, new foods, new eating patterns — and see what works for you. Even something as simple as taking a regular, away-from-your-desk lunch break outside in the sunshine can make all the difference.

4. Change what you wear.

We all know that what we wear affects the way we feel. If you’ve decided to spend the morning working in a cafe, you may wear different clothes than you would if you were at home. But you don’t have to leave your workspace to justify altering your work attire.

If you’re the type to do your first hour’s work in your PJs, change the routine for a week and start the day showered, dressed, and ready to roll. If you’re the sort who wears office clothes all day, consider trying more casual attire. Change what you wear — you’ll be surprised at the effect it has on your motivation, creativity, and output.

5. Take a mental health day.

Taking a spontaneous day off can be a great way to refresh and re-energise. It certainly breaks up the week, and can be a good motivator if you’re feeling sluggish about getting things done. A mental health day can be a soothing or adventurous as you like — it’s a day of complete freedom, so make the most of it!

I’m often trying different things to spice up what can otherwise be the monotonous work week. I like spontaneity, and no matter how engaging or inspiring our work is, we all need a change some time.

What do you do to boost your morale and motivation when things get dull?