Web Worker Daily

This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I read the “Unconventional Guide to the Social Web,” and although I found a lot of useful information in it, one quote has stuck with me since reading it: “Your blog is your mothership. Don’t neglect it for lesser tools.”

This is an important thing to keep in mind when marketing your business online. There are tons of ways to build a web presence, including a variety of social media and networking sites, but nothing is as important as your blog.

Maintained correctly, your blog is the one tool that will get you the most traffic, and it’s the tool over which you have the most control. If you set out with the intention of posting three to five times per week, within a year, you will begin seeing significant activity around your site. Within two to three years, you could easily be an authority in your particular niche.

So, how can you make sure that you don’t neglect your blog (or your “mothership”)? Read the rest of this entry »

Personal blogs have innumerable benefits for web workers including establishing expertise on a subject, personal branding, online marketing and general desire for keeping your name up there in Google search results. The right hosted blog platform is a time-saver for web workers who may not be design or HTML-savvy.

I’ve been running my personal blog on TypePad since 1993 and the early adopter in me made me make the jump to trying out the new preview version as soon as I got the opportunity. Here are some of my first impressions about the impending update to this fee-based blog publishing platform.

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We’ve all learned that good news travels fast online, but bad news travels faster. Now, with social networks, blogs and microblogs, the speed with which bad news can travel online is staggering, as everyone can get in on the conversation almost instantly. What can any of us — individuals, organizations and companies — do to handle a social media communications crisis?

After publishing my 10 Golden Rules of Social Media, I’ve been asked by a number of people what to do when things go wrong in the social mediasphere. Anyone who is putting themselves out there using social media tools is bound to encounter moments of crisis — some as large as the Domino’s fiasco, others as small as an old-fashioned person-to-person flame war.

My advice is to plan now. Don’t wait for that communications crisis to take place before planning for how you’ll handle the fallout when something bad (inevitably) happens. Here’s a blueprint you can use for your own plan.

1. Pay attention. Whether you are using Google Alerts or Twilert or any other monitoring service to see when your name or brand name is mentioned, setting up “digital listening posts” is essential to help learn about not just the good things people are saying about you, but the bad things as well. Getting an early “heads up” can make all the difference in the world between crisis and total disaster.

2. Review context. Before you panic and jump the gun to respond to what might appear to be a crisis, dig a little deeper to make sure you understand what is being said and why. You don’t want to enter the conversation until you have a firm grasp on the issues being raised.

3. Address promptly. Timeliness is everything when dealing with and defusing the crisis. Every day, every hour, every minute you agonize over what to do — or ignore the situation altogether — is time wasted.

4. Acknowledge first. Once you figure out what has happened and what some of the emotions are behind it, make sure to address these issues or emotions in your responses. Like any good interpersonal communications, start with statements like “I understand you’re frustrated” or “We realize this is a confusing situation.” Give credence to the other party’s feelings and perceptions. They may not be correct, but they are valid in that they’re what they believe and feel.

5. Don’t overthink. Running through committees, endless drafts and approval processes to get a response out there can cause far more damage than good. As long as you have taken the time to assess the situation and can take a rational, respectful tone in your response, even an awkward response is OK to start with, and buys you time to continue to respond to the problem.

6. Be open. If you’re upset, nervous, worried, shocked — don’t be afraid to express that as well. People want to see a human response to a crisis, not an overproduced, formulaic or canned reply. When there is a crisis, there are people involved. Pretending there are no emotions mixed in the mess is a surefire way to lose credibility with others. Domino’s CEO responded pretty quickly and openly. However, check out his response to the crisis. The CEO never once looks at the camera. If you are going to be open and forthcoming in your response, at least look straight at the camera at some point. Even when reading from a teleprompter, you can set it up so your eyes are directed at the camera. Otherwise, you’ll look shifty and untrustworthy.

7. Fix the problem. If the crisis is bringing a problem to your attention, admit it, address it and fix it. If something is wrong and you can make it right, do it. If something isn’t really wrong but someone perceives that it is wrong, don’t dismiss their concerns. Take every exchange seriously, and do your best. That is all anyone can really expect. If you make sincere efforts and consistently take the high road, you stand to gain some goodwill, even if the problem is not entirely resolved.

8. Tell your story. Telling your own story throughout the “fixing” process is another good way of helping defuse the issue. Giving updates such as “We’re still looking into that bug that caused your data loss,” and “Please contact us privately so we can make amends to this situation” lets anyone paying attention to the situation see something is being done, even some of it has to happen “behind-the-scenes.”

What other things should we think about when it comes to crisis communications in a social media-powered world?

Thanks to a few lucky opportunities at school, my transition from print to web was a gradual process, and a move that I made voluntarily. That’s not the case for a large number of writers currently making the same transition. The print journalism and publishing industries are in big trouble, with no sign of turning a corner anytime soon. More and more print publications are switching to the web, and finding it hard to deal with the fact that they can’t just move their existing content and keep on doing the same thing.

Likewise, writers can’t just keep producing the same kind of content for a different medium. The web, and its readers, demands a different kind of writing, delivered in a different way. It can hard to find the right mix, especially if you’ve spent your entire professional life writing one way, only to be asked to completely change that up. Here are some tips and resources to help get a handle on just what kind of change is required.

Practice Makes Perfect

It’s an old maxim, but one that doesn’t seem to lose its validity no matter how much time goes by or how many technological changes we may experience. If you want to learn something new, you need to practice it. For online writing, there are a number of different ways you could go about it.

First, there’s good ol’ rewriting. Find a source, or better yet, a number of sources of writing samples that resemble the type of working you’re aiming to do. Then try to produce a similar piece, maintaining the spirit of the original(s), but incorporating your own take. When you’re examining your sources, pay special attention to what they all share, and, when you’ve written your own version, look for things that your piece has that the others don’t. It may be a useful innovation, but maybe it’s something from print that’s extraneous to web writing. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to get lost in the mix when you’re a creative professional working online. Competition is fierce, and the space will only become more crowded as people are laid off and forced to seek out new sources of work. That’s probably part of the reason many new creative portfolio and networking sites like Artician have launched lately, including the similar MyFolio, which I took for a test drive a little while ago. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently interviewed as a “web expert” for a national women’s magazine. The reporter kept trying to get me to explain how a professional could build a static web site on the cheap to effectively “manage online reputation.”

“Web sites don’t really actively manage your online reputation,” I countered.

“Yes, but aren’t there free templates that people can use to set up cheap web sites? And what about hiring someone to create a one-page site?”

“I’m sure there are templates, but I would never recommend to a client today to build a web site like that,” I explained. “And I’d never recommend that anyone just put up a single page.”

My comments didn’t faze the writer, who was determined to present me as a “web expert” recommending cheap and easy web site building solutions for her article.

That exchange got me thinking: How did I – a former web developer – become so anti-web site? And why is a national publication promoting an article advising that businesspeople build web sites for themselves to manage their online reputation, especially when their chosen web expert was telling them, “Don’t do it!“? Read the rest of this entry »

For many web workers, the central hub from which they manage their online identity and portfolio is, or features, a blog. Using a blog to represent yourself has many purposes, including acting as a C.V., establishing your identity as an authority in your field, and providing a launchpad for your various social network profiles.

Those are all very good uses, and benefit you as a web worker immensely. The only question I have as a visitor is, how do they benefit me? Yes, they help if I’m considering you as a prospective contractor for a job, but if I’m not, then the site quickly loses relevance. A blog should be doing work all the time, even when it isn’t speaking directly to your professional history and identity. Here’s how to make sure it is.

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