I’ll be speaking at Connected Marketing Week tomorrow in a session called “Small Voices, Big Results” at 1pm. Specifically, I’ll be discussing blogging rules that I’ve seen work over the years.Since I started blogging publicly in 2007, I’ve learned a lot about blogging and blogging culture. Along with things I’ve learned about myself and my own style there are some universal rules to follow to be a successful blogger, no matter who you are or what you’re writing about. Today I thought I’d share a few lessons I’ve learned and start a discussion. If you’ve got any additional bits of advice you would have given yourself when you first started blogging, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear them. I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m always learning like the rest of you.
Here are my 23 Rules of Thumb for Effective Blogging…
Rule #1: No one cares about you.
Every time you sit down to write, remind yourself that there are a trillion other websites out there competing for attention. Then remind yourself how little time you have these days to spend reading the news, books, all your friends’ Tweets and Facebook status messages and blog posts. Got it? In that moment, ask yourself honestly whether you’d spend time reading a 10,000 word blog post about your cat.
People invest their time reading posts that educate and enlighten, or organize complex information, or bust myths or provide pointers to great resources. Internet users have evolved into ultra-savvy scanners when it comes to web content, and they’re insanely good at figuring out whether there’s something in it for them in under 10 seconds. If they don’t get the immediate impression that what you’ve written is useful or entertaining, they’ll leave and go somewhere else. Web time is “me time” for readers. So write stuff that other people will find useful, and save the stories about your cat for your mom.
One of the issues I see a lot of business people still trying to wrap their heads around is how to measure the effectiveness and value of their social media investment. In a lot of ways, it’s the question because no online effort is free. Even if all the tools are free, every campaign still takes time and effort, which you pay for by the hour in most cases. In almost every case where you commit to an online project the analytics will be squishy and gray at best, and you’ll have to come to terms with the immutable fear that your people could be spending their time and energy elsewhere. The fear is a given, and if you don’t have it’s because you’re not really weighing your options correctly.
Here’s the thing, you’re not alone. We’re ALL trying to figure out how much time and energy to pump into this new medium and what the right approach and mix is. No one has it right. Every situation requires a unique approach. Consumers are fickle. Attention is fleeting. The ecosystem is mercurial at best. For better or worse, this is the state of affairs and the credibility of anyone who tries to sell you on a proven formula should be questioned ruthlessly.
So if no one has a formula, what the hell do you do? Simple, you take everything you know about your customers, what they like and what drives sales, you make an educated guess about how to engage them in a way that drives sales and you go for it. This is where measuring your progress in the right context is key.
Always Put Your Engagement Metrics In To Business Context
If you only take one thing away from this post it should be that your starting point for designing any social media campaign should be one question “how is this going to drive business”. I wish I had a dime for every post that has “how to measure social media” in the title but never talked about revenue. You can track the ever-lovin’ out of YouTube views, blog comments, followers on Twitter and watch those stats increase over time till you’re blue in the face, but if you have no idea how it’s affecting your bottom line, you’re just spinning your wheels and burning cash.
Make no mistake, it’s easy to think you’re doing well when you’re not. That’s where a lot of companies fall down and over commit to projects that are actually hurting them. For example, your company creates a funny YouTube video. It’s got clever product placement and is meant to and act as marketing for your product. You’re tracking the online stats and you see is that tons of people are sharing it and that views are way beyond anything you could have imagined. You get psyched. Your boss is ecstatic. Everyone’s celebrating 80’s style and throwing you high-fives.
Here’s the rub. If you’re only tracking engagement, your marketing department is going to think the YouTube video that cost you 2 weeks of your peoples time and “just $5000″ in equipment was a great investment. But then you look at the metrics in the context of your sales and the data tells a different story. Sales are still static. Congratulations, you’ve just learned that you’ve wasted $5000 and two weeks worth of a team’s pay that could be spent elsewhere. $5000 in fliers handed out on the street at a Starbucks line might have gotten you closer to your goals and taken a day. Without the context of the sales/revenue data, you just don’t get an accurate picture of what’s going on and how effective your efforts are. This is a totally plausible scenario and it happens every day.
The good news is that if you start by asking the right questions and put every campaign in context of metrics that are meaningful to your business, you’ll significantly reduce your risk, and you’ll set yourself up to learn quickly from your mistakes if you do fail and you can pull the plug quickly if you’re not tracking the way you thought you would be.
This is the reality of social media. It’s the smart approach. Take an educated guess and go for it, measuring your progress in a way that is meaningful to your bottom line. Know that you’ll guess wrong sometimes, miss the mark and take a financial hit. Nothing is free and everyone fails a few times. It’s part of the game. The trick is to be able to spot the times that seem like you’re doing well, but you’re actually failing, and to fail fast, pull the plug and learn from the experience.
Twitter’s given us the best approximation of a true, measurable “pulse of the globe” that we’ve ever had and in the last few years we’ve have seen some fantastic Twitter visualizations of world events using all sorts of approaches. I thought that this representation of World Cup Fan activity on Twitter that’s currently displayed on the UK Guardian is pretty awesome. It does a great job of conveying a sense of context and captures the spirit and energy of each game. You can replay each game and see a visual representation of crowd reactions in each country as substitutions are made and goals are scored. Sweet. Here are some screenshots…
Watch the crowd in the US erupt as the score is evened up 1-1 in the England-USA game…(a visceral memory for many of us here in the US).
Special thanks to Rob McGuire for the pointer to this visualization project on the UK Guardian!
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time learning on the web. I’ve temporarily put blogging and all the social stuff on hold in the name of focusing on teaching myself things I’ve always wanted to learn, as well as essential skills that, as a freelancer, help me deliver value to clients and broaden my skill set. When I initially decided to take a few months off to do this, I spent the first few weeks in discovery mode trying quite a few different sites – some I stuck with, some I dropped. Here are the ones where I’ve been spending most of my learning time, where I think the value really is -
My Favorite Learning Hubs:
TutsPlus
This one is by far my favorite learning hub, so much so that I subscribe via email so I don’t miss anything. It’s actually a network of blogs that post daily tutorial content on Photoshop, Flash, web development, graphic design, photography and video creation. Most of the content is free, but for $9 a month, you can get access to their archive of premium video tutorials, screen casts and tutorials, which I do. It’s not all great, but 75% of it is – Jeffrey Way’s screencasts on PSD to HTML to WordPress alone are worth the price. Many of us spend more than that on any given weekend in Starbucks. Believe me, if you’re already at an intermediate level with multimedia creation and want quickly build a broader skill set, this is the place to go.
Kelby Training
Adobe Photoshop is a linchpin application. So many higher-level skill sets these days depend or build on Photoshop that you just can’t get by doing anything front end or visual without it. I’m not saying that Kelby Training is the only place to learn photoshop, but it’s almost certainly the best. For $25 a month you get access to a constantly updated stream of online video training by Scott Kelby (president of the NAPP) and a host of other experts . The content is all targeted towards creative professionals and focuses on Photoshop and the rest of Adobe’s creative suite, as well photography and DSLR videography. Most of the video sessions are over an hour long, and they’re segmented into 5 to 10 minute targeted chunks so you can skip around and just focus on what you want to. Great time value for money and I never leave without feeling like I learned something.
O’Reilly Media
O’Reilly continues to publish some of the best tech books available on the market. The Missing Manual and the Head First series are great. A lot of thought’s put into the delivery of the information in both series which is an important thing when you’re trying to learn quickly and get bang for your buck. The Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML is still a book I go back to frequently for refreshers. I’m still waiting for O’Reilly to expand it’s offerings into a Kelby Training type of video-lecture format, I’ve got to admit that sometimes there’s just no substitute for one of these books when you’re trying to build foundational knowledge, especially when you can download them. Almost all of O’Reilly’s books are available as ebooks via the website and if you follow them on Twitter, they dish out daily $9.99 ebook deals.
Smashing Magazine
Last but certainly not least, this site deserves a mention. It’s a great source for information and tutorials on graphics, coding, and design inspiration and tools. They often have great freebies. In particular, it’s one of the best places to get an idea of current design trends and tools in web design.
Final Thoughts
For me, what differentiates the sites I’ve mentioned above from others is the value I get for my time and money. It takes thousands of hours to get good at web design, creating media and using creative tools like Photoshop. Any resource I can go to that allows me to focus my energy and feel like I’ve learned quickly and effectively is a plus – and at prices like these, you can’t really lose. It actually makes me question whether traditional schooling is even necessary these days. Why would you pay 50-100K to go to college to become a creative professional when you could spend a fraction of that to get access to really recent content, interact with industry experts and get the same skillset? That’s another topic for another time, I guess, but I’m happy to discuss it here with anyone in the comments.
What are your favorite places to learn web design, development and multimedia on the web?
3.0 is here, and it’s packed with awesomeness. I do all of my website development on WordPress these days and there are a lot of great additions in this release that I’ve been waiting on for this site, as well as on client projects. They’ve made the maintenance easier with bulk update functionality for plugins and the software, you now have custom post types for products, newsletters and real estate listings, and you’ve got a heck of a lot more control in the widget area. Here’s a 3 minute video overview on the new release, as well as an hour long video (bottom) where Matt Mullenweg talks at length about some of the updates, why they went that way, and shares some of the vision and philosophy behind what Automattic sees in WordPress’s future.
I’ve got a great two-video combo for you today that throws a spotlight on the current state of remix culture and values that are fundamental to the changing creative and cultural landscape of the social web. By fundamental, I mean that the values we chose to uphold when it comes to freedom, creativity and control in this new world of sharing and remixing content will dictate behaviors and culture that influence the direction and trajectory of the ecosystem. That’s a mouthful that means “for the sake of the community and the future, get the values right first”. Read More
We’re 4 days away from being able to pre-order the new iPhone and my gadget lust is at code orange. Jules and I are still rocking 3Gs so spending on this upgrade is easily rationalized :). There are a lot of groundbreaking innovations on the device, but what I’m most excited about is the camera. To date, believe it or not, I’ve taken 1275 photos with the 2 megapixel camera on my trusty 3G. An unexpected side effect of having a “good enough” camera as part of a device that’s with me wherever I go is that I use all the time – mostly as a memory and inspiration tool. If I want to remember something, or I see something that inspires me, I snap a photo. Over time it just became a habit and I’ve found it so useful that I’d never buy a phone without a camera again.
The volume of pictures I’ve taken on my 3G shows that Apple definitely crossed the usefulness threshold (for users like me at least) with their first stab at putting a camera in a phone. The image quality is lacking, though, and there’s no real manual control and it performs horribly in low light. Apple did a heck of a lot to correct those issues with the 3GS, and even caught the attention of photographers with the improved sensor, an increase in resolution, low light performance and tap-to-focus. (side note: If you haven’t heard about Chase Jarvis’s new book “The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You” check it out…awesome iPhone photography)
And with this release, Apple’s shown that they’re still listening and has put even more useful features into the camera:
- Video recording in HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio and in-camera video editing with iMovie – I’m skeptical about what using this will be like, but how can you say this isn’t cool?
- 5-megapixel still camera – instead of uselessly increasing megapixels they’ve focused on putting in a kick-ass low light sensor, which will make much more difference to image quality.
- The new front-facing camera - finally I can take a picture of Jules and I when we’re out and about that I don’t have to re-take 3 times because all I got was the sky or “just” my stomach.
- Tap to focus video or still images – awesome for isolating your subject and blurring the background – this is the feature that made photographers go banana sandwich when the 3G came out.
- LED flash - huge – this sucker even stays on to light your subjects when you’re shooting video.
- Photo and video geotagging -neat if you care about this sort of thing, which I do because iPhoto’s sorting by place is awesome.
The New Camera + App
OK, so I’ve told you all that so that I can now tell you about this. Now that the iPhone camera is 17 new kinds of awesome, you’re going to start looking for apps, right? Only natural. Along with the “Best Camera” app, I’d recommend this one – Camera+. What’s different about this app is that it gives you lots of control and a much closer experience to an actual DSLR that the pros use. Plus the lightbox, zoom and custom filters are sweet and you can do some really cool “post-production” type of work directly on your phone. For $2.99, it makes the whole experience of using the camera way more than $2.99 cooler…check the video, you’ll see what I mean. If you end up buying it and loving it, you can thank Lisa and TapTapTap for their hard work.
