Tag Archives: DearSoSi

Engage your audience before your speech

A lot of speeches begin with someone introducing you to the audience – reciting your background and qualifications, and then encouraging them to greet you warmly as you head to the microphone.

And once the applause dies down, you’re looking at a sea of people who are probably as unfamiliar to you as you are to them. Your first few lines not only have to launch your speech, but establish a rapport and some degree of trust with your audience.

But in the era of the social speech, you don’t have to speak to an audience of strangers. You can get acquainted and start the conversation days or even weeks before you break out the index cards. You probably won’t get to know everybody beforehand… but you’ll know at least some of them, and they’ll know you.

Start by finding out where your audience hangs out online. Are there professional groups on LinkedIn, or groups on Facebook where they get together? Is there an event or chat hashtag they use on Twitter? Do they frequent the sponsoring organization’s blog? Do they go even more old-school, with discussion forums? Are there Twitter lists or public Google+ circles that can help you discover them? (Just be sure these are public-facing spaces, and not places where participants are expecting some degree of privacy.)
Now that you know where to find your audience – or a chunk of it – you’ll want to introduce yourself. But before you do, listen to the public conversations they’re having. What’s the tone? What issues are high on their agendas? Who are the natural hosts and leaders in the conversations? Once you have a sense of the dynamics, then it’s time to let folks know who you are.
Post a message in the various venues you’ve identified. Let people know who you are, and that you’re excited that you’ll be speaking at the event. Ask who else will be attending, give everyone an idea of what you’re planning to talk about, and invite suggestions and questions. Unmarketing author and speaker Scott Stratten likes to do that through a webcam video he records before his speeches, greeting his audience and letting them know what it’s in for. They get to see who he is and get a taste of his speaking style. (You’ll find that and other fantastic Scott Stratten speaking tips in this blog post.)
Write a blog post referring to your upcoming speech, and dealing with one of the key themes you’ll be covering. (If it’s a theme you’ve posted on before, you can revisit a previous post with a few more thoughts.) Consider asking your audience a question, or assigning a little homework: “You’ll get a lot more out of this presentation if you can come in with a list of the three things you’d most like to try this year in your organization’s fundraising.” And include your video, if you’ve recorded one.
Looking for a big-picture idea of your audience’s interests or level of experience? An online poll (using a service like PollDaddy or GoPollGo) can allow audience members to score their skills, choose a favourite topic or place themselves on a spectrum of opinion.
Your host can make a big difference in the success of your outreach. Ask the event organizers to include links to your blog posts, polls and video on their blog and in their emails to attendees. (Chances are they’ll be delighted that you’re doing this. We’ll look at more ways to collaborate with your organizer in a future post.)
Use Twitter to announce your arrival at the event (which you’ll do early) and at the socials and networking events (which you’ll attend), using the event hashtag. Aim to meet some of the people you’ve talked with online. The face-to-face contact strengthens your online relationships, and can give you a sense of the event’s intangibles that can be invaluable in fine-tuning your presentation.
During your presentation, mention some of the people you’ve talked to and the conversations you’ve had. And if you’ve assigned homework beforehand, mention it and weave it into your speech — you can even call on a few of your new online contacts in the audience to read their answers. (In each case, clear it with them first; some people are happy to talk online, but squirm if they’re singled out from the stage.)

What you’ve done is to bridge your online and in-person presence with these audience members. Your speech will be better, because you’ve had the benefit of some insight into your audience’s thinking. You’ll be more at home on stage, because you know there are friends — or at least some friendly acquaintances — out in the crowd. And you’ve laid the groundwork for ongoing relationships that last long after you leave the stage.

How to spur reluctant bloggers

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“Why won’t they blog?”

That’s a lament I hear from community managers, social media practitioners and communications directors who are begging, cajoling, coaxing and wheedling coworkers, trying to get them to post something to their organization’s or company’s blog.

It can be tempting to throw your hands up. “If your team hates blogging, you need a new team,” suggests one post. The author adds, “They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog.”

True, someone who hates their job is unlikely to blog about it – at least, not in a way that would make their employer happy. But that isn’t the only reason that people say they hate blogging. Here are a few others… and some ways you can respond before you give up on your coworkers:

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the time it takes?

If your workplace is like many others, employees have seen their workloads grow, with less support for getting the job done. If you’re expecting them to crank out blog posts, but you haven’t taken anything off their plates to compensate, you may want to look at some adjustments.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the kind of blogging you’re asking them to do?

Are you expecting detailed, lengthy posts from busy people? Consider starting off by asking for contributions that have a much lower footprint on their time and attention. Are you asking them to write puff pieces about what a fantastic organization they work for? Give them the latitude to be more authentic, and to talk more about their own work passions without having to pump up your brand.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they don’t think they’re good at?

Have you offered training – not just in the technical details of your blogging platform, but in how to write blog posts quickly and easily? Do you encourage them to start out small – for instance, with one-paragraph contributions to a longer post – and work their way up? Have you considered an informal peer mentoring system, group workshops, or assigning a communications specialist to help them write their first few posts?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being exposed to the public?

Some people love being in the public eye (cough). Others find the idea intrusive, or even terrifying. Try finding an area of their work they feel more comfortable sharing with the world. Give them the option of starting out by blogging on the intranet, where their exposure is limited to their coworkers.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they think is pointless?

More to the point, something that’s pointless to them. Look at it from their point of view: maybe you’re asking them to put their urgent work on hold so you can get some content for a trendy blog they suspect will be a flash in the pan. You can – and should – talk to them about the blog’s significance for the organization. But you should also figure out how the blog can advance things they care about, like a professional passion, their profile within the organization, or a cause they’re committed to.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being the first on the dance floor?

You’ll often find it harder to get contributors to a new communications vehicle than an established one. And even if the blog has been around for a while, people may not want to be the first ones from their department or job function to post. But there are still ways to break the ice – for instance, by writing a series of posts based on brief interviews with a few of the kind of individuals you’d like to see contributing. That can be the spark they need to jump in.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate, well, you?

Okay, not hate. But could your relationship be stronger? Do you have bridges to build with other departments before you can start asking for their help? Have you worked as hard to understand them as you would with an external audience you want to reach?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate what it means in your workplace’s culture?

Is yours an organization that welcomes honest conversation, or are people legitimately worried about inadvertently saying the wrong thing? Do you have a “tall poppy” culture where it’s safer to keep your head down and blend in? If you’re having trouble getting one or two people to participate, then maybe – maybe – the problem’s on their end. But widespread resistance to blogging may alert you to deeper issues. If that ends up spurring your organization to make badly needed changes, then that refusal to blog may turn out to a valuable contribution after all.

What you don’t need in your Twitter biography

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Nothing concentrates the mind, the saying goes, like the prospect of being executed in the morning. When you only have a few hours left, you want to make them count.

But substitute space for time, and give people a 160-character limit on summing up their life’s story (or even just the past 525,600 minutes), and they start adding the oddest things.

On Twitter, you have a tiny little space – your profile’s biography field – to tell people who you are. Obviously, that’s an impossible task: you’re a rich, unique and complex person, a proverbial unique snowflake, and your essence can’t be captured in 20 to 30 words.

So you’re going to have to make some choices. Everything you decide to put in that bio means you have to close the door on something else. Mention your dog, your kids, your love of Rational Youth and your significant other, and you have to leave out your profession, your aspirations and your recent Nobel Prize.

Or, if we’re talking about a Twitter feed for a brand or an organization, you may have to choose from among a mission statement, a positioning line, a list of the people tweeting on this account and your intention for this feed.

It comes down to this: people look to your bio to tell them what kind of things you intend to talk about on Twitter – and to make the case for following you. (Or, perhaps just as valuable, for deciding not to.) You have 160 characters to do that.

Let me make that a little easier for you by lightening your load. Here are three things I don’t think any Twitter bio needs – which should free up some badly-needed space for the stuff that counts:

Your follower policy: “I’ll follow back. But I’ll unfollow if u unfollow me!” Unless the central obsession of your participation on Twitter is who you’re following and who’s following you back – and you’re mainly interesting in talking with people who share that obsession – you can drop this. If you absolutely have to tell the world about your policy, then create a custom Twitter landing page on your web site and use it as the link in your profile. But understand that this is a red flag that you’re using Twitter to make up for some high school social trauma… and that never works.

A generic quotation: “Be the change you want to see in the world” is a lovely idea, but the words themselves have been repeated so often, by so many people, that they’ve lost their power. If you really want to use someone else’s words in your bio, choose something distinctive and memorable that we haven’t heard thousands of times before. You’re unique; why make your biography generic?

Your geographical coordinates: “49.268701;-123.178153″ tells a potential follower next to nothing about you and whether you might be interesting to talk with. You’re already telling people what city you’re in in the “Location” field of your profile; if your specific neighbourhood’s really that important, by all means mention it by name. But unless you’re a geo geek of the highest order – not that there’s anything wrong with that – you can lose the numbers.

I asked my Twitter community what they’d like to see dropped from Twitter bios:

John Bollwitt and Paul Rickett each suggested geo coordinates (thanks, you two).

Phillip Jeffrey mentioned that he’d seen people include their Twitter URL in their biography – which is a waste of space, because it already appears on your profile automatically. Good catch.

Tris Hussey, Sean Moffitt and Christine Rondeau are going to have to duke it out; Tris and Christine don’t like “social media guru”, while Sean would rather see “guru” or “ninja” instead of “expert” (maybe because there’s a self-mocking connotation there).

Finally, Christine and Monica Hamburg mentioned religion. I understand why, but I’m prepared to give religion my tentative, uh, blessing… if it’s central to your outlook on life and relevant to your Twitter conversations. Just be aware that some people may well read something you might or might not intend into your profession of faith (or your declaration of lack thereof): for example, that you only want to connect with other members of your faith, or that you’ll be mainly talking about religion (or, again, your opposition to it).

How about you? What do you think people can safely leave out of their 160-character life story?

How a popular (but off-topic) blog post can boost the rest of your content

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Stories abound of rock bands who produce hours and hours of music that deepens the soul, challenges the psyche and redefines human existence in a new, profoundly meaningful way.

And then they write one frigging novelty song, and that’s the one that chews its way to the top of the charts. You spend years writing songs about social justice and the human condition, but I Just Choked on a Tic Tac is the song that defines your life’s work.

This can happen in blogging, too. You’ll write post after post about your interests and passions, posts that draw on your unique expertise… but it’s that one post you dashed off about how to get gum out of your sofa’s upholstery that gets all the search engine traffic and inbound links.

Well, if life’s sending traffic to your lemons, why not let that traffic know about your lemonade stand?

That’s an issue near and dear to me, because I’m facing that exact situation. I’ve been blogging on my personal site as well as on Social Signal, and I’ve written a few tech how-tos that get an inordinate amount of search engine traffic. Four or five of those posts – about Firefox, Drupal, the iPhone, WordPerfect and Mac OS X – are especially popular.

People visiting those pages tend to take the information they need and then leave. After all, my blog really isn’t a tech troubleshooting site, and they’re here on a mission. But I also know there’s stuff I could show them that they might find interesting – especially from my cartoon.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do on those pages: add a few thumbnail images of relevant cartoons, link them to the cartoon section of the site, and invite visitors to check it out. (A related-content plugin could generate that material automatically… but I want to control exactly what I’m offering to the visitors on these pages, and gauge how they respond. Hence the manual approach.)

Most of the people visiting probably won’t click on those links. But my bet is that some will.

I’m trying this out today on the Apple-related pages. I’m annotating Google Analytics, and I’ll let you know in a few weeks how this worked.

Protecting yourself from an online service’s shutdown

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Another day, another bunch of people seeing their content vanish without warning.

According to the BBC, when blogging site Blogetery suddenly disappeared – taken offline after the FBI warned their hosting service about alleged Al Qaeda-linked material posted there – it took with it the posts written by more than 70,000 bloggers.

Make that 70,000 really unhappy bloggers.

They join the users of iPBFree.com, whose users found the forums the site used to host were gone as of last week.

In both cases, explanations were sparse, and didn’t (perhaps couldn’t) offer too much useful or comforting information – and there’s no idea when more information will be forthcoming.

This hardly the first time an online service has closed its doors with little or no warning. Business models come and go; venture capitalists run out of patience; entrepreneurs run out of steam and interest… and sites go offline.

How can you keep your content safe – or relatively safe – in case the service you’re relying on takes a dive? Here are several options. You may not want to do all of them… but the more you can do, the greater your peace of mind.

Before you commit to a platform, look for export/backup features. How easy will it be to make regular backups? How quickly can you do it if a shutdown is imminent?
Look for services that can export your data to an open format, such as XML or a comma-separated text file, so you have a choice of other platforms to turn to if the worst happens.
Look for thoroughness. Metadata like tags, dates and descriptions may be even more important then the original files. And comments and friend lists can be just as key.
Look for stability. It’s great to try out startups and edgy innovators. But if you’re going to commit a lot of time and energy to your content and community, you’ll want to see a solid track record… and enough backing to know these folks will still be around in a few years. (Not that big, established players are above shutting a service down; but when they do, they know their brand equity is on the line, and are motivated to minimize the disruption to users.)
Back up regularly. You’re doing regular backups of your hard drives, right? (Right?) You’ll want to start doing the same thing to your online content as well, and save those backups somewhere safe.
Subscribe to the site’s blog or “What’s new” feed, and check it regularly. This is part of your early-warning system. And when things go bad, there may be very little notice that you need to get your data off the site.
Make a separate, full backup at the first sign of trouble. Online hiccups? Big layoffs? Takeover or sale rumours? Get a copy of your data somewhere safe.
Build your new home before you need it. At the very least, you should have an idea of where you’ll take your content if the service you rely on goes dark. But if you want people to be able to find you, create a bare-bones presence on that site now – if only to reserve your name (so your flaky-dead-service.com/yourname audience can find you at shiny-new-service.com/yourname). Test it so you’ll know how to restore your content quickly and reliably.
Calculate the tradeoff. This isn’t a trivial amount of work; you need to weigh the effort against the cost of losing all of that content. If we’re just talking about a few fun, ephemeral posts, you may not be worried at all. But if you’re sinking a lot of effort into an online presence – and asking your friends, supporters, customers or users to do the same – then the time you put into backing up may be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Can you resuscitate your dead blog?

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It’s official – I’m the cartoon blogger for BlogWorld Expo, coming this October in Las Vegas. And as part of my duties, I’m running a weekly cartoon on their blog. This post originally accompanied one of them.

It can be hard to admit, but blogs have a life cycle – and, in some cases, a best-before date that may be well in the past. Your passion for the subject matter wanes; other interests beckon; your readers and commenters, maybe sensing your faltering commitment, move on to other venues.

And that’s okay. There’s no shame in saying that a blog has run its course. But as Allison Boyer wrote in a post on BlogWorld a while ago, even the most moribund of blogs may not be beyond resuscitation (and she offered a few suggestions for virtual CPR).

If you’re starting to notice the unpleasant smell of decay whenever you visit your blog, here are a few more ideas for bringing it back to life:

Redefine the subject. If your interests have changed, then let your readers know you’ll be introducing a new topic, and shifting the emphasis there.
Redefine the scope. If your blog died because you couldn’t keep up with the expectations you set around frequency, depth or comprehensiveness, then dial that back. Focus your energies more narrowly. Maybe instead of daily wall-to-wall coverage of a subject, you want to post twice a week on one aspect of it – and one of those posts is a collection of links, instead of your usual 20-paragraph essays.
Call in reinforcements. If you don’t think you can do it alone, but you have one or more colleagues or friends with similar interests and solid blogging skills, see if they’d be interested in joining your blog. The mutual encouragement can go a long way to getting you past a slump.
Hand it over. Find someone who shares your passion – or the passion you once had – and transfer the blog to them. You’ll know that all your hard work will still be alive and appreciated; they’ll be able to launch with a built-in readership and traffic stream to build on.

Still not feeling it? If you’re sure it’s time to close the doors and turn off the lights, then go ahead. But let your readers know you’re doing it. And give serious consideration to keeping your blog online (with comments switched off if you don’t plan to reply to them, or weed out spam). It’ll serve as a resource for others… and, if your interest should be rekindled or your spare time suddenly reappear, you’ve left the door open to a return from the grave.

New Twitter feature lets you embed tweets in your blog posts with original formatting

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Updated: Thanks to Mitch Cohen for this comment pointing to a one-click bookmarklet – even easier!

Blackbird Pie (kind of a gruesome name, if you’ve grown attached to the Twitter icon) is a new Twitter service that lets you post individual tweets to your blog or web site – keeping that good ol’ Twitter formatting intact, while picking up elements of your site’s design (such as the typeface) as well.

Now, because of certain style overrides we have on SocialSignal.com, the result isn’t quite as picturesque as we might like:

Finally! A tool for blogging tweets about the new tool for blogging tweets! http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/less than a minute ago via TweetDeckRob Cottingham
RobCottingham

There’s a certain amount of overlap and such. But it’s still pretty sweet, especially since our workflow used to be:

Load tweet in browser.
Capture screen. (We use Skitch, so we don’t have to…)
Crop screen capture image and save.
Upload image file to our site.
Paste a link to the image file in our blog editor.
Add alt text with the contents of the tweet.

With Blackbird Pie, the workflow is:

Copy tweet URL.
Paste into Blackbird Pie, and copy resulting embed code.
Paste embed code into blog editor.

So much easier. And now the text is selectable by others – not a minor issue from an SEO standpoint, either. And it preserves hyperlinks to the original tweet, the Twitter client and the originating Twitter profile.

I like that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is making it easy for people to see the larger context of a tweet: a conversation, for instance, or the user’s Twitter stream. And if you’re trying to blog about a longer Twitter conversation, citing several tweets, this could save you a whole lot of time.

There are plenty of caveats – among other things, it doesn’t work on Tumblr yet, and I keep having to fight the urge to call it “Blackberry Pie” – but it’s a handy tool to have.

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Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the time it takes?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the kind of blogging you’re asking them to do?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they don’t think they’re good at?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being exposed to the public?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they think is pointless?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being the first on the dance floor?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate, well, you?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate what it means in your workplace’s culture?

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