the net101 blog

This year I’ve focused my business reading on the back-stories of the internet and social media  – here’s what I can recommend (they’re all terrific)…

 

	ON GOOGLE In The Plex Steven Levy
	ON WORDPRESS The Year Without Pants Scott Berkun
	ON AMAZON The Everything Store Brad Stone
	ON APPLE Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson
	ON TWITTER Hatching Twitter Nick Bilton
	ON MAPS You Are Here Hiawatha Bray
	ON INTERNET CONTROL The Master Switch Tim Wu
	ON ALGORITHMS Automate This Christopher Steiner

Higher education is powerful, but not necessarily when it comes to mastering social media. Consider this:

1. You’ll learn your best stuff – your skills, your art – in situ. Nothing beats on-the-ground practical experience for disciplines which are new and evolving quickly.
2. Three years to complete your degree is 100 years in internet time. What you’ll learn in your first-year class probably won’t apply by the time you graduate.
3. Employers are less impressed with the ‘piece of paper’ credential these days. They want to see evidence of what you’ve done and are doing in social media right now, i.e. your speaks-for-itself online portfolio. Start fleshing it out – it’ll carry weight at your first interview.
4. If you want to access social media theory there’s a swath of free learning resources out there – blogs, books, podcasts and videos. If you lack the discipline to self-learn, that’s a red flag. In this space anyone who’s anyone is self-learning every day.
5. Need on-the-ground social media skills? Top up regularly with any number of quality courses available somewhere near you.
6. Still want to do a degree and be a social media manager? Do a Bachelor of Arts. The social media professional space is short on humanists, communicators and people who know how to string a coherent sentence together. And are relatable. And can relate. It’s a people profession.
7. Still want to do a degree but not a Bachelor of Arts? Study business. For many organisations their presence of social media is based on commercial drivers – if you have a good business head on your shoulders you can do lots. It’s social media for business after all.

Most SEO ‘consultants’ are dodgy as hell – they’ll take your money and do you damage. But if you’ve already gone down that dark hole, consider the following:

1. SEO (search engine optimisation) is driven by solid content, not the sprinkling of keywords. One does not ‘do’ SEO,  one creates volumes of great market aligned content. Is your consultant helping you with content creation? Would your SEO guy know the first thing about the informational needs of your target audiences? Probably not.

2. SEO is not about optimising your website for the 50 most popular keywords. Read ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson if you want insight to the thinking process of the remaining 98% of any given market segment.

3. SEO is not a set-and-forget thing. Quality content creation and online publishing is an ongoing business imperative (no-one said this would be easy, but then again if it were easy everyone would be doing it well).

4. SEO trickery is dangerous. Contrived back-links, repetitive anchor-text, keyword density formulas and other mumbo-jumbo will be sooner or later be caught out in a search engine algorithm update and your website will be slapped back to the last century.

5. SEO ‘maintenance  plans’ are a RORT. Maintaining what!?

6. SEO without conversion reporting is meaningless. Who cares how many people arrived to your website via organic search – for most of us that’s only a mean to some business end. See if you can find a SEO consultant who will take payment based on measurable conversion performance (good luck).

7. Many so-called SEO consultants have the worst websites – crap copy, cheesy stock images, unsubstantiated claims – they’re not very good marketers. And you want to let them loose on your business…?

 

Your website: the truck which must support everything else you have online.

Email: an outbound marketing channel without equal; always be inviting visitors to your website to opt into your comms loop, and then invite them back to the site from within the newsletter.  Social media: your community… eventually they’ll end up back at the website (hopefully). Search engine optimisation: a website without wide and varied market-aligned content is like a guitar without strings… you won’t be able to play the informational tunes your target audiences are hungry for. Analytics: track website conversions and value via your most valuable referral sources: email, social and organic search.

Respect the trunk.

 

Hey, we were wondering if you could like us?

We’re a likeable business, you probably know that already – we’re just asking you to formalise the obvious by making it publicly known. It’s no big deal, we know it doesn’t mean anything that important, but still, it would really help us out. We could like you back if that makes your decision easier? We could go first as a sign of good faith? We’re more than happy to do that because we like you, and if you go ahead and like us that would just cement things. Amigos forever. We could even like some of your friends if that would help them out – you see, that’s what I’m talking about, the sort of thing friends do for one another without being asked. No probs! Haha, yes of course it’s all just a silly game – we know that, and we know that you know that we know that – but still it would help us a million if you could.  So how about it? Like us that is.

Dear Little Miss Social

I subscribe to well over a dozen newsletters – I love the ease at which businesses are able to freely correspond with me via my inbox. But I am a subscriber to one fortnightly missive which I find unsettling, and I am desperate for your advice. The newsletter I refer to often arrives with a provocative subject line and opens with a ‘racy’ image of some sort – recent examples include a woman wearing fishnet stockings, a frozen fish in a bowl, and on one occasion, a cat wearing sunglasses. There is often little content related to actual products or services, instead there are curious little stories – most of which I suspect have just been made up to make some obtuse point.

Surely this is no way to market a business. I don’t want to unsubscribe because I want to see what’s coming next, but can I – should I – make a formal complaint to someone? Is there a government department that has oversee for the maintenance of standards in this area?

Gladis Mulberny
Perplexed Newsletter Subscriber,
Sydney, Australia

 

Dear Gentle Reader

Little Miss Social demands propriety in all manner of social discourse, including within the electronic formats of blogs, newsletters and social media. But adherence to propriety is hardly as excuse to become a slave to beige. Or as they say in Russia, “The man who lives on borsch believes all food is purple.”

If a newsletter you have subscribed to has caused alarm or offence it has served a purpose beyond its original intent – it is an indication that it is time for you, Gentle Reader, to UNSUBSCRIBE. Confident electronic newsletters do not pander to the lowest common denominators of sensibility as mainstream media do. The rise of narrowcasting has made organisational communications much more fun for everybody – people who like a particular sort of thing tend to stay tuned to that sort of thing. And those who don’t, won’t. Self-managing filters such as the unsubscribe button are a boon for everybody – readers and publishers. A newsletter worth opening should serve to inform, educate or entertain in ways that must marginalise the few in order to delight the rest.

Little Miss Social can recommend some wonderfully bland newsletters to subscribe to if you are looking to make up your numbers.

Yours in Social,
Little Miss Social

Postscript. Little Miss Social is curious to read the newsletter you were referring to – it sounds just like her cup of tea. Please send the subscription details at your earliest convenience.

Would you turn up to a business meeting with a honking great food stain down the front of your shirt?

You’re welcome of course to present anywhere in any which way you choose, and granted, you’d still be the same cool individual underneath regardless of your appearance. But why force yourself to push uphill against the weight of a negative first impression? That dance-step we know as the initial business introduction can usually be reduced to one inner-thought in the mind of the person opposite: demonstrate why I should trust you.

Nobody wantonly sabotages their professionalism, yet a shit website will cruelly and silently undermine the credibility of the brand and people sitting behind it. For many of us the organisational website will be our first touch-point when undertaking pre-selection research: decisions on who we will select for a purchase, for an interview, for an invitation to speak, to partner with, to fund, or to work for. The website is a brand’s 24/7 reception area – make it a solid visitor experience… nay, make it bloody amazing. You’re only setting the scene for all future engagement after all.

So why do so many business-owners and brand guardians let themselves down by presenting an ugly, confused, piece-of-rubbish website to the world? The very same people who wouldn’t be caught dead walking into a business meeting with tomato sauce down their shirt-front? Here’s why: people will readily check themselves in a mirror before entering an important room, but rarely ever do they look at their own website. Business owners and executives are often shocked when somebody holds up a mirror to their primary online branded asset, finally getting to see what the rest of us have been painfully labouring through for years.

The underlying truth is that a website needs constant grooming – left on its own for an extended period it starts to take on a deranged, even menacing appearance… parents can be seen protectively turning the heads of their children away, and decent folk will cross to the other side of the street to avoid making eye contact. And to think it all started with one lousy little food stain.