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Professionalism

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Professionalism Wordpress SEO ExpertIn an email exchange with a client this morning I got to spell out my views on professionalism, and thought I’d share them with you to.

  1. There isn’t enough of it in the world
  2. I’m providing a service, and conduct myself as such
  3. I don’t get precious about things like a lot of developers and designers do. (Honestly, people need to get over themselves sometimes!)
  4. And this one’s really important; I both take pride in my work, and feed my family with it. Anything less than a five-star service means I’ll have less than a perfect reputation, which keeps food off my children’s table.

Point 3. is a particularly interested topic–I have known people who get so precious that they refuse to deliver what their client asks for!

Certainly, as a consultant and professional with 17 years experience, if I think a project or part thereof should be done differently to the brief, I’ll suggest it with a solid rationale. But I also accept that if someone really wants to stick with their idea, they should be able too.

In some cases it boils down to this, I know web development, design, and online community–but my clients know their own businesses better than I! That’s why I like to get to know my clients and their businesses, because I want to make sure they’re using the web as effectively as they can for their business model.

How to spot good after-sale customer care

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This article is alternatively titled: Will you still love me, tomorrow?

I had considered something much more risqué to do with trying before you buy, but it seemed a bit crass in the context I intended it.

Whenever you buy something online, you have options. Product choices, price, and most of all, who to buy from. For every product there are several dozen people queuing up to sell it to you.

And the most successful online business are unsurprisingly excellent at selling.

But how can you tell who is going to offer you good after sale care? And the the case of products you buy to interact with online (i.e., online systems that you’ll log into to manage) how can you spot the people who care about you after you’ve parted with your cash, from those who just want to keep on selling?

I’ll start by putting this out there–for all sorts of reason, GoDaddy are not a company I recommend. In fact I do my best to warn people off them.

And this is a prime example of why. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the GoDaddy homepage. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting in red, any area of the screen which is wholly, and unquestionably (I went easy on them frankly) devoted to selling.

Now to be fair their is a prominent support line number which is likely useful to both new customers, and exisiting ones.

But the only section devoted to existing customers is that small, plain looking “Log In to My Account” button on the top left. Now for sure a lot of business run this way, they are predominantly sales on the first page, and then the bulk of their information (and interactive systems) for clients is behind a password.

But I’d expect to see an obvious login box, with some graphic element drawing out attention to it. Not something so small my daughter’s Sea Monkeys could probably ride it like a tiny train.

GoDaddy’s after-sale support is well known to be, frankly, appalling. Unless you’re buying more products from them in which case they’d love to help you, yes sir, of course ma’am, have a nice day!

And you know what? I can see that right there, from their homepage. They haven’t given screen real estate to existing customers except in the most perfunctory, absolutely necessary way.

It’s just an example, albeit a solid one. Before you sign up for an online service (knowing you can very rarely try before you buy), have a look at how much they value their customers, by looking for screen space they’ve devoted to them.

 

Warren Ellis on social media, my thoughts

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Warren Ellis, English author and social commentator, wrote a wonderful post shortly before Christmas in which he discussed the end of the first wave of social media.

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

This first wave, or cycle as he calls it, can best be described as one of ecstatic enthusiasm bordering on insanity.

His closing statement wonders if anyone regrets giving up their own websites in favour of just using social platforms yet. I bet the answer is yes, and I’ve been warning people against that for a long time. More on that another day though.

To focus on the core message of the piece—yes, he’s right. People have been so far up social media’s behind that they forgot to try to turn the lights on to check where they were.

And just where are they? At the mercy of a bunch or other companies who have very right (although very little market-mandate) to change their terms of service and take what you thought was yours.

Issues of content ownership and the like aside though, I’ve been waiting for this bubble to burst for a long while—because it’s time to simply accept social media, rather than jumping up and down on the sofa about it.

Is social media exciting? Of course. New technology, ways to reach your audience and methods of interaction always are. But they aren’t the be-all and end-all. Television still has exciting content. Radio programs can still blow my mind.

Once all the hype settles down, content becomes the clarifying point, sorting the overly excited from the thoughtful.

When approaching social media for any business purpose, look at it in the context of all your online work, sites, portfolios, information, etc. If you just think outside the box a little bit, you can have a very large and well rounded arsenal of online communications at your disposal. Which can all work together to improve your bottom line.

I’ve been waiting for a long time for people to realise that as exciting and useful as social media is, it’s one tool you have at your disposal, and you have many. Make them all work together, for you.

Think of it like this, there will always be new waves. And just watching them from the beach is no good, you need to ride them. But stay on top of them where you can see what’s happening around you, rather than falling in and finding you’ve crashed up on a beach with no David Hasselhoff in sight.

via Warren Ellis » The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle.

How I work

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You’d be surprised how much of my working is done on the back of envelopes. A scribble here, a sentence there, even database structures usually start life on the back of a scrap piece of paper.

I suppose it’s how my mind works—for me the world that we create online is always an extension of the rest of our reality, so it makes sense in my mind that something starts as a physical entity before it becomes a system on a screen.

Case in point, the apparent game of dots and boxes above is actually the first draft of what became my annual Yuletide greeting card, and ended up like this:

The example I’ve given at least makes sense, you can see the transition from paper to screen. But so many of my scrawlings could only make sense to my mind…I’m reminded that we all have different ways of planning, structuring and beginning a new creative endeavour.

How do you work? Scribbles? Itemised lists? Walls of Post-it notes?

Facebook groups error

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It happened to me.

I logged into Facebook yesterday to find the list of groups I was a part of was huge. Well over a hundred, some I left years ago, some I barely recognised (short lived in-jokes from 2007) and others I wish I didn’t remember.

I was suddenly a member of every group I’d ever joined, even ones that had been deleted years ago.

Further proof that Facebook really does remember everything we do—forever.

To make matters worse, groups I set up, and had needed to remove people a few people from over the years (for unacceptable behaviour) had all the offenders and their content reinstated.

Facebook have admitted there was a mistake, which on the one hand is positive, at least they’re standing up to say an error was made.

I don’t think they’re being honest about how many people it’s affected. Everyone I’ve interacted with over the past 24 hours has had it crop up. But my main concern is simply that an error like this was able to happen. People who had left groups, private, closed groups, were now able to see all the content since they left.

It was a mistake sure, but mistakes of this magnitude shouldn’t be happening in a company the size of Facebook. I’m beginning to wonder if I test the online communities, sites and systems I’m involved with more rigorously.

After all, I’ve never had a privacy scare. Not one. 🙂

When all is said and done though, and statements are issued and emergency fixed made, here’s my final take on the whole thing:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/petermahoney/status/274091747422916608″]

LinkedIn; a kitten free zone.

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I’m the first to admit, I struggled with LinkedIn at first. Not that it’s hard to use or anything, in fact it’s incredibly simple. But I struggled to find its place in my social-media-life.

I’ve had my profile up there for years, and I’d fleshed it out (past jobs, current responsibilities, photo, all the things that seemed important) but I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

All my colleagues and ex-colleagues were on Facebook. LinkedIn let me post messages and share other people’s updates, but so much less then my other social profiles.

Then I started using it regularly; I just made sure I logged in a couple of times a week. Recommended a couple of people. Wrote to someone I could only find on LinkedIn that I hadn’t spoken to for a while.

Before I knew it I became a regular. And the more I used it, the more people found me. Job offers, professional queries, community discussions, they’ve all become an important part of what I do.

I’ve found even people I do communicate with elsewhere interact differently on LinkedIn. We act in the way we want to present ourselves to our workmates, bosses and clients.

The first is to post directly to it. In this case you’re just giving away your content for free to a massive company. They’ll get the SEO authority for that post, not you. And while you might plan to have a link to your site on the bottom of those posts you give them, links coming out of their website are marked as nofollow, which means they don’t get used by Google (or other major search engines) as a way of passing on authority.

Oh and of course some folks repost, posting the content on the social network and their own site. Which simply leads to duplicate content issues.

The second method is to just post a link to the article as it appears on your site. So you’re sharing a link rather than the text. The trouble again is that those links are nofollow, so you won’t get any SEO juice for it.

But social networks are generally quite protective of their own SEO authority, they’re not in the business of passing that on to anyone who posts on their platforms. SO I prefer that second option, just link back to your own site. Forget about social networks for SEO. But it’s still good to interact with people on them, and hopefully those users might follow a link to your own site – then they’re your audience.

One really positive thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn though is it’s easy to accidentally give them your SEO authority. SEO authority is a way of referring to the search engine kudos, or points you might have. There are traditionally two ways most people publish content on LinkedIn.

This is the advantage of LinkedIn. Not only can you build your online community, but you can be sure that your interactions on it are going to be framed in a professional manner, and of a higher quality. To this day I’ve not seen a single photo of a kitten on LinkedIn.

Please don’t be the first.

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