Think Archives - Page 6 of 7

Douglas Bailey Can’t Hear You

July 15, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

Don’t bother talking to Douglas Bailey. First of all, he’s smarter than you, so he doesn’t care what you say. Second, because you’re not working for a dying industry that can’t figure out how to save itself, you are not worthy to share your opinion. Third, since he has no control over his own actions, you need to change how you want to use the web.

Douglas Bailey took the time to write an editorial at the Boston Globe’s website called, Got a comment? Keep it to yourself. It is the heart of everything that is currently wrong with the online newspaper business.

He goes about reminding us of how hard the reporters work to get the story, the long hours of digging, triple checking the facts, editorial reviews, fights with their editors over a paragraph or two that might cause a problem. Now on top of that, says Bailey, the reporter has to put up with the indignity of actually having to see the unwashed masses comment on his pristine work.

This is insane. We know that newspapers made a mistake and devalued their product by giving it away for free on the Internet. Some rebuilding could begin by removing these reader forums and restoring journalism’s dignity.

Newspapers didn’t make a mistake by putting their product online and not charging for it, newspapers are making a mistake by believing that nothing has changed in the last 20 years and they should still be able to do whatever they want and get paid top-dollar for it. I have some hard news for Douglas and his friends still holding on by their fingertips at The Boston Globe – you’re not as important as you think, in fact, everyday you are becoming less important because you continue to look down your nose at the very people you want to influence.

He reminds me of Spaulding in Caddyshack who upon seeing Danny Noonan all dressed up at Judge Smails club greets him with, “Ahoy Paloy”.

People like Douglas Bailey remind me of Clay Shirky’s chapter in Here Comes Everybody where he talks about the Abbott of Sponheim coming to the defense of the pre-printing press scribes. In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply.

Bailey finishes off his argument by sticking his fingers in his ears, closing his eyes and singing loudly while walking back to his house:

By the way, don’t bother posting any comments directed to me when this article appears on the Web. I won’t see them. Instead, go start your own website or blog or buy a legitimate newspaper, or write a letter to the editor, or an op-ed (and sign your own name to it). If you really have something interesting to say, I’ll find you.

Well, I for one, don’t believe him. I think Douglas Bailey is a coward. I think he’s afraid of the future and is unable to keep up with the changes that are re-shaping the once insulated world he was once involved with.

Who Do Newspapers Need To Attract To Survive?

July 4, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

There’s a discussion going on in every newspaper company in the United States, it goes something like this, “… we need to attract a younger audience.” But, now they’re talking about their online newspaper audience.

The problem stems from the same problems that plagues “oldies” radio. The younger audience doesn’t want what you’re offering. If the oldies station wants to attract high schoolers they need to change the music they play, if established newspaper sites want to attract a younger audience, they also need to change the very core way they’re serving their content.

massive change photo by: 416style — MASSIVE CHANGE

That type of change does not start with the online group, it starts with the news room.

If a journalist can’t see the revolutionary changes happening around him, he won’t realize that his job is now so much more than just writing. He now must build an audience. The old built in newspaper audience is now gone.

In the new world, when his story is commented on and he never responds, he misses an opportunity to connect with his audience, misses a chance to grown his audience, misses a chance to be better than 95% of his fellow journalists.

When a blogger links to his story, and the writer doesn’t reach out, he misses an opportunity to grow his circle of influence and misses a chance to start a conversation with a wider audience.

I read stories that news organizations are now “using” Twitter, but pushing out headlines with no context and no ability to answer incoming tweets does not constitute using Twitter in my mind.

I suggested to my friend Kathy Vetter down at the Star-Telegram to use Twitter like it is suppose to be used. To hand craft tweets, to link to anything the S-T audience might find interesting, even it it wasn’t in their paper! She started almost immediately. Over the past three months Star-Telegram’s followers has increased dramatically.

When I see a tweet like:

Morning, all. It’s going to be hot again, after a couple of “nice” days. High around 98 today. http://bit.ly/zPwT0 (Oh, and Rangers win!)

it makes me happy that some of the McClatchy papers “get it”. Take a look at the conversational style of that tweet, that’s not aimed at “younger readers”, it’s aimed at everyone.

That’s who newspapers need to aim for – everyone. I’m certainly not in the “younger” demographic that online newspapers think they need to appeal to, but I am someone they should be trying to convert to become a daily reader. I am a news junkie, I am online roughly 14 hours every day, I read at least a dozen blogs regularly and I watch the local television news daily. The last time I check my local online newspaper site, I was looking for information about a Memorial Day parade, which they had nothing on. I would say on average, I visit the Raleigh News & Observer site about once or twice a year.

If online newspaper sites want to compete for me, they need to put in some effort. They need to change the core way they do business. Here’s what I would prescribe for online newspapers.

Optimize your headlines so I can search and find what I want
Write about what I want to read about
Let me help you by adding content, comments, photos, videos and my expertise
Read your comments and respond where appropriate
Link out to other sources within your stories, I don’t believe that you know everything
Take more pictures, a story without a photo stinks
Take more videos
Treat your readers like you treat your neighbors, when they wave… wave back
The community does not want you to fail, just give them any reason to support you

It’s not about attracting younger readers, it’s about changing the very culture within the news organization. When they’re ready for that, ready to be part of the community, the younger readers will come, and so will everyone else.

Can Online Newspaper Sites Survive?

June 18, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

50 years ago, Joe Morello wanted to play a kick ass drum solo. He pestered his band leader who was also in the mood to do something different from Stardust and Body & Soul.

In the end, The Dave Brubeck Quartet did something that changed Jazz forever. Jazz hits had never been written in 5/4 time, because nobody can dance to it. The Columbia Records’ sales force were scared to sell it because it sounded… well, it just sounded so different.

But when DJ’s started playing it, and the switchboards would light up.

Take Five became the first million-selling modern jazz hit, a landmark at the intersection between jazz and pop culture.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet had already cut a bunch of recordings and had a pretty good following by 1959. But they decided to take a risk. The risk lost them some of their existing fans. They lost the ones that wanted traditional, “common time” 4/4 beats. But what they built instead was a community of true fans. Not just people who listened to their songs on the radio, but people who would say to their friends, “Dave Brubeck is coming to play next month, come see it with me, you’ll love it.”

That is what I think will save newspaper websites. Love. The same kind of love that has built up a community force-field around Wikipedia, 37 Signals, Apple, and Barack Obama. People become invested. When you try bad-mouth the iPhone, an Apple fanboy will jump to it’s defense. Point out Ruby-on-Rails shortcomings, supporters point to the success of 37 Signals. Point out how cluttered and user-unfriendly the News & Observer’s website is, and we all nod in agreement. No community. No passion. No fanboys. Why is that? Where is our community?

Look at the News & Observer’s website. What is the most important story? Where does the editor want you to focus?

What is the purpose of this website?

If you ask the sales manager, he may say the purpose is to have a platform to deliver advertising. If you ask the online editor, he may say the purpose is to publish news to keep the public informed. Other answers I have heard over time include, “to get back some of the revenue we’re losing on the print side” and “what do you mean?”

What if you asked users? What are they using it for? What if we let them use it for whatever they wanted, what would they choose? Would they want to continue to be only a consumer? Are we helping them? Are we connecting them to others who can help them?

My contention is that our failure has nothing to do with metrics, local visitors or site redesigns. I think it’s because we don’t care about our audience. We don’t know our audience. We make zero effort to connect with them, because newspapers are ingrained with the belief that the very people we write for, offer us nothing in return. We are a 20th century, one-way communication platform. We’re famous, they’re not. We’re important, they’re not. We own the ink, the presses, the paper and the delivery trucks and they don’t. Well, that’s not really the case anymore.

I agree with Clay Shirky, in a world where publishing is now effortless, the decision to publish something isn’t terribly momentous. For a generation growing up without the scarcity that made publishing such a serious-minded pursuit, the written word has no special value in and of itself.

Brian Solis's Social Media Prism — Brian Solis’s Social Media Prism

If you use MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, YouTube or any one of the other social sites, you are more than just a consumer. You are joining the throngs of symmetrical participants who have the ability to receive information, but also the ability to send it. Amateur production means that the category of “consumer” is now a temporary behavior, rather than a permanent identity. The term “journalist” is also rapidly becoming an activity rather than a profession.

It’s okay to admit that you don’t “get it”, you’re not alone. Merlene Davis at the Lexington Herald-Leader obviously doesn’t, and neither does her editor. In a story about her joining twitter there’s no LINK to her twitter page. But, just because you don’t get it, don’t think that “it’s” stupid. Right now there’s a woman trying to finish up her doctoral dissertation, but she’s putting it off by reading status updates from her friends on Facebook, or following links posted in her Twitter stream.

That same woman will follow almost any link her friends post, because she knows she can trust them, they are her friends, even if she’s never met them and they live in Australia. Her friends have permission to send her links, in fact, she likes when they find cool stuff and forward it on, because she’s interested in most of the same things.

When we force our visitors to endure a flash ad that takes over their entire screen, what is that really saying? I can tell you what I think when I see it… We value this advertiser more than you. How long can we continue to behave like this and think it’s the way to grow?

Seth Godin has a post called, The web doesn’t care where he observes:

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn’t please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make the marketer happy.

That’s the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn’t invented by business people, and it doesn’t exist to help your company make money.

It’s entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn’t owe you anything.

Our grandparents had time to read a newspaper everyday. Our parents had time to scan the paper most days. We have have the local tv newscast on in the background as we’re brushing our teeth or getting the kids dressed. What will the next generation have time for?

Think about what you make time for in your own life. Who do you make time for? That’s your community.

Do you have any online-only communities? How about communities that span both, like meetup.com? What communities would or could sprout up around our sites if we encouraged that type of behavior? What if we provided a way for news junkies to gather? What about people that are passionate about state politics in the capital sites like Raleigh and Sacramento? What if the site actively added value to a group? What if the Star-Telegram’s Dallas Cowboys group gained them exclusive access to Cowboys stuff – all based on the S-T’s long association covering the team? What if the Charlotte Observer brought a member of their photography group down on the field at a Panther game with a news photographer? Would that type of behavior create a stronger bond with the community? How many bloggers would start writing about that? How fast would competitors try to catch up?

What about a community built around making the website better? If you created a place for real discussion to flourish, there’s no better place to get ideas and keep your finger on the pulse of the very people who can help your site grow and be accepted by a wider audience.

How about starting today?

Twitter Traffic Multiplier

May 12, 2009 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

Yesterday, at 2 o’clock in the morning, Pete Cashmore at Mashable tweets, Reading: “Why You Should Be Twittering More”. A bit surprising considering that I wrote that post back on February 5th, but not totally weird since he’s referenced in it, and it’s about the effect of a twitter run. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the extra 2,500 visitors and 50 new twitter followers, but there was a more interesting part of the day – the data.

The “Twitter Effect” that hit my post yesterday served to crystallize some ideas I’d had for a while about using visitor data related to twitter traffic.

I use TweetDeck, and I know a ton of people access twitter without going to their twitter.com page. Using an application like TweetDeck means that when I follow a link, I get to that page with a blank referrer field. That makes the job of analyzing twitter generated traffic a little bit harder.

Back to my own data from yesterday. I know that the traffic to the post was as close to 100% twitter driven as is possible.

Knowing that lets me pull out specific data.

The post in question received about 2.725 visits yesterday. Of those 1,074 came from the twitter.com domain. There were also 1,353 that showed up with no referrer (aka direct/bookmarked).

There’s a chance that a handful of people happened by a post that during the previous month attracted a whopping 21 visits, but for this argument, let’s agree to ignore that.

That means that roughly 50% of the twitter traffic yesterday came in naked.

Does that mean we should all be multiplying our Twitter traffic x 2 to get a more realistic idea of it’s true impact?

I would love to hear about any other cases where there’s real data to lean on to make this argument or to refute it.

Do You Run Your Business Like A Used Car Lot?

May 5, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Last week was stressful for me. My wife had sold her car quicker than we planned, which meant we were under the gun to replace it with her desired mini van. As everyone knows, having to go out and talk to car sellers is officially considered worse than waterboarding by the UN. So we looked for our gently used Toyota Sienna on craigslist, cars.com and autotrader.com.

We found a handful that looked good and started to go look at them in person. We ended up driving about 500 miles those few days. Most of the visits were about what you’d expect – not pleasurable.

One of our last stops was out in Greenville, NC at Pleasure Ride Auto. The name had us a bit worried, but the van they had on the lot had us hopeful. They closed at 1pm on Saturday afternoon, and we were running late. My wife called at about 12:45 telling them we were still half an hour out. They said they’d wait for us. When she hung up, we both sighed, thinking there would be nobody there when we pulled in.

We got there and sure enough Brad and his dad were both still there waiting for us to arrive. We took the van for a spin and liked it, but had one more to look at the next day, so we told them we’d call them.

Sunday’s car was terrible, totally misrepresented in the ad. So we decided we’d get the one out in Greenville.

Monday morning I looked for a local mechanic out in Greenville to give the car the once over looking for anything drastic. Once I found one, I called Pleasure Ride Auto and asked if they could drop off the van at his shop. Brad said he would take car of it and drove it right over there by 8:30am.

A while later, I called the mechanic and he said it looked fine. With that, I started the drive out to Greenville.

I picked up the van at the mechanic where he told me about a few small items. I drove it back to Pleasure Auto’s lot where it was now lunch time. I showed Brad the paperwork the mechanic gave me, and he offered to fix the 2 things that were wrong (a brake light was out and a screw in one of the tires). He suggested I grab some lunch and when I got back it would be ready to go.

True to his word, after lunch, everything was fixed. He spent about 10 minutes filling out some paperwork with me. He called my insurance agent to make sure all that was taken care of, attached the temporary license plate and also gave me the packet of documentation I would need to give to the DMV.

I was driving back home shortly after.

I started thinking on the drive home just how unusual that used car dealership was. Clean, professional and honest are not usually associated with buying a used car, but at the Pleasure Ride Auto lot it’s what I found.

What are the words your customers use to describe you and your business?

Get More Visitors From Google & Yahoo Search

April 7, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

What percentage of your visits are coming from search queries? Would you like more? When they find you, do they bounce away just as quickly?

If you want more people to find your site via search engines, you have to do a better job packaging your content. If you want them to stay, you need to make sure the important stuff is “front-loaded”.

basketball-hoop — Basketball Sky photo by: laffy4k

Let’s look at a very popular story today on the News & Observer’s site about UNC’s basketball championship last night. The title of the article is: “Not even close: UNC rolls to title”. The headline is the #1 story on their homepage.

Let’s look at a few different ways to view that headline.

From a pure search perspective, the only word in it that may get searched this morning is UNC. Nowhere in the headline are other words that will show up in searches, like tournament, ncaa, basketball, tar heels, michigan, detroit, college.

For a print newspaper, that title works fine, but not on the web. There is reams of research that shows you only a word or two to grab someone’s attention. Jakob Nielsen’s recent article suggests you have 11 characters. If you chopped all your headlines down to 11 characters, would your readers still understand what you are trying to say? In the example above: “Not even cl” = FAIL, we have no idea what that link is going to be about.

There’s no reason professional writers and editors should be making a mistake like that, it’s a simple change to get; “UNC wins title: not even close”. The first 11 characters: “UNC wins ti” gives you a pretty good idea of what the link is about.

When a visitor clicks on the link to go to the full story, the CMS injects the headline into the title tag of the page, meaning they’ve just increased the amount of “lame” in that headline by a factor of 2. For the search engines, the page title holds a lot of weight.

The funny part of the News & Observers weak headline is that their sub-headline is much better: “North Carolina sets records in building a 55-34 halftime lead, then holds off Michigan State to win its second NCAA championship in five seasons”.

Moving on to the second half of the equation, bounce rate. Visitors will bounce when they get to your page and it’s not what they want/expect/need/or it’s just lame looking. In this case, Google’s research shows that you have roughly 8 seconds to grab their attention. Let’s go back to the example. Here’s about what you get in 8 seconds, “DETROIT — As he went down the bench, alternately pumping a fist and hugging his teammates with a minute left Monday night, you could see it…”. Did that grab you? There is also some small color and black & white photos rotating within the story.

Once again, would work fine in print, but not so great on the web. It just seems a little flat to me, but I know my friends who are Tar Heels will tell me there’s nothing flat about a UNC championship story.

If the N&O had me on the payroll to advise them on SEO, I would have set up a special NCAA Tournament section 2 months ago. I would have been pouring small stories into it that were optimized for all the keywords March Madness generates. I would have been trying to tap into the craziness of the NC State, Duke and UNC fans. Getting them to text back updates from the tournament. Upload photos, tweets, facebook status updates and anything else that would overwhelm other tournament coverage sites (especially for ACC teams).

It’s not rocket science, it’s thinking about your content is a particular way. Our brains are processing information from left to right – so start thinking left to right when you’re composing.

Forcing Your Customers To Register

March 29, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I understand that newspaper sites are in turmoil. I understand they need to generate more revenue. I don’t understand some of they ways they try to accomplish it.

Many of the McClatchy newspaper sites set a threshold for the number of pages a visitor can view before forcing them to register. Some sites have that number as low as 10 pages every 6 months. The theory being that once you force a visitors to register, you can then tell the advertisers, “look I have X subscribers”. Advertisers will be impressed by the number and spend millions of dollars on gigantic flashing banner ads.

You still have time to turn around — Contemporary Art in Coppenhagen photo by: Cyb3rbl@ck

The rest of theory is a little fuzzier, but goes something like this, “Once they register they’ll also be able to sign up for daily emails which highlight our top stories. They’ll also have the privilege of commenting on stories.” The reason I think that part is a bit fuzzy, is that many of the people who register don’t use real information. 10 Minute Mail has made using your real email unnescessary. Why would I give a newspaper my real information? What good could possible come out of that information transaction for me?

I bought Avinash Kaushik’s book on Web Analytics a while ago and one thing he says in there rang especially true:

It is critical for near-long-term success and for long-term success that at the heart of your web analytics program you are asking not what the website is doing for your company, but this question: How is the website doing in terms of delivering for the customers?

The fact that sites like Bug Me Not even exist is a testament to how truely unhelpful forcing people to register is. Thousands of visitors hate the process enough to take extra steps so others can avoid registering. It means that there are probably thousands of “toxic accounts” in the registration databases.

There is nothing I can think of that a newspaper has that I can’t get somewhere else without registering. If it’s a local reporter that only writes one column a week, maybe I’d just stop reading it, but anything else I’ll just leave your site and find it at your competitors.

From an SEO perspective, locking down content means the search engines can’t get to it. To get around that, some sites use JavaScript to “lock down” visitors, which means visitors can just disable JavaScript and bypass the gate keepers.

So here’s a idea for newspaper sites that are still stuck in the mindset of the print era, where you controlled the flow of information, stop making me hate your site. You are no longer my only option. Realize that without me coming to your site, you will fail. If you make me hate your site enough, it may carry over to your print product. Give me a reason to love your site, then I’ll register because I’ll want more from you.

Even Though We Say Social Media, Mostly We Mean Twitter

March 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I admit, I stole the title of this post from Chris Brogan. He probably won’t mind since he’s spouting smart stuff all the time on Twitter.

The point was driven home by a tweet I saw from Pistachio which talked about the LA Times having 99 Twitter accounts. Since I have been pushing for McClatchy to define a social media strategy for our papers, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My first question was if the accounts were just headline dumps or real people interacting.

Andrew Nystrom was quick to jump to his paper’s defense:

Of 99 http://latimes.com/tweets accounts, ~1/2 are non-RSS. Goal is to get all mostly human-powered asap.

All 99 @latimes accts at http://latimes.com/tweets are ‘official’ per se; some individual streams may mix personal + professional.

I tossed out one more quick question, asking if the accounts were mandated by the management, or if the bubbled up from the hoi polloi?

Bottom-up, based 100% on reader input. See http://tr.im/hly7 interview by @jayrosen_nyu‘s @MsBeat + http://latimes.com/sm for details.

This is the type of thing that gives me hope. Newspapers get it! Not so much mine, but still, the LA Times is indeed a newspaper that seems to understand that they are there for the public, not the other way around.

Twitter is the hottest cog in the social media engine right now. The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month.

The power of Twitter is the way it lets you segment your audience. It’s a combination search engine, blog pulse taker, social media ticker, and instant feedback thermometer.

If your business isn’t leveraging Twitter, you do so at your own risk.

If You Don’t Pay Attention To The Ads, We’ll Make Them Even Bigger!

March 12, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

I spend many hours every day working in the online newspaper world. The print side of the business is in serious decline all over the country, which is putting more pressure on online to make more money.

Since you did such a good job of ignoring banner ads, we made them flash. Still, you ignored them, so we made them interactive with Flash. Still you ignored them, so we made them slide into the area you were trying to read. Still you ignored them. We even made walk on ads where your local car dealer would walk, and talk at you down at the bottom of your browser, still you stood aloof. Well, you have done so at your own peril, because the ad world is preparing a trio of new monsters that will not be ignored.

green_monster — The Green Monster at Fenway Park photo by: alex

AdWeek reports:

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ESPN and over a dozen more of the Web’s most-trafficked sites that belong to the Online Publishers Association have agreed to run three new ad units that they hope will lure brand advertising dollars.

The new units are:

• The fixed panel, a 336-by-860-pixel banner that is wider than the standard skyscraper and follows users as they scroll down the page.

• The XXL box, a 468-by-648-pixel unit that can expand with video.

• The push-down, a 970-by-418-pixel placement that takes up over half of the page before rolling up.

Yes, you read that last one right, a 970-by-418 takeover ad!

Is this the right way to reach you?

Can anyone tell me about a time you clicked on an online ad and bought something? I would love to hear what types of things can get immediate action like that.

No One Under 40 Uses The Yellowpages

March 11, 2009 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

If you don’t have a wired telephone in your house, and you have google in your pocket, why would you use a phonebook to find a business?

In the title I say no one under 40, but I’m 43 and I haven’t used a phonebook in at least 10 years. With smartphones like the iPhone becoming so mainstream that they are no longer considered “crazy gadgets”, this trend is still picking up steam.

Mobile growth in particular was covered well by ClickZ’s Enid Burns in “U.S. Mobile Ad Revenue to Grow Significantly through 2013″:

The percentage of mobile searches that have local intent will increase from 28 percent in 2008 to 35 percent in 2013.
There are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25 percent of online users.
Approximately 15 percent of iPhone applications are local.

Street in Boston Waterfront photo by wili_hybrid

Can you be found quickly and easily by someone lookin for what you offer? Are you at least listed in the local directories? Surely you’ve put yourself on the search engine local business maps, right?

Think about what you spend on that yellow page ad every year. Could you spend an equal amount on some basic SEO and see an even better return?

Take the test.

Can you summarize your business in under 160 characters?
Do you have a couple of good digital photos?
Do you have a website you can link to?
Do you know your street adress and phone number?
Do you have 3 or 4 hours you can spend to build your business?

Well, what are you waiting for? You have hundreds of people who are looking for you. Go, go get found!

Are You A Yes Man?

March 3, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

When your customers ask you to do something a bit out of the ordinary, do you find a reason to say “no”, or do you try to figure out how to say “yes”?

Seth Godin had a smart post yesterday about people who try to say yes. He uses a common whipping boy, the guy behind the counter at the local post office. He compares the person behind the USPS counter to the person behind the FedEx counter. One of them tries to figure out a way to get to “no”, the other tries to overcome the problems to get to “yes”.

I like to think of myself as a yes man. I tell my customers and clients that anything they want is possible, given enough time and/or money. Sometimes it comes back to bit me, because I get overloaded, but not very often.

There’s a big advantage to being a yes man. People view you differently. If you have to tell them “no”, they generally accept it, whereas if you always say “no”, they then start looking for a way around you to get what they need.

When you hear managers or co-workers say “no”, do you ask why not? Sometimes there is a valid reason, but many times there is a very sketchy answer with no real substance behind it. If you feel a soft answer, try pushing it to try to get it to “yes”.

You’ll feel better being a problem solver than being the problem.

Why You Should Be Twittering More

February 5, 2009 by Phil Buckley 7 Comments

Not everyone in your business gets it. When they walk by your desk and see you looking at Facebook or Twitter they sneer, or even say, “get back to work.”

They don’t “get it”, because you are working!

The social media space is becoming more important everyday. You can tell it’s gaining influence because traditional marketers are now spamming it in hopes of proving some ROI plan they sold to their boss.

Recently, activity on Twitter crashed servers with an overwhelming surge of traffic and has been dubbed The Twitter Effect.

How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

First of all, of course it was a big factor that Pete Cashmore is one of the people on Twitter with the most followers (people who have subscribed to his tweets). According to Twitterholic, he has more than 50,000 followers.

But the key here may not be just the number of followers of the initial tweeter, but the retweets. A retweet is when a Twitter user resends a message so that his/her own followers can share it. Pete Cashmore was the most retweeted Twitter user during the period when the affected blog went down (according to Retweetist).

In that case, the tweet was:

“Reading: “How to use Twitter to find your next job” – http://tinyurl.com/8n8bm8“

Clearly a hot topic put forward by a respected member of the Twitter community. Of course, don’t overlook the good work done by Michael Litman who came up with a powerful title for his post, good social media is usually tightly intertwined with good seo/sem.

So how do you become a bright light within the Twitterati? It takes time and work. One of the best analogies I have come across was by Todd Defren at SHIFT communications. He talks about entering the arena the same way you would enter the neighborhood block party if you had just moved into the neighborhood.

You’d hang back a little, insert yourself mildly into a wedge of conversation, and ingratiate yourself. You’d be a gentleman.

And yet there might still be moments of awkwardness. All the neighbors already know each other. There are cliques. There’s context, politics and in-jokes to figure out. You wouldn’t expect to be the life of the party right away. But, you knew that going in… so, to help grease the skids, you brought some nice bottles of wine and some of your killer BBQ ribs.

Can you dedicate 2 minutes out of each hour to check twitter? That would only be 16 minutes in an average work day, you probably spend more time than that figuring out where to go for lunch.

Start slowly by following people you respect in your area, or your business. For example if you are a newspaper in Raleigh, you might want to check out twitterholic and see who the top tweeters are. You could even use something like TwitterLocal to see who might be worth following that tweets less often, nearby tweets shows you who is tweeting all around you right now.

Once you get an idea of the ebb and flow within Twitter, you can start contributing. Don’t start selling your site, start selling yourself. You are someone who contributes good stuff. You add to the conversation. When you respond to others, help them, they will allow you in. They will “follow” you. Once real people start to follow you because they think you add something valuable, you have made progress.

Maybe you were following Janis Krums when he was the first person to get a close-up photo of “the Miracle on the Hudson” using his iPhone and Twitter/TwitPic just moments after the crash.

If you were a newsie and could retweet (RT) that you your followers quickly, they would have been impressed. You probably would have picked up a few new followers.

Another bonus is that you are sometimes privy to information that slips out via Twitter. You might even come across a Tweet from the head of the BBC newsroom, Peter Horrocks, to the director of global news, Richard Sambrook about some new appointments at the BBC that were meant to stay private.

Then comes the next hard question. Michael Gray had a great tweet a while ago:

ok for all those people out there who want more followers on twitter what will you do with them, for them or to them when they follow you

If you had 50,000 tweeple following you, what would you do with them? Whatever you answer is, that’s the reason you should be twittering more.

Do You Need A Site Redesign?

January 29, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I had an interesting talk this afternoon with the Innovation and Product Development guy at one of the McClatchy markets. He wants to do a site redesign. He wanted my input.

A complete redesign is a big project. It means a minimum of 4 months of hard work, and what does it get you? Let’s think about the pros and cons of a complete overhaul.

The current site is not awesome, but it is not terrible. In the galaxy of news sites, it is clearly in the middle. In many ways, that IS the problem. Seth Godin says it best in his book The Big Moo : Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable:

In the old days, showing up was 95 percent of success. If you offered a good product at a good price in a reliable way, you’d do fine. Being local was a good thing. Having a long track record helped. Decent quality and personal service mattered as well.

No longer. Good enough isn’t good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic – and are being met every single day. We don’t just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away.

Now that brings up another part of that equation. What blows away people when they visit a news site? Is it shiny objects or is it news that is compelling? I think it’s a little bit shiny, but mostly a connection with the readers.

I asked him if he has invited readers to give feedback, maybe ask a dozen or so in, and listen to them about what they want from the site. “Marketing is working on a set of questions”, was the answer.

Marketing really only needs one question, “What can we do to make our site better for you?” After asking that question, you listen and take notes. Since you have no idea what the answers are going to be, just keep an open mind. The only other question I would ask is, “What do you use our site for now?”

The challenge for a web designer at a news site is the fact that a cool widget rarely makes the difference for where someone goes to get their news. But, people generally are drawn to stories where there is compelling photos and/or video, and that is usually lacking in the McClatchy online culture.

Detroit City Council Gone Wild

Because the journalists are still writing for print first, they don’t think to snap a couple of digital pictures, or grab the flip video camera on their way over to the city hall meeting, but you never know what could crop up. Maybe even the wife of a US Congressman will call someone Shrek and keep yelling, “Do it baby!”

There’s a reason that sites like Huffington Post and Human Events have devoted followings. They know what their audience wants, they respond to a constant stream of comments, and they generate more content to satisfy them.

Newspapers have never had to compete like that. Now, on the web, all but the very largest news sites need to find their sweet spot. I can’t imagine that many people in San Luis Obispo California went to sanluisobispo.com on election nights to watch the state by state results come in on November 4th. But when you start planning your trip to California wine country, you won’t start at CNN.

Christopher Penn just wrote a fantastic article about Money as Trust where he ends with:

What should YOU be doing right now, in this economy? Building trust. Building relationships. Strengthening your network. Growing your network. Why? Relationships can exist without money – barter, trade, collaboration. Money can’t exist without relationships, because without trust, money itself fails.

Dedicate yourself to what you do best, local, in fact, hyper-local coverage that gives your readers an angle or insights the can’t get anywhere else. Try to reach out and get you 1,000 true fans. Respond to the community. Use twitter, use Mixx, use Social|Median, use digg, use reddit, use Facebook, use every avenue open to you. But don’t use them like a lazy news organization, use them like you are part of the community. Respect the 80/20 rule.

So I guess in the end, you probably don’t need a site redesign, but you probably need a culture redesign.

Online news is not like the old print newsroom, which is a good thing. Online and print have very little in common. When cars took over from horses, the stable owners didn’t force you to park you car in there, just because that’s the way it had always been done.

The answer is change. Adapt or die. There are plenty of examples of newspapers that are dead or dying. You still have a chance to turn on a dime and adapt – take advantage of it.

Moving Beyond Traditional SEO

January 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Last week, Rae Hoffman wrote a fantastic article about the need to think beyond traditional SEO practices. She explains clearly and with a compelling example why you can’t just optimize your site then sit back and wait for the traffic to pour in.

A few weeks back we launched a little site called Tweetwasters. It wasn’t a “serious effort” or anything we planned to monetize. It was a quick dip into the world of Twitter applications. But it also gave me some actual hard data back up what I had known in my gut to be true for a long while… traffic can have a direct impact on your indexing and rankings.

The old adage that “the rich get richer” is full effect on the web. If you have a popular site, you will move up the search engines ranking scheme, even if you do zero on page SEO. Rae offers the ramp up (and eventual ramp down) of Tweetwasters as a perfect example.

Good core marketing and the occasional yet regular viral success (it doesn’t need to be large scale, especially if your industry isn’t) – both of which amount to driving traffic at the end of the day – can get you good rankings with or without SEO.

Rae hits the nail on the head when reminds us that SEO is but one component to marketing your site. You need to build your user base. You need to cultivate your 1000 true fans, and that doesn’t happen by focusing solely on your on page optimization.

2009 is already seeing the impact of search engine algorithm tweaks, not to mention wholesale changes like search wiki at Google. How are you marketing your site? Are you in a sector that could benefit from you spending some time and energy on Twitter or one of the other social platform? Are you using press releases?

Working with some of the best newspapers in the country is usually great, but some are slow to grasp the change in the way their product is being consumed. Google or Yahoo, more often than not, now decide what newspaper/news-site has the story I search for. The carefully laid out path of homepage->sports section->high school sports->story is rarely followed, because I am taken directly to the story. So while the editor wants to focus all of the resources and cool stuff onto the homepage and section fronts, many visitors never see it. The lowly story page is left as an after thought.

There’s a reason that CNN had some phenominal traffic numbers on Inauguration day, they have a following that thinks of them as “the” place to go get their breaking news. What are you”the” place for?

Redesign Do’s and Don’ts

January 6, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

My friends down in Fort Worth, Texas are planning a major redesign of the Star-Telegram.com website.

A couple years ago, I helped them move from their old Knight-Ridder platform, to their new McClatchy CMS. The move was major, but the design was kept the same. Then about a year ago, they gave their site a face lift and that’s where they’re at now.

I was talking with Cody at the Star-Telegram this afternoon about some of the design, SEO and core functionality they should consider for their next redesign. When I started thinking about it, it became a pretty long list. Then it dawned on me that many of the suggestions are not limited to Star-Telegram.

So my #1 piece of advice is… Take 1/2 the stuff you currently have on your section fronts OFF, maybe even 2/3 of it. For some reason, there is a perception that visitors will not look any deeper than the homepage. Let me be clear about this one… on a normal site, that may be true, but when someone goes to a newspaper site, they don’t expect everything to be on the front page. The people laying out the print paper certainly understand this, they don’t feel the need to have 300 stories highlighted on the front page.

Today there was 353 links on their homepage, 205 of them internal. That seems like a lot to me. It’s not that far out of the “norm” for a news site, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. The homepage highlights over 20 other sections. That must be reduced. It’s overwhelming, and keeps the visitor from being able to focus on any one thing.

#2. Stop publishing stories to multiple sections. The McClatchy CMs allows you to publish stories to multiple sections, which makes sense in some sense, but it’s actual application makes it a problem. One of the main problems is from the SEO perspective of duplicate content. Having exactly the same article repeated 3 or 4 times is not optimal. Until the CMS can give that story a single url, that is used in multiple sections, it should be avoided.

#3 Cull down you sections. You don’t need 350 different sections. If I were the CMS Czar, all the sites would be limited to 40 sections.

#4 Stop publishing stories that are only 2 paragraphs. This one is certainly not specific to Star-Telegram. There are lots of stories that are “updates” or “breaking” that are just too short. I understand if the story is something important, but that is rarely the case.

#5 Start linking. Another one that plagues all the McClatchy property. Did I miss the memo that said, “don’t ever put a link in a story”? Understand that no one thinks you are the ultimate source on every subject. The heart of the web is that articles are hyperlinked.

#6 Add assets to every story you can. I want to see a picture of the kid that won the contest, or the teacher that was arrested or even the house that was raided. In fact, I also want you to embed a Google map of the crack house that was raided so I know where it is.

#7 Work with bloggers. Bloggers are not the enemy. They want exposure, you could use their content/photos/podcasts or whatever your people are failing to get you.

A couple weeks ago, I was adding some assets to a high school football story for The Fresno Bee, and ran across a fantatsic collection high school football photos by John Canton who had a couple of kids playing for the team. He had hundreds thousands of fantastic photos available, and he made them available to anyone. I added one of his photos (with attribution) and a link back to his site. I’m sure he liked the exposure, and The Bee got to use a great picture.

#8 Leverage social media, without being boring. We have tried to use Facebook and Twitter for a couple of sites, but just dumping headlines into the social media stream is not only useless, but seen as rather offensive to the majority of users who make an actual effort to be part of the community.

What I’ve talked to DC about is actually using an app like Twitter to engage the community. The political news junkies are very plugged in, and want to know everything. Why not pull them into the conversation earlier. How about a tweet like, “Harry Reid’s office refuses to say if Roland Burris will be seated today”… and actually put that out in the wild BEFORE you have the story written.

#9 Stop accepting takeover ads, flyover ads and autoplay talking ads. You do not make your users love you when you force things on them.

#10. Strip your main navigation down to bare minimum. This one is like the homepage argument, you don’t need to show everything you have every time someone mouses over a link. Most people are smart enough to find what they are looking for. For example, if I want the score of last nights game, I already figure I’m gonna need to go through “Sports” to get it, and I won’t complain if I actually have to click on Sports. Oh, and don’t stick flash ads in your drop down navigation, it makes you seem a bit desperate.

#11 Can you explain, in one sentencee, what the object of the site is? If you can’t, you need to figure it out. Once you do, tape it to the monitor and make sure everything you do is leading to that goal.

If the goal is to keep the locals of Fort Worth, Texas informed about the Cowboys, why are you spending money on covering the City Hall meetings? If your goal is to cover all the news in Ft. Worth better than anyone else… you need to define what that means.

Really think hard about your goal. Can you reach your goal with your current team? If not, why not? What if you asked for help from a community that would probably love to help?

Avatars Can Solve Some Problems

January 4, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

A few days ago I was looking for a good picture to use for my twitter account. Trying to pick out a picture you think doesn’t look terrible is always hard, so then I turned to the Internet to solve this problem. I had seen a member of the SEO meetup I belong to that had a great avatar and thought that might be a smart solution.

I did a quick Google search for “create avatar”, and found a wealth of free/do-it-yourself sites that take the pain out of creating an avatar.

The first one I tried was DoppelMe. It was really easy, although they don’t actually give you the image, they allow you to link back to it. Having non-black/brown hair puts me at a disadvantage since the colors are limited, and as I would find out, apparently not a lot of old guys are making cool avatars.

The next one I found was Simpsonize Me, which was fun. Aside from the creepy Burger King dude that sponsors the site, it was easy to use and created a very high quality Simpson-like character. This was the only one I ran across that tried to age into account. Simpsonize Me also allows you to create a full body character, and select only the part you want.

Face Your Manga was my third stop. It offers a lot of options and is super easy. The site is hosted under an Italian domain, but is perfectly translated for us English speaking types. This was not my favorite avatar, it seemed more aimed at younger kids.

I also stumbled across BeFunky’s UVATAR. This site has you upload a photo and then uses that as a base. My final product was a bit sketchy, but I really liked the way they let you customize almost everything. I worked with other photos of my wife and kids, and it really depends on the quality of the picture you start with. So don’t take too much from my attempt here. Keep in mind, that this was my first attempt, and as I did more, my results became better and better.

Far and away the funniest site to build an avatar at is the South Park site. This site lets you choose from kids, boys, girls, adults, almost everything. Lots of fun stuff. If you’re a South Park fan, it’s worth the time just to see how you would look if you ever do anything dumb enough that you would get written into a script.

The entire process was fun and lets me have an identity that is me, without really being me. The other interesting part is to do this with a friend who can help guide you. We all see ourselves one way, and that’s not always the way the rest of the world will recognize us.

Why You Should Stop Supporting IE6

January 2, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

Now that Internet giant Google has started telling it’s users to stop using IE6 to access GMail, you should to. The only time anyone should be supporting IE6 anymore is when they are working on an intranet app that will only be accessed by the poor souls forced by corporate policy to use it.

Microsoft even sent out an update last February that “auto-updated” users to IE7. But, not everyone has those turned on, or installs them once they are downloaded.

Reason #1 is simple. IE6 is a terrible browser. It couldn’t be any more non-compliant if it had set out to be.

ie6 Reason #2: Usage has dropped to 20%. In 2005 usage of IE6 was over 80%. Firefox users now outnumber IE6 users.

Reason #3: If you continue to support IE6, people will continue to use it, which is bad, see reason #1.

Reason #4: When someone like Google stops supporting a browser, it’s a watershed moment for that browser. I understand part of the reason Google is doing this is to push Chrome, but the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people will be nudged to abandon IE6.

Reason #5: The other choices are far superior. Even users that want/need to stay with IE can upgrade to 7 and be much better off. Just the tabs in IE7 will be a productivity boost for most users.

Reason #6: No transparent png support.

Reason #7: The IE Developers Toolbar is sub-par. Trying to debug and fix IE problems are too much of a hassle now. Once tools like Firebug became available for Firefox, who would ever develop in IE?

Reason #8: Security. IE6 has so many holes in it it is still the #1 target of script kiddies and real hackers.

IE6 is the Chevy Chase of browsers. At one point in the past, popular, everybody liked it and it did a good job. Now, it’s outdated, nobody likes it and it just can’t do the job any longer. It’s time for IE6 to retire.

I’ll Know It When I See It

December 28, 2008 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

While looking through the stories my friend Robbie had shared via Google reader, Bring me a different rock caught my eye.

Robbie and I worked together for a couple of years at a big corporation that was sometimes often afflicted by the “wrong rock” type of thinking.

This is a game where you attempt to guess the requirements of a manager who cannot or will not communicate his or her goals, and the best attempts to do so resemble a series of frustrating discussions where you are told that your “rock” (product, schedule, process, proposal) is not correct and you should present a new “rock” in a short time frame. The problem is, the person who is rejecting your “rock” is unable or unwilling to describe what an appropriate rock looks like, feels like, tastes like.

It’s a terrible situation for everyone involved. No one in the chain ever gets to feel good about the work they’re doing because they never feel certain that they are working on the “right rock”.

That premise reminded me of a great post by Joel Spolsky from October, 2000 about functional specifications.

The moral of the story is that when you design your product in a human language, it only takes a few minutes to try thinking about several possibilities, revising, and improving your design. Nobody feels bad when they delete a paragraph in a word processor. But when you design your product in a programming language, it takes weeks to do iterative designs. What’s worse, a programmer who’s just spend 2 weeks writing some code is going to be quite attached to that code, no matter how wrong it is.

I have tried to do web design for two clients who fell into this bucket. “No, I don’t like that, but, I’ll know it when I see it”. I’ve since learned my lesson. I can’t imagine ever working with a “I’ll know it when I see it” client again, they drain you and in the end, they never seem to “see it”.

The ideal client is one who is an expert at his business, and allows you to be the expert at yours.

Losing A Customer and Screwing That Up Too

December 19, 2008 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

I try to talk to clients about the new reality in business. Customers have more power than ever before.

You used to be able to treat your customers with disdain and it wasn’t really a big deal, because you had all the power. Now, the dynamic has switched 180 degrees.

When Finnegan was born we looked around for a pediatrician and settled on Schmidt & Catchings Family Practice in Cary, NC. The first appointment we had there went pretty well. Then each appointment got longer and longer. Finally we were waiting an hour before we would finally be seen. As bad as that is normally, with a squirmy 1 year old it should actually be criminal.

So finally we decided to leave the practice because of the horrendous waits and also the poor office staff in general. We had actually liked the woman who saw our baby, but the aggravation outweighed that.

So how did the business try to keep us as patients? They didn’t.

Did they ask how they could have done better? No.

What they did do, is tell us that before they could release our records to the new doctor, they would have to make photo copies of everything and mail it over (even though he is in the same medical complex). I was a little surprised since the doctor always had a laptop, and everything was stored electronically, but I figured they had their reasons.

A few weeks later we received a bill for $28.25 for photo copies.

The pediatrician was taking the opportunity of us leaving to stick us with one final bill. My wife thought $28.25 seemed a bit excessive for making some photo copies and sent them a long letter explaining that this was the type of crap that finally pushed us to find a new practice, and sent them a check for $10.

In another gigantic show of ignorance and hubris, they sent us another bill with the $10 credited. No letter in response, no call, no nothing.

Schmidt & Catchings has driven me to writing blog posts on how to screw up with a customer, and then keep screwing up even after they are no longer your customer! I thought this only happened with cell phone companies.

So what is Schmidt and Catchings getting out of this?

They have alienated a former customer, who used to be mostly neutral about their practice, and made me speak out as an opponent.
I have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau
I have gone online and posted my story in dozens of forums where people ask for recommendations for pediatricians
I have told dozens of people this story, many of them with small children as well.
I have written a blog posting that will now live forever on the web
They may someday get an additional $18 from us.

So what Schmidt and Catchings has done is stopped thinking and fallen back to “this is how we always do it”.

When any business stops seeing it’s customers as people, they get in trouble, and I think that’s what happened in this case.

UPDATE:

I just checked their website to get their email address, I wanted to let them know that I had posted this. I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised that they don’t have anyway to contact the office via email – sheesh.

UPDATE:

I received their response to my complaint to the BBB, which included this piece of superb customer service…

The complaint about the fee for processing medical records. Mr. Buckley signed the request form, and just below his signature, very clearly, it states our policy and charges for processing medical records. This is a practice that is very common and not done only at Schmidt and Catchings.

First off, “very clearly” may be a bit of a stretch, but even better is the “everyone does it” defense!

If You Gave Away Your Service For Free, Could You Thrive?

December 3, 2008 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

As weird as that sounds, it is indeed possible.

Think about National Public Radio (NPR). That’s what they do. You listen for free, then occasionally they say, “if you got some value from our programming, please contribute what you think it was worth.”

I recently used this with a small customer I started working with. I understand the risks that immediately come to mind… “What if they decide my efforts were worth nothing?”. Well, if that’s the case, then there is a bigger problem. This isn’t a stategy for a brand new customer you take on. You need to have a relationship estanlished.

Think about it this way, if you did run your business that way, would it change the way you do business? Would it alter the way you interact with your customers? Would you give customers better service?

If the answer is yes, then why aren’t you already giving them that level of service?

If you had all your clients over for Thanksgiving dinner, would you look forward to it as yet another opportunity to build on your relationship, or as a stress filled nightmare?