Category: Uncategorized

The Office Rat blog, written by massage therapist Larry Swanson, offers tips for reversing the damage done to us daily by our office chairs, desks, and computer set-ups.

One of the reasons I try to get my budget clients to use “canned” templates on their brochure websites is that the templates are generally coded to look good on a variety of browsers. They don’t break, even if the person viewing them is using an old version of Internet Explorer or the latest version of Safari for the Mac.

And I’m astonished by the number of times I’ve been writing content for the site of corporate client and have discovered that their professionally done custom-designed websites break in a standard browser — usually because their designer didn’t bother to test the code.

Browsershots is an online web development tool that lets you submit a web address and get back screenshots that show how your page renders in a variety of browsers and browser versions.

And you don’t need to be a developer to do this — you can use Browsershots to check out your own existing website. But be prepared for the ugly truth. I wasn’t, and was appalled by the way the typefaces on my iWeb-created web pages appeared in some of the Windows browsers. Back to the drawing board…

The Writer Way blog enjoyed a vacation but I didn’t; I was busy…writing. And soon I’m going to be busy putting together a presentation for an upcoming Seattle blogging conference. More on that later.

Meanwhile, check out these insights from the Samurai Radiologist on “Jazz and the Art of Medical Presentations.” They apply nicely to non-medical presentations as well.

The novel itself sounds pretty good, too.

Steve Smith, writing for MediaPosts Mobile Insider (subscription required), quotes Ion CEO Justin Talerico about the behavior of consumers who come to a site from phone-platform email (rather than desktop email). It’s intriguing, though I’m not wild about the term “psychographically.”

Generally, Talerico says, people coming through a mobile email link are highly focused. “They are a great captive audience,” he says. Unlike the Web environment, mobile is not conducive to multitasking, and because of the relative slowness and unpredictability of browsing here, most of us don’t click on links as liberally. In other words, we click through on the things we really want to see. “You have a more committed person,” he thinks. “You apply the same landing page principles but it is a smaller canvas. The interesting thing in our opinion is that psychographically you have a more focused person.”

If you thinking “usability testing” is something that only big companies do, think again. Just about anyone doing website or application design should conduct user research to see how users interact with a beta version of their product. But until recently, this has been a difficult (and expensive) step for developers using Macs.

According to Nick Finck at Blue Flavor, a new $50 program called Silverback by Clearleft solves the problem. Install it on your computer, set up a session, and it will record a user session (screen activity and voice) and transform it into a QuickTime video.

I’m considering installing it and inviting a few of my clients to record themselves using their own websites. There’s a 30-day trial version available.

I’d like to (belatedly) call attention to two delightful online projects that spotlight older or obscure books that are simply too good to be forgotten. You’ll find “You’re Still the One” (in several parts) on The Rap Sheet, the January Magazine crime fiction site run by J. Kingston Pierce. (What book did I nominate for the project? Check here. )

Over at Pattinase, Patti Abbott blogs every Friday about “forgotten books” and has challenged other crime fiction reviewers and bloggers to follow her lead.

If you’re looking for great summer reads, start with these sites and then head to your local used book store — or Amazon.com, where out-of-print books from affiliate stores are often available for a few pennies, plus shipping.

If there’s any hallmark of this era, it’s change — the unprecedented speed of change and the growing need for organizations and individuals to keep pace with it.

And yet, as organizations and individuals, we seem to be more comfortable getting into and staying in ruts — even when they are dangerous to our health and imperil our survival.

The problem, according to author Alan Deutschman, is that we often approach change in exactly the wrong way. My friend Tom Whitmore, a small business owner in the midst of his own changes, offers this review of Deutschman’s thought-provoking book Change or Die. (Thanks, Tom, for sharing this via Writer Way!)

Deutschman, Alan: CHANGE OR DIE
(Collins, NY, 2008; 246 pp, $14.95, ISBN-13 978-0-06-137367-1)

One of the more fascinating statistics in this book is that 90 percent of the people with serious heart disease who are prescribed statins stop taking them within a year. Statins have been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks significantly. Why, if these people are facing a life-and-death situation, are they unwilling to change their lifestyles even to the extent of taking a pill or two a day for the rest of their lives? Just as few follow through on changing diet, exercise patterns, and taking up meditation. In Deutschman’s view, it’s because these patients are being approached in entirely the wrong way by their health care providers.

Health care providers, like our prison system and most of the CEOs of large companies, approach people with what Deutschman calls the Three Fs: facts, fears, and force. These are strong motivators for a short period. They don’t, however, lead to long-term change. Facts aren’t enough; fears are good for a while, but fatigue sets in, taking away fear’s power; and force generates rebellion. Anyone who uses these to try to motivate someone is very likely to get exactly the opposite result from what s/he seeks.

Instead of going for the head, Deutschman recommends going for the heart and using positive reinforcement. He puts forward three Rs instead: Relate, Repeat, and Reframe. Relating involves creating a new relationship, with an emotional component, with (generally) a new person — developing a reason for actually wanting the change. Repeating involves practicing what one wants to develop — “Fake it ’till you make it” is a standard way of saying this, used by Alcoholics Anonymous and others. Reframing involves changing the way one looks at a problem completely. Using long examples including the heart patients, convicted felons (at Delancey Street in San Francisco) and large corporations (GM and Toyota at the NUMMI plant), he demonstrates how well this approach can work. And he has lots of shorter anecdotes: these include how Microsoft engineers got Bill Gates to be a philanthropist and why AA works as well as it does for the people it works for.

It’s a simple and useful model. I can see how it’s been useful in my life, and how it describes why some of the changes I’ve made have worked well and others haven’t. It’s not a quick fix, and it’s going to work differently for each person who tries it. It doesn’t make the change any easier, and it probably doesn’t make it any faster. At least, now I have a model that I can check back against when I feel the change isn’t happening, and recalibrate my own reactions. I can recognize the people I’m Relating to, get myself over the hump of thinking I’m doing things badly as I Repeat them the first few times, and be open to recognizing when I’ve Reframed my world. And Deutschman gives me reasons to do that in my own way, which is very important to me.

If the book has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. Deutschman claims that his model is intended only for use when someone is seeking change and it isn’t happening, or isn’t happening quickly enough. And I think he misses a generalization: that this method of change may not be the only one, but it works powerfully in many more situations than the one he describes. It’s used subtly all the time we’re growing up: a good teacher is one who engages a student and builds a relationship, in school or in college. When someone starts a new job, he or she needs all three Rs to become a very useful part of the particular company he or she is working for. And there’s a darker side: these same techniques can be used subtly to initiate someone into what other people might think is a cult. Rotary International, the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church and the Weather Underground all use or used these techniques, sometimes consciously, to recruit members. Knowing about the dark side of these techniques gives me a chance to be conscious of when they’re being used to manipulate me. That’s a tool I want to have in my mental toolbox. Now I get to practice using it.

—Tom Whitmore

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for pointing out Dave Knox’s post on The Lessons of the Square Watermelon — case where out-of-the-box thinking led to an in-the-box solution.

A number of the clients that hire me to do web writing are small web-based businesses. They ask me to write web copy to boost their search engine rankings and get people to click through from the search results to the site.

But I’m learning that for many of them, the train stops there…quite a distance from the station.

All the emphasis is on getting people to the site. It’s as if the conversion from site visitor to paying customer (or donor) will then occur by magic once visitors see what the business has to offer.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t generally work that way, and I don’t want any clients or prospective clients to think that it does. While a small fraction of site visitors make a purchase on their first visit, in the majority of cases conversion of a site visitor to a business customer requires getting that visitor to take at least one or two of several small but highly significant intermediate steps. Steps such as:

• Signing up to receive emails or subscribing to newsletters or blog feeds
• Calling a phone number, writing to an email address or filling out a form to receive more information
• Acting immediately to take advantage of a limited-time special offer or coupon
• Using an interactive section of the site to create or complete something (contest, quiz) that involves either signing up for something or inviting friends to visit the site
• Making a small initial purchase of a break-even or loss-leader product/service)

When I suggest that prospective clients consider developing some of these web features to create an ongoing marketing relationship with their visitors, they look discouraged and mumble something about not having any database capabilities to manage the electronic mailing list some of this work this would generate, and not knowing how to send out mass emails to a mailing list if they had one. Many say they don’t have time to blog, and others say they don’t want to get a lot of email. In many cases, it turns out they aren’t doing email/newsletter communication with existing customers, either.

Digging deeper it becomes apparent that often the only person who can do anything at all with their website is a web designer they talk with a few times a year. Simply putting up a weekly coupon or blog post would be a major (and costly) operation. And while the designer can create forms, and set up “mailto” addresses so someone in the organization can receive emails from the site, few web designers are in the database management business.

As the title of this post suggests, I can describe the problem, and posit a theoretical solution to it, but when it comes to identifying website-powered database marketing systems affordable for small businesses, I’m way out of my comfort zone. So if someone can tell me about a solution I can pass long to my clients, I’m all ears.