Author: K.G. Anderson

To paraphrase Mark Morris, "I'm a writer; I write!"

Let people see it all with Vizify

Vizify could become the new standard for professional online identity.

A problem

Website, blogs, LinkedIn bio…the list of online credentials I like to provide to potential clients keeps growing. Recently I’ve begun to view this as a problem. I find myself sending emails full of links, explaining each link with a little tagline, trying to anticipate what each prospect might want to see.

After I hit “Send,” I worry that I’m boring people with Too Much Information. And it certainly does make for ugly-looking emails.

The solution

Last week I received a Google alert about a client. The link in the alert was to something called “Vizify.” I clicked and gaped. There was a fabulous infographic about the client: His picture, quotes, and links to his webpages and blogs. It was colorful, it was fun, it was professional — and it beat my fussy linked-cluttered email by a mile.

Of course, I went right over to Vizify.com and signed up for my own Vizify page. I was impressed with how easy it is to use the online tool, and how great the result looks. You can link to any webpage you want, or let Vizify use algorithms to pull your content directly from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare or Instagram. Once published, my site was immediately picked up by search engines and appeared high in search results for my professional information.

The story behind Vizify

Shortly after publishing my page, I received an email from Vizify.com inviting me to phone one of the executive team with any questions.

I called, left a message, and got a call-back from CEO Todd Silverstein. We talked about how he, Eli Tucker and Jeff Cutler-Stamm developed the Vizify service and where they hope to go with it.

“Online identity is becoming increasingly important,” Todd said. “We felt that the tools for self-presentation that are available could be much better. Your LinkedIn profile looks the same as everyone else’s — we wanted to open it up, to help people express all facets of themselves.”

What Vizify offers is a striking graphic design, in a retro flavor, that the user can customize by choosing a color palette and then adding content — text, links, and photos. In essence it’s a slide show: The first page is a visual table of contents. A visitor can click through from any element on the contents page to read a quote, see academic history, see online profile links, or find out what you’ve been Tweeting about. Or a visitor can browse through your whole Vizify slide show.

While the choices are, on first glance, limited, Todd said that creative users are already stretching the boundaries of what can be done. They hide types of pages they don’t need, and they make multiples of other types of pages, such as interesting statistics.

“People are hacking the design,” he said. “We’ve had people put up, instead of photos, QR codes. People are using screen captures of longer pieces of text.”

While working on the Vizify design, the team discovered the people like seeing bits of information, each representing key areas about an individual. Todd calls it “the cocktail party effect.”

“At a party, you go from topic to topic until you find something, some shared interest that activates a conversation,” he said. “Part of what we’re trying to do with the Vizify design is bring those interesting aspects to the top to promote that moment of interaction.”

Less than a month old, Vizify has attracted notice from Mashable, TechCrunch, and from mainstream media such as CBS MoneyWatch. It’s been called a “personal landing page,” an “online business card,” and a “graphical bio.”

The next steps, according to Todd, include the rollout of tools to enable the display of more complex portfolios of content — capabilities that will enable Vizify to sell premium plans (the current service is free).

If less is more, will bigger be better?

I’m a big fan of Vizify and look forward to experimenting with the current capabilities. It will be interesting to see how it fares as it adds more features.

What makes it particularly wonderful now is that it pretty much forces people to lead with interesting high points (facts, quotes, hot topics) while discouraging the sort of jargon-clogged, mission-statement banalities that deaden so many online resumes and Linkedin profiles.

If given the chance to use more features, will people be able to resist the temptation to turn their Vizify profiles from intriguing introductions to boring brag books? I sure hope so. Vizify is solving a lot of communications problems for me, and I’m hoping it will become the new standard for professional online identity.

A little stretch for the social media warrior

Three perspectives on the practices of social media and yoga!

Yoga poseSome big-picture perspectives on doing social media:

How Social Media Marketing Is Like Yoga. Julia Campbell with observations such as “You must do both correctly, and often, to get results.”

How Social Media is Just Like Yoga. (Acceptance: “If you can’t get your ankle behind your ear, so be it.”)

Social Media Is The New Authentic. Josh Pollock of The Magazine of Yoga calls social media “speaking and listening with emotional intelligence.”

Businesses: To Facebook, or not to Facebook?

Should your company set up a Facebook presence? Yes, if a high percentage of its customers are already active Facebook users and…

I’m still on the fence about the value of a Facebook presence for businesses.

Most companies have not yet begun to harness the power of their websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts for social media and search engine optimization (SEO). They’d be crazy to set up a Facebook page where they could make a spectacle of themselves doing yet another mediocre job of social media.

That said, there are some companies for which Facebook pages are ideal:

  • A very high percentage of their customers are already active Facebook users.
  • They have more sense than to beg or buy Facebook “Likes.”
  • They have time and resources to monitor the Facebook page 24/7, to post frequent content updates, and to respond personally to comments (no generic “autoreplies,” please).
  • They have a strategic plan for what they want their Facebook presence to accomplish and what content they will roll out on Facebook to accomplish that goal.

If you’re using Facebook, Jim Belosic of ShortStack has some great tips for writing Facebook posts with good calls to action. These tips also work well for Twitter.

 

Have hackers got the mobile version of your website?

Have hackers compromised the mobile version of your website? It’s worth checking.

(This post on the hacking of mobile versions of websites falls squarely between WriterWay.com and iPhone4Tips.wordpress.com. Therefore, I’m posting it on both blogs.)

A few weeks back at iPhone4Tips.com, I wrote about the increasing proportion of website users who are using mobile devices (Where are the Smartphone-friendly websites?).  While researching that story, I tripped over a far uglier one: Hackers who go under the radar to redirect websites — but just their mobile pages. Let me start at the beginning of this topic and work up to the rather complex explanation behind it all.

While writing the story on the need for mobile-friendly web pages, I checked to see if the organizations I work with are walking the talk. Did they have mobile-friendly pages?

I got distracted almost immediately because the second group whose site I checked had all the mobile versions of its pages redirected to a website in Russia that urged visitors to download something that claimed to be “Adobe Flash.” (Yeah, right.)

When I checked the same site from a desktop computer, it looked just fine. I was puzzled, so I called two friends and asked them to check both desktop and mobile versions of the site. They confirmed what I was seeing — but we discovered along the way that iPhones and Androids were being redirected to different Russian download pages.

I alerted the two volunteers who act as sysops for the website. Both are experienced programmers and website designers, and neither had come across this before.

The bottom line is that someone had obtained our not-very-secure password, compromised our .htaccess file, and inserted their redirect rules in our code. Fortunately, we were able to correct it by filing a ticket with the ISP to get this the .htaccess file corrected. A far more secure password is now in place.

There’s plenty online about attacks through .htaccess file rewrites, but I’ve found very little written about the hacking of the mobile pages of otherwise unscathed websites. It’s quite clever. Many sysops, such as ours, interact with sites only using desktop machines, and would be unlike to spot malicious hacking activity that affected only mobile pages and mobile users. Thus the hackers get to work under the radar — until a mobile user feels inconvenienced enough that he or she goes to the trouble to report that the pages have been redirected.

For those of you with a technical background, I asked our sysop to share what we did to troubleshoot and solve the problem. He writes:

I verified that the redirect was only happening on mobile browsers and not desktop.  Suspecting the behavior was user-agent-string based, I switched my desktop’s user-agent to spoof an Android browser and, sure enough, got redirected.  It was likely to be either a cross-origin scripting vulnerability (where malicious JavaScript is injected into the content of our page), or a redirect at the HTTP level which would mean our Apache configuration was compromised.
I couldn’t see any malicious code in the content of our page, but just to be sure, I used the UNIX “curl” tool to manually look at the response coming back from a request by a mobile browser.  Sure enough, it was an HTTP 301 redirect, saying the requested page had been moved to a new location on a malware site in Russia.  Unfortunately most browsers will “helpfully” perform that redirect automatically, so you need a fairly low-level tool to diagnose when it is happening.
Having identified it as an Apache configuration issue, I contacted [ISP], and they confirmed that our .htaccess file had been compromised and the new redirect rules had been inserted there.  They fixed the offending file, and the problem went away.  I then immediately changed our passwords to prevent the same attacker from continuing to have access.
I can’t be sure how the compromise happened, however our old password was pretty insecure. It may have just been guessed, or somebody who knew the password might have been infected with a keylogger. I doubt it was a targeted attack, because our site is unlikely to have a very large Russian readership who would actually be vulnerable. More likely it was an exploit of opportunity.
It doesn’t appear that we suffered anything beyond some embarrassment from being hacked. It could have been much worse. Take a look at your mobile pages — today!

Explore the writers of the Clarion West Write-a-thon

Here are a few early progress reports from Clarion West Write-a-thon participants:

We’re off! 228 of us, pursuing writing, editing, and publishing goals for six weeks to attract donations for the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

I encourage you to explore the participants’ pages, where you’ll find excerpts from the work of pros like Andy Duncan, Vonda McIntyre, Elizabeth Bear, Louise Marley, Rachel Swirsky, Kelley Eskridge, and Nisi Shawl, and emerging stars like Vylar Kaftan, J.M. Sidorova, and Cat Rambo (to name just a very few of the 228 participants).

In the next few days, I’ll be posting here about my own Write-a-thon goals — which including writing three short stories inspired by Jonathan Coulton songs and publishing them on Writer Way. (Thank you, Jeff and Allen, for your generous support!)

Here are a few early progress reports from Write-a-thon participants:

Brenda Cooper is writing 1,000 words a day on a novel — plus training for the STP (Seattle-to-Portland) bike ride event.

Janine Southard is writing four short stories and outlining a novel.

Sandra Odell is writing 2,000 words a week on her novel while focusing on taming her Inner-Bitch (er, Inner-Editor).

Gabrielle Harbowy, who edits novels for a living, is going to start writing one.

I’m writing this post from the 4th Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, where I just had the honor of moderating a writers workshop on storytelling that featured Oneal Isaac, Scott Lynch, Beth Meacham, and Mary Robinette Kowal. I was so inspired by their presentations and Q&A with the workshop attendees that I’m tempted to repair to my room and spend the rest of the weekend writing. But there are too many other great panels to attend, such as “Story Templates and the Folk Process” — which is starting in 10 minutes.

How they think at Facebook

Get an inside look at what the Facebook Growth Team thinks about when they make decisions about the site’s user experience.

It seems there’s always someone whining about a change in the Facebook interface or a new way that the company uses people’s information. Sometimes I agree with the whining; sometimes I don’t.

But I’m always aware that the changes at Facebook are made with the company’s bottom line, not the users’ preferences, as the first priority.

For an inside look at what the Facebook Growth Team thinks about when they make huge decisions about the site’s user experience, take a look at this discussion on Quora.com. (Thank you to the folks at SEOMoz for pointing me to the discussion, which made their “Top Ten” list of June’s most critical SEO and online marketing news.)

 

Is your web writer stealing content? Are you encouraging plagiarism?

Do you patronize a business that steals content?

image says "copy paste steal"Last week I visited the website of a local business and was astonished to see that the keyworded webpage describing one of their services had the name of a rival business on it — in a big, bold subhead.

Curious, I went to the website of the rival, and there was the exact same content and photo.

The writer for the first business had simply copied and pasted the content (which appears to be original to the second business) onto the client’s site.

I sent email to the manager of Business #1, alerting her to the situation and explaining that the writer she’d paid to develop original content was instead using the content that Business #2 had paid their own writer, and a stock photography house, to provide. I noted that what her writer had done was plagiarism, and her writer had put them into a situation where they could be sued by the content owner.

The manager wrote back, expressing astonishment. She thanked me for letting her know, and said she’d deal with it.

Out of casual curiosity, I went back the following day to see if she had removed the page. My jaw dropped.

The content was still there. All that the manager of Business #1 had done to deal with the situation was to remove the name of the rightful owner of the content, Business #2, from the page and substitute the name of her business in the big, bold subhead. The unlicensed image was still there.

I called and spoke to the manager. She clearly thought that the error I was pointing out was that she had failed to remove the clue pointing back to the source of her stolen web content. I pressed the point, and her utterly unflappable response was that, hey, the content writer was a friend who had done the work for her for free.

Which shows that you really do get what you pay for.

Interestingly, Business #2 is an extremely competitive chain known for aggressive business practices. I predict it won’t take long for them to find the purloined web content.

I flirted with the idea that the writer who left the name of Business #2 in the stolen copy was making a stab at doing “black hat” SEO*, but decided not to attribute malice (or competence) to what’s clearly several layers of small-time thievery and laziness.

*”Black hat SEO” is the industry term for unethical search engine optimization. One of its milder (“gray hat”) tactics involves mentioning your rival’s name on your webpage so that search engines will lead people looking for your rival’s services to your page, where you can talk them into using your services  instead.

Do you write speculative fiction?

Signup is open for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, a “shadow workshop” that runs in tandem with the Clarion West Writers Workshop (June 17 – July 27) and raises money to support Clarion West.

Clarion West logoIf you write fiction, there’s a fabulous opportunity in the next few weeks to join with writers from around the world who are forming an online “shadow workshop.” It runs in tandem with the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle June 17 though July 27.

During the six weeks that the workshop’s in session, participants in the “shadow” group will be pursuing their individual goals for writing (such as outlining a novel, writing to achieve a daily or weekly word count on a current project, editing a completed piece, or submitting work to agents, editors, and publishers). The shadow project is called the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and each participant, in addition to writing, can raise money to support the Clarion West and its scholarship program. (Note: I’m a member of the “shadow workshop” and of the Clarion West board.)

For more information about the Write-a-thon and experience of being a shadow participant, please take a look at this post by author Nicola Griffith. She talks about the experiences of writers in last year’s Write-a-thon.

To sign up as a participating writer, see the Clarion West Write-a-thon page. You’ll find directions for joining the shadow workshop, including creating a profile page with a short excerpt from your work. You do not need to be a Clarion West alumnus to participate.

Not writing this year? You can still be involved — as a Write-a-thon sponsor. To make a tax-deductible contribution to support Clarion West through one of the “shadow workshop” writers, scroll down to the very bottom of the Write-a-thon page to see the growing list of writers who have signed up to participate.

Quick fixes for commercial websites: How to diagnose customer pain points

Five ways to diagnose (and address) customer pain points on commercial websites.

Garry Przyklenk, writing for Search Engine Watch, has a great article for marketing professionals about improving our ability to turn online visitors into customers, clients, and prospects. (The technical name for this process is “conversion optimization.”) The  first step he covers in the article is the one I’m going to talk about here: diagnosing customer pain points.

doctor with patient in painThe truth is that very few marketing teams know if their websites are making life painful for visitors — and that’s because the customer complaints don’t get back to us. In large organizations, or even in mid-size ones, the person responsible for the marketing aspects of the website is often insulated from customer frustration. Chances are that users are squawking to customer service, to sales people in the field, even to tech support — in other words, to people in other departments who roll their eyes and grumble under their breath about “those idiots in marketing.”

Przyklenk notes that if we want to remove the barriers to converting website visitors to website customers, we must seek out the people in the organization who are hearing the moaning and groaning. The means getting the bad news — and good ideas — from:

• The call center. Ask them what they’re hearing from website visitors — and how they’re dealing with it. You’re likely to find you can help them in the short run, and that they can provide valuable input for your longterm website fixes.

• Your IT web team. Are they collecting data on website issues such as abandoned sign-up pages or abandoned shopping carts? If not, ask them to work with you to begin tracking this — it may involve installing third-party software.

• Sales reps. They want to make sales, so chances are they’re coaching prospects and customers on how to deal with your less-than-optimal web pages. Again, find out what they’re telling customers — it could be the basis for a tip or FAQ for the site.

• Customer support. Find out if they use web-based information to assist customers — and what could be done to make that information more helpful and easier for customers to find on their own.

• Fulfillment. Are orders, sign-ups, or donations coming through with inadequate information, leading to errors or re-work on the part of the fulfillment team? Ask them what’s missing from the web-based processes.

Przyklenk advises online marketing folks to try playing the role of the customer. I loved his suggestion that we should try signing up for an account (from a home computer outside the company network) and ordering one of our company’s products — and giving ourselves just 5 minutes in which to do it.