Category: Blogging

I wrote it! Wait, now you want me to talk about it?

This MacVoices radio interview was a delightful, if unexpected, part of promoting my new ebook.

 

The new ebook Take Control of iPhone Basics, iOS 4 Edition

 

This summer I wrote a 138-page book for new and intermediate iPhone users. Take Control of iPhone Basics, iOS 4 Edition, is part of the Take Control series of ebooks (also available in print editions) published by Adam and Tonya Engst at TidBITS Publishing. I’d edited two books for them, and was thrilled when Tonya asked me to take on a writing project myself.

The writing process is iterative: You outline, you research topics, you write sections, you get technical and editorial reviews, and you rewrite. At the end it was tweak, tweak, tweak — plus another round of research and writing to cover the updated operating system for the iPhone.

Maybe you’re not supposed to say this, but I totally enjoyed writing the book.

I also enjoyed, as the writing gave way to editing, developing a modest marketing plan for the book. I didn’t want to find myself in the place where I’ve seen so many authors land: The book goes live, but there’s no support material. Fortunately, Take Control does a fabulous job of creating a book/author page and sending out targeted press releases. But I knew I needed to do much, much more.

A Blog

In July, as I was researching the book, I started the iPhone 4 Tips blog. I used it to write about iPhone accessories, apps, news, and research that didn’t quite fit into the book. Now it includes some information about the book itself — plus the updates to the ebook that Take Control will be issuing. (A huge “thank you” to the makers of the magical DoubleTake software I used to stitch together multiple screenshots to create the graphic for the blog’s header.)

Business Cards

I ordered business cards for the ebook. The problem with using my own business cards is that most prospective customers for the book don’t want to reach me — they want to buy the book. Making them email me, or go to this website — or even to the iPhone 4 Tips website — and hunt around for a link to the ebook is obviously not the way to make sales. The card has the URL for the Take Control sales page. I’ve since met several fiction authors who use book business cards, complete with graphics from the book’s cover.

Social Media

My marketing plan included a list of my existing social media identities: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and some specialized professional lists. I drafted little blurbs for each that I used, with a bit of modification, when the book came out earlier this week. I’m still working my way through that list, crafting blurbs that are appropriate for each list. It’s difficult not to feel that I’m spamming people, so I’ve carefully studied the way that each community handles this type of announcement.

My partner, Tom, is an established member of two major web communities; his postings about the book on those sites, using short budURLs I created, have been more effective than mine in generating click-throughs.

The Unexpected

Now we get to the interesting part: What went, not wrong, but not at all the way I’d expected?

First, I sprained my ankle the day before the book went live, which meant that I was implementing the PR plan while alternately in severe pain or pretty thoroughly drugged. I used a proofreader.

Second, there were radio interviews. I’d been lining up some speaking engagements, but somehow overlooked the radio and podcast world. I found out that Take Control authors get invited to be on some of the major technology shows. The irony here, of course, is that my book is less for geeks than it is for the people who pester geeks when they can’t find their email.

Chuck Joiner, of MacVoices, made my first radio interview a delightful experience. You can stream or download the interview.

Audio interviews require earphones and a microphone, I discovered. Fortunately, I have top-of-the-line noise-canceling earphones. I was not as well prepared on the microphone front — deep in my closet I found a box labeled “audio” that contained an ancient, cheap USB mic with a flimsy plastic mic stand. Fortunately, it worked (taped firmly to the desk), even when the cat leaped on the desk in the middle of the taping and began gnawing on it.

As for the content of the radio interviews, I’m realizing that I need more preparation. More on that, later.

Sneak peek: iPhone 4 Tips

Check out the new iPhone 4 Tips, a blog for iPhone 4 (and iPhone iOS 4) users.

Come visit me as I build iPhone 4 Tips, a new blog for iPhone 4 (and iPhone iOS 4) users.

Do you dare me?

I’d stop reading blog posts full of tips except there are always those few that stand out from the crowd and offer some information that significantly changes the way I approach a project, a client, or my career.

Sometimes I think the blogosphere is tipping over.

I find myself swamped with emails and blog posts that are chock full of tips for this and tips for that. I’d stop reading the stuff except there are always those few tips that stand out from the crowd and offer some information that significantly changes the way I approach a project, a client, or my career.

Is it that they are targeted at exactly my level of experience in a particular area? Or is it that they are written in a particularly engaging way?

Those factors certainly help, but I think the key factor is that they needle me to be outrageous, to take risks, to go the extra mile, or to look at something in a contrarian light. They dare me.

Sometimes I find myself initially offended by the tips, but there’ll come a point during the day when I think back on them…and a little light goes on. And gets brighter.

Who does this?

Seth Godin.

Chris Rugh.

Joe Hage. (Read “The first three questions.”)

Freelance Switch.

Full disclosure: Chris Rugh and Joe Hage are clients of mine, and I’m a client of Freelance Switch.

Objective journalism?

A damning analysis of how contemporary print journalism works, from The Fake Steve Jobs.

Monday’s reading starts off with this damning analysis of how contemporary print journalism works, from The Fake Steve Jobs. He writes:

“They have to pretend to be “objective,” but what that really means is you put a vague headline on the story and you write the top in some boring way but then you just stack up a pile of negative quotes from people who don’t like the Borg — bam, bam, bam — but you spread them out, and you put some boring stuff in between them, like so many pillows between so many grenades…”

Read it all.

(Thanks to my comrade “Boris” for the tip.)

A few words about WordPress

I know quite a few bloggers who are thinking of switching over to WordPress. My advice is: Do it.

After listening to Andru Edwards of GearLive Media making gentle fun of people whose blogs are hosted on their blogging software sites (“Blogname.typepad.com”) I took the plunge and got a WordPress blog. (This one.)

I like it.

But I soon discovered that a lot of the cool things you can do with WordPress, such as running ads, are for blogs that are self hosted. My blog is hosted on WordPress.org, and they don’t allow ads (except for on special VIP accounts for blogs “on par with the Wall Street Journal.”)

If you have a web hosting service you trust (and I do) getting your blog moved over or set up on that outside host is easy. But once you’ve moved it, you are now responsible for updating your version of WordPress yourself. (If you’re hosted at WordPress.com, they do it automatically.) And, if you want to install a new WordPress theme, or simply change a template image, you’ll be on your own. That means dealing with FTP uploads or using some host’s arcane, proprietary file manager software to rummage around in a server hierarchy. (WordPress.com provides an easy interface for these.)

Maintaining your own software is not a big deal? Don’t be so sure. Just about every small company I’ve assisted with blogging has a message on their WordPress admin panel saying that their WordPress software needs to be updated. And they never seem to know how to get it updated. (In one instance, the software was so woefully out of date that I attempted to figure out how to get it updated for them. And ended up utterly baffled.)

ataI’ve just assisted a client in setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog, and in this case was asked to select and install a theme. (“Just make it happen!”)

Writer Way uses a particularly user-friendly theme (PressRow, by Chris Pearson) and I’d found it a breeze to customize. Turns out that not all WordPress themes are so simple to handle. The theme I selected for my client was Atahualpa (by Bytes for All). It’s named after the last Incan emperor of Peru. My experience was, shall we say, an exotic adventure.

Atahualpa turns out to be supremely configurable, with so many complex options that my head began to swim. The code might as well have been written in Quecha, for all I could understand it.

The client was in a hurry, and I was in over my head. But, somehow, I got a customized header image installed (thank you, iStock) and disabled the default floral images (so not my client’s style!).

The final product? Gorgeous.

I know quite a few bloggers who are thinking of switching over to WordPress. My advice is: Do it.

But host the site on a server where you can get a fair amount of hand-holding in terms of setup and updates — this is definitely the time to go with a small, local web hosting service instead of gowhacky.com. And spend some time evaluating WordPress templates before you select one: you’ll be getting to know it very, very well.

Gotta go. I think they just released a new version of Atahualpa.

New FTC blogger-disclosure requirements

The vast majority of bloggers have no involvement in payola schemes, but often find themselves in situations where they could be accused of it.

The Internet Patrol has a detailed explanation of the new Federal Trade Commission rules affecting bloggers who write product reviews or endorsements. The bottom line:

“If you talk about a product or service, and if you put it out on or via the Internet, and if you stand to gain on it, you’d better disclose that relationship.”

I’m not a fan of the rules, but I certainly don’t intend to run afoul of them. They are designed to clamp down on bloggers whose positive comments about a company’s product or service result from undisclosed payments from that company.

But I continue to be puzzled by why the government, which has allowed mortgage con artists to rip off consumers to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, is so excited about protecting web users from inflated reviews of electronic gadgets and resort hotels. My objections:

1. It’s fairly easy to go online and find product reviews from reputable online sources or from sites like Amazon or TripAdvisor that allow unbiased customer comments. Having the FTC jump in to protect people who ignore those resources and instead make their purchasing decisions by reading Joe-the-Blogger is pure nannying.

2. Bloggers who give bad products or services good ratings will rapidly lose credibility, thereby scuttling their own reputations, popularity, and search rankings.

3. The vast majority of bloggers have no involvement in payola schemes, but often find themselves in situations where they could be accused of it. Try this scenario: I write a positive review of my hair stylist. A few months later, he sends a friend to me to have her website content written. That develops into a lucrative contract. If I don’t remember to go back to my blog post and update it with an explanation that he has sent business to me, I could be accused of getting a kick-back for my positive review of him. (FTC fine: up to $11,000.)

I think the online system polices itself. If the government wants to get into the consumer protection business, I’d suggest they do something about the company that sent me an official-looking letter yesterday telling me that my mortgage terms had changed and I needed to call them immediately.

FTC determined to root out payola in the blogosphere

US Coins Collection Isolated on WhiteI confess: One of my largest clients manufacturers and sells safety equipment, and I’ve been known to blog (on my own blog) about the importance of having safety equipment in the workplace — without mentioning that I have an association with that company.

By the end of the summer, this sort of unethical behavior will place me squarely in the sights of the Federal Trade Commission. FTC guidelines regulating blogger endorsements are about to go into effect.

According to this story published yesterday by the Associated Press, people using the internet have no idea that the posts they read on blogs are anything less than objective, and that “Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards, or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post.”

Thousands of dollars for a 200-word post? “Many” bloggers? (I checked the URL to see if I had somehow been redirected to The Onion. I had not.)

But wait! The AP article drivels on:

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

(Would someone please turn off that loud alarm? I’m trying to write.)

Savvy consumers? No, savvy consumers are consulting Consumer Reports, CNET.com, and the consumer comments posted on Amazon.com and Zappos. The people basing major purchasing decisions on a post from Joe-the-Blogger are not savvy consumers but nincompoops, and, to be blunt, they deserve what they get.

The reaction to the AP story from the blogosphere has included widespread incredulity, particularly from people who actually work in the intersection of blogging and marketing. I particularly liked this summary from James Joyner of Outside the Beltway.

To begin with, what company is going to pay a low-level blogger “thousands of dollars” for a product endorsement? And they will be paying a low-level blogger because top-level bloggers don’t accept payola. They don’t accept it, mind you, not because they are all honest but because the blogosphere is a place where unscrupulous behavior has a way of catching up with you. In spades. Imagine these scenarios:

1. Jane-the-Blogger recommends that people abandon their trusted backup software and switch to new Brand X backup software. People follow her advice, and Brand X Backup corrupts their  hard drives. They post angry descriptions of their experiences with Brand X on their own blogs (mentioning Jane’s blog), so that people Googling Jane’s blog find instead a lot of unflattering reports about it. And they post their experiences with Brand X on reputable tech sites, as well. In return for the amount Jane has received from Brand X’s payola department, she’s now forfeited her own blogging credibility, and lost traffic to her blog.

2. Company Z sends Joe-the-Blogger a fancy piece of technology to review and says “go ahead and keep it.” He does. He tries it, is unimpressed, and doesn’t blog about it. The company has achieved…what? I’ve represented clients who do PR campaigns to bloggers, and send out product samples, and they do not waste expensive products on shots in the dark.

While it seems simple for the FTC to require a blogger praising a product to disclose that they have received the product or service for free, or that they receive a percentage when they link to a sales page for the product, the situation gets far more complicated in practice. Try these scenarios:

1. I hear about an interesting new service, call the owner, and write a blog post about it, which generates a lot of buzz. The owner calls me a week later, thanks me, and provides me with some insider tips and connections for a story that I go on to write and sell to a publication for $1,000. Do I go back and amend the original post to reveal this?

2. I attend a conference (for which I pay full fee), and later write a blog post describing the conference and recommend that my readers attend that conference next year. However, I don’t mention in my post that I was a speaker at the conference, and that as a result of my speech I made some important business connections at the conference. Is it possible that the conference, by offering me the speaking opportunity, was in effect “bribing” me to write a positive story about their conference? Should I bring this up in the blog post?

My answer to these questions is, I’m afraid: Oh, good grief.

Full disclosure: Neither the FTC nor the Associated Press offered me any payola to review, respectively, their regulations or their coverage of this story. I endorse neither. They did provide a nice boost to my blog traffic after I was interviewed on KUOW-FM‘s The Conversation  yesterday about the new regs. However, I’m almost positive that boost was inadvertent.

What do good blogging and good journalism have in common?

Easy: Great stories and great writing.

Bloggers often (and justifiably) criticize traditional print journalism as stultifying and ho-hum. But here’s a front page news story from the Seattle Times that adheres to all the journalistic standards, including the fact-filled lead and inverted pyramid construction, while being just as clever (and more absorbing) than most blog posts.

If you’re from Seattle, you’ll recognize the writer.

Who you gonna call? Ghost bloggers.

I sit down with clients and figure out what they really want to get in return for the time they put in — or the money they spend — on a business blog.

Haunted by your business blog? You know, the one you were going to write posts for two or three times a week, but which hasn’t been updated since  — oh dear — Valentine’s Day?Ghost Blogger

Call me. I’m a ghost blogger.

I sit down with clients and figure out what they really want to get in return for the time they put in — or the money they spend — on a business blog. We start with these questions:

• Is the blog there simply to provide the fresh content required to move the site up in the search engine rankings?

• Is the blog’s purpose more complex? Is it a component of a vigorous, structured search engine optimization (SEO) plan, intended to get important keywords on the site for the search engines to find, and to generate links to and from other strong websites?

Either way, I can usually help. If the business has particular SEO issues (it’s a newcomer in a crowded, competitive field, for instance), I’m likely to recommend that the client work with a professional SEO analyst to make recommendations for keywords. This will focus the blogging effort and can also be applied to the rest of the client’s website.

Once we’ve established the blog’s objectives, I draw up a list of two dozen or more blog topics for the client’s approval, and write a sample blog post or two. (How do I find those topics? Aha! We’re into my secret ghost-blogger voodoo here.)

If the client’s happy with this preliminary work, we then decide if I will coach someone at the business to write the posts, or if they’d prefer to contract with me to write posts for them.

I’ve just completed Phase I of a ghost blogging project (topic list and sample posts) for a client and am hoping they’ll bring me on to write the actual posts. It’s a highly colorful business with dozens of juicy topics. I pride myself on being able to write about nearly anything, but it’s always nice if the subject matter meets you half way.

Speed, transparency, and the long tail

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about PR and social media to another communications class at the University of Washington. This time, it’s an undergraduate class. I’m going to hit many of the points I did in my earlier presentation to students already in the business world, but this time I’m going to attempt to give more context.

So much has changed in the PR world in the past 10 years, it’s hard to know where to begin!

The model of PR in which corporate communicators developed carefully reviewed press releases and distributed them to known contacts in print and broadcast media by mail or fax, is over. Five minutes after a company announces a new product, it’s been Twitter and blogged about. (Example — Amazon released Kindle software for the iPhone last night, and that rocketed to a top spot on Twitter in about two hours. Interestingly, it was being discussed on Twitter even before it had registered on Google News searches.)

Any hope PR folks once had of controlling public perception of the announcement — via their carefully chosen words, or via the sedate reviewing of a friendly news reporter — is a quaint delusion. People are raving and ranting about it on blogs — or pointedly ignoring it — within 24 hours. And good luck to the PR person who tries to spin or puff a product. Her or she risks being reviled right along with the product itself.

Clearly, old-school PR doesn’t work in the current online environment. As anyone who follows Twitter has seen, a new school of PR is emerging to meet the new challenges. It can be successful, if it’s mindful of three characteristics of the social media world:

Speed. If PR wants to be part of the discussion, it needs to get out there, fast. A good PR operation, representing an organization that genuinely has something to contribute to the conversation, can make a splash. That may mean twittering about the city’s inept response to the snowstorm at 4 a.m. (Does your PR person work at 4 a.m.? Let’s hope so.)

Transparency. Successful PR folks have to come to grips with the transparency created by online social media. Many companies tried to hop on the social media bandwagon by making community commenting, or video contests, a part of their marketing campaigns. Often they forgot that they could no longer control the distribution of the resulting comments or videos. In 2006, General Motors’ attempt to harness “viral marketing” for their Chevy Tahoe SUV inspired hundreds of people critical of SUVs to create and then post anti-Tahoe videos. To its credit, General Motors remained cool and the flap eventually died down.

The Long Tail. The days when nearly everyone read the newspaper and families gathered around the TV after dinner to watch the network news are long, long over. Instead, household members are more likely to be getting information individually, from a variety of sources (such as watching a NetFlix video, playing World of Warcraft, reading their favorite blogs, or talking to friends on Facebook). To be successful, PR campaigns will need to focus on these narrower audiences, often with savvier members.

The professor of the class asked me to emphasize the continuing need for strong writing skills in PR. That will be no problem. Sure, you see sloppy writing all over the web. But you don’t see it on highly ranked blogs. If PR people want to draw traffic to their blogs and followers to their Tweets, clear, polished writing is a must.