He’s talking about University websites but it applies to any communication venue where the sales and PR brain has taken over from the human brain.

There’s nothing wrong with sales or PR in their place. It’s just their place isn’t right at the front.

When I’m working with people I ask what they want to achieve from their online activity. The answer is usually “more sales” or “more visitors” or something like that. The problem is people don’t want to help you fullfil a sales objective. They want to solve whatever problem they have at that moment. Your job is to turn that into a sale.

I have a suspicion that in the pre-Internet era you could get away this with making people dig through the hype to get what they want but that doesn’t work anymore. They’ll just go elsewhere.

Put yourself in their shoes. If you wanted the thing you’re offering how would you like to be treated? Would you want a flashy website that shouts about how wonderful the provider of the thing is? Or would you just like to know about the thing?

Give people what they want in a manner that doesn’t annoy them. Simple, no?

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.

It’ll take time. A lot of time. But it works. And it’s the only thing that does.

I read this out in a workshop today and someone (Michelle?) asked me for a copy. Here it is.

(If you are interested in the SEO thing, be sure and read Derek’s calmer follow-up post.)

But no, this one is sort of important because it ties in to reputation and trust and all that stuff which powers the social Internet whether we like it or not.

Here’s a tweet:

bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

Sally agrees that this is not only amusing but also interesting and wishes to share it with her followers, so she hits the re-tweet button in her Twitter app of choice. (Like most cool things about Twitter you can’t do this from the Twitter website. This is because Twitter is not a website. It’s an open database with a somewhat mediocre website tacked on. If you’ve only ever used the website and think Twitter is fine but not all that this is why. But I digress. Back to Sally’s re-tweet)

sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

John is following Sally and agrees with her. He does the retweeting thang too:

john: rt @sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

And so does Janet:

janet: rt @john: rt @sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

And now it’s getting a bit long. Let’s say for the same of argument it’s pretty much 140 characters, the Twitter limit. When Henry sees this he has to make a decision. Editing must be done. So he posts this:

henry: rt @janet: An amusing and / or interesting thing

Err-urr! Y’see what he’s done here? He’s credited Bob’s witty thing to Janet when all Janet did was pass it on. Bob gets not credit. Janet gets an undeserved credit.

Now that’s not really a problem, but what if it wasn’t just a joke but an opinion? What if by retweeting all Janet was saying was “look over here and what Bob said. I might not agree with him but, golly!” This has not been turned into “I’m Janet and I think this.”

And so on.

Retweeting might look like a chorus of “me too” echoing around the echo chamber but it ain’t necessarily so. it’s more analogous to quoting or linking to something of interest. Here’s an example with the name removed because they’re not the first and they won’t be the last:

I didn’t say that. What I actually said was this:

Now, I support the message and want it spread around but the top one implies that I might have had the idea or be involved in organising the gathering. Sure, I’m going to try and make it but I’m by no means a contact. Rich, on the other hand, has been campaigning on this issue for ages. Folk should be directed to him, or at least be aware that he’s at the middle of this.

Credit is important in this game but it’s not just about vanity. It affect the message and its effectiveness.

And I would never sign my tweets with Xx. That’s Rich’s thing and he’s welcome to it. ;)

It occurred to me the other day that pubs contain a hell of a lot of data. By data I roughly mean information about a thing that can be transmitted, although it’s obviously a lot more complicated and nuanced that that. So what kind of data does a pub have?

• Commercial data. The beverages and food for sale, the sorts of spaces (lounge, public bar, garden), the opening hours, all the sort of things you’d expect to see in a directory of pubs.
• Qualitative data. What the pub is like. This can be subjective but would also bring in the categories the pub fits in. It could be a village pub, a “vertical drinking establishment”, a family-friendly gastropub, a student bar, etc.
• Event data. What’s going on at the pub? Anything from snooker matches to gigs in the back room. The diary.
• Social data. Who is in the pub? This data is normally captured by sticking ones head around the door and looking, or asking the landlord if “John” has been in tonight. The bar staff will also hold an incredible amount of data about the customers from their preferred drinks to the sort of stuff you only tell a barman when tired and drunk. Further to this, the pub will contain a social graph made up of the connections between customers.
• News data. Gossip, yes, but also hard news about the local area. The landlord will know what’s going on.

Now, the last two forms of data are mildly contentious. You wouldn’t necessarily want your activities, or even your presence, in a pub to be broadcast across the Internet. Pubs offer a pseudo-private space which, while public, has certain social rules ingrained it in. If a gentleman has an intimate drink with a lady who is not his wife, for example, that information is appropriately flagged. This lack of transparency is what makes the pub function as a relatively safe social environment.

That said, there’s potential for social and news data to be published in an opt-in manner. For example, if I find myself walking home and wanting an unplanned drink I might send a message to Twitter announcing my intentions. Or if a quick drink with as friend has turned, somehow, into a few drinks and we’d welcome company I might send another message to that effect. Here’s a Twitter search for the Spotted Dog in Digbeth which just the other day got some business from me when I was standing at the bus stop and, checking my phone, saw John Mostyn was advertising his presence there. News can also be published from the pub where appropriate. Nicky does this occasionally on Digbeth is Good. Check the Spotted Dog archives to see how she gets the balance right. (Come to think of it, is the Spotted Dog the most social-media-ified pub in Birmingham?)

So there’s social data about pubs floating around out there. It’s early days and penetration is minimal but the synergy between an online social space and an offline social environment like a pub is not hard to see. Still, it’s probably a few years off before we can do something really interesting with that sort of data other than keep tabs on it and see how it evolves with wider adoption.

The more traditional data, however, offers much more immediate potential. Let’s have a look at The Wellington in Birmingham City Centre, a pretty nondescript looking pub that’s carved a niche as one of the few places around New Street where you can get a decent pint of bitter. By the bar they have a large LCD screen showing the beers on tap which is also displayed on their website:

This is fantastic. I was looking at this screen just the other night and, not for the first time, wishing I knew something else about these beers. Now I know it’s coming from the Internet, and since I have a Internet enabled phone, the potential is suddenly clear. Here’s what I’d do with The Wellington’s Beer Board.

• Generate it using a WordPress. Each beer would be a “post” and have comments enabled. When a beer is on tap it goes into the “Beer Board” category which builds the above page. When it’s replaced it’s set to “Not On Tap”. Yes, it’d need a fair it of hacking but even I could build this.
• Explain the beers. I’d imagine they don’t change beers that often so writing, or copying, a short piece of blurb about each one shouldn’t be a chore. I’d imagine the staff are given notes to sell them anyway so the data is already in the system. These explanations form the body of each post. Clicking on the name of the beer takes you to that information. Make it clear customers can do this from their phones using a short URL (I see thewelly.co.uk is available).
• Open up comments. Since you’re using a blogging system you might as well make the most of it. Let your customers debate the merits of the beers via their phones while in the pub. Not only does this add potentially useful information it also augments the pub with another social space not restricted by time or place, which is always interesting.
• Once this is working, develop it further. Start thinking about the resource you’re developing for Real Ale enthusiasts both locally and nationally, not just informationally but socially.

What about events data? My local pub is the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath. It’s nice enough but the main draw is the upstairs rooms where all sorts of things go on from gigs to clubs to comedy nights. The pub is also used by groups like the Stitches & Hoes knitting club amongst others. Most, if not all, of these are “dry hire” where a promoter or individual can rent a room for the night and will undertake the organisation and publicity themselves. The pub simply provides the space, any equipment required, runs the bar and lists the event on their flyers and website.

The first thing I’d do is structure the event data on the website using the hCalendar microformat and by providing an iCal feed similar to the way Upcoming, Facebook, Last.FM and other event listing sites work. This would allow people to subscribe to the events and, if they chose, manipulate that data. This isn’t a particularly big step but in doing so it gets the website talking to the rest of the Internet. Add some simple geotagging to the website and you’ve got the basics of a machine-readable database of events sitting on your website. I’d imagine building a system which takes a spreadsheet and turns it into an events listing would be fairly simple and while you can’t necessarily get this off the shelf for free there are plenty of people in Birmingham with experience in this area. Talk to Josh from LiveBrum or Simon from Birmingham Alive.

Next I’d look at some kind of alert system. Frequently an event which is advertised as starting at 8pm will be delayed or, as happened on Sunday, cancelled at the last minute. The trick here is to keep it as simple as possible and only use it where necessary. I’d suggest using a Twitter account for this purpose, not necessarily with the intention of having people follow it but because it’s incredibly easy to update be it through the website or by text message. You don’t want to be doing complex stuff on the website on a Friday night but sending 140 characters to Twitter when you hear the event is delayed shouldn’t be a hassle. Feed the Twitter stream onto the website and folks can check it before they head out. It might seem counter intuitive to tell potential customers they should stay away but I’d argue they’ll appreciate not having their time wasted and be more likely to come again.

This is stuff that’s relatively simple to bolt on to what they’re already doing. All it needs is a small initial investment in infrastructure and integration into existing systems. It might even make things simpler depending on how the data is currently being processed.

But, you might be wondering, what’s so social about event information? On its own nothing. But by making it available in a standardised form it allows it to be moved around the Internet free from but connected to your website. (For an illustration of what I mean see my post Explaining Metadata with Velcro Covered Balls.) What moves your information around the Internet? People finding it in search engines and event aggregators and talking about it. This is what is meant by that vastly misunderstood term Web 2.0 – making data available in ways that enable conversation.

I’ve barely scratched the surface on this one but at 1,500 words it’s time to draw it to a close. As with the cafe blog idea I’m very interested in developing this further so do get in touch if you run or know of a pub that is in a position to try something like this. It doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact if it’s complicated then it’s missing the point. As with everything I do it’s just a case of looking at what you’re currently doing and applying some simple social media tools where applicable.

Photos are my own. The Wellington’s Beer Board being online drawn to my attention by Andy Mabbett.

And that’s the crux of the matter. It’s not enough to have a nice and comprehensive About page on your site. While important it’s the brochure and no matter how hard you try it’s not going to pick up what’s really interesting about you. What you do for a living or what your favourite movies are tells me nothing. In order to really get to know you I need something else. And this is where it gets a bit counter-intuitive.

This afternoon I was in a pub with a bunch of people who use Twitter. As is our way the conversation moved onto Twitter and why it worked so well at creating connections between people. I posited that people bond around pointless, transient, silly and fun things, then once those bonds are formed they can be used for serious stuff. This is how Twitter works. It’s a stream of inane, ephemeral and daft utterances that bond people to the degree that they’ll voluntarily create plain English translations of government documents amongst other things.

But it’s not actually that weird. Look at us in the pub. We sit here with our drinks and pretty much talk bollocks, but not exclusively. Amongst the nonsense I had some really useful conversations about serious stuff. This is how conversational environments work. If every five minutes we’d all distributed printouts of guides on how to get the most out of a pub conversation to each other those conversations wouldn’t have happened.

The value of sharing doesn’t just come from the content. You also need context. If a complete stranger tells me I shouldn’t eat prunes I’ll nod but probably carry on eating prunes, but if someone I feel I know well enough to trust tells me I’ll pay attention. And how do I get to know someone well? By sharing inconsequential stuff with them.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I consider Steve a good friend even though I probably only see him once a year, if that. Beyond friendship he’s one of the people I get music recommendations from. If he were to mention a new band or album on his blog I’d investigate. Loads of people recommend music all the time but I only listen to a few. How does Steve earn my trust? Does he write loads of in-depth articles about the history of obscure bands? Does he constantly post links to Pitchfork et al? No, he writes stuff like this:

We were walking into town near the JobCentre. There was a wall outside about a foot high, but instead of being level, it had a 45 degree angle.

I jumped onto it. “Look”, I said. “This is the sort of thing we will have to watch out for when we come to town with the little man…”

And fell arse over tit. Turns out that standing on a brick wall that is not level is not a good idea at the best of times, less so when the wall is slippery and mossy, and maybe less so when there’s just been a bugger of a frost.

As I ably demonstrated.

On its own this is a pointless, useless piece of writing. It serves no purpose. It does not set Steve up as an expert in anything other than falling over. And yet cumulatively all these snippets add up and create the sense of a person, someone you can identify with (or not) and make an informed judgment about. Not everyone will chose to follow up what Steve might recommend but those that do will invest a lot more in it.

If you’re looking to set yourself up as an expert in some field and want to use social media tools to build a reputation it’s not enough to simply spew out links and tips. All you’re effectively doing is standing in the library throwing books at people. You need to add context. You need to share a bit of yourself.

Have a look at the people you’re willing to learn from, in particular those you only know online. Think about what you know about them as people. What are their hobbies, their quirks, their mannerisms? If you met them in person what nugget of information might start the conversation? (How’s the new puppy? Did your daughter get on okay at the new school? I see you gave up on growing the beard then.) Look at the qualitative stuff they surround their advice with. The pointless, transient, ephemeral and daft things they say. That, I’d suggest, is why you trust them. Because they’re evidently human beings, not info-bots.

In my case the ASH-10 blog doesn’t do this very well unless you read it in tandem with peteashton.com and my other blogs and it’s the realisation that maybe I’m getting this wrong myself that prompted this post. A post which, irritatingly, is all advice and very little story. But hey, we’re all figuring this stuff out together!

One of the main themes for me last year was ultra local blogging. Setting up and running Created in Birmingham in 2007 taught me many things, one of which was it was possibly too broad in scope. Birmingham is a huge city with a million people living here (double that if you include the Black Country) and to expect one person to cover all the creative activity happening here in unrealistic. That’s not to say Chris hasn’t done a fantastic job since I handed CiB over but there’s definitely scope for more focussed blogs concentrating of smaller areas to fill in the gaps. That was part of the thinking behind setting Nicky up with Digbeth is Good, to see whether an small district in the centre of the city with a low population density undergoing massive regeneration could provide enough content for a blog. Nicky quickly proved there is and in six months has developed the site into a fantastic resource for the community exceeding all my expectations and teaching me a hell of a lot. But she’s driven purely by her desire to do it – while she’s no doubt earning significant social capital from the blog there’s no financial reward. So one of the stumbling blocks to developing similar blogs in other communities is finding more people like Nicky. Sure, they will exist but pinpointing them is going to involve casting the net very wide and throwing in a big lump of serendipity. I’m on the lookout for shortcuts.

Last week Chris Brogan asked Can Social Media Save a Local Business?

John Andrews runs the Simply Gourmet Bistro and Groceria in Peabody, Massachusetts. I was fortunate enough to attend a grand opening ceremony the other day, and sample some of his amazing hot food.

John’s situation is like a lot of other small businesses. Things are tight, and he really needs more business to stay afloat. For those of you in Massachusetts, swing by and visit John at 297 Lynn St, Peabody, MA 01960 or call (978) 530-1100. For those of you on Facebook, check out the fan page.

But seriously, is there anything that we could do with social media that would save John’s business?

I really don’t know. Because if you don’t leave near John (and I don’t really), I can’t buy his food often enough to keep him funded. If you do live near him, as @CharJTF from Twitter does, you already know about him.

So how would you help John?

There’s loads of useful advice in the comments but the first thing that struck me was John should look at what he has already. I’m assuming his bistro has regular customers from the local community. I’d imagine these customers fit into three groups: a small number of passionate customers who visit every day and hang out, a larger number of regular customers who think of it as their store but don’t engage too much and a much larger number of occasional customers who come in irregularly or at random.

An online community (be it based around a blog, forum, Twitter or whatever) has a similar distribution of users. The small core people who do most of the work, the regulars who read and chip-in occasionally and the randoms who come in on a whim or via Google. So slotting in a social media space shouldn’t require too much change. He already has a social space – we just need to media-ify it a bit.

Let’s make some more assumptions. The bistro has a cafe-style area where people sit to eat and drink. They have a few staff – a couple full time and a few part time. There are busy periods but also quiet spots mid morning and mid afternoon.

Next we need to look at what John wants to achieve from all this. Let’s say he wants to move people up the chain from random to regular and from regular to passionate. That way he gets more repeat trade and builds more word of mouth marketing. To do this he needs to enable people to feel they have some ownership of his space. The traditional way to do this is by letting people put on their own events off peak (meetups for groups, poetry readings, the usual) and it can work really well, so let’s put that on the list as something that makes sense for a bistro.

Finally, what do people get from the bistro other than that which they buy? Let’s put a sense of community in there, be it gossip and news about the area or simply a sense that there’s something tying everything together.

So here’s my no-brainer social media strategy for an independent cafe-style business that’s looking to increase trade.

1. Set up a blog. Nothing fancy – a basic WordPress.com blog will do the trick. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes to get running.
2. Separate the blog from the business, but not too much. You want the blog to have an independent feel but it still be clear where it’s coming from. In other words it’s not about the business, it’s about the community which revolves around the business.
3. Give whoever is working the counter the ability to update the blog. You could have a small laptop behind the counter or give them 20 minutes a day to transcribe their notes, but make sure the news comes from the front line.
4. Work out an editorial policy for the blog. By placing some boundaries you’ll help the writers focus more. Think about what people want to find out about (and what your writers are interested in writing about). Is it events in the area? Planning applications at local government? Decide on a few themes and use them as the backbone. You can spin off to other subjects but give people something to pigeon-hole you with so they can spread the word easily.
5. Once you’ve got something you can show, have a look at your passionate customers. Identify a few that you think would be good and get them on board. Give them the editorial remit (they’ll appreciate this) and feed back to them regularly. Maybe have a regular evening for blog contributors with free cake.
6. Write about the whole area where your community lives. Get a map and with your business in the middle and figure out the boundaries of walking distance. This is your patch. List the cinemas, bars, venues, libraries, etc and start monitoring them for news. Subscribe to newsletters and RSS feeds. Pick up leaflets. Get a sense of what’s going on outside your doors.
7. Include the competition. This might seem counter-intuitive at first but for your customers there’s no real distinction. Most of them will also buy stuff from the competition so pretending they don’t exist is insulting and petty. Anyway, this isn’t about your business. This is about the community which your business serves.
8. Be positive. Positive can be interesting and is an important part of bringing people together. There’s plenty of places to bitch online should people need one. And you’re looking to convert random customers into regular ones so showing off the community as a nice place to hang out is in your favour.
9. Be campaigning. Nothing brings people together like a good campaign. Look at some of the issues in your area – road safety, graffiti, litter, policing – and allow your blog to be used to campaign on them. Get people writing to local government and, most importantly, keep them informed of the results. You don’t have to do this yourself. If someone comes in saying “Someone should do something about…” call their bluff. Give them a platform and the tools to use it. (Again, make this about the wider community – don’t be campaigning about business taxes!)
10. Be an enabler. You’re busy running the business so you don’t want to be spending hours on the blog each day. Think about how you manage the tables. You keep them clean and the environment secure and occasionally join in but you don’t involve yourself in every discussion. You’re a host who enables people to come together. Apply these skills to the blog.
11. Do an offline publication. Once a week gather together the best bits of the blog, paste them into Word and print out a newsletter. A single folded sheet will suffice. Hand it out with every sit-down purchase. Give people something to read that’s directly related to where they’re sitting. Make sure it plugs the blog, obviously.
12. Connect with other local blogs. Find out who else is blogging in your area. Let them know what you’re doing and ask them if they’d fancy a chat. Most bloggers can’t resist talking about blogging so make the most of the free consultancy! Most importantly you’ll get on their radar meaning they’ll link to you when appropriate sending traffic to your blog and boosting your Google rankings.
13. Further to this, provide some free wifi. If you already have Internet coming into the building buy a cheap-ish wifi router and open it up. Bloggers love free wifi like bears love honey.
14. Above all, start small. Don’t try and run a local media outlet from the outset. Gradually build to being a local media outlet as you add more people to the team. If you just have 5 or 10 posts a week that’ll be fine. Once people know there’s a venue for their news they’ll bring it to you.

As always I could go on but a lot of this will depend on the circumstances of the business and the community it serves. What I hope is clear is that social spaces online are not that different to social spaces offline. At the end of the day they’re about enabling people to communicate and share. If you’re already in the conversation enabling business using those skills to provide and nurture an online space should be relatively painless. And by associating your business with that sort of activity, the few hours a week you feed into the blog should come back to the business many-fold.

If you’re running a cafe or similar business in Birmingham and this sounds like something you’d like to try please get in touch as I’d love to get involved in actualizing something like this. As for the rest of you, how do you think this could be applied to other local businesses? Could a hardware store have a social media strategy? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

(Larger version)

It comes (in the usual roundabout way) from this fascinating investigation by David Meerman Scott into how the Air Force is developing a social media strategy. What I found interesting was the notion of arming all their personnel with these tools and skills and seeing their role in communicating the reality of their situations, whilst also protecting sensitive material, as essential to the campaign. In a way this is revolutionary but it’s really a sensible reaction to a world where most of the troops are young, internet savvy and online. Rather than shutting them down they’ve realised this is their strongest asset propaganda wise.

But what’s really lovely is how methodical and bullshit-free the flowchart is. You can apply this to pretty much any organisation that’s wanting to engage with blogs but is wary of how to deal with negative criticism. Pin it to you wall. Or better still, adapt it for your own use, specifically the Blog Response Considerations of Transparency, Tone and Influence, and pin it to your wall.

1) How can I justify spending time producing stuff for the Internet that doesn’t immediately earn me an income?

2) How can producing stuff for the Internet earn me an income?

A nice illustration of the answer I usually give popped up behind door number 6 of 383 Project’s advent calendar of cool stuff they found this year.

Chris Pugh created a poster called Science Machine. This was to be a limited edition run of 250 prints selling at $45 each. I haven’t looked into how he went about selling them but let’s assume he bypassed the usual channels and just sold them off his website. Selling all 250, which he did, would give him $11,250 before costs and with no commission to pay. Not bad.

But how to sell them without an agent, distributor or gallery? Luckily he had the foresight to set his computer to take a screenshot every five seconds which he then made into two movies, a short seven minute edit…

And the full eighteen minute version…

The short video has been watched 297,000 times while the longer one (which presumably didn’t “go viral” in the same way) has been watched 7,000 times. And someone ripped the video and put it on YouTube gathering another 17,000 views. Interesting to note that they also copied the description and links ensuring those who wanted to could follow through – that doesn’t usually happen unless the ripper admires the individual behind the original work. Some rough and ready analysis therefore says that 1 in 1,284 people who watched the video bought the poster. That actually seems a little low to me in Internet terms but you’ll note that nowhere does Chris allow people to scroll around and explore the image. You watch it being made and you can look at photos of the prints but if you want to see the details and dwell on the art you have to buy it.

Compare this with Rhodri Marsden’s lament that despite 250,000 views of his music video he only sold 58 mp3s, a ratio of 1 in 4310. Rhodri’s problem here, I think, is that once you’ve watched the video there’s no incentive to buy the mp3 unless you really really really love the song. I saw the video when it was doing the rounds. I thought it was nice, watched it a couple of times, possibly blogged it and then moved on to the next thing. There was nothing else to see there. Chris Pugh, on the other hand, has made me hungry. I want to see more of his artwork. I want to drill in deep and really get my head around it. If that hunger stayed with me I might well send him $45. If I could download a high-res version of the print my hunger would probably be satisfied.

I was going to avoid too much maths but got curious so here’s a little bit more. In order to make the same amount as money as Chris, Rhodri’s video would have to be watched 48 million times (11,250 / 58 x 250,000). To be honest that sounds about right for a music video.

Rhodri’s situation also helps me illustrate the answer to question one. He spent a good chunk of time and money making the video which is the main reason for his lament. Chris simply set his computer to automatically take screengrabs as he worked, threw them all into some video editing software (iMovie would suffice), whacked a music track on top and uploaded it to Vimeo. Financial outlay: zero. Time outlay: a couple of hours, maybe more. The video was a byproduct of his actual work.

So here’s the lesson.

1) Look at the process by which you do what you do. Is there a byproduct? Can you very simply create a byproduct?

2) When releasing the byproduct to the world make sure you don’t accidentally give away the product itself.

There’s much more to it than that of course. But if you want to know more you’ll have to employ me. See what I did there?

I’d been meaning to write a guide to what to do immediately after you set up a WordPress.com blog but now I don’t need to as Chris Unitt has written his own and I agree with it 100%.

Even if you don’t agree with it 100% please turn off the Snap Shots popups and hide Related Posts. They’re distracting and pointless and you don’t need them.

Last year I persuaded Birmingham Post journalist Joanna Geary to start her own blog. She took to it like a duck to water and continually surprises me with the ways she’s using the medium. I can suggest things to her to try out and, if she thinks they’re suitable, she implements them in ways I couldn’t have dreamed of either proving my theory or, more interestingly, forcing me to rethink my ideas.

A while back she was having the perfectly normal problem of having too much to write about and no time to do so. I suggested limiting her posts to a few paragraphs, flagging them as just thoughts and ideas and throwing them out there. This made sense to her so she gave it a go.

Here’s a screen-grab:

Check the comments at the bottom there. 34 so far and the debate is still raging from a post that I’m assuming took about 20 minutes to write and publish, if that. I’m pretty sure that if she’d spent the whole evening writing 2,000 words of carefully thought out prose she’d have maybe gotten a couple of comments and the odd link. The latter might have been a more valuable document but the former has created a debate. The comments thread on that post has become an ad-hoc forum for that particular subject bringing together people from disparate communities, some of them her regular readers, some new to her site.

What’s interesting here is that Jo is happy to be wrong in her assertions. She doesn’t know the answer but has the kernel of a notion as to what it might be. She’s putting forward a position but wants people to develop it or even dismiss it. The post isn’t an end in itself – it’s the catalyst for something new and unknown to develop.

This, I think, is what defines Social Media as opposed to media as we used to understand it. In fact what I’m writing here is in the tradition of non-social media. You’re welcome to comment but it’s not my intention in writing it that it spark a debate. I’m essentially broadcasting and while feedback is welcome it’s not going to drastically effect the essence of this post. And there’s nothing wrong with that – sometimes broadcast is the right way to go – but what Jo did in that post is mix up publishing with discussion, a document with a conversation. It’s media but it’s social. And we’re still figuring out exactly what that means.

And the answer, somewhat inevitably, is “it depends”. And that’s where I come in.

All web pages should, with a few exceptions, contain links. This is what makes them web pages and not just documents that have been put on the internet. The act of linking from one page to another via highlighted text is what makes the web a web. It adds value to your text by, in essence, embedding content from elsewhere into words. For example, I can type the word hyperlink and by linking it to a dictionary definition save myself the bother of explaining what it means, freeing me to get on with my writing. Another example might be a web page that described a load of cool videos on YouTube. I could describe and summarise each video or I could link to them allowing you to see them for yourself. This is like the difference between telling somebody about that great movie you saw last night and handing them a DVD you happened to have in your bag. Or something.

So yeah, linking is great. You should all do it all the time. But how much should you link?

The first question you should consider is how important are the things you’re linking to. As a rule the more important the less links. Here’s an example. Now, I like D’Log. He’s one of the best bloggers in the region for cultural subjects with a hint (only a hint) of academia and he really understands the medium well, so when over the summer he decided he didn’t have time to do proper blogging and would just post weekly digests, and when I saw the results in my feed reader, my heart sunk.

It’s all fascinating stuff, no doubt, but it would take me an hour to go through it at least. This is overkill. To much choice, not enough curating. Thankfully he appears to be back at work and normal service has resumed making his posts a great example again. Take this post, a text book example of good short-form blogging. Starts with a link, follows it with an illustration, a bit of commentary, a quote and, in the final description, a contextual link to a person mentioned, should you want to see more of her work. By only having two links he’s telling you those links are important and worth visiting. If he were to fill the post with explanatory links for everything their impact would be lessened.

Linking as a way of emphasising is an interesting one as it puts the act in the same arsenal as bold and italic. This is the thing that I want you to think about as you read on, it says. Similarly, when in the middle of your flow you mention something or someone that you think is important but not important enough to derail into an explanation, a link will show that it’s important, and this is the clever bit, even if they don’t follow the link.

Years ago I remember Diamond Geezer trying out a service that let him see how many clicks his links were getting and bemoaning that a significant number of them weren’t clicked on at all. (When DG tracks back to here perhaps he can inform us of the specific post as I’m having trouble finding it in his extensive archives!) He put so much effort into researching which sites to link to and we, his ungrateful audience, didn’t even bother to click on them. But I’d argue that even if hardly anyone clicks on the links they still have an importance. Here’s a good example of a DG post with loads of links. You know, if you’ve been reading him for a while, that they’re all good value so you might check out one or two but the main reason you’re there is for DG’s writing. His links are, I guess, more like traditional footnotes or a bibliography, adding value by their presence but not requiring you to actually click on them. Compare that to D’log’s weekly roundups. They both have the same number of links but one requires you to follow them while the other offers them as an optional extra.

I did say this was complicated, didn’t I…

If you read my personal blog at peteashton.com you’ll notice I split my blogging into two types. Posts, which have titles and tend to be long and rambling, and Links which are short and serve to send you somewhere else on the internet. There are overlaps and gray areas, obviously, but the distinction is hopefully useful. In the Posts any hyperlinks are there to add some optional value to my writing. In the Links my writing adds some value to the hyperlinks. I could scatter hundreds of links through one of my 2,000 word rambles and it wouldn’t matter one iota if you clicks on none of them but in order to get any value out of my Links you have to click and if I give you too many Links of a morning you’re possibly going to resent having to do that much work. Which I why, though I can come across loads and loads and loads of cool things online I’m quite selective about what I put on my blog.

So, in summary, you should link and link often, but in moderation, depending on the context of the post and the importance of the links, and whether you actually want people to follow them or not.

Make sense?

(And if you really have too much stuff to link to get a Tumblr blog. Works for me.)

First example, comments left on a video about the Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum:

The second example is the comments following this photo on Flickr of a building in Washwood Heath:

When Flickr started they made herculean efforts to have the staff involved in the day to day running of the site, answering questions in the help forums, getting involved in groups and behaving like normal Flickr users in their own accounts. While they let Flickr evolve on it’s own terms their presence meant that when you got involved with Flickr you were aware that this place was more than just somewhere to dump your photos. There were rules of engagement that the community had put in place, namely be nice and helpful and share stuff. It might have been a bit sickly in places but it worked and even now Flickr is a nice place to go to. (Some, myself, might say too nice but that can’t be a terrible thing, can it?)

On the other hand when YouTube was launched it was a place to dump videos, most of which were taken from television shows and movies. There actually wasn’t a lot of user created content on YouTube in the beginning, probably because video camera usage hadn’t quite broken through to the mainstream, so there wasn’t this sense of sharing your own stuff. You were just sharing stuff you’d found and doing so anonymously in case you got in trouble for it. And while this was going on I don’t believe the YouTube staff were actively getting involved with the community that was evolving around the service. (I could be wrong here and am happy to be corrected but it’s not the impression I got.) YouTube didn’t even have groups where like-minded videographers could come together and share their films and discuss stuff. All you had was the, admittedly impressive, Related Videos widget hooking everything together and a system of following other users.

All this together is a recipe for disaster. And so it came to be. YouTube comments are possibly the worst in the history of the Internet and yet there’s nothing particularly unique about video sharing that encourages this.

The lesson should hopefully be obvious but I think it also helps to think of this in real world terms. A pub is, by definition, open to everyone. You can be barred but there’s nothing to stop you going in in the first place. But once you’re in there are rules, often unspoken, as to how you behave. These have been established by the landlord, the regulars and society in general and allow the environment to function. Another example might be a youth centre. Here there will be rules put in place by the youth workers which the youths agree to abide by. Theres a trade off – you don’t get the freedom you might have in a park but you get shelter and a space that isn’t home to be in.

A well functioning online community works on a similar tradeoff. People who use Flickr want it to be a nice place to hang out so they approach it as such. People who use YouTube do so because it’s the best way to distribute video, not because of the community features which are a drawback. If YouTube valued community they should have implemented a Flickr-style strategy from the outset but they didn’t and now it’s too late.

Online social spaces are like any other social space. They will manage themselves if the people in them have an investment in keeping them nice. Give them the reason and, more critically, the support to do so and you’ve won the first battle in community management.

Thanks to my Twitter chums for help sourcing the comments examples.

Recently BRMB, a local radio station, has been emailing bloggers in the Birmingham area about their new motoring website. I know this not because they emailed me but because every so often someone I follow on Twitter would mention it. Chris got one, so did Jez and Nick and Anthony. Rich even went as far as to blog about it. Like I said, I hadn’t been graced with the attention so after I expressed my mock outrage at this snub Nick forwarded it to me. Here’s the document in question.

Hi,

Hope all is well,

After coming across your Birmingham based blog I was wondering if you would consider writing a piece for BRMB Radio. BRMB has just launched a new motoring classifieds site, an alternative to Auto Trader called brmbmotors.co.uk.

This is becoming hugely success within the West Midlands area as it really has a local feel.

We would really like your support with this new service.

www.brmbmotors.co.uk

I’ll look forward to your reply.

Kind Regards

Ben O’Brien

In itself a pretty innocuous email, the sort of polite but unsolicited thing we all get every day, so why did it spark a conversation across Twitter?

The first reason is bloggers tend not to have the same motivations as people who traditionally write copy for publication. The latter will see themselves as part of a process, gathering together information to fill specific sections of their magazine. Someone writing the motoring section of, say, the Metro newspaper would, if they were so inclined, welcome this approach from Ben and, I hasten to add, there’s nothing wrong with that. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to write about stuff they want to write about. Or at least the bloggers Ben was approaching do. They might all be writing from and occasionally about Birmingham but they do so through their own personal filter. So when you approach them with something that is way out of their area of interest eyebrows will be raised.

But that’s not what’s interesting about this. People function like this all the time and the only reason it’s noteworthy is that these bloggers are publishing but don’t fit in with the process. Beyond that there’s something else going on, and in this case it happened on Twitter.

Blogging is a community activity. While each blogger is an autonomous agent acting on his or her own they do tend to cluster into groups, sometimes formally but often ambiently through association. And they don’t just do so though their blogs. When you start using social media tools like Twitter, Delicious and others you tap into networks and information starts coming to you, information that is often surprisingly relevant. And so because I’m interested in uses of social media tools I tend to see interesting examples of that emerging on my networks (along with other things I’m interested in, before you think I eat, sleep and dream this stuff). I didn’t go out of my way to find people who would give me this stuff – I just started following people I knew or thought looked interesting and let the conversational serendipity engine do its work.

So Ben fires off his emails to what he presumably assumes are a bunch of individual people, little knowing that we’re all talking to each other just as you would in a pub about something mildly amusing that happened at work. Somebody feels the need to share that they got a badly targeted email from BRMB and a bunch of others chime in saying they got the same email and Ben becomes the but of a joke. Look at the silly PR guy. He just doesn’t get it, does he.

Is this unfair? Are we being childish? Well, yes. But then we’re a community of human beings and when you get a bunch of people who have bonded over something, no matter how innocuous, they will occasionally behave like arseholes, ganging up on the outsider who wants to join the party but just doesn’t know the rules. It’s not a good thing and I wish it didn’t have to be this way but I’ve seen it happen so many times that I’ve come to accept it as a fact of life. This is social media. It reflects society and while that makes it exciting and vibrant and real it’s not always pretty.

So what should Ben have done if he wants to get bloggers blogging about his shiny new thing? Well, for a start he could tell the truth. I was curious as to how this brand new site had managed to get 4,268 cars within 20 miles of my house. Checking the BRMB Motors Terms and Conditions page reveals it to be “owned and managed by adflyer.co.uk. All information supplied on the Website is managed by adflyer.co.uk.” Adflyer is a national online classifieds site whose submissions system is remarkably similar to the BRMB one, leading me to suspect that they’ve just done a deal with BRMB to use their branding in return for some advertising space on the radio. While a sensible move and one I’d approve of this does not mean the site “has a local feel” and it certainly doesn’t differentiate it from AutoTrader (who, I note, have 25,046 cars for sale within 20 miles of my house, if we’re counting.)

But truth aside, and I grant you that’s not really a big lie, what Ben should really have done is research exactly who he was emailing. Has the blogger ever written about second hand cars before? Do they, for example, document their activities in the garage? Have the done tutorials about finding spare parts online? Do they even care about cars? I’m not being facetious here. For all I know there is a massive network of bloggers who write about second hand cars. I have no idea who they are as I have no interest in that stuff whatsoever, but I’ll give you a clue. You won’t find them by looking for those who blog about Birmingham because they’ll be blogging about cars.

And then lets say Ben did find a rich seam of second hand car bloggers. How should he approach them without becoming a laughing stock on whatever medium they’re conversing through? I’ve given this a bit of thought and, as it stands, I don’t have any advice for him because BRMB Motors is a vastly uninteresting site. Sure, it does the job if you’re looking for a second hand car but so does AutoTrader. What could I, the second hand car obsessed blogger, find to write about it? “It’s a classifieds site that’s a bit like AutoTrader only with less cars and a link to a radio station.”

And that’s the big lesson here. If you’re going to approach people who publish in the social media realm, be they bloggers or whatever, you’ve got to give them something to talk about. If you don’t then they’ll find something else to talk about. Maybe they’ll talk about how you contacted them but didn’t give them anything to talk about. Or that you contacted their friends. Maybe they’ll blog about that on their blog, like I just did.

Well, at least they got a link out of it. That’s got to be good for something.

This is an idea that’s been buzzing around my head for a while now and Stef’s Inbox Victory post (where he got his email down from thousands of unreads to zero in one day) has prompted me to try and turn into a method for dealing with RSS feeds. Or at least start the process.

When I started subscribing to blogs there wasn’t, to be frank, a whole lot to track. There’d be a few for each of my interest areas and a smattering in or about Birmingham where I live. In the last couple of years though it seems like blogging, or at least publishing online and providing an RSS feed, has exploded. Really exploded. When I started paying attention to local blogs you could count them on a couple of hands. Now there are hundreds. Check out the sidebar on BiNS, and that’s just the ones Jon thinks are worth sharing. It’s become apparent that unless it’s your job to do so reading all of these is impossible.

Email has also become a bit of an issue for me, especially in the case of circulars and the like. While most people have been good about removing me form their mailing lists and adding createdinbirmingham [at] gmail.com (hint, if you haven’t already) I still get a fair amount of arts-related email that, frankly, isn’t really of interest to me. But there are also email notices that are kinda interesting, the odd piece of serendipity where I’m hovering over the delete button and pause, cocking my head to a slight angle and going “hmmm…”. So it’s not a hard and fast rule and in many cases I’m reluctant to ask them to stop.

Similarly with the blogs. While there are those blogs I really want read every post from and those I can easily do without (and have done without now) the vast majority I just like having around just in case. Take Laura Careless. I started following her for CiB when she was doing a lot of gig listings and reviews and stuck with her as she moved on to more eclectic blogging (always a wise move, I find). Lately she’s been writing a lot about homemade clothes which, frankly, bore me senseless. If I was being all ruthless about my blog following I’d unsubscribe, but I don’t because I know that eventually our interests will cross and she’ll write something invaluable, as she did with the homemade peanut butter post.

The same goes for the vast majority of the blogs I follow. I might not be interested in most of the things they write but I like their character and writing style and occasionally they inspire me. The problem is finding a way to get to those moments of serendipity without having to spend hours ploughing through the rest.

Unfortunately RSS readers aren’t designed with this middle ground in mind. They have quite a reproving attitude to unread blog posts. Google Reader goes so far as to not even bother telling you how many unreads you have. Mine has been at 1,000+ for months now and it’s like a passive aggressive sneer every time I open it. “You’re so behind that I can’t even begin to quantify how much you need to do to catch up” says Google and since I don’t know whether it’s 1,001 or 1,000,000,001 posts I assume the worst and just never get around to it. Especially as I know that the vast majority of them won’t be of interest to me.

This worried me for a while, but then Twitter came along. Twitter has become my first port of call for Internet stuff. It tells me what my friends and people I’m interested in are up to, it keeps me in the news loop water-cooler style and it provides enough links to cool things to keep me distracted. And it does all this very ambiently. In fact, with the current technical traumas where you often can only get the 20 most recent messages, it enforces ambiance. If you miss it on Twitter then it’s gone and if you haven’t got time to plough through all the tweets then it doesn’t matter. The attitude that Twitter encourages is a very healthy one regarding the Internet. It’s utterly unimportant, unless it’s important, and if it’s important then you’ll find out about it eventually thanks to the safety net of the community. So don’t worry about it.

So, I wonder, how can this be applied to RSS feeds? A technical solution might be to create a middle ground, say a Google Blogsearch that only monitors the blogs I’m subscribed to. But rather than giving it keywords to track (something which destroys the whole serendipity thing) it looks for patterns across the blogs. Take this woefully inadequate diagram:

I’m the red circle and all the blogs I follow are the black circles. The posts they write that are of interest to me are coloured in dark grey and the stuff that people I follow share is in light grey. I wonder if it might be possible to approximate this based on an analysis of firstly what I’m writing about on my blogs and secondly where my reading pool overlaps. This filter could then be applied to the incoming items in my feed reader and create a serendipity pool of alleged relevance.

For all I know Google is trying this already. After all if you have Google History switched on it affects your search results in a similar way (something to remember if you see your blogs coming in surprisingly high for certain searches) but the Home page for Reader never seems that useful to me – just a random selection of recent posts. Maybe if I starred stuff more often it might learn from that, I dunno.

But that’s a technical fix that will need the next generation of RSS readers to solve. Right now I need a solution and that solution seems to be to not worry about it.

While I haven’t put this completely into practice my plan looks a little like this.

1) Locate the feeds you really need to follow. Good friends, essential information, work-critical stuff, current projects, online comics, that sort of thing. Give these specific tags so they can be checked methodologically. But be strict. Some good friends aren’t worth following online. (This is a lesson learned from Flickr – most of your friends aren’t good photographers so you don’t need to follow their photos.)

2) Do the same for admin and pure info feeds. eBay alerts, Google news / blog alerts, comment monitoring feeds, event listings. The sort of things you should keep and eye on but don’t have to worry about every minute of the day.

3) Optionally, create an “Important” tag where you put the things you really really really need to follow from 1 and 2.

4) Finally, put everything else in an extremely vague tag or two. I have “Blogs” and a subset of that, “Birmingham”, a hangover from the CiB days. I have no idea how many feeds are in there but at a guess I’d say 4-500. Give or take.

Now, when you come across a blog you think might be worth following add it to the general “Blogs” tag unless you’re really sure it’s an essential read. And feel free to demote stuff. And above all, feel free to unsubscribe.

The next thing you need is a system and for that I’m going to switch to letters.

a) Aim to clear your essential feeds once a day and certainly the Important tag.

b) Admin tags should be cleared every few days and certainly once a week.

c) Everything else should be skimmed. Switch to Expanded View and scroll for a few minutes looking for things that catch your eye, then Star or open them in a tab or whatever system works best. Expect most of the items in your feeds to be of no interest to you just as most of the books on someone’s bookshelf or songs on their hard drive will be. You’re looking for the common ground, those moments of serendipity where you cock your head slightly to one side and go “hmmmm…”

d) Mark everything as read on Sunday. I’m not 100% sure about this. In some ways it doesn’t really matter if those posts from 2 months ago are read or unread. But it might make you feel better about things to no longer have the 1,000+ hovering over you like a stern teacher.

e) Finally, don’t worry about missing stuff. If you miss someone’s writings then it doesn’t matter. If it’s important then you’ll hear about it eventually and the posts are always there if you want to dig through and catch up. (Say, before meeting them for a drink. Not that I do that ever. Oh no.)

Like I saids at the outset, this is me figuring out a plan as much as offering advice. Got any tips of your own for managing the flood while keeping the serendipity?

In the meanwhile I’ll crack on with putting this into practice, which I’ll have to do now I’ve announced it so publicly. Which, of course, was the whole reason for writing this post. I’ll let you know how I get on.

After a false start he’s giving it another go and emailed for some advice since he felt out of his comfort zone, a natural reaction since his chosen medium isn’t blogging, and here’s what I suggested.

• Remember that while what you do might seem mundane, it’s fascinating to anyone who can’t do what you do. I read comics but can’t draw so watching cartoonists draw and doodle is like magic to me.
• Keep your posts short. A paragraph or two at most.
• Include images. When you finish a painting pop up a photo of it with a brief commentary.
• Document your process. Take photos of a piece as you’re working on it. A local example of this is Phil Wilkinson’s Artfall blog where he blogs the progress of one of his prints. Another that comes to mind is Coop’s Paintblogging experiment.
• Link to your contemporaries, influences and friends. A simple post with one of their pieces, a link to their site and a paragraph on what you like about their work. As long as you credit them and link back there shouldn’t be a copyright issue and you’ll be helping them out with promotion and search engine ranking.
• I don’t know how you get inspiration for your work but say, for the sake of argument, you go off on specific walks around areas making sketches, talk about this and post up a couple of sketches. Give some background to where you’re work comes from.

I wrote that before finding Dean’s blog so it was nice to see he’s already on the right track.

Painting shown is “Maybelene” by Dean Melbourne.

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