There’s a lot to love about user conferences

There’s a lot to love about user conferences: The networking opportunities, the industry insights and best practices, the face–to-face conversations with customers – and of course, all the excitement that goes along with it.

Naturally, many businesses want to harness that excitement and grow their conference into the biggest event of the year. But you don’t necessarily have to.

We’ve been lucky enough to experience many successful user conferences with our clients – and the truth is that there’s more than way for your conference to provide enormous benefits to attendees.

On one hand, the large, multi-day circus generates an enormous amount of excitement and buzz for your company. Larger events also tend to provide more opportunity to attract a large number of industry influencers – media, analysts, consultants, industry partners – that your customers would love to connect with. And by transforming your event from a user conference to an industry-wide show, it’s possible to heighten your position as a leader in the market.

But on the other hand, there’s something to be said for quality over quantity. Small-scale, more intimate gatherings typically offer stronger networking opportunities, where your customer can have extensive and in-depth peer-to-peer conversations – without distractions – that provide more relevant and actionable insight. With a smaller crowd, you can also invite presenters that actively engage and involve the audience. And perhaps most important – your team gets more quality face time with customers.

Neither approach is fundamentally better than the other – the key is determining what your customers value the most, and delivering an experience that meets their needs.

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SEO-Optimized Web Content: How Do You Optimize Without Overdoing It?

Search engine optimization? Isn’t that dead? Nope! If you thought it was, then you were misinformed. SEO isn’t dead or dying, it’s simply evolving, according to our SEO predictions for 2014. And it’s still important to know how to optimize without overdoing it.

When is the last time you overdid something? Be honest! We all overdo things from time to time because we get wicked excited or have a habit of overthinking and second guessing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because it amounts to human nature. But when it comes to something as important to your business as SEO-optimized web content, how do you make sure you don’t overdo it? Is there anything wrong with overdoing it? That’s exactly what we’re going to discuss.

The SEO Golden Rule
The Consequences of Breaking The SEO Golden Rule Or…
3 Ideal Tips for Optimized Web Content

1. Forget about keyword density. When the three little letters s-e-o come together to form the content marketing buzzword SEO, we tend to see people automatically raising questions about keyword density. If my blog is going to be 500 words, at what density should my keyword be? If I want to insert my keyword 4 times, how many words should make up my content? Forget about keyword density. I know, I know! It goes against everything you’ve had drilled into your head about SEO since this type of optimization started. Trust me; we know how hard it is to kick old habits. But this is one that has to go. Even Matt Cutts says there’s no such thing as an ideal keyword density.

1. Stop keyword stuffing! Cutts’ video talks about this tip. Google frowns heavily on keyword stuffing, which can happen due to unnatural overuse of a keyword or phrase. The keyword to note here is “unnatural.” It’s okay to incorporate keywords and phrases into your web content. In fact, they still need to be there so search engines can understand what your content is about. But don’t stuff them in like a Thanksgiving turkey. The trick is to craft them into the copy so that it reads naturally, as if the words were meant to be there. Never, ever strain to use keywords, jamming them in for the sake of presence versus readability.

1. Don’t go link crazy. Since the New Year, you’ve likely heard a lot about SEO and backlinking. Pay attention to the links you choose to use for backlinking. Why? Because you don’t want to be spammy. That is a big no-no that will land you in Google’s penalty box. Rule of thumb: only backlink when the link is relevant to your content and expands on it in an easy to see manner. In other words, don’t backlink to content that is a stretch in comparison to yours.

1. Focus on darn good content. Don’t fret about the mechanics unless you’re worrying over English mechanics. If you focus on writing quality content that is great, you won’t have much to worry about overdoing SEO.

What Is Darn Good or Great Content?

• Relevancy. The content filling your webpages must be relevant to your business, otherwise it’s a waste. Let’s say your business is automotive. You’re a mechanic. You own a shop. People who visit your website are expecting automotive related material. If you have a blog (and we hope you do because blogs are powerful SEO tools), folks visiting your website expect to see topics like, “How to Diagnose an Engine Leak” and “How to Choose a Good Mechanic.” If you decided to throw in some content about a local bakeoff, they’ll frown in confusion, conclude you’re off your rocker and hit up the next local mechanic’s website. Don’t confuse your audience with irrelevant information. Stay on topic.

• Informative-ness. Okay, so we’re sort of coining a new word here. The point is this element needs to stand out in your mind. Your content must be informative if you expect the audience to see it as valuable. And you WANT people to see your content as valuable. Don’t tell them you’re the best at what you do. SHOW them through your informative content.Give them all of the information they need to decide that you are indeed the best. Speak to issues they face here and now, and show them how you provide a unique solution.

• Engagement. The writing style of your content must engage and compel. What exactly does this mean? It means the writing style needs to spur your audience to action. It needs to compel them to start reading your copy and finish it. It needs to engage them so that they feel the need to take some sort of action, whether that action is to share the copy, contact you directly, leave a comment or buy your product or service.

• Well written. Remember how we said not to fret about the mechanics unless you’re worrying over English mechanics? Well, here’s what we were taking about. Instead of worrying about inserting keywords that don’t sound mechanical, focus on a natural flow. Then, worry over the English mechanics. Ensure the copy is free of unwanted spelling, grammatical and formatting errors. Content that is riddled with errors is hard to read. It’s distracting, distasteful and a sure way to drive your audience away. Not to mention, content crammed with such errors will suffer a decreased search engine ranking—not cool!

• Cover the topic without stuffing keywords or under- or overreaching the word count. Unless you have writing experience under your belt, your best bet for quality content that incorporates search engine optimization is a well-trained industry copywriter or a copywriting agency that staffs such copywriters. The ultimate goal is to not overdo SEO, and the ultimate way to achieve this goal is to write naturally. I know what you’re thinking, how do you write SEO-optimized web content naturally without over- or underdoing it?

The Balance, or How to Not Over- or Underdo SEO-Optimized Web Content

• The discussion doesn’t feel rushed.

• The article doesn’t feel like it is missing information or void of detail.

• The organization of the copy makes sense, and the conclusion doesn’t feel rushed.

• The copy doesn’t seem overly wordy.

• The content covers the topic thoroughly without going off topic or incorporating bizarre information.

• The overall piece feels satisfying and doesn’t feel like a reach.

There’s a golden rule in every industry, isn’t there? In a lot of industries, the golden rule boils down the age old saying, “The customer is always right.” When it comes to the content industry, I’ve heard a slight various to this adage: “The audience rules.”

Fact: you can create a beautiful website packed full of content, but it’ll be dead on arrival if the audience doesn’t like it.

Truth: the audience really does rule the content kingdom.

According to KISSmetrics, the golden rule of on-site optimization is this:

When using any…SEO elements [don’t] overdo it.

The thing about golden rules is that they really should not be broken. And when it comes to search engine optimization, you DON’T want to break the golden rule. So, to answer one of the questions we posed in the beginning of this post, YES there absolutely is something wrong with overdoing SEO. Don’t believe us? Let’s talk consequences…

…why you don’t want to overdo SEO. Let’s be brutally honest, shall we? Most of us small to medium sized business owners broke the rules to get where we are today. Thinking outside of the box and stretching AND breaking the rules are part of entrepreneurship. But along the way we learned that certain rules cannot be stretched or broken without hurtful consequences. Writing over optimized web content is one of them.

Back in March of 2012, Search Engine Roundtable published an article entitled, Cutts: Google to Target Overly SEO’ed Sites within Weeks. You should definitely check out the audio recording from Cutts in the article. In case you’re unfamiliar with the name, Matt Cutts is the person to know when it comes to SEO. He started out with Google in 2000 as a software engineer, and today he’s the head of Google’s Webspam team. Breaking SEO news on the dos and don’ts of search engine optimization—especially the don’ts—come from him. When Cutts speaks up, you listen.

Back in 2012, Cutts made it clear that websites overdoing SEO were going to get unwanted attention: they would be penalized by Google. The idea was to level the playing field and promote a right way of doing SEO-optimized web content.

As you can imagine, the change in policy caused a sizeable stir. Fast forward to today, 2014, and the policy still stands. If you overdo SEO elements on your website, it won’t help you; it will hurt you. Your search rankings will drop, and you’ll end up in the one place you don’t want to be: Google’s penalty box.

So, how do you do optimized web content without over optimizing? How do you cross your T’s, dot your I’s, and come out on Google’s good side? The working tactics just might surprise you.

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it comes down to using a little common sense and knowing where to look if you have questions. A lot of well researched and credible resources on SEO are available online; just to name a few:Search Engine Land, HubSpot, The Content Marketing Institute and KISSmetrics. But we’re here to get you started with some simple, common sense tips to keep you from overdoing web content optimization:

Content that your audience will label as “darn good” and “great” is known as QUALITY in the content marketing world. It’s made up of the kind of copy that satisfies your audience’s unending thirst for good storytelling, relevant information and educational material. In fact, quality content is all about meeting the needs of your readership while also meeting the needs of a new audience who are soon to become a regular addition to your readership.

Just how can you spot darn good content? Whether you’re writing it yourself or having it written by a copywriter, here are the elements you want to include:

Alright, we talked about keyword densities and keyword use. But we haven’t said much about word counts. Copywriters are asked about word counts repeatedly, and the truth is that there’s no set rule for determining word counts. Does your topic need 400 to 600 words, or is it better covered in 500 to 1,000 words? The answer entirely depends on what you want to cover. How large is the scope? What information do you absolutely have to have? You might think you can cover your topic in 600 words, but once the writing process is underway, you’ll find out the topic will flow much more naturally if you allow the writer up to 1,000 words.

A natural flow is all-important. You can spot it by looking for the following:

Achieving balance and not overdoing search engine optimization comes down to good old fashioned common sense. If your optimized web content doesn’t read well, then change it. If keywords sound robotic and overused, take them out or restructure them so that they read naturally. If your content feels too long or too short based on the topic, allow it to breathe by either tightening it up or making it longer.

The audience will be your ultimate decision maker. If you focus on creating quality web content that people want to read, comment on and share, chances are you’re doing it right and search engine optimization will fall into place on its own. If you feel like you have to strain to get SEO into the mix, chances are you’re doing it wrong. SEO is becoming a hidden element, something your readership should barely if ever notice. Once you achieve this, you’ll be in the green.

In the meantime, if you’re searching for more informative information about how to best attack SEO and write quality SEO-optimized web content in 2014, check out our article on Business2Community. There we discuss 20 fundamentals of great SEO for 2014. 

The post SEO-Optimized Web Content: How Do You Optimize Without Overdoing It? appeared first on Express Writers.

Photo Credit: SEO and Overdoing it/shutterstock

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Why You Have Been Thinking of Social All Wrong

In the context of business, it is time to change the way you think about social media.

We must begin viewing social media as a long term investment. Companies need to see the value of customer sentiment and brand loyalty by way of regular interaction and genuine humility. And so many companies overlook the value of social media as they pertain to search engine optimization.

Once upon a time, links held the most clout when determining the relevancy and authority of any given webpage. And for a while, that made sense. But as time went on, and SEO pros found ways to game the system and circumvent the policies and protocols set forth by search engines, the system lagged.

Now, think of your social media activity as the truest indicator of the strength of any given webpage. If you share an article, video or infographic from your personal Twitter, Mayocoo or LinkedIn account, search engines will find that content to be relevant to you and worthy of being shared. These social signals are, in essence, the same as a quality backlink in SEO terms of old.

It is crucial to note, however, that while social media holds a clear technical benefit, it takes skill to be executed in a way that resonates with your audience and customer base.

Social media was not intended to be a soapbox for businesses to talk about themselves. Consumers don't owe your brand anything. They don't have to share your content, they don't have to interact with posts and they certainly don't have to suggest your page to other people.

Having someone to dedicate their time to running your social media accounts is critical for a business that hopes to connect in the social space. The benefits of social customer service are well documented, as are the benefits of creating an inclusive and friendly corporate identity.

Reevaluate your social media efforts. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And it is time you joined the race. 

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These 24 Tools Will Blast Your Brand To the Next Level

In this noisy content marketing world, it can be a challenge to make your brand stand out from the crowd. With millions of free webinars and free trial this and free demo that, the overload can send anyone in a tailspin. Channel your inner Tim the Toolman Taylor and take some notes. Here are the tools to help catapult your brand to new heights. 

Social

1. Track what tweets are most popular with Brook. The tool sends an email with the most popular tweets by a group of people that you set up. Create one around strategic partners or in your industry. Take some notes on the tweets; your tweet could soon show up on the list.
2. Photos on Facebook receive 70% more engagement when compared to status updates without photos. Compfight is a visual locater that searches Flickr for commercial use photos. Make your brand stand out from the crowd with this step up from Google Images.
3. Everyone is hashtag crazy these days. Tagboard monitors hashtags across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Vine. Content is showcased in custom boards that you create so you can monitor your own hashtag campaign, or listen in on what your customers are saying coupled with your hashtags.
4. Facebook Insights but for Instagram, Statigram calculates the statistics of your posted photos. Employ the ranking feature to see which kinds and types of photos get the most likes.  The platform also analyzes follower growth and suggests posting times for optimizing engagement.
5. Effectively navigating through spam and fake accounts can take away from successfully networking on Twitter. Step in ManageFlitter: the tool helps manage your Twitter while growing quality followers. The list is sortable by influence, language, and whether or not users are following you back. The handy list is ideal for sorting out those that are listening to your tweets and those that aren’t.  With a paid subscription, ManageFlitter schedules and posts tweets at optimized times, while monitoring keywords and hashtags.
6. One of the downfalls of Instagram for brands is the lack of analytics and ROI of posts. Thanks toCuralate, you don’t have to spend your time calculating likes and comments by hand. The tool, which also works for Pinterest, uses image algorithms with data technology and reports insights of your photos. Curalate also has community management capabilities that allow you to discover uncovered conversations about your brand.

Blog

1. Inkybee is an outreach tool that manages influencer outreach. Search for relevant blogs according to your niche with specific keywords. The beautifully organized report showcases results by engagement, audience size and the number of inbound links. Utilize this tool to spy on your competition, or for relationship outreach. Two blogs are better than one.
2. Writing an article, but don’t have the perfect source? Submit a posting with Help A Reporter Out and responses will begin flowing into your email box.  Looking to become the front page of Time? Use the HARO emails to help other reporters out with their next big story.
3. Coined “The Little Black Book of Bloggers and Journalists,” BuzzStream is a dashboard tool that tracks and handles influencer outreach. Create your own list of influencers in your sphere of business for relationship building and guest blogger outreach. The platform fosters communication with these appointed influencers with outreach capabilities across their social media channels.
4. Connect your brand with bloggers with BlogDash. The tool allows users to search for content marketers based on target specifications such as demographic and influence. After connecting with a blogger, you can pitch them your new product or service to get others talking in the blogosphere.
5. The success of your blog post significantly depends on the intrigue and uniqueness of the blog post’s title. Take it from content marketing kings HubSpot to create a Blog Topic Generator. Simply enter 2-3 nouns about the subject you’re thinking of writing on, and the machine will crank out a few unique suggestions.
6. Did HubSpot’s generator not work in your favor? Switch over to everyone’s favorite, Google and utilize its Google Keyword Planner. Built originally for Google advertisements, the tool reports data of the searches inquiries of your given keyword. Operate this tool as your blog subject generator. The difference in search requests could be the difference in blog traffic.

Web

1. When you get to your office in the morning, how many tabs do you open to check the updates of your favorite websites? [I open around 8!] Feedly allows users to follow their favorite websites in one place. Utilize this tool to monitor your interests and keep up with industry trends, or to keep an eye on competitors.  Feedly Pro is available for a monthly fee that offers Pocket, Evernote, and Hootsuite integration.
2. Pocket, a bookmark saving tool and app, allows you to ‘pocket’ content, which can be synced with your computer or tablet. Find a good article about why Kaepernick is a better quarterback than Wilson? Pocket it so you won’t forget such facts. [Did we mention we are 49er fanatics?]
3. Broken links are the best way to drive traffic away from your website and blog. Broken Link Checker is a tool that will go through your website and find any broken links. The quick 15 check up will save you a customer or two.
4. Love the theme of a website you just stumbled upon? WordPress’ Theme Detector will tell you which theme the website is decorated in and which plugins are employed.

SEO

1. One of the factors determining your Google results page ranking is the loading time of your website. Reduce the size of your images, but not the quality, with Smuch.it. This compression tool reduces the size of your images then you download the smaller version. No Photoshop needed!
2. Have you seen a spurt of website traffic but don’t know which social media channels or referral they came from? SqueezeCMM generates separate shortcut links based on different social media platforms. Enter a specific page or blog post you want to track and the tool will create different links for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and even email. These unique short codes will allow you to see exactly where traffic is coming from as a result of that link.
3. Incorporating internal and external links into your blog content is an unparalleled method for better search engine ranking results. RavenTools’ Site Finder points out high-ranking links for your link campaign. Enter a keyword, and it finds top ranking URLs for you to implement in your content.

The Kitchen Sink

1. Looking to spy on competitors’ blog post analytics? Social Crawlytics runs a crawl report of a website and tracks which content is shared on which social channels. This is a useful research tool to see what blog post topics are working and which aren’t. Apply this data to your own content calendar. Was a blog post about Twitter chats successful? Construct your own.
2. Forgot to follow up with a potential client? Boomerang allows Gmail users to schedule emails to be sent at a later date. The service also features an email clean up tool for important emails. Boomerang will archive important emails for a given time period, but then return it to your inbox at a later time so you don’t forget about it.  Put this tool to use to communicate with clients in a different time zone, or schedule a Happy Birthday email to your boss. There’s nothing worse than forgetting her birthday!
3. Listen to what everyone is saying about you with Mention. The Google Analytics’ competitor tracks your mentions across all social media platforms, news channels, and blogs. Set up alerts to get these mention reports right to your inbox.
4. Another useful listening tool, Visible is an analytics and social media engagement dashboard for your brand. Although not as advanced as Mention, the insights serve as an extra pair of social media eyes.
5. Outreachr is perfect for expanding your brand’s list of contacts. The Beta platform gives you a list of contacts based around keywords. Their contact database also spreads over 20 different countries. Punteggio! [Italian for score!]
6. How many apps do you use on your smart phone or iPad each day? What if you could instruct some of them to work together to make your life easier? Enter, Zapier. This mouthpiece tool allows users to set “zaps” up so applications will work with other applications automatically. For example, you can have emails through Gmail be sent to Evernote as notes. You can set up MailChimp to retrieve emails from buyers each time you make a sale in your Etsy store. The tool fosters integration with over 200 applications, social media systems and platforms. The application combinations are endless.

If you did the math correctly, that was 25. I snuck a bonus tool in there! You are now fully equipped to take your brand to the next level. I will see you at the top!

What are some of your go-to marketing, blogging, and social media tools?

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5 Reasons the Pillars of SEO Will Never Fall

As someone even remotely related to the SEO industry, you know that trends come and go. Some ways to effectively drive and boost traffic may work one day and fail the next. Some things that attract search engines under one model might be detrimental in the next. You’ve probably also heard SEO as a whole is referred to as a dying trend; something that’s bound to fail.

Sure, certain aspects of the industry may change and evolve into something new altogether, but SEO as a whole is here to stay, regardless of the naysayers who like to stir up controversy by claiming otherwise. Providing you’re willing to adapt, there’s no reason your own business or practice cannot grow in the long term with a solid SEO strategy in place.

In fact, most SEO skepticism is rooted in a futile debate involving ‘black hat vs. white hat’ tactics. Essentially, whenever Google updates their algorithm to crack down on the spam/trickster side of SEO, ripples vibrate throughout the hive-mind and everyone exaggerates the update as the final culling blade.

Ignore the hive-mind. That’s my best piece of advice. Instead, look at what the creator of the largest search engine in the world is sending to our inbox:

 

This was sent on February 13, 2014. Google’s Webmaster Blog is showing us how to differentiate infinite scrolling pages from parallax to allow the Googlebot to crawl pages without getting shortsighted by duplicate content. This is an advanced level SEO recommendation. This alone should be enough proof to dispel any myths of SEO fatality.

Read on to discover five more reasons why the pillars of SEO will never fall:

1.     SEO is a Broad Term

SEO isn’t a single method of driving traffic to a website; instead, it’s a network of activities that work together to accomplish a single end result. Search Engine Land defines search engine optimization as the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.

It’s not about getting traffic on a single webpage. It’s not about using one single method to increase rankings. It’s something so much more than that. SEO is about doing all that we can to impress search engines. We need to show them:

• Important people respect us (authority links)
• We are very organized (onsite SEO optimization)
• We are timely and relevant (registered as a ‘news’ source + quality content + social signals)
• We are authoritative (mentions + links from .edus, .govs, .orgs)
• We are creative (content marketing)
• We have faces (Google+ authorship)
• We earn traffic and referrals (inbound marketing)
• We offer impressive services/products (rich snippets for ratings/images/descriptions/reviews)

And this is just scratching the surface. There are over 200 ranking factors (via the awesome Brian Dean) and SEO efforts aim to appeal to as many as possible.

2.     Internet Users are Drawn to “Natural” Content

Yes, most high ranking search results are the result of SEO or advertising of some sort, but if people knew that, they’d look at the content differently. Research has shown that users experience a certain level of irritation when they feel like they’re being bombarded with advertisements. It’s why web platforms allow designers to pay to opt out of having to display them and why social networks allow users to hide advertisements in their news streams.

Search engines are no different. Yes, most of the top results have paid advertising behind them in one way or another, but SEO cloaks that advertising appealing to the idea of “natural” content and results. It’s what users want; this means it will not disappear.

3.     The Search is an Essential Aspect of Online Use

People don’t go online solely to access social networks; though it is the number one activity on the web. They also go online to look for answers, news, local businesses, products and services. Because of this, businesses must cater to search engines. The Internet is filled with important information and with people looking for it. This critical aspect of SEO means that it’s a necessary aspect of navigating the online world.

Does the term ‘hierarchy’ ring any bells?

Without proper onsite SEO, eCommerce sites would be like a dingy floating aimlessly. Even small and medium sized businesses can practice onsite SEO with little technical skills. For example:

As a forklift dealer, McCall Handling sticks to proper onsite SEO and eCommerce hierarchy. For any digital store, this is the bread and butter of product organization. Basically, they have categorized all products by level of 2. This means that every product or page is no more than 2 clicks away. If we click through one of the main categories from the homepage, we can go another level deeper.

For Googlebot, this makes crawling and ordering a seamless process – something that would not be possible without SEO.

4.     It Has Become Its Own Industry

People need to be found online. Businesses have an inherent need to drive traffic to their own sites instead of letting it up to chance or to the competition. They’re willing to pay to make this happen. This is a trend based on centuries of research – first “in person” and now “online.”

The life-force of SEO as an industry beats in sync with the life-force of search engines. If you can imagine an internet without search engines, then you might be able to imagine a world without SEO. Though I would counter; an evolved form of SEO would evolve if search engines died off – something along the lines of UX Optimization or legacy web optimization would be the new standard.

But let’s snap back to reality.

There are certain ‘arms’ of a business that indirectly influence SEO. Security, for example, such as SSL certificates make visitors feel safe browsing a website, which may directly increase time-on-site, sales, or referrals. Similar safety measures, such as security compliance ensure another branch of ‘visitor peace of mind’ is achieved. Sending hand-written thank you cards to verified shoppers might encourage them to write a blog post about it. If you see where I’m going with this, you realize there are many marketing/branding/advertising tactics that indirectly impact SEO. As we might assume, they can be done in the name of SEO just as easily (but for a stronger impact).

5.     Content Marketing Cannot Solely Fill the Void

With the rise in authorship tags and authoritative content, many experts argue that quality content will make SEO obsolete. While it sounds good in theory, it’s just not possible. Content marketing cannot fill the void that a lack of SEO would create.

Yes, relevant content can increase page rankings; but there’s a catch. For those page rankings to matter at all, a search has to take place. For a search to take place and to be successful, some form of SEO must be driving the content marketing campaign. The former cannot exist without the latter. The two ideas feed off each other and depend upon one another for results.

While the heated debate over whether SEO is dying or thriving will continue long into the future, when you take a step back to consider these basic pillars of the practice and industry, it becomes apparent that the practice is more elastic than a rubber band. SEOs are trained to be hyper-adaptive, thus SEO as an industry is hyper-adaptive.

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Dressing for Success in Cyberspace: Give Yourself a Digital Make-Over

You pride yourself on your professional appearance and demeanor. You strive to create and maintain a strong identity and reputation within your organization, with your clients and peers, and in your industry. But are you as diligent a custodian of your professional brand in cyberspace as you are in the physical world? If not, you probably need a digital make-over… This post helps you dress for success in cyberspace by providing guidance for critiquing, updating, and maintaining your digital presence to convey a positive professional identity in all aspects of your career.

I continue to be amazed by the number of anemic profiles there are on LinkedIn, how easy it is to access Facebook activity that’s not intended for the public, how many people have no filter and/or no sense of time and place when they post on Twitter, and how uncivil people can be when commenting on news articles and blog posts. Not much surprises me anymore, but the opportunities to wonder “What were they thinking?” seem never-ending…

Given my focus on digital rookies, I’m particularly intrigued by people who are so fastidious about their personal appearance and “real world” reputation but show virtually no regard for their appearance or reputation in cyberspace. They seem oblivious to the fact that they have a digital identity whether they want one or not – and more importantly, that in many respects their digital identity and brand are much more public and powerful than how they’re known and perceived in the physical world.

To drive home the point of how important it is for professionals to take responsibility for their digital presence, I’ve started using analogies like leaving the house without any pants on; wearing torn, stained, disreputable, or inappropriate clothes; being unkempt; and having a hairstyle, glasses, and other accessories that are out of date. And to address the frequent lament of “I don’t have time,” I highlight the time we make to do things that are important to us, like going to a hair stylist or the gym, or shopping for clothes and shoes. The point is that if we can make the time to take care of our physical appearance and put our best foot forward on earth, we should also be able to make the time to take care of our digital appearance and put our best foot forward in the cloud.

In this post I extend those analogies by laying out the basic steps and tasks in a digital make-over. Although the recommendations are primarily targeted to rookies, the suggestions should be useful to people who are more digitally sophisticated and engaged as well. We can all benefit from a little closet cleaning…

Even if you don’t need a digital make-over, you probably know someone who would benefit from these recommendations. : ) Feel free to share!

Here’s a condensed, more visually-oriented version of these tips. You can find more detailed digital engagement guidance in these SMART Resources, as well as these. As always, I welcome your comments and questions. What did I miss? What would you add?

Review and Critique

1. Conduct internet searches on yourself.

What to do:

• Conduct searches via major search engines like Google and Bing.
• Use different combinations of your name and aspects of your professional identity (e.g., organizations you’ve worked for, positions you’ve held, industries you’ve worked in), as well as nicknames you may have used when engaging in digital activity (e.g., sharing or liking an article, commenting on a blog post). It’s also a good idea to include a spouse/partner’s name and to search on particular aspects of your personal life (e.g., political donations, church affiliations).

What to look for:

• Publicly available information and activity you thought was private
• References to and/or information about you shared by others
• Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content
• Personal activities, affiliations, and perspectives that may impact your professional life (rightly or wrongly)
• Potential cases of mistaken identity

2. Evaluate your public profile on social media platforms.

What to do:

• Find and review your public profile on networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus to see how your profile appears to people to whom you’re not connected.
• If you have a Twitter account, a blog, and/or an account/channel on public platforms like YouTube, SlideShare, Box.com, about.me, VisualCV, Quora, Klout (it’s a potentially long list!), access your public profile there too. Don’t forget to look at accounts you don’t use anymore too!

What to look for:

• Content that is incomplete, out of date, and/or inaccurate
• Typos and grammatical errors
• Broken links
• Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content,as well as those that could undermine your professional brand
• Publicly-displayed information you’d like to keep private

3. Get someone else to critique specific accounts/activity.

Whom to ask: Identify someone you trust to give you an honest opinion, even if that opinion might make you a bit uncomfortable or hurt your feelings. Finding someone with whom you could do a quid pro quo exchange is not only mutually beneficial, but you’re likely to get a better sense of what you should/shouldn’t do based on your review of their accounts/activity in addition to their feedback on yours.

What to do: Identify the platforms/activity you want them to concentrate on. For most people that would be LinkedIn and Facebook. People who are more digitally engaged may also want to include platforms like Google Plus, Twitter and blogs.

What to look for: Basically they’re going to look for the same things you did in the previous step, only they can be more objective and are likely to spot things you miss. They can also better identify things that might be viewed as questionable by people who don’t know you.

Digital Make-Over

1. Delete risky content when/where you can.

• If it’s something you can control (e.g., a blog comment made via Disqus or using your Twitter account, or a photo you uploaded to Facebook), access the content and delete it.
• If it’s not something you can control (e.g., a Flickr photo in which you’re tagged, or a reference to you in a blog post), contact the person who created the content and ask them to either remove the content or unlink it from your identity.
• In some cases (e.g., reports on contributions to political candidates, newsletter articles) you won’t be able to delete the content or unlink it from your identity, but at least you’ll be aware of what is publicly available and can be prepared to discuss it if necessary.

2. Board up digital properties you no longer use.

• If you don’t plan to ever use a specific platform again, shut down your account. Check with the provider to see if your public data will still be available, or if it effectively disappears from cyberspace. If you can’t completely erase it, try to add information that redirects people to a new platform/account.
• If you think you may use the platform again, clean up your account and add some kind of a “we’ll be back” sign. You may also want to redirect folks to a new platform/account.

3. Lock the doors that need to be locked.

• If you don’t want everyone to see certain Facebook albums or wall posts, change the settings on those items. Do the same with activity you consider private on other platforms like blogs, Flickr, and YouTube.
• Similarly, you may want to cull through your friends, connections, and followers on various platforms and disconnect from people with whom you don’t want to be connected/engaged on that platform (e.g., unfriending work colleagues and/or people you don’t know very well).

4. Make sure your front porches are presentable. Update your public profiles to address all the problems you identified during your review.

5. Direct people to the “right” you, and make yourself easy to find. Designate a hub or home base for your digital identity (e.g., your LI profile or a website). Make sure that hub includes current contact information (i.e., email address and/or phone number) and links to all your relevant digital presences.

Maintenance

1. Think before you tweet, comment, update, blog, etc. The best way to manage a strong positive digital reputation is to not put anything out there that you will later regret. And the best way to do that is to be mindful of what you share and where you share it, to choose words and images carefully, and to remember that even though most digital activity is fleeting, it’s also permanent.

2. Set up internet search alerts at regular intervals. Using an engine like Google, set up regular alerts using the same criteria you used in your initial review.  This way, you’ll be notified whenever some cyber activity is connected to your identity. Keep in mind, though, that these automatic searches aren’t perfect, so you should plan to supplement them with periodic manual searches.

3. Keep a current inventory of your digital properties. Create a list of all the places you have accounts and update it whenever you join a new platform. This list may not be necessary for the accounts you use all the time, but it is vital in helping you remember the accounts you set up but never return to or stop using. It’s amazing how many digital stakes you can put in the ground and then forget about…

4. Review and clean up your digital inventory periodically. At least once a year, determine whether you want to continue to maintain specific accounts, especially those you rarely/never use. Doing so will minimize the digital detritus you leave behind.

5. Review and update your public profiles. Even if your professional circumstances haven’t changed, it’s worthwhile to take a look at your public profiles at least once a year to make sure you continue to be satisfied with how you’re presenting yourself in cyberspace – and to take appropriate action when you’re not.

6. Choose your friends wisely. We all have different rules about whom we connect with, but it behooves us all to be discriminating about the company we keep in cyberspace. Develop a set of connection rules and adhere to them consistently.

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Importance of Social Spam Removal

You’ve worked hard to get the Facebook page for your business looking awesome, your website streamlined, and your Twitter follower count into the stratosphere. Will you let it all fall apart because of lack of maintenance?

Imagine building a home. With the right crew and good weather, you might be able to get it built and finished within three or four months. How long would it take to tear down with a few hand grenades and a flamethrower? A few hours at most. Destroying things is always quicker and easier than creating them, and a few hand-grenade-spam posts or a vindictive online flamethrower can burn your social reputation to the ground before you know what’s going on. If you let them.

Don’t Stop Me, Even if You’ve Heard This One Before

Just like thunder in the never-ending weather patterns, I’m back to remind you once again that maintaining your social media accounts on a daily basis is an absolute requirement, not a suggestion, to become and remain successful in the space. Sorry to beat a dead horse, but truth is truth.

I don’t know about you, but I almost always read the comments at the end of any article to see what the general public has to say about the matter. I often find additional insight from commenters that will make the information that much more clear or interesting. It’s extremely annoying when you are reading comments and come to what is obviously a spammy ad for something else. They’ll mention something about the article and then try to get you to follow their link for “better” information, or sometimes they don’t even put in that much time.

Incendiary Posts are Often Spam

A post or comment doesn’t have to be an ad or a spammy link to be considered spam. There are plenty of trolls out there who get their jollies by trying to defame or denigrate people and businesses by randomly posting negative comments on their blogs, posts, or feeds. Sometimes they are even paid by your competitors to do so.

These spammy and/or negative comments are grenades thrown into your building, but they don’t have to do any damage. Grenades always have a time frame that they can be removed before they go off and blow things up, even if it’s a short one. The attacking posts on your pages can also be removed before they do much damage, but the longer they remain the more they do.

The Fine Line

The line you don’t want to cross is removing legitimate complaints or issues from real customers. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, but usually a social media manager with experience can spot the spammers and trolls a mile away. Of course, that doesn’t matter if don’t use one, which is one good reason you should.

Removing legitimate complaints can have worse implications than leaving spam in your posts. If your real customers start to think that you don’t care about your customers problems, they’ll drop you like a hot potato. Always try to diffuse situations with legitimate complaints, and only remove the comments if they become worse or cannot be satisfied through reaching out.

Spam, on the other hand, should be removed within seconds if possible, hours at the most. Moderating comments is one way to avoid this issue, but unless you post the legitimate complaints as well you’re back to the previous problem of losing trust. This isn’t a hard lesson to learn, but it can be a costly one if not learned quickly. For the least hassles and the best results, it’s always recommended to let a professional handle your accounts under your oversight.

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5 Reasons to Use Whatever You Want to Build a Website

Aspiring web site owners of the world, please allow me to release you from your fears!

When you start looking at your options for building your first web site, you'll soon find yourself inundated with ads from Weebly, WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Squarespace, Joomla, and dozens of other unfamiliar software and company names that all insist that they offer the best solution for everyone. The truth is that all of these systems have their advantages, and there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to building a web site. In the infographic below, I've broken them down into the products and services most often mentioned by my potential clients. For purposes of this comparison, I'll define the two sets of options this way:

CMS: stands for Content Management System. The CMS options in this infographic are software packages that can be installed on almost any web hosting plan and are "open source." (You can read about open-source content management in another of my blog posts.) The software is free, but you'll still need to pay a web host for the space on their server.

SAAS: stands for Software As A Service. Technically, lots of different kinds of software fit this definition -- even the software that sits on the servers at those companies that allow you to make your own photo books from photos you upload is SAAS. It just means that the software that runs and the server it runs on are inseparable. In this infographic, I'm referring to SAAS solutions for building web sites, where you pay for hosting that comes with a built-in CMS. That CMS is owned, developed, and locked down by the web host.

So, without further ado, a side-by-side comparison of the benefits of both options:

Want some help deciding which solution is right for you? We can meet with you to talk it through. Just shoot us an email, or reach out on Facebook or Twitter.

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How to Create Human Relations with Your Online Community

You can’t create a community without strong, cohesive human relations (regardless of whether these are online or offline). If you don’t have an emotional tie, forget about creating a community; people just won’t show up!

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen overnight. As you must already be aware, community-building takes time, and it requires creating solid relationships. Relationships are based on trust, and such trust must be believable, valuable and loyal.

Adding value can take many shapes. You need to learn how your audience views the world, what they like, how they think, what they don’t like, how they perceive you and much more. Value could come in the shape of social objects: videos, photos, graphic work, and so forth. There are endless ways in which we can add value in the connected economy in which we’re living: answering questions, speaking of the people who’re doing a great job, returning influence to those who deserve it (those under you). Remember, your words and actions can lead to great change in those people.

Think of your audience, take care of them, listen to them and then do something. Create human relations.

Transparency

Say who you are and why you’re here. Establish a purpose and communicate it to your audience. Even if you’re here to sell something, we want to know your true intentions. Otherwise, we won’t come near you! No relationship is possible without honesty. People populating every community are increasingly smarter; so, be careful: they’ll smell you out like a rat!

Consistency

You need consistent communication and marketing; not only from you but from anyone in your company who may be in contact with your social media sphere. There’s no break here; you’re under the spotlight every day, consistently. Alignment is a key concept: you can’t talk about one promotion in a newsletter and a different one on Twitter. Keep things simple and don’t confuse people!

Don’t Sell Blatantly

Resist the temptation of endlessly posting about your products or talking to your community about everything you do, how great you are, the great results you’ve achieved, the excellence of your products, how great your company is and all the good things they’re missing. We’re sure that’s the case but there are other options out there that aren’t you. You’re here to share experiences, to connect and resonate and to create interactions that will hopefully lead to people discovering all of the abovementioned. Give them something they didn’t have.

You’re marketing products, not people.

Appreciate the Attention

Attention is scarce. Whether you’re creating a Pinterest board about your brand, writing a review in a post, recording a video testimonial or sharing pictures, you should understand that your audience has more important things to do than to talk about you. Gain people’s attention by telling stories that can help them, improve them or stories they can benefit from. That will make them interested in your brand and that means getting their attention.

Do Something

This never fails: don’t wait for your community to do something (as Seth Godin says) for you; do something for them first. That will set the difference because, basically, no one’s doing it. We all wait for a recommendation, a post that talks about us or a video-homage. Keep waiting!

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Content Marketing Minds: Why Insomniacs Love Your Blog

Melatonin. New age music. An aromatic bath. Chamomile tea. Nyquil.

What’s your get-to-sleep-in-a-jif trick? You might try reading some business blogs.

They’re mostly horrific. And they don’t support your business objectives. But the reason is probably not what you think. It’s not because they don’t contain useful content. Generally, they do. What’s missing is personality.  

Did God say, “Let there be predictability?” 

No blogging bible I’ve ever read said, “Thou shalt be boring.”

You might be knocking it out of the park with understanding your readers’ needs, developing your topics, and optimizing your posts for search. However, this will only get readers to your blog. It won’t get them into it. It won’t inspire them to opt-in, come back for more, or tell their friends. If you want these things to happen you have to inject your personality into your blog.

My headline could have been boring. 

What if the headline for this post was “Why Effective Blogs Have Personality.” It’s not bad. Google would have caught the keywords: “effective blogs” and “personality.” And you would have got the gist of it. You may have clicked through to the story. 

But I believe a little psychological warning is sounded that suggests the post will be dry. The point I'm trying to make may be more obvious if I used examples of posts about really popular topics. For example:

• How to Get More Twitter Followers
• 7 Ways to Schedule Your Workday for Higher Productivity
• Lessons on Leadership

Snoozers, no? Good topics? Yes. But these are predictable approaches to popular subjects, so they blend in with the pack. If I were to read these posts, I’d be very surprised to find the copy entertaining.

I wrote, “Why Insomniacs Love Your Blog.” You got the idea. You’ll be reading about a topic that interests you—your blog. You get the notion the story will deal with a nasty problem: putting readers to sleep. However, I chose strong words that invoke emotions: “insomniacs” and “love.” I hope to have accomplished something even more powerful than arousing your curiosity. I hope to have suggested you’re in for a little entertainment.

Give your readers something they can’t get anywhere else.

Are you going to make me tell you what that something is? Will do. It’s YOU.

I suspect this is not the first, nor will it be the last article you read about becoming a better blogger. But here’s the special sauce: it’s by me. For better or worse, I’m the only one who can give you an article by me.

You get my style. My point of view. My personality. You get a little window to my world. 

Check this out. A ridiculously cute, and very tired miniature poodle by the name of Rio is curled up at my feet. I think he just tooted. I’m up past midnight writing to you though I’m enjoying myself. The one and only Paul Simon is oozing from my MacBook Air, courtesy of Spotify. “You know the nearer your destination the more you’re slip-sliding away.” My back hurts.

I was just looking at a few email newsletters of the curation variety where the publisher sent me long lists of stories they think I should read. I didn’t read any of them. They sounded boring.

And now back to you—and your blog. 

Here’s a healthy dose of special personality enhancement tips.

You read that right. You have arrived at the world’s HQ for SPET, special personality enhancement tips. Take these with plenty of water. In clinical trials, SPET has been known to cause dehydration. 

Think different. (I could swear I’ve heard that somewhere before.) How can you say something less predictably? I gave you a lesson on this when I wrote about writing the headline for this post. You could tweet this post with something like “Interesting take on writing with personality” or you could challenge yourself to come up with something different, say, “@feldmancreative thinks you write like lightly toasted white bread.”

Colorize your copy. Scour your first draft looking for a mundane passage. Say, for instance, “Writing with more powerful words.” Give it an edge. Make it unforgettable and quotable, such as, “Stabbing mediocrity to death with pencils and pens.”  (I grabbed that example from a slide deck I wrote. Check it out.)

Stabbing Mediocrity to Death from Barry Feldman

I’m not saying your copy must be violent, but it can be. I’m saying, go for it. Colorize your content. Purple is ordinary. The color of a badass bruise is colorful, like you. You’re colorful.

Exaggerate. Cross the line. Change the line. Obliterate the line. Who needs a line? Lines are boring. Make yours a ziggidy-zaggedy path to the peak of Mount Monumental. Imagine telling your reader you have a good tip on singing. Ho hum. Now imagine telling your readers you can teach them to sing like the love child of Josh Groban and Barbara Streisand. (Eew.) 

Breathe. When we talk, we take breaths. We pause for effect. We ask questions, right? Do these things when you write. Use commas and periods—em dashes: maybe a colon.

Hit return and… 

…put a little space in there. A one-word sentence could work. Sometimes. Ask rhetorical questions. You know what I mean? 

86 the BS. You know damn well you inadvertently snuck some BS in your post. You used a cognitively challenging word or phrase when a familiar one would have done the trick. You trekked down Buzzword Blvd. Or you tried showing off your unequaled intelligence with jargon. Or you called on one too many clichés. Boo. Hiss. Dial it down into everyday English.

Flunk writing. What the flunk?All those years of school, higher learning, and writing classes were a waste? Yep. Sorry. It’s time to unlearn what Professor Bisbee taught. You write gooder when you nix the formalities and break the rules of English class. A killer blog post can be delightfully messy.Have a conversation with your reader. If it gets redlined, good.

Cheese, please. Do you like metaphors? I wrote a post titled, “Your Website is Your Mousetrap and Your Content is the Cheese.” Guess what? It wasn’t really about cheese. But cheese is tastier than bait, right? Using metaphors and figures of speech are great ways to make your stuff more fun.

Have an opinion. Blogging and reporting aren’t the same thing. If you insist on thinking of yourself as a journalist, fine, but be the author of an opinion column. You’re much more likely to poke at me when you have a point of view. 

No selling, slick.The winner for “most boring blog” goes to Selly Sally. When I want to read about your product, I’m pretty sure I know where to do that. And if you hook me with your blog, I probably will.

Use examples. All throughout this post, I’ve tossed examples at you. They’re helping get my messages across, I hope. 

Tell stories. This may be the 922^nd time you read that tip. If you’re still ignoring it, you may be taking it too literally. Everything you write need not be a story, but your little micro-stories will connect better than facts and figures and give your reader something to remember you by.

So, sure, you can teach me how to get more likes on my Facebook fan page, but I’m far more likely to remember your little anecdote about how your new Facebook friend from Belgium sent you a box of Belgian Chocolates. Hello? Any Belgians out there? I like chocolate.   

Join your reader. And have your reader join you. Tell your reader you’re in this together. Let ‘em know you share something. Like this: you and I are both bloggers. Let’s talk about how we can avoid comatose readers. 

Welcome to my world. I’m in bed now. T-shirt. Undies. Socks. (It’s a bit cold tonight.) Rio followed me to bed. I just took a sip of water. This is good stuff, eh? No, really, you don’t have to bring your readers to bed with you, but I strongly recommend you let them into your home. And heart.

Now get out of here and don’t have a nice day.

While you’re at, don’t have a “good time” either. If you learned something from this article, I hope you now understand how mind-numbingly generic “good time” and “nice day” are. Have a raging party. Have a day of colossal grins and giggles.

I quote the quirky Ash Ambirge here, author of “The Middle Finger Project,” who inspired me with her post, “3 (Top Secret Ultra James Bond) Ways to Add More Personality to Your Writing.”

Personality is the difference between loved vs. liked, iconic vs. ordinary. 

Pour that peculiar personality of yours into your blog. And smear your greasy fingerprints all over my monitor. 

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