Social media encourages two common and contradictory mistakes. Social media is fun that way. Over-committing to social media You wake up and check your Twitter, check out the new followers and send five replies and seven retweets. Then off to Facebook to respond to 82 comments on your fan page (you get through 20 by…
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Website heresy: Test your content on real customers
Are your customers real people? You know, people who mostly live offline? Then you need to watch this: (The non-video-watching summary? Google did a street poll in Times Square. Almost all of their respondants used the internet, but only 8% knew what a browser was. Most thought Google was their browser.) I live in the…
Website heresy: Connections first, money later
Imagine Mr Moneybags walking down the street. He has so much disposable income in his pockets that his pants are starting to sag a bit and he has dreadful lower back pain. But suddenly! there you are offering to sell him your wares. It doesn’t even matter what they are, he accepts. In fact, in…
Website heresy: Get educated
Yesterday I wrote about how you need to put down the training materials and get started on something. Today, I want to talk about information products. Yes, that’s the wrong way around. What can I say, I’m wacky like that. Awesome websites at their simplest need a base of technology (about $100 worth) driven by…
Website heresy: Stop learning, start doing
Education leads to action. Or as one of my personal heroes, Henry Rollins, puts it: Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit. There’s a limit on how much you can study without implementing the stuff you’ve learned. There’s a time when you have to stop buying and reading yet another perspective on a subject you already know…
We’re not all the same
photo credit: frozenchipmunk The feedback and interesting conversations from what I’m referring to as That Post continue. One of the comments was so insightful and useful that I have gotten permission to print it in its entirety. Hi Catherine, Coming to this party late, via your cleaned up posts then reading the comments on this…
Stop tweaking your design
photo credit: mugley Design matters. But it only matters so far. Change your design until it has: clear and effective navigation enough white space to not look crowded a few effective images a defined visual hierarchy (where the most important elements are the biggest, boldest and most obvious) no more than two, maybe three fonts…
Stop playing it safe
It’s been an… interesting few days for me. Lots of comments, lots of thoughts, a few regrets, a few shakier relationships, many stronger ones, some polite disagreements, an impressive lack of defensiveness (I hope), creating new rules, destroying some old ones, feeling guilty and joyful and proud and conflicted and growing, growing in so many…
Aftermath of heresy, part 2: Conclusions
This is the last post that directly references the highly emotional post about social media and scalability, although I have had a number of very interesting comments from there and the follow-up post that will turn into other posts later. After much thought and conversation I have come to a conclusion: that post was the…
Aftermath of heresy, part 1: Questions about social media
So yesterday I blurted out a highly emotional post about social media and what I described as the big lie: Anyone with 10,000 followers on Twitter will not be your buddy. I wrote, with very strong NSFW language, about some specific events that I had experienced recently and how I felt about them. Lots of…