Social Signal: Latest Blog Posts

Sketchnotes from the Digital Strategy Conference

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:00:44 +0000

This morning's Digital Strategy Conference sessions dug into social strategy: coupling online engagement with organizational goals. It's what makes the difference between flailing around and getting things done.

I took notes throughout Sandy Gerber's indepth look at social strategy, and Nancy Richardson's account of lessons learned so far at Lululemon. (And I had the opportunity to speak on a great panel with a gang of stellar folks, applying their real-world experience to the audience's strategic questions.)

Use sketchnotes and graphic recording to spread your speech's message

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:44:45 +0000

A social speech has the power to extend your message's reach beyond the audience in attendance. And one of the most powerful ways you can do that is by encapsulating that message in a self-contained, easily-shared piece of content: a social object.

Think of it as a spur to conversation: something that people will share and talk about online. (Jyri Engeström first coined the term, but cartoonist Hugh Macleod has done a lot to put it into practical terms.) For your speech, that social object could take many forms: A great clip of the key moment from your speech. An infographic illustrating and supporting your argument. A striking and relevant image, captioned with a text quotation from your speech.

Or it could take the form of graphic recording: an increasingly popular way of capturing the essence of speeches and conversations as illustrations, usually drawn live and in the moment.

Innovative workshop facilitators have been using graphic recording now for years. (Here's Nancy White doing her marvellous graphic take on my Northern Voice talk from 2009.) And now it's hitting the mainstream with everything from RSA's now-famous whiteboard animations to sketchnotes at events like SXSW and (cough) the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The folks at Duarte Design created a series of illustrations from last month's TED 2013 talks – garnering more than 100,000 views on Slideshare. Here's how one of them, capturing seven different talks, came together:

You don't have to be nearly as ambitious in scope and scale, of course. But even a few simple sketches along with explanatory text can help your message spread – and inspire conversations that can lead to connection, action and impact.

And those sketches don't require any special artistic training or cartooning skill. Books like The Sketchnote Handbook and The Back of the Napkin set out simple techniques you (or someone in your organization) can use to illustrate a message with clarity and power, even if you haven't dared to doodle since grade school. And the Sketchnote Army website offers inspiration on demand, with tons of examples to learn from.

Add some identifying information — the speaker's name, the event and date, an URL and a Twitter ID — and you're ready to release your sketchnote into the wild as a social object. There are countless ways to do it:

post the image to your blog
post the image to Flickr
tweet it out after the speech
add it to the slide deck you post on Slideshare
turn it into a Prezi
animate it a little and post it to YouTube

Whichever way you share it (and any other social object you create), follow and join the conversations it triggers, and engage with the networks it helps you build.

P.S. – I'm convinced the current popularity of hand-drawn live notes owes no small debt to the impact of Common Craft's fantastic explanatory videos. So it's no accident that I'll also heartily recommend Lee LeFever's The Art of Explanation, which is great on images and can help you add sound and video to the mix.

Five ways sharing links can build relationships instead of breaking faith

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:04:06 +0000

Suppose you read a tweet or a Facebook update: an urgent message about something truly vile that a public figure has said. Outraged, you click through... and discover that, actually, what they said is far milder.

Or you click the "About us" link on an organization's web site... and you're taken to a rambling, vague philosophical essay. Or you search online on three keywords, click a promising result, and discover the page has nothing, nothing to do with your search terms. Or you tap a link to "Read more" on a mobile web page, and a 30-megabyte PDF begins to download slow-w-w-ly onto your smartphone, sucking the life out of your data plan.

Been there? Me, too — all in the past week — and it left me fuming.

What happened in every case wasn't just a little wasted time, or a frustrated search, or a dent in my data plan. What happened was a little tiny betrayal.

Because a link isn't just an URL or a little HTML code. A link is a promise.

On a web page, it's a promise that if you click or tap here, you'll go to the page, document or resource that the text inside the anchor tag describes. In a Twitter feed or on a Facebook page, it's a promise that this link will be worth your while – that it was worth sharing because it's worth reading.

Breaking that promise means breaking faith with readers and visitors. And the ways people do just that are depressingly numerous:

Letdowns: Site navigation that leads to "Coming soon!" pages.
Surprise downloads: Links that lead without warning to Word documents, PowerPoint files and anything else that doesn't load seamlessly in a user's browser.
Hype: Claims that the content at the other end of the link is far more controversial, significant, useful, factual or hi-LAR-ious than it really is.
Lockouts: Links to walled gardens that many users won't be able to enter: paywall-protected news stories, for instance, or any service that requires you to create an account to see the content.
Lies: Outright deception about what's at the other end. (No matter what the motivation is – whether it's rickrolling, black-hat SEO tactics or something else – you're making a withdrawal from your trustworthiness account.)

The result? Some pretty upset people:

The flip side? When someone clicks a link of yours and gets exactly what you promised, it builds trust – the same way that keeping any other promise does. Trust helps to build relationships, and relationships... well, they're what social networks are built on.

Here are five ways you can be sure you're keeping those promises:

Open doors: Avoid linking to content behind paywalls or registration barriers. And before you pass on a link to something someone's posted on Facebook or Google+, check the sharing settings on it to be sure it's public.
Fair warning: Let people know when you've linked to something other than a web page or an image. Label your link with the file format and, if it's a hefty one, add the file size: Interview with Nancy Duarte (MP3, 5.5 MB)
Working links: The web is a living thing, which means bits of it die sometimes – bits you may have linked to. From time to time, give your site a check for broken links. (Looking through your analytics for common 404 errors is a start.)
Unvarnished truth: Sharing your honest excitement along with the link? Great. Puffing up mediocre content as life-shatteringly awesome? Less so.
Due diligence: Twitter and Facebook make it awfully easy to repost someone's link if they've made it sound appealing. But have a look first – so you know what you're sharing when you pass a link along.

Sharing links can do a lot of good for you and your audiences. Just remember that when you share content, it reflects on your reputation – for better or worse.

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 12: Mitchell Beer

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:43:10 +0000

Mitchell Beer has been a leader in conference communcations for more than a quarter of a century. His firm, The Conference Publishers, reports and repackages conference content - keeping it useful and relevant long after the closing gavel.

How does that change in the social media era? In this episode, Mitchell tells me how conference reporting is evolving to take advantage of everything from YouTube to Twitter. And along the way, we gain some insights into how speakers and speechwriters can help their messages find a prominent place in those reports... and in the ideas participants take home with them.

Mitchell Beer on Twitter and LinkedIn
The Conference Publishers on the web and LinkedIn

Alex's ebook unlocks the professional power of Evernote

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:07:18 +0000

It wasn't that long ago that "notebook" just meant the paper kind that you'd carry to meetings, refer to as you worked, and jot random thoughts down in… provided you had it with you.

Then came the web, and then smart mobile devices, and everything changed. Today's web-based notebook lives on your laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone and web browser. And the most successful by far is Evernote.

Synchronizing your notes across your various devices and the web is just the tip of Evernote's iceberg (or, if you prefer, the flyleaf of the notebook). Evernote does everything from handwriting recognition to photo synchronizing to web clipping... and much more.

Figuring out how to harness all that power, though, can be a little daunting. (Your last paper notebook probably didn't require help documentation.) To put Evernote's features to work for you, it really helps to have the guidance of someone who not only knows the software itself, but how to make the most of it.

Enter Alex's new ebook Work Smarter with Evernote, the first in the Work Smarter with Social Media series from Harvard Business Review Press. It's available on Amazon, iTunes and HBR.org. (As of right now, it's topping the time management category for Kindle volumes, and hit the number two spot for Amazon's time management books.)

Work Smarter with Evernote isn't a software manual. It's a guide to using Evernote to make your professional life more effective, productive and satisfying. Alex shows you how to use Evernote to capture notes no matter where you are, and to organize your work and your priorities. And show you how to realize the full potential of Evernote's social features — the ones that make it a powerful tool for collaboration.

Maybe best of all, you won't have that long apprenticeship period where you have to patiently learn a tool's intricacies before it starts being useful. Alex's 30-minute setup guide can get a beginner up and running — or, if you've used it before but never really got it, let you give it a real try.

Alex draws on a wealth of experience and knowledge, both around the app itself — she was one of Evernote's earliest adopters and evangelists, and is now Evernote's research ambassador — and around effective online work and collaboration. (You can sample some of that expertise in a few of her recent posts for the Harvard Business Review, Vision Critical and Evernote.)

We hope you'll check out Working Smarter with Evernote. And let us know what you think!

Terms of service changes deserve more than just a shrug and a click

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 01:10:06 +0000

The debate simmering over Instagram's pending terms-of-service changes shouldn't come as a surprise. These days, changes to a site's or app's terms of service get a lot more scrutiny than they used to.

True, most of us just grumble a little at the inconvenience of a nag screen popping up, then click through without reading. (And who can blame us?) But with a growing awareness of issues ranging from online privacy to usage rights, more and more people give amended user agreements a good hard look.

And when they find something they don't like, there's a receptive audience of users ready to spread the word, often on those same platforms. Sometimes those concerns arise from overblown, out-of-context misinterpretations of legal language. Other times, they're just plain delusional – and if you posted one of those Facebook-is-now-a-publicly-traded-company disclaimers, you probably got an earful from your friends to that effect. (I suspect the issue around Instagram using photos in advertising has less to do with conscripting your next coffee photo as a Starbucks billboard, and more with serving "Rob Cottingham also followed [insert brand here]"-style "social ads".)

Yet many user agreements really are downright abusive. They're drafted by the company running the service, and are pretty much always skewed in their favour. Reading them, it's hard not to think that the company's legal department drafted them with one mandate: "whatever we can get away with." The site Terms of Service; Didn't Read documents the ways a range of services put users at a disadvantage (along with a handful that actually do a pretty good job of balancing conflicting interests).

The issues are real. But when people complain about changes to user agreements, as many are doing about Instagram today (the EFF outlines its concerns here), there's often a backlash. They're accused of whining about the free service they're receiving, trying to prevent the company running it from making a profit, and having way too high an opinion of their content's value. (If you're looking for a post that hits the trifecta, with a trollish dollop of sneering, try this one.)

To take the first two arguments on quickly:

It's a free service: Yes, a service like Instagram doesn't charge a fee. You don't pay in money. Instead, you pay in time, creative effort and attention. And that, in turn, creates the community without which the service would be worth far, far less. (See "Just because there's no price tag doesn't mean you aren't paying for it," a post I wrote three years ago.)
Companies need to make money, you commie freak: Of course they do. Even the most co-operatively-owned company needs to bring in enough income to keep the lights on. (Unless it realizes an indirect return for its owners in some other way, an idea we'll set that aside for another day.) But one-sided exploitation isn't the only business model out there (and in the participation business, it's a risky one). Companies and individuals strike mutually advantageous arrangements every day; Flickr's deal with Getty images treats its users as partners.

But it's that third "Get over yourself and your crappy pictures of food" argument that I find especially toxic. (This is apart from the objection that, if the content users are generating have no value, why put the rights to use it commercially on the table at all?) The backlash against user advocacy plays into the idea that all that time and creative energy we're pouring into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Cheezburger, Flickr and the many other services out there, and all of the images, videos and stories we're sharing are worthless.

Sure, a lot of the content being shared is frivolous and silly, or executed with little thought and effort. So is a lot of human conversation and activity; we're playful by nature, and we'll sometimes dabble at things without ever being good at it. (Also, if you ever have a look at some of the drek that often gets pawned off as children's entertainment, you'll look at LOLcats and Twitter memes with a whole new level of respect.)

And all that light conversation keeps the channels open for the more significant stuff. I discover deeply moving personal stories, glimpses of awesome beauty, laugh-out-loud humour and unexpected insights through my social networks every day. They come from people who don't always have the talent and experience to craft a polished, professional piece, but whose distinctive perspectives and voices outweigh those deficiencies.

One of the most powerful things about the social media revolution has been to give those voices an audience. And whether that audience is a small circle of friends and family or a network of hundreds of thousands, it has opened up the world of creative self-expression to hundreds of millions of people, drastically lowering the barriers to participation.

One barrier remains, of course: creating something and sharing it with the world is still an act of courage, especially with the "so... what do you think?" of a comment field or a Like button. There are still many out there who delight in running down things other people have created, and still plenty of opportunity for a first-time creator to experience shame and embarrassment for caring about what they've created. Easier and safer, then, to do that ourselves pre-emptively, to be the first to describe our content as trivial.

But we sell ourselves short, and lie to ourselves, when we dismiss what we're creating and sharing as worthless – and shrug off our rights as creators as being just as unimportant. Which is why it's deeply gratifying to see the protests that arise over terms-of-service changes: we're starting to take our time and self-expression a little more seriously.

And just as important is the way that the platforms themselves are responding. While I was writing this post, Instagram published one of its own, featuring – among other points – an overdue explanation of the most contentious terms-of-service change, governing the use of photos in advertising and promising clearer language on that point.

Instagram's owners clearly understand and respect that, clever and innovative as their technology may be, it's the community and the content they create that gives Instagram most of its value. We should show our time and creativity at least as much respect as they do.

How right-sized graphics can lend a whole new dimension to your online appearance

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:39:02 +0000

Most organizations would never send their leaders to a news conference in pizza-stained sweatpants and a moth-eaten Planet Hollywood t-shirt. But a startling number of them do the digital equivalent.

They stretch low-resolution logos and graphics to serve as cover images. They shovel photos online without noticing that the call to action is getting cropped out. Use intricate, complex images as pinkie-nail-sized profile photos.

The result is a blotchy, pixelated, distorted, unreadable mess.

If you're swallowing hard as you read this, and recognizing your own organization in these words, take heart. Because even if you aren't a graphic designer, there's a simple way to take a huge step toward a better first impression.

And that's to learn the pixel dimensions that your social platform uses... and then stick to them when you create your graphics.

Do that, and your profile photo will suddenly look crisper and cleaner; your logo will be recognizable; your infographics will still contain all their info.

These tips and resources can help:

When you're creating graphics for the web, set your app's measurement unit to pixels instead of inches, picas or centimetres (which don't mean a lot when you're dealing with screen measurements).
Always preview your graphics at their actual size (also known as 100%) before uploading them.
Don't keep hunting down the same specs over and over again. There are some lovely folks who've done that work for you and shared it online:
- Dan Wilkerson of Lunametrics has assembled a fantastic, comprehensive list of pixel dimensions for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn, and created an infographic that displays them all.
- Jon Loomer has a great infographic for Facebook dimensions. With all respect to Dan, I prefer Jon's design for clarity – the numbers are bold and instantly readable. But I have both on my office wall.
Store that information where you can get it when you need it. Scroll past Dan's infographic, and you'll find a table with all the values listed as text. I've copied that table into Evernote, and now it's at my fingertips when I need it. (That feels especially clever when I have Photoshop open on my laptop and Dan's table open on my tablet.)
Can't find the specs for a particular image? You can measure it yourself.
- Install a browser extension that gives you an on-screen ruler (such as MeasureIt for Firefox for and Tape for Chrome).
- Or if you have a little HTML and CSS knowledge, right-click on the image and choose Inspect Element (or your browser's equivalent).
The good folks who build platforms like Facebook and Twitter often change their interfaces, and that means changing image dimensions, too. So when an update comes out (like those banner images everyone's been introducing over the last year or so), check to see if you need to rebuild your images – or create a whole new one.

Let's be clear: how you look on a social platform like Facebook and Twitter isn't nearly as important as what you do.

But as with the rest of life, a little attention to your appearance often makes a big difference. First impressions matter: looking crisp and professional can get you through the front door of people's attention, and allow the conversations to happen that lead to deeper engagement.

You don't need drawing skills to create powerful images that amplify your content

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:39:19 +0000

Across the social web, organizations are discovering the power that the right image - including an apt cartoon - can lend to your content. And there’s never been a better time to not be able to draw.

Okay, let me back up. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how well something is drawn, or how visually attractive it is. If you’re great at drawing, or you have a good eye for color and composition, you’re way ahead of the game — all other things being equal.

But all other things usually aren’t equal. (Try measuring them if you don’t believe me. I know of a rather good book on measuring things.) Exacting design standards can work against you if they keeps you from posting a less-than-perfect visual so long that the conversation has moved on to another topic by the time you hit “Publish”. And slick production values may not have the same impact as something that’s crudely drawn, but reflects an authentic voice conveying an important, resonant idea.

So here’s how you can add some visual cartoon-flavored impact to your story, blog post or report, even if you’ve never so much as doodled Snoopy on a high school notebook.

First, remember that the underlying content trumps everything else. What’s the message you want to convey, the story you want to tell, the fact you want to get across? What’s the emotional reaction you want your audience to have? What action do you want it to drive them to? Start by answering those questions, then start thinking about the visuals you want to create (and how you’ll make them). That can save you a lot of wasted effort, and you’ll avoid wasting your audience’s time and attention.

And tying for first, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t draw. Most of us actually can. We just have limits to what we can draw and how well, and beat ourselves up when we trip over them. But bumping up against our limits is how we learn to do better. And even if you never get to the point where gallery curators are banging on your door, there’s a lot more acceptance online of pretty rudimentary drawing skills… as long as they get across a great idea.

If you can draw two circles and make them overlap, you can make a Venn diagram. (If you can draw three circles, you can draw a more complex Venn diagram than most of the ones you’ll see out there.)

If you can draw a triangle on top of a square, and add a rectangle…

…then with a little practice, you can draw a house…

…and if you draw a line or two coming out of it, pointing to a few words (no shame in doing those with your computer, by the way!), you have a cartoon.

Two pointy lines, a circle, two dots and six straight lines,

… and you can make a cat…

…which, if you play your cards right, might volunteer to help you with fundraising.

The point isn’t to convince you that you can, in fact, draw Tippy the Turtle and should enroll now for an exciting career in illustration. It’s to say this: everyone has limits. See what you can do working within them, and every once in a while, press those boundaries gently and try to learn something new. Because those limits can bend and shift, and the more (and more often) you push against them, the more they’ll move.
(Bonus silver lining: Constraints in your drawing ability can force you into the kind of simplicity that focuses your message onto what really matters. If you can’t draw the cluttered, distracting background, you won’t.)

So that’s my pitch for learning to draw — or, more accurately, learning what you can draw now, and learning how to draw more down the road.

In the meantime…

Still can’t draw?* You can still create great pictures. Sites like Bitstrips.com and apps like Comic Life have amazingly simple interfaces that let you create comic strips and cartoon panels — and you’ll never have to draw so much as an eyebrow. Online charting and data visualization tools like Easel.ly are can let you pull together charts and info graphics quickly and easily.

Countless online meme-generating sites can let you whip up a sharable text-on-photo image in seconds; a mobile photo captioning app like Over for iOS lets you do it yourself right on your own device.

Or find some inspiration from the way webcomics like a) Dinosaur Comics, b) the profanity-laced Get Your War On and c) Wondermark use artwork created by others. Specifically, they use a) exactly the same clip-art in exactly the same positions in every single strip, adding dialogue; b) a very few different pieces of really awful clip-art, adding dialogue; and c) vintage public-domain 19th-century illustrations, adding dialogue. Just be sure you aren’t running afoul of anyone’s usage rights. (By the way, at least one of these artists actually can draw very, very well. So can Randall Munroe, who draws the stick-figure-centered, wildly-successful xkcd

* By “can’t draw”, I mean “Your drawing skills aren’t yet to the point where you feel comfortable sharing your creations with the world, but you’re working on them and any day now, you’re going to post that first doodle.”

If you don’t want to use a pen, you can still use a camera. Whether it’s a top-of-the-line DSLR or the nearest smartphone, a camera coupled with your imagination can take you a long way. Trying to dramatize the impact of overfishing and habitat degradation on wild salmon stocks? Get a few discarded fish bones from your local fish store, lay them on a sandy beach and (with a little chopping and arranging) set out the panels for a cartoon. Snap it, Photoshop in a few dialogue bubbles once you get home, and you have your cartoon.

You can do the same thing with all kinds of visual communication, of course. Those salmon bones could become a bar chart, tracking the decline in population. Or engage your inner pre-schooler to chart changes in education funding: make a line graph by gluing macaroni onto construction paper. Or if you want to draw attention to a word or phrase, write it in big letters on a blackboard or a lined flip chart, or draw it on a napkin — whatever context makes sense for the underlying idea. Take a picture of your creation, and you’re set.

In a bind? Let someone else do it. There’s the absolutely lovely way of paying a cartoonist to draw a custom cartoon (thanks, Beth!), or to license an existing one — but there’s also a trove of cartoons and illustrations out there available under a Creative Commons license. You can search for them on Flickr, or just Google “creative commons”, “cartoon” and various keywords. Or you can start bookmarking cartoonists you come across who post under an open license. (Modesty forbids suggesting a starting point.) Just be sure you respect the terms of that license, which may require attribution, using the image without modification, or using it in content that has a similar license.

Finally, keep working at it. Use your emerging skills — in drawing and in the alternatives — to create cartoons, but also to explore other ways to communicate visually. Try new things, see what works for you and for your audience… and keep learning. Read great books like Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, and follow folks like Sunni Brown. Add Information is Beautiful and Sketchnote Army to your information diet. Watch Beth’s Pinterest board on visual marketing.

And please doodle. On your meeting notes, on your grocery list, on the draft annual report you’re editing… because sooner or later, you’re going to look at one of those doodles and see a cartoon — the kind you’d be proud to post, publish or share.

A version of this post originally appeared on Beth Kanter's blog.

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit has arrived

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 23:03:58 +0000

A few weeks ago, I let you know that Measuring the Networked Nonprofit was on its way, bringing with it the combined wisdom of Beth Kanter and Katie Paine on how nonprofits can measure their impact in an era of free agents and networked activism.

It's a momentous book. Organizations from governments to businesses to community groups to nonprofits have all struggled with whether and how to engage with the networked social world, especially when resources are scarce and stakeholders are feeling skittish. Measuring the Networked Nonprofit opens up new possibilities for accountability, learning, innovation and greater impact.

Today, Beth officially announced the book's availability. It's already been topping Amazon's best-selling book on nonprofits for days because of advance purchases, which speaks to the hunger out there for this kind of practical information, framed in a hope-filled vision for the future of the nonprofit sector. (Beth and co-author Allison Fine articulated that vision in their previous book, The Networked Nonprofit.)

As Beth puts it, "The book is about how nonprofits can measure and improve results from leveraging their networks." The advice you'll find there has been "field tested in real-time as part of my work as Visiting Scholar at the Packard Foundation with 60 of their grantees who participated in a peer learning/focus group and contributed many of the case studies."

And Beth will help you do a little extra good when you buy your copy:

I am donating my royalties to support the Sharing Foundation‘s college education program for young people in Cambodia. My family is sponsoring Keo Savon, who we met this summer in Cambodia. She is second year engineering student and by supporting her education she will have better economic opportunities.

In the interests of full disclosure (by which I mean deliriously excited bragging) here's one more excerpt from Beth's post:

To help those who need to learn to laugh at measurement, not fear it, I commissioned Rob Cottingham to create cartoons that capture the essence of each chapter’s advice. (There were numerous times when I snorted my latte from laughing so hard!).

(Which is why that waiver I have clients sign has such explicit language about burns and scalding.)

Beth and Katie have lined up a slew of events, but they're also eager to hear from folks who'd like on in their community. In the meantime, if you'd like to support the book's launch, Beth suggests four things you can do:

Buy a Copy of the Measuring the Networked Nonprofit

Attend a Book Event this month as part of our book tour

Share of photo of yourself with the book on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook and use the hashtag #netnon

Stay tuned to our blogs as we share more stories about how nonprofits apply the advice in the book and I’ll keep you posted on Keo Savon’s studies

And what do you want to bet they'll be measuring all of it?

Cartoon-blogging at Google Engage Vancouver

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:12:41 +0000

Google Engage for Agencies came to Canada a year ago, training agencies in AdWords and other Google products so they can then offer those products to their clients. Yesterday Google celebrated the program's first Canuck birthday with a four-city conference, connected by Google Hangout, looking at marketing trends facing digital agencies and their clients.

Speakers included the host, Google's Deepak Anand, and local digital mavens Doug Jasinski of Skunkworks, Chris Breikss of 6S Marketing, and Nasser Sahlool of DAC Group.

My iPad and stylus were there, too. Here are my notes:

Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot on the science of Facebook for non-profits

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:36:36 +0000

After reviewing 1,000 Facebook posts and updates from 20 non-profits with large followings on the site, Capulet's Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot can report

a) that it's a really good idea to get other people to tally the metrics for 1,000 separate posts – something they achieved through Amazon's Mechanical Turk; and
people seem to just love simple, evocative text on top of a compelling image.

Actually, they can report a lot more than that... and they did, at last night's NetTuesday meetup at downtown Vancouver's W2 Media Cafe (a terrific space, by the way!)

Here's my cartoon-blog post from the night...

And here, if you want to dive in (and you really do), is the presentation itself, as they first delivered it at NetSquared Camp in the spring:

How NGOs win on Facebook from Darren Barefoot and Theo Lamb

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit hits bookshelves in October

Rob Cottingham — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 00:14:34 +0000

Every once in a while, titans team up. Sometimes the results are catastrophic (Lex Luthor, meet Brainiac) — but once in a while, you get something so wonderful ("You got chocolate in my peanut butter!") it's almost enough to rehabilitate the word "synergy".

Here's a team-up that falls squarely into the peanut-butter-cup category: Beth Kanter, nonprofit social media visionary and pioneer, and Katie Delahaye Paine, the reigning monarch of measurement for organizational communications. Together, they've written Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

It's the natural followup to The Networked Nonprofit, which Beth cowrote with Allison Fine, and Katie's Measure What Matters. And it's a terrific book, aiming to enable the kind of accountability that organizations have a right to expect from their communications efforts, online and offline.

That they're tackling the challenge of measuring outcomes in the distributed, often loosely-organized world of networked nonprofits is especially ambitious... but they deliver, with concrete advice and real-world examples. I can say that with first-hand knowledge, because Beth kindly commissioned me to draw a series of original cartoons for the book. And I got to read the manuscript as it evolved and sharpened.

It was a privilege, because I believe Measuring the Networked Nonprofit will make a huge difference for organizations and the causes they support. (It's also daunting, because I'm pretty sure KD will be able to calculate the ROI on each cartoon to three decimal places.) I'll have more to say closer to the release date. But for now, you can get a taste of their approach in Katie's cover article for the latest issue of NTEN: Change and — if you haven't already — the networked nonprofit wiki, Beth's blog and Katie's blog.

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 11: Maddie Grant

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 08:10:27 +0000

Maddie Grant of DC-based SocialFish has done a lot of thinking about connecting online audiences with speeches, panels and presentations. More to the point, she's done a lot of doing, including convening one of the most ambitious online conference approaches I've seen: NTC Online, the digital version of the Nonprofit Technology Conference held every year by NTEN.

In our conversation, she offers some great advice for event organizers, speakers and anyone who wants to use digital tools to help online and offline audiences learn. And after you've heard our conversation, check out these links:

Maddie Grant on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook
SocialFish on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
Maddie has cowritten two books: Open Community (disclosure: I cartooned for it) with Lindy Dreyer, and Humanize with Jamie Notter
Here's a terrific post from Maddie's blog on hybrid (i.e. online and offline) events
TodaysMeet
Storify

Nora Young on what our virtual selves are building

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:26:25 +0000

As we Like, tweet, post, pin and share our way through our daily lives, we're adding to a staggering repository of information. Exactly what are we creating – and do we have a choice in how it's used?

That's the question Nora Young poses in her new book The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us. The host of CBC Radio's technology series Spark came to Vancouver last night and spoke to a packed Third Tuesday crowd about how we can – and should – start asking ourselves what we want all of this shared information to add up to. It could be a future of everything from smart cities to crowd-sourced disaster relief – or a future where our own information is used to manipulate us against our own interests.

Here are my sketchnotes (click for a larger version):

If you've listened to Spark, then you'll know Nora is a very sharp thinker – and that she avoids falling into either digital utopianism or knee-jerk fear of the new. And if you've heard one of her presentations (I say this as someone who had to follower her very hard-act-to-follow keynote at Northern Voice a few years ago), you'll know she's a warm, engaging speaker. So you'll want to catch one of her upcoming appearances: Third Tuesdays in Toronto June 25 and Ottawa June 27 (with tickets including a copy of the book, and free admission for students), the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival September 16, Word on the Street Toronto September 23, Edmonton's LitFest September 28 and 29, and Toronto's International Festival of Authors in October.

(One last thing: great events like this happen when a few terrific already-busy people become even busier. Thanks, Tod Maffin and Joe Thornley, for making Third Tuesday such a great series of events.)

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 10: Holly Ross

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 20:11:13 +0000

This episode features Holly Ross from NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. She's a great speaker in her own right – and every year, NTEN hosts the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It's a huge gathering (but remarkably relaxed and collegial), and we talk about what it takes to connect that many people online at a conference - and how speakers can make the most of a connected audience.

Some links and resources:

Holly Ross on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
NTEN on the web, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ – if you work in nonprofit technology, you have to check these folks out.
Graphic notes from this year's NTC (with thanks to Rally.org)
Evernote, Holly's tool of choice for organizing information for a presentation (and possibly the flashpoint for a robot revolution)

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 9: JD Lasica

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 31 May 2012 23:02:26 +0000

When you want solid advice on social media, backed up by years of experience with both non-profits and businesses, you go to JD Lasica.

And so did I, for a half-hour conversation that touched on everything from why letting your audience see your slides in advance may not be a bad idea, to how speaking and community-building go hand-in-hand.

Listen to JD, then explore these links for some terrific resources:

JD Lasica: home page, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Flickr, Slideshare - and his Wikipedia entry
Darknet, JD's book on Hollywood's assault on digital-age freedoms
Socialmedia.biz, the business-focused social media consulting firm JD founded
Socialbrite, JD's firm focusing on non-profits and social enterprises
The Socialbrite sharing centre, a learning hub for non-profits and changemakers
Creative Commons and Creative Commons search on Flickr

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 8: Nancy Duarte

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:38:21 +0000

It's hard to say just where Nancy Duarte has had the biggest impact: as the architect of Al Gore's presentation on climate change in An Inconvenient Truth... as the author of two profoundly powerful books on crafting and delivering presentations, slide:ology and Resonate...

...as the co-creator of Duarte Design, a firm that has been redefining the art and science of presentations for nearly a quarter-century...

...or as a pioneer in integrating social media and public speaking around the central driving idea of story.

Our conversation lasts less than 10 minutes, but Nancy packs a lot of insight into

how the backchannel changes the balance of power between speaker and audience
how speeches can take on a life of their own as social objects
how even harsh criticism can make you a better speaker
and how dramatic tension and release can lend your next speech the power and impact your ideas have been waiting for.

Listen in - and then explore more deeply:

Nancy Duarte on Twitter
Duarte Design on the web, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – and the Duarte blog

SlideShare presentations by Nancy and Duarte Design
Steve Jobs' now-legendary commencement address at Stanford (video) (text)
Duarte's new online store Diagrammer (imagine an iTunes for PowerPoint-format diagrams, tailored to the relationship you're illustrating and instantly downloadable for 99¢)
Microsoft PowerPoint, which Nancy recommends for its outlining mode, as a way of clustering and refining your thoughts and crafting a compelling structure
Prezi and Apple Keynote

Why we love ScreenFlow: screen capture for the Mac

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:02:18 +0000

If you spend any time teaching people about online tools, or documenting them, or pitching them, chances are you've thought about screen capture software. And last week, a post on the Web of Change email list asked for recommendations on just that topic.

I weighed in on the side of Telestream's ScreenFlow, and I'm sharing it here in case you're looking for something for your next computer or Internet tutorial:

I have a two-year torrid love affair with ScreenFlow (although Darren Barefoot has actually proposed to marry it, so consider me trumped). It's Mac-only, but if you're in the Apple universe, you get an awful lot for the $99 pricetag.

Here's some of what I like:

A simple, intuitive editing interface that – for me, at least – beats the more recent versions of iMovie for making sense right off the bat
Fast and easy creation of callouts (that is, highlights, with background blurring and darkening, and foreground zooming)
Fast and easy annotation with text and shapes
Easy addition of new recordings
Simple adjustment of playback speed

And here's some of what I'd like to see:

Clip masking or cropping (Update: Lynn from ScreenFlow comments below that you can crop a clip by selecting it and then ctrl-dragging the sizing handles. Huzzah!)
Integrating edited clips into one, so you can then apply affects to the whole
Customizable presets for text, annotations and callouts
More customization in the export settings, especially publishing
Better HTML5 support in publishing

Check out some of the other feature requests from the user community.

A note: because its export function relies on QuickTime, you're limited to Apple's selection of video formats (of which H.264 is probably the most universal). So if you have your heart set on WebM or Ogg, you're out of luck.

How about you? Got a favourite screen capture tool? Do you use QuickTime's free screen recording feature on the Mac? CamStudio on Windows? Camtasia? Jing? Make your case in the comments!*

* Vendors, you know we love you, but please leave this conversation for users and customers. Thanks!

A bookmarklet to hide the Drupal 7 administration toolbar

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 11 May 2012 23:54:26 +0000

The (barely-tested) bookmarklet: Drag this link to your browser's bookmarks bar: Hide toolbar | Restore toolbar

I love the administration toolbar that comes with Drupal 7, the one that puts the admin menu within easy reach at all times. It's one of the most convenient developments in my online life.

But there are times when it's really inconvenient – like when you I want to show an unpublished page the way an ordinary mortal will see it when they visit. There's a shortcut bar underneath it, which you can hide or show at will... but that toolbar stays there, come hell or high water, as long as you're logged in.

Short of installing a module (which would be rude of me, if I'm not the guy actually developing the site), I've resorted to hiding the toolbar by manually editing the CSS properties in my browser. A little "display:none" here, a sprinkle of "padding-top:0px" there, and we're in business.

But that gets old pretty quickly. How about handling it in one click? The JavaScript is actually pretty straightforward (this is on a site where the body's CSS "padding-top" value is zero throughout):

javascript:document.getElementById("toolbar").setAttribute("style", "display:none");void(document.body.style.paddingTop="0px");

It works by hiding the contents of the toolbar, and resetting the body's padding-top value to zero.

I tested it successfully in Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but I ran it through John Gruber's JavaScript bookmark builder to work its magic encoding on the spaces and punctuation just to be safe. It now looks like this:

javascript:document.getElementById(%22toolbar%22).setAttribute(%22style%22,%20%22display:none%22);void(document.body.style.paddingTop=%220px%22);

Of course, you might want the toolbar back again. So:

javascript:document.getElementById("toolbar").setAttribute("style", "display:block");void(document.body.style.paddingTop="65px");

...and, encoded:

javascript:document.getElementById(%22toolbar%22).setAttribute(%22style%22,%20%22display:block%22);void(document.body.style.paddingTop=%2265px%22);

Limitations:

It only disables the toolbar until you reload the page or navigate to another one.
I haven't tested it in anything except the Mac versions of Safari 5.1.5, Firefox 11 and Chrome 19.0.1084.46. Oh, and I've tested it on all of one Drupal site.
It assumes the body's padding-top CSS value is zero pixels.

Let me know if it works for you – or if you've found a more useful/robust solution.

Bookmarklets: Hide toolbar | Restore toolbar (or, if you get easily frustrated, Die, toolbar, die! | Restore toolbar)

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 7: Chris Brogan

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:46:47 +0000

For several years now, Chris Brogan's blog has been a must-read for anyone who wants to use social media productively. Add his thriving practice as a speaker, the fact that he co-founded PodCamp, and his New York Times bestseller Trust Agents (cowritten with Julien Smith) along with two other books (Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything and Social Media 101)...

...and his now-legendary 2009 presentation at New Media Atlanta, where he brought an angry backchannel into the open and won it over...

...and you have a shoo-in for the social speech hall of fame — not to mention someone well worth listening to on the subject of social media and public speaking.

Especially because he'll explain what you, as a speaker, can have in common with the Grateful Dead.

The links:

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 6: Mitch Joel

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:17:57 +0000

Mitch Joel has a lot to share with the world - including some brilliant insights and expertise on marketing, communications and community - so it's now wonder he's found so many ways to do it. He has a long-standing blog, a podcast that just passed the 300-episode milestone, a book... and a well-deserved reputation as one of the best keynote speakers around.

In our conversation, Mitch talks about what matters the most to him about social media and speaking, and the sheer miracle of being able to press "publish" on a blog post and share your knowledge with the world. "These are such early days, and we haven't spent the time to appreciate the tremendous canvas we have in the palm of our hands," he says.

Some links from our conversation:

Mitch Joel's blog and podcast
@MitchJoel on Twitter
Mitch Joel's U.S. and Canadian speakers bureaus
the TED 2012 Conference
Six Pixels of Separation: "the first book to integrate digital marketing, social media, personal branding, and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply"
Mitch's forthcoming book CTRL ALT DEL

The image on the right is a doodle I did a year or two ago.

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 5: Ian Griffin

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:40:48 +0000

With this episode, we flip the mic (metaphorically) and talk with someone who's a lot more used to writing speeches than delivering them. That's not to say Ian Griffin isn't at home behind a lectern; he's an accomplished speaker and a skilled communicator.

If you're in the tech industry, you've probably heard his words; Ian has worked in executive communications at Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. He's also incredibly generous with his time and expertise, as many Silicon Valley communicators who've attended one of his presentations can tell you.

In this interview, he asks why we put so much effort into creating a speech, and then fail to do that little extra bit that can help it reach far more people... and he offers lots of ideas for what that little extra bit can be.

Ian Griffin's blog, Wikispaces hub, LinkedIn profile and Twitter feed
Wikispaces, Slideshare, Twitter search, HootSuite
Cliff Atkinson's The Backchannel (yep, it came up again!)

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 4: David Eaves

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:23:45 +0000

From the moment I thought up the Social Speech Podcast, David Eaves was at the top of my list of people I wanted to talk to. He's a good friend, and a provocative thinker and writer on some of the issues that matter to me most – like the open web and open government.

And he's a terrific speaker, travelling around the world to address audiences on five continents (Australia and Antarctica, that's your cue) about topics as diverse as negotiating, collaboration, conflict management, social media, open government and open data. As you'll hear in this episode, Dave has thought a great deal about what makes for a great, productive speech – one that doesn't just get a solid audience response, but also achieves a larger goal. And you'll hear about how his blog is a crucial resource for his speeches, and how yours can help you deliver a more powerful presentation the next time you're on stage.

Some links:

Dave's blog (check it out to see what a mental gymnasium looks like!), Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, TripIt feed and speakers agency
TripIt, Dave's travel lifeline (I've just started using it – phenomenally useful)

Cartoon-blogging at NTC 2012

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:54:05 +0000

It was another great Nonprofit Technology Conference, my second in San Francisco... and my second cartoon-blogging outing for my friends at NTEN.

This time around, the good folks at Rally – a social fundraising platform, and the folks behind a very cool workspace – sponsored the graphic recording effort.

Which meant there were not one but two pens flying during various keynotes and breakout sessions. My colleague was the amazing Kate Rutter, who manages to combine detail, structure and composition in ways that amaze me. You can see the results of our work here.

I'm pulling together the last of my cartoon-blog images, and I'll post them here soon. But in the meantime, here are the cartoons I drew from the floor of the conference. They include my notes from the session on social media policy, led by Idealware's Andrea Berry and Darim's Lisa Colton and centered around their free social media policy workbook.

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 3: Maggie Fox

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:32:04 +0000

This episode: Social Media Group founder and CEO Maggie Fox

Only a few years ago, business - especially non-tech Fortune 500 business - was pretty skeptical about social media. One of the first people to break through that barrier was Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media group. And she did it by creating solid strategies rooted in tangible business goals, breaking ground with companies like Ford.

Our conversation looks at everything from handling the backchannel to how you can stand out as a smallfrog presented in a big pond conference. And here are some links relating to our discussion:

Maggie Fox on Twitter and LinkedIn
Social Media Group on Twitter and LinkedIn
Doodle, the how-to-schedule-busy-people app

Also from the podcast: I'm heading to San Francisco for NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference next week. And I'll be speaking at Ignite NTC on the social speech. I'd love to see you there!

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 2: with Tod Maffin

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 02:18:47 +0000

If you were to assemble a herd of top-notch researchers, and tell them "Find me someone who embodies public speaking, social media and podcasting," chances are fights would break out as several of them vied to be the first to get to Tod Maffin's door.

One day he'll be speaking to large corporations about digital marketing; the next, to a hometown social media conference about podcasting. His "Taking Crazy Back" keynote takes an unflinching look at his own struggle with depression and addiction as a powerful way of bringing conversations about mental health into the full light of day.

In this conversation, you'll hear Tod's insights on using social networks to get a sense of a room weeks before he sets foot in it; how meeting planners want more value from an engagement, and how you can offer it; why a projected backchannel is as bad a distraction as a troupe of dancing chimpanzees; and why digital dazzle can't top a good, compelling story.

A few links that came up:

Tod Maffin on Twitter
Tod's company, engageQ
Professional Speaking Tips, Tod's email newsletter
Apple's Keynote presentation app, CloudApp and Dropbox
Photo by Jeremy Lim, used under a Creative Commons license

Why you should help users recover gracefully from their mistakes

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:08:13 +0000

We all like to talk about how organizations can recover from their own customer service failures: the gadget that won't connect, the handle that snaps off, the delivery that never arrives.

But how about when the customer screws up? How easy do you make it for them to recover lost information, correct a mistake or get out of a dead end?

Put it this way: if the web is like an episode of The Simpsons, is your site more like helpful, compassionate Lisa, or Nelson "Haw, haw" Muntz?

After a pretty Nelsonish user experience, here's what I included this in a customer feedback survey from Rogers Communications.

Their kind Twitter customer service rep, @rogers_kate, helped me resolve an issue where I was trying to update my expired credit card info for my iPad data plan. The interface wouldn't accept my email and password, and offered to send my my forgotten password. It turned out the problem was I was using the wrong email address - but I didn't find that out before wasting a lot of time troubleshooting.

Every person I dealt with was great. But the interface for handling billing info on an iPad is awful.
Telling someone who's just entered the wrong email address for their account that you've sent them a password reset email, when you actually haven't, leads to lots of digging through inboxes, checking spam filters and troubleshooting. If instead the form had said "Incorrect email address - please try again", I'd have saved myself hours - literally - of frustration.
So kudos to your customer service team. And a tsk-tsk-tsk to whoever set up that billing workflow.

I should have added a little wrist-slap for yours truly; the original error was mine. I just had no way of knowing I'd made it. And customers logging in with the wrong email address, when many of us are running around with three or more, is commonplace these days.

From forms like that iPad billing registration that mislead the customer, to email authentication error screens that tell you you've entered the wrong username or password but won't tell you which one , helping your customers emerge gracefully from their own mishaps will make you some friends.

And save @rogers_kate from yet another tweet of distress.

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 1: Nancy White

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:08:55 +0000

The social web has gone a long way toward changing what it means to be in the audience at a speech – making an audience member less a passive spectator listening to a monologue, and more an active participant in a conversation among peers.

And nobody does that quite like Nancy White – except she doesn't just rely on digital technology. She's one of the best group facilitators in the business, working all over the world with everyone from small community groups to Fortune 500 companies. You can see her approach at work in the March of Dimes' Share Your Story site, which several years on is still one of the examples we cite the most often of how online community can make a real different in people's lives.

So who better to kick off Episode 1 of the Social Speech podcast?

A few links:

Nancy White on Twitter
Nancy's company, Full Circle Associates
Free tools for integrating PowerPoint and Twitter (for Windows) courtesy of Timo Elliott
Timo's Mac-friendly integration between Prezi and Twitter
Alex's case for recognizing online life as real, too: her Harvard Business Review blog post and her TEDx Victoria talk

Photo by kk+
Graphic: A quick sketch I did of Nancy at Northern Voice a few years ago

Introducing the Social Speech Podcast

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 06:56:41 +0000

If you're involved in public speaking – as someone who delivers speeches and presentations, or as an executive communications practitioner, or as an event organizer – then this is for you.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to share conversations I'm having with some of the smartest people I know about public speaking and social media: how connected audiences are transforming the world of presentations, and how some forward-thinking speakers are making the most of it.

I'm calling it the Social Speech Podcast. You can find the feed here or subscribe on iTunes. Here's the introductory episode; the first interview will go live next week.

But please – don't let my schedule hold you up. Give this intro a listen, and if you have thoughts about the Social Speech (I've posted some of mine here) then please share them in the comments. Or email your text or audio comment (up to 25 MB) to rob@socialsignal.com.

Thanks – and I'll look forward to hearing from you!

A social media Valentine

Alex and Rob — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:19:41 +0000

Dearest Valentine,

It has been five years since I last wrote to you, yet my heart is still
a. And though the un demise of so many familiar places casts a over our happiness, I have a we still have a dee in each other.

I don't need to to stick to you; an endless river of joy my way. Heavens to B, you'd have to be an not to feel at least a of love – if not a of passion. And I'm sorry I freaked out when you suggested we get our in your four-. I'll admit - I'm a little .

Let's never ll again. my own judgement when we're apart, sob into my pillow.

It's just that I'm not interested in a mere , or hearing that you me as a friend, but are only interested in . I want to stand beneath your window, and , sweet songs of love to you. And I want children – right now, so we can make your mom an ma.

Let's walk the same , and for the joys of
commit, our lives extricably together.

I'm sorry - I do on. All I'm saying is please,
be my .

Love,

Social Signal

PS - If this letter was tl;dr, fret not - you can always .

Alex on why you should stop apologizing for your online life

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:55:29 +0000

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking what we do online isn't real, and doesn't matter. And it doesn't help that we've developed the acronym IRL, In Real Life, to refer to the offline world.

But why shouldn't we regard our online lives as just as real, just as valid and just as meaningful as our offline ones? That's the question Alex posed a few months ago at TEDx Victoria, proceeding from a blog post she wrote last year for the Harvard Business Review.

The talk, titled "Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your Online Life", just went live. And if you've ever wondered why a valued online friendship doesn't count as "the real world" while a trip to the mall does - and, more to the point, what you can do about it - you'll want to watch.

Just because you have numbers doesn't mean you have insight

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:43:38 +0000

One of the most seductive things about social media is the way it allows us to quantify things. I have more friends than she does – I must be more popular. That blog post got more hits than this one, so that one's more effective. We have more Twitter followers this month than last month, so we're on the right track.

Numbers are lovely that way. In a world where everything seems open to interpretation, numbers offer certainty. Five is bigger than three: end of argument.

Problem is, a beautiful number can hide an ugly bunch of oversimplification. Trying to quantify the complexities of human interaction in a multidimensional matrix of influence and activity in a few simple numbers is next to impossible (although potentially very attractive to venture capitalists).

Which is why, despite a valiant effort, social-media-analysts-turned-political-prognosticators fell so heavily on their virtual fannies in trying to use online metrics to predict last Tuesday's Iowa Republican caucus.

The good folks at Trilogy Interactive summed up how woefully short those predictions fell in a handy infographic. (Only one prognostication came close - eerily so - until a glitch in the data it was based on got corrected, and then it fell into line with the others.)

So why are retweets, likes, mentions and follows such poor predictors of electoral success? As Trilogy points out, it's partly because of the difficulty of focusing that information geographically. And it's partly the way those numbers confuse conversational buzz and notoriety with support. Micah Sifry puts it well:

Saying simple, stupid things that lots of people want to tell their peers about can get you tons of followers and retweets. But it doesn't mean anything definitive about grass-roots support. Otherwise, right now we'd be talking about Herman Cain's amazing victory in Iowa.

More fundamentally, the information that Twitter, Facebook and other platforms can offer us about our relationships to brands, candidates, ideas and each other is still pretty crude. And it would take a far more subtle, sophisticated and complex reading of the things we say to each other to infer anything very meaningful from those blunt-instrument statistics.

Which is worth remembering the next time you find yourself or your organization getting hung up on the number of followers, fans and subscribers you have. Those numbers can be useful... but they couldn't predict Newt Gingrich's future, and they shouldn't dictate yours.

15 best practices for managing your first (or subsequent) web development project

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:05:28 +0000

Back in the day, the only real way to have an online conversation was to build your own blog or online community. These days, many people, companies and organizations have their first taste of online conversation and social media through pre-established social networks like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

But eventually, you might outgrow what you can do with those sites alone, or decide you want to have a new kind of conversation that is best supported with an online community of your own. When that day comes, you’ll face the painful, terrifying and thrilling experience of building a website — if not with your own bare hands, then through the efforts of an in-house web development team or web development company.

It’s a process that is always challenging, but never more so than the very first time you undertake the job of managing or supervising a development process, even if it’s as a client rather than as a developer. You don’t know what to expect, you don’t know what questions to ask, and you don’t know who is responsible for what. So let me offer a very partial set of observations and insights into the development process, which may make your first time out a little less overwhelming — and which may help experienced web-heads refine their approach, too:

Developer hours are your new hard currency. If you’re managing a development process, you need to treat each developer hour like it’s a bar of gold. If this is your first dev process and you’re working with experienced developers (if this is your first dev process, I really hope you are working with experienced developers) then they probably cost your company or client somewhere between 2-5x what you get paid per hour. Unless you’re dealing with an infinite budget, that means you have to be careful about where you spend those hours and dollars — and even if the dollar constraint isn’t tight, you’ll find that a good developer typically has other demands and will offer you only so many hours, so use them wisely. Once you start seeing your development hours as very, very precious, a lot of other development principles follow….
You are supposed to be the bottleneck. One of the challenging aspects of the client or project manager role is that you turn into a bottleneck: there’s a steady flood of incoming tasks for the dev team, which you’re supposed to pass along, only you feel like you can’t feed them to the dev team fast enough. You’re the bottleneck, which we are told is a bad thing, so you feel terrible. But here’s the secret to your role in the development process: you are supposed to be a bottleneck. By slowing the rate at which incoming tasks flow to the dev team, you allow them to work on the priorities that have already been established. While you may need to feed them some occasional additional tasks, particularly after a period of testing, it’s your job to filter all those incoming requests so only the essentials make it to the dev team.
Ticket your tasks. Web development companies typically use tools like Unfuddle to track their outstanding development tasks including bugs that need fixing. If you’re working with a development team that will give you direct access to their ticketing system, you may find it easiest to feed your tasks directly into the system; most of the time, however, the dev team will want you to give them tasks in some other form, so they can enter them into the ticketing system with all the details they need in order to address the task correctly. But you can create your own de facto ticketing system by religiously writing each incoming issue down in a single place, using a consistent format that allows you to review all issues and prioritize the ones that will go forward to the dev team. I recommend doing this in a spreadsheet (if you want others to see what’s already on the list, use Google Docs) or using a task/project management system (like Basecamp).
Review and prioritize. If you’re “ticketing” all the incoming questions, bug reports and change requests in a single spreadsheet or task list, you can review that list on a weekly or daily basis to decide on which items will get forwarded to the dev team. (Weekly for most of the process, daily when you are in the final phase of quality assurance and launch.) The closer you are to launch, the higher your threshold for what gets prioritized: if you’re just a few days from launch, the only things that should be addressed are the 5-alarm fires.
Batch your questions, bugs and change requests. It’s very easy for a web development process to get overwhelming, if only due to the volume of email it generates. (A project management tool that includes threaded messaging, like Basecamp, can help a lot.) If you are relying on email to send requests to your dev team, try to limit yourself to one email a day unless you are facing a major emergency. Ask your dev team to do the same — to reply to all your questions in one email per day (or week), replying to each line item/question directly underneath that question, so you see that each issue is addressed (even if it’s just to say that the dev team has now added that bug to their ticketing system). (You may want to agree that they can reply to each ONE email from you with up to TWO or even THREE emails from them: the first email to answer all the questions they can answer off the top of their heads, the follow-up email(s) to address any outstanding issues that require further investigation.
Snap your glitches. Part of the secret to communicating with a dev team is communicating clearly about what problems you are having or what you need done. That’s a bit of a Catch-22 when you’re new to web development, because you don’t necessarily know how to describe what you are looking at. So don’t try — take a screenshot instead, and send that to the dev team in your next batch of requests/bug reports! Use a tool like Skitch, and you’ll be able to draw an error on the part of the screen that is puzzling you, or to write a short note directly onto the screenshot noting your concern. Just make sure your screenshot includes the URL of the page you’re looking at. (The easiest way to do this is by including the top of your browser in the screenshot.)
Google your problems. If you are doing hands-on work as part of the site development process, such as authoring or loading content, you may run into problems that could be bugs — or could just be things you don’t yet know how to handle. Before you ask your dev team for their (expensive) help, try googling your problem: if you’re getting a specific error message, google that, or if you’re just trying to figure out how to do something, google the task along with the name of the web tool you’re working in (e.g. “WordPress how to insert image in post”). Unless you are working with a custom-built or obscure tool, the odds are good that somewhere on the web, someone will have done an awesome job of explaining how to do the thing you are trying to do, or how to fix the thing you are trying to fix.
Give up quickly. The flip side of batching your concerns is that you know you will be in touch with your dev team every couple of days. So if googling your problem doesn’t yield a quick answer, don’t keep slamming your head into a brick wall. Add your question to the batch you will be sharing with your dev team later today or this week, and then set the task or problem aside until you send your next batch of questions and get the answers your need.
Define what constitutes an emergency. Talk with your dev team about what constitutes an emergency, so that you agree on what calls or emails simply can’t wait for the next batch. Normally that will include any issue that prevents users from accessing a significant part of the site (either because it’s a very important part, or a very large chunk) , an issue that produces a visible and embarrassing bug (like a huge missing image on your home page), or an issue that creates some kind of legal liability (like disclosing private user information). And agree with your dev team on how to reach them quickly if you do face an emergency: email? tweet? SMS? call? Whatever your communications mechanism, it should be a channel that can get a response in less than 1 hour anytime during business hours, and ideally well into the night. (But remember, that channel will only stay open and responsive if you are onlyvery careful not to abuse it. If you have “emergencies” on a regular basis, either you are too quick to call your dev team, or they aren’t doing a good job of keeping your site bug-free.)
Schedule a standing check-in call. Email is great, and project management software is even greater. But there is nothing to keep you in sync with your dev team like regular phone calls. Scheduling can be tricky, so set up a time for a regular weekly call or meeting as soon as your work gets underway, and increase that frequency to at least 2x/week (possibly even daily) for the last couple of weeks leading up to launch (those daily calls can be short, but can help to quickly address urgent issues). Keep a separate queue of issues to discuss during your next call, and take 15 minutes to prioritize that list just before you have your weekly check-in, so that your most important issues get addressed even if you run out of time.
Build a buffer. Just as your job is to serve as a buffer between your site’s users and your web team, you may find that you need a buffer between you and all those authors/users. Don’t feel like you need to address every single question or suggestion as it rolls in: set up an auto-reply if you must (“thanks for your email, someone will reply soon”) and then do a daily (or for smaller sites, twice weekly) review of incoming reports, feedback, info requests etc. Decide which of these should be transferred to the queue for your dev team (if any), which you can and should reply to in detail yourself, and which can either be ignored or get a non-personalized follow-up (“We’ve reviewed your suggestion and will consider it for our longer-term marketing plans.)
Pay attention to what your dev team says is easy or hard. This is a longer-term investment, but unless you are going into web development yourself, the most useful thing you can know about how to build websites is what’s easy and what’s hard. That varies substantially from platform to platform and even version to version, but if you think you’re going to be working with the same web development tools or content management system in the future, it’s worth learning about what is easy to fix and what’s complicated. This is not intuitive, since things that often seem incredibly simple (changing wording on a field, adding a checkbox to a form) can turn out to be very tough, and things that seem hard (adding a rating system, displaying related tweets) could turn out to be incredibly easy. The more you listen to what your dev team says is easy or hard, the better you’ll be at prioritizing items during future dev projects (because you’ll know to prioritize easy-but-important tasks over hard-and-important ones).
You will not get it right. Even if you take all the foregoing to heart, your website (and especially your first website) will be full of shortcomings — if not outright errors and bugs. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong: it’s a sign you’re doing it right. If you waited until every last problem was fixed, you’d never launch. Better to get your site up on its wobbly legs as soon as possible –to “launch crappy”, as we used to say — and to start learning from your users before you invest any more money in building functionality they’ll never use, editing pages they’ll never look at, or fixing glitches they’ll never notice.
Get a mantra. When we were building our very first client website, our client gave us a crucial piece of advice: iterate. In other words, get it done, get it live, and start learning. We printed out that one word — ITERATE — and plastered it on the wall of our office as a touchstone. Choose the touchstone that will help you remember that you’re not trying to build the perfect website, and put it where you’ll see it every day.
Enjoy. One of the things my non-web friends often say they envy about my work is that I actually make stuff. This used to seem kind of funny to me, because I grew up in a world where making stuff meant actual physical stuff like cars and clothes. But with so many of my friends working in professional fields where there is truly no tangible work product — just ideas shared, organizations improved, people made less neurotic — I’ve come to see the miracle of a job that actually creates a visible outcome that other people can visit, experience and participate in. Looking at the site you’ve been part of and thinking, hey!! I helped to make that!! is almost the coolest part of building your own social website.

But not quite. Because the actual coolest part comes when your part is done, at least for now, and all those community members start moving in and posting content and talking and actually using this thing you thought you built. Because that’s when you realize you didn’t actually build a site at all: you built an invitation. And now other people are accepting that invitation, and using it to build something far more personal, meaningful and alive than anything you could ever have imagined.

What bits of wisdom would you pass along to someone working on a web development project for the first time? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below, or tweet them and link to this page in your tweet.

Engage your audience before your speech

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:55:34 +0000

A lot of speeches begin with someone introducing you to the audience - reciting your background and qualifications, and then encouraging them to greet you warmly as you head to the microphone.

And once the applause dies down, you're looking at a sea of people who are probably as unfamiliar to you as you are to them. Your first few lines not only have to launch your speech, but establish a rapport and some degree of trust with your audience.

But in the era of the social speech, you don't have to speak to an audience of strangers. You can get acquainted and start the conversation days or even weeks before you break out the index cards. You probably won't get to know everybody beforehand... but you'll know at least some of them, and they'll know you.

Start by finding out where your audience hangs out online. Are there professional groups on LinkedIn, or groups on Facebook where they get together? Is there an event or chat hashtag they use on Twitter? Do they frequent the sponsoring organization's blog? Do they go even more old-school, with discussion forums? Are there Twitter lists or public Google+ circles that can help you discover them? (Just be sure these are public-facing spaces, and not places where participants are expecting some degree of privacy.)
Now that you know where to find your audience – or a chunk of it – you'll want to introduce yourself. But before you do, listen to the public conversations they're having. What's the tone? What issues are high on their agendas? Who are the natural hosts and leaders in the conversations? Once you have a sense of the dynamics, then it's time to let folks know who you are.
Post a message in the various venues you've identified. Let people know who you are, and that you're excited that you'll be speaking at the event. Ask who else will be attending, give everyone an idea of what you're planning to talk about, and invite suggestions and questions. Unmarketing author and speaker Scott Stratten likes to do that through a webcam video he records before his speeches, greeting his audience and letting them know what it's in for. They get to see who he is and get a taste of his speaking style. (You'll find that and other fantastic Scott Stratten speaking tips in this blog post.)
Write a blog post referring to your upcoming speech, and dealing with one of the key themes you'll be covering. (If it's a theme you've posted on before, you can revisit a previous post with a few more thoughts.) Consider asking your audience a question, or assigning a little homework: "You'll get a lot more out of this presentation if you can come in with a list of the three things you'd most like to try this year in your organization's fundraising." And include your video, if you've recorded one.
Looking for a big-picture idea of your audience's interests or level of experience? An online poll (using a service like PollDaddy or GoPollGo) can allow audience members to score their skills, choose a favourite topic or place themselves on a spectrum of opinion.
Your host can make a big difference in the success of your outreach. Ask the event organizers to include links to your blog posts, polls and video on their blog and in their emails to attendees. (Chances are they'll be delighted that you're doing this. We'll look at more ways to collaborate with your organizer in a future post.)
Use Twitter to announce your arrival at the event (which you'll do early) and at the socials and networking events (which you'll attend), using the event hashtag. Aim to meet some of the people you've talked with online. The face-to-face contact strengthens your online relationships, and can give you a sense of the event's intangibles that can be invaluable in fine-tuning your presentation.
During your presentation, mention some of the people you've talked to and the conversations you've had. And if you've assigned homework beforehand, mention it and weave it into your speech — you can even call on a few of your new online contacts in the audience to read their answers. (In each case, clear it with them first; some people are happy to talk online, but squirm if they're singled out from the stage.)

What you've done is to bridge your online and in-person presence with these audience members. Your speech will be better, because you've had the benefit of some insight into your audience's thinking. You'll be more at home on stage, because you know there are friends — or at least some friendly acquaintances — out in the crowd. And you've laid the groundwork for ongoing relationships that last long after you leave the stage.

The social speech: How your friends and followers can help you write your next presentation

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:44:21 +0000

Speechwriting is a notoriously solitary profession. You might have a few conversations with a client, their staff or — if you're writing for yourself — a mirror. But a lot of your work is going to be just you, a keyboard and the unforgiving blank screen.

At least, that used to be the case. But when you're crafting a social speech, speechwriting can be a team activity. And even though you still have to do the actual writing, you can draw on the ideas, experience and ingenuity of a large networked audience.

You may feel a little hesitant about asking your network for help, especially out in the open: aren't you supposed to be the expert? But even experts have to do research. When you ask for suggestions or ideas, you're acknowledging the collective knowledge, experience and expertise of your friends, fans and followers, and inviting them to make a contribution. That's not admitting a weakness; it's paying a compliment.

Here are five ways to bring your network in on the act the next time you're working on a speech:

Crowdsourcing: Find yourself falling back on the same old examples and cases? Shake things up by asking your network for their favourites. A tweet like "Speaking to HR conference tomorrow - what are your favorite examples of innovative recruiting? #HRINS11" can help you add a few new arrows to your quiver — for this speech, and future ones.
Storytelling: It's one thing to set out an argument and back it up with statistics. It's another — and a whole different level of emotional resonance — to illustrate that argument with a real-world story, attached to an actual human being. Ask your followers for their personal experience, and you can find some remarkable stories to share with your audience (with permission, of course). And if you want to go that extra mile, and you have a willing friend with a terrific story, a webcam clip can dramatically boost its impact.
Media: Flickr's Creative Commons archive and iStockPhoto can get you some great images. But many of your network members' hard drives are packed to the gills with their own photos and videos, some of them quite compelling. Put out a call for a specific image ("I'm looking for a photo of a really beat-up old car for my next presentation") and you may well get just what you're looking for. Alternately, you could consider having a series of related images — people making angry faces, beautiful shots of waterfalls, screenshots of error messages — and turn them into a mosaic or mini-slideshow that reinforces a particular theme in your speech. (Just do your due diligence about usage rights. Make sure the contributor is also the creator, and consider privacy issues around any identifiable individuals.)
Brainstorming: Want to see how an idea or a line of reasoning flies with people? Posting it and asking for feedback (or, if you're up for it, pushback) can help you sharpen your thinking. You may get some encouragement and validation — or maybe you'll hear an unexpected point of view that leads you to revise your approach. (Inviting perspectives from outside your organization and your usual circle can be a great way to break out of groupthink.) And even if you don't change your mind, you'll have a better idea of some of the objections your audience might raise... objections that you can address during your speech.
Polling: A service like PollDaddy, GoPollGo or Facebook Questions lets you create multiple-choice polls to unleash on your networks. Don't go looking to draw any valid statistical inferences from the results... but if you're looking for a general expression of sentiment, you'll be able to tell your audience things like "More than three-quarters of the people I asked in a Twitter poll said they feel extremely swamped by email... and not one said they felt like they were on top of it."

You can turn to a wide range of online services for inviting collaboration and soliciting contributions. Twitter is great for short questions and answers (if you're asking people to share links, for instance). LinkedIn Answers lets you reach out to your professional network. Your profile or page on Facebook or Google+ can serve as a more conversational venue for longer contributions. A Google or Wufoo form can allow people to submit structured responses (the tradeoff being a slightly higher barrier to participation and a much less social experience). And if you have the viewership or readership to reach the right crowd, your blog or YouTube page can be an even more targeted, effective way of connecting with people.

It can't just be one-way, of course, with your friends and followers giving and you taking. You need to thank your network members for their help, and encourage them to be there for you in your next speech:

Immediate thanks: Reply to everyone, if that's even remotely feasible. If you've been deluged, then you might have to consider a group thanks — but most of us should be so lucky.
Credit where it's due: If you're using someone's personal story, you want to attribute it to them (after confirming they don't mind). And you should consider crediting somebody who's provided an especially remarkable piece of information. Letting them know you gave them a shout-out in your speech is a great way to thank them.
Credit where it's due, part 2: If you've used a photo or video clip in your presentation, you'll definitely want to add a credit on-screen. Ask the contributor how they'd like to be credited – and keep the typeface readably large (without detracting from the image itself). If you've created a mosaic or a mini-slideshow, consider adding a credit slide at the end of your presentation.
Thanks afterward: A post-speech blog post or webcam video is your chance to thank everyone who contributed, and single out the folks you leaned on particularly heavily. And not just by name; linking to their online presence of choice is the sincerest form of gratitude.
Continued engagement: Now that they've contributed to your speech, your network members are going to feel vested in its outcome, and in your future presentations. Keep reaching out conversationally, even when you don't have a speech on the horizon, and reciprocate in kind. You're starting to build a more engaged, more committed following — one you'll want to devote some genuine attention to.

Is online activism effective? 5 ways to ask (and answer) the question

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:07:12 +0000

Can social media catalyze or support political change? To answer that question, you have to understand who is asking, and what they really want to know.

And it’s the fundamental question we addressed today in a panel on social media and political activism at Meshwest Vancouver. I’ve been part of a couple of similar panels recently, one hosted by UBC Journalism, the other at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). What strikes me about each of these conversations, as well as in reading articles or online conversations about this topic, is how often we are talking at cross-purposes.

Even people who might reasonably be considered “experts” in online politics and activism approach the topic from radically different perspectives, different not (just) in their left-right orientation but in the way they understand the question. These differences can enrich the conversation about online politics, but only if they can actually converge on a common conversation. Too often, we end up conversing in parallel, using the same terms but meaning such different things that we can’t really understand one another. So let me share what I observe to be the intersecting but very different agendas and frameworks that inform how people approach the topic of online activism.

Policy makers, including both public servants and politicians, want to understand how to weight, respond to, harness or control the online pressures for policy change. They are often eager to fit the phenomenon of online engagement into established, well-understood channels of public engagement, so that they have a template for how to respond: e-mails are treated like letters (but may be taken a little less seriously); online policy consultations are structured like paper surveys or town hall meetings. Channels that don’t correspond to traditional channels, like Facebook or Twitter, leave policy-makers more perplexed, so they want to know how social media participation reflects the intensity of political preferences (if I “like” the page of a given issue campaign, am I really invested in that issue as a voter?) and what kind of formal response, if any, is warranted (does every tweet to a government official require an answer?)
Political organizers and social change organizations, who are trying to catalyze large-scale participation (usually, but not always, to pressure policy-makers), want to know about proven and emergent strategies for online organizing. They typically have some theory of social change: an explicit or implicit causal model of how a given form of political expression (votes, letters, sit-ins) translates into a given form of influence (on public servants, elected representatives, citizens who pressure politicians). They are interested in how social media and other online tools compare with other mechanisms for aggregating voices and converting those voices into political pressure, or often, in how online tools can be used to drive participation in the offline forms of political expression that they recognize as politically influential.
Political scientists and academic observers typically approach the question of online activism with some kind of intellectual framework for understanding how political change occurs. This framework may be a highly formalized, recognizable school of thought, such as “institutionalism”, “realism”, “rational actor theory” etc. They will typically analyze the dynamics of online activism according to their usual analytic framework: if they are used to explaining policy change as a competition among different interest groups, they will be inclined to see the story of online activism as the story of how competing interest groups vary in their effectiveness at catalyzing grassroots pressures on policymakers.
Internet geeks are typically interested in demonstrating how the technological or social characteristics of the Internet make social change possible, or sometimes, in talking about which types of online tools or strategies enable which kinds of social or political change. By “Internet geeks”, I’m talking about a wide range of players, including digital strategists, web developers, and social media enthusiasts: in my experience, these different groups approach the question of the Internet’s political impact with a common passion for showing how the Internet matters. If they have a a priori theory of social change that tells a story about how change happens, they may try to map the Internet’s political significance onto that map of how change happens; if they haven’t got a theory of social change apart from online politics, they may construct a narrative of online political engagement that has no corresponding explanation for how political change occurs offline, and thus, may be limited in their ability to weigh online activism in relation to offline activism.
Citizen-activists are interested in how to allocate or amplify their activist efforts and political voices. They are interested in online channels that can provide the various benefits of political engagement (social interaction with other activists, identity claims, a sense of efficacy/impact) at potentially lower cost (if it’s easier to “like” an issue on Facebook than to show up at a rally). Unlike political organizers, organizations and policy makers, they are not necessarily invested in affecting policy; they may derive the benefits of activism through forms of online participation that have other kinds of pay-offs. They are interested in how online activism can make them feel politically effective, connected and/or identified, in away that is more fun or less effort than offline activism.

When you realize how differently each of these groups approaches the question of whether and how the Internet supports political change, it comes as no surprise that you get wildly varying answers. In today’s panel, for example, I found myself underlining the way in which online activism can defy the label of “slacktivism”, and have a potentially greater impact than traditional forms of offline engagement; in the process, I obscured the fact that high-efficacy forms of online activism (like the example I used of coders distributing banned software) are far less common than low-efficacy forms (such as “liking” a cause on Facebook), and that many forms of offline activism (like sophisticated pressure politics) can still have a greater impact than that Facebook “like”. No wonder that an argument that the Internet can support meaningful and consequential political engagement (as is typical for an “Internet geek”, above) often ends up sounding like a claim that the Internet is the most important or powerful source of political change.

Conversely, when you’re listening to a policy-maker, political scientist or political organizer, it’s helpful to note that the impact of online activism may well be under-estimated. If you’re evaluating an online political effort strictly in terms of its policy impact (which is often not the focus of an online political effort), or if you’re trying to make sense of it by fitting it within the framework of offline organizing, you may end up missing or misunderstanding a big part of the story.

Perhaps it is the citizen-activists, then, who are best placed to assess the absolute and relative significance of on- and offline organizing. Think of citizens as “consumers” of political change, making rational decisions about where to spend their political change dollars (or just as often, their political change-making hours) in order to get the most bang for their buck (or the most political impact for their hour). If online organizing provides the greatest pay-off, they’ll do their activism online; if they feel they make a greater impact in the street, then that’s where they will pitch their tents, metaphorically (or these days, literally) speaking.

But that assumes a level of rationality that citizens may or may not apply to their political activism; I, for one, am deeply skeptical of so-called “rational actor” models. I’m even more skeptical of any constructive political change coming out of a model that treats citizens as consumers, or policy change as a product to be consumed. Most of all, I’m skeptical about citizens having access to credible information about where their time will be best invested: if experts can’t provide a coherent answer to the question of whether online activism has an impact, or even a coherent way of analyzing the problem, I’m not sure how the average voter is meant to make sense of the choice between on- and offline activism.

The reality, I suspect, is that few citizens make that choice per se. They are living their lives online, and they are engaging in political action there because that is where they live. Or they are living their lives offline, as much as they can, and want to keep their political engagement in what they perceive as the “real” world. They’re not asking whether online or offline activism is more powerful. They are engaging where they live. The policymakers and the organizers and the analysts and the Internet geeks can only choose whether and how far to follow them.

Gmail's new design offers plenty of white space... and a good example

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:54:03 +0000

Gmail has had a very interesting redesign. (I love the big fat red "Compose" button. Doesn't work on me, though; I press it, and I'm just as anxious as ever.) You can read about some of the details on the Gmail blog, including an account of the choices they made around designing the left sidebar.

That redesign has a number of people upset at the amount of white space it involves. I get that: it's great to be able to skim tons of information at a glance. And nobody leaps out of bed grinning from ear to ear and says, "I get to do lots of scrolling today!"

But white space has its virtues, too. In the hands of a skilled designer, it can guide a user's focus to the handful of things that matter the most on a page - maybe even letting you think about one thing at a time. (I know: heresy!) Yes, lots and lots of information can be great, but there's real truth to the adage that when everything's important, nothing's important.

Back when I was designing leaflets and mailings for Members of Parliament, there was a constant battle between those of us who wanted to maintain some structure on the page and a sense of hierarchy, and the MPs who wanted to add just one more paragraph of information. "It can go right here - see that blank space? Oh, and there's more blank space over there. You know, if you dropped the type size to nine points, we could fit a lot more stuff on!"

Thing is, for a small number of constituents, the jam-packed-with-information, looks-like-a-Dr.-Bronner's-Castile-Soap-label leaflets actually worked. They loved 'em. And for those few dozen people, if we'd had the time and resources, it would have made sense to create a separate version.

But for the thousands of others we were trying to reach, not so much.

Google does have the resources, and in addition to the airy default (or "Comfortable") layout, you can choose "Cozy" and "Compact" (or, as I call it - affectionately - "Bill Blaikie mode"). If you're feeling the need to flood your eyeballs, by all means make the switch.

But maybe give "Comfortable" a chance first. You may surprise yourself.

And then ask yourself if your web site has enough room for your users to breathe - even if it means a little scrolling.

Using social media to turn your next speech into an ongoing conversation

Rob Cottingham — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 21:44:18 +0000

For all the effort that goes into a speech - especially a big one - they're over surprisingly quickly. You reach a few dozen, a few hundred or (if you have a huge crowd) a few thousand people for a brief while, and then you walk off the stage, and the audience walks out the door.

For a few minutes, you've made a significant connection with those people. But all the potential relationships and conversations that could arise from that connection walk out the door with them.

That's why a growing number of speakers are using social media and online networks to start building those relationships, and expand both their audience and their impact. From Twitter hashtags to YouTube clips, public speaking - the oldest broadcast medium there is - is rapidly embracing the digital realm.

And over the next few weeks, this blog will look at some of the ways you can use social tools to turn those one-speech stands into ongoing relationships.

I can imagine a lot of speakers' and speechwriters' hackles going up right now. You're already going to an incredible amount of effort: writing, reviewing, rehearsing, preparing slides. Why would you add even more work?

Actually, because you're going to so much effort. You want to see as much of a return as possible on all that hard work. And just as social tools have dramatically increased the potential audience for everyone from writers to photographers to (cough) cartoonists, they can do (and are doing) the same for speakers.

You have an audience far outside the walls of whatever meeting room, banquet hall or conference center you're in. Why not address them too? And for that matter, the people who are attending your speech are probably going to be interested in what you have to say before and after your speech as well as during those 20 minutes when you're behind the mic. Why not give them a way to engage with you apart from sitting and passively listening?

And while right now that's an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, it won't long before it's the norm. Audience expectations are changing, as nearly every one-to-many communication channel they use is opening up to many-to-many conversation. It won't be long before participating in Twitter backchannels is the minimum level of engagement many speakers are expected to offer.

Just what that looks like differs from speaker to speaker. For some, it means expanding their reach by posting clips from their speech on YouTube and Vimeo, and uploading the slides to Slideshare. For others, it means crowdsourcing some of their material by posing questions on LinkedIn and Facebook. And for still others, it means carrying on conversations with their online and face-to-face audiences — via their blogs before and after their speech, and via a hashtag-based chat while they're on-stage.

All of this can be powerful... but much more so when those individual tools are integrated into an overall strategy to connect, converse and collaborate.

One caveat: there aren't any guarantees. It's not like social media magic will turn a dull speech into a viral success (at least, not one you'll appreciate - a few million views on a YouTube video labelled "Can You Believe How Long This Guy Goes On About Carriage Bolts?" may not be what you're looking for.)

But when you do have a compelling message (and what other kind of speech is really worth giving?) then your network can magnify it many times over - and help it become a conversation with many of the people you want to reach the most.

Platform requirements for delivering an online course to 4,000 businesses

Alexandra Samuel — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:26:22 +0000

What's the best way to deliver online training to individuals and small businesses?

At Social Signal, we've explored a number of options over the years. Now we're developing content for an online course that launches in January 2012, and the team we working with needs your help in identifying the best courseware solutions or courseware developers/integrators.

This course offering will be seen by 4,000 companies within the first 90 days of launch, so it needs to run on a robust and polished platform. We are considering both pre-existing course delivery platforms, and custom-built solutions.

I've documented the high-level project requirements (below) and would love to hear recommendations. Have you taken an online course that wowed you -- not only with its content, but with the ease and polish of the online interface? Have you delivered an online course using a platform or working with a developer that you would recommend? Are you a vendor with a proven solution or a portfolio of online training projects you've built for other customers? I'd love to hear from you, either in comments below, via Twitter, or via email (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com). (Vendors, please read the note at the end of this post before e-mailing.)

Requirements: Essentials

Web-based course delivery
Intuitive, polished interface: this should look great and be a pleasure to use
Support for multiple media types: video, text, imagesRobust, per-segment paywalls (i.e. students should be able to buy 1 course unit, all 24 course units, or any combination)
Speed of deployment: platform must be live, with all content loaded, by Jan 15 (client to supply all media files and all text in HTML)

Requirements: Important

Alternate distribution channels: apps in app stores (Android and iOS), ebooks (Kindle, Nook, iBooks) and/or physical distribution (DVD/USB drive); purchasing a course on one platform (e.g. web) gets you access on all other distribution channels (e.g. iOS, Kindle); same set of options to buy individual courses or complete package
Social network integration (ability to share selected quotes/videos beyond the paywall via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc)
Interactive worksheets & tests
Some mechanism for student-to-student discussion, e.g. through forums or comments
Tech support: Ideal solution will include a tech support option that you support, addressing any user issues with lost passwords, confusion about how to use the site, etc.

A note to vendors

I am open to direct pitches by vendors, but we will only schedule demos or test drives with a handful of highly likely candidates. If you would like us to consider your platform, please include in your email:

Examples of past projects and clients
Link(s) to your platform or client projects
Paywall approach/expertise
Whether & how you support distribution via non-web channels (e.g. apps, DVD)
Licensing/development model: How are your fees structured (if a licensing model) or what are likely to pay (ballpark costs for a custom dev project building a platform for a 24-unit course)

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions. I'll let you know what we choose -- and when we're able to share more details about the course itself!

Good news: you don't have to follow people back on Twitter

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:31:05 +0000

I've just read another blog post about someone who was accused of arrogance for not following people on Twitter just because they happen to follow him. And it's driving me crazy - crazy enough to have left a comment on his post, and crazy enough to adapt it below.

There are many people out there who will tell you it's a hard-and-fast rule of etiquette: if you don't follow back, you're a boor. (Some of them have suggested it's a crime.)

This arbitrary law of mandatory reciprocity actually makes Twitter less useful, because unless you're incredibly lucky, there are going to be people who follow you who aren't that interesting to you. Maybe they tweet about their cats all day. Maybe they're zealots for a religion, a political view or an operating system (cough) that you don't believe in, share or use. Maybe their entire Twitter feed is devoted to complaints that other people don't follow them back.

Or maybe they're following a few dozen people, but you have several thousand following you, and if you follow them all back, then it's going to flood your feed and you'll miss some conversations you'd really like to have.

The functional purpose of following someone is because you want to hear what they have to say. That's why Twitter created the feature; that's how they suggest you use it.

If you just want to show your appreciation to someone for having followed you, then courtesy already offers a tool for that: the thank-you. It's been around for millennia, and it has the virtue of being unambiguous. Twitter's pretty good at delivering it, too.

What's being invented here with the creation of arbitrary rules like following back isn't etiquette; it's a whole bunch of new reasons to take offense at someone else's behaviour. And when we tell people have to make a tool less useful in the name of being polite (which is what demanding that people use lists to follow the people they're actually interested in boils down to), all we're doing is throwing up barriers to genuine connection and conversation.

Isn't that the opposite of why we have courtesy in the first place?

Update: Jeff Haden, whose post sparked this one, has posted that he's reconsidering his policy of not following anyone on Twitter. "I won’t follow people just because they follow me. But I will start tweeting when I find cool people or ideas I think others might benefit from. I will start engaging in conversations."

Don't delete online criticism. Embrace it.

Rob Cottingham — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 20:15:57 +0000

First posted on ReadWriteWeb

So it’s happened again: a company comes under fire for some misdeed — perceived or actual — and gets a few critical comments on their Facebook Page. And their crisis communications strategy is to pour gasoline on that little flame by deleting those comments.

The latest folks to do this are the people at ChapStick, who ran a print ad that offended a few folks. Those critics posted their complaints on ChapStick’s Facebook page (most of them quite civil). ChapStick’s page administrators then deleted the comments; this case adds an ironic new wrinkle because of the ad copy pointing people to their Facebook presence, which reads “Be heard.”

After enduring a torrent of criticism for deleting the criticism, ChapStick posted an apology for the ad and a sort-of explanation for deleting the comments, saying they follow Facebook guidelines and “remove posts that use foul language, have repetitive messaging, those that are considered spam-like (multiple posts from a person within a short period of time) and are menacing to fans and employees.” Which, with most of the comments, wasn’t the case.

It seems to bear repeating: brands, learn to take some criticism on your social web presences. Why? Because…

Accusations of suppressing those comments are often more damaging than the original criticisms themselves.
The presence of critical comments gives the conversation happening on your Facebook Page, blog or other presence a sense of authenticity. That means the positive user comments carry more weight than they would if your site had nothing but obsequious flattery.
A critical comment can be an opportunity for engagement on your part. It’s your chance to answer a criticism, resolve a complaint, correct some misinformation. And you may be catching a little issue before it becomes a much bigger one.
A critical comment can be an spur to participation and conversation by your community. Let’s face it; for most brands and organizations, excess participation usually isn’t the problem with their Facebook pages.

So maybe it’s time to learn to love the negative. A thicker skin not only saves you from the sting of a little criticism; it can let you realize from genuine benefit… and keep you from becoming the latest high-profile case study in why comment deletion can backfire.

How to spur reluctant bloggers

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:37:23 +0000

"Why won't they blog?"

That's a lament I hear from community managers, social media practitioners and communications directors who are begging, cajoling, coaxing and wheedling coworkers, trying to get them to post something to their organization's or company's blog.

It can be tempting to throw your hands up. "If your team hates blogging, you need a new team," suggests one post. The author adds, "They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog."

True, someone who hates their job is unlikely to blog about it - at least, not in a way that would make their employer happy. But that isn't the only reason that people say they hate blogging. Here are a few others... and some ways you can respond before you give up on your coworkers:

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate the time it takes?

If your workplace is like many others, employees have seen their workloads grow, with less support for getting the job done. If you're expecting them to crank out blog posts, but you haven't taken anything off their plates to compensate, you may want to look at some adjustments.

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate the kind of blogging you're asking them to do?

Are you expecting detailed, lengthy posts from busy people? Consider starting off by asking for contributions that have a much lower footprint on their time and attention. Are you asking them to write puff pieces about what a fantastic organization they work for? Give them the latitude to be more authentic, and to talk more about their own work passions without having to pump up your brand.

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate doing something they don't think they're good at?

Have you offered training - not just in the technical details of your blogging platform, but in how to write blog posts quickly and easily? Do you encourage them to start out small - for instance, with one-paragraph contributions to a longer post - and work their way up? Have you considered an informal peer mentoring system, group workshops, or assigning a communications specialist to help them write their first few posts?

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate being exposed to the public?

Some people love being in the public eye (cough). Others find the idea intrusive, or even terrifying. Try finding an area of their work they feel more comfortable sharing with the world. Give them the option of starting out by blogging on the intranet, where their exposure is limited to their coworkers.

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate doing something they think is pointless?

More to the point, something that's pointless to them. Look at it from their point of view: maybe you're asking them to put their urgent work on hold so you can get some content for a trendy blog they suspect will be a flash in the pan. You can - and should - talk to them about the blog's significance for the organization. But you should also figure out how the blog can advance things they care about, like a professional passion, their profile within the organization, or a cause they're committed to.

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate being the first on the dance floor?

You'll often find it harder to get contributors to a new communications vehicle than an established one. And even if the blog has been around for a while, people may not want to be the first ones from their department or job function to post. But there are still ways to break the ice - for instance, by writing a series of posts based on brief interviews with a few of the kind of individuals you'd like to see contributing. That can be the spark they need to jump in.

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate, well, you?

Okay, not hate. But could your relationship be stronger? Do you have bridges to build with other departments before you can start asking for their help? Have you worked as hard to understand them as you would with an external audience you want to reach?

Do they hate blogging... or do they hate what it means in your workplace's culture?

Is yours an organization that welcomes honest conversation, or are people legitimately worried about inadvertently saying the wrong thing? Do you have a "tall poppy" culture where it's safer to keep your head down and blend in? If you're having trouble getting one or two people to participate, then maybe - maybe - the problem's on their end. But widespread resistance to blogging may alert you to deeper issues. If that ends up spurring your organization to make badly needed changes, then that refusal to blog may turn out to a valuable contribution after all.

Use tags to replace the RSS feed from Google Reader's "Share" button

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:14:14 +0000

Updated: Yes, you get a news feed from this tip... but it's only available if you authenticate as the user who created it. I'm digging around to see if there's a solution.

Subsequent update: I'm not sure if the issue is that I got caught between feature updates, because this was working last night, but there now appears to be no way around the authentication requirement. What's more, you can't just create any old tag in the Edit tags field; you have to choose from your list of existing folders. Lesson for Rob: wait a bit before posting your Handy Tip™.

Some big changes came yesterday to Google Reader, the venerable RSS newsreader that has become part of the texture of daily online life for a lot of us. The design has changed dramatically, in line with changes made to most other Google services. But there are big functional changes too, as Google aims to consolidate social activity in Google+.

That means the end of nearly all of Google Reader's sharing features. There's no more Share link; no more Followers; and no more public pages for starred or shared items. Instead, you click Send To under any post, and share it through one of a variety of web services (most notably Google+).

For many people, that will work just fine. But some of us have been heavy users of that Share link... and at least in my case, it's been a great way to populate an RSS* feed of posts I come across in Reader. That feed can then do everything from generating Twitter posts to updating a widget on my blog.

If that's one way you've been using Reader, then good news: you can still create an RSS feed of blog posts you flag from inside Reader. Better yet, you can draw on one of Reader's lesser-known features - tags - to createseveral RSS feeds.

Here's how it works:

Look at the bottom of any post in Reader. You'll see several links: star, +1, Email, Keep unread, Send to, and - most interestingly - Edit tags.
Come up with a short distinct keyword that you want to use for shared items. Maybe it's just the letter "s". From now on, you'll be tagging any item you want to add to that RSS feed with that keyword.
Click the Edit tags link. Enter your sharing keyword.
Once you click Save, the keyword becomes a hyperlink. Click it, and you'll be taken to a page listing all of the posts that you've tagged with that particular keyword.
Click on the Folder settings... button at the top of the page. Then click "View details and statistics" in the menu that appears.
Hurray! You'll see an URL for the RSS feed for this tag. Use it the same way as the RSS feed for Shared Items.

Note that this isn't a new feature - you've always been able to find an RSS feed for any particular tag. But the latest changes mean it's just become even more useful.

* Actually, it's the Atom format. But people seem to be more familiar with the term "RSS", so I'm using it generically here.

BBC: podcasting still around, and it's bigger than Twitter

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:17:47 +0000

Podcasting, as any social media guru worth her or his robes knows, is dead. Like so many social technologies, it failed to jump the adoption gap, break the hype cycle or clear the Great Hurdle of At-First-Raving-and-then-Dismissive Punditry.

Except that the common wisdom - that podcasts are the 3-1/2" floppy disk of the 2000s - has been lost on one group of people: listeners.

According to a BBC story from the summer,

[P]odcasting has continued to grow and grow.

More than eight million adults in the UK - around 16% of the adult population - have downloaded a podcast, with almost half listening to one at least once a week. This figure is echoed in the US.

As a comparison, this is still a greater percentage of people than use Twitter.

And while many of those podcasts are just repurposed content from broadcasters and other big media voices, they're creating a channel that the rest of us can use as well, whether it's as individuals or organizations.

The lesson? (One that I have to constantly remind myself of?) Don't dismiss a platform just because it isn't on the front pages, or being talked up by the hottest social media voices. It may well be the humble, unsung hero of your next foray into social media.

Three handy tools for engaging on Google+

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 06:03:35 +0000

If you've had the same experience of Google+ that I have, then you're probably loving the more expansive conversational room, the in-context shared content, the simplicity of Circles, the immediacy of Hangouts.

But you may be missing the handy tools that more-established platforms have developed (or that others have developed for them). I'd like to share things right from Google Reader... share any web page with one click... and see who's been sharing other pages on Plus.

You too? Then I have good news.

The folks I cartoon for every week at ReadWriteWeb unleashed a rapid-fire series of posts today, each with a handy tip or tool for making Google+ engagement that little bit easier:

Find something you want to share in one of the newsfeeds you follow on Google Reader? Here's how to set up a custom sharing link in every Google Reader post, using the powerful (and unsung) "Send to" feature.
Landed on a great web resource you want to share with your Circles? This post has a bookmarklet will let you do it in a single click.
Want to know who's shared a particular page on Google+? Here's another post, with another bookmarklet that uses Topsy's new Google+ search service (currently in beta).

I'm delighted to see more and more tools coming out to support the Google+ ecosystem. I've found it to be a great place for more indepth, thoughtful conversations, and for discovering content with more context than just the usual "OMG u have 2 c this!!!"

Got any favourite tools, browser extensions or other Google+ add-ons?

Twitter for Good: positive social change, 140 characters at a time

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:08:08 +0000

By now, Twitter's media stereotype as the place you come to share details of your last meal is finally starting to fade, giving way to a growing understanding of its real impact on the world.

And while a lot of attention has been going to Twitter as a tool for marketing and PR, Twitter is also emerging as a powerful tool for social change. From fundraising to pay for a Cambodian student's tuition to organizing the street protests that marked the Arab Spring, people around the world are using Twitter to advance important causes.

Now there's a new guide for anyone hoping to make a difference in the world using social media: Twitter for Good: Change the World, One Tweet at A Time, by Claire Diaz Ortiz. (If her name sounds familiar, that may well be because she leads social innovation and philanthropy at Twitter.)

I enjoyed her talk at BlogWorld last year, where she set out her TWEET (Target, Write, Engage, Explore, Track) model of Twitter effectiveness. So I'm looking forward to reading the book, which launched today.

And if you are too, good news. Until midnight tonight, Twitter for Good is Twitter for Good for Free: you can download the electronic version at no cost from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iTunes.

And if you miss that deadline, you can always enter to win a copy on Claire's blog.

When social creations take flight

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:03:29 +0000

Five years ago this summer, in a boardroom at Vancity, William Azaroff was unveiling a new online community to an audience of Vancouver-area bloggers — a community we had worked with Vancity to conceive, build and launch. Also in attendance (maybe explaining his later affection for computers and gadgets): our one-week-old second child. (No, not the little one there on the left; that's a stock photo. Ours is cuter... no offence, ©stockphoto.com/tarinoel.)

Today, that child is his own amazing human being, and if you get me started on just how wonderful he is, I won't shut up — which is parental pride at work.

And I feel a shadow of that parental pride toward that online community we were launching half a decade ago this month, called ChangeEverything.ca.

When you create an online social project, and then step back and let your client run with it, it's not that different from watching a beloved child leave home as a young adult. You fret, you worry, you check in... but most of all, you can't wait to see who (or, in the case of our online communities, what) they become.

Three of the online projects we've helped to build over the past few years passed some pretty important milestones recently — kind of the equivalent of hearing that a grandchild is on the way.

With one project, it's a profound transformation; with another, a rebirth; and with a third, a huge step forward to a whole new level of impact.

We'll be blogging about each one over the next few days. But for now, I'm struck by how apt the comparison is between building a community and raising a child.

You can provide infrastructure (whether it's a server or a house). You can manage content (blog posts or books, videos or video games). You can monitor metrics (analytics or report cards) and respond accordingly. You can offer guidance, set and enforce rules, and give them all the love in the world.

But in the end, you can neither determine nor predict where they'll go. It may be that they veer off in a much different direction than you'd planned, or surprise you with some completely unexpected ability. They will become their own amazing, astonishing, wonderful organism.

And you won't be able to shut up about them.

Common Craft's latest move helps point the way for content creators

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:57:39 +0000

Sachi and Lee LeFever's company Common Craft has reinvented itself a few times... and each time, they just get more and more useful. From an online community consulting firm, Common Craft turned into a creator and provider of simple, charming and monstrously popular explanatory videos - starting with the now-famous RSS in Plain English.

Now they've relaunched Common Craft with a membership model for anyone who wants to help educate others. Join for a reasonable fee (there's a reduced rate for schools and non-profits) and you gain access to the entire Common Craft library, which you can use in presentations or embed on your site.

There are a lot of reasons I'm delighted by this latest evolution, not the least of which is my happiness at seeing friends succeed. But maybe the biggest one is this:

Nearly every traditional business model for content creation is in turmoil these days. Books, newspapers, television, movies, music — all of those industries are scrambling to cope with the challenges of a new and dynamic digital world. So when someone comes along who can create something terrific, who can do it really well, and can turn that into a viable business, it offers real hope for anyone who wants to earn a livelihood from their creative talents and skills.

Maybe, on a good day, I could whip up an explanation of what I mean using paper cutouts and a whiteboard. But I think I'll leave that to the experts.

Google Circles is great. But I'm waiting for Google Venn Diagrams.

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:02:49 +0000

If you’ve managed to sprint inside of Google+ during one of those brief periods when the front door has been left ajar, then the first thing you’ve seen has been Google Circles. It allows you to organize your contacts into lists, based on how you know them, how much you trust them, whether you consider them cool, how you want to communicate with them… whatever criteria you want.

It’s a great feature, done in an appealing way. But it only goes so far.

If I want to create a circle called Close friends, for people I deeply trust, and another called nptech, for folks active in the non-profit technology field, I can. But say there’s something I want to share only with close friends in the nptech community. There’s no way to say “Share this with the people who are in both of those circles, but not with the people who are in only one of them.” Instead, I’d have to — manually — create a new Close nptech friends circle.

So either I’m creating a lot of circles, some of which I may only use a handful of times, or I’m missing out on the potential power of the feature.

The thing is, this is exactly the kind of issue Google deals with easily in its search function. (Yes, Google still does search.) If I wanted to search for content that contains both the phrase “Close friends” and the word “nptech”, I’d just enter this:

“close friends” nptech

If I wanted pages that contained “close friends” or ”nptech”, or both, I’d enter this:

“close friends”|nptech

And if I wanted pages that contained “close friends” but not ”nptech”:

“close friends” -nptech

I can do it (and much more complex queries) with search terms. I can do it with iTunes playlists. Why not with Circles - either post-by-post, or with automatic smart circles?

Added competitive bonus: I can't do it with Facebook Lists.

Facebook Group or Facebook Page? Time to decide... now.

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:25:13 +0000

There's an issue people raise constantly in my seminars and workshops, in a conversation that usually goes something like this:

Them: "Should we have a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page?"

Me: "Well, Facebook wants you to use Pages for organizational profiles, and Groups for small group collaboration..."

Them: "You see, we've had a Facebook Group for a few years now, and it does really well. Will Facebook convert it to a Page for us?"

Me: "Funny thing: when they introduced Pages, they told people they'd take requests to convert existing Groups. But after keeping a lot of folks on a waiting list for months, they abruptly announced they wouldn't switch any more Groups."

Them: "So what do we do?"

Me: "Well, either live with your Group - and its shortcomings - or create a new Page, and post messages to your Group's members, asking them to Like the Page. Some will come over; a lot probably won't. You can also maintain both simultaneously for a while, but that can be a lot more work, and you're diluting participation."

Them: "Geez, those choices kind of suck."

Me: "Yes. Yes, they do."

Well, for those who haven't jumped to Pages yet, Facebook is now arguably making the situation a little easier: you're about to be pushed.

Facebook is "archiving" Groups created under their old process, and converting them to the new-style group feature. They'll port over your content... but your group's members will all be kicked out:

Keep in mind that the new groups format was designed to help you share with the small groups of people in your life. If you’ve been using your old group to promote your business, we recommend you create a Page instead. Learn more about the differences between groups and Pages.

(By the way, there is no FAQ to explain Facebook's rationale in capitalizing "Pages" but not "groups".)

So my advice to pretty much everyone now is to start a Page as their organization's Facebook presence. And if you've been relying on a Group until now, this is the time to start gently prodding your members to move over to the new Page:

Message your Group's members (yes, Facebook uses "message" as a verb). Let them know you'll be wrapping things up on the Group, and direct them to the address of the Page.
Post similar messages...
- to your Group's wall
- in any active discussions.
- in the Description field for your Group's "Info" tab
Send a follow-up message every week or so.
As soon as you have enough Likes on your new Page, be sure to claim a username for it.

And, of course, promote your new Page on your organization's blog. (Social Signal's is right here. And my cartoon's is here. See how easy that was?)