TechHerding: Keeping Technical Cats On Track In Training
I’m always telling people about Seth Godin’s book “Tribes” — but I doubt that they go to the trouble of finding, buying, and reading it. Now you can just watch him talk at TED about it:
Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.
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If you’ve got a web page, or a blog, or an AOL site for your collection of Fonzie memorabilia — you’d like to have more traffic. Here are three simple Twix to improve your content and make those traffic stats shoot right off the charts.
If you’re wondering whether or not I can properly spell “tricks” — fear not. I’m headed for a meeting of the Social Media Club in Greenville, SC tomorrow morning. And I’ll be handing out business cards with a little “Twix” bar attached, as I tell people about this post.
Clever, huh? An amazing play on words (being as I’m a “content guy”) that gets all those people to go and read my blog, because of the guilt they’ll feel after eating that free candy. Just consider this an “Extwa Twix” for you to use — at no charge.
Twix #1: Bribe Them
Offer your readers something they actually want — the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, or a way to solve pain. Don’t just give them a link to an interesting site and some quotes from it, explain clearly why it will make their life better. Tell them how they’ll lose weight the moment they get there — or how their sex life will improve just from spending time there.
Twix #2: Speak Their Language
Make sure that you’re using words that the audience might enter in a search tool to find information. You’ll get more hits from a headline that says “How To Escape A Shark” than one that says “Current Research On Techniques Of Decampment From The Vicinity Of Large Hungry Ocean Dwellers”. (Headline #2 is perfectly appropriate if writing for an audience of Ph.D. candidates or Nigerian Finance Ministers.)
Twix #3: Use Key Words In Your Links
If you’re linking to other web sites (a good thing) be sure that your actual hot links contain the key words that people search for:
BAD: …and you can find how to tie your shoes right here.
GOOD: …and you can find how to tie your shoes right here.
Search engines give you additional points for links that contain “hot” words.
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OK — ready to get that content into shape? Leave me a comment, and I’ll send you an empty wrapper from a Twix bar that I ate in your name.
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It’s always nice to hear that you’ve been barking up the right tree. And now I’ve got proof — or “woof” — of that, from Chris Garrett, in a great post about how content improves your Google Authority.
High on the list of “negative influencers”:
“Thin or Spammy Content - Duplicate, scraped or feed content, or spammy gibberish is likely to get marked down. As you would expect, Google is aiming to promote the highest quality. They will use human checks, algorithms and watch the behaviour of their customers to see if what they are delivering meets expectations.”
Of course, there are other important issues — like links, traffic, and what your site looks like in general. But you’ve got that covered already — right?
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I’m a happy WordPress user for several blogs, but one of the best-kept secrets about this software is that it does so much more than just blogging. I ran across a great article on how you can also use it as a Content Management System (CMS) that opens up a whole new world of ideas:
WordPress is often thought of as little more than a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Through a little customization and the use of plugins, WordPress can easily be transformed into a full-featured content management system. Here are more than 25 sites who have done just that (and done it well).
This is the second article in the four-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress“.
UGSMAG
UGSMAG is a Canadian hip hop magazine. The home page is laid out in a grid, with featured articles along the left two columns and news on the right. The color scheme and design choices reflect the young, independent audience they attract. The lack of a category list (other than the top nav, which simply lists “News,” “Features,” and “Interviews”) and archives lend the page to looking more like a traditional news or magazine website than a blog.
Subtle changes to individual article pages, such as removing the category labels, the use of a drop cap initial character, and moving the date from it’s usual blog-centric location under the title to the upper-right hand corner of the page all also contribute to the site looking more like a magazine and less like your standard blog.
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People on Twitter often notice that I’ve got some creds in the “eddication” area, and ask me questions about how to fix the schools down here in South Carolina. We’re currently about 56th out of the 50 states in terms of quality of education, so there’s a lot of talk going on. And they’re usually looking for some kind of quick-fix — bigger budgets, smaller class sizes, charter schools, magic beans — rather than any kind of basic systemic change.
The one thing most everyone down here can agree on is that “testing” is unfair. Students here fail miserably at the No Child Left Behind testing, and the program is reviled. So one of the ways I try to talk with people about education is to ask them about their HVAC system.
“Do you have air conditioning and heating in your house? Good! Now, does your thermostat wait until the end of the day to measure whether it’s too hot or cold, and then decide which one to turn on? It doesn’t, does it? It’s constantly assessing the temperature all the time, based on the limits that you set. And as soon as the temperature gets outside those limits, something happens…”
That’s how learning happens in the best systems. We create “goals” (temperature limits) and constantly keep making “assessments” (measurements) of how we’re doing in reaching those goals. So there’s no real surprise at 10PM each night — we know already whether it’s been hot or cold, and we’ve taken action to change what we’re doing based on that.
A Charter School is probably going to be more successful than our traditional public schools for just that reason. They begin with a clear set of goals — or educational objectives — and will be scrutinized closely by folks who’d like to see them succeed. And, more importantly, by folks who’d like to see them fail. So they’ll be doing lots of assessment along the way, rather than waiting for that “test” at the end of the year.
I suspect that you’ll see many of them succeed for just that reason.
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Fox Television has just announced a new reality show called “Post Office Idol” where customers at every post office in America will be given the opportunity to vote for their favorite employee each week. For a low fee of $5 per call, 
they can choose which employee was the most helpful, gave the best service, or got the line moving the fastest. Multiple votes are allowed by the same customer, as long as each vote is accompanied by the $5 payment.
At the end of each week, the employee with the highest score gets 50% of the total cash take, with the balance going to Federal Defecit. The employee with the lowest score is immediately terminated, and the first job applicant in line is hired to take their place. The game begins again on Monday morning.
Other shows already in the planning stages are “DMV Hero”, “Funeral Home Hero”, and “That Place You Have To Go To Get Your Insurance Physical Hero”. Advertising is selling at well over $1 million dollars per minute.
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OK — I’m fibbing, just a little. Fox doesn’t have this show on the fall schedule, yet. And I’m not really recommending that we terminate employees of the Post Office just because they have a bad day — except for the one that was waiting on me today.
But I’m wondering what your learning and training products might look like if the consumers of your service actually had to call in and vote in front of God and everybody on what they thought. If three celebrity judges listened to you talk about your content on stage in front of millions, live — and then made jokes about what they saw. Would you make the grade? I know that I’d have damp armpits.
But hopefully, some of us would make customers look like this:
Click to see video
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As difficult as it must be for you to believe, dear readers, there are some things at which I am not amazingly skilled. In fact (brace yourselfs) there are multiple areas where my skill level is so low that special measuring equipment must be brought in just to determine the exact level of suckitude. (I suspect that that is a “Havi-ism” but I’m not good enough at attribution to go and check it out.)
I used to work frantically (and usually unsuccessfully) to either cover up or rationalize these areas — because after many years of education I’d been convinced that we all had to be good at everything. Geometry, Chemistry, English, Folk Dancing, Athletics — and that if you weren’t great you just kept slogging to improve.
Then, I read “Now, Discover Your Strengths” byMarcus Buckingham. (Well, I already knew Marcus from “First, Break All The Rules”.) People talk about books that change their lives, and this was the one that did it for me.
In a nutshell: You’ve got things that you’re really great at, and things that you suck at. (Well, he doesn’t say “suck”.) And if you focus all your time on improving what you don’t do well, you someday might improve all the way to kind-of-all-right. But if you focus on the things you’re already great at, you could become world-class.
Short aside — this is usually where people say “Well, but what if that thing I’m bad at is realtionships? Or raising children? Or world peace?” And then I say “I’m trying to make a point here — bite me!”
It changed how I think about the skills that I need to run my business, the skills I need to live my life, and the skills I need to get where I want to go. Now I have three categories:
I spend lots of time trying to improve at #1 — to the point where I can charge clients embarrassing amounts of money because I’m the cat’s ass.
I spend some time at #2, connecting with the best experts and training I can find — often failing over and over — to improve at something I’d really LIKE to do better.
I spend virtually no time on #3, and either pay someone else or find a way to just stop doing stuff that I’m really not good at.
I was reminded of this the other day, when I offended a friend by observing that she really sucked at a particular skill. (I had noticed that she was telling this to a large group, and celebrating the fact that she’d found an assistant who could handle this task seamlessly — so my friend could do the voodo that she do do so well.) But in my typical insensitive way, I forgot that some people havn’t had my years and years of announcing to the world that they suck at stuff.
So I’m now adding a “Step Four” to the list.
Announce, loudly and proudly, that there are things that you suck at. And that it’s really OK with you — actually, that you’re proud of it.
That it benefits your clients, because you’re focused like a laser beam on improving the skill set that they pay you for. That it benefits your spouse, because you’re focused on being the best husband/wife/partner/clone that you can be.
At first, it’s hard. Like admitting you’re an addict at an AA meeting. But it gets easier and easier with time. Soon, you’ll laugh as you say it — and your audience will laugh right along with you. Because if the “expert” is allowed to have weak spots, maybe they won’t be so afraid of looking silly. Or asking for your horrendously overpriced help.
Duh.
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I’ve written previously in this space about my belief that as educators (or teachers, or trainers, or facilitators) we often treat “failure” in exactly the wrong way with learners. Through the K-12 experience, we pretty much dwell on what you did wrong and punish you for it — with bad grades, remedial classes, dunce caps and other types of pain.
After that, in the real world (I observe that place, but refuse to live there) we also punish you if you fail. Trying something new means the risk of making a fool of yourself, being told that you should have known better, that you wasted resources or time.
Gen-next learners spend a lot of time on video games. Failure there is the standard mode of learning. Your car crashes, your airplane gets shot down, or your soldier gets blasted by the bad guys. That’s just an expected part of the learning process. So you push the “reset” button and try again, having learned something.
I ran across this great video from Honda called “Failure: The Secret To Success” talking about how they built their incredibly successful team by failing, again and again.
“Honda is now the sole supplier of engines for the Indy Racing League. We’d really prefer to have some competition in the series, but perhaps the Honda success drove some of them out. Maybe they’ll come back.” Tom Elliott, American Honda
What would your classroom or e-learning site look like if you encouraged and demanded that your participants fail over and over as they participated? If it was an accepted and expected part of the experience, rather than an “exception” that you immediately tried to locate and stamp out?
Pretty much exactly the same experience as when you learned to ride your first bike.
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If you want to share out what you know, there’s no better way than to create a little video. I often show people how to do this when I talk about social media at shows, and thought it might be good to share it out as a video.
Experienced video production folks, before you send me email:
Ready to design one yourself? Take a look at the storyboard for this video.
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If you’re still struggling to explain to the “suits” upstairs why your company needs to be involved in social media, I think you can do it in four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Point them to this wonderful video from Jackie Huba from CreatingCustomerEvangelists.com.
“Your brand is your Google results. It’s the sum of what people are saying about what you do.”
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