How and When to Leave Blog Comments

When we get a new client, we often compare the internet to a foreign country. It truly is its own culture, and building a web site there (aka a storefront) is like setting up business in a foreign country. Even though most of what you do will be in English (for most of my readers - their native language) it is still foreign. We like to think of ourselves as tour guides who will help you not only enjoy your trip, but actually want to enjoy it as a second home!

In that spirit, today's blog post is a little etiquette lesson in how to "act like a local." I (a person with web in my DNA) find it amazing and informative that CC Chapman can get a ton of response from a Podcamp lecture just by asking people to go leave a comment on a blog. It appears that people are confused about how to do this, when to do this, why to do this, and so forth. Just like blogging a lot of people face that daunting question: What on earth will I say? So let me be your friendly tour guide.

Let's make it stupid simple. I like stupid simple. I think hard on complex things most days and being able to "dumb it down" is something I really appreciate!

When to Comment

• Anytime you have an opinion to add to a conversation.
• When you want to promote your products and services (Just don't be crass about it. Add something of value to the conversation.)
• When someone has featured you on their page or site. (If you know about it or your blog software can track inbound links, this is VERY easy). I consider it one of the top ten blogger "miss manners" recommendations. This one is probably the most neglected, yet in my world, the most important.
• Timing can be important, especially if you are tracking A-list bloggers. Our former client, Mary Schmidt took to blogging really well and paid attention to when well-known excellence author Tom Peters would typically post a new blog. Mary made sure she was available to be one of the first commenters. It helped her get noticed and become a key influencer in Mr. Peters popular blog discussions. And yes, it has helped her build her consulting business,

What to Comment

• See above for initial instructions.
• Add your opinion - especially if it is against the flow. Life is not black and white - virtually every conversation is well-served by a range of perspectives.
• Details baby, details. The more specific you can be, the better. Cite examples, give props to others, share your experience. It's all good.

Why to Comment

• Because your point of view is just as relevant as anyone else's.
• Because it is a great way to build your personal or company brand.
• Because it creates inbound links to your site, which helps the search engines rank your site higher.

How to Comment

• There is always a place for your name. You can put anything you want in there! It is what will be displayed on the blog. Some people consider this a personal banding opportunity, and you can say, "Roxanne Darling" or "Nerd Queen" or even enter Rox of beachwalks.tv. Like all things, you can be savvy or you can be obnoxious, and all points in between. As my little 2-year old friend Kaile is learning to do, "make good choices."
• Email: you will be required to enter an email address. If the software is set up correctly, your email address will never be displayed. It is to sort you from the spammers. If you do not enter a URL (see next item) some blog software will show your email. As a precaution, always enter a URL! (if you don't have a web site, you can always link to another web site - a cause you support or CNN or whatever. Best to have your own site of course.)
• URL: Universal Resource Locator, aka your web site address. Be sure to link to individual pages on your web site when that is more appropriate to the discussion at hand. Just navigate to that page on your site, copy the page address, and then enter that into the "URL" field as you are leaving your comment. UPDATE: Consider also linking to you social network pages, like Twitter or your LinkedIn Profile or even your Flickr page if that is your primary home on the web.

Peas in a Virtual Pod

I can get cranky easily about all of the social networks I am invited to these days. If you were a fly on my office wall, you'd definitely be hearing the unanswered threat, "If I have to fill out one more profile and find any more friends to invite, I'm gonna..." Fortunately there is increasing discussion on being able to manage one's identity online and reducing social network fatigue across multiple locations.

But meanwhile, there is Twitter.

The place with the most inane underlying concept that can suck enormous time and energy time while becoming a major communication tool has created the most valuable new contacts and conversations in my world.

Do you remember when you realized that you can more comfortably say things in an email than you would typically say in person? Well, boil that down to 140 characters (including spaces) and it is amazing what we can communicate to each other. People are emboldened to open their hearts and their rolodexes knowing there is system-imposed limit. I often find that limits can be incredibly liberating within their confines.

My role model this month is Susan Reynolds, an amazing ageless woman who is a geek goddess, lives in Second Life part of her days, and now is literally twittering her way through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. She manages to share her experience and receive our abundant love, all in little snippets of text and now the burgeoning growth of avatar pics featuring green peas as our sign of support.

She came home from the biopsy and described her use of frozen peas in the bra to heal faster.

So regardless of the time zone, of the age, of the gender, of the political affiliation, hundreds of us peas are realizing we are all in this pod together. Some are just getting boiled sooner and hotter than others. And we couldn't have a more creative and loving unleader than Susan Reynolds. Follow her on Twitter to get your own morsels of peace.

How much should you budget for monthly website expenses?

Now that most businesses and organizations have a web site, they are used to the line item in the budget for initial development. And for many, getting a site up and running is such a grueling task that they are ready to sit and rest on their laurels for a while after launch! We completely understand; we wish we could take a vacation for a few days after each site launch too.

But really, after launch is when the fun begins. Ideally, your web site has been built so you can play with it as often as you like, and as easily as filling out a web-based form. You are now set free to talk to your customers, to tell the world all about how special you are and why your products and services are the better choice.

As you use your site more, you will run into wanting to do things that you don't how to do or that you don't know if your site can do for you.

1. Training
   • Getting your content to look and speak well is an art that goes far beyond just typing into a form. Photos and graphics for example add tremendous value to a web page, IF they are sized and processed for the web and you know how to add title tags, alignment, and can get the text to wrap around them correctly.
   • Using blog software is easy if you want to do the basics. But once you want to do power blogging, you'll want to know about ping servers, trackbacks, blogrolls, how to find A-list blogs, and so much more.
   • Strategy makes a huge difference too. Using the software to accomplish a marketing or communication goal is not obvious because most people don't have the web in their DNA. It's much more than just remembering to add your web address on all your printed material. It's remembering to blog after you've been invited somewhere and sharing your experience and a public mahalo while linking out to others you met. It's called link love and it's one of the web's power currencies right now.
2. Feature Upgrades
   • Just like anything else you own, if you use it even a little, you are going to want to trick it out. Maybe you want to add an extension or plug-in or social networking application that adds power to your site.
   • Maybe you want to dress it up with a more sophisticated design or add some audio or video.
   • Maybe your competitors started selling directly online, and now you want some e-commerce features.
   • And just like your house or your boat, there is virtually no end to upgrades and widgets you can install to make your site perform better for you.
3. The Unexpected
   • It could be anything right? That's why it is unexpected. Life happens.
   • Even the most user-friendly sites still have a few things that are deep in the code and are better left to your developer to handle for you, like periodic software upgrades.

So bottom line, what should you budget for this ongoing support and maintenance? I think a good rule of thumb is at least 15-25% of initial site development costs to be budgeted over the following 12 months. The less you spend initially, the higher the percentage on average to dedicate to upgrades and support.

It's just no fun (and poor business planning) to build yourself a nice new site and not be able to add a new "work station" or some "grounds maintenance" when the situation arises. More and more, the company web site is becoming its most important communication, sales, and even operations tool. So budget accordingly to keep it humming along nicely.

P.S. To my blogging students: I could have written this post in about half the time if I did not include all the links. But it would have less impact and would have been less useful to you readers who want more resources on these topics. In the process, I actually came across some new interesting blog posts! Just right-click on each link to open it in a new window so you can continue reading here. And I could have saved another 10 minutes by not looking for the confused puppy pic. But how much were you drawn in by that one photo??

Site ReLaunch: Coffee Kids

Coffee Kids has been our client for almost a decade. As a nonprofit, they help coffee-growing families learn new skills and develop sustainable lifestyles, as the coffee industry suffers from a glut of over-production that keeps income low to the first line of coffee workers - those who cultivate and pick the beans. It's not an easy story to tell when you and I are used to paying four bucks for a grandé latté. They depend on their web site as the key communication tool.

Their site has been due for an upgrade for years, but time and money constraints have meant the web site has been on the back burner. Years ago we set them up to collect online payments and also use Contribute software to edit their pages. It was a good tool at that time, but had out-grown its usefulness. It had many limitations and required a software license on each computer that was being used to make updates, not to mention training.

Their new site uses Expression Engine software, which is our favorite enterprise content management system. It is highly flexible from a programmers point of view, very easy to work in from an editor's point of view (right in the browser - no extra software required), and very easy to control multi-user access from an administrator's point of view. With just 1.5 hours of training, the staff was busy adding new Businesses to their searchable database, uploading photos, and blogging in both English and Spanish! Click on the thumbnail graphics to see full size screenshots, then follow the numbers for a detailed analysis below.

Home Page Before	Home Page After

A Few Home Page Highlights
1 Toolbar	Old site: no search. New site: full search plus CSS tools to easily let the user change font size. Donate and Contact are easily found on every single page.
2 High Impact Headline	Old Site: lots going on, no real focal point, a lot of reading required to get your attention. New Site: Wow - color, font size, and brevity all work to stop the visitor and create an emotional connection via a powerful statement of fact.
3 Time-sensitive Call to Action	Via a PHP script, we pull the date in (like a lot of sites do) but we integrate it into the message of the page. It is then immediately followed by three strong actions. Surely one of them will speak to you! This is an editable area, so the client can include as many as they want at any given time. A special link style was created to give this call to action even more prominence and draw users into the site. We are especially proud of the features added to their Business Members database, and pages that encourage people to visit their donors, tell a friend about the local businesses, and support special programs offered by donors. By helping Coffee Kids help their donors, the web site strengthens the donor partnerships.
4 Use Flickr to Manage Photos	Why build a private cumbersome photo gallery when they can join the Flickr community? One of the original (and still one of the best) social applications, it allows for easy upload of pictures, tagging of pictures, creating and belonging to groups, and a little script here automatically feeds in new pictures to the home page. Not only does it help Coffee Kids easily manage their many compelling pictures, it helps them network with others over at Flickr, finding new supporters.
5 Embedded Video Message	Coffee Kids wants to explore using video - which is very hot right now. Because video is much harder to create, we decided to try placing a short intro message on the home page as a way to start. However, this high impact placement can be converted later to a video blog post if desired. We like to build the bones first and then let the site's function and content grow organically over time.
6 A Blog	It's my opinion that you just aren't serious about communicating with your audience if you don't have a blog. Like many companies (and non-profits especially) they had concerns. "We've never done this." "What if people leave bad comments?" "It takes too much time." But luckily and ideally, they now have a staff member, Kyle Freund, who is leading the challenge to provide support and coaching inside the organization. Coffee Kids is also rare in having a multilingual blog—perfect because so much of their work takes place in Central and South America. We've also coded simple buttons in the admin so editors can easily add accented Spanish characters without learning the code.

Donate Page Before	Donate Page After

Making Donations Count
1 Easy to Sort Donor Groups	Old site: one long cumbersome donation page. New site: separate pages for individuals and businesses, because Coffee Kids really has unique messages and requests for each group. The generic donation information is clearly displayed on a separate page, easily accessible to both groups.
2 Custom PayPal Programming	Old Site - default PayPal button functionality. New Site - custom programming for a cleaner, more flexible user interface. We also added the option for gift donations, thereby removing yet one more barrier to give. By continuing to use PayPal, Coffee Kids can leverage the very low transaction fees and very wide user base without incurring custom shopping cart software expense.
3 Colorful clear graphics	The entire look of the site is more modern, easy to navigate, and user-friendly. The submit buttons include help messaging to make the donation process even easier.
4 Multiple Donation Choices	The new configuration allows for different amounts for individuals and business, and allows each group to make a one-time or recurring donation. The layout clearly sorts the two, instead of having them all lumped together as on the old site. This allows for a simple, deliberative process for their donors which means fewer clean ups by office staff for mistaken donations.
5 Interactive Donate button	Every inside page of the site has this bold Donate button, that rolls over to red and answers the "Want to Donate?" question with, "Your gift really helps." A smart strategy and simple programming makes for a high impact conversation with site visitors.

With all this lean CSS design, re-thinking of the content strategy to use social apps wherever possible, and the inclusion of a blog, search engines love this site! And the possibilities for expanding further into social media and community building are amazing.

Blog as Weather Report & ISP Status

We had a large winter storm here on Oʻahu last night. Power was off intermittently, but is now working.

Our main internet connection, via Oceanic Cable, is down. That includes TV service too - so we won't be watching any OC16 or HGTV today!

My internet service via my cell phone, the AT&T Edge network, is also down. Calling and internet services are both unavailable.

Our third redundant backup, EVDO service on the laptop from Sprint, is working and so Shane and I are taking turns on that.

If you need to reach us you may call our land line at 808-262-9409. That is working.

Funny that I did a Beach Walks with Rox episode yesterday on appreciating all those things that just work in the background for us. Even though our main pipeline (and somedays it feels like a lifeline) is down, I very much appreciate all the tech workers who are out in the rain trying to put it back together!

Boycott Facebook & Related Sites

Let me stipulate a few facts:

• I live my life online.
• I have gotten very used to a certain (large) lack of privacy in most traditional senses.
• I am in favor of business relationships with independent media creators.

But the way that Facebook's Beacon is setting cookies and sending my very specific online behavior (at selected sites) back to it's databases not in the aggregate but assigned to my personal data, is going too far.

Beacon is getting a lot of bad press, but this article in PC World hits bottom for me.

I am going to boycott Facebook for now. Please join me. Let their traffic plummet and see how fast the users can speak.

If you think you need to use Facebook for some reason, you can use Firefox and manually block at least some of this bad behavior.

From gigaom here are some of the particiapting sites that I also plan to boycott:
The 44 sites that have partnered with Facebook include everyone from Kongregate, LiveJournal, NYTimes (NYT), Sony Online, Blockbuster (BBI), Bluefly.com, STA Travel, The Knot, TripAdvisor, Travel Ticker, TypePad, viagogo, Vox, Yelp, WeddingChannel.com and Zappos.com. I've also heard Fandango and Epicurious.

I am happy to announce our client, Here Comes The Guide does not particpate, so all you brides? Stay away from The Knot and Wedding Channel! And head over to the nice, ad-free Here Comes the Guide site and plan your wedding in peace and privacy. FYI, they have a great business model and are an excellent example of a company that provides a great service and expertly balances the desires of brides with the sustainability of bridal vendors.

UPDATE: When I said "related sites" in the title, I was referring to the 40+ sites who are in on the Beacon tracking system with Facebook, and was not lumping all social networking sites into the pot. Innocent until proven guilty applies here.

UPDATE 2: Chris Heuer provides an excellent and scholarly commentary on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's most recent apology.

I am glad there is forward movement on the Beacon situation, but this closing remark indicates there is more work to do:

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

"even when partners send them to Facebook"?? Let's keep at it folks. Don't track data to individuals. Consider us a herd if you must, but let us retain the semblance of privacy that can exist in the aggregate while you attempt to figure out how to reach us. (Even though countless among us are posting on this topic daily.)