I came up with three key requirements for effective use of Social Media.

1. Fresh, interesting material that is readily available.
2. Engagement with the reader by developing a writing style and tone appropriate to your subject material.
3. Find a way to create a dialogue by encouraging your readers to respond

Fresh Material

I recently assisted Mensline Christchurch to put up a WordPress website. They have since contracted a designer and made the generic WP site design more their own. A few years ago I helped set up another site. The major difference between the sites is that the landing page for Mensline is the blog and for Other Site is a static page, ‘About’ the organisation. The WordPress default is the blog so you have change this for people to come to a static page.

From a Social Media point of view its much better for visitors to straight away arrive at the most recent and freshest material on the website – the blog, not the same old page that they may have seen before, the ‘About’ page. The blog is about the organsiation communicating with their readers in a dialogue. The ‘About’ page is only about the organisation. There is a blog on the second site but its not the first thing you see. The blog on the Mensline site lets the visitor know what is happening now.

Facebook does new and fresh really well. The first thing you see is the most recent and you have to scroll to see older stuff. If the most recent post is old then no-one is going to be very interested. On the Other site the most recent item is in 2010. This facebook site is effectively dead in the water and a liability to Other organisation. By contrast when I visited the the Mensline’s FB page there was a new post 10 hours old.

Engagement with the Reader

The second thing to develop is an engaging voice for the organisation’s message. If I experience a website thats talking directly to me about what I am interested in then I become more engaged. Remember that Social Media enables people from all over the place to get together with others with similar values and interests. These values and interests have be able to be seen through the information being communicated. In addition If I can imagine the person behind the words I’m more likely to become involved with them and their organisation.

The Other organisation’s FB site gives you the facts but it is hard to detect the person behind words. They haven’t developed a ‘voice’ and there is no attempt to let you know who they are and what they stand for. This communication is reserved for their excellent newsletter, a one way communication. By contrast Mensline’s FB page is personal. You can tell there is person behind the words. The voice is friendly as well as informative as gives information that you may be interested in.

Encouragement to Respond

Really engaging your readers is much easier when they have the opportunity to get involved. Readers become more interested when they are participating in some way and not only reading a webpage. This participation may be by comments and feedback, taking part in a poll or a forum, or by listening to a podcast or watching a video.

Commenting on comments is a good way of building dialogue. It is no surprise that are no comments on the Other organisation’s Facebook page. It (possibly) shows that no one is interested, certainly not interested enough to respond. Mensline’s FB page has plenty of comments. The site is quite new so almost all of the comments are from Mensline themselves! At least this shows that Mensline are engaged with their own material and thats a good start. If they aren’t going to invest time and energy why would anyone else.

To give the workshop participants actual experience of creating and editing a WordPress post was tricky. My first thought was they could all create an account and then get a blog at WordPress.com, the problem being that only some of them would be able to access the confirmation email WordPress.com sends.

Next idea; I set up a  site at http://eyc2010.wordpress.com then I created an Admin level user with an easy name and password. This would be the log in that the whole group would use to have their actual experience and exploration of WP. Once I’d done that I thought ‘actually this is a good example of the start up WP template, so I retained the WP.com site as this example.

Next step was to set up the eyc sub-domain on simongurnsey.net and install WordPress using Dreamhost’s one click install. Its very quick using  one click install as I don’t have to download wordpress and FTP  it to the site. I’ve done a few installs like this now, so I am pretty quick deleting the existing content: posts pages and links and installing a few of of my favourite plugins, like Magic Contact.

I then set up my universal user account with no real way of testing whether WP would handle up to 20 users all logged in and posting at the same time.. Ulp.

The first workshop went ahead with its registered 6 people and the leader of the abandoned Fun with Wordle workshop, which no-one turned up to. After getting the data-projector going and finding out which computer ran it (not the on I had set-up already, un-fortunately),  I asked all the participants to log in to their computers. I then told them all to wheel their chairs up the front and talk about who they were wanting to communicate to and and what. This was the most critical part of the workshop to me, actually getting across that its the ‘message not the media’. Imaging your audience is vital because otherwise the website becomes about you and not about them and what you can do for them.

It comes down to  something as basic which page is the default front page. If you are truly thinking about your site visitors I contend that an up-to-date blog post is the first thing they see. Have an static page with ‘Abouts’ close by with all that stuff about your organisation, have Contact page somewhere obvious, but if you really want to have a relationship with your website visitors,  information has to be fresh, personal and answering the questions, they have come to your website with.

• Who are you?
• Can you solve my problems?
• What are you thinking, doing right now?
• Can I develop a relationship with you?
• ….?

I was delighted when in this workshop, and the one in the afternoon (with 20 people), most of the participants were able to post. They got as far as the create-a-post page, then all of their transferable skills kicked in.’OK this looks like wordprocessor, I’ll write something!’ B = bold, I = Italics “So, now I can change the way the text looks”. “What happens if I click this button… great that lets me put up an image”. There was a sense of that something really tangible had come of the workshop – actually its still there.

If Leftclick are building a site for backpackers, they will go down to Cathedral Square and interview backpackers. LeftClick spends a lot of time imagining who will come to the sites they build and why. AND they talk to real people. They’ve built an enviable reputation as a result.

Do this for your website! Ask yourself and others; Who will come to our website? and Why?

• Imagine the people you think will come to your website
• Who are they? What age, gender, race and sexual orientation?
• What are they coming for?
• Now narrow this down a bit, imagine one person
• Find someone like that
• When you come to your site, imagine you are this person. What are you looking for and is it easy to finding?

Imagine what your visitor wants. What have they come to your site for? It may not be what you want to give them!

Here are some of the reasons that people might come to your site, so make it easy for them to find:

• information about your services, online
• your contact details
• information that can help them solve their problem quickly

This is a once only chance for you to establish trust and build the credibility of your organisation.

The first part of the process described above is called user profiling[1], the second is usability testing[2]. They are both highly technical fields and often expensive to get done professionally. Have a go at doing them yourself, its better than not doing it at all.

[1] “User profiling is the act of building up a profile of who your users are what they want to do. These profiles are used to group and prioritise the activities of users. Knowing who your users are and what they want is the first, vital step in meeting their needs.”  – Open Interface

[2] Read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users Nielson says, if you interview no one you get no insights. Well actually he says “The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.”

Most jobs require writing. And many people hate it almost as much as public speaking and sitting through meetings. If you have trouble writing, here are some rules which might help.

1. Sit down to write for 5 minutes at a time. If you write longer, great. After taking a break, keep coming back for the next 5 minute session.

2. Write about what you feel like writing about at that moment, regardless of where it fits in the overall paper, or even if it doesn’t fit at all in the current project/paper. (Note: I wrote this in the middle of editing a paper on performance measurement, because I felt like writing it.)

3. Find the time of day to write when you feel most energetic. Don’t try to write when you are tired. It’s OK to give up for the day. Some days are just no good for writing.

4. When you get stuck, or as a starter, complete one of the following sentences. It helps make the writing conversational and you can clean up the wording later:

- What I need to tell you is…
- What I’ve learned from doing this work is…
- What I’m trying to say is….

5. Do not try to write like someone else. You can’t do it, and you will make yourself miserable trying.

6. Use humor and vernacular liberally in beginning drafts. Tell it like it is. You can make it ready for prime time later (or not, as the case may be).

7. Never send anything the same day you write it, if you can help it. You will find significant ways to improve it the next day. Several days worth of improvements are even better.

8. Always keep a scrap heap at the end of the main writing for pieces you’re not sure about. Sometimes they can be used later. Sometimes whole papers can be crafted from such garbage.

9. Never throw away anything you have written, no matter how bad it is. Keep a file, notebook or something where you can throw ideas for later work.

10. Nothing is ever final. The word “draft” is a great shield. Don’t be afraid to keep changing things. It’s OK for people to have different versions of things, providing the newer versions are better.

11. Edit your writing by reading it and making changes as you go along. Don’t try to edit your writing on one read-through. It takes eight passes to complete a piece.

12. Be wary of other people’s advice about writing…

From Mark Friedman: rev 2003

Journal by Simon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/Objectives/affective.htm

Affective Domain Taxonomy

This taxonomy lists levels of commitment (indicating affect) from lowest to highest.