Are you all a-Twitter?

I've signed up for Twitter. Not sure whether it'll be useful, but it's worth a shot. If you want, please add me as a friend: http://twitter.com/hilarymarsh.

Diagram of a blog

This image from today's NY Times is all too true! Reminds me of the old light bulb joke about email lists: http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/interlight.html...

How associations can use blogs effectively

Whew! I just finished an article for FORUM Magazine, the monthly publication of the Association Forum of Chicago. I learned a ton and got reenergized about this blog. When the article is live, I'll share it here.

Because of that article, I'm now addicted to several blogs that I was a casual visitor to before:
Charlene Li's blog sharing Forrester analysts' insights
Logic+Emotion from David Armano
The Kinja feed of posts from several smart association communication issues blogs
John Bell's Digital Influence Mapping Project

What are your marketing challenges and goals for 2007?

Nonprofit communicators, you're invited to take a short survey created by Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention. Nancy's articles on how nonprofits can succeed through effective marketing are fresh and insightful, and she wants the community's input to make her articles even better. It's only seven questions, including:

• Looking back at 2006, what was your biggest disappointment or frustration? And what was your greatest success?
• What are your top three communications goals for 2007?
• As you look ahead to 2007, please rate these marketing and communications challenges as they relate to your organization. (checklist)

The survey is located at What are your marketing challenges and goals for 2007?.

Excellent post on technical problem-solving

Michael Stein, who blogs about nonprofit technology issues, offered an important insight about problem solving: "when several problems start up at once, odds are they are related." The example he gave was about connectivity issues, but it's a principle that is relevant in many other situations. Thanks for the insight, Michael!

My new role

I am now the managing director of REALTOR.org, overseeing the site's content, technology, design, information architecture, and metrics. Guess I'll be busy!

The site has 670,000 registered users and receives more than 1.3 million visits per month. We have ambitious goals for it, including better content management functionality, more multimedia, and user-generated content -- stay tuned!

Women blogging

I've heard about this community for quite a while, but just took the plunge and joined today. We'll see where it goes for me....

Online music

I've been spending way too much time during this three-day weekend exploring the world of music blogging and community. I've been having fun with it, and realizing how many others there are doing the same thing. Check out some of my online presences:

hilarymarsh at Last.fm
http://mog.com/hilarymarsh
"Chicks with Guitar" radio on Pandora

Anyone else on these communities too?

My New Music Blog

Like MySpace for music lovers, Mog is a new service that I read about last week in the WSJ (subscription needed to access). It lets people share their love of music and, through a downloaded application, note what they have on their iPod and what they're playing. It's addictive!

My first conference blog!

The National Association of Realtors, my employer, held its annual conference in New Orleans last week. Always one of the country's most substantial conventions, it was the Big Easy's largest since Katrina, with 26,000 attendees. We had had a blog at our last convention, but it was basically a recap of the news that we posted in our online magazine. This time, I wanted to create a blog that had a voice of its own, captured different kinds of information than the news vehicles , accepted comments -- in short, acted like a "real" blog. Inspired by a post by Todd O'Neill on the CM Pros e-mail list that linked to What to Post to a Conference Blog, I developed guidelines for our blog (below). The blog is so successful that, a week after the conference's end, it is still getting comments!

NARdi Gras Live
Experience the information, the atmosphere, and the spirit of the 2006 REALTORS Conference and Expo

Blog’s purpose and goals

• Capture trends shared at the Conference
• Report on the most interesting and/or popular products, sessions, speakers, and events

Assignment/post types

• Session reporting – see Contribution details section for more about how this would differ from Show Daily/RMO session reporting
• “REALTOR on the street”
• “You are here” personal observations of volunteer works, Expo, between-session hallways, special events (Presidents Bush & Clinton, Harry Connick, Bourbon Street), other events (inaugural, Good Neighbor Awards), New Orleans tours?
• Include photos – have one person control the camera each day and take photos where appropriate (“REALTOR on the street,” etc.)
• Include short (under 2-minute) snippets of Hatfield’s videos of the Habitat builds
• Possibly conversations with session speakers, as continuations of conversations begun at their sessions. (The session about blogging will have its own dedicated blog for people to use to learn about the art of blogging, and we will definitely link to that one.)

Contribution details
Each REALTOR.org editor will contribute 1-2 items per day. One of their posts will be a report about an education session relating to one of the content areas of the site they manage. The posts should

• cover the ambiance in the room
• convey the audience’s interactivity with the topic and the speakers
• if applicable, mention what else was going on at the time, and how might that have shaped this session’s audience turnout and expectations
• discuss what information was new to you, as well as what seemed new to the audience

We’ll divide coverage of the major events at the conference:

• Galas (president’s inauguration, international night out, Good Neighbor awards, et al.)
• Star attractions – David Lereah, Bush/Clinton, Harry Connick Jr., REALTORS on Bourbon Street

In addition, I’d like a mix of other types of posts over the course of the conference, covering

• Activity level and atmosphere of between-session areas, registration area, hotels and local restaurants
• A glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes, in the NAR staff area, press room, blog room
• The local New Orleans tours that conference attendees can take
• Volunteer efforts

A note about voice
The blog will have a diverse audience – REALTORS, committee members, Association Executives, NAR staff – so be careful of the use of “you”

Process and Oversight

• I will have daily meetings with Pamela to review the day's posts and make sure the blog is in line with editorial expectations
• I will spend most of my time approving blog posts and comments from the blogger's room, for several reasons:
• so that bloggers who come in will have the opportunity to be involved
• to foster cross-linking among the conference's bloggers
• to show that our blogging is an open process

Blog requirements

• It will look like the President's Blog with the same size logo at the top, and will work largely like the NAR in the News Blog
  
• We will accept comments and will moderate them.
• We won’t allow trackbacks.
• We'll have a blogroll where we can link to other blogs.
• We'll set it up to display the category for each post on the post itself, as well as in the blog's navigation. We'll probably have 5-10 categories.
• We will organize the archives by day, since the blog will only be alive for about 10 days (it will still exist online, but not contributed to after that).
• It will be set up to allow multiple contributors, each with their own login. I will be the sole administrator (although the REALTOR.org editors and Lorelei will have my login information, in case they need to step in for any reason)

Questions

• Can we include audio snippets of the sessions while the conference is still going on? If so, how would we go about doing that?
• How could we/should we use the blog to inform conference attendees about any updates?
• How should we cover committee meetings?

Sources of inspiration
http://agahran.typepad.com/sej2006/
http://blogs.asaecenter.org/BostonBlog/


More about voice and tone:

http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/02/08/conference_blogging.php

This is a very interesting post talking about the modes of conference blogging. I'd like ours to be a mix of the following:

• Impressionistic Transcription -- paraphrase with flair. Usually makes the speakers sound better than they are. Adds a little context that makes particular sense if you have been following related memes in blogspace. Great for the writer because the informality excuses waning attention and need to quote accurately. Archetype: Cory Doctorow (example)
• Running Commentary -- paraphrase with opinion. While blogging in real time, interspersing the opinions or views of the blogger. Perhaps the most value added activity of one person. Takes real skill to capture the essence of a session and add your own. Archetypes: Mitch Ratcliffe or Doc (example)
• Poignant Reflection -- pure commentary. How most people blog conferences. Listen, reflect and post. What drives the post is usually a key quote or a contrary opinion. Archetype: Jerry Michalski (example)

SEO is like the game of jeopardy

I realized the other day that understanding how to optimize your Web site for search engines is just like playing "Jeopardy" -- you have to ask yourself what questions people will ask for which your company is the answer. Then, you have to create content answering each of those questions, and be sure to use the words embedded in those questions on your site itself.

I was recently asked to offer some Web advice for a relative who runs a company that makes the "trees of life" and other products that organizations use as fundraising recognition tools. He's about to embark on a redesign of his site, http://www.bddonorrec.com, and wanted to understand how to improve his conversions -- he has people trickling onto the site, but extremely low numbers who actually contact him.

I told him to keep three things in mind:

• You want to put yourself where your target audience is, online
• You want to describe your offerings in terms your audience uses
• You want to create words and images that will resonate with the people who arrive at your site.

He sounded a little puzzled until I compared this exercise to "jeopardy." We'll see what happens with the site in the future.....

Content style -- usage reflects ubiquity

"Web" or "web"? "Web site" or "website"? Every site, and every organization, grapples with style choices. Tony Byrne's recent post indicates that, for at least one tech trade magazine, we've reached the turning point. This magazine has chosen to eschew capitals for the top Web-related terms -- indicating that these words are so common, they no longer need to be set off with capital letters. This is great news, in my opinion. What do you think?

Is new media changing society and culture?

PBS today launched a new blog that claims they are. MediaShift, written by Mark Glaser, promises to

"track how digital media technologies and techniques such as weblogs, RSS, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and video repositories are changing our world. It will tell stories of how the shifting media landscape is changing the way we get our news and information, while also providing a place for public participation and feedback."

If anyone will have intelligent ideas about this stuff, that person seems to be Glaser. He wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's (Online Journalism Review) and currently writes the OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association.

I'm looking forward to learning more.

Writing FAQs for the Web

What do you think of FAQs -- do you look at them? do they answer your questions?

On websites I work on, I encourage people to avoid them at all costs. Instead, it makes sense to take people’s questions and make sure those questions are answered within the text, in the place where it makes the most sense.

In my view, FAQs are a convenient vehicle for the creator, but not necessarily the best delivery method for the visitor to the page. Jacob's guide is a thorough how-to, if you do decide to use them.

Thoughts, anyone?

What does it mean for writing to be user-centered?

Web writing often contains far too many instances of "I" and "we" and far too few of "you." Bryan Eisenberg has developed the fabulous, free We We Customer Focus Calculator that indicates how much of your site focuses on the customer vs. on yourself.

People come to a site to get information that they can learn from, identify with, and hopefully put to good use for themselves. "Do I want to work for this company?" "Do I want to buy this product?" "Do I want to participate in this program?" "Do I want to join this association?"

User-centered content addresses the reader's needs, not those of the person or organization generating the content.

To ensure that your content is user-centered:

• Make sure it answers the question "so what?"
• Focus not on the features your product offers, but what benefits the customer will enjoy as a result of those features

Developing a strategy for using multimedia on a website

Should we use multimedia on our site? Sounds like a pretty straightforward question, but in actuality it is anything but.

What do we mean by "multimedia," anyway? (After some thought and discussion, we narrowed it down to audio files, video files and presentations.)

If we decide to use it, where and when is it appropriate, and what should the guidelines be for how large the multimedia files can be and how long they should stay on the site?

Should we set up the files to download or stream? What file types should we accept?

I've asked members of other organizations' Web teams what their policies are, and no one has been willing to share them, since they insist that it depends on the nature of the content and the tech savviness of the audiences. But how can we develop industry standards, and influence what our audiences expect and are willing to watch/download, if we don't share information?

I look forward to learning more over time.

Surf a web page without clicking

I learned about this experimental Italitan website from Tidbit, the new blog from Philadelphia usability firm Wildbit. I'm not sure what I think, but I'm glad someone is exploring opportunities.

Join me to discuss "Writing for search" next Tuesday, August 23rd

Can your customers find you? What content do customers look for on your site? Are you making mistakes on your site that keep search engines from seeing your content? Find out the answers to this and more in a teleseminar, where you'll also get to ask your own questions. Talk to you then!

Talking about online press rooms

One of the folks who attended my teleseminar about online pressrooms had nice things to say. I'll publish more soon on this topic.

"Eight Things You Can Do Now to Improve On-Screen Readability"

Do you agree with this article? I don't -- especially the part about creating and embedding a custom font.

I think it's a good thing readers have control over how information is displayed on their computers. I once had a colleague with low vision, and for him, it was easiest to read content online if he had the background set to a dark color -- usually purple -- with the type in white or yellow.

For a designer, "user-centered" means checking aspects of your ego at the door. (It does for content folks too, just in different ways, but we'll tackle that in another post someday.)

Comments welcome....