As most of us know, the quantity and quality of inbound links has a pretty significant impact on search engine optimization. All other things being equal, if I have 10 inbound links to my site, from places like MIT, The New York Times and Apple and you have 10 inbound links from places like Joe's toothpick collectors blog, I'll be ahead of you in the search engine results pages.

So it is no surprise that people strive to attain those links—either by themselves or by hiring SEO firms who specialize in such things. Aside from the SEO value, inbound links also bring in referral traffic from sites that appeal to similar audiences.

Assuming you are producing great content—that people find valuable—there are a variety of ways to gain inbound links. Today I'd like to focus on the most basic approach, the direct ask.

Link requests are often ignored.

Webmasters and bloggers ignore the majority of link requests simply because the requesters don't give us a logical reason to follow through. For example, this request came in a few days ago.

"I visited your website and found it to be pretty useful content. I invite you to a link exchange (3-way link*) with our website (s)."

This was the extent of the message. The sender didn't include the link to the site, so I had no way of telling whether the site would be useful or not. The person also mentioned that this would be a link exchange. That's a common request, but I'm not going to give away a link just to get a link in return. If I link to a site, I do so only because it has information that I think you, my readers, will find useful.

* A 3-way link exchange is a gray/black hat trick meant to disguise a reciprocal link exchange from search engines. Since we only link to relevant sites we need not play such games.

Link requests that aren't ignored.

Visiting Case was redesigned earlier this year. It no longer includes this page, so I'm showing this screen capture of the old version for reference.

When I was Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University I received oodles of link requests because .edu sites are in high demand and we had enough content to appeal to a broad array of topical niches. People wanted me to link to everything from hotels and limousine services to other colleges and "get rich quick" blogs. But every once in awhile someone would suggest a link that was right on target.

One such person was the Webmaster for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA). He first contacted me to suggest some additional bus routes I might link to on the transportation page for our Visiting Case site. When he e-mailed me he sent me the recommended links to his site AND sent me the url of the page on my site where he thought the links should go. Knowing that these routes would be of interest to visitors, I immediately added them to the page in question. Over the years he would send me new links as routes were changed so that I was able to easily keep the information current.

I really appreciated his efforts because they helped me better serve my audience while also making sure that traffic directed to his site went to the right place. Adding the links was beneficial to all involved.

If you don't want your link request to be ignored, then it helps to follow in RTA's footsteps by initiating a link request that benefits both parties.

Choosing your victim Targeting sites that could link to you.

These cool vinyl critters are produced by Ducobi. I haven't done any package design since the late 1990's, but Lovely Package is a great source for design inspiration.

Let's pretend that you write a lovely little blog about package design.* If you were to embark on a link-building campaign you would probably start by identifying the top blogs and sites geared towards designers—people who would also be interested in your site. In particular you might look for sites specifically aimed at packaging.

After identifying a few plausible candidates such as Package Design Magazine and The dieline package design blog, you should then read through the sites to judge the caliber of the information, and to see if they are drawing in the same sort of readers that you seek.

Next you should ask yourself how your site, or a specific page on your site, would benefit their readers. If you can't come up with a clear and specific benefit then you are better off looking for other candidates.

If you do have a good benefit then you should also identify a place on their site where it would be logical for them to add your link. If no such place exists, it will be hard for them to fulfill your request.

* The folks at Lovely Package have never asked me for a link, nor do they need to. Their site has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 47,211 with 852 inbound links—which means it is already quite popular.

Asking for the link

Once you've made it this far, asking for the link is relatively simple.

The first step is to identify the person at the site who has the power to grant your request. This may be the Webmaster, content manager, an editor or someone else.

Then send that person a politely worded email in which you clearly yet briefly:

• introduce yourself
• describe the content and audience of your site
• explain why linking to your site would be beneficial to their audience
• specify the link you would like them to use
• suggest (not specify) keywords they might use for the link
• recommend a page on their site where you think the link would make sense, and
• thank them for considering your request

If they agree with your reasoning then you may very well get that link. If not then at least you'll know you made a sincere effort—rather than spamming them with a nonsensical request.

LInk Building and Related SEO Resources

I regularly add links such as these at the end of blog posts for two reasons. 1) They help guide you to additional information on the topic. 2) It helps me show appreciation to sites that provide helpful information. They didn't have to ask, they just produced worthwhile content.

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
• Link building and SEO
• Link Building Pet Peeves That Drive Me Bananas
• Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

LeanDog's boat, the Keasarge, is docked next to the USS Cod Submarine just West of Burke Lakefront Airport. Clevelanders may remember it as the former Hornblowers Restaurant.

I just had the most amazing weekend at Cleveland GiveCamp, an event at which programmers, developers, designers, writers and others came together to build Web sites and applications for local non-profit organizations. The event was hosted at Lean Dog, An Agile Software Studio housed in a converted steamship, the Keasarge, and its on-land neighbor, Burke Lakefront Airport.

Throughout the course of the weekend 100+ volunteers produced Web sites and applications for 20 organizations. While the sites vary in complexity according to the needs of each organization, it's fair to say that these sites could have cost thousands of dollars each to develop without volunteer labor.

For some organizations this meant they were able to get their first site. For others it meant that they could have their sites rebuilt—in a manner that would help them maintain them on their own—so they could better communicate with their constituents in the future. For all it meant that the dollars that might have been spent on the Web could instead be put towards directly helping their cause.

Mark Schumann, one of the event organizers, drove this point home during the closing presentations. There he told us that the Suicide Prevention Education Alliance will be able to hire another staff person now that they don't have to spend money to build a new site. This will allow them to reach 3,000 more teens, out of which typically 150 will get professional counseling. Mark went on to explain that we can't know for sure how many of those 150 would have taken their lives without getting help—but I think we can all agree that if even just one life is saved, that makes a tremendous impact.

Each of the many charities served by Cleveland GiveCamp supports our community in important ways, so it was really impressive to see how the volunteers were able to help them continue those efforts.

My time at Cleveland GiveCamp

Macintosh, Linux and Windows laptops all saw their fair share of the action as teams worked on developing their projects.

Everyone who participated in GiveCamp had their own unique experience. The organizers have been working hard for months. I, on the othe hand, ended up turning up at the last minute. I'd first read about GiveCamp some months back, but at the time I assumed they needed programmers who knew more about developing applications and other things outside of my skill set. As we all know, one should never assume.

On Friday afternoon I learned that Susie Sharp had been asked to bring down extra volunteers to help document/promote the weekend's activities via social media. I tagged along with "Team Tweet" thinking I'd go see what was up and help live-Tweet the action.

We arrived at GiveCamp just in time to see them assign the developer teams to their non-profit organizations. Originally they'd hoped to have 70 volunteers working on 16 projects, but Cleveland spirit prevailed and they ended up with 100 volunteers who were able to work on 21 projects. At this point I still thought they'd be programming their own content management systems and applications, so I just went back to the boat to set up my MacBook Pro and plan out my Twitter strategy. The one skill group teams were short on was design, so I also let folks know that I could help teams with that as needed.

Almost everyone chooses WordPress

As the groups started planning their projects and choosing their development tools, something unexpected happened. 15 of them chose to use WordPress as the content management system for their sites. WordPress struck me as a good choice because it is relatively simple to implement, it's free, and the end-user interface makes it easy for the non-profits to update and maintain their sites.

Estina Goertz from the Cleveland Tenants Organization asks a question during WordPress training. (Photo by Susie Sharp)

Many of the teams who chose WordPress hadn't used it before. So it was natural that they would have some questions. I'm not an expert, but as many of you know, I use WordPress pretty much every day. This blog runs on WordPress, as does every site I've built in the past year. Their choice of WordPress gave me a new purpose, so I switched gears and took on the roll of roving WordPress troubleshooter. I also gave a presentation on Sunday afternoon to show the non-profits how to maintain and update their sites.

As mentioned, it is relatively easy to set up a WordPress site using a pre-existing theme. Many users can do this themselves. But these were not do-it-yourself level projects. Customizing a site to serve specific goals and functions is far more complicated. One needs to know a certain amount of HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL and may also need to know more elaborate programming. The sites the developers built fit into this category.

Some required more complex navigation, others had special uses for incorporating social media, many needed PayPal integration for online giving, one required an e-commerce shopping cart solution and another was part of a project that also integrated a new iPhone application with a Twitter feed.

WordPress 3.0 has great new features, but—it's really new

Iggy, one of the LeanDogs asks if it might not make more sense to use a WordPress query, rather than a plug-in, for a feature we've been discussing.

WordPress 3.0 integrates the former WordPress MU (multi-user) features as well as many options that make it easier for users to customize navigation and other page elements. But it's also very new. The official final release of 3.0 was just launched in June. I've upgraded many of my sites to 3.0, but I've not yet built a new theme that incorporates the new features.

Some of the developers based their projects on new 3.0 themes while others based them on older themes that will still run on 3.0. It was easier for me to answer questions for the latter group; in many cases I could just go back to my Mac and send them a snippet of code I'd used in the past. Or I could pinpoint which plug-in was involved and just point them to the settings page they had to adjust. It was great when someone asked me a question I could answer immediately.

But that didn't happen all—or even most—of the time. As they came to me with menuing—or other questions that were unique to 3.0—I looked over their shoulders as we tried to work things out together. Other times I hopped on Google and searched about until I found the documentation we needed to solve the problem. Once I found a solution I would e-mail it to the person who'd asked and add it to Delicious where I was sharing links for the WordPress developers. There were a few questions that completely stumped me, or that were outside my bailiwick, but in the end I think we were able to find work-around's or alternative solutions for most of the dilemmas that came up. And in some cases the programmers were able to build their own programs in lieu of plug-ins that didn't already exist.

In the end I think I learned as much as anyone and am glad that I'll be able to put what I learned to use on my next project.

Social media is great for communicating during events

When geeks put together an event, they know what tools to use. Participants needed to communicate with each other and we wanted to spread the word to the public about what the teams were accomplishing.

I used Tweetchat to monitor the #clegivecamp Twitter hashtag.

Keeping in touch on Twitter with #clegivecamp.

The organizers chose #clegivecamp as the hashtag for the event, so one of the first things I did was open a Firefox tab for http://tweetchat.com/room/clegivecamp in order to monitor what was happening. Throughout the weekend participants used this to post announcements; share links, anecdotes and amusing photos; and to converse between the two locations.

I also used it to find out where I was needed for WordPress assistance. If someone Tweeted that team 5 had a WordPress question, I could tweet back asking for the location and tell them I was on my way. If I was away from my laptop others would see the Tweet and someone nearby could let me know where I should go next. People also sent Tweets directly to me, but overall the hashtag made it easy to keep in touch, whether or not we knew each other's usernames or email addresses.

Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious is the social media tool I use most regularly. As I worked with the WordPress teams it quickly became obvious that I needed a place to share links and other information. At first I thought I might make a new blog post here, then keep adding to it. But that seemed like it could become unwieldy. Instead I created a delicious tag for #clegivecamp. Then whenever I found a plug-in, or piece of documentation that would apply to one of the projects, I would save it to delicious along with that tag. I also used secondary tags such as wp-plug-ins and wp-documentation to help differentiate between the saved items.

Throughout the weekend I posted reminders on Twitter and Facebook to let people know that these links were available. Then if someone asked a question, that I'd already researched, I could direct them to Delicious to find the documentation link I'd already saved. I also used this tag as a place to save user oriented documentation for those who attended my WordPress training session. This meant that I only had to give them one link to write down in their notes. They could then follow that link to find all the other links we discussed during the session. Over the next few days I will continue to add more links there as I recall/find those that would be appropriate for this group.

Facebook

Cleveland GiveCamp began the weekend with a Givecamp group on Facebook, but when Team Tweet began their social media promotion they thought they could benefit from the added features of a Facebook page. Thus Susie Sharp created the Cleveland GiveCamp page. Here Susie, Heidi Hooper, Jim Evans, Paul Schambs, Kasey Crabtree, Stuart Smith and others started posting updates and photos about the event.

As the weekend went on, the developers and non-profits added to this content with updates about their projects, announcements and other related information. As people have added to the page it has turned into a nice repository for information about the event. If you have a Facebook account, I urge you to "like" the page. This will help show our sponsors, the media, volunteers and others that you think it is a worthwhile event that should be held again next year.

Cleveland GiveCamp would not have been possible without its volunteers and

Leadership from the organizing team including:

• Jon Stahl
• Andrew Craze
• Mark Schumann
• Nick Barendt
• Laurence Mingle
• Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan
• Jim Gorjup
• Deb Stahl
• Kevin Stahl
• Jane Winik,
• and several others whose names I may have missed

and support from the Cleveland GiveCamp Sponsors:

• LeanDog, An Agile Software Studio
• Burke Lakefront Airport
• Hyland Software
• Rosetta
• DeVry University
• Microsoft
• IEEE
• CODE Magazine
• discount ASP.net
• Keller Graduate School of Management
• American Greetings
• Midwest Research
• Pantek
• Red Bull

Overall Cleveland GiveCamp was a tremendous success. The developers accomplished an incredible amount of work, ensuring that their non-profits can better achieve their goals. The camaraderie of the participants meant that we all had fun while working, and volunteers made sure we were well-fed and provided with sufficient quantities of caffeine to keep functioning. If you would like to learn more about GiveCamp or organize one in your own region, please visit the links below.

Cleveland GiveCamp Links

• Cleveland Give Camp Official Page
• Cleveland Give Camp Facebook Page
• Cleveland Give Camp Twitter account
• #clegivecamp - Twitter hashtag (live)
• #clegivecamp - Twitter hashtag (archive)
• GiveCamp main page

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

After writing my last post, I went offline for 2 weeks to skibble across the Atlantic, where I saw Gaudi's wild architecture in Barcelona, the aftermath of floods in Madeira, and the enormous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca—among other things.

When I came back I returned to thousands of e-mails. My inbox was so cluttered that I'm still wondering what messages I may have missed.

Thoughts of clutter sometimes lead to thoughts of cleaning—or so I'm told. When such thoughts coincide with the chirping of birds and the sprouting of flowers, that means spring cleaning.

Spring cleaning is traditionally a time to take stock of our surroundings, get rid of the detritus and freshen up what's been getting stale over the long winter. Admittedly, this is not my area of expertise when it comes to house cleaning, but it is a task we should apply to our Web sites, particularly if you've not been caring for and feeding your site throughout the year.

Where to start: How effectively did your site achieve its goals?

Runners in the Barcelona Marathon. Did they achieve their goals? Only their times will tell.

Back when you first planned your site you (hopefully) had a purpose in mind. Today is a good day to look at your results. If your goal was to sell more widgets, how did you do? Did the site bring in traffic that converted to leads or sales? If your goal was to recruit students to your graduate program, how did that work? Did the site impact their decision?

Through a combination of Web analytics, leads from contact forms, applications, sales, etc. you should be able to measure your success and gauge how well your site contributed to that success. If you see room for improvement, you'll want to take a close look at what worked and what didn't and focus on enhancing the areas where you can make the most impact. Some of you may need to rewrite copy and offer more calls to action. Others may need to enhance SEO or improve site navigation. Different problems will require different solutions. For ideas that may help, try perusing my:

• Planning Your Web Site Tutorial
• Marketing Articles
• Writing Articles
• SEO Tips

Do your old goals still apply?

When I started this blog the goal was primarily educational. While that goal remains, my site now is also meant to attract potential clients. Whether your site is for a business, university, non-profit or your own personal use, your situation may have changed in the past year. Think about whether your own goals have changed and what you might add or change on the site so that it can continue to support both your needs and those of your site visitors.

Changes in technology

Trixi's are electrically assisted pedal cycles you can ride in Malaga, Spain. On your Web site, you don't always need to use the latest technology, you just need to use that which works best for your site visitors.

Generally speaking (very generally) the Web works pretty much the way it always has. If you view a site built in 1993 in a modern browser it will probably still work to one degree or another. But the technology has also evolved. Newer browsers are beginning to support HTML 5.0 and CSS 3. Designers are experimenting with those standards, while also trying to ensure that the sites they build degrade nicely when viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0.

Where does your site stand in terms of current technology? Does it support the browsers used by your visitors? Does your site use deprecated code? Are you still using tables for layout? Was it optimized for IE 6 in a way that it will break if viewed in IE 7 or Firefox? Are you supporting mobile devices? Should you? Have you incorporated social media features? Are you embedding audio and video in the most effective manner? We have far more options today than we did when the Web began, but that also means we have more potential for conflict. A flash-based site won't run on your new iPad and your CSS3 rounded corners won't be visible in IE6.

Your site has its own unique requirements and probably doesn't need all of the latest bells and whistles. If you don't need to support mobile just yet, or aren't designing for the iPad, then don't worry about that. The important thing is just to make sure that you are using the features and coding that work best for your target audience.

General maintenance

When you first launched your site, you and everyone else involved probably read each page countless times. But typos's and other minor errors may still lurk. Now that some time has passed proofread the site again with fresh eyes. You'll be surprised at what you might find. This is a good opportunity to catch spelling errors, or tweak some copy so it flows more smoothly. While you're reading through the pages, check your links. to make sure they still work. If a page has moved or a site has been deleted you will want to replace it with a working link. You may also decide to add links to newer or more comprehensive resources in addition to those old links.

As you explore your site, put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Does your content still make sense? Are things missing that you didn't notice before? Looking at the site again after a long time can give you a fresh perspective and suggest ideas that you may not have thought of last time around.

Out with the old, in with the new? Not necessarily.

Market: Agadir, Morocco. This donkey may seem old-fashioned, but there is no reason to replace him with something new. As long he remains fuel efficient and can haul produce, he's still serving the needs of his owner—just as your historical content serves the needs of your site visitors.

Some people worry that having old pages on a site makes it look like they've not bothered to update it. But the age of a page doesn't matter as much as the information it contains. If your products page still lists that 20lb hand vacuum you stopped manufacturing 5 years ago, then yes, it's probably time to remove it. You don't want people trying to buy things you aren't selling. But you could also move this information to an historic products section where you include appropriate support materials, such as a .pdf of the user manual. This could be helpful to current customers.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, so I hate to get rid of anything that might be useful, but as you review your site, you too will notice that some older information still has value and is worth keeping. Here are some examples:

Factual information that doesn't change.

If your office has been in the same location for 20 years, then the page listing your address and phone number is probably still accurate. For pages like this, just give them a cursory review to see if all the information is correct and if anything is missing that might help your readers. For example, if you don't have a map, this may be a good time to add one. If you have out-of-date photos of the office, then perhaps a few fresh ones are in order. But otherwise that page may remain accurate for several years to come.

Press releases, news and articles

Press release are timely in nature, but they also provide an historical record of the news your organization has produced. These pages may contain valuable information that tells readers about your track record for innovation, the progress you've made, the endurance of your group, etc. Some organizations like to remove older news stories because they think that visitors will accidentally come across an article from 1985 and think it's current.

But there is an easy solution for that, especially if you maintain such documents using blogging software or other content management tools. Just make sure any news content contains the date it was published. Then you can keep this content in online archives that make it easy for visitors to browse while still showcasing what is new and what is not. In many cases this information is helpful not only for outside readers but also for your employees. If they're trying to find out more about how you launched product X in 1998, or who was the head of IT in 2001, this gives them a good start.

Recurring Events

If you hold an annual conference or other recurring event, consider maintaining archives of the event site for each year. While this year's site may showcase the location and speakers for the current year, the archives can tell the story of past years. Discovering who spoke before, watching videos or slides from past events, and other details can help readers decide whether or not to attend. Such archives also demonstrate that the event has a history of success, and as with news items, these archives offer information that may be useful to newer employees.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content refers to information that is more timeless and less likely to go out-of-date. For example, my article, Voice and Tone: Writing to reflect your personality as well as your message (Part 1), still brings in search traffic 3 years after it was written, because the ideas within still apply today.

Reflections on social media networking and marketing, on the other hand, was written more recently but references social media services that no longer exist, such as Pownce. While some of the content in the article is still relevant, other parts are outdated.

Including evergreen content on your site is a good way to bring in traffic, because people will continue to search for such information for years to come. When they find your site, and discover it also offers other useful resources, they may also stick around to explore it further.

Don't break the Web when/if you delete pages

Closed roads during the Barcelona Marathon prevented our taxi from reaching our hotel. Thankfully the subway provided us with an alternative way to reach our destination. Similarly 301 redirects can help guide your visitors to theirs.

The Web, by nature, is interconnected by links. When we delete pages, we also break any links that go to those pages, thus causing confusion to visitors who follow the links and headaches for those who link to us. If a page is out-of-date and you want to delete it, see first if there is a way to make it more current.

If not, then you may want to set up a 301 redirect that will automatically take users (and robots who index the Web) to a more appropriate page. Another option is to add a disclaimer explaining that the page is an archival page with out-of-date information. This can include manual links to other pages you recommend users visit instead. Users who are guided to more appropriate materials, rather than to a 404 error page, are more likely to find what they need and continue to explore the site.

I have a blog, so my site is already up-to-date.

If you have a blog on your site, and you write with some degree of regularity, then you have a huge advantage over those who maintain more static Web sites. You've been adding fresh content all year, so it probably does include current information. But what about the other pages?

Are your entries and archives easy to browse? Perhaps what worked last year is less manageable now that you have so many more posts. What about your About page? Does it reflect your current editorial policy? Are there other pages you could add that would enhance your user experience? While frequent blogging keeps you involved with your site, a spring review let's you view the site anew and may give you ideas to make your blog even better.

The colors on our site are so 2005, we need a full redesign.

Don't panic. A site review may make small problems look bigger than they seem. The key here is to maintain perspective and look for issues that truly impact your goals and the user experience. While out-of-date product descriptions can be a problem, out-of-date colors may not be. If people aren't applying to your program, don't blame the visuals. They may need some sprucing up, when time allows, but your content and calls to action are probably the areas that need the most help. Craigslist, for example, isn't winning many design awards, but it continues to be a popular and productive site. As the site owner, you may be bored with the look and feel of your site, but that doesn't mean the same is true for users.

While you may be tempted to start over with a full site redesign, in most cases you don't need one. If your site is supporting its goals, and visitors seem happy, then just focus on small corrections, updates and improvements. If the flaws seem to be adding up to a nightmare, then you may want to do a more thorough analysis, but there's no reason to look for a catastrophe unless it really exists.

Regular care and feeding of your Web site

Web sites are like pets. You can't just stick them in a cage and ignore them. (No stuffed animals were harmed while shooting this photo.)

Ideally we'd all maintain and care for our sites on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. How often we should do this depends on the nature of our goals, our content and the scope of our sites. Alas for many of us time slips away, or we don't have sufficient staff to keep up. Others spend the little time they have just updating the necessary bits and may not have the opportunity to really review the site in terms of its overall performance.

A spring cleaning review gives us the chance to really look at how our site is doing as a whole, and to approach it from a fresh perspective. After we've gone through the process we can also get a sense of whether our normal maintenance and review schedule is on track or whether we have to make time to care for our site more frequently.

How is your site performing?

Are you able to maintain it as often as you like? Do you have tips to share with others? Do you measure your results on a regular basis? What did you learn from your last site review? Please share your ideas and questions in the comments below.

Resources for the care, feeding and maintenance of your Web site

• 5 Lists Every Web site Owner Should Keep
• Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools (This is actually a guide for student researchers, but could add perspective to our own site reviews)
• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Spring cleaning doesn't usually require a full redesign.)
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (added insights into your users' experience on your site)
• Web site Maintenance Musts

Fan me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

P.S. All the photos in this entry were shot on my recent holiday. I've not posted many yet, but there are a few more in my Spain, Morocco, Portugal collection on Flickr.

The first post. It's hard to believe I used to write such short entries. (Some of you probably wish I still did!)

Starting this blog was one of the smartest things I've done. To be honest though, it's not something I began on my own, nor did I anticipate how it would evolve over time.

To celebrate the anniversary of this blog (which actually occurs on February 28th), I thought I'd share a bit of its history and reflect on how the blog and I have adapted to changes in the Web and the interests of you, our readers.

A communications need—in search of a solution.

Five years ago Kevin Adams and I were the Web team for the marketing and communications department of Case Western Reserve University. In the second half of 2004 we'd rolled out a new site design as part of a university-wide rebranding effort. Our mission was to maintain the home page, build (and maintain) new sites within the campus Web presence and work with departments across campus to help them do the same with their own sites.

To this end we had periodic meetings with campus Web folk, and answered many an e-mail question or phone call, but this wasn't enough to keep up with the demand for support. Our campus community included hundreds of Web maintainers, of varying skill levels, who had questions ranging from how to edit HTML to how to develop content that would best support their marketing strategies. We needed a more efficient way to serve this audience.

As part of the new site roll-out we had created a Web Toolkit where we shared template files, and various reference materials, but as a static site it seemed an unwieldy place to post announcements or other bits of advice. We needed a system that would let us organize the information more effectively. Thankfully such a system had just been created.

Case launches a campus-wide blogging initiative.

I used the Case blog system to develop a variety of sites ranging from the Community Outreach site to the Case News Center. In July, 2008, I presented Blogs, The many voices of a university at EduWeb 2008 to demonstrate the ways that Case (and other schools) were making use of blogs in the classroom and beyond. You can get a sense of how Case continues to use blogs by visiting Planet Case, a site that aggregates all the most recent posts from the system.

In November 2004, Case's ITS group began alpha testing a campus-wide blogging system using the Movable Type platform. In January 2005 they opened up the system for campus-wide beta-testing, allowing any university students, staff, faculty or alumni to create their own blog(s).

Having previously experimented with blogs on Blogger, I watched the project with interest. Then one day Jeremy Smith, who runs the blog system, called me up to see if I might be able to create a new template design for one of the senior staff. Soon thereafter I had a test account set-up where I could experiment with creating this new theme.

Although I was a regular blog reader I'd not really spent much time thinking about blog construction. As I played with my designs, I found they weren't quite living up to my expectations. I was trying to visually re-style an existing blog structure, when I should have been rethinking the entire interface. Thus the results (such as this example) just didn't feel quite right.

I was learning that the blogs required a different way of thinking in regard to the user experience and navigation system. So I set those first designs aside and focused on learning more about blog structure and the code behind it.

At some point in that process I realized that the blog system was just what Kevin and I had been looking for.

The birth of the Web Development Blog

I don't recall the exact conversation but one way or another Kevin and I agreed to start blogging. Since I'd already been tinkering with the system, I took one of our campus templates and rebuilt it as a blog theme. Once that was ready I wrote our first post. You can view a copy of that post as it appears here on this blog, or the original post on the Case system.

As you will notice the post was surprisingly short. I introduced the reason for the blog, suggested users add contact information to their site footers and listed the hexadecimal colors for the Case Web templates.

Over the next few months Kevin and I continued in that vein, offering basic how-to tips such as setting up password authentication or redirecting pages and posting announcements, book reviews or links to interesting blog posts. As we added more content, the blog began to serve a customer service role. While campus Web maintainers continued to call us, they could now also go to the blog to find answers to many of their more common questions.

Broader mission and the birth of longer posts

When meeting with campus clients to talk about their new Web sites, I often started the conversation by asking about their goals and target audience, much as I do today with current clients. Alas with over 300,000 pages in the Case realm, and just me and Kevin to advise, we weren't able to sit down and have these conversations with everyone. As I was working with the department of pharmacology on their new site it occurred to me that I could write about the Web planning process and post it on the blog. This way users could walk through it themselves if Kevin or I weren't able to meet with them.

On July 1, 2005, I posted So you want to build a Web site, the first chapter of what turned out to be my Planning Your Web site Tutorial. Over the next few months I kept adding chapters while Kevin kept posting smaller articles on various tips and tricks. Kevin spends much of his spare time playing the trumpet in polka bands, while I'm often compelled to write, so it came as no surprise when I turned out to be the more verbose contributor to the blog.

As time went by I found that sharing the Web site tutorial with clients, before we met in person, helped to save us time in the planning process and ensure that we were all on the same page. I also found that people outside of Case, both in academia and beyond, were beginning to read our posts.

As people commented and asked questions we started writing on a wider range of topics. Instead of focusing strictly on issues pertaining to building sites, I also started writing about related topics such as marketing and graphics.

In 2006 we both wrote a combination of how-to articles such as those on editing images but also branched out into more general topics such as discussions on writing styles. By 2007, I'd also begun covering topics related to what we now call social media. In May of that year Kevin left to work on the corporate sector, so I continued the blog on my own.

Between building Web sites and advising clients, we'd never had much time to blog during office hours so I wrote many of these posts in the evening. Writing on my own time also allowed me the freedom to experiment a bit more with what I wrote. By this point I knew my audience extended beyond campus, so while much of my focus was on Web communications as they pertained to higher education I also wanted to include information that would be helpful to other audiences. And, instead of just writing things to help people build better Web sites, I wanted to address related issues such as promoting and marketing those sites. Topics like search engine optimization and social media were a natural addition to this content mix.

Life after Case

Last year after working at Case for almost 10 years I left the university to venture forth on my own. I knew the blog would continue to be an important communications tool, so I brought it with me to this site, while leaving the original files there for archival and reference purposes. I installed WordPress in a directory on this domain, created a theme to match the rest of my site, exported the blog entries from the old site then imported them here.

While I still sometimes find an odd link that goes back to the old site, the process worked surprisingly smoothly—considering that I was not only moving files but changing from Movable Type to WordPress. For a few weeks during the transition I cross-posted to both blogs then on February 23, 2009 I posted The Web Development Blog is moving! as the last post on the old site and began posting here full time.

Starting a new business takes time, so I've not blogged as often this past year as I'd have liked, but for the most part the editorial policy for the blog has remained similar to what it was at Case. Most of my clients are in small or medium sized businesses so I'm writing a bit more with an eye to the corporate sector. I'm still interested in the higher education and non-profit worlds, so I also use examples from those sectors, and read posts from BlogHighEd to keep up with what's happening in academe.

The role of the blog

What began as a simple way to communicate with clients has turned into much more. I think it worked out because Kevin and I started blogging to serve a specific goal, we didn't blog just to blog. As a result, The Web Development Blog has served as a marketing tool, helped me to establish my personal brand and given me the opportunity to connect with bloggers, clients and others with an interest in Web related issues. And of course it gives me a place to wax forth on whatever Web related ideas I may be pondering in a given moment.

But as much as I like to write, none of this would matter if you weren't out there reading. So now, as I near the anniversary date of the blog, I'd like to thank you all for reading, commenting, reTweeting, etc.

And of course if you have any ideas on things I should cover in 2010, please feel free to share them below.

Social Media Marketing Blog

I am now also a co-author of the Social Media Marketing Blog with Wayne Smallman and Emily Cagle. There we'll be focusing on social media marketing tips such as my first post, Listen, learn and leverage your brand via LinkedIn Answers. That site is also home to Wayne's e-book, The Beginner's Guide to Social Media.

Fan me on Facebook - Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

View Listen Now, Talk Later on Slideshare.

Back in high school we took a senior class poll in which we voted on who was "most likely to succeed," "most likely to end up in jail" and so forth. Your school probably did the same thing. The answers were then printed in the yearbook. In our yearbook, Julia Talsma and I were listed as the responses for "talks least, says most." I don't recall who won "talks most, says least," but was glad it wasn't me.

The same idea applies to social media. "Talks most, says least" is not going to make you popular* on Twitter, Facebook or most other social spaces.

*Popularity isn't our goal, but we do want to forge connections with our audience. They are more likely to listen to us if we also listen to them.

Alas, many individuals and businesses see social media as an extra publishing channel. Our species seems drawn to fast easy solutions, and publishing an RSS feed out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. seems easy. It is. But it's not always productive. The true value is found in two-way communication. If we start our social media efforts with listening activities, we can learn how our audience perceives us (if they do) and what they want to hear. Then, when we're ready to speak, we'll know what to say.

What we listen for varies by our goals. In a recent client training session I focused on how we could use listening for that client's specific niche. But there are some general principles that can be adapted to a wide variety of use scenarios. On January 25th I gave a presentation, Listen Now…Talk Later: Listening as the foundation of your social media strategy, to our "Local Entrepreneur & Social Media Network Meetup Group" (run by another client) in which I discussed listening in this broader context. After reading this you may find it helpful to peruse those slides as they include screenshots and other examples of what I'll discuss here.

Listening for brand, product and service monitoring.

For marketers and public relations professionals, monitoring is nothing new. They've used clipping services to monitor brand and product mentions in mainstream media, conducted focus groups and surveys among customers and target audiences, and otherwise monitored feedback and opinion for years.

Monitoring our brands and products is important for a variety of reasons. Whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or an individual freelancer, monitoring can give you insights into:

• Brand/Product/Service awareness (name recognition)
• Brand/Product/Service perception (what do people think of who you are and what you offer)
• Customer Satisfaction (how happy are current customers)
• Your Competition
• Your Industry
• Opportunities for product/service/customer service improvements
• Opportunities for sales and lead generation
• Market needs (gaps in the industry which you may be able to fill by providing a new product or service)
• Liabilities (product faults, bad press, potential communications crises...), etc.

Now that we're in an era when customers blog and share opinions via Twitter—and media outlets publish their content online—monitoring is easier than every before. Rather than paying for expensive clipping services, we can search online ourselves. If the budget allows, we can also use commercial monitoring tools that can give us far more data than we've had in the past.

In this video a somewhat unscrupulous boss finds a new opportunity to take advantage of buyers after social media listening uncovers a customer service problem related to cow making equipment.

When you listen to what mainstream media and the public have to say about you, your competition and your industry, you can then apply that knowledge to everything from your marketing strategies to product development. For example, If you manufacture machines that make plastic cows, and your listening habits tell you of a growing need for plastic pigs, you can retool your equipment to produce pig making machines and get a jump on your competition.

Or, if a user has found fault with your plastic cow making equipment, you can fix the problem for that customer and put your engineers to work to make sure that it doesn't happen again. If the customer has complained publicly, you can also publicly share how you solved the problem to your customer's satisfaction—thus resolving the issue before the customer feels compelled to share his complaint so loudly that it becomes the most watched video on YouTube.

Listening is only half the battle. You still have to make plans for what you'll do with what you learn. But if you listen, then you can plan…instead of having to react in an emergency when it may be too late.

Listening for content curation.

Just as we listen to what customers think about our products, we can also listen to learn more about their interests. If we can find out what intrigues them, then we can create content strategies designed to serve their needs as well as our own goals. Listening also helps us select the content we share on our blogs and through our social media channels. Many companies just blog about themselves. Their Facebook status updates all relate to product news, usage tips and announcements. If you're Apple this type of content could be interesting enough to draw in readers. But if you manufacture plastic cow-making equipment it probably isn't.

By listening to your target audience (plastic cow and other novelty toy manufacturers) you can find out what else they want to hear. Perhaps they've shown an interest in toy trends or the development of new polymers that can produce more resilient cows. If you keep listening you can find blog articles, news stories and Web sites that appeal to their interests and share them through your social media channels.

When you become the go-to source for the information they seek, you give them a far better reason to follow you than if you only shared information about you.

Listening to converse

Imagine this conversation on Twitter. Here a dog food manufacturer quickly offends his new follower by talking at him, instead of to him. (No dogs were injured in the making of this video.)

The easiest people to listen to are the ones with whom we already have a connection. These include the people who comment on our blogs, the people we follow on Twitter, the friends we make on Facebook, Ning, etc. If we want to make friends, share information with peers, convert followers to customers, and so forth, we can begin to forge these connections by listening to them.

On Twitter this means reading your stream one or more times per day and responding to Tweets that are relevant to your industry or interest. If you have a Facebook Fan page this means visiting your page daily to respond to comments and posts made by fans. How often you do this depends on your own situation.

To those familiar with social media this seems obvious, but for those more accustomed to traditional publishing channels, this is a new idea.

When I was working at Case Western Reserve University I created the Case News Twitter account to share our latest news and press releases. These were (and still are) automatically posted to Twitter via Twitterfeed. I then started following Tweeps who might be interested in the university and followed back those who followed the account (with the exception of spammers).

Once a day (usually during lunch) I would skim through the stream to see what people had to say. If it was something related to Case or academia I would respond. In doing so I could answer questions, wish students good luck on exams, thank alumni for donating, etc. I also added event and other postings of interest that weren't included in the automated news feed. Doing this helped me connect with followers and gave me a better sense of what they wanted to hear from Case. It also showed readers that someone was listening and would respond if they wrote to us.

Many organizations just post without listening. This works fine for services like Twitter accounts that post weather updates. But for organizations that want to use social media to build business, posting without listening and responding can send a message that you don't really care what customers think. It can also lead to a rather boring Twitter stream that customers don't find interesting enough to read. This isn't unique to Twitter. The same principles apply to Facebook, Ning, YouTube, MySpace and others.

If you follow a large number of people you won't be able to read everything. But if you check in once or more per day, read all replies and skim the rest of the updates you'll easily find opportunities to converse.

How to listen: news, social media and related searches

Tools and services such as Radian 6 and Social Mention are designed to help with monitoring, but you can also learn a lot through targeted searches. By searching on brand and product names, keywords related to your industry, competitor names and related topics you can find news stories, blog posts, social media comments, discussion boards and other online resources related to what you are monitoring. Here are a few (of many) possible sites to use for social media and related searches.

• Addict-o-matic (social media monitoring)
• Board Tracker (discussion board search)
• Delicious (social bookmarks)
• Digg (crowdsourcing)
• Google News
• Google Blog Search
• How Sociable? (brand visibility scores - more useful for comparison w/competition)
• Reddit (crowdsourcing)
• Same Point (social media search)
• Social Mention (social media monitoring)
• StumbleUpon (crowdsourcing)
• Twitter Search
• Whos Talking (social media search)
• Yahoo Advanced News Search

You'll notice that some of these are typical search sites while others may include bookmarking and other services. Which of these is best for you will depend on your goals and your industry. Generally you'll find that you can choose a select combination of tools that suits your particular situation. Subscribing to blogs in your industry is also a useful way to find out what topics are hot in your field and discover articles you may wish to share with your followers.

The link to this Simpsons Coke commercial was the most popular message found when searching Twitter for "coke" today. (The Superbowl was yesterday, so it makes sense that a Coke ad would dominate the search results.)

When searching it is worth noting that it is easy to get false positives. If you are "Coca Cola" then most of your results for that phrase will be appropriate—but a search on "Coke" may also bring up posts that have nothing to do with refreshing fizzy beverages. Key word terms and phrases can be equally vague. A search on recruiting may bring results ranging from employment and military recruiting to student recruitment and recruiting for cults. But if you specify something like "executive recruiting" you can get more focused results. You may need to experiment a bit to find keyword combinations that provide the results you seek. For Twitter searches you can also compare your results for plain keywords and commonly used hashtags. #recruiting, for example, is popularly used as a hashtag for recruiting related to employment.

Subscribing and sharing via RSS Readers

Many of the search tools listed above will provide you with an RSS feed for your search. Feeds allow you to subscribe to your search so you don't have to conduct fresh searches each time you want to listen.

For those unfamiliar with RSS, such feeds function like magazine subscriptions. If you subscribed to the print edition of National Geographic, then a new issue would show up in your mail box each month. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, new articles show up in your feed reading software as they become available.

Google Reader is one of the most popular feed readers. Once you sign up for a Google Reader account you can subscribe to blog posts and search feeds and organize them by topics for easy viewing. To read the articles you just check Google Reader on a regular basis as you would check your e-mail account.

Slides 22-30 in the Listen Now, Talk Later presentation include a video and screen shots that demonstrate how one uses Google Reader. Google Reader is but one of many readers available, but most work in a similar manner. NetVibes is another popular choice. Some users also use e-mail programs such as Outlook to subscribe to feeds.

To listen is to learn

Listening takes time, but with the right tools we can find manageable ways to listen. What we learn will then guide us to better serve our audience. Now it's my turn to listen to you. I've only covered the broad strokes of this topic here. If you have more tips and ideas for social media listening, please share them in the comments below.

Social Media Listening Resources

When I pick the related links to share in my blog entries, I try to choose articles that will expand on what I've written, or offer a different perspective or insight, so that you can delve deeper into the topic. While some are found through Google I also find them using the listening strategies I've discussed in this post. The following were found via blogs I subscribe to, Twitter searches, Delicious and Google searches.

• 5 Simple Twitter Listening Tips Every Marketer Should Know by ReadWriteWeb's Elyssa Pallai
• Framing Your Social Media Efforts by Chris Brogan
• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Listening Literacy For Nonprofits by Beth Kanter
• The Five W's of Social Media Listening by Chuck Hemann
• The Importance of Social Media Audits by Jeremiah Owyang

Fan me on Facebook - Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page.)

Note to local northeast Ohio readers: The Lake Erie Moose Society is holding its monthly meeting tonight, February 8, 2009. If you blog, or are thinking about blogging please feel free to join us.

When developing a social media strategy, we start with a measurable goal, such as selling widgets, promoting events, recruiting students, sharing knowledge, collaborating with peers, getting customer feedback, or anything else that furthers our plans. Then we identify our target audience, determine where they are spending time on line, and develop communications tactics meant to reach them—on their terms, in the spaces they use.

This latter step is important because people tend to be more comfortable conversing on their home turf. They may also find it easier to make a comment on the page they're on than to click through to someplace else. But once our audience begins to connect with us, they also need to know where they can go to get more information. Thus we need to provide some sort of home base that centralizes our messages and provides them with a destination where they can learn more about us, buy our widgets, join our project, etc.

Ideally this is a destination worth visiting, a place that gives them useful informative content—not just a sales pitch.

They found you on Facebook, but where are you sending them next?

Pittsfield Charter Township 2010 Master Plan

Your home base could come in a variety of forms. For some it's a standard Web site, for others—like Social Media Chat (#smchat) and the Cleveland Social Media Club—it's a Ning Network.

As I discussed in Goal-driven social media strategies & tactics: how are you interacting with your target audience?, my home base is this blog. My blog is only one section of my overall site, but it's the section I link to most often when Tweeting, answering questions on LinkedIn, etc., because it's the place where I can send people to get specific answers. Once visitors arrive here, they can then easily explore other portions of the site.

Whether a blog is right for you depends on your particular goal and the nature of your audience, yet blogs, by their nature, offer certain features that work very well with other social media tools. Today I'll explore some of those features by walking through a potential use scenario.

Blogging for Government Planning

Social Media Outreach Presentation Slides

This past friday I had the opportunity to meet with government (and other) planners when George Nemeth and I presented Social Media Outreach: Communicating in the Online World to Enhance Planning in the Real World at the APA Cleveland Annual Planning and Zoning Workshop.

Currently planners get a lot of their feedback from community meetings or e-mail. It's sometimes difficult to get community members to come out to an event to discuss the various options for building a new bridge, developing a new park, moving a shipping port, etc. In order to increase community involvement, planners are exploring new ways to share their plans and gather feedback.

As I was researching the ways that planners currently communicate, it occurred to me that blogs would work well for this purpose. They offer an easy way to post news, share documents and gather feedback through online comments.

In speaking with the group I learned that while most planning departments have Web sites, very few are using blogs and social media. This is also true of the general population, but in the past year we've seen Facebook and Twitter become more mainstream. If a planning department starts now, they can get their social media plans in place in order to be ready as more and more of their community members begin to use the tools.

A social media plan for the fictional town of Ohtopia, Ohio

Let's pretend that we're the Planning and Zoning Department for Ohtopia. Our town, somewhere in northeast Ohio, has seen growth as people have been moving out from the city and into our community. As such we're working on a new town plan to enhance the town center, create new public spaces and reduce traffic congestion.

Our goal is to increase community participation in our planning process and gather feedback from as many community members as possible. To accomplish this we've decided to add a blog to our Web site then share news (and drive traffic to the blog) through various social media channels. Here's how that might work.

Ohtopia Blog

We can start the process by reviewing our goals, and assessing the needs of our target audience, to develop an overall content plan and structure for the blog. We can then establish an editorial policy to guide our writers and assign a person (or team) to write and publish the content, respond to reader feedback, and monitor social media mentions of our department and plans.

Using an opensource (free) blogging platform such as Movable Type or WordPress we can install a blog in a subdirectory of our main site, design it to match the look and feel of our main Web site, customize our menus and navigation based on our blog plan, and install Google Analytics to measure results.

Advantages of using blogging software for this project

• Team members can add content without knowing HTML, so the site can be updated in a timely manner.
• Entries are archived by date, so visitors can determine what information is most current and review how the process evolved over time. Such archives also form a historical record which may be useful for legal and other reasons.
• Events can be added to a calendar listing, so they stand out from other posts. Event postings can also link to Facebook event pages, E-vite, or other event sites one may use for attendee registration.
• Documents, forms and posts can be organized by categories and topics to make it easier for users to navigate and browse.
• WordPress and other blogging programs provide on-site search mechanisms to make it easier for visitors to seach for specific topics.
• Blogs produce RSS feeds which can be used to automatically post headlines of recent posts to other parts of the Ohtopia site.
• Community members and local media can subscribe to the blog's RSS feed via e-mail, or by using a feed reader such as Google Reader, so they are kept up-to-date with the latest news.
• Entries can be used to embed photographs, .pdf documents, videos and other materials that augment the text.
• Visitors can leave comments on pages so that their feedback can be documented, archived and viewed by others.
• Readers can share posts of interest to Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter or other social media services to help spread the news. (Plug-ins such as addtoany provide buttons that make it easy for visitors to share our pages.)
• The site team can share selected posts to other social media services to reach more of their community members.
• Team members can create a commenting policy, then edit/moderate comments as appropriate for foul language or other inappropriate behavior.
• Team members can respond to comments and use them to create an online dialog.
• Blogs enhance search engine optimization (SEO) by letting us easily produce fresh content in an SEO friendly format. By publishing the blog on our own domain we can take advantage of this to gain more traffic for our overall site.

Editorial Policy

Our blog could be used to:

• Announce town planning meetings/forums open to the public.
• Publish summaries of these events including meeting minutes.
• Upload maps, and planning documents.
• Post plan recommendations with requests for community feedback via comments.
• Alert the public to changes in planning and zoning regulations.
• Distribute building, zoning and other forms used by the public.
• Publish social media press releases complete with photos, video's planning documents and other information that will give media more details about our projects.

By using a blog we'll be able to publish our information in a more timely fashion and provide a forum through which our community members can respond to our plans and converse with us about our projects. Their comments and questions will also let us know what other information we should be publishing on the site.

Expanding our reach through social media.

Our blog will serve as our communications hub, but until we tell people about it, they won't know it's there. Through a combination of traditional and social media marketing strategies we can spread the word and reach out to our community.

The main audience for our blog includes local residents, residents of neighboring communities and local media. Secondary audiences include planners from other locales and others, interested in planning, who may learn from our process. To determine what social media tools to use we'll want to research the more popular social media services, and any niche services (such as a regionally based Ning Network), to see which ones our audience uses most regularly.

If our research shows us that our audience is primarily using Facebook and Twitter, then we can focus on those two services.

Facebook

• Create a Facebook fan page.
• Position ourselves as a resource for news of local interest by posting blog entries AND other news of interest to our community—the core focus can be planning but we may gain more readers by also linking to news items related to economic development, sustainability, public art, etc.
• Share photos of completed and in-process projects.
• Make Facebook events for our public meetings.
• Ask community members for feedback.
• Link to main blog.
• Join/fan other Facebook groups and pages that already appeal to our target audience, start conversing with them there (about topics related to those pages, not just about us) to build connections so we may invite them to fan our page.

Twitter

Cayuga County Planning Department on Twitter

• Create a complete profile with photo (or city logo), brief description of the department and a link to the blog. Also consider creating a special welcome page on the blog that is geared specifically to Twitter users and link to that rather than the main blog page.
• Position ourselves as a resource for news of local interest by Tweeting blog posts AND other news of interest to our community, as we do on Facebook. As there may be an overlap between these audiences, try to avoid duplicating links shared via Facebook.
• Use Twellow.com and related sites to find local Twitter users in our target audience.
• After having made 10-20 Tweets, begin following members of our target audience including individuals and local media. Do this in small increments (25 or so) to build the list gradually. If you follow 500 at once and only have 5 followers, users may not follow back.
• Follow back those who both follow us and who seem to have an interest in what we do. (But don't follow back spammers, and those who may be following just to build numbers.)
• Visit the stream daily to respond to followers, reTweet links/posts of interest to our followers, etc.

Blogging and related social media tools work well together.

In our pretend scenario, our blog provides the bulk of our content, but we also use Facebook and Twitter to share additional news and to drive traffic to the blog. This is a fairly simple scenario—a fully developed social media plan might include other elements and details—but it does give us an example of how a planning and zoning department might use a blog as the backbone of their social media plan.

If your organization has different goals, or a different target audience, you may find that something other than a blog is more appropriate for your needs. Blogs are not a one-size-fits-all solution. But, in many cases, a carefully planned blog can provide a good foundation for your social media efforts.

To further explore the pro's and con's of using a blog as the core component of a social media strategy, I'll be a moderating a discussion of the topic on #smchat, a weekly real-time Twitter chat focused on social media. The chat will begin this Wednesday, November 18, 2009, at 1:00 p.m. e.s.t. Please feel free to join the discussion there, or share your thoughts below.

Blogging and Social Media Resources

• Copy Blogger: Copywriting Tips for Online Marketing Success
• Mashable: The Social Media Guide
• The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing
• Bookmarks saved for the Planning and Zoning Presentation

Recommended Reading for Bloggers

Jeff Hershberger, who writes the blog, My Future Past, recently lent me Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg. I'm just about halfway through it now. If you want to learn more about the history and power of blogging, I highly recommend it.

heidicool.com is also on Facebook

Need more Web tips? Fan the heidicool.com Facebook page. I'm posting 1 tip/link there per day to offer ongoing advice on Web design, marketing and social media—without overwhelming your Facebook stream.

I shot this video riding the Health Line up Euclid Avenue. The quality is a bit dodgy and it isn't necessary to tell my story, except as an example of unnecessary use of video. Audio by Jacinda Espinosa / CC BY-NC 3.0. While I didn't discuss audio in this post, if you do a Google search, you'll find plenty of sources for royalty-free or Creative Commons licensed audio.

While it is true that long sections of text can seem more daunting on a Web page than in a book, that doesn't mean visitors don't read. Nor does it mean we have to throw out our words and replace them with video and pictures.

Instead we can pay attention to our line-lengths, break text into small chunks, use bulleted lists and add images or other media selectively, to enhance—not replace—our main message. Carefully chosen media can help us communicate, while poorly chosen imagery and video only serve to distract. Finding appropriate media can sometimes be a challenge, so today I'm going to discuss some options for finding/creating media that is suitable for your pages.

Audio-visual media isn't a substitute for meaningful content.

Internet users aren't shallow illiterates who will buy your widgets just because your video went viral. That may draw them to your site, but they'll need more to stay there, interact and apply to your law school or download your social media e-book.

Internet users come to your site with the hope that it will help them meet some goal or expectation. They're searching for information that will help them bake a cake, come up with a name for their new puppy, decide which graduate program to apply to, learn how to repair their washing machine, etc.

If we want our content to serve their needs then we need to consider what media will best communicate our message.

I have many dog pictures, but my friend, Ann's dogs, Scout and Kaya, passed away this fall, so I thought it would be appropriate to honor them here in the cute canine example.

• We can share a cake recipe with plain text. But photos and video can help us demonstrate the techniques used in the process and give sighted readers an example of how the cake should look when compete.
• A list of cool dog names with some background on their history will serve our readers needs. But our new dog owners will probably dig pictures of cute canines so it wouldn't hurt to sprinkle a few throughout our pages.
• Information about courses, faculty, current research and campus facilities will help prospects determine if our astronomy program is right for them. If we also add photos of the cosmos—taken from our observatory—and videos of our faculty and students, they can get a better feel for the department and begin to imagine what it would be like to be here.
• Washing machines aren't as complicated as nuclear submarines, but they are three dimensional mechanical devices. It may be hard to walk someone through a repair through text alone. But still photos with captions explaining each step, or video demonstrating the repair may make the directions more clear.

Found Media: stock and royalty free imagery

If you've just populated your database of dog names but only have photos of your pug, then you may be wondering where to get the rest of the puppy pictures you need to illustrate your site. If you've got a big budget then you can hire a photographer or license photos from a stock photography site.

If your budget is smaller, many stock sites also have low-cost or even free images available. You can also do Google and Flickr searches for images that can be licensed under creative commons. If you find a photo that doesn't offer such licensing, contact the photographer and ask if you can use the image. The Internet is a great resource for pictures, just make sure to follow copyright laws and never copy and use an image without the proper permission. Government sites by NASA and the U.S. Library of Congress are also a great source of royalty-free photographs. Both provide very clear terms of service.

Plan ahead. Start building up your own photography archive today.

Turning Point, by Philip Johnson on the campus of Case Western Reserve University

If you're a blogger or site owner who can take a decent picture, carry a camera and use it often. When I worked at Case Western Reserve I took photos at various special events, and I would grab the camera when I walked across campus, just to shoot random images—such as this photo of Turning Point—as I happened upon them.

As time went by I developed a rather large collection of campus shots that I could share with our designers, campus Web maintainers and others looking for pictures to use in their projects. To make these easier to find, I archived them on my Flickr account. This way when a request came in, I could just share a link and the requester could download the appropriate picture.

This also made life easier for me as I had thousands of photos to choose from when I needed images for a new Web page. For a campus etiquette dinner event page, I used a picture of a meal I'd eaten. For the transportation page I used a picture of a campus shuttle bus. For the Year of Darwin I used pictures from my vacation in the Galapagos. There were of course rare cases that required stock photography, but in most cases the photos I needed were ones I had already taken.

Building up such an archive may seem daunting, but if you start now—by taking pictures of anything that might relate to your organization or site—you will begin to build up a nice little collection. My friend Josh is currently planning a food related blog. He's now taking pictures of food, from cooking process to plate, whenever we eat together. By the time he launches the site this winter he'll have a variety of images ready for use.

Rottweilers dig video. I found this on YouTube, but my late Rottie, Shiloh used to watch T. V. and bark at the bad guys when they came on screen. I was never quite sure how he did that, he'd often bark before the plot had indicated they were bad. Perhaps it was in the actors' body language.

Embedded Video

If you are reading this then you already know that you can embed videos—from popular services like YouTube and Vimeo— on your own site. Continuing on the dog theme, I found countless files to choose from when searching for cute puppies and canines. I chose this Rottie because I rather liked that he was watching video too.

These services are great places to find videos that support your message. But again, it behooves us to be aware of copyrights. While users submit many videos that we can freely use on our own sites, some upload videos from movies and television that may be unauthorized. To be on the safe side, check the source and read the terms of service before embedding. Also note that if you are just copying and pasting the embed code from the video site, it may not validate correctly. If you want to ensure your HTML is standards compliant, try embedding your videos with .swfobject 2.0.

Build a video archive

If you have a video camera, you can also begin to build a video archive on these services just as you would build a photo archive on Flickr. Uploading videos to your own YouTube or Vimeo channel is also a good marketing idea as your channels can provide additional pathways to your site. This works most effectively if you take better videos than I do. My YouTube channel doesn't have many videos and they are mostly rather feeble things like driving through Cleveland in the snow.

If you're a serious videographer you'll want a professional quality camcorder, but for more casual shooters, there are many inexpensive options available. The Flip Camcorder is very popular among bloggers or you can use the built in video features now available in many phones and digital cameras. I shot the bus video on this page with the Canon SD1000 that I keep in my backpack when I'm not carrying my Canon EOS 40D. The video was an experiment I made in which I held the lens against the window to try to keep it steady. Alas it turned out to be somewhat more boring than I'd hoped, but I'm more of a still photographer. I expect you can do better.

When real world imagery won't do: cartoons and animation

I made this cartoon to illustrate my What I've
Been Reading in the Blogosphere page.

Sometimes we just can't find an image or video that quite serves our needs. If you want to illustrate how much trouble you have keeping up with all the blogs you follow, what do you show? Neither a screen capture of Google Reader nor a photo of a person staring at a computer quite makes the point. But a cartoon showing your thoughts just might. If you can draw, you can create your cartoon from scratch on paper or using a program such as Illustrator or Photoshop.

If you can't draw, you still have options. I started using Bitstrips last year to illustrate a presentation I was making. Since then I've made several cartoons—to use here on the blog—when I needed something more specific than a photo. If I had more time I could draw these by hand, but Bitstrips makes it easy to build cartoons quickly and to maintain consistent character styles throughout. Bitstrips is but one of many cartoon creation sites online, I've listed more below.

From text to animation via Xtranormal. If you're active in social media you might also be amused by the one I made called "Robots in Meatspace".

Similarly if you wanted to show a conversation between, let's say, a Web developer and a client who wants bells and whistles, you might not find it on YouTube. You could hire actors and shoot a video, but that might be expensive.

If you can draw and know how to use Flash you can make a nice animation, but it will take even more time than drawing your own comic strip. (I think it took me about 40 hours to create this interactive dungeon animation awhile back.)

Flash may give you more control, but new tools like XtraNormal let you write a script, and create an animation— from your text and stock characters—in a fraction of the time. It took me less than an hour to write and create this video about the Behemoth Corporation's Web project.

There are many ways to illustrate your point

If your Web site is an online catalog for your diamond jewelry collection, you're not going to grab the point and shoot camera to take the pictures. You'll hire a photographer. If you're promoting a luxury cruise line, you'll hire an agency to produce a professional video.

But whether you're a large university, small business or independent blogger, there are many times when having an image archive, or the ability to create something on the fly, will best suit your needs. There are many tools available, all it takes is a bit of creativity. Also remember, when using non-text media to augment your message, be sure to include alternative content for those with visual, hearing or related impairments. Additional media only adds value if everyone gets the message.

How are you illustrating your sites? Are there other tools you've found that help you develop images and other media to better convey your message? If so, please share them in the comments below.

Online do-it-yourself media tools

• Bitstrips
• Pixton
• Strip Creator
• ToonDoo
• XtraNormal

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As some of you know, I regularly participate in a variety of real-time chats on Twitter, including #smchat, a weekly discussion of best practices in social media. On Wednesday September 30th at 1:00 p.m. e.d.t. I'll be moderating #smchat as we discuss what social media tactics people have implemented, how they have measured the results and how they have performed.

To prepare participants for the event I thought it might be helpful to give some examples.

Many people are jumping on the social media bandwagon these days just because they feel they should. One hear's people say "Everyone's on Twitter and Facebook, we need to start Tweeting and put up a Facebook page." Needless to say this isn't usually the best approach. Before picking tools and tactics one must assess needs, develop measurable goals and identify a target audience. Once that is done, then one can start developing strategies and tactics to connect with that audience (in their space, on their terms) in a way that will serve one's goals most effectively.

Your goals are set, what's your social media strategy?

To get things started, I'll give you an example of some of the things I've been doing. One of my goals is to get you (or someone you know) to hire me to consult on social media, offer guidance on search engine optimization or design and build a Web site or custom WordPress blog. My audience includes small to medium sized businesses, academic departments at universities, individuals and others who may need such services. My strategy is to position myself as a reliable and knowledgeable resource for information on Internet marketing and related topics.

Tactics to implement this social media strategy include:

• Sharing links to worthwhile articles and videos via Google Reader Share, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and so forth—and conversing with people in those spaces.
• Blogging in-depth articles on Web related topics here on the Web Development Blog.
• Commenting on other blogs.
• Networking with special interest groups on LinkedIn, Ning and the real world.
• Answering questions on LinkedIn. (You can read more about my LinkedIn Q&A strategy in Maisha Walker's Inc. blog, The Internet Strategist in the article, Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3). Read the complete series to learn about the myriad ways you can use LinkedIn for business.)

This blog serves as the foundation for all of these strategies. It provides a destination for traffic from the social media services and offers content for me to share via those services. Since it is built as a part of my overall site, it also gives visitors quick and easy access to other information such as the services I offer, my portfolio and my contact form—and I'm working on some site changes that will make that even easier.

Time is a major cost factor in social media

Measuring marketing results is fairly straightforward. If I want to know which activities are driving the best traffic to my Web site I can look at Google Analytics to see who is visiting from where, how long they stay on site, how many pages they view, etc. This tells me that LinkedIn brings in more new traffic while Facebook brings in the most repeat traffic. Visitors from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all also read more pages and spend more time on site than visitors from StumbleUpon.

In terms of leads and sales I can count the requests for proposals that come in via LinkedIn messages, Facebook mail and my contact form. Measuring the ROI comes from comparing my time investment to the results. In direct mail one measures the cost per sale in terms of dollars spent. When implementing my own social media strategies I must measure the cost per sale first in hours worked, then use that to calculate costs.

Social Media goals come in many flavors—not just marketing

Networking with peers, monitoring your products and brand, enhancing customer service, collaborating with colleagues, sharing policies and procedures, listening for ideas, sharing knowledge, and other functions are also popular and practical uses for social media. Here are a few more examples of strategies and tactics one might use for a few of these goals.

Listening for ideas via social media

During last week's meeting of the Cleveland Social Media Club we listened to a panel discussion in which members of the local media discussed how they use social media. Panelists included:

• Kaye Spector - Health and Medical Reporter, The Plain Dealer
• Howard Fencl - Assistant News Director, WKYC-TV
• Joseph Sheppa - Interactive Content Manager, WVIZ/PBS & 90.3 WCPN - ideastream®
• Scott Suttell - Managing Editor, Crain's Cleveland Business
• Denise Polverine - Editor in Chief, Cleveland.com

As one would expect, these media outlets are all using Facebook and Twitter to publish headlines and links to stories or videos on their Web sites. But they're also listening for information. News travels so quickly via social media that it's not unusual for them to first hear something on Facebook that they can later confirm through other channels. They also listen to their followers to gauge interest levels in certain topics and events. If their Twitter followers are all talking about X and not about Y, then the newspapers, magazines and T.V. stations know that their readers and viewers have an interest in hearing more about X.

Others—including bloggers as well as those in mainstream media—use social media to listen for ideas. When I answer questions on LinkedIn, I can see if certain types of questions in my field are trending. This can give me ideas for blog posts I should write. I also read blogs and listen to podcasts to keep up with information and get new ideas.

For instance yesterday, while listening to Diggnation, I discovered that Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters reads a wide array of blogs and visits Digg.com daily to get story ideas for the T.V. show. He's using the same technique for mainstream media that I use for my humble blog. By simply following my own listening routine, I discovered what he was doing so that I could use him as another example in this post.

Measuring the results of listening is somewhat murky. If you need to justify this use of time one could create a spreadsheet that would tally how many ideas you find each day then develop a ratio comparing "finds" and usefulness to "time-spent." But if you are also reading and listening to increase knowledge it may be harder to quantify. How does one measure the value of such activities? I know that everything I learn in this field makes me better at what I do, but I've not come up with a calculation to demonstrate how much more effective I may be now than I was 5 years ago when I knew less. What I do know is that I will better serve my readers and clients if I keep striving to learn more.

Social media strategies in local politics

Ari Herzog and Jill Miller Zimon are both long-time bloggers, who I've come to know through their blogging activities. Jill is a writer and political analyst who blogs at Write Likes She Talks. Ari is an online media strategist and community manager for business and government who blogs at AriWriter. Each of them is running for City Council in their respective home towns and each is using social media in their campaigns.

One could argue that political campaigning is similar to mainstream marketing, but I think it also bears a particular connection to brand management. When running for office, candidates need to increase name recognition, build a positive reputation, let voters know about their goals and demonstrate how they would serve their communities if elected.

As writers, Ari and Jill have an advantage in this sphere. Each has produced a wealth of online material that is part of the online historical record. If you read their blogs, you will see that they are both candid and direct. While I eschew the word "transparency" they've both exhibited the real meaning of this in their writing. Neither hides behind jargon or political doubletalk, they speak their minds so that you can tell exactly what their position is.

Their similarities extend to social media. As you can see from the links below, each of them is using an array of social media services, and neither is new to this medium. While their strategies may have some subtle differences, both are using social media to spread their message and to let voters know that they are listening.

Jill Miller Zimon - campaigning for Pepper Pike, OH, City Council

• Friends of Jill Miller Zimon for Pepper Pike Council - Facebook Group
• Friends of Jill Miller Zimon for Pepper Pike Council - Facebook Page
• Jill Miller Zimon for Pepper Pike Council (Main Web site)
• Friends of Jill Miller Zimon Flickr Photos
• Jill Miller Zimon on LinkedIn
• Zimon for Council on Twitter
• Jill Miller Zimon You Tube Videos

Ari Herzog - campaigning for Newburyport, MA, City Council

• Ari Herzog for Newburyport City Council - Facebook Page
• Ari Herzog (Main Web site)
• Ari Herzog for Newburyport City Council Campaign Blog
• Ari Herzog on LinkedIn
• Ari 4 Newburyport on Twitter

Measuring the success of their campaigns will be relatively easy. They'll either win or lose. But measuring the impact of social media on the campaigns may be trickier. Will having more Facebook fans make a difference? Does it help to drive Twitter traffic to your site? How does one measure voter engagement? Blog comments? Online donations? Volunteers? How would you measure the results?

What strategies are you using for social media?

Frank Eliason has had great success using http://twitter.com/comcastcares to provide proactive customer service to Comcast customers. The Cleveland Social Media Club used it's Ning Network in conjunction with Google docs to collaborate on our Welcome to Social Media eBook. Companies and universities alike subscribe to Twitter searches to monitor brand and product mentions. What other ways would you use social media tools to serve your specific goals? How do you know if your strategies are working? Do you have measurement techniques in place to gauge success?

Please feel free to share your ideas and experiences in the comments below and/or during next Wednesday's live #smchat. If you've not previously participated in a Twitter chat, you can learn more in my article, Twitter chats: if you can’t meet in real space, meet in real time. I look forward to reading your ideas and suggestions.

Social Media Measurement & Chat Resources

• #smchat Schedule
• #smchat Network on Ning (for ongoing discussion)
• Tweeting With Your Twitter Community: How To Participate In A Twitter Chat
• Introduction to Measuring Social Media for PR/Marketing
• Measuring Social Media ROI: Does size matter?

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United Airlines received a ton of bad publicity after their baggage handlers broke Dave Carroll's guitar. According to Carroll, United did later offer to pay for the repair. He asked them to make a charitable donation instead, which they did.

But imagine the other possible responses they could have made. What if they made a video explaining how they are going to correct the problem to prevent future mishaps? Or a video about the charitable cause that will benefit from their donation?

If they did this the bloggers and media outlets who post Carroll's United Breaks Guitars video could also post United's response and the world would see that they took the problem seriously—all for much less than the cost of a television ad.

Today I had lunch with John Heaney, a local Cleveland entrepreneur, marketer and social media advocate who also blogs about marketing at Orange Envelopes. One of the topics we discussed was the hesitancy some organizations have about implementing social media strategies.

Issues about controlling the message, intellectual property, firewalls, time commitment, return on investment (ROI), measuring results and goal setting are all common concerns, but in particular John raised a point that I've been hearing a lot about lately: negativity.

Specifically we've both heard from individuals and companies who worry that if you're participating in social media, you run the risk that people will say something bad about you. This is true, but the risk is there whether you are online or not. No matter how ethical or clever you may be, someone, somewhere, will be ready to disagree. There's no getting around that. None of us is capable of pleasing everyone all the time. But if we're participating ourselves, we can:

Listen:

People will talk about you or your organization whether or not you can hear them. Ignoring them won't keep the criticism at bay, so you might as well pay attention. If you set up Google alerts on your name or brand, subscribe to Yahoo and Google news search feeds, Twitter searches, etc. you can find out what they're saying about you—be it good or bad—immediately. If we know what others are saying about us on their blogs, our blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online media, discussion forums and elsewhere, we have the opportunity to take advantage of that knowledge and use it productively.

Learn:

Criticism comes in many forms. Some people (trolls) like to leave rude blog comments or make nasty remarks about your brand just because they're angry or they like to stir up a bit of controversy. But other comments can be more constructive. If someone complains about your customer service or your product, this points out a potential problem. You can now determine if this is something you need to fix or if it was just a one-time issue. Someone's product problem could also give you a great idea for a new product or a new version of an existing one. If someone's critique can lead you to build a better mousetrap, then it's worth a listen.

Evaluate:

What was the context of the criticism? Does it have a bearing on your reputation? Your customer service? Your product design? Should this information be passed onto others in your organization, or can it be safely ignored?

Rebecca Kelley, Director of Social Media for 10e20, recently wrote a critical blog post about a panel discussion she attended, Black Hat vs. White Hat Social Media and the Battle for Common Sense. In the original post she had made some negative remarks about Beth Harte who is the Community Manager at MarketingProfs and very well regarded for her knowledge of social media marketing. (I read her blog, The Harte of Marketing and follow Beth Harte on Twitter.) Beth evaluated the situation and chose not to respond. As it happened, other people reacted for her. Readers responded in ardent support of Beth. Rebecca read their comments. She then toned down her blog entry, documented the change and contacted Beth directly to arrange to discuss the panel more thoroughly. Beth and Rebecca each listened and evaluated the situation so that the matter could be peacefully resolved.

You don't need to act on every mention that is made of you, but if you listen regularly you can develop a system of triage in which you determine which mentions deserve which reactions. If you do this regularly and establish a policy, you'll be prepared for the big nasty—that seemingly harmless negative reaction that will get you bad international press if you don't respond in the right manner.

Act:

Once you've evaluated a comment—and deemed it worthy of a reaction—it's time to use that knowledge productively. Can the comment help you improve your widget design? Send it to your product development team. Has it shown a weakness in your customer service department? How can you fix it? Frank Eliason of Comcast became the international poster boy—for using social media to enhance customer service—when he start solving people's problems on his Twitter account, Comcastcares.

Respond:

Let the person who made the comment know what you intend to do. As I recently wrote in Here’s how one web designer deals with negative comments, I like to take a deep breath and step back a bit before responding. If during your evaluation you decide that a response isn't necessary, then you can get back to other matters. But if a response is warranted, then one wants to react clearly and tactfully. Did the person point out a problem that you are going to solve? Explain how you will solve it. Was the comment the result of a misunderstanding? See what you can do to clarify the confusion—while allowing the commenter to save face. If you take the diplomatic route then you both have a better chance of coming out with your reputation in tact. If you respond in anger you'll just make the problem worse.

If you can't solve the problem, do your best to explain why in a manner that will let the commenter know you really did your best. Share the situation with higher-ups in your organization, find out if there is a way to turn the problem into an opportunity, and keep listening.

Establish a baseline reputation via social media NOW.

I've been telling people for years that they need to establish their online presence before someone else does it for them. It behooves us all to take control of our own message. If I'm a small business without a Web site or other online presence, then the only things people will find when Googling my business will be reviews from others, media mentions, social media comments and other opinions written from an external perspective. If I build a site (or hire Heidi to build it for me), start a blog, create a Facebook page, share tips on Twitter, etc. then I can share my expertise and let people know what my business stands for.

What John cleverly pointed out, during our lunch, was that this social media presence also serves to establish your baseline reputation for providing good customer service, offering educational content or whatever else you might be communicating through social media. If you've been doing this regularly, then next year, when customer X blogs about your lousy information resources, he won't have as much clout. Other readers will see that most customers love your blog, enjoy using your customer discussion forum, follow your Tweets, etc. Customer X isn't speaking for the masses, but is instead in the minority.

And, since you are already listening, you will now be ready to respond to customer X in a timely and appropriate manner. If all goes well X can join the majority of your other happy customers. This is a far better outcome than you'll have if X writes a song—extolling your failures—that just happens to go viral on YouTube.

Related Social Media Resources

• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media
• Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus
• Chicago Domino’s Gets Social Media Right!
• My biggest social media mistakes by Mack Collier
• Top 10 Twitter marketing blunders in photos
• United Airlines Online Public Response to Dave Carroll YouTube Video: 9 Tweets

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Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox. Give or take a few pixels these look pretty much the same.

Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. As you can see, the banner breaks in IE 6 but everything else looks pretty much as expected. The page also breaks in IE 7 and IE 8 though the IE 8 version looks different. I've included these samples as a reminder to always check sites in multiple browsers.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. Again it looks almost the same at the semantic version, even breaking in the same manner.

The other day, Aaron Rester posed this question on Twitter: Webbies: any advice on explaining semantic HTML to non-webbies?

I wrote back that I usually show them some source code and walk them through things like using h1 and so forth for headers. That is what I usually do. In fact I'd just done that the other day when I was showing someone the changes I would recommend for search engine optimization (SEO).

But the question made me wonder if my explanations were adequate. If someone doesn't know anything about HTML or other mark-up languages, will such an explanation make sense? Or is there a better way to explain the differences between structural and presentational mark-up to clients and new Web designers?

Why do clients and other non-webbies need to know about semantic HTML?

Typically this topic comes up most often when one is discussing issues related to search optimization and accessibility. If a client needs to enhance their site for SEO, I may be recommending changes to the code that they won't even see when looking at the page in their browser. Understandably they will want to know why they should pay me to do things to their site that they won't notice. The changes we make may not be visually apparent, but they will convey additional information to Web browsers and search engines that can aid accessibility, usability and searchability.

What is semantic HTML?

Semantics is the study of meaning. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary provides us with a definition that relates closely to how the term is applied to HTML "3 a : the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially : connotative meaning." HTML uses elements that convey structural meaning to Web browsers and other user agents such as search engine crawlers.

Writing a page in semantic HTML simply means that you are applying the appropriate structural elements to the various bits of content on a page. Huh? Code elements act like labels that tell the Web browser what each section of content is. HTML gives us structural elements to indicate headers, paragraphs, lists, tables and so forth. If I want to tell the browser to start a new paragraph, I'll type <p>. If I want to start a new subhead, I'll type <h5>.

Then isn't all HTML semantic?

You would think so, but no. Web browsers can be both fussy and forgiving. I can code the same content in multiple ways that will each look very similar when viewed, but will actually convey differing amounts of information to user agents.

Instead of using an <h5> I could use <p><strong>in front of my subhead and make it look the same as it would using <h5>. Such usage would be considered presentational mark-up. It can affect how the header looks, but it is not semantically correct because it doesn't let user agents know that this is a subhead. If a Web designer applies the incorrect elements to page content, the site may look perfectly acceptable. But it is not passing on vital information that user agents may need to:

• Help a visually impaired visitor navigate the page using screen reading software.
• Tell Google and other search engines what topics are the most important ones on the page.
• Show that you are citing a reference document such as a book.
• Indicate that you are presenting computer code, etc.

Same content, different mark-up

To illustrate this point I've created 2 very simple Web pages, one uses semantic mark-up and one using non-semantic mark-up. Basically the non-semantic version uses <p> for just about everything. When you view the pages through a regular browser you'll see that the semantic and non-semantic versions look pretty similar. They both look normal in Firefox, Safari and Opera, and they both break in various versions of Internet Explorer. You don't see the difference visually until you look at the pages in the text browser, Lynx.

When viewing the semantic page on Lynx, we can see that there is order to the page; it looks a bit like an outline. The menu looks like a menu and the headers standout to provide an introduction to the other text.

HTML elements in action, offering added information to user agents

Text readers for the visually impaired and search engine spiders are getting even more information than we can see in the Lynx semantic html example. They know that each menu link should be distinguished from the next. The use of an unordered list for the menu tells user agents to separate these links in a way that use of <p> does not, and allows users of screen readers to jump through or skip these elements to proceed to the main text. In the non-semantic version this is not clear, a text reader may speak all of those links together, making it more difficult for the user to navigate.

These user agents can also tell that the first header is more important than the second because it has been coded as an <h3> while the second header is an <h4>. Headers are ranked in order of importance from 1-6. Here we're using an <h1> for the site name, the most important header on the page. Search engine crawlers will see words in an <h1> as being more descriptive of the page as a whole. This is useful for search engine optimization, because we can include our keywords and phrases in our various headers to let the search engines know that core topics we are covering on the page. Thus on this page you'll notice that I've used the phrase "semantic HTML" in both the text and subheads (which in this case are <h5>'s.) That said I've not used it in every subhead because having these headers make sense to you, the reader, is still more important than SEO. People come first, then robots.

In this example I've focused on just a few a few of the many HTML elements that are important to semantic mark-up, but hopefully these will give you a clearer sense of how such usage can help SEO and accessibility. Other elements such as address, cite and blockquote can add additional meaning to a page's code. You can learn more about other elements and related issues in the reference links below.

Semantic mark-up, validation and content

It's always a good practice to validate your code to check for errors and potential problems, but site validation doesn't guarantee that you've used the best mark-up for the site. While the validator can make sure you've used allowed elements, it has no way of knowing if you've them in the most appropriate manner. Both the semantic and non-semantic page samples used in this post were produced using valid W3C standards compliant XHTML and CSS. One is clearly better formed than the other, but both also break in Internet Explorer.

Thus it's also important to check sites in multiple browsers and to simply think carefully about how visitors will read the site. If my samples were for real sites, I'd fix the IE problem, but I used it here to remind us that using valid semantic code is just the beginning. There will always be additional details we must consider.

It's also worth noting that, when it comes to SEO, a semantically well-formed site is not a substitute for good content. Search engines such as Google are designed to help users, like you and me, find the most relevant pages for the information we seek. With that goal in mind they have to accommodate a wide variety of coding differences. If your competitor has great content and plenty of good inbound links, while yours does not, then his/her site will still win out, even if the code is atrocious. But if you can produce great content and present it in the appropriate format you will be off to a good start.

Semantic HTML Resources

• The Elements of Meaningful XHTML (presentation showing examples)
• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
• Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements
• Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Information and Applications 1.0
• More than one H1 on a page: good or bad? (Video by Google's Matt Cutts)
• Semantics in HTML 5
• W3C Semantic Data Extractor
• W3C: G115: Using semantic elements to mark up structure