Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

This notification is just a friendly reminder (not a bill or a second charge) that on 23-Jan-2012, you placed an order from MacRabbit Store. The charge will appear on your bill as “FS *macrabbit”. This is just a reminder to help you recognize the charge. You will not be charged again.

[....] Our customers have found this notice useful in confirming otherwise unknown credit card charges, as “FS *macrabbit” may not be easily recognizable on your bill.

As somebody who has, in fact, had to track down baffling references on Social Signal’s credit card bills (full disclosure: Morgan does far more of our Visa sleuthing than I do), I was touched that they’d thought of this. I was even more pleased that the email seemed to be only about being helpful; there was no call to action, no “Tell a friend about our new CSSEdit integration, improved language support and JavaScript-based API!”

The thing is, I really love using Espresso. And although it’s capable of some pretty heavy-duty web work, I find it’s my go-to tool these days for even a little light CSS wizardry or email template creation. There aren’t too many software tools that make me think “Damn, I wish I had more tasks that let me use this,” but Espresso’s high on the list of the tools that do.

So since their thoughtful email didn’t push me to buy anything or do any evangelism on their behalf, I’m going to do it unbidden. If you’re on a Mac and want to check it out, there’s a 15-day free trial. It isn’t free, but even an occasional user like me can make a solid case that it’s saved me its $79 pricetag many times over in increased productivity.

And even if you aren’t a Mac user or web developer, but you are in the business of sending email, consider looking for opportunities to send the occasional helpful message that doesn’t have an obvious self-serving angle. It can do wonders for your client relationships. It might even score you the odd flattering blog post.

President Obama’s best moment tonight may have been this one. I don’t think it took anyone’s breath away at the time… but I’ll bet you see this language repeated in speech after speech by Democratic candidates and incumbents in the coming months:

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right.

Every Sunday, when my cartoon gets posted on ReadWriteWeb, I head on over to have a look and join whatever conversation’s going on.

Today’s visit was much the same thing… until I noticed a little wonkiness: a sentence that stopped dead just before the cartoon. Worse, it was a linked sentence… and worse yet, it was the sentence that links from ReadWriteWeb to Noise to Signal.

I clicked on it. Good news: I landed on RobCottingham.ca. Bad news: I was on a 404 page. Because I forgot to include a closing quotation mark in the link to my cartoon site, that link points to:

http://robcottingham.ca/cartoon%3ENoise%20to%20Signal%20cartoons%20here
%3C/a%3E.%3C/em%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cdiv%20style=

No surprise it doesn’t go anywhere useful, right? That’s kind of a big deal, because a) I don’t like people getting frustrated when they click on my links, and b) a lot of people drop by my site every Sunday thanks to that link.

I dropped my editor a note apologizing and alerting him to the issue (apart from everything else, it also broke the layout on that page). Which is a start, but there’d be a few hours until he saw my email (remember, this is Sunday). And in the meantime, there’d be a lot of people clicking and saying “Wha’a?”

What I wanted them to do was click and be taken instantly to the original link. To do that, I needed to set up what’s known as a redirect – an instruction to my web server saying “If anyone tries to load that screwed-up address, take them to the real address instead.”

And ideally, it should be a particular kind of redirect — a 301 redirect, to be technical — that tells search engines, “This item has permanently moved to this other location.”

I could have done this by editing a file in my site’s folder named the .htaccess file, which has a series of instructions for the server covering everything from memory allocation to redirection. There are plenty of great tutorials on how to do exactly that.

But that’s a little cumbersome (especially because this happens just infrequently enough that I have to relearn how to do it every single time). And as a WordPress user, I’ve grown accustomed to talented programmers creating great plugins to solve nearly every technical issue that might come up.

Which brings me to John Godley, and a great little plugin called Redirection.

The Redirection plugin allows me to deal with a whole slew of issues. Had to change my permalink structure because of a plugin update? I can take care of it with a few clicks and keystrokes, permanently redirecting traffic from the old URLs to the new ones. Discovered a bunch of frequent 404 errors from someone’s mistyped URLs? Fixed! And I can see all of my redirects at once, group them however I want, and see just how much traffic each one has diverted (read: “just how much traffic Redirection has routed to the right destination”).

It’s great, it’s free, and it saved a lot of people from thinking ill of me tonight. Check it out.

July 15: Setting off today on greatest adventure yet: traversing the fabled Mailbox Hierarchy. This mighty peak is the tallest I have scaled yet, and is known for its treacherous queries and unnavigable tables. Can’t wait to change the flags up at the top!

July 17: Slow moving so far. But I’ve just found a lost message, and I really think I should try to recover it.

August 2: Still trying to recover that message. I know I can get it, but it’s wedged into this crevasse really tightly.

August 16: Just replenished supplies and updated to 10.7.1. I wonder if I wedged my penknife in between this outcropping and that message if it would come loose?

August 19: Discouraged. Instructions relayed from user at base camp say to stop trying to recover that message. Fine.

August 20: User has now told me seven times to stop trying to recover the message. OKAY. WHATEVER. Moving on.

September 4: High enough now that I’ve finally crossed the spamline. Huge drifts of the stuff. Just spent three days rerouting to avoid a cornice of weight-loss messages.

September 9: Will have to connect with that Exchange server on the other side of this neve field. Checking all my equipment three or four times over. Nervous, but excited.

September 10: Incredibly frustrated!! Connection to server failed, and I slid down about 60 metres over rough ice and crashed. Filters are broken, and this inbox is getting jammed.

September 16: Supplies are running low. Many obstacles in way that aren’t marked on the IMAP. Altitude sickness setting in, and occasionally delusional. Maybe I should try to recover that message again?

September 25: Maybe footwear is the problem? Will reboot.

October 18: Have subsisted for more than a month on thawed spam and old phishing messages. Weighed down with mailing lists and Facebook notifications. Can’t go up, can’t go down, and can’t go on like this much longer. Shrouded in the Cloud for days.

October 21: For a few minutes, the Cloud went down and all was clear. Magnificent – beautiful – found myself meditating again for first time in years. Revelation: seems my whole life has been a struggle to free myself from attachments.

October 24: Decision made. Will attempt last-ditch maneuver: rebuild mailboxes while deleting everything older than two months. Could lose everything. Will let you know if I make it. Either way… see you all at Inbox Zero. 221 Bye.

We can only assume Mail.app’s desperate risk ended in a painful and most likely fatal bounce. 

But why shouldn’t we regard our online lives as just as real, just as valid and just as meaningful as our offline ones? That’s the question Alex posed a few months ago at TEDx Victoria, proceeding from a blog post she wrote last year for the Harvard Business Review.

The talk, titled “Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your Online Life”, just went live. And if you’ve ever wondered why a valued online friendship doesn’t count as “the real world” while a trip to the mall does – and, more to the point, what you can do about it – you’ll want to watch.

Numbers are lovely that way. In a world where everything seems open to interpretation, numbers offer certainty. Five is bigger than three: end of argument.

Problem is, a beautiful number can hide an ugly bunch of oversimplification. Trying to quantify the complexities of human interaction in a multidimensional matrix of influence and activity in a few simple numbers is next to impossible (although potentially very attractive to venture capitalists).

Which is why, despite a valiant effort, social-media-analysts-turned-political-prognosticators fell so heavily on their virtual fannies in trying to use online metrics to predict last Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucus.

The good folks at Trilogy Interactive summed up how woefully short those predictions fell in a handy infographic. (Only one prognostication came close – eerily so – until a glitch in the data it was based on got corrected, and then it fell into line with the others.)

So why are retweets, likes, mentions and follows such poor predictors of electoral success? As Trilogy points out, it’s partly because of the difficulty of focusing that information geographically. And it’s partly the way those numbers confuse conversational buzz and notoriety with support. Micah Sifry puts it well:

Saying simple, stupid things that lots of people want to tell their peers about can get you tons of followers and retweets. But it doesn’t mean anything definitive about grass-roots support. Otherwise, right now we’d be talking about Herman Cain’s amazing victory in Iowa.

More fundamentally, the information that Twitter, Facebook and other platforms can offer us about our relationships to brands, candidates, ideas and each other is still pretty crude. And it would take a far more subtle, sophisticated and complex reading of the things we say to each other to infer anything very meaningful from those blunt-instrument statistics.

Which is worth remembering the next time you find yourself or your organization getting hung up on the number of followers, fans and subscribers you have. Those numbers can be useful… but they couldn’t predict Newt Gingrich’s future, and they shouldn’t dictate yours.

“There is hardly anything more important to getting the right things done than to save and protect the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet. The Internet is bringing life back to democracy.”

It’s an off-the-cuff answer, and mostly nowhere near the eloquence of An Inconvenient Truth, but there’s a moment where you can see Al Gore’s passion break through. This is a man who truly loves the Internet.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

No, no, not “invest in TriMegaMutual”. Not “don’t believe the polar bears when they learn to talk”.

It’s this: “back up your hard drive.”

See, in about a month or two, your (my) hard drive’s going to fail. And you’re (I’m) going to smack your (my) forehead and say, “Why the hell didn’t I back up? If only I could go back in time to the end of 2011, when I had all that free time.”

And then you’re (I’m) going to build a time machine, and go back in time to warn yourself. Except you won’t have to… if you start backing up now. Right now can be the then when you wish you’d backed up, except — hurray! — you did. If you follow.

Here are three things you can do, right now, to make sure your most urgent data is there when you need it:

• Buy yourself a nice big external hard drive (there are plenty of sales on right now) and use a simple backup program with it. If you have a Mac and a recent version of OS X, you already have one: it’s called Time Machine (yeah: spooky, right?) and it came free with your operating system. Just open up the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences, and configure from there. If you’re using Windows, Backup and Restore comes free with Windows. And if you’re using Linux… well, you’re probably already backing up with something like fwbackups.
• Sign onto a service like Dropbox, and use it to back up your most critical 2 GB of info, free of charge. This could be your active work documents, for example. It’ll mean you can keep working on the most important stuff on another computer while you’re recovering from the hard drive failure.
• Start using a networked notebook like Evernote to store notes from meetings, to-do lists, software serial numbers and other key info. Password-protect any info you’d particularly like to keep from prying eyes. You’ll be able to access it from other computers and mobile devices while your computer’s getting back up and running.

Of course there’s more to a solid backup regime than this. (I actually had a visit from the us of late 2012, warning about floods, earthquakes and fire, and suggesting we look into a] an offsite backup and b] the whole Mayan calendar thing.) But with these three steps, you’ll be way ahead of the game in a month or two.

Thanks. I’m hoping that tell you all this won’t cause some kind of temporal paradox that winds up causing the universe to collapse. But trust me: compared to what losing all our data will be like, it’s worth the risk.

And this morning, this news from RWW head honcho Richard MacManus:

I’m thrilled to announce that ReadWriteWeb has been acquired by SAY Media, a digital publishing company headquartered in San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb will anchor SAY Media’s growing Technology channel, which reaches more than 75 million global consumers each month.

ReadWriteWeb is going to get bigger and even better. Our plans include widening ReadWriteWeb’s editorial scope and expanding our team. That starts from today, with the addition of SplatF‘s Dan Frommer to our team as an editor-at-large. We will also be doing a re-design, utilizing the sophisticated designers at SAY Media. With SAY’s technology and services, we’ll be able to scale ReadWriteWeb in ways previously unavailable to us. So I’m very excited about our team joining SAY Media. We’re going to take ReadWriteWeb to the next level!

I’d suggest this is Richard’s big reward, and that he’ll now retire and go live on an island somewhere, except:

• It’s hard to imagine Richard retiring. And
• He already lives on an island.

Congratulations to Richard and the whole ReadWriteWeb team.

And once the applause dies down, you’re looking at a sea of people who are probably as unfamiliar to you as you are to them. Your first few lines not only have to launch your speech, but establish a rapport and some degree of trust with your audience.

But in the era of the social speech, you don’t have to speak to an audience of strangers. You can get acquainted and start the conversation days or even weeks before you break out the index cards. You probably won’t get to know everybody beforehand… but you’ll know at least some of them, and they’ll know you.

• Start by finding out where your audience hangs out online. Are there professional groups on LinkedIn, or groups on Facebook where they get together? Is there an event or chat hashtag they use on Twitter? Do they frequent the sponsoring organization’s blog? Do they go even more old-school, with discussion forums? Are there Twitter lists or public Google+ circles that can help you discover them? (Just be sure these are public-facing spaces, and not places where participants are expecting some degree of privacy.)
• Now that you know where to find your audience – or a chunk of it – you’ll want to introduce yourself. But before you do, listen to the public conversations they’re having. What’s the tone? What issues are high on their agendas? Who are the natural hosts and leaders in the conversations? Once you have a sense of the dynamics, then it’s time to let folks know who you are.
• Post a message in the various venues you’ve identified. Let people know who you are, and that you’re excited that you’ll be speaking at the event. Ask who else will be attending, give everyone an idea of what you’re planning to talk about, and invite suggestions and questions. Unmarketing author and speaker Scott Stratten likes to do that through a webcam video he records before his speeches, greeting his audience and letting them know what it’s in for. They get to see who he is and get a taste of his speaking style. (You’ll find that and other fantastic Scott Stratten speaking tips in this blog post.)
• Write a blog post referring to your upcoming speech, and dealing with one of the key themes you’ll be covering. (If it’s a theme you’ve posted on before, you can revisit a previous post with a few more thoughts.) Consider asking your audience a question, or assigning a little homework: “You’ll get a lot more out of this presentation if you can come in with a list of the three things you’d most like to try this year in your organization’s fundraising.” And include your video, if you’ve recorded one.
• Looking for a big-picture idea of your audience’s interests or level of experience? An online poll (using a service like PollDaddy or GoPollGo) can allow audience members to score their skills, choose a favourite topic or place themselves on a spectrum of opinion.
• Your host can make a big difference in the success of your outreach. Ask the event organizers to include links to your blog posts, polls and video on their blog and in their emails to attendees. (Chances are they’ll be delighted that you’re doing this. We’ll look at more ways to collaborate with your organizer in a future post.)
• Use Twitter to announce your arrival at the event (which you’ll do early) and at the socials and networking events (which you’ll attend), using the event hashtag. Aim to meet some of the people you’ve talked with online. The face-to-face contact strengthens your online relationships, and can give you a sense of the event’s intangibles that can be invaluable in fine-tuning your presentation.
• During your presentation, mention some of the people you’ve talked to and the conversations you’ve had. And if you’ve assigned homework beforehand, mention it and weave it into your speech — you can even call on a few of your new online contacts in the audience to read their answers. (In each case, clear it with them first; some people are happy to talk online, but squirm if they’re singled out from the stage.)

What you’ve done is to bridge your online and in-person presence with these audience members. Your speech will be better, because you’ve had the benefit of some insight into your audience’s thinking. You’ll be more at home on stage, because you know there are friends — or at least some friendly acquaintances — out in the crowd. And you’ve laid the groundwork for ongoing relationships that last long after you leave the stage.

At least, that used to be the case. But when you’re crafting a social speech, speechwriting can be a team activity. And even though you still have to do the actual writing, you can draw on the ideas, experience and ingenuity of a large networked audience.

You may feel a little hesitant about asking your network for help, especially out in the open: aren’t you supposed to be the expert? But even experts have to do research. When you ask for suggestions or ideas, you’re acknowledging the collective knowledge, experience and expertise of your friends, fans and followers, and inviting them to make a contribution. That’s not admitting a weakness; it’s paying a compliment.

Here are five ways to bring your network in on the act the next time you’re working on a speech:

• Crowdsourcing: Find yourself falling back on the same old examples and cases? Shake things up by asking your network for their favourites. A tweet like “Speaking to HR conference tomorrow – what are your favorite examples of innovative recruiting? #HRINS11″ can help you add a few new arrows to your quiver — for this speech, and future ones.
• Storytelling: It’s one thing to set out an argument and back it up with statistics. It’s another — and a whole different level of emotional resonance — to illustrate that argument with a real-world story, attached to an actual human being. Ask your followers for their personal experience, and you can find some remarkable stories to share with your audience (with permission, of course). And if you want to go that extra mile, and you have a willing friend with a terrific story, a webcam clip can dramatically boost its impact.
• Media: Flickr’s Creative Commons archive and iStockPhoto can get you some great images. But many of your network members’ hard drives are packed to the gills with their own photos and videos, some of them quite compelling. Put out a call for a specific image (“I’m looking for a photo of a really beat-up old car for my next presentation”) and you may well get just what you’re looking for. Alternately, you could consider having a series of related images — people making angry faces, beautiful shots of waterfalls, screenshots of error messages — and turn them into a mosaic or mini-slideshow that reinforces a particular theme in your speech. (Just do your due diligence about usage rights. Make sure the contributor is also the creator, and consider privacy issues around any identifiable individuals.)
• Brainstorming: Want to see how an idea or a line of reasoning flies with people? Posting it and asking for feedback (or, if you’re up for it, pushback) can help you sharpen your thinking. You may get some encouragement and validation — or maybe you’ll hear an unexpected point of view that leads you to revise your approach. (Inviting perspectives from outside your organization and your usual circle can be a great way to break out of groupthink.) And even if you don’t change your mind, you’ll have a better idea of some of the objections your audience might raise… objections that you can address during your speech.
• Polling: A service like PollDaddy, GoPollGo or Facebook Questions lets you create multiple-choice polls to unleash on your networks. Don’t go looking to draw any valid statistical inferences from the results… but if you’re looking for a general expression of sentiment, you’ll be able to tell your audience things like “More than three-quarters of the people I asked in a Twitter poll said they feel extremely swamped by email… and not one said they felt like they were on top of it.”

You can turn to a wide range of online services for inviting collaboration and soliciting contributions. Twitter is great for short questions and answers (if you’re asking people to share links, for instance). LinkedIn Answers lets you reach out to your professional network. Your profile or page on Facebook or Google+ can serve as a more conversational venue for longer contributions. A Google or Wufoo form can allow people to submit structured responses (the tradeoff being a slightly higher barrier to participation and a much less social experience). And if you have the viewership or readership to reach the right crowd, your blog or YouTube page can be an even more targeted, effective way of connecting with people.

It can’t just be one-way, of course, with your friends and followers giving and you taking. You need to thank your network members for their help, and encourage them to be there for you in your next speech:

• Immediate thanks: Reply to everyone, if that’s even remotely feasible. If you’ve been deluged, then you might have to consider a group thanks — but most of us should be so lucky.
• Credit where it’s due: If you’re using someone’s personal story, you want to attribute it to them (after confirming they don’t mind). And you should consider crediting somebody who’s provided an especially remarkable piece of information. Letting them know you gave them a shout-out in your speech is a great way to thank them.
• Credit where it’s due, part 2: If you’ve used a photo or video clip in your presentation, you’ll definitely want to add a credit on-screen. Ask the contributor how they’d like to be credited – and keep the typeface readably large (without detracting from the image itself). If you’ve created a mosaic or a mini-slideshow, consider adding a credit slide at the end of your presentation.
• Thanks afterward: A post-speech blog post or webcam video is your chance to thank everyone who contributed, and single out the folks you leaned on particularly heavily. And not just by name; linking to their online presence of choice is the sincerest form of gratitude.
• Continued engagement: Now that they’ve contributed to your speech, your network members are going to feel vested in its outcome, and in your future presentations. Keep reaching out conversationally, even when you don’t have a speech on the horizon, and reciprocate in kind. You’re starting to build a more engaged, more committed following — one you’ll want to devote some genuine attention to.

That redesign has a number of people upset at the amount of white space it involves. I get that: it’s great to be able to skim tons of information at a glance. And nobody leaps out of bed grinning from ear to ear and says, “I get to do lots of scrolling today!”

But white space has its virtues, too. In the hands of a skilled designer, it can guide a user’s focus to the handful of things that matter the most on a page – maybe even letting you think about one thing at a time. (I know: heresy!) Yes, lots and lots of information can be great, but there’s real truth to the adage that when everything’s important, nothing’s important.

Back when I was designing leaflets and mailings for Members of Parliament, there was a constant battle between those of us who wanted to maintain some structure on the page and a sense of hierarchy, and the MPs who wanted to add just one more paragraph of information. “It can go right here – see that blank space? Oh, and there’s more blank space over there. You know, if you dropped the type size to nine points, we could fit a lot more stuff on!”

Thing is, for a small number of constituents, the jam-packed-with-information, looks-like-a-Dr.-Bronner‘s-Castile-Soap-label leaflets actually worked. They loved ‘em. And for those few dozen people, if we’d had the time and resources, it would have made sense to create a separate version.

But for the thousands of others we were trying to reach, not so much.

Google does have the resources, and in addition to the airy default (or “Comfortable”) layout, you can choose “Cozy” and “Compact” (or, as I call it – affectionately – “Bill Blaikie mode”). If you’re feeling the need to flood your eyeballs, by all means make the switch.

But maybe give “Comfortable” a chance first. You may surprise yourself.

And then ask yourself if your web site has enough room for your users to breathe – even if it means a little scrolling.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a video that does such a beautiful job of giving a simple message the emotional power and personal resonance that this one does.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

For a few minutes, you’ve made a significant connection with those people. But all the potential relationships and conversations that could arise from that connection walk out the door with them.

That’s why a growing number of speakers are using social media and online networks to start building those relationships, and expand both their audience and their impact. From Twitter hashtags to YouTube clips, public speaking – the oldest broadcast medium there is – is rapidly embracing the digital realm.

And over the next few weeks, this blog will look at some of the ways you can use social tools to turn those one-speech stands into ongoing relationships.

I can imagine a lot of speakers’ and speechwriters’ hackles going up right now. You’re already going to an incredible amount of effort: writing, reviewing, rehearsing, preparing slides. Why would you add even more work?

Actually, because you’re going to so much effort. You want to see as much of a return as possible on all that hard work. And just as social tools have dramatically increased the potential audience for everyone from writers to photographers to (cough) cartoonists, they can do (and are doing) the same for speakers.

You have an audience far outside the walls of whatever meeting room, banquet hall or conference center you’re in. Why not address them too? And for that matter, the people who are attending your speech are probably going to be interested in what you have to say before and after your speech as well as during those 20 minutes when you’re behind the mic. Why not give them a way to engage with you apart from sitting and passively listening?

And while right now that’s an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, it won’t long before it’s the norm. Audience expectations are changing, as nearly every one-to-many communication channel they use is opening up to many-to-many conversation. It won’t be long before participating in Twitter backchannels is the minimum level of engagement many speakers are expected to offer.

Just what that looks like differs from speaker to speaker. For some, it means expanding their reach by posting clips from their speech on YouTube and Vimeo, and uploading the slides to Slideshare. For others, it means crowdsourcing some of their material by posing questions on LinkedIn and Facebook. And for still others, it means carrying on conversations with their online and face-to-face audiences — via their blogs before and after their speech, and via a hashtag-based chat while they’re on-stage.

All of this can be powerful… but much more so when those individual tools are integrated into an overall strategy to connect, converse and collaborate.

One caveat: there aren’t any guarantees. It’s not like social media magic will turn a dull speech into a viral success (at least, not one you’ll appreciate – a few million views on a YouTube video labelled “Can You Believe How Long This Guy Goes On About Carriage Bolts?” may not be what you’re looking for.)

But when you do have a compelling message (and what other kind of speech is really worth giving?) then your network can magnify it many times over – and help it become a conversation with many of the people you want to reach the most.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

While nearly every objective measure suggested the party I was supporting, Vision Vancouver, was about to win the city’s municipal election, a few recent polls suggested the race had tightened up sharply in the last few days. And they suggested the momentum was with the NPA, Vancouver’s right-wing civic party.

The NPA’s campaign had focused on several targets they evidently considered tempting, including the city’s urban agriculture policies, and new separated bike lanes on a few downtown streets.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so worried. One of the NPA’s last public events included someone dressed in a chicken suit holding a sign that said “Homeless Chickens.” Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If, a day or two before an election, you find yourself appearing at press events with people dressed as chickens, chances are the Big Mo is with your opponent.

The TV coverage I saw was on Shaw’s Community Channel 4, which (as far as I could tell) had managed to find a panel of four white male commentators. Come on, people, what is this? A tech conference?

For a brief while, Gregor Robertson’s NPA challenger, Suzanne Anton, was ahead by several hundred votes. But then a few more polling stations reported and their positions flipped. Not long after that, it became clear that every Vision candidate was cruising to victory, and the mood at the party switched from Confidently Hopeful to Awfully Damn Happy.

Once the results were more or less clear, Anton delivered her concession speech. It was classy and gracious, and I liked the part toward the end refuting the idea of politics as a thankless job.

Now, classy and gracious are good. But just once, I’d like to see a defeated candidate really cut loose on the voters.

Speaking of speeches – if you’re ever in the position of writing a victory speech (and here’s hoping you are!), you have one big challenge: the crowd is deliriously happy. That means every line for the first five to ten minutes is an applause line.

Every. Line.

(In my defence, a] I never claimed to be a caricaturist, and b] I was standing up and juggling a sketchpad, a beverage and a Sharpie fine-line marker.)

The final results.

via kriskrug.com

Kris Krüg has a fascinating post about the work he’s doing with UNAIDS, and in particular a project called CrowdOutAIDS. It aims to crowdsource strategies on youth and HIV, drawing heavily on social networks.

Check out CrowdOutAIDS — there’s a lot to like here, including the four-step diagram right at the top. (I’m also very partial to that sign-up form, and may have to steal emulate the field design sometime.)

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

I’ve just read another blog post about someone who was accused of arrogance for not following people on Twitter just because they happen to follow him. And it’s driving me crazy – crazy enough to have left a comment on his post, and crazy enough to adapt it below.

There are many people out there who will tell you it’s a hard-and-fast rule of etiquette: if you don’t follow back, you’re a boor. (Some of them have suggested it’s a crime.)

This arbitrary law of mandatory reciprocity actually makes Twitter less useful, because unless you’re incredibly lucky, there are going to be people who follow you who aren’t that interesting to you. Maybe they tweet about their cats all day. Maybe they’re zealots for a religion, a political view or an operating system (cough) that you don’t believe in, share or use. Maybe their entire Twitter feed is devoted to complaints that other people don’t follow them back.

Or maybe they’re following a few dozen people, but you have several thousand following you, and if you follow them all back, then it’s going to flood your feed and you’ll miss some conversations you’d really like to have.

The functional purpose of following someone is because you want to hear what they have to say. That’s why Twitter created the feature; that’s how they suggest you use it.

If you just want to show your appreciation to someone for having followed you, then courtesy already offers a tool for that: the thank-you. It’s been around for millennia, and it has the virtue of being unambiguous. Twitter’s pretty good at delivering it, too.

What’s being invented here with the creation of arbitrary rules like following back isn’t etiquette; it’s a whole bunch of new reasons to take offense at someone else’s behaviour. And when we tell people have to make a tool less useful in the name of being polite (which is what demanding that people use lists to follow the people they’re actually interested in boils down to), all we’re doing is throwing up barriers to genuine connection and conversation.

Isn’t that the opposite of why we have courtesy in the first place?

So it’s happened again: a company comes under fire for some misdeed — per­ceived or actual — and gets a few crit­ical com­ments on their Face­book Page. And their crisis com­mu­nic­a­tions strategy is to pour gas­oline on that little flame by deleting those comments.

The latest folks to do this are the people at Chap­Stick, who ran a print ad that offended a few folks. Those critics posted their com­plaints on ChapStick’s Face­book page (most of them quite civil). ChapStick’s page admin­is­trators then deleted the com­ments; this case adds an ironic new wrinkle because of the ad copy pointing people to their Face­book pres­ence, which reads “Be heard.”

After enduring a torrent of cri­ti­cism for deleting the cri­ti­cism, Chap­Stick posted an apology for the ad and a sort-of explan­a­tion for deleting the com­ments, saying they follow Face­book guidelines and “remove posts that use foul lan­guage, have repet­itive mes­saging, those that are con­sidered spam-like (mul­tiple posts from a person within a short period of time) and are men­acing to fans and employees.” Which, with most of the com­ments, wasn’t the case.

It seems to bear repeating: brands, learn to take some cri­ti­cism on your social web pres­ences. Why? Because…

• Accus­a­tions of sup­pressing those com­ments are often more dam­aging than the ori­ginal cri­ti­cisms themselves.
• The pres­ence of crit­ical com­ments gives the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pening on your Face­book Page, blog or other pres­ence a sense of authen­ti­city. That means the pos­itive user com­ments carry more weight than they would if your site had nothing but obsequious flattery.
• A crit­ical comment can be an oppor­tunity for engage­ment on your part. It’s your chance to answer a cri­ti­cism, resolve a com­plaint, correct some mis­in­form­a­tion. And you may be catching a little issue before it becomes a much bigger one.
• A crit­ical comment can be an spur to par­ti­cip­a­tion and con­ver­sa­tion by your com­munity. Let’s face it; for most brands and organ­iz­a­tions, excess par­ti­cip­a­tion usually isn’t the problem with their Face­book pages.

So maybe it’s time to learn to love the neg­ative. A thicker skin not only saves you from the sting of a little cri­ti­cism; it can let you realize from genuine benefit… and keep you from becoming the latest high-profile case study in why comment dele­tion can backfire.

You know how Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world”? Oh, I know the New York Times says there’s no evidence he ever said it… but I can point to a gazillion bumper stickers and Twitter bios that say they’re wrong.

Anyways.

I firmly believe that before you can be the change, you have to put it into words: a pithy statement of belief. In short, something that a man (or a really, really determined woman) could pee in a snowbank.

And in that vein, I’m pleased to announce Pee the Change You Want to See in the World, a series of cards I’m selling in my Zazzle store. I’ve started with a few changes: Peace, Social Justice, Equality, Better Smoothies and Open Web Standards. And I’m open to requests (provided they’re not for causes I disagree with – authorial prerogative and all).

Enjoy!

Browse other personalized gifts from Zazzle.

That’s a lament I hear from community managers, social media practitioners and communications directors who are begging, cajoling, coaxing and wheedling coworkers, trying to get them to post something to their organization’s or company’s blog.

It can be tempting to throw your hands up. “If your team hates blogging, you need a new team,” suggests one post. The author adds, “They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog.”

True, someone who hates their job is unlikely to blog about it – at least, not in a way that would make their employer happy. But that isn’t the only reason that people say they hate blogging. Here are a few others… and some ways you can respond before you give up on your coworkers:

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the time it takes?

If your workplace is like many others, employees have seen their workloads grow, with less support for getting the job done. If you’re expecting them to crank out blog posts, but you haven’t taken anything off their plates to compensate, you may want to look at some adjustments.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate the kind of blogging you’re asking them to do?

Are you expecting detailed, lengthy posts from busy people? Consider starting off by asking for contributions that have a much lower footprint on their time and attention. Are you asking them to write puff pieces about what a fantastic organization they work for? Give them the latitude to be more authentic, and to talk more about their own work passions without having to pump up your brand.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they don’t think they’re good at?

Have you offered training – not just in the technical details of your blogging platform, but in how to write blog posts quickly and easily? Do you encourage them to start out small – for instance, with one-paragraph contributions to a longer post – and work their way up? Have you considered an informal peer mentoring system, group workshops, or assigning a communications specialist to help them write their first few posts?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being exposed to the public?

Some people love being in the public eye (cough). Others find the idea intrusive, or even terrifying. Try finding an area of their work they feel more comfortable sharing with the world. Give them the option of starting out by blogging on the intranet, where their exposure is limited to their coworkers.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate doing something they think is pointless?

More to the point, something that’s pointless to them. Look at it from their point of view: maybe you’re asking them to put their urgent work on hold so you can get some content for a trendy blog they suspect will be a flash in the pan. You can – and should – talk to them about the blog’s significance for the organization. But you should also figure out how the blog can advance things they care about, like a professional passion, their profile within the organization, or a cause they’re committed to.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate being the first on the dance floor?

You’ll often find it harder to get contributors to a new communications vehicle than an established one. And even if the blog has been around for a while, people may not want to be the first ones from their department or job function to post. But there are still ways to break the ice – for instance, by writing a series of posts based on brief interviews with a few of the kind of individuals you’d like to see contributing. That can be the spark they need to jump in.

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate, well, you?

Okay, not hate. But could your relationship be stronger? Do you have bridges to build with other departments before you can start asking for their help? Have you worked as hard to understand them as you would with an external audience you want to reach?

Do they hate blogging… or do they hate what it means in your workplace’s culture?

Is yours an organization that welcomes honest conversation, or are people legitimately worried about inadvertently saying the wrong thing? Do you have a “tall poppy” culture where it’s safer to keep your head down and blend in? If you’re having trouble getting one or two people to participate, then maybe – maybe – the problem’s on their end. But widespread resistance to blogging may alert you to deeper issues. If that ends up spurring your organization to make badly needed changes, then that refusal to blog may turn out to a valuable contribution after all.

Some big changes came yesterday to Google Reader, the venerable RSS newsreader that has become part of the texture of daily online life for a lot of us. The design has changed dramatically, in line with changes made to most other Google services. But there are big functional changes too, as Google aims to consolidate social activity in Google+.

That means the end of nearly all of Google Reader’s sharing features. There’s no more Share link; no more Followers; and no more public pages for starred or shared items. Instead, you click Send To under any post, and share it through one of a variety of web services (most notably Google+).

For many people, that will work just fine. But some of us have been heavy users of that Share link… and at least in my case, it’s been a great way to populate an RSS* feed of posts I come across in Reader. That feed can then do everything from generating Twitter posts to updating a widget on my blog.

If that’s one way you’ve been using Reader, then good news: you can still create an RSS feed of blog posts you flag from inside Reader. Better yet, you can draw on one of Reader’s lesser-known features – tags – to createseveral RSS feeds.

Here’s how it works:

• Look at the bottom of any post in Reader. You’ll see several links: star, +1, Email, Keep unread, Send to, and – most interestingly – Edit tags.
• Come up with a short distinct keyword that you want to use for shared items. Maybe it’s just the letter “s”. From now on, you’ll be tagging any item you want to add to that RSS feed with that keyword.
• Click the Edit tags link. Enter your sharing keyword.
• Once you click Save, the keyword becomes a hyperlink. Click it, and you’ll be taken to a page listing all of the posts that you’ve tagged with that particular keyword.
• Click on the Folder settings… button at the top of the page. Then click “View details and statistics” in the menu that appears.
• Hurray! You’ll see an URL for the RSS feed for this tag. Use it the same way as the RSS feed for Shared Items.

Note that this isn’t a new feature – you’ve always been able to find an RSS feed for any particular tag. But the latest changes mean it’s just become even more useful.

* Actually, it’s the Atom format. But people seem to be more familiar with the term “RSS”, so I’m using it generically here.

Except that the common wisdom – that podcasts are the 3-1/2″ floppy disk of the 2000s – has been lost on one group of people: listeners.

According to a BBC story from the summer,

[P]odcasting has continued to grow and grow.

More than eight million adults in the UK – around 16% of the adult population – have downloaded a podcast, with almost half listening to one at least once a week. This figure is echoed in the US.

As a comparison, this is still a greater percentage of people than use Twitter.

And while many of those podcasts are just repurposed content from broadcasters and other big media voices, they’re creating a channel that the rest of us can use as well, whether it’s as individuals or organizations.

The lesson? (One that I have to constantly remind myself of?) Don’t dismiss a platform just because it isn’t on the front pages, or being talked up by the hottest social media voices. It may well be the humble, unsung hero of your next foray into social media.

But you may be missing the handy tools that more-established platforms have developed (or that others have developed for them). I’d like to share things right from Google Reader… share any web page with one click… and see who’s been sharing other pages on Plus.

You too? Then I have good news.

The folks I cartoon for every week at ReadWriteWeb unleashed a rapid-fire series of posts today, each with a handy tip or tool for making Google+ engagement that little bit easier:

• Find something you want to share in one of the newsfeeds you follow on Google Reader? Here’s how to set up a custom sharing link in every Google Reader post, using the powerful (and unsung) “Send to” feature.
• Landed on a great web resource you want to share with your Circles? This post has a bookmarklet will let you do it in a single click.
• Want to know who’s shared a particular page on Google+? Here’s another post, with another bookmarklet that uses Topsy’s new Google+ search service (currently in beta).

I’m delighted to see more and more tools coming out to support the Google+ ecosystem. I’ve found it to be a great place for more indepth, thoughtful conversations, and for discovering content with more context than just the usual “OMG u have 2 c this!!!”

Got any favourite tools, browser extensions or other Google+ add-ons?