These are notes taken with my tablet during the “A Modern Take On Interactive Prototypes” session at WordCamp Switzerland 2014 and I published them immediately after the talk. You can get a list of all my live-blogging posts of this WordCamp. Beware there may be mistakes, inaccuracies, and other imperfections in all these posts.

an Interaction Designer @wearerequired / required.ch

Interaction flow. Prototype iterations become better. Used for communication as well.

Her job is all about prototype in HTML/CSS for responsiveness and user testing .

Design in the browser early. HTML and CSS from lo to high fidelity. No static mockups.

Dynamic style guides.

Interactions should be designed in the browser which is the real canvas.

From lo to high fidelity. Take a front end framework such as Bootstrap. Wireframe. Add content. Add visual design. With iterations, getting to user testing. Refine the prototype until it becomes production-ready code. No waste of money nor code.

What matters are the skills. Some orgs focus on roles.

Teams. Focus on necessary skills. Front end. Back end. Target group expert.

Ricardoshops.CH redesign. Huge variety of product types. Prototype with real data and content types to see and play with variety. Dynamic content for the prototype and dynamic style guides.

It is a reference to communicate within the team and with the client.
Tight schedule made in time for Christmas.

No more PHP for prototyping.
Prototype generator and framework selector and dynamic content and auto dynamic style guide.

VUE.JS makes all this possible.

github.net/wearerequired

Update: Karin Christen released the slides.

Live tweeting panels is hard. 140 characters is very little. The main goals when covering an event alone is to testify that the event has taken place and that people following either in-person or on a live stream have gotten something important out of it. This encourages attendance for the next events obviously and raises the profile of the organizer.

Go through the list of panelists and search their presence on social media. That maybe frustrating in an academic setting because you’ll often find that they don’t have one. However, you may be surprised! Some prominent figures in the academic world are pretty active on Twitter. Journalists and politicians are also often on social media. Try to memorize their twitter handles or make a list on your laptop. Panelists will retweet you if you show up in their notifications. Accidental subtweeting can be embarrassing but it’s bound to happen.

Announce the event, live-tweet and possible streaming a few days in advance. Give all the necessary details. If many or all of the participants are active online, prepare an announcement tweet featuring each of them. Schedule those tweets at regular intervals. Keep in mind that you might have to mention each of them for fairness’ sake.

Choose your #hashtag with care. Discuss hashtag with coworkers. Go for the obvious one. If the event is about current affairs, chances are there will be one already. Look at trending topics. Make a few searches about the subject of the event. The hashtag will come to you. If all this fails, invent one. If the topic is too controversial, try flying below the radars by using the name of the organizer and the date. Being roped into arguments about the event’s organisation and the choice of panelists during the live tweeting of the event is a nightmare. Try to avoid that even if it means loosing a little visibility.

Be there early. Find a good place. Next to the center aisle is good so you can get up to take pictures. Before the event, encourage people to join one last time and comment positively on the attendance. If there’s a live stream, add a link in those first tweets.

Be accurate. If you’re not sure that the tweet accurately conveys the things that have been said, don’t send it. It’s better to have a partial account than an inaccurate one. If you engage the responsibility of the event’s organizers, misrepresenting the guests could impact their ability to get guests in the future.

Focus on tiny statements. They might seem inconsequential in the grander scheme of the debate but that’s all you can count on. In fact, chances are the grander scheme of the debate will escape you because you’ll be busy trying to catch tweet-worthy soundbites. There’s no way you can follow, synthesize and live-tweet a debate at the same time. If you need a synthesis and live-tweets, take two different people. You can count on partners, especially if the panel has members of the press on it. There will be journalists in the audience. Follow them and publicize their content.

Describe the topic in general. If you can’t be accurate and focus on tiny statements, describe what is being discussed without conveying judgments or opinions. Tell who is speaking and what topics he focuses on without going into details that might introduce inaccuracies. This technique works especially well with pictures.

Post pictures. Pictures do well on Twitter and they don’t require detailed Sit in a place where no empty seats show. Enlist coworkers with phones to send you pictures during the event. You will be able to post pictures from various angles.

Be fair. Find a way to mention and represent every single panelist. Sometimes, this is going to be hard. Some people don’t make tiny statements especially if they get emotional. Use every trick in the books to give them the most equal possible air time. The casual observer of your live-tweet should be able to reconstruct the guest list from your tweets.

Do not make public comments on the quality of the coverage. It isn’t your place to comment on the quality of the partners’ work. You need them. You can count on your followers and the guests themselves to point things out and issue corrections. But do not like or comment on them. Interfere only to kick and ban assholes.

After the event. Round up pictures and take the good ones and put them in a Facebook album (if you got a page) as a long term testament of the event. Since it’s a public event that is publicized, you can tag people in it. If you tag the panelists, you have to tag all of them.

You can keep posting about your event until you announce the next one. Take advantage of transcripts, round-ups, video and audio as they come out.

Image credit: Vdovichenko Denis / Shutterstock.com

How to design a CMS for the modern newsroom in On Content by Lee Simpson describes how the Guardian develops content management as an ecosystem and not through a single specialized piece of software.

Creating ecosystems of smaller and interchangeable pieces joined by APIs instead of betting on a single integrated CMS seems to be the most robust solution. There are content exchange formats emerging and such an approach is not a utopia anymore. Lee Simpson describes the evolving ecosystem thus:

A standardised mechanism for handling content from draft to publish (and beyond) would allow us to take advantage of tools being built by other software houses dedicated to solving the problems at individual stages of the content publishing process. Similarities can be found in the bases of programming workflow — dedicated systems and tools for each step of the process.

The benefits of this approach are numerous. For one, it reduces the friction in the tools’ adoption. If you can offer collaborators options, you will get new procedures and systems adopted much faster. People who have already developed preferences for certain applications may use them. Others will have options. They’ll welcome this freedom and that will make them much more cooperative.

Such an approach will help encourage content creation in non-journalistic organisations as well. Lots of professionals do write. Simply not in their browsers. If you can let them have their writing app or their image manager, for example, that might make organisational changes less painful.

However, the centralized services and APIs necessary to make this vision a reality are shared resources. Organizations in which the power is distributed and where the departments enjoy, cherish and safeguard their autonomy tend to resist the complications of putting shared resources in place. Shared resources require common rules. Sorting this out is digital governance. These rules will be embodied both in policies and computer code. They will be — or at least appear — costly to change. All the negotiations between business units must happen up-front: requirements have to be defined, someone has to be empowered to enforce the rules, etc.  Even if the benefits are great, it takes tremendous amounts of power and goodwill to sell. And the organization must be ready.

[en] Yesterday, we had a meetup about Multilingual solutions for WordPress. It was fun and instructive.

Slideshows or carousels are wonderful. They provide ample space for everything to be on the homepage for weeks. There is no need to hold meetings about the website. All stakeholders think they are getting a fair deal and appropriate amounts of exposure for their content. You may even whisper to yourself that your visitors get a well-rounded idea of your organisation’s activities.

Since the space is unlimited in the carousel, it’s free and harmless. There is no need to argue over what’s more important. Everyone in the organisation can just phone the webmaster and order a new slide. Something comes up, the web gal puts an announcement online as fast as she can copy-paste and markup, adds a new slide. Peace is kept. We’re all happy.

Except. Messages don’t get through. Experts have written about the fact that carousels don’t get people to click and take action (a sequence of events otherwise known as « conversion« ) and also about how carousels are a nightmare both in terms of search engine optimisation and in terms of your site’s ease of use. If effective communications are a real priority, that should be unacceptable.

Carousels are hurting your organisation. You assume it works without having checked. This creates a huge dead angle: it makes all discussions of web governance and due process irrelevant since everyone can request the creation of homepage content. Your web presence could accomplish so much more. You could rock.

Why do we refuse to? We fear tense discussions and accusations of insubordination. We don’t want everybody yelling in a meeting or, worse, agree and hold grudges. We all love peace but we have to weigh that against our need to get our messages across.

Carousels don’t work. You might be OK with that for peace’s sake. But if you’re convinced yours is an exception, at least, measure it and face the facts.

I was prompted to think about the costs and value of comments after reading a post about the latest changes made to Gawker’s comment management system in which Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, laments the poor state of comments sections. Engagement is difficult to get and even more difficult to keep. Whether you get no comments at all or too many, they are always an issue online.

When and How to Invest in Comments

Comments have their place when your blog is about making sense of the world around you — for yourself and your audience. They are for you if you use it to

• learn and teach
• gather insights
• and spot opportunities.

This spirit of quest can encourage great comments and launch deep conversations. If you are willing to participate in comment threads, they offer tremendous help. In “Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort”, Mathew Ingram cites Fred Wilson’s blog A VC as an example of rich comments. Wilson, a well-known venture capitalist and blogger, is ever-present in his comments and nurtures his community because their exchanges are valuable to him.

He shared the main factors behind his blogging success. On the subject of engagement, he wrote:

5) Engage everywhere. That means on Hacker News, other blog communities/comments, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. This takes a lot of time. Too much time. But I get so much value back from doing it that I make the time.

If you’re not in tech, maybe Hacker News is not for you. Anyway, you get the idea. To get more comments, it is very important that you

• leave comments on the blogs of people you respect. They or their audience may take an interest in your point of view
• tweet people asking them for their perspective on issues of interest to both of you
• advertise your post in relevant places.

For more, you can turn to Marcus Sheridan who lists many tips on engagement in comments with illustrations and examples.

Comment Management Tools

Whether you’re a multi-million-dollar publisher, a small business owner or an individual blogger, it’s necessary to filter out spam and moderate to have a healthy comments section. Fortunately, semi-automated solutions are widely available. Akismet, Mollom and Defensio, for example, offer to stop automated comment spam for you. All three have free plans. Akismet is active on WordPress.com blogs by default.

If you have your own WordPress install, you can activate Akismet easily. All you need is to open an account: you will receive a string of characters called an API key that you’ll then enter in the administration area of your WordPress installation.

You can also use services such as Facebook, Google+, Disqus or IntenseDebate which offer to host your comments on their servers for free. Such solutions may seem simpler and less prone to spamming attacks, but they have hidden costs. Comments may load slowly or temporarily go missing if the service goes down. Search engines may not take the comments’ content into consideration, which might impact your SEO.

Moreover, you run the risk of losing your comments if the service shuts down or you change your commenting system. Disqus and IntenseDebate let you export comments if you leave. However, few blogging platforms or commenting systems let you import comments back in seamlessly.

As you can see, solutions exist to make comments work but choosing the right one is a challenge. Whichever you choose, they always demand an investment of time and attention, and sometimes significant amounts of money.

Last year, comments on The Huffington Post crossed the symbolic 100 million line.  According to Arianna Huffington in this Mashable interview, their success comes from a commitment to

• moderating comments using humans and software
• personalizing the display by ranking comments from your Facebook or Twitter contacts higher
• and recognizing good commenters with badges and privileges.

This commitment is real and costly. Their 30 moderators and a robot called Julia cost them a large sum. Lots of dedication and significant investments are necessary to make comments work well.

Another Option: No Comments

When you post reviews or opinions and have no plans to take the feedback into serious consideration, you don’t need comments. When you lack resources or an interest in moderating and participating in your comments section, you might be better off without them.

Solo entrepreneurs and small businesses have limited resources to allocate and that’s OK. You don’t have to accept comments. You can encourage engagement by other means.

If you turn off comments, be sure to write a post explaining your decision. People might accuse you of not being humble enough to accept criticism and dissent. State clearly that you’ll continue to listen to your community. Encourage them to tweet to you, send you e-mails, etc.

Blogging with comments turned off is a sensitive issue and a matter of much debate. Matt Gemmell links to many articles about this question and offers his own take (via Build and Analyze).

There are no absolute reasons for or against comments. It depends on the purpose of both your blog and its comments section. Ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish with your site and whether comments help or hinder your ability to reach your goals.

There are bad reasons for having comments turned on. They are often used to inflate the number of page views on ad-driven sites. When you submit a comment, you have to re-read it and then submit it. That’s two more page views. And when people read comments, they are often displayed on several pages, which adds even more page views. You don’t have to emulate this behavior because page views aren’t the most important metric any more.

In the End, it is Your Decision

You should have a clear idea about what your site is supposed to accomplish; you should think about your comments section with the same care for purpose. Then you can decide whether to have one or not, and how much you are willing to invest in it. Don’t hesitate to think aloud in the comments.

Photo Credits: It just won’t go on! (switch) by derekGavey and Margin Notes by plindberg.

I wrote “On or Off? How to Make Comments Work for You” on Paper.li’s blog, it was originally published on May 16, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

As the festive season was drawing to a close, I –like a large portion of the online population– became concerned about ending the cycle of over-eating. The sense of satiety is easy to numb and hard to get back. It is not only true for food but also for content. Non-physical items can lead to gluttony as easily as the very physical foods and beverages of Yule. Similar mechanisms are at work. Only, content doesn’t have a season. The feast is all year round.

Information overload or gluttony

“Information overload”, I hear you say, “we know that already”. Is it really the problem, though? As Clay Shirky argues in his talk “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”, information overload is our new environment of plenty and not a problem that needs solving. We celebrate the availability of information in many great ways. Yet we experience problems with it sometimes. It lies upon us to create internal and external filters to manage our time and attention because they are our most precious resources.

Excited by the wealth of information available, we lay the traps ourselves by using the tools in an unsustainable manner. I’ve been doing it myself. At some point, I was following three hundred Tumblr accounts and around four hundred RSS feeds. Soon, I started operating under the impression that I should see every item and extract value out of them. These expectations were unreasonable and they were making me crazy. I cut more than half of my RSS feeds. I left Tumblr for a while. Only now that I have returned a wiser man, do I understand more about this information gluttony.

More and More

As humans we’re drawn towards content. There’s a drive to accumulate experience and learn about things because it helps us survive. Putting aside immediate threats, it helps us reach our other goals too. This drive, however, has a tendency to extend. Soon, we start consuming content because it might help us reach a potential goal. Our scope widens out of proportion. That’s also why we hop from entry to entry on Wikipedia and catch ourselves only four hours later. This is why people keep updating their Tumblr dashboard to see more shiny things.

Yet, if we go down this path, neophilia –the love of novelty– becomes the purpose. In the mass of indiscriminate content, true interestingness constitutes a surprise reward. As our brains try to unveil the secret pattern which leads to more such rewards, it sends us on a quest for more and more content. Infinite scrolling or infinite pagination can keep us on a site or service for hours.

Too Little Information To Decide What To Ignore

Dumb aggregation tools collect an endless chronological sequence of content items. The absence of an unread count makes it into a “river of content”. Somehow, this should be enough to change expectations and make it OK. It doesn’t always work and we get stuck on sites like Tumblr or Facebook.

Understanding what features of such content rivers cause you to slip into gluttony is key.

1. Piles make us want to get to the end…
2. but rivers of content have no edges or limits. Trying to consume all that passes on our screens is futile. So, we should know what we can safely ignore…
3. yet, rivers of content are often indiscriminate messes which make it difficult to decide what to read and what to throw out. Posts are often unstructured and stripped from categories: source and date are all we have to decide. Links on Twitter are inscrutable shortened URLs so we don’t even get that precious little indication regarding the source.

Deciding with certainty which pieces you can ignore is important for content consumers as well as curators. Design can help us with that. As publishers and designers we should ask ourselves what relevant information we can provide to help our audience decide what they should or shouldn’t read. Metadata can be richer and more relevant.

Lists and Folders

Until then, we might have to use old tools to organize our incoming streams and restrain ourselves. Lists and categories provide order and visibility. They help us decide what to pay attention to and what we can ignore. To come back to food, you have better chances to avoid picking up candy if you make a list of groceries in advance and stick to it.

Mark Zuckerberg is often quoted as saying: “Nobody wants to make lists”. Most people don’t want to, yet, some order must be imposed if we are to stop treating content like formless stuff. Lists have a long and rich history in helping us make sense of the infinite, as Umberto Eco says. What makes list-making unpopular on the web is the lack of a strong incentive.

Paper.li and Google+ both encourage their users to make lists and categories.

1. Google+ asks you to put the people you follow into circles.
2. Paper.li functions best with public Twitter user lists and, hence, provides a strong incentive to use them.

Yet, there’s something to note about categorization in Twitter lists, Google+ circles and folders in RSS readers. They categorize the sources but not the items they publish. Put a Twitter user in a list and then, regardless of what she publishes, the content is going to be in the list. Same with Google+ and most RSS feed readers. You put a feed in a category or folder and then, the items from that feed are all stuck together. There’s a general lack of granularity and an opportunity for more intelligent tools. Paper.li, however, is different. It shows the source and puts the links in categories like Technology, Business or Education automagically. The result is not perfect but –oh so– helpful. I would love to see other tools do the same.

Bearing this limitation in mind and with practice, it is possible to gain a little control back. Take a little time aside, while we’re still in the beginning of the year, to review your lists of sources and the folders/categories they’re in. It is worth doing.

Image credit: Portion depicting Gluttony in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things”.

I wrote « Content Rivers and Information Gluttony » on the Paper.li blog, it was originally published on January 13, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

I was prompted to think about the costs and value of comments after reading a post about the latest changes made to Gawker’s comment management system in which Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, laments the poor state of comments sections. Engagement is difficult to get and even more difficult to keep. Whether you get no comments at all or too many, they are always an issue online.

When and How to Invest in Comments

Comments have their place when your blog is about making sense of the world around you — for yourself and your audience. They are for you if you use it to

• learn and teach
• gather insights
• and spot opportunities.

This spirit of quest can encourage great comments and launch deep conversations. If you are willing to participate in comment threads, they offer tremendous help. In “Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort”, Mathew Ingram cites Fred Wilson’s blog A VC as an example of rich comments. Wilson, a well-known venture capitalist and blogger, is ever-present in his comments and nurtures his community because their exchanges are valuable to him.

He shared the main factors behind his blogging success. On the subject of engagement, he wrote:

5) Engage everywhere. That means on Hacker News, other blog communities/comments, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. This takes a lot of time. Too much time. But I get so much value back from doing it that I make the time.

If you’re not in tech, maybe Hacker News is not for you. Anyway, you get the idea. To get more comments, it is very important that you

• leave comments on the blogs of people you respect. They or their audience may take an interest in your point of view
• tweet people asking them for their perspective on issues of interest to both of you
• advertise your post in relevant places.

For more, you can turn to Marcus Sheridan who lists many tips on engagement in comments with illustrations and examples.

Comment Management Tools

Whether you’re a multi-million-dollar publisher, a small business owner or an individual blogger, it’s necessary to filter out spam and moderate to have a healthy comments section. Fortunately, semi-automated solutions are widely available. Akismet, Mollom and Defensio, for example, offer to stop automated comment spam for you. All three have free plans. Akismet is active on WordPress.com blogs by default.

If you have your own WordPress install, you can activate Akismet easily. All you need is to open an account: you will receive a string of characters called an API key that you’ll then enter in the administration area of your WordPress installation.

You can also use services such as Facebook, Google+, Disqus or IntenseDebate which offer to host your comments on their servers for free. Such solutions may seem simpler and less prone to spamming attacks, but they have hidden costs. Comments may load slowly or temporarily go missing if the service goes down. Search engines may not take the comments’ content into consideration, which might impact your SEO.

Moreover, you run the risk of losing your comments if the service shuts down or you change your commenting system. Disqus and IntenseDebate let you export comments if you leave. However, few blogging platforms or commenting systems let you import comments back in seamlessly.

As you can see, solutions exist to make comments work but choosing the right one is a challenge. Whichever you choose, they always demand an investment of time and attention, and sometimes significant amounts of money.

Last year, comments on The Huffington Post crossed the symbolic 100 million line.  According to Arianna Huffington in this Mashable interview, their success comes from a commitment to

• moderating comments using humans and software
• personalizing the display by ranking comments from your Facebook or Twitter contacts higher
• and recognizing good commenters with badges and privileges.

This commitment is real and costly. Their 30 moderators and a robot called Julia cost them a large sum. Lots of dedication and significant investments are necessary to make comments work well.

Another Option: No Comments

When you post reviews or opinions and have no plans to take the feedback into serious consideration, you don’t need comments. When you lack resources or an interest in moderating and participating in your comments section, you might be better off without them.

Solo entrepreneurs and small businesses have limited resources to allocate and that’s OK. You don’t have to accept comments. You can encourage engagement by other means.

If you turn off comments, be sure to write a post explaining your decision. People might accuse you of not being humble enough to accept criticism and dissent. State clearly that you’ll continue to listen to your community. Encourage them to tweet to you, send you e-mails, etc.

Blogging with comments turned off is a sensitive issue and a matter of much debate. Matt Gemmell links to many articles about this question and offers his own take (via Build and Analyze).

There are no absolute reasons for or against comments. It depends on the purpose of both your blog and its comments section. Ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish with your site and whether comments help or hinder your ability to reach your goals.

There are bad reasons for having comments turned on. They are often used to inflate the number of page views on ad-driven sites. When you submit a comment, you have to re-read it and then submit it. That’s two more page views. And when people read comments, they are often displayed on several pages, which adds even more page views. You don’t have to emulate this behavior because page views aren’t the most important metric any more.

In the End, it is Your Decision

You should have a clear idea about what your site is supposed to accomplish; you should think about your comments section with the same care for purpose. Then you can decide whether to have one or not, and how much you are willing to invest in it. Don’t hesitate to think aloud in the comments.

Photo Credits: It just won’t go on! (switch) by derekGavey and Margin Notes by plindberg.

I wrote “On or Off? How to Make Comments Work for You” on Paper.li’s blog, it was originally published on May 16, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

As the festive season was drawing to a close, I –like a large portion of the online population– became concerned about ending the cycle of over-eating. The sense of satiety is easy to numb and hard to get back. It is not only true for food but also for content. Non-physical items can lead to gluttony as easily as the very physical foods and beverages of Yule. Similar mechanisms are at work. Only, content doesn’t have a season. The feast is all year round.

Information overload or gluttony

“Information overload”, I hear you say, “we know that already”. Is it really the problem, though? As Clay Shirky argues in his talk “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”, information overload is our new environment of plenty and not a problem that needs solving. We celebrate the availability of information in many great ways. Yet we experience problems with it sometimes. It lies upon us to create internal and external filters to manage our time and attention because they are our most precious resources.

Excited by the wealth of information available, we lay the traps ourselves by using the tools in an unsustainable manner. I’ve been doing it myself. At some point, I was following three hundred Tumblr accounts and around four hundred RSS feeds. Soon, I started operating under the impression that I should see every item and extract value out of them. These expectations were unreasonable and they were making me crazy. I cut more than half of my RSS feeds. I left Tumblr for a while. Only now that I have returned a wiser man, do I understand more about this information gluttony.

More and More

As humans we’re drawn towards content. There’s a drive to accumulate experience and learn about things because it helps us survive. Putting aside immediate threats, it helps us reach our other goals too. This drive, however, has a tendency to extend. Soon, we start consuming content because it might help us reach a potential goal. Our scope widens out of proportion. That’s also why we hop from entry to entry on Wikipedia and catch ourselves only four hours later. This is why people keep updating their Tumblr dashboard to see more shiny things.

Yet, if we go down this path, neophilia –the love of novelty– becomes the purpose. In the mass of indiscriminate content, true interestingness constitutes a surprise reward. As our brains try to unveil the secret pattern which leads to more such rewards, it sends us on a quest for more and more content. Infinite scrolling or infinite pagination can keep us on a site or service for hours.

Too Little Information To Decide What To Ignore

Dumb aggregation tools collect an endless chronological sequence of content items. The absence of an unread count makes it into a “river of content”. Somehow, this should be enough to change expectations and make it OK. It doesn’t always work and we get stuck on sites like Tumblr or Facebook.

Understanding what features of such content rivers cause you to slip into gluttony is key.

1. Piles make us want to get to the end…
2. but rivers of content have no edges or limits. Trying to consume all that passes on our screens is futile. So, we should know what we can safely ignore…
3. yet, rivers of content are often indiscriminate messes which make it difficult to decide what to read and what to throw out. Posts are often unstructured and stripped from categories: source and date are all we have to decide. Links on Twitter are inscrutable shortened URLs so we don’t even get that precious little indication regarding the source.

Deciding with certainty which pieces you can ignore is important for content consumers as well as curators. Design can help us with that. As publishers and designers we should ask ourselves what relevant information we can provide to help our audience decide what they should or shouldn’t read. Metadata can be richer and more relevant.

Lists and Folders

Until then, we might have to use old tools to organize our incoming streams and restrain ourselves. Lists and categories provide order and visibility. They help us decide what to pay attention to and what we can ignore. To come back to food, you have better chances to avoid picking up candy if you make a list of groceries in advance and stick to it.

Mark Zuckerberg is often quoted as saying: “Nobody wants to make lists”. Most people don’t want to, yet, some order must be imposed if we are to stop treating content like formless stuff. Lists have a long and rich history in helping us make sense of the infinite, as Umberto Eco says. What makes list-making unpopular on the web is the lack of a strong incentive.

Paper.li and Google+ both encourage their users to make lists and categories.

1. Google+ asks you to put the people you follow into circles.
2. Paper.li functions best with public Twitter user lists and, hence, provides a strong incentive to use them.

Yet, there’s something to note about categorization in Twitter lists, Google+ circles and folders in RSS readers. They categorize the sources but not the items they publish. Put a Twitter user in a list and then, regardless of what she publishes, the content is going to be in the list. Same with Google+ and most RSS feed readers. You put a feed in a category or folder and then, the items from that feed are all stuck together. There’s a general lack of granularity and an opportunity for more intelligent tools. Paper.li, however, is different. It shows the source and puts the links in categories like Technology, Business or Education automagically. The result is not perfect but –oh so– helpful. I would love to see other tools do the same.

Bearing this limitation in mind and with practice, it is possible to gain a little control back. Take a little time aside, while we’re still in the beginning of the year, to review your lists of sources and the folders/categories they’re in. It is worth doing.

Image credit: Portion depicting Gluttony in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things”.

I wrote “Content Rivers and Information Gluttony” on the Paper.li blog, it was originally published on January 13, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

Hier soir, j’ai appris avec tristesse la fin annoncée de ThinkUp. Anil Dash, co-fondateur de cette entreprise avec Gina Trapani a expliqué les raisons de cette fermeture sur Medium.

ThinkUp permettait de recevoir des informations sur son utilisation des réseaux sociaux sous formes de petites capsules digestes comme “Evren a utilisé des points d’exclamation dans 133 tweets au cours du mois écoulé” plutôt que sous formes de graphiques difficiles à interpréter.

Malheureusement, ce genre de service repose entièrement sur les APIs des grands réseaux sociaux. Les APIs permettent de récupérer des données depuis les réseaux sociaux pour les traiter. Les grandes entreprises qui les gèrent, font régulièrement des changements dans ces APIs — parfois pour des raisons techniques et parfois pour décourager les développeurs de créer des clients alternatifs.

Au plus beau jour de ce service, on pouvait recevoir des observations pertinentes sur notre utilisation de Twitter, Facebook et Instagram. Facebook et Instagram ont récemment fait des changements importants et assez restrictifs à leurs APIs. Twitter se prépare à en faire aussi.

Comme l’explique Anil Dash dans son billet, ces modifications entraînent des surcoûts de développement imprévisibles. Le nombre d’abonnés n’étant pas assez important pour absorber ces surcoûts et les repreneurs potentiels étant inquiets de buter sur les mêmes problèmes, le service sera arrêté le 18 juillet prochain.

Cela me pousse à me demander si on peut compter sur les APIs des géants du web. On est, au moins, obligé d’admettre qu’il faut des poches profondes pour pouvoir suivre leurs évolutions parfois brusques. Cela rend, évidemment, difficile la survie de petits projets financés par l’abonnement et qui se refuse à afficher de la pub ou vendre les données aux annonceurs. Je me réjouis de voir les co-fondateurs écrire à ce propos.

Je tiens à profiter de cette occasion pour remercier encore une fois très chaleureusement Gina Trapani et Anil Dash pour avoir créé et maintenu ThinkUp. Merci infiniment. Et bonne chance pour leurs projets futurs.

Cette annonce de fermeture me fait prendre conscience, encore une fois, à quel point il est important de sauvegarder le web ouvert et indépendant. Les technologies standardisées et ouvertes permettent, seules, l’émergence de ces projets cools. Bloguer sur nos propres sites, avoir nos propres flux RSS, … est très important pour garder ces technologies et ces usages vivants.

The Buzzfeed piece about Twitter abuse that makes the rounds since last Thursday proves to be a very interesting read. The way the abuse problem has been left to fester is infuriating. So much so that while reading I took notes. Notes laced with profanity. Here are a few thoughts.

Free speech radicalism is an easy extremist tenet to hold in many ways. First, it is often defended by people who don’t know abuse at all. They, therefore, don’t have to make any sacrifices for this radical belief of theirs. Second, it is — in theory — a steadfast policy that protects the company from liabilities. They can then say that they’re a utility and don’t make content decisions.

It stems, however, from a weird idea of free speech. Free speech is great. I wouldn’t want the government to silence me but I want to be held accountable for the shit I say. Free speech radicals seem to have another definition. To many of them, free speech as being allowed to say whatever you want, often without suffering any consequences. Allowing people to be protected from the consequences of shitty actions and shitty words is not a moral imperative. It creates a toxic environment where a few assholes can police the speech of all the others by unleashing barrages of abuse and threats. It doesn’t help foster more productive debates. Just the opposite.

Yet, once people accept something needs to be done, the search for the ‘perfect solution’ begins… This search lead to paralysis as Vivian Schiller is reported as saying in the piece. Extremists always ask for a perfect solution before letting go of their own problematic one. Always seeking to swap an extremism for another. But that’s not how the social space works, that’s not how humans function and communicate. There needs to be moderation in every sense of the word. We need kind and intelligent judgment calls and concessions. There needs to be consistency obviously but no solution will ever be perfect.

Jack Dorsey is quoted as saying “No employee should ever be in the position of having to decide, subjectively, what qualifies as free speech and what does not”. This makes me doubtful that this problem will ever be mitigated. It will always come down to human judgment whether the judgment of a moderator or the judgment of an engineer designing an algorithm. Stress cases will always arise where the meaning of free speech will need to be discussed. Putting the burden completely on the users to moderate is again non-committal safe in the sense that investors might not punish the company and it won’t unleash lawsuits but it won’t fix the problem that for a vast majority of users, being on Twitter is very tiring work, an energy drain and often even a safety concern.

Large organizations all have things they’d rather not discuss (*cough* web governance *cough*), power struggles they’d rather not address, ambiguities that are preserved even if they hurt the business because it is believed that somehow these discussions would never end and distract everyone. I firmly believe leaders should encourage these discussions nonetheless. Especially in this case.

I’ve been a part-time social media manager for a long time now. Other responsibilities and tasks have always made it hard to focus on the social media side of things. This is far from ideal. The stakes are high, opportunities to embarrass yourself and your organisation are plenty. There are opportunities to be seized and risks to be mitigated on social media platforms. To reap benefits, you have to engage. Yet, lots of managers throw social media responsibilities on people — often young people because they’re hip — as just another task in their job description.

If you’re a manager, DON’T DO THAT.

If you’ve been tasked with starting social media campaigns with little prior experience and an already full plate, there are corners you can cut and methods you can use. Remember, however, that corner-cutting always comes at a cost. As a beginner, you won’t be good right away. You should manage expectations.

Chances are, your organisation is going to social media because they want to acquire traffic. Temptations are strong to dive head first in a paid campaign and get results on the spot. You should never start with paid advertising on social media. It would be best to establish a strategy and a baseline presence. That way, you may gather a following that will be an asset for future efforts too.

Be honest and strategize

Be very honest with yourself about the time and attention you can devote to them. Open only channels you can sustain and nourish. Think hard about what you have to contribute and what your audience wants.

What will you publish, for whom, and where? These questions are the most important. Answers depend entirely on what you’re selling and your unique constraints. No shortcuts there.

Start by listening. Research your topics, find what you can provide, find people’s pain points. This will help you determine what to publish. Once you start on social media, never stop listening and adapting. Monitor answers, comments, messages and answer them.

Before you do any kind of paid advertising, publish non-self-promotion updates/links. You should be able to publish helpful or entertaining things at regular intervals. Paid campaigns can help you build a following. It will be more effective if there’s valuable content on your profiles. People will follow your profiles in larger numbers if you have a track record of enjoyable and useful content.

Listening tools

Since you’re time-constrained and/or busy, you won’t be able to gather information actively. You’ll have to rely on tools to monitor the conversation online and find links to share with your audiences.

Large organisations circulate press reviews. You should subscribe. It will give you an idea of the conversation around your organisation and, perhaps, give you links to share.

Google Alerts remains one of my most prized tools. Set up one or several of these. Relevant Google results will pour into your e-mail account. Use straight quotes and the operators AND and OR. Like so…

Be sure to play with the advanced settings (content types, language, …) until you get the best results.

Publishing tools

You should craft updates for each social network individually because each has its own culture and “traditions”. That’s the ideal. You’re time-constrained and/or busy so you may publish links and updates on several social media services at once using Hootsuite. Remain aware that updates tailored to specific networks are best. Make sure your updates work in all their contexts.

Hootsuite also makes it possible to schedule updates. Scheduling is antithetical to genuine conversation which makes it risky. Never do it more than a few days in advance. Social media should remain a conversation. When there are major world events or other ripples through your communities, you’ll have to change your plans. Remember…

• Monitor the conversation and events closely.
• Have a device that can access all your accounts and especially Hootsuite to delete/cancel updates with you at all times.
• Give a trusted colleague access to the accounts in case of an emergency.

Be ready for the traffic you buy

Acquiring loads of traffic is the dream most organisations chase on social media. Getting hits on a page with incomplete information is a waste. People will turn around and leave in an eye blink the page doesn’t answer their questions. They will leave if they feel mislead, if the page doesn’t load fast enough, if it doesn’t capture their interest… Problems with your website content can annihilate all your efforts. Best make it good before directing tons of expensive traffic to it.

Work with the people who take care of that website to iron things out. Ask yourself and them… Once they get on this page, what do you want prospects to do? What is the end goal? You can try to get as many prospects to give you their contact information and have your sales team contact them. You may want prospects to send an application through a form or place an order. Decide on a desirable outcomes and trace the steps that’ll get you there.

You should have the basics of this process (the sales funnel) figured out before launching any campaign. You’ll never get it 100% right. Be ready to keep iterating and adapting forever.

Set up your analytics right

There’s money on the line. For each paid publication or ad, you should estimate how many sales you made, how many prospects decided to contact you, etc. depending on your end goal.

Make sure the site where the traffic from the social network will land has Google Analytics enabled. Your objectives (form completions, post-sales thank you pages…) should be set as goals. Get help from the website’s developer for that. Make sure the data is *actually* collected. Require access to all relevant analytics panels to keep an eye on things.

Google Analytics makes it possible to create unique URLs to differentiate traffic sources. For each paid publication, create a unique URL and you’ll know which paid publication generated the most traffic. It will permit to accurately follow which link was clicked. You can, therefore, compare various versions of your ad and campaigns. Use the URL creation tool from Google Analytics. Everything is explained in the detailed help section.

A word of caution… You will most probably have big discrepancies between numbers from Facebook Ad Manager and from Google Analytics. This may feel weird to you and your bosses. There’s not much you can do about that. Analytics are only indications. Most marketers have to accept this as a fact of life. There are various ways to explain these differences in this Quora thread.

Take your time and let algorithms take theirs.

The more time you have to prepare and execute a campaign, the more bang you’ll get for your buck. On the contrary, the less time you’ll have to invest, the more money it is going to take to get results. With enough sharp thinking in your targeting (the criteria used to select people you want to see your ad) and enough time for the social networks’ algorithms to test and optimise your campaign, clicks, likes, comments or video play will be cheaper.

If you feel overwhelmed by these notions, you understand why this is a job ;). Being a beginner at this stuff and be put in a position in which you have to perform is stressful, I know. Don’t get discouraged though: read articles online, make mistakes and correct them, get help…