April 2006 Archives

I'll be speaking on a panel this fall on Web sites for legal professionals at Internet Strategies for Legal Professionals hosted by National Business Institute Seminars. Here are the details as of now.

I'll be speaking on:
Basic Considerations for Marketing Your Firm on the Net
A. The Elements of a Valuable Web Site
B. Getting Started - Maknig a Plan
   1. Selecting a Hosting Company
   2. Creating a URL
   3. Cost-Effective and Free Means of Attracting Visitors
   4. Creating Email Addresses
C. How to Get Visitors Active on Your Site
D. Your Firm's RSS Feeds, Blogs, and Podcasts

Internet Strategies for Legal Professionals
August 28, 2006
Chicago, IL
9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Guy Kawasaki shares some ways to evangelize your blog from what he learned in his first 120 days of blogging. He has several great tips, many of which I would have employed when I launched From the 21st Floor. Two that stand out to me from his list of tops are:

1. Think "book" not "diary." I totally agree with Guy on this one. But when I launched this site I wasn't quite thinking "book." I knew that I didn't want to make a diary. I have another site for that chit-chat babble. No, From the 21st Floor was going to be about highlighting my knowledge on topics and sharing it with you, the reader. It was also an outlet for me to publish my articles and create a professional presence. Taking this process thinking of every post similar to a "book" will only make this Web site better.
2. Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant. Guy actually labels this one as Scoop Stuff, but his Japanese philosopher quote sounds better to me. To augment Guy's comment regarding to read the top fifty bloggers via Technorati and link to important news you find, I say read the top bloggers in your niche market. It could be the top fifty in Technorati, or it could be the top fifty Web designers/developers, or the top fifty knitting blogs. Don't just limit yourself to blogs either, but any Web site for that matter. I call this reading the beacons or the "information hubs." Information hubs are the bloggers who have way more time than I do to read a lot more feeds than I do. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of the profession you monitor. Thus when they pick up a trend, you'll know about it. Now they may be the "scoopers" because they are the ones monitoring the feeds, but if you may find something out of their feeds that is just as important that you can scoop.

The only thing on Guy's list that I would caution readers is regarding number three, Collect E-mail Addresses. I throw out a word of caution on this one in regards to blasting a message out to an acquired list of e-mail addresses. If you acquire them through meetings, business cares, etc. you should be fine with sending them an e-mail. If you harvest them off another blast message you may fall under some CAN-SPAM compliance issues. Finally, whenever you send out an e-mail blast, have a mechanism in place that will allow those individuals whom you have their e-mail address, but never really contact, to opt-out of future announcements. Sounds complicated, I know, but it is really best in the long run. You'll have a healthier relationship with those recipients. Remember, while we all give out our business cards at conferences, meetings, networking events, we tend to forget who we give them to, and the inbox is a very sensitive place. We don't want anymore unsolicited messages in there as the next person.

Finally, Guy mentions creating a blogroll, that is on my to-do list and his blog will surely be added.

Carson Systems launched their latest project last week. It is called Vitamin. Vitamin is a resources for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs. It brings the best and the brightest in the Web industry together to talk about the Web and how to make it better. Amongst other things, the latest post is from Dave Shea. Dave discusses how IE7 is going to break all of our Web design hacks for CSS and gives some guidance on how we wil manage this as we fix our designs and prepare for the future of browser support. I get the pleasure of seeing Dave speak in Chicago at the CarsonWorkshop on Building Beautiful Web Sites with CSS. I was so impressed with other CarsonWorkshop seminars, and Dave for that matter, that I got 14 of my colleagues at work to go too. Should be a great time.

Check out Vitamin, their podcasts, and the advisory board. Great group collaborating in this space.

Feedburner reports that Podcasting is growing by leaps and bounds (at least from the feeds that they service). Rick Klau, VP of Businness Dev. for Feedburner reports on his blog the interesting fact:

In May, 2005, we managed about 6,000 podcast feeds – today that number is well over 45,000 feeds. What’s particularly intriguing about that number is that there are just 44,000 radio stations worldwide (AM, FM and shortwave). It’s a cool milestone, as the media landscape continues to shift…while radio audiences have been declining for years, podcast audiences are growing almost 20% per month.

Yeah, that is amazing. I've only recently got into podcasting. Mostly as a listener, but I've dabbled in creating a show as well. Maybe someday I'll produce one for The 21^st Floor. My new iPod Video helped get me to listen to podcasts. iTunes just makes it so dirt simple. Subscribe, listen, and remove once done.

Of course podcasting has no sign of slowing down. The "un-label" is being created by Adam Curry and Podshow looks to bring everyone new ways of monetizing on podcasts. Big sponsors like Earthlink and GoDaddy see the value and have jumped on board with this new medium. Yes, the record labels and radio stations have something to be worried about because ad dollars are going to be shifted from MSM to independent producers.

Realizing that podcasting is not just for independent radio shows, the legal profession sees this as an educational tool to provide CLE for either on-demand or self-study. You can check out my article on the subject at LLRX in my monthly column.

Two friends of mine, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell have launched their much awaited podcast. Titled The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Tom and Dennis discuss legal technology with an Internet focus. First episode covers ABA TECHSHOW, how to get the most out of it, and what you can learn/take away from legal technology conferences.

Grab the Feed

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does it make a noise? Now, if you write an article that is on a topic, but don't include words that will get picked up in search results, does your article get indexed and consequently read? When it comes to writing for the Web (and really, what isn't written to be syndicated in some way, shape, and form, on the Web these days?) articles, blog posts, essays, reports, registration pages, should contain words that visitors will most likely search upon. More often than not I will see pages that have great content, but are heavy on technical words and/or phrases, not the common man's word for the same thing, which is more likely what will be searched upon. So if you write great content and do not use the rich keywords that are most likely to be searched with, will anyone find your published content? The answer is probably no more than yes.

What sparked this whole line of thinking was the article This Boring Headline Is Written for Google(TimeSelect Article $$) by Steve Lohr from the New York Times. In the article Lohr discusses how newspapers are experimenting with their headlines to make them more search engine friendly. Some are going through the practice of using two different headlines for articles. The "marketing one" where it grabs the readers' attention from the main news page and a more SEO one that is published on the deeper article location, which is more likely to be picked up as the link in search engine results.

This is an interesting approach. Of course newspapers are all about getting readers to read columns. Thus writers are coming up with crafty titles for their stories. Where the problem comes in where the headline has nothing to do with the content if taken out of context, something a search engine is great at. And because newspaper's headlines on their homepage change daily, if not hourly, they essentially can do this without consequence from the search engine algorithm changes. So how can you get your content indexed by the search engines so it can be read more often by Web searchers? Here are some tips.

Recommended Reading

First, I have read a couple of books that I highly recommend when it comes to learning how to write for the Web. They include:

Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy
by Nick Usborne

Content Critical: Gaining Competitive Advantage through High-Quality Web Content
by Gerry McGovern and Rob Norton.

Both will give you a great insight as to how surfers "read" and how you can adjust your writing style to accommodate for that behavior.

Tips You Can Use Today

Here are some tips I recommend you try before and after you write that next blog post, news article, report, or essay.

1. After establishing a topic, do research on the commonly used terms or keywords that are related to the topic. Understand that these terms are more likely to be searched upon than not, so try and use them in your content. Beware not to go overboard using them. You will want to use them in moderation.
2. Conduct some quick searches yourself on the topic. What do you type as your search terms and do you find content related to the topic?
3. Conduct a keyword density check against your completed content to see if your identified words are present enough.

Some Quick SEO Tips for Formatting Your Content

1. Use the title of the content as the title of the Web page.
2. Use rich keywords in your sub-headers (h1-h4 tags).
3. Use sub-headers instead of formatting paragraph tags as bold and size 4.
4. If you link to other pages on your Web site, do not use "click here." Rather, use more descriptive words for the link text. This will help visitors who use screen readers as well as give the search engine bots context about the page it is about to spider.

The ultimate goal around writing for the Web is to make sure you write for search engines and in readable chunks of content for scanners. The more you know about readers' behavior (search, reading, etc) the more you can tailor your content to meet their needs and thus the more you will get read. The only other recommendation I can offer when it comes to writing for the Web, be sure the content is of value. Value has a wide range, but the real goal for the best search engine optimization is to get your content linked to. The only way that will happen is if it is good enough to be linked to – thus valuable to somebody.

Who knew that three little letters could be the future of online publishing and the way individuals gather information? Maybe Dave Winer knew when he started the revolution years ago. Regardless, RSS is going to take over the world one user at time. Still foreign to many, RSS is one of the few disruptive technologies that has changed the way I not only gather information, but surf the Internet as well.

First some background. While the Internet has become the new medium of choice for Generation X, Generation Y, or whatever letter my cousins who are about ten years old are, many of us rely on it just as much for information as our parents did on radio and newspapers. Today more than ever we are in the information age and the Internet is all about information. That is what it was built on and that is, at the end of the day no matter how much marketers and entertainment companies wish to manipulate it, the Internet will always be about words.

To augment information and how it is delivered to the end user RSS was born back in the late 90s. For a good history lesson, head over to Technology at Harvard Law.

Today RSS is popping up everywhere. Made popular by natural integration into blogging software such as Movable Type, WordPress, and originally in Radio, RSS has moved into the mainstream media as well. It is not uncommon now to see the magical orange RSS graphic on major online publication Web sites such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and others. What makes RSS unique is the way it is used by the end user.

The basic scenario: You fire up your computer and you have roughly 10-30 Web sites you like to visit for information, research, or leisure on a regular basis. Sometimes it is weeks before you visit one site again, others it seems like every 30 minutes (can we say ESPN??) looking for new content that has been published. Instead of always surfing back to those Web sites, what if the content came to you, spam free, and always what you asked for? That is exactly what RSS does. You subscribe to an RSS feed by adding the URL to a News Aggregator (Web based like Bloglines, or local like Feed Demon). When the online publisher of the RSS feed you subscribed to publishes new content, your aggregator lets you know usually on a hourly basis. So no more surfing to all those forgotten Web sites, all the information comes to you.

Ok, so how is this important now that we had our short lesson as to what RSS is and how it works? Well in the age of spam, less reliance on print publications (yes the time is coming), and the need/desire for information on a realtime basis RSS is going to take over become the norm. With portals such as My Yahoo! allowing users to add RSS feeds to their own personalized portal pages the need for RSS has become exponentially in demand. Not only does RSS feeds provide news, but sports information, concert updates, and more.

Where RSS has started to solidify it's footing even more is now with the ability for publishers to take even further advantage of the medium with advertising, tracking, and "Flare." All this can be done through a local Chicago company called Feedburner. Feedburner is the no-nonsense solution for publishers of an RSS feed to keep tabs on what is going on with it. Feedburner is one of those companies I classify as a "Company Who Get's It" and one whom I would love to work for someday. I think they definitely "get it" and continue to make other publishers see if they "get it" in terms of where on-line publishing is going and how they can take advantage of it.

My advice to anyone starting up a blog, Web site, Webzine, or any portal on the Internet, make sure it has RSS capabilities. Better to plan now because RSS is not going away. Syndication is here to stay.

This post was updated from a prior post from www.frederickfaulkner.com, which is now defunct.

Note: This is a republished post from my old Web site (now defunct and removed). It still has value towards the "Big Picture" concepts discussed here.

Tom Peters has published another great ChangeThis manifesto called Tomato TomA^[h]to. OK, it was published back in July, but I'm finally getting around to it today. In it Tom explains how while on a trip for a speaking engagement he woke up in the middle of the night sweating.  He had a nightmare of being accused of explaining his point of view with too many exclamation points (!!!!).  To combat his nightmare, he picked up a pad of paper and a pencil to write.  What came out was a manifesto of ‘They’ vs. Tom explanations for how business must be conducted today.  Some examples of what Tom had to say were:

They say…my [Tom’s] language is too extreme.
I say…the times are extreme.

They say that Brand You is not for everyone.
I say the alternative is unemployment.

This goes on for about ten solid pages of back and forth.  I wanted to point out a few that I found thought provoking and true from my point of view. 

They say “We need more steady, loyal employees.”
I say “WE NEED MORE FREAKS WHO ROUTINELY TELL THOSE ‘IN CHARGE’ TO TAKE A FLYING LEAP…BEFORE IT’s TOO LATE.”

They say “Of course we believe in marketing.”
I say “Is your Web site Sooooo Cool, Soooo Fresh, Soooo Friendly to Use that it gives you goose pimples just to e-visit, even though you’ve seen it 1,000 times?”

They say “Employees need Well-defined Structure.”
I say “Talent should be encouraged to embark on Quests to the Unknown.”

and finally,

They say “We can’t all be a Brand.”
I say “Why not?”

 There are many more that are just as inspiring and make you think about the way business is conducted today.  I had a few observations of my own about the business world and what I see in the news today.  I would add the following to Tom’s list: