Reach Further

Andy Roberts recently posted an excellent comment on his blog about how not to use online communities. It’s well worth a read.  His point is that you can’t just pop into a community and use it like a noticeboard, once - especially not for what is essentially an advert.  (”You’ll all be interested in this training course/product/service …”) Online communities, networks or communities of practice are collections of people with similar interests and/or concerns, and they are very useful as a way of spreading the word and establishing your online identity. But to make a impression you must be part of the community, not just trying to take advantage of it.

Do:

• Join relevant online communities and forums.
• “Lurk” (read without posting) in the community for a while before first posting to get a feel for it.
• Reply to messages in the community, particularly if there is a request for information or advice that you can genuinely respond to.
• Offer to sponsor or advertise in a community that is particularly relevant to your area of business. It may be more effective to offer a question and answer session or to be a “resident expert” rather than paying for a banner advert of some kind.
• Offer sample products for the community to review (and accept the review they come up with - even if it isn’t all good! It’s up to you to make sure your product stands up to a test). Make such offers via the community manager or moderator, not directly to the members.

Don’t:

• Join a community merely to post adverts for your business. That will not endear you to either the community manager or the members - and they are the people you need on your side, you want them to use their influence to support you rather than against you.
• Drop in on a community once to post an advert or ask for help.
• Join a community merely to advertise your own community or website - ie poach the members (very bad form!).
• Post anything in a community which is not relevant to their main focus, eg discussing Macintosh software in a PC forum, or screenwriting in a community for poets.

Have you ever been misunderstood online? We’ve all experienced occasions when an email didn’t quite convey the message it was supposed to. Such problems can take a surprising amount of time to clear up - to establish what was really being said.

An amusing email mistake was reported on the BBC last week. A Swansea council emailed its in-house translation service to ask for the Welsh translation for a road sign “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”. A return email arrived and its Welsh text was duly added to the sign. Unfortunately what the sign actually read in Welsh was “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated…”

So how can you avoid an embarrassing mistake like this happening in your business? Just a short company email policy can help. It might include items such as:

1. Treat all email correspondents with the same courtesy as you would those to whom you send a letter, including an informative (but not too long) signature.
2. Read through all emails before you press the SEND button.
3. Make sure you include a relevant subject line for every email (change the subject if replying to someone and the topic has varied from the original)
4. Choose your words carefully to be unambiguous and avoid slang - and be very careful with humour as it can backfire online. This is particularly important if you correspond with those with a different cultural background from your own.

Perhaps one should add: if you have more than one language within the organisation out-of-office messages should be in BOTH languages!

Other helpful information about email policies:

• Acceptable Use Policy
• Business Link’s Internet and email policy guidelines
• Internet and email policies from Acas

Please add a comment if you have any further tips or stories.

Planning is well in hand for tomorrow’s Women on the Web in Leeds (17th September). This all-day conference at exciting venue NTI will bring together over 40 businesswomen. A Forward Ladies event, it is sponsored by NTI and Reach Further, who are organising it. With Meg Pickard as our keynote speaker and a galaxy of local businesswomen sharing their tips and tricks on how to use the Web to further their business, it should be an enjoyable day looking at how women can make the most of the Web for work, learning and play.

Use the Web to:

• Save time
• Save money
• Create new income streams
• Make friends and influence people!

A few spaces still left, booking is available at the Forward Ladies’ website.

You’ll find Reach Further partners in many social networking spaces – we “practice what we preach” and are members of many social networks and online communities. Time is finite, so we’ve found it makes sense to carefully choose the networks and communities that you belong to. Choose those that have the right kind of demographic for your business.

For example, I don’t bother with MySpace and Bebo, although a poet friend loves MySpace for finding readers. That’s because the users of MySpace are generally young and not likely to be our potential clients. Other professionals have recommended Plaxo. We definitely use LinkedIn - not the biggest of the networks but designed to put professionals in touch with one another. Some consultants have reported that all their business is now coming through LinkedIn.

I also use Facebook. We work a lot with Universities, and while the profile of Facebook users is on the whole again very young, the older users that there are tend to be related to the University sector where our clients are. If you can find a network that is related to your industry or market sector then it may have far fewer members than the big networks, but be much more useful for making contacts that benefit your business.  The demographics of sites may also be different in the US from the situation in Europe or in the UK itself. Check information about social network demographics, relating the results to your own geolocation and industry.

 I’ll leave the last word on this subject to my favourite cartoonist blogger, Rob Cottingham on where do the cool kids hang out?

On the BBC’s dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones recently discussed whether or not Brits can make any money from blogging.   While there are various quotes from Ashley Norris, previously of Shiny Media who is convinced the UK situation is too small and parochial for bloggers to make money, Cellan-Jones is slightly more optimistic.

It probably isn’t  possible to replicate the success of the big US blogging companies, but there is certainly money to be made with blogging as part of a portfolio of skills, for example, for journalists and social media consultants - and, I would add, as part of a strategic online marketing policy for any business.

Blogger Patrick Altoft is quoted with some excellent advice for any blogger: what is at the heart of good and successful blogging is that: “You have to develop your own niche, you need to break news, you need to write stuff that nobody else is writing.”

In September 2002 a small news item flashed around the Internet. It was forwarded from person to person in private email, posted on message boards, and written up in news services for “techies” all over the world. Its headline was something like “First Smiley Rediscovered”. Mike Jones, a researcher at Microsoft, announced that he had rediscovered the thread (sequence of bulletin board messages) in which the smiley had been used for the first time.

It was first suggested by Scott Fahlman in a post to the CMU CS general bulletin board in September 1982.

19-Sep-82 11:44  Scott E  Fahlman  :-) 

From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c> 

I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for 

joke markers :-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical

to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. 

For this, use :-(

Why is the smiley so important that several researchers had spent six months tracking it down? They located old backup tapes and the hardware to run them, and looked through them one by one, narrowing the date to find the exact sequence of messages, in a series of discussions by Computer Science staff and students at Carnegie Mellon University, in which the smiley was proposed.

Fahlman himself explained why it was needed: “Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.”

It is generally considered that 55% of communication is non-verbal body language, including facial expression, 38% is tone of voice, and only 7% is content – the actual words used. The exact figures may be disputed, but it is certain that non-verbal clues when combined with verbal ones have many times as much impact as the verbal clues in face to face communication. So how do we replace these vital non-verbal clues in a text-only environment? How do we express the subtleties of human communication from sarcasm to irony to teasing, with just text to do it in?

Writers have, of course, been conveying all manner of emotions meaningfully in words for centuries, but in the normal intercourse and discourse of cyberspace – email, bulletin boards, chat and other text-based virtual environments - the writers are not normally poets nor do they have the luxury of thousands of words as do prose writers.

Online communications are generally rapid and short and misunderstandings can arise very easily, so quite early on in the development of computer communications technology there was a clear need for such short-cuts and symbols. The smiley was probably around long before 1982, but Fahlman can reasonably claim that it was his use of it that was taken up by the fledgling global online community.

The smiley was only the first emoticon (from emotion and icon), and there are now a wide range of them used as a way of expressing emotions and feelings online. Initially they were based on the simplest characters available to computers, ASCII characters, but now many computer systems including word-processors and Web-based discussion boards automatically replace a typed smiley with a special smiley-face icon (try typing :) colon-close bracket into a Word document - or a Wordpress editing window! ).

Fahlman, Scott, “Smiley Lore”

Mehrabian, Albert, “Silent Messages” (1971)

Twitter is a quick messaging or microblogging service. Basically it’s like a web-based texting or short message service. You have 140 characters to say something briefly.  Your series of short messages or “tweets” becomes a record of what you are doing and thinking that other people can “follow”. Many Twitterers mainly put out “what I am doing now is…” type “tweets” and hearing someone’s on the train is not fascinating.  But if a colleague is looking at a new web app or a competitor is reading a new book on your subject, maybe it’s worth joining in and becoming a Twitter user.

It has a variety of uses that could be beneficial to your business, including:

1. Following gurus  in your field and people you admire, and even competitors.
2. Asking questions or throwing out any problems you’re grappling with.
3. Marketing and promotion to any customers who use Twitter – put out brief news and special offers, or alert people to your new web content.
4. Finding out a bit more about your contacts and facilitating closer relationships – when you give someone your business card that’s often the end of it, if you can get them to follow you on Twitter (and use Twitter wisely) then you will always be in contact with them.
5. Keeping in touch with flexible or travelling workers.

So why not see what it’s like? Sign up at twitter.com and if you’re already there why not follow me on @helenrf (http://www.twitter.com/helenrf) and let me know what you’re doing!

Blogging is a great way to establish your identity as an expert in your field and a potent addition to your online marketing activity. If you’re a beginner or need new ideas for your business or personal blog, join our blogging course.

This is a practical 9-week online course introducing you to blogging and providing you with all the content-generating ideas you could ever need, as well as how to write great blog titles, use a blog for search engine optimisation, and more.
Participants can start the course any time in the week commencing Monday 12th May.

Learn how to use a blog to sell your expertise, build relationships with customers, find new audiences and boost your search engine rankings.

• What a blog can do for your business
• Tips and tricks on generating content painlessly
• Getting the search engines on your side
• How to make money from your blog

On this course you will do as you learn, joining a community of bloggers and supporting each other, hand-held by experts, as you launch yourself online.

Here is more information

Register by contacting blogging @ reachfurther . com
or leave a comment.

The BBC programme Click online reports today on a security flaw in the Facebook website. Many users enjoy adding the many third-party games, quizzes and other applications that are available within Facebook, from Scrabble-type games to movie quizzes to ways to turn your friends into zombies.  The BBC’s Click reporters have shown how they could create a Facebook application which looked ostensibly like a harmless fun application but in fact downloaded the user’s personal details AND all their friends’ personal details.

Whether this would be enough for someone’s identity to be stolen would depend on how much information they made available on their profile - but privacy settings would have no effect on this malicious code because you don’t even have to accept the application - you just have to be a friend of someone who has, and your friends have access to all your details.

I have already stopped installing new Facebook applications.  I will also look once again at the kind of information I make available on the Web.

Do you give your real birthdate on Facebook or any other site?  Will you be looking again at what information you give out?

Following the publication of Dr Tanya Byron’s report Safer Children in a Digital World for Ofcom, much is being said in the news media about the dangers for children online. Parents are being frightened into believing the only safe solution is to sit beside their child whilst they are online, or turn off the computer and watch TV instead.

The web is a great place for kids! There are lots of websites that are good for children – offering help with homework, support for their interests, safe social spaces and even advice and education on staying safe online. What do these excellent sites have in common? Good moderation practices. Moderation means that there are people behind the website, people who monitor and if necessary edit or delete the content that children put up, often before it reaches the web. People who make sure that your child is not seeing anything they shouldn’t, or being contacted by anyone inappropriate.

The Byron report specifically recommends the development of an independently monitored voluntary code of practice on the moderation of user-generated content, including making specific commitments on take-down times. Good children’s websites are already following best practices.

Reach Further Ltd. (reachfurther.com) is a Leeds-based specialist in online community and training moderators. Consultant Liz Cable said: “Parents should look for safe online communities designed for their child’s age group, not allow random access to social networking sites. There is a difference, and the difference is safety.”

One of the oldest sites on the Web where children can contribute is Kids on the Net (kidsonthenet.com). Editor Helen Whitehead says “Every piece of writing submitted by a child is checked by a moderator BEFORE it even reaches the website. No information is published that can uniquely identify a child and they cannot contact others except via the moderator. Parents and teachers can be assured that children can enjoy reading and writing in a safe space.”