This post is part of a short series that addresses the top questions at Web Fuelled Business, a training program for thousands of companies across the UK run by Doug Richard’s School For Startups. I’ve developed the social media component for this training.

One of the recurring questions at last week’s workshops was:

Should my domain name and Twitter handle match?

You want your Twitter handle, website URL and company name to be as close as possible, and you want them to be memorable and easy for someone to get right when they enter it into Google. If you have yet to buy a domain name for your business, try to find a domain that is also available as a Twitter handle — or is very closely related. For example, our company is Social Signal, our domain is www.socialsignal.com and our Twitter handle is @socialsignal.

How did we achieve this feat of co-ordination? We chose the name for our company based on the available URLs. (Back in 2005, there was more selection — and since we started before Twitter did, we had our pick of Twitter handles when the day came!) We knew our company was going to do only social web projects, so we wanted the word “social” in our name. (Awesome luck that Web 2.0 went out of style and the term “social media” became the industry standard instead.)

I’m in love with OneLook for just this kind of challenge. We used OneLook to search for phrases that included the word social, and then we narrowed the results to “common words and phrases only”. Then we went through the list, and whenever we found a phrase we thought *might* work, we popped over to our favourite domain registrar (these days it’s Hover.com) to see if the name we liked was available as both a .com and a .org (because we did a lot of work in the not-for-profit sector) and ideally also .ca (Canada) and .net.  Of the various phrases that were available at the time, “social signal” seemed like the best bet (strangely, it no longer appears in the OneLook search results.)

OneLook search results

DomainsBot search results

Another tool that is great for finding that perfect domain is DomainsBot. You can put any word into the DomainsBot search engine, and it will show you a list of all the available domains. You can choose a keyword related to your area of business or company name, and it will give you a list of all the possible domains you could register that contain that keyword or its synonyms and variants, which you can then register with the domain registrar of your choice. This is how I recently became the proud owner of bootseeker.com, so that I could create an affiliate marketing site that would allow me to monetize my compulsive boot shopping, until I stopped to ask what would a normal person do and realized a normal person wouldn’t expect  their Friday night boot-browsing to generate an income stream.

Once you’ve found an available domain you like, double-check that it’s available on Twitter before you register. If you can’t get a domain name and Twitter handle that match, you may want to think about a different name/Twitter pairing. And if you are a new company, or one that isn’t known by its corporate brand (maybe you’re known more by the names of your principals, or you’re a walk-in business) you might even think of changing the name of your company to align with an available domain name and Twitter handle.

Having a memorable domain name is much more important than having a matching Twitter handle — you can san always come up with a Twitter handle that is a slight variant, or even fun name, and use the “name” field in Twitter to enter your company’s URL so it shows up whenever people see one of your Tweets. (This is another reason you want your URL to match your company name.) When you are choosing your URL and handle try to:

• Get a .com domain, and if applicable the national domain for your country (like .ca or .co.uk) and possibly the .net and .org as well.
• Register possible typos or points of confusion — for example we own social signals.com and alexandrasamuels.com. Redirect all your extra URLs to your main site.
• Avoid domain names (or company names, or Twitter handles) that could be confusing if they are heard rather than read. That means puns are a bad idea. If you have a chance to do a radio interview that will let you promote your rabbit farm, you want people going to hareraising.com and not hairraising.com. Which is a great reason to put your website (and company) at RaisingRabbits.com instead.
• Keep your Twitter handle as short as possible since you will want people to “retweet” your posts, and the number of characters in your username (handle) will count against the 140-character maximum when they do.
• Google any name or term you are thinking of using as a domain and/or Twitter handle, so that you know if anybody else is already using it — even if they don’t have the domain, you want to be careful before exposing yourself to potential confusion. So think about whether the other people or organizations using that name could be confused with yours, or could siphon traffic from your site.

If all this sounds like a lot to consider when naming or branding your business, remember that great creativity often comes from great constraint. The fact that it can be hard to find a good URL — let alone an URL and Twitter handle — is hard to find means that you’ll have to think creatively about how to find your name and nice. The great news is that once you find your great name, you’ve made it easy for your customers to find you.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

The entrepreneurs who participated in the Web Fuelled Business program this week are pushing past the limits of physical location. They are bricks-and-mortar shops that are using the web to attract local customers who would never find them on the street; they are manufacturers and distributors who are using the Internet to enter the international marketplace; they are creators and service providers who are creating businesses that exist only thanks to the Internet, either because it allows them to do without a physical place of business, or to provide a core offering that is some kind of online service.

They have been assisted in this voyage by the extraordinary Doug Richard, a successful American entrepreneur who is now the UK’s leading guru of entrepreneurship. In the seven days I’ve spent listening to his presentations over the past year, I’ve watched Doug deliver the best advice I’ve even heard about how to hire, the most succinct summary of what you need to know about SEO, and the kindest dissections of a company’s core flaws. (Doug has a gift for ruthlessly identifying a startup’s essential vulnerabilities, but he manages to deliver the hard truth with the compassionate directness that doctors use deliver a terminal diagnosis.) He’s just as generous off-stage: the frank, thoughtful and surprising conversations we’ve had on the road have challenged my perspective on business and changed the way I think about my work. As a result, I’ve learned more this year about how to grow and run a business than I have in any other year since we launched Social Signal, and maybe more than I have in all seven years put together.

Web Fuelled Business puts Doug’s small business expertise in service to 3500 companies across Britain who are using the web to drive their growth. With the support of the UK government, Doug is delivering a day-long training in 15 cities across the UK; that day covers the first hour for each of five different courses, each of which has another 20-30 hours of material online. I was along to deliver the social media training, for which I’ve created the online course.

Also on the team was James Dening, an e-commerce whiz who launched his own consultancy after several years as Amazon’s Sales Director for Europe. James managed the rare feat of making room after room laugh their way through the job of setting up an e-commerce site and Amazon product listing — in a single hour, while also laying out the fundamentals of e-commerce strategy. If social signal.com or alexandrasamuel.com soon offer shopping carts that sell consulting or content by the hour or page, you can blame James: he left even the most service-y service businesses eager to think about how they could package their services and offer an on-site shopping car. There are a lot of things I could say about how much fun James is or how helpful he is as a translator (there were a lot more vocab gaps than I’d anticipated!), but let me just stick to the thing that will impress some of you the most: he runs his own micro-ISP! Apparently his village is so small that it didn’t have a high-speed Internet service provider, so he got his own backbone, servers etc. I am picturing this as a kind of 21st-century Downton Abbey situation, where the benevolent gentleman ensures the village has Internet access, the way he might once have ensured they have a doctor and a church.

If Doug, James and I were able to show a thousand entrepreneurs in three cities how they could transcend the physical limitations of a place-based business, it’s only because there was an extraordinary team liberating us from the job of thinking about anything beyond what happened on stage. For all that we live in a digital world, there are enormous complexities in doing something as tangible as delivering a day-long training in 3 different cities, 3 days in a row. Four amazing women conquered those complexities and put on highly polished events — events you would seriously think were produced by a full-time, dedicated event planning company — while also handling all the travel, food and psychological needs of Doug, James and me.

They were led by Megan Downey, who has project managed this entire process of developing and delivering a hybrid, on- and offline Web Fuelled Business Program. Her combination of poise and effectiveness led me to assume she must be a lot older than she looks. But she isn’t — my jaw dropped. Thank goodness for her maturity, because she actually had to save me from two potentially humiliating giggle fits. (Hey, you try keeping a straight face while extracting a microphone pack from the inside of a tight-fitting dress.)

Sarah Stephens handled all the travel organizing, from finding our awesome venues (a community church in Manchester, a theatre in Nottingham, and an Indian wedding hall in Birmingham) to lining up great, locally-run hotels (because part of the S4S commitment to entrepreneurship is to patronize local businesses). When I briefly lagged behind the crew on our departure from Birmingham, I had a brief moment of panic when I wondered how I would get back to London if lost them in the crowd. Then it occurred to me that I could look at the train ticket. That was when I realized how completely Sarah had wrapped me in a secure travel bubble, and how rough it would be to return to real life!

Fiona Russell is Doug’s social media goddess, who somehow managed to keep the @WebFulledBiz Twitter feed buzzing along while also managing the registration process — an epic challenge since it required complex coordination between live participant lists and online course registrants. A normal person who has just survived a gruelling fourteen-hour work day might nod politely when a social media smart-ass insists on brainstorming Twitter contests; Fiona not only responded with enthusiasm, but had the whole thing in place by the next early-morning start.

And then there is Fanny, who jumped into fill all the gaps. Fanny reminds me of the old joke about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels. You have not seen fortitude until you have witnessed this lady steer a load of conference gear down cobblestone streets, dressed to the nines and sporting 3-inch heels. (Would that I had taken a photo!) She dresses like a diva, but there isn’t a trace of diva in her, so I’m hoping she’ll join Pinterest and be my new trans-Atlantic fashion inspiration.

While our traveling band was enjoying the sight of faces lit up by the revealed potential of remarketing, Amazon storefronts and LinkedIn, the home team was doing the hard work of finalizing the online learning site. Vanessa Knight managed to bend time (or perhaps the minds of web developers) to go from platform selection to full implementation in just 6 weeks. No, I’m not kidding. And yet she still maintained her good graces when I asked for permission to do just one more set of tweaks to my course…and then another…and then another. At 2 a.m. This is the kind of thing that web developers just love.

If she managed to create six kick-ass e-learning experiences that quickly, it’s in part because she fantastic content to work with. No, I’m not talking about my own brilliant contributions. (Though in all serious, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve put together for this course — I feel like it takes all this stuff I’m randomly spewing out at people 24/7, and turns into into an orderly, comprehensive and navigable plan for building a company’s social media presence.) The really cool parts are the videos created by Adam Tysoe, who got me from a plane to a drafty studio in early November, shot me for two hours, and miraculously produced these amazing explanatory videos that intercut my on-camera comments with related footage.

The live video is complemented by screencasts that were captured and edited by Chris Cunniff, who helped me create step-by-step video walkthroughs on everything from sales targeting with LinkedIn to tweet scheduling with HootSuite. I thought the latter was going to actually break my brain — try lining up multiple tabs with multiple instances of HootSuite, each showing a different set of timings for the same set of prospective tweets, without messing up the datestamp on a single tweet and thus throwing the narrative out of order. Chris met me at 9 am, and by 11 was into full Alex Brain Melt Emergency Panic Mode, but was never anything except incredibly kind and lovely. OK, maybe one thing — incredibly fun.

I’m torn between feeling incredibly lucky to work with a team that is so congenial and so accomplished, and feeling incredibly sad that I don’t get to hang out with them every day. I’m hoping that the Internet will transcend the limitations of our far-flung physical locations just as it transcends the geography of a thousand great, web fuelled businesses.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Social media can be a huge driver of traffic and revenue for a company with an effective web presence, but how do you actually go about setting up an effective site?

That’s what many of the entrepreneurs at Web Fuelled Business asked this week, in one form or another. In the past three days, I helped over a thousand companies in Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham as they plunged into an intensive day-long workshop that tackled the most crucial aspects of using the web to drive business growth. And when the entrepreneurs took the floor, several questions came up again and again:

• Should my blog be on my web site or a separate site?
• Should my Twitter handle and website URL match up?
• What platform should I build my site on?

I was going to blog the answer to all three of these questions tonight, but then I remembered another question I got today: How long should a blog post be? I advised on 300-700 words, and since answering all three questions pushed me well over 1000 words, I’ve decided to take my own brilliant social media advice and split them up into a short series. So today I’m just tackling the first question.

Ideally, your blog should be integrated with the rest of your website, if for no other reason than your own sanity: why burden yourself with maintaining two sites? This will also make it easier for you to use related content from your blog on key pages in your web site, and to make other SEO-boosting interconnections between your blog and other parts of your site. Since a lot of blogging platforms (like WordPress) also let you create regular web pages, it just makes sense to do that as a single site if you’re starting from scratch.

Even if you build and/or host your blog and your website separately (e.g. you have a website built and hosted by a local web company, and a blog hosted on a site like WordPress.com) you should set them up so they share the same domain. In practice that often means setting up your blog on a separate subdomain. If your site is at www.yourcompany.co.uk then you can set your blog’s address to blog.yourcompany.co.uk — many blogging platforms offer the option to have a “custom URL” or “custom domain” as part of their service. On WordPress.com, you can set up a free blog, and it costs another $12 or $17 per year to have that blog on a custom URL (like blog.yourcompany.co.uk) rather than on the default of wordpress.com/yourWordPressusername

I’ll answer the other two questions over the course of the next week. It’s the least I can do, given how nicely everybody lined up to ask them. We Canadians may think of ourselves as an orderly people, but the Brits put us to shame.

Web Fuelled Business enterpreneurs lined up to ask questions of James Dening and me during our lunch break today.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

“I make leather armour.”

That’s a sentence I never expected to hear in this lifetime. In fact, until about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know what leather armour was. I din’t know that leather armour existed.

Leather armor, it turns out, is what you wear if you need to look like you just walked out of a medieval jousting tournament. If you work a desk job, that may not come up a whole lot, but it’s quite useful if you are making a movie or TV show about Ye Olde Lords and Ladies. There’s an even larger market of people who wear leather armour for LARP. (Live Action Role Playing — thanks James Dening for that translation.)

The armorer in question was one Julie Morrisroe of Cosmic Workshop in Manchester, England. Julie is a participant in the Web Fuelled Business program created by Doug Richard, for which I’ve developed the social media course. She’s already an active social media user with a lively Twitter presence, and she wanted to know how she could keep track of all her different social media activities.

No wonder social media works for Julie’s business. She’s in a defined and memorable niche, with customers who are hugely passionate about the part of their lives (role playing) that her products speak to.

If you feel like social media couldn’t possibly work as well in your organization, take a cue from Julie’s role-playing customers. When you create a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or even a blog, you’re putting on a persona just as surely as if you were slipping into leather armour.

I’ll give you a moment to digest that image.

OK, still with me?

Here’s what I mean: yes, social media is all about authenticity — all about speaking to your audience in a sincere voice that feels human and immediate instead of organizational and message-boxed. But you still get to choose which sincere voice to use.  I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t have multiple facets to their personality, and that’s even more true of a company, agency or not-for-profit.

Leather purse by Cosmic Workshop

At the end of the day Julie gave me a lovely little purse she had made for herself the night before. This photo can’t do it justice, since it is made out of the nicest leather and manages to be both very pretty and very tough. It’s going to be the perfect container for my business cards, especially since it will allow me to reply to compliments with, “You like it? It was made for me by my leather armorer.”

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Do you have trouble making good on your New Year’s resolutions? Do you have a hard time staying focused on your most important work? Do you simply get overwhelmed by all the tasks on your plate, and worry about how to get them all done?

When I’m trying to stay on mission or on task, Excel is my best friend. That’s right: the lowly spreadsheet can be a powerful tool for accomplishing your goals. My latest blog post for the Harvard Business Review shares my 7-step process for achieving your goals, using Excel to help you focus on what matters.

Since this system is based on using a spreadsheet to sort and organize your tasks, I’ve created a multi-page Excel template that steps you through the process. Some parts of this process borrow from Stephen Covey (the idea of prioritizing tasks that regenerate you is analogous to his “sharpening the saw”) and David Allen (like the “someday/maybe” category). Most importantly, this process was inspired by my work with executive coach Jeff Balin, who kicked my ass until I finally had to acknowledge that simply putting something on my to-do list wasn’t enough to get it to done.

Download the Excel template: 7 steps to achieving your goals, and please feel free to share with friends.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Last week I shared my top 11 most popular blog posts that I wrote in 2011, as viewed on this site. This week I’m sharing some of my own favourites from 2011: the posts I wrote on different subjects, and later this week, my favourite posts by other people.

I’m beginning with my favourite posts on working with social media. These are the posts that offer insight on how to use the web and social media at work, how to strengthen your practice as a social media professional, or how to sharpen your professional practices by using the web as a catalyst.

1. 5 steps to create your social media toolkit: Building a social media presence around a specific area of expertise is your best way to connect with a network and audience that cares about your work, and gets real value from your online contributions. This blog post walks you through the 5 steps that will get you up and running with three tools that will let you build and maintain a credible online presence as an expert: a WordPress blog, a Google Reader account and a Twitter presence managed through HootSuite.
2. How to sustain a social media presence in 3 hours a week: Feel like you don’t have enough time to create a meaningful social media presence? In this post I spell out my step-by-step process for creating and maintaining a high value, useful blog and Twitter presence in just (I mean it!) 3 hours a week.
3. 7 rules for rule-breakers: The Internet may be based on standards, but it hates rules. Thanks to the Internet we are now faced with almost daily choices about when to obey, and when to defy. If you’re going to be an online rule-breaker (and you probably should be, at least some of the time) these 7 rules can help with your rule-breaking.
4. 10 ways you can help to build the Internet: You can help to create the Internet without writing a single line of code. You can help create the online world in which you and your children are going to live. This post maps out 10 ways you can help with that important and rewarding work.
5. 6 questions to prepare you for a social media crisis: On October 27, 1980, the ARPANET — the Internet’s earliest incarnation — had its first epic fail. The experience of that spectacular, network-wide outage contained lessons that every web professional should think about today.
6. 40 tips on how to make the most of your life online: How can you make the most of your time online? For my 40th birthday, my friends and colleagues offered me their best advice — including some tips that have already changed how I live, on- and offline.
7. Social media for small organizations: Why size matters: This blog post was written as part of a series, but it’s a post that many organizations could usefully read on its own. If your organization has fewer than 100,000 members, you need to recognize the constraints that size imposes on your social media strategy…and develop a social media plan that can work effectively at your scale and with your available resources.
8. Respecting the billable hour: Would you ask a friend or colleague for $500? If you’d even hesitate before asking, you need to read this post about how to understand what an hour of time means to someone whose income depends on hourly billings. And if you’re one of those people, you need to read this post so you know how to handle those awkward requests.
9. The 3 essential questions every blogger should answer: Any blogger — newbie or pro — should be able to answer these three essential questions about his or her blog.
10. 7 tips for creating a great speaker’s video: If you want to pitch yourself as a speaker, trainer or just as a thoughtful person worth listening to, web video is a crucial medium. Event planners use video clips to guide their speaker selections, speakers bureaus use videos to pitch people from their roster, and your target audience of customers, influencers and fans may form their first impressions from your video online. Here’s how to make a great speaker’s video that works for you.
11. 15 best practices for managing your first (or subsequent) web development project: If you’re about to hire someone to build a website for you — or if you’re project managing a website for the first time — this post can get you up and running by telling you what to expect. And if you’re a veteran of web development projects, this post will help you remember how they unfold so you don’t smack your head four days before launch and wonder how you could be going through this yet again!

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Refuse to quantify your worth and your relationships. Delete your Klout profile, and sign onto the Social Sanity Manifesto.

My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review outlines a Social Sanity Manifesto: a set of commitments you can make in 2012 so that the Internet becomes a place where relationships are built, not commodified. Here’s the very first commitment on the list:

I will delete my Klout profile. (If you use social media, you probably have one, even if you haven’t signed up on Klout.) I will assess my influence through my actual and reflected accomplishments, not a commodification of my relationships.

Deleting your Klout profie is an immediate and tangible action you can take to recover from metrics madness. Even if you’re not ready to turn your back on metrics, you may still want to delete your Klout profile. Klout has been criticized for violating the privacy of minors, exploiting users for their own profit, and using a deceptive or unreliable algorithm.

Yes, it feels somehow risky to drop out, in part because other apps, including the beloved HootSuite, now build Klout into some of their filters. But we should be wary of the service’s claim to reduce our importance, and our friends’, to a single number. We should be wary of building a world in which human value, and human relationships, are quantified.

Pulling the plug is simple, but not obvious, particularly since Klout changed the process after a number of pro-deletion posts were published. So I’ve mapped out the steps to deleting your profile, as they stand today. It takes a staggering 7 steps, but you can complete them all in less than 3 minutes, so just take the absurd number of steps as another strike against Klout and a good reason to kiss it goodbye.

These steps work whether you have claimed your Klout account or not, but they are a little different if you haven’t signed up for Klout. Follow the orange arrows in each picture so you know where to click.

1. Go to Klout.com.
   >> If you have previously signed up, log in using your Facebook or Twitter account, and follow my directions for registered users.
   >> If you’ve never signed up, click on “Learn more” (see orange arrow) to get into the Klout site, and follow my directions for unregistered users.
2. Unregistered users: Once you’re inside the Klout site, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on “privacy”. Skip to step 5.
3. Logged-in users: Select your profile settings from the upper-right dropdown.
4. Logged-in users: At the bottom of the profile settings page, choose the itty bitty “click here” link next to the assertion that “Klout values your privacy”.
5. Next, you’ll land on the Privacy Policy page. At the bottom, you’ll see the following text: If are not a Klout user and wish to opt out of Klout, please click here. If you have a Klout account, please sign in before following this link in order to delete your account.  
   
6. Now you’re on the final appeal for mercy — a page that exists just to give you another thing to click before you delete. For logged-in users, it looks like this (click where it says, “continue opting out”):For unregistered users, it shows this option instead (you’ll need to authenticate with Facebook or Twitter to complete the process):
7. Finally, you will see the opt-out completion form, where you get to tell Klout why you are leaving. I told them: I’m committing to the Social Sanity Manifesto! I don’t want to live in a world where my relationships are measured.
   

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

How many project software tools does it take to collaborate effectively?

If you’re anything like me, your answer might run to the double digits. I mean, how can you work with someone unless you can communicate through a combination of e-mail, Twitter, Skype, SMS, and chat? How can you share work in progress and avoid duplicate effort unless the whole team uses Google Docs, DropBox, a shared Evernote notebook, a collection of citations in Zotero, MindMeister for mindmapping, a board of images on Pinterest, a common folder of Google Reader feeds and an agreed-upon tag in delicious? How will you keep track of your tasks and time unless you’re all using Basecamp and Harvest? And let’s be honest, how viscerally annoying will you find it to watch your new teammates take screenshots without using Skitch, update their status without using HootSuite or access PDFs without using Papers?

Lest you think I exaggerate, I have foisted everything except Harvest upon one or another of my Emily Carr colleagues this past year. As far as I’m concerned, the first two weeks of any project should be dedicated to the sign-up process and learning curve that will turn my new team-mates into Web 2.0 productivity nerds.

Strangely, however, some of the people I work with seem to be more interested in getting our project done than in choosing or learning the project software tools that I insist are absolutely required in order to work effectively. And since I notionally recognize that the term “collaboration” isn’t just a category of software, but also a philosophy and practice of working closely and respectfully with other human beings, I have tried to open my mind just a tiny bit to the possibility that not every aspect of group work requires a different web application.

What I’ve learned is that the geekiest person in the group is not, in fact, the right person to drive collaborative software choices. In fact, if you’re a passionate early adopter, you’re probably the last person who should drive which software gets used. After all, your early adopter-ness means you are both experienced and skilled at learning new software; you’re also much more likely to be familiar with the tools your colleagues like to use than they are to be familiar with yours.

So instead of jumping in with your awesome lifechanging software picks, how about hanging back and seeing how the rest of the team likes to work? Find out what they use already — most often a combination of Google Docs, email, and sometimes Twitter or Evernote — and then take the lead in strategizing how to use it for this particular project. And if you’re working together over an extended period of time, and the tools your colleagues like using are failing in some very obvious ways, then and only then can you think about introducing one or two tools that can maybe fill the most painful gaps.

The beauty of this strategy is that when you avoid overwhelming your collaborators with a tidal wave of new software, you actually create some space for them to notice and get interested in the tools you use. Maybe they are still taking notes in Word, but they see you using Evernote; maybe they are trading files by keychain, but get intrigued by your use of Dropbox; maybe they are writing down their appointments in an actual paper calendar (I actually do have several colleagues who do that!!) until they see the jaw-dropping beauty that is Calvetica.

People, when that day comes, you will be ready. And until then, you and your favorite software tools will just have to collaborate on your own.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Back in the day, the only real way to have an online conversation was to build your own blog or online community. These days, many people, companies and organizations have their first taste of online conversation and social media through pre-established social networks like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

But eventually, you might outgrow what you can do with those sites alone, or decide you want to have a new kind of conversation that is best supported with an online community of your own. When that day comes, you’ll face the painful, terrifying and thrilling experience of building a website — if not with your own bare hands, then through the efforts of an in-house web development team or web development company.

It’s a process that is always challenging, but never more so than the very first time you undertake the job of managing or supervising a development process, even if it’s as a client rather than as a developer. You don’t know what to expect, you don’t know what questions to ask, and you don’t know who is responsible for what. So let me offer a very partial set of observations and insights into the development process, which may make your first time out a little less overwhelming — and which may help experienced web-heads refine their approach, too:

1. Developer hours are your new hard currency. If you’re managing a development process, you need to treat each developer hour like it’s a bar of gold. If this is your first dev process and you’re working with experienced developers (if this is your first dev process, I really hope you are working with experienced developers) then they probably cost your company or client somewhere between 2-5x what you get paid per hour. Unless you’re dealing with an infinite budget, that means you have to be careful about where you spend those hours and dollars — and even if the dollar constraint isn’t tight, you’ll find that a good developer typically has other demands and will offer you only so many hours, so use them wisely. Once you start seeing your development hours as very, very precious, a lot of other development principles follow….
2. You are supposed to be the bottleneck. One of the challenging aspects of the client or project manager role is that you turn into a bottleneck: there’s a steady flood of incoming tasks for the dev team, which you’re supposed to pass along, only you feel like you can’t feed them to the dev team fast enough. You’re the bottleneck, which we are told is a bad thing, so you feel terrible. But here’s the secret to your role in the development process: you are supposed to be a bottleneck. By slowing the rate at which incoming tasks flow to the dev team, you allow them to work on the priorities that have already been established. While you may need to feed them some occasional additional tasks, particularly after a period of testing, it’s your job to filter all those incoming requests so only the essentials make it to the dev team.
3. Ticket your tasks. Web development companies typically use tools like Unfuddle to track their outstanding development tasks including bugs that need fixing. If you’re working with a development team that will give you direct access to their ticketing system, you  may find it easiest to feed your tasks directly into the system; most of the time, however, the dev team will want you to give them tasks in some other form, so they can enter them into the ticketing system with all the details they need in order to address the task correctly. But you can create your own de facto ticketing system by religiously writing each incoming issue down in a single place, using a consistent format that allows you to review all issues and prioritize the ones that will go forward to the dev team. I recommend doing this in a spreadsheet (if you want others to see what’s already on the list, use Google Docs) or using a task/project management system (like Basecamp).
4. Review and prioritize. If you’re “ticketing” all the incoming questions, bug reports and change requests in a single spreadsheet or task list, you can review that list on a weekly or daily basis to decide on which items will get forwarded to the dev team. (Weekly for most of the process, daily when you are in the final phase of quality assurance and launch.) The closer you are to launch, the higher your threshold for what gets prioritized: if you’re just a few days from launch, the only things that should be addressed are the 5-alarm fires.
5. Batch your questions, bugs and change requests. It’s very easy for a web development process to get overwhelming, if only due to the volume of email it generates. (A project management tool that includes threaded messaging, like Basecamp, can help a lot.) If you are relying on email to send requests to your dev team, try to limit yourself to one email a day unless you are facing a major emergency. Ask your dev team to do the same — to reply to all your questions in one email per day (or week), replying to each line item/question directly underneath that question, so you see that each issue is addressed (even if it’s just to say that the dev team has now added that bug to their ticketing system). (You may want to agree that they can reply to each ONE email from you with up to TWO or even THREE emails from them: the first email to answer all the questions they can answer off the top of their heads, the follow-up email(s) to address any outstanding issues that require further investigation.
6. Snap your glitches. Part of the secret to communicating with a dev team is communicating clearly about what problems you are having or what you need done. That’s a bit of a Catch-22 when you’re new to web development, because you don’t necessarily know how to describe what you are looking at. So don’t try — take a screenshot instead, and send that to the dev team in your next batch of requests/bug reports! Use a tool like Skitch, and you’ll be able to draw an error on the part of the screen that is puzzling you, or to write a short note directly onto the screenshot noting your concern. Just make sure your screenshot includes the URL of the page you’re looking at. (The easiest way to do this is by including the top of your browser in the screenshot.)
7. Google your problems. If you are doing hands-on work as part of the site development process, such as authoring or loading content, you may run into problems that could be bugs — or could just be things you don’t yet know how to handle. Before you ask your dev team for their (expensive) help, try googling your problem: if you’re getting a specific error message, google that, or if you’re just trying to figure out how to do something, google the task along with the name of the web tool you’re working in (e.g. “WordPress how to insert image in post”). Unless you are working with a custom-built or obscure tool, the odds are good that somewhere on the web, someone will have done an awesome job of explaining how to do the thing you are trying to do, or how to fix the thing you are trying to fix.
8. Give up quickly. The flip side of batching your concerns is that you know you will be in touch with your dev team every couple of days. So if googling your problem doesn’t yield a quick answer, don’t keep slamming your head into a brick wall. Add your question to the batch you will be sharing with your dev team later today or this week, and then set the task or problem aside until you send your next batch of questions and get the answers your need.
9. Define what constitutes an emergency. Talk with your dev team about what constitutes an emergency, so that you agree on what calls or emails simply can’t wait for the next batch. Normally that will include any issue that prevents users from accessing a significant part of the site (either because it’s a very important part, or a very large chunk) , an issue that produces a visible and embarrassing bug (like a huge missing image on your home page),  or an issue that creates some kind of  legal liability (like disclosing private user information). And agree with your dev team on how to reach them quickly if you do face an emergency: email? tweet? SMS? call? Whatever your communications mechanism, it should be a channel that can get a response in less than 1 hour anytime during business hours, and ideally well into the night. (But remember, that channel will only stay open and responsive if you are onlyvery careful not to abuse it. If you have “emergencies” on a regular basis, either you are too quick to call your dev team, or they aren’t doing a good job of keeping your site bug-free.)
10. Schedule a standing check-in call. Email is great, and project management software is even greater. But there is nothing to keep you in sync with your dev team like regular phone calls. Scheduling can be tricky, so set up a time for a regular weekly call or meeting as soon as your work gets underway, and increase that frequency to at least 2x/week (possibly even daily) for the last couple of weeks leading up to launch (those daily calls can be short, but can help to quickly address urgent issues). Keep a separate queue of issues to discuss during your next call, and take 15 minutes to prioritize that list just before you have your weekly check-in, so that your most important issues get addressed even if you run out of time.
11. Build a buffer. Just as your job is to serve as a buffer between your site’s users and your web team, you may find that you need a buffer between you and all those authors/users. Don’t feel like you need to address every single question or suggestion as it rolls in: set up an auto-reply if you must (“thanks for your email, someone will reply soon”) and then do a daily (or for smaller sites, twice weekly) review of incoming reports, feedback, info requests etc. Decide which of these should be transferred to the queue for your dev team (if any), which you can and should reply to in detail yourself, and which can either be ignored or get a non-personalized follow-up (“We’ve reviewed your suggestion and will consider it for our longer-term marketing plans.)
12. Pay attention to what your dev team says is easy or hard. This is a longer-term investment, but unless you are going into web development yourself, the most useful thing you can know about how to build websites is what’s easy and what’s hard. That varies substantially from platform to platform and even version to version, but if you think you’re going to be working with the same web development tools or content management system in the future, it’s worth learning about what is easy to fix and what’s complicated. This is not intuitive, since things that often seem incredibly simple (changing wording on a field, adding a checkbox to a form) can turn out to be very tough, and things that seem hard (adding a rating system, displaying related tweets) could turn out to be incredibly easy. The more you listen to what your dev team says is easy or hard, the better you’ll be at prioritizing items during future dev projects (because you’ll know to prioritize easy-but-important tasks over hard-and-important ones).
13. You will not get it right. Even if you take all the foregoing to heart, your website (and especially your first website) will be full of shortcomings — if not outright errors and bugs. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong: it’s a sign you’re doing it right. If you waited until every last problem was fixed, you’d never launch. Better to get your site up on its wobbly legs as soon as possible –to “launch crappy”, as we used to say — and to start learning from your users before you invest any more money in building functionality they’ll never use, editing pages they’ll never look at, or fixing glitches they’ll never notice.
14. Get a mantra. When we were building our very first client website, our client gave us a crucial piece of advice: iterate. In other words, get it done, get it live, and start learning. We printed out that one word — ITERATE — and plastered it on the wall of our office as a touchstone. Choose the touchstone that will help you remember that you’re not trying to build the perfect website, and put it where you’ll see it every day.
15. Enjoy. One of the things my non-web friends often say they envy about my work is that I actually make stuff. This used to seem kind of funny to me, because I grew up in a world where making stuff meant actual physical stuff like cars and clothes. But with so many of my friends working in professional fields where there is truly no tangible work product — just ideas shared, organizations improved, people made less neurotic — I’ve come to see the miracle of a job that actually creates a visible outcome that other people can visit, experience and participate in. Looking at the site you’ve been part of and thinking, hey!! I helped to make that!! is almost the coolest part of building your own social website.

But not quite. Because the actual coolest part comes when your part is done, at least for now, and all those community members start moving in and posting content and talking and actually using this thing you thought you built. Because that’s when you realize you didn’t actually build a site at all: you built an invitation. And now other people are accepting that invitation, and using it to build something far more personal, meaningful and alive than anything you could ever have imagined.

What bits of wisdom would you pass along to someone working on a web development project for the first time? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below, or tweet them and link to this page in your tweet.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

My latest post for Harvard Business tackles the lessons other companies can learn from the latest social media disaster, this time brought to you by Qantas Airways:

[A]irlines are far from the only businesses to face a newly redrawn balance-of-power between company and customer, or between employer and employee. And it’s these larger shifts that should make every industry take note of the Qantas gaffe…The only way to prevent your company from pulling a Qantas is to…[s]top treating social media as marketing, and recognize it for what it is: an invitation to transform the entire way your company works, and possibly even the business you’re in.

The post focuses on the specific lessons that can be drawn from the Qantas misfire, but there’s a meta-lesson here, too. It’s a widely recognized truth that we must learn from failure: many people argue that failure is actually the most valuable, and perhaps the most fundamental, learning process. That’s why entrepreneurs, and tech entrepreneurs in particular, champion the virtues of failing fast: the faster you fail, the faster you can learn from your failure, iterate, and improve.

But here’s the truth about Internet-era failure: you can’t fail fast enough. Both technology offerings and customer demands evolve so quickly that if  your learning by failure is limited to your own missteps, you will miss several cycles of learning and evolution by the time you get your next iteration out the door.  You have to find a way to identify, track and learn from other people’s and other organizations’ failures, simply to get enough data about what does or doesn’t work today.

That’s why all the exegeses of social media #fails amount to more than just schadenfreude. Yes, it can be kind of amusing to watch other companies’ social media failures, particularly when they go so far over the line that they play as comedy. But it’s also a vital form of learning: a way to get better at social media faster than you can fail, learn and iterate on your own.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do all your learning by failure from the comfort of the cheap seats, however. I see all too many organizations hang back from social media precisely because they’re terrified of failing; terrified of doing something that will provoke criticism or simply the embarrassment of an invitation to engagement that falls flat. The same companies that are too scared to make a move will likely try to convince themselves that learning from the failure of others is a great way to avoid making mistakes of their own.

But you won’t be ready to really absorb the lessons of other people’s social media missteps until you’ve gone wrong yourself. It’s the pain of going awry online — and the knowledge of the complicated organizational, technical and social dynamics that make the occasional misstep inevitable — that allow you to have some insight into the possible sources or consequences of another organization’s misfire. You can learn from the failure of others, to be sure  – but you’ll learn the most if you are risking, embracing and learning from failure yourself.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post originally appeared on my blog for the Harvard Business Review.

"I can see why it's important, but it's not something I need to be an expert on myself."

"I've got better things to do with my time."

"I guess I'm too old to really get it."

I was talking with a colleague about gaming when I heard these phrases come out of my mouth. I run a digital research centre in a city, Vancouver, that's a serious player in the gaming industry. That means I'm one of the few people who worries that I don't spend enough time playing video games. Sure, I have a few games on my iPhone, but as I told my colleague, I've got better things to do with my time, like catching up on Twitter. I've got a Wii, but at my age, it's way easier to see the point of blogging than the value of World of Goo. I got a Playstation 3 so that I could play Uncharted 2 &38212; all the hype about the latest generation of truly cinematic games made it sound like an important development — but hey, I don't need to become a champion gamer.

Holding video gaming at arm's length felt totally justifiable, until I realized why my resistance sounded familiar. It's the same resistance I hear — and counter — about the social web. As a social media geek, I rarely go a day without convincing a friend that even a 42-year-old can enjoy Facebook, or hectoring a colleague about how much time and effort they could save with social media communications, or coaxing a communications pro into embracing social media as a core part of their professional practice. I bat aside the protests about age, time commitment and personal preference.

Until it's time to invoke them myself in the context of video games.

The release of the Microsoft Kinect last week once again forced me to confront my double standard. Faced with the widespread accolades for this "revolutionary", controller-free gaming system, I felt like even a skeptic like me had to take it for a spin.

The experience was in fact revolutionary enough to inspire a set of 10 predictions for how the Kinect will change our world in the next decade. And it pushed me to think about how my anti-gaming arguments would hold up in the face of the same arguments I use to evangelize social media. Here's how they break down:

• I don't need to be an expert on this. You don't need to be an expert on everything, but you do need to be an expert in your own field. And guess what? If you're in marketing, advertising, communications, or the media, social media is now central to your field. That means you need more than a Twitter handle and a LinkedIn profile: you need to be as comfortable choosing the right social network for an online campaign as you are choosing a broadcaster for your latest ad, and as creative in conceiving an online conversation as you are in crafting an offline message. And I'm afraid that if you're in a media or technology field, gaming is now mission-critical too. With American teens now spending more than ten hours a week on gaming, a deep understanding the culture and idiom of video games is essential to participating in the future of in web communications, narrative and media creation.
• I've got better things to do. This excuse is a pet peeve of mine. You find time for professional investments like reading trade journals or going to conferences; you may make time for hobbies like golf or knitting. What makes you think social media is intrinsically less meaningful than what's taking up your time now? In fact, Twitter's being used to help survivors of the Haitian earthquake. It's fine if you have things you'd rather do than tweet, blog or Facebook, but then you'd better not want to want to work in communications or media. Because in 2010, saying you don't think social media is worth your time is like saying your communications job is not worth your time. Same goes for video games. You need to at least have working knowledge of them or you'll lose your job to someone who thought it was worthwhile to understand this enormous new medium.
• I'm too old. Unless you're reading HBR for your high school social studies class, then you're right: you're much too old to "get" social media. You will never be a social media native. On the other hand, that's not an excuse to dismiss them. You simply must get comfortable working with tools and media that feel fundamentally foreign. That goes double for gaming: if you feel like you're too old to "get" console and iPhone games, be prepared to be pwned by 3D gaming and neural interfaces. And cheer up: today's high school students will be tomorrow's old fogeys.

The tough love argument on video games leaves me feeling the way I see my friends and colleagues look after a good harangue on the importance of diving into social media: daunted and anxious. The Darwinian "do it or get winnowed out" lecture may be true, but it's no way to stoke the kind of sustained enthusiasm that's necessary to mastering a field.

Here's what works: URLs. Point me to Dance on Broadway, a Wii game that promises to indulge my weakness for musical theater. Show me a review that makes the latest game title sound as emotionally affecting as the movies and TV shows I love. Get me to download a game that blurs the line between gaming and art.

Stop trying to convince me that learning about video gaming — or social media — is a way of avoiding professional pain, and start showing me how it can be a source of personal delight. Because nobody ever became an expert under duress. The only way to become a real expert is by loving something enough to get really, really good at it.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

At the Merging Media conference today, we heard from Jon Fine, Amazon’s Director of Author & Publisher Relations. Jon’s talk reminded me of the terrific presentation I heard at AOIR from Tim Laquintano, a writing professor at Lafayette College who spoke about the evolution of self-publishing. Drawing on their talks, as well as on a paper by Tim, I have identified 5 key issues that authors need to consider if they are interested in self-publishing:

1. Income potential. Tim Laquintano’s history of self-publishing included the remarkable tale of Carlo Flumiani, who ran a robust and highly profitable vanity publishing scam before being convicted of fraud in 1941. Stories like this may contribute to some authors’ hesitation about self-publishing, fearing that it’s a route to embarrassment or financial ruin. As both Laquintano and Fine have made clear, self-publishing today is frequently more profitable for authors than publishing with a traditional house, since they can sell digitally or through print-on-demand, and earn a significantly higher portion of total sales. Fine made a point of noting that many Amazon authors earn six-figure incomes from their self-published titles, and a few have even hit the million-dollar mark.
2. Discovery. If you’re only selling your book to people who know they are looking for it, you’re missing a lot of your potential market, so it’s important to have a strategy for reaching people who would be interested in your title if they knew it was out there. Jon Fine points out that traditional book discovery has placed a lot of emphasis on “hand selling” (when a bookseller places a recommended title in your hands, based on your expressed interests) and cover appeal. In the world of digital book selling, your book’s cover matters less than the metadata you use to describe your title. Using the right keywords is the online equivalent of the book jacket: it’s what makes your title turn up in searches that are based on topics or areas of interest rather than only for readers looking for your specific book.
3. Platform. Time was that if you published a book with a traditional publishing house, they did the work of building a platform (i.e. a reputation) for you. These days, traditional publishers are primarily interested in working with authors who have a pre-established platform, and authors who go the indie publishing route will likewise need to build (or build upon) their own platform. Tim Laquintano notes that online communities can provide a great mechanism for writers to generate publicity, provided that authors don’t treat these communities as ad platforms, and instead become meaningful contributors to the community conversation.
4. Legitimacy. One of the major themes in Laquintano’s talk was the shift from “vanity publishing” (with its connotation of being far less credible than mainstream commercial or academic presses) to “indie publishing”, in which self-published authors have a newfound legitimacy. But where does that legitimacy come from, if the author hasn’t run the gauntlet of agents, editors or peer reviewers who have read the work and found it worthy of publication? Fine emphasized the importance of authors building out and curating their Amazon.com pages (both the pages for their individual titles, and their overall author page) since this will usually be the top Google result for a search on a book title. Filling out your author bio, upcoming appearances and the editorial reviews of your title all help to underscore the legitimacy of your self-published work.
5. Authorship. Both Laquintano and Fine focused on the benefits of epublishing for authors. The process of exploring epublishing at Emily Carr has led me to think a lot about the other players at the table: not only writers but also designers, developers and media creators. If you want to go beyond print-on-demand books or PDF-like ebooks, and instead create enhanced ebooks that take wider advantage of mobile, social and touchscreen technologies, a traditional writer working alone will not be up to the job.The ebook experiments we are doing at the SIM Centre are aimed in part at evolving a new model of authorship in which writers, designers and developers collaborate on both form and content so that we can create ebooks that realize the potential of tablet-based devices for storytelling and knowledge-sharing. The business models that make indie publishing appealing to writers aren’t as well-suited to these new forms of authorship: the costs of developing enhanced ebooks (which are often highly complex software projects) demand new models of financing and of distributing both the risks and rewards of authorship.

You can read more about Jon’s work in this interview in Publishing Perspectives, and find out more about Tim’s work in his paper on Sustained authorship: Digital Writing, Self-Publishing, and the Ebook.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

If you want to pitch yourself as a speaker, trainer or just as a thoughtful person worth listening to, web video is a crucial medium. Event planners use video clips to guide their speaker selections, speakers bureaus use videos to pitch people from their roster, and your target audience of customers, influencers and fans may decide to follow or contact you based on what they see on film. Creating a great video (or several) for your website is thus crucial to building your audience and reputation, even if you’re someone who mostly communicates in writing.

But creating a great video clip is far from easy, even when you’re blessed with great production values. I was fortunate to speak at a recent CIGI conference that captured a couple of high-quality videos: the straight-to-camera video I posted yesterday, and a video of the panel I was part of (a clip is below).  I reviewed these videos with Rob, who put on his speechwriter/speech coach hat to help me take a honest look at what did and didn’t work.

The fundamentals of a great speaker’s video are the same as the fundamentals of a great speech: focus on the 1-3 points you really want to drive home, illustrate them with engaging stories, and talk (rather than read). If you’ve got those essentials in place, what you need to worry about are the aesthetic considerations that might not matter (or even be noticed) in a live presentation, but can become glaringly distracting on video. Here are some pointers to keep in mind:

1. Move your thoughts. As you can see from watching the straight-to-camera video, I keep my best ideas just above my head, and slightly to my right. That works fine in day-to-day life, but when I’m mid-speech and look up to grab my next idea, my eyes roll up in a way that looks mighty strange on film. So I’m now in the process of moving my ideas down and to the left, so that when I’m searching for my next thought, I can either look off to the side, or into the middle distance.
2. Dress for your audience. I love to wear layers and bright colours, but on camera it looks cluttered. Dress simply, and think about the audience you want to attract: if it’s a business crowd, wear a jacket or suit; if you want to reach creatives, wear a sharp sweater and jeans, or a monochromatic dress in an interesting cut. Keep your jewelry simple (make sure nothing bobs or sways when you move), and if you’ve got facial piercings, wear your most discreet studs or rings.
3. Watch your mouth. These videos constitute reassuring evidence that I am able to go up to 20 minutes without swearing, but if that’s a challenge for you (it is for me!) make sure to implement a swearing ban for at least a week before your talk. And don’t forget to watch your mouth literally: give yourself a pre-talk check to make sure there’s no spinach in your teeth, and (note to self) tone down the redder-than-red lipstick.
4. Talk with your hands. An extended speaker’s video gets dull if it’s just a head-and-shoulders shot. If you’re the kind of person who naturally talks with your hands, cut loose — and I’m not talking about the traditional pounding of the podium.
5. Modulate your voice. We’re taught to associate a steady, low voice with authority, but all that authoritative talking sounds tedious on camera. Use your full register — highs and lows — to keep your talk lively and your audience engaged. Just be careful not to veer into squeaky territory: if that is a problem for you, take note of the changes in your emotional state that get you up into those squeaky spots, and practice breathing before you get there.
6. Smile. The most appealing moments in these videos, IMHO, are the moments when I’m smiling. Don’t be afraid to delight in your own ideas, or in the anecdotes you’re sharing. Breaking into a natural smile brightens your face and helps your audience connect with you emotionally.
7. Picture your grandmother. When I was growing up, my grandmother nagged me mercilessly about my posture. Many other have since joined the choir (which drives me crazy, BTW, so please don’t join them). But the best motivation for working on my posture has been seeing myself regularly on film: every time I do a TV interview, I imagine how my Pilates teacher would feel about the way I’m standing or sitting. Now when I give a talk or interview, about 30% of my brain is focused on standing up straight, which slows the other 70% down just enough to keep my speaking at a comprehensible pace.

If these tips sound like the result of an unforgiving look into the mirror, you’re right. But that unforgiving look is exactly what you need in order to create a compelling clip. Once you’ve got it, don’t forget to give yourself an equally frank assessment of all the ways you’ve gone right!

For more on how social media is redefining politics and political change, read 6 questions about the impact of social media on think tanks.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

True confession: I treat conference panels as competitive events. Whenever I’m participating in a multi-speaker panel my secret goal is to “win” the panel. This doesn’t mean I try to take down my fellow panellists: it’s not like wrestling or ice hockey, where you’ve got to crush your opponent in order to take home the gold. It’s more like rowing or cycling or maybe figure skating, where the goal is simply to turn in the best performance.*

Today I did not win my panel, because I had the privilege of being part of a totally kick-ass conversation at AOIR with 3 smart people doing very cool work on reading and publishing in the digital world, fluidly woven together by Janet Salmons. More amazing still, our work all intersected (not something you can take for granted) in ways that were incredibly constructive for my research, and I hope for others’ as well.

So who were these crazy digital rock stars, and what did I learn from them?

• Peter Boot talked about how online communities enable new kinds of conversations about books, which go beyond reviewing to content creation and identity construction, and made me think about how that kind of identity work could happen within an ebook if it offered a community to its readers
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick talked about how we can get over the conventional model of peer review, already, and start editing in ways that actually enrich scholarship — and made me think that is a universe in which I could get pretty excited about academic publishing
• Tim Laquintano talked about the stigmatization of “vanity publishing” and how it’s giving way to “indie publishing”, and saved me about $5,000 in future psychotherapy by convincing me to just get over this obsession with being published by an Official Imprint

My own talk shared some of the ebook research we’ve been up to at Emily Carr, where I’ve been part a team of designers and researchers including Jonathan Aitken, Celeste Martin and Ron Burnett. In particular, I talked about our interest in creating social ebooks — ebooks that support not only collaborative annotation and highlighting but fuller social experiences in which readers converse and even contribute to book content. To think about how an ebook might deepen reader engagement, I’ve been drawing on the reader-to-leader framework of Preece & Shneiderman, which has been used to study many different kinds of online communities:

If we think ebooks can act as some form of community, then perhaps the reader-to-leader framework can apply to ebooks. Based on the work we’ve done so far, here’s how different ebook features might map onto this framework — along with a minor adjustment to the framework that makes it a little more useful in this context.

It’s going to take me at least a few days to digest the ways in which these talks fit together. When I have something semi-coherent to say, I’ll follow the spirit of the panel and share it digitally, as fodder for further conversation.

* Yes, I am using a sports metaphor — a move that is guaranteed to cost you crucial points in any panel performance I might be judging. And yes, I said “ice hockey”.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online