Nick Usborne

How do you know if your web content is any good?

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measure success of web contentAs content creators we sit down at our computers, check out the content calendar and get started on the day’s work.

Whether we are employed, or work for someone else, we get into the habit of pumping out that content.

Sure, we work hard to create quality content. We optimize it, whether for the search engines or social media. We submit it. It’s published. And our work is done. On to the next page or post.

If you work alone, writing for your own sites, that page is now behind you, and you focus on what to write next.

If you are employed, you write the page, and what happens after that is in someone else’s hands.

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Monday Spark: Yes, you should reinvent the wheel.

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Five people play one guitarIt’s easy to sit in a meeting room on a Friday afternoon and say, “I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel here”.

It’s much harder to say, “It’s going to involve working through the weekend, but let’s step back and see if we can be genuinely creative, and come up with an idea that really is new and interesting.”

In other words, the decision not to reinvent the wheel is the easy way out. It’s the lazy way out. It means you can stop thinking, stop worrying about making a mistake, and grab a “proven process” off the shelf.

It’s also a first-class ticket to mediocrity.

Beware anyone who tempts you with a “proven process” or an easy “success formula”.

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The difference between an authentic voice and a paid-for voice.

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authentic voice
Photo courtesy: CBC

Last week, during the fight against SOPA, I was listening to a radio show on CBC, hosted by Mike Finnerty.

He had two guests – Rob Beschizza, Managing Editor of BoingBoing, which went dark to protest SOPA, and Steve Tepp, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel of the Global Intellectual Property Center.

(Yes, this post is about copywriting. Keep reading…)

Finnerty reached them both by phone and gave them more or less equal time to present their points of view.

Both Beschizza and Tepp are smart guys, and both shared very different views on the value of SOPA. Beschizza said it was bad legislation that would result in a lot of unintended consequences for thousands of websites. Tepp said it was excellent legislation that would put a stop to piracy by “foreign criminals”.

Who won the debate?

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Monday Spark: Tips on creativity from John Cleese.

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john cleese on creativityThe video below is an edited version of a longer talk on creativity, given by John Cleese in Belgium. (Remember John Cleese from Monty Python and Faulty Towers?)

Pretty much everything he talks about applies to freelancers like us. Yes, what we do is creative!

I absolutely agree with him about “sleeping on” a problem. I have had the same experience many times. I’m struggling with something in the evening, sleep on it, and then find the answer to the problem is easy to see when I get up the next morning.

But most of all, I like what he said about carving out some space and time…a place where you can be creative. It’s hard or even impossible to be creative when you are being interrupted or distracted.

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To really understand social media, you first need to know its 30-year history.

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speakers corner conversationsHere’s a timely quote for you:

“…a place for conversation or publication, like a giant coffee-shop with a thousand rooms; it is also a worldwide digital version of the Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, an unedited collection of letters to the editor, a floating flea market, a huge vanity publisher, and a collection of every odd special-interest group in the world.”

That’s not a bad description of social media.

But it wasn’t written about social media.

It was written by Howard Rheingold in his book, The Virtual Community. His book was first published in 1993, before the web even existed.

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Is there a market for more social media experts?

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nick usborne social mediaEvery week I seem to find an article, post or tweet that mocks social media experts.

Granted, most of these pieces are written by social media gurus themselves, who are anxious to separate themselves from this influx of new competitors.

As I say in the video below, there are two sides to this story.

Yes, in one respect these gurus are right. A lot of people claim to be experts, based only on their own, personal familiarity with various social media sites.

But they are also wrong, because there are also plenty of other people who are taking the trouble to dig deeper and learn the skills of true social media marketers.

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