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Last week I had the pleasure of judging the Australian Web Awards 2011. It was a wonderful experience affording me the pleasure of digesting a lot of terrific web content. It also highlighted a particular pet peeve of mine – the Contact page. I'm convinced it's universally misunderstood and it drives me nuts.

Regular readers are accustomed to my complaining about content with an inward focus. . The first rule of content marketing is 'it's not about you'. You know what? The reverse is true when it comes to your Contact page. Nothing drives me away from a site faster than a contact page with no actual contact details.

Who wants to fill out a form?
Think about it. If someone is visiting your Contact page, it's because they want to get in touch with you. You're moments away from the coveted conversion. A passive viewer is about to make contact with you but they can't. Why? Because all you've given them is a form to fill out. If that viewer is me, you'll lose your chance to convert me to a prospect. I'm not hanging around waiting for you to get in touch with me. I'm going to go find someone who wants to speak with me at my convenience.

Sorry, we might not like you
Have you ever encountered a successful business with no doors, blinds drawn against the light of day who only allowed people with a secret handshake to enter? Would you be interested in dealing with a company who treated you as if you may offend them before you even opened your mouth? Of course you wouldn't. Far too many websites are protecting their own best interests with the convenient contact form and doing it at the expense of potential business.

It's all about you!
A form on your Contact page is about you. Actual contact details like phone numbers, email and physical addresses aid your prospective clients. I've heard people say they don't want to deal with SPAM or junk mail and use a form to deter unwanted contact. Well guess what? If you're doing that, you're also deterring people like me – cashed-up customers who want to spend money with you.

What's your opinion on the Contact page?

Image courtesy of Free Digital Photos.

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Have you spotted arrogant bloggers? It's taken me a long while to admit to being a blogger. If you read my first post, you'll see how uncomfortable I was with the idea of keeping a blog. I worried about saying anything relevant. What I didn't share was my worry about establishing a vanity vehicle for my own opinion. It struck me as an arrogant thing to do. I see a lot of arrogance amongst bloggers and it drives me nuts.

What do you mean by arrogance?
I'm not talking about arrogant opinions of writers or arrogant topics on a blog. I'm speaking about arrogant behaviour in people keeping a blog. A web logor blog is intended to attract, engage, discuss and share your ideas. It's on the internet precisely for these reasons, to create an interactive community of people. Bloggers all over the world yearn for someone to read what they've written and comment on it. And yet I see people circumvent the spirit of blogging all the time.

4 ways bloggers demonstrate their arrogance
Here are four ways bloggers express their arrogance and, in some cases, disdain for their readers.

• Me, me and more me

I've written about it before, the stifling inward focus of a blog. Unless someone is an absolute expert in a field, I don't want to read a personal tome to the writer's own greatness. I want the writer to pull me in, to make me relate their points to my own experience. The experts know this, only amateurs prattle on about themselves.

• Gated content Every fibre of my content marketing soul says I shouldn't have to pay for gated content, especially on a blog. I'm still grappling with the idea of pay walls for newspapers but I will never, ever, pay to read someone's blog. Ever.
• When I read something good, I want to share it. If there's no sharing widget or even a tweet button, I find it incredibly annoying. Ideally, I like to see a universal button that allows me to pick my network. In lieu of that, please provide the top three: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Unanswered comments I've written more than

one post about commenting. Nothing – but nothing – smacks of arrogance more than someone who writes a blog post and won't answer comments. It's akin to ignoring someone speaking to you in person and an indication your readers are not worthy of your attention. Even the blogging greats monitor comments and answer when appropriate including Darren Rowse, Joe Pulizzi and Jonathan Crossfield. And, yes, I know Seth Godin doesn't answer comments but he doesn't allow them either. When you get on his blog, you know it's a one-way discussion before the first word.

Honest ignorance or intentional arrogance?
Some of these mistakes are made out of honest ignorance. I'll retweet an article even without a sharing widget but I'm a lot more likely to do it if I get a leg-up from the blog owner. I never read gated blog content. I rarely go back to a blogger-centric site. The one that hurts the most is unanswered comments. It's a terrible feeling to pour your heart into a comment and get no reply from the writer.

If you have no intention of interacting or helping people participate in your blog, I recommend you switch mediums. Keep a diary or an offline journal but leave the blogosphere to the goons like me people who are looking for information and entertainment and want to have a good old chin wag about it.

Where do you see arrogant behaviour in the blogging community?

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Image credit: What is your conversation strategy? by cambodia4kidsorg, on Flickr

This morning, at 4:14, my husband left for work turning the lock behind him. A typical engineer, he wouldn't dream of leaving his sleeping family exposed with an unlocked door. You can argue it's nature or training or experience but one thing's for sure. He doesn't take risks when it comes to his work or his family. While content marketing doesn't present health and safety issues, I see evidence of risky behaviour all the time and am guilty myself.

Going on autopilot

The content marketing recipe for success is simple develop original content, make it findable for Google and distribute it through social media. Early on, we talked about how it's all free of charge, too. But here's the problem; to implement a content marketing system successfully takes:

• Time
• Writing talent
• Networking capability
• Decent idea about how Web 2.0 works

Not many businesses, especially small ones, can become publishers and still run their core business. So what happens? We start taking short cuts or go on autopilot to manage the load. Here are some examples:

• Content aggregators
  Not long ago I saw an update on LinkedIn perfectly illustrating the problem. A book publisher I know writes about literacy and curates excellent content on the topic. The post in question was talking about literacy in tarot card reading. I knew immediately it was an example of content marketing by autopilot. I read the post and, sure enough, it was a low quality, SPAMMY article scraped from several sources and loaded with prime keywords. It also had the ability to levy brand damage if the reader didn't know the business as well as I do. When I alerted the publisher, they admitted to using a service to provide content and didn't know what was being posted.
• Not doing your homework
  I've been caught in the same trap myself. I volunteer with Women in Technology, WA (WITWA). Part of my work involves running their social media activity. During a deadline crunch, I posted an article on Twitter from Fast Company titled, How come there aren't more women in technology? It's a good publication and the title reflected our mission of getting more women into science, technology and math careers. I didn't read the article. It was full of pseudo-science concluding women just weren't up to it due to their "hormones, brain anatomy, and mirror neurons". Believe me when I say I was called on the carpet in the biggest way.
• Social Media integration
  Social media tools pitch the ability to integrate with other products. Appealing to the harassed and harried content marketer, they seduce us with "post once to all your profiles". The problem is you don't have the same audience on every channel. If you did, there wouldn't be any point in having more than one channel. I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to engage with someone on Twitter only to find out it's a `bot version of their Facebook stream.
• Auto posting
  Auto posting can be useful when you're away from your desk for certain periods or have something that benefits from repetition – like conference details. You can appear to be active even when you're not. Herein lies the problem; you're not really there. When abused, auto posting turns you into a full-fledged `bot and all the work you've done to build a community is quickly erased.

Despite early claims, content marketing isn't free. It's not a particularly difficult practice to grasp but it takes dedication and persistence to deploy. While tempting to take shortcuts, the risks to your business and your brand are significant. At the very least, make sure you read every word you post. Only distribute your content to channels where you plan to be active. Avoid the lure of autopilot content marketing and you'll save your brand from a crash and burn.

Have you ever been embarrassed by something you did on autopilot?

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Image credit: cockpit by gcfairch, on Flickr

Have you noticed the buzz about privacy this past week? I speak and blog about social media and privacy issues so I keep my ear to the ground. What surprises me lately is how often I see wall posts on Facebook about privacy violations. LinkedIn ended up in hot water with their members for the same sort of thing. Here's what made people nervous this week and why.

Facebook loosens security settings
If you're a Facebook user, chances are you saw this post pop up on the wall of someone you follow. Four people in my relatively tiny network posted this message:

FB has quietly changed something! Take a look at your URL address (the top box on your screen.) If you see "http" instead of "https" you DO NOT have a secure session & can be HACKED. Go to Account – Account Settings – Account Security – click edit. Check box (secure browsing), click Save. FB has automatically set it on the non-secure setting! Do your friends a huge favor, copy & re-post.. Mine was on the non-secure setting and had to change it.

I checked mine and, sure enough, I was no longer on a secure session with Facebook. It's quick to fix once you know about it. I encourage you to make sure you're operating on a secure session.

Did you even know you had those phone numbers?
Another recent Facebook transgression had to do with phone numbers for people in your contact list. Another batch of warning notices started appearing:

ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now on facebook! go to the top right of the screen, click on ACCOUNT, click on EDIT FRIENDS, left side of screen and click CONTACTS. you will see all phone numbers from your phone (FB friends or not) are published that you have stored in your mobile phone. TO REMOVE, go to RIGHT column, click on "this page." Please repost this on your status, so your friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse.

I checked my Contacts and, sure enough, I saw phone numbers of people I had no idea I even possessed. It was especially worrying for people who had synchronized their iPhones with Facebook. This allowed phone numbers from your mobile phone to be stored in Facebook.

According to an article in TechCrunch, it's not as sinister as the alarmists would have you believe. Still, it's confronting to see the personal phone numbers of everyone in your network. Facebook is notorious for changing privacy settings on a whim. In my opinion, it's just better to get rid of them . In the name of privacy, I would encourage you to remove all imported contacts; I did.

What is LinkedIn thinking?
The thing surprising me most this week was LinkedIn assuming they could get away with using members names and photos in their advertising campaigns. By adding a new section to your Account Settings called "Manage Social Advertising", LinkedIn assumed tacit permission. In LinkedIn's own words:

LinkedIn may sometimes pair an advertiser's message with social content from LinkedIn's network in order to make the ad more relevant. When LinkedIn members recommend people and services, follow companies, or take other actions, their name/photo may show up in related ads shown to you. Conversely, when you take these actions on LinkedIn, your name/photo may show up in related ads shown to LinkedIn members. By providing social context, we make it easy for our members to learn about products and services that the LinkedIn network is interacting with.

I quickly changed my account settings denying LinkedIn permission to use my name and photo in their advertising campaigns. You can do the same by:

• Go to `Settings' in the pull-down menu under your name in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
• Click on `Account' in the last box on the left-hand column.
• Click on `Manage Social Advertising' under Privacy Controls.
• Remove permission at the bottom of the pop-up window.

Fair Warning
No one is ever surprised when Facebook changes privacy settings without notice; they have a long history of privacy violations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg routinely dismisses concerns with weak explanations about improved user experiences. The LinkedIn situation worries me. It's indicative of the huge lure these free networks must experience when it comes to advertising dollars. The information and marketing intelligence stored in the membership databases of the popular channels is awesome to consider. You can't depend on a social media channel to protect your privacy. The only way to ensure your personal details stay private is to resist storing them online.

Do you think your privacy is being violated?

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Image Credit: privacy by Sean MacEntee, on Flickr

When researching a blog post on terrible business writing, I kept running across the work of Ron Denholm from Essay Audit. He had great examples of terrible writing and a lot to say about how to fix it. Knowing it's better to learn from the master, I asked him to guest post for me and he graciously agreed.* Ron has a BA and MA both in Classics. He headed Learning and Development for the Australian Federal Police in Sydney where he developed effective e-learning writing courses, and received a Commissioner's Commendation for improving Ministerial writing. (I say give the guy a medal!) Ron has trained over 2,500 people in efficient writing. Over to Ron.

If you're in business, your time is valuable. You love a quick-fix read over a donut and coffee. You leap at numbered iron-clad reasons, scanning bullet-proof tips, and delight in tight analysis and compelling opinion. And your mouse click is judge and executioner.

You'll tolerate a few glitches in grammar spellling and punctuation but not so long sentences with a lethally toxic cocktail of poor articulation excessive tangential clauses spiced with malodorously inflated and archaic vocabulary and technical specification terms the author uses of which you may not be aware but of which the ramifications of you not picking up on them are that you may miss a really prescient comment hidden fathom deep in the meandering syntax of a lazy writer using comic sans font in 10 point size enveloped in long paragraphs or a sloppy direct translation from another language too fond of emotionally charged redundant adjectives and wonderfully conjured adverbs that hide the message.

Where did you give up reading in the last paragraph? How patient were you with the language? How much of the message did you understand? Few readers would struggle through unless the read was mandatory. And let's face it, reading time is valuable because we are time-poor.

What's poor writing costing you?
Writing inefficiently is part of a hidden economy and it's costing us millions. Of course, it will not always read like the horror above, but it will have some common elements. Now take a look at my presentation showing how inefficient writing can be very costly.

Our company, MiningNexus, recently studied 5500 web sites for their readability. The research found an average 35% of surveyed text was not efficiently written. The big risk in inefficient text is that potential clients and investors will go elsewhere, because they are time-poor readers, and readily click off writing that strains their patience. And there is enough excellent business writing out there to make competition fierce.

Nifty Tool
But identifying and measuring the problem is only the first step. What about a solution? MiningNexus worked on that one too. We invented a handy electronic document checker we call EssayAudit: a bullet-proof benchmark for business writers. The program reports on the amount of known fact, analysis and opinion, and the impact on the reader. It also assesses your document for readability. Here is an example.

A great example
EssayAudit is the world's first writing checker to benchmark both content and readability. It helps give readers what they deserve: a compelling message wrapped in an easy read. Seasoned bloggers and article writers are using EssayAudit to maximise reader impact and to make sure their text is consistently highly readable. Businesses, web copy writers and schools are also using EssayAudit to set writing benchmarks.

OK, you're now at the end of my post and here's how it rated with EssayAudit:

Get in touch
If you'd like to use EssayAudit, contact ron@writeabilityworkshop.com.

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* I have no affiliation with Ron or Essay Audit; I just appreciate what he's doing.