It isn’t uncommon for businesses to want to utilize social media as a marketing tool. But as a business you need to realize that people aren’t likely to want to socialize with you – so it’s up to you to do the socializing. But be warned, if you “socialize” with the intent of marketing – that really isn’t socializing and people will spot you and call you out very quickly. Online socializing is in many ways an escape for offline socializing – people are looking for something online that they can’t find offline:

We live in a society that is absolutely sick of being advertised to, sold to, and marketed to, which is why most people turn to Farmville and the social networks to ESCAPE commercialism.

Actually, this means that there’s a great potential benefit to actually stepping into the online social space: you’re going to have to be honest – in both your words and your actions. To do this you may have to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what your business is about, why do you want reach out to people and why do you want people to listen to you. I think businesses need to be founded with this kind of introspection – but if you haven’t done it yet – then online social media is a great opportunity to finally do it. You will be hard pressed to engage online social media without an honest and inspiring perspective to offer on you and your business.

There seems to be an alternative to being honest – hiring so called “social media marketing” professionals to professionaly manipulate and misrepresent for you:

The know-nothings. You know who I’m talking about right? Social media “marketers” who have never practiced marketing. Maybe have never even had a sales job or a college-level marketing class. But they’ve created a Facebook page and have 500 followers on Twitter so somehow that makes them a guru.

If you are seriosuly considering this then please consider that social media marketing is still marketing – so make sure you are hiring a professional marketer first, then check his specializations in online social media:

At the end of the day making money on the social web — or anywhere — still gets down to MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS. Research, strategy, planning. Creating points of differentiation. Finding a unique way to delight your customers and out-smart your competitors. And then, using the social web as a channel. Maybe.

Confused – Great! Now all you have to do is roll up your sleeves and slowly try to figure this out for yourself. Being confused is an honest experience – everyone goes through it at one point or another – so everyone can identify with it. Experiment – bring your business and your confusion into online social media. Get on twitter and see what happens. Write honest content on your website and see what happens. When you get no feedback try something new. When you get positive feedback embrace and enjoy it. When you get negative feedback be greatful for it, apologize if necessary, and try a different approach.

Online social media is so popular because everyone is free to choose. You can choose what to tune into and what to tune out. You can voice your opinion on anything and everything for anyone (who hasn’t tuned you out) to hear. In the end, I believe you will find that it isn’t about “utilizing” social media, rather it’s about “participating” in it.

My teacher sometimes chooses a student to demonstrate something about the teachings of the lesson. For a demonstrating student this is usually a welcome opportunity to receive personal attention and teaching from our teacher. This is exactly what happened on this occassion – when the demonstration was over my teacher made a few suggestions to the student regarding his personal practice. The suggestions included adding an evening practice, to which the student replied that he needed to “find time” for an additional practice. My teacher replied saying that one can never find time, one has to make time.

I believe that teaching holds true for anything we want to do in life. There never seems to be time. We have to make time for the things we want to do. Usually that means having to give up something to make time for something new.

If you’ve invested in a website with a blog you HAVE to MAKE time for it. In the first days and weeks you will also be forming habits – and habits are hard to change then they are to create. If you fall into a habit of putting off writing for when “you have time” – you will have two obstacles to overcome – the writing itself and the habit of putting it off – it’s a loop that can weigh you down.

Without dynamic content your website is obsolete and can work against you. When you’re not writing, writing seems like a difficult task. Choose a super-easy pace of writing – like once a week. MAKE TIME to write a small post (if it helps you choose a specific day and time to do your writing) – two or three paragraphs with maybe one image will do the trick.

Form a writing habit that will support you and your business. It’s not as difficult as it seems and in the mid-to-long term it will be more valuable then many of the endless day-to-day tasks of running your business that are keeping you from it.

Though publishing online is relatively easy to do (thanks to WordPress, affordable Linux-based hosting, search engine traffic, etc.) – reaching people remains a formidable challenge. There are numerous indicators that can tell you that people have visited and even spent some time at your website. But only a very small fraction of those people will actually make contact with you – and only through direct contact (such as comments, email communications, etc.) will YOU be able to experience “reach” (or failure to reach!). Most of the time you may feel as if you are talking to no-one.

When our actions are rooted in our sense of purpose – they are their own reward. For example, my writing about Yoga is fueled with a purpose of sharing and preserving teachings I have received. Writing and then publishing a post about Yoga is it’s own reward regardless of who else it may reach. But the very act of publishing gives birth to another subtle craving – to actually know that I’ve reached someone. That craving is rarely satisfied. If I do (and I do) falter and seek satisfaction (for example – by looking at my website visitor statistics information) – I usually end up disappointed and with diminished motivation to continue writing.

I constantly remind myself that writing is an intrinsic movement – it comes from within me and satisfies something within me. That awareness from within is like a magical fuel-tank that can keep me going on and on and on. My writing engine stutters when I put in a lesser fuel like social recognition and appreciation.

I believe that the “reach-trap” is even bigger for businesses. A business-website is usually created as a means for generating business leads – a higher level of engagement – reaching people AND prompting them to act. This can easily lead to questions like “What should I write about to convince people to do business with me?”. This is a slippery slope that can quickly lead away from flowing, honest & purpose-filled writing to burdensome, superficial & manipulative writing. It literally defeats purpose (of writing and business).

Good, sustainable, interesting, engaging, passionate writing comes from within. It is an expression and exploration of purpose. It takes vigilance, discipline and a shifting balance to stay in tune with an inner movement that takes on external expression. Blog first and foremost from yourself and for yourself; let it reveberate free of expectations; and stay open to experience anything and everything that may bounce back as it truly is: a pleasant surprise.

• A blog makes it possible for you to be found online.
• A blog makes it possible to have direct contact with your audience.
• A blog is an opportunity to publicly address questions that are commonly raised by customers.
• A blog is an opportunity to passionately talk about what you do.
• You don’t need to blog everyday (find a pace of writing).
• Speak no evil (about others).
• Reach out to other blogs and online-social media, connect, engage, comment, participate.
• Be yourself, be genuine.

Writing a post on curating has been on my mind for a few weeks and as I was getting around to actually doing it my RSS reader trumped me. Erin Kissane has published a wonderful post, a first in a series of five, on curating. So if you are interested in curating content I invite you to to read “Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic” and to stay tuned for the other posts in the series (though the second one was a bit tedious).

“Many consultants have suggested that if businesses want to succeed online, they should become content curators. So should they?

The simple answer is no. No one should reflexively pour time and money into “real-time curation,” because reflexes are a lousy way of making business decisions …

On the other hand, done well, this kind of curation can be useful to readers and can therefore be an effective marketing tool. Of course, doing it well requires a lot of time and money along with (yes) actual human skill.”

Today I came across this post: Checklist: How to Start a Business Blog, which supposedly comes from a source with more merit then me – so I am calling on it to re-iterate my point:

Excellent content leaves the reader with something new that they didn’t have before. People like to get something from blogs they read. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to have a good blog.

The fact is that web sites with a blog received 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages than those that didn’t have a blog. Businesses in particular can capitalize on this because businesses that blog experience 126% higher lead growth than non-blogging businesses. Can you really afford to miss this opportunity?

The articles brings up another interesting point … my one comment on it would be that you shouldn’t do everything at once. Building a website nurtured by content that can grow into a community that nurtures your business is a gradual and organic process. It won’t happen over-night, it will most likely take somewhere between many months and a few years. It is a long-distance race not a sprint – and you need to pace yourself, placing one foot in front of the other. The list of ideas in the article can be visited and used over time rather then all at once.

1. They provide a simple way for an end-user to create menus.
2. Less plugins are required to get the job done. Plugins that were used for things like selecting and sorting pages & categories have become redundant in many cases.
3. Renaming menu items makes it possible to draw a clear overview picture by giving menu items coherent and contextual titles.
4. Smooth integration with widgets makes it simple to integrate unlimited menus into a website.
5. Custom Post-Types & Custom Taxonomies are automatically integrated – bravo!

Since menus have been introduced I have replaced most of the navigation elements on numerous website projects with menus. This has also exposed some problems with the menus user interface. I have been given permission to use screenshots from my most recent project to demonstrate some of these issues in context.

It seems to me that these issues are more likely to be encountered in CMS oriented websites then in Blog oriented websites. Since WordPress is spreading its wings into CMS – I believe these issues need to be better addressed.

List of Menus

The list of menus is arranged in tabs. In my opinion this is a misuse of the tab metaphor and there are a few problems with it.

1. Menus other then the currently displayed menu appear disabled – their design communicates “no point in clicking here”.
2. When there are numerous menus – scrolling in the tab area to find them and is slow and cumbersome. The more menus there are – longer menu names are likely to be used to distinguish between them. This demands even more scrolling – in what feels like a self-defeating effort.
3. The sort order of the menu-tabs isn’t clear – and took some time to figure out. At first it feels like almost like a random order – which made if frustrating to use.
4. The collapse buttons on each menu item are sometimes missed due to a very low-contrast with the background – and they too look disabled.

Add Item Boxes

The list of boxes from which is long enough to start with. It gets to be extremely long with custom post-types and custom taxonomies. This is what it looks like with one custom post-type and two custom-taxonomies.

Open just a few of those boxes and the screen quickly becomes disassociated. The menu itself disappears at the top. When I was working on rearranging the menu system my hand and wrist were hurting from way to much scrolling of the screen.

On top of all that – the boxes themselves are very annoying to use.  Take for example the pages box – longer page titles get broken into two lines, hierarchy information is not displayed, even a short list of 15 pages requires scrolling. The “most recent” option is nice but not enough to compensate for the poor overall design.

It’s really great that custom-post and custom taxonomies are automatically added to this interface. It is very useful to have custom-taxonomies there – but considering that regular posts are not included in the screen – I was amused to find my custom post-type included on it. Though it’s theoretically nice to have it I can’t imagine a need to add Yoga teacher to a menu. Maybe there should be an option to set when creating a custom-post type to indicate of it should be added to the menus UI?

Bad Screen Utilization

When looking at the screen in a given context – it comes across how ineffciently it is arranged. For example – suppose I want to add a page to a menu. Green indicates the areas I need to use. Red is unnecessary distratcion. Gray indicates empty and wasted space:

Performance

As a result (or in addition to all that) performance is terrible with this screen. It is slow to load, clicking save seems to take eternity – and I have a feeling is it choking the server with too many unnecessary requests. I believe that a better design can lead to better performance too.

Redesign

I believe that the WordPress Widgets screen is a better and established template that would better serve menu management. Based on that I created this mockup as a starting point – which I believe addresses many of the current shortcomings.

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