Ah, SMX Israel. Marty Weintraub, Michael King and others flying to Israel to join Israel’s top SEOs. I get to go to a great conference without flying anywhere. And great Kosher food. This is the life. Here were the best lines:

Best Lines

Roman Zelvenschi: Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name, but that’s OK, I rank number 1 for it.

Eli Feldblum: Use schema. Do it now. Seriously. You have an internet-connected device with you.

Eli Feldblum: We’ve reached the point where “normal” blue text links get lost in the noise on a Google SERP.

Barry Schwartz: Google is recommending … Doesn’t mean you should do it … Just saying.

Shira Abel: Google owns you. Get used to it.

Marty Weintraub: Facebook owns you too.

Marty Weintraub: Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a FB account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …

Tomer Honen (from Google): We got better at Flash. Right about the time people stopped using it

Olivier Amar: When you’re in-house you pay a lot more attention to long term. Because you still want to be here.

Ofer Dascalu: Some people say “publishers and Google are partners.” My partners reply to my e-mails. They pick up the phone when I call.

Michael King: When you interact with people on Twitter don’t use the same account that you use to Tweet SEO articles. That’s like trying to pick up a girl while holding a book called How to Be a Pickup Artist.

Best conference coverage:

• Live Blogging SMX Israel with Kahena Digital
• SMX Israel: You’ve come a long way, baby
• SMX Israel: In Rhyme (interesting niche)

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments or by Tweeting to @GilR or with #BestOf #SMX.

Here are the best lines from other conferences:

• Best of PubCon 2011
• Best of BlogWorld 2011
• Best of SMX East 2011
• Best of WikiMania 2011
• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

I gave this presentation at SMX Israel. Rewritten after Google launched Search Plus Your World a few days before the conference.

“I’m so excited that our personalization works so well that people are creating dystopian fantasies about it.”

“How stupid would your friend think you are if he asked for the bus schedule and you gave him schedules for far-away cities? How annoyed would you be at your friend if he wasn’t paying attention to you so he answered your question without considering the previous parts of your conversation?”

Google Product Manager Jack Menzel, Best of SMX East

“Google Plus isn’t Google’s attempt to build a third or fourth social network. It’s the centerpiece of our attempt to understand our users better so we can better serve throughout the product line.”

Google Plus Product Manager Christian Oestlein, Best of SMX East

“Google is portrayed as Godzilla but sees itself as Snuffleupagus”

Jeff Jarvis, Best of SMX East

Yesterday’s release of Search Plus Your World was one more giant step for Google. We are living in the era of Google’s grand unifications.

Search, Social, and Serendipity

Every few months, even at search conferences, somebody gets up and declares the imminent demise of search or SEO. Sometimes they’re just looking for attention, sometimes they’re just idiots. But often the problem is they only understand half the story.

Yes, we often trust our friends more than we trust strangers. Yes, sometimes the thing you want can find you, without you looking for it. Yes, we want more than to type into a text box and see the same 10 blue links that everybody else sees.

But there was some mistaken impression that Google couldn’t or wouldn’t do these things. That Facebook or Apple would get there first. And that the end result would be that search, SEOs, and Google would cease to be involved in how people connect with what they want.

“It is easier to reliably detect social spam than link spam.”

Vanessa Fox, A Holistic Look at Panda

“I always tell people not to ask how does Google know. They just know.”

Vanessa Fox, Best of SMX East

Google is studying the social graph. They know who you are.  They know what you like, what sites you visited, and how long it took you to return to Google. They know how many people who visited those sites clicked +1 or bounced back quickly and hit “Block this site.”

We can argue about whether they’re Big Brother or your best friend. But they’re not a 1999 search engine that only knows about pages and links.

The Search Quality and Spam Groups

The gap between search and social isn’t the only key gap Google’s been filling.

Google decided years ago that the people should be represented by two separate yet equally important groups (as I wrote that, my Android phone made the Law & Order beeping sound that it makes for incoming messages. I think they’re watching me. I should stop using Chrome for writing blog posts). There’s the search quality team, led by Amit Singhal, who rewrote the Google search algorithm in 2001. Blindfolded. In Assembler. While drunk. And the search spam team led by Matt Cutts, who also serves as Google’s ambassador to the search community. [And of whom I do not make fun, because, well, he runs the search spam team, and is therefore probably more powerful than the president of France. Amit probably is too, but he doesn't know who I am.]

Anyway, this division of power worked well, but had some blind spots exposed.

“So we did Caffeine in late 2009.  Our index grew so quickly … we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good.”

Amit Singhal

“It was like, “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?”  It sort of fell between our respective groups.”

Matt Cutts

Google had a blind spot, a vulnerability. Sites could achieve trust, and then mass produce highly targeted pages with thin content. Amit’s algorithms couldn’t quite recognize quality at a page level well enough to know when Google was overvaluing a highly relevant (but useless) page that was mass-produced by a site they had trusted. Matt’s team couldn’t help, because there was no spam involved.

SEO professional: I have a few sites where I had already grown the content and the links, and I was just about to start pushing out the rest of the pages when this thing hit.

Me: So that’s what you do? You build the trust with good pages, wait a bit, then exploit it with tons of crap?”

SEO professional: Isn’t that what we all do?

Conversation between me and a top SEO at a bar outside SMX West, 2011

SEOs were exploiting this gap between Amit and Matt’s groups to establish Google’s trust and then exploit it. Larger sites like eHow, which were once high quality, had a compelling business interest to create large amounts of content but little interest in paying for high quality. [Yes, I continue to think that eHow was unfairly hit because interested parties raised a deafening roar that prompted Google to modify Panda to crush it. But that's another story].

Closing the Gap

So our heroes joined forces and created the Panda Update, which, unless you’re one of the sites affected, is more important for what it foretells than for what it has done.

First, Panda closes the gap between the two teams. They took some ideas from Amit’s bag of tricks. Panda is a ranking factor. It’s a computational intensive process run every few weeks, like Page Rank. They combined that with some of Matt’s tricks. Panda is a sitewide penalty implemented as ranking factor and updated like Page Rank.

Back in the old days penalties were applied by sledgehammer. -30. -50. -950. If Amit decided your page should rank #2 but Matt hit your site with a -950 penalty, you dropped to 952. And you know the difference between a -30 penalty and a -950 penalty?Right, 920. But in reality, nothing. Maybe in 1998 there was a tiny practical difference between being on page 4 or on page 96. But in 2012, neither will get you any traffic.

The Panda penalty is applied as a ranking factor and is far more subtle. If Google can’t find any pages that it likes better for a particular search, your page may still rank first, even if you’re being weighed down by the Panda. You can still find most eHow pages, for example, but you’ll often find them a few slots lower. Which was enough to do this to its stock price.

Panda’s Polluting Publishers Penalty

With Panda, Google decided to make publishers pay a price for putting out bad pages.

When you expose a page to Google, Google considers it a request to trust you to send you its user. If too many users return unhappy, Google responds as it would to someone who has betrayed its trust.

So your job is to stop that from happening. The two obvious pieces to this are:

• Satisfy the searchers Google sends you.
• Don’t ask Google to send you searchers that you can’t satisfy.

Calling All Data

Google’s biggest change in recent years is that they finally declared that they’re considering every signal they can get their hands on. Well – almost. It’s still presumed that they’re not taking data from publisher-side programs like Google Analytics and using it against you. But Google is considering behavioral signals from user activity on Google’s sites, applications, and toolbars.

“In May 2010 I said that we weren’t using Social Signals. Now we are.”

“What we ended up doing is taking multiple data sources and intersecting them, so if one data source had a false negative, the others wouldn’t.”

Matt Cutts, Google Webmaster Video, December 17, 2010

“I always tell people not to ask how does Google know. They just know.”

Vanessa Fox, Best of SMX East

Previously Matt repeatedly answered questions with statements like “we don’t use that signal, it’s too spammable.” Now he answers similar questions by saying that Google considers so much data that even if you fool it on one signal you’re unlikely to fool it on all the corroborating signals. Former black hat SEOs have responded by saying things like “it’s now easier to build a good page than to fake it.” With Panda, Google explicitly stated that they were using some behavioral signals as corroborating signals.

User-Friendly Role Model: The IRS

One way that Google makes sense of the boatload of data that they have is by comparing data sets to paradigmatic models of good and bad web sites. Panda is a Document Classifier, which means it looks at things and puts them in Pile A or Pile B.

“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.”

Matt Cutts, Wired Magazine, The Panda That Hates Farms, March 3, 2011

So your site needs to emit the same signals as sites like the IRS, Wikipedia, and the New York Times. So try to be a blood-sucking anti-capitalist rag. Kidding. But when was the last time you heard the IRS named as a pillar of user friendliness? If more of my visitors wanted to kill themselves after visiting me would Panda like me more?

Seriously though, Google’s use of a document classifier is significant. Combine this with the general idea of using many spammable signals and suspecting sites that don’t conform to expected patterns.

“You know the best way to ensure your site has a ‘footprint that sites that focus on users have?’ Focus on users!”

Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land, Lessons Learned at SMX West, March 12, 2011

I partially agree with Vanessa’s point that if you focus on users you’ll look like you’re focusing on users. But it’s not always true. For example, Answers.com built a great site that spent millions of dollars annually licensing and aggregating quality content, much of it exclusively, from trusted publishers. The site focused on users. But it had the footprint of a scraper. We had some interesting internal arguments about showing Wikipedia content. It was the right thing to do for our users. But, even after we NoIndexed Wikipedia-only pages, it hurt our footprint at Google.

If search traffic is a big part of your business, you need to pay attention to whether you look more like the IRS or like eHow. Even if you think eHow is a better designed and more user-friendly site.

Google’s Timeless Problem, and Their Progress

“‘Junk results often wash out any results that a user is interested in …

The number of documents … has been increasing by many orders of magnitude. …

People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.”

Larry Page, The Anatomy of a Search Engine, 1998

Google’s core problem hasn’t changed: publishers keep creating a lot of junk, and users want the best page to jump to the top. In 1998 Larry Page complained that users were “still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.” Three peculiar words here. The word ”still” indicates that Page thought that search engines would keep falling further behind in their battle to highlight the best content. But you’d need to eliminate the words “tens of” to get to today’s reality, where it’s hard for us to even fathom that our ancestors would look at tens of results. Probably while they were walking 3 miles in the snow to school every day. Uphill. Both ways. And Google has been so successful that users keep raising the bar, and complaining if the best page isn’t the top result.

The Future

 ”The job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda.”

Rand Fishkin, How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

“It’s too hard now to fake a natural footprint well enough to fool Google.”

“Human Engagement is the new Page Rank. Build engagement signals, get links from pages with good engagement signals.”

Greg Boser, Best of PubCon

When I started going to SEO conferences back in 2005 I got the feeling that I was witnessing the end of an era. SEO had been the Wild West, but the great frontier was finally being tamed.

It may take some time for people to acknowledge the new reality. And surely there are still some pockets of rogue activity, especially in the big money spaces like pharmaceuticals and gambling.

But search marketing is increasingly about applying the fundamental principles of marketing to the particular environment of search. And the key strategies are the same.

Specifically:

• Build your reputation.
• Build your relationships.
• Learn what your potential customers want, and how they’re trying to find it.
• Build pages that satisfy their needs and generate positive attention.
• Look like a good business. Make sure you’re giving off the same positive vibes as the places that people trust.

As Google closes the gap between search and social, these fundamentals become increasingly important. For all but a few rogue geniuses who manage to stay one step ahead, SEO is increasingly about reputation and relationships. Earn  people’s friendship and trust. Understand what they want. And only signal Google that you can deliver what their users are looking for when you really can.

Good luck.

This post is a bit off topic, but as the President invokes Theodore Roosevelt, I’d like to take some quotes from my favorite TR speech, which somehow hasn’t lost any resonance in a hundred years.

Teddy Roosevelt

In the Arena

Teddy’s speech at the Sorbonne in Paris is most recognized for the much cited In the Arena paragraph:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

But that paragraph was just part of the speech’s greatness.

On Critics

President Roosevelt preceded the In The Arena sentences with this:

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism …  There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty … A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize … all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men … who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier …”

Mocking the French Military?

I loved this:

“The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial.”

It was part of a serious point, not a cheap shot, and it was an overall very respectful speech. But I’d advise President Obama not to repeat that line.

On Character

“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.”

“Education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.”

I do like how Roosevelt makes the point about how character is more important than knowledge WITHOUT condemning the intellectual elite.

On Pacifism

“There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. … Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.”

On Europe’s Demographic Problem

Roosevelt’s comments on France’s birthrate issue seems far more relevant today:

“The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. … If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.“

On Property Rights

“In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”

On Idealism

“No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work!“

On Inequality

“There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.

We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill.

But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes. To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true.

Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.“

On Class Warfare

“Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy.

The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have.

The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic.”

On Corrupt Politicians

“If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.”

“If you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”

On Patriotism

“A man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. … if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.”

It’s easy to understand why President Obama wants to challenge the first President Roosevelt. Much like Senator Obama in 2008, Roosevelt did a great job showing an appreciation of the values held dear by most Americans. Roosevelt praised intelligence while declaring character more essential. Roosevelt combined progressive themes with conservative ones.

On the one hand, Roosevelt called for courage and action. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s definition of character began with a focus on self-restraint.

I’ll close this post with the scariest and most powerful part of Roosevelt’s speech.

“There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position. In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations. Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.”

I read columnists from the right and the left and I think their biggest disagreement right now is not about ideology; it’s about which side is trying to fix problems and which side is focused on assigning blame for failure. I think most of the swing vote in America today agrees with Roosevelt that our biggest problem is not that one (or both) sides is wrong, but that one (or both) sides is mostly interested in rent-seeking and finger pointing. And I think both sides are therefore going to spend the next eleven months trying to convince America that their opponents are only interested in assigning blame.

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

Growing a community is like rocket science

Growing a community is like rocket science. It takes an enormous amount of energy per mile to get off the ground and to break through Earth’s atmosphere. It takes far, far less energy per mile after that. (Full disclosure: I’m not a rocket scientist.)

Don’t worry about using scalable practices to get off the ground. Very simple example in the blog world is 8 friends who agreed to interact with and promote each other’s content. Does it scale? Not really. But it’s a great way to start.

You have to get off the ground in a high quality fashion. It’s an investment. Don’t expect to break even yet. Ask your friends and family to help. Hire people. Don’t worry that it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t have to yet.

Growing a community is not like rocket science

I lied, it’s not like rocket science. One key difference is that if you’re sending a rocket to the moon you better have all the launch details exactly right. You can’t just say “well, let’s see if we can break through the atmosphere, and then we’ll figure out where we want to go next.”

With a community site you need to make sure you’re pushing it in the right direction. But you’re just kidding yourself if you try to plan too precisely. Try to get the site live quickly, and then listen to your users and respond to their needs. Don’t delay launch because you’re trying to get it exactly right.

Starting & Scaling

When a community site starts, you want to try to use every user contribution. It’s worth putting effort into fixing low quality contributions. When the site gets bigger, the value of each mediocre contribution is lower, but the cost of fixing it hasn’t changed, and you may decide to be more aggressive about just deleting contributions that aren’t good enough for the site. You always have to ask “Is this worth it now?” So when you’re starting, don’t say “we shouldn’t do this, it won’t scale when we get big.” If it’s worth it now, do it. And then when you grow, don’t say “but we grew the site by spending a lot of time fixing low quality contributions.” OK, that’s how you got here. But now that the site scaled, is it worth it now?

Does it Scale?

There’s another way the “Does it scale” question can trip you up. You may have a model that scales, let’s say one paid editor per 10,000 community members. Then as the community grows, you panic. “If we get to 5 million users we’ll need 50 paid editors!” OK, great! If you did the math that the value created by X members more than covers the expense of a paid moderator, then you should be thrilled. Of course you need to check and make sure the model is still working. But don’t drop the model because you’re afraid that if you have a billion members you’re going to need ten thousand moderators.

Summary

Getting off the ground requires significant investment. Don’t worry that your initial strategies don’t scale. On the other side, when you get big, don’t say “we should continue doing this because we used to do this.” Do what’s right for the stage that your community is at. Yes, you need a business model that scales. But at your initial stages be prepared to do things that don’t scale, that use your friends and family, and that lose money. Don’t limit yourself by only looking for techniques that scale.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Tribal Elders & Noobs

Probably the biggest advantage of speaking at conferences is that it helps you establish stronger relationships with the other speakers. A side benefit this time was that Roger Dooley handed me his new book Brainfluence: 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neuromarketing.

Some of the highlights:

• Time “wants” vs. “shoulds.” When most of us think of the future we see ourselves as people who exercise, eat right, and act responsibly. However today most of us want chocolate and to watch TV. So if you’re selling vitamins or gym memberships, promotions should focus on great long term deals which sell to the person we want to be. Big discounts when buying a six month supply of vitamins, or a 12 month gym membership. When you’re selling impulse items focus on how quickly you can get the item to the user. This is why supermarkets start you out at fruits and vegetables and sell you candy bars, soft drinks, and gossip magazines at the counter.
• Free beats almost free. Amazon’s free shipping deal led to a large jump in sales. Except in France. Turns out the French site had altered the program to offer ‘One Franc’ shipping (about 20 cents). When they dropped it to free they saw the same benefit as the other countries. [I think there’s a larger point. There’s a huge difference between being something and being almost something. Many of us consider ourselves rationalists and moderate. But the human brain often seems to react to three compartments: ALL, SOME, and NONE. And even a penny puts you in the SOME category]. Dooley gives one exception where you should go with almost free: when you’re trying to dissuade the people who don’t need the service (and who are of little value to you) from participating in the deal.
• Serving hot beverages makes you seem warm. Cold beverages don’t. [Speaking for the minority that don’t drink coffee, offering me hot chocolate would definitely warm me up].
• Tell people they can trust you. Just adding “you can trust us to do the job for you” to the bottom of an ad caused people to rate the firm higher in every category: fair price (7%), caring (11%), fair treatment (20%), quality (30%) and competency (33%).
• Don’t price in round numbers. When we hear a price of $500 we wonder if it should really be $400. $499 is a better price not because it starts with a 4, but because we instinctively perceive it as a more exact value of the object. [I’ve been pricing in round numbers. I’m going to stop doing that.]
• On a website, the first 50-milliseconds are crucial. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was right about some things. We reach extremely quick first impressions and then filter all subsequent information through a confirmation bias. [BTW, Google recently announced that they’ll be releasing algorithm updates that take into account what a user sees in the first 50 milliseconds.]
• Credibility before claims. First convince people that you’re credible, then make your claims.
• Women (and pictures of women) affect men. Who knew? But Dooley gets specific:
  • Short term thinking: Viewing an image of an attractive woman makes a man more short-term oriented. In a controlled experiment a bank found that putting a picture of a pretty woman on their mailing significantly increased the number of men who took out loans. “The education levels and income of the customers did not affect the performance of the psychological features.” In other words, successful and educated men are just as dumb as the rest of us.
  • Sexy images hurt brand recognition: Sexy images generally reduce men’s ability to remember the brand. It seems their minds are elsewhere (or unavailable) [Though I think some companies like GoDaddy found ways to counter this.]
  • Romantic priming: Romantically primed men show off by buying visible things. Romantically primed women show off through visible altruism.
  • Peacock Effect: When around women, men instinctively feel a need to demonstrate power and competence.
  • It’s in the eyes: Men rated pictures of women as more attractive if their pupils were dilated. Dooley refers to this as a sign of arousal, but Daniel Kahneman refers to this more generally as a sign of engagement.

Use it only for good

What to do with this information? Well, you can just view it as a Defense Against the Dark Arts course, and try to be more aware of how people may be using your instincts against you. I appreciate that Dooley instructs readers to use this power only for good, though of course he can’t actually enforce that. It can be a thin line between manipulating someone and satisfying their psychological needs. But ignorance of neurological principles is probably not better for us than knowledge of what makes us and others tick.

The book is presented as 100 2-3 page lessons like “Simple marketing for complex products” (give buyers a simple reason to buy your complex product). He takes some of the best ideas from authors and researchers (I think 5 lessons are from Dan Ariely) and puts them into engaging and informative action items. It was a fun read that gave me some good takeaways.

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

“Given that you have worked on this tool … I believe you should recuse yourself of any discussion of this feature.”

Wikipedia user suggesting WikiMedia product designers should have no say in the future of the features they design http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback#Please_stop_4386

When you’re running a community you desperately want to give your members a strong sense of ownership, the feeling that this is their community. But that can go too far. There’s a great video from The Onion of Star Trek fans hating the latest Star Trek movie because it was “fun, watchable.” Fans complained that because the Klingon dialogue had subtitles you could enjoy the movie even without having learned the imaginary language.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

So on the one hand you want your community members to feel a strong sense of ownership, on the other hand you have to remember that your most committed members’ instincts and interests aren’t always the same as your company’s.

Here are some of the natural desires of the most committed and admired members of a group:

• Maintain their status within the community (and prevent others from matching or challenging that status).
• Have others “pay their dues,” go through the same initiation that they went through.
• Protect the community from bad changes.
• Maintain what makes the community so great (for them).

None of those desires are bad, but you have to be aware of them, work with them, and make sure they’re working for the entire community.

This is a classic leadership problem. You need to give people ownership, and at the same time you need it to be clear that the community has certain values and goals that you have the authority and responsibility to uphold and to pursue. And that includes doing things that welcome newcomers, and that help you grow the community without diluting the brand.

One spot on some community sites that can be hostile to newcomers is your points system, if you have one. Randy Farmer gives an example of The Sims Online, where some veteran players actually formed a mafia to shake down newer players. In less dramatic examples a site displays a leaderboard, which can be a great incentive for the few top contributors, but signal newcomers that until they do a million contributions they can’t earn respect or recognition.

If you want to have a leaderboard, consider having a Hall of Fame or something to recognize lifetime achievements, but then have your normal leaderboard refresh monthly.
Another issue with newcomers is to make sure you’re guiding them to proper behavior. Wikipedia has a bot called “Huggle” which makes it easy to send semi-automated messages to people who make bad contributions. But they’re really trying to get their senior members to give personal, constructive feedback to new users.

I went to StackOverflow, a Q&A site for programmers, and I asked “what kind of computer should I use for programming, a Mac or a PC.” OK, not a great question, I was just trying to explore their site. But my question got quickly closed as “Blatantly offensive.” Blatantly offensive, really? I mean that’s like coming into a store, asking for a tangentially related product, and having them push you out and slam the door in your face.

Some people think “just get the vandals out of the system quickly, don’t waste time and effort on them.” But Wikipedia found that of their current dedicated editors, 30% had their first edits reverted. And perhaps others had mediocre first edits that managed to slide through. So don’t assume that if a user is imperfect in his first interaction with your system that he’s a loser and that your system is better off without him. You want your existing community to personally engage the new members and help them join the community.
When you’re trying to encourage new users, you really want to focus on that first engagement. Get the user to do something. Ideally you’re looking for some kind of pubic commitment that makes the user feel she’s declared herself part of the community.

In his talk on Tuesday Tim Ash mentioned a classic experiment. The experimenters knocked on doors asking people to put a big traffic safety sign on their front lawn. 92% said no. Then they went to a different group, and asked them to sign a petition to “Keep America Beautiful.” Later they went back to the people who signed the petition, and more than half agreed to put the big sign on their lawn. So you want to get people to take that first, small, public action that makes them part of the community.

Wikipedia tried to lower the bar to entry by adding ratings boxes at the bottom of their pages. They used the Pringles metaphor to explain this. “Can’t stop at just one” is true for potato chips and for contributions to a site.

But the discussion pages on this feature are interesting. Some community veterans don’t like the feature and they demand it be removed. My favorite is the guy who tells one of the feature’s designers that he should recuse himself from the discussion because he worked on the feature. That’s where we’ve come to, some community members feel so empowered that they demand not only to be heard, but that no other groups be heard.

I don’t want to say “the inmates are running the asylum” because you can’t think that way. If you think “us” and “them” you’re on the wrong path. Some people think you should encourage your more experienced users to retire, to make room for the new generation. I disagree. You want your veterans to nurture the newbies. There should be enough room in a growing community for them all.

Last thing related to Wikipedia’s effort. Gizmodo had an article that said that ratings would ruin Wikipedia. These kinds of ratings are not going to ruin Wikipedia. But the article highlights another threat to quality content. Does your system encourage quick and sensationalist posts or thoughtful and nuanced posts. This isn’t just a UGC issue, or just a web issue. The term “yellow journalism” is more than a century old.
To sum up, you need to make sure that you and your senior community members are working towards the same goals, which should usually include welcoming and nurturing newcomers. Give your veterans lots of ownership, but make sure they’re helping, not hindering, your community’s growth and improvement.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Starting & Scaling

“I’m not a jerk like Jobs was. Which is the biggest reason why I’m just a moderately successful business guy, and not a super billionaire.”

Gene Marks, Forbes, Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, Good for Him, October 10, 2011

Steve Jobs

“Gene might have hit a nerve among managers who haven’t found themselves and are willing to try whatever the business press declares to be the flavor of the moment.

I can imagine headlines like “Are You Jerk Enough to be the Next Steve Jobs?” or “Want to Be Like Jobs? Be a Jerk!” or “Think Different: Like a Jerk!” or whatever will sell a book or magazine.

David Coursey, Forbes, Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, You Shouldn’t Be, October 12, 2011

“Those who have followed Apple closely throughout the years have heard dozens if not hundreds of stories of Jobs berating employees … Here’s the thing: the tech world could probably use more jerks.”

MG Siegler, TechCrunch, The Jerk, November 18, 2011

To celebrate a man’s accomplishments while overlooking his shortcomings is normally good, even noble, especially when discussing the recently deceased. But some writers are holding up Steve Jobs’ nastiness as something to emulate. To be clear, I’m fully on board with the idea that you should drive your people to excellence through honesty, high standards, and a commitment to greatness. But I’d like to call bullshit on the religion of Steve before people go further on the path of worshiping Steve Jobs’ dark side.

Power Leads to Asshole-ness, Not Vice-Versa

“Power is wielded most effectively when it’s used responsibly by people who are attuned to, and engaged with the needs and interests of others. Years of research suggests that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror …

People with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes … a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior.

Dachne Kelter, Greater Good, The Power Paradox, Winter 2007-8

There are many reasons for our image of powerful people being jerks. But apparently most of the evidence indicates that being a jerk doesn’t generally lead to being powerful; it generally gets in the way. It’s after assuming power that some people lose the modesty and concern for others that helped them achieve a position of responsibility and influence.

It Minimizes Others

“Often Jobs would suddenly “flip,” taking an idea that he’d mocked (maybe your idea) and embracing it passionately – and as his own – without ever acknowledging that his view had changed.”

Peter Elkind, Fortune, The Trouble with Steve, March 5, 2008

“As soon as people in Silicon Valley heard I was writing a book on the downsides of assholes, I had many people — I mean hundreds, and quite a few who were or had been very close to him — immediately start telling me Steve Jobs stories.

Bob Sutton, Work Matters, The Trouble with Steve Jobs: Asshole, Genius, or Both, March 6, 2008

[Following 11 suicides at Apple's Chinses sweatshops]  ”new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally. Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won’t kill themselves. …

They sleep in cramped rooms in triple-decked bunk beds to save space, with simple bamboo mats for mattresses.
Despite summer temperatures hitting 35 degrees, with 90 per cent humidity, there is no air-conditioning. Workers say some dormitories house more than 40 people and are infested with ants and cockroaches, with the noise and stench making it difficult to sleep.”

Andrew Malone and Richard Jones, Mail Online, Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod, June 11, 2010

“Our secret is teamwork. I do great teamwork.”

Fred, Scooby Doo

Decent people build up their friends, colleagues, and teammates.

To be fair, Jobs was apparently such a genius, and so driven to excellence, that may of his colleagues were willing to put up with the humiliations for the opportunity to join in his quest for greatness.

It Invades Your Life

Cause and effect is hard to determine regarding Jobs’ darkside. Three of his uglier moments outside of work:

• Made his daughter and her mother live on welfare, though he was already quite wealthy, for two years while he denied paternity.
• Proposed to his girlfriend twice. Each time she accepted, and each time he stepped back. He then asked his friends which of his girlfriends was prettier, and which he should marry.
• Drives his Mercedes around without a license plate and parks in handicapped spots.

You Become What You Despise

“The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.”

Mike Daisey, The New York Times, About Nostalgia, October 6, 2011

The greatest curse of revolutions and revolutionaries is they generally become what they despised. Truly successful revolutions, the ones that replace not the individuals but the ideas, can only be brought about through discipline, patience, humility, self-control, and a commitment to a morality greater than ourselves. Steve Jobs was a revolutionary only in the tragic sense of the word, creating an empire of fear, secrecy, and domination that far exceeds IBM’s worst offenses.

It’s Not Worth It

“If you are a winner and an asshole, you still remain — at least in my book — a loser as a human being.  Put differently, if the journey is the reward, then why would any of us choose to travel with a companion who treats his fellow travelers like dirt? ”

Bob Sutton, Work Matters, The Trouble with Steve Jobs: Asshole, Genius, or Both, March 6, 2008

Even if being an asshole were good for business, would it be worth it? Because at the end of the day, you’re an asshole.

Conclusion: Emulate the Good, Reject the Bad

I’ll be honest. I despised Steve Jobs. I despised him for all the reasons I listed above, all the nasty things he did to others. I also despised him because he built an empire that had no room for anybody else. Microsoft and Google, for all their flaws, built platforms around which other partners could innovate. Ultimately IMO that’s why Microsoft won in the 80s and why I hope Google wins today. Steve Jobs seemed to go to sleep at night terrified that somebody else might make a nickle that could have been Jobs’. Since he was a Buddhist I hope he comes back as a worker in one of his iSweatshops.

But let’s put that aside.

Consensus is that Steve Jobs was a genius who led the creation of great products. Let’s learn from his commitment to excellence. Let’s celebrate his tribute to the crazy ones and the misfits who think differently, whether or not there was room for them at Apple. But let’s neither envy nor emulate his depravity.

PostScript

I’ve received a lot of feedback to this article. At the end of the day, it comes down to Gene Marks’ quote with which I opened this post

“I’m not a jerk like Jobs was. Which is the biggest reason why I’m just a moderately successful business guy, and not a super billionaire.”

Sorry Gene. The biggest reason you’re just a moderately successful business guy and not a super billionaire is because you’re not a creative genius, as talented in his field as Mozart and Michael Jordan were in theirs. It’s a perverse pleasure we take in telling ourselves and others that our morality is what separates us from the greats. It allows us to deny that our shortcomings may be primarily due to inferior talent, effort, or commitment.

Admittedly I’m biased too, because I don’t want managers emulating Steve’s dark side.

Was Steve Jobs great despite being a jerk? Was he was great because he was a jerk? Had he not been a jerk, would his company have created products that were worse? Or better? Was it worth it? And what lessons should we teach our children, and ourselves? What do you think?

PubCon was great. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines

William Leake:  23% of adults have cursed at their phone after a bad experience with a mobile site. What if they put siri on? What if it curses at us better than we curse at it?

Dan Zarella: All these takeaways are under 140 characters. *wink* just sayin’ (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)

Ted Ulle: If graphic designers drive the web development process, you are dead, dead, dead! (hat tip: Matt McGlynn)

Roger Dooley: This is a subliminal ad for my book [Large picture of his new neuromarketing book]

Greg Boser: Every year the keynote says SEO is dead. They never come back, but we do. (hat tip: Jonah Stein)

Matt Cutts:

• What is a cell phone? It’s a computer you carry with you everywhere. This will change things enormously. (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)
• If we can move from an anonymous Web to a Web where reputation matters, that’s going to make the Web better. (hat tip: Lisa Barone)

Tim Ash: Recycle content. What’s the least I can tweak an existing piece to publish as new? [That must be a good thing, it’s green]

Derrick Wheeler: No matter how hard SEO team works, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get implemented.

Rick Skrenta: People ask why do we need another search engine? Don’t we already have one? [Notices co-panelist, Bing's Duane Forrester] Or two?

Best Lessons

Dan Zarella: (Facebook shares)

• There’s a series of words that correlate with a page having less likes – optimization, SEO, consulting, leverage, etc. Even if your brand is marketing optimization – consider more social ways to describe your business (hat tip: Lauren Litwinka)
• Most sharable words: why, how, most, world, big, says. Talk about things in the news, it’s basically gossip (hat tip: Merry Morud)
• Weekends are the best time for FB sharing

Brad Geddes: (Landing pages)

• DO NOT USE SUBMIT BUTTON ON YOUR WEBSITE!!! Use Get This Offer, or Start Your Order, or Continue, or Proceed (hat tip: Dan Richey)
• If you don’t NEED something on your form to convert a customer – REMOVE IT! (hat tip: SEOMike)
• CAPTCHAs just stop conversions. Find another way to fight spam, like hidden edit boxes. [Shows numbers to back this up]
• If somebody gives you a credit card, take it. Don’t reject b/c of dashes or spaces.
• Never ask how did you hear about us. That’s what tracking is for. And the answers people give you are usually wrong.
• Never prefill fields. Our eye is trained to find empty spaces.
• What I or anyone else tells you is a test you should run yourself. Don’t assume that just because we said it it will work for you.

Joanna Lord:

• Don’t just test green button vs blue. Test the bigger things on your site. Don’t assume the guy before you tested them.
• If there are no recognized awards in your industry, create one. Make yourself #6 or something. [Don’t say that. People are going to think just anybody can put up a Best Of post].

Tim Ash:

• Don’t use green or blue call to action buttons. They blend in to the page. Use a good contrasting color like orange. [Was then asked “Why not red?” Answer: Because it makes people think “Stop.”]
• Put a box with the most Tweetable line from your blog and prompt people to Tweet that. Works much better than Tweeting the whole post (and it links to the same thing). (hat tip: Alan K’necht)

Jennifer Cairo: Before you think about social media promotions listen on your channels. Do Twitter searches, find LinkedIn Groups

Chris Winfield: Go to Linked In’s How Journalists Use LinkedIn page and reverse engineer it to figure out how you can get journalists to find you. (hat tip: Lisa Barone, details here: Social Media Press Relations & Brand Management)

Brian Chappel: It’s not all about the tools. Follow Avinash’s 90/10 rule. Spend 10% on the tool, 90% on people to analyze. (hat tip: Lindsay Childs)

Matt Cutts: Google will be integrating algos that consider what’s above the fold, what a user sees in the first 500 milliseconds. Do people see content or something that’s distracting?

Marty Weintraub: People think Facebook is for personal and LinkedIn is for business. Wrong! There are great business opportunities on Facebook.

Greg Boser:

• Brute force is dead regarding backlinks. It’s too hard now to fake a natural footprint well enough to fool Google.
• Human Engagement is the new Page Rank. Build engagement signals, get links from pages w/ good engagement signals.

Best Jump the Couch Moment

In an otherwise strong opening keynote, Leo Laporte said he’s not sure search engines will still be relevant in 5 months. Really?

Best Exchanges

Tim Ash shows eye tracking results of a page with a picture of a woman and some text and buttons.

Audience member: Those results are bullshit. The user didn’t look at the woman’s breasts.

Tim Ash: It’s not bullshit, the user was a woman.

Question: If I do doorway pages will the whole site get penalized or just the doorway pages?

Matt Cutts: Are you asking me how to most effectively build doorway pages?!

Question: I have to …

Matt: Oh, somebody kidnapped your family and is demanding that you create doorway pages? OK, I sympathize. But tell the kidnapper that these pages don’t work anymore. They won’t help him.

Amit Singhal: Don’t do it, man. Don’t do it.

[2 questions later]

Danny Sullivan: I have my doorway pages on Blogger …

Best Anecdotes

Greg Boser was drunk the night before WebExpo 2.0 and hadn’t put together a deck, so he went online and took one from Stephan Spencer. Stephan was at the session. Oops.

Matt Cutts had to take a break from live interaction sessions because the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu wanted to borrow the PC he used for those sessions. Matt figured it was good karma and his computer would come back much nicer and calmer. [Maybe it came back as a Mac].

Best Theatrics

• Ziv Dascalu puts on black ski mask to discuss black hat techniques. [Which he says not to use. He’s only teaching you so that you can defend yourself. He’s like a defense against the dark arts teacher].
• Matt Cutts was asked his favorite Tweet from PubCon. He said this one from @maplenorth (Adam Green): @leolaporte - “I don’t know if search engines are relevant in 6 months” … Somewhere @mattcutts just spit out his morning coffee #pubcon. So Matt recreates the moment by drinking some water and doing a spit take.

Best Session Title

• Rob Garner: e-commerce SEO is Dead (and I don’t feel so good myself) (hat tip: Michelle Lowery)

Best Lines from Blog Coverage

• Ryan Jones: Next up is Greg Boser and the room is shocked that he not only has a powerpoint deck, but he also didn’t steal it! Way to go Greg!
• Lisa Barone: Leo [Laporte] asks what we tell our parents what we do for a living. …  My dad tells people I’m a secretary for Google. Which…I mean…he has a point, right?

Best Tweets

• @chrisgoulet: via @WarrenWhitlock at #pubcon - Make sure your messages fit into the length of a tweet, or people will be unab
• @BigKitchen: Twitter makes me want to have drinks w/ ppl I’ve never met & FB makes me want to throw drinks at people I know
• @lindsaylorraine: You know you’re tweeting too much when hubby stops following you.
• @mattcutts: I still can’t believe someone at #pubcon asked me the best way to do doorway pages. Amit’s take: “Don’t do that.” :)

Best Coverage:

• Outspoken Media: Pubcon 2011
• SERoundTable: PubCon 2011 Las Vegas Conference
• Search Engine Journal: PUBCON 2011

Lisa Barone may be my favorite blogger, so it was great finally getting a chance to hear her speak.

And we’re underway. Want to discuss the power of being strategically authentic instead of letting it all hang out.

Lisa Barone at BlogWorld

She’s the co-founder and Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media. Thinks of herself as a corporate blog voice-giver. That’s her passion, giving corporate blogs a voice.

“And as you probably know by now, I stutter.”

The fact that I stutter probably means that I understand the power of voice more than anyone else. I know what it’s like not to have one, I know what it’s like to have it taken away, I know what it’s like to have something to say and no way to say it, and I know what it’s like to get your voice back.

People say that you need to be authentic, show your customers who you are. All the different parts of your personality. You have to let people know everything about yourself. I’m here to tell you that’s a lie.

Problems with full authenticity

Audiences will only remember a few things about you. Giving too much dilutes your brand.

As bloggers, full transparency makes us look crazy.

The idea of authenticity leads us to whine and complain online and look bad.

Some negative examples

National Post reporter contacted somebody for a story. The person took 2 days to get back to him. Reporter was offended and insulted the contact. Contact wrote a nasty Tweet. Nasty phone call followed by nasty tweet followed by flame war. It was embarrassing for both of them. The paper had to issue an apology.

Tom Cruise jumping the couch. Went from beloved leading man to raving lunatic because he told us how much he loved somebody.

Too much irrelevant information distracts people from their core goal and threatens the band they’re trying to build.

The audience doesn’t want the real you, they want your blogging superhero.

Your blogging superhero

The marketing version of you. Using yourself to show people their desired outcome.

Magnify your strengths and marketable traits.

Forces you to identify your strengths.

Create a marketing strategy and editorial guidelines for your brand. Stop winging it to create a more unified, focus voice.

The internet isn’t always the friendliest place to be. There are people who want nothing more than to pee in your Cheerios (OK). Creating your superhero gives you the distance you need to not take these things to heart.

Wait – isn’t this inauthentic?

People are afraid that this will make them see inauthentic. Seth Godin says that authenticity in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.

We do this all the time. When you’re home with the kids you may be softer. When you’re out with the guys you may be louder. It’s not being inauthentic.

So how do you do it?

Steve Jobs told Apple that we live in a busy market. To be remembered you need to be clear about what you want people to know. Identify your place in the market. What 3 things do you want people to associate with your brand? Once you know them, right them down.

Build a story that brings it together. I told you about my strengths and weaknesses, I told you why that’s great for you, and then I told my story to bring it all together.

Lose everything that doesn’t relate back to what you want to show. It’s a distraction.

Like a job interview

Think of it like a job interview. You’re going to tell people about all the things you want them to hear, not about that bad relationship you had in high school. You’re not going to tell them that you just had a fight with your best friend.

A few years ago I took belly dancing lessons. I loved it because the teacher only taught beginner belly dancing because that’s what she wanted to be known for. She’d show up in neon unitards. When she described a move she was crass and vulgar. I doubt she’s like that in real life. I doubt she dresses or talks like that. But it worked for the class. [In that blog post Lisa foreshadows part of this talk, except she calls it "Be the best version of yourself." This talk takes it one step further, it's "Be the best version of yourself for the specific context."]

Takeaways

Your blogging superhero is the best version of yourself.

Allows you to hone in on your marketing strategy, heighten your personality, and connect with your readers.

Will keep you safe when things get rough.

We fall in love with people who are brave enough to be special and memorable.

Base your character on the best parts of yourself.

—

She ends with “I stuttered less than I expected, so we have plenty of time for Q&A.”

All the questions seem to start with “I really enjoy your blog.”

Some points from her Q&A:

• If you wouldn’t let some intern answer your phones, don’t let them Tweet for you.
• Define who you want to be in your market. The quick witted know-it-all? Super-helpful? Identify who you want to be. If your best friend had to pick 5 words to define you or your business, what would it be.

Also see Peter Shankman Rocks BlogWorld, Darren Rowse: Blogging from the Heart but Smart and Best of BlogWorld.

I’ve been enjoying ProBlogger for a while so it was great to hear him in person at BlogWorld. Here’s the essence of his talk.

Darren Rowse at BlogWorld 2011 LA

I’d like to start with an experiment. Find a person next to you that you don’t know and ask them why they started blogging. [Think about your answer, I'll wait.] I asked this on Google Plus. At the beginning most people said something about “I had something I needed to say” or “I wanted to engage people” or “I wanted to help.”

Then some brave soul finally said “I heard you could make money blogging.”

And then other people started saying things like that. Not just making money directly, but raise my profile, get a job, make a book deal.

Many of the earlier bloggers had noble reasons about wanting to share. Many people who joined later were more profit oriented. And some of the old-timers resent the newcomers, but I don’t, these are all good reasons to blog.

Somebody, let’s call her Sally, wrote to me saying “I heard that if you just blog from the heart things will work out. So I’ve been pouring my heart out, helping people but nothing has worked out for me, and I can’t keep doing this with no return.”

It does happen to some people. [And because of Survivors' Bias, those people often loudly repeat the "it will work itself out" canard and implicitly if it's not working out for you you're not really blogging from the heart. I'm glad Darren isn't spouting that line.] But for most people just blogging from the heart isn’t enough.

And on the other extreme I got approached from somebody I’ll call Harry. “I’ve been following the formula and it just doesn’t work.” “What formula,” I asked. He had subscribed to some program that said something like regular content + link building + comments + nice design + ads in good places + affiliate links = large profits.

“Can I look at your blog?” I asked.

“Sure, I’ll send you links to all 15 of them.”

And he’s really writing on 15 blogs every day. But when I read them, it looked like they’d been written by a robot. It was so formulaic and strategic that there was no heart in it.

I started as a heart blogger, but I couldn’t sustain it. It was taking me away from my family, and from commercial opportunities, and it wasn’t making me any money. In fact, it was costing me money.

Then things started working. Once I had 30 blogs going. But I didn’t care enough about the 30 things.

So let’s talk about When Harry Met Sally [I guess I should have seen that one coming. Any of you readers see that coming? Be honest]. Where the Heart and the Smart Come Together. There’s nothing wrong with Strategic Blogging and nothing wrong with Heart Blogging. But ideally you combine them.

Robert Frost wrote “There’s no tears in the writer, there’s no tears in the reader. If there’s no surprise in the write, there’s no surprise in the reader.”

You need to be engaged in the topic.

Tell stories. The posts that people remember are usually stories. They don’t remember what I told them about shutter speed. They do remember “Why this photographer is better than me.” A post about how I was smugly observing this silly woman with a camera at a George Michael concert. She held the camera over her head and took pictures with the flash and then looked and saw just black. She tried looking through the lens and only managed to get pictures of the guy in front of her’s bald spot. But as I laughed smugly she just kept experimenting, learning, taking pictures, and having fun. I realized she was a better photographer than I was, for three reasons. She had her camera with her. She was using it and enjoying it. And she was learning.

My most read post this year is a guest post of How to quit your job, move to paradise, and get paid to change the world.

Build community. People don’t come on line just to get information, they want to engage, they want to belong to something.

Inspire people. I don’t know about you but my life isn’t always that inspiring.

Inspiration was driving readers to information. Put up 15 inspiring photos. People e-mailed him asking for the techniques. Now these posts link to a tutorial. People click on those links like crazy.

Be personal.

Be playful. Be yourself.

I write best in a conversational style. My best posts often start as e-mails. Then I realize I can just remove the other person’s name and it’s a great post that people connect to.

Do Good.

Blogging Smart

If you want your blog to be a business someday, then start treating your blog as a business today. If you want your blog to eventually be something else, start focusing on that today.

After humoring my blogging habit for years, my wife gave me 6 months to get blogging working. That day I started calling advertisers. Finally got one, for $30 a month. Then I needed to figure out how to increase my traffic.

Define what success looks like to you.

I put together a 5 year plan. I recently found it. I was surprised by how much my accomplishments matched my plan. Articulating what I wanted to achieve helped me achieve them. Then I made a 1 year plan, which included what am I going to do in the next 30 days.

Know your reader. Create user personas. Creating a user profile gives me content ideas, marketing ideas, and monetization ideas. It tells me how to engage him. Knowing who you want to reach will transform how you blog. If you already have readers, great, it can help you figure out who you should be reaching.

Branding.

Jeff Bezos says a brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

So what do you want people to say about you. If you spend 15 minutes thinking about that it will help you.

Marketing: Build it and they will come? No, they won’t.

So another exercise: Where are your potential readers gathering? How can you participate there?

Hooks. Think through how do I get a first time visitor to become an evangelist for my site.

Create something to sell.

Editorial Strategy. What type of post should I be writing for my blog? I write to serve my current reader. And some posts I write to get shared. Some posts are to inform, some to interact, some to inspire. Mix it up. The more you think about this the better. Also think about frequency. Do some testing, and look what your competition is doing.

Experiment, test, and tweak. Did 31 days to a better blog. Did OK. Second year did it better. 3^rd year did it again, this time with an e-mail list and a daily reminder, a forum. People asked for an eBook. I said, OK, I can gather it into an eBook and sell you that. We’ve sold around 300,000 eBooks from that random idea that I tweaked and experimented on. It’s now gone through 5 iterations. So if something works, make it work better.

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Great session. And give the man credit, during the half hour I took finishing up this post Darren was patiently talking to everybody that came up to talk to him, and is now talking to the people who stayed in the room.

For more BlogWorld coverage see Peter Shankman Rocks BlogWorld and Best of BlogWorld.