Larry Brauner is 58 this week. And he’s celebrating for four days with a virtual birthday party on Facebook.

Larry’s Facebook party

Now, I have no idea what fizzbang shenanigans are planned, but the very idea is an example of what he stands for: thinking outside the box. It makes me smile, frown and puzzle.

It’s obvious that we haven’t even started using Facebook in a million extraordinary and rewarding ways.

And that fills me with horror: “Oh no! You mean I’m going to have to *think* about this?”… and pleasure: “Thank heavens, someone has smashed the mould.”

So, Larry gets a festival of responses. He offers floor prizes, and here at Contented.com we certainly intend to offer one. He hurls a bunch of bloggers into one spot for a purpose that’s more social than marketing.

And repercussions start percussing. Reverberations start verbing.

Let this genial, ingenious idea wander where it will.

How quickly the shiny-new Facebook became boring-boring same-old same-old. I’m happy to say that Larry’s virtual party has already seeded my brain with other social marketing ideas.

Also, as another person who is not exactly in the first flush of youth, I’m tickled pink to see him declare his age without the hint of a blush. Go Larry!

The Contented email newsletter included three special offers today. In brief…

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all our fantastic customers. You understand the value of great web content, and you chose our courses above all other options. After your first purchase, 38% came back to buy more courses. Typically, you enrol two or three staff, discover how great the courses are, then enrol another 20, 50 or 100.

Frankly, a heck of a lot of hard work lies behind the online courses you love so much. If our customers were ho-hum or grumpy, we might have given up months ago.

1. 5% discount for next group purchase if you are on our clients page or have purchased from us before. This applies when you purchase for a group of 5 or more.
But hurry! This special offer expires on 24 December 2009.

2. Half-price Diploma in Web Content if you did our first generation courses (in HTML).
Be quick! This offer is valid until 28 February 2010.

3. 10% discount for a successful referral.
Tell others about CONTENTED courses! For each successful referral, we’ll give you 10% off your next single licence Diploma purchase.

But wait, there’s more! Two more free gifts:

• Use our writing tips on your intranet free — just drag and drop.
• Follow us on Twitter for unexpected gifts. Our first Twitter exclusive gave five lucky people a free Diploma!
  http://twitter.com/aliceandrachel

A writing revolution has been happening over recent years. It’s not on show, and it’s not happening in the classrooms. On holiday recently I saw it again, under my very nose.

Virtually every young guest at the Heilala Holiday Village was writing daily in a blog. They’d brought a netbook in their luggage, or used the iMacs in the dining room. And they were not just tossing careless words at the screen and hitting Send. They spent time and care over what they wrote. They exhibited precisely the behaviour that English teachers dream of.

They structured their prose. They edited it. They massaged it. They proofread. Above all, they wrote for an audience.

Older people watched the young travellers and waited for the iMacs to come free. And waited. And waited.

I was amazed and impressed. Even as one older guest was ranting on about the Poor Literacy Standards of Young People Today, there they were, under our noses, polishing their prose for a real audience. Writing and writing and writing.

Years ago, when my kids travelled through wild and dangerous lands, I hoped for a postcard every few months. They didn’t write much: maybe because they had to say the same thing over and over again. Today’s lucky parents can open Firefox, join the crowd and sweat over their children’s hair-raising adventure of the day, told to the whole wide world in a blog.

Why this revolution? Why do people work so much harder at a blog than a school assignment? It’s the audience: real, known and unknown, they’re out there and they respond. Sure beats writing for a teacher, and ultimately, no matter how ingenious the teacher, school writing is done for a grade. Then there’s the reward of seeing your writing look good on the screen: a printout cannot compete for glamour.

Clive Thompson calls this “the new literacy”. In Wired magazine he tells us Andrea Lunsford at Stanford has been studying young people’s writing for five years and come to some fascinating conclusions.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The Stanford Study of Writing

A McKinsey Quarterly article on E-government 2.0 concludes that government use of the internet is far from reaching its potential. Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui look approvingly at early initiatives and coolly at what’s happening now:

Despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

Baumgarten and Chui are clear about why e-government seems to have stalled, and have three instructions. They’re talking about the USA, and it’s worth thinking about.

No use doing any one of these three if the other two are ignored. E-government is not a trendy add-on to government bureaucracy. It means re-examining the whole shebang — starting with the org-chart. Who’s in charge? Who has the expertise? Can we afford any technological naivete in management?

To reach the next level in e-government services, organizations must overcome each of these obstacles. First, they must move to a governance model in which e-government initiatives are owned by “line of business” executives and supported by a dedicated, cross-functional team. Second, they must develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Finally, government agencies must shift mind-sets to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

This is the bit that Contented can help with, in our own small way: must develop capabilities in [...] marketing, usability, [...] and customer insights. Our Diploma in Web Content is one way that thousands of web content authors in government can gain those skills.

Does that seem a stretch to you? Well, the old p-government involved thousands of government employees working on paper and shifting those pieces of paper around. Some pieces went to the public. Marketing was seen as a discrete specialty. Even writing plain language was seen by some as an arcane specialty, done by the communications department and unrelated to everyday work! Government agencies should not be ivory towers or even contain ivory towers… but they did, and some still do.

When government went online, every document became a marketing tool — like it or not. Every document should be fuelled by customer insights. Many a government employee who writes at work now writes stuff that directly affects the public.

It’s a huge turnaround from paper writing to web writing and there’s a lot at stake. Million dollar ICT projects can fail if the content is written with a paper world in mind.

Job seekers need facts! It’s heartbreaking. Almost heartbraking. The way so many people start their job ads on Twitter with a rave and a ramble about life in general instead of facts.

Twitter is a perfect place for job ads. But time and again, advertisers blow it by failing to describe the job or the worker they need.

They write an ad for a regular web page or forum. They forget the ad is going to turn up on Twitter, so they waste most of those precious 140 characters on blah. Twitterfeed recycles the first few words — whatever they are. Twitterfeed doesn’t edit (doh).

Take these, for instance, on geekzonenzjobs.

Job: If you’re a people person with good applications performance analysis skills, who enjoys interacting wi..

Job: Become part of one of NZ’s success stories and join one of the best development teams around. Leading e..

Job: Intermediate BA (3-4 yrs experience) to join 8 other BA’s in what has been described to me as a down to..

Job: Sick of playing second fiddle? Ready to fine tune your life and break free from your cubicle? Melbourne..

Job: Work Life Balance in a Multi-International, Really? Advance your career, rewards are plentiful. You owe..

OK, now for a few that fully exploit their allotment of characters and make sense on Twitter. And gosh they were hard to find. As you see these are not deathless prose: because they’re written for job seekers, not creative writing students.

Job: 12 Month Fixed Term contract. Novell: IT & Technology : Help Desk/Support (Full time) Desktop Sup..

Job: XSL Developer for established company in Auckland CBD: Do you know your XSL from your XML? Young V..

Job: * 5+ years experience as Business Analyst * Experienced with Billing Systems * Auckland East location: ..

Writing for Twitter is no different from writing other web content. It’s simply web content writing on steroids. A tweet is a headline, actually, with a few bonus words that summarise the page.

If you want to know why we all need to be trained to write for the web, look no further than Twitter.

People who’ve done the CONTENTED courses in web content writing would spot the problem in a nanosecond. They know a web page should not start with a nice little chat. They’d delete meaningless feel-good phrases and start with facts, facts, facts. They’d make darn sure the first 20-odd words contained at least some keywords.

Then maybe the employees they need would notice the ad, and apply.

Broken heart image from michiyoemi on FlickR: thanks.

James Robertson knows intranets as nobody else does. He and StepTwo Designs are behind the brilliant annual awards for Intranet Innovation Awards. Note the difference: this is not about naming the best intranets in every sense, but about acknowledging innovative projects, large or small, with a big impact on the intranet’s functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery or business solutions.

Intranet management teams are generally isolated, and may depend on developers to show the big picture. The goals of the awards are:

1. to celebrate the great work done by intranet teams across the globe, to give them the recognition they deserve
2. to find [new] ideas, whether large or small
3. to share them with the wider community.

Winners and commended entries came from Canada, Switzerland, Australia, USA, UK and Germany.

With typical generosity, StepTwo Designs provides a 30-page executive summary of the whole report, packed with facts and screenshots. It’s exciting and it’s free. But if you are seriously involved in intranet development, you won’t begrudge the US$189.00 for the full report.

Intranet Innovations 2008

Just by the way, the summary starts with a crystal clear IP statement in plain English.

Have trouble getting your head around particle physics and particle colliders at CERN? Suffer no more. The wonderful Kate McAlpine reduces the whole story to a hip-hop rap that’s drawn half a million viewers already on YouTube.

Is Kate McAlpine, scientist, a relative of yours, I hear you ask? Yes (but she’s a different Kate McAlpine, scientist).

Hip-hop rapper Kate McAlpine, a 23-year-old Michigan State graduate, calls herself a science communicator. Kate, the world needs you—keep on doing what you do:

I am an adventurer in the realm of ideas, and I have pitched my camp at a crossroads: the intersection of science and writing.

The Large Hadron Rap on YouTube

Many community organisations have monstrous problems getting a web site at all, let alone one that meets their needs. Any web site running on volunteers has a bundle of problems, starting with a chronic lack of time and money. Yet the Web today can expand the work they do and save them a heap of their precious money: but who cares to help this kind of group under stress?

Answer: Wellington ICT, a not-for-profit Trust providing ICT programmes and projects for community groups in the Wellington region.

Engage Your Community is a web conference for community organisations in Wellington, 4 September.

This follows a similar conference in Hamilton which was highly successful. By all accounts, community workers will gorge on knowledge and leave inspired. Minimal technical knowledge is needed. Workshops:

• David Barrow on online survey tools
• Mike Riversdale on the marvels of Google applications
• Ben Lampard on online calendaring and scheduling
• Miraz Jordan on how to control the information flood with RSS feeds
• Pamela Minnett on social networking
• Stephen Harlow on digital storytelling

And while we’re on the topic, the Webguide partnership offers:

• Webguide blog with articles in plain English
• Connect your Community, a guide to setting up a community web site, available in hard copy and as a pdf.

What a week!
Yesterday, two days after the Presentation Zen workshop, I went to
Search Engine Boot Camp in Auckland.

I enjoyed this conference and hey, it was at the Hilton on Auckland Harbour. The views! The beef fillet!
Now, I know this blog entry looks like a boring and dutiful list of presentation topics, which you could have got straight from the Search Engine Boot Camp site. My perhaps too subtle intention is to show how the focus of search engine optimisation has changed in the last six years:

• from free to paid search results
• from one-way PR manipulation to managing unpredictable swarms of public opinion on Web 2.0
• from trying to outwit search engines to saying thanks for all the help.

It’s still the wild west out there, so it’s still a lot of fun. SEO is no place for the faint-hearted. Go Barry!

I was quite startled at the shift in audience and focus since the first time I’d presented at a Search Engine Strategies conference in Sydney 2002.

Sydney 2002: the audience was largely male, the industry was packed with cowboys, and people kept asking,

Yes I know you have to you say that but really, (nudge nudge wink wink) what dirty little trick will get my business straight to the top of search results?

What did we talk about in 2002? If I remember rightly — and why would I? — there were sessions on the differences between the major search engines and directories. (Remember Excite? Inktomi? This was before they all started swallowing each others’ tails.) Metatags for sure. Spammy things. And many topics related more to web content management than SEO.

In 2008, worlds away. Despite this being a boot camp, the audience was highly professional, and nearly half were female, I reckon. One of the bad boys had hung up his spurs, but he still had a glint in his eye, and Barry Smyth still kept things trotting along.

Only two of our topics straddled the last six years: SEM Fundamentals (Paul Webster, Google) and Copy writing for SEO (my topic, naturally). Even Researching keywords and Building search-friendly websites are topics that have necessarily changed along with tools and technologies.

Sense the larger changes, but. Several speakers dealt with aspects of paid search, including Writing Ads that convert. A Google Analytics Workshop from Rod Jacka, Panalysis showed us the wonders of some free Google webmaster tools: why try to outwit Google when Google is the optimiser’s best friend?

The impact of Web 2.0 on search engine marketing is enormous, and Boot Camp tackled the topic head on.

• Simon Young of iJump talked about using social media to promote your visibility in search results.
• Jason West of WebSalad discussed reputation management: it’s no longer a case of one-sided self-promotion, but of damage control when other people push your name to unwanted prominence in search results.
• I missed a session on optimising for Web 2.0 technologies but I bet that was interesting too.

Link Building Fundamentals (Jason West, WebSalad) is a topic that has largely outgrown its dubious past. Universal Search and Local Search (Jacqui Jones, Netconcepts) and The Best SEO Practices for Mobile & Local Search are two more talks I missed.

Check out the agenda while it’s still online. And next time there’s a Search Engine Boot Camp near you, enlist if you are half interested.

Hillary vs. Barack: Who had the smartest media strategy? asks Antony Young on the Advertising Age. Fascinating analysis.
The verdict:

Obama wins overall. His campaign’s ability to create personal relationships via mass-marketing techniques characterized his media strategy. The employment of digital media channels — notably his website, use of social media and e-mail marketing — helped gain younger voter support and proved effective in fundraising, a critical factor in sustaining a heavy marketing effort. His early strategy to build his brand, and later deliver a more targeted broadcast media schedule that was supported by on-the-ground events and one to one media programs, helped him to build momentum in Iowa and allowed him to launch his campaign as a viable contender. Clinton’s campaign was very effective in adjusting its strategies, and dollar-for-dollar outperformed Obama in traditional broadcast.

If you haven’t seen the Obama Girl episodes on YouTube, look and laugh. (more…)