Blogging for Election – Top Tips
When we set up blogminster.com, I spent quite a lot of my time trawling through MP websites and blogs. Of the hundreds of websites, some were good, some were bad and one stood out for (unwittingly) containing links to prescription drugs.
I thought it might be useful to share some insights as to how to campaign using blogs. These observations combine industry best practice with specific observations following our review of hundreds of politician websites.
Top tips
1. Think carefully about your audience before you even start
When professionals design a website, they start with the "personas" of their target audience: Who is it that they want to target and why. This may sound like stating the obvious, but too many politicians think that a blog is a place for their ramblings or worse: their press releases.
Examples of groups you would be writing for:
- CONSTITUENTS AND VOTERS
- THE MEDIA
- Your title should contain a hook, to lure the reader in. Think of it this way: if anyone wanted to quote your blog post on twitter, they would only use the title and a link back to your blog. If that were the case, would readers find it interesting enough to click on?
- Think story. Is there something in your blog post that is interesting enough to be quoted by a newspaper? Is there a human element to a story that can make it more accessible and interesting?
You've doorstepped, distributed pamphlets, got photographed with the needy, but what would your constituents think of you if they bought into your campaign and wanted to learn more about you? If you had a good conversation over a cup of tea with Mr Doe, and he decides to check you out, what will he find about you online that would encourage him to support your campaign?
Mr Doe is likely to ask two key questions:
- What do you stand for? What are your policies, especially on local issues and those relevant to him. Are you going to represent him and his views? Are you going to do good? Your general policy views are also important - they convey the full picture, and the background to who you are politically - and whether you deserve his support.
- What kind of person are you? This is where the personal touch comes in. Blog entries about topics that show that you are of substance as a person besides your politics. Would Mr Doe think you are a person of substance and integrity? Can he relate to you? Can he trust you?
If you want your blog entry to be quoted and mentioned, it needs to be engaging. On the Internet, readers tend to scan content, rather than read everything. If the title to your piece is not engaging, they won't follow through to the body. If the first paragraph is boring, they are likely to go elsewhere. Attention spans online are fleeting, and journalists on the lookout for interesting stories are bombarded by too much inane information.
Some key points to getting it right:
2. Create relationships through your blog
For many voters, your blog would be a place they visit once, but if you write well and often, and make your posts interesting, you can create a readership. When your blog becomes a popular read, not only do people engage with you and feel like they have a relationship with you, they also spread the word.
3. Make sure your blog gets exposure. Don't expect people to just come to your blog by virtue of it being there. They won't. You need to take steps to publicise it.
- Make sure you write often, and at least 2-3 times a week (more is better). Google ranks popular blogs higher and better than those that are less active.
- Ensure that every one of your entries gets Twittered. Some blogging platforms allow you to automate this process
- Ensure that your blog is search-engine friendly. Some blogging platforms provide Search Engine Optimisation steps automatically, for example by adding keywords to each entry, and notifying search engines whenever you've written a new post.
- Get other bloggers and websites to link to you. This is another way not only to generate traffic, but also to increase your visibility on search engines.
Ways to increase your blog's popularity:
4. Create a multi-blog campaign
This is a little more sophisticated, but can work extremely well if there is a group of people campaigning together or alongside each other - or the volunteers/staff of a campaign are available to launch their own blogs. You launch several blogs and Twitter accounts that engage in debate with each other and with external websites, cross referencing and highlighting relevant post. If this is done well, and in an engaging way, the campaign itself can start to generate a following, and with it exposure. Of course wit and good writing cannot be guaranteed, but if you are passionate about the issues, it will often come across and engage your readership.
5. Don't get your nephew/niece/neighbour/friend to design a blog for you. Design disasters are often left unobserved by their grateful victim, but are not appealing to the wider audience. The reason we launched a free political blogging platform was, to a large extent, because we saw quite a few such disasters.
6. Be yourself. This may sound like it flies in the face of all the elaborate tips above, but actually it doesn't. When you write from an honest place, it often shines through, and you come across as more accessible and more genuine.
7. And finally - don't delay. The earlier your blog is out there, the more popular it becomes. It takes time to build a readership. Get one going now.
* Danny Dagan is founder of blogminster.com. He has fifteen years of new media experience, including as Head of Online Communities for News Group Newspapers, Web Consultant to the European Bank and Senior Product Manager at Freeserve.
I first published this article here.
Daily Star bombs The Sun newspaper (but is an in-joke really a good campaign strategy?)
With bingo bringing in high revenue streams for online newspaper editions, it is little wonder that the Daily Star chose to hit The Sun where it hurts with its bingo advertising campaign - but bombing The Sun's Wapping HQ with Bingo balls?
I'm sure the Sun's staff in Wapping will see the hilarity. After all, James Murdoch has recently decided to postpone the move from the Wapping site to a new venue, at least until financial conditions improve.
Whether any Daily Star readers will understand the in-joke is quite another matter.
eBay Libel Threat After Negative Feedback – When Online Libel Gets Personal
Chris Read, a 42-year-old from Kent, is facing legal action for libel after leaving negative feedback for an item he bought on auction site eBay. On October 3, Read used the feedback facility on eBay and wrote: "Item was scratched, chipped and not the model advertised on Mr Jones's eBay account." Mr Read subsequently received an e-mail from Mr Jones, a 26-year-old businessman from Suffolk who deals in second-hand electrical goods, saying that his comments were damaging his business, and threatening him with legal action unless he deleted them from the site (Source: Times online).
This case is interesting because it demonstrates how personal libel can get when it takes place on the Internet. If the seller wanted to get rid of the comment posted by Mr Read on eBay, the quickest way to achieve this would have been through a legal threat to eBay, not the buyer.
Companies like eBay would most commonly be advised by their lawyers to remove comments that bear a legal threat, to avoid becoming responsible for the content themselves.
As soon as a libel is reported to eBay, all the legal protections that it might have had by claiming it was only a third party to the dispute are no longer certain. Once it is notified, it is most likely responsible. This principle is often referred to by moderation professionals as "notice and takedown".
But when individuals, not companies, are involved, insult is personal, and they often don't have the benefit of a legal team and a cool assessment of the best way to achieve their objective (in this case the removal of a comment).
Lawyers are trained to separate emotion from fact and process. Private citizens aren't. This case is no doubt one of many to come. It would be interesting to see how the legal system adapts.
UPDATE:
As this blog is of a UK slant, it is always interesting to hear how things are across the pond, where libel laws are less onerous, and freedom of expression has more of a legal stance. I got the following comment from Michael Roberts, a reputation analyst at Rexxfield:
"I liked your article. The poster of the information is certainly liable for damages. However, I think you will find that eBay as a third party republisher of the libel enjoys federal immunity (at least in the USA) from civil litigation; furthermore they do not need to remove the offensive material, even if served with positive proof. (section 230(C) of the information communications decency act). (Although I am sure eBay would, they just don't have to)
Frankly I think it is an absurd loophole allowing web services to turn a blind eye to the plight of innocent victims of malicious speech. I recently published a few essays on this issue:
http://www.rexxfield.com/freedom_speech.html
Be sure to follow the links to the "google" blind eye responses to "take down" notices."
ThatDanny comment: As Michael rightly points out, the treatment of libel is different under US law to English (and Scottish) law. The protections that stringent libel laws provide are a double-edged sword, but in this case they make it simpler for individuals to achieve content removal in the UK than in the US.
Understanding Website Statistics – Five Pitfalls to Avoid
Website statistics: what's wrong with the following statements?
1. My website gets 20,000 hits a month!
2. My website gets three million unique visitors a year!
3. Our statistics show that users spend an average of 30 minutes per visit to our website!
When you boast to your friends that your blog gets 10,000 hits, or tell your boss that your company's website has one million annual unique users, you may be setting yourself up for a fall.
Like most statistics, website stats can be misleading, and this article shows you some common pitfalls when quoting site numbers.
Website statistics – common mistakes:
1. Using ‘hits’ as an indicator – ‘hits’ are an old-speak term that expresses, well, absolutely nothing about the popularity of a website. A ‘hit’ refers to any file or part of a webpage that is downloaded by a user. For example, if your web page has seven images on it, then it will be counted as eight hits (the page itself is one hit, and then each image counts as an additional hit). It is no indication of traffic or popularity or anything meaningful about your users. quoting it shows you haven’t got a clue.
2. Annual unique users – website unique users (or ‘uniques’ as old hands like to call them) are a well accepted measure of a website’s popularity, but only when used daily or monthly. Not yearly. It is ignorant to say that your site gets ‘x unique users a year’. Here’s why: your website tracking code can only count ‘uniques’ by leaving a ‘cookie’ on the user’s computer when he or she visits your site. A cookie is a small file that the website checks for whenever the user views the site. The cookies tells the site that it 'knows' the user, and that it should not count him or her again after her first visit. Once you understand this mechanism, some of its flaws become evident: if a user accesses the site through two different browser types (for example Chrome and Internet Explorer), then they are counted as two separate visits. Visits from two different computers (e.g. at home and at work) are counted separately too. Overall, the industry has come to accept these compromises, and treats ‘uniques’ as a good indicator, for lack of a better statistic. However, this works well for a period of up to a month. Longer than that, and your statistics become too distorted. For example, over the course of a year a single user is likely to get rid of the cookies on their computer at least a couple of times, or even replace their computer entirely. If each one of your unique annual users looses the cookie that counts them as unique twice or more over a year, then your annual count of unique visitors could be half, a third, a quarter or even less than what your stats package is showing you. There’s no way around it: annual uniques are a fallacy.
3. Average minutes per visit – I often hear statements like ‘my users are spending 45 minutes on average on my site'. No they’re not. Your workmate Kirsty looked at your site just before she went home last night and forgot to close her browser, so it remained trained on your website all night. In the morning, she came back, browsed it for a couple of minutes and then closed her browser. By doing this, she has skewed your stats big time – and the fewer users you have ,the more distorting the ‘Kirsty effect’ is. Some web statistics packages now use more sophisticated methods to track viewing time, for example by showing you the median time spent on your site, but if that’s not available, don’t quote this number. It’s not really that helpful.
4. Page impressions – a trusty statistic, page impressions (PIs) or page views (PVs) are still an old favourite, but they too are not without their problems, and it all depends on how your tracking code is set up, so be well informed about your settings before you start brandishing PIs. Here’s why:
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a. There are a lot of files that aren’t actually viewed and are sometimes counted as PIs, for example stylesheets (ending with .css) are also counted, and many sites have more than one, which are loaded every time someone visits your site, thus inflating your PI count. You have to check what's counted and what isn't before you use PIs.
- b. Every time a search engine indexes your site, it imitates a user, often by loading all your site's pages which may well be counted as page impressions. If you have many pages and your site is indexed regularly (for example by Google), you’ll get lots of irrelevant PI counts. Some stats packages exclude them and some don’t – you need to know which is yours.
5. Content groups and folder structures – and finally, you may want to beware how you present popularity of areas on your site. Most commercial website statistics packages allow you to define categories for different areas of the site, and then report on the popularity of those areas. The problem is that the categories in the tracking code often become obsolete in the time between when they were initially put in place and the many site changes and iterations since. You have to ask yourself how different areas are defined: is it by site taxonomy and structure, or simply by a category given to the page by the tracking code. Site taxonomies in themselves aren't a guarantee of accuracy either, because over time they erode, and an urgent patch here, a temporary page there - make them less reliable as an indicator of structure. I'm not saying that either of these can't be powerful analysis tools - they most certainly can be. It's just that you need to make sure you know what you're counting.
And that's really the endgame here –you need to make sure you know what you're counting. If you do, you can make more informed statements about your site's visitors. If not, well... Do not pass GO, do not collect 200 page impressions.
Web Design Companies with Rubbish Websites? Doh!
The web design space is getting crowded, and it's getting difficult to tell the good guys from the ones who try to sell you a falafel of sales jargon. Or does it?
It never ceases to amaze me when a company, purporting to design websites, lets its own site look like it was cobbled together by the work experience guy on a bad hair day.
It's true that sometimes there isn't time - the company is so good, and its reputation is such, that it simply isn't worried about marketing. I have come across a couple of these cases. Websites of this breed tend to have a minimalistic aura about them, like something created by a 'designers' designer', made in a fleeting sushi matt motion. And when you speak to them you know right away that this is the case. They don’t have to work with you. They’ll see if they can slot you in. Or sometimes they’re just too busy to help.
As for the rest of you - please pay attention: If a corporate (or myself on their behalf as is often the case), is looking for the best web design company for a project, the first thing we will check is your website. If it looks rubbish, we won't spend another minute worrying about it, and move swiftly on to the next candidate. Simple as that. You wouldn't buy clothes from a tailor who displays badly-made suits in their shop window, now would you? Or a hairdresser with pictures of the Perez Hilton cut adorning their salon front? Didn't think so.
We want to see what you can do, we want to see who you've worked with, and what you've done for them (a simple logo is no good, we want to know what you've actually designed), we want to see good usability and accessibility, we want to understand what you're about and what makes you special - and why we should work with you. We want a sense of your ethos and maybe that little bit of x-factor.
Your website is your shop window. Now show us your wares. Please!
Oh Sh*t – Google Chrome Doesn’t Really do THAT?!
Your passwords and indiscretions for world+wife to see.
OK - I admit it's a problem that's also inherent in Firefox, but Google’s new browser, supposedly built from the ground up, should really NOT do this. It's absolutely effing bonkers!
What am I on about? Google Chrome allowing users to view ALL their saved passwords for different websites, without any credentials. Not stars nor asterisks – the whole blooming thing in plain ascii, letters, number and pet names alike!
If you are viewing this in Chrome, click on the little options wrench on the top right, then select Options, and click on the Minor Tweaks tab.
Here you will see a button called "Show all passwords" - which does exactly that. I repeat – it shows ALL your passwords to anyone who uses your PC.
Your husband's secret site communications, your daughter's online diary, your co-worker's MySpace account - all there – all just a few clicks away. And if you happen on an Internet cafe using Chrome - you may well find Mr Ignorant’s most secret passwords for his email account: the same ones he uses for his bank and eBay accounts and for buying books on Amazon, and the rest of the poor unfortunate’s life (now over).
Oh - and for those who missed the obvious: if it's stored in a way that's visible to your naked eye, it's only a matter of time before some exploit/trojan/bad-thang will access it too. Passwords should not be visible. End of.
Call me melodramatic - but that's plain stupid!
Footnote: Firefox users - for info on how to protect your passwords click here.
Design Agency Wisdom – How to Fail a Client Pitch in Three Minutes!
I got a call from a web design agency yesterday. The lady on the other end was cold calling the company I am consulting to, and somehow got through to me.
Here is a summary of the interaction:
'I'm calling from agency X', she said, 'and I was wondering if you were planning any web design projects in the near future?'
Now you see, I am this cold caller's dream target: I am actually looking into a design project for my client, and I was willing to hear her out.
'Yes,' I said, 'you actually called at an opportune moment. I'm looking for agencies to pre-qualify for a tender, do you guys design as well as code?'
'Erm, yes, we do both,' she said. She mutters some client names that I don't recognise and can't remember.
'Great! How big is your agency, how many people work for it?'
'I don't know exactly, in the 20's,' she said.
'OK, and what's the split between technical and non-technical at your agency?'
'erm, I don't know, I only started two weeks ago. I'm just... I can arrange a call for you with someone to discuss the detail...'
At this point I stop asking questions, she's obviously wasting my time. Why would I want to arrange another call with someone from a company I know nothing about, who has just cold called me with no further information?
'I can send you some info,' she offers, 'what's your email address?'
So I give her my email address, but on reflection she didn't verify it with me, and she obviously didn't catch it. I never got that email.
And here's the thing: I understand that the agency put an intern or rookie on cold-calling duty and that's entirely not her fault, but if you are out to catch a client - make sure the person on first-contact duty is prepared for the call that will actually get you what you want. If she could have answered my questions knowledgably, and talked me through some good portfolio examples, I would at least have considered her agency.
Now, but for this entry, I would have forgotten their name.
Update: Five days later I did get an email with more details. Five days?
IwantGreatCare.org – “rate your doctor” – will it go up in flames of libel?
IwantGreatCare.org was launched in the UK as a service allowing patients to rate their doctors online. Patients can rate doctors out of 100 on "trust", "listening" and recommended categories, and then leave comments about the doctors that they have rated.
Every time I consult to website owners about user generated content, one of the first points I assess risk on is libel. Some of the key questions are:
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a. How risky is the subject matter and how likely is it to land you in court for libel.
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b. What sort of mechanisms do you have to remove libel promptly (and how prompt is 'promptly').
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c. What sort of defences do you have in law if you are taken to court.
When the subject matter is people in a service profession, especially as personal as healthcare, libel is all but inevitable. Emotions tend to run high, and commentary becomes heated and very personal.
My experience also shows that people who are happy with a service are much less likely to comment on it online compared to those who are aggrieved or unhappy. Although some patients might go online to defend their GP, it is those with a grudge or misgiving who will carry the site, and it is often bad reviews that get the most focus.
To complicate things further, the kind of anonymity offered by IwantGreatCare.org produces a mistrust effect. When you see a good review, you wonder if it is real or produced by allies (or the practitioner themselves) to defend a reputation. When a bad review appears, it could well be a disgruntled colleague, not just a patient.
The risk is higher in the case of IwantGreatCare.org, because not only does it allow you to rate your doctor numerically, but it also lets you leave a comment. This is where patients and upset relatives will vent, like the example I found on the site for a certain doctor (whom I shall not name): "I went to see the doctor on behalf of my mother who is schizophrenic. He refused to listen to the issues i needed to discuss and was very very patronising and arrogant. I am not stupid - i have a doctorate in science and have published in many scientific journals - yet i was not listened to and the arrogance of Dr (Name) was unbelievable. He actually left me in tears as I left the surgery. I would recommend that anyone needing healthcare in (Place name) avoid him at all costs." If it were just numbers, perhaps it would have made it a little easier to defend in a libel case, but words to this effect cannot be taken back easily.
Then there is the question of prompt removal of libel, and how effective it is. I suspect that someone advised IwantGreatCare.org that they have a defence in law because they are not a publisher, as long as they remove content reported to them promptly. This may be the case when you run an online forum or community, but based on conversations with some of the most experienced libel lawyers in the country, I am not convinced that this argument would protect IwantGreatCare.org in court. The facts of the matter are:
- The site invites very specific content - the rating of doctors. It doesn't open a wide avenue of discussions, it isn't a general debate about doctors - it is inviting praise or criticism. A judge may well see this as implying responsibility for the content.
- a site run by "a small team", as IwantGreatCare.org describes itself, does not have the resource for immediate removal of reported content. Again, they may have been advised that "a reasonable time" for removal of content is not defined in law and that some legal experts suggest 72 hours, but in fact, and bearing in mind the point above about the kind of content invited, by the time a piece of content is removed, it may be too late to completely eradicate it from the Internet. The comment about Dr X that I quoted above has since been removed from the site, but still lives in Google's cache. If it is quoted by other sites and related to IwantGreatCare.org, then it will have left the control of the site, and the extent of the libel will have increased significantly. Even if removed, the originator would still be where it started, and I doubt if best efforts would defend the site from responsibility.
The IwantGreatCare.org is still in beta, and is already creating a storm of outrage within the medical profession. If it actually makes it to a full launch and gains some traction, I would not be surprised if it had to defend a libel case within its first 18 months.
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