Things I've learned that make life easier #3: Work with people, not computers

It's very tempting as a web-person to get caught up in the minutiae of coding. Even if you are, like me, a web content manager, whose job only tangentially has anything at all to do with code, you're still likely to spend a lot of your day working on behind-the-scenes aspects of the site such as navigation tweaks and new features.

This is possibly the comfort zone for you, and it's definitely the comfort zone for your managers. They hired you because they didn't feel up to taking on the web and, more often than should happen, this is because they equate "web" with "computer code stuff" and "computer code" with "scary". So they want to see you at your computer screen, solving all the computer-based "stuff" they hired you to deal with.

If you let the computer be the main place you are, you lose three things:

1. You lose control of strategy
   If you sit at a computer doing techie things, everyone assumes you're a techie. And while there's absolutely no shame in being a techie, the sad fact is that they're the kind of people that people only consult when they run into problems. In other words, if you want to take part in the talks that go on *before* problems arise - i.e. the more strategy-related discussions - you need to get away from the computer.
   
   
2. You lose sight of your site's users
   Everyone knows that the only way to get your site right is to involve users. Whether you do this by proper full-on usability testing, focus groups to gather requirements, informal chats, or all of the above, you're going to need to leave the computer to do it. And since user testing is best done often, you're going to spend significant time away from the screen to do it effectively.
   
   
3. You lose the chance to advocate
   Almost without a doubt you know more about proper web content management than your managers - that's why they hired you after all. If nothing else, you're going to have a pretty clear set of ideas about how you want to see the site developing. What better way to make sure your message spreads than to tell people face-to-face? Time away from the computer works doubly well in this case: it gives you time to be with people, and also means you're not irrevocably associated in their minds with scary computer stuff.
   

What is it for?

A few brief thoughts - and I claim no generic rightness or indeed completeness for them - on what I thinks some of the web 2.0 things I'm familiar with are and are not for.

Facebook
For:

• Finding out what people are doing when you haven't seen them for years and don't actually ever want to see them in real life again;
• Keeping abreast of what people are doing in their day-to-day lives, and commenting on it;
• Creating an online image of yourself, whether you are an individual or an organisation - the groups you belong to, the apps that you add all serve as badges;
• Setting up and promoting events.
  

Not for:

• Group discussions. Even though it has forum-style functionalities, it's amazing to me how comparatively few group discussions happen on Facebook. I reckon it's because of the third point above - belonging to a group on Facebook is more about wearing a badge than being part of a community.

Blogs
For:

• Getting your opinion out there - either as a post, or as a comment on someone else's post;
  
• Writing about stuff you're genuinely interested in;
• Discussion with other people who are interested in the same stuff - as you gain audience and people start interacting with you and each other on the blog, you'll end up with at least some community discussion.

Not for:

• Promoting your organisation generically - people look for a more genuine, personal view on a blog;
  

Twitter
For:

• Alerting people to stuff - events, news, a new blog post;
• Finding out what people are saying about you/your organisation;
• Keeping people abreast of your current thoughts/interests/ideas - Twitter seems to be a more ideas-sharing community than Facebook, search me why;
  
• Getting to know new people.

Not for:

• Actually I'm not sure about this one, it seems to do everything :-). I guess it's not for anything you can't say in 140 words.
  

Wikis
For:

• Projects you have in common with a group of people, where everyone has a contribution to make and everyone is happy with the idea of editing a common document to achieve this;
  
• Projects where you want to tap into "common wisdom" and, crucially, have given others the motivation, tools, understanding and structure to contribute.
  

Not for:

• Making your department look cool because they have a wiki;
• Putting some pages up and hoping someone else will do the work of sorting them out for you. You'd be surprised how unlikely it is that another user will even correct a typo on your page unless they know why they're helping you out.
  

I think I'm running out of ideas here, but I'd welcome further thoughts/comments.

The web - because change happens

A feature of the web: it changes, all the time and fast. Things on the web are flexible. New stuff emerges as if from nowhere, stuff you were counting on using disappears to be replaced by the next great thing. There's no resting on laurels: today's innovative approach is next month's tired old design.

So what can you do? I reckon three things:

1. Keep your eyes and ears open
   For the web more than for traditional media, you really need to get a sense of how the landscape is changing. These days there are plenty of ways to do this, from having your professional journal of choice in your RSS feeds to reading blogs from other people in your profession. If you keep your eyes and ears open you'll not only being able to spot the next trend: over time you'll also build a sense of which new things are just fads and which are here to stay - at least for a while.
   
   
2. Focus on the job, not the tool.
   Good service. A sense of community. Being comfortable using what you offer. If you ask users what they want from a site, those are the sorts of things they come up with. Very rarely will they say "I want a site to have a Facebook, a wiki and three blogs".
   Social media - and indeed, any other feature of your website - are only tools you use to give the users what they want. We tend to focus too much on our toolboxes; to worry that this hammer is going to be obsolete soon, or that we can't proceed further until we have a full set of tools made of the latest alloy. Ultimately, though, our users don't care if we used a hammer or a saw, so long as that roof they wanted has been built.
   
   
3. Use the medium's flexibility
   The great thing about the web is, it's pretty easy to change the stuff you put on it. There's a lot more scope for "running it up the flagpole and seeing who salutes", as the truly obnoxious management phrase goes.
   In other words, you don't need to spend months crafting the perfect feature. Put something out there, review it often, and change it if it's not doing what you (or more importantly your users) want. The web lets you change things fast and often - use that power.
   As a corollary to this, you may need to eliminate technology, or more likely procedures, that get in the way of making swift changes to what you offer on the web.
   
   

Facebook - creating an environment you can trust

Facebook puzzles managers. It's clearly a great chance to reach a greater audience in a cool new way. But, they will ask you, how can I control what goes on in my Facebook group so that it doesn't get out of hand?

The natural instinct of managers will be to want draconian measures to ensure that the page only gets used exactly in the way they envision. But that doesn't work on Facebook.

Part and parcel of Facebook is that it allows you to create a social environment that people come to, voluntarily, to be themselves and do their "thing". And that means that you have to have a basic level of trust in the people you interact with, as well as in the "ruggedness" of the environment.

Imagine you're at a party where the host is forever moving from one guest to another, asking this one to be careful of the glass ornaments, that one not to talk about politics to other guests because it's boring, a third to eat over a napkin and not drop crumbs on the carpet. Everything you do seems to make the host twitch in dismay. Good party? Not likely.

Now imagine the difference if the host has put away all the breakables, trusts people to manage their own conversations, and accepts a few crumbs on the carpet as the price you pay for the joy of celebrating with friends. He has a couple of house rules which he makes guests politely aware of, and he keeps a careful eye out in case things go wrong; but he interferes as little as possible and just lets his guests get on with enjoying the party.

That's the atmosphere you aim to create on Facebook. There's nothing wrong with laying down a couple of simple rules - no bullying, no inappropriate images. Indeed, making ground rules clear may be a step in creating a "rugged" environment, one that you can trust not to be broken. And of course you need to keep a careful eye out for behaviour that may be inappropriate and threatening, and be ready to intervene if necessary.

But if you start managing the conversations, dictating what can and can't be done, and pulling the carpet out from under people who are simply doing what they want without harm to anyone else, then you are missing out on the social atmosphere that Facebook is meant to create. If you want to do Facebook right, trust it, lighten up, and for goodness sake stop staring at the crumbs on the carpet.

Things I've learned that make life easier #2: Challenge complacency

Part and parcel of not putting things right straight away is making sure people realise that there is something to put right. Managers, especially those who aren't web-savvy, can get mighty complacent about their website, particularly if it isn't being used for e-commerce (there's something about that bottom line that draws managers' attention straight to the fact that nothing is happening on the site).

You'll naturally feel uncomfortable telling them straight out that their website isn't doing its job. Kindness and politeness dictate that you highlight the positive, to avoid hurting feelings. If you have less status than these managers in the organisational hierarchy, it may feel like career suicide to tell them that they are wrong (that said, if you're in a place where expressing a professional opinion is career suicide, change organisation).

But if you let people be complacent about what's wrong, there is no chance at all that they will give you the time, resources and attention to put it right. So unless you intend to labour away alone and in obscurity on improvements that people don't see the need for and may actively resist, you need to find a way to highlight the negative.

Web stats are great for this. When you can show managers a wealth of intuitively-presented data about their site, it's usually easy enough to challenge their complacency. So your site has a lot of hits - have you seen the high bounce rate? You're sure people are accomplishing specific tasks - want to check that? Oh, surprise, they're not. If you have a poor site and enough data, something negative will show up - with any luck, something the managers can spot for themselves.

Highlighting the negative doesn't mean being impolite, or even superior and condescending. If you have the data to back you up, and use the politest tone you can muster to present your issues, the conversation may even be remembered as vaguely positive. Just remember: panic about the web will mean more resources for you - don't be afraid to cause it.

Genius in writing

One fantasy author I read has a habit of ending each of his books with an Author's Note, which I usually avoid because it's inevitably a whinge about how the world is so unfair and no one recognises the true genius of his work. Due to an unexpected lack of reading material, I read one of his Notes today; and sure enough, he was whinging about critics and their lack of undestanding. His books are more than just a fairly readable plot; they have a *deep* and *subtle* layer which illustrates important points about his worldview, and that makes them *genius*.

Well, no, sorry, it doesn't. Genius - in fiction at least - isn't when reading gives me insight into your worldview. It's when it gives me insight into mine; when your words give form to something in my mind, capturing it for me so that I can understand myself better.

This principle translates to the web. Don't spend pages telling me what's great about what you do, or explaining the deep and subtle genius of your product; I truly don't care (and anyway, if it's so great and genius-like, can't it speak for itself?). Make your website about me.

At a basic level, this means telling me what you can do for me - simply, and on the clear understanding that my needs are *way* more important than yours. Give me the freedom to make up my own mind about you and your product. And, if you really want to be subtle, make it seem as if the website is reading my mind, putting what was in my head into concrete clickable form.

How to do this? Make me (or others like me) a part of everything you do. Find out what I like, what I respond to, what I want to do on your site. Find out what makes me happy, and see if you can give me it - for free (and I mean no strings attached - if I have to sign up for it, it's not free even if I'm not paying a penny). The only way you'll get that "read-your-mind" feel is if you make your users needs and wants the primary drivers for your website.

Now that's genius.

The shop metaphor

It's generally difficult to get points about web management across to people who are not web experts themselves - and that, unfortunately, likely includes all the people with any kind of power over the web in your institution. Whether you're dealing with complete novices ("Can you explain what you mean by 'home page'?") or with power users who have latched on to a particular concept as the solution to all things web ("But having more pages will help our search engine optimisation!"), you'll find it distressingly difficult put across what you *mean* when you talk about the web.

That's where metaphors come in useful. If you relate the web to something more familiar, and then get people to think about that instead, suddenly the expressions of confusion or of mulish determination are replaced by - joy! - understanding . Unless you're dealing with complete idiots (and I haven't yet).

The metaphor I find myself using most is that of a shop. People understand shopping. They know that shops are there to sell stuff, and that people go there to get what they want and then get out. All of which makes this a great metaphor for a website.

Sample uses:

• Case for collecting web stats beyond "how many hits did we get on our site": say we have a shop; measuring hits is like measuring how many people look at the shop window. There's some use to it, but what we really want to know is how many people came in, and how many bought something.
  
  
• Reducing use of explanatory text: if you ask the shopkeeper where something is, do you want him to tell you, or do you want him to spend five minutes telling you why the thing you want is so great?
  
  
• Calling things what they are: which makes you think less, an aisle called "tea and coffee", or one called "variety of hot beverages"?

I'm sure you can come up with your own exampes, and I am equally sure that my metaphor breaks down at some point. But I haven't found that point yet!

Any advances on good web metaphors to use?