Tag Archives: brighton

Guest Blogging: Spec Work for Writers & Content Creators?

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I’ve always advocated guest blogging, but lately it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth

Guest blogging - spec work for writers?

As a freelancer, married to another freelancer (a web designer), I’ve been a staunch supporter of the NoSpec campaign. The recent tendency of successful, lucrative companies to crowdsource cheap or free labour from the web is a worrying one – and one that, I am certain, results in three things: an exploitation of new talent that deserves ample payment for its input, an overall decline in the quality of work that should be top-drawer, and a devaluation of truly excellent creative work.

A lot has been said on both sides of the debate about design spec work (just do a Google search for “spec work” if you want some entertaining reading) but, this week, I’ve been pondering on the implication of this phenomenon for writers and content creators. I willingly offer free content to a handful of small, local businesses and, up until a few months ago, I merrily recommended that all our clients used guest blogging as a means to increase their readership and diversify their content. Lately, though, I’m starting to question the value of certain types of guest blogging.

A familiar shout goes out on Twitter: “Any bloggers want to share their experiences and guest on our blog?” When questioned, it transpires there’s no payment being offered here; just a chance for some exposure to a different audience and a new set of followers. The problem is, this isn’t just another amateur blog site. It’s a commercial site that happens to include a blog, and they’re asking for talented writers to offer their work for free. While the company argues that it’s a fair deal because they’ll guest blog in return for no payment, the phrase “Don’t do me no favours,” springs to mind. It’s not a fair exchange if you’re using free labour for financial gain, unless you’re offering a portion of that financial gain in return, surely?

This is just one example of a growing trend. It stems from this idea that, in a creative discipline – whether that’s writing, music, art, design, acting, whatever – you have to give your best work for free in order to gain the exposure you need to become successful. But I simply don’t believe that’s true and, even if it is, there are plenty of ways to showcase your talents to the wider world without selling yourself short and letting someone else pick up the monetary benefit. With the rise-and-rise of self publishing, blogging, home recording, social media marketing and other affordable, easy ways to circumvent the traditional success routes, I think it’s more important than ever for writers and other creative people to be savvy about exploitation and say no to spec work, no matter how its couched.

In future, I’ll be talking much more explicitly with our clients about when guest blogging is and isn’t appropriate, when it should be paid for, and what constitutes a fair deal for the people generating your content. After all, they’re the people making you money.

10 Things You Need to Know About Social Media for Business

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Using social media for businessWhy Do People Get Social Media So Wrong?

If you’re (relatively) young and a bit media-savvy, social media already seems like old news to you. It’s easy to forget that for most businesses – and your dad – Twitter sits at the bleeding edge of the modern world. Most of the planet is still trying to negotiate the potential minefield that is online communication, writing the rulebook as they go. It’s no wonder that companies often misunderstand Facebook, Twitter and the people who use them, resulting in some horrifying PR blunders. This one by Moleskine leaps instantly to mind.

At the less disastrous end of Twitter misuse, there are plenty of companies costing themselves a pretty penny in lost revenue and royally pissing off their target market, simply because they don’t understand how it all works. Brighton & Hove Buses, for example, treat Twitter as a service update news feed, while miniature-gaming behemoth, Games Workshop – whom you’d expect to have a fully functioning social media department – seems to ignore the vast majority of feedback, good or bad, from their loyal fan base – even going so far as to disable the comments section of their YouTube channel.

It’s not surprising that businesses like these are getting it wrong, though. Their marketing people tell them they must have a social media presence in order to keep up with modern business practices, but they don’t give them fair warning that they’re about to deal with a totally different form of customer service than they’ve ever experienced before. Most of the people playing the game don’t know the rules – and the rules are pretty fluid anyway. And we all know that marketers and media bods like to make what they do sound a lot more complicated than it actually is; we’ve got to justify our fees somehow.¹

So anyway, rather than just having a good old moan up, I thought I’d give you something you can actually use. Whether you’re advising a company on updating their business practices² or are, yourself, a business that wants to join the social media world and get it right first time, here are my top ten tips for using social media without making an arse of yourself.

10 Things You Need to Know About Social Media for Business

  1. Social media is not a news feed, despite the terminology. If all you do is bang on about your latest products or whether your service is up and running today, people will switch off to you. Just appearing in someone’s feed doesn’t mean they’re reading and digesting your updates. You need interesting and engaging content for that.
  2. Social media is a two way communication channel. Be prepared for your customers to get a lot more vocal, because you’re easy to connect with. You may think you’ve been talking to your customers all these years, but that’s nothing compared to the level of contact social media gives you.
  3. Answer your tweets and comments. This is an obvious thing that a lot of businesses fail at. Having a policy of “Twitter silence” only serves to frustrate your customers and make you look like a stubborn old man, shaking his fist at the sky when it rains. Companies who respond to messages quickly and positively get ahead in the game.
  4. Look after your reputation. On Twitter – more than any other place on the planet – news travels like wildfire. Put your foot in your mouth and, before you know it, the world and his dog is boycotting your product. Prepare to be open in a way that companies have previously never been: make sure your business ethics are clean, your tone is polite and positive, and you think before you tweet.
  5. Remember to keep personal and business social media very separate. Linking your own controversial opinions with your company’s brand is a dangerous and tricky game to play. There are some benefits, but a lot of dangerous pitfalls (if you Google my name, for example, you will find an angry tweet about vaginas on the first page. Interesting PR tactics.). When starting out, I’d always recommend keeping your own Twitter account well away from your business one. Remember, too, that if you are well known as working for a certain brand, just saying “…but all opinions are my own” in your profile isn’t enough to stop people making the link.
  6. Be positive! You’ll notice this word cropping up a lot in my writing on social media, and that’s because it’s the single most important thing you can do to protect your company’s reputation. When you open a two way dialogue with your customers, you’re inviting them to criticise as well as compliment you; you have to take the rough with the smooth. Contrary to what a lot of businesses out there seem to think, public criticism isn’t bad press. If you respond constructively and politely with a deferential manner and a can-do attitude, you’ll look like the fantastic company you actually are. If you take it personally, though, and bitch and moan in the public glare, you’ll be seen as small-minded, backwards and stubborn – and that can quickly escalate into bad press.
  7. Get your internal communications in order. If you’re a small company, this is easy peasy, because the left hand pretty much always knows what the right hand is doing. But larger companies with different departments need a plan in place for passing social media feedback to the right people. Your social media team – who know Twitter but don’t know websites – are going to get plenty of feedback on website issues, so make sure that information gets to where it can be used.
  8. Have a personality. In order to engage with your customers, you’ve got to show them that there’s a real person behind the tweets. This is for two reasons. Firstly, social media is informal. Nothing turns a person off more than a company-speak robot. You can still be professional without being soulless. Secondly, people are more forgiving when real people make mistakes. Social media guffs turn into PR disasters a lot faster if people feel they’re dealing with a faceless corporation.
  9. Give people real value. That means: not just stuff you want to give them, but stuff they actually want. So keep your sales-related, look-at-how-clever-we-are updates to a maximum of 25%, and spend the rest of your time giving away things that people value: unbiased information, interesting articles, topics for debate, art, news, how-tos, and all sorts of other free, good stuff. Social media kudos is about what else you can offer people besides what you can sell them.
  10. If you don’t have the resources, don’t just jump in. Getting social media right takes a significant time and skill investment. It’s not rocket science, by any means, but you need to know your stuff if you’re going to avoid the pitfalls. If it really isn’t your bag, get someone in to do it for you – someone who knows their stuff will pay for themselves many times over in increased revenue. Above all, don’t do a half-arsed job; it’ll do more harm than good.

¹ I’m joking, clearly. It’s really very complicated. My cat, for example, doesn’t understand it at all.
² As with all articles on the Charlee Says blog, feel free to use this list as a resource for personal or business use. You’re welcome to print it (or any excerpt from it), distribute it, link to it or, indeed, use it as toilet paper, provided you acknowledge the original source (me) and don’t edit the actual content, except to annotate.

In other news from the Tall Designer/Charlee Says camp this week, it turns out we’re having a boy! Our second baby – currently referred to as Bunsen, but no doubt due to be the recipient of a suitably Brightonian, lefty name – is due on 5th September. Thanks for all your kind tweets and messages.

Conference Review: #BrightonSEO 2011

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Yep, I’m late to the table with this one. Trying to write about SEO in the small spaces between entertaining a just-learnt-to-crawl, mayhem-causing ten month old is, at best, tricky. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

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I know I keep saying this to anyone who’ll listen, but I’m not an SEO. I know SEO, and I do some SEO-shaped things with my Brighton-based copywriting business, but doing SEO all day every day would bore me to bash-my-brains-out-with-my-keyboard death. Nevertheless, for the past couple of years, I’ve hit the BrightonSEO search marketing conference – organised and hosted by Kelvin Newman at Site Visiblity – to brush up on my SEO skills, meet some new people and look at pictures of cats (and, as it turned out, some T&A!)

For me, this year’s BrightonSEO had a stronger sense of community than ever before, although I do get the distinct feeling that we’re all huddling together while the rest of the internet population slows down to lean out of their window and shout “WANKERS!” as they pass by. We’re sort of like the www version of estate agents. Or traffic wardens. I live-tweeted it this year (which, by the way, seems to be an excellent way to gain a bunch of new followers on Twitter). I might have been the most prolific tweeter of the day who managed to say absolutely nothing useful about SEO for eight straight hours. Nobody seemed to mind, though.

The speakers at this year’s event were, to a man (and woman), interesting, engaging and varied. They covered subjects you really wouldn’t expect to hear about at a search marketing conference. We’re talking: brutalist architecture and things you didn’t know about James Bond from Toby Barnes, Hack Days and why you should learn to code by Dom Hodgson – it worked, I’m learning to code! – and what MadMen can teach us (apart from smoking and drinking) by Roger Warner. These three were the highlights of the day, for me.

Among the other speakers, however, it was difficult to ignore a universal presumption that everybody in the room came from a strict SEO-and-nowt-else background. Buzz-words and irritating new media jargon were bandied about with no explanations and certainly no tongues in cheeks. I hate new media terms. Even the fact that I have to refer to myself as a “content strategist” makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. It’s no wonder everyone hates us. To paraphrase Rae Lovejoy, “Don’t assume everyone in the room knows what the hell you’re talking about.” If you’re talking about a specific piece of software, a fairly new technique or a term you made up ten minutes before your presentation because you think it sounds fucking awesome, you’re going to have to explain yourself a bit.

There was a bit of so-called “black hat” at Brighton SEO this year, which surprised me. Black hat SEO, for the uninitiated, is SEO which uses underhand tactics to acheive (usually shortlived) results for clients. It’s the sort of thing I warn my copywriting clients about when they tell me that their boyfriend’s mate Steve – who does SEO in his time off from estate agency – has promised them a no. 1 ranking in Google.

While some people at the conference seemed to rate this kind of information, claiming that it helps you to know how Google works*, I heavily question the intrinsic value of such stuff. Teach me how to steal my neighbour’s TV, and I’m not going to learn anything about how television works. I’m probably just going to get nicked. Giving black hat SEO a forum – even if it’s just for the purposes of information – is always going to do two things: it’s going to appeal to lazy, turn-a-quick-buck arseholes (of which there are many in the world of search marketing, as there are in any industry) and it’s going to reaffirm the rest of the internet’s opinion about SEOs. And that works against all of us.

That said, I don’t want to put a downer on BrightonSEO 2011, because it was thoroughly well organised, had a fabulous line up and was hosted with a wry and self-deprecating sense of humour that is tricky to pull off, but worked brilliantly here. I met a great many lovely people (is it me, or are SEOs getting younger? Goddamn the world of tech, where I am an old fuddy-duddy at 30!), and had a jolly nice time, even I was too shattered by 6pm to join the others at the pier for the beer drinking. But hey, what do you expect from an oldie?

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* You don’t know how Google works. Nobody does, except Google. And even they don’t seem to have a bloody clue.