Twitter banned from courtroom, as it should be

Twitter may allow you to share anything and everything from anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always right to do so.

Spectators at a Georgia state coatroom have been banned from sending tweets during the course of a criminal trial.

District Judge Clay Land said that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which prohibits the “broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom”, can be extended to include the use of Twitter.

Both logically and ethically, that makes a lot of sense.

Many criminal trials are extremely sensitive, and judges have an obligation to control how both media and public are allowed to disseminate information.

What’s possibly harder is to enforce such a ruling. Short of confiscating mobile phones and other communication devices upon entering a courtroom, it could be quite hard to ensure that such a rule isn’t breached.

What do you think? Was the judge right to ban Twitter?

Via

How Well Do You Know Your Readers?

If you have a blog, you most likely have at least a few readers that love to check out your new content. You might even have a few thousand devoted daily readers. Regardless of the number, my question to you is how well do you know your readers?

Have you ever set some time aside to scan through and read all of your comments? What about visiting the blogs of your fellow commentators? By doing this, you can get a really good idea of WHO your readers are and what they are about.

Another great tool is analytics software. You can see where your readers are from, how they found your blog, and how long they typically spend there. This is a ton of useful information that can really help understand your readers.

Why Is This Important?

The main reason why it’s important to know your readers is because they are the people that benefit from your blog. These are the people that use your content in some way, shape, or form. If you know who they are, then you can target your content directly at them.

If you plan to monetize your blog, knowing who your readers are is crucial. Not only will you know your demographics for potential advertisers, but you will also know what type of products and services would benefit your readers. That way you can target your advertising directly at your readers.

This works way better than pasting some random ads into your sidebar or below your blog posts.

So take the time to get to know your readers. It will not only make your blog better, but they will appreciate the fact that you took the time to do so.

Maximize Your Social Media Marketing by Focusing Only on a Few Sites

One mistake I routinely see with bloggers is stretching themselves to thin when it comes to social media marketing.  They hear about the benefits of social media so they join 10 social media sites and start marketing on each of the sites.  After the initial excitement wears off, they find themselves stressed out trying to keep up with each site.  And they’re disappointed because they’re not getting the results they expected.

The reason the above strategy doesn’t work very well is because social media promotion requires time, patience, and focus.  It’s hard to devote the necessary time and focus when you’re juggling a lot of sites.  Remember the old saying, “More is not always better.”

Social media is like the real life social environment.  What does it take to influence a group of people in real life?  It takes time and focus on those people to earn their trust.  You need to add value to their lives for an extended period of time.

Consider the people that you trust offline. Chances are they are people you have know for a while.

Time, Focus, and Adding a Lot of Value

Focus on just one or two sites and really make an impact on that site.  Add so much value to that site that over time you become known as the expert in your field.  This means not only promoting your best stuff but also pointing to content from other sites.  By doing this, you show that you are well read.  Also, you demonstrate that you are not a spammer only looking to promote your content.

It takes time to really understand a social media site.  Each site has its own culture.  You want to understand that culture so you can fit in well with the community and earn a positive reputation.

One of the best ways to build your reputation is networking with the influential members of a community.  Again, it will take time and focus to get them on your side and trust you as a valuable member in the community.

Less Stress and More Success

Marketing can be stressful because you don’t know if your plans are going to work. And the stress only increases, if you keep up with too many sites. Reduce your stress by focusing on a few sites. With less stress, you can focus better, which gives you a better mindset to add value to a site.

Plus, you can now be a regular of the few sites you choose instead of the irregularity that comes from picking too many sites.

Marketing on a few sites will lead to more success, which will keep you from getting discouraged.  The success will motivate you to continue on with your marketing.

For example, let’s say you want to promote on Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Twitter, and a popular forum in your niche.  Think about all the work it will take to become an influential voice on all of these sites.  The task is very daunting especially if you want to continue posting regularly on your blog and you have a full time job and a family to take care of.  However, if you pick just one or two of the sites, your social media marketing will be a lot more manageable.

Take a long term view and don’t rush social media marketing.  It’s like building a friendship offline.  It takes time but the rewards are worth it.  Once you’ve built that reputation, you can leverage it increase your traffic and income.

A year ago, I was using too many social media sites and not getting anywhere. I scrapped all the sites except Twitter and a popular forum. My stress level went down and my blog started picking up. My subscribers have steadily gone up since that point instead of staying stagnant and I’ve developed good relationships with a couple of people. In addition, I’m having more fun.

Performancing offers social media marketing services to jump start your blog.

5 Tips to Help Bloggers Maximize HARO

Peter Shankman founded the HARO mailer network many months ago. Since then, the Help a Reporter Out network has grown into perhaps the most powerful community of networkers, journalists and product marketers on the Internet. Not only is the network free to use, it is also very effective. Here are some tips to maximize the use of HARO.

Don’t confuse the “source” and “media” request pages

This is the most fundamental rule, and is something that Shankman highlights at least twice on the main HARO page, which is reserved for companies who are the source of information. If you’re a journalist or blogger looking for leads, use the other page.

Be brief and get to the point

When looking for sources, note that the HARO mailer comes in the form of a digest. If you’re smart you’ll probably use the search function to go through a ton of requests. If you had all the time in the world to look through a dozen of these queries then fine, but put yourself in the position of the person looking through your query: avoid run on sentences and long introductions (i.e. avoid lines that start with “may I request the permission of your good office…”) and simply, get to the point. If you need a sponsor for a prize, give the benefits of the sponsorship. If you need leads, ask for it.

Be concise in credentials and duration of requests

By credentials, I mean filling up the form with an email that looks authentic. Use your business email if possible. When asking for leads it is beyond a doubt reasonable to give ample time for a response. Don’t ask for a lead with a deadline the very next day. Not only will it cause attrition on your part, but it will also most probably not be sent due to the way the mailing list is compiled. Remember, mailings are not sent immediately, but are collated first, then sent. It also goes without saying that you should not spam the HARO network.

Note the Gift Bag page

There’s a special page within HARO that caters specifically for “goodie bag” sponsorships. This is by all means not a paid list and should be used with a lot of discretion and respect. If you make products and want them to appear in loot bags, this list is for you.

Build relationships

More often than not, PR contacts will often save your email addresses in queries after a successful engagement. Don’t be a stranger an do keep in touch. Provide updates to build your very own network of contacts to sponsor prizes and receive wires.

5 Ways to Remain Focused on Your Blog

Even bloggers who profess a quality-over-quantity focus stress the need for regular posting, if only to keep the blog visible within a niche. The question is, how can a blogger retain focus for what’s admittedly a repetitive task? Here are five ways that have proven useful for yours truly. [Read more]

Do you have trouble staying disciplined?

The single biggest hurdle to online success is lack of discipline.

In my experience online, there has been one glaring issue that “work from home” employees encounter: lack of consistency and discipline. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, when you work from home, the temptation is to put work off until later … to sleep in … to read the political blogs … to watch the pMetrics live stat ticker for hours and hours … to justify the one, no two, no three games of Madden 2009.

More than anything else, I think that freelance workers on the web have to struggle with the lack of structure that working from home introduces. It’s this reason that so many online employers pay on a performance basis rather than a salary basis. But even performance based pay doesn’t solve the problem completely because it fails to account for loss of momentum (i.e. if you start a project and your new employee works for 3 weeks and then decides to work intermittently for the next 3 weeks, your plan to monetize the new site suddenly takes a back seat, and you start losing money. Sure, you can let the employee go, but then you’ve got to reinvest time in replacing the person, regaining momentum for the site, etc.)

When I hire a new full time salaried employee, as I’ve done five times in the last four months, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way of managing the new work-from-home situation is to closely monitor productivity. I hate micromanaging, but after employing dozens of full time employees, I’ve noticed a clear and distinct pattern. It doesn’t hold for everyone, but I’ve found that most work from home, full-time employees, left to their own devices, end up putting about 3-5 hours in on any given work day, when they are being paid for an 8 hour work day. Because of this natural human tendency, the only recourse I have is to repeat my expectations a few times, set minimum performance standards along with incentives, and if that doesn’t work, start applying pressure by voicing my disappointment and potential consequences.

I hate voicing my disappointment. It creates a negative work environment. I also hate setting minimum performance standards. My preference is to set performance incentives that motivate an employee to go above and beyond the call of duty. But that doesn’t often work. Rather, as most of us can understand, the incentive of sleeping-in or playing video games in the middle of the day often wins out.

Learning To Take The High Road

Lorelle Van Fossen at the BlogHerald has published a post discussing how to prepare yourself for the blog bullies. Her article strikes close to home with me because at one point, I had to deal with a blog bully myself. Here’s what happened.

My Experience

Back when I was producing my weekly podcast called WordPress Weekly, I performed a live one hour interview with an individual known as Small Potato. Small Potato was an individual who had made quite an impact within the WordPress community, specifically to those who were involved with creating themes. The interview didn’t go as well as I thought it would. I had prepared 10 or so questions that I thought would get me through the interview and as we discussed those questions, more questions would be brought up and the interview would be more like a conversation. Unfortunately, the conversation part was missing as I received very short answers to my questions, sometimes with a simple Yes or No answer. By the time I reached the thirty minute mark of the show, I was out of questions and didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, a few listeners called in and spoke with SP which ended up saving the show.

I knew the interview didn’t go as well as I had liked but one blogger decided to publish a post discussing the interview. The title of the post was “Jeffro 2.0 Gives Worst Interview Ever“. As I read the title of the post, anger and emotions took over. I read through his article along with his opinions. By the time I reached the end of the post, I wanted to reach through my monitor and punch this guy in the face and tell him to conduct the interview himself.

Instead of telling this guy off on his own blog, I took a couple of deep breaths and then left a detailed, heart felt comment, thanking him for his review along with his opinions. I let him know how I felt about the interview as well as agreeing with some of the things he had said. After I took a few more deep breaths, I decided to publish a post on my blog asking my audience if they felt the same way as this guy did about the interview. I was blown away by the reaction of my audience.

I received a large number of compliments on my blog for the interview along with a number of comments which gave me suggestions on how to make future interviews better. Most didn’t agree that the interview was the worst one ever and that in fact, his review almost contradicted his headline. I didn’t ask for any support from my listeners, but a number of them browsed to where the review was published and gave the guy an ear full.

What I Learned

After the ordeal was over with, it became an event I could look back on and laugh at. I learned an important lesson that at times, is harder to accomplish than to preach. This lesson was to take the high road whenever possible, no matter what the circumstances are. Taking the high road and putting yourself above those who enjoy the bottom of the barrel will not only help to provide you with more leverage, but it will also gain you admiration, respect, and authority. Anything less is just adding fuel to the fire.

It’s 2008 And The Web Is Different

Although I believe blog bullies or internet bullies in general are still plentiful, with the advent of social networking, personal brands, blogging, reputation etc, all on the line, I don’t see this large rampage of internet trolls taking over the internet. With sites and services built specifically to monitor and track a user’s reputation across the web, there is more at stake now than ever before. When you consider many employers are using Google searches, MySpace lookups etc, as part of their background checks for employees, it’s best to make sure that before you hit that publish button, whether it be for a blog post, comment, image, or a video, that your paper trail on the web does not prevent you from future opportunities.

Tell Us Your Story

Have you gone through a blog bullying experience yet? What about comment trolls? Let us know about your experience and tell us how you dealt with your situation in the comments. Stories along with your resolutions will have a chance at being featured in a future post here at Performancing.

Image taken by Eddie~s Under Creative Commons 2.0

Performancing Stream of Consciousness – Mon Apr 28, 2008

Some reading for today, and my occasional commentary:

1. Jonathan Bailey has an indepth article at Blog Herald about orphan works legislation, copyright, how bloggers and illustrators/ photographers could be affected, as well as what you can do about it.
2. Steve Imparl, a lawyer and writer/ blogger, has a guest post at Daily Blog Tips that enlightens us to some legal points for bloggers. (Though I’m surprised at his opening sentence, which says there are millions of bloggers posting daily. Are there really? Wow.)
3. Also at Daily Blog Tips, Daniel suggests we Twitter less, blog more, which is a counterpoint to James’ post here about why Twitter is the blogger’s new sidekick. Personally, I’ve yet to find Twitter as anything more than digital navel-gazing and an interesting sociological phenomena. If there were other elements/ features and it were turned into a sort of followable personal dashboard, then it would interest me. Okay, maybe there are some important uses, such as helping free an American student arrested in Egypt.
4. Jonathan Morrow has a very interesting post about who makes the better blogger: valedictorians or class clowns. Jonathan asks, “do you remember who your class valedictorian was?” He says none of the people he asked could remember, but that class clowns stand out. (I used to remember the valedictorian of my high school year, but not anymore. As for class clown, well that was me. So if Jonathan is right, that’s good news for me.) Let me take a slightly different take on this. Class clowns feel the need to be recognized, for whatever reason, and I’m guessing those who blog actively (but not necessarily freelance bloggers) do too.
5. Eden, the people who’ve brought you PSDTUTS, NorthxEast (recently sold), FreelanceSwitch and other sites, now have NETTUTS, which covers the coding side of website development. The first three articles include building a portfolio site, creating tabbed content areas using CSS & jQuery, and creating PayPal payment forms. So for those of you wanting to delve more into coding but haven’t the time to learn programming, you might find NETTUTS helpful.
6. jQuery is an increasingly hot JavaScript code library that makes it easier for non-programmers to slick up websites with all kinds of dynamic features. I linked to one jQuery tutorial in the last item, and Design Reviver has an article on horizontal accordion menus. If you find that these are the types of design features you’d like to add to your site, I urge you to look up more about jQuery. There are jQuery tutorial articles popping up in blogs all over, and if there’s any demand for it, I might post some with screencasts.
7. David Peralty at Xfep mentions that WP 2.5.1 is out, but that 2.5.2 is probably about to follow soon. I can’t find it, but I did come across another post elsewhere that strongly suggests NOT upgrading to 2.5.1 because several other features are broken. They suggest waiting for 2.5.2, or sticking with 2.3.3. If you’re not sure what to do, you can read my Why I Hate WP 2.5 post – and  my Why I Love WordPress post for balance.
8. If you missed the announcement, V2.0 of ScribeFire, the fantastic in-browser (Firefox) editor extension, has just been released (and a 2.0.1 update). This version offers a long-awaited feature: multiple file editing using a tabbed interface. Now your blogging should be even more productive.
9. Webware recently announced the 2008 winners for their web apps awards. WordPress.com was amongst the winners in the publishing category.
10. I’ve recently started writing about freelancing at both FreelanceFolder and FreelanceSwitch, and I’ll be contributing approximately weekly.
11. Brian Gardner, whose WP themes make up part of Performancing Themes‘ archives, recently released three variations of Revolution Blog theme. (Though despite having a name in common with a series of premium/ magazine themes, it’s not a premium theme. However, it is clean and crisp. And free.) Variations include 2-column, 3-col right, 3-col left/right.

Is This Linkbait?

Regular readers of Perfomancing probably already known what linkbait is: an article that for some reason generates loads of traffic social media sites and backlinks from other websites. Linkbait can arguably be divided into two categories: (1) useful and (2) novel/ interesting. Sometimes linkbait is both.

Seth Godin gives a nutshell, positive definition of linkbait that makes it sound easy and fun to do. And it can be. But look at the example that he gave, Web Trend Map 2008. Which category is it in? Is it actually useful? It’s definitely novel, displaying popular websites clustered like stations in a subway map. But because of that very presentation, I don’t really find the paradigm that useful. It’s rather hard to absorb the map as a whole.

Subway maps are useful because a person using one is interested in getting to from point A to point B. They’ll mentally filter out all the distractions – i.e., all the other subway stations. This Web Trend Map cannot really be used for analogous purpose because there’s no real-world physical relationship for the clusters, so it might be hard for some people to follow.

My point is that it’s easy to come up with web content that give the semblance of “linkbait” but isn’t really.

Now at the time of writing this, the map itself only has five diggs at Digg. Will it get more? Do you think it’s effective linkbait?

6 Easy Ways To Get Eaten By the GOOG Monster

This article is for informational purposes only. Being eaten by the GOOG monster is not something that you want to try at home. Please leave the handling of the GOOG monster to trained experts.

The GOOG Monster is a voracious beast that likes to prey on both the guilty and the innocent. The key to getting eaten by the GOOG monster is to give off the appropriate scent…the scent of website decay. If you really want to give this a shot (disregarding our disclaimer), you’ll need to know the appropriate smells to manufacture.

Here are 6 ways to attract the untamed wrath of the GOOG monster:

1. Syndicate your feed

The GOOG monster likes to eat tiny websites that syndicate their feed to bigger websites. So if you’re just starting out, syndicate your feed and make sure it gets picked up by an established feed syndicator. An alternative method is to attract the attention of dozens of splogs.

2. Change URL structure and help your users with a 301 redirect

The GOOG monster sniffs out 301 redirects from a mile away. A 301 is really just a temporary snack for the GOOG monster, and might be a good entry point for the uninitiated if you’re willing to be nibbled on for a while. The GOOG monster likes to nibble on sites with complete URL overhauls for a good 1-3 months. If you’re lucky, the GOOG monster will be satisfied and let you go after this time.

3. Get a new site design

Just as humans smell chemicals, the GOOG monster smells HTML code. When you get a new site design, you might notice how it looks much nicer, but the GOOG monster doesn’t care about looks. Nope. He notices that your code has undergone a radical change. The GOOG monster loves to devour change. A new site design often results in changes to 1) the location of your content in the code, 2) the structure of your title tag 3) the ratio of code to content 4) whether you have a META description 5) sitewide navigation links. All of these changes will bring out the GOOG monster for a feast.

There are really only 2 ways to beat the GOOG monster here. Either, trick the GOOG monster by mimicking your old code (keeping elements in their same locations) or build up enough stronghold defenses (i.e. become an authority) before hand to minimize the ability of the GOOG monster to take a bite out of your site.

4. Give editorial links to paid partners

The GOOG monster has seen a recent increase in his appetite for paid links. The GOOG Monster wants all paid links to himself. So be careful. He has sent out a brigade of sniffers whose sole task is to horde the paid editorial links of others for himself. The GOOG Monster wants to get fat, and his current strategy for plumping up the coffers centers around keeping all the paid links to himself.

5. Link out to your friends

Do you have friends with websites that are unrelated to your own? Do you link to your friends’ websites from your blogroll? The GOOG monster can smell this…but to the GOOG monster, it smells the same as a paid editorial link. And the GOOG monster’s favorite food are varieties of paid editorial links. So if you have a site about bowling and your sister has a site about girls & gadgets, think twice before linking to your sister’s website.

6. Link to a list of other sites from every page of your site

Haven’t heard of the is_home() function in WordPress? Well, the GOOG monster is glad, especially if your theme designer didn’t incorporate the function into your WordPress theme. The GOOG monster loves to snack on run-of-site links to external sites.

Ok. That’s my list. Can you help me make the list longer by offering more suggestions for feeding a hungry GOOG monster?