Transcript

This is ”˜Professor’ Goetsch reporting from the Spectacular San Francisco Bay Area offices of the Podcast Asylum.

I’m sure everyone who listens to FIR gets e-mail advertising social media webinars, trainings, and other services. Ragan Communications is hardly alone in sending invitations to these events, though I think they may be the most prolific.

But a few days before Thanksgiving, I received a message that provoked more than the usual “Oh, look! Someone wants to charge me money to tell me what I already know.” In fact, it disturbed me so much that I felt I had to share it here, even though the person who sent it is someone I know”¦and used to respect.

Back when he was producing his “Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy” podcasts, Tee Morris used to call these “Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot Moments.” It was kind of like the Bad Pitch Blog for authors who did Really Stupid Things.

In this case, it’s more a matter of consultants behaving badly. You’ll see what I mean when I read the message. I had to spell out the problem to the person who came up with this gem, but no one who’s heard Shel and Neville—or anyone else in this space—talk about transparency is going to need me to tell them what’s wrong with this.

The only thing I’m leaving out is the name of the company and people involved. I’m not sure they deserve my protection, but I am sure that the lesson here is bigger than one misguided “thought leadership” firm.

Subject: New Cheap & Easy Social Media Management

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Clients:

For too many years I have been preaching, imploring, begging and coaching my clients and prospective clients to master the ways of marketing by blogging, and to start maintaining a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the other major centers of current web marketing.

A few of you have become expert and have benefited. Most of you are too busy to do it all yourself and don’t want the hassle of fussing with the technology. Some of you have thrown up your hands in despair.

So here’s the good news: We’re going to do it for you, and it’s not expensive. For a limited time, you can start for as little as $500 a month. Our new business will review and set up all the components of your social media infrastructure. We’ll even extract and write your blogs, or edit your original blog posts. We’ll Twitter for you and maintain your connections. Without breaking a sweat, you’ll be a master of the new social media.

And there’s no start-up fees!

All we want is your success.

Call us now and let us start building your public profile.

The part that really got me was the bit about maintaining connections. You’re going to have my relationships for me? Will you sleep with my boyfriend and take my mother out to dinner? Don’t you think they might have something to say about that?

I bet Lee Hopkins has a sound clip of someone beating their head against the wall. I’m not sure it’s my head that needs contramural therapy, however.

When I objected to this person that Twitter is like a cocktail party and individuals do not send other people to attend cocktail parties on their behalf, he seemed completely oblivious to the five years of controversy surrounding ghost blogging, never mind the criticism Guy Kawasaki came in for when he hired people to tweet on his behalf and got caught at it. My colleague seemed to have entirely overlooked the social aspect of social media, and to be pursuing a numbers game whereby he could build an instant “platform” for his clients, who are mostly business-book authors.

It’s true that Twitter can work fine as a broadcast channel—if you’re the Dell Outlet sending notices of your latest deals. And there are lots of social media services a consultancy can provide its clients in good conscience. You can help them write a great LinkedIn profile or develop a good Facebook Fan Page. You can help with media monitoring. You can provide all kinds of training.

But if you can’t make people’s friends for them in person, what makes you think you can do it online? And why, just when the big companies are finding that they have the most social media success by acting more like real people, should real people start acting more like big companies used to?

Literary agent and one-time blogger Miss Snark used to keep a Clue Gun for situations like this.

And the frightening thing is that like the social media certification mentioned on FIR 506, there are people who will fall for it. According to the person who sent the e-mail, there have been several takers already. He even asked if I’d be interested in participating in the project—since I’m a ghostwriter, you know.

You must be joking. I’d have to be certifiable.

Professor Goetsch, signing off.

Yes, the first thing that happened to me after I picked up my press pass at the Social Media Strategies conference last week was that I got interviewed. The Social Media Marketing crew was still figuring out where to set up, as you can see from the people who keep walking in front of the camera.

I obviously have no clue how to be interviewed on video, because you never see my eyes. (Okay, yes, it was 8:00 in the morning and I would have been looking directly into the sun. That’s no excuse.)

Later in the day I interviewed one of the SMM team, president Jun Loayza. When I finally manage to edit my eight hours of raw audio files into an hour-max podcast episode, you’ll get to hear it.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading for AdWeek’s Social Media Strategies conference in San Francisco—in my capacity as a member of the press, to report on the event for FIR.

I haven’t been able to get a straight answer yet about recording the actual presentations for other than personal purposes, but I am hoping to interview some of the presenters and put together a special interviews podcast for Shel and Neville.

One of the interesting things about this particular conference is that I haven’t heard of most of the speakers. I mean, heck, I tend to assume I hear about everything on FIR. I’m looking forward to hearing some new case studies.

So it’s time to charge all the AA batteries for the iriver and check the microphones and pack up the netbook. If you’re going, just look for the redhead in the white lab coat.

The most diplomatic option (and the one ”˜Professor’ Goetsch prefers) is to click ”˜reply privately’ in order to give the person sending the invite a chance to remind you where you met, who you know in common, and why you should accept the invitation.

by Sallie Goetsch of the Podcast Asylum and Jon Leland of ComBridges

Recently, in a WordPress group on LinkedIn, the question was asked “Is WordPress the answer to all our prayers?” The writer was extending the conversation about his own blog post which objected vehemently to crazy claims that complete novices could build “killer websites” in minutes if they just used WordPress. It seems that the world of technology is filled with these kinds of false promises and unrealistic expectations.

For those of us who have hand-coded HTML back before tools like Dreamweaver were invented, and who have experimented and had learning experiences with creating web pages in a wide variety of ways, WordPress is an important new platform for website development. Compared to anything we’ve seen before, WordPress is amazingly simple and intuitive, especially given its array of powerful features. It lets you change your design without affecting your content, it has great built-in SEO (search engine optimization) features, and it’s free.

WordPress also has advantages over competing website publishing systems like Drupal and Joomla. For one thing, you can use easy offline editors (like Windows Live Writer and Ecto) to update content on WordPress sites. WordPress also began as a blogging platform, and as a result, it’s “natural” for WordPress websites to include blogs. For many website designers, even those who have never learned Java, never learned Flash, never learned PHP, and don’t know a single programming language, WordPress does answer many prayers.

But that’s very different from saying that anyone can use WordPress to design and implement a sophisticated website. If you try to take advantage of WordPress’ full capabilities as a content management system without knowing anything about HTML, CSS, or PHP—or about WordPress itself—you are simply asking for trouble. Yes, you can set up a basic blog using WordPress.com without knowing much, but to really make WordPress (or any other new software) sit up and do tricks, you have to put some time into learning how to use it. (More advanced users download WordPress from WordPress.org. The supply of tricks available at WordPress.com is limited.)

When you think about it, most people only know how to use the most basic features of the software that they use every day. They treat Microsoft Word like a glorified typewriter and don’t even know most of its tools and options exist, much less how to use them. They pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop and only use the functions they could have gotten for free with Picasa. (Photoshop is so sophisticated that even advanced users can spend hours studying DVD tutorials to learn new things.)

So why should WordPress be any different? It’s not, but people get excited and apparently WordPress’ many benefits give birth to irrationally exuberant expectations. Either that, or there are some people out there who think that because WordPress is easy for them, it must seem that easy to everyone else.

For example, if you hear that there are 5,000 free plugins that extend WordPress’ platform, and hundreds of free themes in the theme repository, shouldn’t you expect that just looking through them and testing them to see which ones would be best for you might take quite some time?

And then there’s the fact that new versions of WordPress come out a lot more often than new versions of Photoshop. So you have to stay up to date, by doing things like attending meetups and Wordcamps, reading blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, or even reading books. (There are several good books on WordPress, but it is hard for print books to keep up with the rapid developments in the platform and its plugins.)

Because WordPress is a web-based platform, it’s much easier for geographically dispersed teams to collaborate on websites. But due to its popularity, WordPress sites are also open to server hacks and other attacks—as ComBridges discovered first hand recently.

While it doesn’t necessarily take a programmer to learn WordPress, if you want to create a sophisticated WordPress site, skills like PHP will come in handy. And, if you want to learn your way around, study the WordPress Codex, and be sure to allow some time to learn important fundamentals such as, for example, which plugins make it easier to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system).

Even though WordPress is easy enough for Sallie’s hairdresser to update, Sallie was the one to create the site, and had to provide more than one tutorial on posting to the blog and editing pages.

WordPress deserves to be praised for many reasons, but exaggerated claims about its ease of use for the complete novice do everyone a disservice. Let’s practice a little expectation management, people.

Jon Leland runs web design and internet marketing company ComBridges. Sallie Goetsch is a WordPress fangirl who maintains several WP sites for her own and clients’ businesses. They have collaborated on some occasionally nerve-wracking WordPress projects.

Plus a report from David Phillips, listener comments, and the usual spots from Ragan Communications and CustomScoop.

Shel and Neville will be back for Monday’s show. The listeners will no doubt be relieved—but nowhere near as relieved as Dan and Sallie!