Over the last year or so I've been asked to do an increasing amount of Facebook consulting. Most weeks I get a couple of emails asking for help and asking how this sort of consulting works so I thought I'd explain my experience.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the empowerment of average users. With Twitter and Facebook pages, individuals can now respond back to companies and organizations with a few strokes of the keyboard. Google's recently entered the fray with an intriguing project called Sidewiki. Once again, companies and nonprofits interested in managing their online brands need to be aware of the new medium and how to track it.

What is Sidewiki?
Google started its sidewiki project in September 2009. It's a sidebar that can attach to any page on the internet via the Google Toolbar. Users gain the ability to comment on any page on the internet. Google uses a ranking system based on votes and various algorithms to determine the order of the comments.

When a user of the Google Toolbar visits a page with Sidewiki notes they see a small blue button of the left side of the page with two white chevrons (see screenshot on the right). Clicking on this opens the Sidewiki sidebar. Here they will see comments left by previous visitors. They are be able to add their own comments.

Visionaries have long dreamed of a web with this kind of two-way communication but similar sidebar commenting systems have failed to gain enough momentum to become viable. If this were just another venture-capital-fueled attempt, it would be something marketers could ignore unless and until it became widely used. But with Google behind Sidewiki, it's a service we need to take seriously from the start.

Users Talking Back
When we put together websites, we get to control the message of our little corner of the internet--we have the final say on the material we present. If Sidewiki becomes popular, this will no longer be true. Fans, disgruntled employees and competitors can all start marking up our sites--yikes! But those brands that have embraced the Web 2.0 model will love another place where they can interact with their audience. Today's marketing goal is mindshare--how much of a user's attention span can you win over. The more you get visitors to think about your brand or your message, the more likely that they will buy or recommend your product or service. You need to be active on whatever online channel your audience is using.

Watching the Conversations
What's a good brand manager to do? The first thing is to make sure you have the latest version of Google Toolbar installed on your working browser (get it here) and that you have the Sidewiki service enabled (I've started a Sidewiki for this entry so if it's working you'll see the blue button in your browser).

Brand Management
Google allows website owners the first comment. If you are registered as the owner of a site via Google Webmaster Tools, then you get first say: when you post to the Sidewiki of a page you control, Google gives you the top spot. This is very good. Should you do it?

Probably not. At least not yet. I don't see people using Sidewiki yet. Most websites still don't have any comments. Even Google's projects often fail to gain traction and there's no guarantee that Sidewiki will take off. If your page doesn't have any comments, I wouldn't recommend that you make the first. If there are no Sidewiki entries, the blue button won't be there and visitors probably won't even think to comment.

If you notice that a visitor has started a Sidewiki for your site by leaving a comment, then it's time to log into your Google Webmasters account and leave an official welcome message. Even though you're second to the conversation, you will get first position thanks to your ownership of the website.

The introductory note should briefly welcome visitors. It will appear alongside your website so there's no need to repeat your mission statement, but it is a place where you can give helpful navigation tips and stress any actionable items that the casual visitor might miss. You might consider inviting visitors to sign up for your site's email list, for example.

The Future
Users can tie their Sidewiki comments into Twitter and Facebook accounts. They can leave video comments. If the service takes off there will surely be a mini-industry built around comment optimization. Spammers will get hard at work to game the system. But none is really happening now. Despite a bit of fear-mongering on marketing blogs, Google Sidewiki is a long ways away from being something to lose sleep over. 

More Information:

• Google Sidewiki page
• Sidewiki Bookmarklet (useful for browsers without Google Toolbar support)
  
• Google Toolbar Wikipedia entry
• Techcrunch on the Sidewiki debut
• Google Webmaster Tools

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company's service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn't need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you're ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here's five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You'll see measures like "keyword relevancy" increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions! It's amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What would draw them to the site? 
3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You'll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one "converts" better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you've set? Once you've finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it's conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don't Be Afraid to Get Professional Help If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you'll almost certainly get your money's worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece What to Look For in SEO Consultants for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

Many Friends will know me from my active involvement in the Quaker world. I've been dubbed the "Quaker Blogfather" for my Quaker Ranter (site) blog and my work in pulling together QuakerQuaker (site), an online magazine and blogging community with over five hundred members and 10,000 visitors a month. I am also a frequent Quaker workshop leader and published writer.

I started building websites in 1995 with an award-winning Nonviolence.org hub site and was a social media pioneer when I redesigned its homepage to a blog format three years later. Before going independent as MartinKelley.com in 2006, I served on the staff of Friends General Conference (site) for eight years, where I worked in the FGC Quaker bookstore and built the Quakerfinder, FGC Gathering and youth ministry sites. I also worked for Friends Journal (site) for two years, putting select articles from their Quaker magazine online every month. Since then I've been privileged to work with Quaker organizations such as Friends World Committee for Consultation (site), Friends Council on Education (site) and Haverford Friends Meeting (site). I've done some exciting media work with the Philadelphia Penn Charter School (site) and built personal sites for well known Friends. I bring our testimony of integrity to every business transaction and when I address topics such as search engine optimization or pricing philosophy, I try to do so from a Friends perspective.

Web Design Specialties:

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.

I usually describe myself as a "Web Developer," but often the technical aspects of my job are the least valuable service I provide. Above it I would rank what you might call my experience as a web citizen and online publicist. I put my first website together years before upstart sites like "Google" and "Myspace" came along and I published what I later realized was a "blog" the same month the word "weblog" was coined. I help clients connect with their audiences with a mix of print content, podcasts, pictures and videos, whether delivered through the open web or specialized services like Twitter or Facebook. A better job description might be Technology Lifestyle Guru.

So it was neat to be quoted last week in ReadWriteWeb, a top-twenty blog with hundreds of thousands of readers and a syndication deal with the New York Times Technology section. The article was "Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?" by Sarah Perez. In a section called "When Should You Disconnect?" she wrote:

The fine line between what's worth documenting and what's not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it's these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus. As religious-focused blogger Martin Kelley notes, "there are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation." (He had just surprised himself by reviewing the grainy, blurry photos he felt it necessary to take while watching a bride walk down the aisle. In retrospect, this was exactly the kind of moment that could have gone unrecorded.)

It's a bit ironic that for all of the tech writing I do I was cited for my personal blog, but this blurring of the line between identities is becoming more common with the web. Thanks to Sarah and ReadWriteWeb for the mention!

New York City Journalist Susan DeMark looks for the stories behind the architecture, buildings, history, and nature of NYC and beyond. She and a graphic designer put together the look of the site and I performed the CSS magic to translate their vision into a WordPress blog.

Visit: Mindful Walker

My Twitter followers will know I've been slightly obsessed by Google's new browser, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I've been hitting reload on the download site fairly obsessively. A few minutes ago my persistence was rewarded and I'm writing to you all from the new browser (here's the official release announcement).

The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employee who has largely freed himself from email by consciously using whatever social networking tool would be better at moving the conversation forward, whether it's IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the telephone. This line stood out for me:

I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I've been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions -- maybe they will have a better idea than mine.

This is exactly how I try to describe the blogging philosophy in the business world. Don't think of the blog as another chore that needs to be added to your already overwhelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as another communication tool so it becomes a seamless part of your ongoing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an honesty and approachability it wouldn't have if you thought of it as simply another marketing piece.

And a shout-out back to HitTail folks who linked to my article on Adword shenanigans by naming me a superstar! Everyone Loves HitTail: HitTail Helps Superstar Blogger Martin Kelley Save Money. Is it getting hot in here?

I will say that these guys are really good trackers. I sometimes think if I said "hittail" in my sleep I'd awake to an email thanking me for the mention. I'm always surprised at how many companies don't follow their own public commentary on them across the internet, but Hittail certainly does.

This is part of my Beyond SEO series where I look at the myths and realities behind search engine optimization, with practical tips about publicizing your site and building your personal brand. Read all of my Beyond SEO articles.

The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they've just rewritten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives recommendations about what to look out for. It starts with their definition

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.

The blog asks "how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?" I've been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What's particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I've seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.

Google's job and our job

I've always taken the approach that it's Google's job to give people the most useful and relevant return for their search and our job to make sure we have useful and relevant material and arrange it in such a way that Google can access it.

SEO is important but only in the context of smart web design and a coherent and well thought out internet marketing strategy. Firms that claim to do SEO without checking the analytics data and consulting with the client about their business strategy will not help the site in the long run.

What your SEO expert should be doing

I would agree with most of Google's recommendations of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:

• A SEO consultant that looks at analytics data before making any changes. If the client doesn't already have Google Analytics running on the site I install it and wait a month before doing anything. I do that because you want:
• Quantifiable results. You should be able to see shifting use patterns if the optimization is working. The internet gives us precise figures and it's often very easy to demonstrate the value of the work you've done. Clients should have full access to the analytics and be trained enough to be able to independently verify the results.
• A consultant that frequently answers questions with "Hmmm..., I don't know." No one knows what Google is doing. You try something, then you try something else. Anyone who claims to know everything is scamming you.
• Someone who looks at your entire business model and asks hard questions about your internet strategy. What do you hope to accomplish with your site. Are there specific goals that we can measure?
• Think about your Inbound and Outbound strategies. Google will send people your way if you have useful material so think about what compelling content you can offer the universe. And once people come to the site you have to make it compelling for them to stay a while, subscribe, etc.
• The SEO consultant should make you sweat: anyone who says they can significantly boost your site without you having to lift a finger is fooling you. You will almost always have to add compelling content and it will take you committing staff time to the project (a good development team will look for ways to make this fit into your existing staff routines so that it's as painless as possible!).

Any others suggestions for what to look for in potential SEO consultants?

I was recently working with a client who has a large Google Adwords campaign, with an annual ad budget in the low six figures. He's been very careful about the keywords he's chosen and we've both poured over the Google Analytics figures to see how the campaign progressed.

It took a third party keyword tracking system to discover that many of the ads were being served up to wrong keywords in the Google searches. I want to keep the client's identity private, so let me use an analogy: say you're a boomerang maker and you've bought a campaign intending ads to show up for those who search "boomerang" in Google. What we discovered is that Google was serving up a large percentage of these ads for searchers of "frisbees" -- close, but not close enough for searchers to care. Few people clicked on the misplaced ad. We're talking serious money wasted on ads served up to the wrong target audience.

How did a carefully constructed ad campaign get on so many poorly-targeted searches? Google allows fuzzy matching under their broad match guidelines:

For example, if you're currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost. The keyword variations that are allowed to trigger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords system continually monitors your keyword quality and performance factors. Your ads will only continue showing on the highest-performing and most relevant keyword variations.

You can disable these broad searches using negative keywords (i.e., "-frisbee") and with specific keywords ("boomerang").

But Google does not make it easy to see just where your ads are going. You have to set up a special Search query performance report. It's really essential that anyone doing a large Google Ad campaign set up one of these searches and have it automatically emailed to them every month. Google clearly wasn't tracking the "performance" of its broad search on this client's ad. I'm particularly disturbed that we didn't see these misdirected keywords listed in the Google Analytics tracking reports. It is dangerous to use the same company to both sell you a service and to report how well it's been doing.

Credit where it's due: it was the excellent long-tail blog content service Hittail that gave us the information that Google was misdirecting its ads. See my previous Hittail coverage.

Web 2.0 tools have changed the boundary lines between techies and program staff in many nonprofits over the past few years. At least, they should have, though I know of various organizations that haven't made the conceptual leap to the new roles.

OLD SCHOOL: Webmaster

Let me explain by talking about my own changing work role. Even a few years ago, I was a paid staff webmaster. You could divide my work into two large categories. The first was techie: I managed server accounts, set up required databases, designed sites. I got into the HTML code, the PHP, the Javascript, CSS, etc.

The other was content: when program-oriented staff had new material they wanted on the website they would email it to me or walk it over. I would put in my work queue, where it might sit for weeks if it wasn't an organizational priority. When it came time to add the material I would boot up Dreamweaver, a relatively expensive program that was only accessible from my laptop and I would put the material onto the website. Needless to say, with a process like this some parts of the website never got very much attention.

At some point I start sneaking in a content management system for frequently-changed pages. This seemed very hackish and not good at first but over time I realized it greatly speeded up my turn-around time for basic text content. But the organizations I worked for still relied on the old model, where staff give the webmaster content to put up.

NEW SCHOOL: Web Developer

Nowadays I'm a web developer, a freelancer with an ever changing list of clients. I typically spend about a month putting together a site based on a content management (like this) or automatic feed system (like I did for Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School). I do a certain amount of training and while I might add a little content for testing purposes, I step back at the end of the process to let the client put the material up themselves. I'm available for questions but I'm surprised about how rarely I'm called.

Here's two examples. Steadyfootsteps is a blog by an American physical therapist in Vietnam. When we started, she didn't even have a digital camera! I gave her advice on cameras, started her on a Flickr account, set up a fairly generic Movable Type blog with some custom design elements and answered all the questions she had along the way. She went to town. She's put tons of pictures and embedded Youtube videos right in posts. Here's a non-techie who has contributed a lot to the web's content!

Penn Charter is a school that was already on Flickr and Youtube but wanted to display the content on their website in an attractive way. I pulled together all the magic of feeds and javascripts to have a media page that showcases the newest material.

They're very different sites, but in neither instance does the client contact me to add content. They rely on easy-to-use Web 2.0 services: no specialized HTML knowledge required.

NEW TOOLS, OLD MODEL

I got an email not so long ago from an old boss who manages a monthly magazine. Her site has been radically rebuilt over the years. Dreamweaver is out and content management is in. They use Drupal, which my friend Thomas T. of the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance tells me won the recent popularity contest among nonprofit techies. This is great, a definite step forward, but what confused me is that my old boss was asking me whether I would be interested in returning to my old job (the successor who oversaw the Drupal upgrade is leaving).

They still have a webmaster? They still want to funnel website material through a single person? Every staffperson there is adept at computers. If a physical therapist can figure out Flickr and Movable Type and Youtube, why can't professional print designers and editors?

My hourly rate ranges from two to five times what she'd be likely to pay, so I turned her down. But I did ask why she wanted a webmaster. Now that they're on Drupal it seems to me that they'd be better off switching from the webmaster to the web developer staffing model: hire me as a freelance consultant to do troubleshooting, staff training and the occassional special project but have the regular fulltime staff do the bulk of the content management. I'd think you'd end up with a site that's more lively and updated and that the cost would about the same, despite my higher hourly rates.

I've heard enough stories of places where secretaries have come out of the shadows to embrace content management and have helped transform websites. I'm the son of a former secretary so I know that they're often the smartest employees at any firm (if you walk into an office looking for the expert on advanced Excel features you'll surely find them sitting right there behind the receptionist desk).


FINALLY: WHAT'S UP WITH DRUPAL?

I'm trying to join the bandwagon and use Drupal for a upcoming site that will have about a dozen editors. But there's no built-in WYSIWYG editor, no little formatting icons. Sure, I myself could easily hand-code the HTML and make it look nice. But I don't want to do that. And it's unrealistic to think I'm going to teach a dozen overworked secretaries how to write in HTML. The interface needs to work more or less like Microsoft Word (as it does in Movable Type, CushyCMS, Google Docs, etc.)

Most Drupal sites I see seems from the outside like they're still old school: staff webmaster through whom most content funnels. Is this right? Because if so, this is really just an institutionalization of the content hack I did six years ago. Can anyone point me to lively, active Drupal sites whose content is being directly added by non-techie office staff? If so, how is it set up?

This is a fairly standard Movable Type blog for a Friend (Quaker) based in the West-Philly neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The most unusual element is that the client wanted two separate blogs: one meant for daily posts and the other for more weekly posts (it's all set up in MT via categories). This also shows the use of Slidoo for a photo banner head. The pictures are all pulled from a particular set of her Flickr account. Visit site.

Martin Kelley's work has been featured by top newspapers and tech blogs. He has given workshops and presentations on educational and Web 2.0 themes. He is available for speaking engagements and freelance writing.

Publications/Media

ReadWriteWeb (republished on NYTimes.com), Technology is Great but Are We Forgetting to Live?, January 22, 2009. Quote and citation. Read more.

Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators, published by the O'Reilly Media Shortcuts Series. Commissioned author.

Quakers in the Blogosphere (PDF), Western Friend/Friends Bulletin, February-March 2006, editorial features Quakerquaker.org.

FGConnections, The Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings, Spring 2005. Author.

Friends Journal, "The World Is Hungry for What We've Tasted," October 2006. Author.

Beliefnet.com, "Best Spiritual Blogs," August 2006. Cited QuakerQuaker.org.

Waging War on War, Washington Post, profile of a number of peace groups including Nonviolence.org.

Not Your Father's Antiwar Movement (subscription required), Atlantic Monthly, cited Nonviolence.org.

USAToday, Missiles Aren't the Answer, featured Op-Ed, November 16th, 1998. Author.

Iraqi Crisis Increases Activity on Peace Network, a major New York Times profile of Nonviolence.org, February 21, 1998.

Fellowships

Friends Institute Fellowship, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for work on Nonviolence.org (1996).

Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership, helped support 2005-2006 activities that led to the creation of QuakerQuaker.org.

I live about a quarter mile from the border with Winslow NJ (08095), minutes from most of the township. I even have a little internet fame for having a well-document trip report of my bike trip to the legendary Blue Hole of Winslow (it's one the most visited pages on my personal blog!).

Web Designer, Content Editor, SEO Specialist

See also: Print Resume, LinkedIn profile.

SKILLS

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Consulting: Fifteen years of experience in nonprofit world. Much of this work consists of educating staff and leadership on effective use of online communication technologies. Current focus is on analytics, integrating social media, and helping nonprofits adopt content management systems.

Web Development: Proficiency in HTML, XHTML, PHP, CSS, PERL (CGI), MYSQL, Adobe Dreamweaver, Six Apart's Movable Type, Drupal, WordPress, t and related content management systems, along with Search Engine Optimization techniques and analytic tracking methods. Experience with various shopping cart backends for E-Commerce applications. Comfortable with Quark Xpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Joomla, and Javascript. Close follower of Web 2.0 developments.

Editing: Experience as Acquiring Editor for nonprofit publishing house; proficient at negotiations, copy editing, marketing.