I received an email from the CEO of a company who chooses to remain anonymous and this is how it shall be. What touched me about the gesture was the high compliments paid towards Cre8asiteforums.  Myself, the Moderating team and Cre8tive Community were all noted for their outstanding attitudes and for producing a welcoming web space.

With the buzz the past few weeks on high alert concerning reputation management, both company and personal, I’ve been giving his email lots of thought. I, the Moderators and Administrators, have periodically received thank you notes over the years. And of course, we’ve ticked people off who, for one reason or another, simply didn’t fit or understand what we wanted to create at the forums.

What makes it work there?

I ask myself this question all the time and still have no solid, one answer.

I can offer this small insight, however.

Recently, I started a thread where I ranted in anger about my old web host. They dumped me, with no warning and lots of accusations. They claimed I did something against their Terms of Service. I could prove I didn’t, but they refused to listen. They refused to return my phone calls. They forced me to move my web site and blog within 72 hours and there was nothing I could do about it. In my fury, I named this host in the thread, which is against our House Rules.

I knew it. I did it anyway. I wasn’t thinking clearly.

Some of the Moderators and community members came to my side with support and time to not only help me find a new host and move, but also upgrade Wordpress.  Meanwhile, one of my Site Admins privately PM’d me with a calm sanity check, and suggested, not ordered, but suggested I edit the thread to avoid slandering the offensive old host.

I listened to him, calmed down, and moved on to a new relationship with a new site host.

There are forums where the head honcho makes all the decisions and what they say is how it goes. We’ve never done it that way at Cre8asiteforums. The only staff who ever survive there are those who can tolerate having a voice and accepting decisions by consensus vote. It’s very hard to do it that way, but that’s how I wanted it because I view the forums as a group effort.

This means I have to listen and be willing to be told what to do or follow advice based on trust and the expertise of someone else.

In some forums and blogs, there is zero tolerance if someone comments and dares to disagree with the point of view of the blog owner or a community member. I’ve seen bloggers say one thing, but their actions are the complete opposite. I worry that I might do this and I wouldn’t like it. If I have a bad day or am feeling overly sensitive, I need to have the strength to step away from the keyboard, or have someone at my back.

I think this is one bit of advice that I rarely see. We are often successful not because of what we’ve done by ourselves, but as the result of someone watching our back for us.

This is someone who has the guts to tell us that we’ve overstepped our bounds, written something cruel, didn’t make sense, or in some way caused public pain to another. Granted, some people absolutely have no qualms about outing others, making people squirm, hurting feelings, having their say, getting the last word, needing to be right all the time, and not caring about the long term. What they feel is what is and if people disagree, that’s their problem.

I think there are two sides to every story and am willing to admit the right side isn’t mine because my experiences may be different. My conclusions are different. I want to hear other experiences. Who cares if I agree or not? For me, that’s not the point of sharing. It’s not a contest.

Many times someone will come to Cre8asiteforums to ask how they can start their own forums and what is the magic formula to make it successful?

I think if you start something as a way to carry on a one way dialog, you’re doomed from the start. If you’re willing to listen and have an open mind to ideas and suggestions that aren’t your own, you may be more likely to be respected because people will find you approachable and warm.

While presenting a class on web site usability in New York for Internet Marketing Ninjas Marketing Training, my husband was in the audience as cheerleader and teacher.

I wasn’t connected at first and I could feel it. I wasn’t inspired. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be because the first part was the boring stuff I had to discuss, like business requirements. I said “um” 340 times. However, once I pulled up the screenshot of a web site I’m working on for an artist, Eric said I suddenly “lit up”. I connected. My passion for this web project and devotion to the artist raised my energy level.

From then on, I made eye contact with the audience. I laughed. I read their faces and could tell when I needed to bring them back if they slipped from me. When I got to my ideas about chaos theory, web design, usability and SEO, I saw several people sit up in their chairs to pay better attention. Who would have thought a usability consultant would be talking about the union of energy points with SEO’s?

It was my first ever solo talk. I learned that I was dead in the water unless I allowed my passion out to roam around the room. It was my excitement and love for my work that hooked the room and helped attendees to stay awake to hear what I had to say. If I could light their fire and get them jazzed for their own projects and careers, all the better.

Thought Leaders

Marty Weintraub wrote an interesting blog post called Need to Hire SEM Help? Where to Find Industry Thought Leaders. Doug Heil raised valid points in the comments. Indeed, it is difficult to find skilled SEO’s these days. The top level practitioners do far more than organic SEO. They’ve gone beyond to pick up training in copy writing, user experience design, off line marketing, accessibility and programming.

I doubt these sought after individuals are spending time on the road speaking or running forums. Some do of course. But, I’ve often wondered how much work a “leader” is actually doing when they’re out on the speaker circuit and traveling around the world week after week.

I know that I have to make time to be away from my Administrator duties at Cre8asiteforums to focus on my usability consulting business, keeping my skills current, raising my kids and being a wife. Somewhere in there I need to find time for me and trust me, most of the time I can’t find where I last put me.

Do we want to hire leaders? What do they offer? I like how Marty labeled it “thought leader”. I prefer to be out there, thinking and exploring. I like to open doors for people who have a “special something”. I want to inspire, but that’s because I’m quickly bored. If I won’t listen to myself, how can I expect anyone else to?

Passion Sells Because It Connects

I believe that we create best when we’re in love with our topic. Passion, devotion, adoration, persistence, whatever you want to call it - it’s what drives us to do something because we HAVE to. Even more, we WANT to.

This is why links for the sake of links was always a dead idea for me when it became the craze in 1999. All these years later and many still think that it’s the link that matters. It’s not. What has always mattered is content. People don’t get passionate over links or even anchor text. They react to content.

Miriam Ellis wrote a powerful piece called Links And Better Things Come When People Care. She wrote:

I remember first learning about the importance of link acquisition as a brand new SEO. I had a vague idea that I would be writing to related businesses and asking them nicely to link to whatever website I was working on. The trouble was, the first projects I was asked to do this on were not being run by businesses who had invested the time to create content worth linking to.

Miriam is an activist at heart, as well as web designer and search engine marketer. She’s discovered, as I have, that the projects we care about will feel and act differently to us. The marketing is different. User response is remarkable.

I’ve been able to act as both an information resource as well as a liaison between interested parties, facilitating new important relationships between people who can help one another. A secondary good is the fact that my blog has now been linked to, unasked, by every major entity involved in this project as well as by multiple media sources, wrote Miriam.

My artist friend, whose web site I took over, told me that one night before I uploaded the redesigned version, he looked at his old site after hearing my feedback on it. I had explained to him all the reasons why it was dead and not working for him. He hadn’t understood this until he looked at it again from the perspective of a usability consultant. He told me he was amazed at all that was missing from the old site that he just never noticed before. He had trusted he would be taken care of by those who had built his web sites.

Two webmasters built him web sites on two separate domains. Both were uninspiring, unattractive and lacked a reason to remain on the site or worse, bookmark it or ever return. Two chances. Two complete duds.

I saw his art. I spent the time to get to know the artist as a man, human, visionary. I know he’ll be famous. Neither of the other two webmasters believed and it showed in their work. Neither of them had a clue about SEO, accessibility, persuasive design or marketing.

In today’s Internet market, these skills are what you will need to look for. Skills, along with passion. You want people who help you to succeed and who know how to make it happen because they want this for you.

As Miriam wrote,

Now, I have begun to see that the more the web, and the job of the SEO, is viewed as real life, the more naturally really good work will take place, the more powerful and effective our efforts can be, the more impact those efforts can have on our lives outside the web.

A few have been saying this all along. Ted Ulle (Tedster) and Jill Whalen have long been saying, “Keep it natural”. It’s what separates those who deserve your money from those who don’t.

Discussion on SEO with Passion.

Meet Darryl Heron, who took advantage of our relaxing promotion rules and wrote an excellent piece on Earth day.

It’s been 31 years since the first Earth Day.

Are you involved?

I’m very excited to point you to Cre8 Green Week.

“We’ll be celebrating Earth Day, April 22nd, with a week-long “green” focus. The most unusual facet will be that we’re temporarily loosening some of our usually strict policies about self promotion. We want to make it easier for the community to come in and share about how their projects inspire awareness of our environment and sustainable use of resources.”

Logo design: Risa Borsykowsky of Rb3Webdesign.com

Cre8Green Week Planning and Implementation: Elizabeth Able of Ablereach.com

Some discussions:

How To Promote A Non Profit Organization, how to get more visibility to raise money and funds

Thus, I’d like to start a single thread, where leaders of nonprofit and charity organizations can find resources to make their organization more visible. Obviously, you are supposed to contribute a link or two that will help them in this direction.

Blogging About The Earth The Week Of Earth Day?

Normally, we don’t allow link drops or self promotion. Like never. Just for the week of April 20-26, even if your site is not dedicated to green living, we are bending our rules. If you have written a substantive post that fits with the spirit of Earth Day, you are invited to tell us about it and link to it in this thread.

A commercial in the USA may be aimed at the woman inside the woman. A woman with magic, spark and a no regrets sense of who she is and where she’s going. For starters, in the TV spot, she’s in the driver’s seat.

I can’t remember the make or model of the automobile. I don’t care who the woman is behind the wheel. What I remember and giggle to myself about is that she asks if your car turns you on.

Well, hell yes.

Thanks for noticing!

I have a friend whose car was in my driveway recently. He left at night and my kids and I cooed at how the interior dashboard lit up in blue light. I wanted to make out by that dashboard light. So there.

Marketing to women is usually off the mark. For sassy women like me, however, when you get past how I’m supposed to be according to what tradition and society says I should be, you’ve probably just sold me your product.

Why are men the only creatures who need to be turned on? Who made that rule?

Light and Sound

There’s another user experience rule I’ve discovered I love to debunk. It has to do with sound.

Still experimenting with my new MySpace account, (where I have one friend, who at this point likely thinks I’m completely nuts), I uploaded another new Moby song. I changed my profile picture to remove the bare breasted woman who wasn’t me, because…well. Just because.

(For a moment I thought of putting a photo of chicken breasts there. I still may do that.)

Anyway. I’ve been writing in the blog there. To nobody really, although one man whom I don’t know thinks I’m really far out and “interesting”. I love how I can use images and sound to express myself in MySpace.

I can’t do that here. Usability Law states, “No piped in music.” Guess what? There is, indeed, a place for it. It doesn’t belong on a corporate web site but it can certainly be used in situations with friends where you’re networking and hanging out.

When I want to express light and sound here, I need to find words to turn you on with.

Incentive and Play

When you design your web site, have you put in light and sound? Have you created a mood? Is there something you can say that communicates in an instant why your service is the best? Did you remember to create a need?

Can you change? Yes. When Emoms At Home changed its brand to Sparkplugging, I’m sure there was great agony in choosing the right time, right design and right words to reflect the reasons for the change and not lose anyone in the process.

The new name turns me on. It’s vibrant. It describes exactly what goes into my bloodstream when I’m working on the web or helping clients with their web sites. The new design is surprisingly easy to navigate and more importantly, understand. I LOVE the extra content between the global navigation link labels that describe what’s inside each hub, without the need to click or negotiate a clumsy drop down menu.

Kudos to these folks for providing incentive for me to return, bookmark and write about you. All you did was turn me on by making me feel good and welcome once I arrived.

We need to feel wanted. We need to feel welcomed. We need to feel we’re getting the best bargain. We need to know companies care about our web site experience. We need to be turned on, inspired, catered to, informed, responded to in a timely manner, guided and nurtured.

Is thinking outside the box risky? Yes. Do you like to be entertained while shopping? Well, let’s see. I showed Hema to my daughter and her boyfriend. A minute into watching the homepage explode into something I’ve never seen done before, she asks, “What’s the point?”

Would you sit through while the center content FLASH loads and then watch how the products bang into each other and perform clever tricks? If after I was entertained, I was offered great prices, fast delivery and excellent customer service, I might. I think most people will be annoyed.

Social Disconnect. Yes, I Keep Harping on This.

Many of us seek one another because our butts are glued to our computers.

I’m bored with Twitter. Reading disjointed conversations by other people who don’t know or don’t care that I’m there isn’t doing it for me. I don’t like that feeling of being on the sidelines. Web sites often leave out visitors too. One of the very first words I look for on an e-commerce page is “Customer service”. You may be surprised to know it’s hardly ever there or buried far, far down in the footer as an afterthought.

Customers are not afterthoughts. They don’t want to be treated like one. The HEMA site, while breaking rules for sound and visual, makes me feel like they love what they do, are having fun doing it and want to include me (someone they may never meet) in their fun.

I liked that feeling.

So. I wonder. How come I feel so lonely, that after being in Twitter and Facebook and even owning Cre8asiteforums, that I’ve resorted to writing to nobody in MySpace?

Is it because I want to be un-edited, raw, bold, without barriers and don’t want anyone judging me?

Is it because car’s turn me on?

Or is it that the Internet was an experiment in intimacy with people that failed?

Could it be, that in the end, we need to hold hands and make eye contact with one another?