On personal web sites

In the era of personal branding, you’re not going to manage to be a very good web professional without some semblance of a personal web site.

Perhaps it’s just a link to social presence or whatever else, but it’s pretty important for you to have something, because you can best be sure that people are going to look and do their homework before they meet you.

Now that we have that fact out of the way, let’s talk about the details of such a site. Do you really want to give away all of your trade secrets? No, you don’t. But what do I mean by trade secrets, anyway? After all, you do want people to discover you, right? You need to let folks know how much you know your stuff.

How can you do that without giving away the farm? Here are a few tips, though your mileage may vary with each, I think it’s the sort of stuff you need to know, but that no one will tell you until well after it ceases to be useful:

1. Don’t copy the style of your favorite ___________. It makes sense that you’d go to the site of someone you admire, see what they do and maybe graft together a few styles into your own cohesive thing. The problem here is, you’re trying to make someone else’s style work for you. Maybe it can, but chances are, it’s going to be hard to pull off long term. Put another way, you might borrow a shirt from a friend, but if you two had to switch closets, it’s likely that you’re going to spend several hours of each day a bit uncomfortable. The lesson? Don’t worry about anyone else’s talents. Just do you.

2. Be concise. It can be tempting to tell your life story. Then you remember that no one spends very long on these sites, the analytics confirm it and you just spent an inordinate amount of time telling very personal stories that don’t make the sale. People love human interest stories, but they like them in books or in visual formats that don’t require them to work for it. So unless your entire presence is around a blog that you’ll be updating constantly and it relates directly to what you’re offering up, just keep it simple and clear.

3. Know your audience. Not just the people you want to reach, but the ones that are actually stopping in. Find out who they are and make sure when they get there, they’re getting what they need from you.

4. Understand your goal(s). Intent is huge. If you’re making a site to attract potential clients, that’s one thing. If you’re creating a web presence that’s really just an extension of your personal brand, but isn’t a place where you expect to generate the majority of your contacts/clients, etc., then you can take a different approach in developing your content. It’s really up to you. Your goals may change, but remember to stay the course. It can be tempting to change horses in mid-stream, but if you keep getting out of line to get in new ones at the supermarket, you’ll never checkout and leave the store.

Conclusion: I’m going back to the idea of minding your competition. Everything you say or put out there is open fodder for whoever is competing with you. While you’re not focused on them, as much as you are the stuff you’re doing, it’s important to mind your consistency.

The literature on your site should be enticing and drive interest, but if there are things that set you apart that you’re using to close deals in client meetings and in proposals, don’t go spewing this stuff on the web for someone to retrofit for their purposes and take.  Ideally, you’ll grow and adapt your messages and it won’t matter.

Remember, no matter what you say, if you can’t deliver on those promises it won’t make a difference how great your sales pitch is.

On privacy, context and Facebook

While setting my mother (gah) up on Facebook the other night over the phone at her request, I started thinking hard about privacy settings and a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments last week that privacy doesn’t matter.

First, the increased complexity of site design is really something that’s getting out of hand. People figure it out, but it seems by catering to those of us who use these tools regularly, it leaves late adopters out in the cold — confused and frustrated to the point of giving up. What’s worse, is the trickery involved in these measures. No less than a year ago, Facebook privacy settings were relatively straightforward and made it easier to control who saw what and how. Now? The duplicity of attempting to trick new users into believing their information is “safe” when in reality, the defaults offer no such assurances seems wrong. It’s fine for people who have someone to help them through the process, but what about people who don’t have that? Does is suffice to say, “maybe you just shouldn’t participate in the conversation?”

On the idea of privacy, it’s simple. Not only has privacy become more important as people interact in a digital space, but so has the ability to communicate on your own terms. Meaning, it’s easier now than ever for people to make judgments about people based on an incomplete picture derived from online presence. Some folks counter this by being completely transparent and others maintain selectivity all the same. It depends on a lot of factors such as the work you do, who you interact with and your other reasons for this.

I feel like we’re revisiting this subject a lot, but it’s an important one. If the folks at the helm of web companies don’t take privacy seriously, it’s a sad song for the future of these services. Users will remain complicit by participating and handing over their personal information, believing it to be safe until something happens. Then, the companies will be forced to scramble and implement makeshift measures to assuage the concerns of a leery public.