meghan

The Five-Minute Guide to Monitoring Twitter

Posted on July 9, 2009

In a meeting last week, I was talking about social media (surprise!) and urging those present to listen to the social networks. We often say that — when it comes to social networks — participation is optional, but listening is critical. I promised that if we had five minutes to spare at the end of the meeting I’d show them how to monitor Twitter for their brand and URLs. (I did go over my five minutes, but only because their wireless connection was painfully slow!)

A few days later, I tweeted about my lesson and was barraged with requests to post instructions. So, with that, here is my five-minute Twitter monitoring guide:

1. Get an RSS Reader
RSS has got to be the least understood and most underutilized technology at the moment. Enough with the blank stares, y’all: RSS will change your life! You can read my three part series on how to get started with RSS if you haven’t started using it already (ten bucks says you’re probably using it via Yahoo! or Google and don’t even know it yet).

Anyway, to take the best advantage of my next two steps you’re going to want to have an RSS reader to monitor a couple of feeds. Bloglines is free and easy; you should be able to get an account set up in a few minutes.

2. Twitter Search
Visit search.twitter.com and enter in whatever terms you want to keep an eye on. Do this one term at a time. The search box works a lot like Google (put quotation marks around words or phrases that you want to do an exact search on). So, to monitor for Geek Girls Guide, I enter “geek girls guide”. Twitter also has some handy search guidelines here.

When you get back your search results, you’ll see an RSS icon on the far right of the address bar. Click that, and you’ll be taken to the feed page. Copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into your RSS reader (if you’re using Bloglines, you’d click the Add link to add a new feed and paste the URL into the displayed field).

Add a feed to Bloglines

Rinse, lather and repeat for all the different words and phrases you want to keep track of.

Start with as many as you can think of; you can always remove low-value search terms from your RSS reader later. For example, I get a lot of value monitoring the “geek girls guide” search but much less value for the “geek girls” search (because many people use the words geek girls and they’re not always talking about Nancy and I!).

3. BackTweets
There are probably other services that do the same thing (and feel free to mention them in the comments) but I use BackTweets to monitor tweets for the url geekgirlsguide.com. The thing I love is that it also keeps track of links to my site that are “hidden” inside of shortened URLs (see below if you don’t know what that means).

Again, on the search results page, you’ll see the RSS icon. Click that, copy the feed URL and paste it into your RSS reader.

UPDATE January 2011: BackTweets no longer offers a free service. It’s $100/month (!!!). If you have discovered other free services that monitor links within tweets, I’m all ears!

Voila! You are now monitoring a social network. Nice work! Let me know how it goes.

— — — — —

What are shortened URLs?
There are several URL shortening services that allow you to enter a long URL (like: http://www.geekgirlsguide.com/blog/2008/09/05/24/geek_chic_of_the_week_rss_part_i) and get back a small URL (like: http://is.gd/1rR6S). The small, shortened URL redirects to the same place as your long, ugly URL.

Why do people use them?
It’s nice for people who are sharing links because if you’re emailing a link to a friend you know the URL won’t wrap into several lines of the email and become unusable, or — if you’re tweeting — it doesn’t take up too many of your precious 140 characters. The most well-known service is probably TinyURL, but there are many others (my favorite is is.gd).

Doing Social Media “Right”

Posted on July 7, 2009

When we launched the Geek Girls Guide, we didn’t realize that we’d be talking so much about social media. But, at this point, it’s the topic that everyone wants to discuss. Recently, someone referred to Nancy and I as “social media experts.” That label makes me shudder.

Here’s the thing: the web has always been social. AOL, chatrooms, the BBSes of yore, all of these were ways for people to use technology to connect with other people. So none of this is really “new” — it’s just that the tools and technology are more accessible than they’ve ever been.

Back in the day, it was just us geeks talking to each other. Now our moms and grandmas are here, too! And because of that — because more people than ever are using these tools — this is all new. No one has really figured out how to do social media “right” as a company or business. What’s the right mix? What kind of investment is needed? How can companies engage effectively? Who is in “charge” of social media within a given company? How can it be measured? We’re all learning. So as far as I’m concerned, there are no social media “experts.”

The companies that are in the best position to take advantage of experimenting with social media tactics are small companies. They’re nimble, not constrained by the beauracracy of large organizations, and are — generally — less afraid to try new things (because, of course, the risk of public failure is lower than with a huge company).

With that in mind, I came across this blog recently (via Geek Girls’ pal Sharyn Morrow) and thought it was a beautifully simple example of how a company can do social media “right.” It’s not totally perfect, but they are doing many things well. And I commend them for jumping in.

The blog (ATTN: Anna’s True Thai News) is for one of my all-time favorite Minneapolis restaurants, True Thai (Seriously, if you ever go there get the kabocha squash curry. Trust me.) and here’s what I think they’re doing well:

1. Tying it all together.
They link to their blog and Twitter accounts on their homepage. Nicely done. (Even better if you can integrate your blog seamlessly into your site, but if you’re doing-it-yourself at least linking from your homepage is a great step.)

The Twitter profile links to the blog, and I think they should link to the main web site (because it’s hard to find the main web site from the blog) but overall they’ve done a good job or making sure that all of their social media tactics are tied together (blog, Twitter, Flickr).

2. Having some personality.
The link to Anna’s blog from the True Thai homepage says, “The queen of all curries commands you to read her blog.” It’s charming and fun. What’s not to like?

3. Updating regularly, but not obsessively.
The blog has a a new post every few days. Even better is that the posts actually say something of value.

Their tweets are more sparse, but also packed with value (like an alert that the closest highway was closed and customers would need to take an alternate route).

4. Talking like a human.
Reading the blog and looking at the photos on Flickr give you a sense of Anna’s personality, which makes you feel more connected to the restaurant.

5. Inviting dialogue.
What gave me the idea to write about True Thai’s blog was this post on the difficulty of serving vegan/vegetarian food. Anna is up front about her challenge as a restaurant owner, and is opening a dialogue with people. This is the whole point of social media: to facilitiate and participate in conversations with the audiences that are important to you.

And how about this – an APOLOGY for an evening on which the restaurant was understaffed! How many times have you had crap service at a restaurant? Can you even imagine the restaurant owner apologizing for it publicly and explaining to you why that happened? I wasn’t there that evening, but this apology post — just like the personal “voice” in the posts I mentioned earlier — makes me feel even more connected to this place. I have to imagine it has the same effect on other customers as well.

In general, they are being a good social media citizen. They’re participating in the community, not just braying marketing messages. They’re open, honest and imperfect. The social networks are just that — social. To fit in to the social networks, be social. Be human.

And hey, if you need more encouragement to just jump in — AdRants published a great post on Twitter last week that includes one of my favorite social networking analogies: the cocktail party.

08/11/2009: Heavy Table has a great interview with Anna from True Thai about the restaurant and her blog.

Hacking Mail and iCal for GTD

Posted on June 24, 2009

GTD stands for “Getting Things Done” (the title of David Allen’s first book) and has become a shorthand way to refer to his methodology. You can read an official explanation on his site.

In a nutshell, GTD is a way to get control of all the things you need to get done by getting it out of your brain and into a trusted system. My favorite line from the What is GTD? web page is, “The only “right” way to do GTD is getting meaningful things done with truly the least amount of invested attention and energy.” Sounds great, right? And it really does work.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my amazing experience with GTD because of a tweet. That post led to conversations with Kelly Forrister, a coach with the David Allen company and, ultimately, an invitation to be interviewed by David Allen for the In Conversation series on GTDConnect. I KNOW, RIGHT?!

One of the things that came up in talking with both Kelly and David was how much of the dialogue online about GTD is led by men. And yet, there are plenty of women who use it with great success. So, I figured — why not blog about it? It’s not directly related to technology, but I think it’s a relevant topic for busy people. And everyone I know is busy people.

So, here goes!

What is GTD?

I don’t want to spend too much time on the question of what GTD is because lots has already been written on that topic elsewhere. If you don’t know what it is, davidco.com and gtdtimes.com are good places to start. I’d highly recommend getting a copy of the book, Getting Things Done, and reading it twice. Once just to get the ideas into your head and the second time to actually follow the steps outlined. Seriously. Read it twice (it’s a quick read). Then come back and read this post.

One of the things that appealed to me when reading Getting Things Done was that it wasn’t trying to sell anything. You didn’t have to buy a certain kind of planner, or device, or software. It’s a methodology that can be applied using a paper and pencil or the latest technology. Whatever works for you.

My System

So, what works for me?

When I started implementing GTD about four years ago, I was working on a company PC. I configured Outlook (as outlined in the GTD and Outlook whitepaper) and everything hummed right along. Three years ago, I left that job and transitioned to a Mac. Suddenly, I was adrift without a system and I ended up falling into a trap that I think a lot of GTD practitioners (and geeks) fall into: I started over-analyzing my needs and evaluating software to the point that my system stopped working very well. I tried Backpack, Remember the Milk, OmniFocus and a score of others.

Finally, I decided the best approach would be to figure out a way to bend the applications I already use all day, every day to my will. Namely, Mail and iCal. Why? Because my big issue with all of the software I looked at was that it was another thing to deal with: a web page I had to visit, an app I had to open. It was either too big a hassle or I would totally forget. So, I set about to make Mail and iCal my “system.”

1. Email

I have nine email addresses that I monitor regularly (work, Geek Girls, gmail, etc.). Using IMAP, I check all my email addresses in Mail. I can go through them at the Inbox level, or I can toggle the main Inbox open and see messages in each individual Inbox. Nice! If you have multiple email addresses (and these days, most of us do), I’d highly recommend configuring them to all go to one or two places (perhaps one for Work and another for Personal addresses).

I also have Facebook messages and Twitter DMs emailed to me so I don’t need to remember to check my Facebook messages and so I won’t miss any DMs sent via Twitter. With those added on, I have ELEVEN “inboxes” down to ONE. Nice!

Beneath the Inbox, I have subfolders for Action, Waiting For and Someday/Maybe items.

I also have a series of folders set up for Reference emails (stuff I want to keep but I don’t need to do anything with). For work emails, these are organized by client and project name. For personal emails, I don’t need to parse things out with the same detail, so I have one Personal folder where messages can be archived after I’m done with them. (I can always use Search to find stuff there if needed.)

2. Lists

A big part of GTD is keeping good lists: Projects, Someday/Maybe, Agendas, Waiting-Fors, etc. I use Notes in Mail to keep those lists. But, Mail then buries those lovely lists down in a section called Reminders and also allows for Notes by Inbox. Yuck. Too complicated. To make this simpler and cleaner, I set up a Smart Mailbox called Notes. Any Notes — from anywhere in Mail — are filtered into this Smart Mailbox:

Another important set of lists is your to-dos by context (@home, @work, @calls, etc.). This is where iCal comes in. Mail doesn’t allow for categories on To Dos — but it does allow for To Dos to be associated with a calendar. So, I simply created “ghost” calendars called @home, @work, @calls, etc.). Technically, these calendars show up in iCal, but I uncheck them so nothing shows up. They exist only as a way to categorize my To Dos. Then, I created Smart Mailboxes that filter these To Dos by context:

All of my Smart Mailboxes (To Do lists by context and Notes) are right below my Inboxes for easy access (Mail allows you to drag and drop your items in the left pane into the order you prefer):

3. Calendar

Another big part of GTD is the “hard landscape” — what do I HAVE to do on a certain day, or at a certain time. I have multiple calendars in iCal that I can use to keep track of dates and filter as needed: personal, Trixie (my daughter), Theo (my son), and family. My work calendar is managed using a different calendar system than iCal, but luckily that system has an RSS feed. So I subscribe to my work calendar in iCal — which allows me to look in ONE place to see everything I need to do. My husband uses Google calendar — which also has an RSS feed — so I subscribe to his calendars as well. So then I’m aware if he has an early-morning meeting that may affect our routine or is scheduled to be out of town on a day when I may have to travel for work as well. Since I set up my system before Google unveiled the ability to sync calendars, I bought (and still use) a little app called BusySync that allows me to add new events in iCal. (So, if I add something in iCal, it updates Google, which updates the calendar feed which means my husband’s view of the calendar stays up-to-date, too!) In an extra bit of handiness, any birthdays that are in my Address Book are also displayed on a calendar so, assuming important birthdays are IN my Address Book, I don’t forget to buy and mail cards.

So, with all of that I have EIGHT calendars all displaying in ONE place. And each calendar has a different color — so when I see “Dr. Appt” I know immediately whether that appointment is for me, my husband or one of my kids.

So, while it took me a little bit of time to get this all set up, now that it’s up and running it takes very little time to maintain. To add to or edit one of my lists takes seconds. And I like using it. That’s key: if what you’re doing isn’t fun and easy — you won’t want to do it.

Plus, it’s portable. Most of what I’ve listed above syncs to my iPhone. The only things that don’t make it over are my To Dos, but I can live with that. (And if I need a quick list to take with me to the store, an index card and a pen come along for the ride.)

Whether or not you “do” GTD, think about what tools you are using every day, and how you could streamline them to make life easier. And if you’re interested in my ninja advice on using calendars, check out this blog post.

The Kevyn Burger Show

Posted on June 18, 2009

We had the pleasure of appearing on FM107.1’s Kevyn Burger show this morning to talk about this site, and our upcoming Social Media 101: A Beginner Bootcamp seminar on June 22.

If you missed the show, you can listen to our segment by using the link below to download the mp3.

On a Mac, hold down the control key and click and select “Save Link As…” and save the mp3 somewhere on your computer.
On a PC, right click and select Save Target As… (in IE) or Save Link As… (in Firefox) and save the mp3 somewhere on your computer.

When you open the file, it should launch your preferred audio player.

Download the mp3 >

or by clicking the cute little button below to stream it in your browser window.

It was fun talking to Kevyn, and we got to meet Sheletta, too (who is just as funny in person as she sounds on the radio).

Follow-up

We talked about a few things:

Drop us a line and let us know what you think, or if you have a question!

Listen Up!

Posted on June 17, 2009

The Geek Girls are going to be on FM 107.1 again — this time, on the Kevyn Burger show.

Tune in this Thursday, June 18 at 9:15am to hear us talk with Kevyn and her co-host, Sheletta about…well, we don’t know. But, seeing as social media remains the hot topic of the day, we’re gonna bet that Twitter or Facebook will get a mention. We’ll also be giving away one free pass to Social Media Bootcamp on June 22. You can listen online here, and we’ll also post an audio clip here when we’re done.

In other news, we’re hard at work on new blog posts and podcasts. Stay tuned and, as always, let us know if you have any questions.

David Allen, Me, and the Thousand Dollar Tweet

Posted on April 28, 2009

A week ago today, around 4:30pm, I was sitting at the Clockwork kitchen table (kind of like I am right now as I write this) and working. While rocking through emails, I saw a note from David Allen about an upcoming GTD seminar called “Making It All Work.” I perked up immediately, as I’m a huge fan of David Allen. I read his first book, Getting Things Done, about four years ago and have been working on adopting his methodologies ever since. I noticed that the closest city he’d be speaking in was Chicago (I’m in Minneapolis). I daydreamed for a moment about being able to go. But, it was in Chicago. And it was $995 (not including airfare). So I gave up.

But, before really giving up on the dream, I tweeted: “I wish the magical money fairy would give me cash to go see @gtdguy in Chicago!” Then, I sighed wistfully and moved on.

And then, a few minutes later, David Allen direct messaged me back: “Meghan, you’re welcome to come as my guest tomorrow at the Omni. My treat. All for posting your note.”

WHAT?!

I nearly passed out. Then, I nearly declined. But, my co-workers were egging me on, “C’mon, Southwest Airlines flies there now! YOU GOTTA DO IT!” So I didn’t say no. I went home and talked to my husband. If I was going to go, we’d need to coordinate me being gone from the wee morning hours until the evening, which meant he’d be on his own for the morning and after-work hours (no easy task with a three-year-old and a six-month-old). He was also presenting that evening at Ignite Minneapolis, and I’d miss his presentation.

Long story short, we worked it all out: I got up on Wednesday morning at 5am to catch a 7am flight to Midway and spent the day with someone I idolize. I stepped off the elevator at the Omni and there he was! In person! I shook his hand and tried not to come off like a dorky fangirl. I got my conference materials and stepped into the conference room, expecting to see 100 people. There were about 25. WHAT? I was about to spend an entire day with with a handful of other people listening to, and talking with, David Allen.

I wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of such a last-minute opportunity if it weren’t for three things:
1. an employer who supported my desire to go and
2. the fact that I already follow the GTD methodology enough that I could pick up and go for a whole day and know, confidently, that nothing would blow up and
3. Twitter.

Think about it: in what other universe would a random woman from Minnesota (me) be able to directly contact a best-selling author who travels the world (David Allen) and GET A RESPONSE? Within minutes, even! That is the insane power of Twitter. If the “celebrities” who use it are using it to actually connect and converse with their audience, they can develop an incredibly powerful connection.

Last night, David Armano led a discussion about the future of advertising (I wasn’t there, but I watched in on UStream and followed the tweetstream from home with a baby on my lap — another social media WIN!). My favorite thought from his presentation was the comparison of the mass media audience vs. the social media audience. That advertisers and brands (and let’s face it: authors, celebrities, etc. are brands) need to weigh the value of reaching millions of potential viewers against the value of thousands of engaged consumers.

I was already an engaged consumer of the David Allen “brand.” I’ve even given informal presentations inside our organization around how people can apply his productivity principles to our work.. Through Twitter, I was able to connect with him in a way that would not have been possible years ago. And, by investing just a few minutes of his time in tweeting back to me (and the cost of giving me a complimentary admission to his seminar) David Allen solidified my loyalty to him, his “brand” and his product. More cost effective than a print ad? I have to believe it is. I’ve told this story to anyone who will listen, including to a roomful of people at Social Media Bootcamp last Friday.

Added bonus? As I boarded the plane in Chicago, and as soon as we touched down in Minneapolis I pulled up the #ignitempls tweetstream and was able to follow along what was happeninig with the presentations. The minute I walked in the door, I pulled up the live UStream feed and caught the tail end of the video. The next morning, I checked out my husband’s presentation. So, while I wasn’t there in person to cheer him on, I was able to send him supporting tweets. I was able to “listen in” on what was happening and tweet to people I knew who were there. They gave him the support that I wasn’t there to give. Through social media, we had a shared experience despite our physical separation.

The real power of social media is in it’s versatility: it can be used for a business or a brand, and it can be used to stay connected with the ones we love.

I’m fond of comparing social media to a hammer: you can pound a nail, you can pull a nail or you can hit yourself in the face. How you use it, and therefore your feelings about it’s usefulness, are really up to you.

Lots of people have asked me about GTD: what is it, how do i use it and why do I like it. I’m working on a follow-up post about that.
Update: I finally wrote a GTD post on June 24: read it here.

Does Your Site Need a Makeover? Part I of II

Posted on April 27, 2009

Recently, at my “day job“, a client asked, “How do I know when it’s time to refresh our site?” She offered this analogy, “I don’t want our site to be the woman with the same hairstyle 30 years later.”

My reply? “Yes, but you also don’t want to be the grandma wearing skinny jeans and a Juicy couture shirt.”

Because many of our readers work in marketing and communications, I thought this topic would be helpful to cover here at the Geek Girls Guide. Quite often, those who are in charge of the budgets for web sites aren’t always confident in their own knowledge base on the topic. We’d like to change that. We’re working on a series of posts aimed at helping people evaluate their needs and make good decisions about their web site. We’ve also got some guest posts in the works from do-it-yourselfers — small or independent business owners who, because of budget, need to do things on their own.

So, back to the topic at hand: how do you know when it’s time to give your site a refresh? (I almost used the word facelift, but I really can’t stomach the plastic surgery analogy!) And, how do you know whether you need a refresh or an overhaul?

Scheduling

First, I suggest evaluating your web site annually.

  • Put a recurring event on your calendar so that you don’t forget, and in the description or notes section add the following list of my suggestions and any others that you think of that are specific to your site, industry or business.
  • Don’t schedule it around the first of the year; there’s too much other stuff going on then.
  • Pick a time of year when things generally aren’t overwhelmingly busy. Frankly, spring is a great time — schedule it between March and May and think about it as Spring Cleaning for your web site.

Evaluation

Review your site on three main fronts:

Your Audience

  • Do a gut-check on what your target audience is looking for. What are their goals and does the site still make it easy for them to achieve those goals?
  • Review your site statistics to see where traffic is heaviest on the site. Do you know why? Is that where you want traffic to be heavy?
  • Has your target audience changed since this site was launched (either has your company focused on a new/different target since then or has your existing target changed their habits?).

You, Your Company and Your Brand

  • Does the site still accurately reflect who you are as a company, both visually and in tone/content of copy?
  • Does the site fit in with internal workflow (does it get updated regularly or is it forgotten)? If you want to make updates, it is easy to do or are you at the mercy of the CEO’s nephew to make changes for you?
  • If search traffic is important to you, when you Google your company’s name, or important industry keywords, does your site come up in search engine results?

Your Competitors

  • Does your site still stand out effectively from the competition?
  • Have your competitors, or your industry as a whole, changed how they talk about themselves? Does anyone have any significant online offerings that you need to match or do better at?

Next Steps

An answer you don’t like in any of those categories may prompt you to:

  • make a small tweak (like optimizing the content for better search engine performance or updating the CSS with a slight style change to headlines);
  • an addition or reorganization (adding a new feature/section or moving pages around);
  • or a complete overhaul/redesign.

My next post on this topic will cover what to do once you’ve evaluated the site and come up short in one of those areas.

Geek Chic of the Week: The Dinner Edition

Posted on April 20, 2009

I like cooking just about as much as I love shopping. Which is to say, I don’t like it much at all. Once in a while, I’ll get inspired and cook something amazing (like a monkey cake or a fabulous meal for my family) but for the most part cooking just isn’t my bag, baby. It’s just not my bag.

What’s even more not my bag is cooking on a weeknight after a long day at work with a three-year-old hanging off my calf and a six-month-old fussing in a bouncy seat on the floor. Luckily, I have a husband that shares a lot of the cooking burden. But, we still have to figure out what to make, ensure that our fridge is stocked, and then actually cook it.

Wondering how technology could possibly help with this? Never fear, I’m about to tell you.

I’ve recently discovered three things to help get me through what my aunt (a working mother of three) refers to as “suicide hour.”

Tastebook

A friend of mine, who is also personal chef, recently turned me on to TasteBook. (I know, awful name. Way too much like Facebook. But, let’s forgive them for that because the idea is really great.) It’s a web site that does four things that I think are cool:

1. Aggregates an insane number of recipes from multiple sources.

2. Allows you to input and store your own recipes.
This is really only useful if you’re planning to print your TasteBook, or you want to share your recipes with others. But, a handy feature in my opinion.

3. Allows you to connect with other people to view their recipes.
Now I don’t have to keep asking my friend for her awsome Chicken in Pear-Leek Sauce recipe because I have access to ALL of her recipes on TasteBook. Holler! I can even put her recipes into my TasteBook so I can access them quickly or print them for my own book.

4. Allows you to print a super-swank looking cookbook (er, I mean, TasteBook) with whatever recipes you want.
Perhaps yours might be titled something like “Recipes I Can Make in Under 30 Minutes with a three-year-old hanging off my calf and a six-month-old fussing in a bouncy seat on the floor.” Or perhaps you’ll choose a shorter title. Whatever.

NOTE: They’re running a Mother’s Day special right now: free shipping if you order by April 21. Use the code MOMSDAY at checkout. I do think a Tastebook full of family favorites would be a great gift for someone who likes to cook.

The Six O’Clock Scramble

I’ve been dying to try The Six O’Clock Scramble, which sends you a list of fast, healthy meals AND the shopping list to make all of it. What was stopping me was the fact that my husband is gastronomically high-maintenance (no red meat, no dairy), but the more I dig around the site the more I notice all the ways you can customize your meal plan for the week. This woman is obviously in tune with what’s going on in the allergy-laden American kitchen right now, because you can filter by dairy-free, nut-free, and gluten-free. I may have to break down and buy a membership. Because, honestly, the other thing that’s stopping me is that I’m cheap.

Google

In a pinch, you can type in a list of ingredients to Google and see what recipe matches come back. A search for tomato yogurt chicken yields this.

My husband has done this in the past and, on a night when I was sure we’d have to eat crackers and peanut butter, he Googled a list of stuff we had in the fridge and whipped up an awesome jambalaya that we still make to this day.

My pal Jackie and her husband use Google docs to collaborate on their grocery list and weekly menu. There’s a guest post on that coming soon.

So, there it is. A handful of ideas to help us frazzled non-foodies feed our tired faces before we hit the sack. Is there anything the Internet can’t do?

Why Sharing Slides is Crap

Posted on April 1, 2009

At a recent seminar, I was struck by the number of people wondering, “Will these slides be posted?” Struck because the nature of this presentation was such that, without the presenter, the slides wouldn’t do you much good.

It got me thinking about our constant use of slide-creating software, and I realized there are three things that really bug me about it.

1. Slides don’t tell me what I need to know.
Several weeks ago, I followed a friend’s Twitter link to a presentation on SlideShare. I dutifully watched it, but at several points found myself thinking, “Gee, I wonder what she talked about on this slide.” A big ol’ screenshot of a web site probably provided great fodder for her insightful commentary, but didn’t do me much good as a passive observer. If audio would have been included, it would have been a different story but SlideShare doesn’t include audio. Watching a presentation with no one presenting ends up feeling like listening to one side of a phone conversation: you get the gist, but not the whole story. And entire stretches remain a total mystery.

As my pal @rrazor said, “Slides are often (hopefully?) the most content-poor part of a presentation. SlideShare is just a tease.”

Put another way, if I can get everything I need from your slides alone — why would I bother coming to see you speak? And, if I can’t get everything I need from your slides alone — what’s the point of putting them on SlideShare?

2. I’ve had just about enough of slide culture.
I realize I’m swimming against a cultural tsunami that cannot be stopped, but I really wish we could scale back our use of slides. PowerPoint is the ubiquitous format for communicating everything. And I do mean everything. I recently got an invitation to an event that was — you guessed it — a PowerPoint slide. From what I can tell, the ability for this organization to animate the crap out of every piece of text and embed a soundtrack is what really sold them on this format. A nice, clean PDF simply stating the details of the event pales in comparison.

A colleague sent me a deck of slides that had no business being on slides in the first place; it really warranted several pages of text (like a White Paper). Cramming that amount of information into a set of slides is just silliness: it’s an attempt to bullet-ize information that shouldn’t be communicated in bullets. Thoughts that should be sentences end up as half-sensical phrases and groups of thoughts that should be paragraph end up as dense bulleted lists filling up the slide. Why even try to put that amount of data in a slide?

Something about our ADD/multi-tasking/Twitter-ized lifestyles seems to have made us loathe to communicate information in anything other than small, bite-sized chunks. But, guess what? Not everything can be communicated that way. In 2003, Edward Tufte wrote an article titled PowerPoint is evil. The guy’s got a point.

(He’s also got a longer piece on this topic, which I’d highly recommend, including a fascinating look at some slides from NASA about the space shuttle Columbia.)

3. If we really cared, we’d write it down.
Most of the time, when I hear people ask, “Will this be posted online?” what I think they are saying is, “Do I really need to take notes?” These days, we’re so busy tweeting and live-blogging during presentations that we’re only paying half-attention to the presentation itself. So, we want the slides to remind us of the half that we missed. Maybe I’m being old fashioned, but whatever happened to taking notes? If a presenter says something that you think is really important, WRITE IT DOWN. Is it really that hard?

There is one situation I can think of where I found slide sharing helpful. At an Adaptive Path seminar years ago, they distributed several workbooks. One of which was a printout of the presentation in small-slide format with an area for notes next to each slide. This was actually helpful; while the presenter was talking, I jotted down information related to what he was saying. There was so little data on the slides (compared to the oceans of data coming out of the presenter’s mouth) that the slides alone wouldn’t have been any good. The slides plus my notes were okay, but still not half as good as attending the seminar itself. So maybe that’s what’s bugging me: people mistaking the slides for the presentation. The two are not the same. And if they are, the presentation wasn’t worth whatever you paid to attend.

Am I wrong?
What is with our obsession with sharing slides? Maybe someone who voraciously devours presentations posted by other people can help enlighten me: what am I missing here? I can’t imagine asking Al Gore to send me the slides for his presentation, An Inconvenient Truth. Rather than striving to create slides to post for everyone to see, shouldn’t we strive to create presentations that are so engaging that our audience closes their laptops and listens?

I spend most of my time encouraging people to use technology. This week, I’d like to challenge you to not use PowerPoint (and Mac users — that means no Keynote, either). Let’s see how long we can make it.

[cross-posted at the MIMA blog]

Today’s Radio Interview

Posted on March 27, 2009

We had the pleasure of appearing on FM107.1’s Lori & Julia this afternoon to talk about this site, and our upcoming Social Media 101: A Beginner Bootcamp seminar.

If you missed the show, you can download it now!

Listen to the whole show on FM107.1’s web site

Or, listen to our segment only by using the link below to download the mp3.

On a Mac, hold down the control key and click and select “Save Link As…” and save the mp3 somewhere on your computer.
On a PC, right click and select Save Target As… (in IE) or Save Link As… (in Firefox) and save the mp3 somewhere on your computer.

When you open the file, it should launch your preferred audio player.

Download the mp3 >

or clicking the cute little button below to stream it in your browser window.

We’ll be posting more follow-up (links and more information on topics we discussed with them today) but I wanted to get those audio clips up for those who missed it live.

Lori & Julia were delightful; really nice, funny ladies. We’d love to be on the show again (hint, hint). Who knows, maybe someday we’ll even have our own show? A Geek Girl can dream…

Follow-up

We talked about a few things:

Did I miss anything? Let me know and we’ll post a follow-up.