Sophie Dennis

The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset

Rachel Andrew | ‘If all you have is a hammer…’

You cannot recommend a solution until you’ve identified the problem. Yet the web is awash with people pushing their favourite one-size-fits-all answers to whatever question is posed, whether a particular CMS, a certain programming language, or the latest social media cure-all. They are focused on a solution: one which works for them, one in which they are competent. Their own personal comfort zone, recommended as much for their own benefit as anyone else’s. But Twitter is not a marketing strategy, nor WordPress the only answer to web publishing.

I’m much more interested in problems, burrowing down into what’s really holding a business or organisation back and seeking out those golden nuggets, the smart ideas which are the real solutions to people’s complex, real-world problems. When someone asks for a recommendation, your first answer should be a question: what are you trying to do, what is the problem you are having, tell me more…

37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson on his distaste for the “swing for the fences”, go bust or have lavish success, approach

I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.

David Heinemeier Hansson, ‘The problem with the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach’ | 37signals

and DHH’s business partner, Jason Fried, on Making Money

There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.

On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less—and in some cases, no—pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts…

Anyone can spend money. Making it is the hard part.

Jason Fried, ‘How to Get Good at Making Money’ | Inc.com

All designers fail 95% of the time. This is true for all creative work. And it is unusual in the professional world. The process by which we create is failure centric.

LukeW | An Event Apart: Why Designers Fail

We were talking just last night about design critique and feedback, and how easily it becomes a fraught experience for both parties. If can be just as difficult for the client to talk about what they don’t like, as it is for the designer to hear it.

If both parties accept that, 95% of the time, any design isn’t going to be “right” yet, and treat that as a perfectly normal and natural state of things, those conversations become a lot easier. Because just cos it isn’t right yet, doesn’t mean it won’t be right when we’re finished. The design process is all about spotting what isn’t right and working out how to fix it; refining, improving, polishing and adjusting until it’s all just so.

I find it’s really easy to get into the self-blame game sometimes. The thinking goes that if only you were somehow better, bigger, higher profile, working for larger clients, working for better clients etc… etc… the problems you face as a client services business would all be fixed.

So it’s great to read articles like the latest interview with Jim Coudal on the 37 Signals blog, ‘Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Coudal’, on why he gave up first his job as creative director of a major Chicago ad agency, and then the struggle to turn his own company, Coudal Partners, into the kind of high-profile client-services agency that would “bill $20 million and win some Addy Awards”: 

“I had to feed the beast. If you start adding people, then you gotta bring in more work and sometimes you gotta bring in work that you’re not particularly fond of in order to make the payroll to pay the more people that you’re hiring to do the work that you’re not particularly fond of.”

I’ve said almost the exact same thing many times, to many people, about our decision to break all the business rules anyone had ever preached at us and stop trying to grow as an agency. Still I would be lying if I said I didn’t have occasional moments of nagging self-doubt that that decision wasn’t based on some personal deficiency somewhere. That if only we had been, in some indefinable way, better, the problems wouldn’t have existed. It’s reassuring to hear someone as successful as Jim Coudal give the ‘been there, tried that’ answer: no.

I had a similar moment watching, of all things, the Channel 4 series “Can Heston Save Little Chef?”. The Little Chef chain of roadside restaurants hired Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal of culinary wizardry fame to overhaul their restaurants and menu. It didn’t matter that he was a high-profile, multiply decorated, widely-recognised master of his field. The clients still wouldn’t listen.

It’s always good to be reminded. It’s not you, it’s them.

Jacob Gube aka @sixrevisions graciously illuminated yesterday’s Twitter search mystery:

@sophiedennis Maybe because URL of the article has /content-strategy/ on it and it got retweeted a lot this weekend.

(source: http://twitter.com/#!/sixrevisions/status/28726280802)

I didn’t spot this because the full URL was not visible in the search results. All the tweets use a “short URL” from one of the major URL shorteners instead of the full article link.

So that’s the mystery of the ‘irrelevant’ search results solved. They did match my search term. But only Twitter knew that.

Twitter knew? Now, that is interesting…

The interesting part of this (for a given, geek value of “interesting”) is it shows the Twitter engine tracks the full, expanded URL for shortlinks. And not just from its own native T.co service. Just on this screenshot alone we’ve got TinyURL, Ow.ly, Is.Gd and Bit.ly in addition to T.co links.

This ought to create opportunities for improving both security, and how shortlinks are shown to us, the end-users and readers.

Twitter likes to plug the safety advantages of T.co. With T.co, they tell us, Twitter can easily check the actual destination page for malware, scams and other ‘net nasties and warn you accordingly. If it’s search results are anything to go by these security features should, in theory, extend to malicious content lurking behind shortlinks from any of the major shorteners.

More interesting, though, are the user-interface possibilities. Right now there no way as a Twitter reader to see the full destination URL without clicking on the shortened link. This is a shame. We click on these links largely blind. There are some services - including from the shorteners themselves - which will preview links for you. But it involves moving away from Twitter to another tool. That’s a whole bundle of extra effort most of us won’t bother with.

“New” Twitter already uses the expanded right-hand pane to show additional information about individual tweets: who’s re-tweeted, the context of the conversation and so on. I’d love to see Twitter add full destination URLs here as part of this extra information. This would be a great tool for readers. It would protect us not just from real hard malware, but the whole specturm of undesirable content right the way down to just avoiding wasting clicks on links you’ve already visited.

More about Twitter’s URL shortening (from Twitter.com):

• Links and Twitter: Length Shouldn’t Matter
• About Twitter’s Link Service (http://t.co)
• My Website is Being Flagged as Malware or Spam!

Companies have always created media in the form, usually, of advertising as well as corporate literature, brochures and websites. The difference now is that companies, more and more of them, are creating their own media themselves, without specialized help or resources… Instead of hiring smart, experienced specialists to tell their stories, they are relying on pretty much anyone within the organization who knows how to Tweet… Every company is a media company. Unfortunately, when it comes to creating their own media, most are doing a bad job.

Twitter reaches people who are already significantly more engaged in online community activities (to give it the old-fashioned name) than the general Internet population:

US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%). In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media

Conclusions?

1. Active Twitter users are not “Joe Average” internet-user, but a specific subset of engaged, social internet users.
2. Twitter is not a magic bullet for reaching an otherwise unengaged audience.

[there is a] distinction between traditional music and the fairly useless catch-all term ‘folk’, which can be applied equally to singer-songwriters, acoustic rockers and solo Hebridean fiddlers, and is used gratuitously whenever the music industry wants to make a distinction between their brand of soap and the one that everyone else washes with.

Checking out @bellowhead Hedonism on we7 http://ow.ly/2MlNY. Pulls off the hardest #folk album trick of all: capturing the live energy.

Michael McWatters’ delightfully simple diagram shows how to get started with your web content strategy. Here’s my take on where web content strategies usually go wrong.

Danny Sullivan on the usual lies, damn lies, and web stats tracking Twitter clickthrus with bit.ly and Google Analytics http://bit.ly/NDagC

Catch-up: Facebook accounts for 24% of link sharing, Twitter for 10% http://bit.ly/vzhpT (Chart and report at Business Insider, 21 Jul 09)