Tag: communications

A few thoughts on Twitter, and it’s latest kerfuffle

Carl Setzer2 Comments

This morning I read “Elon Musk Backs Off Legacy Checkmark Purge“. As a long time Twitter user, and someone who held Musk in high regard, I’ve been following the acquisition by Musk with a personal interest. This particular situation has been…fascinating.

Ultimately, Musk fails to understand the value of verification. Yes, it provides some value to the user, but far more value comes to Twitter. Knowing that this person posting REALLY is Steven King, Will Shatner, etc, brings value to Twitter since we KNOW who we’re interacting with. By building that direct connection between fans and creators, Twitter gains.

In his rush to monetize everything (anything?) on the platform, he has lost focus on what makes Twitter interesting and valuable. Which is sad. Over the years, I’ve met amazing and wonderful people. People who’s friendship I value as deeply as anyone I’ve met In Real Life. I’ve learned a huge amount from them.

Fortunately, it’s not been too hard to tune out Musk’s antics. But the increase in hate speech and right wing rage making its way into my feed has deeply detracted from my experience. I still post, but much less often. And I spend far less time on it (which certainly is a net positive).

Will Twitter survive Musk? Possibly. Will it return to what it was before? No. But the platform has evolved considerably since its launch and will continue to. What it looks like next year is extremely hard to predict. We’ll see, I guess.

Some thoughts on the Dark Brandon thing

Carl Setzer2 Comments
mad formal executive man yelling at camera

A blogger I highly admire, Bernie Michalik, posted this article looking at the whole Dark Brandon meme that’s running through the internet right now: On The Good and Bad Aspects of Dark Brandon (a quick aside for those unaware of the meme “Let’s Go Brandon”, it’s basically an anti-Biden euphemism. If you wish to explore it further, here’s the Wikipedia article.)

I understand that it feels good, at one level, to meet political invective head-on. However, I find it counterproductive. Bernie pulls an apt quote:

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

George Bernard Shaw

So, my thoughts? As Luke Skywalker put it, “This isn’t going to go the way you think”.

It’s best to keep our end goals in mind. Which, hopefully, isn’t just to score pyrrhic points in the eternal game of poltical one-upmanship.

My Work Over The Next Few Months

Carl Setzer1 Comment
top view photo of people near wooden table

In my current role, I’m preparing to cover for our communications coordinator while he’s out on paternity leave. This will last through November, and my contract is up at the endo of December.

I covered for him 2 years ago on his last leave, so I know quite a bit about the work (check out samples of that work here). Last round, though, we were at the beginning of the pandemic, so my main focus was on creating and editing video for our services. This round, our video production needs are minimal (we’re fully back in person and streaming. Not much video editing at all). Though we’re launching a stewardship campaign, which will have a video component, we’re outsourcing that. Most of this round’s work will be newsletter maintenance and bulletin creation. I’ll also be doing social media work, some graphic design, and some writing. It’ll be fun.

This gives me pause. I’m good at communications work. The main reason I chose to study web development grew out of comms. I get consulting work for my comms and marketing knowledge. Yet, I also love more general tech. I really enjoyed my Cisco networking classes, the hardware classes, and my current Enterprise Architecture class. Of course, more traditional IT work seems to pay better. And there is a lot of competition for communicator roles, especially with all the changes in journalism careers.

So, I’m not sure what will come of all this. Will I try to leverage my experience in this contract role into a FTE comms role somewhere? Or do I want to be straight tech? Or is there something else I haven’t seen yet? Oh, the mystery of life!

Communicating The Bare Necessities

Carl Setzer
clear communications

This morning I was talking about the importance of brevity in communication. Elegant prose has its place, of course. But when you’re communicating information, say in a corporate environment, in the blizzard of information that is today’s modern landscape, crisp, clear language is critical. Bullet points, sentence fragments, focus on key elements, don’t bury the lede.

“Wait”, you might say, “isn’t this guy studying web development? Why’s he going on about writing and communication?” Well, remember what purpose a website serves: communication. It’s a delivery mechanism for information. Interactivity, color schemes, layout all need to serve the function of the site. Cool features, in and of themselves, at best are distractions unless they serve the reader/viewer.

So, with that, remember, when it comes to most “business writing”, focus on the bare (bear?) necessities.

A Summary Of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Carl Setzer
Google Webmaster Tools

One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.

  • Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
  • Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
  • Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
  • Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
  • Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
  • Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
  • Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.

Great Design Example: Exquisite Poster

Carl Setzer

I’ve long admired Debbie Millman’s design chops. It was really awesome to see this poster she created for Print Magazine. Its elegance resides in simplicity and clarity. As a fan of Swiss Style as well as the Japanese minimalist ascetic, this really speaks to me.

What do you think?

 

A Quick Piece Of Blogging Advice

Carl Setzer

One of the blogs I follow will, often, post a flurry of posts in one burst. So my email becomes laden with a string of 8, 9, 10 posts.

I want you all to be aware of a feature within all blogging platforms I’m familiar with: “Scheduling Posts”.

Below is a screen capture of the current layout for WordPress.

Annotation 2019-09-20 091109

 

This helps in a couple ways.

  1. You don’t flood your readers with content.
  2. Regular postings are better for you, SEO-wise. Scheduling 10 posts to occur over 10 days is better for your site in the eyes of Google.

So, one fast bit of blogging advice. Cheers!

Google’s Tea Uglow Featured On This Week’s Design Matters

Carl Setzer

I’m sad to say that I’ve never heard of Tea Uglow until this evening when I was able to listen to the most recent Design Matters podcast (if you haven’t subscribed, you need to change that). Tea is the Creative Director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, which sounds like an invigorating role.

Tea comes to tech with a delightfully unique mindset. Not from the computer science world, but art and design. A mindset that’s critically important right now, at this point in tech history. I deeply believe that design thinking is the future of tech. And, really, the now of tech. She’s done some other videoed talks, which I’ll explore later. It’s awfully late today.

This talk covers a lot of ground, from sexuality and gender identity to diversity and inclusion in tech. Such broad wandering inspires and engages me.

Give it a listen. It’s well worth your time.

 

Transitions and Next Steps 

Carl Setzer1 Comment

Currently, I’m on a six-week plan to change roles. Permitting and feasibility process (what I’ve done for the past 2.5 years) is not what I want for the rest of my life. And it’s time to do what I love. Mike, the owner of Eagle Country and I worked out the 6 week plan, giving the company time for a transition and me a window to shift. I find this a glorious win-win and am deeply grateful.

​I’m working on transitioning from construction to, ideally, communications. Writing is my first love, and I’ve appreciated every opportunity to do so. I’m also love photography and video. And connecting people delights me.

I define “communications” as this overarching concept encompassing everything from marketing to PR to public affairs to internal comms. I love writing everything from newsletters to creating flyers to PowerPoint presentations.

I have a plan in place. This week I’ll  get my resume out in front of key people, update LinkedIn, my website, Indeed and any other useful websites. And I completed most of all that yesterday. So I’m feeling pretty awesome right now. I need to research what other websites to utilize, if any. Also, I need to work on expanding my list of focus companies.

Boeing is first. As a boy, I fell in love with “space” and aircraft. Growing up in Navy based family gave me visibility to all kinds of aircraft. And at one point I could name off all the different military and civilian aircraft: A6, Tomcat, 707, 747….and on and on. I still get excited watching spacecraft footage.

As a professional, the scale of Boeing and their unique challenges fascinate me. As a truly global company I expect the myriad languages, cultures and time zones to make for interesting and fun challenges. That’s true with both internal and external communication. And I see many opportunities within the current OR challenges the company faces. Challenge presented opportunity.

Other local companies intrigue me, too. Whether Premera here in South Snohomish county, to places I’ve worked before (Microsoft, Starbucks). My goal now is to find work I love. And I’m in my way.

Any advice? Especially web tools and such would be great. Please leave a comment and let me know. Cheers! 

Social Media Ads: Don’t Forget To Focus Geographically

Carl Setzer

Just saw an ad on Twitter for a service available in New York and San Francisco. Well, I’m in Seattle. I expect I’ll make my way to each of those cities in the next few years, but not in the near-term. It looked like a great food idea, but it’s not something I can do anything with right now.

What’s the problem, you might ask? Well, I expect they want their ads clicked on by likely customers. I’m not in that category, living a few thousand miles away. So, the few cents they paid for my click won’t turn into revenue, even if I love them.

Maybe, just maybe, these folks are looking at expanding to the Seattle area. But then you should have the ads go to a landing page for an expansion campaign.

Ads like these can be focused on geography. Pretty slick, giving you much more solid impact. And an essential tool to avoid wasting your online advertising budget.

A few years ago, one of my team-mates placed a Facebook ad but didn’t refine by geography. We had a great return on that if measured by phone calls. But most of those 100s of calls were from well outside our region. We would never be able to convert them to sales. So, a waste of money and time. It was easily fixed, but we spent a few hours of time answering gobs of out area phone calls.