Permission to Speak?

A MULTI PART SERIES ON DESIGNING AND BUILDING A PATH TO ENGAGE

According to the recent report, The State of the Blogosphere 2009, published by Technorati, 70% of bloggers say they blog as a form of self expression, and the experience gives them an outlet for their passion around topics that matter to them. Clearly, Gearhead Gal is a part of that resounding majority, as I am passionate about enjoying and creating great consumer product and service experiences. But in truth, the subject matter has been as much a means to an end for me, and despite my being part of the long tail of writers in the blogosphere, my initial reason for starting this site were not the ones highlighted in the report as one of the most popular ones.

Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009

Why DIY?

Since more and more individuals are creating personal online journals, hobbyist sites, and grassroots communities without the aid of interactive agencies or IT departments, I decided to experience the process of designing and creating my own web destination. From registering a name to establishing a location for my site to live to page layout and content creation, I wanted to roll around in the insights, tools, downloads, communities and product reviews that exist on the web and do the ultimate DIY effort. No teams of people. I just wanted to use my existing skills and some time. My goal was also to see how little investment I could make in cash to do this and how much “traffic” I could generate by spending time with social media tools to promote the site.

I set only a few rules:

1. No manuals, no "...for Dummies" books, and no classes
2. No cheap tricks for traffic or loyalty.
3. Be authentic.

A moment to disclose a few more details about myself to help contextualize my experience and confess where I may have a head start on the average consumer who could attempt the same exercise. I have never had an HTML class, or owned an HTML for Dummies book. And, although I learn from reading I mostly like to learn by doing. I have worked in technology for 16 years, but I am not an engineer or software developer. In our household, I am the one that serves as the home IT manager, setting up the wireless network or Wii and configuring new PCs. In Geoffrey Moore terms, I am an early adopter of technology. My husband is a laggard. Consequently, my expectations for technology experiences are high, but I tend to think like a mainstream consumer. When I interact with new products and services, I just want them to operate intuitively, and to be able to enjoy innovation without frustration, hassle, or a disproportionate amount of time to figure out how to get things running.

Lesson 1

Not sure what I’d learn first hand, I set out with an open mind, taking tips from folks along the way. This multi-part series will chronicle my experience and help share my lessons. And the first lesson is: What you learn isn't always what you expect to learn.

Stay tuned.

Update on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 1:41PM by Gearhead Gal

A Ransom Note Comes From Too Many Choices

Part Two in a Multi-Part Series on Designing and Building a Path to Engage

Lesson 1: What You Learn Is Not Always What You Expect To Learn

Setting out to create a blog, I discovered limitless content on how to make the blog successful.  Write lists. Write compelling headlines.  Join affiliate programs. There were a number of reviews for blogging tools on a variety of tech sites to help me compare the platforms to use.  The accessibility of information was encouraging, so I decided to take the plunge rather quickly.  It appeared that the easiest way to set up my site was to use my existing Google account, so I chose Blogger. It has simple templates, access to a variety of 3^rd party widgets, and an easy to use, Lego-like approach to assembling content elements on the page. I was ready to put out my shingle, and then I found my first speed bump.

Deciding what content to include meant I had to decide what voice to use consistently across my widgets. (Would my site be personal, professorial, confessional, opinionated, pithy?) How would the points of view of the editorial choices I made come together for a single voice? How could my original posts tie them together?  The pages needed to have a shared thread, and not appear like an editorial ransom note, pasted together with fonts, colors, and sizes of mixed media.

Before I knew it, I was making so many choices. Read more...

Update on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 5:17PM by Gearhead Gal

Part Three of a Multi-Part Series on Designing and Building a Path to Engage

Lesson 2: Consumers Don't Understand Cause and Effect

Many choices we may make as consumers are foundational without our even knowing it.  They become pillars that may hold up a series of choices we will make later, even if we don’t know what they might be today.  As business people, we often hope that our products become embedded in a customer’s lifestyle, so it will be hard for our products to be forfeited later.  Unfortunately, when you don’t know what you might want to eventually do with a product, you really don’t know how to assess it fully in the first place.

Several choices I made early on have become burdensome, and very difficult to undo. While I can move blog data around, relocation has had its consequences.  A domain registration service, is where I started this journey in order to own a unique web identity, a vanity URL.  Turns out it wasn’t necessary, because Blogger hosts the pages and gives you a personal blogspot.com address. I released the first .com domain name I selected after I re-thought my original decision to bundle hosting and name registration. But 10 weeks later that original name is still not available.  When I no longer felt Blogger was an appropriate choice, that URL was not portable. My “data” may be movable, but traffic flow still heads to the old location because of persistent digital footprints that still lead there.  Templates may be changeable, but laying out content in a new design format is time consuming when you map the data to a completely different frame. Each decision had ramifications I hadn’t contemplated.

Whenever I uncover new elements I want to include on my site, I try to evaluate them based on why they may be valuable for my commuications purposes.  Most often, though, I find almost every component takes 3 times longer to implement than I expect they will and 5 times longer if I want to execute them well.   I seem to measure time on this project by increments of my realization effort. That widget took me under an hour to customize. This widget requires me to re-run a wizard on its publisher’s site each time I want to add content to it.  There is a constant cycle with each new piece of technology embed, save, resize, save, reformat, save, preview, edit, save.  And that’s just with the text content. Factor in uploading of graphics and rich media, trackbacks, and tagging and time is measured in hours for a single addition.

With that kind of investment in effort, I really needed to find the payoff. Posting all this cool stuff without an audience to enjoy it is about as fulfilling as the sound of one hand clapping. It was time to figure out how to put it all together and find my peeps and Tweeps.