All posts tagged facebook

Social media: do we really have to share everything?

I’m eating the company dogfood, as it were, by selling my house through an estate agent that is a client of ours. I have become the use case. So here I am, on a page featuring the particulars my house, faced with Tweet and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons. My first thought is: I’m not putting the [...]

Spelling mistakes: were you going for rude or inept?

When I first started working with web content it amazed me that people could merrily create web pages with spelling and grammar mistakes on them. It just seemed like a basic consideration that you would ensure that you had spelled things correctly – and not a difficult one to achieve.

Talk about naïve.

Why even introverts should mouth off online

There was a post by Seth Godin some time ago that completely changed the way I act on the web (of course, now I can’t even find the blighter).

I went from passively lurking on Facebook and silently reading loads of websites to setting up three blogs, commenting on other people’s content, and starting to yammer on Twitter. Double-yammer in fact. Okay, I confess, triple-yammer.

So what happened? I have quite a lot of introverted qualities. I struggle a bit meeting new people, even talking to them on the phone, even chatting with them online. I’ll admit it – even playing anonymous multiplayer games.

When my friend Roger’s book about psychology and the teaching of Jesus was first published, he reacted to my congratulations by asking ‘is it too late to take it all back?’ That’s how I feel whenever I publish a blog post. Or send a tweet. Or ‘like’ something on Facebook.

It gets easier the more I do it, but the feeling is still there.

So why do I put myself through this? Why not slip back into the silent ranks of people who only watch from the sidelines, or who leave the arena completely?

How to create metaphors that enhance user experience

I’m working on content for an estate agent (that’s a realtor in the US). On their old site they have one of the worst metaphors that I’ve seen on a serious commercial web site. They have a basket.

That you can put houses in.

Think about that for a moment. As you browse through the site, looking for homes that fit your criteria, you can add ones that you like to a basket. Once they are in there, you click ‘View basket’ to see a list of homes you’ve chosen. There they are, snuggled at the bottom of the basket, waiting for you to – ‘click the register button to post off your details to the agent’. Whatever that means.