Instigator Blog

Akismet works. It stops a ton of spam on my blog (almost 3,000 to-date), and tons of bloggers use it. It’s an essential WordPress plugin for everyone, or you’ll go mad deleting spam from your comments.

But here are 3 suggestions for making it even better:

• Recognize trackbacks and list them separately in the WordPress Admin. Less trackbacks show up as potential spam (than comments), and sometimes they’re not spam, but links back from legitimate blogs. Most of the time they’re trackbacks to scraper sites and splogs, which you can choose to delete. It makes sense to list these separately because trackbacks are so important; seeing who is linking to you is critical for increasing your blog’s success. So being able to isolate trackbacks out of the rest of the potential spam would be great — I could then deal with these as a higher priority than the 3,000 other potential spam messages.
• Separate out obvious spam from questionable spam. There’s some comment spam that’s obviously spam (or darn close to being obvious.) But occasionally, a real comment gets caught. I wonder if there’s a way of separating the two within the WordPress Admin — creating two lists: “Very Likely Spam” and “So-So Spam” (or something like that.)

  Akismet could develop logic for doing this, but also give bloggers some options. For example, if I could input some keywords and key phrases (cialis, levitra, porn, etc.) and say, “those are DEFINITELY spam”, tossing those messages into a separate page titled “Very Likely Spam” will make spam management easier.

  Akismet could even ship with default keywords - because they know what the typical spam looks like.

• Auto-delete spam. Akismet now lets you automatically discard spam comments on posts that are older than a month, which makes a lot of sense - the discussion on those posts will typically be non-existent except for spam. They do mention on the Akismet blog that this new feature eliminates tons of spam automatically, but what about taking the keyword suggestion from above and auto-deleting off that? For example, any comment with the word “cialis” gets toasted. (Unless your blog is about cialis, in which case you’d want to change the keyword list!)

Yesterday I was sitting in a Second Cup coffee shop and I overheard the conversation of a manager with her employees.

Setting the scene — she was on an apparent break, sitting casually at a table sipping a coffee. Lounging like she was on vacation, she barked over to one of the employees and said:

“Now listen to me carefully, I only want to say this once….”

“Blah, blah, blah — (insert Charlie Brown adult-speak) — blah blah…”

“If you don’t do what I say, we’re going to have a problem.”

She then instructed the employee to call over a second staff member, and she repeated the exact same diatribe. This happened a total of 4 times.

Can you imagine what was going through the employees’ heads as they nodded to her blankly? Exactly.

If you can’t do better than that - and say silly, pointless, demeaning and demoralizing things like, “listen to me closely” and “we’re going to have a problem” - you shouldn’t be managing people. Sheep, maybe. But not people.

One of her biggest mistakes was not explaining to the employees why her instructions mattered. She was asking them to do something fairly menial. It was clearly important, otherwise she wouldn’t have used the language she used. But why was it important? I have no clue…I’m guessing the employees don’t get it either…

Is there any chance they’re going to listen to her?

Even before blogging became extremely popular for businesses (and there’s still work to be done in that regard!) people were publishing articles online in article directories.

This is one of Ron’s buzz challenges from his book and part my 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge.

Ron points out that you can get some amazing buzz by publishing content in newspapers or magazines. But that’s still pretty much a “black box” for most of us, and few of us have the right connections to do it. Still, I’d encourage this wholeheartedly and would love to do some writing for prominent magazines/newspapers (hint, hint.)

Publishing articles online is much easier.

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Most people say they’re OK receiving constructive criticism. But few people really are. Criticism of any kind hurts. Even if it’s done properly.

When someone reacts poorly to constructive criticism, they usually:

• Get angry.
• Get defensive.
• Get quiet and tune out.

It’s not quite Kubler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief, but there’s a pattern there. The key for the person giving the constructive criticism is to be prepared with these responses:

1. “I understand.” Don’t respond to anger, defensiveness and quietness with the same emotions. Keeping an even keel and expressing your understanding is important. Bring things back to the key points of behavior that are problematic.
2. “So what you’re saying…” A well-practiced technique in communication is to repeat what someone has said, in summary form. It makes people truly feel like you’re listening. (Hopefully you are listening.)
3. “It’s not you, it’s me.” I’m kidding. Don’t say that.
4. “We can work together on this.” Wow, that’s almost “it’s not you, it’s me” but not quite. Constructive criticism is useless without focusing on solutions. You can’t provide criticism and then say, “off you go, figure it out.” Make it a “we” task not a “you” task.

Sometimes, there’s nothing you can say to make the situation better. It may be time for a break. Suggest a follow-up meeting, providing each person a chance to reflect, and figure out how the constructive criticism will be handled.

Quite a few of Ron’s buzz challenges are related to Web marketing and promotion, including his challenge to create a Squidoo Lens.

What is Squidoo?

It’s the creation of Seth Godin - a site that allows anyone to create a web page of content. It uses a widget-style interface to let you add text, RSS feeds, Amazon links and a ton of other things.

In Seth Godin’s book, Small Is The New Big, he talks about Squidoo:

Squidoo is an all-purpose platform for user-generated content. It’s designed to make it easy for each member of your fan club to build a page that highlights the best of what you have to offer.

Godin envisions people creating lenses about you, in turn creating a huge, content-rich and viral network of people buzzing about your business. But I suspect most of the time people are creating lenses about themselves, much more like MySpace pages.

So Squidoo is another way of advertising and promoting your business. Fair enough.

You can make money off Squidoo - Google ads are placed on your lens, and there are a couple other ways of doing it as well. Or you can donate the money to charity.

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