As you’ve no doubt read, the individual who admittedly leaked government secrets about the National Security Agency’s data-collecting programs was an employee of consulting firm Booz Allen. To make matters worse, this flash appeared late Monday afternoon, June 10th, for the Twitter hashtag @boozallen.

The link led to a story in Forbes magazine that said “anonymous hackers penetrated a server belonging to the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and released what it claims are 90,000 military email addresses, encrypted passwords and an assortment of data related to other companies and government networks. It also claims to have accessed and deleted four gigabytes of the firm’s source code.”

It’s a sign of the times that Forbes posted a tweet to draw readers to the article on its own website. The story about the leaked files broke on June 9th and, to its credit, Booz Allen posted this announcement on it website:

Booz Allen Statement on Reports of Leaked Information

Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.

Booz Allen on Social Media

I decided to check if Booz Allen took to the social media airwaves to reassure investors (its stock has predictably fallen), clients and the business community that it deplores Mr. Snowden’s actions.

Twitter. @BoozAllen. The firm posted a tweet on its official Booz Allen Twitter stream dated June 9^th with a link to its statement on the firm’s website. If you search #BoozAllen you will find dozens of tweets from news organizations and other Twitter members relating to the scandal. Most of them are not positive. I couldn’t find a tweet on this hashtag from Booz Allen.

The Forbes story said the firm posted this tweet on its Twitter account about the hacking of its website: “As part of @BoozAllen security policy, we generally do not comment on specific threats or actions taken against our systems.”

LinkedIn. I was pleased to see that Booz Allen posted the leaks statement on its LinkedIn company page and, to date, has received 14 comments, and, interestingly, 34 Likes. It’s important that 34 people – maybe employees, but so what – in support of the firm. Nothing yet about the hacked military addresses.

Facebook. The company posted its announcement on its Facebook page and at this writing had 71 Likes (good) and dozens of comments that were mainly negative. Again, nothing yet about the hacked military addresses.

Most people on Facebook and the other social media sites couldn’t understand how a firm as prestigious as Booz Allen would hire an employee without a college degree, or even a high school degree, in such a sensitive position.

Google+. Booz Allen has a company page but it’s only a placeholder. Posting to Google+ has the potential to boost a company’s SERP (Search Engine Page Results). Another missed opportunity.

Lessons Learned

A company never knows when a crisis will strike. Every organization’s crisis communications plan needs to include a social media component. It’s too late to open an account on the major social media networks after the fact. These social media sites need to updated continuously as new developments unfold.

As I’ve written before, companies can and should engage their employees as brand advocates on social media, not only in promoting the firm’s products and services but posting breaking announcements from the company when bad things happen.

I hope Booz Allen engages its employees in telling the firm’s side of the story as things seem to go from bad to worse for this storied consulting firm.

The post Should Booz Allen Use Social Media in Managing its Crisis? appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Imagine my surprise when I returned to my office a few days ago and picked up a voice message from HostGator, the company that hosts this WordPress website, informing me they had shut down my site because it was “putting a strain on their server.” What!? I quickly went to my computer, typed in my URL and saw this scary message:

What Did I Do Wrong?

The phone message also told me to look for an email, which I did, and this is what it told me, “Unfortunately, we were forced to disable the script “/home/xxxxxx/public_html/” as it was causing high loading issues on the server. Due to this affecting all of the other accounts on the system, we had to take immediate action for the health of the server. “

I’m just a small company — not a Fortune 500 Goliath with a hugely dense website — so how could this be possible? The email also told me that they noticed I had a WordPress blog, which is true but not quite accurate. As I’ve written before. a WordPress blog IS a website.

But maybe that’s nitpicking when you’re essentially out of business and your visitors find they are Forbidden to access the server  — and your website. They didn’t do anything wrong. Why was HostGator being so nasty? Couldn’t they have given me 24 hours advance notice with instructions how to fix the problem and then shut me down if I didn’t?

I immediately called HostGator tech support, which happens to be excellent. It seems the main problem is that I had disabled the cache plugin. A cache is an archive of files that can slow down the load time of a site.

A plugin, for those who don’t know, is a piece of software that adds functionality to a website. Think of buying a car. You decide you want to install air conditioning and a GPS system. They’re like plugins because they add more functions to your car.

My webmaster and I had decided a while back to disable the cache plugin because it was causing other problems — like the GPS lady who keeps telling you to turn right when you know a shortcut to the left. Plugins can be finicky sometimes. Everything was running smoothly without this plugin until — wham, I was shut down.

How to Fix the Problem

First, I immediately installed HostGator’s recommended cache plugin WP Super Cache. Next, the tech support representative suggested I delete other plugins I wasn’t using, another potential source of the problem.

In HostGator’s email to me they specifically mentioned several plugins, none of which I had installed. If you own a WordPress website and have installed the plugins listed below and use HostGator, beware.

This is the message I received:

• All related posts plugins (WordPress Related Posts, YARPP) can cause significantly high load in most cases.WPRobot3 and other auto-posters can also cause high load issues, and should be disabled if they are causing issues.
• StatPress and other WordPress statistics software should also be disabled, as these too can consume too much CPU in certain cases. Use Google Analytics instead for statistics as well as Awstats which already comes by default on your account.
• WP Post Views is also a plugin that you’ll want to avoid as it causes significant resource usage.
• Any other plugins that are not vital to your WordPress should be disabled.

The HostGator customer service rep reactivated my site on our call. Technically, HostGator won’t let your site go live again unless you respond to their email explaining how you fixed the problem, i.e., installing a cache plugin and deleting unnecessary plugins. I wrote to them anyway after I did that just to be on the safe side.

My webmaster and I think that HostgGator over-reacted in shutting down my site. He claims that as soon as they see it’s a WordPress website they get all in a snit anticipating problems that may never happen. Who knows? I’ve been otherwise satisfied with HostGator’s service which is used by thousands of bloggers.

Maybe their tagline, “we eat up the competition” should be changed to “we eat up our customers” when they summarily shut down your website without so much as giving you a moment’s notice.

The post What to do When Your WordPress Website Gets Shut Down appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

If you don’t subscribe to HubSpot’s newsletter and blog, I highly recommend that you do. This inbound marketing agency consistently conducts research into social media usage which I often quote in my posts. They are very generous in allowing you to download their reports.

This week Dan Zarrella, who is their Social Media Scientist, published a study with an infographic that shows how adding simple calls-to-action, such as Please ReTweet, Comment and Link, can increase how many you get. For example, asking someone to Please ReTweet instead of just Please RT increases your retweets by 10 percent. Words do matter.

Zarrella is able to plumb these juicy tidbits from HubSpot’s huge database of information. The following graphs are copied from his report.

Blog Calls-to-Action

Zarrella studied the words Comment, Link and Share from a database of 50,000 blogs. Blogs that used those words tended to get more Comments, Links and Shares. This is important to bloggers who crave getting comments from their readers.

Facebook Calls-to-Action

Based on the 10,000 most Liked Facebook pages, Zarrella found that posts that called for a specific call to action got more Likes, Comments and Shares.

Twitter Calls-to-Action

From a database of millions of tweets, Zarrella found that simply asking “Please” dramatically increases retweets as opposed to not asking for them at all.

I don’t think I’m alone when I state that I find it difficult sometimes to ask for comments. Somehow it feels like begging. But that’s silly. I honestly do want to receive feedback on my posts. What’s so bad about asking if you say the magic word “Please.”

So, if you would be so kind, please Comment, and, if it’s not too much trouble, Share and ReTweet this post. Thank you.

The post Please ReTweet, Link and Comment on This Post — So Says HubSpot appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

I wrote a version of the following post several years ago when I heard a professor at the prestigious Journalism School of Columbia University say he didn’t know what journalism would look like in five years. Fast forward to the present.

The professor’s — and my predictions — about the future of journalism and the role of the publicist are coming true.

The Journalist as “Curator”

Sree Sreenivasan, then Dean of Student Affairs at the School, and his then student, Vadim Lavursik, were panelists at a Mashable conference where they discussed “The Future Journalist.” It was a bit of a misnomer to call Lavursik only a student, because he was a writer for Mashable and reported for other publications. Since then, Lavursi has become the Journalism Program Manager at Facebook and Sreenivasan has become Columbia’s Chief Digital Officer, a position that barely existed when I first wrote this post.

But what keeps swirling around in my mind is that journalists, we’ll still call them that for the time being – indeed, everyone who writes for a living – have become curators of news and information. This isn’t an original idea on my part. There has been a lot written about it, including a story Lavursik wrote for Mashable in which he referred to “journalists as curators and contextualizers.” Both speakers called on the media to become “community managers,” facilitating conversation on the web and pointing their audiences to other sources of information.

We’re accessing this information from an infinite variety of sources, with Google as our guide, and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook sending us a non-stop stream of news and tidbits. What are we to believe? What’s fact and what’s, frankly, crap. We need to find out.

That’s why writers have to become more like curators in a museum. As John Thomson of the City University London, Graduate School of Journalism, wrote in an excellent post: “You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious, and StumbleUpon.”

The Role of the Publicist Has Diminished

At the Mashable session, I got up and put in my two cents about how the relationship between the press and suppliers of information, like large corporations and PR agencies, has fundamentally changed. Journalists feel they don’t need publicists pitching them stories. Sure, they’ll take a press release and put it on the pile of other bits and pieces they’ve gathered online.

But journalists have become skilled at ferreting out what’s real and what’s – what I wrote earlier. They can bypass PR people (and I love PR people, having been one most of my professional life after a brief stint as a business reporter). If a reporter wants to find someone to give her a juicy quote, say, on nuclear reactors, she can just go online and find an expert.

Now PR people need to feed social media so their companies and clients get found. The blogosphere is a beast with a voracious appetite. It devours information, but indiscriminately.

So, back to the idea of curator. As writers, it’s our duty to feed the beast, but also to whet the appetite of our readers with information we extract, taking just the tasty morsels and making sense out of them in terms that readers can chew on and understand.

The post Is the Term Journalist Passé As Writers Become Curators of Content? appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

This blog is for my subscribers who read my posts on Google Reader. Google, to the consternation of its many fans, is shutting down Google Reader on June 1st. I hope I’m not too vain in thinking that you will be terribly upset if you don’t continue to read my posts if you’re receiving them now via Google Reader.

If you wish to continue using a reader, there are several options as described in this Mashable article: Feedly, NewsBlur and The Old Reader. Of course, you can also choose to subscribe by email. As my small gift for subscribing, you’ll receive my tips about how to get quoted in the media and who doesn’t want free publicity?

Subscribe Here to Receive My Scintillating, Informative, Amusing and Must-Read Information by Email

The post Google Reader is Going Bye-Bye, So Subscribe to My Blog Via Email appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Michael Yublosky

LinkedIn added many new features in their roll out of the new personal profiles earlier this year. The social network continues to expand those features.

One terrific new feature is the ability to include “Rich Media” files in certain profile sections. A recently expanded feature includes uploading smaller files — not larger than 100 mg — directly from your computer.

What Are “Rich Media” Files?

Photos or images, presentations, audio files, and videos as well as documents are included in LinkedIn’s definition of Rich Media files.

These files may be added to three sections in your personal profile: Summary, Experience, and Education. In fact, you can add them to each individual experience and education listed on your profile. LinkedIn also provides the means to play files containing audio as well as video.

Larger files must sit somewhere out on the web and have a public URL (address) associated with it. This includes all audio or video files. However, you can easily overcome this obstacle and should most definitely embrace the opportunity to embellish your brand.

This task may be accomplished in one of three ways:

Select a Content Provider. Open an account with a web-hosting source, called a content provider. Most basic accounts are free. LinkedIn provides a lengthy list of Approved Providers and Content Types. Here are several familiar ones:

• Videos: CNN, Vimeo, Forbes, YouTube
• Images: Twitter, Pinterest, somecards
• Presentations and Documents: Google Docs, BoxNet, SlideShare
• Audios: Band Camp, Rdio
• Others: Kickstarter, Quantcast

Then follow these steps:

• Copy the (URL) address assigned to the file.
• As above, sign in to LinkedIn and go to < Edit Profile >. Click on the add rich media icon in the section where you want to add a file. Click on < Upload File >, browse your drives for the file, and upload. Add a description. Save.
• Paste the URL into the < Add Link > content box, making sure you include the prefix http:// and Save.

Save Your File to a Folder. Upload your file to a folder on your website or blog (or even your own server connected to the Internet). Ask your webmaster for help if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself. In my opinion, it is best to set up a new folder solely to store these files. If you own a WordPress website, simply upload images or documents directly to your media library file. Copy the (URL) address for insertion into your LinkedIn profile as described above.

Sign up for a free WordPress.com website. If you don’t already have a website, set up a free one on WordPress.com. Follow the procedure above after again saving your files to the media library.

Upload Directly From Your Hard Drive

The Rich Media Files option allows you to upload smaller files — not larger than 100 mg — directly from your computer’s hard drive to LinkedIn. This is similar to attaching a file to an email. Click on < Upload File >, browse your drives for the file, and upload. Add a description. Save. These files are limited to:

• Images: jpg, png, gif, etc.
• Documents: doc, pdf, odt, etc.
• Presentations: ppt, pdf, odp, etc.

LinkedIn is gradually releasing this new feature and on May 1 announced:  “Currently, you can only use this feature if you’ve received a promotional email about this or have been notified on your LinkedIn account. Eventually all members will have access to this feature.” If you have not been notified yet, you will be, so be prepared with your account with a content provider or website.

Additional notes: You can no longer use other third party applications on LinkedIn. Prior users of the SlideShare Presentations as well as the Portfolio Display applications saw their content automatically migrated to their Summary section. WordPress bloggers can have their blog articles included in their profile automatically with a plugin available through JetPack.

To learn more about adding, editing or removing work samples on your profile visit LinkedIn’s Help Center. To see how your images would look, scroll through LinkedIn’s presentation below.

Michael Yublosky, MBA, is a small business web marketing strategist and a WordPress and LinkedIn specialist. Michael combines 30+ years of professional consultative sales experience coupled with marketing, training and coaching experience. He presents workshops for businesses, and volunteers for SCORE-Chicago and non-profit job guidance agencies in the greater Chicago area. Read more of his insights into LinkedIn and connect with Yublosky on LinkedIn.

The post To Enhance Your New LinkedIn Profile Add Images, Documents and Files appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Like many former readers of print newspapers and magazines, I now read these publications online. It’s quite satisfying when using my 21” iMac desk computer but increasingly I find myself reading publications on my mobile phone, along with millions of other people.

Even more people are catching the news on tablets, which are actually shrinking in size, too.

Who Started That Rule?

So how about the “rule” that the most important information on any website should be above the fold?

That terminology came into use because newspapers were and are still displayed folded so that only the top half of the front page is visible. That space above the fold is designated for the most important news and information.

But the rule is a little ridiculous. How can you possibly squeeze everything that’s important into the top of your website so that it stands out on a mobile device?

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, you need to design a separate mobile site. And after doing some research that’s just what I did. I’ll show you my current mobile design and the one I’m planning to replace it with (I still may do a little tweaking).

I like the new one better.

Do It Yourself

I formatted my website for mobile viewing a couple of years ago. I should say that a representative from Network Solutions at its trade booth at Blog World (now known as New Media Expo) convention had a little extra time so he did it for me.

I liked the design because it offers the reader a table of contents. You have a choice of things you can do: visit my blog, the full website, and even click on the phone icon and call me directly. Here is what it looks like:

I just screened Network Solution’s video and it’s still necessary to do your own formatting, as is the case with other providers. By the way, several WordPress templates automatically format for mobile viewing.

Things Have Changed

But a lot has changed in the last two years. I pay $8 a month but you can get a basic plan from other providers without charge. All you do is type in your website URL and your site is automatically formatted. Before going live you can even tweak the design.

I did a search and clicked on the site of the first Google paid ad I saw. It’s called Duda Mobile. I typed in my URL and voila! There was my website. However, there are quite a few templates to choose from.

This is where my technophobia kicked in. I decided to call customer service and spoke to a most patient and pleasant tech support rep named Ronald. He patiently explained things to me as I tried formatting a couple of templates. Below is the one I think I am going to use. I like the idea the viewer can scroll directly to the information he wants.

Also, there is the added feature of being able to follow me on my social networks and if you scroll down just below those icons you will see the titles and excerpts of my latest blog posts. I blog for business so that’s important to me.

I’ve saved it and I’m letting it marinade for a few days to see if I still like the design or if I want to tweak it. I chose the paid plan because it allows for more visitors, a customized URL and tech support.

What the Big Companies Are Doing

Several of the biggest companies have chucked the idea of including what’s generally been considered important to include “above the fold” such as contact information and descriptions of products and services.

I visited Apple’s mobile website and the iPhone 5 is most prominently displayed. Apple knows what’s making the most profit for them.

IBM is a global organization with many more services than they could possibly display on a mobile screen so they simply have a list of posts – does my heart good, as a blogger.

I’m happy with my website design when viewed on a regular desktop or laptop computer. I feel all the important information for my readers is “above the fold.” I’m not so famous as Apple so that I can get away with showing a single image on my mobile site. Besides, I don’t sell a product.

The idea of “above the fold” is really an outmoded idea. What’s important to your company is very different from other companies. You want your mobile site to represent your brand in the best light possible. Highlight what will induce a visitor to continue reading.

If your website is not now formatted for mobile, then just do it.

I would love to hear from you about my new mobile design. What do you think? Do you like it? Is it easy to read and understand? What would you add or delete?

The post In Designing a Website for Mobile Viewing Where is “Above the Fold?” appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Your photo?

Are you making a first great impression on your social media networks? The old adage that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression is true. It’s sad when you go to someone’s account on Twitter, for example, and see a couple of tweets and then nothing. Or there is a big fat egg where the person’s image should be.

Update Your Profiles

Maybe it’s time for you to get your social media networks updated so that you make a great first impression.

1. Include a photo of yourself.  It doesn’t need to be taken by a professional, as long as it’s professional looking. Once you pick a photo, go to Gravatar where you can upload your image so that it follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you comment or post on a blog.
2. Refresh the background of your Twitter page. Instead of using the selections from Twitter’s limited selections, you can go to sites like twitrounds or TwitrBackgrounds for dozens of free templates.
3. Fill out your profile. This is especially important on LinkedIn, one of the first stops for employers and business prospects. Make sure it’s complete and update it when there are changes in your life, such as a new job.
4. Post regularly to your sites. Set a goal: I will tweet, share an update on LinkedIn and post to Facebook at least X times a week. The posts don’t need to be original – you can tweet a newspaper article you like, retweet other people’s tweets and include links to articles.
5. Respond to mentions of your name and content. If someone leaves a comment for a question you posed in a LinkedIn Group, be sure to respond. It’s only polite and will keep the discussion going. Same goes for the other networks like Google+ and Facebook.
6. Make it easy to comment. If you have a blog, make it easy for people to comment and provide a link back to their website. I hate captcha which requires you to decipher unreadable letters and numbers to confirm you’re not a spammer. I never get it right the first time. How about just a box to check that you are a real human?

It will enhance your brand if you post content that offers value to your business readers. Don’t tweet anything that you will be embarrassed by later.

Also, no one wants to know what you ate for lunch. And this goes for friends and business associates. Honestly.

The post There’s No Second Chance to Make a First Impression on Social Media appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Have you noticed? The terms “content management” and “content marketing” are all the rage this year.

The Content Management Institute shoots me an email everyday with different posts on the topic, some of which I find quite interesting, and it also offers free seminars on the topic.

What’s the Big Deal?

Copyblogger, considered one of the pre-eminent social media sites on the planet, sells Scribe, a content marketing software program that enables “smarter content creation.”

It describes content marketing as “creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.”

Social Media Examiner held a session entitled “10 Content Marketing Secrets That Will Propel You Beyond the Competition” at its Social Media Marketing World summit last month. I confess that a guest blogger wrote a post on this site a few weeks ago about content marketing and I wrote one, too..

Does it Matter?

Content management seems to matter to a lot of people who are marketing – content management! The term is already becoming a new form of jargon in the social media space (jargon).

Here’s the thing. Content marketing doesn’t seem to be on the radar screen (cliché) of other mere mortals. For the heck of it, I searched the term using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and found an underwhelming 27,167 searches (in the U.S.) for content marketing and 167,000 for content management. That’s decent but not sterling for one of the hottest topics in social media this year.

Now let’s look at a topic close to my heart: blogging. “What is a blog” and variations on that phrase get 20.4 million searches a month. A blog, as you know, is all about “creating and sharing valuable free content,” to use a phrase from Copyblogger.

Avoid Using Jargon

There is a lot more interest in creating content with a blog, which is a mature content creation tool. Those of us who work in social media are using jargon that doesn’t resonate with the very prospects we’re trying to reach. Mea culpa. If you re-read the definition of content marketing, all it’s about is good writing that attracts the attention of prospective customers. It could be a blog or content shared on a social media network.

Wow, that’s revolutionary. To be serious, we all need a common vocabulary in business to communicate with mutual understanding. It may be OK to use the terms content management and content marketing if you’re talking to someone else who toils in social media.

Ask the average CEO (actually I have asked a few) and he will tell you he isn’t searching for the term content marketing and doesn’t know what a Twitter “handle” is. For all we know, those 27,000 searches were by people like me in social media.

Content management and content marketing are just more jargon. Do you agree?

The post Content Management is Just More Jargon appeared first on Write Speak Sell.

Just a brief update about a new LinkedIn feature that is very Facebook-like because it enables you to engage with your network by mentioning your connections and companies in conversations. It’s called Mentions on LinkedIn.

The neat part is the person or company you mentioned will receive a notification alerting them that they have been mentioned. You can learn more at LinkedIn’s blog. This feature is being rolled-out to English-speaking members first and then globally.

Here is a SlideShare presentation prepared by LinkedIn describing the new feature. LinkedIn owns SlideShare, in case you didn’t know.

The post Now You Can Connect With Other Members Using LinkedIn Mentions appeared first on Write Speak Sell.