Heads up! We’re going to take the Squidservers down for two hours tonight, from 12am to 2am EST (4am - 6am GMT).
Just regular maintenance to further engooden the site. Join the SquidU forum thread for the latest updates.
Update: We’re back! Thanks for your patience.
Boy oh boy do we have some active Activists!
They ran a great bake sale to raise money and awareness for charity. Joan4 won lens of the day for her Congo Square and$100 will be donated to Joan4’s charity of choice, Heifer International.
This week we are on to Virtual Concerts. If I wanted to raise money for my favorite charity, you bet your bottom dollar I’d ask U2 to play a benefit concert!
Make a lens on your favorite group. Set the proceeds to charity. Ask an Activist to have a look. They are in charge of nominating our winner who will get LoTD and $100 to their favorite charity.
That rocks!
Your readers luuuuuuv photos! What easier way to show them photos than with a little cross promo between Squidoo and Flickr?
Squidoo makes it easy to showcase your Flickr photos on your lens. There’s the Flickr module, the Polaroid module, the bonus image in the Text/Write module, the Flickr Plexo…
What kind of stuff can you use images for? Here are a few ideas from our fav lenses:
Using Flickr is easy. Sign up for a free account. Take pictures. Upload them. Share them.
Have fun.
There sure are a lot of great lensmasters out there! Amazing things can happen when we put our heads together, just look at the Giant Squids.
One great offshoots of the Superhero contest was that so many great people stood up and took the lead, paid attention and participated and made a name for themselves. They are now our Squidoo Activists!
First project to raise money for charity? Squidoo is hosting a virtual bake sale!
Show off your favorite kitchen equipment. Get some tips on running a real bake sale. Make a lens about your favorite cookie recipe for charity. All for charity!
All the fun, none of the fat.
All of us, at some point, were new to Squidoo. For those of us who were new a longer time ago, it’s hard to appreciate the amazing amount of new information new users must learn as they jump into building lenses, Squidcasting, monetizing modules, and link building.
New members have so much to share. Like stepho123, Squidoo’s newest expert on South Africa. Or computer game and metalcore band guru Biesas. And
chilipoker, your official guide to the lifestyles of famous poker players.
Not only do we have some uber-talented new lensmasters joining us, we have a great group of veteran lensmasters who have been doing a bang up job of welcoming new lensmasters and giving them a solid head start.
Why not wrap up your week by making someone’s day? Head over the the SquidU Forum and say hi to a new lensmaster.
When I was planning my wedding, I set up a website with a whole bunch of helpful info for our guests. Where to stay. What “black and white attire” meant (no, it’s not black tie!). Why we didn’t have a registry. Et cetera.
No one read it. They called instead. Or sent emails. My husband and I played travel agent, social scheduler, matchmaker and stylist to 80 people. They came up with the craziest, most unanticipated questions. And believe me, answering them is not exactly what a bride-to-be wants to be doing with her time.
The story of nuptials aside, I’m betting you run into the same exact problems with your FAQ, every single day. Anyone who has ever written a FAQ online, for their company or soccer league or quiz night, knows that it’s an increasingly outdated way to answer questions. I hate to say it, but your FAQ probably sucks.
But it’s so well written! It’s helpful! It solves people’s problems! No, no it doesn’t. Here’s why:
Marketing is not customer service. When you first write a FAQ, you do your best to imagine questions people will have about your site or product or service. You try to make it sound good. You preen a little. It’s a marketing move, not a customer service issue. But you know where people go when they really need help? Your FAQ. Probably not the best time to tell them how awesome your company is.
It’s static. Very quickly, people will start demanding real answers. So once you’ve done some playtesting, you update your FAQ with real world questions and hope that does the trick. Then you update it again next week. Then you roll out some new features and have to add those to the FAQ. You’re forever playing catch up. So then you get tempted to just automate the FAQ, but then there’s…
The problem with frequent. What’s the cutoff? If 9 people ask the same thing, is that frequent? What if you have 250,000 users? Sure, you could automate the FAQ and show truly the top 10 most often asked questions, but watch out. If the top questions are about problems (and they probably are) then someone who is just trying to learn about your site, or someone who doesn’t have that problem, will see all your dirty laundry at once. Sure, be transparent, but people like to have a little confidence in the stuff that works, too.
The problem with “et cetera”. Just as I never dreamed of the off-the-wall questions I got about my wedding, I am also surprised, daily, by the questions and feedback I hear from Squidoo lensmasters. There’s no way that I, on my own, could represent those in a FAQ or TOS or Handbook and Help Section. For every “frequently asked question” there are 10 more infrequent, one-time questions. Every minute.
The programmers need some sleep. Chances are you have a Feedback/Bug Report/Contact link on your site for people who get stuck. Here’s a secret: 98.5% of the bug reports sent in, to any site, aren’t really bugs. They’re just confusion, misunderstanding, or someone who was in too much of a hurry to read that long explanation you wrote in your FAQ or elsewhere. (Of course they were in a hurry. You’d be too).
There aren’t enough of you. (Or so you think). Unless you’re in a much bigger business than 99% of us out there, you can’t afford to have a trained staff of people standing by, in real time, to help field all the questions that come in. But, if you’re good, I bet you have a pretty hopping forum of users and fans somewhere. I bet you have a top 1%, the people who know all the ins and outs of your site or product, the people who log in almost every day and usually do it with a smile.
But the biggest problem with a FAQ is that people explore, learn, interact and get help in different ways. Some like a DIY approach to figuring stuff out. Just give ‘em a manual and lots of stuff to read and they’re fine. Other people can’t be bothered and would rather jump into a forum and ask. Still others are shy about connecting with peers, and prefer “anonymous” (not really) feedback forms.
SO… here’s my idea. Why not give them everything? Right in one place. Do your marketing at the top and let people know the 5 things you’d like them to know, the 5 things that show off the spirit of your site. Then give them a real FAQ, based on questions you honestly do get a lot. Then some ebooks they can download and read. And a search function, so they can find info specific to their problem, quickly. Finally, of course, point them to forums if they want to connect directly with the real experts–your passionate community.
Of course, that’s not a new idea at all. Flickr does a great job of this, and so does Apple.
What makes this idea work, though, isn’t just the format. It’s the people behind it. Instead of getting your editor in chief or marketers to write a FAQ, instead of making your customer service people your first point of contact, instead of pulling your programmer off feature development to answer so-called bug reports… do something radical: trust your users.
They know what’s up. They know how your site works, intricately, and they have insights you don’t. They’re smart and will surprise you (if you’re lucky, like we are) with their generosity. Let them write their own FAQs and how-tos about your site. Hundreds of them. Full of tips and tricks and gripes and help and answers and hacks and advice.
Don’t put your users to work, though. Don’t try to replace true customer service with them, don’t take advantage of them, just trust them. Let the experts be the experts, and your community with thrive.
That’s what The Squidoo Answer Deck is about.
Check it out.
Squidoo’s Lens of the Day is real popular. Wicked popular. So popular that it’s time for an upgrade.
We’re working this week with Google-owned Feedburner to be one of the first on their brand new email system. This means better reliability, scheduling options, a smoother subscribe and unsub process, and hey, you know you’re in good hands with Feedburner. The only downside is that we have to put Lens of the Day on hold for a few days while we get everything hooked up.
You don’t have to do a thing. If you’re already subscribed to LotD by RSS or email, you’ll get your new pings or emails automatically when we’re back up and running. In the meantime, just keep working on your lenses, and by all means, nominate your favorites to me at lotd at squidoo.com. (Giants, don’t forget the secret email address we gave you!)
For newcomers who aren’t sure what Lens of the Day is: It’s a competition, an opportunity, a candy gram, a daily dose of rocketfuel for Squidoo users and fans alike. It’s the best way to see how real people are using and benefitting from Squidoo.
Each week, with a little help from the community, I pick lenses that really stand out from the crowd. Lenses that are unique in content, topic, approach, layout, imagination… or lenses that just make me smile. I write ‘em up and stick them on the Lens of the Day blog. One a day. People subscribe to that blog via RSS and email (mostly by email) so that the Lens of the Day selections can deliver straight to their inboxes. After all, how else will you know if you got picked?
Among all the hype and junk, sometimes you come across just plain good advice.
lifelongfitness has some of that for you: http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=17362
No muss, no fuss, no trickery. Just good clean fun and solid tips for making your lens great. Everyone wins.
See the update below
A heads-up for the addicts among us: we’re going to take the Squidservers down for an hour tonight, sometime between midnight and five am EST.
Just regular maintenance to further engooden the site. Join the SquidU forum thread for the latest updates.
Thanks for your patience!
Update 2:15am EST: Our maintenance work is now complete. We appreciate you hanging in there!
Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest – and snap it all into focus. It's a supersimple, fun and powerful way to share your interests, build your online identity and credibility, and connect with new readers and friends. It's all free, and you could even earn a royalty for charity or yourself!
Get Started!