How THINK is useful both as acronym and habit

Some months ago, I shared a meme to Facebook. It was a photo of a poster that said:

"Before you use Facebook, send a text, tweet, or blog,

THINK:

T - is it true?
H - is it helpful?
I - is it inspiring?
N - is it necessary?
K - is it kind?"

"Think" also happens to be my employer's slogan since the 1920s (the Japanese translation is the imperative form rather than the infinitive, 考えよ). And as an INTJ, I both value and enjoy thinking (and perhaps over-thinking). Years ago I'd read about an abridged version of the acronym "THINK" - that is, it had omitted the "is it inspiring" criterion. Oftentimes since then, I'd found that my observations or insights meet only half to three quarters of the remainder of these criteria. As a result, perhaps I've become even more taciturn than in my youth - although even back then, I believed in the concept of "live and let live", which also meant I wouldn't try to meddle in others' affairs in a desire to be similarly treated.

What has this all to do with my professional views, one may well ask: it was this article on Ted Nguyen's site about the increase in rude behaviour via social networking services. Despite its bias towards English speaking (and in the case of the accompanying infographic, American) sources of stats, intuitively it is not a stretch to consider that a larger number of people spending more time on SNSs will mean not only an increase in interactivity via those media, but also more spontaneous behaviour. When tempers flare, the physical act of typing privately into a device and hitting send is deceptive, in that it seems to distance ourselves from accountability for our words, and also from the urgency created by looking someone in the eye when addressing them with the exact same sentiment.

Real life creates stressors and balances alike in most lives, bringing both highs and lows to everyone. Facebook, on the other hand, is a place of skewed PR - some will prefer to only share highlights and positivity, whereas yet others may lean towards perpetually complaining about circumstances or those around them. The biased newsreels we see from our contacts may exacerbate irritations we choose to feel about said individuals, more than when spending time with them in person. Since using SNS/SMS to interact with others results in losing tone of voice and other non-verbal cues, text-only communication leads to misunderstandings and other complications, which in turn can result in substantial damage, occasionally permanent in nature, to interpersonal relationships. Humourous examples of more transient instances of confusion has been documented extensively in sites like  Damn You Auto Correct!

If more of us chose to apply THINK the acronym to our SNS based interactions, surely we can curb this insurgence of rudeness. The above linked article says one should consider how one's grandmother would react to what one may be considering to share, but my personal attitude has been to only post anything that I wouldn't mind a prospective employer seeing. I'd like to think this post serves as an example itself, of embodying the THINK acronym, though perhaps it's a bit low on the inspirational scale.

What's in a Title?

After nearly three years in this role, my title changed from "Web Effectiveness Analyst", which was deemed slightly cryptic, to "SEO Specialist", which I hope will not be associated with too many negative connotations (it doesn't, internally to my employer, at least). Those familiar with the fundamentals of SEO would know that the prominence and density of a targeted keyword matters in titles; be they in HTML files, PDFs, videos, or indeed, LinkedIn taglines.
So far this year, however, my deliverables have shifted from traditional consultancy - which implicitly involves knowledge transfer - to more of a training role, which has meant explicitly and convincingly conveying SEO best practices to clients. As early as 2011 I'd begun to co-author best practices guidebooks for an external client (primarily operating as a B2C entity), and this month I used the second of such to create a customized curriculum in the form of a presentation and series of live demonstrative investigations. This I covered over two days last week at one of my client sites.
In March I trained an internal team in similar principles, but with emphasis on B2B, and in Japanese. This necessitated acquiring a greater IT and topic related vocabulary than I'd naturally developed and maintained thanks to my association of the language with comfort and cultural ties, rather than professional goals.
Search engine optimization has been, in my view, a bit of a misnomer, unless one talks about optimizing an internal (site specific implementation) of a search engine.
In a nutshell, one could claim that implementing SEO means making web sites and its collateral conducive to being crawled and indexed by search engines, so the changes are applied to online content, not to search engines. Their algorithms have of course evolved, but more to mimic human language processing, and to address so-labeled "black hat" practices that become too pervasive or too effective to ignore: cf. the infographics of SEO Evolution, courtesy of Greenlight.
Thus, regardless of what I call my role, the language I use, my audience, or medium of communication, my message remains the same - striving to create easily find-able content online requires an understanding of one's desired audience, and the willingness to continually streamline, update, and manage one's web-based presence.

Google+ increasing its reach

Just about a week ago, it was announced that Blogger users may now mention either people or pages from Google+ in the same manner as within G+ itself. This would have been quite useful when I first promoted my +Mayo Takeuchi Plus page, which has now accumulated a good body of photographs. However, I cannot seem to cite myself, perhaps because I've linked this blog to my personal Google+ account and it would be self-serving?
In the meantime, I've also added more G+ related widgets on this blog, including one that allows me to show thumbnails of people who have circled my personal account. Another button hopefully will encourage more people to circle my aforementioned Plus page.
During my "day job" researching I'd also noticed that, although the follower/circle counts weren't up to date, that the PPC spots were also starting to make mention of sponsor pages on Google+.
In an article "marriage of SEO and Social Media" (which likens this union to a predictable yet sudden elopement, to extend the metaphor), Matt Cutts's views on "social signals" continuing to grow in importance is quoted. One presumes that Google+ related cues such as +1s and other activities native to their environment would likely hold more weight than other SNSs, although perhaps there could be favoured emphasis on Twitter for breaking news.
If Facebook and Bing's integration evolves the way it has been implied, such as the 2012 August 30 announcement of the latter enabling searches of photos hosted in the former, Google would find it natural to mine Google+ data to enhance personalized results. Indeed, searching for my name on Google (in an incognito browser session) has started to yield my publicly uploaded photos to my Google+ accounts.
Speaking of social signals and Google, their Android OS received an influential vote of confidence from former Apple evangelist and current author of a free e-guide to Google+, +Guy Kawasaki. I'll be looking through this publication with interest and trying out more of the Google+ features.
In the meantime, I notice that I'm only prompted to share a new post via Google+ if immediately publishing. I'm hoping that time delayed G+ shares/posts (such as are available for Twitter) will become possible eventually.

Three Tips on Time Management

A little over fourteen months ago I'd posted the predecessor to this post, where I touched upon the concept of multitasking. Now, over three months since my last post, I find myself on vacation, and finally able (and willing) to return my attention to this blog.
I recently read a discussion by friends that mentioned that "the days are long, but the years are short". I've certainly found this to be the case also, for the client-facing work I've been involved with since August of last year.
There are advantages to being obsessive, focused, and absorbed in any activity, I believe, but there are also unavoidable detractors, such as needing to use a timer or other externalized tooling to ensure that less engrossing tasks involved in daily living are still accomplished as required.

So, here are three tips to avoid ending up like that (altogether uncomfortably identifiable) XKCD character.

1. Learn to accurately estimate task duration and effort.

As the XKCD comic mentions, building a schedule can be useful to structure one's day, week, or project. However, I also posit that an accurate ability to estimate the effort and time every task can be expected to be required to create an effective timetable.

2. When prioritizing tasks, pick your battles.

Another indispensable skill concerns correctly prioritizing one's to-do list. This I consider as an essential pre-requisite to creating schedules that can be followed, regardless of the desire (or lack thereof) to do so. There are hard deadlines, softer (more negotiable) ones, and "nice to have"s. Identify them first.

3. Make yourself a priority.

Building in breaks, meals, and contrasting activities to break up the day can contribute to successfully adhering to any schedule. This clearly involves self-awareness and learning one's proclivities from experience. Should one take a sugar boost in mid-afternoon to offset the lull of digesting a lunch? Is one most productive first thing in the morning, or late afternoon?

As a child, I thrived on routine, although by external perspectives my parents created a household that was completely enslaved to our (self-imposed) schedule. While now I enjoy heretofore unknown levels of flexibility with my work-week, I'd like to reassess all of my priorities this year's end. Part of the 2013 planning will hopefully include ensuring that I resume blogging more regularly!

Caveat googlers?

Courtesy of article from getlisted.org, circa 2010

Google has enjoyed mainstream use as a verb, in English and Japanese ("ググる"). Furthermore, if Wikipedia is to be believed, people "google" things in Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. However, a quick look at any of Google's portals shows that the company offers much, much more. Combining its various services with the perceived bias for presenting content with close allegations has led to my finding a recent article by Danny Sullivan. There he, in a nutshell, decries his company's having crossed an arbitrary line of what search engines are "expected" to do - objectively point to online content - and what it now (and increasingly) does: provide a biased subset of content that aligns with its business model. I'd found Mr. Sullivan's op/ed via an article posted to TechCrunch, which caught my eye due to its title: "Why we may no longer be able to trust Google".
This was a strange statement to me - Google has never been, to my knowledge, a non-profit or public sector service. Many of Google's offerings have evolved in order to compete against other private sector corporations such as, notably, Microsoft (which had its own news outlet, MSNBC, about 13 years before they unveiled Bing, their search engine).
For this reason, I have never trusted Google any more than I felt comfortable trusting Microsoft, Yahoo!, Lycos, or any of the myriad of other search engine providers that have had their moments in the proverbial sun since the advent of the internet age. I expected each of these companies to have inherent biases in what the present. And as I have thought of mentioning before, I chose Blogger as my hosting site in large part because Google owns it, with the expectation that it would initially give me a slight edge in Google organic results over, say, Wordpress even if my content (read: site and page-specific SEO efforts) were exactly the same.
The fact that Google has branched out to acquire so many data sources, such as Zagat and Frommer's reviews as mentioned by Mr. Sullivan, didn't surprise me either. It's quite understandable that Google may believe that these historically credible sources of information will become popular with its users, thus encouraging widespread adoption of their location based search (now known as Google Plus Local). I believe that's fodder for another blog post, however.

In any case, here is my stance regarding the trustworthiness of search engine services, summarized:

• The major search engines come from private sector companies, and do not have to conform to any idealized view of what search engines may be "expected" to deliver.
• Since their objectives include running a profitable business, they will have inherent biases, which are likely not just to appear via paid advertisements, but in their organic results as well.
• Their users would benefit from being aware of and accounting for said biases when conducting searches. 

If you're afraid of what you share on SNSs being exploited by the services themselves (e.g. Facebook or Twitter in targeting ads to you) or by prospective employers/schools/nosy acquaintances etc. performing background checks on you via said search engines, then control what you share, every time and via every service that you use.
In the meantime, my persistent advice for content creators - and if you're active on an SNS, you are one regardless of whether you realize it or not - is this: so long as you focus on creating high quality content, judiciously use social media to spread awareness of said content, and refrain from using disreputable (underhanded) techniques, your web presence should (eventually) rank reasonably well for your targeted keywords, even if unseating Wikipedia is but a dream. Certainly, I was pleased to see today that this blog is returned first in Ask.com.