Tag Archives: Google

Guest Posting Etiquette & Policy

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Please bear with me for another general announcement. So, I’ve been caught a bit unprepared without establishing a guest posting guideline for myself. I’m rectifying this situation now as well as putting out an FYI on commonly known and accepted guest posting best practices. If anyone is interested in guest posting here (yeah, not everyone at once now!), or even anywhere else, then please refer to the following criteria (see Critical Guest Blogging Do’s and Don’ts for the information in its entirety):

First, the do’s:

  • Read and follow the guidelines of the host blog
  • Write as if you were writing for your own blog
  • After your post is published, return to check for and respond to comments
  • Make sure your post fits well with the audience of the host blog
  • Give every courtesy and consideration to the host blogger / editor

Now the don’ts:

Sometimes it’s impossible to avoid every single faux pas out there, but if you follow the advice of this post you’re already ahead of the game with this list of things to avoid doing as a part of your guest blogging strategy.

  • Plagiarize / duplicate content from other authors
  • Write about a generic or over-used topic
  • Neglect basic formatting, spelling, or grammar
  • Contact any and every blog that might possibly publish your content
  • Add unnecessary links
  • Act unprofessionally if your post is rejected
  • Use low-quality /spun content
  • Submit content that you have already published elsewhere

Again, some fairly common sense advice here, but it is all very important to remember so it bears repeating. Behaving like a professional, courteous person is going to take you a long way in the world of internet marketing. Host blogs don’t have to take your content, and you are not always doing them a favor by giving them your content to publish.

Read more: http://www.rankpop.com/critical-guest-blogging-dos-and-donts/#ixzz2Ng6COaIK
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Some other biggies from Etiquette In Guest Blogging – The Most Complete Guide; don’t:

  • Promote yourself or your products inside the article content. This makes you looks like a sales person who is trying to get anything you want without giving first, which is a very bad impression in the blogosphere.
  • Link to affiliate site of yours. How do you feel when someone put an affiliate link in his comment to your blog? If you feel it’s unacceptable, do not put affiliate links into your guest blog content.

Finally, my word of advice is to look around at what has already been posted at the blog that you are considering guest posting on to see if what you plan to contribute is more or less along the lines of what is already there. Upon doing so, you should be able to get an idea of what would remarkably diverge from that and then check with the host blogger/editor to see if the proposed content sounds alright. It’s a lot like being over at someone else’s house. Make yourself at home but don’t make yourself too at home!

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Independent Thinkers Need Not Apply

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Creativity

Creativity (Photo credit: Mediocre2010)



An issue recently came up with regard to describing oneself as an “independent thinker” on one’s resumé. One of my contacts in Human Resources advised me that this is generally construed as someone who doesn’t follow directions or is resistant to feedback from a supervisor. (I’m guessing that synonyms such as “autonomous” aren’t any better.) However, wherever I look, I see organizations that are interested in innovation as a matter of survival in today’s hyper-competitive world. Hence, I also keep seeing demand for workers who can contribute a fresh outlook and think creatively.

Let’s examine the definition of creativity here. I agree with this one from Dictionary.com: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination. More? According to Robert J. Sternberg¹:

A focus on the nature of the creative person considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behavior and so on. A focus on place considers the circumstances in which creativity flourishes, such as degrees of autonomy, access to resources and the nature of gatekeepers. Creative lifestyles are characterized by nonconforming attitudes and behaviors as well as flexibility.

Or how about this?

Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals (Strenberg, R.J. & Lubart, T. I. 1999)².

As far as I can tell, creativity requires independent thinking. This is part of the package. To want an employee who can contribute creative ideas but yet be amenable to micromanagement seems contradictory to me. It makes as much sense as saying, “I want a man who’s assertive and takes charge but acquiesces to my demands!” Uhh, hello?!

So here’s my burning question: Just how much creativity do managers hope to eke out of someone who prefers to be told what to do? Humor me, please?!

I know I can just state that I am a “creative thinker” instead but, somewhere along the way, someone is going to be frustrated that I’m an independent thinker as well. Oh snap! How did THAT happen! For the most part people realize that, when we are talking about romantic relationships, the very same trait that is attractive is also, at some point, the source of conflict. If you want the benefits, you also have to accept the drawbacks. That said, there is always a certain amount of compromise for anyone entering into a relationship with an employer as an employee as well. However, if organizational leaders wish to maximize benefits from employing creative individuals then the necessary conditions to unleash all of their potential must be created as well. By allowing greater autonomy for high-performance, innovative workers, organizational leaders and managers will enjoy greater results.

Organizations such as Google have figured this out. When will hiring managers of many other organizations seeking to innovate learn to accept this common wisdom? It is my hope that, as organizational survival demands the types of skills that technology cannot, at this time, replicate (such as creativity) that hiring managers will learn to embrace the whole creative person.

¹Sternberg, Robert J. (2009). Jaime A. Perkins, Dan Moneypenny, Wilson Co. ed. Cognitive Psychology. CENGAGE Learning. p. 468.

² Sternberg, R. J.; Lubart, T. I. (1999). “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms”. In ed. Sternberg, R. J.. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.

They need to see you there to know that you are working… Not!

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Any knowledge workers here ever pretend to work? Perhaps you’ve squinted your eyes to feign concentration as you gaze at that document you’re working on and, all the while, thought about what you’re going to have for dinner. People around you just tended to assume you’re working right? If pretending to work is new to you, head on over to Google and search “how to pretend to work” or “how to look busy at work” and you will find that some people have it down to a science. How did we ever get here? You can gain an understanding about the problem of measuring knowledge work productivity by reading GSA Enterprise Transformation’s Knowledge Worker Productivity: Challenges, Issues, Solutions (click to download).  As of the year 2011, the author explains (pp. 2-3):

… there is little movement in the research or application field of how to measure knowledge worker productivity and from there improve it. This gap arises partly because knowledge work is intangible and difficult to categorize in subgroups and partly because the existing productivity measures and performance review systems are rooted in ‘machine age’ organizations that are much more product and service oriented.

So, for example, it is easy to quantitatively measure the number of cookies that are boxed on a production line by a particular worker, or whether salespeople meet their sales targets, and in many of these instances the objective quantitative measure can be backed up by a subjective quantitative measure for example customer satisfaction scores.

It is much less easy to measure productivity that may have a quantitative output but which depends on knowledge worker input – a policy paper is a case in point. In this instance the process for getting to the policy paper is not reliably measurable in quantitative terms. It would be difficult to know whether a policy paper that took ten weeks to write was ‘better’ that[sic] one that took five weeks to write because the speed of the writing depends on the skills, knowledge, and experience of the writer.

… Looking for organizational best practice in measuring knowledge worker productivity does not yield much. There are surprisingly few studies on measuring productivity in the administrative knowledge-intensive services of large public organizations.

When I first encountered this paper I was shocked and outraged at how little has been accomplished to establish appropriate protocol for accurately assessing knowledge worker productivity. The next time I heard the words, “They need to see you there to know that you are working,” I responded, “During all my years of post-secondary schooling I’ve gone home from class without any professors coming home with me to make sure I’m working on my assignments. I’ve completed my assignments on my own, turned them in, and earned my A’s. Why does someone now need to see me in order to know that I’m working?” A long pause followed, and then he answered, “I don’t know.” Why indeed?

That’s not all. Allow me to also draw your attention to their findings on manager effectiveness (p. 4):

Managers who do not have the capability to performance manage remote workers are not likely to have the capability to performance manage on-site workers. Indeed, as the graphic [on page 4] shows manager effectiveness at performance review delivery is, across the board, rather weak.

What this means is that a manager who is not able to measure performance by results (which management of remote workers demands) will similarly not be able to objectively assess the performance of on-site employees. In this case, such managers rely upon subjective interpretations of what it means to be working (e.g., arriving to work on time and not leaving until the work-shift has ended). Thoughts on any of this?

See my follow-up post, A Looking Busy Coach! Plus, Who Pretends to Work and Why?.