Go Go Giant Squid Hopefuls

For those of us who are working on become Giant Squids one day, there are few new incentives to get those first 50 lenses published, polished and promoted. Being a Giant is about more than just having 50 lenses, and the standards get higher with each new batch. To qualify, your lenses have to be pretty good (if not great), and be “performing well.” Hopefully, they’re getting some traffic at the very least!

The first carrot-on-a-stick that the Squidteam is offering is the new Purple Star. We’ve been waiting for it for a long time, and Giant Squids are now seeing the benefits of this fun new recognition system. Lensmasters who want a purple star on their best and brightest need to first become Giant Squids, and then submit their lenses in the same fashion as the Lens of the Day.
To learn more, check out the Purple Star rundown by bdkz.

Perhaps the most interesting motivation for the next Giant Squid casting call is the Giant Squid Challenge 2009. Some of our favorite lensmasters and greeters are gathering up this season’s hopefuls for a mad dash to Giant Squidom. It is also open to current Giants who are working towards Club 100.

Check out So You Want to Be a Giant Squid? To learn more about the teams. If you think you’re up to the challenge, applications will only be accepted until April 31st. After that, it’s time to start creating fabulous new lenses for your chosen team!

Good luck to everyone!

A Guide to SquidooGroups Changes: Part Two

Many Squidoo groups have been disbanded in the last few days, indicating that many groupmasters don’t feel up to the challenge of making their groups great. Although it us unfortunate to see many of them go, it does free up the URLs, and new lensmasters will be able to use them once SquidooGroups open up for creation again.

In the meantime, many of us are rising to the occasion and polishing up our groups to meet the new standards. I personally find the challenge refreshing, and I’m looking at my own groups in a totally new light. Just as no lens is ever complete or perfect, groups need a lot of attention if they are to be successful.

If you’re not ready to close or transfer any of your own Squidoo groups, make sure you read up on the new guidelines from “Making Groups Great: Do you have what it takes?”. There is also a handy list of things that the SquidTeam will be looking for when reviewing groups, and what they hope not to see.

Here are the highlights from “Seven ways to make your Groups rock“:

1. Make your group HQ pretty.

There are plenty of ways to improve the appearance of any Squidoo group beyond that of the default HQ page. Though there aren’t very many modules to choose from, most of them do have description areas that you can use to display interesting pictures that will enhance your group’s front page.

You can use your own photos or scanned artwork, and of course there’s AllPosters.com links. And the internet is swimming with all kinds of free clip art as well.

Many lensmasters are also very generous with their images, and offer up plenty of great pictures especially for use on Squidoo. Check out Free Spacers and Fillers and Borders and Dividers for Use on Squidoo for some examples, and links to other great clip art lenses. (Please remember to give credit and link back to your sources. You can do this with a featured lens module, or with a hyperlink at the bottom of your lens.)

If pictures aren’t your thing, or you want to do a little bit more, try using some fancy CSS Tricks. To make a group even more impressive, combine your favorite CSS with the amazing palette of colors on HTML Tips for Color. For some pre-made module titles and more, grab yourself some Lens Candy.

2. Define the focus of your group.

Groups need to be about more than just the basic Squidoo category. Instead of a “Travel Group”, we need to have a “European Destinations Group” and an “RV Vacations Group”. The more specific your topic - and therefore collection of lenses - is, the more potential you have for visits, clickouts and return traffic. Why be the whole phone book when you can be the dog-eared restaurant guide?

When starting a new group, it’s a good idea to use one of your own lenses as a jumping off point. Start groups about topics that you are interested in. This will help you define your group’s area of expertise.

To fix a group that is too broad, try taking a look at the top five or top ten lenses in your group. What are they about? Check out the primary tags for each of them. Is there one that is used more than any other? Use that tag to set the main topic for your group.

For instance, in the top 100 list of an incredibly large group dedicated simply to music, more than half of the top ten lenses have the word ‘songs’ in the title. This groupmaster could redefine his or her group by changing the topic to ‘songs and lyrics’.

If you change the subject of your group, you will inevitably have to let some lenses go. But that’s okay! That’s what the SquidTeam wants you to do.

3. Go ahead. Fire people. We dare you.

See?

Being a good groupmaster is a tough job. Although the small power trip one can get from rejecting lenses that don’t meet guidelines can be fun, it’s much nicer to be able to thank a lensmaster for their wonderful submission. Booting lenses altogether is hard to do. Luckily, the SquidTeam is backing us up on this one, so we don’t have to worry quite as much about offending others.

If you’re removing lenses because you’ve narrowed your group’s focus, you could write a generic message and send it to those lensmasters who’s lenses will be removed. If your group is huge and you’re firing a lot of people, just post it on your HG page and hope for the best.

There are other reasons why you may want to remove a lens from your group. Perhaps the quality of content has dropped, links are broken and it hasn’t been updated in months. Maybe the lensmaster is MIA, since they have not made anything new or done anything to their profile page since you added them to the group last year.

To keep a good group going strong, take some time now and then to weed out lenses that don’t contribute to the quality of your content.

4. Give lensmasters something to talk about.

Of the small selection of modules available from group pages, most of them are interaction modules like the guestbook and plexos. These tools are there to make your groups more than just a place for people to dump their lenses and get a visit from you.

Amazon Voting Plexo - Find some Amazon products that are directly related to your topic. Ask your visitors to vote for the ones they recommend. Remember to keep plexos items down to a minimum. Huge plexos aren’t flattering to groups or lenses.

Group Discussion - This is just like the guestbook module on lenses. You can have a comments section for members and visitors, and you can also use it to get tips or ask questions. Ask your visitors to leave their opinion on your group subject. If your group is about gardening, ask your readers to leave a tip for growing their favorite plants.

Link Plexo - These can be used to feature your group’s lenses - giving them a nice backlink - or you can ask visitors to share their favorite links related to your group topic. There’s nothing worse than a link plexos with totally irrelevant or spammy links, so make sure that you police your list. This will make sure that you’re providing a good resource for your visitors.

Poll Module - The possibilities are endless - ask a question, compare items, get feedback. Remember to always provide options for readers who are neutral, such as “Maybe” “Sometimes” “I don’t know” or “None of the above”. This will make sure that each visitor has a chance to interact with your page, which is great for lens rank.

Text List Plexo - There are plenty of ways to use this module to enhance the value of your group. Make a list of tips that your members can vote on or add to, or create a wish list for lens ideas.

5. Show off your best faces.

What’s the point of joining a group if your lens is just going to get lost in the crowd?

Use the featured lenses and links plexos modules to display some or all of the lenses in your group. If you’re visiting groups before approving them anyway, it takes only a few seconds to copy the URL and add it to your group page.

By breaking your group’s lenses down into categories, and displaying them in the appropriate section, you help your visitors find what they’re looking for. To see this method in action, check out the Family Time Group. If you're using categories, you should also know how to create a group table of contents.

There are also some modules for showing off your very best group members.

6. Keep it current.

You wouldn’t let your lenses go stale, so why neglect your groups?

The easiest way to keep a group fresh is to add new lenses to your feature modules when they are accepted. You could also change the lens picture once in awhile, add a poll, or write an article or blurb to enhance your content. Keep your page looking new with an RSS feed to a related blog (though new posts don’t count as updates).

7. You’re responsible for your members.

If you’re displaying lenses by someone whose conduct leaves something to be desired, it makes your whole group look bad. Set up some guidelines for lensmasters, not just lenses. Many groups require that lensmasters show some activity in the Squidoo community before being accepted.

Before approving a lens, check out the lensmaster’s profile. Look at how long they’ve been a Squidoo member, and how many fields they have filled out on their profile. Do they have contact enabled? Have they uploaded a picture and written a blurb about themselves? Do they have 10 lenses about acai berries or other spam bait?

Remember that your group is only as good as it’s members. Try thinking of yourself as an employer interviewing applicants for a job. Don’t hire people who don’t have the same ideals that you do. Try to encourage your members - and rejected applicants, too - to be active Squids with quality lenses that improve Squidoo.com as a whole. That’s what SquidooGroups is all about.

Join the Squid Police

Here is some food for thought: Is "Squidoo" A Dirty Word?

It may not be just yet, but it is starting to feel that way. Anyone who tries to use StumbleUpon, Mixx, or Digg to promote their work on Squidoo may already be feeling the burn of everyone else's bad karma.

A lot of the bad feelings are still lingering from Squidoo's first taste of Spam, and subsequent incidents of bad usership. Far too many people have come to think of Squidoo as a place for spam and irrelevant content.

And who can blame them? What if every time you searched for information via Google or Yahoo, you had to sift through dozens of pages of "Great Stuff on Amazon!", without finding the answer to your question? I know it bugs me when I'm looking for lensroll content, and that's all I find. It must be equally annoying for non-Squids who are trying to write book reports or learn new skills.

So what can we do about it? Bad behavior should be reported whenever it violates the Squidoo Terms of Use. Don't be shy. If you truly believe that a lensmaster is not on the up-and-up, it couldn't hurt for someone at HQ to check in on their activities. This way, we can help weed out those lensmasters that are making the rest of us look bad.

SquidU - School or Cafe?

Well, I took Party Animal's advice, and stopped by SquidU for the first time in a while. I browsed through the Critique Me section for a bit. A lot of the lenses looking for input were quite religious, and I don't trust myself to give a proper review of them. I had to pass those by, but I did find a few gems.
My favorite was "How to Set Up a Snake Cage", something I wish I had read when I was snake-sitting for a friend a few years back. The lensmaster, RoundTrip, has written a lot of great tips and advice for snake owners. I was very impressed with the way he presented his Amazon modules. Instead of feeling like I was being sold something, I felt like I was being shown my options, should I ever decide to keep a pet snake.
A badly put together lens can feel like a high pressure retail shop. You can just tell that the staff are desperate to make a sale, and you can't enjoy shopping while they pester you with suggestions. I couldn't stand trying to sell things to people when I worked in retail, because I like to assume that people are generally smart, and I always felt like they were on to me. This feeling has followed me to Squidoo - I don't even list prices on my Amazon/eBay modules. So when I read something that seems to use Amazon like an image picker, not a sales pitch, I really appreciate it. RoundTrip did a great job of this - I learned something from every part of the lens.

On another note, I was pleased to discover that my latest lens Movie Classics: Hallowe'en Marathon was accepted into the group Horror Movies Central. I came across this excellent film group while looking for a home for Hallowe'en Marathon, but I hesitated to join. It's a pretty serious horror fan group, and I wasn't sure if my review of The Great Pumpkin would be a turn off. It turns out that not only did the group master like my lens, but thought it should be featured as the group lens of the week! It just goes to show that taking a chance can certainly pay off! After all, it's just the internet. Getting denied for a group request isn't nearly as terrible as bombing at karaoke or a job interview, is it? As a huge zombie lover, I'm thrilled to be a member of HMC - there's a lot of great lenses there for fright fans.

Mind Your Manners

Today I was reading a new Squidoo blog - Squidoo Land - and found some great links to lens sharing places online. So I went to check out Lensroll.com and saw a lens entitled "Be a Good Squid". I thought that sounded pretty interesting, and so it was. The lensmaster - The_Party_Animal - has some pretty good tips on being an active member of the Squidoo community. Party Animal discusses the importance of responding to positive Guestbook feedback by visiting posters' lenses, and nominating things you like for Lens of the Day. I think I found my next pick, anyway!

The most ingenious part is the "One Hand Washes the Other" plexo, where lensmasters can leave their most visit-needy lens, assuming they will visit the last posted link as well. Naturally, I had to jump on board for that. Even before joining Squidoo, I was quite fond of 'telephone' or relay style games via web forums. It's interesting to see what happens when people participate in a chain-link activity. It's like chain letters, but without all the guilt and postage.

Well, I'm happy to say that I already do 99% of the "Squid Manners" - I guess it is about time I stopped by SquidU. I do love stumbling across Squidoo gems.