10 Things You Must Do to Succeed in the Web Economy

In the past, being a good organizational man or woman was key to career success: obey your boss, respect the hierarchy, and put in your face time. The web changes everything, including what you need to do to succeed.

1. Reach out beyond yourself. Much was made of the news that people like to hang out with people like themselves (homophily), but less has been said about how useful it is to reach beyond your comfortable social sphere. Let’s call that heterophily for love of the different. Sociological and management research indicates that reaching across social clusters — from the ones you feel most comfortable in into different ones — is key to innovation and productivity.

2. Use multi-channel communications effectively. Go beyond email for communicating with colleagues and for creating new relationships. Effective web workers use instant messaging, text messaging, Twitter, blogging, wikis, VoIP, video conferencing, and web conferences.

Despite books and blog posts on the subject, there aren’t firm rules of etiquette about how to use these new channels. But you can watch carefully how people react to your communications — have you annoyed people by instant messaging, did you screw something up with email, do you need to improve your teleconferencing technique? Then modify accordingly.

3. Learn to write. True, podcasting and vlogging are gaining adherents. Video conferencing should take off now that most PCs come with built-in cameras. But text still rules on the web, whether it be email or blogging or wikis or instant messaging.

Not confident in your writing skills? Listen to the Grammar Girl podcast. Read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Blog, so you’ll get regular practice. And get to the point. Some channels are more forgiving than others of rambling communiqués, but your readers and colleagues will appreciate brevity and clarity in your writing.

4. Understand HTML and CSS. We’re moving from the desktop publishing era into the web publishing era. There’s no excuse these days for not understanding how HTML and CSS work together to separate your content and styling and then bring them together at just the right moment. On a wiki, you might use a wiki markup language, but the idea behind it is the same. It’s much more important on the web to know how to use markup languages than to understand how to format an MS Word document.

5. Get your mind around search. You need to learn to search effectively — using Google, in your email, other people’s bookmarks, and so forth — but you also need to know how search engines work and have some understanding of basic search engine optimization concepts. You need to know how to find what you want and ensure people find you and your work too.

6. Experiment. As a relatively new frontier for work, it’s not always obvious what you should do to achieve your goals in web work. Don’t hesitate to try something new, take some risks, then step back and see what happens. The web gives you a ton of feedback about how you’re doing with your online work, whether in the form of emails from potential new customers or stats for your website. You can take what you’ve learned and experiment some more.

UC Berkeley psychologist and self-experimentation maven Seth Roberts suggests that really useful discoveries almost always come about by accident — and he describes how self-experimentation can lead to this kind of discovery. He’s mainly focused on psychological experimentation, but you can do the same kind of self-experimentation on your career.

7. Question conventional wisdom. Is surfing the web unproductive? Do you need to work long hours to show your commitment to work? Should you keep your personal life and activities hidden from colleagues? Perhaps not. While of course you’re not going to want to toss out all the old rules just because they’re old, you should be willing to reconsider what you thought was true.

8. Manage RSS feeds. You need to be able to produce them for your own website or blog and you need to manage your consumption of them so that you get good information from the web without letting it overwhelm you. If you’re a Google Reader user, try these tips from lifehack.org to make your news reading more effective and productive.

9. Recognize good ideas. It’s just as important as having your own good ideas. We’re living in a wonderful soup of inspiration and innovation, but the person who thinks up something brilliant might not be the one who can successfully promote that idea or make it into a viable business. Human beings love to copy — and for good reason. It’s the basis of our reproductive success and it’s more efficient than each one of us trying to come up with good stuff on our own.

10. Show courage. It’s not always pleasant to leave comfortable old ways of working behind, to try new things in full view of the Internet, to experiment knowing you are very likely to fail a number of times before you succeed (and fail again after too). The web rewards bravery, so put yourself out there anyway.

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