Today’s Technology Tools and Social Media for Growing Business was the title, and this session was the last one for Tech Fair, and the Panelists and their company names form an impressive lineup:

Doug Whatley – Human Capital Consultant, moderator

• Scott Ingram – Sales Director, Bazaarvoice / Founder, Network-In-Austin
• Julie Niehoff – ConstantContact
• Dave Evans – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• David Armistead – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• Britton Manasco – Manasco Marketing Partners

After a development manager from Paypal gave a great inspirational talk about how the inflection point for electricity’s usefulness came after an electrical washing machine was invented, bringing the outlet from the ceiling to the wall, Doug Whatley introduced the panelists. Each panelist talked briefly about their perspectives on social business. Here are some notes from the valuable session with interesting insights. I mostly wrote down quotes that I found insightful or that offered a perspective I hadn’t heard.

Britton sums up the social technologies that enable businesses to get work done with a simple phrase: Guidance imperative – the ability to provide expertise, advice, coaching, to be a trusted authority and advisor in the marketplace. He says, social media outlets amplify our ability as authorities – helps us personally brand ourselves. Helps us target and reach prospects.

David Armistead says his perspective is that the C-suite is grid locked on what social media is and what it can do. He typically explains it as, social tech does 2 things well – lower cost of communication and lower cost of coordination. There’s a lot of work to do in comprehending the change and effecting the change – transforming the way we work. No piece of the org will not be affected. We are not “messaging’ any longer, taking a known message through the structures in place – we’re talking.

Dave Evans has been working with groups in Argentina, Netherlands, US and Canada. He observes that 15-45-year olds are doing the SAME things with social tech across all four countries. The other countries just need time to catch up. For example, in India, the 3G spectrum bidding has started, and will enable much more mobile technology. Dave also sees opportunities for businesses monitoring the Social Graph – using TweetDeck and BuzzStream in combination he can monitor microscopic conversations.

One example of business tie-ins with people’s social graph – Social Web Strategies uses the LinkedIn API to build a specific landing page on the 2020 social site that shows C-level people who visits their site a page that shows anyone in their 1st tier who has used their social site. He said later that this is their highest converting landing page. This is B2B lead generation, folks.

Dave also says, this shift affects the whole organization – not just marketing. His example – marketing can’t possibly respond directly to comparison of carbon footprint of products. Basically, consumers can take out their smart phone and scan the barcodes of products while shopping to find out carbon foot print and make your purchasing decision based on the data. That type of decision isn’t made due to marketing or sales team’s efforts.

And next, Julie Niehoff, a development manager at Constant Contact, spoke on her perspective as an email marketing and list segmentation provider. They also acquired Nutshell mail this week, which caused a bit of excitement in the room. She reminds us all that you need a strategy first. Know what your objective is, try and test, then stop doing that when it doesn’t pay off. Loved hearing this as it validates my thoughts in this area. She said, always test just 10-20% of people on your list to try something new – don’t make them all dislike a new method or approach. Later she asked, “Can you segment your lists based on ‘raving fan/brand ambassador’ vs ‘kinda maybe’ vs ‘never gonna’? Do it. Treat brand ambassadors well.”

Another speaker noted that the gaming generation has gained a lot from the mentality that it’s always okay to hit reset and restart.

Where technology turnover is higher, adoption rates are higher. The pay offs are doing business faster, easier, or cheaper.

Scott Ingram spoke from BazaarVoice’s viewpoint, where one of their clients, Sephora, garners lots of reviews, such as 17,000 reviews on a base foundation. Goodness. He noted that people are starting to “live’ in Facebook. One of their customers has 20% of traffic from Facebook. Wow.

I think it was Scott who also said that Twitter is a relationship accelerant. It allows you to stage when you personally and physically interact with others. For example, sales people don’t get on planes until they know what people are looking for. Julie noted that there are also tools that actually mask the relationship – ratings and reviews set the rhythm of the relationship, but you can screw it up with the wrong copy.

The panel session had a question about privacy as the last question, though I think discussion continued after I departed. I liked David Armistead’s assertion that we mostly format questions around privacy when what we need to discuss is security. Julie had good points that there are laws around data collection and privacy policies and companies need to be governed accordingly. She also noted that as individuals we personally need to draw our own points of privacy in what we share online, read the policies before sharing info, and prevent certain connections in order to prevent correlation of data for those people under 13, for example.

What a great session – I could tell many people in the room were learning, taking notes, and nodding in agreement. Thanks to Matt Genovese for starting Door64, to Paypal for sponsoring the session, and to the presenters for sharing their valuable insights.

I did it! I passed and received my individual qualification (IQ) for Google Analytics. Hurray! And Whew!

The site offers a way to look up people who have passed their IQ test so you can verify if someone has it (here’s mine). I wouldn’t call myself an expert yet, since I think expertise comes with more and more experience. The test itself had well-worded questions, and you need 80% correct out of 70 questions.

I got 81% correct (hence, the whew). I double-checked all my answers, and if I didn’t know an answer for certain, I looked up information either in the Conversion University site or the Google Analytics help site.

With 90 minutes to take the test, my look-up-to-verify method would not have worked for all the questions, and I had to be quite familiar with the University lessons in order to verify what I needed quickly. I wish I could find out more about my incorrect answers. Apparently I need to work more on ecommerce, which makes sense since I’ve never run an ecommerce site so I don’t have hands-on experience with one.

Why pay for an individual qualification? Avinish Kaushik has an excellent post where he says for every $100 you invest in web analytics, you should spend $10 on tools and $90 on people with the brain power to think about the results from the tools. So for me, it made sense to test my brain power on a tool, but I realize that each site needs its own analyst behind it to choose the measurements and connect the site to the business.

I had a great talk the other night with a classmate of mine from graduate school, who focused on usability and now works on a web application development team as their user experience designer. He’s Tim Keirnan, and I asked him to explain some of his interview techniques that he uses for his Design Critique podcast. I also got great snippets about his user interviews.

I just marveled at how dedicated he is at getting user information, no matter what the situation. Just acquired a company in an eastern European country? No worries, set up a remote meeting where you can view the user’s desktop. Think your users don’t know what they need in their daily workflow? Ask the right questions with the right context and you’re halfway there at least.

• Don’t ask people to project into the future. For example, asking “What will you do with the Intranet tomorrow?” sound ridiculous if you phrase it that way. Instead, ask about today, this week, this month.

• Don’t ask them anything without having artifacts in front of them to spur discussion, even if you have to use Webex because you can’t travel to their office.
• Do ask users about their daily work.
• Do ask about their last mistake and what they think they could have done to prevent it.

These are just a few notes I jotted down after talking to him. Since most “interview techniques” posts are about job interviews, I wanted to find more user interview techniques. There are eight articles about conducting usability interviews collected on the EServer TC Library. One essay titled Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions on Adaptive Path says to concentrate on immediate experiences, which really hit home with me. At SXSW Interactive, much ado was made about context. And context in interviews – both time and place – can make or break the value of the user research.

I ponder this idea of context as I search for user data on the social web. Perhaps the loudest users are on social media but not a good representative of true users, depending on the product. I’m thinking of the information you can get about job titles, job descriptions, tools used, and so on from a site like LinkedIn or Indeed.com. I described finding your user’s vocabulary previously in a blog post last year. What do you think? Should you emphasize and use the online personas you can build from social media sites, or call that publicly-available information suspect and marginal?

I finally did it, I wrote my first article for the Demand Studios content farm site, eHow. I wasn’t playing the part of a content farmer, though, but rather a farm worker, writing an article for little pay (compared to other rates I have earned as a professional writer).

I signed up for Demand Studios a few months back. There is a company called Pluck here in Austin that was acquired by Demand Media in the spring of 2008. What drew me to them in particular was not only the local connection, but also a fascination with turning search engine optimization on its ear. I first learned of these methods for content creation from this Wired article, The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model. Basically Demand Studios analyzes what phrases are searched for and then enter an article request in their database. There are currently 15,000 articles waiting to be written in their system. The pay for those articles is from $15 to $7.50 or less, and there are some assignments that offer profit sharing based on the numbers of views, apparently.

As a pro writer, I was dead set on following the style guide, knowing that attentiveness to the guidance given is part of the battle in producing good content. In their system, when I “Claimed” the article, it wasn’t immediately apparent which template I would be writing to, which made me a little nervous about attempting it in the first place. After clicking the article to claim it, though, I found that it was the About template. The guidelines were very clear – the About type required five sections with one-word section headers and the first section had to be titled Overview and contain about 75 words. The rest of the sections could contain more than 75 words but at least 50 words were necessary, and overall the article was targeted for 400-500 words. Quite structured.

The web-based authoring forms were easy to use, though it did not include a word count. I found it easier to get word counts in Textpad and then copy/paste the text into each section.

They’ve also very recently introduced an image library that you can search for images, the use of which is encouraged. You could add an image to each of the sections if you wanted. To my poorly trained eye, they seemed adequate but not too glossy, and none of my searches found quite the perfect image, but I included two anyway. They intend to allow people to upload their own photos, which I would have done in a heartbeat as I had one or two that would have been just right.

To my relief, the article I submitted by noon on a week day was approved by early morning the next week day.

It took me about 2.5 hours to write a 500 word article, I’m not proud to admit (or perhaps I should be proud of the quality that comes at that speed?) So my hourly rate for the article was right around $6.00 per hour. At least I didn’t have rewrites (she says sheepishly.)

To reflect back, I did the article because I wanted to see what the authoring system was like, and experience for myself the process of writing in such a system. To be sure, it’s easy to demonize such a system when you’re accustomed to higher pay for content creation. There’s a great interview on ReadWriteWeb by Jay Rosen, who talked with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, and it offers both sides of the issues surrounding content collection and the future of the web. I don’t want to take sides by sharing my experience. I just wanted to collect information based on the writer’s experience.

What do you think? Are content farms cluttering the web and driving down writer’s pay? Or is there an entrepreneurial opportunity here that offers a low barrier to entry for content creators any where to earn pay for  populating the web with content that’s already being searched for?

One of my readers asked for a post about cloud computing. I went straight to my in-Austin expert, Ynema Mangum, and she exceeded my expectations by writing the post! This is a guest post by Ynema Mangum, architect at Hewlett-Packard. She contributed information about web metrics to my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. She’s working on a chapter for the upcoming book Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms. I’ll post a second guest post from Ynema next week.

Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift from traditional IT rooted in heavy process and technology-centric management to agile processes and service-centric management. This shift converges with Web 2.0 and distributed application design, resulting in democratized computing and an economic revolution — where the developer can deploy enterprise grade applications and user services without having to pay the capital expense for the underlying IT infrastructure. It represents a radical change and requires a culture shift for IT when building a private cloud.

Today, confusion exists about exactly what cloud is as well as how it compares to current IT methods and technologies. Clearing the air is the first order of business.

Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

The public cloud model has is vastly different from the private cloud, creating a chasm in their connection. The current expectation for public cloud infrastructure and platform services is the ability to provision compute, storage, database and networking resources in a few minutes, completely online without establishing an agreement or talking to a person.

Private cloud computing has different challenges for the service provider, but often is faced with the same expectations. Regulatory compliance, security, and privacy are just the icing on the cake. The concern that seems most often forgotten in comparing public and private cloud models is quality and compliance of data.

Public cloud providers, in general, do not care what type of application or data you throw on the cloud. Compare that with an enterprise private cloud, where IT not only owns the performance and availability of the organizational assets, but also has responsibility for ensuring that business assets are used in the proper manner. Applications that are developed and deployed on a private cloud need to go through a series of quick checks before they can be cleared in order to prevent misuse of company assets or the risk of retrofit and ground-up redesign of applications developed outside of IT.

There is an ongoing challenge in enterprises today to segment cloud service offerings, architectures and buyer types into useful, focused categories for strategic planning, according to Frank Gillett of Forrester. For public cloud service providers, two IaaS market categories have emerged, the software Platform as a Service (PaaS) and virtual Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that differ by level of infrastructure service and abstraction offered.

For private clouds, there are two types of compute clouds, server clouds and scale-out clouds.

• Server clouds are built for the traditional needs of the business applications, catalyzed by x86 server virtualization and adding self service provisioning.
• Scale-out clouds are designed for massive, highly distributed applications.

Virtualization vs. Cloud

Virtualization and cloud computing have much in common, including phrase overuse and hype, resulting in a lack of understanding of both. Cloud computing does not equal virtualization, but does use abstraction as a common element in each layer of the cloud. In fact, the most distinct differences between the two terms seem to be in the areas of abstraction and IT maturity.

Virtualization is datacenter-centric and technology-centric, while cloud computing is service and user-centric. Memory, desktops, applications, storage, applications, platforms, and servers can be virtualized, or abstracted from the underlying technology. Cloud computing can use or not use virtualization in its architecture.

Typically, the virtualization referred to for use in cloud computing is operating-system virtualization, where multiple virtualized machines can run on a physical server, secure and isolated from one another. These VMs provide benefits in that they can be provisioned without requesting physical hardware, changed, moved, controlled, terminated, and configured more easily than a physical machine. This results in greater efficiencies and productivity in IT, and also increases agility for the services developed and deployed on these VMs.

Beyond this layer of virtualization, cloud computing adds platforms, agile processes, and services for developers, providing value far beyond virtualization.

Utility Computing vs. Cloud

Utility computing is a business or economic model, whereas cloud computing is about technology and process architecture. Utility computing allows users to receive computing resources and “pay by consumption”. Cloud computing is a much broader concept, taking into consideration the underlying architecture and actual services delivered.

Consumer users have been reaping the benefits of the utility model in cloud computing for years — at the application as a service level. It is developers and IT who are using cloud computing in a transformative way now. IaaS and PaaS allows them to develop, test, deploy and run apps that can scale on enterprise grade technology, all without having to pay the capital expense for the underlying infrastructure. This is creating a new cloud economy and truly represents the democratization of computing.

I appreciated SocialText’s Ross Mayfield describing the various levels of interaction in his One on One interview with Fierce Content Management. The interview reminds me that social context alters behavior and motivations. Think of an intranet situation, where interactions are between bosses, colleagues, direct reports, and coworkers. The goals in this context are to increase productivity and collaboration speed, but corporate culture changes motivations. Then consider the context of an internet site, where interactions and customer relationships can be deepened and enhanced while providing customer service. Contributors to a wiki or any online content management system will certainly vary their behavior in accordance with the offline expectations of them.

I think it was in the book Groundswell that I read a case study where a company brought in a wiki, thinking that Generation Y employees would embrace it. But Generation Y wisely stayed away, because they didn’t have the authority required to make the system work well. Since the higher-ups stayed away from the new system, there was no leading by example, nor was there incentive for the newest, less tenured employees to use the system.

Patrick Davison is a digital artist living in NYC, and he designed the cover for my book. His Ignite talk has a similar theme – considering how your reasons for using a particular site or application (such as Second Life) shapes how you act there. The title is “The Plight of the Digital Chickens” and I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

What are other examples of context shaping online behavior? I’m sure danah boyd has great examples in her papers.

Boy, it must be getting harder and harder to be a web writer. I’m reading Content Strategy for the Web, and the web writer job description is intimidating! The quote that stuck with me talks about the Web Writers Real Job: problem solvers who write well. I do hope this quote describes many technical communicators today.

“The web writer’s mission? Useful, usable content that’s also enjoyable. It’s her job to begin a conversation with the reader that results in mutually beneficial outcomes all around. A problem solved. An article found. A connection made.”

All of these outcomes can be tied to thinking about technical documentation as a conversation starter. My book talks about social media enabling those conversations. Often, though, social distribution is simply the technique, but the web itself is the medium. When writing in that medium, we must be the best writers with the most considerations taken into account while writing. Search engine optimization. Style and voice when writing for the web versus print. Information architecture, organization, and label naming. Maintaining a content inventory. Auditing and editing content. Testing content. Handling workflow, reviews, and deadlines. The list could go on and on.

And here’s the thing. People are not backing down from figuring out a great web strategy despite the challenges, and finding great success. I had a great lunchtime conversation with Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist. He basically mapped technical publications’ typical goals to the personas that help you encourage a conversion. Fascinating! He describes four personas typically used by marketing writers on the web in the blog post, Relate to Four, Connect with Thousands:

Methodical - Probably the first persona to come to mind when talking about traditional technical documentation, perhaps not even all that web-hungry. They want proof, answers, solutions, in an orderly fashion. They’d probably download and read a PDF file if it’s offered.

Competitive - They want information that will make them better, smarter, or cutting-edge. They may be the implementer at a company who will train others in the product you’re documenting, so they’d want scenarios that make them look good.

Humanist - To me, this type of persona, one who looks for relationships and the human element, might be difficult to deliver technical documentation to. They might pick up the phone to call tech support faster than looking up a question online, unless a community is behind the documentation that they can relate to. The humanist may also appreciate case studies that help them relate to a real story.

Spontaneous - They want to know the answer quickly and move on, so scannable headlines and topic authoring with any topic being a potential entry point will probably work well for them.

I’m definitely looking at my web writing in new ways. Not just in terms of deliverables, but also in terms of the content I can deliver to the right audiences, to help them meet their goals.

I haven’t been churning out blog posts for a while due to a crazy birthday party incident. I don’t usually tell personal stories on my blog, but I thought I’d personalize this tale and talk about how grateful I am for how it is turning out!

The order of events went something like this:

Party

Saturday early evening. Arrived at large jumping inflatables party place for a five-year-old’s birthday party. Remarked offhandedly to my husband, “I always get pinkeye after going to these types of places.” Boy was that a premonition.

Got a front-row seat to the beating up of a large Darth Vader piñata with a wooden stick.

On the very last blow, just when the payload fell out of Darth Vader, the piñata bat slipped out the 10-year-old’s hands and hit me in the eye and my son, who was sitting in my lap, in the stomach. Ouch hardly begins to describe the incident!

Ouch

Organized chaos ensued and somehow I managed to bleed on other moms, not on myself. My kids were shook up but fine, the party-goers were ushered to a party room for pizza, and we made arrangements for our children, started icing the cut below my eye, and my husband and I took a trip to the nearest hospital.

Hospital Trips

After it was apparent that no eye doctor was answering to their informal on-call arrangement, I was transported to a teaching hospital about an hour away by ambulance. My husband went home to get our kids to bed, another mom slept on our couch to stay with our kids, and my husband drove to the second hospital an hour away.

The continued evaluations and a CT scan revealed that I had an orbital blowout fracture, a hyphema, a cut requiring two stitches in my upper eyelid, and a cut below my eye that was glued back together. All this from a wooden dowel rod flung about 20 feet!

Recovery

But I’m feeling much better this week and I am so grateful to get my eyesight back that I really don’t care about potential scarring or pirate eye patches. My energy level is still pretty low, which I’m not accustomed to at all. I need to sleep eight hours? What?

Apparently I will slowly regain all my eyesight as the blood in my eye gets filtered out. Day by day it improves and I’m amazed at the way the body heals itself. I’m down from three sets of eyedrops and an eye ointment to one drop at night and a clear plastic eye patch while sleeping to ensure I do not accidentally rub my eye.

Three different emergency department personnel asked if the event was captured on video! I’m pretty sure no one was rolling film or tape, thank goodness.

I got a great pan of brownies and a wonderful hand-made pop-up Get Well card from the stick swinger. He’s recovering from the incident as well and we’re all going to be just fine. Darth Vader is a crumpled mess of cardboard, as it should be. That guy really is evil.

Gratitude and Admiration

I’ve known people in the software industry who work with serious eye issues, and I have an even greater first-hand admiration for their tenacity to stick with such a visual profession.

I do try to learn as much as I can about web accessibility. I’ve participated in AIR Austin‘s accessible web design competitions, judged by Section 508 Guidelines for Web Accessibility. It was quite revealing when we were told to turn off our monitors and try to reserve plane tickets!

Yet I know I can learn more and do more. Keith Soltys has a great blog entry, In the country of the blind, where he talks about not being sighted enough to drive, and gives a great example of blind Google engineer making a difference to others dealing with vision issues. I’m here as a reminder that it can happen to anyone.

My son’s preschool has decided it needs a new website. Parents and board members want an online presence that has more interaction, dynamic logins, and password-protected content. We have goals! Elementary and private schools have followed many paths to achieving their web presence including an all-parent volunteer web staff to hiring freelance web designers to $30/month services.

I wondered how these services differed from what a firm like Duo Consulting did to develop an organization’s website. So I interviewed Duo Consulting CEO and visionary, Michael Silverman. I quickly recognized that Duo’s web content strategies for businesses far outpace my preschool’s relatively static content needs. But what I also learned was that the goals of websites for many business models are often similar.

Its All About Content
What Michael told me is that websites that have a lot of changing content represent a breed of website.  These may be content publishers or transactional websites. But the universal feature is that they all experience a challenge sharing their copious information online. Professional service firms, like law and accounting firms, have a lot of intellectual property that they publish on their websites.  Universities, colleges and other higher education clients market themselves with their content.

Transactional websites, essentially online stores, receive considerable visibility in media coverage of the Internet. But helping organizations publish authoritative and informative content that helps them achieve their business objectives is a more challenging goal. Michael said one thing they’ve learned is that Search Engine Optimization and other traffic generation strategies is only a first step. You also need a highly usable and easily navigated site so that once visitors arrive at a site, they have a meaningful business experience.

Experience Managing Content Produces Client Dividends
With a focus on helping its client manage content, Duo has clients in multiple market including newspaper and magazines, professional services and non-profit organizations. Having experience with these industries permits Duo to more effectively scope a project when they’ve done one like it before. And they can bring best practices to the client for their particular type of business and online presence.
Having content management experience helped Duo to be chosen by the Christian Science Monitor to implement their Web-first strategy. The Christian Science Monitor intends to convert their content from a print-based periodical to a weekly web publication system. Duo has the experience with online periodicals to design and build the online interaction that they will need to be successful with this new direction for their content.

Wikis and Social Media Serve Non-Profit Organizations
Non-profits, especially those that do online fundraising, need an evolving strategic web presence to accomplish their business goals. According to Michael one of the trends Duo is seeing with non-profits and web content is a strong interest in using wikis. Volunteers collaborate using wikis when they’re on committees, they share files and communicate with the wiki. They’re also seeing much more uptake of social networking in a website’s strategy, adding functionality for websites so that people can easily form groups for discussion or common interests or other tasks. He mentioned Google Friend Connect which has been in private beta until now. It lets you add social features to your website, and indicates Google is ready to compete outright with Facebook.

When You’re Thinking About a Website Think About…
Michael said he’d like to leave people with two suggestions for strong web content – one is that a web site should have a “job description” just like any employee does. They ask people, what do you want your website to do, and how do you measure its success at doing those tasks? You may not want to set specific numbers to reach within a particular time frame, but you do want to see continual improvement.

Along those lines, he also says that you are never really done with a website. Do not expend all your energy and resources just towards a launch of a website – ensure that you can have the sustained power to see how it’s performing, then look at improvements along the way and milestones that you want to reach with your content.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of online colleges and universities. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 49,000 technical writers in the United States last year. They also say job prospects are best for technical writers over all other types of writers. So, why are so many people just coming out of college with technical communications degrees having a tough time landing that first job? It can be completely frustrating for both new graduates and prospective employers who have vacancies and feel the talent just isn’t there.

Let’s look at some of the skills and education required for technical writers and then examine why entry-level technical writing jobs are few and far between.

Some of these include:

A degree or certification in technical communications.

Often a background in another technical field such as engineering or science and may specialize in a technical area where they have expertise.

An ability to create, assimilate and convey technical material in a concise and effective manner.

In technical writing, even more than in other fields and industries, you need experience to get the job. A technical communications degree is a very good start but many companies (often led by engineers) doing this sort of hiring see writers as ill-equipped for the job and seek a more technical background to “prove” they can handle the job. Writing skills aren’t enough and even knowing the lingo and the software used are often not enough. So, what’s a new technical writer to do?

Here are some ideas:

If you can, take some engineering or computer science classes. If you’ve already graduated, take some continuing education classes to bolster your knowledge.

Offer to do a small project on spec (unpaid) for a company, or seek out volunteer work, such as documentation for an open source software project. You get a portfolio piece if nothing else and the company or organization for whom you did it may be willing to keep you around if they like what you’ve done.

If you’re a more creative type, learn how engineers work and think. They are very linear, literal and see few gray areas in anything. If you can learn how to talk to them in their language, you’ll be more successful.

Like anyone starting a new profession, you’ll need to take smaller or lower-paying jobs in the beginning as you build your portfolio and gain experience. This takes time, but if you decide you can stick it out, you’ll find a wealth of opportunities in a field that’s got nowhere to go but up.