Archive for the ‘websites’ Category

On March 30, I was one of three panelists providing an overview on social media for Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit (CREW).  Joining me were Kelli Herman of MICCO Construction and Heather Greene of Neumann Smith.

 This web document contains links to resources we introduced during our presentation.

Kelli’s topic was Facebook business pages and Heather covered Twitter. I spoke on corporate social media policies and blogging.

 Social media policies

There oughta be a policy — There are two kinds of companies in the world: Those that embrace social media and those that avoid it. No matter which one you are, you have to have a social media policy. It should be part of your employee handbook.

In the links document you’ll find two websites to help you. One engages you in a dialog to help you write your policy on the spot. The other links you to the social media policies at nearly 200 companies and organizations.

Social media R U: I believe that every company should embrace social media. You can use it to help employees and customers more easily collaborate with each other and/or to move from a marketing campaign to conversing with your customers.

For example: When I was buying a used car, the salesman at the dealership was blocked from using the Internet. I could compare prices at other dealerships and he couldn’t!  He had to use his smartphone. (That example isn’t necessarily about social media, but it does show how bad communications policies can hurt sales).

Embracing social media must go beyond a policy. It means training, supervising and measuring results. It means you trust your employees to represent you.

 Blogging

People freak out at the idea of blogging.

“I don’t need to tell everybody what I had for breakfast,” they huff.

Don’t think of it as a blog. Think of it as news. This is especially true if you’re in a service business. You’re selling yourself  – your wisdom and creativity. Show it off!

Blogs posts don’t have to be weighty tomes. A couple sentences about a creative solution to a problem will suffice. Repurpose other people’s content. When you see an interesting article in an online publication, write a sentence about why it’s relevant, include a one-sentence quote from it and provide a link to the body of the story.

There are tools that allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, but don’t stop there. In the digital marketing world there is no pull; there is only push. Today’s best practice is to send a regular enewsletter with headlines about recent blog posts and links to the full article. This puts control into the hands of your readers, using their time in a respectful way. (In fact, that’s probably how you wound up reading this article: Because you receive MY monthly enewsletter).

But sorry, that’s not enough: You must share, share, share! Remember, this is SOCIAL media. Go beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use social bookmarking sites to expand the influence of your product, company or brand: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious.

You can start a blog right on one of websites for popular blogging platforms, like WordPress and Blogger.com. There your blog will have a domain like

Douglascommunications.wordpress.com. But why should wordpress get all the credit? You would do better to work with your website manager to integrate the blog into your existing website: Douglasgroup.biz/newsletter. That way your analytics will measure blog traffic along with the site’s other stats. (You do use analytics, don’t you?)

Once again, click here for the list of links on these and other subjects. You’ll also find my updated list of favorite smartphone apps, including the guide to finding all the Angry Birds golden eggs.

There are trends in Internet design, and those trends are not driven by the fashion world; they’re driven by data. Web creators are all about what works. They are constantly testing and refining and they have discovered that readers are tired of visual noise. They don’t want flash, animation and intro pages. They want to get the information and get on with their business.

Website Magazine effectively made this case in this article. It says websites are getting quieter. It argues for clearer calls to action, simpler color schemes, better mobile compatibility, larger images, simpler typography, more video, more prominent social icons and shorter registration forms. Simply put, websites should be simpler. (Thanks to Kim Adams of Professional Pours for this tip.)

Here’s a quick list of some handy tools and websites I’ve stumbled across lately.

• Microsoft has developed a sensational tool for creating panoramic photos. I can’t wait to use it! Learn more about it here.
• This website will proofread your documents for you.
• Torn  between two lovers? Feeling like a fool? Let Simon Decide and Lifehacker offer two options for better decision making.
• Hashtag? Meme? Reddit? WTF? Go to this site for a glossary of social media terms.

The Pareto Principle says that 20 percent of the effort yields 80 percent of the results. Similarly, many of my friends and clients have heard me say, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” I’ve seen a couple good variations on that recently.

“The Done Manifesto is a set of working rules based on a sense of urgency.” These rules aren’t for every industry – you wouldn’t want them applied to nuclear plant operations or brain surgery – but in the creative sector they can light a fire under the seats of procrastinators and perfectionists.

In my business, we used to obsess over printed materials that had to be “perfect” because they were so expensive and had to have a long shelf life. You can change web-based content immediately and infinitely. Having something up there online, however preliminary, is often better than having nothing at all.

This article about koshering the White House kitchen for a banquet appeared in the December 14, 2011 New York Times. In it, Rabbi Shemtov showed similar view of perfection: “We are very careful, we are meticulous but we are not O.C.D.,” he says. “Otherwise, no one would ever get to eat.”

I’ve considered writing about this subject for some time. What pushed me over the edge was seeing Powerpoint presentations in which small blocks of copy whose left-and-right justified margins made them nearly indecipherable.

I know, it’s so tempting to click that  button. It makes everything neat and square. It feels like you’ve actually DONE something to your copy, instead of taking the path of least resistance and letting that raggedly old right margin hang out there all untidy.

Graphic designers may use fully justified copy for aesthetic reasons. (They’re professional drivers on a closed course. Don’t try this at home.)  As you’ll read here, justification can work in documents with lines of copy longer than 40 characters, but this site and others advise you not to justify copy on the Web. I’ll go a step further and encourage you not to do it anywhere.

In left-justified copy, the ragged right edge gives the reader subtle clues about what’s ahead. It reduces hyphenation. Like Raylen Givens, the lead character in the TV series, it has a certain spontaneity that is altogether likable.

“What would you do with an employee in your sales, public relations, marketing or advertising department who, on a daily basis, damages your company’s image by misrepresenting its goals and mission through misguided communication?” asks Mike Brian, partner at Salt Lake City-based Penna Power Brian Haynes.  Brian’s white paper suggests that you create a job description for your website and conduct a regular performance evaluation.

If you’re deep enough into the Internet to be reading this, then your business probably has a website.  If you don’t, you must, for defensive reasons.  If unhappy customers start posting bad stuff about you, whether it’s on a website, in blogs or on Facebook, THOSE entries will be at the top of the Google results when somebody searches for your name.  Having an active website, suitably optimized for search engines, will put you at the top of the queue and push their comments down the page.

Every day we consciously and intuitively decide whom to trust.  We base our judgments on a firm handshake, a solid-looking storefront or membership in the same club.  The intangible Internet eliminates  those physical litmus tests.

“Online trust must be developed without face-to-face contact, and it must be created instantly in the few precious seconds it takes a website visitor to evaluate your value proposition,” said this article in Website Magazine.

The article describes the four pillars of building trust online.

• Appearance: First impressions matter.
• Transactional Assurance:  Reassure those people who rightly fear spam and identity theft.
• Experts & media:  Repeat favorable publicity, display endorsements
• Consensus of peers: List your customers, show your size (“Billions and billions sold”)

Does your website contain incorrect capitalization or punctuation, misspellings, unclear ideas, cliches or bad grammar? “Of course not!” you reply indignantly. Nobody would deliberately put mistakes out there for the world (this the WORLD Wide Web) to see, right?  Then why do I see so much of it?

Think of the people who visit your site: Current and prospective customers, potential investors, vendors, bankers, reporters, job candidates.  Are they going to tell you your website sucks?  Probably not. They’ll just silently draw their own conclusions.  Maybe they’ll go to another seller.  Maybe they’ll make a low-ball offer, assuming your product is cheap because your website looks cheap or ignorant.

And don’t rationalize by telling me that your site isn’t any different from that of your competitor. Do you really want to be in a race to the bottom?

Websites use a different style of writing than you find in print, but they still demand the same journalistic style as any other publication.

We excel at writing copy that matches the short attention span of website users and meets the high standards of daily newspaper editors and Helen Bitner (my 10^th grade English teacher).