Orangejack LLC

In the late 1990’s the mantra was “If we build a website they will come”. That’s no longer true.

In the late 2000’s the mantra was “We need a blog”. That’s not necessarily true.

What should have been and always will be the best mantra is “Without an Internet strategy, our online presence will fail to be effective.”

There are a lot of ways to build an online presence. Traditional websites, blogs, micro-sites, micro-blogs, portals, relational hubs, e-commerce, collaboration sites, you name it! Today there are so many tools at our disposal that it can be difficult to be truly effective online.

We stay on the cutting edge of web technologies. We’ve been interacting with people in chatrooms since 1995, building websites since 1999, web marketing since 2002, blogging since 2004, and using other interactive tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter over the last few years.

These experiences have taught one very valuable lesson: We need an Internet strategy to be effective and accomplish our goals.

Building an effective online presence requires many puzzle pieces all tied together by an overall strategy. We can help you develop a strategy so that you can be more effective accomplishing your business goals.

Today I had the privilege of being invited back to my previous employer to participate in a training session for some new online community owners. While I was still working at CCCI, our office released a community-based intranet (for a lack of better terms) and I’ve had several years experience running, planning, and testing communities in this environment. I was invited to share my experiences with a few new community owners.

Instead of doing a full power-point presentation I tried something a little different and risky — I just put this photo up on the screen and then interacted with the group for the next 20 minutes.

I chose this photo because it sets the tone for how to run an effective online community. In this photo are two guys, one from Spain, the other from Germany, sitting over coffee and cake having a conversation in England. Among a few of the questions I asked the group were “what do these guys have in common” and “how did these two meet in the place to have this conversation?”

It was a conference several of us attended for our European staff to learn how to be more effective using the Internet. The context was something familiar to us - coffee, conversation, and a conference. I then started asking them how would one go about creating the same thing in a new context online?

Then one person nailed it! She said, “I would think that planning a conference and planning a community would be about the same. You need a purpose, you need to find the right people, and you need a good place to have it”.

And that was the point. Taking conversations and interactions online still requires the same underlying principles we already know. It’s different online a bit to be sure, but at it’s root, it’s still the same.

A friend of mine told me about an article he read talking about how the youth of today aren’t using email, but using mobile phones for text messaging instead. He was pondering if I thought that email could be dying out.

I say no. In fact, I see an even bigger role for email as social networks expand.

Here’s some of what I wrote back:

The more we build our personal networks the more scattered we become. I can go to Facebook and interact. I can go to Twitter and interact. I can go to LinkedIN and interact. And other people’s blogs. And Flickr. And I wonder what websites my friends Digg or StumbleUpon or save in del.icio.us.

Oh, and some of my friends in my network aren’t on any of those places (read: my dad). Oh, hi dad.

So how am I going to tie my network together? My inbox. It’s been our social netowking hub since the early days of the interwebs and I think we’re going to go back to it even more. It’s the one place that I can get a notification from every service I’m a part of and notifications from people not in those social networks. It’s the hub for communicating and notification. Just about every social network, including blogs, can send email to my specified account.

Sure we can use SMS or blogs or Facebook or others as our hub, but that limits the network. And some people don’t have a hub. They just manage everything in other ways.
So if the inbox is the hub, then the real trick is keeping it organized by filtering out spam, sorting email by topic and response, and keeping the inbox clean.

A cleanly managed inbox will be a topic for another day on 170spoons.com — you can count on that!

Did I tell you that I now have a part-time job at Disney?

I had my first day working for Disney on Saturday. It was really just orientation so it was an all-day class with about 100 other new employees. It was a long day, but it wasn’t bad. The quick breakdown is that I’ve been assigned to the one of the PhotoPass Photographers at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. I should get about 16 hours a week on Fridays and Saturdays. I start Saturday with my training.

While I’m getting orangejack.com all situated, I wanted to introduce a new website in the ‘orangejack network of websites ™’: 170spoons.com.

Many of you are familiar enough with your computer and the internet to do things like check email, use Google, and create a spreadsheet. However, I’m convinced that many of you don’t know how to use your computer to be more effective in your every day life. My goal is to help you streamline your life by taking advantage of technology…Just a little know-how, a little motivation, and a relationship is all you need.

I’m excited to bring you this new website. Officially launched on February 29, about 500 people came to check it out! So far I’ve covered organizing your documents and getting online better.

So please stop by for your new resource for tips, tools, and tutorials for technology. And when you’re there, say hello in a comment and subscribe to be notified of new entries.

orangejack.com will be relaunching soon with a new look and a new focus.

if you’re looking for any of the blog posts that we made during out time with campus crusade, they have been archived at orangejack.com/ccci.