Orangejack LLC

Perhaps you’ve heard about Social Media but haven’t signed up to participate on any of the sites yet thinking they are all for kids with too much time on their hands.  Well let me share with you one of the more useful websites you can start with for your entry into social media: LinkedIN.

LinkedIN is a professional network.  It’s like a networking event you attend but this is all online.  They state:

Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.

Just like how most social media sites work, you first go to the site homepage and create a free account.  You now have a page on their network.  Mine is linkedin.com/in/orangejack.

Now it’s time to fill in your profile.  In short, what you are creating in an online version of your resume or business/professional profile.  The goal at this point is to create a profile that shows who you are professionally and what sort of opportunities you are interested in.

Once you are all set up it’s time for the social networking part.  There are millions of others on LinkedIN who have their own profile also.  If you know them you can invite them to connect with you.  If they accept they you two are connected.  Think of it as exchanging business cards but with a lot more relevant information.  The advantage here is that now you can see who they are connected to (and who their connections are) in order to see if you should make more connections and ask for an introduction.

Expanding your connections allows you to be open for more opportunities to connect, find jobs, hire qualified people, and potential partners. Search the site to see if your friends are on there or invite others to connect.  The more you build your network the more opportunities you will find for professional networking.  If you’ve worked with someone in the past and liked their services, you can write a reccomendation that will show up on their profile.

I encourage you to create an account and play around.  Feel free to invite me to be one of your connections by requesting from my LinkedIN profile.  Let me know if you have any questions about LinkedIN.  There’s plenty of other things you can do on the site easily and some not so easily.  But it’s a great start into social media for professionals.

Brilliant marketing idea

Earlier this week a book was released called The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II by Dave Balter. I finished it this morning and I have to say that it was a good read.  If you are looking for examples of how Word of Mouth has worked for various companies and individuals, it’s worth the read.

One of the more compelling stories that I enjoyed was that of Casey Kasem.   He was the first to capatialize and catapult the idea of a Top 40 list (or # Best of Something list).    Balter points to research that we, at any given time, can only have about 40 products in our mind that we are willing to talk about.  When Kasem took the Top 40 songs and played them each week, musicians wanted to be in that list.  When they were, they were talked about.  The more they are talked about, the more sales they received.

I’m convinced that web technology is allowing us to get back to Word of Mouth roots.  We can connect socially and recommend products to others more easily than before.  Our reach is more broad so our voice can be louder and more targeted.  It’s going to be fun to see where all this goes over the next immediate months and years!

If you are interested in the book, you can download a free electronic version (119 pages) or look for it on Amazon.

I found this posting the other day on a job board.  Someone needs some social media marketing press so they want to hire someone to “write authentic comments” on blogs.  I’ve highlighted the parts that make this so ironic.

Right.  Not the way you want be online and authentic.  You really don’t have to pay someone to write inauthentic comments and tell them to make sure it’s all positive if you have a good video.

Comments on a blog should contribute to the conversation, not be abused.

There are all types of websites and many different ways to evaluate if a site is “good” or not. It’s a subjective idea that can be measured objectively. But measurements only work if you know what you are aiming for.

A good website balances between visitors finding what visitors are looking for and visitors finding what authors want visitors to find.

The following components give you the path to begin your plan for building a “good” website.

Audience
Identifying your web audience is crucial to almost every decision you make for the site. The more focused and narrow the audience is defined the better. This isn’t to suggest that other audiences can benefit from your site. Instead this is to focus your efforts. Imagine, if you can, your typical user of the site. Keep that person in mind as you work through the planning. Broad but useful audience ranges may include demographics such as age, gender, and geography, comfort level with technology, and occupation.

Goal
What is it you want your audience to do when they come to your site? Is it to find a resource, learn about you, subscribe to a newsletter, or maybe make a purchase? Decide what the main goal of the site should be and focus the design towards that goal.

Marketing
You may end up with the best designed and most technologically sound website in the world, but if no one visits then it has been a waste of your resources. Decide what principle way people will find out about your site. Will you rely on search engines to dive traffic to the site? Will you use traditional offline marketing practices to get people to remember your web address? Will you email a group of people or encourage others to link to your site? These decisions will affect how you design and provide content for the site.

Design
The design should match both what your audience would expect and how you want to be seen. A good website will have a consistent layout and branding on every page. Pick a technology that will enable your goals to be accomplished easily. Who will be responsible for providing content to the site such as the visitors or a team of authors? Do you want them to interact with the author and each other? Navigation of the site should be intuitive and pages should load quickly.

Content
Text: Content read online is consumed quickly by visitors so writing should get to the point quickly. Pages should be easy to visually scan for relevancy and topics. It is recommended to have a section or page that explains who you are, what you are about, and how to contact you. It is also valuable to have a date on each page of content so others know its age relevancy.

Images: Photos and graphics can be useful in enhancing what is written on a page. To keep these images from being a distraction, however, they should be optimized for the web (resolution of 72 dpi, resized to needed dimensions, and uploaded) for fast load time and visual enhancement. Use a graphics program to make the necessary changes to an image instead of using HTML code to manipulate the image.

Media: Embedded audio, video, and flash can be very helpful in communicating a message online. It is best if these do not play automatically and are used sparingly since they can slow down the load time of a web page. Allow the user to initiate the playing of the media. Your challenge is to make it compelling for them to want to “press play”.

Measure
Various sites measure different metrics to see how effective it is. You will need to decide what is important for you to measure. Some of the most common metrics to monitor include the number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on a page. Websites that offer subscriptions or memberships also use these numbers as a gauge for knowing how “connected” people are with the site.

If you like Africa and African animals and such, you must follow the Mara Triangle blog.

Even if you don’t like this stuff, you’ve got to be impressed with this. It’s run by Joseph Kimojino, Maasai tribesman in Kenya’s Masai Mara preserve (part of the Serengeti National Park). His job is to protect the wildlife, defend against poachers, and raise money for Preserve.

So he blogs about it.

And he uploads incredible photos to Flickr.

And he uploads great videos to Vimeo.

And he updates over 1300 people on Twitter.

And he uses Facebook Causes to raise money and awareness.

What a great example of using technology and a web strategy to integrate several tools in order to accomplish his goals.

And, what an incredible job he has. His story is worth sharing.

There are different approaches to creating an effective plan for a website. Though there is a lot more to it than what is below, I thought I’d provide a short exercise you can try by working through the “Five Ws (and one H)” questions:

Who?
Who do you want to come to your website? Research as much as you can and visualize your typical visitor.

What?
What do you want your visitors to do when they come to the site?  Make that goal easy for the visitor to complete.

When?
When and how often do you expect visitors to come to the site? Come up with a plan to offer updated content or offer a notification to visitors.

Where?
Where will your site live online? Make sure that your web address is easy to find and remember.

Why?
Why are you creating a website in the first place? Make sure that it makes sense for you to use this medium to interact with your audience.

How?
How will you get your audience to your site? Keep your marketing, design, and strategic plans integrated for effectiveness.

There are certainly many options to advertising your website.  This is one way Google does it in Russia: Google Spending $250k/month On Outdoor Ads In Russia

When we were looking for a bank to do business with when opening up Orangejack LLC, I stopped by a few local banks to inquire about their services. Let me tell you about how I visited three banks and because of one factor my decision was simple.

On the second day of checking out banks (I’ll get to the first day in a moment) I had two local banks within very short driving distances I wanted to visit. I went to the first bank and met a customer service representative who I suppose is there to help people go where they need to. I told her I wanted to learn about their offerings for a small business account. She handed me a folder with a lot of information in it and told me a few things but I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me as her head was on a swivel and I’m sure a few sentences that I thought were meant for me were actually for someone else. I thanked her and walked out. She never even asked me what my name is.

The second bank was a bit better as they politely connected me with a rep in an office. He went over some of their options and they didn’t sound fine. I wanted him to not just go over the numbers with me but to talk to me and help me in my decision making process. He didn’t so after about 10 minutes of him talking and asking little questions about me I finally thanked him and stood up. He stood, held out his hand to shake and asked me my name. Oops! Too late!

I was done in 30 minutes including drive time with 2 banks. I mention these first to show you what NOT to do. Now let me go back to the first day of looking.

There is a local bank that is at least 5 banks further from my house but it’s in a town center that we frequent. I stopped in Washington Mutual Bank (or WaMu as they call themselves now) and met Cathy. The first thing she did was extend her hand to shake mine, tell me her name, and ask me for mine. We sat down at her desk, she was personable and friendly. We talked for about 45 minutes not because it took that long to go over the banking options, but because she valued me as a person. Needless to say after my other banking experiences we went with WaMu and I couldn’t be happier.

When we went to open our account I told Cathy that I chose WaMu because she asked me my name from the start. That communicated more than anything else. Obviously if their service was not as good as others we wouldn’t go there, but when faced with a choice of comparable products and services we went with the one who cared about us as people.

I guarantee these principles apply to your online marketing and interaction.

What do you do when you are trying to decide between two similar products or services? I would suspect you are like me and you’ll put the options side by side to compare the features and price. We place value on each feature and if you’re lucky, you can even try them out for free to see what you think.

I found myself in this process evaluating two different free time tracking websites to help me stay organized when working on several different projects. SlimTimer.com offers a great, free, and simple time tracking with a web interface. It works great. Does what I want it to do. And it’s come recommended to me before.

Then a couple weeks ago I ran across another site that met my same requirements at Paymo.biz. It does everything SlimTimer does but it at least seemed better. Then I ran into a slight problem so I emailed the Paymo team late on a Tuesday afternoon. First thing Wednesday morning I had a prompt reply from a person (not an auto-generated reply) who actually read my email and answered it personally with solutions and tips!

It turns out that Paymo offers a download that works with the site that I liked better. But that wasn’t the point. I loved that they replied reasonably fast (within 2 business hours though it was overnight) and dealt with me as a person. That is why customer service is important. With both services being relatively equal, I’m going with the one that gave me a great human interaction — a social relationship.

To be fair, I have not tried to contact SlimTimer so I’m not saying they do not have good customer service. What I am saying is that when everything seemed rather equal, I went with the one that treated me well.

When you are thinking about your online presence be sure to place a high level of importance on customer service. In fact, I don’t even like calling it that. I prefer to think of it as relationship building, social engagement, or just treating people like people. With the social media tools we have available today there is no reason you can’t stay engaged with people and it’s bound to help your business.