Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

Working with Trinity Applied Internet Part B: Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

You know the staff. Now, what is the process? How do we approach your project?

The term “applied” in the name of the company is no accident. A cumulative thirty years experience in software and web development speaks volumes on behalf of the partners, and is directly applied to every project we produce, problem we approach, and product we deliver. The process behind your website or web application development is not piecemeal or made up as we go along.

Consult, research, facilitate, plan (and plan and plan some more), design, develop, test, adjust. Rinse and repeat. Every time, for every project. It doesn’t matter the size or the complexity of the project at hand, we spend the time at the beginning on analysis of your company, research, and planning. In fact, if you have already been through an estimating and proposal process with us, you know we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you before we’ve ever even won you as a client.

Think every shop that advertises their easy and cheap WordPress package, or their hosted solution you dial right into, does that on your behalf? They don’t. Believe us, because we hear time and again from clients who tried out the competition first because of a really attractive price point, and since have realized they didn’t need a cookie-cutter approach. Or they went with a big media and advertising agency and were shoehorned into marketing decisions based on what the agency was “really good at,” and how it wanted to promote themselves as a full interactive shop.

Well, that strayed from the topic a bit, but the point is, at Trinity Applied Internet you get specialized, considerate, and tailored service that addresses your needs specifically. If you are a marketing department working with some IT constraints, we plan for that. If you are a small organization with one paid staff member and no time for teaching yourself website administration, we plan for that when we design your project, rather than discovering it at the end (or not at all.)

The adage about “prior planning prevents…” at best catastrophe and at worse any number of irritating little hassles. We take it to heart, to the extent that we are researching, discussing, and planning your project before you have even officially engaged us.

Perpetual Apprenticeship

Does it seem like you are perpetually learning new things about how tools and strategies online can move your business forward? Over the years, I’ve met many people in many different situations who somehow expected to read up, get some advice, and then carry on with the knowledge of how the internet works and informs their business. Small business owners with marketing websites, IT professionals certified in a particular enterprise system, and plenty of folks somewhere in the middle who have been tasked to generate leads, sell things, or otherwise move business online.

Invariably, after working with us a while, these clients look at me (usually in their mind’s eye because we’re meeting online) and quip something like, “How can you manage this stuff when everything is constantly changing? Doesn’t this drive you insane?”

The answer to question number two is, yes…and no. Luckily, everyone we are fortunate enough to have on this team thrives on learning. Research. Applying lessons learned in one area to another. Patrick brings many years’ experience designing and developing software systems (with a bit of hardware experience, to boot.) Keith has spent an equal amount of time navigating the waters of “we-think-it-can-be-done-let’s-work-it-out” in teams both large and small. We are all perpetual students, continually following industry news and taking learning opportunities wherever we find them. We clock lots of overhead hours to R&D. Those interested in doing one thing over and over their whole day, week, career, need not apply here.

And then, just as we start to feel smart-ish, there’s a new version of IE, or Google releases some big hairy updates, or someone goes and invents something. (Twitter?) Every lesson we learn seems to point to more undiscovered territory, but also allows us to keep a solid footing when recommending solutions, troubleshooting issues, and making informed choices throughout the design and development process. We are keep at it on behalf of our clients, because we’re curious, fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed.

Excuse me, but I’ve got to go review my Google alerts on search marketing now.

Facebook Fan Page

You have been hearing about how your business needs to get ‘social’. You already have a personal Facebook page, but you’re wondering how to set up a Facebook Page for your business?  Believe me, you aren’t the only one asking!

Before we begin discussing the steps to creating a fully functional Facebook Page for your business, it’s important that you keep one thing in mind: You will make mistakes.  Not you might – you will.  Every business has a different ‘feel’ to it that makes it unique.  Maybe you will jump into the social business sphere and everything will go smoothly and easily – you will still make a mistake – but that’s okay.  Don’t be afraid; yes, the internet has a long memory, but showing you are willing to try new things (this Facebook Page thing for instance) and making mistakes is part of the key to showing that your brand and your business is run by humans. Only humans can connect to other humans – a brand by itself, cannot.  So – human good, mistakes okay, now we’re ready to go!

Facebook is Personal

You must have a personal Facebook account in order to create a Facebook Fan Page. (More evidence that you have to be human to connect.) If you don’t have one, get one; it’s free and easy to start (click here for a video that takes you through step by step.) You don’t have to have a million friends (or even two) before you can set up a Fan Page for your business, but you do have to be willing to have your name as an administrator on the business page.  Why wouldn’t you want to promote your own business or brand? Don’t be afraid to stand behind (or in front) of your business and proudly declare, “I made this!”

Why the “Fan” Page

I know it says “fan” as if you are some eighties big-hair band with a bunch of groupies running around fainting when you look at them, but this is serious business. Who doesn’t want customers who are (fanatically) happy about your product or service? Especially one who wants everyone they know to see that they “like” your brand?  This is the ultimate boost for any company, word of mouth, but with a viral spread attached! Think, if your brand or business could touch as many people as the flu, and help them out as much as the flu makes them sick?! It would be amazing – an epidemic of Fans of you! Think that might generate some brand awareness?  We do, too.

Set It Up

If you are still reading, you are definitely on board for getting your Facebook FanPage set up!  Let’s go:

1. Login to your Facebook (personal) account.
2. Scroll to the bottom of your News Feed page.
3. In the footer, click on ‘Create A Page’
4. Pick your type of business and fill in the information.
5. Make sure to read the Facebook Pages Terms, then click Get Started.

Facebook will walk you through all your options for how you want to set up your Page from here.

Post Something

Post something, anything; it doesn’t matter what. Get yourself used to regularly posting as your brand. You can switch between your personal page and your fan page by going to your account (toward the top right) and either clicking “Use Facebook As Page” or “Switch back to “your name.”  Find all your friends, and other businesses you like or frequent and “Like” their Facebook page (while you are using Facebook as your brand.) You won’t be walking into hundreds of fans right off the bat, but the more you post — and the better you become at communicating with the customers you have — the more fans you will acquire.  It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

How To Improve Your Local Search Results

Once you have a basic understanding of what local search is and why it is important, there are a lot of ways to improve your business’ local search results. Lets start with the basics:

Website Content and Structure

You can do a lot to improve your website’s local search performance just by changing the content on your site. One of the most important and most basic tactics is to add your phyiscal address to the footer of each page. Other tactics can include placing location names in URLs, Geotagging the website pages via page Meta Tags (ICBM method or Geo Tag Microformat), adding your phone number with area code to the site, Geo-tagging photos and videos, or even providing a KML file of your business locations.

Location Based Indexes

The next thing to do is to created listing for your business on location based indexes:

• Google Places
• Bing Business Portal
• Yahoo! Local Listings

Here is a detailed walk-through of setting up your business listing on all three indexes (Google, Bing and Yahoo!)

Location Based Social Media

• Foursquare – A location based social network focused on mobile devices. People are now using Foursquare as a location based search engine and this is a trend likely to grow.
• Gowalla – A location based social network a lot like Foursquare. Here is a brief article contrasting the two services.
• Yelp – User based reviews of local businesses.

If you want to go further in depth and learn how your online media impacts local search, this info-graphic on Web Equity and Online Presence is a great place to start figuring out how it all work’s together. I also love this local search ranking factors guide (warning: it is a lot to take in if you are just getting started.)

The Content Crunch: Getting Past the Blank Page

In years past (well, way past, but if you’re my age it really seems like yesterday) building a website was akin to creating a really nice print piece. You planned, you drafted, you paid attention to design and detail, you built it – and then you left it.  Your website gave users great information, such as what you offered, where to find you, how you differentiated your business from all those others. It will have allowed customers or clients to contact you, and might even have gone so far as to sell your product or capture sales leads for you. But, chances are you weren’t even thinking about rewriting it until you started to feel a little pain, or that it lacked something.

By 2011, with the adoption of content management systems, blogging for business, and social media, some websites are re-written almost daily.  A company may have a core group of followers that are listening in for wisdom, tips, and the next good deal, or they may constantly be testing and re-purposing content in order to continue attracting a stream of new customers — or both.  Now, especially in certain industries, if you are not continually adding new information you will be at a real disadvantage in both naturalized search and keeping your audience engaged.

Let’s say you have assigned your resources and planned accordingly. Your new website, with a couple solid pages, has launched to rave reviews. You have a blog ready to be filled up, and social media set up to push your blog content to. What now? How, exactly, do you come up with valuable content that will support all the work you have already invested in this marketing effort?

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 1:  Start Simple

First, just … start. My completely non-studied or academically supported opinion is that writing great content is about 60% getting past the point of procrastination. Take twenty minutes, write a few words down about what you know (your product is a great place to start.) Keep in mind that depending on your site design, three paragraphs and 400 words are usually more than enough for a page. Leave it for a day, then go back and edit it, and – do not be afraid to post it! Hit publish on that blog! Update that page!

You can (and will) always get better, later.

The flip side of this is, if you are a prolific and careful writer, you will need to pare down what you’ve got. Pretend you are summarizing your 15 page article into a three paragraph abstract. That’s all you need (for now, and possibly forever.)

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 2: Work Ahead

Web content management systems offer a really neat feature: the ability to use the system not only to put the content up on the site, but to draft and review it. You can create a page or a post with not so much as a whim of an idea, leave it in your queue until you are inspired to expand and finish it, send it out to your team for review, and edit it comprehensively before it ever gets published to your website or blog.  Take advantage of this to leave yourself starters for later, when you don’t feel so full of ideas. Start a page on a new product or service and keep adding to it as you get more information, so that by the time you know what you’ve got, you are mere moments away from publishing it.

This is especially essential when a team of people is responsible for updating your content. Case in point: here at TAI we have four blog contributors, who are all busy people. By working ahead and having a number of fully finished or even partially drafted posts in the system, when one writer is delayed, another post can pop in and take its spot. It took us a long time to figure this out, but it works pretty well.

Next time: Step 3 and Step 4, and more ideas as to how to generate valuable content for your readers.

The Content Crunch: Setting Your Project Up For Success

We focus on content management systems here at Trinity Applied Internet, but we are constantly reminded that for our clients, the system is not the difficult part when putting together a website redesign. (Probably, that’s because they are relying on us to work the magic.) The system, the code, custom plug-ins and even (to an extent) the design and user interface are usually relatively easy compared to… that’s right… generating the content itself.

In fact, we have worked with some outstanding organizations and businesses that, despite having an awesome story to tell, have no writers, no time, or no inspiration to get the story down on the page.  I understand their plight, having agonized for days over exactly what to write this blog post about, and how to write it.

The key to the success of your new website, depending on its goals and purposes, is probably writing some solid copy that will engage your audience and leave them wanting more. (More product. More information. More of your smiling face or your stellar services. ) This takes time, technique, and at best some experience. And while it is tempting to say it takes talent, the truth is it takes very little talent and can be learned over time.

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 1: Make the Time

So, you are designing a new website for your company. You have a list of features and functionality you need, you have completed your branding, you have plans for both online and offline campaigns to drive traffic and be supported by the website, synergistically. Now, you need to take some time out and plan for, collect and craft your content. We urge the companies we work with to do this during the few weeks or months when we are heads-down coding. We, or your developer of choice, will be busy working on things that won’t be ready for review for a while; you can be busy sharpening your pencil and crafting that content!

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 2: Assign The Right Resource(s)

Your company may have a marketing department, you might be lucky enough to have an agency, or it might all be up to you, as the owner, executive director, or team member who drew the short straw. We have a content team that can be contracted to write your copy, if that’s helpful. But in any case, someone is going to sit down and begin writing and it will be easier, faster and smoother for everyone (your audience included) if your staff or contract resource is the right resource. If you love to write, are excited about the prospect, and can spend a little time reading up on web copywriting –then go for it, you’ll do great! If (and we see this every few months or so) you break into a cold sweat at the prospect and suddenly it feels like you are back in the eighth grade with a big report due, then you are probably not the right resource for this task. Trust me. It will be agony for you, and probably not turn out very well.

Make sure you know who is going to write this (preferably before you start a single thing), and take care that that person or team is the best person or team available to you. Setting your project up for success by attending to these two (easy! simple!) tasks will jumpstart the process and have you just that much closer to some outstanding web content.

Thanks for reading. Next month…The Content Crunch Part B: Getting Past the Blank Page.

Social Media Tracking Application for the Old Spice Campaign

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.

Get the Most out of your Web Developer

When you are trying to get every ounce out of your marketing dollar and decrease your costs – knowing how to work more effectively with your web developer can help you decrease cost and improve your product.

1. Bundle your Requests.

When you ask for changes to your website, gather all your changes and send them over — all at once.  Sending bundled requests will save you time (1 email instead of 5 emails), decrease the likelihood of a request getting lost, and speed up the time it takes to make changes. In order to bundle requests you usually have to gather them over a couple weeks – this gives you time to think about them, and decide if they are essential and truly in line with your website goals.

2. Prioritize your Requests.

Everything can’t be done at once – no matter how fast the developer.  If you are on a budget, prioritizing your requests will also help you decide what changes are essential to your business.

3. Insist on a System to Track Requests.

If your web developer does not have a system to track requests (spreadsheet, project management software, or bug tracking software) or a consistent process for making changes – things will get lost,  items will be done incorrectly, and communication wil get fuzzy. Bad communication increases costs.

4. Take the Time to Test.

Test what your developer is changing for you – or better yet have someone who isn’t making the request test it.

I am always amazed at the clients who approve the changes but never really go try them out. Even the best developers miss something every once an a while. Having to go back and fix something weeks or months later will cost you valuable time and sometimes money.

5. Take a Screenshot.

I recommend Evernote for screen captures (Evernote will even let your draw on the screenshot). Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words (or dollars). Why would you make a request, and then pay your developer to figure out exactly what you were taking about – or hunt for exactly where that detail is on your website?

Creating thoughtful and specific communications, and having a clear procedure for rquesting, testing and approving changes, will help you get things done faster. You will get you exactly what you want, and improve your bottom line. And your vendor must be eager and able to reciprocate with efficient communications! If they aren’t, well… maybe it’s time for a new vendor.

Trinity Applied Internet Launches Nevada Immunization Coalitions Website

Ta Da!  This past September, Trinity Applied Internet completed the redesign for the Nevada Immunization Coalitions website — www.immunizenevada.org.  The launch happened to coincide with a very busy time of year for NIC, the start of the traditional school term and beginning of flu shot season.

ImmunizeNevada.org features the new version of our Content Gadget content management system. (2.0), as well as a suite of custom tools that operate News, Events, Newsletters and Publications, among other items. The organization, which provides education, resources and advocacy about immunzations for patients and medical professionals, has been working with Trinity Applied Internet since 2005.

Extra kudos are due to NIC for establishing their own Facebook page and joining the social networking community. To join their Facebook group and help provide awareness and consistent immunizations for Nevada children and adults, visit the www.immunizenevada.org website and click through the Facebook link on the right hand side.

What will derail your website strategy?

I just read Scott Glatstein’s article in the American Chronicle about Business Strategy Execution: 4 Reasons Why Your Company’s Strategy Isn’t Working. (A nod to Erica Olsen who posted about this on her blog, Strategically Speaking, and got me thinking.)

Scott Glatsteins’ four points of a failing strategy were:

1. The strategy fails to recognize the limitations of the existing organization.
2. Employees don’t know how the strategy applies to their daily work.
3. The organization’s business systems or processes can’t support the strategy.
4. Performance metrics and rewards are not aligned with the strategy.

The same four things that can cause a business strategy to fail can cause your website’s performance to derail or be greatly diminished. I always tell clients that small changes to their website can demand large changes to their business. I think of it as the mind|body disconnect of the web. The client often thinks that the mind (the business) is disconnected from the body (in this case the website.) Mr. Glatsteins’ four points outline where this disconnect can be. Let’s look at an example:

ABC widget wants an email contact form for their website as an alternate method for customers to contact them. The form will store the customer’s information and message in a database and send a notification email to info@abcwidget.com. They hire a web development firm and get the form built. Right before launch (or worse yet – after launch) someone within the company asks a simple question: “Who is info@abcwidget.com?”

There is stunned slience as no one has considered before where the email notification goes. This question then gives birth to more questions (hopefully):

• What is the schedule for checking the email address? (business process)
• Does the person who checks the email need to reply? Is there a generic script? (business process)
• Where do requests get routed to? (business process)
• How are requests tracked? (metrics)
• What is the expected turnaround time for a customer request? (metrics)

All this for a simple form! Every interactive piece of a website (where you are requesting a customer to communicate with you) requires a business process and responsiblity chart. It seems overkill, but when Janice in accounts recievable leaves the company and stops checking the generic email account – will anyone know what to do? Will they even realize what Janice had been doing for years?
If these questions haven’t been addressed beforehand, a customer may email a request and either never get an answer, or fail to get a timely answer, or possibly not get the answer the company’s strategy really calls for — as someone in the IT department ends up getting the email and doing the best they can to route it.

This example illustrates how a customer relationship can suffer if the details behind a simple contact form aren’t planned for and outlined. I would rephrase Mr. Glatsteins’ four points for the web:

1. The website processes fail to recognize the limitations of the existing organization. Often website applications require a human component that you don’t plan on. You have a great new publishing platform (a blog) but who writes for the blog?
2. Employees don’t know how the website can apply to their daily work. Websites can make the lives of employees easier with sales automation, information for customers, etc. but if there isn’t an internal campaign to educate your employees about your new website, then the right hand will truly not know what the left hand is doing.
3. The organization’s business systems or processes can’t support the strategy. Can your website work with your customer relationship management system? Can your sales team go electronic?
4. Website metrics are not aligned with your strategy. If you have a blog that is separate from your website, is it being tracked? Are you still pouring over raw server logs for information? How do you even measure website performance, and who is responsible for that?

These may seem simple questions for you to answer and simple problems for you to solve, and they are — if you’ve taken the time to do your homework. When you think about your website, think about it as an extension of your business and your business strategy.  Like with any business effort, good planning and a little bit of forethought can make (or break) the enterprise.