What is Your Social Media Content Strategy?

Yes, "Pick Any Two" generally applies to content as well

A common complaint from businesses, large and small, is that they have a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, a website, a blog, they’re on LinkedIn and YouTube, etc. and they’re doing everything right in terms of being present in social media, but nothing is happening. 

Upon inspection of their customer source data and other metrics, it turns out that they called that pretty accurately; there is nothing happening as a result of their presence in the digital online world. 

Then you look at what is on their Facebook page, or their blog, or their Twitter feed, and it becomes obvious why nothing is happening. They have little or no content, and/or the content is awful and boring. 

As we mentioned in this piece titled, Business Blog Primer, having smart or funny or informative or engaging or thought-provoking content is key to making social media work for your company, whether that’s on a blog, or on YouTube, or on Facebook, or even if you’re simply participating in a discussion on LinkedIn. And it needs to be consistent, as we mentioned in that same piece from a few months ago. There is nothing more pathetic than a business blog that has three posts in the past 12 months. 

Pivot in Company Strategy – The Nvidia Example

After making chips and graphics chips for personal computers for most of the almost-20 years it has been in business, Nvidia has plunged headlong into a new market; that of the mobile chip, the chip that powers tablets and mobile phones.

Why has Nvidia changed its product strategy, and therefore its market strategy, and therefore its company strategy?

Well, because it feels it has to, that’s why. It’s current market is not only slowing dramatically because computer sales are down, it is beset by competitors like AMD and Intel who now include very adequate graphic processors in their standard setup, thereby effectively cutting Nvidia out of the picture in terms of selling an add-on graphic processor to the target PC manufacturer. Nvidia, and more specifically, Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has made a tough decision that staying in their current market will lead to slow, but certain death, and is now striking out for the frontier of mobile chips.

Amazon Says, Hey, Look at Me, I’m Flying

Amazon, the online retail behemoth, has decided to forgo that pesky thing called a music license as it launches their Amazon Cloud Drive, a “virtual” place where Amazon customers can store their digital music on Amazon’s gargantuan servers. Once stored, Amazon facilitates “streaming” of those music files to a computer or handheld device through Amazon Cloud Player.

Amazon has taken the position that they don’t need a license because their customers are only going to store and stream music that they already own. It looks like the record companies may not agree with that point of view. They’re either staying mum, or, as in the case of Sony, “reviewing their options”.

Rovio Mobile, Developer of Angry Birds, Gets $42 Million in Funding

The newest overnight sensation of the digital gaming industry has now officially been crowned. Rovio Mobile, a tiny mobile gaming company out of Finland run by Niklas and Mikael Hed (cousins), has ridden their Angry Birds game to lofty marketplace success (40 million active users) and a financing round of $42 million USD, led by Accel Partners and Atomico Ventures. 

Of course, someone gets the obligatory board seat, and in this case, that someone is Niklas Zennstrom, a co-founder of Atomico Ventures, as well as another company named Skype. He is going to sit on the board of Rovio Mobile, his new investment. He also issued the even-more-obligatory statement, saying, “Angry Birds is one of the fastest-growing online products I’ve seen, growing even faster than Skype, and the company has done a brilliant job of extending it across different platforms and merchandise.” 

It’s worth noting that little Rovio put out 50 titles before they went platinum with Angry Birds, courtesy of the explosion in smart phones; now that they have a thoroughbred in their stable, they intend to ride that horse until they can breed another winner. 

Interest In Blogs Among Teens and Young Adults Fades

If your organization or business has young people as a target audience or target customers, here’s hoping that you are reaching them through your Facebook site or your Twitter feed.

Surprising no one that follows social media, the most recent data available shows that fewer young people are keeping blogs, and more importantly for businesses, fewer young people are visiting blogs.

The sentiment driving this behavior seems to be a combination of:

• A feeling that writing a blog takes too long
• Low readership of small blogs
• Facebook and Twitter are meeting whatever needs they have for self-expression

Business Blog Primer

BLOG ME

If you’re a business these days, you’re supposed to have a blog to go along with your company website. The reasons why?

Well, it can keep your customers informed, for one. It can provide a great platform for your customers to interact with the company, for two. Third, it’s a great way to keep talking about the company in a positive way. Fourth, it’s a good way for the company viewpoint on issues to be delineated, if that is important to the business. Fifth, people may actually come to your site just to read your blog, or, some other site may find something interesting on your blog and link to it, thereby driving potential customers to your site. Sixth, each new blog post (and each new comment, if you allow comments) is yet another reason for the search engine bots to crawl your site, thereby moving you up in the search engine rankings, which is always good for business.

Okay, so a lot of good reasons to have a company blog. The problem is, of course, just as with other things, the execution. Apropos of that execution, how do you get a blog, how do you get good, relevant content for the blog, and how do you keep it going?

Stodgy Old-Fashioned Dull Obsolete Antique Outdated Sales and Marketing

What I need is a really cool website.

Online marketing is the only kind of marketing I want to do for my company.

Who needs salespeople when you have the web?

Who needs a call center when you have the web?

I hate actually interacting with someone face-to-face and I’m sure all of my customers hate it, too.

Isn’t everyone on the Internet now?

Digital marketing is always cheaper on a cost-per-account basis.

Everyone just throws out direct mail solicitations.

Outdoor media? You mean, like billboards and stuff? Wow, that’s really old-school, isn’t it?

Why would I bother offering sales training to my customer service employees and my other employees? That’s not their job.

Industry conventions seem like a massive waste of time and, plus, they’re a huge pain.

IF you talk to companies about sales and marketing, you’ll frequently hear comments and questions like this, because everyone’s dream these days is to have a virtual organization that does all its sales and marketing over the web, or on mobile phones, or whatever. You know; the kind of organization where you just click on keys, your advertisements go out, customers respond to your website through an online checkout, and you make millions of dollars with less than 10 employees, and very little overhead.

That’s the kind of marketing plan I want, companies will say.

Well, sure.

I want to date Halle Berry, have my own island, and have Warren Buffet asking me for advice about investing, too. The chance of even one of the items in that scenario occurring for me is about the same as all of the pieces falling into place for the kind of company to happen. Yes, occasionally the planets line up and your idea that turns into your product that your company sells is both irresistible and is able to be sold over the internet in such large numbers that you then have articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times business section written about your firm.

But most of the time, the results are less lofty. The internet is merely one small part of all the moving parts that make up a typical successful company, and that’s not how most business comes in the door. Some small companies have less than a dozen employees, but large companies have hundreds, or thousands, of employees. Everyone in the company works hard, because they’re competing with other people at other companies that are working just as hard in the same segment, and that hard work eventually makes for a good living and a good return for the company’s shareholders. It’s not exciting and notable enough so that it’s newsworthy, but it’s a good result. That’s what usually happens.

The reason I’m noting this is because many companies, in their rush to embrace Web 2.0 technology, are now giving short shrift to perfectly good customer acquisition platforms that they’ve successfully used for years, things like a field sales force or radio advertising. Seduced by a younger, more attractive face, these businesses are abandoning their long-time partners for a tempestuous fling with digital marketing. They’re doing this even if that doesn’t make sense in terms of their revenue, profit and strategic goals.

Now, just to be clear, I would not advise any client to eschew a meaningful presence on the web. If you’re in business, your customers need to be able to find you on the web. Much of the work we do for clients is in the area of bolstering their presence on the web, whether that’s through SEO marketing, developing a better website for them, developing a blog component for their corporate site, etc. So we are strong cheerleaders for a healthy web presence.

No, what I’m saying here is that traditional marketing and sales may still be where your company’s bread will be buttered, and there is absolutely no reason to cut back or discard those customer acquisition platforms simply because they’re “not new”.

For many companies, those “old-fashioned” methods are still the most cost-effective, despite all the infrastructure needed, and the blocking and tackling needed to execute, and frankly, with a little tuning up and focused process-improvement work, those old-school platforms can be made even more attractive from a cost-acquisition ratio.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason you cannot keep doing what is bringing you good business results currently, and, beef up your profile and capabilities on the internet at the same time. In other words, there isn’t any way to do too much marketing in too many places.

There is an optimum mix of traditional marketing and digital marketing, specific to your company’s needs and goals. Find that mix and your company will prosper. Because, despite what you read in the media about the latest company to set up a website, and 18 months later, launch a $6 billion IPO, most companies still need the combination of traditional marketing and digital marketing to thrive.

Brendan Moore is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in marketing, sales, front-end operations, and strategy. Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://cedarpointconsulting.com

Intuitive to Whom? (In Web Design, it Matters)

During a recent Management Information Systems course I taught for the University of Phoenix, I posed the discussion question to students, “What do you think are the most important qualities that determine a well-designed user interface?” While responses were very good, nearly all of my students used the term “intuitive” in their response without providing a more detailed description, as though the term has some universal, unambiguous meaning to user interface (user experience) designers and web users alike.

I responded by asking, “Intuitive to whom?…Would a college-educated individual and a new-born infant both look at the same user interface and agree it is intuitive? Or, would the infant prefer a nipple providing warm milk to embedded-flash videos of news stories?”

Far from obvious, an “intuitive” user interface is extremely hard to define because “intuitive” means many different things to many different people. In this article, I challenge the assumption that “intuitive” is obvious and suggest how we can determine what intuitive “is”.

Nature and Nurture

Our exploration of intuitive user interfaces and user experience starts with “nature” and “nurture”, much like the “Nature versus Nurture” debate that occurs when explaining the talents and intelligence of human beings. For those of us who haven’t opened a genetics book in a few decades, if ever, “Nature” assumes that we have certain talents at birth, while “Nurture” proposes that we gain talents and abilities over time.

Certainly, “Nature” plays a role in an intuitive user interface. According to research by Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, there’s a great deal of evidence that we are born with color preferences and that color preferences naturally vary by gender. In addition, warning colors like red or yellow, such as red on stop signs and yellow on caution signs, are likely a matter of science and genetics rather than learned after we’re born. So, an “intuitive” interface is partly determined by our genes.

“Nurture” also plays a big role in determining our preferences in a user interface. For example, link-underlining on web pages and word density preferences are highly dependent upon your cultural background, according to Piero Fraternali and Massimo Tisi in their research paper, “Identifying Cultural Markers for Web Application Design Targeted to a Multi-Cultural Audience.” While research in personality and user interfaces is still in its infancy, there’s a strong indication that CEO’s have different color preferences from other individuals, as Del Jones describes in this USA Today article.

But, what about navigation techniques, like tabs and drop-down menus? In a recent conversation with Haiying Manning, a user experience designer with the College Board, I was told that “tabs are dead.” This crushed me, quite frankly, because I still like tabs to effectively group information and have a great deal of respect for Haiying’s skills and experience. As a Gen-Xer who spent much of his teen years sorting and organizing paper files on summer jobs, I’m also very comfortable with tabs in web interfaces, as are my baby-boomer friends. My Net-Gen (Millenial) friends seem to prefer a screen the size of a matchbox and a keyboard with keys the size of ladybugs, which I have trouble reading.

In the end, because of “Nature” and “Nurture”, the quest for an “intuitive” user interface is far more difficult than selection of a color scheme and navigation techniques everyone will like. What appeals to one gender, culture or generation is unlikely to appeal to others, so we need to dig further.

It’s all about the Audience

In looking back on successful projects past, the best user interface designers I’ve worked with have learned a great deal about their audience – not just through focus groups and JAD sessions, but through psychometric profiling and market research. This idea of segmenting audiences and appealing to each audience separately is far from new. Olga De Troyer called it “audience-driven web design” back in 2002, but the concept is still quite relevant today.

Once they better understood their target customers, these UI designers tailored the user interface to create a user experience that was most appealing to their user community. In some cases, they provide segment-targeted user interfaces – one for casual browsers and one for heavy users, for example. In other cases, they made personalization of the user interface easier, so that heavy users could tailor the interface based on their own preferences.

They also mapped out the common uses (use cases or user stories) for their web sites and gave highest priority to the most used (customer support) or most valuable (buying/shopping) uses, ensuring that they maximized value for their business and the customer. More importantly, the user interface designers didn’t rely upon the “the logo always goes at the top left” mind-set that drives most web site designs today.

Think about the Masai

In hopes of better defining what “intuitive” is, I spoke with Anna Martin, a Principal at August Interactive and an aficionado of web experience and web design. Evidently, “intuitive” is also a hot topic with Anna, because she lunged at the topic, responding:

“Would you reach for a doorknob placed near the floorboard; or expect the red tube on the table to contain applesauce? Didn’t think so. But what’s intuitive depends largely on what you’re used to.  Seriously, talk to a Masai nomad about a doorknob – or ketchup for that matter – and see what you get. And good luck explaining applesauce. (Cinnamon anyone?). Clearly intuition is dependent on what comes NATURALLY to a user – no matter what the user is using.

So why would the web be any different? It’s not. Virtual though it may be, it’s still an environment that a PERSON needs to feel comfortable in in order to enjoy. Bottom line is this…if you wouldn’t invite your 6 year old niece or your 80 year old grandmother to a rage (did I just date myself?) then don’t expect that every website will appeal to every user.

Know your audience, understand what makes them comfortable; and most importantly try to define what ‘intuitive’ means specifically in regards to sorting, finding, moving, viewing, reading and generally experiencing anything in their generation.”

So, audience-driven web design has firmly embedded itself into the minds of great designers, who must constantly challenge the conventions to create truly creative interactive experiences on the web. Consequently, as the field of user design transitions into a world of user experience, it’s going to require second-guessing of many of the design conventions that are present on the web today. This not only means pushing the envelope with innovative design, it also means we need to have a good handle on what “intuitive” really is.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy.  Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

Some Important Things to Know About SEO

By Brendan Moore

Discussions with Cedar Point Consulting clients about SEO (search engine optimization) almost always involve some sense of urgency, that is, “We have to get organized around this search engine stuff so that customers can find our business online,” combined with befuddlement as to just how that happens.

To those companies that hire another company (or many times, someone’s “computer whiz” friend or nephew – no, I’m not kidding), their lack of knowledge about SEO and how it works is often replaced with misinformation about SEO. This is either because whomever they hired doesn’t know what they’re doing, or, more likely, gives the client company only the briefest of explanations about what they’re going to do and why. Because the client doesn’t know enough about SEO and the internet to begin with, they are unable to “fill in the blanks” and process the answer from an informed point of view.

With that in mind, here is a primer of things you may wish to remember about SEO that are wrong:

We’re No.1: Having the #1 ranking in a search engine is not the achievement that many make it out to be. There are a few reasons I say this; the first one being that having a No. 1 ranking is only effective as long as you’re not spending too much to get there. Like any other sort of marketing, if the money you have to spend on keywords or contextual advertising or, anything else, drives your account acquisition cost to a level higher than what makes sense, then you have achieved a phyrric victory. Second, it is a fact that searchers on the internet look at groupings of three to four search results, not just the top result. It is quite possible you could spend merely half the effort and money needed in order to get the top ranking, and get the No. 3 ranking instead, and have a much better cost-per-acquisition, and, still have more customers than you know what to do with. Third, a great header and description goes a long way towards generating a click-through if your company is fourth on the list as opposed to first. Lastly, even rankings and click-throughs together can be deceptive. If searchers are getting to your site and staying only 15 seconds before abandoning their visit, then something is very wrong. Your search-to-sale numbers are going to be extremely poor. Either you have paid for the wrong search words or your site needs a serious revamp in order to accurately reflect what you sell or what you do for a living (shameless plug – Cedar Point Consulting can definitely help you with either of these problems).

Page Rank is important: Well, sorta, but not really. Before Google had a lot of money and internal talent, this was the rudimentary way they ranked sites. The Google search engine is much more discerning now and uses highly advanced algorithms when operating, so it’s now all about relevance when search words are typed into the Google search bar. The current level of discernment will pull up a lower ranked page first if the relevance of the search word is deemed to be greater with that lower ranked page.

Trading links with other sites is valuable: No, it isn’t. It has no effect. And, furthermore, if you do it enough to trigger the internal checking mechanisms for link-trading that exist within all the major search engines, it could get your site blacklisted on those search engines. This means your business site will not ever show up in any search results. So, then you have a case in which trading links produced negative value to your business.

Repeating keywords as often as possible on the site is important: There are a lot of terms I’ve heard SEO “experts” use for this; phrases like “keyword shock and awe”, “keyword stuffing”, “keyword blitz”, “keyword density”, “keyword jamming”, etc. Some of these people reported to me, so I’ve heard these terms a great many times. The premise is pretty simple; if you’re in the plumbing business in Cleveland, then you make “plumbing” and “Cleveland” show up thirty times on your homepage. But, this doesn’t work. Again, as in the example I gave concerning rank of your page, the search engines are much more precise and selective than this, and all this loading up on a keyword (or two) is going to do for your site is make it seem disjointed and awkward and like it was written by an obsessive 10 year-old. Write good copy (or hire someone to write good copy) and you will be rewarded. The search engines use the same criteria most human beings use to pick a page, and you’re much better off being descriptive about your business and its capabilities.

Unless you’re Wal-Mart or The New York Times, SEO is all just a crapshoot, anyway: Nope, simply not true. There are things that even small companies can do from an SEO perspective to increase visits to their sites, and increase the time spent on the site. There are also things every company can do around the design of their site to increase contact rates or sales. Lastly, there are ways to increase the useful content that resides on your site, whether that is through frequent updates, writing a blog, buying or getting relevant content for free and reprinting on your site, etc. The beauty of SEO is that it is self-fulfilling: the money and time you spend on driving more traffic to your site pays off in that you get more site traffic, and it also pays off in the future as more site traffic pushes your site higher up in the search results, which means that more people will get your site in the search results, which means that more people will visit your site, which means that more people will get your site in the search results, which means… well, you get the idea here.

Brendan Moore is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in marketing, sales, front-end operations, and strategy. Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

VoIP, Virtual Teams and the International Pause

The Internet is making us all a little more rude these days and there’s a good chance we don’t even know it.  This has nothing to do with texting while driving or blogging about gossip – it’s much more insidious. It is related to using Skype, Vonage and other types of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) on international calls, so if you’re using VoIP phones or you lead virtual teams, there’s a good chance you’re at risk.

As you probably know, the Internet and major telecommunications systems use fiber optic cables, wireless networks and satellite systems that travel near the speed of light, yet they are still limited by distance, the number of hops and the speed of the equipment to determine how long it takes for information to reach your computer. Loosely speaking, this is called latency, and its higher over longer distances and lower over shorter distances.

Because of latency, on a good day, it takes about 1/5 of a second for a single piece of information containing your voice, called a packet, to travel from New York City to Los Angeles and 1/3 of a second from the U.S. to India (Verizon SLAs)– theoretically not too bad if you’re looking to hold a conversation. Unfortunately, the problem is that you’re not just sending one voice packet when you talk, you’re sending thousands. Those thousands of little bitty packets take multiple directions to reach their destination, once they reach the destination they’re reassembled into your voice, and only then are they heard by the person on the other end. This all adds up to between a ¾ and 1½ second delay between when you speak and when your voice is heard. Of course, it can be quite a bit worse when there are bottlenecks on the Internet, so a 2 or 3 second delay is not out of the question, as this article about latency posted at Sat Magazine concludes.

Latency alone is just a technological problem, and not a very big one – until you add human beings into the mix.  A 1½ second delay might not seem like very long, but there is a magic threshold at around 1 second that dramatically changes the shape of human conversations, according to Maryam Alavi, who conducted pioneering research into technology-aided learning in the 1990′s. Consider that, in a typical conversation between two people in the same room, interrupting that person mid-sentence is considered to be rude, while a 1 second pause is usually a signal to the other person that you’re opening up the opportunity for them to respond to your last statement. Similarly, if you have been speaking and the other person does NOT respond within a few seconds, it becomes a pregnant pause.

Conclusion:  Latency + human conversation = unintentionally rude behavior.

For better understanding, here are a some examples of how VoIP conversations, particularly conference calls, have been misread:

• During a conference call, no one speaks for a full second, so I started to talk. Unfortunately, three other people on the call heard a 1-second pause and started to speak, as well. Suddenly, four people are speaking at once – which is often interpreted as disrespectful.
• During another conference call, I don’t hear anyone speak for nearly two seconds, so I start to talk. However, the person speaking didn’t actually pause — their voice packets were delayed — so they haven’t finished speaking. When I chimed in, their speech suddenly continued, and I appeared to be interrupting them.
• During a VoIP call, a person in the room with me spoke for around thirty seconds and then waited for a response. A second, two seconds and then three seconds passed, yet nothing was heard on the other end. Were they offended by what you said? Was it so earth-shattering that they couldn’t think of a response? Did the line suddenly drop?
• During a conference call, four people in a remote location are in a single room and are using a half-duplex speaker phone (described by HelloDirect). They speak and speak within their conference room, never pausing to allow communication to flow the other direction.  On your side, people are practically yelling in to the phone, but nothing they say can be heard. As a result, the people onyour end think they are being ignored by the other group.

The bad news about all of these situations is that centuries, if not millennia, of human communication have wired us to interpret interruptions and long pauses in speech as rude, but the technology is in many ways introducing the problem.

The good news is that there is a way we can deal with the problem – the international pause. The international pause means pausing for an extra second or two before speaking on a VoIP call, particularly on international conference calls, in order to avoid interrupting someone else speaking.  In short, it’s a way to counteract the effects of latency that occur on IP telephone calls crossing international boundaries.

Using the international pause is simple:

1. When you start a meeting that uses VoIP or crosses international boundaries, remind people that there are often lags in communication due to the Internet and that it may be a good idea to wait a little longer before jumping in on a conversation.
2. As a meeting facilitator, remind people to take more frequent pauses when speaking, so that others will have an opportunity to ask questions or make comments. In addition, consciously ask all participants if they have comments or questions before moving on from one subject to the next.
3. Take an international pause yourself – before speaking, count an extra second or two, then start to talk.

While we could all wait for technology gurus to overcome the problems of latency with VoIP, there’s a great deal of benefit in IP telephone products like Skype, which dramatically reduce communication costs and enable virtual teams to function effectively while spanning the globe. In order to use this new technology effectively without causing strife among virtual teams, however,  it’s important to take an international pause on your VoIP phone calls.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy.  Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.