On the weekend I read a story in the media about how our Foreign Minister has launched a new web app for travelers going overseas.  A great initiative.  As a regular traveler it would be a great tool.  The story went on to mention that Minister Rudd even demonstrated how the web app works with some minor celebrity – presumably a young person from reality TV.  I even saw the app being mentioned on ABC News 24.  It was legitimate news.

And if I wanted it, it would be available at their newly redeveloped web site which now has links to social media!

Excited by the prospect of an app that I think I would get some serious use out of (as a regular traveler) I went to the Smartraveller web site to download it.  I bought the sales pitch and wanted to buy the product.

So I went to the site to find the app.  Nothing.  I used their search function – nothing.  Nice redesign (the site is essentially the same) but the thing I was promised isn’t there.

So I headed to iTunes to see if it was listed there.  Nothing.  Same search results.

So now I have no app, and a reinforced view that this government is more interested in making announcements than delivering products or services.

So what are the issues here?

• Integration: the announcement is one thing, but surely it’s only as good as the product being announced.  If you are going to tell us you’re offering a new service, at least offer the service.  Or at least – and I realize this is going to give some government people a heart attack – hold off the press release until the product is ready.
• Using social media as a sales pitch: social media is a baseline expectation for customers.  It isn’t news.  If you are going to talk about your links with social media, tell us what we can do with it.  The fact that you are on Facebook is no big deal – there are already 500 million other people using it.
• Redeveloping a web site isn’t the same as redesigning it.  That’s like saying you’ve renovated your home after painting it.

But the main point here is … don’t let your audiences down.  My perception of Minister Rudd and his Department is that they’re only interested in the kudos of doing things and not really interested in actually doing them.  Am I wrong?

The answer is the former, with a bit of the latter.  And never the other way around.

I’ve been writing a web site for a client who is obsessed with Google.  All they want is for Google to find their web site and wants every 3rd word on the page to be their business name.  Which, as a marketing strategy, is okay but my question is always, ‘what happens when someone finds your page?  Do they then want to do business with you or do they click the back button because your web site doesn’t make sense?’

Writing your web site should be like a conversation.  You are pitching your business or service to a new customer and you could be replicating the same sales processes you use in the real world.

This was illustrated beautifully by a column I read on the Flying Solo web site, where the author was describing SEO-driven websites in terms of the way they’d talk if they were people you met at a networking function:

“Ever met a website that introduced itself like this? ‘Hi, I’m a plumber in Sydney. As a plumber in Sydney I like to do plumbing…in Sydney. Plumbing in Sydney is fun, so who wouldn’t want to be a plumber in Sydney?”

What would you do if someone pitched themselves to you that way in a networking function?  I know what I’d do.  I’d fake a coughing fit and head for the door.  Or claim I no longer spoke English.  Or shout ‘fire!’

That’s how your web site comes across if you concentrate on SEO at the expense of actually communicating  with people. Only the coughing fit is the back button and once people have clicked that, they never come back.

And this also shows why you need a writer and not someone who is essentially skilled at data organisation.

But do customers care if you like windsurfing?  Or white wine and long walks on the beach?

In short, no.

Think about the businesses you frequent as a customer.  Are all of them chosen on the basis of price or uniqueness of product?  Or do you have relationships in business that you stick with because they look after you, are good people or give you something beyond just a product?

You can replicate that on your own web site.  Personalising your web site is a great idea but how you go about it is critical.

Personalising your web site gives people an insight into WHY you do business, not necessarily WHAT you do.  And don’t underestimate the fact that people do business with you because you’re easy to get along with or professional in your service.

So as you are developing your web site, consider how you could personalise it.  What is it about you and your team that is attractive to your customers and how can you articulate it?

We are working with a client right now where we are applying this.  They are regularly recommended as being ‘great people’ to work with who provide a great service.  Their old site mentions that the staff like wine, cheese, squash and trains.  Their new site is being written to include quotes from them about how they really enjoy fixing complex problems for their clients and includes quotes on how they enjoy the chats with their clients that aren’t work-related.

Which one do you think is more attractive in business?

This time we look at the third tactic at your disposal to get management more involved in your website. Don’t forget to check back on the first two.

Guerilla tactic #3: Get EVERYONE involved.

A website doesn’t belong to the web team. It doesn’t belong to the editor. It doesn’t belong to the person who is responsible for making changes. The website belongs to the whole organisation. So how can you address the issue of your own staff thinking that it’s your problem when it comes to creating good quality content?

We were talking to someone last week about this very problem.  She works for a Government department – we won’t say which one – but the website is seen as ‘her’ problem. She needs to educate the staff that the web site belongs to the whole Department – that if they want a great web site, they can help by contributing.  This is what we told her … and we’re now telling you.

1. Get your organisation involved. Your staff (and management) don’t need to be running the show themselves but they do need to understand that they have input they can provide to the website and they need to know the negative impact if they are not involved.
2. Talk about your wins. In a previous blog post we talked about making sure management understood what was happening when your website worked well. This needs to be continued with your staff so they know what the website does the business and how it works. And unfortunately a number of conversations we have in business surrounding the web are when things go wrong.  People in our workshops rarely tell us that their web site is great.  99% of them tell us what’s wrong with it.  We, as an industry, need to address that. (If you are embracing social media within your business this is something you also need to do. We have talked to countless clients where staff are somewhat cynical of social media efforts because they don’t understand what it is doing for the business. What they end up doing is overlaying their own issues, concerns or perceptions of social media on top of a business tool when in reality they may know very little about it).   If you have a customer who has joined your business as a customer as a direct result of your website, that needs to be filtered through to staff. It needs to go in the staff newsletter, it needs to be included in meeting agendas as a way of reporting back to staff of when things go well. Talk about how you have managed to save an organisation dollars in real terms based on an internal process you have streamlined on the web. If you have reworked your intranet so that is an effective business tool and not a graveyard where PDFs go to die,  measure it and then communicate it.
3. Ask for their ideas. How could staff be contributing to the overall website experience for your customers and community? How could they be providing information for you? What information could they be  providing for you? Throw the strategy back to them – what ideas could they come up with to maintain and run an effective corporate blog for sample? Get three or four of them to become admins of your Facebook group.   And then, make sure you follow through with the important last step.
4. If they are contributing they need to be recognised. Getting them involved excites them about the web and what can be achieved but it also relieves the pressure on the person who is responsible for maintaining all of it.  So recognise that fact.  Give them kudos for the great idea or the shortcut they devised or the social media tool they have helped develop.

So these are just some of the ideas of getting your organisation involved and engaged in your website. There are significant benefits and in our experience, a website or online strategy (including social media) that is embraced by whole organisation rather than just one person one team is significantly more successful.

In this blog post we look at the second tactic you have at your disposal – educating them.

Guerilla tactic #2: Educating your management

One of the things about the web that is different to normal corporate business is that sometimes the knowledge of the web and its benefits is inversely proportional to the amount of time spent at the business.

We have often found that it’s the people at the top of the food chain – particularly in government, universities and large corporates – who do not understand the web, its implications or even its potential.

So in your role, you may need to be educating people above you exactly what you’re doing and how benefits the business. You may need to show them that it is more than just the design, telling them that ‘yes, there are privacy concerns but they are as manageable as any other risks in business’. You may need to educate them that your job is more than just uploading a PDF at 4:45 on Friday afternoon. You may need to teach them that social media is more than just marketing – that it can be a community where you can generate deep loyalty with your customer base.

You may also need to educate them on the wins of your website. We often suggest to clients that they regularly update management on the positives of their website, as sometimes the only information that management gets about the website is when it is broken or not working.

Next time: the third and final guerilla tactic to getting management involved in your website.

In fact, the interest of their management is only piqued when:

• Something is out of date and someone has drawn attention to it
• The manager’s name is misspelt or one of their achievements doesn’t appear
• A competitor re-brands and launches a new website

At other times, when intrepid web editors and maintainers ask for extra time to properly maintain their website or to better integrate a campaign into the web (eg for something positive to happen to the website) the answer is, more often than not, no.

So how do you get management involved in your website? How do you engage with them? There are three guerrilla tactics you can use to do this … and over the next few blog posts we will look at those three ways.

The first of these is quite simple.

Guerilla tactic #1: Corporate jealousy

If you are working within an organisation that really doesn’t seem to care about the web, one tool that is available to you in business is to use the age-old chestnut of corporate jealousy.

Nothing motivates management more than seeing what your competitors are doing and discovering that they are behind.  In fact, we have colleagues in graphic design who have made a career and generated significant business from approaching competitors of an organisation that has just rebranded and relaunched its logo. There is something innate about us that we want to keep up … and in business that is certainly the case.

So if you’re finding it difficult to get management interested in your website and in what you are doing, why not show them what other people are doing in your industry? But then importantly, follow that up with how much they are investing in it and the results they are getting.

For example, we are working with an industry-based commission, which is competing with the other states in Australia to do business. They seemed quite proud that they were spending 10% of the other state’s online budgets. Their bean-counter mentality was almost overjoyed that they had saved significant money. It wasn’t until we revealed how much the other states were generating from their website that they started to seriously consider whether or not they were massively underspending to their own detriment.

If you are like this and are thinking about going down this path, it is also worthwhile mentioning how much time other organisations are spending on their website but again tying it back to results.  That may help.

Next time: guerrilla tactic #2: how to educate your management about what the web can do for you.

So how do you know if social media is actually working?

It can be difficult sometimes to get your results in a clear bottom-line format (ie measuring the value of social media community in terms of sales alone). If you’re building a community, how do you measure its value?

The idea of effectively evaluating websites has always been a difficult task. As an industry, we have for years struggled with the metrics we need to effectively measure our work on the web. Some businesses we talk to us are still mired in the thinking that as long as their website gets hits then their website is effective. They say this as if the measurement tool of hits actually means something. (Which is something we address in our workshops as being a fairly pointless metric.  I don’t know about you, but my bank manager doesn’t accept hits on deposit or as a way to pay my bills. For me, the number of people who visit my website or even the number of times my website appears on their computer screen is the start of the process, it’s not the end.)

So in that environment of limited understanding of how we evaluate websites effectively, we parachute social media in. One of the things about social media in a private context is the more popular you are, the more effective it appears to be.  But even in that context things are changing. There is a genuine trend in social media community such as Facebook, for people to cull their friends list.   It seems  popularity is no longer the only way to measure if things are worthwhile.

Unfortunately, some businesses still use the popularity model as a way of determining whether their social media is working. But there needs to be more.

Measurement should always be measurable. It should always be tangible. If you have a social media community on Facebook or LinkedIn (or now Google + and BranchOut) and you have 3000 people who are part of that community, how do you measure its effectiveness? This is an ongoing challenge when it comes to developing social media.

So what will a successful social media strategy look like your business? Is popularity enough? If it is a very simple, straightforward campaign which is strictly about awareness and nothing else then it may be enough. Oe will it generate ideas to the business? Will it generate customer feedback and free market research? If it is based around an offer, are there ways that we can measure the sales generated and develop an ROI based on that?

Not sure?  We can help.

In the past few weeks we have been working with businesses on the Eyre Peninsula and helping them update their websites. The one thing that was common to quite a few of their websites -  despite their differences in industry and product offerings -  is that within each page there are no links. The information that has been written is very flat and there is an expectation that the user will, if they want to find more information, make their way to the navigation at the top of the screen to find it.

One of the key elements of writing to the web is taking people on the shortest possible journey from point A to point B and to deliver them to the information they are looking for quickly.

That’s where links are important – they take people to the next piece of information from the point at which they are thinking about it. We are not relying on them as web writers to go to the top of the page and find information.

So when you are writing, you need to understand that each page is not a stand-alone item within a website. It is a link in a chain.  And that link needs to be explicit as people are reading.

What the ad campaign didn’t tell me was that the new streamlined website would chew up 45 minutes of my time that I’ll never get back. And I would end up more frustrated that I wanted to be and started my movie experience in the cinema not with a Mini Skip sized box of popcorn and a smile but silently fuming.

Here was the problem … when I was using the website to book tickets, I was carefully following the prompts and putting in information that was requested. I hit submit and sat back basking in the glow of online commerce, the voice-over from the ad campaign ringing in my ears about how easy this particular process was.

I sat there for a few seconds while the website was thinking about my transaction (or at least that is what was telling me on screen).

Obviously the website  didn’t like what it was thinking about. I received a message saying ‘please return to the booking screen’ as the transaction had not gone through. So I did. I checked my information a second time, this time ensuring that I had filled out every field and that all information was correct. They were. I again hit submit and was confronted with the same problem. There was an error.

At this point, as a prospective customer, I was thinking ‘what error?’ I had checked all my information – I had filled everything they wanted me to do but apparently there was a generic non-specific error. I checked my bank balance.  I had money in my account.  But my only direction in terms of the problem was to go back to the booking screen.

I thought perhaps that I had somehow booked the wrong session time or even the wrong movie. So I went back to the homepage and checked all details went through the process again entering the information doublechecking this time and then again hitting submit. Same response.

The only reason I was still going through this process and not closing my browser window and heading to the DVD shop to borrow a move is that I work on the web and had a feeling there was a blog post in it. In my experience most prospective customers don’t give you a second or third chance. They ring, very frustrated and often take it out on the customer service person or they shop elsewhere.

I pressed on and decided to ring the cinema. I had to hunt on their website to find the phone number is obviously their strategy is to drive people to online transactions instead of talking to a real person. My call was answered by an automated promotional message which thanked me for calling the cinema and then directed me to their website to buy my tickets online because it would save me an enormous amount of time. The cinema now owes me a new phone and probably a plasterer to fix the hole in the wall.

Now proceeding only as a web professional and as someone looking for a new analogy for the Writing for the Web workshop, I tried again, determined to see the process through. This time it magically worked. Why? The information I have provided was exactly the same but some reason I managed to sneak past the guards and get my transaction through.

What was the problem? From a technical point of view I will never know. But from a usability and customer perspective, the problem was that doesn’t look like anybody  from the cinema has ever used that side as if they were a customer themselves.

They would know that it’s frustrating to receive error messages that don’t tell you what the problem is. They would know that when you do experience problems (and technical problems are okay, I’m not suggesting the web should exist without technical problems) you need someone to talk to or some line of information that enables people to find assistance.

They would also know that producing glossy advertising campaigns that sell online services need to be backed up by an online product that delivers. And by deliver I mean the service works with the customer from start to finish – I’m not suggesting that the web should be bullet-proof and that there should never be technical issues, but when there are they need to be managed from a customer service perspective not an IT one.

So how was the movie?  The second half was good. I spent most of the first half restraining myself after the very first ad that appeared when I sat down in the cinema was promoting the website and how easy it was to buy tickets.

Anyone who has been to any of our workshops – particularly the one on using social media in business – will have heard us preach incessantly about how tools arrive with a bang and then settle into a pattern; that people are like sheep when new tools arrive and lemmings when they start to fade.

But is it okay to no to social media in business?

In our workshops, we challenge participants to come up with rationale as to why they’d use social media in their business and then rationale as to why they wouldn’t.

They have come up with some interesting ideas as to how they’d embrace social media and these ideas have not only opened new avenues, but they’ve tweaked how they’d currently been running online communities.

The rationale as to why they WOULDN’T use social media are usually because their boss/manager/Chairman has categorically stated that they won’t use these tools because they’re unsafe/unprofessional/I just don’t use it.

As we’ve discussed social media strategically, some participants come to the point of realising that a particular social media outlet is not for them.  The participant often nervously tells the rest of their workshop colleagues that Facebook may not work for them.  The question is: is that okay?    Haven’t we all been conditioned to just embrace the Next Big Thing that arrives on the web?

Our response to that is that yes, it is okay.  If you have looked at social media from a strategic viewpoint and have analysed your audience’s usage and respect for the medium and have come up with a negative … or you don’t have the resources to effectively manage and maintain a social media presence then it’s okay to say no.

We’d rather you said no for reasons of strategy rather than reasons of fear.