7. Build a knowledge base of answers to relevant questions

Reverse the typical question-and-answer process. Help your client write articles that answer common questions. Any blog platform will work fine for hosting these articles. Once these posts are written, look for people asking those questions (particularly on Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Twitter) and point them to the answer. The interaction is spontaneous, even though the development of the answer is not.

Read the full article on Agencyside.net »

Steve and I will address pressing issues that business leaders face as they transition their marketing, communications, and development into a Web-centric culture.

• How can highly regulated industries use social media?
• What are the roles of the “social media manager” in your organization, and how should you hire for or train an existing employee for this new role?
• How do you equip and train the rest of your staff?
• What internal social media guidelines, policies and monitoring protocols need to be in place to reduce risk in your organization?

You’ll walk away with actionable insights, strategies, and tactics for more effectively managing their organizations as they continue to transition into the digital world.

Attendance is free for Chamber members. The event will be held at Southern Market Center, one block south of Central Market in Lancaster. Please register online or by calling Sarah Stevens at 397-3531/x172.

1. Don’t do everything. New Internet tactics are cropping up everyday, from social media “must-do’s” to sound-bites in emails. Understand and define a business’ online objectives, develop it’s strategy, then choose tactics that play to those strategies. Good planning — and using intelligent insights — is the most important and crucial determinant of success, but frequently done in-house by first-timers.
2. Be found. People are looking for a service, a product, or specific answers that your organization may provide. Continually develop your Internet “footprint” to cultivate domain authority and a broader presence. If your organization engages in search engine optimization as a once-and-done deliverable, it is ten years behind.
3. Measure movement. Many businesses pay attention to their website traffic, and perhaps search engine ranking, but numbers tell more interesting stories than how many people visited a website. What percentage of visitors converted to a “contact” after a first-time visit? Where do visitors most typically drop off the site? Which defined metrics will be pulled from social media monitoring? What about brand sentiment reports and their relationship to other metrics?
4. Participate prudently. Before a large institution can participate on the social web, several important things need to be in place. Smart organizations like the Red Cross started with a risk analysis, a web strategy, and an institutional policy document. These steps helped to create needed “buy-in” from the top. Larger organizations should engage in social media monitoring and outline an emergency response plan for public (that is, online) issues needing smart and timely responses. The social web can get messy and there’s no point in pretending it isn’t so; it’s also why organizations are getting involved – so they be good stewards of their brand. An overarching web strategy is a crucial guide for tactical guidance, and a written policy for employees’ social media participation — both personal and institutional — is vital!
5. Prepare conversion pathways. Create well thought-out pathways that accommodate online visitors and lead them to specific, realistic next actions. Consider types of visitors (humanistic, impulsive, competitive, businesslike) at different stages of “client-hood” (stranger, ready to purchase/hire, past client/alumni, advocate, etc.) and orchestrate a positive experience for each, together with logical “next clicks” wherever possible. It’s complicated, but worth the effort.

What are your top five? We’d love to learn from you!

For more of Daniel’s perspective (who, despite what the article suggests, is strictly an employee of YDOP), take a look at the LCCI’s online edition here.

Daniel points out that the process of developing and sharing these prompts is every bit as important as the list itself:

It is vital that you do more than hand your clients a list of prompts. Your role is to coach them on how to come up with these ideas on their own. It takes a different frame of mind than they usually have, and the more you can help get them there, the more effective you will be.

Read the full article on the Agencyside blog »

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?

I purposed to write a blog about my prediction of where the web is going back in July 09, three months ago.  Yesterday’s discovery of Google’s immanent sidewiki made me realize I better hurry up and say this before I no longer have the opportunity to position myself as a wise sage, prophet of the web.  (By the way, aspiring to “sage” status is one way I’ve warmed up to middle age despite aching joints, expanding waistline and scheduled colonoscopies on a calendar I could keep in my head in my 20’s).

“Blurred lines” is where I see it going. (But first a little background from my perspective). Back when, there was the company website(s) and all things web that were controllable by the company and its people.  Then there was the Social Media websites where the masses could talk about the company, its people, its product and its service.  Everybody could post, rate, review and rant on social media spaces, or if mad enough – make their own thisbrandsucks.com and invite others to join in the hate-chime.

Some companies quickly embraced their new found loss of brand control by creatively and authentically participating.  Others put their head in the sand, believing they could opt out of social media’s impact.  Still others hired a young intern and put “social media” on the newly made employee cubicle (we like to call this a social media silo because it makes us feel clever – and gives us an opportunity to explain that at least 5 completely different personality types and skill sets are needed to manage Internet marketing, which is why the newly hired intern needs outside resourcing – here, take a business card).

Brands now need to be “monitored” and “managed.”  Like Charlene Li brilliantly explains in Groundswell; companies need to be stewards of their brands.  The way I see it, effective brand efforts online now have a real names, real people with real personalities attached to them.  We have this new found surfing omnipresence, allowing us to listen to people that just checked out of the hotel we’re thinking of booking, read a review of a book we might download, or hear testimonials before we purchase that miracle weight loss vitamin.

But back to “blurred lines,” I believe that Web 3.0 will have less distinction between web pages that companies control and those that the masses control.  The user will have a more singular brand discovery that will blend the company’s voice with the voices of (hopefully) their online evangelists – or their agents of doom.  (Chris Brogan, here’s an idea for your next book).

We’re already seeing social media widgets appear more frequently on websites.  Companies are putting some muscle behind their use of Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn (to name a few).  But Google’s impending sidewiki will allow everyone to talk about you and your site – on your site – for everyone (with the sidewiki) to see.  I can see where this is going and if it catches on might not be pretty if you’ve been a slow adapter.  The masses just became more empowered.  Social is about to overpower your last bastion of internet control – your website.

Companies that are now creatively and effectively using social media strategies and are busy creating and relating to their online community of brand evangelists will be able to effectively transition to Web 3.0.  This is especially true if the masses are saying the same things about a company that matches the company’s carefully crafted message about itself.

For everyone else, things could get tricky.  But be sure on one thing.  Social media is a growing force that will need to be reckoned with.