October 3, 2011

Why you want to know about Quick Response codes

Did your last poster, flier, ad, or brochure have a QR (Quick Response) code?

If not, listen up and find out what these little square code boxes can do for your event or organization.

Let’s start with the great news: The (web-based) tools for generating QR codes are free. You can find out lots more about the do’s and don’ts of creating QR codes in this article from Search Engine Watch.

Now that we’re past that barrier — why would you want to add this extra step to your design process? Here are two of the reasons:

• QR codes are the vital link between print media and electronic information. They allow you to embed information — such as the URL of a web page — in a QR code (a 2 dimensional bar code). Anyone with a smartphone (with a free app such as Qrafter) can scan the QR code and translate it into text, a hyperlink, a phone number, an email address, etc.

• Think of all the things someone looking at your poster or ad might ask about your event that can’t be handled by the print version. What’s the hour-by-hour schedule? Are there still tickets available?

Chances are you’re seeing QR codes in more and more places these days. One of the coolest uses is business cards — instead of typing someone’s business card info into your electronic contacts program, or relying in a specialized smart scanner, you can scan a QR code that contains the contact information in vCard or meCard format.

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September 23, 2011

The cross-training approach to social media marketing

I’m hearing from a lot of businesses that don’t really want to use Twitter, Facebook communities, blogging, SEO and all the shiny new online social media tools for marketing, but feel that they must take the plunge to “keep up.” A few of these folks are marketing newbies, but most have solid, successful backgrounds in traditional marketing programs.

Solid. Successful.

Let’s look at it this way: If you were a standout basketball or soccer player, would you suddenly want to devote all your energies to learning extreme mountain climbing? Not only is it the latest fad, but, because it is a fad, the mountains are now crowded with other newbies. They’re slowing down the paths and often plummeting to bad endings in crevasses. The sherpas are now charging premium prices to guide you (and schlep your expensive stuff) up the slopes.

Instead of putting all your energy into trying to catch up with the current fad, take the cross-training approach. Get into it strategically and make sure what you do is strongly integrated with and complements your current exercise (or marketing) program. In other words, what you do online should mesh with your existing, successful, use of brochures, ads, trade shows, signage, white papers, and other marketing channels. (This not only conserves your resources, it will make sense to your customer base.)

Consider this: If your competitors are sweating their way up the slopes of online marketing like lemmings, chance are they aren’t paying as much attention as they should to traditional marketing channels. What areas of opportunity are they now leaving wide open for you to take advantage of?

This is a great time to take a look at your users, buyers, and decision makers. It may be the time to do more speaking at conferences, take out a series of eye-catching magazine ads, sponsor events, ramp up sales calls, or use good old email to offer prospects a nice, substantive white paper. The point, after all, is to show customers that you do more for them and do it better (rather than you do pretty much the same thing as the other guys). Plus, those real-world activities will give you plenty to blog or tweet about as you ease your way into social media.

You can’t afford to ignore the impact of online marketing tools — but, like cross training, your forays into social media should be designed to enhance rather than undermine your overall performance.

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September 7, 2011

Corporate bloggers: Stop competing against Perez Hilton

There’s blogging…and there’s corporate blogging. Today I’m going to talk about the difference.

Individuals, news organizations, and political groups blog for blogging’s sake. And those blogs live and die by their content: Quality of writing; freshness of information; originality (or outrageousness) of ideas.

Quick — name three individual blogs, news blogs, or political blogs.

Easy: Huffington Post. Robert Scoble. The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Perez Hilton. Gizmodo.

Now name three corporate blogs.

?

Not so easy.

Just because they aren’t wildly popular doesn’t mean that corporate blogs don’t have their place. Done properly, they can be extremely powerful tools to drive traffic, drive sales, and enhance recognition of a brand, products, or services.

What’s difficult to grasp is that, unlike non-corporate blogs, corporate blogs don’t accomplish these things through great writing, fresh information, or original or outrageous ideas.  They accomplish these results through hard work and smart SEO. Here’s how:

1. They consistently put fresh content on the top tier of the company’s website (which improves search rank for the whole site).

2. They use carefully researched keywords and keyword phrases in headlines, blog text, links, and excerpts. This eventually positions the company near the top of search results for those frequently searched keywords.

3. They link appropriately to other highly ranked websites.

4. They harness WordPress or other user-friendly blogging software to automatically send (keyworded) excerpts with links (think of them as teasers) to the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. This makes the resources invested in the blog post go much further.

For reasons too complex and varied to go into here, few companies are willing to admit that their blogs are simply a tool. And, as a result, they miss out on the powerful results that tool can accomplish.

There’s no way that the carefully screened, days-old corporate information or flattering customer stories that make up corporate blog posts can compete with Perez Hilton or Engadget for readership. Few people read them; all people will ever see of those posts is excerpts on Twitter or on a page of Google search results. (And yet, properly written and keyworded, those excerpts can be very effective in conveying a company’s branding to thousands of viewers.)

To make the situation even worse, many companies fail to invest in the sort of professional SEO analyses that would tell them which keywords to use in their blogs (and on their websites). Instead, they guess about keywords — and often end up emphasizing keywords they already “own” via Google (such as the unique names of their products) rather than the phrases prospective customers are using to try to find their products and services. In the non-intuitive world of keywording, it can even be beneficial to violate the old taboo against mentioning the competition. By mentioning your competition or a competing product on a webpage or blog, you can end up with visitors who started off looking for the competitor’s product but got search results that lured them into viewing your product, on your site, instead. (Chances are your competition is already doing this.)

Bottom line: Stop trying to compete against Perez Hilton! Instead, start using the power of a corporate blog to compete — against your actual competition.

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August 30, 2011

Twitter as paperboy: The role of distribution in online publishing

Jason Preston, VP of strategy for Parnassus Group and instigator at several Seattle online publishing startups, posted some interesting observations today about the need for distribution in online publishing.

A blog platform like WordPress, or a proprietary website, is a tool for publishing; Twitter is a tool for distribution. Using Twitter for distribution takes the published message a lot further.

This is a useful paradigm, but its limits got me thinking about the powerful role of subscription in the online world. You can subscribe to have Twitter deliver information from a blog just as you once had a paperboy deliver The Seattle Post-Intelligencer — but now you can also go directly to the publisher (blog) and subscribe by email (or newsreader), eliminating the middleman.

Whether I notice something as the teaser for it scrolls by me in the Twitter stream is pretty haphazard. However, when a post from a blog I’ve subscribed to via email appears in my inbox, I’m likely to read much of it.

Increasingly, I’m subscribing directly to the publisher and bypassing Twitter altogether.

I’ve noticed that groups like XYDO and paper.li have figured out the value of email subscriptions and allow you to subscribe to read a newsletter that displays teasers to your online friends’ favorite links. The XYDO and paper.li algorithms don’t always get it right, but, even so, I’m finding myself paying a lot more attention to the content in those emails than to tweets.

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August 25, 2011

“We can’t say that!” Why not?

I’ve been doing communications, in-house and as a consultant, for more years than I like to admit.

With nearly every client, and certainly with every in-house gig, I remember the meetings in which we’d sit with senior leaders and map out a plan to distract attention from what was really going on in the company.

Occasionally one of us on the communications team would suggest: “Why don’t we just tell people some of what’s going on?”

“We can’t say that!” was always the answer. There would be a general round of patronizing chuckles, gasps of terror, or snorts of scorn (the reaction depended on the organization) before everyone got back to the business of obfuscation.

Curt Woodward, writing today for Xconomy Seattle, describes how SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin is breaking that tradition by writing publicly about what he’s doing and thinking as he seeks investment capital for his company. Fishkin’s observations are interesting, and Woodward has made them even more so by consolidating all of Fishkin’s blog posts and other communications using Storify, an online tool for stitching together web-based information.

I don’t think that every company or organization is ready for transparency about its plans, nor are certain issues (such as personnel changes or litigation) appropriate to discuss publicly. But I do think transparency is a trend, and, increasingly, something business partners and consumers will come to expect.

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August 17, 2011

Just imagine

I’m working on the volunteer newsletter staff at Renovation, the World Science Fiction convention held in Reno today through Sunday.

Yesterday I wrote articles about convention transportation and tipping; today I’m off to the local library, across the street from the convention center, which is honoring Renovation with a science fiction exhibit, films, and several “Meet the Author” events.

If you’re at the convention, maybe I’ll see you at the Thursday Steampunk Tea or that evening’s Girl Genius Grand Ball. Look for the newsletter, the High Space Drifter, in a hallway near you later today.

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August 9, 2011

2 keys to great content strategy

This is based on my contribution to a recent LinkedIn discussion (started by Boston web designer Craig Huffstetler) about what a content strategist should do.

1. A content strategist is responsible for knowing 4 things:

  • The communications needs and expectations of the target audiences
  • The strengths and weaknesses of the available communications tools
  • The resources (time, money and expertise) the client organization has to use the tools
  • The messages the organization wants to communicate

2. Based on that information, the content strategist builds realistic communications strategies and options.

When creating those options, it is important to:

  • Resist the lure of the tools. I see a lot of content strategists insisting that organizations use the hottest social media tools and channels — even when the organization’s audience has zero interest in receiving information through those channels.
  • Build on the existing strengths. I keep encountering organizations that have committed to content plans that, in order to succeed, would require 20 times the amount of time, money or expertise available carry them out. The plans fail — and the tools get blamed (“Facebook just doesn’t work for us!”)

The hallmarks of a great content strategist are a firm grip on reality and the ability to help the client face that same reality.

When the results come in, your client will thank you.

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August 4, 2011

News about upcoming writing workshops

Here’s a quick roundup of news on upcoming workshops in the Pacific Northwest for speculative fiction writers. I plan later this month to create a separate page for this information.

Clarion West announces Summer 2012 workshop instructors

The Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle has announced the instructors for summer 2012: Mary Rosenblum, Hiromi Goto, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Yes, that George R.R. Martin.

Applications for the six-week intensive writing program will be accepted beginning in December. You can find more information on the Clarion West website.

Clarion West now offers one-day workshops

This fall Clarion West is hosting a series of one-day workshops in Seattle:

  • “Alive in the World,” taught by Molly Gloss
  • “Jumpstart Your Novel,” taught by Mark Tepp0
  • “Your First Scene,” taught by Nancy Kress (including a critique component for which writing must be submitted in advance)

Cascade Writers Workshop announces 2012 program

The 2012 Cascade Writers Workshop, scheduled for Vancouver, WA, in July 2012, will include workshop/critique groups led by Tor editor Beth Meacham, literary agent Michael Carr, and novelists Ken Scholes and Jay Lake. More information is available on the Cascade Writers website.

Cascade Writers reaches beyond Science Fiction and Fantasy to include Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Young Adult, Historical, Non-Fiction, and Commercial writing(though this year, when I attended, a majority of the students were focused on fantasy and science fiction).

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July 12, 2011

The writer’s cat and the dish of strawberries

The cat was sitting peacefully on the table, a dish of fresh strawberries by her paws.

I snapped the picture.

A minute later, the crash: Glass bowl in pieces on the patio pavers, strawberries among the shards. Cat, still sitting peacefully on the table, now facing me.

“So what?” she seemed to ask.

As I crawled around under the table, carefully picking up the pieces of glass, I was thinking about the importance of the first line of a story, or the first page of a book.

Do you start with the peaceful cat and berries? With the defiant cat among the broken glass and spoiled fruit? Or with the broken bowl and berries, no perpetrator in sight?

Yes, it’s the fourth week of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and every domestic disaster is fodder for fiction. I’m working on the second of my three pledged short stories (which is not about strawberries). Clarion West Board Chair Kelley Eskridge has challenged the 142 people writing to raise funds for the organization to each bring in an additional sponsor, via PayPal or check, this week.

Will you become my next sponsor? If you’re local, I’ll bring you the next bowl of strawberries from the garden. Before the cat gets it.

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June 30, 2011

What to do before upgrading your Mac to OS X Lion

If you have a Mac and have concerns about upgrading to the Lion operating system (expected to be released at any minute), good news: You can get clear step-by-step directions and advice from Joe Kissell’s new ebook “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” ($10).

This not an idle recommendation on my part. I’ve been using Joe’s ebooks about operating system software for years. On several occasions they’ve saved me from making decisions about software configurations that I would have later regretted.

Joe takes the surprises out of the process — you know, the part where you find out two days after installation that the scanner you want to use right now won’t work with the new operating system. Really, there’s no need for that to happen. Joe’s ebook explains how to check your current software and hardware in advance so you know about potential glitches and can make adjustments before the upgrade screws up your workflow.

Those of you who might be planning on calling me if Lion gets confusing should know that I’ve already got an answer to your questions. That would be: Download “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” and use it!

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