Category: Communication

Are you ready to have a great website?

You won’t get a great website until your company is ready for website greatness.

It’s easy to do a great website for a company or organization. Here’s how:

Have a homepage with these 6 attributes:

  1. Your organization’s name, clearly identifiable
  2. A picture of one of your typical products or services with a call-to-action tagline or a benefits statement.
  3. Simple, clearly labeled top or side navigation with one- or two-word links to key pages on the site — and a link that gets you back to the homepage from anywhere on the site.
  4. Icon links to your  related social media pages or channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
  5. All the necessary “small print” links at the bottom of the page (Privacy Policy, Site Map, Contact Us, etc.)
  6. Brevity. On a multi-page website (as opposed to a blog), aim for fewer than 100 words on the homepage (about 75 is ideal) and no paragraphs at all. Think of the homepage as a lobby, and your goal is to get the customer into a showroom, a conference room, or someone’s office.

Have your home page navigation link clearly to:

  1. A “catalog” or products page that lists all of your products and services (or categories of products and services) with a meaningful, iconic photo for each (or each category).
  2. A “buy now” page where people can go to buy/order your products, find a dealer or showroom, or contact you immediately by phone to inquire about services.
  3. A “story” page where you tell your story, with professional, candid photos of two or three of your key people (founders, staff, or clients, etc.). You can link from there to staff, board, or other key-people lists.

You might also have links to:

  • Your blog or news page
  • A page for business partners
  • A page for support or discussion boards, if appropriate.

Who’s doing it right?

Here’s what a great website looks like: Feel free to give behringer.com a spin. It not only looks great, it works, right down to finding me a Behringer distributor in my neighborhood. (And, wouldn’t you know, it’s a electronics shop owned by a friend of mine.)

I particularly liked their blog. Because it focuses exclusively on the recording artists who use their products, it isn’t given the deadly name “Blog” in the navigation — it’s called “Artists.” Think about it: Are people visiting their site interested in artists or a “blog?”

Not as easy as it looks

OK, if it’s this easy, why don’t more companies do it?

Here where we get to the sad part of the story. Watch closely, and cringe as I review the FHE (frequently heard excuses):

1. Your organization’s name, clearly identifiable

  • “We paid thousands for this incredibly clever logo that turns the letters of our name into people jumping up and down. You mean, you can’t see that they spell out “McDonald Software?”
  • “We just use the acronym MSIIBG. Everyone knows that MSIIBG means ‘McDonald Software International, Inc. — Bergstrom Group.’ Don’t they?”
  • “The sales director wants the tagline for the end-of-year campaign up at the top of the page and there wasn’t room for that and the company name.”
  • “Oh, everyone knows us by our logo; we don’t need to spell out the name.”
  • “We’re going through rebranding and might change the company name, so we don’t want to feature it until we’re sure.”

2. A clearly identifiable picture of one of your products or services with a call-to-action tagline or a benefits statement that mentions your product or service.

  • “We don’t use a product photo because we keep updating our product, and don’t want to pay the web designer to update the page. So we use this nice photo of our headquarters at the office park.”
  • “We can’t afford professional photography.”
  • “What do you mean, hundreds of other organizations are using the tagline “Software Solutions”?
  • “No, we don’t sell software, we help small businesses configure it. Isn’t that clear from the pile of software boxes in our homepage picture?”

3. Simple, clearly labeled top or side navigation with one- or two-word links in “customer language” to key pages on the site — and a link that gets you back to the homepage from anywhere on the site.

  • “But we can’t call it ‘Our Story!’ We call it our ‘Organizational Mission and Vision Directive,’ and we want the link to be consistent.”
  • “We have 24 links because want people to be able to reach everything on the site directly from the front page.”
  • “Yes, I know all those pull-down menus with multiple hierarchies are a little difficult to use, but we had to get everything up there. What do you mean, the hierarchical menus break on ‘other browsers’? I thought everybody used Internet Explorer.”
  • “Oh, you can just click on the logo to get back to the home page.”

4. Icon links to your related social media pages or channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)

  • “Oh, we don’t believe in that social media stuff.”
  • “Oh, we don’t have time for that social media stuff.”
  • “Actually, we don’t know how to use all that social media stuff.”
  • “I doubt our customers use Facebook/Twitter/YouTube.”

5. All the necessary “small print” links at the bottom of the page (Privacy Policy, Site Map, Contact Us, etc.)

  • “We put them up in the top navigation. I guess that’s why it’s so crowded.”
  • “Oh, nobody needs a Site Map anymore.”

6. Brevity. On a multi-page website (as opposed to a blog), aim for fewer than 100 words on the homepage (about 75 is ideal) and no paragraphs at all. Think of the homepage as a lobby, and your goal is to get the customer into a showroom, a conference room, or someone’s office.

  • “If we don’t put it on the homepage, nobody will read it.”
  • “People can just scroll down two or three screens.”
  • “We didn’t want to add more pages to the website, so we put it on the homepage.”
  • “I guess four different embedded videos in four different formats probably is too much.”
  • “HR, Marketing, Sales, and the Board Office all insisted that their stuff go on the homepage.”
  • “We had new stuff to put up, but no one would authorize us to take the stuff that was already up there off the site.”

Have your home page navigation link clearly to:

1. A “catalog” or products page that lists all of your products and services (or categories of products and services) with a meaningful, iconic photo for each (or each category).

  • “We don’t have/can’t afford good photos.”
  • “Our different in-house groups can’t agree on which categories should be featured, or in what order.”
  • “Oh, we don’t have time to keep something like that updated. People should just email us and ask us what we have.”
  • “Our services can’t be illustrated by photos.”
  • “Our marketing team insisted on a separate section of the website for each product/service, all linked from the top-level navigation.”

2. A “buy” page where people can go to buy/order your products, find a dealer or store, or contact you immediately by phone to inquire about services.

  • “Oh, they can just fill out this web form and someone from our sales team will get back to them…in a week or so.”
  • “If people want to contact us they can click on the “Contact Us” link and fill out the web form.”
  • “We really don’t want people calling us.”
  • “That would mean we’d have to keep our distributor list up to date, wouldn’t it? We don’t have time.”

3. A “story” page where you tell your story, with professional, candid photos of your key people (founders, staff, or clients, etc.)

  • “I don’t think we want to feature one or two people at the exclusion of others. We have 200 people, and we’re a team!”
  • “We have our Mission and Vision Statement on the website, so that tells people what we do.”
  • “I think we have a studio picture of the Executive Director around here…it’s 8 years old, though. He doesn’t like having his picture taken.”
  • “The founder doesn’t usually talk about how he was inspired to form the company after he installed Internet technology for two provincial governments in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Gee, do you really think our customers would be interested in that?”

You get the idea. Many organizations have resource and communications issues that are barriers to effective website communication (and, often, barriers to business success — but that’s a different blog post). You can bring in top-level designers and still not get a great website if a company isn’t ready for website greatness.

NOTE: The tsunami story (details slightly tweaked to protect confidentiality) has to be my favorite FHE ever. A software company had asked my PR team to make their website more interesting to print and broadcast media reporters so they could get media coverage (including interviews with the founder) during the roll out of a new product. But the founder (an extremely handsome, outdoorsy-type dude) didn’t want to talk about anything except the relatively technical product and didn’t want a photo of himself on the website.



Unconferences work — but maybe not for the obvious reasons

Attention is an unacknowledged factor in the success of user-generated conferences like mind camps and barcamps.

For the past five or six years, I’ve been attending “unconferences” like Seattle Mind Camp. I love them because you never know what’s going to happen — only that you’re going to meet, work with, argue with, and perform in front of some of the brightest, most creative minds in the local technology community. (Here’s a great site for the Toronto Mindcamp that captures the experience.)

A year or so ago I brought my friends Hank (a computer engineer) and Tom (a community organizer) along to Mind Camp and they, too, were enchanted. We jumped into spontaneous volunteer activities, played games, learned to swing dance, argued about the future of technology, joined a large group of people scratching their heads over a new Google product, and engaged in a team-building activity that had three groups of people fighting each other over how to arrange a pile of folding chairs. I led a session called “Do Non-Profit Websites Have to Suck” and we actually solved one of the major reasons why they do.

Tom was intrigued by the way the unconference broke down barriers between organizers and attendees, presenters and audience. As a result, he’s about to try the unconference model — on a group of traditional-conference organizers. They have, in the past, held annual traditional conferences and are not wholly on board with the unconference model.

OK, what’s an “unconference”?

The key to an unconference (aka a user-generated conference, open environment learning, barcamp, etc.) is the way the program sessions are created and arranged. Instead of choosing panels of bigwigs in advance and assigning them to pontificate (or debate) topics the organizers think are important, the unconference team simply secures a space, time, food, and other basic conference structures — and gets the word out.

The attendees arrive, register, and are given sheets on which they can write a proposal for a session. They describe what they’d like to present, discuss, or inquire into (in two or three sentences). After an hour or so of registration and meet-and-greet activities, the hand-written session proposals are put up on a wall, and each attendee is given a batch of stickers — usually one for each time slot. A one-day conference might have 6 or 7 slots. Attendees affix a sticker to the proposal of any session they’d want to attend — and they also leave notes to indicate if they’d like to join the panel, or help moderate the session, if appropriate.

After the stickers go up, the event organizers pull the proposal sheets and sort them so that popular sessions can be assigned to large rooms, smaller sessions to smaller venues, and similar sessions don’t conflict.

They then re-post the proposal sheets on the wall in a traditional grid (by time and room), and the unconference begins.

The way in which the conference session content is generated is so unusual that it’s become the definition of an unconference. And I realized that we are all assuming that this unusual generation of content is why unconferences are so refreshing, energizing, and generally successful.

But, as I prepare to go to the unconference Tom has organized, I realized there may very well be a completely different factor playing a major role here.

It’s attention.

Gotcha!

I’m not a major conference organizer, and I’m more or less tagging along to Tom’s conference. It’s my birthday, and I was thinking to get some shopping in, do some yoga, have coffee with some friends in the San Jose area…or, in short, cherry-pick a couple of conference sessions and blow the rest of it off.

That’s a common strategy for traditional conferences. We’ve all done it.

But it’s impossible at an unconference! From the point of view of an uninvolved slummer like me, there’s no way to find out in advance when the good stuff is happening. The unconference requires you to be present! To be involved! To be committed! To bring your whole self, the whole time.

And now I realize that’s possibly why people get so much out of unconferences. The other participants are engaged and contributing. Everyone is responsible for everyone else’s experience.

So much for shopping, yoga, and coffee. I’m going to attend all the sessions, even if one of them is “Pros and cons of unconferences.” At least I know I’ll have something interesting to contribute to that one.

New ideas, including one from Seth

Seth Godin’s blog post on how you can reduce the amount of time you spend in “downcycle” interactions that aren’t working and are only going to get worse.

One of the questions often asked of bloggers by non-bloggers is “Where do you get ideas to write about?”

One of the questions often asked of bloggers by other bloggers is “How do you decide which idea to write about?”

Since rejoining the a nonprofit board of directors last month, I’ve put myself into serious learning mode — learning not just about the organization, board operations, and board culture, but also about how boards work in general. This process includes attending half-day workshops on boards offered by United Way of King County. (Highly recommended to anyone on a board or anyone who works with a nonprofit board.)

As you might image, I’m in danger of drowning in ideas.

While nonprofit culture is vastly different from that of for-profit organizations, I’m finding that, as usual, I’m getting good advice from Seth Godin. His blog post this morning is about how you can reduce the amount of time you spend in “downcycles” (interactions that aren’t working and are only going to get worse) by stepping back and reframing them to create “upcycle” processes.

Change, part 2

Seth Godin explains why change is so easily sandbagged by small groups of nay-sayers.

The last time I blogged about change, it triggered an avalanche of change and challenges that kept me busy for weeks, even months, after.

So I wouldn’t be blogging about change again without very good reason. That good reason is a recent blog post by Seth Godin, provocatively if inelegantly titled “Change and its constituents (there are two, and both are a problem).”

It’s a brilliant insight that explains why change is so easily sandbagged by small groups of complainers. Apply this to elections (know of any coming up?), family discussions, or your favorite board or committee:

People who fear they will be hurt by a change speak up immediately, loudly and without regard for the odds or reality.

People who will benefit from a change don’t believe it (until it happens), so they sit quietly.

The result, of course, is what appears to be overwhelming opposition against change. This often leads people to withdraw their proposals for change — even though, if they pushed through, they’d win the (belated) thanks of the people who’d benefit from it.

My original post about change proposes a corollary to Seth’s insight: That because the dissenters’ protests are often without basis in fact, the dissenters’ commitment to their fears can be fickle. They often turn out to be the people who are happiest with the change when it is implemented — to the point that they’ll often deny they ever opposed the change.

My conclusions: Get tough. Take the long view. Recruit those who will benefit to speak up on behalf of change.

Storytelling. Great storytelling.

Canal+ is a French premium pay television channel. This commercial they produced will get you thinking about storytelling.

The evolution of the eff-word

Do you think the eff-word is obscene? Well, is it?

cee-lo at a Gnarls Barkley concert.
Cee Lo Green in concert (Image via Wikipedia)

I just returned from a discussion with a local company that is considering doing an advertising campaign that uses a version of the eff-word.

The under-20s on their staff think it’s terribly clever. The over-40s suspect it’s a  PR mistake. The 30-somethings are torn between fear of looking uncool by putting a lid on it and fear of looking stupid if the campaign blows up.

They wanted my opinion, and my opinion was: The public isn’t ready for the eff-word. Not yet.

This discussion comes just as Cee Lo Green’s snappy little pop song with the eff-word, imperative, in the title has been banned from radio but has a video that’s racking up 4 million views on YouTube. This made me realize that we’re at a watershed in the evolution of the American vernacular.

Until recently, we’ve framed the argument about the eff-word in terms of a choice about how to handle obscene words. It’s been people who think obscene words should be censored vs. people who think obscene words should be spoken in the name of free speech.

That argument hasn’t changed. What has changed is public opinion about whether the eff-word is an obscene word.

Do you think the eff-word is obscene? Well, is it?

For most people under age 30, living in urban areas, I think the answer to that question has become an emphatic “No.” Or perhaps an emphatic “Huh?” — spoken in a tone of mild incredulity.

Or simply, “Eff, no!”

“Eff” is a word that had an obscene connotation in the 1960s. But by the 1980s it was a form of punctuation in Wall Street conference rooms and by the 1990s it had become a quasi-obligatory rhythm track for rappers.

There’s a trend here.

I expect that 10 or 20 years, we’ll hear as much “eff” and “effing” as we now hear “damn” and “bitching” — and have about the same reaction. And I imagine I’ll live long enough to hear someone refer to the eff-word as “quaint” and “dated.”

What do you think?

Pizza and anarchy, all over again

No matter how you constitute a group, certain people will fall into the roles of the leader, the anarchist, the followers, and the deserters.

I was a psych major in college and working at a community counseling program. We ran a crisis hot line, manned a “trip tent” at rock concerts, and took a lot of practical training in group dynamics as it was then studied by the Tavistock Institute.

A psychologist from the university facilitated a training for us in group processes that had a profound effect on my life.

Or should we order subs instead?

At the training, seven or eight of us were put in a group and assigned what seemed a simple a task: to order pizza for lunch.

But by the end of an hour, we had no pizza, the group had split into two warring factions, and I was miserable.

It started when someone suggested ordering two pizzas, one with one type of topping, the second with another. There was a general murmur of “sounds reasonable” and “one of them should be vegetarian” and I joined in that affirmative chorus. Discussion of specific toppings had begun when my friend Tim, a glint in his eye, said loudly “Why does it have to be pizza? The restaurant has sub sandwiches, too. We could get meatball subs.”

Everyone looked at Tim.

“Good point,” someone said. But others in the group were frowning. Things were getting complicated.

There was discussion of getting a couple of subs and a pizza. Then someone pointed out “Look, the assignment for the group was to order pizza.” General agreement, in which I joined. The suggester, buoyed by the agreement, returned to the plan for choosing the toppings for two pizzas, and people began discussing what should go on the veggie pizza and what on the non-veggie.

“Why do we have to do what we’re told?” Tim asked. “No one said we couldn’t change or modify the assignment. Perhaps this is an exercise to see if we can stop being sheep.”

This made sense to me, and apparently to several other folks. People stopped talking about pizza toppings, and started talking about the assignment. Groups dealt with disagreement! This was natural!

After a while, discussion died down and there was a tentative suggestion that we go ahead and order sandwiches from a deli instead.

At which point, a fellow who’d been moving in to Tim’s camp said. “Why do we have to order anything at all? Why couldn’t we just decide to give the pizza money to charity? We could decide to do that, and just go home. Hey, we could just take the money and go to a bar and get drunk.”

I think, at this point, Tim got up and reached for his coat.

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

Not surprisingly, several people in the group began looking distinctly uneasy. They looked at the psychologist who was sitting on a couch, observing our group process. He, of course, looked utterly detached.

By now the group had polarized. At one end, there was Tim and the other anarchist. At the other end, the conservatives, who by now wanted to order the damn pizzas and forget Tim.

On the sidelines were a few people who thought Tim was being a clever jerk and the pizza people were getting ridiculously worked up over a pizza. By now, most of them looked bored and ready to leave.

And then there was me. All I could think was that this silly argument was going to go on for ever, and we’d never get anything accomplished. Or any lunch. And I was utterly miserable.

At the end of the second hour, the psychologist called a halt to it. He pointed out to us how the group had polarized, and what roles each of us had taken. He assured us that no matter how you constitute a group, certain people will fall into the roles of the leaders, the anarchists, the followers, and the deserters.

At the end of the training, the psychologist called me over. He said: “You need to stay out of groups. You take on the overall experience of the organization. Whenever there is conflict, which there inevitably is, you experience the conflict, and it will tear you apart.”

I heeded his advice, and worked for a number of years as a journalist, observing and describing conflicts without having to be part of the conflicts themselves. In recent years, I’ve been careful (and fortunate) to work with strong, decisive bosses and clients.

I’m just now starting to be involved with groups as a volunteer and, let me tell you, it’s pizza and anarchy all over again.

I’m voting for coherence

Urban Foodlink has a good blog post about the conservation district election. You might want to take a look, and then swing by a polling place tomorrow and vote.

There are elections tomorrow in Washington state for members of regional conservation district boards. Only a few hundred votes get cast, apparently, and this isn’t surprising because it’s tough to find any information about the elections except the times and locations of the voting (at a few library branches).

It’s almost impossible to find a list of candidates and their position statements, so you’re left to depend on guidance from the more obscure political blogs. The left wing blogs just say “vote for the guy the Sierra Club endorses.”

As it happens, a friend of mine burrowed around and located the five candidate’s statements. Fortunate there were two or three candidates who were politically acceptable to him because the Sierra Club’s endorsed guy was completely unimpressive in print. I read the fellow’s statement and came away undecided — undecided, that is, about whether I was more appalled by his typos, poor spelling, sentence fragments, bureaucratic jargon, or just his general incoherence.

“I am running for the board position of King Conservation District, because I am a conservationist that leads by example represents the Mission and Vision of the Conservation District.”

“During my teenier as Chair I increased our partnerships with Landowners within King County either privately or entity owned.”

“In CLOSING; I request your vote so that the word CONSERVATION and partnership remains the main focus of King Conservation District.”

Has the Sierra Club actually read anything this person writes?

It’s all the sadder because one of the other candidates has a great background in natural resources and works with many of the newer and more successful sustainability efforts in the area — the ones that are effectively communicating the value of their work to the general public.

One of those groups, Urban Foodlink, has a good blog post about the election. You might want to take a look, and then swing by a polling place tomorrow and vote.

Old media 1, Amazon 0

Read novelist John Scalzi’s color commentary on the Amazon vs. MacMillan catfight this weekend.

Three reasons to read novelist John Scalzi’s color commentary on the Amazon vs. Macmillan catfight this weekend:

1. You followed the Tweets and blog posts documenting the mysterious disappearance of one-sixth of Amazon.com’s books (those published by Macmillan) from the website Friday evening and want to know what was going on behind the scenes.

2. You tried to ignore the back and forth, but want to know how it ended and why.

3. You are a public relations or marketing professional and you want to follow along as Scalzi documents all the ways that Amazon set the scene for a PR disaster and  made things worse every single step of the way.

Putting a face on swine flu

It’s no secret that people are more likely to pay attention to a movement, a brand, or a product that has a human-interest story attached. Naming a program after a survivor (or a victim) has a powerful impact.

We’ve all heard of the Amber Alert (named after a 9-year-old kidnap victim in Texas). And most people are familiar with the Brady Bill (named for presidential press secretary Bill Jim Brady, shot during the Reagan assassination attempt) that mandates background checks for gun purchasers. Since 1948, the Jimmy Fund (named after a 12-year-old cancer patient who went on the radio to talk about his disease) has been raising money for pediatric cancer treatment.

It’s no secret that people are more likely to pay attention to a movement, a brand, or a product that has a human-interest story attached. Naming a program after a survivor (or a victim) has a powerful impact. Nonprofit fundraisers know this (Gilda’s Club and the Susan G. Koman Foundation). But government agencies rarely use this dramatic marketing tactic  — even when lives hang in the balance.

Marketer Seth Godin, noting that more than 50 percent of parents in New York City initially kept their children out of the government swine flu vaccine program there, says “If I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I’d name it after a kid who died last season.”