edelman interview

here, though I forgot which blog I read about it on, shame on me.

Sounds like Richard gets it.

qualifying in recruiting- crayon vs gm vs apple- keep it simple

Go to crayon’s homepage, and click on ‘people’ in the upper right corner. They end their pitch for new people to join up with “consider yourself essentially hired on the spot. How’s that for a job interview?”

They list the things they want- what is important to them. You need to have been blogging about marketing, and/or podcasting.

Because they base themselves on an island in Second Life, they can say “if you’re right for crayon, you’re right” and don’t worry about that relocation hassle.

I wish every page we built qualified this well for who we want to buy things from our clients. Simple, clear, with a pretty obvious Contact button (call to action).

Contrast this with, oh, say, the GM careers site. First, they call it careers, just like everyone else.

Now go to that page- what are you supposed to do? No clear call to action, and an overwhelming number of choices. Now, GM is huge, but that is no excuse.

I hate to be typical, but compare it to Apple’s career page. Apple says: here are 4 choices. Click one.

Look in the New Grads section (which has the button ’start your career’). It tells you the 3 things that happen next.

So crayon says ‘if you are this kind of person, we want you.’ GM says, well, nothing, because they shove so much information at you that you pass out and die. And Apple says ‘here are the 4 ways you can get in to the company.’

Now apply this to your homepage. Is it easy to buy, easy to know where to go?

Check out the homepage of BlogHer, the women’s blogging community. I am on their case to add three buttons right below the nav bar: Join BlogHer, Find a Blog, and Advertise. Because right now, there is too much information for me to know what to do right away. (Disclosure- we advertise with BlogHer, and we like them, so you should to.)

Check out our client Dessy. The homepage gives you 6 choices in the upper left (where the eye travels to first).

Check out Linda Keith CPA for a speaking business. Do you want to sign up for a class, or sign up for the newsletter? There are more choices on the left nav bar, but these 2 stand out.

In addition to my mutterings, check out Godin’s book The Big Red Fez which basically tells you to make sites really easy where it is super obvious where to click.

If you are not sure that your site does this, and you are not sure how to make it do this, comment here and I will take a glance.

news, search terms, and search engines

Keeping in mind that my blog still gets very few visitors, I am getting a fair amount of traffic from search terms, almost all for the 100 Fastest Growing Companies list I posted here. The only post that beats that out for views is my post about why wordpress is not good for business blogs.

The lesson for bloggers is a) make sure your post titles get in to the url, b) talk about news or c) talk about continually important issues, like wordpress and business blogs.

Notice that most of that traffic is not dependent on whether I am saying anything smart. It is dependent on who is talking about the same thing. Do a google search on ‘100 fastest growing companies puget sound.’ I am the top link. Now, not many people search for that phrase, but for those who do, they see me as the expert.

A first place in google means someone knows what they are talking about, right? In this case, yes, I give the list of 100 companies.

The challenge for you is to find those unusual search terms that can yield highly qualified traffic. Overall, 10% conversion may be acceptable for a PPC (pay-per-click, as in search engine advertising) campaign. But find a niche keyword, and you can get 25% and above.

when it’s okay to lie

I just lied to someone, I stand to benefit if they believe me, and I am not sorry.

One company I know has a web address that is a .org. The .com would of course be better- I still accidentally type in .com half the time.

The .com site is owned by someone else and is just a placeholder, making money (don’t know how much) through ads.

The aboveboard way to go about this would be to have me in my official capacity or the firm that wants the domain to contact whoever currently owns the name, and ask the price. The results would be in the many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars, because the seller would be able to determine (correctly) that we could afford that kind of price if we wanted to.

Instead, I pretended to still be in college and working on a class project. To hopefully get a price that is less than $1k.

There is no question that, applied to daily business, this is totally unethical. Lying to get a good deal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why do I feel so differently about this that I am posting it, opening myself up for criticism?

In short, I believe there is some kind of property right in domain names. The courts agree- we could force the current owner to give up the domain to us, unless it happened to be their name or their business name, both very unlikely. So instead of the direct, confrontational approach, I opt for the quick and dirty approach, that gets us what we want, which we would have gotten through a legal challenge anyways, but still gives the current owner something.

Note that they would not get anything if we were able to get it through a legal challenge.

So, I am basically trading a lot of time and psychic energy, and my ability to say that I never lie in business, in order to get the domain to the people who have a right to it, while rewarding those who were smart enough to claim it in the first place.

Discuss.

Also, what if it was your domain, you could make a legal challenge for $3k and get it because it is your name, but you can misrepresent yourself (lie) and get it for $500 and far less time. Or you could buy it outright for $10k (this is not a made up number- if the seller knows who you are, and you have cash, this could be a reasonable price). What would you do?

pleased to meet you

You think I would understand this by now, being in client services and all, but it surprised me a bit when we talk with a client this morning by phone who expressed how pleased he was to talk with us, to meet us.

Now, we had emailed back and forth, but never talked. Or rather, our boss and his boss had talked, but not us. So now we know what each other sound like, and have a good sense of where the other is at, how happy they are with where the project is at.

We also both got extra information that the other may have deemed not important enough to include in an email, and yet colors the situation in an important way. As in, there is this other project following yours, so we need the site to get done before we can start this other thing.

So besides doing a good job, clients want contact. And they don’t get it much. So give them a call, just to say that everything is all good.

how to say thank you

Today at Service Untitled they are talking about how to say thank you.

One tack we are going to work on is getting company postcards, so after a client meeting, we can go that little bit further in saying thanks.

How can you thank you clients in a way unusual for your industry?

what i do

Start talking about the marketing side of things, the part we get to after main site design is done, and I start smiling. At least that is the evidence from a recent meeting. The big boss noticed that I was grinning like an idiot. I thought (afterwards) of how best to explain what exactly I do.

During the design and development stage of rebuilding a site, I keep the clients up to date on what is going on. I manage expectations. When they have low level questions, like “How do I make my CMS do this?” I answer them. Actually, if it is a fairly technical question, I find the person who knows, get the answer, make sure it is in plain english, and then relay that answer to the client.

If the question is high level, like “Should I try to compete in this particular market over here?” then they talk to Ian, and I get to listen in and offer my thoughts.

In this first stage, I am performing a function. And it is fun, because I get to help people understand what is going on. At that meeting, we talked about URL redirects and how they should be. The boss claimed he was an idiot with this, and wanted it in plain english. So I said:
“I call person A, she answers, I find out who she is. I call person B, the code routes me through to person A again, but I am expecting person B, so I am not happy. That is what you have now. What you want is, when I call person B, their message machine says that I should really be talking with person A, and gives me their number.”

And he was happy. Because, when put in language you understand, URL redirects are not complicated- it is more of a language barrier thing than a requires technical background thing.

So design and development is fun because I get to help people understand stuff.

But then, when the site is mostly finished, we get to work on the marketing stuff. SEO, PPC, maybe landing pages… and here I both get to help people understand what is going on as well as play a direct part in making them money. Also, I understand a lot more of this aspect of what we do. I don’t have to ask anyone about what a landing page is supposed to do, so I can answer client’s questions immediately.

And I get to see a direct impact on sales. Did this ad work? Did that landing page work? How can we tweak this? These are all questions I can sink my teeth into. And, more than being a conduit and a translator of information, I can have a greater impact.

So what do I do? I help people understand their project during all phases, and I help make them more money.

Now that is fun.

the power of a phone call

I called a client. Because she was not happy. And you know, we thought she was not happy because we were not showing her excellent designs in a timely manner.

She is now happy. I think we thought wrong. She may have been frustrated that the designs were not what she wanted- but she was not happy because she thought she was being… ignored. Pushed aside. Or something like that.

And here is the lesson for you- it does not matter that we are all thinking about her project, and how we can make it better, and it does not matter that we are sending her many emails with different designs and ideas.

Because, on this project, for her, right now, she wanted- no, needed a phone call. That’s what told her that we cared about her.

And if your clients don’t feel like you care about them, nothing else matters.

kinko’s part three: becky comes through

So we have business cards. They are not high quality, and we will go to a professional house soon to get nice ones done, but they will work for tonight. Becky came through.

5 minutes this morning, not more than 20 minutes of Anna’s time designing the cards, 10 minutes of our time to drop them off, 5 minutes of my time to pick them up. Done right, the first time, fast, with no exceptions. Of course, it wasn’t Kinko’s first time, but it was Becky’s first time. And she came through. She completely met all my expectations on the first go.

The next time I have a rush job: “Hello, this is Brian with Portent, is Becky available?”

PS The Kinko’s in question is at:
112 Andover Park E # A, Tukwila, WA
(206) 244-8884
Ask for Becky.

kinko’s part two: how it should be

I went to Kinko’s this morning (7:10am), expecting to fight with them to make our business card order happen.

Instead, I explained what needed to Becky, an assistant manager. She told me exactly what I needed to know the first time. She apologized that her coworkers had screwed up, and explained that they were getting a lot of new staff on. She did not say this as an excuse, just an explanation.

I will be back there soon to get the order to her. And I am sure it will be done right the first time. Because Becky is on the job.

I still don’t trust Kinko’s. But I trust Becky. And I will be telling everyone up her chain of command how she got the job done the first time, no fuss. And I am talking about her here. When I get her last name and the address of the Kinko’s where she works, I will tell you, so if you need a job done right and you are in the area, you know where you can go.

I am really really easy to please- I just want the job done right, the first time, fast, with no exceptions. See? That wasn’t so hard. And for Becky, it isn’t.

Takehome: for some clients, like me, even when we lose faith in your organization, a new face who performs perfectly can regain that trust, though it will be focused on just that one person.

Takehome #2: meeting expectations is critical. Notice that Becky has not actually done the job yet, just set the expectation that it will be done right the first time. That is the first step, and a good start to doing a job right- but she still has to deliver. Stay tuned.