At my age and in my business, I meet zealots and Neanderthals.  Other than my kids, I haven’t met many who actually like Face Book – even those who live with it and benefit from it.  Compared to some of my friends and clients, I am a Geek.  Compared to others, including my wife, I am a cave-dwelling Luddite.  I love Express Lanes, cell phones, cable, DVR, GPS, etc. when they function properly.  I hate unwanted updates that slow me down, non-intuitive interfaces and over-engineering.

Where do you stand?  Is the rate of the change of technology a boon or a boondoggle?  I’m thinking of forming a group on Linked In, Face Book, Twitter, Google Plus called Gleekites.  Are you a geek, Luddite, or Gleekite?  Why?  What are the most useful, hassle free tech advances?  The worst time wasters?

Of course, it’s difficult to monitor how a delivery person drives or the appearance of an outside sales person.  Here are five pragmatic ways to make impressions positive – and possibly viral:

1. Your website is often the first impression made on people.  Use analytics to see how prospects behave on your site.  Which pages do they spend their time on?  Which pages prompt them to contact you?  Monitor often.  Modify your site to meet your visitors’ needs.
2. Have someone call or visit your business to perceive it through the senses of an outsider.    Is the phone message or receptionist helpful or clear and respectful of the caller’s time and needs?  Is there an old vacation message still on the phone?
3. Address the condition, not the comment.  People will expend a great deal of energy attempting to counteract what somebody said on Face Book.  If you receive a negative review or comment on SM (Social Media), spend at least as much time trying to ameliorate the condition that caused it as you do refuting it.
4. Contradict stereotypes.  If you’re a lawyer, return calls.  If you’re a contractor, show up on time, finish on time.  If you’re an interior designer, bill reasonably and explain your rationale, etc.
5. Be sensitive to others besides your customers and prospects.  I have had occasion to be first a customer and then a vendor for a company.  The company provided great service to me as a customer, but was unprofessional to the point of being unethical in its treatment of me as a vendor.  And, in my other life as a musician, I have experienced what a number of musicians have.  Many restaurateurs don’t return phone calls, don’t communicate professionally.  It’s possible that they use up all their courtesy and care on patrons, but word travels fast among musicians (and probably other vendors) who can steer people away….

So the bad news is that businesses really should be vigilant and realize that their brand and reputation are always at risk.  The good news is that if you remain loyal to your brand and mission, your business should thrive.

Now that you have taken these steps and your website is fortified with these essentials, you’re ready to leverage your site.  Remember that your objective was to convert visitors to your site into customers.  Now go get more visitors.  Email, mail, publicity, viral marketing, networking, blogging, LI, FB, Tw, cross-marketing, advertising and other online and offline efforts will attract more visitors.

Make your site and success even greater by using Google Analytics to understand the effects of your marketing efforts and learn more about your messaging and your visitors.  For example, write a blog, send an email, or post on one of the social media some pearl of wisdom, insight, or thought-provoking question about your field.  Direct people to a dynamic page on your site to:

• Initiate interaction
• Build site traffic
• Track the effectiveness of the messages that attract visitor
• Do all you can to continue interaction

If you appreciate that your site will continue to evolve, you should monitor it to ensure that it evolves rather than devolves.  Watch visitor behavior as well as technological changes.  If you can’t do it yourself, have a marketing specialist or an objective but concerned outsider monitor your online effectiveness.

 Any questions or comments?

This is the fourth of five posts – each describing a simple but important step to make a web site more effective. These steps are too often omitted by webmasters. All the previous posts are available here on my blog.

The fourth ingredient is to take measures to elicit comments and/or participation from your visitors.  Encouraging comments is critical because it provides:

• Valuable and direct insight into your prospects’ needs and wants
• A means of participation that, while it may be short of a purchase, is also short of rejecting your offers
• A path toward a sale – all sales professionals will attest to the importance of soliciting participation as a precursor to a sale – theoretically, one positive step leads to another.

How do you do it?  Creatively.  Some examples are:

• Request opinions
• Encourage questions or answers with an FAQ
• Solicit anecdotes that will illustrate or refute content
• Gamification – contests, riddles, drawings, incentives

Beyond analytics, it’s worth the effort to develop a dialogue and to create conversation; it’s sort of like cooking your concoction to bring out the best in your site.

If you have any examples or comments regarding participation, please email me.

• keywords that brought them to your site
• how they moved through the site
• which pages they fled from and which they pages enthralled them
• where they come from
• when they visited (often you can associate with an event)

Learning from the website will allow you not only to modify the website to make it more effective (such as localize messages, delete or reduce unpopular pages) but equally important to adjust your other online and offline messaging accordingly.  The website is a tool for stimulating sales and delivering your information to the market; it is also a great source for market intelligence.

• Misplaced Focus — relying on a few “star” initiatives to carry the load
• Inadequate preparation – jumping into an “opportunity” without really setting your objectives and expectations
• Lack of coordination – individuals not leveraging the synergy of the team
• Poor timing – failure to sustain effort, quitting at the wrong time
• Ineffective collaboration – not only the classic and glaring lack of teamwork and team spirit, but also the absence of unity of purpose (i.e., brand)

While it may be difficult to analogize marketing activities to the members of a sports team, the disappointing result of both can be attributed to disjointed and misplaced efforts pulling in different directions.

All is not lost; you can change to strategic marketing or as we say in Boston, “wait till next yeah!”

Moreover, a short backstory of how the company was started, its history, etc. will go long way toward humanizing your efforts.  Why do you do what you do?  Did you set out to do it this way?  What factors shaped your company?  Not only robots visit sites, people do.  And people like to do business with people.  Don’t you?  More ways to improve your website are coming….

Learn about your web visitor.

Technology and sprinkled keywords are often surrounded by muscle-flexing ego boosting pyrotechniques designed to impress their client such as flash, videos, etc.  How many sites have you visited that:

• Bombarded you with useless graphics, talking heads, and meaningless words or mottos?
• Insisted on getting more information than you wanted to give, making it difficult for you to get the information you came for?

A marketer will find out about your prospects.  How did they choose your site?  What are they looking for?  Why your site?  What do they want to do?  This knowledge extends beyond merely listing the keywords they used or which page they landed on or even Google Analytics.  Once you understand the visitor and his motivations, demonstrate your understanding.  Allow him to find the information he needs as he needs it.  Here are six ways to accomplish that:

• Offer multiple paths with appropriate or concise headings to permit them to select the most direct route to what they need.
• Liberally sprinkle hyperlinks to the areas where they might find desirable information.
• Use graphics for clarification and explanation when necessary
• Limit other graphics to memorable association and branding rather than as distracting entertainment.
• Keep core copy concise. (nice alliteration, eh?)
• Enable the visitor to read stories or more verbose content at their own discretion.

Following these and other tenets will show the visitor that you understand them and respect their needs – a great preview of a relationship with your company.  Does the recipe for your site contain this ingredient?  The other ingredients will follow in subsequent posts.

1. How many newsletters have you received in the last month or two?
2. How many newsletters do you delete because you see that they are, in fact, newsletters?
3. How many do you read?
4. How many do you find valuable?

If your numbers dwindle down to a precious few, then you should realize that, with notable exceptions newsletters are an iffy marketing choice – especially when you consider the turn-off factor.

Is News Letter an Oxymoron?

Real news, such as it is, appears in (online or offline) newspapers or on TV/cable news programs.  There may be notable exceptions, but in general I think that the very few newsletters to which I still subscribe are really examples of information marketing.  Even then, I unsubscribed to a newsletter that was chock full of good information just because it came way too often.

Six Alternatives to Newsletters

Let’s talk about six other more effective and appropriate ways to market and inform your prospects, network and customers:

• Alerts or bulletins – immediate developments that might affect your recipient.  Brief and to the point.
• Blog – could be the new newsletter, the reader has more of a choice and those who really benefit can actually maintain more contact.
• White Papers – in depth and informative and they have the added bonus of being passed on
• Periodic emails – to segments with an email application such as Constant Contact
• Email or snail mail – depending on the size of your target market, individual missives could be the best way to go
• Twitter or Face Book – if the information is brief or changes rapidly (e.g., stock quotes, developments in legislation, pertinent news stories).  Even better, you can carry on regular discourse and establish thought leadership.

There are other more elaborate ways to leverage information marketing.  In the meantime, analyze what you receive and what you send in order to maximize the results of your efforts.  Please comment or email me on the results of your newsletters.

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays.
These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.  Last year’s winners.

Here are last year’s winners.
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like…. Whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the ond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10.McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and  Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having leftClevelandat 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other fromTopekaat 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was theEast River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

22. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

23. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

ANY ADDITIONAL SIMILES?