Who Are You?

Read this with The Who's song, "Who Are You?" in your head.

I don't know if it's just me, but I love websites that let you know who's behind the content. Who is the business? What do they do? What do they like? Where are they from? What makes them special? Who makes up their team?

I go to some sites and they have no photo of the owner of the company anywhere in the content. They use stock, canned images to express their industry or happy customers. I'm shocked to see so many websites that don't have personal content. Really?

Why do you think social media has taken over the communication world? Because PEOPLE ARE SOCIAL. So how are you being social on your website? And I'm not talking about adding a twitter feed or Facebook embed. I'm talking about real content that exposes who you are, what you're committed to, and why you're doing what you're doing.

Be a Storyteller

People connect with stories because they are unique, personal, and relatable. The human condition is a natural conduit that bonds us all together. We share hopes, ideas, pain, loves, frustrations and desire. Let them in, let them see who you are, and make it authentic. Those who are looking for you, who would be a great fit and lasting relationship for your business, will be more apt to pursue doing business with you if they connect with WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

Tactically, there are endless ways of telling your story, sharing who you are, and making yourself known to your audience. Photos. Blogs. Drawings. Video. Be creative. Have fun. Make it relevant, fresh, and real. And most of all, be yourself, because no one can compete with your uniqueness.

Are You Too Busy to Read This?

First of all, thanks for reading this. Even if it's just these first few words. Like, if you bail here. Or here. Thanks for reading this little bit.

There is no doubt we are all extremely busy and suffer from info-overload. As a result, we are very selective in what we consume information-wise. And it impacts us personally and in marketing our businesses online.

Are you a small business who is not sure where to put your content or what to write or how to market and position it? Stop and think about what you're reading online. What TV shows are you watching? What ads do you respond to? What brands are you following? What are you posting and where? What are you laughing at online? What content is polarizing you?

Tracking your online social behavior and content consumption can be a key indicator as to what your contemporaries are consuming. Take a moment to write down how much time you spend online, what you're doing, and why. Make a note of the decision process you make when choosing to read something completely versus scan versus skip.

What makes you stop and spend more time on the content? Is it because it speaks to something that's important to you? If so, was it presented to you clearly so you knew it was something that was going to be worth your time to consume?

These are all factors to consider when you are developing your own content. First you need to create it, then you need to post it, then you need to make it interesting to your audience. Don't know who your audience is? Well, that's a great place to start and get some clarity around that.

No matter what you do, it's still in the hands and hearts of your customers and prospects and referrers to choose you...or move on to someone else.

Why Social Media Lags...for Some

Bain & Company writes in their Insights brief entitled, Putting Social Media to Work:

"As part of a broader customer engagement strategy, social media can be an effective and cost-efficient marketing, sales, service, insight and retention tool. Our recent survey of more than 3,000 consumers helped to identify what makes social media effective. We found that customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 percent to 40 percent more money with those companies than other customers. They also demonstrate a deeper emotional commitment to the companies, granting them an average 33 points higher Net Promoter® score (NPS®), a common measure of customer loyalty..."

As business operators, we already have a lot to juggle with web marketing, indeed. Adding a social strategy to the already labor-intensive work we're doing seems daunting, especially with the polarized opinion about the value of using the social web as a marketing channel.

But what I love about this quote in particular is the "deeper emotional commitment" comment. First of all, that's a pretty sophisticated measurement, being that emotions are intangible in the larger sense. But this, later in the brief, is hard to ignore:

"More than 60 percent of Internet-connected individuals in the US now engage on social media platforms every day.

I think we need to pay more attention to the social web. So why is there a widening gap (according to the Bain brief) in adoption?

Every business is unique, including yours. The key is finding out where your audience is spending their time, and if what you're saying to them (or promoting to engender emotional connection with your company) is getting through and having impact.

Try it and see. Give it some time. Use it in an innovative way that fits your business. Let the social web be another conduit to do good in the world.

Why Your Web Designer Is Never Right

One of my most valuable and effective services evolved out of being a web designer: interviewing customers.

In the early days of my web designing career some mumble mumble years ago, I would spend hours coming up with the right combination of color, graphics, photos, lines, gradients and layout to achieve the perfect home page. And it was typically prepared for an executive who led the department that was portioning their budget for my full-time position. I was their web bit**.

"Can you make that picture bigger? I like this blue, but this red is too dark. Can you make it lighter? No, how about green? I like green. Make it green."

This was a regular occurrence for a long time in the corporate world. I tried to gently introduce them to the basics of design principles through my designer street cred, but when I saw the blank stares and slack jaws, I learned to stifle myself. In the end, the website went to green with humongous pictures, and I internalized my frustration with my design-in-a-vacuum situation.

Then usability testing hit the web world (thank you, Jakob Nielsen, for popularizing UT). I heard angels singing. Suddenly, I didn't have to dispute color or layout with the MBAs. The users were judge and jury when it came to website effectiveness. When I started noticing how there was never enough money in the budget for user testing, I understood. It was never about the website's design to begin with.

When I left corporate life and started my own company, things changed. Everything I created, wrote, or designed was driven by one thing: my client's customer and their experience. Suddenly it was about content. Functionality. Usability. How quick they could get in and out and on with their lives. How it solved their problems. How it served their needs. How it made their day. How it made them feel good about doing business with my client.

It had little to do with what my client personally wanted, because my clients get it. Customers are why they are in business. They are why they do what they do, and their reason for being. Granted, customers don't run the show, but they do have a very big voice when it comes to communications and service. It all matters when creating a publishing tool, a servicing tool, a sales tool (and so many other solutions that a website provides) that can hold the key to your business thriving or dying a slow death-by-competition.

So the next time your designer (if they're worth their salt) disputes a subjective decision you're making about their creative work on your site, understand that your designer knows that your website has not an audience of one. It has an audience of potentially thousands, if not more. They are only arguing for your audience, not for their chops as a designer or your subjective observation of their design.

That is, if they've incorporated user feedback into their design. The customer is, after all, always right.

Welcome back, tpappy.com

tpappy.com was a domain I purchased a long, long time ago, and in 2006 it was my sole company.

In 2009, I launched a new company: Better3. It was designed to provide creative services grounded in customer insight, which would be the driver of any message used in marketing, sales or service delivery.

This led to better overall communications, and made the tpappy websites really effective. Because my clients ended up having better customer relationships by understanding them in a fresh way, they were able to more confidently drive messaging and behavior that got fast results. This objective gathering of customer data enabled me to really position my clients as leaders in their industry.

tpappy websites have always been the gateway drug for Better3 work, and the Better3 philosophy of Better Understanding driving Better Communications that result in Better Relationships was a quickly-proven strategy.

What was difficult, however, was selling the Better3 concept.

Everyone gets websites. Not everyone gets Transforming Business Relationships.

So I dusted off the tpappy.com domain and created a whole new website-focused product based in the Squarespace CMS framework. Now I can reliably transform stale, limp websites into stellar performers and use the Better3 philosophy to create compelling content.

How exciting to have tpappy.com back!