Meg Houston Maker

The New Corporate Website

Even second generation corporate websites are looking pretty stale these days. The broadcast model, where the website was roughly a hyperlinked brochure, lasted about a decade. But now social media has permanently changed the way we communicate with our customers, and changed our customers' expectations of us. Customers expect dialogue. As I've written before, communications can no longer be one-way or even two-way; they have to be multi-way.

It seems we are finally fully awake to the notion that companies are cultures, and since cultures are people, companies are, essentially, communities or ecosystems of people. More enlightened companies realize that this interconnectedness means they must be transparent in their communications, and that it's no longer possible, in a multi-connected landscape, to speak to one constituency one way and to another constituency another way, or to hide conversations behind thick velvet curtains. This suggests that a corporate website should reflect community, too, a community in which each constituency—customers, shareholders, executives, managers, staffers—has a presence and a voice and is able to talk to, and with, each other.

Some might consider this multi-way conversation to be chaos. But it's only as chaotic as any real community is. Healthy communities have policies, rules of engagement, and norms to cope with chaos. In a corporation, there's usually a clear, if collective, agenda that everyone's working toward: better products, better customer satisfaction, better market share, better profitability, better experience. These goals don't need to be in opposition—and when they are, it can be useful to have a structure in place to work it out.

So maybe the corporate website of today should stop being a fancy brochure, and convert into something more like a social network, one that supports varying roles and myriad conversations. Sure, a customer could still download a Features and Benefits sheet if he wanted, or a pricing table. But the real meat of the matter, the real communication, would happen between constituents as a constantly evolving conversation. Meaning is made in the interstices, and the outcome could be a more organic, and more genuine, experience for everyone.

Getting Social Media

A senior executive I know recently returned from a conference on social media. It was his first exposure to social tools and social toys, their range and impact. He's never used Facebook, never Tweeted.

"The conference was great," he told me. Then, leaning forward conspiratorially, he added, "I get it."

But knowing about social media isn't the same as getting social media. If you've never experienced it, you've never been exposed to its joys and pitfalls, never been offended when a friend or follower dumps you, never wondered whether your 140-character status haiku struck gold or a nerve with an important other, never struggled to reveal (or hide) your true character under the avatar, never delicately negotiated the intricate textual landscape of meaning, intent, and tone to reach across the electronic ether and win a new friend for life.

The normative is different in social media. If you use it, you will make mistakes. It will exhilarate you, and it will disappoint you. It will hurt you, and it will also heal you. Social media, in other words, is like sex: if you don't do it, you don't get it.

A More Social Definition of Brand

For years I've thought of a brand as the image of a company in its customer's mind. I still like that definition, but today, thinking about the new corporate communications landscape, it struck me that a brand is more like the ongoing contact between company and customer.

The shift in emphasis from the lasting impression to the act of making the impression has everything to do with social media. Now, these customer-company contacts are made daily in multiple active channels, sometimes simultaneously. Each contact fosters a new impression that's part of the customer's evolving understanding of the company.

The new definition also shifts the focus from permanent identity to a kind of perpetual re-creation of identity. This fits the way we all now communicate about ourselves and our institutions: our image, and its expression, is continually re-created in the public communications landscape, often in short bursts. Each burst contributes to the bigger picture of who we are and how we relate to others.

In other words, the brand isn't an outcome of the chatter; the brand is the chatter, more verb than noun. And it's important that corporations get that chatter right.

Magazine Archives: Easier is Better

It must happen a thousand times a day, all across North America. Someone picks up a copy of The New Yorker, maybe in the hair salon, maybe while waiting to tell their psychotherapist about the latest development in their extramarital affair. She, or he, gets through three quarters of an article before her dye job's ready to be rinsed out, or his analyst's previous client exits discreetly through the side door.

So later, maybe much later, she, or he, goes online to the New Yorker website to try to find the article and finish it. Now, who was that author? Was it Atwan or Menand? And what issue was it in? Maybe the Fiction Issue—which was, maybe, a two-week issue. But which two weeks was it? I think it was in... June?

This happened to me, recently (I was the one at the hair salon). The article was in fact by Menand, and it appeared in the June 8th and 15th Fiction Issue. But I didn't remember all that when I began.

There is an "Archive" section of the New Yorker site, and I started there. But the archive doesn't present a list of issue dates, with articles contained therein. Instead, users are invited to search for contents. But search, of course, requires you to know something of what you're searching. My hair appointment was a week ago. I didn't remember all the particulars, so I had to poke away at it to coax the final answer.

Search is nice, but for my use case, a simple taxonomy of the last hundred or so issues, in reverse chronological order, would have gotten me there sooner.

Social Media and Social Media Marketing: Revised Definitions

Recently I posted my working definitions of social media and social media marketing and got good reader feedback both on- and offline. I modified the definitions and used them to kick off a social marketing strategy document for review with my VP. This document was one part disquisition, one part tactical plan, and eleven pages overall, so I decided the definitions could be fairly terse.

Here's where I landed. What do you think? 

Social media
A category of communications that let people create, share, and discuss materials online. Social media includes internet-only services like social networks, video sharing sites, and blogging services, but also simpler tools like commenting and polls that can be embedded on regular sites. Social media users share their photos, videos, stories, comments, and perspectives with each other, leading to multi-way online conversations. This engagement builds shared meaning and relationships among participants.

Social media marketing
A category of Internet marketing that leverages the power of social media to connect companies to customers and customers to each other. Social media marketing seeks to build awareness and shared understanding of a company’s brand through multi-way conversation. It relies on word-of-mouth tactics that let constituents create, distribute, and discuss content about a company’s offerings—stories that become available in real-time and remain findable via search engines later. Social media marketing is an indirect method of acquiring leads and customers. It’s not a direct-response approach, but rather one that helps build brand awareness, affinity, and traffic. As a reward for its engagement with social media, a company can enjoy increased exposure; inexpensive, ad-hoc customer feedback; real-time targeted market research; and enhanced customer affinity and trust.

Twitter It How-to

Hacking around, I realized it's so easy to pass arguments to Twitter that even I can do it. Here's a code snip that builds a link labeled "Twitter it!" Substitute your site and directory. (Entities need to be encoded.):

<a href="http://twitter.com/home/?&amp;status=Check%20this%20out%3A%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engagingexperience.com%2Fwebtech" target="_blank">Twitter it!</a>

On your web page, it looks like this: Twitter it!

This launches Twitter and pre-fills your text and URL, like this:

 

Social Media and Social Media Marketing: Definitions

I'm currently drafting a social media strategy for my company, laying out the business case and identifying how these tools support our objectives. Since my report audience is executives with limited exposure to social media, I've drafted working definitions to guide discussion. As usual, writing encourages mental discipline, so I've had to think hard about what "social media" and its kin, "social media marketing," really mean: It's not a technology, it's a strategy. It's not two-way conversation, it's multi-way. And it's not purely customer-centric, because the company's in the conversation, too.

Here are my current working definitions. Please tell me what you think:

Social media
A category of communications that let people create, share, and discuss materials online. Social media integrates technology with social interaction to let people construct meaning through shared stories and perspectives. Social media offerings range from internet pure-plays—social networks, photo and video sharing sites, or social bookmarking sites—to simple tools embedded on a traditional site allowing users to engage more deeply with its content. Fundamentally, social media is about multi-way conversation, not one-way broadcast.

Social media marketing
A category of internet marketing that leverages the power of social media to connect companies and customers. Social media marketing seeks to build awareness and shared understanding of a company’s brand and products through multi-way conversation between a company and its core audience. Social media marketing relies on viral, word-of-mouth strategies that let constituents create, distribute, and discuss content about a company’s offerings. In exchange, the company enjoys the benefits of increased exposure, real-time targeted market research, and enhanced customer affinity.

Update, June 24, 2009: See my revised definitions based on your feedback.

For the Love of Apple

 
This graphic, courtesy of EdibleApple.com, shows us how far we've come. It also makes me wonder where we're going. What of today's designs will look quaint in ten years? What will look timeless? I'm guessing the iPhone will always look cool. Time will tell.

whitehouse.gov

At noon on January 20, 2009, as Barack Obama sat on a dais listening to Yo Yo Ma and Itzak Perlman play Air and Simple Gifts, a White House IT staffer flipped a breaker on the web server, and the redesigned whitehouse.gov went live.

The people cheered, and not just for our new president. The new site put Obama's "by the people" communications style front and center. Here's a shot of the old site (hat tip: Rex Sorgatz's flickr photostream):

It's cool, sterile, formal, center-framed, and high power distance (to quote Geert Hofstede).  Here's the new site:

It's warm, direct, engaging, and cool in a different way. It has personality, like our president. It even has a blog. Partly what’s good about it is that it’s so much better than the old site. But more than that, it changes our perceptions of a government website, thereby changing our perceptions of government itself.

I was moved to express my admiration, using the "Contact Us" link in the upper right. I'd forgotten about writing that note. The gesture vaporized into the post-inaugural fizz. Today, though, this arrived in my inbox:

Dear Meg Maker:

    Thank you for your recent note, and for sharing your thoughts
with me. Your kind words echo the messages of millions of
Americans who have welcomed me and my family to the White
House with an outpouring of goodwill.

    On January 20th, Americans spoke with one voice, choosing
hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Our
Nation faces serious challenges, but we will overcome them if
our imagination is joined to common purpose. 

    Now is our time to work together, reaffirm our enduring
spirit, and choose our better history. With your help, we will
renew our Nation's promise to carry forth the great gift of
freedom to future generations, as our forebears have delivered it
to us.


Sincerely,

Barack Obama

To be a part of our agenda for change, join us at www.WhiteHouse.gov

Recent note? I had to grope through the haze to figure out what triggered this email. Well, if you consider the last quarter "recent," then it must have been the web comment. I love my new president, but this communication doesn't win awards for timeliness or personalization.

Still, arriving as it did on tax day, I have to believe that someone out there is paying attention, and appreciates my participation on this most participatory of days.

Engaged Readership

In the past month, my food journal, Maker's Table, has been visited by people in, among other places: Petalin Jaya, Malaysia; Lingen, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; Casablanca, Morocco; Guelph, Canada; and Mountain View, California. Because it's on the web, and because all web users have network connections, my data collectors can finger them out.

It is a wondrous thing for a writer to get a glimpse of her readership, and doubly so when her readers find her from the globe's four corners.

Simple Energy = Good Experience

When was the last time you had a service call that was a good experience?

Last week our oil company, Simple Energy of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, sent two technicians to look at a problem we'd been having with our boiler. One man was quite experienced, and had worked on the system when we'd rebuilt the manifold. The other was, perhaps, a trainee.

The men ran some tests and made an adjustment, and took time to explain the problem they'd found and what they'd done to correct it. They were at the house a total of about fifteen minutes. We were relieved our problem was so simply solved, and gratified the men seemed to take the problem, and their work, seriously.

Today we got the bill. I was expecting something like sixty or seventy dollars, because they'd sent two men fifteen miles, and then delivered the value they'd promised. Plus, the bill doesn't cover just technician time and mileage; it has to pay for the scheduler, dispatcher, and, yes, even the person who mails the invoice. I would have paid it, cheerfully, because we got good service.

Total fee? Zero dollars. That's right, zilch. "Technician adjusted air intake on burner. No charge for the call. Thank you for your business."

Wow. Not only was the service call itself a good experience—the men were on time, friendly, and knowledgeable—but the company delivered yet another good experience by waiving the fee for this short trip. A gesture like this says the relationship itself is important to the balance sheet. They didn't nickel and dime.

Simple Energy bills itself as your "friendly hometown heating oil." This week they lived up to their billing.

What's the Story?

As director of fundraising web strategy for a large institution, I create monthly web analytics reports for my internal clients. The process requires me to wade through extensive data on site usage, e-commerce transactions, marketing campaign results, and any other activity that produces measurable output.

Although my clients have full access to this information at all times, they can't digest raw data. They need a condensed version that lets them see how their properties are working and what improvements could be made. It's my job, as their internal consultant, to explore the data for peaks and troughs, trends and correlations, and to turn the data into meaningful, actionable recommendations.

I like to think of this process as "finding the story" in the data, discovering what really happened last month, and why. Stories are easy to tell, easy to remember, and easy to make use of in future planning. I give each client a summary memo with that month's key story. This is far more useful to them than a grid of numbers could ever be.

Here's an example. Last month a client sent an email driving visitors to an online holiday slideshow. The show was a non-commercial, nostalgic, feel-good piece offering warm holiday greetings and, by extension, inviting a sense of connection to the institution. The site enjoyed a huge traffic spike to the slideshow page for a day or two, and this drove up overall traffic numbers for the month. So the slideshow seemed like a terrific success.

But looking further at the numbers, I noticed the site also experienced a much higher than average bounce rate that month. That meant that most visitors arrived at the site, saw only a single page, and left. Looking back at the slideshow—the largest contributor of visits by far—I noticed it provided no call to action at the end. In fact, nothing on its page was clickable—there was no navigation, no footer, not even an email address. There was nothing for a visitor to do next. The slideshow ended in a dark alley.

So what's the client's "story of the month?" That while the email/slideshow combination was wildly successful in driving visitors to the site, the client missed an opportunity to leverage its success by asking the audience to explore related content.

And the recommendation? Keep the seasonal slideshow, because it clearly works to drive traffic. But next time, embed it on a page with site-wide navigation elements. Add a call to action at the end, and on the footer of the page, suggesting links to related content—seasonal events, other multimedia shows, or news articles that seem topical. This will keep some portion of the audience engaged, and continue to foster the sense of connection. Which is, after all, what the slideshow campaign is all about.

MySQL Poetry

There's just something incredibly ironic and wonderful about this:

Lost connections, lost sessions. What can you do with this poem? How does your perception of these warning statements alter when you view them as art, not life?

Take its advice: "work with this poem."

Projects

Today I completed a tiling job. I had started it in the fall, during a weeklong vacation from work. I set the underlayment and stone tile in a matter of a few days, but the thinset adhesive I used to bed the tile needed longer than expected to harden, and it was several weeks before it was possible to advance to the final stages: sealing the tile and applying grout. I managed to apply two coats of the quick-drying, volatile sealant over the course of three November days warm enough to keep the windows open. But the project languished as work, school, and the holidays took over my time and motivation.

My husband and I tried not to use the floor in its ungrouted state, but it is difficult to avoid using a floor, even one in a less-used area of the house. This is our mudroom. It is not our main entry, but is one we use for stomping in and out with dirty boots, firewood, tools, and trash. I resigned myself to using the room, knowing the crevices would need a good vacuuming prior to the final grouting, and reminding myself that extra steps are not unusual when one is simultaneously creating a home and living in it.

Finally, today, home on another vacation, I blocked the half-day required to grout the floor. Grouting is messy, tedious, demanding. One applies the sticky sludge to the cracks between the tiles, pressing it in with a rubber float and swiping off the excess before switching to a wet sponge to clear the surface of residue. The grout starts to harden in thirty minutes, so it’s important to work in sections to keep a dried haze from forming on the tile surface. The grout lines must be tooled evenly, smoothed while still damp. And the whole surface needs a final wipe and scrub before it hardens for good.

As with most creative endeavors, this one provided me moments of deep despair, when success seemed elusive, even impossible. The thinset was wrong for my application. The Indian slate tiles proved maddening to work with, being crumbly, brittle, and uneven. Grouting required innumerable buckets of fresh water, sponge wringing, and paper towels.

I’m not an accomplished tiler, having previously tiled only three small floors and a shower stall. But I am a determined tiler, someone who has undertaken, since a young age, many complicated projects I wanted done but wasn’t sure, exactly, how to do. In such projects, there is an almost inevitable moment when I say (or swear) to myself: This is a mess, a catastrophe. This will never come together. But as I continue to work, to test options and make progress, I learn how to solve the problems the project presents. The result is almost never what I had anticipated, planned, and expected. But the result is achievable, and inevitable. The only way to do a project is to do it, to make it happen.

Knowledge Workers Need Periods of Inattention

"I had this idea while I was in the shower..." How many times have you used that sentence to introduce your new idea that was so novel, so compelling, you knew it couldn't fail? Or maybe you weren't in the shower—maybe you were weeding the garden, chopping wood, or simply stepping away from your desk for a fresh cup of tea, when suddenly the puzzle you'd been trying to untangle for hours, days, or weeks is solved in an instant?

This is the power of thinking without thinking, the knowledge you can suddenly access when you turn your conscious brain off. It's the spontaneous understanding that arises when you've fully internalized a problem, but haven't fully formulated a solution. It's the idea you get when you stop thinking so hard.

Malcolm Gladwell gets at some of this in Blink, but there he's mostly talking about applying deeply cultivated expertise to new situations. I'm talking about another predicament, and one that's probably more common: the insight we can access when we pause, step back, and let our minds work on the problem while our hands work on something else. It's the idea we get when we remove ourselves from deliberation, and let ourselves sink into ideation.

Sometimes an idea comes during reverie—staring out the window, perhaps—but often it comes when we simply stop paying direct attention to an idea and start up a physical process. The process might be weeding or washing or driving, but it's likely one that uses our motor skills more than our intellect. I find that natural and repetitive actions let me work without a lot of conscious thinking, letting my mind explore freely. These are some of my most synthetic moments; the moments when I have good ideas.

It happened one morning this week while commuting in to work. I had the radio on, and was thinking about and noticing a lot of things along the way: the crows by the side of the road, my husband's trip this week to Chicago, my deadline at work. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular; I was paying attention, in a very inattentive way, to the road in front of me, and to the stories in my head. Suddenly I had an idea for a marketing promo to try at work, an idea that synthesized a story on the radio with the time of the year with my client's current marketing goals. When I got to work I tried my new idea, and it worked, famously. I don't believe I could have arrived at that idea while sitting at my desk trying to think it up. I needed to be away from the demands of focused thinking, steeped in a fluid near-trance of mechanical activity, to arrive at my good idea.

Knowledge workers—those of us who make our living by our subject matter expertise rather than by our manual labor—need to remember this important phenomenon. In spite of everything, we need, sometimes, to stop paying attention, to stop trying so hard. This might be the best way to produce our best ideas.

 

Modify Your Posts Based on Search Engine Referrals

Last August I posted to my food journal, Maker's Table, tips for making really good turkey burgers. I provided two recipes, but introduced them with a long article about my personal experiences learning to cook meat. This exposition included information on safe cooking temperatures for both solid and ground meat, tackling red meat before moving to the somewhat trickier subject of poultry.

It was one of my longer posts, but it also become one of the most viewed. In the weeks after publication, I noted significant daily traffic to this page arriving from search engine queries about safe cooking temperatures for turkey burgers. In just the last 24 hours, for example, this page has been viewed by people searching for "turkey burgers still pink," "hot [sic] to cook turkey burgers," and "turkey burger internal temperature." 

The problem? I'd buried the lead. In order to learn the right internal temperature for turkey burgers, a reader would have to wade through 500 words of my personal narrative.

The solution? Put the most critical, most sought-after, information at the top. I edited the post, highlighting the key information in a "quick take-away" header with a link to the FDA guidelines. I made sure to include the words "internal temperature" in this introduction, since that seemed to be the keyword phrase most often used in searches.

The result? A clearer and more definitive summary statement in Google results lists (see above). And, hopefully, a better user experience.

Google Flu Trends

From the Wisdom of Crowds department: Google Flu Trends shows that search queries for flu-related terms are predictive of flu activity in the United States. Although not everyone who searches for flu information is sick, patterns emerging from regional queries are indicative of infection rates and distribution.

These predictors can estimate how much flu is circulating up to two weeks faster than the models provided by the Centers for Disease Control.

Google's results have been published in Nature.

VPR Gets It

I haven't been a member of Vermont Public Radio for years. I live in New Hampshire now, and listen almost exclusively to New Hampshire Public Radio, even though I get both signals. I donate annually to NHPR, and I feel good about that. But I always feel a little guilty switching to VPR at 8:35 a.m. so I can hear the Writer's Almanac.

Two weeks ago, both stations simultaneously started their fall membership drives. I ended up switching back and forth a lot during my morning commute, looking for real news in the interstices between the breathless pitches for support. But yes, I'm enough of a public radio nerd that I also occasionally leave the breathless announcers on air, just to hear how things are going with the drive.

I have to hand it to VPR: they got to me. It took about a week, but during a new-member challenge I pulled over and called them up. I'm a renewing member, I said, but it's been a while, so maybe I'm can count as New toward the challenge? The volunteer agreed, pleasantly took my details, thanked me profusely for my modest gift, and we hung up. I drove on, satisfied that I could now listen to Garrison Keillor's poems with a clear conscience.

That was five days ago, and I'd mostly forgotten about it. But tonight I returned home to a personal voicemail message from none other than Jane Lindholm, the host of VPR's midday program, which I'd heard a few times, in pieces. "Hi, Meg! This is Jane Lindholm, host of Vermont Edition on VPR. I'm just calling to say thank you so much for becoming a new member. Your gift really means a lot, and we're just so happy to have you!"

Typing it out in quotes like that makes it seem scripted, but it wasn't. It was ad lib, it was genuine, it was real. It really was her, not a recording. She took the time.

It was worth it. I felt valued, even for my small gift. Thank you, VPR.

Meaningful Titles and Clear Descriptors Drive Traffic

Last Friday I noticed a spike in traffic on my food journal, Maker's Table. A number of visitors had arrived from search engine results for Flaio, an Italian red wine I'd blogged about in March 2008. I'd assumed the wine had recently gotten some press.

That evening, opening our copy of the Wall Street Journal, I got my answer. Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher had focused their Friday "Tastings" column on Primitivo, the Italian twin of Zinfandel. One of the few wines they really liked was Flaio, and at $10.99, it was also the cheapest. The sidebar showed a photo of the bottle and listed it as "Flaio 2006 (Salento)."

Returning to my site stats, I found at least three search engine referrals for keyword searches of precisely that string. I ran a few of these to recreate the users' search experience—to see what they had seen. My post was on the first page of Google search results for that query, and both the title and search summary gave a good indication the page was a review:

 

I've witnessed similar outcomes when recreating my visitors' searches for turkey burgers, three ingredient meals, and Stella's restaurant in Lyme—three other popular posts whose titles reflect the main point of the story. This underscores that clear titles, good first lines, and detailed particulars in the post body help searchers find your pages.

Sisters

Sisters

My little hurricane,
my little thunder
storming
around the house.
Gray raincloud cats
with claws like lightning
eyes gold like fire.
In your legs,
the strength of
mountains.
In your paws
the speed of light.
Nothing can catch
one
except the other.
Sisters, you live
racing the moon,
winning.