3 Top Tools To Tame Twitter

 

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

As Twitter moves into its more mature phase, a number of Twitter utilities have emerged, some good, some not so good. I’m an early adopter and a daily Twitter user and have experimented with many Twitter tools over time. Please feel free to follow me but without further blather, here’s my top 3, must have, twitter tools:

• TwitThis.com — Though showing its age, TwitThis is a very cool tool. In a nutshell, simply browse to a web page that you want to share. Click the TwitThis bookmarklet (that you’ve previously installed). If you’re not logged in to Twitter, you’ll be prompted to do so.  A window pops up, and you can edit your Tweet and then send it to your Twitter stream. I like it because for quick Tweets, I don’t have to jump to another application, load a Twitter tab in my browser, etc.
• Twitter Twerp Scan — If you care about managing your Twitter Followers, then you need to run the Twitter Twerp Scan from time to time. Basically, Twerp Scan checks your Twitter account for people with extremely high following to follower ratios. These are most likely ‘bots or marketing drones — who could be potentially bringing down the value of your ‘Twitter Juice’ (is there such a thing? I’m thinking of Google Juice here, that mythical elixer that adds Page Rank to your website based on the power of incoming links). You can customize your Twerp ratio but if you have a high number of Twerps, the block/removal process is a bit tedious. Id’ love to see a ‘batch un-follow’.
• TweetLater.com — Ok, you’ve used Twitter for a while, are used to updating your followers, and have a good social network online that notices when you’re not there. Or you’re the Communications specialist for an organization that uses Twitter to keep your audience informed. Regardless, you also have a need to publish Tweets on a regular basis, then TweetLater is for you.  Simply, it’s a hand site that allows you to queue-up Tweets, to be published at a specific time.  One very cool and not-so-obvious feature: you can also set TweetLater up to autofollow people who follow you. Reducing your Twitter maintenance chores, though I’d remember to run TwerpScan from time to time 🙂 Just to nuke the Twerps.

Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

photo credit: Kevin Steele

A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regarding merging two corporate domains. Two organizations, with similar or complimentary lines of business are now one. What to do about the left-over websites. A quandary.

Below I’ve outlined 6 areas to consider, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I guess the only reasonable quick-answer is to first understand the business goal for the merged business. Once you understand that, you can begin to ask questions about the goals for the new website.

Let me create a fictional example to help illustrate the situation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll outline a couple of things to think about for each of these points.

Obviously there are many more things to consider, but this is a blog post and not a downloadable eBook 🙂

Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:

Ben’s Bikes (a local mountain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a market leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new mountain bikes. They also have exclusive dealership agreements with a number of the premier mountain bike manufacturers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select clientele and are considered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional mountain biking aficionados.

Sammy’s cycle shop is a general bicycle retailer. They don’t really specialize, but they do have a wide selection of mid-priced bikes in all categories (road, mountain, touring, cruising, kids, etc). They also have multiple locations in the local geographic region.

The businesses have merged and are operating as Ben & Sammy’s cycle therapy. They have a small internal team tasked to manage the website integration.

Now that we understand the landscape, we go back to the quandary of the website. Let’s get to some important questions:

photo credit: casey atchley

Audience
These are the visitors to your site; your potential or past customers. Questions you should be asking your team include:

• Who are you servicing and what are their goals for using your website? This is basic and should be asked before any website is designed (or redesigned).
• What’s the business purpose? Is your website there to book appointments, to take orders, or to provide a catalogue of information? Your new site will depend on how well you answer that questions, and how well your audience understands that purpose.

photo credit: marcbel

Content
This is what your audience is looking for. Audiences conduct research and order online.

• Inventory — both sites likely have similar content, so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make content decisions until you’ve evaluated all the content assets.
• What about content unique to one business…is it still relevant in the new business landscape?
• Keep only content that supports the audience’s ability to fulfill the business goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.

photo credit: inju

Google Juice
Both sites have some search engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of search keywords or search term. It determines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a particular phrase or keywords are searched upon.

• Determine if pagerank is really important to your business needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
• 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new domain, you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the search engines know that the previous businesses haven’t vanished, just merged. Setting them up can be a bit technical but is very important to ensure that visitors who’ve bookmarked the old business pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.

photo credit: perreira

Ancillary touchpoints
Over the development of the two previous websites, you’ll find that there may be some communication touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular email newsletters. You’re going to have to consider migrating
all these to the new site.

• Now’s a good time to evaluate the integration of your entire communication process. Where does web fit? How about RSS feeds of particular content streams…or newsletters? This is where your marketing team will have some valuable input too…really!
• If you’ve had a website, you’ve likely been measuring traffic to that site. Well, since you’re merging sites, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your website measurement strategy. Will you continue using the free utilities or consider purchasing a service contract with a service provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?

photo credit: robholland

Changing external linking
Both websites have been around for a while, and have a fair number of inbound links from other sites and online articles.

• These help build pagerank (Google Juice). Yes, they’ll automagically flow through when they hit the 301 redirects, but it’s also good to contact the sites directly and ask them to update their links. This is a great time to (re)establish communication with your website network…work the social side of the medium 🙂

photo credit: alq666

Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old websites will still be bookmarked or linked in old email etc. If, perchance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.

• Keep your old sites live for a year or two. Domain names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old content on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to maintain) and leave helpful messages on the appropriate landing pages. Use your analytics and server logs to determine heavily visited pages.

I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I mentioned, this is not a book, just a blog post. So, there are many more things to consder in the merge process. I’ve listed a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.

Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part three)

photo credit: iDream_in_Infrared

Part three: The good, the bad, and the content developer.

This is the third part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern‘s Masterclass for web content professionals. Part one focuses on knowing your audience. Part two is about keywords, carewords and focus. In this part, Krista speaks about the role of the content manager / developer.

Q: You’ve worked as a content developer and web professional for quite a few years now, was there anything at the masterclass that shocked or surprised you?

I wasn’t so much surprised as disappointed by the number of websites that don’t focus on the audience. Obviously I am aware of this, but it really sunk in seeing example after example after example. This is not just a North American problem it’s global.

Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website and getting participants to see the web page with new eyes (along with showing us it’s OK to laugh at ourselves). I found it interesting that in each example he sited, the organization completely missed the mark when it spent to much time focusing on them and not enough time focusing on the audience. Each website that made improvements did so by focusing on what their particular audience wanted.

I find it funny that in traditional advertising, marketers take the time to get to know the demographic they are selling to. They find out what motivates a particular group, then build an ad campaign around what will best speak to the audience they are trying to reach. People seem to forget that the web is really just another marketing tool. Marketers forget that they still need to focus on the audience and deliver a message in a way that will reach the people they are trying to reach.

For some reason I have still not figured out, a lot of people working on the web take it really personally. They create something and it becomes all about them, so it’s difficult at times to recommend changes or improvements.

The web is a really fun place to work, but at the end of the day it’s not about the web team or the organization the website if built for, but the audience. Something not working on the web does not automatically translate to being a poor communicator or being bad at your job. I think of it like a teacher. When you become an educator you learn that people have different learning styles. Some people respond better to hands-on learning, while others respond better to textbook or traditional lecture style learning. A good educator understands the need to teach to all styles of learning during class time. Each class will be different, so the teacher needs to identify the learning styles of each class then adapt their teaching to suite the students’ needs.

As web communicators, we need to understand that our audience may not behave on the web as we intend. We need to take the time to learn how they are using our website, what’s working for them and what isn’t, so we can adjust our communication style to best suite their online behaviour.

It should be obvious but it isn’t. As web communicators, we are producing a product for a particular audience. How is it we even need to spend any time discussing the importance of finding out who a particular web audience is and what their needs are?

Q: Gerry spoke for two days, and there was a lot of information delivered, but if you could have a second part to the masterclass, what additional information would you like to have heard, or explored in even more detail, if any?

I would like to have a hands-on session that gets participants to start analyzing websites to see what is working and what isn’t. As I mentioned earlier, Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website, things we may notice about a site, but be blind to on our own.

I think it would be beneficial to analyze websites and break down what makes them good and what makes them bad. At the end, participants could be required to analyze their own websites. The fresh perspective may allow web professionals to step back and clearly see their websites for what they are. I think as web professionals we need to be able to maintain a distance from the websites we support, so we can continue to see it the way our audience does.

In the final part of this series, we’ll review key learnings from Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for Content Managers.

Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part two)

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Part Two: Words, Carewords, and Focus

This is the second part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern‘s Masterclass for web content professionals. Part one focused on knowing your audience (good advice for any communicator). In this part, Krista talks about carewords and focusing on the really important tasks.

Q:Gerry talks about Carewords, does that resonate with you?

Definitely. I prefer the term carewords to keywords. Carewords focus more on the audience and what the audience wants. Keywords is more about the organization and the words the organization wants it’s audience to use; the words that are important to the president of a company or the head of the marketing/communications department.

Carewords ties in to the key messaging we received over the two days – get to know your audience. A website is built to reach a particular audience and whether the purpose is to communicate an idea or to sell a product, the purpose is still to reach an audience. If you don’t use the words the intended audience uses, you risk not reaching them at all.

By focusing on carewords (the audience) and not keywords (the organization) I believe web professionals better remember who they are creating the website and the content for. Who the audience is and what they want should always be at the forefront of anything a web teams does.

Of all the concepts that Gerry spoke of over the two-day conference, what do you think will be the hardest for most content developers to implement? The easiest?

I think the hardest concept for most content developers to implement will be to get large organizations to focus on the top tasks of a website regardless of which department those tasks may come from. So often large organizations create large websites that are arranged in the classic organization-centric manner of departments. Each department is fighting for their position on the website and their portion of the revenue. It’s all about them and not about the audience.

I think most content specialists would like to get large organizations to accept that an audience doesn’t care which department a particular task or piece of information comes from; to them, the website represents the organization as a whole. Each department needs to work with the others to create a finished product that benefits the audience. By focusing on the audience and creating a user-centric website, the revenue will come, the brand will be recognized and the organization’s reputation will be established.

The easiest concept should be to start writing with the words the audience is using. This is at least one step in the right direction of focusing a website on the audience. Some organizations may not support user testing, but even small web teams can track their web stats and see which terms are being searched for most. They can then begin to use those search terms in their content and check the stats again to see if improvements have been made. This small step may help to support the need for further user testing. It’s a small step, but a first step non-the-less.

In part three, Krista will look at the role of the content manager / developer.

Gerry McGovern Masterclass — essential content for content managers (part one)

photo credit: David Ascher

Recently a colleague attended the Gerry McGovern Masterclass on website content management.

For those of you not schooled in the esoteric yet not-so-obscure art of website content management, Gerry McGovern is an industry-leading Guru. People tend to listen to what he has to say, even if they can’t convince their organizations to see the light.

Since I couldn’t attend, I thought the next best thing was to eat my colleague’s brains and steal her knowledge, but then realized that wouldn’t work, as I’d be left to do her work as well as my own. Closet Zombies are lazy.

So here’s the next-to-next best thing, an interview with Krista Vieira, my willing victim:

Part One: Getting to know your audience.

Q: In your mind, what was the strongest, most meaningful point Gerry made and why?

Get to know your audience. He couldn’t stress that point enough. It was the most repeated message of the two days we spent with him.

As content creators, we need to know whom we’re writing for. We may think we know who is coming to our website, but unless we actually talk to those people, we won’t know for sure. We need to be familiar with our primary audience as well as our secondary audience. Our first priority should be to our primary audience, but we need to be aware that a secondary audience – that we maybe didn’t anticipate – exists so over time we can address their needs as well.

Getting to know our audience will make it clear why they’re coming to our website, what tasks they are performing and how much time they spend using our site. As content creators we need to know if our audience is accessing our website during commercial breaks of their favourite TV show, or once the kids have been put to bed, the dishes have been washed, the bills have been paid and the garbage has been put out. After all of that, how much energy would that person have to spend on our website? Probably not very much.

Knowing our audience makes it easier for your web team to know what to include on the site and what to remove. This knowledge will focus the website and will enable the web team to maintain that focus because feedback will constantly be received about what is working and what isn’t.

Doctors or moms?

Gerry cited an example of a pharmaceutical company that sold products to doctors. They created a website and wrote for the medical community, using language understandable to doctors. The problem was, doctors weren’t using the site because a sales rep would come and see them. A large portion of the audience turned out to be mothers. Now, the company’s primary focal point is to sell to doctors, but patients are becoming more educated and better informed about their health and often make suggestions to their doctors. This secondary audience was using the site so content needed to be created to address their needs, presented in a language they could understand. The company decided they needed to include a section that addressed the needs of this particular audience.

When dealing with two distinct audiences, Gerry stresses to focus on the primary audience first because that’s the bread and butter of the website. You definitely want to include messaging for a secondary audience, but you wouldn’t want to focus on that group so much that you alienate the primary audience. By trying to satisfy everyone you end up satisfying no one.

Managing the managers or defending your actions.

Getting to know our audience also lends support when making requests to management or making decisions about the website. It’s harder for management to steer the website in a particular direction if web specialists have conclusive support that the audience doesn’t like a particular feature, etc. It also works in favour of the web team. By knowing the audience they can make suggestions to management about what is working with the website and what isn’t.

Tied into knowing your audience is the reality that the web isn’t an event, but a journey. There is no quick fix for knowing your audience other than taking the time to get to know them. As web people, we need to talk to them and see them interacting with our website. Then, we make some changes to the website and find out how our audience responds to the changes. The response may be good, mediocre, or poor; if improvements need to be made, we go back and tweak some more and gauge the response again.

The misconception is there is a quick fix. Very often web teams think they know who the audience is and they make assumptions about what they want. But, to know what your audience wants, web teams need to actually get to know their audience. I don’t believe any organization could spend too much time on user testing and it should be a regular scheduled event for any web team.

Coming up in Part Two: Carewords and other million dollar concepts.

…this multi-part interview continues!