Versatility Is The Name Of The Game
April 30, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I had a meeting with new clients today. They engaged me to do content copywriting for their new sites. We sat in favourite meeting joint, The Morrison Hotel (which incidentally has its wifi back up and working at full speed). But it soon became apparent that what they needed was more about user and persona based design.
So I put on my usability hat and we had a very successful meeting where the happy clients have gone off with the bones of a wireframe. They’re selling product. What we came up with was a 3 column layout in which:
- Column 1 is basic product
- Column 2 is packaging up their content for different user types
- Column 3 is packing up their content by need
It’s not rocket science. And it has certainly been done before. But what I liked was they thought they needed my help on one thing but I was able to help them on another. In these days of value for money, versatility is the name of the game!
By the way, for those of you who don’t know – my background is Marketing. I’ve worked in Internet Marketing Ireland for 10 years. And I’ve been developing clever, user focused, accessible sites for 6 years. I’m a qualified copywriter. And I tend to have good ideas.
That will be all!
Tags: Accessibility, Usability
Advice for New Twitterers
April 29, 2009 at 9:11 am
A much loved client has asked me for some tips about using Twitter. He’s new to it. Here are my thoughts:
Like a blog, you must define your intended usage for Twitter.
- If you plan on using it for business, then keep your tone business-like and do not bring your home life/what you’re having for lunch/any other personal data into it.
- When I started using Twitter, it was only a few early adopters. For that reason, I use Twitter to engage with like minded souls. It’s a valuable place for me to get people contact especially as I often work alone. I don’t use it for business and therefore I don’t promote it on my marketing materials.
“The talking convention”. If you wish to promote the fact that you’re now on Twitter, first wait a while! Spend the first couple of weeks finding people you wish to follow (some of them will follow you back). Start talking to people. That’s what it’s all about.
- The way you talk directly to a person is by addressing them with an @ sign. @maryrose means I’m going to listen.
- Due to the huge numbers on Twitter, many people have now disabled the follower email notification, so it is unlikely that they will know you are following them. The way to engage is to talk to them. If you use the @ convention, they will probably pick that up, click the link to your Twitter page and decide whether or not to follow you.
How do people decide whether or not to follow you? I’ve chosen a random Irish Twitterer that I found by selecting the 20th follower on one of the ones I follow. It’s Barry Hand.
- I look at the profile details on the right hand side. His bio is marketing, so I’m interested. There’s a little glitch with the use of ampersand – he should fix this. Often if you copy and paste text directly from Word into web tools these kind of coding errors can occur. So the lesson here is to always check your work! He’s got a healthy number of followers/following. If you see ’someone’ who’s following thousands and has not many following back, they’re generally a spam account so ignore them.
- Next I click the link provided in the profile. He’s got a nice blog, with content that would interest me. *Benefit of Twitter 1* If I see a really interesting blog at this point, I will add it to my RSS. So simply following someone on Twitter can lead to a more sustained relationship where they subscribe to your blog.
- Now I look at their recent Twitterings. Things I watch out for:
- If someone is only posting out and not engaging in chat, I’m not interested. Politicians like Deirdre de Burca from the Greens have jumped on the bandwagon and not only do they not engage in chat and answer questions they are asked directly, but they also get quite snotty about how much time it takes them to manage their electronic communications and how they can’t possibly respond to everything.
- Worse, if someone is only posting links to their blog or website, I’m not interested and a bit annoyed that my time has been wasted in this way. Business Twitterers beware – you are not here to simply post a link farm to your website.
- Barry Hand is posting a lot about rugby, not my subject, but he’s chatting to a few people I ‘know’ (ie. I know them on Twitter, but have never met them in the flesh!) so I”ll follow him.
- Other things to look out for is frequency of posting. I don’t really want to follow someone who’s on once a month.
The real secret to making Twitter work for you, I believe, it to choose a good application for making it work. Similar to ‘favourites’ on browsers, we simply don’t remember to go back into the web version and see what’s going on. Therefore you’ve got to get yourself a good Twitter app. The following are some of the popular Twitter tools – there are literally hundreds out there, so this list is not exhaustive:
- Tweetdeck - what I’m currently using. Stylishly designed, I like it because it enables me to set up searches by keyword, then it delivers to me every single tweet that’s made with that keyword.
- You download Tweetdeck as an application and open it on your computer when you come in in the morning. It’s got a tiny notification box that appears discreetly on top of your screen whenever someone you follow tweets. It also shows you when you’ve got a direct message, or a reply.
- I use it to manage followers. I have a search with my name and anytime someone addresses me directly I can see it. If someone talks to me, I follow them back. This simple method has freed my inbox from hundreds of follow notifications.
- Set up searches using hashtags. Whenever there’s an event on, hash tags evolve. These are the characters that delegates will use at the end of any tweets they’re making about an event. This week the Future of Web Design is taking place in London, I will most definitely be setting up a search using #FOWD
- The real time saving power of Tweetdeck is that it gives you all the functions you need in 1 click: reply, direct message, retweet, follow, unfollow, and some more that I never use. This is better than previous apps I used to use because you had to log in to the web version to follow or unfollow people which seems kind of archaic now.
- Twitterific – I used to use this. It’s an application for mac users. Open it, resize the box to your preference, and drag it to somewhere on the edge of your screen. It’s like an old school news ticker, except the news is controlled by you and who you choose to follow.
- Thwirl – the PC equivalent of Twitterific.
- Tweetie – lots of people are waxing lyrical about this one. It’s fairly new, I haven’t tested it yet.
If you’re interested in how you rank in the Twitterverse, there are plenty of tools out there. I’ve never been interested in that kind of thing; in fact I think it’s a rather male way of looking at things. How big is yours? Ranking I mean. Like Technoratti of old, I never paid much heed. But here’s an article you can read if you’re interested in it.
Anecdotes
These are just some of the basic facts being passed on by an old hand! If you’re serious about using Twitter for business, you must ensure that you allocate the resource to it. Ideally you need one person in your organisation who is going to sit on Twitter, track searches about your company and your competitors and respond to them. If you do it well, it can be extremely powerful. Recently I tweeted something about Vodafone and within an hour Vodafone Ireland tweeted to me asking if they could help me. They did. I was impressed. It’s an extremely low cost way of ramping up customer service. In these fiercely competitive days, being the first in your industry to use Twitter properly has amazing customer service, brand reputation, and marketing advantages.
I’ve found that I’ve gotten to know the leading Irish technology journalists through Twitter. Of course they’re on there twittering away themselves. When award-winning Irish Independent journalist, Marie Boran, is looking for inspiration on blogs to cover in her column, she asks the Twitterverse. And we respond! I’ve found I’ve been asked for more quotes for traditional media since being on Twitters and getting to know some of the journalists in this country. That’s PR, but I haven’t paid for it!
And here’s the original and best Twitter good news story from earlier this year.
UPDATE : here’s a great post to read that reinforces what I’ve just said and includes more great ideas.
Tags: new to twitter, twitter business tool
Update on KLM Spam Email
April 28, 2009 at 9:17 am
I contacted the Data Protection Commissioners to find out more about the status of my spam email complaint about KLM. They wrote to KLM on 3 April and again on 20 April. They have also written to the Privacy Office of KLM which is based in Holland.
[All these letters - it's very exciting... in a postal kind of way]
To date KLM has been ignoring them. But now they’ve been onto the Dutch equivalent of the Data Protection Commissioners – and there’s an all Europe-wide APB out for them… No, actually they have provided more contact details for our guys to follow up on.
We’ll wait and see if big corporate KLM chooses to engage or ignore.
Tags: Data Protection Commissioners, KLM Spam Email
Spelling Police are onto Storyland!
April 27, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Tags: RTE Storyland, spelling police
What The Big Switch & Airtricity Don’t Advertise
April 22, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Yesterday I posted about how Airtricity and how they take €200 off new customers at sign up. I was a bit miffed about that, so I looked to the Big Switch.
As there is no information about customer entry fees on the Big Switch website either, I telephoned and found out that Bord Gais Energy also charge a switching fee. In fact, they have a matrix that helps them determine what that fee should be.
- If you’re already a Bord Gais customer and you are a tenant – you pay €100
- If you’re already a Bord Gais customer you’re a tenant living at your address less than 14 months – you pay €200
- If you’re a home owner living at your home less than 14 months – you pay €200.
The reason they say is because tenants have a habit of skipping off without paying their electricity bills. Fair enough. But what about a new home owner already beleagured with multiple costs? They’re hardly going to skip off.
- How long does Bord Gais get to sit on your money? 6 – 7 bills.
- That’s about 14 months of interest-free cash from you. Nice one.
Now this is all regular business practice I’m told.
But what I find highly irregular is the fact that Bord Gais do not advertise any of this on their website.
The Big Switch says nothing, nowhere, not even in the terms and conditions which I read. Nor does the Bord Gais mothership site. The first time you find out about this fee is when you’ve already done the switch (or so you thought) and you get a demanding letter in the post.
This is not how we do things on the web.
We give people full information as early as possible – so as not to waste their time and piss them off. Good sites show the full price (including shipping) as early as possible because that is the way things are done.
I take issue with Web Factory again because they ought to know this. OK, maybe they were a bit afraid to bring it up with their important client Bord Gais? But hey, the guys at Bord Gais ought to know this. They’re currently shortlisted as best internet marketers in the Net Visionary Awards. Is this how you’d expect such esteemed people to behave?
Either way people, if you are planning on switching from ESB to either Bord Gais or Airtricity, you WILL have to pay for the privilege if you don’t want to give away your bank account direct debit details. Suddenly big fat utility co ESB looks more attractive….
Tags: Airtricity, Bord Gais Networks, ESB, The Big Switch
What I Don’t Like About Airtricity
April 21, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Their customer entry fee of €300.
I decided to go the green route and chose Airtricity as my electricity supplier. I felt noble as I passed over the 1.26 cent saving I could have gotten with Bord Gais.
But a big fail for the Airtricity website – and I’ll be interested to see if they are half as switched on as their newest competitors in their response to this.
I filled in all the required details, got all my bits of paper together for the MPRN number, even took a meter reading, then I got to the last stage “how do I wish to pay”. I don’t like giving companies I don’t know free reign to grab what they want out of my bank account, so the direct debit route was a no-no. But Airtricity obviously don’t like giving service to customers they don’t know either – because they demand a €300 deposit off me in order to become a customer.
And the language? Who wrote that?
They will give me back my deposit ‘in due course’. What is that about? Why don’t they communicate clearly why they are asking for a deposit and when I will get it back. If they stated at one of the earlier steps that they would be making this charge and why, I would have continued. But they didn’t. So now me and my huge electricity habit have pushed off.
Tags: Airtricity, Electricity Providers, The Big Switch
Do You Respond Well To Sex?
April 21, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Recently I ran a little test. I was sending a mail out to a group who all knew me the same amount. No-one knew me more than others. Given that the list size was large enough and the conditions were similar, I thought it was a good opportunity to run a test about how well we respond to seeing pics of men or women flashed in front of us.
The content of the email was a series of training offers, aimed at a business audience. Two versions of the email were produced one with a zany man image and one with a zany woman image:
The list was split.
- Half of the list were given the ‘correct’ picture, ie. a woman was presented with a picture of a woman. A man was presented with a picture of a man.
- The other half of the list were shown the ‘wrong’ picture, ie. women were presented with the image of the man, and vice versa.
The results were interesting although what I expected:
The click rates were the most marked. Click rates were highest when you display the ‘correct’ picture to the sample. This proves the point that people like to see people online, and it would appear they like to see people like themselves. Women would appear to be a little more tolerant when shown an image not like them. Men don’t like it at all! Or else they simply detested the lady in the striped top in the sample.
The effect of the image wouldn’t have had such an impact on the open rates as not everyone uses preview panels, so many would open the email based on subject line and sender alone.
For anyone who clicked on this post based on title alone, sorry if you’re disappointed!
Tags: email marketing testing, People like to see people
Blog Content Planning
April 20, 2009 at 7:00 pm
It’s all very well setting yourself up with a swanky wordpress blog and away you go, but what happens a few months down the line when you’ve been really busy and you’re a bit stuck for inspiration about what to write about? That’s when it’s useful to have a trusty blog plan in place. All you have to do is cast your eye over your calendar and you’ll see what you need to write about.
When we deliver blogs to clients, part of this is around planning the content. We sit down with the client and work out some stories they can most definitely write about in the coming 12 months. Once these have been identified, they go into the client’s own calendar so they get a reminder when the content becomes due.
As foodie blogs are hot right now, let’s look at how a foodie blogger might plan their content for the year ahead.
1. You start off with a blank calendar for the year ahead and begin by filling it with seasonal items. In the case of food, you might expect some summer picnic tips around July. Harvest time pickling tips for September. Christmas party food in December. So now we have some spaces filled with relevant content.
2. Now look at your marketing plan for the year ahead. Say this foodie blogger also sells products – a savoury range of sauces and a sweet range of treats. We’ve got to build blog posts into the plan that promote these. At a minimum aim for one post per range, but if you’re really utilising the blog to sell your product, you could include one a month. We’re not talking shameless plugs here. Think about sporting, cultural and other events you can tie your stories into. For example, if the European Cup is going to be hosted in Italy in June, then that’s the time to write a post about your Italian seasonings. French dressings can be mentioned while the Tour de France is on in July, etc. 
3. Spread the load. Consider inviting some guest bloggers to contribute. Most people will be flattered to be asked to write, and if you pitch it correctly (ie. “Just give us a couple of hundred words – and you can promote your business”) it won’t seem like an onerous task.
4. Now we’re shaping up. Only 3 months where we’ve no content. Think now about food issues – be political – take a stance on nutrition or obesity or skinny models. Don’t be afraid to have a controversial opinion on a subject, this will get lots of comments flying – and in the case of our foodie blogger will fill up the lean month of January!
5. Now we’ve got a plan for content. Let’s add another layer – this time about type of content. Are you doing text, video or images? I like to use colour to denote posts that will be image rich and ones that will contain video. Including a variety of media can add to the quality of your blog – but if you’re producing it yourself from scratch, it can take time. But if you’re in the business of selling food products and writing about food, you’ll know that we eat with our eyes first, so it’s wise to be including video.
Useful Resources:
Good sources of video: youtube and vimeo
Good sources of images: istockphoto, flickr – contact the owner directly
And Finally:
We can’t be talking about food and not show it! One of the best food bloggers around is Niall Harbison. He mixes video with text, and the right amount of images. Here’s a mouth-watering excerpt from his website about rhubarb crumble (one of my favourites):
Tags: Blog Planning, food blogs
Why Do I Blog?
April 20, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Because I have something to say. Most of the time. And I like to write. Plus it allows me to get things off my chest.
Search engine benefits of business blogging:
- If you’re writing 1 blog post a week, that’s one time per week more than your competitors that your content is changing. Google likes frequently changing content and will give a higher ranking to you than your competitors cet. par. (Wow, I haven’t used cet. par. since Trinity days!)
- Your site’s ranking will be further assisted by quality inbound links when other bloggers link to you. Or indeed, when you comment on their blogs and leave your name and website address.
- If you use tags correctly and tell Google what each post is about, this will facilitate deep ranking, ie. it’s not just your home page that will be ranked, but individual blog entries too.
Other benefits:
- If you’re selling professional services, it’s a great chance for you to show off your knowledge on your subject. If you do it often enough, it will soon attract the attention of canny journalists, so there’s even free PR.
- Blogging makes email marketing even more of a no-brainer. Your blog is your email’s content. Come email marketing send date time, simply repackage the best of the blog and ship it on out to your list who will love you for it.
- It’s a great discipline. Writing regularly hones your skills at communicating your thoughts concisely and effectively. You can plug things that you like through your blog. And diss things you don’t like. And even threaten to write about things in your blog when people are being assholes and are refusing to pay for services you’ve provided in good faith.
Soft and fluffy benefits:
- You make new friends! Because blogging is not just about writing your own one, it’s about reading and commenting on other blogs too, you will get to know loads of new people with similar interests to you. Bloggers are generally a nice bunch so you will end up falling in friendship with your new love.
- Puts people off you. By this I mean that people who do not like your style will not come knocking on your door once they read your blog! That’s a good thing. The corollary is that like-minded potential clients will read it and be turned on by it – and that’s the type of person you want to do work for.
So what are you waiting for?
If you haven’t got a blog, and you’re itching to get writing, then get in touch and we have you up and running in an incredibly short amount of time. If you’ve suddenly been tasked with writing the company blog and you’re a bit unsure about how to start, you might want to attend one of our writing for the web or blog training courses.
Tags: Blog Training Ireland, Write for Web Training
Best Blogger | Net Visionary Awards
April 17, 2009 at 9:38 am
I’ve been shortlisted as Best Business Blogger at this year’s Net Visionary Awards. Hurray. And thanks to the judges for letting me get this far. I’ve been outspoken in the past about how I think the Net Visionary awards are a bit of a ‘how large is your list’ competition, so they’re very nice indeed for letting me get through to this stage.
Congrats too to the others who are shortlisted: Puddleducks, Mulley Communications, Murphys Ice Cream, and Peter Donegan Landscaping.
Vote for Brightspark blog. You can do it anytime before 30 April.
3 Reasons Why You Should Vote For Brightspark Blog
- It’s the longest running blog on the list. I’ve been happily blogging here since 2003. In web years, that’s like 47 years old.
- The only chick blogger on there. “Jobs for the girls” and all that…
- This blog is the only one that’s been shortlisted for both the Irish Blog Awards business category and the IIA’s.
Until we won large at the Irish Web Awards, I’d always felt a bit ‘always the bridesmaid never the bride’ at awards ceremonies. Good enough to get there, but not good enough to win. So here’s your chance to bring a smile to my face this May. Vote now. Tell your friends to vote.
And thank you.
