Image by Marion Doss via Flickr

I was recently asked for some simple practical tips that business owners could take to “strike an effective balance between print and digital.” I think that’s the wrong question.

The real issue is how will organizations thrive in a changing environment. Here’s is how I responded:

Examine all marketing, whether print or digital, from a perspective of viability and importance.

It will be difficult to gauge importance without doing some diligent research into which media and specific pieces actually drive sales. For many businesses, learning to do this will be enough to work on as a starting point.

Determining viability is much easier: do you have the in-house skills to create and evaluate good digital work? How about good print work? What evidence exists to support your conclusions? Here again it is likely that new skills will need to be acquired (through learning, hiring or successful partnerships).

This issue of the need to acquire new skills (either to evaluate importance or to determine viability) is not limited to small organizations. It is prevalent across all sizes of companies I encounter. In addition, it isn’t a problem that is confined to entry-level workers or job seekers–in many cases it is company leadership which needs this sort of honest learning the most.

We’re in the midst of an economic shift that is much like the shift from agrarian economies to industrial economies. It isn’t about whether something is digital or print. It’s about how the data flows and how an organization is going to thrive in an environment of increasing change.

Image via Wikipedia

I had the opportunity to take a phone call with Errol Samuelson, president of Realtor.com and talk about their new iPad app. We covered some of my favorite topics: impact of data on design decisions, how people use mobile stuff and so on.

Even if you aren’t part of my real estate audience I think you’ll find some useful tidbits in here on how an organization develops and iterates using data and design processes.

The audio is about 25 minutes long and the image doesn’t change. So you can let it run in the background or read the transcript below.

A conversation between Gahlord Dewald and Errol Samuelson re: the Realtor.com iPad app, data, user behavior, mobile, and other exciting things.

Gahlord Dewald: Were there any kind of data driven decisions that you guys made when you were putting together this app? In terms of what kind of information and feedback were you gathering on your own site? Like some of the features like the mapping and all of that. Or was it mostly a collection of good ideas and thought you’d just give it a whack.

Errol Samuelson: There was a bit of both. We have a design team that’s got good experience doing mobile. We had the experience of doing the three phone apps already.

Some of it came from direct user feedback from folks that had used some of those apps. Some of it was good ideas.

We do have a usability lab in our San Francisco Bay area office. So what we do is we bring people in and give them our apps. And we’ll be watching them through the two-way mirror and record their actions.

“We did look at a lot of the usage statistics on our iPhone app. To take a look at what were some of the features people were clicking on. That helped us decide what information to surface in the tabs.”

A lot of the good ideas we had, we brought folks in to test them to see how they were used. For example, this idea where you want to show a list of property and the map at the same time was a result of that testing.

One of the things we found was that you want to have the list and the map simultaneously but sometimes you want more map real estate. So this idea that with one quick tap have the list contract like an accordion and disappear was a result of that testing.

What we found was that folks were interested in sometimes having the list and sometimes showing as much of the map as possible on the iPad screen. The iPad with the bigger surface area just plays so nicely with seeing the map.

We did look at a lot of the usage statistics on our iPhone app. To take a look at what were some of the features people were clicking on. That helped us decide what information to surface in the tabs. And in what order on the listing detail page. So there was some experiential stuff there.

So it was a combination of the three:

1. What were people doing on the phone app
2. Some good ideas
3. User testing

Gahlord Dewald: You showed off that it has a lot of built in feedback functionality as well. On the conference call you made a point of saying you’re not just relying on getting stars and ratings in the app store.

You have a whole variety of different feedback mechanisms built into the app itself.

Errol Samuelson: Part of this stems from the feedback we get on the website today. We have something called Opinion Lab on the website. Every week we get a summarized report that goes to all the executives in the company–all the product folks get it.

If there are items on the Opinion Lab that look interesting you can click and dig into the specific written feedback from users on the site. We found that to be incredibly helpful.

We look at the Opinion Lab surveys in two ways. One is sort of top pain points, top like points. But then we also look at the trending.

For example, the speed of the site may have been just fine four years ago. But if you see complaints about site speed starting to increase then either you’ve made a change to the site that has perhaps impacted that. Or peoples’ requirements are changing. A lot of times something that was just fine two or three years ago is maybe no longer fine today.

“A lot of time improvements can be simple tweaks. Small changes can have a big impact.”

We found that feedback so incredibly useful on the website. We said to ourselves, how do we get that same level of feedback versus star ratings or folks who occasionally add their comments to the app store. Our sense was that we could get on the one hand more granular, more detailed information. But on the other hand also encourage more people to comment and give us feedback.

If you’re like me sometimes you’ll be on your iPad and get prompted to give a rating on the app store. And if I’m busy I’ll say no, not right now. No thank you.

“If you ask the question and then ignore the answer then you’re not really fulfilling that implicit promise.”

But putting the feedback button on the top right hand of the screen, the idea was to make it always available so we can get more feedback. And yes, to your point the goal is to have rapid iterations and constantly improve the app.

A lot of time improvements can be simple tweaks. Small changes can have a big impact.

Gahlord Dewald: That’s one of the things I noticed. In your feedback form there were a lot of different opportunities for people to give various kinds of “voice of customer” data. By asking for that kind of feedback, it’s almost an implicit promise that “Hey we’re going to make changes.”

It sort of puts your feet to the fire. If you collect all that feedback then you’re going to have to make your app better. Because you’re sort of promising it in a way.

Errol Samuelson: That’s right. If you ask the question and then ignore the answer then you’re not really fulfilling that implicit promise. But I think it’s a good kind of pressure. So we’re ok with it.

Gahlord Dewald: Yeah I think that’s great. As a webhead and marketing data analytics kind of guy I was really pleased to see that built in. Partially because the kind of feedback that app developers get through the iTunes store isn’t always relevant to the task that they’re trying to improve.

For the question of “Is this a good app or not?” well the app has 75 different features one of them was bad so I’m going to leave a good review or one of them was good so I’m going to leave a good review. It’s hard to get granular with that.

Errol Samuelson: I’d much rather find out “I like these two things and I hated that one thing.” So if I’m reduced to a binary decision or even a star rating it’s difficult to get that kind of feedback. I’m with you.

Gahlord Dewald: Exactly. Especially when you’re dealing with something like an iPad which has a lot of screen real estate relative to an iPhone. But there’s only so many features you can show a user at once and knowing which ones they like the most helps make that decision a little easier.

I have another question, the app looks great for finding a house. That’s obviously its primary audience. Is there anything in there for people trying to sell a house?

Errol Samuelson: I think there’s a few things. If I’m looking to sell my home what I’m most interested in are things like

• “How should I price it?”
• “Is now a good time to sell?”
• “What are market conditions like? Long time or short time to sell?”
• “What’s my competition?”

Those are the kind of questions I’m going to typically ask a home seller.

For example, if I go into a particular area and I ask myself “How should I price my house?” The Area Scout feature gives you that real time tracking where I can see the average list price and square footage. So that gives me a general feel for the market. If I’m first thinking about selling my house this is probably a good starting point.

Then I’m going to get more specific. I’m going to say “Show me homes that are similar to mine–bedrooms, bathrooms and so on in the same general neighborhood as mine.” One of the challenges you’ll face is just because two homes are close to each other doesn’t mean that you’re going to price them similarly.

I’d much rather find out “I like these two things and I hated that one thing.” So if I’m reduced to a binary decision or even a star rating it’s difficult to get that kind of feedback.

For example, in LA if you’re in one part of Los Angeles you’re in the Beverly Hills school district. Which is considered to be a very sought after, very desirable school district. They have a lot of good funding, the teachers are good, the schools are good, the test scores are good and everything else. So it’s much more desirable than being in the LA Unified school district.

I can look at two homes, one on either side of the street. One is in Beverly Hills school district and one is in LA Unified school district. They can be identical houses and one is going to be noticeably more expensive than the other.

That’s where you can enter your criteria for the similar home into the Realtor.com iPad app and then you can use the area highlighter features. So in my LA example I would exclude everything on the right half of the street. Another example is in Palo Alto, depends on which side of the freeway you’re on.

If I put those together I can do a search and then get very specific and say “Here’s my competition, what’s currently for sale.”

The third thing I would do is look at those homes and see how long they’ve been on the market. Have they been on the market 15 days, 30 days, 180 days? If I’m seeing really elevated days on market one of the things I know is that you get the most views and lift on a listing when it first goes on the market.

“It’s not a little button that jumps out and says “Home sellers click here!” but by doing the same search, but from a home buyers perspective, you can very quickly learn what’s happening in the market.”

So if I saw my competition and their price and then if I saw that they were on the market for a very long time. My personal strategy would be to price materially lower than the competition to get the attention and get the hit quickly. Because I know otherwise it’s going to take a long time on the market.

Quite frankly in some cases if you price it at a lower level you can get enough interest you can actually get a kind of bidding war and do really well.

If I’m a home seller those are all the kinds of things I can deduce just by looking at the data on the iPad app.

I guess it’s a little different. It’s not a little button that jumps out and says “Home sellers click here!” but by doing the same search, but from a home buyers perspective you can very quickly learn what’s happening in the market.

I guess the final thing that’s of interest is that I might be inclined to pull up the listings in a neighborhood and just go through them. I’d see which real estate companies and agents seem to specialize in that market. I could very quickly tell who really has a presence in my market. It would mean they have a list of home buyers that they’re already working with.

So I would also use it to find out which agents and brokers are more active in the area.

Gahlord Dewald: What about some of the features to help Realtors? Given that people are getting it from Realtor.com we’re going to expect something there.

Errol Samuelson: There are a few. One is perhaps not obvious but is really important.

Because the data is accurate and fresh, and we’re doing 15 minute updates. The moment a listing is off the market we pull it off. If there’s a price change we reflect the price change.

This goes a long way to make sure that people who are inquiring about a property are adequately self-qualified. If I’m calling on a property I know what the actual list price is. I’m also not getting upset because the property is no longer on the market. I call you up and you say the property hasn’t been on the market for a month then you have that unpleasant conversation with the consumer.

It’s actually a surprisingly big issue with websites and apps out there. I don’t think it’s actually reported on enough. There’s a lot of really bad data out there. Surprisingly, double digit percentages on some sites.

Gahlord Dewald: From a search engine optimizations standpoint, people hanging on to old data is helpful for them because they generated this content and it’s out there and maybe they’ve got some links to it or whatever.

So pulling it down is difficult for some people to do. Even though it’s obviously the right thing to do–for all the reasons you just mentioned. So you don’t have to have uncomfortable conversations with people. Why show stuff that isn’t there anymore?

That is an important issue and you’re right it doesn’t get talked about enough. I think part of the reason is that there are people who perceive value in keeping it there when it’s out of date.

And there’s the technical challenges. You guys must gone through some technical challenges to poll all of that data every fifteen minutes without melting down your server.

Errol Samuelson: It is incredibly expensive. You have to have lots of servers, lots of bandwidth, lots of capacity.

I’ll give you another reason why I suspect people leave the data up there. And it’s kind of an interesting story.

We power the real estate search experience at MSN. About a year ago our contract with Microsoft was up for renewal. So we were sitting in Redmond. And they were referring to another real estate site which shall remain nameless. But it was one of the bigger ones.

And MSN said “These other guys have more listings than you do.” So there was this perception that better quality was more comprehensive because the listing count was higher.

We sat down with MSN and went through things listing by listing. We compared it to what was actually in the MLS and discovered that “Oh this one’s not on the market, that one expired, that one sold, this one has the wrong price.”

“I think mobile apps is where people will discover if the Emperor is wearing any clothes.”

But I think some sites want to inflate their numbers for listings count. It’s uncomfortable to come back and say I’ve only got 200 matches when on Realtor.com there’s 400 in the market. So I think that may be another reason.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I think mobile apps is where people will discover if the Emperor is wearing any clothes.

So now it’s not where people are sitting at a screen unable to verify the information. I’m now potentially in the neighborhood, I’m in front of a house and there’s a nice big sold sticker on the sign or it says price reduced. And I look at my mobile app. The question is “does my mobile app still show the sold property on the market or flag it as a price reduction?”

I think mobile apps are going to drive the need for websites to become more accurate if they aren’t accurate today. I think that’s a dynamic that is going to be pretty interesting.

Gahlord Dewald: You’re right. People are in specific locations looking at property and if the app that they’re using isn’t reflecting the real world that they see in front of them they’ll probably have questions. I think that will be an interesting thing to watch. I think that’s going to be a really interesting thing to watch.

I’ve been watching this argument between data quality for years. Some sites have the highest quality data and some of them don’t.

It seems to me that the consumer hasn’t cared that much. They’ve cared, but they haven’t cared enough to just not go to the sites that don’t have MLS-driven data.

Errol Samuelson: I’m not sure that they know. I’m not sure they can tell, unfortunately. We try to educate them.

Gahlord Dewald: I think that’s exactly the point, there’s a steep learning curve.

In some ways it reminds me a little bit of the middle years of computing before Apple switched over to the Intel processor. You’d have Apple fans trying to explain that their computers were faster when they had a slower clock speed. And others would be saying “Well it’s got a smaller number it must be slower.”

Trying to understand those differences for consumers, I think, has been a challenge.

Maybe you’re right. When you’re sitting in front of a sold house using your mobile and the app you’re using doesn’t show it as sold obviously this would have an impact on your trust in the app.

Errol Samuelson: I believe it has the potential to kill your brand if you have bad data. We’ve made a big investment in this. It’ll be interesting.

Gahlord Dewald: Right, that’s your business hypothesis. I think it’s a good one. I’m definitely interested to see how it shakes out.

One thing I was thinking about as you were talking about the mobile experience vs the website experience: it’s common these days for the thought leader geeks to be talking about designing for the mobile first.

For example, get the mobile device experience nailed down and then iterate out to your website from there. There’s a part of me that looks at the Realtor.com iPad app and you’ve got all kinds of features that aren’t on your main site. Some of which would be very difficult to apply to Realtor.com

What do you see going forward? A primary shift to mobile device? Or what’s going on there?

Errol Samuelson: One of the luxuries of designing for the mobile device is that you get to start from scratch. There’s no legacy software. You get to start with a white board and say “What would I like to do.” That’s quite liberating.

I think at times there are things you decide to do on the mobile device that you’re absolutely going to port over to the website. We’re doing this.

But I think the bigger thing is that it’s a different medium. It’s like the early days of television–what people did is they ported radio shows and brought them on to TV.

Then people realized that TV was a different medium. So you can actually design for the medium. I think that’s where the power is going to be around mobile.

That’s what we’re trying to do. This is not a port or a “mobile version.” It drives me crazy when people talk about the “mobile version.” Like it’s a sort of variant.

“I expect to see more divergence of feature sets instead of convergence.”

I think it’s a whole different animal. It’s sort of Marshal MacLuhanesque. Where the message is the medium. I think we have to start and say “What is special and unique about mobile?” And then say “How do I make this app leverage those special things?”

Something really amusing happened to me the other day. Sitting in front of the PC in the office. And I could have easily typed in “realtor.com” into my web browser. Instead I reached over to my iPad and turned it on. There was something on the mobile app that I couldn’t do on the PC–the GPS features.

I genuinely believe that, as things progress, there’s going to be some commonality between desktop and mobile devices–they’ll both have listings and stuff like that. But I think, if you’re doing good design the mobile apps will continue to extend, morph and grow along a dimension which is tailored to what they are.

I expect to see more divergence of feature sets instead of convergence. I think the best features will be customized for the mobile device.

One of the things to think about, for example is if you have a PC in the home we share it. My wife uses it, I use it. But the mobile device, my phone, is uniquely mine. No one really uses it except me.

So all of the historical data, the usage data are really about me. They’re personal. And I think that let’s us customize more than we would ever dare on a web device because you don’t know if the last user is the current user.

The thing we thought was stunning is that on the website, we get significantly more email than phone calls. On the mobile phone app it was the exact opposite.

It makes sense. You’ve got a phone in your hand. Why not just press call. Are you going to stop and then pull up a keypad and start typing a message?

Gahlord Dewald: Right, it’s certainly easier to talk on the phone when you’ve got an iPhone than it is to type an email on it.

Errol Samuelson: That’s right. So what’s funny about that, when you think about agent behavior–the mobile devices are going to demand a different kind of behavior.

So for the last ten years we’ve been banging on people as an industry to say “answer your emails, get back to people with x number of minutes or hours.” Almost to the point where people have forgotten about the phone.

We ran a test last year right after we launched the iPhone app. We ran a test because people were actually phoning more. “What happens when they phone?”

We ran an 800 number on a bunch of the listings, with the brokers’ permission to do this. The brokers said we could listen to the first 15 seconds of every call. So we did that.

What we discovered is that 70% of the time, if the call went to voicemail, the person just hung up.

So now all of a sudden, if I’m getting a lot of phone calls–and not every agent is able to answer every phone call every waking moment–then you better have a strategy to handle those calls and not let them go to voice mail.

There’s this almost unintended consequence. The mobile device drives different behavior. The different behavior then drives a new business need. I think the cascade of what’s going to happen is very interesting.

I guess it’s a long winded way of saying to your earlier question, I think the best designers might migrate features back and forth–but they’re going to design for the medium or the device. And hopefully design stuff differently.

Gahlord Dewald: It just makes sense. Given that mobile devices are carrying a lot more sensors around with them. Your regular computer can tell the website owner only a few things. But your iPhone or Android or any mobile device is going to be give you things like location and phone number and that sort of stuff.

Errol Samuelson: And if you look at the new devices, the phones and stuff that’s coming in the future it’s more and more sensor capabilities

They all have built in cameras and built in video cameras. Why not have the ability to take photographs when I’m touring a home right? Augment the site with my own photos. Why just give a five star rating?

I’m going through the home search process right now, and I’ll go to two or three open houses a day and they’ll all start blurring together for me. If I could, in the house if there was something I wanted to remember, snap a picture.

Now that’s not something we do today. But as an example that’s something you would not ever design for on the computer version.

Gahlord Dewald: Yeah, it’s just not there because there’s no camera on your computer and you’re not going to lug your computer around with you.

Thanks so much Errol for taking the time to talk about these issues and about your new iPad app. I wish you the best of luck with it.

I hope I’ll catch up with you at one of the conferences this summer.

Errol Samuelson: Are you going to the NAR midyear conference in May?

Gahlord Dewald: I might be there at the end of the week. If you’re going to be there let’s grab coffee or something.

Errol Samuelson: Yeah that’d be great.

Gahlord Dewald: Awesome! Have a good time!

Errol Samuelson: Alright, take care, bye.

Image via Wikipedia

Tonight I got involved in a great online discussion with Derek Overbey, Jeff Turner and Matthew Shadbolt about whether “social” levels the playing field between large organizations and small organizations. In other words, does social media make it easier for small business to compete with large business?

@gahlord @respres Do you two think that social really levels the playing field for the small business owner competing with the big box?

02:22:11 5:35 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@doverbEy

Derek Overbey

In our twitter conversation, one of the common phrases was “All things being equal XXXX will win.” Usually XXXX was size but speed and smarts (intelligent online endeavors) were also brought up. For example, “All things being equal, the bigger org will win.” Eventually, we end up with a roshambo hierarchy to determine which resource is most important.

yes, all other things being equal, smarter beats bigger, bigger beats smaller. :) cc: @Corcoran_Group @gahlord #LGvSM

02:22:11 7:30 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@respres

Jeff Turner

There are three problems with this entire line of thought (and Jeff’s smiley in his tweet lets you know we’re all only too aware of them).

1. “All things being equal” is not compatible with the existence of a bigger organization–creating what I like to refer to as the “Calling a dog a dirty name and hanging it” fallacy of hypothetical arguments.
2. One can have too much of something. For example, one can be too big or too fast or too smart or even too social.
3. A clearer understanding of “win” is required.

This, of course, is the perfect set up for the consultant’s answer to everything: It depends.

Whether or not social helps small business compete with big box stores will depend on strategy. Let’s dig in a little, in the spirit of the great conversations I have with these guys.

“Winning” and strategy for online endeavors

The first two issues are intriguing to explore, but the third–understanding what “win” means–is what I think we should tackle first.

I’m going to stick my neck out and drop a definition here (it’s my first time putting this one down in public so feel free to beat me about the head and ears if it doesn’t work):

Strategy

The art and science of maintaining and deploying resources in order to have the freedom and flexibility to continue operations.

There are a few things to unpack in this definition of strategy and since I’ve come this far I may as well unpack them.

• Strategy is an art because it involves personal choices.
• Strategy is a science because there are often visible and repeatable results.
• Maintaining resources is about conservation and growing.
• Deploying resources is about spending and taking action.
• Freedom is your ability to execute your plans at will.
• Flexibility is your ability to respond, react and pivot when required.
• Winning means to continue operations.

So that’s the root theory of strategy that I follow, as much as a bullet list will allow anyway. For the purpose of our “Large Business vs Small Business and the use of Social” conversation, the most important part is what I see as “winning.” It’s merely the ability to continue to operate.

It's about available resources to maintain freedom and flexibility to continue operating. Size, speed, smarts are irrelevant. #LGvSM

02:22:11 7:32 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@gahlord

Gahlord Dewald

So how does “social” fit into online strategy?

“Social” is just another resource. An organization can maintain their social resource and they can deploy their social resource.

Some organizations will have more social resources and other organizations will have less. Some organizations will be better at deploying social resources and other organizations will be better at maintaining social resources.

I believe that the amount of social resource available is not directly related to size. A small organization can have a tremendous social resource.

However, a given that social resources are pretty tightly tied to individuals, a large organization with more individuals in it might have a greater chance of having the most or the best social resources. But it’s just a chance really.

Putting a priority on social doesn’t require size. A small organization can put a priority on social. A single individual in a large organization can put a priority on social. And entire organization can put a priority social. Size, it seems, doesn’t matter.

Size, social, speed, smarts–these are all resources. And they’re independent resources. Big size does not mean slow. Small size does not mean fast. There is nothing inherently social about small business. There is nothing inherently slow about large business. It just depends on leadership and esprit de corps within the organization.

What determines whether an organization wins–whether they can continue to operate–is whether these resources are used to advantage.

Social isn’t a strategy. It’s a resource.

“Being social” or “using social media” are typical descriptions of how people will enhance (conserve/maintain/grow) their existing social resource. But the socialness isn’t the strategy. The strategy is just making sure there are enough resources available to continue operating.

There are many ways to increase the presence of social resources in an organization. You can hire talent that possesses social resources or train existing talent in methods that increase social capability, for example.

The ability to do these things still requires putting a priority on social, which doesn’t require size. It’s the art of strategy.

If you believe that having a social business is going to increase your freedom and flexibility to continue operations, then it’s in your best interest to develop your social resource regardless of the size of your organization.

That’s nice. Can the social resource counterbalance the size resource in a competitive environment?

I believe that social can counterbalance size in a competitive environment.

An example of an end-game in this could be the situation of Borders declaring bankruptcy while there are a great many independent bookstores which continue to operate.

Without the benefit of real data, I’m going to wager that the independent bookstores have a greater social resource than Borders. Borders certainly has size and scale to its advantage (or perhaps, in a world of shrinking paper-media sales, disadvantage). Either way, Chapter 11 is a key performance indicator that heralds significant decrease in freedom as well as a red flag regarding ability to continue operations.

From a strategy perspective, competition for resources was most likely indirect–Borders and independent bookstores were not in direct competition for social resources. The social capabilities of independent bookstores probably wasn’t the deciding factor in Borders declaring bankruptcy.

More likely Borders was unable to pivot in a changing marketplace and effectively use their size to their advantage. This could be a case of having too much of a resource or inability to pivot.

Simultaneously, independent bookstores’ small size may be a default advantage in a shrinking marketplace for paper-media. Whatever inefficiencies and large margins were likely beaten out of them in the first round of online book sales.

The remaining small bookstores are probably as efficient as they can be while still continuing to operate. And by efficient here I mean that the percentage of the small bookstore organization that connects directly with their customers. Connecting directly with customers is a way of increasing social resources.

Small bookstores have become increasingly social in their approach perhaps by default–all non-social resources have been bled away. This is social as survival mechanism.

The social connection customers have with their independent book stores allows for continued operations in the face of a shrinking marketplace. Unable to compete with online bookstores on price, small bookstores compete on social.

Will social always win the day for small business vs large business?

No. Social is just a resource. Different situations, organizations and types of operations that need continuing will require different resources.

Continuing our bookstore example, the continued demise of paper-media may wipe out the independent bookstore just as it did Borders. As the tide of the paper-media market goes out to sea the big boats got beached first but the little boats will surely get beached as well. Social might not be enough to save the independent bookstore.

A different resource focus may be needed to survive the changing marketplace. Instead of focusing on the freedom to continue buying and selling paper media, independent bookstores might need to focus on the flexibility to develop new markets or operations.

How’s that for an “it depends” answer?

Garron Selliken, owner of Portland, Oregon real estate company M Realty, asserts today that blogging, at least in the real estate industry, is dead. Obviously when Garron says that he doesn’t mean that no one is blogging about real estate anymore. Instead, he’s saying that blogging lacks business value for the real estate practitioner.

This view could probably be shared across more industries than just real estate. For some time now there has been a cacophony of voices encouraging “blogging” as the future of getting a positive return on investment for making a website.

A shortish history of blogging

Initially, the activity of blogging was just keeping a diary or log on the web. The first wave of bloggers were just writing about whatever they felt like writing about.

With the enthusiasm of first time competitors at a poetry slam they encouraged everyone else to do the same. As more people began to keep blogs and link to each others blogs a form of status emerged (you may recall a lot of talk about who is an “A Lister” and so on).

This is where the roots of being “authentic” or “transparent” came about. People who bare their souls tend to produce content that is more compelling and arresting to other people. Being “authentic” and “transparent” were tactics employed to increase status within the blogosphere.

The important takeaways from this shortish history of blogging:

1. Originally, the activity of blogging did not have a business objective.
2. People who blog, being human, value personal status.
3. A status-based popularity ranking began to serve as an objective for blogging.
4. “Transparency” and “authenticity” are recognized traits of blogs which tend to rank higher in popularity with other people.

Here is a strategic perspective that evolved from this kind of non-business blogging:

• Objective: Increase status ranking (ex: become an A-lister).
• Channel: blogging peers
• Primary Tactic: create “authentic” and “transparent” content

Note that there isn’t an especially clear path for generating revenue after achieving an increased status ranking. This isn’t a problem for most bloggers because they tend to be hobbyists. Those who get more serious about it tend to try a variety of advertising models to monetize their efforts. Either that or they become consulting gurus.

Blogging for business

The tactic of creating and publishing content on a regular basis has become confused with blogging. This has happened because quick-to-deploy and relatively-easy-to-update sites are often built using technology originally made for bloggers (Movable Type and then WordPress, for example).

The tool has been mistaken for the tactic.

Which is, of course, a frightfully common occurrence (*cough* social media *cough*).

In the beginning of his post, Garron throws down the gauntlet:

When it comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.

What he’s really doing is stating a specific strategic perspective:

• Objective: “generating leads”
• Channel: “from search”
• Primary Tactic: SEO (search engine optimization)

So for Garron, the creation and publishing of content serves to attract new visitors to his site. Specifically, he’s interested in new visitors who are searching for something he can help them with.

Blogging to reinforce existing relationships

There are, of course, some great blogs focused on real estate. These blogs focus on a neighborhood or some other facet of the business that the blogger is passionate about. But these blogs are successful because the content creator’s passion for the topic shows in the quality of the content.

The meaningful blogs often lack a specific strategy. Sometimes the owners of these sites wear their lack of strategic perspective as a badge: “I just write stuff and people read it and sometimes I make a sale.”

If a strategic perspective were to be assigned to the meaningful real estate blogs it might look like this:

• Objective: Deepen relationships with existing customers and prospects
• Channel: social media and/or customer database
• Primary Tactic: create meaningful and/or useful content

This strategy is not as aggressive as the one laid out by Garron. But it’s certainly valid if you know that the best way you can grow your business is through deepening your existing relationships.

The real estate blog may never have been alive in the first place

Though I don’t have any data to back it up, I’d wager that for every solid, compelling and meaningful real estate blog there are twenty zombie real estate blogs: packed with stolen/poorly crafted/duplicate content that is either devoid of purpose or stuffed to the gills with SEO keywords.

The zombie blogs have no strategic perspective. They are often the result of someone throwing money at a problem or failing to commit the resources to learn the techniques. They rarely perform well because no effort at understanding keyword research was spent. Even less effort gets spent on finding common tasks for the website owner and the website visitor, resulting in low conversions and high bounce rates.

Even though there is no strategic perspective for zombie blogging, if we were to ask a zombie blogger the right questions we would get something like this:

• Objective: Make a lot of money!
• Channel: I don’t care where they come from as long as it’s cheap!
• Primary Tactic: I’ll try anything for two weeks as long as it’s cheap!

Avoiding zombie blog syndrome

The problem with the zombie blogs is that the writer may not know she is making a zombie blog. She might think her blog is meaningful and that she’s applying all the “best practices” but in reality the blog is a little bit living dead.

The best way to avoid being a zombie blog is to have a strategic perspective.

Garron’s post lays out good rough outline for a strategy. It might not be the right one for you, but you’ll want to be able to describe why you’re making content for your site in at least as much detail as he’s shared.

At the very least be prepared to discuss these things:

1. Where is your audience coming from?
2. What is your audience looking for?
3. Are you in the business of providing that? (if not, revisit your business model)
4. How will you convert your audience from content consumers into meaningful business?

One of the biggest problems with implementing a digital strategy is figuring out where to start. This gets even worse when there are many options. And let’s face it, there are always many options. Do you focus your efforts on your search engine optimization or do you throw yourself at building a mobile app? Do you spend your time getting up to speed on social networking or do you start a video blog?

A tool I use to help break the logjam feeling of “where do I start?!?” is to think about “importance” versus “viability.” I was introduced to this tool by Dani Giandomenico and have been grateful ever since. Maybe it’ll be useful for you as well.

Importance and viability

When we’re presented with lots of options, as in figuring out what to implement or execute in a digital strategy, it’s helpful to have an aesthetic for sifting the options. That’s all that this importance vs viability thing is: a way to make sense of our options.

What’s important?

If you’re one of those people who likes to talk about “priority” a lot then you already have an inkling of what’s important. But for this tool to be really useful we need to get more concrete. Something is important because without it, your organization will cease to exist. So, in business, something is important only if it provides your team with the resources to continue operating.

That might be a little bit ruthless. But given the temptation to make everything “top priority” making this kind of distinction is a real life-saver. It prevents organizational paralysis.

If you aren’t good at making these kinds of decisions or assessments then it’s a good idea to get some help here. A trusted mentor, a good friend, a consultant.

Here are some questions to help you get started on figuring out how important something really is. These are all yes/no questions. Maybe isn’t an acceptable answer for any of them.

• Can the organization still generate revenue without doing this?
• Can the organization still generate revenue in 8 months without doing this?
• Are our competitors using this to generate revenue?
• Have our best customers explicitly asked us to do this?
• Are the observable actions of our customers pointing us towards doing this?
• Have our best consultants been able to draw a straight line between doing this and the health of our organization?

What is viability?

If you found thinking about importance to be a challenge because there were a lot of “well that would be important if we could do thus and so” then you’re up against viability. Viability is the ability of your organization to actually do the thing that you want to do. It’s your ability to implement and it’s your ability to execute.

The main thing to think about, when examining viability, is “Can we do this right now?” Here are some yes/no questions to help you determine how viable something is:

• Has we done this in the past?
• Do we enjoy and look forward to doing this?
• Do we have all of the physical gear that we need to do this?
• Have we done anything sort of like this in the past?
• Are we going to allocate the time required of us to do this?

Digital strategy in two dimensions

So now that you’ve got a sense of what I mean when I’m talking about Importance or Viability, let’s put it together. Take a pile of options available to you and go through them assigning a number value for Importance and for Viability for each one. I recommend a scale of 1-5 for each one. Anything more than that is really just splitting hairs. If you get really ambitious you can plot them on a graph.

Importance is related to how necessary the thing is to reaching your goals. Viability is how prepared you are to do the thing.

The meaning of each “point” for “important” differ from company to company, even within the same industry. The meaning is even more varied for “viable” from one company to another. So please take the following scale definitions as just an example.

Scale Definition: Importance

1. Worth doing but not very important.
2. Not very important, but is perhaps a step towards another more important goal.
3. This activity has a meaningful impact on our revenue or profit.
4. Our future plans require this to be done. This is how we find new customers.
5. Our organization cannot generate revenue without this.

Scale Definition: Viability

1. This activity will require training, equipment and time but we’re willing to do it.
2. This is sort of like something we’ve done before. We’ll need time and equipment or training to do it.
3. We’ve done this a little bit before but we’ll need new equipment or training.
4. We have done this before and enjoyed doing it. We have all the equipment we need.
5. We’re actively engaged in this right now and enjoy doing it.

Sometimes when I talk to organizations about viability and ask them about whether they enjoy things or not they look at me like I have three heads. It’s important to think about whether you enjoy what you’re doing because it has a huge impact on whether you’ll do it or whether you’ll burn out. Or whether you’ll burn out your team.

Thinking about whether you enjoy doing something is only touchy-feely until all the talent on your team (including yours) goes away.

An example of using Importance and Viability to get started on a digital strategy.

So let’s put this to work for an mythical example, but one that I encounter all the time. Let’s take a hypothetical company: Smile Corp. Smile Corp wants to get new customers and they’ve read all the same blog posts about web marketing that you have.

Smile Corp has come to the conclusion that they need to do some search engine optimization on their website and that they also need to start doing video. Unfortunately, Smile Corp has limited resources and can’t quite get started whole-hog on both of these at the same time.

Time to break out Importance vs Viability!

Smile Corp Digital Strategy Importance vs Viability: Video

First up, Video. Smile Corp has identified video as a requirement for future plans and as a way that they can find new customers. Something to do with actually seeing people smile increasing the likelihood of moving massive amounts of product. They assign Video an Importance of 4 based on this assessment.

When thinking about Viability, Smile Corp realizes it has no clue how to make a video. They’ve never made one before. They also don’t have a video camera. No one on the team dreads making video, but no one is especially excited to make videos either. They assign Video a Viability of 1 based on this assessment.

A chart showing that Smile Corp considers video to be important, but not very viable.

Smile Corp Digital Strategy Importance vs Viability: SEO

Next up is search engine optimization. Smile Corp considers SEO to be pretty important for reaching new customers. Something about 78% of customers looking for new smiles starting their search on the internet. Based on that assessment they rate SEO as a 4 in terms of Importance.

When considering the Viability, Smile Corp has to consider it pretty closely. They haven’t done real search engine optimization before. But from what they gather, it involves writing stuff and publishing it to the web.

The team has written a lot of things in the past and feels comfortable doing it. They also have all the technology they need to write things and publish it to the web. The team will need some training to learn some of the technical ins and outs of SEO, but they feel it’s within their reach. In fact, two of the team members are really excited to learn how to do search engine optimization (poor souls).

Smile Corp averages all of this together: having done something similar, having all the tools required, and having excited team members and come up with a viability of 3. If they didn’t have excited team members they would have only given it a 2.

SEO is both a viable and important activity for Smile Corp

Smile Corp Digital Strategy: Taking action.

Once the charts have been made, Smile Corp senior leadership goes through and makes the call on what to do. The chart that has the biggest blue box is the “low hanging fruit.” In our example, SEO has the biggest blue box so that’s where Smile Corp decides to get started.

Viability, Importance and the role of leadership in digital strategy.

This particular case was pretty easy for deciding what to do. Sometimes the charts have the same size blue box but are weighted towards either Importance or towards Viability. It’s at these times when leadership is especially valuable.

Some leaders will focus on the axis that represents Importance and compel his organization to improve any deficiencies in viability. Other leaders will lean towards the axis that represents Viability and use rapid iteration to stack a quantity of lesser-importance achievements together into a greater whole.

Sometimes there isn’t a right answer on these things. But the decisions that leadership makes when faced with decisions of viability and importance, will define the character of the organization both inside and from the outside.

One thing to keep in mind while using this tool, is that you will get better at it the more you use it. The reason is that your ability to assess how important an activity is or how viable the activity is for your organization will improve. If you are in a position to be making decisions about importance and viability, learning to separate and assess these two characteristics will help you improve those decisions.

Ultimately, the ability to assess these things will have an impact on the success of your decisions.

Image via Wikipedia

Tear down the wild mouse. The wild mouse just runs around, looking for the next bit of cheese. It has a simple observation system in place: a nose that smells cheese. It has an equally simple action-taking system: run towards the smell of cheese.

If your organization feels like riding on the back of a wild mouse, maybe you can use the three kinds of measurement mentioned in this presentation to understand the past, prepare for the present and innovate into the future.

All by itself this probably doesn’t make much sense.

Here are the notes:

Three Ways to Measure, Three Ways to Improve

So there are a lot of different ways and reasons to measure. But this presentation focuses on three broad strokes–measuring for ROI, measuring as research, and the relationship between measurement and innovation.

Ultimately, the act of measuring alone won’t make your organization operate any better. You’ll want to take actions based on what you measure. Deciding what kind of measuring you’re doing up front will help everyone take the right actions based on the data. For example, if some of your team thinks you’re measuring for improved motivation while you think you’re measuring for ROI, you’re likely to experience unnecessary tension.

Measuring for ROI: Preventing Insanity

Return-on-investment is often a starting ground for measuring in most organizations. The way this works is that you do something (that’s the “investment” part of ROI) and then you see what happens (that’s the “return” part of ROI). You need to measure both your investment and your return for this to work out.

Sometimes people just measure the return, say it isn’t worth doing and call it quits. If someone’s not measuring the investment side of ROI then they’re not really doing this all the way. Chances are good that they have some other reason for preventing action. This is an organizational cultural issue and not a measurement issue, though.

When done well, ROI measurements prevent you from doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. Measuring for ROI is a way to prevent insanity. Online, you can measure marketing initiatives, for example, using URL campaign tagging to see what sort of return you get on various marketing activities. Or you could use time-based or location-based correlation to measure the impact of a traditional, non-trackable campaign.

Measuring for ROI is primarily a past-focused activity. You can only measure it properly once it’s been done. If you have activities where past performance is likely to predict future success then ROI measurement can be useful. Otherwise, you might want to use one of the other ways to measure.

Measuring as Research: Making Your Plans Work Better

If you’re planning to do something in the future, you might be able to use measurement to improve your chances for success. For example, if you’re planning an advertising campaign, you might want to research what sorts of phrases people are likely to click on or take some kind of action on. This is where you can do some focused digging into your web analytics: what pages do people visit second (i.e. what pages to people consciously click to read), what are people searching for and where do they land on your site, and so on.

Measuring what people are doing with your content right now is a great way to help inform future plans and actions. You can use the data you gather to make things better for your future plan.

Measuring for Understanding: Observation and Innovation

My favorite kind of measurement: looking at the data to see what narratives present themselves. When you’re just observing the data and not looking for anything in particular (not calculating ROI or planning for a specific objective in the future) sometimes you’ll find patterns. These patterns might let you know what sort of problems you can solve for other people. Or maybe the patterns will suggest ways you can improve your website or service or product or entire industry.

This is one of those fuzzy kinds of measurement that makes the ROI-focused people crazy. But it can really drive innovation and provide a fertile ground to improve your abilities of pattern recognition.

Tear down the wild mouse.

When looking at measurement and observation, there are different reasons and ways to do it. I hope these slides from an introductory presentation I did on three different ways to measure and why you might want to measure in the first place were helpful.

As you add measurement to the core tasks of your organization, decide how you want to measure.

Jeremiah Owyang, in his blog post about his 2010 goals, mentions organizational social readiness. He says “80% of a companies success is getting their organization ready through the right roles, processes, policies, measurement.”

In a lot of ways this isn’t any different than non-social organizational readiness. The aspects listed are the core of what an organization does to stay functional, regardless of whether or not they engage with social media.

Social media, however, provides a distraction from these core tasks. Owyang notes this, crediting  tools with only 20% of an organization’s success. It’s the whole reality of knowing that a hammer doesn’t come with a pre-built house–you need to know how and when to use it.

Let’s take a look at each of four core activities Jeremiah Owyang credits for the bulk of business success:

Determining roles for social media

Who is going to run your social media operations? What sort of skills will be valuable in that person? These are the questions that business owners and marketing managers should be getting answers to, moreso than what social network generates the most buzz.

Companies need to know who is going to do what. In many medium and even larger organizations social media is still being determined based on age (“College kids use Facebook right?”) or other criteria that aren’t related to business success.

Using social media takes time, like any other marketing or customer service task. If the job of dealing with it is being handed off to someone who is already full-time employed then there’s going to be some tension somewhere.

Determining roles based on the skills and thinking of your staff is likely to be more effective than choosing roles based only on ability with a particular tool du jour.

Establishing processes for efficient social media use

Can you draw a flow chart that starts with the creation of content or social media engagement and ends with desired outcomes for your business?

Social media takes time. There are some tools which can make it take a little less time. But having a clear process saves a lot more time.

It’s a little bit like preparing artwork in animation. When you’re making an animated cartoon one of the end results is, obviously, the cartoon. But another of the end results might be artwork that goes on products.

If you prepare the art as if it were all going onto products, then it’s fairly easy to convert them for the animation. It’s impossible to upscale animation art for products–meaning that your effort needs to be duplicated if your process doesn’t take into account your ultimate goals.

You want your social media process to be clear enough that you can reduce duplicated effort and distribute the relevant content quickly and easily. Social media tools won’t do this for you because social media tools don’t know your goals or what’s good for your business.

Clear social media policies

When something happens that wasn’t planned, what will your organization do and how will it respond? Does it look like a flowchart or checklist? Could you follow it if you were panicked about losing your job?

The thing about social media is that it’s outside the control of the organization. There isn’t a newspaper publisher to call and get mad at when someone posts something you don’t like online. Having a clear policy that explains how your organization will respond to unplanned positive and negative events in social media will help a lot of people stay calm in tense moments.

Measuring social media

Do you know how your social media measurement key performance indicators relate to your business goals?

Once you’ve determined what you’re doing with social media, who’s doing it, how they’re going to do it, and what everybody will be doing if things get janky, then you can start thinking about measurement and tracking.

If you’re initiating a social media plan having a solid, useful measurement system in place will be critical to avoiding unpleasant surprises later. But even here, it’s not as much about tools as it is determining that you’re measuring the right things. Your follower count, for what it’s worth, is probably not the right thing to be measuring.

Related articles:

• Join the Social CRM Pioneers! (cloudave.com)
• Nestle Finding That Social Media’s Not So Sweet (marketingpilgrim.com)

In a hurry? The ten steps for scaling social media are in list-format at the bottom of this post.

One of the common laments of companies trying to leverage social media is that it can take a lot of time and resources. If you or your employees are on Twitter and Facebook all day then who’s getting the work done? Common wisdom says that “social media doesn’t scale” or that “engagement doesn’t scale.”

“Doesn’t scale” is true if all of your engagement is one-to-one in real-time and you can’t hire on more people. Absolutely true. But the truth is that many customers will realize that your company is made up of humans and understand that you can’t be one-to-one in real-time all the time. They might not want to realize it if something is going dreadfully wrong. But that’s a special case for another article. This post is about scaling social media in a sane and responsible manner.

There are three areas where scaling is going to cause the hurt: decision-making, receiving information from customers (inputs) and expending effort on behalf of customers (outputs). Let’s tackle them in order of hurtitude.

Decision-making for social media

Social media conversations tend to move very very quickly. What was very new in the morning could be old hat by mid-afternoon. Being forced to make decisions rapidly can cause paralysis in some organizations.

In order to minimize the pain of having to make spot-decisions all the time try setting out a general principles. This is not the same as making 10,000 contingency plans. Setting out your general principles means being clear with everyone in the organization about these two things:

1. Be clear about who you are and what you’re doing with social media.
2. Be honest about your commitment to social media or a specific network.

Make it as simple and obvious as possible so that anyone who may be faced with a situation can refer to the principles you come up with and feel confident that they will make the best choice available to them. Ideally, the “what you’re doing with social media” part will resolve into a set of measurable goals and objectives.

Developing clarity about who you are and what you’re doing can take time. But taking this time is worth it because then other actions will flow much more smoothly. Being honest about your commitment to social media or a specific network means that you know whether you’re going have a token profile or whether you’re really going to work a particular network: and you’re ok with it.

Once your organization has come up with the answers for these two questions, then you will save a lot of time and meetings and general conversation about social media. Someone will say “We should really have a Blahblah Page on Blitzo Network.” Then you can say “You’re right, having a Blahblah page will relate directly to what we’re doing online with social media. Let’s test it.”

Revisit your purpose and your commitments as you gain experience in the medium.

Using social media to receive information from customers: managing inputs

Social media opens a floodgate of data and information from you customers. Managing this can absorb massive amounts of time. Monitoring Twitter all day, and Facebook and then some reputation management and Google Alerts… it doesn’t end.

The thing is, though, that you don’t have to watch all of the information. And you don’t have to watch all of it all of the time. Your purpose and commitment will suggest how frequently you need to be engaged in social media. If they don’t, then you may have made unrealistic decisions about your social media involvement—revisit and be more honest this time.

Here are some specific strategies to pare-back the amount of information you are trying to absorb via social media without sacrificing online goals and objectives.

Identify social media and networks which are most beneficial to your business.

Use your web analytics traffic reports to identify which sites are currently sending you traffic—and which sites are sending you the best quality traffic. Those are the ones where you already have some sort of traction, let these be your core areas of listening.

Go ahead and explore others, but consider non-performing networks to be experimental and don’t be shy about pruning back your involvement with them. If your Twitter traffic is junk, then don’t be shy about scaling back your commitment to Twitter. Same for Facebook or any other social media network.

Identify social media and networks where you have influence.

If you are currently involved in social media, identify the networks where you have the greatest influence. When you share something, does the audience respond? You can track this for links to your own site via campaign-tagging, but for other links to sites you don’t own, link shorteners like Bit.ly will help you out.

If you no one is being influenced by your messaging, then review your commitment to the network or social media site and determine whether you can just have a token profile there or whether you’ll want to step up your game. Be brutally honest. If you don’t have it in you to get better at it, then there’s no shame in backing off. Better to focus efforts where you already have influence.

Hold on… doesn’t all that analytics stuff add more work?

No. Here’s why. Remember back in the day when people did traditional advertising and the joke was always “50% of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Well, using analytics you get to find out which half.

If you spend more time generating reports than the time you save on sending out links and messages that no one hears or no one cares about, then it’s true. You’ve added time. But you’re not going to do that because it’s tremendously easy to configure and read those reports and see what’s working.

If you don’t read the reports, it’s tremendously easy to spend months coming up with catchy link titles to give to an audience that is non-existent or apathetic.

Sending links and ideas to nobody is a bigger waste of time than reading the reports.

A non-web analytics way to lighten your social networking load:

Ask your current best customers what social networks they’re on. Also ask them which ones they think would be a good place to find you and your messages. Chances are good they’ll tell you. This doesn’t involve any scary ol’ web analytics and does involve some data: customer recommendations. This is also a great way to get started even if you are going to use web analytics to help improve your messaging later.

Simplify your inbox.

This is getting more into the personal time-management stuff, but it matters once you open yourself up to taking messages in a variety of formats. Simplifying your inbox means that trying to get the number of places where you check for activity down to one. Probably won’t be able to get to one, but at least try. Here are some ideas:

• Invest time up front making a hand-rolled solution with RSS and Yahoo Pipes.
• Invest money in a solution like Radian6.
• Route all of your social media and networking alerts and communications to a single email address that is reserved for social media stuff.

Once you’ve got the inboxes whittled down to as few as you can, then re-examine your purpose and commitment to social media and come up with the frequency you will check that inbox. Yes I know that Twitter is a real-time environment. But it’s still ok to check the messages when you have time to respond to them.

If you let more than a day go in between questions and responses, remind your audience what you are responding to (they may have forgotten they even asked a question—which should give you an idea as to how important the question was).

Managing social media inputs:

Here it is in a bullet list:

• Eliminate active commitment to non-performing social media networks—scale back to just a profile.
• Eliminate active commitment to social media networks where you lack influence—scale back to just a profile.
• Ask your best customers where they think you would do well, start there.
• Whittle down your inboxes to as few as you can handle. Only check them according to when you can devote time to respond.

Expending effort on behalf of customers: managing social media outputs

If you’ve effectively whittled down your major social media commitments using the techniques above, then you’re halfway to making your existing social media work more efficiently. If you have a clear purpose and commitment and have identified the networks that are most likely to resonate, you’re ready to begin getting social.

Tag Team: Multi-user social media

If you have more than one person who can work on social media goals and objectives, share the load. Use technology like CoTweet and a company account to focus customer responses. That way, while one person is getting non-social-media work done, the other can work the social media.

Go ahead and be frank and honest with your audience that you have multiple people working the account. Also, take good notes on interactions so that anyone from your company can be helpful. That’s just usual CRM stuff.

Shift time

Sure social media is all real-time and all. But not everything you have to share needs to be shared exactly at that moment. Just as you might bank a blog post to publish while you’re on vacation, feel free to pre-publish Twitter posts that aren’t time-sensitive. This helps keep you active in the channel without you needing to actually be there all the time.

Yes, people will respond and you won’t be there right away. But you can respond to them the next time you are active. Shifting time has the added benefit of helping you discover the best time to be online for various markets, industries and topics. Use this for data gathering about influence and activity.

Schedule active use of social media

Go ahead and schedule dedicated time to be using social networks. Setting up a block of time to work a particular network puts you back in charge of your time. You no longer have to respond to everything right now in real-time. You can choose to push non-urgent business off until your next regularly scheduled block of time.

If you are using the time-shifting technique above and also using the tracking recommended in the “Managing social media inputs” section, then you can use that information to find out when is the best time to schedule your social media time in terms of being able to wield the most influence in relation to your online goals. Pretty clever, eh?

Scaling social media: in a nutshell.

So here’s how it all works, for the list-inclined:

1. Determine why you’re using social media (this will take time but better to do this before you blow hours making your Facebook page, right?)
2. Determine your level of acceptable commitment to each channel you’re in.
3. Measure which social media sites and networks naturally send you traffic.
4. Measure which social media sites and networks resonate most with your messages.
5. Ruthlessly prune back to just a profile presence on sites which don’t pass the previous two steps.
6. Set up a single inbox for all social media activity.
7. Tag-team social media responses (requires good internal notes but you are already doing this for CRM).
8. Time-shift posts whenever possible.
9. Schedule your active social media time so you remain in control of your time.
10. Laugh at the suckers who have to check Twitter every 3 minutes.

Note: If you already know a lot about your customers, your corporate design sense, your product and your broader marketplace this article is obviously not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re just starting a business and want to get going on the right foot but aren’t sure how to do it without spending all your startup capital on a website, please enjoy this post (and ask questions).

I often speak at small business groups or startup classes and I teach a beginning class on HTML/web design for continuing ed here in Burlington, VT. It’s awesome to see people get excited about starting something new and working on their thing.

Inevitably, after doing one of these events I get a few calls from people wondering what it costs for me to make a “starter” website. Usually my number is bit larger than they were hoping it would be.

Here’s what I say to people trying to make decisions about getting started with a website if you’re bootstrapping your business into existence.

Start at the beginning: why do you want a website anyway?

Make sure you know what your website is going to do for your business. If you can’t answer this question then you really shouldn’t be spending much money on it anyway. Here are some common reasons people want websites:

• You have a product you can sell online (you’re considering doing some e-commerce).
• You have a service and want people to call or contact you (you’re going to make a lead-generation site, like this one).
• You’re going to sell advertising around your content.
• You’re a non-profit or other organization looking to get donations.

If none of the above describes you, broadly, then you might be better off with just a single page that describes your business, hours of operation and contact info. Save your money and time for working on other aspects of your business for now.

Skip the web design and go with a nice template.

The argument for getting custom web design usually goes along the lines of “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” My reason for recommending that people just starting out go with a template is, oddly enough exactly that same phrase.

While you’re busy going back and forth with your designer and code vendor, the people you want to be making an impression with are going somewhere else–unaware that you even exist. You don’t get a second chance to work with people who are finding their solutions elsewhere as you spend time on your custom web design.

You see, making a custom web design takes time. It takes time for the designer to understand your vision. It takes time for the web designer to translate your vision into something visual. Then it takes time to go back and forth while you both iron out the details. Once that’s done, it takes time to implement the visual graphic design of the website into functioning web code.

Also, since a startup may not have a lot of data about their customers, that design process is happening in a vacuum. It’s a matter of personal preferences of the design team and the client without much input from the real target: potential customers.

A better strategy for a startup is to get up and running with a nice template for the purpose of gathering data about what your audience is doing on your website. Then, after you have that information, you can start talking about custom design. You’ll know more about your customers and your design choices can reflect that improved observation.

So how do you pick a template for your first website?

Start by settling on a content management system. I’m going to recommend WordPress and so is pretty much everyone else. It’s fairly easy to use, has a lot of plugins to add functionality, and there are lots of attractive free templates to choose from.

Here are some things to do when picking out a free template:

• Run the demo version of the template through the W3C validator. If it passes or only has a few errors, then that’s a good sign that the code was well-written. You’ll want that for search engine optimization reasons.
• Pick a design that you can live with. Since it isn’t custom, it probably won’t be exactly what you’re looking for. But pick something that doesn’t require a ton of customizations (otherwise you might as well go with a custom designed website).
• Make sure the site architecture supports what you want to do with the site. Imagine your own headlines and navigation bar items. Will they fit? Will your business make use of lots of images or movies? Will they fit?
• Where will the money-making thing go? Remember the reason why you’re making the site and know up-front how it will fit into the template theme design.

Once you’ve made it through all that, then you can contact a designer to maybe make a few nips and tucks to the theme to get it lightly customized for your needs. Remember you don’t want to totally re-hash the theme–you won’t save money by trying to do a custom design disguised as a theme makeover. Do small things like adding your logo into the header.

And remember, keep it simple. A few web pages, straightforward navigation, and a money-making thing on your website will serve you well to get started.

Start with the mission-critical plugins.

There are tons of WordPress plugins you’ll encounter as you get started. Here are the three to get started:

• Backup. You can configure this to email you the content of your website on a regular basis. Do this so you can sleep at night knowing you have some ability to recover if something goes wrong.
• Google Analytics. The point of getting started right away with a template is so that you can start learning about your customers. If you don’t get your web analytics installed then you’re not making the best use of this time.
• Contact-Form-7. You’re going to want to have some sort of contact form on your website. This is a great tool for making forms.

You’ve launched your website. Now what?

The strategy of going ahead with a template design is best suited to achieve the objective of learning how to operate your website early on and to learn about your customers. It’s what I call the “launch early and launch often” web strategy. So start learning about your audience. Here are some things to make the most of your time.

• Learn to use Google Analytics to make decisions about your business.
• Learn to use Website Optimizer to make improvements to your website.
• Discover other analytics tools like 4q and CrazyEgg to help you make improvements to your site.
• Make content for your site and see what people tend to like.
• Start promoting your website in print, online and in social media.
• Learn about campaign-tagging to track the success of online initiatives.

The time you spend learning these things will be much more beneficial for the long-term health of your business than going back and forth with your designer about the background color or the size of the type on your custom website.

Also, when it’s time to get that custom designed website you’ve always wanted, you’ll be better prepared. Since you’ll have more experience operating a website you’ll know more about what features and functionality you need. Since you’ll have more experience understanding your audience via web analytics you’ll know more about what things they like on your website.

Here’s a small list of free WordPress themes that pass the W3C validator (or have very few errors), just to get you started:

• One Room
• WP-Coda
• DailyPress
• GridFocus
• AutoFocus

Here’s a couple more free WordPress themes that have some W3C validation issues, but wouldn’t be too tough to fix up:

• Sand Dollar
• My Web Blog

Good luck and get started!

Gahlord Dewald, President/Janitor at Thoughtfaucet, has been asked to be one of the judges for the prestigious Mobius Awards. The categories Dewald will be involved in judging are Social Networking/Blogging, Mixed Media Campaigns, and Flash Websites. “I’m especially looking forward to reviewing the entries and seeing how they make use of technology and understanding human behavior to create worthwhile and lasting customer relationships.”

“I’m psyched Gahlord is judging in this year’s Mobius Awards, especially since we’ll be judging some new categories including social media” says Rich Nadworny of  Burlington VT based, Digalicious. “Gahlord’s experience with Web design and development, social media and branded content gives him a unique perspective on digital marketing.”

Established in 1971, Mobius Awards is the oldest, independent, international advertising awards competition. Entries are judged by an international jury on their effectiveness and creativity. Mobius Awards reflects the most current trends in the advertising industry by updating the competition regularly, such as adding new media types and categories.