Author Archives: David

Too Many Chefs in the Home Page

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This post on Fast Company, which features purported inside scoop on how the American Airlines home page is managed, tells an all too common story.

The post features a hypothetical redesign of the home page that dramatically simplifies and focuses the page from the hash that it is currently. An anonymous staff person from American commented on how their decentralized team of over 200 people who work on the site are simply incapable of creating a design like that due to their structure and processes.

Here’s the problem at American and many other organizations with overcrowded, ineffective home pages: they have decentralized the ownership and management of a centralized interface. In effect, no one owns this one page, so any design has to be the product of compromise and consensus.

Home pages benefit from benevolent dictators who make sure this critical entry point to their site (yes, home pages still matter even with Google driving people past them) is focused on achieving tangible outcomes that matter the most.

Massive teams and committees simply cannot muster the discipline required to create a focused and effective home page.

Two Events and a Survey for Association Executives

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Here are two events and a survey that will be of interest to some association executives.

Association Election Trends

Votenet is conducting a survey on association elections with the intent to “identify association election trends such as average voter turnout, election processes, types of elections, promotion methods for elections and challenges to running a voting event.” Everyone who completes the survey will receive a copy of the results and analysis.

Avectra Demo Day

Avectra is holding a free demo day this Friday. The event includes several panel presentations and demos from technology companies. Free to attend but you have to register via the web site.

Buzz 2009

A social media conference for association executives, featuring Guy Kawasaki, Andy Sernovitz and others. Scheduled for July 9 in DC.

No One Cares About Your Intranet

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James Robertson points to a post decrying the lack of attention that corporate intranets receive nowadays in a challenging economy.

Expecting executives to fund the intranet is like expecting them to fund fax machines: better make a good case leading with the value of the outcomes an intranet can achieve rather than the depth of your features or total document count or the purity of your taxonomy.

In fact, I’d stop calling your group an intranet team immediately. Rebrand yourself as the rapid solutions team, working tirelessly to help profit centers make more profit and cost centers to cost less.

Landing Pages: Don't Forget to Cut off the Crusts!

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A landing page is a web page created solely to support traffic that is inbound from an e-mail or online promotion.

Landing pages are optimized for the audience you anticpate sending to them, sporting tailored content that helps the prospect to take whatever your desired next action is.

They are a critical tool for online marketing.

One thing that many people forget about them is that the best landing pages have the crust cut off. Let me explain what I mean here.

My two daughters will not eat a PB&J unless the crusts are cut off the sandwich. Removing the crusts lets them focus on the yummy goodness in the middle. You should do the same with your landing pages.

Most content on your site sport a variety of navigation tools, promotions, and other links around the perimeter of the page. This gives the user lots of options for navigating to their next page. However, with a landing page, you only want the visitor to take one specific next action. Therefore, you should cut the crusts off your landing pages, removing this extraneous navigation and content from the edges of the page.

Crust-less landing pages keep the visitor focused on the specific messages you want them to read and the next step you wish them to take. Note that on Amazon.com when you enter the payment process, all of the navigation goes away. Same concept is at play here.

Cut off the crusts and watch your conversion rate improve!

Hear Me: Podcast and Webinar

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A couple free resources for you on a lovely Thursday afternoon.

First up, my second podcast interview with Sue Pelletier is up on the Face2Face blog. We tackle lots of issues around social media and events, including back channels, blogging, and if a blog will put your event out of business (answer: no).

Next Tuesday I’m leading a webinar on using data to drive membership marketing for associations.

The presentation is part of the Avectra Academy series and is free to attend. I’ve been told there has been a huge response to this one, which makes all sorts of sense. I’ll share why NOW is the best time to be a marketer ever (really!) and how associations can benefit from using data to focus their marketing rather than spamming the hell out of everyone in your database. Hope to see you there!

Outcomes and Audiences

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Successful web sites have extreme clarity on the outcomes they are built to achieve and which audiences they will need for success. These two factors are more important than almost any other element of the process: if they are off base you’ll never get anywhere no matter what you invest in design or technology.

Yikes!

Here are a few questions to consider for the next program, product or service you wish to support with the Web:

  • What specific outcomes do we need to create to achieve our goal?
  • What markets are relevant to those outcomes?
  • Which of these high-value outcomes can best be supported or achieved online?
  • Given that, which audiences among the relevant markets are important for those specific outcomes?

With those answers in hand, you are well on your way to creating a focused effort online that will produce results for your organization.

David Gammel's Web Strategy Report, Volume 2, Issue 4

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Thoughts On Strategy: Back Channels and Event Management

Back channel communications among event attendees, primarily using Twitter, is rapidly becoming common at association industry events. Every ASAE event this year has had a back channel, with traffic and usage increasing. This is likely to impact meetings and events more broadly throughout this year and going forward.

A definition:

  • A conference backchannel is a communication channel where attendees, and anyone else who wants to follow along, can exchange messages via mobile devices and laptops.
  • The most popular way to do this today is to use Twitter. Updates to Twitter intended for the back channel will include a hash tag. ASAE’s Marketing & Membership Conference, kicking off today, is using a hash tag that looks like this: #mmcon09.
  • Searching for the hash tag on Twitter will show you all the messages with that tag. Here is a search result for #mmcon09.
  • Attendees use the channel to share ideas as well as general commentary on the event. It’s also often used to organize happy hour meetings, which should be no surprise!
  • Back channels will often include negative comments as well. Speakers who are overly commercial or boring will get razzed live as they speak. Run out of coffee when attendees are running low on energy? You’ll hear about it in the back channel.

The strategic impact for event management:

There are several things to consider for managing your events with a back channel:

  • You cannot prevent one from forming. Sorry.
  • You can choose to engage with your attendees via the back channel. If so, make sure you have staff monitoring it and acting as needed.
  • Speakers should be educated about the back channel. One tip when you do have a back channel going: ask an audience member who is following the comments to share questions and feedback for the speaker to discuss.
  • A back channel can be a live testimonial for the value of your conference for all those who are following along online.
  • Leading the creation and promotion of a back channel will help you to maximize the positive benefits of the channel for your meeting.

The bottom line:

I think this is something meeting planners and association executives have to get up to speed on quickly and get out in front of with their events. Twitter is growing fast and is often monitored by media and other opinion setters. Full engagement with a back channel can create great buzz and you want to avoid being surprised by a back channel you didn’t know existed!

Offerings from David

New Coaching Club!
David Gammel’s Coaching Club on Social Media
Want to achieve breakthrough results with social media for your organization? Sign up for my exclusive coaching club. Act now, we get started on May 15!

On Twitter?
Follow me @davidgammel.

Case Study: Flu Crisis Response

Associations are grappling with how to respond to the emergent issue of the Swine Flu that is spreading from Mexico. Health organizations in particular have been ramping up their communications. The Massachusetts Medical Society web site provides an excellent example this week.

MMS recently redesigned their site and have a feature position on the home page that can easily be dedicated to specific topics. Frank Fortin, who leads the web team at MMS, had his team create a custom graphic that leads to a clearinghouse of information on the flu for members and patients.

MMS Home Page

There are three things that enable MMS or any organization to use their home page flexibly and quickly like this.

Process: They have a defined management process in place for identifying emergent issues and how to decide when they should be featured. This doesn’t have to be very formal or detailed but you do need to know who has to be part of the discussion and who will make the call.

People: Not only do you need to know who the decision maker is and have access to them, you also need to know what technical or design talent you will need in such a case and how you will access them. Who will you use to design the graphic and how quickly can you access them and get something done? This is more critical when you rely on outside vendors for your web design.

Technology: Your web template must make it easy to pop in a feature like MMS did for their home page. Your content management system should also make it easy to put this kind of alert into place.

If you don’t have a handle on those three factors in advance and how they relate to crisis communication you’ll be behind the news on your home page just when everyone expects you to be out front.

Frank provides more details on their approach to the flu on his blog.

High Geekery: LinkedIn Applications

LinkedIn is rapidly evolving as they play catch up with the interactivity offered by sites such as Facebook and Twitter without losing their original business-friendly roots. One such innovation is the rollout of LinkedIn applications that add more dynamic content to your profile. This page lists all the available applications.

If you or your organization publishes a blog, you can use one of several applications to add your recent blog posts to your profile. The WordPress Application can actually be used to link to any blog that provides an RSS feed. There are other applications for specific blogging tools as well.

SlideShare has released an application for LinkedIn that allows you to display your slide shows on their service as part of your profile. If you have a slideshow that summarizes your professional experience or the offerings of your company or organization, this may be a good addition for you.

Check out the applications and add those that will help you achieve the goals you have for LinkedIn.

Web Strategy for Meetings and Events

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Sue Pelletier of MeetingsNet and the Face2Face blog interviewed me last week about web strategy for event web sites. This previews some of the ideas I will be covering at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Toronto this August.

I was fortunate today to have the chance to speak with Web guru C. David Gammel about what organizations can do to make their event Web sites really get the results they want. He has lots of ideas that you can use to increase the likelihood that potential attendees will register, exhibitors sign up for booths, and overall increase the buzz around your meeting.

You can listen to the podcast here. Thanks Sue!

Free Sites May Curtail Use in Developing Countries

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This article from the New York Times this week discusses how many advertising supported web sites are challenged by growing numbers of user from developing countries: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

According to the article, some companies are offering, or considering, scaled back services to these audiences to limit bandwidth costs for low profit traffic.

This is an interesting consideration for web strategy when your desired web audiences include people in developing countries. You may not be able to leverage or rely on free services that are funded through advertising to spread your message and build engagement abroad outside the developed world. You may have to develop your own channels with which to do so if this trend continues.