Firecat Studio

Voice of the Customer - Gathering Customer Feedback

If you've looked into social media for your business, you're likely already on board with the idea that social media needs to be a dialog, rather than a monologue. But Is your website also inviting dialog?

Invite Dialog on your Website

Every channel you open with your customers and prospects needs to facilitate two-way communication. Here are some options.

• Contact Us Form. 
• EMail links.
• Phone number, prominently displayed.
• Chat now function.
• Rate this page element.
• Comments area.
• Share this page element.
• End content pages with a "what do you think?" type question.

Perform User Research

You don't have to be a usability expert to do user research - in fact, every website designer, webmaster and web sponsor should be showing sketches, layouts, global navigation elements and design comps to friends, family, coworkers or neighbors, if there's no formal usability budget.

Usability doesn't have to involve a lab, cameras, and appointments these days, either. We're making good use of remote usability tactics, and getting a ton of great feedback on proposed architectures, layouts and designs.

We've used the following to conduct inexpensive, remote usability studies:

• SurveyMonkey. Cheap, easy - ask questions, get answers. They support logical branching, which is nice.
• Optimal Workshop. Optimal Sort is online card sorting - grouping pages or tasks into sections that make intuitive sense. Treejack allows us to validate proposed architectural groupings, Chalkmark lets us give users key tasks and make sure they're looking where we think they will. 
• PDFs and the phone. Sometimes we simply sketch out pages or layouts, save those as PDFs, and email them to participants, then schedule time on the phone. Amazingly effective.

What tactics do you use to keep up with your customers and prospects?

10 Easy SEO Tips for Business - B.O.S.S.

I'm presenting these 10 Easy SEO Tips for Business Wednesday, 5/2/12 at the Business Owners Seminar Series. You may know that SEO stands for "search engine optimization" - it's the art/science of getting your website to appear on page 1 of search results in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

At Firecat Studio, SEO is important, and we address it as an integrated part of your content strategy, not with tricks or games that can get you penalized or cost you thousands to keep up. 

 

10 Easy SEO Tips for Business

View more PowerPoint from Susan Price

After the 10 tips, I'm including a "buyer's guide" to SEO and SEM services toward the end of the presentation. You probably get lots of offers to "get you to page 1 of Google - guaranteed." Fortunately, there are some simple ways to tell who's selling snake oil and who's likely to have your best interests in mind.

We're dedicating this week's Firecat First Friday free coworking and workshop to SEO as well - so if you miss the B.O.S.S. series, come out to Firecat Studio this Friday at noon, and hear this stuff in person, with some special guests expert in getting sites to rank well.

 

 

DrawSomething and Other Time-Wasting Digital Games

We've been having some interesting discussions at Firecat lately about our allocations of time spent on- and offline, time spent in social media sharing, games, and especially that interesting place where these intersect - like in DrawSomething.

I got going with DrawSomething at the same time I adopted the new iPad3. DrawSomething makes great use of the touch interface.

I'm in my honeymoon period with DrawSomething; I'm not sure yet whether my interest will wane on a now-predictable curve. Did you ride the wave on any of these?

• Plants versus Zombies
• Angry Birds
• Cut The Rope

I'm still hanging on and getting my butt kicked in Words With Friends - just as I do in Scrabble, the game's parent. And I'm having somewhat better success in HangingWithFriends, which Zynga (the firm cleverly buying up all the social games) marketed me into so cleverly.

DrawSomething's Rise Explained In DrawSomething

Created by MBAOnline.com

Want to Play?

I'm FirecatSue on DrawSomething (and many other games). I'm having a good time with it right now, and it works the visual side of my brain, something I think does me good.

Facebook Pages for Business - Resources Discussed

Great session at Firecat Studio on Friday on Facebook Pages for Business. I've gathered some links about the topics we discussed. Feel free to add more!

• Facebook's Pages how-to - you can find this by searching for Facebook Pages 
• Business Facebook pages for inspiration.
• Info about the new Facebook Timeline that changes the layout of your own page. 
• NorthSocial is the $20/month service that includes a lot of Facebook on-page apps.

I want to thank Jennifer Navarrete again for sharing her expertise. She'll be back on Friday, March 2, with a whole session on SoLoMo - Social Local Mobile.

SOPA PIPA Protest - An Infographic

As a society, we Americans let a lot of upsetting stuff slide. I'm really glad that so many who value the free exchange of ideas on the Internet came together to defeat these potentially damaging bills.

Here's a celebratory infographic from Frugal Dad, which also serves to show what we - corporations and citizens - can do when we come together to express our input on an issue. 

Source: frugaldad.com

Video Blogging: Quick Tips for Video Lighting

Whether you're adding videos to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or your own website, just a little thought and experimentation with the lighting can make all the difference. I learned this from my husband Greg, a theatre director, who makes his own lightboxes from scary-looking instruments. I've also watched Todd O'Neill and Alan Weinkrantz take a few seconds to light even a quickie social media video well.

Vlogging can be done with inexpensive equipment, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't put forth a little effort to make the video attractive. This segment uses three light sources and a diffuser, and we get to see the immediate impact for the better. Via Cameron Moll's excellent blog. 

DSLR Lighting Techniques from Eve Hazelton from Realm Pictures on Vimeo.

Jason Fried on Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work - (TEDxMidwest)

Just found this TEDxMidwest talk by 37Signals founder Jason Fried, where he makes a great case that the typical office isn't the best place to get real work done. He touches on something I find fascinating, the serial, phased nature of dreaming and how it relates to ideation and creativity.

Jason is a fan of coworking as well. If you haven't tried working from someplace different, join us on a First Friday for just a little while, and try it.

The M&Ms

He makes an eloquent case about home having fewer, less damaging distractions than the average workplace. And M&Ms - Managers and Meetings - as the worst involuntary interrupters, are PAID to interrupt.

My favorite quote: "Meetings are terrible, toxic, poisonous things." Expensive to the organization, talking about stuff that should happen, rather than doing actual productive work, too many people attending, and usually scheduled for much too long a period.

His 3 Productivity-Enhancing Suggestions

• No-Talk Thursdays. Just the first Thursday, just in the afternoon. Just silence. An uninterrupted period to allow people to focus. Four hours of quiet time is the best gift you can give.
• Encourage assymmetrical communications. Instead of face-to-face or phone, which interrupt, encourage the use of eMail and collaboration products like Basecamp that allow people to consume information when they're ready for it.
• Cancel one recurring meeting. And find that those meetings you think are indispensable, aren't.

Unique Selling Proposition Workshop, Customer Empathy Map

At last Friday's Firecat coworking and brownbag session, Kate Hayward led a quick but deep excursion into creating a unique selling proposition (USP). Several expert marketers were in attendance, so the insights were flying.

Kate posted her empathy map (below) that she had posted on the writeboard, and shares her own answers to the leading questions in her workshop here in her blog, Eggsactamundo. 

I'm still working on the Firecat Studio USP. Have you made progress on yours?

I also ordered the Business Model book Kate recommended, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers, by Alexander Osterwalder. Let me know if you read it (and what you thought), or other books you find relevant to this work.

One Steve Jobs Treatment Post on Quora Nearly Tubes Career

Like a lot of smart, connected people, Ramzi Amri, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical, participates in Quora. Quora is a social networking site with a question and answer format. Because it was adopted early on by lots of tech industry leading lights and bright minds, the site is full of high-quality content.

Much of the content is, however, speculation. It's a place where we feel free to share opinions. But because these posts are publicly available to anyone through search, Amri's post ended up being misquoted and misused on a high-visibility, top-keyword-laden news item: Steve Jobs' death. And it nearly cost Amri his career. Here's Ramzi Amri's Quora post describing the nightmare.

Note that Amri was careful in his post. He says, "In my Quora piece, I clearly state in my first line that "I do not pretend to know anything about the case on a personal level and I never participated in the care of Mr. Jobs" and I conclude with a full paragraph on the importance of respecting people's treatment choices, no matter how much we may disagree with them."

Amri's debrief on the situation is worth a read. Be sure to scroll to the bulleted reasons he suggests the piece went viral. 

Takeaways

1. If you type it, you own it. It's hard to overstate how "permanent" and "findable" our online musings are, so we all need to be aware and careful of what we say. 
2. Continue to monitor threads you participate in. And when something you said gets attention - pay even MORE attention. Amri's post got additional juice from a Gawker article, which inaccurately described Amri's credentials. Then the Daily Mail picked that up and distorted them even more. 
3. Defend yourself. Amri was able to get his employer, Harvard, to see what had really happened and take the correct action. Going public correcting any misconceptions at once, repeatedly, may help. I certainly appreciate reading about his experience.
4. Consider the source. I hope most of us have learned to check rumors before spreading them, and check facts before publishing.

You'd think what he wrote, and what he did afterward would be enough. But it nearly wasn't. I want this to be a world where we can feel free to share - but we need to be careful out here in cyberspace with our indelible, distortable words.

Lowe's Gives Itself a Social Media Black Eye

Home improvement giant Lowe's pulled its television advertising from the show American Muslim due to some pressure from an ill-informed email campaign conducted by Florida Family Association, reports Ben Popken in AdWeek. 

In bowing to pressure, they fanned a small fire. By not moderating the bigoted comments on their Facebook page, they threw gasoline on it - allowing the discourse to degenerate.

So What Should Lowe's Have Done?

• Announce why they were pulling the ads - and point out the underlying corporate principles under which the decision was made
• Respond quickly to the outcry following in the channels where the debate was happening (Twitter, Facebook)
• Use its available online presence points - web, Twitter stream, Facebook page - to clarify its commitment to its principles and values.
• Moderate comments on the Lowe's Facebook page according to its principles, and be transparent about that moderation.

Here's an example of what they could say:

While we support the right of all customers and visitors to voice their opinions, we require all posts to adhere to [Lowe's Facebook page posting policies].  

Have you faced a social media backlash? How'd that work out for you, and what advice would you give businesses who want to engage in social media, but fear events like these?

Update: Here's another article on the Lowe's/American Muslim situation from E.D. Kain in Forbes.