I have, sitting on my desk, four pieces of unsolicited bulk mail. All of these are from the same company. All of them offer to reduce my mortgage payments by going through their quick refinance service. I’m quite dubious to their claims and will shred them as soon as I finish writing this.

What caught my eye was that even though all the offers are identical, almost down to the exact wording, they all took different forms and had different appearances when still in their envelopes:

• One looked like a bank statement
• One looked like a check
• One looked like an appointment notice from the VA Medical Center
• One looked like “junk mail.”

Of course, it’s very easy to tell without opening that these are all junk. I open them so I can shred the parts on which my personal information is printed. What prompted me to comment was that they all had the same web site address and toll-free number printed on them.

You’d think a company who went through the trouble of creating four different forms for the same offer would have split-tested them. They could have a unique toll-free number and URL for each of the four formats. Then they could quickly learn which one generated the most calls or web traffic and then use it more than the others.

You might hear this practice called “A/B Testing.” Many e-commerce companies employ such methods to find out which versions of banner ads and landing pages produce the desired result. It works quite well in helping get a message to the right audience.

What is old is new again. Well, off to the shredder.

photo credit: StarsApart

Cover Shot of "Read This Before Our Next Meeting"

I hate meetings. Or, rather, I hate what meetings do to productivity. Most meetings are set up to gather facts and data in order to analyze a problem ad nauseum. The worst meetings are those which are held “just because.” When I was in the Army, we had those meetings all the time. Meetings were often used to postpone decisions, as a tool to let the boss show he or she was “boss,” or create an atmosphere which makes everyone look busy when there’s no real work going on.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Boss: Hello, Kevin, are you coming to the meeting I scheduled today?

Kevin: No. I’m trying to wrap up a project I’m working on.

Boss: But I have some information to share with the group.

Kevin: Is John there?

Boss: Yes, he is.

Kevin: Good. If you have anything important to say, he’ll let me know.

In one unit I was part of early in my career, the First Sergeant would have each platoon sergeant and their subordinate squad leaders in his office every morning in order to go over the schedule and tell them what to do. Every day, except Monday which was always Motor Pool day, we would sit in our office and wait for the meeting to finish and someone to come tell us what to do. It was a ridiculous waste of time.

Then, in came the new First Sergeant. On his first day at work, all the usual suspects started filing into his office for the morning meeting. He yelled at them: “Get out of here! If you want to know what to do, read the schedule! It’s posted out in the hallway where it’s always been! If you can’t figure that out, let me know and I’ll find someone who can!” A new era had begun.

Meetings are so ingrained in our culture that some of us may have trouble accepting what Al Pittampalli calls “The Modern Meeting Standard” in Read This Before Our Next Meeting. In his reasoning, a meeting is called only when a decision has already been made in order to either resolve a conflict or to foster complex coordination (which means beyond that which can be done via memo). In this new paradigm, what can be communicated via memo will be – and everyone is required to read memos.

According to Pittampalli, the Modern Meeting …

• … starts on time, moves fast and ends on schedule
• … limits the number of attendees
• … rejects the unprepared
• … produces committed action plans
• … refuses to be informational. Reading memos is mandatory
• … works only alongside a culture of brainstorming.

Brainstorming is different than a “meeting.”

The main goal in changing how we do meetings is to quit wasting time and get to doing more productive work. Can you abandon the old ways of meeting and try a new thing? Check out Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli and see if you agree The Modern Meeting Standard is the way to go. Like many other Domino Project works, it’s a quick read, goes straight to the point and doesn’t waste any time – just like the Modern Meeting it describes.

I received a copy of this book free from GoToMeeting by Citrix, however it is my honest opinion of the work.

All links to the book are Amazon Affiliate links.

I recently wrote a piece directed at marketers reminding them that it is important to keep their IT folks in the loop all the time. This is important so they can get the best advice, counsel and work the IT folks can offer. It’s a topic I talk and write about quite often.

As is usually the case, there is another side to the coin. The IT folks have to be willing to communicate as well.

As in any relationship, the one between Marketing and IT is a two-way street. Each side has to be willing to work with the other and offer the best they have to the relationship. Each side has abilities and strengths the other lacks. By combining skills, knowledge and efforts, the entire organization benefits.

It goes without saying that Marketing and IT have different missions within an organization. But, where those missions overlap, it is in each groups’ best interest to cooperate for the good of everyone. Sometimes this involves compromise and sacrifice. Isn’t that true in any relationship?

Here’s my challenge to my IT counterparts in 2012: Reach out to your Marketing colleagues and try to find meaningful ways you can help them succeed. Look at their business objectives and see if you can find ways to help meet them. Not only will you learn more and expand your horizons, you will help the whole business do better. And that, my friends, is what it’s all about.

What say you? Are you in a corporate IT group and have a good relationship with your Marketing counterparts? What kinds of things help the relationship? Please feel free to share any tips in the comments.

photo credit: mikecogh

Dan Zarrella

I’ve been following Dan Zarrella, the “Social Media Scientist” for a few years now. I get a lot out of his writings and webinars because his studies go beyond the “feel good” or “unicorns and rainbows” (as he puts it) ideas which go around. He attempts to put some hard numbers behind what he recommends and this gives me some great starting points to do my own experimentation and measure how things work for me and those I work for.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness is a compilation of many things Dan has already shared in various media, put together in a nice, easy-to-read format which can help anyone involved with web marketing get a great head start on working their own strategies.

The book is full of interesting statistics and studies of data showing:

• what may be the best time to share on Facebook and Twitter
• how timing affects email opening and click throughs
• how often one may wish to post on Facebook or Twitter
• what makes information shareable by others
• how to define goals and measure whether they were reached

All in all this is a very good work and well worth reading. If you’ve never heard Dan speak nor read any of his other work, you will find this quite interesting and full of ideas to get you thinking. If you’re already familiar with Dan’s work, this is a great reference where everything is in one place so you don’t have to hunt it down.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness by Dan Zarrella

Note: all links to the book in this post are Amazon Affiliate links

I had Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Amazon affiliate link) as my ear worm today – the title of this post is inspired by it.

This past Thursday’s PubCon keynote was a panel discussion between Topher Konan (CNN.com’s SEO Coordinator), Jeff Preston (SEO Manager for Disney) and Alex Bennert (In-House SEO for the Wall Street Journal). It was quite a lively talk about different issues facing in-house SEOs in large organizations.

One stand out comment was Jeff’s mention that everyone involved in the web efforts need to be at every meeting. His comment was very well received by the people in attendance. I was certainly glad to hear him say it, as that idea is something very important to me. It’s something which I stressed during my In-House SEO presentation on Tuesday. In the context of my talk, it was about the importance of marketers being constantly in touch with their IT counterparts.

What I said was something  like …

“If you treat your IT folks as an afterthought, guess what? They’ll treat you as an afterthought.”

Constant and consistent communication is important for several reasons:

• It helps maintain lines of communication which can otherwise get lost
• It helps build those relationships needed for smooth cooperation
• Both sides of the team learn from each other
• Both sides of the team learn each other’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses
• It makes working life just that much more pleasant

Remember that web marketing success means success for the entire organization. Although you may not see the need to communicate across departments on a consistent basis, that need is there. Keep in contact, even when you don’t feel like it. Make time to talk to those who have a hand in all pieces of your web marketing strategy, no matter how small their role may be. In the long run, everyone wins when you do.

Oh, and this applies to outside contractors, too!

The third session I sat in on was the one in which I presented, In-House Team Building and Training moderated by Dave Roth.

InHouse SEO Teams – Tony Adam, Co-Founder, CEO, Eventa @tonyadam

• Recruiting=Biz Dev, get out there and look for people.
• Don’t mess up. You need to sell people as to why the position is important.
• Follow up is very important. Make sure to keep in contact with the ones you want to hire throughout the hiring process.
• After the hire, you need to keep the people happy. Give them challenges to keep them busy and sharp. Don’t forget mentoring and training.
• Three Es: Engage, Education, and Empower
• Let people lead. Give them things to be in charge of according to their abilities.
• Have Fun! Laughter is powerful and fun is energizing. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
• Listen to your people. Find out what their needs are.

From Dashboard to Success and Leveraging 3rd Parties With Your In-House SEO Team – Peter Leshaw, VP, Interactive Strategies, Blue Interactive @peterleshaw

• It’s important to create a dashboard to show what’s going well and what’s not. It helps you be accountable and show your value.
• Include a page with analytics (including organic and PPC data), Call metrics (if appropriate for the business), Leads & conversion rates, and Demographic conversion rates
• The team should include the Webmaster, Copy Writer (preferably and expert in your company’s business area), SEO Specialist, and the Social Media Manager.
• Consider brining in outside consultants or contractors to fill skill gaps on an as-needed basis.
• Outsiders should compliment your team, not just supplement it. Male sure they have the same basic philosophy on how you do things.

How To Hire an In-House Search Team – Josh Gampel, VP, Onward Search @joshgampel

• Indeed.com has job trending info. They show SEO has been declining as of the last 6 months. So are PPC openings. Social media and web analytics are still on an upward trend..
• The ASA National staffing index shows there is a steady climb in temporary hires in web marketing positions.
• before you go to hire an SEO, you have to be prepared to discuss your company’s overall strategy.
• You need to look for people who are creative and analytical. They need to have good communication skills. Hire for attitude as well as skills.
• Write you job descriptions to sell your company as well as fill the position. There is still a lot of demand for talent, so you need to stand out.
• Answer for yourselves the top five things you want the person to have. If you can’t do this, you won’t be prepared for the interview.
• Bullet point your skill needs.
• You can’t get the best from social media alone. Don’t be afraid to call and offer to interview.
• Make sure to ask the right questions. Ask “why” as well as “what.”
• Learn how to close the deal. Good candidates are going to get multiple offers.
• Go to seminars and learn the skills you’re short on.
• Research compensation so you know what people are worth versus what you can pay.

Here is the slide deck from my presentation:

Once again, PubCon is upon us. This time next week I and two of my colleague will be winging our way to Las Vegas for this excellent web marketing event. It’s going to be a busy time of learning and exchanging ideas.

If you’re a Crossing reader and will be at PubCon, I would love to meet you. If you see me wandering the hallways or in a session, please stop and introduce yourself. Here’s my partial tentative agenda:

Monday

• I’ll be at the kickoff event at 5:30pm. This is a great time to meet new people in a social setting.

Tuesday

• I will be presenting as part of the In-House Team Building and Training session at 2:55 in Salon D. This will be a great panel with some luminaries in this area: Tony Adam, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel.
• In the evening I’ll be playing in the Raven Tools poker tournament. Thankfully this is just for “funsies” because I am not that great of a poker player

Wednesday

• After all the day’s festivities, I’ll be participating in the Epic Dinner organized by Alan Bleiweiss.

Thursday

• From 2pm until 3pm I’ll be sitting in on PubCon Labs. This is a new feature of PubCon which I think will be a huge hit. Session speakers will be at a table and will sit down with you and answer your questions. Reservations are going fast. I’m scheduled to cover Beginning SEO, but I don’t think anyone would mind if you wanted to talk about In-House issues or anything else web marketing.
• From my Labs session, I’ll be rushing over to Salon G to moderate a session entitled Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer
• Fest Call! At 7pm we’ll be having an informal and unofficial meetup at the Hofbrauhaus. Anyone is welcome to attend, but I’d especially like to invite Veterans of the Armed Services to come out and tell lies and talk web marketing.

Instead of posting a long summary of the sessions I attend at the end of the day, I’m going to try posting summaries of each session individually. I think this will be more efficient for me and easier to read for you.

What say you? Are you headed to PubCon next week? What do you hope to learn? Please feel free to share in the comments.

Now is the time for you to learn to fly. You’ve come so far and I hope you’ve been keeping up with your posts and updating your site with new content from time to time. Now comes the last article in this series – and the admonition for you to spread your wings and take off. You’re ready, believe me!

WordPress Thesis Menu Area

The main reason I recommended you get the Thesis theme was because it would allow you to have a platform to learn some PHP and CSS as you went along. I could write tons of articles about those two things, but why totally reinvent the wheel when there are so many great tutorials and books available on those subjects? It’s time for you to spread your wings and fly, and you can’t do that if I’m hanging on to your wings.

There are two files within the Thesis theme which you can use to customize your site: custom.css and custom_functions.php. Both of these files can be edited in the Custom File Editor section of the Thesis controls.

Customize Functionality
Click the dropdown box, select the file you wish to edit and click the “Edit selected file” button. Let’s look at the custom_functions.php first.

Thesis Custom File Editor Window

Thesis uses a concept called “hooks” to allow you to change some functionality of your site. For instance, if you want to move the menu from above your site’s header image to just below it (something I prefer to do) then you simply add the following two lines to custom_functions.php:

remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');

The first line removes the menu from its default location, the second line puts the menu after the header. Easy, right?

So, how do you know what hooks are available and how to use them? Easy – it’s all documented on the Thesis web site. Remember what I told you last time – searching online is the best friend you have. It’s likely that whatever you want to do has already been figured out by someone who’s already been there. Learn from them.

There is also an excellent hooks tutorial by Rae Hoffman-Dolan on her Sugarrae site, I highly recommend you check it out: Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies.

Customize The Look
The other file you can edit for customization is custom.css. This is the custom Cascading Style Sheet. If you haven’t already, check out CSS: The Missing Manual by David McFarland (Amazon Affiliate link). You can also google “CSS Cheat Sheet” and find dozens of very well-made shortcut guides to what you can control using CSS.  There is also an excellent CSS tutorial on the Thesis web site.

Here’s a quick example. On this site, I wanted a black border to set off the footer from the rest of the site. All I had to do was add this to my custom.css file:

.custom #footer{
	border-color: Black;
}

Again, easy, once you know how to do it. Play around, don’t be afraid to fail. Keep trying and adding pieces until you get it working the way you want.

Backups!
Of course, it’s a good idea to make copies of these files in case you really mess up. For instance, it’s possible to completely trash your site if you make a mistake in your custom-functions.php file. Download a backup before you start messing with things in case you need to undo something to get your site running again – not that I’ve ever done that …

Test Domains
Another good idea is to set up a test site for experimentation. If you’re host allows it, set up a subdomain like test.yourdomain.com and install WordPress and Thesis in it. You can export your current content using the “Export” function within WordPress’s tools and you can export your Thesis customizations using the “Download Options” tool in the Thesis “Manage Options” section. Then you can use the import or “upload” pieces on your test site to help you make an exact duplicate of your site on the test domain. This allows you to make mistake and perfect your changes without messing up your “real” site.

Now go and spread your wings. If you ever have questions, please feel free to share them in the comments of any of the posts in this series or use the Contact Form to send in a question.

Summer does content strategy, and has been involved in content generation for 12 years. Her employer requires all employees to have a personal blog related to content in order to let them have a voice in the industry. They also blog on the corporate blog.

Summer tweets as @summerH

• Whether to have separate personal and business blogs really depends on what business you’re in
• At a recent conference, it was said “Being human is the new black.” You need to express your real voice in your writing
• The policy at her company is simple: “Don’t be stupid.”
• The things you write on a personal blog can lead to business contacts. You never know who’s going to read your stuff. They may never find you “business” blog, but might get to know you anyway
• Consider: if you want to be found – connect all your stuff together somehow. Otherwise, set up an alias to keep stuff completely separate
• Even a corporate blog should have a personal voice. People will relate more to a person than a “corporation.” Instead of having a “talking logo,” be a person or persons. People want to know the people who make up your business
• Summer tries not to tie herself to a calendar when blogging. She would rather write something interesting and timely rather than write “just because it’s Tuesday”
• When posting, consider a filter like, “What would my mother think about this” or sister, or dad, or whomever. That can help keep you in line and possibly out of trouble
• If you have separate blogs, you can use purposeful linking either by inclusion or omission

The other day I had a great conversation with someone about leadership. He mentioned that it was frustrating to work for a leader who felt they were “entitled.” He described this as someone who, when they achieve a certain leadership rank, feel that they can just lord it over the people under them and don’t have to get their hands dirty. In other words, the opposite of a servant leader.

This reminded me of a certain young lieutenant I had some run-ins with while working in Germany. I was in charge of the orderly room at the time, acting as the company commander’s assistant. One afternoon, this newly-minted young officer appeared at my desk with orders in hand.

I took his paperwork and got him checked in. He asked to see the commander, which was a natural request for someone just arriving at a new unit. I told him that, because the commander was working on a project which required his immediate attention, I would make him an appointment for him to report first thing the next morning. Young Lieutenant “Jones” didn’t appreciate that and was rather vocal about it. I was calm and respectful, but told him in no uncertain terms that I was following the Captain’s instructions and that he could report in the morning.

I had a few more run-ins with this young man, who seemed to think he was “all that and a bag of chips:”

• One day he came into my office and dropped on my desk a large stack of pages ripped from a legal pad. He told me that they were part of a report he was working on and that I needed to have it typed and returned to him by 3pm that afternoon. I offered to let him use the typewriter in my office, since it was much quieter than the one he shared with four others. He declined and insisted that it was my job to type for him. I let him know that I wasn’t the company “typing dude” (though I may have expressed it a little more salty than that) and that he was responsible for his own work. When he tried to pull rank on me, I reminded him that I worked for the guy with two bars, and he only had one. Unless the guy with two bars told me to do something, it didn’t get done. He got someone else to type it.
• The unit we were a part of dealt a lot with radio communication. Among my other duties, I was the subject matter expert on radio theory and radio wave propagation and was often called upon to teach classes related to those subjects. Lieutenant Jones knew next to nothing about such things, and came to ask for help. I invited him to come to my home for dinner, after which I would give him a crash course on radio-related matters. He ate dinner, and promptly fell asleep on my couch. After trying to wake him a couple times so we could work on our lesson, I gave up and let him doze. He woke up just around the time I wanted to go to bed and wanted to continue the lesson. I declined, which didn’t make him too happy. I offered to have him come over another evening, but never took me up on it.
• One day he was in my office waiting for an appointment with the commander, who was running a little behind schedule. I don’t know what got him going on the subject, but he was lamenting the fact that most enlisted soldiers were not educated past high school and this was a handicap to the modern Army. I was rather incensed and felt I should put him in his place (gently and respectfully, mind you). I pointed out to him:
• That I had just completed my Associate Degree
• My assistant had a Bachelor Degree in English Literature
• The Training NCO was only a few credits short of his Bachelor Degree
• The young man working in the arms room was working on his MBA
• One of the squad leaders in his platoon as just completed his Masters in International Relations from, of all places, the Army War College (and it was very rare for an enlisted person to even get into that school).
• Most of the other people in the unit had at least some post-high school education

I don’t want to make it sound like I had constant trouble with this guy. He wasn’t really a bad person, nor really a bad officer. He just didn’t “get it” that he was part of a team in the place as leader and not someone who was there to order everyone about because he was better than they were. His position was one of authority, but the respect he needed to effectively use that authority needed to be earned over time.

A few years later I had a conversation with someone who worked for Lieutenant Jones. My friend related to me that at some point young Jones realized he wasn’t doing very well and asked a couple of the more experienced sergeants in his platoon to help him out. This time, he listened to them, learned from them and went on to be very successful.

I was glad to hear that. Many a young leader (in the military or in business) don’t take such lessons to heart and they struggle throughout their careers because of it.

What say you? Have you run into a leader like this? Perhaps you’ve been one yourself – how did you learn to change your way of thinking? Please feel free to share in the comments.