I love this, and I love what this does for blogging.

A ton of bloggers used to just use their blog to share shallow one-liners and pointer links to other meaningful posts, but now they’ve all pretty much migrated to the social networking sites. I’m glad that they’ve moved on to a medium that’s more fitting.

Now is a time of tremendous opportunity for blogging and article writing. While the thrill of sharing a link on Twitter is certainly instantly gratifying (which can feel really good), I’ve noticed that the people doing the real work have been dwindling.

This is where you come in.

Now is the time for you to be creating thoughts larger than 140 characters and putting yourself out there. Sure, it’s OK to point to other sources when it’s appropriate and to lean on others’ ideas occasionally. But now is the time to have something worth saying and to cut through the noise. Believe me, there is plenty of noise out there.

Give your fellow tweeters something worth talking about. They need you, and they need to have some of your ideas to spread.

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Nintendo’s long-running Mario series has afforded them quite a bit of time to get Mario “right.” Early on, they didn’t have the technology to do anything fancy in games like Donkey Kong, but they worked with what they had. But you can see that as the years passed, Nintendo took their previous work and iterated on it.

Nintendo was wise to ship something and not worry about exactly what Mario’s nose would look like in the end. As you can see, his nose got rounder as time passed. But it got to be that way in small, calculated steps, with a ton of trial and error.

How this applies to web design

The typical lifecycle of a website goes like this:

1. Invest up-front for a design. You love it at this point. Everyone involved feels great.
2. Build out the site and its content. Almost done!
3. Take a break from this website business for more pressing issues. It is done after all, right?
4. 12-18 months later, get tired of the design, so start over at step one. Here we go again. But this one will be so much better!

I call BS. Think about this: wiping the slate clean often does not prove that you’ve learned anything from the process. And if you’re a new manager stepping in to manage an existing website, think twice before throwing everything out the window for a massive redesign project.

A successful website should be maintained continuously in an iterative fashion, just like the Mario design. The Web isn’t like a print brochure where once you send it to the printer, you’re done and stuck with it. You can make changes on the fly and try things out. And you should be doing that.

Scrappiness: work with what you have

I’m not calling for a complete redesign every few weeks. That would be costly and disadvantageous for your business. I’m talking more about Mario’s nose: an evolution if you will.

• Examine what you have: analytics data, advertising data, usability testing data.
• Talk to your customers.
• Pick the weakest part of your site and improve that.

New techniques and design trends will also surface. Evaluate them one at a time, figure out if you need them and where best used, and add them in one at a time. The technology in the 8-bit NES afforded fewer advantages than today’s Wii.

You’ll save time, money, and a costly redesign project in the future if you keep up with it all continuously. If you can’t commit to this, then don’t invest in a website to begin with!

Having a “master plan” is no excuse for a massive redesign project

Let’s make one final point clear. Some of this sounds short-sighted, and it can be if you don’t have a plan.

If you feel like you have a “master plan,” a “vision,” or whatever, I have a challenge for you. Plan out how you can get to your vision iteratively rather than in one giant uber project. Which elements can you change one at a time in bite-sized chunks?

Your team of implementers will thank you for not overwhelming them, and your business will thank you for consistently showing visual progress. Don’t hide away for six months to a year to redesign the site. Business must go on, the website must be maintained, so any redesign efforts should be lumped in with that.

Technorati Tags: agile, agile development, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, glass case, internet marketing, mario, nintendo, web development

Life is all about showing up.

This statement is true, but it’s only half-true in some situations.

“Showing up” every day is important. Persistence and consistency in pursuing your goals will undoubtedly cause you to accomplish what you set out to do. Being present and intentional no matter where you are makes a difference.

But then I entered real life as I got a little older. Over the past couple years, showing up hasn’t been enough. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t remember everything that I want and need to do. I can’t accomplish everything that I set out to do if I set my goals in an ad hoc fashion.

You can call this revelation maturity or common sense (how humbling for me to admit). I’m assuming that a lot of people either get this or don’t. I’ve refused to believe that I can’t do everything. I’ve suffered a lot of grief as a result. I’ve been guilty of missing deadlines, dropping promises, and neglecting relationships.

Now I’ve changed my mantra because my life is much more complex than it was at 25 (and I suspect that it will only get more complex as I move forward with some of my goals):

Life is about choosing your priorities and then showing up.

Oh how the subtle details make a difference. With clarity in what I need to show up for, everything becomes quite a bit easier to manage.

I hope that I can detect the difference when I enter the next stage of my life, whatever that may be.

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1. Use plain-speak to describe it.

This extreme probably has the lowest amount of friction. You have a chance to describe the product in the customer’s language. People tend to like hearing things in language that they can understand.

The downside is that you may come across as bland or unoriginal.

2. Make up a mystical brand name that may have little to do with the product itself.

As Seth Godin puts it, you get to own a term that describes your product. Google, Yahoo!, and countless others did this just fine.

The downside is that no one’s going to be typing your brand name into Google if they don’t know who you are. That part will depend even more on your promotional skills if you take this route.

Looking at this through an SEO lens

If you’re brand new and want to reach out to people with less effort, then option #1 is probably the way to go.

Consider this scenario for portal software that I’m working on building. Right now, the project is code-named Administrivia. Kind of catchy in a way but perhaps too much of a mouth full. And the name doesn’t really describe what the software does.

What happens if I keep that name when I release it into the wild?

1. People will tweet about it, calling it Administrivia.
2. People will blog about it, calling it Administrivia.
3. People will link to it, calling it Administrivia.
4. My product will start ranking very well for the term “administrivia” in Google.
5. The buzz will wear down when people move on to the next fad (as they do in the tech world).
6. My product will be stuck with a great ranking for “administrivia.” This could be good or bad depending on how well I can get the word out, but I get no second chances.

Consider step 4. The word “administrivia” has an actual meaning:

administrivia (plural administrivia)

1. Administrative details that must be dealt with in order to do more interesting work.

   Administrivia take up two hours of every day.

   Administrivia takes up two hours of every day.

So people will be typing that word into Google looking for the meaning of the word as well. Wasted traffic from people who aren’t even looking for my product.

A SEO-friendly approach

If I look up a few search words in the AdWords Keyword Tool, I end up finding this interesting set of words:

What I’m building is described by some of these words, like enterprise portal, portal software, and portal system.

So what if I name my product Enterprise Portal?

1. People will tweet about it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
2. People will blog about it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
3. People will link to it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
4. My product’s page will start ranking very well for the term “enterprise portal” in Google.
5. The buzz will wear down when people move on to the next fad (as they do especially in the tech world).
6. My product will be stuck with a great ranking for “enterprise portal.” People will continue to search for this generic phrase, whether they know about my product or not.

The important part here is that the product name assists natural linking behavior. Bloggers and industry analysts are more likely to link to your product with the name of the product as the link text. If your product has a weird name, that’s what you’re going to rank for in Google.

You can fight this by trying to get links with link text that’s different than your product name. But this is an uphill battle. It’s a lot of work getting other sites to link to yours with text that you want. Many SEOs fight this battle day after day, and the smart ones secretly wish this were an easier task.

A compromise: mixing the two

Another way of looking at this: what if I name it Administrivia Enterprise Portal? This is a compromise. I’d venture to guess that linkers will sometimes call it “Administrivia Enterprise Portal,” but I’m guessing that some or most will still refer to it as “Administrivia” alone. Tweets only allow 140 characters, and people tend to be lazy when writing, so they will find shortcuts.

It’s still your choice

Of course, this is all still your choice. Nobody is twisting your arm to brand your product one way or the other.

Sometimes worrying about search rankings and SEO can be quite maddening. But it is another tool in your toolkit. Being found by your customers is important, and many of them turn to Google first. So you may as well squeeze every little bit of value out of your product name that you can.

Technorati Tags: business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, product development, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo

As many fields, products, and services are becoming commoditized, it’s become increasingly important to plan and implement a great customer experience. Much of this involves planning and gauging how your business makes your customer feel. Creating those “wow” moments aligned with your strategy is key.

The role of prototyping in McDonald’s and Apple

Two key examples were explained and demonstrated in E-myth Revisited and Subject to Change: McDonald’s and The Apple Store, respectively. Both stories involve building physical prototypes of each business and refining them until they ran as smoothly and customer-friendly as possible. Steve Jobs had several versions of the Apple Store built in a giant warehouse so that his staff could test several possibilities. And whether you like McDonald’s or not, Roy Kroc worked with a prototype until he could perfect a McDonald’s business that works for franchisers.

Working on prototypes in a professional services environment

The heart of what I want to do is offer a service, and that’s a tad trickier because I don’t have a physical product or storefront to mock up and prototype. Also, offering a professional service in a creative and technical area is messy. Some efficiencies can be factored out into processes and procedures, but those same efforts can stifle innovation if taken too far.

Adaptive Path had a compelling solution to the problem of prototyping services, described in Subject to Change. They draw comics that mock up key touchpoints in the customer experience. These comics show what’s going on in the customer’s head, how the customer interacts with elements like the website and phone, and what’s going on overall in the customer’s “story.”

Balance between prototyping and execution

While this planning is helpful (and I encourage it), sometimes it’s best to jump in too. I plan on jumping in to some ideas and innovating on the fly more this year. I will try my best to plan as much as possible, but it is time for action in addition to planning and setting up all of my GI Joes.

I will be working for an actual customer or two, work with them to refine the service, all on the fly. It’ll be really tough, but if I play my cards right, much of the discovery will only need to be done a couple times.

We must balance planning and execution. Each is important, and each is really hard work. At some level, your execution is also a prototype that always needs to be refined, only if you’re willing to inspect it and improve it.

Working with both requires curiosity, insight, introspection, and creativity. Wish me luck.

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This series has led to quite a few compliments, and people are watching and subscribing to the videos on our site, on YouTube, and on Vimeo. I think that limiting the length to around 5 minutes has helped keep viewers engaged. 5 minutes only requires viewers to digest one concept at a time, and it isn’t a huge commitment on their part.

Camtasia for Mac has been a wonderful piece of software for getting these up so easily. (There’s a Windows version too.) My first screencast was challenging, but it didn’t require too much effort to get up to speed with how the software works.

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1. Silverback by Clearleft

They give us a sentence, 6 bullet points, and a dead-simple diagram showing what it does. They even show us a video demo that was created using the product itself. Brilliant.

2. iPhone by Apple

The product is so great that their TV commercials don’t do anything other than show the product in use. And it sells itself. When I first picked one up myself, there were no surprises on how it would work.

3. Getting Real by 37signals

37signals lets you read their book online for free. If someone really wants to endure the eye strain or read it slowly, it’s there for the taking. But those who love having a memento or reading a print version can buy those. This works especially well for 37signals because they have other products that others may want to check out.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, marketing

Don’t get me wrong: the words are important. They’re what search engines see. People still need to read some.

But in this visual YouTube generation, people need to see that your product or service meets their needs, not just read about it.

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I’ve been finding myself in that spot over the past couple days. There are some different paths that I can take:

1. Keep trying to get to the top
2. Put down the guys at the top
3. Invent your own authority

I tried option #2 once, and it wasn’t the way to go. I feel really bad about it and won’t do it ever again if I have any choice.

#2 is also the fastest way to get attention. Go figure.

Lately, I’ve been looking to #3. I have decided that I’m not going to convince the other experts that my way is right. They have their own ideas, and that is just fine. We need that in order to foster innovation, after all. I need to create my own market.

One thing that I do swear to do is really get to know my industry better and know what the differences are. Your opinion only becomes stronger when you truly understand all of the alternatives.

Technorati Tags: authority, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, industry, internet marketing, marketing, Strategy

The story and the storyteller

My friend would reminisce particularly about the set-up involved in playing. You would get all of the figurines together and lay them out in a line. Then you would take turns with your friend picking figurines to be in your army. Next would be setting up the battlefield, vehicles, etc. By the time you would get everything set up just the way you wanted, your mother would come into the room, say that your buddy’s parents were there, and you had to stop playing. After all that time spent planning, you never got to actually play.

I found this ironic because I played in a rock band with the friend who told this story, and he was never able to write lyrics when we asked him to. It was his job to write the lyrics because he did have talent. The problem was that he always liked planning things out and envisioning them, but he wasn’t interested in executing on the plans. He wanted everything to be perfect, and it always locked him up when it came time to start writing.

Eventually, the band broke up because we all thought he was lazy. We weren’t getting results.

Too much planning causes poor execution

I know there are people out there that really like to plan things out and create processes. And sometimes it really is called for. But we cannot let it get to the point where it’s getting in the way of accomplishment. With no results, your project will fail. With no results, your business will go under.

So be sure to plan on actually playing with your GI Joes. Add significant time in your plan to execute on your plan. And be agile! There are too many variables in technology development to make the process into a series of work orders. As Seth Godin states in one of his book titles, “Stop trying to be perfect, and start being remarkable.”

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