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Recent Articles from the Blog

June 22, 2009

How Will Broadband Adoption in Specific Segments Affect Your Audiences?

Pew Internet & American Life Project has released their most recent statistics on broadband adoption among adult Americans:

Home broadband adoption stood at 63% of adult Americans as of April 2009, up from 55% in May, 2008.

The most interesting bit of data in the report is that the following groups achieved above average increases in adoption: senior citizens; low-income; high-school graduates (no college); older baby boomers, and; rural Americans.

These demographic shifts can be a great source of innovation in your online efforts. Take a look at the outcomes you want to achieve online and the audiences with which you need to achieve them. Do the changes in the Pew report open new opportunities? Create challenges?

Sites that achieve breakthrough results regularly assess shifts in audience so they can be most effective online.

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June 18, 2009

Creating the Complete Social Media Experience for Your Meetings and Events

I am presenting a webinar with Boston Conferencing/Peach New Media next Tuesday at 12 Noon. The title is Creating the Complete Social Media Experience for Your Meetings and Events: Effective Practices from the Leading Edge of Association Social Media. From the description:

Learn how to plan and implement the complete social media experience for your next event, conference or meeting in this unique webinar. C. David Gammel, CAE, will lead us through the entire process from beginning to end, helping you to identify the specific value you wish to create with social media at your events and how to make it happen. David will share cases and examples from associations and others who have effectively used social media to enhance their meetings and events.

Should be a fun program, hope to see you there!

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June 15, 2009

Starting a New Collaborative Space for Small Groups

I fielded a question last week about what factors are the most important in launching a wiki to support a small working group, such as a committee, task force or team. I’ve decided to address it a bit more broadly by looking those factors for online collaboration in general.

In my experience designing and facilitating collaborative spaces online for large and small association, volunteer groups, alumni and others, you need the following to maximize successful outcomes:

Have a very clear and focused goal for using the space that all participants understand and support. The narrower the better;
Provide ample handholding and individual training for those who need it;
Leadership of the group MUST be avid champions for using the technology;
Start with one group that is excited to use the tool as a pilot test and early exemplars. Their success will draw others to adopt the tool;
Make sure the technology you use is very user friendly and provides the functionality your group will need to achieve their desired outcomes. Bad tech is the kiss of death.

Tools like a wiki can be greatly valuable for group collaboration but people who are new to it must have the value for THEM explained and heavily emphasized. A really strong WIIFM value proposition will get late adopters over the hump.

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June 12, 2009

From Twitter to My Coffee Cup

Tim Cureton runs the best coffee shops on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: Rise Up Coffee. His staff are friendly, remember the names of frequent customers, and serve up a great cup of organic coffee.

Tim has been adding some social media to his marketing mix and I follow his updates on Twitter. Last week Tim posted a request to submit reviews for his store on Yelp.

Given that I’m huge fan of theirs, I went to Yelp, created an account and submitted a nice review for the Salisbury location.

A friend who often picks up a drink for me at Rise Up came by my house a couple days later with a latte. Tim, who recognizes my drink order, wrote a nice thank you note on the side of the cup.

(Tim mistakenly called me John for a while, which is now a running joke.)

Here is the thing: social media as a marketing and relationship building channel only works for Tim and his company because they have a fantastic product and a maniacal focus on customer service. Tim has built a great culture in his small company and works hard to keep it and their product peforming at the highest levels.

Effectively using social media and online word of mouth to grow your company is pretty easy when you have a fantastic product. If you don’t offer exception value, social media may not provide strong returns for you.

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June 11, 2009

Video: Mighty Morphing Event Web Sites

Here is a short video where I talk about my upcoming session at ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s Annual Meeting in Toronto this August.

In the clip I discuss why it is so important to create a flexible site that morphs throughout your event’s business cycle.

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June 11, 2009

Too Many Chefs in the Home Page

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.

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June 10, 2009

Two Events and a Survey for Association Executives

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.

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June 2, 2009

No One Cares About Your Intranet

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.

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May 26, 2009

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

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!

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May 21, 2009

Hear Me: Podcast and Webinar

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!

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