Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results - a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files. - TechCrunch - Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents

The implications of this on search engine optimization (SEO) are fairly huge.  In order for PDFs to be indexed by google, they had to be saved in text format (instead of image format), which counted out millions of older documents and documents from sources not aware of this caveat.  There is a wealth of information online in the form of scientific papers and technical documents that could not previously be included in search results.

For business owners, stop worrying about whether documents on your website will be included in search results.  Instead, shift your concerns to more important issues such as content, usability and increasing sales.

Once you have your business blog set up, what should you write? We mentioned briefly in the Business Blogging Startup Guide that you should write about anything your customers would want to know, but what is that exactly?

Showcase Your Expertise

One of the easiest ways to get started is to write about what you know.  Try to get tidbits of information out of your head and to your customers in short easy-to-understand posts.  Come up with subjects that your customers would be interested in and then break them into smaller topics that you can cover in a series of posts.  Write posts for whatever topics and subjects you mention on your business website, taking the time to explain them more thoroughly.

Tap Into Customer Support Requests

Both product and service companies get customer support requests.  Take a look at what your customers are asking and cover issues on your blog.  If there is a larger problem that affects your customers, address it frankly in your blog.  Covering problems will help your customers help themselves.  More importantly, you’ll let them know that you’re listening so they’ll be more likely to let you know when there is a problem.

Review Sales Info & Quotes

By taking a look at your sales information and quotes, you can find out what your customers are interested in purchasing right now.  You can cover topics regarding those products and services to help customers make informed choices (just don’t sound like an advertisement).

Look for Hidden Gems

In all your sales information and other business statistics you probably have some hidden gems that would be of interest to your customers and to the industry.  Maybe you also belong to an industry association that provides industry statistics you can summarize for your customers.  Look for information that your customers may not be able to find elsewhere.

Have an Opinion

Take a look at industry trade sites and other blogs to see what’s going on.  Feel free to choose topics and post your viewpoint on your blog.  Blogging is about having a conversation and being able to easily find many different viewpoints on any one issue.

Ask Your Customers

This is an easy one.  Just ask your customers what they’d like to know more about.  Sometimes it won’t be a direct question about what to blog but a conversation you’ve had recently at a conference or networking event.  If one person asks a question there are probably others who are interested in the answer.

Have a Conversation

Encourage your customers to comment on your posts.  Listen to their opinions and answer them honestly.  Ask for input with leading questions on your posts.  Take a look at other blogs to see what people are saying about your company and address it on your blog.  Having a blog is a great opportunity to connect with your customers.

Have a business blog?  Where do you get writing ideas from?

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Technorati Tags: blogging, blog, business+blog, business blog, blogging strategy, internet marketing, marketing

Now that is a headline. It’s bold. It’s confident. Its not true, but who cares? If you read this far than it did its job, hooking you the reader in through my digital storefront and into my shop to peruse my wares. That is what marketing does and that is why it still matters.

Steve Yegge starts us off right with his 2007 OSCON Keynote entitled ‘How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps’

Marketing is the difference maker for me when evaluating a software project as being a Technical Success instead of a full out Success. It is not enough that people can use your web service because that is only a Technical Success. They have to prefer to use your service over the competition, prefer to use your application over the way they worked before, prefer to buy your new product over your old product because marketing has made it attractive for your customers to do so.

Advertisers and paying customers are more interested in the market leader than the technical leader.  Alex Kniess wrote a good piece on Scott Bedbury called ‘ Five ways a junior Employee can be a Change Agent’.  Its really a simple Marketing primer that applies to technology just as much as Advertising (his original audience).  With brands like Starbucks and Nike under his belt, it is a ridicious understatement to call Scott a subject expert. I like #3 ‘Make everything a pitch’ because marketing is like any learned behavior, it gets better with practice.  Also, you want to get your bad pitches out of the way early on on unimportant things.

We must remember that, like Steve mentions in his talk, marketing is a powerful way to create persistant pointers to ideas or concepts or things.  With a little effort, you can control where that pointer is directed.  If you don’t, your customers will for you.

Once you’ve decided to start blogging for your business, all the little steps may become overwhelming, so we’ve created this guide to get you started.

Blogging Software/Platform

First you need to decide where you’re going to blog - what software or website you’re going to use.  Having the blog hosted by another company makes things very easy.  Best of all, some of the best options are free, WordPress and Blogger.  We use WordPress for all of our blogs, so I highly recommend it.  The hosted version at WordPress.com has a full set of features, and with spending just a little bit extra, $25 per year, you can customize the theme and the domain name.  Whatever blogging platform you chose, make sure you are comfortable with it and it can grow as your blog grows.

Domain Name

The domain name, or URL, for your blog is almost as important as the one for your business website.  By leveraging your existing domain name (the one for your website), you can make it easier for people to find your blog. It also allows the content on your blog to count towards the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.  How?  Let’s say your website domain name is mycompany.com.  Use a blog domain name of something like blog.mycompany.com (see how it uses your domain name for the last part?).  This is a bit trickier than using the default domain names that many blogging sites give you (mycompany.blogger.com), but pays off in the long run.

What to Write

Now that you have your blog all set up.  What to write?  Write whatever you think your customers would be interested in.  Showcase your expertise.  Try to help your customers by getting knowledge out of your head and onto your blog.  Worried about losing competitive advantage?  Actually by showcasing what you know and your willingness to help, you have a much bigger competitive advantage than keeping it all in your head.

How to Write

Writing for a blog is a bit different than other types of writing.  Posts should be relatively short and to the point.  Using headings or bullet points to highlight your major points make the posts easier to read.  Titles should be catchy (think newspaper headlines).  Adding images to break up the text of your posts makes the blog more visually appealing.  Use a personable voice so readers find you approachable and encourage readers to voice their own opinions in comments.

Getting Readers

Add your blog link to your email, your website, your business cards, and anything else you send out to customers.  Join social networks which target your intended audience and interact with the community.  Once you’ve got a feel for the community, start adding comments to other posts and posting your own articles and blog posts.  Also use social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter where you can syndicate content right from your blog.  Use services like Feedburner to syndicate content from your blog onto your other websites.  Getting readers takes a bit of effort and time, so we’ll go into more detail in a future post.

Be Patient

Getting readers can take time.  Even blogs that are popular today took quite a bit of time to get that way (usually a year or more).  You need to committ to posting regularly for a long period of time to see results.   This also includes marketing your blog through the means discussed in Getting Readers above.  Luckily, once you do get some readers, you should start to see your efforts quickly multiply as they tell others.

(photo by jez.atkinson @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog, business+blog, business blog, blogging strategy, internet marketing, marketing

In the last year, Twitter has been quite the buzz for online marketers. We use it in different ways. It could be for pimping out events, linking to different blog posts, or just random tweets about our pet peeves, or the status from the latest “your-favorite-team” game.

It’s been a marketing tool, but it can be a better customer service tool (I’m a big fan of customer service), especially if you have an e-commerce site. - Search Engine Guide - Using Twitter for Customer Service

Twitter gives you the opportunity to monitor what your customers are saying and respond to their comments and concerns.  Obviously, this only applies if your customer base is actually using Twitter, but Twitter’s usage is growing, so this is a place to keep an eye on.  (You can also monitor what people are saying about your competitors).

ExactTarget and Marketing Sherpa are teaming up to offer a series of webinars covering email intelligence marketing and these topics:

• Top 5 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Benchmark Guide
• Making the Sale: Response and Conversion
• Building Relationships Through the Holidays
• Email Testing and Analytics
• Design and Rendering
• Deliverability
• International Email

More details at Ad Operations Daily.

The guys over at Rails Envy, a Ruby on Rails enthusiast podcast, have a running joke.  Their catch phrase? - ‘Rails can’t scale.’ Yeah, I wasn’t too sure I got the joke either.  Then I heard it myself in CIO level discussions from smart business people parroting things they didn’t understand and read somewhere once in an article in a magazine bylined by a guy in a suit who looked corporate and trustworthy.  Rational reasoning and discourse can sometimes be co opted by bumper-sticker wisdom even at the highest levels.

Here is the thing about corporations; enterprises are in the business of managing calculated risk within the market or industry they operate.  They do this by forcing non-core operations to be conservative, risk-adverse and predictable.  It’s a bit like hedging your business’s bet in the junk bond market (core business) by backing it with rock solid, non sexy T-Bills (non-core like software development).  Sure, the return on the T-Bills is lousy but you know in three years you won’t be out that investment.  Java, backed by Sun Microsystems, and .Net, backed by Microsoft, are some of the blue chip securities of the programming world.  Enterprises trust them.  One-liners like ‘Rails can’t scale’ are the one-handed brushoff of entrenched corporate IT’ers to the mere idea of using something new like Ruby or Rails.

Still, Ruby is a persistent pitch man, especially in the web technologies.

Corporate IT: Ruby uses green threads and Rails is single threaded, why are we even talking?

Ruby: Ruby’s MRI is green threaded, but the JRuby interpreter uses native threads in the JVM, just like Java.  Also, Rails 2.2 just released 2.2 RC1 that is thread safe.  Merb was thread safe from the start and just released 1.0 RC2.

Corporate IT: There aren’t enough ruby programmers to staff a project.

Ruby: The Rails Rumble contest didn’t have any problems finding entrants.  Five hundred programmers just gave up a weekend to write 248,000 lines of code. Teams up to four completed 131 different Rails projects in under 48 hours, so you can see just how productive a small group can be in Ruby.

Corporate IT: Sorry but we need dependable database connectivity, not this serial locking business.

Ruby: So pooled connections in jruby and Rails 2.2 scratch that itch?

Corporate IT: There still isn’t a big company backing it so no support.  No support, no chance bub!

Ruby: Have you ever actually called Microsoft about a .Net problem?  Or maybe Sun to support your Java app?  Maybe you have, or at the very least arranged a support contract with a .Net or Java consulting company.  Try instead one of the fine Ruby consulting companies like EdgeCase, HashRocket or ThoughtWorks.  Sun already bankrolls the JRuby guys and for the Softies out there, Microsoft is putting its wallet behind Ruby on the CLR.

Corporate IT: Books?

Ruby: New one every day.

Corporate IT: You’ll get me to use some text editor in place of my IDE when Heck freezes over.

Ruby: Not a problem.  NetBeans guy, Eclipse, or IntelliJ?

Corporate IT: Yeah, okay, you win.  Now can I have that stack of waterfall project specs back, they were holding up the table at that end.

Ruby: Have you ever considered Agile?

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Photo attributed to Megyarsh @ Flickr CC

Now that we’ve had an overview of what customer-centric design is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create leads.

Providing Valuable Information

Having a reason for customers to visit your site is the first step in creating leads. The most important aspect of customer-centric design is providing your customers with exactly what they are looking for.  Think about everything they might come to your website to look for and make sure the information is easy to find.  It should also be easy for customers to contact you with questions or concerns.

A Place to Connect

By providing a place for your customers to connect with each other and with you, you can help your customers get the information and support they need.  More importantly, you’ll be able to get information about who needs help and where they are in the buying process.

Enticement

Do your customers have a reason to give you their contact information?  Is there some useful information or service you can provide for free in exchange for contact information?  Enticement to create leads can be very effective for you and provide a useful service for your customers.  Remember to keep information gathering to a minimum. (name and email work best).

How do you use customer-centric design to create leads?

(photo by Just chaos @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

Explaining what RSS is to most people is a bit like explaining baseball’s infield fly rule to casual observers.  There is futility in even trying because to get it you have to be more than a casual observer.  Similarly, if I was to say to a casual web surfer that RSS is a way to read a website’s content without having to go to the website, it won’t really make much sense because being a casual web user means surfing from website to website.

The good news for anyone confused by just what RSS does is that, according to Forrester Research, you are in very strong company. It seems that adoption of this federated method of content consumption has begun to level off, putting into question assumptions about how most people really do want to ‘consume’ web content.  They claim that usage of RSS is only 11% and that only 17% of the 89% still not using it are even interested.

Lifehacker has a short blirb on Forrester’s paper, sparse on details and quick to the point.  I found the comments, however, to be highly illuminating.  Reading through the threads, I tried to keep score on the points pro for RSS and pro site vists.  Here is the breakdown of the 82 different threads at the time I was looking at the post.

Pro RSS

• Saves time
• Increases total amount of information absorbed
• Way to avoid ads

Pro Visiting Site

• Enjoy the look of a site
• Want to see all pictures related to an article
• Want to read comments
• Editorial control of content
• Quality vs Noise
• Limited duplication of information
• Surfing relieves boredom

These are some points I drew from this data.

First, LifeHacker draws a technical crowd with Pro Site Visitors mixed in.  It didn’t surprise me that the majority of commenters were pro RSS.  I was more surprised by the commenters in the second camp and their diversity of reasons for not using RSS or used it sparingly. If a technical blog like LH has a good sized representation of Pro Site Visitors, it lends anecdotal evidence to the research numbers.

Second, advertisers want Pro Site Visitors.  When you visit a website, you have lent your attention to that provider.  Those in the second camp are interested in quality over quantity & Signal over Noise.  They want the experience of your website and that includes advertising when done unobtrusively.  The Pro RSS group is more intent on absorbing data without distraction.  Quantity and time are their biggest action items and advertising gets in the way of both.

Lastly, RSS was never the right solution for mass consumption.  Have you seen a professional hot dog eating contest?  Nathan’s is famous for, during 4th of July in the US, promoting people stuffing hot dog after hot dog into their mouths within a ten minute dash.  Anyone ever see this and think ‘Now this here is going to change the way people eat hot dogs forever!’  Fact is, most people are very happy to sit down to a casual lunch of a couple coney dogs with cheese and just enjoy themselves.  Slow? yep. Less hot dogs eaten? yep.  Am I hungry?  You bet!  The point is, people don’t always need a new way to do something.

Photo attributed to 96dpi @ Flickr CC

We’ve mentioned customer-centric design in several of our recent branding and customer service posts.  Using customer-centric design on your site is extremely important to your customers.  Why?  Because they only care about what is important to them - getting whatever information, services, or products they came to your site for.  If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

So what is customer-centric design anyway?

Customer-centric design is design centered around what the customer wants (as opposed to what the company wants).  To do this, you have to always keep in mind why the customer came to your site and make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish their goals.

Ok play nice with customers, but what about my goals?

Your goals are probably concerned with increasing sales and leads (if not, they really should be).  Here’s the best part.  Customer-centric design actually makes it easier to accomplish your goals.  Customers who can find what they’re looking for are much more likely to make a purchase or return later for more information and services.  Most importantly, they’re likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues, which is one of the most powerful ways to increase sales.

I getcha, now what?

Take a look at your site from your customer’s point of view.  What are the most important functions (for them, not you)?  Are they easy to find from anywhere on the site?  When a customer is in the middle of a process (finding support information, making a purchase, etc.), are there places for improvement by making things more clear and removing unnecssary steps or clicks?  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Solicit feedback

Sometimes only your customers really know what they want.  So ask them.  It’s an easy and cheap way to get good feedback and by listening to your customers, you can increase customer satisfaction and brand awareness.

How have you used customer-centric design to help your customers?

(photo by ralphbijker @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management