Headline of the day

Don't Worry, Be Appy
Measuring Customers, Smart Phones and App Usage

Email campaign for the Omniture webinar, "How Smart Marketers Use Smart Phones."

HD Storytelling 2 (the sequel)

In response to my post, "Telling Stories to Generate Revenue," Shannon Danitz contacted me on behalf of NCM Fathom business events to invite me to view the webcast (registration required), no sales call to follow. It was a worthwhile hour, with these takeaways from Brian Schrack, Producer & Digital Media Product Manager, NCM Fathom:

• Effective stories have a beginning, middle and end.
• Customers don’t feel like they're being sold. They're being taken on a journey.
• Stories compel us to change the way we feel, think and act.
• Story telling follows a dramatic structure that leads to a conflict, resolution and call to action.
• Story telling is media agnostic—it works in blogs, websites, print, film.

5 reasons to use storytelling in marketing

• Customers make an emotional investment
• Good stories hold their interest
• The dramatic curve energizes the message
• The resolution illustrates results
• Compelling stories motivate customers to take action

And this from Greg Flessing, President, Fresh Air Media, Inc.: “Your brand is a good story: Telling the why, who and where of your identity makes it personal, engaging and relevant.”

World famous

Interview with a professional freelancer, at Writerfind.com.

Define: Social Media Optimization

Andy Wibbels posted a succinct definition in his post, "What is Social Media Optimization?"

"Social media optimization is a set of practices to ensure that your content is easily shareable across all social networks and services, and ultimately by your target market."

He adds that social media keep your business in touch with prospects, clients and colleagues: "Email newsletters have expanded to blogs and RSS feeds and email alerts and instant messaging alerts and Twitter tweets and Facebook notes ... ."

After briefly trying Twitter then trashing my account, I now see the potential value in flying with the flock on this one. Thanks, Andy!

FileInfo.com

Today I learned that the .mht file extension is a web page archive saved in Windows Internet Explorer. To open files in the resource library a client had sent me, I installed Opera 10 for Mac OS X, created a bookmark folder and bookmarked each file. Now, when I open all folder items, Opera opens each file under a tab. Handy.

I also saved the archived pages as PDF files in my project folder so I can search them all at once using the OS X spotlight. (If you know how to simultaneously search several tabbed web pages in a browser, please tell me!)

Alas, this learning experience took about as much time as the entire assignment should have taken.

Where am I?

If you're like me and forget which social media sites you've registered to use, you can find yourself with this handy look-up tool. NameChk searches for usernames or vanity urls across dozens of popular social networking and bookmarking sites. (I found myself on bebo. Hmmm.)

You can also use the tool to check for name availability, if you're launching a corporate campaign. Cool.

HD storytelling

Regrettably, I missed a recent BtoB Webcast, "Telling Stories to Generate Revenue." The promo was signing my song:

"Good stories can work in a surprising variety of situations - building loyalty, solidifying culture, even solving problems. They make your network of prospects, customers, employees and partners an extended family. But their degree of success comes down to execution: the right stories, told the right way in the right context."

I thought the webcast might be available on demand, and I could pick up a few tips on tying stories to sales. But this bold caveat gave me pause:

"By registering for this event you may be contacted by the sponsor."

So I googled the sponsor, NCM Fathom. Imagine my surprise. I thought we were talking about journalistic stories. But no, these guys are pushing high definition big screen theater production that packages presentations as if they were blockbuster movies.

Better brush up on my storyboarding and get with the HD program!

Not journalism

Journalism is seeking and exposing objective truths. Marketing communications is crafting and conveying persuasive messages. Journalistic marketing tells compelling true stories, with a selling twist.

Posit:

• If the best magazines "demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative editorial techniques [and] journalistic enterprise" (according to the Magazine Publishers of America); and

• The best magazine writing has "the compulsive readability of a good novel, but the immediacy and moral power of good journalism" (according to Library Journal), then

A marketing magazine story can deliver the best of everything -- if the reporting is ethical and accurate.

Internet Culture Study Guide

To be truly web savvy, you need to know how to play Internet pranks as well as have a firm grasp of viral ideas like ICHC, To brush up, consult  The Culture of the Internet, From the Desk of David Pogue. (Update: Here's a cheat sheet.)

Channel fragmentation

Maybe I have fallen completely out of touch in recent months, but it seems to me that combining social media with email marketing, blogging, website content and other marketing collateral requires not only unlimited human resources to write this stuff but also an infinite supply of fascinating information about a company's products and services. How else could marcomm, PR and ad folks refresh online content at the frenetic pace set by Twitter and Facebook?

One-stop opp

Surely there is an app out there that collects your posts from one social media site and syndicates that content to all your other sites. Otherwise, you flit from site to site, updating this, posting that and tweeting the other thing. Unless you are very clever and chatty, you repeat yourself over and over and over ... .

Absent a consolidated news feed from You, Inc., the challenge here is to segment your audiences so that family, friends, colleagues and clients each use different media; and your message is so targeted to each audience that every post is a must read. The reality is, social media users are a mash-up. And most of us have no readers at all!

Social networking or soul destroying time-suck?

Today I updated my Linkedin profile, reactivated my Facebook account, and got setup on Twitter. These three simple tasks consumed at leastt five hours. How can that be?

After reading a NY TImes story on small business marketing (thanks, Gary!), I decided to kill two birds with one stone: Learn to tweet and do a little marketing. But what is worth tweeting about, and who would "follow" my tweets?

Turning to two gurus I admire, I am now following David Pogue and Andy Wibbels to see what they do that is so interesting,  71,663 people (66,480 plus 5,183 for Pogue and Wibbels, respectively) would track their musings online or by text messaging.

Meanwhile, I think I'll stick to blogging more often to stay in touch.(Oh, I did learn a cool Facebook trick: Set up an RSS feed to publish blog posts on the Notes page.)

Tonks and time management

Say hello to my new baby girl, Tonks! She came home with me on Wednesday March 4th when she was 9 weeks old. The breeder assured me that she would be a very nice girl, with a sweet disposition and no unruly behavior.

She was right. Tonks has what Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan would call a calm submissive temperament. She loves a belly rub, chews her own toys, and doesn't talk back (much). She's not a terror (yet!), but she is a toddler, and toddlers require constant attention -- as any parent of small children can tell you.

I was going to adopt a rescue lab, but the process taking too long. So, being my impatient self, I made the impulsive decision to buy a puppy instead. I may as well have said to myself: Cathy, you have nothing better to do than feed, exercise, mop up after and train a wild animal confined to a small space; why not stop working, and contort your schedule around 14  pounds of cuteness?

At mid-life, I find myself wishing I could take maternity leave. Alas, it is not to be. So I am working around naps and quiet play time -- ever vigilant for the sound of gnawing on the furniture.

20 years of freedom

The first time I quit a job to freelance, in 1989, I chose to use the eponymous acronym CC-T appended by "unlimited" to connote my potential as a writer -- potential that felt squelched working for one company. Though I briefly returned to the ranks of the employed, I eventually quit again to resume freelancing in 1999.

I chose my birthday to declare my freedom, and on the 29th of this month, I will celebrate 20 years DBA CC-T Unlimited.

With gratitude, I recognize the clients who have allowed me to work for them whenever I can, from wherever I am, as long as I do a good job on time and for a reasonable price. Thank you for giving me the freedom to pursue unlimited possibilities.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has expanded to include digital audio, video, music and text files along with more than 85 billion web pages saved in "The Wayback Machine." Free to the general public, the library's collection represents cultural artifacts from the era that began with the end of the "digital dark age."

I've been a fan of this project for a while, especially since the web-based content I develop for my clients can be ephemeral. Using The Wayback Machine, I can show you a glimpse of how sites looked when I worked on them -- even if it was years ago. Of course, that has its drawbacks, since sites developed in the late '90s are primitive by today's standards (and the archives often exclude graphics).

Optimizing your value proposition

A recent Marketing Experiments workshop on optimizing value propositions is available in Flash format, with slides and audio. Flip through the slides to see some good examples of value proposition rewrites.

The workshop hits home the key question: Why should a customer buy from you and not the competition?

Three quick takeaways:

• Refine your value proposition until you can articulate it in a single, instantly credible sentence.
• Test three versions in a pay-per-click ad. The ad that gets the most clicks hit the mark.
• Peruse your website for hidden assets--benefits and differentiators buried on the About page.

Campaign model for consultants

Sherpa B2B offers 4 tactics that worked for diversifying a consultant's product-service mix in the case study, "How a Consultant Uses Content to Create New Revenue Stream." Client education is the cornerstone of the campaign:

1. Promote a series of free articles about the consultants area of expertise.
2. Offer incentives to subscribe to an e-newsletter that offers additional advice, tips and resources.
3. Sell ebooks that expand on the article topics, with in-depth trend analysis and how-to information.
4. Create online workshops for hands-on training, with workbooks and data sheets.

By making the series sequential, the consultant guided clients along the learning curve. Ideally, clients reach a point where they need consulting services to realize the full benefits of the techniques they've learned. 

Questions searchers ask

Use WordTracker's Keyword Question tool to discover what questions people type into search engines to turn up your keywords and phrases. This helps you target long tail keywords -- the  "3 and 4-keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling."

33 Tools for Tweaking Your Site

FutureNow points us to 33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better, including my personal favorites:

• Customer Focus Calculator to test the "WeWe" factor of your site (e.g., the ratio of self-focused to customer-focused words)
• Spider Simulator to see how the search engine sees your pages and get recommendations on how to improve visibility
• Bad Neighborhood Link Checker to see if pages your reference have questionable content.

Google's SEO Guide

Brushing up on SEO, I found Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to be a handy reminder about best practices. It's gratifying to see Google reinforce my own SEO philosophy right up front:

"[Y]ou should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines."

The Google guide gives detailed examples and explains how these SEO steps help improve visibility:

• Create a unique, descriptive title tag for every web page. The title tag appears in the first line of the search results.
• Summarize page content in the description meta tag, which may be used as the snippet that appears under the page title.
• Structure URLs to include relevant keywords that visitor- and crawler-friendly.
• Provide a clear navigation hierarchy, using text (not graphics) for navigation links to guide visitors through the site. 
• Include a site map and breadcrumbs for a quick, visual orientation to the site structure.
• Create compelling, useful and relevant content that visitors are looking for, find exclusively on your site, and will refer to in the future.
• Write descriptive anchor text for links to other pages, not "click here," to inform visitors about what's next and guide crawlers to deep pages.
• Use heading tags to create a visual hierarchy on the page -- headline, subhead, sub-subhead -- which takes visitors from the most to least important content.
• Name images with descriptive captions as alt text, which can be read by crawlers and visitors who browse text-only.
• Use robots.txt to steer crawlers away from searchable pages. E.g., a NOINDEX tag prevents a page from appearing in search results; a NOFOLLOW tag  prevents crawlers from going from your page to an untrusted page (i.e., referenced in a blog comment).

Google's guide concludes with tips for promoting your site and includes webmaster resources such as a website optimizer to fine-tune pages for higher conversion rates -- guiding visitors to the desired action.