Donovan-Wright Associates

What is wrong with the people of America? Wasn’t this country founded on principles of democracy and freedom of speech? As far as I can tell, today we are a citizenry of scared, silent lemmings who speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.

Being scared is valid. Being silent is not. True, we are being bullied by the government, business, and other institutional powers. Gas prices are out of sight while the oil companies make record profits. Middle class folks can’t make their utility payments while luxury items such as yachts and private jets are being sold in record numbers to the rich and famous. Is that necessary, my daughter asks when we drive up to spend an evening at a house that has 6 garages, a living-room size game room for the kids complete with bowling alley, arcade games, pool table, ping pong table and lord knows what else. We will not go back to that house.

Okay gang, you complain among one another, but where is the collective voice, the loud voice, the voice that says, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Now here’s the topic connection — write, speak, boycott, make your feelings known.

DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m back to my friend author Sven Birkerts again today, and his book, The Gutenberg Elegies. He postures that reading today is not like reading “back in the day,” where the book was the main medium for learning and gaining information. On the other hand, today’s “readers” have grown up with electronic gadgets bombarding them with song and image so that they “never experiences a sensation singly.” Here is a hint at how technology is impacting our ways of not only reading, but also writing and knowing. For example, history as contained in a book is linear, mimicking the way it actually occurs — in a straight line, governed by time. But history as contained in a computer database is not linear. It is “written” by the person accessing the database, and may never be duplicated because other users may make other choices.

As for knowing, in books, we learned content. Today, there is too much information in databases, so readers must learn how to access and manage information as opposed to filling their minds with material, albeit filtered through the eyes of the author, but content nevertheless.

… or a magazine, or newspaper, or even a web site with solid, informative text?

For me, it’s books. I have stacks throughout my house. In fact, many books remain in their bags because I love the touch, feel, and smell (mostly) of new books. And at the rate I’m going, these books will be in their bags for a very long time. (Damn the Borders coupon program.

Now to the point, I’m reading an interesting and thought-provoking book titled The Gutenberg Elegiesby Sven Birkets. Birkets muses about reading, writing, and culture in both traditional and today’s high tech world. He asks a question that I often obsess over: “What is the place of reading and of the reading sensibility in our culture as it has become?”

He goes on to say: “Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited. … The way that people experience the world has altered more in the last fifty years than in the many centuries preceeding us.”

Wow, scary stuff. And the worst of it is, we have no way to evaluate or categorize these changes because of the speed with which they are occurring.

One change I dare to put on the table is that people are reading less, and younger generations are reading even less than that. What does this mean? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? How will society change? In what new ways will our culture evolve?

Friends, all I have is questions. Thanks to Mr. Birkerts to attempting to pose some answers.

I am outraged. I am incredulous. I am disgusted.

Oil companies are making record profits

Pharmaceutical companies are raking it in.

HMO’s are doing very well

Yes, I am outraged, incredulous, and disgusted about the aforementioned, but I am more outraged, incredulous, and disgusted that the people of our country are taking it in silence. Seems we’ve lost the plate let alone who is standing up to it.

I’ve been around a while. I was around “back in the day” when there was an array of stores and products from which to choose. In this cost-driven, corporate-ruled economy we have come to be, the choices have narrowed both in products and places. A few provide for the multitudes, a few determine the fashions, the makeup, the colors. I don’t know about you, but I really dislike the current fashions. Young women look pregnant, and the colors are dark and drab. I can’t stand crocs, and then there are also the electric colors in sportswear that don’t go with anything but themselves (great marketing ploy – spend more, more, more). My feeling on it all is that I hate to go to the mall – it depresses me. Give me a thrift store any day.

What does this have to do with communication? Back to choices – as the choices narrow, and stores and restaurants are driven out of business, there is the piece about informing employees and customers. This isn’t happening. Workers are showing up for work, people are coming to shop or eat and surprise! The place is shut down, out of business, poof!

What kind of decent behavior is this? Simply slam the door in people’s faces with no warning or plan? How many of you have had this happen?

Here’s another one that happened to me recently. I am one of the millions of Americans who take an antidepressant, or happy pill as they are fondly known. I received a letter one day from my HMO saying that psychiatric drugs would no longer be covered (what in the hell is the logic in this? They will pay a zillion times more when depressed and bipolar, and other people succumb to physical disorders their happy heads fought off). I immediately called my HMO to ask about my specific situation and was told not to worry, that I would continue to be covered as I had been in the past. Relief. Short lived – when I went to fill my prescription a few weeks later, coverage was denied. I came home, called yet again, and was told that yes, my conversation with the representative was recorded, and yes, he had said I would be covered. However, a rather testy young man said I am not and will not be covered.

I ask you, is this piss poor communication? Is this a professional way to deal with customers? Is this a way to garner good will for when it’s needed in the future?

Yes, I am outraged, incredulous, and disgusted.

The other day, I came across the site of someone who calls himself a writer and I was appalled. The writing was amateurish, the punctuation was wrong, the pronouns and antecedents did not agree, among other issues. This is disturbing. I have spent 26 years as a professional writer, honing my art along the way, albeit not without error from time to time. I have taught writing for 10 years with a goal to further perfect my craft. Often, people such as this hang out a shingle one day to offer their skills as talented, experienced witers, a bunch of hogwash at the least, and more likely a manure pile of lies. What is even more scary is how do those of you who do not write on a professional basis weed the treasure from the trash?

Unfortunately, a difficult question without an easy answer. But do try to do your due diligence. Bring your prospect’s work to someone you know is a skilled and competent writer and ask her opinion. Also get yourself a copy of the classic gem, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. This little book will help you recognize good writing from bad in your quest to find a writer who will help you be proud to say “I Am What I Write!”

I teach college writing: I teach students at all levels from freshman to graduates students, and what I see in today’s classroom makes me want to cry. Bottom line — a majority of students today simply can’t write. They don’t know a noun from a verb. They don’t know how to construct a complete sentence. They don’t know how to puntutate. They don’t know what passive voice is and why you shouldn’t use it. And the list goes on and on and on.

What is really heartbreaking about this is that so much communication in today’s world is now based on text — written communication in the forms of websites, email, chat rooms,. listservs, and so on. If we are then propelling this non-writing populace into the world, what are the potential ramifications for society, culture, government, business, religion, education, and more?

Anyway, scary stuff. Right now I do as much as I can by teaching students, courses in which grammar and structure beome a far greater percentage of the course than they should be.

I was working on a project yesterday where I had reason to examine a number of websites for ad agencies and marcom firms. I have to say, by the time I was finished, I was frustrated and bored by the seeming competition to see whose bells and whistles could chime the loudest! Collectively, these sites were not intuitive, did not incorporate good SEO principles, and were full of glitz to showcase themselves as opposed to demonstrating good usability tenets.

So, common guys, get with the program — aren’t you supposed to be about focusing on audience? Give me a nice, simple, usable website and you’ll have a customer who trusts that you’ll place my needs before your own.

Usability

The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals in a specified context of use with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction (ISO 9241-11 International Organization for Standardization).

What the heck does THAT mean?

It means: With usability, the focus for product (website) design and evaluation is on the user. It’s all about what the user thinks, does, believes; “…the user’s perception of the quality of the product, based on the user’s ease of use, ease of learning and relearning, the product’s intuitiveness for the user, and the user’s appreciation for the usefulness of a product” (Carol Barnum). Of course, since we’re talking websites, do substitute the word “website” for “product.”

Another big piece of this usability thing is the user’s satisfaction with the website. Maybe it’s easy to use, easy to learn, and generally useful, but if the user doesn’t like it then it doesn’t make it in the usability arena.

Okay, let’s move on.

Search Engine Optimization

Also known as SEO, is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine” Rustybrick.com).

Once again, we have that magic word “user” in this definition. But I just know you’re looking at me cross-eyed right now wondering how in the world these two concepts relate, or not!

Let me explain.

Back to Usability

Ideally, usability occurs at two stages in the website development process: in the design stage and after the site is launched. In the design stage, the purpose of the site needs to be clearly articulated: are you trying to sell a product? Generate leads? Lighten the service load for your customer service department?

Sounds simplistic, doesn’t it? But you’d be amazed how many sites out there are this sort of amorphous bowl of Jello that never take a solid definition or give the user a clear sense of what they’re about.

After figuring out purpose, you need to define your audience. Granted, that’s not easy to do on the web, and it’s something you might need to do after you launch. But still, during the design phase you’ll have a target user in mind, it’s just that the actual user may be quite different. Once your site is up, put a survey out there to find out as much as you can about users: age, sex, job, reason for visiting your site, education, and so on.

Before you get to far into your design, prepare a prototype of your site and try to find at least one, preferably two or three people who represent your target user. Sit them down at the computer and have them test it. Here are some ways you can approach this testing:

• Let them just “play around” and either speak their impressions into a tape recorder or make notes about the site’s ease of use and overall design.
• Give them a series of goals they must achieve – they must figure out the steps and tasks themselves. You should look for the number of errors they make and missteps they take along the way.
• You demonstrate the site to them and then conduct a focus session to gather their thoughts and opinions.

Now this next statement is going to be a real “duh,” but the idea is to take their comments and experiences and incorporate them to improve the design of your site. Once the site is truly live and operational, you should do the same thing again with a larger sample of users.

All right, I’m sure you’re thinking that we still haven’t explained how this relates to SEO, if it even does.

Onward to SEO

Let’s first talk about a few principles of SEO. As you probably know, the goal of SEO is to improve your website’s ranking when a user performs a web search using specific, relevant search terms, or keywords. Web searches are one of the primary drivers for web site traffic, so the corollary here is, to get users to your site to use it in the first place, a high ranking in the search engines is a real plus.

In order to perform well with the search engines, your site needs to have a relatively high PageRank: preferably 5 or above on a scale of 1 to 10. The factors that go into achieving a high PageRank include:

• Internal site links that work and clear site navigation
• Informative, well-written site content
• Effective use of keywords in page HTML tags, headers, and copy
• External links to your site from quality web sites

There’s more to SEO than this, but that’s for another article, another time.

Putting It All Together

By now you’ve probably gathered that usability and SEO are not one in the same. But they certainly go hand-in-hand, and one really cannot function well without the other.

First, one of your site’s main usability factors is its navigation system: can users find their way around the site? Are all the links working? Does your site have a site map? From the SEO standpoint, as we’ve seen, a clean, effective navigation system is a must, and a site map ensures the SEO spiders can crawl around your site with ease. The user must always come first, but in designing your navigation system, you are really working for both users and search engines. By making it easy for your users to navigate your site, you do the same for the search engine spiders.

Second: good site content – if your site is going to be usable and pleasing to your users, it’s going to have good, solid, well-written content. The search engines require the same thing to increase your site’s ranking.

Third, by using keywords effectively for SEO purposes (description tag, title tag, header tags, keyword tags, body copy, and points of emphasis), you will also be providing consistency in the terms you use on your site, which will make it easier to understand and follow for your users.

Last, good, strong external links to your site are a wonderful way to build your site’s traffic, as well as a testimony to its quality. But the web credo regarding users is “they’re always just a click away” from leaving your site. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: you can get them to your site with a high PageRank and good SEO principles, but you’ve got to keep them there with good usability.

How to keep them coming back time and time again

I had a really wild experience the other day. I was on my bank’s Internet site, wildly trying to ascertain whether an important money wire had been deposited into my account. It hadn’t. I thought perhaps it could be somewhere in the system, so I wanted a warm body to either calm my fears, or establish what my priority was going to be on that day.

One of my biggest frustrations with websites is trying to find contact information when I need it, and of course, even for those sites that have it, there are few standards for where it might be located. These are the instances where I feel alienated, drifting in an impersonal cyber world that for all I know, may be populated with nothing but cyborgs. Many web sites have lost many sales because they make themselves impossible to deal with except through their Internet shopping basket.

Anyway, back to the bank. Lo and behold, there on the page was a chunk of information where I had several choices to actually deal with a human being. One was to send an email, one was to engage in instant messaging, and the third was to click on a button to speak with someone on the phone. I opted to click and my phone immediately began ringing. Now this was service! I picked it up, and although a received a recording, it was just a few seconds later when a REAL person got on the line. Unfortunately, the competent and human representative on the other end determined that my wire was no where in the system, but at least now I had a game plan for what I needed to do that day as opposed to wallowing in ignorance.

This is called relationship, and it is the challenge for today’s Internet. How do you personalize an otherwise vast universe where by its very nature people are relegated to alienation and anonymity?

The first, though seemingly obvious thing you need to do is make it an objective for your site – a priority objective. Once you do that, you can consider and employ specific strategies such as:

1. Identify and describe, as closely as you possibly can, your target customer or visitor. And unless you are a Kodak or Motorola, don’t pretend to be all things to all people. The Internet is about customization – the days of the Industrial Revolution where one size fits all due to manufacturing economies of scale are gone!
2. Content that communicates. Once you have figured out who your target audience is and what content would be valuable to them, fill your web site with lots of it. And also make sure to change that content often. This is the easiest way to keep an ongoing dialog with visitors.
3. Make yourself accessible. Your photo should also be on your site, as well as your contact information, including email, telephone, and address. And hopefully your address is not a Post Office box because brick and mortar gives people that link to reality.
4. Appoint an editorial staff. Advertise for and then appoint a group of individuals with industry credibility to serve as regular contributors to your web site content. Have a weekly, rotating column. Encourage users to write in response to your columnists/editors. Ah, and one very important thing – publish their photos and if they agree, their email addresses. If they don’t want to give out their personal email, then give them one on your server.
5. How about a weekly puzzle? I’ve had great luck with a puzzle we used to run in our biweekly ezine. Visitors loved it and kept coming back for more. Craft the puzzle around your business or industry. For example, come up with a 9-letter word with just one of each letter that has something to do with your industry, and then make it into a sudoku.
6. Start up an advice column. Become the Dear Abby of your industry. Provide readers with relevant, substantive advice and increase traffic while cementing relationships.
7. Offer online seminars and training programs. Though these programs do not need to be synchronous, consider chunking up the material so you can provide personalized feedback at intervals along the way.
8. Build a message board or forum to allow customers, visitors, and other businesses to communicate with one another. Make sure you also play an active role in these communications to further cement these relationships.

The key to successful search engine relationship marketing is to keep a dialog going with your site visitors. Give them valuable content, let them have access to you, and encourage them to participate in your site. When you have succeeded in building a relationship, they will keep coming back to your oasis in the middle of the cyber desert.

It’s time to design your web site. I want everyone to be my customer, you say. I want to be all things to all people, you say. Sound familiar? Hopefully not, because to be all things to all people means to be an indistinguishable pile of mush that will find its way to the bottom of the search engine results, and be confusing and uninspiring to users.

Okay, so to counteract the mush and make magic, you’ve got to put a stake in the ground. Period. You’ve got to figure out for whom you’re designing your web site. This is called “Defining Your Target Audience,” and it is an essential part of good search engine optimization. Why? Because good SEO is all about putting the focus on your site visitors. In order to do so, you need to give them good, quality content, which in turn will attract good, quality, relevant sites to link to yours, therefore ushering in a new group of potential customers. And provide good content and attract quality links, you need to know who your customers are and what they want.

Any English teacher worth her salt will tell you that when writing anything, there are two key concerns. First is purpose: what do I want my audience to think, do or believe. Second is audience: who, exactly, is it that I want to think, do, and believe these things.

It comes down to this: let’s say you have a website where you sell upscale items such as Godiva Chocolates and fancy fountain pens. To market such products to teeny-boppers and teenagers is probably not going to be real effective, so therefore, a “hip” approach for your web strategy is not what you need. A little research shows you that your typical customer has an annual income of over $100,000, has a graduate degree, owns 2 or more homes, and is over 45 years old. So there you go, now you have enough information to design a strategy and a website to target that market segment.

How do you go about defining your target audience?

You gather data. If you already have a web site, invite visitors to fill out a form in exchange for a free gift. The gift could be a downloadable, e-book, or a gift certificate for your products. If you have a database of email addresses, send out a survey, and again offer the free gift as an incentive for them to complete and send it back.

What data should you gather? Get as much of the following information as you can:

• Age
• Male or female
• Geographic location
• Income
• Profession/type of work
• Marital status
• Education
• Attitude toward your product/service category
• Attitude your product/service
• Interests/hobbies

If you’ve been in business for a while, you may have a good feel for who your typical customer is, but still try to glean as much specific data as you can.

What do I do with this data? Now that you have this information, you are prepared to design and produce an effective, targeted website and accompanying marketing program, be it email, telephone, or direct mail. First, write down your goal: What do I want my audience to think, do or believe after or while visiting my website. Second, write down your objective: Why do I want them to think, do or believe it? Third, look at your demographic data and place it alongside your goal and objective. The ideas for your web site marketing plan should start flowing.