Domain7

The Picking Problem

People have a picking problem.

Publishing is so easy we don’t see a need to prioritize. With temptingly simple web tools, we’re now equipped to post any and all content, aiming for any and all people. Instead of choosing to say what matters, we choose to say anything we please.

Meanwhile, our websites balloon into blimp-like monstrosities—filled with hot air and floating aimlessly through the webosphere, blown about by willy-nilly whims. (Full disclosure: I just wanted to write the phrase “willy-nilly whims.” See, I’m doing it too—publishing for the sake of publishing.)

As Richard Rumelt writes in his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, “Strategy involves focus, and therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favour of others.”

If we aim to be truly effective in what we do—in business, as individuals, and on the web—we need to pick what to do well.

This starts with:

• Knowing what you do best
• Knowing what your users need most
• Giving very special attention to the places where those two areas meet
• Reducing the priority on everything else

Above, I drew a terrible little notebook sketch of this idea.

A website can, of course, deliver any message, to any audience. But the best ones are those that deliver what users actually need, and what you’re actually good at delivering.

How do we get there?

In our strategy process, we start with listening. We want to discover the truth of who you are as a company; to know you as well as you know yourself.

We also want to know, embrace, and love your audience. We want to get to know them so well we can both speak on their behalf.

The whole point of this is to discover your area of true, real, actual, mandated, unwavering focus: where your services meet user-thirst. Right there, your business becomes a salve, not a sell.

That’s what content strategy aims to accomplish—help you know yourself, prioritize your content around your audience’s needs, and find true focus.

Does content strategy solve the picking problem? Does it prevent websites from bloating into oversized, directionless blimps?

Not always, but it’s a start. Carrying it out still requires ongoing discipline and hard work.

In his book Rumelt concludes a case study about a client who was unwilling to make the hard choices of where their business would focus, by saying: “…they avoided the hard work of choice, set nothing aside, hurt no interest groups or individual egos, but crippled the whole.”

Saying no is sometimes hard. But it has further-reaching ramifications when we’re unwilling to do the hard work of picking.

Top 50 Social Media Marketing Research, Monitoring, and Measurement Tools

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” —W. Edwards Deming

With that as your mantra, you can make data-driven decisions—even in the hard-to-measure, largely qualitative social media space.

Here is a handy list of my favourite tools for research (prior to crafting a strategy, naturally), monitoring, and measurement. Is your favourite tool missing? Let me know and I’ll add it to the list!

Social Media Freebies

In-platform tools:

• Twitter Advanced Search
• Facebook Insights
• YouTube Analytics

Cross-platform “dashboard” tools:

• Hootsuite (freemium: some options free, others paid)
• Cyfe
• TrueSocialMetrics
• Addictomatic
• Socialmention
• twazzup
• Crowdbooster (freemium: some options free, others paid)
• Social Media Metrics Dashboard (excel template by Erik Ohlen, via Avinash Kaushik)

Blogs & Forums:

• Google Alerts
• BoardTracker

Twitter-specific:

• Twitter Grader
• Klout
• Twitalyzer
• twitrratr
• Seesmic

Pinterest-specific

• Pinreach
• Pinerly

Google+-specific

• All my +

Paid Social Media Monitoring & Measurement

• Sysomos
• radian6
• Lithium
• trackur
• Hootsuite (freemium: some options free, others paid)
• Crowdbooster (freemium: some options free, others paid)
• Sprout Social
• Wildfire
• Beevolve

Keyword Research

• Wordtracker
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Search Grader
• Keyword Rank Checker
• Google Insights for Search
• Wordstream

Competitive Analysis and Trending

• Compete
• quantcast
• Marketing Grader
• Google PageRank
• Google Trends
• WASP

Website Freebies

• Google Analytics (now with social data)
• Feedburner
• AddThis
• ShareThis

Fun stuff

• Wordle

(Next up: a list of website and search optimization tools. Feel free to send me your suggestions!)

Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce's 40 Under 40

Last week I spoke at the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce alongside other previous recipients of Business in Vancouver’s 40 Under 40 designation.

Though asked to share some of my keys to success, I can never separate Success from Purpose. Success looks much different when it flows from purpose, rather than standing as an entity pursued on its own. For me this purpose has always stemmed both two things: the feeling that life is an amazing gift and a passion for the underdog.

I began Domain7 to help a non-profit organization bring their voice to the web. Since then I’ve spent 15 years—with the talent and support of an incredible team—creating practical solutions for clients (often underdogs) online.

At their core, every problem we face in our work is a Human problem. I think the Web opens up a world of creative opportunities to solve those problems—it levels the playing field and gives everyone a voice. We all have equal access to the internet. It gives great opportunities to underdogs.

In our work and life, it’s too easy fixate on the outcomes of our work and forget to continually ground ourselves in purpose. Here are some lessons I’ve learned that help undermine distractions and keep my focus on the “why” questions of work and life:

1. Work at self-awareness. Know what drives you. Articulate your purpose.
2. Find others who share those core drivers. Work with those folk.
3. Make it human. Don’t leave your values and the things you hold dear at your office door. As London Business School professor and celebrated author Gary Hamel asks, “Why are words like ‘love’, ‘devotion’ and ‘honour’ so seldom heard in the halls of coporate-dom? Why are the ideals that matter most to human beings the ones most notably absent in managerial discourse? ” Bring yourself to your work.
4. Be flexible. It’s a tough balancing act to stay consistently true to purpose, and we don’t always succeed. Your purpose needs to be flexible and responsive.
5. Progress is more about changing yourself than it is about changing the people around you. Depreciate your intellectual capital over time.
6. Measure your success against what drives you and what gives you meaning. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

Read more about my talk and the 40 Under 40 event in the Abbotsford Times.

On teamwork and personal opinions

Recently I’ve been researching how people with strong opinions (and often differing opinions) can work together as a team to come up with great solutions. I boiled it down to five factors:

1. Unity of vision. Establishing unity of vision within a team is super important. It helps to overcome flame wars and infighting over specific ways of doing things or technologies. If you provide a true north that everyone agrees upon, it’s easier to develop an understanding for team members that don’t share your opinions.

2. Slow to judge. Don’t judge something until you fully understand its benefits and shortcomings—especially in comparison to your current preferences, wherein lies an existing, festering bias. Don’t get defensive and fill up with FUD when someone mentions a new technology or methodology to you. Posture yourself to be excited and eager to see how it could potentially be an improvement. Give it a good shake before drawing conclusions.

3. Eager to learn. This means being flexible, curious, open, and adventurous in your pursuit of perfection. The web changes too frequently for you to be completely myopic or throw the same solution at every new problem. A good way of measuring your eagerness to learn is to look at how much adoption you’ve put yourself through in the last year, and how many questions you find yourself asking. Both of these things should be regular activities.

4. Avoid the Great Philosophical Takeover™. This is the moment where a staunch philosophical stance builds up a religious fervor deep in your soul to the point where it pushes out any pragmatic evaluation of other people’s opinions. It can quickly turn into bitterness, discontentment and belief that “the rest of the world doesn’t see things the right way, the way I see them.” Developing philosophical convictions is obviously not a bad thing, but it’s more helpful to the rest of the team (and to yourself) if you rid them of dogma and myopia.Be “open source” in your convictions—be open to having them changed by other peoples’ contributions. I’m not suggesting we go wherever the wind takes us, but that we’re not relentlessly dogmatic to the point where objective evaluation goes out the window.

5. Your fate is tied to your teammates. It’s like a three-legged race. Your ability to run fast and be amazing by yourself won’t help you win. You have to work with your team. If you’re faster, you may have to push others to go faster. But you also may have to slow down so you can synchronize your pace. A good expression is “make the others good”. To succeed for ourselves, we have to work to bring out the best in others. This involves encouragement, suspending judgment, or asking tough questions and challenging others. We’re a team and our success is tied to our teammates.

5 Awesome Things About www.regent-college.edu

We are so pleased to launch a brand new, industry-defining site for Regent College. The site truly raises the bar for higher education on the web. The Regent team are fantastic clients—we can’t say enough about how forward-thinking, open and collaborative they were through this process.

Nearly 15 months in the making, the site was touched by more than 20 of our team members in various stages of strategy, content, design and development. We’re incredibly proud of it.

There are so many cool/smart/delightful elements of this site which will have to wait for future blog posts, but to celebrate the launch, here are five things we think are particularly awesome about it:

1. Client-centric

Often agencies are so concerned with bells, whistles and winning awards, that they put actual client needs second. We made Regent’s goals our first concern. That meant building the brand, attracting new students, and communicating with students and alumni. The site is still gorgeous, but form followed function.

2. Mobile friendly

We built the site responsively, so it shifts and resizes for optimal browsing according to what device you’re using. No pinching or pulling required.

3. First class functionality

Our development team got to flex some technical muscle with fun animation and powerful tools like Regent’s course search—students can now find courses by name or course number, and sort by seven different criteria. And thanks to some clever coding, the results load instantly.

4. Lots of personality

One of the biggest challenges of putting Regent online was conveying their blend of rigorous academics and vibrant warmth. We did lots of listening to develop a site that is as fresh, smart and forward-looking as Regent—including visual references to the College’s distinct architecture. The brand shines throughout.

5. Incredibly versatile

Regent needed a platform they could easily replicate for future microsites. We created an additional template they can adapt and reuse for campaigns, conferences, departments, summer school, their library, bookstore, including custom donation and conference registration platforms.

See what we’re talking about! Visit www.regent-college.edu

My thoughts: Growing without middle management. Part 2

The Globe and Mail recently featured Domain7 in an article focused on building teams around creativity and flexibility, instead of creating a level of middle management. We’ve grown quickly in the last five years, but have worked hard to preserve our culture of community and collaboration. I think that’s largely what makes Domain7 such a great place to work, and what helps us produce great results for our clients.

A few weeks ago I posted an initial response to the article and promised to follow up, explaining our approach. At D7 we’ve always put a high priority on collaborative work, but as we’ve grown we’re putting much bigger emphasis on the role of skilled teams.

Here are some of the pitfalls we hope to avoid through this team approach.

• People management overemphasized - If you perform well in a team, does your next step need to be people management? We want to build a team where individual skills are valued and continually improved. By making the career path primarily about stepping into people management, we undermine the value of the excellent practical work we love to do.
• Power rather than influence - In a growing team, making change happen can be challenging. Many will take the easy route, relying on authority and power that come with a title. The problem is: people in authority don’t have the corner on great ideas. If you have to rely on your positional authority to get things done, something’s broken.
• Creative output needs space - as Daniel Pink, Gary Hamel and others have articulated, our time and the type of work we do require creative, emotional, and very engaged thinking. Although creative environments need good structure, hierarchies designed for compliance and restricted work environments are not going to deliver over the long term.

With these challenges as context, we’ve created what we call “Discipline Teams”. By “Discipline” we’re referring to the different skills and crafts we have on our wider team—things like strategy & storytelling, front end development, custom development, design, project management, etc.

In the past few months, we’ve spent time as teams focused on developing the skills and tools in each of our areas in a structured way.

And we’ve already seen the benefits:

• Deeper skills + increased creativity - We know we can always improve and learn, but we now have a much better forum to challenge each other to develop. And by not just going off and learning on our own, the greater team—and ultimately, our work—benefits from each person’s individual insights.
• Much more space - As anyone in a busy business knows, there’s not always the time and space to focus on the business because you need to be working in it. In our creative economy, that’s not enough. Our new team approach gives us the chance to spend more energy working on how we do what we do. And it means we see benefits of better work almost immediately.
• Richer accountability - In the new teams, we’re responsible to each other. It’s a commitment to working together as a group. The teams as a whole report back to all of Domain7. It produces a type of accountability that is not prescriptive or narrow, but still gives the rest of the team a chance benefit from hearing and seeing the results.

Just a couple months in, we can already see the difference that focusing on our disciplines makes. We still have lots to learn as we evolve our teams, but I think this is one approach to building a highly creative and flexible team that we won’t soon give up.

Social Media Lessons from a 13-Year-Old

My 13-year-old niece is a social media guru, as are most of her friends. They excel on platforms where marketers and businesses struggle, flop, and fail (right #Rogers1Number?).

You’ve no doubt heard (or even said), “We need a blog,” “We should have a Facebook page,” “We have to be on Twitter,” or “Let’s use social media to make it viral”?

It’s exciting, but then it fizzles. No one blogs. Nothing happens on Facebook. No one knows what to tweet. And there’s no return on investment. Or worse (right, #Rogers1Number?).

Social media channels are not strategic: they’re tactical. Tweens understand social media strategy. Since they may not be able to verbalize it in a way that’s coherent, I’ve done the translating for you.

Homework First

A 13-year-old girl has done her homework. She knows exactly which of her friends and acquaintances are online and on which platforms—and whether their parents are watching (demographics). She knows their personalities, interests, and attitudes (pyschographics). She knows when they post, and what they share (behavioural segments). The influencers are obvious to her, and she knows who she wants to influence (notably the cutie from Spanish class with the long eyelashes).

Tweens are also clear on what’s in and what’s out, which brands are likable and which are not. She’s acutely aware of what her “non-friends” are doing and saying online—the other cliques, schools, soccer teams, and the snobs. This intelligence is paired with deep qualitative and quantitative off-line research—say, insights from last weekend’s sleepover—to get a complete picture of her social media landscape opportunities and risks.

And, necessarily, these insights inform her choices and her actions.

What does it mean for business? Strategies are built from good information: conduct a SWOT analysis, qualitative and quantitative market research, identify your target market, and include a competitive analysis. Don’t succumb bright shiny object syndrome and skip this step.

Me and My Gurls Havin Fun!!!!♥♥ (actual tween quote)

“Liking” the Jonas Brothers page on Facebook was a signal, carefully chosen to align with her friends’ values. Her and her friends upload heaps of photos and take the time to tag and comment on each one, although you’d need a dictionary to decrypt their comments (Ikr?!). They gripe about school, homework, and lost soccer games. They pump up one another’s self esteem with likes and “lols.” It’s a Petri dish for sociologists, but the gist of it is that tweens are using shared values and social cohesion to create community on social networks. Like, duh.

And although occasionally I get fundraising requests for her soccer team, she doesn’t use social media to sell anything.

What does it mean for business? Recognize that social networks are not just groups, but communities, and you can’t just infiltrate them. There’s a social order and rules of engagement. Your social media strategy has got to detail how you’re going to offer and deliver value to the community.

Definitely Family

Offline, it’s skinny jeans, hoodies, Twilight movies, boys and braces. Online, well, it’s skinny jeans, hoodies, Twilight movies, boys and braces. My niece’s Facebook profile is a fairly accurate reflection of her offline personality. She goes by her real name, but identifies herself with goofy photos, funny link shares, misinformation (she “works” at Bob’s Secret: Underwear for Men), and upbeat posts. She has liked dozens of sports teams and athletes (she’s a killer soccer player herself), loads of bands and musicians that I’ve heard of but thankfully never heard, and a fleet of animé-related figures. She knows that if she posts something out of line—whether not characteristic or inappropriate—her friends will call her out, perhaps even suspect someone of hacking her profile. While her posts are frequently written in indecipherable tween-speak and punctuated with innumerable exclamation marks and emoticons, they even sound like her. It’s all completely her.

What does it mean for business? Brand matters. Ensure you have a strong brand, clearly defined brand personality, and a distinctive brand voice. Your brand strategy will ensure that your communications stay “on brand.”

The downside to my niece’s social media strategy prowess is that she can only apply it to her friends, her, and her “brand,” and thus is not yet employable as a social media superstar. But when she and the rest of Generation Z do enter the workforce, they’ll undoubtedly wonder why we had so much trouble getting social media right.

SEO, meet Content Marketing—your new boss.

Much has been said lately about the idea that SEO (search engine optimization) is no longer relevant. Some industry pundits have even gone so far as to succinctly state provocatively that ‘SEO is Dead’. The proponents of this school of thought will often point to comments like this one Matt Cutts, the Head of the anti-spam team at Google, recently made at SXSW:

“ All those people are doing (for lack of a better word) over-optimization, versus making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it—like too many keywords on a page—or exchange way too many links, or go well beyond what you normally expect. “

In recent years, experts from the search engine world have strongly downplayed the traditional tactical mix we know collectively as “SEO”: link-building, keyword-stuffing, an unnatural fascination with PageRank, etc. All of this is now considered passé in 2012.

Today, we are to expect, you just need to make great content. Period.

So making great content trumps SEO… sort of. This is the understanding that drives the phenomenal growth of Content Marketing—the recognition that your content lives across many digital channels beyond your website, like email newsletters, whitepapers and podcasts, or shared in thriving social media spaces. But great content should also be found, or it’s like that proverbial tree falling in the empty forest.

Is SEO still relevant? Of course. But now it’s more about deconstructing what the “great” in great content actually means. Great content should be informed by research and a solid understanding of your target audience. For this, we can turn to (among many sources) keyword research tools (like Google’s own version). Keyword Research, which used to provide information for SEO, now helps us understand exactly what content we need to produce if we want to find our people where they are. If people are searching for this content, we need to take the steps to make sure our new content will be found by search engines, and the people using them.

We use keyword research to discover keyword phrases. We try to ensure they are relevant, understand their frequency (how often are they searched), and balance this with an understanding of the competitive landscape (or pressure). We write meaningful and relevant content which takes the form of copy in body sections and headings. We craft descriptive page titles and make sure our links and navigational structure support the content. This is all starting to sound an awful lot like SEO.

So is Content Marketing just the new name for SEO?

No. Content marketing is more than SEO because it is concerned with all of our digital channels. Content marketing is the bigger idea, if you will. It is about delivering content that makes your target audience smarter and builds up your credibility and brand.

SEO is not dead, it just found a new job … working for Content Marketing.

If you would like learn more here are some interesting links:

• Watch the webinar, SEO is Dead. Long Live Content on YouTube (courtesy of Compendium)
• Track Google’s Algorithm Changes (infographic)
• Read some easy and practical tips for creating great content (courtesy of SearchEngineWatch)

7 Tips for Applying to Domain7

Want to join our team? We want every candidate to tell us the most compelling story possible, so here are a few tips to help you on your way.

1) Be Human We want to know what makes you different than everyone else. Take the time to show us who you really are and what interests you when you’re away from work. There’s no magic formula to how we hire, but we want to know how your past experiences set you up to be an incredible employee for us. There’s no standard approach—show us something different.

2) Be Social Show us you know the online world and are an active contributor—not just a re-poster. We’ll take the time to look you up online, point us toward your social media channels or blog(s). Don’t be afraid to share more obscure accounts like Pinterest and Instagram.

3) Be Informed It’s refreshing to interview someone who knows a bit about Domain7. Asking specific questions about company structure or our team shows you’re interested in the company and our people. Likewise, every role comes with its own vernacular. If you talk about fresh approaches in your industry, show me how you’re using them. If you’re a contractor, take some extra time to ensure your own site reflects the ideas you bring to the table.

4) Be Specific Tell us what you’re passionate about and clearly define what you’d like to do. If you have a passion in one narrow area, let us know. If you like doing a few different things, that’s fine too. We want people who are a good fit and who can do the work they enjoy. When showing us your work, take the time to describe what extra features or functionality you put in or how you did something different.

5) Be Innovative You really want to be noticed? Do really excellent work. There is no replacement for a standout portfolio. Show us work you’re proud of. Every project you complete should be better than the last. Just bear in mind: creativity and innovation are only great if they serve the needs of your client. We’re looking for employees who are solutions-driven.

6) Be a Thinker (and an implementor) Think we’re missing something? Come with ideas of how we can do better and how you can be part of the solution. It shows you take initiative and can can push our company forward.

7) Be Convincing If you’re going to take the time to reach out to us then take the time to really sell yourself. An in-person meeting is your chance to shine, so show us how you would be a great part of our team. Convince us we’d be crazy to not hire you.

Get Ready to Timeline

Last month I spotted the evolution of a new word which—as a language geek working in the tech field—warmed the cockles of my heart.

Once only a noun, the word “timeline” recently became a verb… as in “Help! I timelined and I don’t know how to undo it!”

If you haven’t already “timelined”, you will, on March 30 when Facebook switches everyone—individuals and businesses alike—over to the new profile format. For individuals it just means rethinking chronologies (who cares about linearity anyway?!). But for businesses—especially ones running promotions—it has some bigger consequences.

To Facebook’s credit, when Timeline completely rolls out on Friday they will mostly avoid the public outcry that usually accompanies their updates. By releasing Timeline to a select group of trendsetters last September, Facebook made it exclusive and therefore cool to timeline. They eased us into it. But as businesses and brands have been invited to make the switch this month, they’ve found some unexpected complications.

The good news is, making the switch to Timeline is easy—as a business, all you need to do is choose a cover photo (ideally a branded image, 720 pixels wide) and hit publish.

The bad news is, that schmancy Welcome/Contest/Promo page you invested design and dev dollars into will no longer appear as your default landing page. Instead it will be relegated to one of the “tabs” that now run across the top of your page.

But never fear. Your money and efforts haven’t been wasted.

Here are some things you should know about sustaining your promotions in the new Timeline format:

Your custom landing page won’t disappear, but you can’t lock it as a default landing page. Instead visitors will have to find your promotion via your “tabs”. Create a relevant, inviting image for your Contest tab, give it a descriptive name, and make sure it’s positioned prominently by swapping its location with other less significant tabs (such as your own list of Likes).

Your current 520 pixel landing page won’t fit perfectly in the wider 720 pixel Timeline format, but it will still work. As you create new promotions in the future they can be designed to fit the new format.

You can still “fangate” your promotions (sort of). Visitors will be able to see your complete Timeline before they “like” your page, but you can still reserve contest entry for fans.

Use “pinned posts” to keep your contest front of mind.Pinning a wall post about your contest will keep it in the top-left position on your timeline for up to 7 days.

Highlight a post to give it extra prominence. Timeline splits your page down the middle. By highlighting a post you can feature it across the width of your page.

The fact is, while Timeline does complicate the way you do promotions, it also introduces lots of new opportunities to tell your story. In the next few weeks we’ll be making some fun changes to ours. In the meantime, check out some companies that are doing great things with Timeline, and talk to learn how to make the most of yours.