Dave Walker

My current employer, Officejobs.com, is a strong supporter of the Calgary Drop-In and Rehab Centre, a local homeless shelter. Every year, we run a clothing drive, and this year, I will be creating a Facebook group to reach out to the community for help. I expect moderate success - I’d love to see 50 members in the first two weeks of the campaign, and lots of donations, of course. The second part of this is, of course, to raise the profile and awareness of Officejobs.com.

(Shameless promotion: I have a Facebook group of my own, “Calgary Cares About Its Homeless“, started as a personal thing. Please join and promote.)

Is it easier to rally people around a cause if there is no corporate name attached to it?

Should companies adopt a cause so they can use Facebook in this manner?

How can your company use the reach of Facebook to rally people around a cause?

Is it cynical or against unspoken Facebook etiquitte to use Facebook in this manner?

Discuss.

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Today is the civic election in Calgary, and a lot of talk has been given to the curbside recycling issue, yet there are few good plans.

It’s just embarrassing that Calgary doesn’t have curbside recycling, and the plans that council have discussed are too expensive for average Calgarians. Even at $100/year ($8/month - the original plan was $21/month), this is still over 4x more expensive than Vancouver, which pays $22.46/year. Council: find the will to make curbside recycling happen for a price that all Calgarians can get behind.

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Um, no… 

Give me a reason to click into your blog/video/article/whatever. If I think I am going to be bombarded by “markety-speak”, forget about it. Give me content - information, opinion, entertainment. Don’t give me the same old stuff you publish in those glossy brochures; I don’t care. If I do care, I will seek it out when I am ready, not before.

Engage me. Talk to me like you are a human and I am a human. What are you offering that I *have* to share with my friends (corporate spam I will send to my enemies)? You won’t start a conversation with me if you are screaming “LIMITED TIME OFFER”. If you teach me something new every week, I will tune in every week. And when I am ready for your company, you are front-of-mind.

If I want to be talked at, I’ll watch TV.

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The last year has seen a pretty radical change in how web sites are getting traffic. Social media is changing the face of web traffic, and a business that is social media savvy is going to do a lot more, and better, business that companies that rely on Google searches.

 Not that Google is dead - far from it - but social media marketing is all about connecting with and engaging your customers and clients. Marketing departments have always paid lip service to this, but real SMM forces them to do it in a real way that ends up having real payoff. Afraid to talk with, not to, your customers? Maybe social media marketing isn’t for you. But if you want to create a genuine dialogue with people, you cannot avoid social media.

 Social Media Marketing uses tools like:

• blogging. Keeping a regular online journal about the things going on in your company and industry. Blogging allows you to:
  • keep people informed about things going on in your company - news, job postings, etc.
  • show your expertise; give people tips and tricks about your business or industry, discuss trends, etc.
  • inform your customers of sales, promotions, contests, etc. - helps drive sales
  • get feedback about your products or services
• social bookmarking. Said something interesting? Allow people to bookmark infomration to share with others on sites like Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Ask what “The Digg Effect” is…
• social networking. Connnect with your customers on sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Some sites have strict rules against corporate spamming, but smart marketers can engage people voluntarily in ways that don’t break site rules or people’s goodwill.
• shared media. How can you use Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare and others to show your expertise?

The biggest difference between search traffic and social media traffic is the level of engagement from users arriving at your site.

Search engines usually drive traffic based on keyword searches. For example, someone might arrive at the Future Shop web site because of a search for LCD TV. Future Shop still needs to immediately convince the visitor to engage with the site right on the home page, and every other page of the site, since users may not come in the “front door”. It is a very difficult and expensive job to create trust, engagement, etc. quickly, and many companies fail this job completely.

However, if you can create this trust level elsewhere and people come to your site because you have established you cred elsewhere, most of the battle has been won long before people come to your site. For example, if Future Shop posts a “What you need to know about LCD TV” on YouTube (how-to videos is one of the biggest categories on YouTube), they have established trust and expertise through non-”markety” media, and the visitor arrives ready to engage. And they have arrived outside of the Google channel.

Google and search engine traffic isn’t dead, dying, on life support or even in need of medication. But there are better ways to bring qualified traffic to your web site.

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Seth Godin blogged yesterday on creating a good web site, and today on creating a great web site (and here I vowed not to mention Seth’s blog more than once a week, but it’s too darned good).

Too many designers I have worked with take a very narrow view of what design is: they concentrate on the great colour schemes, great typography, flashy photos and so on, but ignore other aspects of web site design.

Web design originally stemmed from print design, which is pretty much exclusively great colours, typography, etc. The mindset of designers even today is based in print media, while the web is really a brand new beast, and the design must be treated as so.

The role of a web designer - either a single designer or a small team - encompasses several different roles beyond the “look and feel”.

Dave’s Hierarchy for Web Site Design:

1. Information architecture. This is the foundation for the web site; the way the information is organized. Even basic web sites have a lot of information, and without strong organization, the information can become jumbled and incoherent.
2. Navigation design. How we  move around this information is critical to the success of the site, and the complexity of the navigation increases exponentionally with the amont of information or actions within the site. I particularly like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think book, philosophy and principles.
3. User experience. What kind of experience do you want your users to have when using the site? Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb  lists 7 facets of user experience (click the link to read about the details on these items):
   • Useful
   • Usable
   • Desirable
   • Findable
   • Accessible
   • Credible
   • Valuable
4. Identity and Branding. Your brand is the public perception of your company. Without a good brand identity, you will just be another company out there, not a Pepsi, Nike or Chanel.
5. Look and feel. This is where most designers concentrate because it is what they know and have been trained to do.

(I just realized I have both of Peter Morville’s books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability on my desk, standing beside Don’t Make Me Think)

Seth goes on to explain (my paraphrasing) that web design is not about reinventing the wheel; there are a lot of tried and true techniques and processes to draw upon. While every web site is (or should be) unique to the company, objective or purpose, the web design process is not unique, or even that difficult. With standard processes and systems, web design should not be that difficult.

Are you talking to your user or at your user, or are you just talking to yourself - showing off? The best designs facilitate interacting - talking with your user. How does your design accomplish this?

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Just finished a web site for George Eynon, local Calgary watercolour painter. Beautiful artwork - check it out!

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Wow - what happens when you take a concept a little too far? (When bloggers comment on your ad?  ;)

The ad

Yahoo.ca has a nice little ad going - woman buys fertilizer from TV ad, kills everything in the garden, including a huge tree. That’s effective. Same woman buys fertilizer based on Yahoo Answers recommendation, garden blooms with huge plants, including the tree. That’s effective. The dog, buried in the garden, comes back to life. Little girl jumps off swing shouting “Scruffy! You’re alive”. That’s tasteless.

Yahoo had a nice ad going there. I’m not exactly sure why I find this mildly disturbing - reamination of the dead? Zombie dog? One hell of a powerful fertilizer, not to be used in graveyards? Actually, the more I think about it, that more I can understand why they did the ad the way they did - the dog adds the twist that makes the ad memorable. A bit icky, but memorable.

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It almost saddens me that this will probably be a regular feature…

Patrick Williams at The Selling Sherpa blogs about a catering exhibitor at a trade show that wasn’t giving away samples of some very tasty treats on display. Read the post here.

Far too many web sites are doing the same thing - show off a greatly limited site, tour the features, but don’t take a test run until you give up a whole lot of information. Be cautious of your barriers to entry.

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I came across this recently on Fonts.com, and a friend of mine questioned the ethics of creating a font that is a direct rip-off of a Jewish design style. This brings up interesting questions of appropriating culture and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Designers raid all cultures for ideas, and like all ideas, some ideas are better than others. Point to ponder: I am holding a book of international colour schemes. Is it more or less of a rip off to take design element from a typeface and create a new font, or take a colour scheme that is obviously Chinese (red and gold, for example)? There is a class of typefaces called “Modern” that are predominantly French; if I designed my own Modern typeface, would I be accused of ripping off French culture? Is it more of a crime or less to rip off a European cultural element or to take, say, a Middle Eastern design element?

Design is not about right or wrong, it is about appropriate and inappropriate.

Design is first about very quick communication, and the lazy designers fall back on cultural clichés to do this. I’m not sure it’s an ethical issue, though.

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Yesterday, Seth Godin blogged on Choice.

I was interested in the line

I used to have one choice to make a phone call. Now I have a dozen. I used to have one place to buy insurance for my company, now I have thousands. One bank near my house, now ten thousand a click away.

As desirable as choice is, we aren’t very good at making choices and marketers pick that up and run with it.

Making choices and making good choices is a very different thing. Making good choices requires a lot of time-consuming research, looking at opinions, reviews, etc., and doing many things that are boring, time-consuming or difficult.

There are two very important points. One, schools are not teaching critical thinking very well, until (arguably) the university stage. Two, we have such dense lifestyles that the effort needed to make good choices can be exhausting. These two things leave us vulnerable to marketers who do not have our best interests in mind.

 For example, packaged foods brag about not having trans fats. While this is a good thing, these same foods are often loaded with saturated fat, which is almost as bad as trans fat. There are often healthier choices, but it take effort to find these foods (and effort to learn about healthier choices), and the power of the biggest marketer can often overwhelm our critical sensibilities, which is often the point of marketing.

So where does the responsibility lie? That’s the tough question. Companies sell products as cheaply manufactured as possible, which means opting for cheaper ingredients in the case of food, cheaper materials like lead paint in the case of toys, and so on.  Companies say that the consumer should do the research and decide for themselves, caveat emptor. And then go on to hard-sell their products with advertising designed to overwhelm our better judgement.

Should the government regulate and control? Or should the consumer educate themselves?

Choice isn’t a bad thing especially when monopolies with bad intentions create massive amounts of damage, but it can be quite difficult to make good choices.

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