The Writer's Bloc

Planning a Client Visit, Part 3: Final Prep

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 by JacquiK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Consulting, How To, Project Management

You’ve refined your story, prepped your team and picked up a roll of quarters just in case parking is a problem. Now, it’s time to round up the team and head out! Here are some tips for the 24 hours preceding your visit:
1. Remind your team the day before. Send an e-mail to the team the day before reminding them about the meeting. Ask them to confirm receipt. If you don’t hear from someone, make a point of talking to him or her in person before they leave work for the day. Be sure everyone knows:

Departure/meeting/return time
What to bring (laptops? notepads? handouts?)
Dress code

2. Confirm you have enough room for everyone—and everything—in your vehicle(s). If you have an early morning meeting, do this the day before. If you have an afternoon meeting, check in the morning in case you need to round up another vehicle and/or driver. Keep in mind the number of people riding, but also any materials they are bringing. (Two people might fit fine in your Volkswagen, but the giant display might prove challenging.)

3. Perform a dress-code check. Find a reason to stop by each person’s desk and ensure they are dressed appropriately. In my experience, people who were not dressed for meetings often volunteer that they are going to get dressed before the meeting. In one case, I had a team member who had forgotten about the meeting. Fortunately, he had time to run home and change. Have a sense of humor about it and your team won’t mind.

4. Make sure there is gas in the car(s). An unplanned stop for gas both eats time and adds stress to an already intense situation. You don’t have to fill it up, but do make sure you have enough gas to at least reach your destination without driving on fumes.

5. Give every driver directions. If you have multiple drivers, ensure everyone has directions, the complete address and cell phone numbers for people in the other car(s). Include any information about traffic, parking etc. that you learned in your preparations.

6. Never leave a person behind! Some team members might want to drive themselves, particularly if a meeting is at the end of the day. If someone asks to drive himself, trade cell phone numbers and ensure he leaves at the same time you do. I have made the mistake of leaving someone behind who was going to be “just five minutes”—and ended up returning to pick him up when he discovered his car battery was dead.

Previously:
Better Know Your Client
Prepping Your Team

Planning a Client Visit, Part 2: Prepping Your Team

Thursday, May 21st, 2009 by JacquiK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Consulting, How To, Project Management

You’ve done due diligence to get to know your client. Now it’s time to help your team prepare. While technology tools are helpful in keeping everyone on track, don’t assume people pay as much attention to them as you do.

To help keep your team on track:

1. Set specific deadlines for each person. If a team member is on point for developing materials, set a deadline before the meeting day to review the materials as a team. This gives each person time to provide feedback and revise if necessary. Also, ask each person to review plans or other materials relevant to the project before your deadline.

2. Put time on each person’s schedule to do the work. Book a meeting on each participant’s calendar to study, build their materials and/or prep for the meeting. There is no guarantee that they will use that time, but it is one more tool in your arsenal to help remind them that there is prep work to be done.

3. Pad your timing for the meeting request. Unless you are meeting at your offices, there will be travel time involved. Pad your meeting request by at least a half hour before and after the actual meeting time to ensure your team doesn’t get booked during that time. Include an explanation in both the subject line and the body of the e-mail. For example:

Sample subject line:

4. Book a pre-meeting meeting. Yes, we all know that meetings about meetings are the definition of insanity. Come with an agenda, including a walkthrough of each person’s materials, meeting etiquette and dress code for the meeting. Be prepared to dismiss early if the team is clearly ready to go or needs the extra time to work on meeting-related materials. No one will mind getting back “free” time on their calendar.

Previously: Better Know Your Client
Next time: Final Prep

The ins and outs of Outlook profiles

Monday, May 18th, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: How To, Work Tools

I use Outlook 2007 as my primary mail client, and for what I do it’s a good choice. I use it to manage mail from two different Exchange servers, plus Hotmail, Gmail and six different POP mail accounts. These accounts are, by necessity, divided into two profiles since you can only have one Exchange mail account per Outlook profile.

If you need to create Outlook profiles, here’s a step-by-step guide.

The majority of my accounts – including a rarely used Exchange account assigned to me by the company that finds some of our projects – are part of my first profile. An Exchange mail account that I use extensively for an ongoing client project is my second profile. The good thing about this configuration is that when I’m working, I am entirely focused on this client’s mail and there’s no risk of me sending out a mail from the wrong e-mail account.

The major downside is that when I’m locked into work, I cannot easily see what is going on with my other mail accounts. The best workaround I have found is to use my iPhone to browse my most important POP mail accounts throughout the day (it too can handle only one Exchange account at a time, and there’s no profile option – at least not yet). If I didn’t have an iPhone, I would use a secondary mail client such as Eudora. The important thing here is to tell Outlook (and any other mails clients) to leave your mail on the server, so you can check it with another client. For the secondary Exchange mail account, there’s Outlook Web Access available – so I leave that open in a Web browser and check it periodically.

The only other major issue is that when I make the Exchange server the primary account on a profile shared with POP mail accounts, it seems like Outlook gets confused and tries to send POP mail replies via Exchange. This can cause all sorts of problems including bounced mails. My workaround was to make one of the POP mail accounts primary, but now I have to be very careful or I’ll send mails to clients from the wrong account.

I probably should create a third profile to completely separate personal mail from work mail accounts, but this would create a lot more daily effort to manage all of the various mail streams. It’s easier to just be careful when sending mails that I double-check that the account I’m sending from is correct. If you don’t have two Exchange servers, using profiles to separate personal from work mails would be much more efficient than it is for me, where I have all of my secondary work accounts (for The Writer’s Bloc) mixed with accounts used for personal mail and our gaming blog.

While Outlook is a good choice for managing multiple accounts, as you can see it’s far from perfect. Apart from the issues I’ve already mentioned, here are some of the things Outlook could do better:

Fast profile switching. It would be great if I didn’t have to quit and close all of my open mails and reminders to swap profiles. One of these days, they’ll figure out how to take a snapshot of Outlook’s work state and restore it when I switch back to that profile. At least, that’s my dream and I’m sticking to it.

Smart credential matching. When I sign in on profile A, why does it nearly always prompt me for the sign in credentials for my profile B Exchange server (and vice versa)? The profile should track this and prompt you appropriately. It’s not like I’m ever going to need to sign into the first server with the credentials for the second.

Overall, though, Outlook profiles are a powerful tool and pretty much required if you need to access more than one Exchange mail account. Here’s hoping these tips help you make the most of them.

Planning a Client Visit, Part 1: Better Know Your Client

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 by JacquiK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Consulting, How To, Project Management

Your team relies on you to be the travel agent, correspondent and reminder service all in one. You can help your team help you by doing some pre-meeting homework and ensuring everyone does THEIR homework as well. Here are some tips to help ensure a successful client visit before you enter the lobby.

First impressions do matter—especially if they happen during a pitch. As project manager, it’s up to you to identify the factors that could make or break your visit. Between personal observation and contacts at the company (be nice to the admin—always), you should be able to answer these questions at least a few days in advance:

1. What resources are available in the meeting room? This is perhaps the single most critical issue, and yet it rarely gets asked. Do not assume that your conference room will have multimedia (e.g., a projector), white board or anything else that you might want to use during your presentation. DO tell your contact up front if you have special requests. Remember, no detail is too small. I have been in rooms where you can barely stand much less have the space to place an easel.

2. What is the vendor “Dress Code”?: The common Microsoft stereotype is that you are just as likely to speak to someone in a suit as someone wearing cut-offs and flip-flops. In my 9+ years running around campus, I’ve yet to see cut-offs… but I have seen a flip-flop or two. But I would never wear them myself to a client meeting. My usual attire is a nice pair of slacks and a blouse—even if I’m meeting with someone I know wouldn’t blink if I showed up in jeans. Why? Because you never know when someone important will be pulled into your meeting, or if you’ll have an impromptu meet-and-greet with the VP in the hall. Always dress professionally.

3. How long will it (realistically) take to get there? Yes, the mapping technologies and your GPS all give travel estimates. But they aren’t considering little things such as bridge/lane closures, construction, commuter congestion and accidents. If possible, drive the route beforehand at the same time you’ll be traveling. Also, add your local news radio station to your preset stations for traffic reports. And no matter what, leave early. Traffic is never completely predictable. If you arrive early (as you should), scope out parking and then head to the nearest café for last minute team review. Even though your goal is to arrive earlier than necessary, never go in the lobby more than 10 minutes early—it could be interpreted as poor planning on your part.

4. Where can I park? Is there parking nearby? Does the company validate? Do you need cash or can you use a credit card? These questions might seem banal, but they become the most important thing in the world when you’re up against the clock—and you don’t have five quarters to feed the meter. I was once in a situation where I had to send one person running to the meeting and another team member breathlessly dashing off to find a store to get change for a meter. All because the team leader assumed we could use a nearby parking lot that took credit cards. What he didn’t realize was that the garage had limited public parking—and all those slots were claimed by late afternoon. Always keep a little change on hand if you’re going to an area where you have to pay to park. We now keep a roll of quarters in the glove compartment, just in case.

Next time: Prepping Your Team

Are you using 301 redirects?

Monday, May 4th, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Consulting, Search

One thing about being on the Internet for so many years is that you frequently have to teach yourself new tricks. One of my first clients still brings me back in to consult on occasion, and recently asked for guidance on redirects. (They use redirects in a lot of deep and exciting ways as their site spans multiple server hosts!) A good friend who is a Search expert mentioned to me at dinner Saturday that everyone has moved to 301 redirects, which I hadn’t encountered yet since this is an area that I work in once maybe every couple of years.

In my day, you simply created a quick META redirect and if you wanted to speed it up for modern browsers, you added some Javascript and/or VBScript to flip the page even faster. No more. These days, search engines are wary of these methods, which have been dreadfully abused by spammers and scammers. Now they want you to use ASP, PHP or other server side methods that include a message for spiders notifying them that the change is permanent so they can update their records based on a trustworthy source.

The article How to redirect a web page, the smart way by Steve Hargrove includes all of the code samples you need to pick your method and get started. I trained my client to use the ASP version, which will work on their site and took only seconds to customize:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/fullpathtonewpage”
%>

The best part is that it’s even easier to configure than a META redirect. The only downside is that you can’t use it to replace an existing HTM page. For that, you’ll probably need to try HTACCESS or one of the other methods. If you are redirecting the home page of a site or subdirectory and your server supports ASP, you can simply move or rename the default.htm and create a default.asp for the redirect and your server should find it (just as long as you don’t direct link to the old HTM page).

The value of good production hand-offs

Thursday, Apr 30th, 2009 by JacquiK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Marketing

One of the services I provide is marketing support, which is a fancy way of saying that I help marketing with whatever they need. Much of my work revolves around e-newsletters: tweaking copy provided by a vendor, managing reviews, handing off copy documents to production and even setting up and triggering final sends to millions of customers.

I’ve noticed that marketing often wants to toss work “over the wall” to production and then review it when it’s done. In some cases, this takes the form of a PDF of JPG comp, from which production is then expected to deliver a final, flawless e-mail or Web page. Here is why comps fail in most cases as the sole deliverable for hand-offs:

They typically do not reflect the final copy or layout. In my most recent project, there were several individual mails that were represented in old, out-dated templates and one comp that failed to reflect a desired headline style. If production had looked at the comps, they would have carried over many errors that would then have had to be fixed in review. In my experience, review takes plenty of time just fixing actual production mistakes – you don’t need to extend it correcting errors in the handoff.
They are poor at conveying notes and small details such as ALT text. And if a detail is missed, the vendor or team member who owns them has to update and then build them out again. This can quickly become a lot of work and delays the process. Or if they are omitted, production may try to guess what you’d want. Do you really want developers guessing what marketing wants?
They are difficult or impossible to extract copy from. True, you can cut and paste copy from some PDFs, though it’s not always intuitive and, in my experience, more often than not these documents are locked. And it’s not possible with most other types of image comps. You don’t want production retyping the copy you worked so hard to finalize, right? Because that is what they’ll do if they have to.

Comps can be helpful to give production a visual guide, particularly when introducting a new layout or design. But a Word document is a better handoff for copy. For one thing, you don’t want production retyping your text or making guesses about what to use for ALT text. If you expect production to catch every variance from a comp from an e-mail message, you will probably be disappointed.

Your hand-off document should track changes or at least mark them in comments (doing both is best). Try to make the document look as close to the final copy as possible by including images and using table cells to lay them out alongside your copy. Every image should have ALT text and, if they are clickable, a link. (And why not make them clickable – people do click images, often more than text!) Format your text to look like your comp, matching or at least approximating color and size.

Now don’t get me wrong, comps still have their place: They make great redlines. It’s always valuable to include them with detailed layout specs such as gutter widths (if production is building the layout), fonts and color codes in conjunction with a good copy document. Then production can pull the text and links from your Word document and refer to the comp when laying it out and applying the formatting.

The bottom line here is to anticipate how production will use your hand-off documents and work to minimize the back and forth at the end of the process, where things are most likely to slip.

Where TweetDeck falls short and how to fix it

Wednesday, Apr 22nd, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Social Networking, Twitter | Tags: Facebook, Twitter

TweetDeck

I recently downloaded TweetDeck, overcoming my aversion to installing Adobe Air (I think it’s because I expected it would force a reboot; it didn’t!). Based on all of the tweetbuzz, I frankly expected more – though I do quite like it and have made it my preferred desktop Twitter tool.

By default, at least at my screen resolution, I can see four columns of viewable tweets and Facebook status updates, which is great – but really it’s on the beginning of what I believe it could do. To be fair, it’s only a beta program now but there’s some untapped potential here that I wanted to examine after using it for a few weeks.

Overlay option

My main TweetDeck columns are populated by All Friends, Facebook, Replies and Direct Messages. These last two are just wasted space for me most of the time. Unless you are a serious power user, you probably only get @replies every day or so and direct messages even less often. A good option would be to let the user select to overlay these on top of the rightmost visible column(s) only when something new comes in. This overlay approach already exists in TweetDeck when you click on someone’s profile, so why not put this code to even better use.

That would give me back two columns I could use for groups to better segment my incoming tweets. And speaking of adding columns, groups are great but what about saving filters as columns too? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a column populated solely by retweets?

Power users know that you can click the filter button on a Twitter column and enter a keyword or character such as “?” to find any questions that need answering, or “RT” to find the retweets of the things other people thought worthy of sharing with their networks. This is particularly helpful if you follow a thousand of more people, since at that point reading every tweet would be a full-time job. Instead, you need to mine for the nuggets of interest. Something on the news about Obama? Just enter “Obama” into the filter box and see what the people you’re monitoring have to say.

Note: You can enter a Search term such as “RT” or “Obama” and it will be added as a new column. But this groks everything on Twitter, which is great for some topics but if you use it for “RT” you will be drowning in retweets.

Make your own decks

It took me a couple of days to notice that you can add additional “off-screen” columns to the right of your visible ones. And even now that I know, I really hate it. Horizontal scrolling is just wrong. I’d much rather have the ability to create sets of columns (let’s call them profiles or tweetsets). This would make TweetDeck much more manageable. You could create sets of however many columns easily fit on your screen and then use dropdown selector to quickly flip between them depending on your task or frame of mind.

Another feature I expected but didn’t find is multiple Twitter account support. I use one Twitter account for work and another for my gaming blog. Here’s where profiles would really shine! One or more tweetsets for work, others for play.

Nips and tucks

Now I don’t know if it will be TweetDeck that pioneers this, but someone really needs to create a method to quickly view people’s tweets mixed with their @replies. So if you see an interesting tweet, you can quickly jump to the responses – almost like reading a chat log. This is the heart of Twitter interactivity, yet everyone seems to bury it so that it takes far too much work to easily access.

This is finicky, but it would be great if there was setting in TweekDeck to move names before the tweets. They are so far away from the picture that I often get mixed up about who is tweeting what when I’m quickly scanning.

One final suggestion: a mute button. The incoming tweet alert sounds are nice when I’m not busy cranking away on a project, but they can be distracting. I could simply quit TweetDeck or press the mute button on my laptop, but one more button on the already busy TweetDeck interface isn’t going to make it implode.

Or will it? What do you think – is TweetDeck just the way you like it, or would you appreciate some of these suggested improvements?

Case in Point: When marketers underestimate their audience

Tuesday, Apr 21st, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Customer Focus, Games, Marketing

One of my deepest passions is gaming, and I have a particular love for casual games since they are great pick-up-and-play options for busy gamers like myself. I developed and maintain BusyGamerNation.com to help other likeminded gamers find resources to keep up with gaming news and to advocate on their behalf.

So when I find a code for a free game on my cherry tomatoes container, I’m inclined to give it a try. Though I was a bit dismayed at what I found:

Cherubs Tomatoes Match-3 game (click to play)

This “game” shows a lack of knowledge of the marketer’s target audience, which – as I know from my time working in casual games – is older women. Sure, it’s a Match-3 puzzler but it’s a) extremely dated and b) goes against the expectation of what a free game code should deliver.

Your average housewife has moved beyond the simple online Match-3. Games like Bejeweled Blitz and CSI – The Game are much more diverting than mindlessly matching a few branded icons together. And game codes are more typically redeemed for full-featured downloadable games, not a simple Web game that you don’t really even need a code for (the code directs you, but once you’re there you could share the link to the actual game).

The game does match with the collection of games offered in the Kid Friendly “Fun Zone” but all but the smallest children would be quickly bored by this frail offering. My own 6-year-old is already hooked on Nintendo DS and plays more complex games like Avatar and Kirby. His matching game of choice is the much deeper Pokemon Trozei. In fact, two of the three games currently in the Fun Zone (High Flying Cherubs and Make a Match) are better than this basic Match-3 clone. (The third is a print-a-PDF coloring page.)

There are a few ways this campaign could have been better conceived. The code could have unlocked a more full-featured downloadable game. Nature Sweet might have partnered with a casual game company to create a branded version of a successful franchise, such as a hidden object game (find the hidden Cherubs!) or platformer (Cherub’s jumping adventure in the land of the evil weeds!). Or they could have created a richer version of the Match-3 game with power-ups, leaderboards, and weekly prizes for top scorers.

Instead, the majority of casual game-savvy customers who take the time to enter their codes and play this game will be left with bad tastes in their mouths. Which was probably NOT the campaign’s goal.

Work Samples – Community newsletters

Friday, Apr 17th, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Community, Newsletters, Work Samples | Tags: Community

One of the services I provide (also a passion!) is planning and writing e-mail newsletters. My early career was in journalism, but in the mid-’90s I fell in love with the Internet and this necessitated a jump to a technology publisher where I was one third of the gopher/Web team. (Jacqui was another third, but that’s another story.)

This led me down the path of webmastering for awhile before I settled in at Microsoft, where I paired my love of creating content with developing technology-based solutions. There I actually wrote and helped launch the first HTML newsletter on Microsoft.com and quickly became the go-to person for e-newsletters.

Since then, I’ve become passionate about community, and newsletters are still a great tool for this. Your e-mail content shouldn’t just be a blast out to customers with a call to action (though this is important too). The best e-mail newsletters draw members in and make them feel part of the community of people who interact with your site or product.

When I was at HealthTalk, one of my first tasks was to overhaul electronic communications. Up until then, newsletters had been sporadic and focused just on getting members to sign up for webcasts. Alas, many of the networks became dormant for months at a time, so my job was to develop a format that engaged members regardless of how often they had new programs available to them.

My solution, ultimately, was to begin drawing these members in with questions and topics and then sharing back their answers, as you can see in this example from the Rheumatoid Arthritis network :

HealthTalk newsletter

These stories really grabbed readers and made them want to be a part of the network, even during periods when there wasn’t much other new content for them. I also lobbied the producers and business development folks I worked with to develop new sources of content, and eventually convinced the company’s founder to pilot a blog despite a fair amount of internal resistance. The blog was so successful that shortly after I left, they launched phase 2 of my proposal and added member advocate blogs to each of the active networks.

For the Big Fish Games Atlantis gaming community, my focus was a little different. There already existed a real-time chat engine in all of the online games, and I managed a team of remote moderators who interacted daily with players to facilitate fun and resolve problems. I replaced the ad-only “newsletter” with a longer, content-heavy publication and launched the 5 Questions column to profile a different Big Fish Games employee each month. The goal was to open a window into how the people at the company were actively working to improve the community and provide hints and, where possible, announcements of upcoming games and features.

This just happens to be the one where I was the subject:

Big Fish Games online community newsletter

In a future post I’ll tackle headline copywriting, a task I performed daily for several years and have some helpful insights to share.

Why I let go of RSS and embraced social media

Thursday, Apr 16th, 2009 by DaveK | 0 Comments
Filed under: Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter | Tags: Community, Facebook, Twitter

I recently had a Twitter conversation with a former colleague whom I follow on both Twitter and Facebook. I mentioned that I had traded RSS for social media and hadn’t looked back. Despite being more active than me on both of these services, she was surprised – but thought that it made sense since all of the good links and media generally bubble up through tweets and status updates.

This may be old news for some, but I hadn’t put my finger on why this was significant until that moment. Personally, I had long ago burned out on wading through tons of blog and news RSS feeds just to find those rare stories that I deemed worthy of interest. The signal-to-noise ratio was out of control, and the articles and posts became increasingly time consuming to pore through every day. I felt chained to my feed aggregator and, when it ceased to be fun and necessary for work, I quit.

As I ramped my activity on social network sites these past few years, I re-discovered those interesting news nuggets but now married to community (i.e., the opportunity to comment, share, interact) and with a more personable conveyance. It’s one thing to simply read a news story, it’s another to see why your high school buddy or former colleague thinks it’s interesting.

And, as a bonus, posts are typically 140 characters or less, so they’re easy to scan and clear. If I have a complaint, it would be that I see the same stories again and again – even more so now that Facebook has become Twitter 2 and even accepts tweets directly in lieu of status updates. But then, sometimes it takes 2-3 exposures before I’m motivated to click that link or watch that video. It’s the same with advertising and marketing: It usually takes repeated exposure to a brand or ad message before the customer takes any action. With the exception of straight retweets, each time I see the same post there’s a new perspective added.

All I know is that I find my feeds much more interesting now that they are socially shared and editorialized, and I enjoy the work of keeping up with news and memes and whatever else is buzzing out on the Interwebs since I can do it with my friends.

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