As a marketing and brand strategy person, one of my chief responsibilities is to stay up to date on trends, techniques, and news in the industry. In the course of my Internet travels I run across all kinds of companies that have invested in some kind of Web presence…and that turn me off.  Here, in no particular order, are three mistakes that belong on the wall of shame:

The lights are on, but nobody’s home.  Have you ever gone to a fancy-schmancy website, only to get the feeling that it was designed and implemented by ghostly phantoms who disappeared soon after they hit “publish”?  Over the years, I’ve come to respect marketing as a living, breathing entity, much like a company’s business plan or the business itself.  If you’ve never bothered to update the age-old news on your home page or fix the multitude of broken links, the time is now!  You can’t afford to lose a client who gets bored by stale or broken content.

I don’t care.  You’d be surprised how many marketing pieces are shamefully inaccurate or boast horrid typos and grammatical errors.  I was recently at a workshop sponsored by a highly respected community organization and presented by a company that boasts a long client list and a great pedigree.  Surprise!  The collateral they left on my desk had not one, but four simple typos that, frankly, made the company descend a few notches in my estimation.  Is anyone perfect?  No.  Does spell-check exist for a reason?  Yes.

You’re gonna have to find the baby somewhere in the bathwater.  There’s a reason designers love white space.  It helps point the eye to important information, creating a pleasant user experience.  If your site is so cluttered with badges, feeds, useless graphics, widgets, ads, and irrelevant text that I can’t figure out who you are or why your services can benefit me, I’m gonna move on along with my now pitifully addled and confused impression of your business.  As Dorothy Parker said, “Brevity is the essence of lingerie.”

Photo courtesy of bolobilly

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Spring 2009 is all about social media education, and Twitter is on the tongues of everyone from devoted power-users to confused newbs who can barely use a mouse.

Despite all the hype, news programs and even devotees haven’t quite hit their mark.  I keep running across the same question over and over again…why should I care about Twitter?  Who gives a hoot about whether you had a croissant for breakfast, anyway?

In lieu of writing a thesis on the subject (and if you really want to hear the advanced reasoning behind my use of Twitter, pretty please come to my new Twitter class June 25 and July 9), I’ll give some simple answers.

Why should you care about Twitter?

It’s all about conversation.  If you aren’t having a conversation with your potential clients and colleagues via social media, you’re missing the boat.  Twitter doesn’t just give you an unprecedented chance to engage with your base…it allows you to start, shape, and exert a degree of cotrol over the conversation that just can’t be achieved by a press release, a sound bite, or an advertorial.  And the options are endless:  you can talk directly to your base, ask them questions, gauge their opinions, solicit their feedback, be helpful and offer advice.

It’s happening.  Whether or not you like it, Twitter has taken off in a big way.  Does every business need Twitter?  No way.  But don’t dismiss it because it’s new, trendy, and admittedly overhyped.  The amount of creativity and excitement generated by Twitter is truly energizing and engaging…if you know how to use it properly.

It’s opportunity.  Opportunity to find out what your customers and your colleagues care about.  Opportunity to make mistakes, hone that brand, and get deep into voice and vision.  Opportunity to dip your toe into a huge conversation and watch it morph before your eyes.  Opportunity to be on the cutting edge before it changes into something else (just look at the evolution of hashtags over the past few months). And, yes, opportunity to get business.  I can count twenty or more instances in which Twitter has brought me business or allowed me to refer business to someone else in the last two months alone. Now that’s opportunity.

Sure, you may think you don’t care about whether your client had a donut or a croissant for breakfast…until you use that fact as the launchpad for a personal conversation.  Twitter can seem scary:  it’s immediate, vast, and fast.  It’s also vibrant, thrilling, exciting, maddening, and hilarious.  Go ahead…dip that toe in.

Readers, why do you care about (or shun) Twitter?

Photo courtesy of godsmoon

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From Publisher’s Lunch:

Non-fiction: General/Other

Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, an inspiring look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength and survival, and gleaning the wisdom and solace they offer to help women navigate these challenging times and find their inner heroine, to Jeanette Perez at Harper, in a nice deal, by Larry Weissman at Larry Weissman Literary (World).

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