Notes From the Desk

Early in August KISS introduced a new fan interactive experience to their show. A new program called Liveshare by cooliris. Any fan at a KISS concert carrying a Droid or iPhone can take a photo with the Liveshare app and post it to the jumbotron on stage.

Whether or not you are a fan of KISS musically, this is a brilliant move on their part to include the fans. With this interaction they have created a show that goes past the band and includes thousands in a group experience. Imagine your face or your photo of the band displayed on stage for everyone to see. The KISS Liveshare has given ownership of the show to their fans.

This should be the goal of every online forum on the web. Yet this is the one thing most struggle to achieve. Often forums are over run with spam or over aggressive moderators. Members of a forum need to feel the same ownership over the forum as a KISS fan does at a concert. When this is achieved the over all interaction will grow beyond imagination.

In a not to distant past the US Postal Service (USPS) was the cats meow. Everything from letters to family, pen pals & bills were sent daily. USPS was so big & popular, they even sponsored a Tour de France winning cycling team. But since this new fad called the internet & email caught on, USPS has been struggling to find stable footing & constantly making, not fully thought out, changes with little success.

Currently USPS is surviving off of SPAM letters & proper etiquette. When it becomes socially acceptable to email wedding invites & thank you cards, people will cancel their mail boxes faster then they are ditching land-lines.

So where to go from here? Cancel Saturday service, rate hike, or private sector? Who knows but there is a lesson here for every business to learn from and prepare for in the digital age. It all goes back to Aesop’s fable of the “Tortoise & the Hare”, where slow & steady wins the race. But in reality the hare kicks the tortoise’s tail often. For those that want it spelled out, USPS is the tortoise & the internet/email is the hare.

I’m not suggesting people go crazy and make ill informed decisions on the internet. Once you post it live on the internet, there is no taking it back, it lives on FOREVER……Mwahahahaahhaha. The trick is to constantly look for that next step/technology and mold it into your companies needs. So remember standing still will leave you like the once mighty USPS, swimming in the middle of the ocean with no clear direction to swim.

Advertising products or services has become trickery in the new millennium. People can use TiVo to remove TV commercials and you can use Zinio.com to view magazines without the ads in them. So how do people reach a big audience without being filtered out? A simple answer is social media.

A great example of corporations taking advantage of social media is Burger King with their recently launched Facebook application Whopper Sacrifice. It’s a simple idea to drive people to the Burger King website and restaurants. You delete 10 friends off of Facebook and get a free Whopper.

This is a great idea to get people involved in the campaign. It’s not a stagnant commercial or ad in a magazine. It’s a living breathing advertisement people can interact with and get rewarded for taking part. And for Burger King, Whopper Sacrifice takes very little time or money to keep it running after the initial cost of building the application.

This is just one example of using social media for advertising. There are many more out there from the “Will it Blend Series” on YouTube featuring a high-end blender destroying ordinary objects to the OK Go Videos that brought the band to the main stream. It’s all about breaking the mold we have been trained to follow and discovering a new way to promote our product or services. And usually when we can do this, the outcome is cheaper and more successful than traditional advertising.

Just like the rest of the business world, company newsletters need to evolve and change. No longer can you send out a monthly snail mail newsletter or email blast to get people’s attention. Snail mail newsletters take too long to build and are either thrown out by the person receiving it or already out of date. And junk filters catch email blasts more often than not. There is a smarter way. Switch to a blog that is hosted on your website.

As I mentioned before, junk mail is trashed right away while email blasts are caught by spam filters. The great thing about blogs is they are usually accompanied with RSS feeds. When a user signs up for your blog’s RSS feed, it will automatically update whenever a new article/entry is posted. Also, the users want to receive the information this way so you don’t have to worry about the spam filter blocking you or being trashed.

A blog also breaks the mold of the once-a-month mentality of a newsletter. When you send out a newsletter, you have about one week to capitalize on the momentum the newsletter has generated with potential clients or the opportunity is lost. With a blog you should be adding articles weekly or even daily. This creates a constant buzz about your business or product.

Building your newsletter into a blog has great benefits for your website, especially with SEO. As a blog, search engines will index your articles (Yahoo, Google, Ask) and they will see your site growing with more relevant information. This is a good building block to help crack that top 20 for search results. Remember, the majority of people searching for products or services never get past the first 20 results, so this can be huge in helping you reach that goal.

The last great thing about using a blog to replace your traditional newsletter is it can be a conversation starter with potential clients. Potential clients can leave comments on your site about a recent article, opening up the chance for a dialog. With that, a relationship can be formed to create a customer for life.

While traditional newsletters are by no means dead, their role has changed. Not everyone uses the web for all his or her information. So if you still need to produce a traditional newsletter, use it in conjunction with your blog. A possibility is to continually post your articles in the blog and instead of sending out a paper newsletter monthly send it out quarterly highlighting the most popular entries in the blog. The same can be done with email blasts.

When the word CAPTCHA is mentioned most people scratch their heads and show an odd expression on their face. A CAPTCHA is the numbers or letters you need to type at the end of a survey or contact form to prove you are not a computer/SPAM. CAPTCHA’s are appearing all over the Internet almost as fast as spam is (and sometimes just as annoying).

So the question is, when does CAPTCHA become appropriate to use? To be honest there is no cookie cutter answer for this. Each form or survey needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. But a good rule of thumb is that all surveys and forums should have a CAPTCHA. SPAM can kill a forum and destroy survey results.

A contact form generally should not include a CAPTCHA. There are other methods that a developer can put into place to help prevent spam getting through the form.  The reason for not automatically placing a CAPTCHA on a contact form is that contact forms are where new customers come to get in touch with you. You do not want to add an extra step that might discourage them.

A final note to remember is that SPAM will always find a way. It’s like water finding the path of least resistance, it will get there eventually. So take some steps to help slow it down by having a CAPTCHA or removing the email link on your site and replacing it with a contact form.