Where Can I Get More of This Sample?

If you’ve ever walked through Manhattan you can’t get very far without someone outside a store trying to hand you something. I assume it’s similar in many cities around the world.

You generally aren’t interested in what’s being handed to you. You might take it because it’s easier than not and then proceed to place whatever was handed to you in your pocket or the nearest garbage can.

When the bar of soap was handed to me I never glanced up and visually processed the store and several months later I can’t even tell you what street I was walking down at the time. I think it was somewhere on Columbus Avenue, but I’m really not sure.

Assuming I got home, tried the soap, and liked it, the only way I could ever buy more would be if the soap or packaging told me where to buy more. The problem is neither had any information on it.

• The packaging should have included store name, url, phone number, or other contact information.
• The store name and/or contact information could have been engraved in the soap itself. It would wash away, but give a few extra days to remember the information.
• The packaging (with information above) could have been designed in a way that made me want to keep it at least until the soap was gone.
• A business card or some keepsake could have been included with the sample.

My guess is the store was more concerned with keeping the sample small and the packaging generic in order to save on the costs of the sample. Unfortunately this limited any chance they had for success in marketing their product.

They relied on me remembering where I was when the soap was handed to me, which wasn’t likely to happen.

Better would have been to give a larger sample that allowed for important information to be included and ideally saved after removing the packaging, even if it meant less samples could be handed out.

Missed Opportunities in Social Communities

Recently one of the members of my small business forum became concerned that forum posts were appearing on her Google Places page. The suggestion was offered to remove her forum signature so as not to link back to her site and thus break the connection for Google.

This led to a discussion of customers connecting your business to your online profiles. Another member David made a valid point that there are legitimate reasons for not wanting the two connected.

For example not wanting to share your marketing or pricing strategies. Customers may not appreciate how much you markup your product or how you try to sell to them. He pointed to another member who often complains about specific customers.

• If you say something online you have to accept that someone can find it and connect it to other things you’ve said online, even if you make some efforts to be anonymous.
• If you post strategy questions as theoretical discussions you mostly remove the potential for customers being upset.
• There’s never a reason to talk bad publicly about your clients or customers. Have those conversations in private.

Wanting to separate your business and something like a forum profile might be a valid concern, however it takes more effort to remain anonymous than removing a signature link.

With a simple search on business names I could find forum posts for those people who had removed their signatures. One has mentioned their business in several threads. Another uses the business name as a forum username.

Removing signature links isn’t preventing anyone from connecting business and profile for those members. It’s only making it difficult for people who first find the profile to get to the business.

It only takes one person to discover and publicize the connection for your profile to no longer be anonymous. Better for you to not hide the connection than let others discover it.

In the end I think it takes as much energy to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing as it does to simply say the right thing. For the same amount of effort why not take advantage of the marketing opportunity to connect forum profile and business?

Marketing is hard enough as it is without you throwing away opportunities.

Maximize Your Marketing Efforts

Not too long ago I mentioned my view of multi-tasking. I think it’s silly to think any of us can honestly do multiple things at the same time and do them well. The truth is what we think of as multi-tasking is really bouncing back and forth quickly between several tasks.

I’d rather think of multi-tasking as having one task serve multiple purposes.

For example when I spend time doing research for a blog post I naturally work toward the goal of publishing the post while at the same time learning something new. One task that helps me accomplish two goals.

If you’re going to spend time on a forum or other social community why not take advantage of the marketing opportunity to promote your brand? Why not have one task serve two goals?

Think about how you currently market yourself and how you could better coordinate your efforts.

• Do your social profiles link to each other?
• Do they link to your site?
• Does your site link to your profiles?
• Do you practice good internal linking?
• Do you represent your brand well in everything you do?
• Are you consistent in the things you say publicly?
• Is your marketing focused on a few central messages about your product?

Many business throw tactics against the wall and hope one or two stick. Instead why not spend some time to develop a strategy and have all of your tactics work in harmony with that strategy?

Let your efforts in one place reinforce your efforts in another instead of having them work against each other. Create unity and harmony in your marketing.

If you’re going to spend time interacting with a community of people who might be potential customers, doesn’t it make sense to let those people know about your business and make it easy for them to get there?

Summary

We all miss opportunities. None of us is going to be able to capitalize on everything. However, so many missed opportunities could just as easily not be missed. Often we have to actively work at missing them, which just seems silly.

Think about the different things you do right now. Think about the potential opportunities in all those things to market your business.

Is there a simple change you can make like adding a link in a forum signature or connecting various social media profiles? Are you spending all your time convincing someone to buy from you and then forgetting to tell them how and where they can do so?

Ask yourself if you’re forgetting to include important details necessary to achieve your marketing goals. Ask too if you’re passing up free opportunities to get your message across and enhance your brand.

I still have that sample bar of soap. About an hour or so after having it handed to me I took it out of my pocked on the train ride out of the city and realized I’d never remember where I got it. I put it back in my pocket and starting thinking about writing a post like this one. The soap smells nice. Too bad I don’t know where to get to more.

This is the last post in this series on stickiness. It’s also the post that ties everything together as stories encompass everything we’ve been talking about these last few weeks as we’ll see.

One last time here’s a quick review of the 6 Key Variables of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs) as put forth by the Heath Brothers in their book Made to Stick.

• Simplicity – find the core
• Unexpected – surprise gets attention and mystery keeps it
• Concreteness– use details to help people understand and remember
• Credibility – help people believe
• Emotion – make people care
• Story – get people to act

You may want to read or review the prior posts in this series if you haven’t been following along.

Stories

People have been telling stories since as long as there were people and for good reason. Beyond their entertainment value, stories are an excellent way to communicate complex information in a memorable way. Stories are remembered and stories are shared.

Stories provide 2 things that make them very powerful

• Simulation – knowledge about how to act
• Inspiration – motivation to act

Notice that both of the above are about getting people to take action. Action to share your idea with others. Action to buy your products or inquire about your services. Action to subscribe to your blog. Stories get people to convert.

Stories also include most everything we’ve been talking about till now. While stories can be complex they usually can be described by a very simple plot. A good story contains unexpected twists. By their very nature they use concrete details, which makes them credible. And stories are packed with emotion. We care about the characters in them, especially the protagonist.

Stories ultimately place knowledge into a framework that’s often similar to our day-to-day existence and they inspire us in a variety of ways.

Simulation

At first thought stories seem to be enjoyed passively. We sit back and watch tv or a movie. You listen when someone tells you a tale. You lay down to read a book or curl up with one in a comfy chair. All the doing seems to reside in story itself and not the audience.

Yet we’ve all been drawn into a book while reading or become engrossed watching a move. We empathize with the situations and identify with the protagonist.

In an experiment performed by three psychologists, two groups were asked to read a story. In the first group an important object was associated with the protagonist. He carried the object with him. In the second group the object was separated from the protagonist. He left it behind.

A few sentences later the story threw in a reference to the object. The group that thought the object had been separated from the protagonist took longer to read the sentence with the reference to the object than those who thought the protagonist had it with him.

The implication is that we do more than visualize a story when reading. We create a geographic simulation of it. Those who read the object was left behind simulated leaving it behind. The audience had left the object behind as well, which is why it took them longer to read about that object a few sentences later. It was no longer with them the same way it was no longer with the protagonist.

Simulation is active. It evokes the same parts of the brain as the physical action being simulated would have evoked. People drinking water, but told to imagine that it’s lemon juice actually salivate more. And when people drinking lemon juice are told to imagine it’s water they actually salivate less.

Mental simulation helps people

• Manage emotions
• Solve problems
• Build skills

Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. The more something simulates the real world actions that would be taken, the more effective the simulation will be. Think flight simulators and this shouldn’t be too hard to understand. It’s not actually flying the plane, but it’s pretty close.

The right story creates effective simulation.

• Stories and simulation – Part One
• Stories and simulation – Part Two

Inspiration

Stories inspire and motivate because in their telling we’ve experienced simulation. We identify with the characters, mainly the protagonist, and having lived the protagonist overcoming an obstacle or solving a problem we feel we can do the same. Stories provide an example of success.

In examining inspirational stories, the Heath Brothers came to the conclusion that there were 3 main plot structures to inspirational stories.

• Challenge plot—overcoming a daunting obstacle (David vs Goliath)
• Connection plot—developing relationships that bridge a gap (The Good Samaritan)
• Creativity plot—making a mental breakthrough (Newton and the apple)

Challenge plots inspire us because they appeal to perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder and take on new challenges. The key is overcoming an obstacle and having simulated overcoming an obstacle in the story we’re inspired to do the same.

Think Star Wars or pretty much any action story ever told.

Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others and be more tolerant of others. They make us want to work together and love one another. The key is developing a relationship where a gap exists. People coming together who you wouldn’t expect to come together so readily.

Think Romeo and Juliet or most any romance story.

Creativity plots inspire us to do something different, to be creative. They inspire us to experiment with new approaches to a problem. They lead us to innovation and problem solving. The key to the story is making a mental breakthrough.

Think MacGyver.

One important idea with stories is you don’t necessarily need to write them yourself. You could, but what’s most important is to recognize the above elements in stories you come across. Perhaps one of your customers improved their conversion rate (challenge plot) by hiring you to redesign their site. That would make a great challenge story you could share with potential leads.

Perhaps one of your employees has made a breakthrough with some design pattern (creativity plot). The story could be used to inspire your other employees. You don’t have to write the stories if you can recognize an inspiration plot that matches an idea you’re trying to spread.

Additional Resources

Below are some additional articles that talk about the 3 plot types described above.

• Three story plots we humans dearly love
• It is All Storytelling You Know: Part 3 (PDF)
• It is All Storytelling You Know: Part 4 (PDF)
• Stories: They Take You There

And some additional articles on plot development and stories in general.

• The Elements of Plot Development
• Plots & Stories

Springboard Stories

A springboard story is a story that shows how an existing problem might change and how it might be solved. Springboard stories show possibilities.. They have several built in advantages.

• They combat skepticism
• They create buy-in
• They mobilize people to act

By telling stories with visible goals and barriers you focus people on problem solving, which is ultimately what mobilizes people to act. Springboard stories mobilize us because we’ve simulated the problem solving of the protagonist, but even more because they lead us to thinking about possible solutions to our own problems.

They become springboards (hence the name) for those of us who hear the story.

Springboard stories (PDF) work because they aren’t directly spelling things out for people. Being direct invites debate, judgment, and criticism, which leads people to argue against your idea. A story on the other hand engages people and gets them participating along with you to solve the problem. It puts them on your side.

With a springboard story you and your audience work together, you cooperate, you work in harmony. Telling stories with visible goals and obstacles gets your audience thinking of a solution. They put the audience in problem solving mode thinking of ways to help the main character overcome his or her problem while at the same time thinking how they can solve their own problems.

Each member of the audiences uses the story as a springboard to their own slightly different destination. They use it as a springboard to solve their own problems.

Telling Stories Through Design

When we think of a story we tend to think narrative form, a sequence of events usually told in a linear fashion. Stories don’t have to be told this way. Flashbacks for example remove the linear constraint. If you think about the people you know you learned the stories of their lives slowly and in random order.

One definition I found for a story is the following

The background information regarding something

Sounds similar to what we might do in creating a website.

Every visual element you place on a page communicates something. The sum of these communications is the story you tell with your site. You create a stronger story when

• Your design elements are consistent in the message they communicate
• All parts of your design are in harmony
• Visual design matches the business message
• Copy is written with a consistent voice

The more unified your design across every page of your site the stronger the story you tell.

We can still create a sense of narrative though through web design. Visitors will take a path through your site. Each page in that path is an opportunity to move the story further. Some pages might create drama and tension, while others relieve that tension. We can create a mystery along the visitor’s path.

Different people take different paths. You can create personas to determine who typical visitors will be and to better design a path for each persona. It’s impossible to predict in advance the exact path every visitor of your site will take, but you can predict some common patterns in the paths personas might take.

Mostly you’ll create stories by creating unity and harmony between all of your design elements and by consistently communicating the same or similar simple message with everything you do.

Additional Resources

Below are some articles on visual storytelling. Each should give you a better sense of how to weave a story into your design. You’ll notice a few have the same title, but each is a different article.

• Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data (PDF)
• Storytelling Through Editorial Design: The Ultimate Communication Weapon
• Storytelling by Design
• Toolkit: Tell a Story Through Visual Arts
• Better Writing Through Design
• Storytelling by Design
• Better User Experience With Storytelling
• Experience Themes: How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products
• Storytelling through design

Summary

By their very nature stories encompass most of the SUCCESs elements and in doing so defeat the curse of knowledge.

Stories are concrete and filled with detail. We emotionally identify with the characters, especially the protagonist and stories are often filled with unexpected twists. A good story is believable and builds credibility, even when it’s not true. The hardest part in finding or telling a story is making it simple.

Stories work, but they need to reflect your core message. That’s what you’re trying to communicate after all and it does no good to tell a story that gets people to act on a different idea.

Stories work because they provide simulation and inspiration, which lead people to action. Look for an inspirational plot that matches the action you want someone to take based on your idea.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk through of Stickiness. If you can learn to incorporate more of the SUCCESs variables into your ideas and communication you stand a much better chance of creating sticky ideas. You’ll find people remember you and your message, that they understand, believe, and care about what you have to say and even better will share your idea with others.

In the end your sticky ideas will get people to act, whether that means spreading word about you or buying your product.

Once again let me recommend Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s an enjoyable book to read with much more detail about the points I’ve tried to cover in this series. You can read an excerpt from the introduction to the book here. The book is filled with great stories that truly illustrate the points of SUCCESs. It’s one of the best marketing books I’ve ever read and I can’t recommend it enough.

We’re most of the way through this series on stickiness. We’ve created a simple idea, learned how to attract and keep attention, used concrete details to help others understand, and found sources of credibility so our audience will trust our idea. Today it’s about making people care and to make them care we use the power of emotion.

As we’ve done in the previous posts in the series let’s start with a quick review of the 6 Key Variables of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs) as put forth by the Heath Brothers in their book Made to Stick.

• Simplicity – find the core
• Unexpected – surprise gets attention and mystery keeps it
• Concreteness– use details to help people understand and remember
• Credibility – help people believe
• Emotion – make people care
• Story – get people to act

You may want to read or review the prior posts in this series if you haven’t been following along.

Emotional

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will
—Mother Teresa

There are 4 main ways to build emotion in your idea.

• the power of association
• an appeal self-interest
• an appeal to identity
• focusing on the particular and not the pattern

Each can make people care more about your idea.

The Power of Association

The simplest way to make people care about something is through the power of association. Form an association between your message and something your audience already cares about and your idea will be able to borrow some of that caring.

When talking about concreteness I mentioned metaphor, simile, and analogy as a good way to associate your idea with the familiar. If you find the right metaphor you not only borrow the details to help understanding, but you borrow the emotion people feel for the metaphor.

If your audience cares about the environment, find something environmental about your idea. If your audience cares about sports find the component of your idea that relates to sports.

However be careful with what you associate your ideas with. Association is easy to overuse and the more something has been used in comparison, the less effective it will be to compare the next thing to it.

The power of association wanes the more it’s used.

The important thing to understand about association is that to get people to care about your idea you need to tap into something they already care about and make a connection.

Appealing to Self-Interest

One obvious way to make people care about your idea is to make it about them. Appeal to people’s self-interest. What’s in it for me, after all.

This is why you see so many recommendations to talk benefits over features. Benefits are about your audience. Features are about the product. It’s also why you often see people recommending using the word “you” in copywriting. Using the word “you” can’t help but make it all about you.

Another way to appeal to people’s self interest is to get them to imagine they’re already doing something. Get them to picture themselves using your product. Show images of people like them using your products.

When you get your audience to imagine themselves using your products and services, you cast your audience in the leading role of the story. The whole thing becomes about them.

Even better this lends tangibility to the benefits you describe. The benefits move from being abstract for anyone to something more concrete benefiting each individual member of your audience.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Self-Interest

In 1954 Abraham Maslow wanted to understand what motivated people. He boiled things down into several categories of needs often displayed in the form of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid were our physiological needs and at the top was self-actualization.

If you’re unfamiliar with Maslow’s pyramid you can look at the image above or read Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs, which is a post I wrote for Smashing Magazine a few months ago. That post will include plenty of links to other sources about Maslow.

Maslow’s pyramid was later expanded to include several new categories toward the top of the pyramid. The new groupings from top to bottom are:

• Transcendence
• Self-actualization
• Aesthetic
• Learning
• Esteem
• Belonging
• Safety
• Physical

Maslow’s pyramid is often used by marketers who stress benefits appealing to the needs on the pyramid. Most tend to focus toward the bottom of the pyramid, mainly the physical, safety, and esteem levels.

Identity is Stronger than Self

In a series of tests where people were asked to choose which of 3 things would motivate them the most and then were asked which of those same 3 things would motivate others the most.

People usually chose the option highest on Maslow’s pyramid for as motivators for themselves and the lower options on the pyramid as motivation for others. We seem think we live in Maslow’s penthouse, while our neighbors live in his basement.

The above might help to explain why marketers using Maslow focus on the bottom levels of the pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is about our self-interest. However since most of us say we’re motivated by the needs at the top of the pyramid it also suggests you can appeal to those needs as well.

Principles matter to us. Ideals matter to us. Both sometimes supersede our immediate self-interest. It also turns out that group interest is sometimes stronger than self interest. We’re motivated not only by what’s in it for me, but what’s in it for my group.

In the 1980s Texas had a litter problem. The state signs suggesting Texans “Please don’t litter” and similar weren’t working. Dan Syrek was hired by the state to help. Syrek featured well known Texas athletes and musicians in commercials. The commercials were similar in showing these famous Texans picking up trash and throwing things away and each ended with the single line

“Don’t mess with Texas”

Polls showed that 73% of Texans could recall the message of the anti-liter campaign and within a year litter had declined 29%. The ads appealed to the group, to people’s identity as Texans.

Our group helps form our identity and often the stronger appeal is to our identity rather than our individual self-interest. We respond to our identity. We care about it. You can make an emotional appeal to people’s identity even when an appeal to self-interest doesn’t work.

Think about your customers and ask how they might define themselves. What groups do they belong to? What is their identity? If you can determine how your customers see themselves and want to see themselves in the future you can tap into and appeal to their identity.

Appealing to the Particular

Once again the curse of knowledge enters into the picture. When we know too much about a subject we start thinking of it in terms of patterns. We think in the abstract. These don’t appeal to people’s emotions though.

We need to get people to take off their analytical hats. Critical thinking isn’t emotional.

Empathy comes not from the general, not from the pattern, not from the abstract, but from the particular, the one. We feel more empathy toward a single individual who is real to us than we do to the abstract concept of humanity. It’s the idea of being concrete all over again and it’s why Mother Teresa focused not on the entire mass, but on a single parishioner.

Most of us know there are many problems in the world. Poverty, hunger, disease. These are all abstract concepts. You know that right now someone somewhere is starving and someone else is serious ill. In fact lots of people are both at this very second and they can’t afford food or medicine. Do you care?

I’m sure you do, though it’s in an abstract way. Are you crying thinking about? Are you rushing out to find, feed, and care for any of those suffering people? Probably not and it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you normal. The abstract, the pattern doesn’t make us feel. It doesn’t connect us emotionally.

On the other hand have you ever noticed that many people who get involved in one charity or another do so after a good friend or family member was affected by what the charity is trying to overcome? If someone you know died of a specific form of cancer you’re more likely to donate money or give your time to charities that deal with that specific form of cancer.

You naturally care about your friend or family member who was affected, which made you care more about a specific charity. We feel a deep sadness when a parent passes away from a disease. We don’t feel that same sadness for the many people we don’t know who also pass away from the same disease.

If you want to make people care you need to appeal to the particular, the one, the individual.

Summary

Chip and Dan have a nice summary at the end of their chapter on the emotional aspects of sticky ideas so I’ll give them the floor for a moment.

We get people to take off analytical hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things people already care about. We appeal to people’s self interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.

And while we should always think about “what’s in it” for our audience, we should remember to stay clear of Maslow’s Basement.

We want people to care as a precursor to making them act. It’s all well and good to have that great idea, get people to notice and understand it and make them believe it. If no one cares about it that’s where it ends. You need to make people care and you do that through emotion.

Next week we’ll continue and conclude by talking about stories and how they provide the knowledge your audience needs to act on your idea and how stories give them the motivation to act as well.

So far in this series on Stickiness we’ve covered the ideas of having a simple message, using the unexpected to attract attention and maintain interest, and using concrete details to make sure your ideas are understood. Today we’ll continue with credibility and how you can ensure your audience believes you and trusts your message.

As usual we’ll start with a quick review of the 6 Key Variables of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs) as put forth by the Heath Brothers in their book Made to Stick.

• Simplicity – find the core
• Unexpected – surprise gets attention and mystery keeps it
• Concreteness– use details to help people understand and remember
• Credibility – help people believe
• Emotion – make people care
• Story – get people to act

If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series you may want to give them a read prior to reading this one as some of what we’ll be looking at here will make more sense in the context of the entire series.

Credibility

Credibility is about the believability of the source of a message or the message itself. Typically that means trusting messenger and/or message as well as seeing authority in either or both.

In order to get people to believe your idea you need to offer some source of credibility and there are 3 basic ways an idea can be seen as having signals of credibility.

• A trusted source external to the idea says it’s true
• The idea itself carries internal trust
• The idea is testable and provable

Each of the above lends credibility to your idea and so can be used as a source. Ideally you’d have all 3, but any can work on its own. It’s not always obvious which will work best with your audience, which is why having more than one source is preferred.

External Credibility

When someone you trust or someone who’s an authority on a subject tells you something about that subject you tend to believe it. The trust you feel for that person is transferred to the idea. The authority he or she carries is given to the idea.

Trust

We trust different people for different reasons.

• Family and friends because of our long standing relationships with them
• People who have previously made the decision we’re about to make because of their relevant experience
• People who have little to gain by us believing them because they have nothing to gain

We know our family and friends and for the most part believe they are being honest with us. That might depend on who your family and friends are of course, but most of the time we’ll trust them to tell the truth. At the very least we know who among them to trust and who not to.

We’ve learned over time which of our friends and family we can believe.

When people have previously done what we’re about to do we trust their experience. They can offer us details we can’t yet know about our impending decision. Testimonials can be powerful in part for this reason.

People who have nothing to gain by our believing them are also believed. The fact that they have nothing to gain gives them no reason to lie to us and no reason not to trust them. Again testimonials come into play. In most cases it should make little difference to someone who’s bought a product whether or not we buy it as well.

Naturally with testimonials you may or may not see them as legitimate. If you suspect the seller as leaving a testimonial for his product you aren’t going to believe that testimonial. The profit motive has come into play. Or perhaps we see a complaint as someone with an axe to grind.

Social proof can be one way to generate external credibility. If 100,000 people already subscribe to a blog it’s probably worth subscribing to. You might see content ranking well in search engines as more credible seeing it either as social proof or as an authority (the search engine) vouching for the content.

There’s something of proof in numbers. If many, many people are telling you something is true you’re more likely to believe it than if one person were telling you it’s true.

Other external sources of trust we can add to websites include the logos of trusted sites and various trust seals from security companies. Links into our sites may be seen as trusted recommendations depending on how you feel about the site linking in. More comments on our blogs display social proof can work as well.

Authority

Authorities are usually people with expertise in a subject. You’ll likely trust your plumber to tell you information about the pipes running under your sink. You trust your doctor about your health. Authority can trump trust.

While I trust many of my friends, none are experts in nuclear physics. I might trust them to point me to a source on nuclear physics, but wouldn’t believe their advice on how to split an atom without an outside source corroborating.

Ideally you want to be seen as an authority on your subject so when you have an idea or message to convey your authority status alone can lend credibility to the idea. External credibility means external to the idea and not external to the messenger of that idea. You are external to your ideas and authority you’ve built up on a general subject can be transferred to specific ideas about that subject.

Failing authority status on your own you’d want to get someone who is seen as an authority to confirm or validate your idea. Similarly if you can build a trusting relationship with an audience it’s more likely that audience will believe your message. And again should you not have built that trusting relationship yet, you’d want to find someone else your audience trusts to validate your idea.

One reason many business will choose to start a blog is to build a source of external credibility. Over time you can show your knowledge about a subject and build authority for yourself. You also get to build a trusting relationship with your audience over time. A blog done well can be a great way to set you up as a credible source for your later ideas.

When it comes to the design of your site it’s likely that a professional looking design will carry more credibility than an amateur one. By designing based on sound and proven principles an audience is more likely to see you as an authority.

Naturally that would be true if you’re a designer, but it’s also true no matter what business you’re in. An unprofessional site sends a message your business isn’t to be trusted. It sends a message that you don’t care enough about your site so why would you take care of your customers. It’s similar to the difference of having a store in prime real estate and selling your merchandise on portable stand on the street.

Internal Credibility

We won’t always have an authority or trusted source at hand to verify our claims and we may not have yet built a trusting relationship with our audience. It’s possible you may be seen as having something to gain with your idea losing some credibility due to that potential for gain.

Fortunately your idea itself can carry some credibility on its own. Your idea can have internal credibility. In fact we talked about one way last week.

Details Are Believable

Concrete details are more believable than abstract concepts. Concrete details make an idea seem more tangible and more real, thus the idea becomes more believable.

Vivid details boost credibility.

It’s why case studies (PDF) can be so powerful. It’s also why the the most aesthetically pleasing designs are the ones that add a detailed touch. It’s why the most usable designs are those that get the small details right. Sweat the details and put in that extra effort to get them right and you gain credibility

However the details should reinforce, symbolize, and support the core idea. They need to be in harmony with it. They need to be truthful to the core message you’re trying to convey. Adding details for the sake of detail is not what we’re looking for. Adding detail that supports the idea is.

Statistics Offer Proof

A second way to generate internal credibility is the use of statistics. Statistics come across as evidence.

Statistics carry one problem though. We don’t want to study them and numbers by themselves often have no meaning without context or without relationships to other numbers we have a context for.

When we talked about concreteness I offered an example of movie popcorn being unhealthy due to it containing 37 grams of saturated fat. To most people that’s meaningless. How much fat is 37 grams? Is that good or bad? We could more easily see it was a lot of fat when we saw it was the same as in a bacon and egg breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined.

Statistics will work best at boosting credibility when they illustrate a relationship to something known. They work better when you make the statistics meaningful.

Credibility is also improved when statistics can be placed in more human terms. Again think of the movie popcorn example. The human terms are the breakfast, lunch, and dinner it was compared to. You may not know how much 37 grams is, but you do know how much all that food is.

If you can equate statistics on a human scale and make the data meaningful (PDF) they’ll be understood more and as a result lend credible proof to your idea.

Can Your Idea Pass the Sinatra Test?

A third way to build internal credibility is the Sinatra Test. Recall the song New York, New York.

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”

You pass the Sinatra test when a single example is enough to prove the rest. In the song making it in New York is proof you can make it in Chicago or New Orleans or Milan or Shanghai.

One way to pass the Sinatra test is by having that one super client you’ve done work for. Say Apple let you design their latest site. Even if they never give you a recommendation or testimonial you can point to the site. If you’re good enough to design Apple’s site you’re probably good enough to design mine as well.

This is the idea behind test cases and portfolios. Your clients may not be as big or have the design sense of Apple, but they might help you pass the Sinatra test.

Having written for the New York Times or Washington Post you can probably be trusted to write for the local Penny Saver. Climbing Mount Everest would surely mean you could climb any of the many other mountains around the world.

Testable Credibility

Perhaps the most powerful form of credibility is testable credentials. If people can test your ideas for themselves and draw the same conclusion as your idea, it’s instant credibility.

Are You Better Off Now?

In the 1980 U.S. Presidential election Ronald Reagan asked voters to ask themselves if they were better off than they were 4 years earlier when Jimmy Carter took office. Instead of pointing to statistics about the economy which would have shown most people weren’t better off, he simply asked them to make the determination for themselves.

It was obvious to most people that they weren’t better off. It was a testable credential. It let voters prove to themselves the conclusion Reagan wanted them to draw.

Testable credentials throw the burden of proof back at your audience. A visitor to your site likely sees themselves as the most credible source. Get them to prove to themselves that your idea is credible and they’ll see it as credible.

Where’s the Beef?

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980 election, you should also remember the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” commercials. If you don’t you can watch the commercial above.

Three elderly women are at the counter of a fast food restaurant looking at what appears to be a very larger hamburger. The dialog between two of the women is as follows

“It certainly is a big bun”

“A vey big bun”

“A big fluffy bun”

“A very big fluffy bun”

Then there’s a pause until one woman lifts the bun to reveal a tiny burger. The third woman asks loudly, “Where’s the beef?”

Wendy’s threw the proof back to you. They did have a larger burger at the time and if you compared a Wendy’s burger to one at McDonald’s or Burger King, the Wendy’s burger was the biggest. That was the testable credibility. Anyone could see it for themselves and prove it to themselves. You can’t beat credibility you can see with your own eyes.

If you’re a web designer your portfolio and your site can stand as testable credibility. Others might do well with free demos, a free chapter of a book, a money back guarantee. These let people see for themselves your claims about your product are real.

Summary

What makes someone believe you? The answer is to provide one or more sources of credibility. That source could be an external authority, internal details, or something testable, but you need to find a source to make your idea credible in the mind of your audience.

External credibility borrows the credibility of the external source. Internal credibility relies on concrete details and meaningful statistics, or by passing the Sinatra Test. Testable credibility is the strongest form of credibility as the proof falls on the audience. If someone can prove to his or her self that your idea is credible there’s no room to doubt it.

With trust being such an important part of doing business online keep the ideas in this post in mind not just when trying to create a sticky idea. Keep them in mind for everything you do as part of your business.

Next week we’ll continue our look at sticky ideas by looking at how we can make your audience care about your idea. We’ll talk about the power of emotion and how making an emotional connection between your idea and audience will make them excited about your idea.

If the responsibility lies with you there must be something you can do to help the clarity of your message. There is and it involves the use of concrete details to communicate your idea.

The last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about stickiness. We talked about finding the core of your idea to make it simple and how to attract and keep attention to it. Today we’ll look at how you can increase the likelihood that your audience will understand your idea as intended.

Once again we’ll start with a quick review of the 6 Key Variables of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs) as put forth by the Heath Brothers in their book Made to Stick.

• Simplicity – find the core
• Unexpected – surprise gets attention and mystery keeps it
• Concreteness – use details to help people understand and remember
• Credibility – help people believe
• Emotion – make people care
• Story – get people to act

We’ve covered simplicity and the unexpected. Let’s now move on to concreteness.

Concreteness

There was a boy tending the sheep who would continually go up to the embankment and shout, ‘Help, there’s a wolf!’ The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn’t believe him and no one came to his aid. The whole flock was eaten by the wolf.

I’m sure you’ve heard some variation of Aesop’s “The boy who cried wolf.” The moral of the story, the core of the idea, is that if you’re a liar no one will believe you when you’re telling the truth. Aesop’s fables have survived more than 2,500 years. Why?

Life is concrete, not abstract. Our day to day is filled with specific details not theoretical concepts. It’s easier for us to understand the concrete and as a consequence remember it.

The morals to Aesop’s fables are abstract ideas. The fables themselves are full of concrete details. They show us instead of telling us (PDF).

Movie Popcorn is Unhealthy

When Alan Silverman wanted to get the message out that movie popcorn cooked in coconut oil was unhealthy he didn’t point out that it contained 37 grams of saturated fat. Who knows how much that is or how much is ok?

Even if you know that 20 grams is the daily recommended limit, 37 grams is still an abstract concept that doesn’t really help you understand how unhealthy it is. You probably wouldn’t even remember the number 37 after hearing it, unless you had some affinity for the number.

Instead Silverman pointed out that one medium sized bag of movie popcorn (cooked in coconut oil) had the same amount of saturated fat as a bacon and egg breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined.

Seeing them all placed side by side it would be very hard not to understand the message that movie popcorn was unhealthy and it would be hard to forget. It’s a simple message and it’s unexpected, but it’s also conveyed with concrete details instead of abstract statistics.

Concrete details are a common ground at a shared level of understanding. Most of us couldn’t explain why an airplane flies, yet most of us have probably been in an airplane. The former requires abstract knowledge, the latter is about concrete details.

This common ground is one reason metaphor, simile, and analogy work so well. They associate your idea with concrete details of something you already know.

The Curse of Knowledge Revisited

Again the curse of knowledge rears it’s ugly head. The curse of knowledge leads us to being more abstract. We’re experts who understand the pattern and forget that our audience isn’t as familiar with the subject as we are.

An expert on nutrition hears 37 grams of saturated fat and immediately understands how much that is and how bad it is for someone to consume. The average person doesn’t.

Abstract concepts aren’t necessarily bad. You learned a lot of them on the way to becoming an expert. In fact you needed to learn those abstract concepts and patterns to become an expert. Your audience hasn’t. And it’s hard to communicate abstract concepts quickly and memorably. They’re a language that needs to be learned.

Concreteness builds the foundation that we use to build abstract concepts. We build the abstract on top of the concrete.

Having learned the abstract you can easily communicate to others who have also learned those same abstract concepts. If I say sidebar, you no doubt know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve designed them. You’ve built them. You understand what they are. Does your mom? How about your clients? Most of my clients will talk about a right or left column, not a sidebar.

In a court of law the word sidebar has a completely different meaning. That’s one problem with communicating through abstract concepts and language. We all interpret the abstract differently. We need to share a context, a frame of reference, before we’re talking about the same thing.

You need to communicate with language your audience understands if you want them to understand your message. That understood language is the language of the concrete detail. It’s a shared context. It’s the same frame of reference for all of us.

Remembering to use concrete details, words, and imagery is an easy way to break out of the curse of knowledge (PDF). Your audience isn’t familiar with 37 grams of fat, but it is familiar with a Big Mac and a bacon and egg breakfast. Breaking out of the curse of knowledge is about speaking in terms your audience is familiar with.

Adding Concreteness to Your Design

To make your websites more concrete you want to use plain language and imagery. One reason product images are so important is they’re much more concrete than a description of that same product. Language by it’s very nature is abstract (PDF). Concrete is a universal language.

Some ideas for adding concreteness to your design.

• Design and develop sites for personas
• Use product images
• Build demos
• Add video and audio
• Use text and imagery that appeals to the senses
• Add textures

Are you selling software? Do you present screenshots or a video of the software being used? I’m amazed every time I find some application I’m interested in that doesn’t at the very least offer a screenshot. I can’t even tell you how many of those companies did not make a sale for lack of such a simple thing.

You make things more concrete by appealing to the senses. If it can be seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted, it’s concrete.

Don’t just show an image of an apple. Show an image with a bite taken out and with it’s juice dripping down the side. Make me taste how sweet that juice is. Make me feel the juice dripping down my chin.

The more senses you can appeal to the more concrete your images and words become.

Concrete is also specific people doing specific things. Make connections between your ideas and real people. Use examples and case studies. Create personas so you can know your audience instead of thinking of your audience as an abstract group of people.

When you write imagine writing to a specific person. When you design imagine how that specific person will react to your visual elements.

Making things concrete makes them tangible. You can hold tangible and run your fingers over it. You can’t run your fingers over an idea.

Summary

An important point in communication is being understood. When you’re trying to convey information you want the information received to be the same as what’s delivered. If you’re audience doesn’t understand you the fault is yours and not theirs.

Concrete details are more easily understood than abstract concepts. The concrete is the foundation of our knowledge. The abstract is built on top of the concrete. If you want to be understood be specific. Use details that appeal to the senses.

The curse of knowledge can lead us to forget that and try to communicate abstract concepts to those who haven’t yet built the concrete foundation. Remembering to use more concrete details allows us to communicate our ideas more effectively with a wider audience. Most people won’t have the same level of expertise as you do, particularly when it comes to a new idea.

Next week we’ll continue by looking at how to make sure people trust and believe you. We’ll talk about how to add credibility to your idea.

Last week we talked about how to generate an idea so it has the potential to become a sticky one. We talked about simplicity being the key to finding the core of your message and how you could still convey complex information in a simple way. Today we’ll look at what you can do to get an audience to notice your idea and how you can hold their attention.

First a quick review of the 6 Key Variables of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs) as put forth by the Heath Brothers.

• Simplicity – find the core
• Unexpected – different gets attention
• Concreteness – help people understand and remember
• Credibility – help people believe
• Emotion – make people care
• Story – get people to act

We’ve covered simplicity and today we’ll look at unexpected. And again if you’ve never read Made to Stick, I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

Unexpected

The first steps in communicating a message are to

1. get attention
2. hold attention

We get attention through surprise and we hold it through interest.

It should be relatively easy to understand why surprise attracts attention. When something is familiar there’s little reason to pay attention to it. You know it. You know what it’s about. It’s unlikely to communicate something new to you so you can easily divert your attention elsewhere.

When something is unexpected, when it contains an element of surprise, it draws our attention because there is something new and unknown in it that requires mental processing.

When something new enters our focus we need to quickly determine if it’s a danger to us. There’s a self preservation mechanism at work when encountering the unexpected that demands our immediate attention.

The best way to add an element of surprise is to break a pattern. The pattern is the familiar. It’s what’s expected. Breaking a pattern makes makes us take notice.

However, you don’t want to be different for the sake of being different. You want to avoid gimmickry just to capture attention.

If someone arrives at your website and is met with loud music or a browser that resizes itself several times before finally settling down, you’ve certainly captured that person’s attention. It’s unlikely they’re going to be happy and stick around though.

There are good ways and bad ways to capture attention through surprise (PDF).

Ideally the unexpected aspect you deliver with your idea reinforces the the core of the idea. Figure out what part of your core message is counterintuitive and use that to attract attention. Figure out what the surprise is in your message.

Nordstrom’s Unexpected Customer Service

The department store Nordstrom has a core message of exceptional customer service. We all have a schema for what customer service is.

Nordstrom breaks this schema with stories about some of their employees doing unexpected things such as wrapping gifts purchased at a competitor’s store, ironing a shirt for a customer who needed it for a meeting that afternoon, and even taking a refund for tire chains when the store doesn’t sell tire chains.

Each is clearly unexpected. Who offers a refund for a product they don’t sell? Each grabs attention because it breaks the pattern of what customer service is. Each also fits well with the store’s core message of exceptional customer service.

Nordstrom could have attracted attention by having its employees work naked, which more than likely would grab even more attention, but would hardly get the idea of exceptional customer service across or help them increase sales.

Designing the Unexpected

In designing a web site unexpected might be to create an original or unique design. Something that’s different from most other sites in the industry. Remember though we’re not looking for unique for the sake of being unique. That moves into gimmickry. The loud, browser-resizing website would certainly be unique, but it’s unlikely to be beneficial to your business.

A bank with a core message of personal attention might do well to veer from the usual corporate blue color scheme and perhaps use a color palette or soft pastels of earth tones. Either would break the expected pattern, while still being in harmony with the core idea.

Visually when we think capturing attention we think of the ideas of dominance and contrast and the visual grammar of dots.

Using Mystery to Maintain Interest

The first step was to get attention. The second is to hold attention and you do that by maintaining interest.

Richard Cialdini suggests the secret to maintaing interest lies in mystery. Mysteries are journeys with unpredictable endings. They hold interest by continuing to offer the unexpected. They raise questions that beg to be answered along the way and appeal to our sense of curiosity.

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. It’s the need to put together a broken schema.

We become curious when there’s a gap in our knowledge. We want to close the gap. Mysteries create a series of knowledge gaps for us to close, with each closed gap opening another. An important idea here is that before we close a gap we need to open it.

Something unexpected breaks a pattern. It breaks a schema. Our curiosity wants to fix the pattern and schema. Mysteries continue to break schemas and put them back together in a slightly different form.

This continual breaking and fixing patterns; this continual open and closing knowledge gaps is irresistible to our sense of curiosity. We find it interesting and it holds our attention.

Building Mystery In Your Website

On a website we often want to state the facts. We want to tell everything we can about our products and services. This doesn’t open gaps though. It keeps them closed. Better would be to present some piece of knowledge unknown to our audience that raises questions begging to be answered.

The facts should ultimately be there to close gaps that were opened elsewhere.

How often have you visited the home page of a site, particularly an ecommerce site, that crams as much as possible on its home page? Telling all immediately opens no gaps. Better would be to hold back some of the information and make your visitors follow a path to the information that will close the gap.

Provide a teaser early in the conversion path and slowly fill in the missing information as the visitor approaches your sign up page or add to cart button. Early in the path you should open a gap to make your audience curious. Make them want to fill in that gap.

Gaps in knowledge require some pre-existing knowledge of course so at times it will be necessary to present some backstory to create that initial knowledge. I found the teaser below on Apple’s main page for the iPad.

Imagine being able to page through websites, write an email, flick through photos, or watch a movie. All on a big, beautiful Multi-Touch screen. With just the touch of a finger. Learn more…

The iPad is a new device. There was no pre-existing knowledge for it. There is pre-existing knowledge for websites, email, photos, and movies. There’s the backstory. We know what those things are and we possibly even know what multi-touch is as well. The iPad itself is the gap that needs to be closed.

Also note how the above teaser closes. “With just the touch of a finger.” There’s a period at the end so at first glance it appears to be a complete sentence, but it isn’t.

With a touch of a finger, what? Something else needs to be said to complete the thought. The incomplete sentence opens a gap that our curiosity needs to close. We click the link to learn more, to close the gap, and are pulled further along the path.

Instead of thinking about what you want to convey to your audience, think about what questions you want your audience to ask. Then present information that gets them to ask those questions along with a path to find the answers. Present enough information to raise the question and then provide a scent, a trail to discover the answer.

Summary

If you want to make your simple idea stick you first need to get people to notice it. You need to attract attention to your idea and the way to do that is to emphasize something unexpected in your idea.

You want to break existing patterns, but in a way that reinforces the core of your idea. You want to find what’s counterintuitive in your idea and use that to get people to notice.

The unexpected opens knowledge gaps. Our curiosity wants to close these gaps so we continue to pay attention in order to fill the gap. Mysteries continue to open and close gaps and continue to pull us along.

Try to emphasize that part of your design that might surprise your viewers and offer only enough information to appeal to your audience’s curiosity to know more. Instead of providing all the information at once, provide it a little at a time along a conversion path.

Raise questions and provide paths to the answers.

Next week we’ll continue by looking at how to make sure people understand your idea once you’ve got their attention. We’ll talk about using concrete details to describe your idea to help it be understood.

If you look around the web you’ll find too much content is crap. Some sites stand out for having great content, but the majority produce more garbage than good. Most sites produce content that while occasionally good is inconsistent and meanders from topic to topic. The majority of content on the web is sadly forgettable and does little to promote the goals of the site and users of the site.

What many sites lack is a strategy for their content.

Why You Need a Content Strategy

A strategy is a plan to achieve a goal. Your content should aim at achieving some goal and so it makes sense to have a plan. It makes sense to have a strategy for creating content. Your content should meet business objectives and/or audience goals. Otherwise it doesn’t belong

Developing a content strategy will lead to:

• Better content
• Consistency in your message
• Efficient and intelligent reuse of content
• Better optimization for search engines and conversions

A content strategy will help you focus on what’s important so you can produce better content and produce more content. Your strategy becomes a roadmap leading your marketing and directing you toward your goals and away from wasted effort.

When you fail to have a strategy for your business you run the risk of wasting time, money, and effort on things that won’t help your business regardless of whether or not they succeed. The same is true for your content. Without a strategy you leave to chance it’s benefit to your overall goals.

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and management of useful and usable content. It makes you think about the 5 Ws and the 1 H.

• What content should be created
• Why create this content
• Who is the best person to create this content
• Where will this content be put to best use
• When should this content be published
• How will this content be created, text, image, video, etc.

In creating a plan for your content that’s aligned with your site and business goals, you think more about each of the above. Your content strategy becomes the roadmap for unifying your content toward the things you want to achieve.

Among other things a content strategy can help define:

• themes and messages
• topics and ideas
• the purpose of your content
• gaps in the industry in general and your site in particular
• appropriate meta data for your content
• an approach to seo

A content strategy is a plan for how you will create useful and goal focused content, how you will publish that content, and how you will manage your content after publication. A content strategy turns your content into a business asset that helps you achieve business goals and helps your audience achieve their goals on your site.

How Do You Develop a Strategy for Creating Content?

The first step in developing a content strategy is to ask yourself why? Why are you going to be publishing content? You need to determine the goals for your site, your blog, your business, and determine how content will help with those goals.

Above everything else this is the most important question to answer when developing a content strategy. You can’t plan anything else without understanding why you’re planning in the first place.

The rest of the steps probably don’t need to be done in any order. It’s really about considering a variety of things and making determinations about how they’ll help with the why you answered above.

If you have existing content you might want to move next to a review and analysis of all your existing content. Take an inventory and decide how it is or isn’t helping you achieve your goals. You may decide some of your content is fine as it is, some should be pruned, and some could be tweaked and improved.

Additional Resources

Below are several articles that talk more about content strategy. They don’t all explicitly tell you how to develop a strategy for your content, but you should have a greater understanding how you would develop your strategy after reading them.

• Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy
• The Discipline of Content Strategy
• The Content Strategist as Digital Curator
• Blog Content Strategy 101
• A Three-Step Approach to Strategic Content Development
• A Common Sense Content Strategy

Content Types and the Buying Cycle

Think about what content is. It’s easy to hear the word content and think text, but content comes in a variety of types.

• Text
• Video
• Audio
• Images
• Applications

Think also about the variety within each type above and where in the conversion path someone might be when they encounter your content.

Someone early in the buying cycle may be looking for some information about a topic as you might find in a blog post. Later they may have some specific questions they want answered and a FAQ page might be appropriate. Closer to their decision to buy they might be looking for screen shots, videos, and a full demo.

Start thinking about all these content types and how and where they fit with your goals and your audience’s goals.

Ask yourself who’s best suited to created all those content types? Do you write well or do you need to hire or outsource the writing. What about video? Audio? If your business is you and there’s no money to hire a content creator, decide how you will improve your skills in the multiple types of content you want to create.

Can you focus on one or two types until you’ve increased your skills in others? Be honest with yourself where your skills are involved and determine if you would be better off hiring someone else regardless of how much money is in the budget.

Fill Content Gaps

Spend time researching your industry and potential customers as well as your own content and seek to identify content gaps.

• Are there topics that aren’t being covered or covered well?
• Is there a topic that’s always written about, but has little video ?
• What content seems to generally do well attracting traffic, links, comments?
• What topics appear again and again and again?

Your research should lead you to ideas for specific pieces of content as well as themes you should keep returning to. The message you want to communicate should also play a large part in the themes that develop in your content.

Plan for Content Reuse

Think not just about the now, but the future. Can you sustain a blog about your chosen topic? Is the topic one that changes over time and if so what might the future of the topic look like? Will there be new technologies and content types you should be paying attention to? Think about developing sub-plans that have an eye on the future.

Ask yourself if you can reuse existing content or ideas. Take your text-driven article and:

• Create a screen cast
• Invite others in the industry to do an audio interview on the topic
• Rewrite the content for a guest posting opportunity
• Turn it into a series
• Create an infographic

How can you recycle and reuse content you’ve created and ideas for future content?

Plan for Optimization

You should have a list of keywords and keyphrases to target. Can you create content around certain phrases and keyword themes? Again consider the buying cycle and think which keywords are more appropriately targeted with which content types.

You also want to identify places outside your site where you can create content. Does it make sense to create for Twitter, Facebook, or any other community site. Will your content on these sites promote your brand or direct traffic back to your website? Are there sites on your topic that provide guest posting opportunities.

By no means is the above an all inclusive list of things to do when developing your strategy. The main point is to think more about the purpose of your content and how your content can best help in your and your goals and your audience’s goals.

It’s also important to note that your content strategy should be iterative. Goals might change. Audience interest might change. Your skills will change. You’ll develop a greater understanding of your content over time. Develop a strategy and then keep revising and refining that strategy.

Editorial Calendars

Content producers offline have known the value of an editorial calendar for many, many years. Some online are now also learning the benefits. An editorial calendar is simply a publishing schedule that allows you to plan ahead what content you’ll create and when you’ll publish it.

Planning content in an editorial calendar helps you see the bigger picture. Does a particular article fit well in your strategy? Would it work better at a different time?

You can better plan your work schedule when you see what’s in front of you and improve quality as you aren’t leaving it till the last minute to write today’s post. Planning things in advance adds a buffer of time between idea and finished product. It allows for you to write with a process instead of on a whim.

A calendar can also help you plan when to publish. People read differently on Monday than they do on Friday. Different content is probably appropriate for each day. Certain topics will naturally generate more interest timed with a given holiday or annual event.

A calendar makes it easier to schedule posts when interest in the topic is at it’s strongest.

Michael Gray uses this idea to create an seo editorial calendar to maximize potential search traffic. Using tools like Google Trends and Google Insights you can discover peak searching times and know best when to publish.

Ultimately an editorial calendar allows you to:

• Plan ahead
• Plan your work schedule to get more done
• Maximize the reach of your content
• Capitalize on search trends and interest in specific events
• Increase quality

Keep in mind that your editorial calendar should be flexible. Assuming a planned post isn’t time-sensitive there’s no reason why it can’t be pushed back a week or two so you can publish some time sensitive content instead.

Also there’s no reason why your plan for next month needs to be etched in stone. Part of the benefit of an editorial calendar is being able to see how all your content looks over time within the big picture so you can adapt it better to fit your overall content strategy.

Summary

With content being so important to the success of your site, doesn’t it make sense to put some time into planning it? Doesn’t it make sense to develop a strategy for creating, publishing, and managing your content?

A content strategy will focus your content on achieving your goals and help you help your audience achieve their goals. It gets you to think about what content to create and how best to format that content. If gets you to think about when and where to publish different content and who has the skills to create different types of content.

Most importantly it gets you to think about why you’re creating content in the first place so you can make sure it moves you towards goals instead of away from them.

An editorial calendar can be an aid to a content strategy as it can help you see the larger picture in your publishing schedule and help you adapt your schedule to better fit your strategy.

Do you plan your content or do you create it by the seat of your pants? Do you use an editorial calendar and if so have you found it helps you?

Apple Follows its Instincts

This past weekend I watched Bloomberg Game Changers: Steve Jobs, which presents a short biography of the Apple CEO through interviews with friends, former colleagues, and business associates. One thing that stood out in the 48 minute video is that Steve Jobs didn’t listen to the market, or much of anyone else for that matter. He listened to himself.

Apple as a company follows its instincts. They’re less interested in giving the market what it wants as they are in giving the market what it doesn’t yet know it wants. Apple aims to create innovate products that didn’t previously exist (iPad) or take existing products and redefine them in a way that makes them completely new (iPod, iPhone).

Had Apple listened to the market we would have seen them release a netbook back in April. It likely would have been the netbook of choice for Apple fans and little else. Instead they listened to themselves and gave us the iPad, which may or may not be killing the netbook market depending on who you believe. They also have companies across the spectrum looking to jump into the tablet market.

That’s not to say Apple never listens to its customers, but ultimately they’ll choose their own instincts over what their customers tell them. So far it seems to be working for them.

You may or may not like Apple products. That’s not the point. What’s important is that Apple has mainly followed their instincts instead of their customers wishes and yet they probably have the most loyal customers of any company on the planet.

They’ve created extreme loyalty in their brand in large part by ignoring what their customers tell them they want.

Henry Ford Didn’t Build a Faster Horse

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse
—Henry Ford

You’ve probably heard this Henry Ford quote before. Like Apple he followed his instincts and instead of trying to build a faster horse, something that was clearly impossible, he built an automobile. His customers couldn’t have told them they wanted a car, because they had probably never seen one even though automobiles already existed at the time.

In 1896 when Ford built the original Ford Quadricyle it’s safe to say most people had no idea what a car was or that they might actually want one. They wanted faster horses. Ford was certainly not the only company working to bring the automobile to the public, but again he’s an example of someone following his instincts instead of the market. Or was he?

Is it Instinct or Deeper Understanding?

If we think about Henry Ford’s customers it’s true they might have said they wanted a faster horse, but is that really what they wanted? What they really wanted was faster personal transportation. At the time though, personal transportation was the horse. Ford’s customers would have framed their wants as a faster horse, because that was their context for personal transportation.

What they wanted and what Ford, among others, understood was that what they really wanted was faster transportation. He gave them what they wanted, even though it wasn’t something they could verbalize.

What we should be seeking is a deeper understanding of what our customers want. They can only tells us what they want within their existing frame of reference. Sometimes that’s fine. Often it’s not. Often we should ignore what they tell us and instead try to understand the underlying root of their request.

A year ago did people want a better netbook or did they want a mobile device capable of accessing the Internet and handling a common subset of daily computing tasks? Apple’s experience with the iPhone told them customers wanted the iPad and not the iNetBook. Sales reports since the iPad’s launch would suggest Apple was right.

The instinct is in trusting that you have gained that deeper insight into your customers wants and needs, despite their inability to express those needs and wants outside their existing frame. The instinct is a belief that your customers will see the new frame once they’ve had a chance to use your product.

Should You Aim For the Middle or the Edges?

A few months ago my friend Adam Singer posted, Chris Brogan Nails A Universal Truth. Adam’s post picks up on something Chris said about banal/common being popular and brilliant/offbeat living in obscurity. To quote Adam:

If you play to the middle you’re likely to be more popular than doing something which challenges people and pushes them outside their comfort zone. The truth is, most don’t wish to be pushed outside their comfort zone. They want what is familiar and predictable.

That is a universal truth. A quick study of history shows that many of the brilliant people who truly changed the world were ridiculed initially for their ideas. It’s not easy to change the worldview of people or get them to step away from what’s comfortable.

Doesn’t this seem to be contradicting what I’ve been saying through most of this post? If the familiar and predictable are more popular shouldn’t Apple have built a netbook? Shouldn’t Ford have worked harder to breed faster horses?

I don’t think so. Two different things are at play here. Within a frame of reference the common, the familiar, what people say they want, is popular. However once the frame of reference changes it’s a new common, a new familiar, that becomes popular.

Think about popular music in the 40s and the 50s. At the time jazz, particularly big band jazz, was the popular music of the day. If you wanted to be a famous musician in 1941 you learned jazz and formed a large band. That was the common and the familiar and consequently the popular.

Then something changed. Jazz itself began to change, though what really changed the frame of reference was rock ‘n’ roll. By the late 50’s if you wanted to be a popular musician, you learned to play rock ‘n’ roll and you formed a much smaller band.

The common and familiar lead to popularity, while the brilliant and offbeat toil in obscurity, only until such a time as the brilliant and obscure catches on and becomes the new common.

The brilliant and obscure reaches for the edges. Creativity lives at the edges. Not all edges will become popular and common, but those that do lead to wild success for those that took us there. Ford built a successful company reaching for the edges in personal transportation and Apple has built a successful company reaching for the edges in mobile computing.

Playing to the middle will always work, but you have to be prepared to adapt to a new middle. A year ago you could have built a mediocre netbook and done well. Today you’d have no chance. The paradigm has changed. A new frame exists. A few years from now you’ll be able to do well with a mediocre tablet.

You’ll do even better understanding your customers at a deeper level and giving them something they don’t yet realize they want.

Yes, you should listen to your market, but you should be listening at the edges. You should be listening for the subtext of what they’re saying. You should also be following your instincts and trusting yourself enough to feel confident that you have heard that subtext and can turn it into the main text of the next dialog.

Summary

The market knows what it wants, but often it can’t articulate those wants. The market can only express what it wants based on what it knows. It’s up to you to see past that frame of reference and get to the underlying wants and needs of your customers.

It will always be safe and popular to aim for the middle. It’s where most people are. The edges approach the unknown. They approach possible danger. They also approach the possibility of a better way. There’s more risk at the edges, but also the possibility of discovering or creating something great.

Ford gave his customers faster transportation. Apple is giving its customers better mobile computing. Both had to see past their customers words and look deep into their desires.

Is this following your instinct or is it following your market? It’s really both. It’s having the instinct to know when and where you have to look deeper and give your customers not what they say they want, but something they don’t yet know that they want.

Clearly, a multilingual approach is required if you want to truly tap the worldwide potential of the web.

Should You Target Location of Language?

The first thing to decide is whether to target your markets by location or language. You may consider it enough to make a single site for several markets that share the same language but you should be aware that there may be linguistic variations between different regions.

In Spain, for example, a computer is an ‘ordenador’, while in Latin America it’s known as a ‘computadora’. If you decide to target by language you should make sure your content translates across geographical markets and avoid any specific cultural references. Targeting by location will help avoid these issues and will also give you the option of boosting your SEO by using country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD’s).

The algorithms used by Google and other search engines take location into account and investing in a separate ccTLD such as .fr for France or .ru for Russia will help boost your rankings.

Ensuring the site is hosted on a server physically located within your target market will boost your rankings further. Even if you decide not to go for separate ccTLD’s you should place your localized content into separate sub-domains or sub-directories. You can then use Google’s Geographic Target tool to set geographic targets for each sub-domain and/or subdirectory.

Translating Your Content

There are different methods you can employ for actually translating your content. The simplest and cheapest way is to add a translation widget such as Google Translate or Babelfish to your site, allowing visitors to translate content to a language of their choice.

Building inline translation code into your site is a more involved process but provides a more intuitive automatic translation. All machine translation has scope for errors however. The ideal solution is to use a native speaking translator. This will help avoid mistakes and retain the meaning and nuances of your content. It’s also the most expensive option however and the choice will probably depend on available resources.

Tips for multilingual marketing, localization and SEO

Keep your languages separate

Google’s Webmaster Central blog recommends that you stick to a single language on each of your pages, with each element (header, captions, menus etc.) sharing the same language.

Google’s bots will attempt to determine a single main language for each page and they can get confused by side-by-side translations. How you separate the pages will depend on whether you are targeting your markets by location or language and whether you opt for country code Top Level Domains or a single TLD with extra sub-domains or sub-directories.

Use local social network sites

The burgeoning popularity of social networking sites makes them a useful tool in online marketing but remember that there may be sites in your target market that you are unaware of. In Norway, for example, Facebook is the most popular but local competitor Nettby had almost a million registered members last year. A bit of research will quickly reveal the biggest players within your target market.

Build local links

Link building is an important part in all SEO. Any links you build must still be relevant to the content of your site but, when dealing with multilingual websites, location is also important. In practical terms, this may mean identifying highly Alexa-ranked sites within your target market and offering guest posts and quality content in the local language.

Don’t directly translate keywords

If good quality translation is important when it comes to your content, it’s absolutely essential for keywords. A machine or dictionary translation will not be sufficient — a keyword that works in one market might not work at all in another, where regional variations, colloquialisms, abbreviations or other alternatives could all be more popular options. A literal French translation of ‘car insurance’, for example, would be ‘l’assurance automobile’. This phrase gets very few hits however, with alternative phrases such as ‘assurance auto’ or ‘assurance voiture’ proving much more successful.

Go beyond Google

Google is without doubt the most popular and important search engine worldwide but in certain markets local competitors are more commonly used. In the Czech Republic for example, Seznam is the single most visited web portal while in Russia Yandex is the most popular. All search engines have their own algorithms and it’s worth utilizing the keyword and other research tools of all the major players within your target market.

About the author

Christian Arno is founder or Lingo24, a global language services company with 130 full-time employees operating across three continents. With clients in over sixty countries and a network of over 4,000 professional translators, Lingo24 is on course for a turnover of $7m USD in 2010.

1. If a person truly wants to know who built the site it will be discovered. Most likely he or she will contact the website owner or organization and ask them.

Really? is that true? I’m sure there are some people who will contact a site owner and ask who designed the site, but I would doubt it happens that often. A credit link certainly wouldn’t prevent someone from contacting the site owner.

All the link does is make it easier to find out who designed the site. It’s easier to click a link than send an email or fill out a form, so not having that link only makes it harder to discover who designed the site. It adds another barrier to finding out who the designer of a site is.

If we follow David’s logic why bother adding a phone number to your site. People will surely still email if they want to contact you. In fact why add an email address, since anyone can simply fill out your contact form. Why even have any contact information on your site since anyone can find out who owns the domain and send an email to one of the contacts listed on a whois.

OK, I’m taking that last bit to an extreme, but the point is each additional way to contact you makes it easier for the person wanting to contact you. Some people are happy filling out a contact form. Some aren’t. Some prefer email. Some prefer a phone call. Wouldn’t we advice our clients if they want to be contacted they should provide as many ways to be contacted as is reasonable.

The designed by credit link doesn’t do anything to reduce the chances someone will find out you designed a site. It can only increase the chances. Yes, some, maybe even many, people will still find out who designed the site, but it will absolutely be less people than if the credit link is present.

2. The client is paying you for your services. You are delivering a specialized product that is a very valuable asset to them. To stamp your name – even inconspicuously – on every page is tacky.

I think this is the real argument most people have against designed by credit links and all others arguments are trying to add justification to this, because this argument really doesn’t hold water.

Look around you at any product you see. I’d be willing to bet somewhere on it is the name of the company that produced it. Is there a logo on the clothing you’re wearing right now? If not I guarantee there’s a label somewhere inside with the company name on it. The computer you’re using to read this post, I bet the manufacturer’s name is visible. I see Macbook Pro right at the bottom of my monitor and a very visible Apple logo on the back of the same monitor. My previous laptop had a big Dell logo on lid and the model of the laptop just above the keyboard.

My TV, DVD player, and DVR are all clearly marked as is my stereo. My books all show the publisher and the author on the spine.The cardboard boxes I used to move into my condo have the name of the store where I bought them in very large letters.

It’s called marketing. If you build it they will come only works in Hollywood movies. If you want to build a business you need to tell people about your business. That’s marketing 101 and that’s all a designed by credit link is doing.

There’s nothing tacky about it. And before you say that design is some kind of higher profession and it’s tacky to market its higher purpose check out most of the artwork around you. I bet most of it was signed by the artist too. I guess it was tacky for them to let you know who created that painting.

Yes the client is paying me to design a site and I would never put a link there without asking them first. If the client says no, then no link. That’s their right. But I will ask because it is good marketing. In fact most of my clients have mentioned it to me and insisted I added my link before I ever bring it up.

Adding the link without first asking the client if it’s ok is wrong. Not asking if it’s ok is bad business.

It would also be tacky to make your credit link blink or have it be a dominant element on the page. But to leave it unobtrusively at the bottom, say near the usual copyright information isn’t tacky at all. If it is you may need to rethink your career choice.

Credit Links for SEO

I will agree with David here. Credit links should really not be part of your seo strategy or rather they shouldn’t be a big part. It’s still a link after all so why not get it. However search engines are smart enough to realize why the credit link is there and while I have no doubt the link counts I also have no doubt it doesn’t count for much.

Designed by credit links are not likely to have a significant impact when it comes to where your pages rank in search engines, though like most links they probably help, at least in some small degree.

In general designed by credit links are perfectly fine and and a more than acceptable practice. They’re simply good marketing. If you want to think they’re tacky then don’t add them, though you might want to think through the rest of your marketing, because it’s just as tacky and probably more so.

Designed by Credit Links are Good Marketing

Can we please stop telling people there’s something morally wrong with designed by credit links? If you think they’re tacky don’t use them. We all have limits to how far we’re willing to go in promoting ourselves. Credit links are very far from the envelope though. I’d be willing to bet most everyone who derides the practice markets themselves in some way that pushes things much further toward tackiness.

Don’t place one on a client’s site without asking first, but go ahead and ask. Most of your clients will be fine and some may even ask you to include it whether you ask them first or not. Understand there’s nothing wrong or tacky about them. Those links are simply good marketing.