Win a Kindle from SpinWeb at the IRHA HIT Summit

Posted by: Michael Reynolds, President/CEO in General on Tuesday, November 30, 2010

SpinWeb is exhibiting today and tomorrow at the IRHA Healthcare Information Technology Summit and we are giving away two Kindles! Stop by our booth (next to the food) and pick up one of our ninjas and drop in your business card. There are two ways to win one of the Kindles:

1. Drop your business card into the bowl for the drawing
2. Take a photo of one of our ninjas in an interesting place or situation and Tweet it (with @spinweb in the tweet) or email it to ninja@spinweb.net. We will pick the best photo as the winner.

We look forward to seeing you at the summit!

Cyber Monday specials at SpinWeb (websites, blogging, Twitter)

Posted by: Michael Reynolds, President/CEO in General on Monday, November 29, 2010

We hope everyone has had a fantastic holiday week and is recovering from Thanksgiving festivities. We are celebrating Cyber Monday at SpinWeb with deep discounts of 50% on three of our products.

Website Blueprint. The Website Blueprint plans out your entire website and gives you a detailed document complete with wireframes, site maps, module layouts, and functionality. This is normally $800 but today it is $400.

Business Blog Package. Our Business Blog Package is everything you need to get a secure business blog set up for your organization complete with social media connections and social commenting. Normally this is $1500 but today it is $750.

Twitter Startup Package. Our Twitter Startup Package gets you up and running on Twitter for business. Normally this is $500 but today it is $250.

Orders must be placed online by midnight tonight to take advantage of these promotions. Happy Cyber Monday!

What to ask your constituents before a website redesign

Posted by: Michael Reynolds, President/CEO in General on Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Redesigning your website can be a great way to realign your branding, expand your online presence with new functionality, and enhance communication with your constituents. A common step in the process for many organizations is to survey their audiences to get feedback on what to change and how to plan accordingly. But what should you ask?

The following are some questions that may give you useful insight into how your constituents interact with your online presence.

1. "What is the primary reason you visit the organization's website?" By leaving this question broad and open-ended, you are more likely to get truthful answers on why people actually visit your website. This will help you understand the objectives of your audience without bias.

2. "What type of content (if any) from the organization's website do you share the most on social networks?" This will tell you what people really find valuable. If people are consistently sharing content from your blog, for example, this tells you that you have a high-value blog that is working for you. If you find that most people don't share any content, then you may need to work on providing higher-value content. When people find something valuable, they naturally want to share it with others.

3. "What is the number one thing you wish you could do on the organization's website that you cannot do today?" This will uncover frustrations that people might have as they use your website. Maybe they wish they could make payments or donations online. Maybe they wish they could post comments about content on the site and engage in a conversation. Maybe they wish they could find out more about your board members and communicate with them directly.

4. "If we added one thing to our website, what should it be?" This is a very open-ended but blunt question that should encourage your constituents to really drill down to the one thing that they want to see changed.

5. "How would you like us to communicate with you?" This allows your constituents to give you feedback on how they like to receive information. If most people respond with "email", then you might consider investing more resources into improving your email campaigns. If many of your survey subjects respond with "RSS" or "Facebook", then you may want to create tighter integration with these tools. If you get a lot of responses like "phone", then you may want to start capturing phone numbers more aggressively on your website.

6. "What is one thing we do that annoys you?" This may seem like a scary question to ask but hopefully you want the truth. For example, if your constituents overwhelmingly respond with "you send me too many emails and give me no way to unsubscribe" then you know what to change. Sometimes the best way to grow and succeed is to stop doing things that annoy your constituents. Keep in mind that even if you get an answer that is not even website-related, this will still tell you something useful.

7. "What about our website makes you feel good?" This is a nice, open-ended closing question that lets people end on a positive note and gives you feedback on what their emotional response is to your website. People tend to make decisions based on emotion and this will help you understand how your online presence is currently making them feel.

Notice that these questions avoid any kind of specific structural items about website navigation, what should be on the home page, and so forth. Specific structural decisions should be left to the design and usability experts creating the site and/or through card sorting. What people say and what people do are often quite different so it's important to focus on high-level content-driven questions. This will encourage your constituents to avoid getting caught up "in the weeds" of site structure and instead focus on how they truly interact with your website.

Do you have any other questions that you ask your constituents during a website redesign? I would love to hear them through your comments below.

Succeed on Twitter with logos AND faces

Posted by: Michael Reynolds, President/CEO in General on Friday, October 29, 2010

Companies and organizations continue to jump on Twitter and use this communication tool to share their messages with their constituents. However, much of the time, these organizations simply create a single company account, upload the company logo to the profile, and start broadcasting. This only goes so far.

Ultimately, social media is about human connections. For this reason, I would recommend the following structure to your Twitter communications:

1. Company Twitter account. This account should be set up with your company name, logo, and link to your website. This is your primary "official" source for company information on Twitter. It should be connected to your website so that whenever new content is posted, such as a blog, event, or press release, it is automatically distributed through this account. This is primarily an announcement-only account that shares information and broadcasts news.

2. Employee Twitter accounts. This is where the real conversation happens. In order for organizations to truly connect with their constituents, they must allow and encourage their employees (and volunteers) to actively represent the organizations. These profiles should be set up with each person's full name, photo, personal bio, and link back to the organization's website. It is also a nice touch if the employees' Twitter backgrounds are branded to complement the theme set by the organization account. These personal accounts are where employees re-tweet company information and then participate in conversations about it. It's important that employees talk to people, respond, and show their human sides. People want to talk to actual humans, not logos. This is why it's important to let your people out of the box.

While most companies are getting the hang of setting up their business Twitter accounts, they often leave out the second part of the equation: their people.

Encouraging your employees to communicate as real people will go a long way toward strengthening connections with your constituents. To succeed on Twitter, you need both logo and faces.

Comments? Please share your thoughts below!

How opt-out can save your brand

Posted by: Michael Reynolds, President/CEO in General on Friday, October 22, 2010

Email marketing is a fantastic way to reach a large group of people in a very efficient way. Good email campaigns can keep constituents informed, engaged, and loyal. However, there is one bad habit that I see repeatedly that can cause a great deal of damage to your brand.

That habit is: giving your subscribers no way to opt-out.

Many organizations send out email newsletters and campaigns but offer no way for their subscribers to easily opt-out and unsubscribe. Perhaps they want to try to hold their subscribers captive thinking "if they can't unsubscribe, I've still got them as a prospect!"

This is very bad for a couple of reasons.

First off, it frustrates your subscribers. If your subscribers want to leave your email list but there is no way to do so, frustration quickly follows. Recipients often feel helpless and start to dislike your organization more and more with each subsequent email until they develop extremely negative feelings toward your company. Not good for your brand.

Second, many people will click the "report as spam" button in their email software in order to start sending your emails into their spam folders. If enough people do this, your company can end up blacklisted, which means your ability to send email to anyone will be severely hampered. Also not good for your brand.

When sending out an email campaign, you need to make sure that your recipient can opt out of future emails and leave the list with one click. Any deviation from this is dangerous.

Sometimes the lack of an unsubscribe option is the result of not using a professional email marketing system. Using Outlook to blind carbon copy a huge list of email addresses does not count as an email marketing system.

Giving your subscribers the ability to easily leave your list is polite, ethical, and simply good business. You cannot please everyone so focus on those who appreciate your message and preserve your brand integrity by offering a choice to your subscribers.