We came across an interesting and brief article which may help businesses decide if social media is worth their time and effort.  Most importantly, the article touches upon some of the points we consistently bring up when discussing social media efforts with out clients:

• How do I measure success?
• Which social media tools should I use?
• How much time and effort will this take?

Let’s face it, social media is an emerging force, and one which is constantly changing.  It can be difficult for companies to justify dedicating resources towards social media, especially when success is not clearly defined.  The use of social media can be a fundamental shift in corporate policy towards marketing, customer services and other areas, or it can be just another “checkbox” which gets token effort and returns token rewards.

Ask yourself some of the questions contained in the article, do the research they outline, and soon enough you’ll have clear vision of whether social media can add a quantifiable benefit to your business.

The answer is — nobody really knows.

Not a big surprise, the Email Standards Project gave Outlook 2007 a “poor” rating when it comes to email standards support –  I guess “piss poor” wasn’t an option.   Not only does 07 limit what we as designers can do from a creative standpoint but it creates a lot of angst with our clients who don’t want to pay for the additional time required to properly test and troubleshoot.

To try and (let’s say) “gently pursued” Microsoft to pay a little attention to the glaring frustration, Fix Outlook (http://www.fixoutlook.org), a Twitter mashup campaigning site, has been created with the goal of getting MS to finally hear the screams from voth the world’s designers and client marketing bugdets.  After 20,000 signatures responded to the campaign, Microsoft released a statement that they are going to stay the course.

So, just when you think we might have rounded the corner to safely wave bye-bye to Outlook 2007 in the rear view mirrors velcroed to our monitors (yeah, we have those), Microsoft has decided to stand with their belief that “Word is the best email authoring experience around” — so looks like MS Word will once again be used for rendering emails in Outlook 2010.

According to the Email Standards Project, “For the next five years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.”

Good times.

Many of our valued Monkee-Boy clients are in the business of selling their businesses.  They go into business with a  clear path to increase the value of their company, sell it, and buy one of those really nice houses on the lake.  At Monkee-Boy, we often think of retiring 40 or 50 years from now — having too much fun right now to even consider it (but make me an offer I can’t refuse).

If you are considering selling your business it’s useful to look at your company from a buyer’s perspective. Improving your performance in five specific areas critical to a buyer increases the value of your company, leading to a greater selling price for your business. According to the Austin Dale Group, here are the first five “strategic value drivers” that can raise the value of your business. In our next electronic newsletter we will share five more factors to consider.

1. Customer Diversity: If too much business is concentrated in too few of your customers, the value of your business is reduced. If you have this problem (more than 10% of revenues with individual customers), start focusing on a program to diversify.

2. Management Depth: A buyer will look at the quality of the management staff and employees as a major factor in arriving at an acquisition price. Ideally you should assign your successor a year in advance of your scheduled departure date. If you have a strong management team in place, you should try to implement employment contracts, non-compete agreements, and some type of equity participation to keep these stars involved through the transition.

3. Contractually Recurring Revenue: All revenue dollars are not created equal. Revenue dollars from annual maintenance contracts, annual licensing fees, recurring retainer fees, and technology licenses are more powerful value drivers than projected sales revenue, time and materials revenue, or other non-recurring revenue streams.

4. Proprietary Products and Technology: This is an area where the valuation rules do not always apply. If strategic buyers believe that a new technology can be acquired and integrated with their superior distribution channel, they may value your company based on its projected performance after an acquisition. The marketplace rewards effective innovation over commodity-type products and services. Continue to look for ways to innovate in all facets of your business.

5. Penetration of Barriers to Entry: Owning hard-to-get permits, zoning, licenses, or regulatory approvals can be worth a lot to the right buyer. These may include liquor licenses, government contracts, municipal zoning permits, etc.

Source:  Austin Dale Group

Well, it’s (almost) official, the battle for search engine traffic, and it’s associated pattern-matching potential for advertisers, will be fought amongst two giants – Google and Microsoft.  There’s no ‘David’ here, just two ‘Goliaths’.  Hopefully, unlike those old Godzilla versus Mothra movies, we all won’t be running screaming from the two monsters as they duke it out.

As this article in Business Week points out, the big prize here is related to data mining the search habits of the users – trying to convince potential advertisers that you have special knowledge of what people are looking for and how best the advertisers can attract them to their sites.

As of today, Google owns roughly 65% of search engine traffic, and this deal effectively gives the remaining percentage to Microsoft to help boost it’s relatively new Bing search application. In the coming months we’ll all see what the net effect of this merger will be, but in general my hope is that the presence of two giants won’t preclude some other enterprising types to conceive and build a better mousetrap.

After all, when I first found Google and adopted it as my search engine of choice almost 10 years ago, it was merely the brainchild of a couple Stanford grad students, not the looming monolith of today. Google’s minimalistic interface, fast speed – and ultimately – search effectiveness won me over. Even in the face of their ascendance to major power broker, I’ve stayed with them because generally I find what I’m looking for.

Let’s hope this newly-defined battleground doesn’t turn us all into a screaming crowd fleeing as the monsters fight.

As the popularity of Facebook continues to boom, it’s inevitable that you will be connecting with – either by you asking or them asking you – coworkers and even your managers.  How you manage those relationships can make quite a bit of difference to you.

The folks over at Wired have started a wiki topic on the matter, and the initial posts are encouraging in the sense that they are reasonable and well-intentioned.  Some seem obvious at first, but may not to be to all.

One of my favorites and one which I wish I was more diligent about is “Delete Unwanted Posts From Your Wall”.  If we are truly judged by the company we keep, it’s important to realize that your coworkers and managers may not be pleased to see some of the more outlandish entries some Facebook users seem to post.

If you are like most people, your Facebook friends list contains real (non-cyber) friends, family, coworkers and potentially even others.  The chances that some of them may post material which could offend someone else are high, so keep an eye out for the random comment which could reflect badly on you, fairly or not.

I have a friend I’ve spent a limited amount of time with who occasionally posts comments about her love life which by most people’s sensibilities would be considered crude.  The two times (so far) I’ve seen them I’ve remarked to others “I can’t believe she just posted that!”, but I did not think to delete the entries entirely from my wall.  I need, we all need, to consider the fact that others will view my wall and potentially make a judgement about me based on her crudity.

The Wired wiki has really just begun, and they are solicting entries, so if you think you have something valuable to add, we encourage you to help build up this body of knowledge.

It’s the Social Media version of a Reese’s Peanut butter Cup. You know, “You got your Flickr in my Twitter.” “You got your tweet in my pics.”

In any event, you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon. Through a nifty little Flickr-Twitter integration you can now link your Flickr and Twitter accounts and add a little eye candy to your 140 characters.

Through Flickr’s email upload, you can simultaneously upload an image to your Flickr account and Tweet it with a link. You can also tweet an image directly from your Flickr account.

Here’s the official post with instructions…

Monkee-Boy Social Media Commentary: While this integration presents a great opportunity to enhance the business value of your social presence (for us we can easily share screen-shots of new designs and approved customer success metrics with our tweets), it also presents an equal opportunity to look foolish and harm your reputation.  Remember, the next time you have one drink too many at a professional function, the pictures could be re-tweeted to your colleagues dozens of times before your headache subsides.

Hey, I’m just sayin’….

Patrick Lynch has written a great article, Visual Decision Making, over on A List Apart. It’s about time someone stuck up for designers against the eye-tracking studies that have become the de facto measurement for online usability. Lynch doesn’t discount or even dispute eye-tracking results, but he puts them in proper context.

It’s kind of a long article, especially when you consider that the article is pretty much discussing a user’s first 1/20th of a second they spend with your site.  It’s definitely worth a read, but if you would prefer (Joe’s) Cliff’s Notes, they’re below:

“Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view. [8] Those user judgments begin within 50 milliseconds of seeing the first page of your site.”

“Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs.”

It’s nice to get scientific validation that all those late nights spent perfecting a web site design does indeed do so much to shape a user’s opinion of the site and company brand. However, it’s a little frustrating to know that we spend dozens of hours coming up with something that is processed in less than a second.

You may well ask, with the saturation of blogs out there – enough to require the creation of a new term to encompass them all (blogosphere) – why do we need to add yet another?

Great question!  Blogging has literally exploded on the scene in the past few years, evolving from virtual personal journals to powerful players in such areas as news reporting (especially political news reporting) and information exchange.  In the past year or so, blogging has steadily crept its way into mainstream business operations, adding an exciting new component to the way companies interact with their customers, and the public at large.

As with many new technologies, successful employment of blogging has been spotty.  For every interesting or useful blog, there are a plethora of useless ones.  As people begin to experiment, use and then rely upon technology, lessons are learned (hopefully!) and best practices are developed. We’ll attempt to demystify some of the terminology and help you make sound decisions, with posts such as our “5 Rules to Live By in the Blogosphere“.

Everyone here at Monkee-Boy participates in some sort of blog, whether as author, contributor or just subscriber, and the range of subjects is large and varied.  We’ve logged enough hours in these endeavors to formulate some fairly basic “rules of thumb” to consider when trying to decide if blogging can truly add value to your web operations, and your business success overall.

So why a Monkee-Boy blog?  We’re jumping into the fray to offer our customers and friends a resource to help them navigate the tricky waters of Web 2.0.  We know you trust us to build engaging and effective web sites, to develop sound, measurable marketing programs, and now we’d like to make sure that we offer you the opportunity to discuss with us whatever is on your mind.  We hope you’ll find our blog a useful resource for information and exchange of ideas, and that you’ll comment frequently. Don’t hold back! We want to hear what you’re thinking.

We’ll also publish articles about our work in the community, as it’s very important to us, and we think it helps define us as a company. We’ll also post about interesting things we see or experience related to our core competencies, such as web development and design, marketing and social media, intending to make sure our customers are kept aware of not only the most recent developments in these constantly-evolving fields, but also have access to our opinions about how best to employ them, if at all.

We hope that The Right Click becomes a part of your regular readership, and that you engage us with your comments and questions regularly.  We’re encouraging you to speak to us and our readers in order to gain the most information you can as you look to employ your online resources to the best of their abilities.

So what are you waiting for?

You’ve decided your business needs a blog, your customers expect it and you want to exhaust every channel possible to get your message, and your brand, out to both existing customers and potential new customers. So now what?

We’ve seen a lot of blogs, and frankly, most don’t offer the kind of value necessary to make a business decision worthy of the investment of time and resources. As a way of helping you make the right choice, we’ve put together a short set of five “rules” to govern your life in the blogosphere. Read through them, let us know what you think by commenting, and together let’s make sure that your efforts return maximum value.

1. Have Something Interesting To Say: Seems basic enough, yes? But you may be surprised at how little truly interesting, or unique, things are being published in blogs today. The “signal to noise” ratio of blogs is heavily weighted towards the “noise”, unfortunately. This is understandable given the fact that blogging by nature makes it easy for just about anyone to publish their thoughts quickly, and make them available to a world wide audience cost-effectively. The key to making your blog successful is to offer something of value or unique. Do you possess thought leadership in a space which you can share on a regular basis? Can you offer information which provides value to your readers, especially information which may be hard to obtain elsewhere? These are good questions to ask yourself before committing to publishing a blog.

2. Prepare to Engage: By nature, blogging and Web 2.0 implementation requires interaction. The intent of your blog should not be to just have you publishing your thoughts, but to engage responses from subscribers. Truly successful blogs not only generate responses to the original posts, but often spawn new discussion topics based on the back and forth found in the comments. The authors of blog posts need to understand their role in staying involved with their posts, to respond to comments, clarify positions, and deflect incorrect responses – albeit in a calm, professional manner which reflects well on the business.

3. Be Committed To It: An often overlooked aspect of jumping into the world of online publication is the need to have regular content flowing. You can start out of the gate with some intersting, valuable things which excite readers and compel them to subscribe and respond, but they won’t stay with you if you don’t have new content to offer on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is to have several cycles worth of content ready before you publish for the first time, and create an editorial calendar which identifies topics and authors for a period of time in advance which makes sense. As an example, let’s say you plan on publishing a blog entry every two weeks. We’d recommend that you have four entries close to finalized before you publish your first, and have a calendar showing 22 cycles (the remaining two week cycles for one year) of topics, with authors identified. There’s no requirement that you actually have to adhere strictly to that calendar of topics – you can adjust as you watch market forces change – but it helps you plan your time and provides confidence that you don’t have to sweat thinking of new things every two weeks.

4. Define What Success Means: This is the least understood aspect of blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, for businesses. It easy enough for a political writer to gauge success for their blog – people read and comment, they get quoted by pundits, and eventually become pundits themselves (see Drudge, Matt). For a person blogging about food, they can measure success by the number of subscribers and the contributions of content (photos, recipes, etc.) by contributors. So how exactly should a business define success for their blogging efforts?

Let’s start by saying right off that one way to ensure that you will NOT be successful is by applying traditional, sales-based metrics to define success. The intent of your blogging may well be to drive traffic to your site, and eventually sales, but you’ll end up doing headstands to try and directly tie blogging to such direct sales.

Each business will need to define success in their own way, but in general, the end game of blogging is to be seen as an expert, a ‘go to’ resource for information and advice in a certain field. As we discussed earlier, being a thought leader in a particular space can provide immense value to a business, if only due to people thinking the company is a source of reliable information about that space. Hopefully, as those propsective customers get closer to the point of purchase, they’ve already legitimized your business as a reliable source of the product or service, giving you a ‘leg up’ on your competition.

In searching for hard metrics, the only empirical data of value would be fairly obvious – number of comments, rate of comments, number of subscribers, etc.

5. Be Patient: It takes time to build an audience, whether you’re talking about blogging, television shows, writing a book – really anything. Remember the television show “Seinfeld”? Its hard to remember that such a powerhouse show, now revered as one of the greatest shows of all time, was almost cancelled its first season, as the audience figured out the unique brand of humor they offered (“Its a show about nothing.”) It’s rare than any business will instantly see a flood of comments and subscribers, the key is to keep publishing, try to find other online outlets to link to your blog, and gain readership and participation slowing but steadily. Again, each business will need to decide for itself what the minimum commitment of time and resources will be for their blog, but if you’ll take the steps we outlined in point number 3, we think you’ll find the effort worth it, and give yourself enough time to let your blog have every chance of success.

As many of you know, we at Monkee-Boy feel strongly that community service is an integral part of our business model.  Our employees are encouraged to volunteer their time to whichever organization they wish, and most do so gladly.

Our Marketing Director has delivered Meals on Wheels for a decade now.  Our Trees Initiative has resulted in the planting of over 2,700 trees so far, helping offest the carbon footprints of the sites we launch.

The Miracle League at Town & Country has been an organization we’ve supported since their inception some four years ago.

A member of the Monkee-Boy team sits on their board of directors, and the company provides web, video and photography services which have greatly enhanced their ability to get the word out about their wonderful organization providing fun and safe sports to the special needs children of the Austin metro area.

We’re proud of our involvement with the Miracle League, and continue to contribute whatever is asked of us, whether it be donated services, or sponsorship of holes for their annual golf tournament fundraiser, or financial contribution to their scholarship fund for the high school-aged “Buddies” who pair up with the players to ensure that games are both safe and fun.  We’re especially thankful when we hear from parents how much the Miracle League means to their families, and how much they appreciate the efforts which go into making sure games happen. We hope you agree that the time and effort we expend on behalf of these wonderful kids and their families is time well spent.

By the way, if you’d like to help the Miracle League, or get involved, they are always seeking donations and volunteers.  Just visit their website at http://miracle.tandcsports.org/ to find donation and contact information.  Their motto is “Every Child Deserves a Chance to Play Baseball”, and if you ever get an opportunity to visit the field and watch a game, you’ll see an endless sea of smiles which is sure to warm your heart.