Imagine you’re a public relations professional in search of a job. You’re clicking through Craigslist when you see this ad:
“PR manager sought to execute association media campaign. Duties will include: contacting at least 7 radio stations per week (between 10 am and noon); purchasing banner ads on sites selected by PR director; launching a print ad campaign with the tagline “Building a Better Future”; pitching stories to the press (scripts will be provided). . . . . and other tasks as dictated by PR Director. Office hours are 8 – 5 pm; lateness will not be tolerated. For consideration, send cover letter, resume, five writing samples, six letters of reference, certified college transcripts, and Social Security Number.”
Would you respond? My guess is probably not. Not even in this lousy economy.
A job ad is the beginning of a dialogue between the employer and the eventual employee. This ad opens the conversation with a tone of micromanagement and mistrust, and eliminates any promise of autonomy. Most talented candidates wouldn’t bother to reply,
Think of your RFP as a want ad for a vendor. It’s an opportunity for you to outline your needs, identify your challenges, and articulate your goals. It should give potential vendors a solid understanding of what you want to achieve with the project and what their role will be. Here are a few tips on what to do, and what notto do the next time you sit down to write an RFP.
In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character relives the same day of his life over and over again, at first making the same mistakes and suffering the same consequences.
Eventually, he realizes he can learn from what he does wrong. The next time the same thing happens, he adjusts with much more positive results. Only by improving himself can he break out of his déjà vu.
All too often, though, company web sites are forced to live through Groundhog Day over and over again. Pages with high bounce rates or poor converting landing pages are never optimized. Every day, the site continues to drive away visitors or lose sales. And new pages with the same exact weaknesses are added.
So how do you keep your site from suffering Bill Murray’s fate?
Once you've written a blog post and hit "Publish," and garnered some initial readership and attention, you tend to move on to the next post, leaving the last one to the Archives.
(And by "you," I mean "me.")
But as blog authors, we need to continually remind ourselves that old content is just as valuable as new content, if not more so, due to our good friend, the long tail of search. Over time, it's your older content that keeps driving repeat visitors.
(And by "we," I mean "we.")
Our favorite Google Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, underscored this point in a recent post that explained how to use analytics data to identify existing posts that serve as search engine landing pages and make them more effective.
Google is rolling out new functionality for mobile ads that allows advertisers to targetspecific devices or carriers - so if you sell iPhone or Touch accessories, your ads can appear only on those devices. You can even offer a download option for apps (and they'll appear only on the devices that offer those apps)
I've seen people on Twitter starting to use the new social shopping service Blippy and I'm not sure what I think yet. Springwise points out that it offers transparency - allowing users to see what others are paying for the same service, but I'm not sold yet. Anyone using it to good results?
Obviously this week's earthquake in Haiti is on our minds. The folks at Google Earth worked hard to quickly push out new images and a layer where you can compare before and after photos. These images make it clear just how devasting this is.
Move over Oprah! We’re kicking off 2010 by starting the CDG Book Club. Every month or so, we’ll be reading a book about the web industry and posting our raves, rants, and other unsolicited opinions.
At least a few times a year, I like to rip myself away from screen time and consult a good ol’ fashioned book about the web industry—specifically about content, web writing, and usability. Unfortunately, a lot of the books I’ve picked up are not all that great. They’re either fairly simplistic guides geared toward web newbies or highly academic exercises that are not only a slog to get through, but have precious few practical takeaways.
There are, of course, a few notable exceptions—books that I not only recommend to fellow web professionals and clients—but that I find myself referring to again and again. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is one; Gerry McGovern’s Killer Web Content
is another. And now I’ve found another gem that I’m going to rely on for years to come—Content Strategy for the Web. This book is absolutely a must for anyone who is involved in conceptualizing, creating, producing, and managing online content. Insightful, practical, and fun to read, Halvorson's book had me striking my forehead I-could’ve-had-a-V-8-style more times than I can count. Nearly everything Halvorson says should be self-evident to content professionals, yet she presents it in a way that’s completely revelatory.
I could go on about the book’s merit’s at length, but for the sake of brevity, let me paraphrase some of my favorite takeaways from Halvorson:
One of the best ways to find out what your blog's readers are interested in, and the kinds of topics you should continue to focus on, is to simply see which posts were most popular in the past year.
Fire up your analytics program -- in our case, we're using Google Analytics -- and change the date range to Jan. 1, 2009 through Dec. 31, 2009 and drill down into the Top Content.
This list can be sorted in several ways; it'll probably default to pageviews. It's up to you to decide what makes a post "popular." Is it pageviews? Bounce rate? Time on page?
Once you've sorted your list according to your priorities, some interesting nuggets will probably be revealed.
We've applied this method to our own blog, using unique pageviews. Since these pages also track well with a higher time on site, it means you liked them, you really really liked them.
As the year comes to a close -- and CDG Interactive's offices close for the Christmas/New Year's week break (thanks, Scott!) -- the CDG bloggers take a moment to look back at the Top 9 things we learned in 2009.
(For those of you keeping track at home, that's 3 lessons each.)
What we learned ranges from how to continue to stay inspired when writing to why cute animals will always drive blog traffic.
Seth Godin has a new free e-book out, "What Matters Now." It gathers together nuggets of ideas and inspiration from some of today's top thinkers--from business consultants to authors to creatives of all kinds.
It's a quick read and provides some fresh food for thought as we look ahead to 2010, and what's next.
Download the PDF for yourself, or read the Scribd version, below:
is another. And now I’ve found another gem that I’m going to rely on for years to come—![Facebook [Logo]](/my_weblog/images/icons/icon-facebook_footer.gif){kind=icon}
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