Experts recommend using flexible work schedules and allowing employees to work from home (just a few of the many ideas) to help lower employee turnover. Employee education can be another tool that allows small business’s to retain key talent.  This tool can include reimbursing employees for conferences and classes they attend. But some firms really drop the ball during implementation and management of this program.

While many larger firms have a policy for employee educational reimbursement, most small businesses do not. One of the small business’s I worked for employed the ‘as its needed it will be addressed’ plan of action. In better economic times, the company happily paid for its employees to attend a variety of conferences and classes. But as  the economy started declining, employee education was one of the first expenses to be slashed.  To the best of my knowledge they still haven’t brought the program back.

Another company that I worked with had a program implemented that covered employee education. However, the restrictions on the reimbursement were so tight, I only knew one person that had ever taken advantage of it. Some of the restrictions included reimbursement for classes that provided a grade. This meant that many of the continuing education classes that the local community college designed for working people would not be reimbursed.

I tell you this to encourage small firms to be flexible when developing an employee education program. The point of employee education is to give existing workers  resources that will improve their job skills. Encourage employees to develop an educational plan during their annual review that includes goals and next steps. This will empower them to take control of their education. Hold employees accountable to achieving their goals and provide opportunities for them to use their newly developed skills. And last but not least recognize their commitment and offer praise when it is deserved.

Well, I’m off to do some Photoshop homework.

So I found this post called “Twitter query results: Least favorite corporate jargon” written by Shel Holtz. The author used Twitter as a platform in which to survey users about their least favorite corporate jargon. Here are the results:

* Leveraging low-cost locations (as a euphemism for moving US jobs overseas)
* Class-leading
* Value-added (One of Dave Fleet’s 10 most irritating PR phrases)
* A value-add proposition
* Impact (used as a verb)
* Synergy
* Leveraging synergies
* Working as designed
* Bandwidth (as in “I don’t have the bandwidth to help out)
* Cutting edge (this is another one that made Dave Fleet’s list)
* Leading edge
* Industry leader
* Good PR (as in “get me some good PR”)
* Best practices
* Strategic
* Over-arching
* At the end of the day (this one made Oxford University’s list of the 10 most irritating phrases)
* Ear job (the act of passing on juicy gossip verbally, in private. “I’ll give you an ear-job later”)
* Drilling down
* 24/7 (this one also made Oxford University’s list)
* Mission critical
* Granular insights and solutions
* Reaching out
* From a 50,000 (pick your number) foot level
* Working in silos
* Bio-break (time build into your day to breathe, relieve yourself, walk, look out the window, etc.)
* Tell me your net net
* How does that measure to your performance, department and corporate goals?
* Do we have a quorum?

I admit that I use a great number of these phrases. Terrible, huh? When I first started working in the corporate world, I loathed the jargon, the thumbs up given by upper management, and all the cliché’s I found to be embarrassing and soul draining. Somewhere along the line, I started ‘reaching out’ and ‘drilling down’ at the ‘end of the day.’ The jargon somehow slipped in slowly and silently.

The great thing about small businesses is that for the most part, this type of vocabulary isn’t used and is usually mocked. Small business owners are more focused on building business than appearing intelligent in meetings. So for 2010, one of my goals is to lose the jargon and become a bit more original. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?

According to Marketing Sherpa,

In analytics, a conversion is what is known as a user-defined event. In other words, it can be anything you want it to be.

Some company’s will choose to view a conversion as a visitor completing a registration form while other will define conversion as a product or service being sold. One of the points that Marketing Sherpa stressed was that a conversion should match strategic goals that an organization has outlined and that it is attainable. The conversions need to be able to be tracked and reported upon. Below is the chart that Marketing Sherpa displayed within their article.

One of my client’s main goals for 2010 is to grow their email list. They will be looking at traffic to the site and how many of those visits resulted in a new email address for their list. A secondary goal is to increase the number of people that sign up for their services online. These goals support a long term strategic goal of increasing the volume of their business that is conducted online and developing better analytics on their customers. What are your goals and how are you tracking your progress?

I recommend that small businesses create a company blog schedule. A schedule will allow companies to narrow their focus and develop a real strategy. If you have scheduled events such as tradeshows, new product launches, seminar, or other activities plan to have a blog post written in advance to support the take pressure off of employees who will be swamped with other duties.

Critics of blog schedules say that it kills the spontaneity of a company blog and often leads to dry, dull content. In the case of small businesses, I disagree. Larger corporations have bigger departments and often have the staff available to take ownership of the blog responsibilities. Employees working for a small company are all ready wearing several different hats and can benefit from the stability of a blog schedule.

To avoid having dry, dull content, spread the responsibility of writing blog posts around to different people. The different writing styles and voices will help to keep readers engaged in a greater variety of topics. I encourage small businesses to collect at least two months worth of blog posts in advance as these can tide you over during busy times or during the off season. Collect posts on common technical support issues, customer service stories, best practices, unique client solutions, and funny sales calls.

While planning the yearly, quarterly, or monthly marketing calendar, pay attention to any activities that could yield an interesting blog post. Assign each member of your team a different topic to write about along with a due date. Encourage employees to promote the their post to family, friends, and business acquaintances. Monitor the traffic to each post and provide feedback to the employees.

Employees can help to tell the unique story of your company. By implementing a schedule, the company blog can communicate the efforts that those employees are undertaking each day to serve customers just a bit better than your competition. The schedule helps spread the work around to more individuals and help to keep the content fresh and interesting.

I’ve had several people ask me about the benefits of LinkedIn. The focus of this post is not the pros and cons of LinkedIn. But here they are quickly:

1. The profiles on LinkedIn show up in searches like Google. That helps show people that you are legitimate and exist.
2. You can keep in contact with those people in your life that aren’t necessary friends.
3. Using LinkedIn you can find a job or advertise one.
4. LinkedIn has a groups section that you can join to find like minded people to ask questions or promote products.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s focus on the more important parts of the site. To make the most of a LinkedIn profile, upload a good professional photo of yourself. Not the one from New Year’s Eve. Fill out of the profile completely. Add in education, current and previous positions, and last but not least come up with a summary of all of your experience including what your future goals are. The summary is what most people see just after your photo. It’s like a cover letter for your LinkedIn profile.

A few things I wish I had know. Although LinkedIn allows users to create company profiles which is a great tool for companies. The individual who creates the company profile must have a @insertcompanynamehere.com email address. If you are a small nonprofit who doesn’t have the @insertcompanynamehere.com then you will be unable to utilize this aspect of LinkedIn. Make sure you spell check the content. Ensure you use the same terminology throughout the profile.

To make the most of this tool, join some groups and contribute to conversations. Synch up your address book (either desktop or through your email) and invite people you know to connect with you. They can be colleagues, suppliers, friends, customers, etc. LinkedIn allows you to recommend people and receive recommendations. Use this tool. As your situation changes i.e. change in jobs make sure you update your profile. Initially it does take a bit of time to set your profile up but it only takes minutes a month to contribute and update your network on what you’re working on.

Now that the website redesign project is fully under way for my client’s site, we’ve had to take a hard look at some of forms used to purchase their products. The website was designed about seven years ago. At that time, the forms they used were considered standard for the industry. But now in 2009 (almost 2010) the forms look clunky and out of date.

The web design firm that I am working with was kind enough to send me some links on forms from Smashing Magazine. The first paragraph of the article immediately grabbed my attention:

If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe to them how the service works, explain to them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they’ll get in return. And, of course, we should also make it extremely easy for them to participate.

The parts of this article that really spoke to me was ‘maximize completion rates’ and ‘make it extremely easy for them to participate’. Well, that makes complete sense, right? How do you get all the information that you need and make it easy for a customer or prospective customer to get what they need?

1. Location: place the link to the form in an area of the web page that makes it easy to find it.
2. Name: ensure the name of the link communicates what it is.
3. Simplicity: remove any content such as questions or graphics that don’t help the user complete the form.
4. Clarity: let people know what information is required and in what format. Dates and addresses can be entered into fields in a variety of formats.
5. Spell it out: to maximize completion rates, let consumers know what the benefits are of filling out this form.
6. Expectations: the majority of people want to know how many fields they need to fill out. If you cannot use a one page form, then label questions 1 of 10 or provide a progress bar so that expectations of the time needed to complete the form are managed.
7. Layout: make it look nice. Keep the label and input boxes aligned uniformly. Avoid harsh colors. And please use spell check.
8. Test: have other people such as your mom, cousin, friend, barber, etc. take a look at the form. They might point out something incredibly obvious that you may have missed.

Don’t be afraid to change or modify existing forms to better meet the needs of your audience. To obtain the information that you need, you need to be flexible and open to change.

This blog has provided me a fantastic opportunity to really think and write about what I’m most passionate about. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still learning about all of the topics I write about. Rather than trying to mimic blogs that really address digital marketing from a high level, I’m going to go into the trenches. This means I will write about what I know-actually creating and developing content and implementing it. For example, how to upload a podcast onto your website. How to use HTML meta tags, how to go about redesigning your website, and deciding on what social media sites to focus your resources on.

Occasionally I will read about a company or a group that has done something that has piqued my interest and I will write about it. The purpose of this content is to provide actionable information to people who are just starting to embrace the digital marketing world. Maybe your company has a website and you’ve done a bit of email marketing but are unsure as to how to interpret click through rates on your latest campaign. Read this blog. If you are looking for clever bits of information to ‘borrow’ and tweet about or impress your newest client with, this isn’t the blog for you.

Stayed tuned. We’re going to have some fun!

For the record, I’m not a fan of splash pages, websites that immediately launch a sales presentation or really annoying music. I don’t mind some soft background music but it has to fit the industry, company and website.  There are a few restaurant website that I have visited that have some great tunes loaded. There’s nothing more embarrassing than being in a coffee shop, airport  or meeting and having a sites annoying sales pitch blared at top volume.

I think multimedia can be tricky for a lot of companies. It sounds great to have podcasts, video files, still photos and animation. But if you’re a small company that cannot upload new content, multimedia can be a burden over time. Outdated content is worse than no content at all. For visitors multimedia presents more options to become familiar with the business and its products. Some people prefer to absorb information by reading, some by watching, and others like to listen. Providing this variety improves the likelihood that visitors will retain the information, the brand (and company)will be more top of mind and may inspire customer loyalty. As Mercedes-Benz envisions for their site: “multimedia online brand experience.”

Ensure that there is a purpose to the content. It’s nice to have a really cool website but if your multimedia files don’t offer any value, time and money are being wasted. Show your prospects a new feature on your product or take viewers on a tour of your new facility. Have the CEO or President of the company give their yearly message via video or upload a podcast of the company’s most recent blog post. Post photos of the holiday party or of happy customers.  Keep it real, keep it clean and keep it simple.

I recommend starting with something small like a podcast or videos. Keep them short and to the point. And please, have several people review the content before you upload it to the site. And don’t forget promotion! Send an email to customers and prospects alerting them to this new resource. Mention it in the company newsletter. The more people you involve (employees) and the more people you tell (prospects, customers, suppliers, etc) the more successful your content will be.

Once you decided what you want your newsletter to accomplish, look for other examples. We’ve all seen numerous newsletters. I actually keep two folders in my email that are dedicated to newsletters. One folder contains newsletters that either have an attractive design, fantastic content, etc. The other folder holds newsletters that are bad. Some have terrible subject lines or poor layout while others have outdated information or just weak content. I sign up for a great many newsletters. I receive newsletters based on personal interest (beer or running news) and professional interest (digital marketing news). Another great place to look is at competitors. Sign up for their newsletters and see what they consider news. This will provide an additional ideas for everyone.

How much and how often? Recently I’ve seen companies who are trying to pack a whole years worth of internal company news, sales pitches, and customer success stories. If you find yourself in that place, consider publishing your newsletter more frequently. Are you checking the numbers? What are people clicking on? Look at the open and click rates over time to find out what your customers are interested in and write on those subjects.

What else? Don’t forget to include photos, customer comments, and surveys. This type of content breaks up the monotonous look of a newsletter and conveys quickly conveys information. Most companies use the staff in the marketing department to write the articles for the newsletter. Consider asking the customer service and technical support employees to develop content. If nothing else, they will probably have interesting stories to share.

These are just a few ideas on how to develop good content for customers.

Those of you who are on Twitter know about the infamous Brittney spammer. You know, the one who uses the vulgar photo of Brittney to spam pornography. After blocking various incarnations of that account at least 50 times, receiving a tremendous amount of pornography spam, and seemingly innocent people sending me links (which I was later told open your computer up to viruses when you click on them), I decided to go private on my Twitter account. I am still more than happy to allow almost anyone to follow me. I have well over 1,000 followers. I choose to spend my time communicating with other individuals. Not blocking spammers or defending my opinions against an angry teenage girl who has nothing better to do.

If you would like to follow me, simply send me a request. I don’t allow followers who simply retweet other peoples tweets (unless you declare your account to be such), tweet pornography, or who are malicious and are just looking for arguments. I’m also not interested in looking at your pictures or making $1000 a day from home.

Thank you!