social media

We all know that responsive is good. Responsive means your spouse is happier than most spouses. Responsive means that your teenager is capable of doing what you ask of him. Responsive means the drugs are working.  Responsive is good.

Especially when  it comes to websites.

In February 2015 Google announced that it would change its search algorithm to give extra points to websites that proved to be mobile friendly.  What does that mean? A mobile friendly site is a site that:

1. Does not use Flash or other software that does not work well on mobile devices
2. Uses text that can be read without zooming
3. Sizes the content on the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or vertically to see it
4. Places links far enough apart so the correct link can be easily tapped - even with large fingers (or provides an automatic zoom feature to bring the link up for verification).

Google's Day of Mobile Readiness came and went on April 21, 2015, and guess what? Companies that previously enjoyed high search engine visibility - but which did not update their sites to be responsive - have dropped precipitously since that time.

Perhaps you figured you had other, more pressing business concerns to invest in. Perhaps you hate spending money on marketing. Perhaps your previous experience with website design left you with a bad taste in your mouth. But none of that matters, because mobile website traffic is growing at 3.5% per month across all sectors and industries, and mobile search will surpass desktop searches this year. So even if Google hadn't changed their search algorithm in April, consumers and B-to-B customers are already voting with their smartphones.

When is the last time you even looked at your website from your smartphone or tablet? If you have to scroll, pinch & pull, or squint to view your website, it's not mobile friendly. But don't take my word for it - take Google's. They've produced a Mobile Friendly Test that you can use for free. Just visit this site, enter your domain name, and watch the analyzer do its work. Go ahead and test it now.

If your website came back with a "mobile friendly" result, congratulations! Keep up the good work of keeping up with change on the internet. If you received a "not ready" result, it's time to make some changes.

There are essentially three different ways to make your website mobile responsive. The first (and oldest) approach is to offer a mobile version of your website, perhaps with the domain type of .mobi. This isn't a great option. It creates double-work for you and your staff, and it means that your SEO results get diluted across two domains. If your website provider suggests this, tell him no. The only person who will make more money doing this is him.

The next approach is something called Dynamic Serving. Think of it as a device sniffer. Someone calls up your website, the Dynamic Services sniff out what device is being used, and delivers the correct version. This approach tends to have a high error rate, and with devices changing constantly, it must be updated all the time. Like the previous option, tell your development partner no. This approach ultimately has a high cost-of-ownership.

The one approach you should use is a Responsive Design for your website. Responsive Design means you create and maintain one website. How does it work? Well, picture your website as a grid - which is how most websites are programmed. Here is an example of a grid from a website:

 Until fairly recently, these grids were always static, which means that the elements were in a fixed position to one another.  If you view a static grid website from a mobile phone, you will have to scroll to the right if you want to go from the logo to the header content.

In a responsive website, the grid elements are flexible. On a desktop, the grid elements will appear as in the drawing. On a smartphone, the elements will shuffle and become a vertical stack. You can even decide that some elements will only be visible when viewed from a desktop or tablet, and create specific alternative elements that show only on mobile phones.

If your site isn't mobile ready, it's critical that you invest in updating it as soon as possible. It is next-to-impossible to compete in the current business climate without a good website, and consumers increasingly disregard businesses that are falling behind on the digital marketing front. Until you do, Google will penalize you in their search, though you can earn your search position back once you update your site. And don't think this is just affecting you in Google. The only way a search engine makes money is if the people using it believe they get good search results. Being sent off to a website that offers a bad user experience reflects poorly on the search engine, so all the search engines - Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. - are highly aware of the fact that mobile search is where consumers are driving the internet.

If your site is built on a hosted engine like Shopify or Etsy, you are already covered. If you have a stand-alone site, move away from custom website design if you can. Using a website platform that is constantly being updated (think WordPress, Joomla, or Magento) is a far superior approach that will keep you up-to-date and save you money in the near and long-term.

Modernizing your website may seem daunting, but it's a good thing. A responsive website will better meet the needs of your customers, which means you will ultimately experience more foot traffic, website sales, and loyalty. Sure, the Mobile Bandwagon may have just passed you by, but with a bit of an effort you can catch up again.

Most business owners approach their P&L (profit & loss statement, often called operating statement) as a zero sum game. They want to know where they can trim spending to have more money left at the end of the month.

I call this the getting-blood-from-a-stone approach. Because for most small business owners, there just isn't enough cash to begin with, and moving the money around isn't going to change much.

I evaluate as many as 10 P&Ls each week for small business owners desperate for different results. And 95 times out of 100 my primary advice is, "Sell more," which is not what people want to hear.

A big part of the problem with increasing sales is that most business owners don't really understand what selling is. So let's start with what it is not:

• Selling is not PR or a press kit.
• Selling is not a Facebook page that posts pictures of new products and comments or discussion about them.
• Selling is not a Twitter feed
• Selling is not an national ad - not even if you spent $80,000 for the placement.
• Selling is not training

All those things are important, and they certainly support the selling function, but they have their own purposes to fulfill. Selling is the process of understanding what a customer needs, then helping her see a solution to her needs through something you can provide. A good sales effort tells the customer what to decide, because most people (and therefore most buyers) have a hard time making decisions.

One of my favorite examples of good selling without a salesperson present comes home once each year with school-age children. It's the school pictures order form. The bulk of that promotional device shows you how to buy.

• Package A has two 8"X10"s, four 5"X7"s, eight over-sized wallets, and 16 mini-wallets
• Package B has one 8"X10", three 5"X7"s, eight over-sized wallets, and 8 mini-wallets.
• After describing the remaining packages C through F, there is a list of the "add-on" items you can buy to increase your number of 8"X10"s, 5"X7"s, other sizes, CD disks with digital images, etc.

If you have ever experienced an end consumer or potential dealer saying they love your product but then walking away, you have seen what happens when someone can make the decision that they want to buy but can't progress to the decisions of what to buy or how to buy.  The buyer often doesn't understand himself why he is walking away - he may think he's making sure there isn't something better out there, he may think he needs to 'think about it', he may think he needs to consult his cash-flow, but all of that is short-hand for the underlying problem that he doesn't know how to make a decision he feels good about.

That's why Facebook, Twitter, PR kits, and training sessions are not selling. Selling is the thing that will tell the customer how to make a decision he feels good about. Selling is interactive, selling tailors itself to the needs of each potential customer, selling makes solutions obvious and achievable.

It's time for you to remove yourself from the zero sum game of cost-cutting and austerity. Instead, sit down and re-imagine what selling should be for your products (or services) and your target customers.

Then get out there and sell. It's 95% sure to solve the cash problems you face.

Social media monitoring tools bump up your marketing strategy and planning

Nearly all marketing strategy today includes a significant presence in social media. Many people think the most exciting thing about social media is that it's free. A) it's not, and B), that's not even the most exciting part.

What's truly exciting about social media is how much you can learn about your customers and potential customers. Social media activity is by no means an indication that someone will buy from you, but we are beginning to understand that different types of social media engagement offer varying forms of value to a business. Social media engagement can enable your customers to influence other new prospects for you, it can help you foster an online relationship that leads to a purchasing relationship, and it can keep you top-of-mind for additional purchases and visits.

Yesterday we were evaluating the questions that must be asked and answered before you can create an effective marketing strategy. Today, let's look at some of my favorite tools for tracking and analyzing social media engagement. This will give you additional insight necessary to creating a powerful marketing strategy.

How did they find you and how engaged are they?

If you're not asking customers how they heard about you, you are missing an excellent opportunity to refine your marketing. Always ask, and keep records.  Social media monitoring tools add depth to this knowledge. Using them, you can assess how engaged your customers are with your brand, how often you are mentioned, and what is being said. This type of oversight in the social media world will help you refine your marketing activities and quickly resolve any negative comments. My favorite tools for online brand monitoring include:

• Google Alerts. This is the easiest and most common form of brand monitoring. Put in your brand name and any other well-known terms associated with your company, and get feedback every time those terms show up in the web.
• Hoot Suite. If you use this as your social media dashboard you get a lot of great features, but one of the features I like most is that you can add a keyword tracking column. This gives you a real-time stream anytime someone mentions your brand in your social media space. Seesmic does this as well, but I really prefer Hoot Suite.
• Social Mention. You can set up alerts to notify you when blogs, comments, images, basically anything on other social media sites mention your name, or a product, or any keyword you want to track.
• TwentyFeet. This aggregates your activity from multiple social media platforms so you can analyze which activities work the best for you. Using insights from TwentyFeet, you can decide which activities to do more of . . . and less of . . . in the year to come.
• Klout. Klout gives you an influence score based on your social media activity. It not only scores you, it also enables you to look at your influences and who you influence. Knowing this will help you refine your social media program. Other tools that do this are HowSociable and Kred.
• PeerIndex. This helps you identify who your online brand advocates are. Once you know that, you can get more creative in reaching out to them - giving them more to advocate with and about.
• Brand Monitor. This helps you focus on conversations that are relevant to you so you can participate.

Does this seem like a lot of monitoring? Of course it is; constant monitoring is an essential element of a successful marketing strategy. You can use an RSS feed reader to aggregate all of your social media engines, to make it easier to keep track, but the truth is it does take some effort and you should spend time every week analyzing your online engagement and tweaking it.

* Update 2022: This article was written in 2014, and while the information in the following post is still completely valid, one significant thing has changed. The emergence of frictionless, in-app purchasing on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest and TikTok has made social media channels an extension of website offerings in a much more seamless way. The sale of under $500 items is much more likely to be successful because of the higher likelihood of the purchaser being willing to make an instant purchasing decision (and therefore, the lower the price the higher the close rate). But even luxury goods are experiencing higher sales on social channels than ever before. It's still a numbers game. It's definitely expensive to compete, because paid advertising for social catalogs is almost a requirement at this point. But to say selling on social channels is unlikely, as was true in 2014, is no longer true today.

Social Media Sales are Secondary. Prospecting and Awareness Building are Primary

Sure, in the beginning there was tremendous excitement about how social media would level the playing field for small businesses. It was free, and it was the answer to small business sales.

Only it wasn't. And it isn't.

So when I see quotes that speak to analyzing the success of your social media efforts based on the number of sales, I cringe.  Because the implication that social selling is somehow less expensive or easier than traditional media, is simply incorrect.

Social Media Should be Analyzed like Display Advertising

What is exciting about social media is that if you throw a lot of elbow grease at it, you can create a very large social media following. On Twitter, this means at least 10,000 followers and on Facebook this means at least 5,000 followers. Those aren't goals - those are minimum standards necessary to compete.

Before social media, only large companies could afford to run display advertising in consumer magazines and commercials on television with sufficient coverage to create genuine consumer awareness. But no company ever claimed that it knew how many sales were driven directly by its Super Bowl commercial. Why? Because advertising isn't measured in that manner (see this article in AdAge about the way Super Bowl ads are measured and thought about).

Then Why Advertise?

It is fairly common for companies to complain that they can never tell if their advertising is working. As a result, many small business owners refuse to advertise. This is unfortunate, because the failure to advertise equates to a failure to go fishing for new customers - which is called prospecting.  One way or the other, all businesses must look for new customers.

We do know that companies and products with higher visibility and industry/consumer awareness have higher sales. This is one of the longest studied and benchmarked aspects of the advertising/marketing industries over many decades. Social media appears to have a similar effect as display advertising in magazines and on TV - it makes a brand or a product more familiar, so people are more likely to buy when an offer occurs. But just as when an advertiser runs an ad on TV the phones don't automatically start ringing, when you add a buy link on Facebook the clicks don't necessarily happen either. So what do we measure?

• We monitor relative increase in consumer awareness to the relative increases in sales.
• We measure the number of new prospects per week.
• We measure the effectiveness of sales efforts to those prospects by measuring:
  • Percentage of quality prospects
  • Average number of contacts required to convert prospects to customers
  • Time lapse between acquiring prospects and converting them

If your prospecting efforts improve when using Social Media, then Social Media is working for you. These are just the metrics for monitoring prospecting success on Social Media. There are many other metrics for analyzing Social Media success, but that's a different article.

*Update 2022: We can measure the direct purchasing behaviors of social sales, from demographics to transaction details.

Creating Emotional Connection

Social Media has a secondary benefit which has a cousin in the display advertising world. First, think about how feel-good commercials make you feel about a brand. When Coca-Cola sings about inclusiveness, when the Ford spokesman acts like your next-door neighbor, when Flo at Progressive Insurance makes us laugh, we develop warm feelings for the brand.  This is a very specific advertising method designed to improve consumer brand engagement through an emotional connection.

Social media has an even more tangible engagement effect, because you can improve brand engagement with an emotional connection built on actual, authentic engagement. It requires commitment, but it works.

It's About the Sales Cycle, not the Sale

Remember how the Sales Cycle works?

1. Prospecting: Get prospects' attention, capture leads, establish your credibility as a brand.
2. Cultivating: Bond with your prospects, sort the more interested and likely from the less interested and likely, and create desire for your products.
3. Servicing: Close the sale, service customers, and deepen customer relationships
4. Rinse, Repeat (you will likely lose 14% of your customers each year, so this process never ends).

Just as it can take many weeks or even months for a display advertising campaign to pay off in actual awareness, so does it take many months and even years for a Social Media strategy to pay off in actual awareness. Luckily for small business owners, the economics of organic (unpaid) social media are easier on the budget.

So remember: You don't have to do every social media channel or paid social ads. But you must market and promote and seek new prospects on a constant basis, and the economics of prospecting on Social Media are fairly advantageous for small business. If you do decide to use paid social media as part of your advertising and marketing strategy, don't think you can measure its effectiveness solely based on direct sales. That will lead to disappointment and discontinuation of a medium that - if you're using it correctly - is providing important - and measurable - benefits for the entire sales cycle.

One of my retail clients was just pitched by a local marketing firm on paying for text marketing services. For $1,000/year, the retailer can send unlimited text messages to their consumers. My client wanted to know if it was worth the money.

Here's how I responded:

Regarding text marketing, the jury is still out. While mobile marketing is definitely where marketing is going, I do not believe that text marketing will be how mobile marketing ultimately evolves. Research indicates that youth users of mobile are as offended by text ads as their parents are by getting telemarketing calls at the dinner table. Youth text users view text the way their parents view phone conversations. So text marketing is a good way to alienate the youth crowd.  While their parents aren't quite as offended by text messages (which isn't to say that they aren't offended - they just aren't AS offended), they are also much less likely to use text messaging than their kids.

When does text marketing work? When it comes from within the community - to tell their peers to gather for events, parties, etc. Mass texting is happening, but in a social context rather than a marketing context.

I know the agency said the text users would be "opt in," but part of the problem with building an opt-in text list is all the people you irritate while sending out texts to them to see if they want to opt in! I haven't seen any case studies yet to indicate that text marketing is actually yielding strong sales for any given retailer. All we have at the moment is a lot of testing.

Your reach as a local brand would be better focused on building social media relationships, doing opt-in email messages to people who have provided their email address to you in the first place, and hosting lots of events and other reasons to come into the store. I think it is more likely that a mobile app is in your future than that we want to do text marketing a'la telemarketing.

Do you remember when answering machines first hit the market? Even as early adopters raced out to buy one, the rest of the conversation went something like this:

“What do we need an answering machine for? If nobody answers, they’ll just call back!”

“Who wants to return a bunch of messages? I have enough to do already!”

Sixty years later, it’s inconceivable to most of us that we would live without voicemail (even though now most of us prefer texts).

Every technological advancement presents both new opportunities and new demands— and today’s social media conversations are remarkably similar to the answering machine conversations. Some of these technologies fade away, but social media is here—if not to stay, certainly for the near future.

Most of you have already incorporated social media into your business marketing in some fashion, but some are still wondering what benefits it provides, what the true costs are, and how to measure the results. This little primer will help you frame the issue for further consideration.

Social Media (Mostly) Doesn’t Sell, It Promotes

If receiving a check from a customer is ground zero of your business, then selling is one step away from ground zero: It is the activity that leads to the check landing in your hand. Promotion is two steps away: It’s the activity that creates awareness and affection or respect, which supports the selling, which lands the check in your hand. With some exceptions (big consumer brands, lower price points), social media doesn't drive a lot of direct sales. 

Here’s how you can use key social media venues to promote your business:

Facebook. Selling products on Facebook is a lot like trying to get people socializing in a bar to pay attention to a Public Service Announcement. They just aren’t interested. So what is Facebook good for?

Conversation and play. If you plan to have a Facebook presence, fill it with interesting information that will get your customers talking. Offer fun contests and participation games to maintain engagement. If you do it right, Facebook promotion will keep your brand top-of-mind and help your clients feel more connected to you, which in turn should make the selling process faster and easier

Soliciting advice. Anyone who has ever had to buy a present for someone they do not know well understands how painful that activity can be. It is much easier to buy gifts for those whose tastes and interests are known to us. Carefully facilitated Facebook conversations and interactive promotions will yield insight about what your customers want and need from you.

Twitter. A form of promotion (not selling), Twitter moves faster than Facebook, like a scrolling news ticker at the edge of one’s daily consciousness. Just how many people see any one posting is highly speculative. Twitter does not lend itself to the type of community that Facebook engenders, and as a result it is a less impactful business tool (unless you are selling breaking news, are a gossip columnist, or are in the business of selling personal expertise). So is it worth it to have a Twitter account? My advice to jewelry companies is that if you have a customer base that is Twitter-focused, and you are the type of person who comes up with witty, entertaining tidbits of information throughout the day—every day—then Twitter might be a venue for you. If not, then Facebook is likely to be more beneficial.

LinkedIn. Unless you are in the business of selling services (real estate, insurance, business services), LinkedIn is not a good promotional tool; however, it is an excellent networking tool. If you want to find out if you know anyone who can give you a personal introduction to Michelle Obama, go to LinkedIn. The more contacts you have, the more likely you are to find that link.

Is that all? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? For a jewelry company, yes, that’s pretty much it. Many other social media environments exist, but they cater to people who develop content for a living or to small niches with very specific interests.

Costs and Benefits

The primary costs of social media are how much time you spend engaged in them, and the opportunity costs of spending that time on social media versus something more beneficial. The only way you can measure those costs is to record and track how much time you spend on social media.

Benefits are harder to measure. The easy thing to measure is the level of engagement, as follows:

• Total Followers, Likes, or Friends (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
• Friends of Fans (Facebook, LinkedIn)
• People talking about your posts (Facebook, Twitter)
• Weekly Total Reach (Facebook, Twitter)
• How influential you are (Facebook, Twitter), as measured through services like Klout.

To translate engagement into benefits, measure how many new customer inquiries come in through these social media venues, and then track how many of those inquiries translate into sales. If you find yourself with more prospects of higher quality as a result of social media, then it is working for you. If you find your re-buy rates are higher among social media friends and followers than among those who are not participating in social media, then it is working for you.

But a note of caution: It’s easy to lose sight of what business you’re in—what actually makes you money. Make sure you use social media as part of your marketing strategy and no more—unless you love it so much you want to close the business you are in and do social media full time.

(with a big bow to Marshall McLuhan)

When you were a mere toddler, it's likely you took boxes, pots and pans and turned them into toys. In grade school, we took plastic sheeting and turned it into sleds on the perfect snow of Hospital Hill. In high school we turned Chevys into love machines, and I furnished my first apartment with crates and boards transformed into tables and shelves.

We humans are geniuses at repurposing. We take a thing and apply it for the purpose that we require of it, even if that is not the purpose for which it was intended. And we come up with some pretty terrific solutions.

But sometimes, we repurpose something accidentally. We actually think we are using it correctly, when in fact, our failure to understand its essential purpose means that we are under-utilizing it.

This is what has happened with websites. Here are a few examples:

The company that spends $40,000 on a custom website design to have a look that is unlike anyone else's.  Only to have to redesign the website from scratch two or three years later because the look is no longer current.

The small business owner who puts off his website design for months on end, because he has a "look" in his head and he's determined to achieve it. In the meantime, his online business suffers due to outdated technology and appearance.

The woman who loves minimalism - in her home, in her office, in her wardrobe - and insists that the website for her business mimic the same minimalism in its design - even though her business demands that a lot of information be shared.

What thinker/philosopher Marshall McLuhan taught us nearly 40 years ago was that we must employ each medium in a manner consistent with its inherent qualities and the way people use it. His point was that you couldn't separate the message from the medium (i.e., the medium is the message). Take billboards (please).  A billboard is designed to be read while driving by at 55+  mph.  You could certainly write a novel on one, but nobody would be able to read it. To use a billboard well, you have to think about what the user is doing when they encounter the medium (driving), whether or not the viewer can react instantly to the information (yes if it's to get off at the next exit, not as likely if it's to make an appointment), and what the user most appreciates in the billboard medium (tidbits of entertainment that can be fully digested in milliseconds). The physical reality of the billboard and the experience of the people viewing it are an essential part of the message itself. To use a billboard well, the message must be crafted in very specific ways.

The same thing is true of radio. Unless you have your own radio program, your options for reaching a radio audience consist of 15-, 30-, and 45-second spots. The medium requires that the message be fully understood without the use of visuals. The medium requires very tight writing. If the radio station is a music/entertainment station, the message has a better chance of being heard if it is itself entertaining. If the station is information-based, then an information-based message is likely to be effective. As with the billboard, the medium of radio plays a fundamental role in its message.

The concept of the website was developed by graphic designers excited about wireframes and by business visionaries excited about possibilities. And rightly so. But now it's time for us to be more thoughtful about the medium and how it interplays with the message.

Every type of website you can imagine - from a film studio to an accounting firm, from a music label to an online store - must provide content to its users. This is what people want from a website. They don't expect the website to give them a reflexology session, they don't expect it to repair their car, or test them for strep. Content. Information.

The information can come in the form of video, articles, infographics, pictures, social media streams. blogs, podcasts, and online flipbooks. Many of those content types are highly visual in nature. But here's where business owners often get off track - the website itself isn't a work of visual art. In fact, most websites - given what they need to accomplish - don't need to be very artful at all. They are containers for a broad range of content - content the consumers of your products and services want to access in order to cultivate the desire they need to make the decision to buy.  And when the container gets in the way - either by being too much the center of attention or by taking too long to achieve - it undermines the real purpose of the website.

Think about it in terms of a retail store. A store is a physical reality, a room or a series of rooms in an architectural structure. The structure itself needs to accommodate the store - space for safes with floors strong enough to hold them, space for displays and consumer floor traffic, counters, cabinets, offices, and bathrooms. Some physical spaces are very elaborate and some are plain, but at the end of the day they are just physical spaces with conduits, plumbing, drywall, and flooring.

What ultimately makes the space is the information you put inside it. The information includes display cases, the products within display cases, the colors of the paint,  light fixtures, lounge furniture, publications on display, signage, scents, sounds, and tactical experiences. The most magnificent architecture in the world won't compensate for poorly planned information inside the store.

The information in your website includes products, expanded information about products, company information, fonts, feeds from related content, embedded videos and graphics, interactive/social content, wish lists, ask-an-expert forums, and the shopping experience. The fanciest wire-frame design and most pricey website graphics in the world will not compensate for poorly planned - or missing - information.

Unlike real estate, the architecture of web design is changing rapidly. The conventions that looked good four years ago look stale today.  The designs that look appealing today will be out-of-date again soon. And though most of us know it's too expensive to give our real estate a face lift every other year, the stakes for not maintaining a contemporary look on a website are high.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is. It's to stop spending all this money on custom websites! I imagine a lot of graphic designers are cursing me right now, but as far as small business owners are concerned, custom websites are a waste of money - and they are not necessary. You can create a website in Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress with complete confidence that the underlying technology will continue to evolve. That means you don't have to invest in that evolution (though I strongly recommend providing some financial support to the open source community you commit to).

But what about the design? you ask. First, remember that design means a lot of things. The beauty of the design of each of these open source web platforms is the functionality, the ease with which you can integrate them with extra functionality, their tight integration with databases, and their constant evolution. And yes, design also means the look of the user interface.

If you take an open source program like Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress, then pay a designer to create a custom front-end design for it, you are still throwing money out the window. Why? Because the next time you want to update your look, you will have to pay for additional custom design. The next time your core software takes a technological leap (which is happening every few years), you will have to pay for more custom design.  The next time website styles change (which is happening every other year), you will have to pay for additional custom design.

Instead, use a design template made by a company who is making its money developing templates. Not just any template. Don't buy any one-hit wonders. Buy the template from a company like Infortis or Yoothemes, a company that is dedicated to updating its templates and keeping them relevant and functioning with the current technology. A company that is staying on top of - or even setting the trend for - what is hot in website design. Then pay a website expert to tweak and tune that template to match the colors, fonts, and essential feeling of your brand.

Now it's the designer end of my customer base that's in a dead faint. "But I make beautiful jewelry! My website has to convey my design ethos!" one says. "I am known in the fashion world as a fashion adviser. My site has to convey my fashion sense!" But is that true?

When you advertise in a magazine, does your ad pop up in 3D to show your design ethos? Or do you simply choose colors and a layout that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because print ads are terrible at being anything but one-dimensional, though they are terrific at showing a photograph of amazing design.

When you run a radio spot, does your spot appear to be adorned in fashionable clothing? Or do you simply choose words and music that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because radio is absolutely awful at showing anything visual, but it can do a terrific job of conveying a message.

When we expect any medium to achieve things for which it wasn't designed -or that the cost of achieving isn't worth - the medium, and therefore the message, is undermined.

If you look at some of the most powerful, profitable websites, you will see that the design isn't particularly noteworthy. Amazon isn't that great to look at, but it is the king of all content providers. Lands End's design elements begin and end with simple navy blue elements, but they sure do sell a lot of clothing and home goods. The website for the Art Institute of Chicago has exceedingly basic design elements, but the website performs beautifully and looks beautiful because they use images to convey the mood.  There is nothing designerly or artiste about Jeff Koons' website, but it does a terrific job of sharing information about his body of work.

The underlying promise -and therefore, the message - of websites is content, experience, information, engagement. To sacrifice any of those things for an idea of the prettiest, funkiest, coolest, or most luxurious graphic design is to undermine the medium. To pay $50,000 for a look when you could have spent far far less and put the rest of the budget into content development is to undermine both the medium and your business. And to spend precious marketing dollars on elements that don't ultimately bring value to your business or meaning to your message is unwise.

Learn to use each medium for the purpose it serves best. Use the print medium to engage the visual senses and convey color and richness in a way that cheap monitors cannot. Use video, film, and television to tell big stories. Use billboards and social media to deliver snackable content. Use radio to speak directly to your customers and engage the sense of hearing. And use your websites as a container for all those exciting elements - and more. More information, more detail, more engagement, more content. Stop trying to make the body into a dress. After all, in the case of the website, it's what's inside that counts.

(minor updates for changing technology on July 22, 2023)

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the things we're supposed to be doing on social media . . . TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, blogging, landing pages . . . Threads? . . . who has time to run a business, right?

No doubt Social Media has an important place in at the table of marketing disciplines. But it's just one chair. If you are feeling burdened by your lack of a TikTok presence or the fact that you can't figure out what to blog or tweet about, consider:

• If your company sells to businesses but needs a direct brand awareness with consumers, then Facebook, Instagram and TikTok should be part of your marketing efforts.
• If your company sells to businesses and has something very meaningful to teach or share that your potential business customers want to learn and that something makes it more likely those prospects will call you to do business, then you should  blog.
• If your company sells to businesses and you have something so compelling to say about that business that your potential customers are likely to flag it so as never to miss it, then you should consider leveraging the power of LinkedIn to reach business owners and professionals.

Every business needs a business legitimizing website. It's no longer an option. But what you do with that website must be determined by your business objectives.

Frustrated much? You have 4,824 Fans for your Facebook Page, but only 15-20 of them ever see your posts. Why does this happen?

It's the Facebook News Algorithm

Facebook looks at every single thing posted as an object. Status updates, photos, video links, events - every post type is just an object to Facebook. And Facebook analyzes each object to see how much interaction it gets (likes, comments, shares). If the objects you share on your Facebook page get lots of likes, comments, and shares, then your overall ranking will be higher. If your rank is high, Facebook will show your posts to more people. Here is the information you need to get better visibility.

 Any time you login to your Facebook news feed, there could be 1,500 new stories for you to view. So Facebook has to decide which ones show up, and they created a system they call the Facebook News Algorithm to manage that. The specific workings of the algorithm are a huge secret, and it changes all the time (it used to be called EdgeRank, but if you use that term today you'll out yourself as oh-so-out-of-touch). We do know some of the scoring elements the algorithm uses though, including the following:

Affinity

Do you have some friends or fans that constantly respond to you, share your posts, and like everything you publish? Those friends and fans help you have a high affinity score. The more high-affinity scoring friends you have, the higher your Affinity score will be. Here's the catch though - it only works one way. You can't click on other people's content and increase your Affinity score. When you click on their content, you only increase their Affinity score (a nice thing to do, but it doesn't improve the visibility for your own content).

Level of Interaction

 Just like pouring someone a beer takes less energy than mixing them a martini, hitting the like button takes less energy than making a comment. Facebook knows that, so they give you brownie points every time someone gives you a mixed drink. Want to really increase your level of interactin score? Post activities such as contests and events - that's the equivalent of getting a Mojito.

Timeliness

If you share a new meme that nobody has seen before (and which they like enough to comment on or share), the algorithm gives you points for that. That tired old postcard of a woman complaining about no wine-glass-holder on her vaccuum cleaner? Not so much. Just to give you an idea of how Facebook looks at dated information - they call this element decay.

Relationship Settings

You can't really control this one,  but it's in the mix. If someone marks you as a close friend rather than as an acquaintaince in their relationship settings, that improves your Affinity score. If they choose to see all updates from you, rather than just most updates or only important, that works in your favor too.

Post Type Preferences

Some people love seeing photos in their news feed, some prefer reading status updates, and some only like videos. Facebook monitors which type of content people prefer, and then it serves them that type of content. So guess what - if you only post photos, the people who don't respond to your photos ultimately won't see your content!

Spamminess

If users hit hide post or spam on your posts, it hits you in the algorithm. No big surprise there.

Last Actor

The computing power behind the Facebook News Algorithm is so huge that Facebook is literally tracking every single user's last 50 interactions (that's 1.44 billion active users per month as of April 2015), and deciding which content to give them every time they log in. All the elements we've discussed play into this decision,  but one element - recency - has a lot of weight. If you just posted something and a large number of your fans log in, they are far more likely to see it than if you posted hours earlier. But you need to be careful with this. Some people have tried to resolve this issue by posting to Facebook 10 - 15 times per day. While that works on Twitter, it's likely to get you marked as a spammer on Facebook. 

Now What Will You Do?

You're not on Facebook for your health. If you're using Facebook for business, you need to get a return for that energy. Here are a few things to think about every time you post - each of which will help you improve your visibility to the algorithm and get your content in front of more potential customers.

1. Post content that encourages interaction. Questions, games, contests and surveys naturally drive more interaction than statements. Posts with pictures drive more engagement than posts without. Video really drives engagement. Research has demonstrated that readers and viewers love - and share - Infographics. Make sure some of your posts include interactivity drivers.
2. When you share photos they may show up in the feed like little thumbnails. Sometimes that's OK, but sometimes the image is too small to be interesting. Always post a quick title or comment that is interesting enough to make the reader want to click on the photo and open it up.
3. Ask! Ask for shares. It's OK to do. Not everyone will accommodate you, but it never hurts to ask (just don't do so on every post - that's annoying).
4. Share interesting content that comes from somewhere else but which you know will be interesting to your readers. Sharing the right links is interesting and educational for your readers, and gives you a wider range of things to share when you've said everything you can think of (for now) about your business.
5. Post many different kinds of content - photos, videos, statuses, interactive apps - to make sure that each different type of viewer at least gets served some of your posts.
6. Post when your fans are online. Facebook offers a handy little tool for this. If you go to the Insights section of your Facebook page, then select Posts, you'll see a tab that says "When Your Fans are Online." Post two to three times per day, and focus on the high density times.