I can plan, but I can also do. I posted my approach to strategy consulting a while ago, but then I realized, anyone can say that stuff. Listen to the client, help them. How hard is that? But I thought it might be useful to list some specific things I can do…things that presume a strategy and that could be done by many tech people…but perhaps it is not so obvious…
- Blogs - I can get you started blogging by setting up a website with a professional look and feel, with a “real” web address, and teach you how to use the authoring tools to post. I can coach you on how to write posts that people will want to read and how to deal with comments. I will not design your corporate website or make you a whole e-commerce site for your business…those projects take longer and are less rewarding than anyone ever wants. But a blog can be focused and simple to maintain.
- Twitter - I can show you what twitter is and how it can be useful. I can get you started tweeting and provide some guidance to help you understand if it is worthwhile to pursue. Many people “try out” social media, but don’t go beyond registering and logging in once.
- Facebook - I can help you follow a strategy–again, avoiding the experience of signing up, filling out a profile, uploading a couple photos…and then not doing anything else for weeks. It’s actually easier to help other people than maintain your own presence because, by yourself, you either get it because all your dorm friends are on it…or you tend to lapse.
- Wikis - Creating a wiki–a collaborative online workspace–is 1% technology and 99% advocacy and leadership by example. But that 1% can be daunting. And again, a coach or guide can be helpful to avoid the isolation of “why am I doing this?” that causes so many projects like this to die.
- Email Newsletters – my friend and I hosted a newsletter service almost a decade ago that he wrote from scratch. I would not be programming such a thing for you. I would use Listrak or Constant Contact. But newsletters are very time-consuming when a company has many other unexpected demands. I can put together the creative resources, deploy the weekly newsletter, and deal with the community management challenges, reporting back engagement and conversion metrics. This task alone saves you the eventual cost of hiring a person.
- Web Site Marketing and Analytics – At the most basic level, I can get you set up with Google Analytics so you can see a daily report of who is visiting your website. We can implement Search Engine Marketing (SEM)–paying Google for clicks to advertised links to your site. And I can review your site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to assess if there are simple things that can be done to increase the number of people who find your site. I can determine how to make the urls on your site “friendly” and review your copy for editorial suggestions to improve relevance. SEO can be a very complex and expensive undertaking, or it can be an 80/20 rule thing where I spend half a day to figure out what will give you the most immediate results.
- Link Building – one of the most critical things to increasing traffic to your site is to be linked from other sites. There are services that will sign you up for directories. You may even receive offers in the mail for listings in references. These are like the “Who’s Who” books our parents were sold as we graduated high school and college–they are almost entirely worthless and meaningless–as are all the search engines besides Google. If your company can afford a shotgun strategy, by all means, go for it. But what you really need is a sustained effort to cultivate relationships with other sites that might find your content valuable. For bloggers, this means commenting on other people’s blogs and responding. It means firing off an email to people who comment on your site. It means setting up Google Alerts to watch for mentions of your company name in any news media, monitoring twitter and any other media that might be used by your customers, and then following up proactively to connect with people. One person at a time…you build a following. I don’t have a magic application that will do that for you, but I can devote a set number of hours per week to help you stay on top of these things. Again, instead of doing it yourself or having this task take up a good part of some key employee’s time, I can keep help you stay on top of things.
These are just some quick examples. They are not sexy but they are the kind of things that for most companies are easy to start but hard to maintain.
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