Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

There is a point at work and especially being a Web producer when you reach the ultimate stress level, the apex of the vortex of stress. Many things can cause this and most days you are hovering at some level of stress. It isn't a bad thing, most days it's the adrenaline that gets your job done right, gives the perfect creative spark to a meeting or the urge to buy the whole office cupcakes.

But moments do exist when you could snap just if someone asks you what time it is. We all get to that point, it's okay. It's not about how stressful a project was or how crazy the timeline was, it's about the team that helps you get the finished project out. As crazy as it all seems at the time I always look back at those moments and am thankful because it made us all work better and harder together.

I salute you stress vortex, you make my job interesting and you make me realize how lucky I am to have a team that works like a well oiled machine.

 

While minding my own business on three different occasions of surfing the web I came across some great art gallery sites. My wife and I are art lovers. These artists were good and the prices reasonable.

With each discovery I said to myself, “I love this gallery!” Each site had a section to purchase on-line.

I bit.

Sadly each time, the on-line purchases didn’t go through. So I called. And each time all three galleries said, “Oh, we don’t do that any more. I don’t know how you got this number.” Newsflash: I got the bleeping number ‘cause YOU put it on YOUR web site to SELL YOUR CRAP.

Like all good cobblers’ children, Capstrat struggles to build fresh content throughout our various web properties. We try really hard but still could be better. At least we see the value.

This is puzzling. You design and program a site, then host it. All these events cost money and time. Why don’t people take them down after they no longer do business?

It’s not like they have to unprogram it. What’s your favorite Web peeve?

Look at the big button on Soundcloud.com. This variable width beauty scales in at 920px wide on my 1280px monitor. Someone call the Dept of Game and Inland Fisheries--I think this might qualify as a new record.

 

 

Note: This little how-to works great for me and the way I work. I use a Mac laptop to develop Django sites which have a life as a production site somewhere else. If you work another way (like in Windows, or with Apache for development instead of Django's dev server, or if you work straight off the production server), this might not help directly, but I hope it helps get you started on finding a way to solve this little annoyance on your own. 

 

So I do a lot of Django development on my laptop. I have a bunch of Django sites which I built over the course of the past two years or so - most of which I have to go back and work on a little every now and then. Because they've been developed at different times, most go back to before the new QuerySet refactor merge, and a few go back to before the Autoescape revision. I'm also looking at building my next site with the newforms-admin branch.

 I'm using subversion to check out the latest versions of Django. I usually check it out into /usr/local and then make a symbolic link to it in Python's site-packages folder. Because some of my sites raise errors when I run them with versions of Django released after they were written, I find myself changing the revision number of my laptop's Django occasionally (and by occasionally, I mean way too often).

To get around that, I figured out that I can do this little trick. Now, in my /usr/local I have all the different versions of Django I'm likely to need. Like so:

django/
django-newforms-admin/
django-pre-qsr/
django-pre-autoescape/
django-myclient/

The one called just django/ is the latest trunk revision... the one I usually use. The others are the revisions (or close approximations of the revisions) that I used when I made some of the older Django sites on my laptop. Each of these folders contains a folder called "django".

In the manage.py files for each of my sites where I can't or don't want to use the latest trunk revision, I just drop in a couple of lines right at the top:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, "/usr/local/django-myclient/")

This drops the path to my preferred Django rev onto the start of the sys.path list, and Python uses the first django module it finds in it's path. Now whenever I use manage.py's shell, dbshell or runserver commands, I'm using the Django rev number I need without having to fool around with svn update each time I need to work on a different site.

 

What's news to me may not be news to my super-smart coworkers in the Interactive department here at Capstrat. But what's news to me is likely news to my cohorts in the client services and government relations departments. (Not to mention definitely news to my friends who don't have a clue what it is we do here at Capstrat and barely grasp the concept of the web.)

So, with that, I'm going to provide a snapshot of my favorite findings from the Web Content 2008 Conference in Chicago. (My format = Presentation title, Presenter, Best things I learned.) If you're interested in something particular and would like me to dive into further detail, give me a shout out. I'm happy to oblige.

The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication by Dick Costolo of Google

• There's a new travel site out there, for addicted web travel researchers like me. Build your trip ideas from sites all across the web and publish them in one place, at www.offbeatguides.com . Dick tells us this site is still very early in their beta program, but that it's going to be a huge success. They'll mail you a pocket-sized guide of your destination - including your specific accommodations - or you can print to a PDF version. Either way, it would be a relief to hit the road with something other than my manila folder with a stack of print-outs from various sites. I've signed up for an invitation to the beta version. No luck yet. 

• Interesting remark from Dick: Those who comment across the web (even without association with a company or personal Web site) will be their own brands. And not too far off in the future. Think about that before posting a rash reaction to your friend's latest round of uploaded party photos or worse, getting fired up in a string of comments on a highly publicized news story. Yep, your own brand. I kind of like that.

• One more thing: www.getsatisfaction.com is the future of customer service. Dick recommends a third party customer service organization as a means to participate in conversation with your customers. Whole Foods does it. Food for thought.

The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media by Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications (Voted most popular presenter in unofficial poll.)

• Your brand is what people say your brand is. Case in point - www.brandtags.net (I'm not sure why people would associate Disney with ‘evil', but hey, not everyone is a fan like me I suppose.) The idea of this site is that a brand only exists in our heads. I'd recommend checking out your clients on the site. Go contribute yourself. Could be an eye-opener. Maybe it will lend itself to an argument that they should relinquish control, embrace social media and it'll all be ok Depending on what you find, obviously, you may be doing damage control.

• Dogster . Catster . What about Hamsterer? A quick online hunt reveals Hamsterer really did exist, but does no longer. Shame.

• His five lessons:

•     Relinquish control. Think about pulling your Google results as your bio.
•     Users will help each other.
•     Empower your most passionate customers, perhaps as advocates or private beta users.
•     Think outside the page.
•     Go where your customers are! Don't start your own social network. Try starting a broad discussion online and lightly sponsor it. Check out www.babycenter.com . (All my pregnant friends love it!)

When John Lovett of Jupiterresearch took the podium at the end of the first day of the conference, I thought, "This better be good." By 4pm, we were all on major information overload.

Working on several Web projects that require dynamic content, I was curious to see what John was going to share with us. What perhaps stood out the most to me was his acknowledgment of the challenge of creating dynamic content for business-to-business sites. He also showed examples of dynamic content and reassured us that it could be as simple as adding an image gallery to introduce the concept to a nervous client.

My favorite example was Hotels.com going from a community of 'experts' who post their opinion of hotels to a community of hotel-goers like you and me. He had us raise our hand if we went online to check user reviews of our hotel for this trip, and most of us lifted a hand. It's perfect. Hotels.com has dynamic content, we're providing it for them (thus cutting back on their internal resources) and it's what we want to read anyway.

I take back hotels.com as my favorite example now. It had to be the Target example. Think of the last product search you did on their site - let's say for a blender. The actual content of the product information is maybe two or three paragraphs. The rest is star ratings from users, comments from purchasers, recommendations of other products bought by blender buyers, and the list goes on. Target has dynamic content nailed. At least for now.

The trick is business-to-business. Like John said, that's a tougher nut to crack. I will now (thanks to John) look at my online Target and travel experiences to come up with ideas to address my client's needs dynamically.

I had lunch with a colleague this past week and we were talking about recruiting design talent. 

We chatted about what it was like when designers come in for an interview and "blow smoke" regarding how much they like our current design portfolio. 

We agreed how refreshing it would be to have a designer come in and tell us something less flattering. What does that really accomplish for either person in the interview? 

Because in the end, we strive on constant improvement and we aren't that interested in people, specifically design talent, that like what we have or where we've been. We want someone that has the courage, vitality and vision to tell us where they would like to go.

(full disclosure statement: this is about you, superstar. Give us a call.) 

I'd like to share something we learned last week in our "Say Hello to HTML" class taught by the web wizard himself, John Romano. Naming HTML files appropriately is just a little something that can help out in a big way. So when you're naming your files and your folders, remember these key things.

• No spaces, punctuation or special characters.
• No periods. This helps prevent broken links.
• No underscores, use hyphens instead. Google will identify separate keywords between hyphens.
• Use all lower case, people are less likely to make typos.
• No fancy naming conventions, use direct labels that reflect the content. This will help everyone identify a file's content before even opening it. Also, Google likes having a file name that is related to the content.
• Remember: save your files as close to the root directory/index as is feasible. The farther away your files live, the less visibility they get.

If you do all of this, not only are you making our developer's lives a little easier, you'll get a little Google love to boot.

I was recently asked by a close client contact, "How does Capstrat determine which Web projects to do and which not to do?"  She wondered why we pursued some with vigor and turned down or passed on so many other projects.

I told her it was one part reputation, two parts politics, one part economics and a thousand parts experience.

As far as reputation is concerned, we want to do work that matters. We want to feel great about making HTML products that create value for people and help communities. We want the world to know that we want this. We also want to do work that is exciting and cool--work that makes other potential clients notice us.

In terms of politics, we are a relatively big (88 FTE's) independent firm in the southeast and have alot of big clients. Because we are an integrated firm, it follows if we are doing crisis or reputation management, we are also likely doing interactive and advertising or marketing of some sort. To me it’s all storytelling. Another perspective sees it more about relationships than politics. This is an important piece. We like to work with people who understand projects worth doing are worth sharing risk. To that end, we work with people that trust we can measure and mitigate project risk. It generally takes a good relationship dynamic to make a good project succeed. Client is just as important as agency. Clients tolerant of candid discussions about doing what it takes to succeed are clients we value.

Last, it is about economics. We want to do work that wont break us financially. Believe me, there are many projects on which we take a bath because it is a relationship investment or a cause we are willing to support. But mostly, we do work for clients that understand and value the price of a deliberate and considerate strategy.

So, here is one approach we take on the Web team to help us figure out how to spend our resources:

Client Challenge or Problem

What is it?

What’s causing it?

Are there unstated problems hiding behind their stated problems?

What business benefits will they gain by solving these problems?

Is this problem worth solving?

How does this project relate to the company’s current top priorities?

Our Solution

What form ought it take? (components, timeframe, $, etc)

Why do we feel this is the best solution for the client?

What other options (competitors) are they considering?

What additional information do we need to do an estimate / proposal?

Urgency

When do they need the solution live?

What is driving the date?

Is the client team on the same page regarding vision, scope, urgency and ownership?

Access

Who are the decision makers? Do we have access? Will they trust our ideas?

Who owns the vision for this project? Who is the person driving this day-to-day?

What is the decision process?

What are the decision criteria?

Expectations

What do they think it will cost to solve their problem?

How long do they think it will take?

What resource commitments are they willing to make?

Have these expectations been set internally?

Are the client’s expectations in line with ours?

If not, what’s our plan to calibrate expectations?

Money

Is this a funded project? If yes, how much?

Whose budget will this come out of?

If not, how do projects get funded? How can we help?

Are there unanticipated potential revenue streams we can help tap?

Are there creative budget sharing ideas to follow?

This is one of those weird ideas that, for some reason, is really really easy to understand, seems really intuitive, and yet is realy hard to articulate without a graph. 

Nevertheless, no truer memes were OmniGraffled: