Aaron Gerdes

I’m not referring to the fact that you’re outnumbered by them.

Church of the Customer runs a great quote from Jake Nickell (co-founder of Threadless, a site where users submit designs for shirts and vote on their favorites): “Our community could destroy us if they wanted to.” Understanding that our customers have ultimate control of our business keeps us entrepreneurs from just being folks with very stressful hobbies.

The whole post goes on to show how Threadless applied this awareness in a crisis and contrasts that with Facebook’s recent controversial feature roll-out.

Om Malik of GigaOM fame has started up a new blog (several other authors seem to be involved) called WebWorker Daily. Promising content for those of us working in the “bedouin” lifestyle, as they put it.

A brief post worth looking at is 10 Tips for Managing Virtual Workers. Great advice. Having a bit of experience working on virtual teams, I can attest that these are critical things when considering virtual workers, whether contractors working from home or offshoring work through a management firm.

Maybe you’re in a Do-It-Yourself mood, or maybe you owe your copywriter a draft and want to kick things off right. Here are some basic practices, best applied after the “brain-dump” initial draft.

• Start with the prospect’s problem. Common-sense when writing your service explanations, but also applies to things like your company and process descriptions. Start each section from the problem your prospects are looking to overcome (that’s what they’re most concerned about, after all).

• Appeal to both the consequences of inaction and the benefits of solving the problem. Some people are motivated by negatives, some by positives. Make sure you don’t just focus on your own inclination.

• Talk about benefits, not just features. A feature is a line item on a technical spec sheet. It requires some level of technical expertise to determine its value (if not expertise, at least thought — assume we’re lazy!). A benefit is what the product does for me or saves me from. I’m more interested in benefits.

• Write as informally as suits your business. Think of a spectrum of obtuseness: Poetry – Prose – Persuasion.

• Stories tell it best. Provide real-life examples of results your services delivered. Name names. Link to your case-studies and pepper service descriptions with mini-stories.

• Include testimonials. Some people love ‘em, some people hate ‘em. The percentage of folks that love them may contain your biggest customer, so don’t write to yourself. Remember to tie them to a project and a person – anonymous testimonials have little impact for almost anyone.

• Be concise.

• Close with a call to action. If you’ve done a good job, people will be ready to know more. A good write up on your services will end with a call to learn more. Several of my team members are excellent copywriters. If you’re getting too busy to write or would like to reap the results of a high response rate, let’s discuss your project. Contact me!

This list isn’t exhaustive. Have more to add? Comments are welcome!

I’ve heard that a flock of geese always has one member with its head up, “standing guard”, while the others eat.

It’s “crunch time” at your organization. You’re a few days (read: two weeks) away from launching a new web app. Who’s got their head up?

Who’s prepping contacts to sign up on launch? Who sees that there’s a new beta opportunity? When your competitors blog that they’re launching early, or release that new killer new simplification, who alerts the group?

I’ve heard that a flock of geese always has one member with its head up, “standing guard”, while the others eat.

It’s “crunch time” at your organization. You’re a few days (read: two weeks) away from launching a new web app. Who’s got their head up?

Who’s prepping contacts to sign up on launch? Who sees that there’s a new beta opportunity? When your competitors blog that they’re launching early, or release that new killer new simplification, who alerts the group?

Caterina Fake (of Flickr fame) recently posted on why it’s a bad time to start a business.

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Ruby on Rails fame) responds with an excellent post, saying it way better than I could have!

More on language matters: there’s a subtle but important difference between starting a company and starting a business. Cool.

In the article quoted before on anti-marketing design, Scoble has tangent:

It’s amazing how few corporate types get that the quality and engineering thought behind your HTML matters more than whether your site is pretty or not.

Another way to put it: if your building is beautiful but not up to code, you’re going to have problems.

Three reasons XHTML/CSS (business translation: recent) standards-compliant code is good for your business:

1. Ease maintenance/updating/redesign costs. Good code will separate the design/layout code from the formatted content. Doing so means that if you’d like to change part of a page layout, you edit one CSS file instead of ten or hundreds of HTML files.
2. Lower costs for deploying content in other forms. Related to the above. Create multiple stylesheets for a single body of content is easy. Now your website works on mobile phones and prints cleanly (yes, people still do that). Some will disagree, but I think standards-compliant code deploys better across multiple browsers and platforms. And it degrades gracefully (meaning old browsers will still see a readable version).
3. Accessibility: Better search engine ranking, wider audience. Standards-compliant code is more organized and clean, therefore easily parsed for computers and people. This means screen readers and other assistive devices can process the information on your site for the sight-impaired, for example. It also (I’ve heard this but cannot verify, so take with salt) can improve your search engine ranking by removing clutter and increasing your keywords-to-file-weight ratio.

Find out more about web standards.