As I was cross posting an Instagram photo to Flickr the other day, I found a cool little trick.
Instagram applies to images that you upload to Flickr certain tags like “instagram,” “square format,” and “iphoneography.” It also adds tags for the type of filter you applied to the image, if any. You can use these tags to do searches for photos with only those filters.
So many small businesses I talk to want to treat their website like a brochure – a stylistic, non-changing piece of marketing copy. This is totally, utterly, and completely the wrong mindset.
A website is not a brochure. A website is a living, evolving experience for your target audience (“visitors” or “guests”). There should be a constant flow of new information, stories, and content that keeps your visitors coming back daily. Further, your content should engage your visitors, prompting them to comment on your posts as well as refer to your site in other channels like social media websites.
If, while designing the website, you want things to be more static, you’re treating your website like a brochure.
If you want images to never change (rather than pulled dynamically from the content that you are creating), or if you want have content that will probably never change, you’re probably trying to treat your website like a brochure.
If it is difficult to change and update the content on your website, or if it takes any amount of technical proficiency, you’re probably treating your website like a brochure.
When designing your new website, think about the business processes that will drive the content of your website. Will you have someone assigned to post news articles? How will you get new pictures? When will data points be updated? Who will update them?
Further, make sure you have a dead-simple way to update the content on your website. Often this means using a back-end CMS like WordPress or Drupal. Using a CMS like this allows anyone you decide to update the content and posts on your website – with no technical proficiency required.
Please, don’t treat your website like a brochure!
I have come to realize that more and more of my data and computing is done in the cloud. I use Dropbox everyday, have my music in the Amazon Cloud service, and use Google Docs, Calendar, Mail, and Contacts. My tasks are in Remember the Milk. My reading list is in Google Reader and Instapaper. My financial records are available online through online banks, Mint, and Google Finance. My friends’ birthdays are stored in Facebook. One thing missing are my health records. Google has Google Health, but I do not have an easy way to pull in all of my past medical records. Mostly this is because the records are simply not in digital form. I hope someday my medical records will be as accessible as much of my other data in the cloud.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project came out with a study last week:
8% of online Americans use Twitter
Wouldn’t you think that number should be higher? I’m surprised that number is not higher considering the large sums of money corporations are investing in online social media marketing (a large percentage of which is devoted to Twitter).
A company can reach 68% of Americans through a Super Bowl ad, and at best 8% of Americans through social media marketing.
Full report: PewInternet.org