project management

Posts Tagged ‘project management’

Working With Your Digital Marketing Team

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

First, why work with a digital marketing team?

Digital marketing companies:

create strategy
design
develop
optimize
train
measure

Do any of those sound like processes that could help your marketing efforts?

The Alternative

Yes, of course you could have your brother’s nephew design your website in Front Page. You can also create your own fan page and spam it to bits, post asking for more fans and end every sentence with three !’s. Run your own pay per click campaigns without landing pages and bid management. Want to simply use the same copy from your brochure online? No problem.

Forgive me for sounding jaded, but I’m, well, jaded. I’ve talked to many companies that use that type of rationale I explained above to not hire a digital marketing company.

The fact is, you can run your own digital marketing from the ground up. However, you can also build a car from parts, but why would you do a job that others have years of experience in doing?

By hiring a digital marketing company you can expect efficiency, experience, and in-the-trenches knowledge. You can also expect to be asked to communicate and participate.

The Relationship

Entering into any relationship, whether it be work or personal, requires several things to be successful. Beginning a digital marketing project is no different; people will often enter into a contract not knowing what exactly is expected of them in order to achieve success. Even when entering with eyes wide open, there are still potential pitfalls that can derail your project.

Understanding that digital marketing is important to your company is half the battle. If you and your company don’t buy into the process, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

Once the contract is signed is when the real work begins. It’s important to realize that signing the contract marks the beginning of your work, not the end. View it as an investment; you will reap what you sow.

The Communication

It is always important to make sure everyone is clear on how the project will run and how (and where) communication lines will operate. The time to communicate your hopes, wants, expectations is at the onset, not mid-way.

Establish preferred methods of communication, and don’t be afraid to pick up the phone. Email and Instant Messages offer a great opportunity for quick, concise communication. However, it does not convey tone, sarcasm, and poor attempts at humor.

Provide direction, and still let your team “do their thing”. Give ideas about the design you have in mind. Help brainstorm keyword seed lists. However, let your designer design, let your SEO do the keyword research.

The Participation

Digital marketing projects are processes, not events.

In order to reach the finish line, milestones must be passed and completed. Almost always, you will be asked to provide some form of feedback and approval for those milestones to be met, and for progress to be continued toward project completion.

Providing quality, timely feedback is important to the workflow of your project. When presented with design ideas, a reply of “I don’t like it” helps no one, and serves simply to continue spinning your wheels instead of making progress.

When you participate, you are part of the process. In today’s world, there really is no “completion” when it comes to marketing online. You need to continue to publish, to monitor, measure, and modify. Participating in the planning, the building and the implementation will keep your marketing efforts worth your money and time.

Tags: Digital Marketing, getting started in social media, partnerships, Pat Strader, project management
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

Developing A Content Calendar 101

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Quit stalling.

Your digital marketing needs some new content. But instead of writing something interesting, something that only appeals to your fans, something not everyone will like but is true to your personality, you write what you wrote last year. You’re having a sale. There’s a special. You’re so much better than the competition.

Ugh.

Part of the reason you went that route is because it was easy. Rewriting your old stuff is the path of least marketing resistance. No one will call you out, no one will make fun of you. No one will really notice. But you can check “done”.

A much, much better way to go is to create a content calendar. Planning out your content inspires creativity and gives perspective. If you’re putting time and money into digital marketing, you want to make a content calendar. Here’s how:

Make Some Strategy Decisions: You need to think about platforms, distribution, and consistency. Also tone, style, and substance. All the content in the world isn’t going to make a difference without the planning to make it worthwhile. Who are you writing for? How often? What does your reader need? Who will do the writing? Who owns it after it’s done? What are the outcomes you want at the end?

Define Your Subjects: One cool thing among the many offered in a typical blog platform is the ability to categorize your work according to subject. I’ve had a lot of success starting here in a whiteboard session. If I want to plan out blog posts for a year, it’s going to be a lot more cohesive if I can define several subjects that my posts will cover. It’s a great method for staying on the path you set out with your strategy.

Calendars Aren’t Always Temporal: Another thing I’ve learned is that a content calendar doesn’t always have to follow a time schedule. For instance, if you group your topics according to 6 subjects, you might want to fill each subject with 8 topics, for a goal of 2 posts a week for a year. Then you can pick and choose which topics to write about according to what you’re learning as you write (metrics, man… metrics).

Timely Posts Are Smart: Having said the above, it can also help to plan your topics out according to day. IF there’s a big conference in your vertical, it’s probably good to have a plan to how you’re going to talk about that. Planning your calendar according to day can also help motivate writers; deadlines have amazing power when wielded by the right editors. If, in your case, that’s the same person, all the better to keep you on track.

So, here’s one process for doing all that:

-Sit all the principles down in front of a big whiteboard.

-Discuss the strategy points listed above. Depending on the scope of your project, this phase alone can take hours or weeks. Plan accordingly. Also, be ready to change strategy as the process unfolds.

-Write out your subjects. Make sure they fit in with the strategy points you’ve decided on.

-Fill those subjects with topics.

-Arrange as necessary. Go with a calendar. Assign topics. Whatever structure works best for your project, you’ll need to build it before you start writing.

-Follow through by updating, revising, editing, and monitoring your work. It’s not dead once you hit the publish button (the map is not the terrain, after all).

What do you think? Ever built a content calendar before? What do you do that’s not included here?

Share, people. Share.

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, content strategy, Digital Marketing, getting started in social media, marketing mindset, motivation, project management
Posted in Content Creation | No Comments »

Tools for Cranking Out Content

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Well, it’s that time. The work is piling up like the leaves outside. You know what I’m talking about.

So while I’m getting down to business, I wanted to share some of the tools we use to get things done at Matterhorn. Hopefully, there’s something in here that’s new to you, or we’re using it in a way that you haven’t thought of.

For all of our projects, we use 37 Signals’ Basecamp project management system. I don’t think there’s a better way for us to keep tabs on anything and everything you’re doing. It’s easy to use and great for planning. I particularly like how information like events or files can be viewed indiviually by category or together as a timeline of progress.

For social media, there are tons of tools that we use to listen around the internet for conversations that our clients can participate in. Once we identify them, ping.fm is one way to post in several spheres at once. It’s easy to get in “broadcast mode” with a tool like that, which will hurt you when you’re using social media for business, so be careful.

When I write in a word processor, I pretty much have to use MS Word (cutting edge, I know). It’s too bad everyone uses Word- I like Apple’s Pages much, much better. Even though I can export Pages to Word, the stuff that pages excels at, namely the ease of formatting, doesn’t translate sometimes. So rather that deal with the headache, I just use Word. Damn you, Word! Be smarter!

If I’m writing directly to a blog, I’m in WordPress. On the tech side, WP is easy to attach to the sites we build, and has so many bells and whistles, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the one that’s most ready for heavy lifting. On the interface side, I can (mostly) format my posts however I like, and the dials are easy to tweak.

For staying current, I use an RSS reader. There are tons out there, but I use google’s. It’s got just about everything I want, and nothing I don’t, so it suits me. I messed around with using Alltop for a while, but I ended up just sticking with my original digs. There’s talk that Twitter will replace RSS, but meanwhile, I’ll use a reader.

Finally, for instant messaging we use Adium. It recognizes almost every different IM client, so you only have to use one application to talk to almost anyone. Plus, the duck icon will flap his arms around when you have a message :-)

There are tons more (Pat’s icons for SEO tools alone cover the desktops on 3 of his 4 screens); these are the basics, meaning, these are pretty much what I use everyday for the content and client side of things.

Thoughts?

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, getting started in social media, project management, rss feeds
Posted in Digital Marketing | 3 Comments »

Why Buy Content From a Writer?

Friday, July 17th, 2009

TH-IndexD

Small business owners know exactly what they want to say about their businesses. But they don’t know how to write it effectively, efficiently, briefly, succinctly, compellingly, or strategically. Usually.

Not all of our customers buy content from us. But I wish they did. Pro content writers help businesses in big ways.

There are lots of reasons to buy content. I know because, before I started writing for a living, I investigated them. If I was going to take the leap from outdoor pro to freelance writer, I had a lot of questions to answer.

Here’s what I came up with (and, btw, I did make the leap successfully- thanks to all who’ve helped):

-Time The one thing business owners need above all others is time. There’s never enough of it. Entrepreneurs and small business owners work 16 hour days and could easily make 24 if biology would quit getting in the way.

People have time to write memos and emails. They don’t have time to write brochures, web copy, folders, press kits, and sometimes, yes, their blog.

-Quality Using a professional writer makes a difference in quality. It’s like hiring a graphic designer; there are things that professionals do that others can’t. What’s tricky is that, while not everyone can draw, everyone can write.

But that’s a strictly utilitarian sense of the word “write”. Not everyone can write professionally, and pros do a better job. If an important project comes up- not email, not memos- and quality counts, hire a professional.

-Focus This speaks directly to the first line of this post. Professional writers mold and shape content. They add nuance and style. They add hooks. They tell stories. They can (or, should) make your message sticky.

It’s one thing to know a business inside and out; it’s entirely another thing to write about it.

-Cost To assess the cost of hiring a professional writer, think big. Imagine a big project, like an important speech or a new website: Why is it being created? Big projects are created to make conversions.

Conversions of money. Conversions of mindset. Conversions of information. The written word, if used properly, can do whatever we want it to do. That’s worth a lot.

So there’s my “Why Buy Content” mini-festo. Do you disagree? Do you know some good writers you’d like to plug? Feel free.

Tags: content, content marketing, marketing strategy, project management, writing
Posted in Content Creation | 1 Comment »

What The Heck’s Next?- How We Use Basecamp

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Like thousands of other folks, we use 37signals Basecamp (aff link) for online collaboration and project management. It’s a great system, if you’ve not seen it. Easy to use, intuitive, and covers all the bases for us.

We’ve had pretty good success getting the people we work with involved in Basecamp, which we’ve internally named “Projectpath”.

It’s pretty simple to use. But we wanted to write up a personal introduction from us to our clients, many of whom have not worked within a project management system.

And if they need start-up help, the Basecamp FAQs are pretty much focused on admin support, which is not really what we’re looking for. They do have a very good video how-to section, but that’s not quite what we need either.

What we need is…

A document that would help our clients buy-in to using the system.
Something that would assure them that this was easy to use.
A personal introduction that could be used as a reference, if needed.

So here it is. Feel free to use it if you think something like this would be helpful for you…

-What The Heck’s Next?-
Getting Around In Matterhorn Projectpath

A Quick Guide To How We’ll Manage Things Together

There are a million ways to communicate. We call. We email. We send DMs to an @ on Twitter. It can get a bit… overwhelming. With more people contributing more information about more ideas everyday, it’s very easy for communication to get buried, sidetracked, or lost.

Projectpath is a website that’s designed to keep everything -everything- in one place. Using this system will…

•    Keep all of our communication together over the length of the project
•    Organize each step of our process by topic
•    Archive all of our progress by date
•    Make our project accessible all the time, from any computer

Think of Projectpath as our project’s office. We use a system called Basecamp to run things, and it’s easy to use. Go ahead and be intimidated if you want, but the simple fact is this: If you know how to go to a website, send email, or use a mouse, you can use Projectpath.

Projectpath has 6 different sections…

•    Overview
•    Messages
•    To-Do
•    Milestones
•    Writeboards
•    Files

You can move between sections easily by using the tabs near the top of the page. Each section has a different function, and together they cover all of the things we’ll have to communicate during our project.

Here’s a quick rundown of each section…

Overview- The Overview shows everything that’s happening in our project. Here’s what you can see:

•    The name of the project
•    Shortcuts to the other 5 sections
•    A timeline for the project, if one applies
•    All recent activity in every section, arranged with the most recent at the top
•    An RSS feed for the project, so you’ll know each time something is added
•    The names of everyone involved in our project

Messages- This is email for our project. It works because everyone can share communication in one place (that way, we don’t have to go digging around in your personal inbox ?). To post a message…

•    Click “Post a new message”
•    Write something
•    Click “Post this message”
•    That was easy, wasn’t it?

To Do- The to-do list might be the easiest way to keep track of our project’s progress. Projectpath lets you add, cross off, and move around items in a way that, frankly, makes you want to get more done just to use the to-do features. It’s easy to make lists in Projectpath.

Milestones- This section is for keeping track of things that need to be done by a certain date. It’s divided into 3 parts: Past due, Upcoming, and Completed. There’s a calendar in the margin of the Milestones section that’s color coded to reflect each list.

Writeboards- If there’s ever a need to create a document collaboratively, we’ll use a writeboard. It’s an easy way to keep track of all the versions of a document that we might need. Because we create content using different software, we don’t use writeboards for most projects.

Files- Here’s where we keep any and all files pertinent to our project. Again, the big draw is that they can be accessed and updated by anyone in the project. We keep all content for projects in the files section.

That’s all. The way we’ll use Projectpath is very intuitive. It won’t take long for you to see how collaboration is simplified with this one tool.

We’re looking forward to getting started- thanks for going through this doc.

Tags: business relationships, content, project management, rss, rss feeds, using rss
Posted in Marketing, Partnership, Web Usability | No Comments »

A Blog About Digital Marketing…

Stay in Touch

Receive Our Email Newsletter

Archives

Categories

Matterhorn Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘project management’

Why Buy Content From a Writer?

What The Heck’s Next?- How We Use Basecamp