Just ask your grandparents, parents, or maybe even your older siblings. Or maybe you’re feeling it yourself.

Though the amount of time spent online continues to grow (it recently was reported by eMarketer.com that consumers are spending more time on their mobile devices than interacting with print media), the average time spent consuming each individual piece of content continues to fall.

A similar trend is taking place in the world of books as well. Young adults are reading 21% more than they did a decade ago, but lengthy novels and in-depth analyses have fallen to the wayside. Today, short e-books and digital downloads lead the way, with an estimated 1.2 million expected to be published in 2012 alone.

We are becoming a snapshot society, our attention compromised at every opportunity by the latest status update, email alert, push notification or direct message.

Studies have shown that “the more words you add to a page, the more people skim it.” (Catone, 2008) Chances are good that if you’re a slow reader you won’t even make it to the end of this article (it’s alright, we forgive you).

But what does this mean for your brand?

Think in Snapshots, Tell a Complete Story

Just because your customers may only catch a glimpse of the content you distribute on any given day/week/month doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention. And it certainly doesn’t mean they aren’t connect the dots.

You have a consistent opportunity to share your story with more people today than ever before. Think about ways to share various angles, viewpoints, and departments of your organization with your fans and followers.

Brand Be Quick

Social platforms are enabling users to create, upload and share their findings faster than ever before. Take a look at some of the most popular social web platforms of the past 12 years:

[Photo credit: Elad Blog]

This – coupled with the fact that consumers are rarely spending more than 25 seconds on any piece of content – means brands need to get smarter, more strategic, and more efficient with the amount of time it takes to produce the content they distribute.

The catch is that the quality must remain high enough to create a “wow” factor, the single most important factor when consumers decide to share or pass.

What’s your take? What is your brand doing to accommodate (or combat) this fast-paced landscape?

1. To become a valuable resource within your industry by sharing relevant content,
2. to make your organization accessible to prospects and customers online, and
3. to create top-of-mind awareness for your fans/followers/customers.

Goal #1: Let’s assume for a moment you are doing a decent job at distributing information. Sharing interesting, relevant information with customers and potential customers will (over time) showcase your skills and expertise within your niche.

Goal #2: Without successfully establishing yourself as an expert, it won’t matter how accessible you are online – no one is going to buy from you if you have no idea what you’re talking about. You could be the most active company on Twitter or Facebook, talking to everyone who comes across your stream. But if they don’t believe you can get the job done, you’re wasting your time.

From the moment you open the doors of your business in the morning until the time you close at night, there is a steady stream of customers lined up to buy whatever it is you sell.

• There is no down time; no chance to take a quick break or even clean up your shop.
• You are an order-taking, order-making, customer-serving machine.
• Your customers love everything they order and tell their friends and family about your location, friendly service, and reasonable prices.

Wishful thinking? Maybe for some. But that’s the goal, isn’t it?

One-hundred percent capacity.

You have just enough business to keep you busy all day/week/month long. Any more and you would have to turn business away or raise your prices; any less would mean there is some sort of waste taking place (over-staffing, unnecessary overhead costs, economies of scale are not at work, etc.).

Does your business operate at 100% capacity?

If it doesn’t, what do you and your employees do during your down time? Most importantly, what percentage of that time is spent on income-producing activities?

There are things every small business must complete in order to stay afloat: book keeping, forecasting, legal, marketing, personal development, employee training, and taking inventory for example. Unfortunately, none of those drive sales.

Simply put, nothing is more important than generating sales through marketing and business development.

Nothing.

Without customers, you’re business isn’t a business – it’s a hobby.

So if that’s the case, why do so many organizations insist on spending so much time on non-income producing tasks?

Throughout this series, Social Media Strategies for Small Business, we’ll examine some of these common misconceptions and share our thoughts on:

• how to use social media to increase traffic and sales,
• why you should empower your employees to use social media during their downtime,
• how to maximize – and track the ROI of – the time they spend online,
• utilizing social media to improve customer service,
• and much more…

Join Us! – Click Here to have future blog posts delivered right to your Inbox.

(Photo credit: Abby Normy)

“I’d like to redesign [my] site… but I’m having trouble articulating what I want to do, though – even to myself. I just don’t speak the language well enough to explain my ideas to myself and evaluate whether they’re good, the way I can in lots of other areas. How can I take the next step toward a coherent design from a few scraps of ideas? How do you generate design inspiration?”

The Problem With Design

Design is a tricky thing to pin down. While most people are able to instantly distinguish good design from bad, it is far more difficult to articulate what makes a design successful. People just know it when they see it. Even more challenging is creating a new design from scratch. Trying to express a style, brand, theme, movement, or idea through images, colors, shapes, and textures can be a challenge, even to experienced designers.

• The problem (and frustration) with design lies in translating visual cues into a form that can be shared through our primary mode of communication – language.

Because humans communicate primarily through spoken and written word, it is this disconnect from words to images and back again that creates gaps in the way we interpret and describe the things we see.

• TRY THIS: Describe your favorite painting to a friend. You can describe its color palette, the subject matter, the artist’s technique, its layout, the size, the way it makes you feel. But chances are good that unless it’s a famous painting that your friend has seen before, they will have a very different idea of what the painting actually looks like.
• THE POINT: With no concise way of talking about what we see, it is no wonder we have a hard time discussing design.

The same challenge exists when talking about scents. Fragrance designers, who live and breath (sorry, couldn’t resist) in the world of aromas, can not only identify subtleties from one scent to the next but can also talk intelligently about them using industry-specific lexicon.

Coding at the Speed of Light

The growth of the Internet is staggering but makes perfect sense if you consider the following: Most of the content on the web is in the form of words. Recognizing this, search engines have set up ways to use language to help people find exactly what they are looking for. This ability to quickly type, locate, interpret, and use bits of information that others have already created allows developers (for example) to build on it instead of starting from scratch. Of course, good web development is more an art than a science, but the point still stands: much of the code that has been created up to this point can be indexed and, as a result, searched via text.

Finding Balance in Design

So what does this mean? Like all design, we believe the form of a strong website design (how it looks) should be driven by its function (how it works). And the beauty of creating a cohesive brand identity or an interesting website design, in our opinion, is about finding balance:

Like much of the strategy we do, we suggest starting at the beginning and working backwards from there:

1. What is the goal of the site?

2. What action do we want visitors to take?

3. What is the story we’re trying to tell?

4. How can the design help us tell that story?

Once you have answered those questions, use the following resources to create a visual library of what you like/don’t like and work to describe (in words) your thoughts around each example. Translating your emotions into language will help identify trends and cues that can be used in your ultimate design.

Tools & Resources

• Pinterest: This “digital swipe file” website has quickly become a favorite for visual artists, wedding planners, fashionistas, and designers alike to create a visual reference of their favorite visual digital images.
• Logo Design Love: Launched as a side-project in January 2008, LDL is a website (and a printed book) devoted to the design of logos and brand identities. Great starting point with countless examples of successful logos and brand identities.
• The Dieline: A resource created for packaging designers, but a great place to spark ideas and generate conversations around some of the best branding online.

(Photo credit: Fontshop)

“But if it’s free, shouldn’t we at least try it?” you ask.

Maybe, maybe not. Do you want to try it because it’s popular right now (Twitter, for example) or because it makes sense in your overall strategy?

Can we let you in on a little secret?

Shhhh. Come in closer so no one else hears this…

We don’t have a Facebook page (yet). Crazy, we know.

“What?! How can a web-based company not have a Facebook page?!?”, you ask.

Easy. It doesn’t make sense for our current strategy.

Will we eventually have one? Absolutely. But you can bet that when we launch it, it will be a resource that our clients and prospects will want – and need – to pay attention to, not just another “yeah me too!” page full of rehashed content.

Until then, our blog allow us to share our ideas and create quality content, and our newsletter allows us to distribute it efficiently to our readers. We are also on Twitter to keep an eye on trends and interact with people.

Remember, “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” Spreading your resources too thin is not only tiring, it can be damaging to your brand.

The goal of maintaining an online presence is to get people to pay attention to you, to remember you, and to use you when they need something you have to offer.

Handled poorly, your online efforts could train customers to ignore you, forget you exist, and turn to your competitors when they need to buy something.

Our advice?

Do less, more.

In other words, do fewer things more frequently and with greater passion and purpose.

Once you build an audience and gain momentum, then (and only then) should you consider adding another task to your technology to-do list.

Be strategic. Be yourself. And commit to being memorable, not just another “me too” brand.

What are your feelings about this approach? Are we wrong?

(Photo credit: Spigoo)

The problem with free is that it often leaves people anxious that they are missing out on something better.

Besides, if free is good – MORE free must be better. So we continue our search for the next best thing instead of doing what is truly important…

CREATING.

It’s time to turn off the noise, stop the searching, and create.

There is time to add to your artillery or make modifications down the road.

But today, you owe it to yourself (and your customers, prospects, and anyone searching the Internet) to create something that is worthy of reading, worthy of adding to your library, worthy of sharing with the world.

Because without your content, the best tools – free or otherwise – are worthless.

(Photo credit: ndrwfgg)

This isn’t a trick question or an insult to your intelligence. It’s an honest look at how people perceive the idea of a website today and a nudge to get you thinking about your own site.

Most organizations have preconceived notions about their site needs or how it should function based on what others are doing. (“I want an RSS subscription… and it needs to link my Facebook updates to my Twitter account…” and so on.) By the end, the site has so many features, widgets, plugins and calls-to-action that it is too cluttered to use.

As a result, some of the most effective websites today are top performers because of what they don’t include:

• Rue La La, a fashion site, features a limited list of clothing products for sale each day behind a login wall, making it impossible for non-members to see the deal.
• Groupon offers one or two coupons per day for your specific city – not ten or fifteen.
• ZenHabits is a blog focused on simplifying the fast-paced world of technology.

A few tips to consider, whether you are starting from scratch or re-working your current site:

1.) Start with the End in Mind

Look at the desired final outcome of a visitor first, and work backward from there.

• Do you want someone to buy something online?
• Give you their email address?
• Subscribe to your blog, or leave a comment on your latest blog post?
• Send out a tweet?
• Call your office or set up an in-person appointment?

On this website, our top three priorities are simple:

1. Have prospects interested in setting up their online presence Contact Us,
2. Have people sign up for our weekly newsletter – The Bright Idea, and/or
3. Subscribe to the blog.

We’re also working on a few other elements that will help visitors find what they’re looking for more easily, share our content, and understand what we offer more clearly.

What can we do to make our goals more clear and actionable?

2.) User Experience is Everything

It doesn’t matter how great the content or deep the discount – if a website is hard to read, difficult to navigate, or generally cluttered, visitors leave. It’s a shame too, because there are so many great companies doing amazing work. But if they can’t tell their story simply and effectively, they have lost the battle.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes:

• What do you look for in a website?
• On average, how long do you stay on a website?*
• What are the first things you look for?
• What are the last things you look for?

This is your chance to keep your site simple, to convert visitors into believers, and believers into buyers.

What can you do to make your visitor’s experience with your website as seamless as possible?

(*NOTE: If you aren’t tracking these statistics for your own website, contact us now. We need to have a chat.)

3.) Provide Value, Value, Value

Chances are good that as a business owner, you are thoroughly impressed with your company’s latest press release. The problem is that you’re probably the only one. Don’t get me wrong, press releases have their place in an online strategy. But if they are the keystone of your content strategy, visitors and search engines alike will pass over your site like a plane from 14,000 feet.

Instead work to answer the questions that your prospects and current customers have about your organization.

• What essential information is needed before a “buying decision” takes place?
• What will keep them coming back?
• What will ultimately get them to say “yes” to your call-to-action?

Web design isn’t rocket science.

The systems and features have been built. But without a clear vision and the proper tools, a website can shift from a platform to connect your customers, generate leads, and make sales into your competitor’s strongest marketing piece.

(Photo credit: sacks08)

It’s cheap, it’s fun, it’s easy to find, and everyone is doing it. So you finally decide to make a trip to the store to buy one for yourself. When you arrive home, you crack open the packaging and it hits you – this isn’t going to be as easy as you expected.

All of those tiny random pieces staring back at you can be intimidating. Here are a few tips to help you make sense of the madness:

1.) Use the Image Poster

Most larger puzzles (500+ pieces) come with an enlarged poster inside the box. This print will serve as a road map of what your efforts should ultimately look like. Because it is larger than the image on the front of the box, you can use it to see the detail of each section.

In social media, this poster is your social media strategy. It not only provides you with an overview of the entire program, but also allows you to zoom in on each area for further details, instructions, and timeline.

2.) Define the Edges

First thing’s first: sift through the box and pluck out all of the edge pieces. Just because there are thousands of websites and tools out there doesn’t mean you need to use all of them (right away).

This is the time you should spend up front to familiarize yourself with the different platforms your customers may be using. Set the boundaries of your new initiative by creating borders: define your goals and objectives FIRST. With those goals in mind, you will be able to pick and choose the pieces you need to accomplish them.

Many organizations try using every piece to use from the start and become frustrated when none of them work in the end.

3.) Work on the ‘Easy’ Sections

When you think about it, puzzles really aren’t that difficult; they just take time. The larger the puzzle, the more time.

The most efficient way to speed up the process is to work on the areas that are easy to identify. Group similar colors, patterns, textures, and contrasting areas that you can grab quickly into piles.

In social media, this means using skills and content that you are already producing on a daily basis. This may mean re-purposing materials that have already been produced by your marketing department, using websites that your employees frequent each evening, or talking to your existing clients.

Using this technique will result in some “quick wins,” build momentum, and give you a reference point for all of the other pieces that will complete the overall image.

4.) Link the Islands

Lastly, work to fill in the gaps. Start connecting all of the clumps you have built – the ‘easy’ sections – with new skills, new content, and new platforms. Remember, there is only so much planning you can do until you need to just start grabbing pieces to find what works. Be on the lookout for pieces that look like logical fits, but don’t be afraid to try new things and rotate them around until you find a fit.

What tactics can you use to get your social media strategy moving forward?

This is – by far – the most common response we hear from clients as they prepare to kick off a blog. From one-person shops to multi-million dollar corporations, organizations have a difficult time picturing themselves publishing content on a consistent basis.

It stems from what author Seth Godin calls “the lizard brain,” and what author Steven Pressfield calls “the resistance.”

“The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.” -Steven Pressfield

It’s the fear of the unknown, the fear of starting something new, the fear that what you write or produce won’t be “good enough,” the fear of publishing your article for the world to see. And it’s this paralysis that prevents most organizations from starting – and from being great.

Three Steps to Fearless Publishing

Many organizations (and individuals) feel they must labor over the keyboard for hours to come up with brand new, ground-breaking content. But what they don’t realize is that their experience, perspectives, and projects they create on a daily basis make for compelling online content.

1.) Publish the content you create on a daily basis.

Believe it or not, you have plenty to write about. Every piece of work you create, every client interaction, every success or failure in your day-to-day operations is a publishing opportunity. Remember, what may be routine to you or your employees will almost certainly be new to your readers. Often times, the best articles cover topics we already understand or know to be true, but are presented in a new way and bring a different perspective to the table.

2.) Think outside your core.

It’s true, there’s only so much you can share about a topic before you start running out of ideas or sounding like a broken record. At this year’s Ohio Growth Summit, Dave Murr from re:group gave these tips to help you think of content opportunities beyond your core:

1. Identify 2-3 other Related Subjects to your core - If you’re an Italian restaurant, these related subjects might include A History of Italy, Different Regions of Italy, and Italian Food. While this content may not be about your restaurant specifically, they can provide context for your diners’ next experience.
2. Add 2-3 Passion Subjects – As Dave explained,”passion and emotion are content magnets.” Why? Because if it excites you, chances are good you will have something to say about it – and so will others. Examples might include Music, Wine, and Fine Art.
3. Publish Shared Content – What kinds of content are people already sharing in your niche? And what can you create that people will want to share? Consider writing a response to popular videos, relevant recipes, or posts by other chefs.

3.) Commit to Start

It is impossible to become great at anything without “doing.” Watching lots of basketball won’t make you a better player, just as reading about publishing content won’t make you a better writer.

There is power in starting. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Every artist was first an amateur.” Some of the most popular bloggers today openly admit that their early content was not very strong. But the repetition publishing consistent allowed them to improve their craft and experience first-hand what resonated with their readers.

(Photo Credit: mpcelemens)

Go forth and publish. The world needs your content.

They let their work speak for itself.

Bakeries, shoe stores, clothing shops, restaurants. The formula was the same for everyone:

“If the product was great and they treated their customers well, everyone in town knew about them and did business with them.”

It was the original word-of-mouth campaign. Happy customers told their friends, and businesses were rewarded with loyal patrons who bought over and over again.

Soon after, organizations realized they could expand their reach (find more customers) by advertising – spreading stories about their products and services to attract a larger audience.

They paid advertising agencies, TV stations, print publications, and media outlets to push their message to their audience to generate greater interest, more leads, and higher sales. These efforts were well-organized, well-curated representations of their businesses.

Then, the Internet hit.

Local organizations were no longer competing against shop owners down the street. They were competing with companies across the state – and in many cases the world.

In the beginning, it was enough to have a website. Visitors from all over could find your product or service and order from the convenience of their homes. But as more companies moved online and more websites were created, a single story emerged: “We have the lowest prices.” It was a race to the bottom, driving margins lower than ever before.

Today, the game is changing – again.

It’s not just enough to throw up a website and hope customers show up. Consumers are getting smarter. Price is no longer the only determining factor for a purchase. They expect more out of the products they buy and the companies who produce them.

People now do business with people brands they like and trust.

As a result, organizations are forced to “be themselves,” to do the work, to find a way to be authentic from within – something they have paid others to do for decades. Luckily, (good) social media creates that transparency consumers crave today, which is why it is becoming an integral part of the storytelling process.

The ability to give consumers an inside look at their favorite brands as well as the opportunity to interact with them and receive responses in real-time is priceless.

By creating a direct line of communication with customers, social media can create something that is nearly impossible to replicate – a relationship.

For this reason, companies can’t buy volume in social media to play catch up to their competitors. Once brand loyalty has been established and develops through on-going interactions, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to swoop in and steal customers (back). And over time, it is this bond that consumers will want to tell their friends, family, and business contacts about.

What stories are you telling about your brand online?

And what are you doing to ensure those stories are engaging, interesting, authentic and emotional enough for your customers to share them?