For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

Every great idea is not great feature. And every feature isn’t a great idea. Gold plating and coming soon both have the same ally — the story. If your story is strong, your product/service has a much better chance of success. Unless you have an undiscovered truckload of viral pixie dust in hiding in Iowa, let your product build on story.

The Big Four

Be prepared to change all of these items:

Story: Your story creates and enforces your message — messages are shared.

Features: Features either work or they don’t, but rarely are they shouted from the rooftops unless they are accompanied by a great user experience.

User Experience: User experiences can be exciting or invisible but always include aspects of both your story and your features.

Customer Development: Customer development is the “Will it Float” moment? Will customers bite? Do you know who they are? How will you reach them? What features do they need to adopt your product/service?

Everyday we tell stories. Build on that.

— Ian

Too many companies fail to seek change until after a brand or product is declared broken. Then change is ushered through at a breakneck pace fed by panic and profits. And even after broken pieces are identified, the focus is often on plugging the dike rather than seeking opportunities to improve the entire process.

In other words, maintenance often trumps improvement. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The problem

The distance and prerogatives between “change” and “improvement” often creates organizational pressure. The greater the pressure, the more likely employees are to play it safe and the more predictable a brand story becomes.

“But we make site changes every day.”

Don’t confuse maintenance with change. True change is made with the intention of moving the bar forward.

What’s the root of the problem?

• There is often no process for suggesting change.
• There is often no process for initiating change.
• Change sparks questions that organizations aren’t ready to answer.
• Managing change challenges systems that are already in place (whether they are efficient or not).
• If the mechanism for change isn’t in place and isn’t embraced, people will only push creative they know will get approved. Which means there’s not a lot of opportunity for brand evolution.
• If employees are shot down (or considered “rocking the boat”) for trying to create spearhead change, they’ll go back to pushing papers.
• Change is usually brought on due to a lack of sales, a problem with an existing product, a product launch or new management. In other words, when you’re up against the gun.

The Opportunity

Effective change management is a brand’s greatest asset—if you don’t have the mechanisms in place to effect change, your brand story goes stale.

Ready your brand for change. Prepare your organization to be more nimble. Create systems for gathering input. Map processes for initiating cross-departmental change. Empower your management to move quickly and efficiently.

Why?

Change saves money. Change gets people excited (once they get past the fear). Change broadens your audience. Change evolves your story. Change rocks.

You have your logo, product/service and an awesome domain name. You’re a month or two from launch and smack-dab in buzz-building mode. Creating and pushing live a Coming Soon page should take about an hour, right? Um, not so fast, mister.

Your Readiness

1) Can you define what makes your company different?
While this may seem like something that should be nailed down before deciding to launch a project/company, it’s not always the case. Making a Coming Soon page represents a commitment to designing/developing a website, which in most new businesses will be the largest investment made in year one. It will also challenge your perception of what you do and force you to explain it in clear, concise language.

2) Do you have a tagline?
A good tagline is a natural fit and acts like a nickname, enhancing what is already obvious. A bad tagline is an obtuse, obvious generality that does nothing to differentiate.

-Tip: Segment what type of tagline you are looking to create. Start here for help —Types of Taglines

-Of note: Not having one is better than having a bad one.

3) Have you given some thought to brand attributes and voice?
If you were going to assign the design and copy to a freelancer, how would you summarize what you are hoping to convey about your company?

4) How clear are you on your service/product offering?
If you can’t score an 8 out of 10 on the “describe what we do in one sentence test” to your friends, then you aren’t ready for a Coming Soon page — really. This is your first chance at impressing the influencers and gaining some pre-launch buzz. The idea part of the show moves to the execution phase once a “Coming Soon” page goes live. There will always be iterations, V2 features and like it or not, gold-plating but having the core of your idea nailed down is critical at this juncture. How does this differ from #1? Your company is what you stand for. Your services are what you do.

Site Objectives

1) What’s the purpose of the Coming Soon page?
To build an audience? To build buzz? To prove to investors you’re in development?

2) Are you collecting email addresses or creating a limited, invite-only beta?
No: Most Coming Soon pages collect email addresses, but invite-only betas have their advantages.  A trusted, closed environment accomplishes a number of things. A. The creation of a vetted testing community. B. The why-not-me/this-must-be-fantastic buzz factor created by an “invite-only” beta. C. The ability to iterate, reinvent and fine-tune behind closed doors with expert input.

Yes: If you are going to collect email addresses you need to consider how, and if, you are are going to confirm email addresses. If you are going to confirm you will need to add in time/$ for coding and a minor database setup.

-Tip: Use web form best practices. If you don’t know what they are then get Luke Wroblewski’s book

-Of Note: People differ on strategies here. Some say, don’t capture email addresses if you don’t have a clear launch date. I say if you can estimate what season it will launch, ex. (Summer 2012) then collect addresses.

Technical Matters

1) Purchase your URL
Hopefully you have already done this. And quickly afterward you reserved your company name on Twitter/Flickr/Vimeo/Facebook, right?

2) Determine who is hosting your Coming Soon page
You don’t necessarily need to host your Coming Soon page with the same host you bought it from but sometimes it is easier (see below). Some hosting services have built-in templates that you can modify, others provide only a “Parked Domain” page, or the ever popular “Under Construction” with the yellow hardhat and pylons – Yay!

-Tip: If you’re not ready to select a hosting provider just yet, consider a landing page hosting service, which will also manage email subscriptions for you. Ones to research: Performable, Unbounce, Capturely or Launch Soon.

-Of note: If you go ahead with a traditional host, know that ICANN, the international domain registry organization, has a 60-day wait policy on registrar transfer. This means that when you ARE ready to launch your full site, switching hosts may not be immediate or easy. Which is why you should consider #3.

3) Have a pretty good idea where your site will be hosted upon V1 launch.
Not always, but in most cases, you bought a domain name and have it parked somewhere. If you are reading this prior to purchasing the domain look into the hold-over time your hosting service requires before moving the domain — standard is 60 days. Depending on your time line this may be ok, or it may be a huge p.i.t.a. Better to know now.

Design

1) Do you have a logo?
Clarification — A final logo?

2) Do you have colors, fonts and a living style guide?
The design of your Coming Soon page should reflect the elements of the brand you are building. Ideally you want your brand assets to be as close to final as possible. If the logo you are using is just, “for now” stop right now and reassess. And while you may love comp 1 over comp 2 – usability should be the ultimate decision maker. There are a number of reputable A/B testing services. We like AB tests.

Copy Elements

1) Have you provided all the necessary copy elements to your designer?

• Company Tagline
• Headline
• Subheadline/Hook
• Body text (aim for 70 words or less)
• Call to action
• “Submit” button text (i.e. Subscribe now, Notify me, etc.)
• Error copy for form submit errors (required field, incorrect email, email already on file, etc.)
• Confirmation message for submission
• Submission confirmation email
• Social Media links
• Twitter/Facebook push
• Email link
• Footer

Your primary goals are to create a buzz and collect emails.* The way to do this is with active, intriguing language and engaging call(s) to action. Keep it short, simple and sweet as Pecan pie. There is such a thing as just enough copy*. And it’s usually much less than you thought. Hat tip to @brownthings

*Or not.

2) No really. What did you name your buttons?
“Submit”, “Subscribe” and “Signup” are all clinically unclear and not relevant to what the user is actually doing. (And “Click here” is nonsensical.) Make the button name part of the narrative, something active that reflects what the user is actually requesting. In most cases your Coming Soon page is asking/convincing users if they want to be contacted when the site launches. Try: “Notify me” or the ever-neutral “Go.”

3) Designing the Coming Soon page?
From a cost perspective a well-designed/coded Coming Soon page will cost between $800-2000 depending on the designer and the scope. It will usually consist of one main page, a form-submit and a post-submit landing page. Examples of good Coming Soon pages.

Social Media

1) Will your Coming Soon page have Twitter/Facebook icons?
Do you have accounts set up on those sites? Have you built up a reasonable Twitter timeline? Is there content on your Facebook page? Do you have a social media strategy and/or someone who is going to man the social media fort? Ideally your social media campaign starts months before a “Coming Soon” page. Three Twitter followers and picture of your company mascot on Facebook does not inspire confidence.

2) Are you implementing a Facebook/Twitter push?
Giving users the option of sharing is the best way to extend your sphere of influencers. Facebook and Twitter both have simple code that makes it easy for users to share your Coming Soon page. Some gameify the push by moving users who share more up line on early invite to the beta. The line between marketing/tacky and useful/cool is a thin one, so make sure the sharing experience is about them and not you. 

Email -To confirm or not to confirm?

1) Get confirmed
In order to weed out spam, and keep your database clean, send an invite code to the sent email for confirmation. This adds either one or two copywriting projects and a small coding project to your list of to-dos. The first — the invite code email (along with the code snippet). The second — a “you’re in, stay tuned” email, or landing page, that the user receives on select of the email code snippet.

2) No barrier to entry
The other route is to keep the user in the groove and let them submit any email address. This taxes the data integrity more than a bit and changes the entire strategy of the Coming Soon page.

Getting the word out

1) Now that you’ve done all this hard work, how will people find your Coming Soon page?
A newsletter seems to be lowest hanging fruit, so lets start there.  Bear in mind newsletter coding is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, especially if you have to support IE6.  Even if you use Mailchimp be prepared for a little HTML to work around the browser background-image issues. With that said, add one more copywriting project to your growing list of to-dos. First impressions count. But the sum of that impression made up of many, tiny parts executed flawlessly.

2) Newsletter design/copywriting
Unless you are going lo-fi add another $500-800 for a professional newsletter design to your timeline and budget. When working with your designer and copywriter keep in mind that the newsletter is not a duplication of the Coming Soon page.

Good news, this can probably all be done in a 2-3 days if you are focused, and have the staff. If you are hiring an agency or freelancers you can expect this to take 7-10 days depending on scope.

—Do the hard work now and don’t turn Coming Soon into Coming Sooner or Later.

- “It needs to support IE6.”
- “What can you do for half that?”
- “It has to speak to all audiences equally.”
- “Can you come in and present, again?”
- “Lunch and learn.”
- “Check’s in the mail.”
- “I don’t like this comp.”
- “We’d like to keep everything in Cold Fusion if possible.
- “I email it to him and he uploads it. It’s a flawless system.”
- “I’ll know it when I see it.”
- “Can I pre-pay for a yet unnamed project?”

And the ever popular –

- “Make the logo bigger.”

The magic of experience and forever asking “why” solves every one of the issues above brilliantly.

Your job as a practitioner is to keep digging until you get to the root of the clients phrase/concern. Only then can you deliver a successful project.

-Ian

But you always remember how the party ended: With a fight. Out of booze. In bored silence. Or with a queuing up of Air Supply’s Greatest Hits.

In the web world, the end of the party is the end of the experience — a purchase, an error message or a signup. Often these are experienced as the good, the bad or the indifferent. There’s_got_to_be_a_better_way.

Starting at the end.
The first client review is usually (cue angel music) “The Homepage.” This is what the client wants to see and what we are programmed to create. Make it shiny. Give it curb appeal. Get the team “design-excited.”

The problem with this strategy is it doesn’t address the end result of collecting data or purchasing something (see business objectives). Wireframes certainly address these details, but they are rarely something agencies show clients on a first or even second design review. When wireframes are shown, they are boxes and arrows delivered after the 3 comps/3 revisions cycle we (client and agency) have fallen into.

Something we do here @eatmedia is flip the script by starting our design process at the end of the user interaction. The secret: Go to the farthest end of the interaction and work backwards. Embrace the challenge of working with intense clarity on the messaging and basic design within this “closing experience” constraint. Once you nail down the end of the interaction, you now have something to build on with the client and with the design and messaging.

Segmenting Closing Experiences.

We focus on the following design and messaging experiences prior to tackling the homepage. So far, so good.

1. The successful interaction
-Form submit success messages
-Successful signup email
-Thank you page
-Email receipt post-purchase

2. The unsuccessful interaction
-404 page
-Form submit error message(s)
-Lost username/password message

We mock up these pages and messages as fully as possible and present to clients. It takes much less time than a homepage and with the applied constraints you have the ability to execute many more iterations. Homepage presentations can go in a million directions, but closing experience presentations are much easier for both stakeholders and designers to dig into. We have found that people very naturally jump into playing around with these more tactile scenarios and do so with more clarity and creativity than when we start with the homepage presentations.

—Manufacture the end of the party, skip the big homepage presentation. When the streamers and top-shelf liquor are gone it is the closing experiences and the handshakes at the door that will be last thing users will remember.

This email arrived in my inbox at 5:02am. Just before  33 percent of the country was about to find out that school was canceled today and we would miss yet another day of work.

What I love about this is:

a) Care.com had this email designed, approved and ready to go

b) They included extra incentive: A huge promotional discount on a last-minute sitter

c) But to get the huge promotional discount, you have to upgrade to a premium membership

d) The email arrived at the exact right time. The moment of need.

What’s the moment of need for your customers?

Sure, you have your holiday promotions. But what unplanned event might your company prepare for, design for, create a promotion for, and have in the queue to send out right when your customers will need it the most?

By the way, Care.com’s Founder & CEO Sheila Marcelo has one of the best parenting blogs out there.

MISTAKE #1

Not listening to that inner voice that says, “The time is now!” Despite ever-sophisticated analytics, tell-tale advisors and detailed market reports, I often find the most accurate predictor of what to do, when, is intuition. Unfortunately intuition only works when you respond to its alarm bell. Case in point: we had plans to build four Eat Media tools/products this year for our newly created Lab section. Two of the ideas I sketched out almost 3 years ago. At the beginning of the year, intuition kicked me in the ass, saying, “Time to get started on those projects, Ian,” but my “urgent” list of projects (vs. my “important” list) kept me from completing them.

Here are the results of that waiting:

Project 1 #fail – Three days after buying the URL Slangr.com, the awesome Muledesign launched Unsuck-it.com.

Project 2 #fail – 3 weeks prior to launching Calcium (our vetted conference calendar), Lanyrd.com was launched.

Lesson learned: Ideas are worth very little without prompt and proper execution.

MISTAKE #2

Not bringing up pricing early enough in the conversation(s) Historically we have had 4-5 exchanges (including email and meetings) prior to discussing pricing with clients. Any time a prospective client brought a project/problem to the table I got giddy and immediately started thinking of ways to make things better and then double better. Often this entailed a boatload of research, tests, comps and even sample content. We had more than one occasion in 2010, where I rocked all-nighters and tasked staff with work that I filed under the line item of “research” which really should have been under the line item of  “after we cash the deposit.” On one hand, I think we are going to land every client and love finding the solution(s). On the other hand, a solution that doesn’t fit the client’s budget doesn’t solve the client’s problem.

For 2011 we are testing Sliderocket for proposals as well as Proposable. Addtionally, we now discuss price at 2nd, or at the latest, 3rd contact with the client.

Lesson learned: Not providing pricing as early as possible is unfair to us and the prospective client.

MISTAKE #3

Not being able to reel in the best talent For the past 4 years I have art directed most of visual design and/or comps for our clients, but we reached a point at the beginning of 2010 where in order for the agency to grow we needed (still need) to hire people with more talent so that Britta and I can focus on other parts of the business. We entirely underestimated how scarce great (available) talent is in NYC; especially in the web design and front-end development world. To make things exponentially more difficult, we were/are looking for a FT, in-house web design/developer combo which the esteemed UX/CS Karen McGrane told me was like “hunting for unicorns.” We saw this need coming a year prior and should have started putting out feelers in 2009. The days of placing an ad and getting hundreds of applicants has gone the way of the animated .gif.

We are now offering hiring bonuses, referral bonuses and developing a GEO location campaign to lure talent to our agency.

Lesson learned: Craigslist is a waste of time to capture real talent. All our talented friends were snapped up 3-4 years ago.

MISTAKE #4

We should have expanded beyond content strategy/development two years ago Very early on in our business, Britta and I realized that we would, at some point, need to become a full-fledged agency. Since that is a tough sell out of gate, we decided to start with content development/strategy, build up our portfolio and then expand. Some amazing clients kept us very busy with content development/strategy early on but the desire to provide [content-first] design, development and ideation services was driving us. Why didn’t we move faster? Things were good, our staff at the time probably wasn’t as ready for that shift as we were, and frankly I think we were afraid to rock the boat. In retrospect, we should have bellied up to the table sooner and built the business we wanted. Our clients would have been better for it and we would be closer to becoming the agency we envisioned more than 5 years ago.

Lesson learned: Be flexible but follow your original vision. Sacrifice is more than a bad Elton John tune.

MISTAKE #5

The (client/agency) love is gone Half-way through 2010, we let one of our biggest clients go. It was both a very difficult decision and an absolutely necessary one. Unfortunately it was a business decision we should have made at the end of 2009. After more than 3 years working with this client, we hit a massive change management wall and became little more than executors. Two month projects were dragged out over the course of six months. Conference calls had become bloated and unproductive and our strategy and creative services were lost in the mire of middle management approvals and proposal re-dos. We stayed on mostly due to an amazing relationship with our lead contact, but at some point it was clear that we had both lost the love. It happens, we were a small agency in a huge company that regularly burns through small agencies. We had a good ride. Problem was we had so many projects with them it was very difficult to untangle our operations, project management and culture from them. In the end we parted gracefully(ish) and the breathing room helped us finally expand our business (see Mistake #4).

Lesson learned: Once you are no longer getting paid for your ideas, strategy and creative, the clock starts ticking. Loudly.

These are my confessions of a growing agency. What were your 2010 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

Like this article? Check out the Top 5 Mistakes I made in 2009, one of which should be the orange headers.)

Since 2006, our belief has remained steadfast—content and content strategy should help shape user experience, and all experiences (digital and print) should dutifully serve business objectives.

Now, after 4+ years of providing content solutions to clients, it feels natural (almost obligatory) to put our money where our mouth is and provide a comprehensive solution that includes a broader scope of services.

We believe companies have grown tired of working with multiple practices/agencies who don’t know how communicate with one another.

Which is why we’ve spent the last 6 months expanding our services and rebranding Eat Media as a [content-first] Design | Development | Ideation agency.

In addition to our content strategy, content development and content management services, we are now providing [content-first] solutions in the following areas:

• Web Design/Development
• iPad/iPhone Development
• Print-to-Web Integration
• Application Development/Product Strategy
• Consulting/Tailored Workshops

Bring us your problems.

You’ll love our solutions.

—Ian

@eatmedia

If you are going to send a holiday card out to your customers that:

• Has no personalization whatsoever
• Is signed by a computer attempting to look like a real signature
• Is signed by your entire staff with no personal message
• Does not offer any value in terms of a gift, discount, useful information, an update about how your company is donating part of its profits to charity, or at least something to make me laugh
• (A sentimental statement about the holidays does not count as adding value)

Then please reconsider sending a corporate holiday card in the first place.

It’s generic and makes us feel bad for the trees, which doesn’t make us feel good about you.

Thanks.

P.S. My holidays are about these guys, not my State Farm insurance agent.

Not sure if you’ve noticed, but non-media sites are moving away from multiple departments of homepage content and focusing on clean pages with a simple call to action (CTA). The reason — enlightenment.

In the race to become relevant and trustworthy, many brands have taken “becoming a publisher” out of context and are now following a breadcrumb trail back to reality.

I can understand why:

- Change management is a bear

- Content is tactile

- The concept of “more” usually aligns with “better.”

The problem with “more” as a tactic is that it lacks humility and has a faulty, self-preserving feedback loop. Quite often we over-strategize, we forget that no matter how well-researched our plans are, users will interact with our projects in ways we hadn’t imagined.

Overall, the tactic of producing more content to engage users and produce more sales somewhere down the road is both true and untrue. The true—you may get more content indexed and thereby lead people back to your site. The untrue—this does little to nothing to help keep your users on your site.

Most content marketing/strategy of this type is “traffic content” rather than “trust content.” In order to produce trust-based content, you need to work in concert with other practices. In order to produce traffic-based content, you need some keywords. Big difference.

I recently spoke to a serial startup entrepreneur and he told me that his email splash pages collected between 10-20k emails prior to launch. The content: a one-page site, logo, hed, sub-hed and a well designed form.

Did his network help? For sure. Did his experience and past success help? Yep. But what was most effective? Having the CTA be the most important element on the page.

I’m not here to say we don’t need more content but rather that we don’t need MORE CONTENT! Instead, we should be focused on balancing the types of content (trust, traffic, informational, CTA) we create and being more holistic about how and why we produce content.

When you strip away all the practices you are left with:

-Identifying and understanding your audience/goals/message

-Balancing originality and usefulness

-Selecting and implementing the proper technology/design

-Getting real about what kind of ongoing content you can truly sustain

Only after you lock these items down should you firm up your content strategy and let the writers loose. Don’t buy into the myth of more.

—Ian