There's gold in them there forums

How communities and businesses are helping each other out, online

The second part in our series of posts on online communities is about how they are actually benefiting business, and vice versa. Let's pause now for a minute, while we listen for the sound of Marx stirring in his coffin. Actually, it's not as sinister as it sounds (the concept, not the dead economist) - there's no exploitation going on. Forums attached to business websites are becoming more and more popular, and can be the great leveller.

There are a number of exceptional benefits to be had from a properly functioning community on a website. For a start, on the side of the organisation, a good group of people regularly saying interesting or helpful things will bring new visitors back to your site again and again. If you are offering any kind of product that needs support, having a message board or forum can cut down on your support costs as users give each other advice on how they overcame problems, or you can post advice about common support issues. It's also a good way to demonstrate that you can deal with criticism and respond to problems quickly and effectively. You can scour the forums for positive feedback which can be used (with permission) in your marketing materials and promotions.

On the side of the user, browsing an organisation's forum can quickly tell you whether this is an organisation worth dealing with or buying from. At the very least, simpy having a forum demonstrates an open attitude, and self-confidence in the product or service being offered. You can also search for quick answers to problems you may have been having, or find novel ways of using what is being offered which may be of benefit.

If you are convinced by the benefits, and are considering starting your own community, you should only do it if you have enough time to give to the project. A neglected community does not send out a good message. You need to make sure that you moderate it properly and update it regularly to send out the all-important message of professionalism, and keep the site secure.

Contact rechord if you need any more advice on this subject, at no charge. We could chew anybody's ears off for hours about it; we are just passionate about online communities.

Make your website better for 50p

Although the web contains an awful lot of text, it remains a strongly visual medium. However, most sites contain little in the way of visual imagery. People shy away from using high quality original photos or illustrations because of the perception that they are very expensive.

Those times are now past. Enter Fotolia.

Fotolia has almost 2 million high quality photos which can be purchased for $1 (at time of typing, just over 50p). Even buying one or two can make your website much more appealing to visitors, instantly.

Fotolia

Here's an additional brilliant thing about Fotolia; if you're a pro or a keen amateur photographer, you can submit your own photos, illustrations or 3D models for sale and earn up to 50% commission.

Get popular

Great communities: always talked about, hard to find.

Affinity Trading is a real online community with a very friendly edge.

If websites were real places, it'd be a welcoming village with gourmet bistros and pavement cafes. It has a business focus but is not limited to business. The members of Affinity are dedicated to helping you succeed in life and work. Log in, add your profile and tell them what you want - but make sure to offer to help in return. Who knows what you'll get out of it? New business, new ideas, useful advice, maybe even a great friend.

Affinity Trading

Spreading the online word, part II

Not last post (sorry!) but the post before, we promised to tell you how to get word out about your site if you don't think it's something that people would actively look for. (Who in their right mind would search for "tubby student pumping his arms to Romanian Europop?")

The answer lies in establishing a presence in online communities. This can help a lot more people to notice you. It can be as little as offering friendly, impartial advice in forums. As long as you don’t try and promote your site or service too blatantly as you do it, people are more likely to respect what you have to say. It might also be worth having a forum on your own site, so that when people do find your website they have a reason to stay a bit longer. If you do go down this route, you’ll probably want to have someone to moderate it - maybe yourself, or a regular user - just to remove offensive posts and advertising or spam posts, otherwise it might quite quickly become unusable. Get in touch with rechord if you would like to know how to get a forum up and running.

You can also use viral marketing techniques and stunts to raise your profile. Some of the bigger companies make ads that they know they could never use, but if they get leaked onto the internet, then they’re not responsible, and still stand to benefit.

It’s often assumed that these ads are spoofs, but many of them are outlandish pitches by ad agencies that in the past would never see the light of day due to broadcasting restrictions. In the badlands of the web, however, anything goes.

One such wayard proposal is a Nokia mobile phone advert featuring a cat which accidentally gets stuck to a ceiling fan - it goes without saying that Nokia have come out against it, but it’s got people talking and seems to have raised their profile.

Sadly this kind of thing is beyond most budgets, and not many of us run organisations that would often inspire others to make spoof ads, but the principle is still the same. If you can make something that people will talk about and want to pass on, then people will do just that, and in the meantime your profile will rise. Rechord have created several viral campaigns in the past, one which featured a ninja pigeon, and another which was a soothing interactive screensaver for stressed executives.

A related idea is a relatively new concept - using something called street teams. It’s a technique that bands and record labels often employ. Glam rock afficionados The Darkness were one of the first big groups to use this idea, but it should work elsewhere (yes, even if you're not into lightly reassembled Queen songs).

The idea is that in return for free stuff (CDs or gig tickets, in the case of bands,) members of the street team will visit forums or write comments in blogs, spreading the word about you, voting for your product or service in polls and making sure that people are talking about what you do - as long as what they are saying is good. The ethics of this may seem dubious, but is it really that different from employing a PR agency to promote your wares to the media? As always with ethics, it's a fine line, and something you will have to decide for yourself.

Let us know how you get on with your word-spreading adventures.

Spreading the online word

So you've got a website? That's good, but next door's shed does too. (We kid you not- see below...) So, don't expect floods of visitors without doing something to promote it.
It's true; almost anyone can have a presence on the web, which unfortunately means that it is increasingly difficult to get noticed online. The chances of someone stumbling across your site by accident are, to put it bluntly, very low, and getting lower by the minute, even if your home page is good enough to win a Bafta. But - you know us - not ones to dwell on the bad news. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to get round this, and most of them won't cost you a bean either. Once they have found you, and provided that what is featured on your site is helpful to visitors, they will come back again and again.
Next Door's Shed


One of the first and most oft advised internet marketing strategies is to send a regular or (here, note an embarrassed pause) irregular newsletter to a list of subscribers. The idea is that your subscribers will come to look on you as a source of reliable information, and it will remind them to visit your site - or indeed remind them that you still exist. The only problem with a newsletter is that people must sign up for it, otherwise you're sending out hateful spam. To sign up, in a classic Catch-22, they generally need to visit your site in the first place...


So, what else is there?

The vast majority of people will find your site through search engines, with Google being by far the most popular - accounting for almost half of all searches (and over 80% in the UK). The first step is to get your site listed on Google. If you're technically proficient, you can submit a Google site map. Another very good start is to link to your site from another which currently appears in Google searches. You could do this if you have a site that's already listed, or you could submit your site details to a free online business directory. Once you're listed, then comes the task of climbing the listings. This is made difficult by the fact that search engines closely guard their algorithms. However, a recent posting by a Search Engine Optimisation company hazards a guess at how Google actually works out where sites should go in listings. As you can see from his extensive post, getting your site to the top of the listings is a task only for those with strong stomachs. If the link to it makes you a little light-headed, better ask the professionals for help - see Koded below.
Google Site Maps
The Google algorithm
Koded - Search Engine Specialists


On a basic level, however, at least for Google, the more people who link to your site using certain keywords, the higher up the search rankings it will be. To facilitate this you can set up link exchanges with other similar sites. If you don't already have one, create a page on your site where you include a link to any sites that agree to reciprocate.

Another way to get more people to visit your site is to use pay per click adverts like Google's AdWords. Your link will then appear in the sponsored links section of the results page when someone searches under your chosen keyword. Often this means you appear to be first in the listings, in the blue bar at the top (in Google at least). Latest research shows that only 38% of people know the difference between sponsored links and real, or 'organic' ones; and of that 38%, less than half (47%) are sure they can always tell the difference. It's easy to keep your advertising budget under control as well, because Adwords works like a Pay As You Go mobile phone. You charge up your account with a set amount of money, and every time someone follows your link, a small portion will be debited from your Google account until it's empty. This means you won't spend more than you intended to if you accidentally pick a very popular keyword. The amount per click varies depending on the popularity of the keyword chosen and is determined ad hoc by Google.
Contact Rechord for help with your AdWords campaign
The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall - world expert on AdWords


Perhaps you don't think your site is something that people would search for. It might be the sort of thing your potential customers wouldn't realise they like until somebody else flags it up to them, like the flabbergasting success of the 'Numa Numa dance' video (which even appeared on CNN!) Want to know what you can you do about that? See our next post...
Numa Numa

Better online communication part 2

Email has been around for three times as long as the Web, so we've found out a lot of uses (and abuses) for it since then.
Thus below is the second article in our series on email, and it contains four more must-knows.

5) When replying to something important or complex, quote the original email in your reply.
Have you ever picked up an old letter from a friend and wished to God you'd photocopied the original you sent, so you could remember what you said? This is your answer.
Some feel it is a matter of taste, but to net veterans, "include original message in reply" is an essential feature of their email program. Essential for several reasons; the most notable being that you don't have to cross-reference different emails when later analysing a conversation. Also, this include feature saves time flicking back and forth between messages to make sure you've covered everything your correspondant needed to know (or, more often than not, things that they didn't really need to know, but you thought you'd tell them anyway.)
In days of old, previous correspondence was indicated at the beggining of each line, by a "greater than" symbol, eg:

>what you said to me first
what I am saying by way of reply

and these built up when forwarded, so you could see how the conversation was evolving:

>>>what you said to me first
>>what I said by way of reply
>what you then said to me
what I am saying now

Some people find this difficult to read, but once you've figured it out, it makes detailed correspondence much easier. If you're sent an email using this schema, the politest way to continue the conversation is to respond in kind.

6) Best foot forward.
Email is the only medium that allows you to copy messages to possibly thousands of people by twitching a few muscles.
If all tools amplify our power, then email cranks up the volume to 11. (For those of you who haven't seen Spinal Tap, that means "pushing it off the cliff.")
So be careful with those forwards! If you're not vigilant you can set off streams of data worthy of a chaos theory apocryphal tale. (Email fluttering in Brazil sets off nuclear emergency in Latvia.) If you recieve a chain letter, petition or virus warning, it's important to check it's authentic before mailing it to every poor soul in your address book. This can be very easily done online at sites such as BreakTheChain - maintained by digital saints. Some of these mails are legitimate, but the majority are actually a form of lo-fi virus, childishly engineered specifically to create data traffic jams on the Net.
Spinal Tap - "It goes up to 11"
BreakTheChain

7) Don't say anything I wouldn't say
Something which leads neatly on from this is the inherent paradox of email communication. It can easily lull senders into a false sense of privacy; it feels like you are all alone in a conversation when you read it. And yet sending an email is more like passing a note around your primary school. Everybody knows who it's addressed to, and there's nothing to stop any of your mates having a peek. Worst of all, it's not hard for (oh horror of horrors) Teacher to grab it and read it out in front of everybody.
Remember - just a finger spasm from a bumbling friend or colleague and your email could find itself on the wrong desktop. Or everybody's desktop, for that matter, as Jamie Oliver knows to his cost.
A good rule of thumb: only say things you would be comfortable making front page news, attributed to you. Otherwise, say it face to face.

8) Use receipts in order to see if the recipient has got your mail.
The stalker's favourite; seldom used by technological newcomers and well-hidden by programmers: the receipt option - built into email protocols from the early years - still works. Not all systems can handle it, but it's worth a try. Method of use varies from program to program, even from version to version in certain systems, which shall remain nameless (doncha just love Microsoft?) The only way to find out what to do is to... gasp... look it up in the help file. I know it's a drastic measure, but when you get your first email back from the recipient's mail server telling you your missive has been received and/or opened, the labour will seem worth it.

9) Know when to use CC and BCC
Would you want your friends to post your mail address to all of their friends, and get all of their friends to send it to all of their friends? Not really. Not if you want to keep the junk from your door and the identity thieves away.
So, for the sake of your friends' privacy, use the BCC box rather than the CC box in your email program when you want to send an email to lots of people.
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. It means that any given recipient is unaware of who else the email was sent to and cannot therefore nick their email address.
CC stands for Carbon Copy. Putting somebody's email address in this box means that other recipients will see who it was sent to. Additionally, if they reply, the person in the CC box will see that reply automatically.
It's not hard to work out which is appropriate to use in which situation. That said, be very careful with CC especially.

Better online communication part 1

Email. Rapidly becoming the most used form of communication. Still the killer app of the net after its birth over 30 years ago. (Yes, you read that right... 30 years!)

But how many of us can actually use it appropriately? Maybe our emails are not as effective as we think. Only a small proportion of our communication has reached its full potential. This 2-part post explains our hints for better online messaging.

So here we go, at risk of eliciting cries of "Physician, heal thyself..."

1) Stick to one subject per email.
Otherwise you can create a filing headache for your recipient - especially when mixing business and pleasure.

2) Give your email a succinct, descriptive subject line.
After many years of furious sending and receiving, mailboxes can become stuffed with messages bearing titles like: "Re: [10] Hello" - which seems ok at the time - until you need to find a particular message, months later. Turning up the one you had in mind, in the middle of that lot, can cause more heart palpitations than an English breakfast and solid coffee. Even with intelligent search functions around, there can be hundreds of messages to sort through to find "that one that talked about the thing for so-and-so." One appropriate description at the top of your missive can add days to somebody's life (probably) and endear you to them many years down the line (definitely.)

3) Label your emotions.
Email's lack of cues that, ordinarily, body language or tone of voice would give to the recipient, can result in extraordinary miscommunications, which are the first wedge in the splitting of many a relationship. Irony and dry wit can enrich communication and understanding offline, but online they can easily be taken literally. Additionally, by way of a different extreme example, lack of emotion in email can seem like pure cold-bloodedness to the addressee. There are only 2 ways to prevent this - to use stage directions for yourself (for example "Your time-keeping is, as always, impeccable [smile]") or the ubiquitous smiley- in this case, an indicator of brazen cheek: ("How dare you call me tardy :-P".) Other than in serious or old-school business situations, the casual linguistics which have evolved through email are very forgiving of such informalities. Email beginners may find it irksome or odd, but, as any ex-pat will tell you, foreign customs that seem to fit like a wooden suit at first must be learned and practised to maintain relationships. Eventually they become like old, comfy, utilitarian jeans.

4) If sending an HTML email, give a text-only alternative
Some emails now use HTML to change fonts, colours and embed tables and photos. This gives them the appearance of web pages and is effective for branding and skim-reading purposes. However, it's a nightmare for accessibility. Once an email is forwarded it can break or lose its formatting, and not every mail application or device (such as the new breed of smartphones) can read HTML email. If you are advanced enough with your email to use such a feature, make sure that the email reads as you intend it to when all the HTML is stripped away. Also, (at risk of sounding like a schoolteacher looking over horn-rimmed glasses,) make sure the code produced is written according to proper HTML standards. Or you'll get into trouble.

Next post: How to know whether somebody's got your email, best foot forwarding and the perils of gossip.

Access for all

Sometimes we get stuck for words to describe how powerful the internet is. It has revolutionised our lives in many ways.

Think, though: what if you're blind? What if you can't use your fingers well? What if dyslexia makes it difficult to read from a computer screen? The connected world can become completely inaccessible.

Actually, it doesn't have to. IT can be a tool of liberation instead of widening the gap between the rich and poor. The key is how you use it.

Software is now available which will read out the text of websites and emails to users with sight impairments. Hardware also exists for people with motor impairments and other dysabilities (and no, that's not spelt wrong - it means "less able" rather than "unable" - a new word we like to use).

However, many websites are created with only sighted users in mind, (despite a huge and growing proportion of net users known to be partially sighted, according to the RNIB) and sometimes the software is unable to cope with them. Some sites provide a text only alternative, but to dysabled people this seems almost discriminatory, and loses everything that thoughtful design can bring to them. (If you've ever tried to use the text-only version of the BBC's online weather reports, you'll know about this.) Technologies supported by new browsers taking hold on the web can make life much easier; indeed, they are essential now, especially in the light of the Disabilities Act and related court cases around the world.

Taking the new Rechord site as a case study:

• The text can be enlarged for ease of reading in the browser without corrupting the layout. Additionally, links are easier to click on the larger they are.
• When using reader software, some pages are extremely irritating to use because the software will read out all the links in the menu on every single page, before going to the main content. The Rechord site is cleverly programmed to have the navigation appear at the bottom of the site code, rather than the top.
• Text describing each visual element is present in the code. This means that poorly sighted users do not miss out on anything.
• Careful use is made of colour and underline to avoid drawing dyslexic users' eyes around the page unneccesarily- usually links are present at the end of paragraphs.
  

Making websites accessible in this way also makes life easier for users without dysabilites. The pages are more likely to look good in new browsers which come out, including browsers for mobile phones and other new devices. They are more usable, flexible and generally more satisfying to use. Finally, (and most people's eyes light up at this point) the search engines tend to rank them higher.

If you create anything online, this is well worth bearing in mind.

Search Engineering

Matthew Cartright, from the crew of genius geeks known as Koded, has offered us some tips on getting your website seen by the right people.

In days of old, the web was a wild and anarchic place. By simply inserting 1001 keywords into the code of a webpage and doing a little homework you could find your website listed high in the search engines. You could then sit back and watch the hits pile up like Stock Aitken and Waterman.

But now the web has come of age. The major search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine the relevancy of a site. Thousands of people compete for positions making it increasingly difficult for webmasters to create good results. More and more companies are commissioning the services of SEO companies (Search engine optimisation specialists, who have the proven expertise and technology to ensure results.)

That said, if you have the time and motivation and prefer the DIY approach there are some practical tips which could enhance your visibility.

For instance, optimising the HTML title tag on each page of your site is easy and should not be overlooked as search engines take great notice of this tag.
A few pointers for optimising your page's title tags for the search engines:

• The title of your page counts for a lot
  
• Keep the content of your title tags concise (about 60 characters including spaces)
  
• Use words which accurately depict the content of the page and when randomly juxtaposed can make short phrases.
  
• Don't use lots of generic words! They don't really help and waste that precious 60 character limit.
  
• Use your key words only once! Repeated words can be looked upon as spam by the search engines.
  

Visit Koded's site to find out more or commission the experts to do what they do best.
Koded