Effective communication is vital to the success of any project. Effective communication makes your, and the others around you, job easier. Here are a few tips I’d like to share with you to help improve communication in your organization and improve the outcomes of your projects.

Small Teams Rock
Companies often mitigate risk by getting more people involved in a project. There’s a “the more, the better” philosophy, when nothing further could be the truth. Here’s a simple formula that measures communication channels to prove my point.

C = ( N ( N - 1 ) ) / 2   [From the Project Management Institute]

N = number of people involved in a project
C = number of communication channels

If there are 4 people in a project, there are 6 communication channels. 6 people = 15 communication channels. 10 people = 45 channels.

The number of communication channels increases dramatically. This number means more work to manage communication and an increased risk of miscommunication. If you want to be efficient, keep your teams as small as possible.

Make Sure You are Understood
Communication has not occurred until the receiving party understands the meaning of the message. Just because an e-mail was sent, you have no way of knowing it was read, or understood. Require a suitable reply so you are confident your message was effective. Whether it’s e-mail, a phone conversation or a person-to-person meeting, it is your responsibility to make sure you are understood, not the other person’s to figure out what you meant.

E-mail Peeves: CC, Reply To, Reply To All & Subjects
CC-ing people on e-mails is THE biggest cause of over-filled Inboxes in corporate America today. CC-ing leads to the Reply To All, exaggerating the problem. Only send e-mails to those who absolutely need to receive them. This is a lazy habit fueled by the need to cover one’s ass. Please stop the madness.

Another lazy habit is using an old e-mail for a reply instead of starting a fresh message. This creates an issue with having a subject that does not relate to the contents of the message. This equates to lost information. Help your fellow co-workers by writing relevant subjects and sending e-mails on topic.

E-mail is Not Always the Correct Method
Everyone gets tons of e-mail every day. There’s a lot of noise and clutter in one’s Inbox. If you need something, call the person. Make sure to actually talk to them -  not just leave a message.  If the issue is important, talk to the person(s) in person. Seventy percent of human communication is visual. This is totally lost over the phone.

Meetings Suck
There is not a greater consumer of work hours than meetings. Little work gets done and most attendees sit idly by while others discuss issues irrelevant to them. If you really want to communicate more effectively and get a lot more work accomplished. Don’t have as many meetings, keep the meetings short and with only key people. I recommend standing meetings. These are short, to-the-point meetings where no one sits down and only people close to the topics discussed are present. No food. No vacation discussion. All business. They are very effective.

It seems all I hear about nowadays is Twitter. “We need to be using Twitter.” “How many followers do you have?” “What app are you using to read your tweets?”

I not a user, but I’m not a hater (not any more) either. Admittedly, at first I didn’t understand Twitter’s appeal and called it content of no value, or something like that, but as with anything, the value lies in the eyes of the audience.

Early adopters use Twitter for the right reasons – fast sound bites delivered to a group simultaneously.

For marketers, how does this technology makes sense? Can it build brand? Not by itself. Is it good for sales promotion? Probably. Can it be used for PR? Depends on how fast you can spin the conversation. Speed is the key here. How fast can I communicate to as many people as possible? Real time. Real simple. Real cheap.

The question is, how many people are your tweets reaching? It is the number of followers you have plus the number of people who search and find your message on Twitter. If your message does not have broad appeal and you don’t have an effective number of followers, reason dictates it’s probably not going to be an effective way to get your marketing message out.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it actually fall? In reality - yes. In advertising - no.

My advice to those companies who are considering a Twitter campaign, with short term results, is to concentrate your efforts on medias and technologies that have the largest target audiences. Study your audience’s behavior and base your decision on that. Don’t do it, just to do it, at the expense of more effective options. Use your resources wisely.

On the other hand, if you are in it for the long haul, start tweeting, accumulate followers and one day you may be heard by whom you seek.

Need to resize or crop an image?

Picnik.com offers free, simple photo editing.

Thanks Picnik.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important any company’s web site and I’m frequently asked how to improve it. There are a number of factors involved in SEO.  A big part of my efforts to improve a site’s SEO is by crafting new content and reorganizing it so it is readily accessible by users and spiders alike. Aside from content, I often recommend driving all web traffic to a single domain name. Many companies have numerous domain names that point to different section of their site. An example would be URLs like www.getajobatjoes.com, and www.joesrecipes.com, when the site is really www.joesdiner.com and the first two point to sub-sections.

This has several advantages:

1. Improves search engine rankings by:
   1. Increasing traffic numbers under a single domain name
   2. Adding breadth and depth to the content presented under a single domain name
   3. Allows other sites to link back to single domain name
2. Easier for people to remember or at least guess
3. Builds equity in the domain name
4. Makes management of fewer domain names easier and less expensive
5. Creates a standard practice across the organization
6. No need to create unique and specialized domain names in an already crowded .com landscape

I did not invent this strategy. Google has created it by advancements in their ranking technology. They even have penalties in their ranking algorithms for content that is accessible from more than one domain name. Companies are adopting this practice everywhere. Just watch television commercials.

Friendly URLs can be created to specific sections of the site by using URL rewriting, or a “sub-folder alias” convention like joesdiner.com/careers, or joesdiner.com/recipes. The only time I would use a vanity URL is for a website that has a specific purpose, like supporting an advertising campaign, and is going to be used for a short period of time when search engines aren’t a great concern.

The Paradox of Please, as David Armano calls it, plagues our business everyday.

My analogy:

It's time to order lunch for a group of people. You have to get one type of food everyone will agree to eat. Individually, each person wants something unique. John wants shrimp scampi. Mary wants chicken salad on a croissant. Hakeem wants tandoori chicken with lentils. All are delicious and personal choices. As a group they settle on a common denominator -- pizza. And not just any pizza, bland pizza. It "pleases" everyone, but it's neither personal, unique or delicious.

This is why most marketing communication is so mediocre; it's bland pizza.

I help companies and organizations create, acquire, collect, edit and organize content for their web sites. Many projects begin with a web site that has grown into a giant, organic mess over the course of several years – adding content here and there like weeds enveloping a garden. This happens for many reasons, but the primary one is, people think more information is better. However, this only true if the information has more details, depth, clarity and offers several perspectives.

What content is right for you

One must determine what information is suitable to publish online and create guidelines that benefit the company’s business objectives while satisfying visitor expectations. A good way to accomplish this is by defining some criteria all content must meet. These criteria are created by asking questions about the content:

• Is it relevant to the conversation we need to be having with our visitors?
• Is it unique to our business, services or products?
• Does it support a particular position, or philosophy we endorse?
• Do visitors expect it?
• Do we have the resources to produce and manage the content in an exceptional manner?

The first three questions are introspective and an organization’s marketing message is partly the result of them, but often web sites need to pick up where ad copy leaves off with more details. The fourth is knowing your audience. This is often overlooked and is very important. Lastly, being able to create the content without sacrificing from other business operations in a way as to not create a negative effect is important. Too often trying to do too much ends up being a weak attempt.

Things to keep in mind

• Quality over quantity. Quality over quantity. Quality over quantity.
• Always have a specific business goal for spending time to produce content.
• Be the authority, but make it relevant to your specific differentiators.
• Don’t be an encyclopedia. Most often, there are other sites that are far better than you could ever be at presenting general information.
• Don’t be redundant. Use cross-linking to refer to content located in other sections of your site. If you must repeat something, do it from a different angle using different wording.
• Leverage other online resources. Visitors are appreciative for the help in finding additional information and it costs you little.

I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm going to. It is not necessary to write "click here" for hyperlink text. Let me repeat it another way. Don't use "click here."  It's just not good web.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

http://www.accessibilityblog.com/2005/10/17/how-to-anchor-text-dont-click-here/

The proper way is to have a link clearly appear to be a link by the traditional underline or a well-establish alternative heuristic and link the action text.

Examples:

Click to here view year-end report - BAD

View year-end report - GOOD

Click here to download PDF - BAD

Download Annual Report (PDF) - GOOD

In addition to saving words, space and not insulting your visitors intelligence, hyperlinking the descriptive words help search engines. So please stop using "click here." Please.

My friend Eric turned me on to this handy app for media conversion. Maybe you can use it too.

http://www.formatoz.com/

As of June 2008 Apple has made a version of Safari for PCs. It seems to have the same quirks as the Mac version. Should prove useful for testing. Thanks Apple.

Learn grasshopper.