So I’ve been drafted in to speak at PodCamp Ireland - Krishna De rang me up this morning to point out that if I am going to be there anyway, I might as well open my mouth and do something. I was a little surprised because I assumed that something called “PodCamp” was all about, well, podcasting - a subject about which I know next to nothing - but apparently it covers all kinds of social media. Who knew?

Anyway, Krishna suggested that I do something around design for blogs and websites, but to be honest, I can’t. I suck at talking about design. There are a lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day I just find design very difficult to be articulate about.

So instead, after a quick Twitter poll for topics, I’m going to be presenting on How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.) I have more than a month to put this presentation together, but I’m pretty sure it will break down into the specifics of conversational marketing, generating press and PR, and paid advertising.

I’ve been doing a couple of these informal presentations, so I’m also pondering getting a bit more organised about presenting materials and having downloadable slides and handouts available after each one, just so they’re more accessible to people who missed the gig or want the notes.

Realistically, that probably means a redesign. God help me.

Photo ©TheConsumerist

One thing I’ve noticed is that Irish companies in particular seem strangely hesitant to put themselves forward for things, be it press, social business introductions, or award nominations. This is, in a word, stupid. Unless you are paying a very, very good PR company, the person whose job it is to promote your business is you. While sure, some of your customers or clients may think of you and throw your name in the hat for this or that, there isn’t a lot of sense in sitting on the sidelines and hoping someone will ask you to the ball.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going after something, and hey - if you don’t make it, nobody will know so that’s okay. These quickly approaching deadlines are on my list, and I hereby challenge you to put them on your list, too.

This is the inaugural year for the Irish Web Awards, being held in Dublin on October 11th. Rumour has it that nominations may open to the public in the next day or so, but you can (and bloody well should) nominate your site in the applicable categories. Whether any of my clients make the short list this year or no, I’m going - at €30 a ticket, it’s a bargain for a great night out and Christ knows I need to leave the house.

The Irish Internet Association’s Net Visionary Awards are also taking nominations until Friday, 12 September. I do love a black tie do, but at €250 a ticket I’ll only be dusting off my ballgown in the extremely unlikely event I make the shortlist. Still, this is great PR for any company, so if you fall into any of the categories or love a site that does, those nomination forms are not going to fill themselves out!

One place I definitely will be going to is PodCamp in Kilkenny on the 27th of September. My other half has been drafted as a speaker and is doing From Broadcast to Podcast. I also have a couple of clients ripe for podcasting who I will be dragging along by way of encouraging them to get their feet wet in the podcast pond.

Finally, I have one more, top secret, soon to be revealed event planned for September, but I’m scheduling it around the previously mentioned Girl Geek Dinner in Cork on Sunday September 7th, 2008? There’s still time to sign up if you’re of the XX persuasion — the table is about 1/3rd booked and this event could use a little love if you’re inclined to help get the word out. Thanks! :)

Pat Phelan, who very kindly bought me dinner last night (and is, by the way, looking positively svelt these days, the bastard) asked a question on his blog today about filtering all those things we’ll broadly call stewardship offers. These are the people and organisations who want to solicit you to be a mentor, give you seats on their boards, or have you as their official or unofficial go-to guy for business and strategy advice. They do not, however, want to pay you.

I have to say that I am the original Girl Who Can’t Say No, so frankly Pat should take whatever I have to offer with regards to this question and chuck it directly out the window. I spend at least as much time doling out advice, contacts and expertise on things I’m not being paid to do as I spend doing things I am being paid to do — sometimes for clients, sometimes just for random people who have been referred in or wandered by. I have a terrible time turning anyone away, and I sincerely enjoy getting to meet, talk to and yell at a wide range of really fabulous people, but recently I’ve begun looking at things through the lifeboat analogy.

You’re on a lifeboat, with the Titanic sinking gracefully in the background. You only have so many people you can fit on the boat. Your family, your closets friends and your business are going to take up most of those seats, and that leaves only so many spots left over. With the handful of seats you have available, you then have to make what are frankly tough choices.

Do you take the strongest passengers, those with the greatest chance of making it, or do you take the weakest survivors, those who need help the most? Do you leave behind the people you think are most likely to make it without you, or do you leave behind the ones most likely to go under anyway? Do you invest your capacity in awesome business models or awesome people? Do you grab the folks nobody has ever heard of because you like them and see something good there, or do you pimp out and jump on board with the ones getting good press, good buzz and something that smells suspiciously like a pending VC offer?

However you decide to triage, the fact is that there will be some people to whom you simply cannot offer a seat. And the reality is that if you try to take on board every poor bastard waving his hand in the water, you’re going to sink. The lifeboat will go down in the form of a divorce, a heart attack or a receivership — and take everyone with it.

Were I Pat Phelan, I’d restrict myself to one of each: one Little Start Up That Could, one Next Big Thing, and one I’m Hitching My Star to This Ride Because It’s Good for Me, Never Mind Them. I don’t believe anyone can really truly nurture more than that unless it is their full time job. But because I’m a sucker, I’d maybe also book a day a month for everyone else who knocked on my door, to meet and talk and then walk away.

And most importantly, I’d start making the mountains come to Mohammed, because if my name’s Pat Phelan, I spend entirely too much time on planes as it is.

It’s not often that revolutions happen in retail - one of the most entrenched, least progressive sectors out there. I mean, sure, there’s the whole web thing, but aside from that, the creation of IKEA and the invention of the January Sale, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that really makes consumers wiggle with glee.

But there is a revolution going on at Sleep Squad, a Chicago mattress retailer. Their company story and the way they’re retailing is described in a great article at Furniture Style, but in a nutshell:

You select the mattress attributes you want online, they throw a bunch of matching products into their truck showroom, and they drive to you. You lay down and test out the selections in the mobile showroom, and if you’re particularly happy with one of your choices, you buy it right there. They deliver it directly from the truck to your home minutes later.

This is, in a word, brilliant.

One aspect of Sleep Squad I find really interesting is that founder Michael Cote doesn’t come from a long line of home furnishing retailers, or anything even close. He used to head up nationwide B2B sales for T-Mobile. When he decided to get out and go retail, he surveyed households for the most common items over a particular price mark, and then cross-checked his data with an existing survey on the buying experiences that made consumers the most miserable. That’s how he chose mattresses; because, in his words, “This industry is ripe for change.”

Speaking of the need for change, I do have two criticisms of Sleep Squad, neither of which has anything to do with their product or their retail model.

First of all, their logo is pants. Well, that’s not actually true; it’s a cute rendering of a bed. But they are not selling beds, or even mattresses. They are selling a buying experience, and that buying experience is all about the truck. The truck is their market differentiator, and the truck should be their logo.

They don’t need to create an iconic image for their business; they have one already, and it is their business.

Secondly, they need an image gallery, pronto. I don’t understand, really, how this works. I have no idea how you shove up to 26 mattresses into a truck that doubles as a showroom, but I’m pretty interested. I want to know what the show room I’m supposed to lie down in looks like, before I trundle out there in my bunny slippers. And, you know, since I’m potentially going to be testing products in my nightgown, some nice, reassuring in situ photos of the sales staff I’ll be meeting in the truck would be a plus, too.

There are couple of other things they could do to help position themselves to their best advantage with consumers, but really, despite the oversights, I’m cheering for this business. This is a great way to look at a very traditional sector and do something new and consumer driven, and I love this sort of thinking.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a definite upsurge in people contacting me to ask if I’m available for some consulting hours. By and large, these are companies who want help with traffic, conversions, online marketing campaigns, issues of stickiness, or general communications strategies that do not suck.

While this is great, I always worry about wading in with new clients who want to know if I can help them.

Because the answer is usually, yes, I can work with you. But you’re probably not going to like it.

When I was more active in Second Life and doing consulting for real life and virtual-only brands, my clients always used to joke that they wanted t-shirts that said “I Survived Sabrina Dent’s Business Boot Camp” to commemorate the ordeal.

My real life clients probably think the same thing but are too scared to ask.

Here is the thing. If I’m working with you, you can pretty much assume I think something about your site, your product or your service is great. But I also assume you’re not paying me a (very reasonable) hourly fee to tell you how awesome everything is and outline all the bits that that are working really well.

I’m assuming you’re asking me in to tell you what the problems are, with your site or with your products or with your online marketing, and sometimes, even if you didn’t realise it, all of these things at once.

This is an unpleasant experience.

I’m also very focused on the bottom line. If something doesn’t work, I don’t want to know the story of how you designed that ad or developed that website feature or why you adopted a particular strategy or where your development bottlenecks are. In fact, if you persist in telling me, I may hang up on you. Because those things do not matter to the end user, and the best thing I can do to help you is vigorously maintain my perspective as an outsider to bring you unfiltered feedback.

The clients I click best with, the clients who get the most value for their money are the ones who are prepared for tough love, who are hungry for real information, who don’t have their egos tied to their products, and who sit on the other end of the phone and say “Bring it, bitch.”

These are the clients who get t-shirts.

The back of that t-shirts says “And my business is better for it.”

I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds last night where there was a montage about a physicist who was a brilliant theorist because he could see string theory in action, literally visualise it in action in front of him. It reminded me of (and was clearly lifted from) A Beautiful Mind, in which John Nash has a similar visual relationship with Group Theory. It is possibly worth noting that both of these guys, whilst brilliant, were also schizophrenic.

I am neither particularly brilliant nor particularly schizophrenic, but I can relate to the mind-mapping experience as depicted on film because I have a similarly uh, active imagination when it comes to organising information. This was particularly useful when working with vast government clients who had tons of information to distribute online; left alone in a conference room with a stack of notecards, I could break it down their information and lay it out in a flow of information architecture that was intuitive to the eventual site visitors because it was intuitive to me, even if wasn’t the way the organisation itself visualised or organised it’s own data. Mapping it mentally took no time at all; it was the writing out and physically arranging the notecards bit that could take hours.

In my little schizophrenic way, I have a handy knack for seeing, visually, how information should flow, to whom and from where, where it should enter and where it should leave.

It occurred to me this morning that this is there’s a kind of related intelligence businesses need when they enter social spaces like MySpace or Facebook - but rarely seem to have. The problem is that a lot of marketing people catch on to the latests buzz, like “everyone is on Facebook” and simply follow the herd. They turn up, create an account for their brand, and have no clearcut strategy on what they’re going to do there. I assumed, for example, that Ben & Jerry’s - an extremely personal brand ripe for Facebook - would have a storming Facebook strategy and a massive Facebook entourage. When I went to add them as a Friend, it was clear they had no strategy at all and, accordingly, 82 followers.

Needless to say, I didn’t add them as a Friend.

Contrast this with Greenpeace USA, which is working Facebook like a hooker on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. They get that people come to Facebook to interact with their friends, and that to have friends on Facebook, they need to give people something to interact with or something to do. In their case, they’re providing lots of video to watch and photos to share, plus posting on their own message wall. They are also participating in a viral giving campaign, and while they’re not raising a ton of cash, I’m pretty sure this campaign will be “shared” heavily on Facebook, effectively working as a native viral to increase the numbers of their 1,000+ friends.

The thing is, a strategy for Ben & Jerry’s on Facebook wouldn’t have been hard to formulate if they’d actually looked at how information flows inside that space. They didn’t, or if they did, they failed to understand what they were looking at and made some critical errors right off the bat.

• I love Ben and I love Jerry; they are my friends and I have consumer allegiance to them as personal icons of a brand and product I love. So where are the photos from the company’s history? Where are Ben and Jerry? Come to think of it, where is the ice cream?
• Their account is called Ben & Jerry’s Prudential. Prudential is an insurance company. I do not want to be Facebook friends with an insurance company, thank you very much. Thank God they didn’t call it Ben & Jerry’s Prudential Unilever…
• Their profile’s Information section is straight out of their annual report. It is totally corporate and utterly impersonal; it is the opposite of what Facebook is about. It fails on the platform.
• The only part I can relate to at all is the statement that “Ben & Jerry’s is founded on, and dedicated to, a sustainable corporate concept of linked prosperity.” OK so where are the eco news headlines, where is the sustainability campaign I can get behind?

With a brand like Ben & Jerry’s, you could have amazing viral reach on Facebook. A couple of grand invested in developing an app that lets people give each other free Ben & Jerry’s scoops or build each other ice cream cones would find a home on my Facebook page. They could help undo some of the brand perception damage from being associated with Unilever by creating a fantastic sustainability campaign on Facebook. They could do all kinds of positive things for their brand if they had half a clue about the space they’ve entered.

But they don’t. Ben & Jerry’s is lame. And they have no friends.

Dear LuckyOliver:

I’m very excited about 2008. I know our relationship is new, but we’re going to have a great time this year, I can already tell. I am really glad to have found you, especially since my bastard of an ex-boyfriend, iStock, has raised prices for the new year. (The cycle of abuse just never ends over there, I’m telling you.) I am so done with that, and so ready for a new gig with you.

Before we get too deeply involved however, we need to talk. Undoubtedly you are gorgeous and funny and I really dig you, but there are some issues that make me concerned about our longterm prospects. Normally I charge by the hour for what I’m happy to do for you for free, so I hope you’ll recognise how invested I am in our relationship and listen to what I have to say with an open mind.

For a start, I am concerned that your keyword morals are rather loose. I want to let you know that clean keywords are totally sexy and really put me in the mood to buy from you. In fact, polluted keywords are the single most frustrating barrier for a buyer searching for images. Clean keywords are potentially your greatest market differentiator, and now that you have a competitively large pool of images, potentially one of your greatest strength. For example, I found today’s black and white header image using the keyword letter. It is gorgeous. It is, however, clearly neither brown nor retro. Those keywords do not belong in the tags for that image.

In the same vein, I would also beg you to reserve the words isolated and object to images that are, in fact, isolated objects. This is a routine search most designers run 20,000 times a year (each), and your results are becoming worryingly muddy. This sunflower for example is beautifully isolated. These roses, while also beautiful, are in no way isolated but still come up in the search results.

The word object is of course more debatable, but in practical terms, everything on the planet is an object. If every image at Lucky Oliver is tagged as object, a critical search becomes meaningless. You and I both know that when designers use this term in a search, we are looking for isolated objects. This is a daily frustration in our relationship, and something I’d like you to work on. I’d be happy to help by flagging incorrect keywords, by the way, but you don’t let me do that.

Which brings me to my next point: sometimes you don’t seem to treat me with very much respect. As a buyer I’m not empowered to do very much in our relationship. When you and I go out on dates, I pay for the cinema tickets, the popcorn and the sodas, and yet you don’t allow me to give any feedback on the stuff I’m purchasing. I’m a buyer. Your artists are uploading stuff for me, not you. I can provide valuable information (honest!) that will help your photographers and illustrators learn more about the market - and ultimately get me better images and both of you more money. Get out of the way already.

Speaking of getting out of the way, I have one major criticism of you, and I really urge you to spend some time thinking about changing your behaviour around this issue. When I purchase an image and go to my Downloads History page, it takes me way too many awkward clicks to get back to the portfolio of a particular image’s creator. We could make this far less painful for both of us:

It probably doesn’t seem that important to you. Like the toilet seat issue, it’s a small thing, and just not something that bothers you. But I fantasize every day about breaking up with you over this. It is that frustrating to me. Just make the photographer’s name link to his or her portfolio so I can easily find and buy more of his or her stuff. I don’t care if you don’t understand why it’s important: just do it. For me, and for our relationship. Thank you.

Finally, we need to talk about your communication skills. It’s cool that you’re blogging. Except you’re doing it all wrong. I suspect you have no clearly thought out blog strategy, but if you do - and I’m just going to be honest here, because we’re both adults - it sucks. You’re not addressing your whole audience, you’re not leveraging your natural assets, you’re not telling a story, and you’re not participating in the larger conversation the blogsphere was made for. For all your strengths, you are really failing in this one arena. Which I find sad - not because I’m a blog purist, but because it could work so much better for your company, your artists and your potential customers if you learned to do it better.

I love you, LuckyOliver, and I really do want to see you succeed, so if you want someone to talk to about this, please call me. We’ll go out for coffee or something and try to work it out.

Yours,
Sabrina