July 2006 Archives

Not just for law firms, knowing your own brand is very important. Tom Kane points to quick 10 quesiton corporate brand test for you and your employees. Everyone should take a test like this as everyone in your firm is a corporate advocate or salesperson at some level.

Via Legal Marketing Blog via Tom Collins More Partner Income Blog

To me, your corporate brand is about as important as your product or service. And that has to be distinctly represented on your Web site as well. So if you are in the middle of writing or re-writing your corporate brand policy make sure you incorporate any brand rules to be applied to your Web site as well.

Six Apart this last week announced the release of their latest version of Movabletype. This, for one reason or another, has threw the core users of MT in a tizzy becuase of how 6A made the announcement--via a press release not a blog post (which has since happened). This has sent many MT advocates into a roar about how 6A has forgotten their roots and who put them on the map. The fact is that this latest release had an intended purpose--access and serve a new vertical market. Of course they released it with features that their core users would (*hopefully*) want, and I believe they have. None the less, bloggers around the globe are upset.

I'm on the 6AProNet list and I will admit that even I was surprise when I stumbled across the new MT 3.3 announcement on the MT homepage before I saw it announced on the discussion list. Many of the developers there were seemingly upset as well about the lack of news. From what I can tell, 6A made some minor errors which turned out to be BIG PR headaches which they are now dealing with. I hope that Mena and Ben can handle these in stride and focus on how they can win back some of their audience. Though I hope they also are very clear on who they are trying to win back. What? might you ask. Take a look at what has happened over the last few years with 6A and you might see what I'm talking about.

The following are my top five reasons why your Web site will ultimately be unsucessful and be useless stagnant bits and bytes on the Internet.

5. The IS department is in charge of design and content creation/publishing.
The IS department does not know your content better than you, the content contributor. Unless you have a very specific workflow that facilitates the content creation process and how it interacts with your IS dept. for publishing, it will never work.

4. Your content is "brochure-ware", static and stale.
Have you ever heard this in your office?

"Hey Bob, let's just put our brochure up as content on our web site. It is the same marketing copy we would use anyway, so why re-invent the wheel."

This conversation should never happen. If it does, please..PLEASE say "no" and make sure your content for your web site is written for the Web (yes, there is a difference) and it is reviewed on a regular basis if not changes on a regular basis.

3. The majority of your senior managers and middle managers don't "get it" when it comes to the web.
Your management sees the Web site as a something that you "had" to do to keep up with the Jones', but never saw the value in it and will not put more resources to improving it.

2. You have decentralized content creation without standards and rules.
Can you say Silence of the Lambs? Wild, rabid kids without any supervision will fend for themselves which gives you a fractured, inconsistent mess for your visitors to wade through to find the content they are really looking for. Without explicit standards and business rules, decentralized content control and creation can become unruley and very difficult to manage globally.

1. You don't understand your audience and how they interact wit your brand and company.
Rule number 1: Know thy audience and thy will strive. If you don't know who you are providing content/services to how can you build something they will use or come to?

I recently have been coming across a nagging problem with my IBM ThinkPad that has been frustrating–not enough disk space. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this problem, and I'm sure it is not prone to just ThinkPad's. Rather, in the digital age where everything is BIG, F A T and bulky, disk space on laptops become short pretty quick. When I purchased my ThinkPad two years ago I didn't upgrade to the larger hard drive. When in the world was I going to fill up 40 GB of space, especially when I have a desktop that will hold my music, photos, etc. Funny how that thought process was short sighted. The reason I purchased a laptop was because I needed a new computer and wanted one that was portable. Hence the ThinkPad. Thinking my older Dell would survive for a few more years, and the limited disposable income that I had, I didn't upgrade to the larger hard drive. Well two years later I discovered my Dell was dying a slow agonizing death, and I was using my ThinkPad almost exclusively. That's when things started to fill up.

I got an iPod for Christmas and of course my Dell couldn't handle iTunes, so it went on the laptop...along with a ton of music. Same with the photos from my new digital camera, not compatible with my old Dell either. So between photos, music and my trigger happy right-click-save-file-to-hard-drive habit, my HD became full quickly. I merged, purged, and deleted temporary files as long as I could until I just realized I needed more space. Thus, I was on a mission.

I did all the research any person would do to find an external hard drive, but knew that I didn't want just an EXHD. I needed something more robust. Why? Well with an EXHD you need to have it connected to your laptop all the time to work best–or at least to access the files on it. Seems silly to purchase only a 5 GB EXHD that is portable when for about the same price tag you can purchase a 250 GB EXHD. The answer? A network storage drive. I already had a wireless network set up to roam with my laptop around the house. Why not connect a NEXHD to it? Problem 1: NEXHD's cost more for less space. Problem 2: They are harder to find.

I had toyed in my head with the decision to just bite the bullet and purchase an EXHD rather than a NEXHD because of accessibility to one (every store had anEXHD, but not every one had an NEXHD). The tipping point for my purchase came last weekend when I was fed up with the stupid error of "Your disk space is almost full...." I headed to Best Buy to see what I could find. At Best Buy I was trolling through all the EXHD's and saw that Western Digital was having a sale on their "Book" EXHD (it literally looks like a book that would sit on your desk). It was 340 GB and I was pretty happy with the choice (except that it came with Google Desktop Search and Picassa pre-installed for you to use...which I didn't). Then I came across the Buffalo LinkStation. My dreams came true. For $150 I was able to get a 250 GB NEXHD that could connect to my wireless network, be accessible from multiple computers, store my music, photos, files, etc. and was c|net top rated to boot.

Once I got the new LinkStation home I was up and running in less than 10 minutes from opening the box. The LinkStation connected to my network on the first try, the software it installed was minimal on the HD of my Laptop and the footprint on my desk was smaller than my wireless router. Much like a router, there is a Web interface to add additional security to the LinkStation. Getting my laptop to see the new LinkStation was as easy as mapping a network drive and only took about five clicks. If, for some reason, I end up running out of space on the LinkStation, I can piggy-back a separate EXHD via a USB cable to the LinkStation to expand the space. The LinkStation also has the ability to be a printer router as well which allows me to print from my living room instead of being connected directly to the printer in the home office.

Since I've installed the Buffalo LinkStation I have migrated all my music, photos, and files to it and cleaned up my laptop HD. I will probably use a combination of My Documents on the laptop and initiate a back-up process to do a nightly back-up to the LinkStation while I'm sleeping. I can access the LinkStation while un-docked from my home office desk and roaming around my house wirelessly. I plan on attaching my old Dell to the network soon and migrating all the documents I need off of that to the LinkStation and possibly converting it to a Linux box to play around with...if I have the time.

Get a Buffalo Technology Linkstation 250 GB Network Storage Center External Hard Drive from Amazon.com.