There is a growing trend on the web to launch sites with fewer features and instead build and enhance them over time. There are several advantages to this approach. It takes a tremendous burden off the launch, but more importantly it allows you to observe how real users interact with your site. The wealth of information your site traffic generates can give you tremendous insight into how well you are serving the needs of your users and can identify the strongest opportunities for improvement. This helps you make informed decisions based on usage trends and patterns, rather than relying exclusively on the instincts of your designers, strategists, and IA team.

An additional—and often overlooked—advantage to this iterative approach is that it can also increase the ‘shelf-life’ of your existing website. A website is a huge marketing expenditure, and this approach maximizes how long it remains useful to your users and your organization. Several of the world’s leading web brands such as eBay and Amazon.com faithfully adhere to this principle. Instead of periodically overhauling the entire look and feel of their sites, these organizations constantly test, evaluate, and refine every aspect of their site. The changes are often transparent to end users—minor revisions to forms, improvements in search functionality—but the subtlety keep users oriented within the interface, while constantly improving the effectiveness and intuitiveness of the existing site.

Does this approach mean that an initial site launch does not matter? Absolutely not. A site launch is an important milestone, and is usually the culmination of a considerable level of time and energy. But it is not a stopping point. Take the Rock Creek site for example. We had planned a much more robust site both in terms of content and functionality when we relaunched back in April. But real world client deadlines forced us to do one of two things—postpone our launch, or scale back considerably from our original vision. We chose the latter. Although we are constantly integrating new improvements—some big, some small—the site metrics now help us to prioritize and focus our efforts. The truth is, had we waited until the site was perfect before we decided to launch, we would likely still be waiting.

So how do you determine which elements of your site must be completed prior to launch, and which can be integrated over time? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question. There are many factors that go into this decision, and every situation is different. A good rule of thumb to remember is that the needs of your users have to drive your entire web strategy, and all subsequent decisions must be filtered through their perspective. User expectations have grown exponentially and will continue to do so. If the features in question will make your site more useful, informative, or engaging to your users, every effort should be made to incorporate them as early as possible. The bells and whistles can always be added in later stages, but there is no tool—Flash or otherwise—that will restore the lost confidence of your users.

Count the Herd

The first step is to discover just how much content you have. In doing a content inventory, you not only discover just how big your “herd” is, but you also tend to discover all sorts of forgotten content you didn’t even know you had.

Get Directions

Now that you know how big the herd is, how will you get it into the CMS? The answer is a simple one: create a plan that categorizes the content as essential, stale, or missing. Having content priorities will help you focus your resources on moving the migration forward in bite-sized waves without getting overwhelmed.

Cull the Herd

Next, you need to consider what shape the content should be in when it gets to its new home. Do you need to clean it up and make it more usable? Implementing a new CMS requires you to take an honest look at your content and consider new standards.

Know Your Barns

Make sure to designate where old content will go on the new site. Some content will be an easy one-to-one mapping, while other content will not match up cleanly, if at all. This is where some hard decisions have to be made. The end result should be a complete guide that shows where all of your content goes.

Take Ownership of the Herd

Make sure all migrating content has an owner. By getting in-house editors to make decisions about priorities and locations, you delegate the responsibility to those who care the most about it. After all, these ranch hands will become essential to keeping the herd alive and well long after the migration is completed.

Get Along, Little Doggies

Now it’s time to migrate! You should begin by moving your content in small, prioritized waves. This method gives you the flexibility to quickly clean the content as you go and easily adapt to your new production processes. Unfortunately, the only true way to migrate content is to get your hands dirty with cut-and-paste. But since you’ll be cleaning your content as you go, manual migration is the best way to accurately get your website up and running correctly.

Maintaining the New Ranch

Once all your content is at home within the new fence line, the final step is to find a content manager who will shepherd the herd, enforce participation and timely contributions, and keep your content from wandering off again.

Over the past few years, business and association website owners have started to understand that the strict confines of a static website make managing thousands of pages of content nearly impossible. Most of these Internet pioneers all have similar problems: important content gets lost in the herd, sites are populated with content that should have been put out to pasture months (or years) ago, and their site has become harder to find among all the newer ones. It’s at this point that these Internet ranchers realize that it won’t be long before either their customers leave them or their content stampedes them. Either way, the end results will be the same—a confused online audience and a site ranked low on Google.

However, before all hope is lost, a salesman rides into town wielding the solution to every Internet rancher’s problem: a newfangled online solution called the content management system (CMS)! With buzzwords like “Web 2.0” and “dynamically driven,” it promises to put content in order, make everything easy to find, and allow for endless future expansion. Internet ranchers line up by the dozens to get their hands on their own CMS, expecting to see instant results after they apply it to their virtual acreage. Within weeks, the new fencing is up, the database barn is built, and the new paint on the ranch is dry. But when it comes to putting their content into new boundaries, the Internet ranchers quickly discover that not only does the cattle not fit, but they’re also not even sure what gate to start uploading it into.

With all the content still stuffed inside the old fence line and no clear way to move into the new CMS, the Internet rancher is now stuck with a whole new problem—how to migrate all that content into the new CMS and make it fit. This often-overlooked yet critical part of the CMS process is no small task. Usually it’s not until the new site is built and ready to go live that most organizations come to the sobering realization that their content (which has probably grown even more since starting the project) is far from ready to be added. How unfortunate that the main thing that brings customers and prospects to their Internet ranch—the content—is the one thing that’s forgotten during most website upgrades.

But have no fear, fellow Internet ranchers; there is a solution to your CMS woes. It’s called the Great Content Migration Drive! And it will save your ranch before your herd stampedes!

(To be continued…)

What do I mean by reading between the lines? I start with checking for errors and misspellings in the resume and cover letter. Accuracy and consistency are a big part of the Rock Creek brand—as well as the brands of our clients—so it’s important that the candidate has an eye for detail. Is the cover letter brief, succinct, engaging? We need someone who can present ideas in concise, compelling prose. Does the candidate’s experience match the criteria in the job posting? While we’re big-picture thinkers who don’t always go with conventional solutions, our clients expect us to adhere to their requirements and follow their instructions.

These small errors and oversights can make or break whether a candidate gets to the next step in the hiring process. That’s why your resume and cover letter represent more than just a chronology of your experience. They give hiring managers insight into your personal brand. What matters to you? What do you stand for? Do your values match those of the potential employer? Most importantly, what makes you different, and therefore better, than another candidate? As communications professionals, these are questions that we help our clients answer when developing their organizations’ most powerful assets—their brands. Likewise, a new employee is an investment in our brand. We want to make sure we’ve done our due diligence to ensure a good fit with the internal culture and avoid costly mistakes.

Which brings me to another source that hiring managers are using more and more to vet candidates: Google. In the absence of a direct referral from a trusted source, Googling a candidate’s name offers yet another way for hiring managers to check out potential new hires. Some candidates may argue that MySpace and Facebook pages are private, but the fact of the matter is, if you don’t make them private, anyone can access them. So if you’re looking for a job, make sure that your MySpace and Facebook pages, as well as your Flickr account, blog posts, and online articles, position you in the best light. Do you really want a hiring manager to pass on you because of an embarrassing picture from your college graduation party?

Bottom line: if you’re looking for a job in this tough employment market (news flash: according to the Dept. of Labor, jobless claims hit a record high of 6% in August), put some thought into Brand You before sending out your resume. Make sure that every communication you put out about yourself accurately portrays who you are—or want to be.

I can relate to their excitement and optimism for new ways to reach customers and offer solutions to their needs and wants. Today we’re just realizing the power of Web 2.0 and new media conversations, reversing the mass communication mantra that one-to-many is the best way to deliver a message. Marketing is now about delivering value at the precise moment it is needed, not about carpet-bombing the market 365 days a year with meaningless noise.

But despite Mad Men’s raw entertainment value, and insightful perspective on the industry during the 1950s and 1960s, there are still a few similarities between the fictitious agency of Sterling-Cooper and the modern-day marketing and design firms.

Client service

Good clients are hard to find—anyone in the industry will tell you that. But in a recent season two episode, Sterling-Cooper decides to dismiss a current client to try to win business from the client’s much larger competitor. Taking a risk for a greater opportunity? Sure, who can fault them for that! Sometimes we have to put current business on the line to grow the agency in a new direction—and sometimes we even need to “divorce” clients that erode our revenue. But I shared Sterling-Cooper creative director Don Draper’s inner pain when he was told to “break up” with this good client, and his smugness when Sterling-Cooper lost the pitch and was left without the former client or the prospective one. Decisions about the clients we pursue are made on a case-by-case basis, but relationships remain a driving force behind many decisions in advertising today.

Technology

At Sterling-Cooper, it was a very busy day when the new photocopier arrived. It was also a big deal where this behemoth technological innovation would be situated! The gadget was the wave of the future, streamlining efficiency. Today, technology continues to revolutionize how the advertising industry operates. Once e-mail came on the scene, it was only a short time until the Blackberry took “working around the clock” to a whole new level. And here at Rock Creek, we’ve gone to great lengths (by tearing down a wall) for a state-of-the art digital printer, one of only 40 in the world, that will help us respond more efficiently to our clients’ needs.

Socializing

Long gone are the days of smoking while you work or pouring a colleague a whiskey before a 9 a.m. meeting. And gone are the days of aggressive and pervasive sexual discrimination of women in the workplace. Mad Men depicts an office environment where gender clearly distinguishes one’s role in the corporate structure: with a few exceptions, women are secretaries and assistants; men are sales people, creative contributors, leaders, and decision makers.

The show capitalizes on the mystique and glamour that has surrounded the advertising industry for decades. Just as it was back in Sterling-Cooper’s hey-day, advertising is still exciting and fun. It’s a thrill to work with clients, contribute to creative teams that produce stunning works of art, and create campaigns that change the way consumers see the world. The fantastic mix of business-minded professionals and talented artists and thinkers was—and still is—quite alluring to those seeking a career where the only constant is change.

Take the following example: Pergo is the name of a Swedish flooring company. They are the best selling brand manufacturer of laminate flooring. A commercial real estate company is building a new apartment complex and is looking for flooring materials. A national flooring company that targets commercial real estate companies wants to be the source of the flooring materials. For the flooring company, it’s important to use language in its marketing materials—including online press releases and local search engine marketing efforts—that’s relevant to the type of flooring appropriate for a commercial real estate company.

Using both free and paid keyword research tools may tell you that “bamboo wood flooring” is more popular than “laminate hardwood floor,” but the competition for organic and paid listings is different. The former has higher advertiser competition, but lower organic competition. Add to the mix that the flooring company wants to reach the real estate company when the real estate company is ready to buy—not too early in their research. Should their materials mention Pergo, laminate flooring, or both? Should the online marketing materials also include action-oriented language such as “buy” or “install?”

Google Insights, a new Google tool release building off of the popular Google Trends tool, wants to help. Google Insights is the little brother of Google Trends, which shows keywords in comparison with each other. The result is a graph of the overall search volume, but the real data is in the regional and language data below the graph. And if you’re looking for recent trends, the data can be sorted based on a date range as small as the last 30 days.

Google Trends indicates that “laminate flooring” is a more popular search phrase than “Pergo,” but only in the United States and UK. Virtually anywhere else, and in almost any other language, “Pergo” is more popular. That certainly aids your strategic marketing messages, but does not help you find other high-value search phrases or discover search trends.

The benefit of Google Insights over Google Trends as a basic tool is that it will also show you other top searches and rising searches. The top searches are consistent with your inputs, and include a relevance score that’s a measure of search terms used before and after people submit the same inputs as you. The rising searches section is a highlight of search phrases that have received a significant increase in the number of searches based on the selected time period, in the selected geographic area. And with Google Insights, you can decide not to input a keyword at all, finding top searches and rising searches in more than 25 categories instead.

In the Pergo example, “bamboo wood flooring” is the more popular search phrase, but the question remains: should we include action-oriented language such as “buy” or “install?” The answer is most likely “yes,” but with Google Insights, you can discover that in the last 12 months in the United States, “install hardwood floor” and “hardwood floor installation” are breakout search phrases, indicating a significant increase in the number of searches on those phrases, making them prime targets for a flooring company’s marketing materials, though neither phrase mentions laminate or bamboo.

Insights like this can help inform marketing strategy, but you can’t inform marketing through one tool alone, just as you wouldn’t market through just one channel or using just one form of media. Businesses should be taking note of online search trends through more than just Google Insights. To stay relevant and timely, you have to invest energy into research and development. With Google Insights, beginning your marketing copy and direction is made easier, but keep in mind that Google Insights is a neat tool for beginning your marketing campaign; it will never rival the benefits of a paid keyword research tool or service that takes you from start to successful finish.

Some of the artists you’ll see in the FLIK exhibit are part of the DC Poster Collective, a group of designers and graphic artists who come together to produce poster exhibitions and events. I’ve been a part of the group for several years now; I started with posters that were showcased at Artomatic, which is a month-long multimedia arts event that brings together work from artists, musicians, and performers.

Artomatic is where I first met Henrik Sundqvist, a fellow graphic designer who heads both the DC Poster Collective and Art Outlet and who helped get me involved in the graphic design/print end of Artomatic. Rock Creek has actually printed the designers’ posters for a few of these poster-showing events.

My poster for the FLIK exhibit is designed to inspire people to pick up a paintbrush, pen, pencil, or whatever medium it may be that moves you to become more involved in a fun, hands-on, old school experience, rather than a computer-generated design. Ironically, my poster design, although hand drawn in its concept stages, was brought to completion on a computer.

You can see all the posters at Art Outlet. One of my favorites was done by my good friend Paul Campanella. His poster depicts the classic Mona Lisa made up entirely of large pixels in the year 2008 and showcases a bold theme: technology ruining a painting.

In their own way, each poster is a message to turn off your computer screen and go to a museum or gallery and interact with art in person, with other people. See art how it’s meant to be seen.

The FLIK Interactive Exhibition will be showcased at Art Whino Gallery until August 29. To learn more about the exhibit, visit CultureCapital.com

Art Whino Gallery is located at the National Harbor (173 Waterfront Street, National Harbor, MD 20745).

However, from the perspective of 30 years in marketing and communications, I think LinkedIn could be far better. Sometimes, I wonder if LinkedIn really even understands social networking. Why should they tell me who I can and can’t invite into MY network? If I only invited people I “know well,” my network would essentially be limited to a 50-mile circle around DC and the people I’ve physically met. That’s ridiculous!

The very reason I come to LinkedIn is to meet new people with shared interests, not to keep saying “hello again” to people I already know. But in order to send a request for someone to join my network, I have to first select an option from a list. Is the person a colleague? A business partner? A former classmate? Friend? Other? (In which case I better know his e-mail address, or I can’t send him a request.) And if I can’t prove that I know the person, then I have to choose the last option in the list: “I don’t know this person.” Which then results in an e-mail saying “your invitation was not sent.”

Even worse, when someone gets an invitation from me, they can choose to accept it, archive it, or click on a button that says they don’t know me. No kidding! Why do you think I want to meet you? Once some numbat clicks on the “don’t know” button, as a form of punishment, LinkedIn disables my ability to invite others into my network. Please, If you don’t want to connect with me, just choose “archive!”

Also, I find it insane that some people come to LinkedIn to network, and then hide their contacts. If they don’t want to network, why are they there? And why does LinkedIn allow them to do this?

I realize that LinkedIn has a profit model to protect, but by throwing heavy crude oil on the entire social networking potential of their otherwise brilliant platform, they may be leaving themselves vulnerable to competitors that actually get social networking. Make money on banner ads, job listings, InMails and premium accounts and please let me grow MY network in the ways that I choose.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Way back in 1986 when Margaret and I started the business, our goal was to help clients do a better job of telling their stories by making the most of the technological advances that were available—cutting-edge technology like PageMaker 1.0 and a Mac Plus with a whopping nine-inch screen and no hard drive. Nowadays, we use a high-speed Internet connection, a little thing called the Social Web and our four-pound Mac laptops to help us get the job done. Our focus remains the same—we are still helping clients tell their stories—but as the technology has evolved, so has Rock Creek.

Other things have stayed the same, while still evolving. Twenty-two years ago, our first client was a guy named Richard Levick. Today, Richard’s company Levick Strategic Communications is still one of our biggest clients and our closest strategic partner. We’ve also expanded our team, our client list, and the scope of services we offer. And starting today, we’ve added our voice to the increasingly important (and always interesting) global blogosphere.

So please join us as we continue our journey. We’ll be sharing our opinions, and we hope you’ll use the blog’s comment function to share yours. Tell us what you think—whether we’re right on, dead wrong, or somewhere in between. And thanks for tuning in!