Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

Do curators just create more “noise”?
Fair question. I often struggle with this when I go into curate mode. My inhibiting thought is usually, “Other people have probably already encountered this information. Why add more noise?” But the value isn’t in any single piece of content. The value is in you. Whether you’re an individual or a company, you hopefully have garnered some respect from the people you interact with online, and when you take a moment to highlight a piece of content, that means something.

Curation creates value. This is the “cool” factor. Fortunately, the Internet doesn’t care if you’re cool. It cares that you have taste. That you can separate the wheat from the chaff. That you’re familiar with the subject matter you’re sharing. That you intuitively know what will be helpful or valuable. That is curation.

How can you use curation as an effective marketing tool?
Curation is a useful marketing tool. Most companies have a blog, and one easy way to start curating content is to create a roundup blog post. At the end of each week, write a blog post that links to interesting content related to your industry or business. This demonstrates that you’re connected to what is happening in your industry and that you’re trying to be helpful by highlighting good content.

You can also use microblogging services, like Twitter, to the same effect. You could post one tweet a day that includes a link to interesting content. For example, if you develop apps for mobile phones, you could tweet about a recent mobile usage report. You didn’t produce the report, but you’re validating it by highlighting it.

There are some new web services that use curation as the heart of their business. Pinterest is one service that I’ve been hearing good things about. It’s used like an old corkboard where you can “pin” things you find interesting to a virtual pinboard. Companies can use this service to highlight their own or industry content. Nordstrom uses it to show off its latest collections.

Try it!
You’re probably already retweeting content or sharing interesting links on your Facebook page. So after reading this, try to view social media through the lens of curation. Keep track of what you like and write a roundup blog post. Think about how you can use curation to share valuable content with your customers. Think about how it positions you as a thought leader.

Do you have any specific curation techniques that you employ? If you want to continue the conversation, tweet me.

This is Anika Lehde, Co-Owner, and Jane Shepherd, Account Director for our EMEA office, on the train from London to Reading after having met with a contact at Canary Wharf. Commuting to and from meetings is such a great time to get to know your colleagues. What hidden places do you find time to keep up work relationships?

Social Media

4 Ways to Make Your Professional Online Community More Fun—An interesting take on trying to make online interactions just a little more exciting.

Chunkable Storytelling—Content is changing. People need concise chunks of information. This quick blog post talks about dividing a long-format TV show into smaller segments for the web.

Events

MarketMix 2012—Registration for this Seattle marketing conference just opened up. I’m sure there will be Projectline employees getting their learn on at this year’s event.

Customer Engagement

Role of video in tech purchasing—While this looks at consumer technology, I think there is still some good information here that can be applied to B2B marketing with video.

Customer Case Studies: Are We Just Being Lazy?—Have you ever taken the easy road? It might be easier, but it isn’t always better. This blog post looks at the risk of taking short cuts with case studies.

Projectline Posts

Writing Case Studies: The Hard Part—Molly Dee Anderson looks at some things you can do to make writing case studies just a little be easier.

MLK Day of Service: A Brief Retrospective—Giving back to our community is important to us at Projectline. Read this to learn more about how Projectliners spent MLK Day.

Bedazzle this Email, Please—Kim Johnson shares some of her tips on improving design for marketing collateral.
]]> http://www.projectlineinc.com/2012/01/weekly-roundup-12712/feed/ 0 http://www.projectlineinc.com/2012/01/bedazzle-this-email-please-three-things-to-think-about-when-working-with-designers/ http://www.projectlineinc.com/2012/01/bedazzle-this-email-please-three-things-to-think-about-when-working-with-designers/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:48:44 +0000 Kim Johnson http://www.projectlineinc.com/?p=7042 Have you ever asked a graphic designer to bedazzle an email template? I have (jokingly, of course). The designer’s response was several seconds of silence followed by, “You’re kidding, right?”

It’s good to use colorful language when communicating with our creative genius friends. It can definitely add levity to a stressful project. More importantly, through good communication, you and the designer can collaborate to create something that makes you both proud, delights your client, and secures a relatively stress-free existence for yourself as a project manager. As Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite says, “All of your wildest dreams will come true.”

I’m a visual person, so design is something I enjoy. You could call me a graphic designer in training, so I can empathize with those folks learning the ropes. When providing creative direction and evaluating creative work, I try to keep it simple. I break a long checklist down to three essentials:

1. Concept: What does it mean? What message should the visual convey?

Take the design in as your intended audience would. What story is being told with the visuals? This may be a stretch for simpler deliverables like an email template, but there can be a story in the most basic of design projects. Take a look at the imagery, photos, and other design elements. What does the design say to you about the product, company, or program it represents?

2. Layout: Where does your eye go? What do you notice first, second, and third?

The goal of good design is to communicate a message. Simpler is definitely better, and you want to avoid burying your key message in artistic clutter. Ultimately, it comes down to priority. Identify the hierarchy of elements/messages and ensure that this hierarchy comes through in the layout. You can check this by closing your eyes for 10 seconds and then looking at the piece. Where do your eyes go first, second, third? That’s the hierarchy. Is that the order in which you want your audience to view those items? If not, some tweaks are in order.

3. Emotion: What is the attitude or mood of the piece? Is it appropriate for the message?

How does it make you feel? Sounds like a session with a psychiatrist, but it’s an important question to ask. When giving feedback on creative work, I try to be clear and describe edits in a way that plays upon the senses. Rather than saying “I want more color” or “Let’s add some yellow to that,” you should describe the emotion you want to evoke. For example, you can say that you want a design to be “brighter, more cheerful, and lighthearted.” Then let the designer do her thing to represent that in the work. Though we all have a different mental image of bright, cheerful, or lighthearted, you are getting at the true essence of the design in an attempt to clearly define and express the emotion behind it.

A couple of days after finishing our project, that same designer I kidded with about glitter and a glue gun showed me a very funny video called Make My Logo Bigger. We both had a good laugh. I guess that video can serve as a lesson of what NOT to do when working with designers.

Good communication is definitely a two-way street. I’m waiting for a video from the project manager’s perspective to be released. I wonder what it would be called. “We Need More White Space,” perhaps?

Forty-three Projectliners volunteered through United Way of King County to work on three different projects around the Puget Sound. We spent the day painting walls, hanging blinds and cleaning trash cans at the Center for Human Services. We marched through snowy streets and yelled until our voices were gone as volunteer coordinators at the 30th Annual MLK Rally and March. Bitter weather kept our team from making their way up to the NOAH Animal Shelter in Stanwood, but we’re rescheduling in order to fulfill our commitment to the organization and spend a little quality time with some very cute animals.

We weren’t alone in our efforts. In total, volunteers throughout the Seattle area took on 85 projects logged 7,000 hours of service time, and donated about $152,000 worth of labor. To be a part of something so large felt powerful. And in volunteering, we strengthened our connections with one another, as well as with our community. Join us on Martin Luther King Day next year, or better yet, join us every month as we volunteer with various organizations.

For more information about Projectline’s volunteer efforts, check out this blog entry by company co-founder Anika Lehde or this one by Volunteer Coordinator Carole Magouryk.

And, to volunteer with Projectline at future events, join our Facebook Group to receive the invites or follow us on Twitter@projectline.

Which is to say: writing case studies is hard. Of course, it gets easier because case studies follow a strict editorial form. Once you’re practiced with it, the process can go pretty smoothly. If you want to write case studies, here are a few of my best tips to help you get started.

1. Rely on your advanced training. You have to be a writer to do this job. If you lack knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and composition, you will fail to meet standards of excellence and meaning—which should be the goals of effective case study writing.

2. Conduct a useful customer interview. The majority of your case study will be based on the customer interview. See Ten Tips for Interviewing Customers for ideas about how to effectively get a narrative from the customer. The interview transcript will serve as the foundation for your writing efforts.

3. Look for a lead. Some great case studies have journalistic leads that articulate the news value of the story and set up a narrative. The majority of case studies, however, start with a paragraph that features basic information describing the customer and its services. If you can weave a compelling lead into the piece, you have an opportunity to grab the reader’s interest.

4. Keep writing. Writing a case study takes quite a bit of time, so you need a pretty good attention span. I spend hours writing a draft, restructuring sentences and paragraphs, and seeking the best flow for the message. To get started, remember that the character (the customer or the person quoted in the story) has a problem—known as an “inciting incident” in fiction circles—and that’s the basis of your story. Start with the customer’s challenge and build from there.

5. Break it down. Here’s a trick. As you’re reading through the customer interview transcript, take each bit of relevant information and compose a sentence or two. Place those sentences in the right section of the case study—the challenge, the implementation, or the results section. If the customer provided compelling quotes, compose those quotes and add them to the appropriate sections. The idea here is to coordinate a structure before you have finessed the content. After you develop rough sentences in the right places, you can go back and rewrite concepts, reconstruct paragraphs, and create a strong narrative.

6. Find the right verb. In my work, I often write about technology and sometimes I get impatient because I seem to use the same verbs again and again. Some typical technology verbs include: implement, deploy, migrate, use, employ, take advantage of, facilitate, enable, need, want, adopt, and so on. Verbs are the heart of language. You should take verbs very seriously (but with a light touch) and use a variety of them. Find just the right verb—precise and accurate—to make your point in composition.

7. Use positive constructions as much as possible. If you focus on positive language constructions in your writing, you will get a more robust result. For example, instead of writing, “Company XYZ didn’t have a desktop infrastructure,” you should write, “Company XYZ needed a desktop infrastructure.” This falls in line with the guidelines that Hemingway learned working as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

8. Avoid marketing speak. Hemingway was known for his lean, hard, athletic prose. Strive for the same elements in case study writing. Jargon and overblown language is inappropriate. Although case studies are, in essence, a component of marketing collateral, the job of a case study—which often finds its way into the hands of people deciding whether or not to buy a product or service—is to be sober and credible. Its effectiveness is in proving the utility of a certain solution and helping ensure a sale. Avoid marketing speak and—at all costs—exclamation points. (That should pretty much go without saying.) People instinctively trust a story, so tell the story and keep it real.

9. Know when it’s over. One key to storytelling is to know when your tale is finished. Keep your customer evidence concise, clear, and to the point. Hemingway’s old man knew that it was over when the sharks had eaten the crumbs of his prized-catch marlin. The most important thing is that you have described the change that the company has realized. The results section of a case study is fairly formulaic—you only need to articulate the solution’s benefits under relevant subheadings and include substantiating quotes. The results section will include some of your strongest pull quotes. As with every other section, trim your copy as much as possible to describe only the relevant details, and nothing more.

10. Work it. Readers are paying attention to your nonfiction customer evidence story because they have to make decisions about what solutions to adopt at their company. Still, a case study should have elements of storytelling, including regular instances of surprise and delight. A case study should feature at least one “moment of insight”—that’s another fiction writing metaphor for when a character has an “aha” moment. In case studies, it usually involves the character discovering how well a solution has solved a company’s business problems. For example, let your reader know when the subject of the case study realized that a cloud-based business model was going to change the competitive landscape forever. And remember, sometimes it’s the reader who has the moment of insight. You just have to lead him or her to it.

So you may have heard that it snowed a bit near our HQ in the Seattle/Bellevue area. Here is proof from our 10:42 project covering 4 days of most everyone working from home. Despite being productive from home, we are all ready for Spring. Bring on the blossoms!

2012 Summit on Customer Engagement—Bill Lee talked about adding a new customer panel for this event. Projectline will be at the event and this year is shaping up to be fantastic.

Forrester’s Take on Google’s Search—Google placed more emphasis on their social network, Google+, to help with search results. Forrester wrote a blog post that looks at the impact on marketers.

Improve Work Performance—A Projectliner shared her keen insights on this topic after reading Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done.

Got Writer’s Block?—So much of marketing is about content. If you’re having trouble with writer’s block, check out this quick blog post.

Every year, the customer engagement community gathers in Northern California for a two-day conference and workshop, where companies like Salesforce.com, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Adobe, and Riverbed Technology share best practices for building and strengthening customer reference programs. Whether you’re starting a customer community or have a mature program with thousands of customers, this is the event for you. In addition, you’ll get to meet and mingle with leaders in the industry from around the world! This year, some of the presenters include:

• Rhett Livengood, Director, WW B2B Customer Engagement, Intel Corporation
• Scott Olrich, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Responsys
• Sean O’Driscoll, Co-Founder, CEO, and Ant Advocate, Ant’s Eye View
• Erica Kuhl, Community and Social Media Manager, Salesforce.com
• Emilie Kopp, Customer Advocacy Program Manager, National Instruments

Oh, and possibly me: Karin Zabel, Senior Manager of Customer Programs at Projectline!

Dates: February 28 and 29, 2012

Location: Marriott San Mateo, San Mateo, CA

Cost: $1395 (or save $200 with Early Bird Registration, open through 1/31/12)

For more information, visit: www.customerreferenceforum.com

A couple of months ago, while browsing the airport bookstore, I came across Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Like most people, I often yearn for more hours in the day, so the title alone immediately pulled me to select it for my long flight. By leveraging his engaging and thought-provoking talent for storytelling (as exhibited regularly in his HBR blog posts), Bregman provides a variety of tools, tips, and techniques intended to help us enhance our productivity and maximize our potential.

Reading this book is like having a personal and professional life coach standing right beside you—providing success tips, keeping you focused, and cheering you on along the way. Here are four of my favorite tips from his book that address how we can achieve our goals and use our time more efficiently:

To accomplish the right things, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus. There is an endless supply of information at the touch of our smartphones and computers. The world is moving very fast and will only continue to move faster. How do you keep up with the pace of the action around us? If you are like most of us, you stay awake until 4:00am responding to the 400 email messages in your inbox. “Trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate,” Bregman describes. Arguably, there hasn’t been a time when it has been more important to choose how to spend your time wisely. For instance, consider declining a meeting if it isn’t aligned with your goals and focus. The other tip Bregman suggests is to create an ignore list. We have to-do lists, but how many of us take the time to decide what should be ignored?

Limit your focus to five areas that will make the most difference in your life. Bregman describes his usual experience with buffets: “A few hours later, I was completely stuffed and couldn’t possibly have fit another thing in me.” Since there are so many choices in life, the secret to surviving is to be strategic about how to spend your time. In his instructions, he directs readers to “focus your year on the five areas that will make the most difference in your life. One way to medicate is to decrease your scope and focus on five areas that you deem the most vital.” What are your five?

Plan ahead so that you can fly through your days, successfully maneuvering and moving toward your intended destination. There are times when we have huge obstacles in our way. They may seem daunting, even insurmountable. Bregman describes a time when he was mountain biking and was attempting to ride over a large rock. His approach to riding over this large obstacle was to focus on the hill itself. After many attempts, he kept hitting the launch and falling off his bike. Then finally, “I decided to focus ahead of me—10 feet in front of where I was at any point of time,” Bregman says. He was able to make it over the rock by planning ahead. What could you accomplish if you were to determine your goals, plan the route, and then follow through?

Spend a few minutes at the end of each day thinking about what you learned and with whom you should connect. These minutes are key to making tomorrow even better than today. The “18 Minutes” in the title refers to Bregman’s suggestion of planning out your day, analyzing throughout, and wrapping up with a review of that day’s events. We often are so entrenched in our world and what we need to get done that we don’t always pay attention to our own development—what are we learning, what is working for us. Bregman suggests taking a few minutes for self-analysis before you leave the office. How valuable could it be to pull out your calendar and compare what you set out to accomplish with what was actually produced?

Ask yourself:
1. How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
2. What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do differently or the same tomorrow?
3. With whom did I interact? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question of? Share feedback with?

By tweaking a few of our actions, routines, and focus points, we can accomplish more than we ever imagined. The author Ted W. Engstrom said it well: “Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.”

I’ve just begun implementing some of Bregman’s techniques, such as focusing on five areas that will make the biggest difference in my life, and I’ve already seen positive results! So, after reading Bregman’s excellent tips, how will you define your focus, remove distractions, and conquer your goals?