To Be Known, and to Be Liked online is tough enough.  To Be Trusted is the final challenge.  We are exploring three challenges of any website.  We have touched on what it means to Be Known and to Be Liked.  Here we consider Trust.

Trust comes down to two things: Character and Competence.  It builds over time.  How can a website help build the trust of clients and future customers?

Character:  How who you are is expressed by what you do.

Character is not expressed by knowing what you ought to do, what you should do, or what you intend to do.  Character is the expression of what you do.  No amount of excuses makes any difference whatsoever.

• How do you treat others?
• Do you tell the truth?
• Do you acknowledge mistakes?
• Are you modest in your accomplishments (yet genuinely accomplished)?

Your mother taught you how to project your character in person.  We need to talk about how to project character online – because character plus competence is the only way to build authentic trust.

On the web, it comes down to three things:

1. Transparency – You have nothing to hide.
2. Responsibility-taking­ – You do what you say you are going to do. 
3. Empathy – You care about the thoughts and feelings of others.

Transparency

Transparency is how organizations tell the truth. On your website just tell the world what you are about.

• Are you new in business?
• Are you a sole proprietor?
• Does your service take a little longer because you care about quality?

Tell the world.  Your customers are going to find out anyway.

In the Internet age, it is a Yelp world out there.  Yelp is a crowd-sourced business review website.  And it is not the only one.  Yelp had 61 million unique visits in the third quarter of 2011.  Bad business has no place to hide.

Think through what matters.  What do people want to know (or need to know) and then tell them in as simple and in as direct language as you can muster.  Transparency builds trust.

Responsibility-Taking

If you have made a mistake or failed to deliver, do not bury your head in the sand.  Get out in front of the Yelps and take responsibility.  The bottom line: We all make mistakes.  But we do not all take responsibility for the mistakes we make.

What if you have not made a serious mistake that demands a public confession?  Find ways to demonstrate your willingness to take responsibility.  Let the visitors on your website know that you know that you are not perfect, and that when you are not, you take responsibility for your actions.

It reflects your character.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to appreciate the feelings of others.  Do you care about your customers?  Or are you just out to make a buck?

The visitors to your website want to know.

Speak to the world in a way that shows you understand and care about the challenge of daily living.  The “human interest story” demonstrates that you take interest in the human story.

Projecting character is the first step to building trust online.  Next time, we look at how your website projects competence – the second key to building trust.

To Be Known, and to Be Liked online is tough enough.  To Be Trusted is the final challenge.

Trust comes down to two things: Character and Competence.  And it builds over time.  How can a website help build the trust of clients and future customers?

First, define character as how who you are is expressed by what you do.  This involves any number of expressions, including but not limited to:

• How do you treat others?
• Do you tell the truth?
• Do you acknowledge the contributions of others?
• Are you genuinely accomplished, yet modest in your accomplishments?

To project character on a website really does require that you (and the people you work with) possess a quality of character worth projecting.  A person who lacks that quality of character probably also lacks the courage to project it.

On the web, it comes down to three things:

1. Transparency – You have nothing to hide.
2. Responsibility-taking­ – You do what you say you are going to do. 
3. Empathy – You care about the thoughts and feelings of others.

How do you project these qualities online?

• Be Known
• Be Liked
• Be Trusted

This is the challenge of creating an online presence for your business.  In earlier posts we touched briefly on what it means to Be Known, and to Be Liked.

To Be Known, you must be intentional about building your brand.  To Be Liked, you must put emotion in your website.  This provides a way for users to connect.

The challenge that we will address in this series is to Be Trusted.

Trust comes down to two basic elements: Character and Competence.  If you are a thief, I will not trust you.  If you are a fool, I will not trust you.  The challenge on the web is to project your genuine character and competence.

The thing about character and competence – when comes to inspiring trust – is that you can fake it.

But only once.

In the blogs that follow we assume that you have the character and the competence to present something authentic and worthwhile on your website.

If you don’t, we gently invite you lurk elsewhere.

As we explore the question, “What’s a Website For?” we are considering three key elements of doing business online.

You must:

• Be Known
• Be Liked
• Be Trusted

In the last post we pointed at the role of branding in helping a business to be known.  A brand is more than an identifier.  It is everything a customer will associate with who you are.

The first step in developing your business is to be known.  But the second step follows immediately after: To be liked.

Facebook has reduced “being liked” to a click of an icon.  We mean something more.  To be liked is to be genuinely regarded.  It adds appreciation to being noticed.

Online this means touching the user of your website emotionally.  You need to make a connection.

In an earlier post we linked to one of favorite clients, Sacramento Casa.  This website wins high marks for its emotion. A user has to be a rock not be touched at some level by the websites images of happy kids.

Good design requires taste and an appropriate presentation of image and mood to set the right tone.  In other words, avoid hyperbole unless you intend your brand to be over the top.

Sacramento Casa is a children’s advocacy agency.  It deals with hard stuff in the life of kids.  (Donate here.)  But the website communicates its mission in a tasteful way that speaks to the human heart.

In contrast to Casa is another website that creates emotion of a different sort.  Highline Consulting provides support in “building maintenance and fall protection.” If you have a job that is going to require someone to hang, climb, or otherwise work at great heights you had better know what you are doing.  If you don’t, call Highline.

Unlike the Casa website that touches the heart, Highline’s website excites the imagination.  If you like bungee jumping, you will love Highline’s homepage.  The emotion generated is not compassion, but adrenalin.

Once again, the emotion in your website needs to be subtle – unless of course you have a compelling reason to be over the top.

To be known is not enough. To be liked, you have to connect.  To connect put emotion in your website.

A website is the virtual piazza or plaza for the 21^st century.

It makes you present in the marketplace.  Once you are there, what then?  Just like in the real world, your goal for any relationship is to be known, liked, and trusted.
In this blog we consider what it means to be known.  In later blogs we will address what it means to be liked and trusted.

In the world of New Media, everyone has a brand.  You are familiar with many of the well-known brands of mass advertising.  We know you are because corporations spend millions of dollars to get them established.

The term “brand,” of course, comes from the cowboy days of the open range. Can you hear the sizzle and smell the acrid smoke of seared flesh on the hind quarters of a steer?  Branding is how one rancher could distinguish his cattle from all the rest.

Although you do not bear the scar of hot iron on your hind-quarters, your brand is how you are known in business.  It is more than a logo.  It is everything a customer or prospect thinks and feels about your business.

Your website establishes and promotes your brand.  It is where people find you, and the first place they will go to discover who you are.  It is how you are known.

In this series of blogs we are exploring the question: What’s a Website For?

The new media environment has changed the world and people everywhere are trying to answer this question.

Many businesses simply continue to push the old media message in the new world.  They treat a website very much like old world TV advertising.  They sell, promote, and hustle.

They are making a big mistake.  The new media is not about selling, it is about building a relationship.  A website is less like a TV or Newspaper add, and more like a personal encounter in a piazza.

The new world is very much like the old world before the age of mass advertising.  In the old days business transactions were personal.  The key to success in the 16^th century, for example, was not the ability to fund a multi-million dollar ad campaign.

The key was to be known, liked, and trusted.  A website gives everyone the opportunity to develop their business in the time honored fashion of the plaza.  Only now, you do not need to be physically present in the plaza yourself.  The new town square is virtual.  Your website is your kiosk.

Liegh Mastrantonio of In2Focus has a good sense of what the new world is all about.  Listen to how she answers the question, What’s a website for?

“A website is presence,” Leigh says.  It is how people discover you.  If you go to work dressed in rags, it is probably okay to neglect the look of your website.

If you believe you should dress and behave professionally for your business, your website should too.

So what’s website for?

We are exploring the central question raised by the revolution spawned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 when he cobbled together existing technology to create the World Wide Web.

A website is one example of what has become known as New Media.  Before the revolution, the cost of communication prevented the vast majority of people from participating in any meaningful way.  Three media channels dominated the world:  Print, Radio, and Television.

A very few determined what, where, and when something could be communicated.  In the West, money bought access.  In the East, political influence allowed access.  In the “Third World,” there was no access.

After the revolution, New Media has undermined the control of media outlets by a few.  Now, all you need is a domain name, access to a web server, and content worth exploring, and you can have the attention of the world.

Hence the question: What’s a Website For? The New Media environment gives you the ability to talk to the world.  But what do you have to say?

As with any revolution, it takes times to adapt to the new environment.  Many people are still trying to figure out what to do with a website.

Before the revolution, major corporations purchased access to promote a brand, product or service.  “Two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun” still resonates with a certain generation who grew up before the revolution.

Today, many businesses try to use New Media (including their websites) to accomplish the same thing that old media did for the major corporations.  But, as Marshal McLuhan said so long ago, “the medium is the message.”  A website creates something new.  A new media conveys a different message.

If the goal of the Old Media was to SELL, the goal of New Media is to INVITE RELATIONSHIP.

In the Old Media, those who had the money to purchase media time had a captive audience.  Today, there are literally billions of websites calling out for attention.  Your audience has the power to spend their time where they choose.  Few have tolerance for sales messages.

The New Media allows you to enter into dialogue with your customers and prospective clients.  If they experience value in the dialogue, you may have the opportunity serve them as well.

What’s a website for?  It invites a relationship.

How?

See you next time.

FREE!!! For I-Tul clients only. Discover more about posts, pages, and content for your WordPress site.

We are pleased to invite you to a complimentary WordPress workshop where you can learn about post, pages, and media to fill your WordPress site with interesting content as often as you would like. Updates are at your fingertips.

Some of the topics we will cover during this session are…

• Creating, writing, editing, and saving post
• Pages vs. Posts. What is the difference?
• Adding, formatting, and labeling images for your posts and pages
• Uploading and organizing your images using the Gallery Manager

This session will be hosted online so you can see hands-on how to work with pages, posts, and images on your existing site.  Please  Email Us to Sign Up today!

When: December 1^st, 2011
1:00 pm-2:00 pm (Pacific Standard Time)

Where: Online – Confirmed Attendees will receive login information for GoToMeeting 30 minutes before the class begins.

If you have any questions or topics you would like to explore, please email them to me before the class begins.

So What’s A Website For?

The problem had to do with physicists and their need to access scientific data and ideas at CERN, formally known as the European Center for Nuclear Research.  In 1989 A British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) had an idea to cobble together a number of different technologies that would allow physicists to access information more efficiently.

A network of a variety of CPUs (computer processing units) already existed – known as The Internet, hypertext already existed (having been developed by Sir Tim in 1980), individual work stations existed that allowed physicists to access The Internet.  What was lacking was someone to come along to put it all together.

Putting it all together resulted in the World Wide Web.  The first EVER website had a URL only a physicist could love:  http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.htm.

Now, less than 25 years and one REVOLUTION later, the world has changed.  That first URL that only physicists could love has spawned URLs that have become household words:

• Google.com
• Facebook.com
• Amazon.com
• Ebay.com

If you are reading this, you too, are part of the revolution.  And the revolution continues.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce report on 2^nd quarter retail sales in 2011, ecommerce sales was $47.5 billion.   This was an increase of 3% over the previous quarter, and an increase of 17.6% over the same period last year.

 (Yawn.)

But get this:

Over-all retail sales increased only 1.2% over the previous quarter, and only 8.4% over the same period last year.  In other words, retail transactions over the World Wide Web invented by Sir Tim back in 1989, is growing at two times the rate of general retail sales.

The data does not reveal how many traditional sales were the result of customers who first explored their retail preference on the World Wide Web, and then showed up at a brick and mortar establishment to complete the transaction.

The world has changed.  Businesses and business owners that do not change with it will soon be left behind – if they have not been left behind already.

Given the revolution that was sparked by Sir Tim’s World Wide Web, over the next couple of weeks we will explore the question: So what’s a website for?  You know you need one.  But what does it do – really – to advance your business goals?

Join us.

What does it take be one of the fastest growing businesses in our region?  We are exploring three secrets to our success.  In the first two posts of this series we explored how:

• We partner with our clients.
• We get the job done right the first time.

In this final post we consider the third secret to our success:

• We plan our work, and work our plan.

In a recent discussion with members of our team we discussed our development process.  (Development process?  You have a development process?)

Yes we do, we have a development process.  And it is a very disciplined process at that.  We have actually had prospects walk away from a proposal because they did not like the fact that we have a process that defines how we work.

There is myth that believes creativity is a free-flowing, random exercise, that artists just walk into their studio and run wherever their Muse directs them.

Ask Michelangelo if he just wandered into the Sistine Chapel every morning and followed his creative instincts.

Obviously we are no Michelangelo, but creativity follows discipline.  Beauty requires form and structure.  Creativity comes alive when pressed by the constraints of real limits.

So yes, we follow a strict development process, and it begins with understanding the constraints of the project.  Our clients define the limits that awaken our creativity.  Their need, their vision, their functional requirements and even tastes and aesthetic provide the form and structure within which our designers (artists) and developers (engineers) work.

Be careful to distinguish between the constraints of client need and a failure of imagination.  The limits of the project must be defined by the client, not by a designer’s lack of competence, lack of courage, or unwillingness to do the hard work of creative expression.

The term “I can’t.” is not a part of the I-Tul development process.

We follow a disciplined development process– we plan our work, and work our plan because we know –by experience – artistic and engineering discipline unlocks the magic of “We can!”

And that is the secret to our success.