What will 2012 bring? Technology can be extraordinarily fickle to predict – but here’s what I see in the coming year.

Cross-Platform CMS

Over the past year Social Media Aggregators and Content Management Systems have become easier to use and increasingly important to maintaining the variety of online properties we each deal with.

Currently everyone builds their own toolkit of solutions, but I think that this year we’re going to see increasingly robust systems until it gets to the point where you can use a single pre-built suite to manage the entirety of your online presence from a single location.

Smartphones Overtake Traditional Computer Sales

Smartphones (and their tablet cousins) are where the real market growth will be this year. Not only do smart phones have a relatively short lifespan, but the improvement from one generation to the next is palpable. A faster processor doesn’t mean much on your computer, where most websites load before you even realize you’ve clicked a link – but on a mobile phone where we can still count seconds while a page loads, even a 20% boost in efficiency will be noticeable.

If you do not already have a website customized for mobile viewing, this is the year to think about adding such a template.

This is not to say that the desktop computer is about to go the way of the land-line telephones just yet, but they definitely have become an appliance rather than an innovation. When you go shopping for a new computer, odds are that you’re more interested in reliability, support, and durability than in “cutting edge” functionality.

We’ve stopped merging new technologies into the computer, and started looking for ways to merge computer functions into other technologies (internet TVs anyone?)

Voice Responsive Websites

Because we’re doing more and more of our computing from our phones, it’s only natural that we’re also going to want the functions of our phones on our computers. VoIP is already here with services like Skype and GTalk, but all the hands-free rules mean that our phones have also been designed to accept voice inputs.

I think that 2012 will be the year when we start seeing websites that capitalize on the same technology. We don’t yet have the technology for exact transcriptions, but a site that knows to open a new window or navigate to a specific page is entirely within our current capabilities.

The Death of 3D

The first Golden Era of 3D lasted about 3 years, from 1952-1955. It was a fad, a novelty that seemed to offer great potential but never delivered. Even though 3D offers the illusion of depth, it can’t offer multiple perspectives or create the sort of all-encompassing environment that would actually change the way in which we tell stories.

The new craze hit in 2009 with the release of Avatar. It’s three years are almost up, and modern movie makers have proven no more adept at using the technology to change the movie going experience.

Perhaps the true holographic projectors that are under development around the world will give 3D the tools it’ll need to last, but they’re not going to be commercially available this year.

What do you see?

Share your predictions for 2012 in the comments below!

January is a time of new beginnings, and since mb/i is all about quality, business-centered websites, we thought we’d take a look at 10 reasons you might want to build a new site.

10. Haphazard Growth

Some times a website won’t grow according to plan because there never was a plan to begin with. Poor navigation and uneven development are the hallmarks of an unplanned site. Some pages remain “under development” for years while others grow, and branch, and twist until even a modern Daedalus would get lost in their digital halls.

9. Hard to Update

If you need to call up outside help every time you want to make a small change to your site, it may be time to get a new site. Content Management Systems have been available for years now, and the current crop have been designed so that even a layman with no knowledge of computer code can make routine updates.

8. Social Media

Social Media has revolutionized the online world. Not only has it turned online communications into two-way streets, but it has produced a number of “public squares” where people can reach your business and talk about you whether you are involved or not.

It’s not enough to know about Facebook, Four Square, and LinkedIn, you want to capitalize on that wealth of content to keep your own web presence alive and compelling.

7. Failure to Deliver

You built a website, set benchmarks, marketed your business, and your online strategies just aren’t converting. If this sounds familiar, it’s time to stop throwing good bandwidth after bad.  Revisit your site, revisit your strategy, and come out swinging with a new approach that doesn’t have a history of failure.

6. Mission Accomplished

You knew what you wanted when you built your last website: double your sales; grow your mailing list 10x; build a profile of your typical customer. Whatever it was, you’ve succeeded. Now that it’s time to capitalize on your new position - you should make sure that your website has been retooled to help you pursue your next goal!

5. Old Image

Not only do strategies change, but so do businesses. Even if your goals have remained the same, who you are and how you represent yourself may have changed. Perhaps you’ve opened a new branch, evolved in a new direction, or just rebranded to show a new face.

Whatever you have become, your website needs to be a reflection of the present, not a scrapbook of the past.

4. Launching a New Product

A well tailored website is invaluable to a new product launch. Your website can be crafted to encourage current clients to try the product out. It can ensure that the new additions to your customer base continue to have a place on your site where they can feel at home. It can let you encourage buzz and help people spread it to their various social networks. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that you’ll need new functionality to market, sell, distribute, or talk about your new product.

3. Flash was The Cutting Edge

By now almost everyone has heard that Apple iPhones do not read Flash files. If you want your website to be universally accessible this means either removing Flash from your site or else building a mobile-only template which is Flash-free.

2. Poor Calls to Action

A good call to action is easy to find, fits the natural flow of the site, seems worthwhile to your visitors, and can be executed quickly. While there are ways to tack a call to action into an existing site, the best ones are part of an integrated strategy.  If you don’t have the best, it’s time you do.

Nothing happens without a good call to action.

1. Competition

Business is an ongoing struggle. Just because you were king of the hill one year doesn’t mean you’ll keep your position the next. Whenever a competitor blows you out of the water, it behooves you to get professionals on board who can look at your site – pick it apart – and let you know how you can steal a march on your competitors’ sites to get into a superior position.

Does this sound like you?

If you see signs that it is time to rebuild your website, give us a call at 925.222.5624 (222.5mbi).

Winter is not just a time of celebration, but also a time for solemn reflection. This year two of the computing world’s greatest have passed away. Without their contributions, the world would look nothing like it does today.

Steve Jobs

1955-2011

Steve Jobs is known for creating the Apple powerhouse not once, but twice. His ceaseless quest to marry function and design brought us the desktop, multi-font computing, the iPhone, the iPad, and many other inventions that will be with us for years to come.

John McCarthy

1927-2011

Though not widely celebrated outside of computing circles, John McCarthy was responsible for many computing advances that we now take for granted. He coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1956, developed LISP (one of the earliest high-leveled programming languages) in 1958, and his ideas on computational time-sharing form the backbone of the modern trend in Cloud Computing.

It is worth taking a moment to think on their contributions, and the bright future that they have opened up to us.

A website is only useful if people see it.

The following six strategies are essential in any plan to boost the number of visitors reaching your site.

Gather External Links^[1]

This remains the #1 way to improve your search rankings, especially when the links come from trusted and popular sources.

Effective Title Tags

Limit yourself to 70 characters, and put the most relevant keywords near the front. If your brand is a household name, it should come first, otherwise put it at the end.

Good Meta Descriptions

Make sure to write a 150-160 character meta description whenever you are targeting short or popular search phrases.  Even though the description does not have a direct impact on where Google places you, it can be the deciding factor when someone decides which site to visit from a SERP.^[2]

Get Local

If you have a physical location, you need an entry on any interactive map, rating agency, or directory that matters – from Google Places and Yelp! to local merchant associations.

Ask for Reviews

Search engines look for new reviews when determining the relevance of business to their local search results.

Market Your Website

A site alone will not build traffic!

Advertise your site on receipts, business cards, brochures, coupons, and social media profiles.  And track which methods work (there is always a way to add tracking).

All this month the office has been abuzz with activity to bring back the Webshop, a collaborative website creation workshop for business people to work on their sites side by side with the MB/I team on-hand to guide the process and tackle the sticky technical problems. We’ve been doing our very best to address every obstacle we’ve ever encountered to producing a website, then we’re parceling that process out into manageable pieces so that everyday people can walk through the process with us.

Outside the Bowl

Webshop isn’t just about our process; it’s about people like you.

• Executives who know a website is essential for a modern business, but do not have the in-house expertise to plan or build a website.
• Brand conscious individuals, who want something more out of their site than an off the shelf template with a quick re-coloring job.
• Folks who know that the opportunity cost of relying upon a friend, neighbor, or second cousin for web work will far outweigh the lower “sticker price.”
• Team players who see the benefits of working side by side with other business people to solve problems together.

But above all, Webshop is for busy people. The sort of people who know that they’re needed at the helm of their business, and require assurance that any time the spend on another project (such as building a website), has been structured for the most efficient use possible.

Inside the Bowl

The Webshop is also a great opportunity the core mb/i team as the brisk pace ensures we will literally work side-by-side.

Marissa works with the participants to integrate appropriate lead generation strategies into the underlying structure of the site and then provide them with custom designs that will match any existing branding.

Zac takes those designs, rebuilds them in a content management system so that our participants can maintain their own sites without the need to learn HTML, and adds in any additional functionality necessary to meet your needs.

I then take the words, stories, and expertise of our participants, and turn it all into postable content so that there is no lag in filling the new site with copy.

And Michelle does what she does best: a little bit of everything to make sure the process goes smoothly.

One of the largest mental hurdles to maintaining a consistent business blog is coming up with a topic week after week.  It is easy to trap yourself with an artificial need for novelty instead of sticking to your strengths.  But if you’re really unsure of your ability to come up with relevant topics, the following strategies help.

1. Follow the News

Whether you listen to the radio while you commute or read an industry magazine on the weekends, make sure you keep abreast of current events.  The modern online reader is interested in relevant commentary.

Look for the stories that interest you as a specialist then ask yourself, “was the story perfect?”  It probably wasn’t, which is where you get to step in.  Use your blog as a forum for response in which you answer the following questions:

• Where did you find the story?
• What did the original reporter get right?
• What are the facts? (And where do the facts you have access to differ from those cited or assumed by the reporter?)
• How would you have handled the investigation to produce a more accurate report?
• On the whole, did the reporter do a good job?
• What should your readers think about after hearing a story like this?

2. Read Twitter (or Facebook, or Technorati, or…)

Social Media is another place where you can find relevant topics for discussion.  Sometimes inspiration will come directly from your friends/followers/contacts, but if you intend to make a Muse of your Social Media, there are a few strategies that are particularly helpful.

• Keep an eye on people who share interesting articles and put them in a list so that you can find their offerings quickly and easily.
• Build a separate list of your favorite industry and mass media news outlets to see what they’re promoting through social media.
• Use the search function to find specific articles on a topic that interest you.

Once you’ve been writing online for a while, you may find that your followers themselves become a good source of content.  After all, they’re clearly the sort of people who are interested in the topics you tend to write about.

3. Consider your Marketing Materials

Who is your target market?  What worries them?  How can you help?  If you’ve ever written marketing materials for your business, you’ve probably asked and answered these questions already.  Use that material; expand on it.  If you had a page to focus on that bullet point (you know the one), what would you say?

Congratulations, you have a page!

4. Look at the Calendar

Some of us have it easier than others.  If you’re an accountant or a tax specialist, you probably know what your clients are thinking about at the start of April.  Now work backwards, when should they start thinking about taxes?  What deductions do they tend to overlook?  Are there other deadlines they don’t think about?

Even if your industry doesn’t provide you with clear seasonal themes, you can always look at what you wrote this time last year.  It may seem like only yesterday to you, but your readers aren’t going to remember that article.  Write it again, write it from the perspective of someone a year older, a year wiser, and a year better at answering your readers unwritten questions.

5. Revisit Customer Feedback

There’s one person who knows what your customers are thinking even better than you do: your customers.

Any time a client asks you a question or offers a critique, it’s an opportunity for a customer-centered blog.

• What’s the best question you’ve been asked this week?
• Was a public critique of your company valid? Take ownership of the problem and share how you intend to fix it.
• Do people love you on Yelp!, what about Annie’s List?

Readers love it when they are the focus of a corporate action.  It shows that you’re paying attention and taking them seriously.

Over the past month we’ve been helping one of our clients launch their Facebook presence. This has given me time to reflect on you can develop a personal and respectful relationship even when “you” are acting as a company or organization.

Narrative Voice

Facebook is filled with people who want to connect with people, companies, and causes they care about. However, many are slipping in during the odd moment of freedom at work and don’t have time to waste.

It’s therefore a good idea to aim for something short, clever, and conversational. It’s fine to acknowledge your personal agency as an author, but be sure that your posts always have a clear purpose relevant to the organization you’re representing.

This is most easily accomplished when your posts are driven by passion and calls to action.

• If you’re excited, geek out and explain why.
• If there’s a way to act now, share it.
• If you’re concerned, let it show.

Facebook is not a venue for cold impartiality. Use the first and second person freely.

Remember: Anyone who follows your company on Facebook wants to know what it’s up to.

Frequency & Content

Facebook makes a great hub for your social media efforts.

• When you post a new video, talk about it on Facebook
• When send out your newsletter, put a teaser on Facebook
• When a blog article goes live, make sure people know about it on Facebook.
• When you discover a new social media platform, let your Facebook audience know

That alone may be enough to keep your Facebook profile alive, but you’ll probably want to add some regular Facebook-only posts into the mix.

It is best to start by picking a day of the week when you will always make it a point to visit your Facebook profile, respond to comments, and post a single status update with a clear and simple call to action.

Posts to consider

• An invitation to an event you’re hosting.
• A short description of troubling legislation and a link to readers can take action.
• A question on a subject directly related to your industry.

However, if you are able to maintain a stronger Facebook presence, it is worth considering daily posts of this nature.

When to Post

As with any social media channel, you should aim to post about an hour before the users most likely to act log on. If you’re interested in Facebook “shares,” that means the lunch break – but it can be helpful to see when you get most of your phone calls if that’s the way you want people to respond to your posts.

Who to Like

As an organization, it is best to like other organizations that have a similar purpose or which provide resources useful to the audience you serve. Good choices include:

• Anyone whose product you sell
• Referral partners
• Professional organizations
• Accrediting boards
• Industry news channels

When to Comment

Earlier this year, Facebook added the ability for users to post comments in their organizational persona. A few simple guidelines can save you from future headaches.

1. Respond to to anyone who comments on one of your posts.
2. If someone is not directly addressing your organization, only comment on posts by other organizations
3. Only comment when you want information or you are prepared to voice support as an organization
4. DON’T post to prove a point
5. DON’T start or participate in any online fights
6. Remember that with every post you are speaking for your business

If you see something that requires disagreement, formulate your argument clearly and civilly, and post your reply on a blog that you control, and provide links. If it’s not important enough for a well thought-out blog post, it’s not important enough for a reply.

A word of warning: If you produce blog posts regularly and without fail, this article is not for you.

This article offers approaches to writing, strategizing, using research, collaborating, and scheduling.

If you’re already on top of your blog, producing regular content on schedule and without impacting your other obligations, you will not gain anything from the suggestions it contains.

Where to Begin: Write First

Putting pen to paper is the most important part of any writing project. Without that crucial step, you will never generate any content.

First you must write.

Don’t worry about style.

Don’t worry about substance.

Don’t worry about purpose.

Just take half-an-hour and write.

Stream of consciousness is a great way to get back into the habit of writing, so just put down whatever comes to mind.  You can worry about writing for an online audience later.  If you keep your eyes peeled, I will be sure to offer some more specific strategies particular to blog writing.

Strategize for your Blog

Take a moment to think about your purpose in writing.

• Who are you writing for?
• Do you already produce content for that audience?
• What sort of things do you tend to write about?
• Do you want follow your own footsteps or try something new?

Use these questions to determine what resources you already have at your disposal.  Decide what you can use again, what you want to change, and where you will need to provide brand new content. Your answers should help you pick keywords, set blog categories, and build a plan for how for moving your existing content into blog format and growing into the areas you want to develop.

Research Inspires and Helps Writing

A great blog is authentic, reflective, informative, and backed by a good deal of personal motivation.

Not only does research suggest new blog topics, but sharing insights from your studies is an ideal way to pique the interest of your best readers. It also keeps you abreast of current developments in your field.

If you understand how your discipline has evolved, that knowledge will seep into your writing and reveal your expertise for what it is.

Collaborate to Ease the Load

Soliciting contributions from other authors helps a blog in several ways.

1. Lighter writing burden for each author
2. Greater variety of offerings
3. Exposure to wider audience

Anyone inside the organization has the potential to be a valuable addition to the blog. Give anyone who wants to take part an opportunity to show what they’re made of. Use interviews to get information from other members of the team, and keep an eye out for gems who can produce good content while staying on top of their other duties.

Supplement the contributions of your own team with external sources. Professionals with overlapping target audiences make especially good guest contributors. Some will to write regularly (perhaps in lieu of starting their own blog), while others will only be interested in intermittent or one-off articles.

Schedule is What Keeps a Blog Going

As you build your mix of internal and external contributors, create a rotation that gives your volunteers an opportunity to voice their insights without overwhelming their other duties. Use this rotation in conjunction with your blog strategy to plan a writing cycle that produces a steady stream of content for your readers.

It may even be worthwhile (depending on your contributors) to consider a formal posting schedule. Such schedules do form a contract of trust with your readers, horrible to break, but if maintained they can be a great source of repeat traffic.

What strategies and techniques work for you?

General strategies are not the same as specific tips. What have you done to make sure you write, research, strategize, collaborate, and schedule? Do you find that one of the steps is easier than another?

I will take your feedback into account and write more on each of these topics in the coming months. Keep an eye open for the “Fill Your Blog” keyword to stay on top of this series as it develops.

According to CNN the tech elite are struggling to define Google+.  This seems very odd to me, as the premise of Google+ is very straightforward: it is a social media platform that allows you to control where your message goes.

What makes this a radical concept is that no one else is doing it (well, no one aside from Diaspora, but I’ll get to that later).

The problem that CNN’s experts have run into is that they’re trying to define Google+ in terms of other social media platforms.  No, that’s an oversimplification.  As Jon Stewart recently put it, the mainstream media is biased towards “sensationalism and laziness.”  What they’re trying to do is tell the story of “Google+ the ____ slayer,” and we simply cannot fill in the blank until we see how the cards fall out.

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace: all of these services are built on a broadcast model where you speak to all of your audience simultaneously.  While many of these services allow for private messages, they do not have convenient mechanisms to integrate targeted messages into the live stream of your content.

King of the Hill

Part of the reason why the Social Media Slayer story is so appealing is that we, as a society, like to see the mighty tumble.  We have adopted the story of David and Goliath is part of our cultural legacy, and do our best to find David’s wherever we can (even if it means recasting the giants of the technological world).

But there is also a sense that the established players are vulnerable.  Twitter has a limited scope of service, FourSquare tells strangers when you’re away from home, Facebook assumes that users want to share and doesn’t even tell them when it has made more of their information public, MySpace hasn’t had any noticeable growth for years, and even the blog hubs are under threat from authors who are willing to sacrifice presentation to follow the audience.

And so the race is on among news outlets to figure out which service Google+ most resembles.

Unfortunately, this misses the point entirely.  Social media sites tend towards natural monopolies because someone who wants to be social will go where their friends are.  If I want a Facebook-like service, it’s only natural that I go to Facebook first, because that’s where everyone else is.

What makes Google+ a threat is that it does something entirely new.  Facebook can’t just flip a switch or add a feature to gain all the functionality of Google+, it would need a whole new suite of functionality.  That’s the kind of move that could kill Facebook.  Not only would such a change require a ton of investment, but it would draw even more attention to the product Facebook was trying to emulate.

Google+ the Diaspora Killer

The only project that Google+ has clearly killed off is Diaspora.  Like Google+, Diaspora was looking for an easy way to let users chose who would receive individual status updates.  Unlike Google+ you probably haven’t heard of it before, and with Google+ already dominating the press, you probably never will.

Even in our increasingly social online world, the blog continues to play an important role.  Blogs are one of the few online properties where you have full control over the message while still inviting reader participation.  However, the blogosphere is a cacophonous place.  If you don’t time your posts well you run the opposing risks of missing your audience entirely or of being drowned out by all the other online voices.

How Often to Post

Quality should be the key driver of frequency.  Even if you write infrequently, your readers will come back time and again so long as you always have something valuable to say.  However, the more often you write, the more likely you are to catch the attention of repeat readers.  Just be aware that they will only stick with you as long as you can maintain the pace that attracted their attention in the first place.

When coming up with your schedule, there are three questions you should ask yourself:

• What sort of resource do you want to be?
• How often do you have something to say?
• How much time can you dedicate to writing?

Suggestion: When starting a blog, aim for 1 – 2 internally produced articles per week

• Pick a single day and time when you will commit to producing a blog.
• Allow yourself one additional post a week if you have something more to say.
• Save any additional posts past the second for use in a future week (unless the subject matter is inherently time-sensitive).

Minimum: 2 articles per month. Less than this and you will be unlikely to build or maintain regular readership.

Maximium: Don’t post more than 4 articles in a week unless you can commit to maintaining a daily posting schedule.

When to Post: Time of Day

Eventually you will want to customize your blog times to match the patterns of your own readership. It’s generally considered best to post 1-3 hours before the bulk of your targeted audience visits the site.

In the absence of an hour-by-hour track record for your own blog, you may want to make use of some generally observed Internet trends.

1. More links to blog articles are posted between 7am and 8am.
2. More comments are posted on blogs between 8am and 10am.
3. More people view blogs between 10am and 11am.

It is possible to circumvent these trends by educating your readership on your actual publishing schedule (for example, by posting when your blogs will go live), but you should always keep an eye on your actual traffic to see when people are coming to view your blog.

When to Post: Day of Week

The best day to post is again dependent on your audience and objective. If there is a day of the week when your blog gets more traffic, that’s the day you should post on.

If you do not yet have statistics for your own blog, you may want to use some generally observed trends.

• Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays are the best days to post if you you’re your readers to post comments.
• Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to post when building link traffic.
• Mondays and Fridays are the best days to post if you want a wide readership.

As with time of the day, you can influence the figures some by publishing which day you make updates on.

Pros and Cons of a Published Schedule

Published schedules do not control the behavior of your readership, but it can be an effective tool in guiding their activity into accord with your own timetable.  Just be sure to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of such a move before plastering your posting schedule across every inch of unused blog space.

Pro: Readers know when to visit your site for new content. This will tend to concentrate traffic at the times when you’ve stated there will be new blog posts.

Con: A published schedule is a commitment. You will have less flexibility to adapt to actual high-traffic periods, and missing your stated deadlines will alienate some readers.

Suggestion: Set an unofficial posting time while you’re getting started. If you go a month-and-a-half without ever missing your self-imposed deadline, make your schedule official.

Beyond the Blog

Just this week, KissMetrics developed an infographic on Social Timing (displayed on right).  With a more visual approach to the same information.

But even this research is only as useful as it’s application.  If you have conducted your own experiments on blog timing, we’d love to hear the results!