Author: Laura Creekmore

Get mobile, like yesterday

[This blog post reads like the unsolicited plug that it is.]

I absolutely love when I go to a presentation or seminar expecting to have a good time, or network, and I also come back to the computer lots smarter than when I left, as the stakes are higher here, all the time. I should have known that would happen today, because I knew I was going to hear Tim Moses of Sitemason talk about mobile apps. But still, he got me.

Tim Moses and a bunch of other guys I went to college with started Telalink, one of the first ISPs in Nashville, back in the mid-1990s. They sold it 11 years ago, and most of those guys have gone on to continue to do really interesting things with technology. Telalink’s impact on technology and entrepreneurship in Nashville cannot be overstated — there are an army of programmers, network guys and innovators who came through the doors of Telalink in its few short years as a company.

After Telalink, Tim and Thomas Conner went on to start Sitemason. Sitemason is a great content management system for many mid-size websites. It has a lot of functionality that honestly, you’d expect to pay a lot more for. One of the things they have focused heavily on is mobile compatibility — and not just mobile browsing, but mobile apps. One of the neat things about Sitemason is that your content management system can power your iPhone app as well as your website, bringing apps into reach for many companies.

So at today’s Nashville AMA luncheon, Tim talked about the dramatic changes in the mobile market in the past 3 1/2 years, since the iPhone was introduced. When you think about how many people with plain-old cell phones have 2-year contracts in the U.S., and then you realize we haven’t even been through 2 complete contract renewal cycles since the iPhone came out [and far less since the Android platform was introduced], the market penetration of modern smartphones is astounding, and it’s only going to grow.

If you have any doubts about how critical your organization’s mobile strategy is, please give Tim a call. I suspect he’ll be very nice, but he doesn’t leave any doubt in my mind about how badly marketers in particular need to get mobile in their sights.

Where I’m going in 2011

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months learning about additional conferences in my field — seminars related to content strategy, information architecture and management, and related fields like web entrepreneurship, user experience and social media.

In 2011, I’m definitely attending SXSW Interactive and GEL. SXSWi is not really an optional conference if you’re in the web industry, but it has the wonderful benefits of being educational, a great networking event and held in Austin in March. I’m just mad at myself that I missed the deadline to propose a panel last summer. Must plan my vacation better this year.

I attended GEL [Good Experience Live] in 2005 or so, and to this day, it’s one of the most inspiring business events I’ve ever attended. So I’m delighted to be able to return this year. As I’ve noted here before, Mark Hurst is one of my web heroes, and the positive, engaging spirit of his work infects his annual conference. No matter your field, you cannot help but go home from GEL smarter, with great contacts and energized to do fabulous work.

I’ve heard that SOBcon is not to be missed from Alli Worthington and Becky McCray both [some real web giants themselves], so I’ll check it out in 2012. [It conflicts with GEL this year.]

All of a sudden, there’s a whole raft of content strategy and information architecture conferences. And throw in stuff related to health care information management [a topic I touch on more and more in my work, and that I’m incredibly interested in personally], and I feel like I could spend half my time at conferences.

What are your favorites? What would I be a fool to miss in 2011?

15 things we need to stop doing in 2011

What a great list of things to stop doing and thinking from Chris Koch. Here’s my favorite, though there are several good points here. In 2011, we need to stop believing things like:

Filtered conversation reduces risk. The ultimate risk in business is that your customers stop buying from you because they don’t trust you. Preventing employees from speaking to customers because they might make a mistake ignores this much bigger risk—which existed long before social media came along. Customers want to speak to the people they will be working with. That’s why employees and subject matter experts should be on the front lines of social media rather than marketers or PR people.

Wonderful video on information

You’ve got to make the time to watch this hour-long video on stats, information and the power they give us. If you’ve been hanging around the web for long at all, you’ve likely seen some of Hans Rosling’s and the Gapminder Foundation’s work before, but I love how this video makes clear how information is so interesting and attainable — and critical to our continued progress.

Books on the list for 2011

Over at my personal blog today, I shared the list of books I read in 2010. There are a lot of business books on there, but plenty for fun and serendipity, too.

I’m working to read a book a week again this year, and I’ve already got a number of books queued up. Here are ones I’m planning on. Let me know if you have any suggestions to add to the list!

First, here’s one that I accidentally left off my list of read-in-2010 [bringing my total to 35!]. A great book if you want a primer on search application design theory:
Search Patterns

Now for the ones I am going to read soon, by category.

Business:
The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business

Crush It! Why NOW Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion

The Thank You Economy

Content Strategy
Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business

Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content (Voices That Matter)

Poetry:
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

Nonfiction:
Rome 1960

Fiction:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Slaughterhouse Five

To Kill a Mockingbird

Catch-22

The Catcher in the Rye

Flowers for Algernon

Emma

Persuasion

Brave New World

Ulysses

Twenty books there — just enough to get me through the first few months. I’ll let you know how it goes!

For better health and education in 2011

As we look toward another year, we at Creekmore Consulting have been reflecting on our good fortune in 2010. We decided to make year-end donations to two charities whose causes we support: literacy and health.

Years ago, when I was in college, I was a volunteer for Reading Is Fundamental. The nonprofit gives books to millions of schoolchildren every year. As a RIF volunteer, I got to go read to a couple of elementary classrooms every month, and take the children free books to boot. I felt just a little like Santa Claus, or at least like a favorite aunt. It’s one of my fondest volunteering memories, despite the many more since that time. This year, we thought about our role in content strategy. Basic literacy is an essential building block for success in this world, and we want to support that effort. So we made a donation to RIF this year.

We happen to work with several clients in the health care field, so we’re interested in the cutting edge of health care work. Two of the three of us live in Nashville, and we’re impressed with the ongoing work of the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, so we’ve also decided to support their work this year.

Best wishes to you for health, happiness and good reading in 2011!

More is practically* always better

I was talking with some friends today about their nonprofit website. We were talking about a bunch of other stuff about creating community, building a network, etc., and they said, by the way, how often should we be updating the site?

Love this question. Partly because I have a better answer than I ever have before. It’s one of those questions that editorial folks like me love to bat around, as if there were a “right” answer.

So before I give you the “right” answer, just remember, the real answer is “it depends.”

So the answer I gave is, today, information is flashing past all of us much faster than any human could hope to absorb it. If you want to have any hope of competing — with your competitors, with Facebook, with TV, with Netflix, with text messages and iPhones and Angry Birds — you have to throw as much out there as is humanly possible while staying true to your mission.

The more nuanced answer is, you also have to mind how you’re delivering your content. Because in practically no situation is 100 posts a week on Facebook the right answer. Are you hitting people at the right time, in the right medium, with the right info?

But too much is so rarely the issue. Look around here….I’m terribly stingy with my own blog posts….resolving to improve that situation posthaste. The point is, so few people are putting out too much stuff. The danger of that is rare. So get out there and start sharing!

*Practically: The only situation is which more is NOT better is alas, a situation I do see from time to time, and that social media sadly enables. People who are out there spamming their poor audiences with irrelevant content should be drawn and quartered. There’s enough real information we can’t sort through — don’t muddy the water with spam, no matter the medium.

Learn where to put the peanut butter

I’m blogging today over on the Digital Nashville site. Digital Nashville is one of our great local tech organizations — we have a growing tech community here, and DN connects some of the best marketers and tech folks.

Learn where to put the peanut butter [and how to handle other thorny questions of website structure] today in my post over on the Digital Nashville site.