By Jean Levasseur, Captains of Industry


Most website redesigns succeed or fail before the actual design takes place. That’s because not enough companies really think their strategy through ahead of time. Based on our experience here at Captains, here are the five essential questions to ask at the outset of your web design process.

1. What is the goal of the website?
   A good goal is specific and measureable. If you find yourself stating a goal of “letting people find out more information about your company,” you need to take a step back and think again. Websites convey information, sure, but why are you conveying that information? Why is it important that people find out more information about your company, both for you and for them? Some examples of good goals are “to attract 5,000 new members in the first year” or “to increase revenue by 25% in the first 6 months” or “to generate 5 new leads per week.” Read more Share This
   

By Jean Levasseur, Captains of Industry


On Monday at around 10:30am, I posted about how Comcast had hung an ad on my door for a service that I already subscribe to. Around 3:30 that afternoon (barely 5 hours later), Mark Casem from Comcast’s National Customer Operations department posted a comment apologizing and asking for my contact information so that he could share it with the local team and make sure it didn’t happen again. Signed his name and everything.

That’s how companies are supposed to use social media. Good for you, Comcast – you’re redeemed in my eyes.

Many companies are embracing content marketing as a better way to pull customers to their websites – but there’s also a lot of confusion out there. What is content? What can it do for me? How can I make it? Here’s some much-needed clarity on the topic from Seth Godin’s blog:

In praise of programming
Not computer programming, which is important, but content programming.
Someone decides what to put on the radio after that song you just heard. Someone realizes that Conan needs to do more than just tell stand-up. Someone decides that if every tweet is just like the tweet you just sent, it’s boring.
We’re all programmers now. We all have to decide what to post next, what to point to next, what to launch next. Is there a skill in dreaming up Must-See Thursday nights, or in establishing a season of Shakespeare or even in deciding what’s on the special list at the restaurant? I think there is.
Yes, you must do great work. You also need to figure out how to program for your audience, even if the audience is only one person.

By Jean Levasseur, Captains of Industry


I came home from work on Thursday to find two identical two-foot tall door hangers on the knob extolling the benefits of XFINITY Internet by Comcast – a service I already have. I understand what happened. A person was given a stack of these, and was told to put a hanger on every door in the neighborhood (two of them got stuck together for our door). But there has to be a better way. In addition to being a waste of money and paper, getting an advertisement for a service I’m already using makes Comcast look disorganized, and it’s really annoying. Doesn’t Comcast have a list of all the addresses of current customers? Can’t they cross-reference that, and skip over doors that have XFINITY? That might require a bit more thought on the part of the person doing the hanging, but the added care would mean that I and other existing customers wouldn’t think of Comcast as douche bags. Isn’t that worth it?

Buy Volvos. They’re boxy, but they’re good. Happy Friday!

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry


It used to be that if you were unhappy with an airline, you just grouched about it around the water cooler. Fortunately, the times are a’changin’ thanks to ubiquitous little video cameras and YouTube, allowing us to bitch slap companies in public when they misbehave. As evidence, check out this video made by soldiers who had just returned from Afghanistan and were charged nearly $3,000 for extra bags – like the one holding the firearm a soldier used to defend himself in the war. Even though their military contract with Delta specified that they were allowed the four bags each they were actually carrying.

It’s interesting that for our soldiers – trained to handle machine guns and tanks – their most powerful weapon is a video camera. Delta Airlines quickly apologized, but the damage is done. I sincerely hope that the airlines, and all companies, start to recognize that they are on camera and they had better do right by their customers. And as for our troops just back from war, God bless you all.

By Ted Dillon, Captains of Industry


Why is it that Facebook and Twitter are so often lumped together as the two big social media platforms?  Everyone and their aunt is on Facebook, but only an intimate handful have active Twitter accounts – only 8% of Americans are active Tweeters.  Here are three misconceptions about Twitter:

Twitter is the same as your Facebook news feed.

So I ask my pal if she’s got a Twitter handle, and she says, “I’ve already got a Facebook news feed.” People who aren’t part of the Twitter community tend to believe that Twitter is just a bunch of Facebook status updates. Not true.  Twitter is a tool for sharing information and links to content. The smart Twitter user isn’t using Twitter necessarily to keep up with his/her friends, but to stay abreast of the most current news and information on the web, and to share that news as well.

Twitter is a waste of time.

Another complaint: “I don’t care if my friends ‘just got back from a run’ or are ‘feeding all the cats.’” Many non-Twitterfolk think Twitter is just full of useless status updates.  This misconception comes from the origin of Twitter’s fame: celebrities.  Twitter’s popularity originally sprouted from the Hollywood celebrities tweeting their every move to the drooling TMZ addicts and Hollywood wannabes.  But now Twitter is something much greater. Businesses discovered Twitter and now they can share valuable content, host cool deals to engage their customers and allow the consumer to talk directly to them through the platform.  That’s a whole arm and leg above the older usages of Twitter.

There’s too much information to sort through.

Valid point.  Once you’re following a good size number of handles your Twitter feed could be overwhelmingly full and change drastically by the minute.  All that information can be time consuming to sort through.  But never fear!  There are great third party apps now that can organize Twitter for you and help you find what you want. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, and Twitpic are all apps that can enhance the Twitter experience beyond using Twitter.com to monitor your feed.  Now you can organize your followers into separate streams, check in on just the ones you want, and find the information you’re looking for quicker and easier.

Of course when I tell people I use Twitter the pessimistic response is always some joke like, “Oh you twat?” or “You gonna twit about this ice cream sandwich?” Hopefully you’ll look past the sometimes off-putting name and get a Twitter account, or log back in to the account that’s been vacant for months.  Twitter is a great source of interesting information and personal connections; it’s worth another chance.  And if you’re there, follow us at @captainsboston; we share advertising and marketing insights, posts from our popular blog,  news from the energy sector, and just plain funny stuff we find on the Interwebs. But NOT what we’re having for lunch.

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

Have you ever tried explaining to an engineer at a high tech company why it’s important to create a messaging platform for his marketing? If you’re like most creative folks – me included at one point – you might have said something like, “My feeling is that getting your story right is an important first step in our marketing campaign.” You might as well be speaking Urdu. That’s because the words “feeling” and “story” truly are a foreign language to them when it comes to how they think about their business (not surprisingly, like an engineer). In order to get your idea to sink in, you need to approach your pitch from the perspective of the person you’re talking with. Re-craft your approach to something like this: “Bob, you wouldn’t build anything without first making a blueprint, right?” Bob nods. “Ok, so what we’re going to do for you is engineer the message you tell your customers so they really understand your products and see what they can do for them. And once we have that message, we’re going to create a messaging platform, which is the blueprint that all your marketing efforts will be based on.” I’ve seen this work again and again. Once you craft your own message so that your clients get it, you not only show that you speak their language (literally) but that you understand their business – a critical step in building a strong and long-term working relationship. At least, that’s the way I feel about it.

Exactly what it sounds like. Happy Friday!

By Brian Barth, Captains of Industry

Ladies and gentlemen—back up your Facebooks! Download your profile and look longingly into your social media past! I bring you Social Safe—the Facebook backup application from the British tech-wizards at iBundle. Marketed as a means to protect against the hassle of restoring a lost account, Social Safe provides a much more meaningful service to its customers: searchable social media history reports stored offline. While the Library of Congress still can’t explain why they are cataloging Twitter, Social Safe in making digital reminiscing even easier than ever.

By Brian Barth, Captains of Industry

Intel just released something called Museum of Me, and it still doesn’t make much sense to me. Connect the site with your Facebook profile and BLAM-O!—your life becomes a modern art installation. Trendy twenty-somethings with ponytails stroke their goatees while viewing your “Trip to Cancun ’09” album, and robotic arms arrange pictures of your friends into a collage that is—you guessed it—your profile picture! Hot damn.

While the video is certainly slick and the music is compelling, the viewer is merely left with a lukewarm wash of egotistical catharsis and self-affirmation, almost as if it was “worth it.” “Yes,” protests the bespectacled creative executive who created the video, “isn’t that what everybody wants from the internet!?” Unfortunately, probably.

By Brian Barth, Captains of Industry

It’s not news that the biggest cash cows on the internet are data organization and analytics, but applying those techniques to our social life online is bubbling up as a new trend. This is not to say that *ahem* advertising agencies haven’t been collecting and analyzing peoples’ social data since the dawn of Web 2.0, but now that data is being sold back to the people sharing the content to start with. Enter Social Memories, a Facebook application that creates a digital booklet analyzing your online social activity since May 31st 2009. After wistfully sighing your way through the pages, Social Memories prompts you to buy a physical version of your book. Does it make much sense to print out my Facebook activity? Not really. But do I want one? Hell yes.

The hook here lies in our obsession with permanence. It’s the same reason we take photographs, because our memories fail us daily. With so much social information zooming around the internet, this is the best we can do to grab on and hold tight.