Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’m part of several virtual teams, which is just exactly how many knowledge workers live their work lives today. As such, I’ve used three online collaboration tools exhaustively for the past year, and they’ve each saved my bacon, my gas/phone bills and my sanity. Here they are, in no particular order:

SnagIt

What is it? Free for a 30-day trial period, but worth the $39 investment many times over, SnagIt (download SnagIt here) is a screen capture utility that will not only allow you to capture and edit (resize, crop, add borders, etc.) screen shots; it’ll allow you to save them in a plethora of file formats (GIF, JPEG, BMP, PDF) which is useful for people who work in a mixed Mac/Windows environment.

How do I use it? My favorite (saved my bacon) use was to translate graphic images for a client that I captured on a Mac but wouldn’t show up on Windows 2003 (the most popular version in enterprises today). One client could see all the graphics in a presentation, another could only see some of the graphics - talk about frustrating. But with SnagIt, I was able to open every graphic and save it in a universal format that everyone could see. Whew. I don’t have the need for PhotoShop, so SnagIt fits the bill perfectly.

I’ve also used it to explain (saved my phone bill and my sanity) visually how to use another of my favorite collaboration tools - Google Docs and Spreadsheets - to another one of my clients. (In fact, I’ll use it to describe how to get that set up below…)

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

What is it? Google Docs and Spreadsheets allows me to create the equivalent (almost) of a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet online, and share it with anyone I invite to do so. It is great when you’re working with a group of people who need to capture and share information around a particular project.

How do I use it? In one case, it works like a free, mini-CRM tool for small businesses. I have one client for whom I’m creating a marketing database of prospects. We add prospects into the spreadsheet, and I can comment on- and update every aspect of marketing and sales activities around each one. That way, Steve always knows the current status of every conversation his team is having. And (saving my gas bill) I don’t have to be on-site in order to help him out.

In another case, I’m collaborating on a marketing plan with three other team members, and we can use a document I’ve set up to capture ownership, schedules and activities that each of us are working on. This takes a bit of flexibility in terms of how people like to structure their documents (I love an outline with owners and deadlines!), but the first person to come up with the master document has the opportunity to shape her own future with it. (We’ll cover how to find these tools at the end of this post…) Everyone can see who’s doing what, and we’re all on the same virtual page.

Google Calendar

What is it? A simple calendar system with reminders, which is easy to use and share with your teammates if you like. Every single client I have has a calendaring system, and invites me to meetings using their own system. Who needs to keep track of five calendars in my own land-locked Outlook system?

How do I use it? I keep my calendar and appointments in Google so I’ll have access to it from any internet connection. Plus, it sends meeting alerts to my Blackberry (saves my bacon for sure!). No matter where I am (saves my sanity), I can gain access to my calendar and be alerted to appointments.

Read on for more specifics on how to get the free Google tools… Read more »

Building and monitoring your own personal brand online is something I’ve coached students, colleagues and CxO’s on for several years. I learned why it’s so necessary when I was at Marqui and responsible for their controversial “paybloggers” campaign.

My personal reputation and the company’s reputation were put to the test in a very public manner for a good two years. I’m happy to say mine has remained relatively buoyant and unscathed, but it has taken diligence - which is more than I can say for Marqui.

I’m reminded that I learned the hard way, in reading an article in Advertising Age last week by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson called “How to build the ‘brand called you’ in an online era.”

They give some very useful tips as to how to build your personal brand online.

1) First you Google yourself and find out how visible you are. That’s step one for any brand - personal, product or company. Type your name (in quotes) in your favorite search engine: e.g. “Janet Johnson”

JJ says: A good ‘extra credit’ step would be to go to Technorati (a blog search engine) and do the same thing. You might be surprised at the additional information you might find.

2) What’s your “GQ?” (Google Quotient) You should know the answer to this - how do you rank in search results? The article offers the following rankings:

• Digitally disguised - there’s nothing about you on the web.
• Digitally dissed - there’s little about you on the web.
• Digitally disastrous - there’s plenty of information about you online, but it has little to do with what you think or want known about yourself professionally.
• Digitally dabbling - we’d find some on-brand information about you online.
• Digitally distinct - we’d find plenty on you, reinforcing your unique personal brand and promise of value.

3) Position yourself as you would a product. And then (more importantly) ask yourself - is what I’m about to post online in support of my personal brand position? If in doubt, don’t.

4) Build your brand. They recommend maintaining a blog, creating a professional web site and using online networking sites. In my opinion, if you create a profile on LinkedIN or Facebook, you’re off to a good start. Your participation online is a great differentiator for you. Start slowly if you must, but start today.

5) Be constant. (Their words, not mine - I’d say) Monitor your brand. As you work to build an online reputation, consistency is good, but awareness is key. Set up a persistent search on your name (with an RSS tool like Attensa - which will constantly monitor the web for mentions of any search keyword or phrase) so you’re notified instantly whenever someone says anything about you.

Awareness and brand are increasingly accessible online. You’ve opened yourself up to conversations, let them flow. But (as in the real world) your reputation will require the most diligence and care.

Set yourself up for success in the long run - join the conversation and monitor the conversation. And don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mother to read tomorrow morning.

I was having dinner with my love last night at Toro Bravo, a delicious new tapas restaurant in Portland. We were talking about my propensity to have my head in the clouds (or other, much darker places) when it comes to communication tools.

Here’s how it went:

“This is way better than Patanegra,” I said after about my third bite, referring to another tapas place here. “I wonder how they’re doing now that this place is open?”

She’s a foodie, and reads Portland Food and Drink (a local food blog) religiously.

“Well, there’s been this thread about Patanegra’s service on Portland Food and Drink lately,” she said. “Apparently, there’s some server there who thinks he’s Jack Black - a dirty Jack Black - and people are talking about how to avoid his section.”

“Good grief, do you think they know these discussions are going on?” I was aghast. “If they were smart, they’d subscribe to Portland Food and Drink and know every time their place was mentioned.”

At which point she said, “I have a confession to make. You might want to hold on to the table for this, (I grabbed the table and quietly held my breath - she’s not one to exaggerate) …but I don’t know how to set up an RSS feed, and I’ve been listening to you for months now, talking about how feeds are so great. And it’s not making sense to me. I’m not stupid, either.”

“And you go through the world assuming people know how to do things you take for granted, and they don’t,” she continued.”So if I’ve been listening to you for months and still don’t know how to do it, what makes you think people who’re not as involved with it would get it? I keep telling you, tell me how and why I should care, and I will do it. But make it concrete and personal, or I won’t care.”

“Oh.”

“Well, people used to surf for information when the web first came out,” I said, sheepishly. “Then they searched for information, and now they’re beginning to subscribe to information, so they don’t have to go further than their email or home page in order to get news and information about their favorite people, bloggers, restaurants and such - automatically.”

“Now that makes sense to me,” she smiled.

So after discussing the danger of too much knowledge (that can lead to arrogance and its own kind of ignorance she advised me); we determined I’d be best off removing all assumptions, and talking about the benefits of RSS vs. the features, as it were.

Humbled by the interaction, I’m determined to make RSS make sense in much more concrete terms.

The folks at Patanegra should follow a few simple steps to be automatically notified when their restaurant is mentioned online:

1) Go to www.attensa.com - they’re another Portland company (and client, which is why I’ve been pontificating for months about RSS) who makes an RSS platform for large companies, but they also make free RSS readers (what you use to subscribe to feeds) that anyone can use.

2) Download one of their free RSS feed readers - let’s say they want to have feeds delivered into their Outlook mail program - which is how I use it.

3) Once you’ve installed the reader, you’ll have a little series of icons added to your browser that look like this:

4) Click the “Configure” button, which will open up your configuration options, and set up a Search, by clicking the “Search” button:

5) Once the Search box opens, type in the search phrase, in this case, Patanegra; and I’d just “Select All” to point Attensa to grab any mention of Patanegra from any place on the web.

6) Click the “Add Feed” button and you’re done.

Now the folks from Patanegra will have mentions of their restaurant immediately fed into their email inbox, into the Attensa folder. They never have to go out looking for mentions of their restaurant, mentions will come to them. And maybe they’ll take Jack Black outside and have a little chat with him regarding his service, as a result.

Clearly, I have the changing state of public relations and journalism on my mind these days. In thinking about the read-write web, I found a very interesting post in the Washington City Paper blog about the “Ten Principles for Washington Post Journalism on the Web” released today.

My favorite principle:

10. Publishing our journalism on the Web should make us more open to change what we publish in the printed newspaper. There is no meaningful division at The Post between ‘old media’ and ‘new media.’ (emphasis mine)

Clearly things are changing.

The People Effect

New media influencers are proliferating online – there are expert bloggers in every niche market and Technorati (a leading blog search engine) tracks more then 90 million blogs today. That’s up from 78 million in April of 2007.

In addition to sharing stories and opinions, people are sharing all sorts of media - known as consumer generated content (CGC) - in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIN; and in content portals like Flickr (photo sharing) YouTube (video sharing) and iTunes (audio sharing).

And every single piece of media that is uploaded online is categorized, or “tagged” by the author. Technorati currently tracks more than 250 million tags (July, 2007).

The Technology Effect

Enabling this huge public publishing push is cheap, easy to use publishing technology. Blog software is free and extremely easy to use. Computers have built-in video cameras, and phones have built-in cameras and video. Anyone can be an online, multimedia publisher today.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the ultimate consumption technology. RSS allows publishers to feed their content simply and easily from their web sites to their readers. When readers subscribe to their RSS feeds, they’re automatically delivered to email inboxes, to phones and PDAs - anytime information is updated. Information comes to you as it happens…

Or you can set up persistent searches for categories (tags or phrases) you’re interested in, and anytime someone tags their content with your search phrase, you’ll have it delivered right to you immediately.

RSS is built into blog software, to social networking applications and into web sites. All you have to do is turn it on, and you’ll notice RSS icons (like the little gray one below my categories) are cropping up everywhere online.

The Read/Write Web

And with RSS platforms like that from Attensa, people can now instantly read feeds from within their email, react to them by adding their comments or thoughts, and publish their reactions along with the original feed to their own blog, their company’s intranet site or Wiki.

Knowledgeworkers are at the precipice of an explosion of productivity, enabled by the brains of their peers and the technology that’s now wrapping around every thing we do. It’s great to be alive.