It’s time to rethink the online resources companies provide their partners.

Recently, we’ve been playing with a few concepts and it really seems to be working:

1) Lower the barriers to entry. Your partners probably have many vendors they work with. Gating your content is only a minor hurdle for your competitors who want the information, but its a huge hurdle in preventing your partners from accessing the information. Most of your content isn’t top-secret anyway, and for the few pieces that are, consider distributing through email or locking only those resources down.

2) Cull the content. Instead of throwing every potential resource and document on a partner community or Website, focus on just the few items that the partner needs to be successful . . . a few sales tools, links to resources and materials for download. Supplement with a steady stream of email, blog posts and in-person communications.

3) Build for the user story, not for every potential use case. Identify the stories you want your partners to tell and build the program around those stories. Instead of planning for every eventuality, set up a communications channel that can address those unique scenarios as one-offs.

4) Be mobile friendly. Even in the most complex enterprise partner programs I work on, we’re seeing 20% of traffic from mobile devices.

5) Don’t take the relationship for granted. Listen to what the partner wants, deliver with their needs in mind and don’t sacrifice a steady stream of communication for a Website with a lot of “stuff.”

When we think of touch today, we think of responsive design for smaller devices, not for full sized monitors. I believe we’re just  24 months away from the majority of PCs being touch enabled. I have no official research to back that up, but I trust my instinct. Today we consider responsive and adaptive design to be about scaling down. But what about the tablet experience scaled up? My touch screen monitor at home is 28″. Sony has a 20 inch tablet in market. Every PC manufacturer has 1/2 dozen or more touch based notebooks.

There’s a good chance that the Websites you’re designing today will be used primarily on touch devices by next year. If your design team doesn’t have experience in interaction design and motion studies now is the time to ramp them up.

Designing for touch extends past Websites. PDFs, emails, Facebook tabs and applications will all be consumed on touch devices in the very near future.

Some useful reading on the  subject:

The Tangible Web: Thoughts on Designing Websites for Touchscreens

Best Practices of Touch Screen Interface Design

Windows Dev Center: Touch

Design for Fingers

As marketers, we are great at taking a simple concept or an old concept and making it flashy and new again with some re-branding.  Some of our worst offenses in this art form come from our own industry. I am guilty of using these terms, but next time I use them, somebody slap me.

• Transmedia – Its simple enough, the idea of using more than one channel to tell a story. Just because the word multimedia exists to convey multiple types of media, does that mean we really a word to describe across media?

• Content Marketing – I am a huge believer in the value of good content and thinking about content strategically. But instead of developing a new industry around content marketing. Let’s consider just making marketing better and more effective through good content.

• ROI – okay this isn’t a marketing term. But when was the last time you used it correctly in a sentence? If you have to look up the definition to check, you already know the answer.

• Content creator — Are you a writer? A storyteller? A producer? Years from now we may be able to purchase the Industrial Content Creator 7000 for our content factories, but I don’t think I have any of them on my team now.

Now, get off my lawn!

“Eating while deciding important matters offers profitable, measurable benefits through mutually productive discussions.”

Smart people studied this. They found that eating a meal while discussing business led to maximum mutual benefit. Even more so than other bonding activities.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/should_you_eat_while_you_negot.html

Some might say this is the secret to my success, others might question why I’m not a billionaire CEO.

In  recent tests I conducted across multiple email campaigns, 41 percent of  emails were open on a mobile device. Other reports show an average of 36 percent. When looking at the data, it was clear that mobile has become the new message preview. Our recipients were using their mobile devices to scan through email and deciding what to delete immediately or keep and read at their desktop.

Because our desired use case was to get them to read and act upon the mail in a structured work setting, mobile became a delivery issue, and we just needed to make sure enough content was scannable so the user would be interested to go back and read it on full-sized screen.

But what if you have a use case where user context lends itself to mobile? Do you A) optimize for mobile and potentially sacrifice the desktop experience, B) provide a link to a mobile-optimized Web page or C) is responsive design ready for email?

Assuming all the critical variables align – your mobile user base is predominantly on modern smartphones, you have mobile-optimized landing pages and your message and CTAs make sense for a user who’s probably on the go – then the next item on the checklist is delivery.

And here is where it gets complicated.

Enough of today’s modern smartphones email clients can recognize and render multiple layouts, but not all of them.  Style Campaign has a great list (below) of the most common email clients and whether or not they support media query – the function that drives responsive layouts.

If you do choose to test responsive email layouts, be sure to build the templates for graceful fail. You’re almost guaranteed to have some failure, so make sure that the mail always renders on a full-sized screen and there’s enough information in the subject line, and pre-header that the recipient will decide to keep it.

Sure, an account person must earn the trust and the respect of their clients. They must always be looking out for the client’s business interests, career interests, and make sure they are adding value, but they don’t have to be buddies with the client.

I’m writing in broad generalities here, but when an agency account person tries to be their client’s pal, it makes the average account person more reluctant to maintain an honest relationship. Bad news tends to be delivered slower, and recommendations and advice are often given based on what the client wants to hear rather than what might be best for the customer, the user or the business.

Instead of being a friend, be an advisor. Make the client happy through good counsel, timely interactions and updates and by delivering great work. I know many great account people who have become friends with their clients, but those lasting and productive relationships were built over time.

Facebook Like gates, sometimes called fan gates, increase your Page’s Likes by requiring visitors to Like a Page before viewing content on select Tabs. With each Like, there is a chance your future posts will show up in that visitor’s news stream, creating engagement opportunity. In addition, Likes are becoming increasingly important for SEO.

On the downside, not all Likes are created equal. Requiring Likes at Like gates results in lower quality Likes than organic Likes. Like gates can be an annoyance, and sometimes even a barrier to fans. On the properties I’ve worked with, we see about a 20% bounce rate on Like gates. Like gates also block search crawlers from the gated Tab unless specific customization is done to provide indexible content for bots outside the gate.

Below are some guiding questions to help determine if you should Like gate content or not.

This week I’m working on a mobile strategy for a client, and a deliverable as a result of that strategy is a single experience that works across all devices.  While working on the project, we realized that a user sitting attheir desktop is trying to accomplish something complettely different than someone braowing the web with a tablet, or killing time with a mobile phone.  Looking back at that post, I failed to speak about context in the use case.

Maybe responsive design should be renamed contextual design or responsive context?

In real-life use cases, the form factor is far less important than the context. In fact, the form factor is just an indicator of context and leads you to the likely use cases.

What really matters is not the device, but what the users are trying to accomplish on the device. This means the content, navigation and tools might change alongside the design.

We were reaching the casual information seeker, but not the solution seeker. Our audience was engaging with us out of curiosity. We were seeing high traffic during commute hours and prime time. Now I appreciate the awareness, but I want traffic at 10:30 a.m. when the IT manager is looking for a solution to a problem.  Mobile wasn’t getting us that traffic.

Solution:
We’re going to building tools into mobile experience that makes it easy for mobile users to flag content for follow-up when they’re back at their desk. Our hypothesis is if we can get the user past the awareness and information stage on mobile and get them to the desktop, we have a higher chance of getting a conversion at the desktop.

Observation: As companies expand their social footprint and create more content designed for social, I’ve noticed a remarkable decrease in actual consumer engagement and conversation.

Today, many brands are focused on making sure they have a steady stream of content to feed into Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Creating all that content takes a lot of time and energy. Some of that content builds to engagement, but much of it merely generates Likes, which don’t have a lot of value.

With such a heavy focus on developing content, social media managers aren’t truly listening and engaging as much as they should. For listening they are relying on tools like Radian 6. These tools are very valuable, but they generate reports on listening as opposed to truly listening as if you were part of the conversation. At the same time the heavy content focus has turned engagement to be about putting something out there and seeing how people respond. To truly connect with customers, comp0anies need to also see what their customers are putting out there and then respond and engage with those customers.

Pushing content is a critical element of a successful social engagement strategy, but so is the old-fashioned listen and engage in conversation and make it personal approach.