 So welcome everybody. I'm glad you're here. We're going to talk about zombies. We're going to talk about content, content strategy, especially relevant for small businesses. If you have any questions throughout, you should just yell them out, okay? You don't need to wait for the end. I've reserved some time at the end, but feel free to stop me in the middle if you want. If I use some kind of jargon that you don't know, just say, Melissa, what's that? And I'll clarify. So no need to wait until the end. Business speak that has no meaning. So the most important thing is that you get your questions answered. I'm also not going to let anybody derail the whole presentation. So if anybody's worried about that, we're not going to do that either. We can always talk afterwards as well. So let's get started a little bit about me. So I spend time dealing with websites, dealing with apps, helping them be more clear, helping them be more user friendly. So I'm called a content strategist, which is a subdivision of UX, like UX world. I spend a lot of time doing user experience research as well, because you actually can't have good content strategy unless you understand your users and your customers really well, which makes sense, right? So let's talk about zombies. Let's not talk about me. I want to hear from you for a minute. Let's think about common zombie traits. Can you yell some out for me? What are typical things you think of when you think of zombies? Dead. Slow movements. Fleshy. Flesh eating. Unoriginal. Unoriginal. That's right. Inconsiderate. Inconsiderate. Very good. Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about this lately. And one thing I think a characteristic is that they're often confused or confusing. So here we have a confused zombie. Zombies often don't know what happened to them. They just know they're kind of in this state. They also can't explain themselves very well, which is confusing for everybody who interacts with them. And this is similar to a bad website, right? When I go to a website, I might be confused. Like, I've hit this one. This is a real website. Is the one-stop shop? I had to do the screenshot where you could see that I didn't actually cut it off at the top. It's just naturally cut off at the top. And when I first hit the site, for a minute I paused because I saw the camera and I saw the woman who had the clothes and I was like, did I just hit a porn site? Like, I'm not really sure. That wasn't the case. It's actually a nail salon, hair salon, and photography studio all in one. This is really confusing. I certainly can't figure that out very quickly. And the new parties? Do you see that? Yeah. All kinds of stuff. So this is a confusing website. I would say this is a real zombie kind of website. There's other kinds that are kind of confusing like this one. What do you think they sell? Yeah. So that's what's so interesting. This is actually a really dynamic, interesting shop right near my house that looks like this on the inside. And so when I went to their website that looked like this, I was like, this can't be the right website. I was like, let me, this must be another Morgan Imports. It's a really wonderful shop. It's really dynamic. Not coming through whatsoever, right? So it left me confused. So that's one characteristic about websites and also zombies. Another characteristic of zombies is that they're very haphazard in the way they operate in their movements. Like, for instance, they're very disheveled. You can see these are some guys from this movie Warm Bodies, which was a zombie movie that came out a few years ago. I got permission to use this photo from the studio. And you can just see they look kind of, you know, not real sharp, right? This happens on websites, right? Here we have an example of a website that looks a little haphazard, a little disheveled. It's the slider that actually doesn't work, right? And when I first went to the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and found this, I was like, that's pretty crappy, but I'm sure they'll fix that. So I had another talk 30 days later and I went back. It hadn't been fixed, right? So that's like this haphazard kind of disheveled look. It's not good. Typo's totally zombie, right? You can't have Typo's on your website. Like once you get your website up, you just need to be sending it to everybody who's not seen it lately and be like, hey, can you check me for Typo's? I'll give you a prize. I'll take you out to dinner if you can find a Typo or anything that looks wacky. If you don't have any visual hierarchy, because you've actually never taken, like, Design 101 and you're making your own website, you're going to look haphazard. You're going to look disheveled. Talk to a designer or just take Design 101. You can even take it through lynda.com nowadays and at least get some of those principles. So that's another common thing zombies have with bad websites. And the third thing I really think about is that they're really indistinguishable. Zombies are very unoriginal, as somebody shared. They're very similar. If I asked all of you to stand up and start acting like zombies, I bet you'd all do the same thing. I bet you'd kind of lurch over like this and you'd start, like, dragging along. You would all do that. Because that's kind of what we think of when we think of zombies. There's this similarity to them. There's this rote nature to them. And that's a big issue. Here they all are on the zombie lurch. Have you ever seen a zombie lurch? They're really popular in a lot of cities now where everybody gets together and they all act like zombies. Very fun. They all look the same. They're all bloody. They all kind of go along. That sort of thing. And that happens a lot. One of the biggest issues with websites is that they tend to be indistinguishable from each other at times. This is my friend. She's not a zombie. Her name is Dr. Julie Lellis. We're working on a book together about all these ideas. And so she has spent her research looking at a lot of nonprofits, for example, and dealing with some strategic communication issues. That's like her realm. And what she did for her, I guess this was even back, like the beginning was her thesis project. It's now been 10 years later. But she's continued to have found this happen. She studied 10 local nonprofit disability kind of organizations. So I'm not allowed to tell you their names, but if you can think of any major disability somebody might have, like say multiple sclerosis or something of that nature, you would probably come up with one of these organization's names. And she looked at 10 of these different websites that they had. She looked both at their websites and at some of their promotional marketing materials to really see what is the main message they're trying to get across. And she did what's, you know, like a message analysis, a content analysis. And what she found was that all 10 were saying, we're helpful. This is the main message of the 10 disability nonprofits. We're helpful. Well, that's great. You're a nonprofit. You should be helpful. That doesn't make you different than anybody else. You shouldn't be distinguished by the disease you're addressing. You know, there's other ways to distinguish yourself. We're helpful. We do a lot of blob buzz words, right? I kind of want to just cry when I hear the word innovative. You know, please don't tell me you're innovative. Please put a testimonial of a client saying, I'd never seen anything like this before. Or this was a totally new experience for me. Or something that actually tells me that it was really unique. And reliable, honest, friendly, that's kind of like business 101. You know, if we're going to do business, we need to be reliable and that sort of thing. So this kind of looking like everybody else, I feel like it's very zombie-like. It's very indistinguishable. And what causes it? What are ideas? What causes this? Lack of creativity, lack of innovation. No, say it again. Yeah, wanting to imitate competitors. Absolutely. Copycats, right? We tend to be copycats. So I worked in higher ed for about four years and it was the ultimate in copycats. I mean, I could be talking to people who are world-renowned researchers or whatever. But when it came to the website, I'd say, well, tell me your ideas for the website. The immediate question was, what is so-and-so doing? And what's this group doing over there? And it would happen with groups too. I'd be like, okay, you're the center for blank. And they'd be like, well, what's the business school doing? And I'm like, well, it doesn't really matter what the business school is doing. Tell me what you're doing. Tell me a little bit about you. And it's not that we don't do competitive analysis. Whenever we are, so for example, I'm in the middle of helping a client do a website redesign. And I'm starting with competitive analysis. So I'm like, let me know who you lose business to and let me look at their websites. And if you haven't done a competitive analysis, you're kind of like, I'm not really clear on what that is. Come see me afterwards. I'm happy to show you what it is because it's just an Excel spreadsheet. But I don't do it in order to then copy. I do it in order to then go, how can I stand out? How can I be different than everybody else? So it's easy to be a copycat because it's scary sometimes to stand out from everybody else. You can only put yourself out. You're a little bit vulnerable. But you don't want to be a zombie like everybody else. You really do want your own unique self to come through. There's another reason why I think we end up with kind of these situations where we're either indistinguishable or haphaz or that sort of thing. And it's tweaked like this. And I like entrepreneur overall. But I hate these kind of fear based statements. Like if you're not using video, you're screwed. Or if you don't have a hero image, your website is so outdated. There's these kind of comments that get pushed out on social media that it has to be this way. Everybody has to follow this trend. There's such similar trends in web designs. When you look through the themes in WordPress, I'm like, same, same, same, same, same, same, same, same. There's a lot of similarities at times. And I think that's not necessary. We want to follow best practices and that sort of thing. But that's a way to become haphazard, where you're not making deliberate choices. You're just like, well, they're doing it. I should do it. I'm going to throw it up there. So what's the solution to not be a zombie? So I think the focus is identity. And I'm not talking about identity as in logo, which at some point the design world grabbed onto and we're like, identity is logo and colors. And that's actually not what it is. I've run focus groups with different people. And if I get a bunch of marketing professionals, they'll say identity's logo. But all the lay people are like, well, identity is who you are. It's your real self. And I'll be like, OK, yeah. That's how we kind of define identity. I'm like, what's brand? And they go, rip off. They start some negative connotations come around the word brand. And so I think there's a difference between the two and I'll go into a little bit more about that because it does confuse people. But I think identity comes from core values. What we do, our behavior, what we look like, our visual communication, which, yes, includes our logo. Yes, includes our colors. Yes, includes our beautiful hero image. If you're going to choose a website with a really big, large image on the front of it, that image ought to be heroic. It ought to be awesome, like no doubt. And then our written and verbal communication, right? What we say, the text we write, that kind of stuff. Notice that what we say is on the outside because what we do is the true self, right? We can say we give fast response times and then not actually respond to the contact form requests that came in, right? Which then negates whatever we say. And so that's why social proof is so powerful when you have third parties saying what you've done because it gets to that whole, this is really what they did. This isn't just what they said they would do. If you're dealing with a client and they're kind of putting a lot of text up there, I'm like, do you have to say this yourself or can somebody else say it for you? And if you're even a new business and you're, I talked to somebody yesterday who was kind of starting a new kind of arts oriented business and they've given away a lot of this beautiful art they've made. And I'm like, well you can still get testimonials about how awesome it is and how beautiful it is and how much they valued it and how it sits every day on the living room table that everybody enjoys it and that sort of thing. Even if it actually hasn't been sold yet. I don't care to not be a zombie. This is how to me it's different than brand. So brand and many people do agree with this. It's this idea of all the experiences somebody has with a company. Everything all wrapped together. The thing is you only have a little bit of control around that. And the foundation is your identity. An easy way to think about this is actually if I go into, give you an example of a person and not a company and I think you'll get this. Tiger Woods is the ultimate zombie. Tiger Woods was the golden boy. The mixed race excellent athlete. The poster child everybody wanted to endorse. And then 2009 happened. And then we're looking at the news and we're seeing like golf club chasing car issue like what's this drama. A few months later we're talking 15 mistresses. We finally get the press conference four months afterwards. Look at the apology. Very controlled. It's actually the apology is so painful to watch. It's about 14 minutes long and it should have stopped after 90 seconds. And it just goes on and on and on. The reason it's such a zombie exhaust and it was like who is this guy? He was like this and he's not like that. And Nike goes, yeah, we're done with endorsing that. Bye bye Gatorade, bye bye Accenture. He lost a lot around that whole thing. And did Tiger Woods need a branding expert at that point? Did he need somebody to come in and work on his image? No. He even said to himself, I need to work with a therapist. He needed to work on who he was and what was going on. And oftentimes businesses we focused on kind of like the outer layer of like, yeah, we really need people to get that we're this or that. And I'm like, are you really this or that? Or should you work on that first and make sure that's been communicated out? Sometimes there's a disconnect. And it takes I think a real self-aware business to really look at themselves and say we are totally dropping the ball in this area. And we're just dropping the ball and we need to step it up. If we're going to say that on our website we actually need to do it. And just being really mindful of that sort of thing. Zombies are not mindful. They do not pay attention to this sort of thing. So that's why I think most small business people need to focus on identity. Brand will take care of itself. Let's talk about it in terms of a bigger company. Does anybody recognize this manifesto? Lululemon. Lululemon, right? Friends are more important than money. For those of you who don't know, because there might be a few people who don't, Lululemon is like a woman athletic apparel company that's gotten really popular I would say in the last seven years. Really popular. Their logo is kind of interesting. It kind of looks like, my father-in-law was like, is that a dentist? Because it kind of looks like a tooth? Yeah, yeah. There you go. There's your example. He thought, is that a dentist? I'm like, no, that's Lululemon. He was like, oh, okay. He's obviously not in the target demographic. So they put out this manifesto of like, this is what we're about. And a lot of people like this. They've got it on bags and people will use it to take their lunch to work. And it's really warm and fuzzy and nice. And then this guy gets on Bloomberg TV. This is Chip Wilson. He founded this company. And he makes this comment. I'm going to read it. So they were having an issue with their pants. Some people in here do yoga. Maybe a few people? A few people? Yeah, right? You wear pants. You bend over a lot, right? You do not want your pants to be see-through. You know? So they were having an issue around sheerness of their pants. And instead of like taking responsibility for that, Chip blames women. He goes, they just don't work for some women's bodies. It's really about the rubbing through the thighs. How much pressure there is over a period of time. And his wife looked at him. And she tried to save him. But it was too late. I mean, the Bloomberg reporter was like, did he really just blame Lululemon's issue with their fabric on women's thighs being too big? I mean, there was an uproar about all this. And the uproar was because they'd set expectations, right? This is all about liking yourself and being friendly. And then he's saying, well, like, some women shouldn't even wear our stuff, right? Like, like your body, but don't wear our stuff, OK? And all of a sudden they lost times of business. So this is one of the case studies in a book I'm writing. And it has affected them for a long time. It's like he forgot who they were. And it makes me go, were you ever this to begin with? Or was this just the manifesto? Was this the marketing thing? Was this the branding thing? And I think we're in a world where authenticity is really powerful. I think people do care where stuff comes from. Does everybody care? Probably not. But I think there's a good majority of us who actually do. And so you might be a small business owner and you're like, well, that is great. And I don't really have time to go do a little, like, work retreat right now and figure out my core values and just take a day of reflection and sort it all out. And this is a trust fall. I don't know if you've ever done a trust fall where you stand and you fall back into people's arms. And if you do it with coworkers, it's super weird. You don't want to do it. You don't want to work retreat like this. It's awkward. But there's different ways that you can kind of get your core values in a quick, dirty fashion. And it often comes through this. Like, what three characteristics truly describe you? Not like what you want people to say, but what you really are. Like, when you're your best self, how's your group described? And I'm going to give you an example. So when I first took my job at Duke University, right now I'm a consultant so I don't work there anymore. When I first took a job there, I got hired by the economics department, which was described as a black hole. So they desperately needed communication help because nobody knew what the heck was going on around there. And I spent time doing stakeholder interviews. So if you're in like a little bit of a larger company that's not just one or two people, you actually kind of go around and talk to people. And I just would go. I went to the chair of the department. I went to the co-chair. I went to the chair's wife. I went to other people. And I said, well, what are the three characteristics? Like, what describes this department? How's this department different than the other departments? And why are we different than like the economics department in Michigan? I don't understand. You need to tell me. And they could all really articulate it really well, right? And they were like, this is it. Like, we are young. We are not like the old guys that's sitting around. We are actually, a lot of people are under 40. There's tons of research going on. Actually, Melissa, the guy crossed me on the hall. He's got like more citations than all of us put together and blah, blah, blah. So it kind of gave me, these are descriptive phrases. They're not exactly adjectives, all of them, OK? And it really helped me because then when I was making a decision about content on the website, I'm picking pictures like this with all the young guys, right? This kind of looks like Gap Commercial, especially because of that guy in the middle, right? And like, and they look young. I mean, Jimmy looks 12, right? And he's really like 30 at this point. He has children. But so it's helping me inform those content decisions because I'm remembering like these are the three things that they really feel like they are. And so when it's really important during the year for them to get this message out that we're young and research active, the younger guys, in this case a young lady too, are going to be on the front. And it really helped. Now sometimes you'll be in a situation where you walk around and you talk to stakeholders and you're like, what are your adjectives? And they're like, someone's saying these three things and someone's saying these three things and someone else saying these three things and you're like, who are we, y'all? You know? And are we going to have a work retreat about this? And you know, you might, if you're a marketing person or a communication person or whatever, you might be like, I don't get to control these people and get them to go and get together in a room and figure this out. But what you can do is just like get people to just agree. Okay, for the next year can this be our message? This, I heard a little bit of overlap between y'all. Do you think these are the three things that we can focus on emphasizing about our character? I feel like they're real, I feel like they're authentic. Let's focus on this for the next year and see if you can get people to agree at least on that. And then you might point out to them that longer term we want to figure out exactly who we are because we're all telling people different stuff. So when I worked for a, I did some consulting for a group of really smart people who run around fixing enrollment systems for high schools which is a big deal if you're a parent and trying to get your kid into different high schools and that sort of thing. So they ran around fixing that and I spent a lot of time talking to them about what does somebody have to really get about your website? You know? This is always the ultimate question. If they can't get anything else, like what do they have to get? And he'd be like, they've got to get what's politically neutral. How do they get that? You know? And they would tell me their adjectives and they were really clear about this. And they would tell me, these are our adjectives. And I'm like, that is great, Neil. I'm so glad you told me that. We're going to make sure your website reflects these adjectives. We're going to make sure this message is coming through. But when you go speak at a conference, you need to make sure those are coming through. You know? When you're at a cocktail party, make sure it's coming through. People can only take in so many messages. They're used to this idea and advertising and marketing that you have to say something seven times to people in order for them to get the message. Are you kidding me in today's market? You probably need to say it 20 times for them to get the message. Right? And then we can do a whole another talk on, like, how your message is received by people. Right? So true content strategy is, I figure out what I want to say. I figure out what other people want to hear and learn and need for me. And then I find the overlap between the two groups. Right? And that's a different talk about user research, market research, that sort of thing. But if you aren't clear on who you are, you are going to be zombie-like. You're going to come off as haphazard. You're going to come off as confused. So think about what does somebody have to get. And then the idea is, like, you're going to be mindful. You have a good brain. You're going to be really mindful of that identity for all kinds of decisions on your website. What pictures you put up, what kind of copy you use, that sort of thing. You're going to be remembering it in photos, videos, graphics, copy, everything. I have a friend who used to work at a high-end prep school in my area. It's called Durham Academy. He was talking to me about how he was really careful when he was writing. Perhaps there would be an event, and there would be an event in the gym. And instead of saying something like, the Durham Academy parents and students and faculty all got together in the gym for this event, he would say the Durham Academy community, because that was their big thing. It was like you're not just buying an education and paying, you know, 30 grand a year. You were actually buying a community. You know, you get to be a part of this community. So every time he had the choice to use that word, he would. So this is like subtle messages to keep getting reinforced. They're reinforced through visuals. They're reinforced through the copy, and that sort of thing. So let's look at some examples of mindful websites just to kind of give you a few to look at. I don't think these websites are perfect by any means, but I feel like these three companies are really mindful about their identity and who they are. They're not just switching. You don't want to be a chameleon. You don't want to be a zombie. One of them is Title IX. Has anybody heard of Title IX? Some of our ladies are holding their hands up. Okay. So Title IX is out of California. They are actually the first athletic company that focused on women's apparel. And they started with somebody named Missy Parks, Missy Park, pardon me, back in the 1980s when she was wearing men's athletic clothes because she was a college athlete at Yale. And she was like, this stuff doesn't fit me. You know, like, she got tired of it. So she just started figuring out how to make it herself. And it's created this company now. And they really stand out in this whole realm of like Lululemon, Athleta, Gapbody, whoever else, because their muscles look like they could knock you out. Right? She's got muscles, you know? Nobody's getting that pineapple away from her. She runs down the beach. She's got abs. Okay? They're very picky about their models. Their models look like real athletes. The people they employ in their company actually use the products. You get somebody on the phone, they understand. And I think that is really their identity kind of coming through in everything they do. So this to me is authenticity. Right? You want to buy from this or you want to buy from Lululemon? Big difference between the two, right? There's another company, and this one's kind of interesting. It's from North Carolina, and it started on Kickstarter. Kind of cut off on the side there. It's called Freaker. And what they basically do is they make like little sweaters for your drinks. Right? So like koozies. There's things you get for free at, you know, events. They were like, we're going to sell these. We're going to make sweaters and we're going to sell these suckers. And they're actually doing really good. So, and they are incredibly unique. Let me read you the copy that they've got when they explain themselves. Established in 2011 and located in Wilmington, North Carolina, Freaker USA quickly grew to be the global leader of preventing moist handshakes and sweaty beverages with high quality American made products. So this company doesn't look like other companies. Like they, to do their marketing, what they did was they got a yellow kind of truck thing and they drove around the country for four months throwing grilled cheese parties and getting people to come party with them with beer and would put on their little sweater. They have got like a cult following going on. They're profitable. They're now going into socks and that sort of thing. And the thing I think that really stands out to me about them and really makes them not a zombie is something Anne Hanley, I went to a marketing conference not too long ago. And Anne Hanley is an author of a book called Content Rules, a very good book. She also does lots of blogging which is very good and she's just a speaker, kind of a content marketer sort of person. She really says this quote that impacted me and it said, if they took your label away, your logo away from your website, would they know it's you? Or would they mix you up with the competition? We took off that logo. And if you took the logo off the Freaker, would it still be the Freaker people? You would know, right? But too often we kind of like, is our copy that different? Do we really stand out for our competitors? Or are we kind of the same? Are we kind of just saying the same thing maybe with like a different synonym? And of course there's going to be some similarities because we compete on services. We compete on stuff. So how else do we stand out? Let's look at something that's not quite as exciting. I mean, you may be like, there's no way I'm ever going to take my business on the road for four months and go throw grilled cheese parties or any other kind of party. Like that's not my business, right? Maybe you're like, I'm a law firm or I'm something like that. So here's a law firm that I think it's not a perfect website. Within three seconds, do you understand what they do? Yeah, right? Their identity is clear. They are dealing with accidents. That's their thing. And it's actually kind of depressing. Their website is just kind of like accident after accident after accident. Is it well received by clients? I'm not exactly sure. I can see they're very mindful of their identity. And I think this is stronger than a lot of the website trends I've seen in professional services where it's like the big head of the lawyer or the accountant or whoever being like, hi, welcome to my site. I'm going to be a friendly guy, you know? I feel like I see a lot of that lately. These are men or women who are like, hey. I don't know. There's this whole idea in the world of web design and you ask in particular that within five seconds somebody should know what your site is, like what it's about. Very clear, okay? And you can test this. You can test it on a site called usabilityhub.com. It's the site I tend to use because you can do it for cheap. You can take a screenshot of your homepage and if you're in a middle of a redesign you can take a shot of the Photoshop file or the design before you code it. Don't code it until you test it, right? Throw it out there. Let people look at it for five seconds and then you ask them just a few questions. What's the site about? Whose site is this? Well, who's the target audience? You just ask them a few basic questions and see if they're getting it. See if they're getting the main message you're trying to get across. See if it matches. Now you may be like, okay, I'm on board with this, Melissa. This makes sense to me. I'm on board with identity and core value is going to come through. I'm going to work on being authentic. And then you're like, but I've got a bunch of other people who are not interested in listening to me, right? And co-workers can be like that at times. And I bumped into that. If any of you are from big organizations, there's times when people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, but I just am doing this, you know? Or like, I'm on this part of the website and you're on that part of the website. It's hard to influence sometimes other people. So there's a strategy to do this, right? And it may just be you are the marketing, communications person and the business owner. And the business owner, you're like, I've got to influence this business owner to get clear on our values and get them coming out. And you start first by documenting it, right? So you actually write it down. So, you know, there's a whole phrase of like if there's a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Like, is it even a communication plan if it's not written down? If it's in your head, it doesn't count as far as I'm concerned, right? Like content strategy is like this new sexy word for something we've been doing forever, which is communication planning, right? Content strategy became popular because content has become popular because we're all online now. And when the iPhone hit in 2007, everything went crazy in terms of content and having computers in our pockets and stuff like that. So we've got to be making a plan for this. We've got to plan for our content, be clear on, okay, these are our three things. And if people get nothing else about us, they have to understand just one thing. And you keep reminding people of it, right? This is why companies do mission statements or vision statements and that sort of thing. But there's a big difference between it being on the wall and something that's actually talked about. Something, for example, you might put on a post-it note next to your workstation, you know, and you look at it and you're writing something for your website and you're like, am I really sticking to those values or am I not? And you might think, oh, I'll totally remember this. You won't. I've had to train people in this and they send me their stuff to edit and I'm like, you totally forgot about, like, it's missing. We really need those reminders for ourselves and for other people. It kind of reminds me, honestly, I'm a mom and I've got a four-year-old and I'm always reminding her like, we don't hit people. We are a family that does not hit people, you know? We listen to others. I'm having to reinforce who we are a lot. And I think in companies we need to do that more. Yeah, we're a company that operates with integrity, right? We're going to do what's best for the client, even if that means in the short run it's not good for us. You know, those kinds of reminders. And then we can use usability research. I mentioned usability hub, but you can always, I've got to tell you, the compelling thing to do is like a usability test with your website. You learn how to do them. There's a book that does a really good kind of do-it-yourself sort of thing called Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug. It's very clear, but usability testing is a really great way for people to see if their websites are confusing to other people. Because sometimes I can say to a business owner, I can say, your website's really confusing. And they're like, yeah, that's your opinion. And I'm like, no, you know, you want me to put in front of five people and see if it's confusing? I can prove it to you, you know? I don't say it like that. I'm just like, oh, should we run usability tests? I can get them to agree to that. And if I put in front of five people and they're confused, we have an issue. And you can measure your results over time, too. You can see, okay, are people less confused now? Are we getting more of the kinds of quality leads we want to get? So the idea, when you're clear on your identity, you will repel some people. There are some people who should be repelled. They're not a good match for you. They want you to work for too little. They may be micromanagers, or for whatever reason, they're just not a good fit for you. So the people who are not a good fit for you, you want to get rid of them right away. So how many people in here are married? So we have a bunch of married. Other people have girlfriend, boyfriend, partner. Okay, so in some ways, a lot of us are matched up. I want you to know, you are never done dating. You're dating all the time, all the time in our lives. We're trying to figure out who are those companies we want to give our money to? Who are those people we want to spend our time with? We're going to do it the rest of our lives. Life partner, that's just one person, right? And I think of the internet as a huge match.com, right? And so very quickly, with your identity, you want somebody to be able to be like, yeah, this company's for me. Or like, no, they're too high-end for me. Or they're too this for me. Or they're too bad. Or they're not as quickly as possible. And you can do that. So the whole idea is really avoid being a zombie by being mindful of your identity and letting that really shine through. And maybe I'll give a talk next year more about, like, target audience and that sort of thing, because that's a whole other ballgame. For further learning, I'm writing a book. It'll be out next year. And it's going to go into really details. And we'll have a lot of case studies of this, like Lululemon. There are a lot of cases of zombies out there. It's harder to find the people who we feel like are fully embodied and they're fully themselves. But I think Title IX does it really well. And there's other companies that are, you know, while they might stumble, they then get back on the horse of being like who they truly are. Don't make me think, it's by Steve Krug. He also wrote the book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, about the usability testing. But this is kind of like the UX101 book. This is the book that when a friend says, I'm starting doing a startup. Can you look at my website? I'm like, I will if you read this book first before you design your website. And if you read this book and follow it, then I'm happy to do it ever. But read this book first. Because it is just really basic, very clear. And it correlates really well to what I'm trying to say about identity. So I definitely recommend it. It's $20. It's a five-hour read on Amazon. Totally worth it. Made to Stick is a book by Chip and Dan Heath that was on the bestseller list for five years. It's about storytelling and what makes things memorable. So that is a good way to come up with, like, simple, memorable ideas. There's also a group called the Content Strategy Alliance. So Content Strategy is kind of a newish word. It has to do with digital content a lot. People are still kind of figuring, like, my mom has no idea what I do. A lot of people don't know what I do. I just say, like, I deal with planning for content. I try to make websites better. That sort of thing. But there's a website. And there's a free handbook on this website that a bunch of us made. And there's also free templates. So if you're like, I think I should do a competitive analysis. But I don't know where to start. There's a template for that. You can just go here and download it for free. And you don't have to even give your address or anything like that. It's just a free resource. So questions? I'm going to leave that up there. Go ahead. We start at the core. And a lot of times it's tough to get in touch with the core. And you touched on it three times. It's basically fear, which is the fear-based thing of why you can't really be authentic until, but then that's the many layers of an onion and it never really stops. But you've got to start getting there and overcoming the fear that it's just building stuff. That's my whole lecture by myself. Yeah. I mean, it's easier. It's kind of like in the short run, it feels safer to just be like somebody else. Right? Like play it safe. But in the long run, I don't think that actually helps you gain business. I think it also helps you attract people who are not the right match for you. Like I'm sure some of you have the experience of working with somebody and you're like way down the line in the project and you're like, there were red flags. I knew this was not good at the beginning. I should have, you know, I wish I had just gotten rid of them at the beginning. Like when you're clear on your identity and who you are and who you work with and who you don't work with, that's really going to help. And part of who you work with and don't work with is knowing yourself and who jives well with you. Who's a good match for you. So yeah, it is getting over the fear. There's a lot of fear too of like, I don't want to turn away clients, you know? And there is some of that in the beginning. But as soon as you can like start to just say, I have a document, 20 ways to say no, I'm happy to send it to anybody. It is really helpful. You know, I have to say that when I started saying no, I started getting more of the projects I really wanted. When I started saying no, I don't want to write blog posts, I got more content strategy projects which are more higher like level. They also cost more because they're the planning part of it all, you know? But I had to take that jump and be like, no, I'm not going to write all that, you know? I feel like my time is more valuable than that. So good question up here. You got one back there. Yeah, so what you can do is because you kind of want to see your return on investment. Like if I put money into making my site more usable, how am I going to actually see that? And so you're going to have to like figure out what are your key metrics. And for each type of business that might be a little bit different, e-commerce is like easy because it's sales, right? E-commerce is sales. Anything that's facilitating the sales process, less shopping carts abandonments, that sort of thing, that's great. On a site that's more like a marketing, for sure, it could be, it could be, it depends on what you kind of got going on your site. It could be email signups if that's one of your big things. That's your conversion button. It could be quality of leads that you're getting in. So right now I'm working with a client and I'm like, how do you determine the quality of your leads? Because we need to measure that. We need to measure that what we're doing is actually changing the quality of the lead and we're getting more of the matches that are right for you. And she's like, well, I just kind of keep it in my head. You know, not in your head. I'm like, no. It's in your contact management system. Not your management system. Your CRM, your relationship manager system. I'm like, you've got this person. Write down where it's from and then give them a rating one through five. And we've defined those categories of one through five. Five being the worst, one being the best. And let's rate that. And then over time, whatever we do on the website, we can start to see, are you getting quality of leads that are higher up? What's the average? That sort of thing. So I think it's about figuring out what the metrics are that are important for your business and then keeping an eye on them over time, right? Three months from now is a different. It could be website traffic. It could not. It could be bounce rate. It could not. So there's things like if you are more clear on who you are, you might have more bouncing happening in the beginning. People might come to your website and then head on out. But it's okay because some of the people are going out. Like you don't necessarily know the why behind stuff. So that's why I think usability testing is really helpful to go ahead and catch on to, are my messages being received correctly? And then you can use another kind of quantitative measure like sales, like downloaded paper, white paper or whatever you happen to do and kind of look at those together. So it's not just quantitative website traffic. It's not just qualitative. It's the combination of the two and that's how you measure over the time. You can measure year over year. You want to measure year over year especially because things can change seasonally. But it's worth it to figure out what is the measure? You know? And also sometimes they'll be like measures that, like what I'm doing for a client, the measurement is your stress level. Like if you're less stressed out because I'm doing content work for you, what's your stress level right now? And let's see what it is in three months. And if that decreases your stress, well then that's another measurement we have to enter the factor into the equation. And that actually could be one for development too or that sort of thing if somebody's trying to do something in-house versus outsourcing. Other questions? Yes. Well it's really relevant to A-B testing, right? So you have things like optimizely. You can use for A-B testing or validately for A-B testing. And you're really just testing to see what resonates the most with the user group that you're targeting. So it's absolutely part of it. Because there is no content... So I've done talks about content strategy and I've done talks about user experience like all in one where they're like, for the first half talk about content strategy and the conference organize when we talk about user experience in the second half and I'm like, putting my slides together and I'm like, I can't figure out which half this should go in because it's all the same stuff, you know? Like you cannot have a good content strategy unless you kind of understand your users well what they want and don't want. Right? So it's like know yourself, know your users then find that overlap between what you want and what they want and where you kind of fit. And that's where the A-B testing comes in. That comes in like the optimizing pages. You got to figure out like the general of what they want first. Any other questions about content? Strategy? UX? Usability? Well, so you come up with things like editorial guidelines. So this is the person who is often the content strategist who comes up with a document that's kind of like, so this is how we refer to ourselves. We refer to ourselves as like we instead of the company or the firm and there may be some other things and usually what an editorial style guide is is that they first they adopt like an AP style guide or some other one and they build on top of it. We always call our company this and then you make sure everybody's doing that and then you also have of course style, voice and tone, right? Voice being your personality. So our personality is upbeat but professional, you know? And you actually have examples of like, so write like this and not like this. And so that's what I'll provide to a client. I'll say write more like this, less like this. And so you give people examples that then they can look at and it's all about having them to look at it. So sometimes you create this beautiful style guide so everybody can sound the same and then they don't look at it and then nobody sounds the same. So how do you do it in academia? It's very similar. So for example at Duke there's an office of branding and strategic communication and they're coming up with editorial style guide that then can be used by the different entities around the school. The challenge in academia is everybody's like, I want to be different, like I'm everybody's so decentralized, right? But there doesn't make a lot of sense for you to just separate yourself out from the big school identity and the big school brand. You want to be on board as much as possible in terms of logo and that sort of thing. But it's an editorial style guide and it's written out in companies like Mu.com and some of the, I would say more forward thinking that are very clear on their identity. Instead of doing the style guide like in a word doc they'll put them on like cards that people can like flip through and be like okay I'm supposed to be using we instead of the center for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm supposed to be using a more casual tone of voice and that sort of thing. Academia is a hard one. Academia is herding cats but you just try to do the best you can do and kind of move everything in the right direction and you try to scoot people that way. Long view. Any other questions? Great. Thanks all for coming. I have a...