Posts Tagged ‘Customization’

Twitter does not exist in a vacuum. If you are using it for business, it should be integrated into your overall marketing plan. At the very least, you should be trying to drive some traffic to your website via Twitter. But you can do even more. You might want to show off your Twitter feed on your website. Or maybe you will want to create a customer brag feed for Twitter and also post that on your website. You will also want to promote your site content in your Twitter feed.

Putting Twitter on Your Website

There are several ways to go about putting your Twitter feed on your website. If you use a Wordpress based website like I do, you simply need to add a plug-in widget to your sidebar. I use the “Twitter for Wordpress” plug-in. Just add the plug in and place it where you want on your sidebar.

Twitter provides its own widgets for displaying Tweets. There are specific widgets for MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, and Blogger. There are also Flash and HTML widgets that you can install on any website (assuming you know at least a little about coding). These widget options can be found at Twitter.com/widgets.

If you are in to your own customization, or are paying a web designer to keep your web site up to date, you can customize the Twitter code or find code freely available online to place your Twitter feed on your website.

Customer Brag Feed

You may not want to put your personal Twitter feed on your business’s web site. In that case, consider creating a second Twitter account and publishing a “customer brag feed.” On this feed, you can post cool information about your customers. Then, on your website, you will have a running stream of content all about the customers.

Some other options would be to Tweet testimonials, special offers, or company news. These tweets can all do double duty as part of the Twitter stream and as dynamic updates on your own web site.

Promote Your Site Content

While it is a great idea to integrate Twitter with your website, you will also want to integrate your website more closely with Twitter. Do you have a way for site visitors to follow you on Twitter? You should. You can easily create a Twitter icon and link. Just do a search for Twitter icons to find one that you like. Download it to your computer (right click, save image as…), and then place it on your site. Add a hyperlink to twitter.com/”yourusername”.

You also may want to set up an automatic tweet to go out when you add new content to your blog. There is a service called Ping.fm which will let you send tweets from just about anywhere and set up custom automatic tweets. Or you can do what I do, which is publish my RSS feed to FriendFeed and then have all my FriendFeed updates publish to Twitter as well. While this is kind of a back door to automatic updating, it works well if you are already using both FriendFeed and Twitter. You can do the same thing using Hootsuite. Just look under settings. No matter what service you use, I recommend only doing the automatic tweet once per new post. Use scheduling to do more personal updates on your new posts.

One thing you will want to add to your blog, or even to your static site articles, is a way for others to easily tweet your content. The most popular way to do this is with a service called TweetMeme. With TweetMeme, you can add a button to your posts that will make it easy for people to retweet your article. You can customize the message that goes out and track how many people have retweeted.

These are just a few things you can do to integrate your web site and Twitter. Get it in your head that if you use Twitter for your business, you should seek to make it part of your bigger marketing picture, and that includes integration.

Add your own ideas and experiences on integrating Twitter in the comments below.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

Treating every job as a custom order is very time consuming. You want to be flexible to meet client needs, but being overly custom has some serious down sides. Things take longer, there is more room for error, and you may deliver something completely different than what the client had in mind.

In order to avoid the drain of customization, you need to standardize your practices. Having standard offerings can keep things humming along inside your business and help you avoid serious time drain. Its okay to standardize. It means you present a consistent product or service. And yes, its actually easier to customize if you are doing it from a standard base.

Have you ever watched the reality show, American Choppers? They build custom motorcycles. Even though each bike is a serious custom job, they have to adhere to certain standards. Every motorcycle needs certain things to be a motorcycle. They aren’t reinventing the bike. They simply customize the standard each time they build a custom job.

Save Time, and Money!

Every time you customize something, you are going to spend a lot more time, and probably money. You can pass some, but not all, of this on to your client. If you go into every job with no plan and just throw it together, you are far from maximizing your time.

Why should you care about maximizing your time? Because you can take on more work and scale your business better if you learn how to do it.

Start by building out systems for your basic steps. If you always conduct a client interview, put down regular interview questions on paper. If there are basic things you always do when you build a website, write those down. Perhaps you can even create building blocks to help you move a job forward faster. This might be digital templates or pieces of physical products that you always use.

By creating standard systems, you can move a job forward a lot more quickly. You can also avoid unnecessary errors.

Error Heaven

You do you best not to make mistakes. But you are human, after all. When you customize on the fly, it is much easier to make a mistake. Sometimes, you make verbal promises that you forget to write down. Maybe, you make a change but don’t fully realize what impact it will have on the entire job.

The more you customize, the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong. You may catch all of those things before you deliver to your client, but what a time eater!

If you have standards, they help you avoid errors. One great standard is to have a contract for each sale. The contract should list everything that you and your client need to know about the sale. If its not on the contract, its not going to be done. On the other hand, if it is on the contract, you will be sure not to miss it.

Standards also help you to streamline processes and bring others up to speed more quickly. This is especially important when its more than just you working on the job.

Don’t freestyle everything. Creating systems, procedures, and standards can save you a lot of heartburn later on.

Expectations

You may think its a great selling point that you offer customized service based on unique need. And it is, to an extent. However, you also need to be sure to deliver consistently across the board. If your customization leads you into things you are not as proficient in, you could under deliver for the client.

Sometimes, a client comes to you because she has seen your work. In this case, she hires you to do a job, and you deliver a customized solution. Problem is, she really liked how you did it for the other client, and is disappointed to have something different.

Having standards helps you to set expectations. Not only expectations of the end result, but a good handle on the time a job will take, the cost, etc.  If you get too custom, these things can be all over the board, and even you won’t fully grasp them.

Riff the Standard

Okay, here’s the hidden secret about the power of standardization. If you create strong standards, you actually have a better platform to customize from. If you save time and energy on the basic things, you can get your creative on where it will make the most impact.

Don’t be afraid of standards. Use them to help you toward your creative goal. You don’t need to reinvent your process each time you have a new customer. Figure out the best systems for working with a client and use them over and over again. Add your flair on top of that. A great analogy is the cake decorator. Beneath all of his beautiful and unique decorations is the same cake, every time.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp.