Communications professionals know that the choice of words they use is a key component to messaging to the public. Republican strategist Frank Luntz, the man who coined the phrase ‘Death Tax’, has just written a book titled “Words that Work”. The book discusses the importance of word smithing in communications, and while reviews of the book have been mediocre at best, it does have some interesting case studies, including the coining of the phrase ‘Death Tax’.

Jimmy Carter found this out the hard way when he released his new book on the Middle East, titled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Supporters of Israel were deeply offended by the use of the word apartheid. Or perhaps Carter strategically chose that word, either way; it’s affect created quite a controversy.

There are examples of “word” blunders almost every day, and we’ll see a lot more as we near the 2008 elections. With the advent of new media such as blogs and podcasts, and the influence of the traditional media, it’s more important than ever for communication professional to choose their words wisely. Words matter.

Funny how smaller buyers still devalue software that arguably takes just as much time if not more than physical tangible products like homes, buildings, and cars. Developers: you've seen this before. Keep moving forward. Prospective clients: take note, and if you've done this, don't ever do it again. Complete rotating .gif here.

(Warning: heavy feel-good self promotion to follow) Robert and I are nearing completion of a new, online weight loss community built in Ruby on Rails. And I've gotta say I'm very pleased with the turnout. Robert -- the lead developer -- is a use case ninja and does an excellent job ensuring every base is covered. Granted, the application still has some bugs to work out, but at the moment, I'd argue this is the best "built according to design" site Griffio has ever released. Heck, my biased self would argue this to be the best social site ever to come out of Utah... if you're into health and weight loss, that is. Weight Loss Wars version 2 hits perpetual beta next week and should go live shortly thereafter.

Have you ever bought a car? You have to decide how much you want to spend, what you want, and who to buy it from. The last one can be tricky because everyone has either been ripped off when buying a car or knows someone who has become a victim. Getting a new website for your company is not that different, the main difference is that you probably know more about cars than you do about websites. Well, allow me to be your trusted friend who works for a car dealer and knows the ins and outs. Here are some tips on how to get what you need for the right price without getting ripped off.

1. Start with a plan. If you approach a web design company and say “I need a new website” it’s like going to a car dealer and saying “I need a new car.” Car or truck? New or used? What brand? What color? Mileage or performance? Safety or looks? You would probably already know the answers to these questions if you were buying a car, but you might not know what you need to know before you approach a web design firm. You can start out on the right foot by figuring out basics about your website. How many pages? Will the site simply contain content or will it have features where site visitors can buy things, submit information, or otherwise interact with the site rather than just looking at it? What do you want the site to look like? The best thing you can do is find other websites that are similar in some way to what you want. It’s much easier for a web design firm to understand what you want if you can point to another website and say “I want my website to look or work like this one.” When it comes to this step the more research and planning you’ve done the better, but even a basic plan will help a lot.

2. Figure out how much you can spend. And I mean figure out how much you can really spend. Of course in making deals you always want the other guy to throw out his numbers first. Some web design companies make it easy by putting pricing on their sites, but most don’t, and they might have legitimate reasons for that, but they might just want to know what your numbers are first. What you don’t want to do is go in with no idea of what your budget is, because you’ll only be wasting your own time and the time of whatever firm(s) you talk to.

3. Find a few good firms. This can be tricky. You don’t want to be dealing with the proverbial used-car dealer of web design firms. While bad web designers generally don’t wear tacky suits, the other differences aren’t hard to spot. Things like pushy sales tactics, lots of talk but not much sense, and deals that seem too good to be true are as prevalent in the web design industry as at Gino’s Previously-Owned Car Emporium. Some tips? Get a reference from a trusted friend. Get references from the firms you’re looking at and contact them. Ask the firm about a worst-case scenario they’ve had with a client. If they tell you all their clients are happy they’re lying and you can move on. All web design firms have had bad experiences, and sometimes it’s their fault and sometimes it’s the client’s fault and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault but just a bad situation. What you want to find out is not whether they’ve ever had a bad experience but how they handled it.

But most important of all, contact more than one firm. Having a basis for comparison will be invaluable.

4. Compare apples to apples. When you present your plan to one firm they may interpret it differently than another firm will, and you may end up with two prices that are quite different. This may be because one firm simply charges more than another, but it may be one firm or the other doesn’t understand exactly what you want. This goes back to #1–make sure you have a plan. You don’t want to make the mistake of going with the less expensive firm and halfway through the project having them say “Oh, you want that?! That’s going to cost an additional $10,000.”

5. Figure out the true value. Some firms are more expensive than others, there’s no doubt about it. My firm charges around $15,000 for a basic website. Some companies charge less than $5,000, and even here in Utah there are companies that charge a minimum of $100,000. I would argue the companies charging $5,000 won’t build you as good of a site as my company will for $15,000, and the company who charges $100,000 would probably say the same thing. At the same time the guy charging $5K would say he does just as good of work as my company does, and I would claim to do just as good of work as the company charging $100K. The truth is that with few exceptions you get what you pay for, and price is a good indicator of quality. The good news is that everybody doesn’t need the same quality of website. If you’re a small business just getting started and you plan on making a few hundred thousand dollars this year you might do well with a $5K site. If you’re a mid-sized business with $1-200M in revenue you should expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a website, and if you’re a large company with $500M to $1B+ you would choose the large agency that charges $100K for a website. Just make sure the firm you’re going with matches who you are. If you really need a $30K website but you get a $5K website it may end up costing you in terms of missed opportunity.

6. Negotiate, but with caution. If the firm you like the best costs a little more than you’ve budgeted for, now is the time to disclose your numbers. Tell them “We’d really like to go with you, and I’m not trying to talk you down just to get a lower price, but we honestly only had $10K budgeted for this rather than the $15K you’ve proposed.” Now here’s the hard part to swallow–the better firm will turn you down. Why? Because they know that if they give you a deal, you’re going to become second-place to any client that is paying them their full rate, and they don’t want to put you in that position. However, maybe, just maybe, they’re a good firm and they just happen to have some spare time, your project can be turned around quick, and they can take it on at a discounted price and get it done quickly before they get too busy with higher-paying clients and have to push your project back.

Never negotiate just to get a better deal when you could afford the price the firm has given you. All you’re doing is setting up a situation in which nobody will be happy. Only negotiate if you truly don’t have the money the firm is asking for but you really want to hire them vs. another firm.

7. After you buy, trust. I read some marriage advice somewhere that said couples should take off the rose-colored glasses before marriage and put them on after marriage. I don’t think this necessarily applies to buying a car, but it sure applies to working with a web design firm. I’ve been in this industry for seven years and have worked with hundreds of clients, and I can say with 100% confidence that those clients who were the most trusting got the best results. The clients that second-guessed us on every detail, that micro-managed the process, and that tried to give us design advice ended up with projects that took longer, went over budget, and in the end weren’t anywhere close to the quality of what they could have been. Granted, there are some firms that will do a horrible job and in those cases you need to rip off the rose-colored glasses and get out of there with whatever you can, but if you’ve done the work to find the right firm you should trust them and be as hands-off as you can be after you hire them. If you have a micro-manager personality it might be tough, but you’ll be better off for it in the end. Unless you’ve worked in the industry, the firm you hire will have a lot more experience than you do and you’ll do well to trust their judgement.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.

Utah Business, which is generally a pretty poopsky magazine with very trite articles, has a nice little read on the key benefits of blogging. They dub keeping tabs on what's going on in your space by reading blogs as the first benefit of blogs and the marketing power via publishing a blog. Here's a nice blogging for dummies description from the article: “A corporate blog can enhance a company’s brand, build thought leadership, deepen customer relationships by promoting conversations and put forth a human face to a large organization. A blog also provides fresh web content, which gives you more online visibility, attracts search engines and drives more traffic.”

My only beef; if you decide to publish a company blog, don't call it a "corporate blog." Just call it a blog. Personable. Authentic. Sans spin. No direct selling. Blogging: taking the corporate out of companies since 1999. I should trademark that.

The short answer? Not very much -- if anything -- especially given the landscape of current, more social internet traffic. For the uninitiated, "nofollow" is an SEO-er's worst nightmare. Internet links of type "nofollow" don't get weighted by search engines as credible content. Therefore, search engines are less likely to increase your search engine result page ranking. But the link still exists on a page to send humans along their way (what really counts), and gone are the days of link juice via the mighty Wikipedia with some speculating Digg and others will soon follow. If you run a link farm or use black-hat SEO techniques, you're job just got a bit harder and will continue to do so. On the other hand, if you understand traffic-driving content, solid copywriting, and content optimization for humans, you and your site will do just fine. As search listings get more bloated, people want to be referred by trusted individuals or a consensus group, not some outdated search algorithm. Hence, the "nofollow" link is a good thing to counter spam while humans still get directed to the best content. Remember: search engines follow where humans go, not the other way around. Optimize your content and you'll do just fine. Need another buzz word? Call it SEO 2.0. Okay don't. Just call it smart content.

A study last June (via Business 2.0) revealed that more than 2/3 of all Microsoft employees used Google search instead of internally-bred MSN Search. The reason is obvious, but I bet MS employees are constantly pressured into using MSN over Google, despite the latter being superior (not to mention more efficient. So in a lot of ways, Microsoft could actually save money by openly allowing Google search. Isn't that called a paradox or something?). In working for AOL as a freelance blogger, I felt similar pressure, albeit very minor, when our company's social bookmarking software, Netscape, was first launched to compete against/alongside Digg. Sure, Netscape does some great things, but it's inferior in the sense that Digg fosters a much larger community that drives a lot more site traffic. What was once requests for "Digg" traffic at AOL started becoming requests for "Digg/Scape" traffic in what appeared to be an artificial attempt to increase the userbase. No harm in this, and again, we were in no way "forced" to use Netscape, but I did feel slight political pressure to use it alongside Digg. The act always felt a bit forced as Digg and its organic traffic were the real reason for the traffic submitting requests in the first place. A couple of years ago, Griffio built an internal web project management application in PHP to help keep tabs on our company projects. It was good software, and we spent a significant amount of time designing and building it. But it wasn't as good as Base Camp, 37 Signals' project management software. Wisely, we started using it over our own. It would have been shortsighted on my part to force or socially pressure my employees to use our software (not to mention myself) over Base Camp despite the sunk investment cost of our internal product. So with exception to material costs, I can't think of a logical reason when an inferior product should be used over superior one. Granted, many times this could simply be "awkwardness" when what you're building or offering isn't as good as a competitor's product. Perhaps your product is better suited for a different audience. But whatever the scenario, nothing is gained by forcing or pressuring one's employees into using company built products when cost isn't an issue. Better yet, ask your employees why they prefer the alternative to enhance your offering. That's free advice straight from the end-user.

Last Thursday I gave a presentation to a group of roughly 30 attendees on the topic of search engine optimization. The idea was to show people some easy things they could do to their websites to dramatically improve their rankings, along with some other relevant advice. The content, including the powerpoint, is available on MWI’s new blog.

For the first time in history annual online spending topped $100 billion. Online shopping during the holidays rose 26 percent over sales during the same period in 2005. And the Monday after Thanksgiving this year was nothing unusual, as it was surpassed on 11 other days before the end of the year by greater sales.

If you still feel that those who shop online are high-tech, geeky people in the minority, think again. The Internet has become what all the geeks in 1999 wanted it to be and what gullible venture capitalists thought it already was.

On January 18th yours truly will be giving a 20-minute presentation entitled “10 Search Engine Optimization Tips Anyone Can Implement” at the Corporate Alliance Hub in Provo, Utah. Einstein’s Bagels will be served at 9:00 a.m., and the presentation will begin at 9:15. A question and answer session will follow the presentation.

There is no need to RSVP, just show up if you’re interested.

If you would like to volunteer your website to be used for an analysis case study during the presentation, please contact Jeff Moss at jmoss@mwi.com or 801.495.4110.