Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

On Reading and Writing

I’ve always been a big reader. Writing came pretty naturally to me and I realized early on that the quality of my writing had a lot to do with the amount I read. The best way to develop a firm grasp of language and learn to communicate effectively in your writing is to spend a lot of time immersed in how great writers do it.

This always seemed like a fairly obvious truth to me: to be a good writer, you should first be a good reader. It was thus a surprise to encounter this Salon article that posits that there’s a new generation of aspiring writers with no interest in reading.

The evidence of this as a trend is largely anecdotal, so I’m not sure just how seriously to take it. That said, it’s difficult for me to imagine how someone would even come to the idea of wanting to make writing a focus of life without first cultivating the love of language, storytelling and knowledge that to me seem so intertwined with reading.

I often think of the history of literature as one long conversation. Different writers over time can borrow ideas and style techniques from one another to create something new. Shakespeare took stories from history and many of the great writers that came before him. Jorge Luis Borges, my personal favorite, often wrote of his preference for reading over writing and both his fiction and non-fiction essays are littered with ideas and references to other writers. Dante made this idea of writing as a continuing conversation over generations explicit with his use of Virgil in The Divine Comedy. The two even meet with several other poets in their time in Purgatory and discuss various issues related to poetry and religion*.

The written word allows us the great privilege of maintaining our knowledge of the ideas and stories of the brilliant men and women who came before us. If a writer rejects learning from the writers of our past, he or she lose the opportunity to be a part of the great conversation. So much of what’s been new and progressive throughout human history has come about due to our ability to build off of the ideas that came before. A refusal to embrace that means you’re likely to stay a few steps behind those that do.

*I might be the only person to read The Divine Comedy and prefer Purgatory to Inferno, specifically because I love the idea of Dante using it as an artistic outlet for having an imagined chat with his favorite writers.

Changing Consumer Behavior: Wish Lists and Movie Queues

Modern consumer patterns are decidedly different than they were just a few years ago, and they are constantly changing as businesses and marketers develop new technology and ideas to apply to the consumer experience. Paying attention to trends in consumer behavior is important for small businesses wanting to stay on top of the best marketing options.

The way people approach watching movies and television has evolved considerably with the advent of Netflix’s mail order DVD service, online streaming and on demand services. Very quickly, the idea of leaving home to travel to a video rental store to access the evening’s entertainment became passe, as evidenced by symbolic recent decline of the former entertainment giant Blockbuster.

In a remarkably similar story, many consumers have ceased their trips to physical bookstores to make their book purchases, and to physical electronics retailers to buy their entertainment and tech items.  While these failures can’t be exclusively attributed to the ease of affordable online shopping from vendors like Amazon, you’d have a hard time making a convincing case that it didn’t play a considerable role.

In addition to the convenience of being able to do your shopping from home and have the items brought directly to you, there are some other clear advantages built into the consumer models of Amazon and Netflix.  Both services allow customers to easily see reviews of products before they buy or view them. They both have a built in recommendation system to encourage more consumption, based on the movies and products they’ve previously tracked each customer’s interest in.

My personal favorite of the innovations they’ve brought to consumer behavior is the wish list option Amazon offers and the queue Netflix allows you to keep.  We live in an age of content overload, where an excess of tantalizing products exist for each consumer. It’s especially easy to learn about an item you want, and then promptly forget about it if you don’t have a good system for keeping track of your interests.

It’s in the interest of a business to make it easier for customers to remember what they want, and the Amazon wish list and Netflix movie queues make this a simple process. If you hear an interview with an author describing a book that sounds compelling, but you’d prefer to wait and buy the paperback, Amazon gives you an easy way to add it to a list for later consideration. When a movie preview gets you excited, but you don’t want to pay the cost of a trip to the theatre, Netflix makes sure you can save it to your queue for future viewing. How many of these movies or future purchases would we be likely to forget about without these options? How often did consumers fail to purchase something they may have wanted before these became available?

So what can a small business do to compete? Pay attention to their model and determine if there’s a way to apply it to your own business.

  • If you haven’t already, consider setting up an online store. Let customers browse your selection and order items from your website.
  • Set up a review section on your website for your inventory. Let the opinions of past customers influence the buying decisions of those currently researching. This has the added benefit of alerting you to items you’re stocking that are of lower quality and replace them with products that are more popular with your customers.
  • Think about the best way to incorporate recommendations into the buying process of your customers. As a small business owner, it’s possible that your knowledge of your industry and products could mean more personal recommendations than the automated methods of the larger retailers.
  • Develop a system that allows regular customers to track items they might want in the future. You could then use this information to offer the right promotions to the right customers to encourage purchases they already know they want, but just need a little nudge to make.

Learning Search Engine Optimization

Over the past couple of months I’ve been hard at work researching as much as I can about Search Engine Optimization.  There’s a wealth of resources available to help a person learn this skill, many of which are free.

Based on my experience, the best places to start are with Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and the Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz.  The guide from SEOmoz in particular is very in depth and gives a lot of tips and tools, as well as references to resources for further research into the particulars.

Some of the initial tips I’ve learned are:

  • One of the most important tools for search engine optimization is an understanding of keyword quality.  Google’s Keyword Tool is extremely valuable for understanding what types of terms people are searching for in your industry and how competitive those terms are, so you can determine the best keywords to target and design your website accordingly.  SEOmoz also provides a Keyword Difficulty tool to help you identify the phrases likely to be too competitive to be worth trying to target for a smaller business.
  • Use your title and description meta tags well. Making sure the primary keywords you want to target are represented in your webpage’s title tags is one of the first steps to strengthening a page for SEO.  The meta description tag, while not playing a direct role in how likely your page is to rank high in search results, can play an important role in how likely users are to visit your page once they see it listed.
  • Avoid displaying important information within images, flash animation, java or videos. Often the flashier visual touches on a website are overlooked entirely by the search engine crawlers.
  • Make your website easy to navigate–this is important for human users and search engine crawlers. Make sure that none of your pages are hard to find and the most important ones are linked to from many, if not all, of your other pages.
  • For a small business, avoid targeting general search terms as you’re likely to be outranked by larger businesses with more resources and brand recognition.  Using geographic targeting or a focus on specific product offerings in your keyword choices can lead to better results.
  • Make sure that the copy on your website includes the most important keywords you want to target–but not to the point that the writing becomes awkward or stilted. The usability and consumer appeal of your website must not be lost in your efforts to get it noticed by search engines. In fact, having a well designed website with useful content that people like is one of the most important ways to encourage others to link to you, which is one of the main factors search engines look at in determining page rank.
  • Learn html, at least at a basic level. You can’t make the necessary changes to a webpage if you don’t know the basic structure of the language with which webpages are built.  I was completely intimidated by the idea of learning html until I started and found it’s really not all that difficult. This website’s been the main one I’ve turned to, but this one and this one were also recommended to me as good resources for beginners.

There’s much more to it than what I’ve included here, but these seem like some of the most important lessons for someone starting out.  There are lots of blogs and websites with regular pieces about tips and tools for good SEO, SEOmoz and Search Engine Land seem like two of the most established with regular updates.  Google also has their own blog with some information.

It seems that most SEO consultants regard each other as more of a community than competitors, which leads to many of those with experience offering up their expertise to anyone willing to seek it out.  This means there are ample resources for increasing your knowledge and expanding your skill set in this industry.

Maintaining Customer Satisfaction

We all have businesses that we’ve had exceptional customer service experiences with, and others that we immediately think of when the subject of bad customer service comes up. Ensuring customer satisfaction is hands down one of the best ways for a small business to keep current customers happy and encourage new ones.

Customer service is actually a fairly crucial aspect of marketing, as it has a strong relationship to maintaining a positive brand and encouraging the kind of word of mouth recommendations that are invaluable to small businesses.  With consumers’ growing reliance on review websites like yelp.com and the ease with which someone can broadcast a bad experience with a company via social media, there is extra pressure on businesses to make sure current customers are happy with the goods and services they provide.

So how does a business encourage positive word of mouth and avoid the kind of experiences that send customers ranting and raving to their friends and online social networks?

  • Keep it personal – Have you ever gotten stuck in phone message loop, seemingly endlessly pressing buttons without ever getting to an actual person?  How often have you tried to send a question or complaint via an generic online form or e-mail address and never gotten a reply?  I’ve never known anyone who was more satisfied with an automated customer service experience than with getting a response from an actual human being.  In the effort to increase efficiency, many businesses have opted for methods that isolate and anger customers.
  • Make providing feedback easy – This is valuable on multiple levels, as it keeps you informed of ways to make your business and products better and lets your customers know you’re interested in listening to their suggestions.  Most of us have at some point had an idea for how to make a product we like better, but it’s rare that people seek out the information to communicate that to the company.  On the other hand, if providing that feedback is easy and takes little time or effort on the user’s part, then there’s no downside to providing it.
  • Don’t oversell – Don’t say or imply that your product does something more or better than it does.  Don’t say a new product or update will be ready by a specific date unless you can make sure it will be.  Sometimes user expectations will exceed your promises in spite of your best efforts and there’s little to be done about that, but you can make sure you’re not actively creating higher expectations than what you can provide.
  • Listen – Don’t just make it easy to provide feedback, pay attention to it and make changes based on it.  Not every customer’s going to feel the same way and sometimes what different people want will be in contradiction, but pay attention to the most common suggestions and ideas and act on them.
  • Try to establish and encourage a community – Whether this be via a forum, a blog with enabled comments, social media or meetings with customers at conferences, if your customers can talk to each other and you and know they’re part of a larger conversation and community, it keeps your company and products top of mind and gives them a greater investment in their relationship with your business.
  • Don’t deny or dodge responsibility for mistakes  – This seems to be largely the purview of particularly large companies that train their customer service representatives to never admit an error or apologize.  When I’ve encountered it from a company, I never go back.  I know to many business owners and marketers, the idea of offering an apology or admitting an error is blasphemy, but for many consumers, it’s meaningful to know a company can acknowledge a problem with sincerity and it lets the customer know you’re going to work to avoid repeating the mistake and improve things moving forward.

It is imperative that small businesses make customer satisfaction a top priority, or all the amazing marketing techniques you may find the means to employ will come to naught once word gets out. Don’t let a bad customer experience ruin your brand.

The Value of the Humanities

I went to an expensive liberal arts college on the East Coast, the kind you often hear derided in articles questioning the value of expensive higher education that reaps limited professional rewards. To many, choosing an emphasis on the humanities in higher education seems foolhardy, but my experience has convinced me otherwise. I’ll be paying for this education for many years to come and do wish I’d better understood the full implications of my loans and their interest a little earlier in the process, but even if I had, I’d have gone to the same school and sought out the same classes and experiences.  I’ll never regret the education I got, although I may bemoan those loan payments every month.

So, what makes it so valuable?  How can I justify my four years studying literature, philosophy, film history and foreign languages rather than a specific trade that may have more directly led to job security (and likely much less debt)? For me, that question’s complicated, but easy to answer: I feel like it made me a better person and a better thinker.

On the professional end, it made me better at writing, communicating my thoughts well and analyzing problems.  It  gave me a much greater confidence in my sense of self and ability to take on life.  Every job I’ve had since college I’ve been able to: pick up a great variety of tasks; balance many responsibilities at once; handle my time well; think creatively about the best way to address the issues placed in front of me; and, perhaps most importantly, get along with and work well with other people. While the professional value of a degree in the humanities isn’t immediately clear, it brings with it a variety of skills that can pay dividends in many possible fields and positions.

I remember once being asked by a colleague who preferred reading non-fiction what I felt the value was in works of fiction. To me it seems so obvious: fiction teaches you empathy.  We live in a society where it’s so easy to fall into the common trap of us vs them. We all encounter instances where people are viewed in terms of their political identity rather than as individuals, or largely dismissed altogether in the general consciousness (when was the last time you thought much about what a prison inmate’s life is like, for example?).  This is much harder to do if you spend a considerable amount of time letting your mind be taken over by characters in different contexts than your own.  It teaches you to make more of an effort to understand the world as it looks and is for others and compels you to care more about the experiences of people you have no direct relationship to.

I think that really speaks to part of what makes the humanities so important.  It teaches people to see the world through a larger lens and consider how our actions and decisions influence people beyond us. I wish more of our society saw fit to value this as much as I do.

This post was largely inspired by a couple of articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so.  This article in the New Yorker talks at length about how an education in the humanities compares to other focuses in higher education.  This piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education gives current students a chance to explain why they embraced the decision to study liberal arts rather than something more “practical.” They all speak poignantly on the subject and, hopefully, prove some of what they’re saying to any possible skeptics in the process.