If you plan someday to sell educational products (e.g. publications, videotapes, software, satellite-delivered programs, etc.) via the World Wide Web (WWW or Web), Guerrilla Marketing Online is "must reading."
This new guide by the author of a series of books on marketing techniques (Levinson) and the author of more than 20 books on computer hardware and software (Rubin) covers everything you'll need to know to get started and stay in business online.
The authors thoroughly cover the basics of delivering information via the Internet, and present strong arguments on the economics and effectiveness of using this technology to market your products. They explain the difference between "online services" (e.g. Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online) and the "net" (or Internet), and give good examples of how each work.
A good share of the book is especially of value to those of us who are developing our own Web pages and want to market our products through this medium. The down side of this, according to the authors, is getting and keeping the attention of those people who might be in the market for our products. Their advice to us comes in the form of 75 tips they refer to as "online guerrilla marketing weapons." Examples include: "In cyberspace, most customers will first hear about your business by its name." And you want a name that will be picked up when someone uses a "search" to find sites that market products like those you're offering.
"Your unique position in the market is the best way to distinguish yourself from a horde of competitors." You can set yourself apart from the competition by virtue of the unique nature of your product, its quality, its price, your credibility, etc.
"The way you package your online presence says a lot about you...make sure your packaging is attractive, clear and well-organized."
"Every store is equally invisible on the Net. Each Web or Gopher link you add to your online store is another doorway into it from a different part of the Net."
"Neatness conveys a sense of reliability and competence. It helps give customers the confidence to buy from you. Check...for proper spelling, grammar, and formatting before sending them out into cyberspace."
The authors are liberal in their advice on how to advertise your Web pages. They give the pros and cons of such things as bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, paid advertisements online, print advertisements in magazines and newsletters, postcards, and flyers.
An interesting note from the authors is that "in cyberspace, your marketing message must be carried through written words. You may be able to help it along with pictures or sounds if you're marketing on the Web, but words do the real selling."
And they add, "The most effective online messages are those that don't waste the recipient's time or money."
This is a great book of do's and don'ts. And you're sure to learn more about the online world of cyberspace.
With the advent of desktop publishing, writers and editors in many organizations seemed likely candidates for downsizing. Concerned about this, the Society for Technical Communication funded Janice Redish to lead a one-year project to measure the value added by professional technical communicators. Most extension and experiment station communicators are technical communicators, by definition, because we have degrees in communication and take information from the hard sciences and present it in a way that can easily understood and used by the general public.
Redish was asked to focus on two questions: (1) How do professional communicators and high-quality information products contribute to an organizations's success? and (2) How can the value added be measured?
Seven articles in this special section report the project findings. In the introduction and the first article Redish reviews related literature and discusses relevant issues when measuring value added. Her approach focuses on measuring return on investment. The authors of other articles include the following:
Judith A. Ramey reports on the results of a questionnaire which gives a sense of the current practice in the profession both for building value in and measuring that value. Cathy J. Spencer and Diana Kilbourn Yates of General Electric Information Services present quantitative data on the differences in support calls and costs for users who did not have their manual as compared to those who had it. The differences are dramatic. C. Al Blackwell of SABRE Travel Information Network using customer survey cards demonstrates the value that communicators added to their very first product. Denise D. Pieratti suggests specific ways to measure communicators' contribution to successful processes. Reva Daniel, a technical communications consultant working with subject matter specialists, found that the difference was in how often people called for help.
And Martha Cover, David Cooke and Matt Hunt of Cadence Design Systems show how to estimate the cost of changes at different times in a product's life cycle.
Some organizations still produce publications without professional assistance while in most organizations communicators struggle for recognition and appropriate funding. Subject matter specialists and managers believe that "anyone can write," which puts communicators under pressure to justify their roles and activities - to show how they add value and how much.
Redish (you may remember her as head of the Washington, DC Document Design Center) says that writers/editors add value when they contribute to generating a greater return on investment than the cost of the initial investment. Her hypothesis is that even if quality work by professionals takes more resources up front, the return on the investment more than makes up for it.
She says that if communicators are having difficulty being appreciated or getting resources, they must find ways to show how they add value. If you suspect that poor documents are causing problems, then you must find out about those problems. How great are they? What do they cost? How much less havoc is there when the documents are accurate and readable?
Communicators work in a variety of fields and add value in all of them. One way is the reduction of calls. For example, one year a veterans benefits counselor handled 1,128 calls from one letter to 750 veterans, while another counselor received only 192 calls in a year for a new version of that letter to 710 veterans.
Another way communicators add value is in greater customer satisfaction and fewer errors to fix. Costs saved or costs avoided go up rapidly with more users and higher volumes.
Sometimes, communicators add value by realizing that the best solution to a communications problem is not to develop a document, or to develop an entirely different kind. Other times a way a communicator adds value is savings due to increasing user's productivity such as decreasing training needs, decreasing users' errors or decreasing the need for customer support.
Communicators often find that they receive no credit for helping other departments or that the accounting office doesn't track relevant information. Redish says that without hard data, managers make judgments about the value of contributions subjectively. They draw their own conclusions. It is part of our role to show the value that we add as a professional communicator.
Work on "value added" is continuing. A regular department on "value added" has been included in Technical Communications. As accountability becomes more and more important, as computer technology makes everyone a publisher and as budgets shrink, Extension communicators should become proactive. One way is to become familiar with ways to show the value added by their work and communicate this to their administrators.