I’ve recently gotten the opportunity to teach an IT class at the school where I got my own start in IT:  Brown Mackie College.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to give back to an organization that helped me break into a field I really enjoy.  As of October of this year, I’ll be an official Adjunct Professor.  I report to Dr. Peter Ifeacho, Department Chair of Technology.

The class I’ll be teaching is one that has a lot of benefit to businesses: Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional.  It’s part of this program: Computer Networking and Applications.   To give you a little more background, here’s a snippet from Microsoft about the program:  ”Candidates for this exam operate in medium to very large computing environments that use Microsoft Windows XP Professional as a desktop operating system. They have a minimum of one year of experience implementing and administering any desktop operating system in a network environment.”

Teaching is something I have always been interested in.  The benefit of teaching is that it really is a learning experience in itself.  It encourages you to delve deeper into a particular subject; especially if you’re teaching something that you’re already passionate about.  I look forward to learning from the experience, and hopefully helping the next batch of great IT professionals get their start. 

Our focus in Client Services is providing a great service experience.  We accomplish that partly through following a solid process, and partly through maintaining a steady flow of communication between our internal teams and the client. 

Every agency wants the client to have a great service experience.  Ultimately, it’s the success of the projects assigned to us, and how well we fulfill their expectations that determine client satisfaction.  With that in mind, we do our best to set high goals for ourselves, while setting realistic, achievable expectations for our clients.  However, as a brand marketer or marketing director, there are three key things you can do to set yourself up for a better agency service experience.

1. Set clear and specific goals.  Interactive agencies, in particular, are used to having to demonstrate Return on Investment (ROI) for our work.  However, to do that effectively, we need to know what benchmarks we are measuring, what your business goals are for any project or campaign, and what constitutes “success” for you.  The more clear and specific you can be in the beginning, the higher the likelihood that the end result will hit that target.
2. Ask questions.  Marketers hire interactive agencies for our depth of knowledge, because they understand that interactive is a complicated discipline.  A good agency educates their clients on the value of their interactive marketing.  The more questions you ask, the more you help your agency empower you to make good decisions about how your company will leverage interactive. 
3. Let your agency know when they are missing the mark.  No one bats 1000. If the creative doesn’t quite capture your brand, or there are additional features that need to be scoped out before the project moves any further, or if your business goals and strategy have changed unexpectedly and those changes need to be reflected in the project, the sooner you let your agency know, the better.  An agency can’t fix a situation till they’re aware of it. 

Obviously, we hope that you’ll choose us as your interactive agency.  Clearly, the agency’s own commitment to service has a huge impact on the service experience you’ll receive.  But simply by making a conscious effort to address these three key issues, you can make sure that on your end, you’re setting yourself up for success. 

Client Services is a unique position, because we’re more or less the line of communication between the client and production.  Part of how we add value to the company is by making it possible for the client’s desires and objectives to be clearly conveyed to a village of designers, programmers, web-architects, interactive marketers, art directors, copywriters, online media buyers, ad writers, search engine optimization specialists, and all the other specialties required to fully complete the project.   We coordinate schedules, assign resources and shepherd your project throughout the process to ensure it aligns with your vision at every step along the way.  

Client Services is far more than a communication team.  When we do our job correctly, the client is removed from the management, coordination, and processing of the steps required to achieve their goal.  Instead, the client is placed in a decision-making position – provided choices and recommendations instead of assignments and deadlines.  We also act as translators in both directions, letting the client know, in layman’s terms (or at least in common business language) when there are technical issues that arise in the process.  Because of that unique positioning, we’re sometimes caught in the middle when client objectives don’t align perfectly with technical and creative restrictions.   It’s our job to see the big picture. It’s our job to always look out for the client’s best interest and be their in-house advocate.  Sometimes that means making tough decisions that impact a timeline or goal, while other times it means going back to the client and working to develop an idea that better fits the desired result or budget.  But at all times it means being an honest, dedicated advocate – we’ll always err on the side of honesty and integrity…even when it hurts.  

Being the bungee cord between the objectives of the client and the requirements and restraints of implementation can be stressful at times.  But we learn and grown when we are stretched, and we love becoming a valued, contributing member of our client’s team! 

I’m always on the lookout for new applications and tools to help keep me organized, and streamline my workday. (Because, like most geeks, I have a “twisted skein of attention deficit issues”). In fact, for the last year or so, I refer to it as “the quest for The One App,” the one application that will tie up those attention deficit issues into a nice neat bow, and keep everything I need to know handy at all times. The One App to Rule Them All. I haven’t found The One App (yet), but I have found a new solution for keeping up with RSS feeds that eliminates at least one extra step from my workflow.

Keeping up on the latest news (not to mention gossip) in interactive marketing circles is pretty critical to my job. However, remembering to check my feed reader daily was just one more to-do that kept dropping off the “to-done” list most days.

Enter FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz serves up your favorite RSS feeds by sending you an email summary of new content daily. So now I don’t have to remember to check both my email and my feedreader. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but any time I can eliminate even one extra task and still get the same amount of work accomplished, I consider it cause for celebration.

Yes, I know there are programs you can pay for which will also turn your Outlook into a feed reader. But I also like avoiding paying for services that I can get for free.

Remember the first time you went to a public library? Probably not, ok…Remember last year when you went to the library to check out The Pocket Zen Reader? Well, maybe that’s just me…

In Louisville, the main branch of the public library is on 3^rd and York, roughly taking up the entire block. It’s a cool place, once when I was leaving, a homeless man gave me a well-worn BET t-shirt, 3 pictures of Jesus, and a T-mobile lunch bag. I still have the pictures of Jesus. In any case, no matter how many times I get hit up for money or am scared to get out of my car I will continue to go to the public library downtown. The foyer of the building is gorgeous, by the way, and there is always a fresh rotation of art.

One thing that remains the same each time I go to the public library is that the computers with the internet seem to be the most popular attraction. Reading books is boring anyway, unless it’s Pocket Zen Reader. Anyhow – my point is this: if people aren’t looking at the internet, they want to be. It’s more engaging than television because we get to interact and communicate, and it’s more productive than a video game, unless you count spending two days straight playing Final Fantasy XXVII as productive. Pretty soon the library will be a book cemetery full of computers.

The average public library internet user is not the ideal consumer, I know. I recently saw a PBS special on the hippies that invaded San Francisco in the 60s. I was fascinated by their “no work, buy nothing” mentality. I bet those hippies hung out all day at the public library, and nothing against a hippie, if anyone is a tree-hugger it’s me. Personally, I like to work and I like buying stuff, a lot. Treehugger.com, anyone?

“Living beings have no absolute self; they are all influenced by conditions and actions” Thank you, Zen Reader. As seedy as facilities at public libraries may be sometimes, it’s nice to have those public spaces with internet resources for those who normally have no access to a metal box with a fan on it. Communal internet: the trickle down effect at it’s finest.

A while back, I was assigned the task of writing a new user’s manual for the most recent update of the Leapfrog Editing and Publishing Framework (L.E.A.P. Framework), built on the Drupal Content Management framework. (Which, by the way, rocks. Great job to all the guys who worked on it!) The first place I turned to for ideas and best practices was Creating Passionate Users, the blog of tech author and speaker Kathy Sierra.

I adored her “Creating Passionate Users” blog, and printed and highlighted some of her articles on writing butt-kicking users manuals. And her “Head First” books are fantastic examples of well-written computer manuals.

So I was profoundly disturbed when I checked back at CPU, and saw that Kathy had canceled her speech at O’Reilly Media’s ETech conference. What was more disturbing was the reason why.

Apparently, she started getting several threatening, hate-based comments on her blog. Then a couple of prominent bloggers started up two sites where the whole point was to say hateful things about other bloggers. There were some extremely disturbing, graphic words and images posted on those blogs about Sierra. Eventually, she canceled her speaking engagements, involved the police, and opened up about it on CPU.

It became a huge deal in the blogging community, and it sparked a lot of discussion about misogyny on the web. Many of the men were shocked at the things that were posted to and about Kathy. Most of the women who commented in response had experienced similar things.

This is a very present, personal issue for me. I truly believe in the internet as a powerful communication tool. As a writer, I honestly believe it’s the publishing outlet of the future. The internet and blogging make global conversation possible and personal. The public forum of the ancient Greeks, where important ideas can receive passionate and thoughtful debate by the best minds of the culture, has become the message board forum and the blog in the twenty-first century.

Unless those best minds are held within a woman’s body.

I’ve been writing on the internet for a long time. Long enough to know that it’s a given that if I participated in that global conversation at the level I would prefer, I’d be painting a giant target on myself that says “Hey, misogynistic freaks! Fresh meat!” I’ve had enough experiences on message boards to know that on the internet, just being a smart woman who expresses herself is incomprehensibly infuriating to a small but vocal group of men, to a near-pathological degree.

I hate that. Because I’ve struggled with some of the same questions Kathy is currently struggling with (albeit in a “prior to getting death threats” way, rather than post-death-threat). What I do best is write. That’s the best thing I have to offer and contribute to the world, and my employer, LeapFrog. So do I write anonymously? Write as “K.L. French” and pretend to be a faceless, genderless ghost for as long as possible? Just “suck it up” and accept that receiving vile, hideous comments and emails are just part of doing what I love? Granted, there are no by-lines on much of the web copy I write.

I just wonder how many smart women are not contributing to the global conversation because we’re letting emotionally-stunted freaks win…

If you’re familiar with the concept of kaizen at all, it’s probably in the context of manufacturing or other assembly-line practices, not in the context of creative work.  Kaizen is a Japanese term that, roughly translates to “continuous improvement.” However, there is a lot more implied by it than the standard Western idea of continuous improvement. There is an element of “respect for people” implied in the idea of kaizen, and three guiding principles must be in place for true kaizen: focus on results and process; big-picture, systemic thinking; and a non-judgmental, non-blaming attitude (blame-laying being considered a waste of time and energy).

As an interactive agency, we’re in a radically new industry that blends the creative with the technological. From a project management standpoint, a kaizen attitude is a great fit for process improvement, because it works well with both the very human creative elements and the very practical process and delivery elements. With each new project, we experiment, learn new and better processes, and we implement them and carry them forward into the next project. We also learn from things that didn’t work well, and eliminate those elements from the process as we go.  I’m not saying that we are formally instituting kaizen here at LeapFrog; just that the improvement process here feels, to me at least, very much like kaizen.
Often in business, instead of making small, incremental changes, you determine that you’re going to “do it right.” “Doing it right” means taking time, making preparations, setting the stage, and totally implementing a complete, fully-formed new way of doing things.

But there are a lot of problems with this approach. First, it fails to take into account the shifting, continuously moving nature of work. By insisting on completely defining both the problem and solution in detail first, a person or organization can effectively postpone making any changes …pretty much forever. Second, it fails to take into account the complex nature of change and how even a small change can have difficult-to-predict outcomes that then need to be dealt with. By trying to implement massive, all-at-once, “programs” of change, an organization is effectively tacking learning the new way, maintaining the new way (building new habits and breaking old ones), troubleshooting the new way (dealing with the inevitable “oops, didn’t think about that” items), and improving the new way simultaneously. In short, it’s a great way to set yourself up for failure.

As LeapFrog moves forward and continues to grow, we’ll need to keep improving to continue to exceed client expectations. That means improving one task at at time, one project at a time, continuously, with respect for the creative people who are part of our team and with an eye on the big picture.

OK guys - this will be a quick one today and goes under the category of rants. I was watching television with my family last night, enduring a commercial about life insurance and was actually moved by the subject. While insured, I can always do better and as I looked at my 4 children and my beautiful wife, I said to myself, “I should look these guys up on the web and get some more information.” So I watched the commercial with my laptop in hand just waiting for that URL and it never came!!!

Here is a reputable company with no mention of a website - just some 800 number I could never remember and would surely forget in the time it would take to find the bloomin’ phone (did I mention I have 4 kids). I started to watch every commercial that night and found over half of them did not mention a website, did not mention an extension of their business open 24/7, did not give me a chance to convert for them, interested or not.

We harp on being part of the conversation, about meeting customers at every point we have access to here at LFI - not listing your website on other media is like showing up at your local networking dinner without a business card. Crazy man, CRAZY!

Last week I joked with Jeremy that I was going to start charging people an hourly fee for counseling and therapy services. Both in my personal life and my professional life here at LeapFrog, I find that I’m someone people come to with their problems. Sometimes they want some good ideas for resolving their problems, and as a fairly out-of-the-box thinker, I’m generally pretty good at that. Sometimes I think they just want someone to “feel their pain.”

Those are the people I’d like to charge for the “couch time.”

Psychology, specifically the psychology of personality, has always been interesting to me. The human psyche, what motivates people (and what doesn’t) is pretty fascinating stuff. The drivers that motivate human behavior are of critical interest to marketers.

There are several different systems out there to classify people into different personality types or temperaments, and they all have their different relative merits. But at a high level, I think it’s important to realize that they are not describing who people are. They are describing their most important strategy for behavior. People rarely surprise me with how unpredictable they are. They more often surprise me with how eerily easy it is to predict what they’ll do, sometimes before they themselves know what they’re going to do.

A personality type is a (mostly) unconscious strategy that people use to make decisions so that they don’t have to think about every action they take, and so they can get a predictable outcome to their actions. Humans love predictable outcomes, even if they’re not great outcomes. Most people use the same few basic strategies with the same basic assumptions and values. Given a good enough understanding of the most common strategies, and enough time around a person to learn what strategies they rely on, it becomes increasingly easy to predict what their actions will be. The way a long-time married couple can appear to read each other’s minds is an example of this.

In some ways, marketing is a form of this parlor trick, performed on a mass audience. The better you understand the common denominators of the largest part of your audience, the more effectively you can predict what will and won’t motivate most of them.

Which can be remarkably useful information to have handy.

I’ve always loved writing–I was one of those weird kids who even loved the essay questions in grade school. The web is a much newer passion, but just as intense.

So when I got the opportunity to work here at LeapFrog doing copywriting for the web, it was like finding out about fried ice cream: you love Mexican food, you love dessert, and now you discover you can combine the two? How great is that?

Ultimately, I love writing and the web for many of the same reasons. I appreciate the fluid exchange of ideas, the flow of communication, and the way ideas grow and develop in the process of being shared are common to both the process of writing and the medium of the internet.

Web-based self-publishing companies like Lulu.com and iUniverse have opened up new doors for writers in the same way that the internet and the long tail have opened up doors in music. Web-based events like NaNoWriMo promote writing globally, and do a little bit of good in the world to boot.

The internet began as a method for linking reams and reams of technical documentation, and sharing them collaboratively. It developed into a very visual, design-oriented medium during the first big phase of growth. Now, in the next phase of the web, relevant content is again becoming King, and the need for copy that is well-written and clear for both search engines and human visitors is apparent.

Like Bogart at the end of Casablanca, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.