chrisbrogan.com» contact

Make it Easy to Connect

ceb — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:30:14 +0000

Over at New Marketing Labs, we have a simple contact form on our site. I also use a contact form here. From these forms, both my team at NML and my helpful assistant Diane over here find all kinds of work opportunities. It’s a simple, simple, simple thing.

Having an email address is great. Publishing a phone number is great. Being able to reach me on Twitter or Facebook is wonderful.

But I’m finding such value in the use of our contact forms. We are getting work from them, and it’s paying off.

Note: the forms are SIMPLE. If you look at my contact form, you’ll see how simple:

I don’t want every little detail from you. I don’t need you to prequalify yourself as a paying lead. I’m just asking for basics. Heck, we only ask for 3 things total at the New Marketing Labs form.

Are you making it easy for people to connect?

photo hosted on flickr

The Importance of Your Own Email Account

ceb — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:41:00 +0000

I’m going through my databases, checking up on who I haven’t talked with lately. I realized that a LOT of people I know have lost their jobs or moved on. This means that many of their corporate email addresses aren’t any good to me. Think on that.

Either get a gmail/yahoo/hotmail account, or buy a domain that can be yours forever. Use that email for secondary contact with any business contacts you might want to retain across many relationships. Do your work on your work email, but keep a “stay in touch” channel alive.

And work often on your own databases. Repeat after me: you live or die by your databases. I learned that working with Jeff Pulver. It’s a lesson that sticks with me to this day.

When I say this, I don’t mean anything especially difficult. I might just mean different types of contact lists. And by different types, that’s the power. My company, for instance, has a database of names who might be interested in marketing, PR and business communications. My company has a database for our events. It’s how we know who to reach with appropriate information that they want.

But personally, I’ve got databases of people I’ve reached out to like you, and I’m working on those databases.

For instance, I just took the contacts from my various mail software, the contacts in LinkedIn, and a few other sources, and I pushed them all into BatchBook, my web-based contact management software. In there, I’m slicing up those contacts into “people I want to touch base with more often,” “people I can reach out to with a project,” “personal advisory board,” and “family.”

Now, with those lists in place, I can then either send individual emails and check in, or if it’s a group type of thing, I can use Blue Sky Factory, my email platform, and send out a batch of mail.

Contact is important. Keeping your networks alive is important. Having more than your corporate email address for me to reach you is important.

In 2009, I can tell you this is all very important.

What are you doing about any of this?

Photo credit SC Fiasco

You Need to Be Easy

ceb — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:11:49 +0000

I’m perpetually baffled when I see websites that don’t give me a sense of the human being behind them. I receive business cards by the ton at conferences, and I’m surprised when they don’t offer a great deal of value per square inch of paper. In fact, my own personal business cards don’t offer enough value, so they will be replaced eventually. People of Earth: make it easy for others to reach you and communicate with you.

About Pages

On your About page on your website, have a blurb about the company, if you have to, but then follow it up with a human, preferably with a picture. For every “we” site, you now need a “me” person on the site. Why? Because we do business with PEOPLE, not with corporations. The corporations give us branding and other legal constructs, but we buy from humans.

What’s important to go on that page otherwise? Two things: why should people care about you is the first. Second, here’s a hint: how do you want people to do business with you? What kind of business do you hope they do with you? (By the way, upon reviewing my About page, I’ll rewrite it tonight or tomorrow).

Business Cards

I think business cards need to be informative over clever. Clever is nice, and cheap is still icky, but if you’re not giving people enough queues about yourself, your business, your locale, and your contact particulars, it’s not going to get you to the dance. What should go on cards these days?

Name
Title (clever is okay, but remember this is another judgment someone is making about you)
Company Name (if there is one; if not, be you).
Phone number, specifically the one you hope people will call you on. I use my cell.
Email address. New world or not, email is still the way we tend to message folks.
Company URL (if you have such a thing)
Blog URL – this becomes more important these days, because you want to show your humanity, and/or what’s on your mind.
City/Town and State/Province information. I never used to have this on my cards, and even though I like being virtual, it seems that when professionals are looking at my cards, they follow up by asking where I work. When I show them my CrossTech Media cards, they immediately ask me where Canton is in regards to Boston. So that tells me they’re trying to anchor me in space.
Maybe a tagline about the kind of business you want to do with people.

What’s Your Take?

I’m curious to know what you think about this? How are you framing your about pages and your business cards? Are you easy?