Would you go masked to a business meeting?

Surely not. But that is effectively what people do when they tell us nothing about themselves in the content of the About or About us page on their site.

I don’t know of any research that explains why so many business people neglect to provide any content about their company or themselves, even when the tab says “About Us”. Is it choice or is it an oversight?

I do know that it is a mistake for us to neglect our About or About Us pages.

Because there is nothing mysterious about why people might want to check out our About or About Us page.

It’s just basic human nature: if we like what we read in a blog post or are interested in a product or service we list, it’s perfectly normal for us to want to find out something about the author or the provider of the product or service.

Which means that if we leave that About page in its raw template form – you know, “This is an example of a WordPress About page…” – of just drop some boring promo material into it, then every time someone clicks on that About or About Us tab there could be a missed opportunity for lead generation or for collaboration possibilities.

And I for one find it very frustrating when, having read an interesting blog post, or having received some sort of proposal in my email, I go to the About or About Us page on the company’s site and find either no relevant content or just a (usually) boring blurb about their products.

Only yesterday I received a pitch, via another site of mine, to look at a service which offered to help me manage my sites. On the About Us page there was a whole screed about the service and the benefits I could expect to gain from using the service. And it was free – what was not to like about that?

A lot actually. Because there was no information on that page about the company or people behind the service.

It may be that there is a legitimate company and good people behind the service, but I was not to know from the About Us page.

So I moved on.

Why do people neglect their About page or do a poor job with it?

There could be a number of reasons for not getting the About page right:

• They left their site design to a designer, who just got some information about the company’s products and dropped that into the page.
• They are uncomfortable writing about themselves and singing their own praises, so they put off doing anything about it, sometimes putting it off indefinitely.
• They are trying to make up their minds whether to write in the first or third person.
• They don’t actually have a real, duly registered business.

The key to getting the About page right

He lists some questions users will be turning over in their minds as they read our About page:

• Are you financially stable?
• Who are the people behind your company?
• What is the makeup of your organization?
• What do you do?
• What’s this company’s culture?
• What makes you different?
• Can they back up their claims?
• What do they stand for (and against)?
• Are they trustworthy?

And he provides examples, with screenshots, to illustrate how each of these question has been addressed by various firms.

Is there a guide you can use easily?

The best guide I know for any home based entrepreneur who wants an effective About page is the blog post by Ivan Walsh (good friend, no relation) in his post Why Your About Us Page is the Second Most Important Page on Your Site. Although I had read that post ages ago and in fact linked to it in a post here some months ago, I re-read it yesterday and realized I had not really taken in all of Ivan’s good advice on the topic.

Walking the Talk time

So last night and today I gave my About page here a going over. Frankly it wasn’t easy and in fact I don’t feel it’s right yet, but it is more focused before on answering those questions listed by Peter Boag in the post mentioned above and it’s more now like Ivan’s model than it was before. Feedback welcome.

One thing I intend to do soon is to add a video. (Update Feb 10: video now added.)

If you have examples of About pages that work well, your own or others, I trust you will feel free to share the links and tell us why you like the example you are sharing.

Image credit: Decorative Mask, by alantankenghoe, Flickr, Creative Commons

Looking today for some inspiration for a blog post, I decided to take a dive into the archives (a standard tip as one of the ways to deal with blogger’s block).

I noticed that back in October 2004 I had posted here about some key principles to which Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson  is said to have attributed the brand’s success – Virgin’s “brand values”. The book Business the Richard Branson Way: 10 Secrets of the World’s Greatest Brand Builder, by Des Dearborn.

The principles were:

• value for money
• quality
• reliability
• innovation
• an indefinable, but nonetheless palpable, sense of fun

So I was thinking, how would a home based business go, applying those principles or taking them as a model set of brand values?

I can’t imagine anyone arguing seriously against the first three: value for money, quality and reliability. So surely we can take them as read.

I’m personally ok with innovation in any business context, including for professionals working from home. For example in my coaching business I am always keen to learn about ways I can coach more effectively from a distance – e.g. I love Skype for that, both the audio and video versions.

Sense of fun as a brand value

But what I found really interesting to be reminded about was the Branson/Virgin commitment to fun.

Then I realized I am reminded of it whenever I get on a Virgin flight, which I do fairly frequently. The crew always seem to have a genuine sense of fun, while at the same time having an air of knowing what they are doing professionally, just as much as I see with crew on planes of their competitors.

And by the way, now that I think of it, I wonder why the crew on the competitor planes don’t give any sense that they are having fun, any sense that they might be feeling – if I can put it this way – that right now the best thing they could be doing in the whole world is helping to make my flight and that of a crowd of others on the plane as comfortable, safe and enjoyable as it could be. As the Virgin crews seem to be able to do.

My sense is that it’s that kind of “sense of fun” the adventure-loving, knighted tycoon Branson means as one of the key Virgin values.

So back to the professionals working from home.

I’m trying to think whether having and displaying a sense of fun (indefinable, but nonetheless palpable) is part of how I do business now.

I certainly feel it is. I know I enjoy the coaching process, including when it is dealing with quite serious business issues. I enjoy helping companies develop and implement their social media strategies. In that sense I have a sense of fun about what I do. And I enjoy continually learning more about coaching and social media and sharing what I learn.

I quite like the idea of elevating the sense of fun I *feel* in doing business to being a key brand value. After all, if I’m not having fun doing business and letting that show, I believe I’m going to have a difficult time trying to help clients look to having a sense of fun in their business – however indefinable, but nonetheless palpable that might be.

What do you feel about all that.?

Is a sense of fun a useful, appropriate value for a business?

Is there anything about working from home that makes it particularly appropriate – or inappropriate?

Can you share an example of how having and displaying a sense of fun might help (or has helped) your business or a business you know about?

Or the obverse – how it has been present but has not served your business, or someone else’s, well?

In recent weeks my partner Suzie Cheel and I have been very preoccupied with re-focusing our consulting business. Today, prompted by a four year old blog post about Sir Richard Branson’s business values, we reminded ourselves about the necessity of having a very clear, understandable, easy-to-communicate values framework for the business. And that led to a very productive discussion about our marketing.

Although we have had the consulting business in place for over twenty years, and our formal company structure for some sixteen of those, what we have been setting up with our all-new, all singing and dancing Social Media Powered Marketing is in many ways a new business, with some of the usual challenges attendant on such ventures.

It’s involved getting out of our comfort zones and some 4 am starts to take advantage of coaching sessions from the USA. And balancing other commitments, including family ones, some travel, my ongoing coaching commitments and so on.

We have been attending to a lot of practical details of how the business will work, getting clarity about our target market, developing marketing plans and initiatives, ensuring the supply of some outsourced services, developing product. All good, all necessary. But not much, at least explicitly, about the values framework.

Then today, in a management magazine I was scanning over breakfast, I read some comments by a top executive which reminded me of how essential it is for any business with long term prospects to define and articulate its values. I made a mental note to get around to that. “Too busy” right now, of course. Which if I heard a coaching client say I would no doubt ask, so when would be a good time to identify and document your company values?

Physician, heal thyself!

It’s not that we are working in a values-free zone, or that we don’t have shared values guiding the way we do business. Just that we had not had that specific conversation to identify our values in sufficient clarity to guide and monitor the way the business operates.

No doubt because I had been thinking briefly about these issues, my eye was caught a bit later in the morning, while fixing some photos that had somehow gone missing from older blog posts here, by a post I had written back in 2005 about the values espoused by Sir Richard Branson for his Virgin brand enterprises. One version of those values lists the following:

• Value for money
• Quality
• Reliability
• Innovation
• Sense of fun

The first four make eminent good sense to me but I like particularly having “sense of fun” inscribed as a key company value. I suspect that, in a sea of companies offering internet marketing services, it could be easy to think we have to be and be seen to be Very Serious.

Because business is serious, right?

Well, if Richard Branson and Virgin can be so successful (and not just in monetary terms), we can hardly be said to be irresponsible about our business if we choose to be known as people who are committed to having fun, as well as to providing value for money, quality, reliability and innovation, and whatever other “serious” values we might choose to incorporate.

Incidentally, taking time out just now to have that conversation about our values and to agree definitely that Sense of Fun was going in the list, we went on to have a further, very productive conversation about our branding – which frankly until this morning had been a bit fuzzy and is now clear enough for us to have a story we are keen to tell. But you know how it is, we had spent some money on branding and would now have to change and probably spend some more money.

We took the long view, better to get it right now, even if there is a bit of extra expense, than to stick stubbornly to something just because we have paid some design costs. Specifically, we are switching from “Webarts Online Marketing” to “Social Media Powered Marketing” – if you check out the site in the next day or so, just imagine that the name has been changed .

All in all, a fast trajectory of marketing clarification and decision-making between breakfast and lunch, triggered by the initially disconcerting and disruptive effect on my thinking from seeing “sense of fun” listed as a business value. But a process which rapidly pulled some loose threads together and which we believe gave us a better framework with which to proceed.

So what would your business look like if you incorporated a sense of fun as a key value? Or have you already done that? Or does the idea appal you?

I’d love to hear about  any other companies you know of – including your own – that have incorporated a sense of fun in their values framework. No doubt there are some obvious ones, such as clown services for children’s parties. But what “serious” businesses are there, besides Virgin, which include a sense of fun in their values, explicitly or implicitly in the way they deliver service?

[Image credit: "Branson posing with the band", courtesy riz94107 on Flickr, Creative Commons]

If you’ve noticed, when you leave a comment on a blog post, that other commenters have images of themselves alongside their comments but your comment has only a grey “mystery man” blob or a symbol like the one in the margin here, where the others have pictures of themselves, this post is for you.

Note: this post includes quite specific details about how to get a usable picture – may be -101 obvious to some, but we all have to start somewhere and I remember when it was all a mystery to me!

What is a Gravatar?

“Gravatar”? Strange word: and unless the dictionary on the shelf in your office or at home is very new, you almost certainly won’t find it there – maybe not even in an online dictionary. Apparently the word is made up from Globally Recognized Avatar, using “avatar” not in the Hindu sense of an incarnation of a higher being, but in the – literally more mundane – computer usage of a graphical representation of a user.

So Why would you want a gravatar?

Personal interests aside, it’s simply about branding.

I realize some people don’t want to have their personal photos online or use their personal photos as part of their branding. My own view is that your branding will be more effective when potential customers or colleagues can see a picture of you.  Just as I believe that your comment on a blog post or forum thread will be more effectively communicated if people can see a picture of you. Matthew Stibbe has an excellent post on using a good photo to build your personal brand.

Of course, your gravatar does not have to be of you. It could be, for example, a company logo. There is a whole side conversation that could be had here about corporate and personal branding, but for the moment and admittedly at the risk of over-simplifying the underlying issues, think about what you are wanting to communicate: if you want or need people to see you as someone they can – in the marketing phrase du jour – know, like and trust, ask yourself whether that trifecta is more likely to get up with a (good, professional) picture of you or one of the company badge?

How do you go about getting a gravatar?

Easy peasy.  Three steps.

1. You go to the Gravatar site and click on the Get Your Gravatar Today button. They then send you an email so you can confirm your application and have access to your new account.

2. You find or create a picture 80 x 80. If you are worried about how to edit a picture to get that size, Irfanview is a free, downloadable program with great editing tools. You will need a picture which is square. To get that you may have to crop a picture you have: Irfanview is great for cropping.

If you need to get instructions for cropping, search on <Crop> in the Irfanview Help screen.

You select the part of the picture you want and make it square. You do that by adjusting the frame until the width and height coordinates match (or nearly match within a pixel or so) as you will see in the blue section at the top of the Irfanview window: in the illustration here I have adjusted to 259×259, because I want to see how it looks before I reduce it to 80×80).

After you have cropped the picture, save it as something like imagename259.jpg (to avoid confusing it with the original or the avatar picture you are about to make).

Once you have saved the cropped version and if you are happy with that, it’s time to make the smaller, 80×80 version. With the cropped (square) image open, click on Image -> Resize/Resample and you will see a box as displayed here.

Uncheck the box that says <Preserve aspect ratio>, then type 80 in the width box and 80 in the height box (see screenshot below). Then save as something like imagename80x80.jpg so you will know that’s the one.

3. You go into your Gravatar account and upload your lovely new 80×80 picture.

You’re done. And as Mike Bergin explains in his helpful post, Get Your Gravator On, which I drew on for this post:

Not only will all your new comments be beauteous but your graphic will populate every comment you’ve ever made on a gravatar-enabled blog as long as they’re linked to the signifying e-mail address.

For the motivation to research and write this post thanks to the post on the subject at Blogging for Boomers.

I look forward to seeing more pictures of smiling (or serious) faces on the comments here.

If you have any challenges with setting up your gravatar, please leave a comment here and I will do what I can to help you sort it out – or another reader may well get in first and help.

For WordPress bloggers who would rather not have their site plastered with just the standard Gravatar logo, the default where a commenter has not activated their own gravatar, there is a very interesting option with WP-Identicon. Haven’t explored it or tried it – just noticed as I’m wrapping up this post.

Last night, as a panelist at the Networx Marketing Meeting in Brisbane, Australia, I received a delightful – and tasty – gift.

At the end of the discussion session each of the panelists was presented with a bouquet. When I saw the bouquets being brought up my first thought was that this was unusual, especially as three out of the four panelists were male.

I’m more used to getting a bottle of good wine at that stage.

Then I realised that the “flowers” under the cellophane wrapping were actually chocolates.

This was fun. And even more so when I got to taste the gift after I’d removed the cellophane and taken the picture here.

It was an example of being remarkable.

It was a purple cow.

Earlier in the evening, my fellow panelist Richard Slatter of wotnews and wearehunted fame, had talked about being remarkable – with a hat tip to Seth Godin and his famous purple cow.

I thought I had a fair idea of the precise meaning of “remarkable”, but looked it up anyway.

remarkable adj. 1. worthy of note or attention a remarkable achievement 2. unusual, striking, or extraordinary a remarkable sight

Clearly Richard (and Seth) were talking about the second meaning - unusual, striking, or extraordinary.

The chocolate bouquet qualified. It was made by the appropriately named Edible Blooms – whose tag line is “We make indulgent gift giving an easy and memorable experience!”

Worked for me.

So now I’m thinking, what am I doing or could I do with my business to be remarkable?

“Competent”, “capable”, “interesting” won’t cut it.”Unusual, striking or extraordinary will.

Please share, in the comments, what you do to be remarkable in your market.