John Cow dot Com » communications

Why You Need an Online Privacy Policy – To Cover Your ASS of Course

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:37:44 +0000

I get asked a lot about whether or not a particular website needs an online privacy policy or not. My answer to all those different websites is the same: for the love of little puppies, yes. No matter what your subject matter or nature of your website, you need to have a privacy policy.

NOTE: Now before i get into this any farther I do need to make one thing VERY CLEAR… I AM NOT A LAWYER and therefore do not take anything I post here as legal advice. You are on your own there… so if you are not sure then check with a lawyer.

The reason you need one, as I mentioned in the title of this post, is to cover your ass. With all the news and talk about the FTC and the changes that are coming you do NOT want to be unprepared for the unexpected.

An online privacy policy states the terms and conditions under which your website handles the personal information that it obtains from anyone who visits your site. What that means for you is that, because you had a posted policy, no one can come to you after visiting your site and complain that you misused their information or didn’t inform them about how their information was going to be used.

You may think that you don’t need a privacy policy because your site isn’t hosted in a state or country that has any laws that protect consumer privacy online. But you’re not actually protected by that – if a user who does live in one of those places takes offense to the way their information was used, and you didn’t disclose that it would happen in your privacy policy, then you could be liable.

Yes, I know, what are the chances of that happening to your website, but you never know. And frankly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that hard to do, and it covers any chance of liability, so why wouldn’t you do it?

So if you don’t have a privacy policy in place, you need to get one now. While you can find lots of different examples of privacy policies from all over the internet, don’t just copy one from another site and paste in your company name over theirs. You need to make sure that you privacy policy covers you for exactly the way you use the information of the users who come to your site.

Here’s what your privacy policy needs to include:

An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.
An explanation of how you use that information you collect from your users.
Your contact information so people can contact you if they have any questions about the privacy policy.
An explanation of how you will communicate any changes to the privacy policy to your users if/when it happens.

And, if your site has a forum, comments section, or some other kind of interactive content that requires people to register to participate, then you also need to include a statement about how people can review or make changes to their personal information they provided to you.

Now that you have a privacy policy in place, you need to display it somewhere where it can be easily found. A link at the bottom of your homepage will usually suffice.

So what are you waiting for… oh wait probably some examples or something right?

Well honestly my suggestion is, if you are going to be serious about this online business of yours then you take this seriously and do what I did…. Let someone who knows what they are doing handle this for you. You will notice that on this blog and my membership sites that my privacy policy states a source at the bottom (http://www.internetlawcompliance.com/)… that is who I used and I highly recommend you do the same. Do NOT just copy and paste from another site cause not only may that not suit your needs, these are copyright protected as well.

Go to http://www.internetlawcompliance.com/ (not an affiliate link either.. cause this is a serious topic and I want you 100% trusting me on this to protect yourself. Not that you should not trust me but… ya I will just shut up now).

You may not feel you need one right now, but most people don’t realize they need a privacy policy until after there’s a problem. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or, in this case, one simple little document and a link on the homepage can save your ass later.

How to Start to Build Your Own Communication Strategy

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:47:26 +0000

Now, we’ve been talking about why you should be looking at things differently, and what you should be doing instead, and we’ve even gone through how to make your website more functional in order to meet your customers needs (because it’s all about them, remember?)… oh and yes, this is a continuation from the previous post on Press Releases

The next step is to start to actively promote yourself (or, rather, why you’re the solution to their problems and establish yourself as a thought leader in your category.) But with all of the options out there, how do you do this?

It can be daunting simply because of the sheer number of possibilities.

What we’re going to concentrate on is promoting your website essentially through PR. Now, I’m not referring to simply putting out press releases, although they will be a part of the plan. When I call it PR, I use that term, but what I really mean is not-advertising. Meaning, you’re not going to have to pay for it.

Although paid advertising can and does have a part in marketing yourself on the web, there are approximately 2 billion books available (and a lot of them for free) so what I’m going to concentrate on is seeing this concept of basing your decisions on your buyer’s needs instead of your wants through to the end.

And there are a lot of non-paid resources out there that can promote your business and get people talking about you. Which is kind of what the point of PR was in the first place, before it forgot what it was supposed to do.

Remember, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t utilize paid advertising, or that it doesn’t work. But I think the things that we’re going to outline here are important that you have established first, as they are crucial to the reputation and the success of your business. Plus, they give you a big bang for your non-buck, so why wouldn’t you want to take care of this first?

Here’s what to do:

The first and most important thing to building your communications strategy is to forget about yourself and concentrate on your customer.
Understand your buyers, so you can then create a communications strategy that will reach them.

Stay tuned for more

Continually Improving Your Communications

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:10:14 +0000

In the previous post “Communication In Your Web Design” I talked about how your web design can actually communicate to your visitors as to whether you are a “Trusted Expert” or not. In this post, I talk about the final phase of your communications strategy and becoming (and staying) a Trusted Expert which is…

TESTING

Why do you run tests?

So you can be as certain as possible that your communications strategy is helping rather than hurting your online business.

You’ll never know if you have the right site for your customers unless you test it.

You need to examine all the elements of the site – every single thing on your site is part of what will persuade user to purchase. You can’t take your assumptions and intuitions for granted, or assume that traditional marketing practices will apply. You have to examine everything you do with a critical eye. To be a Trusted Expert, you must have the best and most functional site you possibly can.

One of the best ways to realize the full potential of your website is by testing, and to keep right on testing. Your website is like your spokesperson, and it works 24/7 – out there, interacting with potential customers, all the time trying to persuade them to take action. You need to know if the assumptions under which you built your site are, in fact, true and meet the needs and expectations of your audience.

There are three major components to your ‘testing’ process that you need to take into consideration: testing, measuring, and optimizing.

Testing is when you compare elements on your sites or within your advertising campaigns to see which variation or combination is the best for persuading users to complete the desired action, whether that be a sale or a sign-up.

Measuring is when you monitor what the visitors to your site do. Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics (which is free, so why wouldn’t you use it?) you determine key performance indicators – traffic, overall conversation rate, page abandonment rate, length of time spent on a page, etc.

Optimization is when you put your test results in action to maximize your conversion rate. You take your insights and learnings from the tests you ran and put the results into action on your site.

As you test, you’ll learn more about the assumptions you made when you crafted your communications strategy. You’ll reinforce some assumptions, and have to refine and change others. While no one wants to be proven wrong, the great part about this process is that you are learning things about your buyer personas, and learning what they like, in real time.

You can use this information to continually improve your communications strategy. When you know what your buyers want, you’ll find it easier to be a Trusted Expert to them. As you grow more familiar with your users and what they want, you can create more meaningful options to test to continue to further improve your site, improving your conversion rate the entire time.

Communication in Your Web Design

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:45:59 +0000

Continued from previous post Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert

While ‘content’ usually refers to the written part of your communications, it really includes all the visual elements, as pictures also communicate to your users. So really…

‘content’ is anything and everything that the user sees that will affect how they perceive you!

And web design is more important than you think; users make judgments about the authority and credibility of websites based on their design.

You could have the most informative, authoritative written content in the world, but if your site looks like it was designed by a 12 year old with ADD (or even worse, a 60 year old with no web experience) the user will reject your site.

Web design also goes beyond the look and feel of the site to its usability. This is something that a lot of advertising agencies were forgetting about for a while: they were designing these beautiful, meaningful, and significant websites that won a lot of creative awards, but were absolutely horrible to try and navigate or get any kind of useful information out there. This was the most self-indulgent import from the world of traditional advertising – the habit of creating advertising for people in the advertising world, not to accomplish the goals of the business.

In traditional advertising, it was hard to say that a campaign hadn’t worked when it had gotten so much good press (which, first clue, was about the ads and not the products) but in this online world, where everything is measurable, it became obvious quite quickly that advertising for advertising’s sake wouldn’t cut it. (That’s not to say that it doesn’t still happen, but you’re too smart and now well-informed to let that happen to you, right?) Truly remarkable sites are beautiful and easy to use.

Unfortunately, those beautiful and easy-to-use sites are few and far between. But there are a lot of small changes that you can make to improve both the look and the functionality of your site. Above all, you can’t underestimate the importance of your usability; your decision process about the design choices you make should be subject to the same amount of scrutiny of your other business decisions.

Remember, whether or not a user completes a transaction on your website depends heavily on the experience and usability of your web design. If you haven’t prioritized your resources to include some time spent on your web design and how it communicates to your targets, it can have an adverse affect on your sales.

The Importance of Communication And How We Should Be Communicating To Be Successful

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:43:22 +0000

To succeed in the future you must first understand the past.

That sounds like something someone famous would say, but I’m not quite sure if that’s exactly how it goes, but you get the idea.

To succeed in the online world, you have to understand where it came from, and how’s it’s changed. Then you can see where it’s heading, and be ahead of the curve.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how business communication works, both past and present. How traditional advertising worked and the theories behind it, as well as the early forays into the online medium. How does online business work today, and how you can tailor your marketing and communications strategy to take advantage of that.

Advertising, marketing, branding, sales, PR, web design – all of these are considered separate departments within a business. But they really are all about one thing: communications. Every piece of your business, from your logo to your ads to your website to the way the receptionist answers the phone; they all say something about your company (if you’ve got one). And that, in turn, influences people’s opinions about your company and the products or services you provide.

Who then decide whether or not they buy that product or service.

Again, we’re back where we’ve always been – it all comes back to the content.

Great content is what will drive people to find you, instead of you having to spend money to drive them to your site. More importantly, you need to think about what the message is that your potential buyers want to hear. That’s the real key.

You know what you want to say, but is it what they want to hear? But how do I know? Should I ask them?

No. You should test them! Their actions will speak louder than words.

You’ll be seeing a lot more posts like this in the following weeks; posts that don’t give you a how-to on how to fix a plug-in bug, or posts about the latest or newest product out there, but rather posts on how we think and communicate. How we used to communicate, how we communicate now, and how we should be communicating to be successful in business (notice those are two separate things).