Matrix Group International

Category: Blog

Don’t Like Facebook? Try Another Social Network!
If Google and Twitter seem to be getting all the press, but they’re not your cup of tea, don’t despair! There is a social network out there for nearly every interest group and demographic. Here are some I’ve tried out recently:
- FoodBuzz is a social network for people who like food. You can create a profile and share your recipes, restaurant reviews and photos. In addition, FoodBuzz aggregates content from food blogs and allows food brands to create a presence and interact with users. Here’s a link to my jmpineda profile, although I’m new so it’s still sparse.
- TeeBeeDee is a social network for “grown-ups” aka mostly the 40+ crowd. You can invite your friends, join and create groups, and participate in discussions. As expected, the top topics are: Work, Sex Over 40, Relationships, and Health.
- Bebo is AOL’s social network. It allows you to aggregate streams from other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. I really like how you can create an interactive timeline of your life through LifeStory.
- If you want to create your own social network, there’s Ning. Ning lets you create your own social space, invite people, and customize what people can do through the hundreds of applications. Associations might use Ning to create a closed network just for members where you control the brand experience and ways that members can interact.
How about you? What social networks are you on? Which best suits you and your interests? Which one is your favorite?
May 7, 2009
Election Day Needs a Marketing Plan or How To Get Voters to the Polls
It’s Election Day in Alexandria, VA. Today, we voted for Mayor, City Council and School Board. These are pretty important positions in our City government. Here’s the problem: voter turnout was ridiculously low. When I went to vote at lunchtime, I was the only person in the entire polling station. The volunteer told me that about 5% of registered voters in my precinct had voted.

Low voter turnout, especially for a non-Presidential race, is nothing new. Mid-term elections are notorious for having low voter turnout. Evidently, the millions who turned out for the 2008 Presidential race that elected President Obama have tuned out again and are skipping local elections.

Know what I think? Election Day needs a marketing plan. We market our meetings, conventions, products, and tradeshows. I say that we need to deploy some of the tactics we use to get people to attend a tradeshow, register on a Web site or buy a product and get people to the polling stations! Here are some of my ideas:
- Create a sweepstakes. Every person who votes is entered into a contest to win $10, $100, $10,000 or whatever amount is available. The dollar value doesn’t matter; the excitement of a sweepstakes is what counts.
- Give out points for voting. We all love gold stars. My polling station should have my voter record and give me a gold star for consistent voting. A bell should ring when a longtime voter checks in. I should get a $25 Starbucks card for a perfect voting record in the last 24 years.
- Voting should be fun. Let’s face it. We all want to be entertained. Why not have the local school bands perform at the polling stations? We should have stand-up comics making fun of the candidates. Let’s have magicians entertain the folks waiting in line.
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May 5, 2009
Happy 10th Anniversary, Matrix Group!

I can’t believe that Matrix Group will be 10 years old tomorrow. A decade. 10 years! When I started Matrix Group in shared office in Georgetown, little did I know that the journey would be difficult, challenging, exhilarating and deeply satisfying.

It feels like just yesterday that I was renting furniture to impress a dotcom client coming in (year 1), getting our own cabinet at the data center (year 3), and celebrating at the Torpedo Factory (year 5).

Looking Back on the First Five Years

I found the e-mail that I sent out to clients, partners and friends inviting them to our 5th anniversary party back in 2004. Here is what it said:

“When I pondered starting my own company in April 1999, I had no idea how wild the ride would be. The first year was all about surviving, begging clients and staff to come on board, launching our first applications, figuring out what we wanted to be when we grew up, and feeling poor when every other Internet company had millions to spend.

The second year was about creating a process that would make us different from other companies, figuring out that clients need us to build their sites AND help them stay on top of Web technologies, and building an internal infrastructure that could support our growth and activities.

The third and fourth years were about deepening our knowledge of Web development best practices, strengthening our ties to clients, figuring out how to keep and retain our excellent staff, and launching a software division.

This fifth year has been about tackling integration projects that other companies won’t touch, hardening our development and testing processes, rethinking how we can do our best for clients, discovering that our software has made all of Matrix better, assessing which of our services to keep and which to abandon, and deciding what we want to be when we grow up.”

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April 30, 2009
What Is a Taxonomy and Why Does Your Site Need One?
If Matrix Group is creating a new Web site for you or updating an existing one, our project plan is almost sure to include development or review of your taxonomy. Taxonomy? Doesn’t that have to do with biology and how we classify organisms? (you know, kingdom –> phylum –> class?) Sort of.

Taxonomy today refers to more than the classification of organisms. Wikipedia calls taxonomy “the practice and science of classification.” A taxonomy can help you organize an unstructured collection of information. On most Web sites, information can be organized by:
- Topic – these tend to be the topics, issues and special interest of your readers, members, customers, visitors. For example, a trade association in the auto industry might have topics related to safety, marketing, supply chain, quality.
- Type – these tend to refer to the content collections on a Web site. For example, a think tank might have news, policy briefs, commentary, testimony and podcasts.
Why do I think every site needs a taxonomy? And how do you use a taxonomy?
- Different people navigate according to their needs and interests. On any given day, a journalist might want to see all of your company’s press releases, regardless of topic; on another day, the same journalist might want to know everything your organization has to offer in the area of food safety. So let same journalist navigate by both content topic and type!
- Tagging content by taxonomy allows you to relate content by topic and type. So, a news item on climate change would have a sidebar containing other news items related to climate change, recent publications and meetings about climate change, and recent news items (regardless of topic).
- A taxonomy allows you to connect people with their interests. Let your visitors sign up for news by their interest areas, let them personalize their Web experience on your site, and compare the interests of your members with the content you have online.
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April 28, 2009
People Want to Follow; Are You Ready to Lead?
I’ve been thinking about the terminology that we use to describe our relationships on various social networks. I “follow” people on Twitter and people “follow” me back. I have “friends” on Facebook. I am “linked” to people on LinkedIn. The “follow” relationship is the one I find most fascinating.

When you “follow” someone, you:
- Accept them as a guide or leader
- Imitate or follow their example
- Watch their movement or progress
While I understand that my “followers” on Twitter probably don’t see me as a leader, there are certainly people on Twitter who I “follow” because I consider them thought leaders and I want to know what they’re reading and thinking. Think about it. We never say that we “follow” a Web site, company or newsletter, but we do say that we “follow” someone’s blog. I know I consider it a high compliment when someone tells me that they “follow” my blog.

In the book Tribes, marketing guru Seth Godin tells us it’s human nature to want to be part of a group that shares a common passion and recognizes the same leader; in other words, most of us want to be part of a tribe. Further, Seth believes that using the Web and social networking tools, everyone can now find or assemble a tribe and lead it.

So I say to each of you and your organizations: People want to follow, are you ready to lead?
April 23, 2009
What We’ve Learned About the New Facebook Pages
The dust is finally settling on the Facebook pages for companies and organizations. The new pages were supposed to go live March 11, but the transition seemed to take a few weeks. Here’s what we’ve learned so far about the new Facebook pages:
- Status updates (aka What’s on your mind?) are definitely posting to the organization’s Wall and showing up on fans’ streams. Fans can indicate if they like a post, they can comment, and they can share the update.
- Only native Facebook applications are showing up on fan’s streams. In the past, we brought in photos and videos from Flickr and YouTube via RSS. You can still do this today, but these updates do NOT show up in fan’s streams. For example, if you want your fans to know that you posted a new photo album, you have to use the native Facebook application.
- Sending an update to fans does NOT trigger an e-mail. Instead, these updates show up in fan’s Inboxes, in the Updates tab. These updates also exist in View Updates in the left navigation of the company pages, but only if you click More. It took us forever to figure this out and I’m convinced that nobody is reading our updates because they have no idea these updates exist.
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April 21, 2009
Getting Started with Twitter For Your Organization
Many clients ask me how to get started with social networking. Should they blog, be on Facebook or LinkedIn, or should they start tweeting? For many organizations, I recommend Twitter. The concept is simple: Twitter lets you broadcast short updates (140 characters or less) to the people who “follow” or subscribe to your updates. These updates are called “tweets.” Twitter is also called micro-blogging because people tweet about what they’re doing, thinking, eating, reading, yada, yada. So how do you get started?
- First, you need to set-up an account on Twitter.com. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, you don’t connect your organization’s Twitter account to a personal account. And both people and organizations have equal status on Twitter. Not sure if you’re ready to start tweeting? I recommend setting up an account anyway so that somebody else doesn’t grab your name. And be sure to record the username and password on the account so that if the person in charge of tweeting for your company leaves or goes on vacation, someone else can do the tweeting.
- Next, you need to personalize your account. I recommend uploading a logo or image, and entering a short description of your organization plus your Web address. This is critical to helping others find your company, and to encouraging others to follow you. For example , I generally don’t follow people or organizations that don’t have a description or URL. You can also get fancy and customize your background image. Check out how Business Insider customized their Twitter account with images from their Web site and job fairs. I also like the backround image for Pocket.
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April 15, 2009
Creating a Content Strategy for your Web Site, Blog, Social Networks
In my last blog post, I referenced the content strategy that the marketing team at Matrix Group has developed to keep our Web site and social networking pages fresh and interesting. Several folks asked for more details on our content strategy, so here you go.

Our communication/conversation strategy has several elements:
- Communication vehicles. We created an inventory of all the ways that we use to communicate with clients and prospects. Our inventory includes: the Web site, e-mail newsletter list, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and e-mail discussion lists.
- Communication schedule. We have mapped out a schedule that delineates what we will post or send out every day, week, month, and quarter. For example, we strive to tweet every day, update our Facebook page twice a week, and post new blog entries twice a week.
- Content strategy. We believe that it’s important to NOT post the same stuff across all channels. For example, on the Matrix Group Twitter account, we tweet about association/non-profit news, how companies and organizations are using the Web and social networking in interesting ways, cool sites, Web standards, site and application launches, job openings, Matrix Group events, and fun stuff going on around the office. My personal Twitter account (@jmpineda) is different; I will post personal updates, sites I love, business news and trends, cool gadgets, blog posts and Matrix Group events. You’ll notice that there is overlap in what we tweet when it comes to Matrix Group; otherwise, what we tweet between the two accounts is very different. That’s intentional; we want our followers to have a different experience on each Twitter account.
- Tone and voice. Our Creative Director, Alex, says tone and voice are very important, no matter what the vehicle, so we have guidelines for the writing across our sites and pages. Our updates are always professional, not formal but not too casual either, friendly and warm.
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April 13, 2009
Time Management and Social Networking: How to NOT make social networking a huge time suck
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve met with clients about their social networking (SN) strategy. A common refrain is this: “Social networking takes too much time. I don’t have extra time in the day. And I don’t want my staff wasting huge amounts of time on social networking.”

There’s no question that we can fritter away hours reading Twitter posts, watching random videos on YouTube, updating our Facebook status, yada, yada.

But for organizations that have made the decision to incorporate social networking into their communication, conversation or marketing strategies, how can we be sure that social networking sites aren’t just a sinkhole of time?

As someone who is fairly active on different SN platforms (I tweet and update my profile on Facebook regularly, I browse sites on StumbleUpon, and I certainly watch my share of YouTube videos), here are my top time management tips:
- I set aside time during the day to read blogs, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc. Typically, I set aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night.
- I may update my status on Twitter and Facebook during the day, but I don’t do a lot of reading.
- I don’t read everything. I’m really good at skimming.
- I use Tweetdeck to manage the tweets from people I follow. I set up groups for the people whose tweets I really want to see: family, friends, clients, CEOs, thought leaders, research orgs. Love Tweetdeck!
- If I find something I like, I either read it right then, or I save it to my Delicious account (social bookmarking) site for later consumption.
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April 6, 2009
What Clients Want: To Be Understood
One of my Project Managers (we call them PMs at Matrix Group) was struggling with an account. The client was frustrated, the Project Manager was frustrated, so of course, now I’m frustrated. I called the client, had a long de-brief session, worked through some issues, and with a few tweaks, the project was back on track. The PM wanted to know how I did that. My secret? I put myself in the client’s shoes.

As a business owner, I get to be manager of staff and projects AND client to our many vendors. As the chief salesperson for the company, I interact the most with customers and users. As a liberal arts person turned techie, I know enough to be dangerous, but I can’t write a line of CSS to save my life. All of this means that I can more easily see a situation from a client’s perspective. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about clients:
- Clients are busy, the Web site is usually just a small fraction of their job, they don’t spend all day thinking about the Web site, and there’s a whole lot of stuff going on that they don’t know and don’t care to know. We can never assume clients know that a new version of Internet Explorer is coming out and it’s going to be more standards-compliant, that title tags should not be more than 64 characters or Google will ignore them, and that a print style sheet is different from a printer-friendly page.
- Most clients are non-techies who need a technical solution. They seek a solution and a result. We need to give them context for our solution, and enough detail so that they can make an informed solution, but not so much that they get overwhelmed. We also need to communicate concepts using terms they understand. For example, when a Web design has been approved and we have to now slice the design, I liken it to going to blueline. Clients who have ever had anything printed are familiar with blueline; it’s close to a final proof and changes cost time and money.
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March 31, 2009