Account Managers have been around as long as advertising agencies have existed. If a client wants to advertise their product or service, there must be someone to advise, educate, communicate, listen, produce, and yes, hold their hand.

Account managers can be found in all industries, but their responsibilities remain consistent; creating presentations for new clients, helping clients achieve their goals, maintaining a respectable relationship between the company and the client, and giving the client the best service possible. Since 1812 when the first advertising agency is said to have been established, Account Managers have been doing just that.

Easy enough, right? Perhaps if you are a “people” person with adequate social skills, capable of working under pressure, well organized, self-motivated, and able to successfully communicate at various levels – this may be your cup of coffee. However, in the last decade or so, a relatively new industry has formed in conjunction with the World Wide Web; Interactive. Considered untraditional to most, Interactive Agencies offer a mix of web design and development, software development, and online marketing, including SEO and SEM.

So, does the role of Account Manager change? Yes and no. Keeping our clients caffeinated, and acting as the liaison between the client and the production team, are number one priorities for traditional and non-traditional AM’s. However, as Interactive Account Managers, it’s crucial to stay abreast of the latest technology. Because our industry is constantly changing, we strive to educate our clients on cutting-edge trends and innovative strategies. Interactive AM’s are also involved in every piece of the process. Whether it be developing a website or setting up an online marketing campaign, we carry the project from beginning to beautiful.

Client Service Professionals, such as ourselves, want our clients to have an online presence as experts in their field. We oversee the project process, ensuring our clients are set apart from the competition. Some food for thought – or crème for your latte – Success is to Internet as Account Manager is to Client. We manage and implement every phase of the project and must come to know our clients’ industries virtually as much as they do. We are needed and when you need us, don’t worry; we hold hands.

There is a specific height of importance to the jobs we do everyday. As the client service team, we hold ourselves to the highest regard; pleasing clients that sometimes may be incapable of feeling satisfied. A happy client is a paying client, and if your actions (or lack thereof) remove this glee from the equation, you might as well sign your own pink slip.

So how do we do it? Aha! – A golden question that we at DBS are delighted to answer. We do it by living, speaking, and breathing A.C.D. And no, we did not leave off the last C. We pride ourselves on being Accessible, Communicating, and Documenting everything. A.C.D.

A. Be Accessible.

As an Account Executive, accessibility holds extreme importance to our clients. Before we land a client, we initially hand out business cards. Boom – we become instantly accessible. It is important for a client or a potential client to understand that you can be reached when they are in need.

An important component of being accessible is dependability. If you are not readily available to clients, they will be unable to depend on you, and eventually they won’t want to work with you. Whether your client emailed you, Skyped you or left a message on your phone, it is always a good idea to return their message within two hours.

Being accessible now could possibly save you later. For example, say you miss a deadline. Clients are more likely to be lenient about your oops if they have been in constant contact you with throughout the project and they know you care. (ON a side note – DON’T EVER MISS DEADLINES!)

C. Communicate effectively. COMM-UN-I-CATE.

Engage in conversation with your clients. We are all guilty of multi-tasking when we are on a call. Maybe we’re writing down tomorrow’s to-dos, or revising design work, but we do it. DON’T! Multi-tasking is a great skill, but not when interacting with a client. Instead, listen, learn, comprehend and respond. If you are not 100% there, they will sense it.

It is also important to get to know your client on a personal level. Perhaps they aren’t as chipper as they normally are; they may tell you their daughter has stomach flu. Be sure to follow up on their daughter’s illness. ALL business, is not always a good thing.

Be an active listener to your clients. Really, listen. In order to be proactive for your clients, you must know exactly what they want, their needs, and how you can make them successful.

Make sure you ask questions. You will never really know and understand your clients if you don’t ask. Be the expert for your clients. Get to know their industry. As Account Executives, we may have clients that deal in food preparation, medical issues or logistics. We must be able to talk intelligently about their product or service.

Communication must go a step further as a client service team. We must be able to spread our clients’ wants and needs on to our creative people. Relay the hardcore information while still allowing creative juices to flow within the production team.

D. Document everything.

There’s a plethora of ways to execute complete documentation methods in business. Some forms include email, note-taking, software programs and saving your dated notes in folders/binders with all your client collateral will keep you organized.

Never rely on memorization. This can unfortunately backlash on you, leaving you spiraling out of control. Too many fires happen in the day of the Account Executive for you to remember a forty-five second conversation with a client. Carry a notepad with you at all times!

Document alongside the process of every project. You will have notes that will allow you to understand what was happening during the development of that specific project, client’s thoughts, and other details that you may forget later.

So A.C.D.Accessibility, Communicating and Documenting. All important attributes that act as glue to bond with our clients and make them successful, which in turn, makes our company successful.

Listen To Their NEEDS, Not Their WANTS

As obvious as it may seem, listening to your clients is absolutely imperative to a successful relationship. We are client service professionals; we are responsible for recognizing and understanding our clients’ needs, even when they don’t directly communicate them.

Far too often in this industry, a lack of engagement by account managers leads to confusion between client and agency.  As a result, the client is often the one left holding the short straw.

Let’s say you have a client who is very interested in the idea of making a Facebook fan page. They heard through the grape vine that Social Media is the new wave and that it will ultimately revolutionize the way they do business. You listen to their desire for a Facebook fan page, and act on it by setting up the page, without ever discussing the goals or details of managing it. A year after creating their fan page, you check on it to see that they have 7 fans and haven’t updated in 10 months. You listened to their wants and did exactly as they requested, but the client is still unhappy with the results and the blame may likely fall on your shoulders.

So where did the process go wrong? To be as succinct as possible, you listened to their WANTS, not their NEEDS. They wanted a Facebook fan page; they needed a place where they can interact and communicate with their loyal customers. Wants and needs are often not the same, and those client service professionals that can distinguish the difference between the two are a step ahead of the game.

Talk WITH Them, Not AT Them

Yes, we are in the market of people pleasing, but if you only provide your clients with what they want to hear, you are missing the opportunity to be more than just pleasing. You miss the opportunity to be Wonder Woman (or Superman), the hero of the office place. When your clients ask, “What do you think”, respond honestly as a professional. You are the expert in this relationship. The client rarely has the intimate knowledge of Internet best practices that you have as an online account executive.

Suppose you did listen to your client’s needs in the example raised above and the results of the fan page are still less than desirable. You realized that what they are asking for isn’t specifically a fan page, but rather, another means to talk with their customers. Regardless of this “Eureka!” you decide a Facebook fan page is the solution and ensure them that they will get tons of customer interaction. So what was the reason for the failure this time? As it turns out, the reason the Facebook fan page was not successful happens to be the same reason your client is unhappy with you.  Both of you incorrectly talked AT your customers, not WITH them.

A Facebook fan page is essentially an advertisement.  Just as you made the mistake when dealing with your client, a fan page is a business talking AT its customers. A great way to talk WITH your customers is to create a Facebook group. The intention of a Facebook group is to bring together individuals with mutual interests.  These individuals naturally will care about your client’s business because they share the same interests.  They will be more likely to share the information your client divulges and spread it amongst their network of friends. Your client’s customers also become the primary content creators. Had you talked with your client, and not at them, you would have learned that they don’t have the necessary resources to regularly create new content and update the page, a fact made evident from their 10 month hiatus on the fan page. This aspect makes a Facebook group especially appealing to your client. Now that you’ve identified the solution, you can wear your cape proudly, but don’t wander too far from the phone booth, as there is still one more step to ensure a healthy client relationship.

Follow Through. Kind of Like Your Golf Swing

The clever saying, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me” does not apply in the client service’s world. You can listen to what your clients are saying (and not saying) all day long. You can respond with a well thought out response that inquisitively probes your clients’ needs. You can talk in depth with your customer about the implementation of your solution. But if you do not follow through, just ONCE, you lose it all.

FYI: following through is important everywhere. When swinging a golf club, you need to follow through; when getting a chic’s digits, it’s necessary to follow through (seriously). Because this action is instrumental for success universally, you can guarantee that it is equally as important when managing a client relationship. Ignoring this simple fact is the easiest and quickest way to a disgruntled client. So when you tell your client that you will get them the quote they requested– get it to them. If you tell your client that you’ll be available when they post their first blog – be available. If you tell them that you will give them your first born – well you get the point. Follow through!

In no way are the three steps above meant to be the cure-all for client services. They are merely the three things that you can do today to turn around that relationship or help solidify that new one.

In the beginning …

The web was a very simple place. A “web page” was most likely to be a “static” page, meaning what we saw was the result of just the HTML code in a single file. Modern “web pages” are dynamically generated from data stored in a database server. They are displayed using templating engines and other more advanced techniques, all the while being accentuated with liberal doses of JavaScript and CSS.

Back in the day, on the rare occasion when a web page needed to talk to a web server, a “CGI” program (Common Gateway Interface) would do the talking. In all likelihood, this was written in the ubiquitous language of the day, “Perl”. If you knew some simple HTML and some Perl, you could really do it all, man.

And just as the web itself was simple, so were the tools we used to build web pages and web sites. A simple HTML file could be written with a basic text editor (like Notepad), or maybe if we got fancy, we would use Composer from Netscape Communicator Suite of Internet tools. You couldn’t use web-specific Microsoft products then, because they didn’t exist.

But now you can’t think about building anything on the web without a box full of serious programming tools. The good news is that there are plenty of tools to choose from. There’s a variety of languages to choose from, frameworks to support those languages, different IDE’s (Integrated Development Environment), editors that are available specifically for your language of choice, and a choice of database server implementations.

In many cases, a given project can be done with any set of tools. The finished product we deliver will be a mix of standardized open technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are the true languages of the web and the only languages a web browser is capable of utilizing.

For the most part, no matter what choices we make on the development path, we will all wind up at the same place technologically. A typical user will never know whether we used Java, Ruby, or .NET to generate all that HTML their browser is displaying, so how we choose to deliver the finished product is often up to us. However, there are occasional exceptions when the project requirements limit what tools we can use.

When starting a new project, we want to use the best tool for the job. Although there are a variety of choices, not all choices are equal. So how do we decide which tool is best?

Factors to consider include:

• Adaptability: How much of the heavy lifting of the project can be done by the language and framework, and how much functionality do we have to create from whole cloth?
• Extensibility: How easy is it to extend and modify the built-in features to help us with the task at hand?
• Scalability: Does our toolset help or hinder us if we have to start sharing the load amongst multiple systems? Or datacenters?
• Maintainability: As the project we are creating evolves over its lifetime, and perhaps takes unexpected turns, how well will the given toolset be able to grow and expand with us? Or will it get in the way of unseen future requirements?
• Documentation: Do we have good developer level documentation?
• Support: Where and how do we get support, and how good is it? For paid software, most support comes from the provider. From open source and free projects, this is either the developers or other users (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
• And last but not least, Familiarity: If we are hiring outside developers, we obviously want to choose those that are intimate with the tools we have chosen. If we are using in-house developers, how well do they know the language and framework? The devil you know is often better than the devil you don’t, which translates directly into increased productivity.

Some tools may be better suited to certain projects than others, in that they bring something to the table that significantly reduces development time. For instance, using Eclipse as an IDE for Android app development would be a good choice. Google has made specific extensions available for Eclipse that helps push the development process.

The bottom line is to find which set of tools will meet all of the project requirements and get the job done in the least amount of time.

To be continued …

@author Hal

“Content is King,” has always been a saying that belonged to marketers. However, as more and more people are embarking on the quest to build a website, one aspect of the process seems to get overlooked, the content. These people are centrally focused on the web site design and the intricate functionality so often that they miss the most important function of a website, to send a message.

To sum it up, Content Strategy is the practice of developing a comprehensive plan for the content that your website will feature. For the sake of clarity, let’s identify what is considered content on a website. Content can be text, images, videos, and audio. Content can show your customer a process, tell them where to click to purchase, or guide and inform a user. In a nutshell, Content is your message, your means, your ROI!

So, if content is so important then why do we wait until the eleventh hour to think about it?

When going through the process of developing Content Strategy take the following steps to ensure that you have relevant, usable, and focused content on your site.

• Plan: A strategy is a roadmap, so plan accordingly. You don’t start down the road to a destination without knowing how you are going to get there. Who is in charge of the content? What steps are you going to take to eliminate the bad copy and keep the good copy? Layout the steps and put people in charge.

• Analyze the Road Ahead: Which routes are the right ones? Are there detours? Are the shortcuts worth it, or do they have the potential to just cost you more time in the end? Take a moment to look at your content, all of the content (remember what constitutes content?) and see what is working and what isn’t. Then get rid of what doesn’t work and move forward by improving the message. Don’t get overwhelmed with all the content you have. Remember: you planned for this and you have systems in place.

• Hit the Road!: Now that you know where you are going with your website content and how you are going to get there, start creating content. Create Videos, Images, Text; whatever it is that gets your message to the consumer and stays in line with the overall voice and goal of the site. Since you planned ahead, you should have some structure to the process of gathering, approving, and posting all content for the site, preferably with one person making the decisions. Websites usually have many content stakeholders, each with their own point-of-view and many want their individually tailored message to be heard. This is not conducive to a well organized and well voiced website. Keep the consumer in mind. Give one person the job of owning and enforcing that voice.

• Stay the Course: You have a site. It is well written, well organized, and has been successful in informing and converting online traffic. Now what? Stay the course! Maintain the content. If you have a new video, post it. New images that speak to the websites overall goals, upload them. Have a new product or a new service? Add it! Sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it? Not to someone who did Step 1. You have planned for this and you have named an Editor in Chief. Yes, just like in the publishing world, the EIC is in charge of maintaining the voice and integrity of your website content. As we add things that we think are relevant and/or insightful, we can lose the message and take away from the overall goal of the site. We may even add conflicting messages. The EIC is in charge of knowing everything thing that is on your site and making sure anything that’s gets added contributes to your sites success and takes nothing away from it.

Sounds simple enough! When I break it down for you in 700 words or less (which is what our EIC told me to do), it does. However, there is much more to it. Take a look for yourself. Get the book that brought this to my attention, “Content Strategy for the Web,” by Kristina Halvorson. She goes into much detail about each step, the roles and responsibilities of the EIC, and companies that are successfully using this principle when developing their websites. Not only is it informative, but for those of us who have been through the process of waiting on content, it is great to hear from someone who shares our pain.

Often I talk to potential clients who just want to build “a nice enough for now” website, or drive more traffic to a website that isn’t getting results, or simply follow the latest buzzword.  A few years ago it was pod-casts and v-casts; now it’s twitter and Facebook. These potential clients want to jump right in, saying “Let’s just do it”!  As an ethical company, it is our responsibility to not allow our customers to throw good money after bad ideas.

What we saw from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990’s proved overall that a solid foundational business strategy still applies to this industry.  After all, any house built on a foundation where the bricks were laid without mortar is sure to eventually tumble.  This same theory applies to your online business strategy.

So, when we look at a business’s existing website we must see it as not only an additional 24×7 storefront and customer service center, but also a feedback center for everything else that business does.  Additionally, we now have gathering places of our potential audience where we can participate and/or target our consumers exactly. (There is a fine line between the two).

Some of the components for your next online business strategy that need to be taken into consideration, before the first pixels are delineated are:

•    Brand objectives of the company
•    Brand audience
•    Goals of the website
•    E-commerce
•    Customer feedback
•    Scalability needs
•    Usability
•    Search engine marketing
•    E-mail marketing
•    Business blog
•    Social media opportunities/polices
•    Monitoring brand buzz
•    News room press releases
•    Collaboration with traditional advertising

Regardless of your immediate goals, everything you do today regarding the web will affect your goals of tomorrow.  Investing in an online plan up front will prevent you from having to reinvest in the same technologies and will help ensure that the online systems that you are creating are set up to work together. Ultimately, upfront planning will bolster the combination of components rather than overworking an independent system.

Modern technology is moving forward at an incredible rate. We all know someone who finally bought that new computer or video game system, only to despair when it was outdated just six months later. The internet seems to be developing even faster, building upon itself and always raising the standards of what can be considered “cutting edge.” Staying adequately informed about all the changes involved with this digital age can be difficult and stressful.

Those wanting to adapt their business to the internet or those wishing to start their online business from the ground up will quickly find that keeping “up to date” with the technology can require more time than is available when they have a business to run. One way of alleviating this burden is by entering into a digital partnership.

But what does entering into a digital partnership mean?

At DBS>Interactive, we feel it means developing a long-term relationship with your business, or you as an individual, in which we can assist in your education about technology trends and how these trends can affect and benefit your specific business model. A true digital partnership is completely symbiotic, requiring both parties involved to invest into the growth and success of your business. Investment is the key word; a digital partner is not someone who is simply bidding for your business, but someone who is committed to your success.

A digital partner does not have to be a full-service interactive agency, however. It can also take the form of well-connected consultant who knows the local and regional businesses and can provide you with expert services and development.