It must be the first question answered during a website design.

Re: web design, Tesla Motors gets it. Confederate Motor Company doesn’t. Sure, I’d love to park either of those companies’ machines in the garage, but I can’t make it past Confederate’s mission statements to their products.

Ask “What do we do?” before the first wireframe is sketched.  If you can visually explain to a visitor why he should (or shouldn’t) be spending time with you, you win.

For Confederate, the answer to that question shouldn’t be: “Rebel.”  The answer should be: “We build motorcycles.”

You only have a split second.

One website launch; Young & Free Texas campaign finals (congrats, DeAndre’); gigs in South Dakota, at TCUL Marketing, and SWOMfest ‘08.

Without fail, my CEO asks me each time I see him, “Are you having fun!?”

Today, our Microsoft Surface developer unit got installed.  We have crazy ideas and we have developers itching to turn those ideas into reality.

I’m having fun.

I started our corporate blog shortly after arriving at TDECU but didn’t announce it internally or externally.  I’d make occasional posts but there was no traffic.

In fact, I didn’t care about generating traffic; I cared about content.  I felt that seeding the blog with compelling posts was a necessity before a huge launch.  And I was planning to coordinate the launch with the rollout of our new corporate website.

Then last week, that little blog went from less than ten visits the prior day to over 1,000 the next.

What happened?

It became useful.

It became our instantaneous communication line to our scattered communities.

Now, we have contributers posting across our organization - not being assigned to blog but asking for ways to contribute to the conversation.  

Also just in the last week we’ve been using other social media (namely YouTube) and both integrating it into the blog and the landing page of our corporate website.

What Ike taught me is that when you’re doing something special offline, there’s no faster or more effective way to get the word out online than through social media.  (Not that I didn’t know that already, but it was nice to be proven right.)

If you’re not first doing something compelling in the real world, don’t bother getting into social media.

Why? Social media simply extends conversations that should be happening “off the grid.”  If nobody talks about you with their mouth, don’t expect Google to love you.

Old-mentality marketers wanting to jump on the bandwagon focus too much on the “media” and not enough on the “social.”

I’m guilty of having too few memorable days.

You know, those sort of “hey, remember that day I _____?” days that will resurface in my brain next month, next year, or during a round playing golf for life for free at The Villages, Florida’s friendliest hometown.

Tomorrow is a to-do list of things I didn’t have time for today.  That’s not memorable.  And I’m the only one who can fix it.  I have 24 hours.

And… go.

Google Reader tells me that “from your 161 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,824 items.”  I won’t even estimate how many tweets I’ve read.

Time for some spring cleaning on my feeds and on Twitter.

And time to start using this blog as a personal creative outlet.  I’ve been talking too much business lately.  In the past month, I’ve made 42 posts across three different blogs.

Although we’re a good 150 miles inland here in Austin, Ike is top of mind this morning - particularly because my employer is located in Brazoria County, Texas - where today voluntary and mandatory evac orders were issued. 

So I’ll be updating our corporate blog throughout Ike.  Fingers crossed that it somehow fizzles out in the Gulf.

I’m a loyal reader of Church of the Customer.  I preordered Citizen Marketers before its release.  So when I saw that Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell were planning the first ever SWOMfest ‘08 right here in Austin, I didn’t just want to go, I wanted Young & Free Texas to help sponsor the event.

Ben’s post today covers the part of event we’re sponsoring (local dive to be rented out for this TBD) - 

Pre-conference ’80s party. SWOMfest ‘08 is during Halloween week, so we’ll blind ourselves with costume party science on Wednesday, Oct. 29, the night before SWOMfest. The pre-conference party theme? The ’80s. Bring your Devo energy dome and leg warmers. We’ll have prizes for best costume. Then we’ll adjourn to see the best ’80s cover band ever, the Spazmatics.

I am so excited about this I am typing it standing up.  And it’s not just that the conference will have a live DJ throughout.  Or that beer will be served throughout.  It’s the content and the bright minds in the room that’ll make this so cool.  Also I’ll be doing a brief case study on Young & Free Texas (it’ll be happening October 30th, right after the spokesperson gets announced).  

BTW, Church of the Customer has over 209,000 RSS subscribers.  My credit union has about half that many members. 

I’m sitting here watching the Olympics live without using the DVR to skip commercials. And I see the new Volt commercial and it induces chillbumps.

After following the product development for many months now, I’m still as excited by the Chevrolet Volt as I was about the Wii before its launch.

It’s sexy, it’s fresh, and it’s going to be just as hard to get.

It’ll be the GM-saver.