Operate Your Website for More than One Audience at a Time.

You’ll see this graphic when you go to Upstream Marketing’s revamped website. Principal Brian Bearden and I were looking for a way to simply show how many more audiences are affected by a company’s website than most businesspeople consider.

We drew an early version of the graphic on a prospect’s whiteboard. (It really wasn’t a blackboard – that’s so 20^th Century.) Even in the new website version, Bearden has kept the graphic expression simple.

The effects of the Web are indisputable; but listen, there are about 7.6 million businesses in the US alone (US Census, 2010). Which means that for every spectacularly savvy biz with a great website or two or three, there are maybe 10 or 15 that DO NOT realize all the impacts a website can have on their company’s sales, marketing and growth.

Effects on your audience(s) can be both positive and negative. So I view websites as “conversation changers.” Company managers can’t control every single conversation with a prospect, with an investment analyst, with a shareholder. Yet the website’s going to be the first place people go to have a conversation in both metaphorical and literal senses.

The graphic also imagines that some of the website’s exchanges ought to be two-way conversations, dialogues between you and customers, for example; or employees. Other interactions may be one-way: messages to prospects, perhaps, or trade press editors, at least to start with.

In a 50-word opening paragraph, the UpstreamMarketing.net “About” section says:

We believe that in today’s world more and more effective marketing and sales conversations start with the website. Your website. So our job is to build engaging, easy-to-use, industrial websites for process and manufacturing industries, engineering and service companies. Conversation-changers. Game-changers…the most effective sites – bar none.

I want you to be strategic about your website before you actually make changes, radical or not. SEO is important; content creation also. But deliberation counts for more. A thoughtless website can kill a sale.

The right website, one touched by human thinking, can change your sales or marketing or employee conversations for the better. This is provably true. The best websites can change your game.

To keep the total idea in mind, simple is what you can draw on a whiteboard.

PS: Having visualized this marvelous model, now I have to figure out how to apply it to my own Signalwrite.com site. I’ll get back to you on that.

Coffee #2: “Bringing the Siren to Life” at Starbucks.

This was the project of a lifetime. The designers here at Starbucks have such a love for this brand – it’s what drives our creativity.

It’s what the Starbucks Senior Creative Manager wrote about on the company blog January 5. It’s what’s exercising the profanity of hundreds – if not thousands – of Starbucks brand loyalists who hate it: the spanking new 2011 Starbucks logo.

I vote in favor of the change forthwith. It (the change) is pretty dramatic for a strong, popular brand. It has far more cogency and thoughtfulness than the recent Gap logo misstep, to which the Starbucks re-brand has been compared. It’s more cohesive than the United-Continental re-brand which I wrote about here.

Steve Collier of Collier Graphica has a different take. He wrote me:

Like Continental Airlines, it was not the logo that needed changing, it was the management and core business structure that needed changing. Starbucks reinstated its original CEO and founder which was a great move but now it needs to find its footing and direction for the future business model and the logo is not the answer for a brand that is already established and accepted by their customer base…

The creative director at 2020 Exhibits, Marilyn Muller, is eyeing the Starbucks customer base too:

It seems a pretty bold thing to do to remove the name recognition and stand on the logo alone. There are so many knockoffs and emulators that try to mimic Starbucks as the kind of ‘generic’ coffee brand (like the Kleenex of coffees) that it would seem to blur the integrity of the initial brand.

Contrariwise, I applaud the company that pours a lot of my coffee. First is the immense benefit of proximity. Starbucks is everywhere I am (mostly) with the brews I want. They taste good, too. Second is “destination.” Rachel Parker, principal of Resonance, responded to another Signalwriter post:

Starbucks isn’t a coffee – it’s a destination. It’s where friends connect, where business deals take place, where solopreneurs set up shop to stave off cabin fever.

Third, Starbucks have taken evident care over the siren’s new look – I hope you’ll read the design details on the company’s blog.

So there are at least three great reasons I’m going with Starbucks on its logo. At the end, it’s as simple as what Upstream Marketing’s Brian Bearden Facebooked onto the Starbucks wall:

The new logo is fine. I knew one day that word coffee would be removed from the logo… because their business has grown to offer more. Just keep making good coffee…