JEFF THOMAS COBB

Leading with Learning

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3 Essential Rules for Learning Yourself and Your Business Forward in 2013

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Open Road

We’re turning the corner to the end of the first month of 2013. If you haven’t already, it’s high time to pull back and think about how you are going to build the value of both yourself and your business in 2013. It will come as no surprise that I think active, conscious learning is the key in both cases. Here are three essential rules to keep in mind as you think about learning in the coming days, weeks, and months.

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How do you get them to sign up?

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Will People Sign Up?How many times have you visited a Web site, poked around a bit, and then left when you were presented with a form to “sign up” for something? It must happen millions of times every day. Lost opportunities scattered all over the information highway.

Many organizations, if they are even aware of the issue, will assume that the problem is with the form itself, or perhaps with finding the form in the first place. Often these are problems, but usually there is also something deeper: the visitor has no real motivation to fill out the form. This is a failure of strategy, a failure of marketing, a failure of design – not a failure of technology.

The graphic in this post (click through if you don’t see it) is clipped from an excellent slide presentation on Designing for Social Traction that Joshua Porter has posted over at Bokardo. In it he addresses what he calls “the usage lifecycle, or the stages people go through as they use and adopt software over time.” While focused on software, most of the presentation can be applied to other types of products and services. Getting people to sign up is only one aspect of it – it just happens to be the aspect that jumped out at me most immediately.

The presentation is long, and like most slide decks, you will have to do a certain amount of extrapolation and filling in the blanks, but if you are serious about converting, engaging, and retaining customers on the Web, it is well worth a look.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

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