connecting*the*dots

In my long-term quest to become more localized with my business ventures, I recently partnered up with John Ford at Aldenta to design a web strategy for one of his clients: Louis’ Healthy Breads.

Louis is a local entrepreneur who pours his heart and soul into his amazing line of health food products. Prior to our initial meeting, John mentioned that he was passionate about his product, and after meeting him, I have to say that he’s as authentic as they come.

Okay, a gear clicked.

After speaking with his daughter, Ann (his soon-to-be-hired editor and marketing person) and hearing about his son, Grant (the Chief Chef of the operation), my original plan began to grow some serious legs.

Yep, we’re going to create a Louis’ Healthy Breads blog.

Logistically speaking, Louis’ hip to email, but he’s not technically savvy and he’s always on the go — visiting stores across the east coast and beyond, trying to land retail deals for his product. The best thing about his day to day is that he’s constantly meeting interesting people who are always sharing personal stories, ranging from pure testimonials to insight into their health issues and fitness goals. Hey, he’s a salesman from the heart; a great candidate for simple posting, but not necessarily the archival aspects of tagging or the community aspects of linking out.

Louis is already doing the conversational work of a blog, but his “interface” doesn’t have built-in permalinks, comments and trackbacks (heh). Our job is to figure out the best way to corral his conversational personality and guide it into a realm with a searchable past and a participatory interface.

As a next step, I sat down with Ann last week to discuss a blogging strategy for the company. We both realized that Louis’ strong suit is writing, so we’re going to play to his strengths and limit his role as much as possible, keeping his publishing responsibilities focused by sending emails to Ann for editing and posting. We applied the same thinking to Grant, who will be able to provide a “behind the scenes” look into the baking process, leads on new ingredients, etc.

By heading down this road, Ann has implicitly agreed to become the blogger, editor, curator extraordinaire. Essentially, she’ll be editing posts from Louis and Grant, applying structured tags to the posts, linking out to related conversations across the blogosphere, participating in related conversations, managing comment threads and tracking related information in her RSS aggregator.

The idea that I’m trying to impart is that we don’t need to “segment” people into groups or “target” them like they’re deer in order to “push” product. We already know that the majority of people who are drawn to Louis’ Healthy Breads share certain interests, desires; call them attributes if you will. Health enthusiasts gravitate toward the product, yet their reasons for doing so could be as diverse as a fear of heart disease and diabetes to wanting nutritious fuel just prior to a marathon.

Ann is going to make it her personal mission to explore these existing communities, enter the fray of their current conversations and build relationship with actual people (not segments). Once she finds these resources, she’s going to start tracking them for interesting conversational nuggets to point to and contextualize from the LHB blog. Then, and only then, will she (and LHB) come off as credible participants in the communities they wish to serve.

Checkout the above workflow (228k | .pdf) that I put together to help get them off the ground. Can you think of anything that I might have overlooked?