Communication...

Metis Internet Partners believes that both online and offline communication is essential in our business. We ensure that we understand our client's needs through listening and mapping how their business or project operates, getting to know their values, beliefs and business goals.

Online we focus on knowing the behaviours and preferences of our web users, we understand our markets and we analyse the way that people choose to communicate online.

We focus on simple messages and simple designs to ensure that our target audiences know where they are and can get what they want whenever they want.

Communicating Information Needs

Who is my audience?

Metis Internet Partners focuses on the delivery of valuable and significant written, aural and visual online content. Excellent online communication starts with knowing who you are talking to.

A few general rules of creating website content include:

Written content should be brief and to the point in short paragraphs
Website users should always be referred to in the first person where applicable
Subheadings should be utilised to capture a user’s attention like headlines
The most important information should always be displayed above the fold (before a user has to scroll down)

Before you start deciding how to communicate your message, you will need to understand who you are speaking to, what their information needs are (what they want from you) and what information you want them to know (what do you want to say).

Metis Internet Partners works with our clients to:

model their information needs by developing a logical layout
analyse and model their target markets
determine the information needs of their target markets and
find the best ways to communicate with their target markets

We model the information needs of each target market according to:

Business Profile - Who are they to your business?
Market Segment – What do they do?
Brief Description and Demographics
Their information needs - What do they want from your website?
Your information needs - What do you want them to know / do by visiting your website?

We then analyse and recommend a mixture of written, visual and aural ways to communicate these information needs online, whether it be through a blog, a news room, a mailing list, an animation, a podcast, a video and whether it be placed on your site or externally where your target audience frequents.

Communicating and creating compelling content involves ensuring that there is an increasing amount of unique content on your website which is not available to competitors, that infomation needs are satisfied and that messages are targeted to your target audience and not for search engines. Metis Internet Partners highly recommends that customer follow-up is utilised to continually feedback and ensure that the right content is being communicated in the best possible way.

3-Way Communication

Online Engagement: Utilising User Feedback to Create a Premium Online Brand

Providing your users with exciting and relevant content and a rewarding experience is a core ingredient to establishing a premium online brand. To create, manage and distribute content that communicates effectively and keeps your target audience staying longer and coming back for more, Metis Internet Partners encourages a 3-way online communication and feedback approach. An approach which invites conversations from website owners to users, from users to website owners and between users themselves. Establishing a successful online brand has become much more sophisticated than traditionaly pushing one-way content down to the user.

The Internet was created to transfer and disseminate information quickly and effectively. Although it has moved from simple text and hyperlinks, the principles of the internet remain the same. In their most basic form, the most popular online brands of today:

Disseminate high quality information quickly or on-demand (Google, IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon).
Encourage communication and/or extensive community participation (eBay, Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr).

Current internet users are also becoming more involved in content creation, more discerning at picking and pulling the content that they want and better at collectively searching, recommending and finding the content that is right for them.

As website owners it is important to encourage and respond to as much valuable feedback and behavioural user demands as possible to ensure that you are providing the best and most relevant content for your users.

Metis Internet Partners works with clients to find a 3-way online communcation approach that responds to user demands and behaviours. This involves finding the right mix between:

providing excellent and timely customer service and follow-up
inviting user-participation and feedback in content creation (through digital media, blogs, comments, forms, wikis, competitions, advertising etc)
offering alternative methods of on-demand content selection tools and web based subscription services (such as mailing lists, RSS feeds, SMS notifications, photocasts, podcasts, vodcasts etc.)
allowing users to rate and share the value of your website through recommendation engines, social networking and bookmarking tools (such as digg, technorati, del.icio.us, reddit etc.)
continually evaluating your website's performance and strategially building on where your users are coming from, where they are spending most of their time and how and why your users are coming back

A three way communication approach offers rich communication and far greater possibilities to truly learn from your target audience and respond to real needs. It also offers something much more than information to your loyal members, an interactive and rewarding experience.

Metis Internet Partners believes strongly in utilising user feedback through a 3-way online communication approach to engage your users with the best quality, most relevant, up to date content, everyday.

Digital Media In the New Millenium

Podcasting, Google Images, YouTube: Why you should care about Digital Media?

Creating, distributing and managing digital content is one of the most exciting areas of internet growth today. During the 1990s, the internet and its applications were predominantly technology and functionality driven. Today the social and commercial demands and preferences of internet users are resulting in a more practical, affordable and useful internet for people's day-to-day lives. As service providors, project creators and internet users, Metis Internet Partners is driven and inspired by this convergence of user demands and responding technological advances that is creating a more powerful, dynamic and co-evolving virtual world.

Digital media has been one of the most exciting areas of internet growth and popularity in the new millenium. Communicating information and connecting to people today is much more than text on screen. Audios, images, animations, videos and interactivity are getting easier for web users to generate, manage and distribute amongst colleagues, friends and family. The shift in the internet has both responded and facilitated this with commercial and personal web applications like YouTube, Flickr and MySpace attracting millions of users enabling them to upload their favourite videos, photos and audios and share them with millions of other users within minutes.

Internet search is moving beyond text with multimedia search engines from Nexidia and TVeyes using speech recognition and analysis tools to search inside audio and video content word by word, frame by frame. Google in addition to the innovative release of Google Maps and Google Earth is working on better ways for users to search and find images. This is very exciting for the future of eCommerce with customers potentially able to shop across product catalogues from different online stores.

All major online markets such as entertainment, news, health, sport and hobbies, business and personal finance are using digital media in additional ways to communicate their information to their target audience. Technological advances in computer applications, mobile phones, iPods and mp3 players, digital televisions, PDAs and laptops now allow audio and video to be downloaded as easily as emails through podcasting and vodcasting feeds. In addition to text based subscription services (mailing lists, RSS feeds, SMS notifications), users can now subscribe to their favourite audio (podcast) and video (vodcast) programs and can then watch or listen to them wherever they are, whenever they want and on-demand as soon as it is released.

Metis Internet Partners recommends that all website owners utilise digital media as part of your communication strategy and content creation. We understand the growth in online digital media as an excellent opportunity

to provide valuable and significant content to satisfy the information needs of your users
to communicate unique and compelling content
to attract and connect with additional users who search and access online information in different ways and
as valuable subscription tools to invite users to regulary return to your website.

As consistent with our Online Marketing Strategy, we emphasise purpose and maximum return on investment when creating, managing and distributing digital media.

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