While I was at Back on My Feet, something I was proud of completing was, with the great help of a colleague, a company style guide.

A style guide should be a fundamental piece of documentation that goes a long way to creating an institutional memory. If everything imploded, a style guide would help you rebuild your organization — with workflow being more explicitly enumerated in staff manuals.

As your organization grows, it’s easy to wake up and find a lot of disparate, disconnected pieces that you’ll need to assemble again. Take hold and  keep connected the work you do for a tighter, more inspired and successful campaign.

In looking at other guides and finding value in ours, there are a few items that I think every style guide should include:

• Branding: Take control of how employees describe, share and employ reference and mention of your organization.
  • What is your organization’s name and its appropriate shorthand?
  • What is your organization’s logo and its acceptable varieties?
  • List the colors in your logo and the palate of colors from your website and other materials.
• Language: You don’t want your staff sounding like robots, but getting everyone on the same page can help create an effective culture in talking about your mission.
  • What is your mission statement and acceptable shorthand?
  • (i.e. At Back on My Feet, staff took issue with reporters describing us as a ‘homeless running club,’ so we needed to combat that with something nearly as short but more descriptive. With all parties, we came to “a running-based program to combat homelessness.”)
  • What are basic responses to common questions that staff can use? Save your staff time with quick, canned responses to common questions.
• Marketing: Keep materials around marketing, invitations, one-pagers and the like similar.
  • What are the major events your organization hosts or is involved in and how do you market them?
  • What are the fundamentals musts and basic look
• Style: The broader, specific expectations that fit into all three of the above categories.
  • What are the fonts you use?
  • Is your basic grammar and usage AP style? Or something else?
  • Are there organization-specific words or phrases that should used or portrayed in a specific way?
• Anything else you have basic, staff-wide rules around.

1. Signing off initials — If you have multiple people using your organization’s account, sign off with initials for transparency, personal connection and ease.
2. Do create regular content — Part of my schtick is having a lunchtime regular feature, like Noontime Number for Technically Philly and Running News at Noon for Back on My Feet. It’s something followers come to expect and helps you be sure to fill content.
3. Do take the RSS feed from your blog and then do a second (or third) tweet later for ifferent audience — It helps feed the beast, but also means your next tweet will hit for a new audience. Note, though, that some feel Twitter should be all engagement, so sending an RSS feed is somewhat looked down on. Still, I think as long as an RSS feed doesn’t dominate your Twitter conversation, it’s an added value.
4. Do tweet your content more than once — Yes, as a follow up to the item above, keep in mind that Twitter users tend to focus in at different times, from the morning to lunch to the evening or something like it, so by tweeting a story a few times (without getting spammy), you have a better chance of hitting an interested party.
5. Do use CoTweet to manage multiple accounts with multiple user — the former central Pennsylvania startup has a lot of good features for archiving messages, assigning followup and forward posting tweets.
6. Instead of just responding, RT a meaningful message — When you reply to someone, RT her message and add your own when space allows. This gets other people into the conversation. If no one is interested, then take it to DM or email.
7. Do more often have a call to action — (usually a link) but don’t be afraid to offer meaning in words. It’s a push media, so what are you pushing? Don’t take that to mean you should always be pushing your stuff, but conversation, engagement, sharing, linking, etc. are all good calls to action.
8. Do be able to share a specific point in those 140 characters — So, ‘Man speaks at classroom’ is a whole lot less effective than ‘this is how we can make homework suck less, man says,’ which can inspire conversation or thought or response or, even better, a click.
9. Tweet strong quotes or (even better) hard numbers – I’ve always found pushing clear information and statistics travels better than something less actionable or more vague.
10. Break quick news on Twitter — When you’re reporting on something, feed good, interesting, independent content on Twitter. When possible, sure, having a link of yours can help you capture the clicks, but ultimately, you’re trying to create an audience and you do that with content, so Twitter needs its own material.

Short, compelling videos of interest travel well on the web.

That means video can take your brand, organization, mission, message or call to action with it. I served my media director role with Back on My Feet for less than a year, but I’m proud of moving the staff to more frequent video creation for those reasons and to give our members — people experiencing homelessness — a platform to share their stories.

Looking back, though I shared other metrics from my time there, I realized I never shared the best of what I thought was some meaningful video for just a start.

So, below, that’s what I do, highlight 15 of the best videos we created during my tenure as media director, clamoring on email that “everything is content!”

A Boston member of the month Jackie Kenyon talking about her path:

There were also some great write ups, like this one of a Boston member grappling with serious weight issues.

We highlighted new members each month, like Tyrone Collins in Philadelphia not long before I left.

One of the first member interviews we did on video was with Stacy Stone at Brotherhood Mission in Philadelphia:

One of the more powerful member speeches was from a Boston volunteer talking about her own past with addiction, one of physical and emotional abuse.

We took to tracking progress and interest of our members, by introducing them early in the process and planning on checking in later, as we did below with some new Chicago members.

We highlighted our corporate partners, like the Hauptman Wellness Center and, as seen below, tailor Henry A. Davidsen, which donated suits for our members.

Baltimore member Charlie Tiller was interviewed for the Baltimore Bash.

I grabbed video of Philadelphia alumni Eddie Smith speaking at the 2010 Bash.

I interviewed Philadelphia alumnus Kenny Herder at least a half dozen times.

We interviewed our volunteers, especially before they tried to run 100 miles straight in our 20in24 ultra-marathaon.

Philadelphia Member Antonio LaBoy spoke poignantly about losing a son and that affect on addiction. Below is one of several videos:

During the Boston chapter launch, Philadelphia alumnus Kevin Brown brought down the house with his emotional, honest story.

Video played a role in many ways other than member stories.

We amplified and archived what we shared at smaller events, like when our founder Anne Mahlum spoke at the National Press Club in Washington D.C..

We introduced our audience to our organization, like celebrating our staff running the Chicago Marathon or, as seen below, the tradition of staff signing a wall in our office.

We were able to share the many, many TV news stories, like D.C. member Chris Hatton, who returned from serious jail time to work for stability.

We used existing video to connect our running-crazed base, like with these great commercials.

Video also enabled us to share amazing opportunities our members had. I can’t embed the video and I can’t lay claim to having anything to do with this, but one of our Baltimore members and a Vietnam veteran spoke before a Congressional sub-committee on Veteran homelessness.

We offered a multimedia dimension to our events, like this Bash introduction video.

The devotion to video has continued. Recently I noticed that the staff made sure to record the Dallas chapter launch kickoff speaker, and Charlie Tiller made the organization proud.

And the second part

I received an email a couple weeks ago from an entrepreneur who formerly worked for a startup in Philly. He’s with a new startup in another region but asked for quick  advice on reaching out to bloggers and other journalists for coverage.

I shot back three quick thoughts:

1. First, prove you’re a human being and not a robot. Anyone who receives press interest will at first assume any email is a mass email. Prove it’s not. Say, ‘yo, I saw you wrote about this, so I thought you might be interested in this thing I do.’ And say ‘I think it’s relevant because you seem to write a lot about this.’ Basically, the five minutes of scanning a site will bring you much stronger results, and so the success is worth the extra effort.
   
2. Secondly, just make it really freakin’ easy. (a) Don’t get caught up in every nuance of what you think your business is about, give the name and the 5-10 word summation and share a few links. Then, maybe include a bit deeper graf, but not much more. (b) Offer to talk on the phone — they probably won’t want to but it again shows you’re a real person — or answer any questions via email. (c) If there is interest, provide compelling images or photos or video to make publishing online more compelling without any extra effort from the writer. (d) Help promote the thing. If you want it, push the coverage for your own benefit and for the goodwill from the publication you’re pushing.
3. Thirdly, do do a second follow up about a week later. If no response from there, forget about it.

A small item on a niche blog or an industry site can have great power and be a start, so, in general, do not underestimate the important and influence of smaller, more focused publications online or otherwise.

Pull media, like social networks are incredibly powerful, but the power of the push media of email hasn’t much waned.

Nonprofits, companies and organizations still rely on its ability to land in the inboxes of busy readers, consumers and supporters. Since announcing that I’m leaving Back on My Feet, I’ve taken a bit deeper a look at the metrics behind the monthly newsletter and blasts that remains a large part of our outreach efforts.

I was proud of some progress we worked to make with our use of email marketing during my time there, though I didn’t find the time to spend nearly as much time focusing on further development as I would have liked (by offering beta tests and such).

More importantly, there are a dozen take aways, some of which may seem intuitive, that I can now comfortably call lessons:

• Subject lines should ideally be between 5-10 words, preferably with a call to action — Give people an easily recognized reason to open your blast and do it in fewer than 30 or 40 characters.
• I pushed for our blasts to be sent 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, or as near to it as possible, for similar sentiment as this. — Timing is nearly everything (We sent our national blast the first Tuesday of every month), and consistency helps.
• A bigger newsletter contact number comes in conflict with a more engaged audience — The moment you start adding users on your own (which comes breaks any sense of opt-in marketing) or otherwise coercing user acquisition, your open and click-thru rates fall.
• Smaller, more targeted lists are opened more often — I started establishing city-specific lists and those blasts were better opened and had more clicks
• Almost no one will ever complain about not getting enough emails from you — Despite what your staff might try to tell you, it’s true, so stick to a monthly regular newsletter and perhaps the occasional blast. If you want to send out more often, start collecting more targeted lists for those other reasons.
• Give good content, not just organization or promotional updates — If people can feel good or learn something from your newsletter,  it’ll surely get better traction. In our case, we pushed for sharing a member story in each of our monthly newsletters and often other related content to boot.
• Fewer exclamation points — Good God, fewer exclamation points.
• We use Constant Contact, which offers enough flexibility and metrics to allow additional growth. It has survey options to better segment contacts, which I never had the time to explore.

Compare this November newsletter here and one from before I arrived, a December 2009 newsletter here.

Nobody in business will ever say he isn’t concerned with listening to the customer. Really proving it, of course, is the difference between well-loved companies and those that aren’t.

Even notoriously frustrating Comcast has gained ground with its use of social media — a powerful mechanism for communication that, despite all the attention, we still may have yet to fully grasp. But beyond the buzz, the real value is hearing from customers who experience your products, whatever they may be — from buying tires to reading news.

I had two experiences with the concept recently, one from your friends in old media.

On Friday, I was driving a car that wasn’t my own through Flemington, N.J., though I had been holding on to the keys quite a bit in the past few months and noticed no warning signs of trouble. After filling up the tank at the Quick Check — something of a North Jersey Wawa, 7-11, fill-in your moderately well-liked convenience store that makes hoagies etc. — I turned the key and.. nothing.

I got the chance to offer, as a regular customer, my thoughts but didn’t feel anyone cared — how strange a successful regional corner store chain can’t do what old media did the same week.

When I turned the key in my ignition switch, my accessories came on — like the radio, lights and power window control — but no real clicking noises from the ignition switch. The lack of noise might lead one to be believe it was a problem with the battery — surely the most common cause of care difficulties like this — but the full, unimpaired accessory-action might lead one to believe it was a problem with the starter — perhaps the second most common in older cars like the one I was driving — a 1995 Nissan Maxima with more than 198,000 miles on it.

Of course, men are want to offer something to say when a car hood is up — so their opinons muddled between it being a battery or a starter problem. I pulled out my jumper cables — knowing the battery was the easiest to test — and tried to jump my car using the functioning batteries of two vehicles driven by willing strangers.

No jump, but, also, no real spark from the cables. The concern came from the old heads standing around the gas station offering opinions no one really asked them for that my jumper cables were trash.

What next then?

Well, with the traffic at this Quick Check on the day before July 4, you’d think I’d easily be able to find someone else with cables, time and the willingness to help. Well, you’d be wrong. It wasn’t for lack of trying from me or the gas station attendant — who even went as far as letting my try getting a jump from his car.

With no luck and no cables, the kindly attendant helped me push the car into a vacant spot, when three gentlemen in suits and Quick Check name tags came by asking questions with clip boards in hand. They were in some way related to the management of this franchise at the corner of state Rt. 31 and county Rt. 579 in Hunterdon. They started walking past me toward their car, when I stopped them.

“That attendant has really been helpful and considerate,” I told them. “I through this stretch a lot and will be more likely to stop here because of him.”

I was trying to repay the kid’s attention and kindness. The lead man in the suit felt compelled enough to ask if everything was alright — my leaning on my car in the lot.

I asked them if they had jumper cables.

“We really need to get going,” one of the other three said. “I’m sure someone else will be able to help you.”

They didn’t quite hear me suggest, as they got into their car, that they have a $25 pair of jumper cables at all of their stations. It could be a liability issue, or it could simply be an oversight.

I won’t know and they’ll never hear my suggestion. Strange, because, so far as I see it, there’s nothing more important than hearing a genuine concern from a rationale, paying customer.

It made me smile — on an otherwise frustrating day — to think that just a few days before I had a very different experience with another industry people rag on these days.

From the good people at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I received late last month — likely using the e-mail I have for getting access to write comments on their site — an invitation to be  a part of a Web-based reader panel. It’s surely nothing revolutionary or particularly innovative, but it was so different than my Quick Check experience a few days later that it piqued my interest.

Of course, what knowledy the Inqy will garner or use from the panel is another conversation altogether. But at a time when newspapers are offering less content that increasingly has to be less reported yet are often asking readers to pay more, it sure is  a fine time to figure out what could change the tides — even if it’s likely way too late.

And, of course, Quick Check almost certainly has panels and surveys and questionnaires, like the Inquirer and every other company does — win an iPod if you answer these 10 questions that only three percent of our customers will.

But last Friday was an opportunity for a man a suit and presumably some influence in how the chain is run to hear my thought, but he passed on them. Seems strange. I wonder if there is any mechanism for most newspapers to generally absorb genuine advice from their readers.

I bet there was at sometime. I suppose it’s too much of a scramble for that now.