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We’re having a party and your invited.

At Duo, we like to celebrate.   And we’re fortunate to have this opportunity frequently. Everything from team member birthdays to website launches merit a celebration.

However, it is not everyday we get to celebrate the publication of a book. In fact in my 10 years at Duo I’ve yet to celebrate such an event! So we’re celebrating the release of Duo CEO Michael Silverman’s book, “Capturing Community – How to Build Manage and Market Your Community Online.”

This invitation is extended to YOU. Consider this a good ol’ social event. Don’t be shy! Show up. We’ll have beer, wine and light hors d’oeuvres.  Here are the details:

Capturing Community Book Release Party
Thursday, May 24, 2012
5 PM – 7 PM
20 W. Kinzie Suite 1510
Chicago

More info or to RSVP: Shari (312) 529-3000 or sspraker@duoconsulting.com

“We can no longer turn a blind eye to the deplorable state of civics education in our country,” explains Arnstein & Lehr West Palm Beach Partner Joel Rothman.

“Hi!” He thrust his hand at me at a Midwest Chapter Legal Marketing Association luncheon. Another sales guy pushing some law firm oriented commodity I figured. But, in fact, the friendly visitor was Joel Rothman an intellectual property attorney with law firm Arnstein & Lehr visiting from Florida. Joel immediately disarmed me as he proceeded to tell me that he’s been blogging for years. “Not a week goes by”, he offered, “that I don’t have somebody call me with a business opportunity because they read something on my blog.”

Given how hard it is to identify metrics connecting social media initiatives to business development outcomes, I usually settle for good anecdotes. And Joel was a walking anecdote. We chatted a little more before we seated ourselves for lunch and the main speaker. But I hadn’t heard the last from Joel.  I should have known better. I mean what was an IP guy from West Palm doing at an LMA luncheon anyway?

As lunch began, Joel grabbed the microphone. He told us he was writing a book. It’s called “Wainright for the People” which he characterized as an exciting legal thriller for the teenage market. Really? Was this guy here shilling for his book? Well, not exactly.

Joel went on to tell us of his passion for the law and his desire to engage young people in their understanding of the law and our justice system.  I learned that Joel regularly speaks to middle schools on Law Day and Constitution Day about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and our system of justice. And Joel understood that a direct approach to this subject would be as dry as dust. So he crafted a book based on his own experiences as an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx.

With the evolution of social media there has been an increasing awareness of the value of creating quality content and marketing via content.  One can assault people with advertising and try to win attention by hammering your message with increasing frequency and reach. Or you can just tell a good story that someone will remember. And maybe tell others. And possibly motivate behavior and influence outcomes. That’s what content marketing does.

IP attorney and blogger Joel Rothman understands content marketing and the value of story. I have no doubt people seeking his professional services find him through his blog. And hopefully he is equally successful reaching his target teens and motivating them to develop a passion for the justice system as well.

Joel Rothman is seeking financial support to complete “Wainright for the People,” a Children’s Book project accompanied by student and teacher guides and available free. American Bar Association Publishing has agreed to publish the story upon completion. You can (and should) support Joel’s effort here.

Communication tools are the key elements of any online community—but you shouldn’t let your software limit you if you recognize features that could help you grow.

That’s the idea that spawned a big change for Built In Chicago. The thriving online community for Chicago tech professionals grew too big for its britches on the Ning platform. Based on our experience with the Drupal CMS platform and online community development, BiC management chose Duo to rebuild the site and migrate content.

The move to Drupal was a strategic one. First, the open source CMS has a much greater capacity for organizing the massive amounts of content that BIC members have contributed. Second, BIC administrators required a more flexible platform for organizing and reorganizing how content appears on the page. Third, social login was a necessary addition, eliminating barriers to sign up for potential new members.

Of course, BIC also expected to leverage the benefits of a CMS platform evolving fluidly, integrating new developments as quickly as they gained traction on the Web. With Drupal, BiC is no longer subject to the whims and priorities of its proprietary software developer. It’s free to scale and innovate as quickly as it grows because the Drupal platform can support these innovations.

A rescue project of sorts, we came onboard because the previous Drupal developer was unable to complete the project. The migration was a big undertaking for Duo in a small window of time considering we’d never worked with Ning before. Nevertheless, the team was up to the challenge. The rebuild and content migration took a total of six weeks.

The new site integrates layout and design created by a freelance designer and fine-tuned by the Duo team. Take a look at the sleek new online community by visiting the new Built In Chicago site.

To read the full case study, visit our portfolio.

For more about the evolution of online communities, read Duo CEO Michael Silverman’s book, Capturing Community.

P.S. I’m sorry for ordering you around so much!

The seminar tour continues! Three Drupal Business Summits in the US and Canada in late May and early June will feature the success of the Drupal content management system framework for meeting sophisticated business requirements. With millions of Drupal websites online and an army of Drupal technologists buzzing about the platform, the business aspect of Drupal rarely gets the attention it deserves. The Drupal Business Summit has been created for Senior IT and Marketing Professionals who are responsible for web strategy, IT, communications, marketing, and branding.

According to the event’s website:

“Drupal is much more than a content management system. Discover how organizations are using Drupal as a platform to power social communities, mobile sites & apps, and to create highly engaging user experiences. Hear lessons learned, tips, techniques and best practices for using Drupal in your organization. Learn how Drupal measures up to other CMS platforms, and how it can help to reduce operating costs without sacrificing usability.”

Drupal Business Summit will be occurring in:

• Toronto: To kick off, the first summit will occur in Toronto at the Hotel Ocho on May 29^th.

• Chicago: Taking place on Duo’s home turf, the Chicago event is taking place June 5^th at the Gleacher Center.

• New York: The city that never sleeps will host the final Drupal Business Summit on June 11^th at the Union League Club.

Given the focus of Drupal as a business solution, Duo  has elected to be a Platinum Sponsor to help insure the success of these summits. With the experience we’ve cultivated developing online communities on the Drupal platform, Duo CEO Michael Silverman will make presentations drawing on anecdotes in his recently published book, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community.

Michael’s presentation will guide the audience through the research and best practices he collected for the book. Want a preview? All of the presentation slides are up on Slideshare. You can also purchase Michael’s book on Amazon. Interested in learning about online communities but aren’t sure yet whether to buy the book? No problem. We have a free ebook entitled Join! available for download via this page.

Joining Michael Silverman at each of the city summits will be another Michael.  Michael Meyers, an Emmy-nominated technologist and entrepreneur. Michael Meyers currently advises several startups on Internet and mobile product and software development. He is a passionate open source advocate and advisor to the Drupal Association Board of Directors.

Registration is free and open now. Space, of course, is limited. You can register here

With the imminent debut of Duo CEO Michael Silverman’s new book, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community, we’ve turned our attention to the benefits that marketers and entrepreneurs can gain from building and participating in web communities. Michael undertook the book project partially to share Duo’s experience with building online communities—but there’s another great driving factor.

As a company, we’ve been focused on Drupal as a content management platform for half of a decade. No question that our experience has cultivated some wisdom about building online community. But we are also part of a community – the Drupal community.

Built on a foundation of 17,000+ developers and 800,000+ users, the Drupal community is one of the web’s greatest examples of the power that an online community can wield. Developers, marketers and business owners across the world are all part of this expansive community, and members stay active on a daily basis.

From Drupal’s simple origins to the robust open-source platform it has become, the focus has always been on community interaction—how members collaborate to make the software a better solution for everyone. Collaboration pervades the Drupal platform. It is expressed in the core functionality of a software platform built on community that makes it ideal for other online communities.

Propelled to develop its own strong organizational standard to maintain the community, Drupal echoes that standard in the software itself. For content-rich sites (like web communities), the software provides a robust framework that supports an easy-to-manage website structure.

Acquia, a leading applications developer and hosting source in the Drupal community, has  recognized how the software can be beneficial for communities. They assembled a prebuilt application (a/k/a distribution) called Drupal Commons, and it’s already showing big returns for companies like Twitter, eBay and Mercedes.

Has Drupal’s community origins and philosophy affected your business? We welcome your comment.

I know from talking to my clients as well as looking at their web analytics that many (most?) people use Internet Explorer to browse the web. And those who don’t use IE, use FireFox. Google Chrome, along with others come in pretty much behind these giants. This is NOT an advertisement for Chrome. Rather there are a lot of things in Chrome that are synonymous with good usability on the web. After all, Chrome is a website. So I thought maybe we could learn a little about usability from looking at this excellent but less popular browser.

When Google’s Chrome browser launched in 2008, it was the first browser to integrate the search bar with the address bar, a website user experience solution that seemed so obvious when we tried it, yet it had eluded the browser market for decades. Why?

As Drupal website user experience consultants, we are still bewildered by the number of web users who type URL addresses into search engines. It is tempting to yell, “You are doing it wrong! The search bar is for searches! The address bar is for addresses! How can we get this across better?” Other browser developers were thinking the same way, which is why they missed the solution for so long.

The reason Chrome’s elegant and deceptively simple usability solution didn’t appear earlier is because we tend to fall in love with our own technology and forget that users don’t care about the technology. They only care about what technology enables them to do.

Here is how Google put it just before launch:

To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. [from the Google Blog].

Lessons in Website User Experience from Chrome

1. The user is always right

Too often web developers assume that website user experience means making it easier to do things the “right” way  (the way YOU think it should be or the way it always has been), instead of making it easier to do it the “wrong” way (the way that the most novice users tend to do it).

Before Chrome, usability improvements tended to make it easier to use the elements that already existed. One might add a friendly reminder, “put the address here” and “type search terms here,” in an attempt to reduce confusion, but it didn’t work.

What happened? People kept doing it the “wrong way”, the way they always had.

Finally, Google decided to make it easier to search the web the “wrong” way. If you type Google.com into it and hit enter, it reasonably deciphers that you probably want to go to the home page of Google.com. If you leave off the .com, it searches. Duh.

2. Keep Advanced Features Hidden, Where Only Advanced Users Can Find Them

All the advanced features are located in a single, small menu button. Basic users can easily ignore it and get the basic features they want. Advanced users can easily find it and get all the advanced features they want.

You want to keep hidden from the home page anything that your basic users don’t need every time they visit your site. A great example of this lesson for website user experience is the “Work with Us” link, which is often hidden as a small link in the footer of the home page, where only a job hunter will be inclined to look.

3. Simple is Good for Smart People Too

What we learned the moment we started using Chrome is that it just feels right. No matter how smart we are, we are relieved not to have to make the decision whether to type an address or a search. We just start typing and Chrome works with us either way, instantly suggesting pages from our browsing history (I love that).

Here is where Chrome failed, though; it didn’t make itself synonymous with “the internet” like Internet Explorer does, making it hard to understand what it does and why my grandma should click that Chrome icon on her desktop. “What is a Chrome and what does it do? “ Oh well.

4. Use Images Instead of Words, Whenever Possible

In Chrome, all advanced settings are included in a single button, indicated by a wrench icon with no words. It doesn’t take much hunting at all to figure out where all the options are. The button doesn’t say “Tools;” it is a picture of a tool. If I am curious, I will point my mouse at the button, and words will pop up that tells me what the button does: “Customize and Control Google Chrome.”

5. Remove options when they are not relevant

Google has recently standardized removing options dynamically. Fewer options means less room for confusion.

For example, the “back button” will be faded out when there are no pages to go back to, indicating that it is still there, just not relevant, reducing the chance that someone will click on it with the empty hope that something will happen and be disappointed.

Though this is super advanced usability design, regular web developers can still apply the lesson. Instead of assuming that users always want more choices (a common mistake), make a case for each individual link or option, pare them down to essentials, and prioritize them visually in the design.

6.We don’t know what we want until we use it

The thing about intuitive browsing is that we can’t plan it. It is an automatic response to the situation. So if we users can’t predict what we want for ourselves, how much less can website creators predict what users will want!

Instead of making haphazard guesses, observe what users do with your site. Whenever they do something “wrong,” that is when YOU need to change something so that what they do becomes the “right” way.

7. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Website user experience can always be simpler, and work is never finished. Yet with a sense of humility and an eye for observing user experience objectively, egregious mistakes, like including both a search bar and address bar in browsers, can be fixed immediately, with low effort and high reward.

8. Get Out of the Way of Website User Experience

Chrome enhanced website user experience mostly by creating a browser that is as invisible as it can be, with a sophisticated and invisible back end that seems to read the user’s mind. Usability expert Steve Krug’s dictum, and title of his book, is “Don’t Make Me Think.” To that, Google adds, “Get out of my way.”

The story of web usability has been a constant realization that the things which are intended to attract and engage in the first place instead tended to get in the way of and distract from what the user came to do. Consequently, a better-designed site typically includes more empty space, and fewer words in bigger letters.

The moral of the Chrome story is to never assume you know the right way to experience the web. There will always be some Internet users out there to show you a better way. To enhance your website user experience, be humble, listen to them, don’t make them think, and get out of their way.

One of the most pressing concerns for new websites being launched is where they plan to be hosted. Moreover, it rarely receives the priority of attention and consideration well in advance of the need. For most companies and organizations, purchasing and maintaining your own servers simply isn’t cost effective, and therefore, you’ll need a hosting provider. There are limitless options out there for hosting with varying degrees of value. Some providers claim to offer free Drupal hosting, but can it compare with managed hosting?

Every hosting provider is different, and which one you choose will depend greatly on your needs. However, there are some universally relevant concepts to consider when choosing one to host your company’s website. First, free Drupal hosting is rarely free. There are options for hosting websites that don’t charge for their use, but these are generally limited to sites without a top-level domain and offer little control over things like page design, content management systems and FTP access. These are meant for personal websites and blogs, and websites built on these platforms are unsuitable for mission-critical corporate use.

While paying for server space from a hosting provider is a better option than free Drupal hosting, it’s far from the best bet. For one, traditional hosting providers often offer little in the way of service. When you buy their services, you’re renting space on their servers, and usually that’s it. Well, you ask, what more could you want?

If you want your website to truly perform to its peak potential, you should consider managed hosting. Duo  offers its clients managed hosting using the Amazon Cloud, which brings with it a host of services not available through traditional hosting. With services like nightly backups, performance tuning, firewall services and application monitoring, Duo can have your Drupal website running it’s best at all times. Case in point is the performance improvements we recently achieved for the recently launched Jones Lang LaSalle website.

In addition, cloud hosting through Duo has the added benefit of scalability. We offer different plans based on the size of your website and bandwidth needed. Because our hosting is cloud-based, it can be scaled as large as you need it to be—growing as your company does without the need for investing in infrastructure – servers, bandwidth and the like.

Hey y’all—if you hadn’t heard yet, the bigwig around these parts is about to be a published man. Duo CEO Michael Silverman is gearing up to launch Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage, and Market Your Online Community, a how-to book of sorts focused on best practices for nurturing community on the web. It’s coming out through the Content Marketing Institute’s new publishing arm.

Creating the book took countless hours and sleepless night, but the end product turned out to be a pretty informative look into the current landscape of web communities. It includes interviews from dozens of community managers and marketing experts, including David Meerman Scott (prominent author and creator of WebInkNow), Meghan Peters (community manager for Mashable) and Mike Samson (co-founder of Crowdspring).

This is our first go at book marketing, so we hope to open up the conversation with our own community on our plans to build a buzz. So far, we’ve come up with several ideas to help our promotion efforts.

• Speaking Engagements: Michael is currently making the circuit as a presenter at conferences like the CMS Expo and Drupal Business Summits in Toronto, Chicago and New York City.

• Landing Pages: We have two separate landing pages—one through Duo, under construction , and one through the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)—to support our marketing efforts. We plan to drive most of our traffic to the CMI page. Buyers will be directed to the book’s Amazon listing (when available).

• Press Releases: We’re creating a series of press releases (like this one) tying Michael’s conference presence and the book to build more buzz.

• Ebook & Sample Chapter: We’ve developed an ebook around online communities that we’ll be distributing for free in conjunction with the book. In addition, we’re offering a sample chapter on the book’s landing page (forthcoming).

• Social Media: Each piece of content created for book marketing will be mentioned in our social media channels, as well as CMI accounts.

• Press Outreach: To be honest, we haven’t put much together around press outreach yet—but we plan to send free copies of the book to prominent community management writers and other web destinations focused on our niche.

What are we missing? Any ideas on how we could improve the outreach effort?

Duo’s on the move again. This time, we’re shipping CEO Michael Silverman off to hang with our friendly neighbors to the north. The Power of Choice: Attracting Consumers in an Opt-In World will take place at the Old Mill Inn (Toronto) on April 25, 2012. The event features presentations from companies like Weber Shandwick Canada, the Content Marketing Institute and Social Media Group on planning and executing a strong content strategy.

Michael will be sticking to our most recent theme: how to nurture a healthy online community. His presentations are part of our campaign to build visibility for his new book, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community, available through CMI at the end of the month.

Following the rigorous research conducted for capturing community, the presentation will detail how participating in online communities helps marketers & entrepreneurs break through the media clutter and engage their target markets on a personal level. With businesses everywhere struggling to gain a full understanding of how to best leverage social media, Michael will present best practices on encouraging engagement and sparking a rich dialogue within your community.

OpenDialogue reached out to us back in January to speak at the event, which will bring together a wide array of different marketing and brand professionals for what promises to be productive learning and networking. If you’re located around the Toronto area (or just looking to jump the border for a bit), there’s still time to sign up.

If you’re a Chicago website professional, we hope you’re signed up and psyched for the 2012 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference. Taking place at Evanston’s Hilton Orrington Hotel on May 8-10, the conference a great opportunity to talk all things content management, spotlighting some of the major players in the space.

It’s also a great place to learn—and this year, Duo CEO Michael Silverman will present on building and maintaining online communities in a session called Capturing Community with User-Generated Content (Wednesday, May 9 at 2 PM).

The session demonstrates how participating in online communities helps marketers & entrepreneurs break through the media clutter and engage their target markets on a personal level. Michael explores what it takes to effectively manage a community, from technology to engagement techniques to promotional channels.

Presentation attendees will:

• Learn how marketers, entrepreneurs and other managers can benefit from creating or participating in online communities

• Understand best practices for creating a sticky, engaging online community from the most successful community managers

• Hear stories about different communities (and their leadership) and how they achieved success—creating communities with many thousands of loyal members

The content of the session summarizes the key insights covered in Michael’s forthcoming editorial debut, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community, which will be available through the Content Marketing Institute at the end of the month. (Keep your eyes peeled for updates on how you can get yourself a copy.)

There are, of course, other reasons to attend the CMS Expo. (Ahem…we’re also one of the sponsors.) With 90+ sessions, the conference features the best and brightest marketers and technology experts covering topics like content management, content marketing, content strategy, design, writing, mobile, cloud tech and more.

It’s a great networking opportunity that will bring locals and national representatives together. To register for the event, visit http://cmsexpo.net/.