Now I have seen plenty of cheesy mission statements in my day (seeing as how I am of such ripe age….) I believe they are important in business, and should be a guiding factor, but inspiring and fun.

If I ever get employees, the will have the option of writing their own personal mission statement, for how they will have fun at work, or how they contribute to the company. Like

• I will only play 4 games of solitare when I am on the phone
• Coffee + Work = good times, work - coffee = nap times, coffee + work + coffee = lots of work done, coffee + work+ coffee + work + coffee = weekend

Hopefully they will be more creative than me. But here is the working mission statement for Eliysys

Help businesses and individuals create and manage their digital identity. We do this through:

• Facilitating online community
• Ongoing training for our current and future clients
• Utilizing the long tail of customer niches

This is a work in progress. There are concepts that I want to incorporate, but right now they are very specific, and need to be generalized. Ideas like the long tail of customer niches, prosumers, and wikinomics all inter relate in my mind, but they need to be applied to my business.

A big question I have, that will have bearing to my mission statement, is how to be an online, locationless, consultant? I do not want to limit my services to only people in my hometown, and I also do not want to fly all around the country. But the way the internet has been going, there are so many ways to telecommute, and interact with potential clients.

We shall see, we shall see.

What would business websites look like if they were created with the businesses customers in mind? I have seen plenty that were essentially online brochures, digital versions of a brochure a business might have in a rusty old stand in a musty foyer (just kidding, foyers and brochures have their place, they are simply tools, I should not pick on them without their ability for rebuttal).

A website is also a tool. Like the power for world domination, it can be used for good or evil.

Website Evil: When a local small business invests in a website, then does nothing with it for two or three years. Their digital sign cordially invites me to attend “future” events that have already happened Several “comming soon” sections, from years ago.

Website Good: Current events sections with actual current events. Photos of actual people who still work there. Just like a dog and its owner, the website reminds you of the company it represents.

So how do you go about making a website that fits the company it is being made for? Glad you asked, here is what I think (feel free to add your own in the comments section)

• Determine what the company wants from a presence on the web
• Work with people in the company who will update content on the site
• Continuing education for each client about how to continually improve and use the website to achieve their goals
• Set realistic time sensitive goals for what the website can and cant do, and how much work the client company is willing to put into it every day, week, and month.

What this looks like to me is a partnership. Websites are no longer one time activities, sunk costs to incur once and forget about. Websites can be viral marketing tools, a customer relationship management solution, customer service contact point, and simply another face to interact and engage with customers who chose to use the internet.

You: Tags you say? Give me an example, explain with some cool metaphor to real life, then how I can use it to make my life easer.

Coffee Master: You got it. Hows about a picture,

Tag (Wikipedia Definition) : A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.

Tag (My Definition): It is the internet’s manila envelope, with way more features than the dead tree version. Want to categorize your photos by who is in them, add tags of peoples names. Want to organize the same info into multiple categories, add several tags to each piece of info.

I think of tags like that scene from matrix where neo says “We need guns, lots of guns” and whoosh, they all appear. But what if he wanted only semi auto, 9mil submachine guns? Here is an interesting distinction. In the digital world, there is no cost to move things around, or have the same thing appear in multiple places. So those guns could be organized by caliber, or Neo could change his mind, and organize it by how fast the guns could shoot. Within the time he could think of the category of guns, they could be arranged accordingly (or if you prefer, wooshed into existence with cool animation).

I wish I could tag everything in my life like this. My book case looks like it is organized by a schizophrenic anal retentive librarian, never being able to decide if books should be color coordinated, alphabetical, topic, or organized from most frequently used, to those collecting dust.

So we had the description, cool metaphor, now for the application.Think of projects you have worked on before. Are on a team of 3 people designing a cool new phone (heard of any recently?). Then, suddenly, a new person comes on to help with the specs. If you were using email to do the project, you have to sift through each one, bla bla bla. If you were using wikis or blogs or google docs, and had tagged documents according to what was in them, what they pertained to, it would be a simple matter of having the new guy subscribe to those tags, and BOOM, he would have the most current info. Then your boss walks in, and asks to see the latest schematic, you happen to have tagged each of the latest schematics with the tag, you guessed it, schematic + codeword for latest version. Or if it was a blog format, you would see the updates reverse chronologically (recent first).