Here’s a shout-out from the heart to Boston World Partnerships.

Few organizations in Boston that we’ve experienced bring the diversity of people together you find at BWP events. It’s not just mass crowds of service providers, startups, or those fancy corporate people. It’s a healthy mix of everybody brought together with a common cause – to keep Boston cool enough to dissuade you from moving to San Francisco. While they can’t [yet] change the weather, they are on a mission to help you grow your business and get people working together on raising the bar in Boston.

I like the range of events in terms of intimacy. You do have the large, free-for-all networking events, which are great for getting into the scene and meeting lots of people, and they also have smaller gatherings like strategy sessions for startups which allow members and connectors to have more relaxed and helpful conversations with each other. The focus isn’t to just meet more people and collect business cards, BWP brings those together who are enthusiastic about working with other people grow businesses here.

And every once in a while, they have a hot event at a cool Boston venue. Next Tuesday, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary at the Liberty Hotel with some wildly successful speakers and an awesome guest list.

We’ll be there.

- Matt Boynton

Why is this important?

Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.

If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.

When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.

We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:

“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife

We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton

Although still in a state of refinement here is the process and some specific tasks associated with each step. Keep in mind this specific checklist is in context of creating buzz for Fresh Tilled Soil so the relevant audience targets would be exchanged for each appropriate client should we go that route:

Buzz Process Checklist:

1. Read through the list of design blogs that are looking for contributions and add each one to a spreadsheet (use Google docs if you can so we can all have access to it and make edits if necessary)
2. Determine which writers and contributors are associated with each blog and add them to the spreadsheet. We’re not looking for editors here, just the people who contribute regularly to the blogs.
3. Find out what each writers personal blog is and start to follow them on twitter (add a column for their twitter handle and personal blog/s to the spreadsheet). We’ll need their twitter names so we can all start to follow them individually.
4. Systematically research each writer and make a few notes about each (e.g. likes to write about web design, loves the outdoors and has three dogs). Getting to know them as human beings will help break the ice when you connect with them for the first time. For example, I was able to connect to a big deal CIO by starting with, “Hi Steve, I see you are as crazy about scuba diving as I am. Maybe we can trade stories of the best places to dive. I’m relatively new to the local diving scene so I’m always looking for some expert advice”.
5. Contribute to their blogs via comments, retweets and start to email them with ideas for new blog postings or offers to help them with their current writing
6. Establish relationships with the writers and establish a “what can we do to make them more successful?” and a “who should they meet?” list for each.
7. Watch as magic happens!!

The key theme to this strategy is you should be contributing to others blogs so you create a rising tide of success. Their success will eventually flow to us if you are genuinely able to help them and remain patient. This is how we were able to build a constant flow of sales leads without any marketing at all. Building good content on our blog is great but it’s more important for us to make deep connections to the people that already in the limelight.