A friend’s fiance is joining his parent’s law firm in Denver. He wanted to help give the firm a fresh update, and I was lucky enough that he thought to ask for my help.

Poland & Wheeler P.C. asked me to update their logo, create a website from scratch and update their business cards to match.

We established a hosting plan and a new logo within an afternoon. Expanding from those decisions, I found a WordPress free template from WooThemes that fit most of what Poland & Wheeler P.C. wanted. Lastly, I spent a handful of hours preparing their content and tweaking the theme to fit our plans.

My additions include page templates that display specific post categories. Poland & Wheeler P.C. doesn’t currently have any written testimonials from clients, but once they collect them it takes just a click to activate that section and display as many as they like. A similar template pulls the biographies of all employees, and is easily updated by adding or removing another post.

As always, I reinforced to my unexpected clients that the web shouldn’t be the private domain of code jockeys. I set out to build them a website they could maintain on their own, and I think this was a success.

Earlier this week I was honored to present to several local businesses about the pros and cons of several social media platforms. The experience renewed and reinforced my thinking about smart content as a marketable commodity.

What makes it smart, I believe, is that it adds value to a consumers life. I don’t believe that value needs to be direct, but certainly at least tangential to their needs or interests.

Of course, in news content is all we produce. The challenge in this case was to think of content that other businesses can produce, while not losing sight of their primary product or service.

To that end, I did not say during my presentation that every business should be on every platform. Instead, I suggested that businesses must pick the platforms that fit their model most closely. A business that makes or sells colorful items should think about exploiting that strength through photos or videos on Pinterest or Flicker, for example. Or a business whose customers are primarily other businesses should focus not on individual consumers through Facebook but on their target audience through LinkedIn.

The presentation was well received, and that made me realize that I’d taken for granted my willingness to experiment with digital platforms. I was in a room full of smart entrepreneurs but many had simply been too afraid to test something new.

My first few months at KKTV have culminated in an award from the Colorado Broadcasters Association!

KKTV.com was named the best non-metro (read:Denver) website among Colorado’s TV stations.

The award was presented and announced during a banquet in Denver. It was a dressy affair, complete with representatives from many radio and television stations.

Additionally, the website award was not the only we took home that night. We won enough other first and second place honors to take home station of the year as well.

Businesses will be quick to point out that it isn’t easy to make money directly from your social efforts. In that sense, social doesn’t add directly to your bottom line.

What it does do, on the other hand, is offer an opportunity to increase awareness and converse with potential customers. The value is derived from how well you project your customer experience to those people who aren’t yet customers.

When a business decides to advertise on TV or in print, they’re throwing a dart at a target audience they’ve selected based on statistics. Web ads can also be like that, but social media is not. Social media lets the customers throw the dart, seeking what they need. Businesses just need to make sure they’re target it out there waiting.

That said, here are a few “no-duh” suggestions for handling social accounts:

1. Have fun with it. Use your personality and culture online in the same way you do in person.
2. Converse. Try to respond to every question and try to give every troll at least one good-faith effort.
3. Ask for opinions and crowdsource for new ideas. Find out what your current customers want and why others haven’t become customers yet.

As a web presence manager for a television station, I’m constantly checking the analytics for our social accounts – but I also know that they only tell half the story. The bigger value, the value that the business really benefits from, is when people are thinking about the news we’ve delivered throughout the day and decide to visit our website or watch our newscast.

Every business, from a bakery to a zoo, should think the same way. You shouldn’t expect to make money from your Facebook account, but you can expect more customers to say, “I thought of you because of your Facebook page.”

Although PhilTenser.com is designed to showcase my resume and freelance availability, I’ve redesigned the template with “newssense” in mind.

I’m imagining this as a potential template for a news organization. That is why there is a breaking news functionality built in – any posting assigned to that category will trigger a special section in the header of every page.

Certainly a video player could also be showcased where I’ve currently got a javascript slideshow, and ads could be incorporated into the header or any of the columns.

In future renovations, perhaps I’ll set up a set of options for deciding which categories go into each column. Right now they’re hard-coded, but I could offer this template as freeware if I set it up with simpler options.

Lastly, I will once again champion the strength of the WordPress platform and its corps of developers. Many of the elements making up this site are inspired by freeware templates, and cannot emphasize enough how thankful I am to the entire community for all the work they do.