Janet Cromer: Author, Speaker, Advocate for Brain Injury Survivors, Families & Caregivers

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Client Success Story with the Social Web

Janet had a website when we met, but it was focused solely on her book and didn’t help expand her public speaking and outreach. Her book Professor Cromer Learns to Read is a deeply personal memoir about the challenges of rebuilding a life and marriage after her husband suffered a severe anoxic brain injury caused by lack of oxygen to his brain during a massive heart attack and cardiac arrest. Janet self-published her story in an award-winning book and is a widely sought-after speaker and educator who continues to expand her practice and advocacy by successfully using the Web and Facebook.

Strategy: Janet wanted a new site that integrated the different areas of her work, served as a platform for outreach, and helped to legitimize her advocacy work by providing much-needed resources.

Audience groups: Family caregivers, medical professionals, media professionals, and brain injury survivors

Challenges:

  • Creating a coherent story for Janet’s advocacy and work
  • Becoming a resource site for her different audience groups
  • Developing easy-to-use navigation to handle lots of different types of information

The Team:

Web Strategy & Information Architecture: Jo Golden
Content Strategy & Creation: Janet Cromer & Jo Golden
Design: Mor Vimmer
Development: Tracey Holinka
Maintenance: Tracey Holinka

Jo developed both a project strategy and web strategy; then she mapped out the structure of the new site (the Information Architecture) so that she and Janet could make adjustments as Janet’s vision of the project developed. Using the IA map, Janet wrote her own content and worked with Jo to establish a coherent approach for her outreach and develop her voice for the Web.

While Janet worked on her website content, Tracey set up a basic Facebook fan page for Janet and Jo worked with her on using it to expand her network. Tracey also converted the book to Kindle format for Amazon (now more than 50% of Janet’s sales on Amazon are in the Kindle format).

Mor designed Janet’s site to appeal to multiple audiences and to gracefully balance her personal story and professional path. Janet’s site needed a special plugin to handle all her annotated resources, and Tracey also created a plugin to handle the News & Events section. During design and development, Janet continued to work with Facebook and started writing blog posts to be ready when her website / blog went live.

Along the way Jo guided Janet through business and content strategy challenges, made sure that she understood how to tag and categorize her posts, and generally provided support as needed. Once her website went live, Janet notified her network, continued blogging, and added more valuable resources to make her site a content-rich destination on brain injury.

These days Janet continues to focus on her work and has made excellent use of both her blog and her Facebook Fan Page. As a result of her new blog, Janet was invited to blog weekly for Lash and Associates, the leading publisher of brain injury education tools. Meanwhile Tracey handles her site’s maintenance, keeps it compatible with browser upgrades, and stays on the lookout for other useful plugins to improve visitor experience.

Website: janetcromer.com
(Launched January 2011)

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