New Ways the Shure Website Can Make You Even Smarter

If you haven't visited shure.com recently, you're in for several surprises. In addition to the product news and information, technical data, downloads and Shure artist profiles you've come to expect, you'll see an expansion of pro audio intelligence that runs the gamut from sound basics to choosing and finding the right gear.

We sat down with Joe Hasselwander, Senior Manager of Global Web Marketing at Shure and the leader of a six-person crew whose mission is to deliver the Company's promise and its products to a worldwide web audience. We wanted to find out what's in it for Shure Notes® readers, a community of performers and sound practitioners always on the hunt for practical information.






You've recently spearheaded a major project – enhancing the educational content on shure.com. Can you talk a little about the philosophy behind the development of the new additions and enhancements?
In looking at the website, we really wanted to continue providing our customers industry-leading educational articles and overall professional audio expertise. We saw an opportunity to help simplify the selection process for our customers as they decide what to buy and how to best use professional gear.

All of our educational articles were originally centralized on one page in a very long list. We decided to regroup this material to address three major needs—the customer who is new to Shure, the customer who is looking at a variety of microphones and is trying to choose the right one, and the customers who have a more complex application or installation requirement and need guidance.

To offer our customers better website navigation, three distinct sections were created to address their needs. A Buyers' Guide was created to address folks who are in the process of looking for the right product. The How To Use Guide is full of helpful tips and tricks, tapping into the expertise of our Applications Engineering and Market Development groups that have been writing on these subjects for decades. There's also a Where to Buy section that puts customers in touch with our channel partners, or dealers to assist them with a purchase.

And we didn't stop with just articles. We have brought in more demos, podcasts, and PDFs, too. Beyond that, our education content is now organized by product and by application for easier browsing.



How common is this type of content in the pro audio world?
Other companies also provide educational materials to a varying degree, but certainly not to the depth that Shure has done. We have the best educational resources by far, which allows us to produce the most useful content for our customers. This project was an opportunity to spotlight that.

That leads us to another question - where does the content come from? Who are the experts?
We have a lot of audio experts working here at Shure and we tap into that rich knowledge at various levels to produce various types of content that find its way to shure.com.

The editors of Shure Notes use the resources here as well as those out in the field – professional sound engineers, performers, audio and worship tech crews. There's the industry-leading Applications Engineering Group, which has deep technical expertise in the history, use and construction of Shure products. They author a lot of our technical articles. We have folks in our Marketing Department who produce mobile-format podcasts on various technical topics.

We also have Product Development teams that work together with other key players in the industry to pull together articles and demos. The Shure Engineering department also plays a key role. All of that content can be found on shure.com.

I happen to know that your web team includes inveterate trackers. What kinds of results have you seen so far? Are more visitors accessing these tools?
We've been up for about a month and haven't launched them aggressively, so they've appeared in our top navigation only. We've seen a great response so far. For new pages and new sections, they're getting a lot of traffic. We'll track it very closely over the course of the next several months.

	The Shure Web team: Front row; Joe Hasselwander, Wendy Gutierrez, Ellen Mahon, Frank Mylonas. Back row: Matt Dobschuetz, Dick O'Brien. Not pictured: Ryan Laverty.

What's the best, fastest route on shure.com to educational content?
The fastest route on shure.com is to go to Pro Audio and right in the top nav is the education content. You've got Products, which is an overview of our products – wireless systems, microphones and so on. You'll find the Buyer's Guide we've been talking about, How To Use, Where to Buy and Tech Support, a longstanding resource that includes more technical resources in our Technical Library plus online tools, applications, a comprehensive FAQ, and other valuable resources. We also have a link on the page to the Audio Resource Center that offers more specialized content for contractors, installers and sound engineers.

Let's talk a little bit about your Team.
Our group has grown in the past few years from two individuals to a team of seven, including me. A few years ago, we had a technical focus on keeping the site up and running. Today, we're still concerned about those issues but we have a broader range of functions that reflect the Shure commitment to content and industry trends.

We still have folks that monitor shure.com from an IT perspective but we've implemented an enterprise-wide content management system that requires administration from all of our global business units. We've also increased our role in supporting our business unit partners, so we have folks on staff who work as project managers. Our most recent additions to the team provide the Company with web analytics, content management administration and web design. And of course, we all work towards an end objective of making the site as useful as possible for our customers. So that's where we are today.

What new initiatives are underway?
We're thinking more globally, including how we can provide more resources for our regions worldwide, our channel partners and our customer base. We are looking at design tweaks and an expansion of content that better reflects Shure in specific countries. Those plans are coming along nicely and will be executed in stages over a long range timeline in order to enhance the customer experience without disruption. We'll be simplifying our Products section with intuitive navigation and we'll be adding dynamic content in the form of selection tools, podcasts, video, and artist endorser features. Very exciting stuff.

Anything else?
We've recently launched shure.jp which is a Shure website in Japanese and a Spanish language site, es.shure.com.

Our Artist section is growing and we're very proud to share it with our customers worldwide. For every artist, there's a listing of the Shure gear that they use and how they use it. Something that Shure Notes readers will find interesting. The diversity of artists represented, from new to established, really speaks, I think, to the Company's deep roots in the music industry. For instance, last month we featured Buddy Guy and this month, it's G. Love.

We thank Joe Hasselwander for his time and remind Shure Notes readers to bookmark shure.com and visit often to stay current with pro audio products, practices and performers.