We recently held a client appreciation party and served them hot dogs. Now you may be thinking, well, I never want to be your client if you’re going to feed me hot dogs!, but let me tell you, these were not any simple hot dogs. In fact, had a client’s daughter not specifically asked for the ketchup, it would not have made an appearance on the menu. What did make the menu were some really fun concoctions like Hot Dog Satay, Tropical Dog and the winner, Homestyle Breakfast Dog with Hot Sauce. So venture on over to our facebook page and check out these great hot dog photos. Be sure to be a client for next year’s party… you never know what we’ll be up to, but it will be fun.

Here are some snaps from my visit. You’ll see some of this show up in our new work home, which is still about a month away, but stay tuned.

What else this book does, though, is give you small bites of things you can do for every situation. I was happy to learn I was doing some things really well, and doing things I didn’t even realize would make an impact.  Let’s take the first chapter about your home. We recycle, which lots of people do, and it seems like an easy thing to do these days. Just this weekend we made a run to the big recycle center in Hamilton County to take lots of cardboard boxes we have from buying in bulk and recently having a birthday party. The thing I did that I didn’t even really think about was the fact that we have no plastic shower liners (or curtains). This helps keep unnatural vinyl plastics out of landfills. PVC plastic waste amounts to 1.23 million tons per year, none of which is recyclable. Then there is the thing I’m still working on… turning off the water while brushing my teeth. I personally brush and let the water heat up because right after brushing I wash my face and I like the water hot. If I’m not washing my face, I turn the faucet off, but I do have that guilt of letting it warm up. This could help me conserve up to five gallons of water per day.

Other things I do that I think are easy…

1. I drink tap water when I’m out. I do buy bottled water from time to time, but I reuse the bottle; either to drink more water from, to use to water plants, to use when I go on long walks with the dogs (they love to drink out of water bottles) and when I buy water bottles I try to buy Ethos from Starbucks.
2. I download tunes and books. It’s not especially easy for me as I love to have the real thing when it comes to books, but I’m learning to adjust. I have an iPod and a Kindle and I use often. I also go to the library often and share books with friends.
3. I use magazines for gift wrap. Remember this past holiday season I showed you my gift wrap? It’s really fun.
4. I use a digital camera. Yeah, I also just really like the convenience of digital, but the chemicals used in developing film require special treatment and disposal.
5. Recycled paper. We use recycled post-it note paper and file folders at our office. We also have a bin where I take home our items on the weekends to recycle them here since they don’t offer the service at our building.

What are you doing at home or at the office you can share? I’m going to add something new to my green list this week in honor of Earth Day. Not sure what yet, but I’m excited to pick a new habit. Here’s to being green!

So what else could I possibly blog about today other than Butler!?

Go Dawgs!

My real point, though, is that your business has a unique opportunity to connect with your audience on April Fool’s Day. Even if the voice of your business is very formal and polished 364 days a year, you do have a chance on this one day to be irreverent. We’ve talked before on this blog about the value of using humor in your marketing. We walked the walk yesterday with our humorous video on our new design breakthrough. (Haven’t seen it yet? Head over to YouTube and leave a comment after the video to let us know what you think.)

The response to the video has been great. We connected with customers, referral partners, and other people in our network. The video was spread around to coworkers and friends. It was seen by people we’ve never met. Once we started getting some attention, we stoked the fire by adding a link for viewers to download a PDF of the actual charts we used in the video. We added the link into the comments on Facebook and added an in-video annotation over on YouTube.

We’re not the only ones who jumped at the opportunity to have a little April Fool’s fun. Here are some other great jokes from yesterday:

Have any favorites we missed? Sound off in the comments.

I started Silver Square 10 years ago, and I’ve learned a lot about what makes a marketing piece work. I’ve always had hunches about which elements were making a dynamite piece work, but I didn’t have any hard data to back it up… until now. Clay Mabbitt has been crunching the numbers and boiled it down to a single element that is the key to maximizing the effectiveness of the logos, printed pieces, and websites we create for our clients.

I’ll let him share the secret with you in this video.

Update: Happy April Fool’s Day, everybody. Thanks for all the emails and warm responses to this video. If you liked it, don’t forget to give it a Digg or leave a comment over at YouTube.

Understandably search engines don’t publicize their ranking formulas because that invites search engine spammers and “black hat” search marketers to manipulate the system. So these numbers are approximate, but it will give you a reasonably good idea of how pages are ranked.

• Talent 35% – Does the page demonstrate something unusual and interesting that the search engine hasn’t seen before? Pages with video clips of strong musical performances or juggling fire will see a boost in their ranking.
• Evening Wear 25% – Does the page project an image of elegance and sophistication? Significant preference is given to sites that include rhinestones and colorful sequins in their design. Any page layout that includes an exposed midriff in the middle of the page is going to get dinged, but a modest slit up the sidebar is acceptable.
• Swimsuit 20% – Although the page should reveal some tantalizing content when a visitor first sees the page, the search engine judges like for you to leave something to the imagination. For this reason, it’s important that you don’t put all of your information on the home page. Save a little something for the secondary pages of your site, or at least move it below the fold of the home page. Stay classy.
• On-Stage Question 15% – Each page also has the opportunity to use their title and description meta tag to respond to questions asked by search engine users. Examples of common questions asked include “how far to the sun?” “what is bill gates worth?” “jonas brothers lyrics” “danica patrick” and “free mp3 forum”
• Judge’s Discretion 5% – The judge also has a small amount of leeway to push a page higher (or lower) in the rankings if the page demonstrates strength in keyword density, page titles, meta descriptions, page rank, inbound links, relevant anchor text, keywords used in title and heading tags, age of domain, traffic and historical click-through data, social media buzz, keyword appearing in root domain, image alt tags, freshness of page, unique content, frequency of updates, ratio of code to text, query parameters, W3C standard compliance, presence and prevalence of advertising, diversity of link sources, location in site hierarchy, internal link popularity, global link popularity of domain, links from hubs/authoritative sites, growth of inbound links over time, page load time, server uptime, use of XML sitemaps, use of feeds, use of SSL certificates, detection of keyword stuffing, cloaking, excessively long URLs, links from untrusted sites, overuse of nofollow attribute, language of site, country code TLD, geographic location of visitors to site, and geo-tagging in meta data.

So there you have it. Now as you are preparing to enter the competition for search engine rankings, you know where to focus your efforts. Good luck!

Earlier today, Indianapolis-based Twitter aficionado Kyle Lacy ( @kyleplacy ) wrote the following tweet:

Follow @claymabbitt : It is very rare to find an individual that can make you laugh through Twitter. This guy does it.

Do I make people laugh on Twitter? Well, I certainly think I’m pretty funny. Apparently Kyle does, and I imagine there are at least a few others out there. Is it the tweets about the songs playing in the bathroom where I work? The inappropriate things I say to my wife? Road rage? Maybe it’s just because I make a point of following very funny people and retweeting their best stuff.

Would Kyle have told people to follow me if I had never made him laugh? Well… hmm… maybe? I do also tweet about serious stuff in the online and social media spheres, which are areas most of Kyle’s audience probably cares about. But it certainly isn’t “very rare to find an individual” who does that. (Actually Twitter is crawling with us.) Kyle decided to endorse me because he thinks some of the stuff I’ve put out there on Twitter is funny.

That endorsement had a positive effect. My new followers have spiked in the last few hours. That’s more people who get to see me be funny on Twitter. While they’re chuckling, they also get to see my occasional tweets about upcoming Silver Square seminars and new resources we have available. Because I’ve made them laugh, they like me a little bit.  Because they like me, they’ll be more inclined to look for the value in the seminars and resources I’m talking about.

Does that mean everyone I’ve made laugh will become a paying customer? Not even close. My product or service still has to address some pain they have, be appealing, be in their price range, and fit dozens of other variables that go into a buying decision. But I have a bit of their attention, a bit of their interest, and a bit of their goodwill.

And that’s a good place to start.