Silver Square

Silver Square helps you make your site a LEAD GENERATING MACHINE

What is completely and totally original about your site?

September 2nd, 2010

Look at the websites of your competitors. Now look at your website. How is yours different? Naturally, it has your branding and colors. There’s information about your company, and your contact information. Okay, technically that’s different – but your competitors still have their branding, their about us, and their contact information. You’re not going to make your website stand out by just trading jabs.

Let’s rephrase the question: how is your site better than your competitors’ sites? That’s the question you need to be asking yourself because that’s the question your customers are asking.

We all get that simply having a website of any kind no longer makes you unique. Everyone has a web presence. Congratulations, you occupy space. Now what?

Something about your site needs to be jaw-droppingly good. What might that be?

a startling and compelling visual design
an engaging tool where your customers can log in and see their history with you
give away practical and relevant advice to your visitors
explain clearly how and why your product is important
get involved with a charity important to your customers
have a contest where visitors enter pictures, videos, or stories
be funny

You don’t need to be the best at all of these things. You might decide you want to do a couple of things well, but all you really need is to find one unique hook for your site. If you knock that one thing out of the park, you’ve given your customers an answer to the question.

Need to know more? Join us at The Combine in Bloomington, Indiana (9/9 – 9/12). On Saturday, Raquel and Clay will be presenting on Web Strategy.

Clay Mabbitt

technology, web

ideas, marketing, technology

You now that 'lean your ladder against the right building' thing? MARKETING STRATEGY Silver Square can help you find your building

Marketing a Musical

August 25th, 2010

This summer I appeared in a musical called Enter Love. This was an original work by a very good friend, Lynn Lupold, among others. Because I cared about the people and the project I volunteered to lend my professional expertise and run some online promotion for the show. The show was wildly successful, selling out every single performance. So how did we get there?

Website

The website for the show is actually pretty basic. It’s a simple blog layout. What made it successful was the editorial calendar. When the site was created I mapped out 10 weeks of posts leading up to opening night. The topics included profiles of people involved with the show, casting announcements, photos and videos, and contest announcements (see below). The steady stream of new information helped us build inertia and interest in the show. Because we included individual profiles of people in the show, we made it very easy for them to tap into their personal networks by sharing a link to their profiles.

Email Newsletter

We knew we would have a small group of advocates who would love to help promote the show if we could arm them with the ideas and collateral to do so. On the website we created a signup form for anyone who wanted to receive a weekly email with tips on what they could be doing to help promote the show.

Facebook

An enterprise like this is ideally suited for Facebook. Armed with a decent camera you can walk into rehearsals and get a steady trickle of photos leading up to the show. Photographs like these get good traction of Facebook. Many of the photographs were of cast members who are regularly active on Facebook. Tagging them in photos drew a lot of online attention to the show.

Contests

We ran weekly contests leading up to the show in which people could win free tickets to the show. The details varied from week to week, but ways to enter included tweeting about the show, leaving a comment on the blog, or commenting on a promotional video on YouTube. I was honestly surprised that the contests did not draw even more attention, although they were certainly successful at raising awareness and buzz about the show.

Other Contributing Factors

Less it seem like I’m claiming sole responsibility for the successful promoting of this show, it’s worth mentioning other factors that certainly impacted the box office sales.

Local celebrity. Many of the people involved in both creating and performing the show are well known names in Lafayette, where this world premiere was held.
Creative. Thanks to John Metzinger the show already had a great logo and visual branding in place before I was involved.
Video. Promotional, performance and documentary footage of the show was captured and edited by video wunderkind Jack Klink
Lafayette Civic Theatre. It’s not their first rodeo, and the theatre’s relationships with local media, the blog, and their existing promotional machine was also a key for this run.

Clay Mabbitt

marketing, web

Good systems remove the opportunity for human error

July 2nd, 2010

The great thing about computers is that you can automate repetitive tasks. A human being can get bored or distracted and make a mistake. A computer performs with complete efficiency and accuracy each and every time.

As a programmer I’m in the business of shifting mundane jobs off the plate of a living, breathing person and onto the plate of a computer. I focus on creating sites that do simple tasks for you, and I love seeing other systems that are doing this right.

When we prepare an email campaign, we send a test message out to a few of us here in the office to make sure there are no errors. It has to be clear that the email is just a preview, though. If the date of an upcoming event is wrong in the email, do you need to a.) panic and go into damage control mode to get the correction out in time or b.) just fix the date before the real email goes out?

So we decided a while back that before we send a test message out, we need to add the word TEST to the subject line. When we see the message in our inbox, we know right away that we’re looking at a preview. It works great, but there is a catch. If the email looks right and no changes are required, it’s so-o-o easy to just send it out to the entire subscriber list. Oops. If you do that, the subject line still says TEST. I’m happy to say that we’ve never had that happen with a message we sent out for one of our clients, but wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t even a possibility that could accidentally happen?

This looks like a job for a computer.

I’ve talked before about the cool features of Campaign Monitor. Here’s one more area they get right. First of all they ask you if you want to send a test message before sending it out to your entire subscriber list. It happens from a different screen on their website, and you’d never confuse sending a preview email with sending your real one. And what happens when you send your test? The word Preview is added to the subject line automatically.

You don’t have to manually change your subject line. If the email is great you just send it out to your subscriber list and everything reads perfect.

It’s not that other email campaign providers don’t let you send a test message. It’s that Campaign Monitor makes it hard to screw up.

Clay Mabbitt

campaign monitor, email

Silver Square Web Sites: Class of 2010

June 24th, 2010

As we’ve almost reached the mid-point of 2010, I’ve been looking at the websites that we’ve put up this year. Silver Square has done some very cool work, and I’m proud of it. What exactly has me feeling pride? Let me show you…

Accurate Tax Management

This property tax assessment business previously had a website that did not convey how large and successful they had become in recent years. In order to attract the larger clients they were ready to service, Accurate Tax Management needed a site that showed they were serious and able to tackle assessments of large commercial properties. This home page includes a section to display a photo, and as you look at the page it fades through a series of carefully selected photos that illustrate the type of properties where Accurate Tax Management can really make a difference. http://accuratetaxmgmt.com

Emily Frank, MD

Emily is positioning herself as an expert in the field of healthy eating. It’s a crowded space, but Emily is unique. In addition to being a practicing MD, she has a fun personality, a passion for understanding how the body processes food, and a willingness to call people out when they are making bad food choices. Her site needed to be extremely inviting and accessible, even though it’s packed with information. http://emilyfrankmd.com

Orchard in Bloom

Orchard in Bloom is a garden show and fund raiser for various education programs in Indianapolis. The event has a lot of moving pieces with an events calendar, vendors, sponsors, and a ton of logistic information for people coming to the show. We were able to provide all the necessary information and still project the flavor of the event by giving the site a large photographic background depicting a colorful garden scene. http://orchardinbloom.org

Training By Tanner

Karen decided 2010 was the year to expand her remote personal training. With regular communication, custom workout routines, and instructional videos she can work with clients that may not be within driving distance of her studio. Since so much of that service relies on communication, it was critical that the website gives potential clients confidence that Karen has the appropriate technology setup to make it work. We also needed a design that communicated that you still receive a custom workout experience with a personal connection. http://www.trainingbytanner.com

Greg Mrakich Painting

Greg is a talented painter who needs to find clients who value the high-level of craftmanship he brings to his work. So while Greg’s website has a thumbnail gallery of his work, we also wanted to make sure that visitors could immediately get a sense of what they can expect in working with him. So each page of the site features a prominent image to help them understand what Greg has to offer. http://gregmrakichpainting.com

Clay Mabbitt

news, web

Not All Content Management Systems Are Created Equal

June 18th, 2010

Part of me feels like CMS (Content Management Systems) has become something of a buzzword over the last year or two. I guess there’s good reason for that. For over a decade, web developers held the keys to the kingdom. If you wanted to make a simple change to your website like updating your phone number, you needed to get down on your hands and knees and beg the dude who built your website a year ago to make time in his schedule to do the update. Even if it was changing a few numbers, you would get a bill.

So a CMS gives you the power to make those type of changes yourself. The purpose of content management is to make your life easier, and some content management setups are better at this than others.

We recently put together a small site for one of our clients, Walter Knabe. This site is primarily a gallery of his fine art pieces that are available for sale. As he completes new pieces of art, they are added to this site.

The newest pieces have a small red ribbon at the top corner that says New. As you can probably imagine, it’s important that this ribbon only shows up on art pieces that truly are new.

Ten years ago, you would have to pay for your web developer to go in once a week and update this sort of thing. Now we can just set your site up to use content management, but not all CMS’s are created equal.

An unsophisticated approach would be to give you a little checkbox next to each picture in the admin area of the site. When you add or edit a picture, you would just click the checkbox if the red ribbon should appear. When the box doesn’t have a check, no ribbon. This approach gets the job done, but there’s a problem. You have to go back in a few weeks later and uncheck the box when the piece is no longer new.

We can do better. On Walter’s site you set in one place how long you want the new ribbon to appear. 14 days. 30 days. If you were selling new cars, maybe you would mark them as new for a whole year. Whatever is appropriate for your site, you set that time period in one place. You’re done.

The system will automatically calculate how long ago each image was added to the site. If it’s within your set time period, it’s marked as new. As soon as enough time passes, the new banner will stop appearing on it’s own. That’s a smart CMS: one that saves you time and does work for you.

Clay Mabbitt

cms

It’s a Violation To Run a Contest on Facebook

June 4th, 2010

Earlier this week the good and noble Chuck Gose posted a link on Twitter to an article about things that many businesses do that are in violation of Facebook’s policy. The big one that jumped out at me is that Facebook prohibits running any contest where the method for entering is to take some action on Facebook.

I can’t count the number of contests I’ve seen where you enter by leaving a comment on a business’s Facebook page. It turns out that’s verboten. Uploading a photo to Facebook? That’s a no-no, too. If you read the rules strictly, even telling people to enter a contest by becoming your Fan (or clicking the Like button to use the new Facebook vernacular) is grounds for having your account deactivated.

Are these rules enforced?

No. Not based on what I see happening on Facebook. There are so many active accounts that it would be a monumental task to try to police all the “illegal” contests that are running, but the rules are officially on the books. So Facebook could drop the hammer any time without notice.

The good news is you can still promote a contest on Facebook as long as the action of entering the contest doesn’t occur on Facebook. So we’re running a contest right now where you leave a comment on our blog and you get a chance to win a free copy of Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. We had been considering allowing people to enter by leaving a comment on our Facebook wall, as well, but decided to comply with Facebook’s stated policy on contests.

So Facebook is useless for contests?

What we can do while still obeying the letter of Facebook’s policy is talk about the contest on our wall. We can invite visitors to click a link to our blog and leave comments over here. That let’s us still leverage our Facebook network and avoid the risk of offending the powers-that-be.

And of course our friends, clients, and business partners can talk about the contest on Facebook, too.

Clay Mabbitt

social media, web

facebook, social media

Why I Like Campaign Monitor For Email Newsletters

May 26th, 2010

I read a profile this week of email marketing software company Campaign Monitor. It got me thinking about why I like using this service and recommend it to our clients. I first came across Campaign Monitor a little over a year ago. Their target audience is me: a web developer who sets my clients up to send and maintain their own email campaigns. Here’s how they make my life easy:

Setting up a new client is simple. I can create passwords and set up billing options in a matter of minutes.
I can add custom templates. Each one of our clients has a unique email template that extends their brand.
It’s easy for clients to create a new email. Using the template as a base, the client can change the content, links, and images without needing to understand a lick of HTML.
Subscriber management and archiving can tie into a website. On each client’s website I can include a subscription form and an automatically updating archive of past issues of the email newsletter.

There’s some other nice touches like Google Analytics integration and verifying DNS records to maximize deliverability, but the features mentioned above are the biggest – and the most important of those is how easy it is for clients to create a new email.

They just open up the template with default text. Anywhere text is editable, they’ll see a pencil icon. Click on the icon, and they can start editing that text. No HTML required. Some of the images on the newsletter will stay the same from issue to issue (like the logo), but others will change. Those images will have a link in the bottom corner that says “replace”. Click that and upload the new image that you want to go there.

The interface is the easiest I’ve come across for a person who doesn’t spend all day working on HTML code to be able to manage their email campaign. It’s extremely powerful. Here are some close-up shots of a real template to show just how easy it is.

Edit (or delete) your text by clicking the icon next to it

replace an image with a mouse click

edit, delete, or add another event

Click the image below to see what an entire template looks like:

Silver Square's email template

Clay Mabbitt

campaign monitor, email, newsletter

Why I’m Chomping at the Bit for WordPress 3.0

May 19th, 2010

I really enjoy creating websites in WordPress. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean I enjoy creating the sites where you download a free template from somewhere and just start up a generic blog. I like taking a unique, custom website design that we’ve created and bringing it to life with the WordPress framework.

The generic pieces of a content management system are already in place. Password protected areas, search engine friendly URLs, content formatting, and heck even simple things like date formatting are already in place with WordPress. I don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel by integrating those elementary pieces into every website I create. Instead I get to focus on adding the unique touches that are only going to appear on the particular site I’m working on right then.

Need a dynamic photo gallery that works in some crazy way? Cool. I want to spend my time on that. Some neat jQuery slider effects on the home page? Rad. Let’s do it. Using WordPress lets me focus more on doing those cool things because I know the administrative login has already been programmed, tested, and debugged.

So I already love the current version of WordPress, but the latest version (expected to be released in late May or early June) adds a few key features that make my job even easier. They give me some flexibility to customize your site even more. There are some new features that are definitely cool (like WordPress MU assimiliation, new install options, an updated default theme, and custom author templates) but don’t effect most of our clients’ websites.

I do want to talk about the two new features that are going to have a big impact, though.

Menus

So up until now the navigation menu in your WordPress site has usually just been a tree of all your static pages. Now I could go into the code and exclude certain pages, but other than adding a new page, there wasn’t much you could do to change your navigation. Even reordering your pages requires special hoop jumping.

Now there is an interface for you to take control. Reorder the links. Add a link to another website right in your top navigation. Make one of your blog categories a top-level link. Go crazy. Need to move a subpage under another page. Just click and drag it to where it needs to go. Click this image to see a larger version:

Custom Post Types and Taxonomies

By default WordPress lets you have blog posts and static pages. Unless you really dive into the code and do some tinkering, all posts look the same and all pages look the same. But imaging you have a website that talks about books. Wouldn’t it be handy if the Grapes of Wrath page didn’t look just like your About Us page? With custom post types I can create a Books section in your administrative area. Any books page could be structured completely different with a picture of the cover in one corner and everything arranged differently.

Not impressed yet? Well WordPress makes it easy for me to setup your site so that you can enter certain types of information for each book. Author. Date published. Number of pages. Instead of those bits of information being buried in a paragraph, I can build your Books pages so that the name of the author is always right there under the book cover. And when you click on John Steinbeck you’ll get a list of all the books on your site that he’s written.

What Does This Mean?

The bottom line is pretty simple: some website features that had previously been extremely costly are now much easier to implement. Hurry up, WordPress. Let’s get that stable release out the door. I’m ready.

Clay Mabbitt

cms, wordpress

Clay Mabbitt

news, social media, web

facebook, social media