Web | Marketing Muse

Update Your Profile Picture Across Multiple Websites All At Once

February 19th, 2010

I visited a social network this morning that I haven’t been to in almost three months. I wasn’t surprised to see that it still had an old picture of me on my profile. I thought I had updated my picture on all my social media networks a while ago, but this wasn’t a network that I go to a lot. It did get me curious, though, so I checked some of my other profiles. It turns out I only thought I updated all my online avatars with that new photo. More than half still had my old photo up.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could update my photo in one place and have it updated everywhere? I think so, and the folks at Gravatar agree. They’ve created a central repository where you can upload photos of yourself.

Then any social network or other website that uses Gravatar doesn’t need to ask you to upload a photo. They can look at the email address you used to sign up and pull the image straight from Gravatar. So when you update your Gravatar photo, it automatically updates your photo on every site that uses Gravatar. Makes life a lot easier.

Who uses Gravatar?

I’d love to tell you that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN all use the Gravatar protocol. They don’t. If you want to update your photo on these sites, you have to go to each one individually and upload an image.

Most of the action that Gravatar gets is on blogs like this one. That’s right. If you create a Gravatar account (it’s free) and leave a comment on this post, your picture will show up right next to your comment. It will also show up on comments you leave on thousands (if not tens of thousands) of other blogs.

What if you leave a comment and you don’t have a Gravatar? Nothing breaks. You’ll just have a non-descript gray icon that looks vaguely like a human being. I find that when I’m reading a blog post with a long list of comments, the ones with a unique image next to them tend to catch my eye.

Why doesn’t every site use Gravatar?

My first guess is that they want to allow you to be unique on their site. You might put a casual photo of yourself on Facebook and a more professional photo of yourself on LinkedIN. I prefer to have one photo that works in a professional or casual context, but maybe I’m in the minority.

Clay Mabbitt

social media, web

blogging, facebook, linkedin, social media, social networks, twitter

2 Comments

Big, fabulous ideas you take and use how you like.

10 Suggestions for Planning a New Web Site Design

February 8th, 2010

Today’s post is from guest author Curt Franke. Curt is Vice President of Business Development with BitWise Soultions.

My friends at Silver Square have asked me, Curt Franke of BitWise Solutions, to write a blog entry this week. (Yeah, it’s possible that their judgment was slightly impaired.)

If you know anything about BitWise Solutions, then you know that we develop complex web solutions – that means web sites and software applications meant to run on the web. So, I would just like to take this opportunity to share with you a few of my thoughts about getting a good web site design.

(In this case, when I’m referring to design, I’m not talking about the look and feel, because frankly it’s more art and preference and subtle psychology than what I am probably qualified to weigh in on. Although if you know me, you know that I have opinions.)

Number one key to getting a good web site design – find a good designer. (By the way, Silver Square does good great work.)

Besides that, here are nine more thoughts to help you get a good web site design:

If you already have brand standards, (i.e. logo, colors, etc., and printed materials), be consistent with them on your web design. Why confuse a prospective client about whether they have come to your site?
There are de facto standards for good web design. Don’t get cute, follow them. For example, clicking on the logo should return the visitor to the home page. Search boxes go near the top.
Make it easy for your site visitors to contact you. Don’t make them dig for a phone number or some other way of reaching you. Put your contact information on the footer of each page and/or present a “Contact Us” page.
Then there are the basics. Who are your target visitors and what specific action do you want them to take when they visit your site? What is the call to action for individual pages? Good web site developers will ask you these questions.
Great web site developers* will ask you the questions that help to define the web site strategies that support your business goals and objectives. A web site that supports your business goals and objectives will ensure a good investment of your time and money. A good investment should anticipate a return on that investment. If not, it’s not an investment. It’s a donation.
Be logical in the presentation of the content. Think through the groupings of the content so the site is intuitive. This is part of what great web site developers* do for you.
What web site functionality will support your goals and objectives? For example, does there need to be a secure login for customers to be able to access your inventory and place orders online so that you can increase sales and customer satisfaction?
Practically everyone wants some visibility with search engines. So, make sure to invest the time and effort to get the tags and content in place that will support the search terms for which you want to be found.
Practically everyone wants to make changes to the content on the site themselves. So, get a good Content Management System (CMS). Get a demo of it first. You will be glad you did. Not all CMS’es are created equal.

I realize these are pretty basic elements. But heck, John Wooden taught his basket players at UCLA how to put their socks on. So, getting the basics right is a good first step.

May God bless you.

Curt

*BitWise Solutions = great web site developers, providers of complex web solutions, and good people

Angela James

branding, graphic design, web

no comments

Catch Jeff Heinzmann on Silver Square's Intimate Invasion

You Are Not Your Customer

February 5th, 2010

Who is your customer? You’ve given some thought to this question. How old are they? Male or female? Are they tech-savvy? Where do they spend their free time?

Your customer and how they think should be the driving factor in all of your marketing decisions. You may love reading The New Yorker, but if your customers prefer People, there isn’t any reason to spend your marketing budget on ads in The New Yorker. Nothing shocking here, right? We all understand this.

Here’s where it gets tricky: do you think you are your customer? You’re wrong. Disagree with me? Perhaps you’re thinking, “I’m just like my customer. I am my target market. We’re the same in every way.”

same taste in music
same age
same income level
same hobbies
same politics
we read the same magazines
we watch the same TV shows
we like the same celebrities
we care about the same news
we live in the same kinds of neighborhoods and shop in the same stores

All of these things will help you understand your customer. You are a part of your target demographic. This will give you extremely valuable insights for growing your business, but you still aren’t your customer.

What’s the difference? Your expertise. Your solution. Your business.

Your product or service addresses some pain. Maybe you used to have that pain, but you don’t today. Your customers still have that pain. Every time they decide to hand you their hard-earned money, they are thinking about that pain and deciding you are worth the price you set.

Why am I making such a big deal about such a subtle difference? (And it is subtle.) It doesn’t matter if you like your website. It doesn’t matter if you like your logo. Or your copy. Or your business cards. It doesn’t matter unless they motivate your customers to buy. Sometimes the small difference between you and your customer is why you like one logo when a slightly different one would resonate better with your customers.

Obviously you don’t want to be embarrassed by any of your marketing pieces. (If you grimace when you hand someone your business card, that will ultimately hurt your bottom line.) The opinion that really counts, though, is the one of someone who needs your solution and has money to pay for it.

Sometimes that’s easier to see as a business owner when you don’t have anything in common with your customer. But it doesn’t matter if it’s easy or not. Either way it’s critical to your success.

Clay Mabbitt

branding, marketing, web

advertising, branding, key message, marketing plans

no comments

2010 is a Great Year for Using Humor in Marketing

February 1st, 2010

I have been thinking about quite a few marketing ideas for a few clients who have marketing plans in the works, and I keep coming back to a common theme – humor. I am pretty sure right now, 2010, is one of they best years to have some humor with your marketing. At a minimum, it’s one of the best years to test how well the funny works with your audience. So why do you ask is 2010 one of the best years to have fun with your marketing? There are many great reasons, but this one’s the best: It’s easy to test.

Social media often gets a bad wrap for things like… it’s time consuming, it’s always changing, there are too many mediums, I don’t know how to get started, etc. but in my opinion, it’s one of the best places to throw out new ideas and tactics and see if they stick. Think of 10 years ago, or let’s take five, even, and how quickly would you test out a new marketing campaign? How would you test ? People were a lot less willing to try multiple new marketing ideas in a given year. I think that mindset is gone, and hopefully gone for good.

Let’s discuss an idea I know a bit about. The Proust spoof we have been doing at Silver Square, launching with the new year, was a new marketing tactic for us. We came up with it to show and tell the great people in our network, whether they be clients, friends, family, family friends, peers, etc. and to also bring new people to our site. We can already tell this tactic is working. In 30 days, we know a spike comes each Tuesday, when our Proust appears on our blog, and typically visitors read three more additional posts. They come, they stay, they read, they get to know us. Exactly the point. Even more to the point we get a few people signing up for the blog, interacting with us, signing up for our newsletter… you see how this works? Had this marketing idea cost $10,000 to implement do you think we would have thrown it up there for kicks to see what happens? As the driver of this bus, I can tell you most definitely not. This idea is fun, is interesting, and brings about a personal side to our marketing mix.

Another way using the web makes testing for humor easy is that you can change it and make updates on the fly. Can you imagine how loud you would gasp if a promotion in a printed magazine went out with the wrong phone number or web address? Well, if you do that on a Facebook ad or on your LinkedIn status, you just go change it. Ta da. It doesn’t live forever wrong.

So your challenge for this week is to come up with some humor for your marketing. Have an extremely fun brainstoming session, have some of your employees play like your clients to make sure your humor is actually on target with your audience, and toss out some fun campaign ideas. Pick the best and decide which medium(s) you’ll post your greatness. How will you get people to your funny? Do you want them to interact? Do you want them to go to an event? Think through the idea, give it some legs and run with it. If it didn’t work, it cost you an enjoyable brainstorming session with your team, and a step further in learning about what works for your audience.

Try again. Measure, repeat.

Raquel Richardson

business smarts, marketing, social media, web

ideas, relationship building, social media

1 Comment

Etiquette of the Twitter Follow

January 28th, 2010

It’s an almost daily occurrence. I get a notice that someone has stopped following me on Twitter. I don’t recognize this person or organization that has decided they aren’t interested in my tweets any longer. I hadn’t even known they were following me until they stopped. My total number of followers (that all important number on which hardcore Twitter users hang their self-esteem) remains steady because some different person that I’ve never met or heard of has started following me… at least for a few days.

So what’s happening here? In all likelihood, these people are following me in the hopes that I will follow them back. From what I can tell they don’t care about hearing what I have to say or starting a conversation with me. But when Twitter was still a fledgling social media startup, it was customary to follow anyone who followed you. Some would say that reciprocal following is still the appropriate etiquette today.

Ultimately you will decide how you want to use your Twitter account, but you have some options when deciding how you want to dole out your Twitter follows. Spoiler alert: my recommendation is the third option mentioned below.

1.) Auto-follow

With this approach you reciprocally follow anyone who follows you. You can even set up third-party Twitter add ons that will take care of the following for you. Perhaps appropriate when Twitter was just starting out, I’m not a fan of auto-following these days. Not only do you get inundated with a stream of tweets from people you don’t know or care about, you’re also rewarding “Twitter spammers” who follow thousands upon thousands of accounts just to inflate their own number of followers. It’s not too melodramatic to say this practice is bad for the social economy of Twitter.

2.) Ignore New Followers

On the other end of the spectrum you can simply ignore any stranger who follows you out of the blue. That’s not to say you don’t follow anyone, but when you add a new follower it’s because you found them and are interested in what they have to say. It doesn’t matter who is following you. I personally feel like this devil-may-care attitude is a step above auto-following, but it certainly doesn’t leverage the power of a social media network like Twitter.

3.) Selectively Follow

When I learn someone new is following me on Twitter, I’ll usually check out their Twitter page. I’ll look at the quick bio and read some of their latest tweets. If I find value in what they are talking about, then I follow them. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that new people follow me all the time that I don’t even know about. But there are a very intelligent few who don’t just hit the follow button and call it a day. They mention me in one of their tweets. Something like…

if you want a good web guy in indianapolis, you could do worse then @claymabbitt

When I see that tweet, of course I go check the sender out.

I think selectively following is hands down the best approach. The power of a strong social media network like Twitter is you can make connections and start a conversation with new people. You just have to be smart about it.

Clay Mabbitt

social media, web

relationship building, social media, social networks, twitter

2 Comments

Angela James

social media, web

no comments

Under the Hood of Your Blog: Tags vs. Categories

January 15th, 2010

When you start writing a blog post, the process is pretty easy to grasp right off the bat. You give your post a title. You type the main text (like what you’re reading now). Then things get a little stickier. You can select categories your post falls under. You can also create tags and attach them to your post. Understanding categories and tags seems to be a common speed bump people encounter when they first start blogging. You may gather from the names “category” and “tag” that they are meant to be some means of organizing your blog, but how? Are they different? How do you know when to use a category versus a tag?

While no analogy is perfect, I’ve got one that might help clear up some of the confusion. If your blog was a book, it would probably have chapters. And let’s suppose you gave each chapter a title. When a new person picks up your book, they could look at the table of contents and quickly scan the chapter titles to get an idea of what you talk about in your book. A book on earth science might include chapters like Geology, Oceanology, and Meteorology. If a reader is particularly interested in Oceanology, they could jump right to that chapter and start reading. The chapter titles are the categories of your blog. It’s a way of describing the organization of your blog from a big picture perspective. On our blog, the post you’re reading right now is under the category: Web.

Other people may come at your book in a different way. They have a specific topic in mind, and they only want to look at the places where you talk about that word in the book. If all I care about is plate tectonics, then I don’t need to look at the table of contents. It’s faster to look in the index to see where you mention plate tectonics and go straight to those pages. When you create a tag in your blog, it’s like putting that tag in the index at the back of a book. And when I click on a tag on your blog, I’ll get a list of all the posts where you have used that tag. This post is tagged with the word: blogging.

So how did that analogy hold up? After reading this do you have a better grasp on tags and categories?

Clay Mabbitt

web

blogging

no comments

Blogging Just Got Easier: Release of Wordpress 2.9

December 21st, 2009

I’ve been a fan of Wordpress for several years because the development team has always managed to strike a perfect balance between the needs of a site developer like me and the needs of the site owner who needs to be able to make updates to the content of the site. Most site owners are not web developers themselves, so they need an interface that makes it easy to add pages, images, and video to their site. Wordpress has make those tasks simple for years, but release 2.9 adds a few features that take this simplicity to new heights.

Embedding Video

In previous versions of Wordpress, embedding video from a site like YouTube on your web page had a few extra confusing steps. You had to find the embed code on YouTube, switch from the visual editor to the HTML editor in Wordpress, and the whole process felt a little clunky. Now you can just paste a link to your YouTube video into the middle of your Wordpress page. When a visitor views the page, the video will automatically be embedded. Simple.

So when I edit this page, I paste in the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FEyMO713-Y …but you see:

Editing Images

Gone are the days when you need to use photo editing software to crop, rotate, and resize your images before uploading them. You can now do all of those functions from right within your Wordpress site.

And of course there’s also behind the scenes changes that help me as a site developer out, but you don’t care if there are better filters for query_posts and WP_Query. And the great thing about using a content management system like Wordpress is you don’t have to.

Clay Mabbitt

web

blogging, cms, wordpress

no comments

Clay Mabbitt

social media, web

foursquare, mobile networks, social media

3 Comments

My new favorite book… Getting Real

November 11th, 2009

It’s time for Mr. Canfield to step down as my favorite book (The Success Principles). He has held the title crown for a couple years now, so it is time.

Getting Real by 37 Signals is a simple read, which is the point, as the book’s subtitle is: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. While this book does all that, it does more too. The smarter, simple, faster, easier way they approach web work has many lessons that can be placed in to your world. It’s also such a quick read, I’ll probably read and reread this one a few times.

It’s funny how things are applicable at different times in your life. I typically don’t pick up web books, but this is one of Clay’s top reads, so I wanted to read his top read. He’s a super sharp dude, so why wouldn’t I want to know what he knows? More than that, though, the book was great for me to read because it helps us work smarter as a team, and, I know a lot more about where he is coming from when we approach a web project. Just this week, a client wanted to have a few websites for their business. This could have been a very OK thing for that company, however, my main point, of course from the thoughts of this book, were that making three sites only lead to additional sites to MANAGE. Most clients don’t want to add to their work load on purpose, nor leave open an opportunity to cause error by forgetting to change information in one place but not in the other two. It was timely, and spot on advice for this situation.

There are many other lessons I’m sure I’ll share in future situations, but for now, take my advice and read this book. It’s more than simple advice for web work. It’s great advice for business.

Raquel Richardson

book reviews, business smarts, web

book review, design, ideas, web

3 Comments

Silver Square

10 Suggestions for Planning a New Web Site Design

You Are Not Your Customer

Under the Hood of Your Blog: Tags vs. Categories

Blogging Just Got Easier: Release of Wordpress 2.9

Embedding Video

Editing Images

My new favorite book… Getting Real

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