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Twitter, Why So Difficult?

Twitter, sometimes awesome; usually not so much, for me at least.

I do like Twitter for the fact that it’s this cool virtual networking event that you can show up to in your underwear and chat with people you might not ever meet in real life. I just find it über difficult to predict which of our tweets will pick up momentum and garner 3,500 clicks and which ones will fly under the radar and only generate three clicks [even if it’s hilarious].

Part of me thinks that our following isn’t being compelled/engaged sufficiently either because I’m not sharing the right content or because I’m just not very interesting, but a little research quells my insecurity from the latter. Sort of.

Guy Kawasaki has 1,360,205 followers on Twitter, and he rarely gets more than a few retweets per update.  The same is true for Brian Clark (aka Copybloger) who has about a tenth of the following and actually posts interesting, original material on copywriting and marketing.

Mindy Kaling, who you might know as Kelly Kapoor from The Office, posted that she woke up with “crunchy hair” this morning and received 123 retweets and 220 favorites.

I’m not sure what that means, but it’s kind of discouraging.

Feeling a little dejected, I sought out counsel on how to step up my Twitter game. And rest assured, there’s no shortage of articles that’ll tell you how to amplify your presence or be more engaging or write better tweets based on semantics and so on and so on. I read a ton of them and compiled a list of actionable advice before coming to the realization that I’d rather crab walk on the highway than publish that article.

The fact is there isn’t a singular “right way” for using Twitter (or any other social media platform for that matter). It really depends on your business and your goals. Just know that the people you want to get in front of are already somewhere online. It’s up to you to figure how you want to connect with them.

For me, that means removing my ego from the equation. This isn’t about me; it’s about the people I’m trying to engage. That means that I need to spend more time interacting with the people in my network and less time pushing content in one direction (i.e., into a wall).

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos said, “We’ve found that Twitter has been a great way for us to connect on a more personal level with our employees and customers. We use it to help build our brand, not drive direct sales. It’d be like asking how does providing a telephone number for customer service translate into new business when they are mostly non-sales-related calls. In the long term, Twitter helps drive repeat customers and word of mouth, but we’re not looking to it as a way of driving immediate sales.”

How do you use Twitter?

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How to Manage Your Brand

When we think of branding, we tend to think of it as this modern day phenomenon where companies work to create an emotional connection that resonates between itself and its products with customers. But the fact of the matter is that branding has existed for nearly as long as people have sold goods to one another. In preparation of writing this article, I did some light reading on the history of branding to better provide context and yeah, it’s all over the place.

One source attributed ancient Babylon as a frontrunner. Because the general public by and large was illiterate, barkers were used to attract buyers by “exhorting” passing crowds (i.e., pitching spices, wines and other goods). I took “exhorting” as a euphemism for barking. Another cited ancient Greece and Rome where merchants would hang pictorial signs and paint their storefronts. Another credited Pompeii where advertisements were written on walls. I’d previously read and wrote that stelais, made of basalt, were used in Egypt.

Here in the states, its roots go back to the late 19th century when a massive shift in product offerings and purchasing occurred with the advent of railways and the expansion of the postal service. For the first time, consumers had access to a wider selection of goods from outside their local economy. What quickly became evident was that new and unknown goods had a difficult time competing with proven local products. Because of that, manufacturers needed to convince the public that their products were just as trustworthy, if not more so, which led them to develop the concept of the unique selling position.

What happened after World War II, was that as consumer choice continued to proliferate, product quality only increased incrementally leading to this sort of standardization between similar goods that rendered them nearly indistinguishable from one another. As product differences continued to erode, companies shifted their focus from functional parity to building emotional associations. This sparked a creative revolution in advertising that became synonymous with branding. In doing so, a brand perceived as being superior would be able to charge a premium and price itself above its competitors.

So how do you apply this to your business?

With or without your input, either your customers or your competitors will position your product.

Product positioning is the process where marketers determine how to showcase a product in its best possible light while simultaneously communicating its unique attributes. If I were to ask you what you thought of Lexus automobiles, you might associate it with luxury or elegance. If I were to mention Honda, you might think efficient or affordable.

You might actually be thinking of vivid negative attributes when it comes to either make, but you get where I’m going. The fact remains that people don’t simply buy exclusively based on efficiency or affordability. We’d all be driving Smart Cars or Nissan Versas if that were the case, but we don’t. Why? Because preference aside, consumers factor in value: perceived or otherwise.

Successful product positioning requires a clear understanding of your customer and their needs, so that the right messaging can be created and delivered through the right touchpoints. To do so, you need to identify a specific target. It’s not enough to say, “men over 25.”  It would be single men between the ages of 25 to 30, with college degrees, who work in X industry and make Y dollars each year. The more specific, the better. Once you’ve segmented that target, you need to do three things:

(1) You need to create a message that differentiates your product from your competitors’ (2) that addresses your customers’ buying criteria (3) and articulates key product attributes.

Just to kind of go full circle and recap, purchase decisions take both time and energy, something that are always in short supply. Your branding should alleviate both and work to differentiate not just between the good and the bad but the better and the best.

Your brand’s reputation is its lifeblood.

Niall Fitzgerald once said, “You can have all the facts and figures, all the supporting evidence, all the endorsements that you want, but if at the end of the day you don’t command trust, you won’t get anywhere.”

Think about it in terms of your normal day to day. You trust that when you stop and proceed through a four-way-stop that the next driver will yield to you. You trust that when you buy meat or produce at the grocery store it won’t make you sick upon consumption. If that were an actual concern, wouldn’t you shop elsewhere?

Back in 2009, Concerto Marketing and Research Now conducted a study on the benefits and drivers of trust. They found that when people trust a brand, 83% will recommend it to other people. 78% will look to it first for things they want, and that 50% of respondents said they would pay more for it.

But as it turns out, brands really struggle to deliver on the promises they make due to glaring inconsistencies, empty claims, misbehavior and so on. Burberry boasts that its luxury apparel is “Made in Britain.” There are two factories there. The rest of the operation has been shipped to China. McDonalds is an Olympics sponsor. It also represents a leading contributor to obesity and poor nutrition. One of Unilever’s most well-known campaigns was Dove’s “Real Beauty” initiative that focused on self esteem and realistic body images for women.  Ironically, it also owns one other brand called Axe, where the recurring theme of body spray commercials is scantily clad, sex-crazed women. Weird.

Remember: not doing anything is better than making a new promise and not delivering on it because a brand can’t survive without trust. If you fail here, you can potentially burn through brand equity extremely quickly.

That means that a brand’s values must be embedded into every action and decision the company takes and not spearheaded or compartmentalized solely to a marketing team. If it is, therein lies a strong possibility that it’s destined to fail. Any actual change should be clear throughout the entire organization and obvious at every touchpoint.

To wrap things up…

When writing this, I naturally thought of Bravo Design, Inc.’s branding and what we’ve done to make good on our promises. One of which is that we’ll always work our asses off for our clients to do things right and turn work around as soon as possible. It doesn’t actually say that in our mission statement verbatim, but it’s implied. If you go through our testimonials or talk to our clients whether that be small business owners or the folks at movie studios, they won’t tell you otherwise.

Another thing we promise to do is deliver information that’ll help you at the end of the day. Whether you have questions about web development, design, branding, whatever that is, someone here at the office will be able to help you if you fill out a contact form or leave us a comment. That’s what this blog is for.

Someone [me] once said, “Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned.” Your brand is one of your most valuable possessions. Treat it well.

Photo Credit: Printpapa.com

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How NOT to Get Brandjacked on Google+

Sometime last week, a few of us at the studio were wondering how we might procure a vanity URL to replace the 21-digit ID our Google+ profile currently has.

Google+-Vanity URL

The thought process being that if we had something more manageable like plus.google.com/bravodesigninc, it’d be easier to share on assets (e.g., on printed materials like business cards, stationary, etc.) or over the phone.

After some digging, I found that Google rolled out vanity URLs for verified pages in August of last year, but that they weren’t made available to all G+ users. I’m late to yet another party. Initially, Google had indicated that it “should be available to many more of your business pages over time.” Ten months later, that isn’t really the case, even for household brands.

Coca-Cola (989,781 G+ followers) and The Coca-Cola Company (4,774 G+ followers) each have their vanity URLs. Pepsi (703,818 G+ followers) does not.

When searching for PepsiCo, I found this:

+PepsiCo Search

And since people and pages are grouped together in +search, it goes on and on and on.

+PepsiCo Search 2

Six sites, three “official ones.” Seems legit. I’ll get to that momentarily. Using Google, I searched for the Pepsi Company which populated a G+ profile in the site’s metadata/link section.

Google Referral

Here it is:

Recommended G+ PepsiCo Page

Womp, womp. Each of the unofficial “official” pages has more followers.

What threw me for a loop is that when I went back to see if I had set up the Bravo Design, Inc. G+ page correctly, I found that I can create what seems like an unlimited number of Google+ profile pages despite the fact that a verified listing already exists with a vetted phone number that corresponds to our local listing. Not cool, Google. I can only imagine that the ability for random people to create profiles using your brand name at will would be a vulnerability.

Unlike Twitter, which allows parody accounts, Google has a ban on all pseudonyms used on G+ profiles, and they’ll suspend you if they catch you. Tell that to the 300 PepsiCo profiles.

Brandjacking happens when “someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that person’s or business’s brand equity.” An example of such would be if I hypothetically pretended to be 50 Cent, borrowed [read: stole] part of his following and used it draw attention to my own personal causes (e.g., distributing my mix tape).

Notably, it has happened to Starbucks, Nestle, Exxon and British Petroleum.

Bank of America was infamously brandjacked on G+ when a satire page was created advertising its “new” slogan: “We took your bailout money, and your mortgage rates are going up.” While obviously a fraud, it stayed online for a week before being pulled. I don’t know how that could have possibly happened. But reputation risks aside, knock off pages could include redirects for phishing purposes or to spread malware.

Bank of America, Brandjacking

We recommend verifying your G+ business page. All you have to do is add a G+ badge or snippet of code to your page, request a PIN if you have a Local page and fill out an application online. It’s pretty painless. This won’t stop someone from setting up G+ pages with your name, and it won’t guarantee you the option to claim a vanity URL in the near future, but it’ll help differentiate your verified page from an imposter if both come up in a search query.

Just for kicks: another site that has a vanity URL is K-Mart. Its competitors, Target and Walmart, do not. In-and-Out, Burger King, McDonald’s and Jack in the Box don’t. Wendy’s does. Wendy’s. There is no justice in this world. Just kidding. Kind of.

To follow us on Google+ and/or come up with ideas to create an imitation Bravo Design, Inc. profile: click here.

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Simple Tips for Writing Headlines That Attract Readers

Crafting high quality headlines that resonate with readers is one of the most deceptively difficult components of writing for several different reasons.

For starters, headlines need to draw attention to your topic and attract the right readers. We could write “Justin Bieber has nervous breakdown on stage” on the Bravo Design, Inc. blog and receive 10,000 hits, but it wouldn’t really help our business. Unless, we missed this huge market that loves both the Beebs and graphic design, but I’m pretty sure I already looked into that. Second, they need to relay context. And third, headlines should assure prospective readers that the time and energy they invest will yield a positive return. All of this is made harder by the fact that all three boxes should be checked in around 10 words.

So with no further ado, here are tips on improving your headlines.

The Mosquito Bite

One method to use is intrigue. By enticing readers to discover more, you provide compelling reasons for them to click on an article then move from the headline to the next line to the next.

“The Information Gap Theory,” was made famous by George Loewenstein, a leader in the field of behavioral economics and professor at Carnegie-Mellon. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is brought about when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know.” Jonah Lehrer of Wired Magazine succinctly summarizes this by writing, “This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because that’s how we scratch the itch.”

Just remember: if you give up all the pertinent information in the headline, people won’t feel the need to read more so focus on the itch first and the scratch second.

What to Post

e.g., “You have a problem; we want to help you. Here are X, Y and Z solutions.”

People want useful information, especially when it provides solutions to problems or offers tips that improve their lives making them easier and/or better. Lists and how to articles foot the bill here along with pieces that answer the five W’s (who, what, why, when and where) These types of posts are perfect for building your authority and demonstrating your area of expertise which is critical for business blogging.

Incorporating Keywords

Should you utilize keywords in headlines? Yes, absolutely. We probably wouldn’t use the title, “How to find a graphic designer, graphic design studio, graphic design agency Los Angeles,” but who knows? I like a shameless promo plug every now and then. No, I’m kidding.

Write for an audience in their terms using your keyword research. These terms can be related to anything from problems to solutions to brand names to service offerings. It’s a win-win because you’re able to engage readers and attract search based traffic.

What NOT to do + Other Headline Landmines

I’ve said it numerous times in the past, but your products and services won’t appeal to everyone. Bummer, I know. But what’s worse is watering content down for mass appeal. I’ve made this mistake and really encourage you not to do the same.

Other things to avoid are overselling, fear mongering, trickery, desperation, hubris (desperation’s distant cousin) and the obvious ad. All of which are likely to scare prospects away before they go from browser to reader.

Practice Writing Headlines

With print media you don’t get to try multiple headlines for national audiences. You pick one, the material gets shipped, and you hope for the best. But with social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, you can test different headlines to see which garners more attention, and it’s very much measurable.

Just keep in mind that with practice, you can only get better (even if all signs point to the contrary), especially if you’re providing useful information with real problem.

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Massive: The Advertising Summit 2013

This week, Variety hosted Massive at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, a one-day summit dedicated to the convergence between advertising, content partners, digital media brands and next-generation technologies.

This was the first year I was able to make it out to the conference. And of the workshops presented, I thought that these three might have been the most timely given the changes we’ve seen across a quickly shifting media landscape.

The first was “Understanding Millennials for Ultimate Brand Success” by Melissa Lavigne-Delville, VP of Strategic Insights & Culture Editor at NBCUniversal and author of The Curve.

In it, she says: Millennials are unlike any other demographics. They consume media differently than those who preceded them. They’re influenced differently. They have different measures for success. They’re prone to moving back home as young adults and take longer to reach adulthood overall, and there are almost as many of them (born between ’76 and ’95) as there are baby boomers.

Because of that, advertisers and marketers have had to switch gears to reach out and engage not only them but also the ever changing modern family. According to the census, only 4% of American families today consists of a married couple where the wife stays home, the husband works, and their biological children are under 18. Another massive shift from the traditional family paradigm is that a whopping 41% babies are born to single moms.

So as family life changes so must entrepreneurs, advertisers and marketers.

The second workshop was “A Conversation with Google” presented by Jennifer Prince, Head of Industry, Media and Entertainment at Google, and moderated by Gordon Paddison of Stradella Road. In it, Prince reported that organic search queries on Google can reveal box office performance about one month before a release date with about 92%-94% accuracy.

According to Andrea Chen, Google’s principal industry analyst, “In the seven-day window prior to a film’s release date, if a film receives 250,000 search queries more than a similar film, the film with more queries is likely to perform up to $4.3 million better during opening weekend. When looking at search ad click volume, if a film has 20,000 more paid clicks than a similar film, it is expected to bring in up to $7.5 million more during opening weekend.”

While Google doesn’t plan on charging studios for tracking information, any actionable data might help movie marketers fine tune campaigns to better engage potential moviegoers and maximize revenue from theatrical runs.

The third and final workshop was “The Changing Rules of Audience Measurement.” Of the speakers, Jack Wakshlag, Chief Research Officer at Turner Broadcasting System, and David F. Poltrack, Chief Research Officer at CBS Corporation and President of CBS Vision, were the most authoritative.

What’s interesting is that despite fears that alternative consumption (e.g., streaming and DVR) might erode ad revenue, major content distributors view it as just another avenue to provide their service and sell advertising though the market is still very small. This year, only 2% of viewers took to streaming the NCAA tournament on CBS, but this makes live events even more valuable as viewers can’t cannot fast-forward through programming.

One intriguing sidebar made was on the importance of sound in commercials because even when viewers get up and walk away from the TV, any information heard keeps them connected even if they’re not in the immediate vicinity.

It should go without saying but collecting and analyzing data is a necessity for marketers to develop actionable insight. That’s pretty intuitive. What isn’t is the fact that how we adapt and respond to changes in the marketplace are paramount to long-term success. I say that because it’s easier to get caught up in one component: what the competition is doing, versus improving our own processes.

If I learned anything from Massive, it’s that businesses that effectively engage their people and have their finger on the pulse of what customers want will always have a competitive advantage.

Photo Credit: Jeffrey R. Staab (CBS), Virginia Sherwood (NBCUniversal), Variety

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Bounce Rate + Site Optimization

Over the course of the last few weeks, we’ve shifted the focus on the Bravo Design, Inc. blog from a semi-random traffic grab to generating meaningful content for better overall engagement. And outside of gaining a regular following (i.e., growth in repeat visits), a peripheral goal of mine is to decrease our bounce rate as needed and optimize the BDI site for visitors.

“Are bounce rates and exit rates the same thing?” you ask.

No, your bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave before navigating to the next. They might be on that page for one second, one minute or one hour, but they’re not going anywhere else before leaving.

The exit rate is defined as the percentage of traffic that leaves your site from a given page based on how many visits that the particular page has received. These visitors have landed on other pages, going from pages X, Y to Z and jumped on the last.

While it may be inferred that high bounce rates are always bad, it’s really just a matter of context. For example, if a user navigates to your site, finds a succinct answer to their question and leaves, that specific page has successfully completed its goal. It becomes a problem when the bounce rate is high at the top of the funnel (e.g., on your homepage or halfway through a paginated article).

“So what does a high bounce rate mean?”

One, you’re acquiring the right kind of traffic, and your pages are doing their job. All is well like in the example listed above. This might be true if your visitors are successfully completing a call-to-action and exiting immediately after.

Two, you’re drawing in the wrong traffic, a segment uninterested in what you have to offer. We publish an article showcasing our featured film release almost every week. And for the longest time, we were receiving tons of traffic for a horror movie called The Apparition. Yes, traffic is cool but much more so when it’s relevant.

Now that might not be the best example given the fact that we do a lot of movie marketing work, and a featured release series is right up our alley. But we know that the visitors who frequent these pages shouldn’t be misconstrued as potential customers interested in custom WordPress development of graphic design work. They want to know more about a movie, and we’re happy to oblige.

Three, there’s a disconnect between what visitors anticipate to find and what they actually see. Not too long ago, I subscribed to Ramit Sethi’s newsletter, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich.” He’s enormously popular; author to a New York Times bestseller; etc., and I was looking for practical ways to save money here and there.

One of the first e-mails I got from him was titled, “Congrats, Your 1-Week MBA on Earning More Money Starts Tomorrow.” Really? In it, Ramit goes on to say that he went from making $20/hour to $3,000 in just a few years, and that might be true. It might not be. I have no idea, but claims that seem too good to be true make me increasingly more apprehensive as do “30-Day Courses on Hustling.” As a result, I didn’t read any of the additional literature sent to me.

This also takes shape in the form of link bait. The people who frequent your site and follow you via social media do so as a vote of confidence. Don’t abuse that.

Four, your website is killing them, Smalls. This might be due to technical bugs, a lack of user-friendliness, poor design, slow load times, etc. It’s impossible to diagnose without actually seeing your site, but we’d be happy to give your site a look if you drop a line in the comment box below with your URL and e-mail address.

“Why does any of this matter?”

Imagine that you’re going out to dinner. You’ve heard raving reviews from everyone and their mom, and you’re amped to finally get the chance to try it out. Only, when you walk into the foyer of the restaurant, you see a giant rat dart across the corridor. What do you do? You probably leave regardless as to what you’ve heard and call the health department before pulling out of the parking lot.

If the homepage of your website is in any way similar, and your prospective clientele exits as soon as they enter, you have a serious problem. Bounce rates provide you with insight as to how your website is performing and will help you determine if landing pages are performing up to standard. Because in the end, vanity metrics like web traffic are pretty meaningless and a huge time suck.

If you’d like some feedback on your website free of charge, leave a comment in the box below with your URL and e-mail address or send us a Tweet with the hashtag feedback (#feedback).

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Traffic & Engagement

I’ve made a mistake and now it’s time to own up to it.

Over the course of the last year, I made it a priority to maximize Bravo Design’s traffic volume and broaden our content marketing pipeline going the route of “accuracy by volume.” I figured that if conversion rates held constant with growing traffic, more visibility would produce more business.

Through 2012, visits more than doubled and so did page views compared to 2011. We ranked on page one for graphic design and web development related keywords locally. But did our conversion rate double as well?

No, it did not.

Why? Because I didn’t engage them effectively. Instead of talking with people, I was talking at them. And unless you’re YouTube or a site that makes its money off of ad impressions, web traffic is a vanity metric that doesn’t correlate to revenue on the backend.

More important than attracting visitors is attracting customers.

For fans of .GIFs, this is what it looks like when you target one-off visitors who won’t follow you over time or do business with you (i.e., the wrong people).

So what should you do?

Focus on the things that matter.

Objectivity

Your people are your greatest asset. A lot of businesses think they know who their customers are and what they want, but few ever take the time to find out for sure.

In 2011, I had broken my leg badly enough to require surgery and was completely dependent on the people around me for probably about a month, and a huge chunk of that responsibility was shouldered by my parents. When I couldn’t get off the couch, my dad would come home from work during his lunch break to cook for me and later on again for dinner in the evening. It was huge, and I’m both grateful and humbled by that love.

But just so you know, my family is Thai. So by default, my dad cooks the spiciest food ever. It’s not spicy where you pound down a glass of milk or water and keep trucking on. It’s debilitating where confusion is followed closely by its friend panic. He doesn’t do this on purpose of course. He just knows what he likes to eat and thinks that everyone else will enjoy it too.

I didn’t, and still don’t, have the heart to tell him that his cooking stresses me out, and I actually don’t think he’s ever asked. But your customers will most definitely let you know if your product offering isn’t up to par. That might come in the form of negative feedback or a pass so take a step back and reassess. Optimization is an ongoing process, and you need to be objective.

The Perfect Customer

In a webinar on Attracting the Right Customers to Your Business, Sonia Simone of Copyblogger encouraged her listeners to, “spend 10 minutes describing [their] very perfect customer. That’s the person who can afford what you sell. They need and want what you sell. They’re ready to buy it.”

That’s obviously a highly specific group, but it’s who you should be targeting.

If you were in the market for a new car, let’s say a Porsche. I would probably be hard pressed to sell you a Dodge Grand Caravan. The same would be true the other way around. And while it pains me to say this, I must. You can’t be all things to all people.

On the upside, really understanding that affords you the opportunity to concentrate on viable prospects.

Apparent Value

Most of your content should be about your customer, specifically the one you’ve spent 10 minutes to describe, and should demonstrate why you should be trusted and why your product is valuable.

Each and every week, I receive an impressive amount of SEO spam from strangers that goes straight to the trash. It would be one thing if they were to say, “We helped XYZ Company in Burbank, California reach the first page by doing yadda, yadda, yadda” or offered a case study, but they never do.

One person who has e-mailed me numerous times simply says, “We can increase rankings of your website in search engines. Please reply back for more details.” No, sketchy guy. I’d prefer if you didn’t carpet bomb our website, and it get de-indexed.

Brian Clark says, “That’s the beauty of social media, blogging, Twitter, Facebook. People will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you with the sound of crickets chirping and you have to say, ‘Well, I screwed up.’ And move on. Don’t give up. Try something else.” Conversely, if it is something your people like, they’re going to let you know by commenting on it or sharing it with their circles.

Moving on

There are more points I could (and maybe should) touch on, but I’ll do that that in the coming weeks. If you’re not following us on Twitter or Google+, make sure to do so. We’ll keep you posted on tips and tutorials as well as the sequel to this part. As an added bonus, I find the best .GIFs.

Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you’re unable to successfully engage customers, switch it up and do something different like throw your parents under the bus. Just kidding. But sorry in advance, dad.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

WordPress

If you own your own business, you need an online presence. That’s non-negotiable.

That doesn’t mean you need a website equipped with every bell and whistle, but your online traffic is likely to find you through organic queries, at least in part. And since search is by and large intent based where users know or have a general idea of what they want, basic information should be made available to streamline matchups with potential customers.

A locksmith might post hours of operation and a telephone number via Google Places; a restaurant its menu for customers to peruse through on Yelp or GrubHub; and a graphic design agency a blog for readers to find tips and tutorials or browse through an amazing portfolio that showcases its incredible work. That’s my one shameless plug for the week.

That’s not to say that a locksmith wouldn’t blog. It’s just that the minimum viable product requirements are different for them than, say, a brain surgeon. Primarily, because you’d want to obtain as much information as possible on surgical candidates who would potentially open up your head versus a seemingly interchangeable supply of locksmiths. For those who disagree with this point, make sure to leave a comment in the section below.

In any case, an excellent option to cover all your bases is a WordPress si

WordPress, Bravo DesignA Live Look at Activity Across WordPress

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that has taken the world by storm. Known primarily for blogging, it has grown to be much more than that. It powers nearly 66 million websites, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Notable users include: E-Bay, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Reuters, Katy Perry, UPS and a wide array of Fortune 500 Companies. Each month, 371 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages on WordPress sites, and the number of posts created is continuing to trend upwards.

Posts on WordPress, Bravo DesignThe Number of Posts WordPress Users Are Publishing

It’s Cost Effective.

Because it’s open-source, it’s free to download and use, making it extremely cost-effective even if you do decide to purchase themes or widgets; whereas coding a custom CMS with similar functionality could cost a boatload. It’s robust and professional looking and one of the best ways to manage your SEO on the cheap.

Yoast is a plugin that let’s you optimize page information along with meta descriptions, using snippet preview functionality to see what it would look like in Google. If you have pages you don’t want indexed by search engine robots, you can hide them per page. And lastly, you can canonize pages, distinguishing originals from derivatives. Best of all, it’s free.

Yoast, Bravo Design II Yoast, “Why You Should Be Using WordPress”

It’s Flexible.

WordPress is extremely flexible and pragmatic. If a specific feature isn’t built-in to a template, there are currently 24,897 plugins available to enhance your site’s functionality making WordPress a serious contender as an e-commerce platform. With active members contributing from around the world, as well as developers for hire, the customization opportunities are endless.

As an FYI, if you’re a developer looking to chat with peers, you can do so via the #WordPress-dev channel on IRC or using #WordPress. If you’re new to the process like myself, sign up at WordPress.org and use the Codex and/or forums to start learning.

It’s Easy to Use.

Prior to working at Bravo Design, Inc., I had zero experience working with CMS no less WordPress, but learning is a piece of cake. Rest assured, you’ll pick it up quickly too. Everything from backend navigation to adding posts, media or tweaking metadata for search engine optimization is really straightforward.

That’s the beauty of WordPress.

This last week, I uploaded my own demo WordPress to tinker around with, marking my third install ever. I’ve done one via WAMP, one through GoDaddy’s easy install and this one onto the Bravo server. While it wasn’t quite done from scratch because I had a pre-configured FTP login, hosting and a tutorial on hand, it was pretty simple. When I say “simple,” I mean a novice could do it and not “simple” as in the way Ikea describes its kitchen installations.

In the coming weeks, we’ll try and upload an easy to use tutorial for those of you who want to install their own WordPress. But for those of you who already have websites, what CMS do you use and why?

Photo Credit: WordPress.org, Webdesign.org

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Smarter Web Design

Just recently, I read an AdWeek article on the ANAR Foundation, a Spanish child-advocacy organization. With the help of their ad agency Grey Spain, they used lenticular printing for a powerful outdoor advertising campaign that offered help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they saw the ad simultaneously. Lenticular printing is a process where printed images are given the illusion of depth or motion and allows for different photos to be seen depending on the angle it’s viewed from.

For this particular poster, anyone over four-foot-five would read, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Above)

Those under that height would see, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you” along with the phone number for ANAR’s hotline.

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Below)

Seeing this made me wonder: how are we as an industry adopting smarter, more responsive design given the incredible tools that we do have?

In an article in Smashing Magazine, Vasilis van Gemert wrote: Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. In the ‘90s, the web was 640 pixels wide. In the early 2000s, it grew to 800 pixels and later to 1024 pixels. Then, a device with a very small screen entered the market. Suddenly, our ideas about the size of the web did not work anymore.

Something similar happened with bandwidth and page load time. We went from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to broadband and got faster and faster. Then people started using those very same mobile devices to browse the web more and more but expected for load times to be comparable to what they saw on PCs only to find that they wouldn’t due to compatibility and integration issues.

According to an article on KISSmetrics: Surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com indicate that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again, and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.

At the moment, you may not be seeing much in terms of web traffic from different devices, but I wouldn’t be quick to disregard this advice. As we’ve all seen, history is filled with examples of once-thriving businesses that were wiped off the map due to an inability to adapt (e.g., Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Kodak vs. Fujifilm, Borders vs. Barnes & Noble).

As a sidebar, each of these businesses failed to read emerging markets correctly and defeated themselves. Ironically, Kodak invented one of the first digital cameras in 1975 only to put it on the backburner for about two decades because it wouldn’t be very profitable at the time. By the time Kodak decided to switch gears, it was much too late.

But going back to the point, back in March, Adobe Dig­i­tal Index posted a study after ana­lyz­ing more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide uncovering trends in the transition from PC to mobile device usage, which are impressive to say the least.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

Global Traffic by Device Type:

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

The study goes on to say that while smart­phones remain much more com­mon, the tablet form fac­tor makes it ideal for brows­ing. Whether it be leisurely surf­ing the web, engag­ing with video or shop­ping online, on aver­age inter­net users view 70% more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

In an article on “Responsive Web Design,” Ethan Marcotte writes “an emergent discipline called ‘responsive architecture’ has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds interact with them” much like ANAR’s outdoor ad buy.

Marcotte goes on to say, “This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.”

Since the end of 2012, we’ve incorporated responsive web design into all of our web design projects from sites that stream movies via CDN to those with online shopping carts. If you have questions on the either its benefits or how to achieve this, please contact us here.

Photo Credit: PetaPixel.com, Adobe Digital Index

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The Attribution Problem

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” –John Wanamaker

Throughout the history of advertising, drawing a line between an asset and a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. In its infancy, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors in the form of measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, the online advertising industry continues to face several challenges including a critical dilemma known as the attribution problem.

Neil Mason, SVP of Customer Engagement at iJento, writes, “Marketing attribution is both a business problem and an analytical problem. The business problem is simple: ‘How do I best spend my budget?’ The analytical problem is a bit more complex: ‘How do I develop a methodology that delivers some valuable insight to solve the business problem with the data, time, and budget available?’”

Currently, the last impression or click served is attributed as being the tipping point in a purchase and fails to credit other touch points thus discounting the impact of previous ad impressions made previously. By ignoring the contribution of previous ads, the current system devalues high impact ads and obfuscates the impact of social media on downstream conversion.

Think about the last time you saw a movie. What coaxed you into seeing it? Was it a billboard, a trailer, something you heard on the radio or maybe a mention on Facebook? In reality, all of those touch points probably contributed towards you making that decision in part. With regards to the attribution problem, only the last interaction is credited with a conversion. If that were the Facebook ad, should movie studios then decide to allocate more of their ad spend towards Facebook ads? Well no, not necessarily at least.

Last November, IBM issued its annual Black Friday Report analyzing sales trends and year over year changes on a percentage basis. In 2012, online sales for doomsday Black Friday increased 17.4%, contributing to a 20.7% overall surge in sales. Pretty surprisingly, it goes on to say that Twitter delivered 0% of referral traffic and Facebook just 0.68%. And finally that between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, the social sites generated 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday, down just over 35% from 2011.

IBM Black Friday Report

But before you abandon your ad spend on the aforementioned social media services, you should probably take the report with a gain of salt. Because it doesn’t disclose the methodology used to compile the results, it’s difficult to assess how significant the data is without the proper context. Curiously, it’s worth noting that Black Friday is a day where retailers push to get people into stores, not make purchases online. It would’ve been interesting to see follow up data from Cyber Monday in a second report, but it doesn’t seem as if that was taken into consideration.

That said, this doesn’t mean that Twitter or any of the other social media sites aren’t driving referral traffic or that they don’t have the capacity to influence, neither of which is true obviously. What it does indicate is that there are serious issues in tracking and quantifying downstream conversion when it should clearly demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) to businesses willing to shell out precious advertising cash.

In a Forbes article on “Search vs. Display Advertising,” Michael Blanding writes, “Faced with this conundrum, most companies allocate their advertising budgets in a an ad hoc manner—throwing money into whatever bucket they perceive to have most influenced past purchase decisions leading firms to overspend on some actions and thus waste money and/or under spend in others.” Blanding goes on to say, “The only way to truly determine the efficacy of display ads versus search ads is to watch the effects over time, and to see how modifications in budget allocations change customers’ purchase decisions.”

That’s exactly what Sunil Gupta, a professor of business administration at Harvard would do in a working paper titled, “Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising.” Through the use of persistence modeling, Gupta along with Pavel Kireyev and Koen Pauwels were able to figure out the ROI on search and display ads for every $1 spent by a major US bank in new customer acquisition. By first calculating the expected effect of advertising and later using a series of regressions over time to isolate the effects of display and search ads, the three were able to see how changes in ad budgets change those expectations over time and optimize ad spend.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of us don’t have Harvard business school professors available to fine tune our ad budgets or expertise in advanced statistics, so we’ll have to tough it out on our own. But going back to Mr. Blanding’s article, you’ll have to tinker with your ad budget to figure out where you should be spending ad dollars and where you should taper back. Don’t be discouraged if ads fall flat. That’s really just the nature of the beast.

Have questions? Leave a comment in the box below or fill out a contact form here. We would be happy to work with you to create a plan that best serves your business by maximizing your ad dollars.

Photo Credit: Inc.com, IBM

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Tips on Avoiding the Pitfalls of Content Marketing

I was reading an article by Mauro D’Andrea on KISSmetrics the other day where he wrote that: most blog adopters were successful because they adopted content marketing early on. They anticipated a trend at a time when few others did and were able to stand out and be noticed. Today, content marketers face competition in every segment of the economy, and many aren’t accomplishing it in a great way.

You and I? We’re a little late to the party, at least I am.

Content creation is a core component of inbound marketing and, hands down, one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website. That said, doing so effectively is really difficult. Outside of coming up with things to write about on a regular basis and actually writing, you’re clamoring for attention amongst a countless number of distractions whether that be Facebook, Candy Crush Saga, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, possibly even your local competitors.

According to MBAonline.com, each day, two million blog posts are posted, enough to fill Time magazine for 770 years, and 532 million statuses are updated.  Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, revealed that 400 million tweets go online daily.

So how does that bode for those trying to break through the noise? Not great though the task is certainly not insurmountable. Whether you’re launching a new blog or getting back on the horse, here are tips on amplifying your message.

Users Can’t [Don’t] Read

They skim. At least that’s what Jakob Nielsen has said time and time again. To summarize the latter study, when supplied with a dataset detailing nearly 60,000 page views provided by Harald Weinreich, Nielsen found that as users encounter pages with ever increasing amounts of information, they’d expend an average of 4.4 seconds for each additional 100 words. And since the average reading speed is estimated to be around 300 words per minute (WPM), an additional 4.4 seconds would net 22 of the 100 words meaning that readers would only consume 22% of additional information shown. Nielsen used 250 WPM as his benchmark and landed at 18% hence the variation.

Duration of Visits vs. Content Length

While one takeaway might be that the average web user has little or no patience, another might be that we, as content providers, are failing to provide things worth spending time on. Instead of trying to skirt this by pruning copy, prioritizing information above the fold, A/B testing, calls-to-action, etc., we should aim to optimize the experience as whole.

Remember: humans are visual creatures and while exceptional content is paramount, content takes form in different shapes and forms outside of text (e.g., pictures, tables, infographs, videos, etc). Switch things up to take full advantage of each medium’s strengths and to play them off one another. Pamela Wilson has an excellent article on Copyblogger with simple tips to get more people to read your content.

Share Your Content on Channels off the Beaten Path

Next, if you’re sharing content via Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’re on the right track. But you can also use Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pinterest to supplement the process. According to data released by Shareaholic, Pinterest “continues to outpace Yahoo! organic traffic and hold its spot as a significant traffic driver.” StatCounter ranks it as the second most frequently used social site just behind Facebook.

Global Stats for Social Media Sites

If you’re employing StumbleUpon, use the su.pr URL shortener so that when users click on links, they’ll see the StumbleUpon dashboard where they’ll have an option to give you a thumb up. In turn, whatever you originally shared will then be shown to other users with similar interests. Free traffic? Yes, please. After tinkering with a few mediums, you’ll know which ones to invest in more heavily when searching through your referral traffic on Google Analytics.

Network or No One Will See Your Message

And last but certainly not least, you need to expand your network by interacting with other bloggers and readers, prospective or otherwise. That might mean grabbing coffee with people who might help you further your message, regularly commenting on blogs, going to conventions or just providing answers to questions on Yahoo! or Quora. Though it might pain you to resist going to completely obscure conventions and/or answer random questions, neither are likely to help your content marketing efforts even if they are hilarious.

Content Marketing

I wanted to touch on this point because even if you are sharing your content via social media, without a following, you’re really just screaming into the abyss. It took me forever to figure out that by tweeting random followers back and forth and by failing to form real relationships, I wasn’t setting Bravo Design, Inc. apart from any of its competitors. It was just this weird dance, and I’d like to help you avoid making that mistake if at all possible because it can be a huge time suck.

TL;DR (Because You Skim)

I hate to end this entry with a quote, no less a long one, but Seth Godin capped this off so succinctly in an article on Fast Company. In it, he wrote: “I’m driving through France with the family. And for the last 12 and a half hours, there’s been nothing but a ruckus. Suddenly, it’s quiet. My kids are transfixed, looking out the window at these beautiful cows. Then it’s a ruckus again. Because cows are boring. If you’ve seen one cow, you’ve seen them all. But what if one of the cows were purple?

Purple cows are remarkable. At least for awhile. Remarkable means two things. One, it means cool, neat. Two, it means worth making a remark about. If you make stuff that’s worth making a remark about, you’re 99% of the way there.”

We challenge you to be purple cows. In the comment section below, let us know how you engage and share remarkable content with your audience!

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Digital Sharecropping

Sometime last week, I was perusing through Copyblogger when I saw an article titled, “The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Online Marketing Efforts” by Sonia Simone.

In it, Sonia opens up with an anecdote about an independent bookstore that has good coffee, readings from published authors and is an all around great place. What happens is that the landlord decides to triple their lease when it comes time for renewal, which results in the bookstore going out of business.

This is what Sonia likens to as “digital sharecropping,” a quasi-pejorative term coined by Nicholas Carr. Outside of the digital space, sharecropping was a farming system in which landowners would allow tenants to use part of their land in exchange for a portion of the harvest, putting land to use that might have not been utilized otherwise. The system was a way to pool risk and protect both parties in the event of a catastrophe or bad season. And though it may sound pretty sweet conceptually, historically speaking in the United States, it often resulted in exploitation and was little different than slavery, which had just been abolished. While there’s no shortage of information on either version of sharecropping online, in as few words as possible:

“One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative(Carr).

For you non-jargonauts, the term “Web 2.0” was coined back in 1999 to “describe websites that [would] use technology beyond static pages of earlier websites” (Wikipedia). The theory was that, eventually, the Internet would become a collaborative medium that would allow users to interact with one another through social media, user-generated content, virtual communities, etc. Think: the Cloud; YouTube; Facebook; Wikipedia; Reddit; Pinterest; Tumblr; Content Management Systems like WordPress and on and on. Nicholas went on to hypothesize that this would ultimately “provide an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of free labor” as innovation would allow companies to crowd source and profiteer from content generation done by us, the poor sharecroppers.

Sonia cautions that this is “the most dangerous threat to your online marketing efforts” for a few reasons:

“Landlords are fickle.” Because Facebook and Google are ever changing platforms, your business is susceptible to their whims, and your page can be deleted at any given moment should their terms of service change. “Sharecropped land has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time,” and “Landlords go away.”  Eventually, all of these social media mega sites tend to turn into ghost towns. Look at Xanga, Digg, Myspace, Yahoo! Buzz, Friendster and Google+ (Half-kidding about that last one).

After having read her article, I understand what’s being said. It just seems really strange in an I’m-comparing-apples-to-the-business-model-that-most-closely-represents-slavery-kind-of-way. Yes, Sonia is right when it comes to controlling and owning your assets; especially your website, and that social media works for you by driving traffic to your website where conversions are completed, not the other way around. A strong marketing and advertising campaign will integrate, manage and interchangeably use different channels that enables it to reach customers most effectively.

But in an ever-growing trend Web 2.0 is painted in broad strokes as a zero-sum game where businesses profiteer at the expense of their user base and fails to acknowledge how those very companies have provided value by making our lives better if not more convenient. A pretty obvious example is YouTube, which in 2006 changed how we use the Internet for better or worse, the latter depending on how much time you can lose to it in a single sitting. One reason YouTube grew as much as it did in its infancy was that it was easy to use. Users who weren’t particularly tech savvy could watch videos as well as upload and share their own all without having to download any software. At the end of that year, “You” were selected as Time’s Person of the Year for “seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.” In Lev Grossman’s cover story, he writes:

“It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world but also change the way the world changes.

While this excerpt may seem a tad bit cushy sans the rest of the article, social media’s impact on the world is undeniable and has given the most marginalized groups a voice. That much is evident in the Arab Spring, the series of demonstrations and protests in countries across the Middle East in which activists relied on Facebook and Twitter to spread awareness and organize protests and, ultimately, removed regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen from power.

If you find that your online marketing is at a standstill, take a step back and recalibrate your bearings because the most dangerous thing isn’t that you digitally sharecrop, and unknowingly provide value to others in doing so. That’s not a bad thing at all. The most dangerous threat is not knowing where you and your business are going, which tends to happen when values lie on the fringe and not at the core. In a world where competition can change overnight, it’s important to dust off the map every once in a while and make any necessary revisions whether that be tweaks to overall strategy or making changes to the content you curate and share. The more accurate your map, the better prepared you’ll be when it comes time to navigating obstacles and harsh terrain.

But as for digital sharecropping being “the most dangerous threat to your online marketing efforts?” It’s more like a shallow creek than it is K2.

Photo Credit: ww.utahimages.com

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Digital Ad Growth

In the first half of 2012, digital ad revenue climbed to an all-time high of $17B with Q1 accounting for approximately $8.3B and Q2 $8.7B. Combined, this represents a 14% increase, compared to the first two quarters of 2011, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The not-so-great-part is that half-year growth has declined from 23% between 2010 to 2011 to 14% between 2011 and 2012, indicating that digital ad spend may finally be slowing down. Chief research officer at Kantar Media North America Jon Swallen writes, “Ad spending growth sputtered during the second quarter and was unable to sustain its early year momentum,” and that, “The advertising market is mirroring the tepid, slow growth performance of the general economy.” Despite this, online advertising continues to show strong growth in certain segments.

Digital Ad Spend, Bravo Design

Other highlights from the report include:

  • Mobile advertising increased 95% in the first six months of 2012 going from $636M (2011’s half year amount) to $1.2B. Mobile represents about 7% of online ad spend, which is still relatively small.
  • Display-related advertising (e.g., display/banner ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship) revenues in the first half of the year totaled almost $5.6B, accounting for 33% of 2012 half-year revenues, up 4% from $5.3B in the first half of 2011.
  • Ad spending increased on TV 4.4% in Q2 of 2012, 2.5% for outdoor media and 1.9% for radio, according to Kantar.
  • Display ads for online publications, were less successful than all of the above. Advertising revenue declined 1.9% for local newspapers, 2.6% for consumer magazines, 5.4% for display ads online and a whopping 10.7% for national newspapers.
  • Despite an overall decline of about 4%, retail advertisers constitute the largest category of Internet ad spending for the first half of this year, claiming 20% total revenue at $3.4B.
  • Consistent year-over-year, performance-based pricing (CPC) remains the preferred model over impression (CPM) and hybrid models.

CPC vs. CPM, Bravo Design

David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, writes, “The tremendous growth of mobile advertising revenue over the past year is an indication of the importance of location to advertisers and mobility to consumers. Bringing the power of the Internet to mobile devices has opened up a world of possibilities to both consumers and marketers.” But while the IAB and others continue to tout digital ad growth by citing its progress relative to other mediums, the majority of ad dollars are still spent offline. In 2011, newspapers and magazines yielded $35.8B in offline ad revenue. Whether or not online ad spend exceeds print media by the end of this year is anyone’s guess, but it almost certainly will at some point in the next few years. In any case, it’ll definitely take a lot longer for it to surpass TV as it accrued nearly $75B in ad dollars in 2011.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Photo Credits: Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Womensmarketing.com

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Curating and Sharing Content for Beginners

Information Overload, Bravo DesignMush. That’s what my brain feels like after curating our Twitter and Facebook feeds, digging through Inbound.org, Hacker Network and a dozen other news sources for high-quality content on search engine optimization (SEO), advertising, graphic design and web development to share throughout the day. All of which is made significantly more difficult due to the fact that there’s so much information to sort through online, plenty of which is deficient in some way or another. According to MBAonline.com, every 24 hours, two million blog posts are written, and 864,000 hours worth of video are added to YouTube. All in all, about 168 million DVDs worth of information is consumed by Internet traffic every single day. As Mitchel Kapor, an entrepreneur and software developer, says: getting information off the Internet is like drinking via fire hydrant.

So why do we do it?

At the end of last year when I was going through the interview process here at Bravo Design, part of what was discussed was how the company could foster and grow its online presence. And since then, we’ve seen some real progress in terms of our web traffic, due to our improved search engine ranking, and in the increase in our social media fan base. Not everything has gone as planned, and progress has sputtered from time to time, but we’ve stayed steadfast in our commitment to write about current events and trends in the industry to position ourselves, so we can serve as a resource for both our visitors and our clients even if it’s just a random something to make them smile. With so much great information online, often in obscure places, it’s been a priority of ours to put our readers in touch with content and tools that have the potential to make their lives easier and/or run their businesses more efficiently. Up through now, it’s been a great learning experience. That being said, I really want to encourage you to start curating great content and sharing it with your friends and followers. If you want to read more on the subject before making the leap of faith, Michael Fern from Intigi has a great write up on the topic.

Listed below are a few considerations that will help you get started.

1. Determine what you want from this exercise by setting goals on the front end. Are you looking to monetize your site by driving sales or with ads and need to increase traffic and return visits? Are you looking to increase your readership? The sooner you know, the better prepared you’ll be to set milestones to gauge success along the way.

2. Know your audience, so you can share content they find useful or interesting. This means getting comfortable reading through your website’s analytics and tracking hits, click-through-rate, interaction and propagation. If you’re two steps ahead on that front, here’s an article on actionable and vanity metrics and measuring what matters.

3. The audience you’re reaching out to is likely widely disparate, so you might have to use different forms of media like podcasts, videos, white papers, infographics and so on to increase your brand’s exposure. That also means using different channels/platforms like social media, mobile as well as content curation and industry communities.

4. Each piece of content you share should serve as a stepping-stone that guides your audience from one interaction to the next. Of these considerations listed, adhering to this might be the most difficult. Just tacking on a URL isn’t good enough, and neither is simply adding contact information.

Curating and sharing content, like some of the other exercises we’ve detailed in the past, takes both time and patience. You might not get much feedback early on, but interaction with your audience will ramp up if you’re engaging and sharing solid pieces of content. If you’re not following us on Twitter or Facebook, you’re missing out. When you do, shoot us a message or leave a comment in the field below, so we can reciprocate the favor in kind.

Photo Credit: Mike Segar (Reuters) and Iloveseo.net

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Five Things Marketers Can Take Away from Politics

As we approach the finish line of yet another election, millions of Americans are gearing up to head to the polls to exercise their right to vote. And while it may seem as though presidential elections have become decided largely by likeability versus policy or competency, that might not be as surprising a change as it seems. In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in the first televised presidential debates in what proved to be a key turning point in both of their campaigns. An estimated 70M viewers tuned in. Nixon, who had not yet recovered from a two week long hospital stay, looked pale, sickly, was about 20 pounds underweight and tired from having campaigned until just a few hours prior to the broadcast. Kennedy, by contrast, having spent the early part of September campaigning in California, was tanned, confident and well rested. Nixon later wrote, “I had never seen him looking so fit.”

Those who heard the broadcast on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner, but those who watched it on TV thought otherwise. They focused on what they saw and not what they heard. What they saw was a candidate who was frail and sickly who was very obviously discomforted by his younger opponent’s smooth and charismatic delivery. Of their four debates, the consensus is that Nixon won bouts two and three, and that the two men drew in debate number four, but it was too late. Between the first and second debates, it was reported that there was a drop off in 20M some odd viewers. As a result, Kennedy, who had been trailing by a small deficit up until this point in the campaign, gained a little bit of traction that gave him a slight lead. And in November, he was elected the 34th President of the United States.

While you and I might not see eye-to-eye on how things should shake out come November, we can probably agree that since the first televised debates, politics have become increasingly focused on the marketing component as opposed to the policy aspect. Listed below are a few pointers taken straight from the political arena that marketers can use in their daily grind. If nothing else, it might help should you decide to run for office one day.

Anticipate

Whether it is a candidate, issue or product, the ability to change rapidly and respond effectively is character of resilience. Successfully running a business extends past identifying consumers’ needs to anticipating how that might evolve in the future. Take the time to plan for the ups and downs, and you’ll be better prepared to navigate through the unknown and capitalize if and when opportunity knocks.

Be Consistent

The best way to avoid flip-flopping back and forth on an issue is to clearly define your messaging early on. This requires a well thought out plan as well as both courage and conviction. The problem, both in the private sector and in politics, is that messaging focuses more on winning than on being sincere. Stick to your guns here. And if you happen to be wrong, own up to it.

Use Multiple Channels

While the Internet and social media have changed advertising and marketing by and large, candidates are known for utilizing every channel available (TV, radio, outdoor, e-mail, bumper stickers, buttons, etc). Politicians play for keeps, and that means reinforcing their position in the minds of constituents at every opportunity possible. Finding out who you want to target and where they’ll be is half the battle.

Measure Your Progress

Political candidates know if they’re ahead or behind and by exactly how much. If you want to be successful, you need to figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. If certain forms of content are performing better than other types, stick to what works instead of expending precious time on something that doesn’t.

Be Transparent

John Adams wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.” In a world filled with bloggers; Tweeters; and ever connected social media users, consumers and constituents alike want to know where their money is going and if the companies they support are operating ethically so be forthright.

It’s pretty clear that the coming election will make for one of the most heated in recent memory. If you haven’t registered to vote or aren’t sure if your registration is current, you can check here to see. If you need to register or have questions about voting, this should help.

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Yelp and What It Can Do for Your Business

If you had the chance to read my entry, “One Year,” you’ll know that I’m, more or less, in the middle of moving from one apartment to the next. This go around, I’ve done my due diligence as best I can. I researched where I’d like to live in the city. I tore through the listings on Craigslist for longer than I’d like to admit, and I’ve visited ones that stuck out to get a feel for the property and the neighborhoods themselves. Finally, I went through the reviews on ApartmentRatings.com and Yelp to see what both former and current tenants have to make a more informed decision. It’s a funny thing to trust someone you’ve never met, and may have absolutely nothing in common with, with a personal decision. But according to a study published by Search Engine Land, approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 72%.

This summer marked Yelp’s eighth birthday. And in that time, the company has gone from having a handful of employees to over 1,000 of them and has 61M users in 17 different counties. With millions of contributed reviews, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that the site has become one of the most authoritative resources for finding great local businesses, no matter what you’re searching for.

For those of you who own, operate or are running the online marketing efforts for your business, you might want to spend some amount of time getting a little more familiar with Yelp. If you haven’t unlocked your business account, you can do so here. It’s free, and it only takes a couple of minutes. Why? Because it’s free, and it only takes two minutes. Well, that and the fact that in the second quarter of this year, 78M people visited Yelp to find businesses and make purchase decisions. Without an account, you might be missing out on a ton of potential business; especially, if you’re in the food and service industry. That being said, it might be most useful for businesses that serve the general public (B2C), but it sure doesn’t hurt if you’re a B2B and have a page. Once you do set one up, you can insert your business’ information, add photos, use it to create deals for visitors who use Yelp to find you, message customers and view how your page is doing in terms of traffic. Keep in mind that Bing is now using Yelp’s application programming interface (API), most likely as a result of Google’s incorporation of Zagat into its own, and will show content including: snippets, photos, business attributes, etc. in local searches so having a presence on Yelp translates to having one anywhere else the API is used.

Additionally, you’ll be able to respond to reviews that may not be especially favorable, either publicly or privately. Inevitably, everyone eventually gets one so try not to take it too personally. This presents an opportunity to fix things with a dissatisfied customer and improve that review. I’m a stickler when it comes to customer service so seeing a company go out of their way to provide a better experience the second time around, when it’s so much easier to ignore the fact, is huge. If you find yourself getting too hung up over reviews, you may have to delegate the task to someone who can serve as the point of contact and will manage your online reputation. Do not do this. Ultimately, reviews should serve as a feedback mechanism. Positive ones will let you know what you’re doing right, and less than sparkling ones will let you know what you need to work on. If you feel like a review violates Yelp’s terms of service, you have the option of flagging it for evaluation.

You might notice that it might seem as though reviews sometimes disappear. What actually happens is that they sometimes get filtered. Yelp has an automated review filter that prevents people, or businesses, from spamming fake reviews to boost ratings and/or to undermine their competition. The ones that don’t end up making the cut and get filtered typically originate from accounts that don’t have additional reviews published. Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp, writes, “If they [slanted reviews] were allowed to occur, they would erode trust…which would reduce the usefulness of the site for both consumers and the good businesses that rely on the positive word-of-mouth they’ve earned.” Without authentic, trustworthy reviews to depend on, Yelp is little better than the phonebook. If you’re a Yelp user who isn’t very active, give back to the community by submitting reviews when you can. That’s something on my list of things to do.

Once you have your page set up and ready to go, focus on providing great customer service. If you consistently put your best foot forward, your customers are bound to notice. And hopefully, the positive reviews you earn in the process will help you attract new customers because those who discover your business online are much more likely to share their experience with others online.

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One Year

This upcoming Sunday, the 26th, marks one year since I moved to Los Angeles from Dallas. If you’ve ever moved to a city you knew basically nothing about, you know how difficult finding an apartment or home is. But to be fair, it’s actually kind of a pain even if you’re only moving a mile down the road. Though the Internet enables you to browse through reviews of neighborhoods and properties, look at crime maps as well as check out schools, attractions and so on, it really only prepares you so much. I learned that lesson the day I signed my first lease here in a seemingly okay neighborhood only to find an intruder in my bathroom later on that very evening. With just one month left on my lease, the apartment hunting process has begun. What’s interesting is that as I invest more and more time into digging through what seems like an endless list of potential options, I’m starting to see the similarities, namely recurring problems, that pop up here and in both graphic design and advertising.

First and foremost, it’s no secret that the cost of living in Los Angeles is high. That’s reflected in everything from a gallon of milk to a gallon of gas. While I can’t afford to live in a 5,000-squarefoot mansion in the Hollywood hills, I’m very adamantly against the idea of living in a 300-squarefoot bare boned “bachelor pad” even if it is the most practical option from an economic standpoint. With regards to marketing and advertising, don’t assume that spending more correlates with yielding more. Research shows that there isn’t a positive relationship between the cost of an ad’s production and its corresponding sales effectiveness. If you’re operating on fairly limited ad budget, remember that it doesn’t take superhuman strength to move a 500lbs rock. One only needs a fulcrum, a lever and a little knowhow. There are a countless number of free resources, tools and forums you can use online to beef up your marketing efforts. All you have to do is put in the time.

Second, remember that all the marketing and spin in the world won’t fix a crappy product. Having spent a lot of time perusing about on Craigslist, I’ve gotten pretty good at eliminating lemons from the bunch by quickly skimming through listings. If you do find yourself looking for a new place, know that if at any part of a listing mentions “old world charm,” that usually means it’s haunted. Not really. But the 100-year-old building will usually look pretty scary so taking a pass is prudent for those who haven’t completely disqualified the existence of ghosts (e.g., me). Outside of apartment hunting, a brand’s strengths depend on more than just its name and the hype surrounding it. It’s dependent on the public’s perception of its quality. If a product is deficient in some way or another, that will show as soon as someone actually uses it, at which point they’ll probably decide to never repeat that mistake.

Finally, call it what you will but a big part of my decision making process in finding a new home is knowing that I’m going to spend a lot of time at this place. Maybe, I’m overly sentimental. On the short side, that might only be 12 months, though it may end up being much longer, but a one-year lease can certainly feel like an eternity if you get locked into something that’s not at all what you thought it would be [think: haunted apartment from point number two]. But in all seriousness, a home is more than bricks and mortar. Outside of being the place where I sleep, eat, shower, play videogames and so on, it’s where I can get away from the craziness that is Los Angeles. Provide more than just what’s necessary, and you stand to separate yourself from the pack.

Here’s to another year and not finding intruders in my next place, in the bathroom or otherwise.

 

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Unconventional Routes Towards Success

The Olympics, Success, Bravo Design

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been mulling over what it means to be successful. We all do at some point or another, or I think we do at least. It’s just that the term success is so abstract.

With the Olympics on, I’ve tried to reframe the concept in regards to how Olympians come by it. Generally speaking, these athletes have trained for most of their lives to earn the right to compete for their countries. When I say most of their lives, I don’t mean just on the weekends from the age of six until now. I mean everyday when we’re stirring in bed, when we’re at work, when we’re going about our day-to-day. It’s a more than a full-time job. It’s a lifestyle.

Moreover, I think it’s easy to assume that the pinnacle of their success is directly tied to whether or not they take home the gold. For some, maybe it is, but the Olympic creed states that, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

And while that may seem a little too cliché for some of you, an Olympian’s fight isn’t limited to the water, court, mat, field or wherever that may be. Many countries, including the US, don’t subsidize training programs for athletes. That’s why American track star Lolo Jones juggled part-time jobs at Home Depot, as a personal trainer and waiting tables, so she could train and compete on her own schedule despite having a degree in economics from Louisiana State University. Karen Hultzer, an archer competing for South Africa, is a landscaper by trade. Chi Yip Cheung, who represents Hong Kong in judo, is a full-time fireman. Urige Buta, a marathon runner from Norway, is a janitor. Jamel Herring, the American boxer, is a sergeant in the US Marine Corps. Gwen Jorgensen, an American triathlon competitor, is an accountant at Ernst & Young, and Samyr Laine, the American triple-jumper, has a law degree from Georgetown and is bar certified in New York but put his career in law in on hold to train and compete in London.

Most of us don’t work a 40-hour week and go the gym regularly, no less train at a competitive level everyday. Why? We don’t aim to because we each yield different levels of satisfaction from it. Some people love training, and some hate it. That and the fact that we’re not all phenoms. I’m not one to quote Steve Jobs, but a buddy of mine just recently forwarded me the transcript from a commencement speech he made at Stanford in 2005. In it, he says:

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today.’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

For an Olympian to lead a life they’re content with, that might involve competing and then teaching or it might involve doing something completely unrelated. Ryan Lochte, the American swimmer, has said he wants to move out to Los Angeles to design clothes after he’s done. You might want to work the traditional eight to five doing what you are now or maybe you’d like to do something completely different and become an artist. If you do find yourself getting away from where you’d like to be. Well, we hope you have the strength to turn around and double back.

How do you define and pursue success in your everyday life?

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Aesthetics and Usability

In a study by Antonella De Angeli, Alistair Sutcliffe and Jan Hartmann done at the University of Manchester, the three concluded that the perception of information quality is affected in a manner resembling the halo effect in person perception. The halo effect or halo error, given its name by psychologist Edward Thorndike, is a “cognitive bias in which our judgments of a person’s character can be influenced by our overall impression of him or her” and “can be found in a range of situations—from the courtroom to the classroom and in everyday interactions.” In Thorndike’s first study done in 1920, he tasked two commanding officers with evaluating their soldiers in terms of physical qualities by rating their “neatness, voice, physique, bearing and energy,” along with their personal qualities in terms of “dependability, loyalty, responsibility, selflessness and cooperation.” What he discovered was that “the correlations were too high and too even,” meaning that a high score in a physical quality would trend across all the other results, more specifically, those relating to personal qualities. Conversely, a negative attribute would correlate with the rest of that soldier’s results. What’s interesting is that these results aren’t limited exclusively to likeability. Attractiveness also produces a halo effect. In 1972, Dion K. K., Berscheid E. and Walster E. conducted an experiment at the University of Minnesota where participants evaluated the photos of an attractive individual, an average one and an unattractive individual along with 27 personality traits like altruism, assertiveness, stability and so forth. Participants were then asked to predict the future happiness the photos’ subjects would have in regards to marital, parental, social, professional and overall happiness. What the results overwhelmingly showed was that participants believed that attractive subjects would have more desirable personality traits than their average and unattractive counterparts.

One of the takeaways from the first study I mentioned, done by De Angeli, Sutcliffe and Hartmann, suggests that there’s a correlation between the aesthetic qualities of an interface, its perceived usability and the overall user satisfaction with that system. With a more aesthetically pleasing site, users tend to find the website more credible and easier to use. Noam Tractinsky would later prove that this phenomenon is not culture specific. According to Donald A. Norman, the writer of Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, “The result is that everything has both a cognitive and  an affective component – cognitive to assign meaning, affective to assign value. You cannot escape affect: it is always there. More important, the affective state, whether positive or negative affect, changes how we think.”

The caveat is that beauty is contextual.

Though attractive products are perceived as easier to use, purchase decisions are based on actual usability. They are conceptually at least because I still don’t know what my girlfriend bases hers on. Just kidding. But ease of use is measured as having a smaller learning curve. It’s efficient and memorable, and it requires less training and support. That being said, the frequency of error should be low, as should the subsequent consequence. Norman writes, “The human perceptual and attentional systems are tuned to notice discrepancies and problems, not that which is expected. So we tend to notice things that distract, that impair our ability to get something done, or in the realm of aesthetics, that are particularly distasteful. We do indeed notice especially attractive items (or people), but quite often the attention drawn to the appearance can be detrimental to the task. So the best designs are often the ones that are least noticed.” On a site, users want problems solved whether that takes form as an answer to a question or a product or service that makes their lives easier. The process that provides that solution should be as painless as possible. Ideally, given the option to have a do-over, a user would still opt for your product over that of a competitor’s.

It’s important to understand that how we perceive a site evokes an array of emotions and attitudes that affect our attitude towards the content, the products being sold, the company itself as well as its credibility. A site’s attractiveness will draw users in and will incentivize them to stay, but it doesn’t complete a site on its own. Without usability and substance, those very users will grow listless and move on. Joel Spolsky argues that, “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

Aesthetics and usability form the user experience, and as that’s optimized, your site’s likeability and credibility increase, so does the likelihood that a user will complete a transaction. If you’re looking for some professional help, you can contact us here. We’d love to hear the details of your next project. And not to be immodest, but we’re pretty good at what we do.

Photo Credit: Buzzle.com

 

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Picking & Choosing

I was at the mall this last weekend, passing some time before seeing The Dark Knight Rises when I stopped in at a T.J. Maxx. As strange as it may sound, I really enjoy stopping by stores of the like just so I can peruse through the home and electronics sections. It’s not so much because I expect to buy something useful at a heavily discounted price. I just like the random goods. The typical electronic section at a store like T.J. Maxx or Ross consists of digital tire pressure gauges, the perfect pushup, cheap headphones and a whole slew of other products that have escaped various recalls over the years. There’s no order or sense to it. This last time I was there, I snagged a leather travel size grooming kit complete with tweezers, nail clippers, hair trimmers and more for $13. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, the trimmers didn’t work. Even with new batteries, they refused to turn on. Was I mad? No, not really. Part of buying something at a heavily discounted price has a lot to do with implicitly acknowledging the fact that I might be settling for a suboptimal product, and I think that’s perfectly acceptable because I would rather skimp on a replaceable grooming kit than say, my health insurance.

When you think about it, businesses aren’t all that different in that they have to pick and choose which investments will best serve them. Because most startups don’t have much going as far as cash flow goes in their infancy, they bootstrap. Bootstrapping means using the startup capital available, which typically consists of personal savings, credit cards and loans, and trying to extend that as far as possible while keeping other costs down because you can’t spend money you’re not making, not for forever at least. Amongst some of the common tips for reducing expenditures is keeping teams lean by hiring only those critical to success, giving out equity versus cash upfront, outsourcing and, lastly, cutting back on marketing and public relations. Mark Cuban, to the ire of the PR industry, pointed that out when he blogged about the last point. To summarize, he said that the cost of the service and its actual value are misaligned, and that a CEO or someone on the management team should be tasked with outbound communication to garner buzz and media coverage. It’s only later on, once a company has matured and passed this phase, that it might be more practical as time becomes the more valuable commodity. But right out of the gates, it’s better to skimp on something on like marketing and advertising rather than something critical, like electricity.

When you think about it, all of this is more obvious than it is revolutionary. If I were trying to sell you a car, we probably wouldn’t disagree that owning a vehicle has value though that much depends more so on where you live. Coming from Texas, I can assure you that not having one there is terrible when everything you need to go to is far and wide apart, and the public transportation system is abysmal. But just because car ownership has value doesn’t mean you should go out and buy one right this minute. You might not be in a position to for any number of reasons.

That being said, the same is true for the services we offer. Bravo Design, Inc. develops really great websites, and our design and print production work is bar none. While I may have violated some unspoken rule of blogging with what might sound like shameless promotion, it doesn’t make the prior statement any less true. I’ve written a few articles on design since I started here, but I thought this would be a good time to point out the elephant in the room. Attractive products with better aesthetics, whether that comes down to packaging design or an item itself, are going to be chosen over ones that don’t have those qualities. A better looking, better functioning website is going to be perceived as more authoritative, and more attractive marketing collateral is not only going to command more attention. It lends itself more credibility. I’m sorry. I didn’t make the rules. You might disagree with all of the above but if you were having chronic migraines, you’d probably trust WebMD over this Geocities site though you should definitely contact your general practitioner before attempting to diagnose thyself.

Employing a professional designer might not be in your cards for the near future. But when the time does come, we’d like for you to keep us in mind. Your website, and all of your marketing collateral equate to interactions with your prospective clients. We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. We recommend you put your best foot forward.

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Media Agnosticism

This is actually a response to an article I recently read on media agnosticism, maybe more so a rant. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I’ll get to defining that here in a bit. It’s a buzzword and an ambiguous one at that. I just wanted to write this because I was frustrated that the article was so brazenly misleading. I’d post a link to it, but the downside that could ensue outweighs any benefit almost exponentially. I have little interest [read as: none whatsoever] in a full-blown argument on the Internet. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a bigger time suck.

Back in February, I wrote an article on cross-channel marketing (CCM) and then, a little later, another on actionable metrics but failed to connect the dots between the two. The take away is that marketing is hard. No, that’s not it although it is. The point I should have emphasized is that different jobs require different tools just like a DIY project at home would. Functionality aside, you probably wouldn’t use a chainsaw to fix the piping under your kitchen sink or a garden trowel to dig up a tree if you had better tools available because of the differences in scale. What this comes down to is evaluating your goals and objectives as well as figuring out which touch points are most effective for reaching out to potential consumers because the mediums you use to reach your end consumer are separate and NOT equal. Cold calling is different than commercials on TV, which are different than spots on the radio, which are different than social media, which is different than an interactive event and so on.

This should all be fairly obvious, and that’s not to say that you can’t use them together for an integrated campaign. You can, and you should. What I mean is that each has its unique set of attributes as well as its own limitations that differ from one channel to the next. That’s where the term media agnosticism comes in, also referred to as being media or channel neutral. It’s planning that’s impartial and avoids bias towards a particular platform or strategy – until due diligence helps determine the best way(s) to engage the right consumer given the goals and objectives of the media campaign. The point being that whatever process is used to produce the solution should not be biased or predisposed towards any particular outcome.

While this all might seem pretty intuitive, the concept gets lost amongst all the noise put out by the snake oil salesmen and pseudo experts of the Internet. “SEO will put you at the forefront.” “Facebook will catalyze engagement.” “PPC will affect your bottom line.” Yeah, maybe.  Each of those services could definitely make your business more visible, but that doesn’t automatically translate towards sustainable success. Why is that though? Because search engine optimization won’t save your business if you have huge, fundamental problems in your marketing and advertising strategy. A “like” you receive on your social media network of choice is different than one that Starbucks or Coke receives on theirs. Why? Because for a major brand, that additional impression has a dollar value attached to it. For someone with little to no brand recognition, it’s inconsequential. And the claim that PPC would save a business with the aforementioned problems is laughable. The article I mentioned in the opening of this entry wrote that media agnosticism was “bullsh*t” on the basis that it takes a single piece of collateral, say a TV spot, and tries to apply that voice to the rest of a campaign. That’s not media agnosticism. That’s bad advertising. From there, the writer extrapolates that those foolish enough to believe messaging can make that jump are only willing to chase down big ideas and creates deficiencies in the creative process. One, seriously? And two, that’s just silly. We’re not looking for the golden gun here. Progress is made one step at a time.

To clarify, I’m no Pelé of marketing, advertising or anything else really, and I do make mistakes. Well, I’m pretty good at Halo 3 and being snide, but I haven’t found a way to monetize either. That being said, my advice isn’t infallible. No one’s is. The thing is that I read. A lot. If you’re running a business or are in the process of starting one, you should too. Why? Because your business, or the company you work for, is probably different than most and positioned to serve some segments of the market better than others. And on the receiving end, faced with a seemingly endless number of ways to consume media, your prospective customers are receiving information through a slew of different channels. Some potential clients will seek out recommendations. Some will do research online to seek out reviews. Some might just find you by taking the path of the least resistance. That being said, how you leverage your knowledge and experience will probably be different if you sell shrunken heads versus if you have a lemonade stand. If I were doing the former, I’d probably have to find a niche market on some underground forum to advertise my product because it’s probably illegal. And if I was doing the latter, I might just make signage on poster board to target passing traffic as opposed to posting 324 tweets a day.

How you go about your business, down to how you gloss over seemingly inane details, is working against your best intentions. You might get your marketing and advertising right on the first try, or the process could be one that iterates itself over and over like it is for the rest of us. Ultimately, media neutral panning might mean more than putting habits and assumptions aside. It might require stepping back altogether and thinking outside of the box. Don’t play favorites just use what works best.

 

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Outdoor Advertising

One of the earliest mediums of mass communication was the stele of ancient Egypt. Made of basalt, these tablets were about five-feet long, two and a half-feet wide and eleven-inches thick. Displayed prominently in high traffic areas, these stelais were the earliest form of mass advertising known to man. Fast forward several thousand years, and we’re kind of doing the same thing. Between the two, we’ve had numerous developments and breakthroughs in technology. We went from papyrus to paper. We built the printing press, the Internet, Facebook. So what changed or… what didn’t?

Once upon a time, outdoor advertising came in a variety of sizes. Okay, it still does. What’s different is that it can be posted basically anywhere. Aside from posters and bulletins, you’ll see advertising on newsstands, bus benches, on buses themselves, blimps, on gas pumps at gas stations, everywhere. The different shapes and sizes facilitate reaching consumers seamlessly, several times a day, from when they commute to work to when they pop out for lunch or coffee to when they leave to go home. Doing so presents both challenges and opportunities to those searching for the perfect marketing mix. As a word of caution, the more you segment and target, the more complicated your advertising campaign will inevitably become. Though, complicated does not necessarily equate to bad. For me, the objective is to reach the right people at the right times, which is convenient because outdoor advertising thrives on simplicity.

To be forthright, writing this entry has been really hard. Mainly, because you won’t find actionable metrics you can leverage like you will from the different analytics services you currently use. It’s difficult to link a piece of signage and the completion of a call-to-action. And when I say difficult, I mean it more closely represents shooting in the dark. That’s why marketers will typically prefer to buy placement in newspaper and magazines and continue to allocate their marketing dollars to online ad spend despite the fact that click-through-rates (CTR) are abysmal. Despite this, billboards are everywhere, and companies still pay to erect messaging on them. Why? Because you don’t have to try and convert the non-believers with truncated messaging in the smallest of windows only for them to maybe navigate to your website and then drop off. Billboards aren’t supposed to persuade. It’s a place where you can establish your business’s name and strengthen its image.

In a given year, there are about 250 business days after you subtract weekends and bank holidays. My commute to and from work takes roughly an hour combined each day, so we can safely say I commute around 250 hours in a year. That’s approximately 10.5 days sitting in my car just driving to and from the office. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on average, Americans spend more than 100 hours per year commuting. I don’t think that’s a very a good estimate, but you get the picture. Multiply this by the thousands of commuters driving down the highway, walking down the street or whatever you may have, and you have a monstrous reach that has mass target potential. You’re no longer honing in on just your target demographic but everyone past that. Frequency builds awareness. Awareness builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Because in the end, unaided brand recall can be seen as the pinnacle of any advertising campaign. It indicates superiority relative to all of its competitors, and sometimes it becomes so dominant that consumers are only able to recall that one brand. History is full of such examples. Coca Cola was once so popular that people referred to all soda as “Coke.” “Fridge” is actually short for Frigidaire, not refrigerator. Photocopiers are often referred to as the “Xerox,” tissues as “Kleenex,” bandages as “Band-Aids” and petroleum jelly as “Vaseline.”

That’s not to say that the correlation is if you use outdoor advertising, your brand will become a household name around America. The takeaway is that these brands achieved widespread success by promoting recall instead of focusing on persuasion. If you’re already using cost per mille (CPM) advertising, you might want to start shopping around for outdoor ad buys.

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Being Different

If shoppers were motivated solely by price, our world would be a drastically different place, but the fact that we’re regularly inundated by a wide variety of products just goes to show that different people value different things when it comes to purchasing goods, similar or otherwise. As an employee trying to grow the business I work for, a good deal of my time is dedicated towards finding new and exciting ways to engage prospective clients. If you’re still reading this, your workday might not be so different than my own. The tough part is that because we’re constantly fighting time constraints with limited resources, we’re in this perpetual rush to prioritize which touch points to use, and which to put on the backburner or discard altogether. This much is further complicated by the fact that individual consumers interact with brands differently.

So what should you do? Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you what I would. When in doubt, I tend to break a problem down to its simplest terms, and I’m a big believer that the simplest explanations are typically the best ones [see: Occam’s Razor]. Here, the question should probably be framed as, “How do we provide value beyond a transaction?” It’s something I think I can answer, at least partially, with three anecdotes from my growing up.

My mom has owned restaurants in Downtown Dallas since I was about six or seven-years-old, good ones too. I’m not just saying that because she is who she is. They’ve just always had really good food at a phenomenal price. When I was last helped out there, a cheeseburger combination with fries and a drink cost $4.28 with tax. In LA, I’m lucky if I can pay around $8.00 for something comparable. Outside of those two selling points, quality and price point, she knows basically everyone’s name who walks through the door despite the fact that the restaurant gets really, really busy. Growing up, my parents would pretty regularly forget how old my siblings and I were when taking us to the doctor’s office as kids, but my mom wouldn’t forget her customers’ names or what they regularly ordered. By the time you walked up to the counter, she’d be pouring your soda of choice or handing you a glass of ice for tea. Get to know your customers. Be personable and ask them how they’re doing. You or I could probably find 100 different burgers at 100 different places on Yelp. What you probably won’t find is an eccentric little Asian woman who will ask what your kids are doing for the summer or where your other lunch buddy is. It’s both hilarious and unequivocally welcoming.

When I was 11-13, I would go to an old school barbershop a few blocks away from the restaurant. When I say old school, I don’t mean that it had a barber’s pole complete with old men. I mean that they used straight edged razors, heated shaving cream and the Oster Stim-U-Lax for back rubs after haircuts. They had a guy who shined shoes in the corner though I don’t remember ever seeing him actually working. Having established that, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that these guys were probably born sometime during FDR’s presidency, and I’m thinking more along the lines of his first term and not the second or third. What was great about their shop was that it didn’t have bells and whistles. It didn’t need to. Being a barbershop for grown men, it didn’t need to blast house music or serve green apple martinis. Stick to your guns and focus on producing a high-quality product because all the bells and whistles in the world won’t obscure a bad one, not in the long-term at least.

Lastly, I’d encourage you to be mindful of all the small things. Back in Dallas, there’s a steakhouse called, Nick & Sam’s that I absolutely love. The first time I went, I was charged with booking a reservation for my family, so we could celebrate my brother’s finding a new job. If you’re a meat eater in Dallas and haven’t been, or you find yourself close by for some reason or another, you have to go in and try their porterhouse. The customer service was good and so was the food. What stood out was the fact that the general manager called me the next afternoon to ask how my family and I enjoyed dining there. Before you extrapolate that the GM was a telepath, he had my phone number from the reservation where I had indicated that it was our first time dining there together. Even still, you have to admit that his calling was both thoughtful and very cool. He could’ve sent a form e-mail, which would probably save him boatloads of time, but he didn’t. He took the time to make the call. Each and every business will inevitably develop kinks. That’s just a simple fact. Gathering feedback is an easy way to figure out if you’re operating up to par or that you need to make changes somewhere along the way.

Be passionate about your business and your work. That means caring about your customers because passion translates into commitment, and commitment drives success. Your business and its branding is born out of differentiation and dies from its lack thereof. Setting yourself apart is doing more than saying that you’re different or that you’re better. It requires action.

At the end of the day, how are you doing that?

Photo Credit: GraphicsDB.com