Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

IE9 Drops Suppost for Flash

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

It’s official, Flash is dead! Microsoft have effective killed it by siding with Apple, and dropping support for Flash video in its new, soon-to-be-released browser, IE9 (http://bit.ly/cxuVRM).

Along with Apples iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad devices, this has effectively made Flash a technology without the vast majority support it has relied on to dominate the web video market.

So will we mourn it’s loss? Well I’m sure Adobe are in crisis, but the ones I feel most sorry for are the Flash and Flex developers, who are now in a position that they are likely to have to retrain fast. As for the technology, it seems like flash was becoming an unacceptable combination of security nightmare, resource hog and accessibility nightmare.

There are many clouds in this silver lining though. Many sites will now need to start shifting over to html5, css3 and javascript rather than using flash. This gives an opportunity for designers and developers to have massive increase development over the next few month to a year.

The other upside is of coarse the possibility that Flash is the killer app., and that lack of support in IE9 will finally drive people to Firefox and other alternative browsers. My feeling is though that this is just the start and we’ll now see other browsers following suit.

What are your thoughts? Do you a Flash site that you feel can only be made with Flash, or are you happy to let it go?

Posted in Flash, General, Marketing, Web desvelopment, usability | No Comments »

Master that Presentation by….Spending Quality Family Time

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

So you have a big presentation tomorrow and you really need to get it slick and smooth but you just have one night to do it in.

You could spend the night rehearsing and going over the slides to make sure you know exactly what’s coming up. I’ve got another suggestion for you, and this one will make your presentation really sizzle. Spend a bit of time with your kids!

At this point you probably think I’ve totally lost it, but let me explain why spending some quality family time can be good for you and your presentation. I promise I’m not going to hit you with any new age relaxing stuff either, although there is something to be said for relaxing and getting some sleep before the big day.

Ok, so enough dithering, how can spending time with the kids improve your presentation? Simple, you are going to read them their bedtime stories and in doing so you will improve your presentation skills no end.

Reading to children is the ideal practice for presenting in a way, that will keep your audiences focus on you.

Pick a good book with good guys and bad guys. I like something like Narnia, Harry Potter, Septimus Heap and the like. Then when you read put some emotion into it. Change the volume, pitch and pacing of your reading to match the story. Your kids will tell you when you are getting it right by giving you their full and undivided attention.

When you have finished reading, go back to your presentation and think how you can use the same techniques when you present that. You might even like to write comments about how you present on the slide.

When you get to work and make your presentation, use these techniques and you will see that your colleagues and customers will respond so much better to even the driest of subjects. You are showing passion, and that in contagious!

The final benefit is of coarse that your kids will love it. Not only will you be spending time with them, but it will be time they will enjoy.

What more can you ask for, a great balance between home and family.

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Posted in General, Marketing | No Comments »

Integrating Social Media into Your Website
– Part 2

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

This second post concentrates on selecting the right social media websites for the client, and how to try to ensure that traffic to their main site is maximised.

As I mentioned in the last post, my client in this case is an actor and the site is designed to both help him get new work, and to chat with his fans.

Firstly we looked at what type of content he was going to be able to put up on the site. In this case we came up with: -

  • Video of his acting gigs and profile videos
  • Photos, both as screen captures from his acting roles and profile pics that he has done
  • Status updates from Facebook (he is on Facebook pretty much every night)

On top of this, I added Twitter as the ideal way to post messages while he is working on a set, and blog posts for longer stories he writes about some of the funny things he gets up to.

A Bit of Background on Twitter & Facebook

If you don’t move in web circles you will still probably have heard of Twitter and Facebook, but just to give you a bit of background: -

  • Facebook – currently the largest social media website in Australia and the world. This is typically a closed system where only people you specifically allow, will be able to see your content (although Facebook is trying to change this). Facebook is most often used to connect friends that may have drifted apart, but is also used as an online meeting place for like minded people.
  • Facebook Fan Pages – These are special Facebook pages that are open to outside searches and can be accessed by anyone. People can post comments, photos, video, events and more. Once you have a certain number of followers, you can also get a custom URL. In our case we got http://www.facebook.com/frankieoatway so it is nice and easy to remember.
  • Twitter – the current darling of the social media world, news and tech community, where twitter usernames are now the de facto name badge. Twitter allows you to post short messages of 140 characters or less that say what you are doing there and then. They can be sent via the Twitter website, many phone applications and even SMS. These are great for very quick messages posts and are totally open to searches and casual visitors.

Both of these sites are great community builders and can drive a lot of traffic to a central location if you provide links to good content on your own website.

Having taken care of the text based social media, we need to look at blog posts, which is almost the same, but longer!

Blogging

Blogs started off as ‘web logs’ which were basically online diaries, but have evolved to cover pretty much anything up to very large news organisations. The great thing about blogs is that they are easy to update, and Google loves them as content is always being refreshed.

There are various blogging platforms including Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace to name just a few, but the 500lb gorilla is WordPress.

I have to admit that I am a WordPress fan, it is very easy to post to via the web, email or iPhone apps, you can set up static pages and there are 1001 plugins to add functionality to the system. It’s also free, and easy to install (many hosting companies will install it for you). You can also buy or create themes that customise your sites look and feel to just the way you want it.

As we were going to have our own hosting and URL (http://www.frankieoatway.com), WordPress seemed an easy choice to make. This was particular because of the ease of posting and changing content for the less technically minded, but also because of the links that can be set up to social media sites, and the text (RSS) feeds it produces that can be used in many other ways.

So we seems to have our text based information published. Next we look at some of the other media we need to incorporate.

Photos

The next content type we had to look solve was how to spread photos around the other social media properties, and back to the main WordPress website.

There are quite a few choices here, but sticking with the big boys, you have Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Picassa (owned by Google). Both of these allow you to upload photos, organise, distribute and even edit them.

This was a difficult choice I have to say, but in the end I went with Flickr, probably because I am more familiar with it, but also because they have a very simple uploader I can just put on my clients computer.

Video

Video was an easy choice. Youtube has the widest reach and is easy to use. Setting up a channel also makes sure your video is collected together. The downside is in this case is that videos are limited to 11 minutes long, and in our case, that has meant we will also need to look at other channels such as Vimeo for short film releases.

Keeping It Together

When setting up these sites it’s important to try to keep things together, so that you have a consistent brand image across all the media you use. In our case we have used the same profile photo, same bio info and have managed to get the same url for all of the sites. That makes it really easy, as you can pretty much type in the URL knowing what you are going to see and once you land on the page the right person is confirmed by the profile photo.

In our case we were lucky as Frankie Oatway is not that common a name. We managed to get: -

As you can see we have consistent branding to avoid confusing messages to people who may want to see Frankies site.

The next post concentrates on how we planned to connect the sites so that they all talk to each other and updating one will trickle down into the other sites when and where we want it to.

<<< Part 1

Part 2 >>>

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Posted in Marketing, SEO, Social media | 1 Comment »

Integrating Social Media into Your Website

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

This is the first in a series of posts looking at how social media can be integrated into a website, what advantages it has and why you would do it for particular clients.

I recently put together a website which integrates a clients site requirements, with social media such as:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

These posts are a summary of what I have learned along the way. They include a summary as possible of my thought process, planning and how I implemented the integration.

Why Integrate Social Media into a Site

There are many reasons why you might want to integrate social media into a site including:

  • To take advantage of existing community you have developed – This depends on whether you already have an active Facebook or Twitter following, for example. Taking advantage of these existing friends/followers can help drive traffic and interest in your site.
  • To improve the visibilty of your site to search engines – Often getting a new site in front of Google can be difficult. However, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages are being spidered by Google all the time, so links from these sources will help get your site initially spidered. The other factor is that creating these pages will get you inbound links to your website which will help with your ranking. How much it helps, coming from a social media site, nobody knows, but I’m guessing that the more followers/fans you have the better, and the more specific your discussion the better.
  • To spread your content as widely as possible – One of the biggest problems I see is people with good content, but just not getting it out in front of their audience. By distributing your content as widely as possible you increase the chance that your content will be seen, your site linked to, and your product or service bought. This takes a bit of a leap of faith from marketers more used to control of their information stream, however structuring your content appropriately makes sure your name is out there, and that you are not annoying your readers/viewers.
  • Ease of use, for a client used to social media sites – I threw this one in there because it is increasingly the case that clients, who may not know how to drive a websites CMS system, do know how to use Facebook and Twitter. By integrating these into your site, the page stays current, Google spiders it more, and there is also often more topical interest from clients.

There are more reasons than I have here, but hopefully this will be enough to get you thinking!

Case Study

In the case I’m going to look at, my client is an actor, Frankie Oatway, who’s career has all of a suddenly taken off after a move from England to Australia. He is a big user of Facebook with quite a few followers, but had never had a website before and wanted to keep everything as simple to manage as possible.

As an actor he was looking to develop fans, but was also looking to show his work as widely as possible to attract casting agents and may potentially release short films on the web.

In this case it was very apparent that Frankie was the brand, he is full of life and a really nice approachable guy. Social media was the therefore key to get his content in front of as many people as possible along with links back to his site (ideally with a high ranking in Google, for his name) so that agents could find and contact him should they need to, and fans could just have a chat with him.

The next post covers how we decided which social media to use and how we should develop his site.

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Posted in Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »

Navigation in Rotating Banners

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Just a short post on the use of navigation in banners. This was after one of my clients made the very valid point that they looked intrusive. I restyles the navigation to small squares which hopefully solved that but thought that my ideas on why banner navigation is a good idea might be interesting: -

  • The banner provides a highly visual view of a product or service which is likely to catch the eye of a casual browser.
  • If the banner changes while they are reading it and deciding whether to interact with it you have a problem that they would have to wait for the cycle to come round again. In practice they never do! They either look for what they are interested in elsewhere in the site or forget about it and go elsewhere in the site or to another site.
  • In any of the cases above, you have missed the opportunity to interact with the client on something that has interested them, when they are interested in it, and may therefore have lost them as a potential client.
  • By adding in a way to navigate backwards in the banner, you give them a renewed opportunity to read and to click the banner link
  • The indication also gives a casual browser the ability to see that the banner will change, if they want to watch it.
  • The disadvantage is that it can look intrusive if not well styled.

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Posted in Marketing, usability | No Comments »

SEO and SEM – What Are The Differences

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

This post is follow up to some discussion on merketinggeek.tv and relates to whether SEO/SEM is useful for small business. I have edited it a bit to make it suitable as a standalone post, but essentially this is just a long winded comment I wrote!

Firstly I should mention the definitions that are being used. The industry seems to be using the following (which I actually don’t agree with but hey that’s what they are using): -

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – Optimisation of a website for organic search results. This could involve changing code, rewriting content, inbound links, article writing etc etc.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – This is pretty much defined as Adwords or similar paid advertising, and to be honest is why I said I actually don’t agree with these definitions as marketing isn’t just advertising). If you look at wikipedia for example they define it quite tightly as ad related  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing).

These can essentially be used differently. Personally I believe that every commercial site should have SEO and usability work done on them. This can be done by the site creator or an external company. The reason I say this is that it will help you be found over time, but importantly it will help users find what they are looking for. As an example You may have a page about orange widgets. If you were to optimise this page for Google you would make sure that the title h1 tags included ‘orange widgets’ preferably at the front of the title.

The reason that Google likes this is that it is how readers read too. The title of the page should be what the page is about and by front loading the keywords the title becomes easier to scan and see what it is about. Therefore what is good for Google is good for site visitors too (after all that is what Google is about), and what is good for your users is also good for your business bottom line.

SEM on the other hand will depend on the business. If you need to drive new customers and are not high up in Googles natural (organic) listings. SEM is a good way to get a presence. This may be the case particularly when you are starting up a business. There is also an argument that even if you are no1 in Google for your keyword, advertising may still help to solidify a searchers perception that you are the company to deal with. I haven’t seen any stats on that but it sounds a reasonable argument.

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Posted in Marketing, SEM, SEO | 1 Comment »