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June 30, 2010 – Social Media Day

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Wow, we have our own day. Mashable has announced that today is Social Media Day. The first question is, will anyone notice. It is very prominent on the Mashable site (first thing you see), so then I went to Facebook. Facebook has the ability to sent a message to everyone. I expected to see something announcing to the almost 500 million members that this was a very special day, a day celebrating what Facebook has helped shape – social networks. Alas, no global message, Facebook let the moment pass.

So I went to Twitter and checked my stream, and lots of social media, but not a lot of Social Media Day. Hmmm, how could Social Media Day go unnoticed. I checked CNN (online of course) They even link to Mashable and The Wall Street Journal (checking the technology sections of course). Then I went old school, I “Googled” Social Media Day and no major news media outlet (sorry KCTV Kansas City) came up, only Mashable.

So does this mean social media doesn’t work? No, it means social media doesn’t work in a vacuum. It is what I tell my clients. You want to be on Facebook, because if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. You want to be on Twitter, because you want to have the opportunity to meet people, influence people, show people that you are smart, funny, engaging, etc. – pick your adjective that best describes you. You also want to be on Twitter so that you can know what people are saying about you and your company and your product. You can’t respond if you are not a part of the conversation. You need to have a LinkedIn profile so other professionals can find you and know who you are and what you do. You want to have a YouTube channel so they can see you in action (keep checking back, I am editing our video!).

So why did my Google search yield only Mashable links (okay and KCTC), because Mashable forgot that the traditional media, and other social media outlets still look to old fashioned ways to be kept up-to-date: press releases, phone calls, personal interviews. Social Media works, you just need to use it in conjunction with more traditional forms of media if you want to be sure to get wall-to-wall coverage of your very first Social Media Day. Maybe next year, we will be everywhere!

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Posted in General, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Technology | 2 Comments »

Art of the Logo

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Following on Robin’s excellent post about branding, I wanted to take a closer look at one specific aspect of building your brand, the thing that one might say is the foundation of every brand: the logo.

We here at ribit do a lot of work for start-ups and small businesses in additional to our larger, established clients, and one of my favorite challenges when we get those clients is being able to start at the very beginning in building their brand, and specifically in doing their logo design.  The reason it is a challenge is largely due to the fact that so many people have trouble understanding what a logo is, and what it is supposed to do.

A logo is a hieroglyph.  A rune.  A pictogram.  It is a simple, easily recognized symbol that stands in for the name of your business.  Done properly, a logo can become a sort of  letter added to the collective symbol alphabet.  It should not, and indeed cannot, capture everything about you and your business.  To do so would require it to be very complex, and when it comes to logos, simplicity is best.

Consider the Nabisco logo. If you don’t know what it is, go look in your pantry. Chances are something in there will have it. On any of their products, it will be in the upper-left corner. It is a red triangle with the word “NABISCO”, surrounded by something that looks vaguely like an old fashioned T.V. antennae. Nothing about that thing (and incidentally, it is actually called “The Nabisco Thing” in internal Nabisco marketing documentation) seems to say anything about what Nabisco does. Taken out of context, that thing does not say Ritz or Nilla Wafers. Heck, it doesn’t even say “snack food”.

But we all know that it means Nabisco. We’ve been seeing it on the upper-left corner of boxes of crackers since we were children. That thing is possibly the ultimate logo ever created. Everyone knows what it means, that silly little oval and line sketch has become a symbol, a hieroglyph; a letter in our collective alphabet that means “Nabisco”.

As far as possible, every logo should aspire to that standard.  It should be simple, instantly and easily recognizable, and it should be usable but also unobtrusive on every piece of paper and every web page or TV ad that your company produces.

Some basic guidelines:

  1. Simplicity!  Do not be afraid of “plain”.  Your logo is like a letter, not a painting.
  2. Recognizability.  Avoid obscure or arcane looking symbols.  If the viewer stops and thinks about what the logo is rather than what it stands for , they are no longer thinking about your company.
  3. Scalability.  Your logo should look good on packaging, on a letterhead, projected large on slideshow, or printed small on a business card.
  4. Professionalism.  The logo is your business, not yourself.  If, for instance, you dislike a certain color, but that color works well in the logo design, do not let your personal preference ruin your logo.
  5. Trust your designer!  You are paying them to do your design.  Trust their expertise, otherwise why did you hire them?

Designed and used effectively, your logo can become a symbol that, when viewed, sets up a whole series of associations in the mind of the viewer and constantly reinforces your brand in the public eye.

Posted in Advertising, Design, Marketing | No Comments »

Welcome to our New ribit Web Site

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Yes, we are the cobbler’s child. At least every five years we totally redo our web site. Trash the old one and start over from scratch.

This time we decided to leave the old content management system we used (short tutorial – a content management system is a database driven system that allows us to build you a web site where the content of the pages is separate from the design and structure of the web site. This allows us to be able to give the web site owner a user name and password that will allow them to update the content on the pages without changing the design or structure of the web site, using a content editor that is “similar” to editing in your basic word document editing software package.) and switch to WordPress.

WordPress offered a lot of advantages, ease of use being first and foremost. WordPress also has a huge community building Plugins, small applications that add functionality to the “base” program. You want more SEO (search engine optimization – what you need to get higher in the Google rankings) than you get out of the “box” from WordPress, there is a plugin for that. You want a Captcha field (those annoying squiggly letters that automated programs can’t generate to “steal” the form) to go with your contact form, there is a plugin for that. You want it, someone has probably already made a plugin for it.

So why didn’t we “switch” sooner. We at ribit pride ourselves on not only creating sites that work, that incorporate the SEO you need, that connect you to the Social Media, that have a blog, but we create sites that have unique designs that reflect the owner of the web site – that will help them reach their marketing goals and objects. Whenever we looked at WordPress sites, well, they looked like WordPress sites.

The challenge for us was how to make a WordPress site that doesn’t look like a WordPress site. This is what we came up with, different frog paintings on each page, the blog (okay the blog looks like a WordPress blog), a portfolio that is very clean and highlights just a smattering of our work.

We are going to be added to the site in the coming weeks, keep coming back to see how the site progresses. And welcome to our new site!

Posted in Design, General, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media | 10 Comments »

Social Media, Is It Worth the Time?

Friday, March 12th, 2010

Everyone always asks me how much time I spend on Social Media, and is it worth it. I Am here to tell you that it definitely is worth every minute I spend on tweeting, blogging, updating, etc. I probably spend fifteen to twenty minutes a day keeping up with social media. If I am adding in a blog post, I might spend more – if I have a heavy load of commitments to clients and training meetings I might spend less, but on average I spend fifteen to twenty minutes a day.

What do I get for my time spent on Social Media you ask, I have a community of people on Twitter, that when I have a question, they will answer for me, they have amazing insights into things I might not, and best yet, they refer business to me. By posting interesting tidbits and links to articles of relevant information, I make myself a useful resource on Twitter. Yes, they refer business to me! My fans on my Facebook Fan Page, while few in number, have access to a portfolio and a “sampling” of my thoughts and posts. Not to mention that Facebook, if it were a country, would be the fourth largest country in the world, don’t you want to be “listed” as a part of the “country”?

Plaxo and LinkedIn are interesting places to be a part of, I admit, I am not that active in Plaxo. I tend to post a status update once a day, and check the status e-mails every week to see what is going is new and to send out birthdays (I love their birthday card feature!). LinkedIn is great for not only keeping up with what is going on with all of my contacts, but for the Groups feature, where you can either run a Group or join a Group. Either way you can easily become known as an expert in your field by replying to discussions that are posted, starting your own discussion within that group or submitting a news item for that group. LinkedIn also let’s you answer questions, posted by other members which let’s you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

Is PR Really Necessary?

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

If you build it won’t they come? Clients always think if you build them a beautiful web site, a great web site, if you put in all the meta information (code that the people creating your web site put in that the search engines read) that correlates with all the information on your site, that people will come by the droves to their site. Alas, only in Kevin Costner movies does “…if you build it, they will come” work (and yes, for the uninitiated, I am referring to a line in the movie Field of Dreams).

So you have your blog on your web site (or you are using a WordPress, Blogspot, Blogger or one of the many other blogging web sites available) and that is garnering some interest. And you took our advice and you set up a Facebook Fan Page for your company, and you started to use Twitter, but how do you get people to know about all the great things you are doing (and saying).

That is where PR comes to the rescue. Yes, your blog, your Facebook Fan Page, your Twitter account, your YouTube Channel are all pieces of your PR campaign, but you need a coordinated campaign and a way to reach your audience.

Public Relations campaigns are built around reaching the appropriate individuals in the media to get your story out to the masses (i.e., your potential customers and clients). Most people think you can just send out a press release and viola! Instant Story. Front page of the paper. Not so fast. To get good coverage you have to sell your story, you have to have a relationship with the reporters and know how to engage them. More importantly you need someone who knows how to get your story in the paper, on the air, or in their blog.

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Posted in General, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Best Ad Campaign

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

The International Cannes Advertising Festival awarded one campaign the Grand Prix award for direct, cyber and PR for the “Best Job in the World” campaign for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. According to Fast Company, the campaign was “done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just 1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.”

Okay, let’s start with the comparatively paltry marketing budget of just 1.7 million dollars. I think paltry is relative. Seeing as Hamilton Island has a population of 1500 people (according to Australian Bureau of Statistics) no math I know makes this look like a paltry budget, although it could just be that I’m jealous. The town I live in has just over 15,000 residents and and our marketing budget is approximately a whopping $200,000. Now I realize I’m using “Boomer Math”, but my friends in Hamilton Island are spending $1133 per resident while versus $13 per resident, yes they had better results. Miracle results? Let’s not let the media fool you into thinking they had a small little budget and pulled off a miracle, they had real money and agencies working for them on two continents.

Now for what they did right, they came up with THE IDEA (yes I meant to shout), it was fabulous. They had a beautiful, gorgeous location they wanted people to visit. Hmmmm, how to get the word out, I know, let’s have a contest! So they created a contest for the “Best Job in the World” where the job is to live for six months on Hamilton Island and share with the world your experiences through a blog, twitter, etc. And don’t forget you get paid for this, you get paid a lot.

So people started to apply online, lots of people. So many people applied that the web server crashed two days into the campaign. (oops, you’d think one of the agencies might have prepared for that.) Because you needed to have people vote for you to get the job, people started to create web sites and blogs to promote themselves, and of course this promoted the “job” itself. The perfect storm of publicity, when your PR goes viral.

So what did little Hamilton Island get for their 1.7 million dollars, they generated $200 million in global publicity for Tourism Queensland according to the BBC (I found this reference on Wikipedia). Now a new Yacht Club as well as a new Golf Club are opening in 2009. Oh, and I’m writing about it in my blog. What more could they ask for! Guess they’ll have some more “great jobs” for us to apply for.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Facebook Pages, Are They Professional

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Several of our clients have asked if they should use Facebook as a way to connect with clients. If you have a personal Facebook account and like to “share” on it, continue to do so, just not with your clients. For your clients, set up a Facebook Page. The difference is that a Facebook Page is for a business or organization or band, etc. This is where you connect as a professional, so you can separate your personal and professional sides of your life.

I use my Facebook page to keep up with friends, Ribit’s Facebook page is strictly professional. For instance, when I post this blog to the Ribit web site, I will also post a comment on Ribit’s FB Wall (for those that don’t use Facebook, the wall is where you post your comments) that I have posted a new blog and suggest that Ribit’s Fans check it out. Yes, you have friends that connect to your personal account, but you have Fans that connect to your Facebook Page for your business.

I know it is all a little confusing separating personal and professional, but it is worth it. Once you have 1000 Fans for your Page you can get a vanity URL for your Page to make it easier for people to find your Page. A vanity URL is where instead of having a random set of numbers assigned as your page id, you can set your own id as long as no one registered it with Facebook before you did. Ribit still needs several more Fans before we will be getting our very own vanity URL.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Why Blogging?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

People ask why I bother to blog (and why so infrequently) so I thought I would answer. Number 1, why so infrequently, well this year was a bad year. In addition to running a successful (if I must say so myself) company, I spent part of the year as a full-time caregiver. Trust me, not a job you want, and not conducive to blogging. At the end of the day you are just tired. I shared the duty with my sister and it was still exhausting. Number 2, why I blog, because it is a fun way to interact with the people who visit our site. I get e-mails from people who read my blog (really, I do), and they seem to enjoy what I have to say. It is also a creative outlet for me.

Blogging also serves a useful purpose that all my clients could benefit from, they can use their blogs to tell their clients, and their prospective clients about how they can better serve them. For an existing client who reads my blog it shows them that I keep up with technology (so they don’t have to!), and for prospective clients it can give them a feel for who I am and how I think.

There are bloggers who have a wide sphere of influence who corporations court to have their company or product mentioned in their blog. Blogging is now a really big business. Public Relations campaigns now include a “blogging” aspect, many vineyards now as a practice (take Rodney Strong for instance) send the top wine bloggers (Good Grape, Tom Wark’s Fermentation, Steve Heimoff, 1 Wine Dude, Bigger Than Your Head, etc.) free bottles of wine in hopes that they will blog (favorable of course) about the wine. While there is much discussion over whether or not the fact that the wine was provided free should be disclosed, the fact that these bloggers are deemed authorities give credence to their favorable reviews.

A blog can either be available on your site (hosted on your own domain) or use a “blog platform” just like using Microsoft Word to type a letter. Platforms include familiar names such as Google, Typepad and WordPress to ones you have never heard of. A blog can be just text and links (strictly a blog), photos (technically that would be a photoblog), video (vlog), audio (podcasting), or art (artlog). You should choose a format and a platform you feel comfortable with, and a topic that you can grow with. I tend to talk about technology, it is what I do everyday.

If your blog starts to gain a following, you to can become an authority that people will turn to for information. Note that on our site we archive the blogs so you can go back and review what I have written. And I plan to write more as the year goes on and I challenge you to as well. If you aren’t the type to write, we should develop a plan to get your product or service written about. Remember, “if you build it, they will come” only worked for Kevin Costner.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media | 3 Comments »

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