I admit. I’m riding shotgun on the World Cup bandwagon. And after several hours in a crowded sports bar here in Atlanta, it is clear I’m not the only one. I was welcomed into a community of individuals who actively sought information about the team, the sport, the players, even the South African culture. We shared stories, we spilled beer on our jerseys… and we Facebooked each other so we could meet up for the next weekend’s games.  I’ve officially expanded into new social network.

• On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans
• Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand
• Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends

• Starbucks: Starbucks offers promotions, but more importantly, the page also connects to those fans that are socially and environmentally aware— a strong attribute of Facebook users within that 18-24 demographic segment.  Maybe this is why a Syncapse report revealed that Starbucks fans are likely to spend $238.22, more than triple the $71.84 average.  In addition, their photo albums tell vivid, engaging stories about the company, the products, and the leadership (Check out Howard Schultz’ trip to Rwanda).

• Southwest Airlines: As over-the-top as the flight attendants can be, it is refreshing to witness personality in the airline industry.  The persona is also displayed full force on the Southwest Airlines Facebook page, and fans eat this up (a relatively safe assumption given the number of times fans ask, “How do I work for Southwest?”).   Another thing I like about the page is how they speak to checked bags like they are passengers, personifying a service they offer.  I value my personal belongings on a trip, and everything on this page reminds me that Southwest Airlines does also.

• Nike Football (Soccer): Admittedly chosen due to its soccer content, this site still exemplifies the art of storytelling.  The videos instigate a real emotional connection, and the calls to action are extremely powerful.  The Nike Red campaign is building the same momentum as the LiveStrong campaign did $47 million dollars ago.  This page screams “Join the team, unite as a fan of the sport, rally behind the cause, and be loyal to the Nike brand.”

I recently read that the White House has chosen an Open Source CMS (Content Management System) to develop their government Web site. This announcement caught my attention for several reasons--not only are many agencies moving their clients to open source and praising it's virtues, I also started using Drupal this past year and found it remarkably fast and easy to setup and maintain my own Web sites with quality results. Despite some criticism of open source over the years--more and more commercial (and government) developers are choosing it.

It's hard to argue against the benefits of free software, especially when results show that the software does what we expect, often exceeds expectations, and provides more opportunities for expansion than many proprietary products. While relative newcomers Drupal and Wordpress lead the pack for CMS offerings, open source mainstays such as Linux and Perl have been around for many years--not only surviving, but thriving over time. In a study by Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle of SAP Labs, LLC, Total Growth of Open Source results have shown that "the total amount of source code and the total number of projects double about every 14 months." Open source enables freedom for both users and developers to move & change quickly when needed, as well as providing more flexibility with software decisions such as to upgrade or not to upgrade. It's really no surprise that businesses and individuals are moving to open source at exponential rates.

Of course, Open Source has always been very much associated with Free, although there are other solid reasons to choose it beyond its cost. The pool of development resources is not limited to a specific company or provider, but instead is seemingly unlimited. As a specific open source project becomes popular, more and more developers start contributing, growing and adding to the code. Not only do they enhance the software to make it better for everyone, but they also create markets for their own support services. The better the code is--more people will use it-- and the more support is needed. Large developer communities have evolved around each software project, contributing to its growth, and administering its support. These open source communities are continually coming up with new innovations, powerful add-ons, extensions, and effective tools.

With so many open source choices available, even the ubiquitous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl) has come to be accepted as generic term for any completely open source application stack--substituting interchangeable parts from other sources that include "PostgreSQL, SQLLite, Apache Derby," as well as "PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and JavaScript." Even behemoth Microsoft has entered the game with their own Open Source CMS Platform.

Additionally, interactive ad agencies are able to offer their managed computer services at lower rates when developers take advantage of Open Source technologies. This enables clients to do more within their budgets. Every size company can now take advantage of Website integration, online advertising, and interactive media development due to the emergence of open source and accumulation of knowledge brought to us by the developer community. Businesses across industries are now embracing these technologies, taking advantage of interactive media, and using a more integrated approach to marketing with the vast number of new tools that are now available from these creative, innovative communities of developers.

1. SalesView:

In a recent Sales Caffeine email newsletter from Jeffrey Gitomer, there is an article by Michelle Joyce on Making Transactions Memorable.  She had a pleasant experience at the McDonald’s drive thru in Huntersville, North Carolina, and summarized what made the transaction memorable.
 
These three simple steps can be considered website redesign tips to improve user experience at your eCommerce websites and in all your interactive marketing efforts.

1.  Start with a smile and engage your prospect in a friendly manner.  Would you do business with someone you didn’t like?  Well, neither would your prospect.  This guy made me like him – immediately.  When he made that connection, the transaction became enjoyable and personal.  It was all about me, not just my order. 

2.  Offer alternative solutions.  People want choices.   Don't assume that your customer is aware of them.  Uncover their needs and help them make a choice.  McDonald's already mastered the upsell technique with their famous line, “Do you want fries with that?”  What kind of additional features and services can you upsell?  What kind of additional revenue are you leaving on the table at every sale?

3.  End the transaction with something memorable.  When is the last time that a fast food worker told you to “drive safely”?  Usually, it is the perfunctory "thank you” and “have a nice day”; but this guy made me feel like he was genuinely concerned about my personal safety.  What are you saying to your customers that make them remember you personally?

Michelle ends by saying:  The reality is that people are still buying products and services in this economy.  The only question is "Will they buy them from you?"

Definition 6 is an interactive marketing agency that can help you make a connection to your users, whether customers or prospective ones.  We are experts in website development and custom application development.  Even though we are an Atlanta Ad Agency, we have clients across the US that we help differentiate themselves from their competition.

I just got a call from a strategic business partner, and as an Interactive Advertising Agency we stay up to speed on most things in the marketplace, and he was calling me from a break at a conference for his company.  As he said hello, I congratulated him on their company raising another round of VC dollars.  He said "Wow, how did you know that?!"  I told him simple; Twitter!  I was a follower of his company's partner account and at the same time they told the company they tweeted about it.  Interactive communications is so fast, that in less than 5 minutes the word was out!  Now this is a great story because they are an eMail marketing partner of ours, he is a long time friend and the news was good.  We talked about what the investment meant to his company and our partnership, we discussed how online ad agency business was continuing to see good growth this year and that 2010 was going to be a great year, and hung up smiling.

Now what if the news had been bad?  What if they had a meeting that was altering the relationship with partners and it was negative?  And someone had tweeted about it? I suspect our call wouldn't have been the same. 

Let's talk about your online interactive marketing and message management.  Do you have a twitter monitoring policy?  Do you have an account?  Do you follow your partners, customers, employees, competitors?  I do, you should too. Website Development is a very small part of being digital, search engine optimization is only a part as is eMail or even PPC. The big parts are listening, monitoring, and watching the ecosystem and being informed as quickly as possible to make decisions as rapidly as possible.  So next time you are with your Interactive Ad Agency, ask them what they know and when they learned it.  You will be amazed at how fast Digital has become.

Our society has become accustomed to instant access to relevant information within moments of thinking of a question.  Even the slightest curiosity can easily be satiated by launching a web browser and typing a word that seems to represent what you're looking for.  Search engines have been around for ages-- and the way search results appear on a web page hasn't changed a great deal in the last 10 years.   It's still just a page with small paragraphs, underlined links and bolded keywords.  But dramatic improvements in search result relevance have changed the landscape of information pursuit.  What used to be considered "resourcefulness" in the ability to dig up obscure yet valuable information has become the norm, completely accessible to the average computer user.
 
Google has ushered us into this world of information access.  They've trained us to expect to find what we're looking for within the first page of results.  I find it frustrating to even have to read beyond the first few results.  Once you have to click beyond the first page of search results, you are considering whether you might have made a bad choice in what keywords you chose to search for. 
 
So how can you leverage this Google phenomenon in your business?    It's about leveraging the fact that everyone now knows how to use the Google user interface.  What if you were to offer that same familiar user interface to your employees?  They're already trained to form the appropriate "question" to type into the form, you just need to point them to your companies own Google.  Imagine giving users access to SharePoint sites, internal wiki's, company documents or even purchase orders without needing to publish another document explaining how?  How much do you spend on putting together documentation specifically geared to the "lowest common denominator" users?  Thanks to Google's enterprise technologies, you don't have to any more.  You can hook it up, turn it on and turn them loose.

And, people don't just search for web pages containing information.  They even use Google as an internet "quick-launch."   I was perplexed the first time I saw someone Google (yes, it's a verb too) "facebook.com" and click the first link.  Why not type it into the URL field of Firefox?  Because if you Google it, you don't even have to type it correctly.  You can completely botch the spelling and still find exactly what you want.  Furthermore, you don't have to guess on whether it's .NET or .COM or .BIZ and risk accidentally ending up on some unpleasant website that has nothing to do with what you're looking for.

There's another plethora of value and excitement in the Google OneBox features.  Although this isn't quite as well known as Google itself, most people have experienced it before.  You Google "MSFT" and you get the current stock quote for Microsoft Inc.  Or you Google "Weather 30306" and you see the Atlanta weather appear in a small comic-strip form across the top of the search results.  These aren't web pages so how is that information getting up there above the search results?  This is the Google OneBox.  It allows you to connect your enterprise Google Search Appliance to other sources of real-time information - SAP, CRM, ERP, Sales Force, etc.  You can add a connection between your Google Search Appliance and Sales Force to enable you to find contact information that is stored in SalesForce.com, by simply typing in the person’s name or some other associated information.  There are lots of things going on behind the scenes-- XML moving between these systems,   but that doesn't really matter.  The point is that you get your information without having to go into Sales Force.  Read our detailed document on the Onebox to dive into the details.
 
This is starting to sound pretty compelling, right?  For the accounting types, it's not a hard sale as it's going to deliver improved operational efficiency, reduced cost of infrastructure, and reduced complexity of internal data access.  The other half of your organization will be benefiting from the value of information that previously was just not accessible without substantial and cost prohibitive efforts.      Your newest client will find your most recent proposal was right "on the mark"…all because the business development executive was able to find previous RFP responses that your agency has delivered over the last 5 years.     
 
It's hard to imagine areas of your business that wouldn't be affected by implementing such a game changing device.  Definition 6 can work with you to implement Enterprise Search Solutions, helping your company leverage the power of Google Search.    We're certified Google Search Enterprise Partners, trained at Google Headquarters in Mountain view, California.  We have a team of top solutionists that are among the most experienced in enterprise search field.

Business Development Exec, TJ Hargen, came across a study conducted by Ispos Insight which explored the media trends, attitudes, opinions and purchasing habits of America's business elite, or "C Suite".  The study shows a dramatic shift toward the impact that digital media has on this particular demographic now that they are fully embracing online.
 
A few key findings from the study...
1. execs have rapidly adopted the Internet with rapid growth in the usage of print media sites - however this has not reduced usage of other media types such as TV
2. using a publication's website is part of the daily routine for about 2 out of 5 execs
3. top websites visited by US execs are heavily news-oriented including large portals and search engines, followed by cable news and newspaper sites

Business elite are getting more deeply emerged into the digital space including streaming video, blogs, podcasts, etc. which means good things for interactive ad agencies and interactive media agencies.  According to all of these findings, trends in this space are going to continue to accelerate.  You can read the article in its entirety on mediapost.com.

Director of Software Development, Graham Street on the popularity of website integration with content management tools.

I've been noticing in recent months that the development projects crossing my desk for estimation have more and more in common. It's CMS, CMS and more CMS (Content Management Systems.)  Everyone feels entitled to have administrable content on their corporate website. CMS solutions have been around since the good old days of dial-up BBS systems. They've been steadily improving every day, from complicated systems that allow you to jump through 10 hoops to edit a sentence, to 1 hoop to edit a whole page. But this incremental improvement in CMS technology doesn't explain the spike of interest that I am speaking of.   

My father even asked me about a CMS topic on a recent trip home. This is the same Dad who showed me Lotus 1-2-3 on my first Compaq 286 in 1984. I still receive all tabular correspondence from him as a 1-2-3 attachment. So for him to be asking about easy self administration of web content for a non-profit, I was a little perplexed.. Excited and definitely proud, but also perplexed.

It's like activism for free speech at the corporate level. Only the cause for oppression is the "old system" that either allows very limited content administration, or perhaps offers too much flexibility with no boundaries, requiring that "editors" learn a syntactically obscure markup language specific to their respective system.  

As an employee of an online agency, with experience in website development and website integration, I hear things like "I want to update every page on my site, and I want to be able to do it just like I do here on my MySpace." It seems these users have learned how easy it "should be" to author some content and publish it to a web-page. I'm quite sure we can thank MySpace, FaceBook and Gmail for much of this. They've set a precedent for what is literally "even your parent could use it" usability standards.       

This new user group is a diverse group of people from all walks of life, from all generations,  who are ready to add content to their respective  enterprise's website. And where CMS systems do not already exist to support that in those organizations,  they're ready to spearhead an initiative to get it implemented,  because they know it can be done at a competitive cost,  almost as easily as creating a new my space page.

Definition 6 Technical Project Manager, Mike Reese, delivered an article presentation on developing effective affiliate polices.  Affiliate policies can be an extremely lucrative supplement to your standard marketing practices while at the same time they can also be harmful.  Without an explicit set of policies and rules to govern affiliate programs, you may find your company being misrepresented thus driving down revenue and reputation.

We recently encountered an issue involving an affiliate that simply wasn’t playing nice. The result of this was diminished reputation and poor conversion performance. This affiliate was including my client’s website in “adware” distributed to its users, thus creating a spike in visits and reducing conversions. These users were being displayed the client’s website either unknowingly or without requesting it. This is a simple case of increased traffic not always being a good thing. Revenue generation is the key for any company, so if increased traffic is not contributing to that number is it really worth it?  And where exactly are the users coming from?  By setting guidelines, and enforcing them, you can ensure your reputation is being upheld and your own marketing message is not being diluted.

Mike closed with three final points:
1. Know your affiliates – conduct thorough research to better understand your affiliates marketing practices as well as how they intend to utilize your band and marketing messages.
2. Maintain a consistent message – your new email campaign utilizing the latest promotional offers will only serve as a point of confusion if your licensed affiliate is using last year’s campaign information
3. Enforcement – policies and regulations can only go so far.  You have to be prepared to make immediate concise action against affiliates that have broken the rules.  The quickest way to destroy your marketing message is to allow affiliate companies to continue their illegal or ill-advised practices.

You can read the article in its entirety at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/articles/Developing_Effective_Affiliate_Policies.aspx

Definition 6 is a leading interactive agency delivering comprehensive solutions focused on solving real business problems through analysis, strategic vision, innovation, and technical competency.  Contact us today to find out how we can help you with all of your email marketing efforts.

Steve West, a Definition 6 Senior Graphic Designer, recently shared his thoughts with our Creative Team on conventional verses non-conventional website development...

October marked the 10 year anniversary of the original iMac computer. When it came out was met with polarized opinions for and against the little desktop computer. Instead of the beige or gray computer box with a separate monitor, it was a complete computer in a jelly colored case. Aside from looks, it also came standard with what was a new connection, USB 1.0 and did away with the floppy drive only coming with a built in CD drive. At the time it was widely criticized for doing away with the ubiquitous floppy drive because that was considered the normal way to store data.

The same strategy can be used for website development. As the internet has continued to grow and evolve, standards have become entrenched. The most common being that the logo should be in the upper left with the navigation to the top or down the left side. Who says that your website has to do the same? When does one make the decision to continue following the "norm" or even the competition?

Magnum Photos website, http://www.theplaceswelive.com, is an example of an easy to navigate site that's visually enticing as well as a bit unconventional. The main navigation is placed in the upper right. While in a different location it's easy to find and use since the type is white on a black background and the rollover state makes the type bold. Along with color, there are only five links but they¹re also a bit unconventional by having the home button on the far right instead of the left. As you dive into the site you're greeted with large images on the left with the copy pertaining to the section on the right. This seems pretty easy to use so why all the fuss? Because it¹s not what's normally done.

For Magnum to put the photos large and to the left makes sense since this is a site showcasing photography for their new book. Photographers in general seem to forgo conventions and blaze a path that engages the user to explore their sites. The better photographers have put more into this idea of engaging users and built both large showcases of their work but also created an environment that takes users on a journey. Photographer Jill Greenberg's site, http://www.manipulator.com, showcases her large body of work in both an easy to use navigation as well as thumbnails that you can peruse through choosing to view larger. What's more interesting about this site is that it's a few years old but still seems fresh. While the content is regularly updated, the unconventional nature makes it feel different from other sites. So there's really no need to revamp it, just update the work that's showcased.

In this post, usability is something that should be discussed. To put your menu off to the right or even bottom right isn't a license dismiss usability. When you break the convention, consistency is paramount. Putting your menu in a new location on each page may seem like a fun idea but after a couple of clicks followed by a search for your navigation, your user is going to become frustrated and most likely move on. Consistency needs to be maintained and once usability is established, your user will continue to navigate effortlessly through your site.

So what can breaking conventions do for you? It's a great start to separate you from your competitors and it also portrays your company as a bit different. The web is a great place to brave new approaches that help your company stand out and call attention to what you do. After all, when was the last time you saw a computer with a floppy drive?