Web Based Email Marketing

How Brands Can Benefit from Pegshot

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by Ashley Reed

You’ve probably heard about location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, but have you tried Pegshot yet? Instead of answering the question “Where are you?”, Pegshot tells your friends “What’s happening where you are?” by enabling users to quickly share videos and photos with their social networks. The application allows users to “peg” a shot from their location and post it to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Digg and Posterous in real-time.

There are many ways in which brands can take advantage of Pegshot to increase awareness and engagement with their organization. Pegshot is especially well-suited for promoting events as it facilitates quick and easy sharing of photos and videos in real-time, allowing immediate visibility on the social web. This means your audience can interact with your events while they are happening even if they cannot be there.

Real-time sharing also increases pass along rates since, attendees are usually active on social networks at events and can quickly view your content and re-tweet it, “Like” or comment on it. Not only can content be published on your social media accounts, but Pegshot even allows you to post photos and videos directly to your company’s website. In most cases, companies allow only their employees to publish content to their website to ensure that all material is appropriate.

To take advantage of Pegshot at your next event, follow these easy steps:

1. Create your event.

Add your event by filling out the details of your event including the name, date, your Twitter hashtag, and location. Your event will appear on any user’s mobile device in the surrounding area.

2. Create a branded landing page for your event.

You can create a custom branded landing page for you event or choose your Twitter background.

3. Promote your event and add contributors.

Pegshot offers a custom registration page so you can collect as many contributors as possible. You can use this custom landing page to promote your event across social networks as well as your website, email and print marketing initiatives.

4. Capture your event as it’s happening.

Now you’re ready to begin pegging photos and videos of your event in real-time. Your contributors as well as any Pegshot users in the vicinity can share content of your event which will be displayed on your custom landing page in addition to social networks and your website (if permission is granted.)

Anticipating Key Developments in Web Design

Friday, April 9, 2010 by John Harne

It took a little over a week to get over my SXSW experiential (and literal) hangover and to sum up my thoughts on the 2010 Austin event. One word sums up my thoughts coming out of this year's festival..."Anticipation".

Remember the Heinz TV spots of the early 1990's, with Carly Simon singing for ketchup. This year it seemed like everyone was waiting for something, but it just didn't seem to show up. Since this was the venue that Twitter and FourSquare debuted in years past, I think the majority of the attendees were "anticipating" more. Instead there was a lot more marketing of Miller Lite beer, Chevy Volt and Monster energy drink, more parties, more free beer and a whole lot more people. Over 6,200 more folks in fact, all anticipating something, some next big thing at SXSW 2010.

Anticipation was also common Twitter theme and with so many birds of a feather together, the Twitter and FourSquare servers seemed to lag during certain keynotes and party hours. FourSquare had to invent a new badge for the experience called a super swarm. This designated that over 250 users checked in to a specific location, like the Frog Design party at MACC on Sunday evening. Everyone was gathering and waiting on something to happen.

Sometimes it pays to look the other way. While most of the crowd was attending keynotes given by the founders and thought leaders of social media, some big news was breaking in some smaller sessions and workshops.

This year three key developments signaled future implications for web interface design that will change the visual future of the web. CSS 3, HTML5 and Fluid Type are what I am talking about. The ability to leverage thousands of fonts will release web design from restrictions and separate creative talent from web generalists. HTML5 will do away with the use of proprietary plug-ins for basic rich media.

HTML5 adds video and audio capabilities to core markup languange with the intention of reducing the need for browser plug-in-based rich internet applications (RIA). And it is being employed now. Big entities like CBS are displaying their content video while Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash are just beginning to do battle. The take-away is that open source code will have the ability to display media that the bulk of Flash and other RIA's are doing now. This spells the end for many plug-ins and the best part is HTML5 is here now and should reach W3C Recommendation by late this year.

CSS3 is still currently under development but many of the recommendations are working in existing browsers. The list of features continues to grow and the ability of designers to use these features to extend web design is exciting.

Consider what a designer might be able to do with just multiple backgrounds. This feature already works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Don't ask me about IE, but even IE has revealed better CSS controls are on the way.

Jason Cranford Teague might have given the most interesting presentation. I have known Jason personally for over ten years and I can testify that his vision of the future of web development has been uncanny. He was one of the very first to author a book on CSS, and in fact later served as an advisor to the CSS W3C group. Now he is an evangelist for web design and his passion is releasing the artform of typography to the web.

As any designer knows, fontography online is a shadow of what is capable in print, film and other fixed media because of browsers, usage laws and technology. But there are now alternatives to system fonts and type displayed as bitmapped images.

Jason's new book presents three approaches to using a wide variety of fonts in web design and goes into depth in his explanation of just what fontography really is. After being an interactive creative director for more than a decade, I can say with authority that most of the web has become a sea of sameness because of the lack of font variety and the ability to design with fonts.

Fluid web typography will give artists access to over 100 thousand fonts versus the less than 5 that are typically used online. So take a look at embedded open type, license font servers and web-font linking. You just might realize another wave of innovation in web design is already here.

A couple of links worth reading:

MIX 2010: Microsoft Steps Up Its Game With Designers and UX (and Bill Buxton Destroys Las Vegas)

Monday, March 22, 2010 by Paul Hernacki

I recently had the opportunity to attend MIX 2010, Microsoft's annual conference for web designers and developers focused on building great user experiences, in Las Vegas, along with Definition 6's two interactive Creative Directors from Atlanta and New York.

MIX 2010 is highly unlike most other Microsoft conferences where the topics frequently focus on .NET, Exchange, Office, and Windows. Instead it's chock full of design and UX goodness - a geeky love fest for all the cool tech that goes into creating great web, mobile, desktop, kiosk, and other assorted technically enabled experiences using the Microsoft platform.

It's hard to argue that this isn't an arena in which Microsoft is still playing a lot of catch-up. Adobe Creative Suite and Flash/Flex are still easily the staple of most creative and design departments. And many people definitely hug their MacBooks and frantically wave their iPhones about when asked to provide examples of great user interface design. But if there was one thing abundantly clear at MIX 2010 it is that Microsoft has no plans to cede the battle on these fronts, they are rapidly catching up in many areas, and even appear to be leading the way in a few. Seriously.

Microsoft is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. And as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last year regarding questions as to why Microsoft doesn't cede such battles as Search and Advertising and retreat back home to their core Windows, Office, or SQL Server business lines, "We. Don't. Go. Home." Anyone who doesn't believe him should have been at MIX. And do you really have to look further than an example like the Xbox?

Probably the hottest subject of discussion and presentations was Windows Phone 7 Series. I am, admittedly, an avid iPhone user who stood in line the first week they came out. I happily ditched my old Windows Mobile device and it's BlackBerry predecessors back then to live in Apple's world and I've never been seriously tempted to use something else until I saw WP7.

I really believe WP7 is a game changer for Microsoft and the mobile industry. Sure, it has some shortcomings. I don't know how they could decide to not include copy-and-paste as a feature in the first release. And like iPhone, they also do not have application multi-tasking and they appear to have similarly stringent plans regarding their app store.

But the interface is fantastic, I love the "hub" metaphors, streaming video and even Xbox Live over the phone looked amazing. Not sure exactly how badly those things will kill battery life, but they sure looked impressive. For heavy Outlook users, the Outlook mobile experience on WP7 may alone be enough to get you to switch. Just awesome. And there's a chance it could finally be the breakthrough that Zune has been looking for.

Silverlight 4 is definitely another big step in the right direction. They continue to slowly chip away at adoption and now claim that it's at 60% market penetration, probably mostly attributable to the Olympics and adoption and rollouts of Windows 7.

Tools like Expression Blend keep getting better, and Sketchflow may even be better than the competition, it is simply cool. IE9 beta demos also got big buzz. It appears they have surpassed Firefox on overall performance, are coming close to Chrome in many aspects, and for certain functions like handling of video and HTML5 they could end up being even faster and better (when running on a Windows platform of course) by taking better advantage of your computer's processor and using a form of background hardware-based acceleration. The head-to-head examples showing some really slick use of animation and video in HTML5 were really amazing.

The one thing that Microsoft has which no one else can offer (not Google, not Adobe, not Apple, not anyone) is an end-to-end story on tools and capabilities in this arena. The depth and breadth of their tools and services is truly staggering when you put it all together. And I'm not just talking about the typical story of Windows + Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server. On top of that throw in Expression Studio with SketchFlow + Project "Dallas" + Azure + Silverlight + Surface + Windows Phone 7 + OpenData + IE9 + Bing Search and Maps and on and on. Sure you can poke certain holes in individual pieces versus their competitors. But the cohesive power of all that together makes for a truly impressive lineup.

There definitely were a few other good tidbits at MIX. Announcements around Orchard, freely available tools for WP7 development, great live streaming of Channel9 straight from the event, strengthening support for JQuery, and a surprising number of atypical logos on screens being talked about as friends (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, PHP, etc.).

And the keynotes included fantastic sessions by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu), VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, and great demonstrations by consummate tech presenter Scott Hanselman (@shanselman). But for me, the highlight of MIX was the opportunity to see Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, speak live. He is simply brilliant and one of the most passionate people alive when it comes to interface design and technology.

If you've never seen him speak it is worth your time to google (or bing) for videos of his speeches and spend an entire day just watching them. As the conference organizer, Microsoft's Thomas Lewis (@TommyLee), put it in a tweet during Bill Buxton's keynote: "OMFG! Buxton's brutality has destroyed Vegas! Only zombies, mushrooms & lavender frogs have survived! DESIGN IS GOD!". I couldn't have put it better myself. Buxton's speeches are often too filled with memorable lines to count, though my favorite at MIX included "The most important thing in the system is the wetware... the human being" during a segment where he described the importance of taking into account all the users different prior experiences within the specific environmental contexts of where, when and how they will use a system that you are designing.

Side note: I still don't understand how such an amazing guy who lives and breathes design and is considered the Father of Multi-Touch can have such a horrible personal web site, but I can only assume it's a "cobbler's children" thing.

And last but not least, the overall crowd and dynamic of the attendees at MIX was fantastic if not a bit quirky. It was a great group of highly intelligent people that are all passionate about great design and truly unafraid to ask the hard questions of Microsoft and dole out praise as well as tough love in person in the sessions and in torrents over Twitter. Unlike typical creative and design conferences it's definitely rooted in a true developer core (e.g. more guys still talking about compilers as opposed to a more mixed-gender crowd talking about heuristics and having used many tools like these for years), but unlike normal Microsoft conferences it's a large group of people who love great creative design and have been dying for Microsoft to bring these kinds of things to the table.

This conference in Vegas was more WXSW for geeks than it was the concurrently running SXSW, but Twitter and Foursquare definitely reigned supreme there as well as the tools that joined everyone together digitally during the sessions, into the evening, around the bars, and throughout the event. Sunday evening even kicked off the conference with a massive tweetup at the MIX Lounge at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. There is a real embrace of Twitter showing through by Microsoft that is really uncanny with regard to how they normally react to any tech service that they don't build and own.

At Definition 6, we do use a lot of tools and services across platforms including a very significant amount of work in the Microsoft platform. And we do use tools and design for platforms that are competitive to many of those that were showcased at MIX 2010. But there is no doubt that what we saw there has given us a lot to think about, some great ideas, and a few new weapons to put in our arsenal. We look forward to using many of these to create great solutions for our customers and to seeing them continue to evolve and improve.

Consider a Content Delivery Network to meet website performance needs

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Mike Reese

If you've heard of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) then you probably either work for one or you've had issues with website performance. Or maybe you believe that there is a potential concern with increasing website traffic and how your application will handle it. First of all, if you're facing the fear of an expanding user base, you've obviously done something right. So how do you avoid being the one left holding the bag while end-users fall off your site in droves? Maybe a CDN is the right way to go...but maybe not.

As a Technical Project Manager for Definition 6, I've had the opportunity to work with clients and projects that require, at least, an initial discussion regarding performance, and others who simply do not. Let me focus on those companies first. If you own a lead generation website that leverages alternatives means for producing sales and receives 2,000 - 5,000 unique visits daily, odds are, you're not going to need advanced performance capabilities. If you are noticing issues, then take a look at your production configuration. Are you on a shared solution? Are you serving up heavy, rich media content? Are your servers out-of-date and unmanaged. Take a closer look and you might find that the potentially expensive CDN solution isn't necessary.

But for website owners that are out of capitol to invest in peformance increasing devices for a struggling system, or for those that wish to provide enhanced, rich media content to users, then look at a CDN as a possible solution to your problems. I recently read a post on www.websitemagazine.com by Peter Prestipino in which he introduced TinyCDN (www.tinycdn.com). If you've researched CDN's, you know how expensive it can be, depending on the size of your content and frequency of delivery. TinyCDN is a good example of a feasible solution from a complexity standpoint and budget concerns.

If you're considering one of these options, hopefully you've taken the time to discover what is causing your website's slow performance. What you don't want to do is spend your budget on improving usability and find out after implementation of those changes that users are experiencing the same degraded performance. Take the time to baseline your performance metrics, from an application and server standpoint. There are numerous tools available that can provide these key metrics. Take a look at your analtyics package as well, what is it telling you? Application can't keep up with continuous requests? Or maybe you've had a dramatic increase in requests to view your new product video. If you're in a pinch, give something like TinyCDN a try. A band-aid solution might not be so bad if it's reasonably priced and avoids the loss of users.

Introducing the Interactive Roadmap

Friday, April 17, 2009 by Ira Gross

The mantra of our time seems to be “do more with less.” Nowhere in business is this sentiment more pronounced than marketing. With the economy in free fall and marketing budgets slashed to the bone, maintaining market share, let alone growing market share, is more difficult than ever. Enter the Interactive Marketing Roadmap.

One of the keys to “doing more with less” is reuse. Most marketing organizations spend a lot of resources developing marketing collateral for various tradition channels. These artifacts include direct mail pieces, television spots, brochures, catalogues and the like. The goal of the interactive marketing roadmap is to identify the optimal re-use of these items on the web. The challenge is to employ limited incremental spend to leverage existing assets created in traditional channels for re-purposing in the web channel. Definition 6 has spent a lot of time and intellectual capital trying to address this challenge. Via our Interactive Marketing Roadmap, you can get the benefit of this cumulative effort and knowledge base.

So let’s start with a simple example. Your company is about to launch a new product, so the marketing manager has created a new direct mail piece to explain the offering. For educational purposes, let us say that it cost one dollar for the design, development and distribution of the direct mail piece. And let us also assume the target market for this effort is 50,000 households. That would equate to a cost of $50,000 to reach 50,000 prospects, or $1.00 per prospect. If the piece got a 2% conversion rate, the program would be considered wildly successful. More likely, most of the direct mail pieces end up in the circular file. And identifying the one’s that didn’t is no easy task. Plus, the “shelf life” of the entire promotion is no more than a week or two.

Now, let us leverage the Interactive Marketing Roadmap. In this instance, we would identify the best re-use of the promotional direct mail package for the web. First, we would most likely turn the direct mail copy into a targeted email marketing campaign. The cost to turn the direct mail content into an email friendly version is a few thousand dollars. Then there is the cost of the email blast, usually no more than pennies per email. So we can spend $5,000 to make the direct mail piece email friendly, and spend an additional $2,500 on email distribution. At that point, we can blast the email to 100,000 prospects for roughly $7,500. Hence we tripled the total audience of the initial direct mail piece for an incremental spend of less than 20% of the cost of the original direct mail piece. And click through and conversion rates from targeted email marketing campaigns is in the 4% conversion range. At even less incremental cost we can add the direct mail piece to the website as new and additional content. This will boost natural SEO results. We can also allow the promotional coupon to be live on the website for an extended duration, thereby increasing its shelf life. And through all of these initiatives, we have the added value of web analytics to give us insight into who is actually receptive to our overtures, so we can do even better next time!

Now, imagine that you have multiple brands, each of which employ a wide range of traditional marketing tactics, and the messaging of those tactics varies by market. The Interactive Marketing Roadmap will literally map out the alignment of traditional and web programs across all of these brands, assets and markets to create a uniform, comprehensive marketing and tactical strategic plan. And we can create this plan in matter of weeks. That enables the marketing department to get the benefit of this analysis for the duration of the year. I consider that a prime example of “doing more with less.” And Definition 6 is the only online ad agency to offer such a service.

Seven Top Online Marketing Trends for 2009

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 by Michael Kogon

Business Development Exec, Rhonda Vincent, shares with us the 7 top online marketing trends for 2009…

For online marketers 2009 will be a challenging year, they’ll need to build the basis for future expansion, leveraging social media, emerging technologies and vendor partners who are thinking about their business and find ways to maximize their budgets. Here are 7 online marketing trends for 2009 that I came across on a ClickZ report:

• Increase customer retention efforts by marketing to your existing customer base – it’s cheaper and more effective because you know who they are and you understand their behavior.
• Create more attractive content – it will engage your customers and will help with your search engine optimization marketing
• Develop targeted marketing campaigns across a variety of mediums…e-mail, text messages, instant messages.
• Leverage online communities such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter…
• Increase your Web Analytics efforts
• Enhance search marketing advertising to expand across social media, mobile, and local search.
• Continue to integrate distribution channels despite higher cost

Interactive Ad Agencies like Definition 6 can leverage this insight to maximize your spends with the best ROI to get you through this year and still plan for 2010 initiatives.

Keep New Registrants Coming!

Friday, January 23, 2009 by Michael Kogon

Client Manager, Gabe Rand came across a Marketing Sherpa article discussing 6 steps on how a simple referral process can create a surge in registrations. The 6 steps mentioned in the article include preparing your email servers, building a referral page, building your email message, protecting the information, providing incentives and keeping the process as simple as possible.

Kiwibox's registration process has 3 simple steps:
1. choose a username
2. enter personal information
3. refer friends

After selecting which of your friends will receive the email and clicking the 'invite your friends' button, the registrants are dropped onto the welcome page where they being interacting. A screenshot of the welcome page is provided here as an example.

Login to Marketing Sherpa to learn how Kiwibox, an online magazine and social network for teens, launched a redesigned site and saw an immediate lift in their registrations. Contact Definition 6 to find out how we can help in the website integration process of a new or existing email service provider.

Messaging in the Browser

Thursday, January 15, 2009 by Michael Kogon

Technical Project Manager, Jason Norton, shares an article he recently came across about how Mozilla looks at the future of messaging...

"The web is an increasingly chatty place. Between following comment threads, checking in with friends on Twitter, reading a few blogs with RSS feeds, and conquering a mountain of e-mail, we have plenty of conversations to keep track of. Mozilla wants to help us on the conversational journey, which is why the company has launched Snowl, a new tool that offers a small glimmer of hope for those seeking communications nirvana.

Announced on the Mozilla Labs blog, the company presents Snowl with a simple question: "Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?" Snowl has materialized as a prototype Firefox extension based on a few key ideas:

• It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They're alike, whether they come from traditional e-mail servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.

• Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.

• A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.

• Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.

For its debut, Snowl only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter messaging, and it offers two UIs for reading. The first is a traditional three-pane setup where feeds and Twitter users are organized in a left sidebar, with a message list above the center column and a preview/reading pane below."

The traditional 3-pane list view

River View:

SharePoint is the way to go for an Enterprise 2.0 platform

Friday, December 26, 2008 by Michael Kogon

Definition 6 Client Manager, Andy McCann, recently presented an article to our group on how more and more companies are utilizing SharePoint as their next Enterprise 2.0 platform.

Recognizing Sharepoint's dominance in the Enterprise 2.0 space, many other Web 2.0 companies are now beginning to release and develop Sharepoint Web Parts and features that allow for easy integration into the Sharepoint environment. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's ability to build a huge Sharepoint user base is building a platform for partners to grow upon. This will allow for an even richer experience for Sharepoint users which in turn should help drive even larger adoption of Sharepoint which in turn should grow the number of available tie-ins to Sharepoint.

Andy pulled out three key points from his findings:

1. For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data - and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.
2. Microsoft and several partners announced new social networking, RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 technologies that allow integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 so users can integrate internal company data with outward-facing applications like external customer and partner communities. Awareness Inc., NewsGator Technologies Inc. and WorkLight Inc., for example, are all announcing updated versions of their Enterprise 2.0 tools integrated with SharePoint. Microsoft will also announce nine partners that have released or will release Enterprise 2.0 tools integrated with SharePoint.
3. Nine companies have recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology. Here is an example of how NewsGator launched their SharePoint add-on

To read the article in its entirety, go to: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sharepoint_to_run_enterprise_2.php

Contact us today to find out how Definition 6 works with clients to build and deploy Microsoft’s SharePoint applications.

Managed Services

Friday, December 12, 2008 by Michael Kogon

Companies are scaling back on their IT staff and supporting the often necessary multiple fully loaded FTE’s to monitor, manage and maintain their sever infrastructure. This is often seen as an expense they could more easily outsource and reduce costs on.

What We Deliver:
• Hosted or remote managed services for web and general Windows server infrastructure and most key network appliance devices
• A full range of per device monitoring and management services on a monthly basis. It can be done by hosting the devices with us or remotely, leaving all of the devices and network where they currently reside

Estimated timeframe for delivery: Monitoring services can begin in less than a week, management typically in less than 2 weeks. Contact us today for more information.

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