Another chapter in the great LinkedIn vs. Google Adwords debate
At cre8 we’ve used LinkedIn ads and AdWords for our own internal advertising for our CRM application Lead Zeppelin. LinkedIn didn’t generate the same number of customers for us that AdWords does, and we stopped using it. But we’re always willing to experiment, and one of our customers, a niche B2B firm has trouble advertising with Google. Not all the acronyms in their industry (and the synonyms for those acronyms!) are accepted by Google, and we were getting hammered by low quality scores.
So we gave LinkedIn a go, focusing exclusively on groups that pertained to their industry. The results have been dramatic. Three times more leads, at nearly half the cost! The LinkedIn clicks are more expensive – but they’re more likely to convert.
The moral of the story: If you have a product that fits a very specific niche, one that makes people scratch their heads at cocktail parties, LinkedIn may be the better deal, particularly if it is B2B.
After recently doing some work for our friends over at the Chicago Music Exchange, they just updated their Team page with some of our work. You can see our original design comp below:
If you're viewing this page in your mobile, save it as a bookmark (preferable in your Bookmarks Bar for easy access). Then, after adding it, edit the bookmark, replacing the URL with the script above. Now, when you want to view the source of page you're on, click over to your new bookmark!
In her column, Tough Customer, Anne Kadet of SmartMoney outlines some of the techniques employed by charities to drum up sales albeit by playing on your emotions. Many of these tactics could (and should) be tested by the rest of us as well:
[Donors] gave 66% more when they got a [photo of starving Ethopian child] and story line without the famine data. Statistics, it seems, “reduce empathy and interest in giving,” says Christopher Olivola, coeditor of the The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity.”
As you’d expect, potential donors gave more when they were told the fund had an excellent rather than a poor efficiency ratio. But the highest response came from the donors who were given no efficiency information at all. “People give less when they’re thinking analytically,” says Princeton psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer.
In an experiment with Sierra Club, researchers found donations increase 2.3% when prospects were told a major donor had made a big contribution. Rightly or wrongly, we assume a rich philanthropist has inside information about the quality of a charity. “People like to invest with a winner,” says John List, a University of Chicago economist. And when it comes to door-to-door fund raising, never underestimate the power of a pretty face. Researchers found that an attractive woman at the door could double the frequency of donations. And blondes raised 65% more than brunettes.
How can you apply these findings to your homepages or landing pages?
Chances are you’re already experimenting with social media. Odds are you may not have a blog or skipped over starting one. Finally, some of you may have already tried the social media thing and have abandoned profiles.
It’s hard coming up with blog posts, so you probably figured, hey I can put up some witty comments every day, that shouldn’t be too hard. Sometimes it isn’t, but getting people engaged should also be a goal too (not just clicking on links in your posts, but commenting, liking, etc.)
The beauty of Facebook and Twitter status’ is that they have to be short. If you look around, you probably have items or content that’s too large for one status or tweet. Like they say about eating elephants, let’s break ‘em down into sizable chunks.
Money quotes from publications. Do you have a book (or column?) Congratulations, you have have a year’s worth of micro content right there. Go thru your writings and highlight the ‘money quotes’ for status postings. Even better are statements that contain opinions, advice or other debatable elements. Make your statement and follow it up with “what do you think?” or something similar, that’s just asking for interaction by your more engaged followers.
Events. Any time you or your company has a customer event, attending an industry event or something similar, put out a date and link to it. Don’t have any? Find any other events in your (and your customer’s) industry that you think your followers may find interesting and helpful.
Photos. If you have any customer events, take photos, even with your crappy mobile phone camera (it’ll make it look more ‘authentic’). Remember, you’re bringing your followers along for the ride. No events? If you’re in the products business, new photos will lapped up by your most loyal followers. see: Porsche, Audi . Foodie? Girl and the Goat, Alinea.
Videos. Creating videos is becoming more accessible every day. If you have TV commercials, even easier. See: Chicago Music Exchange.
Contests. Give away your product or service. Better yet, drive registrants to your other channels i.e. Follow us on Facebook/Twitter for a chance to win, or sign up for our newsletter. see: Matt & Tamsen.
Blog content. We’ve always been keen on making your blog your epicenter of your social media strategy. Longer postings, announcements, how-to’s, reviews and more can be posted on your website’s blog. Send out beacons to your blog content on your various channels. As mentioned above, stick a question afterwards to engage social media followers to like/comment too. See Snooth.
Many of our customers are experimenting with social media with varying degrees of success. The first thing we ask folks when they want us to manage their social media for them is what is their ultimate goal? “To get more traffic to my website”. Ok, that’s a good start. Does “more traffic” pay your rent? Thought not. Ah, you want more sales, more leads. Now you’re talking our language. And, more importantly, something we like to measure and test.
Those tweets, pokes and likes can add up after time, but you really should commit at least 90-120 days to get your social media campaign ramped up and getting measurable results. Much like a new diet or workout, you have to commit some time and resources to it to see some results. If you bail after two weeks, well, guess we’ll both never know how it could have worked out.
A day doesn’t go by without getting a request for a customer to be “number one on Google search results”. While we never promise that to anyone, there is something even far better they should be considering. Why just settle for being on page one of Google? Why not dominate the first page? Think about it… check out these search results for a client of ours. Yeah, they’re number one, but they also have number 2, 3, 4 and 5.
You don’t have to have hundreds of followers on Facebook or Twitter to benefit from this. By referencing your product or service in your Tweets or Facebook posts (and linking back to your site/blog), you’re getting some additional link juice from these activities, AND claiming some real estate on the search engines. As a business owner, I’d take 4-5 links on page one even if I couldn’t get one link at spot one.
With this age of Facebook, blogging, Twitter and more, do people still send out newsletters? Yes! Its great to monitor the conversation of your product or service outside of your company walls in the social networks, but you should still keep a strong, curated message coming from home base.
We discussed in our last post whether an email address is worth more than a Twitter follower. Our experience has shown that Facebooking and Tweeting can certainly help with SEO but for some customers, a regular email tying back to content on their website, can certainly give them a needed boost.
The spikes in the graph above are on the days when our client sends out their weekly email, usually containing an excerpt from their latest blog posts, tempting folks to click thru with the help of a juicy cliffhanger link. Usually a couple other topics are added to the email newsletter like upcoming events or special offers, to capture the reader’s attention, if the primary content isn’t interesting enough for them.
Before we began helping with this client’s email newsletters, they were putting unique content into the newsletters that couldn’t be found elsewhere. That’s a great tactic to get people to signup for your newsletters, but not to get people to re-visit your website. Now, by moving their interesting content to their website’s blog, the newsletter can be a beacon, bringing people back to the website. Sure, we’ll post links to the blog posts and events on Twitter and Facebook too, but don’t forget email as a trusty channel in your marketing plans.
Is an email address worth more than a Twitter follow?
I had a prospective customer explain to me (after asking if they were capturing emails for a newsletter):
“We kind of think of Twitter and Facebook registrations as a way to promote our blog posts and ad messages. So this is a form of newsletter”
Using these other channels to promote your blog is great; drive prospects back to your website.
No, having fans on Twitter and Facebook does not replace capturing prospect’s emails for a newsletter. Its like the pretty girl letting you sit next to her at the lunch table, but won’t give you her phone number.
People are going to recommend you to their followers, or complain about you, whether they’re “following” you or not. These days, people will more readily follow you on Twitter or Facebook (hey what’s one more…). But giving you their email? That’s gold. They don’t want to have to go the trouble of having to unsubscribe to your email, (or order call blocking or get a restraining order). Giving you their email address is a whole different level of trust. Mess that up and they’ll mark you as spam in Gmail, so don’t be a creep.
Get them to follow you on the various networks because they care what you say and think. Get their email addresses and show them you value their time and loyalty.
Posted on September 27, 2010 by Eric Gockel | Leave a comment
Facebook Places, Badges and Then Some
I spent some time this week playing around with Facebook‘s new Places functionality, going against FourSquare, et al. Some first impressions:
The Nearby feature isn’t as robust as in other iPhone apps such as Yelp‘s. I often found myself having to search for where I currently was standing in Facebook vs. Yelp pretty much having my current location in the first page of their results (i.e. Girl and the Goat).
It makes more sense to check into Places vs. Yelp. Your friends are on Facebook (most are) and check there a couple times a day. Yelp? I really only go there when I’m looking for a new place to check out (not to check in with friends)
How do I check out? Facebook says you are “are at” somewhere, but doesn’t give a way for you to “check out” of somewhere. Presumably this gets updated when you check in at the next place you go to. However I’m not that OCD about checking in everywhere I go, and certainly not when I get home (privacy)
Speaking of Privacy. Facebook’s default settings are set to publish publically when you check in somewhere. In my case I first tried it at Binny’s, a liquor store here in Chicago. While there, I could see some other guy was checked in too! (creepy!). Might come in handy when looking for your friends at the mall or at the nightclub, but in mass social situations, call me an introvert, I’d rather stay in the background. Luckily you can change this setting in your Facebook privacy settings, so only your friends (not the whole world) can see when you’re presently somewhere, or recently there.
Finally, what’s in it for me? I’ve heard stories about people not wanting to leave town so they don’t lose their “mayor” status, but if business’ aren’t giving premiums for loyalty (i.e. similar to your swipe card at the grocery store), why fanatically check in everywhere you go?
Further, if you’re a local business trying to jump on this “check in” bandwagon, which wagon do you jump in on? Facebook, FourSquare, or Yelp? As with everything, test, test and test some ‘mo. It’s easy to set up monitoring of your popularity on these networks. If you see one spiking over the others, consider sticking your toe in the water and offering a deal for frequent customers.
Interesting note, while singing up for FourSquare, it asks your “hometown” and then uses that as your current location. Maybe I’m an anomaly, but I moved away from my hometown?
Check back next week for our experience notes on FourSquare!
While spending a few days in Montreal last week, I wanted to take advantage of the social web to help give recommendations of where we should go. My wife had picked up the prerequisite Fodor’s book for the city, but I insisted on letting the intertubes guide our journey (along with AT&Ts roaming charges, ouch)
Being a Yelp user and seeing as how they had a decent number of listings for Montreal, I downloaded their iPhone app. And I do have to say, with its “nearby” function and “directions to Business” function, it really does blow away carrying around a fat guidebook. While checking the Google map directions to our next destination, I commented to my wife:
“Carrying around a Fodor’s book instantly labels you as a ‘tourist’, while checking your iPhone while walking down the street merely labels you as a ‘geek’”
While using the handy “nearby” feature (I choose restaurants for all 3 nights using this feature) I thought I’d try out the “check in” feature. I’ve seen other people I’ve been following on Facebook and Twitter occasionally “check in” using services such as Foursquare (aka “rob my house”).
I chose to use Yelp for checking in since I’m an active user on Yelp, and post reviews to contribute to the ecosystem that does so well giving me recommendations, it only made sense. For example, check out Foursquare’s page for Cafe Ba Ba Reeba vs. Yelp‘s . Yelp has star ratings, nearby links and venue information (and deals)
But, much to my chagrin, this feature left much to be desired. Sure, my check-in’s could make me a “Duke”, but there was no way for me to access my check-ins after logging into their website (not via my iPhone). I can add “tips” when checking in somewhere, but not a full review. Which was fine with me. I figured I could log into the website later to review my list of check-ins and use that as my reminder list of places I recently visited to post a full review. Not So. I tweeted them about this, no word back yet.
Badges
Other services such as Foursquare go a step further with their badges and appoint ‘mayors’ to people who frequent places more than other users.
Starbucks has latched on to this, giving special offers to its ‘mayors’. This tactic may work work for chains with hundreds of outlets, but for mom and pop’s with only one location or two? You really don’t want to reward the one super customer over your dozens of steady regulars?
Take an Idea from Amazon
This made me think of Amazon with their review system, but also of their Associates program. I can post a review of a product I’ve purchased on Amazon, but if I blog or use some other social media outlet, I can add links to products with my referral code and get a referral bonus when people click the links and actually purchase something. Now that would add more value to these “check in” features sites are using today. Its one thing to broadcast to your 4 twitter followers that you’ve just checked in to Starbucks and just bought a Latte, but if your followers were to then click thru on your link, perhaps the business could give you a discount or coupon on their service for referring business. That’s much more powerful.
If you have (or are thinking of) a blog for a business, these tips play a key role in lead nurturing and educating prospects. If you don’t already have a strategy, try these:
Create thought leadership content
Add a human touch
Provide insight into company and products/services
While reviewing a client’s engagement process today for one of their services, I noticed a few things they could improve upon:
1. Deliver Your Promise.
The promo link from their site promised one thing, but after registering, what I wanted (and was promised) could not be found. If this client’s goal was to merely capture my email address to spam me later for another service (or worse, rent it from a list), he succeeded. But did he? If the unsuspecting registrant (me) were to ever receive an email from this service (or something vaguely resembling it) they’d surely mark it as spam. Long term strategy fail.
2. Just Give Me What I Asked For
I didn’t get one email after registering for my promotional content that I requested, but two! One was about the service (I had actually only signed up for a sample report, not the “service”) and the second email was long-winded with instructions on how to retrieve my special report. Jeebus man, just get to the point and give me the link!
3. Keep It Focused
After orientating myself with the retrieval instructions, I clicked a few links, logged in and ended up on what appeared to be an overview page for their entire service (and then some). Most of the content was inaccessible to me since I just had just signed up for the little trial freebie. To boot, the particular item I had requested was not available. If they had just a dedicated page with “here is the content you requested”, it would have went a long way to reinforcing their brand in my brain (really!). It’s called keeping a ‘scent’ for your prospect, if they land on your page or website and they don’t see anything that smells like your previous page, email or link was talking about, they’re gone, my friends.
Times are tough, we know. It’s even harder to imagine “nurturing” a prospect vs. pouncing on them with every offer you have, relevant or otherwise. Don’t. In the case above, they could have kept it light and simple. I gave them my email (and permission). They could have sent a follow up email a week later asking what I thought about the content piece I downloaded, or forwarded me relevant (!) offers in the future.
Are you afraid you’re not giving prospects enough options? Try giving them less, and keep them relevant and on-brand. You don’t want to lose a prospect, but you don’t want to damage your reputation either to cause prospects to leave the (virtual) room the next time you come around.
I had a call from one of our customers the other day asking about search engine optimization (SEO). They were concerned about their SEO efforts and wanted to know how I could reassure them that we were doing the right thing and how it could be verified. First, they had the basics nailed: full product names, H1 and Title tags, Image Alt attributes, keywords in links. But they had bunk for most of their product descriptions.
No Secrets
First, we don’t try to employ SEO voodoo here. If you invest a couple hours, you can Google most of the basics yourself. It’s been pretty well documented on best-practices, how to code your pages, what tags to use, et al. How to track how you’re doing? Hopefully you’re using a program like Google Analytics with some goals set up, so you can track referring websites and referring keywords. From that, you should get an idea of what’s moving the dial on your website, and where you could perhaps do some tweaking.
SEO Goes Beyond Your Website
Even after you’ve got all the tags right, there’s still link building and channels. Do you have your site listed in all the appropriate directories, submitted to the search engines? Are you linking to your site from your social presences, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others? Are your press releases SEO friendly?
Content Will Save You
Even if you manage to botch up all of the above, good, juicy, keyword-laden content will make the search engines happy—and encourage other websites to link to your creative, original content which is hard to come by these days. That’s right. Focus on the content, update your website, early and often.
Your Website is the Main Channel
Post content on your website FIRST. Don’t put tasty tidbits of orphan content in your email newsletters, nowhere to be found on your website. Facebook is great, but those channels are to get people back to your website to transact. If you have a new product, service, case study or anything interesting to say, post it on your website first. Then be sure to follow up on your other properties with links back to your website. Your fans can feel free to pan or rave about your postings in the social ‘spheres (that’s what they’re for), just remember to drive them back to your site so you can close the deal.
Post Something Today
Find something to say to your prospects today. Have you expanded your service hours or offerings, added a product line or have a new prominent customer? Put it out there. Make a practice once a week to ask yourself what happened interesting in the last week. After awhile you’ll get better at remembering topics as they come up to make a blog post or add a case study for (this post was one of three that came to me this evening).
Posted on July 06, 2010 by Eric Gockel | Filed under SEO | Leave a comment
Tools of the Trade
I've been wanting to write this post for awhile, just to let some of our customers in on our process and the tools that we use. Hopefully they may pick up a few ideas for their own business, based on our own experience running ours for over a decade.
Lead Management
It all starts with a lead, doesn't it? This is so important, I decided we should build our own web application for this, Lead Zeppelin. Granted, there are plenty out there already, but we just needed something simple that we could wire up to our website, track deals and reminders for bids and follow ups. Follow up is key! Many of our own customers have admitted that they suck at follow up. You don't have to remember everything (you can't!) so let your little computer be your nag and worry about the one hundred other things on your plate.
Project Management
We've been using Basecamp for about as long as it has existed. It truly simplifies project management, and makes our team of remote workers collaborate as if they were right down the hall. Our customers like being able to 'check in' and see what's still on deck with the to-do's and milestones, or see what got completed yesterday on the dashboard.
Time Tracking
After trying a few systems, we settled on Harvest. The only reason we don't use their nice invoicing system too is because we still have messy accounting things to take care of via QuickBooks. There are a number of 'invoicing' systems out there, but many don't manage everything from end-to-end, they may track hours, but if you have to expense items that were purchased on your credit card, and track that credit card as a payable as well, you're still gonna need some accounting system.
Payroll
We just signed up with Intuit Online Payroll to handle our quarterly filings and cutting paychecks. We'll follow up with a post on our experience.
Content Management System
We eat our own dog food here and the the cre8 website is powered by the ExpressionEngine content management system. We had worked with a few CMS' over the years, but have settled on specializing in EE. It has the best blend of developer-friendly features and user-friendliness (for non-nerds adding content). For our .net friends, we do handle DotNetNuke CMS too.
HTML, PHP Coding & FTP
John, KC and I all use Coda for the Mac for coding. It's a hand-coding app with built in SVN. Carolynn here (on the PC) uses DreamWeaver.
Version Control
We've been using Beanstalk for a few years now and love it. Its great for collaborating with multiple people and especially when we are sharing website updates with clients. Bonus: clients get a backup of their website.
Page and Email Testing Litmus gets used here almost daily, checking out pages and emails across a variety of popular browsers and email clients. It's a lot easier than firing them all up on our end individually. And, we can share the test screenshots with clients to show them how their pages and emails fare.
Image Editing Photoshop has been a mainstay for me, and have been using it for years. It's not cheap, but it does everything. Carolynn and John also use Fireworks.
Browsing
Recently switched from Firefox as our primary browser to Google Chrome. It [seems] faster, less hanging.
Mobile Phones
We have service with AT&T for our phones -- I have an iPhone (1st gen) and a Bluetooth Plantronic headset. We just 'upgraded' Carolynn's phone to a Backberry Curve 9300 for testing purposes. In addition, we do have a Google Voice number and are thinking about making that our primary number and routing system.
Chat/Video
We primarily use Skype around the office here to talk to (and see!) our peeps abroad. Other than that we use MSN Messenger.
The website needed a design refresh, better content organization, and most importantly, an easy way for staff to make updates themselves. To accomplish that, we leveraged the ExpressionEngine Content Management System (CMS). We worked closely with Aharon Solomon from IGSB to arrive at a clean, easy-to-navigate design worthy of an institute working on the The Chicago Cancer Genome Project and other notable initiatives.
A feature story/image rotator was custom-built and integrated into the CMS, allowing IGSB to add images and links to stories and research independently, as needed.
While the new CMS is only scratching the surface of possible functionality, a few popular sections like Research Papers, News and Seminars & Events are now getting better visibility thanks to the CMS. IGSB can add an item which will show up in the corresponding section as well as the most recent will bubble up to the homepage as well as update RSS feeds.
IGSB needed an easy way to manage their 140+ staff and fellows directory and the new CMS gives them exactly that. People can also be associated with labs, research papers and more.
As IGSB staff are added as editors and contributors to the new CMS, the website will only continue to grow and serve the scientific community as a source of knowledge and inspiration.
CBOE came to us with a new website redesign that was done for them in early 2009. The new templates needed to be integrated into their current website, merging CSS where necessary. Also, new interactive modules utilizing jQuery needed to be programmed. It all came together January 2010 when the new CBOE.com was launched. Here are some highlights of our participation:
Template Development Along the way, we discovered that a template wasn't provided for wider than normal pages (i.e. option chains listings). Since the new site required the myCBOE module on the right sidebar, we were limited in width with the provided templates. We debated about converting the entire site to a fluid, 'stretchy' layout. In the end, we developed an adaptable, fluid template for use only on wider pages as needed. John Reed did his usual magic and managed to make it all come together.
One other custom piece we created was a calendar UI for Earnings and CBOE events
Navigation The old website had unwieldy double-column dropdown menus. We worked with CBOE to streamline their menu options and provide clean, single-column dropdown menu lists.
Horizontal navigation indicators were also designed for in-page navigation
Copywriting Carolynn Gockel worked with CBOE to create informative and compelling intro copy for many of the top level pages.
Education Center An important piece in the new website. We helped make some minor revisions to the Education 'card' that appears in various places across the site which displays your progress, next steps and resources.
User Segmentation Flash A prominent piece on the new homepage is the Flash module on top which allows the user to select which section is most relevant to them: Individual Investors, Institutional Investors, Advisors, Members or Media. We assisted with functional and programming improvements on this piece to make the content easier to manage for CBOE.
Teamwork Of course, the internal team at CBOE.com had to do the heavy lifting of wiring up the new templates and scripts to the existing website. Raj, Brad, Hua, Kan, Doug and many others at CBOE did a fantastic job pulling it all together.
We’ve always prided ourselves on cross-browser compatibility with the sites we develop for our clients here at cre8. Most recently, we raised the bar by optimizing our own website for the iPhone.
The initial release of Safari for the iPhone made nearly all web content (Flash excluded) more accessible, but we thought we could — and should — do better. After switching to table-less layouts some years ago, the pros continue to outweigh the challenges faced by mastering CSS for presentation, and this became even more apparent when creating an iPhone-targeted stylesheet.
But before diving into any tech-speak, let’s take a quick look at the before and after views of our About Us page.
Who we were
The two screenshots below show the full page upon initial load (image 1), and the main content column after zooming in (image 2).
At first glance, not too bad: the user gets a view of the entire page and can focus on the body copy without a lot of fuss. But “not a lot” of fuss didn’t cut it. For starters, unless browsing in landscape mode, a user would have to strain their eyes or zoom in to read what we have to offer, and our navigation was even more difficult to make out.
Image 1 (before):About Us page on initial page load. While all page content is visible, the majority of the copy is illegible.
Image 2 (before): Zooming in helps the situation, but our tagline (“Web Strategy & Design Agency”) is now obscured. The font-size proportions are also distorted.
Who we are
The next screenshot (image 3) is our About Us page seen with an iPhone-targeted stylesheet, no zooming or scrolling necessary. The body copy and navigation bar are clear and easy to read, and the proportions between heading and copy font-sizes match our site when viewed on a desktop browser. Our logo and tagline are also legible and equally accessible at the top of the screen. A much better first impression for our visitors, to say the least.
Image 3 (after): No need to zoom. Body copy, site navigation, logo and tagline are all clear and legible.
The nitty-gritty
So how did we do this, anyway? As mentioned before, beginning with clean, semantic markup made this optimization possible without re-structuring any of our HTML templates. All differences seen are a result of an iPhone-targeted CSS.
iPhone users, please identify yourselves
Almost easier done than said. With PHP, this is as simple as checking for the string “iPhone” within the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] variable, and serving up a different CSS.
Or rather, bump up the font-size. In standard browsers, we set the font-size for our body tag to 62.5% (most browsers have a default body font-size of 16px, so this translates to 10px, making the em-to-pixel conversion a cinch — 1em = 10px), but this is just too small for the iPhone. We found that 30px was a nice, legible baseline.
Images too small? Force-resize!
No, seriously. Safari handles resized images without a hiccup, and we used that to our advantage.
The <img /> tag for the cre8 logo has a parent node with a unique id attribute, and the photos in our About Us page bios have the same parent elements, so just two declarations handled the job of resizing four images.
Explicitly declaring width and height worked great in these cases, as the position and context of the images are predictable. But what about images that change depending on the orientation of the iPhone? Take the hero image on our homepage as an example.
This image takes up the full width of the viewport, which increases from 320px wide in portrait mode to 480px wide in landscape, so how can we handle this situation? One method involves using an @media query to determine the device orientation.
This approach has clear advantages (for one, no scripting is required), but in this case it also requires us to calculate the height of our hero image in proportion to the viewport width. We didn’t want to be locked into the same width/height ratio or have to update our CSS every time we change the height of this image, so we had to find another solution.
Give ‘em 100%
Or 90%, or whatever you choose. Set an element’s width to a percentage and the height to “auto”, and Safari will do the rest.
.promo img {
width: 100%;
height: auto;
}
With this simple declaration, our hero image fills out our homepage in both portrait (image 4) and landscape (image 5) modes.
Image 4: cre8 homepage, portrait mode
Image 5: cre8 homepage, landscape mode
That’s that (for now)
We’re constantly trying to improve the user experience, and we hope you find browsing cre8 on the iPhone a breeze. Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts, or contact us if you need your site optimized for the iPhone.
...or rather, the air is in the bag. Our home-grown web app, Lead Zeppelin has taken off and is accepting beta testers!
What is Lead Zeppelin? Our attempt for an easy-to-use customer relationship management (CRM) web application to manage your leads and customers. What drove me to want to create our own (yes, there are others out there), is that a number of our customers have a basic website with a basic contact form. But your inbox is no place to manage your leads.
Some of our customers have asked for a place that they can manage these leads separately, outside of their inbox. For most of our small business owners (SMB), building a custom webapp can be cost prohibitive. After seeing a few requests like this, we decided we’d build one ‘for the masses’.
The key part, to me, is connecting your form on your website to your CRM. There are some CRMs now that have this ability, or you can stitch it together thru a couple APIs, but most of our customers are small, busy, businesses and don’t want to hassle with multiple app integrations and signups. They also don’t have the time to learn an app that has more features than they need. They just want to go one place and see their leads.
Further, some of our customers are having great success with lead generation from using Google Adwords, landing pages, and the like. But, they suck at follow up. And they admit it. So, this is somewhere we feel the Zeppelin can help. Along with reminding you that you have new leads to qualify and keeping track of your closing ratio, we plan to build in tools and reminders to help cultivate your leads into customers.
Altho our webapp can be classified as customer relationship management (CRM), I’d like to think that it puts more emphasis on the prospect. Perhaps we’ll use the Blue Ocean Strategy and create a new category, Prospect Relationship Management (PRM). But I don’t want to go too far with that, as this webapp can certainly be used as “cradle-to-grave”, helping you convert leads into customers, retaining your important notes and files generated while in the conversion process well after they’ve become a customer generating referrals for you.
Posted on September 19, 2009 by Eric Gockel | Leave a comment
Free Form Validation
Well, free in the context of saving a server hit or springing JavaScript validation messages on your users. What I thought was common knowledge, apparently is not. If you haven’t been using the maxlength attribute on your form fields, you don’t know what you’ve been missing.
You may have restrictions in your database of 25 characters for a particular field, but why not also put that limit in the form too? ProActive Validation™ we like to call it. Keep your users from hurting themselves.
I was talking to a customer today who had mentioned that they had obtained a large list of emails from their main office for prospects that hadn’t been closed yet. It may seem like they’re doing you a favor (hey, free leads!), but if you end up emailing these people, you’re really spamming them.
If you use an outside service like ConstantContact, or even ours, Ocho, we have strict anti-spam checks and balances in place. Because:
Spam is any email you send to someone who hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them on the topic of the email.
So that list of 10k emails from the corporate office, of people that never ended up completing their online account openings or made an initial deposit? They didn’t give you, the separate branch, or dealership, permission to send them emails. You don’t like it when you get those types of emails either. Don’t be that person.
OK then, who CAN I send emails to? Here’s who:
They opted in via your web site
This could either be through a newsletter subscribe form or by checking a checkbox on another form. This checkbox cannot be checked by default (sneaky!) and it must clearly explain that checking it will mean you will be contacting them by email.
They completed an offline form and indicated they wanted to be emailed
If someone completes an offline form like a survey or enters a competition, you can only contact them if it was explained to them that they would be contacted by email AND they checked a box indicating they would like to be contacted.
They gave you their business card
If someone gives you their business card and you have explicitly asked for permission to add them to your list, you can contact them. If they dropped their business card in a fishbowl at a trade show, there must be a sign indicating they will be contacted by email about the specific topic.
They purchased something from you in the last 2 years
By making a purchase from you they have provided their permission implicitly. Feel free to email them but at the same time, we think it’s always better to ask anyway, so why not include an opt-in checkbox as part of the checkout process.
Just to be clear, these following scenarios don’t mean its OK:
You obtained the email addresses from a third party
Whether you purchased a list, were provided one by a partner or bought a bankrupt competitor’s customer list, those people never gave YOU permission to email them and they will consider your email spam. No matter the claims of the source of this list, you cannot email them using our system (nor should you via other systems).
You scraped or “copy and pasted” the addresses from the Internet
Just because people publish their email address doesn’t mean they want to hear from you.
You haven’t emailed that address for more than 2 years
Permission erodes after time. Even if you got their permission legitimately, they won’t remember giving it to you. If you haven’t sent something to that address in the last 2 years, you really shouldn’t start now.
While doing some Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) for a customer, I noticed today that even if you delete a blog post on MySpace, it will still appear in your activity stream. Seems the only way to get that removed is to quickly carry out at least 5 new actions to push it off the list.
But why MySpace? Oh, its just but one in the necessary web of cross-linking properties to help give juice to positive stories about your company (or person). Our current inventory of sites include:
43things
Alltop
Blogger
corkd
delicious
digg
Facebook
friendfeed
last.fm
LinkedIn
Windows live
mybarackobama (depending on your political leanings)
MySpace
Posterous
Naymz
Netvibes
Newsvine
Plurk
Spoke
Stumbleupon
Twitter
VisualCV
Wetpaint
Wise Guides
Wordpress
Yahoo
Yelp
YouTube
Zoominfo
Posterous has become really handy with its ability to let you simply send it an email and (after getting it setup), auto-posting to your blogs, twitter and other places simultaneously.
Be sure to leverage the Google Profile feature too, if you haven’t already. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are.
Each site has a profile area you can manage where you can usually post links to other sites or profiles you have on the web, this is where you cross-link up as many of the sites to each other as you can. Then when you have company, personal or product news, be sure to link out to it from your new network. Rinse, repeat. It may take a couple months to start pushing the bad sites out of view, but the more new content you can link to the better, preferably something that would get picked up by other sites (press releases), or news sites with a high page rank.
Stop the presses, er, um start them! We just polished off an update to CNX's latest print ad (yes, we do print too)
CNX just released Valence v1.2 so if you’re an RPG developer, or know someone who is…send them CNX’s way and get them to upgrade their apps from green-screen land.
The folks at TechTarget were cool enough to give Richard over at CNX Corp some airtime and posted his Valence demo up on YouTube. Some of our work can been seen from the video including the tradeshow booth design, the Valence and CNX logo designs, as well as some interface design on the Valence web app itself.
After completing 5 EE websites, we’ve joined the Expression Engine Pro Network. After working with a number of content management systems, we’ve chosen EE as our preferred platform. Along with a flexible system that has a boatload of features right out of the box, more importantly, the interface is pretty nice to use for our customers.
Posted on April 20, 2009 by Eric Gockel | Filed under News | Leave a comment
Pardon Our Dust
We’re migrating our site to the ExpressionEngine content management system (CMS) this week, so we’re eating our own dog food, so to speak. You may run across more than the normal amount of weirdness with our site. Not to worry though, pages will be polished shortly.
If you’re tired of paying your web designer (or agency) to make simple updates, you should really contact us about getting set up with a CMS. In addition to this website, these are some other sites that we’ve hooked up with EE:
Stroik Architects Site Redesign. A Religious Experience.
We hope you feel the same way when you visit Duncan G. Stroik Architect’s new website. Beautiful, ecclesiastical architecture. And, its running on the ExpressionEngine content management system (CMS).
We’ve been working with the Options Industry Council to enhance some of their current landing pages, such as Getting Started in Options. We’ve reorganized some of the content based on their key performance indicators (KPIs), turning it inside out almost, giving users quicker access using deep links to content and increasing traffic to previously buried podcasts.
We’ve done a little design work too on pages like Online Classes, giving the page some life by adding some happy, smiling traders and warming it up a little. Bold, color-coded categories help direct visitors to the categories most appropriate for them.
We rolled out a redesign for CNX Corp today along with a spanking new logo. We also designed the logo for (and named) their new web application framework product, Valence.
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