11.07.08

Small Giants

Small Giants outlines a refreshing trend of what its author calls ‘a new class of great companies’ who have consciously chosen a way of business that embraces notions of profitability and in some cases employee profit sharing while maintaining an equal focus on other non-financial priorities such as community service, being the best at what you do, embracing life/work balance, and creating a great place to work. By remaining privately owned and thus not beholden to the bottom line needs of shareholders, these companies have replaced the rapid growth cycle so common in corporate America with a set of characteristics that makes them truly unique in today’s business landscape. These are what Bo Burlingham refers to as small giants.

Each small giant, he purports, has a certain mojo that helps define it as such. What makes up that mojo differs from company to company but recurring characteristics tend to be a strong commitment to employees, community service, charity, life/work balance, flexible rules and regulations, and a general open book policy about management. The businesses profiled have incorporated different practices into the fabric of their respective company cultures but the end result is a trend of happiness and fulfillment in the workplace for all involved, a community that respects them, and committed employees who stay on for the long haul. Each of these elements contribute to the organization’s overall long-term success and the mojo of which Burlingham speaks.

Unique Approaches
The case studies range from companies as small as a single person to those with thousands of employees. Some companies, like Righteous Babe Records, Anchor Brewing or Clif Bar & Co., are product-focused while others, such as CitiStorage, or Chicago’s own The Goltz Group, owners of Artist’s Frame Service on Clybourn, offer services to their clientele. Each company’s approach to business is unique, their structures differ wildly from one to the next, and they couldn’t be more divergent in terms of what they sell, but all maintain a commitment to the communities in which they do business as well a razor-sharp focus on customer satisfaction and building long-term relationships with their clients.

Going Public
Another thing that all these companies have in common is that they have consciously decided against going public. They have rejected opportunities for expansion and profit in exchange for freedom and control. For some that decision was fraught with difficulties. Gary Erickson of Clif Bar & Co. was offered $120 million by a “midwestern food conglomerate” that some have identified as Quaker Oats in early 2000. On the day of the deal he backed out in the name of independence and ended up having to pay his then partner $65 million over five years at a time when he had only $100,000.00 in his bank account. Yet somehow in an atmosphere giant food conglomerates out to crush it, Clif Bar & Co. more than doubled its sales to $92 million in just a few years without taking on any outside investors or expanding its workforce. For Erickson and others in the book, decisions like these, difficult though they may be, are well worth it.

“In business, after all, it’s easy to confuse size with greatness,” Burlingham says, “and getting bigger and getter better. When you stop and think about it, the connections between the two are tenuous at best, but--with all the attention paid to getting big and growing fast--it’s easy to understand why most of us tend to equate them. By deciding to go for greatness rather than bigness, the small giants remind us that the two are not the same...”

Required Reading
This book should be required reading for any would-be entrepreneur, small business employee or MBA student. Though I am a business owner, I don’t often get excited about reading purely business-related books. In my off-time I’d much prefer to read about design trends or learn a new After Effects or Flash technique, or better yet dive into a good novel or short story collection (it’s that life/work balance thing). Small Giants is a notable exception, however, one that has reinvigorated my aspirations for both life and work and helped me reconsider what I want out of each.

Barack Obama said in his presidential acceptance speech “Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.” Companies like those outlined in Small Giants have already taken a massive leap forward in making this statement a reality. I hope that I can as well.

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11.04.08

Adobe getting good at audio? Who woulda thunk it.

It seems like everybody and their mother is writing some kind of article about CS4. Being that I’m particularly susceptible to peer pressure, I’ve decided to chime in as well. Yes, I’m half lemming. No, I do not prize my individuality. Yes, I would jump off a bridge if my friends did too. Just like in Lost Boys. So sue me.

I come from a mostly video background, and so the big Adobe releases don’t usually get me as excited as, say, a new version of Final Cut Pro might. That said, at least half of my work day seems grasped tightly in an Adobe headlock. Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator… I can scarcely imagine a workflow without them now. But I have never really taken Premiere seriously, and I don’t think I’m the only one. This edition comes with the new ability to use blend modes for overlapping footage, which is nifty but not unique among editing suites, and you can have multiple video standards (SD and HD in the same project for instance) which is just par for the course nowadays. The further new addition of being able to scrub audio tracks is neat but not really that useful. I’ve always found the idea of editing in an Adobe environment interesting, though, especially when it comes to something like importing Photoshop lower thirds.

After Effects is a great program, and there were so many new additions in the last release, I was not at all surprised to see that the CS4 version has mostly functionality improvements rather than crazy new tools. Though I am totally going to use that new Cartoon effect as soon as I get the chance. Encore seems fine and all, but I know DVD Studio Pro a lot better at this point, and why change? Fireworks is useful for prototyping, surely, but I’m more of a dive-right-in-and-make-it kind of guy. And as a musician, Soundbooth always seemed like a mysterious Tron-like throwback, a sound editor from a previous era when home computers were brand-spankin’-new and teased hair was in. (Cue any Frankie Goes to Hollywood song here).

That said, this release has only truly changed my mind about one of the programs out there, and it’s Soundbooth. It still looks a little Tron-tastic to me. Something about that green sound wave doesn’t look quite right. But the functionality is superb, the controls are powerful and intuitive, and it’s one of the best mastering tools I’ve found to date.

Regarding the controls, let’s begin with the way you build fades. I’ve never seen such a seamless and simple way to do something that practically every other audio editor I’ve seen makes complicated mince-meat out of. There’s a little “fade” button in the interface. You tap that. Yep, it’s that easy. If you want to finesse the fade, you just drag it how you want it to go. Couldn’t be simpler, and it works like a charm. Instead of putting in a dozen anchor points and building a shape, it just bends the fade as you drag it, and it works just the way you hope it would.

Now, audio mastering is generally considered to be half technology, half voodoo. If you have any doubt about the voodoo part, ask any mastering engineer about the “pixie dust” and “sparkle” that they add to tracks. Both of these are common terms used in mastering, and they help illustrate the Fantasy Island-style wizardry involved. Essentially, you’re manipulating compression, limiting, EQ, reverb and gain (and occasionally gates and other effects) to make your finished tracks sound their best, but there is no single way of doing it. It’s a unique process every time, and when it’s done correctly, the difference is spectacular.

In the home studio, my experience is that it’s incredibly easy to overdo it and screw up a bunch of perfectly good tracks. I’ve done it many times. But with Soundbooth, the built in mastering suite of effects does a wonderful job of laying out the tools you need, and while it’s possible to overdo it, the way it is set up helps you to avoid going overboard. I found the tools to be very high quality, and the results to be fantastic.

The settings on the Exciter, for instance (Tube, Tape, Retro...) got me very… well...excited! And they sound great without being too over the top. The compression is flexible enough to squeeze your track into a bar of musical steel, or gently lift your quieter moments into the mix, and the visual EQ is easy and intuitive to work with. And having controls to simply make your track louder without clipping to start with is just great. 

So I’m happy to live with the green sound wave and the slightly retro layout, as long as the mastered tracks keep coming out so well. I’ve been hoping for a mastering tool this easy to use and effective for a while, and I have to say I’m a little stunned that it ended up coming from Adobe rather than one of the musical mainstays out there. Now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that the new Flash, which I haven’t had an opportunity to try out yet, is as cool as it looks like it is! 3D?! Hoo ha!

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10.27.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #6

Tactic:
Use online tools like TubeMogul or blip.tv to easily distribute your video content across multiple community-based video sharing sites.

Why It Works:
These sites make it easy for users to distribute content to a variety of destinations with just a few clicks. As long as you have accounts with the supported partner sites uploading a video and distributing it is a simple and painless process that involves filling in a few forms and clicking the upload button. Once the video has been distributed you can track hit counts and follow metrics data in one convenient location.

The most time consuming aspect of using these sites is the fact that you need to sign up for accounts with all the sites they support. Though time-consuming, it’s also an important step to make sure your video content is relevant to the site’s mission. For instance, do you really want your educational video on StupidVideos.com? Once registration is out of the way, the tools these sites offer are simple and straightforward. Blip.tv allows you to bring your blog(s) into the fray and features a Windows/Mac desktop application as well.

TubeMogul works best with Quicktime movies or MPEG-4 video content that use MP3-encoded audio and have a 700-1500 Kbps data rate. Just a word of caution: we have run into a couple situations where we unknowingly used an unsupported audio codec in our MPEG-4 videos and the distributed content appeared on a number of sites without any audio. Though distributing video content via TubeMogul is easy, we have found that removing content from all member sites is not supported, thus forcing us to change our video settings and content on each individual sharing site. Perhaps that might be a good feature request for future versions of the product.

Distribution via TubeMogul and blip.tv also greatly increases search engine results. The simple act of uploading our demo reel gave us several additional pages of results based on the tags we included with each video. Plus, some of these sites aggregate their video content to other sites via RSS, adding even more results to the mix. Best of all, a basic account is free and upgrades are available to those who require more robust reporting and metrics data.

Resources:
As of this writing, TubeMogul supports twenty-one video sharing sites. Blip.tv supports twenty-two, plus the built-in ability to custom skin your content and share it via your blog(s). A complete breakdown is as follows:

TubeMogul:
AOL Video
Blip.tv
Break
Brightcove
Crackle
Daily Motion
Google Video
Graspr (instructional video network)
Howcast (how-to videos)
Imeem (music site with video sharing)
Metacafe
MySpace
Revver
Sclipo (social learning network)
StupidVideos
Veoh
Yahoo! Video
YouTube
Viddler
Vimeo
5min (quick instructional videos)

Blip.tv
iTunes
Internet Archive (content must have a Creative Commons license)
del.icio.us
Flickr
Adobe Media Player
Slide
Akimbo (video-on-demand system)
FeedBurner (video feeds via RSS)
MySpace
Twitter (Auto-Tweets your Twitter account every time you upload a video)
Facebook
Yahoo! Video
AOL Video
Lycos Mix
MeeVee
Mefeedia
Meebo
Blinkx
SplashCast
blip.tv Channels (various channels on the blip.tv network)
Pando

As you can see from the above lists, with a few exceptions each site distributes your video content to a variety of different sites, so it’s worthwhile to have accounts with each.

How We Have Embraced It:
When we finished our latest video and animation demo reel in June ‘08 we used TubeMogul to distribute it and received significant traffic increases and search engine results because of it. We did the same for our kiosk video on How We Help Publishers at the Association of Educational Publishers Digital Publishing Summit in June as well. Now, whenever we finish any video content, be it a blog entry, live performance, promo video, or education tip, we use these tools to distribute it to as many relevant sites as possible.

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10.27.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #5

Tactic:
Use RSS to aggregate your content across multiple sites and allow users to subscribe to your content feed.

Why It Works:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another way to quickly and easily distribute your content across multiple sites and directly to users via web, mobile and desktop-based software, typically called aggregators or readers. RSS works on the premise of converting your content to a standardized XML-based feed that can then be consumed by sites and software that support the format. RSS feeds typically include full or summarized text plus metadata that includes publishing dates, authorship or links to image, audio or video content. Users who subscribe to your feed are automatically updated every time you add new content.

Feed readers include desktop applications such as Feedreader and Akgregator, email programs like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, and browsers like Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (version 7 or higher). There are also many web-based applications that support RSS, like Netvibes, Bloglines, and Pageflakes. Google and other companies such as Mippin and Litefeeds have created RSS readers for mobile devices as well. iTunes and other media aggregators use RSS as the foundation upon which podcasts and other audio/video content are distributed and updated. Blog software auto-generates RSS feeds as well, so if you have a blog set up on your site users can subscribe to your feed. Most social and media sharing sites also have the ability to generate RSS feeds that can be aggregated to other sites, allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds and populate your site, profile, or page with content from other sources, including your blog, YouTube account, and so on.

Resources:
There are scores of online RSS resources. A Google search of RSS, for instance, brings back ‘about 3,500,000,000’ results. Here are just a few to get you started from the top of the list.

Wikipedia list of RSS readers

RSS Toolbox from mashable.com

Here’s a video from the Plain English folks at Common Craft on RSS. The content is great, but they sure could have benefitted from a lavalier microphone, as the sound quality is a bit iffy. But the content gets the point across.

How We Have Embraced It:
Mightybytes’ news feed automatically gets ported over to the company’s Facebook page and Friendfeed via RSS. Users can also subscribe to our company blog feed. The company blog content gets ported to Friendfeed and Plaxo as well.

Additionally, I use a Twitter plug-in for my feed at timfrick.com, so anytime a new blog entry is added an auto-tweet is generated on my Twitter account. The same goes for my Flickr account, which I can easily use to send photos to my blog with a single click.

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10.12.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #4

Tactic:
Implement an educational email campaign (not one that is filled with thoughtless marketing messages).

Why it Works:
As long as you provide content that your subscribers can use or that they find thought-provoking you shouldn’t have to worry about your newsletter being considered junk or spam. An occasional ‘hey look what we did’ marketing message is fine, but for the most part newsletters work better when they meet the information needs of those to whom they are sent. Services such as MyEmma or Constant Contact let you track user behaviors and feed customized information appropriately. If everyone clicked on the newsletter story about online video but no one looked at the blog entry on house training your cat you might want to consider providing more information on the former and perhaps curbing the cat fancy pontifications.

Resources:
Constant Contact, PatronMail, and MyEmma are just a few of the large number of online resources that make it easy to create email campaigns, manage recipients, and analyze metrics data for a successful email campaign. Before you decide on one particular solution, come up with a list of ‘must have’ features and make sure the solution you are considering best fits your needs.

Most online email campaign tools charge based on number of subscribers and the three mentioned above are comparable in pricing. They also provide sign-up widgets to use on your site for bringing in new subscribers and offer many options for sorting campaign data and using that data in future mailings.

How We Have Embraced It:
MyEmma is Mightybytes’ particular email management tool of choice and we really like the ease with which it allows us to manage our campaigns. With Emma we can create our own custom-designed HTML templates (important for a design firm), glean relevant data regarding how our campaigns are received, and target particular users with very specific content. For instance, we can save everyone who clicked on a story in our last email about online video as a group and target those particular subscribers with video-specific content.

As a general rule, we only send out e-mail newsletters when there’s enough useful information to make for interesting reading. Sometimes that’s once per month, sometimes every other month. Our standard newsletter, which we’ve dubbed the Mbulletin, typically contains a blend of tutorials about how we accomplished a particular task for a client or project and relevant marketing messages about specific accomplishments, such as awards or recent projects. 

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10.09.08

Terrible Timing

Terrible Spaceship, an ‘ambient synthetic horror pop’ ensemble comprised of Bumpus members and folks from Mightybytes performed their very first show at Martyrs in early September. The experience was a well-received sensory overload of music, performance and synced video clips that captured audience attention and got the crowd moving. The show gave us an opportunity to experiment with triggering visuals and creating real-time motion graphics on-the-fly using an M-Audio Trigger Finger and new software from Arkaos called Grand VJ.

Tools of the Trade
In addition to the Grand VJ software, we also used our usual media creation tools like After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, and so on. To complement the album’s War of the Worlds theme, we first built a library of old retro space footage and edited clips down to a manageable length. We then created custom animations for specific portions of each song to fill gaps as needed. Once all the production work was complete, we had 146 clips total, ranging in subject matter from old propaganda films, sci-fi movie clips, TV footage, educational films, and the aforementioned custom animations. At that point we started building the Grand VJ project file.

1.0 Software
Considering its 1.0 release status, Grand VJ is excellent software, though I certainly have my fair share of feature requests for the next version. The Terrible Spaceship set consisted of fifteen songs, and Grand VJ gives you sixteen banks that will hold sixteen clips each, so we comprised a bank of clips that would be triggered randomly during each song. Grand VJ supports numerous real-time animation effects as well as live camera inputs, both of which we took advantage of for the show. One of the biggest challenges was choosing real-time effects that fit with our retro sci-fi theme. Many of the animation presets call attention to themselves with a specific look and feel and thus weren’t appropriate for use within this particular project. Some worked perfectly, however. The binary effect, for instance, seemed a perfect fit for the song Binary has got me Down.

Grand VJ runs in two modes: synth mode, where you can trigger clips individually, or mixer mode, where you can composite up to eight layers of video on top of one another. I experimented with both modes and found the synth mode to better fit my needs for the spontaneity of a live show. Once everything was configured within the Grand VJ project file and we rehearsed the show at Bumpus’ practice space, we were good to go. The result was a fun and spontaneous live exploration of video synced to music. You can see the results in these two clips for Stardust and Elizabeth:

Stardust:

Elizabeth:

Terrible Spaceship is comprised of the following fine folks:
Travis Chandler: Bass
James Johston: Guitar
Andy Rosenstein: Keyboards
Zack Marks: Drums
Tim Frick: Live Visuals
Whit Nelson: Camera

Buy the full album on iTunes.

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10.09.08

Portfolio Teardown

Flash is amazing. For years it has allowed programmers to do what was impossible in the browser. When it comes to games, rich media, and specifically video, it has been eating HTML and JavaScript’s lunch for years. No longer. With improvements in JavaScript speed, the creation of browser agnostic libraries to simplify development, and the wide adoption AJAX for asynchronous communication, JavaScript is back.

For a digital media company like Mightybytes, finding the right tool can be as involved a process as using it. Our original portfolio page was designed in early 2007 completely in Flash. While sleek and efficient, the design had a fatal flaw: the content was locked into Flash, uncrawlable by the search engines. We quickly concluded that the functionality needed to be ported to a standards-compatible language, and its content exposed as HTML. JavaScript animation libraries allowed for much of the same interactive feeling that the original Flash movie provided. We couldn’t abandon Flash altogether, as it was needed at the very least for displaying video samples.

We decided to create a Flash viewer, which would load video and image data, and allow the user to browse it. Viewer aside, the majority of the page was built in HTML and JavaScript, using the jQuery library. The JavaScript would use ActionScript callbacks to communicate with the Flash viewer, instructing it which media to load. The Flash viewer would also communicate back to the JavaScript where necessary.

Building the JavaScript to behave like the previous interface was surprisingly intuitive. The trick to jQuery’s animations lie in the incremental adjustment of CSS rules over time. Want to slide something right? Incrementally increase it’s left margin. If your knowledge of CSS is good, you will quickly invent new ways to animate objects and containers on the page.

Once the data is in HTML it can be crawled by the search engines. All text for each entry is loaded into the page and hidden until needed. The reason we didn’t use AJAX to pull the entries in asynchronously is the same reason we pulled them out of Flash:

“ ... like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully.”
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [source]

Perhaps Google is capable of indexing this AJAX content, but Google isn’t the only search engine, and broad access to crawlers was a very high priority.

jQuery has revolutionized the way that I look at the page, much in the same way ActionScript revolutionized the way I look at the stage. All things once seemed static and mysterious under the browser’s hood, but cross-browser libraries have changed all that. Not only that, but they have sped up development time by making JavaScript write once, run anywhere. In short, JavaScript is amazing.

The new portfolio is slated for a Halloween launch.

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10.09.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #3

Tip #3: Create and update social networking profiles on all the major community sites, including those that cater to special niche interests.

Why It Works:
Social media sites are built around the idea of community-based sharing. They offer a great opportunity for you to keep in touch and exchange information with a large number of people at a time. By updating profile content and status as often as possible your friends and constituents are kept up to date with what’s going on in your world. Conversely, you also receive updates from those in your personal network, including job leads, events, and yes, even notices that they are on a bus or doing pilates.

Also, joining groups that reflect your intentions and endeavors will put you in touch with like-minded people or those who might be interested in your product or service. Finally, each of these sites offer the chance via your profile to link back to a company site, personal site, blog, or all of the above, thus generating more external links and increasing search engine ranking.

As with blogs, these sites only work as marketing tools if you keep them updated regularly. Each time you change your status, add a video, join a group or share a link it goes to the top of the list of network updates. But that goes for all the people in your network as well, so if you have 200 friends on Facebook, for instance, and they each make an update over the course of the day, yours will be at the bottom of the list by day’s end.

Resources:
Social site are cropping up on a near daily basis due in part to the huge popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook. General sites are being usurped by niche social sites catering to users with very specific needs or interests. Shelfari and Good Reads cater to book lovers while Cork’d caters to wine afficianados, and so on. If you’re a business professional you probably already have a LinkedIn account, and maybe even a Plaxo profile, but there are many more resources out there for social media marketing as well.

This is by no means a thoroughly comprehensive list of social sites, but includes those we use most often:
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Crunchbase
Friendster
WhoHub (shared professional interviews)
Plaxo
Xing
Wis.dm (get questions answered)
Squidoo (create pages on shared topics)
Twitter (update your status)

Other niche sites:
Flickr (photo sharing)
Good Reads (for those who like books)
Shelfari (for those who like books)
Cork’d (for wine fans)
OddPodz (for the creative community)
FineTune (music)
imeem (music)
Last.FM (music)
Meetup
Yelp (restaurant and business reviews)

How We Have Embraced It:
I have created either personal or company profiles on all of the sites mentioned above and update them on a near daily basis. Sometimes the update is as simple as “Tim is getting ready for a conference.” Sometimes updates include videos, press releases, photos, news stories, links to relevant content, and so on. We also have configured our various profiles so that anytime an entry is added to the blog or News section of the Mightybytes site it is aggregated via RSS to our company Facebook page, Plaxo profile, Friendfeed account and several other places. I have set up my personal blog so that every time I post an entry my Twitter account gets an auto-Tweet. I almost always receive some sort of comment on the posted item, be it words of encouragement, shared facts, or just a friendly hello from someone I haven’t spoke to in a while.

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10.08.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #2

Tip #2: Create an informative blog on your topic of choice.

Why It Works:
Like content management systems, blogs are natural search engine magnets. They also help you communicate with a community of like-minded people and, if you regularly provide insightful and useful content, can position you as a thought leader in your particular industry.

A blog won’t do its job if you don’t update it, however. Gartner Group says that over 200 million bloggers abandon their blogs within a year after starting them. Tenacity, patience and fortitude are the keys to blog success. And of course it helps if you can write your way out of a paper sack as well.

Here are a few things to consider when it comes to blogging:

Make It Useful:
A blog with copious amounts of helpful educational content, news tidbits, and so on positions you as an expert in your field. It shows that you are passionate about your blog’s topic and instills confidence in those who may want to buy your services or products. Knowing what you want to blog about is the first big hurdle. Come up with a strategy on how you will approach content as well as an always evolving list of things to blog about that will serve your target audience well.

Comments and Trackbacks:
Find blogs on similar topics and start making comments on the posts. Utilizing blog comments and trackback fields will help you communicate with like-minded individuals across a series of blogs. This also helps build links back to your site, which ultimately increases search engine ranking.

Use Your Blog’s RSS Features:
Blog content can be easily aggregated via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so users can subscribe to your blog feed, which alerts them to new entries instantaneously. RSS also lets you automatically feed blog posts to your Facebook, Plaxo or Xing profiles or send a new blog post alert to Twitter.

Register Your Blog:
Be sure to register your blog with sites like Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse, Google BlogSearch, and so on. These sites track blog traffic, links, and content in different ways. They can be used to get your content in front of a larger audience and will also provide metric data such as how many sites link to you and who they are.

Resources:
There is a huge wellspring of knowledge available online on every aspect of blogging and blog marketing. A simple Google search on “Why should I blog?” reveals ‘about 41,100,000’ results, so there’s no shortage of information on this topic available. Any of the sites mentioned above contain valuable insights that can answer many of your questions. The usual suspects of MarketingProfs, Hubspot, and Marketing Sherpa are great places to start. The American Marketing Association also offers seminars and online webinars on many aspects of blogging and online marketing as well.

If you prefer the analog approach, Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright is an excellent resource to help you answer the questions you might have about blogging. The book includes thorough explanations of why you should start blogging and how to do it. Real world case studies on blog success stories offer useful information as well.

How We Have Embraced It:
Mightybytes added the Mblog to our site earlier this year. Updating its content while simultaneously juggling multiple client projects is admittedly a company challenge, but one we are committed to meeting over the long haul. Thus, we write when we can. Sometimes it’s several times per week. Sometimes it’s once or twice a month. Our entire site, including the blog, is currently run by Expression Engine, so in effect the entire thing is a series of blogs since that’s how EE deals with site content. We have also configured, skinned and created custom templates for many client blogs as well.

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10.07.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #1

Tip #1: Integrate a content management system (CMS) with your site.

Why It Works:
In a nutshell, regular content updates increase search engine ranking. Search engine spiders constantly crawl the web looking for new content. If your content is constantly updated, chances are the site will get crawled more frequently. Also, having a site that can be updated at a moment’s notice not only keeps your site from appearing stale and outdated, but inspires repeat visits from users as well.

Resources:
It is important to define your needs now and moving forward to make an educated decision about which CMS to choose. Open source tools are free but you can’t just call tech support when something’s not working. Commercial tools may not offer the features you are looking for. Oftentimes, blog software, which is relatively easy to install and configure, can serve as a perfectly viable CMS but these solutions come with their own inherent shortcomings as well. If you can define your content needs now and down the line, it will go a long way in helping you make the right decision.

Below are just a few CMS solutions available:

Expression Engine: flexible commercial tool that we have come to really appreciate
Joomla: open source tool that offers many extensibility options
Drupal:  open source tool that offers many extensibility options and a huge developer community
WordPress: blog software that can be customized for use as CMS
Movable Type: blog software that can be customized for use as CMS

How We Have Embraced It:
At this juncture, with few exceptions, Mightybytes only creates content managed web solutions for our clients. Sure, they may be more complicated to implement and have specific server requirements, but the benefits earned from using a CMS far outweigh those any static content solution can offer. Our clients appreciate the power a CMS gives them and it allows us to focus on creating design and development solutions that specifically suit their needs rather than making text changes and adding news stories.

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10.07.08

Digital Marketing Series

We have lately fielded an increasing number of calls about online digital marketing services and strategies, so in the spirit of sharing decided it was time to put together a primer that outlines digital marketing basics such as social media, bookmarking, video/podcasts, RSS, and so on. Since it’s too much information to share in a single post, we have broken our primer into a series of tips and tactics that not only answer the questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ but also offer practical steps for integrating these practices into your own online endeavors.

Powerful Marketing Tools
We have seen firsthand the power of how this works. A few years ago mightybytes.com was a fun but difficult to update site that relied heavily on Flash and, if we were lucky, received a few thousand hits each month. The design was clever, the animation was engaging, but since it was rarely updated and all content was hidden from search engines via barriers formed by the Flash Player it was hard to find. As such, it certainly didn’t live up its marketing potential. When we converted to a standards-based site our hit count went up significantly just by the mere fact that Google and other search engines could now understand and interpret our content and serve us up in results accordingly.

But that was only half the challenge. Since the launch, we have marketed the site and our company online with tools like blogs, social media, social bookmarking, and so on. We update site content as much as our schedules will allow and aggregate each update via RSS and other tools in the hopes of reaching the widest possible audience. As a result we have seen traffic (and business) rise on a level proportionate to our efforts. The site now regularly gets between 100,000 and 150,000 hits per month and has been on a steady incline since we started all this digital marketing madness.

The Almighty Link
In a nutshell, online digital marketing is mostly about the almighty link. The hope is to foster an environment that makes it easy for users (i.e. potential customers) to find links to your content. ‘Link Love’ isn’t the only element of digital marketing, of course, but it plays a huge role. Search engines evaluate your site based on the number of external links coming to you and how those sites rank in terms of traffic and reliability. The more external links there are leading to your site, the higher your site will rank and the more often it will appear in search engine results. Many of the strategies outlined in this series are built around this concept.

Personal Relationships
Digital marketing is also about personal relationships. Transparency is the modus operandi in today’s digital marketing world and folks who are insincere about their product or service run the very real risk of being called out and blacklisted. The internet has an uncanny knack of crying shenanigans on charlatans and snake-oil salesman, so if your product or service is anything less than reputable you might want to rethink it. Many of the tips and suggestions outlined in this series allow you to quickly and effectively communicate on a personal level with a large amount of people. When you do so, make sure you are being honest, sincere and, dare I say it, personal. Social media by its very nature blurs the lines between business and personal and in my humble opinion it is the wise digital marketer who embraces that fact. People want to build business relationships with people not faceless corporations. Keeping it real can go a long way toward making this happen.

Myth: Digital Marketing is Free
Let’s also debunk the myth that social media and online marketing are free. Sure, it doesn’t cost anything to create a Facebook profile or sign up for a Digg account, but if time is indeed money, anyone looking to embark on a digital marketing journey should realize that what digital marketing offers in terms of free services, it more than makes up for in time needed to do a good job. On any given week I can spend as little as a few hours or as many as twenty updating profiles, status, photostreams, blog entries, or submitting content to YouTube, Digg, Technorati and their ilk.

All this said, please enjoy (and comment prolifically on) our series of digital marketing tips. For more in-depth and detailed information on these topics and more, check out the excellent content at MarketingProfs, Hubspot, Marketing Sherpa and others.

Also, David Meerman Scott book titled The New Rules of Marketing and PR is an excellent resource to help get you started. To see all posts related to digital marketing on this blog, click on that category to the right.

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09.23.08

Adobe CS4 Release

Adobe has announced a new version of its flagship product line, Creative Suite 4. The suite boasts more seamless integration between applications as well as a whole slew of new features that will no doubt change our workflow over the coming months. A few features--AIR integration, Dynamic Link, improved Device Central, and Connect Now, which allows users to share their screen from within an application--are available across multiple applications, while individual apps have seen significant overhauls as well. Hopefully the apps will load faster too, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

As with CS3, the suite comes in a variety of different flavors for designers, web developers and video professionals. As a company that uses pretty much the entire suite, we’ll no doubt be looking to upgrade our Master Collections. With Production Premium users can benefit from a renderless workflow, easily bouncing between After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth and back again via Dynamic Link. The Web Premium suite boasts richer integration between designers and developers, as well as a number of nifty prototyping and collaboration tools. Design Premium also allows for much more seamless integration between the company’s flagship design tools, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

Some of the more impressive individual product features I noticed (but not a comprehensive list by any stretch of the word) are as follows:

Flash
Object-based animation
Bones (inverse kinematics) tool including runtime support for interactive animations
Better support for H.264 video

Dreamweaver
Browser rendering engine built into the application
Source file toolbar that allows users to easily navigate between a web page’s dependent files, such as CSS and JavaScript

Fireworks
Standards-compliant CSS Export
Interactive PDF exports for prototypes

Illustrator
New Blob brush for better drawing control
Multiple artboards

Soundbooth
New non-destructive audio file format that allows for easy editing/integration with other Adobe products
Snapshots of your work for easy access to old versions of a file

After Effects
Searchable timelines
Textured 3D model import from Photoshop
Better motion tracking via Mocha AE
Export to editable Flash files
Device Central profiles for scaling compositions to fit specific device standards

Premiere
Speech-to-text metadata conversion allows for automatic transcriptions of voiceover or narration audio within video clips, which are then searchable
Multiple tapeless formats in a single project, sequence by sequence

Photoshop
3D painting and rotoscoping in Photoshop, including the ability to merge 2D layers onto 3D objects
Content aware resizing, very cool dynamic scaling technology acquired by Adobe during MAX last year

InDesign
Flash export

Encore
Dual layer Blu-Ray authoring support

Also new to the suite is the standalone Adobe Media Encoder, which supports batch encoding of multiple files to a wide variety of media formats. I haven’t figured out yet if this replaces the Flash Video Encoder, but my hunch is that it does.

Detailed video tutorials on all of the suites can be found at Adobe TV.

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