Social Media Marketing – The Solution

Posted by on November 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment 

If you are just checking out this blog post, you may want to read the precursor to this post first.

Let’s build our social media presence!

For people who use social media sites on a regular basis (I can think of at least five social media sites that I visit every single day), learning how to use social media to market ones products or services isn’t very hard. However, there are many people who don’t visit social media sites but are then told to create a social media presence for their company or organization. To make it easier for all readers, I will break out the process into four steps.

Become familiar with your options

With so many social media sites on the web today, it can be exhausting trying to determine which one to use. Sites like Wikipedia (hey, that’s a social media site!) have a lot of general information relating to social media. It’s also very helpful to have first-hand experience with the social media site you are interested in, so set up your own personal account and begin learning about the site.

Develop your strategy

This is the most overlooked part of the process. Many companies simply use their traditional marketing tactics when creating a social media presence. Don’t do this! Other companies will completely change their marketing message when using social media marketing. Don’t do this either! Your message must stay consistent through ALL of your marketing outlets. However, you must also recognize that you’re marketing a different audience. Therefore, your tactics, promotions, and audience interaction will likely be much different than your traditional marketing efforts. Make sure you’re also building in ways to track your successes and failures. You’ll want to do this during this upfront, instead of trying to incorporate it once you’ve already built your social media presence.

Implement (and keep implementing!)

Once you have a strategy, put it in place and begin building your social media presence. However, don’t forget to keep updating your social media pages. Just because you have 5 posts and 20 friends/followers doesn’t mean your presence will keep growing without your help. There are many helpful tools out there (like Tweetdeck) that help you organize all your social media sites and keep on top of updates.

Monitor and Assess

How are your social media pages performing? What are you followers saying about you? Have you seen positive benefits from this endeavor? Is your social media marketing still conveying the same message as your traditional marketing? Monitoring your performance will tell you what you need to change, and what tactics are really worth your time. Hopefully you will see positive results and find that the time you’ve put into the process has been worth your while.

We understand that for some people this process is extremely overwhelming and intimidating. If you would like help developing your social media marketing strategy (or any marketing strategy), implementing your social media presence, or assessing your current presence, we would love to help!

Contact us to learn more about how we can work together to build a strong marketing strategy for your business or organization!

Filed under How To, Marketing, Uncategorized · Tagged with , , , ,

Basic Wireframe Tool – Free PDF Download

Posted by on May 17, 2010 · Leave a Comment 

(website) wireframe

- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia

Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion.  You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.

You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:

FHD Wireframe Tool – PDF

And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:

  • Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
  • Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
  • Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads.  Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
  • Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping.  If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).

So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer!  They’ll thank you for the clear communication.

Filed under How To, Web Design · Tagged with , , , ,

Best WordPress Modifications: Article2pdf

Posted by on July 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

PDFSay you want to offer your website content as a downloadable PDFs.  A typical process for this might include:

  1. Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
  2. Export as PDF
  3. Upload to your website
  4. Modify page to include link to PDF

It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).

FPDF

However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process.  The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF.  This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.

Article2pdf

If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler.  Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library.  The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.

To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated.  The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design.  With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to.  Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.

So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!

Filed under How To, Web Design, Wordpress · Tagged with , , , ,

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