Uncategorized Category Archive

Pinterest for Business? Yeeeep.

Friday, February 24th, 2012

By Jason Falls

 

Move over Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Another social media site is stepping up as a valuable marketing tool for businesses.

Pinterest, an online bulletin board for your favorite images, launched in 2010 and is already experiencing wild growth. The site registered more than 7 million unique visitors in December, up from 1.6 million in September. And it’s driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined, according to arecent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based content-sharing site Shareaholic.

Why should small businesses care? To answer that, you first have to understand how consumers are using the site. Pinterest allows you to organize images — maybe pretty sunrises or wines you’ve tasted — into boards for specific categories. When you “pin” something new, your followers will see it. They can like, comment or re-pin it to their boards. Like Facebook content, your Pinterest pins can go viral.

Brides-to-be can pin pictures of different wedding dresses to review, and people shopping for a new car can pin images of their options. When I joined Pinterest I started a board to show the Major League Baseball stadiums I’ve visited. The possibilities are unlimited.

Here’s a look at why some business owners — particularly retailers — might want to seriously consider starting a business profile on Pinterest now.

How It’s Being Used
Perhaps the most powerful business application is the ability to post images of your company’s products on your Pinterest board and link them back to your website. It works as a sort of virtual store catalog.

But remember that this is social media. If you simply display images of your products without contributing other content or sharing other users’ pins, you’ll likely find that people don’t pay much attention. After all, no one likes a self-absorbed blowhard.

Related: Emerging Social Media Sites to Attract Users

But savvy social media users know not to get too promotional. For example, Whole Foods Market pins pictures of delicious-looking food, food art and images of recycled or reused products to inspire customers to be environmentally responsible. Daniel Gordon, who runs Samuel Gordon Jewelers in Oklahoma City, pins pictures of his rings and watches, but he also has a board for images that make him laugh and other types of products he loves.

Driving Sales

Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. In the last six months, the retail deal siteideeli.com has seen a 446 percent increase in web traffic from Pinterest and sales resulting from those visits have increased five-fold.

“We continue the Pinterest conversation with [the] members by following their pins, and we love to give feedback outside of the shopping category — whether that means commenting on a great recipe or [giving] a heart next to our favorite pet pics,” says ideeli.com social media manager Sarah Conley. “We also see Pinterest as a growing resource to better understand our members and the larger retail landscape.”

Is Pinterest Right for Your Business?
The site does have some drawbacks for businesses. If your product or service isn’t particularly visual, your images may not tie directly back to your brand. Pinterest also doesn’t offer business-oriented features, and its search function prioritizes pin and board subjects ahead of “people,” the category that brands would fall into.

The best way to determine if Pinterest could attract buyers is simply to give it a shot. Set up an account and start pinning things that are relevant to your business but not too promotional.

Related: How to Use Social Media for Research and Development

If you run a lawn-care center, for instance, pin pictures of landscaping you find online or snap in your community. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store, pin shots of the interesting sites and people around your neighborhood and photos you take at community events. You also can search through Pinterest’s categories and add some inspirational, funny or beautiful images you find.

Then, follow interesting boards and individuals who post images that inspire you. Once you’ve done some pinning of other people’s content for a week or so and attracted a few followers, create a new board of your products. Add descriptions and perhaps the price to the images. Make sure they link back to your website and start tracking pinterest.com as a referral source in your website analytics.

Next, try creating an image of a special deal or coupon just for your Pinterest followers. Upload it to a new board for Deals. Perhaps offer a prize to the person who gets the most likes or comments on a re-pin of the coupon, and then see who shares it the most. Don’t fret about creating multiple boards. People who follow you will see them all.

In a month or two, see if you’re getting referral traffic or sales. Depending on the results, you may need to tweak your boards with new images and words.

One thing is clear whether you’re on Pinterest for personal or business reasons: the best images — be they funny, beautiful or thought provoking — attract the most attention and followers.

 

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NFC? The New Kid on the Block on Recognition Technology

Friday, February 10th, 2012

Yep… they’re delivering data to smart phones using touchpoings rather than scanning… http://tag.microsoft.com/what-is-tag/nfc.aspx

We found this on the Microsoft website and just had to share…

Be The First

Want to position your brand as a cutting-edge technology adopter? Consider adding NFC to your campaigns. People with a compatible phone simply tap (or get close to) your NFC-enabled materials to open a web page, dial a phone number, see a free message, open a Vcard, or download a mobile app.

Some Android phones come enabled for NFC, so if your customer base leans heavily toward those devices, using NFC may be a great way to engage with them. Not sure if your customers are NFC-equipped? You can put more than one recognition technology on your marketing materials. Add a Tag barcode and you’re covered either way.

Create Unique Experiences

In addition to offering an array of experiences, like linking to websites and downloading apps, with Tag NFC technology you can also capture the rough location of where each tap is taking place. This lets you send people on-the-spot info. 

Go beyond just telling how you hand-pick your ‘cukes and berries – give directions to the closest shop carrying your artisanal pickles and jams. You can also capture a unique Device ID of each mobile phone engaging with your content. That way, you can go a step further and serve up a different experience with each tap: Give a buy-one-get-one-free coupon with the first tap and a recipe for wild mountain blackberry thumbprint cookies with the next tap. Yum!

Fine Tune With Metrics

You’ll find reports on your NFC-enabled material along with the rest of your reports in Tag Manager. The reports show details on each tap by date and category. 

For a richer set of data, you can also use the Scan Data API to provide more metrics on NFC engagement, including how many people are sharing your mobile experiences within our app, the exact time of each tap and more.

Getting Started

Adding NFC to your campaigns is easy to do using Tag Manager. You’ll create an NFC URL that can be downloaded and shared with a third-party vendor who can set up your NFC tags using that URL and create your touchpoints. Add those touchpoints to your printed materials, such as a poster, and you are set!

 

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Ideas for Better Networking

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Like the “givers gain” philosophy of Business Networking International (BNI), it’s not in what your get when you meet someone, it’s in what you give that you’ll receive. The following are a few tips on how to effectively network.

 

 

 

 

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QR code or Microsoft tag?

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

To use a QR code or Microsoft tag… that is the question.

Okay, so we started out here at DSYL using the Microsoft tag. It’s pretty and you could add images to the code. (Now QR is doing it too.) The thing we liked best about Microsoft is that you could change what you link it to, rather than having to create a new tag/code each time you wanted to establish a new promotion or offer. But… it appears that Microsoft just like Betamax has the earmarks of going the way of the dodo. Bye-bye. Ahh, but the jury is still out.

Microsoft does have deep pockets, so they can continue to promote their tag upon consumers for a while, even if consumers aren’t that interested. However, Microsoft doesn’t have the presence in mobile technology that it did in desktop computing. And as we all know, both Google and Apple are in the lead for smart phone technology. And my bet is on the likelihood that they would rather support an open-source solution to this whole code/tag thing, than one that would help Microsoft. Right?

The other biggie here is that QR codes simply seem to be gaining leverage. We’re seeing them EVERYWHERE: Magazines, packaging, store front windows, signs, you name it!

The other interesting fact is that no one owns QR codes. Ahhhh, but the Microsoft tag? Microsoft has even announced recently that they might be charging for their Tag related services in a few years. Ouch.

Seems to me that QR codes are leading this race, but time will soon tell. What are your thoughts?

 

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What You Shouldn’t Post on Your Facebook Page If You Want a Job

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

OCT 3 2011, 6:27 PM ET – From theatlantic.com

Kashmir Hill, Forbes’ indispensable privacy blogger, posted this chart today, drawn from a survey of employers. Three things to note. 1) 95 percent of employers say they use social media sites to ferret out more information about job candidates. 2) If these employers informed these job candidates why they were dropped, Facebook as we know it might not exist. 

That’s not because social media is bad for job candidates, per se, but rather that the sense people have that they are just talking with their homies would evaporate. It would become clear that Facebook is, in fact, a quasi-public forum in which what you say attaches very strongly to your identity. It’s the persistence that makes it different from “real life” and it’s the persistence that Timelines is going to highlight.

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7 Ways Google+ Users Are Getting More Out of Their Circles

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

By Stephanie Buck, on Mashable

Organizing your circles in Google+ can be the most confusing part of the new social network. Yet people are learning to embrace and even optimize their circles for better productivity, filtering and privacy.

We spoke with some Google+ mavericks about how they’ve corralled their circles to be more effective. Below, they share their clever tricks and best practices so you can learn from both their mistakes and their successes.

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1. Sourcing

Technology writer +Mike Elgan will directly address people that circled him. He’ll reach out with a personal question like “Where do you live?” Not only do Elgan’s polls help him get to know his followers, but he often uses the feedback from his circles as a resource. His “What should Google users be called?” poll, for example, generated 181 responses. “I’ve crowdsourced some issues for columns I work on and taken polls to get a finger-on-the-pulse idea of what people are thinking or doing,” Elgan says.

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2. Learning

+Steve Rubel, EVP/Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman has organized his circles to focus on early adopters and thus access valuable feedback and information. He uses Google+ as a virtual “Junto,” named after Ben Franklin’s original discussion forum. Rubel’s circles are organized by persona, for example, “Pluserati,” “CEOs” and “Clients.” From there, he shares “semi-private posts just to ask questions … we can explore the issues of the day, much as Franklin did.”

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3. Deeper Interaction

Many Google+ early adopters are curious about their followers. Because Google+ doesn’t require mutual friend acceptance like Facebook, many users have gained hundreds and even thousands of followers in the first few weeks of registering.

Mashable‘s +Ben Parr regularly asks his public circles for responses and insight. One recent request, “What’s the name of your favorite Google+ circle?” received funny replies including Purgatory, The Circle Of Trust, The Party Posse, Inbreds, Ppl I’ve Kissed, Ppl I Want to Kiss, People I NEVER want to Kiss, Tila Tequila Wanna-bes, Guys Who Pissed Me Off in High School, Scoblized, People I Call When I’m Dying or Arrested, More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle, Muggles, and of course, Ubergeeks.

Google+ users are finally able to put faces to their followers and interact with them in meaningful (and sometimes hilarious) ways.

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4. Filtering

Google+ users are two to three times more likely to share in specific circles than in public, according toBradley Horowitz and Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of products and senior vice president of social, respectively.

Google+ circles encourage user etiquette, sparing certain members of your network from updates they can’t relate to or flat out don’t care about. “You share each item with only the people who deserve to know. And simultaneously, you spare the masses from seeing news of no interest to them,” wrote David Pogue of The New York Times.

Technology journalist +Steven Vaughan-Nichols divides his circles into three basic categories: personal, work and interest. He warns about proper circle etiquette on ZDNet’s blog. “Just keep in mind that if you want to keep people reading your words, show some sense about what you post,” he advises. “For example, I can already tell you that a lot of Google+ users are already sick and tired of animated GIF graphics, no matter how cute they are.”

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5. Personal Memos

Advanced Google+ users have discovered a way to use circles to save personal memos, drafts or articles to read later. Think of it as a type of Google+ reader, especially when articles that you’ve “+1′d” don’t make it to your profile.

Creating a circle-of-one (just your own profile) can function as a type of scrapbook, a history of interpersonal notes or private memos. Blogger +Charo Nuguid created a circle only composed of herself. “I created two ‘private’ circles, one for private messages and another for my notes-to-self,” she writes. “So far it’s worked out well. The posts show up in the circles. I finally have a way to keep track of my notes and the messages I post.”

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6. Organizing

Technologist and startup advisor +Christopher Allen explains his method for organizing his circles (seen above).

Although Google+ is not yet offering sub-circle organization, Allen figured out a way to organize circles within circles. For example, under “1.0 Kin,” he’s added sub-circles called “1.1 Immediate Family” and “1.2 Extended Family.” All in all, Allen has created 42 circles. It may sound daunting but it does allow him to better target his posts to specific audiences.

Still, that’s a lot of sorting to do especially if you already have a lot of followers. Allen suggests reviewing a few circles every day: “I do so by going to ‘Manage Circles,’ then selecting ‘People in your Circles’ and sorting by last name. I choose that letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the day of the month and hover my mouse over each name … If they’re in the wrong Circle, I move them.”

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7. Preparing for the Future

Many Google+ users have already begun to think about future uses for circles. Although Google is still tight-lipped about additions, our early adopters have certainly been chiming in with suggestions.

• Search: Mike Elgan suggests that “standard search, plus a lift on the limit of people in circles (something rumored) would enable me to follow a gazillion people without actually seeing the full stream generated by that gazillion — only the most relevant items.”
• Organization: “I would love to be able to organize my circles any way I want (alphabetical, most used, etc.). I also would love to color code them,” says indie film producer +Adam Cohen.
• Topics: Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes, “At the moment, Google+ circles aren’t ideal for interest circles. For example, if you were to follow me in a dog-lovers circle, I might only mention pups once every other day or two. It’s my understanding though that Google intends on making it easier to post by topics. I certainly hope they do.”

Google+ circles have surprised and stumped the world’s greatest technology leaders. Hopefully these quick tips will help you optimize your own circles and become a Google+ master.

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How To Do What You Don’t Know How To Do

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

Picture this…

You’re thinking about starting up a new business but you have no idea where to start. You know you need to file some paperwork, and you have an idea of how you want your brand to look, but you have no clue how to execute your ideas.

That’s because you need a plan. Advertising plans are a great way to get all your ideas out onto paper. In addition, it will focus you to target a specific group, or groups, of people so your message isn’t getting wasted on just any Joe Schmoe out there. When you incorporate an advertising plan into your business model, your goals will be set, guaranteeing you a higher level of success. DSYL can help you develop this plan.

We like to see businesses succeed, and at DSYL, our goal is to guide new business owners to what will work for them and their target markets. By implementing the various elements of the plan, you will watch your business flourish.

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When Is It Time To Update Your Logo?

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

Each year, many brands, even some big ones like Pepsi, Tropicana, BP, UPS and Starbucks, spend a large amount of money on redesigning their brand and their logo. In some cases the rebrand is successful whereas in other cases it fails miserably. (I personally miss the Pepsi wave and I predict it will come back in a few years.)

So, why risk losing the brand recognition you’ve worked so hard to build?

1. The Logo is Visually Outdated or Has a Bad Reputation

In some cases, the logo was great when it was designed, but now looks outdated. A redesign keeps the brand from feeling stale or out of touch.

Take for example Proctor & Gamble and all the hoopla regarding their 1851 man in the moon with the 13 stars that represented the 13 original colonies. Critics later claimed the stars also connected to form “666″ and that the curls in his beard were in the shape of devilish sixes as well. WHAT??? So in 1991 they cut off Mr. Moon’s bearded curls, then finally dropped the graphic two years later for the now current P&G italicized letters.

 

2. The Desire to Show an Expanded Business Focus

Another noticeable trend is formerly brick-and-mortar institutions developing an online presence, or wishing to appear as though they have.

UPS’s new logo represents a strategic decision to emphasize UPS’s expanded business operations, all the while preserving their shield, keeping it lighthearted and of course their signature color brown.

Walmart’s redesign changed their company name from two words to one, softened the blue, got rid of the capitalization of all letters, updated their tagline and moved their focus from rural to urban.

 

3. Simplifying for Better Recognition

The classic example here is Apple. Their original logo in 1976, when the company was still operating out of a garage, shows Isaac Newton sitting beneath a tree with an apple dangling precariously above his head. A year later their logo was redesigned to the dated looking rainbow apple. Finally in 1998 they opted for a monochromatic version that could be produced in every color possible, before settling on their current chrome version.

 

So, how does your logo stack up? Is it still stuck in the dark ages? Does it represent YOUR brand or simply your industry? And of course is it memorable? And do you use it with consistency? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen medium to small businesses have a myriad of versions of their logo. How are your customers supposed to recognize you if that is what you’re putting out there?

Lastly, if you do decide to change or update your logo, hire a professional. I know, I know… but my best friend has a nephew who is in school for graphic design. He can do it!

Really? Has he had years of experience knowing what works and what doesn’t? Does he know if it’s reproducible in all platforms and applications? Does he know the difference between RGB, CMYK, PMS and Hex colors? Does he know the symbolism behind color and what thoughts and feelings that certain colors evoke? I’m thinking… probably not. Can you tell I’m rather passionate about this subject?

I really enjoy working on logos for clients and treat it as serious business. It’s your face to the world and should NEVER be simply a template or stock icon found at Mr. Copy. It never ceases to amaze me to see, even as recently as last week, other agencies that use logo design as a loss leader to get people in the door. It makes me shudder to think that this is the case and quite frankly I find it sad.

 

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Radio Interview…

Monday, April 18th, 2011

DESIREE STIMSON AND CATHY NANADIEGO

Since 1992, DSYL has been providing clients with creative and high-quality advertising, contemporary design and innovation. Every marketing tool created for a client is developed exclusively for them.

Effective advertising backed by sound research is a key element to our clients’ success. DSYL’s media expertise covers all disciplines and we have assembled and maintained the finest creative resources and business-savvy account managers available.

In almost 20 years, DSYL has helped many different companies brand and differentiate themselves from their competitors, giving them the edge to successfully meet and exceed their marketing objectives. With every successful project completion, DSYL takes that experience and learns from it, continually strengthening the amount of knowledge, resources and innovation we bring to the table. As we learn, we also strive to teach. Our goal is to educate as we create, in the hopes that our clients learn with us. This in turn increases the depth of our business relationships while generating high quality and most effective advertising.

You can contact Desiree at:

 

CARY FACER AND ROBERT MCNIDER

Primary clients include owners of closely held businesses, professionals, contractors, and other affluent individuals.  Evaluate present financial positions, identify shortcomings in current financial planning, and recommend investment strategies to achieve desired objectives in light of tax and legal regulations.  Review and analyze areas of income tax planning, investments, fringe benefits, business continuity, and estate analysis.

http://pilgrimonthe405.podbean.com/2010/04/16/pilgrim-talks-desiree-stimson-cathy-nanadiego-cary-facer-robert-mcnider-41410/

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Identity System Guidelines—All Businesses Should Have Them

Monday, April 4th, 2011

The goal of an Identity System is to present a coherent, distinctive and memorable image your brand in a full range of printed and electronic materials. By practicing consistent and conscientious application of the identity guidelines, you will help differentiate your brand from that of your competition.

This can be done through a few different channels.

 

Logo

Your logo is often comprised of two main components:

• A graphical component also known as your icon.

• A logotype component which is your name which is spelled out or sometimes abbreviated.

Decide how these elements should be used. Will they ALWAYS be shown together? Is there any instance where you might separate them? Either waythis needs to be documented and adhered to.

 

Color

Color affects perception in deep and compelling ways. As with typography, strategic and consistent use of color can be a significant factor in the creation of a powerful and cohesive visual identity.

We recommend that there also be color guidelines in place as well which would include:

• Decide whether you can use only specific or any color palette for your different projects.

• Decide how or if percentages of color is appropriate or allowable.

• Remember your guidelines for type color.

 

Typography

From font selections for headlines and body copy to type size for designed and business documents, consistency is key. Other critical items to consider when dealing with typography is alignment, scale, color, spacing between paragraphs, indentation, letter spacing, kerning, leading and treatment.

There are many line items to consider when creating your brand’s guidelines. But once you have honed in on what will be your style, stick to it. By doing so, you will be able to present your brand and your message distinctively and consistently.

Good Luck!

 

 

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