Meetup meetings and other Realtime encounters

Posted in: Blog by Paul McEwan on November 26, 2009

Out and about at meetings and seminars this past week. Here are some of the new and interesting people I had a chance to be introduced to in the past week.

John Grey CEO of Skript Foundry

Mike O’hanley owner operator of Barnowl Photography

Sam Omidi executive director of Bravemedia

Roxanne Finnie sales and marketing coordinator for SGS Minerals Services

Greg Kettner comedian and owner of Habit Entertainment

Maureen McKinnon from C3 Mentors

It was great to talk with you all. Hope to see each other again.

The Art of Design and Client Relations

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on November 23, 2009

A lot of the worlds best designers (or at least the ones who win all the awards) get fired a lot. Whether it be a creative marketing campaign, advertising campaign or some other idea that got canned and unused often will still get submitted and win a lot of awards. So what does that say? Are most marketing designers producing mediocre work because that’s what their client wanted?  “Build me a website like that guys” scenario.

It’s important to note that industry standards and mediocre are not the same thing.

The new direction of TribalYell puts creative energy first. We’re going to put our foot down on that. We know more than the client who is hiring us what leads a person to read a website and what causes search engines to find it and we know it well. If we don’t then we deserve to be fired and the question needs to be asked, why were we hired in the first place if they know more? Always doing exactly what the client asks turns around and bites both  of you in the rear eventually. The fix can be costly.

We’ve never been fired but if we are it will be for doing our work really well.

Designer’s Head Explodes

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on November 19, 2009

Yup, you might have guessed it: One more person said “Wow, that sounds like a lot of work” when discussing the advantages of Social Network Marketing. And Boom, my head exploded.

It stems from this post yesterday.

People with established businesses might find it harder to start using social media. It’s a “no pain no gain” thing but in this context it means things haven’t got bad enough for them yet or they don’t understand where the “pain” is coming from. Trying to figure out social media marketing when you absolutely have to is going to be a lot harder.

Want to learn more? Owen Greaves gives a more detailed explanation of the way things are changing here.

For those who don’t get Social Network Marketing

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on November 18, 2009

Try explaining the how-to’s of online social networking to a traditional bricks and mortar business or sales person (who isn’t already on-board) and you might hear, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of work”. It’s a common phrase along with “Who can I hire to do all that for me?”. When added to a day of existing work, the work it takes to run a traditional bricks and mortar, yes, it is added work.

Online marking professional’s solution is to just ignore those people – forget trying to explain it, preach to the converted and to those who get it and want it. After all, that’s who’s going to be holding more of the cash to spend on marketing in the long-run as they leapfrog over their competitors.

Online social networking is recreation to many and that seems obvious. To those in business it’s work – and so it should be but not to the degree it is in their minds. The unconverted ask, “What can I take out of my regular day?” and “What’s it replacing?” and then there are the inevitable return on investment questions.

Here’s how I explain it:

Ma and Pa business owner of the past spent a little time each morning sweeping the front step of the store and tipping their hat to people passing by as they did so. Chatting while dusting the shelves or cleaning the front windows. If more people start their search for everything online and it’s generally agreed that the new storefront is online then wouldn’t it make sense to be tipping your hat to people there?

Do you have a simple way of explaining it? Please, do share.

When things get busy

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on November 16, 2009

It’s good to have created business processes prior to creating a business. When things get busy it all gets done. That’s the goal right? Wrong.

Sure, getting things done is part of it but we’re a creative business so keeping a fun and stress free environment is key to keeping that creative juice flowing. How do other creative companies deal with the stress of getting things done and staying in business?

A single contractor working from home have a process for when things get busy: Stop taking work – or get swamped. When things slow down a large company might lay people off or worse, go out of business.

The way things are set up here enables us to expand when we need to step it up and it’s too easy to re-size when things slow down to even think of going out of business, (We’re here for the long haul). This means we aren’t ever stressed out of our minds being swamped or inflating billing to pay for all the overhead when things slow down. One thing stress does well is kill creativity.

We offer creative services so we set out to find ways of keeping creativity front and center. Creativity: That is our main goal and that’s one more reason we set ourselves up the way we have.

Just say no to business cards

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on November 13, 2009

Will there ever be a day when we don’t need business cards? Well yes. Right now. We don’t need business cards right now. For the very few people who don’t have a device to put our contact info in we could write on a piece of paper. But business cards remain, and are in fact stronger than ever. Is it saying something about us all? Or is it simply that no one wants to be the first to not use them?

Just put the finishing touches on our business cards. We’re still going to use them. You stop first.

Does Google fail?

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on November 12, 2009

“Google doesn’t fail very often” a friend told me over lunch the other day. “If some SEO company can trick Google into bringing up the search ranking of a website then Google fails”

It’s an easy case to make because if it were true, (if Google could be easily tricked), then every spam business would be doing it. And they are not. Nope, Google displays some pretty relevant results. And you have seen it yourself when a superior styled site is beat by some frame based site from Ma and Pa Design Farm. The difference is in the sites’ activity.

Brian Clark from Copyblogger writes, “Search engine algorithms come and go but human nature remains” in his post SEO Copywriting is Dead.

SEO is your content, your incoming links and how active those two things are. Everything else is tweaking that may or may not help. For the amount of energy your going to spend, don’t worry – just write (or get someone to write) – and get some incoming links.

Can’t Crush Marketing

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on November 6, 2009

Marketing has been turned upside down by the popularization of social media and will probably never be the same again but that’s not new. Marketing consistently re-invents itself every time new technology comes a long. It tells us how long a popular song can be, how long a newspaper article should be and how much time and money can be spent on producing a television show. Marketing is trying hard to shape social media like it shaped television, radio and magazines before.

The big difference this time is marketing can’t seem to find a dedicated place to play by it’s own rules with social media, at least not yet but we’re seeing a lot of attempts.

We’re too close to the moment in history to make out exactly where things will end up. It’s an important time for those in the business of marketing, design and branding to start listing and keep an ear to the ground. Predictions anyone?