Technology

Introducing E-flier Social Sharing

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Company News, Marketing, Technology by Paul McEwan on February 4, 2011 | 1 Comment

Our new Social Sharing feature in our Email Newsletter software went live yesterday, making it super easy for you to share your campaigns on Twitter and Facebook and then see a report of the results.

Before I dive into the details, here’s a preview of the new Social Sharing report. You can click it for a full-size version.

Our providers have been thinking long and hard about the best way to add this kind of social integration for the TribalYell Eflyers System. As always, the goal was to keep the sharing process as simple as possible for you and your subscribers. Here’s how it works.

In-email sharing made easy

The easiest way for your subscribers to share your email newsletter  is by adding a “Tweet” or “Like” button to your campaign. Then with a couple of clicks any subscriber can share your email with their friends or followers. To do this, we’ve introduced two new tags that you can easily add to your existing designs.

Add a “Like” button to your campaign

Just add the following tag anywhere in your email design and we’ll instantly turn that into a working Facebook “Like” button.

<fblike></fblike> turns into

When your subscriber clicks on this button in their email, we’ll load the following lightbox where they can “Like” your campaign and see which of their friends have also liked it. Here’s an example of this in action:

If you don’t want to use the standard “Like” button, just add your own text or image between the tag and we’ll turn that word or image into a link that, when clicked, loads the lightbox like the one above.

Add a tweet button to your campaign

Let your subscribers tweet about your campaigns using the new tag below.

<tweet></tweet> turns into

If your subscriber is a Twitter user, clicking that button takes them straight to a compose window with the tweet pre-populated with your campaign subject and a shortened URL linking to the web version. Here’s how that one looks:

Just like the Facebook Like tag, you can add your own text or images between the tags and that will be used instead of the default tweet button, giving you complete design flexibility.

Sharing made simple for our clients

If we’ve built templates for you, we can easily add permanent “Like” and “Tweet” buttons to them that work for every email newsletter you send. We’ve also made it simple for clients to add their own share links to any campaigns they send using the editor.

Get the word out from within Campaign Monitor

Our new social tags aren’t the only way to get the word out about your latest campaign. You can also share them yourselves right from Campaign Monitor. The report for every email you’ve ever sent now includes a new “Share” button in the top right corner. Here’s how it looks:

Clicking the “Share button” will open the popup where you can share on Twitter or Facebook with a single click.

Whenever that URL is mentioned on Twitter or “Liked” on Facebook, we’ll track the results for you. You and your subscribers can share your campaign any way you like and we’ll handle the rest.

Real-time reporting to bring it all together

While there are lots of different ways to share your campaign, we bring it all together with the new Social Sharing report. This includes who tweeted about your campaign, who liked it on Facebook and who forwarded your email on to friends. Basically, whenever anyone shares your campaign, we’ll show you who it was and how they did it.

The report is broken up into two parts. Up top we’ve got a summary of the activity so far across Twitter, Facebook and email forwards.

Below that is a real-time list that pulls all of this together into a single activity stream. See what people are saying about your campaign on Twitter, who’s sharing on Facebook and which subscribers have forwarded it to their friends.

For each subscriber that tweets, we’ll show you their Twitter avatar and a link to the tweet in question. We also link to the subscriber snapshot and display a gravatar if available for anyone who “Likes” your campaign or forwards it on to friends.

There are loads of other subtle features in this report, but I’ll leave some of them for you to discover once you start sharing. We hope you have fun with this new feature. It’s a brilliant way to learn more about who is sharing your campaigns with the world, and what they’re saying about you in the process.

More about Tribal Eflyer Service

At TribalYell Integrated Branding, we offer everything you need to create and send successful email marketing campaigns. Deliver beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign results, all from within your browser!

It’s new, as self serve as you want and it’s free. There is no monthly subscription. You are only charged a small fee per eflier and email in that campaign.  TribalYell Efliers [Beta]

Send beautiful emails

• Build your own campaigns
• We provide a custom template designs
• Choose which customers to target

Great looking reports

• Great looking charts on the results
• See who opened, clicked and forwarded
• Drill down to individual subscribers

Manage your subscribers

• Easily add your own subscribers
• Handles unsubscribes & bounces automatically
• CAN-SPAM compliant

Target specific customers

• Create segments for targeted campaigns
• Segment based on location, interest or
  anything else you store

View the results anywhere

• Mobile friendly version
• Access results from anywhere

No experience required

• Simple interface
• You don’t need to be a ‘coder’

Master Template vs Index Page in myRealPage

Posted in: Blog, How to Video, myRealPage, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on January 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

Social Media Links added to myRealPage’s Dynamic Contact Weblet

Posted in: Blog, Design, myRealPage, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on January 7, 2011 | No Comments

A new feature was added to myRealPage today that enables an average user to add their social media links with icons in their contact information. You can read about it on their website at Adding support for Social Media links to the websites.

How does it work?

There are two basic steps.

1. Add your links in the Site Settings of your website staging area and publish.
2. Add the Contact Info Weblet into a page of your website (Manage Content) making sure the Hide Social Media remains unchecked and publish

What does this mean to you?

This is basic administration. You don’t have to ask a designer to this for you and you don’t have to know any advanced administration to add links to your social media sites and profiles. This is basic and offers no styling from a basic administration level so you may still want help to swap out the icons or place them a certain way on your website.

What does this mean to us?

We now offer this new item under basic administration; yes, we can do this for you. We have been adding social media links to websites for a long time without using the Contact Info Weblet. Now that we can do this from the Contact Info Weblet means your information will be dynamic from the site settings. If you ever delete and change a Twitter account all you need to do is update the Site Settings in your myRealPage website and publish to make the change on all pages.

On a side note, many myRealPage designers have made the mistake of not using the dynamic weblets. Some websites get re-designed to a point of complete dependence on the designer that made those changes. For instance, when the Contact Info Weblet is not used then a simple phone number change or update to the photo is a call to your designer at a greater expense than a simple basic administration update to the Site Settings. Keep that in mind. Our designs try to maintain all the owner editing abilities that came with the off-the-shelf myRealPage product. From my point of view, being able to edit myRealPage easily and on your own is a huge selling feature.

Image courtesy of myRealPage

WordPress 3.0.4 Critical Update

Posted in: Technology, Wordpress by Paul McEwan on December 30, 2010 | No Comments

Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, sent an email to me about an important update that fixes a core security bug. Here is the official announcement.

We do this update automatically (among many other things) for clients on any one of our monthly site maintenance, SEO or administration packages. It’s easy for us because we constantly have an ear to the ground for these things. If you are a do-it-yourself type or have someone else looking after your site administration, please see this as helpful information. You will also get an email from us. If you are not on any sort of maintenance, SEO or administration package then contact us now to have us install this update and find out more about keeping your website worry-free and up to date all the time.

Now, some of you have been putting off updating the website for many years and this can cause issues of compatibility between custom built features, plugins and the latest version. If you know this is the case, contact us now to find out your next step and more about keeping your website worry-free and up to date all the time.

If you are interested in any of our monthly maintenance, SEO or administration packages but have had your website built elsewhere and by someone else, we will need evaluate your website to check for proprietary features that may not be compatible with standard WordPress Updates. We would be happy to evaluate your site and get you worry-free and up to date all the time. Contact us now to find out your next step.

Please update to the latest version of WordPress right now.

Conversation vs Interruption Marketing

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Marketing, Technology by Paul McEwan on December 20, 2010 | No Comments

Who came up with the phrase conversational marketing? Probably the same people who came up with the phrase interruption marketing. These phrases themselves aren’t bad descriptions of marketing styles but I’m seeing the descriptions used  for defining different marketing tools as either new school or old school and therefor, either good or bad.

For those of you who do not understand what Conversational Marketing and Interruption Marketing are, here is a brief explanation.

Conversational Marketing: Conversations happen and you are weeded out or led further into levels of brand alignment based on what you say. Contests and give aways might be used to entice you to re-tweet or post something and can help create a viral marketing spin and gain more conversation for catching already aligned people. Or to explain it differently, turn each person in the conversation into an advertiser. Facebook, and Twitter are the types of platforms where Conversational Marketing can happen.

Interruption marketing: This is a single sided conversation. An advertisement that is placed in a relevant magazine or a TV commercial that is played to a demographic who is watching a show. Interruption Marketing has interrupted you to say its thing. Considered Mass Media Advertising it is  therefor considered “Old School”. There is a trade-off that in return for the interruption, entertainment congruent with the pitch is offered as part of the better more well rounded advertisments.

For some odd reason, one is seen as good and the other as bad. Personally, I love good traditional advertising but then that’s part of my industry and perhaps I’m biased but tell me, don’t you hate missing the preview ads before a movie? I am always a little disappointed. Do people not like the Super-bowl ads? I love them. It’s part of the game on the screen!

With Interruption Marketing at least we know what we’re getting into. We either stop to look or move on. For me, (and again, my point of view), Conversational Marketing can be insidious and boring. Is the conversation real or fake? The day is coming when bots will be able to auto converse with masses upon masses of people to weed them out and get to a small percentage of those who will be lead down a garden path turning each one of them into little advertisers who tow the party line. (Also known as raving fans).

Interruption marketing tactics get used in purely conversational mediums. For instance, Twitter now sells tweets and is considered interruption advertising but with the ability to position well and so begins the confusion. They are also boring as hell, especially for those who communicate visually.

Then there are those just winging it with zero thought put into what they are trying to do.

Think Ben Think

Look Great?, Look silly

Almost 4000 tweets and 0 followers. What a charmer

RISO Press best for production colour

Posted in: Blog, Printing, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on December 16, 2010 | No Comments

Here is a great little printer by RISO. I have used a number of these in my day and they keep making them better since my print house days. Because they use ink and not heat to fuse the image, they run 95% less energy and way faster than convention digital presses. Add to that the soy based inks and you have a pretty green machine. The video above shows the newest two colour machine. They have a full colour and single colour version as well.

Quality? this is not for high end printing but it’s not terrible either. The output quality on a RISO is stock dependent, meaning different grades of paper change the quality by miles. But I have seen prices for printing retailing full colour starting at 8 cents each for 1 to 10 pieces. That’s Cheap!

Pros: Very green, inexpensive to operate, extremely fast 1, 2 & 4-full colour output, easy to run, They are very capable of variable data printing.

Cons: Although best in it’s class ”Production Colour” means it’s a lower quality.

Summery: This is a great little machine for those things you would normally run in black and white or absolutely need to have run in full colour but don’t have the budget for it. Let’s face it, high end printing isn’t necessary all the time. This machine is perfect for those times so go and find a printer who owns one.

Free Client Appreciation Social Media Workshop

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Clients, Marketing, Technology by Paul McEwan on September 17, 2010 | 5 Comments

I consider my clients, The Tribe. Being part of the Tribe has its privileges like re-tweeting everything I see you say on Twitter, joining your Fanpage and linking with you on Linkedin and now a free workshop. This kind of online networking and sharing helps everyone be found online. However, something is amiss. Not enough of my clients are online. The websites are there but they themselves are not. It’s like opening the store and leaving it unattended. So, I want to help out.

This Free Client Appreciation Social Media Workshop  is for you if you are a client and one of the 4 categories below

1. You don’t have or understand Twitter, Facebook Fanpages, or Linkedin but want to.
2. You have, and understand Twitter, Facebook Fanpages, or Linkedin but want to connect them to your website
3. You have Twitter, Facebook Fanpages, or Linkedin, have them connected to your website but don’t follow a regular social media campaign.
4. You just want to hang out and meet your other Tribe Members.

Before I can commit to a date time and place, I need to discover how many would want to attend. For those of you out of town, let’s rig up Skype. Pre-register by emailing me or commenting below.

While you are at it, follow me on Twitter, Join our Fanpage and link with me on Linkedin.

Update WordPress to 3.0

Posted in: Blog, Technology, Web Design by Paul McEwan on June 21, 2010 | No Comments

This was an email sent to me from Matt, the creator of WordPress and some of you may have already got it.

You’ve probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background.

Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1,200 bug fixes… there’s so much to enjoy in this new release, we’re really proud of it. It’s the best WordPress yet, and available for a limited time for only free ninety nine.

Tell your friends, help them upgrade, write new themes that use the new features, spread the good word.

Please back up you database before updating. You can follow these instructions or contact us to have it done for you.

WTF is HTML 5

Posted in: Blog, Technology, Web Design by Paul McEwan on June 9, 2010 | No Comments

For those of us who learn by seeing, here is what html 5 is, what it will do and what browser works best with it – in a glance.

Featured by myRealPage

Posted in: Design, Real Estate, Technology, Templates, Web Design by Paul McEwan on May 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

When we toot our own horn it’s a week sound indeed. When someone else does it we can hear it for miles and we really appreciate the thought of someone doing so. myRealPage has done just that. Three times in fact. It about time we toot their horn. That is coming in a big way. myRealPage asks for no designer fees or designer sign up to build on their system. Take look at our featured websites on the myRealPage blog. Thanks myRealPage, always glad to help your clients get branded online.

• Ben Chimes website
• Alan M website
• Robert Britch website