“conversation is no longer limited to social cul-de-sacs like the phone”
// Hat tip to @ev and original quote from “Here Comes Everybody”, by Clay Shirky //
Now, we don’t hang our “Social Media Consultants” sign on the door just because it is cool, we’re a full service Communications agency, but this is a sure reminder of why conversation and storytelling across the full set of mediums is an important, and telling part of our clients activity.
Viewers eyeballs are fast-moving and keeping your presence in their field of attention is becoming a key point of interaction. As your story builds, and trust evolves, your call to action will start to reach the audience, resulting in your campaign achieving it’s goals.
Does it matter if each of these viewers comes to your actual website? Of course not, talking to each one within their comfort zone is going to build more trust and involvment than forcing them to change direction and re-focus.
As we build client programs we are ensuring energy is spent in building and educating users in the correct program of Social Media usage. What are you doing?
When you are asked the question “How do you deal with SEO on your site” – how do you answer.
Do you have an SEO agency monitoring your site? Do you think about it at all?
There are lot’s of urban myth’s about how best to SEO your site to win the best Google placement, but here’s on fact – SEO starts at home, and the best SEO is simply good content. Not only will this improve your sites Google Juice, but done well it should also be improving the readers (your customers!) experience.
Here are my top 5 tips to growing your own great SEO, and improving the readability of your posts:
1. Think about what you are writing, and not how many keywords there are in the first paragraph, write well and not only will Google like you, but your readers will too!
2. Write something definitive, and be the best. If your subject is ‘Growing a Cactus’ aim to be the best post on the internet about Cactus Growing, and think about the things to include that would make people read AND link to your post.
3. Think about your post title, and keep the title tight. This will mean when other writers describe, and link to, your post, they will be using the same or similar keywords as your title. Google will like the relevance of this.
4. Write, edit, re-write. Write your post and then take some time to edit it (maybe print it and edit by hand, or get someone else to read it). Check for relevance and distraction – stay on topic and conclude or close your post well. There’s nothing worse that losing your track in a post that rambles…
5. Make it easy to read. If your post is long – pages long, remember to make it easy for the reader to pick out the key points. The average person can read approx 250 words a minute (that’s about a normal page) so think about the length of the post and how long you expect the reader to spend. For long posts, bold the key facts, and provide section titles, so it’s easier for readers to scan, and still come to the same conclusion as someone who has read in detail.
SEO can start at home – follow some golden rules to ensure you can deliver great posts.
When you are asked the question “How do you deal with SEO on your site” – how do you answer.
Do you have an SEO agency monitoring your site? Do you think about it at all?
There are lot’s of urban myths about how best to SEO your site to win great Google placement, but here’s on fact – SEO starts at home, and the best SEO is simply good content. Not only will this improve your sites Google Juice, but done well it should also be improving the readers (your customers!) experience.
Here are my top 5 tips to growing your own great SEO, and improving the readability of your posts: (more…)
Update: Excited that Merlin Mann is writing a book on Inbox Zero – out next year!
We live every minute by email – auto checking in Gmail / Mail.app and iPhone’s in hand for those moments when a laptop is too far away (normally just in a rucsac!). Here’s a great (not so new, but still great) video from Google Campus / Merlin Mann (43 Folders fame) about keeping the inbox clean and managing email.
Expect some more articles about Inbox Zero coming here soon…
We’ve been spending the past weeks putting the finishing touches to our shiny new web app FileShareHQ (a great way to share files for pro-users). Part of this process is to decide on the price plans that will be available and how they stack up.
We’ve fixed our overheads reasonably well, with a great developer (@elliottkember) a talented designer (@robhampson), some good hosting, and cloud services from Amazon S3. It should be easy to put all of these figures together and work out what a GB/user is costing us, and apply a nice healthy Porsche buyers margin. But we’re not going to be doing that.
So why not.
Well, we have costs and overheads that will need to be paid for from day 1, so we can’t be a totally FREE service, but what we do want to do is generate a loyal and growing userbase by being a great VALUE service. We’ll be letting users sign up to their choice of plan for as little as we possible can (starting with a free plan), and putting in more time than the application can afford for our team to talk with, and understand our users. We’ll make the app better, and hopefully cheaper to use (scaling should quickly lead to cost savings, just check out the S3 pricing model).
We want the app to grow and survive, with great buzz, excited users, and a continued growth curve. And, yes, for those reading ahead, this is where our VALUE model does extend our PROFIT. For sure, costs covered, a lower margin point than the grab and run model, but a sustainable, long term profit that will assure the applications success, positive marketing, and continued growth.
The VALUE is put first, and yes, at the greater good of the PROFIT in the long term, but who benefits the most? You. The customer.
We’re being pounded. Pounded by signals. Internet signals. Everywhere we go the web comes with us. 3G, WiFi, iPhone, Laptop.
The internet is ubiquitous – we use it everywhere we go, every day, wherever we are. The simplest of cell phones can access the web, see a mobile page, check out the scores. Whatever it may be we use it everywhere and rely on it.
So, this is the reason why we use web apps everywhere today – we are always connected to the web – and not just with a bulky laptop.
The date has been set for 15th April 2009 at the Royal Southampton Yacht Club, in Ocean Village, Southampton. We have some great speakers and there will be some good Development and Business talks at this event.
Things are moving along and Slipstream Studio is now into it’s permanent offices, in Southampton UK.
We are very aware that we’re not the only Digital Agency in the area (in fact not the only one in our office building), so in true spirit of Open Source (wouldn’t be the web without it) we would like to send an open invitation to web agencies, developers, freelancers and designers to attend the first OpenWeb // Southampton Meetup of 2009.
The idea is simple. We will meet at a small venue, with some Coffee / Beer / Pizza (and WiFi) and discuss / meet / share and learn. Ideally we will arrange one keynote speaker with a topic for the evening.
And hey, look at this, we already have a date! 12th February 2009 – 4pm till it ends!
To kick things off we’ll happily host things here at Slipstream HQ, but if numbers get too big we’ll quickly move to a bigger local venue.
To get things moving, and to learn a little more, join the Google Group for OpenWeb over at http://groups.google.com/group/openwebsoton/ where you can sign up to a simple email digest and offer your help / raise questions there.
If anyone wants to drop us a line direct to help move things along email hello {at} slipstreamstudio {dot} com.
Thanks, we hope that this can turn into a regular great event.
There have been some well publicised, and controversial, recent posts talking about the current economy and the ‘Runway’. Jason Calacanis sums up his runway as preserving cash in order to “complete their mission” – in other words, to keep cash in the bank in order to survive a deep recession.
Here at Slipstream Studio, our first challenge, is to stay on the ‘Runway’, while moving fast to deliver on the projects we are working on. We’re moving fast because we are a small company with lots to do, and, where a few months ago decisions came easily, it’s time to keep the pedal down but with a raised awareness of what is happening. This applies to all of our actions, but most of all with regard to our spending.
With big prospects, clients to deliver to, and some (shhhhhhh) killer web apps to build, we’ve got to move quickly, get bigger, employ staff, move into an office and get the tools we need to run effectively.
Our ‘Runway’ is as long as we want to make it, but we are making some key decisions now to give the company the best possible advantage:
We have changed our office location, at the last minute, as a result of a *great* offer we received from a local provider. Same space, better infrastructure, and a massive saving without a long lease. We’re really pleased to have done this, and feel we have an even better office now. It’s lucky the landlord on the first office took soooo long to decide on a lease (6 years – no thanks) so we had time to consider the new option.
We’ve used some great web apps in the past, but we’re now making decisions on what we use for our day to day tools. Basecamp (project management) and Accounts software are defaults, they make us work more effectively. Elsewhere there’s some great options to save money. This very site is powered by Wordpress, a great free CMS that can be used for any of our clients. When times are hard we are making it easier for our clients to cut their own costs with our recommendations.
Staff are essential, and we are recruiting now for more team members to join us. For those who haven’t done it – staff cost money, and recruiting costs even more, so we’ll be looking after our staff well, so they stay with us. We use the best Apple gear, in a nice office, with great coffee, and most of all we’ll be trusting and respecting the team to do their jobs. He’s had to make some tough decisions but we’ve leart a lot from watching Ryan Carson’s team.
Google. You’ve heard of them, yeah – the search engine. But did you know they’ll manage your email, calendar and documents, for FREE. That’s not a Type. Google Apps Standard Edition is free, and amazing. Great webmail, IMAP, Spam protection, iCal calendaring, and all you have to do is register your domain and manage some DNS. A must have.
These are just a few items from the long list, and we’ll talk more about the company (and maybe some office pics ) in future posts.
How are you moving fast on your runway – it would be great to read your thoughts.
Week 1 of this new company was a week for setting up. A long list was prepared, with design staff to be found.
Right below the ‘Find Designers’ on the to-do list was a new challenge ‘Design Company Logo’. The observant reader will notice that those two points kind of create one issue – no logo. So what to do – take the crowdSpring challenge!
CrowdSpring is a Crowd Sourcing website. You put a job out to the widest audience possible, in this case a design brief to a whole raft of registered designers. With a clear brief, price, and deadline, there isn’t much more to do apart from sit and wait (in this case 7days) for the deadline to approach.
As you can imagine we were nervous of the results. Would we get entries? Was the brief clear? Would the quality be what we are looking for?
The results themselves answer the questions. Yes, we got entries, 202 to be precise. It seems in most cases the brief was clear, though some designers thought the ‘Studio’ meant we recorded music (and for those still unclear, we don’t). And, yes, we got some good entries, at least 10 make the grade, and there will be a decided winner some time this week. Oh, and there are some no-goes to. Please can someone who uses Word art NOT be welcomed into a design community!
Overall we are very happy, and will take, and work with, our new $400 brand. There are some things to remember though, when working with crowd sourcing.
1. It’s not for everyone.
We used crowdSpring because we didn’t, at the time, have the time to run the logo ourselves, but we DID know what we wanted from the brief, and how to decide. That is because we are creatives, and have designers around us to help with the advice and decision process.
2. Feedback is king.
We learnt quickly that feedback is key and helps you get the design you want. We left feedback with creatives who had designed something we liked, and nearly always got a new version within a few hrs. A great way to work.
3. You get what you pay for.
This is the start of our branding process, and whilst it won’t be wholesale changes, we will tweak and amend as we use the brand. The crowdSpring system generates a contract, and we will have EPS / AI files of the chosen design.
Overall, it has worked, but it’s not for clients, it is for the people who know how to brief, manage, and feedback on a project. Because we have been involved in the evolution (all be it on a short time scale) we know where we will go with the usage of the new logo, for cards, web and other applications.
We’ll post the winning logo when it’s delivered, and you can watch how we grow to use our new brand! If anyone is wandering, we probably wouldn’t use it again, but only because we now have our own team, who can themselves learn from this experiment in crowd sourcing.
[The facts and figures are in this blog post because the crowdSpring system is public, so if you can find it, you can review all of the entries received]
The one-time Twitter pretender is being closed down and rolled into popular blogging platform Six Apart (who make Movable Type, and Vox). As a one time – some time – Pownce user it never really bit me with the ease of use that Twitter proclaims as it’s killer USP. For sure it is useful to be able to post those links, photos and movies to friends, but with the easy set up of Twitterific (with auto Tiny URL), TweetDeck, and TwitPic, these features can be almost out of the box for any savvy twitter user.
Pownce obviously didn’t grow at the rate founder investor Kevin Rose hoped, and the natural route was acquisition of the service, code and the highly talented Django developers, led by Leah Culvey (her of Laser Etched Macbook fame!).
However, and here is the point, Six Apart are closing Pownce (including Pro accounts) in 10 days. Why? Is the cost of running the file storage / code that high that immediate closure is necessary. Is there a cash burn (and therefore, surely, a mistake) we don’t know of? Did the Segway and coloured walls just cost too much to run!!??
Yesterday Jason Calacanis offered the point (ironically via Twitter) – why not leave Pownce, open source it, just do something with it! Surely allowing it to be open sourced would keep it running, and not lose any of the benefits of the code knowledge to Six Apart – they have the developers after all.
Offer it out for $10 and I’d take a pop at it! What would you do?
) in future posts.
