We are proud to announce the launch of the completely redesigned website for Algonquin Commons!

Inland Real Estate Corporation approached us with the unique challenge of creating a website that needed to be a bit more dynamic than our traditional build.

1. They needed an editable merchant directory with individual merchant profiles.
2. They needed to be able to post individual Events, Promotions and Job Opportunities for each merchant.
3. The data from each Event, Promotion or Job Opportunity needed to dynamically populate the merchant profiles.
4. All of these pages, in addition to other standard pages such as Directions, Contact Us, etc., needed to be editable within an intuitive administration interface.

 We had our work cut out for us.

We decided to use WordPress for the CMS. It’s a popular choice of ours since it is open source and incredibly easy to use. Unfortunately, WordPress does not have a built-in method for creating custom write panels.

Enter Magic Fields. There are a couple of WordPress plugins out there that have similar functionality, but I’ve found this one to be the most powerful. In addition to the standard Posts and Pages write panels that WordPress comes with, Magic Fields allowed us to create the additional write panels for Merchants, Events & Promotions and Job Opportunities. These custom write panels include fields beyond the standard Title and Content fields, such as Store Hours, Address, and more. Having that data separated out made it pretty easy to lay out our theme. I highly recommend this plugin to anyone looking for this type of functionality.

Our designer really knocked the theme out of the park. The rich graphics and unique interior pages impressed Inland right out of the gate. After a few rounds of minor tweaks, we now have an excellent solution that gives Algonquin Commons an attractive and scalable web presence.

Head over to ShopAtAlgonquinCommons.com now to check it out!

It’s now been one month since my sojourn to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. As I’ve decompressed and looked back on the experience, the importance of content for brands has become even more apparent. As I mentioned before, the most popular panels at SXSWi were all about content. Creating content for brands, journalism for brands, and utilizing online channels to publish and promote that content.

Everywhere I turned at SXSWi I saw evidence of this. Many teams had been deployed for various blogs and sites, the Austin Convention center was constantly crawling with Canon 5Ds, Flip Cameras, iPhones, and other assorted camera gear.

What some people saw as production crews, I saw as modern ENG (electronic news gathering) teams. Raidious is a content company. Owned media is our center, and quality content creation is a key element of that. Many times we deploy ENG teams to gather stories or elements of a content plan.

Wikipedia has a very broad definitely of ENG, but the core is as follows:

“It can mean anything from a lone reporter taking a single camcorder out to get a story, to an entire television crew taking a satellite truck on location to do a live report for a newscast.”

I was most excited to check out NPR’s team at Stubb’s BBQ during SXSW music. The coverage they were providing of the line up on DATE was incredible. Their team featured an entire live production crew, mutliple cameras, live HD switching, social media monitoring and promotion, and on air talent – all being broadcast and interacted with LIVE online.

Raidious has experienced a lot of success in deploying ENG teams for our clients – we’ve produced huge batches of video content to activate trade shows online, and utilitized mobile technology such as iPad to report back on events as they unfold. This can create an incredible synergy of content. This is one of they many ways we help brands shine online.

Most likely you’ve seem them.  QR is short for “quick response,” and they’re those little black and white squares full of black “modules” arranged in a square patterns on a white background often displayed in magazine ads, on signs, buildings, business cards, or on most objects about which a person might be seeking more information.  QR codes were developed in Japan in 1994, but the western world has been a little slow on the uptake.  With the spread of smartphones and scanner applications, they’re catching on like wildfire.

What they do:

QR Codes are a great way to connect the print world to the online world.  QR codes, once scanned, can display text information, add contact infomation to your smartphone, take you to a website or YouTube video for more information.

Requirements:

To utilize a QR code, you’ll need a QR or barcode scanner app downloaded on your smartphone.  Using QR codes, at least at this point in time, puts a lot of faith in your target audience.  Many users likely have no idea yet what QR codes are or how to use/read them when they see them.  The learning curve is still in progress.

Effective use of a QR code:

• Using a QR code to share quick and simple text-based information or instructions with a user can be an effective use. Many advertisements take you to a YouTube video that will give more information on whatever topic or product the ad is pushing.  This is also a more effective use of a QR delivering information to a smartphone user.  Better print ads have a small description of what the QR codes is and exactly how to use it.
• Offering a special or bonus deal in an advertisement with a QR code can be a great way to further engage with users.
• Sign up for our mailing list!  Engage your user with a great ad and use a QR code to link them to an easy online sign-up so you can further market to them.
• Ordering products or selling tickets to an event – great use, just make sure you are connecting the user to an app/site where purchasing through a smartphone is easy.  Nothing will be more frustrating to the user than to take them to their goal and it be difficult or unattainable.

Ineffective use of a QR code:

Cassidy/Turley commercial real estate is putting huge QR codes physically on their downtown buildings, hoping potential renters will notice and scan them while walking or driving by.  These codes will take the user to a website listing.  Creative, yes.  However, no explanation is provided on the code or building.  If these QR code linked the user to a video tour of the property, with contact information at the end of the video, they might be moving in a more effective direction.

Know your audience and demographic.  Anything targeting Baby Boomers or Seniors is likely not yet an effective use of QR codes, but people are starting to catch on. What are you hoping your target audience will do once they scan the QR code? Make sure they can do it, fast and easy.

If you’re in marketing, odds are good that this week’s issue of Ad Age is sitting on your desk, in your briefcase, or in your mailbox. It’s the annual Digital Issue, a special (and  widely-read) edition of Ad Age, focusing exclusively on the fast-moving world we live in every day, known as interactive / digital / web / online marketing.

Raidious put a special message in this year’s Ad Age Digital Issue: just a little reminder for all you CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Social Media Managers, eMarketing Managers, and other digital marketing junkies. Turn to page six please. Then contact us!

On Monday InsideFacebook.com reported in-depth on some changes to the Facebook Like button. This is in relation to using the Like button on a published site. Basically, they are replacing the “share” button on sites with “Like” and “Like (with comment)”.

This means when you have this functionality installed on your site, and a user “likes” something, the user of your site is effectively syndicating your content directly into Facebook, publishing it into the streams of all their friends.

Let’s hope that content doesn’t suck, eh? The real world equivalent of this would be advertising to get people into your store, then handing them 150 flyers to go give to all their friends, along with a personal endorsement (implied, at the very least) of how great your company is.

You can’t get that with paid media. You can’t get it with earned media. Only owned media gives you this unique scenario where not only do you get to control the message, and the platform, but the credibility of the source is almost unquestionable.

If my friend says it is so, it must be true! I trust them. I confide in them. I have a relationship with my friends that brands–regardless of their budgets or their hip factor or their sheer will–will never, ever be able to replicate, because brands are not people.

What is an impression like that worth compared to buying a print ad (if it’s good enough I’ll see it online), or having a story featured on the local news (which my friends curate for me on Facebook)?

I would have to say it is worth a helluva lot more than any tactic a traditional medium–paid media or earned media–can offer. Plus, you can track each actual impression or interaction all the way through to conversion, if you know what you’re doing on the anlaytics front. Earned media and paid media are at best a guess, an approximation.

The Like button could (and probably will) become one of the top syndicators of your content, if you employ this technology on your site or your blog. What else are you doing to syndicate your content?

We have seen a lot of success with our clients on Reddit, as well as occasionally on Digg (hit and miss). Twitter and Facebook syndication works. We have also recently been working more traditional syndication into our content planning, as well as guest blogging strategies for brands and thought leaders.

Getting the content off of your site or blog and proactively getting it in front of people is critical to your success, and a Facebook Like button is a great start. Let us know if you need a hand with this, or other syndication strategies; we’ll be happy to help!

Despite what many social media gurus want to preach, social media culture is still being defined. The rules and best practices are still being worked out by its users.

We as a social media culture haven’t completely defined the new norm, but we are well on our way. With that said, I thought it would make sense to revisit a book I read in college: When Old Technologies Were New by Carolyn Marvin.

In this book, Marvin looks at the cultural impact, social breakdown, and the rebuilding of social norms brought on by the inventions of electricity and the telephone. I didn’t want reread the entire book –come on, I’ve only got a week left of my Netflix free trial– so I decided to read just one chapter I thought was most relevant to our current state of communication … it’s about the telephone.

The telephone, like all new technologies, did not find its way into every home overnight.

Also the necessary improvements to the technology, the laws (wiretapping, privacy), the new defined social norms, or the cultural impact took decades to stabilize. One one end of the spectrum of cultural impact was Fort Wayne, IN, patent attorney Judge Robert S. Taylor who said the telephone created an “epoch of neighborship without propinquity.”

Let the comment fight begin!

On the other end was an article written in American Electrician who said “We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,” … in 1897, roughly around the time Mark Zuckerberg’s great-great-grandfather was wondering if William McKinley was going to make a better President than Grover Cleveland.

“Reliable cues for anchoring others to a social framework where familiar rules of transaction were organized around the relative status of the participants were subject to the tricks of concealment that new media made possible. Lower classes could crash barriers otherwise closed to them, and privileged classes could go slumming unobserved.” (Marvin, p. 86)

The barriers of social distance are continuously broken. For example, I technically caaaan reach Oprah by telephone or mail, I could also just tweet at her. One in a million chance she reads it, but nevertheless the communication barrier is nearly non-existent. The means of creating social currency are further eroded: not only am I able to communicate up the social ladder, but the opportunity for my voice to reach thousands or millions and actually move up the social ladder is present. Many non-celebrities have thousands of followers on Twitter because they offer humorous, thoughtful or engaging content.

Communication technology, by its very essence, brings together people who are not spatially close–which by itself can be kind of intimidating if not outright terrifying. Popular culture has time and time again assigned communication technology to power to act as gateways to other dimensions and the harbingers of evil, e.g. Poltergeist, The Ring, White Noise, One Missed Call or When A Stranger Calls.

...or the inevitable gritty remake

This evolving social pathway may be scary as you try to manage your brand. The general public feels free, if not obligated, to tell the world about any positive or negative opinions they have. Marvin writes of New York Governor Chauncey Depew, who was terrorized by constituents who felt it was their right to call about any and all things they read in the newspaper (p. 66).

The difference between the telephone and today’s social media outlets is that today there isn’t a direct call to a Governor, CEO, or President: it’s a loudspeaker shouting a message to the masses that has to be actively monitored in order to make adjustments and respond. The goal of a social media management team shouldn’t be to affect change by shouting at target markets, but to embrace the open platform and see how it can work for you to make your product and customer relationships better. We as a culture have been here before and will be here again.

In the meantime let’s all go tweet at Oprah.

Related articles

• When Will the Social Media Gatekeepers Arrive? (briansolis.com)
• The Psychology of Social Media that Fuels Social Change (mprcenter.org)

My grandmother used to tell me that there’s nothing worse than a know-it-all. As a bright, precocious youngster, it was advice I needed–and advice that stands to this day.

As internet marketers, we’re often faced with companies who aren’t certain what online channels to use or how to best utilize them. That’s perfectly understandable, as it’s a complicated ecosystem in which we’re trying to blaze our trail.

What is inexcusable is being told “You can’t do that, nobody can do that.” The notion that if you don’t understand something then it must be impossible is arrogant and foolish.

As I type this I’m watching my beloved Phoenix Suns play the Miami Heat. My main man Steve Nash is a year older than I (he’s 37) and yet he’s out there playing at an all-star level. He’s able to do this because he outworks, out-thinks, and out-hustles players 15 years his junior. Oh, and in the off-season he found time to direct a documentary film.

So a 6’3″ Canadian soccer player can’t play in the NBA? Nobody can play basketball at nearly 40 years of age? Tell that to Nash, and ask to see his two League MVP trophies while you’re at it.

No matter how long you’ve been around the game–basketball, marketing, or owning a bakery–there is always something new, always someone younger, faster, better. Your agency, brand, or company may have decades of experience on its side, but you’d better be prepared to work harder than ever if you want to remain an all-star.

Ask questions, read the blogs and whitepapers, attend conferences and seminars. Work hard, then work harder. Learn, then learn some more. Don’t purport yourself to be an expert in everything. And don’t tell someone else what they can’t do.

Or you can keep up with that know-it-all attitude, and a younger, faster, brighter kid will take your spot in the starting lineup.

Raidious has teamed up with Spredfast to create a powerful suite of social media tools and services for business. Social Center is a collaborative effort that leverages the power of leading social media management software Spredfast with the content development, management and deployment prowess of Raidious.

In our experience, companies are often confused about which resources and tools best suit their online marketing needs. Additionally, they usually lack the expertise to best utilize these channels. Social Center combines the enterprise class Spredfast software with the full line of Raidious services to solve both the technology and resource problems.

Social Center isn’t just something we sell: we eat our own dog food and use it to manage all our client accounts including Marsh Supermarkets, Comcast, CyberDefender, and other regional and national brands. We work directly with Spredfast to help refine the software to meet our needs and those of our clients.

Social Center plays nicely with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, Foursquare, and a host of blogging platforms including Blogger, WordPress, Drupal and more. The software allows companies to create, schedule and maintain the content that drives all these digital platforms in one place.

Measuring effectiveness is also easy, with built-in integration with Google Analytics as well as customizable metrics for all activity across all digital channels. You can dig as deep as you want into the analytics, or get a quick bird’s eye view with the dashboard.

Social media is a two-way channel, and Social Center knows it. With it you can monitor dialog in real-time from all across the web, and decide when and how to respond. It’s also built to factor in governance, allowing for a content “chain of command,” ensuring that messaging is consistent and brand-approved.

The services in Social Center are powered by Raidious, bringing our experience, agility and acumen for creating and managing online content to your business.

We can assist with content planning and strategy, as well as the actual creation of content for blogs, email, mobile devices, web video, social media and more. Equally importantly, we can monitor, moderate, govern and promote social media content, and provide all the analytics you need to prove ROI.

If you already have an in-house staff to create content, Raidious offers training in using Social Center software as part of our SocializeU training program so you can make the most of it to create measurable results.

Learn more about all the features Social Center has to offer and sign up for a free 30-day demo at GetSocialCenter.com.

While I’m at total humanist at heart, I am an online marketer by trade. I know (and tell everyone I can) that truly effective digital marketing is about bringing your brand’s content to people utilizing the channels they use and like.

With that in mind, comScore recently released data on the U.S. exposed reach of advertising on various social networking sites, and the numbers speak for themselves. Looking at data from September, 2010, ads on Facebook.com reached 62.4% of the U.S. online population. Demonstrating its continuing decline, MySpace.com paced a distant second at 24.3%.

Courtesy comScore Data Mine

The simple fact is that the combination of ad reach and the potential for consistent customer advocacy makes Facebook one of the most–if not the most–powerful social marketing channel for reaching customers on the internet. If your company is ignoring this valuable resource for reputation management and return on investment, you do so at your own risk.

The website for the 2010 Masters of Business Online conference went live, signifying the opening of registration. I am a featured speaker, conducting a session on developing a digital content strategy.

2010 Masters of Business Online Conference

The Masters of Business Online conference is a one-day intensive conference focusing on utilizing the internet as a prime marketing channel.

From their website:

MBO 2010 brings together marketers from business and industries of all types. From Fortune 500 companies on the bleeding edge of innovation to small businesses breaking into the social arena, this year’s agenda is chock full relevant case studies and practical tips on how to use the internet as your best marketing channel.

How easy is it for customers and prospects to find your site when they do research? Are prospects connected in a way that convert their leads into sales? The web can be a powerful tool, but only if you know how to use it! That’s what this intensive one-day conference is all about!

At MBO 2010, you will:

• Learn how to maximize your company’s sales and leads with internet marketing and social media.
• Understand the relevant analytics to evaluate and test your campaigns.
• Create a bridge between your business’ brand and online goals.
• Connect with other marketing professionals and industry experts.

Other speakers include Amy Baker, Director of Digital Solutions for Fusion Alliance, Dave Morse, eMarketing Manager for Delta Faucet Company, and Ryan Mull, partner at Imavex. The keynote will be given by Mark Roberge, VP of sales, Hubspot.

If this all sounds like it’s right up your alley, read more or by all means go and register right now. It’s sure to be a day filled with great insights.