Brand that Facebook Page!

Recently I read an article from Techipedia about “Building the Perfect Facebook Page for 2011.” This article breaks down and simplifies the page layout. It is a great resource for companies, small businesses and not-for-profits.

Normally, the a page looks like an extension of Facebook with your logo on it; however, customizing your page will easily create brand awareness and continuity. Many people realize the importance of a great looking website, but underestimate the importance of a great looking fan page.

Having an underwhelming fan page will get you an underwhelming response. Companies such as Pepsi, Red Bull, and McDonald’s realize the potential opportunity and have created a page that is consistent with their image and looks fantastic.

Creating a branded, stylistic Facebook page will entice customers to check out your company. You will get your message out, not Facebook’s. Talk with us today and we can help your brand successfully use Facebook Pages.

Tumblr: The next Star?

Recently I have begun to experiment with a new (2008+) and growing media tool: Tumblr. The tool combines Twitter and Blogging to create a “micro-blog.” Instead of short posts on your WordPress or Blogger account, you post small updates on your Tumblr page. These updates can be larger than Twitter’s 140 character limit, but users are encouraged to keep updates small. Multimedia can be uploaded to a page directly, much like a blog or a Twitter pic link.

Tumblr wants you to Save Twitter for short links and updates, blogs for longer discussions and Tumblr for longer than Twitter updates but not long enough to merit a new blog post.

On one extreme there are blogs (long, in-depth) and the other extreme is Twitter (short and shallow). Tumblr strives to hit the golden mean and let users post medium posts, enhanced with embedded multimedia.

My favourite feature is the news feed, which standard blogs do not have and acts just like the Twitter feed. Users can “reblog” their favourite posts directly from the news feed.

Does it work? From what I have seen so far, Tumblr is easy to use and is quite unique. If it was not for their technical instability I think Tumblr would be the next big social media platform.

The instability means that users can never know whether their posts will be posted or lost. They won’t know if people will even be able to access their page when Tumblr servers go down. Tumblr will not continue to grow if users become frustrated with technical glitches.

Tumblr is a neat tool and has a vibrant community if they can fix their issues I can see it becoming quite popular. I definitely recommend checking it out and see if it is useful for you and your organization.

Is Tumblr the way of the future, or is there some other site out there that is thriving and growing? Let us know what you think. You can check out my work-in-progress Tumblr at: troyvstew.tumblr.com

Physically Represent your Brand

As we say on our website “a brand is a powerful collection of perceptions in the mind of a consumer.” Although your brand image depends on what your consumer thinks, you can do many things to help foster a positive brand image.

A relatively easy way is to start from where you do business. Whether you are a manufacturer, small business, multinational or creative business, your location can make a lasting impression. A great location will convince people of your mission and your passion.

A great example is the BMW headquarters (seen in the YouTube video). The tower was designed in the shape of four-cylinders, which alludes to a four-cylinder car engine.

Also, as I begin interning here at Engine, the first thing I noticed is that they take their mission to heart. Positioned at a railway station, the constant rumbling, horn-blasting and bell-ringing remind me that we are here to drive businesses toward success.

It really makes a lasting and great first impression on both consumers and employees. Take a look at your business, or your place of employment. Does the location reflect your mission?

Troy is currently interning at Engine Communications as part of his Loyalist Post-Grad PR Program.  He likes anything to do with PR, social media and technology.  A UWO graduate, he is always looking at new ways of doing things. His blog can be found at: troyvstew.wordpress.com

Photography

Camera Lens Mug

Camera Lens Mug

You may not know this, but I am an avid photographer. I may not make a career of it, but I find tremendous joy in all things photographic–from the gear, to the process, to the final image.

 

iphone lens

iphone lens

I received an e-newsletter this morning from a company called photojojo. I love the stuff they sell and their light hearted approach. Like this camera lens mug:

Or perhaps you been looking for a fisheye lens for your iPhone?

Well, if you’re not ready to spend your cash on such frivolous items, and you have been wanting to experiment with photography – may I suggest you visit: DIYPhotography. If you are a do-it-yourselfer and want to save some money on studio lighting and such, you can find all sorts of great low cost ideas. Be warned though these projects require some resourcefulness. It isn’t all building stuff however, they also have some great instruction on a variety of techniques too.

Check it out…

Hire a Blind Person

I’ve recently come across what may be some of the most controversial television advertisements I’ve seen in a while. They are from the Norwegian Association of the Blind, and while I can appreciate humour in advertising, I find this brand of self-deprecating humour to be in poor taste. Sure, they accomplish their goal of making the viewer consider the advantages of hiring a blind person, but it almost feels like they’re encouraging the exploiting of handicapped people.

What are your thoughts; are these ads in good taste – or do you think the only reason they get away with showing these ads on the television is because the blind people they are talking about can’t see them? Comment below…

Waiting for the iPhone…

There has been a lot of buzz over the last few days regarding Verizon finally being able to sell the iPhone after four years of being available exclusively through AT&T.  My question today is, did Apple make a catastrophic marketing error by not allowing Verizon to sell the iPhone until this year? While the phone is still expected to sell well in the US market, time will tell how many potential iphone users have now settled for another brand of smartphone.

I am a Verizon customer who was waiting for the iPhone. I have been eligible for an upgrade for over a year now. This poor old phone of mine has total call time of 636:37:53. Most people I know gave up on Verizon getting the iPhone and settled for an alternative about a year ago. People have upgraded to Android phones or a Blackberry, because trust me, people’s loyalty to Verizon seems to be a lot higher than to Apple. Funny thing about smart phones is that once people own one, brand loyalty seems to be pretty high.

How many Blackberry or Droid users will readily switch to an iPhone…and how many iPhone users see a blackberry as an alternative. Needless to say many Verizon customers who simply got a Blackberry or Droid and are now locked into contracts for another year or two. As for switching to AT&T, some people did, but lets be honest when you live in the US there is only one network you want to be on….Verizon.

Only time will tell if Apple really has a dominant product strong enough to take over the portion of the market share they could have had, or if they made a fatal marketing error. What do you think?

For more info see this article.

How to Design Your Website for 2011 and Beyond

The web is an ever-changing symphony of technologies and trends, that when blended together in harmony, produce great experiences in the form of those websites that populate our bookmarks list and the links we share with our friends. This past year (2010) brought us the promise of a paradigm shift and laid the foundation for some major changes to the way we think about web design. For the first time in the history of the web, we have to assume that any content must be accessible from devices other than computers and intentionally plan for mobile devices.

Shifting our thought from designing a separate website for mobile devices to designing mobile devices for the web, has allowed us to create new technologies like geolocation to tailor web content to your geographic location automatically (Foursquare and Facebook Places use this). There has also been a sharp decline in the use of Adobe’s proprietary Flash plugin to display essential content or navigation because it has been handicapped by a severe lack of support in the mobile marketplace.

So what lies ahead on this continuing evolution of web design, and how can we plan to design our sites with 2011 (and 2015) in mind? Here are a few trends I see in the near future that are mostly simple design choices within the reach of any new website, that will make your site a trendsetter.

Design With Mobile Devices in Mind

We’ve experienced an almost unbelievable explosion in the use of mobile devices for browsing the web with smartphones, but with the introduction of tablet computing into the mainstream last year with the iPad and many competitors soon to be on the market. We know this is only the tip of the iceberg, so how can we design with mobile touchscreen devices in mind?

Don’t rely on mouseovers for essential content, like navigation
Touchscreen devices have two states: touching, or not touching. There’s no ‘hovering’ with a touchscreen, so interactive elements that rely on a mouse hovering over a link (a rollover) simply won’t work on a touchscreen. The good news is that almost any rollover can be converted to a click toggle instead just by making a few minor alterations to code.

You should steer away from relying on rollovers for navigation or displaying your information, but having rollovers for animations or effects is still okay as long as you assume no touchscreen users will be able to see these effects and they don’t alter their ability to navigate the site.

Make your design narrow
Many sites suffer from being too wide to be comfortably readable. The line-length of text that works best for legibility is somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred letters long. Anything longer is simply a chore to read, and anything under thirty-five letters wide causes eye strain. Try building your site to fit within 960 pixels wide, think of the width of a sheet of Letter-sized paper. Remember you can scroll up and down a website all you want, but the wider the design is the hard it will become to navigate. Both mobile and desktop users can also see a narrow website equally well.

Dont rely on Flash so long as it can be avoided
Flash is a proprietary plugin made by Adobe, and because of this there is support only on the operating systems which Adobe chooses to plugins for, and with varying levels of support at that. There is no Flash plugin for most mobile platforms and even when Adobe has created a plugin, there have been many issues with running Flash on mobile touchscreen devices because most Flash designs cannot capture the multiple pointers simultaneously which breaks the multitouch gestures used on touchscreen devices.

Keep in mind that a phone or tablet has only a fraction of the computing power of your computer and can’t handle the complex animations that your computer can even if it happens to have Flash. With this in mind, most uses of Flash aimed at mobile markets should be lightweight, and almost everything that can be done in Flash that is lightweight can also easily be achieved without using Flash and simply using standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript that almost all mobile devices (as well as computers) already have. Designing interactive elements in standard web technologies lets you display your content without plugins and without breaking the multitouch gestures you use to navigate touchscreen devices.

Use Minimalist Design to Communicate Better

Use bold photography
A coming trend for web design is featuring bold photography, even as large as a site background. If a picture is worth a thousand words then why not make those pictures speak the best of you and your brand? A poor photo takes the same amount of resources to view on your site as a great photo, but a poor photo can hurt your brand. A wise idea if you haven’t done it already, is to have professional-quality photos taken of your product/location/people. These will come in handy for any current or future web and print design project you might want.

Use a limited colour palette
We have the ability to use millions of colours on the web, but more isn’t always better. Picking two or three well-chosen colours that coincide with your branding will really help set you apart from other websites, and make a memorable impression on your readers. A simple layout and limited colour palette will clearly define your brand and help unify the tone of your content.

Use typography artistically
Until recently websites were limited to displaying content in the fonts installed on each readers own computer. Since OS X, Linux, and Windows all come with different fonts pre-installed, there were only a handful of fonts in common between all computers that you could use with the confidence that it would show up the same universally.

Lately, new technologies have allowed designers to use any font they wish on their website, whether the readers have it installed on their own computers or not. Starting today, we will see an explosion of the use of creative typography on the web, and a much more mature feel to web design in general.

Use Playful Design to Connect With Your Reader

Memorable domain names are better than shorter domains
Having a domain that is easy to remember and say over the phone to a friend is far better than a brief domain that is easily forgotten or hard to communicate to others. Saying YourTableIsReady.com is easier than RestaurantReviewsOnt.com

Don’t be afraid to be whimsical with your content
The web is different than print or radio, and the attitude is much more personal and playful. Try writing your web content like a conversation instead of a loan application. A little playfulness and whimsy goes a long way to making reader feel connected to you and your brand.

Try saying “Thanks for sending us a message” instead of “Form submitted successfully”, or “Nothing makes us happier than hearing from you, if you want to get in touch with us please fill out the form below” instead of “Contact form below, fields containing an ‘*’ are required”

Final Thought

The number one business trend according to a number of successful web entrepreneurs, is hand-written thank-you notes sent by mail. Don’t forget that the best advocate for your brand is you, and the time you take to connect with your readers. If mailing personal thank-you’s is out of reach for you, a heartfelt and grateful email can help build friendship and loyalty between you and your readers too.

Best of luck to you this coming year from Engine Communications!

Merry Christmas

We will be closed December 23rd, 2010 at 5:00pm – January 4th, 2011 at 9:00am. Enjoy the Holiday!

Engine Staff on TV tonight

Check out the Engine staff on Eat Local Challenge! Eat Local Challenge is a documentary series that follows Eastern Ontario families and individuals as they challenge themselves to 7 days of eating only foods grown and raised locally.

Episode #1 will air in Belleville tonight, Thursday Nov 11th, at 8:00pm on TVCOGECO Cable Channel 4!

http://www.tvcogeco.com/kingston/gallery/our-shows/1593-eat-local-challenge/26558-eat-local-challenge

Creative Office Interiors

Does creativity inspire creative interiors or do creative interiors inspire creativity?

Have you ever noticed that often the most creative companies have the most interesting corporate interiors? I have often wondered if the inspiring interior space is reflective of the innovative, artistic people who work there or if that type of interior design fosters creativity.

Perhaps it is a little bit of both! Think about offices like Pixar, Google and facebook, there has got to be a reason why these companies spend so much on the look and feel of their offices, besides the fact that they are billion dollar companies. When I need creative inspiration I often spend some time looking through a books of corporate interiors. It seems to help spark my creativity. I think by creating an environment that employees feel relaxed and comfortable it does foster creativity. The more you go outside of the box to create a pleasant work environment the more employees will develop outside of the box ideas for your company.

It has been suggested that the more appealing an office is, the more likely employees are to live at the office, and volunteer overtime. Some companies strategically plan their offices in this way, offering services to staff so that they do not need to do as much running around and can maintain focus on projects, and creative brainstorming. Happy, relaxed people love their jobs!

What are your thoughts? What does your workspace look like? Does it inspire you?

– Sandra