Business owners can get themselves into a trap always asking “what’s my ROI,” as if the only things worth doing are the things that you can draw a direct line from expenditure to profit.  The reality is that at some point you just have to do it because you know it is the right thing to do.  I am pretty sure that The Brockway Pub has no idea how much money having their bartenders draw three-leaf clovers into beer foam has gotten them.  However, they also probably know how much of an emotional impact it has on their customers.  And when you make an emotional connection with a client, then you can bet they are coming back.

The little things are often the first to go.  The things that don’t seem to directly affect sales get cut by the “suits and ties” who like to sound smart.  The real bottom line is that we are all looking for places to spend our money where we feel like we are getting more than just what we pay for.   The little add-ons we don’t expect are the things that take an “OK” experience and turn it into a great one.  A little time and attention goes a long way in building customer loyalty, and that is something even a “suit and tie” knows has value.

It’s my responsibility to make sure any new project initiatives are explained thoroughly to all of the employees and that tasks are doled out evenly.  Of course this often creates tension, as we all know that nothing is actually “fair” when it comes to project tasks.  Assigning roles at “OMY” is proving to be very challenging for me.

As with most companies with which I work, it is also my task to come up with new marketing ideas.  These ideas are put into place to increase company profits, returns and exposure.  This company is a little different.  It’s not a true non-profit business, as the projected profits for this company come in measures not equivalent to money.  So when I’m trying to spark new ideas for “OMY” without specific return measurements, e.g. financial bonuses, paid time off, etc., I sometimes find myself at a bit of a loss.

So today: the goals were very simple; small tasks to be completed in order for a larger goal to be started.  All employees were verbally instructed on the tasks and the CEO was on board.  However, just a couple hours into the day and employees were calling me to complain and the CEO needed a break.  Unfortunately, a lot of my job is not done on-site at “OMY”, however, this called for swift action.  I immediately left my office and headed to headquarters.

Upon arrival, I was informed that all plans had been scrapped for the day.  There was minimal opportunity to get the employees back on track.  We talked through the issues, but resolved to start fresh tomorrow.  You might think that some of these communications would fall under the scope of work for the Account Manager.  However, because of the vested interest I have in this company, it’s really all on my shoulders.

I have found as a Marketing Director though that not all tactics work the same for all companies.  I have some companies whose focus is primarily online advertising, with small pushes in social media.  I have a couple companies who are immersed in social media and have yet to start pay-per-click advertising.  As a whole we encourage all of the companies we represent to utilize all of the tools available to maximize their businesses. I often ask myself if there are tools for “OMY” that I don’t have in place, or how can I make “OMY” run smoother?

“OMY” has lots of room for growth and I am not giving up on its great potential anytime soon.  My official title with their company doesn’t really fall under “Marketing Director” and while I constantly try to utilize the skills I’ve learned as a Marketing Director with my other clients, I must remember that the employees and CEO at “OMY”… call me mom and wife.

General Tips

1. Google

This may seem obvious, but seriously, Google is your best friend. Knowing how to search for something efficiently is paramount.

2. W3 Schools

Running though the HTML and CSS tutorials on W3 Schools can help either give a great basis to any beginner in the web development field, or sharpen a veteran’s skills set. I highly recommend them.

3. Learn by Doing

What I’ve found from experience is the best way to learn is to try something yourself. Even if you don’t fully understand what you’re doing, try to accomplish it anyway. You may find you’ve learned more than if you knew what to do all along.

HTML/CSS Tips

1. Write Clean Code

Messy

<div><ul><li>
<a href="#">Nav Item 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Nav Item 2</a></li><li><a href="#">Nav Item 3
</a></li></ul>
</div>

Clean

<div>
	<ul>
		<li><a href="#">Nav Item 1</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Nav Item 2</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Nav Item 3</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

While both examples will display on the page exactly the same way, being able to properly indent code can greatly increase readability, which in turn leads to easier editing… not only by you, but anyone else who might edit your work.

Some can be against indenting code, using the argument that tabs and spaces in the file will increase the file size, thereby increasing load time. But the size it adds is so minuscule, you would only see true benefit if your site gets a massive amount of visits a day. Bottom line, for the sake of readability and ease of editing, writing clean code has a much greater payoff in the end.

2. Use a Great Text Editor

Most tutorials for writing HTML or CSS have the user open their default text editing program, which most of the time is Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac. While these programs can get the job done, there are MUCH more efficient applications that are designed for writing code. Below is a list of my favorite apps at the time of writing this article.

Sublime Text 2 (Mac/Windows/Linux)
Unlimited Free Trial – $59 to buy

Currently my favorite text editor for writing HTML/PHP/Javascript. Features include automatic tag ending, color schemes to aid in readability, syntax highlighting, multiple select, optional grid layout, etc…

Espresso 2 (Mac)
15-day trial – $79 to buy

Although this app can write everything Sublime Text 2 can, I feel this is the best app for writing CSS. Period. Espresso has the ability to edit CSS on a live site and watch your changes happen in real time. That alone makes this my top choice for styling.

3. Pioneer

My mantra is all about coding for the future. Using the latest advancements in HTML and CSS lead to a better looking (and faster loading) future for the web. Although we aren’t quite to the point where entire sites can be crafted with these new technologies (I’m looking at YOU Internet Explorer!), using the benefits of HTML5 and CSS3 in cases where a fallback in other browsers are possible is best. However, my personal opinion on the matter is if you are using a dated browser you deserve to view the more plain looking version of a site. There should to be a visual benefit for people who have the sense to upgrade their web browser.

Photoshop Tips

1. Trim Tool

On the surface this tool doesn’t appear to be very useful, but as a developer the time this nifty little tool can save you really adds up. This feature will trim either transparent space or a solid color from the edges of an image. This will allow you to instantly crop a image down to exactly the part that matters. This tool goes hand in hand with my next tip.

2. Hide All Other Layers

When developing off of a photoshop file, good designers will place each element of the site into a different layer in the file. You are able to show and hide each layer to only pick out what part of the file you need. In the past I would go through the file and manually hide each layer until only the part I needed was visible… until I learned this. If you hold down the “alt/option” key and click on a layer, it will hide everything BUT that layer you clicked. This can save minutes of time, and after a quick trim you’ve got the part you need.

3. Save for Web

Using “Save for Web and Devices” is a great way to cut down on image sizes when saving an image. Reduced image sizes means faster loading, and faster loading leads to a happier web experience for users.

These are the latest things I have run into in the world of web development.  Stay tuned for further tips or never hesitate to reach me via email any time: dan@fatatom.com

With our wide array of clients there comes a wide array of needs, working styles, time lines, expectations, you name it, different something.  This is where flexibility and adaptability come in as must haves for myself as Account Manager, but better yet as a member of the Fat Atom team.

Each client is going to have different hot button items that need to be done yesterday.  Each client is going to have a preference for meeting space and time.  Each client is going to have a unique approval process.  These are all things I observe and learn as Account Manager and as main point of contact for clients. Being flexible is something I always have to be, especially when getting to know a client and their individual work style.  Other projects and needs come up, deadlines move, but expectations remain the same.  Working around the changes (being flexible) and still providing quality work is the task at hand.

Adjusting to clients’ specific needs and learning about their industry is what comes next.  And this is where adaptability comes in. Each client will have different requirements, some more important than others, and adapting to each of these is something we do for every single one of our clients.

For instance, one of my clients has a distinct need for all types of reporting and likes reports throughout the month.  This is something we as a team have adapted to as we’ve gotten to know this client and their industry.  This is something we do specifically for this client.

Our job is to simply make sense for a client and help them ultimately be more successful, whatever that may look like.  And for us that means being flexible and adaptable.

A visit to downtown Indy will expose you to various signage and the construction of the Super Bowl Village. Some of the street signage I noticed advertised the Super Bowl zones and routes, along with renamed street signs to honor the event. The Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association will launch a campaign to get visitors into the “Super City” before the Super Bowl weekend. As always, you have to spend money to make money, but all money spent on advertising expects to be brought back to the city from the visitors.

All artwork for the events appears to be strong. The official 2012 Super Bowl logo showcases a shiny, structured logo featuring the Lucas Oil Stadium in the background and emphasizing the Roman Numerals. Designers of the logo decided to keep the look consistent with the previous logo from 2011. Also, the “Know Before You Go” program has designated street signs for the “Super Route” and “Bowl Route” for out-of-towners navigating downtown. Directional signage is always needed when people unfamiliar with an area are visiting. Use of striking imagery and bright colors are a plus as well to draw attention.

I snapped this photo recently while downtown. A few Super Bowl signs are visible.

With all the new visitors coming into the city, it is Indianapolis’ opportunity to get them to come back in the future – so we will soon learn how successful they are with hosting Super Bowl XLVI. I expect great things from the Super City!

Ever had one of those days where you felt you needed to be doing three or more things at once?  Of course you have.  Everyone has.

I can promise that you didn’t go through that day thinking how wonderful it was that you had things to do to keep you active.  It was probably chaotic, stressful, and incredibly exhausting.

Just for kicks, let’s say these things you had to take care of were a to do that was already late and needed to be wrapped up yesterday, a last minute task that fell out of the sky and onto your lap and needs to be dealt with ASAP, and a long term project you’ve spent months working towards and are nearly done with.

Now imagine for a moment (please literally try to capture this feeling) that rather than just three things you need to accomplish and work on today there are at least TWENTY.

Welcome to the world of a professional Account Manager!

You might read this and come to the conclusion that this article is going to turn out to be a sort of silly rant for better working conditions, the start of a strike, or some other subtle complaint disguised as advice, but trust me, it’s not any of the above.  It’s quite the opposite in fact.  Rather, this is about how it’s possible to not only manage large numbers of projects simultaneously, but to do so in an exceptionally efficient way.

If you’re new to directly managing or even just being involved with the large picture of EVERYTHING that is being worked on at any given moment within a company, it can seem extremely intimidating to see all that needs to be accomplished; each individual task with its own set of requirements, deadlines, potential issues, and challenges.

The keyword for success here is diligence. It takes an incredible amount of dedication to ensure that issues are dealt with, progress made, and innovations planned out in a practical way.

As an account manager, I have tools and systems that I’ve learned and been taught that help me to efficiently organize, plan, and distribute work.  They give me the ability to work with low stress, a clear mind, and provide a real love for what I do.

But even with great resources like custom built software, magical pens, and advanced time tracking, there’s a certain point where none of those matter without the right people running them. After all…

A tool is only as good as its user.

This brings us back to diligence. The best way to keep large numbers of simultaneous projects from making you suffer a nervous breakdown is to have the experience, instinct, and competency to watch them all and make sure they get the attention that they need. As with most things, this is much easier said than done, but that’s what it takes.

When you have that diligent person keeping the ducks lined up and the cats herded it opens the door for others to do better work with less stress and more focus because they don’t constantly have to worry about the big picture of everything that will need to be finished next.

All of this organization and mental gymnastics ultimately leads to higher quality work and to happier people.  Who doesn’t want that?

Have any questions or just want to talk?  Feel free to post away in the comments section below!

Search is the primary source of site traffic for most companies, and a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is the only way besides luck to increase the quality and quantity of that traffic. If you want to consistently show up well for more than your company name, a significant but reasonable SEO effort must be taken. Doing so can increase your site traffic for years, without the repetitive cost of pay per click campaigns. On the other hand, if you make no effort, you won’t rank high enough and your traffic can nosedive, especially now with Google Instant Results and more reliable results meaning few people click below the 5th position and the second page is nearly useless.

What determines Search Engine Result Page ranking?

Every time we search, Google uses the keywords we’ve entered to try and find what it thinks we’re searching for. It does so by examining the relevance of both site and individual page content to the search phrase we enter. It considers the weight (or importance) of each site, determined by its inbound links, traffic and social linking. A very basic, broad indicator of a site’s weight is its Google PageRank.

The Google PageRank formula is ridiculously complex.

There are many things which influence how a page or site ranks. The amount of competition for each keyword can vary dramatically, and can drive down your rank. Newsiness – how recently a page was first created matters, especially now with the Caffeine algorithm which affects 16% of all searches, according to Google. The click behavior of each user influences ranking as well, as Google tracks your use by logged in Google users, as well as IP address. If your company searches for its own site again and again and clicks every time, you make it show up higher on your computer than what it does to the rest of the world. If you searched for your company name and never clicked, your site will show up ranked artificially lower. Location, especially your country and what town your IP address says you are in, play a part, although location clues in the search also matter. Google knows what to do if you search for “Hotels in New York”.

How to choose what keywords to target for SEO

Unless you have money to burn, you will need to stick to 3 or 4 carefully selected keywords. The primary means of evaluating keywords is KEI (keyword effectiveness index), which compares the number of local (US) searches to the amount of competition, enabling you to get the most SEO bang for your buck.

Relevance is important, as the highest KEI term is typically too broad to apply to just your business. You need to balance KEI versus relevance to make sure that most people searching for your selected keywords would want to visit your site. Localization (adding state and city names before or after terms) is also helpful, if you can show up for low KEI but very specific and relevant terms. Long tail keywords will be discovered in this process, showing other semi-relevant and less popular terms that you can work into the site and can bring in up to half of your traffic.

How to SEO site content

As far as SEO goes, content is king, and growing in importance. Your primary goal should be to create engaging content that visitors will find genuinely useful as this is the best way to increase links and traffic.

Judicious use of keywords helps, but should never be forced. Keyword stuffing is bad, and can be detected by Google and users. If your content reads naturally then it’s fine. As far as keyword inclusion goes, page titles are extremely important, as are section headers (which should be in H1, H2, or H3 tags).

The further through a page’s content you go, the less important it is. The earlier content, like the first 20 words on a page, are much more important than the tenth paragraph. Link bait is really good too, as it interests or angers people, either way getting a lot of links and traffic.

The description and keyword section of the meta tag is near useless, aside from the description often displays at least partially in search results.

How to use link building to build SEO

To help boost your ranking, links must be non-reciprocal. If you link back to a site that links to your site, it destroys the link’s value. Chaining won’t work either. But a sophisticated link exchange program involving dozens of sites can work if you know what you’re doing, although whether it is worth the effort depends on the weight of the sites involved.

Site and page weight are extremely important, and each page on a site has its own weight. A PR 7 (Google PageRank 7) site linking to you is worth dozens of PR 2’s. The linking site’s relevance is also very important. If you run a beauty salon blog, 100 links from llama farms are either going to do nothing, or actually harm your site. Worse yet, pay for 5,000 junk links from non-relevant sites (which is very black hat) and you will likely have to scrap your site, make a new one and pray that Google will let you get back to zero so that you and an reputable SEO agency can rebuild (that was the exact opposite of fun).

The keyword of the anchor link (what the typically blue, underlined link text on the linking site says) should be relevant, and if it’s a target term, even better. Link building agreements and services are a good way to build links, and many use social bookmark sites to make sure they’re indexed. Link building services comes in two flavors: more DIY ones of varying reliability (Build My Rank and Linkvana are decent) that cost hundreds to several thousand, and large companies (such as Slingshot SEO) that execute a strategy and provide other services and do an excellent job but require a minimum contract of around $100,000, which is a serious chunk of change. Additionally, social media links and traffic aren’t typically counted as links, but are used as an aggregate indicator of importance as far as weighting.

How to optimize site setup and architecture

The most important thing you can do is use clear text on your site, using text instead of images wherever possible. Page URL’s should be SEO-friendly, as in site.com/parts/blue-car-widgets/ instead of site.com/?article=1037. All images need to be described using the alt tag, adding relevance, keywords and the possibility to show up in image searches. Avoid Flash when possible, and make sure to describe any Flash content.

Sitemaps and especially sitemap feeding plugins are very important, notifying search engines of new pages and getting them crawled.

Make the site non-duplicating. Either the root (preferable) or www should be the only subdomain, with one of these forwarding to the other. Additionally, rel canonical tags in your code can tell Google which version is the preferred, simply telling Google “this is the URL you should index me as”.

With significant effort and a bit of expense, you can boost your search rankings compared to your competitors. You may wonder if you can afford it, but the real question is can you afford not to?

Always be prepared for the unexpected like the ever changing weather forecast, tip 1 for event planning!

Not everything always goes according to plan though (or does it ever?), so being prepared for the unexpected is the first tip I’d share with other corporate (or just for fun) party planners.

Time is always of the essence…right? So with that in mind I share my next tip: to always start event planning early, early, early to make sure you have enough time to plan the event itself (which is typically the easiest of the tasks) and get the right people to RSVP.  For example, if your business is hosting a free event like a seminar or launch party for a new product, you most likely want customers and potential customers to attend. To obtain these crucial RSVPs, you’ll want to plan and execute a marketing campaign to get them there.  Getting the right peeps in the seats is no easy task so start early! Time is always of the essence.

Tip three…say cheese!  Take pictures at the event or capture a video, if applicable and appropriate, to share with guests and those who weren’t able to attend.  This helps in two ways as it lets guests reminisce about the event, comment on their experience (hopefully positive!) and it connects with those who didn’t attend, showing what they missed out on.  To do that you can post event pictures on Facebook, write a blog post and attach a picture, send a thank for coming email or Tweet about it.

My last tip is to have fun!  Event planning can be stressful especially when things don’t go as planned, you are in a time crunch with few RSVPs or your camera battery dies 10 minutes into the event. So in light of any or all of the mishaps that might happen, enjoy your event and simply have fun!

I wonder why this is even an issue. It’s as if social responsibility is an add-on to corporate operations. As if you should get a pat on the back for doing what should be a natural part of doing business.

In my opinion this is altogether missing the point. The majority of corporations haven’t the slightest idea how much untapped productivity and potential for social responsibility they already come packaged with. All corporations have an army of people taking care of their daily operations, yet they are oblivious to their people’s true potential. Why? Because they’ve never really given their employees a reason to express their genius.

I often ponder why people who give 10% of their energy at work throughout the day, turn around and give 110% of their energy and commitment to their recreational activities or their social cause; and often during that same day. Why do people drag their feet all day bored out of their minds at work, then suddenly come to life among their friends at the corner bar, or pour their heart into their basketball team on the community league?

How much time do corporations spend looking into this phenomenon?

If only the majority of people can feel as passionate about their jobs, they will be happier at work, they will challenge themselves to think better, achieve more and always aim to be on top of their game. If this could be a part of corporate operations we would not need to talk about corporate social responsibility, because satisfied workers would willingly go the extra mile to make sure their work touches all aspects of life in a well thought out manner.

Corporate social responsibility starts from the very nature of the organization. It’s not a patch job, it’s not putting pearls on a pig and suddenly expecting it to be glamorous.

How do people feel about your brand? Is your brand telling a convincing, interesting and compelling story? In a previous blog post I stated that a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization. We human beings are complex creatures and sometimes don’t make decisions that seem logical. How do many of us make decisions? Much of our decision making is based on following our gut and deciding on impulse. Not to say that at some level we don’t do our due diligence and research before deciding to make a purchase or support a particular brand. It’s easier for us to obtain and share information about a company’s products and services (i.e. a company and competitor’s website, news articles, social media, etc.) to help our decision making. Many times a company and its competitors have a product or service that may have similar qualities or features. An organization can differentiate their brand from others by establishing a certain feeling around your brand. What do I mean by feeling? A feeling is a word to describe an experience. It’s the gut feeling or reaction to something. Feelings are more of a reflection of intuition than rationality. These feelings are driven by consideration of the moments of engagement, or touch points, between people and brands to create this experience. How can a company establish a certain feeling around their brand and differentiate it from the competition? It all starts with understanding and answering these questions:

1. Who are we?
2. What do we do?
3. Why does it matter?