Brass Tacks - Michael Mancuso

Horn Group's New iPhone App

Michael Mancuso — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:01:36 -0700

Today Horn Group is extremely proud to announce the availability of our very own mobile application for iPhone. We're the first agency of our kind to design an iPhone application that puts important agency news, information and contacts in the hands of its clients, prospects and employees. The application, available for download in the iTunes App Store now, was designed and built entirely in-house by Horn Group ID – our award-winning interactive design team.

For current Horn Group clients as well as companies in search of the right digital agency, the launch of this app offers valuable insight into Horn Group's capabilities and offers iPhone users a new and convenient way to stay connected. Our plans for future enhancements include features such as notifications, ID portfolio work and much more. We're building apps for our clients too - stay tuned for more iPhone app launch announcements shortly.

As the digital landscape expands and flourishes in the mobile arena, it's critical to have a presence on the platform that is increasingly the last thing a user sees before they go to sleep, and the first thing when they wake up in the morning. We believe companies should have the proper tools to compete for that prime real estate that is the curated selection of mobile applications chosen by each user.

Find out more by viewing a walk-through video in our ID portfolio.

We Are Interactive Design

Michael Mancuso — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 04:30:00 -0700

We have been working toward this day for quite some time. The day when we as an agency, and specifically we of the Interactive Design team, can proudly strut our stuff for our clients, colleagues and the general public. But what does it mean and why should you care?

By launching ID today we’re formalizing what we’ve already had in practice – that visual communication is not only important by itself, but also augments PR activities. Too many agencies make half-hearted efforts to offer these services via partnerships and third parties, and especially in the PR world, it shows in the quality of the final product. Horn Group has been about giving our clients all the tools they need to compete since day one, and today we are announcing Horn Group ID because we want a broader audience to know about it too.

Horn Group’s DNA is infused with visual thinking and we’ve been working together to bring the conversation to the places where our clients’ customers spend their time. The list of those places extends well beyond the website experience to mobile devices, social networks and other content channels. To that end we’ve developed ourselves into skilled visual communicators with chops in all things design and web-related as well as mobile application development and motion graphics.

So why work with Horn Group ID? Our mission is to create a unique personality for your brand and build your presence to achieve your business goals. Usually that’s about two basic concepts. Clarifying your message and getting noticed by your targets. Here’s how we do that:

Create positive brand perception

A lot of what we do is about perception, and being perceived well can help generate traffic, leads, revenue and get you noticed by potential investors or even position your company for acquisition. By creating a high-quality online presence we instantly up level your brand perception. For most businesses, and especially most start-ups, the Internet is really the main venue where most interactions take place every day. Your corporate identity, website and accompanying collateral all need to be created as part of a concerted effort based on a thorough discovery process. Rising to the top of the pack cannot be undervalued in a crowded, fragmented online world where competition for visitors’ attention is cutthroat.

Create fresh content

Content creation is a big job, and yet too often companies make the decision to take that task on themselves. The results are usually lackluster at best. At a minimum, potential customers already interested in your products and services need to understand what you offer, and how it is different. That’s why we have seen a huge increase in engagements to create video and motion graphics content to help explain the often-subtle differences between you and your competitors. It’s not rocket science – hire experts to create engaging content and watch perception, traffic and new business leads increase. Engaging and varied content is essential for SEO, and by mingling social integration points you open up new pathways for sharing and word of mouth autonomous networking.

Extend your brand experience across all channels

Then we extend the core visual concepts and content we created to work as a concerted campaign in places like Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, as well as in ads, print publications, mobile apps and shareable content. The idea is simple – if your business can communicate in a clear and concise manner, customers have an easier time making a buying decision about you. The value of a consistent experience cannot be overemphasized – examples of what a closed system experience can do are all around us. And that is exactly what digital communications aims to do – present a controlled environment of verbal and visual messages to keep the conversation on track to an end result. Then with those guidelines in place, your user community can take and extend your message for you.

Horn Group is everything you need in an agency today. We are the new model. We do what your ad agency and marketers can do; what your public relations teams can do; what your design firms do. We are your one agency of record with a multidisciplinary team savvy in every area you need to address as part of your digital communications strategy. We are built on solid experience and fundamentals and have some of the brightest minds and best talent today. We’re agile enough to move quickly. We’ll help you to stand out and get noticed.

Does My Business really Need an iPhone App?

Michael Mancuso — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:56:01 -0700

After seeing the lines and frenzy outside Apple stores the last few days with the launch of iPhone 4 with iOS4, there's no question that the iPhone is red hot. That is, if Apple's sales figures and the interest in the last 3 iterations of the iPhone didn't tip you off. One would think Justin Bieber was in there or something. With the growing openness business is showing to the iPhone, for many businesses and especially start-ups, the barrier of entry into the app store is cost vs. features. It makes perfect sense to want only to develop an iPhone or iPad app that has functionality that mirrors the company's products or services. Anything less wouldn't be worthwhile, right? Not so fast...

There are a host of reasons why having a branded mobile presence is a sound investment. In the same way having a website isn't really a choice anymore, a simple, proper application available from the app store can be achieved for sometimes less than the cost of creating a custom mobile site, and take advantage of more handset features.

Brand Awareness & Differentiation

A presence in the app store where your competition may not be, or if they are you level the playing field. You can tout and market the quality of service over competitors because you have an iPhone app and therefor may have greater appeal to that segment of your audience. Many users delight when brands they care about have a branded iPhone presence - I know I do, and am equally disappointed when they don't.

Customer Service

A proactive approach to customer service by connecting to your users where they do their everyday tasks will create brand loyalty and spark word of mouth referral.

Connect With and Grow Your Audience

You can take advantage of social media integration, and tap into the iPhone's functionality to distribute company information via SMS, easy sharing of links, and even collect user generated content via upload such as comments, posts, testimonials. Notifications can help keep those users engaged. Even add a referral feature akin to "Like" this company to spread the word.

Tracking and Analytics

Learn a lot more about your users beyond simply tracking browser stats, such as usage habits, location, and get their direct feedback from the only device that is next to them usually 24 hours a day.

Offline Access

One very important thing a mobile website can't do is be accessed offline. Depending on the features of your app, offline access to crucial data and features could be clutch for your customers.

A simple application that repackages content and features and rolls it into portable experience that is accessible anytime and enables two-way communication with your customers and sharing is a win for your brand. Especially if the can be achieved at a certain reasonable price point. It can educate and empower your existing customers to spread the benefits of your company to others. It can help journalists and the media to passively follow you on the go aiding in Public Relations efforts.

Without question, the mobile experience of your brand is an important consideration. One thing is becoming increasingly clear, having no presence for the small screen at all is no longer an option.

Video Demand Is Growing

Michael Mancuso — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:31:32 -0700

Our Interactive Services practice continues to experience a dramatic uptick in the demand for the creation of video and motion graphics content that began in Q1 and is only increasing. We're creating videos for both stand alone use and as content for incorporation into websites we're building for our clients. Most recently we completed an energetic 2-minute motion graphics piece for client Conductor to support the launch of their new product called Searchlight.

Video as content is much more engaging and better for search visibility in some cases than just plain old text, but we also see it as a natural progression from the homepage Flash animations and demos of yesterday to be a more engaging way to communicate messages. When the video content is standalone or shared and embeddable via popular video destinations like YouTube and Vimeo, it can enjoy far more reach than something just living on your homepage or buried behind a lead capture form.
Just another way that in-house interactive capabilities enhances the reach and effectiveness of our public relations services.

Horn Group, HTML5 and Web Standards

Michael Mancuso — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:36:18 -0700

Riding the crest of the anti-Flash wave, our interactive team is primed to start offering HTML5 development services, for example to create ads for our clients for use with Apple's iAd Platform tentatively to come with iPhone OS 4. While our approach has always been to create experiences that look and work the same across as many devices as possible via web standards, mobile and tablet computing have had a serious impact on the what trade tricks we have in our repertoire. Apple just released an HTML5 and Web Standards showcase (for Safari only) that is a strong example of what can be done without Flash or JavaScript. While Flash still has its place, we're very open to exploring the use of HTML5 for interactivity and mobile consumption for our clients.

Hallelujah! IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US

Michael Mancuso — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:12:29 -0700

According to StatCounter via TechCrunch, IE6 market share has dropped below 5% in the US, while IE8 is still on the rise.

What this means is that our Interactive Services team has further justification for having dropped support for IE6 last year, following in the footsteps of a few companies we admire, and moving forward we will be removing this browser from our list of supported browsers for all interactive projects by default. In the future, our clients will need specifically to request support for IE6, and extra time and budget will need to go toward such efforts as if it were an additional feature. This makes sense for us because in the past our work has been geared more toward a tech savvy B2B audience with the latest browsers and broadband connections. However, there have been some recent exceptions in which we've dealt with IE6 compatibility as a scope line item, and in some cases we have sacrificed the full experience for IE6 users, allowing them to experience only the basic functionality or simply to consume the content without the "bells and whistles."

For those of you who are not aware, because of the lack of standards support employed by Internet Explorer 6 as compared to modern browsers, developers have long lamented coding for IE6 compatibility because of the vexing problems and cumbersome code that is often necessary in order to get things to work the same way in all browsers. In a nutshell, by simply surviving this long, it began stifling innovation and has impeded the general advance of technology on the web. IE6 was released in 2001 and has sparked many online movements to kill it, but many large corporations around the word continued to support it due to legacy systems compatibility concerns (the possibility of negative impact on existing software) or the cost to upgrade, which could include training.

These figures indicate rapid movement in the right direction for web development and make Horn Group's development team smile.

Our New Portfolio

Michael Mancuso — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:02:49 -0700

Quietly late last week, our own Interactive Services team pushed a major update to our company website live, mainly centered around revamping the client list and portfolio for better usability and fresher content. These new enhancements along with an upgraded version of the CMS will allow visitors to more quickly view and sort through our client list by industry, provide better visibility to search engines and better demonstrate our penetration into the industries where we excel.

The new portfolio section comprised of a combination of projects from integrated accounts, Interactive only and PR only showcases work done over the past 24 months that just didn't make it onto the portfolio until now and demonstrates our wealth of capabilities.

The features we added across the board are there to help prospective clients more easily find crucial information about our experience and capabilities. A few important features I'd like to point out include:

Sorting and search functionality has been overhauled for the entire portfolio section
You can now share direct URLs with clients for all projects, something that was not possible before due to the structure (key for pointing out portfolio examples to prospective clients or up-selling IS work
An 'Addthis' widget is present in each portfolio project via the 'share' link for sharing across many popular social networking sites, email, etc.

All projects are now effectively blog posts which enables such features as:

Projects can exists in multiple categories, such as industries and services
There can be a virtually unlimited number of tags applies to each project, enabling better visibility through sorting and search
Comments have been turned on for all projects - a feature we hope our current and past clients will use to comment on the work we did for them

Other content-related enhancements, such as:

Shorter project descriptions for better reading
Logos for all clients
Color logos across the board
Centralized client data (clients for which we've done work and case studies are linked to custom searches for work under their names via the client list)
The bottom-rightmost panel of the homepage has now been updated to read "Our Portfolio: Get Familiar with our work" and links to 6 of the most recent projects
Out toll-free number has been added to the footer across the board
Prominent links to our Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, RSS feed and Twitter page have been added to the footer
Contact buttons linked to custom contact forms are present for each of the executive team members now facilitating direct contact with our executive team

We have additional content enhancements planned in the near future that have been made possible by this big push. We are also really excited to showcase new projects as they launch, especially our upcoming iPhone application launch designed and developed by the Interactive Services team.

Now check it out already, and check back often while we soup this baby up!