I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.
It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.
Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.
Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:
You have no photos with people in them.
Your site colors are all cool in tone.
Your site is static with no interactivity.
Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors’ wants and needs.
You have no audio or video media.
If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:
Add a video message, demo, or interview.
Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.
Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!
Video can’t do everything, but for specific things, it outshines any other medium on the web (text, pictures, audio, interactivity). Here are my top five:
Tutorials. There’s nothing better than an online how-to video. One of my favorite places to go for video tutorials is the DIY site Curbly.
Virtual Tours. We have a bunch of these over at Wonderfile that help a new user take a peek at what the product can do even before signing up. Within a minute, a visitor can usually tell how useful and easy to use a product is.
Interviews. Video the only way to capture the personalities of the interviewee and interviewer. Transcripts can’t capture pregnant silences or boisterous outbursts. Podcasts can’t capture gestures and facial expressions. Video wins for interviews, hands-down.
Product demonstrations. Think Guthy-Renker infomercials you see on early AM television. Apple does a great job of showing off products and what they can do in a short amount of time.
Viral Marketing. Nothing spreads faster than viral videos, particularly those that are funny. Check out the Will-It-Blend series and just try to NOT send it on to someone else.
By the turn of the twenty first century, it became essential that businesses have a website. Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool, a company’s address in the virtual landscape.
Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool
Now that websites are commonplace, a new, more specialized evolution of the website is becoming a business prerequisite: Blogs.
Once only pursued by prolific writers and angst-ridden teenagers, blogs have become a valuable marketing device, making them many companies front line weapon in the battle for customers.
Keep reading for my guide on how to turn your companies collective knowledge into a blog, and a blog into profits.
Today, Brian Clark from Copyblogger posted on a video where NPR’s Ira Glass talks about the building blocks of storytelling in broadcasting. (Video embedded below.) Like any Monday morning, I had plenty of email to slog through, but I had to watch this video. For those of you who are fans of Ira, you know what I mean -– that something in his voice and manner of speaking that compels you to stop everything you’re doing and listen.
In the video, Ira talks about how to take traditional story structure that we learned in school and turn it on its head. That is — forget the topic sentence followed by a set of supporting facts — it isn’t effective for TV and radio. Instead, Ira’s got two key building blocks of storytelling:
In anticipation of Firefox 3’s release on a day TBD, Mozilla’s marketing team has created Download Day- Firefox 3’s 1,440-minute quest to make the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most downloaded software ever in one day. Download Day has a website, http://www.spreadfirefox.com/, created to spread the word and entice Firefox luverz across the globe to literally pledge their allegiance to Download Day. By clicking the “Pledge Now!” button, you increase your country’s number of pledges on a Google-Maps-esque world map. The cool part of the Download Day site is if you hold your mouse over a country on the map, you can view the aggregate number of pledges from that country.
Close to 175,000 of us Americans have given their pledges, while our friendly neighbors to the North have 30,000 on board (Good work Canada! You’re super!). How many people in Myanmar have pledged, you ask? Go see for yourself.
With already over a million pledges worldwide, Mozilla seems to be on track to grab the record, with potential to earn legendary status like Guinness Record Holders Jackie Bibby (most rattlesnakes held in mouth by their tails, 10, as well as three other rattlesnake-related records) and Niek Vermeulen (largest airplane barf bag collection- over 3,700). If you haven’t already, go make your pledge and become a part of history.
UPDATE: Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday next week (June 17).
In my ongoing series on on-line advertising faux pas, anomalies, and general weirdness, I have come across quite a few examples of what I call “competeverts”. Competeverts are ads placed in a page where the content of the page expunges about a company in direct competition with the advertiser.
One of, if not the finest, example of this was on Gizmodo today. As you can see from the screen capture above, Blackberry took advantage of some prime advertising real-estate on a iPhone article to advertise its competing device.
With opportunities like this, it’s no wonder ad dollars are transitioning from print to the web.
And in case you don’t know what a favicon is, it’s that small image next to the URL of the page that you’re on.
In Google’s case, the voluptuous small “g” (Google) has replaced the big “G” (Google). Are they rebranding? Is it an attempt to appear less corporate and more humble as it increasingly dominates the search market?
Birth is a messy operation. The creative process is messy. A software application that is gonna scale better not be messy.
Giving birth to a new software application puts you in the very zen-like place of being both messy / not messy.
Does anyone hear the sound of one hand clapping?
ArcStone is in the final pangs of the Wonderfile birth process. We have our first paying Wonderfile customers - yeah! We have a number of consulting projects that leverage Wonderfile’s SOA (Service Oriented Architecture - in plain English: using web services to access Wonderfile functionality from any web site). And we find ourselves in the unique position of having developed a really useful tool - a fantastic, shiny Swiss army knife for tagging and file management.
We love it, we understand it - the tool works for us - but we’re finding that those who jump into Wonderfile just don’t get it.
I have come to realize, that most of our clients aren’t ready for Wonderfile as a general tool. They just don’t have the time or inclination to fully grok it - there’s no way there gonna buy it.
I know that our customers (and people in general) will buy a solution to a specific problem. People will visit Google and look for solutions to ease their pain / scratch that itch.
What is more likely to happen? Xavier has to manage leases for his company - keeping track of all the docs, expirations, etc. He goes to Google - does he search on “file management keyword search tagging reminders” or “lease management systems”? My money is on “lease management systems” - he has an itch that needs scratching in specific terms, not general. The more specific we can be with Wonderfile driven apps and Wonderfile marketing - the more successful we’ll be.
That’s our charter and the next round of work for us - tailoring Wonderfile and marketing it to solve specific problems in specific markets.
The product development folks call this “development to commercialization” - I call it ArcStone’s biggest marketing challenge for 2008.
Wonderfile driven apps - coming soon to a web site near you.
When you leave software to make up its own mind, like which ads to show a user, sometimes strange things happen, or worse. I have been noticing this more and more, especially in high profile sites, like Gmail, CNN, CNET, and other sites you would think sport top-of-the-line advertising engines.
Here is CNET’s media player, currently sponsored by T-Mobile, playing a Sprint phone review. Before the review you get to enjoy a short T-Mobile spot professing the superiority of their phones.
Here is Google attempting to peek my interest in purchasing a heavily armored vehicle. I have also been served ads for body armor and night-vision goggles. Just how dangerous does Google think Minneapolis is?
There have been a few nerds who have attained prominent positions in politics, but you rarely hear about the flip side of the coin: the nerd vote.
Chris Knight of North Carolina is clearly vying for the nerd vote with his campaign commercial.
It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, tries to capture the nerd vote in the 2008 presidential race. Without Al Gore running I fear this growing and misunderstood voter group will once again be ignored. [Gizmodo]
