Marketing & Advertising

Current thinking on more traditional topics.

New Year Dusting

January 8, 2013 in Agency Life, Design, Marketing & Advertising, Technology, Tips from the Experts, Web & Social Media by Roger | No comments

New Year DusterAs we begin a new year, most of us think about what we were able (or unable) to accomplish the previous year, and we set new goals for ourselves. Sometimes our goals are personal, like losing weight, starting to exercise, and eating better. Maybe we plan to make home improvements or spend more time with the family.

In business, we often focus on reaching more customers and selling them on our products or services. But unless we have a business that no one else has, or it is so much better than all others, it may be tough to make a big impact. Not to fear! There are myriad ways to get your company out there and get noticed by new contacts that won’t break the bank.

Here is a short list of things you can do to help promote your company:

Email Marketing – Bing works with small to medium businesses to help them reach out to current and new clients, creating awareness for their product and services. We take advantage of various online services that offer pre-made templates to simplify the process and keep it affordable. We’ve also found that creating customized HTML emails is a way to get attention and promote what you might be up to or have to offer. Costs for the various services are based on your recipient list. Costs for customizing HTML and graphics for your brand is determined by your goals.

Social Media – Many people now have their own account on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, or other popular social media sites. Why? Some like to have personal access to friends, co-workers, or staff, others just like to share with the world. Here at Bing, we know there is a real benefit to having a social media presence for your business. One, you are out there in a very public space and accessible. Two, you can use that space to attract old and new customers. Just note, social media outlets are very keen to businesses fishing for new business. Be real, be honest, join in conversations and you’ll find leads. With many sites, you can also have a small page for your business. Just be cautious about depending on these sites for all your web presence, they still own the space, not you. Most sites are free to join. Costs for strategically establishing your brand and goals is determined by your situation.

Web Site – The days of starting a small business site out with a very expensive platform and hosting package are gone. These days, reliable hosting is extremely affordable and we can help you establish a CMS site with all the contemporary bells and whistles. Bing works with clients daily to establish hosting, select and purchase a domain name(s), map out a site, and build content that is good for SEO, relevant to users, and easy for clients to edit and modify if needed. We often work with clients on monthly maintenance such as copy revisions, new content, and special offers relevant to individual branding and marketing needs.

The economy seems to be slowly progressing and growing. If you can position your company well now, you’ll be in a better place to manage new work, with less struggle to bring it in.

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Understanding HTML5 and CSS3

June 20, 2011 in Design, Marketing & Advertising, Technology by Roger | No comments

For the past year or so, companies that use the internet for sales, products, or services are aglow with conversations of HTML5 and CSS3 and how it will save the world! Well, it will certainly help your browsing experience be more useful and be a little less work for coders, but it takes content to save the world.

HTML5 is still going through standardization as there are so many browsers and devices, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium – the group who helps make standard for the internet) is still tweaking HTML5 definitions. For now, HTML4 remains the current standard of internet pages, standardized in 1997. HTML5 has been in the works since 2004, and the W3C hopes to have it released in 2012. There is a lot to this to be sure!

The goal for HTML5 is to pull current web technologies into one standard, including HTML4, XHTML1 (HTML with XML), DOM2HTML (document object model HTML), and some JavaScript. Just don’t forget that most users don’t have HTML5-ready browsers, so there is a very good chance that you’ll have to make your content work for both (doubling your work) if HTML5 is what you want.

First, let’s look at some of the key benefits of HTML5 compared to HTML4. Since most of the inner-workings of HTML code is just Greek to most folks, we won’t delve into the specifics of each of the new elements added to HTML5, but here is the list some of them:

article, aside, audio, bdo, canvas, command, datalist, details, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, nav, output, progress, rp, rt, ruby, section, source, summary, time, video, and wbr

If you have ever worked with a blog such as WordPress or Blogger, you may recognize some of the page elements above that you are familiar with.

Of all the new elements that are listed above, some of the most talked about are these:

  • article – an independent piece of content in a document
  • audio and video are less dependent, sometimes not dependent, on plug-ins to play multi-media content in HTML5
  • canvas – probably one of the most talked-about element in HTML5, it is used to render dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly in graphs or games through the use of JavaScript and other dynamic content tools
  • footer, header, and nav – all the regions of a page typically coded in most sites, but especially in blog sites

There are also many new APIs for HTML5 that were not part of HTML4 making using, playing, watching, and interacting with web content a little easier for web servers, computers, and users alike.

Many new mobile devices such as the Apple iPad are using HTML5, as are other desktop browsers, but none fully utilize HTML5 – yet. Currently the top contenders for the use of HTML5 according to HTML 5 Test website are the following (scores indicated out of a possible of 400 points each):

  1. Google Chrome v10.0.648 – 288 points
  2. Opera v11.10 – 258 points
  3. Mozilla Firefox v4.0 – 255 points
  4. Apple Safari v5.0.3 – 228 points
  5. Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 – 130 points

Browsers are working hard to adopt these new standards, and often standards change as challenges for global implementation arise.

While HTML5 offers some great ways to use JavaScript and built-in processes to provide content a bit faster and with less reliance on plug-ins and add-ons, the changes to CSS3 are substantial too! While changes to how a page displays has been controlled by CSS (cascading style sheets) for over a decade, the slow adoption in consistent support of CSS styles has made it tough on users and developers alike.

While you have been able to add rounded corners, drop-shadows, and gradients to pages with CSS for some time, some of the most prominent browsers (cough, cough, IE) have not provided support for many ‘standard’ CSS rules. So developers often have to write separate style rules for specific browsers. Been there, done that, don’t want more of it!

In addition to rounded corners on an HTML page, CSS can now rotate content, it can change the opacity of a page element with RGBA (RGB for colors: RED, GREEN, and BLUE, and A for “alpha” or transparency). So you don’t have to use a semi-opaque PNG file to fill a DIV, but you can just say ‘make this DIV 50% transparent’. SO much easier!

Below is a screen capture from CSS3PIE. They offer tools to allow Internet Explorer to support standards-based applications of CSS. Normally getting IE to render CSS consistent with other browsers is a wash.

The sample below shows some cool CSS3 style examples you might like using on your own site! Note the redundancies in the CSS code below the sample. You’ll see how browsers ‘see’ the styles are NOT the same (click image for a larger view)…

CSS3 Sample Pie Tool Example

  • BORDER-RADIUS: is the new CSS3 definition for HTML5 documents to display rounded corners on DIVs.
  • WEBKIT-BORDER-RADIUS: is now Apple’s Safari browser and Google Chrome recognize rounded corners.
  • MOZ-BORDER-RADIUS: tells Mozilla and Gecko how to display rounded corners

So as you see, making all browsers play the same game with HTML and CSS styles could really improve our lives, both in time saved making pages online, and time reduced viewing content. But it may not save the world…

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YouTube vs. Vimeo for Marketing

May 3, 2011 in Marketing & Advertising, Technology, Web & Social Media by Joe Gauder | 2 comments

Working with one of our clients, we were tasked to find a video-hosting service to promote a series of videos to enlighten the world with knowledge. The two heavyweights we were looking into to host the thought leaderships episodes were between YouTube and Vimeo.

YouTube Vimeo

From my personal perspective, YouTube is to online videos what Google is to search. However, when I think of YouTube, I think of webcam videos, product reviews, and the always entertaining pet videos. When I view channels on Vimeo, I see more creative usages of video, people with a passion for creative, and a much more artistic community.

I had to set my perspective aside to determine what service would be best for our client. Below we take a moment to examine the two hosting services and some key factors that helped us determine our video marketing strategy. In general, YouTube is really no better or worse for hosting videos than Vimeo. It’s all about how you use any given video hosting service, considering the advantages of each service in relation to the goals of publishing your videos. Let’s look at how these two stack up:

Traffic
Interesting fact: Vimeo (Nov. 2004) was founded before YouTube (Feb. 2005). Though YouTube is the more popular service for people to host their videos. In 2010, 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. Vimeo has over 3 million members and an average of of more than 16,000 new videos uploaded daily.

Restraints
YouTube, at the time of our reviewing of the online video hosts, would not allow videos to exceed ten minutes in length, and 2GB in size. This has since changed for most accounts, but if you are a new user, you are limited in the length of your videos to fifteen minutes in length. This can be extremely annoying, if you don’t want to have to go back and cut and edit your videos.

With Vimeo, there is no cap on the length of video that a user can upload. However, users can only upload 500MB per week with a basic account. Vimeo offers a premium account for $60/year that lifts the restriction of the 500MB upload limit to 5GB and allows for unlimited HD uploading with priority uploading over basic accounts.

Quantity or Quality?
If you’re looking purely at the numbers, YouTube is your undisputed champion. YouTube’s new content daily easily trumps Vimeo’s daily uploads. But, as the expression goes, sometimes less is more. It all depends on what you’re looking for. Quality or quantity? After all, 10% of all the videos uploaded to Vimeo are in HD. The videos are always quick and responsive and buffer incredibly fast. You don’t have to use the paid feature on Vimeo, it just means that it will take a little longer for your videos to be converted to HD.

I’ve noticed that YouTube is not great for HD videos because of how slow it causes the videos to buffer. This can be incredibly frustrating for your viewers, especially when the video keeps pausing to buffer.

The bottom line is that if you want better quality videos that buffer much quicker to put on your website or blog, then I highly recommend checking out Vimeo to host your videos.

As for actual businesses, it is a little tougher to decide. YouTube has the reach, but Vimeo has the quality. From a business perspective, there is one thing about YouTube that bothers me. Let’s say, for example, you have a link on your website to a video on your company’s YouTube Channel. Once a viewer has watched that video, a series of “related videos” appear on the screen. While this is great for the user because they can now watch more content that interests them, it is not necessarily great for me. That related content could be, and probably is, my competition. Sending a potential client from my YouTube video, to a competitor.

InterfaceAnnotations
YouTube InterfaceFrom the interface perspective, I find YouTube very cluttered, and frankly ugly. The constant ads and annoying annotations (those tacky speech bubbles that always pop up over a video) are my two pet peeve features on YouTube. Vimeo does away with both of these features and provides a simple interface for all users, however with the basic account, you do not have the ability to fully customize your player.

Where as YouTube, you have the ability to customize your Channel page to your brand or you can use YouTube to your advantage like one of my favorite examples of a company using YouTube FOR their website, BooneOakley. Check out their home page.

Now, the $64 million dollar question – which one is better for you to promote your brand? I guess this is another one of those “it all depends” scenarios. If you want to SHOW the world something you should use Vimeo but if you want to TELL the world something you use YouTube. In fact, YouTube is owned by Google and videos on YouTube tend to rank much better than any other video site. So, I do recommend still using YouTube for your video marketing efforts.

But ask yourself: Do you want to have MANY people watch your videos or do you care more about WHO is watching your videos?

After looking at some of this criteria, we decided to go with posting videos on… Vimeo AND YouTube.

Because of the sheer size of YouTube and number of users you can generally expect to get more views on YouTube than Vimeo. So if your goal is to get more people to see your video, link to both accounts via descriptions or annotations on the videos. We utilized YouTube with snippets of some of the series of thought leadership videos, but for the full “high-end” videos, we pushed all the users to the Vimeo channel based on the HD quality of videos and the length allowed.

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