I just finished reading the  June/July 2009 issue of Streaming Media Magazine.  Contributing writer Nico McLane wrote an excellent in-depth article titled, “In Search of Video SEO that Works”.     Like me,  McLane is frustrated with the hassles and inconsistencies of Video SEO or VSEO as he calls it.   He recommends using Yahoo! Video, YouTube or Hulu.com for a straightforward video search rather than relying on major search engines.   Although, he does note that the major search engines are working to integrate online video into their native search results working with native technology and third-party aggregators.

All of this comes on the heels of  PermissionTV’s video marketing survey posted recently to eMarketer.com.  The survey queried 400 senior marketing and media executives with some very interesting results.  For example:

• 67% identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.
• 50% of the respondents are planning the launch of an online video project by the second quarter of 2009.

The survey also found that the foremost value of online video was as follows:

• Brand awareness (71%)
• Lead generation (47%)
• Customer retention (44%)
• Customer conversion (41%)

In addition, 33% of respondents expected that their 2009 digital marketing efforts will be least affected by cuts to budgets,  much less so than traditional marketing (24%), trade shows (21%), and guerrilla marketing (14%) efforts.
Obviously, interactive video is a high priority for marketers this year.

Any marketer, big or small, producing any type of video content needs to have a VSEO strategy as part of their overall marketing mix.    The article goes on to recommend some VSEO best practices:

• Use either social sites or search engines to promote your video, or  create your own portal—or you may be better off doing both.
• The best practice for YouTube VSEO is to use channel pages to take advantage of the searchability of YouTube content, as the site’s pages get better positioning because of its size. This is also true for MySpace, Facebook, and other large community sites that allow video to be uploaded to their pages, have a vast collection of pages, and are viral.
• Host your own video and syndicate that content to get the best metrics.
• Use Google Analytics with any open source CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, all of which offer free plug-ins to upload video and track usage.

The article concludes with some basic steps every marketer should take for VSEO:

• Choose where to promote your video.
• Narrow down your audience by demographic.
• Select your keywords.
• Define the naming schema for best search performance.
• Include RSS feeds with relevant metadata.
• Produce amazing video content (or syndicate it from other sources such as Truveo or blinkx).

You can read the full article here.

“According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of bloggers being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

Takeaways:

If you update your blog at least once every four months, you’re more prolific than 95% of blogs out there! (Facetious takeaway)

Working your corporate or personal blog is still a true differentiator.  It results in better search engine rankings, increases traffic, and positions you as having something to say.  Keep at it.  It’s worth it.

4 out of 5 inquiries from new customers begin with some form of the question, “How much does a website cost?”

I think they would be most happy if I could open up the magic website price book and provide them with a useful answer.

Instead, we usually say … “well, that depends upon the type of website you would like to build.”  (How’s that for helpful?)

Actually, it is helpful because such a question begins a discussion that allows both parties to thumbnail out the actual scope of the project at hand.

Here is Stone’s approach to collecting the information necessary to provide initial pricing estimates.  It is a four quadrant model that includes: scale, features & functionality, content development, and interactivitiy.

Scale - How many sections and pages are we thinking about here?  Is it a redesign of your current site whereby the size of the site might grow by a foreseeable percentage?  Is there a competing site that does a good job capturing the information we’re hoping to capture?  Have you jotted out a preliminary sitemap?  The more thoughts the client can provide on the scale of the site, the quicker we can provide helpful budgetary information.

Features & Functionality - Basically this means “what do you want visitors to be able to do on your site?” - and - “what type of management control and integration are you looking for on the back end?”.   Front end features are usually more obvious.  Are you looking for basic forms, links, and a search feature?  Do you want to post jobs, manage news & events, and host a forum?  Is ecommerce involved? (If so, get ready for a good many more questions.)  Back end features are typically not as thought through.  What degree of content management are you looking for?  Does the site need to integrate with any other software, servers, databases?  One atypical feature request can easily add 50% to the cost of a web project.

Content Development:  Content covers both the copy (words on the page) and the images (photos, illustrations, video).  Will the client be providing final website copy?  Or, will you be in need of copywriting and/or copyediting services?  To what degree?  Is there any video production needed for the website?  Will we be using stock photography, client-provided photography, or custom photography? 

Interactivity: How much interactivity are we wanting to incorporate into the website?  Hold all other parts equal (scale, features, content), a website with a high degree of interactivity (transitions, multimedia presentations, flash integration) can easily cost 2-3 times more than a basic static website.

To make the “how much?” question even more interesting, the “how much” often depends upon “who” you’re asking.

As you move across the scale from part timers/freelancers/students/friends to very-large-agencies, the cost of a similary scoped project can increase by a multiple of 10 or more.  Experience, team size, and overhead all get factored in and influence the pricing.  On the plus side, you do usually get what you pay for.  Not always.  Usually.  Also, it’s sometimes comforting to know that your web resource will be reliable and won’t be moving/leaving the industry/graduating/you-name-it any time soon.

Technologies used to create your website certainly influence price.  Microsoft licensing costs can add up.  Open source web technology provides a major value, though is not welcome in all organizations.

Lastly, certainly not least, is the degree of search engine optimization effort that is provided with your website.   If a web partner is going to invest the time and effort to identify how people find your business and then incorporate that knowlege into the architecture of the website, be prepared to see at least a few thousand dollars added to the cost of the project.

Stone has delivered websites for $6,000 and we’ve delivered websites for well into the 6 figures.  There’s no one price for a website, only a series of trade-offs.

So there we have it, right?

You’re still very welcome to call us and ask “How much should a website cost?”.  We’ll help you figure it out.

I was recently reading an article in Fast Company magazine about the most influential women in technology. The article was the second in a series that was originally called,”The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0.” The first article became a heated debate on many social media networks, including Digg because some readers felt the article was sexist. Sexist? Come on.

This lead me to think about what a disadvantage that women have had in the technology department by any metric: average salary, top-management representation, board memberships and many geographic areas like Silicon Valley are still just a boys club. In fact, most of technology seems to be a “boys club.”

The fact of the matter is now that social media has taken off with such rapid fire, women are becoming very influential and making a dent in the technology world. For instance, look at some of the executives of large social media and technology firms. Susan Decker, President of Yahoo, Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook, Megan Smith VP, New Business Development of Google.

What about some of the fastest growing social networking sites? Caterina Fake Co-founded the photo-sharing elephant Flickr and then sold it to Yahoo for a reported $35 million. Everyone is buzzing about her highly anticipated project called Hunch, which is in development.

Women Bloggers? Look at the site http://www.blogher.com/ and you will find over 2,200 women bloggers and counting. This site has become its own community that even has its own blogging conference. Anyone can sign up and have your blog posted. There are even large advertisers on the site such as Cover Girl and Oil of Olay. Wonder what Eilsa, Jory and Lisa (the founders of Blogher.com) made on that contract?

It’s not just about money, although that is a great perk. Blogging allows us the freedom to write and discuss things that are relevant to us and to have them published. Anyone can blog and anyone can use blogging to drive traffic to his or her site, develop their own company or just have an opinion. It has become the way of communicating these days and it would be a shame to not take advantage of this great tool in marketing and PR.

Jennifer L Peak

Are you getting the most out of your Pay Per Click Advertising? Here are a few known – yet frequently forgotten – tips to make the most of what is left of your online advertising budget.

The Big 3: Pay Per Click

Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter make up some of the better known pay per click opportunities that are available.

Here are a few tips that can allow you to get high quality traffic with a low budget:

1. Misspellings

Capture the visitors who typed too fast, that misheard a word, or are spelling out a keyword phonetically. Take for example the popular diet trend of “Acai Berries.” Considering people pronounce it out both “Ah-Kai” and “Ack-Sai,” you can only image how they spell it out. If you were only to bid on the high CPC keyword “Acai,’” you’d be missing out on spellings like “acsi,” “aki,” and “ac9i” (someone typing in too fast and hitting the 9 instead of “i”) that only cost $.05 per click.

There would be a bit of extra work involved in setting up a “Misspelled” keyword campaign, however, and yes, make sure to group any set of misspellings into their own ad group or campaign so that you can closely watch them. You’ll need to watch the conversion rate on the keywords to make sure that the visitor truly did mistype the word and didn’t mean something else; I’d suggest starting out using “Exact Match” for any misspelling of keywords and doing a search on each misspelling so that your ad doesn’t end up showing up for similar words or known association names and abbreviations.

On top of any misspellings that you may be aware of, you can also use SEO Book’s Typo Generator.

2. Long Tail Keywords

Most people give up on their PPC campaign after they’ve realized that hundreds and thousands of dollars have been spent but not a single click has lead to a conversion. There could be many culprits (like grouping all of your keywords into one campaign, with one ad group, that has only one ad and one landing page), but the mistake that will cost you the most money is targeting highly trafficked keywords that don’t reflect what your company actually does. Targeting the keyword “Lawyer” when you only specialize in “Family Law,” and you only work in a specific geographic location, will lead to a lot of impressions with a low Click Thru Rate (CTR) or worse yet, a high CTR with zero conversions.

Check out Google’s Keyword Search tool to find some long tail keywords that receive traffic at a lower CPC, but also scan your own site, talk to your customers to find out how they describe your business, and review your competitions website for terms you may have skipped over.

3. Local Keywords

Even if your service is available nationwide, you can still benefit from using local targeting AND local keywords. Make use of targeting specific offers to a radius of zip codes, inserting city names before or after your keyword, or split testing ads to different states.

4. Match Types

A lot of people skip this step completely when setting up their PPC campaign. You have a few keyword options, including broad, phrase, exact, and negative match. With broad match, your Ad may show up whenever Google feels that a keyword is similar to yours. It’s important to keep an eye on your analytics and to run regular reports in AdWords to find out which search queries your ad is actually showing up for. If you do notice that your ad is appearing for a keyword that isn’t relevant to your business, make use of the negative keyword option.

With phrase match, your ad will show whenever someone types in a word plus your keyword, such as “red shoes” for the keyword “shoes.”

Exact match ensures that your Ad only shows up when someone types in your keyword, word for word. While exact match may cost a bit more, the click is usually of higher quality.

For testing purposes, you can set up three different ad groups for a set of keywords, one for each match type, to find out which keyword performs the best. You may find that one match type leads to a better conversion rate, so when it comes time to trim your budget, you won’t feel bad pausing the lesser performing groups.

Have you ever received an email with a super long link in it, but when you click on it, it sends you to a page not found? Try turning your link into a TinyURL. TinyURL.com is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently have long and cumbersome addresses.

Shorter URLs are better to work with because they are easier to remember, write down, copy and paste, and pass around. They’re great for spaces in which you are limited to the number of characters you are allowed to use such as Twitter and Facebook, and they’re less likely to break when you send them.

TinyURL.com randomly generates a tinyURL (shorter link) after a user pastes the long URL into a text field on the site and hits the make tinyurl button. A user also has the ability to make a custom TinyURL that is more meaningful and easier to repeat, such as http://tinyurl.com/stoneig.

When was the last time you updated your keyword list? If it’s been awhile, you may be missing out on relevant keywords that could bring free – and targeted – traffic to your site. Take a minute to visit these free keyword tools and update your website keyword list:

1. SEO Book Keyword Density Checker: Stuffing your content with keywords is not an advised method to achieving SEO rankings, but Keyword Density Tools can still be useful by allowing you to view which keywords your competition is targeting. Enter your competitor’s URL into the search box, press submit, and pull up the keywords and phrases that are most often used on their website.
2. Googe Insights for Search: Visit Google’s Insights for Search tool and type in a keyword in the search box to see the popularity of that term over the years. This tool can be helpful in determining seasonality trends, regional interest of a keyword, and the top searches related to a given term.
3. SEO Book Keyword Tool: SEO Book’s Keyword Tool pulls in the daily average search numbers from a number of search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Wordtracker. The Keyword Tool from SEO Book is also useful in determining long tail keywords.
4. Google Keyword Tool: While Google’s Keyword Tool lists out related terms for the keyword you type in, it also provides helpful numbers such as approximate search volume per month and which month the keyword was most popular in.
5. Google Search Based Keyword Tool: You can use this tool in a number of ways – update your PPC keyword list, see if there are any key phrases missing from your content, or to view your competitors website for commonly used phrases.
6. Wordtracker Questions: Are you missing out on long tail phrases in your website content? Visit the Wordtracker Questions tool to find out common questions people are typing into search engines, then use these questions to update your FAQ section or write a new blog post.
7. Backlink Watch: Another “Spy on your competitor” tool, Backlink Watch is useful for determining the keywords that your competitor is targeting through back links. Type in the URL of another website (or yours) and pay special attention to the “Anchor Text” column, making note of any keywords that you aren’t currently targeting.
8. KW Map: Keyword Map is an idea generator tool that can help you visualize relationships between keywords. Type in a keyword that you currently target to find related terms.
9. 5 Minute Site Local Keyword Generator: The local keyword generator is helpful when it comes to updating your PPC campaigns, but can also be useful to services that target specific regions. Type in your keyword and the zip code + radius you are targeting and 5 Minute Site will attach the city names and zip codes to that keyword, saving you time and research.
10. Google News: Meme trackers, such as Google News, are useful in determining trends and slang that you aren’t targeting yet. Type in your keyword and read through the latest articles to pick up keywords as they become popular.

Social Media outlets can be a great way to better get the word out there about your business or organization, but with so many options out there, knowing the difference between different types of social media can greatly help your cause. The three main outlets are Blogs, Forums, and Social Networks.

A Blog (a contraction of the word “Web Log”) is a website usually maintained by an individual and sometimes teams, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. A blog can contain links, videos, images, events, articles, or any number of things. It’s an online diary of sorts in which questions and comments are allowed from users. Blogs are most helpful when talking about your marketplace.

Common places to create a blog are:
Blogger.com
WordPress.com
Twitter.com – mini blogging

A Forum is a meeting place for open discussion of various topics. A forum may also be referred to as a bulletin board or discussion area.  Unlike a blog, a forum allows numerous users to write stuff – and for other users to add questions and comments, starting any number of discussions segmented by topic.  Many forum users are also respected experts and bloggers in the topics covered in the forum and making a good impression to this audience can help your marketing message spread far and wide. You can use forums by creating one for your own site and opening up discussions or you can participate in the numerous industry specific forums out there to help promote your business.

A Social Network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations that are tied together by one or more common interest. Social Networks allow users to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather than just focused on a certain topic. These are great tools to get people with similar interests together to share information and make new business connections. Not only is social networking great for making new connections, but it’s also a place where new ideas, products and ways of doing things develop.

Common Social Networks to join are:
MySpace.com
Facebook.com
LinkedIn.com
Orkut.com
Plaxo.com

Now that you know the difference between some common social media outlets, it is important to define who your community is, where they are, and what messages you want to get across to them. From there you can better choose an option that is best for your business or organization.

So you have a great website name, wonderful design, perhaps a blog, and a few pages of content – you’re ready to go! A quick glance at your analytics, however, shows that only a few people are reading your blog, and you’re pretty sure that the IP address that keeps on showing up is actually your mom.

On top of word of mouth promotion to your clients and building up content, creating a few pieces of link bait can bring in additional visitors as well as establish links to your site – something that, in the long run, will help with your site’s SEO.

While you’ll still have to do a little bit of promotion after creating any of these pieces, a quality piece of content will help you to get your website – or blog – to the place you want it to be traffic wise. And won’t your mom be so proud….

1. Top 10 Lists
   Whether it be a Top 7, Top 10, or Top 100, lists tend to be a fan favorite when it comes to earning back links. Lists can also earn you expertise status if packaged correctly and can be a start to a series to expand on in future blog posts. Take for instance Time’s list of 50 Best Websites in 2008 or Web Worker Daily’s list of 12 Free Tools for Online Collaboration. Make the list as silly or as serious as you want, but make it unique. Hair Salon? Top 10 Cuts for Fall. Law office? The Top 5 Craziest Lawsuits in History. Restaurant? Top 100 Things You Can Use a Fork for Other than Eating. Make it fun, make it unique, and make it interactive. A good discussion piece will bring in quality links for time to come.
2. Checklists
   A few minutes of keyword research shows that people regularly look for terms such as SEO Checklist or Travel Checklist. Create a quick checklist of items your clients and potential clients would find valuable, then PDF it or make an interactive html page that can easily be printed out. Examples of link worthy checklists include a travel agency that puts up a To Pack List and the magazine that puts up a wedding registry checklist.
3. Contest
   Any contest will bring in a few back links to your site, just make sure to make it something people want to enter. Have a product that you can give away? A service that you can offer for free? Heck, money always works, as do gift certificates. Just tie in the contest to your business somehow. You can also use the contest as a way to gather additional email address by allowing contest entrants to subscribe to your rss feed or newsletter sometime during registration. Check out these sites that increased readership just by having a contest.
4. Competition with another blogger
   Friends with another blogger in your industry? Suggest holding a competition, such as bloggers John Chow and Shoemoney did, that cross promotes both of your sites. Whether it be a competition to see who can write the most posts in a month, grow the most traffic, or even sell the most of a specific product, a friendly competition can earn you some links as well as promote your site to a target audience.
5. Calculators and Widgets
   Since web visitors are often in the research stage when they’re visiting your website, offering up a tool that allows them to answer questions on their own can draw in a variety of links to your site. A bank could put up a calculator that allows people to calculate interest or try something silly like this Web 2.0 URL generator. Visit Widget Box for already created widgets and calculators that might help to conjure up some ideas. Perhaps our developer could come up with a Top 10 List generator
6. Resource List
   Create a page on your site that lists out every quality resource you would recommend in your industry. Examples of resources could include free tools, magazines and blogs relevant to your industry, or case studies and white papers that would be valuable to clients. Check out Agency Tool’s Web Design Directory that lists out a plethora of web design resources, or this fun list of “National Days.”
7. Offer Something Free
   Free consultation, free fonts, free images – people like free. Whether you offer a free consultation, product/sample, or even a download of advice or tips, promote the free item as something unique and valuable that only you are offering. This online fax company offers up a free fax service for those who don’t (yet) need regular online faxing services and this software company offers up a free trial download of their quality control software. You can also offer up a free eBook, online tool, or even email address.
8. Review a product
   Review a product, brand, or website that is related to your industry then let those people know that you reviewed them. Have a grocery store? Review some of the latest foods out and give them a rating. Attend an industry conference or convention recently? Review the latest and greatest in new products or recap a speaker’s presentation. Become the CNET, PCMAG, or TechCrunch of your industry.
9. Capture a Round Up of News
   Do you have a list of websites or blogs related to your industry that you frequent on a daily or weekly basis? If so, your potential customers may be interested in learning about them. If you have a blog, a weekly or monthly round up of all the blogs or news articles in your industry that interested you can garner in quite a bit of attention. Check out YumSugar for a fun example of a round up of restaurant and food related posts.
10. Expose a Trend
    Have you noticed a new trend in your industry? Keep an eye out for clients that are asking for something out of the ordinary, products that are selling out quickly, or ideas that you think may take off eventually – trends do have to start somewhere. You can also pick out trends from industry publications that clients may not read or visit sites like Google Trends or Digg to discover items that people are talking about.

From You Can’t Touch This to a profound love for web analytics, MC Hammer has had quite a journey in life. But I have to admit his excitement about web analytics is well founded. Without numbers you won’t know how people are finding your site, where they’re going once they get there and about a thousand other juicy nuggets of information that, at the end of the day, can provide a lot of insight into your website’s operation and strategy.

Be sure to watch the video and if you’re feeling like maybe you haven’t been as excited about your site’s analytics as Hammer is about his, then its time to start.

In case you haven’t heard this week a new search engine named Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched to much fanfare. In fact the amount of free publicity that they received as a suspected “Google killer” was unbelievable. In the first day it seemed like everyone was talking about them, but as the dust settled and people began trying the engine out the results weren’t so good.

Cuil’s search results are just nowhere near those of Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask. In fact, I bet some of the old school meta search engines may have better results. To top it off, Cuil has a bad habit of associating a random picture with a search result. In fact just today, Mark, one of our managing partners searched our brand name “Stone Interactive Group” on Cuil and noticed a seemingly random “Hell Cab” image listed next to our company’s search result.

Here’s a close up of the logo:

So for now Cuil has a looong way to go, but it is kind of fun to search with and see what kind of bizarre stuff you can come up with.

Find anything weird on Cuil? Share it in the comments…

Content.  The bane of my existence as a Project Manger in the web industry. Every schedule I have ever created includes “Content for the site”, the Functional Templates I put together, although tedious, shows every page of the site that will need content. Yet when the time comes for the content to be sent the first words I hear are, “I have most of it”. (No you don’t )Now I admit, perhaps we (Project Teams) don’t explain ourselves very well. We should be very clear. Yes, content does include the words that will be on a page. What you may not realize is that content is also every picture on the page, taglines, PDF’s you may want to include, charts, white pages, email address, links to other sites,  headers, EVERYTHING you want on your site.



How many  content items do you see in this picture? If you guessed 7 content items you are correct. Anything less and you have to take a step back and look at the content you will be creating for your website. 

While it is easy to look at your current website and think, “I’ll reuse this copy”, once you really look at it you realize that you really dont want to put out the same old message. If you have waited to have this realization the night before you are to deliver the content then you are now in a jam that could cost time and money. The more realistic you are about what you will need to accomplish, the less inclined you will be to put off the task until the night before the vendor is putting it on the site. 

Just yesterday Google opened up a new services called Knol. The premise is quite simple, each knol on the site is a single, authoritative article on a specific topic. For Google, the idea is to build an information resource of a similar scale to that of Wikipedia. Whether or not Knol will be successful is yet to be seen, but if it is you can’t afford to miss out.

The beauty of Knol is that anyone can write their own knol on the subject of their choice and publish it. All you need is a Google account and enough time to slap together a half-decent few paragraphs on whatever you’re an expert on and go from there. In fact I just whipped together a quick Knol discussing how small businesses can use social media. I know, i know…not the prettiest thing ever, but projects that Google puts their weight behind tend to at least be moderately successful.

Basically, Knol is an easy way to show off your knowledge and getting in early definitely can’t hurt. I’m sure at some point they’re not going to want multiple articles on the same topics, so I suggest you knol (if that’s even a verb) now on a few broad topic in your industry, then toss in a little About the Author at the bottom and see what happens.

Going through a website redesign and build is a huge and exciting undertaking. It involves re-writing content, restructuring architecture, researching innovative technologies and implementing new business strategies. A timeline and budget are formed, and hopefully followed, and many countless hours of discussion and brainstorming are involved. When all is said and done, a beautifully designed, full of rich content, easy to navigate site is created and launched, and then we all live happily ever after.

Wouldn’t it be great if everything were just that simple? Unfortunately, we know that building and launching a new site is just the beginning. A website is only effective if a.) People go to it, and b.) People update it. Think of this new website as an arm in your organization that needs constant attention if it is to grow and prosper.

Your first post-launch task is to drive traffic to the site. This can be done in a number of different ways: word of mouth, send out traditional mailers/flyers, put your web address on EVERYTHING, create press releases, and/or hire a SEO (search engine optimization) firm to manage pay per click accounts and help with organic and other search ranking efforts.

The second task is assigning people in your organization to take care of keeping the site up to date and current. If a content management system is put in place, someone needs to be trained on usage and set aside the time to make continual updates. Other possible tasks might include fulfilling ecommerce orders, managing customer support, monitoring forums, and my favorite – creating blog posts.

Organizations that fail to do the above will risk wasting the huge effort they undertook from the beginning, and most likely see their website fade over time. It’s key to the evolution of a website to always promote it and to keep the content dynamic and fresh so that users continue to visit for years to come.

You have settled on the scope of the project, the project has started and then you realize it, you forgot a feature, forgot a stakeholder, forgot to think about what happens after you start getting all the email. Heck, it could be that your hairdresser came up with a great idea and you want to incorporated it now. What happens next…

Client said - “Jennifer, we need to talk about XYZ. I know we haven’t discussed this before but it HAS to be here. It is one of our biggest requirements. The WHOLE reason we are doing the project.”

I don’t know what the big deal is, just fit it in. Yeah-Yeah, I’m sorry I forgot it right up front, but come on, how hard can it be to add? It’s just a tiny thing that leads to this form that needs to be sent to our 3rd party vendor and then sent back nightly so we know what the customer did and if they have been here before. (You would think that they have been doing this job long enough that they could do it in their sleep.)

Plus, isn’t it their job to expect things to change? How should I know what is hard and what is easy to do? If I had time to do their job I wouldn’t have had to hire them in the first place. Plus, I’ve got to get this project done and off my plate. Especially if I want to be recognized within the company. This is huge.

Vendor said - I don’t see why they don’t get it. This is why we discussed requirements in the beginning of the project. I don’t understand why they didn’t talk about it earlier if it was so important. I mean sure, it looks easy, but it isn’t that easy and now it’s going to put us back in the project timeline because we have to redo the architecture of the project. A=d to top it off the client is going to be mad because it’s going to cost more=and I’ll have to explain why and have them ask how to do it cheaper.

Seriously, I don’t know why in this day and age people just don’t get it.

Conclusion - The truth is, when you take the personal feelings out of this situation, what you have is a change. Don’t fool yourself, everyone knows where the other side is coming from. The client really does know that it is going to take more time and more money and although they really don’t know how much they do know it is a change and that they are the ones that are guiding it.

And on the flip side, the vendor really does know that you hired them for a reason. Yeah, it is going to change the timeline and the price, but the purpose of putting together the requirements and documenting the process as you go is so that it is a level playing field for everyone.

And seriously, the client doesn’t know that you hear this 3 times a week from anyone else, they only know that they need to accomplish something and it needs to look good for their bosses/organization/mother.. Any number of people. They are just trying to do it right.

The point of the story for both client and vendor is this. When you start a project and you need to add/edit/change something, step back and take a look at the big picture. Remove all personal feelings and write up the change request. Include why the change was asked for, what the change is, how it will work, how it won’t work, what it will effect and how much time/money it is going to take to change it. One of three things will happen; they will accept the change and you move on. They will reject it and you will move on, or they will decide it can wait until the next phase of the project… and you will move on. But change happens, it is the only thing we know to be an absolute truth.

Plan the work, work the plan…This statement makes project planning sound so easy, but in truth many projects fail before they even get started. How is that possible you ask? Failure to plan.

Sometimes the “need” to get something done outweighs the need to plan correctly for it. Or so some think. Have you ever heard, “We will make a decision when we get there”, or “Lets investigate some options and I’ll let you know”, or my personal favorite, “I have to see it working to know if it is right “. While working in this fashion feels good to start, it is not the most direct route to getting the work done and it is a heavy load on the finances as well. Both for the client and the company.

One way to help avoid these problems is to have a detailed discussion at the beginning of the project. A discussion where you gather the stakeholders and discuss the scope of the project. (The scope of the project is the sum total of all of its products or features.) Make decisions together on the direction to go. You should decide the way features should and will work. Write them down; include assumptions about how they work, and assumptions on how it won’t work. Being clear up front gets everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction. Do not count on the proposal to cover features in this much detail, it doesn’t and it isn’t supposed to. While having these talked up front may not curb the occasional “that’s not how I thought it was going to work”, it will, if documented, help to avoid rework of things that have been done.

Keep in mind that planning the project SHOULD take a big amount of time. The more planning and discussion done up front the less that needs to be done later. This means less rework to correct issues or misunderstanding and less money and heartache to the client, the team and the bottom line. Changes may come along, but your whole project is one big moving target if it isn’t planned correctly to begin with.
( That is putting it nicely)

So instead of groaning when the Project Manager wants to talk about the nuts and bolts of a project, next time rejoice that someone cares enough to want your project to be a success.

Over the past few years video has experienced rapid growth and adoption rates online.

Broadcasting networks continue to push more and more video content out on the web, large corporations use video to build their brand and, of course, videos on YouTube are viewed daily by millions.

But even with the growth of the past few years, for most industries online video is still in its infancy, which means big opportunity for businesses looking to differentiate themselves online.

Easy Ways for Your Business to Use Video on the Web

• Customer testimonials
• Online product demonstrations
• Video bios of employees
• Intro to the company or a product
• As a blog entry
• Facility overviews
• Viral/Buzz marketing
• and anything else you can dream up

If you’re interested in exploring how video can differentiate your business online, get in touch with us. We can help formulate a web video strategy and then execute the strategy to ensure its success.

I was asked the other day to walk a potential client through The Stone Content Management System which is based on a very popular open source CMS (Content Management System). If you are not sure what a CMS is, it is a tool that allows non-technical people to update the content, add/delete pages, add/delete images and many more things on their website through a user-friendly administrator tool.

As I was answering questions, the potential client told me that they had heard from another company that an Open Source CMS does not allow for a very flexible design and that if you wanted to have a nice design, the way to go is with a custom CMS. If you have ever taken a look at Stone’s Web Design Portfolio, you will know the answer to this. However, here are my two cents regarding that comment.

It doesn’t matter whether the CMS is custom or Open Source. If you know the system well enough (which Stone Interactive Group does) the design can look however you would like it to look. The second thing to consider is the designer themselves. Stone has a fantastic design team that produces wonderful results and the developers have been able to put every design thrown at them into this CMS.

The nice thing about Open Source is that you have an extremely large amount of team members that put time to keep the CMS up-to-date. If you ever need more help in the future with your website, you can go to many developers out there that may know the system and be able to pick it up quickly. The custom CMS projects that Stone has adopted from clients are typically very time consuming to understand and are typically out-of-date quickly and are not as easy to apply a redesign to.

So when you have the option to decide Custom VS Open Source, in my opinion, Open Source is the way to go and Stone is there to assist you along the way.

Have news: When you sit down to write a press release, ask yourself, “Is this really news? If you answer no, put the pen down or step away from the keyboard.

Get to the point: Remember those 5 W’s in school. Put them to use. Who, what, when, where and why. That’s it. You will be sending this to reporters who have deadlines and thus skim the release looking for answers to those questions and your contact info only…you’ll have about 5 seconds. Your boring, robotic quote will not be used; if they want a quote from you, they’ll call.

Ditch the buzz words: This is why people hate press releases, “green” “eco-friendly” “foreclosure” “toxic tomatoes”, don’t use these words if they have nothing to do with your company or if you are a politician.

Grammatical and Spelling Errors: Proofread. Proofread. Proofread. Do not use all upper case…yes, not even for the title. Do not rely on spellchecker. Do not go in the complete opposite direction and sound like an English Lit. major…no one likes a pompous press release.

Spam I Am: You’ve sent 10+ press releases of similar “news” to a media contact and nothing has come of it. You are blocked. Make one, I repeat one, attempt to contact said media representative and inquire as to what releases would be of interest and abide by their suggestions.

Yep that’s right, we’re on the hunt for a new Search Engine Marketing Specialist.

So, if you or someone you know are looking for an exciting new job and have some experience in search engine marketing (search engine optimization and/or pay-per-click) then we’d love to hear from you.

The more detailed job description can be found on our careers page as well as how best to get in touch with us.

As a side note, we’re also always on the lookout for interactive and web talent, so don’t be shy…if you’re looking then drop us a note, you never know what might come out of it.