For the DIY types among us: Four fonts are too many for the content area of your website. Two is the rule of thumb.
Remember, the more fonts you use, the more it looks like a ransom note.
Typical Phone Conversation:
Client: “Yeah, did you get the pictures I sent over?”
Me: “Um, yes I did. A lot of them are kinda small. Where did you get them?”
Client: “I got them from Google. You can just make them bigger, can’t you?”
Me: “Well, not really. I can make something bigger smaller, but going the other way usually looks pretty bad. I can’t use these pictures, tho. They belong to someone.”
Client: “No they don’t. I got them from Google. They’re on the internet, so they’re free, right?”
Me: “Not exactly. Google looks at websites and pulls the search results from websites. When you use Google Image Search, what it’s showing you is images from other websites that are owned by other people. It’d be kinda like someone finding a picture from your website and using it on theirs.”
Client: “oh…”
To the more web-savvy of you, this might seem like a dumb conversation, but it happens a lot. Many people assume that just because you can find it online means you can use it for whatever you like. If you’re one of those, it’s no fault of your own, really, but now you know.
Say it with me: “Google Image Search is not a good source for stock photography.”
via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog
As some of the comments on the Youtube page have pointed out, this does not work as some sites don’t allow non-alphanumeric passwords and limit the length to something ridiculous like 6 characters or less.
Still, good to know.
When I worked at WWAY, we always greeted the ratings book with a high mix of anticipation & anxiety. The provider of the numbers that we lived and died by also provides a crazy amount of information about digital media, consumer trends and a wide array of info that’ll make your head spin.
Click on the big pic of their homepage for a link to the wire section, or if you’re interested just in marketing, I highly recommend the Media + Entertainment Section.
story via Brand Flakes for Breakfast
It’s a interesting story – a restaurant is about to go under and social media comes to the rescue. You’ll need to read the story over at All Facebook: How Facebook, Radio & Mimosas Saved A Local Restaurant, but I want to make a couple of points:
In case you’ve been living under a social media rock for the past 48 hours, Old Spice has launched the current mother-of-all viral social media campaigns.
Apparently, they’ve assembled a crack creative team and locked them in a Portland, Oregon bunker with cameras, a shower and a live internet connection to answer questions posted at various social media sites.
When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was going to poke all sorts of holes in it. Yeah, a big company with a well established character & brand could do this sort of thing with deep pockets, but it really doesn’t do any good for the little guys. Local businesses could never pull this sort of thing off.
But why not?
I mean, yeah, you couldn’t do it on this sort of scale cranking out 87 videos in 11 hours that get national attention, but how about on a micro scale?
Maybe one a week?
With some sort of interesting delivery?
Educating & informing your potential customer base instead while entertaining them?
It could be done.
But you’ve got to have something of value and be interesting first.
Clickbrix QR Codes for Real Estate: via Brand Flakes for Breakfast
QR Codes are nifty little things. I’ve even spotted a few in the wild locally in Wilmington and we spotted them in a few places around Washington, DC while we were on vacation.
Basically, they are bar codes that can be read by smartphone users. The information that they can contain varies, but the really cool application is that you can use them to direct smartphone users to a web page. Realty companies in the area are starting to use them on for sale signs to direct potential buyers to listings and I’ve seen them at Lowes linking to information on plants & plant care.
They’ve been around in Japan for a while now, but you can generate your own with one of several online tools. Put them in your ads, on business cards or on various items in your store and lead customers to more information to complete the sale.
I’ve tried a lot of twitter tools and some are painfully slow or borderline useless. Yesterday, I decided to thin the number of people I’m following and used Refollow ( http://refollow.com ) to thin the herd.
It was awesome. Fairly quick to use once it loads your info and offered just about every way possible to sort Friends/Followers.
** This is a unsolicited/unpaid, yet glowing endorsement
While I was going through the list of people that I followed, I started to notice that quite a few people weren’t following back and I started to get a little miffed. I’m not talking about celebrities either major or minor (for a good take on that look here: What Twitter is For ). Some were people that I knew personally and others were businesses that I though, “Well, heck. why wouldn’t they want to follow me???”
You Can’t Take Social Media Personally
After getting a grip on myself, I started to really think about why someone doesn’t follow back and I’ve put this in a nifty web friendly scanning unordered list for your viewing pleasure & enlightenment.
Along the same lines, I don’t follow everyone back immediately. I only reciprocate after I look at their profile & recent tweets and decide that they’ve got something I’m interested in. I also am not prone to follow someone if I’ve already got an expert in their field in my list. For instance: I’ve got my goto guys for SEO already.
In Closing
Getting upset about the whole who-follows-me-and-who-doesn’t social media game is a lot like cursing the darkness; the darkness doesn’t care. The best thing to do is be yourself and try to be interesting. All the cool tools & tricks in the universe won’t gather you anything of value if you’re not trying to do those two things first.
Social Media badges on every page?
Why?
Once customers come in your shop, would you send them down to the coffee shop (where all their friends hang out) just to sign up for your mailing list?
Heck no.
So, now that they’re on your website, why would you make it easy for them to go to Facebook where there are a thousand other distractions?
Once they visit your site, you’ve got their attention. Do something quick or you’ll lose it.
What follows is part of a email that was sent to a client this week concerning some problems we were having with Google Analytics.
“Ok, first thing is first. I can’t personally guarantee 100% that I’m going to resolve this. There’s several things outside of my control that could be causing anomalies; the visitor clicks on a link before the analytics code loads, GA hiccups, or the planets haven’t aligned properly. It’s Google Analytics and it’s free and so that means no direct support. There’s no person to contact at Google to say ‘Why isn’t this working?’. They have a support forum and it’s like panning for gold in there. Sometimes you find a nugget, but mostly it’s dirt and dead bugs. I’ll keep pounding at it, but at some point I’ve got to say that there are parts of this that are out of my hands.”
I can’t say I stated everything as eloquently as I should have. I was a little frustrated with the problem seeing as how I thought it was resolved. Some of it was my fault and the rest of it I can’t determine because I haven’t worked my search engine voodoo well enough to find the answer. But I walked away from this with some key lessons.
So, like it, love it, hate it; but it is what it is.
Cool? Yes.
Free? Yes.
Accurate? Not so much.
Frustration Free? Absolutely not.
Things I’m Reading