Corporate blogs benefit greatly from a collaborative effort to produce and maintain. While it’s easy for anyone to start a personal blog in seconds, a company blog takes considerably more thought and planning to execute.

We are fortunate to have talented and engaged clients and want to highlight a couple of our most successful blog launches for The Alter Group and Bliss PR, which each benefit from multiple contributors. These projects engaged talented designers and thought leaders outside Astek who were essential to the end results. Both blogs run on custom installations of Wordpress.

Astek’s focus on helping our clients produce blogs over the past few years is especially rewarding since the client has so much influence over the life of the end product, which changes nearly daily.

Case Study #1
Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire blogs featuring podcasts
Business Focus: One of the nation’s preeminent corporate real estate development firms.
Blog Focus: Corporate Real Estate, Finance, Economy, Healthcare
Approx. Combined Monthly Visitors: 4,800+
Original launch: April 10, 2008
Redesign and ALTER+CARE Inspire launch: April 6, 2009
Featured in: Alltop.com

Astek worked closely with The Alter Group team over several months to hone the voice and focus of the blog, identify and train contributors on software, design the feature set needed, and deploy a flexible platform for growth. The initial budget was low to make sure appropriate resources could be committed consistently and to prove ROI before “going big.” Once the process and message proved stable, we engaged a designer to add the finishing touches that make the blog what it is today.

Dramatic color and imagery set Alter NOW apart from other blogs:

Consistent and careful use of relevant imagery in each article pulls the reader in:

The footer of each article features a ShareThis link for easy distribution across email and other web sites (important for viral growth to reach new readers), the author photo, name, relevant categories and tags, and a link to leave a comment, which invites readers to become part of the ongoing conversation blogs present. This article also features a link to the corresponding podcast on the subject.

The sidebar features easy subscription links, quick links to the podcasts, and prioritized standard blog features such as search and recent posts:

Both blogs are featured prominently on The Alter Group home page for easy access:

Case Study #2
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders blog
Business Focus: Business-to-business strategic media relations and marketing communications
Blog Focus: B2B marketing, public relations, professional services, financial services, and healthcare

Working with BlissPR to design and launch their blog was, well, blissful! They had been planning this launch for some time so the overall strategy and content development were in good shape. BlissPR primarily needed a partner to help with design, production, and blog deployment and integration strategy.

BlissPR wanted to integrate the new blog into their existing Web site, which presented a unique set of design opportunities and challenges. The new design features a prominent masthead for the blog with subscription links and a search box. Each article on the home page is clearly delineated with a green title bar, photo of the author, and crafted abstract leading to the full story. The “Share” link has plenty of room to breathe, highlighting the importance of this word of mouth feature.

The side bar focuses on the people behind the blog to provide context to visitors. A brief description of BlissPR is immediately followed by photos linking to bios of all the authors. This is a great way to add personality to your blog. The sidebar is followed by standard blog elements like tag cloud and recent posts.

We’re very proud of our clients’ ongoing success with these publications. Please check them out and remember to leave a comment!

Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders

Here’s a succinct list of five things you can do to improve your corporate blog. The three blogs featured above stand as testimony to these recommended tactics.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

 Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet?  Sign up! 

Comments

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

The theme of the week is showing off our clients’ successes. Recently, L.A.-based VeriFacts Automotive received some nice press for their ongoing efforts to increase the quality of collision repair work through coaching and therefore increase the safety of cars on the road.

Read more about VeriFacts and President Farzam Afshar, interviewed in Parts & People magazine.

Afshar says his company’s goal “is to go into shops and evaluate their work quality and coach their technicians on what they’re doing right and wrong rather than waiting for a repair issue to get them into court and conflict.”

Astek supports this goal by providing Web consulting, back-end development, and maintenance for the organization’s custom Web applications.

Comments

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology

Whether they are sending beautifully designed eNewsletters, or simple text based email outreach, these Astek clients have inspired us with email marketing campaigns that are well executed and “just right” for their organizations.

Case Study #1
Gotham Research: Simple and Sharable
Gotham Research Group approached Astek a few weeks ago to implement a fairly simple email campaign introducing Gotham’s services to a list of potential new clients. Gotham wanted to put their best foot forward to these new prospects, providing a PDF summarizing a recent research project. They wanted to deliver this in a simple, text-only email. Things about the email content that really impressed us:

• Emails began with a polite, yet personalized greeting – “Ms. Smith,“
• The voice of the email was right on – it struck an excellent balance between professional and personable, informative and concise. It was written as a personal message from the company’s President & CEO, Jeffrey Levine, Ph.D.

• In an almost textbook example of “viral” marketing, Gotham was giving prospective clients valuable content that was also an example of their work – in this case a 2-page summary of a research project performed by Gotham Research that was of relevance to their target market – and encouraging recipients to pass on the report summary to their colleagues.

When Gotham originally contacted us, they were considering sending this email using Outlook. As we’ve discussed in this blog previously, there are some major advantages to using an Email Service Provider like Emma to send out an email to a large list. Of these advantages, Gotham was most excited to learn about the ability to:

• Easily automate personalized greeting lines
• Protect their company’s office email from getting flagged as Spam
• Generate metrics showing delivery rates, open rates and click-through rates.
• Set hyperlink colors to match brand colors.

Even though Emma can handle complex HTML formated emails, Gotham decided to stick with the original ”letter” formating of the original email and not add any photos or graphics. Needing to add only a few subtle touches to already solid content, Gotham and Astek were able to get the email ready to send through Emma in a mater of hours.

Gotham began receiving inquire calls within hours of the emailing going out. The email got a 15% open rate and approximately 4% of the people who opened the email called to inquire about contracting the company. Gotham and Astek are continuing to execute similar email campaigns to new lists and strategizing ways to build on these successes.

A big thanks to Vin Design, Gotham’s brand consultant and a regular partner of Astek’s, for introducing us to this savvy company.

Case Study #2
Chicago Dancing Festival: Building the List
The Chicago Dancing Festival draws more than 10,000 attendees to world-class dance performances in downtown Chicago every August. But after three years of successful events, the organization had collected less than 300 email addresses. Every Spring, the event promotion efforts had to start from square one.

For the 2009 festival, CDF was ready to invest in technologies that would allow them to better build momentum from one year to the next. Astek worked with CDF and Vin Design to more aggressively gather opt-in email addresses through multiple tactics:

• From June through the end of the festival, a “cookie” was added to the homepage so that the first time someone visited the site, they were prompted to join the mailing list.
• A special welcome email was automatically sent to new sign-ups. The email outlined “all the festival details in one handy email.” Most importantly, the email was topped by a message encouraging recipients to forward the message.
  
• Buttons labelled “forward to a friend” and “signup for updates” were built into the sidebar of every email sent from CDF.
  

By the end of the three month push, CDF had grown their list to 10 times the original size. And because the list had been built so carefully, CDF enjoys incredibly high response rates: open rates averaging around 40% and click-through rates as high as 57%. (Open and Click-through rates for opt-in email lists are typically in the range if 10-25% and 10-15% respectively.) It was a highly successful campaign on all fronts.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet? Sign up!

Comments

Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

For businesses, an email signature is like a website on a micro scale.  You should definitely have one, but it needs to be done well to make the right statement about your business.  There are also various stylistic and technical issues to consider.  I like to think our email signature is pretty good.  Clean, simple, with a hint of color to make it stand out and represent our brand:

However, one of our clients stands out for having an all-around great email signature that I think should stand as example to others.  As part of our ePiphany issue focusing on inspiring work by our clients, we would like to show you the email signature from Demi and Cooper. They are a Chicago advertising agency we have worked with to provide webcam service for building development projects.  Their signature has a nice mix of clean and simple design, appropriate use of images, and inclusion of social media links.  Have a look at the signature of Walter Ottenhoff, who did the actual design for it:

	Walter Ottenhoff | Web Art Director/Manager | Demi & Cooper Advertising P 847.931.5800 | F 847.931.5801 | demicooper.com

If you’re going to use graphics in your signature, do so sparingly.  And be sure to host any images at your company’s website, referring to them there rather than including them as email attachments.  If social media links are appropriate, by all means include them and use the appropriate thumbnails.

A professional email signature should ideally be crafted by an experienced web designer.  The signature is basically just a little bit of HTML, but there are concerns specific to viewing in an email client.  Test in as many email clients as possible to be sure that people won’t see an unintended mess at the bottom of your emails. We recommend Litmus for an automated service to perform such testing.

If you can’t get a custom HTML signature, one free alternative is a Firefox browser plugin called WiseStamp.  Their signature edit tool would feel familiar to anyone who has used MS Word or blog authoring tools.  You can input your social media profile addresses and it will add links to them automatically, with some nice options for customizing their display.  WiseStamp will add your signature to all the common web mail clients.  You can even get the HTML from it (although without the social media links) to use in a desktop email client like Outlook.  One tip: be sure to uncheck the promote Wisestamp Project option in the settings.

Comments

Andrew Crowe Categories: General, How To, Marketing, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

What is Google Fast Flip? 

From the Google Fast Flip page: “Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.”

You can search by keyword string or browse by four main categories. There are several pubs in each category that display a 200 x 220 pixel thumbnail of each article’s page.

Below it appears Google duplicated Salon’s home page with two thumbnails and had trouble naming each thumbs’ caption but the actual article of “Where the wild things aren’t” turned out OK.

I say smart for the most part because sometimes the text appears to be pulled directly from the page copy. Smart because not every pub used the code the same way to delineate title.

On all the articles I tested the html title, and the H1’s or H2’s did not consistently have the article title, or the title used in the caption all by itself. So maybe Google is looking at something else – the visual representation of the page not just the code or text alone??? Not sure.

It is clipping the text caption / link to the article at the 65-character limit though, just like the normal SERP’s titles.  

What made me click seemed to be the articles that were easiest to read in that 200 x 220 thumbnail format. So big pictures and big headlines win for me here.  And who can resist a good ol’ fashioned dispute inside the Lohan clan.

Normal on page text was just too small to read. So if this format became a dominant source of traffic it may skew how publishers design pages for optimum CTR’s.  For now there are only 39 news sources so I don’t expect a new protocal to evolve, IE: Fast Flip Thumbs. I do suspect some sort of hybrid will evolve into our search results with more images.

Kinda cool for you really big or multiple monitor junkies. When you expand it to fill all the space horizontally you get as many 200 x 220 thumbs as will fit.

Information overload or just the right sized distraction. You decide.

For now you can make a day of it  on “Balloon Boy” alone, who is forever forward to be known as “balloon boy” instead of, “son of former Wife Swap star Mayumi.”

Check out Google fast flip here: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Comments

Tom Lynch Categories: Fun, Web, google

We couldn’t be prouder of the first member of the Astek team to complete the Chicago Marathon. He clocked in at 4:03:28 last Sunday, which is great especially for a first-timer! Andrew’s an inspiration to us all, inside the office and out. I took the photo below after the 24-mile mark in his final push and got him airborne.

Comments

Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, General

Astek is proud to announce the first session of classes for our new Green Star Academy! Wednesday, October 21, 2009, get out of the office and make some real progress on Web Marketing for your company as you learn tips, tricks and shortcuts used by the experts!

In the morning Tom Lynch teaches a crash course in Search Engine Optimization:

SEO: Smaller Ponds, Bigger Fish
Targeting Behavior to Lure Customers

Turn your online presence into online performance. Find your customers by behavior and reel them in as they search. Master the SEO strategies, tools and shortcuts used by the experts to find “smaller ponds” filled with new customers.
REGISTER

In the afternoon, Katie Hawkey gets you set up to reach new customers through Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter:

Zero to 60 Social Media
Rev Up Your B2C Marketing with Facebook & Twitter

Now is the time to implement your social media strategy. Get the concepts and tools you need to drive social media marketing while you set up optimized Facebook and Twitter accounts for your company.
REGISTER

We hope you’ll join us! If you know anyone who might benefit from this class please pass it on! And if there is a class you would be interested in seeing us offer, by all means, let us know!

Comments

Katie Hawkey Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Technology, Web

If you do any kind of web development, and you’re a Firefox user, chances are you know about Firebug.  I began using it a couple years ago when I needed to do some serious Javascript debugging, but it has since become indispensable to me for more basic web design.  It allows you to inspect the HTML and CSS code behind web pages, letting you see exactly why any particular element of a page is displayed how it is.  See an example here of inspecting the Clients link at the bottom of our home page (click for larger):

click for more about on the fly edit/preview, and tools for IE and Safari…

Comments

Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

The Federal Trade Commission recently announced that they are now requiring bloggers to disclose any payments or freebies they receive from a company in exchange for a review. This is the first time that the rules on endorsements and testimonials have been updated since 1980 and the first time the rules have covered bloggers. (source Associated Press)

Astek has worked with many of our clients in crafting blogging and social media strategies. We’ve often stressed the importance of transparency online. Misleading “From” information and subject lines have long been part of the CAN-SPAM laws and as blogs become an everyday news resource for Americans I’m sure they will fall under more Federal regulation laws applied to “mainstream” media.

For the most part, I see these new regulations as a good thing – blogs and micro-blogging sites like Twitter have proven in recent years that they are a necessary and powerful source of news and information (and misinformation). And as Uncle Ben taught us, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Regardless of what the FTC or FCC decide to regulate in the future, I hope your company is already applying disclosure and transparency best practices long before they are enforced by the government.

Comments

Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web