2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

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

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

Whether you are publishing content or selling products, you need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to get to your goods on their terms. Mobile usage is growing exponentially and will be an increasingly essential part of your toolkit to keep your customers coming back for more.

But if you’re just starting to think about how to go mobile, it can be hard to know where to begin. Two of the key things you’ll need to research are what mobile devices your customers are using now and what they want to use in the future. This information will help you make the right decisions when planning how to allocate your valuable resources.

Review your analytics. You should have Web analytics running on your website. Google Analytics is a top-notch free tool that will tell you a lot about how people are accessing your content. While analytics are useful, they don’t tell you the whole story. You also want to know how people ideally would view your content, which isn’t completely revealed until you’ve created an optimized mobile experience.

Send a survey. The best way to find out what your customers want is to ask. There are numerous survey tools available, which you can use to send a Web-based survey to your email list. Regardless of how you deploy the survey, it’s important to keep it short to increase the number of responses. Here is a suggested set of questions to find out your customers’ mobile preferences:

1) What type(s) of mobile phone do you have?
        a) iPhone
        b) Android
        c) Blackberry
        d) Windows
        e) Palm
        f) Other

2) What type(s) of mobile phone do you expect to have 1 year from now?
        a) iPhone
        b) Android
        c) Blackberry
        d) Windows
        e) Palm
        f) Other

3) From where do you typically view our website?
        a) Work
        b) Home
        c) On the go

4) From what type of device would you prefer to view our website?
        a) Desktop computer
        b) Laptop
        c) Tablet
        d) Mobile Phone

5) On a mobile phone, how do you prefer to read content?
        a) Apps
        b) Mobile Web browser (e.g., Safari)
        c) RSS Reader

6) If you own a tablet, what kind?
        a) iPad
        b) Android
        c) Windows
        d) Blackberry
        e) I don’t own a tablet

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, How To, Marketing, Mobile, Technology

We’re big fans of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA), an organization focused on the ever-changing needs of niche publishers, typically in the B2B space. As members and speakers, we’ve enjoyed getting to know the diverse groups involved, and I often learn as much as I teach at their seminars, since publishers are in the middle of a bone fide revolution.

Tom Lynch and I attended the national conference in Washington D.C. this month, and added “exhibitor” to our list of credentials. Astek’s growth has always been fueled by word of mouth from our happy customers (thanks!), but we felt it was important for us to add another layer of support for SIPA, as well as to get some extra exposure for Astek by having a booth that stood out and quickly became known as “Astek Lounge.”

I’m thrilled with how well our booth turned out, thanks largely to Vin at Vin Design, who is an expert in experiential design.

First things first. Tom and I headed over to IKEA to pick up some essentials. We were creating something very different from the blue table we were provided — a space that would invite people to come in and stay awhile. And it worked!

While we were giving away real apples (on the right), we decided to have a contest and give away another Apple in the form of a new iPad 2. People entered by scanning our QR code (on the left) to register for our ePiphany newsletter. This gave us an opportunity personally to help several SIPA members get their QR code readers installed and working on their smart phones, which proved most painful on Blackberries.

Check out Astek iPad winner Brad Forrister, of M. Lee Smith Publishers/Business & Legal Resources, basking in his new toy (green cover of course):

We had fun experimenting with colorizing QR codes, and used them on the table tents strewn throughout the lounge to make it easy to learn more about Webany CMS, ePiphany, and the people at Astek:

I gave a talk on mobile publishing to a standing room-only crowd. Every couple of years publishers are thrown for a new loop in technology: SEO, CMS, social media, and now mobile. We’re helping many publishers figure out how to go mobile, which is the fastest growing content consumption market.

SIPA is a very progressively-minded organization, and hired Astek to run Twitter for the whole conference. Rachel was putting in 12-hour days back in Chicago, but it was a raging success. Several members participated, both those at the show and ones who could not make it. We had two Twitter walls (one shown below with Kati and Anne), and hashtags for the conference and each seminar to facilitate macro and micro topical real-time conversations.

I tweeted the awards ceremony in real-time and Rachel picked up the broadcast to retweet through @sipaonline. It was a blast and really demonstrated the power of Twitter to the attendees. We’re racing with it, offering this service to all kinds of conference organizers. Twitter has come a long way since I first wrote about it in 2008, and the conference aspect has become the clearest way for me to explain its true potential to people.

We had a tiny bit of downtime in the booth, which Tom used to show me how to juggle apples:

At the end, we donated the IKEA furniture to the local Boys & Girls Club of America, who were as thrilled to get it as we were not to ship it home. Now that’s a win-win.

See you in Miami!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, How To, Marketing, Technology

As business people we seem to swim in a culture that abruptly labels unmet expectations as failures rather than lessons learned. This could be labeled as black and white, carrot and stick — take your pick. To me it places an unnecessarily negative and narrowly reviewed label on lessons that could otherwise bear real fruit for future interactions.

In the wake of countless huge companies being rewarded for failures that rarely seem to produce lessons or better results, this could be seen as the wrong message to send. But I’m talking about the little guys — those of us who have the gumption and power to do it better next time.

We had a project a few months ago that delivered less-than-hoped-for results. It happens. We learned a ton and the client acknowledged that the information and research was well worth the price.

The owner said something valuable to me, which was that success is unmistakable. You can smell it, taste it, and see it from a great distance. No one argues with it. No one makes excuses for it. It speaks for itself and everyone celebrates.

I agree with that philosophy. I’m not saying we should all pat ourselves on the back for not meeting expectations, whether they are from clients, employees, family, or anyone in between. But certainly there are constructive ways to evaluate those failures as lessons, which elevates our responsibility and chances to do better next time.

Make a point of scheduling time to review what went wrong and what went right. At Astek we call them postmortems. They are project reviews, or whatever you want to call them. The point is that you assign a focused amount of team energy and time to the evaluation, reach some reasonable and measurable conclusions (which requires knowing what you were measuring when you started), and then move on!

This last part is essential to make sure it’s a lesson and not a cloud of failure that can quickly turn to poison in an otherwise constructive work environment. Learn and move forward. After all, if you learn your lessons wisely pretty soon you’ll smell that unmistakable smell of success.

I place a real dollar value on these lessons, because they have real quantifiable value that is often thrown out with the bathwater. As a society we have no trouble spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on formalized education, so why are the street lessons so different? Both types of leaning require perseverance and a dedication to the end result.

Thomas Edison really said it best: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

A business partner once said it like this: “In life you have only accomplishments and excuses.” A lesson learned is an accomplishment in its own right, but a failure with no lesson is nothing but an excuse and waste.

Another business partner once told me: “If you don’t learn something every day, your life sucks.” That one really stuck with me to this day. No one expects you to know everything or be perfect. Just do the best you can.

So go learn some lessons and let me know what you find!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, How To

While I’m a frequent traveler to Austin, TX, for music events and family, this was my first time at South By Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi). SXSW is divided into Interactive, Film, and Music festivals, each world-renowned for the quality of talent, content, and fun.

SXSWi is the height of Tech geekery, mostly focused around Web and mobile apps related to social media, such as Foursquare or Twitter. This is my crowd, for sure, and our social media guru Rachel Yeomans was even more plugged in than me due to her incessant and productive use of Twitter.

I dusted off my Twitter account just for the occasion. While I was one of the first people on it three years ago, I’ve found it difficult to keep up, which is a common issue for our clients to which I can relate! I’m glad I brought it out, though, as much of SXSW takes place on Twitter. This isn’t a surprise considering that Twitter essentially launched at SXSW years ago, but what did surprise me was the advanced and consistent use of hash tags to create interactive audience feedback for every session. Moderators would monitor the Twitter traffic for that session and involve the audience as they could.

Most of the big tech brands were present, as were most of the geek celebrities. A highlight for me was getting to meet a childhood geek hero, Guy Kawasaki, who was there supporting his new book, Enchantment. I fondly remember reading Guy’s column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. As Chief Evangelist for the Mac when it was first released in 1984, he was there right at the beginning. Now he turns much of his attention to helping entrepreneurs, writing, speaking, and VC’ing. I got to meet him at his book signing, pictured below!

The learning, networking, funning, eating, and yes… drinking, all made for a dense and highly worthwhile experience, starting with legos. When we first arrived at the conference center, I found three huge tables full of legos, which immediately put me in a five-year-old state of mind. Perfect! No, we didn’t spend the whole time there, but it was a good way to get the juices flowing.

Me and my amazing creation…

And our friend Miguel Cano, from JSH&A, working on his own…

Presenter highlights included Chicago friend Jenni Prokopy (ChronicBabe) talking about building better health communities. An interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly gave us a glimpse into the future of digital. I learned about everything from social media metrics to text donations for nonprofits to web typography to mobile optimization to user experience process and more. I did make it one film event — a panel with Rainn Wilson for his new movie, Super. And somewhere in there we even made it to a couple of parties!

The food trucks are a highlight of Austin, particularly in the downtown area. Rachel, Miguel, and I walked until we found one with a short line — Turf N’ Surf Poboys. Yum…

Major sponsor and Foursquare competitor Gowalla was heavily represented, though I stuck to Foursquare personally. And vowel-challenged startup SCVNGR had everyone running around finding things for various types of rewards. All this served as real world preview of what is being largely hailed as the “next big thing” — the gamification of pretty much everything. What’s that? Well, it basically means that technologies with built-in game mechanics are more successful at getting people to actually use the technology. The best app in the world is useless if nobody uses it.

Foursquare, in my opinion, is the most successful example of merging game motivation with real-world advertising. While I’ve been using the mobile app for nearly two years, I’ve never seen such an intense concentration as I did at SXSW. People were checking in to everything, everywhere. Every room, event, party, and sometimes cars. I hit a new week record of 403 points! They released a big update to the app for SXSW, so it now tells you lots of good tidbits related to your own data, such as how long it’s been since you were at that location. This intrigues me since I purposefully choose not to broadcast my location to very many people.

The Foursquare people were everywhere as well. Forty of them came to SXSW, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, who I saw interviewed by Mashable SEO Pete Cashmore. In a particularly humbling moment for Dennis, an enormous print of his GAP ad was brought on stage and offered up to the audience member with the best question.

Dennis spoke about the future of Foursquare, and his vision to help you remember and find that coffee shop your friends were telling you to visit when you go to San Francisco, for instance. I also had a nice chat with Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen after a smaller discussion he led with Lisa Bradner of Geomentum about the future of geo-related marketing and advertising.

Saving one of the most amazing moments for last, Rachel suggested we check out a live recording of The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick podcast at Esther’s Follies, a really fun local venue with lots of history. Fifteen minutes into the recording, Chris said it was time to bring out their special guest, who was none other than John Oliver from The Daily Show! Rach and I just about fell out of our chairs, as we’re both HUGE fans. We were treated to more than an hour of John hamming it up with the guys.

We’re looking forward to next year! Hope to see you there, too.

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

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

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web

A couple months back, I spoke in Miami to members of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA) about publishing to mobile devices. These are typically niche publishers, each offering unique value to their readers and each with unique editorial and technology requirements. Mobile is an exploding market for content delivery, offering enormous possibilities and potential value.

One of the first major decisions you make when deciding to go mobile is App or Optimize. In other words, are you talking about building a mobile-friendly website that almost any smart device can display (optimize), or do you need apps on various mobile platforms (app)? Here are some tips to help you make the right decision, which will likely lead to better results for you and yours.

App Advantages

• Max control over brand, user experience, and rights management
• Expanded options for ad revenue
• Enhanced feature set for media-rich content
• Enhanced ability to view content offline (plane)
• “Cool” factor

App Disadvantages

• Typically higher production and maintenance cost and time
• Access is limited to devices you can afford to support
• Potentially more difficult to integrate with existing publishing solutions
• Reduced flexibility in a rapidly evolving industry

Mobile-Optimized Website Advantages

• Standard rich content formatting language for Web/Email
• Free, flexible and open – works on most devices
• Typically reduced production costs and time
• Typically easier to integrate directly with existing content management systems (Webany)
• Easier viral distribution and linking, with methods to deter unauthorized copying
• Control viewing access (rights management)

Mobile-Optimized Website Disadvantages

• Lack of complete control over brand and user experience (esp. with RSS)
• Fewer options for flexible rights management
• Fewer embedded/easy ad revenue options
• Reduced ability to add interactive features
• Reduced offline content access without additional software support

The recent iPhone release on Verizon is good timing for Apple since Android had been out-selling it in the last months of 2010. More choices of carriers should lead to an increase in sales.

I hope this was a helpful breakdown of some of the considerations. Our process has helped several clients make the right decisions when going mobile. Let me know if you have any questions.

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

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

The Working Wardrobe, an Astek blog consulting client, just made #4 in Forbes’ list of The 20 Best Fashion Blogs for Professional Women. Hats off to Rachel Yeomans and her team for achieving such an honor in little more than a year of publication.

After working with Rachel to establish the initial strategy and infrastructure of her blog, nothing gives us more joy than seeing it soar like this. Once a publication is off and running, the majority of the hard work is in the diligence and discipline of writing and editing. In addition to that, Rachel has a natural ability to cleverly leverage social media channels to reach the people for whom she and her team write.

The Working Wardrobe is a publication geared towards the working individual–be it on finding a job, maintaining that job, interviewing for that job, or changing jobs–all the while knowing what to wear for that specific occasion. Please join us in congratulating The Working Wardrobe for their ongoing success!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web

This month we’re discussing Web analytics and how they can help you construct your website in the manner that will best enable you to reach your goal, whether it’s to generate leads, sell products, express thought leadership, or anything else. There are numerous design and strategic decisions involved in each of these. To help you get started, I’ve provided a simple outline of things to consider.

1. Establish your goals. You must know what you want to get from your website before you talk about how to design or build it.

2. Have a clear call to action. If you want people to buy something, don’t be afraid to make the “Buy Now” button prominent. If you want people to contact you for more information, put your phone number on the top of every page.

3. Study your analytics to figure out what kind of people are visiting your site. You’ll know from where they came, for what they searched to find you, and all kinds of other goodies.

4. Start with a wireframe storyboard to establish the strategy and hierarchy of your site before getting into the design and graphics of it. Using your goals established above, create a rough sketch of the most important elements on the page starting at the top. People still read left to right, top to bottom, so they will see everything “above the fold” before clicking or scrolling. And if they don’t see what they are looking for, they might not look any farther.

5. Design to build trust. Use trust icons such as affiliations, awards, memberships, ratings, partners, and certifications to create immediate recognition of brand value for the visitor.

6. Focus on benefits not features. Every successful company does many things well, and we often focus on listing our features. However, focusing on the actual benefits or value you bring to the table creates a much more compelling point of differentiation. (Thanks, Mr. Schmooze, for that one)

Using this process should help you establish your goals at any stage in the Web design process. The more information you have going into it, the better you’ll be able to communicate your goals with your Web consulting partner.

Here is an example of a landing page we designed for a client’s pay-per-click ad campaign in the data center business to give you some ideas:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

One of the biggest challenges we face when working with bloggers and within Astek is keeping the momentum of the blog going. If you were to look at our blog for the past month, you’d think nothing was going on at Astek, which couldn’t be farther from the truth!

As we get back in the saddle after vacations and various other last ditch efforts to soak up what’s left of the summer’s warmth, it’s a good time to offer some suggestions for keeping your (and our!) blog going.

1. Set a Realistic Schedule. Whether it’s once per week or once per month, set a schedule that you’ll be able to keep. We all get busy once the day starts going and the blog often falls to the bottom of the list. Try committing to writing your blog before you do ANYTHING else on every Tuesday, for example, and see if that helps.

2. KISS (Keep It Short & Simple). One of the things that seems to block a good article is being worried about making it perfect and long. By all means, you want to use proper spelling and grammar, but often the posts that get read the most are the shortest. Post a link and your immediate thoughts if you don’t have more time.

3. Remove Barriers to Publication. Even the act of logging into a website to update your blog can create an excuse not to publish. We recommend MacJournal or WinJournal to write posts quickly and easily from your computer. Programs like this make adding images simpler and save your login information so you can publish with one click.

4. Keep a List of Topics. Find a way to keep a list of all the interesting things you see on Facebook, the Web, or that people send you. I use MacJournal to queue up possible blog topics, but you could use Delicious.com or even a Word doc. If you keep a simple list you’ll never be stumped for a topic. As Andrew Crowe recently discovered, sometimes the list is right under your nose.

5. Be Honest. …with yourself and your audience. Don’t waste time back-filling spans of time without posts. It’s all ancient history by now anyway. Just focus on getting on top of your current schedule and don’t worry about the past.

Keeping a steady publication schedule is important for readers and search engines to know that you’re active. Let me know if these help and if you have some other tips that work for you, please leave a comment.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media