PlaidSheep is now finished its move to Nova Scotia (sort of). Naturally, we are very busy with catching up on some of our backlog, and the office space isn’t set up quite the way we would like it to be, but we have computers, desks and chairs (for the most part).
We are pleased to report, that this move did not entail any loss of service to any of our application hosting.
The PlaidSheep
This article is part of an ongoing series regarding Social Media, and its implications to advertising and marketing effots. This is Part 3, please read Part 1: What is Social Media, and Part 2: Spot Advertising, if you missed them.
Social Media is not a Revolution. Social Media is an evolution of communications technology. In our last article, we discussed Spot Advertisements, such as radio, newspaper, and television, and their modern Internet equivalent. Renting communication space from a party that is attracting attention, and drawing an audience. While this can be effective, another option is to become the media that is attracting attention. Being the media offers the advantage of not only giving you a free place to advertise, it allows you to influence what the audience values.
Controlling the media has been an important factor in controlling people throughout history. That is one of the reasons, freedom of the press is such a highly valued virtue; and why totalitarian states take measures to control what people may publish. There is a reason that powerful individuals tend to be associated with the press. Lenin popularised his revolution overthrowing the Russian Tzar through self-published magazines and leaflets. In recent memory, one only need to look at the power held by Conrad Black to see the relationship between power and media.
Being the media allows you the ability to influence people’s wants. Martha Stewart achieved this brilliantly.
Ms. Stewart hosted a television show, that encouraged people to live their life a particular way. For 1 hour a week, people tuned in to learn how they could impress their neighbours. What Martha was really doing, was defining what goals needed to be achieved to impress neighbours. It did not matter whether these actions were important prior to her stating it; with the size of her audience, once the expert had stated it, it was believed by thousands of people across North America.
If you didn’t catch what Martha had said, or needed more detailed instructions, buy her magazine. Did you like the tools she used to create those displays? You can buy them from her product line.
Her television program and magazine were advertisements for the Martha line of products. She generated her own demand.
In the past, there was a significant expense associated with publishing, with a high probability of not recuperating those costs. Paper, ink, writing, printing, distribution, sales: all of these things are a major expense. This high cost of entry has ensured that very few groups are able to enter the market, and therby influence the audience.
As with all things communication, the Internet has changed the expense of publishing.
For the low monthly expense of web hosting ($5/month at Plaid Sheep) we are able to publish a nearly infinite amount of information. The cost of entry has traditionally been in the specialised knowledge of arranging text for the web. This has been an ongoing issue since the advent of the Internet: starting with gopher, archie and then the World Wide Web.
The advent of WWW technology changed everything, it offered a way to deliver rich content (images, text, and video) to everyone, what it lacked was the ability to for the average person to publish. It still required specialized knowledge (HTML). Over the years developers have written several tools that allow individuals to create online content with little knowledge of what is happening in the background.
Blogging is a simple mechanism to generate an online periodical. Blogs originally began as Web based applications that allowed users to publish information on a periodic basis (aka “a periodical”). Using this technology any individual with an opinion on any subject can publish information online for the entire any internet user. This offers product and service vendors a distinct advantage:
Print periodicals, while the first, were not the last to be adapted to the Internet. Many forms of media have an online equivalent:
| Original | Internet | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Magazine | Blog | Knock Off Wood: a successful online magazine that teaches people how to do simple woodworking projects based on big brand name products |
| Radio | Podcast | Free Talk Live: started as an online broadcast, but has syndicated its shows to several radio stations across the United States |
| Television | Vlog | Great Depression Cooking:An elderly lady has become an Internet sensation with her online cooking show |
| Book | Website | Subversion Manual: the manual for a popular software development tool. Written by the developers of the software, the online version encourages people to buy the handy hard-copy (which they get a cut of) |
Think Outside the flock,
The Plaid Sheep
PlaidSheep is excited to announce that over the course of June 2010, we will begin moving our offices to Nova Scotia.
This move will not entail any disruption of our hosting services, though it will mean some changes to the way we serve you.
Rather than involve our customers in the headaches associated with moving, we will not be taking on new work during the month of June. PlaidSheep will continue be available for support regarding issues that our customers may experience during that period.
PlaidSheep is changing over to new servers. Over the next few months, we are planning on migrating existing customers to our new servers. For us this means greater control over the backup and maintenance procedures, allowing us to serve you better.
For the most part, our customers should notice no change in service, though going forward this will offer you direct benefits:
PlaidSheep will be contacting customers to schedule migration times, and to explain what these changes will entail for email and web based services.
PlaidSheep continues to seek new and more efficient ways to serve our customers and would like to thank our customers for thinking outside the flock.
The PlaidSheep
This article is part of an ongoing series regarding Social Media, and its implications to advertising and marketing effots. This is Part 2, please read Part 1: What is Social Media if you missed it.
Advertising, in its myriad of forms, has always had a single objective: get your message in front of people who you want to influence. This has taken on many forms over the years: billboards, hand-bills, magazine and newspaper spots, or television and radio spots. All of these mediums of advertising have been effective and the introduction of new media (television supplanting radio) has caused a shake up in the old industry. The advent of the Internet and, more specifically, websites is no different.
The key to the type of advertising being discussed is that someone has created some content that people are finding interesting to them; this may take the form of newspaper articles people read, television programs people watch, or events people attend. In all cases, an audience has been created that is willing being communicated to and can be defined in demographic terms. In all these cases the producer of the content has the opportunity to bring his audience together with people offering services that may be of interest to them. This is often sold as Spot Advertisements. Spot advertisements have always needed to take on forms approriate to the medium: video on television, audio on radio, posters and banners at events, and print for newspaper and magazines.
The Internet has created several new medium for the transfer of information, the most commonly used to date being web pages. These have supplanted several forms of prior entertainment: print periodicals have moved to blogs, books have moved to webpages, video has moved to youtube, radio has moved to podcasts. What is important to note, is not how these items have moved, but that these new mediums are generating content that people find of interest, and in which advertisements can be placed.
There are several ways to approach these various media for advertising.
If your product or service is sufficiently interesting to the public, and simple enough to sell, it is possible to offer an enticement to others to sell the product for you. This takes the form of a sales commission. This is a highly technical and expensive venture as it requires tracking all of the individuals selling the product or service, tracking their sales, paying them out, and maintaining confidence in your system. Having said all of this, this can be one of the most cost-effective mechanisms as you only pay out on a confirmed sale.
Probably the best example of an effective affiliate program is Amazon. Often when reading websites, you will see an Amazon link to a product being discussed. These links carry a special code in them that tells Amazon where you came from. If you purchase a product from Amazon, after following one of these links, often the owner of the website will get a small percentage of commission off your purchase. Amazon only pays out in the case of a sale, reducing their cost, and motivating an army of thousands of individuals to come up with unique and interesting ways of marketing Amazon’s products.
It is worth considering what a large technical system this is, and that there are large expenses in maintaining an affiliate program. These are fixed costs, meaning that the cost is easily spread across the volume of people in it, but that means volume is the key, and the program itself must be advertised.The entry costs are high, making this a non-viable option for most companies.
Originally, internet websites used the same mechanism of selling advertisments as anyone else: you paid for a specific spot, of a specific size, on a specific page. This changed overtime to spots on webpages that had different advertisments each time the page loaded, but the fundamental was the same: you contacted the website owner directly and asked what it would cost to have your advertisment placed on their content.
This technique shifts the expenses to the publisher. They must maintain a list of all their advertisers, they must find advertisers willing to pay for advertising, and they must maintain their content in such a fashion so as to ensure a particular demographic that their advertisers are interested in.
This form of advertising does mean control for the advertiser, in that they can see the content that the advertisement is being placed on, but the added expense of maintenance to the publisher gets passed on to the advertiser in the form of higher fees. Further, there is difficulty finding these sites; of all the millions of websites, which ones are relevant to your advertising campaign, this is a hidden expense to the advertiser.
Several websites maintain this form of advertising
There is a middle ground between Direct and Affiliate, the Syndicated Service. Several providers perceived a need to reduce the expense to both advertisers and publishers, while allowing advertisers a broad spread of relevant websites, and publishers the ability to focus on their content rather than their advertisers.
Advertisers register and pay the service to have their advertisment published on the internet to a target audience. Publishers register their site with the service to display ads relevant to their target audience. The Syndication Service plays middle man, determining which advertisements match with which content in the most effective manner. To keep things honest, this is often handled on a “Pay-Per-Click” (PPC) basis, meaning that the advertiser does not have to pay unless the advertisment is clicked on, and the publisher only receives revenue from their affiliate advertising link. Since the service deals in large volume, they are able to maintain a listing of revenue and expenses for both parties, for a very small overhead.
Syndication services offer the best generic advertising solution as they require less investment (both in time and money) while offer the broadest range of advertising opportunities.
All three of these forms can be effective, depending on your budget, time requirements, and advertising objectives. In the end the objective of advertising has not changed in a thousand years: get your message in front of your target demographic.
Think Outside the Flock,
The Plaid Sheep
Logos have been around a long time. Whether you call them crests, seals, or marks; logos played an important role in the identification of a business before literacy was common.
Coat of Arms of England
One of the best logos I have ever seen is also one of the simplest. It is the first registeredtrademark in Britian, and is still in use to this day: it is Bass Brewery’s red triangle.
The simplicity of this logo is its strength. This crest can be branded on a wooden cask; painted on a sign; stamped on a document; or used as the icon in a software application (look a their website’s icon in the tab of your browser).
Is your logo timeless?
Think outside the Flock,
The Plaid Sheep.
The emotional impact of a good slogan is undeniable…it can make or break your image. But what goes into coming up with a great slogan that represents your product or service?
The City of Calgary has recently come under fire for already spending over $10,000 of tax payers money to come up with a new and improved slogan. Now, Calgary’s present slogan is “Heart of the New West”, which still conjures up images of cows and cowboys; probably a little narrow for a city vying for a bigger share of the cosmopolitan pie. Do they need a new slogan? Well that’s certainly up for debate. Is $10,000 a lot of money for a large organization to spend on part its branding? Probably not.
Large organizations have large infrastructure, everything from pens to letterhead to buses need to be rebranded and redesigned. The expense in altering all that equipment, and all those images is huge. When cities brand themselves a lot of people are affected and a lot of people need to be informed. Ensuring that people receive the intended message is important. Ensuring there are no unintentional gaffs is critical. To ensure that all of this goes smoothly armies of consultants, focus groups, statisticians, psychologists, and designers will be employed. Getting it right the first time is absolutely necessary.
The Province of Alberta has just gone through the rebranding process. The old slogan “Alberta Advantage” has been replaced by “Freedom to Create. Spirit to Achieve.”, at a cost to Alberta tax payers of $25,000,000. No that is not a typo. The new slogan, while giving you the warm fuzzies, is difficult to recall. I like the slogan, I hear it on the radio almost every day, but I still had to look it up before writing this. Hopefully, the $10,000 that the city of Calgary has invested so far will produce a memorable slogan, boost Calgary’s self esteem and be money well spent for the future of the province.
Having said all that, dropping a couple of million on marketing is far out of reach of the average business, but it does demonstrate the importance of putting proper thought into your image… your brand.
Think outside the Flock... The Plaid Sheep
Design in print. Design on screen. The problem arising in the early draft sessions is the customer gets distracted by the actual printed words and becomes unable to separate them from the design.
One of my favourite resources is http://www.lipsum.com/. It is a generator of Lorem Ipsum dummy text. I use this generator in the early stages of all my mock ups. You are able to generate a user defined number of paragraphs, words, bytes or even lists to keep the eyes and attention of your clients on your layout and design.
PS You may want to give your clients the heads up on the dummy text otherwise you may get panicked messages about everything being written in Latin! Been there…done that. ..The Plaid Sheep.
Do you remember playing the game? This game was where there was a tray or table with a number of random items placed on it. You got to look at the items for a number of seconds. The items were then covered up and you had to remember what was on the tray. Of course, the more items placed on the tray; the more difficult it got to remember.
Well here’s a twist…what does your customer see when he tries to recall your logo? Can he sketch it out to be recognizable? Or are there way too many elements placed on your tray?
Take a moment to sketch out (from memory) the logos from companies like Macdonald’s, Shell, Nike, Apple and IBM. You may not get it exactly right but you’ll be close enough. This is what your company logo should be aiming for.
Here is an interesting piece from monochrom. They went out and asked people to draw 12 logos from memory.
Apple Logo Drawings
On David Potsiadlo’s blog SkipVision you can find a great piece about sports teams and their logos. It’s interesting to see some of them go back to a simple shapes and figures.
PS Can you draw the Plaid Sheep from memory?