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

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.

Martha Stewart

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.

Self Publishing

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:

1. You are an Expert: Anyone offering a product or service is presumabely an expert in that field (if you aren’t find another field). This means that uneducated people can come to you for advice when trying to learn about the products offered in your field. Like Martha Stewart, you want to be the expert they turn to. Obviously you feel your product or service is the best (if not, find antother field), therefore you can push your product or service.
2. Low Cost: Outside of the initial set-up expenses, $5 per month is not a lot to invest in advertising. Outside of the low monthly cost, a little time is all that is required on your part.
3. SEO: Search Engine Optimization. There is really a very simple key to getting noticed on the web: generate a lot of relevant content. Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all make an attempt to give the most relevant information to their users, by generating a lot of content you increase the chances of your website being the most relevant one. If Google is shooting for relevant information, you can make yourself the broad side of a barn.

Other Media

Print periodicals, while the first, were not the last to be adapted to the Internet. Many forms of media have an online equivalent:

Think Outside the flock,
The Plaid Sheep

This move will not entail any disruption of our hosting services, though it will mean some changes to the way we serve you.

Support

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.

New Servers

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:

• with direct control over the services we offer we will be better able to manage these services as well as offer a greater range of services
• your Canadian web page will be identified as being hosted in Canada, better communicating your location with Search Engines
• our new Control Panel will enable you control of many of the services we offer; including creating new email addresses, and maintaining mailing lists, and managing service requests.⁽¹⁾

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

1. Not available to financing customers

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.

Affiliate Programs

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.

Direct Spots

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

• Calgary Sun: maintained a staff dedicated to selling advertisements at the advent of the Internet, and has a regional demographic
• Survival Blog: a small, but dedicated user base that fits into a very niche demographic that ensures advertising, while expensive, is highly effective
• Facebook: has a very large user base, the personal information stored on a facebook page allows advertisers to track and target various demographics, its size allows it to keep cost down

Syndicated Services

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.

Conclusion

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

the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

An exciting video for sure, but may overstate the point a little.

I have been thinking about a conversation I had with a client yesterday, and after watching the video, I think I have put my finger on something that I was trying to get across but had not quite nailed.

I have been using the Internet for a very long time. One trend I have noticed is for people to get very excited about the latest tools available online. I strongly believe that these are fads.

In the early 1970s, a tool was created on the Internet called “finger”. If you are wondering what finger was, look at Facebook (or read a message from the creator). I remember using Finger avidly in 1996 but haven’t heard a thing since. As I understand it the creator stopped using it in the late 1990s). I raise this example to point out that there are fads on the Internet; tools come and go. That does not mean that “Social Media” is a fad trend (its been around since the seventies), mearly that it is not a revolution, so much as an evolution of the existing technology.

Effective marketing is done through communicating with your target audience. There are two keys to doing this successfully: identifying your target audience, and identifying how your target audience is already communicating. In the past, newspaper, and magazines have been effective means of advertising with an audience because the audience is clearly identifiable, as well as offering you a means to communicate to the audience in a means they are already using. The same applies for radio, television, and all forms of internet communication.

What this video is pointing out is not a revolution in the use of the internet, but the continuing evolution of the Internet. What we are seeing is not a revolution of social media, but a continuing trend for existing communications to transition to cheaper and more convenient mechanisms.

Think outside the flock,

The Plaid Sheep

The Just Say Y.E.S. Program offers a selection of group based workshops to develop and enhance employability skills, and work experience in active workplaces suited to assist youth in their career goals.

Just Say YES - First Nations, Metis & Inuit - A Program for Youth 17 - 30

Over two weeks the students moved from a basic introduction in computer usage, to a creating documents using the core Microsoft Office Suite of products: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. While Microsoft Office was the tool of the lessons, Plaid Sheep focused on core computer skills in order to ensure the students are able to apply their knowledge in whatever way their careers may take them.

The course was be broken into 5 sections:

• General Computing
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Power Point
• Alternate tools and Resources

Throughout the course we used a fictitious company to demonstrate the creation of common business requirements. This created scenarios that demonstrate common business uses for Office Suite tools and the specific skills required to meet those uses; also having the side benefit of exposing students to common business terminology and documents that they will be exposed to in the workforce. Based on the student demographic (youth aged 18 – 25), the fictitious company chosen was a “Designer Clothing Company” specializing in “Designer Socks”. Each student was expected to create documents throughout the course that could be used by the company to communicate with the it’s customers and employees.

Students completed several projects and class activities over the course of the two weeks:

1. Corporate Logo using Microsoft Word’s Drawing tools and Word Art
2. Sales Letter using Microsoft Word
3. Time Sheet using Excel
4. Invoice using Excel
5. Trade Show Presentation using PowerPoint

On top of Microsoft Suite of tools, attention was paid to alternate and cost effective resources, such as Google Docs and OpenOffice. We hope students find these tools empowering, allowing them access to sophisticated software regardless of cost or connectivity.

Plaid Sheep would like to thank all students for their hard work through the course of the two weeks. We hope you enjoyed learning as much as we enjoyed teaching. Congratulations to all the graduates of the program, we wish you good luck and hope you continue to expand on everything you have learned.

The Plaid Sheep

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 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

A few years ago I was asked to teach a drawing class to upper elementary school kids. Almost all these kids told me they couldn’t draw. I realized that these kids, like most adults, were unhappy with the outcome of their drawings that they eventually stopped trying. I set to work to change this attitude one small step at a time.

My best resources for this were:

• Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes
• The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
• Draw Squad by Mark Kistler

At the end of the eight week session only one of my 42 students had not improved. The others were proud and amazed at their success. Happy kids, happy teacher.

Drawing is not always about talent or lack of it. It, like most things, is about practice, practice, practice.

PS The Plaid Sheep

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.