In a previous post on mobile web strategy, Joe discussed how to get mobile user data from your site’s analytics.  Most site’s analytics tell a much different story from reports as early as even 6 months ago.  The landscape has changed — and will continue to change as more business mobilize their content, developers push the boundaries of what is possible in the mobile web universe.  Takeaway here though is that users are already viewing yours site on their phones… it is not an uncertainty.

A big question for many businesses is “what is better — a mobile app or the mobile web?”  The answer, of course, is “it depends”… but for us we believe for most businesses the answer is “mobile web”.

In a recent article on the Mobile Commerce Daily called “Four reasons why the mobile Web is key to everything”, Bryce Marshall has summed it up beautifully. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Earlier this spring, comScore released data indicating smartphone users are accessing the Web and applications for content at about the same rate.

That is happening now.

Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends report, and projections for 2010, estimate that access to the Web via mobile devices will outpace access from traditional desktop/laptop devices sometime in 2013. This is the future of Web access from mobile devices.

This data paints an exciting picture of the present and future of mobile connectivity.

But how smartphone users can make those connections, and what steps marketers take to facilitate them with their brands is unclear.

Applications or the mobile Web browser – what is the best way to experience the best of smartphones, and the best of the Web?

Applications undoubtedly provide compelling and engaging experiences for consumers, which make applications compelling for marketers. But the mobile Web is key to everything mobile for consumers and marketers for four primary reasons.

Flexibility

The mobile Web, leveraged effectively, in coordination with a variety of online (SMS, email, mobile search and banner ads, 2D bar codes) and offline (print, point-of-sale, out-of-home) media, creates differentiated and nuanced Web experiences that both support and improve all aspects of the brand-consumer relationship.

Web-entry points and access to content can be customized, delivering contextually-correct experiences. This can be the difference between a more traditional “home page” experience and deep-linking a consumer to product-specific information.

Flexibility means supporting and responding to consumers’ varying preferences in how they use the mobile Web, whether they are completing an online purchase, or finding a store location to help finalize a purchase decision at retail.

Efficiency

A mobile-savvy developer can produce device-specific, user-friendly Web experiences for the majority of mobile Web users at a fraction of the time and resources it takes to create an application experience for the same users across devices.

Add into the cost the additional oversight and compliance processes baked into app stores, and what it takes to promote the application.

More time and resources go into applications. For most brands and campaigns, the marketing objectives can be met with the Web.

Intuitiveness

To borrow a line from Apple’s iPad commercials, “You already know how to use it.”

Consumers already know how the Web works, so nobody is reinventing the wheel. Today’s consumer is hard-wired to go to the Web for any reason, every reason, and for no reason at all.

The mobile Web simply taps into established consumer habits and expectations. You need information? If you have a browser and an Internet connection, the world is at your fingertips.

The stickiness of applications is appealing, there is no doubt. But accessing applications is a habit that users of some devices have learned, and it can be unlearned. The Web is not about to be unlearned.

Inevitability

The greatest shortcoming of the mobile Web today is not the devices and browsers, it is the sites, pages and the content itself. Jumping onto the Web from a smartphone is still a hit-or-miss proposition – regrettably mostly misses in terms of mobile usability.

But top consumer portals and brands already understand that the traditional heavy, deep, flashy Web sites can be substituted with quick, accessible, bite-size Web experiences through social media and mobile-optimized Web experiences and with great success.

In the next 12-24 months, as more consumers go online via the phone, and mainstream brands adapt with mobile-friendly Web experiences, consumer adoption of the mobile Web will explode.

Will applications be dead in two years? No. Applications deliver fantastic user experiences.

When developed smartly, they can be mind-blowing in terms of elegance, simplicity, usability, and engagement.

Applications are the whispers of an exciting future world where everything is small and easy.

But it is clear that the stickiness applications have in the minds of consumers and marketers alike is manufactured (smartly).

We have been trained to abandon hard-wired habits for learned ones, but only temporarily. The mobile Web, for everything it will deliver in the next 12-24 and months and beyond, is the key to everything mobile.

Bryce Marshall is director of strategic services at Knotice, Akron, OH. Reach him at bmarshall@knotice.com.

• Should my company build a mobile site?
• Are many people using smart phones to conduct online business?
• Are my customers using their phones to view my site?

Well, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed on your web site to help you figure out how your visitors are using your site. If so, I we can help you answer the above questions and more. If you don’t have it installed, you should consider it. It’s free and gives you a lot of very useful information. If you’d like help or advice about getting Google Analytics or another web metrics package installed, give us a shout and we can help.

Back to the topic at hand, up until a few months ago, isolating mobile visits in a Google Analytics report was a bit trickier. However, about six months ago (at the end of 2009) the Google folks rolled out a new set of reports dedicated to tracking mobile visitors to your site. I’ll show you how to run those reports and, more importantly, what you should be looking for.

Let’s get started:

1. Step 1: Login to your Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/) with your Google account user name and password. After logging in, you should be on the “dashboard” screen of your web site.
2. Step 2: In the upper right area of the dashboard you’ll see a date range, and to the right of the ending date, you’ll see a small arrow pointing down, click on that arrow and you can change the date range.
3. Step 3: Select a start date of 01/01/2010; an end date of the most recent Saturday and click the “apply” button. You should now have a date range from the beginning of this year through the most recent full week. This should provide us with enough data to help us answer our original questions above.
   

   Select a timeframe of at least five or six months, that will give you a decent trend for growth.

4. Step 4: Immediately below the date range, you can choose whether you want to graph by daily, weekly or monthly segments; select “weekly” to give us the best view of the data for trending. (If you’re reading the blog post some time in 2011 or beyond, you can select “monthly” if you prefer.)
5. Step 5: Now, let’s navigate to the Mobile report. In the upper left corner of the dashboard, you’ll see the main navigation. Click on the “Visitors” link to expand a list of all available visitor reports.
6. Step 6: There should be a link near the bottom of the choices called “Mobile”. Click on that link and you get two sub-reports, click on the one that says “Mobile Devices”.
7. Step 7: This is our report.

This chart shows a 3x increase in mobile visits since the beginning of the year.

What are we looking for?

• Growth – Look at the trend line (chart above) to see how rapidly your audience is adopting mobile technology into their web-viewing habits.
• Percentage of Overall Site Traffic – Growth is great, but if you are experiencing 4x growth by going from one mobile visitor a month to four, you can probably put mobile initiatives behind other site needs.
• Mobile Visitor Activities – Look at your bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site, etc. If these are lower than your site average, it could mean that mobile users don’t fing your site to be as usable on a phone as on a desk top. If you do decide to build a mobile site, use these numbers as a before-and-after benchmark.

Before making any key changes to your web site, look at your analytics. Nine times out of 10, the data is there to help you make the best decision possible.

If you are jumping into web design today or tomorrow you are lucky because you get to skip what we like to call the “creative-period-that-must-not-be-named.” Not many years ago (time sure flies) most designers were limited to 256 (not pretty) colors – far fewer than your handy-dandy Pantone book. It was a painful time of burning retinas and handcuffed creativity.

the infamous 256 color palette

Fast forward a decade – great monitors are cheap and have beautiful displays, browsers are much more advanced and flexible, there are powerful web editing tools and the push for breaking creative barriers online continues on a daily basis.

There has never been a more exciting time, with more valuable resources for technical documentation and creative inspiration than right now. Today is a new day to expand your mind, unleash your creativity and say “Hello, World!”

There is not such limitations in your print world, we know. The web is definitely more restrictive on many levels and color is one of them, but once you figure out what works you’ll see that there’s a lot of room to flex your RGBiceps. Besides, we think that when posed with restrictions, designers are challenged to really think of ways to push their designs further.

The Skinny.

The basic difference between color for print and web (as you might already know) is that print uses CMYK colors, or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Any color that you see in a print piece will be a combination of all or some of these 4 colors. The web uses RGB, which stands for “Red, Green and Blue”. If you were to create a design in Photoshop with the color settings on CMYK, and then changed it to RGB when you got done, you would notice a slight difference in color. Since most users don’t go through this exercise, the difference will not be perceptible to them − unless they find a print version of the same design to hold up against the screen, which is slightly lame.

The right use of colors can add a lot of value to your design, and help kick it up a notch. There’s no magic formula and no silver bullet, but with a little observation and common sense you will be in good shape. Of course, our tips will probably be massively helpful! Here is a quick breakdown of some things to remember:

On The Big Screen.

We don’t expect this to create any big “a-ha” moments, but it is important to remember that this means the colors you choose and use could potentially look different for every user. Each monitor types, brightness level, contrast setting, and even angle at which you view the website could cause a shift your website’s colors. Even some computers using dual monitors show slightly different variation between shared screens – yes, they use the same computer and same video card AND same settings, but still render slightly different. And while it’s nice to dream of telling people how exactly to configure their monitors so they can have the color experience you want them to, this is clearly not a feasible option.

So this is good and bad news. Bad news is that there is nothing you can do about it so users will see you site slightly different. Good news is that most people do not view your website on multiple monitors at the same time so the variations are not very apparent and usually unnoticeable.

Don’t blind your user.

With print you have all kinds of selections between matte and shiny colors, paper types and textures. Online, not so much.

We have had many clients hand us a color palette that looks fine in small quantities but when plastered into the background of a website, or even used for typographical components just explodes off the page (and not in a good way). Again, color will vary slightly between monitors so make sure that even if you are designing on “Way Back Wednesday” you leave the neon pinks, greens and other very bright colors to smaller components of your site.

We have found that earthy/matte colors work very well and provide a solid foundation for any website. If you think it is too bright, just dial it back a little bit and see if that helps.

Color can inform functionality.

Unlike the world of print, changes in color as the user travels through your website can be informative. Some simple examples:

1. Using different colors for hyperlinks vs. normal text will help the user identify which words are “clickable”, and will help the eye scroll through the text faster to pick out the operative words.
2. Changing the “hover” (when your mouse is hovered on something) state of an item’s color can inform the user they are in the hot zone and if they click something will happen.
3. Highlighting in the navigation can inform the user of the section, sub section, etc where they are in the site to give them some sort of orientation in your site’s architecture.
4. Colors can also help enhance headings and help to call attention to anything you want to highlight on a web page.
5. Besides these practical reasons, color by way of graphics, page header/footer images, buttons etc. will definitely help make your site look more attractive, and draw the attention of the user to those elements you need to POP!

When you are done choosing the colors for your site, play the “ordinary user” and evaluate your color choices for readability and visual appeal. You don’t want to go overboard, and use a different color for every element. In this regard, a web page behaves almost like a print piece in that the information has to be legible and easy to follow, and color is only used to enhance and accent the design.

We would recommend the following:

1. Keep all text flowing in the same color and make sure that it stands out well against the background
2. Use one consistent color across the site for all hyperlinks
3. Use color and font size variations to differentiate between hierarchical headings
4. Choosing different shades within the same color family is an easy and effective way to tie the look of the site together while still achieving the usability you want

HELPFUL COLOR HINT:

Make sure you are in RGB mode.

Before you get started designing in your design program of choice, make sure you are in RGB Mode. We prefer Adobe Photoshop for creating webpage layouts because it is a pixel based software, and since pixels are the active unit of measurement in web browsers, it makes translation a lot easier. Here’s how to make sure that you’re in the right color mode:

Open a new document in Photoshop, and when the dialog pops up, you will see an option for color mode in the left column. When you click the down arrow, it will show you Bitmap, Grayscale, RGB, CMYK and Lab Color. Select RGB and specify the dimensions of your webpage, and you should be good colorwise. Set the resolution at 72 pixels/inch or screen resolution. (We will discuss resolution in more detail in another article.)

Selecting RGB Mode in Adobe Photoshop CS4

If you insist on using Adobe Illustrator to lay out your page, do this:
Open a new document, set the units to pixels, specify the dimensions, and click ‘Advanced’. Under color mode, choose RGB, and set Raster effects to Screen (72 dpi) and click Ok.

Just to warn you, Illustrator is a vector-based application, and ideally works better for print pieces, and to create illustrations and graphics. Using Photoshop to lay out your web page design will be much easier for the long haul, trust us.

Selecting RGB in Adobe Illustrator CS4

Be Kule.

If you are generating a color palette or need to play with some web colors, check out our favorite online color matching tool.

http://kuler.adobe.com

Next Topic: Font and Type and All the Hype.

As a print designer (freelancer or part of a marketing team), your clients love your work. You want to keep as much control over the brand and identity materials you have worked so hard to create and sell to your audience.  Now your boss/client wants you to design their website. Maybe it’s a comprehensive overhaul or just time for a refresh – at the end of the day, it is time to make sure the (web) drapes match the (print) carpet, so to speak.

When a client asks you to design their web site, there are not many places to turn to get a quick-and-dirty introduction and resource of things to keep in mind for designing online. Additionally, building the design in a fashion that can then easily be handed off to a development team can cause additional headaches and potentially lead to excessive re-work, lost profits, and blown project schedules. Nobody wants that, right?

So let’s break it down.

User Environments

It is the age of green, and paper seems like a less-than-sensitive way to express ideas and creativity, and possibly not in the best interest of our tired environment. Yet, ask any print designer why the medium is so addictive and they will tell you that looking at your design on a screen is one thing, but seeing it take shape and become a tactile piece of expression is a whole different form of satisfaction.

It’s nice to be romantic and wish that print design will enjoy its pride of place forever. The reality is that almost everyone’s world is slowly floating into the web, and if that’s where the audience is, then designers will have to follow suit if they hope to do their clients justice. Even if this were not the case, we think it’s nice to be able to express your ideas via more than one medium, cuz’ it’s cool to be able to speak many languages.

While we aren’t the self-proclaimed torch-bearers for Web vs. Print, the one sphere in which the web has an undeniable advantage is the extent of its reach, not to mention the saving on printing and mailing charges in case you need a little convincing on why it might be time for you to get your fingers into designing for the web. Making a smooth transition from paper to screen can be challenging, but what’s life without a challenge? By tweaking your existing skills a little, you will literally open yourself up to a world of new possibilities and audiences.

The good thing is that in general, designers who began their careers with the print medium tend to have a solid understanding of effective layouts, typography and how design elements can play nicely with each other on a page. All of this knowledge can definitely be used in layouts for the web, albeit with some restraint. Think of it as having to color within the lines.

The other great thing about print design is consistent user experience. A book cover looks the same all over the world, no guest at a wedding feels less special because they received a different looking invitation, and signage relies on this same visual consistency to make branding impactful.

You may wonder – how different can designing for the web be? The site is going to be viewed on a computer screen, and all computers show pretty much the same thing, right? The answer sadly is, “no”.

Many things influence how a design layout translates into effective web design. The most important of these is the user environment. Starting with where in the world the user is, what speed his internet connection is, what browser (and version of that browser) the site is being viewed in, to what resolution your user’s computer screen is, can all affect the way your design looks and operates. Translated this means exponential variations in the way your site can be viewed and your user’s experience affected. Good times.

The latest screen resolution breakdown:

Most computer resolutions are now at 1024×768 or higher.  Here is the breakdown from last year according to www.W3Schools.com

There’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that unfortunately, there is no sure-fire way to predict that your design will hold its ground in every single user environment, but the good news is that there are steps and measure to make sure that for the most part, your site affords a consistent viewing experience to anyone who wants to use it – oh yay!

In our following articles, we’re going to try and expand on some of the parameters that affect the overall design and user experience of any site – color, fonts, web browser dos and don’ts etc. and give you some tips & tricks to get you started on your way to building an effective and reliable site. While we’d like to cover it all, we don’t want this blog to get boring so just shoot us an email with any questions you might have, and we will be happy to help you out!

A Browser By Any Other Name…Stinks!

An exciting part of the print process is being able to choose the size and shape of your design. You can even incorporate folding, cutouts and other cool things to make your piece unique. Any design on the web however, is restricted to the browser window, and dealing with this beast requires patience and diligence. Two things that scream “fun”! Not.

It would make sense to have all browsers programmed to read code the same way – which is exactly why this is not the case. Every browser – from IE to Firefox to Safari to Opera and even to Google’s new Chrome – reads code differently. For example, margin and padding settings do different things on IE and Firefox. Firefox (our current holy grail of browsers) usually reads these settings the way it is expected to, so this is a good standard to compare the other browsers against.

There’s no limit on the amount of artwork or images in a print piece. At the most, you’ll have a hard time emailing it to the printer, but there’s always yousendit.com to fix that. With websites though, image overload is frowned upon. Using heavy artwork and images slows down the site, and let’s face it – time is money, so you don’t want a heavy site costing you valuable traffic that could bring you good business.

Some versions of the most used browsers don’t handle transparency well. They like a certain amount of concealment. This comes into play with images that have rounded corners, or if you want to use a graphic that has a complex shape, but you don’t want it on a white background. There are various image formats like JPG, GIF and PNG that are compatible with web browsers, but since their relationship’s kinda complicated, we will devote a whole chapter to figure these guys out.

Because of the above issues, it is very important that the design is tested/viewed across multiple browsers to make sure it will look the same no matter what browser the site is being viewed in. You might need to put in “fixes” depending on the browser, to make sure that the end result looks the same.  It’s probably a good idea to start doing this right at the start, when you begin building the design framework of your site. Usually, testing with IE and Firefox should cover most glitches waiting to happen, but if your machine is equipped with other browsers in addition to these, go ahead and test on all.

The latest browser breakdown: According to www.w3schools.com the vast majority or users are still on IE and Firefox.

As you go along filling in the blanks, loading content and images, you will hit tiny speed-bumps with the way these elements render on different browsers, but not to worry, Google is standing by and it’s more than likely that someone else has had the same problem as you. If you can’t find a fix, you can always find a forum to complain on before trying a new route.

SO WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?

1. Get Your Browsers Locked and Loaded.
   Make sure you have a downloaded all of the latest versions of browsers for your testing arsenal.  Pick your favorite site and view them in each browser to see how things like forms, fonts, and layout vary.Here are some helpful links for downloading:
   • Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com
   • Opera: http://www.opera.com
   • Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ (Windows too!)
   • Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/
   • Internet Explorer (IE) v7 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/ie7/
   • Internet Explorer (IE) v8 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx
2. Pay attention to the “you-ser”.
   Remember, at the end of the day someone is going to have to use this site you are designing so make sure you pay attention to common placements web components like logos, navigations, calls-to-action, etc live.
   • How would you use the site you are designing?
   • Is it intuitive?
   • What kind of content will it showcase and in what order/heirarchy should that content be showcased?
3. Find inspiration.
   The best thing about the web is that if it can’t be done, people aren’t doing it, so you can usually rest easy knowing that if you have seen it on another site, a talented developer can usually make it work.  Find a group of sites you like and add them into your creative blender for inspiration.  You don’t have to like the whole site – take a search bar from one, a button design from another, and even find out which fonts look the best to you online.
4. Push the envelope – just a little bit more each time.
   At the end of the day, graphics on the web have to be some form of rectangle or square when cropped, so figure out clever ways to break outside of the box with curves, layers and textures.  As you design more and more sites you will start to get a feel for what is and isn’t possible and you can slowly take the web-cuffs off.

Next Topic: Color Me Tricky

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7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation

In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation does not only require a good website design but a lot more to build confidence, to grow sales and ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability.

In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.

Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation:

1. Respond to customers

Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.

2. Answer the negative comments humbly

Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there!

Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.

3. Create official online profiles

Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.

4. Report stolen material from you

It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.

5. Write blogs

Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website.

If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts, let say you write blog for “basic tips for web design”. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.

6. Optimize For Search Engines

Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.

7. Using the social media

Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:

- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks

You might have spend good time and money for your website design and building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.

About the Author: James Parker is a marketing specialist and IT consultant working in diverse domains of IT. He has also worked with some Web design and web development and Web design Firms. He can be approached at jamesparker.cdz@gmail.com.

When the Monkee-Boy team decided to kick off the official Monkee-Blog, one of our goals was to keep it as “noise free” as possible and hopefully break through the static. Our goal is to create an informative tool for our audience and provide educational, industry appropriate, tactical take-aways for our audience demonstrating how a blog for a business can help educate and inspire. No pressure, right?

As Founder and Creative Director here at Monkee-Boy, I can say that mission certainly raises the bar on how to gracefully approach the discussion of web design. Much of our day-to-day activities involve pulling stuff out of thin air and translating client requirements into business appropriate visuals while pushing Photoshop as far as possible to meet that delicate balance of “pop” and “interaction”.  So the challenge here is  breaking that process and complexity down into digestible chunks of web design nuggets (yummy!).

The other thing that has to be factored into any discussion of web design, and every discussion with clients when delivering comps for sure, is that “design is subjective”. Our collective approach here is to
not get into why I think “orange is making a comeback online” and that “gradients are your friends” but to provide a common demographic of print designers with nice takeaways to get up-to-speed in the world of web design.

So this is where the Web Design for Print Designers (WD4PD) series plugs in.

Our goal here is to provide the following:

1. Help you, the print designer, sleep better at night knowing you are not alone. (check!)
2. Help you extend your traditional services online and expand your business.
3. Help raise awareness into the biggest “gotchas”, educate you on why they are important keep in mind, and give you background information into why these problems/solutions are important so you explain to your clients why certain creative decisions were made throughout the design process.
4. Explain how design decisions hurt/help your client’s search engine rankings.
5. Working with developers and the overall best process (from our perspective) of designing sites and how to package them up for developers to start the coding process.
6. Take the subjectivity of design out of the equation and provide real world issues that need to be considered when working on web designs and pitching web design services.
7. Hopefully establish a relationship between you the print designer and Monkee-Boy to create mutually beneficial partnerships.

So, getting #1 above out the way, get some rest knowing that you are not along and we will be tackling lots of useful information over the next couple of months.  If you have any topics you would like us  include as part of the discussion, please send them to me (Hi, I’m Aaron) at aaron@monkee-boy.com.

Next subject: Unraveling the Web

Now, there was a graphic designer before his time! Every work he produced straddles the delicate line between artistic finesse and modern graphic appeal. His pieces could be viewed by some as too constrained or calculated, and not ‘free’ enough, but to me, it’s like his work is always getting ready to walk off the page, illustrations that have a mind of their own, and that will confuse your mind if you let them! The kind of command he had over perspective and visual proportion is absolutely stunning. Designers of our time are still inspired by him, and designers of generations to come will continue to be influenced by this maverick.

Just as I am in awe of artists of times past, I also spend a considerable amount of time looking at the work of current designers and illustrators for sparks of genius that compel me to try and push the envelope of my own work. On one of these random expeditions, I came across Yehrin Tong.  Going through her work, I found some pieces that were ‘Escheresque’ in their quality, but beautifully reinvented. Her repertoire doesn’t end with psychedelic pen-and-ink illustration. She has a number of pieces where she mixes line art with ‘realistic’ human portraits and creates visual collages that are obsessively detailed and a little eccentric.

For her complete portfolio, please visit www.yehrintong.com. If you’re looking to be inspired, I promise there will be no disappointment here.

A recent article entitled “How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media” offered some additional validation for concepts we’ve discussed here on The Right Click earlier – “Give It Time” “Dedicate Resources” “Define Some Goals” – but also has some interesting thoughts about social media policy development.

For companies large and small, exploring the brave new world of interactive social media can be daunting.  How should you react if someone says something unkind about your company?  How can you interject yourself into a conversation between two people about your company?  For these an other new frontiers it’s important to think through what you wish to convey about yourself, and then make sure everyone in your company understands and adheres to your vision.

Recently I saw a great example of how not to use social media.  On Yelp, a leading review site featuring “real reviews by real people”, a business owner reacted to negative comments with over-the-top angry and insulting responses.  He called the people who reviewed his business names, including using profanity, and generated a firestorm of response inside Yelp for his boorish reactions to what most felt were polite, if negative, comments about people’s experience at his place of business.  The ensuing community response was swift and sure – many people being pointed to his comments who otherwise may not have even seen them, most of them announcing their intent to not only never patronize his business but also warn others about what type of people work there, etc.

In another interesting phenomena of internet communities, some members started doing research into just who owned the business, and tried to ascertain what the exact relationship the person representing the business had.  It turned out he was listed as the “General Manager”, and the Owner’s contact information was rapidly disseminated.

I’m sure you can imagine the notes began flooding into the Owner’s inbox, all decrying the behavior of his General Manager.  Within two hours the Owner was posting apologies to the Yelp community, with assurances that all employees would be “retrained” in not only the proper etiquette of participation in online communities, but in customer service response to negative experiences at their place of business.  The Owner made inroads into undoing the damage caused by his employee, but it would have been much better to have conducted training before any of this took place.

The linked article above provides some starting points to developing some social media policies for your business.  It’s not as difficult as you imagine, most are common sense:

• Define what your company stands for and make sure all employees understand it.
• Make sure anyone with responsibility for posting to your website and social media outlets understands the importance of being polite and respectful, even when it seems most difficult.
• Honesty is the best policy – really.  If you think a complaint has merit, admit it and tell everyone what you’re going to do to prevent another occurrence.
• Be firm but fair.  Some people are just not going to be happy.  You can’t help that, but you can speak your mind and stay consistent.  Most customers appreciate consistency.

Remember, social media is a two-way street.  The best blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts all get people talking.  Monitor your outlets, look to see who’s talking about you.  Get involved in the discussions in a positive way, and don’t just send out marketing messages.  Let the audience know that you’re listening, and reacting, to their thoughts.

A new article today in USA Today discusses how social networking has made significant inroads into the business world.   What’s nice about this article is that they provide some specific, real-world results of the efforts, something often missing from discussions about effective use of social media tools in the business world.

For example, Intuit, maker of the popular Quickbooks software, launched a new small business site, incorporating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The result was that customers flocked to the site and shipments of their flagship product were up 57% year over year.

Papa John’s Pizza launched a Facebook-based marketing campaign and gained thousands of customers, and saw traffic on their website soar by over 250%.

Companies like Comcast and Lenovo are using Twitter to conduct elements of their customer support, and seeing a reduction in call center traffic.

It’s heartening to see some companies realize tangible benefits to their investments in social networking.  All too often you hear more about the ineffective use rather than successes.  Who cares how many Twitter followers you have if it doesn’t benefit your bottom line?  As more and more stories such as this one come out, we expect that more companies will start to evaluate social networking for their own purposes, and we are here to help.

There are the usual caveats, however, as you read stories about these companies’ successes:

• Social networking is not a replacement for other, more traditional marketing tools, but rather an additional tool to leverage.  In fact, the key to success is figuring out how to integrate between all your marketing tools to get the biggest return.
• It takes time to build an audience.  Most all of the successful practitioners have invested time and resources into making sure that their efforts will lead to measurable benefits.  You can’t use the “check box” mentality in this effort, namely just saying “Oh yeah, we have a Twitter account” but not really using it to any specific end.
• Some companies are not particularly suited for social networking.  Most obvious are any industry with tightly regulated information.  Allowing customers to freely post their thoughts could quickly devolve into an administrative or even legal nightmare in such industries.

The article closes with an important warning for those who choose to dismiss social networking in their business plans.  “Companies have no choice.  This is where their customers are going.”

This article in Smashing Magazine outlines some of the more common flaws with many of today’s corporate blogging efforts, and reinforces many of the concepts we stress to our clients when they ask us if they should be blogging, namely:

• Your blog isn’t a one way channel, it’s intent should be to initiate a dialog
• It takes time for a blog to generate readership and activity so you have to remain committed
• Get more than one person at your company engaged with your blog
• Allow comments and expect some criticism – be prepared for it!

Successful blogs, in fact, successful social media efforts in general, are all about engaging people with your business.  Don’t fall into the trap of using your social media tools as just more arrows in your traditional Marketing quiver, it’s a recipe for failure.