We  designed and developed a robust new site built on the WordPress platform, making on-going site maintenance a breeze. We also leveraged third-party tools including Flickr and Goodsearch helping to extend the reach of the foundation. Most importantly, the foundation is fully funded by the generous donations of the local community so it was crucial that the new site be equipped to accept donations online, for which we leveraged PayPal. Incredibly easy to use (and easy to implement on site from a programming perspective), PayPal is the clear front runner in a sea of third party online payment tools – it even flexes its good karma muscle by offering a special low rate for non-profits. And you don’t even need a PayPal account to donate. How easy is that?

Click here to check out the new site, and don’t be afraid to flex your good karma muscle for this great cause.

This week we launched a new,  integrated winter campaign for Vibram whose high-performance soles can be found on the world’s best ski and snowboard boot brands.  At the center of the campaign is the Vibram “Grip Your World Giveaway” sweepstakes - a 10-week co-promotion that we conceived and developed in partnership with Jackson Hole Mountain Resort to help drive email acquisition.  Grand Prize is a 5 day ski and stay vacation to Jackson Hole including airfare, weekly prize giveaways include top-of-the-line ski/snowboard boots with Vibram soles and Vibram Five Fingers. 

The sweepstakes runs through December 10th and is being promoted in the United States and Europe via rich media banners, Twitter, Facebook, digital PR outreach and multi-wave email.  

After just one week, sign-ups have already exceeded the goal for the entire promotion proving once again the power of a great offer and engaged brand following.  Enter for your chance to win at gripyourworld.com.

Only one criticism - why make this great content so hard to find from the main ecomagination site?

http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid

The perfect example of a sticky idea?

Conjunction Junction, what’s your ________?
Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your ________?
I’m just a bill. Yes I’m only a bill, and I’m sitting here on ________?

If you’re like me, a child who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons during the 70s and 80s, it’s a good bet that you had no trouble filling in the blanks. That’s right, I’m talking about that cultural phenomenon known as Schoolhouse Rock! — the series of educational, animated, musical shorts that aired from 1973 to 1986 and helped introduce a generation of kids to grammar, multiplication, science, and American history three minutes at a time.

I recently picked up the Schoolhouse Rock! retrospective DVD for my five year old and we got hooked into watching all 46 lessons. Beyond being hit by a nostalgic blast from the past, I was struck by how, after all these years, I instantly remembered all the songs and was able to sing along. But what really blew me away was the shows effect on my son. He was completely riveted and now, after watching just a couple of times, he walks around singing his times tables, telling everyone how the nervous system works, and reciting the preamble to the Constitution.

Could Schoolhouse Rock! be the quintessential example of what Dan and Chip Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick as a “Sticky Idea”? It certainly seems to successfully hit on all of the principles — the ditties do a great job of grabbing your attention, simplifying complex concepts, making dry subjects unexpectedly entertaining, using analogies to make the abstract more concrete, and making strong use of stories. The songs are exceptionally catchy and communicate information effortlessly.

In a profession in which we’re constantly striving to break through the clutter and have our messages understood and remembered, maybe there’s yet another lesson we can learn from Schoolhouse Rock! – How to make our own messages stick.

Take a trip down memory lane…

“Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.”

There have been some emerging signs of this attitude for a while, and we’re seeing more and more of it now that social media is at the forefront of everyone’s consciousness…

“We just need to come up with a YouTube video that is cheap to produce and will go viral to millions”

“With some quick-hit SEO, we should be able to shoot right to the top of the listings and instantly get more traffic”

“With Facebook and Twitter, we can do most of our marketing for free!”

While it can be easy to get caught up in all the hype, when intellectually honest with ourselves, we become fully aware of the flaws in this thinking.

Sure there are examples of viral videos that have caught lightning in a bottle, but it’s extremely rare and even less predictable. While SEO can make a big impact, doing it right requires a real, sustained commitment to long-term content creation and link building.  And, while social media is profoundly changing the way we can dialogue and build relationships with customers, the time commitment, thoughtfulness, and organizational changes it requires to deliver real value and keep the dialogue alive makes it anything but “free”.

With emerging media, as with anything else, there are no guarantees and success usually comes from smart planning, creativity, hard work and perseverance.

We shouldn’t lose sight of that which makes the foundation for long-term marketing success: a relevant, credible and ownable positioning; the ability to really connect with your target; and a smart, well-executed program of integrated tactics (including but not limited to social & emerging media).

It’s not the number of times your video has been viewed on YouTube, where you rank on the SERPs, or how many followers you have.  Real marketing success is defined by answers to questions such as: Are we increasing qualified leads and sales?  Is there greater awareness and preference for our brand? Are we building customer relationships that will lead to greater loyalty and lifetime value?

Additionally, while analytics has given us the power to measure results real time, it has also made us more impatient.  In our quest for instant ROI, sometimes we can be too quick to abandon a campaign when, if we would just allow a little more time for an idea to take hold or put in a little more work to test/optimization, we might find that we really have a winner.

We should try to remember that many overnight sensations took years to create. Sure, lightning can strike and when it does we need to be prepared to capitalize, but for most of us a pragmatic, smart, disciplined, integrated marketing approach that combines solid blocking and tackling AND the occasional Hail Mary (not ONLY Hail Marys) gives a much better chance of long-term success.  Achieving it requires hard work and commitment, smarts and hustle. Because, no matter what the tactics, there really are no shortcuts.

Bill Gates was a young, reckless, Harvard dropout in 1977. Just the type of criminal mastermind who'd conjur up IE6.

Want to have some fun with your Web Developer friends? The next time you’re chatting with them,  ask for their opinion of IE6. They might smirk a bit and maybe do a little fake nausea routine. Then as your query sinks in, they may exhibit some genuine exasperation as they explain to you the myriad hoops that must be jumped through to get a modern website to work reasonably well in an old, buggy browser.   You see, Internet Explorer 6 - Microsoft’s nearly 8 year old, bug-ridden browser  - is bad news.

All browsers have bugs, but IE6 has lots of them.  There are workarounds to most of them, but these workarounds invariably lead to compromises. For example, unlike all “modern browsers”, IE6 does not support transparent PNG images. There is a well known hack which lets you achieve the desired support of transparent PNGs in IE6, but this hack can lead to other layout problems, and is essentially incompatible with some other modern techniques, like using image sprites. The result of all this hacking? Compromises in the site design as well as the cleanliness of the code.

The complexities of a modern web application are getting harder and harder to accurately replicate in IE6. More importantly, there is a significant amount of project time spent resolving IE6 issues, and there are some techniques that just don’t work. Most websites use conditional statements to test if the site is being viewed in IE6, and include a seperate stylesheet or javascript file if so. This can mask some of the buggy behavior, but the user experience for someone using IE6 will be different than someone using virtually any other browser.

So, why are so many people still using IE6 in 2009? Why is this still a problem? For starters, IE6 shipped with the extremely popular and well distributed Windows XP operating system in 2001. After the enormous success and proliferation of XP, Microsoft didn’t release IE7 until 2006 - 5 years later. Given the predilection towards Windows networks in the corporate world, Windows XP and thus IE6 became firmly entrenched during this five year period, to the dismay of web developers everywhere.

According to some recent reports, IE6 is finally dying. In January of 2009, global usage of IE6 dipped below 20%, while Firefox, IE7 and IE8 all continued to gain market share at it’s expense.  Add the introduction of Google Chrome and Safari for Windows into the equation, and it looks like we could be witnessing the end of an era. As a matter of fact, according to ripie6.com, IE6 has already died.

While debugging a site recently in IE6, I checked our YouTube Channel, and noticed an ominous message from YouTube/Google: “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.” They have links to IE8, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome. A notice like this from YouTube to their extremely broad audience could produce a significant migration towards modern browsers.  37 Signals, the creators of the very popular Ruby on Rails framework, as well as the collaborative project management application Basecamp - phased out support for IE6 in October of 2008, citing that support for IE6 resulted in “slower progress, less progress and in some cases no progress.” Ouch.  Finally, there’s idroppedie6.com. It’s a place to officially declare ones independence from IE6 to the world. As of today, there are 473 sites and counting.  With all of this gathering momentum,  I’m expecting to see a growing list of large sites announce a “phasing out” of support for IE6 over the next year.

So, what should an IE6 user do?  Well,  Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome are all free to download, easy to use, and closely conform to established web standards.  If you haven’t tried any of them, give them a shot, and join the world of modern web browsers.

To their credit, Microsoft has also released two major, significant upgrades to IE6. If you’re still using IE6 and you’re weary of non-Microsoft browsers, for Pete’s sake, try IE7 or IE8!

In 2001, IE6 was the best way to browse the internet on a PC. But it’s now 2009.  Browsers have evolved. The web has evolved. IE6 is a relic from another time, and while we’ll continue to support IE6 for the rest of it’s (hopefully short) lifetime, it really is time to say…”buh bye”.

Booking Travel.
Without a doubt, Bing is great for booking travel.  It has a full reservation system, and allows users to compare multiple fares and even has a great price predictor tool.  New for a search engine? Yes, but hardly a new idea.  The reservation system and search results look and function remarkably like all the existing travel sites (it’s creepy how much it looks like Kayak.com).  The only apparent innovation here is that a search engine is serving you the results, so really Bing’s just saving you a click.

Local search.
Bing touts local search as one of its strengths and something it hopes to hang its hat on.  Bing does a great job of collecting reviews and data on each listing and rendering it in a smart way making the user’s browsing/decision making infinitely easier.  However, the tools are easily missed (I knew this functionality existed and was purposefully looking for it and it took me several minutes/searches to find).  Additionally, although Bing has all these great tools and aggregators, their local search falls short in plain old search results.  A search on “Somerville MA laundry mats” gave me 2 results in Somerville.  The first few pages of the local results included several results in surrounding towns, which are not-so-surrounding: Lowell, Natick, Groton, Wakefield, Mattapan, Framingham, Providence RI and Brookfield Wisconsin.  I did the same search on Google and pages 1-4 of the local search results were all Somerville, Cambridge and Medford - much more accurate and useful.

Shopping.
This seems to be where Bing really shines.  Microsoft offers registered users rebates on purchases (“Cashback” program), and like the local and travel searches, aggregates reviews, prices, discounts, etc. and displays them in a very straight-forward and smart matrix, making the decision process essentially brain-power free.  Great for the obsessive review-reading price-comparison shopper, may be overkill for the casual browser.

The net net on Decision Engine Tools: Bing is on to something, but it needs some refinement.  The tools execute their basic functions (quite well in the case of shopping), but are easily missed and a bit clunky to navigate around.  Their basic search engine results seem to be about par with no real innovation shining above Google and Yahoo, with an interface that’s a bit cluttered with all of the tools.

Paid Search.
Bing has made some cosmetic changes to the way the page is set up, which might prove to be advantageous for paid search advertisers: In a User Centric eye tracking report released June 8, 2009 42% of users looked Bing’s paid search ads as compared with 25% of Google users.

However, this is most likely due to the exploratory nature of using a new search tool – the Bing results page is a 3 column format with a number of new links/tools that a veteran Google/Yahoo user is not used to, and most are probably still exploring and figuring out what is where.  There is a lot to distract a user on Bing’s search results page - especially if you are running an ad in the shopping/travel/restaurant space there are a number of tools and other links that clutter the page and distract from your message, potentially decreasing the effectiveness of your ad.

Recommendation for Paid Search: Wait it out.  While Bing appears to be performing well in its first few weeks and has encouraging statistics for paid search advertisers, this is likely to change once the curiosity factor has worn off.  Bing definitely offers some great technology in the shopping/travel/restaurant categories, but I think this technology could potentially be distracting the user from the paid search ads.  Additionally, while Bing’s search results for categories outside the shopping/travel/restaurant space are adequate, there is nothing different or ground breaking about it that would potentially persuade a Google/Yahoo user to switch.  Advice to advertisers – keep your paid search ad budget in Google/Yahoo for now, and see where Bing’s search volume is 2-3 months from now after the curiosity has worn off and the multi-million $ ad campaign is no longer hitting searchers over the head daily.

P.S.   I’m curious to see how Bing’s unusual moniker will work itself into our internet vocabulary.  I would never say I “Binged” something; honestly it sounds a little dirty (also the spelling is unfortunate – not to be confused with binged, as in overindulgence).  I don’t know if it will ever be a household name if you can’t make it an appropriate verb (i.e. Tweeted, Friended, Poked, Googled).  Just saying.  Now go Bing yourself.  See? You were kind of offended by that.

While we’re still compiling our report, some interesting tid bits have emerged…

1. Wednesday was the most popular day for ski resorts to send eNewsletters (27% of all sent) followed by Thursday (26%).  This is not surprising as we know most people plan their ski weekend in the middle of the week.  What is a bit surprising is that Sunday ran a very close third at 24%.

2. The breakdown of eNewsletter subject line content was as follows: 42% general information or news focused, 34% deal focused, 22% weather focused, 2% other.

3. Ski resorts big and small are using social media tactics: 21 of 22 resorts have Facebook pages (avg. 913 fans). 19 of 22 are on Twitter (avg. 318 followers). 18 of 22 have YouTube channels (avg. 45 videos per channel). 12 of 22 have blogs. 8 of 22 resort web sites feature user generated content.

Our final eastern ski resort competitive report should be available in a few weeks, if you are interested in obtaining a copy please contact us.

Eight years ago, email marketing was just coming onto the scene. Man, if you didn’t have an email newsletter you were going to be left behind. And does anyone really still use RSS? Wasn’t RSS supposed to transform the way businesses connected with consumers? My favorite, The Blogosphere. Just 3-4 years ago, everyone HAD to have a blog, and today, few are left standing. All these burgeoning technologies have been hyped in the press as the next “killer marketing app”, and then something shinier always seems to come along and they fade from the limelight.

So, is Twitter just the current “big thing” that will eventually fall from stardom?In a word… yes. BUT, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a useful tool in your mix. Like all of these new technologies, Twitter has a certain buzz about it that reflects positively on your company. It tells your audience “Hey, no flies on us. We’re living in the 21^st century and we have knowledge and insight to share here”.  That reason alone could be enough to make it worth your while.  And there ARE people finding smart uses for Tweeting to their audiences. Celebrities and sports stars have used Twitter to help build their popularity by letting fan base feel a close connection with them. We have B2B clients who have used Twitter to help position themselves as indutry thought-leaders by sharing some of their knowledge through Tweeting.

In the end, like most technologies on the web, it’s all about the content. If you have something really compelling to share that other people value and want… then it will be successful no matter what technology you use to push it out. I mean, HDTV is a great new technology, but it doesn’t make a TV show successful. It’s been said before, but in this world content is king. Sorry folks, it’s up to YOU (and us) to make your marketing messages interesting and desirable. If you think you’re going to get customers interested in you by using Twitter to push out links to your company’s sell sheets, you may want to rethink it.