Category: ABT Culture

Let’s face it, the majority of us work a significant portion of our adult life.  Many companies today take the attitude of ‘be lucky you have a job’.  Not Atlantic BT.   Here, culture is a big part of our mission.  With a dedicated, employee-driven Culture Club to orchestrate various events throughout the year, we take “Work Hard, Play Hard” to a whole new level.  Not to mention most of us are just BIG KIDS.

Last Friday’s 2nd Annual Atlantic BT Summer Olympics proved, yet again, how teamwork, fun and a little crazy can go a long way in creating collaborative environments..not to mention, happier employees and a great place to work.

Check out the latest way we blew off some steam….

Thought synchronized swimming, gymnastics and shot put were the rage?
Try Sumo Wrestling, Corn Hole and Water Balloon Toss!

SUMO

Truth be told, I couldn’t wait to put these silly costumes on, 90 degree weather and all, since seeing others partake at a Durham Bulls Game.   Unsurprisingly, I was on the ground in 2 seconds flat against the undefeated Brandon “The BullDog” Ambrose.    But I wasn’t alone!  Dave, Greg, even Andrew B or CEO Jon Jordon could not hold “The BullDog”  back!
Check out hilarious photos and “Like” us at our Facebook  page to follow all the fun.

Water Balloon Toss

Yes, it’s an official sport.  What?  Well, whatever.  It’s fun watching people get splatted.  Winners are debatable, if you ask USA, I think they said they took it, the score-sheets are missing.

Flip Cup

Scotland THOUGHT they had it in the bag on this one, but to everyone’s amazement, Team Ghana took gold to make up for their three legged race fallout.

Memory, Cup Stacking, Three Legged Race and many more games were played.  But in the end, no team, not even the Scots in their kilts, could hold back Team USA from bringing home the Gold.

Final Score:

USA 1st                 Scottland 2nd            Djibouti 3rd

On behalf of staff, thanks to Atlantic BT leadership, the proctors and Culture Club for a orchestrating a great event.  As a relative newcomer, I feel lucky to be part of such a great group of people.

We are hiring!
Check out our latest openings  in development and marketing.  If you think you might be a fit, shoot us a note at careers(at)atlanticbt.com  Before you know it, you could be part of a “winning” team!

Jon Jordan with Eggstinguisher	2nd Annual Atlantic BT Egg Drop Contest Tension is running high here at the Atlantic BT Center across from Macy’s Crabtree Valley mall today. Competitors in the second annual Atlantic BT Egg Drop Contest are trying to inconspicuously walk by competitor desks where a variety of engineering, art and egg drop science is on display.Some egg drop engineering is similar.”Might be some high level egg drop espionage going on,” is how Atlantic BT’s founder summarized how similar shock absorbing devices got used on several devices.  When this reporter asked Jon how he judged his chances he said, “We have to take it one drop at a time, but the Eggstinguisher is ready to take the punishment of multiple drops.” Rules established at Atlantic Business Technology’s Inaugural Egg Drop Contest are strictly enforced. “Do you see any rules violations,” Jon asked this reporter. Tensions are running high this year given the high bar set by Chutzpah and Monster Box last year. Watch Videos From Last Year or Pictures From Last Year’s Contest
Engineer/Designer/Artist	Odds	Concept	Egg Drop Entry
Billy Bonar	3 to 1	Pea Pods float to earth and so will Billy’s egg in this wind surfing pea pod design Last Year: Eggplane
Jon Jordan	3 to 1	Eggstinguisher is based on Jon’s motorcycle shock absorbers and his frustrated desire to land on the moon.
Eileen Allen	5 to 1	Eileen’s Mr. Peanut is based on the science and art of peanuts.
Colin Butler	4 to 1	Colin based his design on the fact that even angry birds fly.
Andrew Wirtanen	9 to 1	Godfather’s Dream is based on Andrew’s love of the Godfather I, II and NOT III.
Will Haley	10 to 1	Will based his egg drop machine on artist Vollis Simpson’s Whirligig.
Brian Shirley	4 to 1	Brian’s design is based on his love of the aluminum foil.
Chris Duffy	Unavailable	Chris’s design, based on his junk drawer at home, is so secret it wasn’t available for pre-drop review.
Corey Brinkman	3 to 1	Corey’s Big Moo comes complete with aerodynamic udders and controversial shock absorption.Straw-Tastic from last year
Curtis Martin	8 to 1	Curtis believes presence of his favorite super hero should carry the day for his Christmas stocking approach.
Jamie Kahgee	3 to 1	Jamie’s collapsible tube is patent pending and sure to provide competition.
Addie Caulk	4 to 1	Addie’s “Stay Calm and Carry On” looks ready for heavy seas…floating is another matter.
John Procter	5 to 1	John’s unique flying hockey puck design is sure to copter down to earth gently (his story).
Adam Daniels	7 to 1	Adam’s design can protect the egg and clean your toilet.
Mike McTaggart	0	Mike’s egg of doom is such a secret it was unavailable for pre-drop review.
What’s Next? Competitors will try and find some way to contain the unique combination of nerves, worry and concern between now and Atlantic BT’s 2nd Egg Drop Contest dropoff. I was impressed with the engineering prowess, artistic skill and crazy talent on display at Atlantic BT’s 2nd Egg Drop Contest.Before leaving the Atlantic BT Center I asked Creative Director Eileen Allen how it felt to be the only female competitor, “I’m not the only female competitor, Addie’s Carry On is competing too.” Bonne chance to all competitors in their droppings.* Odds are strictly for entertainment, please don’t bet and drive. Odds were determined by calling a secret number in Vegas and starting the conversation with, “the eggs are dropping again.”

Continuous Quality Score (CQS)

How can we save time and money spent on web development and Internet marketing? This was the question Atlantic BT Founder Jon Jordan faced as our company grew from a handful of employees to almost seventy.

After fourteen years of company growth while successfully undertaking many web development and Internet marketing challenges, Jon knows that web development and Internet marketing are organic, fluid things. Any plan is as good as the commitment between web development company and client. Changes are inevitable and anticipated, but progress is measurable and knowable.

The key is for developers (us) and customers to stay on the same page and be flexible. Flexibility is important. Web development and Internet marketing change all the time, so new market, competitive and technical changes require responsive flexibility. Projects need tracking, modification, and careful stewardship to stay on budget and to meet launch goals. Each week Atlantic BT launches new web sites and Internet marketing initiatives, but, Jon realized, a new approach was needed to keep tabs on our increasingly complex projects as they travel toward their “go live” dates.

Continuous Quality Score – CQS
Jon charged Atlantic BT to develop a new tool called CQS or Continuous Quality Score.  CQS is a simple weekly customer survey with a single question:

On A 10 Point Scale, Where 10 Is “Very Likely” and 1 is not very likely, are you likely to recommend Atlantic BT to others?

If scores are low, the second question asks permission to call. Such a weekly check takes seconds to complete but saves hours or days of misdirected project management time. CQS will save customer and Atlantic BT time. Similar to the Net Promoter Score, CQS is our application of Net Promoter score to web development and Internet marketing project management.

Atlantic BT will be rolling CQS out soon to all customers, so look for full CQS details soon.

– Marty

Free SEO Evaluation White Paper (coming soon)
Writing a Free SEO White Paper to become the first step in our Free SEO Evaluation process. Our Atlantic BT Free SEO White Paper will share knowledge learned during a week of training in California with leading SEO expert Bruce Clay and over twenty years of combined content marketing experience on million dollar ecommerce and B2B sites by members of the talented Internet Marketing team I have the honor to lead (Martin’s Bio and LinkedIn) at Atlantic BT.

Look for the Atlantic BT SEO White Paper soon. Today’s post shares SEO Tips prompted by a customer who successfully made SEO low hanging fruit changes and is looking to move his web site to the next level.

SEO – Martin’s Tips Note

SEO is a many layered challenge with touch points in site design, site reputation, viral campaigns, PPC (as a traffic generator and source of content research), hosting (site speed is becoming an increasing issue), meta data (particularly page titles), keyword aligned body copy and about fifty other things. We’ve seen tremendous SEO change in the last two years due to the growing influence of social networks. Diving into the middle of such a many layered challenge takes skill, time and a solid understanding of your site and business goals. Here are “best practices” you can implement in your site today to improve organic traffic:

• Facebook Likes (macro and micro) – Be sure to have the Facebook LIKE button on your home page and on important individual pages such as product pages or key articles AND make sure your counters are accurate to the page the LIKE button is on. I want a macro “reach” counter capable of summarizing LIKES across multiple touch points, but no such tool exists yet (that I am aware of) so make sure your Facebook counters are aligned to pages they are on.

• Platforms Beat Websites – read my Internet Marketing – Platforms vs. Websites post on ScentTrail Marketing to understand how significantly Internet marketing is being transformed by Web 2.0 and the promise of Web 3.0. As Amazon nears a billion pages in Google’s index understanding the interconnected “platform-yness” of Internet marketing has never been more important.

• UGC Rules – One of the implications of living in the land of platforms is you can’t create enough content to win keyword wars on your own. You team and content creation budget isn’t big enough even if you have millions. User generated content (UGC) is KEY. Create campaigns that develop community and encourage people to share your site across their social nets (and remember to use the Facebook LIKE button whenever possible). You may want to read my 1:10:89 Rule post too as it explains how magical and rare contributors are. My favorite UGC tools are polls, contests and games. Each UGC tactic has a “best practice” application I will write about in another post.

• Content, Community and Campaigns THEN Conversions – Living in a platform time means learning SEO stepping stones to success. Each step builds on and contributes to the next. Create a content strategy. We create content strategies with extensive keyword research, something we’ve named “branding keywords”. Branding Keywords maps keywords to business values, buying personas, buyer pain points and potential blue oceans (those keywords not frothy red with competition). This kind of research is a HUGE time commitment (days usually), but it makes your content and campaigns jump off the page. We are working on sharing these steps so anyone who wants to can “brand keywords” (look for our tutorial in about a month). Community can be as little as adding reviews or as much as building out a Facebook environment. Content without community support is a tree falling in the desert with no one to hear it. Campaigns are the “buy one get one free” or the “free white paper” or the “Holiday Sale” language of email and social marketing. You need deadlines, a great offer and compelling presentation across all touch points (site, blog, social, email) to motivate and cut through clutter and buyer apathy. Conversions come because you fire on every step. Any friction such as TRUST and REPUTATION must be fully eliminated (another post for another time). Conversions Key Performance Indicators can be anything including more time on site or increased page views. We like to make conversions some ACTION such as sign up, download or buy.

• SPEED – Go to Alexa or use a speed evaluation tool. If your site is anything other than FAST redesign it or serve it better or both. Google’s margins erode when pages take too long to load so they will punish your listings for slow response.

• SPAM – Work in SEO long enough and you can feel hidden SPAM traps. You know exactly how to SEO write to push keyword density without spamming. There are tools that you can use to confirm and help eliminate things like “stop words”, but do this long enough, test enough content and you develop an intuitive feel for what works. If you don’t have such a sense yet read my SEO Writing Tips 1 – 5 on ScentTrail Marketing for a quick crash course.

• DATA – We are constantly reminded that however much we think we know about SEO we don’t know anything. SEO and the Internet live organically in Real Time. The only things that matter or define SEO success is what is happening now. The good news is there is a sea of data to help cut the cost of the gamble. SEO and Internet marketing are always gambles, but informed ones perform better and better over the long run. Every now and again we re-read Black Swan by Taleb just in case we think we can finally predict Internet marketing’s future (no one can and arrogance goes before a huge fall in our Internet marketing experiences).

• Snake Oil – In another much younger life I sold soap for P&G, an honorable straight forward job. SEO is full of people who project confidence when they should have NONE. They use words they don’t understand but do so in a way that makes listeners confused or anxious. Here is a quick Snake Oil test. Ask a prospective SEO how they would change your home page title, the most important meta copy on any page. If they answer anything other than, “I have no idea,” RUN FOR THE HILLS. Existing sites are modeled and indexed in Google. Change is expected and accepted WITHIN parameters, within modeled limits. First rule of SEO is DO NO HARM. Anyone who, at a moment’s notice, creates a SEO plan for your site is dangerous and should be avoided. Avoid snake oil salesmen since the first rule they violate is DO NO HARM and harm within Google’s Elephant Memory Brain is forever (or a very long time anyway). Another good Snake Oil test is anyone who says, “I can get you #1 on X keyword in Y time.” The only way to achieve such a mission is to wear a black hat, to game or trick Google. Never game or trick Google. The math always wins and the over/under doesn’t favor such a tactic (what you stand to gain vs. lose). A former CFO told me, “I want you to make something happen on Google by the end of the week.” Something is happening on Google all the time, I had to explain, but only BAD things can happen for sure by the end of the week. Hard concept for a CFO to grasp.

Keep the faith, keep creating content and find a way to move your “site” to a platform generating UGC and the magic Google Juice it provides is the most important SEO lesson once you are past the low hanging fruit of solid meta, body copy, tags and purple cow link bait.

Hope these ideas have helped. Look for our Free SEO White paper and more on Branding Keywords soon. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest at Atlantic BT (never share our list and don’t spam) use the link below to stay in touch.

Yes, Please Add Me To Your Think Like An Internet Marketer Email List.

Martin
Director Marketing

Suggested Reading:

Phil Simon’s new book

The Age of the Platform

Yes! Content Curation Contest Is On

February 7 Update
Thanks to everyone of the 27 GREAT curators who’ve applied for our first Content Curation Contest. Use the link above or click on Curate This to enter our first Content Curation Contest.

Who will win the iPad or Kindle? Keep the Entries coming!

Content Curation Contest…coming soon
We are working on a Content Curation Contest to identify and reward great content curators such as Robin Good, Anise Smith and Michele Smorgon (maxOz). If you are a great content curator and would like details about the contest, please follow @Atlanticbt and use #curationcontest in a Tweet (or two or three). If you know content curators such as Karen Dietz, Alex Butler and Morten Myrstad please let them know about our contest.

Pre-Contest Tweets & Email
Use #CurationContest in a Tweet to be on the contest mailing list. Curation Contest will start before Christmas. Or email Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com with “Curation Contest” in subject.

Will be running the Content Curation Contest on Atlantic BT, so be sure to follow @Atlanticbt and look for details soon.

Thanks and stay tuned.   Martin

More on Content Curation and our Content Curation Contest on ScentTrail.