Category: Managed Services

Our clients are making news! Jimmy Tompkins of JT’s Landscaping was featured in this article on WRAL for his innovative approach to keeping his Raleigh Landscaping business going through the winter.

Although landscaping tends to be a seasonal industry, Jimmy Tompkins has found a way to not only maintain his business during the typical off-season but to grow his company and keep his employees working through the winter. Every fall, we help JT’s Landscaping transition his focus from lawn maintenance to holiday decorating by updating his website, re-optimizing for search engines and targeted pay-per click campaigns for the holiday season. Innovative clients such as Jimmy make our job easy!

JT’s Landscaping provides holiday lighting and holiday decorating services for the Triangle, including Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and Wake Forrest. This year his team is decorating more than 160 homes in the Raleigh area.

As marketers, we admire Jimmy’s ability to recognize a void in a market and capitalize on it. This helps grow his business, develop his brand, and maintain jobs for his employees when traditional landscaping work is slow.

Razoo is a free donation platform for non-profits to easily accept donations. They provide an embeddable widget for your site. This plugin exposes this form as a shortcode for you to drop in your pages and posts. See also Razoo Widget Creator.

Actually based on the “share” widget creator (from the “embed this on your site” link on the widget) to customize the options and basic appearance.

Download the plugin – razoo-donation-widget v0.9

(now on  WordPress.org!)

There is nothing more horrific to me than Black Friday.  I would rather spend the day in the park with my kids than fight the masses for the holy grail of deals.  Now Cyber-Monday I thought I could handle as well.

Last night I attempted to purchase some toys from ToysRUs.com.  The inventory was rapidly changing in front of my eyes, only certain items were available for in-store pickup, etc.  When I actually placed my order, the “find the store nearest you” feature was dead in the ajax waters of no return.  In short they were getting slammed!  Good for them.  Bad for me.

So an announcement quickly appeared on their home page that they were extending their deals to Tuesday.  A really solid business move on their part and good indicator that they can react well to crisis.  I logged on today and when I went to purchase an item one item (that was on sale that was supposed to be in-stock) was not available.  It was pulled off my order and my discount evaporated through the ether.

So I placed a phone call to customer service and the representative was able to make sure that when the order was in-stock I would get the discounted price.  A notice to all merchants: as Gary Vaynerchuk warned us all at the Internet Summit #ISum11 that service and engagement with your customers is what will allow you to survive.

All it took was awareness of their own performance issues, empathy and a little Christmas Spirit.

Helpful tips for ToysRUs:

1. Get rid of the phone maze, I want to talk to someone
2. Real time inventory is a must now for a chain your size
3. Give customer service reps the power to make things right and you will keep customers who had tough on-line experiences

@darylhemeon #ISUM11 has a lot of my notes from the day as well

Driving Innovation in Audio : How ESPN Takes Content Local, Mobile and Social

@espn Traug Keller Senior VP, Production, Business Division

This is a mix of my thoughts and pseudo quotes of all presenters.

Notes:

ESPN’s mission is to bring sports to fans anywhere at anytime and now you can be bored in any meeting and watch ESPN.  This might be the greatest innovation in history.

They were one of the first radio companies to stream their presence. How are their audio users interacting with ESPN?

1. 21.1 minutes with the Internet
2. 12.3 minutes per day with Mobile
3. 55.9 minutes with Terrestrial Radio
4. 27.5 minutes with Streaming Radio

In 2010 the decided to put the World Cup on the Radio.  Many thought this was a dicey proposition.  During the Cup on an average day 6.6 million people tuned in to the coverage. Among all the listeners 30% were digital.  This is HUGE.

I have to get a hold of Traug’s slides because ESPN does great data management.  The thing they spent the most time on is the ESPN Radio App – Number One Paid App on iTunes. $2.99 one time fee.  They really focused on the less is more strategy.   The App has more than 500,000 downloads.   He dropped @sportsguy33 Bill Simmons, when he does a pod cast over 1 million people download it after it is posted and they have found a way to monetize it.

Mobile Audio is no more complicated than making the experience convenient, on the go, and INTERACTIVE.  They monitor the number of Tweets on Mike and Mike to see when to move on to a new topic.

The story for ESPN Audio is GROWTH.  The prediction of the session was that we may see the end of AM Radio in our life times because of mobile devices.  ESPN just make it easier to listen and they were able to increase revenue for ad sales.

Some stats:

1. Most listened to sports stream on the planet
2. ESPN brand lives in over 350 markets nationwide
3. Over 24 million listeners per week consuming ESPN content
4. Over 24 million total streaming listening hours
5. Nearly 32.5 million session starts
6. 9 million to 10 million podcast downloads per week

Someone asked a question about whether or not they were worried that users were transitioning to moving away from traditional cable providers.  Traug’s response was that people a lot smarter than him are going to try and figure that out.

Commentary:

Mobile Consumer Issues – Privacy and Trust

@franmaier Fran Maier President & Executive Chair, TRUSTe

Notes:

Privacy Tips for developers: Get Serious about Privacy, Give Consumers Transparency and Choice, Always Ask Before Collecting Location Data, Prepare to Offer Opt-Outs For Mobile Ad Targeting, Push for Mobile App Directories to Filter by Privacy and Security.

Shorthand for TRUSTe is Transparency, Choice and Accountability.  TRUSTe works with companies to figure out how information is shared.  Consumers want choice over how their information is shared and they want CONTROL over how my information is shared.

A lot of apps are asking for notice about collecting location data, but they don’t explain what they are doing with their location information.

Without transparency 70% of all consumers think they are being tracked on your mobile phone, but we need to do a better job of educating consumers. 45% of consumers said that they would not share information even if they were offered free services.  Many consumers feel like the App Stores don’t give a good overview of privacy security.

300 of the largest free apps and only 25% of them have a link to their privacy policy, the message there is to really as consumers to push for privacy policies so you can hold companies accountable.

You can download a mobile privacy policy generator at TRUSTe if you don’t have one.

Commentary: The content of this presentation was really relevant to what is happening today in the mobile space, but the stats and survey’s were really powerful, but the slides and charts were not really very easy to read and they really were the story about educating the consumers so they can make better choices.

Uses for Location-Based Mobile Marketing for Non-Brick and Mortar Business

@gregkihlstorm Greg Kihlstrom, Chief Creative Officer and Founder, Carousel30

Notes:

Why location based services?  It is all about engaging people about where they are physically located. How do you take advantage of this technology if you have on-line presence only. Location based marketing does not only mean FourSquare.

Consumer = location.  As the consumer you can become a location now.  Greg referenced the Heineken’s app that allows users to connect during soccer games.

Red Cross created a Blood Donor badge on FourSquare.

Deliver exclusive content that can only be delivered at a conference.  Animal Planet had a campaign at ComicCon where you had to find BigFoot and Tweet a picture if you found him.

History Channel has offered tips at Historical Places when you check in to them to better send a message about their brand.

One of his major points was to use the right medium to cater to the audience that you are trying to reach.  The California Department of Public Health created a text service to send locations where you could get a flew shot during the H1N1 crisis.

Not everyone is motivated by obtaining a FourSquare badge, but a lot of people think that it is valuable.  These are successful because they are exclusive!

Commentary: There is tons of room to grow in this arena, but find something that motivates and captivates your audience.  The main point is that mobile location marketing creates an opportunity to create ads that are beyond the normal flat advertising.

Right Here, Right Now: The New Pace of Mobile Consumer Insight

@lumimobile Dana Kirchman SVP, Head of Client Operations

Notes:

The opportunities to survey your costumers are out there because you can collect information instantly and Report Immediately as to what is happening with your clients.

Mobile unites four insight types: Self Reported, Behavioral Insight ( your phone can tell you how far your drove to get a bargain ), Social Insight, Emotional Insight ( video recording of emotions in reactions to advertising ).

With the mobile world has the focus group died? Can you have access to larger groups and get access to data in the same day?

The challenges that are out there today are the multiple platforms (iPhone, Droid, iPad), device customization, data plans and costs of those plans are some of the challenges.  Are we trying to reach users that don’t have a TV, a high bandwidth plan, but they have a phone.

What is the potential of mobile?  Can an app capture health and wellness?  Can it capture leadership behaviors?  Could we use games as a diary? Is Crowd Memory very far away to share all of our experiences?

Commentary: This is more of a high level overview of what a few different valuable people in the industry are trying to push, but overall I thought it was at too high, too broad, but again some valuable insights.

What Would Steve Jobs Do?

He would WATCH OUR PREZI / VIDEO on how to Think Like An Internet Marketer.

In the middle of the morning strange things happen. The office is so quiet it seems haunted. Lights start to move in ways reminiscent of college days and it is hard to stay in the white lines driving home. Certain western tribes took Peyote, danced around a fire until exhausted to see the future. Tribes knew how to party. Steve Jobs understood something only a few can or will ever. Steve Jobs, especially after his cancer diagnosis, knew the future always happens NOW. It takes uncanny nerve or nothing to lose to work backwards from the future. BTW, in the end no one has anything to lose, nothing of substance anyway. Substance stays, substance lives on as stuff fades fast.

As a fellow cancer survivor, and Steve was a cancer survivor considering he battled one of the most deadly cancers for years, I see a little of what Steve saw. I feel a little of what Steve felt. I see all of life is in every moment so this moment’s quality, authenticity, joy, magic and love IS your life. At this moment I write from the Atlantic BT Center in Raleigh about to work on a strategic plan. “Strategic plan” is too small. Any successful Internet marketing must be a hero’s journey. Marketing is too hollow to describe Steve Jobs straw to gold alchemy. Steve wasn’t a marketer. I’m a marketer. Steve was our Einstein, our EinstiJobs:

Atlantic BT’s Internet Marketers / Company Founders / Wizards = Physicists List

Einstein = Steve Jobs (Apple computer Founder and world changer)

Stephen Hawking = Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and the creator modern arbitrage network selling infinite inventory so a close second to Jobs)
Heisenberg = Sean Parker (Napster’s lamented Founder)
Neils Bohr = Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder)

Richard Feynman = Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder)
Robert Oppenheimer = Jerry Yang (Yahoo founder because of the “I’ve become the destroyer of worlds” thing)

Newton = Gordon Moore of Moore’s Law fame (Intel founder)
Galileo = Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments

Disagree?
Feel free to disagree with these characterizations, write and supply your own (will pick them up into this post)

Watch our Prezi on What Would Steve Jobs Do? How to think like an Internet marketer (or a close approximation thereof :).

WordPress User Impersonation class

I was recently asked to develop an easy way to allow the administrator to perform specific action on behalf of as user.  Many of these tasks were already set up to auto-populate fields with information pulled from the current user, so I figured the easiest way to address this task would be to allow the administrator to impersonate a user and perform these actions using the same process any other user would.

With this concept in mind, I set about creating a user impersonation class that would allow just such functionality.

The first issue to address was the creation of a way to initiate this impersonation.  Luckily I had already created a report system which lists all the users I would need to impersonate and displayed some information about them.  This proved to be the perfect place to build the link.  A simple URI string let me initiate the process.  By passing the users id as the value of a URI parameter, I could have my class watch for that variable and capture its value.  I implemented WordPress’s nonce with this link to ensure some level of security.  To make this process even easier, I created a static method within the class that creates the necessary link while giving me the ability to specify the link target, which I set to ‘_blank’ so as to allow me to keep the admin page window open while I do what I need to do on the front-end.

Now that I had the link in place, I had my class create session values to hold the original admin user id, the impersonated users user id, and the nonce string I had generated to allow for continuous validation (note: the $_SESSION super global needs to allowed in wp_config.php in order for this class to work).  Additional validation was set in place using roles and capabilities to make sure that the user doing the impersonation was actually allowed to do so.

Now that I had the necessary values stored in the session, I used WordPress’s wp_set_current_user function (which really seems to have been designed for just this purpose) to set the current user to the specified user while on the front-end.  The session allows for persistence.

Once I got all that working, I wanted an easy way to stop impersonating the user, so I hooked to the admin_bar_menu and added a ‘Stop Impersonating [username]’ menu item.  I wanted this to take me back to the admin page (since theoretically I’d be done on the front-end), but this resulted in permissions errors.  I added nonce to the link, but that had the same result, because I was clicking the link as the impersonated user but getting to the admin page as my original admin user.  I ended up replicating WordPress’s nonce creation functions to allow me to use the session stored admin user id to generate the nonce so that when I hit the back-end it would be accurate.

This class works great for my needs and could be modified to maintain impersonation on the back-end if needed since the abort link in the admin bar would allow you to get back to your original user if necessary.

This functionality could prove exceptionally helpful when testing permissions, user-specific issues, or anything else where being another user temporarily would be required.