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2011-10-282014-11-02

Schipul Heads West “Virtually” to Share Social Media Graphic Design Tips with IABC Silicon Valley Members

If you’ve ever found yourself standing up in front of an audience while some sort of technical glitch prevents your presentation slides from magically appearing on the big screen behind you’ then you understand how important the visual element is when trying to communicate in business. We all find it harder to communicate with words alone, and images keep your audience focused on your words.

When you communicate online through your social media channels’ it is no different. The images, layout, and design that your online audience sees when they visit your company’s LinkedIn or Facebook Pages is critical to relaying your organization’s missions, vision and Brand across the internet.

The Silicon Valley chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators, (SV-IABC), understands how important it is to include the right graphics when talking to clients and prospects and all of us at Schipul’ The Web Marketing Company were honored and excited when SV-IABC invited us to host the webinar for their members ‘Good Design Matters in Social Media Communicationâ€ this past Thursday.

Erica Bogdan, Schipul’s Creative Services Designer, shared ways to improve your business communication using graphic design tailored for social media platforms. Erica shared how to unify your organization’s online brand across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social channels to engage your audience and increase traffic to your website.

Erica also shared design tips for ensuring your images looked great including sizing your images for each of the different online social websites and how to find free graphic design resources online even for the novice designersâ€¦ (or those folks like me who have trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler, let alone a professional vector logo.)

In case you missed it, we’ve posted the slides and a transcript from the presentation on Erica Bogdan’s Slideshare.

Erica lists some terrific and free online resources for graphic design, images and stock photos, and tools to edit graphics to use on social media websites. I want to share some of my favorite tools online that I use when I want to incorporate a better design or add more color to a social media page for the design-newbies like me.

If you’d like to watch the webinar in it’s entirety, you can watch it or download it here.

5 Free and Easy Ways to Incorporate Graphics on Social Media Websites:

Try CutMyPic and in 3 easy steps you can upload a picture, crop it and add a drop shadow.

ColorLovours’ Themelon has free themes, backgrounds, and custom layouts to give your Twitter Page a truly personal appearance without any design experience whatsoever.

Befunky is the easiest way to add special effects to photos and puts the FUN in photo editing.

Recommended by AllFacebook, Pagemodo offers tools to generate professionally Branded Facebook Fan Pages without any design skills. Pagemodo gives you one free Facebook page then offers additional tabs and pages for a low monthly price.

Aviary offers a suite of design tools for web and mobile graphics including a vector editor, image markup, and even music and audio editing software.

Try out these online tools and then come show off your creative new social media designs with us on Schipul’s Facebook Page!

You can learn more about the Silicon Valley IABC Chapter on their website and if you are in the northern California area’ be sure to check out their upcoming events and stop by to learn how to improve your business communications both online and off. Thank you again to everyone from SV-IABC who joined us Thursday and we hope you’ll come Hang Out With Us Again soon!

2011-10-182014-11-02

Good design matters in Social Media

Graphic Design for Social Media Webinar with Erica Bogdan from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

Compelling graphics are essential to effective web marketing – especially in the realm of social media! Join Schipul’s Creative Services Designer, Erica Bogdan, as she demonstrates what key tips and tools you’ll need to know for creating stellar graphics for your company’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Here are some of the cool tips this webinar covers:

How social media is growing for businesses as a free and effective marketing tool to create open dialogue with clients. Kick-butt graphics will make your Facebook and Twitter pages stand out from the crowd!
Awesome resource links to find images, fonts, and free alternatives to Photoshop so you can start creating your own graphics today!
How to incorporate branding consistency across multiple social media platforms and how to uploading your graphics onto your Facebook and Twitter once you’ve finished creating them!

If you’d also just like to view the slide presentation by itself, the slides can be found here.

2011-08-102014-11-02

Schipul Reviews Campaign Monitor: An Email Marketing Tool for Your Website

Campaign Monitor Worldview Reporting Feature Email Marketing — The WorldView Reporting Feature in Campaign Monitor

With the recent upgrade of the Tendenci membership management CMS platform to Tendenci 5.0, we thought now was a great time to consider integrating a 3rd party email marketing application instead of using the in-house Tendenci newsletter module. We have started testing a few of the popular ones including MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor so that we can better help our clients create successful email marketing campaigns.

Last week, I drafted and sent out my first email newsletter campaign using Campaign Monitor. I was truly impressed with its ease of use and cool features that most email marketing applications don’t have in one package. Here are my top 5 reasons Campaign Monitor is an awesome email marketing tool:

1. Drafting and editing an email newsletter template has never been so easy! Anyone who has ever put together an email newsletter knows you’ll spend 1/4 of the time writing the content and 3/4 of the time editing and formatting your newsletter. Campaign Monitor greatly reduces your time spent creating the newsletter with their new vertical split editor, drag and drop functionality, drop-down menu selection to personalize messages, and an expandable WYSIWYG editor that automatically adjusts in size as you add content to it.

2. Reporting and Tracking tools like no email campaign has seen before! Campaign Monitor’s Worldview is the coolest new web marketing feature I’ve seen and that is just 1 of the numerous tools they offer with their email marketing program. You can easily see a summary of the campaign in the Snapshot view that includes unique opens, clicks, shares, bounces, unsubscribed, top links clicked and more. Click on one of the overview items on the snapshot to dive deeper into the results of your email campaign, and export all the data into any .csv or excel spreadsheet. You can compare your recent campaign to past campaigns, track google analytics to see sales and conversion rates and even see who is sharing across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

3. Campaign Monitor Integrates with Tendenci 5.0 and oh so many other online platforms! In addition to standard integration with Tendenci 5.0, Schipul can integrate Campaign Monitor with most website content management systems including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Campaign Monitor also plugs-in to a number of different software programs including Google Analytics, WuFoo, Salesforce CRM, Shopify, and others.

4. Your email campaign is delivered instantly! No more waiting hours after you press send for your email newsletter campaign to go out. Campaign Monitor lets you send your campaign instantly, or you can schedule it to go out at a specific date and time. You also have the option of sending a test email to up to 5 email addresses at once before sending out the real campaign. You also can pay a small fee to submit your email newsletter through a design and spam testing before you send to ensure the best success rate.

5. Set-up and automate segmented and customized marketing campaigns! Campaign Monitor’s Lists & Subscribers tools enable you to import, segment, personalize, and target specific demographics with ease. You can create rules within your subscriber list to create and automate multiple A/B email tests and measure the results with simplicity. Campaign Monitor also automatically clean-ups your subscriber list with unsubscribes and bounced emails and helps you avoid sending spam. You can even sign up to receive new subscriber activity through an RSS feed.

I actually look forward to creating my next email newsletter using Campaign Monitor. I also am addicted to the Worldview reporting feature.

I want to add that Campaign Monitor does have the option for agencies and designers to rebrand their email marketing interface and resell to their clients. Schipul will not be doing that, and clients will be charged directly by Campaign Monitor at their base prices.

Want to learn more? You can schedule a live demo with us, sign-up for one of our free webinars on Email Marketing and Newsletters or check out Campaign Monitor’s website!

2011-02-222014-11-02

Stamp(s) of Approval

Schipul is incredibly excited to show off some new stamps we’ve had created with the help from our friends at Gowalla.

While we are still trying to figure out everything there is to know about location based social media, we LOVE the way Gowalla allows locations to easily customize their visitors’ experience. These three stamps are our first steps to helping our clients get more out of Gowalla, and help them find new ways to interact with their customers, visitors and patrons.

Download the Gowalla App, and collect these beautiful custom stamps!

Bayou City Art Festival Memorial Park

The Bayou City Art Festival Memorial Park will be held Friday, March 25 through Sunday, March 27 in Memorial Park. The Bayou City Art Festival is produced by the Art Colony Association, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to producing high quality art festivals and events, which provide financial support to local nonprofit organizations. Over the past 39 years, Bayou City Art Festival Memorial Park and Bayou City Art Festival Downtown have raised $2.6 million for local nonprofit organizations.

For more information, visit the Bayou City Art Festival web site.

Miller Outdoor Theatre

The 2011 Miller Outdoor Theatre season kicks off March 23 with Swing, Jive and Pop! Into Dance presented by the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company. The performance incorporates history, fashion, music and the arts into an interactive blast of excitement. The company dances through the eras of the 1930’s Lindy Hop, bops into the 1950’s, grooves into the 1970’s and ends into the Hip Hop music of today.

For more information on this and other performances, check out the Miller Outdoor Theatre web site.

2011-01-19

A Reality, A Challenge, An Adventure

Performing Arts Marketing Online

I’ve been working here at Schipul for almost a year now. I came here after 4+ years of working for the Society for the Performing Arts in Houston, TX. During this time, my mind has not strayed far from trying to find better ways for performing arts organizations to harness the power of the Internet to enhance audience development and, more importantly, sell more tickets.

This post is a first step in helping performing arts institutions to better understand and use the Internet for their organizations and their artists. I welcome your feeback, and hope you forward this on to anyone you know that works for a performing arts organization if you find it useful.

A Reality: Performing Arts needs SEO

You probably think an organization like Lincoln Center wouldn’t need Search Engine Optimization. You’re wrong.

Despite being quite familiar with their site, I had to Google them first to find their site. Today’s web user is very reluctant to start slapping .com on anything you want on the web. For instance, try typing whitehouse.com into your browser. You will not find our President.

Need more proof? Take a look at this report from Google Insights about searches including the words lincoln and center. NOTE: These results are from New York state.

I don’t know about you, but I know Lincoln Center is in New York City. Yet above you can see that many people actually search for “lincoln center nyc” or “lincoln center ny”. Again, these are searched from the state of New York. The point here is that regardless of how strong your brand or position is in a patron’s mind, they will more likely be Googling you or the performer first.

Wait! Don’t go optimizing your performances just yet. You need to develop your strategy first. You’re probably thinking you’ll succeed if you start optimizing around the same time you start marketing the performances through your other outlets. That’s not going to work. You need at least three months of continuous optimization to start getting attention of the great and powerful Google. This means your online marketing should not, in any way, be tied to your other marketing plans. Why?

Newspapers are dying because they thought reprinting their paper on the web was all they needed to do. They were wrong. You must market to an online audience (i.e. Google) if you want people to find your web site. This means you need to start treating Google like your oldest subscriber and donor.

A Challenge: Performing Arts needs Video

Do you remember when we all thought how crazy it was to have a camera on a cell phone? Now we have phones offering HD video! But there’s a HUGE drawback as it’s not so easy to transmit video via today’s web. However, as the Internet continues to become more mobile, and the transmission lines get faster and more widespread, sharing video is going to become as ubiquitous as photo sharing is today.

Today, many performing artists rely on photos to tell their story. Take this image from Diavolo’s Trajectoire.

But doesn’t this video do a better job of telling their story?

Of course, it’s not just about presenting it, it’s HOW you share the video. Take this video I’ve embedded from Alvin Ailey Dance Company. NOTE: Alvin Ailey has restricted our ability to share their videos to this format.

Revelations from AlvinAileyAmericanDanceTheater on Vimeo.

Not very impressive, is it? If you do decide to click on it, you will bear witness to one of the greatest displays of American choreography the world has ever seen. But if you’re like most web users, you are more likely to trust the Diavolo video link (32K+ hits) over the link from Alvin Ailey (26K+ hits).

Proving a picture is worth 6,000 clicks.

Artists and presenting organizations have to work together to provide better opportunities for patron video consumption. It’s not about showing entire pieces or performances, it’s about whetting the appetite of an audience that is starved for good content. And like we’ve seen above, how you allow your patrons and fans to present is important as well.

An Adventure: Check in, Experience the Performing Arts

Do you remember your reaction when you first heard someone talk about Twitter? It was probably the same reaction you have had listening to someone talk about Foursquare, Gowalla or SCVNGR. I must admit, I long fought against the location-based check in services. However, the more I learn about them, the more I begin to see the dawning of a new level of personal interaction.

The purpose behind these services isn’t to alert people of your location, it’s to tell a story about a location. Every time you walk into a special place, like a performing arts venue, a memory is made. You are not the person you were after you’ve walked into one of your special locations.

For a performing arts organization’s patrons, this is a regular experience every time they walk into your performance hall. The hall is your sandbox, and you now have some pretty amazing toys to play with in it. Whether you create photo contests with Instagram or Hipstamatic, or offer discounts to patrons who check in via Gowalla or SCVNGR, you now have the ability, generally for FREE, to create memories and expand your patrons’ experiences beyond the stage and performance.

Performing Arts Online

I want to explore these and other ways the Internet can be used to tell the story of performing arts over the course of this year. I can tell you now, the performing arts groups are not fully utilizing the power of the web to further their mission and vision. My goal, my New Year’s resolution, is to help change that.

I hope this is a first step in the right direction.

2010-05-21

An Intro to The Google Font Directory: The Next Step for Web Ready Fonts

If you’ve ever wondered why all the fonts on the Internet look the same, it’s because there’s a very limited number of them for Web designers to choose from. The issue is this: For a font to work correctly, it has to be installed on your computer. If it’s not there, it doesn’t show up.

Fortunately, every single computer on earth comes with at least one font installed. In fact, there are multiple. And because every computer has this specific set, Web designers are free to use those fonts in their designs because they a) know what it will look like, and b) they know it will work.

Being limited to around five or six fonts (Arial [or Helvetica on a Mac], Verdana, Times New Roman, Georgia, Tahoma, roughly) seriously limits the way your designs will look.

But as the Internet grows up, Google is hoping to utilize some new features to allow for designers to use more fonts in their creations. Enter the Google Font Directory.

The Google Font Directory now easily allows designers to embed fonts into a site itself, rather than require the computer to have them installed. (Visit the Directory itself to see the ever-growing list of new fonts available.)

And the best part? It’s incredibly simple!

All the designer needs to do now is drop this line of code…


<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Yanone+Kaffeesatz'


rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

…in the header, and now it’s available for use in their style sheet! So if they wanted to make all their paragraphs Yanone Kaffeesatz, they can now do this:


p { font-family: 'Yanone Kaffeesatz', serif; }

Pretty cool, huh??

Google hopes to continue to build the list—and there are still some hiccups—but as Web designers, we’re hoping this is another great step towards a much larger palette for us to work with.

2010-05-112014-11-02

Trend Tuesday: Reviewing the iPad on an iPad

I was pretty excited the day I heard about this thing. Now I’m typing this very blog post on it, sitting on an airplane on the way to California. What follows here is less of a review (5 thumbs up!) and more of a commentary on why I think this thing is the beginning of something.

iPad Home Screen — My iPad home screen apps

iPad Form and Feel

The specs on the device don’t really do it justice. The screen is much bigger than an iPhone, but not exactly as big as a laptop screen. It weighs about as much as a dinner plate, which is light to move around but heavy to hold one-handed. The aluminum is a bit slippery to the touch, but I’ve got the apple case on mine which is thin but tactile enough that I don’t expect to drop it. While adding a case adds thickness, it doesn’t matter that much because the iPad is much too big to put in a pocket.

The screen is the same buttery-smooth glass as the iPhone. Fingers slide around very easily, though they do cause quite a bit of smudging. The buttons are all distinctly placed and easy to access. The headphone jack occasionally seems to be in the wrong place, but that it easily corrected by rotating the screen. Almost every app rotates around so that there is no top or bottom of the device. Overall the device is plenty big to see and light enough for a lap, which secures it in that middle space between iPhone and MacBook.

iPad Function and Performance

This thing is fast! The biggest problem that has plagued many similar portable devices is speed, and the iPad delivers better than anything I’ve ever used. You tap or swipe something, and things start happening immediately. The Wi-Fi is quick and browsing websites feels as fast as using a desktop.

The function of this magical thing is most called into question. If I already have a laptop, desktop, and an iPhone, why would someone ever need an iPad? Well, the short answer is you don’t need it, but you probably really want it. The iPad combines much of the portability of the phone with the power and relative size of a laptop. Using the apps loaded on the device along with some from the app store you can:

Play games where you touch the screen
Surf the web on a large screen
Read and respond to email with a full keyboard
Administer websites from a command line
Design websites using mockup and graphics apps
Edit, share, and upload photos
Write blog posts (like this one)

While that likely doesn’t cover 100% of what you do in a day, it probably covers 75-80%. And in doing so, it lets you do the things you need (or want) to do from a couch, coffee shop, airplane, or even the beach with the 3G model. The battery life will cover you all day, as it is pretty true to the quoted 10 hours. I got only 9 hours with the 3G, but that is still much longer than I would get if I was constantly using the iPhone or even a laptop.

Worth the cost?

I, like many other people, fully expected the iPad to cost over $1000 when it was first announced in January of this year. I was blown away by the entry-level price of $499. For some people, that $499 version (16GB, Wi-Fi only) will be good enough. I settled in on the 32GB model with 3G, which rang up to close to $800 after taxes and such. Throw in the case and a couple of other extras and it’s closer to $900. Then, pile on the $80 on apps I have spent so far and I am almost at that $1000 mark. Even then, I think it all has been worth it.

The iPad changes my entire day. I wake up and am able to read my RSS feeds on a large, light weight screen while sitting in bed. That’s about 20 minutes a day. I take the iPad to work and use it to check and file email, test web designs, and keep up with social media. At night, I take it home and I browse the web from the dinner table or while on the couch. I use it as a giant remote for the media center computer hooked up to my TV. All in all, I probably spend about 3 hours a day with the device.

While I could do most of those things from a phone or a laptop, they are so much nicer on the iPad. It has the best balance of being powerful and portable than any other device I’ve ever used (and I’ve used a few). Having a great experience for 3 hours a day is entirely worth the cost of the device.

Future of computing

There was much debate before the device was released (some of which I contributed to) about the effects of the iPad on the future of computer. I do believe that touch is something that will be around for the relative future, until we get Minority Report style gesture interfaces. Using the device needs little or no training to jump in and start browsing or using apps. That jumps a major hurdle in using almost any other computing device. The iPad was made for people who aren’t that in to computers, but who use email, social media, and the internet at large.

A big part of the negative side of the discussion comes from individuals who want a normal computer with a touch screen. This is not the iPad, and I don’t think it describes the future of computing. When you really think about the level of abstraction that is involved in a normal desktop, it’s pretty mind-blowing. If you come in with the goal of wanting to look at pictures, you have to find the right folder, open the pictures (usually 1 by 1), and flip through them while they are surrounded by a window with menus and buttons and other extras. On the iPad, you tap the photos app, and there they are. When browsing a photo, your options are limited to what you can do with that photo at that moment. Many people are scared of that word ‘limited’, but I think the reduction in UI junk helps you to accomplish your goals at that time.

All of this said, the iPad can’t do everything. I won’t speak on Flash, because that has been talked to death, but the iPad is also incapable of some other things. As I said before it tackles about 80% of computing tasks. But remember, this is just the first iteration. The biggest thing the iPad has going for it is that it makes the things you want to do easier and more fun.

I’ve had my iPad for just over a week, and I love it. I carry it around with me and have already used it for movies at the gym, in a client presentation, while taking notes, at home, at my desk, and on an air plane. Much of those things can be done other ways, but nothing can do all of them the way the iPad can. Check out the iPad at your local Apple store or borrow one from your local Apple fanboy so you can understand what I am talking about.

While this review was written on an iPad with both the onscreen keyboard and a Bluetooth one, the post was published on a desktop.

2009-11-03

Thirty Days of Thanks – Thank Goodness for Good Design!!

We’re a Web Marketing company so of course one of the thirty things we are thankful for is good design!!

And we’re not just talking web design either… we’re talking about the design of all of your everyday things from the mundane to the magnificent.

To celebrate our love of design, we’ve got a super special giveaway for you this month!!

Our very own Search Engine Marketing Team Manager, Jonti Bolles, is a former professor of Architecture and we can testify that this gal loves her design… so much so that she was tapped to offer her expert design commentary in the recently published Deconstructing Product Design book by Will Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa.

Want a copy? Tell us what product you can’t live without and what about it’s design has made it integral to your life.

For inspiration check out my 5 Favorite Product Designs from the book!!

the Motorola Razr V3: I had one of these babies. And yes I agree… the silver version pictured in the book was a step forward for phones, but the Pink Razr (with duct tape accents) that I personally owned was what I’d consider more of a giant leap. Razrs are risiliant little things and last for years!
Aeron Armchair: I sit in a wannabe one of these (from Eurway) all day at work and I would never switch to a different chair. Commenter Carley H. Franklin calls it the “Rock-Star of the Seating World” and I wholeheartedly agree! Even if my chair is merely the pop-star version.
the Chanel No. 5 Flacon: Ladies across the world will unanimously agree that this famed bottle of perfume is one of the iconic symbols of all things womanly.
POM Juice Bottle: I love pomegranates so by proxy I love this bottle. The design helps too.
Glock G17 Semi-Automatic Pistol: I’m an Army Gal and so weapons of all shapes and sizes interest me. This one is a little smaller than the ones we used to tote around in basic training but I love that they featured it in a design book!!

And if you MUST have some Internet Inspiration, check out the Sew Crafty Houston Site or Gwen Bell’s Beautiful Blog. Both make me smile every time they pop open in my browser. I blame the monsters.

So one more time. How do you win this awesome book??

Leave a comment below
What product can’t you live without and what do you LOVE about its design
We’ll pick a winner using the random integer generator on November 18
Make sure you include a way for us to contact you when you win!!

2009-06-15

Culintro hits 1,500th member milestone

A big “wow” and “congratulations” go out to the folks at Culintro, one of our newer customers who use Tendenci to manage their Web site and membership. In just a few short months they have registered 1,500 members after starting from scratch earlier in the year. Clearly, that rapid growth suggests they are satisfying a need for executives in the restaurant industry. Check out the news release for more details.

The Culintro Web site was designed by Schipul and is powered by Tendenci.