Okay, spring is on the way and everything in the marketplace is starting to warm up too.  You get up early and arrive at the coffee shop early to savour the first cappuccino while you start to write reams of your best content over two additional Americanos.  Now you’re flying high and your heart’s racing one-twenty through a caffeine high.  Last night, you overheard the guy next to you at the hockey game talking about something called social media and  a  movie about Facebook, so you’re looking at the movie trailer through the coffee shop Wi-Fi.  Jackpot, something called Twitter came up in the search as did a bunch of other sites you had no idea even existed before.  So now you’ve feverishly compiled a list of these strange web lands in a new email and hit send with glee.  You figure the 20-year-old intern is smart enough to figure it all out.  In your head, widgets are flying out of the factory faster than you can make them and everything’s green delirium.  You’ve already sent her the morning stream of consciousness that should be called BUZZ-ARDS because they’re circling over you right now.

BEING BLUNT:

There’s a disturbing trend in the communications world. Kids like the nephew of the CEO in a first year marketing program, who put in a word for the cute 20-year-old intern, are being allowed to burn future business alliances because of obvious mistakes too many companies across North America are committing. For starters, hire professionals and pay them. Don’t be like a typical company that posts an ad on a community job board who wants qualified professional services for far less than fair market values.

WORD BUZZARD BEATERS:

Write in bites. Bullet and separate. Make very word tell. Hire a writer, or a technical communicator. They’ll take your stream of consciousness and strip it down so users on your site will find information quickly and efficiently. They’ll also map your site information structure and assess how user friendly the navigation is.

IMAGE BUZZARD BEATERS:

Hire a designer who took more than a weekend online course. If you need photos, hire a photographer. They’ll shoot it properly, likely in a RAW format. Do this and you’ll have an archive for print and web projects. Respect what a good web designer charges and use them to make your site look like something unique and different. In today’s world, your website is going to be the first impression you make on any new potential business, or customer. If you blow this, the buzzards are going to eat you.

COMMITT, PLAN, AND STAFF:

A competent media designer these days has to solve a myriad of problems on the fly and work with numerous software packages. It requires years of experience and schooling to be competent. Before you send the link list off to the intern, delve into the subject on your own time and learn as much as you can. Consider making a plan and budget the planned hiring of a multimedia/social media specialist. It is a full time commitment to create online awareness. In the fleeting world of tweets and streamed media, you have scant seconds to grab your future client’s attention and turn them toward your brand. Think micro bites of information that the social media specialist designs, leading to new customers and market shares.


EMAIL ACCOUNTS:

If you’re a small enterprise, or business, that requires you to view email at more than one computer in different locations, consider using IMAP account protocols. This stands for: Internet Message Access Protocol.  With IMAP account settings, the upside is that your email is stored on your service provider’s server for viewing from any computer, so long as you’ve set up your account on that computer with  your IMAP protocols.  Even sent messages are seen on all the computers with your IMAP accounts.  For setting up an IMAP account, Google setting up an IMAP account on your mail client (give name: i.e. Windows Live Mail) for instructions.

IMAP ACCOUNT REMINDERS:

You will need to log into a webmail account and delete inbox messages on occasion, as most providers post limits on storage. Consult with your provider to see what options are available.  And email that needs to be saved for more than a month should be saved as a document, or draft.  Lastly, create a folder somewhere to save all the important received attachments to.  If you get a number of emails, the system may fail to store  some past emails and attachments if you go over your storage limit.  This way, your documents will be safe and saved.

WEB & THIRD PARTY ACCOUNTS:

To manage web and social media, create browser groups with Firefox. For instance, we open our web page on one tab, we have the admin access open on the tab next to it, the form page provider’s web link, the Vimeo admin and upload page, plus any additional web pages we’re working with that are relevant to updating our site. Then we save them all as a group in Firefox by selecting: Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs. When you do this, Firefox will ask you to name the group. So we give it a name like, Website. So, now when you want to do your web updates, you just click the group in your favourites and select, Open All in Tabs, from the right opening tab.  Now each necessary page will open  and automatically sign in to your accounts , as long as you’ve instructed Firefox to remember the log info for the pages.

We create browser groups for other clients. We have a browser group for Google Analytics website tracking, ad words tracking, and pay per click tracking on LinkedIn. And we have browser groups for email marketing campaigns, and tracking of RSS feeds too.

Opening the group tabs all together is a faster and more efficient way of managing, updating, and tracking your website and social media progress.

Welcome to our new website and blog!!

Tell us about your business and challenges, or maybe you have another great third party application you’d like to let us know about. We’ll post them in the “parties” page.

What in media has you confused..? Maybe we can help find the answer, or refer you to someone who can help.

Maybe you want to talk about how to do something that will help make your website more functional or beautiful. For example, the photo above was taken in Langley, BC, on a very hazy day in a RAW image format. It was all washed out and there were ugly orange floats in the water for rowers. Also there was other misc. landmark blight, such as poles and wires on the other side that cluttered the simplicity of the little church there. Here’s the before and after:

I adjusted the curves in Photoshop and brought the exposure range into a more pleasing one. I zoomed in and used the stamp tool to sample and stamp over the places where I wanted the wires and floats to disappear. Then I followed that with a very light brush with the blur tool set at about 10-15 percent on the very large RAW photo size. The adjustments took about 15 minutes. This is 5 minutes longer, due to the patching and covering of the water markers and wires. It is one of the only exceptions to my cardinal rule that had a good outcome. Cardinal rule:

A single photo should never take more than 10 minutes to edit its basic features in Photoshop, or the result will most always be disappointing…