protocol 80, Inc. Blog

A History Lesson in Marketing

Sometimes marketers think of great ideas…sometimes they think of bad ideas. Most of them have same goals however…get you to do something.  If you come across a marketer that doesn’t want to talk about goals you should talk to someone else! One thing is for certain, the way we do marketing has changed DRAMATICALLY! Take a look at this infographic from Hubspot. What type of marketing are you most responsive to as a consumer? Do you even know?

Jeremy Callinan Leaves protocol 80

One of the founding partners of protocol 80, Inc. is no longer an owner or an employee. Please join us in wishing Jeremy Callinan luck with his new career path. Jeremy has taken a permanent position with one of protocol 80′s longstanding clients doing programming work.  He has worked with this client as a contractor since 2009 so the transition should be fairly smooth.

Jeremy started the business with Donny Kemick back in 2002 while they were both still attending the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. Although the business was originally started to raise some extra cash during college, it quickly became apparent that there was a serious need for IT Services, Web Marketing and Development and Programming.  Gaining Zippo Manufacturing Company as one of their first clients, protocol 80 quickly grew in the McKean County area.  The focus of protocol 80 has always been to help small to medium size businesses succeed online through web marketing and to benefit from technology in the workplace.  In more recent years the IT services division has been re-branded and operates as Omnis Technologies while protocol 80 maintains the web marketing and development needs.

Donny Kemick and Josh Curcio will remain as owners of the company and along with the other employees will continue to provide website development and marketing to the businesses in PA and the Western NY region. Omnis Technologies will also continue to provide high quality IT services in Bradford, PA and the surrounding areas.

Thank you Jeremy for 10 years of dedication.  We wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors.

protocol 80 Office in Bradford, PA

It’s no secret, we are  a small business just like many of you. We are happy to have finally been able to have our own office located in East Bradford, PA! Our building was a church many many years ago and more recently was used by a small business to engineer electrical things for the medical industry. Below is a photo from the Bradford Era of our office from 1949 when it was the 2nd Free Methodist Church.

Download the Bradford Era Article Here

Our new address and phone number:

15 North Kendall Avenue
Bradford, PA 16701
Map It
814-596-0020

The renovations and closing took a bit longer than expected, but in the end everything turned out well. We wanted to be able to do some of the renovation work ourselves, but client work is always a priority so unfortunately we did not have the time so we hired most of it out to local contractors in and around Bradford. It probably turned out for the better as we are not the most skilled carpenters. You can see some before, after and during pictures of our renovations in the slideshow below. We also like to have company, so if you’d like to stop by we’d be happy to have you.

[slickr-flickr]

Google Plus Brand Pages

Good news! You can now create a brand page on Google Plus. Many of you had probably already done this prematurely and had the page removed. Now you can safely create a page for your business or organization and it will not be removed by Google. Here is what you need to know so far.

1. There is no brand verification in place currently. It is very important that you go and grab your brand now even if you don’t plan to use it. It would not be hard for someone else to hijack your brand without verification. Save yourself the hassle and get started today.
2. Currently it only supports 1 admin, though multiple admin support will be coming in the near future. If you aren’t the one that plans on updating the Google+ brand page, have the person that will be the ongoing admin create the page. You can add team members to a brand, though they can’t really do anything with it. If you are the admin of a page, Google has made it very easy for you to update a status for either your personal page or your brand page…more good news!
3. If you choose to follow other brands and people, their updates will show in your news stream, so choose wisely. If you as a brand add tons of people to your circles, your brand news stream will be cluttered. If you want to add 3000 people to your circles, do it from your personal accounts.

Social Media and Nonprofits

We spoke at a nonprofit conference last week, discussing social media. One thing is certain, everyone wants to be involved, but there tend to be obstacles. Whether it’s lack of staff, time or a strict gatekeeper, many of them have a hard time doing what they would really like to do with their social media strategy. I came across this infographic and thought the attendees of the conference might want to know what people are already talking about in the nonprofit online world. Good news if you have anything to do with animals! Infographic courtesy www.craigconnects.org.

 

It’s Movember at protocol 80

Movember. Mustache season. More importantly, time to raise funds and awareness for men’s health.

A couple of us at protocol 80 have joined a Movember team and hope to use social media to help our teams success.

The Background

Movember participants will start on 11/1 completely clean shaven. For me, this was odd. I have had a beard for more than 6 years. Now through the end of the month, we have committed to keeping, growing, and grooming only a mustache. In hopes to get my first donation, I will not post a photo of my clean shaven face until that first donation comes through. Throughout the month, the more donations I get the more pictures I will post. We will even take recommendations as to how to style our mos…but the donations have to come in. Official Movember rules can be found here.

Our Story

I wanted to start a team because there is certainly not enough attention given to men’s health in my opinion. This is a fun way to help and we hope that we can be successful raising awareness in our local community and as far as our social media reach can go.

The Use of Social

We know that social is a great way to build awareness for any subject. All of us on the team already have personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. We started recruiting for our Movember team through these outlets. So far we are a little short on the volume of team members we would like, but we will continue recruiting.

Secondly, I took 10 minutes to create a team Facebook page so that we can communicate with the community as a team, share progress, answer questions, etc. I don’t expect to create a specific Twitter account for the team, as I believe we will have better success promoting through our own personal accounts. We hope to have fun with it on the social outlets while creating conversations and ultimately bringing in the donations. Our goal for donations will be $200 per team member. We currently have 3 team members, so the team goal will be $600.

Additionally, I have created this blog post. Given the success or failure of our efforts, I would like to keep you updated with our thoughts on social media and it’s effectiveness. Hopefully non-profit organizations will be able to gather ideas from our experiences to use with their own causes.

Here are some links:

Our Team for donations

Join The BFD Movember Team

The BFD Facebook Page  – Like us!

About Movember from the official website…including data on where the money goes!

 

PNC Bank Launches a Facebook Page

One of the nations largest banks has been missing from the Facebook landscape until just recently. They have launched a new Facebook page in which they want to keep you up to date on what is happening in the PNC world. So far they are off to a pretty decent start by responding to customer service comments that come through the news feed. One thing that struck me as odd is adding a guidelines (rules) tab for using their page.

What are your thoughts on Facebook brands adding “rules of use” for their page?

Does Klout Matter?

If you have not heard or checked out Klout.com, it is essentially an easy way to measure your online influence. Each person has a Klout score provided they are involved with social media in some way. Even users that do not participate are assigned a Klout score based on their interaction with the social world. To keep it simple, the more people you can reach and the more people that interact with your content and more importantly amplify your content, the higher Klout score you will have. For more details, check out their frequently asked questions section.

 Personal Use

Of course there are reasons that your Klout matters on personal level…most people want to have some sort of influence. Also, the more influential you are, the more Klout Perks will be available to you. You can get Klout perks by achieving a certain score or by being influential about a specific topic. Though the idea behind the perks is pretty good, I have not found them to be all that interesting. Though I think Klout is interesting, in the long run it doesn’t really matter all that much on a personal level.

From a Business Perspective…

Klout definitely matters if you are a business owner…especially a brick and mortar business. Here’s why. People using social media are not scared to mention a brand. They will talk about their experiences, both good and bad, through social media. Influential people can have much more of an impact of what actually happens when they talk about it.

While you should treat all of your customers the same, you really want to treat your influential customers well. Wouldn’t you want to know when someone influential walks through your doors? With the power of Klout and check-in services, you will be able to do such a thing. Imagine your host/hostess getting a notification when someone with a Klout score of 65 checks in to your restaurant via foursquare…not only that, but they are influential about the topic of food. You can then take the next step based on your business to make sure that person is treated right…or at least not poorly. Understanding when influential people are arriving at your business is HUGE.

I have already read about a few start-ups tackling this type of application, and I can only imagine that we will see many more. Klout has already teamed up with Postling to notify an owner when someone influential is following them. Good information…but not nearly as powerful to a brick-and-mortar establishment. I like Klout and am quite interested to see how it progresses in the near future. Have you checked your Klout score?

IMS11 Takeaways: Customer Personalization

I had the opportunity to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit 2011 in Boston this year along with Donny and Josh, and one of the biggest takeaways from a developer’s standpoint is that the best way to enhance user and customer experience with the websites and applications we develop is to add elements of personalization – this creates a “sticky” experience that keeps folks coming back for more over time.  So what is a personalized experience?

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog there’s a good chance you’ve had a chance to use either Amazon.com or Netflix.com – two websites that are very well optimized to provide a personalized user experience.  When you first visit either of those websites your experience is fairly bland.  Let’s take Netflix for example, this is what you see the first time you visit:

It’s a fairly boring user experience. You see what the Netflix service is, how it works and they have a great call to action to get visitors signed up for a free trial. Other than that though, the website offers no input as to how they recommend using their service – they’re leaving that bit up to you. What’s cool about Netflix is that it learns over time and adapts to your tastes in movies, so that once you’ve been using the service for a while your user experience changes to something like this instead:

As you can see Netflix shows me my most-recently watched content as well as similar content that I might also enjoy, and they’ve even lined up some recommendations in one of my favorite genres so I never have to hunt for new stuff to watch.  They do this by watching my habits over time and building a personalized profile for me that makes using their product a heck of a lot more fun and a whole lot easier.  I never get to the point where I feel like I’ve run out of things to watch on Netflix because they’re constantly honing my customer profile to show me more of what I like!  Amazon.com works in much the same way.  Over time they keep track of the products you like to browse and purchase and will show you recommendations for different products to try.  Essentially they’re just making it a lot easier to continue using their service so they ensure you stick around to give them repeat business.

Facebook Connect

Another cool way to add personalization into a website in my opinion is by using Facebook Connect.  Facebook Connect is an API that lets developers utilize a Facebook user’s account info to make a more personalized web experience for them.  What that means is that a web developer can build your website such that visitors can use their Facebook login to access your website also (or, let’s be honest, get logged in automatically since most people are accessing Facebook all day anyways).  After that it’s incredibly easy to pull in “like” data and other information to make it easier for people to share your products and content with their Facebook friends.  Check out some of the cool things Spotify, a new on-demand music streaming service is doing with Facebook Connect to make sharing playlists with Facebook users a breeze.

Spotify is Seriously Facebook Friendly

So that’s my main takeaway from #IMS11 – personalization! I can’t wait to start creating more personalized customer experiences moving forward that help keep visitors coming back for more.

Scheduling Tweets in Advance for Free With Buffer

One of the most-important aspects of succeeding with a social media strategy is to stick with it.  Posting a tweet or two per week isn’t going to cut it.  On the other hand, it’s also important to set time aside to devote to your social media accounts.  The problem with that is you’ll generate a whole bunch of activity in a short amount of time, and if your followers aren’t paying attention during your scheduled time there’s a good chance they’ll miss your Twitter updates entirely.  So, how can you keep your Twitter account active without spending your entire day posting tweets?

Enter BufferApp.com

Scheduling tweets isn’t a new idea.  Hootsuite has been doing it for quite some time.  However, what caught my eye about Buffer is its simplicity.  All you have to do is create an account which takes a second, link your Twitter account which will take up second #2, and then type in your tweets.  That’s it.  You don’t even have to worry about scheduling them, that’s all done by Buffer from the get-go, so they’ll figure out when to randomly post your tweets (though you can go back and modify their initial settings to your own preference).  With Buffer you can finally set aside a time to plan out your Twitter updates for the day or even week, just by adding tweets to your Buffer.

Buffer Goodies

There are also some cool features with Buffer that makes tweeting a lot easier, including web browser plugins that can let you add a tweet from any web page you come across during the day.  This happens to me all of the time – I’m at work researching things for a project and I come across something cool that I don’t have time to post to Twitter at that instance.  I try to make a mental note to revisit the news story or article later, but 9 times out of 10 I forget.  With a browser plugin like Buffer for Chrome you’re just a click away from adding a tweet to your Buffer with the current page’s web address packed into a neat short URL.

The folks behind Buffer have also created mobile applications for iOS and Android so you can build your buffer on the go, and even a badge you can place on your blog or website so visitors can quickly tweet your content by adding it to their own buffers.  All of these features are designed well and simply, so unlike the Hootsuite dashboard which can be quite intimidating if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’ll be finding your way around Buffer in no time.

Perfect for Twitter Newbies

There is one final feature that I really like that will make Twitter very easy to use if you’re just starting out, whether you’re posting to your personal Twitter account or the account you created for your small business, and it’s called Suggest A Tweet.  When you’re just starting off with Twitter a lot of times folks aren’t really sure what to post, or maybe they don’t have any content to post or anything significant to say, but they don’t want their Twitter feed to be stagnant.  If you ever run into that issue with Buffer, you can use their Suggest A Tweet feature that will automatically come up with a new tweet for you to post all on its own!  You can of course modify the tweet before sending it to your buffer if you so choose, but it’s a perfect way to overcome Twitter writer’s block.  Try out Buffer right now by heading over to bufferapp.com, and let me know what you think in the comments!