Brass Tacks

4 Reasons to Add Online Video to Your Marketing & Communications Strategy

Hello and welcome to Horn Group's new series on online video best practices!

At Horn Group, we know seeing is believing and we’re big proponents of using video to get messages across. Our Interactive Design practice even has a specific focus on creating compelling videos to help clients maximize audience engagement. 

Check out our video on the top four reasons we recommend you start using video in your communications strategy today – and if you need help or want to work with a partner to start achieving success with video – feel free to give us a ring!

If you are looking to see what other leading brands are doing creatively with online video - check out some of these examples:

• Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”
• Evian “LiveYoung”
• Blend Tec “Will It Blend?” 

We Are Interactive Design

We have been working toward this day for quite some time.   The day when we as an agency, and specifically we of the Interactive Design team, can proudly strut our stuff for our clients, colleagues and the general public.  But what does it mean and why should you care?

By launching ID today we’re formalizing what we’ve already had in practice – that visual communication is not only important by itself, but also augments PR activities.  Too many agencies make half-hearted efforts to offer these services via partnerships and third parties, and especially in the PR world, it shows in the quality of the final product.  Horn Group has been about giving our clients all the tools they need to compete since day one, and today we are announcing Horn Group ID because we want a broader audience to know about it too.

Horn Group’s DNA is infused with visual thinking and we’ve been working together to bring the conversation to the places where our clients’ customers spend their time.  The list of those places extends well beyond the website experience to mobile devices, social networks and other content channels.  To that end we’ve developed ourselves into skilled visual communicators with chops in all things design and web-related as well as mobile application development and motion graphics.

So why work with Horn Group ID?  Our mission is to create a unique personality for your brand and build your presence to achieve your business goals.  Usually that’s about two basic concepts.  Clarifying your message and getting noticed by your targets.  Here’s how we do that:

Create positive brand perception

A lot of what we do is about perception, and being perceived well can help generate traffic, leads, revenue and get you noticed by potential investors or even position your company for acquisition. By creating a high-quality online presence we instantly up level your brand perception.  For most businesses, and especially most start-ups, the Internet is really the main venue where most interactions take place every day.  Your corporate identity, website and accompanying collateral all need to be created as part of a concerted effort based on a thorough discovery process.  Rising to the top of the pack cannot be undervalued in a crowded, fragmented online world where competition for visitors’ attention is cutthroat.

Create fresh content

Content creation is a big job, and yet too often companies make the decision to take that task on themselves. The results are usually lackluster at best.  At a minimum, potential customers already interested in your products and services need to understand what you offer, and how it is different.  That’s why we have seen a huge increase in engagements to create video and motion graphics content to help explain the often-subtle differences between you and your competitors.  It’s not rocket science – hire experts to create engaging content and watch perception, traffic and new business leads increase.  Engaging and varied content is essential for SEO, and by mingling social integration points you open up new pathways for sharing and word of mouth autonomous networking.

Extend your brand experience across all channels

Then we extend the core visual concepts and content we created to work as a concerted campaign in places like Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, as well as in ads, print publications, mobile apps and shareable content.  The idea is simple – if your business can communicate in a clear and concise manner, customers have an easier time making a buying decision about you.  The value of a consistent experience cannot be overemphasized – examples of what a closed system experience can do are all around us.  And that is exactly what digital communications aims to do – present a controlled environment of verbal and visual messages to keep the conversation on track to an end result.  Then with those guidelines in place, your user community can take and extend your message for you.   

Horn Group is everything you need in an agency today.  We are the new model.  We do what your ad agency and marketers can do; what your public relations teams can do; what your design firms do.  We are your one agency of record with a multidisciplinary team savvy in every area you need to address as part of your digital communications strategy.  We are built on solid experience and fundamentals and have some of the brightest minds and best talent today.  We’re agile enough to move quickly.  We’ll help you to stand out and get noticed.  

Introducing Horn Group ID

This is a big week in our history.  We are in essence relaunching our Interactive Design practice (formerly known as Interactive Services) with lots of goodies.  I’m really proud of this for a couple of reasons. 

Back in 2003, we were among the first, maybe even the first, boutique PR agency to start an interactive practice.  We thought interactive would be an important differentiator for us, but also that it would be the future of the PR world and communications in general.  Because of the Internet, you have to have visual capabilities along with verbal communications.  They just belong together we thought, and why not have them all under one roof?!

I’m also excited because our Interactive Design practice has grown up.  We have world-class designers and programmers, an expanded leadership team, tons of case studies to show in our portfolio, and new services in popular areas like mobile application development and video production. 

Building an interactive department “from scratch” is not for the faint of heart.  There are lots of issues to sort out.  Different billing models, business models, best practices for client service... Figuring out a way to support an integrated account with both Interactive and PR requires some training and learning on the part of the PR staff.  Now, we can proudly say we have sorted through many of these issues and are ready for the next phase in our evolution.  Sabrina

Horn Group, HTML5 and Web Standards

Riding the crest of the anti-Flash wave, our interactive team is primed to start offering HTML5 development services, for example to create ads for our clients for use with Apple's iAd Platform tentatively to come with iPhone OS 4.  While our approach has always been to create experiences that look and work the same across as many devices as possible via web standards, mobile and tablet computing have had a serious impact on the what trade tricks we have in our repertoire.  Apple just released an HTML5 and Web Standards showcase (for Safari only) that is a strong example of what can be done without Flash or JavaScript.  While Flash still has its place, we're very open to exploring the use of HTML5 for interactivity and mobile consumption for our clients.

Hallelujah! IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US

According to StatCounter via TechCrunch, IE6 market share has dropped below 5% in the US, while IE8 is still on the rise.  

What this means is that our Interactive Services team has further justification for having dropped support for IE6 last year, following in the footsteps of a few companies we admire, and moving forward we will be removing this browser from our list of supported browsers for all interactive projects by default.  In the future, our clients will need specifically to request support for IE6, and extra time and budget will need to go toward such efforts as if it were an additional feature.  This makes sense for us because in the past our work has been geared more toward a tech savvy B2B audience with the latest browsers and broadband connections. However, there have been some recent exceptions in which we've dealt with IE6 compatibility as a scope line item, and in some cases we have sacrificed the full experience for IE6 users, allowing them to experience only the basic functionality or simply to consume the content without the "bells and whistles."

For those of you who are not aware, because of the lack of standards support employed by Internet Explorer 6 as compared to modern browsers, developers have long lamented coding for IE6 compatibility because of the vexing problems and cumbersome code that is often necessary in order to get things to work the same way in all browsers.  In a nutshell, by simply surviving this long, it began stifling innovation and has impeded the general advance of technology on the web. IE6 was released in 2001 and has sparked many online movements to kill it, but many large corporations around the word continued to support it due to legacy systems compatibility concerns (the possibility of negative impact on existing software) or the cost to upgrade, which could include training.

These figures indicate rapid movement in the right direction for web development and make Horn Group's development team smile.

Our New Portfolio

Quietly late last week, our own Interactive Services team pushed a major update to our company website  live, mainly centered around revamping the client list and portfolio for better usability and fresher content. These new enhancements along with an upgraded version of the CMS will allow visitors to more quickly view and sort through our client list by industry, provide better visibility to search engines and better demonstrate our penetration into the industries where we excel. 

The new portfolio section comprised of a combination of projects from integrated accounts, Interactive only and PR only showcases work done over the past 24 months that just didn't make it onto the portfolio until now and demonstrates our wealth of capabilities.

The features we added across the board are there to help prospective clients more easily find crucial information about our experience and capabilities.  A few important features I'd like to point out include:

• Sorting and search functionality has been overhauled for the entire portfolio section
• You can now share direct URLs with clients for all projects, something that was not possible before due to the structure (key for pointing out portfolio examples to prospective clients or up-selling IS work
• An 'Addthis' widget is present in each portfolio project via the 'share' link for sharing across many popular social networking sites, email, etc.

All projects are now effectively blog posts which enables such features as:

• Projects can exists in multiple categories, such as industries and services
• There can be a virtually unlimited number of tags applies to each project, enabling better visibility through sorting and search
• Comments have been turned on for all projects - a feature we hope our current and past clients will use to comment on the work we did for them

Other content-related enhancements, such as:

• Shorter project descriptions for better reading
• Logos for all clients
• Color logos across the board
• Centralized client data (clients for which we've done work and case studies are linked to custom searches for work under their names via the client list)
• The bottom-rightmost panel of the homepage has now been updated to read "Our Portfolio: Get Familiar with our work" and links to 6 of the most recent projects
• Out toll-free number has been added to the footer across the board
• Prominent links to our Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, RSS feed and Twitter page have been added to the footer
• Contact buttons linked to custom contact forms are present for each of the executive team members now facilitating direct contact with our executive team

We have additional content enhancements planned in the near future that have been made possible by this big push.  We are also really excited to showcase new projects as they launch, especially our upcoming iPhone application launch designed and developed by the Interactive Services team.

Now check it out already, and check back often while we soup this baby up!

Google, Bowman, and the Sword of Data

The news that visual design lead Douglas Bowman is leaving Google got me thinking again about web design in the context of metrics - should web design be seen as a science or an art Certainly every minute design decision at the scale of Google is significant. Bowman cites lack of design freedom as his main reason for leaving, lamenting not being able to operate in an environment that is testing 41 shades of blue for performance, or having to prove a case for a 3, 4 or 5 pixel wide border.  While this may sound extremely frustrating to most designers reading this, I also think there is an important lesson here for any designer creating web and mobile applications, even on a much smaller scale than Google.

While Bowman may be over it, the valuable training a designer receives by being beholden to performance on that minute level offers insight to the challenge that technology places on interactive designers every day. Back in the earlier days of the web, I cut my teeth designing ad banners, trying to eek-out as much color and as many frames as possible within the 12kb file size limit. While that felt like menial labor at the time, it has proven to be extremely valuable training.  That work shapes my thinking when designing every page, trying to do more with code and less with images for performance, scalability and ease of updating without the need for a designer.   Any visual design system should remain inspired by art, to serve science. It's also a reminder that at a smaller scale, with ubiquitous high bandwidth and with most clients' user-base at nearly 100% broadband penetration, a designer can get lazy, and their designs get fat.

Bowman's Stopdesign has been an inspiration for many years, and I am sure wherever he lands the results will be stunning. We can all agree that up until a few years ago when Bowman joined Google, it's web presence was in dire need of a designer-ly touch. Bowman and team's positive impact has clearly been felt across the board. And while he has decided to move on for valid reasons, I am certain there are 10,000 eager designers behind him ready to fill his shoes to accept the challenge that designing for data poses them, as of yet unabashed by the debate of pixel widths or shades of blue.

In the context of the web, design is the sheath that houses the might sword of data, working in tandem to make sure the sword travels in style and can be served up expediently to execute its purpose.

Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

The always brilliant Smashing Magazine has another great post, this time about the problems that commonly plague both client companies and their web and social media agencies when setting about to design a corporate website. Although these points are somewhat common sense, I would suggest that many of these points are required reading for CMOs and Creative Directors everywhere. But alas, often times these pitfalls cannot be avoid as much as they can be managed and minimized.

Perhaps the biggest overall takeaway for me is that many problems in corporate web design projects are caused by an underlying fear by corporations to take calculated risks, instead pulling CYA moves and designing by committee. As a result some of these corporate marketing professionals never stick their neck out for fear of losing their heads. This is a lesson to learn when vetting an agency - talk ideas at the beginning of a project, and avoid the all-too-common me-too website approach. Make sure your agency knows what they are talking about and can walk the walk with social media. The best agencies will be energized by a client's willingness to stand-out from the pack and do something different or bold - and you get a lot more agency investment and personal commitment to doing great, stand-out work for your company. And of course in the end, the old adage remains true - you get what you pay for.

Getting the Word Out, about the After School Art Class and Project Tasks

I’ve been thinking a lot about communication lately, both because I’m a project manager and well…that’s what project managers are supposed to do, and because I’ve had my share of frustration with my older daughter’s preschool and their process of sharing information. It’s funny to me that professionally I try to be completely on top of information and making sure it gets to where it needs to go, but yet I can’t seem to keep anything of importance about my daughter’s school, the schedule, meetings with teachers, etc. anywhere on my radar. A few times already I’ve had to dash out to get her because she had a half day that I didn’t know about, or the after school program was canceled that day. Fortunately I’ve been able to keep straight what days she gets school lunch and what days she gets lunch from home…so I am proud to say I have not let her go hungry yet!

But, maybe it’s not so surprising that I’m easily forgetting all of the information they try to pass to me because it’s not the way that I am used to storing and accessing it. For them, everything is on paper…flyers coming home in her backpack, flyers coming in the mail, calendars getting printed in the beginning of the year that I guess will never need updating because nothing ever changes? Seems impossible to me, but I try to play along. I tack up the flyers, and put the calendar somewhere that I hope I will look at often.

Where’s the place that the most important stuff goes? On the refrigerator of course! The fridge serves as the command center of the home, or the “Information Dashboard”. There’s not enough room on the fridge to put all of the flyers and calendars and updates and whatever else they send over, and this is why things fall through the cracks.

What do I wish they would do? I wish they would go 100% electronic, emailing reminders, keeping their important dates on an online calendar that all the parents can access, keeping a blog for each class with updates and discussions. Send me the information in the way I can easily store and organize it. But, we’re far away from doing that, even though I try to push them.

But, what I can learn from all of this is the importance of streamlining the information flow to a project team. There are so many tools we can use to share information, but we don’t want to flood the group and make things unmanageable. Since I’ve started at the Horn Group I’ve been working on an information dashboard for the Interactive Services team. We’re using Basecamp as our main project/client communication tool, LiquidPlanner as a resource/task management tool, JIRA as an issue/bug tracker, and Outlook and instant messenger for other communication. We want to build one place where the group can find all of their information, and we think an excellent solution will be an  iGoogle page as an "Information Dashboard".

With an iGoogle dashboard, we can have a gadget that will pull in all of the recent activity in Basecamp, a Google calendar gadget with all of our upcoming deliverable dates pulled from Basecamp, a bookmarks gadget for sharing useful and interesting links, and a status and hours report on all active projects. We also have individual task lists setup for each team member, which I manage centrally via LiquidPlanner and publish to the team members on a regular basis, and a general "What everyone is working on" list that I also manage. Since it's not all about working hard all of the time, we also setup a photo-gallery gadget with nice embarrassing pictures of the group. Long term, we'd like to have a Yammer-type communication gadget on the page, and a feed of our email inbox.

One of the basics that we all learn in Project Manager camp is that as the size of the team increases, the lines of communication multiply. The more that can be stored and shared via a central location for all team members to see the better. And with all of the web tools out there just waiting to be utilized, it seems silly to print up memos to walk around and hand to your people every morning!

Bye Bye Brochureware

So what would happen if you did away with the traditional corporate brochureware website and replaced it with a blog? I don't mean replace a static website with a CMS system. I mean actually use a blog-like publishing model for a corporate website. And, instead of populating the site with approved marketing material, the content was mostly employee generated.

Well, Right Media is doing just this. Their corporate website is for the most part a blog of employee generated  posts. There is static content like case studies and whitepapers available in the sidebar navigation, but the majority of content is employee generated. Why are they doing this? I think they put it best themselves:

"Instead of trying to describe what we do with traditional marketing copy, we’re letting our employees tell our story by simply writing about what they do every day. From pitches to training summaries, success stories to ongoing challenges, each article will be a personal, unfiltered glimpse into Right Media."

And this is my favorite:

"...we’re always developing new products, improving upon existing ones, and contending with new issues. Static marketing copy can’t keep up with it all. Our employee articles will."

The implications of this are interesting on so many different levels, and whether or not they've found the perfect solution is beside the point. What is exciting here is their willingness to take risks and do what it takes to overcome the inertia inherent in traditional, static marketing.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Communcations Blogs Right Media

Elance.com

We're doing a bunch of web design work for Elance. Initially they brought us in to help with their Enterprise division. After seeing our initial design comps, they decided to have us redesign their corporate site as well. Yesterday, the homepage for the corporate site launched. They're pleased. We're pleased.  Check it out: elance.com

We're still working on the Enterprise site. Launch should be in the next few weeks.