Marketing and Management Thoughts

I recently read the article ‘Managing an Online Reputation‘ by Kermit Pattison in the NYT. It was a great article and we recommend that you check it out online.  The three keys are to Monitor, Manage, and Promote. Below are some of the highlights:

To monitor your online reputation check out some Web tools that do just that. We use Google Alerts here at nineteen05 and simply subscribe in our RSS reader to get updates daily. We have several set up for our business name, staff member names, and some key terms related to our business. Some of the tools in that review are free, others can get quite expensive. For churches I would recommend the free options.

Free Automatic Alert Options

• Google Alerts – Searches blogs and more
• technorati.com – Blog Search Engine
• keotag.com – very simple, but lacked ability to search all sources at once
• monitorthis.info – Blog Search Engine (found out of date entries)

Follow Up Post: Psychology of Tropicana Re-branding Failure

Yesterday it was announced by Pepsi Company (the owners of Tropicana brand Orange Juice) that the new packaging/brand that they rolled out in January for Tropicana will be removed. Over the last two months Pepsi has undergone a very aggressive re branding campaign of many of their largest products (Pepsi brands, sierra mist, mountain dew).

Now in a statement released by Pepsi Co and an article in the NY Times Pepsi says they are rolling back the brand to the much more familiar orange with the straw in it. So what was the problem?

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Following up our post on the Evolution of Video is this 4 minute video (by MadV)  that uses a communities response to a video to form this compilation of hope. I found it very inspiring, I also tried to find the original video clip but it was taken offline for some reason (likely when the owners account was hacked last week).

While there is a lower production value due to the heavy use of web-cams, the impact more than outweighs that drawback in my opinion. Your thoughts?

Welcome to a new series that will be rolled out over the next few weeks where we’ll highlight the community building power of technology.

Everyone hopes that the ministry they lead will have an effect on influencing the lives of those they are ministering to. It is at this point that the church holds up the importance of community to bring about these changes. More and more we are learning empirically that intimate friends improve ones health and well being. This then becomes our goal; building communities of intimate friends. (more…)

You might have heard about this net neutrality issue, or you might not. It’s a topic of grave concern for web-developers. In a nutshell this is net neutrality.

I bring this up today because the FCC is in the process of defending Net Neutrality against Comcast this Friday. We’ll post the results of their ruling them.

Currently every bit of information sent over the Internet is treated the exact same, no priority is given to anything. The email the US President goes just the same as one I send. Some congressmen/women in D.C. believe in-correctly that the volume of traffic currently experiencing is causing massive delays in the deliver of some of these information bits.

To be far, there is more traffic on the Internet than ever (thanks to video sharing sites like you-tube). Yet everything is still clipping along just fine.

So why the problem here?

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The first page of your website is the only page a vast majority of people visiting your website will ever see. It should receive the bulk of our attention as designers and site maintainers. While we like to believe that our visitors will spend a fraction of the time reading our content as we spend creating it (like the faith statement pages…), the truth is that they don’t.

While looking over some site statistics for clients this week I was reminded of a often forgotten web truth.

Most users spend under 10 seconds at your site.

This means we have only an instant to communicate our message to our end users.

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