Archive for November 2008

Small Box Rocks Broad Ripple

Posted by Jack
Nov
19
2008

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Filed Under: Everything Else

It’s been almost a whole month since we put on our second annual gargantuan, world-renowned and highly accoladed music festival, Broad Ripple Music Festival.

Okay, so maybe it’s not world renowned or terribly enormous, but we’re proud of taking part of the community of Broad Ripple and the culture within, as well as raising money for many of Indy’s non-profits. As far as we can tell it’s the only 15 stage music festival going on in Indianapolis these days and this year we wanted to make sure it really got seen.

We first got the idea to do it last year after the Midwest Music Summit, which was hosted in Indy, came to an end after five or six years of rocking Indy. The summer of 2006 just didn’t seem complete without a local celebration of culture and music, so our hands were practically tied. Though this festival doesn’t have quite the far reaching locale as it mainly focuses on Indianapolis and the surrounding cities, like Bloomington and Muncie, it still proved to provide plenty of musical entertainment.

We learned a lot in the first year and made some adjustments accordingly. We had a bigger head start and made a lot of strategic moves that equally brought more people to the festival, strengthened the quality of the event as well as tied Small Box to it to get noticed for our efforts.

Sponsorship was much stronger this year, as was media coverage. Besides great coverage and advertising leading up to the festival by the main sponsor, NUVO Newsweekly, we also got radio spots on WTTS, an indystar.com front page story and coverage or ads on indy.com, indianapolismusic.net, myoldkentuckyblog.com, and of course musicalfamilytree.com. The fest was even sponsored by Butler Scion. If you had you ear to the proverbial musical ground here in Indy, you at least heard about the festival.

With this year’s festival we launched a new social site for the Broad Ripple area called BroadRippleBuzz.com. This new venture is especially for fans of Broad Ripple and encourages interaction and participation. We hope for it to become a place that people go to find out about what’s going on in Broad Ripple, be it music, art, business, or juicy gossip.

This years lineup included lots of great local bands, DJs and acoustic performers. We added a kick-off party this year, which took place on Friday night at the Vogue. The lineup included Everthus the Deadbeats, Mardelay, Grampall Jookabox, Born Again Floozies, Twin Cats and Abner Trio. This was certainly the most star studed lineup of the weekend, but we made sure to keep plenty for the actual festival too!

There were 15 venues total with individual promoters and individual non-profits benefiting from each.

Some of these venues were booked by Small Boxers. Jeb put on the show at Spin once again, which featured the beat juggling and rhyme saying talents of the Mudkids and indie rockers Gentleman Caller. Connor’s Pub, a new venue to the fest, had psychadelic band Everything, Now! and Marmoset and was put on by Karl (who also drums in the band Abner Trio). Karl and I (I’m aka Jackola, a DJ) put our band and DJ heads together to put on an all day schedule at Casba, also a new venue to the fest, with bands from 6-10pm (like Kentucky Nightmare and Thin Fevers) and DJs from 10pm to 3am (including DJ StarSteady and Action Jackson).

We’re proud to have put it on again this year and can’t wait for next. It would not have been possible without the undying efforts of all of the promoters, venues, musicians, fans and music nerds. Let’s rock the ripple again next year!

Secrets of Psychic Web Pages by Small Box EXPOSED!

Posted by ben
Nov
19
2008

2
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Filed Under: Development Internet Marketing Search Engines

You’re probably thinking that just like with John Edwards of Crossing Over and the magicians David Blane and Criss Angel, there’s got to be a “trick” behind the seemingly other-worldly, metaphysical, mind reading powers of Psychic Web Pages by Small Box. If so, you’d be right.

Psychic Web Pages by Small Box use techniques very similar to those used by the most successful mentalists and poker players. Mentalists and poker players rely upon observing “tells” (i.e. often overlooked details of speech and behavior) to successfully infer what’s on your mind. Similarly, Psychic Web Pages by Small Box make note of the “tells” you leave around as you surf the web.

One of the biggest “tells” you leave around is the URL of the page you just visited. Whenever you enter a new web page, your browser tells the server of that web page the URL of the page you just left. So, anytime you leave Google to visit a web site, that site “knows” that you just came from Google.com Not only that, it also knows the exact URL on Google.com that you came from.

Now take a closer look at the URL for the Google search of “indianapolis labor attorney” in the screen shot below. It contains the keyword “labor”.

When you click on the entry for Harrison Moberly, the server “knows” that you just came from a Google search that used the keyword “labor”. So, it serves up a homepage that features the Employment Law Practice Group and one of that group’s attorneys.

Even though it’s not magic, it still seems pretty magical to your site’s visitors when they see highly targeted and relevant content that matches exactly what they’re looking for. This will result in a lower bounce rate and increased number of conversions from your site’s visitors.

Getting this to work just right requires a team effort between Small Box web developers and Small Box SEO consultants. The web developers implement the technology that allows a server to see the URLs of referring sites and serve up dynamic page elements based on a defined set of keywords. The SEO consultants do the content and keyword analysis to determine which dynamic page elements best match the user intent behind the search phrases used to enter the site. Over time, Small Box SEO consultants also “train” the site to become a better “psychic” by conducting periodic reviews of site’s web metrics in Google Analytics. These reviews uncover new keywords visitors use to find the site and also reveal effectiveness of particular dynamic page elements against their assigned keywords. As this data driven maintenance is carried out, the web site becomes more and more uncanny in its ability to read the mind of its visitors.

Want your very own psychic web site? Then contact us through our web site or give us a call at (317) 254-0932.

Psychic Web Pages by Small Box Can Read Your Mind!

Posted by ben
Nov
19
2008

0
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Filed Under: Internet Marketing Search Engines

YouTube is replete with videos of David Blane, Criss Angel and other magicians demonstrating their uncanny psychic abilities to read minds. Although none of us at Small Box are blessed with such powers, we have discovered how to develop Psychic Web Pages that can read visitors’ minds.

Don’t believe me? See it for yourself:

After a Google search for an “indianapolis apellate attorney”, I clicked on the listing for Harrison Moberly, LLP half way down the first page at #5.

I arrived at the homepage of Harrison Moberly which displayed the Appellate Law Practice Group as the “Featured Practice Group”. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the “Featured Attorney” is one of the lawyers in the Appellate Law Practice Group.

Maybe it got lucky, so I did another Google search for an “indianpolis labor attorney” and clicked on the listing for Harrison Moberly which was the second one in the inset map.

I arrived again at a Harrison Moberly homepage that looked the same, but wait! This time the “Featured Practice Group” was the Employment Law Practice Group and the “Featured Attorney” was a lawyer from that practice group.

The homepage was psychic and had just read my mind!

The advantages of Psychic Web Pages are pretty obvious, but bear repeating.

  • Lower bounce rates
  • Visitors view more pages on your site
  • Visitors spend more time on your site
  • More visitors convert
  • Better search engine rankings

Want to impress your customers and friends with a Psychic Web Page all your own? Then don’t hesitate to contact us through this website or give us a call at (317) 254-0932.

Want to know how the Harrison Moberly homepage pulls off this mind reading trick? Then read my blog post on:
The Secrets of Psychic Web Pages by Small Box EXPOSED!

Economic Downturn Bright Spot- Talent Land Grab!

Posted by Jeb
Nov
19
2008

4
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Filed Under: Everything Else

I know, I know, we are all freaked out by the strange economic times. So I thought it would be good to take a look on the bright side for a minute. With all the layoffs and general upheaval there are some golden opportunities here. The one that I keep focusing on is the coming talent land grab.

As highly skilled and experienced workers are laid off by companies forced to downsize these workers will be pushed into the job market. I see two basic benefits to businesses coming from this unfortunate situation.

The first benefit is the flood of new talent available to established companies as well as start ups. These workers will be highly motivated and willing to make concessions on salary, benefits, etc. in exchange for job security. They may also be open to to accepting equity in a start up as partial compensation.

The second benefit is existing employees will work harder and hopefully smarter knowing that their job security is not what it was a year ago. When they joined a company a year or 10 years ago they were in the driver’s seat when it came to benefits, salary, time off, etc. Now they are coming to see that there is a queue of qualified applicants jockeying for their position. Businesses will benefit from this dynamic and see a decrease in turn over and an increase in employee loyalty overall.

Another bright spot here is that a downturn is a great time to start a business. Labor is cheap. Rent is cheap. Investors are looking for investments they can have a say in after getting burned by a lack of transparency in the markets. Also, companies that start up in a downturn learn out of the gate how to deal with tough times which will create a healthy discipline to reign in excesses during the good times.

I know it seems at times like we are falling into an economic black hole but we will come out the other side in the next couple years and the companies that survive will go on to reap the benefits of survival.