Archive for ‘SmallBox

Think Kit: a year-end inspiration kit

Posted by sara
Dec
1
2011

0
Comments

Filed Under: Culture SmallBox Social Media Think Kit

Think Kit 2011

Lydia and I used to participate in a group blogging project called Reverb run by Gwen Bell. The idea was simple: post on your blog everyday in December (or as much as possible) following a series of prompts designed to reflect on the past year.

Yesterday I got an email that Gwen wasn’t going to run the project this year. Instead, she open sourced it, inviting others to create their own version. We couldn’t resist. With one day to swoop into action, we hatched this plan and dubbed it Think Kit.

Daily posting? Are we crazy?!
We wanted to flex our publishing muscle a little. We like to blog. We squeeze it in when we can. This project will help us approach our sharing habits with a little more intention, at least for this one month.

At the same time, we’ll sate another need: we like to connect with our community and value being part of a larger Indy tech culture. We’re hoping other companies and individuals will join us. Won’t you, please?

Why Think Kit?
In our weekly internal meetings, we talk a lot about ideas, from whence they spring, how we seek and maintain inspiration. This seems like a perfect place to start – a simple set of topics to spark some thought and wordsmithing.

Week 1:
We’re keeping it simple to start. The first week is all about reflecting on your favorite things from this year. Today: a favorite photo.

Go here to see this week’s prompts. There, you’ll also be able to sign up to receive a daily email about each prompt during December.

Are there any rules?
Only rule is no rules! Post when you want, write about 3 prompts or 30, change up topics. Take the Think Kit and make it yours. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Happy Think Kitting!

 

Internet on the move. Why Mobile matters:

Posted by Justin Shimp
Nov
29
2011

0
Comments

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Marketing Mobile Search Engines SmallBox

Think back to your first cell phone. Mine was a black and white Nokia with detachable faceplates and a wonderful version of the game snake. Those days are long gone and I now have an iPhone that makes my first computer growing up look like a sad joke.

Not only is this little device in my pocket faster than the computers of yore, it also has the power to view just about every bit of content on the web. But have you tried looking at a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices?

Mobile optimized verus not optimized for mobile traffic

It’s confusing. Images break, forms don’t work. A bad mobile experience means I’m almost certain to search for another site that offers a better user experience on my phone.

According to Google, I am not alone. Around 60% of people are unlikely to return to a site that’s not mobile friendly. User engagement increases by 85% with a mobile-friendly design. That is steadily increasing and for the most part businesses have been slower about catching up with technology than their customers.

In response to these numbers, Google has launched a information site called GoMo to educate owners of websites. The site provides data that makes it pretty clear: mobile browsing is here to stay.

Google’s findings are very much in line with the trends we see in our client sites. In fact, in reviewing a sample of the scores of websites SmallBox monitors, mobile traffic increased a whopping 230% in 2011 compared to 2010.

If you’re ready to get serious about mobile, SmallBox can help! Don’t be caught with a website that cannot be viewed by a huge percentage of your customer base. Contact us today for questions or quotes.

Beautiful Brown County’s Beautiful New Website

Posted by tyler
Nov
15
2011

1
Comment

Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

When we travel somewhere, whether it be for an extended weekend or longer, for work or for play, there are things we obviously want to know in order to make the experience memorable. What are the best places to eat? Where will we be staying? Is there anywhere to shop? What do we have to see and experience before leaving?

For Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), they knew a more user-friendly website that answered all of those questions and more for visitors would be key to their future growth.

The Challenge

For years, CVB knew their website provided valuable information to visitors, but content was hard to find unless visitors knew exactly what they were searching for. Navigation was unorganized and hard to manage. CVB wanted their visitors to find lodging solutions much more easily and quickly.

CVB needed a custom web solution that was clean and user-friendly – allowing customers to easily find lodging locations throughout Brown County. They also needed a solution that was easy to manage, provided valuable information to their customers and offered a fun experience. They wanted their customers to be able to search for and find valuable information easily.

Brown County CVB has partnerships with local businesses as well. Restaurants, lodging, shops and other multi-faceted organizations have pages and information on CVB’s website for people visiting the area. For years, CVB was spending countless hours inputting information from their valuable partners who operate businesses throughout Brown County. Anytime a partner needed an update to information, CVB was responsible for updating that on the site.

They needed a custom solution that allowed all of their partners to login and update their pages and information that was important to them and potential customers.

The Solution

After two years of deliberating on building a new web presence, Brown County CVB partnered with Smallbox. Brown County CVB knew they wanted an Indiana company to build their new website and after they learned about Smallbox’s success with the 24-Hour Web Project and involvement in the community, they felt that the partnership was a good fit.

www.browncounty.com

Smallbox built an incredibly robust content management system that would provide logins and editing capabilities to CVB’s unique partnerships. Not only did Smallbox address Brown County CVB’s lodging concerns and make it easier for visitors to locate local lodging establishments, we applied the same technology and functionality to restaurants, shops and other organizations in the community as well.

Smallbox implemented multiple calls-to-action on Brown County CVB’s new website that drive traffic to upcoming events and an interactive map where visitors can browse all of the businesses and establishments by location.

www.browncounty.com

 

The Results

In browncounty.com, Brown County Convention & Visitors Bureau now has a robust custom web solution that is extremely easy to navigate for visitors.

Whether you’re looking for a place to stay, shop, eat or see, or if you’re looking for things to do, it’s easy to find simply by browsing and making your way through the website. You can search by things to do, see, eat, etc or by location through an interactive map. No longer does a person have to know specifically what they’re searching for in order to find it.

Clear and easy-to-find calls to action blocks throughout the site help drive visitors to finding information and content they’re looking for.

Brown County is beautiful. CVB’s new website and CMS provide the tools they need to sufficiently show off Brown County. The Smallbox CMS is easy to update content with new photos, video or other media like a live “Leaf Cam” where visitors can monitor color changes in the trees and make trip decisions based around “peak times” throughout the year.

With the addition of partner logins, Brown County CVB team members save substantial amounts of time and resources from fielding requests to edit, exchange and create new content for each individual business on the site. Now, individual businesses and partners can manage their own content anytime they want.

Feedback from users has been incredibly well received. Brown County CVB partners predominately love the flexibility the site and CMS have to offer.

Check out Brown County’s new site here.

 

 

The One-of-a-Kind Million Dollar List

Posted by tyler
Oct
25
2011

1
Comment

Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

One of the most important aspects of philanthropy is simply awareness. The more transparent a foundation, charity or other organization is about their mission and needs, the higher probability there is for people to interact through donations or other contributions.

We are so excited to have worked with Center on Philanthropy to launch The Million Dollar List, a one-of-a-kind online database. Here’s the story:

Challenge

Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University wanted a comprehensive resource that projected philanthropic gifts of $1 million and more to anyone who was interested in learning about philanthropy, donating or raising funds.

They wanted to raise awareness through the transparency of giving. Anyone should be able to search to see where donations are coming from, the organizations receiving them, and where else needs for donations might exist.

Solution

Center on Philanthropy came to SmallBox with a big vision in functionality and a short timeline. Not only did we want to make this extensive list of data searchable, and easy to understand, but we wanted to make it fun for visitors to the site!

One million dollars is a significant amount of money to donate, and therefore we needed to provide users with the ability to easily discover where they want to give. We implemented a search functionality that allows users to search donations by donor, recipient, location or subsector.

An Indiana resident who is passionate about both higher education and his local art community and wishes to support it through donating $1 million, but wants to know where his money is most needed, can visit www.milliondollarlist.org and search by location. From there, he can search total donations received by sector and will notice that higher education has received over 57%, while Arts, Culture and History organizations have received just over 4% of total Indiana donations. He can easily and quickly click on organizations to learn more about them and discover where his contribution best fits.

SmallBox scaled processes to fit within Center on Philanthropy’s quick 4-week timeline. We wanted to see what tools were already available that would fit with this big picture, but we also wanted the user experience to be easy and fun. We made sure that while the deadline was tight, our quality of work didn’t waiver.

An effective and interactive interface, even one that contains extensive data, shouldn’t require instructions. The content and functionality should do all the work. We wanted it to be easy and fit Center on Philanthropy’s needs and the needs of visitors to the site.

Results

In milliondollarlist.org, Center on Philanthropy has an awesome searchable, powerful and free tool that arms their audience with a tool to easily make decisions, learn about philanthropy and raise their awareness on where needs for substantial donations might exist.

Anyone can visit the site and learn about philanthropy by seeing who has given, where they gave, discover trends in giving and more. The site covers more than 60,000 gifts of $1 million and up in one single database. A visitor can search throughout the entire world for donation information, or segment their list as small as individual donors or recipients.

SmallBox’s content management system allows Center on Philanthropy to be more efficient in their reports on giving. They no longer have to take the time to update extensive spreadsheets. The data updates on the site and is easily exported in as large or small segments as needed.

Together, Center on Philanthropy and SmallBox launched the most comprehensive, free, online public record of gifts of this size.

 

Finding Your Content Comfort Zone

Posted by sara
Oct
20
2011

1
Comment

Filed Under: Culture Marketing SmallBox

I’ve heard this echoed a thousand times: don’t tweet about food. Funny thing, though. Many of my personal tweets about food get an enthusiastic response. In recent months, my most @replied tweet was about meat loaf. Seriously. Part of it is that I’ve connected with other food lovers and so a food tweet is very at home in my twitter stream.

After offering consulting for a wide variety of brands, I can definitely say that each client and audience is unique and different. When thinking about new content for your brand, forget any generalities you’ve heard like ‘don’t post about this, don’t tweet that.’ What is okay for the casual swimming pool company, might not be kosher for the addiction treatment center.

Take this pineapple picture we posted to the official SmallBox business facebook page as example. It may not tell you that we offer amazing web design and marketing services, but it does provide a feel for our culture and let you know that we like to have fun. For SmallBox, there’s value in this type of message because we’ve decided we want to let people in – to see our space and get to know our team a bit. If you have a more buttoned-up, corporate culture, this type of post might not work for you.

Creating Content for Your Brand

So, how do you decide what’s acceptable for your brand?

Define Your Brand Tone
To determine what is acceptable, start simply by establishing your ideal brand voice. What words best describe the vibe you want to share with your audience? Pick 5 words, or more if you need them.

For SmallBox, we define our ideal tonality like this:
Knowledgeable, Bright, Community-Minded, Approachable, Witty, Personable, Creative, Fun. Sometimes cheeky. We joke, we give shoe-fives.

All content we create is filtered through this lens. In a way, this is just who we are, but it’s also well thought-out. With multiple personalities creating content for SmallBox, having this general direction clearly defined is critical.

Build a Team Who Gets It
As Jeb refers to in his digital brand ecosystem, HR is marketing. Hire and train a team that gets your culture and brand voice and can run with it. Having a tuned-in team that just ‘gets it’ lessens the need for strict guidelines or micro-managing oversight of all of your content creation.

Create Your Content Comfort Zone
What if your team needs more guidance? Your might find you need to spell out what’s black and white, and whether you’re comfortable in the gray areas. Let your content creators know if they’re allowed to be silly and make jokes. Don’t want your official brand twitter to comment on last night’s tv show or celebrity gossip? Say so. By providing specific examples of the types of content you want, and what you don’t, you’ve given your team the confidence to create within your framework.

Detailed content guidelines can be a considerable time investment up front, but really digging in to find your content comfort zone will make your future content creation easier and more focused. Add in a solid content strategy with your business goals, defined target audiences, an editorial calendar and more and you’ll really be set up to succeed in creating great content.

« Older Entries   Newer Entries »