Understanding how your Facebook fan page is working for your product, service or organization is key to analyzing your ROI when it comes to your social media efforts. As a major part or your overall marketing strategy, social media outlets have become some of the major driving forces behind added communication between your customers and your brand as well as extending the reach in a viral way.

Facebook Insights functions as an analytics tool for your Facebook Fan Page.  One of the metrics that it reports on is something called “Talking About This.” No, this doesn’t mean that Facebook is monitoring every conversation on people’s pages, but it means that someone has taken an action that is visible to THEIR friends on Facebook.  Actions that generate this metric are:

The user…

• Clicked on the “Like” button
• Shared a post
• Commented on a post
• Posted on your wall
• Liked your page
• Responded to an event
• Mentioned your page
• Checked into Your Place Page
• Recommended Your Page

The reason why this metric is so important is because it will show you the level of interaction that people are having with your Facebook Fan page.  We all know that the more interaction and activity with your page, the more likely it is that your social media footprint will increase and thus your marketing reach.  After all, we are using social media to connect with as many people as possible and the “talking about this” metric is a direct example of how “Viral” your social media marketing is.

By Mike Sauce, Head Media Chef – SaucePan Creative

I know… a provocative title to this blog post. However, it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. When we “designer types” talk about color and choose them in our branding or website designs, we use color for specific reasons. Colors are, aside from the overall aesthetics, a huge part of how someone feels about a design. What does the color say about a brand? Why were the colors chosen?

Some of those answers are obvious but many are subconscious. I often use the term “Gestalt” to describe why something feels like it works or doesn’t work. That term means simply, the sum of all parts. Color can have a huge impact on the overall design just by its use. Does the color direct users to do something? Does the color (or lack of) portray a feeling or focus the user’s eye to a specific point on the page. There is a reason why a button is RED. That means “DONT PUSH IT” unless you are really sure.

For example a couple of years ago, I was involved with an e-commerce project where we experimented with the color of an “Action” button for a web site. We prepared the proper A-B test to determine which color was more “clickable.” Initially, the button was orange because it was aesthetically consistent with the overall logo and branding. However, once we changed the color to a bright green… it became more of a focal point and suggested that it was an “Action” item thereby creating more click-throughs.

In Art School, I spent my fair share of time studying the use of color… ok…. I more or less spent about 6 months of my life understanding how to mix the primary colors to obtain all hues, values and shades on the color wheel. The same thing.. over and over again until my eye was so trained that my wife literally hates shopping for paint colors with me. Thanks Mom and Dad… that was a real value for your tuition money! Anyway, I was fascinated by how colors, even in combination with other colors, could convey an emotion or provoke a response from the viewer. Here’s a list of “simple” colors and what they mean.

RED
Red is a dramatic and warm color. Red also conveys “warning” due to the fact that it is used on stop signs and stop lights. Red can also convey energy and strength because of its bold nature.

ORANGE
Orange, while my favorite color, is a mix of red and yellow (any school kid will tell you that!). It is often cheerful and warm almost like the sun. It conveys a sense of happiness or youth.

YELLOW
Yellow has been said to be an “Angry” color. While I don’t feel that it is always an angry color, it can have a sense of tension just because of the way it is used with other colors. Because it is the most visible color, it can often “Vibrate” with other colors. It also conveys a sense of cheerfulness and warmth, again like the sun.

GREEN
Green can either be a warm color or a cool color. The yellow-ey greens can go warm, while the blue greens can go cool. Green is a peaceful color that can often be calming to the mind. We see so much of it in nature (present drought aside) that we are accustomed to seeing it and it blends into the background. Green makes you feel secure (like in a forest) and offers a bit of tranquility.

BLUE
Blue is a cool color. It is also the most popular color by far for most things. It conveys a sense of trust and dependability. It’s also a color that doesn’t fight with you. It is tranquil and peaceful just like green.

PURPLE
Apart from the stereotypical “Regal” nature of purple, it too is a calming color. Purple has long been associated with kings and queens.. that is until the Knights Inn used it as their bed spreads and, in my mind, ruined purple forever. It is considered to be stately and humble but possesses a richness not found with any other color.

BROWN
“What can Brown do for you?” (apart from a the slogan in the UPS commercials) Brown conveys reliability and stability. It also has a sense of realness that doesn’t intrude on you. It is also a color we are used to looking at in nature so it too has a calming effect.

WHITE
Hospital. Enough said. Seriously… white says pure, fresh and clean. White, with light, is the presence of all colors and with pigments is the absence of all colors.

BLACK
Black means elegance. Black conveys a sense of power, refinement and sophistication. It can also be mysterious and authoritative.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December, 21 – Noblesville, IN, Even though the Expression Engine website content management system is relatively new for SaucePan Creative, lead developer, Justin Kimbrell, has won a national award for his work. The plug-in, “Google Maps for Expression Engine,” beat out many other worthy contenders to take the top honor in the “Best Field Type” category at the Devot:ee’s AcademEE Awards 2011. The awards are in their 4th year and have recognized some of the most influential and innovative solutions for the Expression Engine platform.

“We had several website projects at SaucePan Creative that had a need for location information tied to driving directions and a visual display of a Google Map,” said Mike Sauce – Owner SaucePan Creative. “Justin put is skills to work to not only solve the client needs, but build a self contained and universally adoptable plug-in for the entire Expression Engine community. I’m excited for him to continue to develop and adapt the plug-in as we gain feedback from other users and our own business scenarios. Through this open, community approach to continual improvement of the plug in, we will be able to offer our clients a “value add” through software upgrades and even better utilization of the Google Maps technology.”

Google Maps for ExpressionEngine makes it easy for website managers, admin, and developers to quickly implement many of the powerful features within Google Maps, and doing so without writing any programming. Using a simple and intuitive interface users can add points of interest, routes, regions, directions, radius based proximity searches, create custom maps, and a lot more.

“I decided to make the project public in April, 2011 with intent on giving back to the community,” Said Justin Kimbrell – Lead Developer at SaucePan Creative. “The project has quickly grown in popularity and is used by people all around world, and is currently available in five languages. I get a great sense of satisfaction knowing I am able to make a quality product that real people use on a daily basis. What start as a free project, now has people waiting to pay for the next major release, which will be for sale around the 1st of next year.”

About SaucePan Creative
SaucePan Creative is a full service marketing and website development company located in Noblesville, Indiana. Founded by Mike Sauce, and co-owned by Gabrielle Sauce, SaucePan Creative has been serving clients innovative and creative digital media solutions since 2002. They are located at 936 Maple Ave, Noblesville Indiana and can be reached at: (317) 773-2194.

For the past year, I have been preaching that social media (Facebook, twitter, et. Al.) is where clients should be focusing their online marketing dollars. While I still believe that more and more people are turning to these outlets for information, I do not believe in a single, silver bullet for targeting potential and existing customers.

It is true that over 60 percent of online marketing dollars will be spent on social media management and relationship building in 2012, the runner up is email. I would also argue from past experience, that email marketing can be more cost effective when you look at actual dollars spent to revenue.  In fact, I feel that in a business to business situation, email is more accepted as a method of communication.

NO SPAMMING – Let me take a moment to define what I mean about email marketing. I’m not talking about purchasing a list of email addresses and sending an email blindly to the list. I’m talking about utilizing an existing customer list or a list that was cultivated through a special event promotion or offline method. With that said, the use of regular and targeted email messages to the company list can have many benefits but the emails must be targeted an simple.

KEEP IT SIMPLE - Gone are the days of a huge, monthly email newsletter. People already receive a huge amount of email on a daily basis so it is important to reach a balance of the amount of information in each email vs. the frequency that it is sent. The email should be crafted in a way that it is easy to scan for only the information that the viewer finds interesting, and if at all possible, provide an excerpt with a link to a blog post or web page with the full details of the story.

DESIGN MATTERS – Many email list providers offer do it yourself templates for email. I could go on and on why I feel that template based any things are a bad idea, but I will just say that you are a unique company. Why would you want to look generic? Take the time and have a professional designer layout your email in a way that the design looks and feels like your company and it utilizes design principles that allow for easy scanning and proper use of typography.

By following this approach to your email marketing in conjunction with a solid social media campaign (not just a parrot of your email campaign) you will achieve a solid 1-2 punch to online marketing for 2012 that reaches your audience no matter which outlet they prefer.

If you would like more information about how we utilize email with existing saucepan creative clients, please contact us today! info@inthesaucepan.com or (317) 773-2194

What is a “CMS” or Content Management System?

I recently saw a TV commercial put out by 1&1 internet about how you can create your website in minutes.  These types of services always make me laugh. You get to select your template, type in your text, define your color scheme, upload a logo and you’re online ready to do business with your new “custom” website. Ha!  Sounds easy doesn’t it. Sure… if you want to look like you bought a website and put it together in 15 minutes… that is a perfect solution.  You’re never going to be MY client with that mindset. I believe that a website is an experience.  It is an extension of your brand… your company… your face to the internet. If that’s the image you want, the 15 minute website, then have at it.  Hope it works out for you!  The majority of OUR clients want to convey an image… a statement about how they want to communicate with online users and, in many times, their first contact with a potential customer.

When we’re done creating a website, or even during the sales process, the topic of “how do we change things on our website” always comes up.  In the not to distant past, the answer was… just send us the updates and we’ll update the site for you or you can get Adobe Dreamweaver and learn how to edit HTML.  The other option was to have your site developed on a CMS or content management system. I hated them. All of them… and for good reasons. To me… CMS was a dirty word for a site that was uninteresting, visually dull and cookie cutter.

Until recently, most CMS systems confined your design abilities to a series of “stock” templates that were fairly rigid when it came to customizing design and user experience. This went against my core belief that form is always more important than function. You see, the websites that we create at SaucePan Creative are “custom” designed for the client and the particular branding we are trying to build. When we’re forced into a “box” with the various CMS systems, we don’t like that because it makes us have trade-offs.

Another major drawback to a CMS system was the fact that, generally, the code set was not “open” for development. By this I mean that it was, or is, proprietary to the company who produced the system. One example would be a system designed by Microsoft, a company who is notorious for building software that is proprietary to other Microsoft software and requires certified developers to maintain or modify. This is a HUGE issue with me. Most Microsoft products or other proprietary systems are far more bloated than they need to be and cumbersome for “real” developers to work with. Their efforts to make things easy for the masses do nothing more than cause inefficient systems and non-standard compliant code. The first generations of Microsoft “Front Page” (an HTML Website Editor) is an example of a piece of software that tried to make website editing “easy” and did nothing more than DESTROY well written HTML code with Microsoft junk code.

Another example of a bad CMS would be WordPress.  While I have extensive experience using WordPress as a blogging platform, and customizing the look and feel to our needs, I feel that WordPress is dipping their toes into the website CMS area by the pervasive use of the WordPress platform as a Website CMS combined with a blogging platform.  If you’re on a shoe string budget, WordPress can get the job done and provide the novice internet user the ability to maintain their website content rather effectively… as long as you like boxes.  However, I don’t consider WordPress a platform to launch a major corporate website (I challenge you to find any fortune 500 company using WordPress as a corporate website platform.) There are many intricate “hacks” that need to take place to perform functions that are very easy to implement when dealing with true HTML and other coding languages that are more open. WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL so at least we can get in and modify the site functions, but again, these are often “hacks” or require 3rd party plug-ins to achieve basic functionality tweaks that are easy with a custom built website.  I spend more time just trying to find the page that has the code I need to modify than doing the modifications themselves.

Fast forward to today… As the coding platforms and other “open source” systems have evolved, I am happy to say that there are viable options to effective CMS systems. At SaucePan Creative have begun to utilize an “enterprise” class CMS software called “Expression Engine” as the basis for all of our websites. So, we can offer a true CMS system with a custom design, standards based compliant HTML / CSS, and specific programming modifications to allow the site to just about anything it needs to do. From a developer perspective, the ability to control all aspects of the coding is essential to a long-term viable website that will last.  That’s what we have with the Expression Engine system.

There is another benefit to using Expression Engine for all of our clients. We’re dealing with only 1 type of code set. We’re not having to learn the system all over again when a modification needs to be done. In addition, many of our sites have had specific customizations that are easily adapted for any of our sites that utilize the Expression Engine platform. Take, for example, we develop a specific plug-in that allows integration with a third party website like “Mail Chimp.” Say a user wants to sign up for an email newsletter with one of our sites and we develop a plugin that allows this email to be dumped directly into their Mail Chimp account.  We can share this plug-in with an of our sites who want to utilize it without re-writing it. This makes us more efficient and allows all of our sites to benefit from many different industries specific needs. A win-win.  This move to “standardize” our platform will help us to serve our customers with more innovative web solutions for years to come. We won’t be talking about re-working the website… we’ll just be talking about enhancing the website.  While it may cost a little more to build the site initially, this can pay dividends in the long run through easy adaptations and feature modifications.  Often times this is a difficult benefit to sell during the sales process… but I feel it is one of the MAJOR issues that anyone who is looking for a new web site needs to consider.

To sum this up. I no longer consider a CMS a “dirty word” as long as it is done properly with an “open” platform to allow the design and user experience to dictate what the technology has to make happen.  I consider our approach like the Apple approach. The user is always the most important thing. Nice type, white space, fast loading pages with properly written code are all factors that I place heavy emphasis on rather than making a site that just so happens to fit in the “box” that the opposite approach offers.

SaucePan Creative recently completed a project for Encoded Guardian that involved an external marketing website, intro/how-to video and proprietary web-based software solution. The system is a “turn-key” system that allows encoded guardian to market their solution to theme parks, cruise lines, community events and more. The online system, combined with a QR code wrist band, allows for the parks, cruiselines, etc., to provide “lost child prevention” capabilities to their check-in or ticket counters. What’s different about this system is the fact that the dependent child’s information is kept confidential and not printed on the band itself. Rather, it is encoded with a QR code that is tied directly to the web enabled look up and registration application.

MORE ABOUT ENCODED GUARDIAN

The Encoded Guardian bracelet id band and hosted software system is a turn-key solution for privately managing guardian and dependent contact information for a wide variety of applications. From a child’s guardian contact information at amusement parks, museums, cruise lines and other public events to the elderly with medical conditions to persons with mental disabilities the Encoded Guardian system can be customized for any application. Guardian contact information is quickly and easily added to your private database in “REAL TIME.” In the event of a lost child or emergency situation where the designated guardian must be contacted, the data can be be accessed by any terminal or mobile device that is authorized to view your data. The software system is not only affordable, but adds necessary lost person liability protection for your company.

Learn more at: www.encodedguardian.com

In the 2008 election, the Obama campaign undoubtedly raised the bar for marketing and technology professionals to utilize mobile media in conjunction with traditional campaign strategies. Their iPhone app was arguably a pivotal way that they connected with a specific demographic of voters who utilize mobile technologies for their daily news and information. With that success in mind, SaucePan Creative has developed an application for Mayor John Ditslear to utilize in his re-election campaign for 2011. Very soon, the application will be available for download in Apple’s iTunes and is compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The App brings together many forms of news relating to the campaign including: current news, photos, videos, views and it has the ability to integrate with the user’s social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. For those wishing to donate to the campaign, can also do that via the app and a link to the Campaign’s PayPal account. Stay tuned for more information and for a debut date in iTunes.

The Noblesville Rotary has retained Noblesville based, SaucePan Creative to build a website that will establish the web presence for the club. The main goals of the website are to inform the public about the various projects that the Rotary is involved with to raise awareness of the club’s community service and their mission of “Service Above Self.” The site will encourage new memberships, offer a method to accept donations as well as provide information about other ways that the general public can help the Rotary fulfill its mission of community service.

“I am so excited to be a part of this project. One of our main values at SaucePan Creative is to be involved in the community, to give back and to make the community a better place. The Noblesville Rotary has, at it’s core, a mission that coincides with our company philosophy,” said Mike Sauce, Owner of SaucePan Creative. “We hope that by developing the new website, we’ll be able to share the great work that the Rotary has done and is doing on a daily basis to help our community.”

The new website will be located at www.noblesvillerotary.org and is scheduled to go live in the second quarter of this year.

ABOUT THE ROTARY
The mission of Rotary International is to provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through its fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders. The Rotary motto Service Above Self conveys the humanitarian spirit of the organization’s more than 1.2 million members. Strong fellowship among Rotarians and meaningful community and international service projects characterize Rotary worldwide. Rotary clubs make a difference locally and internationally through community service. All Rotary clubs share a key mission: to serve their community and those in need throughout the world while promoting high ethical standards. By participating in club service projects, club members learn about their club’s involvement in local and international projects and can volunteer their time and talents where they’re most needed.

The Noblesville Rotary meets Tuesday’s at noon at the Sagamore Club, 10900 Golden Bear Way in Noblesville.
You may also follow the Noblesville Rotary on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Noblesville-Rotary-Club/105390032875379