andydidyk.com

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May 22nd has been a deadline that has been staring me in the face for the last 7 weeks, starting with the signing of a proposal I wrote. Today is the launch of the “reskinned” HunterFan.com. It has been an ambitious journey, reskinning an entire site, plus completely designing and building 3 micro-sites for the same customer, all in less than 2 months! I’m proud of the work our excellent creative team has done, and I truly get fulfilled watching a project go from conception to completion. It was also cool to witness some hardcore legerdemain (YES! I used that word in real life!) by our programming staff to resolve server-side issues I won’t even pretend to comprehend.

The new homepage is much, much cleaner than the old version, and it has a variety of ways that a customer can navigate to the same information. As you can see, our client is really making a move to embrace the new green color, which I think works very well on the live site.

All we had time to do in this phase is redesign the homepage, add a few features, and add a new look and feel to the interior pages – still a huge improvement over the previous site. Of course, now comes the real work: Phase 2. Phase 2 will bring this site up to a new standard. Stay tuned!

According to a recent Prospectiv survey and Brandweek article, 56% of survey respondents stated that their social networking experience would be better if they were served ads targeted to their interests, and 62% said they would be interested in offers from their “preferred brands”.

While research is certainly important to our business, I’m not quite sure why anyone had any doubts about this issue. Ask anyone involved in sales at any level, and they’ll tell you: it’s much easier to sell to someone you’ve already sold to then to try to sell to someone new.

“But what about getting new prospects?” one may ask. Surely there is some value in the scattered, “shotgun” approach to buying online media, but it is much more valuable to create brand evangelists that are absolutely in love with your product or service. They’ll do the best job of creating new customers for you.

Someone on LinkedIn asked the question, “What are the top 5 things you are thinking about in eMarketing? I responded to her, and I thought I’d share with you the top 5 things on my mind:

1. Valuation of Social Media users – how can you determine their worth to an organization?
2. Engagement – how can you ensure online audiences are genuinely engaged with the brand, both on- and offline?
3. Analytics – eMarketing is unique in that with the proper analytics one can easily measure true ROI on a campaign, rather than nebulous “impressions”
4. Permission-based mobile marketing – mobile marketing is great, but without gaining the permission of the users, it’s just expensive spam and an ineffective marketing tool.
5. Convergence – no, not the buzzword of the late 1990′s, but the idea that people’s lives and technology are becoming increasingly inseparable and in some cases, wholly integrated. A marketer can take advantage of this by facilitating conversations and interactions the user is already interested in.

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“Show me that smile…” I know that is the song that anyone born before 1980 undoubtedly had playing in their heads when they read the title of this post. Although I’d love to have some witty commentary on one of the legendary episodes from the early 80′s sitcom, I’m afraid that my title is alluding to something much less nostalgic (and notably lacking Kirk Cameron or Tracy Gold).

The agency I work for, now named n-tara Interactive, is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s very exciting to be working in an environment that is aggressively growing, because you always end up with something new to do, and limits are often tested. Our marketing department is working like crazy to crank out our new ID set and other materials, but the new logo and materials are just a small part of how our agency is growing. We’re adding more people, capabilities, and expertise, and running out of room in our building.

Where that affects me is that we’re obviously adding more clients with bigger budgets and more strategic objectives. It’s certainly kept me hopping and my blogging activity to a minimum, which in turn does not represent very well what I’m actually learning and experiencing on a daily basis. New trends in analytics, guided-selling, and the value of social media are all at the top of my mind, as well as the old favorites of agency project management and the proper way to manage client expectations (one in the same, to some degree). It’s become comical to me how much being a successful agency involves balancing bleeding-edge creative and technology with the basic principles of listening, managing expectations, doing your homework, and respecting those you work with.