the sephone blog

“The truth, George. Always tell the truth. It’s the easiest thing to remember.”
–David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

One of the services I provide as a media developer is producing audio — commercials, on-hold messages, and more recently, podcasts. I’d like to recommend one of the latter.

Dean Brenner is President and Founder of The Latimer Group, a company that focuses on helping executives and professionals develop powerful and persuasive communication skills. I recently finished work on one of Dean’s podcasts, called “The Key to Delivering a Powerful Message,” in which he discusses the importance of authenticity in delivering your message. When delivering any message, Dean explains, simply be yourself: “It’s more honest. It’s more real… The last thing we should attempt to do… is to sound the same.” Dean goes on to say that “being authentic when you speak is a form of telling the truth.” In addition to their importance in public speaking, those two statements alone almost entirely define what make up a successful advertising campaign, because after all, what is advertising but persuasion in thirty seconds?

One key to having your ads work as effectively as possible is to have them be remembered. And the best way to fail at that is to have your ads look or sound like “all the other ads out there.” This month, as you know, is the NCAA Basketball tournament. Have you noticed how many advertisers are having “March Madness” sales? It happens to be that the phrase “March Madness” is copyrighted, and thus, illegal to use without consent from the NCAA… However, it doesn’t stop the phrase from being bandied about the newspapers and the airwaves by virtually every car, furniture, and RV dealer across the country. I have colleagues in the radio business who are upset because “Joe’s Furniture is using ‘March Madness’ in their ads. So why can’t my client use it in his?” Legal issues aside, if someone else is saying it, why do you want to? That doesn’t make you stand out. It makes you blend in. It makes you part of the crowd. It makes you forgettable.

Honesty in your advertising is as important. More and more nowadays, the public’s “BS radar” is up, and very finely tuned. Consumers rely on other consumers for information, rather than ads, which are often discounted as “them just trying to sell me something.” Instead, people consult blogs, online user reviews, friends and “regular people” in a fervent search for honest feedback about their purchases. This is why it’s imperative that what you say in your ads, you deliver in your business. If your ads talk about “top-notch auto repair, a clean, comfortable waiting area, and a friendly staff that greets you with a smile,”* then your customers had better get all those things when they come in. Otherwise, you’re perceived as trying to put one over on ‘em. And your customers share those experiences… right after they stop coming to your store.

Thanks to Dean Brenner of the Latimer Group for inspiring this post. For more info on The Latimer Group, please visit TheLatimerGroup.com

* Ordinarily, I would never condone such blatant abuse of advertising clichés in my ads. I only use them here to make a point.

share this

What is a web browser
A web browser is a piece of software that you look at websites with. More than likely it’s what you are using to view this article right now. I wrote this article in a web browser. Many people think a web browser is how they “get on the internet” or how they “look at the internet”.

What is Firefox
Firefox is a web browser that is a product of a company called Mozilla. Its history dates all of the way back to the earliest days of the internet with the Mosaic web browser which became the Netscape web browser. Firefox is the chief rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and brought more secure and standards compliant browser to the general public that included new features such as tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, addons, and a search system that uses Google. Firefox at this time, has about a 17% market share. Firefox is available for nearly all versions of Windows, Macs and Linux machines.

What is Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer, often called just IE, is Microsoft’s Web browser. At this time it is the most widely used browser and comes pre-installed on all windows machines since 1995. The latest stable release is IE7. IE has been criticized in the past for the lack of full CSS standards support, lack of full PNG support. IE7 is better. IE8, their latest browser in beta right now, does comply with standards support unseen in any Microsoft browser before it. IE is available for all Windows releases.

What is Safari
Safari is Apple’s web browser, it was released in 2003 and has been included with every Mac since version 10.2. Safari has some of the best CSS support of any web browser available. Safari has a bookmark technology, and features a management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software, integrates Apple’s QuickTime multimedia tabbed-browsing interface. A web search box is a standard component of the Safari interface, as are software services that automatically fill out web forms, manage passwords via Keychain and spell check entries into web page text fields. The browser also includes an integrated pop-up ad blocker. Safari is available on Mac OS X, and several Windows releases.

Which one do I use?
Well, that is a great question. It depends on what you like to do on the Internet. Here at Sephone, we are partial to Firefox because of the great development addons to help us do our job. Try all of them if you want and pick your favorite.

No matter what browser you pick, it’s important to make sure that your browser software and OS are updated with the latest patches on a regular basis.

Happy browsing.

share this

Whether your company is a business or a non-profit organization, if it has been around for 200 years or 2 days, there is a threat to your organization that the majority of owners, CEO’s and board members are reluctant to confront.

In reality, this threat has made the headlines repeatedly, whether you’re in Bangor, Maine or Seattle, Washington, the stories are hauntingly similar. At times it can bankrupt an organization, other times it cripples them, destroying lives and the livelihood of the employees, owners and their families. What could be so devastating and yet so misunderstood? That one word which escapes a label on a balance sheet and is not identified on a profit and loss statement is “Fraud”.

Think back over the past couple of months. How often did you read or hear the word “Embezzlement” (which is a type of fraud) in the local news? I am willing to bet that it’s popped up several times. As a mini, non scientific experiment, pay attention to the news for the next few weeks, chances are you will be shocked at the organizations that are victimized.

You may be shocked, but that is nothing compared to how shocked the victimized organization was. Right up until the scheme came to light the organization had no clue that they were being taken advantage of. Read the quotes of the business owner or Executive Director, many go something like they “never thought it could happen to them” or “She (or he) has been with us for years.”

Unfortunately, it is this very thought process that allows an organization to fall prey to employee fraud.

Now that we’ve established that it does happen, especially to those companies who are positive that it couldn’t happen to them, let’s jump right into why it happens. For this we will need to understand something called the fraud triangle.

The fraud triangle was model developed by criminologist, Dr. Donald Cressey. He indicated that three separate factors needed to be present in order for an ordinary person to commit fraud:

• Pressure
• Opportunity
• Rationalization

Let’s take a quick look at each one of these factors to see how it applies to the typical fraudster.

Pressure – Sure we all have some form of it, but this pressure is actually the motivator. This is the point whereby the feeling of no way out, for example a financial situation due to family illness, addiction or divorce.

Opportunity - Pay attention to this one. Of the three sides to this triangle this is the one an organization may have the most control over. Why? Because it enables a person to feel they can use their trusted position within the organization along with poor internal controls to commit the fraud with very little risk of being caught.

Rationalization – This is where desperate people sometimes do desperate things. In order to commit the fraud an ordinary person needs to reason with their conscience. Often, the person believes they are only borrowing the funds, fully intending to pay them back. Perhaps they are dealing with an ill child or parent and they see no other way out. Feeling that they are underpaid or underappreciated and basically owed the money is another example of rationalization.

By now I hope you are starting to realize that under the right (or wrong) circumstances it is easy to see how some people begin their walk down a very slippery slope. But of course, it couldn’t happen in your organization, right?

Join me in the near future when we will take a walk deeper into the world of fraud and provide insight into various fraud schemes, how they are accomplished and the best ways to prevent them.

share this

What is a Podcast?

A podcast is a way to subscribe to an audio or video show and automatically receive new episodes. For example, I listen to the NPR morning stories. When they publish a new one, I want it to automatically be placed on my iPod. That’s exactly what a podcast does. In my media player, I have subscribed to the NPR morning stories podcast, and at night I plug my iPod into my computer. As I sleep at night, my media player will download the new episode from NPR and place it on my iPod so I have it in the morning, automatically.

Become a Podcaster

Do you have audio content that you wish to podcast? All you need is some MP3’s and a RSS feed. QuickTime Pro, GarageBand, and iWeb on a Mac would get you on your way. If that is a bit over your head, give us a call or send us an email, and we would be glad to help you out.

share this

Last night, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of marketing students about YouTube, and its viability as a marketing vehicle for your brand, or for yourself. We talked about the importance of becoming involved in the growing communities fostered by YouTube, and other social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Participation in these kinds of sites, as well as blogs, gives you the opportunity to either meet others who do what you do, or who need what you offer.

Many of the students I spoke with hadn’t realized the impact of YouTube. A few numbers, courtesy of Wikipedia.org:

• In June of 2006, people watched an estimated 2.5 billion videos on YouTube.
• In May of ’06, about 50,000 videos per day were uploaded, a number which increased to 65,000 by July 2006.
• There are currently an estimated 72 million videos on YouTube, and over five million user accounts (which doesn’t include the number of YouTube visitors without accounts)
• In November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for the cool sum of $1.65 billion in Google stock.

And those numbers are growing.

Of course, the reasons people watch online video are numerous. Oh, sure, if you want to watch cute videos of bulldogs skateboarding, or otters holding hands, you certainly can, and millions do. However, as a Brand, or as a Marketer, you must know two immutable facts: First, online video is RAPIDLY becoming an information source – a place to learn about politics (Remember the CNN YouTube debates?), keep up with current events, discover new music, and so on. Second, it’s still pretty young. It’s a new idea for many, who don’t yet see the possibilities it presents as a bona fide medium.

YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself.” So, if you’re selling yourself, or you’re selling a product or service, why not? It’s free, it’s pretty easy, and you don’t have to be a professional videographer to post your own videos, comment, interact with the community, and be visible to millions. But you don’t have to reach millions. You don’t have to be worldwide. You can post a video to YouTube, and very easily embed it onto your own website, or your company’s, or your MySpace or Facebook page, where your customers, contacts, or colleagues already are. You can post a video, and link to it when you blog, or when you comment on other blogs. In fact, if your laptop has one of those little video cameras, create and post your vlog (video blog). You can be more visible for free.

Best of all, that increased visibility can be targeted to the people you want to reach. Say you’re a hotelier in a New England resort town, interested in attracting vacationers. You can produce a short video* about your hotel or your town, post it on YouTube, and then put that video on your website, maybe the town’s Chamber of Commerce website, as well as link to it through travel blogs, and so on. Plus, YouTube allows you to add searchable keywords to your video so that viewers who are searching for, say, “Maine vacations” can find your video more easily. In short, your product, your service, your Brand, can be placed online where it’s easy for people who are looking can find you. Compared to ad campaigns through traditional media, it’s an extremely cost-effective way to add a facet to your marketing, and “fish where the fish are.”

To see what a YouTube “channel” looks like, I invite you to visit my SlatersGarage channel: Try it. Explore. You can set up a free YouTube account without having to upload videos. You can simply watch, comment, add favorites, and participate within the community. If you’re a business owner, search YouTube for similar businesses, and see what others are doing. As you read blogs, notice how many have YouTube videos embedded in order to augment content.

I’ll sum up with the same words I spoke to those students last night: Get involved online. If you’re marketing a business, blog about your own, and contribute to others. If you’re marketing yourself, do the same. Your YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook pages are like living, breathing resumes that are always visible to future employers and future colleagues. It’s interactive marketing in an interactive medium.

So, interact.

* Look for future posts soon on how to inexpensively produce your own videos, as well as more on consumer-generated advertising, viral marketing, and online video concepts and strategies

share this

The obvious and not so obvious things you can do to make your site more searchable without spending money on search engine marketing & How to apply to datAvenger and dALite.

The following may be basic, or obvious- but sometimes overlooked. People used to say computers were dumb. They can only spit out what they are given. So are Search Engines. They can only know so much about your website, but what your ‘tell’ them.

The responsibility falls with the site owner, because that is who knows the most about their business, but if the site isn’t built right or doesn’t support current methodologies, then that is our responsibility.

datAvenger 4.0 CMS and daLite both have META and content features that allow content editors the ability to manage and optimize what a Search Engine can see about a business or organization to assist in indexing and ranking a site when it gets crawled.

By no means are we stating that this is the end-all/save-all to having your site rank in the top 10; but not doing these basic things can almost guarantee that you will not be in the top 10.

OK-

Here are some OBVIOUS guidelines.

1. Have a somewhat recognizable URL. Abbreviations are not the best when dealing with the web. www.cooc.com is quick to say but www.coloradooutdoorcenter.com (if available) is better.
2. Find and arrange to have sites that are relevant to yours link to you. And link to them. By having this in place- you tell SE’s that your site is relevant in this category when they see that other sites related to yours link to you. SE’s actually find you through those links and then if you have a link back to that site- it is even more relevant. These links should be done with individual contact with each site owner.
3. Submit your site to DMOZ, Yahoo, Google, etc. and other industry sites if applicable.
4. Add a crawl-able site map to your site. The Google Site Map is great and is used by SE’s to learn about the sites architecture/navigation and adds exposure to all your pages.
5. Maintain the site content regularly. Doing this not only shows regular visitors that you maintain the site with current/timely information, but also demonstrates to SE’s that you are in fact still around.
6. Domain Registration- If you can- renew your domains for as long as you can. Domain names registered for a long time demonstrates legacy and longstanding meaning that adds to your ranking. Renewing a domain 1 year at a time for the last 8 years is less effective than renewing a domain for 5 or 10 years into the future at a time. Having an 8 year old domain name IS fantastic- but give it more value- renew it for longer periods if you can.

For datAvenger 4.x and daLite users-

We have already taken care of clear text page names and paths for SE’s to be able to index. Again, though, refrain from Cryptic abbreviations or extra long page names when creating them.

1. Title all your pages from within the Admin area look for the <M> icon for META data. Then review all pages for a good Page Title. Titles should be more than “Home” or “Contact US”. A better Page title contains your primary category for your business or Organization and the name of this page;
2. When including images, make sure they all have meaningful names AND you include alt-text for ADA assisted browsers. A typical photo from a digital camera may be given the name DSC0001.jpg. Only YOU know what it is and therefore you should rename it to “snowmobiling_in_maine_08.jpg before uploading it; and include an alt-tag for ‘Snowmobiling in the North Maine Woods, Maine - Colorado Outdoor Center- 2008″
3. Add links within content to other relevant sites
4. Add links to associations Rotary, Professional Associations, etc.
5. Have relevant, current and orginal content
6. Avoid tricks and other “Sure ways to get ranked”
   1. hidden links or text to attempt to trick SE’s
   2. unnecessary or duplicate content
   3. doorway pages created just for search engines
7. Fresh Home page content that includes links to your internal pages with in the context of the content- Whew- what does that mean - Try to have the pages linked within the actual text of the home page. This aids in showing SE’s that the site has relevance; re-using the navigation terms, which is also relevant, that is keyword density. The higher the relevance and density, the higher the rank. That’s why you dont place popular/trendy keywords on a site if they have nothing to do with the site. At one time this was a big trick. Placement of these terms almost guarenteed SE’s would rank the site- Now they know better.
8. Keywords placed in the Admin Area for <Meta data> should be ordered by the relevance to the actual services provided. IF you sometimes serve lunch- dont put it # 1.
9. Description should be detailed but NOT more than a sentence or two. A paragraph or marketing tagline is not what this should be.

Periodically- we will update this and share insight on the do’s and don’ts- If you have any questions please send them to support@sephone.com

share this

Welcome to the first of many datAvenger tips & tricks from the gals in the front office! This week we’ll be going over how to re-order and re-organize navigation points (for datAvenger users only).

Start by clicking on the Architecture tab at the top of your screen. Your pages are organized in a hierarchy. Pages at the top level of the hierarchy are called “Parent pages”, and those one level lower are called “Children pages” or “Child pages”.

Click on a page title to select it, then on the pencil to edit.

To move a page above or below another page at the same level in the hierarchy, use the dropdown next to “Order”. To change the current page’s parent page (the page one level higher in the hierarchy), you’ll first need to click on the plus sign next to “Advanced Information”.

A new section will appear with a dropdown menu called “Parent Page”. Any page can be a parent page. This dropdown contains a list of every page on your website. The page that you select will become the current page’s parent, meaning that the current page will be one level beneath it.

Once you have selected the new parent page, you might need to revisit the “Order” dropdown at the top of the screen if there are multiple “children” pages. When you are done, don’t forget to click on “Save Changes”!

Was this topic helpful to you? Do you have any questions? Feel free to leave us a comment!

share this

How can you keep up on everything these days? With the 24 hour news cycle, your business and personal life (what’s that?) all going full tilt, how do you keep on top of it all?

As a small business owner, the thought of even having to try to learn something new is just mind boggling. EVEN if it means that in the long run you know it is a time saver.

Well, enter a “feed reader.” Rather than go to individual web sites to see what is new about them, like foxnews.com, espn.com, maine.gov, blog.sephone.com, or whatever other sites you are interested in, what if those sites came to you in one location for you to look at there new content.

That’s exactly what a feed does. A “feed” is a way for a website, to get new information to you, without plugging up your email inbox or worse your computer with junkie software.

In your browser (that’s what you look at the Internet with, like Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari), have you ever seen that little orange icon that looks like the one to your right?

That little icon means that the website provides a feed for you. Sometimes you will see abbreviations like ATOM, RSS, or XML, don’t worry about what all of those mean. Sometimes the icon may even appear in your address bar, like it does for my browser.

See below:

Feeds are best delivered through a website that you log into, I prefer GOOGLE READER. It is what they call “web based” and it is FREE!! Enter your email address, put in a password and start grabbing information from sites you look at all ready. The reader just puts them all in one place so no more surfing, no more downloading .pdf’s, etc.

We would like you to subscribe to blog.sephone.com so you can look at our updates. AND we are not trying to sell you anything! Just as a Sephone client, as we learn, you can learn with us! Also the others, you won’t have to remember all the sites you like. The headlines are on your screen and you can manage them when you are able to catch up on the news!

Feeds are only going to grow and you can eliminate all those “newsletters” to your mailbox!

Below is a simple screencast of adding maine.gov news feed to my Google Reader.

share this

Whenever you talk about technology, you’re likely to get an earful of abbreviations and acronyms. We know it’s confusing - we deal with it every day! Here’s a little “geek glossary” to help you navigate some of the more common things you might hear us mention.

• dA / dA lite: dA and dA lite refer to Sephone’s content management systems, datAvenger and datAvenger lite. The content management system is the administrative area where you can edit your site.
• HTML: HTML is really the language of the Web. Just like Word documents are used for word processing and PowerPoint is used for presentations, HTML is used to display Web pages within a browser. When the browser reads the HTML, it adds the right colors, links, text sizes, and more to create a readable Web page (like this one!). (It stands for “hypertext markup language”, which is a really complicated way of saying that HTML pages can use text formatting and can link to other pages.)
• PHP: Most of the sites we create use another programming language known as PHP. PHP allows us to build sites that change based on what the site owner tells the site to do: display an image gallery, post press releases, or allow you to check out on an e-commerce site. All of these happen before the page even reaches your Web browser.
• SEO: Short for “search engine optimization”, SEO is an ever-changing study of how to make your sites look their best in search engines like Google and Yahoo. This is done through a combination of stuff that we control (easy-to-read page addresses, clean programming, and more) and a bunch of things that are up to the site owner to control (page titles, meta data, and most importantly, the actual content of the site).
• WYSIWYG: Many of our products use a tool known as a WYSIWYG, or “what you see is what you get” editor. A WYSIWYG editor looks like a stripped-down version of a word processing program like Word; it will give you the ability to boldface, italicize, or resize text, as well as a number of other functions. Some WYSIWYGs even let you insert links or images into your text. The WYSIWYG in datAvenger, for example, has over 25 different actions built right in.

Is there anything else that you think should be a part of this list? Leave a comment and let us know.

share this

Microsoft has placed a bid to buy Yahoo for 44 billion, Microsoft’s largest acquisition so far. Read more at Fox News. Here are a few Sephone opinions on the announcement.

Alan:

It’s going to be really good or really bad. It could be good because yahoo/MS together can compete with Google, and both will get better. It could be bad because their cool things like del.icio.us and flickr could get bad because Microsoft has a rep for being bland, bloated and generic; Delicious and Flickr are lightweight and personal. It’s good that somebody is going to try to keep Google from running away with the show.

Joe:

It better not happen.

Kelly:

If the quality of Microsoft services will affect Yahoo and their services, then we are really in trouble.

Scott:

Good for Microsoft, bad for Yahoo.

Justin:

If the deal ends up going through, it will be up to Microsoft to decide how much freedom to give Yahoo’s properties like del.icio.us and Flickr to allow them to innovate and grow. Yahoo has a major place in the Web’s history, and it’s still the top site in terms of traffic. What would the combination of Live Search and Yahoo mean for Google and the Web in general?

share this