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Holidays are more than wrapped packages, aren’t they?

December 19, 2012

Holidays mean different things to different people.

Often circumstances dictate the mood for the occasion. Tragedies or victories within your family or extended community can make a person stop, think and feel grateful for family, friends, business associates and others. And not so much for the iPod, iPad, Kindle or other “thing-a-ma-jig” that is on your “List.”

We want to “Thank You” for all you have given us these last 11+ years.

We are grateful for the relationships that have begun and grown over the years. To our customers, our networks and all of us that make Sephone, we are grateful. Period.

We have some different Holiday Hours than our usual 8-5:

Monday, December 24, Christmas Eve and Tuesday Christmas Day we will be CLOSED.
We will reopen December 26 at 8am and resume normal business hours through Friday December 28.

Monday, December 31, Sephone will open at 8am and close at 3pm.

Tuesday, January 1, Sephone will be CLOSED.
We will reopen January 2 at 8am and resume normal business hours through Friday, January 4, 2013 (WOW! That feels weird!)

From our Geeks: (Bless them!) “During this time our technical team will be on alert and able to respond to any critical events such as server disruption resulting in website downtime. Due to an emergency, if you require immediate service, please submit a support ticket at support.sephone.com. Any support requests that are not an emergency will be handled when our office resumes normal operating hours.”

And from all of us! To You and Yours: However, whenever and wherever you celebrate, be safe, be merry and bright. And to a prosperous 2013!

~ Sephone

*Thank you to Dreamstime for the use of the beautiful image.

Kelly's been known as the Marketing Maven since before the term was hip. (That means she's old.) She loves to get people together and help when she can to bring resources to the table and solve problems!

Does size matter when picking vendors?

December 14, 2012

We here at Sephone have worked with all sizes of companies. Some as clients, some as vendors. All the way from one man shops to the top IT companies publicly traded. We have had both good and bad experiences. We are going to relate some of our experiences with different size companies to answer the question, is bigger better when picking a technology partner.

Bigger is better

Everybody knows about Google Analytics, but what many don’t know is about it’s history. Urchin was a company that specialized in web traffic software. The service was good compared to the alternatives at the time. It scaled well, the price was fair, and it had options to do data collection in addition to log file processing.

In 2005, Google bought Urchin, and changes started happening. Not to give a big history lesson, but this was the start of what today is Google Analytics.

Since Google took over Urchin, the price dropped, in fact, it’s mostly free now. Google has introduced a slew of new features, and it’s hosted on Google infrastructure. Uptime is much better, and in general faster. Urchin started as a small company, but grew steadily, and employed about 40 at the time of the Google takeover. Google now employees around 50,000, but at the time of the Urchin take over, far less, but still several thousand.

In this example, the bigger company is better. Urchin was never a bad product or service, but Google really made much better.

Smaller is better

We have used numerous companies for hosting servers and networks over the years. The companies in this example will need to remain nameless. Several years ago, we used a company that specialized in hosting for Software as a Service (SaaS) and ruby on rails. The company was small, young and had a lot of fun. The support staff was top notch, because they used the service themselves to make their sites. They also hosted their own stuff, so they didn’t over load their servers.

The company was bought out by a company over 100 times bigger. A very well know company in the server industry. The support staff was not nearly as good. It was a much more generic support, from people without intimate knowledge of their platform. Because it was a publicly traded company, and stock holders needed to be happy, servers and networks were much fuller than at the former company.

In this example, the little guy wins.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that it really does not matter, we have good and bad experiences with some of the biggest companies in IT. Additional we have good and bad experiences with shops that are only a few people. When picking companies to partner with, look at portfolios and talk with people to get references.

Alan has been creating websites since CompuServe was huge. Today he still is developing websites using technologies such as CSS3, HTML5, jQuery and CakePHP.

Use your market’s news as inspiration

December 13, 2012

Sometimes you can find new ways to innovate simply by reading news headlines.

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a firestorm in the Twitterverse after a change in policy from Instagram, one of the most popular mobile apps for photo sharing. As you may recall, Instagram was acquired by Facebook earlier this year. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear yet, Facebook decided to change how Instagram photos show up on Twitter; instead of showing up right in the tweet itself, Twitter users now have to click the link to the photo to see it on its own instagram.com page. (Facebook’s version of the story is that they made the change either to provide a better experience for users, and pretty much everyone outside of Facebook thinks they’ll eventually put ads on those pages.)

What happened next was kind of interesting. Many tech and mainstream news outlets played the story with a bit of sensationalization, using headlines like “Instagram photos will no longer work on Twitter”. Users, many believing that they’d no longer be able to share their Instagram photos on Twitter (not true), panicked and started looking for other options.

In the wake of the story, Twitter announced that they’re releasing a new version of their mobile apps with a lot of Instagram-like functionality built-in. And yesterday Flickr announced a completely revamped version of their mobile app that also includes sharing, filters, and more, highlighting in a blog post that “your photos look gorgeous no matter where they are viewed, on or off Flickr”.

Here’s the thing: a relatively small change in policy from a photo sharing giant has caused what may be the next wave of innovation in that space. Twitter and Flickr listened to what users were saying, understood their frustrations, and did something to make their experience better.

What’s happening in your industry that your company could address? What frustrations do your customers have with your competition, and how can you provide some relief for them?

We see news of companies innovating every day. Will yours be next to make headlines and grab new customers?

Thanks to Kristin Wall for sharing the photo in this post with a Creative Commons license!

Justin is one of the developers at Sephone. He's interested in user-driven design, social media, and web services. He also enjoys learning and exploring new ways for businesses and people to use the web.

Free To Use, But Do You?

December 12, 2012

Facebook. Yelp. Twitter. YouTube. Pinterest…

The list goes on. Social Media tools are all over the place and nearly all are free for any of us to use.

But do you?
Do you have time?
Do you see the value?

If the answer to the first two questions is “No.” And the third question is “Yes.”

Then consider a few options:

Post when you can and ask for help in executing a schedule. Something your “Community” can count on.

Share Your Expectations and Goals:

How do you want it to work for your business? If you are asking someone (a relative, friend or a company) to do it for you, then ground on what is acceptable, what isn’t and invite your colleagues to share in what they feel is of value.

Write this all down.

Your “social media” partner, whether you pay money for this work or don’t, needs to understand where your company stands and have the latitude and the information to engage when someone asks a question in a reasonable timeframe.

First off -Your company needs to make sure it is listed on the major directories and that the information is consistent and accurate.

For example: If one online directory shows your company located on one street and others show your company located somewhere else it obviously can be detrimental – especially if your customers punch the wrong address into their GPS or even better, if you never even “claimed” your business address on the GPS database! Did you know you need to check that too?

Decide Value and Assign Priority

Setting up accounts and profiles, checking listings take time. Doing it piece meal is not the answer. Often when you set up company listings there is a followup email or a phone call often with a time limit to act. Then, you need to write it down somewhere. I prefer the “write it down” method rather than having it only on line. Lists of platforms, user names and passwords – if your company is paying for this work, your company needs to have this information. Then if your company chooses to bring it in house or go another route you have access to the accounts you paid for to be set up and managed. If you have a family member doing it, don’t count on them to remember things, this information is YOURS. YOUR COMPANY. YOUR BRAND. This is serious business.

Don’t Farm it Out. Own it.

This is a battle cry of a certain segment of people. We say, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.” But we also say, “Do you fix your own car? Do give your pets their shots? Do you put in your own furnace?” In most cases the answer is probably “No.” And why? Because you are an expert in running your business, generating revenue, serving customers and you must do that.

All these other things are no different than the execution of a Online Marketing Strategy.

It does take expertise.
It takes time.
It takes focus.

If you just want to post something on your Facebook page that’s great, but there is more to social media and online marketing than Facebook (Don’t faint, it’s true!) and if you want more than a few “Likes” on Facebook, more results and consistent branding as a whole, you may consider a Social Media partner…like us. ( Sorry for the shameless plug but I cannot help myself.)

*thank you to the tomtom website for the photo.

datAvenger Tutorial – Theme Builder

December 4, 2012

Theme Builder is a great way to build your basic website and customize it with your colors, logo, and headers. To start using theme builder you will want to login to your datAvenger. From here go to settings and click the themes tab. Here we have some preset themes and the Theme Builder. If you would like to just use one of the preset themes, click it to highlight that theme, and then click choose. This will provide the preset theme for your website.

If you want to use the Theme Builder, choose that option from the themes page and click choose. This will bring you to the Theme Builder customization screen. Here you can customize a few things to help build your website.
Colors:

Highlight – what color the headings for your site will be, as well as the border below the header and above the footer.
Link – what color your links will show up with.
Background – what color your site’s background will be.
Sidebar – what color the site’s sidebar will be.
Footer – what color the footer of your site will be.

When working with the color picker for any of these items, you will choose your color and then will need to click off of the picker to set that color to the item.
Images:

Logo – lets you choose the logo for your site. This image will need to be uploaded into the assets section of the site to be used. The logo will show up in the top left corner of your site.
Image – lets you choose a header image for your site. This image will need to be uploaded into assets as well in order for you to use it. The header image needs to be 960 px wide by 200 px tall. If your image is a different size than that it will be cropped/resized to fit. For optimized viewing you should try and do the cropping and resizing of your image before uploading it to assets.

Content:

Sidebar – allows you to designate a specific page on your site to be in the sidebar. This content will show up below the navigation on the left side of the site. We find it helpful to name your sidebar page with all lowercase letters to set it apart from the rest so that you can find it easier in all of your pages.

Once you have made all of the necessary changes to your theme, simply hit save and the new theme changes will be live to the world.

If ever you want to make changes to your theme, just head back into the settings area and themes, and choose the Theme Builder again. You will see all of your current settings and can make any necessary changes.

To control the navigation for your site you will need to setup manual control of it, watch this video to find out how to do that.

It is important to note that if your website has a custom theme built for you by the Sephone team, then changing to the Theme Builder or a preset theme will remove the custom theme we have made for you. If this happens please let us know so that we can correct it for you.

Brady is the voice on the other end of the phone line when you call Sephone. He graduated from the New England School of Communications in 2009 and assists Sephone in building and maintaining our sites.

Who Do You Love?

November 19, 2012

At least once a month someone comes to us with an idea. Sometimes they feel like they are “ditsy” – a term used by on customer to me just last week. They come to us because they know we think out of the box, we love to hear new ideas. We love to hear YOUR ideas. Some of the ideas are a little “out there.” But so thought many about Google when their idea of “search” came along in 1998.

We aren’t Google and we aren’t meaning to imply that you are either. And there are a lot of great ideas that just melt away because there is lack of implementation and/or poor promotion. (We have our own list !) But you are not “ditsy” for having those. (We prefer the term “Out of the Box” and spoken like the Maine girl I am, “That aint all bad!” )

You know your business better than any body. You know those “things” that if you could only do better and faster than you could deliver that “special sauce” customer service to your customer. Is it something you could deliver on their Smartphone?

Relationships and Trust

Aligning yourself with someone -a fellow business person, or a developer like us, that looks forward, and doesn’t look at a “one size fits all” template could help you solve some challenges. We all need to be more efficient and more accurate to be able to provide the customer with the best product or service the first time around.

Go through your address book, rolodex or whatever you use and take “that person” to lunch. The “Face to Face” meeting creates a lot of energy and brainstorming opportunities.

**Thank you for the image.

Make Your Life Easy…Even When it’s Not!

November 12, 2012

I am not good at filing or organizing. I would love it if I knew where things were, but taking the time to do “admin” stuff gives me a headache. (But it rivals the headache I get when I cannot find things!!)

Hurricane Sandy brought untold devastation and impacted millions. So many folks said, “We lost everything, but we have each other.”

Let’s be honest, many of us just watched Sandy on TV, we had a little or no damage or some power out for a few hours, a day, but for me, it was about taking inventory of my family members within the storm area.

This is where Facebook came in handy.

We talk about Business and Business use of applications on this blog, but if you cannot connect PERSONALLY with something, it feels like a “thing” and not part of you, so why would you feel comfortable with it and use it?

I have an aunt, a retired, who lives in New Hampshire. She is less than tech savvy and she admits it. She said to me while I was taking inventory on the family, “I have a “Family List” on Facebook, so I can keep track of everyone.” And if the power goes out she can check in with the ”Family List” on her cell phone and do it quickly.

When we all have family spread out all over the map, we can stay in touch easier than ever. Relatives in California may have mudslides or fires, you see it on TV on the East Coast and you wonder, “Oh no, cousin Lu Lu lives there!” Establishing a Facebook “Family List” or “Group” helps everyone stay in touch.

A Facebook “Family Group” – open to only those that you want to share with, allows any one person to post something that all other “family group” members can view, without placing the burden on anyone person.

These not only come in handy in natural disasters but when someone is ill and you would rather tell the story ONCE rather than tell it to 30 people. They can reply back too.

Plan Ahead

Oftentimes we have a choice of device that we feel most comfortable using. Pick yours and set up your groups or lists through it. Be clear on the GOAL of the Group so people don’t think it is planned to be Spammy or used as a tool to sell Girl Scout Cookies. (Girl Scout Cookies aren’t bad, just be clear on the purpose of the Group.)

Facebook will send messages to those people asking them to join for you. When you allow a few days for this to happen you will have better success with those that may not check Facebook as much as you might.

As people join, post an acknowledgement to the “Family Group” let them know you are the one that set up the list or thank the person who set up the Group and ask them your questions!

Then, you are good to go!

Ready for the next disaster, anniversary celebration or family illness. Encourage others to update the Group on their news.

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