There seems to be another scammy trend brewing in email marketing. Recently I’ve been receiving email promotions from brands with subject lines apologizing for a mistake or retracting a misstatement. I like to forgive and forget as much as the next guy, but when the apology requested is nothing more than a trick to get me to open an email, I’m opting out.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve fallen for the trick a few times. Most such emails are from smaller companies hurting for revenue, but some are from brands that are well established and trusted. Just recently I received an email apology from TripAdvisor (a site I always use when planning a trip, by the way).

TripAdvisor’s subject line was: “Oops we had a glitch.” Inside was a copy of an email I had received the day before about its Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards, which I had clicked through earlier without a glitch. The message said:

“Our Travelers’ Choice announcement was so popular this week, many readers couldn’t access the results. They’re available now.

Apologies and many thanks,
TripAdvisor.”

It’s hard to believe that TripAdvisor’s sophisticated servers crashed due to the high volume of visitors from this email campaign, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the company really had a “glitch” and should apologize. Was there a better way to handle this?

My first recommendation would be to make the subject line less ambiguous–and, in fact, less intriguing. If it’s really an apology, save me time and let me know directly in the subject line that there was a problem with the Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards. Brands should be honest and accountable for their mistakes—but if this is a tactic to improve open rates disguised as an apology, it will ultimately diminish the site’s credibility.

TripAdvisor could easily have promoted its awards within another value-added email promotion, by using search marketing, on its website, or through other avenues. Brand loyalty must be earned over time, but it can be destroyed quickly through overzealous marketing.

Customers form their opinions of you based on your value and how you treat them. Treat them with respect and they’ll be loyal forever.

Just before the holiday we received my oldest son’s current school progress report. (Thankfully he is a good student and always does well.) This reminded me of a useful tool I’ve found to help measure websites with regard to best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) and web marketing. The tool is the Website Grader.

This tool essentially scans your site for common HTML related to best SEO practices. It combines that data with other data from around the web, such as the web ranking in Google, the number of inbound links on your site, and where your site stands in relation to social media. It then generates an overall grade and a summary report.

Using a tool like this can help you gauge your site’s current rank and determine where you can most effectively put additional resources and time to improve the SEO of your site, and also to get more inbound traffic and converted leads.

Here are some screen shots of what you can expect if you use the tool to generate a report.

After entering your URL, you get a summary grade for your site:

The grader tracks on-page SEO:

It also tracks off-page SEO:

It determines whether you have a blog, and if you do, grades it:

It analyzes what’s happening on your site with regard to social media:

It helps you track information about your competitors’ sites:

Finally, the grader looks at the forms on your site that help convert visitors to leads:

When I was a creative director at HomePC magazine back in the early ’90s, there were lots of articles making predictions about the convergence of PCs, TV, and telecom. Along came WebTV in ’96, a big box with a wired keyboard that made your TV into a monitor for accessing the Internet. Microsoft bought WebTV, but it never took off; it was very clumsy, with a bad browser among other shortcomings (not surprising). Now here we are in 2010, and you can plug your ethernet cable or wi-fi into your TV. Presto, you’re on the Web—sort of.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the television/Internet space, but I can assure you that something’s very wrong with this picture. I’ve been doing a little research and I’ve looked closely at Web-enabled Sony, LG, and Panasonic TVs. These sets do not offer the big, open Internet we know and love; instead, they provide widgets and content channels chosen for us based on licensing deals between TV manufacturers and content providers such as Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Time Warner.

This may seem to be a huge improvement for consumers. We can get movies instantly from Netflix and YouTube and great content from some of the best media companies in the world. In return, the media companies expand their audience, which will help them weather the recession and diminish their advertising woes. This is great for Sony and Google. But it’s bad for us. As Dan Frommer from Business Insider puts it, “We want a TV with a real Web browser that offers full access to the entire Web via wi-fi/broadband—not some crippled gimmick.”

As a marketer and consumer I have serious concerns with the direction the new Web-enabled TV movement is taking. I’m reminded of the AOL days, with closed proprietary systems where content was pushed and interactivity was limited. The only true convergence happening here is the merging of services provided by ISPs, telecoms, and TV manufacturers.

My exploration into the world of Web-enabled TVs has renewed my appreciation for the current Web—the Web that is free, open, and innovative. We need to remind ourselves that we have a wonderful and fragile resource that needs to be fought for and defended. I hope we haven’t lost the battle when it comes to Web TV, and that it will evolve based on user demand and not on corporate enrichment. Content providers, telecoms, and manufacturers need to realize that with an open Web they’ll have their biggest audiences and happiest sponsors.

If you’re interested in the fight for the open Web and Internet neutrality, please visit these sites:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.freepress.net/

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com/

http://stopbigmedia.com/

Black Friday & Cyber Monday may have come and gone but the spending season has just begun and if you have an iPhone, as nightmarish as it may seem, every minute of every day can be Cyber WhateverDay.

Like the DVR did away with having to clear your schedule to make it home to watch your favorite show at 9PM, dedicated shopping apps can let you shop whenever you feel like it without having to rush home to your laptop or even worse – the store.

Amazon Mobile

With about a year on the competition, Amazon Mobile has had some time to refine what was an already great app last holiday season. Being able to see an item in a b&m store, look it up on Amazon, find a better price and purchase it before you even make it back to your car is a pretty cool experience.

Best Buy

Best Buy’s app provides great interaction with their physical stores by allowing you to search inventory and reserve an item at a location close to you. I did find that I had to jump through as many hoops as I would have to on the desktop to actually place an order, which is something that the Amazon app managed to avoid. But still, being able to browse the weekly ad and see what they have on sale saves you a little time digging through the newspaper and a bunch of time actually going to the store.

Target

The Target app has the most limited purchasing options of the three. You can browse anything in the store and like the Best Buy app, see the weekly ad deals, but if you want to purchase an item, you are kicked over to the full-flavor html site which really defeats the whole purpose of mobile shopping. The coolest thing the Target app does though is allow you to set your local store and not only will it tell you if an item is in stock – it will tell you what aisle you can find it in.

Mobile shopping is still in it’s infancy but the experience is really beginning to take shape. Already there are expectations forming of just how the experience should work and it’s interesting to see all the major players take a stab to see what works.

For b&m stores, location awareness, stock checking and item reservation are a must because they save customers time and pull customers into the store. For online-only stores, robust personalization options and one-click purchasing (or as close as you can get to it) are important to recreating the impulse purchase, press-a-button-and-get-it experience that has worked so well for Apple’s iTunes and AppStore.

I truly love this time of year. Getting together with family and friends. Sharing a fantastic meal (my wife is a wiz in the kitchen). Even the hustle and bustle of shopping doesn’t get me down. I don’t think we have Thanksgiving often enough. We should have it every few months so that we realize there is so much to be thankful for—even with the economy, and the wars still going on. Our lives in general are easy. We grumble if our lattés are too cold and lament the typical workday. Our ancestors would laugh at how easy our lives are. In honor of this holiday, the folks here at Loewy wanted to send out a “Happy Thanksgiving” to all of you, our clients, friends, and colleagues. You are all very special to us. You’re why we come to work every day—why we’ve been successful—and you’re the inspiration for all the great work we’ve been able to accomplish.

Here are some of the things we’re personally thankful for:

“I give thanks to Thanksgiving, because it brings us back to what really matters in life. This year has been filled with challenges most of us have never experienced before. It’s forced us to be stronger, smarter, more efficient, and more competitive. For this I’m thankful. I’m always thankful for healthy family and friends. Finally, another big thanks goes out to the social web, which allows us to globally exchange ideas, passions, and ‘thanks.’”  -David

“I’m thankful for the clients who understand the value of good design. They let us serve them by leading them down the right paths and they have confidence in our ability to embrace their goals, make them our own, and produce results that are effective and pleasing to look at.”  -Donald

“I’m thankful for the connections I’ve made with co-workers and clients whom I can also call friends. They are understanding, they’re there for me in a pinch, and there is no monetary value that can be placed on them. They are truly recession proof!”  -Selina

“I’m thankful for the continued lowering of the barriers to entry for self-publishing across all media. All forms of expression, from writing to music to video, are getting easier and easier for people to get started with, which lets them contribute to the collective exchange of ideas. I’m even more thankful for the advanced rating, moderation, and filtering systems that make it easy to find the cream of the digital crop.”  -Marc

“I’m thankful to have the ability to be creative every day, and to have that creativity help others.”  -Jenna

“I’m thankful for my parents, who have shown me support above and beyond that shown by any other parents I’ve seen. They are the model of good parenting.”  -Matt

Please comment and tell us what you’re thankful for.

Earlier this month I attended the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) conference in New York. The mission of SoDA is to advance the profession of digital marketing through education, discussions of best practices, and advocacy. The conference was billed as an “un”conference, which made the event conversational, collaborative—and at times a little too “un”structured. Still, it was a good experience.

We broke up into groups to discuss hot topics: Challenges of the Modern Agency, Metrics for Success, Engaging Social Media. I had hoped to gain insight into how large companies and agencies are managing their brands within their social-media initiatives. It’s clear that social media should be part of a brand’s marketing strategy, but how are companies controlling their brands’ voices? To my surprise, other attendees from top agencies and brands had similar questions—but few answers.

Some sound ideas popped up, such as the development of branding guidelines for social media, and the hiring of brand editors who can provide a checkpoint before tweets, blogs, and comments are published. These two methods can work fine for blogs themselves, but they can kill the spontaneity and immediacy of a tweet or a comment on a blog. Moreover, what do you do if your entire company is enthusiastic about speaking out and joining in on all the conversations?

If it’s your company’s policy to allow many social-media voices, it’s imperative to set up rules and guidelines and hold your employees accountable. Amber Naslund of the blog Altitude provides great examples of blogging policies from large corporations that can be used as an excellent starting point for developing your company’s guidelines.

If your social-media voice is monitored by a specifically designated department or by an outside agency, it’s easier to stay in control and keep your brand’s message inline. Your social-media captains should plan how they will uphold your brand’s promise in their conversations with customers, employees, and partners. They should meet weekly or monthly with the marketing or brand teams to ensure that all efforts are aligned with your brand’s strategy and corporate culture.

For a Twitter campaign for one of our clients, we create a monthly bag of “evergreen” tweets that are mixed in with spontaneous ones. That client is accustomed to having its copy and creative approved by its legal department and brand managers, which is not an ideal situation for quick tweets about what’s going on at the moment. To overcome this we develop 20 tweets that can be preapproved, and then mix those in with 10 spontaneous tweets that follow our defined social-media strategy. With this method and ongoing monitoring we’re able to lower the risks of tainting the brand, while still appearing spontaneous and continuing to build one-to-one relationships with the company’s customers.

This is new territory, and the best tactics have yet to be determined.  We encourage you to share your experiences and thoughts on how you manage brand continuity in social media for your company and your clients.

We may have only moved up one floor but a lot has changed. We tried to document as much of the design and construction process as we could and created a video to share with you. Check it out…

When sending us mail, delivering pizzas or just dropping by to say hello, please note our new suite number and update your address book:

So stop by if you’re in the neighborhood. In related news, we also have a new phone system. Our main number is still 631-249-2429 but it now goes to one of those fancy menu systems everybody loves so much. If you want to reach David or any of our other staff directly please use the following extensions:

I’ve worked at Loewy Design for five years, and over time I’ve noticed a growing trend in requests for content management systems (CMS). After building out a handful, I noticed another trend that struck me as odd. Some of the clients wanted me to make edits to their sites post-launch, even though I had just handed them a fully functional, easy-to-use CMS.

How could this be? Did I do something wrong? Was the training I gave them on the software not good enough? A lot of thoughts like these ran through my mind. Maybe, or perhaps…there’s more to this trend.

I’ve noted that the clients who end up not using their new CMS software have these traits in common:

1. They’re terrified of breaking something.
   Even though it’s been explained to them that it would be very hard, if not impossible, to truly “break” the site, they still show tremendous trepidation about hitting that save button.
2. They’ve underestimated the learning curve
   Everything new has a learning curve to it. Although we strive to use the simplest systems out there, everyone learns at his or her own pace, and some people pick up things faster than others. Either frustration sets in, or it’s too costly for them to spend all day playing with new software. And some people just don’t want to learn anything new.
3. They generally work for larger companies
   Strangely enough, the companies that have larger budgets are the ones that don’t tend to use the systems. Clients like the idea of being able to manage their own websites, but quickly realize that although a CMS is easy to use it’s another task they need to add to their busy schedules.

My third point brings me to a question: “How do you, as the client, know when a CMS is needed?”

There are lots of possible scenarios, but in general, if you have a little time to invest in learning the software and a good development team supporting you along the way, you can’t beat the value and independence a CMS provides.

The recent widespread rise in popularity enjoyed by content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and MODx has changed the way clients feel about their websites. No longer are they just hiring someone to build something. They are now really part of the process: able to affect their websites directly, without needing any programming knowledge or having to pick up the phone.

So are you ready to move to a CMS?

The relentless commercials for remote backup almost had me convinced to retire my arcane system of external usb drives and cases of DVDs on my bookshelf. Then a couple of weeks ago that little bit of doubt I was feeling became a reality for users of the T-Mobile Sidekick when a server failure at Microsoft’s Danger division left them holding a dataless hunk of plastic. Sidekicks rely on the servers at Danger to store things like contacts, photographs, notes, to-do-lists and other important user data. Sidekick users could do little but wait for Microsoft to restore the data. The interruption was so bad that T-Mobile temporarily stopped selling Sidekicks.

Periodic outages of cloud based services are to be expected but you would never guess that with the dependency that many of us have on them. Take Gmail for instance – when it goes down for even a minute people freak out. (Hopefully Twitter is available for you to see that link.) Now imagine if your Gmail account just goes poof one day. Unlikely, but many of us would be crushed because backing up Gmail is just not something people do and as a result, our only copy of some of our most important information is in the hands of Google. And that’s the real crux of the problem – the instant gratification of not having to worry about physical media backup is at odds with the long term realization that our important data is in the hands of others. Is the Sidekick issue a hint of what’s to come? Are we doomed to an event of large scale data loss?

We’ve been trained that backing up our data is our responsibility, and I may feel like I am doing the responsible thing by utilizing a remote backup service as a safety net in case of fire or theft, but it’s looking like I may have to start – you guessed it – backing up my online data to physical media in my home. Think of the absurdity of remotely backing up my data to Carbonite for example and re-backing that up to over a hundred DVDs. Anybody looking for a job as a professional backer-upper?

In a previous post, I talked about trimming the fat from content. But let’s face it: trimming the fat assumes you had good meat to start with. In a world where people have precious little time, if you’re thinking site redesign, content strategy has to be a main priority.

I’ve been working with a client recently on a large site redesign. Like many of my other site-redesign projects, this one was long overdue. Much of the content was outdated. It had been managed by a host of individuals, all from different countries, who each had their own way of doing things. The jargon was so product- and business-specific (filled with acronyms and marketing brand names) that it was hard for anyone outside the company to understand. Images (yes, images are content too) were old and poorly optimized, and they incorporated a myriad of photo styles, none of which went together. The client was going to implement a new content management system, which is very robust but needs a lot of management on the development side to institute roles and define content types. What was needed was a true content strategist.

A content strategist works with a client to understand what content will end up on a site, how that content will be organized, what processes will be in place to manage content of different types, and how various types of content relate to one another. Content strategists are part information architects and part copywriters, with a dash of user advocate thrown in. They create rules-based approaches for refining existing content, enhance search optimization of content through metatags and keywords, and develop new content.

While working with an information architect (IA) is necessary in nearly all web and application design projects, for large brochure and information-rich sites a content strategist on the team is also invaluable.

The benefits of working with a content strategist:

• Content strategists are more focused on the specific content of the site and not just the organization of that content as it relates to the overall architecture, as an IA would be.
• A content strategist can develop a matrix that defines content types and sets up relevance relationships to shape how content is linked throughout the site.
• Content strategists can set up keyword, data tag, and metatag information for content elements and pages.
• Content strategists can set up rules for content, such as whether a page title also becomes the menu title to navigate to that page, or whether images should have captions. These details are often too granular for an IA to be involved with.
• A content strategist can define data elements for individual page templates and help the IA structure the priority for those elements. This can be a way to organize existing content, or to help understand what important content elements might be missing.
• Content strategists can help define roles for those who edit content. In complex companies, multiple levels of access and workflow processes might be needed. This “behind the scenes” look into content creation is something information architects don’t often perform.