BigTuna Interactive » Online Marketing

Concepting for Conversation

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:20:32 +0000

To kickoff the tracks at the 2011 San Diego Ad Club Interactive Day, Josh Rose spoke about the creative process and the new social consumer. Key learnings:

Consider the conversation, not just the content. Comments can have a greater effect on the brand than the original content.
Feedback from social media should be part of the creative process. Tools like hootsuite, tweetdeck, Lithium, etc are great for social monitoring.
Causes can be great engagement tools.
Some creative campaigns have a hook. These would be unique product tutorials (will it blend) or jib jab like tools where customers participate in the creative process.
For crisis management, stay on track by asking your team open ended questions to help find creative solutions. “What if this never happened, what would we do.”
Focus on making headlines, not reading headlines.

On a whole, Josh’s presentation was solid. It was great to get some behind the scenes look of some wildly successful campaigns.

We’re Hiring!

admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 23:17:37 +0000

BigTuna Interactive is currently looking to fill an internship position! We are an extremely fun Interactive Agency located in the heart of Mission Beach. This is a great opportunity to learn and network with some of San Diego’s Brighest!

Responsibilities:

Help to manage day-to-day social media campaigns, email campaigns, SEO, search marketing campaigns and day-to-day activities. Duties include entering/developing email content, keyword research, online advocacy, social media posting, writing editorial, community-outreach efforts, promotions, etc.

Help manage presence in social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and other similar community sites, posting on relevant blogs, and seeding content into social applications as needed.

Manage, update, and edit content through various content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, SAP, Shopify).

Skills and Requirements:

A college junior, senior in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Graphic Design, Interactive Media or related discipline
Fluency in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator
Flash animation experience a plus
Good verbal and written communication skills
Marketing/Advertising course work
Knowledge of HTML/Web Dev is a huge plus
Must love the internet
Willing to learn Online Marketing
Must be socially adept and have an interest in Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and other social networking platforms.

What you will learn:

You will have access to cutting edge web tools. These include the pro toolkit from SeoMoz, usability tracking software Silverback and Userfly, and social media optimization program ScoutLabs.
Access and exposure to larger agencies in San Diego, Northern California and Las Vegas.
Mobile Marketing from Treeline Interactive, BigTuna Interactive’s strategic partner.

Included in the internship program is a membership to Ad 2 San Diego, the Young Professional section of the San Diego Ad Club.

Details:

This internship is for a maximum of 10 hours a week. Flexible hours. School credit or paid compensation.

Please send your resume to jobs@bigtunainteractive.com

SXSW: How Print Design is the Future of Interaction

admin — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:20:43 +0000

9:30 panel: Mike Kruzeniski, Creative Director for Microsoft gave a steller Saturday morning presentation for How Print Design is the Future of Interaction. He started with a great history of UI design, and then incorporated best practices of print design, as now applied to web design.

Key learnings:

Icons are only useful if everyone understands what it means. This is a great principle to follow.
Grid based designs speed up your development systems as we as increases the user experience. It helps form the appropriate amount of white and negative space. We’ve been a huge fan of a modified version of the 960 grid system for our web designs.
The Flipboard RSS reader provides a print page like interface and provides a cleaner RSS reader experiencee.

In summary, Mike spoke often about Paul Rand’s quote regarding how bad design is now become common design. This is a quote that you should show clients whenever they want a glossy or reflection-like layout, circa 2008!

The Redesign of BigTunaInteractive.com

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:18:49 +0000

After three weeks of usability testing, we are proud to officially announce the re-launch of BigTuna Interactive’s site! The features of this site are a product of our San Diego web design skills that we have advanced tremendously over the past few years.

Here are some images of the old site. Please click on them for a full screen graphic.

We used these technologies and design techniques on the new BigTuna Interactive website:

CSS Sprites

We really went nuts with CSS sprites on the redesign. Sprites are images with various usability states. These states could be either current, active or hover. Sprites are a great way to increase page speed and reduce server calls. In the past, you had to use javascript to accomplish the effects of sprites. However, you can develop them using strictly CSS today. The first sprite that you will see is our navigation.

The navigation of our old site had a drop down menu. However, after researching our analytics, we saw that the drop down navigation was not used and that we would be better off by simplifying the navigation.

The footer is also blinged out with two different sprites:

CSS sprites also increase usability by showing the visitor that they are on a clickable object.

jQuery

jQuery is a clean, unobtrusive javascript library that allows you to add flash-like interactions to your site. We are a huge fan of jQuery. jQuery allows you to pack meaningful content on a page; yet, you can still keep the layout integrity. This is great for search engine optimization. You will see jQuery interactions on the following pages:

The contact form on the right sidebar, the hover states for the images in our portfolio, and the fancybox image galleries are also triggered by jQuery.

Icons and custom graphics

Icons are consistent throughout the entire site. They serve as descriptive indicators of what the visitor will be clicking on. You name the page, you’ll see some icons!

We also gave each services page a custom designed header graphic. This graphic was created in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Improved Portfolio section

The portfolio section for Interactive Agencies can be one of the trickiest page to lay out. We gave each of our products a thumbnail image, and an icon to show what services we performed. You have the option to check out all our our portfolio items directly on that page, through a fancybox modal overlay image gallery, or you can click directly to that page for more information.

Contact forms

We decided to put the contact form, fixed right to the visitors browser. Once clicked on, this contact form expands to include all of our pertinent contact information. On our old site, the contact form was in the footer and was hard to find. This is an absolute no-no for web design!

All of the site forms are connected to various databases, which allow us to manage the flow of information more efficiently.

Search Engine Optimization

I often tell our clients that there are two things that you need to be successful at seo:

Links
Pages

This redesign allowed us to add another 30 pages to the site and create an information hierarchy that is scalable.

Please let us know what you think of the new site. Like all good websites, your job is never finished. You should be consistently conducting usability studies, checking your analytics and optimizing the site for conversions. We plan on practicing what we preach for our clients with this site!

Facebook Social Plugin API Tips

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:36:59 +0000

Facebook social plugins are becoming a core component of social media campaigns. Facebook’s api is very robuts; however, their documentation needs some work.

If you click on the attached thumbnail, you will see that the API that Facebook is documenting is actually the API of the Lactose Free FanPage, not BigTuna Interactive’s. Make sure that you document your API number!

Another good tip is to make sure that you are using the JavaScript SDK. This will make sure that it does not conflict with any other javascript that may be running on the page.

Bing’s Online Marketing Launch Strategy

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:39:32 +0000

The launch of Bing in June of 2009 was a very thought out and integrated online marketing strategy. Below are the key learnings from Tuesday, March 16’s SXSW session titled “Bing: admit it, you thought it would suck”:

Bing had a strong online marketing campaign to launch their product which emphasized an emotional connection to a brand. Word of mouth, relationship marketing provides 40% emotional proximity to the brand. Tactics to pull this off are talking to friends and family, writing for blogs, participating to the online conversation through social communities, etc.

Social Media

Bing really sought out to connect with their audience and online visitors. They wanted to be intimate with their users while providing a strong search experience. Over 72% of users who clicked on their facebook ad became fans. Through a media buy with Farmville, Bing obtained over 400,000 fans through that campaign. If they became a fan of bing, Farmville gave them 3 credits. This was a media spend done through a cost per engagement buy. Believe it or not, farmville has more users than twitter.

People often forget that “media” is part of social media! Having a paid budget for social should be a core component of your media buy.

Leverage Crowd Sourcing

Bing opened up their homepage to photo contests. This is another nice crowd sourcing approach to drive traffic and build evangelists.

Key management learnings:

You don’t know anything: you can’t always predict with social media. Bing reached out to the key players in social media {Mashable, All things D, Web Pro News, Read Write Web, Search Engine Journal, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, etc}. They couldn’t predict who would pass the message the furthest.
Bing had their interns come up with a bing jingle contest. They offered $500 for the jingle. Not a big story, but Mashable and TechCrunch picked up the contest. The funny part is the TechCrunch author thought that it was terrible and the campaign actually went viral. Within weeks, the video winner created a video mocking the TechCrunch author and the campaign took off from there.
Integrate across different channels. Bing had a strong traditional budget but used it in innovative ways. They bought an entire commercial time slot for the Daily Show. They showed a quick commercial and than gave Daily Show visitors 2 extra minutes for the show.

In summery, the Bing: admit it, you thought it would suck session at SXSW was my favorite panel. The speakers all had good personalities and were transparent about their campaign. Bing is a much better search engine than it was a year ago and it will only get better.

Twitter At Platform

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:15:44 +0000

Evan Williams was the keynote speaker on Monday’s session at SXSW. Evan announced Twitter’s At Platform to which allows twitter into websites. This feature shows a jquery tooltip when you hover over a link with a twitter name and allows you to follow them directly without going to your twitter tools or twitter.com directly.

The at platform gives a platform to have you juice up your network and pull more twitter streams into the conversation.

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:32:25 +0000

The Beyond Algorithms session at SXSW was filled with with an All Star cast. Danny Sullivan, Editor for Search Engine Land and one of the most respected thought leader was a surprise addition to the panel.

The semantic web has been the most emerging topic in search engine optimization and the overall usability of search engines. The term semantic web has a lot of different meanings from different people. My definition of semantic web is that it is a higher level, or more concise matching the search query to the user’s intentions.

Danny Sullivan wasn’t a big fan of the term “semantic web”. His argument was that the core functionality of search is semantic and that the term is not needed. Search should be relevant and match the users intentions by default. He also brought up the point that since December, Google has been personalizing the search results pages.

A passion point of the panelists was what do you want out of your search results? Are you satisfied with the current results or would you like more detailed answers. The use of API’s to mashup (Yahoo! search monkey for example) can allow you to build some really cool pages on the fly.

In summary, you will see improvements in semantic web, but it will take a while. Faster innovations are coming up with display advertising serving up ads that are more relevant to users.

Optimizing a WordPress Post

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:05:25 +0000

Optimizing a WordPress Post

This video the shows the proper on page optimization processes for a WordPress post. It covers the correct title structure, category alignment, more tag positioning and use of the All in One SEO plugin. There are hundreds of other factors that go into optimizing your WordPress pages. This tutorial shows the basic best practices for what to do with the default settings and the all in one plugin.

We wrote earlier about best practices for wordpress on page seo. This video will show you what to do once you are logged into the admin panel. By no means is this a quick search engine optimization solution. It will point you in the right direction to using WordPress properly for SEO.

SlickMap CSS Site Map

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:55:46 +0000

I added a SlickMap CSS site map to this site today. Slickmap provides a “mind-map” like sitemap. Surprisingly, you would think that this site map would have been written with jquery. However, it is written in pure CSS, with no javascript.

Site maps are a staple web usability feature. They give visitors a quick way to find information. Site maps are also great link juice for search engine spiders.

Since this site is managed by WordPress, I was able to use php to dynamically add my blog posts to the site map. Check out the site map and let me know what you think.