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 King Kustom Podcast One [12:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (68)

Fluid Media is pleased to announce the official launch of a web site for King Custom Cycles.  We are excited about the opportunity to assist our good friends Laura & Phil King in expanding their community base of motorcycle enthusiasts via Web 2.0 tools, and to help them generate business for their parts and repair business.

Let’s share with you some of our initiatives:

First, to touch on the logo design for the brand.  We were brought in on the tail end of the design process and Cameron was able to salvage some of the elements that had been developed, but immediately the concern regarding the “distressed” look revolves around replication issues on merchandise and smaller collateral.

So to avoid losing the little K in custom and other smaller bits, a non-distressed application is being created for certain usage.

We also added a secondary color palette and font styles for use on the web site and collateral materials.

The intention of the web site is to ultimately act as an online community where friends of King Kustom Cycles can interact, exchange tips on great places to ride, discuss new gear for their bikes … or just pass the time during the intervals when not on the road.  In order to achieve this objective we are integrating some exciting new applications and are waiting for others to be released from beta testing!

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On August 17, 2008 Liliana (Lily) Jade Magennis was born at 3:20 pm. Mom was super awesome in her preparation and execution! At 12:30 we thought it would be a dinnertime delivery but the nurse checked in and declared “you are at 10, we’re going to have a baby soon!

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This event relates to befluid.com in a personal way obviously, but by sharing the experience through the use of social networks it relates to the business side as well.

The best way to present the topic is to simply link to a “dotcompadre” named Scott Jangro who went through the experience literally days earlier. Follow the post’s comment thread to see my input.

I never want to say things like “I told you so” or “You should have listened to us” .. but more and more our strategy appears to have been a bit ahead of its time regarding the STORIES campaign that we pitched to a client way back in early 2001.

A client at the time was a resort property that I won’t name, but had hired us to provide all of their marketing communications and design services, including a new web site.  The web site was integrated with a newly developed online reservations system that would have benefited greatly from a well executed plan to convert site visitors into guests.

The concept was simple, we would focus on user generated content, which is the basis of sites such as You Tube, and every blog commenting system in use today.  We wanted to drive traffic to the website that contained a collection of resort guest’s memories, photos and stories - A site rich with customer testimonials!  These firsthand accounts of the experiences awaiting at the property would help to drive reservations from new visitors, as they established pseudo peer to peer relationships via the web site.

This is the backbone of all social media marketing tactics these days.  The strategy of building a community of customers, brand champions, and actual users, and allowing them to interact directly is far superior to building a static site with corporate bulletins and polished prose.  User Generated Content (UGC) is perceived as authentic and credible in the age of Web 2.0.

Hesitancy at the resort, and many entities currently considering opening up these channels, derives from a constant fear that someone might post something that is negative.  Let them!  It provides you with two things — an immediate and direct customer service focus group, and authenticity.

When something negative is exposed it allows for the opportunity to correct the issue (and respond appropriately to visitors via the web site) and in the mind of a site visitor it provides a subtle sense that you have not “scrubbed” the comments inappropriately and are displaying real experiences.

As and aside, user generated content tends to be very strong, keyword rich material that can be easily indexed by Search Engines and helps to drive site rankings.

Ultimately the Stories campaign was never fully executed.  Our plan provided guests with a small journal as an offline tool to keep their memories while on the property, and to point them to the web site URL upon returning home.  These tools were not dispensed at the resort and the site never recieved it’s flurry of content, which I guess is another lesson in itself.

Ideas are only as good as their execution … even if they are ahead of their time.

I spent the day today recording and editing Episode #2 of a podcast for Kush Supports.com called The Kush Report.  In this episode, Cathinka Chandler the company Founder & CEO and I review the various customer profiles of women who purchase Kush Supports, including women who are pregnant or nursing, and sleep support for women post augmentation.  We discuss details of the upcoming trade show they are attending, plus reveal that the Kushsupports.com web site will be re-launching in 2 - 3 weeks.

When the web site launches, we will have integrated a new blogging platform where we can establish a “home base” for all of the Social Media Marketing efforts that we have implemented, plus a location to launch the podcast.

The Wordpress blogging platform has become a major component of Fluid Media marketing initiatives for clients, simply because it is so much more versatile than building a traditional .html or .php based web site.  The most obvious advantage is the flexibility in adding new content and functionality that in the past would have required more significant resources.  It’s common knowledge that indexing and search results (and resulting web traffic) benefit from a steady stream of content .. and architecting and building a static web site does not achieve that need for updated, relevant content.

Clients do not have to entirely scrap the existing web site that they have, especially if there is a commerce engine built into it, a blog can simply be set up at a third level of the domain so that the entire site benefits, for example http://blog.coastalbean.com as part of the www.coastalbean.com domain.

However, the hardest challenge when adding a blog is the time involved in adding new content on a consistent basis.  When talking to prospective clients or even existing clients considering adding a blog, the first stated concern is having the time to post written entries on a regular basis.  With that in mind we have started to move more and more towards recording and posting podcasts as content.

Technology now allows us to use voice over IP connections to initiate and record what could be classified as a form of a “telephone call”, after completing the recording there is desktop editing software to help add some finishing touches like opening and closing music and credits … and voila, you have some rich media content to help to communicate the marketing message, that extends well beyond the pictures and text of a static web site.

As a side note, previously a transcription of the show would be posted as a blog entry to ensure that search engines index the post, but Google is creeping forward with speech recognition software that may soon peak inside a podcast in order to index the contents.  That would be an amazing advancement for podcasts and videos on line!

So if the hesitation about adding a corporate blog to your web site stems from the lack of time to write entries, there is now an approach that is just like picking up the phone.

This morning I was working away, as usual multitasking a variety of items including researching a tool to update PDF documents on a site, so that they are properly indexed by the search engines.  This will prevent the client from having to backtrack and re-compile the documents. (Note: think I’ve found something but looking around to be sure it’s the best option).

I was also monitoring twitter (profiled today in USA Today) via an application I am testing called TweetDeck.  This elegant desktop application is written in Adobe Air which allows for cross platform functionality … but more importantly TweetDeck has built the user interface in silos where you can categorize incoming tweets, helping you to monitor a diverse range of conversations.  The key reason that I am most intrigued by it, is the ability to set up silos to sort “searched” terms in the background.  This is similar to the disabled “Track” functionality originally incorporated in Twitter IM clients, and to me the killer app for brands on the web.

One of the terms that I have set up for TweetDeck to scan for is “Social Media”.  Right in the middle of the page I get to see every tweet that is happening with the term social media in it .. this keeps me right on top of the conversation, allowing me to reply, follow, check out a URL, or simply absorb what is being said regarding social media on twitter.

This morning I came across the following tweet from mdurwin that said; “to link 2 each other on LinkedIn, should we put Twitted as an employer? until LI recognizes social media connections…”  You know what? He’s exactly right.

First of all, notice that I saw this tweet because he had included the term social media in the statement.  When I read his statement it caught my attention because I have been struggling with growing my personal network on LinkedIn because of this exact reason, I just hadn’t been able to put my finger on it to state it out loud.

The LinkedIn network is a powerful web service geared specifically for business users.  The more famous social network sites like Facebook & MySpace are overrun with a much younger demographic and a quality resume would get lost in the crowd.  LinkedIn can help professionals looking for business relationships plus it can act as a defacto employment placement tool.

When attempting to connect to others in LinkedIn, you are asked how you know the person, ie. Colleague, Friend, Classmate etc.  These categories don’t exactly work for the growing connections being made via the social web.  Mdurwin is not a colleague of mine, we never worked at the same company, we did not go to school together … and the ambiguous term “friend” does not apply since I have only known of his presence since this morning.  However, we both believe that there are benefits to linking our networks together in a mutually beneficial way.

LinkedIn needs to update the application to include another classification of connections called “Social Networker”.

(Update 7/22: I was directed to this web site where the discussion of newly minted terms was being defined including the term “Dotcomrades”.  There you go LinkedIn .. your new classification!”)