Some mornings, you wake up at 4:45 a.m. to this alarm. Then at 7 a.m., your real alarm doesn’t go off, your dog poops on the floor, you discover there is no more coffee, and your upstairs neighbors sound like they’re playing “Dance, Dance Revolution” in high heels. It’s pretty difficult to be motivated to do anything except go back to bed.

But you have to go to work. So what do you do? Here’s what I did this morning:

1. Breathe—Breathe deeply. Sit or stand very still, drop your shoulders, and take the deepest breaths you can. Doctors, therapists and yoga instructors all say that by concentrating on the basic function of taking deep breaths, you introduce more oxygen to your blood stream (which translates to more oxygen to your brain). All that oxygen quickens your thinking and wakes up the further away parts of your body. The repetition also calms you down.

2. Focus—Think of two or three things that you are incredibly grateful for in the middle of everything going wrong. Be grateful that you got to sleep next to your sweet husband all night. Be grateful that you have a roof over your head and food to eat and a car that works. Be grateful that you can bend over and touch your toes and stretch this way and that. Be grateful that your dog behaves most of the time.

3. Move on—This is the hardest part (and I clearly haven’t done it, or I wouldn’t be posting this blog). Complaining only keeps the trouble present. You have better things to spend time and energy on. Let the crap (har har) and disruption of your morning go away. Unless you can make a really funny joke out of it. Or a blog post.

Tell me about how you overcame your worst morning. What got you motivated?

→ Jess Hutton, Lead Copywriter, AREA203 Digital; follow… @JessLHutton

→ David Pemberton, Editor, Social Media + PR, AREA203 Digital; follow… @Dave_Your_Fave

]]> http://area2oh3.com/motivate-inspire-social-interaction-infographic/feed/ 0 http://area2oh3.com/write-better-blog/ http://area2oh3.com/write-better-blog/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 20:11:26 +0000 Heather Osteen http://area2oh3.com/?p=24634 [...]]]>

Writing a blog post can be a little foreign—even for those of us who have degrees in English (or, at least, to me). This type of writing often has nothing to do with the super-intense learning, research, and writing that goes into the fact-based, rhetoric studies I’m used to, much less the 10-page papers with necessary notations and citations.

Do a Google search of the term “blog writing 101” and rest assured no one is really going to discuss the use of grammar. Instead, the search will return sites that offer tips on how to add video to your site, how to write the way you talk, and how to ensure that you use terms that will refer readers to your blog.

I am not referring in any way, shape, or form to the specific terminology or abbreviations used in the digital world. As someone who finds language fascinating, I am very aware of the fact that those terms and abbreviations are different and have their place. (See my post “Talk the Talk.”)

I am making a concerted effort to become the blog writer I would like to be. My teammate, Dave Pemberton, offers some very helpful tips for those who haven’t quite mastered the art of blogging. The answers to these three questions will help refine your blogging process:

A good blog will fulfill a need. That need can be something simple, like self documentation or complex, like art criticism. However, it’s important to have reasonable expectations for what your blog will achieve based on its purpose. If you are only looking to fulfill the need of an autobiographical pursuit, realize that you will never be famous. Ever.

But that leads into my next point. Seek to be genuine when you write. Blog because you want to. Blogging should be a work of passion and, as such, you shouldn’t be doing it for the fame. A good blog will always be motivated on a personal level.

When deciding what to post, make sure you choose a topic that you are ardently passionate about. A good place to start when brainstorming a topic is by looking for a lack of information in a given area. If you can provide that information, in an excited and genuine way, then you’re going to have a good post.

Consider your audience. Who is most likely to read your blog? What information are they interested in? What kind of language are they comfortable with? What is their attention span? Figure out who is reading your blog so that you can discover how to write for them.

If you’re blog is seeking to educate a portion of the Internet’s population, it’s wise to first understand that population.

For example, say you are passionate about writing movie reviews, and you have realized there aren’t enough action-horror film reviews on the Internet, so you start an action-horror film review blog. If your blog’s demographic is comprised of men ages 18 to 35, with mid-level education, then your blog should likely focus on a fun and interesting writing style.

Knowing who your audience is will allow you to sharpen your writing style. Speaking of style…

In blogging terms, “voice” is how your writing communicates with your audience. If you want your blog to feel a certain way, it needs to sound a certain way.

This is a matter of personal branding. Once you’ve figured out why and who you’re blogging for, you’ll be able to determine the sound of your blog’s voice. A tech blog, for example, might sound geeky in order to feel authentic, or helpful to feel relevant.

Writing in a specific voice to a specific audience will help you develop a consistent style. The best posts are those that are written in a consistent style because they communicate clearly with their intended audience.

As always, there is no substitute for experience and talent. However, every writer needs a framework in which to base their revisions. Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or first time Tumblr-er, answering these three questions will help lead you to better blogging.

• UC Berkeley student rigs his dorm room to become an amazing automated experience.

• Tired of celebrity status updates polluting your feed? There’s an app for that.

• Ever wonder what physics go into the Hulk’s massive jump? Here’s an explanation.

• Tech giants are trying to change journalism.

• Will Instagram-like apps make video sharing popular?

• Briggo Coffee has hired robot baristas. The end is nigh.

• This elephant never forgot…how to play the harmonica.

• Speaking of music, this TED talk may not be the newest, but it is certainly inspiring.

• Looking for a new way to keep your teeth healthy? Try a good ol’ massage.

• What would happen if you put your hand in the LHC’s beam? What’s the LHC? Just watch this video.

• This guy drove over an iPad 3 with his truck. He might be evil.

• If you like I Can Has Cheezburger, you’ll love somuchpun.com. Less cats, more puns!

• What would you do for free Wi-Fi? Ad agency DDB  in Mexico finds a creative way to offer dog owners free Wi-Fi.

• Here are 10 awesome uses for a USB flash drive.

• Apple is worth a lot.

• Learn a new language while surfing the Web.

→ Bill Colrus, Managing Editor, Social Media + PR, AREA203 Digital; follow… @billcolrus

The Internet is not a new frontier anymore and hasn’t been for quite some time. The online world has become an integral part of our lives, and businesses must expand beyond the typical shopping behavior. The research and development that was once spent on product placement in retail stores is continuously being adapted to the online world. This research is typically done through analytics—software that tracks user actions on a particular site. The data that’s being captured tells a bigger story about user behavior than you may think.

We All Know Analytics Is More Than Numbers

A standard Web analytics package wasn’t enough five years ago, and it’s definitely not enough today. Sure, overall visits and page views are important metrics, especially if tracked properly for each marketing channel, but what about the quality of the customer? Is SEO traffic the same as Lead Generation traffic? Of course not, but do they work together? How do you know?
Rule #1 for any analyst is not to assume something because what might be the most obvious answer is probably not. Not to mention, there are endless amounts of questions that might help or contradict a solution. For example:

• How can you justify a call to action change with millions of dollars in media spend?
• How do you know a website’s true user experience without first looking at basic analytics?
• Why not add search engine friendly text to every single page?
• Should you invest your time chasing long-tail keywords?

I’d love to sit here and say there are simple metrics and a simple dashboard that can explain everything any business would need to know, but that’s just false. Don’t get me wrong: numbers don’t lie, but you need someone to put those numbers into context. This is especially true if you find yourself dealing with problems because the analytics code was not set up properly.

Customize Your Analytics

Now, if you think analytics is just as simple as plug and play, then you’ve probably set yourself up for failure. As digital marketing professionals, we all have the understanding that every campaign, website, and company is different in how they operate. KPIs will always vary for each client and campaign, depending on a wide variety of factors. For example, seasonality, goals, conversions, risk management, innovation, brand awareness, and stressing selling points will all have a different KPI that will measure success (aside from overall conversions).

There are a host of different types of customizable code that can be set up to suit any type of website. From ecommerce to simple landing pages to sites with more than enough subdomains, each type of site will require a different type of code. This is even more relevant if you are trying to track channel-specific traffic to the conversion level. Sure, Google Analytics does a pretty good job of outputting some code to use, but once you’ve got it all set up—out-of-box, of course—you’ll always want to see something else. This will eventually lead to a point where an individual channel’s performance needs to be monitored.

Prepare for Third-Party Analytics Integration

The days of automation and turnkey solutions are now becoming generic for any business that wants to thrive online. It’s safe to say that measuring a customer’s behavior is the number one priority for any marketing agency out there today. Free analytics tools are great, but they don’t tell the bigger story. What are those visitors doing on your site? How did they get there? Where can you maximize more quality traffic? No matter how many custom updates you make to your standard analytics’ package, the time will come for more data. This is where innovative and channel-specific monitoring tools come into play. This is when it’s time to go shopping.

Just like shopping for electronic devices, integration with other products goes a long way in value. It’s the selling point for third-party monitoring tools. At AREA203, we’ve made integration a key resolution by implementing IMB Coremetrics because of the diversity of tools we use. You need to be able to monitor channel-specific results in perspective with the rest of the marketing mix in real time. It wouldn’t be very time-efficient to collect and store data in multiple applications that each measure important business decisions. Real-time analytics will pave the way for more logical decisions.

→ Jig Patel, SEO Specialist, AREA203 Digital

I Love to Laugh

My husband will tell you – I crack myself up all the time, giggle at commercials, and get tickled over silly typos and silly looking animals. I think this week we need to start with some comedy.

(Here’s the secret behind today’s Motivation: Laughing is good for you physically. We know that. But comedians have the gift of seeing things around them differently than the rest of us. Watching these three comedians in particular can help you change the way you look at ordinary objects and everyday obstacles. Enjoy!)

• Mitch Hedberg’s Comedy Central special
• Demetri Martin: Visual Jokes
• Bill Cosby on Dentists (He’s my favorite!)

→ Jess Hutton, Lead Copywriter, AREA203 Digital; follow… @JessLHutton

As both a former student of journalism and a social media professional, I’m torn on this issue. On one hand, I say let social media be the spreader of news, the timely messenger that allows everyone to have a voice and their own, custom news stream.

On the other hand, journalism is still a vital part of society and we need people who are trained to find the closest version of the truth on the beat, creating valuable content from an informed perspective.

The “Pros vs. Cons” section of this infographic by Schools.com does an excellent job of battling out the positives and negatives of living in a socially streamed news world.

What do you think? Will social media replace other media outlets?

Check out this other blog post for more discussion on how social media has already made an impact: The Impact of Social Media.

→ Louise Elliott, Editor, Social Media + PR, AREA203 Digital; follow…@geez_louise_

]]> http://area2oh3.com/old-news-social-media-infographic/feed/ 0 http://area2oh3.com/monday-motivation-play-creativity/ http://area2oh3.com/monday-motivation-play-creativity/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:42:00 +0000 Jess Hutton http://area2oh3.com/?p=25456 [...]]]> I turn to TED.com for inspiration on a regular basis. Their talks are inspiring, palatable (no longer than 30 minutes), and downright brilliant. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, spoke (four years ago) on the relationship between creativity and play. Here’s a summary and a challenge:

Mr. Brown points out in his 30-minute lecture (and I encourage you to watch it for yourself) that there’s a difference between kids and adults. And it’s not height. Kids play and they play freely—they never apologize for their creativity, they’re more open to possibilities, and they’re very quick to play hands-on. But as we grow up, we seem to forget how to play. We are conscious of our peers’ judgments, we are quick to categorize and dismiss new objects, and we begin to self-edit.

Mr. Brown identified three categories of play that are common to all children: exploring, building, and role-playing. He suggests that if we can relearn how to play, we only stand to benefit from it. “Playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions, helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them,” he says.

Exploring

Children look at a new object and ask, “What is it?” but they also ask, “What can I do with it?” The adult version of this exploration is brainstorming. We look at a new situation or product and search for creative uses and solutions. We establish rules for brainstorm sessions (“No slighting or criticizing. No black-hatting. No idea is a bad idea.”), and Brown says this is good. Adults need rules to help them break their adult habits and get back to playful ideas.

Building

Kids spend the majority of their time in “construction play,” or thinking with their hands. As kids go through school, the at-hand play and building tools are taken away and the environment is made more serious. As human beings—child or adult, we are more able to describe our needs and dreams when we have models (even crude replicas) to work from.

Role-Playing

Many adults are skeptical about role-playing—acting out a scenario or experience. But research shows that kids’ role-playing is directed by social scripts that they’ve learned and adhere to naturally and quickly. Since we have even more scripts as adults, it only makes sense that relying on those internal cues and acting something out will result in a “seamless and authentic” experience.

So here’s my challenge: look around your workspace. Do you have “tools” or “toys” that you can build with, color with, shape and arrange? Is there a space where it’s OK for you to write on the walls (glass meeting room walls or whiteboards)? Do you trust your peers enough to ask them to engage in acting out an experience you’re designing? Why not?

Watch Mr. Brown’s talk, and let me know what you think. I think he’s on to something exciting and revolutionary.

→ Jess Hutton, Lead Copywriter, AREA203 Digital; follow… @JessLHutton

When we approach new clients who are currently running PPC advertising campaigns, we often offer quick optimization tactics that can equate to big savings in media dollars. Suggestions include best practices like: managing display and content campaigns separately from search campaigns, changing and expanding keyword match types to drive more qualified traffic, updating landing pages to include keyword rich content, and incorporating negative keywords to limit unnecessary exposure – just to name a few.

Yet every now and again we engage clients that are already employing these tactics and are looking for more ways to streamline and grow their accounts. One trick we use to grow an account and lower the CPA for our clients, which you won’t find in the Google AdWords Help Center, is what we call hammering the tail.

Hammering the tail is the practice of building out extensive lists of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are search queries that contain three or more intent-focused words. These keywords typically result in lower search volume, but are highly specific terms that hone in on user intent and often times, have far less competition in the keyword auction space.

Example:

Head Term: Guitars – vague term with little known about searcher intent, lots of traffic, high competition, top of the sales funnel, high CPC’s, typically lower conversion rates.

Tail Term: Martin D-45 Dreadnought Acoustic Guitar – lower traffic volume, lower in sales funnel, lower competition, and low CPC’s.

The importance of long tail keywords in any keyword portfolio is their ability to capture prime real estate on the SERP with highly-targeted, low-cost words that, with proper management, can drastically increase ROI. See the chart below:

This tactic is often underutilized by clients because they either do not have the time or the resources necessary to mine through cumbersome, yet valuable, data from search query reports. They fail to see the importance of incorporating these insights into a strategy for building a comprehensive keyword list that encompasses both the head and long tail terms. These tactics require a great deal of time and strategic planning, but the results speak for themselves via increased revenue and decreased costs.

→ Levi Mueller, Sr. PPC Specialist, AREA203 Digital; follow… @JLeviMueller

What do Paypal, Mars, Iron Man and high-performance electric sports cars have in common?

Elon Musk.

Musk is the charming, young entrepreneurial genius and all-around rock star who co-founded Paypal and currently serves as the CEO of two (that’s right, two) start-ups, Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (known as SpaceX).

He’s appeared on the Time magazine top 100 list, been named Inc. magazine’s “Entrepreneur of the Year,” serves as the designer of the Falcon 9 booster rocket for SpaceX, is a pioneer of green power, and is the real-life inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark character in the film Iron Man. Musk also serves as Chairman for SolarCity, the leading provider of residential solar power in California since 2007.

Browse the Internet and you’ll find photos of Musk hanging out with the leaders of hot tech companies, President Obama, and Kanye West.

Read his Twitter feed and you’ll learn he is insanely passionate about his work and has an irreverent sense of humor.

So how does one go from creating a peer-to-peer, Internet payment company to developing top-of-the-line, fully electric sports cars to space exploration?

Passion, Planning, and Plenty of Hard Work

When Musk was in college, he pondered the top three areas that would most impact the future of humanity. The answers he came up with were the Internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration with the purpose of inter-planetary colonization. And then he did something about it.

After starting and selling an Internet company that assisted newspapers in going digital, Musk reinvested the funds into X.com, which eventually turned into PayPal Inc. PayPal took off with a viral marketing campaign designed by Musk, which gave any new customer — as well as anyone who referred a new customer — $10 in their PayPal account. With his leadership, PayPal was eventually sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock.

“The Internet is like the world acquiring a nervous system,” Musk said of his reasons behind being interested in growing online services. “You have access to the cumulative knowledge of humanity. You have access to more information than the Library of Congress through your iPhone.”

SpaceX and Tesla

Musk took the capital from the sale of PayPal and founded SpaceX, a company that develops and manufactures space launch vehicles. SpaceX has a stated goal of getting humans into space. Tesla says of the company, “We want to be like the shipping company that brought people from Europe to America or the Union Pacific Rail Road. Our goal is to facilitate the transfer of people and cargo to other planets, and then it’s going to be up to other people to decide if they want to go.”

In 2012, SpaceX expects to make more rocket engines than any country in the world.

Musk also acts as the Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors. With famous owners like Matt Damon and George Clooney, Tesla is the hottest green sports car on the market. But Tesla doesn’t just focus on making bucks from the production of their super-stylish, eco-friendly road machines. Musk sees the sale of their high-dollar vehicles as a tool for investment in the development of more affordable electric motors. Eventually, Musk would like to offer an affordable, fully electric, highway-friendly vehicle to the masses.

“The overarching goal of Tesla is to get the industry to move towards electrification…faster than it otherwise might go,” says Musk. He says they’re pleased when there’s an announcement from anyone else in the industry concerning the production of electric cars, whether that means competition for Tesla or not.

So, yes, Musk is a genius of business and science. But he’s not just a face, an idea man, or someone behind the scenes pulling the strings. He is developing ideas, making them come to fruition and isn’t stopping. This video of Musk giving a tour of SpaceX says it all. As Musk stands in front of steampunk-esque equipment, detailing the minutiae of its functioning, it hits you that he really knows what he’s talking about. Musk knows exactly what’s going on with every process, every project and every person in his headquarters. He’s a calculating evil genius, minus the evil.

And as for being the inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark: “I thought he was cool, but I spend my weekends going to Disneyland and I don’t think Tony Stark’s doing that.”

Basically, Musk is The Coolest Guy on Earth, and his goal is to make that title interplanetary.

→ Louise Elliott, Social Media and PR Editor, AREA203 Digital; follow… @geez_louise_