All posts in Business

Our Harlem Shake

by Chris M on March 3, 2013 in Business, Humour, Video with 3 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, we (iMod Digital) decided to launch our very own Harlem Shake video. Why? No other reason than to have a little fun and be part of a meme that was causing huge waves over the Internet. Hells, I even heard the song played on KFM yesterday whilst sitting in traffic and it immediately brought a smile to my face.

We shot the video in literally 20 minutes with just 2 takes, so appreciate it from that point of view. Oh, and keep your eyes open, there IS a character that remains very still during the video ;)

Did you shoot a Harlem Shake video? We’d love to see it, pop a link in the comments below.

Everyday Awesomeness: Lost Type and its controversial business model

by on December 19, 2012 in Business with No comments

Have you heard of Lost Type? It’s a font foundry created by two designers, Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. Typeface designers contribute fonts to the foundry, and the fonts are sold on a pay-what-you-want basis. All designers receive 100% of the donations made towards their fonts.

This is a great idea for at least three reasons:

1      High quality fonts are available at an affordable price

2      Typeface designers can contribute to and profit from a pioneering font project

3      This business model is a fascinating change from the traditional premium business model

The pay-what-you-want model gives you the freedom to pay far less/much more than you would for an average font. Few individuals, especially, can afford to buy a typeface like Proxima Nova or pay the typical $29 price tag attached to one weight of one font. For the self-employed crafter or the freelance designer, Lost Type offers an excellent range of fonts that are the definition of affordable. You can even type in “$0” for a free download if you’re broke.

What do you think of this business model? Is it sustainable?

The cheapest isn’t always the best

by Chris M on December 19, 2012 in Business, My Life, Search Engine Optimization with 7 Comments

I’m not one for pitching on projects as I believe building business relationships on trust is far more concrete than doing some fancy presentation and winning the work – of course, this applies to both sides, the company and the provider. That is not to say that it isn’t important to communicate what one is able to do, please don’t get me wrong, I just don’t feel that a flashy presso is an approach that is better than building the trust. I also understand that sometimes you have to pitch, but in most of my cases I like to get to know potential clients before entering into business relationships, it’s worked very well for me.

A few months ago I was involved in a situation where there was a level of pitching involved, I did what I had to do, I also went for the trust angle and my offering and costings were very good – I went in lower than usual as it was a client I would have very much liked to have worked for as the brand shared a lot of my feelings. The pitch went well, the client liked me and I was fairly confident that I would get the work. A month went by, I sent through a follow up email and the client replied positively, but explained that it was going to be a slow process – I’m happy with that and completely understand.

I didn’t land the project.

My company is fairly new and I wanted to understand why I hadn’t landed the project so I popped the client a reply thanking them for letting me know (I truly appreciate being told when I don’t land work) and asked for some advise, was my pitch bad, did I quote incorrectly or anything that I could take and work on for the next time. The response was very polite and it boiled down purely to cost. I was a little shocked by this, but I was given some insight into the client’s budget at the time, so I thanked the client and went on with business.

Now, today, a few months later the brand popped up in passing conversation, completely randomly, and I decided to head back to the office and have a look at the website and see how things were going. My experience in SEO allows me to quickly look at a website and identify some of the key tasks any SEO company would immediately implement on a website, such as: meta data, sitemaps, backlink profile and so forth. Now, most of us know that meta data is no longer the be all and end all when it comes to SEO (if you didn’t know that, you do now). However, although it’s not a heavy ranking factor, it’s still incredibly important to make sure that it’s relevant, suited to the page’s content, not duplicate and is user friendly for when the results are displayed by Google, Bing and so forth. On this client’s website, all the meta data hasn’t been updated, it includes keywords that are irrelevant and in many cases, they’re duplicate! The website runs on WordPress, I’ve seen the backend, so I know it’s not a case of being a strong CMS that doesn’t have the functionality to update meta data uniquely. I also noticed that the sitemap is old, it doesn’t take any of the new pages that the client had just created when I met them into account and there’s no sign of any changes to the link profile. The list does go on, but for the sake of this post I shall not bore you. Oh, and the website’s rank for the keywords they were interested in haven’t changed one bit, I compared it to the report I pulled when I was pitching.

This sort of thing pains me, not because I didn’t win the work (sure, that plays a part), but mostly because I know that I could have done a better job, an ethical job and a job that the client would be able to see the result of. I can’t help but think that the company who won the pitch quoted really low, landed the client and has honestly done absolutely nothing – probably sends them a monthly report with some complicated graphs and keyword lists that make it seem like a lot is happening. It just feels wrong to me, horribly wrong, when there are SEOs and inbound marketers out there doing great ethical work, these cowboys and flyby nighters are giving the industry a bad name.

Now, I know this is life and I know that this happens in all industries, so I’m certainly not saying this is all about SEO, but in this case it was and it infuriates me that these great people (the client) are not getting what they are paying for. It also makes me mad that I could have landed an incredibly nice client and done some amazing work.

Perhaps I should email the client and touch base?

less than sign, forward slash, rant, greater than sign

The 2012 Social Media Report

by Chris M on December 4, 2012 in Business, Networking with 1 Comment

It’s that time of the year again, Nielsen have published their State of the Media: The Social Media Report for 2012, with all these juicy statistics about the social networks that we have all grown to love.

There is some great insight into mobile usage, but apart from that, I like to know the number of users for the social networks and this year shows us the following usage and year-on-year change (remember, this is mostly US based):

The report is 28 pages long and is packed with interesting facts, it’s well worth the read in my opinion.

Quick links: The Post | PDF (not direct download)

Winners of the 2012 eCommerce Awards

by Chris M on December 3, 2012 in Business, Jobs & Money with No comments

The winners of the 2012 eCommerce Awards have been announced. I’m a bit sad as I would have loved to have entered some of the eCommerce websites we’ve been launching at iMod Digital, I guess there’s always next year :)

I love initiatives like this that are bringing out some of the eCommerce websites in the public’s eye. I still believe that there are a lot of eCommerce sites that don’t fall into the “clicks” and are therefore not being featured in these awards, but I don’t think it’ll be long until the public start recognising these sites as leading sites and not just being the ones that receive the most publicity/sales.

Here’s the list of winners:

  • Best eCommerce Store: Yuppiechef
  • Best eCommerce Services Website: Bidorbuy
  • Best Group Buying Website: Groupon
  • Best Classifieds Website: Property24
  • Best Design, Standards, Ease of use: TravelGround
  • Best Shopping Process: Yuppiechef
  • Public’s Favourite eCommerce Website: HomeChoice

If you’re interested in seeing who the runners up are, you can do so on the official site.

Congratulations to all nominees and winners!

What information, where?

by Chris M on November 27, 2012 in Business, Internet, My Life with No comments

For the most part of my life I’ve used all communication channels to advertise my life. iMod Blog was started many moons ago as a channel to keep my friends updated with my life and to assist others with all things digital and marketing, as well as the odd things here or there. Facebook and Twitter came along and I found myself following a very similar pattern for information distribution. I have no complaints nor problems, it was all about putting information out there that I felt was useful, funny or interesting. Of course, I used the channels for engagement too be it assisting someone, discussing a topic or the likes.

Today, or at least the last several months, I’ve found myself in an interesting position – what information should I share and through which channel. This all came into play when I started a company – clients find your Twitter handle and they take a peak, service providers friend you on Facebook and watch your updates, there are suddenly far more eyes on deck. It didn’t feel like this when I was employed, I was always careful about my image, but now it seems more important than ever. Deciding what to share and where is far more difficult than imagined.

There are folks who run and work for digital agencies around the world that I have huge respect for; they’re leaders in their industries and I follow them like a hawk to see what they’re doing and how they do things. Now, I don’t believe in replicating what someone else does at all as I believe individuality is crucial is being successful through carisma and the likes, but we’re mammals that learn by nature and if you’re following the right people you’re learning, so learning how others do things is important, for me at least. I started following a gentleman called John Doherty, he’s an SEO who works for a great company in New York City that does all things SEO, but he’s also a photographer and someone who loves to travel (even if it’s on his bicycle on the way to work). John’s a great guy and I really hope he doesn’t mind me writing about him here (bet he’ll be stoked about the backlink though, ha ha). Now, John preaches all things SEO, he’s an optimist and in my opinion he’s very intelligent, but not only in SEO, many other things too. His Twitter account consists of 90% inbound marketing stuff (doesn’t help that at the time of this post his second most recent tweet is about Kim Jong Un being the sexiest man in 2012), but take my word for it, 90% of his tweets are inbound marketing related with a strong focus on SEO. It’s not often that I see him tweet about things that are more personal and I start to wonder whether that’s the best approach.

(ok ok, enough about John now)

That is to say, keep your work interest related matters to the public forum that is Twitter and keep your more personal items to Facebook, where you have more control over privacy, lists and such? Do you put your personal information through Facebook and your carefully curate your Twitter account? I selected a handful of other people who are located closer to home and who run businesses and I definitely see a trend whereby the general message being put out on their Twitter account is business/work related, with the occasional twitpic of a sunset and the likes. I also ran a small test where I asked a handful of Twitter users questions that were somewhat off the work/business topic and was interested in seeing that 80% of them replied to me via DM rather than in the public space – the questions weren’t terribly personal either. Of course, keeping a topic (read: niche) going on a Twitter account is a great way to gain followers who are like minded, for example, if I engage in a discussion around SEO, get followed and then blog about my new shoes or going out to a party or falling off a chair whilst being drunk, they’ll probably decide to unfollow me, whereas, those people on Facebook are meant to be “friends” (oh how that makes me laugh) and would therefore appreciate the more personal updates.

I’m not going to get onto the topic of blogging, because for me that’s far bigger, I would need to password protect my personal posts and only grant access to those who ask and that’s a story for another day, but Twitter and Facebook, and the separation of information definitely does intrigue me and I’m fascinated by what people are doing.  I read a fantastic article the other day shared by Gino Cosme (I think it was) entitled, “5 Reasons Why Your Online Presence Will Replace Your Resume in 10 years” and that something else that sparked this whole quest to find the best mix of what goes where.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s a correct answer and it all boils down to what we choose to share, but if we’re moving into a day and age (we’re there already) where we’re represented so heavily through our social interactions and communications, I do believe that this is a topic with value and is worth the discussion.

What’s your opinion?

How your staff can help your social

by Chris M on November 12, 2012 in Business with No comments

I work with a lot of different companies on a daily basis and a topic that comes up all the time is social media, and rightfully so. The realisation of the power of social media is starting to sink in with most companies and they’re trying to embrace it as best as they can. The problem is, creating a Facebook Page and a Twitter account isn’t enough, just like spending your entire budget on a website isn’t enough – both mediums then require an audience.

Of course, the best way to build an audience is to ensure that interesting content is pushed through the social streams, but a lot of companies don’t have someone who can dedicate themselves to continually source, write and publish information, so a sort of dead end scenario is arrived at. Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency, in my opinion, is probably the best way to handle social accounts as having an experienced person manage the accounts will more than likely give you the best results, but if you’re not in a position to commission an agency, then you need to look at options.

Several years ago I managed a marketing team at a company and digital was at the forefront of their operation. I was tasked with growing a following, ranking their website and exploring other inbound marketing strategies to assist with their digital footprint. I wasn’t given a budget, so I couldn’t run ad campaigns on Google or Facebook, so I had to look for different options. The company I was doing the work for had a great team filled with talent and a passion for the company, so I turned to the staff to assist with the digital initiatives – When I put a tweet out, I had the staff retweet it, when I updated the Facebook status of their page, I got the team to like it and we followed this pattern for a number of different inbound marketing channels. I took the sum of all the staffs Twitter followers and it worked out to several thousand in comparison to their one month old business Twitter account, which only had a handful of followers. This meant that almost every time we put a message out into our stream, we had the potential to share it with an audience of several thousand people – it didn’t take too long before our business accounts following increased by several hundred followers, which then went on to reach several thousand. What came of this was an interest from the team, before I knew it, I had members of the team sending me interesting facts and such to tweet from the account and they engaged on the Facebook Page – instead of just me running the accounts, I suddenly had several incredibly bright and knowledgeable folks running the account with me – this buy in was incredible and the results achieved were outstanding.

One of the best things any company can do is educate and involve their staff in their social media initiatives – make it fun, incentivise it or do whatever you have to in order to get your staff involved, but most importantly, to enjoy being involved. If you do this, you will gain traction with your social accounts and you will start to see a return – after all, several minds are definitely better than one and the cost of initiating this is minimal.

Give it a bash and let me know how it goes for you!

5 Lessons I learnt opening a business

by Chris M on November 9, 2012 in Business, My Life with 6 Comments

It’s been about 8 months since I opened my own company and it’s been an incredible journey, from working in my bed (Have a read, it’s a decent article with lots of comments) to finding myself getting up earlier and earlier, and working later and later. I’ve learnt some incredible lessons along the way and I wanted to share these lessons with you.

In no particular order:

1. Accounting is serious stuff

Boy oh boy did I have to learn a lot about business finance and quickly. I did accounting at school and UCT, but that book smart stuff really doesn’t teach you anything at all. Understanding returns, expense management, PAYE, salary vs dividends and so the list goes on, has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever dealt with and I’m still nowhere near being able to vaguely say I know what’s actually going on. One of the best decisions I made was to hire an accounting firm from the get go as I’m a firm believer in letting professionals do what they do best rather than trying to be a professional in denial – Knowing that my books are carefully balanced each month and that all returns are done in time allows me to concentrate on running my business with peace of mind.

2. Free time is rare

I think a lot of people find themselves in a position where they’re unhappy at work, they feel as though they work too much and get paid too little, and I’m sure there are people who really do fit that bill, but the majority of people who think that getting out of that scenario and starting a company will free them and allow them to live a life of waking up late every day, are grossly incorrect. I’m one of those people who, even when hired, treats the company as if it’s my own. Every position I held over the past several years of employment has been treated as all or nothing. I never thought that starting a company would be easy, but I certainly didn’t understand the sheer quantity of additional tasks that sneakily find a place on the plate. Before you jump ship and start a company, look very carefully at your life and the commitments you have, because I can tell you right now, you will be busier than you were when you were employed.

3. Try to choose your relationships

I’m sure you’ve heard someone say, “Make sure you choose your clients and the people you work with carefully”. You have haven’t you? It’s really easy to say to someone, “If you choose your clients, you’ll be far happier”, and you know what, they’re dead right, but putting that into practise.. haha. When you’re employed, you receive that cheque at the end of every month, when you run your own company, you don’t. When you’re employed, who can sometimes push things aside and the likes, avoid certain people and so forth, but when it’s your own company and you’re fighting to bring in enough money to pay salaries, you’re not going to avoid anyone and you’re going to sign almost anybody you can, regardless of how annoying the relationship might be. I do agree though, selecting your clients does make a huge difference and it’s something I’ve been working on, but it’s almost as hard as learning to say, “no”. I can’t really offer too much advice in this area, as I’m only 8 months in, but what I can tell you is that I’ve been trying to find a balance, each time I attend a meeting and am asked to write a proposal, I try my best to think about what the relationship might be like in a few months and if the feeling is not great, then I see how I can possibly change things to work with the client or I try to refer the client to somebody else – the same applies to relationships with other business owners and/or developers, designers and other service providers.

4. Think before you speak

This was an interesting lesson for me, before I started my own company, I was rather fearless about what I put out onto the Internet, but since starting the company I’ve learnt to think before pushing the publish button. Not so much because I was saying things I shouldn’t have been, but because the spotlight falls on you, clients follow you on Twitter, they read your blog and the even engage with you – Some things are best left online and that’s a lesson everyone needs to learn, the sooner the better. Your reputation is your brand, if you don’t have a good reputation, you won’t have a good brand and if you don’t have a good brand, you won’t sell and if you don’t sell (and deliver), you won’t have a company.

5. Friday afternoons rock

On a bit of a lighter note.. if you’re employed or have been employed, especially in Cape Town, you’ll know how long it takes to get from 15h00 on a Friday afternoon to 17h00/18h00 that afternoon – it feels like hours! Running your own company, it doesn’t and although many Fridays I end up working way later than I would have when I was employed, I certainly don’t feel that awful slump and that’s something I’ve come to really enjoy and when possible, I’ll force myself to take an hour lunch break to go to the nursery or get things for the weekend so the admin is out of the way.

–

So that’s it, these are just 5 things that came to mind this evening whilst I was waiting for a server to sync. Yup, it’s 1h50 in the morning and I know my alarm is set for 07h30, so I’ll be feeling it tomorrow, but I’ve got some good friends coming around for a braai, so that’s something to look forward too!

If you’ve got a lesson to share, please pop it in the comments below :)

Hiring social media-aware developers and designers

by Chris M on November 8, 2012 in Business, Networking with No comments

Over the past month I was involved in the process of assisting a large corporate in hiring the right people for their soon to be in-house marketing / development team. The aim of the team was to create a small group of innovative individuals who would work closely on a daily basis to launch, monitor and further innovate different Inbound Marketing strategies.

As with most things in the digital marketing space, you can’t do really innovative campaigns without having a developer or a designer (gross generalization, but I feel it’s an accurate statement). I interviewed several candidates and I found a common trend amongst the people, who were mostly developers – They didn’t have much of a passion for social media, in fact, social media didn’t ever get brought up despite me trying to inject it into the interview.

See, the problem with a lot of companies is that they hire designers and developers to work on internal inbound marketing projects, but these designers and developers don’t understand social media and in a lot of the cases, they dislike social media. Social media is a big deal, I don’t think I need to go into much detail about this, but 95% of the applications and projects we’re seeing launched on the Internet will have an element of social media as it’s one of the most powerful ways to draw additional people into a resource. If you’re hiring designers and developers who dislike social media, you’re going to run into many situations where you launch a product and then struggle to get people to the product without spending a decent amount of money on external marketing strategies.

If you take a look at some of the most successful applications being launch, you’ll notice that these applications have mechanisms that do the following:

  • Allow users to invite their friends.
  • Allow users to tweet out results at the application provides.
  • Allow users to recommend various items to their friends.
  • Allow users to sign in with their social media accounts

These are four incredibly simple tactics that we’re all getting more and more used to, and that’s the exact reason why you can’t ignore social media – it’s right there, people almost expect it, so if you’re not designing and building with it in mind, you’re making life more difficult. Further to this, designers are creative people, throw a passion for social media into that creativity and you may come up with a really interesting way of attracting more people to your website. On the other side, developers who are good with APIs (huh?) will be able to understand just what they can push and pull from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and this could save you tens of thousands of rands in post-deployment marketing.

Of course, you can hire a social media wizz and have them form part of the team, but at the same extent, a social media wizz may not be able to relate to designers and developers, especially if they aren’t experienced – this could be an expensive hire with limited return and much frustration for the designer and developer.

My advice: When you’re hiring designers and developers, get a feeling for their understanding of drawing visitors to an application, see if they talk about social media, see what they say about social media and make your decision really carefully because it might just be one social media hook that makes or breaks your application.

In contradiction: Please, please don’t forego an excellent designer or developer simply because they don’t know social media, these things can be taught.

Don’t underestimate creative work

by Chris M on November 6, 2012 in Business with No comments

Just a few days ago I wrote a blog post about e-commerce websites in South Africa and put an emphasis on why there aren’t any attractive ones. This morning I received a newsletter from B?hance entitled “An Ode to Creative Work” along with a video:

I’m a developer and logical thinker at heart and although there’s a level of creativity to that and the digital marketing that I do, when it comes to actually making beautiful things, that’s not my strong point. So, I aligned myself with some people who are exceptionally good with design and I allow them to handle that side of things. I have learnt a lot working with incredible designers, but I will never take on that responsibility myself.

With all that being said, as I practise digital marketing, SEO specifically, more and more, I’ve learnt how crucial great design is. I’m able to rank a website well, bring converting traffic to a website and other such things, but if I’m doing all of that and people are arriving at unattractive and messy websites, they’ll not turn into paying customers. It’s for this very reason that I’ve learnt to respect design more than I used to and I’ve learnt to listen carefully when it comes to designers explaining user journeys and user experience, two things I thought I knew a lot about, but actually didn’t.

This video triggered these feelings and thoughts inside me and so I wanted to share it as I’m sure I’m not the only one in my position.

Hope you enjoyed it!

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